 Chapter 16 Mr. Disraeli, Part 1 The speaker who rose into such sudden prominence and something like the position of a party leader was one of the most remarkable men the politics of the rain have produced. Perhaps if the word remarkable were to be used in its most strict sense and without particular reference to praise it would be just to describe him as emphatically the most remarkable man that the political controversies of the present rain have called into power. Mr. Disraeli entered the House of Commons as conservative member for Maidston in 1837. He was then about thirty-two years of age. He had previously made repeated and unsuccessful attempts to get a seat in Parliament. He began his political career as an advanced liberal and had come out under the auspices of Daniel O'Connell and Joseph Hume. He had described himself as one who desired to fight the battle of the people and who was supported by neither of the aristocratic parties. He failed again and again and apparently he began to think that it would be a wiser thing to look for the support of one or other of the aristocratic parties. He had before this given indications of remarkable literary talent if indeed it might not be called genius. His novel Vivienne Grey published when he was in his twenty-third year was suffused with extravagance, affectation, and mere animal spirits, but it was full of the evidences of a fresh and brilliant ability. The son of a distinguished literary man, Mr. Disraeli had probably at that time only a young literary man's notions of politics. It is not necessary to charge him with deliberate inconsistency because from having been a radical, of the most advanced views, he became by an easy leap a romantic Tory. It is not likely that at the beginning of his career he had any very clear ideas in connections with the words Tory or Radical. He wrote a letter to Mr. W. J. Fox already described as an eminent unitarian minister and rising politician in which he declared that his fort was sedition. Most clever young men who are not born to fortune and who feel drawn into political life fancy too that their fort is sedition. When young Disraeli found that sedition and even advanced radicalism did not do much to get him into Parliament, he probably began to ask himself whether his liberal convictions were so deeply rooted as to call for the sacrifice of a career. He thought the question over and doubtless found himself crystallizing fast into an advocate of the established order of things. In a purely personal light this was a fortunate conclusion for the ambitious young politician. He could not then have anticipated the extraordinary change which was to be wrought in the destiny and the composition of the Tory party by the eloquence, the arguments, and the influence of two men who at that time were almost absolutely unknown. Mr. Cobbden stood for the first time as a candidate for a seat in Parliament in the year that saw Mr. Disraeli elected for the first time and Mr. Cobbden was unsuccessful. Cobbden had to wait four years before he found his way into the House of Commons. He might did not become a Member of Parliament until some two years later still. It was, however, the anti-corn-law agitation which by conquering Peel and making him its advocate brought about the memorable split in the Conservative Party and carried away from the cause of the country's squires nearly all the men of talent who had hitherto been with them. A new or middle party of so-called Peelites was formed. Graham, Gladstone, Sidney Herbert, Cardwell and other men of equal mark or promise joined it and the country party was left to seek for leadership in the earnest spirit and very moderate talents of Lord George Bentink. Mr. Disraeli then found his chance. His genius was such that it must have made a way for him anywhere and in spite of any competition, but it is not too much to say that his career of political advancement might have been very different if in place of finding himself the only man of first class ability in the party to which he had attached himself he had been a Member of a party which had Palmerston and Russell and Gladstone and Graham for its captains and Cobden and Bright for its habitual supporters. This, however, could not have been in Mr. Disraeli's thoughts when he changed from radicalism to conservatism. No trace of the progress of conversion can be found in his speeches or his writings. It is not unreasonable to infer that he took up radicalism at the beginning because it looked the most picturesque and romantic thing to do and that only as he found it fail to answer his personal object did it occur to him that he had, after all, more affinity with the cause of the country gentlemen. The reputation he had made for himself before his going into Parliament was of a nature rather calculated to retard than to advance a political career. He was looked upon almost universally as an eccentric and audacious adventurer who was kept from being dangerous by the affectations and absurdities of his conduct. He dressed in the extremist style of preposterous phoppery. He talked a blending of cynicism and sentiment. He had made the most reckless statements. His boasting was almost outrageous. His rhetoric of abuse was even in that free-spoken time astonishingly vigorous and unrestrained. Even his literary efforts did not then receive anything like the appreciation they have obtained since. At that time they were regarded rather as audacious whimsicalities, the fantastic freaks of a clever youth than as genuine works of a certain kind of art. Even when he did get into the House of Commons his first experience there was little calculated to give him much hope of success. Reading over his first speech now it seems hard to understand why it should have excited so much laughter and derision, why it should have called forth nothing but laughter and derision. It is a clever speech, full of point and odd conceits, very like and style and structure many of the speeches which in later years won for the same orator the applause of the House of Commons. But Mr. Disraeli's reputation had preceded him into the House. Up to this time his life had been, says an unfriendly but not an unjust critic, an almost uninterrupted career of follies and defeats. The House was probably in a humor to find the speech ridiculous because the general impression was that the man himself was ridiculous. Mr. Disraeli's appearance too no doubt contributed something to the contemptuous opinion which was formed of him on his first attempt to address the assembly which he afterwards came to rule. He is described by an observer as having been attired in a bottle green frock coat and a west cut of white of the dick squibbler pattern the front of which exhibited a network of glittering chains, large fancy patterned pantaloons and a black tie above which no shirt collar was visible completed the outward man. Accountants lividly pale set out by a pair of intensely black eyes and a broad but not very high forehead overhung by clustering ringlets of coal-black hair which combed away from the right temple fell in bunches of well-oiled small ringlets over his left cheek. His manner was intensely theatric, his gestures were wild and extravagant. In all this there is not much, however, to surprise those who knew Mr. Disraeli in his greater days. His style was always extravagant, his rhetoric constantly degenerated into vulgarity. His whole manner was that of the typical foreigner whom English people regard as the illustration of all that is vehement and unquiet. But whatever the cause, it is certain that on the occasion of his first attempt Mr. Disraeli made not merely a failure but even a ludicrous failure. One who heard the debate thus describes the manner in which baffled by the persistent laughter and other interruptions of the noisy house, the orator withdrew from the discussion defeated but not discouraged. At last, losing his temper which until now he had preserved in a wonderful manner, he paused in the midst of a sentence, and looking the liberals indignantly in the face, raised his hands, and opening his mouth as widely as its dimensions would admit, said in a remarkably loud and almost terrific tone, I have begun several times, many things, and I have often succeeded at last. I, sir, and though I sit down now, the time will come when you will hear me. This final prediction is so like what a manufacturer of biography would make up for a hero, and is so like what was actually said in one or two other remarkable instances, that a reader might be excused for doubting its authenticity in this case. But nothing can be more certain than the fact that Mr. Disraeli did bring to a close his maiden speech in the House of Commons with this bold prediction. The words are to be found in the reports published next morning in all the daily papers of the Metropolis. It was thus that Mr. Disraeli began his career as a parliamentary orator. It is a curious fact that on that occasion almost the only one of his hearers who seems to have admired the speech was Sir Robert Peele. It is by his phallipic against Peele that Disraeli is now about to convince the House of Commons that the man they laughed at before is a great parliamentary orator. Disraeli was not in the least discouraged by his first failure. A few days after it he spoke again, and he spoke three or four times more during his first session. But he had learned some wisdom by rough experience, and he did not make his oratorical flight so long or so ambitious as that first attempt. Then he seemed after a while as he grew more familiar with the House to go in for being paradoxical for making himself always conspicuous for taking up positions and expounding political creeds which other men would have avoided. It is very difficult to get any clear idea of what his opinions were about this period of his career if he had any political opinions at all. Our impression is that he really had no opinions at that time, that he was only in quest of opinions. He spoke on subjects of which it was evident that he knew nothing and sometimes he managed by the sheer force of a strong intelligence to discern the absurdity of economic sophistries which had baffled men of far greater experience and which indeed to judge from his personal declarations and political conduct afterwards he allowed before long to baffle and bewilder himself. More often, however, he talked with a grandiose and irracular vagueness which seemed to imply that he alone of all men saw into the very heart of the question but that he of all men must not yet reveal what he saw. At his best of times Mr. Disraeli was an example of that class of being whom Macaulay declares to be so rare that Lord Chatham appears to him almost a solitary illustration of it, a great man, a real genius and of a brave, lofty and commanding spirit without simplicity of character. What Macaulay goes on to say of Chatham will bear quotation two. He was an actor in the closet, an actor at council, an actor in parliament, and even in private society he could not lay aside his theatrical tones and attitudes. Mr. Disraeli was at one period of his career so affected that he positively affected affectation. Yet he was a man of undoubted genius. He had a spirit that never quailed under stress of any circumstances, however disheartening. He commanded as scarcely any statesman since Chatham himself had been able to do, and it would be unjust and absurd to deny to a man gifted with qualities like these the possession of a lofty nature. For some time Mr. Disraeli then seemed resolved to make himself remarkable, to be talked about. He succeeded admirably. He was talked about. All the political and satirical journals of the day had a great deal to say about him. He is not spoken of in terms of praise as a rule. Neither has he much praise to shower about him. Anyone who looks back to the political controversies of that time will be astounded at the language which Mr. Disraeli addresses to his opponents of the press, in which his opponents address to him. In some cases it is no exaggeration to say that a squabble between two Billingsgate fish-women in our day would have good chance of ending without the use of words and phrases so coarse as those which then passed between this brilliant literary man and some of his assailants. We have all read the history of the controversy between him and O'Connell, and the savage ferocity of the language with which O'Connell denounced him as a miscreant, as a wretch, a liar, whose life is a living lie, and, finally, as the air at law of the blasphemous thief who died impenitent on the cross. Mr. Disraeli begins his reply by describing himself as one of those who will not be insulted even by a yahoo without chastising it. And afterwards, in a letter to one of Mr. O'Connell's sons, declares his desire to express the utter scorn in which I hold his, Mr. O'Connell's, character, and the disgust with which his conduct inspires me, and informs the son that I shall take every opportunity of holding your father's name up to public contempt, and I fervently pray that you or someone of your blood may attempt to avenge the inextinguishable hatred with which I shall pursue his existence. In reading of a controversy like this between two public men, we seem to be transported back to an age having absolutely nothing in common with our own. It appears almost impossible to believe that men still active in political life were active in political life then. Yet this is not the most astonishing specimen of the sort of controversy in which Mr. Disraeli became engaged in his younger days. Nothing perhaps that the political literature of the time preserves could exceed the ferocity of his controversial duel with O'Connell. But there are many examples of the rhetoric of abuse to be found in the journals of the time which would far less bear exposure to the gaze of the fastidious public of our day. The dueling system survived then, and for long after, and Mr. Disraeli always professed himself ready to sustain with his pistol anything that his lips might have given utterance to, even in the reckless heat of controversy. The social temper which in our time insists that the first duty of a gentleman is to apologize for an unjust or offensive expression used in debate was unknown then. Perhaps it could hardly exist to any great extent in the company of the dueling system. When a man's withdrawal of an offensive expression might be imputed to a want of physical courage, the courtesy which impels a gentleman to atone for a wrong is not likely to triumph very often over the fear of being accounted a coward. If anyone doubts the superiority of manners as well as of morals which comes to our milder ways, he has only to read a few specimens of the controversies of Mr. Disraeli's earlier days when men who aspired to be considered great political leaders thought it not unbecoming to call names like a costumonger and to swagger like Bobadil or the copper captain. Mr. Disraeli kept himself well up to the level of his time in the calling of names and the swaggering, but he was making himself remarkable in political controversy as well. In the House of Commons he began to be regarded as a dangerous adversary in debate. He was wonderfully ready with retort and sarcasm, but during all the earlier part of his career he was thought of only as a freelance. He had praised Peel when Peel said something that suited him or when to praise Peel seemed likely to wound someone else, but it was during the debates on the abolition of the Corn Laws that he first rose to the fame of a great debater and a powerful parliamentary orator. We use the words parliamentary orator with the purpose of conveying a special qualification. He is a great parliamentary orator who can employ the kind of eloquence and argument which tell most readily on Parliament. But it must not be supposed that the great parliamentary orator is necessarily a great orator in the wider sense. Some of the men who made the greatest successes as parliamentary orators have failed to win any genuine reputations as orators of the broader and higher school. The fame of Charles Townsend's champagne speech has vanished, effanescent almost, as the bubbles from which it derived its inspiration and its name. No one now reads many even of the fragments preserved for us of those speeches of Sheridan which those who heard them declared to have surpassed all ancient and modern eloquence. The House of Commons often found Burke Dull and the speeches of Burke have passed into English literature secure of a perpetual place there. Mr. Disraeli never succeeded in being more than a parliamentary orator and probably would not have cared to be anything more. But even at this comparatively early date and while he had still the reputation of being a whimsical, self-confident and feather-headed adventurer, he soon won for himself the name of one who could hold his own and retort and ensarcasm against any antagonist. The days of the more elaborate oratory were going by, and the time was coming when the pungent epigram, the sparkling paradox, the rattling attack, the vivid repartee, would count for the most attractive part of eloquence with the House of Commons. Mr. Disraeli was exactly the man to succeed under the new conditions of parliamentary eloquence. Hither too he had wanted a cause to inspire and justify audacity and on which to employ would affect his remarkable resources of sarcasm and rhetoric. Hither too he had addressed an audience out of sympathy with him for the most part. Now he was about to become the spokesman of a large body of men who chafing and almost choking with wrath were not capable of speaking effectively for themselves. Mr. Disraeli did therefore the very wisest thing he could do when he launched at once into a savage, personal attack upon Sir Robert Peel. The speech abounds in passages of audaciously powerful sarcasm. I am not one of the converts, Mr. Disraeli said. I am perhaps a member of a fallen party. To the opinions which I have expressed in this House in favour of protection I still adhere. They sent me to this House, and if I had relinquished them I should have relinquished my seat also. That was the keynote of the speech. He denounced Sir Robert Peel not for having changed his opinions, but for having retained a position which enabled him to betray his party. He compared Peel to the Lord High Admiral of the Turkish Fleet, who had a great warlike crisis when he was placed at the head of the finest armament that ever left the Dardanelles since the days of Suleyman the Great, steered at once for the enemy's port, and when arraigned as a traitor said that he really saw no use in prolonging a hopeless struggle and that he had accepted the command of the Fleet, only to put the Sultan out of pain by bringing the struggle to a close at once. How do we remember on this side of the House, not perhaps without a blush, the efforts we made to raise him to the bench where he now sits? Who does not remember the sacred cause of protection for which sovereigns were thwarted, Parliament dissolved, and a nation taken in? I belong to a party which can triumph no more, for we have nothing left on our side except the constituencies which we have not betrayed. He denounced Peel as a man who never originates an idea, a watcher of the atmosphere, a man who takes his observations and when he finds the wind in a particular quarter trims his sails to suit it, and he declared that such a man may be a powerful minister, but he is no more a great statesman than the man who gets up behind a carriage is a great whip. The opportune, says Mr. Disraeli himself in his Lord George Bentonk, in a popular assembly has sometimes more success than the wadiest efforts of research and reason. He is alluding to this very speech of which he says with perhaps a superfluous modesty that it was the long constrained passion of the House that now found a vent far more than the sallies of the speaker that changed the frigid silence of this Senate into excitement and tumult. The speech was indeed opportune, but it was opportune in a far larger sense than as a timely Philippic rattling up an exhausted and disappointed House. That moment when Disraeli rose was the very turning point of the fortunes of his party. There was genius, there was positive statesmanship in seizing so boldly and so adroitly on the moment. It would have been a great thing gained for Peel if he could have got through that first night without any alarm note of opposition from his own side. The habits of parliamentary discipline are very clinging. They are hard to tear away. Every impulse of association and training protests against the very effort to rend them asunder. A once powerful minister exercises a control over his long, obedient followers somewhat like that of the heart of the Bruce in the fine old Scottish story. Those who once followed will still obey the name and the symbol even when the actual power to lead is gone forever. If one other night's habitude had been added to the long discipline that bound his party to Peel, if they had allowed themselves to listen to that declaration of the session's first night without murmur, perhaps they might never have rebelled. Mr. Disraeli drew together into one focus all the rays of their gathering anger against Peel and made them light into a flame. He showed the genius of the born leader by stepping forth at the critical moment and giving the word of command. End of Section 36. Section 37 of a history of our own times, Volume 1 by Justin McCarthy. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Pamela Nagami. Chapter 16. Mr. Disraeli, Part 2. From that hour Mr. Disraeli was the real leader of the Tories Squires. From that moment his voice gave the word of command to the Tory Party. There was a peculiar courage too in the part he took. He must have known that he was open to one retort from Peel that might have crushed a less confident man. It was well known that when Peel was coming into power, Disraeli expected to be offered a place of some kind in the ministry and would have accepted it. Mr. Disraeli afterwards explained, when Peel made allusion to the fact, that he never had put himself directly forward as a candidate for office, but there had undoubtedly been some negotiation going forward which was conducted on Mr. Disraeli's side by someone, who supposed he was doing what Disraeli would like to have done, and Peel had not taken any hint, and would not in any way avail himself of Disraeli's services. Disraeli must have known that when he attacked Peel the latter would hardly fail to make use of this obvious retort, but he felt little daunted on that score. He could have made a fair enough defense of his consistency in any case, but he knew very well that what the indignatories wanted just then was not a man who had been uniformly consistent, but one who could attack Sir Robert Peel without scruple and with effect. He made his own career by the course he took on that memorable night, and he also made a new career for the Tory party. Now that he had proved himself so brilliant a spadasan in this debate, men began to remember that he had dealt trenchant blows before. Many of his sentences attacking Peel which have passed into familiar quotation almost like proverbs were spoken in 1845. He had accused the great minister of having borrowed his tactics from the wigs. The right honorable gentleman caught the wigs bathing and he walked away with their clothes. He has left them in the full enjoyment of their liberal position, and he is himself a strict conservative of their garments. I look on the right honorable gentleman as a man who has tamed the shrew of liberalism by her own tactics. He is the political Petruchio who has outbid you all. If the right honorable gentleman would only stick to quotation instead of having recourse to obliquy, he may rely upon it he would find it a safer weapon. It is one he always wields with the hand of a master, and when he does appeal to any authority in prose or verse, he is sure to be successful, partly because he seldom quotes a passage that has not already received the mead of parliamentary approbation. We can all readily understand how such a hit as the last would tell in the case of an orator like Peel, who had the old fashioned way of introducing long quotations from approved classic authors into his speeches, and who not unfrequently introduced citations which were received with all the better welcome, by the house, because of the familiarity of their language. More fierce and cutting was the reference to Canning with whom Peel had quarreled, and the implied contrast of Canning with Peel. Sir Robert had cited against Disraeli Canning's famous lines praying to be saved from a candid friend. Disraeli seized the opportunity thus given. The name of Canning is one, he said, never to be mentioned, I am sure, in this house without emotion. We all admire his genius. We all, or at least most of us, deplore his untimely end, and we all sympathize with him in his severe struggle with supreme prejudice and sublime mediocrity, with inveterate foes and with candid friends. The phrase, sublime mediocrity, had a marvelous effect. As a hostile description of Peel's character, it had enough of seeming truth about it to tell most effectively alike on friends and enemies of the great leader. A friend, or even an impartial enemy, would not indeed admit that it accurately described Peel's intellect and position, but as a stroke of personal satire, it touched nearly enough the characteristics of its object to impress itself at once as a master hit on the minds of all who caught its instant purpose. The words remained in use long after the controversy and its occasion had passed away, and it was allowed that an unfriendly and bitter critic could hardly have found a phrase more suited to its ungenial purpose, or more likely to connect itself at once in the public mind with the name of him who was its object. Richard Israeli did not in fact greatly admire Canning. He has left a very disparaging criticism of Canning as an orator in one of his novels. On the other hand, he has shown in his life of Lord George Bentink that he could do full justice to some of the greatest qualities of Sir Robert Peel. But at the moment of his attacking Peel and crying up Canning, he was only concerned to disparage the one, and it was on this account that he eulogized the other. The famous sentence to in which he declared that a conservative government was an organized hypocrisy was spoken during the debates of the session of 1845 before the explanation of the minister on the subject of free trade. All these brilliant things men now began to recall. Looking back from this distance of time, we can see well enough that Mr. Disraeli had displayed his peculiar genius long before the House of Commons took the pains to recognize it. From the night of the opening of the session of 1846 it was never questioned. Henceforward he was really the mouthpiece and the sense-carrier of his party. For some time to come, indeed, his nominal post might have seemed to be only that of its bravo. The country gentleman who cheered to the echo his fierce attacks on Peele during the debates of the session of 1846 had probably not the slightest suspicion that the daring rhetorician who was so savagely revenging them on their now hated leader was a man of as cool a judgment, as long a head, and as complete a capacity for the control of a party as any politician who for generations had appeared in the House of Commons. One immediate effect of the turn thus given by Disraeli's timely intervention in the debate was the formation of a protection party in the House of Commons. The leadership of this perilous adventure was entrusted to Lord George Bentink, a sporting dobleman of energetic character, great tenacity of purpose and conviction, and a not inconsiderable aptitude for politics which had hitherto had no opportunity for either exercising or displaying itself. Lord George Bentink had sat in eight parliaments without taking part in any great debate. When he was suddenly drawn into the leadership of the protection party in the House of Commons, he gave himself up to it entirely. He had at first only joined the party as one of its organizers, but he showed himself in many respects well suited for the leadership and the choice of leaders was in any case very limited. When once he had accepted the position he was unwirying in his attention to its duties and indeed up to the moment of his sudden and premature death, he never allowed himself any relaxation from the cares it imposed on him. Mr. Disraeli in his life of Lord George Bentink has indeed overrated with the pardonable extravagance of friendship the intellectual gifts of his leader. Bentink's abilities were hardly even of the second class and the amount of knowledge which he brought to bear on the questions he discussed with so much earnestness and energy was often an of necessity little better than mere cram. But in Parliament the essential qualities of a leader are not great powers of intellect. A man of cool head, good temper, firm will, and capacity for appreciating the serviceable qualities of other men may, always provided that he has high birth and great social influence, make a very successful leader, even though he be wanting altogether in the higher attributes of eloquence and statesmanship. It may be doubted whether on the whole great eloquence and genius are necessary at all to the leader of a party and Parliament in times not specially troublesome. Bentink had patience, energy, good humor, and considerable appreciation of the characters of men. If he had a bad voice, was a poor speaker, talked absolute nonsense about protective duties and sugar and guano and made up absurd calculations to prove impossibilities and paradoxes, he at least always spoke in full faith, and was only the more necessary to his party because he could honestly continue to believe in the old doctrines no matter what political economy and hard facts might say to the contrary. The secession was therefore in full course of organization. On January 27th, Sir Robert Peale came forward to explain his financial policy. It is almost superfluous to say that the most intense anxiety prevailed all over the country and that the house was crowded. An incident of the night which then created a profound sensation would not be worth noticing now but for the evidence it gives of the bitterness with which the protection party were filled and of the curiously bad taste of which gentlemen of position and education can be guilty under the inspiration of a blind fanaticism. There was something ludicrous in the pompous tone as of righteous indignation deliberately repressed with which Mr. Disraeli in his life of bentink announces the event. The proceedings and the House of Commons, he says, were ushered in by a startling occurrence. What was this portentious preliminary? His Royal Highness the Prince Consort attended by the master of the horse appeared and took his seat in the body of the House to listen to the statement of the First Minister. In other words, there was to be a statement of great importance and a debate of profound interest and the husband of the Queen was anxious to be a listener. The Prince Consort did not understand that because he had married the Queen, he was therefore to be precluded from hearing a discussion in the House of Commons. The poorest man and the greatest man in the land were alike free to occupy a seat in one of the galleries of the House, and it is not to be wondered at if the Prince Consort fancied that he too might listen to a debate without unhinging the British Constitution. Lord George Bentink and the protectionists were of flame with indignation. They saw in the quiet presence of the intelligent gentleman who came to listen to the discussion, an attempt to overall the Commons and compel them to bend to the will of the Crown. It is not easy to read without a feeling of shame, the absurd and unseemly comments which were made upon this harmless incident. The Queen herself has given an explanation of the Prince's visit, which is straightforward and dignified. The Prince merely went as the Prince of Wales and the Queen's other sons do for once to hear a fine debate, which is so useful to all princes. But this, the Queen adds, he naturally felt unable to do again. The Prime Minister announced his policy. His object was to abandon the sliding scale altogether, but for the present he intended to impose a duty of ten shillings a quarter on corn when the price of it was under forty-eight shillings a quarter. To reduce that duty by one shilling for every shilling of rise and price until it reached fifty-three shillings a quarter, when the duty should fall to four shillings. This arrangement was, however, only to hold good for three years, at the end of which time protective duties on grain were to be wholly abandoned. Peele explained that he intended gradually to apply the principle of free trade to manufacturers and every description of produce, bearing in mind the necessity of providing for the expenditure of the country and of smoothing away some of the difficulties which a sudden withdrawal of protection might cause. The differential duties on sugar, which were professedly intended to protect the growers of free sugars against the competition of those who cultivated sugar by the use of slave labor, were to be diminished but not abolished. The duties on the importation of foreign cattle were to be at once removed. In order to compensate the agricultural interests for the gradual withdrawal of protective duties, there were to be some readjustments of local burdens. We need not dwell much on this part of the explanation. We are familiar in late years with the ingenious manner in which the principle of the readjustment of local burdens is worked in the hope of conciliating the agricultural interests. These readjustments are not usually received with any great gratitude or attended by any particular success. In this instance, Sir Robert Peele could hardly have laid much serious stress on them. If the landowners and farmers had really any just ground of complaint in the abolition of protection, the sav which was applied to their wound would scarcely have caused them to forget its pains. The important part of the explanation so far as history is concerned consisted in the fact that Peele proclaimed himself an absolute convert to the free trade principle, and that the introduction of the principle into all departments of our commercial legislation was, according to his intention, to be a mere question of time and convenience. The struggle was to be between protection and free trade. Not that the proposals of the ministry wholly satisfied the professed free traders. These latter would have enforced, if they could, an immediate application of the principle without the interval of three years and the devices and shifts which were to be put in operation during that middle time. But of course, although they pressed their protest in the form of an amendment, they had no idea of not taking what they could get when the amendment failed to secure the approval of the majority. The protectionist amendment amounted to a distinct proposal that the policy of the government be absolutely rejected by the House. The debate lasted for twelve nights, and at the end the protectionists had 240 votes against 337 given on behalf of the policy of the government. The majority of 97 was not quite so large as the government had anticipated, and the result was to encourage the protectionists in their plans of opposition. The opportunities of obstruction were many. The majority just mentioned were merely in favor of going into committee of the whole House to consider the existing customs and cornaxes. But every single financial scheme which the minister had to propose must be introduced, debated, and carried if it was to be carried as a separate bill. We shall not ask our readers to follow us into the details of these long discussions. They were not important. They were often not dignified. They more frequently concerned themselves about the conduct and personal consistency of the minister than about the merits of his policy. The arguments in favor of protection which doubtless seemed effective to the country gentlemen then, seemed like the prattle of children now. There were indeed some exciting passages in the debates. For these the House was mainly indebted to the rhetoric of Mr. Disraeli. That indefatigable and somewhat reckless champion occupied himself with incessant attacks on the Prime Minister. He described Peel as a trader on other people's intelligence, a political burglar of other men's ideas. The occupants of the Treasury Bench, he said, were political peddlers who had fought their party in the cheapest market and sold it in the dearest. This was strong language, but it was after all more justifiable than the attempt Mr. Disraeli made to revive an old and bitter controversy about Sir Robert Peel and Mr. Cobden, which for the sake of the former had better have been forgotten. Three years before, Mr. Edward Drummond, private secretary of Sir Robert Peel was shot by an assassin. There could be no doubt that the victim had been mistaken for the Prime Minister himself. The assassin turned out to be a lunatic and as such was found not guilty of the murder and was consigned to a lunatic asylum. The event naturally had a profound effect on Sir Robert Peel, and during one of the debates on free trade Mr. Cobden happened to say that he would hold the Prime Minister responsible for the condition of the country, Peel, in an extraordinary burst of excitement, interpreted the words as a threat to expose him to the attack of an assassin. Nothing could be more painfully absurd and nothing could better show the unreasoning and discreditable hatred of the Tories at that time for anyone who opposed the policy of Peel than the fact that they actually cheered their leader again and again when he made his passionate and half frenzied charge on one of the purest and noblest men who ever sat in the English Parliament. Peel soon recovered his senses. He saw the error of which he had been guilty and regretted it, and it ought to have been consigned to forgetfulness. But Mr. Disraeli in repelling a charge made against him of indulging in unjustifiable personalities revived the whole story and reminded the House of Commons that the Prime Minister had charged the leader of the free trade league with inciting assassins to murder him. This unjustifiable attempt to rekindle an old quarrel had, however, no other effect than to draw from Sir Robert Peel a renewed expression of apology for the charge he had made against Mr. Cobden in the course of a heated debate when I put an erroneous construction on some expressions used by the Honorable Member for Stockport. Mr. Cobden declared that the explanation made by Peel was entirely satisfactory and expressed his hope that no one on either side of the House would attempt to revive the subject or make further allusion to it. The government prevailed. It would be superfluous to go into any details as to the progress of the Corn Bill, enough to say that the third reading of the Bill passed the House of Commons on May 15 by a majority of ninety-eight votes. The Bill was at once sent up to the House of Lords, and by means chiefly of the earnest advice of the Duke of Wellington was carried through that House without much serious opposition. But June 25, the day when the Bill was read for a third time in the House of Lords was a memorable day in the Parliamentary Annals of England. It saw the fall of the Ministry who had carried to success the greatest piece of legislation that had been introduced since Lord Grey's reform Bill. A coercion Bill for Ireland was the measure which brought this catastrophe on the Government of Sir Robert Peel. While the Corn Bill was yet passing through the House of Commons, the Government felt called upon, in consequence of the condition of crime and outrage in Ireland, to introduce a coercion Bill. Lord George Bentink at first gave the measure his support, but during the Witzentide recess he changed his views. He now declared that he had only supported the Bill on the assurance of the Government that it was absolutely necessary for the safety of life in Ireland, and that, as the Government had not pressed it on in advance of every other measure, especially no doubt of the Corn Bill, he could not believe that it was really a matter of imminent necessity, and that furthermore he had no longer any confidence in the Government and could not trust them with extraordinary powers. In truth the Bill was placing the Government in a serious difficulty. All the Irish followers of O'Connell would of course oppose the coercion measure. The Wigs, when out of office, have usually made it a rule to oppose coercion Bill's if they do not come accompanied with some promises of legislative reform and concession. The English radical members, Mr. Cobden and his followers, were almost sure to oppose it. Under these circumstances it seemed probable enough that if the protectionists joined with the other opponents of the coercion Bill, the Government must be defeated. The temptation was too great. As Mr. Disraeli himself candidly says of his party, vengeance had succeeded in most breasts to the more sanguine sentiment. The field was lost, but at any rate there should be retribution for those who had betrayed it. The question with many of the indignant protectionists was, as Mr. Disraeli himself puts it, how was Sir Robert Peel to be turned out? It soon became evident that he could be turned out by those who detested him and longed for vengeance, voting against him on the coercion Bill. This was done. The fiercer protectionists voted with the free traders, the Wigs and the Irish Catholic and Liberal members, and after a debate of much bitterness and passion, the division on the second reading of the coercion Bill took place on Thursday, June 25, and the ministry was left in a minority of 73. Two hundred and nineteen votes only were given for the second reading of the Bill, and two hundred and ninety-two against it. Some eighty of the protectionists followed Lord George Bentinkin to the lobby to vote against the Bill, and their votes settled the question. Mr. Disraeli has given a somewhat pompous description of the scene. As the protectionists passed in defile before the minister to the hostile lobby, Pallas Tehok Wollnare Pallas Emolot cries the hero of the Aeneid, as he plunges his sword into the heart of his rival. Protection kills you, not your coercion Bill. The irreconcilable protectionists might have said as they trooped past the minister. Chance had put within their grasp the means of vengeance, and they had seized it, and made successful use of it. The Peel Ministry had fallen in its very hour of triumph. Three days after Sir Robert Peel announced his resignation of office, his speech was considered one of glorification and peak, says Mr. Disraeli. It does not so impress most readers. It appears to have been full of dignity and of emotion, not usual for Peel, but not surely under the circumstances incompatible with dignity. It contained that oft-quoted tribute to the services of a former opponent in which Peel declared, that the name which ought to be and which will be associated with the success of these measures is the name of the man, who, acting I believe from pure and disinterested motives, has advocated their cause with untiring energy and with appeals to reason, enforced by an eloquence, the more to be admired because it is unaffected and unadorned, the name of Richard Cobden. An added effect was given to this well-deserved panagyric by the little irregularity which the Prime Minister committed when he mentioned in debate a member by name. The closing sentence of the speech was eloquent and touching. Many would censure him, Peel said. His name would perhaps be executed by the monopolist who would maintain protection for his own individual benefit. But it may be that I shall leave a name sometimes remembered with expressions of goodwill in those places which are the abode of men whose lot it is to labor and to earn their daily bread by the sweat of their brow, a name remembered with expressions of goodwill when they shall recreate their exhausted strength with abundant and untaxed food, the sweeter because it is no longer leavened with a sense of injustice. The great minister fell. So great a success followed by so sudden and complete a fall is hardly recorded in the parliamentary history of our modern times. Peel had crushed O'Connell and carried free trade, and O'Connell and the protectionists had life enough yet to pull him down. He is, as a conqueror who having won the great victory of his life, is struck by a hostile hand in some by-way as he passes home to enjoy his triumph. End of Section 37 Section 38 of a history of our own times, Volume 1 by Justin McCarthy. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, recording by Pamela Nogami. Chapter 17 Famine, Commercial Trouble and Foreign Intrigue, Part 1 Lord John Russell succeeded Sir Robert Peel as First Lord of the Treasury, Lord Palmerston became Foreign Secretary, Sir Charles Wood was Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord Gray took charge of the colonies, and Sir George Gray was Home Secretary. Mr. McCauley accepted the office of Paymaster General with a seat in the cabinet, a distinction not usually given to the occupant of that office. The ministry was not particularly strong in administrative talent. The Premier and the Foreign Secretary were the only members of the cabinet who could be called statesmen of the First Class, and even Lord Palmerston had not as yet won more than a somewhat doubtful kind of fame, and was looked upon as a man quite as likely to do mischief as good to any ministry of which he might happen to form a part. Lord Gray then and since only succeeded somehow in missing the career of a leading statesman. He had great talents and some originality. He was independent and bold. But his independence degenerated too often into impracticality and even eccentricity, and he was in fact a politician with whom ordinary men could not work. Sir Charles Wood, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, had solid sense and excellent administrative capacity, but he was about as bad a public speaker as ever addressed the House of Commons. His budget speeches were often made so unintelligible by defective manner and delivery that they might almost as well have been spoken in a foreign language. Sir George Gray was a speaker of fearful fluency and a respectable administrator of the Second or Third Class. He was as plotting in administration as he was precipitate of speech. Peale, wrote Lord Palmerston to a friend a short time after the formation of the new ministry, seems to have made up his mind that for a year or two he cannot hope to form a party, and that he must give people a certain time to forget the events of last year. In the meanwhile it is evident that he does not wish that any other government should be formed out of the people on his side of the House because of that government he would not be a member. For these reasons and also because he sincerely thinks at best that we should for the present remain in, he gives us very cordial support as far as he can without losing his independent position. Graham, who sits up under his old pillar and never comes down to Peale's bench, even for personal communication, seems to keep himself aloof from everybody and to hold himself free to act according to circumstances. But as yet he is not considered as the head of any party. George Bentink has entirely broken down as a candidate for ministerial position and thus we are left masters of the field, not only on account of our own merits, which though we say it ourselves, are great, but by virtue of the absence of any efficient competitors. Palmerston's humorous estimate of the state of affairs was accurate. The new ministry was safe enough because there was no party in a condition to compete with it. The position of the government of Lord John Russell was not one to be envied. The Irish famine occupied all attention and soon seemed to be an evil too great for any ministry to deal with. The failure of the potato was an overwhelming disaster for a people almost wholly agricultural and a peasantry long accustomed to live upon that root alone. Ireland contains very few large towns. When the names of four or five are mentioned the list is done with and we have to come down to mere villages. The country has hardly any manufactures except that of Linnan in the northern province. In the south and west the people live by agriculture alone. The Coddier system, which prevailed almost universally in three of the four provinces, was an arrangement by which a man obtained in return for his labor a right to cultivate a little patch of ground. Fast enough to supply him with food for the scanty maintenance of his family. The great landlords were for the most part absentees. The smaller landlords were often deeply in debt and were therefore compelled to screw every possible penny of rent out of their tenants at will. They had not, however, even that regularity and order in their exactions that might at least have forced upon the tenants some habits of forethought and exactness. There was a sort of understanding that the rent was always to be somewhat in a rear. The supposed kindness of a landlord consisted in his allowing the indebtedness to increase more liberally than others of his class would do. There was a demoralizing slatterliness in the whole system. It was almost certain that if a tenant by greatly increased industry and good fortune made the land which he held more valuable than before, his rent would have once been increased. On the other hand, it was held an act of tyranny to dispossess him so long as he made even any fair promise of paying up. There was therefore a thoroughly vicious system established all round demoralizing a like to the landlord and the tenant. Underlying all the relations of landlord and tenant in Ireland were two great facts. The occupation of land was virtually a necessity of life to the Irish tenant. That is the first fact. The second is that the land system under which Ireland was placed was one entirely foreign to the traditions, the ideas one might say the very genius of the Irish people. Whether the system introduced by conquest and confiscation was better than the old one or not does not in the slightest degree affect the working of this fact on the relations between the landlord and the tenant in Ireland. No one will be able to understand the whole meaning and bearing of the long land struggle in Ireland who does not clearly get into his mind the fact that rightly or wrongly the Irish peasant regarded the right to have a bit of land his share exactly as other peoples regard the right to live. It was in his mind something elementary and self-evident. He could not be loyal to, he could not even understand any system which did not secure that to him. According to Mishle, the land is the French peasant's mistress. It was the Irish peasant's life. The Irish peasant with his wife and his family lived on the potato. Hardly in any country coming within the pale of civilization was there to be found a whole peasant population dependent for their living on one single root. When the potato failed in 1845 the life system of the people seemed to have given way. At first it was not thought that the failure must necessarily be anything more than partial, but it soon began to appear that for at least two seasons the whole food of the peasant population and of the poor in towns was absolutely gone. Lord John Russell's government pottered with the difficulty rather than encountered it. In their excuse it has to be said of course that the calamity they had to meet was unprecedented and that it must have tried the resources of the most energetic and far-seeing statesmanship. Still the fact remains that the measures of the government were at first utterly inadequate to the occasion and that afterwards some of them were even calculated to make bad worse. Not a county in Ireland wholly escaped the potato disease and many of the southern and western counties were soon an actual famine. A peculiar form of fever, famine fever it was called, began to show itself everywhere. A terrible dysentery set in as well. In some districts the people died in hundreds daily from fever, dysentery, or sheer starvation. The districts of Skibarine, Skull, Westport and other places obtained a ghastly supremacy and misery. In some of these districts the parochial authorities at last declined to put the rate payers to the expense of coffins for the two frequent dead. The coroners declared it impossible to keep on holding inquests. There was no time for all the ceremonies of that kind that would have to be gone through if they made any pretense of keeping up the system of ordinary seasons. In other places, where the formula was still kept up, the juries added to their verdicts of death by starvation, some charge of willful murder against Lord John Russell or the Lord Lieutenant or some other official whose supposed neglect was set down as the cause of the death. Unfortunately the government had to show an immense activity in the introduction of coercion bills and other repressive measures. It would have been impossible that in such a country as Ireland, a famine of that gigantic kind should set in without bringing crimes of violence along with it. The peasantry had always hated the land tenure system. They had always been told, not surely without justice, that it was at the bottom of all their miseries. They were now under the firm conviction that the government could have saved them if it would. What wonder then if there were bread riots and agrarian disturbances? Who can now wonder that being so that the government introduced exceptional measures of repression? But it certainly had a grim and disheartening effect on the spirits of the Irish people when it seemed as if the government could only potter and poulter with famine, but could be earnest and energetic when devising coercion bills. Whatever might be said of the government no one could doubt the good will of the English people. In every great English community from the metropolis downwards subscription lists were opened and the most liberal contributions poured in. In Liverpool, for example, a great number of the merchants of the place put down a thousand pounds each. The Quakers of England sent over a delegation of their number to the specially famine-stricken districts of Ireland to administer relief. Many other sects and bodies followed the example. National Relief Associations were specially formed in England. Relief indeed began to be poured in from all countries. The United States employed some of their war vessels to send gifts of grain and other food to the starving places. In one Irish seaport the joy bells of the town were kept ringing all day in honor of the arrival of one of these grain-latent vessels, a mournfully significant form of rejoicing surely. One of the national writers said at the time that the misery of Ireland touched even the heart of the Turk at the far Dardanelles and he sent her in pity the alms of a beggar. It was true that from Turkey as from most other countries had come some contribution toward the relief of Irish distress. At the same time there were some very foolish performances gone through in Dublin under the sanction and patronage of the Lord Lieutenant, the solemn inauguration, as it would be called, by a certain class of writers now of a public soup-kitchen devised and managed by the fashionable French cook Monsieur Soyer for the purpose of showing the Irish people what remarkably sustaining potage might be made out of the thinnest and cheapest materials. This exposition would have been well enough in a quiet and practical way but performed as a grand national ceremony of regeneration under the patronage of the viceroy and with accompaniment of brass bands and pageantry it had a remarkably foolish and even offensive aspect. The performance was bitterly resented by many of the impatient young spirits of the national party in Dublin. Meanwhile the misery went on deepening and broadening. It was far too great to be effectually encountered by subscriptions however generous and the government meaning to do the best they could were practically at their wit's end. The starving peasants streamed into the nearest considerable town hoping for relief there and found too often that there the very sources of charity were dried up. Many, very many, thus disappointed, merely lay down on the pavement and died there. Along the country roads one met everywhere groups of gaunt demide wretches clad in miserable old sacking and wandering aimlessly with some vague idea of finding food as the boy in the fable hoped to find the gold where the rainbow touched the earth. Many remained in their empty hovels and took death there when he came. In some regions the country seemed unpeopled for miles. A fervid national writer declared that the impression made on him by the aspect of the country then was that of one silent vast dissolution. Allowing for rhetoric there was not much exaggeration in the words. Certainly the Ireland of tradition was dissolved in the operation of that famine. The old system gave way utterly. The landlord-ism of the days before the famine never revived in its former strength in its peculiar ways, for the landlord class there came out of the famine the encumbered estates court. For the small farmer and peasant class there floated up the American emigrant ship. Acts and even conspiracies of violence, as we have said, began to be not uncommon throughout the country and in the cities. One peculiar symptom of the time was the glass-breaking mania that set in throughout the towns of the south and west. It is perhaps not quite reasonable to call it a mania, for it had melancholy method in it. The workhouses were overcrowded, and the authorities could not receive there or feed there one-fourth of the applicants who besieged them. Suddenly it seemed to occur to the minds of many of the famine's victims that there were the prisons for which one might qualify himself, and to which after qualification he could not be denied admittance. The idea was simple. Go into a town, smash deliberately the windows of a shop, and some days of a jail and of substantial food must follow. The plan became a favorite, especially was it adopted by young girls and women. After a time the puzzled magistrates resolved to put an end to this device by refusing to inflict the punishment which these unfortunate creatures sought as a refuge and a comfort. One early result of the famine and the general breakdown of property is too significant to be allowed to pass unnoticed. Some of the landlords had been living for a long time on a baseless system, on a credit which the failure of the crops brought to a crushing test. Not a few of these were utterly broken. They could maintain their houses and halls no longer, and often were only too happy to let them to the poor law guardians to be used as extra workhouses. In the near neighborhood of many a distressed country town, the great house of the local magnate thus became a receptacle for the pauperism which could not find a refuge in the overcrowded asylums which the poor law system had already provided. The lion and the lizard, says the Persian poet, keep the halls where the jam-sheed gloried and drank deep. The pauper devoured his scanty dole of Indian meal porridge in the hall where his landlord had gloried and drunk deep. When the famine was over, and its results came to be estimated, it was found that Ireland had lost about two millions of her population. She had come down from eight millions to six. This was the combined effect of starvation, of the various diseases that followed in its path, gleaning where it had failed to gather, and of emigration. Long after all the direct effects of the failure of the potato had ceased, the population still continued steadily to decrease. The Irish peasant had in fact had his eyes turned, as Mr. Bright afterwards expressed it, toward the setting sun, and for long years the stream of emigration westward never abated in its volume. A new Ireland began to grow up across the Atlantic. In every great city of the United States the Irish element began to form a considerable constituent of the population. From New York to San Francisco, from St. Paul, Minnesota to New Orleans, the Irish accent is heard in every street, and the Irish voter comes to the polling booth ready, far too heedlessly, to vote for any politician who will tell him that America loves the green flag and hates the Saxon. Terrible as the immediate effects of the famine were, it is impossible for any friend of Ireland to say that on the whole it did not bring much good with it. It first applied the scourge, which was to drive out of the land a thoroughly vicious and rotten system. It first called the attention of English statesmen irresistibly to the fact that the system was bad to its heart's core, and that nothing good could come of it. It roused the attention of the humble Irishmen, too often inclined to put up with everything in the lazy spirit of a Neapolitan or a fatalist, to the fact that there was for him, too, a world elsewhere. The famine had indeed many a bloody afterbirth, but it gave to the world a new Ireland. End of Section 38 Section 39 of A History of Our Own Times, Volume 1 by Justin McCarthy. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, recording by Pamela Nagami, Chapter 17, Famine, Commercial Trouble, and Foreign Intrigue, Part 2 The government as it may be supposed had hard work to do all this time. They had the best intentions toward Ireland and were always indeed announcing that they had found out some new way of dealing with the distress and modifying or withdrawing old plans. They adopted measures from time to time to expend large sums in something like systematic employment for the poor in Ireland. They modified the Irish poor laws. They agreed at length to suspend temporarily the corn laws and the navigation laws, so far as these related to the importation of grain. A tremendous commercial panic, causing the fall of great houses, especially in the corn trade all over the country, called for the suspension of the Bank Charter Act of 1844, and the measures of the ministers were for the most part treated considerably and loyally by Sir Robert Peel, but a new opposition had formed itself under the nominal guidance of Lord George Bentink and the real inspiration of Mr. Disraeli. Lord George Bentink brought in a bill to make a grant of sixteen millions to be expended as an advance on the construction and completion of Irish railways. This proposal was naturally very welcome to many in Ireland. It had a lavish and showy air about it, and Lord George Bentink talked grandiose in his speech about the readiness with which he, the Saxon, would if his measure were carried, answer with his head for the loyalty of the Irish people. But it soon began to appear that the scheme was not so much a question of the Irish people as of certain, moneyed classes who might be helped along at the expense of the English and the Irish people. Lord George Bentink certainly had no other than a direct and single-minded purpose to do good to Ireland, but his measure would have been a failure if it had been carried. It was fairly open in some respects to the criticism of Mr. Robuck that it proposed to relieve Irish landlordism of its responsibilities at the expense of the British taxpayer. The measure was rejected. Lord George Bentink was able to worry the ministry somewhat effectively when they introduced the measure to reduce gradually the differential duties on sugar for a few years and then replace these duties by a fixed and uniform rate. This was in short a proposal to apply the principle of free trade instead of that of protection to sugar. The protective principle had in this case however a certain fascination about it even for independent minds, for an exceptional protection had been retained by Sir Robert Peel in order to enable the planters in our colonies to compensate themselves for the loss they might suffer in the transition from slavery to free labor. Lord George Bentink therefore proposed an amendment to the resolutions of the government, declaring it unjust and impolitic to reduce the duty on foreign slave-grown sugar as tending to check the advance of production by British free labor and to give a great additional stimulus to slave labor. Many sincere and independent opponents of slavery, Lord Broome and the House of Lords among them, were caught by this view of the question. Lord George and his brilliant lieutenant at one time appeared as if they were likely to carry their point in the commons. But it was announced that if the resolutions of the government were defeated ministers would resign and there was no one to take their place. Peel could not return to power and the time was far distant yet when Mr. Disraeli could form a ministry. The opposition crumbled away therefore and the government measures were carried. Lord George Bentink made himself for a while the champion of the West India sugar-producing interest. He was a man who threw himself with enormous energy into any work he undertook and he had got up the case of the West India planters with all the enthusiasm that inspired him in his more congenial pursuits as one of the principal men on the turf. The alliance between him and Mr. Disraeli is curious. The two men one would think could have had absolutely nothing in common. Mr. Disraeli knew nothing about horses and racing. Lord George Bentink could not possibly have understood, not to say sympathized with, many of the leading ideas of his lieutenant. Yet Bentink had evidently formed a just estimate of Disraeli's political genius and Disraeli saw that in Bentink were many of the special qualities which go to make a powerful party leader in England. Time has amply justified and more than justified Bentink's convictions as to Disraeli. Bentink's premature death leaves Disraeli's estimate of him an untested speculation. There were troubles abroad as well as at home for the government. Almost immediately on their coming into office the project of the Spanish marriages concocted between King Louis Philippe and his minister, Monsieur Guiseau, disturbed for a time, and very seriously, the good understanding between England and France. It might so far as this country was concerned have had much graver consequences but for the fact that it bore its bitter fruits so soon for the dynasty of Louis Philippe and helped to put a new ruler on the throne of France. It is only as it affected the friendly feeling between this country and France that the question of the Spanish marriages has a place in such a work as this, but at one time it seemed likely enough to bring about consequences which would link it closely and directly with the history of England. The ambition of the French minister and his master was to bring the throne of Spain in some way under the direct influence of France. Such a scheme had again and again been at the heart of French rulers and statesmen and it had always failed. At least it had always brought with it jealousy, hostility, and war. Louis Philippe and his minister were untaught by the lessons of the past. The young Queen Isabella of Spain was unmarried and, of course, a high degree of public anxiety existed in Europe as to her choice of a husband. No delusion can be more profound or more often exposed than that which inspires ambitious princes and enterprising statesmen to imagine that they can control nations by the influence of dynastic alliances. In every European war we see princes closely connected by marriage in arms against each other. The great political forces which bring nations into the field of battle are not to be charmed into submission by the rubbing of a princess's wedding ring. But a certain class of statesmen, a man of the order who an ordinary life would be called too clever by half, is always intriguing about royal marriages as if thus alone he could hold in his hands the destinies of nations. In an evil hour for themselves and for their fame Louis Philippe and his minister believed that they could obtain a virtual ownership of Spain by an ingenious marriage scheme. There was at one time a project talked of rather than actually entertained of marrying the young queen of Spain and her sister to the Duke de Mal and the Duke de Montpensier, both sons of Louis Philippe. But this would have been too daring a venture on the part of the king of the French. Apart from any objections to be entertained by other states it was certain that England could not view with indifference, as the diplomatic phrase goes, the prospect of a son of the French king occupying the throne of Spain. It may be said that after all it was of little concern to England who married the queen of Spain. Spain was nothing to us. It would not follow that Spain must be the tool of France because the Spanish queen married a son of the French king any more than it was certain in a former day that Austria must link herself with the fortunes of the great Napoleon because he had married an Austrian princess. Probably it would have been well if England had concerned herself in no wise with the domestic affairs of Spain and had allowed Louis Philippe to spin what ignoble plots he pleased if the Spanish people themselves had not wit enough to see through and power enough to counteract them. At a later period France brought on herself a terrible war and a crushing defeat because her emperor chose to believe or allowed himself to be persuaded into believing that the security of France would be threatened if a Prussian prince were called to the throne of Spain. The Prussian prince did not ascend that throne, but the war between France and Prussia went on. France was defeated and after a little the Spanish people themselves got rid of the prince whom they had consented to accept in place of the obnoxious Prussian. If the French emperor had not interfered it is only too probable that the Prussian prince would have gone to Madrid, remain there for a few unstable and tremulous months, and then have been quietly sent back to his own country. But at the time of Louis Philippe's intrigues about the Spanish marriages the statesmen of England were by no means disposed to take a cool and philosophic view of things. The idea of non-intervention had scarcely come up then, and the English minister who was chiefly concerned in foreign affairs was about the last man in the world to admit that anything could go on in Europe or elsewhere in which England was not entitled to express an opinion and to make her influence felt. The marriage therefore of the young queen of Spain had been long a subject of anxious consideration in the councils of the English government. Louis Philippe knew very well that he could not venture to marry one of his sons to the young Isabella. But he and his minister devised a scheme for securing to themselves and their policy the same effect in another way. They contrived that the queen and her sister should be married at the same time, the queen to her cousin Don Francisco Dacis, Duke of Carith, and her sister to the Duke de Montponsier, Louis Philippe's son. There was reason to expect that the queen if married to Don Francisco would have no children and that the wife of Louis Philippe's son or some of her children would come to the throne of Spain. On the moral guilt of a plot like this it would be superfluous to dwell. Nothing in the history of the perversions of human conscience and judgment can be more extraordinary than the fact that a man like Monsieur Guiseau should have been its inspiring influence. It came with a double shock upon the queen of England and her ministers because they had every reason to think that Louis Philippe had bound himself by a solemn promise to discourage any such policy. When the queen paid her visit to Louis Philippe at E, the king made the most distinct and the most spontaneous promise on the subject both to Her Majesty and to Lord Aberdeen. The queen's own journal says, The king told Lord Aberdeen as well as me, he never would hear of Montponsier's marriage with the Infanta of Spain, which they are in a great fright about in England, until it was no longer a political question which would be when the queen is married and has children. The king's own defense of himself afterwards, in a letter intended to be a reply to one written to his daughter the Queen of the Belgians by Queen Victoria, admits the fact. I shall tell you precisely, he says, in what consists the deviation on my side, simply, in my having arranged for the marriage of the Duke de Montponsier, not before the marriage of the Queen of Spain, for she is to be married to the Duke de Carith, at the very moment when my son is married to the Infanta, but before the queen has a child. That is the whole deviation, nothing more, nothing less. This was surely deviation enough for the king's promise to justify any charge of bad faith that could be made. The whole question was one of succession. The objection of England and the other powers was from first to last an objection to any arrangement which might leave the succession to one of Louis Philippe's children or grandchildren. For this reason the king had given his word to Queen Victoria that he would not hear of his son's marriage with Isabella's sister, until the difficulty about the succession had been removed by Isabella herself being married and having a child. Such an arrangement was absolutely broken when the king arranged for the marriage of his son to the sister of Queen Isabella at the same time as Isabella's own marriage and when therefore it was not certain that the young queen would have any children. The political question, the question of succession, remained then open as before. All the objections that England and other powers had to the marriage of the Duke de Montpensier stood out as strong as ever. It was a question of the birth of a child and no child was born. The breach of faith was made infinitely more grave by the fact that in the public opinion of Europe Louis Philippe was set down as having brought about the marriage of the Queen of Spain with her cousin Don Francisco in the hope and belief that the union would be barren of issue and that the wife of his son would stand on the next step of the throne. The excuse which Louis Philippe put forward to palliate what he called his deviation from the promise to the queen was not of a nature calculated to allay the ill feeling which his policy had aroused in England. He pleaded in substance that he had reason to believe in an intended piece of treachery on the part of the English government, the consequences of which, if it were successful, would have been injurious to his policy, and the discovery of which therefore released him from his promise. He had found out, as he declared, that there was an intention on the part of England to put forward as a candidate for the hand of Queen Isabella, Prince Leopold of Coburg, a cousin of Prince Albert. There was so little justification for any such suspicion that it hardly seems possible a man of Louis Philippe's shrewdness can really have entertained it. The English government had always steadfastly declined to give any support whatever to the candidature of this young prince. Lord Aberdeen, who was then Foreign Secretary, had always taken in his stand on the broad principle that the marriage of the Queen of Spain was the business of Isabella herself and of the Spanish people, and that so long as that Queen and that people were satisfied, and the interests of England were in no wise involved, the government of Queen Victoria would interfere in no manner. The candidature of Prince Leopold had been in the first instance a project of the Dowager Queen of Spain, Cristina, a woman of intriguing character on whose political probity no great reliance could be placed. The English government had in the most decided and practical manner proved that they took no share in the plans of Queen Cristina and had no sympathy with them. But while the whole negotiations were going on, the defeat of Sir Robert Peel's ministry brought Lord Palmerston into the Foreign Office in the place of Lord Aberdeen. The very name of Palmerston produced on Louis Philippe and his minister the effect vulgarly said to be wrought on a bull by the display of a red rag. Louis Philippe treasured in bitter memory the unexpected success which Palmerston had won from him in regard to Turkey and Egypt. At that time, and especially in the court of Louis Philippe, foreign politics were looked upon as the field in which the ministers of great powers contended against each other with brag and trickery and subtle arts of all kinds. The plain principles of integrity and truthful dealing did not seem to be regarded as properly belonging to the rules of the game. Louis Philippe probably believed in good faith that the return of Lord Palmerston to the Foreign Office must mean the renewed activity of treacherous plans against himself. This at least is the only assumption on which we can explain the king's conduct if we do not wish to believe that he put forward excuses and pretexts which were willful in their falsehood. Louis Philippe seized on some words in a dispatch of Lord Palmerston's in which the candidature of Prince Leopold was simply mentioned as a matter of fact. Declared that these words showed that the English government had at last openly adopted that candidature, professed himself relieved from all previous engagements and at once hurried on the marriage between Queen Isabella and her cousin and that of his own son with Isabella's sister. On October 10th, 1846, the double marriage took place at Madrid and on February 5th, following Monsieur Guiseau told the French chambers that the Spanish marriages constituted the first great thing France had accomplished completely single-handed in Europe since 1830. Everyone knows what a failure this scheme proved so far as the objects of Louis Philippe and his minister were concerned. Queen Isabella had children, Montponsier's wife did not come to the throne and the dynasty of Louis Philippe fell before long, its fall undoubtedly hastened by the position of utter isolation and distrust in which it was placed by the scheme of the Spanish marriages and the feelings which it provoked in Europe. The fact with which we have to deal, however, is that the friendship between England and France, from which so many happy results seemed likely to come to Europe and the cause of free government, was necessarily interrupted. It would have been impossible to trust any longer to Louis Philippe. The Queen herself entered into a correspondence with his daughter, the Queen of the Belgians, in which she expressed in the clearest and the most emphatic manner her opinion of the treachery with which England had been encountered and suggested plainly enough her sense of the moral wrong involved in such ignoble policy. The whole transaction is but another and a most striking condemnation of that odious creed, for a long time tolerated in statecraft, that there is one moral code for private life and another for the world of politics. A man who in private affairs should act as Louis Philippe and Mr. Gizzo acted would be justly considered infamous. It is impossible to suppose that Mr. Gizzo at least could have so acted in private life. Mr. Gizzo was a Protestant of a peculiarly austere type who professed to make religious duty his guide in all things and who doubtless did make it so in all his dealings as a private citizen. But it is only too evident that he believed the policy of states to allow of other principles than those of Christian morality. He allowed himself to be governed by the odious delusion that the interests of a state can be advanced and ought to be pursued by means which an ordinary man of decent character would scorn to employ for any object in private life. A man of any high principle would not employ such arts in private life to save all his earthly possessions and his life in the lives of his wife and children. Anyone who will take the trouble to think over the whole of this plot, for it can be called by no other name, over the ignoble object which it had in view, the base means by which it was carried out, the ruthless disregard for the inclinations, the affections, the happiness, and the morality of its principal victims, and will then think of it as carried on in private life in order to come at the reversion of some young and helpless girl's inheritance, will perhaps find it hard to understand how the shame can be any the less because the principal plotter was a king and the victims were a queen and a nation. End of section 39, recording by Pamela Nagami in Encino, California, March 2019. End of a history of our own times from the accession of Queen Victoria to the general election of 1880, volume one by Justin McCarthy.