 CHAPTER XIX One association of profound melancholy clings to that great debate. The speech delivered by Sir Robert Peel was the last that was destined to come from his lips. The debate closed on the morning of Saturday, June 29. It was nearly four o'clock when the division was taken, and Peel left the house as the sunlight was already beginning to stream into the corridors and lobbies. He went home to rest, but his sleep could not be long. He had to attend a meeting of the royal commissioners of the great industrial exhibition at twelve, and the meeting was important. The site of the building had to be decided upon, and Prince Albert and the commissioners generally relied greatly on the influence of Sir Robert Peel to sustain them against the clamorous objection out of doors to the choice of a place in Hyde Park. Peel went to the meeting and undertook to assume the leading part in defending the decision of the commissioners before the House of Commons. He returned home for a short time after the meeting and then set out for a ride in the park. He called at Buckingham Palace and wrote his name in the Queen's Visiting Book. Then, as he was riding up Constitution Hill, he stopped to talk to a young lady, a friend of his who was also riding. His horse suddenly shied and flung him off, and Peel, clinging to the bridle, the animal fell with its knees on his shoulders. The injuries which he received proved beyond all skill of surgery. He lingered, now conscious, now delirious with pain for two or three days, and he died about eleven o'clock on the night of July 2nd. Most of the members of his family and some of his dearest old friends and companions in political arms were beside him when he died. The tears of the Duke of Wellington and one House of Parliament and the eloquence of Mr. Gladstone and the other were expressions as fitting and adequate as might be of the universal feeling of the nation. There was no honour which Parliament and the country would not willingly have paid to the memory of Peel. Lord John Russell proposed with the sanction of the Crown that his remains should be buried with public honours, but Peel had distinctly declared in his will that he desired his remains to lie beside those of his father and mother in the family vault at Drayton Basset. All that Parliament and the country could do therefore was to decree a monument to him in Westminster Abbey. The offer of a peerage was made to Lady Peel but as might perhaps have been expected it was declined. Lady Peel declared that her desire was to hear no other name than that by which her husband had been known. She also explained that the express wish of her husband, recorded in his will, was that no member of his family should accept any title or other reward on account of any services Peel might have rendered to his country. No desire could have been more honourable to the statesmen who had formed and expressed it, none certainly more in keeping with all that was known of the severely unselfish and unostentatious character of Sir Robert Peel. Yet there were persons found to misconstrue his meaning and to discover offence to the order of aristocracy in Peel's determination. A report went about that the great statesman's objection to the acceptance of a peerage by one of his family implied a disparagement of the order of peers and was founded on feelings of contempt or hostility to the house of lords. Mr. Goldburn, who was one of Peel's executors, easily explained Peel's meaning if indeed it needed explanation to any reasonable mind. Peel was impressed with the conviction that it was better for a man to be the son of his own works and he desired that his sons, if they were to bear titles and distinctions given them by the state, should win them by their own services and worth and not simply put them on as an inheritance from their father. As regards himself it may well be that he thought the name under which he had made his reputation became him better than any new title. He had not looked for reward of that kind and might well prefer to mark the fact that he did not specially value such distinctions. Nor would it be any disparagement to the peerage, a thing which in the case of a man with Peel's opinions is utterly out of the question, to think that much of the dignity of a title depends on its long dissent and its historic record, and that a fire new, specially invented title to a man already great is a disfigurement or at least is a disguise rather than an adornment. When titles were abolished during the great French Revolution, Mirabeau complained of being called Citizen Raquetti in the official reports of the assembly. With your Raquetti, he said angrily, you have puzzled all Europe for days. Europe knew Count Mirabeau but was for some time bewildered by Citizen Raquetti. So Robert Peel may well have objected to a reversal of the process and to the bewildering of Europe by disguising a famous citizen in a new peerage. Peel's death, Lord Palmerston wrote to his brother a few days after, putting the remark at the close of a long letter about the recent victory of the government and the congratulations he had personally received, is a great calamity and one that seems to have no adequate cause. He was a very bad and awkward rider and his horse might have been sat by any better equestrian, but he seems somehow or other to have been entangled in the bridle and to have pulled the horse to step or kneel upon him. The injury to the shoulder was severe but curable, that which killed him was a broken rib forced with great violence inwards into the lungs. The cause of Peel's death would certainly not have been adequate as Lord Palmerston put it, if great men needed prodigious and portentious events to bring about their end. But the stumble of a horse has been found enough in other instances too. Peel seemed destined for great things yet when he died. He was but in his sixty third year. He was some years younger than Lord Palmerston who may be said without exaggeration to have just achieved his first great success. Many circumstances were pointing to Peel as likely before long to be summoned again to the leadership of the government of the country. It is superfluous to say that his faculties as parliamentary orator or statesmen were not showing any signs of decay. An English public man is not supposed to show signs of decaying faculties at sixty-two. The shying horse and perhaps the bad ridership settled the question of Peel's career between them. We have already endeavored to estimate that career and to do justice to Peel's great qualities. He was not a man of original genius, but he was one of the best administrators of other men's ideas that ever knew how and when to leave a party and to serve a country. He was never tried by the severe tests which tell whether a man is a statesman of the highest order. He was never tried as K'vur, for example, was tried by conditions which placed the national existence of his country in jeopardy. He had no such trials to encounter as were forced on pit. He was the minister of a country always peaceful, safe, and prosperous. But he was called upon at a trying moment to take a step on which assuredly much of the prosperity of the people and nearly all the hopes of his party along with his own personal reputation were imperiled. He did not want courage to take the step and he had the judgment to take it at the right time. He bore the reproaches of that which had been his party with dignity and composure. He was undoubtedly, as Lord Beckinsfield calls him, a great member of parliament. But he was surely also a great minister. Perhaps he needed only a profounder trial at the hands of fate to have earned the title of a great man. To the same year belongs the close of another remarkable career. On August 26th, 1850, Louis-Philippe, lately king of the French, died at Clermont, the guest of England. Few men in history had gone through greater reverses. Son of Philippe Egalité brought up in a sort of blending of luxury and scholastic self-denial, under the contrasting influence of his father and his teacher, Madame de Jean-Lis, a woman full at least a virtuous precept and rousseau-like profession. He showed great force of character during the revolution. He still regarded France as his country though she no longer gave a throne to any of his family. He had fought like a brave young soldier at Valmy and Jean-Map. Egalité Fice, says Carlisle, speaking of the young man at Valmy. Equality, Junior, a light-gallant field officer, distinguished himself by intrepidity. It is the same intrepid individual who now as Louis-Philippe, without the equality, struggles under sad circumstances to be called king of the French for a season. It is he who, as Carlisle also describes it, saves his sister with such spirit and energy when Madame de Jean-Lis, with all her fine precepts, would have left her behind to whatever danger. Behold the young princely brother, struggling hitherward, hastily calling, bearing a princess in his arms. Hastily he has clutched the poor young lady up in her very nightgown, nothing saved of her goods except the watch from the pillow. With brotherly despair he flings her, among the band-boxes into Jean-Lis's chaise, into Jean-Lis's arms. The brave young Egalité has a most wild moral to look for, but now only himself to carry through it. The brave young Egalité had indeed a wild time before him. A wanderer, an exile, a fugitive, a teacher in Swiss and American schools, bearing many and various names as he turned to many callings and saw many lands, always perhaps keeping in mind that Danton had laid his great hand upon his head and declared that the boy must one day be king of France. Then in the whirl-a-gig of time the opportunity that long might have seemed impossible came round at last and the soldier, exile, college teacher, wanderer among American Indian tribes, resident of Philadelphia and of Bloomingdale in the New York suburbs, is king of the French. Well had Carlisle gauged his position after some years of reign when he described him as struggling under sad circumstances to be called king of the French for a season. He ought to have been a great man, he had had a great training, all his promises a man faded when his seeming success began to shine. He had apparently learned nothing of adversity, he was able to learn nothing of prosperity and greatness. Of all men whom his time had tried he ought best to have known, one might think, the vanity of human schemes and the futility of trying to uphold thrones on false principles. He intrigued for power as if his previous experience had taught him that power once obtained was inalienable. He seemed at one time to have no real faith in anything but chicane. He made the fairest professions and did the meanest, falsest things. He talked to Queen Victoria in language that might have brought tears into a father's eyes, and he was all the time planning the detestable juggle of the Spanish marriages. He did not even seem to retain the courage of his youth. It went apparently with whatever of true unselfish principle he had when he was yet a young soldier of the Republic. He was like our own James II, who as a youth extorted the praise of the great Turin for his bravery, and as a king earned the scorn of the world for his pusillanimous imbecility. Some people say that there remained a gleam of perverted principle in Louis-Philippe which broke out just at the close, and unluckily for him exactly at the wrong time. It is asserted that he could have put down the movement of 1848 in the beginning with one decisive word. Certainly those who began that movement were as little prepared as he for its turning out a revolution. It is generally assumed that he halted and dallyed and refused to give the word of command out of sheer weakness of mind and lack of courage, but the assumption according to some is unjust. Their theory is that Louis-Philippe at that moment of crisis was seized with a conscientious scruple and believed that having been called to power by the choice of the people, called to rule not as King of France but as King of the French, as King that is to say of the French people so long as they chose to have him, he was not authorized to maintain himself on that throne by force. The feeling would have been just and right if it were certain that the French people or any majority of the French people really wished him away and were prepared to welcome a republic. But it was hardly fair to those who set him on the throne, to assume at once that he was bound to come down from it at the bidding of no matter whom, how few or how many, and without in some way trying conclusions to see if it were the voice of France that summoned him to descend, or only the outcry of a moment and a crowd. The scruple, if it existed, lost the throne, in which we are far from saying that France suffered any great loss. We are bound to say that Monsieur Thier, who ought to have known, does not seem to have believed in the operation of any scruple of the kind, and ascribes the King's fall simply to blundering into bad advice. But it would have been curiously illustrative of the odd contradictions of human nature, and especially curious, as illustrating that one very odd and mixed nature, if Louis Philippe, had really felt such a scruple and yielded to it. He had carried out with full deliberation and in spite of all remonstrance schemes which tore asunder human lives, blighted human happiness, played at dice with the destinies of whole nations, and might have involved all Europe in war, and it does not seem that he ever felt one twinge of scruple or acknowledged one pang of remorse. His policy had been unutterably mean and selfish and deceitful. His very bourgeois virtues on which he was so much inclined to boast himself had been a sham, for he had carried out schemes which defied and flouted the first principles of human virtue, and made as light of the honour of woman as of the integrity of man. It would humor the irony of fate if he had sacrificed his crown to a scruple which a man of really high principle would well have felt justified in banishing from his mind. One is reminded of the daughter of Macklin, the famous actor, who having made her success on the stage by appearing constantly in pieces which compelled the most liberal display of foremen limbs to all the house and all the town, died of a slight injury to her knee, which she allowed to grow mortal, rather than permit any doctor to look at the suffering place. In Louis Philippe's case, too, this scruple would show so oddly that even the sacrifice it entailed could scarcely make us regard it with respect. He died in exile among us, the clever, unwise, grand, mean old man. There was a great deal about him which made him respected in private life, and when he had nothing to do with state intrigues and the foreign policy of courts. He was much liked in England, and for many years after his sons lived. But there were Englishmen who did not like him and did not readily forgive him. One of these was Lord Palmerston. Lord Palmerston wrote to his brother a few days after the death of Louis Philippe, expressing his sentiments thereupon with the utmost directness. The death of Louis Philippe, he said, delivers me from my most artful and inveterate enemy, whose position gave him in many ways the power to injure me. Louis Philippe always detested Lord Palmerston, and according to Thier was constantly saying witty and spiteful things of the English minister, which good-natured friends as constantly brought to Palmerston's ears. When Lord Palmerston did not feel exactly as a good Christian ought to have felt, he at least never pretended to any such feeling. The same letter contains immediately after a reference to Sir Robert Peel. It, too, is characteristic. Though I am sorry for the death of Peel from personal regard, and because it is no doubt a great loss to the country, yet so far as my own political position is concerned, I do not think that he was ever disposed to do me any good turn. A little while before Prince Albert, writing to his friend Baron Stockmar, had spoken of Peel as having somewhat unduly favored Palmerston's foreign policy in the great Pacifico debate, or at least not having borne as severely as he might upon it and for a certainly not selfish reason. He, Peel, could not call the policy good, yet he did not wish to damage the ministry, and this solely because he considered that a protectionist ministry succeeding them would be dangerous to the country, and had quite determined not to take office himself. But would the fact that his health no longer admitted of his doing so have been sufficient as time went on to make his followers and friends bear with patient resignation their own permanent exclusion from office? I doubt it. The Prince might well doubt it. If Peel had lived, it is all but certain that he would have had to take office. It is curious, however, to notice how completely Prince Albert and Lord Palmerston are at odds in their way of estimating Peel's political attitude before his death. Lord Palmerston's quiet way of setting Peel down as one who would never be disposed to do him a good turn is characteristic of the manner in which the foreign secretary went in for the game of politics. Palmerston was a man of kindly instincts and genial temperament. He was much loved by his friends. His feelings were always directing him toward a certain half-indulent benevolence. But the game of politics was to him like the hunting field. One cannot stop to help a friend out of a ditch or to lament over him if he is down and seriously injured. For the hour the only thing is to keep on one's way. In the political game Lord Palmerston was playing, enemies were only obstacles, and it would be absurd to pretend to be sorry when they were out of his path. Therefore there is no affectation of generous regret for Louis Philippe. Political rivals even if private friends are something like obstacles too. Palmerston is of opinion that Peel would never be disposed to do him a good turn and therefore indulges in no sentimental regret for his death. He is a loss to the country no doubt and personally one is sorry for him of course and all that. Which done God take King Edward to his mercy and leave the world for me to bustle in. The world certainly was more free henceforth for Lord Palmerston's active and unresting spirit to bustle in. XVI. The autumn of 1850 and the greater part of 1851 were disturbed by an agitation which seems strangely out of keeping with our present condition of religious liberty and civilization. A struggle with the Papal Court might appear to be a practical impossibility for the England of our time. The mind has to go back some centuries to put itself into what would appear the proper framework for such events. Legislation or even agitation against Papal aggression would seem about as superfluous in our modern English days as the use of any of the once popular charms which were believed to hinder witches of their will. The story is extraordinary and is in many ways instructive. For some time previous to 1850 there had been as we have seen already a certain movement among some scholarly mystical men in England toward the Roman Church. We have already shown how this movement began and how little it could fairly be said to represent any actual impulse of reaction among the English people, but it unquestionably made a profound impression in Rome. The Court of Rome then saw everything through the eyes of ecclesiastics, and a Roman Catholic ecclesiastic not well acquainted with the actual conditions of English life might well be excused if when he found that two or three great Englishmen had gone over to the Church he fancied that they were but the vanguard of a vast popular or national movement. It is clear that the Court of Rome was quite mistaken as to the religious condition of England. The most chimerical notions prevailed in the Vatican. To the eyes of papal enthusiasm the whole English nation was only waiting for some word in season to return to the spiritual jurisdiction of Rome. The Pope had not been fortunate in many things. He had been a fugitive from his own city and had been restored only by the force of French arms. He was a thoroughly good, pious, ingenial man, not seeing far into the various ways of human thought and national character, and to his mind there was nothing unreasonable in the idea that heaven might have made up for the domestic disasters of his reign by making him the instrument of the conversion of England. No better proof can be given up the manner in which he and his advisers misunderstood the English people than the step with which his Sanguun zeal inspired him. The English people, even while they yet bowed to the spiritual supremacy of the papacy, were always keenly jealous of any ecclesiastical attempt to control the political action or restrict the national independence of England. The history of the relations between England and Rome for long generations before England had any thought of renouncing the faith of Rome might have furnished ample proof of this to anyone who gave himself the trouble to turn over a few pages of English chronicles. The Pope did not read English, and his advisers did not understand England. Accordingly he took a step with the view of encouraging and inviting England to become converted, which was calculated specially and instantly to defeat its own purpose. Had the great majority of the English people been really drawing toward the verge of a reaction to Rome, such an act as that done by the Pope might have startled them back to their old attitude. The assumption of papal authority over England only filled the English people with a new determination to repudiate and resist every pretension at spiritual authority on the part of the court of Rome. The time has so completely passed away, and the supposed pretensions have come to so little that the most zealous Protestants can afford to discuss the whole question now with absolute impartiality and unruffled calmness. Everyone can clearly see now that if the Pope was mistaken in the course he took, and if the nation in general was amply justified in resenting even a supposed attempt at foreign interference, the piece of legislation to which the occasion gave birth was not a masterpiece of statesmanship, nor was the manner in which it was carried through always creditable to the good sense of Parliament and the public. The papal aggression in itself was perhaps a measure to smile at rather than to arouse great national indignation. It consisted of the issue of a papal bull, given at St. Peter's Rome under the seal of the fishermen, and directing the establishment in England of a hierarchy of bishops deriving their titles from their own seas which we constitute by the present letter in the various apostolic districts. It is a curious evidence of the little knowledge of England's condition possessed by the court of Rome then that although five-sixths, at least, of the Catholics in England were Irish by birth or extraction, the newly appointed bishops were all or nearly all Englishmen unconnected with Ireland. An Englishman of the present day would be probably inclined to ask on hearing the effect of the bull, is that all? Being told that that was all he would probably have gone on to ask, what does it matter? Who cares whether the Pope gives new titles to his English ecclesiastics or not? What Protestant is even interested in knowing whether a certain Catholic bishop living in England is called Bishop of Mesopotamia or of Lambeth? There always were Catholic bishops in England. There were Catholic archbishops. They were free to go and come, to preach and teach as they liked, to dress as they liked. For all that nineteen out of every twenty Englishmen cared they might have been also free to call themselves what they liked. Any Protestant who mixed with Roman Catholics or knew anything about their usages knew that they were in the habit of calling their bishops, my Lord, and their archbishops, your Grace. He knew, of course, that they had not the slightest legal right to use such high-sounding titles, but this did not trouble him in the least. It was only a ceremonial intended for Catholics, and it did not give him either offense or concern. Why, then, should he be expected to disturb his mind, because the Pope chose to direct that the English Roman Catholics should call a man Bishop of Liverpool or Archbishop of Westminster? The Pope could not compel him to call them by any such names if he did not think fit, and unless his attention had been very earnestly drawn to the fact, he never probably would have found out that any new titles had been invented for the Catholic hierarchy in England. This was the way in which a great many Englishmen regarded the matter even then, but it must be owned that there was something about the time and manner of the papal bull calculated to offend the susceptibility of a great and independent nation. The mere fact that a certain movement towards Rome had been painfully visible in the ranks of the English Church itself was enough to make people sensitive and jealous. The plain sense of many thoroughly impartial and cool-headed Englishmen showed them that the two things were connected in the mind of the Pope, and that he had issued his bull because he thought the time was actually coming when he might begin to take measures for the spiritual annexation of England. His pretensions might be of no account in themselves, but the fact that he made them in the evident belief that they were justified by realities produced a jarring and painful effect on the mind of England. The offence lay in the Pope's evident assumption that the change he was making was the natural result of an actual change in the national feeling of England. The anger was not against the giving of the new titles, but against the assumption of a new right to give titles representing territorial distinctions in this country. The agitation that sprang up was fiercely heated by the pastoral letter of the chief of the new hierarchy. The Pope had divided England into various diocese, which he placed under the control of an Archbishop and twelve suffragans, and the new Archbishop was Cardinal Wiseman. Under the title of Archbishop of Westminster and Administrator Apostolic of the Diocese of Southwark, Cardinal Wiseman was now to reside in London. Cardinal Wiseman was already well known in England. He was of English descent on his father's side and of Irish on his mother's. He was a Spaniard by birth and a Roman by education. His family on both sides was of good position. His father came of a long line of Essex gentry. Wiseman had held the professorship of Oriental languages in the English College at Rome, and afterwards became Rector of the College. In 1840 he was appointed by the Pope one of the Vickers Apostolic of England, and held his position here as Bishop of Melopotamus in Partibus in Fidelium. He was well known to be a fine scholar, an accomplished linguist, and a powerful preacher and controversialist. But he was believed also to be a man of great ecclesiastical ambition, ambition for his church that is to say, of singular boldness and of much political ability. The Pope's action was set down as in great measure the work of Wiseman. The Cardinal himself was accepted in the minds of most Englishmen as a type of the regular Italian ecclesiastic, bold, clever, ambitious, and unscrupulous. The very fact of his English extraction only militated the more against him in the public feeling. He was regarded as in some sense one who had gone over to the enemy, and who was the more to be dreaded because of the knowledge he carried with him. Perhaps it is not too much to say that in the existing mood of the English people the very title of Cardinal exasperated the feeling against Wiseman. Had he come as a simple archbishop the aggression might not have seemed so marked. The title of Cardinal brought back unwelcome memories to the English public. It reminded them of a period of their history when the forces of Rome and those of the national independence were really arrayed against each other in a struggle which Englishmen might justly look on as dangerous. Since those times there had been no Cardinal in England. Did it not look ominous that a Cardinal should present himself now? The first step taken by Cardinal Wiseman did not tend to charm away this feeling. He issued a pastoral letter addressed to England on October 7th, 1850, which was set forth as given out of the Flaminian gate of Rome. This description of the letter was afterwards stated to be in accordance with one of the necessary formularies of the Church of Rome, but it was then assumed in England to be an expression of insolence and audacity intended to remind the English people that from out of Rome itself came the assertion of supremacy over them. This letter was to be read publicly in all the Roman Catholic Churches in London. It addressed itself directly to the English people and it announced that your beloved country has received a place among the fair churches which normally constituted form the splendid aggregate of Catholic communion. Catholic England has been restored to its orbit in the ecclesiastical firmament from which its light had long vanished and begins now anew its course of regularly adjusted action round the center of unity, the source of jurisdiction of light and of vigor. It must be allowed that this was rather imprudent language to address to a people peculiarly proud of being Protestant, a people of whom their critics say not wholly without reason that they are somewhat narrow and unsympathetic in their Protestantism, that their national tendency is to believe in the existence of nothing really good outside the limits of Protestantism. In England the National Church is a symbol of victory over foreign enemies and domination at home. It was not likely that the English people could regard it as anything but an offense to be told that they were resuming their place as a part of an ecclesiastical system to which they of all peoples looked with dislike and distrust. We are not saying that the feeling with which the great bulk of the English people regarded Cardinal Wiseman's church was just or liberal. We are simply recording the unquestionable historical fact that such was the manner in which the English people regarded the Roman church in order to show how slender was the probability of their being moved to anything but anger by such expressions as those contained in Cardinal Wiseman's letter. But the letter had hardly reached England when the country was aroused by another letter coming from a very different quarter and intended as a counterblast to the papal assumption of authority. This was Lord John Russell's famous Durham letter. Russell had the art of writing letters that exploded like bombshells in the midst of some controversy. His Edinburgh letter had set the cabinet of Sir Robert Peel on to recognize the fact that something must be done with the free trade question. And now his Durham letter spoke the word that let loose a very torrent of English public feeling. The letter was in reply to one from the Bishop of Durham and was dated Downing Street, November the 4th. Lord John Russell condemned in the most unmeasured terms the assumption of the Pope as a pretension of supremacy over the realm of England and a claim to soul and undivided sway which is inconsistent with the Queen's supremacy, with the rights of our bishops and clergy, and with the spiritual independence of the nation as asserted even in the Roman Catholic times. Lord John Russell went on to say that his alarm was by no means equal to his indignation, that the liberty of Protestantism had been enjoyed too long in England to allow of any successful attempt to impose a foreign yoke upon men's minds and consciences and that the laws of the country should be carefully examined and the propriety of adopting some additional measures deliberately considered. But Lord John Russell went further than all this. He declared that there was a danger that alarmed him more than any aggression from a foreign sovereign, and that was that danger within the gates from the unworthy sons of the Church of England herself. Clergymen of that Church he declared had been leading their flocks step by step to the verge of the precipice. What he asked meant the honour paid to saints, the claim of infallibility for the Church, the superstitious use of the sign of the cross, the muttering of the liturgy so as to disguise the language in which it is written, the recommendation of a regular confession, and the administration of penance and absolution. The letter closed with a sentence which gave a special offence to Roman Catholics, but which Lord John Russell afterwards explained, and indeed the context ought to have shown, was not meant as any attack on their religion or their ceremonial. I have little hope that the propounders and framers of these innovations will desist from their insidious course, but I rely with confidence on the people of England, and I will not bait one jot of heart or hope, so long as the glorious principles and the immortal martyrs of the Reformation shall be held in reverence by the great mass of a nation which looks with contempt on the mummaries of superstition, and with scorn at the laborious endeavours which are now making to confine the intellect and enslave the soul. It is now clear from the very terms of this letter that Lord John Russell meant to apply these words to the practices within the English Church, which he had so strongly condemned in the earlier passages, and which alone he said he regarded with any serious alarm. But the Roman Catholics in general and the majority of persons of all sex accepted them as a denunciation of popery. The Catholics looked upon them as a declaration of war against Catholicism, the fanatical of the other side welcomed them as a trumpet call to a new no-popery agitation. The very day after the letter appeared was the Guy Fox anniversary. All over the country the effigies of the pulp and cardinal Wiseman took the place of the regulation guy, and were paraded and burnt amid tumultuous demonstrations. A colossal procession of guys passed down Fleet Street, the principal figure of which, a gigantic form of sixteen feet high, seated in a chariot, had to be bent down and compelled to veil his crest in order to pass under Temple Bar. This titanic guy was the new cardinal in his red robes. In Exeter a yet more elaborate anti-papal demonstration was made. A procession of two hundred persons in character dresses marched round the venerable cathedral amid the varied effulgence of colored lights. The procession represented the pulp, the new cardinal, and the inquisition, various of the inquisitors brandishing instruments of torture. Considerable sums of money were spent on these popular demonstrations, the only interest in which now is that they serve to illustrate the public sentiment of the hour. Mr. Disraeli, good-naturedly, endeavored at once to foment the prevailing heat of public temper, and at the same time to direct its fervor against the ministry themselves by declaring in a published letter that he could hardly blame the Pope for supposing himself at liberty to divide England into bishoprics, seeing the encouragement he had got from the ministers themselves by the recognition they had offered to the Roman Catholic Hierarchy of Ireland. The fact is, Mr. Disraeli said, the whole question has been surrendered and decided in favour of the Pope by the present minister's government. The ministers who recognise the pseudo-archbishop of Tuam as a peer in a prelate cannot object to the appointment of a pseudo-archbishop of Westminster, even though he be a cardinal. As a matter of fact it was not the existing government that had recognised the rank of the Irish Catholic prelates. The recognition had been formally arranged in January 1845 by a royal warrant or commission for carrying out the Charitable Bequests Act, which gave the Irish Catholic prelates rank immediately after the prelates of the established church of the same degree. But the letter of Mr. Disraeli, like that of Lord John Russell, served to inflame passions on both sides and to put the country in the worst possible mood for any manner of wholesome legislation. Never during the same generation had there been such an outburst of anger on both sides of the religious controversy. It was a curious incident in political history that Lord John Russell, who had more than any Englishmen then living been identified with the principles of religious liberty, who had sat at the feet of Fox and had for his closest friend the Catholic poet Thomas Moore, came to be regarded by Roman Catholics as the bitterest enemy of their creed and their rights of worship. The ministry felt that something must be done. They could not face Parliament without some piece of legislation to satisfy public feeling. Many even among the most zealous Protestants deeply regretted that Lord John Russell had written anything on the subject. Not a few Roman Catholics of position and influence bitterly lamented the indiscretion of the Papal Court. The mischief, however, was now fairly afoot. The step taken by the Pope had set the country aflame. Every day crowded and tumultuous meetings were held to denounce the action of the Court of Rome. Before the end of the year something like 7000 such meetings had been held throughout the kingdom. Sometimes the Roman Catholic Party mustered strong at such demonstrations and the result was rioting in disturbance. Addresses poured in upon the Queen and the ministers calling for decided action against the assumption of papal authority. About the same time Father Gavazzi, an Italian Republican who had been a priest, came to London and began a series of lectures against the papacy. He was a man of great rhetorical power with a remarkable command of the eloquence of passion and denunciation. His lectures were at first given only in Italian and therefore did not appeal to a popular English audience. But they were reported in the papers at much length and they contributed not a little to swell the tide of public feeling against the Pope and the Court of Rome. The new Lord Chancellor, Lord Truro, created great applause and tumult at the Lord Mayor's dinner by quoting from Shakespeare the words, Under my feet I'll stamp thy cardinal's hat in spite of Pope or dignities of church. Charles Keane, the Tragedean, was interrupted by thundering peals of applause and the rising of the whole audience to their feet, when as King John he proclaimed, Let no Italian priest shall tie their toll in our dominion. Long afterwards and when the storm seemed to have wholly died away, Cardinal Wiseman going in a carriage to the streets of Liverpool to deliver a lecture on a purely literary subject to a general audience was pelted with stones by a mob who remembered the papal assumption and the passions excited by the ecclesiastical titles act. The opening of Parliament came. The Ministry had to do something. No Ministry that ever held power in England could have attempted to meet the House of Commons without some project of a measure to allay public excitement. On February 4, 1851 the Queen in Person opened Parliament. Her speech contained some sentences which were listened to with the profoundest interest because they referred to the question which was agitating all England. The recent assumption of certain ecclesiastical titles conferred by a foreign power has excited strong feelings in this country and large bodies of my subjects have presented addresses to me expressing attachment to the throne and praying that such assumptions should be resisted. I have assured them of my resolution to maintain the rights of my crown and the independence of the nation against all encroachments from whatever quarter they may proceed. I have at the same time expressed my earnest desire and firm determination under God's blessing to maintain, unimpaired, the religious liberty which is so justly prized by the people of this country. How little of inclination to any measures dealing unfairly with Roman Catholics was in the mind of the Queen herself may be seen from a letter in which when the excitement was at its height she had expressed her opinion to her aunt the Duchess of Gloucester. I would never have consented to anything which breathed a spirit of intolerance. Sincerely Protestant as I always have been and always shall be, and indignant as I am at those who call themselves Protestants while they are in fact quite the contrary, I much regret the un-Christian and intolerant spirit exhibited by many people at the public meetings. I cannot bear to hear the violent abuse of the Catholic religion which is so painful and so cruel toward the many good and innocent Roman Catholics. However we must hope and trust this excitement will soon cease and that the wholesome effect of it upon our own church will be lasting. The papal aggression question, Lord Palmerston wrote to his brother just before the opening of Parliament, will give us some trouble and give rise to stormy debates. Our difficulty will be to find out a measure which will satisfy reasonable Protestants without violating those principles of liberal toleration which we are pledged to. I think we shall succeed. The thing itself in truth is little or nothing and does not justify the irritation. What has goaded the nation is the manner, insolent and ostentatious in which it was done. We must bring in a measure. The country will not be satisfied without some legislative enactment. We shall make it as gentle as possible. The violent party will object to it for its mildness and will endeavor to drive us farther. A measure brought in only because something must be done, to satisfy public opinion, is not likely to be a very valuable piece of legislation. The ministry in this case was embarrassed by the fact that they really did not particularly want to do anything except to satisfy public opinion for the moment and get rid of all the controversy. They were placed between two galling fires. On the one side were the extreme Protestants to whom Palmerston alluded as violent and who were eager for severe measures against the Catholics, and on the other were the Roman Catholic supporters of the ministry who protested against any legislation whatever on the subject. It would have been simply impossible to find any safe and satisfactory path of compromise which all could consent to walk. The ministry did the best they could to frame a measure which should seem to do something and yet do little or nothing. Two or three days after the meeting of Parliament, or John Russell introduced his bill to prevent the assumption by Roman Catholics of titles taken from any territory or place within the United Kingdom. The measure proposed to prohibit the use of all such titles under penalty and to render void all acts done by or bequests made to persons under such titles. The Roman Catholic Relief Act imposed a penalty of 100 pounds for every assumption of a title taken from an existing sea. Lord John Russell proposed now to extend the penalty to the assumption of any title whatever from any place in the United Kingdom. The reception which was given to Lord John Russell's motion for leave to bring in this bill was not encouraging. Usually leave to bring in a bill as granted as a matter of course. Some few general observations of extemporaneous and guarded criticism are often made, but the common practice is to offer no opposition. On this occasion, however, it was at once made manifest that no measure, however gentle, to use Lord Palmerston's word, would be allowed to pass without obstinate opposition. Mr. Robuck described the bill as one of the meanest, pettiest and most futile measures that ever disgraced even bigotry itself. Mr. Bright called it little paltry and miserable, a mere sham to bolster up church ascendancy. Mr. Disraeli declared that he would not oppose the introduction of the bill, but he spoke of it in language of as much contempt as Mr. Robuck and Mr. Bright had used, calling it a mere piece of petty persecution. Was it for this, Mr. Disraeli scornfully asked, that the Lord Chancellor trampled on a cardinal's hat amid the patriotic acclamations of the metropolitan municipality? Sir Robert Engels, on the part of the more extreme Protestants, objected to the bill on the ground that it did not go far enough. The debate on the motion for leave to bring in the bill was renewed for night after night, and the fullest promise of an angry and prolonged resistance was given. Yet so strong was the feeling in favour of some legislation, that when the division was taken, 395 votes were given for the motion, and only 63 against it. The opponents of the measure had on their side not only all the prominent champions of religious liberty, like Sir James Graham, Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright, but also Protestant politicians of such devotion to the interests of the church as Mr. Roundell Palmer, afterward Lord Selburn, and Mr. Beresford Hope, and of course, they had with them all the Irish Catholic members. Yet the motion for leave to bring in the bill was carried by this overwhelming majority. The ministers had at all events ample justification, so far as parliamentary tactics were concerned, for the introduction of their measure. If however we come to regard the ministerial proposal as a piece of practical legislation, the case to be made for them is not strong, nor is the abortive result of their efforts at all surprising. They set out, on the enterprise without any real interest in it, or any particular confidence in its success. It is probable that Lord John Russell alone, of all the ministers, had any expectation of a satisfactory result to come of the piece of legislation they were attempting. We have seen what Lord Palmerston thought on the whole subject. The ministers were in fact in the difficulty of all statesmen who bring in a measure, not because they themselves are clear as to its necessity or its efficacy, but because they find that something must be done to satisfy public feeling and they do not know of anything better to do at the moment. The history of the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill was therefore a history of blunder, unlucky accident, and failure from the moment it was brought in until its ignominious and ridiculous repeal many years after, and when its absolute impotence had been not merely demonstrated but forgotten. The government at first, as we have seen, resolved to impose the penalty on the assumption of Ecclesiastical Titles by Roman Catholic prelates from places in the United Kingdom and to make null and void all acts done or requests made in virtue of such Titles. But they found that it would be absolutely impossible to apply such legislation to Ireland. In that country a Catholic hierarchy had long been tolerated and all the functions of a regular hierarchy had been in full informal operation. To apply the new measure to Ireland would have been virtually to repeal the Roman Catholic Relief Act and restore the penal laws. On the other hand the ministers were not willing to make one law against Titles for England and another for Ireland. They were driven, therefore, to the course of withdrawing two of the stringent clauses of the bill and leaving it little more than a mere declaration against the assumption of unlawful Titles. But by doing this they furnished stronger reasons for opposition to both of the two very different parties who had hitherto denounced their way of dealing with the crisis. Those who thought the bill did not go far enough before were, of course, indignant at the proposal to shear it of whatever little force it had originally possessed. They, on the other hand, who had opposed it as a breach of the principle of religious liberty, could now ridicule it, with all the greater effect, on the ground that it violated a principle without even the pretext of doing any practical good as a compensation. In the first instance the ministry might plead that the crisis was exceptional and that it called for exceptional measures, that something must be done and that they could not stand on ceremony even with the principle of religious liberty when the interest of the state was at stake. Now they left it in the power of their opponents to say that they were breaking a principle for the sake of introducing a non-entity. The debates were long, fierce, and often passionate. The bill, even cut down as it was, had a vast majority on its side, but some of the most illustrious names in the House of Commons were recorded against it. By far the most eloquent voices in the House were raised to condemn it. The Irish, Roman, Catholic members set up a persistent opposition to it, and up to a certain period of its progress put in requisition all the forms of the House to impede it. This part of the story ought not to be passed over without mention of the fact that among other effects produced by the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill, perhaps the most distinct, was the creation of the most worthless band of agitators who ever pretended to speak with the voice of Ireland. These were the men who were called in the House, the Pope's brass band, and who were regarded with as much dislike and distrust by all intelligent Roman Catholics and Irish nationalists as by the most inveterate Tories. These men leaped into influence by their denunciations of the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill. They were successful for a time in palming themselves off as patriots upon Irish constituencies. They thundered against the bill. They put in motion every mechanism of delay and obstruction. Some of them were really clever and eloquent. Most of them were loud-voiced. They had a grand and heaven-sent opportunity given to them and they made use of it. They had a leader, the once famous John Sadlier. This man possessed marked ability and was further gifted with an unscrupulous audacity at least equal to his ability. He went to work deliberately to create for himself a band of followers by whose help he might mount to power. He was a financial swindler as well as a political adventurer. By means of the money he had suddenly acquired and by virtue of his furious denunciations of the anti-Catholic policy of the government, he was for a time able to work the Irish popular constituencies so as to get his own followers into the house and become for the hour a sort of little O'Connell. He had with him some two or three honest men whom he deluded into a belief in the sincerity of himself and his gang of swindling adventurers, and it is only fair to say that by far the most eloquent man of the party appears to have been one of those on whom Sadlier was thus able to impose. Mr. Sadlier's band afterwards came to a sad grief. He committed suicide himself to escape the punishment of his frauds. Some of his associates fled to foreign countries and hid themselves under feigned names. James Sadlier, brother and accomplice of John, was among these and underwent that rare mark of degradation in our days a formal expulsion from the House of Commons. The Pope's brass band and its subsequent history culminating in the suicide on Hampstead Heath was about the only practical result of the ecclesiastical title's bill. The bill reduced in stringency, as has been described, made however some progress through the House. It was interrupted at one stage by events which had nothing to do with its history. The government got into trouble of another kind. At the opening of the session Mr. Disraeli introduced a motion to the effect that the agricultural distress of the country called upon the government to introduce without delay some measures for its relief. This motion was in fact the last spasmodic cry of protection. Many influential politicians still believed that the cause of protection was not wholly lost. That a reaction was possible. That the free trade doctrine would prove a failure and have to be given up. And they regarded Mr. Disraeli's as a very important motion calling for a strenuous effort in its favor. The government treated the motion as one for restored protection and threw all their strength into the struggle against it. They won, but only by a majority of fourteen. A few days after Mr. Locke King, member for East Surrey, asked for leave to bring in a bill to assimilate the county franchise to that existing in Burrus. Lord John Russell opposed the motion and the government was defeated by one hundred votes against fifty-two. It was evident that this was only what is called a SNAP vote. That the House was taken by surprise. And that the result in no wise represented the general feeling of parliament. But still it was a vexatious occurrence for the ministry already humiliated by the small majority they had obtained on Disraeli's motion. Their budget had already been received with very general marks of dissatisfaction. The Chancellor of the Exchequer only proposed a partial and qualified repeal of the window tax, an impost which was justly detested, and he continued the income tax. The budget was introduced shortly before Mr. Locke King's motion, and every day that had elapsed since its introduction only more and more developed the public dissatisfaction with which it was regarded. Under all these circumstances Lord John Russell felt that he had no alternative but to tender his resignation to the Queen. Leaving his ecclesiastical titles bill suspended in air, he announced that he could no longer think of carrying on the government of the country. The question was, who should succeed him? The Queen sent for Lord Stanley afterwards Lord Darby. Lord Stanley offered to do his best to form a government, but was not at all sanguine about the success of the task nor eager to undertake it. He even recommended that before he made any experiment, Lord John Russell should try if he could not do something by getting some of the Peelites as they were then beginning to be called, the followers of Sir Robert Peel, who had held with him to the last, to join him, and thus patch up the government anew. This was tried and failed. The Peelites would have nothing to do with the ecclesiastical titles bill, and Lord John Russell would not go on without it. On the other hand Lord Aberdeen, the Chief of the Peelites in the House of Lords, would not attempt to form a ministry of his own, frankly acknowledging that in the existing temper of the country it would be impossible for any government to get on without legislating in some way on the papal aggression. There was nothing for it, but for Lord Stanley to try. He tried without hope, and of course he was unsuccessful. The position of parties was very peculiar. It was impossible to form any combination which could really agree upon anything. There were three parties out of which a ministry might be formed. These were the Wigs, the Conservatives, and the Peelites. The Peelites were a very rising and promising body of men. Among them were Sir James Graham, Lord Canning, Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Sidney Herbert, Mr. Cardwell, and some others almost equally well known. Only these three groups were fairly in the competition for office, for the idea of a ministry of radicals and Manchester men was not then likely to present itself to any official mind. But how could anyone put together a ministry formed from a combination of these three? The Peelites would not coalesce with the Tories because of the protection question to which Mr. Disraeli's motion had given a new semblance of vitality, and because of Lord Stanley's own declaration that he still regarded the policy of free trade as only an experiment. The Peelites would not combine with the Wigs because of the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill. The Conservatives would not disavow protective ideas. The Wigs would not give up the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill. No statesmen therefore could form a government without having to count on two great parties being against him on one question or the other. All manner of delays took place. The Duke of Wellington was consulted, Lord Lansdowne was consulted. The wit of man could suggest nothing satisfactory. The conditions for extracting any satisfactory solution did not exist. There was nothing better to be done than to ask the ministers who had resigned to resume their places and muddle on as best they could. It is not enough to say that there was nothing better to be done. There was nothing else to be done. They were at all events still administering the affairs of the country, and no one would relieve them of the task. If so, fact, though, they had to stay. The ministers returned to their places and resumed the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill. It was then that they made the change in its conditions which has already been mentioned and thus created new arguments against them on both sides of the House of Commons. They struck out of the Bill every word that might appear like an encroachment on the Roman Church within the sphere of its own ecclesiastical operations, and made it simply enact against the public an ostentatious assumption of illegal Titles. The Bill was wrangled over until the end of June and then a large number, some seventy of the Irish Catholic members publicly seceded from the discussion and announced that they could take no further part in the divisions. On this some of the strongest opponents of the papal aggression, led by Sir Frederick Thessager, afterwards Lord Chelmsford, brought in a series of resolutions intended to make the Bill more stringent than it had been even as originally introduced. The object of the resolutions was principally to give the power of prosecuting and claiming a penalty to anybody, provided he obtained the consent of the law officers of the Crown, and to make penal the introduction of bulls. The government opposed the introduction of these amendments and were put in the awkward position of having to act as antagonists of the party in the country who represented the strongest hostility to the papal aggression. Thus for the moment, the author of the Durham letter was seemingly converted into a champion of the Roman Catholic side of the controversy. His championship was ineffective. The Irish members took no part in the controversy, and the government were beaten by the ultra Protestant party on every division. Lord John Russell was bitterly taunted by various of his opponents and was asked with indignation why he did not withdraw the bill when it ceased to be any longer his own scheme. He probably thought by this time that it really made little matter what bill was passed, so long as any bill was passed, and that the best thing to do was to get the controversy out of the way by any process. He did not therefore withdraw the bill, although Sir Frederick Thessager carried all his stringent clauses. When the measure came on for a third reading, Lord John Russell moved the omission of the added clauses, but he was defeated by large majorities. The bill was done with so far as the House of Commons was concerned. After an eloquent and powerful protest from Mr Gladstone against the measure as one disparaging to the great principle of religious freedom, the bill was read a third time. It went up to the House of Lords, was passed there without alteration although not without opposition, and soon after received the royal assent. This was practically the last the world heard about it. In the Roman Church everything went on as before. The New Cardinal Archbishop still called himself Archbishop of Westminster. Some of the Irish prelates made a point of ostentatiously using their territorial titles in letters addressed to the ministers themselves. The bitterness of feeling which the papal aggression and the legislation against it had called up did not indeed pass away very soon. It broke out again and again, sometimes in the form of very serious riot. It turned away at many an election the eyes and minds of the constituencies from questions of profound and genuine public interest to dogmatic controversy and the hates of jarring sectaries. It furnished political capital for John Sadlier and his band, and kept them flourishing for a while, and it set up in the Irish popular mind a purely imaginary figure of Lord John Russell, who became regarded as the malign enemy of the Catholic faith and of all religious liberty. But save for the quarrels aroused at the time, the act of the Pope and the act of Parliament were alike dead letters. Nothing came of the papal bull. England was not restored to the communion of the Roman Catholic Church. The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London retained their places and their spiritual jurisdiction as before. Cardinal Wiseman remained only a prelate of Roman Catholics. On the other hand, the Ecclesiastical Titles Act was never put in force. Nobody troubled about it. Many years after, in 1871, it was quietly repealed. It died in such obscurity that the outer public hardly knew whether it was above ground or below. Certainly if the whole agitation showed that England was thoroughly Protestant, it also showed that English Protestants had not much of the persecuting spirit. They had no inclination to molest their Catholic neighbors and only asked to be let alone. The Pope, they believed, had insulted them. They resented the insult. That was all. The first of May, 1851, will always be memorable as the day on which the Great Exhibition was opened in Hyde Park. This year, 1851, indeed is generally associated in the memory of Englishmen with that first great international exhibition. As we look back upon it, pleasant recollections come up of the Great Glass Palace in Hyde Park, the palace up springing from the verdant sod, which Thackery described so gracefully and with so much poetic feeling. The strange crowds of the curious of all provinces and all nations are seen again. The marvellous and at that time wholly unprecedented collection of the products of all countries, the glitter of the co-ignure, the palm trees beneath the glass roof, the leaping fountains, the statuary, the oars, the ingots, the huge blocks of coal, the lacework, the loomwork, the oriental stuffs. All these made on the mind of the ordinary inexpert a confused impression of lavishness and profusion and order and fantastic beauty which was then wholly novel and could hardly be recalled except in mere memory. The novelty of the experiment was that which made it specially memorable. Many exhibitions of a similar kind have taken place since. Some of these far surpassed that of Hyde Park in the splendor and variety of the collections brought together, two of them at least, those of Paris in 1867 and in 1878, were infinitely superior in the array and display of the products, the dresses, the inhabitants of far divided countries. But the impression which the Hyde Park exhibition made upon the ordinary mind was like that of the boy's first visit to the play, an impression never to be equaled, no matter by what far superior charm of spectacle it may and after years again and again be followed. Golden indeed were the expectations with which hopeful people welcomed the exhibition of 1851. It was the first organized to gather all the representatives of the world's industry into one great fair, and there were those who seriously expected that men who had once been prevailed upon to meet together in friendly and peaceful rivalry would never again be persuaded to meet in rivalry of a fiercer kind. It seems extraordinary now to think that any sane person can have indulged in such expectations, or can have imagined that the tremendous forces generated by the rival interests, ambitions, and passions of races could be subdued into harmonious cooperation by the good sense and good feeling born of a friendly meeting. The Hyde Park exhibition and all the exhibitions that followed it have not as yet made the slightest perceptible difference in the warlike tendencies of nations. The Hyde Park exhibition was often described as the festival to open the long reign of peace. It might as a mere matter of chronology be called without any impropriety the festival to celebrate the close of the short reign of peace. From that year, 1851, it may be said fairly enough that the world has hardly known a week of peace. The coup d'etat in France closed the year. The Crimean War began almost immediately after and was followed by the Indian Mutiny and that by the war between France and Austria, the long civil war in the United States, the neapolitan enterprises of Garibaldi, and the Mexican intervention, until we come to the war between Austria, Prussia and Denmark, the short sharp struggle for German supremacy between Austria and Prussia, the war between France and Germany, and the war between Russia and Turkey. Such were in brief summary the events that quickly followed the great inaugurating festival of peace in 1851. Of course, those who organized the great exhibition were in no way responsible for the exalted and extravagant expectations which were formed as to its effects on the history of the world and the elements of human nature, but there was a great deal too much of the dithy rambic about the style in which many writers and speakers thought fit to describe the exhibition. With some of these all this was the result of genuine enthusiasm. In other instances the extravagance was indulged in by persons not habitually extravagant, but on the contrary, very sober, methodical and calculating, who by the very fact of their possessing eminently these qualities were led into a total misconception of the influence of such assemblages of men. These calm and wise persons assumed that because they themselves, if shown that a certain course of conduct was for their material and moral benefit, would instantly follow it and keep to it, it must therefore follow that all peoples and states were amenable to the same excellent principles of self-discipline. War is a foolish and improvident, not to say a moral and atrocious way of trying to adjust our disputes, they argued. Let peoples far divided in geographical situation be only brought together and induced to talk this over, and see how much more profitable and noble is the rivalry of peace and trade and commerce, and they will never think of the course and brutal arbitrement of battle any more. Not a few others it must be owned, indulged in the high-flown glorification of the reign of peace to come, because the exhibition was the special enterprise of the Prince Consort, and they had a natural aptitude for the production of courtly strains. But among all these classes of p. n. singers it did happen that a good deal of unmerited discredit was cast upon the results of the great exhibition, for the enterprise was held responsible for illusions, it had of itself nothing to do with creating, and disappointments which were no consequences of any failure on its part. Even upon trade and production it is very easy to exaggerate the beneficent influences of an international exhibition, but that such enterprises have some beneficial influences beyond doubt, and that they are interesting, instructive, well calculated to educate and refine the minds of nations, may be admitted by the least enthusiastic of men. The first idea of the exhibition was conceived by Prince Albert, and it was his energy and influence which succeeded in carrying the idea into practical execution. Probably no influence less great than that which his station gave to the Prince would have prevailed to carry to success so difficult an enterprise. There had been industrial exhibitions before on a small scale and of local limit, but if the idea of an exhibition in which all the nations of the world were to compete had occurred to other minds before, as it may well have done, it was merely as a vague thought, a daydream, without any claim to a practical realization. Prince Albert was the president of the Society of Arts, and this position secured him a platform for the effective promulgation of his ideas. On June 30th, 1849, he called a meeting of the Society of Arts at Buckingham Palace. He proposed that the society should undertake the initiative in the promotion of an exhibition of the works of all nations. The main idea of Prince Albert was that the exhibition should be divided into four great sections, the first to contain raw materials and produce, the second machinery for ordinary industrial and productive purposes and mechanical inventions of the more ingenious kind, the third manufactured articles, and the fourth sculpture, models, and the illustrations of the plastic arts generally. The idea was at once taken up by the Society of Arts and by their agency spread abroad. On October 17th, in the same year, a meeting of merchants and bankers was held in London to promote the success of the undertaking. In the first few days of 1850, a formal commission was appointed for the promotion of the exhibition of the works of all nations to be holding in the year 1851. Prince Albert was appointed president of the commission. The enterprise was now fairly launched. A few days after, a meeting was held in the mansion house to raise funds in aid of the exhibition, and ten thousand pounds was at once collected. This of course was but the beginning, and a guarantee fund of two hundred thousand pounds was very soon obtained. On March 21st, in the same year, the Lord Mayor of London gave a banquet at the mansion house to the chief magistrates of the city's towns and boroughs of the United Kingdom for the purpose of inviting their cooperation in support of the undertaking. Prince Albert was present and spoke. He had cultivated the art of speaking with much success, and had almost entirely overcome whatever difficulty stood in his way from his foreign birth and education. He never quite lost his foreign accent. No man coming to a new country at the age of manhood as Prince Albert did ever acquired the new tongue in such a manner as to lose all trace of a foreign origin, and to the end of his career Prince Albert spoke with an accent which, however carefully trained, still betrayed its early habitudes. But except for this slight blemish, Prince Albert may be said to have acquired a perfect mastery of the English language, and he became a remarkably good public speaker. He had indeed nothing of the orator in his nature. It was but the extravagance of courtliness which called his polished and thoughtful speeches oratory. In the Prince's nature there was neither the passion nor the poetry that was essential to genuine eloquence, nor were the occasions on which he addressed the English people likely to stimulate a man to eloquence. But his style of speaking was clear, thoughtful, stately, and sometimes even noble. It exactly suited its purpose. It was that of a man who did not set up for an orator, and who when he spoke wished that his ideas rather than his words should impress his hearers. It is very much to be doubted whether the English public would be quite delighted to have a Prince who is also a really great orator. Genuine eloquence would probably impress a great many respectable persons as a gift not exactly suited to a Prince. There is even still a certain distrust of the artistic in the English mind, as of a sort of thing which is very proper in professional writers and painters and speakers, but which would hardly become persons of the highest station. Prince Albert probably spoke just as well as he could have done with successful effect upon his English audiences. At the dinner in the mansion house he spoke with great clearness and grace of the purposes of the great exhibition. It was, he said, to give the world a true test, a living picture of the point of industrial development at which the whole of mankind has arrived and a new starting point from which all nations will be able to direct their further exertions. It must not be supposed, however, that the project of the great exhibition advanced wholly without opposition. Many persons were disposed to sneer at it. Many were skeptical about its doing any good, not a few still regarded Prince Albert as a foreigner and a pedant, and were slow to believe that anything really practical was likely to be developed under his impulse and protection. A very whimsical sort of opposition was raised in the House of Commons by a once famous eccentric, the late Colonel Sipthorpe. Sipthorpe was a man who might have been drawn by Smollett. His grotesque gestures, his over-boiling energy, his uncouth appearance, his huge mustache marked him out as an object of curiosity in any crowd. He was the subject of one of the most amusing pieces of impromptu parody ever thrown off by a public speaker, that in which O'Connell travesty drydens famous lines about the three poets in three distant ages born, and pictured three kernels in three different countries born, winding up with, the force of nature could no farther go to beard the one she shaved the other two. One of the gallant Sipthorpes as special weaknesses was a distrust and detestation of all foreigners. Foreigners he lumped together as erasive beings whose chief characteristics were popery and immorality. While three-fourths of the promoters of the exhibition were dwelling with the strongest emphasis on the benefit it would bring by drawing into London the representatives of all nations, Colonel Sipthorpe, was denouncing this agglomeration of foreigners as the greatest curse that could fall upon England. He regarded foreigners much as Isaac of York and Ivanhoe regards the knight's Templars. When, asks Isaac in bitter remonstrance, did Templars breathe ought but cruelty to men and dishonor to women? Colonel Sipthorpe kept asking some such question with regard to foreigners in general, and their expected concourse to the exhibition. In language somewhat too energetic and broad for our more polite time, he warned the House of Commons and the country of the consequences to English morals which must come of the influx of a crowd of foreigners at a given season. Take care, he exclaimed in the House of Commons, of your wives and daughters. Take care of your property and your lives. He declared that he prayed for some tremendous hailstorm or visitation of lightning to be sent from heaven expressly for the purpose of destroying in advance the building destined for the ill omened exhibition. When free trade had left nothing else needed to complete the ruin of the nation, the enemy of mankind, he declared, had inspired us with the idea of the great exhibition, so that foreigners who had first robbed us of our trade might now be enabled to rob us of our honour. CHAPTER XXI The Objections raised to the exhibition were not by any means confined to Colonel Sipthorpe or to his kind of argument. After some consideration the royal commissioners had fixed upon Hyde Park as the best site for the great building, and many energetic and some influential voices were raised in fierce outcry against what was called the profanation of the park. It was argued that the public use of Hyde Park would be destroyed by the exhibition, that the park would be utterly spoiled, that its beauty could never be restored. A petition was presented by Lord Campbell to the House of Lords against the occupation of any part of Hyde Park with the exhibition building. Lord Broom supported the petition with his characteristic impetuosity and vehemence. He denounced the Attorney General with indignant eloquence, because that official had declined to file an application to the Court of Chancery, foreign injunction, to stay any proceeding with the proposed building in the park. He denounced the House of Lords itself for what he considered its servile deference to royalty in the matter of the exhibition and its site. He declared that when he endeavored to raise the question there it was received in dead silence, and he asserted that an effort to bring on a discussion in the House of Commons was received with a silence equally profound and servile. Such facts, he shouted, only show more painfully, that absolute prostration of the understanding which takes place even in the minds of the bravest when the word Prince is mentioned in this country. It is probably true enough that only the influence of a Prince could have carried the scheme to success against the storms of opposition that began to blow at various periods and from different points. Undoubtedly a vast number probably the great majority of those who supported the enterprise in the beginning did so simply because it was the project of a Prince. Their numbers and their money enabled it to be carried on and secured it the test of the world's examination and approval. In that sense the very servility which accepts with the light whatever a Prince proposes stood the exhibition in good stead. A courtier may plead that if English people in general had been more independent and less given to admiration of Princes the excellent project devised by Prince Albert would never have had a fair trial. Many times during its progress the Prince himself trembled for the success of his scheme. Many a time he must have felt inclined to renounce it or at least to regret that he had ever taken it up. Absurd as the opposition to the scheme may now seem it is certain that a great many sensible persons thought the moment singularly inopportune for the gathering of large crowds and were satisfied that some inconvenient if not dangerous public demonstration must be provoked. The smoldering embers of chartism they said were everywhere under society's feet. The crowds of foreigners whom Colonel Sipthorpe so dreaded would, calmer people said, naturally include large numbers of the reds of all continental nations who would be only too glad to coalesce with chartism and discontent of all kinds for the purpose of disturbing the peace of London. The agitation caused by the papal aggression was still in full force and flame. By an odd coincidence the first column of the exhibition building had been set up in Hyde Park almost at the same moment with the issue of the papal bull establishing a Roman Catholic hierarchy in England. These conditions looked gloomy for the project. The opponents of the exhibition, wrote the Prince himself, work with might and main to throw all the old women here into a panic and to drive myself crazy. The strangers they give out are certain to commence a thorough revolution here, to murder Victoria and myself, and to proclaim the Red Republic in England. The plague is certain to ensue from the confluence of such vast multitudes and to swallow up those whom the increased price of everything is not already swept away. For all this I am to be responsible and against all this I have to make efficient provision. Most of the continental sovereigns looked coldly on the undertaking. The King of Prussia took such alarm at the thought of the Red Republicans whom the exhibition would draw together that at first he positively prohibited his brother, then Prince of Prussia, now German emperor, from attending the opening ceremonial, and though he afterwards withdrew the prohibition he remained full of doubts and fears as to the personal safety of any royal or princely personage found in Hyde Park on the opening day. The Duke of Cambridge, being appealed to on the subject, acknowledged himself also full of apprehensions. The objections to the site continued to grow up to a certain time. The exhibition, Prince Albert wrote once to Baron Stockmar, his friend and advisor, is now attacked furiously by the times, and the House of Commons is going to drive us out of the park. There is immense excitement on the subject. If we are driven out of the park the work is done for. At one time indeed this result seemed highly probable, but public opinion gradually underwent a change, and the opposition to the site was defeated in the House of Commons by a large majority. Even however when the question of the site had been disposed of there remained immense difficulties in the way. The press was not on the whole very favorable to the project. Punch in particular was hardly ever weary of making fun of it. Such a project, while yet only in embryo, undoubtedly furnished many points on which satire could fasten, and nothing short of complete success could save it from falling under a mountain of ridicule. No half success would have rescued it. The ridicule was naturally provoked and aggravated to an unspeakable degree by the hyperbolical expectations and preposterous dithy rambics of some of the well-meaning but unwise and somewhat too obstreperously loyal supporters of the Enterprise. To add to all this, as the time for the opening drew near, some of the foreign diplomatists in London began to sulk at the whole project. There were small points of objection made about the position and functions of foreign ambassadors at the opening ceremonial, and what the Queen and Prince meant for politeness was in one instance at least near being twisted into cause of offense. Up to the last moment it was not quite certain whether an absurd diplomatic quarrel might not have been part of the inaugural ceremonies of the opening day. The Prince did not despair, however, and the project went on. There was a great deal of difficulty in selecting a plan for the building. Huge structures of brickwork, looking like enormous railway sheds. Costly and hideous at once were proposed. It seemed almost certain that some one of them must be chosen. Happily a sudden inspiration struck Mr., afterward, Sir Joseph Paxton, who was then in charge of the Duke of Devonshire's superb grounds at Chatsworth. Why not try glass and iron, he asked himself? Why not build a palace of glass and iron, large enough to cover all the intended contents of the exhibition, and which should be at once light, beautiful, and cheap? Mr. Paxton sketched out his plan hastily and the idea was eagerly accepted by the royal commissioners. He made many improvements afterwards in his design, but the palace of glass and iron arose within the specified time on the green turf of Hyde Park. The idea, so happily hit upon, was serviceable in more ways than one to the success of the exhibition. It made the building itself as much an object of curiosity and wonder as the collections under its crystal roof. Of the hundreds of thousands who came to the exhibition, a goodly proportion were drawn to Hyde Park, rather by a wish, to see Paxton's palace of glass than all the wonders of industrial and plastic art that it enclosed. Indeed, Lord Palmerston, writing to Lord Norman B. on the day after the opening of the exhibition, said, The building itself is far more worth seeing than anything in it, though many of its contents are worthy of admiration. Perhaps the glass building was, like the exhibition, project itself in one respect. It did not bring about the revolution which it was confidently expected to create. Glass and iron have not superseded brick and stone. Any more than competitions of peaceful industry have banished our bitrement by war. But the building, like the exhibition itself, fulfilled admirably its more modest and immediate purpose, and was, in that way, a complete success. The structure of glass is indeed, in every mind, inseparably associated with the event and the year. The Queen herself has written a very interesting account of the success of the opening day. Her description is interesting as an expression of the feelings of the writer, the sense of profound relief and rapture, as well as for the sake of the picture it gives of the ceremonial itself. The enthusiasm of the wife over the complete success of the project on which her husband had set his heart and staked his name is simple in touching. If the importance of the undertaking and the amount of fame it was to bring to its author may seem a little overdone, not many readers will complain of the womanly and wifely feeling which could not be denied such fervent expression. The great event, wrote the Queen, has taken place, a complete and beautiful triumph, a glorious and touching sight, one which I shall ever be proud of for my beloved Albert and my country. The park presented a wonderful spectacle, crowd streaming through it, carriages and troops passing, quite like the coronation day, and for me the same anxiety, no much greater anxiety on account of my beloved Albert. The day was bright and all bustle and excitement. The green park and Hyde Park were one densely crowded mass of human beings in the highest good humor and most enthusiastic. I never saw Hyde Park look as it did as far as the eye could reach. A little rain fell just as we started, but before we came near the crystal palace the sun shone and gleamed upon the gigantic edifice upon which the flags of all nations were floating. The glimpse of the transept through the iron gates, the waving palms, flowers, statues, myriads of people filling the galleries and seats around, with the flourish of trumpets as we entered, gave us a sensation which I can never forget and I felt much moved. The sight as we came to the middle was magical, so vast, so glorious, so touching, one felt as so many did whom I have since spoken to, filled with devotion. More so than by any service I have ever heard. The tremendous cheers, the joy expressed in every face, the immensity of the building, the mixture of palms, flowers, trees, statues, fountains, the organ, with two hundred instruments and six hundred voices which sounded like nothing and my beloved husband, the author of this peace festival, which united the industry of all nations of the earth, all this was moving indeed, and it was and is a day to live forever. God bless my dearest Albert, God bless my dearest country which has shown itself so great today, one felt so grateful to the great God who seemed to pervade all and to bless all. The success of the opening day was indeed undoubted, there were nearly thirty thousand people gathered together within the building and nearly three quarters of a million of persons lined the way between the exhibition and Buckingham Palace and yet no accident whatever occurred, nor had the police any trouble imposed on them by the conduct of anybody in the crowd. It was impossible, wrote Lord Palmerston, for the invited guests of a lady's drawing room to have conducted themselves with more perfect propriety than did this sea of human beings. It is needless to say that there were no hostile demonstrations by red Republicans or malignant Chartists or infuriated Irish Catholics. The one thing which especially struck foreign observers and to which many eloquent pens and tongues bore witness was the orderly conduct of the people. Nor did the subsequent history of the exhibition in any way belie the promise of its opening day. It continued to attract delighted crowds to the last and more than once held within its precincts at one moment nearly a hundred thousand persons, a concourse large enough to have made the population of a respectable continental capital. In another way the exhibition proved even more successful than was anticipated. There had been some difficulty in raising money in the first instance and it was thought something of a patriotic risk when a few spirited citizens combined to secure the accomplishment of the undertaking by means of a guarantee fund. But the guarantee fund became in the end merely one of the forms and ceremonials of the exhibition for the undertaking not only covered its expenses but left a huge sum of money in the hands of the royal commissioners. The exhibition was closed by Prince Albert on October 15. That at least may be described as the closing day, for it was then that the awards of prizes were made in presence of the Prince and a large concourse of people. The exhibition itself had actually been closed to the general public on the eleventh of the month. It has been imitated again and again. It was followed by an exhibition in Dublin, an exhibition of the paintings and sculptures of all nations in Manchester, three great exhibitions in Paris, the International Exhibition in Kensington in 1862, the Enterprise II of Prince Albert, although not destined to have his presence at its opening, an exhibition at Vienna, one in Philadelphia, and various others. Where all nations seem to have agreed to pay Prince Albert's Enterprise the complement of imitation, it seems superfluous to say that it was a success. Time has so toned down our expectations in regard to these enterprises that no occasion now arises for the feeling of disappointment which was long associated in the minds of one sanguine persons with the crystal palace of Hyde Park. We look on such exhibitions now as useful agencies in the work of industrial development and in promoting the intercourse of peoples and thus cooperating with various other influences in the general business of civilization. But the impressions produced by the Hyde Park exhibition were unique. It was the first thing of the kind. The gathering of peoples it brought together was as new, odd, and interesting as the glass building in which the industry of the world was displayed. For the first time in their lives, Londoners saw the ordinary aspect of London distinctly modified and changed by the incursion of foreigners who came to take part in or to look at our exhibition. London seemed to be playing at holiday in a strange carnival sort of way during the time the exhibition was open. The Hyde Park Enterprise bequeathed nothing very tangible or distinct to the world except indeed the palace which built out of its fabric, not its ruins, so gracefully ornaments one of the soft hills of Sydenham. But the memory of the exhibition itself is very distinct with all who saw it. None of its followers was exactly like it or could take its place in the recollection of those who were its contemporaries. In a year made memorable by many political events of the greatest importance of disturbed and tempestuous politics abroad and at home of the deaths of many illustrious men and the failure of many splendid hopes, the exhibition in Hyde Park still holds its place in memory, not for what it brought or accomplished, but simply for itself, its surroundings and its house of glass. End of section 9