f CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY. I !VK; ' .:. 5®;; ■■©) , T^' fai] g This book is not to be taken Wi m, i^ Reading Room, i im ■ ' . @ @: • '©: ^0 WHEN DOi^£ WITH, RETURN AT ONCE TO ,^' ±y.^^ / ',©' '3) Cornell University Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924088012137 W JL « ATE fiUt '*ttW:Ml967]1ti$-^ / V J^ i^ €■ \ (P 5'S"6 10 24 t;* REIGN OF QUEEN VICTOEIA VOL. I. THE EEIGN OF QUEEN VICTOEIA A SURVEY OF FIFTY YEARS OF PROGRESS EDITED BY THOMAS HUMPHEY WARD, M.A. LATE FELLOW OF BRASENOSE COLLEGE, OXFOKD IN TWO VOLUMES VOL. I. @ LONDON SMITH, ELDEE, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE 1887 lAll T igh t s rese rved} /I' Z3^3rS-~ \\\\\\\\\\\ PREFATORY NOTE. Foe the signed chapters in this book the Authors are re- sponsible. For the unsigned, the responsibihty rests with the Editor. He has been greatly helped in the preparation of the chapters on ' Legislation ' and ' Foreign Policy ' by Mr. E. C. K. GoNNBR, B.A., of Lincoln College, Oxford; and Mr. Gonnee has written the greater part of the chapters on ' Colonial Policy and Progress ' and ' Locomotion and Transport.' The Maps show the percentage of increase and decrease in the population of the different counties of England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, and of the different districts of London, between 1831 and 1881, the year of the latest Census return. CONTENTS THE FIEST VOLUME. PA UK Intkoduction The Editor 1 Legislation of the Eeign . . The Editor 25 FoEEioN Policy .... The Editor . o^r ... 72 CoNSTiTDTioNAL Development . Sir William li. Anson, Bart^jj^^. . 117 The Aemy General ViscounLWolscley, O.G.B. . 155 „ ' ^ „ ( Colonel Sir cYw?\Vilson, K.C.B., Note on the Okdnance Survey \ - ( Director-General of the Survey . 220 The Navy Lord'tirasscy . . . ^ . . . 23'1 The Adsiinistk.ation op the Law Lord Justice Boioen i . . 281 Finance Leonard H.' Courtney , M.P. . . 330 Religion and the CHnKCHES . . Bev. Edivin Hatch, D.D. . . 364 CoLONiAi. Policy and Peogkess . The Editor 403 India Sir Henry Sumner Maine, K.C. S.I. 4G0 Ieeland ...... Sir Roioland Blennerhassett, Bart. . 52y MAPS. Map or England To face Title-page „ Scotland To face page 1 „ Ireland . ,, 529 ^ ? " Q m fWt uj ; Q OQ s M ! :ji ■u.r-ii ■ijl v^ •1 I !■,/' coN ■10 =^55^ "^pU-' THE EEIGN OF QUEEN YIGTOEIA. INTRODUCTION. The fifty years which are surveyed in these volumes have been years of change so great and so far-reaching that scarcely any other half-century of the world's history can be compared to them. The fifty years that followed the battle of Salamis, the fifty years that followed the battle of Pharsalia — these indeed have so vitally affected the develop- ment of mankind that the mind instinctively seizes upon them as the most important of all historical epochs. But, leaving them out of count, it is hard to say that any other half-century has seen changes so momentous, so in- stantaneous and yet so permanent in their effects, so wide in the range of their influence, as that in which the men and women now living have reached middle age. It is commonly said, and with truth, that to judge an age rightly we must be removed from it by a considerable interval of time. But, though the subtler lessons of our own day may escape us, there is no possibility of our mistaking the broad significance of the changes which have covered England and the world with railways and telegraph wires, have VOL. I. • B 2 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA thronged the sea with steamships, have completed the transformation of our Constitution from a monarchical aristocracy into a monarchical democracy, have filled the world with inventions for saving labour and escaping pain, have brought the whole of India practically under the direct government of the British Crown, and have formed out of a number of scantily peopled settlements a great Colonial Empire. Once only in the history of England has a single half-century witnessed a development and a series of changes at all comparable with these. The fifty years that followed the accession of Elizabeth were, in their way, as full ; and the men who had lived through them might feel, as we do, that the world and the England in which they stood were different in kind from those in which they had been reared. It is needless to point out that the ex- pansion and the development of which they were conscious was of another kind from that of which we are conscious to-day. The fact is certain that the England in which Milton was born in 1608 did not differ from the England of 1558 more completely, or in a manner more full of import for the future of mankind, than the England of 1887 differs from the England over which fifty years ago the young Princess Victoria was called to rule. The changes of which we speak will be described in con- siderable detail in the ensuing chapters. But it may be convenient in these few preliminary pages to indicate some of the main lines of growth and expansion, of development and transformation, on which the United Kingdom and the Empire have proceeded during the half-century. The population of the United Kingdom has increased from 25,650,000 in 1837 to 37,000,000 in the present year, a growth of about 44 per cent. In England and Wales the increase has been about 90 per cent., from 15,000,000 to 28,000,000 ; in Scotland about 60 per cent., from 2,500,000 INTRODUCTION 3 to 4,000,000 ; in Ireland, where fifty years ago 8,000,000 ■were crowded, half of them in a state little removed from starvation, and never free from the imminent peril of starvation, the numbers are now about 5,000,000. These are the broad results of the census, and the maps which accompany this volume illustrate them in detail. Thus we find that throughout England and Wales, with the exception of the two counties of Eadnor and Mont- gomery, there has been a steady increase, which has varied from 6, 8, and 9 per cent, in the agricultural counties, to 262 per cent, in Durham, and 304 per cent, in Glamorgan. The counties of York and Lancaster, which were populous at the beginning of the reign, have increased since then, the one by 143 per cent., the other by 158 per cent. ; the metropolitan counties of Middlesex and Surrey have, the one more than doubled, the other very nearly trebled in population ; whUe Kent, owing chiefly to the vast increase in the south-eastern suburbs of London and in the watering-places where Londoners take their holiday, has doubled its population in fifty years. The lowlands of Scotland have seen a corresponding development. The border counties have advanced at about the rate of the agricultural counties in England, but as we approach the district of mines and mills we find a great change ; we find Ayr adding 50 per cent, to its population, Edinburgh 77 per cent., Eenfrew 97 per cent., Lanark 185 per cent., and Selkirk, which has surpassed Durham in the rate of its growth, very nearly quadrupling its population. The eastern counties show figures scarcely less remarkable; whUe, on the other hand, the Highlands have declined through the removal of numbers of crofters from the little plots on which they were formerly settled, and the consoli- dation of holdings into great sheep farms and deer forests. The two counties in Ireland which have increased are those 4 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA of Dublin and Antrim, examples which offer a. further illus- tration of the tendency of the time towards the flocking of population to capital cities and to industrial centres. As to London itself, which sums up in the most striking manner the history of the reign, the maps which we furnish of London in 1831 and London in 1881 tell their own marvellous story. The City, indeed, which at the former date retained its own composite character and was still a place to live in as well as a place to trade in, has declined in population in proportion as it has increased in the amount of business done, in the size of its buildings, and in the width and convenience of its thoroughfares. But the City stands alone. Elsewhere, in all directions, there has been unchecked growth, a filling up of unoccupied spaces, a pushing outward of borders. The population of Hampstead and Highgate, which fifty or sixty years ago had changed but little from the days when they had been reckoned among the pleasantest of suburban villages, have grown, the one from 12 to 91 per acre, the other from 39 to 89 per acre. Kensington, which in days before the Great Exhibition, and its successor of 1862, was but a quaint little town not essentially different from that which had grown up round the palace of William III., is now one of the most populous of the well-to-do districts of London, and has risen during the period in question from 10 to 70 per acre ; Camberwell has increased in like manner from 6 to 42 per acre ; Hackney from 9 to 49 per acre ; Poplar from 12 to 74 per acre; Fulham from 4 to 29 per acre, and, taking London as a whole, the population has increased from something over 22 to no less than 51 per acre. It is not, however, to be supposed that the movement of the last fifty years has been solely a movement of con- centration. Our great towns, indeed, have grown in a certain degree at the expense of the country districts ; but INTRODUCTION 5 if we look outside the narrow limits of the United Kingdom upon the world-wide empire we find the same expansion of the British race, the same addition of new subjects to the British Crown. At the begmning of the Queen's reign the population of the British colonies and dependencies, not including India, amounted to close upon 4,000,000. This figm'e has now been reached by Australia and New Zealand alone, which fifty years ago numbered no more than 100,000 inhabitants, just the population of a second- rate provincial town. Canada and the neighbouring colonies have increased from 1,250,000 to 5,000,000 ; the South African colonies from 131,000 to 2,000,000 ; and, if we take into account the growth in the other and less important colonies, such as the West Indies and Ceylon, we find that the 4,000,000 have quadrupled, and that the population of the British possessions, other than the Indian Empire, is now some 16,000,000, of which considerably more than half are of British race. Besides this, there has been during the reign of the Queen an extension, a consoli- dation, and a settlement of the vast Indian Empire which of itself would mark this period as among the most important that English history has seen. On the details of this we need not here dwell, since they have been told in a special chapter by a writer of authority ; but it is enough to say that accordmg to aU the evidence the population of India has nearly doubled during the half-century, and that whereas fifty years ago the British rule extended directly over 90,000,000 and indirectly over 40,000,000 more, it now reaches over 200,000,000 iu British India alone, and 55,000,000 more in the native States dependent upon it. With this increase of population there has come an increase of wealth still more remarkable. It would, indeed, be far from the truth to suppose that great and widely diffused prosperity, such as has been granted to the great 6 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA body of the inhabitants of the British Empire since Sir Eobert Peel's fiscal reforms, has been universal, or that it is likely to become universal while human nature remains the same. At the best, and when trade is most active, there are always a number who do not profit by it, always some whom fortune passes by, some who are unemployed, and many who are underpaid. This is not the place to discuss the practical questions to which this fact gives rise, or to canvass the various solutions of them that are put for- ward by social reformers. To them we must leave the problem of finding some remedy for the evils which under our present industrial system always accompany keen com- petition ; the evils of overcrowding, the evils of over- population, the evils of an excessive supply of labour and of sudden demands for it ; it is enough here to point to certain unquestionable facts, namely, that whereas at the beginning of the Queen's reign millions of the population of this country were in a state of abject, grinding poverty, intolerable to themselves, a scandal to civilised government, and a constant danger to social order, the vast majority are now well-fed, well-clothed, better though not well- housed, fairly paid and fairly taught. Mr. Spencer Wal- pole, in the recently published volumes of his history of England, has described at length the distress under which the masses of the people were suffering during the first seven or eight years of the Queen's reign, and has illustrated what every elderly man now living will remember, ' the vast load of suffering under which the population was sinking,' ' the almost universal poverty.' He has spoken of the strikes and riots of 1842, and has shown how, when these came to an end, ' the working classes relapsed into the dull despair which was the eternal condition of their lives.' He has reminded us how, out of 10,000 persons in Manchester in 1841, it was found that 2,000 had only INTRODUCTION 7 Is. 'l\d. a week for each individual, and 4,000 only Is. \\d., and that this was a state of things by no means exceptional, whether in the manufacturing or in the agricul- tural districts, at a time, moreover, when wheat was between 60s. and 70s. a quarter. We have not yet escaped from the occasional pressure of hard times, but nothing of this sort can be recorded of recent years, save, perhaps, at a moment of exceptional distress in some single district where work has been suddenly withdrawn. On the other hand, we have such figures to console us as those which are pre- sented by Mr. Giffen in the first chapter of our second volume ; and we have what is perhaps the still more strik- ing testimony borne by the experience of any one who has watched the manufacturing districts, has seen anything of the life of the workmen, has talked with them at work or at play, and has watched them at their political meetings. What the future may have in store for them and for us no man can tell us certainly, but for the present we have the broad facts that wages have increased some 40, 50, or 60 per cent., and that the consumption of the articles which the masses use has increased in a still greater pro- portion. Where a person fifty years ago consumed 15 lbs. of sugar in the year he now consumes 70 lbs., where he consumed 1^ lb. of tea he now consumes 4| lbs., where he contented himself with less than 1 lb. of tobacco he now buys IJ lb. At the beginning of the reign the annual value of houses above lOZ. rental was about 12,500,000Z. sterling; it is now 60,000,000L; and, though ours is not a saving people, the sums deposited m the savings banks have increased during the same time from 14,000,000Z. to 90,000,000L sterling. Side by side with these facts we may set those which reveal a parallel extension of our internal and external trade. The difference between the foreign trade of this 8 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA country at the time of the Queen's accession, and the same trade at the present day, is the difference between the trade of a small state and that of a great empire. Figures are sometimes said to be misleading, and are commonly thought to be not picturesque, but it is impossible to mistake the significance of such figures as those which marked the ex- ports and imports of the year 1837 and of the year last completed. They show that at the earlier date the value of our imports amounted to 66,000,000Z., and of our exports to 58,000,000Z., while at the latter date the imports were valued at 374,000,000L, and the exports at 271,000,000L ; in other words, the foreign trade of the country has risen in two generations from little more than 120,000,000Z. sterling to close upon 650,000,000^ Of course, this implies a corresponding development in our domestic trade, and a corresponding increase in the figures recording the amounts of our several manufactures. Of these the two most im- portant, the cotton and the iron trade and manufacture, have been described at some length in our second volume, and the story which is told by the writers of those chapters might have been repeated with Httle variety if our space had allowed a history of the woollen, the linen, and a mul- titude of other less extensive trades. Our manufacture of iron has increased eightfold, from a little over 1,000,000 tons in 1837 to more than 8,000,000 in 1883, and behind these figures there lie such facts as the growth of Cleveland from a quiet pastoral region into a region covered with mining villages that feed the great new town of Middles- brough; the transformation that has come over the dis- trict of Furness ; that increase in the population of the south of Scotland to which we have referred, and the vast development of such towns as Birmingham, Wolverhamp- ton, and Sheffield. The imports of cotton have nearly INTRODUCTION g or quite doubled during the reign, and, as a consequence, the population of Lancashire has risen from 1,500,000 to 3,500,000. We might extend these statistics to a number of other trades, but, confining ourselves to the most impor- tant of those not specially dealt with in these volumes, the woollen and the worsted trades, we find a similar increase. In 1845 the amoimt of wool grown or imported was about 77,000,000 lbs. ; in 1885 it was over 500,000,000 lbs., and these figures are specially noticeable because they illus- trate in a remarkable way not only the growth of British manufactures, but to a still greater extent the growth of the colonial trade. While the production of home-grown wool has actually decreased during the forty years in question, that of the wool imported from the colonies has increased more than thirteenfold. In 1845 we grew 157,000,000 lbs. ; we now grow only 120,000,000 lbs. ; but whereas we imported from the colonies only 31,000,000 lbs., we imported in the year 1885 no less a quantity than 430,000,000 lbs. If we ask what has made this sudden and astonishing development possible, we have to give the commonplace answer — railways, steamships, and improved mechanical appliances generally. On the details of the steps by which our means of communication have been developed we dwell in another chapter ; here we need do no more than call attention to the enormous influence which they have wielded upon individual, social, and political life. In the reign of William IV., England was, indeed, a civilised and a wealthy country, and every educated foreigner who landed on her shores was struck by the signs of order and of opulence that met his eyes ; but in the one respect which seems to us at the present day all-important the England of William IV. was the same as the England of the Stuarts. There were no means of transporting man, merchandise, or message 10 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA quicker than a horse could take them. The result was an isolation of town from town, of village from village, and of the country from London, which makes between the England of that day and the England of our own a difference in kind. It is true that the roads were good, the coaching system well organised, the canals useful, and, given a certain lapse of time, the life, the habits, and the voice of the capital found themselves transported to provincial towns. But the instantaneousness, the universality which are the note of this kind of diffusion in modern times, were not there. There was no single daily newspaper published outside London ; how could there be when news travelled no faster than the mail coach could bring it ? The Post Office, which then, as now, was a Government monopoly, and was there- fore organised as completely as the times would permit, was a clumsy and inefficient institution, which took letters slowly and precariously, and charged for their delivery rates that made a large correspondence impossible, and led to all sorts of subterfuges and evasions on the part of those who could not afford the heavy postage dues. In the present generation familiarity with modern modes of communication has bred something like indifference, and it requires an effort of the imagination to realise the condition of a society standing in the forefront of civilisation and yet unprovided with those means of moving rapidly from place to place, of learning every morning what happened yesterday all over the world, of communicatmg its wishes or intentions by telegraph, which are now the indispensable conditions of existence. Yet it was a society unfurnished with these necessaries that Queen Victoria began to rule over in 1837, a society as far removed from ourselves in these matters of material convenience as it was removed, on the other side, from the England of Queen Anne. The discovery, moreover, of new means of communica- INTRODUCTION ii tion has been but a special case of the general advance of discovery for which this reign has been remarkable. Natural knowledge — that is to say, the knowledge of the rational order of the universe — has increased so rapidly during these fifty years that a survey of the main facts of its growth leaves one with the impression that all that was known before scarcely amounted to so much as what has been added to the knowledge of mankind — as much by British discoverers as by those of any other nation — since the be- ginning of the period. Of this extraordinary growth, the plainest result is to be found in those inventions and dis- coveries devoted to the service of man of which we are speaking. Not that the practical additions to human con- venience are the sole or even the most important results of the growth of science, but they are those by which science brings itself and its value home to the mmd of the many. To the many it has offered during these fifty years, on the one hand, a marvellous development of industrial machinery in all its forms, and, on the other hand, a series of discoveries bearing upon human life, altogether unparalleled in their number and in their importance. Improvements in the pro- cesses of the greater industries have been accompanied by such altogether new inventions as those of photography and of the homely lucifer match — to name but two out of a multitude of inventions that have combined to transform the external conditions of existence. With these have come a number of discoveries that have in like manner immensely modified our knowledge of the nature of the various diseases by which the lives of men and animals are afflicted, dis- coveries of which a detailed account is given in a special chapter in our second volume. It is there told how the knowledge of the conditions necessary to health has been completely transformed during this short period, and how, as a consequence, the average mortality in town and country 12 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA has been greatly reduced ; how the army, whether in peace or war, is no longer now the home of deadly disease ; how a number of specific maladies have been traced to their sources, and consequently robbed of half their dangers, and how — greatest and most beneficial change of all — the dis- covery of various practical antesthetics has trebled the resources of the physician and the surgeon, and infinitely lessened the terrors of injury and disease to the sufferer. But, as we are warned by the distinguished writer of the chapter on Science, the task of science is by no means confined to the discovery of means for increasing the con- veniences of life, or of prolonging life itself. It has to do, in the first instance, with the discovery of the rational order of which we spoke, whether or not the discovery may tend to human advantage. Its greatest discoveries are those generalisations which, as one after another they are added to the sum of knowledge, modify or transform man's outlook upon the universe, and his own conception of himself. In this aspect, as in the more obvious aspect of a practical dis- coverer, science has during this half-century made the most conspicuous advance. This is not the place to enlarge upon such a theme ; we may content ourselves with repeating what is stated with great copiousness of illustration else- where, namely, that, leaving out of account a multitude of minor additions to theory, science has during the reign of the Queen established three great doctrines — the first is the so-called ' molecular ' doctrine of the constitution of matter, the second that of the conservation of energy, the third of evolution. Time alone will show how these doctrines will ultimately modify thought in all its forms, but we have in the twenty-eight years that have elapsed since the pub- lication of the ' Origin of Species ' the most striking evi- dences of the way in which the last of the three has affected every kind of speculation and every kind of serious litera- INTRODUCTION 13 ture. The wild outcry with which the book was received has subsided, as mere outcry always will ; but it must be owned by those who look calmly back upon those times, and who consider all that was involved in the new conception, that the resistance of those who opposed Mr. Darwin was not unnatural. But science does more than promote invention and establish theory ; it teaches method. In this last respect the work which science has done in the United Kingdom, as throughout the civilised world, has been immense, for its mfluence has penetrated into literature, and has transformed history, criticism, and scholarship. On the one hand, the student of any of the historical sciences now starts from the position that, for his conclusions to be of any value, he must have got as near as possible to the original authorities, and that he must have tested them by a wide comparison. His materials are almost too abundant, for not only have a score of societies been at work printing documents and pub- hshing records that till now were unknown or scarcely at- tainable, but the State itself has taken the lead in such publications as the Master of the EoUs' Series, the Calendar of State Papers, and the Keports of the Historical Manu- scripts Commission. In fact, the danger now is the very opposite of what it used to be ; the historian, like the phy- sical investigator, finds his materials but too great, and is compelled to enter upon that course of specialisation which is a prominent feature, and not in all respects an encourag- ing feature, of the scholarship of the age. We have learnt to distinguish between what is sure ground and what is not. Philological, archseological, and literary research are rapidly transforming our knowledge of classical and Biblical history, and are beginning to pour hght upon many a dark corner of the past. With all this, the Universities, which should be the homes 14 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA and nurseries of knowledge in all its forms, have begun to play a new part in English life. They are still, indeed, far from the ideals entertained by some of their most distin- guished sons, and a scholar like the late Mark Pattison can still break his heart over the evidence which they afford of the English preference for the appearance of knowledge to knowledge itself ; while to many others it seems hardly worth while that those great endowments should be conse- crated to the promotion of much athletics and little learning. But if a comparison between the Universities as they are, and the Universities as they might be, is distressing to the ideal scholar, others will find cause for some moderate satis- faction in a comparison between the state of the Universi- ties now and their state at the accession of the Queen. Then they were close clerical corporations, suffering in an extreme form from the vices of such corporations, doing little good to learnmg, less to the Church, and leaving altogether uninfluenced the vast majority of those who would, under a better system, have wished to profit by them. Fifty years of effort and discussion, covering the Tractarian movement, the Liberal reaction it provoked, two University Commissions, and the abolition of religious tests, have transformed these great bodies, and given the nation as a whole a far larger share in them. These significant changes and their effects are sketched in a special chapter of this book, as are the subsequent developments which have little by little extended the course of University studies, brought the old Universities into close relation with national life, and, in the foundation of the University of London, done much to promote a high standard of education among those who, for one reason or another, are unable to reside for three or four years at Oxford or Cambridge. The fifty years have done something too, but not enough, for the cause of secondary schools. The Queen's INTRODUCTION 15 accession found a great man at work at Rugby ; and Dr. Arnold lived for five years more. It was not long enough for him to survive obloquy, but it was long enough for him to lay the foundation of the public school system of England as we know it. In his day the schools were few, their tone was generally not healthy, the education that they gave was excellent as a discipline to boys whom its dryness did not disgust, but to the majority was not stimulating. Even now our system of public school edu- cation is open to criticism and debate, and it is abun- dantly criticised and debated ; but, as a rule, in any of the multitude of iirst-grade schools to be found throughout the country, well-trained and sympathetic masters make it their first business to interest their boys, and to a great extent they succeed. At all events, whatever are the imperfections of the existing system, due to incomplete organisation, to wrong ideals, or to dull human nature, we have now not one Eugby, but a score; and, just below them,' a hundred schools to which a parent may send his son in the certainty that he will not be grossly neglected. That this is enough it would be idle to pretend. These schools are mostly for the well-to-do — for those who can afford at least eighty pounds a year for the education of each of their sons. The work of the next generation ought to be the provision of schools as good as these for the sons of that enormous class which will not use the ele- mentary schools and cannot use the higher schools. ' First and foremost,' said Sydney Smith, in his funeral sermon on William IV., 'I think the new Queen should bend her mind to the very serious consideration of edu- cating the people.' At the time when the words were spoken the great question had been just touched by the Whig Government, and the principle of tl^^ State's obhga- tion to educate its citizens had been admitted, after the i6 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA tentative, half-hearted English way, in the assignment of an annual grant of 20,000L for the purpose of building National and British schools. We have told elsewhere the now familiar story of how, in fifty years, there has grown from this small beginning the great system of elementary education which now obtains throughout the country. It is difficult to say how many, or how few, children were receiving elementary education at the beginning of the reign, since the statistics are wanting, but it is known that in the schools of the National Society and of the British and Foreign School Society — the societies representing Church and Dissent respectively — there were but 58,000 children ; and it was these societies that did the bulk of the work. Thirty-three years later, when Mr. Forster introduced his Elementary Education Bill, the number of children in the State-aided schools had risen to 1,150,000 ; but, for all that vast increase, there were still nearly a million children in the country who were receiving either no education at all or an education that was little better than none. In 1885, when the Act had been in operation but fifteen years — but half the lifetime of a generation — the number attend- mg school had trebled. There were in average attendance 8,370,000 children ; and the number of certificated teachers, which had been 12,000 in 1870, had grown to 40,000 in 1885. The aspiration of Sydney Smith had been realised, and ' the people ' was being taught. From one point of view this general and compulsory edu- cation may be regarded as flowing directly out of another and still more important change which this generation has wit- nessed. Education is the effect, and it is also the safeguard, of democracy ; and it is nothing less than democracy that has been installed in power by the Eeform Acts of 1867 and 1884, and 1^ the Eedistribution Act, which was a con- sequence of the latter of those measures. INTRODUCTION 17 We stand now at the point to which our fathers looked forward, a few with passionate hope, many with quiet resolu- tion, many with indifference, and many with dismay. The path of progress has brought us — to what ? To the land of Beulah, or to ' the boundless plain, where every molehill is a mountain and every thistle a forest tree ' ? ^ The future alone can decide which of these designations wiU best apply ; and for the present habit and idiosyncrasy must count for much in the judgments which men will form of the change. But a few points may be put forward as scarcely questionable, and they will help us to an opinion, sine ird et studio, as to the real effect of the democratic revolution. (1) A healthier system and a healthier tone prevail in the public services. There is immeasurably less corruption ; there is immeasurably greater efficiency. The adoption of the principle of free competition in admitting persons to the military, naval, and civil services has made those services popular, and has made their scientific organisation possible. (2) Not only the material but the moral condition of the working classes has greatly improved. On the former head nothing need be added to what has been said in this book by Mr. Giffen and Mr. Mundella ; and, on the latter head, what Mr. Mundella says is supported by the experience of everyone who has Hved among the industrial population. ' When we see or read of what goes on in the streets of our great towns,' wrote the late Arnold Toynbee, ' we think badly enough of their morality ; but those who have had most experience in manufacturing districts are of opinion that the moral advance, as manifested, for example, in tem- perance, in orderly behaviour, in personal appearance, in dress, has been very great.' ^ Conversation, in the workshop and the public-house, is often bad enough, but it is not so bad ' Mr. Lowe, speech on Eeform Bill of 1866. ^ The Industrial Revolution, p. 147. VOL. I. C 1 8 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA as it was when no cheap newspapers supplied the workmen's minds with political topics for discussion, and when their opportunities for rational amusement — even now far too scanty — did not exist at all. Drunkenness is still the national curse, but it is much less general than it was. Fifty years ago it had scarcely been banished even from the class of gentlemen ; now it is thought disgraceful in classes far below them. In 1855 there were 20,000 convictions for drunkenness. In 1880, with a more efficient and more active police, the number was not much more than half. A like improvement is to be observed in the statistics of crime of every kind throughout the country. (3) Every class amuses itself more ; or rather, amuse- ments which were formerly thought the birthright of the upper classes alone are now largely shared by the many. Prize-fighting, dog-fighting, and cock-fighting have been con- demned, first by public opinion and then by law, and their place has been taken by sports and pastimes which may often indeed be wanting in refinement, but which are at least rela- tively free from brutality. The improvement in the material condition of the working classes has brought with it some increase of leisure, and from one cause and another the working men have been enabled to employ their leisure in what approaches to a reasonable manner. The amusement that interests all classes most is still horse-racing, and horse-racing, as we know, does harm as well as good ; but cricket, football, and other athletic sports have simulta- neously developed and annually arouse an increasing inte- rest in the mind of the people. In 1837 there was but one important cricket club, the Marylebone, which in this Jubilee year is celebrating its centenary. In 1848 the Surrey Club was established at the Oval, and the club called I Zingari began its wanderings. Now every county, every town, and almost every , village has its club ; cricket is so INTRODUCTION 19 much a national institution that in every great centre of population it is found remunerative to set aside a space of valuable land for the purposes of the game. Professional cricketers, drawn mostly from the working classes, find their skill a most marketable commodity ; and when Aus- tralia sends her eleven to contend with picked teams of Englishmen, tens of thousands of people troop to see the contests at the Oval, at Nottingham, or at Old Trafford. In the winter the same passionate interest is shown in every manufacturing village or town in Lancashire and Yorkshire in the cause of football, and the struggles between England and Scotland are witnessed by vast crowds of enthusiastic spectators. These things are not insigoificant, and the historian finds in them, and in the corresponding spread of indoor entertainments for the people, one of the most encouraging marks of progress. Pleasure, says the Greek philosopher, is not happiness, but it is an essential part of happiness, and if the happiness of the people is the ad- mitted end and aim of statesmanship, their pleasures can hardly be deemed unimportant. (4) The extraordinary diffusion of good and cheap litera- ture is another striking feature of the time. Fifty years ago there were no decent periodicals for the working class, except Chambers' s Journal and Knight's Penny Magazine, ■while the Government was fighting hard for the suppres- sion of unstamped newspapers, and using all the means at its disposal to resist the efforts of men like Lovett and Hetherington for the removal of the ' tax on knowledge.' Some of the details of the change which has passed over this department of the national life are given in a special chapter of this book, so that the story need not be told here. It is enough to say that at the present time the humblest household has at its command not only the news of the day, seasoned and illustrated with plenty of political discus- c 2 20 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA sion, but, on the one side, a multitude of cheap periodicals to provide amusement and social and technical instruction, and, on the other, the masterpieces of the literature of the past. For a penny a week the working carpenter or engi- neer can inform himself of the latest improvements that science has introduced into his craft ; the country boy can learn in a clear and accurate form what is known of the birds and the butterflies of his neighbourhood. For nine- pence a man can buy the whole of Shakespeare, and ' National Libraries ' and ' World Libraries ' provide him with chosen portions of Milton and Addison, of Bacon and Pope, at threepence a volume. (5) Good literature is one safeguard of society ; another is to be found in that good feeling between classes which has always been more or less a mark of the English race, and which, in spite of many an influence tending the other way, has, on the whole, been a special mark of this age. Long ago the old semi-feudal relation between employers and work- men broke down, and dismal were the forecasts made by Carlyle and other prophets of evil as to the anarchy and the mutual antagonisms which were to follow. But retrospects of an imaginary golden age will seldom bear exact criticism, and the advantages of that semi-feudal relation tend to dis- appear the more its actual conditions are examined. If one fact is established more than another, it is that combina- tion among the workmen themselves has not only increased the sum of comfort which they enjoy, but — at all events since they obtained political power — has improved the relations between themselves and their employers. And moving parallel with this has come the great and unques- tionable development of philanthropic effort which this age has seen. A keen sense of the evils incident to our civili- sation has led, and is leading, hundreds and thousands of men and women to devote time, thought, and energy to the INTRO D UCTION 2 1 alle^'iatlon of the hard lot of the poor, and to the discovery of some rational solution of the problems that must arise in an industrial society like ours. Isolated effort, such as has always existed amongst us, has more and more given place to organisation, and now in every great town, and most of all in the east of London, organisations are at work under skilled direction which aim not merely at satisfying the material wants of the destitute, but at bringing enlighten- ment and rational pleasure within the reach of the multi- tudes who could not find them for themselves. The scien- tific spirit of the age is at work here as elsewhere, and little by little we have come to the conclusion, first that the state of the poor is an evil that must be dealt with, and, secondly, that the first and most necessary step towards any reform in this direction should be a knowledge of what the poor are and how they live. Hence the movement of which the late Edward Denison was the pioneer, and with which the name of another young workman in the cause of social regenera- tion, Arnold Toynbee, has been permanently identified. (6) When we come to inquire into the social mfluence of religion, and to ask in what respects this has been modi- fied during the reign, the answer is more difficult. Two or three points are indisputable : that every reUgious body has displayed great and unprecedented activity in building churches, and in developing other elements of its organisa- tion ; that the clergy of every denomination have shown a devotion and a spirit of self-sacrifice beyond all praise ; and that, especially during the last twenty years, the tone of religious controversy has softened, and the language which was formerly thought to be the expression of a meritorious zeal is now not permitted among self-respecting men. These things are obvious enough, so obvious, indeed, that we are apt to forget them, except when it happens that an eccentric dean amuses and shocks the readers of the magazines with 22 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA polemical utterances that recall the cudgel-play of Friar Tuck. They are obvious, and they are matters which may be fairly grouped under that debatable word 'progress. But there still remains the question whether religion, with all that has been done by those who feel its influence, has succeeded in overtaking the democracy. Has it touched the life, the habits, the thoughts of the majority of the workmen m the great towns ? Assuredly not ; and the ques- tion whether it will yet succeed in doing so is a question of scarcely less importance to the social philoso2:)her than to the religious man. To say that these fifty years have been years of progress is to imply that the progress has been real, and is likely to be permanent. In point of fact, this assumption is habitually made by almost everyone, though there are not wanting those whose outlook over the future is less en- couraging, and who see neither in the political nor in the social state of England much ground for reasonable hope. Sir Henry Maine, whose contribution to these volumes is among the weightiest of the chapters, has lately published a series of reflections upcn popular government, as it is now established in this country, which have caused the believers in democracy many an anxious hour ; and Mr. Cotter Morison "' has more recently published a view of the social and in- dustrial prospect which, if it were generally accepted, would seem to leave to Englishmen no alternative but that of suicide or emigration. Undoubtedly the pohtical difficulties before us are of extreme gravity. We have to hold our own in the face of Europe, at a time when the air is full of thunder-clouds, and this when our hands are occupied with the seemingly insoluble problem of Ireland, and with the growing anxieties caused by Parliamentary obstruction, and ' The Service of Man, preface. INTRODUCTION 23 by the influence of the poUtical platform. Whatever may be the case with domestic policy, it is a truism to say that under a democratic or popular government the preservation of a consistent foreign policy is matter of extreme difficulty; and it is equally a truism to say that a foreign pohcy that is not consistent is fruitful of danger. The writer well remembers, in one of his last conversa- tions with Mark Pattison, asking that acute observer what he considered to be the most important fact in contempo- rary history. The answer was given without hesitation : ' The fact that 5,000,000 of our population possess nothing but. their weekly wage.' Before us looms the question. Will the 5,000,000 remain contented with it ? — nay, the further question, to which Mr. Morison gives so despairing an answer. Will they continue to earn it ? At this moment we are engaged in a struggle, which to a mind so trained and unprejudiced as that of Professor Huxley is indistinguishable from a state of war, with Germany, Italy, France, and with the United States, to say nothing of the small States of Europe, for the command of the markets of the world. We have no longer the monopoly of the great industries. Mulhausen competes with Manchester, and Liege with Sheffield. The Continent, by means of agents often better trained and more energetic than ours, is forcing its goods upon our old customers in Africa and further Asia. Yet the population of our great towns is fast increasing ; the ' devastating torrent of children ' grows and gathers force ; and, with each recurrence of the ' depression ' that is periodical in trade, the vendors of the Socialist panacea become more active. Thus it is plain that the problems, political and social, which the future will have to solve are not easier, but infinitely more difficult, not simpler, but mfinitely more complex, than those with which this country has been con- 24 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA fronted in any former age. If we can look out upon them with hope rather than with fear it is for definite reasons, gathered from the whole history of England, and especially from the history of the last fifty years. We have seen during that period all those instances of a sober and successful handling of public difficulties to which these volumes bear witness. We have seen statesmen coming to the front as dangers arose, and the ship of the State steered by them without great disaster. At certain critical moments in recent history the democracy has shown promising signs of reaction against some of the errors which most easily beset it. And last, but certainly not least, the monarchy, as represented by the Queen, has weathered the storms of fifty years, and is certainly to- day as strong as ever in our English society. That the throne should have been occupied for half a century by a woman of exemplary life, who from the beginning formed an accurate view of her constitutional position, and who, Ln spite of difficulties innumerable, and of the most cruel of all bereavements, has continued to fill that position with remarkable success, is matter not only for satisfaction as to the past, but for confidence as to the future. Any such precedent, any such striking instance of political and moral stability, is of enormous value in our modern democratic world. Liberal and Conservative alike will do well to celebrate the Jubilee of 1887 with modera- tion indeed but with unfailing hope, and with a special impulse of respect and sympathy towards the Sovereign who nas so worthily fulfilled the high and arduous task imposed upon her in 1837. 25 LEGISLATION OF THE REIGN. Of the multifarious legislative Acts by which the reign of Queen Victoria has been marked, by far the greater number Ccin find no place in a book which attempts to do no more than summarise the main events and the main tendencies of the history of these wonderful fifty years. Of the rest very many will be noticed in their proper place, in the chapters which deal with the different departments of the national life : with the army, or with India, or with Ireland, with trade, with the means of raising revenue. It will nevertheless be desirable to group into one chapter some of the principal Acts which have affected either the distribu- tion of political power, or the system of local government, or the land system, or national education, or the protection of the poorer classes and of women and children. The merest outline will serve to show how completely the framework of our national life has been changed within the space of half a century. In 1837 the great Eeform Act of 1832 was in full Beform working, and its good and evil had had time to make 1332. themselves felt. The fierce struggle was over ; the question whether the United Kingdom was to be ruled by a Parlia- ment aristocratically nominated or chosen by free election of the middle class had been definitely settled, and there had even been time for the inevitable reaction against the first flood of Liberal reforms to make itself felt. The 26 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA system under which the House of Commons was chosen at the time of the Queen's accession may be summarised in a few words. The borough franchise belonged to those occupying houses of the clear annual value of lOL, provided they had paid their rates. The county qualifications were somewhat more complicated, for votes belonged (a) to forty- shilling freeholders for life and their successors by settle- ment or inheritance (i.e. not by purchase) ; (&) to persons possessed of ordinary freeholds of the clear annual value of lOZ. ; (c) to copyholders and long leaseholders who held at lOL ; {d) to short leaseholders and ordinary tenants who occupied at 50Z. These restrictions seem now oppressive enough, but it must be remembered that, as compared with the restrictions in force before 1832, they were freedom itself. At the same time, they were not to last long without being vigorously attacked both by the excluded classes themselves and by various statesmen. The early years of the reign, as has been indicated in several chapters of this book, were by no means years of prosperity. On the con- trary, food was dear and work was scarce, the expenses of the country were heavy, and the most active members of the working class were filled with a deep discontent against the corruption and mismanagement which even a reformed Parliament had not been able entirely to remove. The Chartist agitation, which went on with more or less vivacity for ten or twelve years longer, made manhood suffrage its chief demand, and many a reformer who did not go so far as Feargus O'Connor yet believed that the only hope of good government lay in the lowering of the franchise so as to admit the great body of the working men. Attempts No change, however, was to take place for a whole reform^ generation, though several Governments, both Whig and Tory, attempted with more or less sincerity to deal with the question. In 1854, Lord John Eussell introduced a LEGISLATION OF THE REIGN 27 Reform Bill which might have had some chance of passing had it not been for the foreign complications in which the country was involved, and the attempt to enlarge our Constitution ended in the withdrawal of the Bill almost before it had been discussed. The Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny blocked any further attempt in this direction for several years. Mr. Disraeli tried again in 1859 with no success, and Lord John Eussell followed him with a measure equally abortive in the next year. Private members, such as Mr. Locke-King and Mr. Baines, often made vain efforts in the same direction. The truth was, as everybody saw, that while Lord Palmerston lived it was useless to expect any great measure of organic reform, or, indeed, any legislative action on a large scale, and it was not till after his death in 1865 that the country seriously took up the question of enlarging the representation. In that year the proposal by Mr. Baines, the member for Leeds, of a Reform Bill with a 6L borough franchise, allowed it to be seen that the question had come to its final stage ; for it was on that occasion that Mr. Lowe took the House by surprise by the delivery of the first of his famous speeches upon the evils of democracy. The next year saw Mr. Gladstone leader of Keform the House of Commons, and on March 12, 1866, he pro- isee. duced his long-promised measure, the essential principle of which was a 11. rental franchise for boroughs and a 14L rental franchise for counties. It was evident almost from the first moment that the Government would not succeed in carrying their Bill ; for the Conservatives were reinforced by a large number of Liberal seceders, who, led by Mr. Lowe, entered the famous Cave of AduUam. The debate on the second reading was one of the most memorable of all the great debates that have taken place in the House of Commons during the reign ; the level of speaking was never higher, and the pubHc interest was seldom, if ever, more keenly 28 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA aroused on any political question. Lord Stanley, Lord Grosvenor (now Duke of Westminster), Mr. Horsman, Mr. Lowe, and Mr. Disraeli did their best to tear the Bill to pieces, and not all the eloquence of Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Bright, supported by the logical force of Mr. John Stuart Mill, could gain for the measure a majority of more than five.' Li the end, the Bill was lost upon a question of comparative detail ; the Government resigned, and were succeeded by a Government in which Lord Derby was Prime Minister and Mr. Disraeli leader of the House of Commons. Then followed the celebrated demonstrations organised by the Eeform League, the rioting in Hyde Park, and an autumn of agitation. Next year the Conservatives took the question of reform in hand, and succeeded in solving a problem about which at the beginning of the session the Government frankly did not know its own mind, and on which the whole traditions and prepossessions of the party were in dh-ect opposition to the line ultimately taken with success by its leaders. It is not necessary here to tell over agam the story of that celebrated session which has been told so often already, and which must remain famous as having witnessed the last strenuous protests on the part of the believers in aristocratical government against the ad- vance of democracy. It is enough to say that the end of Mr. Disraeli's measures was in no sense like their beginning. First he proposed a moderate and half-hearted Bill, called by his opponents the Ten Minutes' Bill, because, as Sir John Pakington had confessed, the Cabinet decided in a ten-minutes' sitting to adopt it in preference to an alterna- tive measure. Then this was withdrawn, and a proposal for household suffrage, fenced in by numerous safeguards, was introduced. One by one the safeguards were beaten down by the Opposition ; the ' checks and counterpoises ' of ' The numbers were, for the second reading, 318 ; against it, 313. oMse. LEGISLATION OF THE REIGN 29 which Mr. Disraeli had spoken \Yere taken away, and, as Lord Cranborne said in his vigorous speech upon the third i-eading, the Conservative Government succeeded in win- ning a triumph for its party by adopting the principles of Mr. Bright. The arguments which Mr. Lowe had drawn from the ' Politics ' of Aristotle, the arguments which Lord Shaftesbury drew from the experience of a long life spent in converse with the working classes, were of no avail, and on August 15, 1867, the royal assent was given to a Tory Bill which granted the right of voting to every borough householder, and to every lodger who paid four shillings a week for his lodging. One step more required to be taken before the demo- The cratic character of our Constitution could be completed, fran- By the Act of 1867, supplemented though it was by the Acts of 1868 and 1869, the agricultural labourer, the miner, and the denizen of the manufacturing village had practically been left without a vote. While in the boroughs every householder received the franchise, in the counties the limit was lowered, but to nothing like the same extent. The value of property quahfication of freeholds, copyholds, and sixty-year leaseholds was reduced from lOZ. to 5^., and the new franchise was extended to all occupiers holding a 12L ratable value ; but plainly, this excluded a very large class of the population, a class in fact which, when the time came to enfranchise it, was held to number, not less than two millions of men. It was not to be supposed that the grievances of these persons would be neglected by politi- cians, whether inspired by the genuine democratic passion or anxious to secure for their party such a mass of potential votes. Accordingly for many years the extension of house- hold suffrage to the counties was made an article in the advanced Liberal programme, and it became a test question dividing the more sanguine Liberals, hke Mr. Trevelyan, 30 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA from the more cautious, like Mr. Goschen. This question, however, did not actually come to the front until the general election of 1880, if it can even be said to have come to the front at that time. There was a general understanding among the Liberals that the reform of the county franchise should be undertaken during the career of the Parliament which was then chosen, though, as the passing of a Eeform Bill would have made a new election immediately necessary, there was naturally no great hurry to introduce it. At last, in 1884, when the pressure of Irish demands had been for the moment somewhat relieved, Mr. Gladstone introduced the measure for assimilating the borough and the county franchise, and he easily carried it through the House of Commons. The Lords, however, were not disposed to yield without a struggle, and, employing the argument which had been used with effect in 1866, they refused to pass the Bill until the measure for the redistribution of seats, which such a Bill made necessary, was presented to them. A series of ' demonstrations,' held throughout the country, and especially in London and in the North, during the early autumn, showed that the working classes were genuinely anxious for the measure, and that the Lords would be running serious risk if they opposed it further. Making a fortunate precedent, the leaders of both parties came together in the late autumn, and arrajiged among themselves the scheme of a Eedistribution Bill. In the course of the next session both Bills were duly carried through both Houses, and henceforward the system of Parliamentary representation throughout the three king- doms was arranged on a broad, simple, intelligible, and thoroughly democratic basis. In fact, though not in name, the old principle for which the Chartists contended, the principle of equal electoral districts, became the law of the land, and, not to dwell upon a few unimportant limitations, LEGISLATION OF THE REIGN 31 the principle was established that any qualification which gave the right of voting in a borough would give it in a county. Closely connected with this measure of Parliamentary reform are the Acts which affect the mode of voting, and the conditions under which votes may be asked and given. Before 1872 voting was ' open' — i.e. the voter presented himself at the polling-booth, was asked his name and for which candidate he voted. It is obvious that this gave a great scope for intimidation and undue influence, and the ad- vanced Liberal party lost no opportunity of advancing the argument, that if employers and landlords knew how their men voted they could always employ irresistible means of directing their votes. TheBallot was one point of the Charter The with which many who were in no sense Chartists were in hearty sympathy. Year after year, Mr. Grote, while a member of the House of Commons, moved the adoption of this method of voting, of which almost every democracy of which we have any knowledge has seen the necessity. For a long time, however, the natural disinclination of landlords and of employers to relinquish what influence remained to them was reinforced by the argument — an argument employed by Mill, among Liberal writers ' — that the franchise was a trust, and must therefore be exercised openly. It was not until Mr. Gladstone's first Premiership that the Ballot took its place in the ' authorised programme ' of the Liberal party. But in the year 1871 Mr. Forster, then Vice-President of the Council, introduced and carried through the House of Commons a Bill which would esta- blish it by law. Here, too, the House of Lords resisted, and the measure was thrown out, only to be reintroduced ' Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform, 1859. ' I oapnot think that even if the people were fit for, and had obtained, universal suffrage, the Ballot would be desirable.' 32 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA Act of 1872. Public nomina- tions abo- lisbed. Corrupt practices. next year and carried after many months had been wasted in unnecessary wranghng. At first the measure was only of a temporary character, the Lords having inserted a clause limiting it to eight years ; but experience soon showed the advantages of this method of voting to be so considerable that the measure for its renewal was passed almost without a protest. With the Ballot have come two other modes of securing the freedom and purity of elections : the provision for abolishing public nominations and the various provisions for preventing bribery and other corrupt practices. On the former little need be said. Those who have reached middle life can well remember the scenes which used to be habitual in the days when Parliamentary candidates were forced to meet the noisiest portion of their constituency, the ' free and independent electors,' and the still more free non- electors who, if they could not use their votes, could at least use their voices at the hustings. The scandal of these scenes had been matter for the satirist ever since Hogarth's day, and though, as time went on, manners became some- what softer and consequently the scandal less, it came to be felt that there was no advantage in these public nomina- tions that compensated for the harm that was done by them. A simple clause in the Ballot Act (1872) provided that in future nominations should be made in writing, and from that time, instead of the clamour and the coarse jokes of the hustings, we have had the decorum and the dullness that commonly attends the performance of a strictly legal duty. More difficult has been the problem of how to deal with the briber and the bribed; but by the two measures of 1868 ' and 1883 it would seem that almost as much has been ' 31 ifc 32 Vict. 0. 125. The law on corrupt practices, as it then stood, was consolidated in 1879. LEGISLATION OF THE REIGN 33 effected as can be hoped for while human nature remains the same. The first of these measures consisted of the simple but Aot of most important expedient of transferring the jurisdiction over bribery cases from the House of Commons to the judges of the High Court. Before that time, all petitions against the return of a member not only had to be pre- sented to the House of Commons, whose dignity was supposed to be at stake in the matter, but the question had to be in- vestigated by a Committee. This was an improvement upon the days before the Grenville Act of 1770, when the House itself decided — of course on party grounds. But still, such a Committee, composed of men whose own experiences were much the same as those of the candidates indicted before them, was hkely to prove a lenient judge, and a too liberal interpretation was habitually given to the statutes which prescribed what a candidate might, and what he might not, do. No better illustration of the ordinary view entertained by members of the House of Commons in general as to what constitutes a corrupt practice could be found than in the debates of the year 1842 on the question raised by Mr. Eoebuck with regard to some election petitions of the day. It appeared that petitions had been presented against the members lately elected for certain two-seated constituencies — Harwich, Nottingham, Beading, and Lewes. The Committees had met, had made some preliminary investigations, and had then adjourned ; during the ad- journment one and all of the petitions had been with- drawn; and a short time afterwards in each of the incriminated boroughs one of the members had resigned his seat, to be succeeded without a contest by a represen- tative of the opposite party. If there ever were grounds for a suspicion of collusion it was surely here, and Mr. Eoebuck, then in the first fervour of his Eadicahsm, VOL. I. D 34 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA denounced this collusion accordingly. The House, however, was more than apathetic, and there were not wanting members who, ten years after the Keform Bill, protested against his attack as unjust to those who had fairly bought their seats and fairly paid for them. The reform which in 1868 placed the decision of the electoral petitions in the hands of the Judges was the first and perhaps the most important of the serious attempts to destroy this inveterate idea, and, as many a member and many a borough discovered to their cost, the standard enforced by a judge proved to be very different from the standard enforced by a committee of elected members. But still the old evils went on, for though bribery and the receipt of bribes had both been made criminal offences, the cases were seldom pressed home and the punishments remained too slight to deter candidates and their agents from breaking the law. At last, after the general election of 1880, a further attempt was made to stop the evil. One member of the Liberal Cabinet was unseated for the corrupt practices of his agents. Another, after his assumption of office, was defeated, and the investigations of a commission revealed widespread corrupt practices in the constituency. Another member of the Government had found that his own seat was in imminent danger from the same cause, and thus strong personal reasons co-operated with a ripened public Act of opinion to bring about a reform. The Corrupt Practices Bill of 1883 was brought forward by Sir Henry James and Sir William Harcourt, and was passed into law. By this measure several most important reforms were carried out, the most important of all being the compulsory limitation of a candidate's legitimate expenses. From this time forward, it was unlawful to hold committee-rooms in public-houses ; it was unlawful to spend more than a certain sum, proportioned to the size of the constituency, 1883. tiou. LEGISLATION OF THE REIGN 35 in printing, agency, or messengers ; and a, candidate was obliged to name one single agent through whose hands every penny paid for the purposes of the election was obliged to go. It would be inaccurate to say that this Act has put a stop to every form of corrupt practice, but it has totally changed the conditions of English elections; it has to a great extent robbed the professional electioneerer of his occupation and the loafer of the price of his vote, and it has reduced the expenses of the candidates to a half or a quarter, or sometimes to a tenth, of what they were before. Closely connected with the measures which concern re- Eiemen- presentation are the measures for the spread of elementary edifoa- education by which the reign has been signalised, and which, if they stood alone, would suffice to mark out the past fifty years from all preceding periods of English history. It is true that many objects have been in the minds of statesmen when they proposed means for helping or organising the primary education of the country. They have had in view the diminution of crime, the commercial interests of England, and even, it may be said, the de- velopment of the happiness of the people; but a leading object with them has undoubtedly been to qualify the elec- torate for its political duties. From one motive or another, Parliament has from time to time extended the bounds of citizenship. Its inducement may have been the fear of public disturbances ; it may have been the desire to enfran- chise what Mr. Gladstone called ' our own flesh and blood ; ' it may have been the desire of a victorious party to strengthen itself for the future. However this may have been. Parlia- ment was clearly bound to take what guarantees it could that the new rights which it bestowed should not be abused. ' We must,' said Mr. Lowe, in yielding to the democratic revolution, ' we must induce our masters to learn their D 2 36 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA letters ; ' and in obedience to this maxim statesmen have taken in hand the problem of national education. It is not necessary here to give the details of this most important section of our national history, for in the second of these volumes the subject is treated at length by one who is a master of it. But touching shortly on the principal stages in educational legislation, we may say that the very begin- nings of the Government control ovei- schools almost co- incided with the Queen's accession. It was in 1834 that the first grants, amounting to no more than 20,000L a year, were made to the British and National schools, and this paltry allowance was not exceeded for five years. In 1839, the Ministry, through their spokesman. Lord John Kussell, proposed to increase the grants and to remodel the system on which they were distributed. As yet neither of two essential conditions had been observed : there had been no compulsory inspection of schools, and no reports had been made upon the practical The Com- working of the system. Lord John Eussell proposed to mittee of ^ *' . . ^ ^ Council, transfer the supervision of the grants from the Treasury to a special committee of the Privy Council, by which means it would be administered by a non-political body, and it would become possible to organise a regular system of inspection and report. Nothing is more curious to the reader of to-day than the history of this proposal and of the way it was received by different parties. The Duke of Wellington wrote a strong memorandum against it, taking up the most uncompromising Church of England ground. In the House of Lords, the Archbishop of Canterbury, adopting the duke's line of argument, moved the rejection of the Bill and was easily successful. His example was fol- lowed in the House of Commons by Lord Stanley, and Lord Ashley — the Lord Shaftesbury of later years — seconded him in a speech of the fiercest opposition to the proposal. So LEGISLATION OF THE REIGN yj evenly were opinions divided as to the advantage of teach- ing the poor to read and write that Lord John Eusseh's motion was only passed hy a majority of five in a House of 350 ; but the Government was firm and carried out the momentous change. Undoubtedly this was the most im- portant step taken by any Government with regard to education between the first voting of the grant and the great Act of 1870. Everything, indeed, which happened between those two dates may be regarded as a detail ; what was really of consequence during the period was not so much this or that actual proposal, but the fact that, as the years went on, as the inspectors renewed their visits, and as the grants one after another were paid, the opposition both of Dissenter and Churchman to State interference in edu- cation gradually and silently wore away. Such opposition as there was to this interference took almost exclusively a religious colour, and may be traced, broadly speaking, either to the Dissenters' jealousy of the Church or to the Church's hostility to Dissent. Thus in 1843 the Government pro- posed to enforce compulsory education upon two classes, the children of paupers and the children covered by the Factory Acts, and to educate them by means of district schools under Church superintendence. As might have been expected, the proposal met with the strongest opposition on the part of the Dissenters, and the Government could only carry its Factory Bill at the price of dropping the educational clauses. On the other hand, one effect of the Tractarian movement had been by this time to generate a distrust between the High Church party and an Erastian Government. The party of Keble and Pusey denounced every suggestion of a national education conducted upon any principles but those of the National Church, and, as a consequence, Lord Melbourne's proposition for the establishment of normal schools had to be withdrawn in deference to those who 38 THE REIGN OF (2UEEN VICTORIA feared the rivalry of such institutions with the Church training colleges. Still the principle of Government aid to education slowly gained ground. In 1846 we find the grants to teachers aug- mented ; we find special grants made to training colleges, and more important still, after the dissolution of the Anti- Corn Law League, we find that many of its most active members threw themselves vigorously into the cause of spreading instruction among the people. In 1856, when the grant already reached 451,000^., the appointment of a Vice-President of the Council, charged with the special supervision of the Education Department, greatly helped the movement. In 1861 came the celebrated Eevised Code of Mr. Lowe, which has practically settled, down to the present time, the principle on which the grants have been administered. Lastly, after the passing of the Keform Act of 1867, the Liberal Government took up the question, and we had in 1870 the great Elementary Education Act, which will always be as much identified with the name of Mr. Forster as the earlier stages of the settlement will be identified with that of Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth. Mr. We may leave the details of this great measure to be Act of treated elsewhere. It is enough here to say that it imposed 1870. vipon the local authority the responsibility of seeing that sufficient school accommodation was provided for all the children within their jurisdiction, and empowered it to levy rates for the purpose. This local authority was the School Board, and its duties were not to supersede but to supplement the existing organisation of the voluntary schools. It was devised to meet the ease of the 1,100,000 children who received no instruction at all, as well as of those not less numerous children whose school attendances were irre- gular or who left too soon. The principle, expounded by Mr. Eorster with great mastery of detail, was generally LEGISLATION OF THE REIGN 39 accepted by Parliament and by the country ; but, as had been feared, vehement discord broke out when the rehgious question was approached. The twenty-fifth clause of the Bill proposed to authorise the local authority to pay the fees of poor children attending denominational schools ; and upon this provision the Birmingham Education League swooped down as upon one that would confer intolerable advantages upon the privileged Church of England. The battle raged fiercely, and, as Mr. Lowe put the matter, Church and Dissent began to behave like a fine herd of cattle in a large meadow, which had deserted the rich grass spread all around them and had begun to fight desperately over a bed of nettles in the corner. In the end, the Government agreed to a compromise which severed the connection between the School Boards and the voluntary schools, leaving the latter to depend entirely upon the central grant for help. The Dissenters had fought desperately for the principle of making all schools un- denominational ; the Churchmen had fought not less strenuously for a clause which would have enlarged the denominational schools so much that in most parts of the country they would have had no rivals at all. Mr. Forster had to bear the attacks of both parties ; but before he died he had his reward in seeing the Act of 1870, as strengthened by the Acts of 1873 and 1876, in full work throughout the country, and, to use his own phrase, ' England covered with good schools.' A very large portion of the legislation of the reign has Local govern- been concerned with local government — that is /to say, with ment. the organisation of the local authorities, and with prescrib- ing the questions with which these authorities are to deal, and the principles by which they are to be guided. At the time, indeed, when these volumes appear the problem of a, 40 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA reorganised local government is the question which, next to the Irish problem (and that again is one of its aspects), chiefly occupies the minds of politicians. We are as yet far from a scientific or satisfactory system, and in our rural districts, as well as in London, there remains much of the old confusion of authorities and absence of direct respon- sibility which in times past caused local business to be grievously mismanaged ; but even in London and in the villages a great deal has been achieved since 1837— how much, may be understood by those who care to find their way through the mass of facts which Mr. Clifford has lately collected in his ' History of Private Bill Legislation.' Much more has this been the case in the towns, which since the passing of the Municipal Eeform Act in 1835 have been endowed with constantly increasing powers of managing their own affairs, and, under the combined pressure of public opinion and of the central authority, have generally done their work extremely well. The powers of the local authorities are very large and miscellaneous. Often they have to administer considerable endowments. Under one group of Acts they have the superintendence of roads and streets, of lighting and sewerage. Another imposes on them, in one form or another, the control of the police, and even a share in the administration of justice. Under another they are charged with the supervision of lodging-houses and of workmen's dwellings in general. Another charges them with prevent- ing the adulteration of food ; another with providing ceme- teries that shall not endanger the public health. Besides these, the two great duties are cast upon them of providing for the support of the very poor and of administering the Elementary Education Acts. It is, of course, not the same authority that has to deal with the whole of this class of cases ; we have vestries and local boards, we have boards LEGISLATION OF THE REIGN 41 of guardians and school boards, we have courts of quarter sessions, and doubtless before long we shall have some larger and more widely representative bodies which will generally superintend the business of counties, or possibly of some still more extensive local divisions. Without attempting to assign the precise tasks that belong to each of these authorities, we may shortly indicate some of the principal steps which have been taken by Parliament during the Queen's reign to enlarge and regulate their powers. At the time of the Queen's accession the new Poor Law d) The had been in partial operation for nearly three years, and Law. its good effects were already such as to have convinced many of its opponents that their hostility had been unrea- sonable. Still the memory of so bitter a struggle as had accompanied the passing of the Bill was not to disappear so soon, and the newspapers of the time are fall of stories of supposed hardship, varied bycontinual wild denunciations The Act of the new measure from such men as Oastler and Stephens ; but these protests became fewer and fewer in the face of the steady improvement that was everywhere evident, and that was directly traceable to the new law. As Miss Martineau puts the matter in an excellent chapter in her ' History of the Peace : ' ' The effects, which all men might own if they would, were that before two years were out, wages were rising and rates were falling in the whole series of country parishes ; farmers were employing more labourers ; surplus labour was absorbed ; bullying paupers were transformed into steady working men; the decrease of illegitimate births chargeable to the parish throughout England was nearly 10,000, or nearly 13 per cent. ; . . . and finally, the rates, which had risen nearly a million in their annual amount during the five years before the Poor Law Commis- sion was issued, sank down in the case of the five years 42 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA after it from being upwards of seven millions to little above fom-.' • This was quite enough to convince the country of the soundness of the principle on which the new Poor Law was based, namely, that though (as under the old law) every inhabitant of the country was legally entitled to such relief as would keep him alive, he must, generally speaking, go into the workhouse to receive it. The partial abolition of outdoor relief, combined with a thorough reform of the old law of settlement, and an extension of parental responsibility, were the principal results of the Act of Amend- 1834. Since that time very great modifications must have been effected by Acts of Parliament which amount to no less than 130 for England alone. Among these a few may be mentioned. The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1844 provides that, in the case of London and certain other great towns, temporary relief may be given to the class who are now commonly called ' casuals,' such persons having to pay for this relief by fulfilling a labour test. Acts passed in 1847 and 1876 give power to the guardians to escape from the sometimes cruel necessity imposed upon them by the original Act — that of keeping husband and wife always separate. They are now able to allow married people to remain together in the workhouse if they are over sixty years of age or if they are infirm. Pauper lunatic asylums have been established in every comity, and by the Act of 1867 a central Asylums Board was constituted for London, on which the guardians of every parish are represented and which has the management of a common fund. The diffi- cult problems of settlement and removal have been dealt with by several Acts. Formerly the natural desire of every parish to impose upon some other parish the burden of keeping its paupers led to the grossest abuse of the principle that a person could only claim relief from the ' Martinsau, History of the Peace, ii. 511. LEGISLATION OF THE REIGN 43 parish in which he had what was called a ' settlement.' In 1846 it was enacted that any person could be relieved from a parish in which he claimed relief after he had been settled there five years, and this was in 1861 reduced to three years, and in 1865 reduced to one year. The law of rating has been established by many Acts and decisions, the principal one, the Parochial Assessment Act, having been passed in the last year of William IV. Lastly, the education of pauper children, which had been a problem and a difficulty to many preceding Governments, was finally settled by the legislation which supplemented the great Act of 1870— by the Acts of 1873 and 1876. It was the latter which, with the view of making education compulsory throughout the country, provided a means of paying for the teaching of not only workhouse children, but all the children of poor parents who are in receipt of any kind of parish relief. It enacted that the guardians might pay the school fees of such children. ' It was to be a condition,' it said, ' of the continuance of relief to parent or child that elementary education in reading, writing, and arithmetic was to be provided for such child, and the guardians are required to give such further relief, if any, as may be necessary for the purpose.' It is clearly to the public interest that some chance at least should be given to the children of the very poor of putting themselves in a position to escape from the hard lot of their parents. It may truly be said that the reign of Queen Victoria f2) saui- witnessed the first serious attempts that have ever been latiou. made to cope successfully with the sanitary problems that surround a swarming population ; and though we are still far enough from ideal perfection, though our cities are still overcrowded, though misery, vice, and disease are still encouraged by the lamentable conditions in which many thousands of the urban and the rural poor are housed, 44 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA Begin- nings of sanitary reform. Commis. sion of 1810. there is yet a vast and indescribable difference between the sanitary state of Great Britain in 1887 and its state fifty years ago. It was about the beginning of the reign that the national conscience seemed to awake with regard to this most elementary of all national necessities. On the one hand, there were the doctors, like Southwood Smith," show- ing by the clearest evidence the extent of the existing scandal, and prescribing remedies not beyond what might fairly be accomplished by a wealthy country. On the other hand, there were the clergy and the professed leaders of public opinion in and out of Parliament, aided by such specialists in sanitary reform as Mr. Edwin Chadwick, who still lives to witness the immense improvements that have been brought about by the spirit which he helped to arouse. In 1840 the House of Commons, on the motion of Mr. Slaney, appointed a Commission upon the health of towns, and the report of the Commissioners did a great deal to stimulate sanitary reform. They described the cellar dwellings of Liverpool, in which 39,000 persons huddled for shelter. They described the courts of the same town, ' built up at the sides and end, with only one entrance, frequently under a narrow archway,' which contained a population of more than 68,000. They described the still worse state of things in Glasgow, endorsing the words of a witness who said, ' I did not believe until I visited the wynds of Glasgow that so large an amount of filth, crime, misery, and disease existed in one spot in any civilised country.' They found London itself as bad ; throughout the whole of the East End, much of the Surrey side, and the Holborn Union were multitudes of houses, courts, and alleys, with no sanitary provision whatever, ' dirty beyond description, as if never washed or swept, and extremely crowded with ' See e.g. his ' Beport on the Prevalence of Fever in Twenty Metropolitan Unions,' annezed to the Report of the Commission of 1840. LEGISLATION OF THE REIGN 45 inhabitants.' In some respects the condition of the smaller manufacturing towns, such as Chtheroe, was worse, for while Acts had been passed prohibiting the use of unsanitary cellars as dwellings in Liverpool, Leeds, and London, in other places people lived where they chose, and how they could. Still more important were the investigations of what Commis- is known as the Duke of Buccleuch's Commission, appointed 1343. by Sir Eobert Peel in 1843. As though the revelations of the earlier Commission had not been sufficient, this body, with the aid of its assistant commissioners, visited and minutely reported upon the state of fifty large towns. They found, as might have been expected, that all the Local Improvement Acts which had been passed during the pre- ceding half-century had done very little to compel a regard for the public health either on the part of landlords or on that of the local authorities. Those Acts, indeed, were 400 in number ; but, as Mr. Clifford remarks, ' many of them contained no provision whatever for the drainage either of streets or houses,' and he adds that where this was not the case there was no provision either for j)reliminary survey or for professional and permanent inspection. The Duke of Buccleuch's Commission reported as to the fifty selected towns, that ' in scarcely one instance could the drainage or sewerage be pronounced complete or good, while in seven it was indifferent and in forty-two decidedly bad, all in districts inhabited by the poorer classes.' Its report of the water supply was equally unfavourable. It had no better account to give of the organisation of local jurisdictions, finding everywhere a jumble of powers which made it useless to expect that any thorough and consistent reforms could be passed or administered. It found no facihties afforded for spreading the repayment of town loans over a series of years, so that, as things then were, any drainage works or paving works or wholesale rebuilding must either be paid for 46 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA on the spot or not attempted. It found flagrant nuisances abounding, slaughter-houses and pig-sties common in the midst of towns, the smoke nuisance uncontrolled save by a few obsolete local Acts, lodging-houses uninspected and imlicensed except in one or two boroughs in Scotland, and in London all these inconveniences intensified by the hope- less aggregation of conflicting authorities.' Putuc The immediate result of the Duke of Buccleuch's Corn- Act, mission was the Public Health Act of 1848, a great and ^' important measure, though, like too much of our legislation, injured and often made useless by its permissive character. It created a General Board of Health, consisting of a presi- dent and two other Crown nominees ; it made town councils into local boards of health, and prescribed the election of such boards in rural dictricts. To these boards were entrusted the construction and control of sewers and drains, the removal of nuisances, the inspection of offensive trades and common lodging-houses, the supervision of building and street making, and many other functions, among them the appointment in every district of a public m-edical in- spector. The Act has been long since superseded, but, imperfect as it was, it marked a most important step in our social history, and deserves a leading place in the story of the legislation of the reign. That it was speedily improved is to a great extent owing to the visitations of cholera from which the country suffered in 1848 and in 1853-54. Without dwelling upon many of the details of this improvement, it may be mentioned that the Local Government Act of 1858 supplemented the Public Health Act of ten years earlier, and increased the powers both of the central authority and of the local boards. In one sense we may group with these Acts the whole of the factory legislation to which we refer elsewhere, and we ' Clifford, ii. 318. LEGISLATION OF THE REIGN 47 may certainly class under the same head the numerous Artisans' and Labourers' Dwellings Acts, which since 1868 have tended little by little to improve the conditions of life for the working classes ; but it was not till 1875 that the question was comprehensively taken in hand by Parliament and the great Public Health Act was passed which consoli- dated and amended all existing statutes. This Act was the result of the Sanitary Commission appointed in 1871, with Sir Charles Adder ley for chairman. One of the recom- mendations of this Commission had indeed been carried out immediately on the presentation of the report, namely, that which aimed at clearing away the confusion of central sanitary authorities that still existed, the Home Office, the Privy Council, and the Board of Trade each having its share in that jurisdiction, This state of things was re- medied by the establishment in 1871 of a Local Govern- ment Board, in which were vested powers of the old Poor Law Board, together with those relating to public health and local government, which till then had been the concern of the Home Secretary and the Privy Council. The Act of 1875 effected little positive change in the law ; but it codi- fied no less than forty-seven existing statutes, and thus had an immense effect in making the sanitary law simple, clear, and intelligible. With the general improvements in the sanitary law Housing must be grouped the various legislative attempts that have working been made to provide better dwellings for the working classes. No problem of modern society is more difficult to solve than this ; no kind of legislation is more beset with difficulties, or has a greater tendency to defeat its own ends. It may be said that, throughout the Queen's reign, the attention not only of professed philanthropists, but of all those who desire to remove palpable blots from the civilisation of their time, has been fixed upon the state 48 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA of working-class accommodation, whether in the country districts or in the great towns. It is, of course, in the latter that the scandal has been most serious and the remedy most hard to find. We have already referred to the state of working-class dwellings in Liverpool, Man- chester, and the smaller manufacturing towns forty or fifty years ago. With all the efforts that have been made to amend this state of things, it certainly is saddening to find the late Lord Shaftesbury telling the Eoyal Commission on the housing of the working classes in 1884, as the result of nearly sixty years' experience, that however great the improvement of the condition of the poor in London has been in other respects, ' the overcrowding has become more serious than it ever was.' This view is borne out by much of the evidence that was laid before that Commission, which proved that it was no excejjtional thing for people to herd together as they herded in Wilmington Place, where were ' eleven families in eleven rooms, seven persons occupying one room.' The principal efforts that have been made to cope with this specific evil have been the following : Two measures carried by Lord Shaftesbury in 1851, the Common Lodging- houses Act and the Labouring Classes Lodging-houses Act ; the great Metropolis Local Management Act of 1855, of which we have already spoken, passed through Parliament mainly by the efforts of Sir Benjamin Hall; the Act known as Torrens's Act of 1868, and the three Acts of 1875, 1879, and 1882 which bear the name of Sir Eichard (now Viscount) Cross. These have been supplemented by the Act passed at the end of the session of 1885 as the result of the cele- brated Commission on the Housing of the Poor, over which Sir Charles Dilke presided, and among the members of which were the Prince of Wales, the Marquis of Salisbury, and Cardinal Manning. The principle which underhes all recent legislation of LEGISLATION OF THE REIGN 49 this kind has been the recognition of the right and the duty on the part of the local authorities to demolish and rebuild unhealthy dwellings and to exercise a general control over the houses of the poorer classes. Mr. Torrens's Act applied Torrens'i to single tenements or comparatively small groups of houses, cross's and Sir Eichard Cross's Acts, to use the words of the last '^°*^' Commission, were intended to do on a large scale that which Mr. Torrens's Act meant to do for the smaller areas. Both gave large powers to the local authorities, but they are powers which, even if the will and the energy of these bodies were greater than they are, would be extremely diffi- cult to exercise. How, indeed, is it possible in a vast city like London to make the public improvements which are imperatively demanded by the convenience of the many without sacrificing the few, and those few inevitably of the poorer class ? A new street is wanted, and the making of it will not only provide a much-needed means of communi- cation between this quarter and that, but will incidentally destroy a large number of dwellings of the poorest kind. Both these are excellent results to achieve, but meanwhile what is to become of the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people who crowd those narrow streets, those courts and alleys ? The same thing happens when a Board school is erected, or when a railway station, like the Midland Terminus at St. Pancras, has to be built. Inevitably the effect is to drive the people from the demolished quarter into the already crowded dwellings close by, to send up rents and to increase misery. If there is any lesson to be learnt from the history of the legislation which has attempted to deal with this enormous difficulty, it is that amelioration must be slow and partial, and that without ceaseless vigi- lance on the part of the local authorities and of the Local Government Board every improvement must bring with it, at least for a time, an increase of the old evil. VOL. I. E 50 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA Local The tendency of the legislation of the reign has been central to prescribe a general uniformity of system in local adminis- bodies. tration, while at the same time giving large powers to the local authorities. It may, indeed, be said that the problem of local government consists in just this : in establishing areas that shall be large enough and not too large for the proper and economical performance of the ordinary local functions. We have certainly not gone as far as it is desirable to go towards an ideal system of local organisa- tion : we have still a number of conflicting authorities ; local burdens are unequally distributed, and public works are not so efficiently contrived as we may hope to see them. But still very much has been done, partly by that establishment of the Local Government Board which we have described, partly by the organisation of rural and urban sanitary authorities, and partly by the development of a regular system of municipal corporations. This last has been effected by the new enactments, not less than forty-two altogether, that followed the great Act of 1885, which with them has been superseded by the Municipal Corporations Act of 1882. As to the former point, great additions have been made to the power and efficiency of the sanitary authorities since the Local Government Board came into existence, and in 1878 the county authorities were directed, when forming new highway districts, to alter them as far as possible so as to coincide with the districts of the rural sanitary authority. These authorities, themselves origi- nally the creation of the new Poor Law of 1834, have grown in jurisdiction and in power, as time went on. The Poor Law established the ' union ' districts, but solely for the purposes of Poor Law administration. They have had added to them sanitary functions ; they have great powers in connection with the Education Act where there is no school board ; they frequently possess power under the LEGISLATION OF THE REIGN 51 Lighting and Highway Acts ; they have been brought into relation with the central Government by means of the Local Government Board, and there is little donbt that any future attempt to reorganise local government throughout the country will take this Union of parishes as a basis. In one respect the tendency of the time has been in an Police, apparently opposite direction, that is, towards a more centralised system. At the beginning of the reign the organisation of the pohce was not uniform enough for the public security. There was a high constable for each hundred or similar area, there were petty constables throughout the country, and there were watchmen in towns. Some of the inconveniences of this system are described in the present volume in that chapter which deals with the administration of the law. They were inconveniences of which every one had long been conscious, even fifty years ago, and many attempts were being made throughout the country to follow the example of London and establish a better organised police. In 1839 the justices of the peace were permitted to establish a county constabulary, and it followed that, if the police system was to be uniform throughout the country, the county police must undertake the care of the small towns as well as of rural districts. By an Act of 1840 small boroughs were encouraged to consolidate their police system with that of the counties in which they were situated, and in 1856 the decisive step was taken of declaring that no Treasury grants would be made for the maintenance of the police in boroughs which did not contain 5,000 inhabitants. In 1877 an Act of Parliament declared that no separate force could be established in boroughs of less than 20,000 inhabitants, and thus the risk and inconvenience attending the old police system, with its multipUcation of petty authorities, was reduced to a minimum. A stni more decisive step towards bringing the £ 2 52 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA whole administration of justice under central control was taken when Mr. Cross in 1877 carried an Act for withdraw- ing the prisons from the control of the county authorities and placing them under that of the Secretary of State. Such, in the broadest outline, are the principal features of the legislation which during fifty years has had for its object to place the government of the country, imperial and Bemovai local, in the hands of the people themselves. We may anifes.^^' HOW pass to legislation which has been definitely intended to remove grievances, legislation which from the very nature of the ease it is more difficult to summarise because of its vast complexity. The laws which come under this head touch life in all its aspects ; they affect the relations of locality to locality, of one religious body to another, of one social class to another, of purchasers to vendors, of some trades to the public at large, and — by no means the least important of all — of women and children to their husbands, fathers, and employers. It is obvious that to speak fully on such subjects would require not a few pages, but many volumes, and all that a summary can attempt is to indicate the broad lines on which this legislation has proceeded. We have spoken already of what has been done to remove the friction between one locality and another in the various Acts and administrative measures that have (a) Eeii- affected local government. With regard to religious bodies — bodies. ^ Subject which will be dealt with more fully in a special chapter — the tendency has been towards their complete equality before the law. The Established Church remains established, but many of its exclusive privileges have been withdrawn. Compulsory Church rates, which formed the subject of hot debate throughout the session of the very year in which her Majesty came to the throne, were finally abolished in 1868. Three years later, after a struggle LEGISLATION OF THE REIGN 53 which had lasted long, and which had done more than anything else to throw the educated classes into the ranks of the Liberal party, religious tests were abolished at the Universities. Another great grievance of the Nonconform- ists, the grievance connected with the burial system, was removed in 1880 by Mr. Osborne Morgan's Act. The Jews were admitted to Parliament under the Jewish Disabilities Act of 1858 ; and the head of the family of Eothschild is now a member of the House of Lords. It is hardly necessary to refer to the painful wranglings which in 1880 and the subsequent sessions attended the admission to Parhament of a man whose presence offended the orthodox even more than that of a Dissenter or a Jew had offended their fathers. The chcumstances of this scandal are not such as can be dwelt upon with satisfac- tion by any party, all the less since the question was solved not by any clear decision of Parliament, but by the cessation in 1886 of any opposition to Mr. Bradlaugh's taking his seat. _ To treat the repeal of the Corn Laws at a length eommen- fb) com surate with its importance would require at least a chapter, peai. But several reasons combine to make this unnecessary. The story is more generally familiar to the people of this country than that of any other political struggle of the reign, especially since Mr. Mor ley's ' Life of Cobden ' put the career of the chief agent in the repeal into the hands of everyone who reads. Moreover, the changes brought about by Free-trade are individually discussed, not in one chapter of this book but in several; and the manner in which it has affected the national life is illustrated by its relation to national finance, to the progress of wealth in general, to industrial organisation, to agriculture, and to individual trades. Thus a detailed history of the move- ment of 1840-46 would perforce amount to a repetition of 54 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA much that is said or implied elsewhere ; and this justifies us in reducing to small dimensions of space our account of what, taken altogether, is probably the most important series of events to be found in the history of the reign. Cobden joined the Anti-Corn Law Association in October 1838, when wheat was at 77s. a quarter, wages terribly low, and vast numbers of the people out of work. By the next month the Association — renamed the League — had branches in thirty-six principal towns, and its plan of lectures and public meetings was in full working. From this time it grew and grew. Mr. Charles ViUiers, its Parliamentary champion, annually brought forward a motion for the repeal of the Corn Law of 1828, though the House of Commons was as yet obdurate. In 1842, at the moment which a recent historian has described as that at which the general distress was keenest. Peel brought in his proposal for a new Corn Law, reducing by something like one-half the duties payable according to the law of 1828. Total repeal was not to be thought of ; and the avowed aim of the Minister was to keep corn at a price varying only from 54s. to 58s. But things had gone too far for such half- measures, though in the celebrated Budget that year, in the preparation of which Mr. Gladstone had no little share, vast changes were made in the way of the removal of duties. Nothing short of total repeal would satisfy the League ; and Cobden and Mr. Bright, following up the words with which the former had received the Bill on its first pro- posal, determined to agitate against the new law more fiercely than they had agitated against the old. By the next year Cobden had converted a large number of the farmers themselves to Free-trade. Li the autumn of 1843 alone, more than 5,000,000 of Free-trade tracts were dis- tributed among the electors of England and Scotland ; 140 towns had been visited, and 520 meetings had been held in LEGISLATION OF THE REIGN 55 country places.' During the next two sessions, however, other matters blocked the way, and it was not till the Irish famine of 1845 had revealed the grim reality of the danger that always threatens a populous country when food is dear, that Peel came round. The Minister's proposal, at the opening of the session of 1846, was that the Corn Law should be totally repealed, but not immediately. After three years the ports were to be entirely open, and meantime he would establish a slid- ing scale, with ' a maximum duty of 10s. when the price of wheat should be under 48s., and a minimum duty of 4s. when the price reached 54s. a quarter.' The League had thus triumphed ; with what result of bitter hostility to Peel on the part of the Protectionist dukes and their following, of furious attacks by their spokesman Mr. Disraeli, every record of that time has made us familiar. But the Grovernment held its course. On February 9, the motion to go into committee on the Prime Minister's Free-trade resolutions was carried by a majority of 97, after a debate of twelve nights. Mr. Villiers proposed that the repeal should be immediate, but was beaten by a majority of nearly 200. On March 27, the Corn Bill passed its second reading by 302 to 214 ; and on May 16, the third readmg was carried by 327 to 229. In the Lords, the second reading was passed by 211 to 164, and on the third reading the House did not divide.^ The fifty years of the Queen's reign have brought about co) Posi- an immense alteration in the position of women. They are women, not, indeed, admitted to the Parliamentary suffrage, in spite of strenuous efforts on the part not only of various leaders of their own, but of Liberals like Mr. Mill and Mr. Fawcett, and Conservatives like Lord John Manners ; but they can vote in other than Parliamentary elections, and in many a ' Morley, hi^e of Cobden, i. 290. ' Ibid. oh. xvi. 56 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA municipal contest the scale is turned by the women electors. The real change, however, has been a social change. Women are now permitted to qualify in medicine ; in one university at least the degrees that are open to men are open to them ; in almost every other university they are admitted to examination, and in some they have residential colleges organised on exactly the same basis as the colleges for male students. Still more important are the changes that have been made by law in the relation of wives towards husbands and children, and of women and children to their employers. The tendency of modern legislation has been to advance wives from a position where they had scarcely any rights at all to a position of almost complete equality with their husbands. Besides the changes that have taken place in the law of divorce, by the passing of the Divorce Act of 1857 most important additions have been made to the rights of women as regards the custody of children, and as regards the tenure of property. Before 1839 the father had the sole right to the custody of his children, but by an Act of that year it was granted to the mother in the case of children under seven years of age. Clauses in the Divorce Act of 1857 and the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1878 extended this custody in the case of chUdren up to sixteen years of age. An equally important reform was carried only last year in the Infants Act which is connected with the name of Mr. Bryce — an Act that gives to the mother that right which nature claims for her, but from which legislation had till then excluded her, the right of being guardian to her children after her husband's death. With regard to property, it was only under special circum- stances that the wife, fifty years ago, might hold any at all. The ingenuity of lawyers had indeed provided that her dowry might be settled on trustees so that the capital itself might be kept out of the reach of a grasping or improvident LEGISLATION OF THE REIGN 57 husband, but anything that the wife earned for herself after marriage became ipso facto his. Legislation has provided that a protection order may be obtained by the deserted wife, the effect of which is to guard her property acquired during the period of her desertion from marital interference, and the same right has been extended to women judicially separated from their husbands. A great step was taken in the passing of the Married Women's Property Act of 1870, which carried the important principle that the husband could no longer claim the earnings of the wife gained by work carried on separately, even though they should be hving together. How important this protection is to the women of the working classes is known to all who have had any practical experience of them, and those who knew most of the question were best pleased when the rights of married women were still further extended by the Act of 1882. Another very beneficial Act was passed in 1878 giving power to a magistrate to pronounce a judicial sepa- ration in cases of violent assaults upon a wife ; and several measures of recent date have increased the protection afforded to the persons of women and young girls. Much of the important legislation that has affected the (d) Fao- general well-being of the working classes will be dealt with legisia- in the chapter which relates to the organisation of industry. ^^°^' *°' It is enough here to summarise it in the briefest possible way. First must come the whole of that mass of factory legis- lation which, beginning with the often visionary schemes of Eobert Owen, was carried into practical effect by the efforts of Michael Sadler, of Eichard Oastler, of Fielden, and of Lord Shaftesbury. The whole story has lately been told from the point of view of the chief promoter of this legislation in Lord Shaftesbury's 'Life,' and mdeed it is well known to every one who has any familiarity with the history of the first fifteen years of the reign. The social misery of that 58 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA time was enough to call for strong remedies, and it found its expression in the threefold agitation for the Charter, for Free-trade, and for Factory Legislation. The Chartists believed that the best way to remedy the grievances of the poverty-stricken millions was to obtain for them political power, and thus to enable them to provide their own measures of alleviation. The Free-traders, with Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright at their head, denounced Chartism as misdirected effort, and promised prosperity to the country the moment it should recognise the expediency of allowing every one to buy without restriction in the cheapest market. The factory reformers pointed to what was called the tyranny of the capitalists — to men, women, and children brutalised by long hours of labour in unhealthy rooms ; to the scandals of the mine and the agricultural gang, to the helplessness of the workmen in the face of the odious truck system.' It is curious, as one looks back upon this threefold agitation, to find that in a single reign all the important measures for which the three parties contended should have been carried : that the points of the Charter have nearly all been passed into law, that England has been a Free-trade country for forty years, and that the restrictions on factory and mining labour, against which the Free-traders protested, have not only been carried, but have been extended into almost every trade. ^ Confining ourselves for the moment to this last point, we may indicate the principal stages through which the legislation that aims at the protection of women and young people has gone. It is not to be supposed that there were no Acts of the kind during the first half of the century ; indeed there were several, but they were almost exclusively confined to the cotton trade, and the protection which they ' Disraeli's Sybil, bk. iii. ch. i. ' Herbert Spencer's The Man versus The State, p. 10. LEGISLATION OF THE REIGN 59 afforded was altogether inadequate. The first serious at- tempt to restrict this kind of labour was made by the Act of 1833, which forbade the employinent in cotton mills of children under nine, which limited those between nine and thirteen to 48 hours a week, and those between thirteen and eighteen to 68 hours a week. As yet, however, public feeling had not been really aroused, and it was not till the publication of the report of the Eoyal Commission of 1842 commis- that the public as a whole can be said to have begun X842.° to realise the condition of things among the industrial population. That Commission revealed what was being done in the mining districts. It showed that children of four, five, and six years old were habitually at work the whole day through in the black darkness of the mine ; that the wretched little creatures, almost as soon as they could run and speak, were set to this horrible labour as ' trappers,' ' hurriers,' ' tippers,' 'riddlers,' and 'fillers;' that women worked as hard and as long as men under conditions such as to revolt any in whom the most elementary sense of morals or decency existed ; and that, as a conse- quence, the whole mining population was sunk into a moral condition which was a scandal to the country and to the age. The credit of giving an effective voice to the public indigna- tion against this state of things belongs to Lord Ashley, who succeeded to the position of Michael Sadler, and who, in 1842, strove hard to bring home to the House of Commons the lessons of the Commission and of his own researches. The result was not doubtful, and he succeeded at once in carrying a measure which forbade work in the mines to children under ten and to women. Two years later the Factory Act was passed which limited children's labour in factories to six and a half hours a day or to ten hours on alternate days, and which put all women on the footing of ' young persons,' bringing them therefore under the mild 6o THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA restrictions laid down by the previous Act. Then came Lord Ashley's Printing Works Act in 1845 ; and in 1847, Ten after a long struggle, _ the ' Ten Hours Bill ' became law. Act. It enacted that the labour of women and of young per- sons, i.e. boys and girls between thirteen and eighteen years of age, should be confined to ten hours a day : these hours to be reckoned between six in the morning and six in the evening, with a Saturday half-hoUday. In 1860 and 1862 the operation of the Act was extended to bleaching and dyeing works ; and in 1874, when the passing of the Elementary Education Act had aroused a wider interest in the teaching of the young, the lowest age at which chUdren might work in factories was raised to ten years. Seven years before this, in 1867, were passed two great measures — the Factory Inspection Act, which brought all kinds of factories under the provisions of the former Acts, and the Workshops Eegulation Act, which applied the same principle to those tens of thousands of small estabhshments that had till then escaped interference, though interference was as necessary there as it had been in the case of factories. Lastly, a Consolidating Act was passed in 1878, under the auspices of a Conservative Government, restating and harmonising the law. It provided that all buildings should conform to the elementary laws of health ; that women and children should work no longer than during certain specified hours ; that care should be taken to see that the children were educated ; that medical aid for the sick and the injured should be readily at hand ; and that a system of inspection should guarantee the observance on the part of the factory owners of all the conditions laid down by Parliament, (e) other Much more could be added to show the length to which class the state has gone m assertmg its right to interfere for the tili!^''' benefit of the weak. Several Merchant Shipping Acts have been passed, and several more proposed, with a view to LEGISLATION OF THE REIGN 6i compelling shipowners to take reasonable precautions that their ships should be seaworthy and not overloaded. Even the very details of industrial life have been provided for. In 1864, for example, it was enacted that persons employed in the matchmaking trade should not take their meals on the premises except in the woodcutting workshops. In 1874 ' An Act to Provide for the Payment of Wages with- out Stoppages in the Hosiery Manufacture ' was passed without debate or division. In 1880 a ' Merchant Seamen (Payment of Wages) Act ' prohibited the ' advance note ' system, under which ' crimps ' had been accustomed to advance money to sailors, receiving a kind of mortgage of their wages. In 1883 it was declared illegal to pay wages in public-houses. More recently. Sir John Lubbock, who in 1871 succeeded in passing the Bank Holidays Act, has pro- posed to carry the principle of interfering with individual liberty so far as to compel the early closing of shops — a principle long since applied to public-houses by various Licensing Acts. With these measures, carried or proposed, we may class the Employers' Liability Act of 1880, which provides that under certain circumstances the employer shall be pecuniarily liable for accidental damage caused to the workman in the pursuit of his trade. The fact that the employer can contract himself out of the Act is at the present moment a great grievance in manufacturing constituencies. Three principal measures, all of recent date, and passed (f> Com- bination since the Eeform Act of 1867 gave political power to the and con- artisans, have dealt with the law of master and servant. The Trades Union Act of 1871, brought in by Mr. Bruce when Home Secretary, was an advance in the direction of free combination, which the legislation of centuries had tended to prevent. The public mind had been horrified by the revelations made before a recent Eoyal Commission 62 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA with regard to the ' rattening ' and other worse outrages practised by certain unions at Sheffield, and it was felt that the time had come for a revision and consolidation of the law relating to workmen's combinations. Mr. Bruce's Act cleared away all the civil disabilities imposed by pre- vious laws upon trades unions, and repealed a number of penal enactments ; but, on the other hand, it retained and re-defined certain offences, such as molestation, hiding a man's tools, &c., and provided a more summary punishment for them. Unfortunately, the question of the right of workmen to strike was not settled by this Act. In the next year (1872) took place a great strike of the London gas stokers, whose leaders were afterwards indicted at the Central Criminal Court for an illegal conspiracy, and sen- tenced by Mr. Justice Brett to twelve months' imprisonment. Indignation meetings were held ; men like Mr. Thomas Hughes and Mr. Frederic Harrison took up the case of the imprisoned workmen, and a serious amount of ill- feeling was aroused between classes. A Eoyal Commission sat upon the whole question, and three years later, in 1875, Mr. Cross, the Conservative Home Secretary, brought in two Bills, one to amend the general law of master and servant, and one to amend that of conspiracy. The effect of these, taken together, was to transform the employer's remedy for unperformed contracts, as a general rule, from a penal to a civil remedy. The exceptions are : (1) in the case of a workman employed by a gas or water company, whose breach of contract may endanger the pubHc supply of those necessaries; (2) in the case of a workman who wilfully causes damage to property by leaving his work. The Acts assigned definite punishments for intimidation of various kinds, such as threatening a workman or his family, dogging him in the street, besetting his house, or hiding his tools. With these provisions the bulk of workmen pro- LEGISLATION OF THE REIGN 63 fessed themselves satisfied, since they removed the main grievance — that they were criminally answerable for the breach of a purely civil contract. Another class of legislation, that of dealing with land, Land la-w is of its nature so technical that we may fairly be excused ''^^°'^'^- from giving any very minute account of the various measures. Those which relate to Ireland, than which few laws of greater moment have been passed during the reign, will be dealt with in the chapter that summarises the history of that country. The English land system is one of the most complicated in the world. It has called into existence a highly specialised class of lawyers, whose business it is to deal with its intricacies and to sur- mount the difficulties with which a mass of customary and statute law has invested it. It has offered an easy ground of attack to reformers of all kinds, from reforming lawyers who aim at nothing further than a simplification of the law and the removal of obvious grievances, to Eadical reformers who have sought to serve the cause of democracy by breaking up large estates into small holdings. In the election of 1885, which followed the extension of the county franchise to the agricultural labourers, the question which seems to have most moved the mind of the masses was this question of the land, and the programme of what was commonly called ' three acres and a cow ' was the programme for which great numbers of the Liberal party voted in rural districts. When Parliament met, by one of those strange fatalities which sometimes hap- pen in public as in private affairs, not only were the labourers disappointed, but the very men who had been most active in advocating their claims, and who were triumphantly returned to Parliament to support them, found themselves immediately afterwards thrown over by 64 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA the leader of the party, who gave precedence to the Irish question and proposed a solution with which neither Mr. Chamberlain nor Mr. Jesse Collings could agree. As far, then, as concerns any compulsory assignation of small holdings, things are as yet very much where they were. At the same time, it is the fact that considerable legis- lative changes have been made in the land laws of the country since 1837. They have been directed mainly towards two ends : towards the relief of the tenant-for-life from disabilities which pressed hard upon him, and towards insuring to the occupying tenant the preservation of an in- terest in his own improvements. As everyone knows, a vast quantity of the land of Great Britain is held by persons whose ownership is strictly limited, and who in fact, in the eye of the law, are not owners at all, but tenants-for-hfe. At the beginning of the reign the tenant-for-life could not lease lands for any certain term, but only for a term commensurate with his life ; he could neither sell his land outright nor exchange it, though such an exchange might be to the advantage of his estate and of his family ; he might not cut timber except under special conditions, and he was subject to all sorts of vexatious restrictions under the head of ' waste.' Various Acts have softened the hard lot of the unfortunate men whose interests were thus limited by a regard to the supposed, but very often imaginary, interests of their suc- cessors. In 1856 the tenant-for-life was empowered to grant leases for 21 years, and this power was greatly enlarged by successive Acts ; and, with the consent of the Court of Chancery, he might sometimes even sell portions of the settled The estate. In 1882 the Act known as the Settled Estates Act Estates which was passed mainly through the efforts of the late Lord 1882. Cairns, effected real changes in the position of the limited owner, changes which have been made apparent by the number of sales of great libraries and picture galleries that LEGISLATION OF THE REIGN 65 recent years have seen, and which would no doubt have resulted in the sale of vast quantities of land had not the fall in agricultural prices happened to come at the same moment, making land comparatively valueless. A con- current course of legislation has given the tenant- for-life power to effect reasonable improvements at the cost of his estate, the principal Act under this head being the Improve- ment of Land Act of 1864, which gave a liberal interpretation of the term ' improvement,' and provided for the raising of money by way of rent-charge. Together with these Acts we may put the very important Bill which has just (March 1887) been introduced into the House of Lords by the Con- servative Lord Chancellor, Lord Halsbury. Of this Land The Laud Transfer Bill it may truly be said that had it been introduced Bin, twenty years ago by a Liberal minister — for no Conservative ■''^^''' would then have introduced it — the outcry on the other side would have been tremendous. It proposes to abolish the custom of primogeniture, to prohibit entail, and to grant an indefeasible title. If something has thus been done to affect and alter the position of the landlord, something also has been done for the agricultural tenant. He was in former times liable to lose all the money that he had put into the farm, as on quitting it he received no compensation for unexhausted improvements. Of course, though in England the outlay on the land has commonly been the landlord's, this insecu- rity of the tenant had the effect of checking improvement ; the land was in many parts of the country not developed as it might have been, and was not farmed to the general advantage. The numerous attempts made by private mem- bers to remedy this grievance were on the whole failures, and from the time of Mr. Pusey in 1847, to that of Messrs. James Howard and Clare Sewell Eead in 1873, compara- tively little was effected to secure the interest of the tenant VOL. I. F 66 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA Agri- cultural Holdings Acts. Crofters' Act. Game la'srs. in his holding. Two years later than the last date, the Conservative Government passed an Agricultural Holdings Act which would have been very effectual had it not been for its permissive character. It permitted the bad landlords to contract themselves out of the Act, and it enabled the good ones to do no more than their sense of justice and interest had always led them to do before. In 1883, when the Liberal Government was in power, this permissive Act was superseded by a new Agricultural Holdings Act of a different character. In this Act the basis of compensation to an outgoing tenant was the value of his improvements to the incoming tenant, provided that this alteration in the value of the farm was not owing to the inherent powers of the soil. As to ordinary farming improvements, its provisions were compulsory, and it laid down the principle that such improvements could be made by the tenant, and that he could get compensation for their unexhausted value from the landlord. As to permanent improvements, such as buildings, he could not make them without the landlord's leave ; while with regard to the third and middle class called drainage improvements, he had to give notice to the land- lord, who might either do the work himself or agree with the tenant as to how it should be done. In case of his refusal, the tenant was empowered to act and to charge the landlord with the cost of his improvement. In 1886 an important Act was passed for the relief of the Scotch crofters, in whose favour a Eoyal Commission had reported two years before. The Act was more or less modelled upon the Irish Land Act of 1881, and aimed, but with imperfect success, at giving fixity of tenure, fair rents, and compensation for improvements to this class of tenants. If amendments to the land laws were necessary in the interests of landlords, tenants, and labourers, the game LEGISLATION OF THE REIGN 67 laws have been amended, now in the interests of one of these classes, now in that of another. The course of legislation on this subject has not been uniform ; it has, in fact, been guided by two contradictory tendencies. On the one hand, the Legislature has desired to put down poaching; on the other, to enlarge the rights of the tenants over the game upon their farms. At the beginning of the reign, and until the year 1863, the law was chiefly contained in two statutes •of George IV. and Wilham IV., the latter of which (the Game Act) consolidated much earlier legislation, while the former imposed heavy penalties upon night poachers. In 1863 the legislation against the latter was made more severe by extending the jurisdiction of police officers in poaching cases, and by giving them the power of arresting on suspicion any person whom they believed to be unlaw- fully carrying game, or engines for taking game. This Poaching Prevention Act, for which the great spread of the ' demoralising vice ' of poaching was given as the reason, is one of the few examples of what may be called retrograde legislation which are to be found, as far as concerns Great Britain, in the annals of the Queen's reign. Much more in harmony with the general course of events was the Ground Game Act brought in and carried by Mr. Gladstone's Government in 1881, in obedience to pledges given to the farmers at the preceding general election. It gave the farmer the right to kill hares and rabbits on his farm. The farmer was gratified ; but the hare in many parts of the country has since become almost extinct. One other class of legislation, of vast social importance, J^'qSor can be described in a few words. The fact that the con- la-"^^- sumption of strong drink in this kingdom has not increased in proportion to the increase of wealth is not, indeed, wholly the result of legislation ; it is the result, in a far greater degree, of the growth of moral habits and of the teaching r 2 68 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA of individual social reformers, from the days of Father Mathew to the days of Sir Wilfrid Lawson. But still the course of legislation, whether that which is concerned with the licensing of pubhe-houses or that which has to do with fiscal policy, has had a powerful bearing upon the drink trade, and consequently upon the social state of the people. At the beginning of the Queen's reign, the restrictions on the multiplication of beer-houses were extremely slight, and in 1839 both Houses of Parliament witnessed attempts to in- crease them. Lord Brougham proposed to assimilate the beer-house to the public-house, and to make a magistrate's licence compulsory where only an excise licence had been compulsory before. Sir John Pakington proposed — and the proposal soon afterwards passed into law — to refuse a Ucence to all houses below a certain rental value : a prin- ciple carried further, thirty-three years later, in Mr. Bruce's celebrated and much-attacked Licensing Act (1872). It is not surprising that a limitation of numbers should have been demanded if it was the case, as Mr. Spring-Eice maintained in the debate on Pakington's Bill, that in 1839 the number of public-houses was 55,513 and of beer-houses 86,054, of which 18,379 public-houses and 15,318 beer- houses were below lOZ. annual value. In such a case paternal legislation was excusable, even if it withdrew from a section of the humbler class the chance of making a living in the way they preferred. Thirty years later, the Wine- and Beer-house Act (1869) consolidated and modified the law ; and in 1872, in the flush of the legislative fever which stirred the pulses of the reformed Parliament and of the Government of Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Bruce brought in and carried his Licensing Bill. It laid down several new principles. It introduced a confirming authority in the form of the whole bench of magistrates in boroughs and counties, with the view of restricting the issue of new LEGISLATION OF THE REIGN 69 licences. It laid down a qualification of annual value, with the view of reducing the number of low houses and facili- tating the controlling work of the police. It altered the hours of closing ; and it ordered that a publican's licence should be endorsed with a record of each conviction for a breach of the law. The Act was unpopular, and one of its chief effects was to swell, perhaps to create, the Conservative majority at the general election of 1874. Soon after the accession of Mr. Disraeli to power, his Home Secretary (Mr. Cross) brought in a Bill which, among other amendments of the law, removed all magisterial discretion with regard to hours of closing, and gave complete discretion with regard to endorsing licences. Both before and since that date a powerful agitation has been carried on, chiefly under the lead of Sir Wilfrid Lawson, in favour of ' local option ' — that is, the legislative enactment of the right of each locality to decide by a majority (generally given as a two-thirds majority) what shall be the number of public-houses in the district. It seems to be in this direction that opinion is movmg. In Ireland, in Wales, and in the two counties of Cornwall and Durham, public-houses are now by law closed for the whole of Sunday. They are so in Scotland under the Forbes-Mackenzie Act of 1853, which was amended in 1862. The remaining provisions of that Act classify hotels, public-houses, and grocers licensed to sell spirits ; and, m the case of public-houses, practically limit the hours of trade to those between 8 a.m. and 11 p.m. More important in their effects upon the drink trade have been the changes which have taken place in the duties on spirits and beer, and on their great rival, tea. At the beginning of the reign these duties stood at 7s. 6^. per gallon on English spirits, 3s. Ad. on Scotch spirits, and 2s. Ad. on Irish spirits, while beer was taxed indirectly, the sion. 70 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA tax being imposed as an excise upon malt.' The spirit taxes were raised by slow steps up till 1860, the year of the French commercial treaty which brought in French wines on such favourable terms, when the tax on spirits was fixed throughout the United Kingdom at 10s. per gallon. The tea tax, on the other hand, has fallen from 2s. ^\A. per lb. in 1840 to 6f/. per lb. in 1865, at which figure it still remains. The statistics of the consumption of spirits and tea form an instructive chapter in our social history. While that of s]Dirits has remained almost stationary, varying only from '97 of a gallon per head in 1842 to 1'03 gallon in 1884, that of tea has risen during the same period from 1-22 lb. to 4-87 lbs. per head.' Conoiu- It would be vain, in closing this very general review of the legislation of the reign, to look for any common prin- ciple pervading it. Party government, acting through a popularly elected House of Commons, is not the most scientific machinery in the world for making laws ; and there would be no difficulty in showing that Parliament has at different epochs passed laws that sj^ring from oppo- site principles. The Irish Land Act of 1870, for example, which established tenant right, was the negation of that of 1860, which aimed at taking off all restrictions from free contract ; and the Act of 1881 contradicted both. But in one respect it may almost be said that the legisla- tion of these fifty years displays a single tendency. While financially and for revenue purposes, ever since 1846, the policy of Free-trade has been followed with logical precision, and taxation has been raised more and more from direct sources, in all social legislation the tendency has been towards an increasing interference with indi- vidual liberty. We have given numerous instances of ' See the figures quoted in Walpole's History 6f England, v. 255. LEGISLATION OF THE REIGN 71 laws passed during recent years which do violence to the old principle of kisses /aire —the whole of the voluminous factory legislation, the Sanitary Acts, the Acts prescribing certain modes of paying wages, and the rest. These are the fruit of the revolt against the older political economy which has been slowly making way during the lifetime of the present generation — a revolt anticipated by the early factory and mine reformers, and by all who, forty years ago, inclined to Socialism, Christian or Continental, as a remedy for the evils of our existing system. An English Parliament is not in the habit of laying down principles for its own or its successor's guidance, but insensibly it adopts principles, and one of them which it has adopted with little hesitation of late years, under Mr. Gladstone's guidance, is the banish- ment of political economy, as Eicardo understood it, to Jupiter and Saturn. To interfere on behalf of the weak against the strong, of the workman against the employer, of the woman and child against those who might oppress them ; to establish various State monopolies, as of telegraphs and telephones ; to prescribe the closing of factories, public- houses, and even shops at a given hour ; to cover the country with an army of State schoolmasters and State in- spectors — these things are the acts and objects of a modern Legislature. It cannot be said that its course has been en- tirely consistent, but the Acts which we have mentioned in this chapter are numerous enough to show how steadily, in a Parliament where the interests of the working classes are prominently represented, the movement towards a legisla- tion that may be called socialistic has been gaining ground. 72 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA FOREIGN POLICY. Euroipe A GLANCE at the map of Europe as it stood in 1837 and as and in it stands in 1887 is of itself almost enough to explain the ^^®'' essential changes that have passed over the foreign policy of England during the reign. At the Queen's accession the settlement of 1815 remained almost unaltered. Europe was still, territorially speaking, in the condition in which it had been left by the Congress of Vienna. Except for the separation of Belgium from Holland, the declaration of Greek independence, and the forcible transfer of the French crown from the elder to the younger branch of the Bourbons, the Continent remained practically what it had been, and was still subject to the artificial restraints imposed for their own protection by the conquerors of Bonaparte. Germany was parcelled out among a number of Governments, mostly despotic, and mostly ruling over small States, with the in- fluence of Austria predominating ; Italy was divided among the Austrians, the King of Sardinia, the Grand Dukes, the Pope, and the King of the Two Sicilies. In 1887 changes have passed over the scene which may fairly be described as the greatest that modern times have witnessed ; for Austria has been forced to look eastward, Italy is a united kingdom ruled by a Hberal and constitutional monarchy, and Germany is a united empire which has proved its enormous mihtary strength on the battle-fields of conquered France. It is natural that the relations of England to the new FOREIGN POLICY 73 Europe should not be so intimate and close as were her relations to the old. By the Treaty of Vienna, England, as became the country ■which had borne so great a part in the struggle against Napoleon, and which had dealt him his final defeat, occupied an important Continental position ; in fact, by the necessity of the case, England forfeited many of her insular advantages to take a place side by side with the Continental Powers. If the pohcy of non-intervention had at the time entered into the consideration of statesmen, it would have been found absolutely impracticable for Eng- land, bound as she was not only by the ideas that had triumphed at Waterloo, but by the obligations of treaties. The events of the last thirty years, the treaties of Paris, of Ziirich, and of Berhn, have done as much to reheve her from these legal obhgations as the general change in political relationships has done to alter her point of view. England has stiU foreign interests of immense weight and import- ance, but they are no longer concerned as closely as they were with the affairs of Europe. Except so far as she is still bound by a few treaties, her interests are concentrated upon the affairs of her own world-wide empire, and especially upon India. It is to the security of the Indian frontier, and to the safety of the route to India, that the chief attention of an EngUsh Foreign Minister in modern times is bound to be directed; and when it is not directed to India, it is principally directed to the security of British commerce and of the colonies. To a great extent, of course, this has been the case throughout the reign ; but, in Lord Palmers- ton's time, the term 'British interests' was practically held to have a much wider signification, and the right and the duty of England to interfere in the affairs of the Continent was much more generally admitted. After the final overthrow of Napoleon in 1815 the Great Powers of Europe entered into treaty obligations, binding 74 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA them to take the field against France if revolution should again convulse that country and endanger the peace of Europe. This alliance, which included Great Britain, was not in the first instance directed against constitutional or liberal principles generally ; on the contrary, the Czar of Eussia was at that time the patron of those principles. In the course of a few years, however, reactionary influence became supreme on the Continent, and the League, origi- nally framed against French agitation, became an alhance of autocrats against Liberalism. In this new form it ceased to include Great Britain. The Continental union was now a union of Courts as opposed to the aspirations of their subjects ; moreover, it had a further result, for under the pretext of preserving the peace of Europe, it checked and suppressed the smallest advance on the part of any nation- ality which might, for natural development or any other cause, seem inclined to disturb the settlement of 1815. ' The Emperor,' said Metternich, ' will never admit the principle of non-intervention in face of the persistent activity of the revolutionary propaganda. His Imperial Majesty recognises it not only as his right, but as his duty, to lend to every constituted authority attacked by the common enemy every kind of assistance which circumstances may permit him to employ.' With the intention of making such interference of easier application, Metternich in 1820 summoned the Congress of Troppau (afterwards Laybach), which, in spite of a formal protest from England, decreed that an Austrian army should restore absolute government, under Ferdinand I., at Naples. The British minister who protested against this Congress was none other than Castlereagh, and that it should have been so is the strongest proof of the change which was imperceptibly making itself felt in English sentiment, and which before long would have its weight upon English policy. For some years after FOREIGN POLICY 75 Waterloo, England was suffering from reactionary in^ fluences ; but after 1819, when the feelings generated by the war had had time to wear themselves out, and when reviving commercial prosperity turned the current again in the direction of freedom, British sympathy with the op-' pressed, and the natural British desire to spread the benefits of constitutional rule, began to influence the actions of Ministers. When, in 1823, the Due d'Angouleme, carrying out a policy that was strictly permitted by the Treaty of Vienna, crossed the Spanish frontier to aid Ferdinand VII. in crushing the liberties of his country, Canning, a Tory Minister, strongly protested against the employment of force ; and in the next year the same Minister recognised the inde- pendence of the Spanish republics in South America, and ' called a new world into existence to redress the balance of the old.' Then followed the strange alliance between England, France, and Russia for the pacification of Greece, an object for which the three Powers strove, impelled by such totally different motives. With those of Eussia and France we are not immediately concerned ; but what is to be noticed is the fact that England joined the alliance moved by a genuine desire to secure the blessings of free- dom for an interesting people. In 1830 Lord Grey became Premier, with Palmerston, Palmer- ston. then a man of fifty, for Foreign Secretary. From that time to his death in 1865, with the exception of about nine years. Lord Palmerston was responsible for the foreign pohcy of England, either as Foreign Minister or as Pre- mier ; and to understand his line of action during Queen Victoria's reign, it is necessary to summarise what he did in his first Ministry under her predecessor. From the first it was evident that the policy of Canning would receive a considerable extension in Palmerston's hands. Canning had intervened, but generally in the case of countries 76 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA towards which England had undertaken serious treaty responsibihties ; but Palmerston, not limiting himself too closely by treaties, was ready to afford the protection of England to any country that might be struggling to obtain or to preserve national and constitutional liberties, while at the same time he endeavoured to prevent any of the great Powers from securing a preponderating position in Europe. It is not necessary to suppose that this was done from any sentimental attachment to the ideas of liberty and nation- ality ; indeed, it would not be difficult to show that he made very light of this latter principle in cases where it did not square with his views of the interests of England. He opposed, for instance, the independence of the Danubian Principalities in 1856 ; in 1863 he wrote to Baron Briin- now and employed very slighting language about Servia; and, long before, he had exerted himself to oppose Mehemet Ali. But, as the Prince Consort said, he was determined to maintain and extend the influence of England, and he thought that England was most likely to find friends and allies among peoples governed on principles like her own. 1830 to The condition of Europe at the time of Palmerston's entry into office was such as to give immediate scope for his activity. The Ordinances had precipitated the French Ee volution of July, and it was a question whether Europe in general would not be involved in the struggle between Authority and Eevolution which, as a matter of fact, broke out eighteen years later. In one point, and that a point in which English interests were closely involved, there was a violent rising against the settlement of 1815, and it was a rising which Palmerston supported, and which was finally composed by his means. This was the Belgian revolt against the arrangement which bound the country in close subordination to Holland. Palmerston was called upon to decide whether he would support the insurgents in what 1840. FOREIGN POLICY yy was really an attack upon the European status quo. He did so in spite of difficulties at home and abroad ; for he had to overcome Tory resistance in Parliament, he had to make use of French troops and yet to persuade the French to retire without claiming territorial aggrandisement, and he had to gain the consent of the Powers to the construction of the new kingdom.' The work, however, was successfully accomplished, and Leopold of Coburg took his seat upon the Belgian throne, destined thence to exercise during many years a great and important influence on the side of consti- tutional government throughout Europe. Soon afterwards Austria moved troops into Italy, and Palmerston, confirmed and encouraged in his new policy, notified to the British Ambassador ' that it would be impossible for England to take part with Austria in a war entered into for the purpose of putting down freedom and maintaining despotism.' Two years later, the Courts of Eussia, Prussia, and Austria con- cluded the League of Miinchengratz (September 1833), which, in point of fact, was a mere continuance of the Holy Alliance. In the following year, Palmerston, by way of reply, concluded the quadruple alliance between England, France, Spain, and Portugal, ostensibly with the purpose of expelling usurpers from the Peninsula, but really intended as a counterpoise to the despotic League. All would have gone well if Palmerston could have con- England tinned to depend upon his Western friends. He had by France, this time made up his mind that it was the duty of an English Minister to preserve an attitude of watchfulness, even of opposition, towards Eussia, on the double ground that the Court of St. Petersburg was the great fountain of reactionary ideas for Europe, and that the direct interests of England m the East were threatened by the Eussian advance. It was with this view that he endeavoured in all honesty to bring about and maintain an alliance with 78 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA France ; but, unfortunately, his plan was thwarted, and in the end rendered impossible, by the personal character of Louis Philippe, by the dispositions of Thiers and Guizot, and by the anti-English feeling which still animated the military class in France. In 1830, France had annexed Algiers without much interference on the part of England ; but, from many things that happened during the next ten years, it appeared as though she were aiming at the contrdl of the Mediterranean, and in several points her action was not such as could command English approval or support. She declined to aid England in repressing the cause of absolutism in the Spanish Peninsula, and Palmerston had to act alone. In many other ways the friendship was sorely strained, so that in 1840 we find the British Foreign Minister writing : ' It has long been quite evident that the French Government has been deceiving us about the affairs of Buenos Ayres, as they have done about almost every other matter in which we have had communications with them.' Mehemet Immediately afterwards came the critical quarrel with regard to Egypt, when France determined to aid Mehemet Ali, while England strenuously supported the rights of the Sultan. Whether it was, as Palmerston supposed, the intention of the French to declare war upon England, and with this purpose to gain the support of the Egyptian fleet, is a question that cannot well be decided, but it is certain that, when Palmerston interfered and outwitted the French, he was only just in time to prevent an agreement between Russia and France, by which Russia was to settle the Eastern question according to her liking, and France was to secure the Ehine boundary. The plan was suggested to the Emperor Nicholas, and he replied, ' C'est trop tard.' Palmerston had already opened negotiations with Briinnow.' Then followed the famous quarrel about the Spanish ' Eaikes' Diary, ii. 253 ; Lord Calling's Lif& of Palmerston, ii. 303-4. FOREIGN POLICY 79 marriages — a quarrel, indeed, which was not so pregnant The with the danger of war as the Egyptian imbroglio, but m^ar-'^^ which did still more to estrange the ruling classes of the ^''^ses. two countries from one another. It is scarcely necessary to tell over again the story which has been so amply treated in many of the recent records of that time, especially in the ' Life of the Prince Consort ' and in the ' Greville Memoirs.' It is enough to say that it arose out of the question who should marry the young Queen of Spain and her sister ; that the Court of France was anxious to give to both princesses Bourbon husbands ; that another proposal, supposed with- out good reason to have the support of England, was that the Queen should marry a Coburg prince ; and that the matter, so far as promises could settle it, was settled by King Louis Phihppe's undertaking that, to avoid a re- currence of the old dangers of a union of the crowns of France and Spain, his son, the Due de Montpensier, should not marry the Queen's sister until the Queen herself was married and had children. This promise was broken, and, without a word of warning, it was arranged between the King, Guizot, and the Spanish Ministers that the two princesses should be married on the same day, and that the husband of the younger should be Montpensier. The danger that had been foreseen came to nothing, for Queen Isabella had children of her own ; but the reputation of the house of Orleans was terribly damaged, and the entente cordiale between France and England was broken almost past repair. In a very short time the effects of this rupture were made apparent, for Austria, in defiance of treaties, was able to annex the Eepublic of Cracow ; and there were not wanting other signs of dangerous innovations in the East, which, in Lord Palmerston's mind, could only be checked by the union of the Western Powers. Consequently, though his confidence in Louis Philippe and Guizot was 86 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA Louis Napo- leon. The peace party. Cobden. greatly shaken, and though he wrote, ' The truth is that Louis Phihppe is a man in whom no sohd trust can be placed,' yet he added, ' There he is, and we call him our ally.' ' When the Orleanists fell, Palmerston endeavoured to keep on good terms with their successors, and, as everyone knows, he was only too ready to recognise the cowp d'etat which, by placing Louis Napoleon definitely in power, put an end, as Palmerston thought, to the chances of an Orleanist restoration. He supported Louis Napoleon, and lost his place through his indiscreet manner of doing so, because he believed that in him England would find a trustworthy ally. It is not, however, to be supposed that during these years of activity Lord Palmerston had matters all his own way, or even that the opposition with which he was met was exclusively the party opposition of the Tories. A new party was growing up, which took for its motto ' Peace and Non- intervention,' a party which endeavoured to give voice and force to the feeling which must always be so widely preva- lent in an industrial society — the feehng that it is better for a nation to have as httle as possible to do with the quarrels of its neighbours. Of this party the most active members were Cobden and Mr. Bright, and it derived even greater importance from the influence which its doctrines exerted over the mind of Lord Aberdeen. So early as 1836 Cobden had written his pamphlet on Eussia, and had given utter- ance to opinions which, as the events of the past ten years have shown, are now those of at least one half of the people of this country. He argued — whether history has justified him is another question — that Eussia has no power to make extensive conquests ; that, even if she did make such conquests, her influence would be more civihsing in its effects than that of Turkey ; and that, lastly, the affairs of Turkey and Eussia had little concern for England. ' ii/e, ii. 2. FOREIGN POLICY 8i In the same way, eleven years later, in discussing with Mr. Bright the Spanish marriage question, he writes : ' I began my political life by writing against this system of foreign interference, and every year's experience confirms me in my early impression that it lies at the bottom of much of our misgovernment at home. My visit to Spain has strengthened, if possible, a hundredfold my conviction that all attempts of England to control or influence the destinies, pohtical and social, of that country are worse than useless. They are mischievous alike to Spaniards and Englishmen.'' When the Crimean war was impending it had no such vi- gorous opponents as the two great leaders of the Manchester school, and the speeches then delivered by Mr. Bright will remain, so long as English political oratory is read, as ex- amples of the highest political eloquence. We know that the effort was of no avail, we know that the country declared against the peace party, and that Cobden and Mr. Bright were for a long time discredited. Mr. Kinglake has said that they were discredited in their opposition to that par- ticular war because they were known to be against all war ; but it is pretty clear, as Cobden's biographer has put the matter, that in the state in which the public mind then was ' the most sohd reasoning, the most careful tenderness for prejudice, the most unanswerable expostulations, are all alike unavailing.' The war took place ; brought on by what designs of The , J. ,. ., • Crimean interested men and wilfulness on the part ol nations, it is -j^ar. not necessary here to tell at length. Every history of the time is full of those great events, and in the narrative of Mr. Kinglake they have received a form which, had that brilliant writer possessed the gift of compression, would be classical. It is enough here to say that the war arose from certain causes that may be called national, and from certain 1 Life, ii. 8. VOL. I. G 82 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA other causes that were personal to the individual actors. On the one hand, there was the old antagonism between Eussia and Turkey, the traditional policy of England to support the latter as the most convenient occupant of Con- stantinople, and the special detestation for Eussia that was then felt throughout this country on account of the inter- ference of the Czar with the cause of the Hungarian patriots in 1849. On the other hand, there were the characters of four men — of the Czar Nicholas, oi the Emperor Napoleon, of Lord Palmerston, and of the British Ambassador at Constantinople, Sir Stratford Canning. With every desire to keep the peace, Lord Aberdeen could not bear up against the pressure put upon him by these last two ; pressure, it may be added, in which in the main they were supported by the influence of the Prince Consort.' Sir Stratford, afterwards better known as Lord Stratford de Eedcliffe, be- lieved, like Lord Palmerston, ' prospectively in the regene- ration of Turkey ; ' and he entertained, besides, a bitter personal grudge against the Emperor of Eussia.^ Palmers- ton, though only Home Secretary, was the strongest man in the Aberdeen Cabinet ; and without due calculation of the cost and of the question whether our wretchedly organised little army was able to bear the strain of war, he deter- mined to support the resistance of Turkey by force of arms. Of the French Emperor's part in the declaration of war still less need be said, since Mr. Kinglake has placed it eternally upon record in his burning indictment. Napoleon III. saw no way but this of entering definitely into the group of European sovereigns, and of assuring his position both at home and abroad. He cared nothing, the French ' Lije, vol. iii. passim, esp. p. 47 ; and again, see the Queen's letter to Lord Aberdeen, ib. p. 77. ' See Humphry Sandwith, a Memoir, p. 108, for a proof of this state- ment. The phrase quoted is Mr. Gladstone's (English Historical Review, April 1887). FOREIGN POLICY 83 army cared nothing, for Turkey, where national interests, except for the traditional qxiasi protectorate of France over the Latin Church, scarcely existed for them ; but they cared very much for the opportunity for military glory, and for the chance, which seemed a good one, of assuring French predominance in Europe. By a strange irony of fortune it was the most pacific of EngKsh Ministers that declared this war, on March 28, 1854. When it was over, Cobden did not cease his oppo- sition to Palmerston and the Palmerstonian policy, but, on the contrary, carried it out to the end, extending it even to such measures as those which, assuredly with every justifi- cation, the Minister was taking for the fortification of the ports of the country. The man who had converted Peel to Free-trade, and who had seen the enormous accession of prosperity which it had brought to England, could never rid himself of the generous idea that it was by free and peaceful intercourse between nations, and not by mutual distrust, that mankind was to be served. He talked Napo- leon III. into signing the Commercial Treaty; and how could a monarch so friendly and so enlightened dream of invading England ? Cobden, perhaps fortunately for his peace of mind, died before 1870, or he would have seen the man he so much admired, worn out with anxiety and disease, driven by the fear of revolution into a wanton in- vasion of Germany. Had it served Napoleon's purpose equally well, he would certainly have offered little opposi- tion to the wild desire of his colonels to invade England ten years earlier.' ' Careful observers knew that an invasion of England was ' in the air ' long before 1860. Cf. the recently published Becollections of Count Vitz- thum, i. 162 (Eng. trans.) on date Jan. 15, 1855. ' The fiasco of the English expedition to the Crimea can hardly be welcomed in St. Petersburg with more malicious pleasure than in Paris. . . . The notion of a future Ereneh invasion of England would seem to be less fanciful since this expedition than it was before.' G 2 84 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA Lord Cobden's ideas had undoubtedly great influence, though deen. rather on the masses than on those who are directly respon- sible for government. Almost more important was the opposition to the Palmerstonian policy of intervention that grew up in the early years of the reign in the minds of a small group of statesmen, and especially in that of Lord Aberdeen. In 1829, indeed, Aberdeen had consented to a limited interference on behalf of Greece, but from that time forward he resolutely declared himself in favour of non- intervention. He refused the invitation of Louis Napoleon, then a prisoner at Ham, to ask for his release.' A little earlier, on the Tahiti question, he displayed unwonted con- ciliation, and consented to a compromise which Lord Palmer- ston denounced as ' truckling to France.' ^ In 1842 he despatched Lord Ashburton to America to settle the thorny question of the Maine boundary, and was again denounced by Palmerston for what he called ' a most disgraceful and dangerous arrangement.' ^ In 1844 Lord Aberdeen, with Welhngton and Peel, gave a friendly hearing to the claims of the Emperor Nicholas to the legitimate protectorship of the Greek religion. It would be easy to add further instances of his pacific disposition, and of his desire to keep England on good terms even with those whom Palmerston was ready enough to regard as her enemies. We know that the result was not happy, and that, whatever other causes may have brought about the Crimean war, it was precipitated by the Czar's belief that Lord Aberdeen would submit to any action on his part without appealing to arms. But, for good or evil. Lord Aberdeen's views have had great posthumous in- fluence. They have contributed more than any other single cause to mould the foreign policy of Mr. Gladstone. Palmerston, however, prevailed while he lived. He had ' Lord Malmesbury's M&moirs, p. 160. 2 Life, by Ashley. = Ibid., i. 452. FOREIGN POLICY 85 been prompt to recognise Louis Napoleon as the ruler of paimer- France, and the way he did it had brought to a head the triumph, old antagonism between him and the Court. He was dis- missed from his post as Foreign Minister, and remained for some little time out of office. The Government which had dismissed him fell. ' I have had my tit-for-tat with John Eussell,' he writes on February 24, 1852, ' and I turned him out on Friday last.' The Tories came back for a few months, to be succeeded by Lord Aberdeen, with Palmerston in the anomalous position of Home Secretary. The Crimean war took place. There were victories in which the small British army played an heroic part, but there was also that long history of disastrous maladministration — of troops dying from hunger and cold, of resources wasted and lost — which , led, at the end of January 1855, to the vote which drove Lord Aberdeen from office. The Tories could not govern, and the voice of the country called for Palmerston. Quod Divpm permittere nemo Auderet, volvenda dies en attulit ultro. So wrote the new Premier in a letter to his brother on February 15, 1855 ; ' and he added : ' A month ago, if any man had asked me to say what was one of the most impro- bable events, I should have said my being Prime Minister. Aberdeen was there ; Derby was head of one great party, John Piussell of the other ; and yet in about ten days' time they all gave way like straws before the wind, and so here am I writing to you from Downing Street as First Lord of the Treasury.' Then after shortly explaining how it was that he came to be there, he proceeds : ' I am backed by the general opinion of the whole country, and I have no reason to com- plain of the least want of cordiaHty or confidence on the part of the Court.' The Queen, indeed, in the letter in ' Ashley's Life, ii. 305. THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA KesTilts of the Crimean Tsrar. which she first summoned Lord John Eussell to form a Government, had made a special request that Lord Palmers- ton should join him, and, when all the other combinations broke down, her Majesty and the Prince, so far from ob- jecting to entrust him with the Premiership, were glad to give effect to the voice of the country. This, it must be re- membered, was the time of which the Prince Consort wrote : ' Things have gone mad here ; the political world is quite crazy, and the Court is the only institution which does not lose its tranquil bearing. . . . The press, which for its own ends exaggerates the sufferings of our troops in the Crimea, has made the nation furious.' ^ Crazy or not, the nation was indignant with those under whose direction of affairs the mishaps of the Crimean winter had taken place ; and, with a kind of blind instinct, it looked to Lord Palmerston as the man who could best extricate it from its difficulties. It is unnecessary to tell over again the story of the events which followed; of how, after many disappointments and much delay, Sebastopol fell, the active campaign came to an end, and — though the difficulties of the peace negotiations were scarcely less than those of the campaign itself — the Treaty of Paris was finally signed on March 30, 1856. The Crimean war appeared to prove the disinclination of the English people to follow the policy of the peace party, and it also appeared to provide a settlement of the Eastern question. In point of fact it did neither. True, for some years afterwards, the peace party as a party, and as repre- sented by its leaders, Bright and Cobden, was in a minority, was even almost discredited. True, Lord Palmerston in 1857, when beaten in the House of Commons on the question whether certain actions done towards the Chinese had not been violent and unjustifiable, appealed to the country and was returned to power by a large majority. None the less ' Ashley's ii/e, iii. 213. FOREIGN POLICY ^^ the sentiments and the opmions of Cobden and of Lord Aberdeen were silently gathering a force which was in no long time to transform British foreign policy. The govern- ment of the country, indeed, was as yet in the hands of a Parhament elected by the middle and upper classes, and was therefore less disinclined to war than is likely to be the case with a Parliament chosen by the masses. But by this arowtu time the masses were knocking at the door of Parliament ; peace it was well known by the leaders of both parties that their ^®®^''^^- admission could not be long delayed, and, excluded though they still were, it was not possible to ignore their feelings and ideas. Moreover, after the experience of the Crimea, the middle class itself began to look on war with new eyes. They had seen it, not indeed sweeping over their fields and ravaging their towns, but calling upon them for great sacrifices, costing them the lives of their sons and brothers, and crippling their resources. For the future they would look more closely into the real meaning of war whenever it was proposed to them, and, while just as ready as of old to strike when their real interests required it, they would be on their guard against being led astray in defence of interests that were not real. In other words, the immense cost and the doubtful result of the Crimean war gave a prodigious impetus to the doctrine of non-intervention ; and though a dozen years after Palmerston's death, at a great crisis in English and European history, Lord Beaconsfield presented the Palmerstonian view with an imaginative force of which Palmerston never was master, the election of 1880 showed that when foreign policy was before the country Mr. Gladstone was stronger than he. It is still more obvious that the Crimean war offered no real settlement of the Eastern question. It had crippled Eussia, but it had not changed her policy nor destroyed her power ; it had prolonged the life of Turkey, but it had not 88 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA The really secured the Ottoman Empire. Eussia was glad ques-"^ enough to make peace, for her forces were terribly injured *'°"- by the war. She saw that the realisation of her hopes must be deferred for a while, until she had built her railways and strengthened her army ; and she saw, moreover, that there existed an excellent chance of breaking up the Anglo- French alliance, and of her being left to deal with England, her more obvious enemy, alone. The Treaty of Paris was, on her part, but the expression of this feeling, and the history of the subsequent thirty years has shown that she was right in regarding that treaty as a merely provisional settlement, and her own defeat as nothing but a temporary hindrance. To England, on the other hand, the Eastern question has become only more real and more pressing since the Crimean war. Throughout that time the foreign policy of England, so far as it has displayed activity, has been con- centrated on the solution of that question ; from every other foreign complication that does not touch this cardinal interest of hers she has in one way or another extricated herself, and in the minds both of the people and of the governing class the very words ' foreign policy ' and ' foreign affairs ' have come to mean the relations between England and the East, and especially between England and Eussia, her great Eastern rival. Lord Palmerston himself was not by any means set free from the Eastern question by the Treaty of Paris, for in the very next year (1857) he was obliged to undertake ' a little war ' against Persia in order to compel her to evacuate Herat, which she had occupied contrary to her engagements with England. ' We are begin- ning,' he writes on this subject to Lord Clarendon, ' to repel the first opening of trenches against India by Eussia ; ' ' for he foresaw Eussia's eastward advance, and was determined that Herat should not fall into the hands of a ruler who ' Life, ii. 341. FOREIGN POLICY 89 was a mere vassal of the Power that was destined before long to occupy Khiva and Bokhara. The Indian mutiny, its suppression, and the closer relationships into which India was consequently brought to the British Crown, added still more importance and reality to this Eastern aspect of the foreign policy of England. There were, of course, during the years which intervened Paimera- between this date and Lord Palmerston's death, many other pr^nce. important foreign questions with which a Prime Minister was bound to deal. The relations between this country and France were for some years after 1856 by no means so cordial as might have been desired, and Lord Palmerston, in an ill-judged attempt to improve them by his Conspu-acy to Murder Bill (1857) — brought in after the attempt of Orsini upon the life of Napoleon III. — was defeated by a vote in the House of Commons, and resigned. He was succeeded by Lord Derby, and for fifteen months the foreign policy of England was directed by a Tory Prime Minister and by his Foreign Minister, Lord Malmesbury. ' In giving me the Foreign Office,' writes the latter,' ' Lord Derby has imposed a very great responsibility upon me. At this moment our relations with France are in a state of more than tension, and it will require the utmost temper to clear away the clouds that threaten a storm.' The feelings of both sides were by no means simple. Neither the French people nor the French army had much liked the alliance and the war. They asked themselves what France was fighting for, and the question was easier to ask than to answer. As is usual in such cases, the unpopularity of the alliance was reflected on the ally; and public opinion in France, worked upon by Piussia, came to regard England as a country which had used the forces of the Emperor for her own ends. It was not so clear to the French mind as Mr. Kinglake has made it to ' Memoirs of an ex-Minister, p. 417. go THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA the English, that there would have been at least as much truth in a precisely opposite view, and that, however willing Lord Palmerston was to form an alhance for the purpose of beating back Eussian aggression, Napoleon III. was just as willing to form it for the purpose of consolidating his own power and securing European recognition. Then came the attempt of Orsini, whose plot was believed to have been hatched in London; the abortive trial at the Old Bailey of his supposed accomplice. Dr. Bernard ; and the failure of Palmerston's Conspiracy to Murder Bill — events which excited beyond all bounds the anger of the Imperialist press and of the colonels. Just at the same time the fortifications of Cherbourg were^ completed, and France became conscious that, with a strong steam fleet and a fortified harbour of the first class just opposite our shores, a,n invasion of England need not be put aside as alto- gether a chimera. Though it practically went little fm'ther than the gossip of the mess-table and the denunciations of the Chauvinist press, the language used was of a kind to fully justify Lord Malmesbury's uncomfortable com- ment. The war The year 1859 and the two or three which followed were somewhat critical from the point of view of our foreign relations. It was evident that Napoleon meant to move, and the question was how far his movements could be directed or restrained. It was not at that time known for certain, as it was known later, but it was shrewdly sus- pected, that he had an understanding with Cavour, and that he was about to aid the King of Sardinia and the Eevolutionary party in Italy in striking the long-deferred blow for Italian freedom. In the middle of December, Count Buol had written that Austria declined to move from the Italian settlement of 1815 : ' that no exchange, no cession, and no negotiation would be granted by her for any part of 1859. FOREIGN POLICY 91 of her Italian dominions.'' The French Emperor met this declaration with a New Year's speech of a threatening cha- racter, and, as the months went on, it became apparent that there would be war. The attitude of England was complicated by various Attitude considerations. On the one hand, the Tories, who were Lnd"^" in office until June, were favourable on the whole to the maintenance of Austrian rule, and the Court was with them. ' The Queen and the Prince,' writes Lord Malmes- bury on May 29, ' feel very strongly the defeat of the Austrians, and are anxious to take their part.' But Tory sympathy did not go so far as to propose active co-opera- tion with Austria, and Lord Malmesbury continues, ' I told them it was impossible.'- Indeed, the feeling of the country at large — of the whole of the working class so far as it had any opinions on foreign affairs, not to mention the literary and professional classes— sympathised, if not with the policy of the French Emperor, at least with the aspirations of the Italian people. Austria had a bad name among the English masses, who remembered 1849, the atrocities of General Haynau and the stern rule of Eadetzky in North Italy. They thought ill, too, of the Pope; and the Bombas, father and son, had been made odious to them by what they had heard of the cruelties practised in Naples, and especially by the letters which Mr. Gladstone had written on the subject a few years before. It is true that Garibaldi had not yet risen to concentrate upon his own picturesque person the admiration of all British lovers of freedom and heroism, but the mind of the people was quite prepared for such an outburst as that which greeted the great Liberator on his visit to London in 1864. Between these two extremes, of decided Austrian proclivities and of thoroughgoing sympathy with Italy, there ' Malmesbury, Memoirs, p. 457. 92 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA were the views of those who, with Lord Palmerston, were on the whole in favour of the Franco- Sardinian alliance, but who foresaw its dangers to Europe and to England. The war took place ; there were victories of the allies at Magenta and Solferino, and the Austrians were driven within the Quadrilateral. By that time Napoleon thought that he had lost men and treasure enough ; and, besides, he had trustworthy information that, unless he promptly terminated the war, the forces of Prussia and of her German allies would very soon be on the march to Paris. He tried for English intervention between himself and the Austrians, but Palmerston did not like the task, nor did he like the conditions which were suggested to him as the basis for his intervention. ' If the French Emperor is tired of his war,' he wrote to Lord John Eussell, ' and finds the job tougher than he expected, let him make what proposals he pleases and to whomsoever he pleases ; but let them be made as from himself, formally and officially, and let him not ask us to father his suggestions and make ourselves re- sponsible for them.' ' Napoleon took the hint, and the two Emperors met and concluded the peace of Villafranca (July 11, 1859) — a peace which satisfied no one, least of all Cavour, and which left much for the Italians themselves to do, and much for Europe to do, before the Italian question could be regarded as settled. Inconclusive as the war had been, however, the peace freed Napoleon's hands, and left him at liberty to turn his scheming activity in other direc- tions. Thus, in October, we find a quarrel between Spain and Morocco, on which Lord Palmerston's comment is : 'It is plain that France aims through Spain at getting fortified points on each side of the gut of Gibraltar, which in the event of war between Spain and France on the one hand, and England on the other, would by a cross-fire render that strait ' hije, ii. 367. FOREIGN POLICY 93 very difficult and dangerous to pass, and thus virtually shut ij-apo- us out of the Mediterranean.' ' Palmerston, in fact, by this inT"^" time had become thoroughly suspicious of his old friend, and ^'^siand. had almost reached the state of mind which led him to say a few months afterwards : ^ ' The Emperor's mind seems as full of schemes as a warren is full of rabbits, and, like rabbits, his schemes go to ground for a moment to avoid notice or antagonism.' =* And chief of all these schemes, in Lord Palmerston's belief, was the scheme for invading England and avenging Waterloo. ' I have watched the French Emperor narrowly,' he writes to the Duke of Somerset, ' and have studied his character and conduct. You may rely upon it that, at the bottom of his heart, there rankles a deep and inextinguishable desire to humble and punish England, and to avenge, if he can, the many humiliations — political, naval, and military — which, since the beginning of this centurj^, England has by herself and her allies inflicted upon France. He has sufficiently organised his military means ; he is now stealthily but steadily organising his naval means ; and when all is ready, the overture will be played, the curtain will draw up, and we shall have a very disagreeable melodrama.' ^ At all events, the relations between the two countries after the annexation of Savoy and Nice, and after Lord Palmerston had notified that England would regard the cession of Genoa to France as an act which could not be ' ii/e, ii. 374. ^ Letter to Lord Cowley, April 1860. ' Compare the very strong language used by the Prince Consort, who had in former years been on such cordial terms with Napoleon, in a letter to Lord Malmesbury, Jan. 16, 1859 : ' The Emperor has been born and bred a conspirator, and at his present age will never get out of this turn of mind— a schemer himself and suspicious of others. For his schemes he wanted, and still wants, an ally. England was the only one he could obtain after his assumption of the Imperial Crown ; but as the English alliance means maintenance of public law and treaties, and progress in civilisation, it was frequently most irksome to him, and hence his constant complaints of the restraints to which it subjected him.' < Life, ii. 391. 94 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA permitted,' were so much strained that in the session of 1860 Lord Palmerston was able, in spite of the vehement opposition of Cobden, and, strange to say, of Mr. Disraeli, to carry a resolution for spending nine millions sterling on the fortifications of our dockyards and arsenals. Lord Palmerston's memorandum of a conversation which he had had with Count Flahault, March 27, 1860, would of itself be a sufficient explanation of this vote. "While the tone of the two statesmen was pacific and friendly. Count Flahault confesses that ' his great object was to prevent war between the two countries ; ' and added, ' What I fear is an invasion of this country, for which steam affords such facilities, and which would be disastrous to England.' When an ambas- sador speaks in this way, it is time for the Power he is addressing to put its house in order. The signature of the Treaty of Commerce between France and England marked a fortunate change in the relations between the two countries. If Napoleon was a schemer, he could change his schemes rapidly enough ; or, rather, he was so abundantly provided with them that, if he found one was not likely to work well, he would readily abandon it for another. Many reasons concurred to make him abandon his designs against England, and for the remaining ten years of his reign his eye was fixed rather upon the EhLne than upon the Channel. It is very noticeable, moreover, that from about this time the policy of England ceases to concern itself in a primary degree with the affairs of the European States. When in 1863 Napoleon proposed a congress to revise the settlement of 1815, Palmerston refused to co-operate. He was old, though age counted for less with him than with almost any other man of his generation ; he was practical to the core, and dis- trusted large schemes and wholesale attempts to transform ' Life, ii. 387. FOREIGN POLICY ^5 existing arrangements ; above all, he had begun to see that Paimers- public feeling in favour of concentrating British attempts last'* upon strictly British interests was far stronger than it had y^i'^- been in the days of his youth and middle age. Indeed, had any active interference of England with the concerns of foreign States been at that time practicable, it is probable that the intervention would have been directed, not towards Europe, but towards America. The great war between South and North — that blind struggle between two huge, untrained armies, spread over vast regions, where strategy was a series of experiments and where ultimate victory was only to be won by numbers and sheer endurance — was what attracted the gaze of Europe from 1860 to 1864. More than once it was proposed to recognise the independence of the South. Napoleon III. wished to do so.' Mr. Roebuck strenuously urged it in Parliament, and, as Lord Malmesbury puts it, ' the feeling for the South was very strong in society.' Moreover, there was a moment when, in consequence of a flagrant breach of international law on the part of the North, there was imminent risk of war between England and the Federal RepubUc. But, fortunately, the ' Trent ' affair was settled by the practical admission on the part of the authorities at Washington that they had been in the wrong ; the South was not recognised, and the war ended without interference on the part of England. In the Schleswig- Holstein war (1864), waged by Prussia and Austria against Denmark for the possession of the Duchies, France and Russia declined to interfere, and England, who would have done better had she frankly followed their example, con- tented herself with remonstrances and a suggestion that the question should be referred to those Powers who had signed the Treaty of London. There was a war on the Gold Coast (1863), and a menace, not unaccompanied by some show of ' Malmesbury, p. 559, c/. p. 556. 96 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA His force, against Japan (September 1864), and the next year death, unexpected though not premature, deprived England of her great Minister. His death closed a period of foreign as of domestic policy. At home a number of organic questions, which by common consent had been allowed to slumber so long as Palmerston lived, came immediately to the front, and, under the active guidance of Mr. Gladstone, the country entered upon an era of Parliamentary reform and large legislative changes. Abroad, the principle of non-intervention, which, as we have said, had been slowly gaining ground ever since the Crimean war, became accepted as the cardinal point in the policy of the country. The campaign of 1866, in which Prussia beat Austria in the struggle for the leadership of Germany ; the greater campaign of 1870, in which united Germany beat France in the struggle for the leadership of Europe ; the overthrow of the French Empire and the sub- stitution of a Eepublic ; the Spanish Pievolution of 1868, and the changes which followed, all took place without a protest or the shadow of interference on our part. There was, indeed, a moment in the course of the Franco-German war when the intervention of England seemed imminent ; the intervention, however, would not have been in order to satisfy the natural desire on the part of the people of this country that France should not be irretrievably ruined, but because the German forces had seized some British ships, and, as we believed, had refused redress. The exception seemed to prove the rule. Fifty years before, an English Minister would not have hesitated to strike for the balance of power, or for any other general interest which seemed to him to be important ; but in 1870 the principle had been established that a great country has responsibilities enough of her own, and must not interfere in the quarrels of other nations except to protect herself. FOREIGN POLICY 97 The twenty-two years that have elapsed since the death Eastern of Palmerston have, indeed, been marked by a singular con- ^^®^''°^ centration of the foreign policy of England upon one single "p^"^®"*- question or group of questions. Except so far as regards the relations between this country and the United States on the one side, and the far East on the other, it may be said that, so far as our foreign policy has been active, it has been confined to what is known as the Eastern question. As has been said above, the Treaty of Paris offered no per- manent settlement of this question, and few statesmen ever believed that it would. So early as 1860 there was very considerable danger of its being reopened — not, indeed, by the action of Eussia, but by an outbreak of Mussulman fanaticism in the region of the Lebanon. The Druses rose against the Maronite Christians, and throughout the whole region of which Damascus is the capital there were terrible massacres and outrages of every kind. Nothing more disastrous to Turkey herself could possibly have happened, for it was proved that the Turkish authorities and the Turkish soldiers in Syria had been, to say the least, back- ward in suppressing this outburst of violence, and, as a con- sequence English public feeling, which had already become more or less lukewarm towards Turkey, fell into a condition which a statesman anxious to defend her against her ene- mies would have found it extremely difficult to inflame into sympathy. An incidental danger connected with this outbreak arose from the fact that French troops were allowed temporarily to occupy certain parts of Syria ; but, though the French Emperor was not unnaturally suspected of wishing to establish French influence in that quarter in a permanent and visible way, these troops were in due time withdrawn. The fact of this refroidissement of English sympathy with Turkey became very clear two or three years later, after the bombardment of Belgrade by the Turkish VOL. I. H 98 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA garrison of that city, in revenge for a trifling outbreak on the part of some of the inhabitants. Out of this arose a general debate in the British Parliament, in May 1863, in which the leading part against the Government and the traditional policy of the Foreign Office was taken by Cobden. It is worth while to quote the letter to M. Chevalier in which he describes his own impressions of this debate, for the subsequent course of history has offered remarkable confirmation of them. ' I was very much struck with the altered feeling towards the Turks. They have not a friend except Palmerston and his partial imitator Layard. Palmerston was absent from the debate owing to a slight attack of gout. Gladstone was obliged to speak in reply to me, but he did so with evident reluctance. There will be no more Ciimean wars for us in defence of the Turks. Should a Slavonic or Hellenic Garibaldi arise to wage war with the Ottoman oppressor, British public opinion will instantly leap to his side.' ' The The next disturbance of the status quo in the East was sea° iiot, however, of a kind to separate England still further ques- from Turkey ; it arose not from Mussulman violence, but from the diplomatic action of Piussia in the Franco-German war. It was, of course, of enormous importance to Ger- many to secure the friendly neutrality of Eussia during this life-and-death struggle ; for while an active alliance between Eussia and France would have made the German victories almost impossible, an unfriendly neutrality would have made it necessary for Prussia to keep a third of her army inactive on her eastern frontier. The Emperor Alexander was not Ul-disposed to Germany, but he very naturally required a price for assistance so valuable as that which his friendly neutrality would give, and part of the price was claimed without long delay. On Nov. 14, 1870, Eussia gave notice that she repudiated the restrictions which ' Morlej'B Ijii& of Cobden, ii. 403. FOREIGN POLICY 99 had been imposed upon her occupation of the Black Sea Ly the Treaty of Paris. It is only necessary to turn to such authorities as the ' Life of the Prince Consort ' to see the great importance which, in the opinion of the men who conducted the Crimean war, was attached to this provision of the treaty. Early in 1855, when the allied armies were still before Sebastopol, a Conference had taken place at Vienna with the view of arranging terms of peace, and this Conference had been attended, on behalf of France and England, by M. Drouyn de Lhuys and Lord John Eussell. Austria proposed, and, what is more significant, the French and English plenipotentiaries approved, terms which should enable Eussia to keep a fleet of considerable size in the Black Sea. What the Court thought of this proposal was put on record by the Queen and Prince Albert. The former wrote : ' The Queen has received Lord Clarendon's letter with extreme concern. How Lord John Eussell and M. Drouyn can recommend such proposals to our acceptance is beyond her comprehension ; ' and the Prince affirmed that the effect of the Austrian terms would be simply ' de per- petuer et legaliser la preponderance de la Eussie dans la Mer Noire.' ^ In point of fact. Lord John Eussell was soon afterwards compelled to resign his position in the Ministry in consequence of the discrepancy between his attitude at Vienna and his subsequent attitude in Parliament. The plenipotentiaries met at Paris, and the treaty was signed in due course ; but Eussia and her friends made no secret of the fact that, as far as this restriction was concerned, she had assented to it under compulsion and intended to respect it only just so long as it suited her con- venience. The question, then, before the Cabinet in the beginning of 1871 was, Should this act of Eussia be resisted ? Should it be acquiesced in with or without protest, or should ' Life of the Prince Consort, iii. 262. H 2 iQo THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA a firm refusal be offered ? — such refusal, of course, meaning war. It was not to be supposed that this last would be the course adopted. England's old ally was fighting for dear life on the soil of her own country ; Mr. Gladstone was in office ; his mind and the mind of his party were full of great projects of domestic legislation ; the old anti-Eussian feeling in the country had to a great extent calmed down ; there were few who still believed in the reahty of Turkish reforms ; and such interest as could be spared for foreign affairs was spent in watching the deadly duel that was being fought out round the walls of Paris. In the end, by way of saving appearances, a conference of the Powers which had signed the Treaty of Paris was summoned to meet in London, and these Powers, while carefully placing on record a protest against the view that any one signatory Power could with- draw from a treaty without the consent of the others, prac- tically gave Eussia all she asked by consenting to alter the obnoxious clause in the sense she desired. Mr. In the beginning of 1874, while affairs in the East seemed to be quiescent, a combination of causes brought about the famous Conservative reaction which carried Mr. Disraeli into power. Por the first time in his life that extraordinary man found himself in office with a great majority behind him, and, as is always the case when a Conservative Minister is in that position, his Parliamentary power was really far more absolute than that of any Liberal Mmister is ever hkely to be, for he had with him not only the House of Commons, but the House of Lords. The history of the six years that followed is remarkable on many gi-ounds, but especially because it is the history of a large and comprehensive attempt on the part of a statesman of truly original genius to give effect to views which he had formed not upon any traditional model, not upon what might seem to be the needs of the moment or the claims nf FOREIGN POLICY loi any large section of his countrymen, but rather from a contemplation of ideals evolved by solitary study and medi- tation. By a curious accident, a man of purely Oriental race found himself in command of the power of England, the greatest of Oriental empires, and he determined to do his utmost to develop what may be called the Oriental side of English pohcy. Always fond of dramatic, not to say theatrical, effects, he began in November 1875 by making a great purchase on the part of England of the Khedive's shares in the Suez Canal. From a financial point of view nothing could have been more satisfactory, for the pro- sperity of the company was increasiag month by month, and the value of shares increasing with it ; but it was a novelty in European, and still more in English, policy for a Government thus to identify itself with a commercial undertaking in a foreign country. This step was followed in the next year by the introduction of the Eoyal Titles Bill, which was to invest the Queen in the most formal and solemn manner with the style and title of Empress of India. The Liberal party took the alarm, and many a protest was made both in and out of Parliament against a step which \i&^ thought to be in some sense retrograde, and which in- creased that jealousy which is always felt in England of any- thing that tends to increase the power of the Crown. The Bill, however, passed, and Lord Lytton, a Viceroy after the Premier's own heart, was sent to India to carry out the Ministerial policy. He held a great durbar at Delhi, pro- claiming the Empress to her feudatories and to all the world, and, what was much more serious, he proceeded to declare war against the Ameer of Afghanistan, who had refused to receive an English embassy, and who had thus shown himself too amenable to Eussian influence. Meantime, events pregnant with great changes were occurring in the east of Europe. General Ignatieff, the I02 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA Events in cleverest of Eussian diplomatists, had for some years been 1875-78'. Ambassador at Constantinople. In the autumn of 1875 a slight outbreak took place among the raj^ahs of Herzegovina, always ready on any slight provocation to rise against the tyranny of their Mussulman masters. Discontent and outbreak were met by brutal repression, and in the summer of next year the flame spread to Bulgaria. There were massacres of Christian peasants at Batak and Tatar- Bazardjik — no worse, it is lamentable to say, than hundreds of other massacres that had happened at any time during the previous centuries in many a province of the Turkish Empire, but differing from them in the fact that the public opinion of Europe was prepared to take notice of them, and that witnesses were close by ready to record them. English newspaper correspondents made their way from Constantinople to the scenes of the massacres, and their accounts filled England with horror. Mr. Gladstone took the tide at the flood, and by pamphlets and speeches he started an agitation which may be said not to have subsided for four years. The Servians, partly from sympathy with their Bulgarian neighbours, and partly from a sense that the moment had come for them to strike for complete indepen- dence and for the right of expansion, declared war upon Turkey, and it became evident that the general conflagration must spread over the East. After a winter of more or less in- sincere negotiations between Eussia and Turkey, and an abortive Conference at Constantinople, war was declared by Eussia and Eoumania, and on June 27, 1877, the Czar's troops crossed the Danube. After many difficulties and not a few failures, they reached Adrianople on January 20, 1878, and some of them pressed forward till they were actually within view of the mosques and minarets of Constantinople. The dream of ages seemed to be on the point of realisation. Every Eussian believed that the rule of the Turk had FOREIGN POLICY 103 come to an end, and that the Cross was once more 10 be raised upon St. Sophia. But this was not to be. Europe was not yet ready for such a consummation, nor would it even permit the ratification of a special treaty between the belligerents. The Treaty of San Stefano, drawn up between General Ignatieff and the Turks, was not permitted to stand ; the Powers, and notably England and Austria, insisting upon a solemn revision of the treaty by a general Congress. The result was the Treaty of Berlin, July 13, 1878, that great Treaty of instrument under which, though in several important ^^'^^''^• respects it has since been modified, the relations of the different States of South-Eastern Europe to one another and to the Powers received the definition which still holds. To England especially the situation had for more than twelve months been extremely critical, and the country, which by no means wanted war, was glad to acquiesce in the settlement which the Tory leader so proudly described as ' Peace with Honour.' From the first outbreak of hostihties between Servia and the Porte, Lord Beaconsfield had used towards Russia the language of menace, and towards the Christian nationahties language of chilling discouragement. He had spoken at the Lord Mayor's banquet of the might of England, which was not to be exhausted in ' one, two, or three campaigns ; ' he had summoned the fleet to enter the Dardanelles under circumstances which led his Foreign Minister, Lord Derby, to resign ; above all, by a C0MJ9 de theatre which at once dismayed constitutional purists as much as it impressed the statesmen of the Conti- nent, he suddenly appealed to the forces of the Empress of India to fight in the quarrels of the Queen of England. Seven thousand Indian troops passed through the Suez Canal and were landed at Malta — a hint which reminded the general staff at St. Petersburg that England could draw, in case of need, not only upon the men of Lancashire and Yorkshire, 104 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA but upon 250,000,000 who own her sway in Asia. More- over, when the time came to discuss the Eastern settlement round the Congress table at Berlin, Lord Beaconsfield was on more than one occasion on the point of breaking off negotiations and of returning home — a step which could hardly have meant anything else than a declaration of war. It is not greatly to the credit of his political foresight that the point which he regarded as so important as to be ready to hazard the peace of Europe upon it was that very separa- tion of Bulgaria into two provinces which in exactly seven years was found by the people themselves to be intolerable, and which was put an end to, with the full assent of England and amid the surly protests of Eussia, by the revolution at Philippopolis in September 1885. Disraeli The signature of the Treaty of Berlin laid to rest for stone. the time the fear of war. By half the people of this country Lord Beaconsfield, the man who in old days had been re- garded by his party as an adventurer, a political gladiator, a man to be used but not trusted, to be at once admired and despised, came to be looked upon as the saviour of his country, and as a statesman of the calibre of Pitt. By the other half — which was soon proved to be the larger half — he was thought to be the most dangerous of guides, and a man who, if power were stUl left to him, would inevit- ably plunge the country into hardship, and probably into disaster. This was the view which was inculcated without ceasing by his great rival, Mr. Gladstone, who in Parha- ment and on the public platform, by letters and by articles, by private conversation and by all kinds of public effort, en- deavoured, as he himself pubUcly confessed, ' to counterwork the purposes of Lord Beaconsfield.' The difference came to an issue in the general election of April 1880, preceded as that had been by the famous Midlothian campaign. In a series of speeches which would FOREIGN POLICY 105 have been remarkable under any circumstances, and which Election of 1880 were httle short of a wonder as the work of a man of seventy years of age, Mr. Gladstone examined and did his best to destroy the whole policy, especially the foreign policy, which had marked the Tory Government during six years of office. The charges were expressed in a concentrated form in the address which Mr. Gladstone issued to his constituents after the dissolution in the spring of 1880. After fiercely attacking the conduct of the Ministers in home affairs, he proceeded : ' Abroad they have shamed, if they have not endan- gered, the prerogative by gross misuse ; have weakened the empire by needless wars, unprofitable extensions, and un- wise engagements ; and have dishonoured it in the eyes of Europe by filching the island of Cyprus from the Porte under a treaty clandestinely concluded in violation of the Treaty of Paris, which formed part of the international law of Christendom. 'If we turn from the consideration of principle to material results, they have aggrandised Eussia ; lured Turkey on to her dismemberment, if not her ruin ; replaced the Christian population of Macedonia under a debasing yoke ; and loaded India with the costs and dangers of a prolonged and unjustifiable war, while they have at the same time augmented her taxation and curtailed her hberties. At this moment we are told of other secret nego- tiations with Persia entaUing further liabilities without further strength, and from day to day, under a Ministry called, as if in mockery. Conservative, the nation is per- plexed with fear of change.' The election of 1880 was one of the few of recent years that have turned upon questions of foreign policy. To the average elector, indeed, foreign pohcy as such means and must mean very little ; but when foreign policy resolves ic6 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA itself into a question of less or more taxation, and when it is complicated by moral questions of right and wrong, it may exercise a decisive force upon his vote. This was notably the case with the election of which we are si^eaking ; for, as Mr. Gladstone and his lieutenants put the matter, the issue before the country had these two aspects above all, the financial and the moral aspect. The result of the struggle was a great victory for Mr. Gladstone and his party, and for more than five years they held the government of the country. During thfit time, indeed, domestic questions, and especially the question of Ireland, occupied the first place in the attention of the public and the Government, but they were years during which the course of foreign policy Egypt. was by no means smooth. In 1881 Egypt began to be the centre of trouble. A military insurrection, complicated by so- called ' nationalist ' demands, threatened the authority of the Khedive and the international settlement which had been organised under the lead of England and France. It is not necessary here to tell over again the intricate story of the negotiations which ultimately led to the forcible suppression of Arabi by England alone, France having refused to co- operate in the necessary military action. The forts of Alexandria were bombarded by the British fleet in July 1882, and on September 15 a battle was fought at Tel-el- Kebir, a few miles from Ismailia, between the army of Sir Garnet Wolseley and that of Arabi. The war itself was decided at a blow, but for two years and a half operations had to be continued in the outlying regions subject to Egyptian authority, which were troubled by native insurrec- tions, more or less concentrated under the so-called Mahdi. There were two expeditions to Suakim, on the Eed Sea coast. General Gordon was sent to effect the evacuation of Khartoum ; and too late, as it afterwards appeared, under Lord Wolseley's command, a large force advanced up the FOREIGN POLICY 107 Kile for his relief. All that has happened since the return of that expedition has tended, no doubt, to the pacifica- tion of Egypt and the satisfactory reorganisation of her resources ; but England is none the less hampered in the ■work by the persistent rivalry and opposition of France. If there were no other difficulties in the way of the renewal of the French alliance which existed thirty years ago, the ill-will with which the work of England in Egypt is regarded by French politicians of all schools would seem of itself to make such a renewal impossible. ^ As regards other matters connected with the East, The East Mr. Gladstone's Government in many ways endeavoured isso. to bring about the fulfilment of the Berlin Treaty. The frontiers of Greece, after tedious negotiations, were enlarged, the influence of England being used to induce Turkey to grant what was desired without any further resort to force. A naval demonstration at Dulcigno, in which England took the lead, brought about the promised rectification of the Montenegrin frontier. The Afghan war was brought to a successful close, and the troops were withdrawn from Candahar ; but early in 1885 further trouble arose in that region, not by the act of the Afghans, but by that of the Eussians. A joint English and Eussian Commission had agreed to meet to settle the north-western boundary of Afghanistan, beyond which Eussia undertook not to advance her Central Asian territory; but the negotiations were interrupted by what the Eussians called ' the unfortunate incident ' of Penj-deh, in which the Eussian troops under General Komaroff attacked the Afghans and inflicted severe loss upon them. The two great empires were brought within a hair's-breadth of war, for it was impos- sible not to regard this act of the Eussian general, who was supported throughout by the Czar, as anything but an act of hostility against England. A vote of 11,000,000Z. io8 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA was taken in Parliament, and military and naval prepara- tions were pushed on rapidly ; but the cloud blew over, the boundary negotiations were renewed, and the evil day was at least postponed. The antagonism, however, between England and Eussia was soon afterwards sharpened by the revolution at Philippopolis (September 1885), when the people of Eastern Pioumeha proclaimed their union with their Bulgarian brethren, and when Prince Alexander of Bulgaria, who was, to say the least, not discouraged by England, accepted the new position, and consented to rule over the united province. At that time Mr. Gladstone was no longer in office, having resigned in the previous June, in consequence of a hostile vote on the Budget. He returned, however, in the following January, and Lord Kosebery, his Foreign Minister, announced his intention of not departing from the line that his predecessor, Lord Salisbury, had adopted in regard to the East. Servia and Bulgaria had fought their brief and bloody contest ; Prince Alexander had conquered, but thereby only increased the anger and the hostility of the Czar. Greece was clamour- ing to be compensated for the increase of her Bulgarian neighbours ; she massed a large force on her frontier, and was only restrained by the forcible action of the English fleet from declaring war against Turkey. So matters pro- ceeded, and, meanwhile, a revolution in domestic policy had again driven Mr. Gladstone from power. Lord Salis- bury returned, the Foreign Office was transferred to Lord Iddesleigh, a midnight conspiracy drove Prince Alexander from the throne, and Eussia endeavoured again by every means short of a military occupation to impose her will upon Bulgaria. The attitude of England since this cowp d'etat was accomplished has been an attitude of expectancy, more or less anxious. At the moment when these words are written FOREIGN POLICY 109 the horizon is certainly clearer than it was a few months ago ; but while Europe remains what it now is, a vast entrenched camp, in which every Power is armed to the teeth, and in which the highest efforts of statesmanship are directed to the making and unmaking of alliances, it would be childish to assume that the prospects of peace can ever really be assured. As regards the policy of England under the present Government, it is in a sense a waiting policy, but a policy that implies action in certain eventuali- ties. The most authoritative definition of it was given by Lord Salisbury at the Guildhall banquet on the 9th of last November, when he declared that though it was not the business of England to take the initiative in resisting Eussia in Bulgaria, the support of England would be given to Austria, supposing it were unfortunately the case that Austria should find herself compelled to oppose a Eussian advance to the South. Since that time the sudden death of Lord Iddesleigh has placed the seals of the Foreign Of&ce in Lord Salisbury's hands, and given him a more special control of the foreign policy of the country. On the other hand, the Austro-German alliance has been strengthened by the adhesion of Italy, with the result of making the dreaded war for the moment less probable. Looking back for a moment upon the changes which English fifty years have brought about in the foreign policy of this policy country, we find that events have effected a complete trans- °' ^^' formation both in the problems that have to be solved and in the views of statesmen with regard to them. Old ideas about the balance of power are gone, and no English Minister who wished to preserve his reputation for sanity would base his policy upon the need for retaining or restor- ing it. The military strength of every European State is immensely greater than it was at the time of the Queen's accession ; we alone have nothing like compulsory military no THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA service, and consequently have neither the wish nor the intention to interfere where we should have relatively so little force to support our interference. Again, if the fear of the universal domination of some one Power, or of some universal despot, whether a Napoleon or a Nicholas, has disappeared, so also has the dream of an approaching era of universal peace and harmony. England has not wavered in her attachment to Cobden's principles of Free- trade, but she no longer shares Cobden's illusion that Free- trade would be universal, and would bring with it the Millennium. We look out upon a world of great military States defended against one another not only by armaments of constantly increasing ■ efficiency, but by the barriers of protective tariffs. We live, in fact, in the age of Bismarck, and we have come perforce to the sad conclusion that the only principle which governs the public policy of Europe is his principle of ' do ut des.' English foreign policy habitually suffers from the re- proach of vacillation and uncertainty — a vacillation which, as an eminent writer has frequently pointed out, springs from the fact that during the past two generations, Eng- land has been mainly under the control of a middle class not sufficiently educated to know its own mind. It is probable that the gradual devolution of power from the middle to the working class will have a great and lasting effect upon the foreign policy of the country ; but meantime we must expect instances of that vacillation and of that anarchical conflict of principles of which the Egyptian expedition of 1882 was the crowning example. Making due deductions for this weakness, we may say that the course of English foreign pohcy tends, on the whole, to a withdrawal from any interference with the affairs of other nations except so far as they directly touch the interests of the British Empire. The course of recent European history FOREIGN POLICY in on one side, and on the other the growth of population and wealth in the colonies and of material civilisation in India, have combined to bring about this result ; and if it were permissible to predict where the elemtots are so uncertain, we might say that the course of the next fifty years, which will see democracy strengthening itself at home, wUl also see English popular statesmanship withdrawing itself more and more from the questions which concern the continent of Europe, and looldng more and more exclusively to the development of the wealth and the defensive force of the empire. It is necessary to supplement this short account of the main current of English foreign policy during the reign with a few words upon certain other relations of this country, viz. those which she has held with the West and with the Farther East. 1. United States. — Not to speak of the fact that the American trnited people are in a sense our kindred, their relations with the S'^*®^- Enghsh Government are influenced by the consideration that their territory and ours are conterminous for several thousands of miles. Hence, on more than one occasion, difficulties have arisen, sometimes serious, sometimes merely vexatious, and the history of the relations between two great countries has been to a great extent the history of a series of attempts to settle these difficulties without recourse to force. Boundaries have been surely fixed, causes of commercial irritation have been removed, and it has been attempted, though not with perfect success, to settle those insignificant but dangerous questions which arise from the conflicting interests of the fishing population of two neigh- bouring countries ; but though these efforts have been continuous and on the whole successful, there seemed at two periods to be considerable danger of war. (a) At the beginning of the reign the boundaries between Canada ^ ' , ,, i_ • -t • ^^ and tile America and Canada had not been clearly asoertamed, especially flsi with regard to the frontier of the State of Maine. A further and eries. even more acute cause of disturbance arose through the abor- tive Canadian insurrection in 1887. A vessel, the ' Caroline,' manned by Americans, had greatly aided the insurgents ; she 112 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA was attacked and sunk in American waters. Some time after- wards, one of those who had been concerned in this attack, a man named McLeod, boasted in New York of his share in the exploit. He was arrested and sent for trial, and, as a natural consequence, there was great excitement in England, and loud threats were uttered of war in case of his execution. Fortunately he was acquitted. Then arose the long dispute with regard to the right of search claimed by England as to vessels suspected of carrying slaves. The Americans denied this right in cases where ships bore the American flag, and England rejoined, that her ships must be entitled to investigate whether the slavers were really American or not. It may be said that this dispute would hardly have been pacifically settled had not Palmerston in 1842 made way for Aberdeen, under whom the Ashburton em- bassy was sent out and that treaty arranged which Palmerston, as we have already recorded, denounced as an undignified surrender. Then arose the dif&culty of the Oregon boundary, which in its turn exasperated both countries until it was happily settled by a compromise which fixed upon the 49th parallel as the boundary and the cession of the whole of Vancouver's Island to England. Another difficulty, acute while it lasted, but fortu- nately not long-lived, arose during the Crimean war, when British agents were charged with having broken the American law of foreign enlistment. The dispute was serious enough to cause the dismissal of the British Minister from Washington. At this present moment, the question of the rights of Canadian and American fishermen to fish in disputed waters is giving no little trouble to the Governments of Washington and Ottawa, and of London. The fisheries in North America have, indeed, been one of the most fertile causes of disagreement during recent years. The rights of the French to fish on the coast of Newfoundland had, before this recent settlement, been a matter of controversy for upwards of a century and a half. Even the Treaty of Ver- sailles in 1783, by which it was hoped a lasting solution might be attained, only opened the way for fresh discussion by reason of the various constructions placed on several of its clauses. The French on their side asserted that the rights granted them were exclusive rights, and that all British settlements of what- ever nature on certain portions of the coast were contrary to law. FOREIGN POLICY 113 To these claims the English demurred, the more particularly since the French in obvious excess of their rights had commenced to fish the rivers. The question indeed was one of no small im- portance to the people of Newfoundland, who were prevented from opening mines and developing industries on the coast through the French claims to exclusive occupation. In con- sequence of this, attempts were made during the early part of the reign to arrive at some satisfactory compromise. In 1846 a commission was appointed, and the discussion opened by it resulted eleven years later in a convention, which, however, fell to the ground through the opposition of the Newfoundland legis- lature. For divers reasons a similar fate befell many other like attempts, and it was without any great feelings of sanguine anticipation that a commission, the eighth in number since 1846, was appointed in 1884. Its labours were, however, not in vain. The first convention, concluded in the same year, was, it is true, annulled, but only to make way for another more complete in every way, which was agreed to in the autumn of 1885. By it, while common rights of fishing were acknowledged on the under- standing that the colonists should in no sense interfere with the French, the rights of these latter were fully secured and protected ; on the other hand, every reasonable provision was made for the development of the industries and resources of the country. ' Meantime difficulties had arisen with regard to the rights of American fishermen in Canadian waters and harbours. During 1870 there had been a lengthy correspondence on the subject, but the question at issue, one relating to the interpretation of the treaty of 1818, was not determined, and matters remained in this somewhat inchoate condition until the seizure of several American fishing smacks last year (1886) made a thorough settlement most desirable. The British Government supported the action of the Dominion, and, though each Government has been profuse in the civility of its expressions, the unwillingness on either side to compromise any position which can be made of practical advantage has hitherto prevented any approach to a satisfactory solution of the difficulty. (h) Much more serious questions arose between the two 'Ala- Governments during the American War of Secession. Immense liama' dissatisfaction was caused throughout the North by the readiness tion. with which the British Government recognised the South; not VOL. I. I 114 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA as a State but as a belligerent. The Government, indeed, had an easy justification, for the Government at Washington had itself admitted this fact by proclaiming blockades of the Southern ports ; but none the less the act caused great irritation, as did the frequent declarations of prominent men of both parties to the effect that they believed the South would conquer their indepen- dence. The mutual antagonism burst into a flame when Captain Wilkes, of the United States war ship ' San Jacinto,' stopped the British passenger steamer ' Trent ' and forcibly removed the two Southern Commissioners, Messrs. Mason and Slidell. So near was war that the Guards were despatched to Halifax, and the quarrel was only made up by the prompt surrender of the Commissioners by the Washington Government. On the other hand, the ravages committed upon American commerce by the Confederate steamer ' Alabama ' offered a grave cause of complaint against England, for the ship had been equipped in a British port. After the war was over, it became evident that the United States did not intend to allow this question to rest, and it rapidly became so serious that no choice was left to the British Govern- ment except that between arbitration and war. Mr. Gladstone, for the first time in history, submitted an international issue of extreme gravity to the arbitration of a neutral Court — that tribunal whose sitting at Geneva was believed by the whole Liberal party at the time to have founded a new era in the relations between States. The award was unfavourable to England, but was loyally accepted. Soon afterwards the question of the possession of San Juan Island was referred to the decision of the German Emperor, who awarded it to the United States. China. 2. China. — In 1839, and again in 1857, war broke out between England and the great Chinese Empire. On the first occasion, the Chinese had refused to concede to this country any further commercial privileges than those which had been enjoyed by the East India Company. They would have preferred, if possible, to have no intercourse whatever with strangers whose universal name among the Chinese of that date was ' Fan-Kwai,' or foreign devils ; but, if this was impossible, they would keep that inter- course within the narrowest limits. They alleged against European merchants the introduction of opium, and in one case went so far as to demand the surrender of what they thus FOREIGN POLICY 115 considered contraband goods. This was made a casus belli by England, and a long desultory war took place, which ended in 1842 by the treaty under which the Chinese bound themselves to allow the entry of Europeans into four additional ports, and to pay a war indemnity. The second war, which was taken by Palmerston as an occasion for forcing &, plebiscite as to his foreign policy, arose from the case of the lorcha ' Arrow.' Under the existing agreement, English vessels in Chinese waters were only subject to consular jurisdiction, and, as a result, any Chinese vessel which wanted to escape the interference of the Chinese authorities had only to hoist English colours and to obtain an English captain. Wishing to put a stop to this system, the Chinese seized the 'Arrow,' and carried off the crew, some of whom they accused of piracy. The English Consul resented this in a manner so harsh and dictatorial as to lead to war. The Chinese suffered severely, and Canton was bombarded. In the end, to settle a dispute upon which it is impossible for an Englishman to look back with much satisfaction. Lord Elgin was sent out as High Commissioner, and concluded a treaty at Tientsin by which China conceded all the essential points demanded by England. Unfortunately, through the imprudence of Lord Elgin's brother, who was bearing the treaty to Pekin to be ratified, his advance was forcibly opposed, and in endeavouring to pass the Ta-ku forts he suffered severe loss. In the end, peace was made in 1860, but not untn the Summer Palace had been destroyed by a combined English and French force, by way of reprisals for the murder of certain Europeans. In 1873 the right of Imperial audience was granted to the representatives of England ; and in 1885, when China was exasperated by the proceedings of France in Tonkin and at Foo-chow, a treaty was signed which aimed at con- cluding a close alliance for defensive purposes between Eng- land and China — a treaty prompted on the part of England by the desire to strengthen herself against the Eussian advance in Asia. The politic intention of this treaty was further confirmed by the terms of the convention concluded with the Celestial Empire on the English occupation of Burmah in 1886, whereby China, while she secured certain practical concessions in the continuance of the decennial mission from Burmah, and the abrogation of the proposed commercial embassy to Thibet, promised to use her i2 ii6 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA utmost efforts, not only to facilitate commerce between that country and India, but to afford additional opportunities of inter- course with Soutb-west China. She acknowledged, in the most satisfactory terms, the rights of England over Burmah, while the question of the frontier was left for settlement to a delimitation commission. CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT. It is not a very difficult task to enumerate the great Legis- legislatiye changes which Parhament has during the last changes iifty years effected in our constitution. The introduction f^'^^^^^s •^ ^ the con- of the household and lodger qualifications into boroughs in stitution. 1867, and into counties in 1884, has made us a democracy, in which the labouring classes are of course numerically the strongest element ; the redistribution of seats in 1885 has enhanced the importance of opinions held by numbers as opposed to opinions held by localities. The Ballot Act has enabled such opinions to be freely expressed at the poll, and the legislation concerning corrupt practices at elections has brought the attainment of a seat in the House of Commons within the reach of persons of very moderate means. Nor, again, is it hard to discern the effect upon the exercise of political power which may be produced as the indirect result of legislation or by reason of changed habits of life. Compulsory education, a cheap press, increased ease of communication — all tend to stimulate political interest, to promote the expression and concentration of political opinion. It is not so easy to say how these changes have affected the working of institutions which in outline have remained the same — how the old machinery acts under the new motive power which has been apphed to it. The legal and can. ii8 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA the customary relations of Crown, Lords, and Commons to one another in Parliament, of the Crown to its Ministers, of Ministers to Parliament, have not altered in the last fifty years ; yet it would be a truism to say that the balance of power has shifted, that new forces are brought to bear upon the action alike of Ministers and of Parliament. We can form some idea of the nature and extent of this change if we compare the criticisms passed on our con- stitution by eminent political thinkers twenty or thirty years ago with those of distinguished authorities at the present day. English Earl Grey in 1858, Mr. Bagehot some ten years later, tion com- each in a masterly analysis of our constitution, extolled its pared flexibility. It was compared to its advantage with the Ameri- constitution of the United States, where the President and the whole executive enjoyed a fixed term of office and could not be got rid of until that term had expired, whereas an adverse vote in the House of Commons might at any time suffice to change a Ministry which had lost the confidence of the country. And, again, while in the United States legislature and executive were severed, and acted apart, it was claimed as a merit that with us Ministers, by their presence in one or other Hoiise of Parliament, were kept very closely alive to the legislative wants of the community and to the opinion of the people, as expressed by its repre- sentatives, on the conduct of affairs of State. It would not seem that these writers were specially influenced by the comparative merits of written and un- written constitutions, or by the stability which a written constitution secures. The fixity of the executive for a term of years — not the fixity of the constitution ; the incapacity of the legislature to control the executive — not its mcapacity to alter the constitution, were the points in which writers of what may he called the Palmerstonian age thought that CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 119 the constitution of the United States compared unfavour- ably with our own. Very different are the points touched by the criticisms of students of comparative politics at the present day, by such writers as Sir Henry Maine and Mr. Goldwin Smith. To them the fixity of tenure enjoyed by the executive of the United States appears a trifling inconvenience beside the advantage of a fixed constitution. It may be troublesome to be saddled for a term of years with an executive which is incapable of conducting the affairs of the country or which is out of sympathy with its wishes ; but this seems a small thing as compared with the instability which exists in our own country, not only of policies and of Ministries, but of institutions, where all alike depend for their existence upon the gusts of feeling which agitate a vast democracy. Nor, again, is the separation of the executive and legislature in the constitution of the United States regarded as so serious a disadvantage, when compared with the embarrassing control which the legislature of our own country endeavours to exercise over the action of the executive, and the burden and responsibility which Cabinets of the present day undertake in preparing fresh legislation and carrying it through Parliament. It is plain that the writers of the earlier generation speak of a time when the conduct of public affairs was the chief political interest, and when great legislative changes, if contemplated at all, were contemplated with the delibera- tion which remoteness gives to the consideration of a change. They had their eyes fixed on the episode in the conduct of the Crimean war when a Ministry unsuited to a crisis of that nature was turned out and a new Ministry substituted with as little friction as is compatible with a change of hands in the midst of a great war. They write in days before local representation had given way to nume- 120 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA rical representation, while local character and interests and distinctions broke the force of the great wave of public opinion. They write before political organisation, acting on vast constituencies, had enabled the whole strength of popular feeling to be brought to bear upon a Ministry or a Parliament, with the view of bringing about a change of policy or insisting on the passing of a Bill. It is clear that we have to take account of the effect upon an unwritten constitution, a constitution which knows no fundamental laws, and is at the mercy of any and every Parliament, of a vast increase in the numbers of those who have to choose the members of the House of Commons. We must further consider that this great addition to the electorate has been taken from one class in the community, the working class, and that it has been made in the last twenty years of the present reign. It must not be expected, however, that changes in the balance of power are only to be looked for in the last twenty years. The force of the Eeform Act of 1832 was not spent in the first five years of its working ; rather one may say that its full effect was not realised till the present reign had well begun. And throughout the whole of the last fifty years the increase in the spread of education, in the rapidity of communication, in the facility for interchanging and organising the expression of opinion, has been steadily advancing. Since then the forms of the constitution are the same, though subjected to the constantly increasing pressure of the numbers whose will, clearly expressed, may change it at any moment, it may be well to take our political institu- tions one by one, and see whether they have changed in character or in their relations to one another. The first, and perhaps in some respects the most diffi- cult to deal with, is the Crown. The prerogatives of the CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 121 Crown must for the most part be exercised so entirely changes upon the responsibihty of Ministers, that it is difficult to the"""^ dissociate this topic from the kindred topic of the relation '^^°'^'^- of Ministers, to Parliament and the country. Of the few things which the Crown can do in person, without the intervention of the seals or counter-signatures of officers of State, the rejection of Bills, the dissolution or prorogation of Parliament, the appointment and dismissal of Ministers, are alone of real importance. The possibility that a Bill approved by both Houses of (d The Parliament should be rejected by the Queen has never of buis.'^ been seriously suggested in the present reign ; but though the royal veto has been disused for more than 170 years, it must not be forgotten that the opponents of the Catholic Belief Bill entertained a substantial hope to the very last that George IV., if he did not reject the Bill, would interpose delays in signing the commission for signifying the royal assent. And this expectation was shared alike by the sup- porters and the opponents of the Bill. ' After all I had heard in my visits, not a day's delay ! ' wrote Eldon. ' The Bill has now passed its last and most difficult stage,' were the words of Peel. Questions regarding the right of dissolution tend to a) The resolve themselves into discussions as to the circumstances dSsoiu- under which a Minister may justifiably ask the Crown to *^°^' dissolve a Parliament, or may hold office in a hostile Parliament without advising a dissolution. Constitutional authorities maintain, and no doubt correctly, what has never become a doctrine of practical application during the present reign, the right and power of the Crown to exercise a discretion in dissolving Parliament and to refuse an appeal to the country. Such a refusal would be justified if a Minister asked for the dissolution of a lately elected Parliament, when there was no reason to suppose that the 122 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA country had changed its mind since the last general election, and when no important political question had arisen on which the constituencies had not been consulted. But although the Crown has always taken the advice of its Ministers in the exercise of this prerogative, there is at least one occasion on which Ministers have so framed their advice as to leave the responsibility with the Queen. In 1868 the Ministry of Mr. DisraeH was defeated by large majorities on resolutions brought forward by his oppo- nents in favour of the disestablishment of the Irish Church. The Queen was thereupon advised by her Ministers to dissolve Parliament, but was at the same time informed that they would, if she so pleased, retain office until they had wound up the business of the session. The Queen declared her pleasure not to accept the resignations of her Ministers, and her readiness to dissolve Parliament so soon as the state of public business would jDermit. But as a matter of fact the chief public business on hand was to con- clude the legislation necessary for an appeal to the new con- stituencies created by the Eepresentation of the People Act, 1867. To have dissolved before the Scotch and Irish Eeform Bills and the Boundary Bills were passed would have resulted in the postj)onement for some time of an appeal to the new constituencies. The Ministry therefore, by offer- ing to resign or not to resign, by proposing an immediate dissolution and at the same time suggesting the convenience of a dissolution six months later, did practically throw upon the Queen the responsibihty of determining whether or no the then existing Parliament should continue in existence. The Queen retained her Parliament and her Ministers until everything was ready for an appeal to the new constituencies, when, as a matter of course. Parliament was dissolved. It cannot well be maintained that the prerogative of dissolution is impaired when the Queen can say whether CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 123 she •will appeal at once to constituencies which Parliament has declared to be obsolete, and by intimating her readiness to appeal to them can retain in office a Ministry which is in a minority in the House of Commons. The majority was thus restrained in the exercise of its powers by the knowledge that such an exercise might bring into play the prerogative of dissolution, and was compelled to adapt itself to the continuance in office of the existing Ministers of the Crown. In theory the right of appointing and dismissing (3) The Ministers remains on the same footing as the right of dis- me^°'of' solving Parliament, but in practice we can trace a change ?'^^^'^" in the mode of its exercise. Before the Eeform Bill of 1832 the boroughs which were always at the disposal of Ministers or of persons who usually supported the Court gave a substantial advantage to any Minister the king might select ; patronage, too, was more extensive, and public opinion less critical or less easily brought to bear upon the king's choice. It would be idle to collect illustrations between the Eevolution and the Eeform Bill of ministerial difficulties caused by the king's personal dislikes, of hopes based on the king's personal inclination. After the Eeform Bill of 1832 we hear much less of this feeling, but it does not altogether disappear. William IV. endeavoured to anticipate a Conservative reaction by the dis- missal of Lord Melbourne's Ministry. In 1835 he turned out the Whigs and put in the Tories by a mere exercise of the prerogative determined by his personal wishes. It is true that a general election showed that the country was coming round to the same conclusions as the king, though not so fast. It is true that, though the king could put the Tories into office, he could not keep them there, but was obliged to accept the adverse verdict of the country. But the fact remains that WiUiam IV. dismissed a Ministry 124 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA which had an overwhelming majority in the House of Commons, partly because he thought that the country had changed its mind about them, but chiefly because he, personally, preferred their opponents. Although one might search the history of the last fifty years in vain for a similar exercise of power, yet there is no doubt that the predilections of the sovereign were supposed to be likely to count for a good deal when the Queen came to the throne. The Duke of Wellington thought ill of the prospects of the Tory party on account of the social characteristics of their leaders. ' I have no small talk,' he is reported to have said, ' and Peel has no manners.' But whatever the regard which the Queen may have felt for one or other of the many Ministers who have guided the affairs of State during her long reign, it may be said with con- fidence that the powers given to her by the constitution have never been used to gratify a personal feeling. The ' Bedchamber question,' which has been cited by eminent authorities as a strong exercise of the Queen's right to choose and retain what Ministers she pleases, is for several reasons an inapt illustration of the exercise of such a right. It turned on a misunderstanding. The Queen thought that Sir Eobert Peel wished to dismiss all the ladies of her household. Peel, in fact, only wished to dismiss a certain number. The Queen might reasonably object to the demand of a Minister to dictate the entire composition of her house- hold. The Mmister might reasonably insist on his right to object to some members of it. The matter was complicated by the considerations attaching to the youth and sex of the sovereign, and by the curious line of conduct adopted by Lord Melbourne and his colleagues, who continued, as a Cabinet, to advise the Queen in her communications with Peel, though they had resigned office and were no longer in fact the servants of the Crown. CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 125 But, in truth, the incident is robbed of significance by the absence of any decided preference in Parhament or in the country for one set of Ministers over another. The result of the general election little more than eighteen months earlier had been to give a diminished majority to the Whigs ; the cause of Lord Melbourne's resignation was a combina- tion of Tories and Eadicals, which reduced his majority in the House of Commons to five. The Queen might fairly say that, since Parliament and the country seemed so nearly divided on the merits of Whig and Tory rule, she was free to retain the Ministers whose continuance in office would best suit her personal comfort and convenience. If the Whigs had been in a hopeless minority in the House of Commons, it is pretty safe to say that the misunderstanding with Peel would have been cleared up, nor is it . likely that the Queen would have made an appeal to the country in order to enable her to retain in her service the wives and daughters of the defeated Whigs. But the Bedchamber incident does serve in one way to illustrate the relation of the Crown to its Ministers which has become established in the present reign. Usually the state of parties in the House of Commons limits the pos- sible selection of Ministers to a certain gTOup. Sometimes the voice of the country or the prevailing opinion of the majority in the House of Commons may exercise an almost irresistible pressure upon the Crown to invite some one individual to form a Ministry. But times may come when the country is indifferent and parties broken up or equally balanced. Under such circumstances the discretionary power of the Crown comes into play, and the Queen can, within obvious Kmits, follow her judgment or her inclina- tion. The Coalition Ministry of 1852 is an instance of the exercise by the Queen of an independent judgment. The Bedchamber incident is the sohtary instance of advantage 126 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA taken by the Queen of a balanced state of parties to follow her own inclination. There is no more striking feature of the present reign than the unhesitating loyalty with which the Queen has accepted the decision of the electorate as to the party from which a Ministry is to be chosen, or the decision of the party as to the man who is to lead it. The power which the Crown can exercise at will as a matter of law, and does as a matter of fact exercise in accordance with the popular choice, may be contrasted with the influence which the Crown can and does exercise in virtue of individual experience and knowledge over the policy of its Ministers. What that influence is it is not easy to say, but it would seem probable that with length of years a sovereign must acquire a continuity of experience, more especially in respect of our foreign relations, which no Minister can possess. But we seldom get a glimpse of the exercise of such an influence. The acts of the executive are the acts of the Crown ; the responsibility for them is the responsibility of Ministers ; the policy is the policy of the nation. With the extension of the franchise, the development of education, and the increase of political interest comes a more fre- quent and ready assertion by the nation of its wishes, so as sometimes to override the opinion of the Crown and its Ministers. What may be the opinion of the Crown we seldom know ; when the action of the executive vacillates, as of late years it has va'^illated in accordance with the changes of sentiment which pass over a busy and ill- instructed democracy, we blame the Ministers or we blame ourselves ; we do not blame the Crown. But there is an incident in the present reign which enables us to form some idea of the influence which the Crown may and does exer- cise over the foreign policy of the country. For this we are indebted to a peculiar combination of circumstances. CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 127 In Lord John Eussell's Ministry, from 1846 to 1851, Lord Palmerston adopted a line of policy as Foreign Secretary which, while it was popular in the country, was disapproved ahke by his colleagues and by the Queen. Whatever may be said in favour of Lord Palmerston's view as to the duty of this country in its foreign relations, his pohcy certainly involved us in bickerings with foreign Courts which were distressing to the Queen and to the Prince Consort. The Prime Minister and most of his col- leagues being of the same opinion as the Queen, it would have seemed natural that they should declme to retain of&ce with so independent a colleague. But Lord John Eussell had in view the stability of his Ministry and the popularity of Lord Palmerston in the country ; and with a timidity which was little else than discreditable he allowed the Queen to take the line of remonstrance which he ought to have taken on her behalf. In 1849 she required that despatches should pass through the hands of the Prime Minister on their way to her, and that she should receive from him any suggestions as to their modification which he might think it right to make.' In 1850 the Queen in a celebrated memorandum required, first, that despatches should be sent to her in time to give her some opportunity of forming an opinion upon them, and, secondly, that they should not be altered after she had approved them. Such an act she described as amounting to a breach of faith on the part of the Foreign Minister, and justly to be visited with the exercise of her prerogative of dismissal. To these conditions Lord Palmerston assented. He doubtless was devoted to the work of the Foreign OfSce, and thought that his popularity in the country would enable him to get his own way in spite of the restrictions laid upon him. Otherwise he would seem to have retained office ' Martin's Life of the Prince Consort, ii. 302. 128 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA under somewhat embarrassing circumstances. For if his despatches were to pass through the hands of the Prime Minister and be subject to discussion between the Prime Minister and the Queen, he was placed in relations to the Crown as regarded the business of his office different from those of any other Minister ; ' and the Queen's memorandum further intimated to him pretty plainly that his conduct had been wanting m respect, if not in good faith, and that if it was repeated he would be dismissed. It is impossible to speak too strongly of the moral weakness of Lord John Eussell, who, sooner than break with a popular colleague, took refuge behind the Queen's right to know what her Ministers were doing, and brought her into such relations with the Foreign Secretary as are disclosed by the memorandum of 1850. If the memorandum was required. Lord John should have insisted on the dis- missal of Lord Palmerston ; if it was not required, he should have resigned himself. It does not restore his character for firmness that a year later he caught Lord Palmerston acting at variance with Cabinet instructions, and at the same time doing an unpopular thing, and thereupon obtained his dismissal. But the real interest of the incident for our purposes is to be found in the hght which it throws on the influence exercised and the interest taken by the Queen in the conduct of the executive ; if Lord John had been a stronger Prime Minister we might not have known so much either of the relations in which Ministers stand to the Queen, or of the strong opinion which the Queen may hold ' Modern science has affected the relations of the Foreign Secretary to his colleagues, as appears from the very recent statement of Lord Salisbury in the House of Lords. Despatches are superseded by telegrams, and ' the telegrams are seen by all the members of the Cabinet about as fast as they arrive. Our knowledge of what is done is prompt and intimate, and the Foreign Secretary is twenty times more under the control of his colleagues than he was in the time of Lord Palmerston.' — Times, Jan. 28, 1887, p. 6. CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 1:9 and the anxious supervision which she may exercise in matters of foreign poUcy. Passing from the prerogatives of the Crown to the legis- ciiauges lative rights of the House of Lords, we come upon what the °*™^ may be called the valetudinarian part of our constitution, ^o^s °^ Ever since 1832 the House of Lords has had to endure taunts at its weakness or threats launched at its exhibitions of strength. ' I am quite certain,' said Macaulay in 1838, ' that in a few years the House of Lords must go after Gatton and Old Sarum. What is now passing is mere skirmishing and manoeuvring between two general actions. It seems to be of little consequence to the final result how these small operations turn out. When the grand battle comes to be fought I have no doubt of the event.' ' Forty-nine years have passed, and the activity of the House of Lords has certainly not diminished since' it dealt so freely with the measures submitted to it by Lord Melbourne's Ministry. When Macaulay wrote the sentence quoted above, the effects of the first Eeform Act on the re- lations of Lords and Commons were beginning to be felt. Before 1832 the two Houses were not so very different in composition, and other circumstances helped to make them much of the same mind. A good many members of the Commons were actually returned by or through the influence of peers, and a great many more, even if returned independently of such influence, were connected by family ties, by neighbourhood, by community of interest with the Peerage. The transfer of power to the middle classes in 1832 so far changed the composition and character of the Lower House as to make the Lords at once more disposed to differ from it and less capable of resisting it. Such efforts ' Trevelyan, Life a-nd Letters of Lord Macaulay, ii. 57. VOL. I. K 13° THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA at resistance as it made during the first years of the pre- sent reign might have brought about a constitutional crisis if the House had not been under the vigorous leader- ship of a man to whom party considerations were compara- tively immaterial and legislative changes indifferent so long as he could make the existing constitution work as nearly as might be in the accustomed manner, and could insure that the Queen's Government was carried on. It was the opinion of the Duke of Wellington, as ex- pressed to Lord Derby in 1846, that while the House of Lords represented ' Conservatism ' in the constitution, its Conservatism must be subordinate to the public interest in the harmonious working of the two Houses. In the particular matter of the Corn Laws his opinion was that Lord Derby should advise the House ' to vote that which would be most beneficial to the immediate interests of the country.' Acting on this advice, the House of Lords has in the present reign assented to many measures of which the majority of its members must have cordially disapproved, but the advice itself does not come to mu6h more than a recognition of the fact that there is a force before which all our institutions must bow, the determined expression of the national will. Setting aside, for the moment, occasions on which the House of Lords has yielded its convictions to the vis major of strong and considered pubhc opinion, its attitude \yould seem to be one of somewhat increasing vigour in resisting measures of which it disapproved. One may see this in matters of ordinary legislation. Passing by the free handling of the measures of the weak Whig Ministry which held office at the beginning of the present reign, and the long resistance to the removal of Jewish disabilities and the abohtion of Church rates, it is remarkable how often the House of Lords crossed the will CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 131 of the House of Commons between 1868-74 and 1880- 85. The House of Commons in each case contained very large Liberal majorities, and those majorities were under the control of a leader of almost unexampled popularity in the country. But the mode in which the House of Lords dealt with the University Tests Bill in 1870, the Ballot Bill and the Army Purchase Bill in 1871, the Compensation for Disturbance Bill and the Irish Eegistration Bill in 1880, and the Franchise BiU in 1884, to say nothing of the amendments introduced into the Land Bill and the Arrears Bin in 1881 and 1882, seem to show that it was willing and able to take its part as a legislative chamber. In financial matters, again, the House of Lords through- out the present reign has very decidedly extended its func- tions. For centuries it has been held to be a settled rule of constitutional law that the House may not suggest a grant of public money, nor meddle with the amount or sources of the supplies granted by the House of Commons. Techni- cally the Lords had retained the right to reject any Bill that came before them ; their disabihty only extended to the initiation and amendment of money Bills. On the strength of this technical distinction they were not afraid, in 1861, to interfere with the financial arrangements of the year, and throw out a Bill sent up from the Commons for repealing the paper duties. It might, of course, be urged that they were technically within their rights, and, further, that the BlU before them did not refer in terms to the supplies of the year, but merely repealed a duty on paper. Practically, they rejected part of the financial scheme for the year, submitted by the advisers of the Crown to the House of Commons, and accepted by that House. The Commons were angry, but contented themselves with a protest and an assertion that the remedy, for future years, lay in their own hands ; that they could frame the financial scheme of each year so K 2 132 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA that the Lords could not alter it, consistently with their constitutional position ; and so the storm blew over. But it is not only in this matter of the paper duties, nor so long ago as 1861, that the Lords have trespassed on the forbidden ground of finance. Speaking of modern infringe- ments on the exclusive right of the Ministers of the Crown to propose grants of money, and writing in 1877, Mr. Gladstone says : ' The House of Lords has done very great mischief in this respect by voting into Bills the establish- ment of officers and appointment of salaries, and sending these Bills with all such portions printed in italics, a con- ventional expedient adopted in order to show that they are not presented as parts of the Bill, but only as indications of the view or wish of the House of Lords : in matters, how- ever, in which they have, as a body, no more right or title to any view or wish at all than the House of Commons has or had to send by any subterfuge to the Lords a direction as to judgments to be given in ajipeals.' ' But in 1884 the House of Lords not only pushed to an extreme limit their legislative rights as agamst the House of Commons, but even encroached upon the royal preroga- tive in respect of the dissolution of Parliament. At the general election of 1880 a very large majority of those who were returned to the House of Commons came pledged to vote for an assimilation of the county and borough fran- chise. Circumstances delayed the introduction of a Fran- chise Bill until 1884, but in that year a Bill was carried through the Commons by very great majorities, for esta- blishing in counties the household and lodger franchise. A Bill for the redistribution of seats and another for the registration of voters were to follow, but Ministers did not think it possible or advisable to carry these Bills through Parhament fari jmssu with the Franchise Bill. The House ' Gladstone, Gleanings of Past Years, i. 81. CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 133 of Lords declined to consider the Bill before it until it was in possession of the scheme for the redistribution of seats. The question of dissolution arose from the mode in which the majority in the House of Lords identified their House with the interests of the Conservative party. Their position was this. ' We should probably gain by a dissolution on the old franchise and old constituencies, and probably lose by a dissolution on the new franchise and the old constituencies. If, therefore, we let the new franchise become law, we shall be at a great disadvantage if we do not like your Seats Bill, and have to push matters to a dissolution in resisting it. Our battle ground, therefore, shall be the status quo, and if our opposition forces you to dissolve, you shall appeal, now, to the old electorate.' The result is within a short recollection. Ministers, after an autumn of agitation, let their scheme of redistri- bution be known to the Conservative leaders ; it was found acceptable, and the result was a quiet passage of both Bills through the two Houses. The House of Lords had, indeed, asserted themselves, and not unsuccessfully. But their action is subject to criticism on two points. They had identified themselves with the electioneering prospects of the Conservative party, and they had created an impression, which no explanations could efface, that they were hostile to an extension of the franchise. This is important as regards the durable character of their House as a part of the constitution. Its continued existence will not depend upon the results of academical discussions on the value of a second chamber, or of the pro- priety of constituting such a chamber out of an hereditary peerage. If it were so, one might say that our good fortune has developed the estate of the baronage into a body singu- larly well fitted for discharging the critical functions of a second chamber : a body consisting, in part, of men who 134 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA have had nothing to do all their lives long but to study political and social questions, in part of emeriti in all depart- ments of professional and public life. But the House of Lords, if it is to remain part of our constitution, must depend on no such considerations as these, but upon the harmony with which it can co-operate with the other members of the body pohtic. Bearing this in mind, one cannot but see that exhibitions of strength avail it little if it is year by year drifting further from the great democratic assembly with which it must needs act, and these very exhibitions of strength are in themselves an indication that the House of Lords is less homogeneous with the Commons than it was befor§ 1832. Has it, then, changed in its relations to the rest of the constitution since the beginning of the Queen's reign ? It would seem that it has, though the change is not apparent on the surface. There is no doubt that the House of Lords was not liked by the leaders of the middle class who represented the ' advanced ' or ' earnest ' political thinkers in the Parlia- ments between 1832 and 1867. Mr. Bagehot, writing in 1859, says, ' Mr. Burke described the first East Indian Nabobs as " Jacobins almost to a man," because they did not find their social position proportionate to their new wealth ; ' and he adds, ' We cannot fail to observe that the new business wealth of the present day (of which Mr. Bright is the orator and mouthpiece) has a tendency to democracy for the same reasons.' The House of Lords was probably never better hated than it was by the middle-class Eadicals of the first twenty-five years of the present reign. It may be doubted whether the democracy created by the Acts of 1867 and 1885 entertains the same active dislike of the Peers. Yet, in spite of its constant reinforcement from all branches of the public service, the House of Lords is ever CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 135 less in sympathy with a House of Commons elected by householders and lodgers. For one thing, it may be said that the actual personal connection of the two Houses is much slighter ; that the relatives and friends of peers are fewer in the Commons than they were. For another thing, the democracy is farther oif the Peers than were the middle-class leaders of 1840-1860, and though this may diminish the personal bitterness entertained towards the Peerage, it heightens the feeling that the House of Lords is an anomaly in a democratic constitution — an anomaly too which possesses considerable powers of obstructing the divinely prompted instincts of the people. The existence of a rival may be accepted, but it is hard to see why an anomaly should be permitted to mar the harmony of things. Once more, a democracy has a liking for legislation of a bold and sweep- ing character. The cautious middle class might grumble at the social superiority of the House of Lords, but it would think many times before it altered the existing constitution. The democracy would have no such hesitation ; in abolish- ing the House of Lords it would feel that a striking legisla- tive reform had removed an obstructive influence, that its power had been manifested in an impressive and at the same time a useful change. In truth, it may be said that any part of our constitution which cannot furnish offhand a commonplace reason for its existence may fare as ill at the hands of the newly enfranchised electors as a Dresden china ornament in the clutches of a strong and inquisitive infant. Lastly, the alleged security for harmonising the action of Lords and Commons is wholly out of date. Constitu- tional writers tell us that, just as the House of Commons can be brought into accord with the feelings of the country by a dissolution, so may the House of Lords by a creation 136 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA Changes aflfeeting the House of Com- mons. of peers. At the best it would be a violent mode of turning a majority into a minority by an exercise of the royal pre- rogative. On the only occasion that the method was applied a creation of twelve peers sufficed to turn the balance of parties in the House. The Peerage in the reign of Anne numbered scarcely two hundred ; at the present day there are between five and six hundred peers. Obviously such a creation of peers as would have sufficed to carry the Franchise Bill in the summer of 1884 would have made the Peerage ridiculous. Thus, in spite of its constant reinforcement from the ranks of the professions, the House of Lords has less in common with the popular assembly than it had fifty years ago ; and at the same time it has completely outgrown the machinery by which alone a variance between the two Houses could be corrected. The reform of the House has been urged within its walls by Lord Eosebery, and from without in the programme set forth by Mr. Gladstone to the electors of Midlothian in 1885. The abolition of the Plouse of Lords has been urged by responsible politicians, such as Mr. Chamberlain and Mr. John Morley. The new House of Commons contains 165 members who have declared agamst the continued existence of the hereditary legislative chamber. It must be admitted beyond doubt that, though threatened men live long, the House of Lords as at present constituted is not as firmly fixed in our institutions as it was when Macaulay prophesied its speedy extinction in 1838. When one comes to ask whether the House of Commons is a more or less powerful body than it was fifty years ago, the answer seems at first sight obvious. In proportion as the House of Commons represents a greater mass of opinion, its power would seem to be enhanced, because it has a force at its back which Lords and Ministers would not care to CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 137 resist beyond a certain point. And it is no doubt true to say that upon the House of Lords and upon a Ministry the House of Commons of the present day can exercise an irre- sistible pressure. The instances, cited above, of resistance by the Lords to Bills sent up from the Commons are as nothing to the unpalatable measures which the Lords have been constrained to swallow. Nor would any Ministry of the present day regard the good opinion of the House of Commons so little as did the Ministry of Lord Melbourne, which was prepared to retain office though a part of its budget to which it attached great importance was rejected by a large majority after several nights' debate. The House of Lords and the Ministers of the Crown are thus sensitive to the opinion of the House of Commons, as expressed in the division lobbies, because the House of Commons itself, elected on an extended suffrage, represents a greater mass of opinion than heretofore. Whether or no the opinion so expressed is sounder or more valuable than it used to be does not concern us ; a majority of the House of Commons nowadays represents, or nearly represents, the actual numerical majority throughout the countrj- of men who ha've any ideas at all on the question at issue. And it not only represents a greater mass of opmion ; it represents a greater mass of organised opinion, of opinion available for expression at the polls. This makes the House of Commons infinitely more powerful than it once was, if we regard it as an engine for expressing and enforcing the wishes or views of the majority of the people. And yet it is no paradox to say that, except as a channel of public opinion, the House of Commons is infinitely less important and less powerful than it was fifty years ago. If we regard the House as a body of men capable of forming independent conclusions on matters of pubhc policy, of expressing them, of acting upon them, of educating and informing the public mind by the 138 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA matter and tone of pai'liamentary debate, we cannot fail to see that in all these respects it has lost ground. The so- called mandate of the constituencies takes initiative from the House and independence from individual members, and the educating power of pohtical discussion has passed from the floor of the House to the platform of the public meeting. The If ■we ask why this is so, the answer must be that the classes^ Same cause which makes the House of Commons the most I)owerful part of the machinery of government has reduced it to the character of a machine. The means which exist for organising pubhc opinion, and the rapid spread of intel- ligence which informs it, combine to concentrate upon the House and its members a force which deprives them of inde- pendent action. The cheap party newsjDaper keeps everyone well aware of the sayings and doings of members, offers such information on foreign affairs as it can obtain, and puts such a construction as may best suit its party purposes on the action of the Government for the time being. Every voter has therefore the opportunity of making up his mind what his member ought to be doing, and is also able to know what his member is doing. Together with this ease of communication and spread of knowledge, or perhaps as a result of it, there is doubtless a keener and more widely dis- tributed interest in political questions, for to the working man pohtics are for the most part the one intellectual interest of hfe. And at the same time has grown up a deference for the opinion of the working classes, or, as it is fashionable to call them, ' the masses ' — a deference wholly alien to the minds of the middle-class reformers of forty years ago. ' You never heard me,' said Cobden in 1846, ' quote the superior judgment of the working classes in any delibera- tions in this assembly ; you never heard me cant about the CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 139 superior claims of the working classes to arbitrate on this great question ' ' (the Corn Laws). Compare these words and the illustrations with which Mr. Gladstone in 1878 empha- sises his argument on behalf of the extension of the house- hold and lodger franchise to counties. ' Did Scribes and Pharisees or did shepherds and fishermen yield the first, most, and readiest converts to the Saviour and the company of His apostles ? As the barbarian, with his undeveloj;)ed organs, sees and hears at distances which the senses of the cultured state cannot overpass, and yet is utterly deficient as to fine details of sound and colour, even so it seems that in judging of the great questions of pohcy which appeal to the primal truths and laws of our nature, those classes may excel who, if they lack the opportunities, yet escape the subtle perils of the wealthy state.' ^ This dogma of the infallibihty of the uninformed, this theory that ignorance many times multiplied may produce results more valuable than can be produced by the know- ledge and experience of the few, is a factor which cannot be overlooked in estimating the forces at work in modern pohtics. A more tangible influence than the spread of political The information, or the belief in the value of opinion based rather on sentiment than on knowledge, is to be found in the organisation of political opinion throughout the consti- tuencies by means of the machinery which it is convenient to describe as the ' caucus.' This process was first intro- duced into Birmingham, but it began to be employed in other constituencies soon after the general election of 1874. In that election the extent of the Conservative victory was partly due to the disunion of the Liberals in many places, and a security against such disunion was found in the practice of entrusting the selection of the party candidate ' Hansard, 84, 281. ' Gladstone, QUanings of Past Years, i. 201. 140 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA to a committee, itself elected by the members of the same party in the constituency. Sucli a security is no doubt supplied by the caucus, but it has two other effects besides that of keeping the party together. It must inevitably emphasise party differences, for the committee of three or five hundred are chosen to promote the interests of the party, and are bound to choose in their turn the candidate who promises to be the most unswervmg supporter of the party. And, again, it must tend to diminish the freedom of action accorded to the representative in Parhament. It seems clear that a candi- date who has in competition with others to satisfy a com- mittee of the sort described must do something more than show himself to be a man of capacity and pohtically in sympathy with those before whom he appears. He must declare himself emphatically on certain issues which are for the time test questions in the party. In order to assist the committees in their selection, and indirectly to bind the candidate more closely to his narrow creed, a somewhat later development of the system has supervened. A meeting, yearly or oftener, of representatives of all these committees discusses the prospects of the party and formulates its policy. It is almost unnecessary to point out the influence of single-member constituencies in accentuating this marked division of parties. The total result is to reduce politics to two sets of opinions, sharply defined, not merely mutually exclusive, but not admitting of shades or variations in the minds of the holders. The party politician is free to append to his creed, for local purposes, certain miscellaneous articles of belief on the subjects of local option, vaccination, or the like, but his main tenets must be common to the whole party, and admit of no variety or modification on pain of being pronounced to be traitorous, and a disqualification for serving the party in Parliament. CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 141 The effects upon the House of Commons of the forces Deca- brought to bear upon its action from outside have been parUa-°^ ah-eady touched upon. One of the most striking is the ^e^i^^tT'' decadence of Parhamentary debate. Lord Grey and Mr. Bagehot both dwelt with much force on the educating and informing duties of the House of Commons. In a debate on which depended the fate of a Bill or a Ministry the public heard the best that was to be said upon the most important topic of the day. But since at the present time a Minister has to look outside the House of Commons for the in- fluence which is to keep or gain his majority, political discussion begins at an earlier stage. The presence of a party leader at a meeting of Liberal or Conservative federa- tions, the opening by a Cabinet Minister of a political club at a time when interesting topics are in the air, the unveil- ing of a statue, the celebration of an anniversary — all or any of these may furnish occasion for a speech which, in respect of the interest and importance attaching to it, will make more impression on the country than a long-drawn debate on a vote of censure or the second reading of a BilL What is said in the House of Commons, even if said by leading men, is but a repetition of what has been said out of doors, and the platform speeches have this advantage over Parliamentary debates, that there is nothing to read or hear, as the case may be, but the speech of the great man ; whereas a debate is a jungle of words in which the utterances of those who have something to say are nearly lost amid the mass of speech proceeding from members whose ambition is satisfied by the appearance of their names in the reports. Debate may still be a useful means of testing the capacity of rising candidates for office, but for the people at large its educational influence is gone. And the force brought to bear upon the House of Commons from outside has other effects besides the destruc- 142 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA Increase of the Prime Minis- ter's power. tion of the interest attaching to debate. It has immensely increased the power of the Prime Minister. The vast con- stituencies of the present day must needs contain many voters to whom poUtical opinions are but a form of words. Such voters are apt to materialise their creed in the person of an individual. To them the right or wrong of politics is represented by Mr. Gladstone or Mr. Disraeli, Lord Salis- bury or Mr. Chamberlain, and a general election declares not only which party shall be in power, but who shall be in power for that Parliament. No subject during the last two hundred years has enjoyed the power which Mr. Gladstone enjoyed from 1880 to 1885. Walpole had all the machinery of parliamentary management at his disposal, but never the cordial regard of the people ; Chatham had the enthu- siastic support of the country, but no Parliamentary partj' ; the younger Pitt had king and country with him, but his Tory followers were safe enough in their seats to give him trouble. To come down to recent times. Peel, in his powerful Ministry of 1841, had to take account of the insubordination of some members of his i^arty; neither Palmerston nor Eussell could count upon the Eadical vote from day to day. In 1868 and in 1874 the vote of the country was nearer to a plebiscite in favour of Mr. Glad- stone in the first case, and Mr. Disraeli in the second. But it is not until 1880 that we find a party leader enthusias- tically accepted by the majority in the country, and backed by the whole force of a highly developed party organisation. It is vain under such circumstances for a member to allege reasons to his constituency for an occasional vote given against his party. The constituency is not concerned with his reasons, nor even with the measure in question. It sent him to Parliament to support Mr. Gladstone ; it does not care to know why he has failed to do so. It may condone the offence on promise of amendment ; if not, it CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 143 will have to find a more docile representative at the next election. Loyalty to a leader may very possibly under such circumstances become slavery to a master, who drives his gang into the division lobbies in the assurance that their constituencies will care as little as he does about their personal convictions. This altered position of the Prime Minister in recent i-oroe of years has interposed a double difficulty between men of feTiing. independent judgment or unpopular views and a seat in Parliament. It used to be said that one merit of our representative system and its anomalies was that its variety gave a chance that men of unpopular opinions might be returned to Parhament ; but it would now seem that a candidate for a seat must not only hold popular opinions, but must hold these as explained and interpreted by the popular man. Thus it is not only men of exceptional or unpopular opinions who find it difficult to obtain a seat in Parliament. Political opinion is now so formulated by associations outside Parliament that men whose opinions are just off the main party lines may find themselves on that account rigorously excluded from the consideration of the constituencies. The effect of this organisation of opinion is apparent if we compare for a moment the position of the Peelites with that of the Unionist Liberals of the present day. The Peehtes vdth their illustrious leader broke away from the ranks of the Conservative party in 1846. ' It took,' says Mr. Gladstone, ' no less than thirteen years to effect their final incorporation into the Liberal party.' During the greater part of the time they were independent members, and during the whole of it the same high authority regards them as having been a poHtical stumbling-block. ' They were like roving icebergs on which men could not land with safety, but with which ships might come in perilous 144 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA collision. Their weight was too great not to count, but it counted first this way and then that. It is not alleged against them that their conduct was dishonourable, but their political action was attended with much public incon- venience.'' When the Peelites joined Lord Aberdeen's Coalition Ministry six years after their breach with their party, they brought with them some thirty votes, they occupied six places in the Cabinet and four important offices outside the Cabinet. And the fact must not be forgotten that the Peelites were an important element in all political combina- tions, and occupied this position of perhaps inconvenient, certainly honourable, independence for a long period of years, while no eminent member of their party was rejected by his constituents for having asserted his right to think for himself. The break up of the Tory party took place in 1846 ; a general election followed in the summer of 1847, but the leading Peelites in the House of Commons had no difficulty in finding seats. The comparative sharpness of party lines forty years later, and the increasing demand made upon individual conviction, is manifest if we turn from the Peelites to the Unionists. The Peelites broke suddenly away from their party on a subject which had been matter of political discussion for j^ears ; the Unionists exercised an indej)endent judgment on a subject which had never liefore come in a practical shape within the range of political discussion. But the Peelites were able to offer themselves on their own merits at the general election of 1847, and were returned to a Parlia- ment in which the number of independent members was singularly, and to a Minister inconveniently, large ; the Unionists have fared very differently. Great knowledge and tried political capacity did not save Mr. Goschen from ' Gladstone, QUanings of Past Years, i. 127. CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 145 defeat, nor did Sir George Trevelyan's toilsome and peril- ous experience as Irish Secretary lead his constituency to think that he had any right to an independent judgment on the question of Irish government. Those who are returned must feel their political position to be precarious. The Liberal associations will not permit a departui'e from the Liberal creed, and the Liberal creed consists in such articles of faith as may for the time be held paramount by the Liberal leader. Nor, on the other hand, will the fact that an eminent Liberal has sacrificed his seat to his convictions soften the heart of a constituency in which the majority is Conservative. Possibly the con- stituency, if left to itself, might be found to think it well that the country should retain the services of Mr. A or Mr. X, but the Three Hundred or the Five Hundred has been elected for party objects alone ; the individual merits of the candidates only come under discussion after it has been ascertained that they will render unswerving obedience to Mr. Gladstone or to Lord Salisbury, as the case may be ; then, and not till then, nor always then, is it admissible to ask which is likely to render the greater service to the country. There is another result following from the extreme rigour with which party lines are drawn and maintained : this rigour is to a great extent responsible for the loss of control by the House of Commons over the conduct of its business. A third party, bent, as the Irish Nationalist party has been bent, on subordinating all, other considerations to the infliction of the utmost inconvenience upon the House, can exercise an extraordinary power where it has to deal with two forces whose rivalry is so bitter that they cannot coalesce against a common foe. If Liberal and Conserva- tive did not hate one another better than they love their country, they would long ago have re-established order in VOL. I. li 146 THE RETGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA the House of Commons. And the irreconcilahle character of these differences is beginning to enhance the power of any groups of members possessing a common interest and sufficiently numerous to affect a party division. Thus the Welsh members have obtained the insertion of the dis- estabhshment of the English Church in Wales as a part of the Liberal programme, and the Trade Congress of last September looked forward to getting a sufficient number of members to create a Labour party in the House of Commons, and ' with the success of the Irish party before them, to be able to command attention to their needs.' Minis- Closely connected with this altered relation of the cendenoy House of Commons to the constituencies is the relation of terTof" Ministers to the House of Commons. Unless we bear in legis- mind that it is to the force of outside opinion that a Govern- lation. _ ^ ment must look for the maintenance of a Parliamentary majority, it is not easy to understand the strength and de- termination with which Ministers press then- legislative and financial schemes upon Parliament, nor their spasmodic action in their proper sphere, the executive. The importance attached to legislation arises from the fact that a democracy has many wants, and that under the present condition of political life in this country those wants can be formulated into a pressing demand for legislation of the required character. Ministers, who have to look for their continuance in power to organisations outside the House of Commons, must insist, and often can insist, on the acceptance, with little or no amendment, of the Bills they propose. But in so doing they assume liabilities which would have been repudiated by Ministers fifty years ago, and they are also able to dictate to the House of Commons in a manner which a House of Commons of an earlier date would have been disposed to resist, and perhaps capable of resisting. CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 147 We are fortunate in having an excellent illustration of the habit of political thought as to Government responsi- bilities in respect of legislation nearly fifty years ago. Sir Robert Peel, on May 27, 1841, moved a vote of want of confidence in the Ministry of Lord Melbourne, and he based the argument in favour of his motion, not on any specific failure in the region of executive government, nor on a defeat sustained on an important proposal for legislation, but on continued failure to carry any measure in the form in which it had been introduced by them into Parliament. ' I am not speaking of casual defeats, of casual obstruc- tions to the progress of pubhc business ; I speak of the general course of public business, of measures which have been brought forward and postponed almost without an effort to carry them ; I speak of occasions on which measures proposed by the Government have been modified in deference to the opinions of those who opposed them. I speak of their failure to carry into effect measures which they strongly recommended for the adoption of the House. I am speaking, not, as I said before, with reference to one or two failures, not of obstructions offered to the Government on its first formation ; I am drawing my inference of loss of confidence from the continuous course of the Government in respect of legislation, and the degree of support which Ministers have received from the House of Commons. I am speaking, of course, immediately with reference to the de- feat they sustained the other night on a most important measure connected with the financial administration of the country, following other defeats which they have recently met with.' The Ministry of Lord Melbourne did not conceive that they were under any such liabilities with regard to legis- lation as Sir Eobert Peel sought to lay upon them ; they t 2 148 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA maintained that, while their administration of home and foreign affairs did not excite dissatisfaction, they were fulfiUing the duties which the Queen's Ministers might reasonably be expected to fulfil, and that, except under special circumstances, they were not concerned to propose or carry fresh laws, or to insist on laws which they proposed being carried in the terms in which they proposed them. Mr. Macaulay ' did not hold that any Government was bound to resign because it could not carry legislative changes, except in particular cases where they were convinced that, without such and such a law, they could not carry on the public service.' Lord John Eussell was still more explicit. He spoke of the paucity of legislation during the last and the early part of the present century, and went on to say : ' In later times, however, and more especially since the passing of the Eeform Bill, the country and the constitution have re- quired a different course of conduct on the part of Ministers. What with the necessity for legislation — what with the difficulty which individual members experience in carrying through Bills — what with the great changes so long delayed, and which after the passing of the Eeform Bill it was in- dispensable to make suddenly and on various subjects — from all these causes an expectation has arisen that the Government should bring forward measures which excite pubhc attention, and do their best to carry them through the House. But when this is the case, I think it is un- reasonable to expect that a Government should possess the same general and uniform support on the part of the House of Commons which was required when Governments had merely acts of administration to perform.' The general proposition laid down by Mr. Macaulay and Lord John Eussell that a Government is not responsible for the passing of the Bills which it introduces, or at any CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 149 rate is not responsible for their passing in the shape in which they were introduced, has no doubt been long since abandoned. But Ministries of modern times have come to insist that their measures, legislative or financial, shall pass, and, as is not unfrequently the case, shall pass in the form in which they were introduced, on pain of re- quiring their opponents, even though in a minority, to take ofSce. When Mr. Gladstone was defeated on the second reading of the Irish University Bill in 1873 he and his colleagues at once tendered their resignations, and in the negotiations which ensued Mr. Gladstone seems to have maintained that unless the Opposition leaders were prepared to take office they had no business to defeat the Ministry. Mr. Gladstone had, for ordinary purposes, a majority of from eighty to ninety ; he was defeated, not by an organised effort on the part of the Opposition, but because his Bill was unsatisfactory to various sections of his habitual supporters. But he stated to the Queen that he ' will not and does not suppose that the efforts of the Opposition to defeat the Government on Wednesday morning were made with a previously formed intention on their part to refuse any aid to your Majesty, if the need should arise, in providing for the government of the country ; ' and he holds that such a refusal is ' not in correspondence with Parliamentary usage.' This contention amounts to a demand by a Minister that his followers should surrender their discretion on pain of driving their leader from office, and that an opposition should refrain from opposing on pain of having to conduct the government while in a minority in the House of Commons. Equally marked is the contrast in the region of finance. The Ministry of Lord Melbourne was prepared to revise its budget in deference to the will of the House of Commons. 150 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA The defeat which it sustained on the sugar duties was en- hanced by the association of the question at issue with the impending struggle between the principles of Free-trade and Protection, and with the last echoes of the struggle over the abolition of slavery. But a defeat so significant in its cir- cumstances did not appear to the Ministers of the day to necessitate their resignation ; not even a vote of want of confidence could induce them to do more than obtain from the Queen a dissolution of Parliament. But in 1885 a Ministry which, the year before, had carried the Franchise Bill by a majority of 130, resigned because, owing to the carelessness or indifference of its followers, it chanced to find itself in a minority of twelve on the second reading of the Customs and Inland Eevenue Bill. They resigned, not because they were refused supplies, but because they could not get their supplies precisely from the sources which they had selected. It would not be safe to lay much stress on the contrast which is oifered by the Ministries of Lord Melbourne and Mr. Gladstone in their dealings with the House of Commons in financial matters. It only serves to show the sort of treatment which a Ministry with a nominal majority was willing to endure fifty years ago. But the insistence of Ministers on having the Bills they propose carried in the form in which they propose them does illustrate the de- clining influence of the House of Commons for all purposes save those of carrying out the wishes of the democracy, expressed through the mouthpiece of the democracy, the Prime Minister. Nor can we set off against this diminished control over legislation the constant interference which the House of Commons now permits itself in the departments of execu- tive government. Questions put to Ministers on matters of current policy have increased to their present number CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 151 in comparatively recent years. A cursory reference to interfer- Hansard will show how the practice has grown since the the com- commencement of the present reign. Until 1849 no speci- matters tied place was assigned to them in the business of each °^ ®^'^- ■^ ° outive day ; they were few, and for the most part prompted by a policy, genuine desire for information. Now they fill an important place and occupy a considerable time in the business of every day ; they cover the whole surface of executive government, and they are not unfrequently asked with the deliberate intention to create difficulty and embarrass- ment. It may be said that questions addi-essed to Ministers serve the important purpose of keepiag executive and legis- lature in close communication, and of reminding the various departments of Government that they work subject to the criticism of the House of Commons. But, in truth, the character of these inquiries indicates the dependence of the House upon outside opinion. They are not meant to correct or stimulate the action of the executive, but to depreciate opponents and to excite party feeling out of doors. The questioner does not often trouble himself to consider whether revelations or suggestions of ministerial pohcy extorted by cross-examination are for the benefit of the country ; his end is gained if opponents who are in office are put to inconvenience, are reduced either to say what was better left unsaid or to seem as though they were carrying out a pohcy which they did not like to divulge. The general result is that, as has been most forcibly pointed out by Sir Henry Maine,i the duties of executive and legislature would seem to be reversed, and while Ministers settle the matter and form of legislation and force their Bills through Parhament with httle or no amendment, the legis- ' Pojpular Government, i. 239. 152 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA lature busies itself with the concerns of the executive and interferes at every turn with the conduct of affairs. Hence the spasmodic action of Government, especially in matters of foreign policy, of late years. Sometimes a Ministry, exasperated with the constant intervention of hresponsible inquirers and critics, is driven to practise such concealment as led to the secret treaty of 1878 and the movement of the Indian troops to Malta without the consent of Parliament. More often, as in our dealings with Egypt in 1884 and 1885, the ministerial policy fluctuates in correspondence with every passing wave of public opinion. But it is not difficult to account for this transposition of duties if we recollect that the power on which a Ministry rests is wholly outside of and superior to the House of Commons. In legislation the democracy generally knows and says what it wants ; a Minister in such regions can walk with a firm step — he knows what is popular and what is not. It is otherwise in matters of executive policy ; he cannot tell from day to day what wUl please the people, because the people do not know themselves. Enough has been said to indicate the lines on which constitutional change has taken place and is taking place. Great political power has passed to bodies outside the old framework of the constitution, to the organisations which express the opinion of party, and that part of our constitu- tion seems to have grown at the expense of the rest through which these new forces find the readiest expression. But, as I have tried to show, the House of Commons only seems to have increased in power because it is the vehicle of this expression of outside opinion, which has come to dominate the independent action of members. Ministers wielding the prerogatives of the Crown retain substantial power by reason of what they can do before interference and beyond recall. To have a hold on the CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT T53 machinery of government is always in itself a source of strength, and where a Mmister represents the popular choice or feehng he is, at the very least, secure that a favourable construction will be put upon his actions, and that his mis- takes will be soon forgotten. Yet government is conducted under increasing difficulties, partly because it is thought to be the duty of every good citizen to find out and publish what Ministers think it prudent to conceal, partly because the mass of the voters whom a Ministry must be taken to repre- sent, and on whose behalf it acts, are not only inquisitive, but are ignorant by necessity and impulsive by temperament. Hence the connection of the executive with the legislature by means of a Cabinet selected by the Crown from the Parhamentary leaders of the dominant party, a connection on which we are wont to pride ourselves as the great political discovery of modern times, results in an irregular and spasmodic action of Government in almost all its departments. Thus, of the two branches of the executive power, the prerogatives which the Queen exercises in person are un- impaired because they are studiously exercised in accord- ance with the wishes of the nation or the circumstances of the occasion ; those exercised by Ministers — and these cover the greater part of executive government — are affected, as I have described, by the uncertain action of the popular will. Of the two branches of the legislature, the House of Lords is yearly becoming more and more of an anomaly in a demo- cracy such as ours, and that in spite of occasional manifes- tations of vigour and in spite of the high quality of its debating power. The House of Commons is yearly becoming more and more the mouthpiece of forces outside, a body of delegates rather than of representatives. Institutions are phable things, and the framework of our constitution may yet adapt itself to the new forces introduced into it. At 154 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA present these forces would seera to have weakened the structure in every part, but it would be idle, even if it were in place here, to speculate upon the results of a change of which we can only see the very beginnings in our own time. W. E. Anson. 155 THE ABMY. In this chapter I hope to lay before the reader a brief description of the most important reforms that have been effected in the army during her Majesty's glorious reign. We have not at any one time in that period changed the whole organisation of our army ; we have not rooted up the old foundations on which it rested to replace them by others entirely new, as the Prussians did after Jena, the Austrians after Solferino, and the French after 1870. The great and sweeping reform of the Prussian army in 1861-62 has no parallel with us in this century. Our reforms have been effected — as is our wont — slowly, cautiously, and by degrees, bit by bit. Each has been won in the teeth of violent prejudices and of antiquated superstitions. Much still remains to be done ; but great things have been already achieved under very great difficulties, and I shall endeavour by a description of our army as it existed in 1837, and as it is now, to enable the reader to judge our military reforms for himself and to fairly estimate their value. In 1837, when King William the Fourth died, our army strengtii establishment, officers not included, was as follows : 10,656 army un. cavalry, 87,083 infantry of the guards and line, 5,631 wnua^ colonial infantry, 6,652 artillery, and 1,038 sappers and ■'■^• miners.' These numbers, with a few odds and ends, made up a total of about 111,200 men. The army was, however, ' This corps is now known as the Eoyal Engineers. 156 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA 9,619 privates below its establishment, a condition which may be said to have been normal at that epoch. The actual strength of the regular army when Queen Victoria came to the throne was, therefore, only about 101,580 men. Its distribution in round numbers was — 19,000 in India, 36,000 in the Mediterranean stations and in the colonies, 20,000 in Ireland, and 26,000 in Great Britain and the Channel Islands. Tke arms Of liorsed field-guns we had only 72, all of which were troops in at home ; the Horse Artillery batteries were armed with 6-pouiider guns and 12-pounder howitzers ; the field batteries with 9-pounder guns and 24-pounder howitzers. The infantry was still armed with the old flint ' Brown Bess,' from which, at a range of 200 yards, half the shots fired missed a target 11 feet 6 inches wide. The two rifle regi- ments had been recently armed with the ' Brunswick rifle,' whose shooting became very wild at 400 yards. When peace was made in 1815 our regular army num- bered about 220,000 men. It was at once largely reduced, and in 1818 it reached its minimum of about 80,000 men. To even that small establishment strong objections were raised in Parliament. The public mind seems to have assumed as a positive fact that this world of ours had reached the era of universal peace. To provide for what was then regarded as the impossible contingency of war was not only thought to be a useless expenditure of public money, but as actually wrong on moral grounds. After many lengthened discussions on the subject, the existence of some military force was eventually recognised as neces- sary for the protection of our colonists from the savage people amongst whom they had settled, for the mainten- ance of our supremacy in India, and also for the support of the civil power in the interests of law and order at home. It is no easy matter for this generation to realise the con- THE ARMY 157 dition of the country with its limited available means for the repression and detection of crime and for the protection of hfe and property, before our present police system had been called into existence. In the event of serious riot or disturbance, it had long been the practice to call upon the Eegular Army, on the Yeomanry, or on the Militia for assistance. A sort of constitutional superstition stiU lin- gered in the minds of many that a standing army was, at least theoretically, dangerous to liberty ; but the serious disturbances that preceded the first Reform Bill convinced all reasonable persons of the still greater danger that its total disbandment would entail. Had it not been, however, for the great influence which the Duke of Wellington very naturally exercised with all parties in the State, the army would have been much further reduced in numbers. A wise, far-seeing statesman, he knew from his own experience what the politicians of that day could not grasp, or for party reasons did not wish to recognise, namely, that a nation whose greatness chiefly depends on the possession of distant provinces cannot long maintain its power without a standing army to garrison and defend them. To keep up any military force, except with the consent TheDuke of the people, he knew was out of the question in England ; ungton's but long study of the working of public opinion taught him ^^^^^ that men would soon forget the existence of a little army during ° •' peace. they never saw. He therefore deliberately adopted the policy of hiding our soldiers away in small detachments throughout the United Kingdom and our distant colonies. He did all he could to keep army matters from the remem- brance of fanatical economists, by keeping as far as possible our soldiers out of their sight. When the clamour for any reduction of numbers became irresistible, he strove to main- tain the fighting strength at the cost of the non-combatant departments. He was fully aware of how indispensable 158 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA these latter are for war, but he knew they could be more easily improvised or obtained from civil life than trained soldiers. The result of this policy was that, although we had a small number of fighting soldiers, we could not even put a brigade into the field, in any sense of the term, ' equipped for war.' When therefore in 1854 we declared war with one of the great military powers, the country possessed no land transport or any of those civil departments without which not even one Army Corps can be duly fed and maintained in the field. At that time, except Dublin, there was no station at home where we could turn out one efficient brigade of all arms for ordinary manoeuvres. Indeed, few of our officers had ever drilled four or five battalions together. Our regiments were very weak, both in men and horses, during the early years of this reign. Each battahon in India had the cadre of one company as its depot. The battalions in the colonies were of six companies, with four others at home as a depot. These four company depots consisted chiefly of worn-out old soldiers, left behind as unfit for foreign service, of invalids sent home from the companies abroad, and of a few recruits. The four company depots were, however, kept moving about from station to station at home, as if they were effective battalions. In 1842 more troops were wanted in the colonies, and several of these depots, increased to six com- panies, were sent abroad under the title of 'Eeserve Batta- lions.' The extra men required were obtained by volunteers from other regiments, and by raw lads picked up wherever they were to be had. No reserves of uniform were then ever kept in store, so these depots embarked in all sorts of slop clothing, purchased by the officers at the ports from which they sailed. The arms for the recruits and volunteers about two-thirds of each of these so-called 'reserve bat- talions ' — were embarked in chests. The history of one of THE ARMY 159 these corps is now before me, and I make these extracts to show my reader the poverty of our mihtary resources and the inefficient condition of our army in ' the good old times.' The story ends with an amusing account of how the men mounted guard for some time after their arrival in Canada with sticks instead of muskets, and in a variety of slop clothing. The character and conduct of our men were deplorable. The oha- The Duke of Wellington, about this period, wrote as fol- of°the lows : ' The man who enlists into the British army is, in i°|fg|y^ general, the most drunken and probably the worst man of the village or town in which he lives. There is not one in a hundred of them who ought not to be put in the second or degraded class of any society or body into which they may be introduced ; and they can be brought to be fit for what is called the first class only by discipline and the precept and example of the old soldiers, who, if not them- selves in the same second or degraded class, deserve to be placed there for some action or other twenty times in every week.' ' The memorandum from which this is extracted should be studied by all who wish to compare our old with our new army. In conversation, the Great Duke continually referred to our soldiers of that time as ' the scum of the earth.' The manner in which we dealt with our soldiers under the old system was peculiar ; the young officers of the present day would scarcely credit the account if related in all its details. The soldier was treated alternately as a criminal to be punished with flogging and as a child whose every action should be watched and guarded. He was not allowed any claim to individuality, or to be even classed as an English freeman. It was assumed that, by his act of ' See page 592, vol. v. of Published Desj^atches, dc. i6o THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA enlistment, he had not only forfeited all rights of citizen- ship, but even all claim to be dealt with as a reasoning human being. It must, however, be freely admitted that the stereotyped soldier of that day had many traditional peculiarities which gave a certain sanction to his treatment. We undoubtedly dealt with him honestly, and to the best of our lights, but it will now be readily admitted that our military laws were injudicious, and of themselves calculated to make the men as vicious as we assumed them to be. ' If you want to improve the character of men or boys, you must treat them as if they were what you wish them to be.' ' So wrote a most careful student of human nature, and few will deny the converse of his apophthegm. The pessimist view of the British soldier existed very commonly down to a recent period, and is to be discovered cropping up through all our army regulations prior to 1871. ' Who the devil, sir, gave you any right to think ? ' was the very ordinary interjection of the commanding officer to the young soldier who began to excuse himself by ' I thought so and so.' This mode of dealing with the soldier arose from the conviction that, if he was not exactly what the Duke of Wellington described him to be, he was at least an un- reasoning animal, quite incapable of looking after himself. The officers were fond and proud of their men, but it was an affection that resembled the feelings they entertained for their horses and for their dogs. The soldier was re- garded as a sort of mechanical contrivance, capable of the most daring conduct, and of rendering the most valuable service as long as his officers were present to lead and direct him ; but it was commonly accepted that, without their fatherly supervision, the machine would cease to work with any gleam of intelligence. What the Duke of Wellington thought on these subjects ' Dr. Arnold. THE ARMY i6i the officers of all grades thought also. Great, however, a^ he was in all the splendid qualities that make pubKc men respected with us, the Duke lacked that sympathy with his social inferiors, and above all with the private soldier, which in all armies and in all history has made leaders beloved and idolised by their followers. He never aimed at gaining the affection of those he commanded, nor was he ever loved by them. Sad experience in the Peninsula had shown him what fiends the soldiers of that time could become in moments of temptation when discipline was relaxed. He believed them to be all alike — that all were naturally brutal in disposition — and the result of this belief on his mind was that the laws which he devised for their better government were correspondingly stringent, almost brutal in their general character. It was not in his disposi- tion to invent measures whose aim and object should be to raise the soldier's moral tone by kind and sympathetic treatment, and so to create a better feeling amongst them. His thoughts turned to the punishment and repression of crime, rather than to any cure for the evils from which it sprang. He had very clear and well-defined ideas of what disciphne should be, and, if his view of the character of the men he had to deal with in his day be accepted as correct, there are still people who will regard his laws as best suited to the object he had in view. To obtain a better stamp of recruit never seems to have struck him as either possible or desirable ; an army constituted somewhat after the Crom- wellian pattern did not enter into his philosophy. He ap- parently regarded the army as the national and fitting receptacle for the bad characters of the nation, and upon all occasions the interests of the nation were paramount with him. He had gained great victories, and had won for his country the highest position amongst nations, with an army whose ranks had been often replenished from the VOT,. T. ^ 102 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA TlieoJd. terms upon which, our sol- diers were en- listed. gaols at home, and he could see no good reason why the generals to come after him should require armies of any superior material. In 1837 our soldiers were enlisted for life or a term of twenty-one years. Sir Charles Napier — an ardent mili- tary reformer, and the real soldier's friend of this century — strenuously endeavoured to open the eyes of his brother generals who then governed the army to the necessity of reducing the term of enhstment to seven years. The only result was to draw down upon himself the charge of being a mihtary Eadical. It was not imtil 1847 that the law was passed which allowed men to enlist for a period of ten years. The prejudice in favour of hfe enhstment was then still very strong amongst our senior officers. It was, how- ever, about this time that many began to realise the neces- sity of shaping the terms of the engagement entered into between the soldier and the State in accordance rather with the feelings and sentiment of the classes from which we drew our recruits than with the notions and prejudices of the senior officers of the army. The increasing difficulty of obtaining the 10,000 recruits then annually required had great influence in bringing about the Short Enhstment Act of 1847. The old stock phrase of immemorial origin, that ' the army was going to the dogs,' was, in 1846-47, every- where alleged with all the weight which long experience of war in the Peninsula gave then to the opinions of our best known generals. The Duke of Wellington strongly disliked the proposal to enlist men for ten years, and only gave way at last, in very guarded language, when he found it was inevitable. The old terms of enlistment, and the lengthened periods during which regiments were kept abroad at the beginning of the Queen's reign, acted strongly, with other causes, to make ' soldiering ' an object of strong disUke to the people. THE ARMY 163 Even amongst the poorest classes there was a certain skir attached to the youth who ' took the shilhng.' The soldier's lot was commonly regarded as a sort of penal servitude, a species of Hfe bailishment from which few ever returned. The popular idea of the army was like that about Lagos, which place the old song described as The Bites of Benin, the Bites of Benin, Where few come out, though many go in. A large proportion of our recruits were obtaiued through Foreign the lying stories of recruiting sergeants poured into the ears of country yokels befuddled with drink. In fact, they were to a large extent nothing more nor less than kidnapped. The lad who enlisted was looked upon as lost to his family for ever. Three-fourths of the infantry of the line were con- stantly abroad : one-fifth of it was always in India, and another fifth in other tropical stations, many of which were very unhealthy. Even those who had a share of home service were abroad double the time they were quartered in Great Britain or Ireland, and more than one half of their foreign service was in tropical climates. The history of an ordinary battalion now before me states it was raised 187 years ago ; since then it has been 137 years abroad or on active service. Sanitation was then a science little known or cared for. Our soldiers were huddled together, closely packed in badly designed and badly ventilated barracks, where they were wretchedly fed. At home the rooms were cold in winter and, because very badly lit, they were very cheerless. Those who could read or write had no light in the long evenings to enable them to do so. There were no recreation rooms in barracks, and it is little wonder that most soldiers spent their evenings in the neighbouring public-houses. Abroad, the life was equally monotonous, whilst sickness and mortahty were very great. We could M 2 1 64 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA not then conceive a man to be a soldier unless he was dressed, Prussian-Hke, in very tightly fitting clothes. Even in India the poor British soldier was sent into the field with high stiff leather stock and closely huttoned- up jacket, with merely a thin cotton cap-cover over the ordinary home forage-cap as his only protection from sun- stroke. If the reader wishes to ascertain how the soldier about this period suffered from the ignorant notions then entertained upon the subject of dress, let him read the story of the first China war of 1839 to 1842, and, even still more recently, that of the war in Burmah in 1852-53. In those wars the men died in large numbers from sunstroke, heat- apoplexy, and cholera, as can be now well understood when it is remembered they were fed on salt beef that would have made them thirsty in a Canadian winter, receiving nothing else for weeks at a time to live on beyond biscuit, rum, and a trifling quantity of tea and sugar, whilst they were dressed under a tropical sun very muqh as they would be at home in summer. Married In those days of enlistment for long j)eriods it was absolutely necessary to allow a certain proportion of our men to marry. Most of the sergeants in every regiment were married with leave, as well as seven per cent, of the rank and file. It is quite safe to say that another seven per cent, were married without leave. This left about 86 per cent, of the men — whose ages ranged from eighteen to forty — who were forced to lead bachelor lives in barracks ; as might be expected, the result was to establish amongst them a low standard of morality. The movement of a regiment from one station to another, owing to the number of families to be conveyed, was very costly to the State, and entailed great discomfort upon the women and actual hardships upon their children. The families of the men who had married without leave were not allowed to stay in barracks, and the THE ARMY 165 squalor, filth, and misery in which they lived, hidden away in some loathsome tenement in the neighbourhood, waiS a crying scandal in the army and a disgrace to modern civihsation. The wretchedness of their condition was a standing warning to the classes amongst whom they lived, telhng them not to enhst. Let the reader imagine what must have been the feehngs of gallant soldiers as they were marched on board ship, torn from the wives they had married without leave, and from children they were forced to leave destitute behind them. It was no uncommon thing to see women rushing madly into the water after the boats which carried away their husbands from them. The women and children thus left behind without any means of subsistence soon became the degraded pariahs of their neighbourhood. There is but little in the most affecting stories of American slavery more repulsive, more heartrending to any person of ordinary humanity, than the scenes which too frequently accompanied the embarkation of a regiment for foreign service forty or fifty years ago, owing to the large number of women and children which the system of long or continued service gathered round our colours. The condition of even the women married with leave, and of their unmarried daughters, was very repulsive and demorahsing. There were then no special quarters for married men ; and, although the officers did their best to collect the families into rooms apart from the unmarried soldiers, it was the commonest thing to see women and young girls herded together, brutelike, in the sleeping-rooms of the unmarried men. In our barrack-rooms we were forced to ignore those ordinary decencies of life which are generally respected even among savages in their social dealings with women, and in their measures for the pro- tection of female virtue. I shall draw a veil over the brutalising and -degrading 1837. 1 66 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA condition of things I have witnessed m my day consequent upon the intermingling of the sexes in barracks and on board troopships ; the details would be disgusting. The pro- His Eoyal Highness the Prince Consort took this matter vision of i . i married up Very Warmly, and, with that practical earnestness which distinguished him, did great things towards the removal of these scandals. The army had chiefly to thank his Eoyal Highness for the construction of those special quarters for married soldiers which are now to be seen in all our barracks. The regi- To describe the regimental officer of 1837 it is necessary mental officer of to study him under two distinct characters — first as a man, and secondly as a professional soldier. The officer then was a great improvement upon the officer who fought at Vittoria. It is cm-ious to note how frequently the Duke of Welhngton had to find most serious fault with him in the Peninsula. In one minute he wrote : ' Unfortunately the inefficiency of the officer has induced many to consider that the period during which an army is on service is one of relaxation from all rule, instead of being, as it is, that during which (of all others) every rule for the regulation and control of the conduct of the soldiers . . . must be most strictly attended to, if it is intended that an army — a British army in particular — shall be brought in a state of efficiency to meet the enemy in the day of trial.' This is a very different picture from what is now often drawn of our army in what some regard as its halcyon days.' By birth our officers fifty years ago were of the same class as they are to-day — that is to say, of the class which has always been the backbone of England's strength, and which has from time immemorial suppKed us with leaders by land and sea. Even in those foreign countries where Britain is ' See pages 55 and 56 of Life of General George Napier (John Murray) for his views of the officers of his early days. THE ARMY 167 enYied and hated most, the English gentleman has long been recognised as the representative of all that is manliest and noblest, most brave and honourable, in human nature. The very prejudices of the English gentleman only serve to make him all tjie more popular with his soldiers. Our men have always had implicit confidence in the honour of their officers, feehng that under all circumstances they would act with the strictest justice, and would see that all had what soldiers term their ' rights.' For their safety the officer has always been ready to risk his life, and none will deny that he has always striven manfully, no matter what might be the danger to himself, to do his duty to his Queen, and also, according to his lights, to the soldiers she had committed to his care. In return for all this the officer demanded from his men an implicit obedience, not only because he was their officer, but also their social superior and, as he believed, their natural, born leader. Foremost in all the manly sports he encouraged amongst them and shared with them, proud of his position, of his uniform, confident in his own strength and powers of endurance, he felt himself a fit and proper person to lead brave men in action, and gloried in setting them an example of daring, reckless courage. Strange to say, the British soldier has always evinced an aversion to the men of his own class who had become officers, although well aware that such a posi- tion can only be reached after years of good service by well-conducted sergeants of ability and well-tested worth. The training we gave and still give our soldiers in- The reia- culcated the principle that they should look to their officers tw^en ^' in all difficulties, whether in the private affairs of peace or ^^^^^ during moments of extreme danger before an enemy. The and the o '-' soldier. initiative in ■ everything, and at all times, belonged ex- clusively to the captain. The relations between the officer and the private, with us, have always partaken very much i68 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA of the patriarchal and feudal character. Looked at in this light, our regimental officer was, and still is, all that he should be amongst his men, namely, a kind, indulgent, outspoken, liberal, and generous master. In this aspect of his character he was and still is perfect. He possesses as an Enghsh gentleman all the natural qualities upon which can be built up by military education the perfection of an army officer ; but it must be admitted that, at the time about which I am writing, he was entirely wanting in military knowledge. Neither he nor eyen the generals under whom he served recognised its necessity. Had not Marl- borough and Wellington won great victories and placed England on a high pinnacle of military glory with a previous race of English gentlemen as officers, to whom the science of war was as little known as it was to them ? They knew how to lead their men as straight under the heaviest fire as their fathers and grandfathers had done before them, and what more was necessary or should be required of them ? The art of war, as distinguished from its science, was then very simple when compared with its practice now, and the reputation of being a reaUy good officer was then by common assent ac- corded to the man who brought the manly ' all round ' quali- ties of the Enghsh gentleman, of the English sportsman, to bear upon a sound knowledge of driU and a quick aptitude for its practice in the field. Doing duty with a regiment or detachment hidden away in some country quarter, where no combination of the three arms was possible ; more or less imbued with the popular idea that the days of war had passed away for ever ; it is no wonder that the regimental officer, to whom no incentive to military study was held out by his superiors, should settle down into the sport-loving man of pleasure that he certainly was fifty years ago. He was quite contented if his knowledge of drill was recognised as satisfactory. His commanding officer, the adjutant, and THE ARMY 169 the sergeant-major taught the men all they were requh-ed to know ; it was his simple business to move these well-drilled machines quickly on parade without confusion. The system of drill then in vogue was becoming obsolete, and was entirely so when we went to war in 1854. As years rolled on in peace, it became more and more theatrical. The spirit or the tactical exigencies that had prompted these military evolutions at the beginning of the century were forgotten, whilst everything tending to any display in them was re- tained, increased importance and care being given to it, until at last our drill had become a complicated puzzle. Its intricacies served no useful purpose beyond exhibiting the extent to which human individuality can be so oblite- rated by drUl that, at last, the integer man is on parade little more than as a cog in the wheel of some great steam engine. The English general of that day seemed to think that all military excellence consisted in moving a few hun- dred soldiers about in a small barrack-yard without crowding or confusion. Beyond an accurate knowledge of the very comphcated manoeuvres designed for this purpose, our regi- mental officers knew nothing of their profession. Had they wished to study its science, there were practically no English works on the subject, and very few could then read either French or German, in which languages books on strategy and tactics were then almost exclusively written. The lieutenant-colonels commanding regiments were mostly old men who had seen service in the great French war. Their views of the British soldier, and of the best way of dealing with him, were those of the Duke of Wellington. There were many very useless men amongst them who were totally unfitted for the trust confided to them. An Irish- man once described one of these useless, ignorant old officers in the following words : ' Sure enough, he has great claims on the service; he's been thirty years going to parade, 170 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA mounting guard, going to mess — to say nothing of all the port wine he has drunk. Why the tax he paid the country on the wine would keep up a little bit of a war of itself, let alone all the advantage the service had of him when he was asleep, doing no mischief.' In 1837 the great majority of our generals had seen active service : they knew what actual war was like, but it is very doubtful if many of them had fully grasped the science of the art they had practised under their great master. It must often have struck the student of the Duke of Wellington's campaigns how great was the gulf that separated his mihtary genius from the very ordinary capacity possessed by his subordi- nate commanders. He seems to have been quite contented as long as those supplied to him were young and vigorous. The average age at which he himself and most of his best- known subordinates had attained the rank of major-general was about thirty-five, and in the last campaign of the Peninsular war there were only two British general officers who were over forty years of age. He only required his generals of division to carry out the orders he gave them ; he did not want them to make strategic plans for them- selves. It carmot certainly be averred that a high order of military talent or genius was ever shown by any of them. At the Queen's accession the Duke was sixty-eight years old, and most of his companions in arms were a little older. Of those who had occupied minor positions during the great war, only Lords Hardinge and Seaton had come to the front in any way. Army Without a well-founded, well-recognised, and well-en- disaipUne . in 1837. forced discipline an army is of little value in the day of trial. The outsider may think it ought to be an easy matter for the general, with his despotic powers, to lay down laws to secure good discipline in an army. This is true, but those laws must be of a practical, reasonable THE ARMY 17 1 natui-fi, and not diametrically opposed to the common instincts of civilised man. If they are opposed to those instincts or to the national prejudices of the soldier, if they are in any way tyrannically oppressive or nagglingly irritating in their character, they will in the end prove most injurious to the maintenance of good discipline. They will create the very condition of things they are meant to prevent; they will increase the amount, the extent, and intensity of the very crimes they were intended to suppress. In the quiet of garrison life, or in a stationary camp, you may by sheer force give effect to stringent laws of this kind ; but once on the move, and in the hurry-scurrj' of active operations, your strict police supervision over trifling minutige and over the hourly doings of the soldier then becomes impossible : the tight hold you had maintained over his every action wiU have so strained the bands and ties with which all unnecessary regulations have been en- forced, that when, through the circumstances of war, the pressure by which they were enforced is necessarily relaxed, the rebound is considerable, is serious. This has always been the result and will always be so. Before the Crimean war, for example, the dress of the British officers, however appropriate in a ballroom, was absurdly unsuited for a campaigning life. The regulations on the subject had en- forced an unnatural condition of things, and the result was that, in a few months after the beginning of hostilities, it was difficult to find in the Crimea any three officers of a battalion dressed alike. Our dress regulations were thrown to the winds, and thus to do away with any regulations gives a shock to discipline which has for its foundation strict and unquestioning obedience to all orders. Nothing can be more dangerous than to educate soldiers in a system of drill and discipline which you dare not practise and could not enforce in front of an enemy. In the moment 172 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA of trial the soldier so trained becomes demoralised, because, not being able to practise what you have taught him, and not knowing what to do, he loses all faith in those above him. Flogging. In 1837 the men were punished for all faults with severity. The most common punishment was that of flog- ging ; it was cheap, simple, and withdrew the soldier from his duty for the shortest length of time. Two hundred lashes was the maximum number then allowed. Men were flogged for almost trivial offences of a purely military character, a practice that tended to blunt in them any good feelings they may have been born or reared with. Many, both in high and in humble positions, had re- peatedly endeavoured to arouse the nation to a sense of the folly and brutality of flogging our men as if they were so many cattle or slaves. It was out of place to talk of mili- tary honour m an army where a mode of punishment existed which foolish but well-meaning humanitarians had taught the soldier to regard as degrading. I have no intention to recount the horrors of flogging, which was so long continued in the army by the influence of the Duke of Wellington and generals of his school. The good sense and humane feelings of the nation, and some few expe- rienced soldiers of broad views like Sir Charles Napier, were opposed to it ; but still it remained in the Mutiny Act till 1880, a stigma of shame fastened upon what ought in all countries to be looked up to as a profession of honour. The brutality with which it was too often inflicted at the beginning of the century had disappeared before 1837, but it was not until 1868 that its infliction was restricted to time of war. I feel certain from recent experience that its abolition has raised the character and tone of our men. The British soldier can now look the soldiers of all other nations in the face, for he can be flogged no longer. THE ARMY 173 The army in 1837, contemptible in numbers, hidden away in small bodies all over the earth, its rank and file as described by the Duke of Wellington, its officers ignorant of military science ; this army, badly equipped, absurdly dressed, and destitute of those civil departments without which no army can exist in the field, was indeed in a pitiable condition in all respects. Had the French landed 100,000 or even 50,000 men in the Thames or on the south coast, it is quite certain that our army could not then have saved London from capture. Of that army, in 1837, General Viscount Hill was the Commander-in-Chief and General Sir John Macdonald was the Adjutant-General. Let us now turn for a moment to the condition of the Militia and Yeomanry at that same epoch. In 1837 the Militia force was a phantom. At the close The Mi- of the great war it had been allowed to die slowly. Men Ye'omau- who sought for political notoriety as economists made easy capital in calling for a reduction of expenditure upon it. The Duke of Wellington was just able, with all his influence, to maintain a small number of regular soldiers, but to do so he was forced to allow the politician to work his will upon all the auxiliary forces as well as upon the civil departments of the army. All that remained of the great Militia force that had been under arms in Napoleon's days were some 127 effete adjutants and 1,017 aged sergeants, who were hidden away in our county towns, dragging out so useless an existence that it was difficult to justify their maintenance on any military grounds. The force nominally consisted of 68,413 men, but, as they were never either mustered or drilled, they had but a paper existence. There had been no ballot or training for the Militia since 1831. The total amount voted for the Militia in 1837 was 192,115^. It was not in ry m 1837. 174 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA any way under the military authorities, but under the lords -heutenant of counties, who received their instructions about it from the Home Secretary, its cost being borne on the civil, not on the army estimates. This continued until 1852, when the Militia was entirely reorganised under the Act passed that year, and its command transferred to the military authorities. The Yeomanry, then styled the 'Volunteers,' numbered about 18,000 of all ranks; their cost in 1837 was 105,400L They were called out annually for a few days' training, and had always proved most useful in putting down riots and in otherwise assisting the civil power to mamtain order before our present police system had been called into existence. The ' Enrolled Pensioner ' force only came into existence in 1842, although all pen- sioners had previously been deemed liable to military service when required. This new force was created more as an aid to the civil power than for any military reason. In 1845 its numbers were 7,000 men. I have thus briefly described both the army and the auxiliary forces as they existed at the beginning of this reign. I shall now devote a few pages to the consideration of what we were pleased to call our national defences at that period. Eug- The possible invasion of England by a French army is liability ^ subject that has been the constant and careful study of our ablest soldiers and sailors since the beginning of this century. Napoleon, the greatest of soldiers, believed it was a feasible operation under certain conditions, even in his day, before steamers were invented, and when England was a great naval power and France a very weak one. The Duke of Wellington repeatedly, but in vain, endeavoured to awaken the new race of public men at the beginning of her Majesty's reign to a consciousness of the dangers to which the country was exposed through the weakness of its' army and navy, and the almost total absence of any coast to inva- sion. THE ARMY 175 batteries or fortifications to protect even our dockyards from sudden attack. He warned Ministers that the appU- cation of steam to ships as a. motive power had completely revolutionised the conditions under which war would in future have to be encountered by us. He told our political rulers that England had been joined to France by a sort of isthmus of steam. His warnings fell upon the unwilling ears of men engrossed in money -making, a greed which the railway movement then beginning developed, until the nation was drunk with riches. Men hated to hear the home truths which this great soldier -patriot told them, and cheered the professional politician who asserted that all this war-giant said was the folly of an old man who, made great by war, loved large standing armies and great mili- tary and naval expenditure. The party politician, with his dreams of universal peace, of general disarmament, and of international courts of arbitration, is always ready to ridicule as useless waste any expenditure upon armaments, and his listeners are generally only too glad to revel in the fool's paradise so created for their edification. It is a curious phenomenon of the British mind and character that, except in moments of imminent peril, the opinions of the military and naval expert is as the voice of one crying in the wilderness. The poorest babbler of philosophic commonplace can easily pooh-pooh the most accomplished expert on war subjects. The expert in all the arts and sciences of peace has attentive hearers ; his advice is care- fully weighed and generally acted upon, but the advice of the expert in the science of war is scarcely treated with ordinary civility, always viewed with suspicion, and his advice most rarely followed. Forty years ago, as is still the case, our Navy no longer The bore the same proportional strength to that of France of our it had done during the wars of Napoleon, and yet since ^^®*' 1/6 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA then its duties and responsibilities have gone on steadily increasmg. Every extension of our commerce served and still serves to render the concentration of our fleets in the Channel for home protection all the more impossible. The loss of one great naval battle there would leave our coasts open to easy invasion. The places where the several divi- sions of a hostile army could land are as well known to the headquarter staffs in Paris and Berlin as in our Horse Guards. Defence- Towards the close of 1846, General Sir John Burgoyne dmon of pomted out to Lord John Eussell and his colleagues, in a £1^37'^ very remarkable paper, the dangers the country was exposed to from invasion. In it he reminded' the Government that, after devoting from 20,000 to 25,000 men to the protection of Ireland and of what we were pleased to call our home fortifications, we could not put in the field for the protection of Great Britain more than from 5,000 to 10,000 men ; that in all Great Britain and Ireland we had not enough field- guns for 20,000 men, and that our reserves of muskets and other warlike stores^ had been allowed to dwindle down almost to nothing. He declared that even our dockyards might be destroyed by a sudden attack upon them. This drew from the Duke of Wellington his now celebrated letter of January 9, 1847, which mysteriously found its way into the newspapers the year following. This letter was a most serious indictment of recent and of then existing Ministers, made by the most able, cautious, and dispassionate of great soldiers, who, although perhaps wanting in sharp political cunning, was, in the highest acceptation of the word, a great statesman. Penned as it was on a subject that he understood better than any man of his time, it will always be regarded as one of the most remarkable State papers that has ever been made public at the moment to which it referred. THE ARMY \tj Lord Palmerston, then at the head of the Foreign Office, was, it would seem, alone amongst our Ministers able to grasp and realise the gravity of the position. His report on the defence of the country which was submitted to the Cabinet on December 17, 1846, shows him to have been a man whose intellect could not only devise schemes for the paving and hghting of towns, but who could rise to the useful consideration of those great subjects upon which rests the question of our very existence as an independent people. His report should be studied by all thoughtful Englishmen who love their country. The following is one sentence in it : ' Surely there can be no duty more urgently pressing upon a Government than to place the country which it governs in a position to defend itself ; and, if any mischance were to happen, what possible excuse could be made for the Ministers by whose apathy and neglect the country had been left without adequate means of defence ? ' He concluded this able minute by a strong appeal to his colleagues, in which he pointed out the urgency for a loan to meet the expense of the military works deemed necessary for the protection of our dockyards and the defence of our most important harbours. In the Administration of that day, the exigencies of party were apparently stronger than statesmanlike instinct, so nothing came of the matter until 1859, when Lord Palmerston was himself Prime Minister. To his wisdom and forethought then we owe the security from attack which the works he had constructed have since afforded those great naval establishments without which our fleets could not keep the seas. At the time, however, his proposal to expend 7,460,000Z. on fortifications met with some considerable opposition, that was shared in, as rumour said, by one member of his Cabinet. Previous to their construction, the hopelessly defenceless state of England often led to panics that were very injurious to our VOL. I. N 178 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA commercial prosperity. One of these alarms swept over the land in 1859, occasioned by the dread of a French invasion. Magenta and Solferino had excited in the breasts of French of&cers a new thirst for military enterprise. Some colonels in Paris had allowed themselves to speak publicly in a threatening tone towards this country. The French press took the matter up and fanned the national vanity, until it became doubtful if even Napoleon III. would be able to control the warhke frenzy thus aroused. No one trusted Louis Napoleon, and all felt he would have to swim with the current of popular feeling in France and with the sentiment of his army. This noisy expression of anger on the other side of the Channel caused thoughtful Englishmen to study and take stock of their military position. Many of the calmest awoke suddenly to a consciousness of our absolute inability to defend our very coasts should it please any of the many new presidents or emperors to attack them. The birth The Queen's Ministers, paid by the country to watch voiun- over its affairs, had become accustomed since Waterloo to force. concern themselves only with questions of internal reforms and the party contests arising from them. The efficiency of the army and navy had little or no interest for them. They had led the nation astray, directing popular thought to money-making and to the enjoyment of the luxury that money provided. From this condition of foolish lethargy the nation suddenly awoke, and iaamoment, and for the moment, it was intensely in earnest. Its first sensation was seem- ingly one of helpless humihation, that sent a shock through all classes that was felt in the remotest districts of our island. The rebound from the condition of dangerous ease and delusive slumber was remarkable. The people seemed to rise in arms as a protest against the manner in which their political leaders had beguiled them. The caU to arms THE ARMY 179 which, as a consequence, resounded throughout the land announced the birth of the Vohinteer force. No man in England was more sensible of the risks to which England was exposed at this time than his Eoyal Highness the Prince Consort. No Englishman has ever set higher store upon the maintenance of our national honour and of our complete supremacy at sea. He was ever fore- most in urging upon the Queen's Ministers the necessity of being strong and secure on land at home, whilst we occupied a position of undisputed authority over every sea where our ships could float. His pen and his wise counsel were always at the service of those in power. With the Duke of Wellington and Lord Palmerston, he had been fully alive to the dangers to which we were exposed from the smallness of our army, and the absence of defensive works even for the protection of the Thames and of our great dockyards. It was, therefore, with pleasure and satisfaction that in 1859 he hailed this awakening of the people to a due sense of their weakness, as shown in their creation of the Volunteer force. He viewed the Volunteer movement with all the satisfaction the sailor does the first glimpse of daylight after a long night of storms off a lee-shore. The ' Instructions to Lords-Lieutenant ' issued by the Secretary of State for War, May 25, 1859, which were, in fact, the regulations upon which the Volunteer force was raised and organised, were drafted by the Prince Consort.' Up to the time of his lamented death he did all m his power to give permanency to this new force, and to give it for ever a recognised posi- tion in the military organisation of the country. It is curious to note how much more far-seeing this great Prince was upon all matters of mihtary organisation and efficiency than the bulk of our contemporary generals. ' See page 437, vol. iv. of Sir Theodore Martin's Life of the Prince Consort. N 2 i8o THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA The Volunteer movement of 1859 is, without doubt, one of the most remarkable and important events in modern English history. During her Majesty's reign we have had wars and Eeform Bills ; High Church, Temperance, and Chartist movements ; we have well-nigh covered the world with railways and encircled it with telegraph wires ; some of our poorest and most distant colonies have expanded into rich and imjjortant provinces of the Empire ; a great wave of democratic thought and feeling has with slow, measured tread passed over the land, and no man can foretell what may be its effect upon either our future prosperity or national strength. But those who believe that security from invasion, and ability on the part of the nation to defend itself in the event of attack, are the first elements of greatness, will for all time regard the Volunteer movement as more seriously affecting the nation and its destinies than each and all of the events I have enumerated. The law that enforced national education can, I think, alone compare in importance with that memorable event. The Before we consider its military aspect, let us examine bearing its social bearings and the effect it has upon the lives of the volun- English people. The system of compulsory military service teer prevailing in all the great States of Europe has, and, as ment. generation succeeds generation, will have in the future still more influence and effect upon the physical appearance, strength, and health of the people. In accordance with its rules, nearly all the young men of the nation are clothed, fed, housed, and well taught at the public expense during the better part of those two or more years of early manhood, when mental training and muscular development are of the first consequence. The young man then learns habits of order, obedience to superiors, cleanliness of person, punctuality, and tidiness. In fact, he acquires what is most likely to make him a loyal subject and a good citizen, whilst his THE ARMY i8r phj'sical development is most carefully attended to. Men so trained are calculated to be the healthy fathers of healthy children, and, as time goes on, the effects of this system of compulsory service become more and more evident in the increased mental and bodily vigour of the people. Quite apart from all army questions, I believe it would well repay every nation to subject all its young men to this sort of training ; many think it is the most important duty of the State, no matter what may be the expense, to establish by law some system of this nature that will secure health to a nation by the physical training of its sons. If the men are sickly and small, with poorly developed muscle and with weak constitutions, no amount of political freedom or of book education can ever compensate a nation for such a terrible misfortune. To amass wealth by industry and commerce is nationally very desirable, but surely it is of far greater consequence that the men should be strong, healthy, and brave. Take any two nations living side by side under similar conditions of civilisation and on an equality as regards race ; let one adopt the Prussian system of mihtary service, and the other not. Before a century has passed the sons and daughters of the former will certainly be stronger, more comely, and healthier than those of the State in which they have been left to grow up in the overcrowded cottages of the farm-labourer or in the fever-stricken alleys of its towns and cities. The volunteer has supplied in England in a marked, though possibly m a small degree, some of the mental and physical training that compulsory service secures abroad. In 1885 the Volunteer force enhsted 54,754 young men for its ranks, of whom 7,000 had previously been drilled either in the army or auxihary forces. In 1886 the number was 49,140, and in those two years together it sent back into 1 82 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA private life over 88,000 drilled men. It is calculated that we have now in Great Britain about 800,000 men who have passed through the Volunteer ranks. Those, added to the 226,762 now enrolled, make up about a million of men who have had the benefit of the mental and bodily training and discipline which service in the Volunteer force implies. This may be a poor substitute for the good feeding, housing, &c., furnished by the State to the young German ; but still it has done, and continues to do, great things for the health of our people — more than is generally realised — the value of which it is difficult to appraise in figures or to describe in words. On May 12, 1859, notices were issued from the War Office to authorise the formation of Volunteer corps in Great Britain under an Act of King George III. Battahons sprang up as if by magic all over the country. Gentlemen came forward as officers, many of whom had previously served in the army. Before the summer of 1860 ended, 119,000 had been enrolled. Since then the movement has continued to take firmer root year by year, as one of the most important of our great national institutions. In November 1886 its enrolled strength was 226,752 men, of whom 220,829 were ' efficients.' The country supplies the force with arms, accoutrements, and ammunition, and, when in camp, fur- nishes the battalions &c. with camp equipment. To cover the cost of clothing, of accommodation for the headquarters of corps, and other regimental expenses, the State allows \l. 15.S. annually for each man who is efficient. Of the above-mentioned force, over 41,000 are gunners, who, with a little hardening by detachments from the Eoyal Artillery, would in the event of war man our coast bat- teries. The number of field-guns with the Eoyal Artillery at home is small ; if we sent two army corps abroad and kept up the strength of our present garrison in Ireland, THE ARMY 183 we should only have about twenty-four guns left in Great Britain. The whole Militia, Yeomanry, and Volunteer force is absolutely without any field artillery; it is therefore hoped that we may soon bury our Eoyal Artillery prejudices against the creation of Volunteer and Militia field-batteries. The Volunteers already supply the army with corps of tele- graphists, signallers, and post-office men, and it is to be hoped that we may soon have medical corps for hospital work, also corps for the maintenance and working of railways, and as volunteer police companies, for duties at the base of operations, the advanced depot, and stations along the line of communication. The greatest possible credit is due to all classes and grades in the Volunteer force for the patriotic way in which they have worked to bring it to its present satisfactory state. They had at first many difficulties to contend with : they were chaffed in Punch ; absurd little stories, meant to ridicule them, were invented, and even on the stage many a laugh was raised at their expense. The army officer as a rule — for there were some brilliant exceptions— disliked them ; he had never been very fond of the Militia, but the new Volunteer force was far more offensive to him. He was frequently told that, if it became a permanent in- stitution, it would render useless any regular army. He laughed at their unsteadiness on parade, at the many mistakes they made in drill ; their purely civilian manner of conducting military duties, and, above all things, at their want of discipline, and their seeming inability even to appreciate its advantages. He scouted the notion of their ever being more than toy-soldiers, or of their ever reaching a standard of efficiency that would enable them to take their place in brigade with regular troops. The organisa- tion was generally regarded as an organisation of panic called suddenly into existence, and it was predicted on all 1 84 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA sides that when this panic subsided, as other previous panics had done, the Volunteer force would disappear also. On the contrary, however, it has gone on steadily increas- ing both in numbers and efficiency. Of the three great reigns when the throne was occupied by a Queen, that of EHzabeth is best known to the mass of the English people to-day in connection with the destruc- tion of the Spanish Armada by the gallant Drake and the loyal Howard. The reign of Queen Anne will be for ever memorable as the era of England's greatest power, when no hostile fleet could keep the sea, and when the fame of Marlborough overshadowed Europe, and, acknowledged everywhere, was paid homage to even in the children's nurseries of our enemies. In like manner, I believe the reign of England's best and greatest Sovereign, Queen Victoria, will be remembered for all time as that when the English people called the Volunteer force into existence to redress the military ignorance and incapacity of our political rulers. The Volunteer force has no parallel in any other country. Besides the three-quarters of a million supplied to it annually from army funds, large sums are voluntarily con- tributed towards its support. All ranks of Volunteers, from purely patriotic motives, give their time to their military duties without any remuneration whatever. Our army officers now begin to understand and appreciate the military value of this splendid force. All now see how much the Volunteer movement has done to popularise the army. It is but natural that the army should be popular with the Volunteers, since it is the pattern of excellence upon which they model themselves, and is the source from which they obtain their adjutants and instructional staff. What is popular with such a truly national force cannot fail to be popular with the British people. We have to thank the THE ARMY 185 Volunteers for many valuable alterations in our old drill ; bright, fresh, business-like, and unprejudiced minds were and still are brought to bear upon the subject, and many obsolete movements have in consequence disappeared from our drill-books. Volunteer battalions now form part of each of the great territorial regiments into which the infantry of the country is divided, and it is hoped that, as years go by, the bonds of union between all the battalions of each regiment may, by wise administration, be drawn closer and closer. To-day the force possesses a solidity which few anticipated in 1859. It is now armed with the Martini-Henry rifle, and it is hoped it may soon be in possession of our new-pattern army rifle. In 1860 the National Eiflie Association was called into existence as the result of the Volunteer movement, and the Queen inaugurated its creation by firing the first shot ever heard at a Wimbledon meeting. If there were a Temple of Janus in England, its gates The wars would seldom have been closed during her Majesty's reign, tie™^ Until the British Empire be broken up by some mad ^^gn!^''^ minister, and his madness be so communicated to the English people that, one by one, in pursuit of some party object, we force our loyal colonies to dissever their con- nection with us, and we lose all our foreign possessions, we cannot expect our swords to be ever sheathed for any number of years consecutively. The great military nations of Europe, who always seem so anxious that we should adopt their system of universal army service, taunt us with not being a military nation. This may be true, but without doubt we are the most warlike people on earth. No other army has portions of it so constantly in the field as we have. Whilst French cor^s d'armee are being practised in autumn manoeuvres on the plains of Champagne, and German battalions are learning drill at Potsdam, the 1 86 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA soldiers of Queen Victoria are to be found year after year in small numbers in remote corners of her empire, up- holding the honour of England and fighting hard in its interests against hordes of barbarous foes. Our annual manoeuvres take place in distant countries whose very names even are unknown to the foreign officer. Whilst the latter is taught his military duties in sham-fights, we use ball cartridge when we learn ours. British officers have more varied experience of war than those of any other nation, and a larger proportion of them know what it is to be shot at. Sixteen years — half the life of a generation — have now elapsed since the German army burnt powder in earnest, and the recent campaigns of the French in Tunis, Tonquin, and Madagascar have been most remarkable in showing how badly military operations in wild and distant countries can be planned and executed by a great military nation whose officers are inexperienced in savage warfare. Until men have taken part in very distant wars where courage, dogged determination, physical spirits and endurance, resource on the part of company officers, and of skill on the part of their leaders, have had to com- pensate for great dis]3arity in numbers ; until men have experienced the sensation of being surrounded by hordes of brave savage enemies, where all immediate help is impossible ; and until generals and staff officers have had to feed and supply troops with all they require in war when far from all som-ces of supply, it is hard for them to realise the great difficulties encountered year after year by British soldiers all over the world. It is their varied experience, their frequent practice in war, that makes our young officers the best in the world. They are now well grounded in military knowledge ; it is hoped that we have at last broken down all opposition to military education as an essential for promotion. The army is daily becoming more of a THE ARMY 187 profession, in which men begin to feel that hard work and ability now obtains the same fair field as in all the other great professions and in every walk in civil life. In a few years more we shall have entirely rid the army of the officer who thought a sound knowledge of drill was all the military knowledge that should be required of him. When all the important posts in our military hierarchy are filled by selected officers of the young school of educated captains, colonels, and generals, I verily believe we shall have reached perfection as far as our officers are concerned. The first serious war of the Queen's reign — that against The Dost Mahomed — was undertaken the year after her Majesty's war. accession. Its history is painful to the soldiers of to-day, but it is most instructive, both to generals who have to plan campaigns and to statesmen who have to decide upon de- claring war. UntU, through the incapacity of our military leaders, demoralisation took possession of all ranks, break- ing down all self-respect and soldierlike spirit, the British regiments in the first Afghan war fought splendidly, with all their wonted dash and daring. I shall attempt no criticism of operations that few Englishmen can ever re- member without a blush of shame. "Were it not for two great lessons to be learnt from those events, we should like to forget the national indignities we submitted to at Cabul in the winter of 1841-42. The first of these two lessons was, that to send an army into a distant field of operations under two distinct leaders — one to command the troops, the other to direct the negotiations upon which the movements and operations of those troops depended — was to court certain failure and possible disaster. It is only rulers ignorant of the first principles of war who could be capable of such egregious — I might say of such criminal — folly. The second lesson which the Afghan war taught us has at last, but only of very late years, borne fruit— I mean the error of commit- 1 88 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA ting the direction of a campaign, the custody of our national honour and the Uvea of thousands, into the hands of a general enfeebled by old age. It is bad enough to take any so-called general at haphazard to command troops in the field, but deliberately to select an old worn-out man for such a position cannot be condemned in too forcible terms. One of the most important of our recent reforms is the careful selection of young commanders. For wars such as those we wage so frequently, youth, and the inventive genius that is one of its characteristics, is far more essential for all ranks than for the ordinary cut-and-dry campaigns where vast bodies of about equally well-trained and well-armed regular troops meet in almost equal numbers. A great readiness of re- source and immense powers of endurance are especially necessary for the leader who has to penetrate far into a little known country with a force that will be outnumbered ten to one. ■Wars in Then Came our first war with China ; our Indian and Sikh wars ; our campaigns in New Zealand, Kaffraria, and on the north-west frontiers of India ; our Punjab and Burmese wars. In many of these we paid dearly in money, blood, and in reputation for the reckless manner in which the generals were selected, and for the consequent folly and war-ignorance with which the operations were conducted. Good, brave gentlemen endeavoured to fight the Afreedee warriors on their rough and roadless mountains, the Kafirs in their bush, or the Maories— the bravest of savages and most ingenious of military engineers — in their underground pahs, all in the same stiff fashion and in the same regular formations we had employed in the Peninsula. It was thought then by our generals — I see it even now sometimes enunciated by military theorists — that the plans and tactics and formations which enabled us to win at Waterloo and on the Alma, when contending against first-rate troops, ought •India, &c. THE ARMY l8g surely to be good enough to secure us success in any contest with the indiscipHned forces of savage nations. Almost all the military misfortunes we have sustained during her Majesty's reign are to be traced to this notion ; they have arisen over and over again from a close literal adhesion on the part of colonels and generals to the dry-as-dust rules taught in every work on military science. Those rules are invaluable to the young, able leader who knows how to plan his operations in accordance with the spirit of their teaching, and to fill in the details to suit the mode of fight- ing, tactics, and armament of his enemy ; they are fatal when they are strictly and literally followed in detail as if they were the voice of some divine oracle. They are excellent and invaluable as servants, but fatal as masters. The above-mentioned wars also taught us how equally cruel and foolish it was to feed men badly — that salt beef or ^ork and biscuit, with a strong dram of rum and a pinch of tea and sugar, were not enough for the British soldier to live on for any length of time. More recent cam- paigns have made it evident that money spent in pro- viding our men with jam, pickles, cheese, bacon, pre- served vegetables, &c., is well and economically expended. Humanity apart, regard for the morale of troops in the field has taught us that too much care cannot be taken of the sick and wounded, and, above all, we have learnt that when the great truths of hygienic science are ignored the army suffers proportionally by loss of life, of health, and of .^rength. I have already referred to the loss from sunstroke and heat-apoplexy that resulted from the cruel habit of making our soldiers fight, even in the tropics, in leather stocks, tightly buttoned-up jackets, and without any effective protection from the sun on their heads. It was the influence of pubhc opinion — to which we soldiers owe so much — that delivered us from these evils. A great deal still remains to 190 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA be done before the soldier is clothed in a manner suitable for the hfe he has to lead in the field, and before we follow the example of the navy, and dress our men suitably for the hard work they have to do. However, those who can remember these early wars of the Queen's reign will readily admit the great improvement already effected in the soldier's dress. The Hus- The war with Eussia followed. There had been revo- lutions and street massacres on the Continent not many years before, and a gallant Piedmontese army, struggling for Italian freedom, had been crushed atNovara; but until 1854 no two great European Powers had stood up face to face since Waterloo to settle their differences on the battle-field. Most Englishmen had heard their fathers speak of Trafalgar and of Salamanca, but few had thought we should ever again take the field in Europe. The declara- tion of war against Eussia demoralised the peace party. Its members had been tolerated before, now they and their teaching were equally laughed at. England seemed as if suddenly aroused from a heavy sleep during which she had been deluded by the pleasing visions of universal peace and goodwill towards all men. Not since the days of Cromwell's Ironsides has any physically finer body of British soldiers taken the field than the 26,800 we disembarked at Oldfort. Men and officers were perfectly drilled, but such was our poverty in warlike stores that we had considerable difficulty in gettirg together the equipment for the ten batteries (sixty guns) which at first constituted all the field artillery of this army, and we had no transport equijDment of any sort. It was, indeed, a sad joke to call ours an army at all. With some few exceptions its generals and staff officers were unequal to their duties. It would not become me to enter upon any criticism of the chief actors before Sebastopol. I often hear astonishment expressed at our want of success THE ARMY igr in that war ; but, looking back to the events of the winter of 1854-55 and of the following spring, summer, and autumn, my astonishment is that any considerable number of us surTived to return home and tell the story of our military incapacity. This result can be only explained by the fact that the Kussian army was then in every respect inferior even to ours as a fighting-machine. We may speak with affection of the brave Enghsh gentlemen who led us then ; we can afford to make allowance for the ignorance and shortcomings of our staff officers ; we may condemn the folly of a Government that sent an army into the field without any transport or properly organised civil departments ; but every man who witnessed the manner in which our soldiers fought, in which day after day, and night after night, in obedience to the call of duty, they went through what then seemed as if it were to be the never-ending routine of winter trench-work — all who saw this will for ever recall it witk feelings of pride of race and deep admiration for the British private. I have seen men, on their return from night duty during that first winter, lie down from want of strength, and, without a murmur, die from over-fatigue, exposure, and want of proper nourishment. That we reaped so little advantage from our victory at the Alma ; that our brigade of Light Cavalry was practically annihilated to no useful purpose at Balaclava ; that our army was nearly cut in two and destroyed at Inkermann ; and that our final assault of Sebastopol was a cruel failure, may well be laid at the doors of our superior officers and their staff ; but, without any doubt, the want and misery that killed our army in that first winter was the result of the gross military ignorance of Lord Aberdeen's Cabinet, and of the false and paltry economy of our Treasury officials. The Select Committee which inquired into these circum- 192 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA stances in 1855, in their report, thus referred to that Administration : ' They hoped and expected that the expe- dition would be immediately successful, and, as they did not foresee the probability of a protracted struggle, they made no provision for a winter campaign. What was planned and undertaken without sufficient information was conducted without sufficient care and forethought. This conduct on the part of the Administration was the first and chief cause of the calamities which befell our army.' Our mistakes and failures in the Crimea aroused the anger of a proud people. The Government of the day — as, under similar cu'cumstances, is the invariable practice in England — endeavoured to shift all the blame from their shoulders, and to fasten it upon some soldier. By a strange fatality, they selected as their scapegoat the one general officer whom the rismg generation of young officers in the Crimea looked to as their future leader. After the most unworthy efforts to fix the blame upon him, they failed signally ; but the struggle broke his spirit, and thenceforward military ambition no longer moved Sir Eichard Airey. The The three years' fighting of the Indian Mutiny followed. Mutfny. Our men were armed with rifles, the enemy with smooth- bores. The backbone of the rebelhon was broken at the assault of Delhi, the siege of which place reflected the greatest credit upon the leaders, staff, and most of the troops engaged. Havelock and Outram's operations to relieve Lucknow showed what British troops, when really roused by intense feeling, can do against overwhelming odds and under the most difficult and trying circumstances. The assault of the Secunder Bagh, and the slaughter of its garrison of about two thousand men, struck terror into the hearts of the rebels. The other operations of Lord Clyde caused the mutineers, and the people who had sided with them, to realise that all further resistance was in vain. THE ARMY 193 Fighting, however, especially in Oudh, where the gallant ' Moolvee ' had long been the moving spirit against us, was continued iitfuUy for another year and a half after the capture of Lucknow in 1858, but there was no real heart in the struggle. Then came the war of 1860 in China, when The a British army, assisted by a small French contingent, wa™ marched to Pekin and dictated terms to the Imperial ruler of the sun, moon, and the starry firmament generally. In this war we for the first time used breechloading field- guns, and they were an acknowledged success. The cam- paign was admirably planned by that able and gallant soldier, Su" Hope Grant, and it was in every way a complete success, reflecting the greatest credit upon all concerned. Since then, every new war we have been engaged in General has taught the present generation something. In fighting J^n^ts!"^" courage, marching power, endurance, and physical strength the soldier of to-day is fully equal to his prototype who fought under Wellington. Thanks to his better education, he is now more intelligent, better disciplined, far better behaved, more contented, and, indeed, in every way far more efficient for all the purposes for which he is main- tained. As for the officers, they come still from the same class that has always furnished the army and navy with leaders, but they are more professional than formerly. You are no longer voted a bore if you discuss military subjects in military society ; the study of war, and its science and practice, is the duty of all, the pleasure of most of our officers, for it now begins to be felt that without a knowledge of those subjects there can in future be no prospect open to any of us. Our staff officers are carefully trained, and at the camps of instruction our superior officers are afforded constant opportunities of manoeuvring all three arms to- gether, and of practically teaching every rank their duties in the field. The drilling and instruction of the men, VOL. I. ° 194 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA formerly done by the adjutant and by the sergeants, is now the duty of the company officers. We have rele- gated to the library of the military museum our old drill- books, crammed as they were with movements suited pos- sibly to a theatrical display in Hyde Park, but absolutely impossible in the field. The schoolmaster and military critic are now abroad in our ranks. Everything is scrutinised from a practical standpoint, and we strive to confine the recruit's instruction to those useful matters which are in- dispensable to war efficiency. We have discovered that, in the multitude of practical subjects now to be learnt by the young soldier, we have ample range for imparting to him that discipline of the mind which it was formerly imagined could only be taught through the medium of useless and complicated parade movements. Inspecting generals of the modern school now prefer to judge the military value of a regiment by the manner in which it does outpost duty and field-firing than by the way in which the men ' lock-up ' as they march past. The army of to-day retains all its old proud regimental traditions and everything that was good in the army under King William IV. Our reforms have not been sensational leaps in the dark : they were made slowly, and the present efficiency of the army is an evidence of the careful and sure manner in which they were effected. From time immemorial the Sovereign has been the head of our army, and it will be a bad day for England should this be ever changed. ' Command, preferment, and honour come to the army from the Crown,' says a great lawyer, and if at any time the favour of- political parties is allowed to weigh in the selection for military promotion, or in the distribution of honours or rewards, it will be disastrous to the best interests of the army and dangerous to civil liberty. THE ARMY 195 In 1837 the command and administration of the army The old ■were curiously divided. Like most other sections in our army™°* machinery of government, the system had not been the ^^ticm^' design of one man or of any one body of men vforking together at the same time. It had grown up bit by bit, and was patched here and there as the necessity for repairs became apparent. The control of all military operations in war rested with the Minister who was at once Secretary of State for War and for the Colonies. With him the general commanding in the field communicated officially upon aU subjects, and to him all despatches were addressed. During peace his control over the army was more nominal than real, and had most to do with it in its relations to our colonial possessions, for which he fixed the strength of their garrisons. The government and administration of the army was divided between several departments of State. Its affairs were divided into three great divisions — the Com- mander-in-Chief, the Secretary at War, and the Board of Ordnance. In the Commander-in-Chief was vested all that related to the discipline, instruction, promotion, arms, dress, and equipment of the cavalry and mfantry, the distribution of honours to them, and all kindred subjects that did not involve any expenditure. He acted in all such matters as the mouthpiece of the Sovereign. The Secretary at War was a political officer, responsible to Parliament for the army estimates and for the proper expenditure of all moneys voted by it for military purposes. As the Duke of Wellington said, when describing the rela- tive positions of Commander-in-Chief and Secretary at War, the former could not move a corporal's party from London to Windsor without the latter's permission, because even such a move would entail expense. The Board of Ordnance was presided over by a Master- 2 196 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA General who had been almost always a member of the Cabinet, and was, in fact, its adviser upon all military- matters. Under him were the artillery and engineers, whose numbers were then only about 6,600 and 1,000 men respectively. He was always a distinguished soldier of great war experience — Marlborough and Wellington had both held the office. The manufacture and custody of all warlike stores, guns, powder, &c., for both army and navy, the construction and maintenance of all fortifications and barracks, devolved upon the board. The Commissariat — a civil department — was exclusively under the orders and control of the Treasury, and its officers (no soldier belonged to it) were, to all intents and pur- poses, mere Treasury clerks without any recent military experience. We had no military transport of any sort, but, in theory, this unfortunate Commissariat department was supposed to create one at a moment's warning when required. It is difficult for the officer of to-day to realise that fifty years ago experienced commanders should have ear- nestly opposed any changes or reforms in this curious, Chinese-puzzle-like system of army command and adminis- tration, with all its ' Parliamentary safeguards ' and its many checks and interminable counter-checks. It was part and parcel of our Constitution, and many wise men disliked any tinkering of or tampering with that strangely constructed edifice. It was thought better that friction and antagonism should exist between the several oddly shaped pieces of this army puzzle than incur any risk to the Constitution — the ark of our covenant. Our re- Before we had been many months in the Crimea it became evident that our old-fashioned and compKcated army machinery was not calculated to bear the strain of modern war. A sweeping army reform was determined formed army adminis- tration. THE ARMY 197 upon. The first step taken was the abolition of the offices of ' Secretary at War ' and of ' Master- General of the Ordnance,' and the creation of a fourth Secretaryship of State, to be known as that ' for war,' which was to embrace the duties of both. Our military collapse in the Crimea shook the Constitution seriously, and Ministers had cause to tremble before the anger of a deceived people. The cry for still further army reforms was heard on all sides, and the echo of that cry still rings in Pall Mall. When the Board of Ordnance disappeared, the command of the artillery and engineers was transferred to the General Com- manding-in-Chief, and the control of the Commissariat Department, with all its responsibilities, was shifted from the Treasury to the War Of&ce. The respective duties and responsibilities of the Secretary of State for War and the General Commanding-in- Chief, roughly blocked out at first, were clearly defined in 1870. Since then the latter has been the recognised military adviser of the former. Mr. Cardwell divided the business of the War Depart- ment into three great sections, of which the General Com- manding-in-Chief, the Surveyor-General of the Ordnance, and the Financial Secretary were to be the respective heads, all acting under the responsibility of the Secretary of State for War. When the office of Surveyor-General of the Ordnance was created we were told he was to be a military officer of great experience — a point of vast importance, if the army and navy is to be well supplied with the best guns, arms, ammunition, and other warlike material. To work these three great branches effectively, it was found neces- sary to concentrate them under one roof with the Secretary of State for War. This was done by moving the office of the Commander-in-Chief and of the army headquarter staff from the old Horse Guards to that rabbit-warren of rooms in Pall Mall known as the War Office. This concentration 1 98 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA of army administration saves an infinity of writing, and conduces largely to facilitate its business. The Duke of Wellington, when Commander-in-Chief, had authority only oyer the regular army in the United Kingdom. In 1871-72 greatly increased powers and responsibilities were con- ferred upon the General Commanding-in-Chief. He was given command of all the land forces of the Crown, regular and auxiliary, both at home and abroad. Abolition Then came the great dispute upon the proposed aboli- chase!" tion of pm'chase. The Government of the day decided to termmate for ever all the vested interests in the army which the officers claimed to own from having purchased their military rank. This course was adopted, amongst other reasons, because it was felt to be but just to the officers to do so before the introduction of that system of careful selection for promotion which had been finally re- solved upon. The real interests of the army as a profes- sion, the welfare of the soldiers, and the paramount interests of the State had over and over again suffered seriously through the incompetence of officers who had been allowed to obtain the command of regiments by purchase. Only fancy what the medical and legal professions, or that of the civil engineer and many others, would be hke if junior men, often of inferior abilities, sometimes men of well- known ignorance and stupidity, had been allowed to pur- chase high professional positions over the heads of men like Paget, Jenner, Brunei, BetheU, and hundreds of others who could be named ! However, the die was cast, and the pur- chase system, with all its absurdities and its many good points (for it had many), disappeared for ever in 1871, notwithstanding the most violent and determined opposition the measure encountered from the great bulk of those who had been and were then officers in the army, and from their numerous friends. Both Houses of Parliament, and THE ARMY 199 society in all its phases, abounded then with men who had served for a few or more years in the army. All seemed to think they were fully competent to pass judgment on every military question of organisation or administration, although in reality most of them knew little about the army, and still less about war. The man who had spent half a dozen years of pleasure in a regiment was looked upon by his friends as a military authority, and, if he had been a few months in the Crimea, he was regarded as a veteran whom it was preposterous for any civilian to gainsay. The army as a body dishked the political party to which Mr. Cardwell be- longed, and the world generally was inclined to smile at the notion of a lawyer, educated to the study of politics and of social problems, who assumed the garb of an army administrator, and, what was still worse, of an army re- former. Mr. Cardwell was not, however, a man that could be easily Mr. card- diverted from the path which he believed to be the right reforms, one. His task was difficult, but he was in earnest and de- termined. The rapid and startling successes of the German army had just set men thinkmg on military subjects, and drew pubhc attention to the crying necessity for reform in our army. I shall briefly refer to some of the most important changes he effected. Up to 1870, an inducement, in the shape of so much Bounty money. ready-money down, was held out to yomig men to enlist. The amount varied according to the ease or difficulty with which we were able to obtain recruits. These bounties, especially when war caused them to be high, gave rise to a regular class of professional deserters — or, as the Americans called them during their great war, ' bounty -jumpers.' Bounties were aboHshed by Mr. Cardwell, and yet we now obtain more recruits than ever. In 1870 the short-service system was established bylaw. 200 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA It must not be imagined that enlistment for short periods was any starthng novelty. Before this century, whenever men were required for any war, they were commonly enlisted either for two years or for as long as the war lasted. During the Crimean war, when paying large bounties for poor, undersized boys, we were glad to take them for a term of two years. From 1808 to 1829 our men were enhsted for only seven years with the infantry, after which the system of limited engagements was abolished and enlistment for life alone allowed. Large Mr. Cardwell made very important additions to the increase in field army. The Militia and Volunteers had added considerably ^^^' to the number of our infantry, whUst no corresponding increase to the number of our field-guns had been made. When Napoleon threatened to invade England in 1805, we had in all 336 horsed-guns at home. After Waterloo their number fell rapidly, until in 1819 we only had 22 horsed-guns at home. One of the results of the scare which the Duke of Wellington's letter of 1847 occasioned was the almost annual increase to our field artillery. In 1852 we had at home 120 horsed-guns, and in 1870 the number was 180, until it was raised to 336. The strength of the cavalry was also then raised from 8,762 men and 6,425 horses to 10,422 men and 7,481 horses. Our old Our antiquated staff system then came under revision. new staff. 0^ the efficiency of the staff depends very much in war the welfare of the soldiers and the success of the opera- tions. Up to 1871 our staff organisation had been very curious; no one could tell its origin or account for the eccentricity of its arrangement. In almost all the armies of the world the staff was worked as one body, made up of officers of the several grades — of generals, colonels, &c. ; every general officer, whether he commanded an army, a division, or even a brigade, had one staff officer who was THE ARMY 201 his mouthpiece, and who issued all orders and instructions in his name. He was, in fact, a sort of alter ego to the general, and with aU large bodies of troops was styled the chief of the staff. With us there was the Japanese arrange- ment of having two men to do the chief of the staff's work with every general, whether in command of an army or of a division. They were co-equal in rank and authority, and to say that a considerable jealousy always existed between them is merely to remind the reader that they were human. When both were very superior men, thanks to their good sense the army coach rumbled along, although even then the friction was serious, and heated bearings added to its troubles when at times it bumped violently over trying ruts and broken ground. These two sections into which our staff was divided were styled the Adjutant-General and the Quartermaster-General's Departments. All the best officers who had had much staff experience in war bore witness to the difficulties this dual staff entailed, and to the dangers it made possible from the constant friction it neces- sarily introduced into all military combinations. However, there it was, and the do-nothing school would listen to no proposals for any reform in the system. The Duke of WeUington, as a young man, had been his own chief of the staff, commissary-general, storekeeper, and paymaster, and had left the staff organisation very much as he had found it. ' He was the best judge on such points — why not, therefore, leave matters alone ? ' This was the argument of men without war experience on the subject, and whose temperament caused them to dislike all change. Notwith- standing this opposition, however, the co-equaUty of the two staff departments was abolished in 1871-72, and, although at the War Office we still maintain the fiction of an adjutant- and a quartermaster-general, the latter is in reality only an officer of the Adjutant-General's Department. In all our 202 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA recent wars— those in India excepted — we have had a chief of the staff, and many regret that we maintain a different staff system during peace from that with which we work when in the field, and that the regulations which exist on the subject have not as yet been fully carried out. In 1870-71 Mr. Cardwell brought home 20,000 men from our great self-governing colonies, which were en- couraged to raise local forces for their own defence. The In 1872 the localisation scheme was submitted to tion of Parliament, where it was well received and finally adopted, e army, rjij^g impossibility of obtaining the required number of recruits, and other cogent reasons, had forced the short- service system upon us, and we found it could not be worked satisfactorily under the old happy-go-lucky order of things. To go into details on this point would inconveniently lengthen this chapter. I shall content myself with a sketch of its broad outlines. The cavalry was not included in the new organisation, as it was found impossible to connect it with the Yeomanry in any useful manner. The time may come, however, when it may become advisable to localise the cavalry as has been done for the infantry with so much success. County Under the loeaKsation plan. Great Britain and Ireland mints. are divided into 69 infantry Eegimental Districts, each of which contains the depot of its territorial regiment. Each of these county regiments — as they may be styled — consists of at least two battalions of the line ; of one, two, or three of Militia ; and generally of all the Volunteer infantry be- longing to the district. To meet the regimental and other susceptibilities of the moment, and to smooth over the objections raised against the complete fusion into one regiment of two battalions of the line that had previously had no connection with one another, curiously long-sounding, and in many instances uncouth, titles were invented and THE ARMY 203 conferred upon these regiments so amalgamated. By and- by it is hoped that our infantry regiments may be allowed to shed some of the superfluous words in many of their grotesquely exaggerated titles, and that each regiment may be known simply by the name of the county or of the town to which it belongs. The country is divided on a similar principle into large Looaiiaa- artillery divisions, several counties being grouped together the artii- in each. All the Militia and Volunteer artillery belonging ^^^' to those counties form part of the Artillery Division. The Eoyal Artillery, which is now over 34,000 strong,' is still worked as one regiment ; until it be divided into battalions of a manageable size, and the field artillery entirely sepa- rated from the garrison — ^as is the case in all great armies — our artillery will be in an unsatisfactory condition. We -were first to adopt breechloading field-guus, and Breeo>- our experience with them in the China war of 1860 was so guns, satisfactory that other nations soon followed our example- Strange to say, in about ten years afterwards, our artillery authorities went back deliberately to muzzle-loaders. It is owing to this fatal mistake that our field artillery is now so far behind that of Continental nations. In no other army is the horse artillery armed with such an inferior gun as our 9-pounder muzzle-loader. We have at last adopted a 12-pounder breechloader, which is superior to any other gun of the same weight ; but England, we are told, is too poor to supply more than a small number of them this year. For some time, perhaps for years to come, we must therefore rest content with our inferior guns. The Duke of Wellington had never favoured the adoption The rifle of a rifled musket, and it was only at his death, when Lord ™"^ Hardinge became commander-in-chief, that the subject was seriously taken up. Thanks to his advanced views, 1 February 1887. 204 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA our troops landed in the Crimea armed with rifles. I think the first man in England to recognise the future of the breechloading musket was his Eoyal Highness the Prince Consort.' As usual, he was far ahead of all his contemporaries on these points. In 1866-67 we converted our Enfield rifles into breechloaders on the Snider prin- ciple as a makeshift, until a better pattern rifle of a smaller calibre could be selected. The result was the Martini-Henry musket, with which we armed the infantry in 1872-3-4. We have now fixed upon a barrel whose calibre is 0*402 inches, and have determined upon the magazine arrange- ment with which it is to be fitted. This barrel gives more satisfactory results than that of any of the rifles in use with foreign armies. The sol- It is often asked, ' What sort of a life do our soldiers life. lead now ? ' I shall endeavour to answer this question without entering into details, and to explain in general terms what the State demands from them and gives them in return. For the first three months the soldier is kept hard at work, learning his drill under the tuition of corporals and sergeants, men of his own social class, who are occasionally very rough with him, and who are at times a little inclined to bully. This is the most trying period for the young lad of eighteen or nineteen, and during which most desertions occur. Young fellows, many of them as wild as hawks, all unaccustomed to obey, find strict, punctual, and unques- tioning obedience to orders difficult and often galling. The man accustomed to a wandering and very irregular mode of life cannot easily and all at once conform to our strict barrack regulations. His spirit rebels at their restraint u2)on his liberty, and the injudiciously worded reproof of some drill-instructor perhaps excites his anger, not yet ' See his Eoyal Highness's letter to Lord Palmerston of Oct. 12, 1861, at page 403 of Sir Theodore Martin's Life, of the Prince Consort. THE ARMY 205 under control, into an insolent answer. He is brought be- fore his officer in consequence, who is often apt to forget his previous want of education, his youth, and ignorance of all discipline, and to punish him as if he were an experienced soldier fully conscious of the respect and obedience due to his superiors of all grades. This old-fashioned Spartan treatment of our young soldiers is not to be reformed in a day, nor will any amount of orders and instructions on the subject suddenly effect the desired change. We are, however, improving greatly in this respect, and, as time goes on, we have less and less of the old system of ' swingeing punishments ' inflicted by courts-martial upon recruits and young soldiers for offences against laws and regulations they had not yet clearly learnt, much less comprehended. There is now a great deal to teach a man in order to The iu- make him a useful soldier for the field; as far as possible, of the our endeavour is, little by little, to have him taught by the officers of his own troop or company. Our officers have hitherto been so accustomed to regard this work as essen- tially the duty of drill-instructors, that it is only by degrees and with caution that the new practice can be usefully introduced. Our young officers are quite prepared for the change, and most cordially accept these new, and it must be granted irksome, duties. The young soldier, when ' dismissed drill,' has to perform The all the regular routine work of the trained man — to attend ^l-^l^l_ ^ several parades a day, to mount guard every fourth, fifth, or sixth day, and to continue all those fatigue duties, such as carrying coal, sweeping and cleaning the barracks, &c., which as a recruit he disliked so much. As a rule, he is master of his own time from 3 or 3.30 p.m. to his tea-time, about 6 o'clock in the evening, after which he may do as he likes until 9 or 9.30 p.m., when he has to be in barracks and go to bed. Practically he can always obtain leave to 2o6 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA stay out until midnight, if he wants to go to a theatre, &c., but he must ask for it beforehand. Whilst in barracks he has an excellent and fairly comfortable canteen, where he can enjoy himself and have his beer with his comrades. There are usually fives-courts and skittle-alleys for him, and during fine weather he can generally join with his officers in cricket and football. There is a good recreation room where he can smoke and read books and papers with which it is supplied, and where he can have at all times tea or coffee and bread and butter. Altogether his life is a good one, and he has the enjoyment of creature comforts and of amusements which his brothers in civil life can partake of but seldom, and then very sparingly. But it must not be forgotten that codes of rules and regulations are necessarily all round even the very pleasures he has provided for him. He can never forget that he is part of a great machine whose great wheels go flying round with the utmost regularity it must be admitted, but still with a force which, if resisted, will entail serious consequences. In fact, from the moment the recruit enters the barrack gate upon enlistment, he leaves behind him all that indi- vidual freedom that is so especially dear to the Englishman. He is no longer a free agent or an independent citizen. The change is much greater than most educated people imagine, and it is so ever present to the recruit in all the little incidents of everyday life that many fly from it into desertion. We now do our utmost to smooth over the trials of this probationary period in a young soldier's life, and to treat him with every possible and lenient consideration. Tjie The infantry soldier of the line receives daily one shilling, and a ration of three-quarters of a pound of meat and one pound of bread ; for all extras in the way of tea &c. he pays himself. In the cavalry, artillery, &c. the daily pay is higher. It is believed that to increase soldier's pay. THE ARMY 207 these rates by sixpence a day would well recoup the nation in enabling us to compete on better terms in the labour market for good men with other great employers of labour. 72,249 men presented themselves for enlistment in 1885, of whom 28,933 were rejected on medical grounds, and only 39,552 were accepted, or, in other words, only 55 per cent. The number rejected in 1886 was 32,783. A higher rate of pay would induce a larger number of good recruits to come forward, and allow us to be even more particular as to their quality than we are at present. All recruits for the infantry must be 5 feet 4 inches in height, and at least 33 inches round the chest. This is a higher standard than that for the infantry of any of the great European armies, although most only take men of twenty or twenty-one years of age, whilst we take them at eighteen. We find they develop into full-grown men, far beyond our enlisting standard, by the time they attain their ' majority.' For other corps the standard increases to a height of 5 feet 11 inches. All men are now enlisted for twelve years, seven of which, as a rule, are to be spent with the colours, the remaining five as civilians in the Army Eeserve. The colour service in the German army is nominally three, but in reality seldom more than two and a half years. Our army reformers ask eagerly why it is that British officers cannot convert the recruit into a trained soldier as quickly as the German officer. The British officer's answer is that he can do so whenever he is allowed to try. Indeed, with the Foot Guards the engagement now is, three years with the colours and nine in the reserve— a recent reform we were forced to adopt to obtain big men of the required standard. For some years previously the Guards had been lamentably below establishment, but under this new rule they filled quickly, so popular is short service with the classes from which we obtain recruits. The Guards only serve abroad in 208 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA Good- conduct pay and deferred pay. Pension. time of war or of threatened hostilities, so in their case the short term of colour service presents no difficulties ; but for regiments of which one battalion is always on foreign service many impediments stand in .the way. The problem now before the military authorities is to devise some workable and economical plan for overcoming those difficulties. Every soldier can begin to draw good-conduct pay when he has been two years in the army. For every year he serves, he earns, in addition to his ordinary pay, the sum of 3Z., which is given to him in a lump sum (21L) at the end of his seven years' colour-service, when he is transferred to the Army Eeserve. This 21L, in addition to what he may have accumulated in his regimental savings bank, is meant to give him a start in civil life. Whilst in the First-class Army Eeserve his pay is Qd. a day. Upon the expiration of his twelve years' term of engagement, he can re-engage in the supplemental reserve for four years more, receiving M. a day during that time, in return for the liability he accepts of returning to his regiment in the event of war. At the end of seven years' colour-service, if he does not wish to enter the Army Eeserve, he can serve on to complete his full twelve years' army engagement, and will receive on discharge a lump sum down of 86L Every good soldier who wishes to remain in the army is allowed to serve on for a total service of twenty-one years ; when discharged as a private, at the end of that time, he receives a lump sum down of 36L and a pension for life of Is. a day. If a sergeant when discharged, he receives 72Z. down, and a pension of from 2s. 3i. to 2s. 9d. a day for life ; and if a sergeant-major, or any other grade of warrant ofScer when discharged, his pension for life is 4s. &d. a day. I am not aware of any other trade or calling where the man who can neither read nor write can secure such a j^rovision for his old age, nor where the man of very humble education can THE ARMY 209 return into civil life at forty years of age so well off as our non-commissioned officer can do now. Many admirable non-commissioned officers could neither read nor write when they enlisted. They were taught to do so, and well grounded in elementary education in our regimental schools. No matter, therefore, how ignorant a young fellow may be when he enlists, if he is steady, intelligent, and determined to get on in life, he has a career in the army assured to him he can find nowhere else. The soldier pays from '2\d,. to 3fZ. a day for groceries, £'ood. vegetables, milk, and some extra bread, which, added to his free rations of bread and mea,t, gives him three good meals a day. If he wishes for luxuries, he can obtain in his regimental canteen, for a penny or two, butter, cheese, eggs or baeon, and a pint of beer for his dinner, or coffee and bread and butter in his recreation-room for supper before going to bed. All the profits made in the canteen — they are kept down as low as possible — go back to the soldier in some form or other. ' I remember,' said an old general offi- cer the other day, ' when the men had only one regular meal a day, and when the only breakfa.st they took before morn- ing stables was a large glass of rum.' How different from the soldier of to-day ! The private soldier who buys his quart of beer daily, after paying for his groceries, &c., has always from 2s. to 2s. 6d. a week for his pocket-money. He has nothing to pay for lodging, coals, or candles. Where is the labourer or the ordinary mechanic who is as well off? Until 1869 there was always a very large number of im- pri son- soldiers in prison for ordinary drunkenness. A system of meut and fines instead of imprisonment for this national failing was then instituted, and has proved a complete success. When the pay of the soldier is raised, it is hoped we may be able to extend the system of money fines to other minor offences VOL. I. P fines. THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA Commis- sions from ttLe ranks. for which imprisonment is now often inflicted. The services of a soldier when in prison are lost to the State, and we are obliged to maintain warders and gaolers to look after him. Besides this, when fed upon prison diet he loses that physical strength which is essential to his usefulness. Our great aim is to reduce the number of men in prison as far as possible, so as to have the more of efficient ' duty-men.' The improved conduct of our men is a great help in this respect. In 1838, the proportioia of courts-martial in the cavalry and infantry ' was 103 per 1,000 men, whereas in 1884 that proportion was only 73 per 1,000. Statistics will not, however, afford the reader anything like a full estimate of the real improvement that has taken place in the conduct and general demeanour of our soldiers. It is only those who have lived in their midst in the field, under the old regime and lately, who can fully realise how great has l)een the change for the better. A far larger proportion of well-to-do and educated men enlist now than formerly. Many join now in the hope of obtaining commissions. In 1885, commissions were given to twenty-three sergeants, and in If 85-86 that number has risen to forty-two. This is besides 160 who in the last five years have been commissioned as quartermasters. A colonel stated the other day that he had in his regiment some thirty sons of well-to-do gentlemen as privates, corporals, &c., and that they had done much to raise the tone of the men in barracks. We must now learn to appeal n ore and more to the soldier's honour, loyalty, love of country, and pride of race than was the practice formerly. The general who knows how to strike the true chord in doing this will find the British soldier of to-day far superior in every way to the poor ignorant fellow whom we flogged ' I cannot find in any published returns for the year 1838 what this proportion was for the whole army. THE ARMY 211 into obedience in the Peninsula and on the heights before Sebastopol. When Mr. Cardwell became Secretary of State for War The new in December 1868, he entered upon office determined to army make the army popular with the classes from which we °\l^^^^^' obtained recruits. It was his resolve also to make the officers feel they belonged to a great profession, in which, as in all others, men could secure advancement only by dUigent study, hard work, zeal, and well-grounded know- ledge of their duties. Henceforward there was to be no royal road to promotion. The war in 1866 between Austria and Prussia had turned public attention to army matters ; men asked how it was that the Prussian soldier, who only remained mth the colours about two and a half years, could be so efficient for all war purposes. Only a few years before. Lord Clyde had closely inspected the Prussian army, and had reported it to be a first-rate militia ! Bred up to think that only men who spent all their lives in the ranks could claim to be regarded as soldiers, he could not see any excellence in an army com- posed of men who had been only two years in the ranks. The idea that a standing army during peace should be more a manufactory for the making of soldiers than a receptacle for veterans, or an aggregation of perfectly trained fighting-men, had not yet taken hold of the military mind in England. The commonly accepted idea with us was that a standing army should be maintained so that, if we went to war, it should be the, force to take the field — that we should trust to luck, or to the plans of the moment, to keep its ranks full whilst hostilities lasted. It was the old story — the course which we followed under IMarlborough and Wellington ought certainly to suffice for all time. In our Eussian war of 1854-56 we found how cruelly erroneous was this faith. We were taught a sad lesson when our p 2 212 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA little army died away before Sebastopol, and we had no reserves behind it to replace casualties, and only untrained boys instead to send out to it — youths to whom Lord Eaglan objected as useless for all fighting purposes. With our customary indifference to all military organisation, peace soon obliterated any remembrance of the lessons we had then been taught, but had not learnt. The public generally contented itself with the conclusion that all our misfortunes in the Crimea were directly owing to the incompetency of the generals in command. It was easy and pleasant thus to wash out the remembrance of all disagreeable responsi- bility as regarded the future, and thus to avoid the trouble and expense of measures designed to prevent the recurrence of any similar misfortunes in the future. An Army The Franco-German war taught the absolute necessity Heserve. « , . « for the creation of a trustworthy Army Eeserve of well- trained men, in the full vigour of their manhood. When the subject was carefully studied in all its bearings upon our army, it was very evident we could only obtain such a reserve by the adoption of a system of short colour-service, and that such a system would certainly tend to make the army more popular with the classes from which it is recruited. That the result has been as was expected is shown by the fact that only a small proportion of privates re-engage to serve on for pension. The new system has practically, almost entirely, rid the army of women married without leave. If it had conferred no other benefit upon the army or the State, this fact of itself should make it valued by every officer who is proud of his profession and who is jealous of the soldier's reputation. There are many reasons why it is not desirable to in- crease the inducements to tempt men to re-engage to com- plete twenty-one years' colour-service. It is an undoubted fact that after a private has been about twelve to fifteen THE ARMY 213 years in the ranks, it does not pay the State in any way to retain his services. There are doubtless many exceptions, but, as a rule, the private soldier after the first few years of his second engagement is of little use for active work in the field. It is good policy, therefore, to encourage him to settle down in civil life after he has been seven years with the colours ; for at the end of another five years, when he would have finished his twelve years' army engagement, he will have found his place and means of liveUhood in the civil world. The lump sum of 21Z. that he receives when he has finished his seven years' colour-service, and the 6rf. a day he receives for those five j-ears of Army Ee- serve service, are very great helps to him in enabling him to settle down into some profitable employment for the rest of his days. In a country like England we shall always have a large roving population, many of whom try the army as they try other means of livelihood. It is to this class our deserters mostly belong, and also those men of the Army Eeserve who wander about from town to town. You meet a tramp on his travels. He is badly clothed, perhaps footsore. He pulls out his parchment certificate to show you he belongs to the Army Eeserve. He does not really want settled employment, and would not keep it if it were promised for him ; but, to excite your pity, he assures you it is because he is liable to military service that he cannot obtain work. We are very prone to generalise from individual cases that come under our own direct cognisance, and to accept them as 'the rule,' and not the exception. No matter what you do, we shall always have dozens of these men tramping over England. You will find them on the racecourse in summer, in the hop gardens of Kent and Hampshire in autumn, and in the manufacturing towns in winter, and sometimes those who are ill or too lazy to work may be seen in the poorhouses during bad, cold weather. sation. 214 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA The well-behaved, decent, and steady reserve soldiers, who are the great majority of the whole reserve, have little difficulty in finding employment. Our The organisation of our army is based on the principle organi- that at least one-half of each arm should always be at home. As foreign complications often oblige us to send extra battalions abroad, it is laid down very clearly, in theory, what steps should be taken whenever this balance is seriously disturbed. Our occupation of Egypt has seriously disturbed the balance between the infantry at home and on foreign service, but the measures devised to meet such a contingency have not been put in force, and consequently our whole army machinery is seriously strained and somewhat out of working gear. Under our system of voluntary enlistment, we always have been, and always shall be, obliged to accept as recruits youths of eighteen and nineteen years of age. Before they are fit to stand a tropical sun they require to be seasoned and matured at home, or in some good and congenial climate, for about two years. The army at home has to manufacture soldiers for the army abroad, and its manufacturing power is in direct ratio to the strength at which that home army is main- tained. When its establishment is allowed to run down beyond the number of each arm abroad, the foreign re- quirements exceed our manufacturing power. We cannot turn out a sufficient number of trained soldiers, and are consequently obliged to fill up the gaps in the army abroad with immature lads, who have neither the training nor the physique required for a soldier. I believe that much of the recent mortality at Assouan is to be thus accounted for. It is cruel, it is foolish to send lads of eighteen or nineteen to such a trying climate. On January 1, 1886, we had 72,777 infantry of the line abroad, whilst the number at home was only 58,834. The constant number of our in- THE ARMY 215 fantry recruits at home may be taken at about 10,000 men, and until the strength of the infantry of the hne at home exceeds its strength abroad by that amount, we shall never be able to supply the battalions on foreign service with effective soldiers. The total army establishment for this year 1886-87 is Present 201,955 men. To reinforce it in the event of war we have taSfsh-" 4(5,800 men of the First-class Army Reserve, than whom ™®'^'- no finer soldiers exist in the world. We have also 31,000 very fairly drilled men of the Militia Eeserve, who in the event of war are bound to join the regular battalions of the territorial regiment to which their own Militia battalions belong. This recent addition of 77,780 men to our fighting army is far more imjDortant than the mere figures convey, or would appear to indicate, for this reason. If from the 201,000 men of which the standing army consists this year, all the garrisons we should require in war both at home and abroad be deducted, we could only just furnish about 60,000 men for active service in the field abroad. Let us estimate the value of these 77,780 men by recalling to mind what their value would have been to the nation in the winter of 1854. At first it was predicted by those who clung affection- ately to old ideas, that the Army Eeserve would never be forthcoming when wanted. This was tested, at first for the sake of experiment, and subsequently because we wanted men for one of our little wars ; the result was most satis- factory. One of the results of the publication of the Duke of ThR Wehington's letter in 1848, was the Militia Bill of 1852. ^'""''• The strength of the Militia force was then fixed at 120,000 men, to be raised by voluntary enlistment. In 1859 it ceased by law to be local, and became available for ser- vice everywhere in Great Britain and Ireland. Militiamen 21 6 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA were allowed to enlist in the line, and under certain regu- lations Militia regiments might serve abroad. During the Crimean war many of them were quartered in the Mediter- ranean garrisons. The Act of 1869 enabled the Crown to place the Militia under the generals in command of districts, and two years later the powers of the lords-lieutenant over the Militia were transferred to the Sovereign. In other words, all the land forces were placed directly under the general commanding-in-chief. These important measures added materially to the efficiency of the Militia and Volun- teer forces. Since then both have been, as already men- tioned, incorporated in the territorial regiments formed in almost every county. Every year all the battalions in each regiment become more and more closely united in sympathy and regimental spirit ; with a little more encouragement from the military authorities, complete union and a perfect community of feeling would soon follow. Each year an in- creasing number of militiamen enlist in the line battalions of their regiment. In 1885 the number was 14,513, and of the Volunteers 1,961 men also enlisted in the army. The Militia now is really a serviceable force ; this year about 105,000 men turned out for their annual training. In the event of war, it would be used as garrisons for our home and foreign stations, for duty at the base of opera- tions and along the line of communications. After three months" embodiment it would be fit for more active work. It is surprising to see how well Militia battalions can drill at the end of their annual training. Shooting is their weak point, and that is due to the want of rifle ranges, which the country is too poor to provide. Instead of the old decrepid staff, the Militia is now provided with young adjutants who are changed every five years, who, together with all the staff-sergeants, come from the line battalions of their respective regiments. The Yeomanry also obtain THE ARMY 217 their adjutants and instructors from the army, new men being appointed every five years. The Yeomanry is now a very useful force, capable of rendering excellent service should the country be invaded, or should we at any time require the use of mounted troops when all our available cavalry had been sent abroad. During the Queen's reign some of our great colonies The have raised large bodies of militia and volunteers. These ^rors.'^^ are destined to play an important part in the defence of our empire in the event of a war with any naval power. In these days of steam, fleets can only keep the sea to any useful purpose by the aid of well-defended coaling stations. In many instances large sums are being expended by the colonies in which these coaling stations exist, in the erection of batteries and other military works intended for their defence. The local forces will assist largely in furnishing them with garrisons. Lately, when it was thought we wanted help, New South Wales sent at its own cost a fine battery of field artillery and a splendid battalion of infantry to take part in our Soudan war. Other colonies also offered contingents, a proof that whenever the mother country requires help, she can always depend upon the loyalty of her children to render it. This event inaugurated a new condition of national exist- ence for England. It was an enlargement of the base — a deeper sinkmg of the foundations on which our empire rests — the first serious step towards the binding together of the colonies and the mother country into one great and powerful State. This event reminded us that we had at hand all the materials required to build up an empire far greater than any ever known or dreamt of before. We only want the creative genius of a statesman-architect to give those materials form and shape. Would that we possessed either a Bismarck or a Pitt as our master-mason ! 2l8 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA Tiie The present German army has had in many ways much army. influence upon ours. A comparison between them was forced upon us by the events of 1870, and that comparison pressed many reforms upon us. It is only by progress, by frequent reforms, that any army can be kept on a level with that steady advance in the arts and sciences always going on around us. The army that is over-slow in the adoption of . new ideas can never be a really good one ; when tested, it will tumble to pieces as the Prussian army did at Jena, as ours did at Sebastopol, as the Austrian army did in 1866, and that of France in 1870. The army that stands still, and will not reform itself with the times, is a dangerous and most expensive plaything. Since the Crimean war it has been our practice to hold up some foreign army as the pattern of military excellence. When any new idea is started it is pooh-poohed unless it finds favour in the army most admired at the moment. This is certainly a policy well calculated to prevent all change, no matter how much it may be needed. For years past many have striven in vain to introduce machine-guns into our army ; they were always met with the argument, ' The Germans don't think anything of them.' History tells us of the great and sweeping reforms effected at several epochs in the German army, and there can be no doubt that considerable changes will be made in it when its commander-in-chief, the revered Emperor- King, now weighed down with years and honours, leaves this world. A German officer lately said : ' We have not the heart to tell him that the tactics in which he has been educated and still believes are obsolete ; so no changes will be made as long as he is spared to us.' It is no sound argument, however, that because the Germans make no changes we should make none. Our army is very small, too small for our national require- THE ARMY 219 ments, so we should strain every nerve to make up for want of numbers by extra efficiency. Let us select the best arms for it, and take a lesson from the German officers in teach- ing our men how to use them. Do not let us always lag behind other armies, waiting for their opinions on all military subjects ; always ready to copy in a servile way the armament, tactics, &c. of any army that has been most recently successful ; never striving to develop new ideas of our own. We have now plenty of most excellent young officers, who think seriously on all army matters, and who thoroughly study the science of their profession. They are quite capable of giving us new ideas, of lifting us from the old worn-out gi-ooves in which we still blunder aimlessly along. No army has officers of such varied experience in all parts of the world as ours ; they are to be found in the remotest regions of the earth, restlessly bent on ' sport.' They hunt lions in Equatorial Africa, tigers in Bengal, elephants in Ceylon, and other big game in the snows of Thibet ; they scramble up glaciers in Switzerland, ride straight across country in England, fly over the Channel in balloons, spend their leisure hours at cricket, football, polo, and other manly games. This training gives them a self- reliance that no foreign military schools can ever attempt to rival. These men, being now well educated as officers, are calculated to make our army, so far as it goes, second to none in the world. These men will push our army forward along the path of intelligent progress, unless they should be, unfortunately, held back by old-fashioned pre- judices and obsolete notions of what soldiers and an army should look like on parade. It is to them we must look for new ideas. Hitherto we have seemingly striven to force war, as it were, to conform to our theatrical ideas of what it is like, and to our theatrical mode of imitating it at peace manoeuvres. In future we must reverse this process, and, THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA having ascertained what war is in reality, we must strive to organise, clothe, equip, and train our men in peace for that reality and for the work soldiers have actually to do in war. A study of the following table will best enable the reader to compare the present strength of the military^ forces of the Crown with what it was at her Majesty's accession, and with what it was in 1870, before the exist- ing army organisation was introduced. Officers uot included 1837 1870 1886 Eegular Army : At home Abroad Eeserve for the Eegular Army : First-class Army Eeserve . Second „ „ . . Militia Eeserve .... Yeomanry Mlitia Volunteers . . . ... Totals (round numbers) . 46,300 55,200 I non- f existent 1,8000 1 non- ( r existent 1 84,500 85,500 2,100 18,o00 26,400 14,000 77,800 193,800 101,700 102,200 46,700 > 6,800 31,000 10,900 98,300 215,000 119,500 602,600 611,600 Our system of Parliamentary government throws many difficulties in the way of military efficiency. For instance, if our army is to be as perfect as its small numbers permit, all promotion in the higher ranks should be, as far as possible, by selection. But hitherto, whenever this system has been followed, the friends of the superseded officer generally endeavour to represent the matter in Parliament as a gross job. The newspapers refer to it in big type as ' An Army Scandal,' and thus many are led to conscien- tiously believe that a glaring injustice has been done some most deserving officer. Now and then some thoroughly useless or disreputable fellow obtains a commission. He will not do, or even try to do, the nation's work for which he ' On February 1, 1887, its numbers were 46,701. THE ARMY 221 is paid ; after long forbearance on the part of all with whom he is brought in contact, he is at last compelled to retire. Strange to say, such a man often finds stout supporters both in Parliament and in the press. Then again, at times, we see an apparent effort made in Parliament to control and direct the course of discipline, which, if conceded, would destroy the efficiency of the army. Ministers, anxious to please, are at times apt to answer questions on matters of discipline which cannot be discussed in public without injury to the best interests of the army and of the State. The more all such matters can be withdrawn from the arena of politics the better for the country. To allow questions of promotion to depend in any way on party influence would soon destroy all that is best in our army. It is a great misfortune that no attempt has ever been "Why made to specify and to fix definitely, with the authority of an army ? Parliament, the national objects for which our army is required. If this were done. Parliament could easily determine what the normal strength of the army should be in peace. And yet it is a very simple matter to state specifically the nature and extent of our military require- ments at home and abroad, both in peace and in war. In the absence of all authoritative information on this most important point, our army administrators have to work in ignorance of what the nation wants or wishes to be done. Money is, consequently, often squandered on objects which, although perhaps in themselves very desirable, are not immediately essential to the efficiency of the indispensably necessary military establishments. We work in a hap- hazard fashion, having no well-understood aim or military poHcy before us. It is to be hoped that the subject may soon be inquired into by a Koyal Commission of both Houses of Parliament, and composed of all poUtical parties. Experts could give THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA Eoyal Com- mission on our military require- ments. the Commission their views and opinions on this miHtary problem. It is known exactly what troops are required both in peace and war, for India, our colonies, coaling stations, home fortresses, &c. In the same way, evidence can be taken as to the number of trained soldiers we have to send abroad annually to fill the gaps in our foreign garrisons occasioned by death, invaliding, discharges, &c. For every thousand men so required we know what should be the strength of the home army, in which they must be trained and from which they must be supplied. On all such points answers could be easily given by our head- quarter staff ; but it is not for them to say whether the nation expects to have either one, two, or three army corps always ready for immediate mobilisation. The nation through its Parliament must settle that important question, and it is believed this could be most easily effected by means of the Eoyal Commission I have proposed. There is a sort of vague superstition, that to have two army corps — about 65,000 men — always r^ady for rapid mobilisation is a fixed principle with us. No such rule has ever been laid down or acted upon, and until the nation through its Parliament settles this point, we .shall continue year after year to spend the people's money striving to accomplish we know not what, we know not why. The military expert would have no difficulty in con- vincing a Eoyal Commission that the defence of these kingdoms could not be insured with less than two army corps of regular troops in addition to the existing auxiliary forces. No sane general would undertake their defence with a smaller nucleus of perfectly trained regular soldiers. It is believed that Parliament and the people would readily consent to fix the peace establishment of the army at the figure recommended by such a Eoyal Commission, as the minimum that would supply the nation with all the THE ARMY 223 regular troops deemed essential for its wants and interests. The establishments so fixed could be revised by a similar commission every ten or twelve years. This would help greatly to remove this vital question from the contentions of party. We should then not only know specifically what the nation wanted, but this fixity of establishment, would enable us during peace to provide more effectually for war requirements. It is impossible to do this as long as the numbers to be maintained are annually determined not in accordance with the evident military requirements of the empu-e, but with the momentary political and financial exi- gencies of the party then in office. Each succeeding Adminis- tration plumes itself upon announcing that for the coming year they will ask Parliament for a thousand or two fewer men than were voted the preceding session. The report of this Eoj'al Commission would enable the people to understand why it is that an army is maintained, and what is expected from it both in peace and war. It is high time the nation was told the whole truth on this great subject, so vital to our very existence as an independent people, and it is difficult to see any reasonable objection to this plan for doing so. The ear is sick of hearing that we are a business people ; The un- 1)1.15111683- as private bankers and as stockbrokers we may be so, but like cha- in all matters of Government administration, and especially our*miif- in our Treasury management, we are exactly the reverse. *^^7 Surely if we were businesslike in our national affairs we should, like every commercial firm, from the Bank of England to the little retail grocer round the corner, ' take stock ' annually. With us such a process would embrace a careful inquiry into our naval and military assets and liabilities. Hitherto no Government has ever had the honest courage to do this. Both political parties know that the pubhcation of any such ' stocktaking ' would occasion 224 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA a demand from the people that could not be resisted, to insure the safety of our dockyards and coaling stations. Without them our fleets could not keep the seas, and on our fleet depends the safety of our commerce, on which again depends our food supply. Over and over again our best soldiers and sailors have told our rulers this, and stated what was required. The answer has always been, that the cost could not be paid for out of the revenue, and that the ' Treasury ' objected on principle to a loan ! God help us ; our political rulers have not the courage to do so. The day will surely come when England, in dire need of soldiers, will realise too late that an army cannot be im- provised in a moment or organised in a week. When that day comes, an angry, because a deluded, people will call for vengeance on those who lacked the honest courage to take them into confidence — who dared not tell them the whole truth as to our want of military organisation, our utter un- preparedness for war. At any rate, it is essential to make it known that soldiers have no secrets on this subject which they wish kept from the people. On the contrary, they beg, in what they believe to be the great interests of the nation, for a public and searching inquiry into it. At present the nation is left in ignorance of what its military requirements are, and is consequently indifferent to them ; nor is the subject one that would politically ' pay ' any party in the State to adopt. It is for the people to wake up from their lethargic indifference and take the matter up for themselves ; it is for their Parliament, after careful investigation, to pronounce authoritatively what are the aims, objects, and duties for which a British army is necessary in the widely extended interests of the empire, and to fix the minimum strength at which it can be safely kept in peace. Professional soldiers will then be able to advise how that army should be organised so as to be always THE ARMY 225 ready for expansion to war strength when required. If the necessary means are furnished, the nation may depend upon having all it wants. If, however, all this be neglected, and the army fails the nation when the emergency arises, then, Not ours the folly or the sin Of golden chances spurned. The people will have themselves alone to blame ; on their heads be the consequences. They would not take the trouble to define the military requirements of their country, and withheld the supplies which military efficiency demanded ; they left us soldiers in uncertainty as to the extent of the fortifications deemed essential for the protec- tion of the empire, and refused us straw for the bricks requu-ed for their construction. WOLSELEY. VOL. I. 226 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA NOTE ON THE ORDNANCE SURVEY. The Cadastral, or, to use the more familiar name, the Ordnance Survey of the United Kingdom, is one of the most important and complete works of its kind that has ever been undertaken. At the memorable Paris Exhibition of 1867 French experts classed the survey as ' a work without precedent,' and one that ought ' to serve as a model for all civilised countries.' The various processes by which the English maps are produced have been largely adopted not only by India and the colonies, but by many foreign states ; and no higher testimony to the scientific reputation of the survey could be found than the readiness with which all the countries of the world entrusted to one of its most distinguished officers. Colonel A. E. Clarke, C.B., F.E.S., E.E., the comparison of their national standards of length. The survey had its origin in the military necessities of the army of occupation which was quartered in the Highlands of Scotland during the troubled period that followed Culloden. Eoads had to be made for the passage of troops and supplies ; and, to facilitate their construction. General Watson, an engineer officer then serving as deputy quartermaster-general on the staff of the Duke of Cumberland, conceived the idea of making a map of the Highlands. In this work he was assisted by William Eoy, an engineer officer of high scientific attainments, who measured the first base line on Hounslow Heath, and gave the national survey that military character which it has ever since retained. The history of the survey lies beyond the scope of the present memoir, which deals only with its progress and develop- ment during her Majesty's reign. When that reign commenced the genius of Drummond had given the lime-light and the heliostat to the world ; Colby and Drummond had designed and perfected the beautiful apparatus, for making exact measurements, known as Colby's compensation bars ; the operations connected with the great triangulation were in progress ; Ireland was being surveyed on a scale of six inches to one mile ; and the Ordnance Survey ha,d taken its place as one of the great scientific works of the NOTE ON THE ORDNANCE SURVEY 227 cotintry. England, however, had at that time nothing better than an unfinished survey on a scale of one inch to a mile ; and Scotland was in even worse plight. In 1842 the Ordnance Survey of Ireland, one of the most valuable acts of practical government that has ever been carried out in Ireland, was completed. Among the Engineer officers employed upon it were Colby, Drummond, Larcom, Dawson, Portlook, James, and YoUand. These men, all remarkable for their active intellects and high scientific attainments, were not content with the simple performance of their survey duties, onerous though those duties were : they conceived the bold idea of obtaining information of every description that could be collected in connection vsdth the survey. This scheme, only partially carried out, was abandoned on the refusal of the Government of the day to sanction the publication of a work of such magnitude ; but more than 200 manuscript quarto and many smaller volumes, with several hundred plans, tracings, and drawings, together forming a treasure of located and arranged antiquarian information, were deposited in the Eoyal Irish Academy, and these, with many statistical memoirs, remain as a testimony to the earnestness and completeness with which the work was carried out. The maps of the Irish Survey are used in the valuation of land for all local assessments and taxes, and for private purposes ; the income tax is levied by them, the census statistics are based upon them, and they are in almost universal use in the management of estates. The maps are also used in all transactions affectmg land under the various Acts that have been passed to facihtate the sale and transfer of land in Ireland ; and it may be said that, as the great Down Survey was made the instrument for conveying to the adventurers and soldiers of Cromwell's army lands taken from the old Celtic owners, so the Ordnance Survey of Queen Victoria's reign is sometimes the instrument for conveying to the descendants of those owners the lands to which they had clung as tenants, and which they have now been enabled to purchase by recent Land Acts. The survey of Ireland is at present being revised and corrected, but, unfortu- nately, only on a scale of six inches to one mile. The sister isle is now almost the only civiHsed country in Europe which has no cadastral survey on a scale sufficiently large for the sale and transfer of small parcels of land, and it is to be hoped that the Q 2 228 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA Jubilee year may see lier receive the same favourable treatment in regard to surveys as England and Scotland. The survey of Ireland having been completed, that of Great Britain was resumed ; the triangulation of Scotland was con- tinued ; the old base line on Salisbury Plain, originally measured in 1794, was remeasured in 1849 with Colby's compensation bars ; and in 1852 the great triangulation of the United Kingdom, which had occupied nearly seventy years, was brought to a suc- cessful conclusion. The trigonometrical operations involved an amount of privation and exposure which can hardly be appre- ciated by those who did not take part in them. Toilsome marches each day whilst station-hunting in the Highlands of Scotland, and in the wilder districts of Ireland ; weary watchings, some- times for weeks, on the top of a high steeple or lofty momitain, waiting for the signal flash from a far-distant station ; complete isolation for months in a solitary camp on some rugged peak ; snowstorms and furious gales, during which the tents were blown dovm and the safety of the great instruments endangered — such were some of the experiences of officers and men. The rough life was not, however, without its charms. No one can read Drummond's graphic letters to his mother without fe,eling how much there was of interest, adventure, and romance in the work, and how well calculated it was to bring out the best qualities of the men employed upon it. The minute and watch- ful care bestowed upon the measurement of the bases and of the angles of the triangulation were well rewarded. When five hundred feet of the Irish base were remeasured in presence of Sir John Herschel and Mr. Babbage, the difference between the old and the new measures was only one-third of the finest dot that could be made with the point of a needle ; and when the base on Salisbury Plain was computed from the Lough Foyle base, through a network of triangles covering an intervening space of three hundred and fifty miles, the computed length was found to differ from the measured length, of nearly seven miles, by less than five inches, a result which has well been called a genuine triumph of geodesy. From the data afforded by the triangulation, and observations for latitude at thirty-two trigonometrical points, Colonel Clarke was able to find the length of an arc of the meridian, extending from the Shetlands to the Isle of Wight. He then determined NOTE ON THE ORDNANCE SURVEY ii() the figure of the earth which would best correspond with the surface of Great Britain ; and, by combining with the Enghsh arc the best of those measured in other parts of the world, he determined the figure of the earth which most nearly represented all the measurements. In 1860 a proposal was made to connect the triangulations of France, Belgium, Prussia, and Russia with our own, for the purpose of ascertaining the length of an arc of the fifty-second parallel of latitude, extending from Valentia, on the west of Ireland, to Oursk on the river Ural ; and in 1861 the task of connecting the trigonometrical points on our south-eastern coast with those on the opposite side of the Channel was com- menced. Observations were taken from four English and seven French and Belgian stations ; and the whole operation was done independently, in duplicate, by observers from England and France. A special feature of this work was the construction of lofty scaffolds for the instruments, and in this service the Sappers showed great skill and ingenuity, re-erecting in mid- winter a French scaffold, at Harlettes, which had been blown down. One of the instruments used by the English observers was the great three-foot theodolite, made by Eamsden in 1787, which had been in constant use for seventy-five years on our highest mountains and on the pinnacles of our loftiest churches. The connection of the triangulation was followed by a com- parison of the standards of length of our own and other countries. The comparison, a work requiring rare scientific care and skill and unbounded patience, was carried out at Southampton ; and numerous observations of a most delicate kind were made by means of special apparatus, and in a special building, both de- signed by Colonel Clarke. The results obtained led to a further correction in Colonel Clarke's determination of the figure of the earth. The importance of these two great works, the connection of the national triangulations and the comparison of the natural standards of length, can scarcely be exaggerated. In 1854 observations were made to investigate the amount of the deflection of the plumb-line at Arthur's Seat, near Edinburgh, and data obtained for ascertaining the earth's mean specific gravity. At a later period the amount of deflection at Cowhythe in Banffshire and at Blackdown in Dorset was also ascertained. As the great triangulation advanced, a network of lines of princi- pal levels, generally following the main roads, was extended over 230 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA the kingdom, and permanent records left in the shape of bench marks, /n , on many a milestone. The lines of the initial leveUing were executed with great minuteness and care ; and tidal observations were made in connection with them at a number of places on the coast of Great Britain. Prom these last observations was obtained the mean level of the sea for Great Britain ; but it must be remarked that the heights on the Ordnance Survey maps of England are given in feet above the mean tide level at Liverpool, which is 7"4;7 inches below the mean level of the sea. Having given a brief outhne of the more purely scientific work of the Ordnance Survey, we must turn to other details con- nected with the scale and preparation of the maps. The maps of Ireland having proved to be of such great value to the public, for numerous important purposes not originally contemplated, the Treasury issued a Minute in 1840 directing the six northern counties of England and the whole of Scotland to be surveyed and engraved on a scale of six inches to a mile. That scale, however, proved to be too small, and in 1854 and 1855 the Treasury issued Minutes directing the survey to be made on the cadastral scales now in use. In 1837 Dawson first proposed that a cadastral survey should be made of the United Kingdom, similar to that of France ; and, by a curious coincidence, the field work of the Cadastre will be completed in 1887. By June next the ubiquitous sapper and the well-trained civilian surveyors will have dragged their chains through every county, parish, village, and property, from the Shetlands to the Isle of Wight, and from Norfolk to Valentia Island. On August 11, 1854, Lieutenant-Colonel (afterwards Sir) Henry James was appointed director of the survey, and on the same day the Treasury Minute authorising a cadastral survey was placed in his hands. To the late Sir Henry James, more than to any one man, the country is indebted for the great work which is now so near completion. Before the Parliamentary Committees on the survey, no less than in the great battle of the scales, his ability, his mastery of details, his persistency, his tact, and his shrewd common sense were conspicuous. In the face of hostile votes in the House of Commons, of fluctuating estimates, and contradictory orders, he never desponded, but manfully main- tained the true policy of executing the national survey thoroughly NOTE ON THE ORDNANCE SURVEY 231 and once for all. The scales finally adopted for the survey, and upon which the maps are now being published, are : (1) the town map, -5-^ or 10'56 feet to a mile, on which one inch repre- sents 500 inches as measured on the ground; (2) the 25-inch, or parish map, -j-jVtr. which is the true cadastral survey, agreeing as regards scale with the recommendations of the Brussels Con- ference of 1853 : on this scale the area of every parcel of land is computed and published, either separately or on the plan itself, and a square inch represents very nearly an acre ; (3) the county map, six inches to a mile, ^siicn on which the form of the ground is shown by contour lines at regular vertical intervals ; and (4) the general, or military map of the country, one inch to a mile, "B"T!-3"inr> which is published in three editions — one showing only the rivers, roads, railways, canals, &c. ; another representing the undulations of the ground by contour hues ; and a third with the hills shown in a pictorial manner, by vertical lines or hachures. We must now glance at the processes by which the maps are produced, and the first step is the very important one of ascertaining the boundaries of the civil divisions of the country — coimties, parishes, &c. This is the special care of a Boundary OiBce in London, which has in many ways rendered invaluable services to the State ; and it may be remarked that no private boundaries are shown as such on the plans. The original survey and manuscript plan are made on the -j-jinr scale ; the great tri- angulation is broken up into secondary triangulation, and so on, until triangles of a convenient size for measurement are obtained. Each of these smaller triangles is allotted to a surveyor, who measures the sides, without knowing their computed lengths, and aU the detail contained in the triangle. A second person lays down the lines on the plan, and if the measured lengths do not agree, within certain Umits, with the computed ones, the lines are sent back to the surveyor ; a third person plots the detail on the plan ; a fourth makes a tracing of the detail, which is given to a fifth person to examine on the ground ; a sixth person draws the fair plan ; a seventh examines the draughtsman's work ; and an eighth computes the area of each inclosure on the plan. In this manner eight persons, who form mutual checks upon each other, are employed on the production of one plan ; and all errors of survey in a triangle are strictly confined to that triangle. The areas are computed with the ' computing scale ' — a simple con- 232 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA trivance, invented by one of the staff of the department — and none but horizontal measurements and liorizontal areas are given. Finally, all the documents are sent to Southampton, where they undergo a thorough examination. After the manuscript -^^ and a s'u a plans have been examined they are traced in transfer ink on transfer paper, and the traces are laid down on zinc ; copies are then printed for sale. By a recent improvement, however, plans which would be costly to trace are photozincographed their full size of 88-016 inches by 25-344 inches. The six-inch maps are produced by two processes — engraving and photozinco- graphy ; for the first, the -g-gVu- plans are reduced by photography, traced and laid down on copper for engraving ; for the second, the manuscript plans are specially prepared, so that when the names and ornament are reduced by photography they are of suitable size. The one-inch map is made from the six-inch, only so much of the detail being reduced as can be shown on the smaller scale without impairing its distinctness. The hill features are drawn in the field on photographic reductions of the six-inch map, and, from these sketches, finished brush drawings are made for the guidance of the engraver. The beautiful engraving of the one-inch map has been the subject of frequent praise, more especially for the skill with which the artists have caught the geological features. ' I never tire of looking at them,' wrote a distinguished geologist some years ago, ' they are so beautifully done and so wonderfully suggestive.' Amongst the many special processes employed, we may mention — (1) the ruling of houses, demesnes, &o. on the copper plates by specially designed instruments ; (2) the insertion of latitudes, longitudes, and sheet lines on the copper plates by a specially constructed machine ; (3) the electrotype process, which has been in use for more than forty years ; and (4) photozinco- graphy. The electrotype process is used to produce duplicates or fac-similes of the engraved copper plates, which show signs of wearing after 700 or 800 impressions have been printed ; it is also used in an ingenious way for producing the revised maps of Ireland. The electric current was formerly obtained from voltaic cells of Smee's pattern, but latterly these cells have been replaced by a dynamo driven direct by a Willans high-speed engine ; and the same dynamo works an electric-light for printing photographs in dull weather. Before 1855 the survey plans were reduced NOTE ON THE ORDNANCE SURVEY 233 from one scale to another by pantograph, a tedious and expensive process ; but in that year Sir H. James instituted experiments, which proved successful, to test the possibility of reducing plans accurately by photography. This was followed by the invention of the process of photozincography by Captain (now Major- General) A. de Courcy Scott in 1859. The process, which com- bines the accuracy of photography with the facility of printing from zinc, consists of obtaining, from a photographic negative on glass, a print in greasy carbon ink, which can be transferred to zinc, and printed from in the ordinary way. It is hardly too much to say, that without this invention it would have been impossible to complete the survey in any reasonable period. It was eagerly adopted by Continental States, and received extensive develop- ments and applications in this country. Perhaps its most impor- tant application has been in the reproduction, in fac-simile, of ancient manuscripts. At Southampton alone, the Domesday Book; the Black Letter Prayer-hook of 1636 ; several volumes of the national manuscripts of England, Scotland, and Ireland, with translations and explanatory notes by Mr. W. Basevi Sanders ; a series of Anglo-Saxon charters ; and other rare documents, have been photozincographed and published by the Ordnance Survey Department, under the supervision of Mr. Sanders. The Ordnance Survey has also been called upon to make surveys of Canada and Gibraltar ; of Jerusalem and the Sinaitie peninsula ; surveys for the War and other departments ; and to perform an infinite variety of subsidiary services, which we have no space to mention. Its scientific publications are too well known to require enumeration. For those who wish to obtain an insight into the working of the department, two popular works have been written by survey officers,' and to these we must refer the reader for further particulars relating to the great cadastral survey, which will always remain as one of the greatest and most generally useful works of the present reign. Chaelbs W. Wilson. ' The, Ordnance Survey of the Kingdom, by Capt. (now Colonel) H. S. Palmer, E.E. (Stanford). The Ordnance Survey of the United Kingdom, by Col. T. P. White, B.E. (Blackwood). 1886. 234 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA THE NAVY. Contri- butors to tile chapter. In a book designed to commemorate the fifty years of her Majesty's happy reign some record should be found of the services and the administration of the Navy. The compiler of the naval chapter is profoundly sensible of his slender quahfications for dealing adequately with the subject. The difficulty of the task is enhanced by the circumstances — the writer being at sea, on a voyage to Bombay, the thermo- meter at a high level, and the coral reefs of the Eed Sea demanding the constant attention of the navigator. In the preparation of the imperfect sketch here presented, assistance was invited, and it has been generously given by several competent authorities. Eeserving for his special task the administrative changes, the compiler has obtained the section devoted to shipbuilding from Sir Nathaniel Barnaby, K.CJB., the summary of the improvements in the steam-engine from Mr. Sennett, and the brief description of the advance in gunnery from Captain Orde-Browne, E.A. ; Colonel Percy Smith, E.E., the Director of Works, has traced the expansion of the dockyards ; Captain Wharton, E.N., has described the voyages of exploration during the reign of her Majesty, and the progress of hydrographical knowledge. The compiler regrets that the account of the war services of the Navy is so meagre. Naval men are as modest as they are brave, and it is difficult to extract from the principal actors in scenes, which will doubtless THE NAVY 235 hereafter be more fully and worthily depicted, a narrative of the deeds by which they have achieved distinction. Deahng first with the subject from the point of view of SMps administration, the enormous changes through which the mission, Navy has passed in the reign of Queen Victoria can hardly " ^' be presented to our view in a more graphic manner than by comparing the Kst of ships in commission in 1837, with the corresponding hst in 1886 : Classified List of her Majesty's Ships in Commission, July 1, 1837. Rate Number of ships First 2 Second 4 Third 11 Fourth 5 Fifth 9 Sixth 20 Sloops 39 Gunbrigs 16 Brigantines 7 Schooners ....... 5 Cutters ....... 3 Stationary and receiving ships ... 8 Steam-vessels, 24 Packet-brigs 25 Surveying-vessels ..... 10 Ketch 1 Yachts 7 Total 196 Classified List of hee Majesty's Ships in Commission OCTOBEB 1886. Bate Number of sMps Armoured ships 29 Corvettes 30 Torpedo ram ...... 1 ,, vessel 1 Frigate 1 Armed despatch-vessel .... 1 Sloops 19 Brigs 6 Carried forward . . . .88 236 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA Rate Number of ships Brought forward . , . .88 Schooners ....... 2 Gun-vessels 17 Gunboats ....... 48 Torpedo-boats 4 ,, depot ship 1 Cutters ....... 3 Small steam-vessels ..... 9 Stationary and receiving ships . . .19 Surveying-vessels ..... 7 Store-ships 2 Troopships ....... 9 Tank-vessel ....... 1 Despatch-vessels 3 ' Yacht 1 Drill-ships 9 Gunnery-ships 2 Training-ships 7 Torpedo school ships 2 Total 234 Omitting steam-vessels, which were not at that time regarded as Yessels-of-war, and other small craft, the Navy List of 1837 consisted of 129 vessels. The displacement of the largest ship was 4,000 tons. The Navy List of the present year, omitting non-combatant ships, contains 191 vessels. The largest displacement is 12,000 tons, and the average is out of aH proportion in excess of that of 1837. The number of men voted for the fleet has advanced from 26,500 m 1837, to 61,400 in 1886-87. In the Navy hsts of 1837 and 1887, all the great changes are epitomised through which the Navy has passed in the present reign — the change from sails to steam, from wooden walls to armour of proof, from armaments of many hght guns to armaments of few guns of tremendous power. We can trace in the disposition of the ships some of the changes which have occurred in the external relations of the empire. Our happy reconciliation with the United States is marked by a large reduction in the force maiatained on the North American station. The expansion of our trade with the THE NAVY 237 farthest East is marked by the presence of a considerable fleet in the China seas. At the accession of her Majesty our trade in the Pacific was not of sufficient significance to demand special protection from the Navy. We have now a squadron in those distant waters, under the command of an admiral. Last, not least in the order of political importance, the splendid growth of our colonies has impressed itself on the administration of the Navy by the creation of a separate Austrahan command. It is a position of the highest re- sponsibility, and therefore a p];ize much coveted in the profession. Looking to the wide expansion of naval force which has increase been demanded by the altered circumstances of the times, expendi- and to the substitution of ironclads built at a cost of three- ^^®' quarters of a miUion sterling for the old saiUng liners pro- duced for a tenth part of that amount, we have a ready explanation of the inevitable increase of estimates. The amount voted for the Navy was 4,419, TOOL in 18B7. It has risen to 12,741,000L for 1886-87. This increase should in fairness be regarded as a premium of insurance upon our trade. In 1837 our imports were 66,000,000L, our exports 58,000,000Z. The latest annual returns give our imports at 374,000,000Z. and our exports at 271,000,000L If our naval expenditure has trebled, our imports have increased 5| times, and our exports 4f times. Within the sphere of administration nothing has been Manning accomplished more to the advantage of the Navy in the ^eet. present reign than the improvement in the system of man- ning. During the great war the navy was manned by rude expedients, which the more humane and enlightened sentiment of these later days would no longer tolerate. Eecourse was often had to impressment, and complements were sometimes made up with prisoners liberated from confinement. In the long peace which followed, these 23S THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA violent measures could no longer be resorted to, and great difficulty was often experienced in manning the ships. A popular landlady at a favourite resort of the seamen could often do more to furnish a crew for a ship under orders for sea than could be accomplished by the authority of the Admiralty or the most urgent appeals of the officers. At length, in 1852, steps were taken to place the manning of the fleet on a more satisfactory footing. Sir Alexander Milne had addressed a letter to the Duke of Northumberland on the subject. It was referred to a committee of naval officers, and our present admirable system of continuous service was established in pursuance of their recommenda- tions. The Navy is now recruited by the entry of boys in training-ships, under an engagement to serve from the age of eighteen for a period of ten (recently extended to twelve) years. By the adoption of this plan all the difficulties — nay, more, the humiliations — of the former state of things have been removed. A constant and adequate supply of men, thoroughly trained, has now been insured. Encou- ragement is held out to continue in the services by pensions on a Hberal scale to those who enter into an engagement for a second term of ten years. By far the greater number of the men avail themselves of this privilege. On the other hand, a charge has been created for what are called non- effective services, but which may be more strictly designated as reserved pay, which has tended in recent years to swell the Navy Estimates to an extent never anticipated when pensions on the present scale were first authorised, im. In connection with the subject of manning, it is as agree- ^^Jf*^ able as it is appropriate to refer to the higher discipline of piine. |]^g service, and to the wise and considerate methods by which that improvement has been brought about. In deference to the public opinion of the country, flogging has been discontinued, and discipline is now enforced by a THE NAVY 239 carefully framed scale of fines and mulcts, and by a liberal and discriminating distribution of rewards. There was nothing formerly to mark the good, indifferent, or bad men. All were on an equality. The badge has marked the good man, and others are glad to follow his example. The whole service has been wonderfully improved by this ex- cellent plan, which is due to the initiative of Sir Alexander Milne. Higher rates of pay have been granted to seamen, Addi- not as a general increase, but as a reward for the ac- pay.^*° quisition of knowledge of special subjects. In this category should be included all the allowances and additions to pay for gunnery and torpedo men. Among the many other improvements which the sea- Boons man owes to Sir Alexander Milne, the introduction of a fo the^"^ careful system of training for ship's cooks and the establish- seamen, ment of canteens in her Majesty's ships deserve mention. The seaman has shared with the soldier in the improve- BTurses ment in the care of the sick and wounded. It is to the noble jJitais ' devotion of Florence Nightingale — a name ever dear to Enghsh hearts — that a boon of inestimable price in the extremity of suffering is mainly due. The work of ' the ministering angel ' in the Crimea, and since, has been de- scribed by Mr. Kinglake in a moving passage : ' A gracious dynasty stiQ reigns supreme in the wards where sufferers lie, and even brings solace, brings guidance, brings hope into those dens of misery which, untU the blessing has reached them, seem only to harbour despair. When into the midst of such scenes the young high-bred lady now glides, she wears that same sacred armour — the gentle attire of the servitress — which seemed heavenly to the eyes of our soldiers at the time of the war.' The example set by Florence Nightingale has been followed by many devoted women, and it is one of the happier recollections of the present writer's 240 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA term of of&ce at the Admiralty that it fell to his lot to give official approval to the scheme of Sir Anthony Hoskins's Committee on the nm-sing staff of the Navy. The super- vision of the nursmg in naval hospitals is now entrusted to trained nurses, many of whom are of gentle birth. Pensions Another boon to seamen should not be passed by in lieu of _ admis- without notice. Through many generations the palace of Green- William and Mary, the noblest ornament of the Thames, ^'° ■ had been used as a home for our aged and disabled seamen and marines. It was in a sense gratifying to see these gallant old fellows gathered together under the protecting care of the nation, in a building which was a symbol and mark of the popular affection for the sea service. But the sympathy which is so deeply felt was more wisely and truly shown in giving to the seamen the choice between residence in a palace, splendid in its architecture but irksome in its discijjline, and the more natural and grateful solace of their own homes. The option of a pension in lieu of asylum was first offered in 1865, and was so greatly appre- ciated that the number of inmates of the hospital fell from 1,400 to 400 ; and when, in 1869, under an administration which will be remembered, and hereafter more fully appre- ciated than hitherto, the precedent of 1865 was extended, the answer was unanimous. Every pensioner, save the helpless inmates of the hospital, accepted the offer, made by Mr. Childers and Mr. Trevelyan, of an allowance suffi- cient for his maintenance through his dechning years by his own fireside. The change is not the least among the many advantages which the seamen have received in the course of the past half-century. Organi- jjj addition to the seamen and marines borne on the sation of Naval strength of the Navy, an effective reserve has been organised Eeserve. . during the present reign. The Eeserves include in the first line the Coast Guard. This admirable force has taken THE NAVY ii,x the place of the old and inefficient body of civilians, acting under the authority of the Customs. Behind the Coast Guard we have the Seamen Pensioner Eeserve, consisting, as its designation implies, of able seamen in receipt of pensions. A still more numerous body of reserve men has been enrolled, chiefly in accordance with the recommendations of a Commission over which the late Lord Cardwell presided. The Eoyal Naval Eeserve consists of officers and men from the mercantile marine, who, in consideration of a liberal re- tainer and a pension, agree to go through an annual course of drill, and to hold themselves ready to serve in the fleet in obedience to the Queen's proclamation. The Naval Eeserve is of three classes. The first class comprises a considerable proportion, but by no means the whole, of the best men in the mercantile marine. The second class reserve is chiefly recruited from the fisheries and the coasting trade. The third class was established for the encouragement of the valuable work performed in the mercantile training-ships ; after eighteen months' instruction in one of these ships, boys are eligible for the third-class reserve. The Eoyal Naval Artillery Volunteers are the youngest Royal Naval branch of the reserves. This force has been organised on Artillery the same principle as the Volunteer forces for land service. teer^°" The difficulties to be overcome were, in the nature of things, more serious ; they have been conquered by patriotic spirit, and by the singular aptitude of our nation for the sea. The efficiency of the force has been tested by experience, and the Admiralty have expressed their confidence and approval in the most practical form by allowing a capitation grant to efficients. This concession will lead to a wide extension of the force. The total strength of the Eeserves, according to a recent return, is as follows : VOL. I. B 242 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA Total strength. of Be- servea. Coastguard Eoyal Naval Eeserve : OiSeers . . . • . First class .... 325 . 9,508 4,000 Second class .... . 8,100 Third class .... . 207 Firemen 60 18,200 Seamen Pensioners Eeserve . . 2,072 Eoyal Naval Artillery Volunteers . • 1,427 25,699 Waval training and educa- tion. Gunnery and torpedo schools. To these numbers may be added the large body of men in the Nayy serving in the home ports, thus constituting an aggregate of some 40,000 men available for manning the fleet on the outbreak of a war. The efficiency of the Eeserve has been tested by actual service. In 1869 the coastguard squadron was largely manned by merchant sea- men, and many officers of the Eeserve were temporarily appointed to the evolutionary squadron under Admiral Hornby m 1884. We may now pass on to consider what has been accom- plished during the reign of her Majesty for the training of the men and the education of the officers of the Navy. On our success in this essential particular, the efficiency of the fleet must mainly depend. The wise naval admmis- trator of every age will bear in mind the words of Pericles : ' Maritime skill is, like skill of other kinds, not a thing to be cultivated by the way or at chance times ; it is jealous of any other pursuit which distracts the mind from itself.' In the older days, when steam was unknown and naval gunnery was of the most elementary description, seaman- ship and tactics under canvas formed the principal part of the training of a naval officer. The progress of science has necessitated a corresponding enlargement of the scope of his education. For instruction in gunnery, the ' Excellent ' has been commissioned at Portsmouth and the ' Cambridge ' at THE NAVY 243 Devonport. For instruction in the torpedo a school has been established on board the ' Vernon ' at Portsmouth. A similar establishment is about to be formed at Devonport. The valuable instruction given in these schools is shared alike by officers and men. For the primary education of seamen, training-ships Training- have been fitted out at Portsmouth, Portland, Devonport, ®''^^^' and Falmouth. To these ships brigs are attached as cruising-tenders ; and the training in seamanship is com- pleted in the flying squadron and the Channel fleet. All this is the work of the present reign. For the officers of the Navy it was decided in 1857 to The ' Bri- place the ' Britannia ' as a school-ship at Dartmouth. ^^'^^'^'^' Through this vessel every cadet must be passed into the service. The school, as at present organised, has many merits. If it fails to accomphsh all that is desired, it is because we demand too much from youths at the early age of thirteen to fifteen years. The whole question of naval education is at the present time under consideration. A committee has recently reported in favour of a more ad- vanced age of entry, and a more extended course. Officers brought up under the existing system find it hard to approve the abandonment of methods and regulations which have yielded in practice such excellent results. The officers of a future generation will be more scientific than those who have gone before. In skill and conduct as commanders at sea they will never surpass them. An incident of the present reign is worth recounting, as ciiannei an example of the fine spirit which prevails in the service. f]^|* '"' Admiral Sir George Elliot, K.C.B., was in command of the '^°'^^^ , o ' ' Charter' Channel fleet at the date of the memorable gale in which the sale. ' Eoyal Charter ' was lost. He was overtaken by the storm while cruising in the Channel. With the leading ships he might have gained Plymouth. But seeing that it was B 2 ■244 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA doubtful -whether the ships in rear could succeed in entering the Sound, Admiral Elliot, with the true spirit of a British seaman, determined to stand off the land and to face the tempest at the head of his squadron. By admirable sea- manship the ships escaped without disaster, and gained the anchorage off Portland on the following day. Eoyai The present reign is memorable in the history of naval College, education for the inauguration, under the able administra- tion of Mr. Goschen, of the college at Greenwich. It is the most important centre of scientific instruction for the Navy, and here, after their period of service at sea in the junior grades, officers are required to go through a course of study, and to pass the examination for the rank of lieu- tenant. Side by side with the officers of the executive branch, naval architects of the Eoyal Corps of Constructors, and that other class of officers yearly growing in import- ance and efficiency — the engineers of the Navy — receive an education of the most complete kind in mathematics and applied mechanics, chemistry, and physics. The college has been furnished, on a scale of generous and wise liberality, with a staff of professors and teachers, and with every ap- pliance for experimental investigation. The service has appreciated the advantages aflbrded. Among the officers studying at the college, many are found who may well be compared, in point of application and proficiency, with the most earnest and the ablest students at Cambridge and Oxford. Admitting, as perhaps we should without hesitation admit, that our present plan for the education of officers needs revision, certain it is that no Navy is better supplied than our own with the means of professional instruction. The standard of knowledge and the facilities and methods of study afford a striking contrast to the rude and imperfect methods which were being followed in the Navy at the THE NAVY 245- accession of Queen Victoria. Her reign has marked an epoch in naval education. Having dealt with the manning of the fleet, we pass to ship- the ships. In the department of shipbuilding a revolution t^lf^^ has occurred in the reign of her Majesty. But if everything ■'^^^^• has been changed in the art of shipbuilding for the purposes of war, those who have been most prominent in carrying forward the work of progress will be the last to speak with contempt of the constructions of their predecessors. In a recent contribution to ' Harper's Magazine,' Sir Edward Eeed has given his authoritative testimony to the difficulties of workmanship which were involved in the production, with an adequate measure of strength, of ships carrying three tiers of guns on wooden decks in wooden hulls. The type of three-decker constructed at the commencement of the present reign was a great advance upon the ships of earlier date. It must, however, be acknowledged that in respect of designs our shipbuilders in the past displayed httle of that original power for which our naval architects in the present day have been distinguished. In the middle of the last century our ships were copied from Dutch models. Our experience of their superior powers of sailing in the great war led to the construction of ships on the lines of the prizes taken from the French. Some of those early ships, with their elaborately carved quarter galleries and tumble-home sides, are still to be seen doing duty as coal-hulks in Portsmouth Harbour. These introductory observations have brought us to a contribution for which the reader, not less than the compiler, is indebted to Sir Nathaniel Barnaby. What follows is mainly from his pen : When in the presence of an enemy the fighting man is essentially conservative in his choice of weapons. Like the young Hebrew champion in the Vale of Elah, he refuses coat, 246 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA helmet, and sword in the day of battle, however highly they may be commended to him, if he has not personally proved them. He would rather trust to his rude but well-proved sling and stone, and his accustomed freedom of movement. Changes in weapons are wrought out cautiously in times of peace, and but little improvement is to be looked for in the midst of war. There are notable exceptions to this, as, for example, the introduction of armour-plating for the sides of ships during the Crimean war, and the invention of the turret-ship during the war between the Northern and Southern States of North America. The changes in these two exceptional cases were not brought about by the fighting-men themselves, but were the suggestions of engineers, to meet the actual conditions of the strife. The sailors took the new weapons into action, the iron- clad ship against the batteries, and the turreted ram against the enemy's ironclads, without having had any opportunity for proving them ; and they were successful. But the more usual course is to experiment in time of peace, with weapons of offence and defence. An improvement in one demands a corresponding advance in the other, and the rivalry of the weapon-makers is unceasing. A French ofBcer devises a shot which will explode and break into murderous hail on striking, or at some desired point in its iJight. Another French officer thereupon introduces iron armour for side-plating for the ships, to protect the men at the guns from the exploding shell. The artillerist increases the size of the gun, and improves the form and material of the shot, to enable it to pierce the armour. The armour is then corre- spondingly thickened and improved in quality to resist it. This thickening and improving on the part of the defence reach their limits before the improvements in the attack have culminated. The armour thereupon takes a different form, and smaller ships, with fewer men and quicker gun-fire, are substituted for ships with large and crowded guns' crews and slow fire. The ships are attacked beneath the water by a new weapon, devised by an Austrian officer and an English engineer, working together in Austria. Eapid boat-service comes to the aid of the new weapon, and the attack is most seriously increased in power. Then the mitrailleur, or magazine gun, with rapid fire, and the electric light, come in to render the torpedo attack by boats so perilous as to deprive it of much of its significance. So it has come THE NAVY 2i,7 about that while there has been no great naval war for thirty years, and no naval engagement between the leading maritime Powers for twenty years, the progress in guns, armour, torpedoes, torpedo-vessels, machine-guns, torpedo-nets, and electric light- ing for naval warfare, has been unceasing, and is now in fuU activity. The reign of her Majesty has been happily marked by only one war with a European Power, and that was waged thirty years ago. But the changes in naval war material have been beyond comparison greater than in any similar preceding period in our history. During the reign the largest ship-of-war has more than doubled its size ; the largest gun has become thirty times as heavy, and the velocity of discharge has been doubled. The highest speed of ships has been doubled. The materials of which ships' guns and projectiles are made have all been changed. The mode of propulsion now universal was not in use in the Eoyal Navy at the commencement of the reign. War material has become rapidly obsolete. No single ship of war is in existence now, as a war ship, which was launched earlier than the middle of the reign. The oldest ship of war, large or small, in service in the British Navy is the ' Warrior,' launched in 1860. In order to contrast more particularly the characteristics of state of the ships of war of 1837 and 1887 we may consider ourselves in ^^oMt the position of the public of the former period. They had still ture in among them, employed in public affairs, the renowned seamen of the fleets which had been commanded by Nelson. Old methods of warfare remained as the standards for the training of the Navy. Fighting under sail was the exclusive principle of all their study. Experimental sailing-vessels had been designed by different constructors. Some of these were naval officers, and some were naval architects trained in an Admiralty school which had been established in 1811. One of the most successful of these rival designers, Captain William Symonds, had been appointed Surveyor of the Navy in 1832. Up to this time a system of measurement of tonnage or size had been in force, which made it proportional to the length of the ship and to the square of the breadth. This discouraged breadth, and made the ships incapable of carrying their canvas properly, or of obtaining high speeds under sail. To the new Surveyor, known to fame 248 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA as Sir William Symonds, belongs the merit of recognising the foUy of this system, and the advantage to be gained in sailing by increasing the breadths of the ships. He broke the fetters with which designers had been bound for so many years, and did excellent service. The French authorities, reviewing the differences between French and English types of this date, said that greater breadth was found in the French 100-gun ships than in the British 120-gun ships (55-31 feet instead of 54-43 feet) ; in the French 74-gun ship than in the British 74-gun ship (49-17 feet instead of 48-16 feet) ; in the 52-gun frigate (45-21 feet instead of 44-16 feet) ; and in the corvette (32-6 and 36 feet instead of 31-82 feet). But they said that, speaking generally, they found the following differences : ' They (the English ships) are not so long as ours, with a tendency to greater breadth, which may make them appear to us, on the broadside, more powerful. They have a greater height of ports.' They go on to say : ' It is generally thought that the English have known how to improve the sailing of most of the French ships, which the chances of war have thrown into their hands ; it has often happened that their best sailers have been found to be of French origin, and this appears to be the case in the present day in respect of the "Donegal," one of the ships of the combined squadron.' (The ' Donegal ' had been captured in the Bay of Donegal in 1798.) ' It appears that they have obtained this result of sailing, particu- larly in our old frigates, by lightening their armament, reducing the length of their masts, diminishing proportionably their ballast, and increasing in a remarkable manner the depth of their false keel. Further, our masts being longer, larger, and consequently heavier, operate against the stability, all other things being equal. In many English ships, some of the condi- tions of stability, owing to the form of the bottom, are found to be more favourable than in our ships. Our ships will sometimes, from this cause, be less able to carry sail.' These were the subjects which were occupying the minds of the sailors and shipbuilders of the Koyal Navies of England and France at the commencement of the reign of her Most Gracious Majesty. The commissioners, from whose report these extracts have been taken, complained further of the weakness of the struc- ture of their ships, and of their falling off in speed owing to change THE NAVY 249 of form. In the English Navy very considerable improvements had been made, since the close of thfe French war, by Sir Eobert Seppings. His structm-al alterations had greatly increased the strength of the English ships. They had also undergone, during this period, another change due to Sir Robert Seppings. The old beakheads had given way to the modern form of bow, and round sterns had replaced the old square sterns of Trafalgar. The shipbuilders of 1837 were also greatly occupied with the question of the supply of shipbuilding timber. So late as 1851 we find Fincham saying, ' The produce of our forests and of the private estates of the kingdom is not sufficient to meet the re- quirements of the country.' In 1837 all the steam-vessels in the Eoyal Navy put together did not equal in tonnage or horse-power a single first-class ship of war of the present time. ALL the line- of -battle ships, frigates, and smaller vessels then in commission were propelled by sails and built of wood. The first steamships of war in the Navy were propelled by Early paddles. The introduction of paddles was soon followed by the fj,^~?+gg conversion of a 46-gun frigate. In 1843 she was cut in two, lengthened, and supplied with engines of 650 horse-power. Several ships were also built expressly for the paddle. Of this class the ' Terrible,' a frigate-built ship of 21 gmis and 800 horse- power, was the most powerful. The ' Valorous ' is the only representative of this class still in commission. As to dimensions, the shipbuilders of that day learned from First the Great Western Steamship Company, formed in 1836, that steamers. for passages from England to America a vessel as much as 212 feet long would be required. It was estimated that the outward passage might be made in such a vessel in less than twenty days, and the return passage in thirteen days, whereas the average outward passage of saihng-paekets at that date, between Liverpool and New York, was thirty-six days, and the homeward passage twenty-four days. In 1838 the ' Great Western,' built of wood and propelled by paddles, marked the high -water of progress in ocean navigation. She left Bristol on April 8, 1838, and reached New York on the morning of the 23rd of the same month. The return passage was made in fourteen days. Seven years later, the ' Great Britain,' built of iron and propelled by a screw, was started by the same company across the Atlantic. She was 286 2 50 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA feet long between the perpendiculars and of 8,000 tons dis- placement. The stride made in her, in respect of material and mode of propulsion, was due to the genius and energy of Mr. Brunei. The Cunard Company commenced its Atlantic mail service in 1840. Their ship, the ' Britannia,' made the passage between Liverpool and Boston in fourteen days eight hours. The same company can now make the passage from Queenstown to New York in less than six days and a quarter. In the Eoyal Navy all fighting ships were, as has been said, propelled exclusively by sails in 1837, and twelve to thirteen miles an hour marked the highest attainable speed under any circumstances in navigation. Iron vessels had been built before 1837, but it was not until that year that the first entry of an iron ship was made in Lloyd's Eegister. Epooiis Such were the beginnings of the Victorian age in shipbuilding, prosress During the reign, while there has been unremitting progress, there have been remarkable epochs. The building of the ' Great Western ' and of the ' Great Britain ' marked two such epochs, the first in relation to ocean navigation generally, and the second to the use of iron instead of wood, and of the screw in place of the paddle. The building of the ' Battler ' in 1843, the first screw steamship of war, was the next ; and with this also Brunei was intimately associated. Introduc- The want of handiness and the exposure of the side wheels to ^^^ ° injury in action were serious defects in the method of propulsion screw. by paddles. The introduction of the screw was a decided im- provement. The propeller was out of reach of shot. It gave greater power of manoBuvring. It could be used effectively in combination with sails, which the Admiralty, for excellent reasons, were most reluctant to abandon. The earliest screw- ships in the Navy were converted from sailing-ships. They were of the class designated as block-ships, and though inferior to the later vessels, specially designed, they were a creditable adapta- tion, and vastly superior for purposes of war to ships dependent entirely on the uncertain action of the wind. In addition to the block- ships, many other unfinished ships were converted from sailing-vessels, and a large number of new ships were specially designed for the screw. Of these noble con- structions not one is now in commission as a seagoing vessel. The ' Duke of Wellington,' which for so many years has carried THE NAVY 251 the flag of the commander-in-chief at Portsmouth, is one of the finest examples of the screw three-deckers. Those who had the good fortune to be present at Cherbourg Com- in 1858, on the occasion of the meeting of our Queen and the g^^d- Emperor of the French, will retain a vivid recollection of the rons at spectacle presented by the combined fleets. The flagship of the bourg. squadron which escorted her Majesty was the ' Eoyal Albert,' aiid the admiral in command was Lord Lyons, who had gained such well-merited renown by his conduct in the Black Sea. The roadstead of Cherbourg was crowded with such an assemblage of yachts as had never before been brought together. The interest of the scene was enhanced by the meeting of many old comrades- in-arms of the Crimean war. The experiences of that struggle had already rendered the impend- stately liners assembled at Cherbourg obsolete for the purposes Jufjon^n' of war. The destruction of the Turkish fleet at Sinope and the sbip- slaughter of 4,000 of the seamen, the practical failure of the ^'^i^'^^'^s. attack by the fleets on the batteries of Sebastopol, the scanty results obtained by two expeditions to the Baltic — results not unanticipated by the Admiralty which despatched them — all pointed to the necessity for considerable modifications to enable ships to contend with a chance of success against the more power- ful ordnance which had been introduced. When Sir James Graham instructed Sir Charles Napier as to his proceedings in the Baltic, he expressed the deliberate view of the Admiralty as follows : ' I by no means contemplate an attack on Cronstadt or Sveaborg. I have a great respect for stone walls, and have no fancy for running even line-of-battle ships against them. These considerations should not be overlooked by you. I recall them to your mind, lest, in the eager desire to achieve a great exploit and to satisfy the wild anxieties of an impatient multitude, you should yield to some such impulse, and fail in the discharge of one of the noblest duties — which is the moral courage to do what you know is right, at the risk of being accused of having done wrong.' These instructions were a complete admission of the weakness of large and costly ships unprotected by armour. When it had become obvious that the combined fleets could do nothing more than maintain a blockade, the Emperor of the French, adopting the plan of an American inventor, suggested 252 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA Iron floating batteries ar- moured. Rapid construc- tion of gun- vessels. Sea- going ironclads. the building of batteries protected by 4|-incb plates. Three of these vessels took part in the bombardment of Kinburn in October 1855. They were completely proof against the guns to which they were opposed. Meanwhile the British Admiralty had determined to follow the example of the French. They built three armoured batteries with incredible rapidity. Two of these vessels arrived at Kinburn only a week after the bombards- ment. The rapid construction of the flotilla of gunboats was a feat not less noteworthy than the construction of the armoured batteries, and it has been surpassed by a more recent instance. In the spring of 1885, stern-wheel steam-vessels being re- quired by Lord Wolseley for service on the Nile, the following contract was entered into between the Government and Mr. WUnam Pearce, of the firm of John Elder & Co. on the Clyde : To build ten such steamers, 80 feet long and 20 feet broad, divided into twenty watertight compartments, and constructed in four sections for convenience of transport to Egypt. The contract was made on March 24, and the ten boats were built and delivered at Alexandria at the end of April — i.e. in thirty- seven days. The builder had offered to contract for thirty boats on the same terms. In the prospect of war with Eussia, the same builder undertook to build steel ships-of-war of 1,600 tons displacement, with engines of 3,500 horse-power, under the following conditions, viz. to deliver the first in six months and to complete ten within nine months. This is very significant of the progress made in the organisation and perfection of appli- ances in private shipbuilding establishments. The French were so satisfied with their floating batteries that they decided to extend the use of armour to ships of a more seagoing character. The ' Gloire ' was designed for this purpose by M. Dupuy de Lome, the designer also of the ' NapoMon,' the pioneer of our own ' Agamemnon ' and other fine screw line-of- battle ships, armed with ninety-one guns. The Admiralty did not hesitate long before they adopted the new type. The building of the first British seagoing ironclad of iron ; the building of the ' Bellerophon ' with a new and excellent system of framing in steel and iron, from the designs of Sir Edward Eeed ; the building of the ram ' Monitor ' in the United States by Captain Ericsson, were all fresh starting-points. Epochs were marked THE NAVY 253 also by the invention of the Whitehead torpedo and of the machine-gun. But before all these should be placed, in point of significance, ifew the production of ingot iron, or mild steel, for the manufacture ^^t^'^.i^^s f. , . , . tor snip- ot shipbuilding and engine -building material by the two inde- building, pendent processes of Bessemer and Siemens. Either of the two modes invented by these remarkable men would have revolu- tionised the manufacture of shipbuilding materials. By a strange coincidence they appear nearly together in this reign. The building of steam-launches by Mr. Thornycroft must "Work of also be referred to. In respect of the structure of the vessels, '^'^°r°-'^\ . "^ ' croft and and of the improvements m the generation of steam and in its Proude. use in the engine, Mr. Thornycroft has conferred on shipbuilders and marine engineers, and on steam navigation generally, benefits which it is diflScult to acknowledge in suitable terms. Another distinct epoch, was, the establishment by the Admi- ralty at Torquay, under the superintendence of Mr. William Froude, of the experimental works for measuring fluid resistance in ships. To this is mainly due the improvement in form in recent ships of large size. Eespecting such ships, the Institu- tion of Naval Architects was lately informed by Mr. White, the Director of Naval Construction, that the speed-trials had fully confirmed the anticipations based on the analysis of steam-trials of earlier ships and the experiments at Torquay. The names of the ships referred to are ' Colossus,' ' Edinburgh,' ' CoUingwood,' ' Rodney,' ' Howe,' ' Anson,' and ' Camperdown,' in all of which the same form and proportions were adopted. The ' Howe,' said Mr. White, had practically the same mean draught of water and wetted surface as the ' Warrior,' and was 55 feet shorter, but she was 10 feet broader and of nearly 800 tons greater displacement. She was, however, on the whole, as easily driven as the ' Warrior ' up to the maximum speed (14'85 knots) which the ' Warrior ' attained ; and she reached a maximum speed of 17 knots. The formation in 1860 of the Institution of Naval Architects Institu- gave just the aid to the shipbuilding industry which it needed, in ^°^°/ producing the iron and steel steam-shipping which has displaced ArcM- the wooden shipping of the earlier time. There is not a ship- ®° ^' builder or marine engineer in the kingdom who would not grate- fully acknowledge the splendid service rendered by this Institu- tion. We had the iron and the coal, and the mechanical skill 254 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA needed for the gigantic task of creating iron and steel shipping for the ocean commerce of the world, in a great era of transition from sail to steam, and from wood to iron. The Institution of Naval Architects has brought together the shipbuilders and marine engineers, the practical workers and the skilled experi- mentalists and observers, the shipowners and the naval officers. It has analysed their experience, recorded their facts, and directed their efforts. Our mer- In 1885 the registered merchant-steamers of 100 tons gross ■^^^ and upwards existing in the world were (excluding yachts) as follows r Built of wood 805 Composite 103 Built of iron 8,101 „ of steel 633 Total 9,642 Of these, 5,712 were sailing under the British flag. Of the 25,766 sailing-ships, of 100 tons nett and upwards, 7,881 were saihng under the British flag, and of these latter 1,750 were built of iron or steel. Of the total number of such ships, steam and sail, 7,200 of the former and 5,016 of the latter had been built in the United Kingdom. In the year 1885, of sailipg-ships as defined above, 354 were built in the world, and of these 141 were built in the United Kingdom. Of these 141, all but twenty — and they were vessels of very small size — were built of iron or steel. The total number of steamships built was 338, and of these 241 were built in the United Kingdom, and of these latter all but eight were of iron or steel. During the year 1885, while the number of vessels of 100 tons and upwards added to the British register was less than the number of those removed from it by 138, the total British regis- tered tonnage was increased by 107,790 tons. These interesting particulars are taken from Lloyd's Universal Eegisterfor 1886-87. Lloyd's The first issue of this splendid and complete register marks Kegister. ^gjj ^^ q\.o&& of fifty years of good work. Lloyd's Register of Shipping was established in 1834, but it was not until 1837 that its prosperous life commenced. A Select Committee of the House of Commons, reporting in 1886, attributed the construction of the cheap and bad ships then in existence to the defective system of teots. THE NAVY 255 classification of the old register societies. They stated that the system of classification had been greatly improved by the formation of an association entitled Lloyd's Eegister of British and Foreign Shipping, the basis of whose regulations appeared to be a hond, fide attempt to classify vessels according to their real and intrinsic merits, including their age, construction, materials, workman- ship, and stores ; and that there was reason to believe that the ultimate result of this new system of classification would be to effect a great improvement in the general character of the ships of the United Kingdom. All who are familiar with the working of this association will agree that the prediction of the committee of fifty years ago has been fulfilled. A large number of the officers of the association have been trained in the employment of the Crown. The Admiralty policy as to technical education has been Educa- for many years past enlightened and generous. In all their ^2t^ dockyards there are good free schools for their apprentices, arcM. at which there is compulsory attendance. From these schools selections are made, by examination, of the most advanced and promising lads, who are further trained, at the expense of the State, in a technical college in the principles of design and con- struction of ships and engines. The chief naval architect has always been chosen, during her Majesty's reign, from officers trained in the Admiralty Technical Schools, In future the technical school at the Eoyal Naval College, Greenwich, will receive not only free students, selected from the schools for apprentices at the dockyards, but students entered directly from public or other schools, on payment of moderate fees. Such students will have before them appointments in the Civil Service of the Crown, in the Eoyal Corps of Naval Constructors, established in 1884 on the recommendation of a committee over which the compiler had the honour to preside. Similar provisions were made for training marine engineers, first in the ' Marlborough ' at Portsmouth, and subsequently in the Eoyal Naval College at Greenwich. These careful provisions for technical instruction, continued during many years ; the establish- ment of the experimental service under Mr. Froude ; and the financial support, rendered at a time when it was much needed, to the Institution of Naval Architects, indicate a desire on the part of successive Boards of Admiralty to neglect nothing which can add to the greatness of the Navy of Great Britain. 256 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA Scientific investigation, which has immortalised the names and works of Macquorn Eankine and William Froude, has also won an imperishable fame for the reign of Queen Victoria. More has been done in respect of the knowledge of the laws of fluid motion and resistance during her reign than was done for centuries before. What is the prospect now of shipbuilding ? England can be made no larger by the sword with profit to any one. Her enlarge- ment rests with the shipbuilders. To these let us add the engi- neers who have achieved those remarkable results which we shall proceed briefly to describe, and the shipowners who have given judicious encouragement to the men of practical and theoretical science. England on the sea is their creation. There is no sign of decadence in that part of the Queen's dominions, and no one can assign limits to its future greatness. Having dealt with the ships of the Navy, the improve- ments in the steam-engine from the early paddle-wheel frigates to the compound engines with which our ships are now fitted, the economies effected in the weight of machinery per indicated horse-power, the superior construction of boilers, and the advance in speed, will be described in a contribution kindly furnished by Mr. Sennett of the Admiralty, the author of the well-known treatise on the marine steam-engine. The first introduction of steam into the naval service was in December 1827, when three small paddle-wheel vessels were purchased to be used for towing and general purposes. Other vessels of a similar class were added to the Navy from time to time, and in May 1885 an Order in Council was obtained for the appointment of a chief engineer and inspector of machinery at Woolwich dockyard, which was the beginning of the engineering department of the Navy. steam- At the date of her Majesty's accession there were altogether ships in. forty-two steam vessels in the Navy, all of small size, and only ten of these carried guns. The ' Salamander ' and ' Ehada- manthus ' may be taken as illustrations of this type of steam war-vessels. They were wooden paddle-wheel steamers, 164 feet THE NAVY 257 long, 32 feet 10 inches broad, and carried four guns each. Their engines were worked with steam at a pressure of only four pounds per square inch, and developed about 400 horse-power. These early marine-engines were not only heavy and cumbrous, but were also so expensive in fuel that steamships could only be used for short voyages. The great problem was the reduction of the consumption of coal, and this object has been attained by the gradual increase of the working pressures of steam and the altera- tion of the type of engine. This has not orily produced economy of fuel, but has also reduced the space and weight required for the machinery. The adoption of the screw-propeUer in lieu of the paddle-wheel in 1845-50 was the most important step taken in the progress of marine engineering. The speeds of piston and of revolution of the engines were increased, and steam was used at higher pressures. It is not too much to say that steamships of the great size, power, and speed that we have to-day would not have been possible had not the screw superseded the paddle. During the period 1850-60 a number of wooden frigates and Period corvettes, fitted with horizontal screw-engines, were added to the ^^^ '° Eoyal Navy. The working steam pressure of the engines was twenty to twenty-five pounds. The average result from this type of engine was five and a half horse-power per ton of weight of the machinery. The introduction of surface condensation, which became general in 1860, rendered it possible to use high-pressure steam in marine-engines, and an advance was at once made to from thirty to thirty-five pounds per square inch. The cylinders were steam-jacketed, and were made large enough to allow of considerable expansion. In this improved type of engines the average weight of the machinery was 3 cwts. per indicated horse- power, and the consumption of fuel was only about two-thirds that of the type immediately preceding them. We now come to the compound type of engine, in which the com- expansion of the steam is conducted in two or more successive po'md engines, cylinders. This system has since 1870 become universal, and has effected so great a degree of economy of fuel that it has practi- cally again revolutionised marine engineering and led to an enor- mous increase in steam navigation. The consumption of coal in the marine-engine of the present day is not more than one-third that required for the engines in general use prior to 1860, and is VOL. I. s 258 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA Poroed draught. Contrast between 1837 and 1877. only about one-fifth of what was required for the engines in use at the time of her Majesty's accession. The effect on war-ships of this great reduction of coal expenditure has been twofold : (a) the increased distance which ships are able to steam without exhausting their coal supply has rendered sea-going mastless armour-clad ships possible ; [h) the reduced quantity of coal required in the majority of war-ships has made it practicable to devote space and weight, formerly used for coals, to the increase of offensive and defensive power. During the past few years another important step in advance in machinery for war-ships has been made, by the application of forced draught to the furnaces of marine-boilers. This has enabled the power obtained from a given weight of boiler to be nearly doubled, and, combined with further considerable increase in the speed of piston and revolution of the engines, has facilitated the attainment of much higher rates of speed. In many recent war-cruisers of moderate dimensions speeds of eighteen to twenty knots an hour have been attained, a result altogether impracticable without the application of forced draught. The Navy in 1837 practically consisted of sailing-ships alone ; in 1887 it consists entirely of steamships. The total indicated horse-power of the machinery of the Navy in 1837 was about 10,000, and the value of the machinery about 200,000Z. In 1887 the total horse-power of the machinery of the Navy is about 1,000,000, and its value may be estimated at between 10,000,000Z. and 11,000,000/. sterUng, The ' Salamander ' and ' Ehadamanthus ' have been already referred to as examples of the type of war-cruisers in 1837. Their maximum speed was nine knots per hour. The machinery weighed 275 tons, and indicated 400 horse-power. In the steel twin-screw belted cruiser ' Galatea,' now nearly completed, the machinery weighs 770 tons, and is capable of developing about 9,000 horse-power, and driving the ship at about nineteen knots per hour. The weight of the machinery is two and three-quarter times that of the ' Ehadamanthus.' The power developed is over twenty-two times as great. The ' Ehadamanthus ' carried 820 tons of coal, which was sufficient for 1,900 knots at a maximum speed of nine knots. The ' Galatea ' is nearly four times as large as the ' Ehadamanthus,' but the same coal supply would be suffi- cient for nearly 3,500 knots, and with her full supply she can THE NAVY 259 steam nearly 9,000 Imots at a speed of nine knots. At twelve knots the ' Galatea ' can steam 6,000, and at full speed nearly 2,000 knots, with her full coal supply. At the date of her Majesty's accession, there was building at Woolwich dockyard one of the first-class battle-ships of that day, named the ' Trafalgar.' She was a wood-built sailing-ship, 205 feet long and 55 feet 1\ inches broad, carrying 120 guns of the average weight of 45 cwts., and throwing projectiles averaging 16^ lbs. Her crew would consist of 1,000 men, who would be required for the sails and guns, all the work of the ship having to be performed by manual labour. In the present year, another first-class battle-ship, also named the ' Trafalgar,' is building at Portsmouth. This ship is built entirely of steel and is subdi^dded into about 150 watertight compartments. She is 345 feet long, 73 feet broad, and of 11,940 tons weight. She is to be fitted with cyhndrical boilers, pressed to 135 pounds per square inch, and triple expansion engines capable of developing 12,000 horse-power, and of driving the ship at a speed of nearly seventeen knots per hour. At a speed of ten knots the coal supply is equal to 7,700 knots, and at full speed 2,000 knots. The crew will consist of 520 men, or only about half that of the ' Trafalgar ' of 1837, though the ship is much larger and more powerful. She has two revolving armoured turrets, weighing with slides, presses, and other re- volving gear 456 tons each, and containing two pairs of 67-ton breechloading guns, which fire projectiles weighing 1,250 lbs. with 520 lbs. powder charges. The minor armament includes eight Hghter guns, each of which is enormously more powerful than the guns fitted in the earlier ' Trafalgar,' and nineteen smaller quick-firing guns for repelling torpedo-boat attack. Apparatus is provided for charging and launching torpedoes. The armour consists of steel-faced plates, varying in thickness from 20 inches to 14 inches. The ofi^ensive and defensive powers are so great that alone the ship would be more than a match for the whole of the British Navy in 1837, being absolutely invulner- able so far as their means of attack were concerned. The auxiliary machinery and fittings of the ' Trafalgar ' and other similar ships are scarcely, if at aU, less important than the main engines. Powerful hydraulic machinery will be fitted for working the turrets, shot and ammunition hoists and guns, and s 2 26o THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA possibly for steering, hoisting torpedo-boats, &c. There will also be between fifty and sixty auxiliary steam-engines fitted for various purposes, such as air-compressing, electric-lighting, ven- tilating, weighing anchor, &c., besides those fitted in the boats she wiU carry. The ship herself may, in fact, be considered as a huge floating war-machine, and all the necessary operations for working, steering, and fighting will be performed by steam alone, without the intervention of manual labour. This comparison of the ' Trafalgars ' of 1837 and 1887 re- spectively will show very clearly the enormous changes that have been brought about in the ships of the Navy during the fifty years of her Majesty's reign by the progress of engineering science. In 1837 the ' Ehadamanthus ' was probably considered as near finality as the ' Galatea ' and ' Trafalgar ' are to-day, and we may confidently look forward to further progress in marine engi- neering. Economy of fuel has not yet reached its climax, and screw propulsion has barely emerged from its infancy. The weights of machinery required for a given power may be much reduced, and higher speed may be expected. Torpedo-boats have proved that twenty to twenty-four knots per hour are attainable with small vessels, and speeds nearly as high have been reached with some modern ships of large size. There is no reason to doubt that these and stiU higher speeds may become general, and that, with increased economy of fuel, decreased weights of machinery, and improved forms of ships and types of propellers, a still greater development of steam navi'gation, both for war and mercantile purposes, will be one of the principal features of the not distant future. Great as have been the changes in the ships of the Navy, and their propelling machinery, the revolution in ordnance is not less remarkable. It will be described in a contribution to this paper from the pen of Captain Orde Browne, E.A. Progress The great naval battles of England were won wdth compara- orduance tively Ught ordnance. The ' Victory ' at Trafalgar carried only 32-pounders and smaller guns. In 1837 some 42-pounders existed, but the regular armament of a 120-gun ship consisted of THE NAVY 261 ninety-eiglit 82-poiiiiders, four 18-pounders, two 68-pounder car- ronades, and sixteen 32-pounder carronades. It is interesting to compare such an armament with that of the new ships of the so-called ' Admiral ' class. One of these, the ' Benbow,' carries two llOi-ton 16;^ inch guns and ten 6-inch guns. The ' Anson ' and two others mount four 67-ton guns and six 6-inch guns, besides fifteen ' quick-firing ' and ten machine-guns. It will be seen, then, that instead of a large number of comparatively light pieces we now have two or four of enormous power, supported by a secondary armament for quick light work. The introduction of armour gave ships complete protection against all the old-fashioned guns. At the time of the Crimean war in 1864, the largest vessels, such as the ' Duke of WelHngton ' and the ' Eoyal Albert,' carried two 68-pounder pivot guns of 95 cwt., and even these at 200 yards range were hardly a match for the 4^ inches of iron armour of the ' Warrior.' Vessels now exist carrying as much as 22 inches of steel, while guns have increased in power in even a greater proportion than armour. The guns of the ' Benbow,' ' Sanspareil,' and ' Renown,' sup- pUed from Elswick, are the most powerful in the world. They are ' calculated to perforate nearly 36 inches of iron at the muzzle.' The weight of metal projected by both broadsides of a first-rate man-of-war in 1837 was about 3,856 lbs., while the guns of the ' Anson ' would throw 5,600 lbs. of metal. The real estimate, however, of the power of a gun is the ' energy,' as it is termed, of the projectile — that is, the weight multiplied by the square of the velocity. This gives the actual work stored up in the blow. The energy of both broadsides of the 120-gun ship would be about 67,034 foot tons, while that of the ' Anson ' guns is about 162,860 foot tons. A single projectile from one of the 110|-ton guns above mentioned weighs 1,800 lbs., and has about 60,000 foot tons energy at the muzzle. The development here exhibited has been achieved by science and manufacturing power, which appear to us great, though no doubt they may soon be dwarfed by comparison with future achievements. It is no light task to control a gun over 40 feet long, in the act of delivering a blow of 60,000 foot tons. This amount of energy applied in the form of an upward push would lift the entire vessel, weighing 10,000 tons, six feet into the air. By hydraulic buffers the gun is brought to a stop with a recoil of five feet. The gun, the carriage, and lastly the 262 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA projectile, whicli is capable of passing through two or even three feet of solid iron, are each in their way remarkable. It is only possible to trace the process that has led to such results in the barest outline. During the long peace that Europe enjoyed after Waterloo, the science of artillery slumbered. Indi- vidual efforts hardly received attention until the nations awoke at the Crimean war to find themselves literally using the same ordnance and war stores in 1855 that had been in use half a century before. Our gmmers in the trenches fired mortar fuses bearing dates of the last years of the eighteenth century. Before tiie war was over rifled guns and armour had suggested possible powers that made their introduction a mere question of time. Bronze and cast iron, however, which were then employed for ordnance, offered only a limited scope for improvement. The first great step in advance was made when Sir William Armstrong brought forward his breech-loading polygrooved gun of wrought iron and steel. It was introduced into the service about 1858. After years of competition between rifled guns of various systems, we have arrived at the construction of which the 110^-ton Arm- strong gun furnishes the most notable example. This is made entirely of steel, the interior barrel being formed in a single tube, supplied by Whitworth, hooped and supported by steel cylinders shrunk on over it, the breech end being built up to with- stand the great stress falling on it. The exterior hoops are keyed on to each other in such a way as to resist longitudinal strain, while they are shrunk on with such tension as to support the inner tube against tearing or bursting laterally. If we owe much to Krupp, Whitworth, and Vavasseur for the successful use of steel, our gun in its most important structural features closely resembles the original Armstrong piece of 1858. It is a breechloader, polygrooved and built up. The last feature to notice in modern ordnance is their great length. The old 24- pomader, with a bore of 5'8 inches, was under 9 feet in length. The present 6-inch gun has a bore nearly 13 feet 8 inches long. This enables slow-burning powder to be used in such a way as to move the projectile forward with as much of a push and as little of a blow as possible. By this means the strain of the gun is brought to a minimum in proportion to the energy impressed on the projectile. Short guns and quick-burning powder came in as a false move. An old bronze gun mounted opposite to the THE NAVY 263 gates of the Royal Arsenal, Wool-wicli, wliioli was brought from Malta about the beginning of the century, has a bore of very nearly the length recommended at the present time. The history of projectiles has resembled that of guns in Projeo- one important feature, namely, the triumph of steel over all ^^'^^^^ other metal. Common shells — that is, shells filled with powder, and intended to act like a mine when they burst — had long been fired from mortars. Early in the present reign they were intro- duced into the Navy for guns. At the battle of Sinope the Turkish ships with one exception were destroyed by the Eussian common shell. Such an occurrence is now almost impossible. Comparatively thin armour will keep out fire, especially when shells strike obliquely, and burst at the face of the armour, so that dead metal only enters the vessel. The explosive effect of common shell, however, is formidable to the parts of ships not protected by armour. Steel shells may be used charged with gun-cotton and other explosives more destructive than powder, but great skill is necessary to enable them to be used safely. Should a shell burst prematurely in the bore of a gun, it will destroy it. Steel enables common shell to be made with thinner walls and larger bursting charges than is possible with iron. Sohd shot have long disappeared. With our long guns is used powder formed in large prisms instead of grains. It is made to burn slowly at first and more rapidly afterwards, so as to keep up the pressure till the projectile leaves the muzzle of the gun. Machine-guns of two classes have recently come in. The mitrailleuse proper fires over a hundred rounds a minute per barrel. One designed by Maxim discharges six hundred rounds per minute. These pieces are for mowing down infantry or repel- Img boarders. A larger machine-gun fires steel buUets to sink or repel torpedo-boats, and still heavier pieces, partaking of the nature of machine-guns, termed ' quick-firing guns,' are used for attacking the unarmoured parts of a ship. A 6-pounder fires about seventeen shells a minute without aiming, and about twelve rounds taking fair aim. A 40-pounder gun of this class has recently been made at Elswick. In 1837 the British seaman, like the infantry soldier, was. Small with few exceptions, armed with the smooth-bored musket known as ' Brown Bess.' Until 1837 this weapon had a flint lock. Its range was supposed to be about 200 yards, but it hardly carried, arms. 264 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA even wildly, farther than 188 yards, and with fair accuracy only up to 70 or 80 yards. It was difficult to load and fire faster than one round per minute for any length of time. With the Mini6 and Enfield rifles, which came in about the year 1853, much greater range and accuracy were attained. The introduction of breechloading small arms was initiated by Prussia, whose cele- brated ' needle rifle ' displayed the powers of breechloaders so remarkably that other nations, who for ten years had disregarded them, hastened in 1866 to convert their muzzle-loading rifles into breechloaders, and afterwards to replace them by more perfect arms. The Martini-Henry rifle, at present in the hands of the British seaman and soldier, is sighted up to 1,000 yards, at which range it possesses fair accuracy, while for general fire it is used up to 1,400 or 1,500 yards. With this piece a man may fire ten rounds per minute as long as his ammunition lasts. It is now, however, decided to replace this rifle by a ' magazine ' or ' repeating ' arm, which provides a certain number of rounds for rapid dehvery at any critical moment, by a single movement, without loading. A rifle thus provided is preferred, for the con- fidence it engenders, even to a single loading arm capable of firing forty rounds per minute. TiTavai Having traced the history of ordnance, a few words may with re- be appropriately added in vindication of the course pursued to'^guns by our naval administration in reference to guns. The Navy has been charged with yielding too much to prejudice in its resistance to breechloaders. The objections to that complicated system are obvious, and, when first introduced, breechloaders offered no particular advantages to com- pensate for the loss of strength and of simplicity of con- struction which they involved. Guns of the largest calibres then in use could be loaded as fast by the muzzle as by the breech. It is the introduction of the slow-burning powder, and the necessity for length of bore which it involves, which has compelled a change in the method of loading. The French have gained nothing by their earlier adoption of breechloaders. The slow-burning powder brings weapons. THE NAVY , 265 a strain upon parts of guns which, in the older patterns, ■were not prepared to bear them. The decision having now been made in favour of breechloaders, the British Govern- ment has taken in hand the difficult and costly work of re-arming the Navy, with a vigour which will soon enable them to recover the ground lost during a long and anxious period of deliberation. In the period embraced in the present review, two new Wew weapons have been introduced, and they are formidable rivals to the gun. The blow of the ram, if hard to deliver, is deadly in its effect. The terrible incidents of the battle of Lissa, and the losses of the ' Vanguard ' and the ' Grosser Kurfiirst,' testify to the tremendous power of the ram. All our battle-ships are now fitted with this weapon. Like the ram, the torpedo is an uncertain weapon, and how effective are the means of defence by cellular sub- division has been lately demonstrated by the experiments on the ' Eesistance.' Yet although not likely to supersede the heavy ships, the torpedo flotiUa has become an essential part of the Navy. It is now a conspicuous feature m the programme of building in the estimates submitted to Parlia- ment. The Hst of torpedo-vessels actually in progress in- cludes the following : twelve steel torpedo-cruisers of the ' Scout' class improved, of 1,630 tons; four torpedo-gun- boats of the ' Grasshopper ' class, 450 tons ; one gun and torpedo vessel, the ' Landrail,' 785 tons ; and forty torpedo- boats. The French Navy estimates for 1887 provide for work on three torpedo-cruisers and fifty torpedo-boats. From shipbuilding and sun-making we pass by a natural Exten- slon of transition to the dockyards. In the extension of our naval dock- establishments much has been done in the reign of Queen Victoria. The work will be described by Colonel Percy 265 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA Smith, the present head of this department at the Admi- ralty, and the successor of a line of engineer officers each of whom has rendered valuable services during his term of office. The principal alterations and improvements that have been made in the royal dockyards and naval establishments since her Majesty's accession may be summarised as follows : Portsmouth dockyard was first extended by the addition of a basin, opened for use by her Majesty in May 1848, and by the estabhshment of a steam factory. Li 1862 a further extension of the yard, by the reclamation of a part of the harbour, was commenced, and this is now nearly completed. It includes three close basins, or large wet-docks, having areas of 14, 14, and 22 acres respectively, and also a tidal basin of 10 acres. This tidal basin forms the approach to two looks, by which access is gained to the other new basins, and to a deep graving-dock. These locks and docks will receive the largest ships of the Navy at any time of tide, and one of the basins contains two additional graving-docks for the largest ironclads. The area of Portsmouth dockyard, which in 1837 was only 81 acres in extent, now contains 298 acres, and the number of graving-docks has been increased from seven to fourteen. Chatham dockyard, which in 1837 was 79 acres in extent, has been increased to 516 acres by the reclamation of the marshlands known as St. Mary's Island. St. Mary's Creek, which divided the island from the mainland, has been converted into three basins of 21, 20, and 28 acres respectively. The first of these basins has an entrance from the Medway, and contains four graving-docks, each of the largest dimensions. The last basin may be entered from Gillingham Eeach by two locks, which may also be used as graving-docks for the largest ironclads. A new yard was commenced at Keyham in 1844 ; it contains two basins of nine and seven acres respectively, in one of which are three very large graving-docks. It has also an extensive quadrangle, surrounded by storehouses and factories filled with machine-tools, the buildings for which, covering some three acres, were built from designs by the late Sir C. Barry, E.A. The old Devonport yard is connected with Keyham by a THE NAVY 267 tunnel and railway. It has an area of 72 acres, and has been lately improved by the addition of a dock to receive the largest modern ironclads of the Navy. In Ireland, the naval yard at Haulbowline, in Queenstown harbour, has been extended by the reclamation of the Spit Bank, on which a dockyard of 33 acres, containmg a basin of 10 acres, with a graving-dock capable of receiving the largest ships in the Navy, has been formed. These works are approaching completion ; and, upon the visit of the Prince and Princess of Wales in 1885, the naval establishment was named the ' Eoyal Alexandra Yard.' Turning to dockyards abroad, the most important is at Malta. This establishment, formerly confined within the limits of the Dockyard Creek, has been greatly enlarged and improved by the appropriation to the Navy of the whole of the French Creek, where a modern dock for the largest ironclads has been built, and another of the same description begun. Gibraltar yard has been protected by a ' mole ' or breakwater, and Bermuda has been provided with a steam factory, and with the largest floating-dock in existence. Naval yards have been established at Hong Kong and Esquimalt ; those at the Cape and Halifax, Jamaica and Trin- comalee, have been extended and improved, and coaling-stations at a great number of places have been formed. It should be mentioned that nearly all the large extension works referred to above were designed mider Colonel A. Clarke, E.E., C.B.,' and that, except at Malta, a large proportion of them was carried out by convict labour. Besides the extensive additions made by the Imperial Govern- ment to the dockyards, both at home and abroad, much has been done by colonial governments and by private enterprise, which has materially improved the dockhig facilities for her Majesty's ships in different parts of the world. In 1837 there was probably not a graving-dock in any of the British colonial possessions capable of receiving a ship of war of moderate size. There are now docks of large dimensions at Cape Town, Melbourne (Victoria), and Hong Kong, and smaller docks or shps at Singapore, Moulmein, Penang, Brisbane, Sydney, Hobart Town, Auckland, N.Z., Port Nicholson, Lyttelton, Otago, ' NowLieut.-Gen. Sir A. Clarke, G.C.M.G., C.B., CLE. 268 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA Mauritius, Demerara, Quebec, and St. John's, Newfoundland. Besides these a large dock has just been completed at Esquimalt, one is in hand at Kowloon (Hong Kong), and another at Halifax, each constructed by private companies with the aid of a subsidy from the Admiralty. Among. minor additions to the naval establishments, that have been made since the commencement of her Majesty's reign, may be mentioned the gunboat slips and experimental works at Haslar ; the gun-mounting, gunnery, and torpedo establishments, and the torpedo range (in hand) at Portsmouth ; the new barracks at Eastney and Keyham, and additions to the barracks at Forton and Plymouth ; the establishment for cadets on board H.M.S. ' Britannia ' at Dartmouth ; the conversion of part of Greenwich Hospital into a college for officers of the Navy, the enlarge- ment of the school attached to it to provide for the training of a thousand boys, and the college for engineer students at Keyham. Besides these, in all the dockyards the old docks have, where necessary to meet modern requirements, been enlarged or rebuilt, and new establishments have been erected in consequence of the introduction, first of steam machinery, and lately of modern ordnance and the torpedo. All the dockyards except Sheerness have been connected with the railway system of the country. The great breakwaters constructed during her Majesty's reign should be mentioned, though they were not exclusively intended to benefit the Navy. The breakwater at Plymouth was virtually completed in 1837, but the breakwater at Portland was com- menced by Mr. J. M. Eendel in 1848, and completed by Sir John Coode in 1871. Alderney breakwater, completed in 1864, and Dover pier, recently finished, were both carried out by Messrs. Walker and Burgess, C.E., and, lastly, the breakwater at Holy- head was commenced by Mr. J. M. Eendel in 1848 and com- pleted by Sir John Hawkshaw in 1873. Fortifl- In connection with the extension of the dockyards reference should be made to the great works carried out during the present reign for the defence of our naval arsenals. Public opinion was roused on this subject by the correspondence between Sir John Burgoyne and the Duke of Wellington. In his earnest appeal to the country, the cations. THE NAVY 269 illustrious soldier made use of the following impressive language : ' I am bordering upon seventy-seven years, passed in honour ; I hope that the Almighty may protect me from being witness of the tragedy which I cannot persuade my contemporaries to take measures to avert.' The question was referred, as usual in such cases, to a Commission, and in 1860 Lord Palmerston obtained the authority of Parliament for the commencement of the fortifications recommended in their report. The works are now complete, but they are still unprovided with guns. The necessary defences of our mercantile ports and our coaling- stations abroad are now in progress. Having dealt with the administration of the Navy in its General various departments, we turn to the active services of the navai Navy during the present reign. durSJ The first services of the Navy after the accession of her *^^ reign. Majesty were rendered in support of the military forces engaged in estabhshing order in Canada. The story of the rebeUion sounds strange to ears now accustomed only to warm and enthusiastic expressions of loyalty from every dependency of the Crown. In 1840 the fleet in the Mediterranean was engaged, Syria, under Admiral Stopford and Sir Charles Napier, in opera,- tions on the coast of Syria, which resulted in wresting that province from the Pasha of Egypt, Mehemet Ali, and restoring it to the Sultan. The next operations of the fleet on the Mediterranean Crimean "war. stations were on a more formidable scale. The story of the Crimean war has been told by many writers, and it need not be repeated in any detail in these pages. The embarka- tion of 27,000 men at Varna, and the landing at Eupatoria, the occupation of Balaklava, the bombardment of the forts of Sebastopol, the operations in the Sea of Azov, the skill and energy displayed by Lord Lyons and the younger men 270 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA The ' Skan- non' brigade. China. under his command, are fresh in the memory of our readers. The Navy, reduced to comparative inaction by sea, did good service on shore in support of the army. The guns were landed from the ships and batteries were formed, manned by men from the fleet. All through the siege the sailors were conspicuous for their cool courage and their skill as gunners. WhUe the main attack on Eussia was directed from the shores of the Crimea, a powerful fleet was twice despatched to the Baltic. Allusion has already been made to the slender results obtained, and to the causes of failure. The line-of-battle ships in those days were not adapted to the work which had to be done, and the great flotilla of gunboats and armoured batteries prepared for service in the Baltic and Black Seas, though built with marvellous rapidity, were not ready until the war had been brought to a close. The buildmg of these vessels was not, however, without its effect as affording evidence of the resources of England as a maritime power. The awful struggle of the Indian Mutiny followed closely on the Crimean war, and honourable mention must be made of the part taken by the crew of the ' Shannon ' under their gallant captain, Sir William Peel. By main force they dragged the heavy guns from their ship across the thirsty plains of India, and in the siege of Lucknow they planted them within a few yards of the massive stone walls of the fortress. In the China Sea, at various intervals between 1839 and 1860, disputes were frequent in connection with British trade. The issue with China was not the trade in opium. The case was clearly put by Captain Elhot in a despatch "to Lord Palmerston. ' The true and the more important question to be solved is whether there shall be honour- able and extending trade with the empire, or whether the coasts shall be delivered over to a state of things which THE NAVY 271 will pass rapidly from the worst character of illicit trade to plain buccaneering.' In February 1841 Hong Kong was ceded to the British plenipotentiary, Sir Henry Pottinger. Under the security inspired by our well-ordered rule, the island, which formerly was inhabited by 600 people hving on piracy, has now a population of 140,000, of whom 138,000 are Chinese. In wealth and prosperity Hong Kong is, for its extent, the most favoured spot upon the globe. In the course of the opera- tions carried on in 1841 and 1842, Amoy and Shanghai were captured, and Canton and Nankin would have fallen into our hands if the Chinese Government had not come to terms. The war was brought to a close by a treaty, in which it was agreed that Canton, Amoy, Foo-chow-foo, Ningpo, and Shanghai should be thrown open to British merchants, and the island of Hong Kong was ceded in perpetuity. The distinguished services rendered by Sir William Parker, in command of the naval force, were acknowledged by the thanks of Parliament, and by the gratifying letters from leading politicians on both sides which have recently been pubhshed in the life of the admiral by his old follower Admiral PhUlimore. One of Sir William Parker's greatest achievements in 1842 was the taking of a fleet of over 200 men-of-war and transports, with 19,000 men, for a distance of 200 miles up the Yang-tse-Kiang river to Nankin, with- out the aid of steam. In 1854, in consequence of the seizure of a vessel bear- ing a neutral flag in British waters, hostilities were once more renewed. During the Crimean war active operations were suspended, but they were continued in 1856. The naval force was under Admiral Sir Michael Seymour and Commodore Keppel (now Admiral of the Fleet Sir Henry Keppel, G.C.B.), and the military force under General von Straubenzee. The Bogue forts were taken, and in 1857 2/2 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA Burmah.. Opora- tions on coast of Egypt. the narrow passage of Fatshan was forced and the Chinese war fleet destroyed. Canton was subsequently captured, and it was determined to push the advantages aheady gained by an advance on Pekin. At the mouth of the Peiho, the attempt to take the forts by which the passage was defended was repulsed by the Chinese. The Navy suffered heavy losses, and Admiral Hope, who was in command, was wounded. The British force returned to Shanghai to await reinforcements. In 1860 a large force of troops was despatched to China under Sh Hope Grant, Sir Eobert Napier (now Lord Napier of Magdala) , and Sir John Michel. The fleet was still under the command of Admiral Hope. On this occasion the opera- tions were entirely successful. The Taku forts were captured, the Summer Palace was sacked, and Sir Eobert Napier marched through the gates into the city of Pekin. Our disturbed relations with Burmah have on frequent occasions called for the intervention of the Navy. In 1852 Eangoon and Bassein, Pegu and Prome, were captured by a combined naval and mihtary expedition. Captain Lambert was in command, and the late Admiral Tarleton particularly distinguished himself. As a result of the warfare reluctantly renewed in 1885, Upper Burmah has now been annexed by a royal proclamation to the British dominions. Passing over the wars at the Cape, in New Zealand, and in Ashantee, in all of which the Navy took part, we may conclude with a reference to the recent operations in Egypt. The bombardment of the forts of Alexandria, the change of base from Alexandria to Ismaiha, the seizure of the Suez Canal, and the operations on the Nile afforded to the Navy the opportunity for the display of all those quahties for which it has long been renowned. The command in the Mediter- ranean during these years of arduous exertion was held in succession by Sir Beauchamp Seymour (now Lord Alcester) THE NAVY 273 and Lord John Hay. The admirals were most ably seconded by the officers and men of their squadrons. Where all did so -well it would be invidious to mention individual names. In the operations in Egypt the efficiency of every arm of the service was put to the proof. The personnel in every branch gave evidence of the high training they had received, and that largely under officers to whom fortune had denied the opportunity of sharing in the honours awarded to those engaged on active service. It was under such men as Admirals Martin and Hornby that the Navy had been brought to that high standard of efficiency which was sig- nally illustrated in the operations of the Egyptian war. In every operation in which the Navy has been concerned Eoyai the Marines, so highly and so deservedly popular, have ■'^^'^"'®^- borne an honourable part. In the Egyptian war they were everywhere to the front, and want of space alone prevents us from giving a more detailed account of their services in the course of the present reign in Japan, in Mexico, and, indeed, in every part of the globe in which our forces have been actively engaged. Great services have been rendered by the Navy during the present reign in scientific exploration and nautical surveying. We are happy to be able to supply a summary of the work which has been done in this wide and interest- ing field from the pen of Captain Wharton, E.N., the present Hydrographer to the Navy. At the commencement of her Majesty's reign but little field Progress remained for discovery by sea, in the broad sense of the word. °j^'^"' The wide Pacific had yielded up its secrets, in the latter part of research, the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, to the refgn Cook and his successors. All the coasts and groups of islands of the habitable world had been sighted, and had more or less found their places on charts and maps. Of accurate surveys, however, there had been but few. Many lands had only been roughly sketched from a distance, and details were wanting in VOL. I. T 274 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA every quarter of the globe. It is to this more accurate charting that the majority of hydrographical labours have been directed. There were, nevertheless, two great exceptions to this general knowledge of the sea and its shores, to which attention was much turned in the early years of the Queen's reign. Of the regions environing the two poles little was known. The Antarctic was nearly a blank. The vague outlines of Graham, Enderby, and Kemp Lands, all discoveries of British sealing vessels, alone indicated that man had penetrated those icebound seas sufficiently far to sight land. To the Arctic many expeditions had been sent, each one adding a small something to existing knowledge ; but the possibility of a north-west passage to the Pacific, the dream of many years, was still unproved. In 1840 the celebrated expedition under Sir James Clark Eoss was despatched m the ' Erebus ' and ' Terror ' to explore the Antarctic. To mere exploration was added the desire of information on many scientific problems, notably those connected with terrestrial magnetism, and ably were the many duties of the expedition fulfilled. Balleny, in a small sealer, had in 1839 sighted the islands which bear his name, m lat. 67° S., long. 165° E. ; and Eoss, steering a Uttle to the east of them, plunged boldly into the pack, undeterred by the imminent danger run by his ships of being crushed by the ice in those stormy seas. After a long struggle of 130 miles, he passed into comparatively open water, and was re- warded by sighting and closing the land he caUed South Victoria. This lofty mountain mass, bound in eternal ice and snow, was traced for 400 miles to the south, till the ships found themselves face to face with an impassable barrier of ice cHffs, 200 feet in height, which stretched eastward across the path of the expedition from the foot of the active volcano of Mount Erebus, 12,000 feet in height, in lat. 77° 30' S. Following the icy cliff for 250 miles, Eoss was compelled by dense pack-ice to return to the north, after another vain attempt to find a harbour on the coast of South Victoria. Solid ice, however, lined the shore for many miles to seaward, and on two outlying islands only was he able to effect a landing. Constant magnetic observations in this and succeeding years enabled the position of the south magnetic pole to be fairly determined— a necessary knowledge for an accurate completion of magnetic theories. THE NAVY 27 S In the two following years, with many hairbreadth escapes of being destroyed by the ice — the two ships on one occasion lost their rudders in a gale in the pack — the indefatigable explorer was continually battling with the frozen sea. He attained the higher latitude of 78° 10' S. The ice, however, proved everywhere too dense to allow of approach to any more land, save to the southward of the South Shetlands, where the eastern coast of Louis PhiUppe Land was laid down, after which the expedition returned to England with the valuable results of many scientific observations. To Sir James Eoss belongs the honour of having first demonstrated the possibility of measuring the profound depths of the sea, soundings up to 2,670 fathoms having been obtained in the course of this voyage. The ' Pagoda,' Captain Moore, was sent in the following year to complete the magnetic survey in high southern regions where Eoss had not sailed ; but she only crossed the Antarctic circle in one place, and no land was sighted. In 1845 the Arctic was again attacked. Sir James Boss's two ships were sent, under Sir John Franklin and Commander Crozier, to seek the North-West Passage. Their fate is now weU known. Beset in the ice off King William's Land, in September 1846, they lost their commander in June 1847, and in the following year abandoned their ships, with the hopeless task before them of reaching on foot that mainland which none of them hved to see. Many search expeditions, however, hunted in vain before these facts were known, but much knowledge of Arctic lands was gained by them. Space does not permit of minute detail. From 1848, when the ' Plover ' sailed vi& Bering's Strait to the relief of Franklin, to 1857, when McClintock in the ' Fox ' discovered the relics of the lost expedition, not a year passed without not only ships of the Eoyal Navy, but private expeditions from Great Britain and the United States, by sea and by land, searching every channel and shore of these inhospitable regions for signs of it. There were at one time eight vessels in the Arctic employed on this search. One ship's company actually performed the North-West Pas- sage, that of the ' Investigator,' under Captain McClure, which entered the Arctic Sea by Bering's Strait in 1850 ; but the ship remained in Mercy Bay, on the northern shore of Banks Island, T 2 276 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA fast locked in the ice. McClure and his men in 1852 joined the ' Eesolute,' one of Sir Edward Belcher's squadron of four ships which had heen searching for Franklin from the eastward. All these four ships had eventually to be abandoned, and the united crews returned in 1854 in the ' Phoenix.' The ' Eesolute ' was, however, in 1856 drifted out by the ice into Baffin's Bay, and was returned by the United States to the Queen. In 1857, when the Government, assured that no member of the ill-fated expedition could survive, had given up the search, Captam McClintock in the ' Fox ' — a small steamer fitted out by Lady Franklin and her friends — sailed for a last examination of shores not previously visited, and in King William's Land first discovered the documents which told the story of the earlier disasters. He then tracked the course of the remnant of the crews by their whitening bones, and by the scattered relics left here and there as they had struggled onwards towards the mainland. Arctic exploration, so far as England was concerned, slept awhile until 1875, when, incited by the efforts of other countries, the British Government despatched the 'Alert ' and ' Discovery,' under Captain Nares, to endeavour to reach the pole itself by way of Smith's Sound. The attempt failed. The land, instead of extending north, as was hoped, turned east and west, in latitude 82° 20', leaving a sea covered with the densest and roughest ice, on which a party under Commander Markham made a desperate attempt to struggle north. After thirty-two days' labour, with slow progress, a latitude of 83° 20' was reached — the highest then attained by man — but failing provisions necessitated an immediate return. The south shore of this northern sea was traced for two hundred miles to the west, and for seventy miles to the north-east ; but the main object of the expedition being clearly impracticable, the ships returned home in 1876. In all, twenty-one expeditions, comprising thirty-three ships, together with boats from the northern shores of America, have sailed for the Arctic during the Queen's reign. Of the work of accurate charting of the oceans and their shores, that has occupied so much attention during the last fifty years, it is all but impossible to give a commensurate account in a brief compass. British surveying- vessels have been continu- ously employed, not only on our own shores and on those of our THE NAVY 277 numerous possessions, but in all seas traversed by British com- merce. The comparison of the Admiralty catalogue of charts in 1837 and 1887 will give the best idea of the vpork accomplished. Out of 2,700 charts now published by the Admiralty, 1,500 are wholly from surveys made by her Majesty's ships since 1837, and of the remainder many more are partially derived from such surveys. The 1,500 charts above mentioned are geographically dis- tributed as follows : British Islands 315 European shores of North Sea . 4 Baltic 3 France, Spain, and Portugal 1 Mediterranean 152 Islands in Atlantic .... 15 Arctic and N.E. American shores 168 West Indies 93 Eastern South America 82 Western shores of America 103 Africa and Indian Ocean . 128 East Indies to Sunda Strait 96 Chinese Seas . 172 Australia and New Zealand . 178 Pacific Ocean . 47 Intimately connected with the work of mapping the coasts and sounding the depths of the seas, is the determination of accurate positions. In 1837 many islands and shores were very erroneously placed in longitude. The work of connecting them with well-established positions, by means of chronometers, has been imremittingly carried on, with the result that at present there are few parts of the coasts of the world that are not correctly placed to a considerable degree of accuracy. The aid of the submarine and other electric telegraphs has also of late years been called in to assist in this work. In another particular, progress has been remarkable. In 1887 the great depths of ocean were unfathomed, and few attempts had been made to sound them. Before Boss's voyage no greater figure than 1,000 fathoms appeared upon the charts. Even after his success, little advance was made until 1861, when the United States commenced the work, and one of their officers devised a means by which specimens of the bottom of the sea could be brought up. 278 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA The demand for submarine cables which soon followed, necessitated knowledge of the sea-bed, and somading expeditions were carried on, in the first instance in the Atlantic, by British men-of-war. The Mediterranean, Eed Sea, and Indian Ocean were next sounded for a like purpose, and, later, oceanic depths have been ascertained, not only for cable-laying operations, but for scientific purposes, in all parts of the world, by her Majesty's surveying-ships and others. The most remarkable of these voyages was that of the ' Challenger ' in 1872-76, fitted out especially for scientific research in the depths of ocean. The results of this voyage, and of the labours of the staff of specialists employed in connection with it, have proved a remarkable gain to every branch of science. Observations on the depths, temperatures, and specific gravity of the seas have unveiled many of those secrets of the laws of oceanic circulation so necessary for a full understanding of meteorological and climatic changes. Biology has received fresh stores of knowledge. Life has been found possible at the most profound depths. Geology and astronomy have also been great gainers by the ' Challenger ' expedition, and probably no voyage, not even any of the celebrated Cook, has been so productive of lasting information. The greatest depth yet found is 4,650 fathoms (27,900 feet) to the eastward of Japan, but this is quite exceptional. The average depth of the great oceans may be considered to be about 2,200 fathoms. The meteorology of the seas has also received much attention. In 1837 the mariner, except in certain parts where regularity prevails, scarcely knew what winds or currents to expect. Systematic record and the digestion of many observations have resulted in charts being compiled of the winds and currents of the seas, by the help of which passages have been greatly shortened. The voyage to Australia, which formerly frequently occupied ninety days and more, is now often accomplished by sailing vessels in fifty days. Another notable outcome of these studies during the Queen's reign has been the unravelling of the compMcated movement of the destructive storms known as hurricanes. In 1838 Reid pub- lished the ' Law of Storms,' and he has been followed by many others. If all the intricacies of this law cannot yet be said to be perfected, the broader principles are perfectly understood, and THE NAVY 279 the knowledge now at the disposal of every navigator has saved many a ship and the Uves of those on board from destruction. In concluding this branch of the subject, it should be placed on record that the first Atlantic cable was laid in 1858 by H.M.S. ' Agamemnon ' and the United States frigate ' Niagara.' We have described briefly the development of the Navy. Conoiu- We have glanced at its honourable history during the long and happy reign of Queen Victoria. We have traced the revolutions which have taken place in the shipbuilding for the Navy. When the Queen acceded to the throne her fleets con- sisted of ships towering high above the water. Iron and steel have taken the place of those wooden walls renowned in ancient story, and our most powerful ships are almost entirely submerged beneath the waves. The clouds of can- vas swelling to the fitful breezes have given place to steam. A broadside of sixty guns has been concentrated in one monster piece of ordnance. In the Navy of the present, it may truly be said, nothing remains of the glorious past except the high professional skill and the courage, devotion, and patriotism for which British seamen have ever been dis- tinguished. My son, No sound is breathed so potent to coerce, And to conciliate, as their names who dare For that sweet motherland which gave them birth, Nobly to do, nobly to die. Their names Given on memorial columns, are a song Heard in the future ; few, but more than wall And rampart, their examples reach a hand Far thro' all years. On the necessity of a powerful navy to Great Britain it is not necessary to enlarge. For us the Navy is a defence against aggression. It is not a menace to the peace of the 28o THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA world. British officers have shown again and again that they know how to vindicate the honour of their country without abandoning the methods of concihation. It was by firmness, happily combined with forbearance, patience, and consummate tact, that Sir Alexander Milne pulled us through the ' Trent ' affair without a conflict ; that Admh-al Yelverton kept in check the Intransigentes at Cartagena without firing ; that Lord Alcester secured the fulfilment of the Treaty of Berlin for the advantage of Montenegro ; and that, on a late occasion, Lord John Hay, and his successor the Duke of Edinburgh, prevented war between Greece and Turkey. It was said of the great Duke of Wellington by Lord Derby, in an eloquent panegyric, that ' his object was not fame nor glory, but a lasting peace.' Such, and not less, should be our motive in seeking to maintain a supremacy at sea. In a volume commemorating the Queen's Jubilee it would not be fitting to close the chapter dedicated to the Navy without a dutiful acknowledgment of the repeated occasions on which her Majesty has manifested her deep interest in the sea service. Early in her reign she paid a pious tribute to the memory of Lord Nelson, by visiting the ' Victory ' on the anniversary of Trafalgar. She has passed in review many fleets and squadrons, and has never lost an opportunity of encouraging and acknowledging the patriotic enthusiasm of her sailors. Beasset. 28l THE ADMINISTRATION OF THE LAW FROM ^837 TO i887. No story can be more dif&cult to tell than that of the progress of reforms in the administration of the law during a period of fifty years. It consists for the most part of the history of countless changes of detail, many of which must remain absolutely unintelhgible to the greater portion of the pubHc. To comprehend their exact value would require a number of minute and technical explanations sufficient to fill, not merely one chapter, but several volumes. All that can be aimed at within the compass of a few pages is to endeavour to sketch in outline the broad features of a picture which it would be hopeless to attempt to render elaborate or complete. The recent fusion of the superior tribunals of the country into a single Supreme Court of Judicature is a landmark on which the attention of the lay world fastens, and which it in some measure can appreciate. Yet this change, important as it is, has only perfected and crowned a long course of simplification and reform, of which it is the logical consequence. Perhaps the best way of making the narrative understood by those who are not adepts in the language or the procedure of the law will be to explain briefly, even if it must of necessity be roughly, what the great English Courts of Justice were at the beginning of the reign, and the kind of imperfection that existed in their constitution and their practice. 282 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA The Eng- The ancient barrier which separated the several Courts of Courts the Common Law from the Court of Chancery still subsisted were^^ ^ the year 1837. Two systems of judicature, in many respects at variance with each other, flourished side by side under the famous roof of Westminster Hall. The principle of a division of labour by which distinct machinery can be accommodated to special subject-matter is based upon reason and convenience. A large portion of the law busi- ness of the country is made up of litigation in the result of which no one is directly interested but the rival com- batants. But there are many matters of which the law takes cognisance that necessitate a special and a more com- phcated mechanism for their adjustment. The property of infants, for example, requires to be protected — trusts to be managed day by day during a long period of years — the estates of deceased persons to be dealt with for the benefit of creditors, the assets to be collected and distributed, ac- counts to be taken, directions to be given, questions to be settled once for all that affect the interests of many. It is desirable that special tribunals should be armed with the particular organisation requisite for purposes such as these. The distinction between law and equity went, however, far beyond what was needed to carry out this natural division of labour. The two jurisdictions had no common historical origin, and the principles on which they administered justice were unUke. The remedies they afforded to the suitor were different ; their procedure was irreconcilable; they appHed diverse rules of right and wrong to the same matters. The common law treated as untenable claims and defences which equity allowed, and one side of Westminster Hall gave judgments which the other restrained a successful party from enforcing. The law had always cherished as its central principle the idea that all questions of fact could best be decided by a jury. THE ADMINISTRATION OF THE LAW 283 Except in cases relating to the possession of land, the relief it gave took, as a rule, the shape of money compensation, in the nature either of debt or of damages. The procedure of the Court of Chancery, on the other hand, was little adapted for the determination of controverted issues of fact, and it was constantly compelled to have recourse for that purpose to the assistance of a court of law. The common law had no jurisdiction to prevent a threatened injury ; could issue no injunctions to hinder it ; was incompetent to preserve property intact until the litigation which involved the right to it was decided ; had no power of compelling Litigants to disclose what documents in their possession threw a light upon the dispute, or to answer interrogatories before the trial. In aU such cases the suitor was driven into equity to assist him ui the prosecution even of a legal claim. The Court of Chancery, in its turn, sent parties to the Law Courts whenever a legal right was to be estabhshed, when a decision on the construction of an Act of Parhament was to be obtained, a mercantile contract construed, a point of commercial law discussed. Suits in Chancery were lost if it turned out at the hearing that the plaintiff, instead of filing his bill in equity, might have had redress in a law court ; just as plaintiffs were nonsuited at law because they should have rather sued in equity, or because some partnership or trust appeared unexpectedly on the evidence when all was ripe for judgment. Thus the bewildered litigant was driven backwards and forwards from law to equity, from equity to law. The conflict between the two systems, and their respective modes of redress, was one which, if it had not been popularly supposed to derive a sanction from the wisdom of our forefathers, might well have been deemed by an impartial observer to be expressly devised for the purpose of producing delay, uncertainty, and untold expense. 284 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA The com- The common law tribunals of Westminster Hall con- sisted of three great courts, each with a different history and originally different functions. In the growth of time, and by dint of repeated legislation, all, so far as the bulk of the litigation of the country was concerned, had acquu-ed equal jurisdiction, and no practical necessity was left for the maintenance side by side of three independent channels of justice, in each of which the streams ran in a similar fashion and performed the same kind of work. First came the Queen's Bench, composed of a chief justice and four puisne judges. Its authority was supreme over all tribunals of inferior jurisdiction. It took sovereign cognisance of civil and criminal causes alike — kept the Ecclesiastical Courts and the Admiralty within bounds, controlled magistrates and justices, supervised the proceedings of civil corporations, repressed and corrected all usurpations, all encroachments upon common right. It wielded two grea.t weapons of justice over public bodies : mandamus, whereby, when no other remedy appeared available, it compelled them to fuMl the law ; prohibition, by means of which it confined all inferior authorities strictly to their respective provinces and powers. The Court of Common Pleas, historically the most ancient of the three, which had retained, with no particular benefit to society, supervision over the few ancient forms of real actions that still survived, exercised also a general authority over personal actions. It was directed by a chief justice and four puisne justices. It laboured, how- ever, under the disadvantage that, as far as the general bar of England was concerned, it was a ' champ clos.' Serjeants- at-law had exclusive audience in it during term time, and it was not till 1847 that this vexatious and injurious monopoly was finally abolished. The Court of Exchequer had been from early years the special tribunal for dealing with matters in which the king's revenue was interested. It stiU THE ADMINISTRATION OF THE LAW 285 retained in revenue cases and some other matters a par- ticular jurisdiction, though clothed by this time (like the Queen's Bench and the Common Pleas) with power over all actions that were personal. Besides these functions, it was also a Court of Equitj^, and took part from time to time in the Chancery business of the realm. A chief baron was at the head, assisted by four puisne barons, of whom two still remain and preserve to us a title which otherwise would be extinct, the present Baron Pollock and Baron Huddleston. The procedure at the common law, as compared with Pro- the wants of the country, had become antiquated, technical, °^ ^^^' and obscure. In old days the courts at Westminster were easily able to despatch, during four short terms of three weeks each, together with the assizes and sittings at Guild- hall, the mass of the business brought before them. But, fi-om the beginning of the century, the population, the wealth, the commerce of the country had been advancing by great strides, and the ancient bottles were but imperfectly adapted to hold the new wme. At a moment when the pecuniary enterprises of the kingdom were covering the. world, when railways at home and steam upon the seas were creating everywhere new centres of industrial and commercialhfe,the Common Law Courts of the realm seemed constantly occupied in the discussion of the merest legal conundrums, which bore no relation to the merits of any controversies except those of pedants, and in the direction of a machinery that belonged already to the past. Frivolous and vexatious defences upon paper delayed the trial of a litigant's cause. Merchants were hindered for months and years from recovering their just dues upon their bills of exchange. Causes of action had become classified, as if they were so many Aristotehan categories — a system which secured learning and precision, but at the risk of encourag- ing technicality ; and two causes of complaint could not be 286 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA prosecuted in one and the same action unless they belonged to the same metaphysical ' form.' An action on a bond could not be joined with a claim upon a bUl of exchange. A man who had been assaulted and accused of theft in the market- place of his town was obliged, if he wished redress for the double wrong, to issue two writs and to begin two litigations, which wound their course through distinct pleadings to two separate trials. If a surprise occurred at Nisi Prius or the assizes, the court was unable to adjourn the proceedings beyond a single day. Old fictions still survived, invented in bygone ages to assist justice — with no particular harm left in them, it is true, but which were well fitted to encourage the popular delusion that English law was a mass of ancient absurdity. In order to recover possession of any piece of land, the claimant began his action by delivering to the defendant a written statement narrating the fictitious adventures of two wholly imaginary characters called John Doe and Eichard Eoe, personages who had in reahty no more existence than Gog and Magog. The true owner of the land, it was averred, had given John Doe a lease of the property in question, but John Doe had been forcibly and wrongly ejected by Eichard Eoe, and had in consequence begun an action of trespass and ejectment against him, Eichard Eoe, meanwhile, being a ' casual ejector ' only, advised the real defendant to appear in court and procure himself to be made defendant in the place of the indifferent and unconcerned Eichard Eoe, otherwise the defendant would infaUibly find himself turned out of possession. Till within the last twenty-six years, this tissue of invention of unreal persons and of non-existent leases preceded every investigation of the claim to possession of land. Nor was the trial itself of a common law cause productive of certain justice. Eight was Uable to be defeated by mistakes in pleading, by variances between the case as previously stated upon paper THE ADMINISTRATION OF THE LAW 287 and the case as it stood ultimately upon the evidence, or by the fact that the right party to the suit had not been nominally joined, or that some wrong party had been accidentally joined with him. Perhaps the most serious blemish of aU consisted in the established law of evidence, which excluded from giving testimony all witnesses who had even the minutest interest in the result, and, as a crowning paradox, even the parties to the suit themselves. ' The evidence of interested witnesses,' it was said, ' can never induce any rational belief.' The merchant whose name was forged to a bill of exchange had to sit by, silent and unheard, while his acquaintances were called to offer conjectures and behefs as to the authenticity of the disputed signature from what they knew of his other writings. If a farmer in his gig ran over a foot-passenger in the road, the two persons whom the law singled out to prohibit from becoming witnesses were the farmer and the foot- passenger. In spite of the vigorous efforts of Lord Denman and others, to which the country owes so much, this final absurdity, which closed in court the mouths of those who knew most about the matter, was not removed tm the year 1851. In a strictly Hmited number of cases the decisions of the Appeals, three courts could be reviewed in the Exchequer Chamber — a shifting body composed of alternate combinations of the judges, and so arranged that selected members from two of the courts always sat to consider such causes as came to them by writ of error from the third. The House of Lords, in its turn, was the appointed Court of Error from the Exchequer Chamber. The modern system of appeal, rendered necessary in our day by the weakening of the Courts in Banc and the development of what has been called the single- judge system, had not yet come into existence. Nor, in truth, on the common law side of Westminster HaU was 288 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA there any great necessity for it. The Queen's Bench, the Common Pleas, and the Exchequer — whatever the imperfec- tion of the procedure — were great and powerful tribunals. In each of them sat a chief of mark, with three puisnes to assist him, and the weight of authority of four judges, amongst whom there could not well fail to be present one or more men of the first rank of intellect and experience, was sufficient as a rule to secure sound law and to satisfy the public. The prestige, again, of the Exchequer Chamber in such cases as were allowed to reach it upon error was of the highest order. But the principle upon which appeals were allowed by the law in some matters, and refused in others, was full of anomahes. Only matters of ' error ' which were apparent on the record could be the subject of a hearing in the Exchequer Chamber. No appeal lay on subjects so important as a motion for a new trial or to enter a verdict or a nonsuit — motions which proceeded on the assumption of miscarriages in law by the judge or the jury who tried the cause. If the aggrieved party had not succeeded in complying at the trial with the difficult formalities of the rule as to bills of exceptions — an old-fashioned and often impracticable method of chaUenging the direction of a judge — no review of it was possible. Error lay from a special verdict, where the parties had arranged, or the judge directed at the trial, a special statement of the facts. No error lay upon a special case framed without a trial by consent. That is to say, no appeal was permitted unless the expensive preliminary of a useless trial had first been thrown away. Arrears. The technicaUties which encumbered the procedure of the courts furnished one reason, no doubt, for the arrears which loaded the lists at the accession of her Majesty. Other accessory causes may be found in the survival till a late date of the old-fashioned term of three weeks, recurring four times a year, at the end of which the courts ceased THE ADMINISTRATION OF THE LAW 289 sitting to decide purely legal questions while the three chiefs repaired to jury trials at Nisi Prius. It was not till after the beginning of the reign that an Act of Parhament was passed which enabled the Queen's Bench, the Common Pleas, and the Exchequer to dispose in Banc sittings after term of business left unfinished on thek hands. Under the old system, the last day of term was famous for the crowd of counsel and of solicitors solely intent upon having their pending rules ' enlarged,' or, in other words, adjourned till term should again begin. The Queen's counsel in the front benches spent the day in obtaining the formal leave of the court to this facile process, and in marking each brief in turn with a large ' E ' as the token of a regular ' enlargement.' ' How do you manage to get through your business in the Queen's Bench ? ' said a spectator to the late Sir Frederick Thesiger (afterwards Lord Chelmsford). ' We find no difficulty,' said the eminent counsel; 'we do it always with great " Ease." ' At the beginning of 1837, the accumulation of arrears in the Queen's Bench, to which court the great bulk of business necessarily drifted, had been most formid- able. Three hundred cases of various descriptions were waiting for argument in Banc. The haw Magazine of two years later still complained, in its notice of the current events of the quarter, that the Banc arrears had reached to such a pass that a rule nisi for a new trial could not in all probability be disposed of under two years and a half from the time of granting it, at the end of which time, if the appKcation were even granted, the cause would still have to be reheard. The Court of Chancery was both a judicial tribunal and The old an executive department of justice for the protection and chan- administration of property, but the machinery that it em- ployed for the two purposes was, unfortunately, not kept dis- tinct. Its procedure in contentious business served as the VOL. I. u eery. 290 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA basis of its administrative operations, and persons between whom there was no dispute of fact at all found themselves involved in the delays and the embarrassments of a need- less lawsuit. In its judicial capacity the Court of Chancery gave effect to rights beyond the reach of the common law, corrected the evils that flowed from the imperfect jurisdic- tion and remedies of the Common Law Courts, and dealt with whole classes of transactions over which it had acquired a special cognisance. The code of ethics which it administered was searching and precise — academical, perhaps, rather than worldly, the growth of the brains of great masters of learnmg and of subtlety, whose maxims and refinements had crystallised into a system. But its practice was as dilatory and vexatious as its standard of right and wrong was noble and accurate. For deciding matters of conflicting testimony it was but little fitted. It tossed about as hopelessly in such cases as a ship in the trough of the sea, for want of oral testimony — asimple and elementary method of arriving at the truth, which no acute- ness can replace. It had no effective machinery at all for the examination or the cross-examination of witnesses, and (as we have seen) fell back upon the Common Law Courts when- ever questions of pure law were raised, or as soon as depo- sitions and affidavits became hopelessly irreconcilable. Oral evidence had always been at common law the basis of the en- tire system, although the common law perversely excluded from the witness-box the parties to the cause who naturally knew most about the truth. The Court of Chancery, on the other hand, allowed a plaintiff to search the conscience of the defendants, and the defendants, by a cross bill, to perform a A Chan- similar operation upon their antagonist, but only permitted ''bin.' the inquiry to be on paper. A bill in a Chancery suit was a marvellous document, which stated the plaintiff's case at full length and three times over. There was first the part in THE ADMINISTRATION OF THE LAW 291 which the story was circumstantially set forth. Then came the part which ' charged ' its truth against the defendant — or, in other words, which set it forth all over again in an aggrieved tone. Lastly came the interrogating part, which converted the original allegations into a chain of subtly framed inquiries addressed to the defendant, minutely dovetailed and circuitously arranged so as to surround a slippery conscience and to stop up every earth. No layman, however intelligent, could compose the ' answer ' without professional aid. It was inevitably so elaborate and so long, that the responsibility for the accuracy of the story shifted, during its telling, from the conscience of the defendant to that of his solicitor and counsel, and truth found no difficulty in disappearing during the opera- tion. Unless the defendant lived within twenty miles of London, a special commission was next directed to solici- tors to attest the oath upon which the lengthy answer was sworn, and the answer was then forwarded by sworn mes- senger to London. Its form often rendered necessary a re- statement of the plaintiff's whole position, in which case an amended bill was drawn requiring another answer, until at last the voluminous pleadings were completed and the cause was at issue. By a system which to lawyers in 1887 appears to savour of the Middle Ages, the evidence for the hearing was thereupon taken by interrogatories written down beforehand upon paper and administered to the witnesses in private before an examiner or commissioner. At this meeting none of the parties were allowed to be present, either by themselves or their agents, and the examiner himself was sworn to secrecy. If cross-examined at all (for cross-examination under such conditions was of necessity somewhat of a farce), the witnesses could only be cross-examined upon written in- quiries prepared equally in advance by a counsel who had never had the opportunity of knowing what had been said ■0 2 292 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA during the examination-in-chief. If the examination was in the country, it took place at some inn before the com- missioner and his clerk, the iDrocess seldom costing less than 60L or 70L It often lasted for days or weeks, at the end of which its mysterious product was sealed up and forwarded to London. On the day of the publication of the depositions copies were furnished to the parties at their own expense ; but, from that moment, no further evidence was admissible, nor could any slip in the proofs be repaired, except by special permission of the court, when, if such leave was granted, a fresh commission was executed with the same Lengtii formalities and in the same secret manner as before. The and cost of trials, expense of the pleadings, of the prejoaration for the hearing, and of the other stages of the litigation may be imagined, when we recoUect that it was a necessary maxim of the Court of Chancery that all parties interested in the result must be parties to the suit. If, for example, rehef was sought against a breach of trust, all who were mterested in the trust estate had to be joined, as well as all who had been privy to the breach of trust itself. During the winding journey of the cause towards its termination, whenever any death occurred, bills of reviewer supplemental suits became necessary to reconstitute the charmed circle of litigants which had been broken. On every such catastrophe the plaintiff had again to begin wearily to weave his web, hable on any new death to find it unravelled and undone. It was satirically observed that a suit to which fifty defendants were necessary parties (a perfectly possible contingency) could never hope to end at all, since the yearly average of deaths in England was one in fifty, and a death, as a rule, threw over the plaintiff's bill for at least a year. The hearing in many cases could not terminate the cause. Often inquiries or accounts were necessary, and had still to be taken under the supervision of a master. Possibly some THE ADMINISTRATION OF THE LAW 293 issue upon the disputed facts required to be sent for trial at the assizes, or a point of law submitted to a common law court. In such cases, the verdict of the jury, or the opinions of the court so taken, in no way concluded the conscience of the Court of Chancery. It resumed charge of the cause again, when the intermediate expedition to the common law was over, and had the power, if it saw fit, to send the same issue to a new trial, or to disregard altogether what had been the result. In a case which was heard in February 1830, there had been seven trials, three before judges and^ four before the Chancellor, at the close of which the suit found its way upwards to the House of Lords. "When a cause had reached its final stage — when all inquiries had been made, all parties represented, all accounts taken, all issues tried — justice was done with vigour and exactitude. Few frauds ever in the end successfully ran the gauntlet of the Court of Chancery. But the honest suitor emerged from the ordeal victorious rather than triumphant, for too often he had been ruined by the way. Courts where ultimate justice is achieved, but where delay and expense reign supreme, became at last a happy hunting-ground for the fraudulent. The hour for reform has struck when the law can be made an instrument of abuse. We must not make a scarecrow of the law, Setting it up to fear the birds of prey. And let it keep one shape till custom make it Their perch and not their terror. With all its distinction and excellence, the Court of Equity was thus practically closed to the poor. The middle classes were alarmed at its very name, for it swallowed up smaller fortunes with its delays, its fees, its interminable paper pro- cesses. The application of such a procedure to the large class of transactions, where no fact was in dispute, and only the careful administration of an estate required, was a cruel 294 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA burden upon proiDerty. A large portion of the cases before the Court of Chancery had ' nothmg of hostihty and very Httle of contentious htigation in them.' Trusts, it may be, had to be administered, obscure wills or deeds to be inter- preted, assets of a deceased person to be got in, classes ascertained, creditors paid. Though nobody wished for war, yet all the forms of war had to be gone through — the plaintiff and the various defendants drew out the pleadings in battle array, interrogated and answered, took evidence upon commission, examined and cross-examined upon paper. 'It is a matter of frequent occurrence in court,' say the Chancery Commissioners of 1851, ' to see cases encumbered with statements and counter-statements, evidence and counter-evidence, with which the parties have for years been harassing each other, although there has been throughout no substantial dispute as to the facts, and although the real question lies in a very narrow compass, and would probably have been evolved in the first instance if the court had had the power summarily to ascertain and deal with the facts. The judges of the court were the Lord High Chancellor judges. (who then, as now, was a pohtical officer and changed with every change of Ministry) ; the Master of the Eolls stood next in dignity ; last came the Vice-Chancellor of England — a judge who in 1813 had been created to relieve the X^ressure. Some equity work was also done by the Chief Baron, or, in his stead, a puisne baron sitting on the equity side of the Exchequer ; but this could only be during a limited portion of the year. The ai^pellate system was defective in the extreme. The Chancellor sat singly on appeals from the Vice-Chancellor of England and from the Master of the Eolls (whose inferior in the science of equity he easily might be), and presided in the House of Lords over the hearing of appeals from himself — a position the less satisfactory inasmuch as, owing to the imperfect con- CliaTicery THE ADMINISTRATION OF THE LAW 295 stitution of that august tribunal, the Chancellor was very often its ruling spirit. These appellate functions left him not too much time to bestow on his own duties as a Chancery- judge of first instance. To a court so loaded with pro- cedure and so undermanned in its judicial strength, the Chancery business of this kingdom, contentious or non-con- tentious, metropohtan or provincial, all flowed. A formid- able hst of arrears naturally blocked the entrance of the Temple of Equity. At the beginning of January 1839, 656 causes and other matters were waiting to be heard by the Chancellor and the Vice-Chancellor. Those at the head of the hst, excluding all which had been delayed by accidental cu'cumstances alone, had been set down and had been ripe and ready for hearing for about three years. Three hundred and three causes and other matters were in like manner waiting to come on before the Master of the Rolls. Those at the head of his list had been standing about a year and a half. The total amount of causes set down and to be heard was 859, and it was facetiously observed that a greater arrear would probably never appear in the lists of the Court of Chancery — seeing that it had become wholly useless to enter any cause which was not to be brought on out of its turn as a short or consent cause. Since in each suit there were on an average two hearings, each destined to be separated by a period of something like two years, it was obvious that, in even the most ordinary litigation — such, for example, as that which involved the payment of debts or legacies out of a deceased man's estate — four years must be wasted in absolute inactivity, over and above any delays that might occur in taking accounts or prosecuting in- quiries. If, as seemed possible to skilled observers of the day, the Chancellor should prove unable to do more than keep pace with his appellate work, it would be— so they cal- culated—six years before the last in the hst of 1839 came 295 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA on for hearing even on its first stage ; if a second hearing was required, thirteen years or more would elapse before this was reached ; while, if on the final hearing the master's report was successfully objected to, the long process must begin de novo. ' No man, as things now stand,' says in 1839 Mr. George Spence, the author of the well-known work on the equitable jurisdiction of the Court of Chancery, ' can enter into a Chancery suit with any reasonable hope of being alive at its termination, if he has a determined adversary.' The Attached to the Court of Chancery, performing a large masters. portion of its functions, responsible — if we are to believe the torrents of criticism directed against them during the earlier portions of the reign — for much of its delay, were the masters of the Court of Chancery, their offices, and their staff of clerks. One great blot upon this portion of the Chancery system was that it was for all practical pur- poses under the control and superintendence of nobody in particular. The office of master of the court was one of historical dignity and antiquity. His duty in 1837 was to act in aid of the judge, to investigate and report upon such matters as were referred to him, including the investigation of titles, to take complicated accounts, to superintend the management of property of infants and other incompetent persons within the jurisdiction, and to be responsible for taxation of costs. A considerable portion of these judicial and ministerial duties he discharged by deputy. The work was done in private with closed doors, removed from the healthy publicity which stimulates the action of a judge. There was little practical power to expedite proceedings or force on the procrastinating litigant. At the beginning of the reign, complaints were loud both as to the expense and the delays in the masters' offices ; and one of the best in- formed Chancery lawyers of that day recorded it as his opinion, in the year 1839, that, with proper regulations in THE ADMINISTRATION OF THE LAW 297 those offices, nearly double the quantity of business might be done and with greater promptitude. The Chancery judges at this period only sat in open court, and did not despatch business at chambers, and the great pressure of arrears and the want of a chamber jurisdiction caused a good deal to be shunted upoii the master's office with which the judge himself would have been the best person to deal. Much legal literature during the beginning of the reign was devoted to attacking and defending the institution of the masters in Chancery ; but when at a later period it fell, it fell with the general assent of the legal world. A system of payment of officials by fees is often synonym- ^j^g ous with a system of sinecures, of monopolies, of work oi^rks done by deputy, as well as of work protracted and delayed. To such an epoch of administrative laxity belonged the origin of the institution of ' the six clerks,' whose places were worth about 1,600Z. a year, and who were in theory at _ the head of a body of officers called the ' clerks in court.' Mr. Edwin Field, a well-known solicitor of position, in a pamphlet published in 1840, tells us, that although he had been almost daily in the ' six clerks ' office during a con- siderable part of twenty years, he had never to his know- ledge seen any one of the ' six clerks,' nor could he conceive of a sohcitor or a solicitor's clerk having any occasion to see one officially. He believed that most of the ' clerks in court ' did not know even by sight the ' six clerks ' to whom they were nominally attached. The ' clerks in court ' were officers who were supposed to be irpo^svoi of the suitor and of the suitor's solicitor. They were twenty-eight or thirty in number, and presided over the copying of records, the issue of writs, the signing of consents, the service of notices — for notices were served upon them by proxy, which they then sent on by post or by messenger to the solicitor in the cause. They also acted as mediators in taxing costs, 298 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA for which they were paid by fees in proportion to the length of the bills to be taxed. Most of this work, however dili- gently performed, was useless, for it might have been done by the suitor's own sohcitor ; but, useless as it was, it was lucrative to the clerks in court, and the chief clerk in each court received, it was said, an income varying from 3,000Z. to 8,000Z. The chief argument in favour of the institution was that the clerks in court were the repositories of the practice of the court. Whether they were the pundits their adherents represented, it is difficult at this interval of time to decide ; but an anecdote survives, accordmg to which an eminent Chancery Queen's Counsel, being consulted on a point of practice, recommended his client to ask his ' clerk in court,' and to do exactly the oj)posite of what that official should advise. Eeforms Such, roughly speaking, were the salient defects of the cedure, Superior Courts of this kingdom, in the year 1837. To attempt on the present occasion to follow the changes as . one by one they have been made, would be to lose oneself and to drown the reader in a sea of detail and of technicality. But, from the above outhne, it will not be difficult for any- one to determine what kind of shape any legal reform was bound to take that was to be worthy of the name. In the first place, the distinction between the Chancery and Common Law Courts required to be swept away, except so far as it was founded on a natm-al division of labom\ The Common Law and the Chancery Court each demanded to be clothed with complete and independent powers, and ren- dered competent to do in every individual instance full and perfect justice within its own four walls. The law and the equity which were to be administered needed to be made similar in each, the rights recognised by the one to be the same as those enforced by the other ; the remedies given to be identical and in both final. The law of evidence at THE ADMINISTRATION OF THE LAW 299 common law still laboured under the terrible absurdity ■which declined to permit of evidence from the parties to the action. A suit in Chancery had yet to be relieved of the mass of paper which swamped it, oral examination of parties and witnesses to be introduced, and both party and witness brought face to face with the judge who was to debide the cause. Technicalities on either side of Westminster Hall needed to be rooted out, and machinery provided to enable the opinion of the courts to be promptly and expeditiously obtained, without useless preliminaries, whether they took the shape of pleadings, or commissions, or trial. The staff of Chancery judges was moreover hopelessly inadequate, and as every Chancery judge sits singly, a satisfactory system of appeal in Chancery was essential. The of&ces of the masters in Chancery and of the clerks wanted to be over- hauled, the progress of references and accounts brought more directly under the eye and supervision of the judge, arrears dealt with, delays minimised. Law reformers looked for- ward, but not with too sanguine anticipations, to some coming time, when a sovereign of the land might say, in the language of Lord Brougham, that ' he found law dear and left it cheap, found it a two-edged sword in the hands of craft and of oppression, left it the staff of honesty and the shield of innocence.' All of these evils, most of the requisite remedies — both of com- for common law and for Chancery — were pointed out by the courts, legal profession fifty years ago. But it was then the habit in England to advance slowly in the du-ection even of necessary change. By degrees, however, the horizon brightened, and improvement upon improvement became law. Six years after her Majesty's accession. Lord Denman — Chief Justice of the Queen's Bench and father of the present Mr. Justice Denman — carried an Act removing the archaic fetter by which persons interested in the result of an action or suit 30O THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA were disabled from becoming witnesses. Eight years later still, another statute rendered the parties to almost all civil proceedings competent and compellable to give evidence. Commissions sat to inquire into the procedure of the common law. Three Procedure Acts, the fruit of their labours, cleared it of its technicalities, improved its ma- chinery, extended its remedies, and laid finally to rest most of the abuses above described. In connection with this in- valuable work — which deserves from its importance to be called the Eeformation of the English Common Law— a grateful country ought not to forget the names of Sir John Jervis (from 1850 to 1856 Chief Justice of the Common Pleas) ; of Mr. Baron Martm, with whom law was synonym- ous with shrewd common sense ; of the late Sir Alexander Cockburn, the versatile and eloquent Chief Justice of the Queen's Bench ; of Lord Bramwell, a great lawyer who lives to survey the success of his own handiwork ; of the late Mr. W. A. Walton; of Mr. Justice Willes, whose brilliant and subtle learning was lost to the nation by an untimely death. lof Court Progress of no less moment was taking place m Chancery. Trustee Pvelief Acts, Acts to diminish the delay and cost, and to amend the practice and course of procedure, to abolish the circumlocution office of the masters, to en- able the Chancery judges to sit in chambers so as to facilitate the management of estates, and to allow the opinion of the court to be obtained in a more summary and less expensive manner, followed in due course. Misjoinder of plaintiffs ceased to be a ground for dismissal of a suit ; rules for classi- fying the necessary defendants, and for minimising their number, were laid down. The effete system of taking evidence disappeared ; the pleadings, the takmg of accounts, the pro- gress of inquiries were simpHfied and subjected to control. The court was enabled to do speedy justice without the long bf Clian eery. THE ADMINISTRATION OF THE LAW 301 preliminaries of a hearing. A code of orders was drawn up regulating the chamber practice. The Chancery Court was freed from the necessity of consulting the common law, and power was conferred upon it of giving damages in certain cases to avoid recourse to law. New Vice-Chancellors were appointed, and a Court of Appeal created, with two Lords Justices and the Chancellor at its head. The roll of names connected with this gigantic reformation is long. Upon it stand Lord Cottenham, her Majesty's first Lord Chan- cellor, and the other Chancellors of her reign. The council of the Incorporated Law Society occupy a conspicuous and honourable position in the van of other law reformers. In addition to these may be mentioned Lord Langdale and Lord Eomilly, Sir J. Knight Bruce, Sir George Turner, Vice-Chancellor Parker, Mr. Justice Crompton, the late Mr. Edwiu Field, the late Mr. W. Strickland Cookson, and the late Lord Justice James, whose broad and lucid mind was till recently an element of strength in our new Court of Appeal, and whose services in the cause of reform, both at law and in equity, if equalled, have certainly not been surpassed by any lawyer of modern times. ' Multi praeterea, quos fama obscura recondit.' The sketch of English justice at Westminster Hall in The old bygone days would hardly be complete if no mention were raity and made of three important courts which, during the present siaaticai reign, found their way thither, and have since followed the '^°^^'^*^- fortunes of the common law — the Court of Admiralty, the Court of Probate, and the Court of Divorce. The Admiralty in 1837 did not enjoy its present powers or importance. Borrowing from abroad the procedure of the civilians and the rules of foreign maritime law, confined for centuries within the bounds of a narrow jurisdiction by the prohibi- tion of the Court of Queen's Bench, the Admiralty Court had only been rescued from obscurity by the great wars of 302 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA the reign of George III., by the prize cases for which it was the necessary tribunal, and by the genius of Lord StoweU. But its range still continued hmited, and its rules occasion- ally conflicted with the rules of the common law. The spiritual or ecclesiastical courts of the country from an early period had exercised authority in matters of testacy and intestacy as regarded personal estate, had issued pro- bates of the wills of those who died possessed of personalty, and letters of administration of the estates of those who died without a will. The bulk of the testamentary business of the Ecclesiastical Courts was chiefly non-contentious — formal representative proceedmgs where no dispute arose. If the validity of a will or the title to administer was chal- lenged, a suit became necessary, and to this all parties interested were cited. A number of spiritual courts or chambers scattered through England took cognisance of this testamentary procedure — the courts of the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, the diocesan courts of the bishops, the archdeacons' courts, and other tribunals of still more limited jurisdiction. The Court of Arches, which belonged to the Archbishop of Canterbury, served as the appellate centre for the province of Canterbury, and from it a further appeal lay to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, a body that had been recently substituted for the Court of Delegates of Henry VIII. Doctors' Commons was the place where the principal ecclesiastical proceedings were held, and a body of advocates and proctors enjoyed in it a monopoly by which the general profession was excluded from audience and practice. All judges and officers of the spiritual courts were appointed by the prelates, and the other functionaries over whose tribunals they presided. They were sometimes lawyers of position, sometimes lawyers of no position at all, some- times clergymen, and were usually paid by fees. Many offices were granted in succession and reversion, deputies THE ADMINISTRATION OF THE LAW 303 discharging the duties, of which the emokiments were con- siderable. The inefficiency of the judges, the variations of practice and procedure, the expense, the delay, the fre- quently inconsistent and mistaken views of law and of fact adopted by the different authorities, the anachronism of a system which permitted civil rights to be decided by judges not appointed by, nor responsible to, the Crown, and, finally, a general sense that these tribunals were a soil in which abuses grew and flourished, rendered their fall inevitable. The flavour, the air, the humorous absurdity of many abuses in many branches of the law have been pre- served to us by the pen of Charles Dickens. Writers of sentimental fiction not unfrequently exercise their powers of sarcasm on the subject of the enormities of law by inventing for the law courts an imaginary procedure which never yet was seen, and then denouncing its iniquities. But the caricatures of English law, at the beginning of the reign, which Dickens has made immortal are full of the insight of a great artist— come direct from the brain of one who has sat in court and watched — represent real scenes and incidents as they might well appear to the uninitiated in the ' gallery.' His pictures of the Chancery suit of ' Jarndyce and Jarndyce ; ' of the common jury trial of ' Bardell v. Pickwick ; ' of the debtors' prison, of the beadle, of the con- stable, of the local justice, and of the local justice's clerk, contain genuine history, even if it is buried under some extravagance. In ' David Copperfield ' he has sketched with his usual felicity the fraternity of Doctors' Commons and the ecclesiastical officials who thronged its purlieus. Like so many other of the antiquated subjects of his satire. Doctors' Commons was soon destined to decay. A royal Court of Probate was established in its place at Westmin- ster Hall, with district registries throughout the kingdom ; and the various ecclesiastical jurisdictions which the new 304 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA court superseded ceased to exist thenceforward, so far as testamentary causes were concerned. Divorce. The creation in 1858 of a Court for Divorce and Matri- monial Causes has been a measure, necessary no doubt, but not productive of unmixed benefit. Divorce a vinculo 7natrimonii, fifty years ago, was unrecognised by English jurisprudence, except where it was the result of an Act of Parliament. The laxer law of an exceptional period which followed upon the English Keformation had long disap- peared, and from the close of the seventeenth century down to the recent statutes of our own days no one could be divorced otherwise than by the Legislature. After the year 1798, Parliament had declined to grant the relief to any husband who had not previously obtained damages at law against the adulterer, and prosecuted a further suit in the Ecclesiastical Courts for a divorce a mensd etthoro. When a Divorce Bill reached the Commons from the Lords, the question of adultery had thus been tried three times over. The practice was adopted in 1840 of referring such cases to a Select Committee of nine members, who heard counsel and examined witnesses. This was the fourth and not the least expensive inquiry of all. A divorce in 1837 was there- fore a luxury of the wealthy — a pririlegium beyond the reach of a poor man's purse. Its average cost in an ordinary case was estimated at from 1,000Z. to 1,500L An anecdote — -timeworn among the bar — relates that the final stimulus to the change of public opinion which brought about reform was supplied by the caustic humour of the late Mr. Justice Maule. He was trying for bigamy a prisoner whose wife had run away with a paramour and left him with no one to look after his children and his home. ' Prisoner at the bar,' said the judge to the disconsolate Ijigamist, who com- plained of the hardship of his lot, ' the institutions of your country have provided you with a remedy. You should have THE ADMINISTRATION OF THE LAW 305 sued the adulterer at the assizes and recovered a verdict against him, and then taken proceedings by your proctor in the Ecclesiastical Courts. After their successful termina- tion, you might have applied to Parliament for a Divorce Act, and your counsel and your witnesses would have been heard at the Bar of the House.' ' But, my lord,' pleaded the culprit, ' I cannot afford to bring actions or obtain Acts of Parliament ; I am only a very poor man.' ' Prisoner,' said Mr. Justice Maule, ' it is the glory of the law of England that it knows no distinction between the rich and the poor.' The present Divorce Court, whatever the social evil it has revealed, at least has brought within reach of the humble that which was supposed to be for the public advantage in the case of the rich. The nation has been fortunate in this, that a branch of justice so difficult has been administered in succession by presidents of singular personal dignity, wisdom, and discretion. To the practical arbitrament of the Courts of Common Election petitions. Law was transferred, after no long interval, another class of cases of much importance to the State^the trials of contro- verted election petitions. At the time when her Majesty succeeded to the throne, the cognisance of such matters belonged exclusively to the House of Commons. Through a moral blindness which party politics occasionally encourage, the election committees of the House had become a tribunal as untrustworthy as if they had been pecuniarily corrupt. The composition of each committee proceeded upon strictly party lines. On the day appointed for the ballot the friends of the respective Utigants were collected by a ' whip.' Out of a House of a hundred members, thirty-three names were drawn, and these again reduced to eleven by repeated challenges — a process facetiously known as ' knocking out the brains of the committee.' The Parliament court so chosen had often to decide difficult matters of law, on which VOL. I. x 3o6 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA the validity of votes or the quahfication of voters or of candi- dates in former days might depend ; often to determine issues of fact as to bribery or intimidation. In the result, the sitting members were seated or unseated with more regard to the colour of their politics than to any merits of the case. ' The tribunal,' says Mr. Charles Buller in 1836, 'is selected under a system by which those who have any pro- fessional acquirements, admitted abilities, proved industry or marked consideration in the pohtieal world are too often studiously excluded from it.' ' We do not exaggerate,' ob- serves the Liaw Magazine, of 1837, ' when we say, that during the last two or three sessions none but the uninitiated ever dreamed of supposing that the right to a disputed seat would be decided by the merits of the case.' In 1838, a writer in Fraser calculates that there had been ten Whig committees, and that they had decided in every case in favour of Whig members. In the session of 1838, twenty- four Whig committees, it was alleged, had defeated petitions against twenty Whigs and unseated six Tories, while they had only unseated two Whigs and dismissed two Whig petitions. During the like period, sixteen Tory committees appeared to have dismissed petitions against four Tories and unseated eight Whigs, while two Tories only were unseated and two Tory petitions were unsuccessful. Before the system was ultimately abohshed a growing sense of public duty had substantially curtailed its gravest abuses, but the judicial vindication of electoral purity ought, like Caesar's wife, to be above suspicion. The House of Commons, while reserving to itself the formal shadow of supreme jurisdiction, has at last delegated to the judges of the land the duty of dealing with these election controversies ; and, in addition to the exacter justice thus secured, it is some advantage to the public that election petitions are now tried in the locality where the transactions THE ADMINISTRATION OF THE LAW 307 have occurred. A similar change as regards a variety of private Bills, whose success or failure ought to depend upon evidence alone, is only as yet in the air. Private Bills continue to be referred to Select Committees of five — an institution which has, however, undergone considerable improvements during the reign. There is reason to hope, that the functions imposed upon the judges of dealing with electoral petitions are destined as time progresses to become light. After the hotly contested election of 1886 only one single election petition was set down for trial in her Majesty's English courts, where the election turned upon a scrutiny. All these jurisdictions, all these scattered duties, as the reign progressed were gathered together by degrees and entrusted to courts sitting in Westminster Hall. At last the final blow was given to the old system which The new had divided equity from law. In 1873, Lord Selborne, as the Chancellor, with the assistance of Lord Cairns and aided court.™^ by the Attorney-General and the Solicitor-General of the day (the present Lord Coleridge and the late Sir G. Jessel), carried successfully through Parliament a measure which, supplemented by still later legislation, has swept away the old divisions. A 'Supreme Court' of Judicature — a modern variety of the ancient Aula Eegia — has been substituted, each chamber or department of which adminis- ters the same principles of equity and law, and is governed by a common and simple code of procedure. Some older lawyers still cast back at times a 'longing, lingering' look to the ancient courts of Westminster with their glories and their historical associations, and to the former Court of Chancery with all its genius and its faults ; but by no less trenchant a revolution could the reforms of the reign have been completed and the organisation of the law adapted to the necessities of this great kmgdom. The scheme in its outline was the outcome of the labour of a Commission of X 2 3o8 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA 1869, the names of whose members are appended below." All imperfections of remedy, all conflicts of jm-isdiction, were at last to cease, while such a classification of business was still retained in the different branches of the Supreme Court as common sense required. It took a few years of further legislative arrangement before the plan thus adopted ripened into its present precise form ; but the details of this process may on the present occasion be passed by, in order to fix our attention on the broad result. The ' Supreme Court ' as constituted in 1887 is made up of the High Court of Justice and the Court of Appeal. The High Court contains several divisions. The largest in size is the Queen's Bench, consisting of fourteen judges and the Lord Chief Justice of England. It represents the old Queen's Bench, Exchequer, and Common Pleas rolled into a single tribunal ; for the Exchequer, with its Chief Baron, and the Common Pleas, with its Chief Justice, exist no more. The Queen's Bench tries, either by jury or by a single judge, any cause which does not belong to those special classes of business which for convenience are assigned to other .departments. It conducts the assizes, civil and criminal, all over England ; furnishes judges who preside at the Old Bailey ; is, with unimportant exceptions, the final court of criminal juris- diction ; acts as a court of review on appeal from the judgments on matters of law of the county courts ; controls the action of all inferior tribunals, wields all the powers and authority of the former Common Law Courts, and adminis- ters equity as well as law. A staff of fifteen to eighteen ' Lord Cairns, Lord Hatherley, Sir W. Erie (Chief Justice of the Common Pleas), Sir Jas. Wilde (now Lord Penzance), Sir E. Phillimore, Mr. G. Ward Hunt, Mr. Childers, Lord Justice James, Mr. Baron Bramwell (now Lord Bramwell), Mr. Justice Blackburn (now Lord Blackburn), Sir Montague Smith, Sir B. Collier (afterwards Lord Monkswell), Sir J. Coleridge (now Lord Coleridge), Sir Eoundell Palmer (now Lord Selborne), Sir John Karslake, Mr. Quain (afterwards Mr. Justice Quain), Mr. H. Eothery, Mr. Ayrton, Mr. W. G. Bateson, Mr. John Hollams, Mr. Francis D. Lowndes. THE ADMINISTRATION OF THE LAW 309 masters are attached to it, who exercise judicial functions in interlocutory matters, report on inquiries referred to them, preside at taxation of costs, and supervise the machinery of the central office and its clerks. The next branch of the High Court is the Chancery Division, consist- ing of five judges, who sit singly — a chief clerk and a body of clerks working under each. On the principle of division of labour, the Chancery Division attracts to itself adminis- trative and other business, for which it has a special organisa- tion and aptitude ; but its jurisdiction is complete and not confined to any particular subject-matter, and it administers law as well as equity. Third comes the Probate, Admiralty, and Divorce Division (under a president and another single judge), independent in itself, managing the Admiralty, divorce, and probate business of the country and control- ling the district registries throughout England. From the judgments and orders of all branches of the High Court alike an appeal (except in ordinary criminal matters) lies to the Court of Appeal, composed of the Master of the EoUs and five Lords Justices ; the Lord Chancellor, the Lord Chief Justice of England, and the President of the Probate, Divorce, and Admiralty Division ranking as ex-qfficio members. The decisions of the Court of Appeal are only reviewable by the House of Lords — a tribunal that has been strengthened by the creation of law lords, and to which the appeal business of the Privy Council (at present the court of appeal from the colonies and the ecclesiastical courts) is destined in a few years to be virtually, though not perhaps nominally, transferred. A complete body of rules— which possesses the great merit of elasticity, and which (subject to the veto of Parliament) is altered from time to time by the judges to meet defects as they appear — governs the procedure of the Supreme Court and all its branches. In every cause, 310 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA whatever its character, every possible rehef can be given with or without pleadmgs, with or without a formal trial, with or without discovery of documents and interrogatories, as the nature of the case prescribes — upon oral evidence or upon affidavits, as is most convenient. Every amend- ment can be made at all times and all stages in any record, pleading, or proceeding that is requisite for the purpose of deciding the real matter in controversy. It may be asserted without fear of contradiction that it is not possible in the year 1887 for an honest litigant in her Majesty's Supreme Court to be defeated by any mere technicality, any slip, any mistaken step in his litigation. The expenses of the law are stiU too heavy, and have not diminished 2>«« iMssu with other abuses. But law has ceased to be a scientific game that may be won or lost by playing some par- ticular move. Simultaneously with this culminating mea- sure of reform, we have seen the creation of one central Palace of Justice for the trial of all civil causes. On December 4, 1882, the judges of the land, with the Chan- cellor at their head, bade good-bye, in long procession, to Westminster Hall, and followed in her Majesty's train as she opened in State the present Eoyal Courts of Justice. The old order was over and the new had begun. Taking farewell of a profession which he long adorned, the late Vice- Chancellor Bacon — who has himself been a partaker in the great movement we have endeavoured to narra.te — thus summed up in last November his own experience of the legal achievements of the reign. ' I have seen,' he said, ' many changes, all of which have had the effect of simpli- fying and perfecting the administration of the law, to the great advantage of our ever-increasing community, to the protection of civil rights, to the encouragement of arts and commerce, and the general prosperity of the realm.' The name of one happily still living, and the name of one who THE ADMINISTRATION OF THE LAW 311 is deplored in more than one department of the State, M'ill always be connected with the final consolidation of the English judicature. To the co-operation for the public weal of Lord Selborne and of the late Lord Cairns — rivals in politics, but fellow-workers in the reform of the law — is chiefly due the completeness of the contrast between the English judicial systems of 1887 and of 1837. Justice would fail in one of her chief attributes if she county concentrated all her attention upon the superior courts and ""^"^ ^' made no effort to bring English law within the reach, so to speak, of every subject of the Crown. It is a striking reflection, that the system of county courts, which now forms so essential a part of our institutions under the ma- nagement of a body of judges whose merits it would be pre- sumptuous to praise, is entirely a growth of the present reign. The ancient county court of the common law (perhaps the oldest tribunal of the country) had long since fallen for all practical purposes into complete disuse. Since the time of James I. local ' courts of request,' designed for the recovery of trifling debts and created by local Acts of Parlia- ment, with a limited jurisdiction only, had gradually become common, but were wholly inadequate to the wants of the public. At her Majesty's accession there was nd tribunal in existence that discharged the duties or possessed the jurisdiction of the present county court. The year 1846 sounded the knell of the old-fashioned and comparatively useless courts of request. In their place was built up slowly, by a dozen or more successive statutes, the county court of to-day. Five hundred districts have been formed, with about fifty-nine circuits — a single judge, as a rule, being annexed to each circuit. Every judge in the matters submitted to his cognisance administers law and equity concurrently — is a judge of bankruptcy outside the jurisdiction of the London Bankruptcy Court, and in certain in 1837. 312 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA selected districts an Admiralty judge as well. The pro- cedure has been rendered simple and rapid ; but its details and the limits of the jurisdiction to which it belongs, though matters of considerable practical importance, are beyond the range of this paper. If the population of the country are at last furnished at their very doors with justice, cheap, excellent, and expeditious, they have to thank the county court legislation of the last forty years, and the men who . have carried out its provisions in the provinces. Debtors The progress of the general law relating to the enforce- ment of debts is a subject interwoven with the administra- tion of the law both in our supreme and in our provincial courts. Ancient and modern history are alike full of the record of hard codes pressing severely upon debtors. In England, down to within living memory, our law of debtor and creditor reposed upon the persistent notion that insolvency was a crime. Paramount necessities of trade and commerce had taught us, indeed, the distinction between the case of the insolvent trader who was unable to fulfil his commercial engagements, and that of the ordinary debtor who had no such mercantile excuse. To the debtor who was not in trade, and who failed to liquidate his debt, the English law applied the sharp, stern corrective of imprison- ment. It sent him to gaol — till he found security or paid — before the debt was even proved, and on a mere affidavit by an alleged creditor that it was owing. After verdict and judgment, the unsatisfied party had an absolute option of taking, in satisfaction, the body of his debtor. Traders to whom the bankrupt law applied might escape by making full disclosure and complete surrender of their effects for distribution among their general creditors ; and, owing to the demands of the commercial world, the law of bankruptcy since the reign of Henry VIII. had been the subject of constant amendment. But the general law of insolvency THE ADMINISTRATION OF THE LAW 313 continued in its barbarous condition, owing in part perhaps to the legal difficulty of enforcing money debts against landed property. Occasional Insolvent Acts from time to time were passed for the relief upon terms of insolvents who might apply for their discharge, and ultimately a per- manent Insolvent Court was established to deal with their petitions. Yet it was not till after the beginning of the reign that arrest upon mesne process was abolished, and imprisonment in execution of final judgments continued to be the law till a far more recent date. From October 1, 1838, to December 1, 1839 (a period of fourteen months), 3,905 persons were arrested for debt in London and the provinces, and of those 361 remained permanently in gaol in default of payment or satisfaction. Out of the 3,905 debtors so arrested, dividends were obtained in 199 cases only. The debtor who was left in durance vile shared a common prison with the murderer and the thief, and the spectacle of misfortune linked in this manner to the side of crime was as demoralising as it was cruel. The following ' is the account given in 1844 by a Government inspector of the condition of the debtors lodged in Kidderminster Gaol, which was read to the House of Commons by Sir James Graham : — ' At the time when I visited the gaol there were six male debtors confined under executions from the Court of Bequests. They occupied a single room paved with bricks, the extent of which is twelve feet in length by twelve in breadth, which is destitute of table, bed, seat, or any other species of furni- ture whatever ; and there is no fireplace or any means of lighting a fire. A heap of straw is scattered over the floor of half the room, on which the prisoners sleep, for they have no other bedclothes, and from time to time the worst part of the straw is removed and better substituted for it. The ' Hansard, vol. Ixxvi. p. 1711. 314 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA privy occupies a corner of the roora, but, from the oppres- siveness of the stench, the prisoners have been allowed to close it with straw. The yard into which the room opens measures thirteen feet in length by twelve feet in breadth, and is so badly drained that in wet weather the water lies in it to such a degree as to confine the prisoners entirely to their room. This yard is closed in by a high wall, sur- mounted by an iron lattice. The prisoners are very dii-ty, as they never take off their clothes, and are allowed only two jugfuls of water per day for drinking and washing themselves. Their diet consists of an allowance of the quarter part of a quartern loaf of bread per day, but their friends are permitted to brmg them any other articles of food while the officer is there. In case of illness there is no means of getting assistance, for, though the prisoners might succeed in making themselves heard by the inha- bitants of the neighbourhood, they could not afford any help without the beadle, who hves in a remote part of the town. Female prisoners, if confined there, were deprived of all separate accommodation, and cannot be visited by their own sex in cases of sickness, except while the officer is there.' Tie old The leading idea of the law in the case of the ordinary ru'^^o" insolvent was to seize his person. The principle of the law law. of bankruptcy with reference to a trader is to confiscate his property for the benefit of creditors. But during the first thirty years of the century, the English bankruptcy law had been, and at the beginning of the present reign still was, a discredit to a great country whose fleets covered the seas and whose commerce ranged the globe. Scotland and several Continental nations were far in advance of us. England alone among her commercial rivals still kept to the mischievous doctrine that mercantile insolvency was to he rooted out as if it were an offence against society. The THE ADMINISTRATION OF THE LAW 315 bankruptcy law down to within fifty years ago maintained, accordingly, a procedure the severity of which from this distance of time appears monstrous. The one mitigating feature about it lay in the fact that the great commercial world, ahenated and scared by the divergence of the English bankruptcy law from their own habits and notions of right and wrong, avoided the court of bankruptcy as they would the plague. The important insolvencies which had been brought about by pure mercantile misfortune were admi- nistered to a large extent under private deeds and voluntary compositions, which, since they might be disturbed by the caprice or malice of a single outstanding creditor, were always liable to be made the instruments of extortion. ' To the honest insolvent the bankruptcy court was a terror.' To the evildoer it afforded means of endlessly delaying his creditors, while the enormous expenses of bankruptcy administrations rendered it the interest of few to resort to the remedy, except with the object of punishmg the fraudu- lent or vexing the unfortunate. The legal illusion, that a debtor •prima facie must be wicked, produced in the bankruptcy law, as indeed was natural, a curious procedure which began in secrecy and ex parte processes, and every stage of which was capable of being abused. The declaration in 1831 of a Lord Chancellor, made from his place in Parliament, that ' ever since he had been acquainted with the profession he had uniformly heard two evils complained of, the state of the bankrupt law and the mode of its administration,' was but the echo of general opinion. The adjudication, with which the per- formance opened, deprived the debtor (till it was reversed) of all his property, left him absolutely penniless, and pilloried his name as that of an insolvent in the Gazette. Yet this decree was granted ex parte in his absence, without the knowledge of anybody except of the one soi-disant 31 6 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA creditor who had chosen to put the law in motion. All that was needed was an affidavit of debt, coupled with a bond which bound the deponent to substantiate his allega- tion. Upon such material, a fiat issued to a grouj) of com- missioners, who assembled from their houses in town or country, as the case might be, met in private at a coffee- house or inn, and after an ex jjarte hearing declared the supposed debtor bankrupt. A warrant was thereupon delivered to a messenger, directing him to enter the bank- rupt's house, to lay hand upon his furniture, ready money, property, and books of account, and to serve him with a summons to appear. The sight of the officer armed with this authority was the first notice to the trader of an occm-rence which put at issue his whole commercial reputa- tion. Under this system the first merchant in London or in Manchester was liable to suffer unspeakable annoyance, and the whole Eoyal Exchange, as it was said, might wake up one morning and find themselves in the Gazette. An adjudication so obtained necessarily lacked the element of finality. It could be impeached by the bankrupt himself as well as by others before any other civil court, even after the whole estate of the bankrupt had been divided. Its validity might be challenged in an action of trespass or of false imprisonment brought against the commissioners of bankruptcy, or against their messenger who had done nothing except execute his warrant, or against the assignee who had innocently dealt with the estate. The mere inti- mation on the part of the bankrupt that he disputed the propriety of the adjudication, and denied the alleged act of bankruptcy on which it was founded, was enough to paralyse the perplexed assignee, who thenceforward, if he distributed the assets, did so at his own risk. In the year 1825 a trader of the name of Campbell had been declared bankrupt on testimony that he had denied himself to a THE ADMimSTRATION OF THE LAW 317 creditor. Campbell disputed the adjudication and the allegation upon which it was based. Thirteen years afterwards, in 1838, the question whether he had really denied himself to the creditor who called on him was still in controversy, and remained unsolved even after Campbell's imprisonment and death. During the interval 170,000Z. of his property had been received by his assignees, but not one farthmg of the amount in 1888 had yet reached the hands of his general creditors, while 50,000Z. had been expended in costs. The commissioners under whose directions an adjudica- tion took effect were gentlemen appointed to perform this function, who lived at a distance perhaps from one another, who had to be convened on each occasion and to travel (in the days of the infancy of railways) perhaps thirty or forty miles to attend the rendezvous. Shortly before 1837, the metropohs had been reheved from this incubus, and the seventy commissioners of London replaced by a London Court of Bankruptcy, consisting of a chief judge and two colleagues (forming a court of review) and six commissioners. But the country districts still groaned under a judicial army of 700 commissioners divided into 140 courts. Each tribunal, as a rule, had five members (generally a couple of local barristers and three local solicitors), who taxed among other things the local practitioners' costs. During the years 1837-39 the number of fiats opened before the 700 country commissioners was, on an average, 780 per annum — nearly a judge to every fiat — while the fees paid for this process, and wrung out of insolvent estates, amounted to between 34,O0OL and 35,000Z. But the paucity of provincial fiats was no indication of provincial prosperity. London creditors found the difficulty of proceeding against debtors in the country nearly insuperable, and hesitated to throw good money after bad. Finally, the giving or with- 3i8 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA Modern bank- ruptcy reiorm. The criminal law. holding of the bankrupt's certificate depended on his being able to procure the necessary number of creditors to sign his certificate of discharge. Secretion of traders' effects, bribery of creditors, manufacture of fictitious claims, were the natural consequence of such a system. Several distinct endeavours have been made by Parlia- ment since those days to create an ideal plan for the administration of bankruptcy and for the distribution of a bankrupt's property. The legislative pendulum has oscil- lated from one theory to another, as the imperfections of each were experienced in succession ; and the pendulum will yet go on swinging. But the whole of the mtolerable abuses above set forth have been swept away. Imprison- ment for debt is gone, except in particular cases, where the non-payment of money is accompanied with fraud, mis- conduct, breach of trust or of duty, or disobedience to the order of a court, or where it is shown that the debtor can but will not pay. Com-ts of bankruptcy have been created, with a machinery the details of which require still to be watched with care, as they still belong to the category of legislative experiment ; but traders and non-traders alike have been brought under a system which is as complete as the ingenuity of Parliament has hitherto been able to render it. ]\Ieanwhile, the country had not stood idle in reference to the administration of the law for the repression of crime. As early as 1826, the late Sir Piobert Peel initiated a course of legislation intended to consolidate and amend the cri- minal law, which till then had been scattered in fragments over the statute book, uncollected and unarranged. A commission had issued shortly before 1837 with the view of digesting the written and unwritten law into two monster Acts of Parliament, and the earlier portion of the reign produced a series of valuable reports of successive com- THE ADMINISTRATION OF THE LAW 319 missions upon the subject. But although a digest was prepared in 1848, it never became law. In 1852, Lord St. Leonards determined to attempt codification as an alterna- tive expedient, but after two years of labour this project was also laid aside. Both digest and code appearing to be beyond the range of practical politics, the idea of consolidating and amending the existing law was revived again, and six Criminal Law Consolidation and Amendment Acts of much importance were passed in 1861, which now constitute the nucleus of our written criminal law. This is the greatest achievement of the reign in the branch of the law now under consideration. Mr. Justice Stephen has produced of late years a draft code that has not yet received the sanction of Parliament, but which in itself is an effort worthy to be remembered as one of the valuable pieces of industry of the last fifty years. Among the names that deserve to be recollected in connection with the amendment of the statute book stand pre-eminent those of Lord Campbell and Lord Cranworth, of Sir J. Jervis (the Chief Justice of the Common Pleas), and of the late Mr. Greaves. The law of libel has been corrected by enabling a plea of justification to be pleaded in matters where publication of the truth is for the pubhc interest. In 1851 invaluable, though not unlimited, powers of amendment were conferred on criminal courts, and other practical changes in procedure enacted to prevent slips and miscarriages of justice. In 1865, the present Mr. Justice Denman introduced into Parliament an Act to rectify certain anomalies, chiefly in the law of evidence, and an Act due to the initiation of the late Mr. Eussell Gurney con- tributed, two years afterwards, greater improvements to the procedure. The present Court of Crown Cases Eeserved was created in 1848 : a tribunal for which doubtful points of law may be reserved at the trial— reservations previously dealt with by the judges in a less pubHc and general, and 320 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA therefore a less satisfactory way. But the criminal pro- cedure and practice has undergone less alteration than the civil, i^robably because ample protection for the prisoner was afforded even by the older law. Although miscarriages are but rare, the system of criminal pleading is still ex- traordinarily cumbrous and involved. Ten years ago, an indictment drawn by the present writer in an important Government prosecution, and settled in consultation with the present Lord Chancellor and the late Lord Justice Holker, reached, when engrossed on parchment and presented at the Old Bailey, ninety yards in length. Nevertheless there is no place in the world where justice is more admirably done than in our great courts of criminal law. Many difficulties yet remain to be overcome in devising, if possible, some ade- quate system for the interrogation and examination of the accused, in equalising sentences throughout the kingdom, in bringing those passed at quarter sessions into more com- plete harmony with those inflicted by the judge at the assizes, and in graduating and adjusting with greater nicety as well as in lessening the severity of the longer sentences of penal Magis- servitude. As regards the procedure before justices, and all trates. matters that relate to their jurisdiction, the reign has been fruitful of the best and most careful legislation. Jervis's Acts (drawn by Mr. Archbold and introduced by Sir T. Jervis when Attorney- General), the new Summary Juris- diction Act of 1879, and a group of statutes that extend and regulate the summary powers of magistrates, have been of considerable benefit to society. At the beginning of the reign there were outside the metropolis but two or three stipendiary magistrates. The extension of their Extra. number has been a measure of unqualified good. Extra- dition statutes have been passed, which, together with a series of treaties, now enable justice to follow many English criminals beyond the seas, and to remit for trial to their ditiou. THE ADMINISTRATION OF THE LAW 331 own country many foreign culprits who have fled to seek an asykim here. For some few years before 1837, the punishment of death Capital had ceased to be inflicted except for the crime of murder, m^nt But the condition of the Statute-book in this respect had not kept pace with the humane practice of the Executive. Death was still the sentence for some lesser offences, though it was, as a rule, commuted. So lately as 1833, a poor little boy of nine pushed a stick through a broken window, and pulled out some painters' colours worth twopence. He was sentenced to death for burglary. The result of this con- dition of the law was twofold. In the first place, it led pro- secutors and witnesses to abstain from pressing home the evidence of a prisoner's guilt, and to connive anxiously at his escape. In the second place, the deterring influence of the sentence was destroyed, since it was not likely that it ever would be enforced. In the year 1886, the number so condemned to death was four hundred and ninety-four, only thirty-four of whom were hanged. The first year of her Majesty saw a series of Acts of Parliament limiting the number of capital sentences and graduating the secondary punishments. In 1861, a still further amelioration of the law took place, and now murder and treason, piracy with violence, and setting fire to her Majesty's dockyards, arsenals, ships, and naval stores are the only capital crimes. While the population of England and Wales has nearly doubled, the average number of executions, according to Sir Edmund Du Cane, has not increased at all, and the capital sentences have enormously decreased. The present reign, moreover, has seen the extinction of the savage custom of converting into a public spectacle the execution of the final sentence of the law. Down to 1837, the pillory was still a punish- ment for perjury and subornation of perjury. It ceased in that year ; but public executions remained in fashion VOL. I. "if 322 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA for thirty years longer. The scenes of licence and dis- order which on such occasions might be witnessed outside the prison walls have been portrayed by the graphic pen of more than one great author of the age. Each unhappy criminal, as the fatal day drew near, became the object of sensational curiosity. In 1840, the Lady Mayoress of the day attended the funeral sermon preached in Courvoisier's presence on the last Sunday before his death. On the night preceding an execution, brutal crowds took up their station in the vicinity of the gaol, and parties of pleasure were organised to witness the scene of death — parties not composed only of the uneducated. Even down to 1868 English gentlemen might be seen occasionally at the ad- jacent windows which commanded a commodious view of the gallows and the drop. The barbarous ceremony which served to familiarise thousands with the agonies of a death struggle is now a thing of the past, and since 1868 the law inflicts its most terrible punishment in private. Tie Prevention and detection of crime are subjects which, like the subject of the execution of the law's judgments, may fairly rank under the head of its administration. Not the least valuable of the reforms of the reign has been the perfecting throughout the country of a proper system of poHce organisation. The metropolitan police, to which not merely London but all England owes so much, are a still earlier institution ; and, before the year 1836, legislation had provided a constabulary for the boroughs. A police force for the rural parts of the county palatine of Chester was also in existence, and many country districts had them- selves raised voluntary associations to maintain officers of their own— a task in which they received valuable aid from the police of the metropohs. But, with these exceptions, the lesser towns and the rural districts were guarded, in 1837, from the depredations of the criminal by the effete institu- polioe. THE ADMINISTRATION OF THE LAW 323 tion of the parish constable and the watchman. It requires General an effort of the imagination to reahse the extent to which security lawlessness then reigned in the suburbs of our large towns ^^ '^^^T- and in our country places. In the smaller towns and vUlages the constable was chosen from the humblest order of trades- men, farmers, or even day-labourers. He was frequently the master of the alehouse or the Tillage shop, who for a trifling remuneration had accepted the office, or had it forced upon him in rotation ; and the guardians of the public peace could not always read or write. The last thing such officials wished was to incur the trouble, the danger, or the odium of pursuing or arresting a culprit. Over a considerable portion of England, property was less secure than in any great European country, excepting only Italy and Spain. Com- mercial travellers were loth to travel after dark. One of them, who for twenty years had made the round of the south-eastern counties from Norfolk to Devonshire, states in the year 1838 that, although perfect security prevailed within five or six miles of the metropolis, it would be im- prudent beyond that distance to venture out after nightfall ; and that if he could travel where there were no police with the same freedom as he could within the police district, he should be able on his rounds to save perhaps five days in forty. Property was safe neither on the river, nor on the canal, nor upon the turnpike road. Commercial houses came forward in numbers to complaiu that whole lines of canal were absolutely unprotected, that bales were opened, and their boxes and cases broken or abstracted. Along different lines of canal receivers of stolen goods set up regular estabhshments, and entire famihes in the neigh- bourhood lived on the receipt of the plunder. Silk, wine, spirits, flour, malt, groceries of every description disappeared wholesale. In the Enfield district, upwards of thirty gentle- men in the year 1838, during a period of twelve months, had T 2 324 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA their stables opened and large quantities of property carried away. Footpads lurked in the vicinity of the great manu- facturing centres of the north ; robbery with violence, murder itself, went often unpunished. Gangs from towns drifted into the country for the purposes of crime ; the towns, in then- turn, suffered from the bad characters who took up their residence in the country, with no apparent anxiety to avoid the presence of the parish constable. Vagrants per- ambulated the kingdom, living on their wits, and even the cottagers' dwellings were rifled while the inmates were working in the fields. The farmer who kept no private watchman, or who did not live within the radius of an association, was liable to lose great quantities of agricul- tural produce. If he lived near a town like Leeds, he hesitated before returning home after dark from the market or the fair, unless he was in the company of friends. The local constable was sometimes too stupid, sometimes too busy, often too timid, to attend to information given him. It was due to the same cause that wreckers at this date haunted the dangerous and desolate places on the coast. Rural crime, in fact, went unprevented, undetected, unpro- secuted. The returns of prosecutions and convictions, to which the statesman and the philanthropist in our time have recourse as affording some clue to the prevalence or absence of crime, told absolutely nothing, for they bore no relation at all to the good conduct of the locality. Men abstained from prosecuting when there was no certainty of redress, and the absence of criminal statistics resulted frequently from the undisturbed immunity of the offenders. In two instances towards the beginning of the reign, in neighbourhoods where crime was remarkably prevalent, her Majesty's judges were presented with white kid gloves at the assizes, as em- blematic of the purity of the district. Even in country towns and places where a constabulary THE ADMINISTRATION OF THE LAW 325 force was raised and paid by voluntary effort, the justice administered by it was rude. In one district, in 1838, the parish constables were under standing orders from the magistrates to tap with their staves the pockets of all labourers or other persons found abroad after nightfall, in order that the pheasants' or partridges' eggs therein, if any, might be broken ! In conformity with the behest of the chief magistrate of one considerable town, the constables seized all vagrants found within their jurisdiction and took them to prison to have their heads shaved, after which operation they were set at liberty and went their ways. The superintendent of police was asked by what right he appre- hended them and cut their hair. ' The mayor,' he replied, ' who is a man of few words, says he crops them for clean- liness.' In some rural districts the paid police were in the habit of dispensing altogether with the constitutional for- mahty of a warrant. An officer interrogated on the sub- ject frankly confessed the irregularity, but added, that ' he chanced it.' In another new borough the superintendent of police prided himself ' on never waiting for a warrant. It was not his plan. It was a waste of time.' ' I am,' he added, ' for being prompt in everything. I say, " If I can take him up with a warrant, I can take him up without a warrant." ' In the year 1839, there were upwards of five hundred voluntary associations for promoting the appre- hension and prosecution of felons — for performing, in fact, by individuals the first duty of a civilised government. Among the rules of some of them were rules for mutual insurance by payment of part of the loss caused by depreda- tions. In some of the farmers' associations members were bound by their code, in case of horse-stealing, to mount and join themselves in pursuit of the thief upon an alarm given. By Acts of 1889 and 1840 Parliament enabled bodies of 326 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA police to be established for a county. But the English farmer and the English ratepayer hesitated, from fear of loading the rates, to put in force the permission which the Legislature had given. It was not till seventeen years afterwards that the establishment of county police was made compulsory in all places where it had not been intro- duced, and that the organisation of what has been called our standing army against crime was placed upon its present footing. What requires to be done to perfect still further its efficiency, it would be beyond the limits of this paper to discuss. To what has already been accomplished is due the disappearance in the course of the present reign of a lawlessness and insecurity in our country districts which had become a disgrace to England. Prisons The treatment of our criminal classes while undergoing convicts, sentence of imprisonment or penal servitude constitutes the last head of the present subject ; and limits of space require that the notice of it should be brief. The darkest ages of English prisons had closed before 1837, but a prison system was as yet unorganised. Throughout our local gaols there was no uniformity of management — the hours of labour, the discipline, the diet varied in each ; a separate system of confinement, a careful graduation of punishments, the classi- fication of offenders, the construction and sanitation of the prison, all remained to be dealt with upon a natural and complete basis. The years 1840-43 began an epoch of im- provement with the opening of Pentonville — a model esta- blishment, with airy single cells and sanitary arrangements of the best kind, which has been the means of developing and perfecting in England the separate system, and been largely imitated abroad. Eifty-four new prisons were con- structed on a similar method during the next six years. But prison reform still moved slowly, owing to the number of local gaols, each under a management of its own. THE ADMINISTRATION OF THE LAW 327 Even in the year 1863, the food at one gaol was furnished from a neighbouring inn, -^'hile at another the inmates passed fifteen hours out of the twenty-four in bed. In some smaller prisons the prisoners slept two in a bed, in com- partments which the warders were afraid to enter in the dark. Parliament in 1865 introduced the separate cell system, with rules for the discipline, health, diet, labour, and classification of the inmates ; but the essential step towards complete uniformity was not adopted till 1877, when Government took over the local prisons of the country, and the Secretary of State and the Commissioners of Prisons became responsible for their management. A uniform code now regulates them all, and prisoners awaiting trial are separated from those who have been found guUty. The Government convict prisons, where sentences of penal servitude are carried out, belong to a different category, and are under a different direction and distinct rules. The ' hulks ' have been abandoned as a receptacle for convicts, and transportation to the Australian colonies has ceased Trans- since 1867. Its evils had long been intolerable to our ^on.^" colonists. The four or five thousand persons who were sent out on an average, at the beginning of the reign, as convicts to New South Wales alone, were not absorbed in the popu- lation, but, to borrow the language of Lord John Kussell, ' formed a large and vicious separate class.' The future of the convict depended on the character for humanity of the master to whom he was assigned, and flogging by colonial magistrates was a common and recognised punishment. Modifications of the system were tried between 1840 and 1850, but failed. At last, in 1853, penal servitude in Eng- land was substituted in the case of all crimes for which four- teen years' transportation had been previously a possible sentence, and in 1867 was legalised in every case. Since the year 1867 no convict has been sent to Australia. Eefor- 328 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA matories and industrial schools are institutions that belong wholly to the present reign, and will hereafter be reckoned among not the least of its humane inventions. Judges A lawyer may perhaps be excused for mingling with his lawyers retrospect of a period some names that appear boimd up reign. with the honour of his profession. The public service is greater than the men who serve it, and no judge, fortunately, is indispensable to the law, any more than a single wave is indispensable to the sea. Of the livmg, this is not the time nor place to speak. But as regards the dead, no generation can complain of judicial mediocrity that has seen upon the woolsack, Cottenham, Lyndhurst, St. Leonards, Cran worth, Chelmsford, Westbury, Cairns ; at the Eolls, Langdale, EomUly, and Jessel ; among its Lords Justices, Knight Bruce, Turner, Mellish, James, Giffard, Thesiger ; in its Court of Chancery, Wigram, Kindersley, Stuart, Hatherley, Wickens ; in its Queen's Bench, Denman, Campbell, Cock- burn, Williams, Wightman, Coleridge, Patteson, Crompton, Lush ; at the Common Pleas, Jervis, Erie, Maule, "Willes ; at the Exchequer, Abmger, Pollock, Kelly, Parke, Alderson ; at the Privy Council, Kmgsdown ; Cresswell in the Probate and Divorce Court, Lushington at the Admiralty. Trans- planted to the House of Lords, or raised to the Privy Council, Lords Penzance, Blackburn, Bramwell, Sir John Mellor, Sir Henry Keating, Sir Montague Smith, and Sir James Bacon remain to remind us of the glories of courts now extinct. Apart from the luminaries of the Bench, the Bar of England looks back with pride on the memory of Follett, Karslake, Benjamin. The roll of the legal heroes of the past is always healthily inspuiting. It nerves those who come after — in the language of the Poet Laureate — to Push off and, sitting well in order, smite The sounding furrows. THE ADMINISTRATION OF THE LAW 329 For much always is left to be accomplished. There is and can be no such thing as finality about the administration of the law. It changes, it must change, it ought to change, with the broadenmg wants and requirements of a growing country, and with the gradual illumination of the public conscience. Chables S. C. Bowbn. 330 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA FINANCE. Initial A SURVEY of the financial experiences of the first years of the ditiou. reign of the Queen must afford some comfort to those who have to deal with the finances of the kingdom to-day. As those years passed the prospect was not indeed inspiriting. On the contrary, it was calculated to develop the deepest gloom. The first, the essential, condition of good finance was wanting. Every successive year was marked by a deficiency of income to meet the demands of the pubhc service. This was not due to any indulgence in extraordinary expenditure. No large works of a permanent character were undertaken, such as might justify the postponement of payment of part of their cost to later years. No sudden necessity of war or warKke preparation compelled a Chancellor of the Ex- chequer to consent to immediate outlay, and to bethink himself afterwards how it should be met. The calls of this nature which arose were such as must always be expected in an extended empire, and ought not to have embarrassed a Finance Minister. The annual expenditure of the nation was normal and ordinary. It was, moreover, moderate — not by comparison with the totals of later years, but when set beside the burden of the generation im- mediately preceding. The functions of the national Go- vernment were narrowly restricted. Thespirit of economy animated successive Administrations. If there was any tendency to outlay on the part of his colleagues — and it is FINANCE 331 believed there was then very Uttle — the Chancellor of the Exchequer curbed it, and provided, as he hoped, sufficient means of revenue to meet the anticipated expenditure. Yet the following is the record of the results of these years : Income Expenditure £ £ Year to Jan. 5, 1838 . . 50,419,134 51,145,304 1839 . . 51,310,006 51,654,000 1840 . . 51,850,139 53,381,258 1841 . . 51,684,766 53,244,494 1842 . . 52,228,320 54,314,844 We have here a perpetually recurring deficit as the first Becur- evil fact of financial administration at the commencement ^e^oits of the reign. If we proceed to inquire how the income, in- adequate as it was, was raised, we may Kght upon what we now beheve to be an explanation, more or less complete, of the recurring deficiency in the revelation of the charac- teristics of the existing taxing system. Taking the middle year of the five of which the figures have been given — that ending on January 5, 1840 — we find the income thus com- posed : Customs 28,387,269 Excise 14,871,597 Stamps 7,353,819 Land and Assessed Taxes, &o. . 4,164,877 Post Office 1,324,342 Crown Lands 167,500 Miscellaneous 415,362 From which it appears that almost exactly three-fourths of the revenue raised in the year were derived from the duties of customs and excise. This is enough to suggest a doubt of the justice of the financial system as regards the reparti- tion of the national burden among the different classes of the community. Although the pressure of indirect taxes becomes shifted and adjusted in the process of distribution, so that it is always difficult to trace the ultimate incidence of 332 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA the levy — and there is some plausibility in the suggestion that in the end the burden reaches each back according to its capacity to bear it — yet we cannot doubt that of the amount thus annually raised, even if we regarded for the moment nothing but the sums actually extracted from the taxpayers, too large a share came from those who consumed the mass of dutiable articles, whether of customs or excise. But a statement of the proportion of the revenue derived from indirect taxation is an extremely partial revelation of the truth. We must inquire upon what commodities duties of excise and customs were levied. The excise still extended Indus- to such articles as soap, glass, bricks, and paper, and in- fettered, eluded a newspaper duty. To protect the revenue thus raised constant supervision of each trade was necessary, restricting the exercise and hmiting the development of all of them, whilst tending to foster monopohes in the hands of those engaged in each industry. Strict regulations directed the processes of manufacture, and improvements, were hampered by the necessity of inducing the co-operation of the excise department in any transformation of the mode of production. The duties on bricks and glass may be especially instanced as far-reaching in their effects on other trades besides those primarily concerned, and architecture itself suffered from limited and stereotyped forms of manu- facture. But the customs duties were worse. Upwards of 1,200 articles were included in the tariff, and many of them not for the purpose of bringing money into the Exchequer, but in order to compel people to buy dearly at home what they could have got cheaply from abroad. The express object of many of the duties was an absolute prohibition of importation ; and, even where some foreign trade survived, it was on a reduced and limited scale, and potential con- sumers were debarred the cheap satisfaction of their desires without any gain either to the Exchequer or to a home FINANCE 333 manufacturer. The unproductiveness of many, or rather of most, of the customs duties was in truth their recom- mendation to those who approved of them. Out of the 1,200 articles in the tariff, nine did in fact contribute seven-eighths of the revenue received. Tea, sugar, tobacco, spirits, wine, timber, corn, coffee, and cotton wool made up the large proportion of the whole. Out of these, five, tea, sugar, tobacco, spirits, and corn, were the most pro- ductive, yielding just two-thirds of the total customs revenue — all articles of practically universal consumption ; while in the case of corn, the effect of the duty was, and was intended to be, the raising of the price of the corn produced at home for the benefit not of the Exchequer, but of the persons in possession of the prime material of its production, corn- growing land. In the same way differential duties on sugar and on timber taxed the home consumer in order to confer a bonus on colonial producers. The tariff was tainted with injustice in its most lucrative items, and, apart from injustice, it was almost everywhere open to the charge of impolicy. The import duty, or rather import duties, on wood burdened all industries. It is scarcely intelli- gible upon what grounds an import duty on cotton was defended. No manufacture was too insignificant to escape the Pree- notice of the officers of the customs, and, although it was a apj-a. primary object to prevent the importation of the manu- ^^^*^^. factures of other nations, the hand of the collector was vanoing. heavy upon raw materials, so as to weigh down the develop- ment of manufactures at home. And, to crown all, the prospect of a better policy seemed to recede rather than to advance. In the unreformed Parliament before 1832 there had been a strong demand for fiscal improvement. The petition of the London merchants had been presented to Parliament as early as 1821, and Lord Liverpool had ex- 334 THE REIGN OF QUEEN, VICTORIA pressed an abstract approval of its principles.' Mr. Huslds- son had shown a readiness to carry abstract approval into practice. In 1828 Sir Henry Parnell had obtained a Com- mittee on financial reform, and, although it never reported, he himself tabulated the conclusions to which its inquiries led in favour of large remissions of taxation, including the abolition of all taxes on the raw materials of manufactures, and the imposition of a property and income tax to make good any consequent deficiency. But the reform of Parlia- ment did not apparently develop any further movement towards fiscal reform and the hberation of trade. The new electors were restive under direct taxes, and agitated for an abolition of house duties and window tax, but acquiesced in indirect taxation. The recovery of strength by the Conservative party boded no good, bound up as that party was with the maintenance of the Corn Duties ; nor could those who remembered Sir Piobert Peel's strenuous opposition to Lord Althorp's at- tempt to reduce the timber duties expect much assistance from him towards financial reform. Such was the situation in the earUer years of the reign. An inadequate revenue ; a system of taxation pressing disproportionately upon the means of the poor, but injuring the industrial classes still more in the way it tied and bound the processes of manu- facture and restricted the exchanges of commerce ; and an increasing certainty of the approaching accession to power of the pohtical party whose bond of union was the mainte- nance of those import duties which had the worst charac- teristics of civic injustice and financial impohcy. Sir Eobert Peel entered into office immediately after the ' This famous petition was translated into Spanish in 1825, at the instance of the Political Economy Club, for distribution among the new States of South America — such were the hopes excited by their deliverance from Spanish authority. FINANCE 335 reassembling of Parliament upon the general election of 1841 ; but he spent the winter in elaborating his plans and sir Kol Peel on the Oi Laws, in famiharising his colleagues with them, and it was not -^"^^^^ until the session of 1842 that he explained his policy to the ^'^^ ^°'^^ House of Commons. He dealt first with the Corn Laws, proposing to substitute a less severe sliding scale for that in existence. Lord John Eussell and the Whig party had adopted the policy of a moderate fixed duty ; and against them Sir Eobert argued that such a duty could not be maintamed if the price of corn became high, and that, once withdrawn in deference to pressure, it could not be reimposed. His own shding duty would vanish and reappear automati- cally without recourse to legislation, and without the inter- vention of the Executive Government. Against Mr.Villiers, Mr. Cobden, and the advocates of unconditional repeal, he urged the pohcy of maintaining such a supply of corn at home as could, in circumstances of visitation, be expanded without great difficulty into a sufficiency for the whole population. It is noteworthy that of pure Protection he spoke little ; nor did he dwell on the supposed sufferings of the ill-used race of men that cleave (or own) the soil ; and the sturdier advocates of Protection were justified in sus- pecting his steadfastness. Their suspicions must have increased when the Budget was unfolded. Sir Eobert Peel His proposed the reimposition of the income tax for a limited of i842. period, and he appealed strongly to persons of means to emulate the civic zeal of their fathers by accepting cheerfully a sacrifice necessary for the re-establishment of public credit. His adjurations to his hearers to restore the equilibrium of income and expenditure were so earnest that this aim has been sometimes represented as the sole motive of his policy. It is not easy to say with decision how far his mind had advanced in the spring of 1842 — most probably he did not know, and certainly he did not tell himself — but his Budget contained 336 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA two perfectly independent branches, and besides proposing the income tax as a means of equihbrium, he recommended a large reform of the tariff in the interest of trade. His reductions affected 750 articles out of the 1,200 in the tariff, and his aim was to make the duties on raw materials nearly nominal and to reduce those on partially manufactured materials, while on fully manufactured articles the duty was not to exceed 20 per cent. The income tax was imjaosed for three years ; but 1842 was already too far spent to allow the attainment within it of the equilibrium Sir Eobert Peel desired. The experience of the years that immediately followed attested his success, although further remissions had been made : Income Expenditure £ £ Year to Jan. 5, 1844 . . 56,806,081 55,360,511 1845 . . 58,302,812 54,840,518 His and when he met Parliament in 1845, he was encouraged to Budget . . *= of 1845. essay a further flight. The period of the tax was exphing ; but he asked leave to renew it for another three years, and, this time, avowedly in the interests of an invigorated com- merce. His recommendations prevailed. The tariff was absolutely cleared of 450 items, chiefly raw materials ; all ex- port duties were swept away, and the excise on glass aboUshed. There could no longer be any doubt as to the meaning of Sir Eobert Peel's poHcy, but the year 1845 was to be signalised by an open abandonment of the Corn Duties themselves. The failure of the potato crop precipitated a famine in Ireland, before which the necessity of maintaining a measure of self- subsistence in respect of food within the United Kingdom crumbled away, and in the spring of 1846 Sir Eobert Peel proposed to Parliament, Lord John Eussell having found himself forced to decline the task, the virtual repeal of the Corn Laws. This determined the course of fiscal policy for several subsequent years. The finances of the country were FINANCE 337 temporarily disarranged by the necessity of a famine loan for Ireland in 1847, when 8,000,000L were granted to the relief of its starving inhabitants, and the year of revolution (1848) dislocated for the time the trade with the Continent, but the progress of remission of duties was practically uninterrupted. The excise on bricks followed the excise on glass ; the abolition of the Navigation Laws, which Cromwell had instituted and Adam Smith defended, followed that of the Corn Laws ; the differential duties on slave-grown sugar disappeared ; and the income tax was renewed for varying terms as the instrument which made all these reforms practicable. It had never, however, been accepted as a permanent element of our financial system ; and in 1853, when Mr. Gladstone was for the first time at the Exchequer, as Chancellor in Lord Aberdeen's Ministry, he made its definite extinction a primary object of a far-reaching and elaborate Budget. The situation in the spring of 1853 appeared favour- Mr.Giad- able to large financial schemes. The peace of Europe had first remained practically unbroken since 1815. The revenge of isss^^ ' Waterloo, often threatened, had never arrived, and the fear of it had so passed away that not even the installation of another Napoleon in power in Erance provoked anxiety. We ourselves were unmistakably pacific. Free-trade had been accepted as the forerunner, and had come to be regarded as the hostage, of Peace. If Sir Eobert Peel's first motive had been simply the restoration of the national credit, he had amply succeeded, for the Three per Cents, were above par. With peace assured, with an elastic revenue, and with the national credit firmly established, Mr. Gladstone was easily allured into suljmitting to the House of Commons a Budget providing for the reduction of interest on the National Debt, a removal of the last of the evil excise duties, a further reduction and simplification of the tariff, VOL. I. 2 338 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA an important advance towards the establishment of an identical system of taxation throughout the United King- dom, the extension of duties on devolution by death to settled property, real and personal, and the extinction of the income tax. This last achievement, approached by steps, was to be consummated m. 1860, when the expiration of the Long Annuities would facilitate the accompKshment of the full design. The scheme was large and generous ; and if it be objected that a financial system minus the income tax would press too severely on the consuming masses, even though rectified by a succession duty producing as much as its creator anticipated, this is a criticism which could have been dealt with subsequently, had experience proved its force. But Mr. Gladstone's plans were baulked almost as soon as they were formulated. He did happUy succeed in abolishing the excise on soap, in bringing nearer equality the spirit duties in the three kingdoms, in extending the income tax to Ireland, and in instituting the succession duty ; but the interest on the National Debt remained unreduced, and the income tax, instead of being continuously diminished in successive years until it vanished, was raised to unheard- of rates, and, surviving 1860, has endured to this day. His plans The truth is that what appeared to be the crown of a period by war. of peace was the commencement of a period of war. In 1853 began the movement which has made Europe an armed camp for a generation. When not actually at war the nations have been watching and preparing for war. Military budgets have absorbed the energies of financiers, and the nations which have remained at peace have been drawn along the course of warhke expenditure. And in 1853 the United Kingdom was a principal in the first European struggle. It was Mr. Gladstone's cruel fate to be called upon within a few months to demohsh his own constructions. When the evil day came he struggled to FINANCE 339 limit the duration of the derangement of the national finances at the cost of making it more severe. He laid down the counsel of perfection that the expenditure upon war should be defrayed as incurred out of the supplies of each year. It is indisputable that warlike expenditure, save so far as it is met by loans from outsiders, is withdrawn from the existing wealth of the belligerent nation ; and if each taxpayer could be got to contribute his share the total drain would be no greater than when the total is borrowed, whilst there would be no collective debt to be borne by later generations. But there are classes of taxpayers who, though possessing the necessary wealth, would rather borrow than diminish what they profitably employ, while there are many more who, though rightly called upon to contribute, have no assets beyond their natural energies, which they would be constrained to mortgage. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, in making a loan, borrows en bloc what these taxpayers should, but never could, borrow for themselves ; and his financial administration is justified if he is sustained in the policy of compelling these thriftless units to repay within a reasonable period the loan so contracted. Mr. Gladstone himself left the Exchequer before the necessity of borrowing was completely developed ; but he supported his successor. Sir George Cornewall Lewis, in frankly following the previous practice, and he himself so far departed from his higher doctrine as to anticipate the taxes of future years by the issue of Exchequer bonds. The episode of the Crimean war was the first serious Arrest check of the financial progress which dated from the Budget reversal of Sir Eobert Peel in 1842. The National Debt, exclusive llf^°.^ of terminable annuities, had declined from 792,209,685/. on January 5, 1841, to 769,082,549Z. on April 5, 1854 ; but it rose to 808,108,722L by April 5, 1857 ; while a further addition of 3,000,000L was involved in an increase of the z 2 340 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA terminable annuities. The income tax, which had been maintained at the uniform rate of Id. from the time it was reimposed, was raised during the war to Is. 4c?. in the pound. The reduction of the tea duty, which Mr. Gladstone had arranged in 1853 to proceed by steps, reaching Is. the pound in 1856, was arrested and reversed, so that in 1856 it was l.s. 9(i. instead of Is. The coffee duty, the sugar duties, the malt duty, were all raised for war purposes, and occasion was taken to raise the spirit duties to a level from which they were not allowed to recede. One fact, however, of great significance must be noted in connection with the financial administration of the Crimean war. No indirect tax which had been previously abandoned was reimposed. but BO Any suggestion to revive a tax, whether of excise or customs, tax was mentioned only to be rejected. There had been an revive . addition made to the total of national indebtedness ; the tax on incomes, and the existing taxes on consumption, had been sharply increased, but there had been no recur- rence to any discarded engine of finance — least of all to those taxes which, while offering some revenue to the Exchequer, inflict a disproportionate amount of injury on taxpayers, commerce, and industry. So it might be said that the war left no lasting effects on our financial system. The war taxes disappeared ; the question of debt was at a later date seriously grappled with ; all became as before, save that the military expenditure of the country has never recovered its old proportions. This may be matter of con- gratulation or regret. It may be that the experience of the Crimea revealed a dangerous weakness which we have wisely abated ; or it may be that the new circumstances of Europe have compelled preparations which were not wanted in the earlier years of the reign. It is enough here to recog- nise the fact of that development of military and naval expenditure which, obtaining a great start in the years FINANCE 341 1854-57, has never since been arrested. We have never oid scale returned to the moderate scale of army and navy estimates tf™^"" which prevailed before the Crimean war, and it mav now expendi- •^ ture be admitted that it was inevitable that a higher level should never re- be mamtamed. These estimates had been rising before the peace was broken, and it is inconceivable that the expe- riences of war should have caused what would have been a reversal of a movement already in progress. But it may be questioned how far this inevitable increase of military expenditure should have been recognised and confessed at the time ; and upon the answer to this doubtful question must depend our judgment of the conduct of the most eminent political persons of the day. Notice has been taken of Mr. Gladstone's argument — it can scarcely be called more — at the inception of the Crimean war in favour of meeting the expenditure of war by increased taxation, and it has been shown how this excellent counsel was abandoned. Debt was created, but simultaneously with it taxes were imposed which would, within a definite period, suffice to extinguish the additional debt. The establishment of a sinking fund, whatever its form, is nothing more than a solemn resolution on the part of the representatives of the nation to practise some degree of self-denial in the future, which resolution may be kept or broken like the resolutions of separate mortals. At the commencement of 1857 the war had ceased, but war taxes were still legally in force, and the income tax in particular was by law leviable at the rate of Is. 4cZ. in the pound up to April 5, 1858. It had been provided that this rate should last for a year after the April 5 first following the ratification of peace, and the Treaty of Paris was ratified on April 27, 1856. A month's delay in the settlement of peace had fastened the higher rate on the nation for another year ; but this was scarcely to be regretted by those who desired peace to make good 342 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA the expenses of war. Some popular impatience was natm-al ; it remained to be seen what statesmen would do. Taxes In the debate on the Address, Mr. Disraeli gave notice that (1857) 1^6 would move resolutions against the continuance of war of keep- '^^'^'^^ in time of peace, and he would do this 'as an impetus iug down to salutary economy,' and as a declaration against England miUtary expen- becoming ' a great military nation.' Mr. Gladstone, also in Opposition, held a similar view in favour of enforcing economy by cutting down income, and hankered also after that extinction of the income tax in 1860 which he had planned in 1853. When Sir George Lewis opened his Budget ten days later, he proposed to meet his critics by reducing the income tax at once from Is. 4cZ. to Id., and by making small immediate reductions in the tea duty and the sugar duties, with successive reductions in the following years ; and he argued that the engagements that had been made to repay the war debt necessarily required a re- arrangement of Mr. Gladstone's jjlans of 1853. But his proposals were contested. After a preliminary debate on Mr. Disraeli's abstract resolution, in which he received Mr. Gladstone's support, the latter, in Committee on the Budget resolutions, moved for a further immediate reduc- tion of the tea and sugar duties, and Mr. Disraeli for a reduction of the income tax to 5(i. in the pound. These motions were unsuccessful ; but the combined action of these statesmen had modified Sir George Lewis's Budget in ad- vance, and produced further fruit in the following year. Effect, Mr. Disraeli was then Chancellor of the Exchequer at the fioeof t"e ^®^<^ 0^ ^ minority in the House of Commons, and the out- sinking \qq\_ was unpromising. The estimates for the services, to fund '■ " (1858). which the new Government had succeeded, were not dimi- nished ; and if the arrangement for the repayment of the war debt was to be maintained, the contemplated further reduction of the income tax must be abandoned, and some FINANCE 343 additional revenue sought from that or other sources. In this dilemma the Government decided that the reduction of the income tax was a more sacred engagement than the repayment of war debt, and Mr. Gladstone, with the ulti- mate extinction of the tax in 1860 ever in his mind, sup- ported the Conservatives against a vigorous argument of Sir George Lewis. The Budget was otherwise noteworthy only because it equalised the spirit duties in Ireland with those in Great Britain, and thus established uniform taxa- tion in the kingdom. The extinction of the income tax in 1860 must have seemed a dream to many in 1858. Mr. Gladstone himself, returning to the charge of the finances in 1859, had to propose no less addition than 8cZ. to the income tax for the first half of the financial year, making it 13d. in the pound for that half, to meet the very large addition to the army and navy estimates, due to the anxieties provided by the state of Europe ; and when 1860 came the income tax was still wanted, aided though the Exchequer was by the falling in of the Long Annuities, to enable that last great revision of the tariff to be effected which was consequent upon the commercial treaty with France. Instead of the long- contemplated extinction, the income tax, which had been 13d. in the pound in the first half and 5d. in the second half of 1859, was raised to lOd. for the year 1860. With or without the treaty there was ample ground Mr.Giad- for retaining the income tax in 1860. Had no such con- Budget, tract been made with the Emperor of the French, and apart J^g°' from the question whether the income tax or some equi- '^^^'^f^ valent direct impost is not necessary to the justice of our otcom- financial system, the reasons which led Sir Eobert Peel to renew the tax in 1845, if not those which led him to reimpose it in 1842, would have justified its maintenance in 1860. To get rid entirely of customs duties, such as those on merce. 344 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA Unfor- tunate colour given to Protec- tion by negotia- tion of treaty. silks, gloves, flowers, watches, and all manufactured articles ; to set free the importation of such articles of food as butter, cheese, eggs ; to reduce the articles in the tariff from 419 to 48, of which 15 only were significant factors, were further steps in the progress of liberation of commerce and of the removal of protective duties that were most advan- tageously secured by the retention of the income tax. If Sir Eobert Peel was right in 1845, the apology of a treaty was not wanted in 1860. Even if attention is confined to the reduction of the wine duties, the sum levied by the income tax to enable this to be made is advantageously balanced. The fact that action, which might have been judiciously taken unilaterally, was made the consideration of a bipartite exchange, did without doubt double the im- mediate advantage, and the temptation to throw the trans- action into the form of a treaty was enormous ; but it must be recognised that this making the reduction or abohtion of customs duties a matter of bargain has had prejudicial after-consequences in strengthening the delusion that protective duties are a source of gain, and their aboli- tion a sacrifice. It would be too much to put down the recrudescence of protective ideas on the Continent to this cause, but they have almost insensibly been instUled in the minds of men by the use of language and of forms of bargain and exchange having no meaning except as the expression of Protectionist principles. Happily we have not ceased in subsequent practice to falsify the attitude of negotiation assumed in reference to the French treaty ; and, indeed, whilst we obtained a reduction of import duties upon our goods in France by the reduction or abolition of duties in our own tariffs, we refused to restrict these modi- fications to goods of French import, and extended them to the produce of all markets. Of the fifteen significant articles retained in the tariffs of 1860, six have since been FINANCE 345 entirely removed (three of them, sugar, corn,' and timber, being highly productive of revenue) without any attempt to make the removal of any one of them a means of producing correlative reductions in other countries. The financial year 1860-61 ended with a deficit, chiefly through the effect of a bad harvest ; and the year 1861-62 had the same unpleasant experience, too large reductions of taxation having been made upon too sanguine estimates of revenue ; but with the nest year began a period of financial prosperity, which, despite a severe commercial crisis in 1866, may be said to have continued up to 1874, or even through that year. It is not intended to dwell upon the incidents of each successive twelvemonth, but the Budget of 1866 demands attention on account of the serious effort Mr. Gladstone then made to deal with the National Debt. The years that had passed since Sir Eobert Peel began his fiscal reforms had left this permanent burden but shghtly reduced. The period before the Crimean war had closed with a sensible diminution of the total, but that war had undone all that had been effected, and we have seen how the resolution to pay off the addition contracted under its pressure had melted away. It seemed as if the temptation to purchase popularity by reducing taxation must always prevail. Thus the tea duties had been brought down to Is. in 1863, and Mr. Gladstone then spoke of this reduced rate as one that would be maintained ; but in 1865, on the eve of a general election, the rate was again brought down to &d. in the pound, while the income tax was reduced to M. But ia the year 1866 Mr. Jevons pubUshed a remarkable book, ' The Coal Question,' in which ' Com had remained, under Sir Eobert Peel's Act, liable to a duty of Is. the quarter, which he regarded as nominal and retained for registration purposes ; but the tax produced nearly 1,000,000Z. sterling when Mr. Lowe abolished it in 1869, and it undoubtedly contributed a still larger bonus for the production of corn in the United Kingdom. 3+6 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA he pointed out that the progressive increase in the estrac- Mr.Giad- tion and consumption of our coal could not be maintained, (1866) and that as our superiority in respect of the cheapness and with accessibility of this spring of power deehned, the develop- nationai ^ ment of our national prosperity must be arrested ; and, debt. unless men were wise in time, dangerous embarrassments might arise between swollen needs and attenuated resources. The book fell mto IMr. Gladstone's hands. His receptive and impressionable intellect was strongly affected by it, and in his Budget of 1866 he proposed to the House of Commons to make use of our time of prosperity to pay off as much debt as possible, so that in respect of it the national ener- gies of the future might not be unduly handicapped. Mr. Jevons's position has often been derided by critics whose language proves that they have not understood it, and many suppose that his warnings have been discredited by the falsification of prophecies they attribute to him which he never uttered. His wisdom received a sharp practical illustration in 1873, and, if the evidence of its truth has not smce been so acute, it has been abiding. Mr. Gladstone carried Parliament with him in his main proposal, though he had to drop part of his machinery. His plan, stripped of all disguises, was nothing more than this — to apply to the service of the debt a sum exceeding what was required to pay the annual interest on its capital, and with this excess and its accumulations to purchase and extinguish capital up to a fixed date — in this case 1885. This is no more than the principle of every sinking fund, but the merit of His dis- Mr. Gladstone's proposal lay in the thoroughness of the Siking disguise in which it was wrapped. It was thought at the fund. ^jmg ^]ja,^ jjg ];ia,d succeeded in clouding it from himself; and, indeed, the gravity of the respect he paid to his own machinery supported this suspicion.' A few years later, ' It may be as well to explain the machinery. The State owes a capital FINANCE 347 Sir Stafford Northcote, when Chancellor of the Exchequer, follo-ning up Mr. Gladstone's desire to promote a reduction of debt, needlessly varied the form of procedure; and a strenuous debate arose, remarkable because both sides shirked the true test of relative merit, viz. which plan best concealed from the ordinary politician, and best prevented the ordinary politician from explaining to the ordinary elector, that a large and increasing sum was annually applied to the redemption of debt which might at any moment be shifted to the reduction of taxation. Judged by this criterion, Mr. Gladstone's plan was incomparably superior — its excellence, as we have said, going so far that perhaps it shrouded the truth from himself; and it was not, indeed, until many years later that the mask was re- moved from the real character of the operation.' The disguise was so well maintained that the State was for two or three years paying off debts through one agency and contracting it anew through another without the nation being conscious of the process. Mr. Gladstone obtained, as has been said, the assent of Parliament to his proposal, to which Mr. Disraeli made an of (say) 750,000,0002., on which, through Department A, it pays an annual interest of 22,500,000Z. But the State, as banker of the Savings Bank and the Post Office, holds in Department B (say) 50,000,0002. stock, part of 750,000,0002., on which Department A pays Department B annually 1,500,0002. interest. Department A says to Department B, ' Instead of paying you 1,500,0002. for ever, we will pay you 2,500,0002. for a sufficient number of years to insure you the same capital at the end of it.' Depart- ment B agrees, and during this period of years Department A pays annually in respect of debt 23,500,0002., while Department B invests in the first year 1,000,0002., and increasing sums in each successive year, so that at the end of the term it is reinstated in the possession of 50,000,0002. of stock purchased from other holders. It will be seen that, putting aside the solemnity of formal interdepartmental action, made more solemn because expressed in an Act of Parliament, the State has simply decided, and can at any time revoke, vary, or suspend its decision, to put aside a sinking fund, beginning at 1,000,0002., for a defined number of years for the re- demption of 50,000,0002. of d£bt. ' Seej)0«<, p. 352. 348 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA Mr. Lowe at the Exche- quer, 1869-73. XJnsuc- cesaful attempt to impose a neisr indirect tax. addition on precisely the same lines in 1867 ; but the period of prosperity of which we have spoken enabled these efforts for the reduction of debt to be made concurrently with reductions of taxation. Mr. Lowe was the most fortunate of finance ministers, and if the ' leaps and bounds ' of industry and commer ce during his tenure of office as Chancellor of the Exchequer raised some foreboding of reaction in the minds of forelookers, he was spared the necessity of meeting the ebb. He began his financial administration with a coupoi dazzling success. He reformed and simplified the assessed taxes, and took occasion of this change to call for their collection and that of the income tax — in short the direct taxes — in the quarter January to March, and by this acceleration of payment provided himself at once with a surplus. The following years produced more legitimate surpluses, through largely increased consumption of dutiable commodities, especially of beer and spirits ; but an increase of expenditure may always outrun an increase of income, and the army esti- mates of 1871, being much swollen through the influence of the Franco-German war, compelled Mr. Lowe to anticipate and provide for a deficiency. What followed is worth attention as illustrating the ordinary limits of financial action. Indirect taxes had been repealed and reduced until they had become very few in number though affluent in produce, and no attempt had been made to impose a new indirect tax or (except in respect of spirits) to increase an existing tax since the Crimean war. Successive Chancellors had been tempted to meet emergent necessities by addi- tional pence in the income tax, so that any fresh adventure involved a call on a limited class of citizens. Mr. Lowe courageously tried to depart from this practice by the intro- duction of a new tax on matches ; but the developed opinion of the time was too strong for him, and the proposal was FINANCE 349 abandoned, along with others ' which might perhaps have been adopted had they stood alone, and the ambitious Chancellor had to fall back upon the simple policy of his predecessors — twopence more in the income tax. This was the only check in Mr. Lowe's good fortune. Surpluses allowed reductions, and reductions were followed by sur- pluses, and when Mr. Gladstone resigned in deference to the adverse verdict of the general election of February 1874, the surplus to be dealt with by the mcoming Chancellor of the Exchequer was no less than 6,00O,00OL The election of 1874 was perhaps unique in the attempt made to decide it upon a purely financial issue. Mr. Glad- Mr. Glad- stone offered, if maintained in office, to abolish the income election tax. The offer was coupled with some plan of taxation the °^^'^}? ^ '■ abolisli nature of which has never been explained, and upon which tiie inoome it may be imagined no stress whatever was laid by Mr. tax. Gladstone's supporters at the hustings. Yet upon the character of this plan the whole question of the acceptance or rejection of Mr. Gladstone's offer ought to have depended. An abolition of the income tax, unbalanced by some strong proposals of taxation of property and some means of assessing the more lucrative trades and professions, would have left our financial system flagrantly unjust. It is not surprising that contemporary continental critics should have been amazed at such a proposal coming from a democratic Minister. Mr. Disraeli was not slow to appear with a counter declaration that his policy no less favoured the abolition of the income tax. Fortunately the electors it fans, paid extremely little regard to these rival professions, and, when the election was over, nothing more was heard of the abolition of the income tax. With Mr. Gladstone it had > Proposals to make tlie income tax move by percentages instead of by jumps of pence in the pound, and to alter the rates of legacy and succession duties. 350 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA been in former years a constant aim. He had planned for it in his great Budget of 1853. He had kept it in view in the years after the Crimean war. But 1860, the promised year, came, and other objects pushed it aside, and from that time it seemed to be dormant in Mr. Gladstone's mind until 1874. The response of the general election put it to sleep once more, and it has since rested in peace. The financial record of Lord Beaconsfield's Administra- tion (1874-80) is not brilliant. After the distribution of the surplus to which it succeeded (which involved the dis- appearance from the tariff of the sugai' duties) came years of increased expenditure, due, among other causes, to war in South Africa and warlike demonstrations in south- eastern Europe, and of stagnant revenue owing to an extraordinary series of bad harvests. The last three years ended in large deficiencies. The attempts made to supply the wants of the Exchequer were insufficient, but Sir Stafford Northcote deserves credit for having been the first for many years to raise an indirect tax other than that on spirits. In 1877 he increased the tobacco duties, and, though the result proved unequal to his anticipation, the courage of the attempt must not be overlooked. Mr. Glad- The leading feature of the financial history of the later second years of the reign must be briefly noticed. Mr. Gladstone teauon^^" ^^gan his second Administration by transforming the malt 1880-5. duty into a beer duty. The suggestion of this change had The malt ofton been made, but as generally dismissed by the experts duty. Qf |;]2e excise as impracticable. Mr. Gladstone, however, succeeded easily in accomplishing the impossible, and, by transferring to the finished product the tax before imposed at an earlier stage of manufacture, he took another step in his life work of liberating industry from the influence of the tax gatherer. Financially the change has been most successful, and the only complaint raised has been because FINANCE 351 the freedom of brewing has been too fully established. It appears that excellent beer can be made from maize and rice as well as from barley or sugar, and the growers of barley are displeased at the discovery. All the good counsels of Mr Gladstone's second Adminis- tration were, however, neutralised by its excessive expendi- ture, mainly on the army and navy, and almost entirely due to compUcations in Egypt and on the Afghan frontier. The expenditure on the forces in 1885-86 did not fall far Enor- short of 40,000,000Z., and the average of the six years ™°it^arr 1881-86 just exceeded 30,000, OOOL These sums are un- expen- diture. paralleled m the expenditure of years nominally years of peace. It is no part of this sketch to trace the political spring of this drain. Whether it was due to the evil policy of Lord Beaconsfield or originated with Mr. Gladstone, or whether, if started by the former, it might not have been stopped by the latter, or whether, again, it flowed from external causes which neither could prevent, and against which both were bound to provide, are hypotheses that are arguable and have been argued. All that is to be noticed here is that under the strain of this expenditure perished excellent financial designs, just financial principles, and ultimately Mr. Gladstone's Administration itself. At the beginning of Mr. Gladstone's Government, the course of redemption of debt, which had practically been almost destroyed in the later years of Lord Beaconsfield, was merrily resumed. Stock was absorbed under the Pre- operation of the plan of terminable annuities, and the attempt price of the 3 per cents, was steadily maintained at and j°tere^t°^ above par. Mr. Childers, in 1884, gallantly attempted a 011 debt. further conversion of the 3 per cents, into 2^ and 2| per cents., and he obtained the sanction of Parliament to his plans, to which at first a sufficient number of holders of stock seemed prepared to assent ; but the political horizon 352 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA became clouded even while the details of the scheme were under discussion. The suggestion of a considerable loan in connection with the Suez Canal deranged the money market, and the design proved practically abortive. A more serious occurrence befell in 1885. It will be remembered that the terminable annuities, which had been created as a means of reducing debt, came to an end in that year, and those who had at heart the policy of diminishing the national burden were concerned as to what might happen when the opportunity would be openly pre- sented of diminishing taxation by some 6,000,000L at a stroke. It was felt that this temptation must somehow be averted ; and, accordingly, when in 1883 Mr. Childers anticipated the future by proposing a further conversion of about 70,000,000L of stock into terminable annuities, to take the place of those soon about to expire, thus pre- venting the occasion of temptation, his invitation was sanctioned and the danger seemed past. But what The happened was, perhaps, worse than what had been guarded fund against : 1885 came, and with it the enormous, the un- ^^nded paralleled expenditure to which reference has been made ; (1885). and a general election was nigh at hand, disinclining both Government and Opposition from any suggestion of increased taxation. In these circumstances the Chancellor of the Exchequer proposed to balance, or approximately balance, his yearly accounts by suspending the payment of terminable annuities for the twelve months to the extent of 4,600,000L, leaving a stUl uncovered deficiency to be met in a similar manner next year. The proposal was accepted, and the superstition of the sacredness of termin- able annuities was gone for ever.' ' As these pages are passing through the press, Mr. Gosohen has pro- posed to diminish by about 2,000,OOOZ. the annual reduction of the capital ol the debt through the operation of terminable annuities, in order to FINANCE 353 Yet another sinister circumstance must be mentioned in connection with the year 1885-86. Mr. Childers did not content himself with a suspension of terminable annuities. His proposals included ^d. more on the income tax, an increase in the beer and spirit duties, and a revision of death duties. He avowed himself anxious not to throw the whole of the increase upon direct taxation, and he therefore suggested additions to the beer and spirit duties. Against this last resistance was raised. Wholly neglecting the effect unsuo- of the additional 3^. on the income tax, a vulgar outcry attempt was made that the Budget taxed the luxuries of the poor crease without touching those of the rich, and upon this issue the ''s.®'^^"* Conservative Opposition, reinforced by the partisans of beer duties, and whisky, defeated the Government. The proposal was withdrawn by the new Administration which was formed, and the revision of the death duties was reduced to an extension of the principle of the succession duty to a small class of corporations, so that the taxing part of the Budget practically became an unbalanced addition to the income tax. Thus Sir Stafford Northcote's action in 1878 ia respect of the tobacco duties remains the sohtary instance of an indirect tax raised, and none has been imposed smce the Crimean war ; and usage has almost consecrated the principle that every new demand for expenditure must be met by a levy on the limited class of payers of income tax. A review of the financial history of the reign shows that there has been accomplished in its course : (1) A removal from the national system of taxation of Besuits all imposts which, operating as protective duties in favour years, of the home or colonial producer, imposed taxes on the nation greatly in excess of the receipt at the Exchequer. relieve to the same extent the payers of income tax, who are now, he alleges, disproportionately burdened. VOL. I. A A 354 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA (2) The abolition of all excise duties on domestic manufactures other than intoxicating liquors. (3) A reduction and simplification of taxes of all kinds, so that instead of a multiplicity of imposts of which many- were very slightly remunerative, we have now a few taxes cheap in collection and reaching all classes. (4) The establishment of identical taxation throughout the United Kingdom, except in respect of minor assessed taxes. (5) The reimposition and maintenance of the incom e tax, which must now be defended as a necessary corrective , in default of a substitute, of what would otherwise be a disproportionate taxation of the less wealthy classes ; but against this there is (6) A tendency to make the income tax the sole re- source of the Chancellor of the Exchequer when additional demands are made upon him ; the discovery of a new tax and the reimposition of a discontinued tax appearing to be practically impossible. (7) A deliberate policy to reduce the permanent burden of the National Debt, steadily maintained through the machinery of terminable annuities from 1866 to 1885, and we may hope capable of being maintained in future though now impaired in authority. (8) A system always declared to be temporary, but as constantly increasing in dimensions, and now of long standing, of alleviating the difficulties of local taxation by making grants from the Exchequer in relief of the cost of local administration ; and lastly, (9) The years subsequent to the Crimean war have been characterised by an almost continuous growth in naval and military expenditure, due to an apprehension, well or ill founded, of danger from the military ambition of now one and then another continental Power during that period. FINANCE 355 A comparison of the pressure of taxation at the commence- ment of the reign and to-day cannot be stated with arithmetical precision, because the indirect burden of protective duties cannot com- be arithmetically measured. What, for example, was the effect p^gg^Jj^g of the sliding scale of corn duties as it stood at the accession? oftaxa- The Whig proposal of a substituted fixed duty of 8s. a quarter was offered as a mitigation of Protection, and to accept this as an estimate of the average duty paid would be within the mark. An import duty of 8s. would not, however, imply an increase to the same extent of the price of all home-grown corn, as the effect of the removal of the duty in increasing importation, and in bringing about a discontinuance of the growth of corn on the worse soils at home, would be to establish in the markets some intermediate price between what had been obtained by the home grower and by the importer in bond. It has, however, been esti- mated that sixteen times as much home-grown wheat was consumed in Great Britain at the time of the accession as imported wheat, so that if an average duty of 8s. produced an average increase of price of 4s., the nation paid by way of bonus to the home pro- indirect ducers eight times as much money as the duties brought into the |^®j^er°^ Exchequer. This was doubtless the most flagrant example of system the pressure of Protection ; but evils of a similar character ^o°^g^ attended many other duties, e.g. those on timber and sugar; but not and the mischief produced by the interference of the Excise with of^xaol aritli- metioal industry is incalculable. Discarding altogether the indirect effect of taxation, we know ^ate" that in the year ending January 5, 1838, the total income was ment. 50,419,134L, of which there was raised by taxes 47,637,6422., viz. : Customs. . . ^22,108,833")^ ^.^ggg^ggi^^ jjjij;j.gg(.^g^^gg_ Excise . . . 14,568,144/ Stamps . . '^•063,9151 ^^jQQgQggg ^jj,g(,j^g^^gg_ Land &c. Taxes . 3,896,750/ In the year ending March 31, 1887, the total payments into the Exchequer amounted to 90,772,758Z., of which there was raised by taxes 76,115,000L, viz. : Customs . . ^20,155,0001 J, ^45 405 000 indirect taxes. Excise . . . 25,250,000/ A A 2 356 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA Stamps . . . £11,830,000-, Land Tax and House „ „ ^„„„„ ■,. , , Duty . . . 2,980,000 ^"-^ ^30,710,000 direct taxes. Income Tax . . 15,900,000 J The population of the kingdom at the accession was estimated at 26,000,000, and may now be taken as 37,000,000. Mr. Giffen has reminded us that the national capital paying probate duty has risen during the reign from 55,000,000L to 140,000,000Z., or 155 per cent. ; and the national income, as indicated by the income tax assessments, has risen since 1843 from 515,000, OOOZ. to 1,200,000,000/. ; and it may fairly be assumed that the rise in the income and wealth of the nation since the beginning of the reign has been 150 per cent. It will be seen, therefore, against a rise in resources of 150 per cent., the taxation per head has risen only from 1^. 16s. 'dd. to 2Z. Is. 2(i. per head, or 12 per cent., while the portion raised by indirect taxation has fallen from \l. 8s. 2d. to \l. 4s. 6d. per head, or 13 per cent. ; the percentage of taxation raised by in- direct taxes having fallen from 77 to something under 60 per cent. Local The story of national finance during the fifty years of finance. ^^ reign has been one of comparative simplicity, and, in spite of some unpromising circumstances marking its close, it is a record of great success. But something must be said of the development of local finance in the same period, and here the survey is neither so easy nor so gratifying. Whilst our national taxation has been simplified and ad- justed by successive Ministers, local taxation has become more and more confused, and both in the amount and incidence of its levies excites increasing complaints. Each of the three great divisions of the kingdom has a system of its own. Differences of detail between them are natural and justifiable, arising from differences-of historical develop- ment and of existing circumstances ; but it might have been expected that some attempt would have been made to attain a similarity of principle, especially as there is no- FINANCE 357 where contentment with what prevails. This has not been done, and it must be understood that the remarks imme- diately following refer to England and Wales.' The con- fusion and burden of local taxes are due to the constantly multiplied functions attributed to local authorities. At the beginning of the reign the relief of the poor was the one great, almost the only, duty of country authorities. The parishes had been associated together in unions under the New Poor Law, but each parish remained strictly charged with the maintenance of its own poor, and the poor-rate was the parish tax. There were parish roads and a way- warden nominated annually to look after them, but the standard of their condition was not high, and they practically served as supplementary relief to the labom-ing poor. A church-rate defrayed the cost of the maintenance of the edifice of the parish church, and afforded easy opportimities of sectarian controversy. The county charges extended to the county gaols, the costs of criminal prosecutions, the ex- penses of coroners, the maintenance of bridges, and a few other items. The cost of these services was collected through the parishes, and formed part of what was still called the poor-rate. In the towns, in addition to poor-rates, there were pairing and lighting rates ; and both town and country met the small charge of a feeble constabulary. Within the' metropolitan district, and in some of the larger towns, water companies had been estabUshed for the supply of ' Scotland has nearly the same complexity and confusion as England and Wales ; but it possesses a far superior, and practically sufficient, system of valuation, supplying a basis of assessments. It has in the machinery of the Eoads and Bridges Act a first draft, if no more, of county government ; and,, in respect of some rates, the principle has been accepted of dividing the burden between owner and occupier. In Ireland this principle has similarly been accepted, and Griffith's valuation is even better than the Scotch system ; but the distinguishing feature of Ireland is the greater centralisation of its administration, involving the consequence that the whole cost of its police and almost all the charge for primary education are defrayed from Imperial funds. 358 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA water, and had obtained statutory powers of rating as a means of income. It must be added that all the principal roads were under the management of turnpike trusts, and the cost of their maintenance was met by tolls levied for their user. Some of the older towns were in the possession of property, the rents of which went to defray common charges ; more had rights of market tolls and harbour dues constituting sources of revenue ; but the deficiency not so provided in towns, and practically the whole exjjenditure in rural parishes, was met by rates levied on the occupation of real property. Such is in brief a sketch of the system of local taxation pre- vailing in England and Wales at the accession of the Queen, with respect to which it must be observed that rates formed the mainstay of local finance. They supplemented all other supplies, and in an overwhelming majority of local areas they were the only source of supply. It must be added that at the time of the accession the total sum raised by rates had declined to its lowest level. More than three-fourths of the amount expended was applied to the relief of the poor ; and the resolute administration of the New Poor Law had operated to reduce the total sum expended in this relief from what had been an average of 6,800,000L in the years 1829-33 to an average little exceeding 4,000,000L in the years 1836-38. The total levied in rates attained a mini- mum in the year 1837-38 of 5,186,000L One more point must be noted in connection with local finance as it stood at the time the Queen came to the throne. In the session of 1835, after the return of Lord Melbomme to office, a motion was made by Lord Chandos calling at- tention to the alleged grievances of farmers. Lord John Eussell, on the part of the Government, met the motion by referring to the report of a Select Committee of the previous year, and said that, acting in the spirit though not in the FINANCE 359 letter of their recommendations, the Government proposed to repay to the counties half the expenses of prosecutions ; and a sum of 110,000L was accordingly inserted in the Budget of the year for the relief of local taxation to the extent indicated. The sum required proved less than had been anticipated, but the action is noteworthy as the begin- ning of a system of partial repayment of local expenses out of the Consolidated Fund. There was thus in 1837 a narrowly restricted expendi- ture, chiefly directed to the relief of the poor, and in this respect much reduced in amount, provided in the main by rates on the occupation of real property, with, however, the commencement, in the smallest possible proportions, of aid from the Consolidated Fund. The growth of local finance during the fifty years has been continuous and considerable, through the attribution to local bodies of new functions or the development of those already existing ; the growth of functions being facilitated by additional grants of aid from the Consolidated Fund, sometimes offered beforehand, sometimes conceded after pressure has been felt — the single spruig of revenue in default of such aid remaining as at the beginning, rates. Very large sums have, however, been borrowed on the security of rates to meet what has been regarded as capital expenditure incurred in new fields of activity. The chief heads of growth may be roughly stated as police, sanitation, education. The establishment of trustworthy police forces throughout England and Wales may probably be traced to Sir Eobert Peel's mstitution of the Metropoli- tan Police in 1829. The attempt to introduce a similar machinery throughout the country was not, however, made elsewhere until 1839, when counties and boroughs were invited to organise poHce forces upon the promise that, if certain conditions of efficiency were satisfied, one-fourth 36o THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA of the cost of pay and clothing would be repaid by the Treasury. In 1856 the invitation was turned into a com- mand ; but in 1875 the consequent pressure on the rates was further relieved by the one- fourth contribution being raised to one-half. There has been a tendency to use the forces thus organised for purposes not within the original design. This is especially the case in counties where the police are the administrative agents of the local authority, and act as such in respect of the supervision of weights and measures, the administration of the Contagious Diseases (Animals) Acts, the collection of statistics, &c. Sanitary legislation has almost been created in the present reign, and has found expression in many Acts worked through several channels, but in nearly every case local in character. Among the subjects of this legislation are (in town and country) the supply of water, sewerage, drainage, inspection and prevention of nuisances, provision of hospitals, burial grounds, &c., and (in towns only) street improvements, lighting, roads, market regulations, &c. A distinction has been drawn with respect to all sanitary expenditure thus incurred in towns or urban districts, and with respect to so much in country districts as may be required by water works, sewerage works, or other special works, that while the cost is met in all cases by a rate, yet agricultural lands, tithes, railways, canals, are only assessed to this rate at one-fourth of their rateable value. This de- parture from the old principle of the poor rate is a con- cession of the injustice of charging the occupiers of land at the same rate as the occupiers of dwelling places in respect of the cost of services of such different degrees of utility to houses and lands. It must be added that it is for works like these that such large sums have been borrowed and made repayable within different fixed periods. The development of local expenditure on education FINANCE 361 needs no explanation. Here again large sums expended upon capital account have been raised by loans for fixed periods, but the annual charges to be met locally are defrayed out of rates without any discrimination of agricul- tural lands, &c., as is the case with sanitary charges. Two or three more points remain to be noticed. It has been mentioned that in 1837 parishes had been associated in unions under the new Poor Law, but each parish re- mained strictly charged with the maintenance of its own poor. Various steps have since been taken to make the union rather than the parish the area of chargeability, by throwing on the associated parishes expenses that were at first exclusively parochial ; and in the metropoUs yet another step was made in advance by the transfer of certain charges from its separate unions to a Metropolitan Common Fund. The local burden of the relief of the poor has, moreover, been diminished by grants-in-aid from the Exchequer towards special charges, e.g., the maintenance of pauper lunatics. The School Board rate became ab initio, in the metropolis, a common charge, one Board having been instituted for the metropolitan area, and its expenditure recouped by an equal rate. So also in respect of highways, parish charges have tended to become district charges, and district charges have been practically relieved by partial conversion into county charges, in respect of which last again contributions in aid have been obtained from the Imperial Exchequer. These various steps illustrate what have been and remain the main difficulties and the main defects of the English system of Local Government and Local Taxation. The Legislature has been searching after juster delimitations of the com- munities interested in, and properly chargeable with, the cost of the several subjects of local administration ; and has confessed, by a continuous series of grants-in-aid, the injustice of the present system of meeting the cost of local 362 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA government ; without, however, having been able to dis- cover any scheme of local reformation of it. Successive Governments have addressed themselves to the solution of the jjroblems thus indicated, and the present Administration have announced that they have in preparation plans which may be presented for criticism, if not for adoption, in the current year. It is no part of this sketch to discuss the future lines of local administration, but a word may be per- mitted on the subject of the raising of local revenues. Eates have been the mainstay of local finance, and there has been much dispute as to their ultimate incidence. It has been contended that they settle down on real property, and the owners of real property complain of the injustice to which they are subject, and call for contributions from the owners of personalty which they appear to think could be obtained through an appropriation of income tax. It is believed that rates on the occupation of land are ultimately borne by the owners of land, but that rates on the occupation of houses are borne by the occupiers of houses ; nor can any manoeuvring by way of requirmg a partition of the burden between owners and occupiers, so long as it is imposed by rates, do anything more than effect a temporary shifting of this incidence ; from which, however, the conclusion must be drawn, that in any resettlement of local taxation land- owners cannot claim to be relieved from burdens subject to which land has long been bought and sold. The suggestion of a Local Income Tax is beset with difficulties, which may be appreciated by those who remember that the income tax of a rentier in a country parish is paid entirely through the bank, railway, and other companies in which his invest- ments are made ; and if these difficulties could be got over it would be still unjust in principle, when a person has two residences, to levy a full income tax upon him in each of the districts in which he spends a part of the year. The FINANCE 363 present writer would rather look to a reformed house duty as the best auxiliary of local finance, but he makes the suggestion with a keen sense of the difficulty of the problem, and of the limitations and conditions that must form part of any tolerable solution of it. The rateable value of England and Wales at Lady Day, 1885, was 147,350,562L The outstanding debt was 173,207, 968i. The local receipts, other than loans, during the year were 43,849,181^., of which 25,666,552Z. was raised by rates, the balance being made up of rents, tolls, receipts from gas and water works, Treasury subventions, &c. ; and in addition to these receipts 11,141,053?. was raised by loans. These figures illustrate the magnitude of the interests involved ; and in the return from the Local Government Board from which they are taken, it is said that they have been compiled from the accounts of 28,486 authorities. L. H. COUKTNET. 364 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA RELIGION AND THE CHURCHES. Eeligious move- ments in tlie Cliuroh of Eng- land. Begin- ning of the Catholic move- ment. The religious history of the reign reflects on every page the shifting features of a time of transition and of progress. A brief survey of it will be conveniently grouped under the several heads of the inner movements of the great religious communities, their growth and organisation, and the legislation which has affected them. I. The inner history of the Church of England has been mainly the history of the successful endeavour of each of three great schools of thought to vindicate its right to exist. The movements which are respectively known as Catholic, Evangelical, and Liberal, or Tractarian, Puritan, and Eationalistic, according as they are described by their adherents or their opponents, had always existed as latent tendencies ; they are now recognised, and tend to recognise each other, as well-defined and legitimate currents flowing side by side in the common channel of the national organisa- tion. The largest and most important place is that which is occupied by the Catholic movement. The history of its beginning is more easy of explanation than that of the changes which it has undergone. Its first impulse came from the discussions which followed the Catholic Disabilities Belief Act of 1829, from the suppression of some of the Irish bishoprics, and from the threatened changes in the organisa- RELIGION AND THE CHURCHES 365 tion of the Church of England.' The first form which it took was that of an ' Association of the Friends of the Church,' with the avowed ohject of circulating ' right notions on the apostolical succession, and for the defence of the Prayer Book against any sort of profane innovation.' ^ In this early stage ' it was essentially an aristocratic move- ment, addressing itself to the higher and more educated classes through the medium of the intellect.' ^ It was soon joined by another and stronger current. The religious force of the Church of England was at that time Evangelicalism. But it was mainly an emotional force. Though loyal to the Church, it had no intellectual basis for its loyalty other than that which is possessed by every denomination of Nonconformists, which believes that its creed and its prac- tice are in harmony with the New Testament. To the more keen-sighted among its adherents such a basis, how- ever sufficient for an individual, was insufficient for a Church which stood in a position of privilege. It was there- fore not unnatural that they should adopt and accentuate the theory which the old Anglican party had received by tradition from the Caroline divines and the Non-Jurors, that the Church of England was not the child of the Eeformation but the primitive Catholic Church, which in the sixteenth century had exercised the inherent right of a national church to reform its ritual and to recast its confession of faith. The movement thus ' very powerfully reinforced from the Evangelical party ' " had begun in the first years of the reign to emerge from the cloister, and to ' It was this whieli in the summer of 1833 moved Keble to write the Oxford assize sermon entitled 'National Apostasy,' from which the Catholic movement may be dated. (Coleridge, Memoir of JoTm Keble, p. 218.) ^ Letter of Keble in Memoir, p. 220. ' W. Palmer, Narrative of Events connected with the Publication of Tracts for the Times, p. 60, 2nd edit. 1883. ■• Gladstone, ' The EvangeMoal Movement,' in Gleanings of Past Years, vii. 227. 366 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA Its early success. ' Tracts for the Times.' exercise a marked influence upon the Church at large. ' The outward face of Divine worship began to be renovated, and the shameful condition of the sacred fabrics was rapidly amended. The greatest change of all was within the body of the clergy. A devoted piety and an unworldly life, which had been the rare exception, became visibly from year to year more and more the rule.' ' This success of the movement was a surprise to its originators.^ It was probably due less to the strength of their principles than to the remarkable combination of piety, erudition, and dialectical skill with which these were enforced. The piety was conspicuous in Keble, the erudition in Pusey, the dialectical skill in Newman. It was due also in part to their activity. The ' Tracts for the Times,' in which they recommended their principles to the mass of Churchmen, and which also form a remarkable index to the progressive stages in the theo- logical education of their writers, succeeded one another with great rapidity. It was this unexpected success, and the rapidity of writing which it stimulated, that led them into disaster. They had the singular disadvantage of having no adequate literary opposition. They were de- nounced, but not combated. The Evangelicals who wrote against them had abundance of fervour, but neither learn- ing nor logic. The Liberals who wrote agamst them had abundance of logic with but little knowledge and less fervour. The opposition to them, though inadequate, had a moral effect which was out of proportion to its logical value. It drew them gradually off the line of the examination of primitive antiquity to that of the examination of the common ground between the Church of England and that of Eome. They were charged with the holding of Eoman doctrine. ' Gladstone, ' A Chapter oJ Autobiography,' in Gleanings of Past Years, vii. 139, 140. 2 Newman, Apologia, 1st edit. p. 156. RELIGION AND THE CHURCHES 367 and they were led to justify the charge. At the beginning of 1841, Newman wrote what proved to be the last of the series, Tract No. XC, in which, by a perhaps conscious Tract irony, applying to the interpretation of the Thirty-nine Articles some common methods of the interpretation of Scripture, he showed that the Articles are entirely consis- tent with the doctrines which they were intended to condemn. The gathering storm at once broke. The Tract was cen- sured by the Hebdomadal Council at Oxford, and the series came to an end. It was the beginning of troubles. Two years afterwards (May 21, 1843) Pusey preached a sermon on the Eucharist, for which he was suspended from the exercise of his statutable right to preach before the University for three years. At the end of the following year another member of the party, W. G. Ward, published his ' Ideal of a Christian Church,' in which he went so far beyond Tract No. XC. as to claim a right to hold, as a member of the Angli- can Church, all Eoman doctrine. The thesis shocked the moral consciousness of many who had hitherto been indif- ferent to the movement. At Oxford the authorities were roused to vigorous action, and Mr. Ward was deprived of his degree.^ In the meantime, the Eoman Curia had not been in- The con- sensible to the movement. The endeavour to find an with historical basis for Anglicanism had led some of its defenders to use unfamiliar weapons. They were conse- quently an easy prey for the astute controversialists whose arguments had been polished and tempered by many generations of active use. Dr. (afterwards Cardinal) Wise- man, who had been at the head of the English College at Eome, was sent to England in 1836, and shortly afterwards ' The pamphlet literature which refers to Ward's case is considerable ; the most succinct and graphic history of it is contained in an article (by Herman Merivale) in the Edinburgh Review, vol. Ixxxi. Eome. 368 , THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA joined with Daniel O'Connell in founding the Dublin Review. In 1838 and 1839 he pubHshed in that review two articles on the Anglican Claim, the drift of which was to show that, assuming the Tractarian premisses, the position of the Anglican Church was untenable.' The articles were incon- trovertible, and they did their work. With the slow force with which all strong convictions grow, it became clear to the more logical Tractarians that the platform on which they stood rested upon an illusion. Between 1840 and 1850 ' an unrivalled band of recruits . . . principally clerical, but not without a lay fraction, made up of men competent in every way by talent, attainment, position, character, to exercise a judgment,' ^ passed over to the Church of Eome. ' The secession of this body of men is a conspicuous event of the first order in the Anglican religious history of a very remarkable time.'' Transi- The significance of the secession becomes even greater tion to . . a new when it is noted that since it began no person of eminent ment.' ability has joined the Anglican ranks. With the departure of Newman and Ward in 1845 the original movement began practically to come to an end. It passed by insensible tran- sitions mto another movement, widely different from it in both its external features and its inner character. The original movement had been mainly theological ; the new movement was mainly practical. The one was learned, led by scholars, and with its seat in Universities ; the other was speculative, led by parish priests, and with its seat in great centres of population. The two main features of the Contes- new departure are the practice of confession and the revival in public worship of the symbolical ritual of the Middle Ages. Of these, the former constitutes the chief link ' Newman, Apologia, 1st edit. p. 211. 2 Gladstone, The Evangelical Movement, pp. 228, 229. 2 Ibid. p. 229. sion. RELIGION AND THE CHURCHES 369 between the later movement and its predecessor, inasmuch as it was practised by both Keble and Pusey. It began, on Keble's part, in a desire to know more of the characters of his parishioners at Hursley,' and on Pusey's part in a similar desire to help undergraduates at Oxford. In both cases it was extended beyond its original intention ; for they were both men of large experience, and their advice was sought in spiritual matters by many persons in all parts of the country. The inculcation of the practice of confession as an ordinary condition of receiving the Holy Communion, and the hearing of confessions by inexperi- enced clergymen as a part of the ordinary routine of their duty, do not seem to have been at first contemplated. The ritual of public worship in the earlier stages of the Kituai. Tractarian movement was simply a return to the observance of the Canons, and of the Eubrics of the Prayer Book. It is probable that there is now only a smaU minority of churches in all England in which the points which were then denounced are not observed. But part of the intel- lectual force of the Tractarian movement was expended on ecclesiastical antiquities. The Cambridge Camden Society (afterwards entitled the Ecclesiological Society) began in 1842 a long and praiseworthy effort to revive and extend a knowledge of the ecclesiastical arts of the Middle Ages. Out of this has come an enormous change, both in the external aspect of a large proportion of churches and in the acces- sories of worship. It was for a long time mainly an histori- cal or antiquarian revival, and dealt more with the general architecture and furniture of churches than with the decora- tion of the altar or the dress of the minister. But it ulti- mately became symbolical. The esoteric doctrine of the Eucharist became more prominent than before, and ritual assumed a new significance. ' Coleridge's Memoir, p. 313. VOL. I. B B 370 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA Opposi- tion to tlie new move- ment. Causes of its success. The new departure was vehemently attacked, sometimes on its doctrinal side as contravening the Thirty-nine Articles, and sometimes on its ritualistic side as. contraven- ing the Eubrics. The most important of the attacks upon doctrine was that which procured from the Privy Council in 1870 a confirmation of the judgment of the Court of Arches that it is lawful for a minister of the Church of England to preach ' a real, actual, and objective presence of our Lord, external to the communicant, under the form of bread and wine.' ^ The attacks upon ritual showed both the extreme uncertainty of the law and the difficulty of putting it in force ; the decisions of able judges conflicted with each other, and the procedure was as cumbrous as it was costly. A Eoyal Commission was appointed in 1870 to endeavour to find out the legal basis for the new ritual, and an Act was passed in 1874 to simplify the proceedings against clergymen who contravened the declared law. The prosecutions of clergymen under this Act (the Public Worship Eegulation Act) have shown the futility of endea- vouring to stem by penal measures the tide of a real current of opinion. Five clergymen in succession — Messrs. Tooth, Dale, Enraght, Green, and Bell Cox — have preferred im- prisonment to the abandonment of forms of worship which, in spite of decisions of courts of law, they considered to be no less legitimate than desirable. The success of this great transformation of the original Oxford movement is a feature of contemporary religion which yields only imperfectly to analysis. The revived love of art, the reaction against individualism, the splendid self-devotion of its preachers, the life and pageantry of its services, are all elements in that success. But no religious movement wins the large place which Pdtualism has won ' Sheppard v. Bennett, in Phillimore's Tlze, Principal Ecclesiastical Judgments delivered in the Court of Arches, 1867 to 1875. London, 1876. RELIGION AND THE CHURCHES 371 unless it satisfies a real want of the human nature of its age. It is probable that while the social strain and pressure •which have resulted from the fluctuating prosperity of our time have produced in all the struggling classes a yearning for the consolations of religion, the very intensity of the need of those consolations leads more than one type of mind to embrace a form of religion which is definite and concrete, and which is linked by a hundred ties of visible symbolism to the worship and the beliefs of a great historical past. The second school of thought in the Church of England The which in the course of the reign has won its way to legal geucai recognition is that which is known as Evangelical. In the ment.' earlier part of the century that school had worked power- fully on a few minds : it had done a noble work in bringing back to the Church the preaching of the gospel, and it had kindled a strong enthusiasm for the comparatively new work of missions to the heathen. But its preachers, though fervid, were few in number ; it held scarcely any of the greater preferments of the Church ; its leader, Mr. Simeon, exercised a strong, though not a wide, influence at Cam- bridge, ' whereas nearly in every college in Oxford it was a thing unknown, except by hearsay.' ' It satisfied a real want of contemporary religion, but it is probable that the large place which it has gained in the Church of England is due less to its preaching than to the organisation of its societies ; it applied to the management of those societies, its especially the Church Missionary Society, a singular energy and skill ; they constituted a rallying point for its adhe- rents ; the constant movement of their machinery gave a constant interest and stimulus to a large army of voluntary agents ; and, with the foundation of Exeter Hall in 1836 as ' Gladstone, ' The Evangelical Movement : its Parentage, Progress, and Issue,' reprinted from the British Qttarterly Review in Gleanings of a Past Life, vii. 212. B B 2 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA The Gorham case. The im- portance of the Gorham judg- ment. their common meeting place, the position of EvangelicaHsm may be said to have been fairly secured. But its special doctrines were also distasteful to the mass of the old Church party, and in 1849 the strongest bishop on the bench, Bishop Phillpotts of Exeter, resolved to test the question whether Evangelical opinions could legitimately be held in the Church of England by refusing to institute to a benefice a clergyman, Mr. Gorham, otherwise unexception- able, who held Evangelical views on the subject of baptismal regeneration. The case came, on appeal, before the Privy Council. The gravity of the crisis was felt by all parties, and it is probable that no decision on an ecclesiastical question has ever given rise to a more anxious expectation. In anticipation of a judgment adverse to the High Church party, the leading journal of that party urged the creation, or the revival, of a Church legislature ' competent not only to administer, but to ma/ce and change the doctrines of the Church of England ; ' ^ and when the adverse judgment which had been anticipated was actually given, the ex- citement for a time was intense. Archdeacons Manning and WUberforce, Dr. Pusey and Mr. Keble, published a solemn protest. Bishop Phillpotts wrote to Archbishop Sumner, who was known to agree with the judgment, a letter of mingled fire and sarcasm. Dr. Mill preached at Cambridge on the text, ' Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.' ^ Nor was the importance of the judg- ment exaggerated ; for it laid down the principle, which has since been reaifirmed and is not likely again to be disputed, that the Articles and Formularies are to be construed, in such suits, strictly as legal documents, and that the question which judges have to decide is not whether a given doctrine is true or false, but whether the statements in which it is expressed do or do not contravene the authori- ' Tfte Guardian, January 9, 1850, p. 24. ^ /jj^^ p^ 224. RELIGION AND THE CHURCHES 373 tative statements of the Church of England.' The applica- tion of this principle has saved each of the three schools of opinion in turn. The school which has profited least by it is that which it immediately benefited. For that school has made no apparent progress. Its theology has been singularly inelastic. It has perpetuated the scholasticism which survived the Middle Ages and lived again in the Puritans. It has assimilated none of the new elements of modern thought. It is out of sympathy alike with learn- ing and with physical science. But, bearing a remarkable testimony to the vitahty of the truths which it embodies, it continues its splendid philanthropies on an apparently undiminished scale, its literature still circulates, and some of its preachers stUl attract large congregations. And it has a claim to the gratitude of the Christian community in ' that the pith and life of the Evangelical teaching, as it consists in the reintroduction of Christ our Lord to be the woof and warp of preaching, was the great gift of the movement to the teaching Church, and has now penetrated and possessed it on a scale so general that it may be con- sidered as pervading the whole mass.' ^ The Liberal or ' Broad Church ' school, no less than Tie the Catholic and the Evangelical schools, has successfully move-^ vindicated its right to exist ; and, like them also, it owes no small part of its success to the opposition which it has encountered. It represents an element which has never been whoUy absent from the Church, but whose modern forms may be said to have arisen in the same decade as Tractarianism, in the same University, and even in the same College. Its three leaders were Arnold, Whately, and ' The judgment is given at length in Brodriok and Fremantle, Collection of the Judgments of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (London, 1865), p. 64. 2 Gladstone, The Evangelical Movement, p. 224. ment. 374 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA Hampden. Of these, Arnold was the most vigorous personahty, and had the largest following; hut he was absent from Oxford and busy with other than theological work.' Whately was at Dublin. Hampden, though in a seat of authority, had been discredited and discouraged by the opposition which had been made to his appointment as Eegius Professor at Oxford in 1836. The intellect of the Universities was drawn to Newman, Pusey, and Mill ; and, when the first freshness of theological discussion began to flag, it drifted off in the direction of academical reform and literary culture. Liberalism was re^dved in the Church of England at large by the attack on Professor Maurice in 1853 on account of a volume of ' Theological Essays,' in one of which he had questioned the popular idea of eternal punishment ; and at Oxford by the first attack on Professor Jowett in 1856 on account of the essays appended to his edition of some of St. Paul's Epistles. Five years later appeared a collection of seven papers by seven different 'Essays Writers, entitled 'Essays and Eeviews.' It was in reality Tiews.'" a continuation, limited to theological subjects, of similar collections of papers on miscellaneous subjects which had appeared for several consecutive years under the names of ' Oxford Essays ' and ' Cambridge Essays.' The collection was made without previous concert between the writers, and was very unequal. Its most friendly reviewer agreed with its censors in the charge of ' flippancy of style and rash partnership.' ^ Buc it was regarded as the result of a deliberate conspiracy to emasculate Christianity of its ' The extent to which Arnold was distrusted may be inferred from the fact that in 1837 Archbishop Howley refused to let him preach the sermon iUi Lambeth Chapel at the consecration of Bishop Stanley, the father of the late Dean of Westminster ; the progress of opinion maybe inferred from the fact that, forty years later, Arnold's successor and admirer presided in that same chapel as Archbishop. - Dean Stanley in the Edinburgh Beview, reprinted in his collected Essays, p. 89. RELIGION AND THE CHURCHES 375 religious elements. It was considered to present ' the immoral spectacle of six ministers of religion conspiring to assail the faith which they outwardly professed.' ' Its authors were sometimes spoken of as the ' septem contra Christum.' ' The panic occasioned by this idea of a rational- istic conspiracy invested the volume with an importance out of all proportion to its real power.' ^ Tractarians and Evangelicals sheathed for a time the swords which they had used against each other to search for new weapons to be used against a common foe (' facta pariter nunc pace feruntur ') . Two courses of procedure were adopted. The one was that of issuing a ' Declaration on the Inspiration of the Word of God and the Eternity of Future Punishment, by Clergymen of the United Church of England and Ireland,' which was originally signed and circulated by six leaders of the other parties in the Church. It was calculated that more than half the total number of clergy ultimately signed this ' Oxford Declaration,' but the fact that an unexpectedly large proportion refused to sign it deprived it of some of its moral weight. The other course was to bring some of the Essayists before the courts of law. Mr. Eowland Williams, The ■Williams whose somewhat crudely expressed statements of recent and German opinions as to various books of the Bible had judg- raised most of the storm, and Mr. H. B. Wilson, who had ™®^*' dealt freely with the questions of inspiration and future punishment, were, as beneficed clergymen, especially under the jurisdiction of the episcopal courts, and were both prosecuted. The Court of Arches decided against them ; but its judgment was set aside on an appeal to the Privy Council. The judgment of the Privy Council in their cases is the charter of the Liberal school in the Church ; it formally reasserted the principle enunciated in the ' Burgon, Letter to the Bishop of London (Parker, Oxford, 1870). 2 James Martineau's Introduction to J. J. Tayler's Beligious Life of England, 2nd edit. p. 14. 376 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA Gorham case in 1850, and dealt with the Articles and Formularies ' according to the legal rules for the interpreta- tion of statutes and legal instruments.' ' Two other results followed, besides the vindication of the right of the Liberal school to exist : the one was that the form of subscription to the Ai-ticles was altered so as to express an assent to rather than an agreement with them ; the other was that, attention having been for a time diverted from it, Eitualism, which hitherto had been but slenderly rooted, had time to grow strong. It was long before the after -swell of the storm sub- sided, and in the mean time another storm had been raging. Dr. Colenso, Bishop of Natal, published in 1861 a commen- tary on the Epistle to the Eomans in which he discarded the current views of the relation of Christianity to heathenism, and in 1862 an elaborate work on the Pentateuch, in which he dealt freely with the questions of its authorship and its unity. The English bishops, with one exception, called upon him to resign ; the South African bishops, reviving an ancient custom, excommunicated and deposed him. But their sentence was held, on appeal to the Privy Council, to be legally invalid, and Dr. Colenso remained in his see. Many of the views for which he was attacked have been absorbed into the general body of current beliefs, and the policy of prosecutions for the holding of independent views on questions of scholarship or of speculation has been dis- credited not only by failure, but also by the growth of mutual respect, and of the sense that a Church gains rather than loses by comprehending various schools of thought within its pale. Liberalism is still attacked, but it has uew secured its place ; and twenty years of comparative immu- nity from the violence which once assailed it have given it an opportunity of changing its attitude. From having attitude of tie move- ment. ' The judgment is given at length in Brodrick and Fremantle's Collec- tion of the Judgments of the Judicial Committm of the Privy Council in Ecclesiastical Cases relating to Dodrine and Kscipline (Loudon, 1865J. RELIGION AND THE CHURCHES 377 been critical and pugnacious, it is becoming constructive and sympathetic ; and in the accurate study of Biblical exegesis and of Church history it is finding a basis for distinguishing itself, no longer as the negation of the ecclesiastioism of the Middle Ages, but rather as the re- assertion of the simpler faith with which, in ages of mental doubt and social pressure not unlike the present, the first preachers of Christianity 'overcame the world.' In other great communities besides the Church of England there have been, in the course of the reign, move- ments of singular interest. The same decade which witnessed the Cathohc revival Tae dis- in England witnessed also a remarkable revival of religious in the°" activity and interest in the Church of Scotland. The ^"^l^^^l revival was marked partly by the growing influence of Thomas Erskine and John McLeod Campbell, who endea- voured to infuse a humanitarian element into the stern theology of the Westminster Confession, and partly by the determination of the great Evangelical party, which had grown to be a majority in the Church, to assert its spiritual independence- In 1834 began what is known as the Ten Years' Conflict."- The General Assembly of that year de- clared the right of a congregation to veto, and of a pres- bytery to reject, a presentation by a patron. The action of the Assembly was never ratified by Parliament, and so had no legal force ; but it expressed so deep a conviction of the necessity of maintaining the ' Headship of Christ ' that, when Lord Kinnoul nominated an unacceptable minister ta a certain parish, it was resolved to fight the question to the last issue. The House of Lords, on appeal, confirmed the decision of the Scotch Courts against the Assembly, and the House of Commons rejected a proposal of inquiry into ' E. Buolianan, The, Ten Years' Conflict, Glasgow, 1849, gives full details and documents. 378 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA the grievance. Consequently, when the Genei-al Assembly met on May 18, 1843, a solemn protest, which was signed at first by 896, and ultimately by 474 ministers, was read by Dr. Welsh, the retiring Moderator, and the protesting ministers, giving up their status and their stipends, with- drew to a separate place of meeting in order to found what has since been known as the ' Free Kirk,' with Dr. Chalmers for their first Moderator. The grounds of the secession have been justified by the fact that thirty-one years afterwards, by ' a Liberal measure which had become a reactionary scheme by being brought into the world a generation behind its time,' the obnoxious Patronage Act of 1711 was repealed; and, whatever view may be entertained as to the expediency of the secession, the splendid self-sacrifice of the seceding ministers, and the splendid liberality which it called forth, are a testimony to the possibilities of modern Christianity of which all Churches may be proud. It is probable that each of the two Churches finds itself a gainer by separation ; for each of them has been stimu- lated to new activity. Within the Church of Scotland the influence of such men as Dr. Norman McLeod, Principal Tulloch, and Dr. Eobert Lee has left its mark upon the generation from which they have been called away, in the co-ordination of social effort by the ' Committee on Christian Life and Work,' in the breadth and power of such pulpit discourses as the ' Scotch Sermons ' of 1880, and in the new church buildings and the new ritual of worship by which Scotland has been remarried to the spirit of beauty and of cultured emotion. The Free In the Free Church there has been the inevitable and Church, j-^gg^i^ijy activity which comes of the necessity of material self-support ; its theology has tended to be more conservative than that of the Established Church, and an endeavour on RELIGION AND THE CHURCHES 379 the part of one of the most distinguished professors in one of its Divinity Colleges, Dr. Eobertson Smith, to deal with the Old Testament by modern critical methods, led to his removal. But the discussion which resulted in his removal appears to have had the effect of widening rather than narrowing the prevalent doctrines ; though it is still in- tolerant of advanced criticism, its ministers are said to be outgrowing the theology which finds its ablest exposition in Principal Candlish's ' Fatherhood of God.' And in the other great Presbyterian communion there The has also been a progress. ' The continuous earnest struggle p^egby- of Scotch thought to escape from the harsher points of the Kenans. Confessional theology has been nowhere without result.' ' The United Presbyterian Church, which was formed in 1847 by the amalgamation of the two bodies known as the Secession Church and the Belief Church, put forth in 1879 a ' Declaratory Act,' which practically superseded the Standards by a liberal interpretation of them. In England the most interesting movement outside the The Estabhshed Church is that which has been going on in the gationti vigorous body which is known as the Congregational Union. '°"^^°'^- The Union was formed in 1833 by the agreement of a large number of churches to adopt a common line of action, each church maintaining its own full independence. To one clause of the agreement a Declaration of Faith and Order was appended, setting forth the doctrines which were accepted by, though they were not imposed upon, those who thus joined together. Its principles were strictly evangelical. But it tended, as all such documents do, to outlive its time ; and when, in 1860, a minister of singular culture, T. T. Lynch, published a smah volume of poems, I Principal Fairbairn, ' The Westminster Confession of Faith,' in the Ccmtemporary Review for 1872, p. 80. 38o THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA ' The Eivulet,' from which some of the accustomed phrases ■were absent, it was evident, from the strong resistance which was made to the attack upon him, that the doctrines of Congregationahsm had entered upon a new phase. This was still more evident some years afterwards from the diseuBsions which arose out of a conference at Leicester in 1877; and the chairman of the Union for 1886, Mr. E. "White, stated in his formal address that ' the whole mode of conceiving of some subjects referred to in the Declaration of Faith and Order has altered with the general thinking and fashion and feeling in English Christendom.' ' But even more important than the bringing of its theology into greater harmony with current thought has been the resolu- tion which is now being carried out, to transfer one of its chief theological colleges to Oxford. It is one of the most promising steps that has ever been taken by a Noncon- formist body ; for it brings Nonconformity into contact with culture. No community has suffered more than the Church of England, and no school in the Church of England has suffered more than the Catholic school, from the want of an educated ' opposition.' The existence of a body of men who, without having sacrificed any essential element of evangelical truth, have been trained to scholarly me- thods, and are competent to deal with theology on both its speculative and its historical sides, will constitute a new factor in English religion ; there is nothing that may not be hoped from a free Church that is at once evangelical, learned, and progressive.^ II. Pro- ^_ ijjjg development of the machinery of religion during gress of i. 1 ^ 'J religious the reign, both within and without the Church of England, tious. has been enormous ; it has been partly an expansion of ' Cmicjregational Year-Book for 1887, p. 29. ^ See Mansfield College : its Idea aixd Aim, by Principal Fairbairn (The GreBham Press, 1886). RELIGION AND THE CHURCHES 381 traditional forms, and partly a development of new forms of organisation side by side with them. 1. Inside the Church of England the expansion of traditional forms has consisted mainly in the multiplication of parishes and clergy, and in the formation of new bishop- rics, both in England and in the colonies. The multiplication of parishes and clergy has for the Muitipii- most part proceeded upon the assumption that it is better ''arishes^ to subdivide large parishes into independent cures than to ^'^^ organise them under a single head. The Legislature, partly by the appointment of the Ecclesiastical Commission with special powers, and partly by the Acts known as the Peel and the Blandford Acts, has given large facilities for work- ing upon this assumption. There has consequently been in the course of the reign an increase in the number of benefices from 10,718 to 13,896.' The increase in the number of clergy cannot be precisely stated, because the returns are not all made on the same system, some ex- cluding and some including those who are not strictly engaged in pastoral work ; but some indication of the increase is afforded by the returns, which show that 7,119 persons were ordained deacons in the ten years between 1874 and 1885, both inclusive ; ^ the number of persons who were confirmed during the same ten years was 1,761,864,' so that one clergyman was ordained for every 240 persons admitted to the privileges of full membership. The funds for these purposes — the endowment or augmenta- tion of benefices, the building of new churches, and the supply of additional clergy — have been obtained partly from ' The former of these numbers is taken from the return made to Parlia- ment by the immediate predecessor of the present Ecclesiastical Commission in 1835 ; the latter is obtained by adding up the numbers recorded for each diocese in the Official Year-Book of the Church of England for 1887, p. 619. ' Official Yea/r-Book for 1887, p. 488. ' Ibid. p. 493. 382 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA the better distribution of existing funds by the Ecclesiastical Commission, partly from the official fund known as Queen Anne's Bounty, partly from the sums raised by central or diocesan societies, and partly from local contributions. The amounts from these several sources do not in all cases admit of exact statement, but they are unquestionably large. The following figures are taken from the ' Official Year -Book ' for 1887 : (1) Total value of annual grants made by the Eccle- siastical Commissioners in the years 1840-85, 739,000L, representing an estimated capital sum of 22,170,000L^ (2) Total estimated value of grants made by Queen Anne's Bounty Fund in the five years 1881-85, 109,400^2 (3) Total estimated value of sums voluntarily raised, whether by societies or locally, in the single year 1885 : For church building and restoration ... £ 1,351,567 Por endowment of benefices ..... 166,888 For parsonage houses 173,234 For burial grounds 42,211 1,733,900 3 Muitipii- The number of English dioceses has been increased in the course of the reign by the creation of the separate Sees of Manchester, St. Albans, Truro, Newcastle, Liverpool, and Southwell. The number of colonial dioceses has been increased in a much larger degree. At the beginning of the reign there were only three Anglican bishops in India, one in each of the Presidency towns ; there were two in North America, the Bishops of Nova Scotia and of Quebec ; there was one in the southern hemisphere, the Bishop of Australia ; there were two in the West Indies, the Bishops of Barbados and Jamaica. There are now in all 63 bishops in British colonies or dependencies, and 13 mis- sionary bishops in other parts of the world. The total 1 Official Year-Book for 1887, p. 35. 2 JMd. p. 499. ^ Ibid. p. 514. cation of dioceses. RELIGION AND THE CHURCHES 383 number of clergymen who are supervised by the colonial and missionary bishops is 3,352/ i.e. each bishop has on the average 44 clergy under him; in England and Wales the same proportionate numbers of bishops and clergy, if the present numbers of the clergy be taken as the basis of calculation, would require 450 bishops.^ In 1867, under the presidency of Archbishop Longley, 'Pan- Anglican and again in 1878, under the presidency of Archbishop Coun- Tait, the whole body of bishops of the Anglican communion were invited to a conference at Lambeth ; 78 bishops were present at the iirst, 95 at the second of these conferences. The advantage of giving an opportunity of consultation to persons who are engaged in the prosecution of common objects in various parts of the world can hardly be ques- tioned ; at the same time, Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, whose right to speak may be gathered from the fact that he was the writer of the Pastoral Letter which the first conference put forth, admits that there was the further purpose ' of encircling the home Church with a band of far more dogmatic, truth-holding communions, who will act more strongly in favour of truth here.' ^ La early Christian times this episcopal organisation Growtii would have provided for every form of benevolent or spiri- sations tual activity. Of all such activity the bishop was then the °;^e^epr- official centre. The bishop's treasury was the depository soopai sys bSHit of every kind of gift for religious or charitable purposes. The bishop's house was at once hospital and poor house, training coUege and clergy house. And even when separate buildings were constructed for these several purposes, they ' This is the addition of the returns in the Official Year-Boo^, for 1887, pp. 522-531. 2 The numbers are: English and Welsh bishops 32, clergy 19,880 -i.e. aboi:t 620 to each diocesan— assuming the figures of the Official Year-Book, p. 51 9, to be correct ; but there is the difficulty that in the census of 1881 the number of clergy doing duty in churches was 21,663. ' Extract from a letter in his Life, iii. 237. 384 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA still remained closely under the bishop's supervision, and were administered by his clergy. But this element of the episcopal system had long been detached from it, and the small degree of elasticity which that system possesses in an established church formed a practical obstacle to its being reunited with it. But it is a remarkable testimony to the vitality of Christianity as a social force that it has developed on a large scale new forms of organisation in harmony with, and consequently fitted to maintain a hold upon, the new conditions of modern life ; and it is no less remarkable a testimony to the special vitality of the Church of England that these new forms have nowhere been more fully de- veloped than within its borders. Their general character has been determined by the general drift of the age towards association for common objects. Commercial activity works through ' companies,' religious activity through 'societies.' ' Societies ^'^ the beginning of the reign the system of working by before means of societies had already taken firm root. The Society reign. fQj- i^^ Propagation of the Gospel, the Society for Promo- ting Christian Knowledge, the Church Missionary Society, the Church Building Society, the National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church, had been many years in exist- ence and were doing useful work. The Church Pastoral Aid Society was founded in 1836, and the sister Society for Promoting the Employment of Additional Curates in 1837. Of the two great societies in which Churchmen and ' It is worthy of being noted that the possibility of combining the system of societies with the episcopal system was at one time fairly discussed, and that, moreover, by a society which has sometimes been suspected of an es- pecial jealousy of episcopal interference ; it was suggested that the societies should simply stimulate the collection of money by existing church organi- sations, e.g. the cathedral clergy in each diocese, and place the money so collected unreservedly in the hands of the bishops for distribution. (See a long Minute of the Committee of the Church Missionary Society printed in the Appendix to the Memoir of Henry Venn, p. 467.) RELIGION AND THE CHURCHES 385 Nonconformi.3ts meet on a common platform, the Eeligious Tract Society was founded in 1799, and the British and Foreign Bible Society in 1834. But in the course of the reign the system has grown to Growth enormous proportions. Every one of the societies which societies have just been mentioned has added largely to its income the'^* and to the sphere of its operations. The Society for the "^^^sn. Propagation of the Gospel had, in the year 1885-86, an in- come of 117,971Z. ; the Church Missionary Society an income of 232,219/1. ; the Society for Promoting Christian Know- ledge an income, exclusive of trading profits, of 65,106L ; the Church Pastoral Aid Society an income of 54,226L; and the Additional Curates Society an income of 64,160L ; in addition to which the former of the two societies claims to have called' forth local contributions to the amount of 82,215?., and the latter to the amount of 39,215Li The Eeligious Tract Society, aided by the profits upon the sale of its publications, made grants in 1886 to the amount of 47,722Z., and the British and Foreign Bible Society ex- pended a total income of 238,391L (of which 105,517?. was for books sold, 132,874?. from other sources) in putting into circulation 4,123,904 Bibles, or portions of the Bible, in as many as 277 languages. Of the societies which have come into existence during Central the reign, those which deal with what are sometimes diocesan specially called spiritual agencies have tended to be rather ^°°^^ '^^' local than general. In twenty-seven out of the thirty-two dioceses of England and Wales, there are special diocesan associations for building churches and providing for clergy. The most important of these associations, the Bishop of London's Fund, has expended on these objects since its institution in 1 863 a total sum of 739,227?.^ The general ' The statistics are taken from the Official Year-Booh for 1887, pp. 538, 639. ' Ibid- P- 21. VOL. I. C C 386 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA Paro- clilal organisa- tions. "Women's work in the Churoli. societies which have come into existence during recent years have been directed mainly to that element of religious type which consists in moral and social improvement. There are societies, for example, which are doing work of national importance, and on a large scale, for the promotion of temperance, for the rescue of girls from lives of vice, and for the training of children belonging to the doubtful classes in industrial schools. Many of these societies, like the Eeligious Tract Society and the Bible Society, are worked by the members of various denominations, acting together without regard to their differences of organisation or creed ; and it is possible that philanthropy may be the solvent in which those differences are ultimately destined to melt away. But while this system of central societies has grown up outside the episcopal system, and in some respects ignoring it, the local organisations for church work have for the most part grown up inside the parochial system, and as ramifica- tions of it. In those parishes in large towns which are normally worked upon the modern plan, there is usually a large group of guilds, societies, or clubs, worked by volun- tary workers, but all clustering round the parish church, and set in motion by the parish clergyman. Nor is this parochial character destroyed, even when these organisations are associated together so as to form diocesan societies ; they still recognise the parish clergyman as their head, and work under his direction. The machinery is sometimes remarkable for both its extent and its variety ; some typical examples, which are too long to be quoted here, are given in the ' Official Year-Book ' for 1887, pp. 62-69. There are, at the same time, some elements of modern life with which, in spite of its extended organisations, the parochial system fails efficiently to deal. The existence of these elements and the need of dealing with them, on the one RELIGION AND THE CHURCHES 387 hand, and the existence of a large number of women with- out occupation on the other, have given birth to institutions which already exist on a considerable scale, and which promise largely to affect the parochial work of the future. The institutions are those which, under the name of sister- hoods or deaconesses' institutions, band women together by various bonds to do the work which women can best do. This form of work began in 1845, with the help of Dr. Pusey, and under the immediate supervision of Mr. W. U. Eichards ; soon afterwards, and also with the help of Dr. Pusey, it began at Devonport, under the direction of Miss Sellon.' The sister- hoods which now exist are numerous ; among the most im- portant are the Sisterhood of St. John the Baptist at Clewer, and that of St. Peter at Kilburn. Each of them is on a large scale, and carries on in several parts of England works of great and varied utility. The former, which was founded in 1849, possesses and manages a penitentiary for fallen women, an orphanage and industrial school, a convalescent hospital for the poor and for others, schools of all grades for boys and girls, a sanatorium, a house of charity for the temporarily destitute, and mission-houses in eight different parishes for all kinds of parish work. The latter, which began in 1861, adds to many of these works a restaurant for sailors and working men, the provision of food for destitute children, a home for invaUded missionaries, and a depot for the sale of clothing to the poor.^ No less in the work which they do than in the widespread interest which they create, these sisterhoods, in spite of some perhaps needless imitations of alien ways, are doing a work which as much as any other is giving to Christianity its lost place in the classes of society ■ See an interesting article on ' English Sisterhoods ' in the Nineteenth Century for August 1884. 2 For the varied work of the Kilburn Sisters, see the monthly record which they publish, entitled Tlie Banner of Faith. c c 2 388 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA which modern civihsation has first created, and then trampled under its feet. Besides these changes which have been mentioned, the Church of England has shared with other communities, and partly borrowed from them, the custom of holding general meetings. Convooa- The Gorliam judgment led to an outcry, which was at length successful, for the revival of the dormant life of the two Convocations of the ecclesiastical provinces of Canterbury and York. In 1854 the necessary permission of the Crown to those two bodies to transact business was granted. The first year's experiment was pronounced a success, that of the second year a failure ; ' and since then, though the meetings have been allowed to take place every year, the verdict of failure has not yet been reversed. It is considered that the machinery is cumbrous, that the number of official members is excessive, and that the mode in which its elected members are chosen prevents it from being in any adequate sense a representative assembly of the clergy. The experiment of holding a large annual voluntary meeting of clergymen and laymen for the more or less informal discussion of current questions has been much ChureiL more successful. A ' Church Congress,' as it is termed, has gresses. been held in the autumn of every year since 1861, and has drawn forth a large body of opinion which forms an even better index than religious newspapers to the course of con- temporary Anglican thought. In a large majority of dio- ceses a similar experiment has been annually made. ' Dio- cesan Conferences,' under the presidency of then- respective bishops, have given an opportunity for the meeting of ac- quaintances and for the ventilation of subjects of common mterest, which in many minor points has improved the ' A vivid description of the meeting will be found in the Edinburgh Beview, ov. 99. RELIGION AND THE CHURCHES 389 "working of the ecclesiastical machinery. The main point in which both the Congresses and the Diocesan Conferences have differed from Convocation is the presence in the two former bodies of a lay element. An attempt has been made to do away with this point of difference by creating side by side with Convocation a voluntary ' House of Laymen.' The institution is still young, but, so far, it is unfruitful ; it suffers from the inherent weakness of all such voluntary in- stitutions, that the persons elected are elected almost wholly by the small proportion of laymen who busy themselves with ecclesiastical affairs, and do not represent the mass of prevalent opinion. 2. In the Churches of Scotland, in the Protestant similar Nonconformist Churches of England, and in the Catholic in other Church, there has been a similar development both of ni™^_"" centralised and of local activity. The growth of the several denominations, and especially their growth in relation to one another, do not admit of being accurately stated, inas- much as the statistics which refer to them are compiled on different principles. The following figures can therefore be only regarded as approximately true, but they are given as the most trustworthy that can be obtained. The Congregationalists in 1801 are returned as having 901 places of worship ; in 1851 as having 3,244, an annual increase of 46 ; in 1886 as having 4,315, an annual increase since 1851 of about 30. The Baptists in 1801 are returned as having 652 places of worship ; in 1851 as having 2,789, an annual increase of 42 ; in 1886 as having 8,737, an annual increase of 27. The data for estimating the growth of the Wesleyans are complicated by the fact that there have been several con- siderable secessions from the main body. But it seems probable that the Primitive Methodists have grown more rapidly than any other section ; their numbers in 1849 are 39° THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA said to have been about 94,000, in 1885 they are returned at 192,889. The Catholic Church has grown in both numbers and organisation ; but the figures are uncertain. In 1838 it was estimated that there were 610 priests ; in 1886 the number is returned as 2,522, an annual increase of nearly 40. The organisation has greatly changed. In 1837 there were the four districts, or vicariates, which had been created by Innocent XI. in 1688 ; in 1840 Gregory XVI. doubled the number of the districts, and, consequently, of the vicars- apostolic in charge of them ; in 1850 the substitution of a regular hierarchy of one archbishop and twelve bishops, deriving their titles from their sees, lashed the nation into temporary fury and produced the legislative fiasco known as the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill. The growth of all these bodies, like that of the Church of England, has been a growth of many forms of activity. There are in the Protestant bodies central societies for building chapels, for home and foreign missions, for pensions to ministers and their widows, for Sunday schools and ragged schools. There are in the Catholic Church, in addition to most of these, the societies which may be expected to exist where an active propaganda is being carried on, for the diffusion of good books and for the circulation of Catholic literature. Paro- And just as in the Church of England each parish in a organisa- large town tends to mclude m it a group ot various agencies B^'cmcon- for both spiritual and social good, so the Nonconformist chmohes, churches of large towns tend to be the centres of great activity. To take one typical ease, round the Congrega- tional church known as Union Chapel, Islington, cluster a Benevolent Society, a Dorcas Society, a Maternity Society, a Tract Society, a Ministers' Aid Society, a Penny Bank, a Sunday school with nearly 700 scholars, and in connection RELIGION AND THE CHURCHES 391 ■with it a Sunday-school Institute or Guild for the elder scholars, a ' Band of Hope ' or Temperance Society for the young ; there are organised branches of the missionary and other societies of the denomination, the London Missionary Society, the Church Aid and Home Missionary Society, the Evangelical Continental Society, the Colonial Missionary and Irish Evangelical Societies, the Congregational Chapel Building Society, and the Jews Society ; and there are two groups of branch institutions, chapels and missionaries, ragged schools, and other benevolent agencies, which are supported and managed by the church in the East End of London. It will thus be seen that the development of religious machinery during the reign has been enormous. The amount of religious activity which the working of it implies is a testimony of unquestionable force to the vitality of Christian principles. It may at the same time be doubted whether the activity is all pure gain, for it tends to destroy that which is an integral element in the higher forms of religion — the element of repose. The communion with an unseen God, the raising of the soul above the fret and passion of a transitory world, become less possible than before when the stillness of the closet is invaded by the restless movement of the street. III. The ecclesiastical legislation of the reign, so far as m. eo- it has affected the Church of England, has moved along tioai two main lines — that of the better distribution of its funds, j^^'|^ and that of the diminution of its special privileges ; it has disestablished the Church of Ireland, and several enact- ments have tended in the direction of withdrawing the recognition of the State from religion altogether. (1) The distribution of the funds of the Church of Eng- land in the first third of the century was eminently un- satisfactory. The incomes of both bishops and parochial 392 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA (11 Be- venues of the Chureli of Eng- land : the Eccle- siastical Commis- sion. (2) Re- moval of disabili- ties of TToncon- formists. clergy varied to an extent which left on the popular mind the impression of a great abuse. The iacome of the See of Durham was nearly twenty-two times as great as that of Llandaff ; some Uvings were worth less than lOZ. a year, and some more than 3,000L The theory on which these inequalities were defended was that, certain lands haying been left by pious persons to particular churches, the tenure of such lands by those churches rested upon an indefeasible divine right. But the theory was abandoned almost without a struggle. Church and State alike had survived the revolutionary tendencies of the earlier part of the century only by the persistence of the hope and the probability of reform. And when reform came it affected the one no less than the other. One of its first results was to assert the right of the State to deal with Church property. A Commission of Inquiry was suc- ceeded in 1836 by a permanent Commission, with powers, which have since been extended, to hold Church lands and to redistribute their revenues.' This body, which is known as the Ecclesiastical Commission, is still in active existence, and the results of its activity, however much its existence may clash with the original theory of the tenure of church property, are now commonly acknowledged to be beneficial. (2) The movements of legislation in the direction of diminishing the special privileges of the Church of England, thereby relieving the disabilities of Nonconformists, have been singularly rapid. It was not until the passing of the Test and Corporations Act in 1828 that, after nearly two centuries of exclusion, mitigated only in later years by the passing of an annual Indemnity Act, Nonconformists had been rendered eligible to civic and public offices ; it was not until the Marriage and Eegistration Acts of 1836 that ' The Acta are 6 & 7 Wm. IV. c. 77 ; 3 . c. 104 ; 23 & 24 Vict. c. 124. ; 4 Vict. c. 113 ; 13 & 14 Vict. conces- sion. RELIGION AND THE CHURCHES 393 marriages could be celebrated except in a church, or that births could have any official record other than the register of baptisms ; it was not until the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1846 thatthe penal enactments by which, for example, a man might be fined, and ia default of payment committed to gaol, for not attending church, were finally wiped from the Statute-book. Even within the last twenty years a Nonconformist was ineligible for almost all University emoluments ; he might be compelled to contribute towards the working expenses of the church from which he dis- sented ; and he could not bury his dead, except with rites which were distasteful to him, in a public churchyard. The legislation which has dealt with all these questions Foiicy of has proceeded uniformly on the principle of leaving the constitution, the doctrines, and the ritual of the Church of England untouched. It has permitted, if it has not also encouraged, the existence within the Church of varied and contradictory elements; but, accepting the 'Eeformation settlement,' it has never reopened in modern times the question of enlarging or varying those elements. Its policy has been one, not of comprehension, but of concession ; it has treated the National Church as a privileged denomination, and not as the aggregate of all the Christians of the nation. The policy of comprehension has, in fact, been rendered less possible than before by the accelerated growth within the last forty years of the theory which regards a ' State Church ' as being in its nature out of harmony with Christianity, and which takes exception not so much to the policy of the Church of England or to its doctrines, as to the fact that it is ' established.' The legislation which has thus moved on the lines of concession to Nonconformists has, in the course of the reign, affected the Universities, church-rates, the right of burial, the Jews, and oaths. 394 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA (i) Ad- mission of Non. conform- ists to the ITni- versiiies. (i) The movement in favour of opening the Universities to other than members of the Church of England may he said to date from 1834. In that year Mr. Wood's Bill, to admit Nonconformists to Cambridge, passed the Commons, but was thrown out by the Lords (by 85 to 187). The result was that in 1836 the University of London was founded ; and, although this University did not at first fulfil all the hopes of its founders, its existence staved off legisla- tion in regard to the older Universities until 1854, when the partial relief was afforded of admitting Dissenters to matriculation, residence, and the B.A. degree. It was a tantalising boon. Young men of eminent ability were allowed to compete for, and to obtain, the highest distinc- tions which a University afforded to its students, and were then, unless they subscribed to the Thirty-nine Articles, sent off to seek their fortunes elsewhere. In 1866, Mr. J. D. (now Lord) Coleridge brought in a Bill for opening almost all degrees and offices in the Universities without restriction of creed ; and for five years his measure knocked unsuccessfully at the door of the House of Lords. In 1871 the Bill was adopted by the Government and became law. It was viewed by many members of the Church with dis- favour and alarm. Before it finally passed there was a suggestion, which found some support, that the education of such students as were destined to be clergymen should be entirely withdrawn from the ' Universities, and that an attempt should be made by the foundation of special colleges elsewhere ' to provide, on a totally different scale from any- thing which has hitherto been attempted, an education at once efficient and religious for her (the Church's) future pastors.' ' But the alarm proved to be so groundless that the University Commissioners, which were appointed by a ' Dr. Llddon's sermon at Cuddesdon on The, Work and Prospects of Theological Colleges, 1868. RELIGION AND THE CHURCHES 395 Conservative Government seven years after the passing of the Act of 1871, used their powers to abohsh the restrictions which that Act had allowed to remain, and to dispense with the religious qualification for all College as well as for all University offices, excepting only degrees and professorships of divinity. (ii) The attempts, which were for a long time unsuccess- (ii) ful, to relieve Nonconformists from the obligation to support forms of worship in which they declined to take part, date from the earliest year of the Eeformed Parliament. The earliest forms of such attempts consisted of proposals either to provide for all Church expenses by a better management of Church estates, or to exempt Nonconformists from the payment of whatever rates might be imposed. The first proposal to abolish church-rates altogether was that of Sir John Easthope in 1841. But it was unsuccessful, and was not renewed. In the mean time, the question was kept alive by the Braintree case, which began in 1837, but was not finally decided by the House of Lords until 1853. The decision was that, however necessary a church-rate niight be in a parish, the minority could not impose a church- rate against the will of the majority. The result of the decision was that church-rates were constantly refused. According to a Parliamentary return, they were in 1859 refused in 1,525 parishes.' The amount raised by them had begun to diminish long before. In 1831 the amount so raised had been 446,247Z. ; in 1843 it was only about two- thirds of that amount, viz. 262,271^.^ The times were consequently ripening for their abolition ; but that abolition took ten years of struggle, dating from 1858, when Sir John Trelawney's Bill first passed the Commons, to 1868, when Mr. Gladstone's Bill was accepted by the Lords. ' May, Constitutional History, iii. 207. 2 These Parliamentary returns are quoted in the Edinburgh Eeview, c. 321. Church rates. 396 THE RElGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA 'J."' (iii) The slowness of the movement of the legislation Burials. ' ° which ultimately secured to Nonconformists the right to bury their dead in the public churchyards, with their own religious services, is a striking testimony to the strength of the illogical elements in the English character. For ' nowhere was the painfulness of schism more deeply felt on either side. The clergyman reluctantly performed the solemn service of his church in presence of mourners who seemed to mock it even in their sorrow. ... On his side, the Dissenter recoiled from the consecrated ground and the offices of the Church. Bitterness and discord followed him to the grave, and frowned over his ashes.' ' Freedom was only achieved after two campaigns, the first of which began in 1861, the second in 1870. In 1861 a Bill on the subject was introduced by Sir Morton Peto. It was no doubt a shock to the religious consciousness of many excellent persons. Mr. Hubbard, a prominent member of the Anglican party, said of it, in moving its rejection, that ' if a Bill had been introduced for turning the monarchy into a republic ... it could not be more inimical to the constitution of Church and State than this Bill.' ^ It was rejected by the decisive majority of 155 to 236 ; and although, when reintroduced in the following year, it reached the stage of being referred to a Select Committee, it was not further pressed. The second campaign began in 1870 under the vigorous leadership of Mr. Osborne Morgan. For ten years there were alternate victories and defeats in the Commons, and constant defeats in the Lords. At last, in 1880, the Lords accepted the measure (43 &44 Vict. c. 41). Under due restrictions in the interests of order, burials were allowed to take place in churchyards without the presence of a clergyman of the Church of England, and ' either with- ' May, Constitutional History, iii, 194. 2 Hansard, 3rd series, clxi. 1034. RELIGION AND THE CHURCHES 397 out any religious service or with such Christian and orderly religious service ' as the person in charge of the burial might think fit. The measure has -^'orked with less friction than was expected even by those who wished well to it ; the fear which had been expressed ' of turning every parish church into a bear-garden, where every man who takes out a licence to preach may beard the parson on his own ground,' has proved to be without foundation.' (iv) The legislation of the reign has slowly, but almost (iv) Tte completely, removed the civil disabilities of the Jews. The ®^^' passing of the Test and Corporations Act in 1828, which had relieved other Nonconformists, had placed the Jews in a worse position than before, for they thereby lost the advantage of the annual Indemnity Act, which they had hitherto shared with other Nonconformists, while at the same time they could not make the declaration ' on the true faith of a Christian ' which the new Act imposed. The first proposal for their special relief, in 1830, met with a passionate opposition. Mr. Perceval entreated the House, ' in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, to preserve the religion of Christianity, the religion of the State, from being defiled by the introduction of the Bill now proposed.' ^ It was not until 1845 that they came to be eligible for muni- cipal offices ; and it was not until 1858 that, after a struggle which assumed at one time the proportions of a constitu- tional crisis, they became eligible to sit in Parliament. (v) Under the pressure of the new conditions of religious (v) oatiis thought, the Legislature has come slowly to recognise the aflirma. existence of persons who are neither Protestants nor *^°°-^- Catholics nor Jews. The stages of that recognition are marked by the changes in the statutes respecting oaths in courts of justice. Until 1833 there was but one form of > Tirms, April 25, 1861. ' Hansard, 2nd series, vol. xxiii. 1328. 398 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA oath, which all persons without distinction were required to take. In that year an Act was passed to allow Quakers, Moravians, and Separatists to substitute an affirmation for an oath. Five years later an Act was passed to legalise other than the customary forms of oath, ' provided the same shall have been in such form and with such ceremonies as such person may declare to be binding.' But in the same year a proposal to give a general right to make an affirma- tion instead of an oath was rejected by the House of Lords ; nor was it until 1870 that the Legislature admitted that a person might be competent to give credible testimony who, to his misfortune, had ceased to recognise the force of any religious sanction whatever ; and even the Act of 1870 is held by the courts not to apply to the oath which must be taken by members of Parliament.' These results will be variously viewed as signs of progress or of retrogression. But it is doubtful whether any serious person now believes that the tide of religious freedom will ever flow back again, or that it has reached the hmit of its outflow. ' The idea of asserting (on the part of the Church of England) those exclusive claims, which become positively unjust in a divided country governed on popular principles, has been abandoned by all parties in the State.' ^ Move- Two important acts of the Legislature have indicated ™ wards the direction which its further movements in regard to ushmen't' religion may be expected to take. (1) (1) The Canadian Clergy Eeserves Act of 1853 definitely cie'rgy^^'^ endorsed the principle of not giving pubhc funds to the Heserves. g^ppQ^t of a rehgious denomination in a colony. When the colony of Upper Canada was first organised, a seventh ' L.E. 7 Q.B.D. (C.A.); March 31, 1881. 2 Gladstone, ' A Chapter of Autobiography,' in OUanings of Past Years, vii. 143. RELIGION AND THE CHURCHES 399 part of all settled lands was assigned for the support of the Protestant clergy. These lands, the ' Clergy Eeserves,' were a continual source of contention, and since the Provincial Legislature could not deal with them on its own authority, an enabling Act was passed by Parliament, by virtue of which, in 1854, they were reassumed by the State, and the proceeds of the sale of them applied to municipal purposes. The life interests of the existing clergy were compensated by the payment of capital sums ; and by an arrangement which involved some individual self-sacrifices, but which proved to be of great advantage to the general body, the sums so received were thrown into a common fund and reinvested, so as to form a new endowment.' (2) The Irish Church Act of 1869 was a larger applica- C2) Irish tion of the same principle— that ecclesiastical, like other Act. funds, are ultimately the property of the State, and may be reassumed by it. The reason for such reassumption in the case of the Irish Church was that it was not the Church of the mass of the Irish people. The active campaign against that Church began soon after the Eeform Act of 1832, and the debates upon the ' Appropriation Clause ' of the BiUs of 1835 and 1836 form the first important practical discussion in modern times of the relation of the State to ecclesiastical funds. The Irish Tithe Eedemption Act of 1838, by which 30 per cent, of the tithes were given to the landowners, staved off for thirty years the serious consideration by Parliament of the Irish Church as a whole. In the course of those thirty years the question was repeatedly brought forward— by Mr. Ward in 1843, by Mr. Bernal Osborne in 1849, by Serjeant Shee in 1854, by Mr. Dillwyn in 1865, by Sir John Gray in 1866 and 1867 ; but it was not until 1868 that Mr. Gladstone's Eesolutions brought the question > A short history of the question will be found in an article, ' A Free Anglican Church,' in Maomillan' s Magazine, for 1868. 400 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA Its grounds. Its results. fairly to the front. The final campaign was short. An ap- ,peal to the country brought about a change of Government. An Act on the lines of the Resolutions was passed in 1869, and on January 1, 1871, the 'Church of Ireland,' as it is still styled in official documents, became a voluntary and independent community. If the principle that the State may interfere at all in any such cases be admitted, it must also be admitted that its grounds for interference in the case of the Irish Church were exceptionally strong. The number of members of that Church was altogether out of proportion to its wealth and its organisation. ' I pay tithes,' said Mr. G. H. Moore in the House of Commons in 1849, ' in eight parishes. In the whole of those parishes there is not one church, one glebe, or one single resident clergyman.' ' In the diocese of Dublin, the ' capital of the pale,' where the Church might have been supposed to be exceptionally strong, there were 78 parishes with a total number of 719 members of the Irish Church. And whatever view be entertained of the policy of the Act, it must be admitted that the result of it has not been unsatisfactory. The Church has more than held its own in respect of the number of its members ; for while the decrease of the total population of Ireland in the twenty years 1861-81 amounted to 11 per cent., that of the number of members of the Irish Church amounted to 8 per cent.^ The financial history of the Church ' is on the whole a record of progress.' " The life interests of the existing clergy were commuted for the sum of 7,581,471^.'' Following the Canadian precedent, a large part of this ' Hansard, 3rd series, vol. ovii. 132. ^ The numbers wiU be found in the Official Year-Booh for 1887, p. 375. = Ibid. p. 385. The words are those of an official statement. * Ibid. p. 382. RELIGION AND THE CHURCHES 401 sum was thrown into a common fund and reinvested. The voluntary contributions in aid of this fund have amounted in the sixteen years 1870-85 to 3,110,150L ; ^ and the re- sult is that, after having in the mean time paid all the necessary annuities to the clergy who had commuted their capitalised life interests, and after having spent large sums on the purchase of glebes and other legitimate objects, the representative body of the Church had on January 1, 1886, a total capital almost equal to the original sum handed over to it by the Government — viz. 7,239,120L^ The highest income of a benefice is returned at 905Z. ; but since the lowest is returned at 20L, an amount which is below the living point, it is clear that these sums do not represent all sources of an incumbent's income. The ratio between the number of benefices and that of Church members remains about the same as before the disestab- lishment ; in 1868 there was an average of 457 Church members to each benefice, in 1885 there was a similar average of 502. ^ There is no room to enter here into the subtle and interesting question of the progress of religious ideas as expressed in rehgious literature. But if it be desired to form a summary estimate of the progress of religion itself apart from the history of religious communities, or the statistics of religious organisations, that progress will probably be found to consist chiefly in its having begun again to move with the movements of contemporary life. > Official Tear-Book for 1887, p. 385. "^ Ibid. p. 381. 3 The figures are : in 1868, benefices 1,514, Church members 693,357 ; in 1885, benefices 1,274, Church members 639,564 {Official Year-Book, p. 375). InEngland the ratio cannot be so exactly ascertained, the number of Church members being uncertain ; if that number be taken to be 15,000,000, the average obtained by dividing it by 13,896 (the number of benefices) will be 1,079. VOL. I. D D 402 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA It is losing its isolation. The measure of its vitality is its power to readjust its conceptions and to readapt its institu- tions to their environment. The measure of its weakness is the timidity of its official leaders. The measure of its hopes is the self-sacrifice which it more and more inspires, and the reality of the consolation with which it saves the wretched from despair in an age of growing and inevitable sadness. Edwin Hatch. 403 COLONIAL POLICY AND PROGRESS. The present survey of the colonies, and especially of colonial y^^ extension, must be content with making bare mention of of the ... T present many questions which it cannot discuss, and with discussing sketch, others so briefly that it dare not venture on any decision. It cannot, for instance, dwell at any length on that vague, and therefore fascinating, subject of Imperial Federation, which offers many points of comparison with the ' syste- matic colonisation ' so much debated among a previous gene- ration, when there were few colonists to federate, just as now there is little fresh country to colonise. It can give but a brief account of that little body of men who laboured so unceasingly in the early years of the reign to preserve the colonial dominion of England in all its freedom and integrity, and amongst whom Gibbon Wakefield stands out as the man who, by the bold daring of his character, dominated the colonial action of England, winning his way at one time by his strong personal influence, and at another by the very audacity of his enterprise. The subject is of itself so large that we must be content to confine ourselves (1) to a survey of the colonial policy of the mother country, (2) to the political and social development of the colonies. In the latter case it is well to observe that the reign divides itself, roughly speaking, into two periods at the year 1856. At that date responsible and representative government had been granted, and guaranteed by custom, to all the more important colonies. D D 2 404 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA Colonial policy. First period, 1837-56. The con- dition of England and ques- tion of colonisa- tion. Emigra- tion. The history of colonial policy affords an apt illustra- tion of the manner in Avliich a subject that at one time re- ceives the attention and attracts the interest of a nation is at another allowed to fall into the most complete obscurity. Probably no other question has encountered such rapid changes of political temperature. Politicians and the public alike have been unwillmg to grant it consideration until the needs of foreign diplomacy or the dangerous demands for internal reforms have been satisfied. In the decade from 1830 to 1840, however, several circumstances compelled them to take serious note of what they would otherwise have regarded as a mere resource for unemployed statesman- ship. It was a time of great distress. Suffering was prevalent throughout the manufacturing districts of the country, where great numbers were out of employment, and the price of food was high. There was an outcry for work and for bread. To many it seemed that the state foreshadowed by Malthus had come upon the country, and that the population had reached the limits of subsistence. But the economic teaching which had promoted these suspicions was busying itself in seeking an outlet for the population from which it apprehended such peril. On the other side of the sea was an abundant field of employment. The colonies needed cultivation, and means were sought to pro- mote emigration from England to their territories. This was not the only effect which economic theory had on the opinion of the country with reference to this subject. Besides offering what seemed the only solution of this very pressing question of over-population, it inspired enthusiasts to enlist themselves in schemes which might display the practical validity of their particular theories. Up to that time a colony had been too often regarded as an alternative to the workhouse and a natural home for convicts. The COLONIAL POLICY AND PROGRESS 405 paupers were ' shovelled out ' ' of the country, and the con- victs were shovelled into the colonies. Although the desti- nations of the two classes were kept apart, the latter going to Australia, the former to Canada, it was very evident that, so long as emigration was utilised for purposes such as these, it would be shunned as an implied disgrace by the more energetic or more fortunate members of the com- munity.'^ Gibbon "Wakefield's pamphlet of 1829 directly attacked the system of free grants of land ; but its effect was to draw the attention of many of the best men at home to the whole question of the relations between England and her colonies. In 1830 the Colonisation Society was founded, mainly with the support of the Eadical party. Its first work was to rivet attention on the question of transporta- Trans- tion ; and so great were the evils of the .system suspected Xi^^^' to be, that a few years later a Select Committee was ap- pointed to inquire into them. Wi^en the Committee re- ported, in 1838, there was no longer any room for doubt, for the very worst suspicions were confirmed. Had there been nothing, however, to render some con- indiffer- clusion on this subject, and on others, absolutely inevitable, England it is still possible that a continuance of the old policy of °^iQ^^g^ alternate indifference and interference would have allowed v^^^- tions. the further degradation of the colonists in the Pacific and brought about separation between England and her North American possessions. When, during a debate^ in 1831 on the feasibility of affording some representation in the Imperial Parliament to the colonies, it was suggested that a member might be appointed for Australia, the idea was greeted with laughter, not because the representation was ' An expression frequently used by Charles BuUer. 2 Wakefield, Art of Colmvisation, Letter xxi.,in which the results of this system are described. ' Hansard, August 16, 1831. 4o6 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA deemed inadequate, but because it appeared altogether unnecessary. So complete was this indifference that Lord Durham, in concluding his report, found it necessary to say, ' I cannot participate in the notion that it is the part either of prudence or of honour to abandon our country- men.' It is true that events happening in the colonies made a temporary impression in England ; that tales of danger from Australia reminded men that the epoch of discovery and adventure had not yet passed away; that the discontent in the West Indies attracted notice from its connection with the struggle for emancipation. Yet instances such as these only serve to show the more clearly how transitory was the interest aroused and how rapidly it faded as soon as the dangers or difficulties of the moment were overcome. There- In North America, however, events of a different cha- Cana°da^^ racter were taking place. The Canadian rebellion broke compels Q^^ jjj 1837. It recalled the time of the American secession. atten- tion. The awakened interest of the country showed itself in the heated debates of Parliament, fanned by the advocacy of Eoebuck and the philippics of Brougham. In the ensumg Lord year Lord Durham was sent out as Governor-General with unusual, and in his opinion unlimited, powers. The de- cisive vigour of his action excited both the fiercest attack and the warmest support ; but his defence was luke- warmly undertaken by the Miaisters who had appointed him, and he returned home, embittered by this desertion and depressed by what his enemies deemed his humihation. In 1839 his report (in the composition of which he had had the aid of the brilliant pen of Charles Buller) was laid before Parliament, and the next year he died. The enmities of party strife and the inopportune close of his life enhanced the interest surrounding this report. They did not give it its importance, but they drew attention to COLONIAL POLICY AND PROGRESS ^o^ the grave significance of the facts which it related, and rendered the public mind more ready to adopt and carry out the principles on which it was based. When divested of its merely temporary and local cha- The racteristics, it contained little that had not been stated or report., advocated before. Its great value was that it gathered together the miscellaneous utterances of the past, and pre- sented them under an almost official sanction to the re- formers of the future. After debating at some length the evil consequences that had resulted from the lack of sys- tematic colonisation, it proceeded to consider the causes which prevented both the mother country and her colonies from deriving the full benefits from emigration. It drew attention to the necessity of exercising a more minute control over the manner of emigration, with regard to the selection of the emigrants, their passage across the sea, and their settlement in the colonies. Negligence in this de- partment was not, however, the chief weakness of the existing change system. There were two other sources of difficulty, both of ^r'^'^re- them mentioned in the report, which require further con- ^i^i'^d sideration, on account of their after prominence. They direc- relate to the management of the public lands and the mode of government. (1) The Public Lands. — It had been customary to dis- (i) The pose of the land by free grant, under the belief that such lands, a course was likely to attract emigrants in great numbers, ^^^eariy In reality it had an entirely contrary effect. There was no ^y^'^™- concentration of the settlers, for their eagerness to obtain land led them to scatter themselves far and wide over the soil to the prevention of all effective cultivation, as capital and labour were forced into continual separation. Those of the new settlers who had been labourers at home were unable to reap much advantage from the uncleared plots which they received from the Government, for not only 4o8 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA •were they cut off from all markets by the difficulty of communication, but even prevented from clearing their land by their lack of capital and assistance. On the other hand, many who had come out in the hope of making large profits by working extensive estates found that they could get no labourers to work for them with constancy, and, in disgust, withdrew their capital and returned home. This evil was aggravated by the action of those who ob- tained land with the intention of ultimately parting with it when its value increased, since in the interval before sale they left their grants untouched, and thus imposed huge barriers of waste between the more energetic settlers. In order to effectually remedy such a condition, it was necessary to improve the means of communication, to pro- vide for the more thorough working of the land, and to promote the influx of population. These results it was proposed to achieve by the sale of the land ' at a price determined according to the circumstances of the case, and by the application of the proceeds to the two latter pur- substi- poses. The South Australian Company^ was formed in of sale 1834, with the view of carrying out this plan; while so grant^^ early as 1831 instructions were issued from the Colonial Office ^ which substituted sale for free grant ; and the Com- mission on Australian Lands which sat in 1836 advised the more complete adoption of this policy. Effect was given to these recommendations by the Australian Land Act of 1842. Yet so hesitating was the official recognition of this principle that in 1843 it again formed one of the chief topics of debate in the House of Commons.* With the progress of time and the increase of population, ' Only this first part of the scheme was advocated by Gibbon Wakefield as essential. Cf. Wakefield, Art of Colonisation, and Merivale, Lectures on Colonisation, Lecture ix. ^ Art of Colonisation, Letter ix. ^ Grey, Colonial Policy, Letter vii. * April 6 ; Hansard, Ixviii. 484, &c. COLONIAL POLICY AND PROGRESS 409 this particular question ceased to be of such importance, control The connection between the land system and emigration public continued, however, to be recognised, and the Imperial Jf^'^^g^ Government retained the control of the lands some time o'^erto colonial after it had surrendered other rights and powers to the authori- colonial legislatures. But when it was determined to throw upon the colonies the full responsibility of their own government, it was felt that the time had come to give up to them such means of revenue as might be offered by the pubHc lands. The importance of the land question still survives. Questions of State resumption and State owner- ship arise, are legislated on, and again arise ; but, when settled, they will be decided, not by the Imperial Govern- ment, but by the legislature of that particular colony in which they occur. The settlement of that land which was once the subject of legislation in the English Parliment, because it afforded an outlet for a population supposed to have reached its utmost limits, is now ordered by the legis- latures of the communities which are settled upon it, and which it has furnished with the means of unparalleled advancement. At that time the population of the United Kingdom was nearly 26,000,000 ; now it is upwards of 36,000,000, while during the same period the population of the North American colonies has increased nearly fourfold and that of Australasia twenty-five fold. How is it that colonial legislatures now determine matters which were formerly the subject of discussion in the Imperial Parliament ? By what process has this change been brought about? These questions naturally present themselves for consideration. The injudicious disposal of the public lands had tended to deter settlers from entering the country, but the mode of government made their life there intolerable. (2) The Mode of Government. — Since the rebellion of 410 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA (2) the American colonies it had been the aim of EneHsh Mode of , . goTern- statesmanshijD to prevent the occurrence of a similar disaster in the case of the remaining possessions. This change of ciiange purpose had necessitated an entire change of policy. In the after loss earlier period, though there had been little attempt at inter- rioa™^' ference in the internal government of the American pro- ooiomes. yijjcgg^ minute attention had been paid to the problem of regulating the commerce in such a manner that England might obtain the greatest possible advantage.' But during the years which intervened between the Declaration of Independence and the beginning of the present reign, the altered aim of colonial policy had caused the Government to maintain a strict supervision over the internal life of the colonies, in order to stifle any incipient attempt at revolt, while it encouraged the modification of the commercial re- lations ia favour of the colonists. There were protective and differential duties on both sides ; and the result was, that England voluntarily limited the supply of her own market, while the colonies agreed to procure from her commodities which she produced in greater quantities and at cheaper rates than any other country. The inconvenience entailed on England was very considerable, for she had to buy many commodities from the colonies which she might have obtained more cheaply elsewhere ; while, on the other hand, no real restriction was placed on the action of the colonists, since England, as the first manufacturing country of the world, would have poured her goods into their markets even had she been given no fiscal preference. These material advantages were granted the colonies to bribe them to aUow to England the privileges of imperial supremacy.^ On both sides there were obstacles to the longer continuance ' The early English colonies were in practice independent of the mother country, except as to their external commercial relations. — Lewis, Govern- ment of Dependencies, p. 161. ' Merivale, Lectures on Colonisation, i. 78. COLONIAL POLICY AND PROGRESS 411 of such a policy. On the one side was a growing im- patience of all commercial restrictions — for the era of Free- trade was beginning, and within a short time the differen- tial duties in favour of West Indian sugar and Canadian timber would be repealed ; on the other there was continued irritation at acts of arbitrary interference. The system of government was somewhat complex. In Mode of the West Indies and North America representative institu- govJin- tions were in existence. Their value was, however, neu- ^3^*^"^ tralised by two facts. The people had no real control over ^-^^ its . . defects, the executive, which was not chosen by the assembly, but appointed by the Crown. Further, their rights were not as yet so guaranteed by custom as to be free from danger of subversion. When the Jamaica legislature, for instance, endeavoured to compel the assent of the executive to its pro- posals by a refusal of supplies, it was superseded by the Home Parliament. It is, of course, necessary that the sove- reign power, wherever situated, shall retain such potential rights of interference ; but a great advance in the consti- tutional growth of the colonies was achieved when it had been shown by experience that such powers would not be exercised except in the gravest emergency. The two defects mentioned were largely remedied during the first twenty years of the reign, during which responsible government was introduced, and the independence of the colonial legis- latures abundantly recognised. Three modes of government were possible. The sove- possible reign authority might exercise its powers through a gover- ^°,rMn-^ nor, or delegate them to local bodies, which, in turn, "^^^^^^ might be either appointed from home or elected by the dency. inhabitants of the colony. Each system had its difficulties. Were the governor surrounded by a council, which had yet . no full control over his action, he was merely hampered ' ' Wakefield, Art of Colonisation, p. 196. 412 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA ' by a nasty local opposition ; ' were he without the council, he was inconvenienced by the unpleasant interference of the Colonial Office.^ Many of the colonies have passed through each phase, but the chief interest of the period under discussion is contained in the history of the progress from the second to the final stage, which would, as it was then thought, be equivalent to virtual independence.^ There was, indeed, an intermediate position in the develop- ment, which was reached when, though the administration was left in the hands of nominee officials, the rights of taxa- tion and consent were given to a representative assembly. Such was the condition of the representative colonies at the beginning of the reign. It could only be temporary, for it furnished every possible cause and opportunity for dissen- sion. Both in the Canadas and in the other North American possessions there was unceasing antagonism between the assembly and the executive, which was, as a rule, supported by the council, for, hke itself, that body was composed of the nominees of the Crown. Very often all administration was rendered impossible. In the Durham report the diffi- culty was detailed at great length ; and when, in 1840, the Ministry came to consider the question of Canadian reform, they determined to give effect to its recommendations. The fulfilment of their purpose was all the easier as it required no legislative action. The necessary alterations were already within the powers and discretion of the Colonial Office. In 1839 Lord John Eussell had called the atten- tion of the governor to the expediency of retaining his ministry only so long as he might deem advisable, but it was not tiU the appointment of Lord Elgin m 1846 that the principle was fully acted upon, and the executive, chosen ' Wakefield, Art of Colonisation; cf. Responsible Government, by C. Buller, chap, vi., ' Mr. Mothercountry, of the Colonial Office.' ' Lewis, Government of Deipendeivcies, p. 306 COLONIAL POLICY AND PROGRESS 413 according to the parliamentary custom of England, was placed under the control of the assembly. Two years later the same custom was adopted in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, and in 1851 it was extended to Prince Edward's Island. The action of the Home Parliament soon showed that it had determined to recognise the rights given by the Canadian Constitution of 1840. In 1849 it refused to interfere with the Rebellion Indemnity Act of the legisla- ture of Canada, while the year before it had assented to the proposal to place the civil lists under colonial control. In 1850 the management of the post office had been handed over to the colonists themselves. The most signal confir- mation of this policy was yet to come. In 1853 the Ministry of Lord Aberdeen, despite the vigorous opposition of the main body of the Conservatives led by Lord Derby, succeeded in passing through Parliament a measure which gave the colonial legislature full power to deal with the clergy reserves.' Meanwhile, in the other colonies, a similar advance had Bepre- been taking place, though in their case the concession of govem- representative institutions, being made after 1840, carried ™®"* with it the acknowledgment of local responsibility. In traiia. 1828 nominee councils had been established in New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land, and during succeeding years the Crown had been empowered to appoint similar councils for both South and Western Australia. In 1840 a council was nominated in New Zealand. Two years later, the constitution of New South Wales was altered and a chamber established, one-third of which was nominated, wiiile two-thirds of the members were elected by the people. To this assembly authority was delegated to constitute local or municipal councils. ' Hansard, cxxiv. 1070, &o. ; cxxv. 450, &c. ; cxxvi. 282, &o. 4t4 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA Eespon- Events hurried on. A premature attempt was made to govern- grant a constitution to New Zealand. At last, in 1850, in'Aus- the Australian Government Act ' was passed. Councils '^ ^^' similar to that existing in New South Wales were granted to Victoria, Van Diemen's Land, and South Australia, with power to alter their constitution on assent of the Crown. There was one grievance common to all the Australian colonies. They objected to the mode adopted by the Home Government m dealing with the public lands, and in their consequent anxiety to obtain full local powers of control they hastened to avail themselves of the authority granted by the preceding Act to introduce a more fully representa- tive system with two chambers. Their action was confirmed by the Home Parliament,' and the public lands were sur- and in rendered to colonial management. By that time New Zea- land, and If'i^'i ^'^^ t^s C!ape had obtained representative legislatures, at the |-]^g Qj^g ^jj 1852, the other in the succeeding year. The resiUt of the policy of this period was, not only that representative institutions had been granted to the colonies of Australasia and the Cape, but that throughout the British possessions the independence of the colonial legislatures had been acknowledged, and their claims to a parUamentary govern- ment satisfied. These It Can hardly be said that these reforms were promoted IcMeved by any display of public feeling. They were agreeable in- by the | ^j ^ i^^ Liberal mstincts then predominant m the country labDurs ^ ^ of asman g^^(j throughout Europe. But it was the action of a small body of ox men, and body of men that lent vitality and impulse to the movement. faTiy'of' The Colonial Society, represented by such men as Sir Wake" William Molesworth, and deriving its inspiration from the field. -tt-ritings and influence of Gibbon Wakefield, made itself a real force in politics. It served both to awaken the in- terest of the country, and as a means of bringing the > 13 & 14 Vict. 0. 59. ' 18 & 19 Vict. o. 54. COLONIAL POLICY AND PROGRESS 415 ministerial machine into action. The hindrances which its members had to encounter were great. In their at- tempts to advance the cause of local government, officialism was all against them. They were accused besides of attack- ing the supremacy of Parliament, and they replied by proposing to divide colonial affairs into those which were imperial and those which were local. In the case of these latter, they contended that the Ministry had little know- ledge and acted with the most arbitrary freedom. To the objection that the Ministry was responsible to the nation for the just exercise of its powers, it was retorted that such a system meant 'government by the misinformed with responsibihty to the ignorant.' ' Their efforts were crowned with no inconsiderable success by the measures and resolu- tions which were passed between 1848 and 1856, but from that time their importance diminishes. Their chief aims were accomplished, and in the period of colonial history which ensued they exerted a much less potent influence. In estimating the value of their work it is important to ob- serve that much of their activity had been directed to removing the suspicion, so prevalent at the time, that such grants of autonomy would produce separation. In the first years of the reign a philosophic observer ^ had declared that a position such as that conceded to the colo- nies in 1856 meant 'virtual independence.' In that very year a constitutional historian ' considered that it must be the aim of statesmanship to ' ripen ' them for the responsi- bility of such an ultimate separation. From that date a new period of colonial history begins. The legislation wanted had been mainly achieved, and the new period is rather one of development and definition. It was a time during which people began to realise what was ' Sir William Molesworth. ^ Sir G. C. Lewis, vide, supra. ' Mr. Arthur Mills, Colonial Constitutions, Introduction, p. 69. 4i6 THE BEIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA Colonial policy. Second period, one of defini- tion, 1856-87. Con- tinued indiffer- ence of public. Position of gover- nors de- fined. the real nature of the alterations already effected, and what would be their necessary complement. In one quarter, indeed, of the empire a definite political change was made. The colonies of the West Indies surrendered their ancient constitution and lapsed into a state of immediate depen- dence upon the Crown. It must not, however, be forgotten that, although representative, these legislative bodies had represented the English inhabitants alone, and had thus enabled a small class of planters to obtain an almost abso- lute control over the large mass of the people. During this period there were several circumstances which prevented colonial matters from attaining much pro- minence. In this itself there was no harm, since of the grievances that stUl remained many could be remedied only by the long experience and efforts of the colonists themselves, while the defining influence of time was needed to reveal the difficulties which underlay others. Even had this not been the case, the attention of England and her statesmen was now effectively diverted to other quarters. The country had already been roused into a state of warlike ardour by the events of the Crimea, soon to be followed by the Indian Mutiny, and the influence of Lord Palmerston was in the ascendant. And when this state of feeling passed away, there ensued a clamour for those measures of English internal reform which had been so often promised and so long deferred. Meantime, events had been quietly consolidating the new constitutions. As each question arose in practice, it received its decision. The twofold position of the governor was defined. He was the embodiment of sovereignty in the country over which he presided, but he was responsible to the Crown whose authority he wielded. It is a matter of no little complexity to define his functions in the case of those countries which COLONIAL POLICY AND PROGRESS 417 have received responsible government. He must, of course, act only on the advice of his ministers, who, as in the case of England, are virtually representative of the majority in the assembly. So far his position is similar to that of a constitutional sovereign. But, in addition, he has to as- sume responsibilities of a different character, for as the servant of the Crown, his conduct may become the subject of discussion in the Imperial Parliament. In many instances these conflicting positions might lead him to contrary con- clusions. "Were he governed solely by the necessities of his position as a constitutional ruler, he would assent to Bills which his imperial relations might bid him reject. Thus he might co-operate with the colonial ministry in bringing forward Bills to meet the veto which in his imperial capa- city he must himself pronounce. His character is the standing compromise of the Constitution. As he has two sets of responsibilities,' so his policy must meet with a two- fold support — in the colony from the local legislature, at home from the Crown, or rather from the majority of the House of Commons. Now it is his business to prevent these two forces from coming into collision. As the pointsman of the Constitution, he must shunt them on to parallel lines. Opposition between them may arise in two ways, indirect and direct. The Queen, acting on the advice of her Minis- ters, may veto a colonial Bill, or disallow it after its trans- formation into an Act. In either case the veto has to be pronounced by the governor, and for it his ministers will be responsible in the colonial legislature, as, on the other hand, the English Ministry is responsible in Parliament. Thus the two hostile majorities may drift into strife. Again, the Imperial Parhament may pass a measure which concerns the colonies, or the colonial legislature one which infringes • This word must not be taken in its technical sense. He is not con- stitutionally responsible to the colonial legislature. VOL. I. E B 4iS THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA Two other questions solved. (1) The position of the Anglican Church in the colonies. the provisions of an Act of Parliament. Hitherto, however, judicious compromise has prevented any critical difficulty from arising out of such cases.' The instructions which have from time to time been issued, and the opinions given on points of difficulty during the last thirty years, have de- fined this twofold position of the governor, and thus illus- trated the nature of the connection between England and her colonies. But this has not been the sole progress made in the work of definition. The position of the colonies with regard to the Anglican Church and the British forces has been the subject of considerable discussion. In one instance, the difficulties have received a definite solution ; in the other, a great advance has been made towards their determina- tion. Before this time (1856), it had been assumed that the Enghsh Church was established in the colonies as in the mother country. Its position had been taken away in the Canadas, but that had been effected by the express will of Par- liament. Possibly the difficulty might have escaped elucida- tion for some time, had it not been for the pertinacity of the Bishop of Cape Town in prosecuting the Colenso case, for it was only through decisions on points arising out of that suit that it was authoritatively decided that the Crown could not of its sole will establish the English Church in such colonies as were possessed of representative constitutions. There were two possible com-ses open — either the decision of the courts might be acted on, and the Church regarded as a voluntary and not a State institution, or the Crown might seek the aid of the colonial legislatures in forming an establishment. Fortunately the former alternative was decided on, and a rule of religious equality introduced, to ' Todd, Parliamentary Constitutions in tlie British Colonies, c. iv. pt. lo ; cf. Tarring, Law relating to Colonies, c. ii. and c. v. COLONIAL POLICY AND PROGRESS 419 be afterwards extended to the colonies under the immediate control of the Crown.' The protection of the colonies by the English army and (2) The rfil fli'hi €\T\ navy had been necessitated by the policy of England before of the the beginning of this reign. In the first place, it was not gove^iT-^ regarded as advisable to teach the colonists to rely too ^fth'^e- exclusively upon their own strength ; in the second place, ^^^? *"* the duty of protection was an adjunct of that position of and naval supremacy so eagerly assumed by the mother country. As forces, local independence was conceded, the idea grew of throwing the burden and privilege of self-defence upon the newly organised communities. There were many points in dispute, for then, as now, it was the opinion of some statesmen that the colonies were generally involved in war because of the quarrels of the mother country, while others thought that wars were more frequently entailed on the mother country by the action of the colonists themselves. This difference of opinion naturally led to opposite conclusions as to the obligation of the Home Government to defray the expenses of colonial defence. In 1851, Lord Grey contrived a most unsatisfactory compromise, by which it was agreed that a certain number of troops should be mamtained by the Imperial Govern- ment, while the separate colonies were to pay for what they might require in excess. The continuance of his plan was deprecated by the Committee which sat in 1861, and which practically came to a conclusion expressed in the words of one of its most distinguished witnesses,^ that no community could be justly caUed free if it were not primarily charged with its own defence. Self-defence is a necessity which calls out the energy of a new country. The recommenda- 1 Phillimore, Ecclesiastical Law, pt. ix. c. iii., ' The Church in the Colonies.' 2 Mr. Gladstone, Q. 3781, Pari. Fcx"S, 1861, xiii. E E 2 420 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA Eaeh self govern- ing colony respon- sible for its own defence. Inter- colonial federa- tion : tions of the Committee were carried out by the gradual with- drawal of the British troops from the colonial empire, while the Colonial Naval Defence Act of 1865 arranged that the various colonies should undertake the defence of their own shores, and otherwise strengthen and augment the royal navy. In other words, they were to take their j^lace as integral portions of an empire which depends for its unity and strength upon its marine supremacy. Thus gradually had each community learnt the lesson of self-government; but, even as it realised the importance of local independence, it grew more fully cognisant of the advantages it derived, and might derive, from intimate con- nection with others in the same, or similar, circumstances. The clause in the Australian Government Bill which pro- vided for an intercolonial federal council had been dropped after a hostile attack in the House of Lords by Lord Stanley.' Advance in this direction was first to be made in another quarter of the empire. The union of the North American possessions had been foreshadowed in the Durham report, and smce 1854 it had been the subject of considerable dis- cussion. In 1861 it was suggested by the legislature of Nova Scotia, and met with the approval of the Colonial Secretary. At first, the union jDroposed was a legislative one, and limited to the maritime colonies; but gradually the idea extended to a federal union of all the jDrovinces. Public meetings of delegates were held amidst great enthu- siasm,^ at which the advantages of a common military or- ganisation and of commercial union were recognised, and the project of an intercolonial railway was received with much favour. For the time the difficulty of arranging details triumphed, and, during the next two years, the Civil War in the United States caused an unavoidable postponement. ' Hansard, June 14, 1850. 2 Whelan, Union of British Provinces, 1865. COLONIAL POLICE AND PROGRESS 421 But the disputes arising out of this war, which for a time threatened a hostile invasion, only served to strengthen the newly awakened instinct of unity, and in 1867 the Dominion in North of Canada was constituted, with its four provinces, Ontario, ■^™'^'-'^°'*" Quebec, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. Since then three other colonies — Manitoba, British Columbia, and Prince Edward's Island- — have entered the union, the first in 1870, the last in 1873. In other parts of the empire similar movements have been made. In 1877 the Imperial Parlia- ment passed an Act to enable the colonies in South Africa the Cape, to enter into a union, while in later years small confedera- tions have been formed in the West Indies. Meanwhile in Austraha the colonists themselves took the matter into con- aus- sideration ; and in 1885 a federal council was established for Australasia, including the Fiji Islands. Its first meet ing ' was held in the ensuing year at Hobart Town, despite the refusal of the two colonies of New South Wales and New Zealand to accede to the union. There is a considerable difference between the Dominion Parliament of Canada and the Federal Council of Australasia, for while the one is almost supreme, the other is simply a council with dele- gated authority, and with functions which are, chiefly, con- sultative. From the earlier years of the century there had been The oon- great difference of opinion as to the possibility of prolonging of Eng- the connection between England and her colonies. While ^^ g^^. nies. the large body of the nation took practically no interest in colonial questions, there were many among those prominent - in the political world who regarded separation as actually desirable, while very few indeed thought that the union separa- could be fairly and successfully maintained. Nor were sidered ' these feehngs confined to the first few years of the reign. P^'o^^^ie- Whenever the question of colonial government was raised, ' Federal Council Papers. 422 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA there were many prominent men, both political theorists and statesmen, ready to seek the solution of the problem in the severance of the bond. More particularly was this the case at the time when the possibihty of Canadian federation was discussed, for during the decade 1860-70 the whole question of colonial government was the subject of much dispute. Separation met with many an advocate, and so practical did the discussion become that political opponents vehe- mently alleged that it was part of the policy of the Liberal Ministry of 1868. But the action which they were accused of meditating remained unperformed, and the prospect of so crude a solution of the difficulties became less and less probable. Events of The effect of the progress described above has been two- present £ j^ — jjj ^]^g |^j,g^ place, the colonies have increased both reign -l ' have iQ size and importance ; again, the delicate nattu-e of the shown ^ ' <=. ' impor- tie which yet unites them to the mother country has been nature of clearly revealed. The growth of the colonies has made tion^^^^" 't'liis latter difficulty more apparent. They cannot con- tinue to be dependencies, and yet they are not regarded as mtegral portions of the empire, with equal rights and equal privileges. Laws differ and interests are not always common. Is that state of things satisfactory under which one province can levy custom duties on commodities im- ported from another, or even from the mother country ? Ought not each part of the empire to contribute to the maintenance of the royal army and navy ? Mean- Questions like these demanded thirty years ago, as they *'°^® still demand, careful consideration. But meantime the change in pubHc attention of the public has been awakened. The country which formerly devoted a large part of its energies to agriculture is now dependent for much of its food supply on importation. Year after year many men go abroad to seek careers which competition precludes at home. The COLONIAL POLICY AND PROGRESS 423 colonial trade has grown with unequalled rapidity. Further than that, the various colonies have increased in strength. Canada, in 1837 with a population of 1,400,000, now numbers 5,000,000. Australia, then the destination of convicts, is now the home of between three and four miUions of inhabitants, prosperous, energetic, and free. The advance has been like the realisation of a dream. With the increased ease of communication, these countries are brought ever more and more clearly before the English mind. At the beginning of the reign Canada was rarely reached in three weeks, and Australia lay at the end of a journey of very uncertain duration. Now they are visited for the sake of pleasm-e or health, and the news of events is flashed with the swiftness of the telegraph from one continent to another. Nearly every family has friends or relations who have traveUed or settled in the colonies. The effect of this change on the public mind is apparent in every way. The newspapers, which commonly ignored colonial events, or, when they spoke of them, regarded it as ' the merest prudery to blink that inevitable event ' ' of separation, now chronicle the changes of local administra- tions, and consider the maintenance of imperial union as a matter of the first importance. But a still more striking evidence of the alteration in popular feeling is afforded by the genuine enthusiasm which has attended the tours of the various cricketing teams in England and Australia. These are but solitary instances of the ample manner in which the importance of the colonies and their solidarity with ourselves have been recently recognised. Last year the attendance at the Colonial Exhibition afforded a practical proof of the interest of the people themselTes, while at the present time the project of an Imperial Institute is officially adopted as the national plan for celebrating the Eoyal ' Tiynes, February 11, 1850. 424 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA Impfrial federa- tion. Effect of policy and growth on con- dition of England. Trans- portation abo- lished. Jubilee. At the beginning of the reign it was difficult to call the attention of Parhament to the colonies; now the interest of the nation is aroused and the projects of statesmen receive popular support. The idea of colonial representation in the British Parliament can be traced back a centm-y or more. Adam Smith and Burke spoke of it ; in much later years Joseph Hume proposed it. It was impossible then, not only by reason of the barrier of distance, but because the colonies were not aware of their corporate strength and needs. If it is possible now, it is because they have learnt to realise their powers and future possibilities. But whether imperial federation be practicable or not, some change in the colo- nial system is imminent, and by way of prelude it is fitting that this year (1887) there should be for the first time a conference between England and her colonies for the con- sideration of the questions of imperial defence and com- munication. We have thus sketched the development of self-govern- ment in the colonies, and the leading ideas which during the last half-century have governed the political relations of England towards her growing dependencies. But it remains to be asked not only how England has governed her colonies, but how she has peopled them, and what connection then- growth has had with our own insular life. From 1770, the year of the foundation of New South . Wales by a colony of 2,000 convicts under Governor Phillip, down to 1863, the system of transportation, by which English criminals were set to do the rough pioneering work in the infant States of the Australian Pacific, obtained to a greater or less degree. But directly a colony began to feel its feet, so to speak, directly it obtained any measure of independent prosperity, its convict population became COLONIAL POLICY AND PROGRESS 425 a burden to it. By 1840 the hatred of ' the convict taint ' had become so pronounced in New South Wales, that the Home Government was forced to discontinue the practice of transportation so far as that colony was concerned, and the whole stream was for a time diverted into Tasmania. The result was so deplorable that it was by almost unani- mous agreement abandoned in 1846, nominally for a period of two years, but in reality for ever. Four years after- wards the attempt to send convicts to the Cape of Good Hope was frustrated by the colonists themselves, who re- fused to allow them to be landed ; and with that event the system may be said to have ceased, although the practice of sending convicts to "Western Australia was not actually dis- continued for some years. By the abolition of the system the colonies were appeased and the United Kingdom was not injured. Since that date our crime statistics, owing, no doubt, to a great variety of causes, show a steady improvement, although the punishment of transportation no longer exists ; and the same is naturally the case with the colonies, although the oldest colony in Australia, and therefore the one in which the convict system prevailed longest, appears still to retain an unenviable pre-eminence. The results, therefore, of ' the stream of vice ' set in motion by transportation promise to be of no great importance in the moral history of the colonies ; while it must not be forgotten that at the outset convict labour laid the first rough foundations of civilisation in a manner which the free emigrants could not have achieved for them- selves. The history of emigration, of the mode in which the increase races of old Europe have been lured or driven into the great gration, vacant spaces of the American, African, and Australian continents, will in the future form, in the hands of a philo- sophical historian, one of the most interesting episodes in 425 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA the story of the nineteenth century. Here we can only indicate some of the broad facts which most concern our- selves. In the beginning emigration to Canada or to Australia was mostly undertaken by the Imperial Govern- ment, and was very badly conducted. The emigrants, chosen, often out of the workhouses, nearly always with an entire disregard of the particular needs of the various colonies, met with little consideration either on the voyage out or on their arrival in port. Of those who went to Canada, in the years about the beginning of this reign, it was calculated that at least 50 per cent, passed on into the United States. If they went to Australia they had to com- pete against convict labour, which was employed in pre- ference because it was more completely under control. Under these circumstances it is hardly a matter for surprise to find that their numbers were very small. From 1830 to 1840 only 320,766 persons went from the United King- dom to the various parts of British North America, and 53,274 to Australasia. After 1847, however, there was a vast and rapid increase in the emigration returns. The distress of the Irish famine, the energy developed by the era of Free-trade, the facihties of steam communication, and the amount of surplus labour set free by the development of machinery, all rendered men more willing to quit their own country. Moreover, aradical improvement in the system of emigration was introduced when the chief superinten- dence of it was surrendered to the colonial governments. They undertook to provide not only for the reception of emigrants, but also for their selection, leaving to England the regulation of the mode of transport, a task effectively fulfilled by the Passenger Acts of 1855 and 1868. Effects The results of these improvements in method, of the oncoio- growing attractiveness of the colonies themselves as they became more settled and civilised, and of the various COLONIAL POLICY AND PROGRESS 427 causes we have named as operative towards eniigration at home, were soon conspicuous. The statistics of emigration may be grouped in different ways. (a) While the average total yearly number of emigrants from Great Britain for the ten years 1828-37 was 63,000, the same average for the twelve years 1873-84 was 265,000, of which number 38,000 went to Australia and 28,000 ' to the North American possessions. (6) From 1880-39 the emigration from the United Kingdom to British North America reached a total of 320,766; to the United States, 170,000; to Australasia, 53,274. From 1840-49 the same figures were respectively 428,376, 674,000, and 126,837. Here the enormous increase in the emigration to the United States was of course due to the Irish famine and to the clearances subse- quently effected on Irish land. Of the 674,000, Ireland contributed 646,195. In the following decade (1850-59) emigration to British North America stood at 258,460, to Australasia at 498,537, while that to the United States rose to the enormous figure of 1,351,000, Ireland contributing 1,073,063. The next decade shows again a decline in the emigration to British North America — 169,741 ; a decline also in the Australian figures — 287,435 ; and a slight de- cline in those relating to the United States — 917,000. The decade of 1870-79 sent 184,242 to British North America ; 1,074,268 to the United States; and 293,709 to Australasia. Since then the figures relating both to British North America and to Australia have shown a tendency to rise. In 1883, for instance, 44,000 persons of British origin only sailed for Canada, a great advance on any previous year. On the other hand, emigration to the United States rose in the same year to 191,000. And quite recently, during the ' This does not really show the number who emigrate to Canada, as many travel vi& New York. — Caixadian Seasiotial Pampers, ' Agriculture,' 1886. 428 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA month of May 1887, 11,000 odd persons have left Cork in one week for the States. (c) Broadly speaking, the emigration totals from 1830- 1839 rose a quarter of a million as compared with the pre- vious decade ; from 1840-49 they rose three-quarters of a million ; from 1850-59 they rose a million ; from 1860-69 they declined three-quarters of a million. During 1870-79 there has been an increase of a quarter of a million, while the figures for the next five years show an annual increase of one hundred thousand. We have thus run rapidly through the main figures of the subject. They are to some extent misleading, because emigrants to Canada frequently pass through the States and sometimes vice versa. But, on the whole, the lesson of them is plain enough. From 1847 onwards the enormous totals of emigration to the "United States bear witness partly, as Mr. Spencer Walpole says, to the fact that ' the United States are still the greatest colony, the favourite airoLKia of the English race,' but still more decisively, of course, to those political difficulties of ours in Ireland with which our hands are still full. By choosing the United States rather than Canada the Irish emigrant escapes from British rule, and in losing a subject Great Britain too often gains an enemy. On the other hand, the recent increase of Canadian emigration shows that our home popu- lation is at last waking up to the attraction and importance of a country which has been opened up in all directions of late years, of which the new North- West Territories alone represent an area as large as that of Europe, excluding Eussia, and where a far greater choice of good land in favourable positions is open to the settler than is now the case in the fast-filling States. Such have been some of the effects of the colonies on our population. COLONIAL POLICY AND PROGRESS 429 As to the effects on our trade many facts and figures will be detailed in the present book, under the headings of Agriculture, the Cotton Trade, &c. But the latest statistics available are eloquent of a future' which few sus- pected twenty years ago. Those who then regarded the colonies as mere costly dependencies are now beginning to see in them new markets where British trade may constantly expand even while it shrinks in the old markets. Our exports to Australasia last year were 8,000,000L more than om- exports to the United States. That is to say, Australasia with 3,000,000 inhabitants already takes more of our goods than the United States with 55,000,000 inhabitants. Our exports to British North America are all but half as much as they are to France ; those to India are almost as much as those to Germany, Holland, and Belgium put together. No wonder that the colonies are looming larger and larger in the eyes of the British workman, and that Imperial Federation promises to become something more substantial than a mere dream of ingenious politicians. The circumstances of the colonies differ very widely. Three Those of chief importance may be placed in three groups : colonial (1) The North American possessions. groups. (2) Australasia. (3) The South African colonies. The population of these three groups has increased in round numbers from 1,700,000 in 1837 to 10,500,000. It is only in their mode of government that they closely Their resemble one another. In other respects there are several enca in prominent distinctions. Australia, more than the others, is isofatfon, isolated from all foreign territory ; in a word, it is a conti- nent of itself. The Dominion of Canada, on the other hand, lies on the frontier of the United States, and, in consequence, many difficult questions may arise. But this colony it is which possesses the most complete political organisation, and 430 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA this very self-sufficiency enables it to deal more satisfactorily with the questions involved in its territorial position. In one respect there is less probability of difficulty there than else- where, for there is little likelihood of conflict with the native races. In Australia such conflicts have frequently occurred and been settled little to the advantage of the natives. In New Zealand difficulties may recur again/ while at the Cape they have assumed formidable proportions. There the interests of England come into contact with the interests both of the Boers and of the native warlike races. In reia- Again, if attention be paid to the relative strength of tive , . . strength, these portions of the empire, it is quite evident that, while the North American and Australasian colonies strengthen the empire in many ways, those at the Cape seem at first sight chiefly productive of demands for fresh annexation or new imperial interference. The frontier in Africa is very elastic. But these colonies are none the less important. Together with India and Australia, they sustain the English influence in the South, and thus secure her dominion over one of the most important parts of her empire. The value of the Cape as a military or naval station would be particu- larly shown in the case of a war which should necessitate the transport of troops to the East or to Australia, since it can hardly be doubted that the opposition of any one European power would prevent the Suez Canal from bemg successfully employed for such a purpose. (1) The North Ambeican Possessions. Insecure The Condition of Canada at the beginning of the reign ofcanada is Very completely portrayed in the Durham report. The Bin '^of°' pi'ospect was exceedingly gloomy. In every quarter there reign. ■^yg_g ground for apprehension. Indeed, it is scarcely possible ' Questions arose for settlement in 1881, COLONIAL POLICY AND PROGRESS 431 to exaggerate the peril that threatened the connection be- tween England and these colonies. Open revolt and in- ternal disorders were bad enough, but far more important was the danger arising from misunderstandings between the settlers and the Home Government, so permanent and deep-rooted that they caused every action of an English minister to be viewed with suspicion. Fortunately, the very -violence of the discontent rendered its causes more apparent. These the report graphically recapitulates, and from among them singles out the two chief. In Lower Canada there was a chronic animosity between the French Baeiai and the EngUsh. It was a war of race which so divided sh^°" the people that they hardly mingled in society, and ' the only public occasion when they met was in the jury-box, and they met there only to the utter obstruction of justice.' This condition was peculiar to one province, but there was a grievance which was common to all the North American possessions. There was no agreement between the execu- Dissen- tive and the assembly. ' In all of them the administration between of pubUc affairs was habitually confined to those who did t^^e°and not co-operate harmoniously with the popular branch of ^^^®™- the legislature.' The necessity of the case was pressing. The idea of union with the neighbouring republic might be entertained by few, but the imminent peril of the moment lay in ' the sad work of depopulation and impoverishment now rapidly going on.' These were not idle words. The number of immigrants declined between 1830 and 1838, and most of those who came were paupers desjDatched by their respective parishes ; while energy and improvement were discountenanced by the land system, which imposed large tracts of waste between cultivated plots. The report concluded with two particular recommenda- tions. It advised the combination of the two provinces in a legislative union, and the concession of the principle of 432 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA Tie two Canadas united and mi- nisterial responsi- bility granted. Early troubles. Prospect of Cana- dian federa- tion not very pro- mising. ministerial responsibility. The importance of the latter has been akeady explained. The position of the provinces showed the necessity of the former. It was useless to at- tempt to improve the conditions of Upper Canada without some assurance of the co-operation of the Lower Province, as the latter commanded the seaboard and the river. Again, disturbances in the one were sure to lead to disorder in the other, while by the union the race quarrel in Lower Canada would be neutralised. In 1840 the policy of reconstruction was begun. The moderation of the first parhament and the firmness of the governor. Lord Sydenham, were of good augury ; yet party feeling ran high. Nearly every question led to a conflict between the Eefcrmers and the Conserva- tives, the one supporting, the other opposing, the abolition of the seignorial tenures and the secularisation of the clergy reserves. But when these matters had been settled, and their effect supplemented by that of the removal of the other class restrictions, the Eeform party itself showed signs of division, and in 1854 the more moderate arranged a coahtion with the Conservatives.' This was absolutely necessary, unless the whole power of the State was to fall into the hands of the extreme Eadicals, for the population of Upper Canada, the home of reform, was increasing much more rapidly than that of the neighbouring province. In 1841 the population of Lower Canada was 691,000, while in 1861 it numbered 1,110,000 ; but during the same period the population of Upper Canada had increased from 465,000 to 1,896,000.2 As yet there was little prospect of federation. It had been advocated in Nova Scotia so early as 1853, but the pro- posal had excited comparatively Uttle attention. In 1860, adopted as part of the Eadical programme, it was repu- ' History of Canada, J. MacMuUen, p. .')26. ' Id. p. 555. Turootte, Le Canada soils V Union, pp. 225-229. COLONIAL POLICY AND PROGRESS 433 diated by the ministers and their majority. The presence of external circumstances was needed to show its expediency. The Canadian federation was a consequence of the Attitude American Civil War. Not only did there seem to be every stSes*^"^ prospect of attack, but the action of the Home Government c°anadl* taught the various colonies of North America that they must rely on their own strength for defence. The necessity was common to all, and the advantages of a defensive union were conspicuously brought before them. The events of the war had a further effect. The commercial disturbances in the United States had poured wealth into Canada, and had stimulated her trade. Thus the same event which threatened the colonies with danger, in another way provided them with the strength necessary to avert it. The ultimate results of the war were equally important. The reciprocity treaty with the United States came to an end, and, though some had ventm-ed to prophesy that its termination would result in a willing acceptance of annexation, it was soon seen that the commercial condition of the country was such that a new difficulty only put it on its mettle. The action of the United States had certainly not been conciliatory in this instance. If there had been any desire on their side to annex Canada, it would have been the part of wisdom to have said nothing about it, but to have relied on secret influence and the result of English negligence or inter- ference. On the contrary, there was a considerable amount of talk about annexation, and to many it appeared that the Fenian invasion of 1867 was encouraged by way of menace. In the colonies themselves the subject was discussed, and, in proportion to its publicity, the idea of separation from England grew more and more distasteful. The prospect of federation became popular. Conferences Domi. had been held in the autumn of 1864 and had ended in a Canada, display of popular enthusiasm ; and though for a time its VOL. I. F F 434 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA Progress before and after th.e fede- ration. Increase of grain produce. fulfilment had been delayed because of divisions of ojDinion and other incidental difficulties, the project received fresh and growing support, and in 1867 the Dominion of Canada was formally constituted. The progress in British North America during the thirty years before the federation had been considerable. The population had increased from 1,400,000 to 3,500,000. The total trade, exports and imports, had risen in value from 9,500,000L to nearly 35,000,000L in 1866. In the year after the federation, the Dominion was enlarged by the addition of the property belonging to the Hudson's Bay Company, noAV forming Manitoba and the North-West Territories, which was purchased for 300,000Z., together with certain grants of land and reservations. The chief aim of Canadian policy since 1867 has been to insure greater cohesion among the provinces, and to forward the develop- ment of the natural resources of the country. There has been great stability of government, which has been reflected in the jjrogress made by the country. From 1867 to 1874 a coalition administration was in power, and, though superseded for five years by the Piadical party, it was again replaced in 1879. Twenty years ago there were only four provinces in the Dominion, now there are seven ; while the North-West Territories, though still without a constitution, have been placed under the authority of the Dominion Parliament. The Federation Act was passed with the understanding that an intercolonial railway should be established. This great work was completed in 1885 and opened last year. As yet there has not been sufficient time for its effects to be felt, but there can be no doubt that it will largely promote the export of the agricultural products of the country. The following figures show the extent to which grain products have already been exported.' On the average of the two ' Canadian Sessiotial Papers, 1886, and Colonial Abstract. COLONIAL POLICY AND PROGRESS 435 years 1874-75, the balance of exported over imported grain did not amount in value to 5 per cent, of the total exports, while during the two years 188-l:-85 it nearly reached 8 per cent. During the decade from 1871-80, the amount of grain produced in the four older provinces rose from 74,000,000 to 121,000,000 bushels. In the same period, the land 'im- proved ' in the two provinces of Ontario and Quebec increased from 14,000,000 to 17,000,000 acres. At the census in 1861 it had been only 10,000,000 acres, and at the preceding one in 1851 only 7,000,000. While in 1851 only two-fifths of the land occupied had been ' improved,' in 1881 nearly three-fifths had been brought into a condition for culti- vation. Such progress is no ill augury for the future of Canada as a grain-producing country, and it must be re- membered that none of these latter estimates take into consideration the recent great advance made in cultivation in Manitoba and the Territories. In the four older provinces, at the census of 1851, the Indus- number of people occupied in agricultural pursuits and employ- ment manufactures was estimated to be some 15 per cent, of the since whole population — men, women, and children — while in 1881 it had risen to 25 per cent. At both dates it may be said that, for every three in trade there were five engaged in agriculture. This ratio has been maintained notwith- standing the more rapid increase of the urban population. While in 1861 this was 11 per cent., in 1881 it was 15 per cent, of the total. Its increase was especially rapid in the last decade, being some two and a half times as fast as that of the total population.' Thus, although agriculture has become more productive, there is a tendency already existing towards concentration. Moreover, these statistics show not only that a reasonable equilibrium is maintained between agricultural and other pursuits, but that the num- ' Census returns for respective years. F F 2 1851. 436 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA ber of those employed in directly productive pursuits has increased very rapidly. Material The total material progress during the reign assumes progress. very striking proportions.' At the begmmng, the popula- tion was 1,400,000,2 now it is 5,000,000. Then the exports and imports were worth 9,600,000^., now they amount to 43,000,OOOL The total shipping has risen from 3,500,000 tons to over 8,000,000 tons. A revenue of nearly 500,000L has increased to one of 7,100,000L Where fifty years ago there was only one paltry httle railway line, about 16 miles in length, the total length now completed is 10,773 miles, inclusive of the Canadian Pacific line, which stretches across the continent and measures some 3,500 miles. The average speed, as stated by the companies, is in no case less than ten miles per hour, while on six railways it is said to range between thirty and thirty-five miles.' Corapari- If the history of Canada is separated into two periods, tie two and the date of the federation be taken as the point of periods thyigion, it will be seen that the progress in the earlier Canadian period was the more rapid. During that thirty years the population more than doubled itself, and the trade returns increased nearly fourfold. As we have already pointed out, one effect of the American Civil War was largely to aug- ment the trade of Canada, a fact which serves to explain another point of interest. Of the total trade in 1836, one- half was carried on with the United Kingdom, while not two-fifths (37 per cent.) passed in this channel during 1866. Similar consequences manifested themselves again. Of the annual trade for 1873-75, the trade with the United Kingdom "* was just one-half, while during the years 1883-85 ' statistics from Sessional Papers on Trade and Commerce for 1886, and Colonial Abstract. 2 Martin, Statistics of British Colonies, publ. 1839. ' Railway Statistics of Canada, 1886. ■■ Cf. Statistical Society's Journal, xlvii. Inaugural address by Sir Eawson Eawson. COLONIAL POLICY AND PROGRESS 437 it only amounted to 44 per cent, of the total. The high average for the earlier of these years may be due to the repeal of the Eeciprocity Act between Canada and the United States.' The artificial stimulus applied through the Civil War just before the beginning of the second period gradually ceased to exercise any influence, and the rate of progress became much slower. It has been a time of stable organi- sation rather than one of abnormal development. The finances of the country have been regulated, the militia has been established on a firm basis, with an active strength of 36,000 men, the activity of the banking and insurance industries has been stimulated, and communication by railway and telegraph extended in every direction. It is certain that the effect of these improvements will make itself speedily felt, and that the rate of progress will be accelerated during future years. (2) Australasia. At the beginning of the Queen's reign, the condition of Condi- Australia gave little promise of its future development. Australia Only two of the provinces were really colonised. Western Australia had been founded in 1829, but under the name of the Swan Eiver Settlement had acquired notoriety only by its disastrous failure. The colony of South Australia was not declared till 1836. In the same year the territory of Port Phillip (Melbourne) had been claimed by a private settler,^ but it had been formally decided that it was part of New South Wales. Only in that colony and in Tasmania — then, and for long afterwards. Van Diemen's Land — were there signs of vitality. As yet, however. New South Wales ' This, of course, diverted a good deal of the trade from the United States, as heavy duties were levied on both sides. '^ John Batman, who produced a treaty of purchase with the natives. 438 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA Early difficul- ties ia New South "Wales. The crisis ol 1842. was a convict settlement, with a population of 85,000 ; while the disorders in Tasmania had just been quelled by the stern rule of Governor Arthur, who introduced a strict discipline among the convicts, and removed all cause of strife between the settlers and the aborigines by exiling the latter to the rocky islands off the shores. It is with the growth of the older colony that the political history of Australia begins. The system of go- vernment was bureaucratic m the extreme. There was an official party, which received the confidence and the favour of the governor. But beneath this party there were two classes in constant strife, the higher class of settlers and the convicts on leave — ' emancipists,' as they were called. It was urged by the former that these men, who had not as yet worked out their sentence of punishment, ought not to be allowed the same social or political rights as themselves. But to many of the early seekers^ after constitutional freedom it seemed impossible to refuse any such claims of equality. This notion seems natural enough if their position be taken into account. They themselves were occupied in wresting from a government, which they considered unwilling and despotic, such rights as that of trial by jury ; and in their haste they deemed all as adversaries who opposed the fullest extension of these principles. They made good their claim for the settlers, but the ' emancipists ' were excluded. This cause of strife was soon removed, for transportation to New South Wales ceased in 1840, and the stream of free immigrants, of some 10,000 a year, soon rendered the con- victs an unimportant portion of the community. Further than that, for a time severe trouble befell the colonies. There was a disastrous crisis. South Australia became bankrupt ; New South Wales was in a state of financial em- The more democratic party, prominently represented by W. C. Went- worth. COLONIAL POLICY AND PROGRESS 439 barrassment. Imports, which had risen from 1,300,000L in 1837 to 3,000,000L in 1840, fell to 1,500,000L in 1842. Ex- ports, which m 1837 were 750,000Z. and in 1840 1,400,000L, declined in 1842 to 1,000,000L The average amount of coin in the public treasury in the years 1836-39 was 188,000L ; in 1840 it fell to 38,000L, and in 1842 to nothing.' The revival was but gradual. Meantime the germs of future The first trouble were preparing. Sir George Gipps, m his anxiety the land to prevent ahenation of the land, had begun to enforce the "i^®^*'""- right of the Government against the squatters, who sought pasturage for their herds on the unoccupied lands. His arbitrary manner, as much as the action itself, gave offence, and the appearance of despotism united all classes of the community agamst him. The Pastoral Aid Association was formed, and made powerful representations to the Home Government. Unfortunately, the complaints met with a fatal attention, and by the Act of 1846 and the Instructions of 1847 the grievances of the squatters were redressed and the right of pre-emption secured them. It was not long before another phase of the difficulty pre- sented itself, and before it was understood in what manner the claim of the squatters conflicted with the interest of the people. For the time, however, the change in the position passed unheeded, for, as yet, the large population which was to form the democratic opposition of the future had not come into existence. It was a time of growth, but the rate of progress was slow, position and there was little sign of the marvellous change which t^aiia^' was so soon to pass over Australia. . During the decade j-grethe 1840-50, though the population in New South Wales had s°id ^is- ' ° '- ^ coveries. increased from nearly 150,000 to some 250,000, there were other signs less favourable. The marriage rate had risen but slowly, and, while the average value of the ' History of Australia, G. W. Eusden, ii. 253. 440 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA exports and imports for the years 1838-40 amounted to 3,300,000L, that for 1849-51 exceeded them by only 600,000L The chief progress had been in the Port Phillip district, which was not as yet formed into the colony of Victoria. There exports had doubled themselves and im- ports increased fivefold. In the other colonies, it is true, there had been greater signs of advance, for though in Tas- mania exports and imports had declined from 1,800,000^. to less than 1,300,000Z.,' in South Australia ^ the trade returns rose from 335,000Z. in 1840 to 1,416,000L in 1850. At the beginning of the new decade important altera- tions were made with regard to government and internal relations. By the Australian Government Act of 1850, power was granted the Crown, with respect to South Austraha, Victoria, and Tasmania, to establish councils similar to that already possessed by New South Wales, and a further provision was added, which permitted the altera- tion of these constitutions by the councils themselves, with the assent of the Crown. This important change was almost forced upon the colonies, for by a despatch in 1851 they were informed that only on the adoption of fully representative institutions would the control of the waste lands be transferred from the imperial to the colonial governments. The separation of the Port Phillip district from New South Wales was an event of no less importance. It had long been desired by the inhabitants, who complained bitterly of their inability to mfluence the council at Sydney. In 1861 their wishes were met by the proclamation of the district as the independent colony of A'ictoria. As it turned out, an indispensable preparation had thus been made for those responsibilities which the discovery of gold was to bring with it. ' statistical Register of Tasmania, Summary Tables. 2 South Australia, J. P. Stow. COLONIAL POLICY AND PROGRESS 441 There had been previous indications of the presence of Gold coveries. gold. At an earher period Su- George Gipps had, in comment- ing on the probabihty, laid full stress on the danger that would result from such a discovery in a country peopled so largely by convicts and their descendants. This danger had to some extent passed away. Meantime the Californian discoveries had roused a new hope ; and for the few years about 1850 the ordinary motives which instigated the search after gold had been supplemented by a desire to prevent emigration from Australia. On May 14, 1851, gold was found at Bathurst ; on September 8 came the news of the discoveries at Balla- rat. The effect was prodigious. In 1850 the population of Their eifect in New South Wales, exclusive of the Port Phillip district, had New- been some 190,000 ; in 1856 it was 286,000. In a similar -waies, manner the population of Victoria rose from 76,000 to Victoria, 397,000.' The change throughout Australia may be briefly stated in round numbers. In 1850 the population was 425,000, in 1856 it was nearly 1,000,000. The amount of land under cultivation rose from some 450,000 acres to 660,000. Exports, which at the earlier date bore the value of nearly 4,000,000L, were now worth 22,000,000L ; imports rose in value from 3,800,000L to 24,000,000Z. This progress was not confined to the two colonies in which gold had been discovered. The Government of South Australia,^ anxious south to prevent a drain of population, organised means whereby traiia, a great portion of the gold raised should be brought across their country and made to stimulate its industries. During this period the amount of land under cultivation in this colony increased more than threefold. The exports rose in like proportion. It seemed at first that the condition of Tasmania would be stationary, if not retrograde, since the Tas- mania, immediate result of the discoveries was to cause a large ' Victorian Tear-BooTc, Summary Sheet. 2 Eusden, ii. 731-734. 442 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA We-w Zealand, and political conse- quences. Tie growth of demo- oraoy. The CLuestion of the land. emigration, no fewer than 45,000 persons leaving for the gold fields.' This was in reality a great advantage, as thereby the more criminal portion of the population was drafted away, and the fatal legacy of convict times avoided. In New Zealand the progress of agriculture was stimulated,''* a ready sale being found for its products in Victoria. It would be difficult to overrate the political consequences of these events. A democracy was thus called into existence under the most unfavourable conditions. There was no gradual development, and custom could not exercise a re- straining influence. The people who poured into the new continent were intelligent above the average,' but they could not boast of a like moral elevation, as by the very nature of the case they were largely composed of men adventurous, reckless, and often criminal. To hands such as these the control of the government was committed by the Acts of 1855 and 1856. Subsequent history records the progress of a democratic policy : universal suffrage has been intro- duced ; difficulties have arisen between the council and the assemblies ; administrations have lasted but for a short time ; and yet, when all has been said, it must remain a testimony to the good sense and ability of the people that the troubles of the time have been encountered without more disastrous results, and that continued improvement has taken place.** One political difficulty has naturally taken precedence of the rest. In any colony the land furnishes the infant State with its first easy means of revenue, but, naturally, this source of revenue is cut off by a policy of wholesale ' Experw7ice of Forty Years in Tasmania, H. M. Hull. 2 Hon. E. Stout, Progress of New Zealand, p. 4. ' This may be seen from comparing the number of people signing the marriage register with marks, during the period 1853-72, with average in other countries. •• ' Working of Australian Institutions,' C. H. Pearson, In Essays on Reform, p. 159. COLONIAL POLICY A.ND PROGRESS 443 alienation. In Australia, before free grant of land was stayed, some 10,000,000 acres had been given away, and the process of alienation by sale continued until, at the end of 1884, nearly 109,000,000 acres had been alienated or were in process of alienation, though there still remained some 1,860,000,000 acres in the possession of the State. In the older and more cultivated colonies, the relative amount of land under private ownership is much greater. In New South Wales nearly one-fifth of the land has been alienated, in Victoria nearly two-fifths. The effects of this policy have, in consequence, been felt more acutely in these colonies, and they have shown by recent Acts that it is an object of concern to restrict the further alienation of the public estate by limiting the amount which may be sold by auction, by substituting leasing for sale, and by only allowing the latter under particular conditions as to amount and occupation. In none of these countries are these con- ditions more stringent than in Victoria, where the Torrens Act may be regarded as a satisfactory settlement of many of the points of difficulty involved in the question of the land. Indeed, as far as means of transfer and registra- tion are concerned, the land systems of Australia are far superior to that of England. During more recent times the agricultural and pastoral Deveiop- resources of the country have been developed. The tempo- ^tLui- rary excitement of the gold discoveries had done its part *"''®" towards the prosperity of the country by the imjDetus which it gave to immigration. When the mines became less pro- ductive, the population which had worked them did not quit the country, but spread itself over the land. In 1856 the amount of land under cultivation was 650,000 acres, and the number of sheep 18,000,000 ; in 1873, 3,300,000 acres were under cultivation, and there were upwards of 57,000,000 sheep ; while in 1884 the acres under cultivation exceeded 444 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA 8,000,000, and the number of sheep was 74,000,000. This enormous increase represents something more than material growth. The character of the people has been largely in- fluenced by their main occupation. Eural pursuits and country life tend, as we all know, to produce a robust and independent individual type. Bush life in Australia pos- sesses many of the ad^-antages which belong to country life in England, and is marked besides by the elasticity and vigour which belong to a new society. A warm belief in democratic progress, and the independence which is born of a life spent far away from cities, these are the two great features which circumstances have impressed upon the Australian character. They are reflected in the colonial literature, particularly in that of a poetic form.' There is a sense of freedom and power which is almost blatant in its self-assertion ; and, on the other hand, there is a faith- ful echo of the weird nature that surrounds the solitary life of the settler. Australian poetry does not seek its ideals amid a mediaeval chivalry, but in the circumstances of con- vict life "- and in the perils of the bush. In the elaboration of such themes it is buoyant and vigorous, and in its hand- ling of nature there is a crude power which seems to reflect the solitariness of a half-peopled land. The history of New Zealand has many interesting features of its own. Owing to the importunities and action of the New Zealand Company,' the English Government was forced to proclaim its sovereignty over the islands in 1840 ; and thus a threatened annexation by the French was antici- pated. The immediate difficulties were two. Many specu- lators claimed to have purchased lands from the natives, and the equity of the claims needed examination, and, further, it ' The three chief poets— Gordon, Kendal, and Brunton Stephens. ^ Stephens, Convict Once ; cf . the two novels, For his Natural Life and The Broad Arrow. ^ Gisborne, New Zealand Statesmen, p. 8. COLONIAL POLICY AND PRCGRESS 445 ■was necessary to arrive at some general understanding with the whole Maori population. The first question was made the subject of compromise, and the second was for the moment decided by the treaty of Waitangi (1840), whereby the natives recognised British supremacy, and were in re- turn assured their rights of property and freedom. The two ehief wars occurred because the Maoris believed that these promises were being violated. As the time grew near for conceding responsible government to New Zealand, another phase of the difficulty revealed itself. By the Act of 1852 the natives were practically excluded from the franchise, as tribal holdings did not rank among the property qualifications. The consequent reservation of all native questions for settlement by the Imperial Parliament and the governor placed the latter in a false position. In general policy he acted on the initiative of his ministers ; in these particular instances on instructions from home. The solu- tion of the difficulty was sought by placing all matters what - ever under the control of the colonial legislature, while certain alterations were made in the constitution of the latter, in order to provide for a special representation of the Maoris. The assent of the Imperial Government to the principle of full colonial responsibility was shown by the refusal of the English Ministry, in 1882,' to interfere in the settlement of the native question. In another way, also, the constitution has been altered from its original form. In 1852 six provincial and subordinate councils were created, ultimately increased to nine. For some time the policy of ' provincialism ' continued to divide the political parties of the colony,^ but in 1875 the provincial councils were abo- lished, and an entire legislative union adopted. One industry of New Zealand is a subject of peculiar ' History of New Zealand, Eusden, iii. 478, &c. 2 Gisborne, pp. 153, 265. 446 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA The meat interest for the United Kingdom. The home meat supply industry. _ ° i- i. J is even now only sufficient for seven and a half months out of the twelve, and it is probable that it will soon bear a still less ratio to the total demand. An export trade of frozen meat has been opened from New Zealand. It is impossible to foretell the future volume of this trade, or its future importance to the English consumer, but some slight idea of both may be formed from the fact that the number of sheep in the colony has increased from 1,500,000 in 1858 to 14,000,000 in 1884, while it has been calculated that the country is fairly able to maintain eight times this quantity.' The material progress of Australasia ^ since the begin- ning of the reign can be represented very conspicuously. In 1837 the population numbered 143,000 ; the land under cultivation amounted to 181,000 acres ; the number of sheep was 3,500,000; the value of the exports was 1,300,000L, that of the imports 2,000,000L Now the population is 8,500,000 ; the land under cultivation in 1884 was upwards of 8,000,000 acres ; the number of sheep exceeds 74,000,000 ; the exports are worth 54,000,000L, and the imports 64,OCO,O0OL , At the earlier date the ratio of exports to imports was 65 per cent., now it is over 84 per cent. Then the revenue was 429,000L, now it is some 23,000,000L ; the shiiDping tonnage was 283,000 in 1837, and now it is 15,000,000. The average man of the earlier epoch would have cultivated one and a quarter acres of land, and owned twenty -five sheep, while he would have exported goods to the value of 9L, and employed less than two tons of shipping. Now he would cultivate two and a quarter acres, and own twenty-one sheep, while his exports would amount to the value of 15L 8s., and the shipping put in motion by him would ' England's New Sheep-Farm, M. G. Mulhall. 2 Colonial Abstract, Victorian Year-Book, and the Statistical Register for the various oolonies. COLONIAL POLICY AND PROGRESS 447 be nearly four tons. Then his share of the revenue was 3Z., now it is more than 6L lis. At that time his companions were under 150,000, now they are over 3,000,000. It is important, too, to notice that though the gold discoveries gave the first powerful stimulus to the trade of Australia, that trade continued to expand long after the rush was over. Its progress has been continuous since that epoch, and has been more rapid in the last than in the preceding decade, as the following table shows. The total trade returns mclude exports and imports, and in order to exhibit the rela- tion of the Australasian colonies with the United Kingdom, figures are added to show both the trade between them and also the percentage of this trade to the total. Ayerage on two years Total trade Percentage of increase Total trade with United Kingdom Percentage of trade with United Kingdom to total 1863-64 1873-74 1883-84 & 65,600,000 81,900,000 117,900,000 24-8 42-9 £ 28,900,000 45,900,000 59,108,000 44 56 50 If, however, the Australasian intercolonial trade be de- ducted from the total, the trade with the United Kingdom amounts to 76 per cent, of the remainder. It is impossible, however, to realise adequately the pre- sent position of these colonies by means of these broad comparisons between their existing and their former con- ditions. Nowhere has greater energy been displayed in developing the new means of industrial and commercial improvement and communication. In New South Wales the number of factories is reckoned at 20,000.' In New Zealand capital, upwards of 8,600,000L in amount is sunk in the principal industries other than agricultural.^ The de- posits in Australasian banks in 1881 were over 64,000,000Z., ■ Statistical Register, 1883, Summary Sheet. ' Progress in New Zealand, Tables. Its rapidity. 448 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA in 1884 they were over 80,000,000L Thirty-five letters per head are annually transmitted through the post, a number which is only exceeded in the case of the United Kingdom, where it is forty. But while in the latter country each person cannot be reckoned as despatching one telegram, in Australia the average is two per head. In the United Kingdom, in 1883, there were open 52 miles of railway line for every 100,000 persons, in Australasia 216. But in 1873 there were open 50 miles in the former and 71 in the latter. The rate of construction has, in fact, been unparalleled in rapidity. Marvellous as has been the growth of Australasia in the past, facts and figures such as these latter make it probable that the rate of progress will be maintained in the future. The early troubles of colonisation have been surmounted, the mistakes of youth in some part rectified, and, as yet, no obstacle has interposed to prevent the fulfilment of the proud colonial motto, ' Advance.' There are difficulties consequent on intercolonial tariffs and dangers in the exist- ence of keen material jealousies which, in the words of an Australian poet, it will be the duty of future generations to remove : Till, all our sundering lines with love o'ergrown. Our bounds will be the girdling seas alone.' (3) The South African Colonies. Although the condition of these colonies has altered greatly during the past fifty years, the change has not been entirely for the better, as in the case of the other groups. In 1837 the British territory at the Cape was 110,000 square miles, now it exceeds 232,000. Then its position seemed comparatively simple; now it is seen to be mvolved in diffi- culties, which have been exemplified and, in part, created ■ Stephens, Miscellaneous Poems, p. 174, ' Dominion of Australia.' COLONIAL POLICY AND PROGRESS 449 during the present reign. In 1835 the decisive action of the governor in removing the Kaffirs to a great distance was disallowed by the Home Government ; for even then the imperial policy exhibited a prevailing indistinctness of aim. What injuries this lack of finality was to work were soon shown on a large scale. The Boers, or settlers of Dutch Tiie race, were discontented at this act of interference ; and '^°^^^- other events happened, which added, or seemed to add, to then' list of grievances. Financial arrangements in which they considered themselves wronged, and the emancipation of the slaves, combined to make them anxious to remove from the control of England. In numbers, variously estimated from five to ten thousand, they went into voluntary exile and passed over the Orange Eiver to found new homes. They formed the Orange States, and many drifted thence into Natal. But Natal was claimed by the English Government, and they returned, only to encounter once more the decla- ration of English sovereignty and to be driven across the Vaal. In 1852 the independence of the Transvaal was fully guaranteed, an acknowledgment afterwards extended to the Orange Free States. Meantime war had more than once broken out be- The tween the Cape Colony and the Kaffirs. In 1853 they had ^'^^'^^■ been vanquished, and the province of British Kaffraria was formed. The colonists had previously given proof of strength and independence by their refusal to allow con- victs to be landed, and in 1853 representative institutions were conceded to them. During the ensuing decade it Tran- seemed as if success had already been won by their efforts, pro. The imports, which in 1853 were worth 1,700,000L, rose in ^p^"''^- value to 2,740,000L in 1868. Similarly exports had in- creased from 1,090,000?. to 2,380,000L Under the firm guid- ance of Sir George Grey, progress was made in every direc- tion. The first railway, with a length of 58 miles, was opened VOL. I. G G 450 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA Diamond dis- COTery. Material results. Political effects. "War with the natives. in 1863. But those who looked below the surface saw that, as yet, no decisive settlement had been arrived at. There were differences of interest between the Dutch and English even in Cape Colony itself. Careful attention was needed for the solution of the native question, and unfortunately no such attention was forthcoming. One thing had been achieved, for there were two free Dutch States interposed between the English possessions and the tribes of the interior. But events occurred which destroyed even this shadowy ap- pearance of politic intention. In 1871 the diamond dis- coveries became of importance, and trade, which during the five or six preceding years had shown marks of stagnation, now bounded forward. The imports rose from 2,300,000L in 1869 to 6,600,000?. in 1873, and the exports increased from 2,900,000L to 4,600,000Z. But the political consequences of the discoveries were not so wholly advantageous. The Boer Government, in whose territory the mines were, proved un- able to maintain order, and the land itself was claimed by a native chief. The Enghsh Government interfered, with the result of bringing it under their own rule, and the province of Griqualand West was constituted, to be incorporated in the Cape in 1880. The Boers were deeply offended, although they afterwards agreed to receive money in full compensation of their claims. It was at this critical time that the practice of ministerial responsibihty was intro- duced into Cape Colony, in accordance with the result of an electoral appeal. This change was very important, as, by the nature of the case, a very large portion of political power fell into the hands of those colonists who were of Dutch birth, just at the time when the annexation of the Transvaal brought the colony once more into contact with the native tribes and roused afresh the enmity of the Boers. The events that followed are at once too complicated in their details, and in their broad outlines too fresh in the COLONIAL POLICY AND PROGRESS 451 public mind, to need recapitulation here. There was war with Cetewayo, the powerful king of the Zulus, and, after the frightful disaster of Isandhlana and the heroic defence of Korke's Drift, his power was broken at Ulundi, and his country, it is to be feared, ruined. The annexation of the and the Transvaal, sanctioned by a Parhament which knew far too little of the real nature of the question, led to the disastrous war which brought to the small British force the defeats of Laing's Nek and Majuba Hill. In 1882, though an army was on its way out which would have sufficed to crush opposition, the claims of the Boers were granted, and the Transvaal became once more an independent republic, ac- knowledging the nominal suzerainty of the British Crown. The problem of the political future of the Cape Colony Future is hard of solution, for not only are there discordant cuities. elements in the colony itself, but outside its boundaries are the opposing bodies of the Boers and the natives. The difficulty is illustrated by the position of the governor, who is also High Commissioner for South Africa; for while in the former position he acts on the advice and with the support of the Cape Ministry, in his other capacity he is a Crown official, and may be refused colonial assistance. At two periods the trade returns showed considerable Material growth- increase. During the decade beginning with 1854 the first signs of commercial importance were seen. But since the diamond discoveries, the advance has been far more rapid. In 1873 there were 65 miles of railway open; in 1885 the mileage was 1,599. Similarly, the length of the telegraph wires rose from 846 to 4,339 miles. One valu- able industry other than diamond minmg has sprung iato existence during recent times. In 1858 the value of the ostrich feathers exported was 12,000L, while the annual average during the years 1882-85 was 890,000L' > CapeofGoodHope Official Handbook, pp. 256-262, and Colonial Abstract. G Q 2 452 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA In 1837 the area of the colonies at the Cape was 110,000 square miles, while now it is over 230,000. The population, exclusive of native tribes, has increased from some 130,000 to 1,700,000, and the revenue has risen from 158,000L to 3,990,000L Then the exports and imports together were valued at 900,000L ; • now they are upwards of 11,000,000?. The histories of these groups have been very different. In North America an old colony was reconstructed, in Austral- asia a new country has been created, while at the Cape, a colony which was once valued merely for its position as a shipping station has grown populous and wealthy, in spite of the unique difficulties which arise from the divisions of its European population and from the presence of native tribes both within and beyond its northern boundary. The In other parts of the empire there has, generally Indies. Speaking, been great progress accomplished. Th,e West Indian Islands are, it is true, no longer of the same im- portance as formerly, as they have been far outstripped by other colonies. During the earher part of the reign they suffered severe reverses. The effect of the emancipation of the slaves contmued to be felt, and the position was aggravated by the Free-trade policy, which deprived them of their sugar monopoly in the English market. From the effects of these measures they have recovered but slowly, though during the last decade their trade has been very steady and shown considerable improvement on that of the preceding decade. The annual average of exports and imi^orts together, during the years 1866-75, was 9,90O,O0OZ., while duruag the years 1876-85 it was 12,000,000L Very recently, however, the fall in the value of sugar has greatly injured them and brought many planters to ruin. ' Martin, Statistics of the British Colonies. COLONIAL POLICY AND PROGRESS 453 The colonies with which the United Kingdom carries Trade of on the most important trade may be divided into two groups. KSgdom In the south He the Indian, Austrahan, and Cape posses- ^j^ sions. On the west are the West Indies and Canada with colonies. Newfoundland. With the former group the annual trade amounts to 142,000,000L, with the latter to 29,000,000?. The roads of communication with India and Australia are TheMgh- greatly altered from what they were at the beginning of the X^J^ reign. Then the main highway was round the Cape of Good coio^^i^^- Hope ; now not only is the Suez Canal open, but it has been largely brought under the control of England, already owner of Aden and Perim, by the purchase of the Canal shares and the declaration of the Dual Control in Egypt. The occu- pation of Cyprus has the object of further strengthening this position, while the opening of the Canadian Pacific EaUway affords a third route to the Australian colonies. The connection with the west is less beset with diffi- culty. In that case the road lies across the open sea, where there are no positions of advantage, which must either be secured, or be suffered to become a menace and a peril m hostile hands. The cost of maintaining these marine highways falls The . cost of largely upon the Imperial Government. It consists of three defence chief items. Mihtary strongholds, such as Gibraltar, must sated tor be maintained ; the coaling stations must be fortified, and the paths of the sea traversed and protected by an efficient navy. Formerly, in addition to this, England was called on to protect her colonies in the case of local wars, but now all the chief colonies are required to furnish the means of their own defence. The former expenses would have to be incurred whether the colonies belonged to this country or not : for the commerce of England is supremely important, by com- ' D i " ^ mercial and it could not be retained unless adequate protection position was afforded to its conduct. It is often said, indeed, that 454 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA the trade of England with her colonies would, in the event of separation, continue to be as great as before, but conside- rations like the foregoing tend to show that such a change would result rather in an increase than in a diminution of naval expenditure. But the proposition itself is untrue, and Nearly one-half (48 per cent.) of the total colonial trade trade. ^^ with the mother country — a larger proportion than that which she enjoys with any other country. Her share in the trade of the United States is only 40 per cent., and the imports from England into that country only form some quarter (24 per cent.) of the total import trade. On the other hand, the imports from the United Kingdom into her colonies are some 55 per cent, of the total. Again, her share in the trade of Germany is only a tenth (11 per cent.). Moreover, during the period 1874-83, while the foreign import trade into the United Kingdom has only increased 9 per cent., and the foreign export trade 4-6 per cent., its imports from the colonies have increased 15 per cent., and its exports to the colonies 20 per cent.' Before quitting this subject of colonial trade, a word must be said about those tariffs which are so much a grievance to the British manufacturers, and so much a source of reso- lute pride to many of the colonists. From the earliest times the Imperial Government, in virtue of its power to regulate the commerce of the colonies, had levied duties on goods imported into them. When the colonies obtained the rights of self-government, the power of raising revenue and of regulating commerce passed over to them. The last instance of interference on the part of the Imperial Government with the Canadian tariffs was in 1842, when the Governor-General announced that the Imperial Parliament had passed a tariff for the British possessions in North America. At the same time, the colonies have not the complete power of settling ' Stoi. Soc. Journal, xlvii., Deo. 1884. m area. COLONIAL POLICY AND PROGRESS 455 their own finance. They may not give other nations a pre- ference over England, and they may not interfere with the treaty arrangements of the United Kingdom. It should be observed that as the colonies under the old protectionist system of England enjoyed differential privi- leges as against foreign nations, the adoption of Free-trade ' by the mother country was something of a boon to them ; and at this moment the grievance of the West Indies is that we will not, in some form or other, renew those dif- ferential duties, as against French beetroot sugar. The colonies, with the single exception of New South Wales, are at the present time intensely protectionist. It is not necessary to take much notice of the supposed increase increase iii the area, as distinguished from the increase in population, of the British colonies ; with the lapse of time many were certain to extend then- frontiers, and others, which had either not been surveyed at all or had been measured inaccurately, would be estimated in their true proportions. In 1837 the area was computed at 2,000,000,^ now it is known to extend over nearly 8,000,000 square miles. Some territories have been annexed. Colonies already proclaimed have been settled, while others have extended their boun- daries. Natal and New Zealand have been founded ; Aden and Cyprus established for military purposes, and by the acquisition of Hong Kong a British commercial settlement has been made in what was Chinese territory. In Canada the vast North- West Territories have been placed under the control of the Dominion. At the Cape, English rule has been extended from the coast into the interior, and British Bechuanaland placed under the protectorate of the Crown. ' In Martin's Statistics of the British Colonies the returns for 1836 are given. 456 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA Many great additions were made to India after the Mutiny, while in 1885 Upper Burmah and Socotra were acquired. In Australasia, while the Fiji Islands have been included in the Federation, the course of settlement has been pushed forward in all portions of the AustraHan continent. There are signs, mdeed, that the policy of those who would extend the authority of the British Empire over more territory, and in many more directions, is discountenanced by the nation. Putting aside a natural unwillingness to incur greater responsibilities, we cannot but remember that already the colonial policies of other countries have warned us to look carefully to the security and maintenance of our existing possessions. The Eecidivist policy of France with regard to the New Hebrides was, it is true, a matter of little political importance ; but it is not well to depreciate the gravity of the incidents attaching to the acquisition of the north of New Guinea and of the African settlements of Angra Pequena and the Cameroons by the German Empire. The friendly conventions, concluded in 1885, only serve to further enforce the truth of the late Mr. Merivale's saymg, ' the surface of the world is taken up.' Increase At the beginning of the reign the population numbered rftioa''' 100,000,000, of which only some 2,000,000 were white, while now it is 215,000,000, and 10,000,000 of these are European. Population has more than doubled itself. The increase in the North American possessions has been from 1,400,000 to 5,000,000 ; in Australasia from 140,000 to 3,500,000. The mode, too, in which these were governed was vastly different from that which exists at present. Eepresentative institutions were established, indeed, in North America and the West Indies ; but in the latter country they were extended only to the white inhabitants, while in the former they were rendered of little value by the restrictions placed upon their exercise. In all some 1,500,000 COLONIAL POLICY AND PROGRESS 457 were allowed a limited control over their own government. Now nearly 10,000,000 are in colonies where the ministers are wholly responsible to the popular assemblies ; while over 1,800,000 possess institutions of varying representative character. It may well be said that there has been an increase of 8,000,000 of European descent, guaranteed the full rights of citizenship, and bearing the responsibility of their own government and defence. The material growth is equally striking. At the begin- Material ning of the reign the total export and import trade of the colonies was worth some 55,000,0001. If the returns of the Past United Kingdom be roughly computed and added, the total pared trade of the whole empire may be reckoned to have amounted pre^gj^t to 200,000,000L This is somewhat less than the present annual value of the colonial exports. Even in 1856 the colonial trade amounted to only 140,000, OOOZ., and the trade of the United Kingdom to nearly 260,000,000L The total, 400,000,000L, is not so great as that now carried on between the different parts of the empire. The imports into the coioBiai colonial possessions are now 203,000,000L and the ex- with ports 205,000, OQOL Of the exports, over one-half — some ^Sg^ 107,000,000?.— go into the United Kingdom; while the imports into the colonies from the mother country amount to 88,000,000L The total trade is worth 408,000,000L, and of this some 48 per cent, is carried on with the United Kingdom. This is the annual average for the years 1883-84, but the average for the years 1881-83 is 49 per cent.' Even this does not, however, fully represent the close connection which exists between the different parts of the British Empire. To do this it is necessary to take into account the trade carried on between the various colonies themselves, which can be represented but imperfectly, as in some of the returns no such distinction is drawn. Any estimate will in consequence ' Stat. Soc. Journal, xlvii. 595. dom. 458 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA The internal trade of the empire. fall below the real value, since the total returns will be in- creased in many instances where this inward traffic will not show its augmentation. Of the whole colonial trade, some 285,000,000Z. or nearly 70 per cent, represents the trade carried on withm the empire ; the trade with the United Kingdom amounting to 196,000,000^., and that with other possessions to nearly 90,000,000Z. Now the trade of the United Kingdom in 1884 was 686,000,000^., of which that with the British possessions amounted to 184,000,000^. The entu-e export and import trade of the empu-e is, then, 1,089,000,000L, and of that 469,000,000L or 42 per cent, is the value of the trade within its boundaries. Comparison may be carried further. The export and import trade of the world is reckoned at 3,600,000,000Z. ; nearly 13 per cent, of that whole trade is carried on within the British Empire. There was no prospect of such splendid progress at the beginning of the reign. Then the mention of Australia could be greeted with laughter, and the rebellion in Canada gave opportunity for envenomed discussion, in which se- paration and coercion were alternately advocated. There were gloomy forebodings as to the future of England ; there were many who doubted whether she would maintain her position among the Powers of Europe. But beyond the reach of European politics an empire of British origin was growing up. As during the reign of Ehzabeth the naval supremacy of England was estabhshed by individual daring and endurance, so during the reign of Victoria colonies were settled, explored, and developed by the labour and determination of the people, sometimes aided, but often hampered, by the action of the Government. Stride by stride they have advanced until the mother country finds that she no longer stands alone, but that her future strength and position will depend, not only on those who inhabit her narrow bounds, but on those who look back to her with COLONIAL POLICY AND PROGRESS 459 loj'alty and affection from the east and the islands in the west, from the Dominion of North America and the far continent in the south. Already the colonists have stood by our side in the field. New South Wales, stirred by an enthusiasm which found a grateful echo in England, has sent her contingent to Suakim, and Canada her voyageurs to the Nile. What once was but the language of showy epigram is now the simple record of historic fact. ' A new world has been called into existence ' under British auspices and by British energy. 46o THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA INDIA. The portion of Indian history which is co-extensive with the reign of her Majesty Queen Victoria is crowded with events of which the detailed mention would far exceed the widest limits which could be assigned to this paper. I propose in the fol- lowing pages to dwell only on events which suggest some general conclusion, or which show the greatness of the changes which have occurred in a half-century of unusual im- portance, or which seem to me to have been misinterpreted, or which throw some light on a number of grave problems which may some day have to be dealt with by this country as controlling the destinies of a vast and populous depend- ency. It will be an inevitable consequence, not only of the narrowness of my space, but of the limitation of my know- ledge, that I shall in a great degree avoid military affairs, and confine myself to civil history. Extent of Wlien her Majesty first ascended the throne, the group of territories under British authority which is known as India did not include the two frontier provinces which now form part of it. The Punjab, or ' Country of the Five Elvers,' in the north-west, and, save a small portion, Bur- mah in the south-east, were still under native rulers, owing no allegiance to the British Government or the Crown. It is observable that, though several attempts have been made to frame a definition of India for legal and legislative pur- poses, none have been successfully constructed except one founded on historical facts. India in 1837. INDIA 461 We have here an illustration of a truth which governs, or ought to govern, all speculation and discussion about India, that, strictly speaking, there is no such country. It is very doubtful whether a single common name for India exists among the populations whom we are in the habit of calling its natives. India in reality consists of a number of coun- tries successively acquired by the East India Company, or obtained by the Crown in the exercise of rights inherited from the East India Company. The impression of uniformity which this collection of Different countries sometimes produces in the Western observer is ^o^f probably little more than the sense of a great difference ffisedin ° the name between every one of them and the part of the world to 'India.' which he belongs. In reality, the varieties observable in them are extreme, and it is not too strong an assertion that India is much less uniform than Europe. The countries which make it up are as unlike in their history as European countries, and the languages spoken differ as widely from one another as European languages. There is no more resemblance between a Punjabee and a Bengalee, between an Indian of Hindustan and an Indian of Malabar, than there is between an Englishman and a Eoumanian, or be- tween a Spaniard and a Swede. The chief causes of the common social characteristics which belong to European countries have been a common Christianity, and, in a less degree, a common law and a common stock of legal ideas, ultimately of Eoman origin. But rehgion in India has been on the whole a disintegrating rather than a unifying force. There is no quarrel between Christian sects as bitter as that which divides the Maho- medans from each of the multitude of groups which call themselves in one sense or another Hindu, or as violent as the antipathy of some of these groups to the remainder. Hinduism does no doubt give a superficial air of similarity 462 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA to many populations ; there is considerable resemblance between the pretensions of Brahmans in all parts of India ; but Hinduism has also a profoundly separating effect by keeping alive that very ancient state of society in which the commonest, and here and there the exclusive, form of asso- ciation is that of distinct bodies of kinsmen following a common occupation, each having its own worship, and often its own gods, its own standards of social propriety, and its own customary law. Some unifying influences do exist in India, but they are comparatively modern, and they may all be traced to forms of sovereignty binding these countries together by a com- mon rule. The administrative system of the Mogul em- perors, whose dominions when at their largest extended farther to the north-west than the British-Indian Empire, but not quite so far to the south-east and south, has bequeathed to the British Government a land system every- where extremely uniform in principle. But far the greatest number, and far the most powerful, of the influences tend- ing to give a common character to the Indian population are of British origin. There are large masses of the people to whom Christian missionaries, have never had access, but few attentive observers of Indian history can fail to see that the morality of modern indigenous literature tends to become Christian morality, which has penetrated farther than Christian belief. But the most powerful of unifying agencies has been the administration of justice by Enghsh courts, which has now been proceeding for more than a century, and which has gained much of late years in consistency and steadiness of operation through the promulgation of four codes — the Penal Code, the Codes of Criminal and Civil Procedure, and the Code of Substantive Civil Law, now all but completed. These codes, as will be pointed out presently, are an exclu- INDIA 463 sive product of her Majesty's direct administration of India. England under the Queen still denies her the advantages of codified law, but she has given to India, which she intro- duced to regular law, opportunities of becoming easily acquainted with it which are not yet possessed by the bulk of Englishmen. Under all the Indian codes there is of course a moral basis, from which a new set of moral ideas are diffused among the population of the Indian countries. The English language, too, is more and more spoken, carrying with it a certain appreciation of Western modes of thought. It would be unsafe to make any assertion as to the extent to which it has spread among so vast a multi- tude of men ; but with professional men, men of business, and servants of Govermnent in all grades, English is gra- dually becommg a linriua franca, and there is a class, as yet relatively small, which has not only learned to write and speak it excellently, but has become acquainted through it with some of the most characteristic Western ideas of our day. At the accession of her Maiesty, the Indian territories The Bast ... . India were under the direct administration of the East India Com- Company. This system of government had already begun to look strange in 1837 ; but two centuries earlier, in the commencement of a distant maritime adventure, the agency of a company had been the favourite method of conducting intercourse with remote, but settled, populous, and wealthy countries, as distinguished from lands peopled by barba- rians or savages. Such a body was formed with a fixed capital in the ordinary corporate form of the day, and, in consideration of some advantage to the Government of the- country forming it (generally a heavy subsidy), it was in- vested with a monopoly of trade, and, for the purpose of conducting it, it was expected to establish factories and to make small territorial acquisitions by favour of the local prince or ruler. pany. 464 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA The The peculiarity of the EngHsh East India Company, Govern- among all the companies set on foot by the various Euro- pean Powers, was that these acquisitions, originally small and subordinate, grew into a great empire. The Company began its operations when the Mogul Empire was just reaching its largest expansion, and soon witnessed the utter anarchy into which that empire fell in its decay. Amid this confusion, and after a prolonged contest with one ener- getic European competitor. Prance, it ultimately became the most powerful sovereignty in the cluster of provinces to which it restored order and peace. These conquests brought upon it an addition to the mechanism of its government, which greatly increased its apparent complexity. The British Parliament, which had itself not long ceased to be the most corrupt public body in the whole world, had its atten- tion more and more attracted to the Eastern possessions of the East India Company by rumours of great abuses, and by its own awakened sense of responsibility ; and, at last, after a violent struggle between the two English parties, a system was created long known as the Double Government of India. The East India Company, which governed India in theoretical subordination to the Crown, was itself con- trolled by a Board of Commissioners, which was a depart- ment of the Home Government. It has sometimes been questioned what was the authority which really ruled India under Mr. Pitt's legislation. India has been at all times mainly governed in India itself, but there is no doubt that the effective part of the Home Go- vernment was the East India Company, or rather its Court of Directors, which, under the provisions of successive Acts of Parliament, had gradually engrossed the whole of its powers. The Board of Control examined all the despatches of the Directors. It could recommend alterations in them, and, if necessary, it could compel the adoption of those INDIA 465 recommendations. But the initiative rested with the Court of Directors, and it was coupled with the authority which can never be separated from the initiation of policy. The actual administration of India was in the hands of their servants, and they included among themselves, and com- manded in their establishment, much more knowledge of Indian questions than was at the disposal of the depart- ment to which the superintendence of their affairs was committed. The Court of Directors was thus a powerful, and the Board of Control, except in one particular, a feeble authority. But the exception was a very serious one. In all Indian war and in all Indian diplomacy the Board of Control had the initiative, and on these subjects its i^ower was real and effective ; but the value of its occasional intervention in the exercise of its exceptional powers was a subject of the most vehement controversy. The Double Government was superseded in 1858 by her Majesty's direct authority, under circumstances which made the change the most momentous event in British Indian history. The first great occurrence which marked her Majesty's iiie reign had its origin in the exceptional initiative given by qufstion. Parliament to the portion of the Home Government of India which was directly responsible to itself. The Afghan war of 1838 was exclusively the work of the Board of Con- trol. The subsequent avowal of its President, ' Alone I did it,' has stamped itself on Indian historical recollection. The British arms have hardly ever been engaged in a struggle of such sustained and varied dramatic interest. But the moving incidents of its course, the triumphs, the reverses, the reconquest of the country, and its final abandonment, must be left to the military historian. The permanent interest of this Afghan war arises from its being the first of a series of efforts to arrest or neutraHse the steady advance VOL. I. H H 466 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA of the Eussian power to the mountains which form the north-western frontier of India. In India itself the public men charged with government and administration, while fully admitting the danger of Eussian approach to be very grave if it were real and press- ing, were nevertheless slow to believe that it was sufficiently imminent to require their attention and to mould their policy. The vast distances which long separated the Eussian possessions from India, the physical obstacles, the barbarous, warlike, and fanatical populations which inter- vened, the barrenness of most of the territories which lay between, and the impossibility of then- paying for the outlay of men and money which then* conquest would entail, dis- inclined some of the strongest and acutest mtellects in India to allow that the Eussian movements in Central Asia needed to be taken into serious present account. But the event has not justified this mcredulity, for the greatest part of the territory between Kussia and India has been absorbed by Eussian conquest or Eussian annexation. There is no question whatever as to the facts, and, apart from all question as to the way in which the peril could best have been encountered, the miscalculation has been signal. I believe that, to a certain extent, it may be explained by several defects in English political knowledge. Englishmen do not understand the strong points of despotic Governments. They very imperfectly appreciate the far-reaching influence of great armies raised by conscription, and very nearly co- extensive with the whole of the male population in the flower of life ; and, above all, they still share the delusion of the younger Pitt, who never could be persuaded that a country using assignats, instead of silver and gold, could conduct great wars and win great victories. They do not recognise the immense force at the command of a government which can issue paper money at its discretion. INDIA 467 though the force be but temporary, and though it cause at all times the utmost inconvenience to foreign trade. The effect of the Eussian proximity to the Anglo-Indian boundaries will undoubtedly be to modify the Anglo-Indian estimate of the securities necessary for the tenure of an empire which has now lost its capital advantage of being solely accessible by sea ; and some interest will perhaps attach to our having full in view a method of governing a distant Asiatic dependency which is fundamentally different from our own. The greatness of the contrast may be shown by a simple illustration. The minimum of coercive restraint of a community by its Government is shown by its posses- sion of two rights — the right of contesting the acts and policy of its rulers through the press, and the right of protesting against then- measures in public meeting. Even in the popularly governed European countries, with the exception of Great Britain, both these rights are much more restricted than common opinion supposes ; indeed, the right of holding public political meetings can hardly be said to exist on the Continent, and it is especially narrowed in the republic which is close to our eastern shores. But the right of political criticism through public meetings is as wide in India as in Great Britain, whilst the right of criticism through newspapers is actually wider. There is no workable law of seditious libel in India.' But in the Eussian territories these liberties wholly disappear. The Eussian government established in the countries to the north and north-west is far the best which they have enjoyed. for many centuries. The murders, the mutilations, and the man-stealing which abounded there are severely ' The Indian law of seditious libel is contained in the Penal Code, sect. 224 A. The opinion of the Indian law officers upon it is given in the Parliamentary Papers of 1878, ' East India (Native Press) ; Correspondence on the subject of Act IX. of 1878,' p. 34. 468 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA repressed, and the populations are returning to peaceful industry. But the administration is military throughout Eussian Turkestan. The smallest approach to sedition would be punished with the utmost rigour, and no language about Government would be permitted in speech or writing which was not encomiastic of the Great White Czar and of his beneficent rule. And there is only one newspaper, an official Gazette. The chastisement inflicted on the Afghans after the first Afghan war was exemplary ; but it seems certain, from the reports of European travellers who made their way into Afghanistan after the close of the war, that the impression soon arose among the people that they had been victorious in their contest with the British armies. Their country had been evacuated ; they had preserved their independence, and they finally recovered their chief ; nobody who has observed the ease with which communities forget military disasters will wonder that the Afghans shortly believed themselves to have defeated then- enemies. It is probable that a measure of discredit attached itself far and wide to the mili- tary reputation of the British, and was, in part at all events, the secret of events which led to the next great struggle in which the British-Indian Empire was engaged during the reign of her Majesty. Since the beginning of the eighteenth century a powerful military State had been formmg itself in the north-west of the Indian peninsula. It was partly a confederation of cognate clans and partly a combination of Hindu sectaries, and it had been for many years under the dominion of a man of high natural capacity, who had conceived great respect for the British power, not unmingled with distrust. Eevoit But, at the death of Eunjeet Singh, the government of Punjlb. the Punjab fell into weaker hands, guided by less pru- dent counsels, while the numerous and admirably equipped INDIA 469 soldiery which Eunjeet had discipHned on European models was sensibly affected by the diminished fame of the British arms. A movement followed such as would have infallibly occurred in the older India. The Sikh army precipitated itself on the British possessions, and a contest began which severely tried the military strength of the British-Indian Empire. After a series of hardly won successes, the Indian Government made an attempt to govern the dominions of Eunjeet Singh in the name of a prince of his house, sub- jected to British direction. This system was shattered by a revolt, and a second war followed, in which the British armies were signally victorious. It was then, after some hesitation, determined to make the Punjab a British pro- vince, and it soon became one of the most prosperous and loyal portions of the empire. The failure of the previous endeavour to treat it as a feudatory or ' protected ' State seems to have left on the mind of the Governor-General of that day an impression unfavourable to that form of government, for the period which succeeded was remarkable for the number of instances in which the territory of dependent Native States was annexed to the British possessions. The plea was sometimes misgovernment, and it was very scandalous misrule which brought about the annexation of Oudh, a measure destined before long to have the gravest consequences. Frequently the pretext had a legal colour, the British Government claiming the right to disallow, for purposes of succession, the adoptions of male heirs which are common m India through the singular liabiUty of the reigning houses to failure of male offspring. The controversies which this pohcy excited were vehement, but they are not now in- structive, especially since the general succession of the right of adoption by her Majesty after her assumption of the direct government of India. 470 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA The truth is that the question between the British Indian and native Indian types of rule is a question of the ideal of Oriental government. In the natural India, a State of the second or third order left to itself was the unhappiest of pohtieal structures. It had to bear the full onset of per- petual war, or of war converted into brigandage, and the student of the Indian history of the last century is apt to thmk that the best fortune which could befall it would be its conquest by a powerful neighbour. But the modern Indian protected State, the feudatory of the Queen-Empress, can neither go to war nor be warred against. Life there is said by some to be simpler and easier than in the British dominions. A rough form of justice is msisted upon; over- taxation is as far as possible discountenanced, and oppres- sion, if not altogether unknown, is nowadays exceedingly rare. Such a State, however, is not, as the modern phrase runs, progressive. There are few public works, almost no education, and society is not organised on the competitive prmciple. But the increase of commerce, the activity of justice, the rapid construction of public works, the spread of education, are tests of success applied to modern States, and nme Englishmen out of ten would insist on the British- Indian political system being judged by them. Nevertheless, in the East at all events, it is not yet quite settled which is the ideal condition. The All the occurrences on which I have based the preceding considerations took place before the assumption by her Majesty of direct authority over British India. The event, in itself tragically calamitous, which brought about this transfer of government to the Crown is the greatest fact in aU Anglo-Indian history. The mutiny of the native army of Bengal constitutes the dividing line between two periods. The Englishmen who know India best, either by public service or by residence, may be seen to be divided into two Mutiny. INDIA 471 classes by their actual recollection of this military revolt, or by their being too young or too old to have witnessed it ; and, in point of fact, on the proper interpretation of it depends in great measure our knowledge of certain points of character which are common among all the Indian popula- tions, but which lie too deep for the complete observation of the most experienced student of Indian phenomena. Nothing can show superficiality of mmd more conclusively than wilful neglect of it, or than the preference to it of theories about India either imperfectly verified by observa- tion or experience, or not verified at all. The native armies of the East India Company were in a certain degree representative bodies. The families of certain classes which in English phrase might be described as consisting of peasant proprietors or yeoman farmers, but which in Indian language might be said to be generally of high or very respectable caste, had preserved, and they still keep up, the habit of providing for at least one son by sending him to military service. Even the ranks of the army are considered to furnish an honourable and well-paid career. In the great armies of European States military service in the ranks is regarded as a burden, sometimes as a degradation. But throughout the Indian provinces, which are the home of energetic populations, the common complaint in rural society is that there is not enough of this coveted employment. In the course of the year 1857, the native army of causes Bengal, which had been the instrument of many military Mutiny, triumphs (and virtually the whole of the army), mutinied against its officers. The Bengal army was followed by a large part of the Bombay native army ; but the Madras native army, which was maintained on a separate footing and in which the soldiers spoke a different language, held altogether aloof. The cause or pretext of the revolt was 472 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA the duty imposed on the soldier of biting off the end of a new cartridge introduced with the Minie rifle, and the rumour soon spread that this cartridge, which had a glossy appearance, had been greased with the fat of oxen and swine. Now, a principle which runs through Hinduism, in all its multitudinous shades and subdivisions, is the essential difference of blood in each group or caste, and the un- imaginably greater purity of the blood in some of them than in others. But for a Hindu to taste the flesh or fat of the sacred cow destroys all purity. In remote times, the Ma- homedan tyrant of Bengal, the Nawab Nazim, compelled the heads of several families or clans to swallow broth made of beef, and these families, which m Western society would be called aristocratic, still occupy a special position among their countrymen of the same provmce, and, from one point of view, an inferior position. I need scarcely add that, to Mahomedans all over the world, the flesh of swine is an abomination. But in India, through contact with Hinduism, the Mahomedans, who are themselves, or whose ancestors were, nearly all converted Hindus, have come to regard the eating of forbidden food very much as Hindus regard the eating of beef. The struggle which succeeded was as fierce and as relentless as any in which any bodies of mankind are recorded to have engaged. For an analogy to it we must look back to the mutinies of Carthagmian mercenary troops, of which one has left behind a tradition of its nature in the name appropriated especially to it of bellum iuexpiabile, the truceless war. When the terrible intelli- gence of its outbreak reached Great Britain, the first question asked about it was the most natural of all. How was it possible that such a movement could spring from such a cause ? So far as my own knowledge extends, INDIA 473 no Anglo-Indian authority, with the smallest title to be listened to, has ever doubted that it was a genuine fana- tical rising. As the revolt proceeded, it undoubtedly drew to itself many disorderly elements, and incorporated with itself many personal grievances, the inevitable legacies of a century of downright anarchy followed by half a century of effort to restore order ; but, at the bottom of all, there was an honest belief that the British Government, which in parts of India is still accused occasionally of the most incredible designs, intended to take away from soldiers, whom it would be grossly unjust to think of as belonging to the dregs of the population, a special inherited virtue on which depended both their social status and their religious hopes. There are many striking stories which show that the minority of soldiers who remained loyal held to their allegiance not because they denied or doubted the magnitude of the asserted grievance, but because they were incredulous as to the matter of fact. They did not believe that the British Government had any design of destroying their purity of blood. The mutiny of the Bengal soldiery and its true cause caste should not be a mystery to anybody who can bring home ^®^i™e- to himself the feeling of the unsophisticated Hindu on the subject of his caste. It is a compound of two of the strongest feelings which have not even now ceased to actu- ate men in Western Europe, a social feeling and a religious feeling, the sense in the nobly born of the value of the privileges of birth, and the sense in the most intensely beUev.ing members of a sect of the value of the fact that they are numbered among the Elect. All the democratic and sceptical sentiment which modifies these feelings in Europe has to be abstracted if we would give them the force which they possess in India, where the real dissidents do 474 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA not amount to more than a few thousands out of two hundred and fifty millions of souls. It is one of the great delusions of civilised societies — a delusion to which Englishmen and Frenchmen are es- pecially liable — that no man sincerely holds a religious opinion which seems to them both false and grotesque. Let us, however, once make the assumption that the bulk of the Bengal sepoys really believed that the use of the car- tridge would take away their social and personal dignity in this world, and would consign them to countless cycles of perdition in the next — and a very little knowledge will suffice to show us that, from the tenth century to the seventeenth, nothing could have prevented the British people. Catholic or Protestant, from rising in armed revolt against the men credited with such a design. Far slighter outrages in a far later time would have had scarcely less tremendous effects. When the French armies in Spain stripped altars of their silver and images of their jewels, they thought that they were merely insulting a superstition which no rational men seriously beheved. But not the less by their pillage of churches and monasteries did they turn the unarmed and long-submissive Spanish peasantry into a nation of desperate guerillas. The Indian class, however, which believed itself to have suffered an outrage, had at once the material strength of the French and the religious susceptibility of the Spaniards. They had already the guns, equipment, and the big battalions. The defect of knowledge or imagination which hides these truths from the English mind prevails so widely that every sort of explanation of the Mutiny has commended itself to politicians and historians except the true one that it was an outburst of terrified fanaticism. The historical writer will single out some portion of policy which he dislikes or deems indefensible, and will argue that the INDIA 475 Sepoy Mutiny was merely the form accidentally taken by the dissatisfaction which it excited. It is quite true, as I have stated before, that, as the revolt gathered strength, all varieties of political and personal grievance rallied to it. Everyone who was in distress, and everyone who was in debt, and everyone who was discontented, gathered him- self to the sepoy. No class gave him such powerful assistance as the talukdars of Oudh — great collectors of revenue, who under the native government had developed into great landlords, and whose authority over their tenantry had been too summarily limited by the British Government after the incorporation of Oudh with the British territories. But perhaps the weakest explanation of the military insurrection is that which seems to have commended itself to certain English politicians, who have argued that, by the necessity of the case, it proved that some system of bad government must have previously existed, though there be no evidence of it in official documents. It is impossible to confute an opinion which does not pretend to rest upon evidence. But I venture to assert that the opposite method of inquiry, the critical examination of the authentic admi- nistrative history of British India, will show that, by 1857, the East India Company and its servants had established by progressive ameliorations, though, doubtless, amid some well-intended mistakes, a system of administration which was not only the best which had existed in any Oriental country (which is but small praise), but which, in some of its departments, might have been envied by civilised Western communities. Assuming that the prime cause of the mutiny of the Bengal troops was genuine suspicion and fear of an attack on the institution by which the large majority of the Indian people are distributed in groups, distinctly rounded 476 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA off and separated from one another, the fact assumed is as far as possible from having a merely historical interest. It is a question of the gravest practical importance for the rulers of India how far the condition of religious and social sentiment revealed by the Mutiny survives in any strength. The English community and their public servants fully allow that they govern their Eastern dependency by the tenure of continuous amelioration, but within what limits can they improve ? It is manifest that, if the belief in caste continues unimpaired or but slightly decayed, some paths of legislation and of executive action are seriously unsafe : it may be possible to follow them, but it is impera- tive to walk warily. The question of the existence or otherwise of this belief has also a direct bearing on the structm-e of the government which it may be possible to give to the Indian possessions of this country. In the Western world, it is taken for granted on all sides that, if a government be changed, it must be changed in the direction of democracy. But anybody who will carefully examme the democratic theories now spreading over the West will find that, in some sense or another, they all assume the equality of men. ' One shall count for one, and for one only,' said Jeremy Bentham, the father of British democracy. But caste among Hindus is the negation of equahty. It proceeds on the principle that men are unequal, both in this world and the next. This direct and emphatic contradiction in the East of a position apparently destined to be universally accepted in the West throws a strong light on the difiiculties of Indian govern- ment, and makes the actual prevalence of the belief in caste a question of the first importance. It is a subject on which many contradictory assertions are made even in India. The opinions of those who are persuaded that caste sentiment has decayed must, I think, contain a particle of INDIA 477 truth. The multipKed railways are credited with impair- ing it, and it is very hkely that, in a miscellaneous travel- ling multitude, some of the rigidity of caste practices has to give way. It is also certain that the higher education, given through English media, tends to weaken the senti- ment which brought about the revolt of thirty years since. It tends to destroy the religious sanction, not through any dehberate hostihty to Hindu belief, but through the in- evitable effect of accurate scientific teaching on a religion abounding in all parts with false assertions about nature. The prejudices of caste may, however, even when they cease to be connected with religion, remain social pre- possessions of the strongest vitality and strength; and, even while I write, the panic which has spread through North-E astern India on the subject of the adulteration with fat of the clarified butter universally used in native cookery suggests that some of these prejudices survive in their coarsest form. But, whatever be the truth as to the operation of the influences I have mentioned, the greatest of all facts remains. There are 200,000,000 of souls in British India, perhaps 250,000,000 in British India and its dependencies. Of this multitude the great bulk ' have been hardly touched at all by education, and have the slightest possible experience of railway travelling, and ' I know no more vivid illustration of this than one given by Lord Northbrook in a lecture delivered by him after his return from India : ' Let me take you first to the great city of Calcutta. You will find there a contrast as striking as any that exists in the world. You will meet native gentlemen who speak EngHsh as well as yourselves, who are ready to discuss with you English history and literature, modern philosophy, and European politics. But, if you wander for a few miles into the surrounding country with its pahn groves and luxuriant tropical vegetation, and turn up one of the many footpaths which lead to the dwellings of the industrious cultiva- tors of the soil, the first man you meet would hardly know the name of the Queen ; he certainly could not tell you who was the Viceroy of India, and if he knew the name of the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, his immediate lord and master, it would be surprising.' (Address delivered in the Town Hall, Birmingham, on October 29, 1880.) 478 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA numbers of them have perhaps not even seen a man of European colour. I am not making any confident asser- tion on a subject so vast and so superficially examined as the character of native Indian rehgious and social belief. But I msist on the necessity of having some accurate ideas about it, and on the fact that a mistake about it caused the Sepoy Mutiny. The The military insurrection was a terrible surprise, not Mutiny a . surprise. Only to the military and civil governments of India, but to all communities of Englishmen, wherever they exist, and to the people of the British Islands. Nevertheless, it had been preceded by events which foreshadowed it, and which, though they had been imperfectly appreciated, had caused much temporary uneasiness. In 1806 there had been, at Vellore, in the Madras province, a military revolt which closely resembled the outbreak of 1856 in all respects except its magnitude and duration. An order to the sepoys to wear a hat of somewhat European fashion was succeeded by a massacre of their officers. But the Madras army was isolated, great energy was displayed in suppress- ing the revolt, and it was quickly ended. At a later date, the larger Bengal army was observed by foreign officers who travelled m India. They expressed their astonishment at the effects of caste on military discipline. They had seen the native officer bowing low before the high-caste private ; they had heard of the suffering endured after an engagement by the wounded rather than take water or medicine from impure hands. Atro- Among observant British officers there had been much the muti- anxiety on the score of the paucity of British regiments, and it had been noticed that native regiments had objected to foreign service in a manner not consistent with strictness of discipline. The army had become conscious of its strength — a feeling which, even in democratically governed neers. INDIA 479 Western countries, constantly portends military revolution. But not the less was the immediate occurrence of the Mutiny unexpected by all. In England it was wholly unintelligible. While some persons who had experience of India explained it, not quite unreasonably, by certain indiscretions of persons in authority which were believed to have irritated native religious opinion, the bulk of the British public seemed to accept the opposite view. They accepted, or did not reject, the accusation that the East India Company and its servants had been too much ashamed of their Christianity. But the opinion of the country was finally determined by the ever-strengthening reports of the atrocities committed by the mutineers. The temper of the nation was wrought up to the highest heat by the slaughter of women and children. And then arose a raging tempest of indignation, of a kind which is very rarely seen, but of which those who watch the moods of the British people during long periods knew them to be abundantly capable. The stern reprisals of the British authorities in India call for less explanation than the special atrocities of the mutineers. It is useless to discuss military punishments, and least of all those which in all ages and countries are meted out to a mutinous soldier. Like every part of war, its penal code implies a suspension of ordinary morality. It is one of its axioms that the soldier or the corps which violates the military oath invites the utmost severity of punishment ; and, whether we like it or not, we must admit that military service could not exist without this principle. But how are we to account for the indiscriminate slaughter of men, women, and children by the revolted sepoys and by the desperadoes who followed them ? It has often been argued that they must have laboured under one fatal misconception. They supposed the English race, 48o THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA even in its own home, to amount to no more than a mere handful, and conceived that, by this bloodshed, they would go far to exterminate it altogether. This opinion is far- more plausible than it may appear to those who have not realised the fewness of the English in India as compared with the vast native population — a disproportion which is extraordinary even now, when the numbers of Englishmen have been considerably increased by the augmentation of the British army and the prosecu- tion of great public works. But the explanation must chiefly lie in the previous military history of India. War has probably been always bloodier m the East than in the West. Oriental war cannot but have been affected by the practices of the Tartars — the most merciless of all com- batants — and it never received the mitigations which the European law of war owes to the jurists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, who worked up a set of principles of Eoman origin into a system of comparative humanity. In India, till the British Empire arose, war had been growmg more and more relentless. After the last of the battles fought on the historical field of Paniput, where Mahratta and Mussulman had faced one another, it would appear that every single prisoner was put to death. During the agony of the Mogul Empire war in fact became brigandage. The Mahrattas were literally brigands. The traveller m India who comes on a series of blockhouses in successive villages finds that he is following some habitual track of the Mahratta armies, and learns that the strong places which he sees were especially buUt to protect women and children from torture and slaughter. But the Mahrattas, in their decay, left behind them the mere banditti known as the Pindarries. What were their practices is known from unusually authentic evidence. One of their raids was made into British territory, and INDIA 481 was the subject of inquiry by a commission. We have it on record that it lasted ten days, and that, independently of some hundreds of villages burned and men slain, no less than 3,600 persons were put to torture. The Pin- dar ries were crushed by the British arms no later than 1817. I have been informed that, in 1857, not a few native officers of the Bengal army admitted having served with them in their youth. There is thus no reason to suppose that the incidents of the Sepoy Mutiny differed widely from those occurring in Indian wars which had occurred during the lifetime, or just before the lifetime, of men who took part in it. But its moral effects were prodigious. It was regarded as a supreme trial of strength. I have myself been told by Indian gentlemen of much intelligence, who well knew educated native society before the Mutiny, that the govern- ment of India by what seemed a mere handful of English- men had been universally regarded as an example of mysterious good fortune, which must come to an end some day. But the attempt to terminate it, made with every conceivable advantage, failed completely. It survived the revolt and the desperate attack of the very army to which it owed its greatest successes. Some of the events which marked the progress of the British arms in 1857 and 1858 made a profound impression on the minds of thoughtful native observers, perhaps more than all the defence of the Eesidency at Lucknow against tremendous odds. For the old conviction that luck must change, the opinion gradually substituted itself that every movement for the redress of grievances, and all resistance to unpalatable innovations, would have to proceed on the assumption that the British government of India must continue. It is practically a principle of British government, and VOL. I. j: i 482 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA Eflfeots one which, though it occasionally works some injustice, is Mutiny OH the wholc justifiable, that serious disaster in any depart- lation.'^" naent of public affairs should be followed by large legislative or administrative reconstruction. The true causes of the Indian Mutiny were such as no legislation could touch, but nobody can be surprised that events so tragic as those of which India had been the theatre, and emotions so keen as those which had been excited in the British pubhc, produced a demand for legislative change, or, at all events, a belief in the Government of the day that a change was demanded. Parliament therefore attempted a reconstruction of both branches of Indian government. It is likely that the au- thors of the statutes of 1858, which reformed the Home Government of India, and of 1861, which reformed the Local Indian Government, limited themselves to altering those parts of Indian institutions which seemed to them most difficult to defend. In the Home institutions the so-called Double Government, under which the Board of Control was in one part of London and the Directors of the East India Company in another, was abolished. The President of the Board of Control, who had absorbed all the powers of the Board, became, with greatly enlarged powers, a Secretary of State responsible for the whole business of India. The Directors of the East India Company lost all authority over India, but the great amount of knowledge and experience which they either included or commanded was to be supplied by an Indian Council, which, however, was not to have the initiative which was the secret of their power. The new legislation for India itself left the Governor- General and his Council very much as they were, but an active legislature was created by adding to the Governor- General's Executive Council experienced public servants and native and European gentlemen unconnected with public office. Similar legislatures were estabhshed in parts of INDIA 483 India other than the seat of the Central Government, and provision was made for their multiphcation. The strange double system of courts of justice which I have elsewhere described in a special work ' was abolished by fusing the tribunals which composed them. But, whether intended or not, the changes effected by the statutes of 1858 and 1861 have been prodigious. Possibly without design, Parliament swept away the obstacles to a transformation as remarkable as has been the development of any Western country. If this language appears extravagant, the cause must be sought in the superficiahty of the attention given to Indian affairs in this country. The East India Company, which lost a magnificent empire through the mutiny of the Bengal sepoys, was not altogether a body of the spirit and temper which might have been inferred from its constitution and history. A certain number of hostile critics, pursuing the line of attack commenced in the great party controversy at the end of the last century, represented it as animated by the mercantile spirit in its worst form. They continued to call it a monopohst corporation — greedy, grasping, and aggressive, deposing dynasties and swallowing up kingdoms for the sake of augmenting its dividends. It is true that it was per- petually at war, but its wars were principally attributable to authorities over which it had no control or little — the Governors- General who, though nominally its servants, were always in close relations with the Government of the Crown and the Board of Commissioners established by Parliament for superintending its affairs. Its Directors seldom lost an opportunity of protesting against the belli- gerency forced upon it. The East India Company had plenty of civil courage. With the help of the admirable civil service which it had ' Village Communities in the East and West, ch. i. I I 2 484 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA ciiarao- Created, and, what is rarer in the experience of communities tteEast holding distant dependencies, it had ended in completely Com- Piii"ifyiJig! it had given to a great collection of populations a pany. better government than had ever been known in the Bast. Over the bulk of its territories it had established a land system of which the main principles were bequeathed to it by its Mahomedan predecessors. But the modern mechan- ism of this system was the creation of the Company and its servants ; it is even now a marvel of precision, and I shall surprise those only who have paid no attention to it by saying that there is nothing to be compared with the mechanical part of it in any portion of the British dominions. The East India Company had further put down all sorts of abominations among its subjects. It had made an end of the burning of the widow on her husband's funeral pile, of human sacrifices, of the widely extending system of professional murder called Thuggee. If it had not wholly abolished, it had gone a long way to abolish the wholesale homicide of female infants. It took a step of the greatest boldness in preventing the loss of property and the forfeiture of inheritance for change of religion. But there is no doubt that it was defective in what may be called mercantile courage. There was some truth in the reproach that it did not sufficiently ' develop the resources of the country ' which it governed. I attribute this to privileges which were once thought to be necessary incidents of its position, but which later economical science counts amongst its misfortunes — its monopolies. It had the monopoly of the China trade till 1833. I infer from the line of argument followed by the Com- pany and its advocates when seeking for a renewal of its charter, that, while the East India Company had abundant faith in the profits of its monopolies, it had but little in the territorial revenues of its Indian possessions. It seems to INDIA 48 s have more than doubted whether, without its monopohes, it could defray the cost of Indian government. The effect of these misgivings was to endow it with some virtues. It was on the whole thrifty, and practised an economy which its successors have been frequently reproached with neg- lecting, and which is certainly maintained with extreme difficulty. But it was also unadventurous, and what has since followed entitles us to say that it was unduly so. This failing was especially felt in o;ne great department, that of Public Works. It would be grossly unjust to say that it neglected them altogether. The Government of the East India Company, before it fell, had carried two great undertakings all but to completion, the Grand Trunk Eoad and the Ganges Canal. They were constructed with the funds of the State ; but a new financial system had been devised under which the subscriptions of capitalists were invited for specific public works, the Government paying a fixed rate of interest on the money raised, and superintending, and to some extent controlling, the progress of the undertaking. Under this system, three trunk railways, the East Indian Eailway, the Madras Eail- way, and the Great Indian Peninsula Eailway, had been commenced. Still, it cannot be denied that there is truth in the following passage from the ' Indian Polity ' of General George Chesney (p. 158, 1st edition) : ' The Court of Directors, until almost the termination of their existence, did not recognise the prosecution of public works as a neces- sary part of their policy. The construction of a road or canal was regarded by them, in their earlier days, much in the same light that a war would be, as an unavoidable evil, to be undertaken only when it could not be postponed any longer, and not, if possible, to be repeated. Latterly, the force of circumstances led the Court to acquiesce in the prosecution of several extensive new works ; but the great 486 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA development of progress under this head dates from the transfer of the government to the Crown.' The The direct government of the Crown which succeeded au- that of the East India Company derived one paramount °"*'^' advantage from the occurrences of 1857, which enabled it to be financially more adventurous. A great issue had been fought out before the eyes of all men in India itself, and it had been conclusively decided in favour of the English power. So far as any forecast could at that time be formed of the future, the fundamental security for all funds lent to the Indian Government or embarked in Indian enterprise, the British-Indian Empire, was solid and safe. The chief money market of the world, the money market of London, proved to be far more readily open to the new Government than ever it had been to the old ; and the whole economical condition of India, and the whole of her commercial and financial relations with Great Britain, were rapidly revolu- tionised by the practically new conviction that the British tenure of this extraordinary dominion was likely to be of indefinitely long duration. I proceed to dwell on certain pomts in the fiscal, financial, and economical history of British India during the Queen's reign, and especially during the period of her Majesty's direct authority. The later portion of this history is set forth w'ith fullness and clearness in a series of official documents of much value. The Act of Parliament which transferred the government of India from the East India Company to the Crown provided (21 & 22 Vict. c. 106, s. 53) that the Secretary of State in CouncU should lay before Parliament in May of each year an elaborate return of the revenue and expenditure of India ' in such form as should best exhibit the moral and material progress and condition of India.' From the information contained in these ' Moral and Material Progress ' reports, published each year, I INDIA 487 select, as in the rest of this paper, such portions only as suggest questions which appear to me to be of permanent interest or on which misapprehension seems to exist. The gross revenue of India and the expenditure against KeTenue. revenue may be conveniently compared as they stood in three years, the year preceding her Majesty's accession, 1836-87 ; the year preceding the great Sepoy Mutiny, 1856-57 ; and the last year for which accounts have been made up, 1884-85. In 1836-37 ' the gross revenue was 22,334,666L and the expenditure was 19,633,968Z. In 1856-57 the revenue was 32,168,727L and the expenditure 32,464,317Z. In 1884-85 the revenue was 70,979,625Z. and the expenditure 71,024,567L On these figures the remark has to be made that the account for 1856-57, which exhibits a deficit, illustrates the true financial position of the East India Company as regards its territorial revenues better than the account for 1836-37, which shows a surplus, practically produced by receipts from its monopolies, of which the last had come to an end in 1834. The territorial revenue of the Company had been increasing since the beginning of the century, but its wars had produced repeated deficits, and the first Finance Minister sent to India from England had calculated that of 46 years there had been 33 of deficit and only 13 of surplus. When defending its monopolies of the Indian and of the China trade, the Company had, in fact, constantly declared that the territorial revenues of India would not meet the expenses of Indian government. Since the govern- ' The accounts of the East India Company were Ice^jt in rupees of vary- ing value, first in sicca rupees of 2s. each ; then in Goinpany's rupees, which bore a certain fixed relation to the old sicca rupee. I am indebted to Mr. G. H. M. Batten, formerly Eevenue Secretary to the Government of India, for placing the results of the older accounts in such a form as to admit of com- parison with the modern figures, as well as for much other valuable assistance. The pound sterling in my figures is taken at the conventional value of 10 rupees. 488 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA ment of the Queen began, estimated surpluses have several times been turned into deficits by unlooked-for famine or unexpected war ; but in 1884-85 the chief modern embar- rassment of Indian finance, the relative depreciation of the rupee, had akeady made itself felt. The gross revenue of India at the Queen's accession was therefore about 22,000,000Z. sterling. Just before the revolt of the Bengal native troops it was a little over 32,000,000L ; it is now very nearly 71,000,000Z. It has therefore risen during the Queen's reign from the standard of a second- class European State to the standard of a European State of the first order. But it is less instructive to compare it with the public income of any European Government than with that of some Government which has existed m the East or in India itself, if evidence as to its income can be obtamed. Even if any trustworthy figures existed, it would be unreasonable and unjust to compare the revenues of the East India Company with the sums exacted in India by sovereigns from subjects during the period of anarchy and rapine which immediately preceded the British conquest. We are, however, in possession, owing to very recent researches, of information which can be very fairly de- pended upon as to the revenues of the Mogul emperors, whose government struck Western travellers as an example of a great, wealthy, and well-ordered empire, and is still looked back to by considerable numbers of learned Indians as marking a period of national prosperity. The system under which the Moguls collected their land revenue, at all times the stand-by of Indian finance, is perfectly well known ; indeed it still exists in India in an improved and civilised shape. There is also evidence, on which rehance can be placed, of the amounts which were paid into the imperial treasuries. But until lately there was great want of knowledge of the value and nature of the INDIA 489 coins in which the payments were made and the accounts stated. This has been supphed by the labours of Mr. Edward Thomas, a scholar and antiquary recently lost to Indian historical inquiry.^ We may now believe, with only slight allowance for Land error, that the great Akbar, at the close of the sixteenth century, received a revenue from all sources of 42,000,000Z. sterling, of which between 16,000,000L and 17,000,000L were land revenue, the last collected after a method which he is said to have himself invented and formed. We have to observe, however, that the dominions of Akbar were much more limited than those of the Queen-Empress. Bengal proper and Northern India paid him revenue, and so did Kabul beyond the possessions now British, but he had no authority over the territories, of which some are very fertile and wealthy, which we now officially call the Madras and Bom- bay Presidencies. The great aim and effort of his succes- sors was to extend the Mogul Empire to the south, and the steady increase which we may observe in the revenue of the emperors no doubt corresponds in a great degree to the area of then- conquests. In 1609-11 the revenue of the Emperor Jehangir had reached 50,000,0002. sterling. In 1695 the total revenue of Aurungzeb is variously given at 80,000,000L sterling and 77,500,000L This great sum appears to have been taken just about the time at which the Mogul Empire most nearly coincided in extent with the British, but it is also the time at which the Mogul Empire began to break up, jprmcipally through the military and rehgious revolt of Hinduism against Mahomedan rule which was conducted by the Mahrattas. There seems no room for doubt that the taxation of the Mogul emperor was at all times severer than that of ' Tlw Revenue Resources of the Mogul Empire in India, by Edward Thomas, F.R.S. 490 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA the Queen-Empress. Under the head of land revenue alone, Akbar, in 1594, exacted from Bengal and Northern India' a larger amount, by at least 2,000,000L sterling, than the modern British Government has ever collected from the same countries. The pressure of the impost was, moreover, much harder, since the purchasing power of the precious metals in which it was paid was considerably greater. But the most interesting question about this taxation is concerned less with its amount than with the services rendered by the sovereign in return for it. The Mogul emperor un- doubtedly kept the peace and exercised criminal justice; what would now be called civil justice was mainly administered by the natural bodies into which the population was dis- tributed, the joint families and the village communities. The face of India still shows what was the expenditure of the Moguls on (in modern phrase) public works. They erected buildings of the greatest beauty, palaces, tombs, and mosques. They shifted the sites of great cities, which were in truth their successive camps. They made a small number of tanks and canals, of which at all events the secondary use was to irrigate the land. But it is impossible to doubt that their vast revenues were principally spent on luxury and courtly state, and on virtually unceasing war. War has also absorbed a jjortion — sometimes, it may be, an undue portion — of the British- Indian revenues, but these revenues must be credited with a great deal more than the unbroken order, the regular justice, and the public instruction, which are always present in India. Out of the public income of the British-Indian Government, or on the credit of it, has been constructed ' Imperial Gazetteer of India, iv. 344 (Dr. Hunter's article on India). Dr. Hunter puts Aibar's taxation at three times that of the English. His excellent article gives a table printed by Mr. Thomas in 1871, and subse- quently revised by him, of the progressive increases in the Mogul revenues (p. 346). INDIA 49' that broad network of railways and that ever -lengthening string of irrigation works which have transformed the material conditions of India. There are now 13,000 miles of railway in India open to traffic. One great system starts from Calcutta, traverses the vast plain of Northern India, passes the largest of the Hindu and Mahomedan cities, Patna, Benares, Agra, Delhi, and Lahore, till it reaches Peshawur, which is less an Indian city than a city of Central Asia. From this prolonged system, as it pro- ceeds, others branch off into the fertile provinces skirting it on the north. A second primary system leaves Bombay, passes in two lines through Western and Central India, and joins the northern railways at Agra and Allahabad. Another of its lines runs south-easterly and connects it- self with a third main system, the South Indian railways spreading from Madras. Yet a fourth system, of even more military than commercial importance, starts from Lahore and stretches south-westwards to the newest of the British seaports, Kurrachee. Speaking broadly, it is only the meshes in this net of railroads which require to be filled up. The irrigation works constructed by the British-Indian Government are on a still more striking scale. In 1884-85 27,000 miles of canals and their distributaries irrigated 10,000 square miles of land. These creations of the Indian engineer literally drank up whole rivers. The Ganges, when it leaves the Himalayas at Hurdwar, passes wholly in the dry weather into the bed of the Ganges canal, and the natural bed of the stream can be crossed on foot. Farther on, at a lower level, when the great river has recruited its waters, it again flows entire into the canal. The irrigation works of Southern India have similar effects, and there are rivers in the Madras province which are so absorbed by them that they never reach the sea. The rail- ways have given a new commercial life to India, and the 492 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA railways and the canals together are performing a greater feat by correcting the cruel aberrations of nature and bringing a time in view when Indian famines will be known no more. There are certain items of this revenue of 70,979,625Z. levied by the British Government of India which call for especial notice. The land revenue, which from time imme- morial has been the backbone of Indian public income, stood in 1836-37 at 12,319,422L ; in 1856-57 it had risen to 17,954,571L ; in 1884-85 it was 21,832,211Z. The method of assessing it dates from the Mogul emperors, but it is probably of far higher antiquity than the date of its ostensible origin. The Emperor Akbar is said to have established it, but in all probability he merely systematised it, and this system has never died out. It is known in India as the system of ' survey and settlement.' The officers of the emperor surveyed the area to be assessed ; they calculated the probable produce of each field; they estimated the value of the emperor's share of the gross produce ; and they imposed on the cultivator the duty of paying this value in cash. The evidence as to the imperial share is conflicting, but, theoretically, it seems to have been a third of the gross produce. The assessment was not to be altered during at least ten years. A great deal of the land revenue of India is still assessed under modifications of this system, though the measurement of the soil, and the estimate of produce, conducted by scientific methods, are of course greatly more precise than they can have been at the end of the sixteenth century, and though the share of produce claimed by the Government is always less than the old imperial share. It has already been explained that the Mogul emperors appear to have collected a much larger revenue from the land than the Bast India Company or the Government of INDIA 493 the Crown. Akbar's revenue from this source, in 1605, near the end of his reign, is given by some authorities at 17,500,000Z. ; but, fifty years ago, the East India Company received only 12,000,000L and less than a half, from a larger extent of territory. When we find that, a century after Alibar's day, the Emperor Aurungzeb was receiving the prodigious land revenue of 38,000,000Z. sterling, one cannot but suspect that, not merely extension of territory, but a gradual enhancement of the rate of assessment, that is, of the emperor's share, is the secret of the great aug- mentation. It will be observed that the land revenue of the British-Indian Government rose by about 5,500,000Z. sterling in the twenty years between 1836-37 and 1856-57, and again by about 4,000,000L sterling between 1856-57 and 1884-85. The addition to the proceeds of the tax in the first period is chiefly attributable to the large annexations of territory during Lord Dalhousie's Governor-Generalship. The growth of land revenue during the period between the Sepoy Mutiny and the present time is almost exclusively owing to the progressive cultivation of lands imperfectly cultivated or waste. So far as my knowledge extends, there has never been an enhancement of the rate, nothing like the fluctuations to which Englishmen are accustomed in the income tax. But, locally, there have been very con- siderable reductions of the Government share. There has been much discussion as to the nature and incidence of the Indian land revenue, but, for the most part, it has been entirely sterile, owing to the employment of terms and the indulgence in economical ideas which, though familiar enough to Englishmen, have in reality no relevancy to the East. Is land revenue a tax or a rent ? How does it affect landed property? What is the position of the cultivator subject to it ? Is he a tenant of the State, or is he a co- owner with the State of the land which he tills ? But the 494 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA . imperial financier who first placed the land revenue on its present footing was not influenced by considerations which enable these questions to be confidently answered. He appears to have thought himself entitled by ancient custom to all the produce of the land which the cultivator, who was just as often a group of men as an individual, did not require for his own subsistence. But his standard of what the cultivator should be allowed to retain seems to have been liberal. Enough was left for comfort, and the time is usually described as one of plenty, when war and famine were absent. Subject to payment of the emperor's share, the peasants or village communities who were found on the land remained there, and divided the residue of the produce according to their ancient customary rules. What corresponded most closely to the landed property of the West was the interest of the emperor's servant in the profits of collection. The collector might be a mere official or the chief of an indigenous clan, or even the associated heads of a village community, but there was always something left in his hands over and above the payments which he was bound to make to the treasury. This excess was often increased by imperial favour, and a grant of land meant an increase of the portion of his receipts which the collecting officer might retain. Private property in land, as it exists in India for purposes of enjoyment, is in reality a British creation. The general peace and prosperity, the growing general wealth, the leniency of the British assessments, have enormously increased the value of the share left to the cultivator ; and, on the other hand, the servant of Government, the zemindar, has occasionally been allowed to excuse himself from accounting for his collections by the payment of a permanently fixed annual sum. The item in the Indian revenue accounts next in INDIA 495 importance to land revenue is opium, on which the gross opium receipts in 1884-85 reached the great sum of 8,816, 490Z., ■n'hich was subject, however, to very heavy charges, amount- ing to nearly 3,000,000L sterling. This branch of Indian revenue has given rise to very bitter controversy, manifestly the offshoot of the British movement for legislative inter- ference vsdth the consumption of alcohol. I own I am myself struck by the slightness of the material for a clear opinion on the questions involved. There is some evidence of the abuse of opium at the Chinese seaport towns, but, so far as any opinion respecting the vast Chinese popula- tion can be thought trustworthy, I am inclined to place reliance on the opinion of medical experts who have acquaintance with China, that the extensive use in that country of opium, a nervous sedative, is closely connected with the greatly more extensive employment of a nervous stimulant, tea. Any nation which took upon itself to sever the combination of the two, which has grown up quite naturally, might produce terrible physical evils, and would incur a grave responsibility. The opium imported from India bears an inconsiderable proportion to that produced in China itself, but it seems to keep its place in the Chinese markets, for a reason quite inappreciable by an Englishman. It holds the same posi- tion amid the supplies of locally grown opium, and of other foreign opium brought into competition with it, which certain wines of eastern and western France hold amid wines of other growth. It, would, I imagine, be generally thought inadmissible to Hmit the consumption of alcohol in Great Britain by simply interdicting the importation of fine claret and champagne. Meanwhile, the system pursued with regard to the cultivation of the poppy in India, the heavy export duty levied on the produce of the Native States, and the prohibition of raising a poppy crop in 496 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA British India, save under licence, undoubtedly tend to restrict the quantity grown and to render it greatly more expensive. Income I will Select for remark only one more head of Indian revenue, and one at present not especially productive. The licence tax is a rough income tax. It has often been said that an income tax is unsuited to India, and this charge may justly be made against the income tax first introduced into India by the Government of the Crown. It was a mere reproduction of the English tax bearing the same name. The gravest practical objections to it arose from its requiring an agency of assessment and collection fairer and more incorrupt than can be found in India. But there was another sense in which it might be justly said to have been unsuited to the genius of the Indian people. India is a land of joint interest, joint property, joint trade, and joint income. The distribution of incomes into exact shares, so as to admit of a separate levy on individuals, is a difficult, a disagreeable, and, in the eyes of the native Indian, often an unnatural process. The fiscal measures which followed it in various forms since its expiration in 1865 have been far less open to these objections. Most of them have been called licence taxes, and have consisted in the formation of a series of classes, into which the persons liable to the tax are distributed according to a rough estimate of their income. The occa- sional slight inexactness of the taxation as between indi- viduals is a recommendation in India. A form of direct taxation, not seriously at variance with native usages and ideas, is essential to the completeness of the Indian fiscal system. The standards by which Indian progress is judged in the mind of Englishmen are in the main commercial standards ; and, if this test be applied, this progress has been extraordinary. Great commercial wealth has beyond INDIA 497 all doubt been accumulated ; bi^t, without direct taxation, it bears an insignificant part of the cost of the very system to which it owes its existence. British rule has benefited all classes, but the commercial classes more than the others, and, save for a few items in the ever-dwindling list of import duties, they would be wholly untaxed in the absence of an income or licence tax. The public debt of India was, in 1836-37, 32,503,295L ; Public in 1856-57 it was 52,263,913Z. ; in 1884-85 it was '^^"' 162,360,517?. Of this last sum, rather more than ninety- three millions was borrowed in India, and rather more than sixty-nine millions in England. But from the figures now representing the Indian debt, we have to deduct 73,771,332L This sum is only not in the Indian Exchequer because it has been profitably invested. The money was borrowed. It was spent in constructing irrigation works and railways and in purchasing others, and these ' productive ' public works now contribute a larger amount of receipts to the Treasury than the whole of the interest payable to the original lenders. The public debt of India stands, there- fore, at 88,683,416?. Like other national debts, it reflects the whole of the previous history of the nation. When there is war or a series of wars, the debt grows through the inadequacy of the revenue in successive years to pay the cost of fighting. When there is peace, the debt re- mains stationary or even diminishes. The debt of the East India Company in 1836-37 includes the whole of the outlay on the conquest of India, so far as revenues did not defray it; and it is also due to the obstinate contest called the first Burmese war, which did not end in any great annexation of territory. The ad- ditions to this debt, which brought it up to more than 52,000,000L in 1856-57, were caused by a succession of wars— the first Afghan war, the prolonged and desperate. VOL. I. K K 498 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA struggles which followed the invasion of British India by ihe Sikh armies, and which terminated in the incorporation of the Punjab with British territory, and by the less famous but costly campaigns known as the Gwalior and Sind wars. The great increase of the debt after 1857 was wholly brought about by the terrible events of that year. The most imj^ortant parts of India were lost for a while, and had to be reconquered, principally by the aid of English troops, whose services were paid for by India. The incidental outlay occasioned by the mutinies was also very great. The sum borrowed was 47,000,0002. , which proved to be slightly in excess of actual requirements. During the period which has passed since India came under the direct authority of her Majesty, the additions to the debt, over and above the amount borrowed to repair the destruction caused by the military revolt, have been little more than nominal ; and the burden of the debt is being steadily lightened by the productiveness of the Government investments. The history of the national debts of the civilised world is extremely various, and their pressure on the population paying interest on them is not at all uniform, and, there- fore, the comparison of them with one another has but a limited use. Still, taking this standard for whatever it is worth, the public debt of India is not large, and may even be called extremely small. It amounts, I have said, to 162,360,517L, or, excluding the portion covered by actu- ally productive public works, to 88,683,416L There would be no advantage in comparing it with the enormous public debts of England and France, the first principally repre- senting the cost of the gigantic struggle for the inde- pendence of Europe at the end of the last century and the beginning of the present, the second having for its main item the penalty levied for ill success in a war which, for INDIA 499 its length, was probably the costliest and bloodiest in human history. But there are other public debts more useful for comparison. Prussia (now included in the German Empire) has long been the thriftiest State in Europe, though it has always to be reniembereJ that for seventy years she has placed on her -population the severest stress in imposing compulsory military service on the whole of her male citizens in the flower of life and even in middle age. But the public debt of Prussia is 207,316,522?., of which a considerable part is covered by public works. The finance of the little State of Holland is also carefully administered; its debt is 90,399,250?. There ara other States, however, of which the indebtedness is astonishing considering the resources of the taxpaying community. The public debt of Eussia is 576,692,142Z. That of Spain has been estimated at 512,000,000L ; that of Portugal at 166,462,914L Italy, since she became a united kingdom, has assumed the debts of the States which she has ab- sorbed ; but her entire public debt, estimated upon the basis of the interest which she has to pay, is 449,262,660?. The figures which show the expansion of the external Expan- trade of India since the Queen's accession to the throne, trade. and since her assumption of Indian government, are given in a note.' It will be seen that the imports of Imports : — Merchandise Treasure Exports : Merchandise Treasure 1836-37. 1856-57. 1885-86. iise , 5,636,990 2,036,167 £ 14,194,587 14,413,099 £ 55,655,910 16,477,801 Total . 7,573,157 38,607,686 71,133,711 dise . 13,240,183 263,934 25,338,453 1,253,428 83,861,264 1,108,238 Total . 13,604,117 26,691,881 84,969,602 Although the mode of valuing the imports into Great Britain which was followed in the early part of the Queen's reign was such as to forbid any K K 2 500 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA merchandise and treasure into India, which were 7,500,OOOL sterHng in 1836-37, had about quadrupled in 1856-57, and in 1885-86 they had about decupled. The exports from India, which were rather over 13,000,000L sterling in 1836-87, were about twice as great in 1856-57 ; they were more than six times as great in 1885-86^. But, besides this great expansion ol" external trade, there must have been a vast increase of internal trade, which there are no means of calculating with accuracy. The inland trade of India in 1886 must differ from the Indian inland trade of 1836 by all the difference between the railway and the metalled road on the one hand, and the river boat, the train of laden bullocks, and the rough cart track on the other. It seems probable that the internal trade will exhibit considerable expansion. The fortunes of the external trade will depend greatly on the maintenance of the bold policy commenced by the Indian Government in 1864, continued in 1875, in 1878, and 1879, and terminated in 1882 by a measure abolishing import duties on all articles except salt, alcoholic liquors, arms, and ammunition. This series of measures has never, it must be owned, been popu- lar with any class of persons in India, least of all with the native communities. If this causes regret or surprise, it should be recollected that a similar feeling would have shown itself in any country in the world except our own. The preference of direct to indirect taxation is peculiar to Englishmen or to certain classes among them, and even with these it is of very modern origin. Everywhere else the repeal of import duties is as little relished as the income tax, which is the natural accompaniment of such a policy. very confident assertion on the subject, there is good reason to think that the entire British trade at that period was not greater than the present trade of India. INDIA 501 It is certain that there could have been no considerable expansion of Indian trade without the extensive construc- tion of roadways and railways. It is more than probable that there would have been no such system of roads and railways in India without a considerable expenditure of public money, either directly or in the form of interest gua- ranteed to private companies. But there is one other condition of a great trade in a country as vast as India which is apt to escape attention unless notice is specially du-ected to it. This is a tolerably uniform and intelligible law, and a tolerable simple system of legal procedure. The bulk of the initial transactions which feed Indian commerce are extremely small. If the law of property were very uncertain, if the interpretation of contracts were very diverse and capricious, if the legal procedure applied to disputed questions were very complex and difficult of appli- cation, the Indian staples, raised over an enormous area by small cultivators, would probably never reach the coast. Now the progress of India in the simplification and Progress intelligible statement of law has been greater than that of any Western country, except perhaps the German Empire. From the first the court of justice was the most powerful and beneficial of the agencies introduced into India by British rule. By the example of the principles which it adopts, it has sensibly improved the morality of large populations, impaired by two centuries of anarchy, and it has resuscitated the great practical virtues of vera- city and good faith by the strictness of the tests which it applies to speech and conduct. But, down to a compara- tively recent date, its influence for good was much dimi- nished by the nature of the law which it administered and of the procedure which it was compelled to follow. I have explained in another work that, from the scantiness of native recorded law and usage on certain points of much S02 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA practical importance, the largest part of the law adminis- tered by the Indian courts was English law, either in its original or in some derivative shape. ' It is possible,' I added, ' to hold a respectful opinion of many parts of English law, and yet to affirm that its introduction by courts of justice into India amounted to a grievous wrong. The English law is a system of colossal dimensions. The community which immediately obeys it has ceased to pro- fess to be acquainted with it, and consents to be dependent for knowledge of it on various classes of experts. These experts do not affect to practise their art without access to law libraries, consisting when complete of many thousand volumes. Now there are probably half a dozen law libraries at most in all India. The books they contain are written in a foreign language, and the persons able to consult these books and to use them properly are extremely few, and collected at one or two points of Indian territory very remote from one another. And at length, when the law has been elicited, it is necessarily law brought into existence by a highly artificial process for a remote com- munity, extremely unlike the natives of India. The system which Indian legislation is superseding was in fact one under which all really important influence was falling into the hands of a very small minority of lawyers trained in England, whose knowledge must have seemed to the millions affected l)y it hardly less mysterious and hardly less explicable than the inspired utterances of Mahommed or Manu.' ^ This state of things grew to its worst in India when the influence of Bentham was rising to its highest point in England ; and Bentham's pupil, James Mill, whose history still holds its own, for want of a better and later book, has used the strongest language of condemnation for the whole ' Village Communities and other Essays, pp. 300, 301. INDIA 505 legal and judicial system of India. Mill's language seems to produce in some minds the impression that the abuses. he attacks still continue. But, as a matter of fact, British India is now in possession of a set of codes which approach the highest standard of excellence which this species of legislation has reached. I am not claiming perfection for the substance of this law ; the conception of what is best. in law alters with the modification of society. But in form,, intelligibility, and in comprehensiveness the Indian codes, stand against all competition. These codes are wholly the growth of the period during which India has been governed by the Crown, and we may safely infer, I think, that the Parliamentary legislation of 1858 and 1861 must have swept away some serious impedi- ments to the formation and enactment of codified law. The Indian Penal Code was framed by Lord Macaulay and his coadjutors, and was ready for enactment in 1835. But it had to wait twenty-five years before it became law. It was passed m 1860. But in the interval between that date and the present moment British India has obtained an all but. complete system of codified law. It has a Penal Code and Codes of Criminal and Civil Procedure. It has a Code of Substantive Civil Law, of which no part is wanting except a chapter on ' civil wrong,' which at the time at which I write is in active preparation. British India, during the present reign, has thus become one of the few countries — becoming fewer rather than the contrary, through the strange tardiness of the Americans in this branch of legis- lation, and through the mass of uncodified law which has grown up round the French codes — m which a man of moderate intelligence, who can read, may learn on any point emerging in practical life what is the law which should regulate his conduct. Public education in India has received wide extension 504 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA Eduoa- in all its branches during the reign of her Majesty. In the course of its growth it has given rise to many contro- versies ; out of these I will mention a few, not because they were the most hotly conducted or for the moment the most important, but because they seem to me to possess the most permanent interest. In India, as in most countries, the connection of government with education had its origin in religion. From a very high antiquity seats of learning had existed in India, in which the sacred literature of the competing religions was taught, and the languages in which that literature was written were cultivated. We learn from Sir William Jones that these Hindu and Ma- homedan colleges, as they were called, had fallen into much decay in the last century, but they were of import- ance to the Government as supplying the experts on whom the courts of justice depended to advise them on rules of Hindu and Mahomedan law which pretended to a religious sanction. The East India Company aided some of these institutions, and even founded others, but a public duty of encouraging native learning and learned natives was thrown on the Company when Parliament passed the Act for the renewal of its charter in 1813. This statute (53 Geo. III., c. 155, s. 48) directed that a sum of not less than 10,000L in each year should be ' set apart and applied to the revival and improvement of literature, and the encouragement of the learned natives of India, and for the introduction and promotion of a knowledge of the sciences among the inhabitants of the British territories in India.' A Committee of Public Instruction was appointed to administer this fund. Very strong differences of opinion soon sprang up within the committee between a portion of the members who thought the statutory provision exclusively intended to promote Oriental learning, and others who considered that it INDIA 505 permitted the encouragement of Western knowledge. The question turned principally on the methods by which a knowledge of the sciences should be promoted. At first the committee seems to have confined itself to republishing books written in Arabic or in Sanscrit, or in some of the derivatives of Sanscrit, in which there was least departure from physical truths. Afterwards it proceeded to publish vernacular translations of Western scientific works. But the ' Occidental ' party, as they came to be called, always contended that there could be no rational application of public money to the objects which Parliament had contem- plated, except by teaching English and republishing English books. The dispute was extremely vehement ; but before long a Minute of Lord Macaulay, then Law Member of Council, which is famous in India, led to the triumph of the Occidentalists. The Governor- General in Council on March 7, 1835, published a resolution, in which the Govern- ment, while disclaiming the intention of abandoning any school or college of which the native population seemed inclined to avail themselves, declared that 'the great object of the British Government ought to be the promo- tion of European literature and science among the natives of India, and that all the funds appropriated for the pur- pose of education would be best employed on Enghsh education alone.' This decision became the basis of all the higher education in India, especially of that which was conducted in colleges, and which is now tested by uni- versities established just when the direct government of India was transferred to the Crown. It has produced many grave and unlooked-for results. The education, however, on which the attention of the Western world is fixed is primary education in the rudi- ments of knowledge, and it would not be probably disputed in any European country that this must be given by 5o6 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA teaching through vernacular languages. The decision of the Indian Government had but little application to this education. The fashionable Indian theory of that day was that knowledge and culture might be left to ' filter ' from the higher classes of native society to the lower. No such consequence can, however, be traced, and it must be con- fessed that, until lately, primary education through the Indian vernaculars was comparatively neglected. Yet, if ever there was a country in which such education is needed, it is India. Popular education may be defended on various grounds, as giving new pleasures, as dispelling gross delusions, as facilitating the spread of a particular faith ; but, in India, it is a security against serious oppres- sions suffered by the mass of the population in everyday life. The multitude of local weights and measures, the multiplicity of small transactions, the intricacy of accounts, afford opportunities of fraud against which there is no adequate protection save through acquaintance with the elements of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Whenever, as in the case of the peasantry of the Dekkan, a previously unsuspected grievance has almost given rise to a revolt, the grievance has proved to be one which could only have risen to considerable proportions among an illiterate people. In fact, all over the country, large numbers of the popula- tioQ, probably the vast majority, are placed in regard to the simplest money transactions in very much the same position in which the people of England stand in regard to law. All knowledge is left to an expert class ; and when the expert is also the creditor, the most extreme oppression is the natural consequence. I have said that the Government Eesolution of March 1835 was pregnant with very serious results, quite un- expected at the time. It laid down the proposition that the promotion of European literature and science among INDIA 507 the natives of India ought to be the great object of the British Government. Of the vahie of European science to highly gifted and active-minded classes in some of the populations inhabiting the countries which make up British India there can be no question ^Yhatever. Where the Indian intellect had been trained at all before the esta- blishment of the British-Indian Empire, it stood in need, before everything else, of stricter criteria of truth. It required a treatment to harden and brace it, and scientific teaching was exactly the tonic which its infirmities called for. For a while science was unduly postponed to literature in the higher education of India, though the course insisted upon by the Indian universities is now elevated to some- thing like its proper place. But, in reading Macaulay's Minute, no one can fail to observe that the issue raised is far less between science and literature than between the literature of the East and the literature of the West. It is impossible not to agree with a great deal of the argument. The older Indian literature, taught with all the energy and resources of the British Government, might have produced a mental condition like that of China, where all national thought is coloured through and through, and is most seriously dwarfed, by intense admiration of classical literacy models. But Euro- pean literature, the literature of the West, means in India English literature, and this has one peculiarity hardly noticed by the disputants of 1835. English classical litera- ture is saturated with party politics. At the beginning of the last century it was mainly Tory ; towards the end of the same century it was mainly Whig. This would have been a less serious fact if, at the latter epoch, one chief topic of the great writers and rhetoricians, of Burke and Sheridan, of Eox and Erancis, had not been India itself. I have no doubt that the view of Indian government taken mg. 508 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA at the end of the century by Englishmen whose works and speeches are held to be models of English style has had deep effect on the mind of the educated Indian of this day. We are only now beginning to see how excessively inaccu- rate were their statements of fact and how one-sided were their judgments.' Many unscrupulous acts were done during the British conquest of India, yet some of the men from whom their condemnation proceeded lived to see them far outdone in the French conquest of Central and Southern Europe, effected by the most civilised nation of the Western world. Growtii It has been noticed for some time past by careful ob- cai feel- Servers of India that a strong political feeling was growing up among the class educated in the principles laid down by the Government in 1835, and the phenomenon is now attracting attention in England. The demand to which this feeling has given rise is sometimes described in this way : the natives of India desire to have a greater share in the government of their own country. So far as these words mean that a certain portion of the native community wishes for easier access to the higher offices in the Queen's ser- vice, I will say, without touching on some difficult questions which the demand raises, that no rational man will set any limits to its gratification, except those imposed by the para- mount duties of preserving the safety of the British-Indian ' This is a very gentle expression of the conclusion which forces itself on the reader of Sir James Stephen's Nimcomar and Impey, the first attempt to apply robust, careful, and dispassionate criticism to this period of history. Of a later authority, to whom many of the prevailing impres- sions of the East India Company's early government are due, Sir James Stephen says : ' James Mill . . . whose excessive dryness and severity of style produce an impression of accuracy and labour which a study of original authorities does not by any means confirm.' (Nuncomar and Impey, ii. 149.) And again, at 198, &c. : ' Mill's want of accuracy is nothing to his bad faith. My experience is that, when he makes imputa- tions, especially on lawyers, he ought always to be carefully confronted with the original authorities.' INDIA 509 Empire, maintaining the efficiency of its administration, and doing justice to all those classes and races, including every variety of intellectual capacity and martial vigour, which make up a vast population. Even if the words be taken as implying a claim to a fuller participation in poli- tical influence, I should be very sorry to deny that some experiments successfully tried in other portions of the enormous British Empire may have shown how an advance in that direction may be securely attempted. But it is impossible to conceal from oneself that the language of political aspiration, in India itself, implies a great deal more than this. It seems to me to savour of the new political philosophy which has spread of late years over the West, and which has substituted for the old axiom that govern- ment should be carried on for the good of the community, the new assumption that it should be carried on by the community itself, that is, by the numerical majority of the adult male portion of it. Such a contention raises ques- tions of sufficient general interest to justify my dwelling on them at some little length. It is possible to regard British India as a cluster of popuia- countries differing from one another not less than the various countries of Europe, physically and historically, and differing even more than European countries in the customs, religious beliefs, tastes, character, and intellectual power of the communities of men inhabiting them. But it is also possible, and this is apparently the commonest view among Englishmen, to look upon India as one country, because its various parts are held together by the same set of political institutions. If India be regarded in this last way, by far the most important fact about it is the numer- ousness of its population. It is known to all that the population of India is very large. It is known to some that British India contains a very little under 200,000,000 of tion. 510 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORfA souls, and that a little more than 55,000,000 inhabit the dependent Native States. But the significance of these numbers is very imperfectly appreciated. They are like the distances of the fixed stars, which make little impression on the mind because we have no available standard of com- parison for them. But possibly something may be done towards pointing out the inference which they suggest, by giving the numbers of communities existing, or once exist- ing, which approach those of British India in magnitude. The most careful estimate of the population of the Eoman Empire arrived at by German learning places it, in the fourth century of our era, at 90,000,000. The popula- tion of the Chinese Empire was once loosely estimated at 300,000,000, but later and more trustworthy estimates place it at very little under 400,000,000, and if the population of the border countries on the north be thrown in, it probably exceeds that number. The population of Eussia in Europe is just over 87,000,000, that of Asiatic Eussia is nearly 16,000,000; in all, the subjects of the Eussian emperor are almost 103,000,000 souls. The aggregates reached in more westerly States are notably smaller. The population of Austria-Hungary is under 38,000,000 ; that of the entire German Empire rather over 45,000,000 ; that of France midway between 37,000,000 and 38,000,000 ; that of Italy somewhat above 29,000,000 ; that of Great Britain and Ireland was, in 1881, 35,241,482, of which 5,174,836 be- longed to Ireland ; finally, the population of the United States of America is 50,500,000. It is impossible to look over these figures' without observing that where a State, held together by the same political institutions, contains a population at all resembling that of India in multitudinousness, those institutions are strictly despotic. Popular governments are confined to considerably smaller communities. The apparent exceptions INDIA 511 are Italy and France. In the first, the present form of government is of extremely recent origin. France has been under governments having their historical basis in popular institutions for close upon a century, but in the course of that century the French Government has been nine times overthrown, and France, which is now a republic, was practically under military government until 1878. The populations of the German Empire and of Austria-Hungary are considerable ; but though popular institutions have been introduced into these countries, their working is very strongly affected by a most vigorous survival of royal power, and in neither of them is there a completely centralised administration or a single Parliament monopolising all legis- lation. Popular government was preserved to the world by Great Britain, and republican government was redeemed from deep disrepute by the United States. But the United States are a collection of thirty-eight States (with eight Territories), connected by a Federal Government, which controls much more than it legislates. Of the States which exercise the largest part of legislative power, one only has a population of 5,000,000, while nineteen have a population of under 1,000,000. It is not possible that, writing in 1886, 1 should affirm, nor would it be becoming to affirm if possible, what bearing the experience of this country has upon the question before me. But the tempestuous controversy lately raging in these islands clearly compels us to hesitate before laying down whether England, the parent of popular government, is an example of the success of that government in keeping a numerous community under the same political institutions. On the whole, the world, surveyed from the political point of view, suggests to the political observer much the same conclusions which a smaller area and a smaller popula- tion suggested to Montesquieu in the last century. He thought that large collections of mankind were naturally 512 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA under absolute governments, and that republics had naturally a small territory ; but he also thought that the area of territory which republics were capable of governing might be largely increased by their confederation. The multitudinous societies of men are still under despotisms, and while there are some republics governing a large popula- tion whose institutions seem perilously unstable, there are others which, through their having applied the principle of confederation, give promise of indefinite continuance. Midway between the despotisms and the republics, there are forms of government which take the place of that England which, in the eighteenth century, had such fascina- tion for Montesquieu. Popular institutions are combined in them with institutions of an older type which exercise a great and sometimes a preponderant influence, and these mixed governments hold together societies of considerable magnitude. But the one popular government which controls a population very slightly over 50,000,000 is a confederation of republics, and all larger populations are under absolute governments. Putting aside, then, the special difficulties which arise from the social condition of the East and of India, it seems to me that such large terms as self-govern- ment and responsible government must be discarded from all discussion about changes in Indian political institutions. There is no reason to suppose it possible that 200,000,000 or 250,000,000 men could govern themselves or enforce re- sponsibility on the part of those governing them. These are the astronomical measures of politics. Human experience affords us no ground at present for supposing that the institutions of the popular governments which have arisen in the course of a century, and which, after a stormy history, are still on their trial, are capable of being applied at all to numbers expressed by such figures. Let me add that if INDIA 513 the effect of employing in an Eastern society the poHtical mechanism growing into favour in the West were to lift into administrative and legislative supremacy a small group of men numbering about 5,000 or 10,000 or 100,000 — a particular caste or race or class educated in a particular way — the government thus established might have merits or demerits, but it could not, without violent straining of language, be called a popular government or a democracy. Euling over 200,000,000 or 250,000,000 men, it would be one of the narrowest oligarchies which the world has ever seen. But such an experiment must not be confounded with another of a less ambitious kind which has already been tried in several of the British colonies. Some of the councillors of the deputy of the Crown, instead of being nominated by him, are chosen by select portions of the community under his government. This is, in strictness, neither self-government nor responsible government ; but it appears to do something to gratify aspirations which are constantly growing up in the more elevated minds of every race. The vastness of the Indian population, especially as con- centraii- trasted with the extreme diversity of the elements of which that population is made up, suggests some questions of more practical importance than even that of the possibility of applying modern political theories and systems to the Indian community. The vulgar conceptions of the oneness of India and of its people, of the existence of a single definite country which may be called India or British India, and of a tolerably homogeneous population inhabiting this country which may be distinguished from the rest of mankind as ' natives of India,' and who maybe contemplated as a whole under that name, are all expressions of the fact that a great number of countries with their inhabitants, nearly all of which were successively conquered by the East India VOL. I. L L goveru- meut. 514 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA Company, are more or less governed in the name of the Crown by the Governor-General in Council. This supreme authority, known also as the Viceroy or the Government of India, was not coeval with Indian conquest, nor were its relations with all parts of India exactly what they are now. Much the oldest governments in India are the governments of Madras and 1? Dmbay, which still retain a mark of their comparative antiquity in having their governors directly appointed by the Crown. The great wealth of the province of Bengal, more recently conquered, led to the conversion of its governor into the Governor-General of India, and all the subsequently acquired territory has been made closely dependent on the Governor- General by being placed under lieutenant-governors or chief commissioners. Governor, lieutenant-governor, and chief commissioner (which is the historical order of the appellations) represent stages of increased subordination to the Governor -General in Council. The process has thus been one of centralisation in form, and on the whole it has been one of centralisation in actual working. But it has been gradual ; it has been to a great extent unintended ; it has even been resisted by some Governors-General who thought it dangerous or mis- chievous, and some of its most powerful causes have been indirect in their operation, such as a greatly extended railway system, and the multiplication of codes imposing a uniform civil and criminal law. Nor can those who feel most distrust of it deny that it has some advantages. It certainly simplifies administration. It facilitates financial regularity. Military experts affirm that it adds to military efficiency. It also has the effect of surrounding one single individual with a splendour of state which is not without value in the East, particularly among parts of the popula- tion and among dependent princes as yet little affected by h\DIA 515 contact with Western ideas. But it seems to me to be attended by some serious evils. It certainly encourages among the British people at home, and probably in Par- liament, a false conception of what India is and what the natives of India are. It stands in the way of fresh experi- ments in government under safe conditions, and it enervates local administration, for a very wide experience shows that a man of powerful mind or obstinate character, placed at the centre of a centralised government, is in all parts of the world very jealous of departures from his ideas on the part of subordinates whom he has the power of constraining or controlHng. But the greatest danger which a centralised Indian Dangers of cell- government entails is one which will be only admitted by traiised those who feel as I do, that no special structure, no benevo- ment!"^' lence of intention, and no individual sagacity, will altogether save a government in charge of such an unexampled under- taking as the rule of India from occasional serious errors. Under a centrahsed government there is danger of gene- ralising a local mistake. Localised, a mistake can be corrected with comparative ease ; it becomes dangerous in proportion to the area of its diffusion. I care to give no illustration of this danger except by reference to the Sepoy Mutiny, which I again call the most important fact in Anglo-Indian history. The Bengal army, like aU armies, was a homogeneous body. The Bombay army, recruited in the same localities, was extremely like it. But the Madras army was isolated and separately organised. There was, further, a single province in India which was not yet assimilated to the general Indian administrative sys- tem. The Mutiny originated in a local mistake which caused a panic, and the panic spread through the Bengal and Bombay armies with the customary force of those panics which traverse the East, blowing where they list It was L L 2 5i6 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA stopped by the isolation of the Madras army, and by the as yet imperfect assimilation of the Punjab to the rest of India. I believe that Mr. Bright once declared British India to be too big for government, and argued that it ought to be broken up into a number of smaller dependencies. The opinion, stated nakedly, may be thought to point to too drastic a change, but I am persuaded that the principle which it contains deserves the utmost attention from Anglo-Indian experts and statesmen. It is worth while observing that much the most successful administrative reform which has taken place in India in my time was in the direction of decentralisation. The East India Company, as was perhaps not unnatural in a body which had ori- ginally regarded itself as mainly commercial, had never adopted the most characteristic feature of a budget system. It did not make any distinct appropriation of expected revenue to specific heads of expected expenditure. At most a beginning had been made in its latest years, confined to the Department of Public Works ; and it remained for the Government of the Crown to introduce this indispensable condition of public economy. But the system of appropriation, established in a country so vast and so various as India, and enforced by a rigid central financial control, proved to have some grave drawbacks. AU the revenue collected in India by the various local governments was paid, theoretically and to a great extent actually, to the credit of the central govern- ment, the Government of India. The bulk of it was after- wards returned to the local governments as the means of paying for the public services which, between them, they rendered to two hundred millions of souls. But the share of each government depended on the success of a formal claim which it made for the allotment of funds sufficient tion. INDIA 517 to meet the estimated expenditm-e of the succeeding finan- cial year. The defect of the system is obvious enough. The au- Fiuanoiai thorities which collected the revenue had no motive, ex- traiisa- cept their general sense of public duty, to economise its expenditure or increase the productiveness of its sources. On the other hand, they had the strongest interest in making their demands as heavy and as exacting as possible. ' The distribution of the public income,' wrote the principal author of the reform which followed, ' degenerates into something like a scramble in which the most violent has the advantage with very little attention to reason ; as local economy tends to no local advantage, the stimulus to avoid waste is reduced to a minimum.' A measure was, however, adopted in 1870, which is known as financial decen- tralisation. When it was completely carried out, certain sources of revenue were placed in the hands of the local governments, which were left to cultivate and improve them, to augment their produce, and to spend all of it or a definite part of it at their discretion. On the other hand, certain branches of administration were transferred to them, and the cost was to be defrayed from the newly obtained funds. Each provincial government had hence- forward a strong interest in making the sources of revenue allotted to it as productive as possible, and in spending the portion it retained as thriftily as was in its power, while its interest in making heavy demands on the central trea- sury was much diminished. The increase in efficiency of administration secured by this simple expedient has been most remarkable.' ' A full account of tlie reform may be found at page 144 et seq. of the Finances and Public Works of India, by Sir John Strachey andLieutenant- General Strachey, to the latter of whom the origination of the measure is chiefly due. Of this book I will only say that, while it exists, the loose Si8 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA Progress In Concluding this paper, I venture to make two 1837. assertions about India under her Majesty Queen Victoria. From 1837 to 1858 India was governed by the East India Company in the name of her Majesty, and the govern- ment which the East India Company had set up, and with the help of Parliament had steadily improved, was far the best which had ever existed in any Eastern country. East of the Eoman Empire till it fell, east of the Mediterranean countries after its fall, there is no record of any government which can be compared with it for justice, for steadiness, for efficiency of administration, and, on the whole, for peaceableness. From 1868 to 1887 India has been governed by the Crown under the control of Parliament, and the facts and figures which I have given seem to me to show that, taking the standards of advance which are employed to test the progress of Western countries, there is no country in Europe which, according to those criteria, and regard being had to the point of departure, has advanced during the same period more rapidly and farther than British India. Can it be confidently predicted that this advance and improvement will continue ? It cannot, in candour, be denied that there are some clouds over the prospect, to which I will call brief attention. Pro^^iems India seems likely to experience, more than any society future. of men, that peculiar trial which follows good govern- ment, as certain diseases of plants and animals appear to follow their over-cultivation. In no country will there be probably a severer pressure of population on food. The demonstrations of Malthus, which revolutionised English political philosophy at the beginning of the century, have fallen into singular neglect, though the truths they con- veyed are almost certainly the secret of the ephemeral language sometimes employed about the finances of India is extremely surprising. INDIA 519 duration and occasional disastrous failure of modern poli- tical theories. But no such laborious demonstration as was required to establish the theory of population in the "Western world is required to show the gravity of the question of population in its bearing on India. In the first place, India is the only part of the world in which every single male of the population is married as soon as it is possible for him to be married. This is virtually true of the Mahomedans, but it is absolutely true of that enormous majority of the two hundred and fifty millions of souls who in some sense or another are Hindu. Further, the more that the actual religious faith and practice of Hindus is examined, the more it appears that the most permanent and universal part of it is the worship of ancestors. A man's fate in the next world depends on the oblations offered at his funeral by his male children and descendants, and their participation in his inheritance depends on their due performance of the sacrificial service. The religious beliefs of the Hindu thus directly encourage the multiplication of male children, and, though female children were largely put to death before the epoch of British law, this form of infanticide is believed to be on its way to extinction. This is the direct effect of Hindu religious belief on the population ; but, while it tends to increase the number of persons born, it limits the supply of food which might sustain life. Nobody can precisely say what is the capacity of the soil of India for supporting a great population, for the superstitions of the vast ma- jority will not allow animals to be bred or killed for food. Nor will the population emigrate. Ambition, coupled with the abandonment of superstitious restraints, induces a small number of young Indian gentlemen to cross the ocean to England, and a certain proportion of the lower classes, perhaps too carefully supervised by the Indian Government, 520 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA are led, by the prospect of high wages, to migrate to other tropical countries. But these, taken all together, are the merest handful as compared with the entire community. There is no shadow of doubt that the bulk of the Hindus look upon crossing the sea either as a sin or as a decline in social consideration. Such causes of increase in the population and limitation of the supply of food have existed from time immemorial in India. But, till the present century, there were com- peting causes which impeded their operation. Far the most powerful of these were war, pestilence, and famine. We have good historical evidence concerning the prevalence and nature of war in India, and we know that, as far back as there are records worthy of attention, the whole penmsula was scourged by war, which ever tended to degenerate into brigandage. As to pestUence, India is still suspected by medical science of being the seed-plot of deadly diseases which, startmg thence, spread over the civilised world. The peculiar virulence of new maladies appearmg there has often been noted, and there is every reason for supposing that the Indian population was for centuries what a large population in a sub-tropical country might be expected to be without any real medicine and without any real surgery. Famine there must always have been in India. The physical causes which bring about the occasional failure of the rains must have been in operation since the beginning of time, and no carriage of produce from more fortunate regions to the afflicted area was possible, for India, till the British occupied it, was an absolutely road- less country. But, though all these destructive agencies have not disappeared, they have been greatly weakened by the British Government. There are still Indian wars, but they are much fewer, much shorter, and much less bloody than the wars of a hundred years smce. Pestilence still INDIA 521 exists. Cholera cannot be quite extirpated without an energetic sanitation which Indian native feeling does not greatly favour, but smallpox, which once threatened to become a plague, has been locally reduced to insignificance by vaccination ; and possibly there is not now any waste of life in India resembling that of the ancient days, except in those zenanas into which medicine is barely beginning to be introduced by female hands. Famine long baffled the most energetic attempts to combat it, but famine rehef has become an art by itself and a distinct branch of administration ; and, if it be true that there is never a vmiversal famine in so vast a region as India, no year passes in which the construction of railways does not add new means of conveying the surplus produce to the starving multitude. War, pestilence, and famine are therefore losing their maleficent power. But these were the chief of the ancient checks on the growth of population, and with their disappearance population will fast increase its volume, forcing on the attention of the rulers of India a number of grave problems which have been very imperfectly faced of late years by the economists and statesmen of the West. No doubt some mitigation may be suggested of the difficulty which is looming in the distance. The exportation of graia to distant countries, which is sometimes looked askance upon in India, is in fact tempting the cultivator to acquire the habit of raising a large surplus produce, which any rise in the Indian demand would soon divert to local markets; and the expansion of irrigation works, and perhaps to some extent the newly established agricultural schools, will add to the physical possibility of raising larger crops. The primitive natural social system of India already secures a system of distribution which is probably the best for a multitudinous community in danger of suffering from scarcity of food. The great partnerships 522 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA of men, the joint families with their common meals, may not be favom-able to enterprise and energy — indeed, an enterprising and energetic member usually does his utmost to break them up ; but they certainly render it possible to make the most of insufficient food supplies. The earlier process of distribution, however, which is effected by the carriage of grain from province to province, was till lately extremely imperfect, but is greatly facilitated, and will be much further facilitated, by the extension of railways. But then, unfortunately, nobody who has a real apprecia- tion of the problem of population will recognise these mitigating agencies as amounting to more than transitory palliatives. Another difficulty, belonging to a very different order of difficulties, ought, I think, to be looked upon in the most serious light from the point of view of the Indian admiais- trator. I am not going to lay down that the great Power of the North, which has extended its territory to the very verge of India, has a deliberate design of attempting to conquer it. Whatever be the wild talk of the professional military classes in Eussia, I have no belief that Kussian statesmen could enter lightly on an undertaking which would very probably end in miserable failure, and which could not win even partial success without tremendous expenditure of blood and treasure. But what the proximity of Eussia incontestably proves is, that British India is now mixed up with a group of problems as nearly insoluble as any which ever perplexed the mind of the world, the questions raised by the apparently inevitable dissolution of the Turkish Empire. I cannot for a moment doubt that the dominant object of those, whoever they are, who have pushed on so steadily the Eussian movement towards India, is to have the means of neutralising one of the European Powers by menacing demonstration in the event of a con- INDIA 523 flict in Eastern Europe. But the threatening presence of a very powerful State on the north and north-west must exercise very mischievous influence on all civil policy, and specially all reforming civil policy, in India. All Indian measures call for care, study, self-command, and patience in their author, but nothing is likely to be so fatal to these conditions as the anxiety and excitement — and, I will add, the lavish unproductive expenditure — which will arise from the perpetual proximity of a possible enemy. It sounds a trivial observation to say that India would be better governed if it were not so hot. But this only means that Indian government, so far as it is conducted by English- men, would be better if there were less physical pressure on then- nerves. It is the entire community, Indian and English, which will be kept in a state of irritation by periodical military menace on the north-west frontier. Except the questions which spring from these two Magni- formidable sources, I am conscious of none likely to arise Indian in India which may not be successfully disposed of by ^^^g" adequate sagacity and knowledge. But I hope I may be pardoned for saying that they will most assuredly not be successfully dealt with if the British public and the British Parliament, with whom rests the ultimate control of Indian affairs, are induced to accept the assumption which seems to commend itself quite readily to some minds, that Indian questions are easy. There are signs of this rising belief on all sides. It betrays itself occasionally in a measure of contempt for experience in Indian government and ad- ministration, in a notion that a particular political theory, a benevolent intention, the study of a few Blue-books or volumes of Parliamentary debate, a visit of a few months to India, or a series of conversations with English-speaking Indian gentlemen, will serve as an adequate substitute for it. There was this justification for the terms of reproach 524 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA which were apphecl more than a century ago to Enghsh- men who had spent a large part of hfe in India, that they were visibly rich and were suspected of having been corrupt. Eut the dyslogistic language now coming into use imputes nothmg but knowledge and experience. The ' Indian bureaucracy ' is merely a barbarous foreign phrase, applied with gross inaccuracy to as remarkable a group of public servants as any country has produced, engaged in ad- ministering the affairs of a vast population under perfectly definite and intelligibly stated rules. If government be an art, an ' old Indian ' is constantly a man who has practised it with more success, and under far more difficulties, than the foremost English statesmen. What reason can there be for supposing that the British-Indian Empire will con- tinue at all except a reason furnished by experience of a very peculiar kind ? There is nothing like that empire in ancient or modern history. No foreigner has as yet succeeded in describing it with even moderate accuracy. The remoteness and vastness of its territory, the multitudinousness and singu- larity of its population, would by themselves suggest that no foreign people, having only maritime communication with it, could possibly hold it as a dependency. But it has lasted nearly in its present form for more than a century ; and we reasonably infer from the fact, remark- able as it is, that the empire may last longer under substantially similar conditions. There is nothing in these conditions which should alarm the conscience or affront the common sense of Englishmen. They no doubt include the observance of the greatest wariness and caution, but they also include a process of continuous moral and mate- rial improvement which in some particulars has attained a higher point than has yet been reached in England. Modern politics may perhaps be called the science of short INDIA 525 cuts, but he who -will be at the pains to consider what India really is will soon be convinced that there is neither a royal nor a democratic road to the solution of Indian questions. The indicia of modern civilisation are certainly multiply- ing in India. The observer of a country new to him who sees railways growing to vast lengths and spanning mighty rivers, public works executed on a magnificent scale, schools and colleges in numbers, law courts everywhere, with barristers, pleaders, and codes, newspapers with leading articles, and public meetings with speeches, would be sure to think that he had before him a society of the most ad- vanced modern type. Yet even if he went no farther from his home than Eastern Europe, he would soon begin to suspect that his first impressions were not trustworthy, and he would find an extraordinary proportion of notions, cus- toms, and institutions which belong to the most distant past surviving amid the familiar signs of the present. The contrast between the formal and material civilisation of a people and its real mental, moral, and social condition is all the greater when the civilisation is the work of a small number of foreigners almost lost amid a multitudinous population. The modern and Western spirit is assuredly at work in the Indian countries, but the vital question for Indian Governments is, how far has it changed the ideas of men ? There is, in the first place, a very interesting, which may also be made a very valuable class, principally collected in or near the oldest European settlements, consisting of young and middle-aged men educated on the principles laid down by the Government of India in 1835. Here we have the Present as represented in the educated classes of the West, with its humanity and sensitiveness, with its abundant faith in theories and generalisations, with its somewhat con- 526 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA temptuous view of religious sanctions except so far as they maintain some favourite institution, with its pessimistic view of that which exists at the moment and its optimistic view of that which may exist some day. But then, as I said before, the most important fact about India, if taken as a whole, is number. How many are there of these edu- cated Indian gentlemen ? It is not easy to be certain, but, observing the statement of writers who sympathise with them that they are mainly a product of the Indian univer- sities founded in or since 1859, 1 have examined the number of graduates who have passed the Bachelor and Master of Arts examinations in all the universities in the period between 1864 and 1883, both years included, and I cannot bring up the total to 5,000. I will take the number, however, at 5,000. I will assume that every man who has taken a Bachelor of Arts degree is sufficiently educated to have valuable ideas on politics, and for the purpose of including all who in any sense can be called educated men, I will multiply the total by five. That gives 25,000 Indian gentle- men of an education and age to take an interest or a part in politics. But the population of all India — of British India and of the dependent States — is rather over 250,000,000 of souls. . Thus the proportion of the educated element to the rest of the population is as 25,000, which is probably much above the mark, is to 250,000,000, which is below the true total. What, then, is to be said of the population indicated b;y the vast number which I have just given, insufficiently impressive because of its very vastness ? The official state- ment about it is that, in the British provinces, one male in every sixteen can read and write his own language in some humble way. But looking to their ideas, it might be safely said of these 250,000,000 that, while they have almost no relations with the Present of the Western world, they are a INDIA 527 most energetic expression of its Past. They include a small number of savages, but there are also among them consider- able populations, such as that of Chota-Nagpore, amounting to over 4,000,000, which are exciting keen interest among anthropologists by their preserving some of the most charac- teristic usages of the savage state. But the most instruc- tive analogies of India as a whole are with Europe of the Middle Ages. Take any century of the West from the tenth to the fourteenth, select those of its ideas, beliefs, forms of. government, social divisions, and institutions which are most repugnant to the modern spirit, and especially to the modern democratic spirit, and I believe that you can find the counterparts of all of them vigorously surviving in India. The vast and populous India which has no share in an education of foreign origin is, in fact, a chaos of survivals, moral, social, political, and economical, circumscribed, no doubt, and limited in their practical operation by British authority and the British laws, but, on the other hand, ren- dered more tenacious of life than they were in other countries by an intense conviction of their supernatural origin and divine ordination. I have said that there are many different countries in the remarkable dominion which we call India. But on all of them a double current of influences may be seen to be playing. One of these currents is of foreign origm, and it has done much to shape the mental condition of a relatively small minority, characterised by aspirations with which it is impossible for Englishmen not to sympathise, but too apt to take its opinions from what are called schools of advanced thought, an expression to which I hope I do no injustice by suggesting that it means thought which has shaken itself free from the restraints of human nature and historical fact. The other current arises in India itself, engendered amid a dense and dark vegetation of primitive opinion, stubbornly 529 IRELAND. At the time of the accession of Queen Victoria there was Ireland reason to hope that a great change was about to take place ^'^ '^^^'^' in the poKtical and social aspect of Ireland. Everything seemed to point to a period of prosperity and peace. The island was ruled by a vigorous and honest administration. Wisdom and moderation prevailed in the counsels of the Government. The law was sternly and impartially enforced, turbulence and disorder were quelled, but at the same time no effort was spared to remove political abuses, and wise plans were elaborated to develop the industrial resources of the country. The life and soul of the Government was Mr. Thomas Drummond, the Under-Secretary, a man of real culture, who did not view Irish questions from the standpoint of an official pedant, but approached their con- sideration with the open mind of a statesman and the trained intellect of a man of science. He succeeded in winning for the Government the confidence of the Irish people, and O'Connell proclaimed at a large meeting in DubHn, that he would abandon the project of Eepeal, if it were rendered unnecessary by English justice.' The Queen herself also enjoyed extraordinary popularity, and perhaps nothing more strongly illustrates the position she held in the imagination of the Irish peasantry than the fact that lines in her praise were added to the favourite national ballads which were sung or recited by the itinerant ' Fagan, Life and Times of Daniel O'Connell, ii. 623. VOL. I. MM 530 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA ballad-smgers who at the time of her accession were still very numerous in Ireland. These ballad- singers had always considerable political influence. Their songs or recitations exercised over the people in former times much the same influence as the national press of the present day, and these peasant poets played a most important part in all rebelHous and popular movements in Ireland from the days of the Eeformation. Their ballads were often religious and pro- phetic in tone, and alluded to the prospective triumph of the Catholic Church, and the advent of the Saviour, who was to drive the heretics from the sacred soil of the island of saints. In the reign of Elizabeth it was Philip II. who was to deliver the true Church from bondage ; in 1641 it was Sir Phelim O'Neill, who was to do the same and to restore their lands to the disinherited race. In the next century it was to the exUed Stuart, in alliance with the House of Bourbon, that the Catholics of Ireland looked for deliverance, and it was to aid the Catholic cause that thou- sands of young men took ship in the wild and lonely bays of Cork and Kerry, and sailed away to enter the service of the most powerful of the enemies of England. All these movements were encouraged by the ballad-singers ; but in 1837, for the first time, they began to preach the duty of loyalty to a lawful sovereign. They prophesied that the reign of Queen Victoria would see an end to all the miseries that afflicted humanity in Ireland. The tenants were to be secured in the possession of the land, the cathedral on the rock of Cashel was to be rebuilt, and the Catholic Church once more set up in the pride of place and power. The causes of this unexampled and widespread feeling of attachment to the legitimate sovereign were, in the first place, the wisdom of the Government then in power, and, as a consequence, the attitude of O'Connell. Then there was the natural interest felt by so warm-hearted a people as the IRELAND 531 Irish in a Princess of eighteen suddenly called upon to fulfil the duties of sovereign of England. But there was a further reason why the people took a lively and affectionate interest in the young Queen. It was generally believed that the Orange party, or a considerable and influential section of it, had conspired to deprive her of her inheri- tance ; and as this incident illustrates more than one passage in Irish history, it may not be out of place to refer to it as briefly as possible. In the month of March 1835 the readers of the Parlia- The mentary debates were surprised at the persistent manner society, with which the Ministers were questioned by O'Connell, SheU, Eonayne, Hume, Finn, and others about certain addresses from Orange societies which had been presented to King William IV. At that time very little was known by the general pubhc in England about Orange societies or Orangemen. There was a vague idea that Orangemen were proud of their loyalty, and much attached to memories connected with the events of 1688 ; that they were in the habit of commemorating in a noisy and ostentatious way particular anniversaries, associated with the triumph of the Protestant cause in Ireland ; that on these occasions they were accustomed to march, with drums beating and banners flying, through Catholic districts in the North of the island, when numerous and serious breaches of the peace usually took place ; and that they wound up the day after these exploits by drinking vulgar toasts, which, in so far as they had any meaning at aU, were grossly insulting to the majo- rity of their feUow-countrymen. This Orange Society first took shape in 1795. A httle more than twenty years before that time. Lord Donegal and Mr. Upton, two great Antrim proprietors, proceeded to evict their Protestant tenants in large numbers and to replace them by Catholics who would promise to pay anything to recover their hold on the M M 2 532 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA land. This example was followed by other landlords, and the North of Ireland was thrown into confusion. The more sturdy and independent of the evicted Protestants sailed for the New World, where they became the most determined enemies of Great Britain, and did all they could, with much success, to embitter the strife between the North American colonies and the mother-country. Those, however, who were too poor or too indolent to emigrate, formed them- selves into societies called the Peep of Day Boys and the Hearts of Steel. They attacked the farmhouses of the Catholics who had supplanted them ; they destroyed their cattle ; they terrified the local magistrates into inaction. It became impossible to get a conviction from a jury. As a consequence of repeated failures of justice, witnesses grew more and more unwilling to give evidence which would be unheeded and only expose them to the certain vengeance of the crimmals. Society became thoroughly disorganised. In order to protect themselves, the Catholics planned a counter society, and took the name of Defenders. After the outbreak of the French Eevolution, when the minds of men were excited and expectant in Ireland, Wolfe Tone and others formed the Society of the United Irishmen, the object of which was the establishment of an Irish republic and the separation of Ireland from Great Britain. Tone looked upon the Peep of Days and the Defenders as merely divisions of the revolutionary army, and he did all he could to arrange their differences. On September 18, 1795, peace was actually formally concluded at Portadown ; but on the very same day, in the evening, one of the leading Protestants was shot. The next day there were some fresh disturbances, and on the 21st both parties assembled in force at a village called the Diamond. A faction fight then took place, which is dignified in Irish history by the name of the Battle of the Diamond. The Protestant party were IRELAND 533 victorious ; but from that day all hope vanished of recon- ciliation with the Defenders, who were absorbed into the Society of the United Irishmen. The Protestants, on their side, resolved to form a league not only for mutual de- fence, but for the purpose of maintaining the connection of Ireland with Great Britain. They had been accustomed to designate those who adhered most faithfuUy to the prin- ciples of 1688 by the name of Orangemen. It was there- fore determined to call the new association the Orange Society, and the first lodges of the institution were imme- diately established. The lodges multiplied rapidly, particu- larly in the North of Ireland ; and in the spring of 1797 the Orange organisation was able to place 20,000 men at the disposal of the Government, and undoubtedly, by thwart- ing and counteracting the progress of the United Irishmen in Ulster, the society might fairly claim to have rendered invaluable service to the British Crown. A very short time after the Union, Orange institutions were introduced into England, but at first all the lodges were formed under Irish warrants and were under Irish authority. The first purely English lodge was founded in Manchester in 1808, and from that time lodges began to be formed under EngUsh authority. In 1828 it was considered that the society could be made more efficient if its constitu- tion were more centralised ; and, in accordance with this idea, the English and Irish lodges were brought into one system of secret signs and passwords, and the entire society was placed under the Duke of Cumberland as Grand Master. The ^ Duke of One of the first acts of his Eoyal Highness was to select cumber- a certain Lieutenant-Colonel Fairman, and to give him plenary authority to establish Orange lodges wherever he could. Colonel Fairman accordingly set out on his mission, and succeeded, not only in establishing a considerable number 534 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA of new lodges, but in making the Orange organisation still more perfect. The main object of the society was now to maintain unimpaired Protestant ascendency in Ireland, and to uphold the preposterous system under which the nation was confined within the narrow limits of a sect. When the Duke of Wellington carried Catholic Emancipa- tion, the leaders of the Orange Society seem to have lost their senses altogether. It was well known that the health of King George IV. was failing rapidly, and a plot was actually formed, on the demise of the Crown, to depose King William, to pass over the Princess Victoria on the ground that the famUy law of the House of Hanover excluded women from the succession, and to place the Duke of Cumberland on the throne. When all this became known, men were partly amused and partly indignant. They were amused at the simplicity of those who thought this absurd intrigue could possibly succeed, but they were also roused to indignation at the treason to Kmg William IV., and their sympathies were still more strongly engaged on behalf of the young Princess Victoria, whose rights were menaced in so uncere- monious a fashion. The power of the Orange Society was at this time at its height. There were no less than 381 Orange lodges in Great Britain, and of these thirty were in the army. There were some 50,000 Orangemen in London. The actual number of the members of the order in Great Britain and Ireland was not far short of 850,000 persons. Besides this force at home, there were lodges among the troops at Bermuda, Gibraltar, Malta, Corfu, New South Wales, Van Diemen's Land ; and in Canada alone there were no fewer than 12,000 Orangemen enrolled. The whole of this society obeyed absolutely the orders of the Duke of Cum- berland. It was proved before a Parhamentary Committee that Colonel Fairman, the confidential agent of the Duke of Cumberland, had endeavoured to enlist people to support IRELAND 535 a movement to depose the King and to place the crown on the head of the Duke of Cumberland. Matters grew extremely serious, when at last, owing to the revelations which Mr. Hume made in Parliament with regard to the nature and scope of the conspiracy, and to the threat- ening attitude which the House of Commons began to assume, the Duke of Cumberland recommended the dissolu- tion of the Orange Society. This was done, as far at least as the great majority of lodges were concerned, and little more was heard of Colonel Fairman's consphacy, which has not generally obtained from historians the attention it deserves.' The whole affair was allowed on all sides to quietly drop, and this was the wisest course for all parties. The Orange- men felt on their side that they were running risks too grave and serious to be pleasant. On the other hand, the Melbourne Government had to consider the importance of not driving the Orangemen to despair, and, by showing moderation in their conduct with regard to them and their leaders, to get something like fair play for a policy of conciliation in Ireland. The Eadicals were quite as much alive to the importance of this as the Whigs and the leaders of the Government. The consequence has been that the recollec- tion of Fairman's plot faded in the minds of men, and the few who perhaps know of it at all remember it in some hazy connection with the party struggles of fifty years ago. Nevertheless it accounts for the extraordinary satisfaction with which all England viewed the departure of the Duke of Cumberland to take possession of his kingdom of Hanover > The details of this conspiracy will be found in the Parliammtary Papers, Session 1835, vols, xv., xvi., xvii. ; in the Lotidon Review, Nos. IV. and v., which contains the correspondence of Col. Fairman with the Orange leaders ; in Miss Martineau's History of England during the Thirty Years' Peace, 1816-1846. There is also some account of it in Molesworth, History of England, i. 476 et seq. ; and it is somewhat more fully dealt with by Mr. Walpole, History of England, iii. 338 et seg. 536 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA on the death of William IV., and it helped enormously to intensify the popularity which Queen Victoria enjoyed in Ireland in the early years of her reign. II TheUrish From the time of the passing of the Emancipation Act, L^^_ ,™,. in 1829, to the accession of the Queen, there was little or no legislation of permanent mterest, as far as Ireland was concerned. But after 1837 greater activity began to be displayed, and soon after the coronation one of the most important measures of the reign, the Irish Poor Eelief Act, became law. The question as to whether Ireland was to have a poor law like the English, was one of the most diffi- cult of all political problems. Earnest and patriotic men, well acquainted with Ireland, took different sides. O'Connell changed his mind on the subject several times. Dr. Doyle, the Bishop of Kildare and Leighlin, one of the most enlightened Irishmen of his day, ardently desired the intro- duction into Ireland of a poor law system, and the result was a coldness between him and O'Connell, who up to 1836 took an opposite view. In that year, however, the report of a Commission to inquire into the state of the Irish poor was published and had an immense effect on public opinion. It told of men lying for weeks on damp straw, because they were so weakened by hunger as to be unable to go in search of a better lodging ; of numbers who fed on unripe vegetables and damaged corn ; and of poor creatures who induced artifi- cial vomitmg, in order to get the warmth and shelter of the cholera hospital. These revelations brought home the real condition of Ireland to the public mind, and O'Connell began to see the absolute necessity for the introduction of a poor law. He wrote to the electors of Kilkenny to tell them he had changed his mind, and that he now saw how neces- IRELAND 537 sary it was to establish a system of legal charity. But he did not hold firmly to new convictions. When the Bill was introduced in 1837, he stated he would not oppose it, but at the same time he attacked every important part of the measure. His arguments were often self-contradictory. Thus at one moment he said that the Irish would never enter the workhouses ; and in the next, that men would go there to live in idleness. And so, as the BUI went through, his views continually shifted. It was generally considered at the time that his conduct was not honest, and that he was only anxious to ensure the failure of the measure, with a view of keeping open the festering sore of pauperism, which was producing discontent and helping agitation. But the truth seems to be that he was really perplexed by the difficulties of the case, and persons who had given more attention to economic science than O'Connell ever did, who were really great authorities in it, were often in considerable doubt as to the wisdom of the proposal. From one point of view the case seemed clear enough. The Irish were re- markable for their warmheartedness and boundless charity. A poor family in the West of Ireland had no hesitation in sharing the daily meal with any beggar who might pass the door. This generosity of course encouraged reckless- ness and want of forethought ; for the family that shared the last potato yesterday with the strolling beggar, expected similar assistance in the hour of need. A system of legal charity would put a stop to this method of mutual relief. It was, moreover, expected, that the introduction of a poor rate would tend to reform the land system. The land- lords, when they felt the obligation of supporting the poor, might reasonably be expected to make some effort to improve their estates, and it seemed only natural that the tenant-farmer would also rather employ labourers to im- prove his land, than pay heavy sums to the rate collector. 538 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA O'Connell maintained that the Irish would never enter the workhouses. If he were right, so much the better, since they would, in the end, only keep out of them by getting employment. If, on the other hand, the people did flock into the workhouses, then the pressure of competition for little bits of land would come to an end, and better agricultural methods would be introduced. But some of the opponents of the poor law felt that the whole social, religious and political circumstances of Ireland demanded different treatment. They were of opinion that this system of indis- criminate almsgiving, which had become a religious habit in some of the more Catholic districts, could not be checked in the way proposed, and they suggested that a system of legal charity should be introduced, so far as the sick and in- firm were concerned, and supplemented by a large scheme of emigration from congested districts. These were the views held by the different parties concerning Ireland fifty years since. But no one seemed to understand or to face the great and permanent difficulty in the way of every effort to better the condition and elevate the character of the Irish people. The land was the basis upon which the structure of the poor law was to be raised. But the title to the possession of land in Ireland was always felt to be insecure, and there- fore one of the main objects of the poor law was not attained. In some districts in the West only about one-tenth of the population had the means of living during the winter. It was hoped that the landlords would give them employ- ment, in order to escape the poor rate, and so of course the landlords would have done, if they had felt themselves strong in unquestioned possession. In 1837, the jDroportion of paupers in Ireland to the rest of the population was twice as great as in England. This fact was serious enough, but it became much more grave when the insecurity which every one felt as to landed property in Ireland, came to be con- IRELAND 539 sidered. If this be borne in mind, O'Connell or any one else may well be excused, at the time of the Queen's acces- sion, for doubting the effect of the Irish Poor Law Act. The Bill, notwithstanding strong opposition, became law in July 1838. Before the end of 1840, 127 unions were declared, leaving only three to be formed, and fourteen workhouses opened for the reception of paupers. On the whole, the operation of the poor law must be pronounced to have been successful. There was at once a perceptible diminution in the crowds of beggars which used to be seen on the roads near the villages and the towns, and whose numbers and wild and withered appearance have been so often described in the writings of men who travelled in Ireland. Those who continued to think it might have been better that no system of legal charity should have been adopted, and who lived through the years from 1846 to 1852, must have seen grave reasons to modify their opinions. Frightful as were the sufferings of the people during that terrible period, most assuredly they would have been very much worse had there been no poor law in existence. Unfortunately, for many years after its introduction, various questions were constantly starting up in regard to its administration, which gave rise to much angry discussion. The provision of funds for reli- gious services in the workhouses, the religion of deserted children, the appointment and salaries of chaplains, were the topics of angry disputes among the guardians, and formed the subject-matter for the speeches of agitators, for nearly a quarter of a century. Within the last half-dozen years, again, the working of the poor law has suffered, in consequence of the passions excited by the present agita- tion. The administration of a great number of unions has become anything but satisfactory, and causes well-founded and grave anxiety for the future. Still, taking everything into consideration, and bearing 540 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA in mind the frightful suffering which has been avoided by the existence of the Irish poor law, it is quite certain that the Ministry who were responsible for it, and the Duke of Wellington, without whose powerful aid it could not have been carried, conferred a great and substantial benefit upon Ireland and its people. The union has now grown to be a most important factor of local government. Since its crea- tion its duties have become more various, and they are bemg constantly enlarged. In its early years, the system was "Working controlled by English commissioners ; but, in 1847, the Irish system. Poor Law Commissiou was created ; and in the year 1872 this body was merged into the Local Government Board, that had been established the year before. The areas of poor law administration are townlands, electoral divisions and unions. The townlands have no corresponding areas in England. They vary very considerably in size. When the limits of the several unions were determined, under the Act of 1838, the system was to take as a centre the chief market town in each division of a county, and to attach to it, without any consideration for the boundaries of baronies, or even counties, a rural district within the radius of about ten miles. Certain clauses prohibited the division of the town- lands, so that the townland is the unit, as the parish is in England. These townlands are grouped together and form what are called electoral divisions. The number of townlands is 62,205, of electoral divisions 3,438, and of unions 163. The supreme local authority of a union is the board of guardians. This body meets weekly and is com- Board of posed partly of ex-officio guardians. The Local Govern- dian^s' ment Board fixes the number of elected guardians, and also the qualifications necessary to become a guardian. This qualification varies from 6L annual value to 30Z. ; the average qualification is about 20Z. The constituency is composed of the owners and occupiers of the soil, and the IRELAND 541 cumulative system of voting has been adopted according to the following scale. "When the valuation or net amount of the rent received is under 20Z. one vote is given. Over 20L and under 50Z. two votes. „ 50L „ lOOL three votes. „ lOOZ. ,, 150Z. four votes. „ 150L „ 200L five votes. For 200L and over, there is a maximum of six votes, and voting by proxy is also allowed. Ex-officio members are justices of the peace residing in the union. When they do not equal the number of elected guardians, non-resident justices with a certain property qualification are added, and may vote by proxy ; but in no case can the number of ex- officio guardians exceed that of the elected. Each union has a staff of paid officers, who are appointed by the guar- dians, to -carry out the duties which fall upon the board. But these nominations are subject to the veto of the Local Government Board, and that body may remove them for good cause, as it may also, in case of default, summarily dismiss the board of guardians altogether, and appoint paid guardians in their place. Since the formation of the unions, greater power has been given to the guardians, and that board is now the means of administering several very important statutes, such as the Vagrants Act 1847, the Evicted Poor Protection Act 1848, the Medical Charities Act, the Sanitary Acts, the Parliamentary Voters Acts and Labourers Act, and several others. There was another Act passed soon after, hardly less Muni- important for Ireland, or deep-reaching in its consequences, reform, than the introduction of the poor law system. The muni- cipal institutions of Ireland called loudly for reform. The whole system was a mass of corruption ; and, besides, the Irish corporations were strongholds of sectarian ascendency and intolerance. 542 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA In the reign of James I., municipal officers, who were indifferent or hostile to the Protestant cause were depriyed, and their places filled by nominees of the Crown. The new corporators then surrendered all the rights and privileges of their native town to the central government, and then new charters were granted by the king, in which local privileges were considerably curtailed, and the nomination to all chief offices reserved to the Crown. Those persons, chosen by the Crown, were given power to nominate their successors, and by this means the great majority of the Irish people were as much excluded from local influence as they were from exercising any power over the great council of the nation. In 1672 there was some change made in favour of the Catholic majority, but any advantage gained by the Catholics was completely lost after the Eevolution. From that time, the municipal institutions of Ireland were mono- pohsed by the Protestants. During the eighteenth century, smaller monopolies inside the great Protestant monopoly grew up rapidly. Thus it came to pass that many cor- porate bodies passed almost entirely into the hands of some private family. It often happened that all the chief offices in a town were held by the relations of some neighbouring landlord, and often these nominees were the constituency which returned a member to Parliament, to represent the people of the locality. Municipal offices were openly sold ; the possession of them was allowed as a ground for com- pensation when the right of patrons of local bodies to send members to Parliament was interfered with, and several small boroughs lost representation by the Act of Union. In some cases, almost the whole body of the bur- gesses were non-resident, and charity funds, the house and landed property of the corporation, were used for the benefit of a small minority. In short, it was hardly possible to exaggerate the iniquity of the whole system, and if ever IRELAND 543 there was a case for reform it was here. The Whigs were therefore right in urging it, and many of their abstract arguments on the value of free municipal institutions were sound. On the other hand, they were wrong in not per- ceiving that the peculiar conditions and history of Ireland would hinder the working of popular institutions, and they were grossly unjust to their opponents, in accusing them of desiring to maintain abuses for the benefit of their local supporters. What the Duke of Wellington really desired, was to prevent Ireland being administered on a system inappHcable to its social position. He had a perfect right to prefer the centralising principle as the basis of Irish government. Unfortunately, many of the Tories committed the grave error of wishing government to be carried on almost exclusively in the Protestant interest, and hence the Tory party never could obtain the confidence of any large section of the people, or due consideration for the policy advocated by leading Conservative statesmen. The struggle for municipal reform lasted five years ; but it is unnecessary to dwell at any length upon the details of the strife. At the time of the Queen's accession there were seventy-one corporations in Ireland, embracing a popula- tion of nearly a million souls. The main provisions of the Municipal Eeform Act were as follows : Ten corporate towns, viz. Belfast, Clonmel, Cork, Drogheda, Dublin, Kilkenny, Limerick, Londonderry, Sligo, and Waterford, were continued as corporations. Between thirty and forty of the smaller corporations were dissolved, and their funds were vested in commissioners who appUed them to pubhc objects. Some towns had already been supplied with com- missioners, under the Lighting and Cleansing Act of 1828. The towns which had not commissioners were divided into two classes, in the first of which were towns empowered to 544 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA elect a board of commissioners, in the proportion of one to every five hundred inhabitants ; and in the second were some smaller towns, whose funds were to be administered by the poor law guardians of the locality. The franchise was a lOZ. household suffrage, with a residential qualification. This Irish municipal legislation has further been developed. Since 1854, any town with a population of 1,500, through a meeting of ratepayers of the value of %l. and upwards, may obtain the application of the Irish Municipal Eeform Act, which at the present moment regulates over eighty towns. There was an important reservation in the first Municipal Eeform Act. In the old corporations, the sheriffs were chosen by the corporators, and panels for the special jury were chosen by the sheriffs. By clause 150 of the Act, the right of appointing the sheriff was reserved to the Lord- Lieutenant, in each of the counties of the cities of Cork, Dublin, Kilkenny, Limerick, and Waterford, and in the counties of the towns of Carrickfergus, Drogheda, and Galway. Subsequently, however, under Lord Beaconsfield's second Administration, this restriction was modified : the Lord-Lieutenant now appoints the sheriff from a list of three names, selected by the respective municipal coun- cils. The aldermen are elected for six years ; the town councillors and town commissioners for three years. It is not necessary to enlarge on the enormous change which this legislation has produced in the whole life of the country. The councils of the cities and the boroughs, instead of being the nominees of a sect, are everywhere elective assemblies, chosen by the votes of those whose affairs they administer. On the other hand, after the experience of forty-seven years, it cannot be plausibly maintained that municipal reform has answered all the chief expectations of its authors. They confidently hoped that local corporate bodies would be great schools, wherein the Irish people IRELAND 545 might be trained up in the practice of civic virtue. Time has proved this idea to be erroneous. Whatever improve- ment they may be on the old corporate bodies, it cannot be contended that the present Irish corporations have done anything to promote poHtical virtue, or moderation, or dis- interested pubHc spirit. Experience has confirmed the opinions of those who held that it would be better for the country if the central authority had retained more power over local bodies, and it is now clear a great opportunity was lost of mtroducing into Ireland an administrative system similar to that of France, which has been the means of conducting the municipal affairs of that country under so many forms of government, through half-a-dozen revo- lutions and three successful invasions, and which would have given to Ireland that firm and stable local administra- tion which her interests imperatively require. A most fertile source of Irish discontent and crime was Tithes, closed during the early days of the Queen's reign. No one who is acquainted with Irish history, is ignorant of the numerous outrages to which the collection of tithes formerly gave rise. The tithes formed one of the most oppressive taxes that could possibly have been levied on the people. In the first place, they were constantly fluctuating in amount. Moreover, they were collected by harsh and unfeeling agents, and were intended to support the church of a small and comparatively rich minority. The animosity caused by the collection of tithes pro- The tithe duced crimes and outrages of the worst description, which frequently assumed almost the proportions of civil war. Various associations were formed in the country to resist and defy the powers of the law. People dared not disobey the orders of these associations. The Black Feet and the White Feet, as they were called — from the fact that some wore shoes and some went barefoot — were the masters of VOL. I. N N ■war. 546 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA large areas of the country. During twelve months, in 1832 and 1833, as many as 32 murders were perpetrated in the county of Kilkenny alone ; 34 farmhouses were burnt, the cattle of 36 farmers were injured, 519 houses were broken into, and 178 serious assaults were committed. In the Queen's County there were as many as 60 murders, 626 burglaries, 209 serious assaults upon individuals, and 115 cases of malicious injury to property. ' Assassination,' said the Attorney-General for Ireland, ' is the order of the day, and the habitual practice of those who make robbery their occupation.' ' The secret associations carried on their reign of terror, so that they frightened people from giving evidence against them and from serving on juries. Sons refused to disclose the names of their father's murderers. At a trial in Kilkenny the jury were dismissed, being unable to agree to their verdict. The names of the jurors who were in favour of a conviction were printed in red on a placard, immediately after the trial, and they were forced to leave the country. What had rendered the question of tithes such an important one in Ireland, was the action taken by the Irish House of Commons, when it exempted pasture land from this tax. In consequence of this legislation, the tithe fell on the tillage land, the greater part of which was held by cottier tenants. It was collected by a person called the tithe proctor, who was a sort of middle man between the people and the clergyman. He usually paid the rector a certain portion of the demand, and kept what he could collect over that amount for himself. As, in the system of estate management, there were gradations of persons between the head landlord and the people, so also there were grada- tions of tithe proctors, one below the other. The man who actually collected the tithe held perhaps from another, who ' Walpole's History of England, iii. 141. IRELAND 547 held from another, who held from the clergyman.' The proctor was sometimes also an officer of revenue, and would arrange his demands for his own advantage. He might overcharge the tithes and keep the surplus for himself, and then compensate the tithepayer by undercharging the taxes. He sometimes took the money in bonds bearing interest, and when these fell due and the peasants were unable to meet them, they were entirely at his mercy, and had to work on his farm and to carry his crops without adequate remuneration. To make the matter worse, the rich graziers were exempted, so that it was really the poorest and the exclusively Catholic portion of the population, which maintained the cost of the Church establishment. No one who observed Ireland towards the close of the last century failed to point out the terrible suffering of the people under this system. Mr. Pitt intended to take the question in hand ; he had a Bill actually prepared for the commutation of tithe.^ Unfortunately, his death, and the general trouble caused by the great war, drove the Irish question into the background, and so matters dragged on for a generation. During that time the scenes that went on in Ireland have often been described : the seizing of the only cow of the poor cottier, the misery of the parents at the loss of the milk of which theu' children were thus deprived, and this done ui the sight of the farm of the opulent grazier, whose numerous herds were cropping the most luxuriant pastures, while the grazier himself, who was exempted from tithe, looked on with callous indifference.* In the spring of 1835, the Whigs overthrew Sir Eobert Peel's Ministry by resolutions to the effect, that besides the conversion of tithe into a rent-charge — which Sir Eobert desired to carry — there should be a reduction of the Church estabUshment in Ireland, and that the money thereby > Froude's English in Ireland, ii. 453-4. 2 Wakefield's Account of Ireland, ii. 484-5. " Ibid. N N 2 548 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA obtained should be appropriated to the religious and moral instruction of the people, without distinction of religious persuasion. "When Lord Melbourne's Government was formed, a Bill embodying these principles was introduced and carried through the House of Commons. The House of Lords, however, struck out the appropriation clauses, and the Government abandoned their Bill. The same thing took place m 1836. In 1837 the Bill passed through the House of Commons, but was dropped in consequence of the death of the King. Tiie In 1838, the Whigs, finding their majorities lessening and tiie and their government growing weak, gave up the appropria- tion clauses, and the Tithe Commutation Bill became law. Then- conduct in so doing was disastrous, and gave a fatal blow to the confidence which the Irish had hitherto given to the Whig party. It was by insisting on the necessity of these clauses, that they drove Sir E. Peel from office in 1885. After years of struggle, they now abandoned them, although the necessity for insisting on them was clearly as great as ever. Had the Government withdrawn from power and allowed Sir E. Peel to pass the Tithe Commutation Act, the Whigs would have been in a position to force on the whole question of the maintenance of the Established Church in Ireland. Instead of that, they practically dropped the question altogether, and thirty years afterwards, when it came again to the front and pressed for solution, the result was a settlement, neither as conservative, nor as suitable to the real interests of Ireland, as certainly would have been arrived at sooner, had the Whig party not deserted the cause of religious equality. Ireland has to thank Lord Melbourne, Lord John Eussell, Lord Palmerston, and their political friends for the fact that her ecclesiastical endowments, instead of being rearranged and redistributed on some reasonable basis, have been utterly destroyed. IRELAND 549 By the action of the Government, however, the tithe difficulty was solved, the occupier of the land was relieved, the tithe- owner obtained a permanent property, which he was able to collect without the aid of the military and of the police, and disputes about tithes were transferred from the night meeting of the Eibbon lodge to the Courts of Law. Before leaving the consideration of the laws which were charit- the direct and logical outcome of Catholic Emancipation, bequests, it is necessary to refer to another statute, passed in her Majesty's reign. This was called the Charitable Bequests Act, and it is remarkable that, until it became law, the only legislation affectmg gifts for charities in Ireland came from the days of the Plantagenets. In the reign of King George II. a Mortmain Act was passed for England, but it did not extend to Ireland. In that country, as the whole system of law was based on opposition to Catholicism, the absence of a particular statute of that kind was not a matter of great importance. During the eighteenth century, no court in Ireland would have carried out a bequest for a charitable trust. The first symptom of any fair dealing with bequests for the pious use of Catholics was the decision given by Curran in the case of Merry v. Power, which caused great as- tonishment to the Bar of his time, and gave great umbrage to the ascendency party. One of the last Acts of the Irish Parliament was to estabhsh a board for watching over chari- table bequests. But this board, as might be expected from the source whence it emanated, was purely sectarian and Protestant. Justice was not done till the present reign. In the year 1844 a new Board of Commissioners was created, and all charitable donations, in which any question should arise as to the usage and discipline of the Catholic Church, were ordered to be referred to a committee of Catholic commissioners, of whom it was necessary to have five upon the board. The Act also contained provisions to enable ment. 550 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA Catholics to vest lands and goods and chattels in the com- mission, either for the building or furnishing of Catholic places of worship, or for the benefit of any Catholic arch- bishop, bishop, or clerk in orders, or for those who from time to time officiated in any district, or for pastoral superintendents, and for building a residence for the use and benefit of such persons. It is also necessary to mention that the legislation of 1844 requires deeds and wills, con- taining donations for charitable purposes, to be executed three months before the death of the person executing them. The tern- While the Legislature was thus busy in endeavouring to move- place the Catholics of Ireland on a footing of equality with their Protestant fellow-countrymen, a movement was going on of another description, tending to elevate their social and moral condition. In the year 1829, the year in which Catholic Emancipation was passed, Ireland spent six millions of money on proof spirits. In the summer of that year, an American gentleman, named Penny, visitedafriendin Belfast. The name of the latter was Dr. Edgar, and the American found him exceedingly anxious to discover some means for securing the better observance of Sunday in the North of Ireland. At that time, the minds of many men in America had been turned to the necessity of making an effort to check the spread of intemperance. Various temperance societies had just been formed in the United States, and they were be- ginning to get into working order about the time that Penny came to Belfast. Under the influence of this American, Edgar began to feel that the spread of temper- ance would help to further the cause he had specially at heart. He became anxious that temperance societies should be formed in Ireland. In August 1825 he put forth his first appeal on their behalf, and then proceeded to publish tracts upon temperance and to employ travelling agents to distribute them throughout the island. The question IRELAND S5I ■was thus prominently brought before the pubhc. Men got interested in it, and soon became aware that most of the crime and poverty, and an immeasurable amount of disease and mental suffering, proceeded from the abuse of alcohol. The Eev. George Carr, a clergymen of the Established Church, took the matter up, and founded the first temper- ance society in New Eoss. Other temperance societies were quickly estabHshed elsewhere, and one was founded in Cork, chiefly through the exertions of a member of the Society of Friends. There lived at that time in Cork a Franciscan friar, who had won his way to the hearts of the people by the great zeal and self-sacrifice he showed at the outbreak of the Asiatic cholera in 1832. This clergyman, the Eev. Theobald Mathew, was earnestly pressed to take up the Father __..,,,„ , . Mathew. temperance movement. He hesitated tor some time, no doubt because he disliked mechanical organisation for the purpose of inducing moral restraint ; but at last he over- came his scruples and devoted himself heart and soul to the work of the temperance society. Father Mathew took the pledge on April 10, 1838, at once set out on his mission, and became the moral apostle of Ireland. Within a very short time 2,000,000 of Irishmen were induced to pledge them- selves to temperance. The work of the apostle may to some extent be estimated by the following figures, which show the quantity of spirits distilled in Ireland, and the revenue collected thereon, in each of the five years from 1837 to 1841 : ' Year Gallons Duty 1837 . . 11,235,635 . . £1,310,824 1838 . . 12,296,342 . . 1,434,573 1839 . . 10,815,709 . . 1,261,832 1840 . . 7,401,051 . 936,126 1841 . . 6;485,443 . 864,726 His influence over the people became almost unbounded. > Porter, Progress of the Nation, p. 556. 552 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA He was believed to have the gift of miracles, and rumour told that, on one occasion, he had raised the dead. A great and sudden change was wrought in the national character. More than 2,000,000 of men entirely altered their habits, and the fact that they had given ujd drinking left them with time on their hands, which might be utilised for the political regeneration of the country. A great opportunity was now offered for the political education of the Irish people, but no one undertook the task, and the golden moment was lost. O'Connell could have easily turned the minds of men to strive for the removal of real grievances, and undoubtedly the force he wasted on his Eepeal agita- tion was more than sufficient to carry all reasonable reform. In the meantime the temperance movement spread. The material prosperity of the country grew with it, and when the number of teetotallers had reached 2,500,000, it was asserted that not one of them had for a whole year been charged with any offence in a court of justice. It must, however, be admitted that the principle, on which all this reform was based, was not altogether sound. When the superstitious disciple knelt at the feet of the apostle, pronounced his vow and received the medal, he was persuaded that something frightful would happen to him if he broke the pledge. Father Mathew was believed to have peculiar means of knowing whether the vow was observed, and a peculiar virtue was supposed to reside in the medal he hung round the necks of kneeling multitudes. The excellent priest himself neither originated nor en- couraged the superstitions. On the other hand, he thought it hopeless to contend against them. ' If I could prevent them,' he said, ' without impeding the glorious cause, they should not have been permitted; but both are so closely entwined, that the tares cannot be pulled up without pluck- ing up the wheat also. The evil will correct itself, and the IRELAND ■ 553 good, with the Divine assistance, will remain and be per- manent.' ^ Unfortmiatety, the good has not remained per- manent. In fact, the widespread existence of the vague fears, horrible imaginings, and excited feelings, which cha- racterised the movement associated with the name of Father Mathew, clearly showed that its character was essentially ephemeral. Like the famous mission of Xavier, the work of the Irish Franciscan made no lastmg impression. But although its effects upon Ireland have almost entirely passed away, the memory of the good priest will continue to be held in veneration by those who appreciate untiring and unselfish devotion to the cause of the moral regeneration of mankind. It is now generally admitted that the agrarian difficulty Tte land lies at the root of almost all trouble in Ireland; but many of 1^®^*^°"^- those who insist strongly upon this fact are often but im- perfectly acquainted with the real reasons why this should be so. In order to master the Irish question, it is essential to understand the agrarian system which prevailed very generally in Ireland at the beginning of the seventeenth century, when, for the first time, the English law obtained authority throughout Ireland. And this again carries us back to very early times, and to the origin of landed property and the formation of political society, upon which so much light has been recently thrown by the writings of such men as Maurer, Sohm, Sir Henry Maine, and Dr. W. K. Sullivan. When we first become acquainted with the Aryan race. The 1 • J? 1 1 tribal we find it divided into tribes, each settled on a bit of land, system. For my present purpose it is not necessary to enter into the constitution of the tribe itself. Those who desire to make themselves acquainted with it, will find a minute account in Dr. SuUivan's invaluable work on the manners and customs of the ancient Irish. As far as we are concerned, it is enough ' Martineau, Histm-y of England, ii. 297. S54 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA to bear in mind that the great body of the clansmen held temporary possession of land under the chief. A portion of land in the neighbourhood of a settlement was set aside for the chiefs use and benefit. Upon that land he settled, if he thought fit, persons who might be strangers to the clan, but who wished to reside among them. They were called in Ireland ' fuidirs,' and they were generally broken men of neighbouring tribes and entirely dependent on the chief. It was their position of social inferiority, and absolute de- pendence on the chief, that made Spenser assert that the ordinary occupiers of the soil had no rights under the old Irish system. Spenser, no doubt, was led into this error by his experience of Munster, for in that province, on account of the very frequent wars among tribes, the number of fuidirs was more considerable than in any other part of Ireland. At the death of a clansman his property was divided amongst his sons, or, if he had no children, amongst his brothers or collateral heirs. Daughters also were en- titled to inherit land. This system was called, ' gavelkind ; ' but to prevent the division and sub-division of the property of the chief, his property followed a rule not of gavelkind, but what was called ' tanistry.' The tanaiste was chosen to succeed the head of the clan, during the lifetime of the chief. It was required that he should be a member of the chief- tain's family, but not necessarily his son. These institutions prevailed in Ireland, or over the greater part of Ireland, up to the date of the accession of James I. Then suddenly, Decision in the Hilary Term of 1605, the illegality of all native Irish tenures of land was af&rmed, the tribal rules of succession were abolished, and the English law of real property was declared to be in force throughout Ireland. The sudden- ness with which this was done, the indifference to existing rights then shown, has had more influence than any other event in Irish history, not excepting even the confiscations of 1605. IRELAND 555 of which we hear so much, to bring about the agrarian difficulty. Under the old system, the clan had a vested interest in the soil ; it was only a portion of the land of the settlement which could be in any way considered the abso- lute property of the chief. By the decision of the judges, in 1605, a large body of the people were deprived of pro- prietary rights. It was undoubtedly necessary to reform the land system then prevaihng in Ireland, which was archaic and semi-barbarous, and fairly open to the severe criticisms made upon it by Sir John Davis, who pointed out its inherent defects of insecurity and uncertainty. The change La the law, indeed, rendered the descent of land permanent and uniform, and a clear and distinct step in the direction of civilisation was taken. There lurked, however, behind the decision of the judges, an idea which was full of fatal consequences ; it involved the introduction of all the feudal doctrines of escheat and for- feiture. Moreover, no effort was made to effect a compo- sition of the compHcated rights of chiefs and clansmen. Gross injustice was done to the latter, and the seeds were sown of lasting discontent. With regard to the momentous results of the doctrmes of The planta- escheat and forfeiture, they were shown almost at once by tion of Ulster the plantation of Ulster and the introduction of an era of intermittent confiscation. In consequence of the outlawry of some great Ulster nobles, the six counties of Donegal, Londonderry, Tyrone, Fermanagh, Cavan, and Armagh were escheated to the Crown. It was at once determined to plant this territory with English and Scotch settlers, and if that plantation could have been accomphshed without doing out- rageous wrong, there can be no doubt but that it would have been politic and wise. But the proceedings were radically un- righteous ; for whatever may have been the guilt of the lords, the clansmen had done nothing to forfeit their proprietary 5S6 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA rights in the soil. However, in consequence of the decision of 1605, their rights were completely ignored. The land which was actually in possession of the attainted nobles was comparatively little ; by far the larger proportion was held by the clansmen, upon whom no attainder had fallen, and to whom no crime of rebellion could be attributed. Neverthe- less, not by barefaced power, but in the name and with the colour of law, a mass of people attainted of no crime were dispossessed of their holdings, and their possessions given to strangers. The dispossessed people were, it is true, promised land to be selected for them by agents of the Government, but the land in which they possessed a clear and definite estate was given over to others. The land selected for them was mountain or cold marsh land, so that, in the counties of Derry, Tyrone, Down and Fermanagh, geologists of this day can point out the race of the inhabitants by the characteristics of the soil. The people were powerless and without leaders, but a hoard of vengeance was treasured in their hearts which was destined to find a frightful issue. The men who supplanted them were undoubtedly of a more civilised stock ; they were a more thrifty and industrious race ; but it was inevitable that they should look with fear and hatred upon those who had been ousted to make way for them, a hatred which soon became aggravated by an unrelenting spirit of religious intolerance. In some cases, the clansmen did not obtain any compensa- tion at all, and were deprived of their lands without any means of subsistence being assigned to them. It is hardly wonderful that people in Ireland did not appreciate all the beneficent working of the law which to them assumed the practical form of expulsion from house and home. Kebei- When, after the lapse of a generation, the great rebellion 1641. broke out on the night of October 22, 1641, the Irish had been exasperated beyond endurance. The barbarities which IRELAND 557 attended that outburst, grossly exaggerated as they were by fear and hate, excited the passions of Enghshmen to a height which nothing but a terrific vengeance could satisfy. Yet it is worthy of note that many of the most distin- guished Anglo-Irish families stood firmly by the Irish in that struggle. The Wesleys of Dangan Manor in Meath, the ancestors of the Duke of Wellington, were outlawed at that time, for their real or supposed participation in the in- surrectionary movement. So also were members of the families of the Poles, the Longs, and others equally re- markable for their general loyalty to the English Crown. But vengeance came at last. The massacres of Drogheda and Wexford, and the Cromwellian settlement, were crom- episodes in the story commenced by the Plantation settie- of Ulster and the doctrine of tenure in viUemage. The ^^^ ' struggle, which began in 1641, lasted eleven years. Lord Clare, in his great speech on the Union, called it justly a war of extermination. Sir William Petty ' calculated that nearly one half of the population perished by sword, pestilence, or famine. When tranquillity was restored, the land belonging to the Irish in Ulster, Leinster, and Munster was confiscated, and few pages of history can compare with this stupendous act of spoKation. It did not leave untouched the estate of a single Irish Catholic whose property was worth more than ten pounds. All persons who had taken part in the rebeUion before November 1642, or who had in any way assisted the rebels before that date, and also every one who had sat in the general assembly of CathoKcs — nearly a hundred members of the aristocracy of Ireland — were con- demned to death and to the absolute loss of their property. Secondly, all landowners who had at anytime fought either for the rebels or for the King against the Parhament were to lose > Leeky's History of England, ii. 172. 558 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA their estates, but to receive one-third of their value in land in Connaught ; and further, Catholics who had never resisted the Parliament, but had not taken sides with it, were deprived of their estates, but received two-thirds of their value in Connaught. Thus almost the whole land of Ireland was placed at the mercy of the English Parliament, to do as it pleased with it. The disinherited race were ordered to retire to Connaught by a certain day, and were forbidden to recross the Shannon on pain of death. This sentence was rigidly enforced until the Eestoration. Charles When that event took place, the question arose whe- ther the Cromwellian settlement was to be confirmed, and whether persons who had lost their estates for the cause of Charles I. were to be left in beggary by Charles II. Of course it would have been impossible to have totally dis- regarded the interests of the actual possessors, for the confiscated land was given either to soldiers or officers of the Republican army in satisfaction for arrears of pay ; while, in some cases, it was held by persons as payment for money which they had advanced, with the sanction of King Charles, to the ParUament, at the beginning of the insurrec- tion. But at the same time it is quite impossible to defend the Act of Settlement and Explanation by which it was sought to satisfy the various claims to Irish land. The Act disturbed the Cromwellian settlement, but it did little or nothing to rectify the high-handed wrong which had been perpetrated under the rule of the Protector. Thousands of the old Irish proprietors, who had been dispossessed for their attachment to the English Crown, had their claims for compensation disallowed, and were excluded for ever from their ancient heritage ; and no less than 7,800,000 acres of land were settled under this Act on a number of English adventurers, to the total exclusion of the old inhabitants of Ireland.' As for the mass of the people, they were given ' Lord Clare's speech on the Union. IRELAND 559 over to the absolute dominion of the gentry, who, so far from having a spark of sympathy with them, were animated by feeUngs of the most profomid antipathy. CromweUian settlers, who had won their possessions by the sword, looked to the sword alone to maintain them. They regarded the mass of the people as a horde of superstitious savages, whom they were determined to keep down, to crush, and to disarm. When James II. came to the throne, the Irish hoped to regain some of their ancient power, and at the Eevo- lution they made a desperate effort for it. They were again defeated, and a fresh confiscation of more than a miDion of acres of land took place. This property was sold to defray the expenses of the Williamite war, and a new set of adventurers were introduced into the country. This was the last of the wholesale confiscations. During the seventeenth century, no inconsiderable por- I'enai laws. tion of the island had been confiscated twice or three times over. These successive revolutions in land had completely destroyed and ruined the old Irish proprietors ; and then, in the eighteenth century, there commenced the penal laws against the Cathohcs, which intensified the agrarian difficulty. Under this system, no Catholic could acquire a single acre by devise, gift, or purchase, with the exception that he might take a lease of unprofitable bog, in order to reclaim and improve it for the landlord. He could not have a lease for more than thirty-one years, and no lease at all under which his profits exceeded one-third of his rent. He could not buy land from a Protestant ; if he did, the first Protestant who informed against him became the proprietor. A curious illustration of the working of this provision is connected with the history of the family of O'Connell. In the course of the last century, Mr. Maurice O'Connell, of Derrynane, the uncle of the Liberator, had agreed to buy the mountain called Tomies, then covered with oakwood, 56o THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA and whose picturesque form is so well known to visitors to Killarney, for it is the mountain on the south side of the lower lake. He had arranged the purchase, and every- thing was nearly concluded, when Mr. Herbert of Mucross sent him word that, if he bought the property, he would inform against him and take possession of it. It is worthy of remark, and illustrates the social condition of Ireland at that time, that Mr. O'Connell thought his family under particular obligations to Mr. Herbert, because he did not allow Mr. O'Connell to complete the purchase and afterwards step in and deprive him of the property. The few Catholic landlords whose estates were not confis- ca,ted were not permitted to bequeath land ; and, with the view of destroying the social position of the Catholic aristocracy, their landed estates were divided equally amongst their sons, unless the eldest became a Protestant, in which case he took the whole. If a grown-up son became a Protestant, he could force his father to produce his title-deeds, and the Court of Chancery had power to confer as much of the estates as it liked immediately upon the son. Of course, the result of this was discord and insubordination in families, and the creation of a crew of miscreants who preyed on property and intensified the divisions between classes. Throughout the whole of the eighteenth century, the condition of the Catholic tillers of the soU became more and more wretched, and the antagonism between landlord and tenant was further developed by eco- nomic causes. In 1739 a cattle plague broke out in Hol- stein, spread rapidly over the North of Germany and Holland, and extended to England. The immediate effect was an enormous rise in the price of cattle, and this circumstance, added to the fact that pasture land in Ireland was exempted from tithes, led to the wholesale consolidation of holdings into large grazing farms. The consequence, of course, was IRELAND 561 eviction of cottier tenants on a large scale, and as a result the formation of secret combinations, which have ever since, from time to time, thrown the country into turmoil and con- fusion. When the Queen came to the throne, the estimated population of Ireland was close vipon eight millions, the great majority of whom were entirely dependent on the land ; while, at the same time, the agricultural interest was de- pressed by a variety of causes, of which the chief were insecurity of tenure and the reckless subdivision of farms. In regard to the insecurity of tenure, everything tended from the middle of the last century to increase faciUties for eviction. The Quarter Sessions Act of 1816 was a most important step in that direction, and an- other Act, passed in 1831, placed the tenant more com- pletely than ever at the mercy of the landlord. The reck- less subdivision of farms was also beginning to bear fruit. It became a custom for the farmer to divide his farm, no matter how small, amongst his sons and other relations; and, as the population increased, so did subdivision. The Devon Commission revealed the astounding fact that, in 1843, farms let long previously on lease to a single tenant, had been cut up and divided amongst sixteen, twenty, and fifty cultivators. Ten tenants were found subsisting on six acres, and it appeared that in a single generation a town- land of 205 acres had been subdivided into 422 lots.' The inevitable result was that the people were more and more driven towards starvation point, and became more and more dependent on the potato for support. At last the cata- strophe came. The harvest of 1845 seemed to be the richest that had appeared for years. Suddenly the alarm was The given that the potato had failed. However, the crop was so ^^™™^- abundant, that it was expected an average result would be obtained, but during the winter it turned out that the tubers ' Digest of Evidence on Occupation of Land in Ireland, part i. p. 422. VOL. I. 562 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA had rotted in the pits. Farmers, however, made desperate efforts to recover their losses at the harvest of 1846. It was this year that sealed the doom of the Irish people. The crop failed, not partially, Ijut completely and utterly. It promised well up to July, when suddenly, in one night, whole districts of the country were blighted, and no portion at all of the crop escaped. The result was ruin on all sides. An entire people were threatened with destruction, and in the train of famine there came fever and cholera so as to make the catastrophe complete. Of course, the landlords received no rent ; the poor-rate rose up oftentimes to almost the whole value of the property, and there came a general crisis. The Government introduced and obtained the sanction of Enoum- Parliament, to enable any landlord or his creditors -to sell his bered Estates estate, and a special tribunal was created for the purpose. Act This institution, like the Act of 1881, was praised at the time, and for years afterwards, as the very height of political wis- dom, and it was in vain that, from the Irish point of view, some criticism was attempted. Its immediate effect was that a large number of properties were sold, at a moment when they had fallen to an unprecedented extent in value. The most solemn engagements were set aside ; the most venerable traditions of the English law of property were ignored ; and the late Mr. Butt, in his book on ' The Land Tenure in Ireland,' goes the length of saying, that in the whole of Enghsh history there was no similar legal attack on the right of private property. It intensified rather than diminished all the angry passions of the people. The tribunal began its work in the year 1849. Between that time and now, it has sold land worth 50,000, OOOL, and about one-fifth of the soil of the island has passed into the hands of new owners. These new owners, as a class, ignored all the old customs which had existed in the country, and done something to mitigate the exasperation of the people. They undertook no IRELAND 563 obligations, but they were put in possession as absolute owners. They could make the farmer pay what rent they chose to fix, and if he did not pay, they could evict him, and this very circumstance was held up by the Government, as an inducement for persons to buy land. In a very short time, a considerable number of proprietors were turned out of their ancient homes, where they and their families had lived, on the whole, upon the best terms with the populg.- tion ; and while many amongst them, in spite of adverse circumstances, had always guarded and respected the feel- ings and traditions of the people, their successors in the possession of the land looked upon it purely in the light of an investment. In order to get the greatest and surest return for their money, they proceeded ruthlessly to consoli- date the holdings on their estates. If ever a better agricultural system was to be introduced into Ireland, it was of prime necessity that the very small cottier tenancies should be abolished. But it was equally necessary that this change should take place with as little friction as possible, and with the greatest possible consideration for the traditions, opinions, and prejudices of the people. It was above all essential that no pains should be spared to secure the future position of the small cottiers, and provide for them the means of a better and more civilised existence. It is unfortunately true that a great number, especially of the new proprietors, •did not always consider the claims of the cottier tenantry, and their duties to them. The famine and plague of 1846-47 was accompanied, and ciear- succeeded, by a wholesale clearance of congested districts ^^^^^ and by cruel evictions. The new landlords, bent on ^^^'^■ ■consolidating their property, turned out their tenants by regiments, and in the autumn of 1847 enormous numbers were deported. It is absolutely necessary to bear this strictly in mind, if we would judge of the intense hatred 002 564 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA which prevails amongst the Irish m America to Great Britain. The children of many of those, who were exiled then, have raised themselves to positions of affluence and prosperity in the United States. But they have often heard from their fathers, and some of them may perhaps recall, the ch'cumstances mider which they were driven from their old homes in Ireland. Time has thrown into the shade the circumstances of their former struggle for existence, but what they can recollect is, that although they were willing to pay any reasonable rent, and to meet all their obligations, they were forced to quit the country. They can remember the days of anxiety, which preceded the appearance of the sheriff, the circumstances of their eviction, and their dreary journey to the emigrant ship. But there is a further and awful memory, connected with that time. The people who had been suffering from fever carried the plague with them on board, and the vessels sometimes became floating charnel-houses. During the year 1847, out of 106,000 emigrants who crossed the Atlantic for Canada and New Brunswick, 6,100 perished on the ocean, 4,100 immediately on landing, 5,200 subsequently in the hospitals, and 1,900 in the towns to which they repaired.^ In the great ports of America, floating hospitals were erected, and as the ships arrived from Europe, the sick were at once transported to those vessels. During the voyage across, whole families disappeared, and sometimes all the adults were taken and the children alone survived. Frequently it was impossible to ascertain the names of those who died, and all clue to the identification of children was lost, so that charitable organisations frequently found them- selves in charge of children whose name and parentage it was impossible to discover. The late Mr. A. M. Sullivan describes how, not so very many years ago, a man in possession of ' Hansard, Feb. 1848. IRELAND 565 considerable wealth in America called upon him in Dublin. This person had come across from America in order to obtain some clue to his family, which had perished entirely during that miserable time. He treasured up a few pieces of a red-painted emigrant box which he believed belonged to his father, and so he travelled about Clare, Kerry, and Galway, to try and see whether he could penetrate the secret which, in all probabihty, was buried for ever beneath the waves of the Atlantic' The official report of the Montreal Emigrant Society for 1847 states that from Gros Island up to Port Sarnia, along the borders of the St. Lawrence, on the shores of Lakes Ontario and Erie, wherever the tide of emigration extended, the final resting-places of the sons and daughters of Ireland were to be found in a melancholy chain of graves, ' where repose fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers, in one commingled heap, without a tear bedewing the soil or a stone marking the spot.' These are the circumstances which explain the hatred of the American-Irish against all landlords without exception, good and bad, and which furnish the reason of the enormous sums which have been sent over to the Land League. Undoubtedly, historical circumstances have, as I have already said, had much to do with the political hatred to Great Britain ; but its newly acquired intensity is owing to the still fresh remembrances of what took place after the famine, and to the fact that the wholesale clearances of Irish estates were, to say the least, not discouraged in the writings and speeches of English lawgivers, economists, and statesmen. The subsequent legislation which took place with regard Land Act to the land was not calculated to diminish the discontent of the people. The Act of 1860 went still further, in some respects, than the Act of 1849 ; for it endeavoured to destroy what was remaining of the old customs, and to ' 'S&w Ireland, p. 127. 566 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA substitute for them a law of contract, as rigid as that which prevails in France. But even this might have tended ultimately to the solution of the agrarian difficulty, if the policy, on which it reposed, had been steadily persevered in, and if, at the same time, some vigorous attempt had been made to simphfy land transfer, and to help and encourage of 1870 : the peasantry to buy their farms. But in 1870 a very great alteration in the land system was effected. Mr. Gladstone's Land Act of that year conferred extraordinary benefits on the tenant. It put an end to the power of the landlord to evict a tenant without giving him compensation for improve- ments, made by him or by his predecessor in title. All improvements on the farm were henceforth held to have been made by the tenant, unless the contrary was proved, and in certain circumstances on eviction he might receive compen- sation for mere disturbance. of 1881. Tj^g ^g^ ^^ 1881— also introduced by Mr. Gladstone- went a good deal further. This Act established a com-t, called the Irish Land Commission ; every yearly tenant in Ireland has the privilege of going to the Court, and getting his rent fixed unalterably for a certain period ; and, by the operation of the clauses of the Act, under which this is effected, the rents of 160,000 tenancies in Ireland have, within the last six years, been reduced about 20 per cent. There can be no doubt that this Act has been accompanied, in many cases, with enormous hardships to landlords. In the first jplace, the landlord is now a mere rent-charger on what was formerly his estate. In the second place, the encumbrances on his property have not been reduced fro rata, as in common justice they ought to have been. As far as the tenants are concerned, they ar6 now in Ireland in an infinitely better position than farmers of land in any portion of the civilised world. Never- theless, it is quite certain that these Acts have failed to IRELAND 567 settle the Irish land question. Nothing will do this, until the peasant is withdrawn altogether from passive or active sympathy with revolution, and this can only be done by placing him in such a position, that he will have more to fear than to hope for from revolutionary change. Let the Irish tenant once have the certainty that, if he only comphes with some fixed and not very onerous conditions, his holdmg will belong absolutely to him, and every year that passes will leave him less disposed to sympathise with sedition, and he will more and more reahse, that he has no interest in disorder. The present state of things in Ireland has all the evils of that system of dual ownership, which was the chief cause of the French Eevolution. Before that terrible event, there were not wanting men who pointed out the evils of dual ownership in the soil. Throughout the whole of the eighteenth century, almost every French political writer of eminence insisted on the danger likely to arise from the deep ill-feeling between noble and peasant, created and fostered by their perpetual law-suits on the subject of land. Men in high places turned a deaf ear to all these warnings- When Boncerf published his well-known book ' Les Inconve nients des droits feodaux,' which had for its main object the simplification of tenure, he was denounced as a dangerous, person ; and a few weeks afterwards, in consequence partly of the storm this work created, Turgot was dismissed and carried with him into his retreat the last hopes of settling the agrarian difficulty without turmoil and confusion. Thirteen years followed, during which various reforms were made, but none of them went to the root of the evil, and they simply intensified discontent. At last the tempest of revolution burst over the country. Authority slipped out of the hands of the executive; anarchy ran riot. The Convention appeared upon the scene ; the evils of dual ownership in the soil, and the bitter feelings between classes S68 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA which a complicated system of land tenure engenders and develops, is written in the black and bloody characters of the Keign of Terror. The same bad feeling, which existed in France between the peasant and the noble, exists in Ireland between the tenant and the landlord. It arises from the same cause, the dual claim to the land, and peace will never find her way to Ireland till single ownership is introduced into the country. It is not within the scope of this paper to show in detail how this can be accomplished ; but that there can be no very great difficulty about it is well known to all who are acquainted with the history of Europe. In Sugenheim's well-known book, ' Die Geschichte der Aufhebung der Leibeigenschaft,' examples may be found of countries of all sorts, of small states and of large ones, of rich states and poor, in the middle ages and in modern times, which have disentangled landed property and esta- blished single ownership, without doing any injustice or wrong to any human being. With regard to Ireland, the best example to follow would probably be the Bavarian j)recedent. In order to get rid of the serious agrarian trouble, caused in that country by the system of dual owner- ship, the State stepped forward in 1848 and offered any landlord, who wished to surrender his estate, to take it off his hands. When a landlord gave up his interest in the land, the State paid him in debentures, bearing interest guaranteed by the Government, but redeemable at par. To meet the interest, and provide a fund to extinguish the debentures, a rent-charge was imposed on the holdings, and a certain number of debentures are paid off every year. The whole business will be wound up in about seventy-two years from 1848. But whatever mode be adopted, it should be one which will work with as little friction as possible. This is a matter of prime necessity. Men are loyal in proportion as they enter into the spirit of the political system IRELAND 569 under which they Hve. They never will do this if the laws are not simple, and do not work with smoothness and ease. Complex legislation produces uncertainty, doubt, and dis- content, and is the parent of disorder and revolution. Ill There are, however, some who think that an Irish Tiiena- national question exists altogether apart from and beyond question, the agrarian difficulty. In this opinion I am quite unable to concur. It is difficult to believe, there can be any genuine national feeling in a country which has never known national unity, or in a country without any political traditions of an international character. The history of Ireland is pre-eminently agrarian. There has never been a really popular movement dissociated from the land question. The struggle for Catholic emancipation forms no exception. The enthusiasm of the peasants for that cause was not due to the circumstance that they cared deeply or at aU for the political privileges which its success would confer on Catholics. The Irish peasant was not inspired by the hope that Catholic peers would sit in the House of Lords, that Catholic gentlemen would be eligible for the public service, or that the prizes of the Bar would be open to the Catholic lawyers. But his instinct told him that when the royal assent was given to the Belief Bill, a wide breach would be made in the citadel of Protestant ascendency, the outward and visible sign of the agrarian settlement under which his ancestors had been deprived of their interest in the soil. This circumstance did not escape the observa- tion of philosophers and keen observers who investigated the Irish problem fifty or sixty years ago. M. de Tocqueville, who visited Ireland in 1835, saw it plainly enough.' ■ CEuvres computes d' Alexis de Tocqueville, viii. 386. O'Con nell and S70 THE REIGN OF QUEEx\ VIC TOR J A Gustave de Beaumont ^ and Friedrich von Eaumer ^ per- ceived it with equal clearness. But no one understood it more thoroughly, no one indeed has ever written more shrewdly on Ireland, than Prince Piickler-Muskau, who travelled in the country during the height of the struggle for Catholic emancipation. His book, ' Briefe eines Verstor- benen,' is indeed fm-ther remarkable, as it contains evidence that O'Connell was obUged very reluctantly to admit what was the real driving force of the movement which he was then leading. After the Catholic Belief Act had been carried, an agita- Bepeai. tion was Set on foot to procure the repeal of the legislative Union. Here again the hope of the peasant that this move- ment would conduct him to the ownershijD of the land he cultivated was the true source of its strength and of the for- midable dimensions it assumed. In order to convince our- selves of this we have only to recall the history of its rise and progress, and the reasons of its complete collapse. "When the Eepeal movement was first started, it was received with enthusiasm by the people, and O'Connell obtained the cordial support of some distinguished Eoman Catholic clergymen and a Parliamentary following of forty members. The moment, however, there seemed to be some hope of legislating for the benefit of the people of Ireland, and not in the interest of a class, the agitation for Eepeal came to an end. Unfortu- nately, the weakness of the Whigs in passing the Tithe Bill as a mere commutation measure, and in abandoning the surplus and aj)propriation clauses, which allowed the deep- seated injustice of the ecclesiastical settlement of Ireland to remain undiminished, shook to its very foundation the confi- dence of the people in the steadfastness of British statesmen, a,nd in the possibility of obtaining the redress of grievances ' L'Irlande sociale, politique et religieuse, 1839, 2 vols. 8vo. ^ England im Jahre 1835, vol. ii. IRELAND 571 from the Imperial Parliament. This was in 1838. Two years afterwards, in April 1840, Mr. Thomas Drummond, the Under-Secretary, passed away. A cool man of science, a political philosopher and a practical statesman, of wide and ample sympathies, of deep insight into hmnan nature and profound knowledge of Irish history, of lofty personal character, of subdued enthusiasm, he had during his tenure of the Under-Secretaryship given an example, perhaps not surpassed by any man in any country during this century, of the art of rule applied under circumstances of the extremest difficulty. What Mr. Drummond, had he lived longer, could have done in science or in politics, it is now useless to inquire ; but it is certain that, by his death, the group of men, who sincerely desired the introduction into Ireland of a just, firm, scientific, and sympathetic political system lost their master-mind. They became, after a short time, ignorant of the condition of the country and of its real wants, and, consequently, uncertain and vacillating in opinion. The inevitable result was to deepen the distrust which was beginning to be widely felt in Ireland in the Imperial Parliament, and to quicken the desire for repeal of the Union. In 1841, the accession to power of the Conservative party under Su^ Eobert Peel obliterated the last ray ot hope, which the Irish entertained, of obtaining from the Parhament at Westminster a system of government suited to their country. O'Connell raised at once the question of Eepeal. Still, notwithstanding the moral disasters which the Unionist cause had sustained by the abandon- ment of the appropriation clauses by the Whigs and by the death of Drummond, O'Connell's agitation met with little success for a time. It required two years of Sir Eobert Peel's government to drive the great body of the people into the movement. In 1842 O'Connell brought the question 572 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA of Eepeal for discussion before the Dublin Corporation, and after a long debate, in which the opposition to him was conducted by Butt, he succeeded in carrying a motion in its favour by 45 to 15. After this, the agitation grew rapidly, subscriptions to maintain it increased, and meetings, which were often attended by considerable crowds, were held all over the country. The speeches delivered at these meetings were often extremely violent, and appealed to revolutionary passions, not only in Ireland, but throughout the world. These appeals met with a fair response. Throughout the United States, a very strong movement to support O'Connell was set on foot, and contributions to the Eepeal rent were sent to Ireland. A great meeting to express sympathy with O'Connell's movement was held in New York. It lasted six days, was addressed by persons of the highest position, and attended by enthusiastic multitudes from be- ginning to end.' Mr. Seward, who afterwards became the Secretary of State under President Lincoln, and one of the foremost men of the Eepublican party, and Mr. Horace Greeley, the defender of State rights and champion of the Democratic party, both warmly sympathised with the Irish movement. Of course, there was a very considerable amount of blustering language talked, but it is not unlikely that some promises of material aid were made to O'Connell in case of insurrection. The British colonies of North America took up the tale. Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and Canada sent large subscriptions to the Eepeal Association. The sympathy of French revolutionists was not wanting. A great public dinner was held in Paris. It was attended by Eadical deputies and the chief representatives of the Eevolution. Ledru EoUin spoke with a recklessness and a violence which called to mind the extravagant rhetoric which orators of the First Eevolution delighted to indulge in, and he was ap- ' Young Ireland, by Sir Charles Gavan Duffy. This interesting book contains one of the best accounts of the Bepeal movement. IRELAND 573 plauded by such men as Arago, Marrast, and Garnier-Pages. On the east of the Ehine there were also many who had much sympathy with the Irish movement. This feehng was specially hvely among the Czechs of Bohemia and the Poles.' The Government and the public began to grow alarmed. Sir Eobert Peel declared in the House of Commons that, much as he deprecated civil war, he thought it preferable to the dismemberment of the empire. This was looked upon by the Irish leaders as a declaration of war; their attitude became more uncompromising and revolutionary. The number of meetings multiplied to an enormous extent, and they were often attended by several thousand persons. A meeting, held at Mullingar immediately after the declara- tion of Sir E. Peel, is said to have been attended by 100,000 people. But perhaps the most striking of all these mon- ster gatherings was the muster of some 500,000 men or more, round the Hill of Tara in Meath, which is associated with so many touching legends and so many solemn memories. It is certain, however, that what roused the enthusiasm of the multitude, was not the prospect of a Parhament sitting in Dublin, but the hope of obtaining from that Assembly agrarian legislation of a very radical character. The speeches made at these meetings became more and more seditious, and obviously the country was drifting fast into rebellion. For a year and a half the movement in Ireland had been allowed to grow, without any real attempt to cope with it. Its energy was increasing and its purpose was gathering strength from day to day, almost from hour to hour. It became clearly necessary to take some vigorous steps, to hinder the progress of sedition. The meetings must be suppressed, if any respect for authority was to be maintained. But what was to be done ? All petty attempts to deal with sedition were sure to fail, as they had failed before, as they always will fail in every country where they ' Springer, Gescliklite Oesterreichs seit dem Wiener Frieden. 574 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA are employed. On the other hand, the timid Minister was evidently afraid of O'Connell, and he had a superstitious dread of putting down by force a meeting, however sediti- ous, which could be described as peaceful and orderly. It was almost universally believed in Ireland that Sir E. Peel would never summon up courage to come to close quarters with O'Connell. Things were going from bad to worse, when at last, most likely through the influence and in con- sequence of the expostulations of the Duke of Wellington, an announcement was made that a pro^^osed monster meeting which was to be held at Clontarf would be suppressed, and a proclamation was issued at Dublin Castle, cautioning her Majesty's subjects against attending Eepeal meetings. The hour had now come to make a stand, and openly rebel or submit. O'Connell chose the latter course, and it was a deadly blow to his power. Had he resisted, the result must have been the same. The rebellion would have been crushed with ease, and it is at least doubtful whether the majority of the people would have sympathised with him in resistance. Immediately after the suppression of the Clontarf meeting, O'Connell and seven of the leading Kepealers were indicted for sedition. They were convicted, and sentenced to various terms of imprisonment, and O'Connell was fined 2,000L O'Connell and the otlier seven traversers were confined in Eichmond Bridewell, the healthiest of the city prisons, pending the issue of his ajjpeal to the House of Lords against the judgment of the Queen's Bench. During the period of his imprisonment, he passed his time in receiving public and private friends. He gave dinner parties every day to not less than thirty persons, and fell in love with a gifted young lady, who might have been his granddaughter,' and who, with great good sense, declined his advances. But the spell of invincibility, that had cemented ' Yomifj Ireland, by Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, p. 531. Ireland. IRELAND 575 O'Connell's power and sway over the masses of the people, was broken by this imprisonment. He, who used to defy and scoff at British rule, was now forced to feel its power, and his downfall unquestionably dates from that period. After an imprisonment of four months, a decision of the House of Lords reversed the judgment of the Irish Court, and O'Connell was liberated. But he was no longer the same power, and his influence was undermined by the younger section of his followers. In February 1847, he made his last speech in the House of Commons ; he then went abroad, and, on May 15, died at Genoa, on his way to Eome. After the death of O'Connell the Repeal agitation Ian- Toung guished for a time under the leadership of his son, John O'Connell. But a new combination sprang up, called the ' Irish Confederation,' and the old Repeal party came to an end. The new party was divided into two sections. One group, which was led by Mr. William Smith O'Brien, was composed of theoretical revolutionists, who thought it wrong to have recourse to arms till all other methods had failed. But there were others, who held that it was by rebellion alone that Ireland could succeed in obtaining complete separation from Great Britain. The apostle of this doctrine was Mr. John Mitchel, a Northern Presbyterian, who published a paper, called the United Irishman, in which he wrote furious articles against England and the English, and preached undisguised and open treason. During this time, clubs were being formed for the purchase of arms, and meetings were held, at which the most inflammatory harangues were delivered. Of course, this state of things could not be ignored by the Government. Mitchel was arrested and tried under the Treason Felony Act which had recently been passed. He was found guilty and sentenced to transportation for fourteen years. The jury that tried him was said to have 576 THE REIGN OF (2UEEN VICTORIA been packed. Undoubtedly it was composed of persons, who desired to maintain the connection between Ireland and Great Britain ; but of Mitchel's guilt there was not the shadow of a doubt. Indeed, he himself admitted and gloried in the acts with which he was charged. Immediately after sentence had been passed, he was removed from the dock and driven to a wharf, where a steamer was ready to receive him. He was no sooner on deck, than the sloop began to move, and quickly ran out to sea. Mitchel was taken to Bermuda, and the insurrectionary movement of 1848 was hopelessly paralysed by his loss. Smith O'Brien, indeed, was not discouraged, and he saw there was now no retreating. The Habeas Corpus Act was suspended. Smith O'Brien and some others dispersed themselves through the country and called on the people to rise. They were met everywhere with the most chilling apathy and indifference. O'Brien, indeed, induced a few peasants to follow him in some aimless wanderings about the counties of Kilkenny and Tipperary, until at last, at a place called Ballingarry, they were dis- persed by the fire of a few policemen. O'Brien, with two or three fugitives, hid for some days in the mountains, but he and most of his chief associates were ultimately arrested, and the rebellion of 1848 came to an end. The Its complete and somewhat ridiculous collapse, like the RigM 6i^d of the Eepeal agitation, showed how very little the League, jj-jg]^ peasant cared for political movements that did not promise him some tangible advantage. While Mr. Smith O'Brien and his friends were thinking of constituting an Irish nation, the Irish tenant was interested in Mr. Sharman Crawford's tenant-right proposals. In 1847, this gentleman In'ought forward a Bill, to extend to the tenants all over Ireland the right enjoyed by the tenantry in Ulster, to sell their interest in their holdings. He failed to carry the Bill, but the agitation in favour of its general principle went on, IRELAND 577 and, in 1850, the present Sir Charles Duffy, who had been a leading Young Irelander, Mr. P. Lucas, editor of the Tablet, and a Mr. MacKnight, an Ulster Presbyterian, took the matter up. A convention was held in August of that year ; it was very largely attended, and resolutions were passed in favour of fixity of tenure, fair rents, and free sale. Nothing showed more clearly than the reception which this pro- gramme met with in Ireland, that the land question was the cause of Irish discontent. The peasantry were now really interested. The demands they made were on the whole moderate and not unreasonable, and, under proper guidance, they would have probably succeeded in realising them. Unfortunately, the question of the Papal Aggression came to the front ; a Catholic Defence Association, supported by the Eoman Catholic bishops, was formed, and the tenant's cause was thrust into the background. The tenant-right agitation, however, went on, but owing to quarrels among the leaders and other reasons, it ultimately collapsed. No public man appeared, who either understood or cared for the Irish question, and the people began to despair of obtaining relief from constitutional action. During all this time, there had actually been growing up a movement which was destined to reach a certain degree of organisation, at the very moment when the chances of Irish land reform seemed at their worst. After the Young Ireland rebellion, in 1848, several of penian- the leaders fled to Paris, and amongst them were three '^°'- very able men— O'Mahony, Doheny and James Stephens. O'Mahony and Stephens fell into the society of persons, who had taken part in the revolutionary movement, in various parts of Europe. They investigated the methods of the Continental revolutionists, and discussed with them a plan for forming a great secret society in America and Ireland, to organise a general uprising against British VOL. I. PI' 578 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA rule. The Young Irelanders of 1848 had made their pre- parations quite openly, and, as a natural consequence, the authorities had no difficulty in dealing with them. But it was obvious that a secret movement in the same direction would give very much more trouble, and would be more difficult to suppress. The idea was approved by several Irishmen of the extreme party, and O'Mahony departed for New York, to organise the society, while Stephens quietly returned to Ireland for the same purpose. Por a consider- able time, the project did not succeed in either country, but the outbreak of the Civil War in America, and the virtual destruction of the hopes of the people in Ireland, to get their grievances removed by political effort, set it on its legs. It was pointed out by the Nationalist press in America, and Join very ably, persuasively, and persistently by John Mitchel, who had escaped from the penal settlements of Australia, that young Irishmen, by joining the United States army, could acquire the military training, requisite to qualify them for taking part in the fight for the freedom of their native land, which must come sooner or later. Wliat was the actual effect of this writing it is difficult now to say ; but there is no question that the Irish brigade, that fought on the side of the North, was almost entirely composed of sworn Fenians, while among the Irish regiments in the Confederate service the Irish revolutionary party was very largely represented. In Ireland, too, the rebel cause began to make progress. Stephens Stephens was incessant in his efforts to organise the society, and particularly successful in the neighbourhood of Skibbereen, to which he paid a visit in May 1858. There he made the acquaintance of a man named Jeremiah Donovan, who shortly assumed the name of O'Donovan, and, as his family belonged to Boss, he adopted the affix of Bossa. Eossa, and has become known to the world as Jeremiah O'Donovan Eossa. On an evening in May 1858, Eossa was IRELAND 579 waited upon by a mysterious person who said tTiat he had something to communicate. He told him that the Irish in America had resolved to send aid to the men at home, for the independence of Ireland, and that, if a certain number of men were sworn to fight, an equal number of arms for those men would be sent over to Ireland, and, besides that, an invading force of some 5,000 to 10,000 men. The arms were to be in the country, before the men were asked to stir ; they were not to be distributed, but were to be kept con- cealed, until the appointed time, when they would be handed to those who were to use them. And as soon as men were enrolled, military instructors were also to be sent to them, to drill them into soldiers.' Eossa was delighted at this news, and set to work the next day, to enrol young men into the society ; and this was the start of Fenianism in Ireland. In the south-western portion of the island, in Cork and in Kerry, the enrolment went on briskly ; but the Catholic clergy soon discovered the conspiracy, and they were determined to intervene at once and severely. The Eight Eev. Dr. Moriarty, Bishop of Kerry, was especially strong on the necessity of at once dealing with it. The Irish Executive was also on the alert and began to take steps for its suppression. On December 3, 1858, a Viceregal proclamation appeared, declaring that there was public danger ; and a few days afterwards, Eossa and several of his companions were arrested. A special commission was issued for the counties of Cork and Kerry, and, in March 1859, a man named Daniel O'Sullivan, a national school teacher, was put upon his trial. The jury disagreed, and the further trial was postponed. At the next Kerry assizes, O'Sullivan was found guilty, and sentenced to ten years' penal servitude. At the trial of the other prisoners in Cork, Eossa and his companions pleaded ' Sullivan, JVeio Ireland, p. 201. p p 2 58o THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA guilty. They took this course in consequence of an under- standing with the Crown, that the conviction would be merely recorded, that they would receive no punishment, and that their comrade O'SuUivan should also be liberated. In ac- cordance with this arrangement, the prisoners were released, to appear when called upon, and 0' Sullivan also was restored to freedom. This prosecution was altogether carried on in a most injudicious and absurd way. It served as a most useful advertisement to the enterprise of Stephens. The progress of the secret movement was further demonstrated very soon afterwards. One of the 1848 rebels, Terence McManus, had died in California, and it was determined to send his body to Ireland, the American Fenians being of opinion that a public funeral in his honour would ad- vance the movement. The demonstration took place in Dublm on Sunday, December 10, 1861 ; it was estimated that over ten thousand young men marched in military order, and the sympathising spectators seemed to be as many more. This evidence of revolutionary feeling astonished the authorities and law-abiding citizens of Ireland. At the close of the Civil War in America, in March 1866, the con- spiracy on both sides of the Atlantic was in a state of the highest efficiency. So perfect seemed to be its organisa- tion, that Stephens fixed the rising to come off at the close of that year, or early in the following spring ; and, as the American armies were disbanded, the Irish-American officers set out for Ireland to take part in the preparations. The Irish Government, however, were kept accurately informed of what was going on. The movements of the Fenian con- spirators were well known to them, so that, on September 18, the Dublin poHce took possession of the office of the Irish People, the Fenian organ, and some of the best known leaders were arrested. Stephens himself escaped on that occasion, but was finally captured, with two other persons, in IRELAND 581 a suburb of Dublin, on November 11. The arrests did not have much effect on the fortunes of the conspiracy. Stephens had al-n-ays maintained, that there was no gaol in Ireland from whence he could not escape. He openly said the Government could not detain him in custody, and he made good his boast by escaping from Eichmond Bridewell, about three weeks after his arrest. The fact was, that some of the prison officers had been secretly secured as sworn members of the society of which he was the head, and a man named BresHn, who was hospital superintendent, and another named Byrne, the night watchman, enabled him to leave the prison in the early morning of Saturday, November 28, and the affair was managed so skilfully, that they were not detected. Stephens remained in Dublin for some three months, and then left for Paris. Many of his companions in Ireland were not so lucky. On November 27 their trials commenced, and in almost every case they were convicted and sentenced to imprisonment or to a lengthy term of penal servitude. The result of these trials did not deter the conspirators. In February, 1866, the Ministers of the Crown found it necessary to apply to Parliament for power to suspend the Habeas Corpus Act, and to enable them to arrest treasonable persons at their discretion. "Wholesale arrests followed this measure, and before long there were as many as 1,200 persons in prison. This action of the Government was a great blow to the conspiracy, and signs of its disintegration began to be manifest in America. Stephens crossed the Atlantic, and found the Fenian organisation divided into two parties. One, under a Colonel Eoberts, favoured a raid' upon Canada, instead of sending assistance to the rising in Ireland, and the first-mentioned attempt was actually made in May 1866. Six hundred Fenians, led by an Irish- American officer, crossed the frontier near Buffalo, but only speedily to retreat after a skirmish with a Canadian regiment. 582 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA Suppres- sion of Fenian- ism. Stephens, dumig this visit to New York, found it utterly hopeless to organise efficient assistance for rebellion in Ireland, and he at last gave up the project in despair. This conduct, of course, annoyed many of those who had followed him so long, and they determined to go on with the project which he had abandoned. All these men were Irish- American officers, but one of them had long been in the pay of the British Government. This person was named Corydon, and he enabled the Irish Executive to anticipate the Fenians in every one of their attempts at rebellion. In January, 1867, the leaders arrived in Manchester, and they determined to commence operations. At a council held in Dublin, February 12 was fixed upon for the rising ; but sub- sequently it was decided to postpone the xaroceedings till March 5.' The countermand did not, however, arrive in time to prevent the Fenian captain who was in command at Cahir- civeen from moving on the first day named. Accordingly, on the night of February ] 1, the rebels in West Kerry rose. They captured a mounted orderly, sacked a coastguard station, and ultimately dispersed. The same evening, crowds of Irishmen began to assemble in Chester. They lounged about the city, and were gradually being recruited by comrades from the great centres of population in Lan- cashire. The fact was, a Fenian council in Liverpool had resolved to attack Chester Castle, and take possession of the arms which were known to be stored there. The railway rolling-stock was then to be secured, the telegraph wu-es cut, and trains of armed men run to Holyhead, where they were to seize all the steamers, proceed to Dublin, and con- tinue the insurrection in Ireland. The authorities, how- ever, were informed by Corydon of the plot, and they took such precautions, that it was perfectly plain to the Fenians who had come to Chester, that their enterprise was known. ' Sullivan's New Ireland,, p. 274. IRELAND 583 They immediately began to disperse, and some left for Dublin. Those who went to Ireland were arrested the moment they went ashore. The night of March 5 was still held as the time for the general rising. During that night, some assemblages of armed men under Irish-American officers took place in the vicinity of Dublin and Cork, and in parts of the counties of Limerick, Tipperary, and Louth, but in every case they were without difficulty dispersed by the constabvilary. That, after so much preparation and so much talk, the Fenian rising should have been such a failure as it was, shows beyond all doubt how little real enthusiasm or intensity of feeling there was among the Irish at home for the overthrow of the rule of Great Britain in Ireland. The Fenian conspiracy wrought little more evil than The the sufferings it broiight upon some of its own members, Buie for it is an indisputable fact that its early record shows an ^°^t" ahnost entire absence of crime, and its leaders never en- couraged anything like an attack upon property. After the Fenian excitement had subsided, the Home Eule movement, under the leadership of Mr. Isaac Butt, commenced. Be- yond, however, a few debates on the abstract question, nothing was done to further this cause. As a matter of fact, the people did not take the matter up warmly, and the Fenian leaders had no difficulty in ultimately bringing it to an end. At the close of his life, Mr. Butt resigned the leadership of the movement, and died in May 1879. While this was going on, the Fenian conspiracy existed, but in a very torpid condition. The first batch of the Fenians were amnestied unconditionally, in March 1869. Three of these men, on the very day of their arrival in Dublin, met some Fenian organisers, and arranged to re- organise the Fenian Brotherhood. A convention was sub- sequently held, the new constitution was accepted, and from that time to this, the Fenian conspiracy has been controlled 584 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA by the Supreme Council of the Irish Eepubhc. The or- ganisation is now, and has been for several years past, affihated to the Clan-na-Gael, a secret society in the United States. As regards successful insurrection, the revived Fenian organisation has had as little to boast of as its predecessor. Its energy seems to have been chiefly directed to guard against treachery in its own ranks. The new Fenian organisation pressed forward, to obtain an amnesty for those who had been convicted in the Fenian trials of 1866-67 ; and although they would not give coun- tenance openly to an agitation which looked for the removal of grievances to the Parliament at Westmmster, they gave passive toleration to the Home Eule movement, principally on account of the respect which they entertained for its leader, Mr. Butt, and for his successful management of the amnesty agitation. But it was not long before the Home Eule movement wore out their patience ; they resolved to make an end of it, and to substitute Mr. Parnell for Mr. Butt in the leadership of the Irish party in Parliament. Mr. Parnell made his first appearance as a public man as candidate for the representation of the county of Dublin, durmg the election of 1874, when he was not successful. He did not, at that time, make a great impression. But he was known in private to be a man of very advanced views and of much firmness of character, and the Fenian party felt that they were pretty safe, if they placed him in the position which had been occupied hitherto by Mr. Butt. And they were not disappointed. In January 1878, Michael Davitt was released from j)enal servitude ; he soon after met John Devoy, and together they concocted a plan, by which they hoped to secure the support of the peasantry for the Fenian cause. They did so, by raising the land question and placing it in the forefront of their programme. They set on foot an agitation which has had for its watchword : IRELAND 585 ' The Land for the People.' The Fenian party undertook to support and sustain it, morally, financially, and physi- cally ; but of course only as a means to an end — the separa- tion of Ireland from Great Britain. On this latter point, Devoy was particularly explicit. He laid it down distinctly that the common object of the new league was the esta- bhshment of the complete national independence of Ireland, and the severance of all political connection with England. As far as the Fenians were concerned, this was a new de- parture. They had always been hostile to constitutional agitation, in every shape and form. But they had tried re- belhon, and they had failed. They were now willing to make an experiment and adopt a new system of attack. Devoy returned to America, where he enlisted the co- operation of the trustees of the Fenian Skirmishing Fund, which had been collected, chiefly by O'Donovan Eossa, in New York, during the years 1875-77, for the purpose of suborning dynamite outrages and wholesale arson in British cities. A sum of money was voted out of the fund, to set the agitation going. The new movement began in the county of Mayo in 1879, and no one can possibly doubt that its real strength is the desire of the peasants to possess the land. During the reign of the Queen, notwithstanding the Material many ckcumstances which have occurred to hinder the of ire- material progress of Ireland, it is nevertheless true that her revenue has increased to a remarkable extent, if not more than any other part of the United Kingdom. This growth of revenue is particularly striking during the last thirty years. The gross public revenue of Great Britain, in 1850, was 47,818, 573L,' and the revenue of Ireland for that year was 4,414,433^^ Now the gross revenue in Ireland, in 1884, was 7,770,626/., showing an increase of 76 per ' Thorn's Directory, 1853, p. 98. ' Ibid. 1886, p. 673. 586 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA cent, oyer the revenue of thirty years ago. If the revenue of Great Britain had increased in that same proportion, it ought to have been, in 1884, 84,160,724Z. ; whereas the actual amount was only 82,566, 095L, thus showing a deficiency of 1,594,629/., or nearly 2 per cent.' But the increase of wealth in the community must be relatively greater than that indicated by the growth of the revenue ; because the consumption of duty-j)aid articles is necessarily confined within limits, while the increase of wealth is not. This is shown by the amount of deposits and private balances in Irish joint-stock banks, at different portions of the reign. In 1852, these deposits amounted in round numbers to about 10,000,000L ; in 1885 they were 29,000,000/., and this notwithstanding the failure of a bank in the South of Ireland, and the run upon banks in other parts of the country. So that we see the enormous amount of increase, in one single item of wealth in Ireland, of 172 per cent, in a period of thirty-three years. Moreover, it must be remarked that, for several years past, there have been stagnant trade and falling prices, and were it not for this depression, and for the still more mischievous agitation which has unsettled everythmg in the country, there can be no doubt that these deposits would be far greater than they are. The savings banks, which are the popular banks with the poorer classes of depositors, tell the same story. In the year 1849 there was only 1,200,000L deposited in the savings banks. In 1885 there was 4,800,000/., or an increase of over 250 per cent. ; and not only have the aggregate deposits in these banks increased to this extent, but the number of depositors has increased also. The average amount of each depositor forty years ago was 27/. ' Union Vindicated, p. 44. Published by the Irish Loyal and Patriotic Union (1886). IRELAND 587 It is now over 40Z., showing an increase of 40 per cent., or nearly one half. In 1862, the Post Office Savings Banks were opened. They have attracted small depositors to the number 124,973, who, in 1884, had an average balance of Yll. 16s. M. standmg to the credit of each depositor. • If we take these two classes of savings banks, we shall find no fewer than 177,628 depositors in 1884, with an average balance of 24L 10s. due to each, as against 49,554 in 1851 with an average balance of 27L 3s. Thus we have, in thirty-three years, an increase of 258 per cent, in the number of deposi- tors ; an increase of 222 per cent, in the aggregate amount lodged, an average decrease only of %. 13s. in the balance due to each depositor, which is, of course, the result of the greater number of small depositors, called into existence by the Post Office Savings Banks. Thirty-three years ago, more- over, there was only 1 person in 132 of the total population of Ireland, who was a depositor in a savings bank, whereas now about 1 in 28 has become a depositor. Surely, no greater evidence can be given, not only of the prosperity, but of the thrift and prudence of the Irish people. It has often been remarked in the history of mankind, that there is no better indication of the upward movement of barbarism to civilisation than the dwellings of the people ; and in this respect the last returns, in 1881, compared with those of 1841, show a marvellous change for the better. The Census Commissioners of 1841 divided the dwellings of the people iato four classes. The fourth class comprised all mud cabins, having only one room ; the third class consisted of edifices of a somewhat better description, but built of mud, having from two to four rooms and windows ; the second class were ordinary good farmhouses, having from five to nine rooms and windows ; and the last class included houses of a still better description. ' Union Vindicated, p. 47. S88 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA The following table shows the house accommodation in the years 1841, 1861, 1871, 1881 : Ireland | 1841 1801 1871 1881 First class Second class . Third class Fourth class . Total 40,080 264,184 533,297 491,278 55,416 360,698 489,668 89,374 60,919 387,660 357,126 155,675 66,727 422,241 384,475 40,665 1,328,839 995,156 961,380 914,108 It will be found, moreover, that for every 100 families who dwell in mud cabins now, there were more than 700 at the commencement of the reign. The number of persons, living in the third class of houses, is also enormously dimin- ished. There are nearly double the number of families, living in second class houses now, to what there were in 1841, and for every 100 families living in the first class in 1851, there were nearly 250 thirty years after.' With regard to the education of the people, the facts are perhaps still more striking. The total number of persons of five years old and upwards in 1841, who were unable to read and write, was 3,766,066, or more than half the population. In 1881, the proportion fell to one quarter, showing a decrease, during the period between 1841 and 1881, of over 50 per cent. That is to say, in other words, the percentage of those who could read and write advanced from 28 per cent, in 1841 to 59 per cent, in 1881. In the year of her Majesty's accession, viz. 1837, the number of schools in Ireland was 1,384. The Parliamentary grant given was 50,000L The number of pupils receiving education was 169,548. In 1884 the number of schools had grown to 7,832, the number of pupils educated in them to 1,089,079, and the Parliamentary grant in their aid had grown to the enormous figure of 756,027^ The university question has been dealt with by the establish- ' Tine, Union Vindicated, published by the Irish Loyal and Patriotic Union,, pp. 60, 61. IRELAND 589 ment of the Eoyal University, an examining body furnished with a certain number of endowed Fellows. This, however, cannot be considered a final settlement. The educational system fostered by it is grievously wanting in breadth and depth. It would not be right to omit all reference to the progress of shipbuilding and of the linen trade of Ulster. The linen trade has attained very large proportions. Ship- building has been successfully revived in Belfast, where splendid ocean steamers, not inferior to those built anywhere else — on the Thames or on the Clyde — are turned out. The manufacture of woollen goods has been established in several places in the provinces, and Irish friezes and Irish tweeds now compete successfully with the production of the English and the Scotch looms. The most unsatisfactory institution which exists in Ireland has been the railway system, which, in spite of the warnings of Mr. Drummond, has been allowed to grow up. Nevertheless, even here there has been a gxeat progress. The total length of metal in 1849 was 428 miles. The mileage open now is over 2,500. The share capital, actually paid up on these railways, amounts to 25,703,097Z. Of this 16,609,645/. is in ordinary shares, and 9,093,452/. in pre- ference ; and of this sum at least 20,000,000/. is held by Irish proprietors. It seems then, that in spite of misfortunes and in spite of agitation, the progress of Ireland has been great, and the elements of future progress are there. To set the country once more started on the path of progress nothing is necessary but the restoration of confidence. IV During the fifty years of her Majesty's reign, great as conoiu- have been the changes in every part of the world, it may safely be asserted that nowhere have they been greater and deeper than in Ireland. All the prominent evils in the 590 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA political state of the country have been removed. The law under which legal provision is made for the poor has not only rendered impossible those scenes of shame and horror, so often described by writers on Ireland fifty years ago ; it has also laid the basis of a system of local government, capable of indefinite expansion. Since the passing of the Municipal Eeform Act, the corporate property of cities and towns can no longer be administered for the benefit of a favoured few. No civil disabilities now press upon the Irish Catholics. The burden of tithe has been removed. The church of a small minority no longer occupies a place of privilege. When Queen Victoria came to the throne. Catholics had no power to dispose of landed property, by deed or will, for charitable purposes. The Charitable Bequests Act, which was passed in the seventh and eighth years of her reign, redressed this grievance. Eeligious liberty and religious equality now exist to the fullest extent, and the Eoman Catholic Church especially enjoys a far larger measure of freedom in Ireland, than in any country which professes the Eoman Catholic faith. But the greatest change which has taken place in Ireland during the Queen's reign, is the alteration in the status of the occupiers of the soil. In 1887 the Irish tenant was absolutely at the mercy of the landlord or his agent, or, worse still, of the tithe proctor. His life was full of care, and his position often not so good as that of the slaves who laboured in the cane-fields of South Carolina. Now there is no hher of land in any European country who enjoys privi- leges anything like so great and wide-reaching as the Legis- lature has bestowed on the Irish tenant-farmer. But although these great reforms have been carried, and no grievance of any consequence now presses on the Irish people, the tendency to disturbance seems not to have materially diminished, and its continuance calls for an ex- IRELAND 591 planation. I am quite satisfied there are two causes which are responsible for the continuance of disorder in Ireland, and these causes are to some extent at least interdependent. The first is the dual ownership of the soil, which always existed in fact, and which has been confirmed and conse- crated by the Land Act of 1881^ Now it is an undeniable fact that, wherever dual ownership in land prevails, con- fusion and disturbance invariably accompany it. Where- ever the peasant has a sense of property in his holding, he always regards any charges upon it, for the benefit of the landlord, with the very strongest feelings of repulsion, and the greater his interest in the land, the more bitterly he resents the claims of the landlord. In countries or districts where the landlord is considered to be absolute owner of the soil, the peasants never look, even on exorbitant rent, with the same bitterness with which they regard the imposition of a very moderate charge, for the benefit of an individual, whom they consider an idle sleeping partner in their business. This is strikingly illustrated in French history. At the outbreak of the Eevolution, it was Justin those provinces, where the peasantry were the most independent and had the sense of ownership, that the revolutionary movement met with the heartiest support, and where the cultivating classes con- stituted themselves a voluntary police, to prevent the escape from France of the enemies of the Eevolution, and to assist Eobespierre in sending them to the guillotine. On the other hand, in Brittany and Anjou, where the peasant had no sense of proprietorship, the cultivating classes stood by the ancient institutions, and offered a stubborn and heroic resistance to revolutionary doctrines and the Jacobin army. The Irish farmer now, as far as his interest in the land is concerned, is in much the same position as the French pea- sant in Picardy or Limousin was on the eve of the Eevolution. He considers himself the principal partner in the business 592 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA of working his farm, and regards the other person who has an interest with him in the land as an incubus and a nuisance. The Irish landlord has been deprived of all possible means of improving what was his estate. He cannot inter- fere practically with the mode of cultivation adopted by his tenants, and all the most valuable and useful rights of ownership have been taken away from him. From the point of view of the tenant, he is neither an imposing nor a profitable institution. He is simply looked upon as a man, whose hand is in every man's pocket, and against whom every man's hand should be raised. The fact is, then, that this Irish land question never will be settled, until states- men arise who will deal with it boldly, generously, and on scientific principles, similar to those which lay at the foun- dation of all the agrarian reforms carried out in the diffe- rent states of Germany and in the various provinces of the Austrian Empire. It is surely worth while to attempt this. The Irish agrarian legislation has been the occasion of the misery and crime, of the bitter hatred, envy, and malice, of the outrages, murders, conspiracies, and base treachery, which throw such a lurid light on Irish history. No one has benefited by it. Noble and peasant have each in turn suffered from it. When one thinks of the progeny of evil it has produced in Ireland, memory recalls the phantoms which iBneas saw when he entered the kingdom of night : — Vestibulum ante ipsum primisque in faucibus Orci Luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curse ; Pallentesque habitant Morbi, tristisque Senectus, Et Metus, et malesuada Fames, ae turpis Egestas, Terribiles visu form£e, Letumque, Labosque. Sorrow, disease, penury, hunger, the great counsellor of ill, aimless toil, cheerless old age, and miserable death were the lot of the Irish peasant under the old land system. However much his position may be improved now, he cannot forget IRELAND 593 the dark and evil past ; and it is not possible for him, even if other instincts in human nature did not hinder it, to hve on peaceful and friendly terms with the powerless person who is continually asking him for a share in his profits under the name of rent, and whom he regards as the representative of a system and a cause which have brought untold wretched- ness to his class. The second reason of the contmuance of trouble in Ire- land is want of government. During the last fifty years, the governmental system, based on the ascendency of a class, and on privileges accorded to a favoured religious sect, has been completely undermined ; the edifice is now a crumbling ruin. But, though the old system has been de- stroyed, little or nothing has been done to replace it. The great need of the country is the establishment of a firm, impar- tial, and scientific administration. Unfortunately, firm and resolute government in Ireland has hitherto almost always been associated with mere repressive measures of police. To enforce the law, to repress and punish outrage and crime, is of course a prime function of government. But repressive measures alone will not suffice to restore confidence, without which there can be no permanent improvement in the con- ditions of Irish life. The duties of government in Ireland are many and complicated. The political and social condition of the country re- sembles that of France on the eve of the 18 Brumaire, and, like France, after the crimes of the Terror and the weakness and pedantry of the Directory, it has to be taken vigor- ously in hand and thoroughly reorganised. The powers of corporations, the duties of boards of guardians, the functions and composition of presentment sessions, the mode of appointment and prerogatives of grand juries, should all undergo revision. The machinery for the ad- ministration of justice in the inferior courts, no longer VOL. I. . Q Q 594 THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA suited to the exigencies of the times, should be remodelled. The railway system should be under State control, and be worked and developed for the benefit of the whole nation. The fisheries, the trades, and minor mdustries require the intelligent assistance of public authority. In a word, the laissez faire policy will have to be given up, and with it the whole false and narrow conception of the State, and of the nature and scope of the duties of government, upon which it rests. But if it be conceded that, what is called State interference, to a very great extent is a necessity in the present condition of Ireland — and this is admitted even by persons who have the greatest general belief in the doctrine of laissez faire — then it is obvious that such interference should take place in a scientific and methodi- cal way, and this cannot be accomplished except by a centralised administration of highly trained and impartial officials. If her Majesty, who has seen the destruction of the old government of Ireland, should live to witness the establishment of a powerful and centralised admini- stration in that country, with wide attributes suited to the requirements of modern life, and carrying on the daily government with impartial firmness and intelligent sym- pathy, it is safe to predict that her reign will be remembered m Irish history for its solid and enduring splendour. The evil spirits which have so long tormented the land will vanish, confidence will be restored, enterprise encouraged, the interests created by remedial legislation must become daily more powerful, and no Irish agitator will find it possible to raise a cry against the Legislative Union. EOWLAND BlENNBEHASSETT. Spottisuvode . ^vo. Is. 6rf. MORE LEAVES EROM THE JOURNAL OF A LIFE IN THE HtGHLANDS, from 1862 to 1882. "Witli Portraits and 'Wocdout Illustrations. Fourth Edition. 8vo. 10s. 6(i. *^,* Popular Edition. With Portraits and Woodcut Illustrations. Fcp. 8to. 25. 6d. LIFE OF H.R.H. THE PRINCE CONSORT. By Sir Theodoee Martin, K.C.B. Illustrated with Portraits and Views. In 5 vols, demy 8vo. I85. each. *^* Also a ' People's Edition,' in 1 Volume, hound in cloth, 4s. 6d. ,- or in 6 Par-ts, price 6d. each. Cloth Cases for Binding, Is. each. PARLETINGS WITH CERTAIN PEOPLE OP IMPORTANCE IN THEIR DAT. 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