 CHAPTER VI. QUESTION DE JUPON, PART I. Meanwhile things were looking ill with the Melbourne Ministry. Sir Robert Peel was addressing great meetings of his followers and declaring with much show of justice that he had created anew the Conservative Party. The position of the Whigs would in any case have been difficult. Their mandate, to use the French phrase, seemed to be exhausted. They had no new thing to propose. They came into power as reformers and now they had nothing to offer in the way of reform. It may be taken as a certainty that in English politics reaction must always follow advance. The Whigs must just then have come in for the effects of reaction. But they had more than that to contend with. In our own time Mr. Gladstone had no sooner passed his great measures of reform than he began to experience the effects of reaction. But there was a great difference between his situation and that of the Whigs under Melbourne. He had not failed to satisfy the demands of his followers. He had no extreme wing of his party clamouring against him on the ground that he had made use of their strength to help him in carrying out as much of his programme as suited his own coterie and that he had then deserted them. This was the condition of the Whigs. The more advanced Liberals and the whole body of the Chartists and the working classes generally detested and denounced them. Many of the Liberals had had some hope while Lord Durham still seemed likely to be a political power but with the fading of his influence they lost all interest in the Whig Ministry. On the other hand the support of O'Connell was a serious disadvantage to Melbourne and his party in England. But the Whig Ministers were always adding by some mistakes or other to the difficulties of their position. The Jamaica Bill put them in great perplexity. This was a measure brought in on April 9, 1839, to make temporary provision for the government of the island of Jamaica by setting aside the House of Assembly for five years and during that time empowering the Governor and Council with three salaried commissioners to manage the affairs of the colony. In other words, the Melbourne Ministry proposed to suspend for five years the Constitution of Jamaica. Nobody of persons can be more awkwardly placed than a Whig Ministry proposing to set aside a constitutional government anywhere. Such a proposal may be a necessary measure, it may be unavoidable, but it always comes with a bad grace from Whigs or Liberals and gives their enemies a handle against them which they cannot fail to use to some purpose. What indeed it may be plausibly asked is the raison d'etre of a liberal government if they have to return to the old Tory policy of suspended constitutions and absolute law. When Robagus, become Minister, tells his master that the only way to silence discontent is by the liberal use of the cannon, the Prince of Monaco remarks very naturally if that was to be the policy he might as well have kept to his old ministers and his absolutism. So it is with an English liberal ministry advising the suspension of constitutions. In the case of the Jamaica Bill there was some excuse for the harsh policy. After the abolition of slavery the former masters in the island found it very hard to reconcile themselves to the new condition of things. They could not all at once understand that their former slaves were to be their equals before the law. As we have seen much more lately in the southern states of America after the Civil War and the emancipation of the Negroes there was still a pertinacious attempt made by the planter class to regain in substance the power they had to renounce in name. This was not to be justified or excused but as human nature is made it was not unnatural. On the other hand some of the Jamaica Negroes were too ignorant to understand that they had acquired any rights. Others were a little too clamorous in their assertion. Many a planter worked his men and whipped his women just as before the emancipation and the victims did not understand that they had any right to complain. Many Negroes again were ignorantly and thoughtlessly bumpious to use a vulgar expression in the assertion of their newfound equality. The imperial governors and officials were generally and justly eager to protect the Negroes and the result was a constant quarrel between the Jamaica House of Assembly and the representatives of the Home Government. The Assembly became more insolent and offensive every day. A bill very necessary in itself was passed by the Imperial Parliament for the better regulation of prisons in Jamaica and the House of Assembly refused to submit to any such legislation. Under these circumstances the Melbourne Ministry proposed the suspension of the Constitution of the Island. The measure was opposed not only by Peel and the Conservatives, but by many radicals. It was argued that there were many courses open to the Ministry, short of the high-handed proceeding they proposed, and in truth there was not that confidence in the Melbourne Ministry at all which would have enabled them to obtain from Parliament a majority sufficient to carry through any such policy. The Ministry was weak and discredited. Anybody now might throw a stone at it. They only had a majority of five in favour of their measure. This of course was a virtual defeat. The Ministry acknowledged it and resigned. Their defeat was a humiliation, their resignation, an inevitable submission, but they came back to office almost immediately under conditions that made the humiliation more humbling and rendered their subsequent career more difficult by far than their past struggle for existence had been. The return of the wigs to office, for they cannot be said to have returned to power, came about in a very odd way. Gulliver ought to have had an opportunity of telling such a story to the King of the Brobe Dingnagians in order the better to impress him with a clear idea of the logical beauty of constitutional government. It was an entirely new illustration of the old Cherche La Femme principle, the Femme in this case, however, being altogether a passive and innocent cause of trouble. The famous controversy known as the Bedchamber Question made a way back for the wigs into place. When Lord Melbourne resigned, the Queen sent for the Duke of Wellington who advised her to apply to Sir Robert Peale for the reason that the chief difficulties of a Conservative government would be in the House of Commons. The Queen sent for Peale and when he came told him with a simple and girlish frankness that she was sorry to have to part with her late ministers of whose conduct she entirely approved but that she bowed to constitutional usage. This must have been rather an astonishing beginning to the grave and formal Peale, but he was not a man to think any worse of the candid young sovereign for her outspoken ways. The negotiations went on very smoothly as to the colleagues Peale meant to recommend to Her Majesty until he happened to notice the composition of the royal household as regarded the ladies most closely in attendance on the Queen. For example, he found that the wife of Lord Normanby and the sister of Lord Morpeth were the two ladies in closest attendance on Her Majesty. Now it has to be borne in mind, it was proclaimed again and again during the negotiations, that the chief difficulty of the Conservatives would necessarily be in Ireland, where their policy would be altogether opposed to that of the Whigs. Lord Normanby had been Lord Lieutenant of Ireland under the Whigs and Lord Morpeth whom we can all remember as the amiable and accomplished Lord Carlisle of later time, Irish Secretary. It certainly could not be satisfactory for Peale to try to work a new Irish policy while the closest household companions of the Queen were the wife and sister of the displaced statesmen who directly represented the policy he had to supersede. Had this point of view been made clear to the sovereign at first, it is hardly possible that any serious difficulty could have arisen. The Queen must have seen the obvious reasonableness of Peale's request, nor is it to be supposed that the two ladies in question could have desired to hold their places under such circumstances. But unluckily some misunderstanding took place at the very beginning of the conversation on this point. Peale only desired to press for the retirement of the ladies holding the higher offices. He did not intend to ask for any change affecting a place lower in official rank than that of Lady of the Bedchamber. But somehow or other he conveyed to the mind of the Queen a different idea. She thought he meant to insist as a matter of principle on the removal of all her familiar attendance and household associates. Under this impression she consulted Lord John Russell, who advised her on what he understood to be the state of the facts. On his advice the Queen stated in reply that she could not consent to a course which she conceives to be contrary to usage and is repugnant to her feelings. Sir Robert Peale held firm to his stipulation, and the chance of his then forming a ministry was at an end. Lord Melbourne and his colleagues had to be recalled, and at a cabinet meeting they adopted a minute declaring it reasonable, that the great offices of the court and situations in the household held by members of the Parliament should be included in the political arrangements made on a change in the administration, but they are not of opinion that a similar principle should be applied or extended to the offices held by ladies in Her Majesty's household. The matter was naturally made the subject of explanation in both houses of Parliament. Sir Robert Peale was undoubtedly right in his view of the question, and if he had been clearly understood the right could hardly have been disputed, but he defended his position in language of what now seems rather ludicrous exaggeration. He treated this question de jupe en as if it were of the last importance, not alone to the honour of the ministry, but even to the safety of the realm. I ask you, he said, to go back to other times. Take Pitt or Fox or any other minister of this proud country, and answer for yourselves the question. If it is fitting that one man shall be the minister responsible for the most arduous charge that can fall to the lot of man, and that the wife of the other, that other his most formidable political enemy, shall, with his express consent, hold office in immediate attendance on the sovereign? Oh, no, he exclaimed, in an outburst of indignant eloquence. I felt that it was impossible. I could not consent to this. Feelings more powerful than reasoning told me that it was not for my own honour or for the public interests that I should consent to be minister of England. This high-flown language seems oddly out of place on the lips of a statesman who of all his contemporaries was the least apt to indulge in bursts of overwrought sentiment. Lord Melbourne, on the other hand, defended his action in the House of Lords in language of equal exaggeration. I resume office, he said, unequivocally and solely for this reason, that I will not desert my sovereign in a situation of difficulty and distress, especially when a demand is made upon her majesty with which I think she ought not to comply, a demand inconsistent with her personal honour and which, if acquiesced in, would render her reign liable to all the changes and variations of political parties and make her domestic life one constant scene of unhappiness and discomfort. CHAPTER VI In the country the incident created great excitement. Some liberals bluntly insisted that it was not right in such a matter to consult the feelings of the sovereign at all, and that the advice of the minister and his idea of what was for the good of the country ought alone to be considered. On the other hand O'Connell burst into impassioned language of praise and delight, as he dwelt upon the decision of the Queen, and called upon the powers above to bless the young creature, that creature of only nineteen, as pure as she is exalted, who consulted not her head, but the overflowing feelings of her young heart. Those excellent women, who had been so long attached to her, who had nursed and tended to her wants in her childhood, who had watched over her in her sickness, whose eyes beamed with delight as they saw her increasing daily in beauty and in loveliness, when they were threatened to be forced away from her, her heart told her that she could as well part with that heart itself, as with those whom it held so dear. Fergus O'Connell went a good deal further, however, when he boldly declared that he had excellent authority for the statement that if the Tories had got the young Queen into their hands by the agency of the new ladies of the bedchamber, they had a plan for putting her out of the way and placing the bloody Cumberland on the throne in her stead. In O'Connell's case no mystery was made of the fact that he believed the ladies actually surrounding the young Queen to be friendly to what he considered the cause of Ireland, and that he was satisfied Peale and the Tories were against it. For the wild talk represented by the words of Fergus O'Connell, it is only necessary to say that frenzied and foolish, as it must seem to us now, and as it must even then have seemed to all rational beings, it had the firm acceptance of large masses of people throughout the country, who persisted in seeing in Peale's pleadings for the change of the bedchamber women the positive evidence of an unscrupulous Tory plot to get possession of the Queen's person, not for the purpose of violently altering the succession, but in the hope of poisoning her mind against all liberal opinions. Lord Broome was not likely to lose so good an opportunity of attacking Lord Melbourne and his colleagues. He insisted that Lord Melbourne had sacrificed liberal principles and the interests of the country to the private feelings of the sovereign. I thought, he declared, in a burst of eloquent passion, that we belong to a country in which the Government by the Crown and the Wisdom of Parliament was everything, and the personal feelings of the sovereign were absolutely not to be named at the same time. I little thought to have lived to hear it said by the Whigs of 1839, let us rally round the Queen, never mind the House of Commons, never mind measures, throw principles to the dogs, leave pledges unredeemed, but for God's sakes rally round the Throne. Little did I think the day would come when I should hear such language not from the unconstitutional place hunting King-loving Tories who thought the public was made for the King, not the King for the public, but from the Whigs themselves. The Jamaica Bill said to be a most important measure had been brought forward, the Government staked their existence upon it, they were not able to carry it, they therefore conceived they had lost the confidence of the House of Commons. They thought it a measure of paramount necessity then, is it less necessary now? Oh, but that is altered, the Jamaican question is to be new-fashioned, principles are to be given up, and all because of two ladies of the bedchamber. Nothing could be more undesirable than the position in which Lord Melbourne and his colleagues had allowed the sovereign to place herself. The more people in general came to think over the matter, the more clearly it was seen that Peel was in the right, although he had not made himself understood at first, and had perhaps not shown all through enough of consideration for the novelty of the young sovereign's position or for the difficulty of finding a conclusive precedent on such a question, seeing that since the principle of ministerial responsibility had come to be recognized among us in its genuine sense, there never before had been a woman on the Throne. But no one could deliberately maintain the position at first taken by the Whigs, and in point of fact they were soon glad to drop it as quickly and quietly as possible. The whole question it may be said at once was afterwards settled by a sensible compromise which the Prince Consort suggested. It was agreed that on a change of ministry the Queen would listen to any representation from the incoming Prime Minister as to the composition of her household and would arrange for the retirement of their own accord of any ladies who were so closely related to the leaders of opposition as to render their presence inconvenient. The Whigs came back to office utterly discredited. They had to tinker up somehow a new Jamaica bill. They had declared that they could not remain in office unless they were allowed to deal in a certain way with Jamaica, and now they were back again in office they could not avoid trying to do something with the Jamaica business. They therefore introduced a new bill which was a mere compromise put together in the hope of its being allowed to pass. It was allowed to pass, after a fashion that is, when the opposition in the House of Lords had tinkered it and amended it at their pleasure. The bed-chamber question in fact had thrown Jamaica out of perspective. The unfortunate island must do the best it could now. In this country statesmen had graver matter to think of. Sir Robert Peel could not govern with Lady Norman B. The Whigs would not govern without her. It does not seem by any means clear, however, that Lord Melbourne and his colleagues deserve the savage censure of Lord Broome merely for having returned to office and given up their original position with regard to the Jamaica bill. But what else remained to be done? If they had refused to come back the only result would have been that Peel must have become Prime Minister with a distinct minority in the House of Commons. Peel could not have held his ground there except by the favour and mercy of his opponents and those were not merciful days in politics. He would only have taken office to be called upon at once to resign it by some adverse vote of the House of Commons. The state of things seems in this respect to be not unlike that which existed when Mr Gladstone was defeated on the Irish University Bill in 1873. Mr Gladstone resigned or rather tendered his resignation and by his advisor Majesty invited Mr Disraeli to form a cabinet. Mr Disraeli did not see his way to undertake the government of the country with the existing House of Commons and as the conditions under which he was willing to undertake the duty were not conveniently attainable the negotiation came to an end. The Queen sent again for Mr Gladstone who consented to resume his place as Prime Minister. If Lord Melbourne returned to office with the knowledge that he could not carry the Jamaica bill which he had declared to be necessary Mr Gladstone resumed his place at the head of his ministry without the remotest hope of being able to carry his Irish University measure. No one ever found fault with Mr Gladstone for having, under the circumstances, done the best he could and consented to meet the request of the sovereign and the convenience of the public service by again taking on himself the responsibility of government, although the measure on which he had declared he would stake the existence of his ministry had been rejected by the House of Commons. Still it cannot be denied that the Melbourne government were prejudiced in the public mind by these events and by the attacks for which they gave so large an opportunity. The feeling in some parts of the country was still sentimentally with the Queen. At many a dinner table it became the fashion to drink the health of Her Majesty with a punning addition not belonging to an order of wit any higher than that which in other days toasted the King over the water or prayed of heaven to send his crumb well down. The Queen was toasted as the sovereign of spirit who would not let her bells be peeled. But the ministry was almost universally believed to have placed themselves in a ridiculous light and to have crept again into office as an able writer puts it, behind the petty coats of the ladies in waiting. The death of Lady Flora Hastings which occurred almost immediately tended further to arouse a feeling of dislike to the wigs. This melancholy event does not need any lengthened comment. A young lady who belonged to the household of the Duchess of Kent fell under an unfounded but in circumstances not wholly unreasonable suspicion. It was the classic story of Callisto Diana's unhappy nymph, reversed. Lady Flora was proved to be innocent, but her death imminent probably in any case from the disease which had fastened on her was doubtless hastened by the humiliation to which she had been subjected. It does not seem that anyone was to blame in the matter. The ministry certainly do not appear to have done anything for which they could fairly be reproached. No one can be surprised that those who surrounded the Queen in the Duchess of Kent should have taken some pains to inquire into the truth or falsehood of scandalous rumors, for which there might have appeared to be some obvious justification. But the whole story was so sad and shocking. The death of the poor young lady followed with such tragic rapidity upon the establishment of her innocence. The natural complaints of her mother were so loud and impassioned that the ministers who had to answer the mother's appeals were unavoidably placed in an invidious and a painful position. The demands of the Martianess of Hastings for redress were unreasonable. They endeavored to make out the existence of a cruel conspiracy against Lady Flora, and called for the peremptory dismissal and disgrace of the eminent court physician, who had merely performed a most painful duty and whose report had been the especial means of establishing the injustice of the suspicions which were directed against her. But it was a damaging duty for a minister to have to write to the distracted mother as Lord Melbourne found it necessary to do, telling her that her demand was so unprecedented and objectionable that even the respect due to her ladyship's sex, rank, family, and character would not justify me in more, if indeed it authorizes so much, and acknowledging that letter for the sole purpose of acquainting your ladyship that I have received it. The palace scandal, as it was called, became known shortly before the dispute about the ladies of the bedchamber. The death of Lady Flora Hastings happened soon after it. It is not strictly in logical propriety that such events or their rapid succession should bring into disrepute the ministry who can only be regarded as their historical contemporaries, but the world must change a great deal, before ministers are no longer held accountable in public opinion, for anything but the events over which they can be shown to have some control. On January 16, 1840, the Queen, opening Parliament in person, announced her intention to marry her cousin, Prince Albert, of Saxa-Coburg-Gotta, a step which she trusted would be conducive to the interests of my people, as well as to my own domestic happiness. In the discussion which followed in the House of Commons, Sir Robert Philip served that Her Majesty had the singular good fortune to be able to gratify her private feelings while she performs her public duty and to obtain the best guarantee for happiness by contracting an alliance founded on affection. Peel spoke the simple truth. It was indeed a marriage founded on affection. No marriage contracted in the humblest class could have been more entirely a union of love and more free from what might be called selfish and worldly considerations. The Queen had for a long time loved her cousin. He was nearly her own age, the Queen being the elder by three months and two or three days. Francis Charles Augustus Albert Emanuel was the full name of the young Prince. He was the second son of Ernest, Duke of Saxa-Coburg-Zalfeldt, and of his wife Louisa, daughter of Augustus, Duke of Saxa-Gotta Altenberg. Prince Albert was born at the Rosenau, one of his father's residences near Coburg, on August 26, 1819. The court historian notices with pardonable complacency the remarkable coincidence, easily explained surely, that the same accouscheuse, Madame Sieboldt, assisted at the birth of Prince Albert and of the Queen some three months before, and that the Prince was baptized by the clergyman Professor Gensler, who had the year before officiated at the marriage of the Duke and Duchess of Kent. A marriage between the Princess Victoria and Prince Albert had been thought of as desirable among the families on both sides, but it was always wisely resolved that nothing should be said to the young Princess on the subject unless she herself showed a distinct liking for her cousin. In 1836 Prince Albert was brought by his father to England, and made the personal acquaintance of the Princess, and she seems at once to have been drawn toward him in the manner which her family and friends would most have desired. Three years later the Prince again came to England, and the Queen, in a letter to her uncle, the King of the Belgians, wrote of him in the warmest terms. Albert's beauty, she said, is most striking, and he is most amiable and unaffected, in short, very fascinating. Not many days after she wrote to another friend and faithful counselor, the Baron Stockmar, to say, I do feel so guilty, I know not how to begin my letter, but I think the news it will contain will be sufficient to ensure your forgiveness. Albert has completely won my heart, and all was settled between us this morning. The Queen had just before informed Lord Melbourne of her intention, and Lord Melbourne, at his needless to say, expressed his decided approval. There was no one to disapprove of such a marriage. Prince Albert was a young man to win the heart of any girl. He was singularly handsome, graceful, and gifted. In princes, as we know, a small measure of beauty and accomplishment suffices to throw courtiers and court ladies into transports of admiration. But had Prince Albert been the son of a farmer or a butler, he must have been admired for his singular personal attractions. He had had a sound and varied education. He had been brought up as if he were to be a professional musician, a professional chemist or botanist, and a professor of history and ballet and the fine arts. The scientific and the literary were remarkably blended in his bringing up. Remarkably, that is to say, for some half century ago, when even in Germany a system of education seldom aimed at being Todes Teres Atquero Tundes. He had begun to study the constitutional history of state and was preparing himself to take an interest in politics. There was much of the practical and business-like about him as he showed in afterlife. He loved farming and took a deep interest in machinery and in the growth of industrial science. He was a sort of combination of the troubadour, the savant, and the man of business. His tastes were for a quiet, domestic, and un- ostentatious life, a life of refined culture, of happy, calm evenings, of art and poetry and genial communion with nature. He was made happy by the songs of birds and delighted in sitting alone and playing the organ. But there was in him, too, a great deal of the political philosopher. He loved to hear political and other questions well argued out, and once observed that a false argument jarred on his nerves as much as a false note in music. He seems to have had from his youth an all-pervading sense of duty. So far as we can guess he was almost absolutely free from the ordinary follies not to say sins of youth. Young as he was, when he married the Queen, he devoted himself at once to what he conscientiously believed to be the duties of his station, with a self-control and a self-devotion rare even among the aged and almost unknown in youth. He gave up every habit, however familiar and dear, every predilection, no matter how sweet, every indulgence of sentiment or amusement, that in any way threatened to interfere with the steadfast performance of the party it assigned to himself. No man ever devoted himself more faithfully to the difficult duties of a high and new situation or kept more strictly to his resolve. It was no task to him to be a tender husband and a loving father. This was a part of his sweet, pure and affectionate nature. It may well be doubted whether any other Queen ever had a married life so happy as that of Queen Victoria. The marriage of the Queen and the Prince took place on February 10, 1840. The reception given by the people in general to the Prince on his landing in England a few days before the ceremony and on the day of the marriage was cordial and even enthusiastic. But it is not certain whether there was a very cordial feeling to the Prince among all classes of politicians. A rumour of the most absurd kind had got abroad in certain circles, that the young Albert was not a Protestant, that he was in fact a member of the Church of Rome. In a different circle the belief was curiously cherished that the Prince was a free thinker in matters of religion and a radical in politics. Somewhat unfortunately the declaration of the intended marriage to the Privy Council did not mention the fact that Albert was a Protestant Prince. The cabinet no doubt thought that the leaders of public opinion on all sides of politics would have had historical knowledge among them to teach them that Prince Albert belonged to that branch of the Saxon family which since the Reformation had been conspicuously Protestant. There has not, Prince Albert himself wrote to the Queen on December 7, 1839, been a single Catholic princess introduced into the Coburg family since the appearance of Luther in 1521. Moreover the elector Frederick the Wise of Saxony was the very first Protestant that ever lived. No doubt the ministry thought also that the constitutional rule which forbids an English sovereign to marry with a Roman Catholic under penalty of forfeiting the crown would be regarded as a sufficient guarantee that when they announced the Queen's approaching marriage it must be a marriage with a Protestant. All this assumption however, reasonable and natural, did not find warrant in the events that actually took place. It would have been better of course if the government had assumed that Parliament and the public generally knew nothing about the Prince and his ancestry or the constitutional penalties for a member of the royal family marrying a Catholic and had formally announced that the choice of Queen Victoria had happily fallen on a Protestant. The wise and foreseeing Leopold, King of the Belgians, had recommended that the fact should be specifically mentioned, but it was perhaps a part of Lord Melbourne's indolent good nature to take it for granted that people generally would be calm and reasonable, and that all would go right without interruption or cabal. He therefore acted on the assumption that any formal mention of Prince Albert's Protestantism would be superfluous and neither in the declaration to the Privy Council nor in the announcement to Parliament was a word set upon the subject. The result was that in the debate on the address in the House of Lords a somewhat unseemly altercation took place. In altercation the more to be regretted because it might have been so easily spared. The question was bluntly raised by no less a person than the Duke of Wellington whether the future husband of the Queen was or was not a Protestant. The Duke actually charged the ministry with having purposely left out the word Protestant in the announcements in order that they might not offend their Irish and Catholic supporters, and by the very charge did much to strengthen the popular feeling against the statesmen who were supposed to be kept in office by virtue of the patronage of O'Connell. The Duke moved that the word Protestant be inserted into the congratulatory address to the Queen, and he carried his point, although Lord Melbourne held to the opinion that the word was unnecessary in describing a Prince who was not only Protestant, but descended from the most Protestant family in Europe. The lack of judgment intact on the part of the ministry was never more clearly shown than in the original omission of the word. Another disagreeable occurrence was the discussion that took place when the bill for the naturalization of the Prince was brought before the House of Lords. The bill in its title merely set out the proposal to provide for the naturalization of the Prince, but it contained a clause to give him precedence for life next after Her Majesty in Parliament or elsewhere as Her Majesty might think proper. A great deal of objection was raised by the Duke of Wellington and Lord Broom to this clause on its own merits, but as was natural the objections were infinitely aggravated by this singular want of judgment and even of common propriety which could introduce a clause conferring on the sovereign powers so large and so new into a mere naturalization bill without any previous notice to Parliament. The matter was ultimately settled by allowing the bill to remain a simple naturalization procedure and leaving the question of precedence to be dealt with by royal prerogative. Both the great political parties concurred without further difficulty in an arrangement by which it was provided in letters patent that the Prince should thenceforth upon all occasions and in all meetings except when otherwise provided by active Parliament have precedence next to the Queen. There never would have been any difficulty in the matter if the ministry had acted with any discretion, but it would be absurd to expect that a great nation whose constitutional system is built up of precedence should agree at once and without demure to every new arrangement which it might seem convenient to a ministry to make in a hurry. Yet another source of dissatisfaction to the palace and the people was created by the manner in which the ministry took upon themselves to bring forward the proposition for the settlement of an annuity on the Prince. In former cases, that, for example, of Queen Charlotte, Queen Adelaide, and Prince Leopold, on his marriage with the Princess Charlotte, the annuity granted had been fifty thousand pounds. It so happened, however, that the settlement to be made on Prince Albert came in times of great industrial and commercial distress. The days had gone by when economy in the House of Commons was looked upon as an ignoble principle, and when loyalty to the sovereign was believed to bind members of Parliament to grant without a murmur of discussion any sums that might be asked by the minister in the sovereign's name. Parliament was beginning to feel more thoroughly its responsibility as the guardian of the nation's resources, and it was no longer thought a fine thing to give away the money of the taxpayer with magnanimous indifference. It was therefore absurd on the part of the ministry to suppose that because great sums of money had been voted without question on former occasions, they would be voted without question now. It is quite possible that the whole matter might have been settled without controversy if the ministry had shown any judgment whatever in their conduct of the business. In our day the ministry would at once have consulted the leaders of the opposition. In all matters where the grant of money to anyone connected with the sovereign is concerned, it is now understood that the gift shall come with the full concurrence of both parties in Parliament. The leader of the House of Commons would probably by arrangement propose the grant, and the leader of the opposition would second it. In the case of the annuity to Prince Albert the ministry had the almost incredible folly to bring forward their proposal without having invited in any way the concurrence of the opposition. They introduced the proposal without discretion. They conducted the discussion on it without temper. They answered the most reasonable objections with imputations of one of loyalty, and they gave some excuse for the suspicion that they wished to provoke the opposition into some expression that might make them odious to the Queen and the Prince. Mr. Hume the Economist proposed that the annuity be reduced from fifty thousand pounds to twenty one thousand pounds. This was negative. Thereupon Colonel Sid Thorpe, a once famous Tory fanatic of the most eccentric manners and opinions, proposed that the sum be thirty thousand pounds, and he received the support of Sir Robert Peel and other eminent members of the opposition and the amendment was carried. CHAPTER VII These were not auspicious incidents to prelude the royal marriage. There can be no doubt that for a time the Queen stole more than the Prince felt their influence keenly. The Prince showed remarkable good sense and appreciation of the condition of political arrangements in England and readily comprehended that there was nothing personal to himself in any objections which the House of Commons might have made to the proposals of the Ministry. The question of precedence was very easily settled when it came to be discussed in reasonable fashion, although it was not until many years after, 1857, that the title of Prince Consort was given to the husband of the Queen. A few months after the marriage a bill was passed providing for a regency in the possible event of the death of the Queen leaving issue. With the entire concurrence of the leaders of the opposition who were consulted this time, Prince Albert was named regent following the precedent which had been adopted in the instance of the Princess Charlotte and Prince Leopold. The Duke of Sussex, Uncle of the Queen, alone dissented in the House of Lords and recorded his protest against the proposal. The passing of this bill was naturally regarded as of much importance to Prince Albert. It gave him to some extent the status in the country which he had not had before. It also proved that the Prince himself had risen in the estimation of the Tory party during the few months that elapsed since the debates on the annuity and the question of precedence. No one could have started with a more resolute determination to stand clear of party politics than Prince Albert. He accepted at once his position as the husband of the Queen of a constitutional country. His own idea of his duty was that he should be the private secretary and unofficial counselor of the Queen. To this purpose he devoted himself unswervingly. Outside that part of his duties he constituted himself a sort of minister without portfolio of art and education. He took an interest and often a leading part in all projects and movements relating to the spread of education, the culture of art, and the promotion of industrial science. Yet it was long before he was thoroughly understood by the country. It was long before he became, in any degree, popular, and it may be doubted whether he ever was thoroughly and generally popular. Not perhaps until his untimely death did the country find out how entirely disinterested and faithful his life had been in how he had made the discharge of duty his business and his task. His character was one which is liable to be regarded by ordinary observers as possessing none but negative virtues. He was thought to be cold, formal, and apathetic. His manners were somewhat shy and constrained, except when he was in the company of those he loved, and then he commonly relaxed into a kind of boyish freedom and joyousness. But to the public in general he seemed formal and chilling. It is not only Mr. Pandanus who conceals his gentleness under his shy and pompous demeanor. With all his ability, his anxiety to learn, his capacity for patient study, and his willingness to welcome new ideas, he never perhaps quite understood the genius of the English political system. His faithful friend and counselor, Baron Stockmar, was not the man best calculated to set him right on this subject. Both were far too eager to find, in the English Constitution, a piece of symmetrical mechanism, or to treat it as a written code from which one might take extracts or construct summaries for constant reference and guidance. But this was not in the beginning the cause of any coldness toward the Prince on the part of the English public. Prince Albert had not the ways of an Englishman, and the tendency of Englishmen, then as now, was to assume that to have manners other than those of an Englishman was to be so far unworthy of confidence. He was not made to shine in commonplace society. He could talk adverbally about something, but he had not the gift of talking about nothing, and probably would not have cared much to cultivate such a faculty. He was fond of suggesting small innovations and improvements in established systems to the annoyance of men with said ideas who liked their own ways best. Thus it happened that he remained for many years, if not exactly unappreciated, yet not thoroughly appreciated, and that a considerable and very influential section of society was always ready to cavill at what he said, and find motive for suspicion in most things that he did. Perhaps he was best understood and most cordially appreciated among the poorer classes of his wife's subjects. He found also more cordial approval generally among the radicals than among the Tories or even the Whigs. One reform which Prince Albert worked earnestly to bring about was the abolition of dueling in the army, and the substitution of some system of courts of honorable arbitration to supersede the barbaric recourse to the decision of weapons. He did not succeed in having his courts of honor established. There was something too fanciful in the scheme to attract the authorities of our two services, and there were undoubtedly many practical difficulties in the way of making such a system effective. But he succeeded so far that he induced the Duke of Wellington and the heads of the services to turn their attention very seriously to the subject, and to use all influence in their power for the purpose of discouraging and discrediting the odious practice of the duel. It is carrying courtly politeness too far to attribute the total disappearance of the dueling system, as one biographer seems inclined to do, to the personal efforts of Prince Albert. It is enough to his honor that he did his best, and that the best was a substantial contribution towards so great an object. But nothing can testify more strikingly to the rapid growth of a genuine civilization in Queen Victoria's reign than the utter discontinuance of the dueling system. When the Queen came to the throne and four years after it was still in full force, the duel plays a conspicuous part in the fiction and the drama of the sovereign's earlier years. It was a common incident of all political controversies. It was an episode of most contested elections. It was often resorted to for the purpose of deciding the right or wrong of a half-drunken quarrel over a card-table. It formed as common a theme of gossip as an allotment or a bankruptcy. Most of the eminent statesmen who were prominent in the earlier part of the Queen's reign had fought duels. Peele and O'Connell had made arrangements for a meeting. Mr. Disraeli had challenged O'Connell or any of the sons of O'Connell. The great agitator himself had killed his man in a duel. Mr. Roebuck had gone out, Mr. Cobden, at a much later period, had been visited with a challenge, and had had the good sense and the moral courage to laugh at it. At the present hour a duel in England would seem as absurd and barbarous and anachronism as an ordeal by touch or a witch-burning. Many years have passed since a duel was last talked of in Parliament, and then it was only the subject of a reprobation that had some work to do to keep its countenance while administering the proper rebuke. But it was not the influence of any one man or even any class of men that brought about in so short a time this striking change in the tone of public feeling and morality. The change was part of the growth of education and of civilization, of the strengthening and broadening influence of the press, the platform, the cheap book, the pulpit, and the less restricted intercourse of classes. This is perhaps as suitable a place as any other to introduce some notice of the attempts that were made from time to time upon the life of the Queen. It is proper to say something of them, although not one possessed the slightest political importance, or could be said to illustrate anything more than sheer lunacy, or that morbid vanity and thirst for notoriety that is nearly akin to genuine madness. The first attempt was made on June 10, 1840 by Edward Oxford, a pot boy of seventeen, who fired two shots at the Queen as she was driving up Constitution Hill with Prince Albert. Oxford fired both shots deliberately enough, but happily missed in each case. He proved to have been an absurd creature, half-crazy, with a longing to consider himself a political prisoner and to be talked of. When he was tried the jury pronounced him insane, and he was ordered to be kept in a lunatic asylum during Her Majesty's pleasure. The trial completely dissipated some wild alarms that were felt, founded chiefly on absurd papers in Oxford's possession about a tremendous secret society called Young England having among its other objects the assassination of royal personages. It is not an uninteresting illustration of the condition of public feeling that some of the Irish Catholic papers in seeming good faith denounced Oxford as an agent of the Duke of Cumberland and the Orange Men, and declared that the object was to assassinate the Queen and put the Duke on the throne. The trial showed that Oxford was the agent of nobody, and was impelled by nothing but his own crack-brained love of notoriety. The finding of the jury was evidently something of a compromise, for it is very doubtful whether the boy was insane in the medical sense and whether he was fairly to be held irresponsible for his actions. But it was felt, perhaps, that the wisest horse was to treat him as a madman, and the result did not prove unsatisfactory. Mr. Theodore Martin in his Life of the Prince Consort expresses a different opinion. He thinks it would have been well if Oxford had been dealt with as guilty in the ordinary way. The best commentary he says on the lenity thus shown was pronounced by Oxford himself on being told of the similar attempts of Francis and Bean in 1842, when he declared that if he had been hanged there would have been no more shooting at the Queen. It may be reasonably doubted whether the authority of Oxford as to the general influence of criminal legislation is very valuable. Against the philosophic opinion of the half-crazy young pot-boy, on which Mr. Martin places so much reliance, may be set the fact that in other countries where attempts on the life of the sovereign have been punished by the stern award of death, it has not been found that the execution of one fanatic was a safe protection against the murderous fanaticism of another. On May 30, 1842, a man named John Francis, son of a machinist in Drury Lane, fired a pistol at the Queen as she was driving down Constitution Hill on the very spot where Oxford's attempt was made. This was a somewhat serious attempt, for Francis was not more than a few feet from the carriage which fortunately was driving at a very rapid rate. The Queen showed great composure. She was in some measure prepared for the attempt, for it seems certain that the same man had, on the previous evening, presented a pistol at the royal carriage although he did not then fire it. Francis was arrested and put on trial. He was only twenty-two years of age, and although at first he endeavored to brazen it out and put on a sort of melodramatic regicide aspect, yet when the sentence of death for high treason was passed on him he fell into a swoon and was carried insensible from the court. The sentence was not carried into effect. It was not certain whether the pistol was loaded at all and whether the whole performance was not a mere piece of brutal play-acting done out of a longing to be notorious. Her Majesty herself was anxious that the death sentence should not be carried into effect and it was finally commuted to one of transportation for life. The very day after this mitigation of punishment became publicly known another attempt was made by a hunchbacked lad named Bean. As the Queen was passing from Buckingham Palace to the Chapel Royal, Bean presented a pistol at her carriage but did not succeed in firing it before his hand was seized by a prompt and courageous boy who was standing near. The pistol was found to be loaded with powder, paper closely rammed down, and some scraps of a clay pipe. It may be asked whether the argument of Mr. Martin is not fully borne out by this occurrence and whether the fact of Bean's attempt having been made on the day after the commutation of the capital sentence in the case of Francis is not evidence that the leniency in the former instance was the cause of the attempt made in the latter. But it was made clear, and the fact is recorded on the authority of Prince Albert himself, that Bean had announced his determination to make the attempt several days before the sentence of Francis was commuted and while Francis was actually lying under sentence of death. With regard to Francis himself the Prince was clearly of opinion that to carry out the capital sentence would have been nothing less than a judicial murder, as it is essential that the act should be committed with intent to kill or wound, and in Francis's case to all appearance this was not the fact, or at least it was open to graved out. In this calm and wise way did the husband of the Queen, who had always shared with her whatever of danger there might be in the attempts, argue as to the manner in which they ought to be dealt with. The ambition which most or all of the miscreants who thus disturbed the Queen and the country was that of the Montabank rather than of the assassin. The Queen herself showed how thoroughly she understood the significance of all that had happened when she declared according to Mr. Martin that she expected a repetition of the attempts on her life so long as the law remained unaltered by which they could be dealt with only as acts of high treason. The seeming dignity of martyrdom had something fascinating in it to morbid vanity or crazed fanaticism while on the other hand it was almost certain that the martyr's penalty would not in the end be inflicted. A very appropriate change in the law was affected by which a punishment at once sharp and degrading was provided even for mere Montabank attempts against the Queen. A punishment which was certain to be inflicted. A bill was introduced by Sir Robert Peale making such attempts punishable by transportation for seven years or by imprisonment for a term not exceeding three years, the culprit to be publicly or privately whipped as often and in such manner as the court shall direct not exceeding thrice. Bean was convicted under this act and sentenced to eighteen months imprisonment in Millbank Penitentiary. This did not however conclude the attacks on the Queen. An Irish bricklayer named Hamilton fired a pistol charged only with powder at her majesty on Constitution Hill on May 19, 1849 and was sentenced to seven years' transportation. A man named Robert Peate, once a Lieutenant of Hussars, struck her majesty on the face with a stick as she was leaving the Duke of Cambridge's residence in her carriage on May 27, 1850. This man was sentenced to seven years' transportation but the judge paid so much attention to the plea of insanity set up on his behalf as to omit from his punishment the whipping which might have been ordered. Finally, on February 29, 1872, a lad of 17 named Arthur O'Connor presented a pistol at the Queen as she was entering Buckingham Palace after a drive. The pistol however proved to be unloaded, an antique and useless or harmless weapon with a flintlock which was broken, and in the barrel a piece of greasy red rag. The wretched lad held a paper in one hand which was found to be some sort of petition on behalf of the Fennean prisoners. When he came up for trial a plea of insanity was put in on his behalf, but he did not seem to be insane in the sense of being irresponsible for his actions or incapable of understanding the penalty they involved and he was sentenced to twelve months' imprisonment and a whipping. We have hurried over many years for the purpose of completing this painful and ludicrous catalogue of the attempts made against the Queen. It will be seen that in not a single instance was there the slightest political significance to be attached to them. Even in our own softened and civilized time it sometimes happens that an attempt is made on the life of a sovereign which however we may condemn and reprobate it on moral grounds yet does seem to bear a distinct political meaning and to show that there are fanatical minds still burning under some sense of national or personal wrong. But in the various attacks which were made on Queen Victoria nothing of the kind was even pretended. There was no opportunity for any vaporing about Brutus and Charlotte Corday. The impulse where it was not that of sheer insanity was of kin to the vulgar love of notoriety and certain minds which sets on those whom it pervades to mutilate noble works of art and scrawl their autographs on the marble of immortal monuments. There was a great deal of wisdom shown in not dealing too severely with most of these offenses and in not treating them too much au sérieux. Prince Albert himself said that the vindictive feeling of the common people would be a thousand times more dangerous than the madness of individuals. There was not indeed the slightest danger at any time that the common people of England could be wrought up to any sympathy with assassination nor was this what Prince Albert meant. But the Queen and her husband were yet new to power and the people had not quite lost all memory of sovereigns who well meaning enough had yet scarcely understood constitutional government and there were wild rumors of reaction this way and revolution that way. It might have fomented a feeling of distrust and dissatisfaction if the people had seen any disposition on the part of those in authority to strain the criminal law for the sake of enforcing a death penalty against creatures like Oxford and Bean. The most alarming and unnerving of all dangers to a ruler is that of assassination. Even the best and most blameless sovereign is not wholly secure against it. The hand of Oxford might have killed the Queen. Perhaps, however, the best protection a sovereign can have is not to exaggerate the danger. There is no safety in mere severity of punishment. Where the attempt is serious and desperate, it is that of a fanaticism which holds its life in its hand and is not to be deterred by fear of death. The tortures of Raviak did not deter Damian. The birch in the case of Benin O'Connor may effectively discounten its enterprises which are born of the Montabanks and not the fanatics spirit. CHAPTER VIII. THE OPIUM WAR. PART I. The opium dispute with China was going on when the Queen came to the throne. The opium war broke out soon after. On March 3, 1843, five huge wagons, each of them drawn by four horses, and the whole under escort of a detachment of the sixtieth regiment, arrived in front of the Mint. An immense crowd followed the wagons. It was seen that they were filled with boxes, and one of the boxes having been somewhat broken in its journey, the crowd were able to see that it was crammed full of odd-looking silver coins. The lookers on were delighted as well as amused by the sight of this huge consignment of treasure, and when it became known that the silver money was the first installment of the China ransom, there were lusty cheers given as the wagons passed through the gates of the Mint. This was a payment on account of the war indemnity imposed on China. Nearly four millions and a half sterling was the sum of the indemnity, in addition to one million and a quarter which had already been paid by the Chinese authorities. Many readers may remember that for some time China money was regularly set down as an item in the revenues of each year with which the Chancellor of the Exchequer had to deal. The China war of which this money was the spoil was not perhaps an event of which the nation was entitled to be very proud. It was the precursor of other wars. The policy on which it was conducted has never since ceased altogether to be a question of more or less excited controversy, that it may safely be asserted that if the same events were to occur in our day, it would be hardly possible to find a ministry to originate a war for which at the same time it must be owned that the vast majority of the people of all politics and classes were only too ready then to find excuse and even justification. The wagon loads of silver conveyed into the mint amid the cheers of the crowd were the spoils of the famous opium war. Reduced to plain words, the principle for which we fought in the China war was the right of Great Britain to force a peculiar trade upon a foreign people in spite of the protestations of the government and all such public opinion as there was of the nation. Of course this was not the avowed motive of the war. Not often in history is the real and inspiring motive of a war proclaimed in so many words by those who carry it on. Not often indeed is it seen, naked and avowed, even to the minds of its promoters themselves. As the quarrel between this country and China went on a great many minor and incidental subjects of dispute arose which for the moment put the one main and original question out of people's minds. And in the course of these discussions it happened more than once that the Chinese authorities took some steps which put them decidedly in the wrong. Thus it is true enough that there were particular passages of the controversy when the English government had all or nearly all of the right on their side so far as the immediate incident of the dispute was concerned. And when if that had been the whole matter of quarrel or if the quarrel had begun there a patriotic minister might have been justified in thinking that the Chinese were determined to offend England and deserve humiliation. But no consideration of this kind can now hide from our eyes the fact that in the beginning and the very origin of the quarrel we were distinctly in the wrong. We asserted or at least acted on the assertion of a claim so unreasonable and even monstrous that it never could have been made upon any nation strong enough to render its assertion a matter of serious responsibility. The most important lessons a nation can learn from its own history are found in the exposure of its own errors. Historians have sometimes done more evil than court flatterers when they have gone about to glorify the errors of their own people and to make wrong appear right because an English government talked the public opinion of the time into a confusion of principles. The whole principle of Chinese civilization at the time when the opium war broke out was based on conditions which to any modern nation must seem erroneous and unreasonable. The Chinese governments and people desired to have no political relations or dealings whatever with any other state. They were not so obstinately set against private and commercial dealings but they would have no political intercourse with foreigners and they would not even recognize the existence of foreign peoples as states. They were perfectly satisfied with themselves and their own systems. They were convinced that their own systems were not only wise but absolutely perfect. It is superfluous to say that this was in itself evidence of ignorance and self-conceit. A belief in the perfection of their own systems could only exist among a people who knew nothing of any other systems. But absurd as the idea must appear to us yet the Chinese might have found a good deal to say for it. It was the result of a civilization so ancient that the oldest events preserved in European history were but as yesterday in the comparison. Whatever its errors and defects it was distinctly a civilization. It was a system with a literature and laws and institutions of its own. It was a coherent and harmonious social and political system which had on the whole worked tolerably well. It was not very unlike in its principles the kind of civilization which at one time it was the whim of men of genius like Rousseau and Diderot to idealize and admire. The European, of whatever nation, may be said to like change and to believe in its necessity. His instincts and his convictions alike tend this way. The sleepiest of Europeans, the Neapolitan who lies with his feet in the water on the kiaja, the Spaniard who smokes his cigar and sips his coffee as if life had no active business whatever, the flaneur of the Paris boulevards, the beggar who lounged from cabin to cabin in Ireland a generation ago. All these, no matter how little inclined for change themselves, would be delighted to hear of travel and enterprise and of new things and new discoveries. But to the Chinese, of all Eastern races the very idea of travel and change were something repulsive and odious. As the thought of having to go a day unwashed would be to the educated Englishman of our age or as the edge of a precipice is to a nervous man, so was the idea of innovation to the Chinese of that time. The ordinary Oriental dreads and detests change, but the Chinese at that time went so far beyond the ordinary Oriental as the latter goes beyond an average Englishman. In the present day a considerable alteration has taken place in this respect. The Chinese have had innovation after innovation forced on them until at last they have taken up with the new order of things, like people who feel that it is idle to resist their fate any longer. The emigration from China has been as remarkable as that from Ireland or Germany and the United States finds itself confronted with the question of the first magnitude when it asks itself what is to be the influence and operation of the descent of the Chinese population along the Pacific slope. Japan has put on modern and European civilization like a garment. Japan effected in a few years a revolution in the political constitution and the social habits of her people and in their very way of looking at things, the like of which no other state ever accomplished in a century. But nothing of all this was thought of at the time of the China War. The one thing which China asked of European civilization and the thing called modern progress was to be let alone. China's prayer to Europe was that of Diogenes to Alexander, stand out of my sunshine. It was as we have said to political relationships rather than to private and commercial dealings with foreign peoples that the Chinese felt an unconquerable objection. They did not indeed like even private and commercial dealings with foreigners. They would much rather have lived without ever seeing the face of a foreigner. But they had to put up with the private intrusion of foreigners in trade and had had dealings with American traders and with the East India Company. The charter and the exclusive rights of the East India Company expired in April 1834. The charter was renewed under different conditions and the trade with China was thrown open. One of the great branches of the East India Company's business with China was the opium trade. When the trading privileges ceased, this traffic was taken up briskly by private merchants who bought of the company the opium which they grew in India and sold it to the Chinese. The Chinese governments and all teachers, moralists and persons of education in China had long desired to get rid of or put down this trade in opium. They considered it highly detrimental to the morals, the health, and the prosperity of the people. Of late the destructive effects of opium have often been disputed particularly in the House of Commons. It has been said that it is not on the average nearly so unwholesome as the Chinese government always thought, in that it does not do as much proportionate harm to China as the use of Brandy, Whiskey, and Jin does to England. It seems to this writer hardly possible to doubt that the use of opium is, on the whole, a curse to any nation, but even if this were not so, the question between England and the Chinese governments would remain just the same. The Chinese governments may have taken exaggerated views of the evils of the opium trade. Their motives in wishing to put it down may have been mixed with considerations of interest as much political as philanthropic. Lord Palmerston insisted that the Chinese government were not sincere in their professed objection on moral grounds to the traffic. If they were sincere, he said, why did they not prevent the growth of the poppy in China? It was, he tertely put it, an exportation of bullion question, an agricultural protection question. It was a question of the poppy interest in China, and of the economists who wish to prevent the exportation of the precious metals. It is curious that such arguments as this could have weighed with anyone for a moment. It was no business of ours to ask ourselves whether the Chinese government were perfectly sincere in their professions of alofty morality, or whether they, unlike all other governments that have ever been known, were influenced by one sole motive in the making of the regulations. All that had nothing to do with the question. States are not at liberty to help the subjects of other states to break the laws of their own governments, especially when these laws even profess to concern questions of morals. Is it the duty of foreign states not to interfere with the regulations which a government considers it necessary to impose for the protection of its people? All traffic in opium was quickly forbidden by the governments and laws of China. Yet our English traders carried on a brisk and profitable trade in the forbidden article. Nor was this merely an ordinary smuggling, or a business akin to that of the blockade running during the American Civil War. The arrangements with the Chinese government allowed the existence of all establishments and machinery for carrying on a general trade at Canton and Macau, and under cover of these arrangements the opium traders set up their regular headquarters in these towns. Let us find, in illustration intelligible to readers of the present day, to show how unjustifiable was this practice. The state of Maine, as everyone knows, prohibits the common sale of sprituous liquors. Let us suppose that several companies of English merchants were formed in Portland and Augusta and the other towns of Maine for the purpose of brewing beer and distilling whiskey and selling both to the public of Maine in defiance of the state laws. Let us further suppose that when the authorities of Maine proceeded to put the state laws in force against these intruders, our government here took up the cause of the whiskey sellers and sent an iron-clad fleet to Portland to compel the people of Maine to put up with them. It seems impossible to think of any English government taking such a course as this, or of the English public enduring it for one moment. In the case of such a nation as the United States, nothing of the kind would be possible. The serious responsibilities of any such undertaking would make even the most thoughtless minister pause and would give the public in general some time to think the matter over, and before any freak of the kind could be attempted, the conscience of the nation would be aroused and the unjust policy would have to be abandoned. But in dealing with China, the ministry never seems to have thought the right or wrong of the question a matter worthy of any consideration. The controversy was entered upon with as light a heart as a modern war of still-graver moment. The people in general knew nothing about the matter until it had gone so far that the original point of dispute was almost out of sight, and it seemed as if the safety of English subjects and the honour of England was compromised in some way by the high-handed proceedings of the Chinese government. The English government appointed superintendents to manage our commercial dealings with China. Unluckily, these superintendents were invested with a sort of political or diplomatic character, and thus from the first became objectionable to the Chinese authorities. One of the first of these superintendents acted in disregard of the express instructions of his own government. He was told that he must not pass the entrance of the Canton River in a vessel of war, as the Chinese authorities always made a marked distinction between ships of war and merchant vessels in regard to the freedom of intercourse. Misunderstandings occurred at every step of negotiation. These misunderstandings were natural. Our people knew hardly anything about the Chinese. The limitation of our means of communication with them made this ignorance inevitable, but certainly did not excuse our acting as if we were in possession of the fullest and most accurate information. The manner in which some of our official instructors went on was well illustrated by a sentence in the speech of Sir James Graham during the debate on the whole subject in the House of Commons in April 1840. It was, Sir James Graham said, as if a foreigner who was occasionally permitted to anchor at the Nohr and at times to land at Wapping, being placed in close confinement during his continuance there, were to pronounce a deliberate opinion upon the resources, the genius, and the character of the British Empire. End of Section 17 Section 18 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 8 The Opium War Part 2 Our representatives were generally disposed to be unyielding, and not only that, but to see deliberate offence in every Chinese usage or ceremony which the authorities endeavored to impose on them. On the other hand it was clear that the Chinese authorities thoroughly detested them in their mission and all about them, and often made or countenance delays that were unnecessary, and interferences which were disagreeable and offensive. The Chinese believed from the first that the superintendents were there merely to protect the opium trade and to force on China political relations with the West. Practically this was the effect of their presence. The superintendents took no steps to aid the Chinese authorities in stopping the hated trade. The British traders naturally enough thought that the British government were determined to protect them in carrying it on. Indeed the superintendents themselves might well have had the same conviction. The government at home allowed Captain Elliot the Chief Superintendent to make appeal after appeal for instructions without paying the slightest attention to him. Captain Elliot saw that the opium traders were growing more and more reckless and audacious that they were thrusting their trade under the very eyes of the Chinese authorities. He also saw as everyone on the spot must have seen that the authorities who had been somewhat apathetic for a long time were now at last determined to go any length to put down the traffic. At length the English government announced to Captain Elliot the decision which they ought to have made known months not to say years before that Her Majesty's government could not interfere for the purpose of enabling British subjects to violate the laws of the country with which they trade and that any loss therefore which such persons may suffer in consequence of the more effectual execution of the Chinese laws on this subject must be borne by the parties who have brought that loss on themselves by their own acts. This very wise and proper resolve came however too late. The British traders had been allowed to go on for a long time under the full conviction that the protection of the English government was behind them and wholly at their service. Captain Elliot himself seems to have now believed that the announcement of his superiors was but a graceful diplomatic figure of speech. When the Chinese authorities actually proceeded to insist on the forfeiture of an immense quantity of the opium in the hand of British traders and took other harsh but certainly not unnatural measures to extinguish the traffic, Captain Elliot sent to the Governor of India a request for as many ships of war as could be spared for the protection of the life and property of Englishmen in China. Before long British ships arrived and the two countries were at war. It is not necessary to describe the successive steps by which the war came on. It was inevitable from the moment that the English superintendent identified himself with the protection of the opium trade. The English believed that the Chinese authorities were determined on war and only waiting for a convenient moment to make a treacherous beginning. The Chinese were convinced that from the first we had met nothing but war. Such a condition of feeling on both sides would probably have made war unavoidable even in the case of two nations who had far much better ways of understanding each other than the English and Chinese. It is not surprising if the English people at home knew little of the original causes of the controversy. All that presented itself to their mind was the fact that Englishmen were in danger in a foreign country, that they were harshly treated and recklessly imprisoned, that their lives were in jeopardy, and that the flag of England was insulted. There was a general notion too that the Chinese were a barbarous and a ridiculous people who had no alphabet and thought themselves much better than any other people, even the English, and that on the whole it would be a good thing to take the conceit out of them. Those who remember what the common feeling of ordinary society was at the time will admit that it did not reach a much loftier level than this. The matter was however taken up more seriously in parliament. The policy of the government was challenged in the House of Commons, but with results of more importance to the existing composition of the English cabinet than to the relations between this country and China. Sir James Graham moved a resolution condemning the policy of ministers for having by its uncertainty and other errors brought about the war, which however he did not then think it possible to avoid. A debate which continued for three days took place. It was marked by the same curious mixture of parties which we have seen in debates on China questions in days nearer to the present. The defence of the government was opened by Mr. Macaulay, who had been elected for Edinburgh and appointed secretary at war. The defence consisted chiefly in the argument that we could not have put the trade in opium down, no matter how earnest we had been, in that it was not necessary or possible to keep on issuing frequent instructions to agents so far away as our representatives in China. Mr. Macaulay actually drew from our experience in India an argument in support of his position. We cannot govern India from London, he insisted. We must for the most part govern India in India. One can imagine how Macaulay would in one of his essays have torn into pieces such an argument coming from any advocate of a policy opposed to his own. The reply indeed is almost too obvious to need any exposition. In India the complete materials of administration were in existence. There was a governor general, there were councillors, there was an army. The men best qualified to rule the country were there, provided with all the appliances and forces of rule. In China we had an agent with a vague and anomalous office dropped down in the middle of a hostile people, possessed neither of recognised authority nor of power to enforce its recognition. It was probably true enough that we could not have put down the opium trade, that even with all the assistance of the Chinese government we could have done no more than to drive it from one port in order to see it make its appearance at another. But what we ought to have done is therefore only the more clear. We ought to have announced from the first and in the firmest tone that we would have nothing to do with the trade, that we would not protect it, and we ought to have held to this determination. As it was we allowed our traders to remain under the impression that we were willing to support them until it was too late to undeceive them with any profit to their safety or our credit. The Chinese authorities acted after a while with a high-handed disregard of fairness, and of anything like what we should call the responsibility of law, but it is evident that they believed they were themselves the objects of lawless intrusion and enterprise. There were on the part of the government great efforts made to represent the motion as an attempt to prevent the ministry from exacting satisfaction from the Chinese government and from protecting the lives and interests of Englishmen in China. But it is unfortunately only too often the duty of statesmen to recognize the necessity of carrying on a war, even while they are of opinion, that they whose mismanagement brought about the war deserve condemnation. When Englishmen are being imprisoned and murdered, the innocent, just as well as the guilty, in a foreign country, when in short war is actually going on, it is not possible for English statesmen in opposition to say, we will not allow England to strike a blow in defense of our fellow countrymen and our flag, because we are of opinion that better judgment on the part of our government would have spared us the beginning of such a war. There was really no inconsistency in recognizing the necessity of carrying on the war, and at the same time censuring the ministry who had allowed the necessity to be forced upon us. Sir Robert Peel quoted with great effect during the debate the example of Fox, who declared his readiness to give every help to the prosecution of a war, which the very same day he proposed to censure the ministry for having brought upon the country. With all their efforts the ministers were only able to command a majority of nine votes as the result of the three days debate. The war, however, went on. It was easy work enough so far as England was concerned. It was on our side nothing but a succession of cheap victories. The Chinese fought very bravely in a great many instances, and they showed still more often a spartan-like resolve not to survive defeat. When one of the Chinese cities was taken by Sir Hugh Goff, the Tartar general went into his house as soon as he saw that all was lost, made his servant set fire to the building, and calmly sat in his chair until he was burned to death. One of the English officers writes of the same attack that it was impossible to compute the loss of the Chinese, for when they found they could stand no longer against us, they cut the throats of their wives and children or draw them into wells or ponds and then destroy themselves. In many houses there were found from eight to twelve dead bodies, and I myself saw a dozen women and children drowning themselves in a small pond the day after the fight. We quickly captured the island of Chuzhan on the east coast of China. A part of our squadron went up the Peiho River to threaten the capital. Negotiations were opened and the preliminaries of a treaty were made out, to which, however, neither the English government nor the Chinese would agree, and the war was reopened. Chuzhan was again taken by us, Ningpo, a large city a few miles in on the mainland fell into our hands, Amoy further south was captured. Our troops were before Nankin when the Chinese government at last saw how futile was the idea of resisting our arms. Their women or their children might just as well have attempted to encounter our soldiers. With all the bravery which the Chinese often displayed, there was something pitiful, pathetic, ludicrous in the simple and childlike attempts which they made to carry on war against us. They made peace at last on any terms we chose to ask. We asked, in the first instance, the session in perpetuity to us of the island of Hong Kong. Of course we got it. Then we asked that five ports, Canton Amoy, Fu Chaofu, Ningpo and Shanghai should be thrown open to British traders and that consul should be established there. Needless to say that this too was conceded. Then it was agreed that the indemnity already mentioned should be paid by the Chinese government some four millions and a half sterling in addition to one million and a quarter as compensation for the destroyed opium. It was also stipulated that correspondence between officials of the two governments was henceforth to be carried on upon equal terms. The war was over for the present and the thanks of both houses of parliament were voted to the fleet and army engaged in the operations. The Duke of Wellington moved the vote of thanks in the House of Lords. He could hardly help, one would think, forming in his mind as he spoke an occasional contrast between the services which he asked the House to honour and the sort of warfare which had been his glorious duty to engage in so long. The Duke of Wellington was a simple-minded man with little sense of humour. He did not probably perceive himself the irony that others might have seen in the fact that the conqueror of Napoleon, the victor in years of warfare against soldiers unsurpassed in history, should have had to move a vote of thanks to the fleet and army which triumphed over the unarmed, helpless, childlike Chinese. The whole chapter of history ended not inappropriately perhaps with a rather pitiful dispute between the English government and the English traders about the amount of compensation to which the latter laid claim for their destroyed opium. The government were in something of a difficulty, for they had formally announced that they were resolved to let the traders abide by any loss which their violation of the laws of China might bring upon them. But on the other hand they had identified themselves by the war with the cause of the traders, and one of the conditions of peace had been the compensation for the opium. The traders insisted that the amount given for this purpose by the Chinese government did not nearly meet their losses. The English government, on the other hand, would not admit that they were bound in any way further to make good the losses of the merchants. The traders demanded to be compensated according to the price of opium at the time the seizure was made, a demand which if we admit any claim at all seems only fair and reasonable. The government had clearly undertaken their cause in the end, and was hardly in a position either logical or dignified when they afterwards chose to say, yes, we admit that we did undertake to get you redressed, but we do not think now that we are bound to give you full redress. At last the matter was compromised, the merchants had to take what they could get, something considerably below their demand, and give in return to the government an immediate acquittance in full. It is hard to get up any feeling of sympathy with the traders who lost on such a speculation. It is hard to feel any regret even if the government, which had done so much for them in the war, treated them so shabbily when the war was over, but that they were treated shabbily in the final settlement seems to us to allow of no doubt. The Chinese war then was over for the time, but as the children say that snow brings more snow, so did that war with China bring other wars to follow it. CHAPTER IX The Melbourne Ministry kept going from bad to worse. There was a great stirring in the country all around them which made their feebleness the more conspicuous. We sometimes read in history a defense of some particular sovereign, whom common opinion cries down, the defense being a reference to the number of excellent measures that were set in motion during his reign. If we were to judge of the Melbourne Ministry on the same principle, it might seem indeed as if their career was one of extreme activity and fruitfulness. Reforms were a stir in almost every direction. Inquiries into the condition of our poor and our laboring classes were, to use a can't phrase of the time, the order of the day. The foundation of the colony of New Zealand was laid with a philosophical deliberation and thoughtfulness which might have reminded one of Locke and the Constitution of the Carolinas. Some of the first comprehensive and practical measures to mitigate the rigor and to correct the indiscriminateness of the death punishment were taken during this period. One of the first legislative enactments, which fairly acknowledged the difference between an English wife and a purchased slave, so far as the despotic power of the master was concerned, belongs to the same time. This was the custody of Infant's Bill, the object of which was to obtain for mothers of irreproachable conduct who through no fault of theirs were living apart from their husbands, occasional access to their children with the permission and under the control of the equity judges. It is curious to notice how long and how fiercely this modest measure of recognition for what may almost be called the natural rights of a wife and a mother was disputed in Parliament, or at least in the House of Lords. It is curious too to notice what a clamour was raised over the small contribution to the cause of national education which was made by the Melbourne Government. In 1834 the first grant of public money for the purposes of elementary education was made by Parliament. The sum granted was twenty thousand pounds and the same grant was made every year until 1839. Then Lord John Russell asked for an increase of ten thousand pounds and proposed a change in the manner of appropriating the money. Up to that time the grant had been distributed through the National School Society, a body in direct connection with the Church of England and the British and Foreign School Association which admitted children of all Christian denominations without imposing on them sectarian teaching. The money was dispensed by the Lords of the Treasury who gave aid to applicants in proportion to the size and cost of the school buildings and the number of children who attended them. Naturally the result of such an arrangement was that the districts which needed help the most got at the least. If a place was so poor as not to be able to do anything for itself the Lords of the Treasury would do nothing for it. The rich and powerful Church of England secured the greater part of the grant for itself. There was no inspection of the schools, no reports were made to Parliament as to the manner in which the system worked. No steps were taken to find out if the teachers were qualified or the teaching was good. The statistics of the schools, says a writer to the Edinburgh Review, were alone considered. The size of the classroom, the cost of the building and the number of scholars. In 1839, Lord John Russell proposed to increase the grant and in order in council transferred its distribution to a committee of the privy council composed of the president and not more than five members. Lord John Russell also proposed the appointment of inspectors, the founding of a model school for the training of teachers and the establishment of infant schools. The model school and the infant schools were to be practically unsectarian. The committee of the privy council were to be allowed to depart from the principle of proportioning their grants to the amount of local contribution. To establish in poor and crowded places schools not necessarily connected with either of the two educational societies and to extend their aid even to schools where the Roman Catholic version of the Bible was read. The proposals of the government were fiercely opposed in both houses of parliament. The most vigorous and fantastic forms of bigotry combined against them. The application of public money and especially through the hands of the committee of privy council to any schools not under the control and authority of the Church of England was denounced as a state recognition of pulpery and heresy. Scarcely less marvelous to us now are the speeches of those who promoted than of those who opposed the scheme. Lord John Russell himself who was much in advance of the common opinion of those among whom he moved pleaded for the principles of his measure in a tone rather of apology than of actual vindication. He did not venture to oppose point blank the claim of those who insisted that it was part of the sacred right of the established Church to have the teaching all done in her own way or to allow no teaching at all. The government did not get all they sought for. They had a fierce fight for their grant and an amendment moved by Lord Stanley to the effect that Her Majesty be requested to revoke the order in council appointing the committee on education was only negative by a majority of two votes 275 to 273. In the lords to which the struggle was transferred the archbishop of Canterbury actually moved and carried by a large majority and addressed to the Queen praying her to revoke the order in council. The Queen replied firmly that the funds voted by Parliament would be found to be laid out in strict accordance with constitutional usage the rights of conscience and the safety of the established Church and so dismissed the question. The government therefore succeeded in establishing their committee of council on education the institution by which our system of public instruction has been managed ever since. The ministry on the whole showed to advantage in this struggle. They took up a principle and they stood by it. If as we have said the speeches made by the promoters of the scheme seem amazing to any intelligent person of our time because of the feeble, apologetic and almost craven tone in which they assert the claims of a system of national education yet it must be admitted that the principle was accepted by the government at some risk and that it was not shabbily deserted in the face of hostile pressure. It is worth noticing that while the increased grant and the principles on which it was to be distributed were opposed by such men as Sir Robert Peale, Lord Stanley, Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Disraeli, it had the support of Mr. O'Connell and of Mr. Smith O'Brien. Both these Irish leaders only regretted that the grant was not very much larger and that it was not appropriated on a more liberal principle. O'Connell was the recognized leader of the Irish Catholics and nationalists. Smith O'Brien was an aristocratic Protestant. With all the weakness of the Whig Ministry, their term of office must at least be remarkable for the new departure it took in the matter of national education. The appointment of the Committee of Council marks an epoch. Indeed the history of that time seems full of reform projects. The parliamentary annals contains the names of various measures of social and political improvement which might in themselves, it would seem, bear witness to the most unsleeping activity on the part of any ministry. Measures for general registration, for the reduction of the stamp duty on newspapers and of the duty on paper, for the improvement of the jail system, for the spread of vaccination, for the regulation of the labor of children, for the prohibition of the employment of any child or young person under 21 in the cleaning of chimneys by climbing, for the suppression of the punishment of the pillory, efforts to relieve the Jews from civil disabilities. These are but a few of the many projects of social and political reform that occupied the attention of that busy period which somehow appears, nevertheless, to have been so sleepy and do nothing. How does it come about that we can regard the ministry in whose time all these things were done or attempted as exhausted and worthless? One answer is plain. The reforming energy was in the time and not in the ministry. In every instance, public opinion went far ahead of the inclination of Her Majesty's ministers. There was a just and general conviction that if the government were left to themselves they would do nothing. When they were driven into any course of improvement, they usually did all they could to minimize the amount of reform to be effected. Whatever they undertook, they seemed to undertake reluctantly, and as if only from the object of preventing other people from having anything to do with it. Naturally, therefore, they got little or no thanks for any good they might have done. When they brought in a measure to abolish in various cases the punishment of death, they fell so far behind public opinion and the inclinations of the Commission that had for eight years been inquiring into the state of our criminal law that their bill only passed by very narrow majorities and impressed many ardent reformers as if it were meant rather to withhold than to advance a genuine reform. In truth, it was a period of enthusiasm and of growth and the ministry did not understand this. Lord Melbourne seems to have found it hard to persuade himself that there was any real anxiety in the mind of anyone to do anything in particular. He had apparently got into his mind the conviction that the only sensible thing the people of England could do was to keep up the Melbourne ministry, and that being a sensible people they would naturally do this. He had grown into something like the condition of a pampered old hall porter who dosing in his chair begins to look on it as an act of rudeness if any visitor to his master presumes to knock at the door and so disturb him from his comfortable rest. Anyone who doubts that it was really a time of enthusiasm in these countries has only to glance at its history. The Church of England and the Church of Scotland were alike convulsed by movements which were the offspring of a genuine and irresistible enthusiasm. Enthusiasm of that strong, far-reaching kind which makes epochs in the history of a church or a people. In Ireland Father Matthew, a pious and earnest friar, who had neither eloquence nor learning nor genius, but only enthusiasm and noble purpose, had stirred the hearts of the population in the cause of temperance as thoroughly as Peter the Hermit might have stirred the heart of a people to a crusade. Many of the efforts of social reform which are still periodically made among ourselves had their beginning then, and can scarcely be said to have made much advance from that day to this. In July 1840 Mr. Hume moved in the House of Commons for an address to the throne, praying that the British Museum and the National Gallery might be opened to the public after divine service on Sundays, at such hours as taverns, beer shops, and gin shops are legally open. The motion was of course rejected, but it is worthy of mention now as an evidence of the point to which the spirit of social reform had advanced, at a period when Lord Melbourne had seemingly made up his mind that reform had done enough for his generation and that ministers might be allowed, at least during his time, to eat their meals in peace without being disturbed by the urgencies of restless radicals, or threatened with hostile majorities and Tory successes. End of section 19