 Chapter 45 Palmerston's Last Victory, Part 4 Yet it was as impossible as it would have been absurd for England to maintain in arms the cause of Denmark. To begin with, the cause was not one which England could reasonably have supported. The artificial arrangements by which the Dutchies were bound to Denmark could not endure. They were the device of an era, and a system of policy from which England was escaping as fast as she could. It was not a controversy which specially concerned the English people. England was only one of the parties to the diplomatic arrangements which had bound up the Dutchies and the Danish kingdom together. Lord Russell was willing at one moment to intervene by arms in support of Denmark if France would join England, and he made a proposal of this kind to the French government. The Emperor Napoleon refused to interfere. He had been hurt by England's refusal to join with him in sustaining Poland against Russia, and now was his time to make a return. Besides, he had, after the attempt at diplomatic intervention between Poland and Russia, issued invitations for a Congress of European Sovereigns to assemble in Paris and make a new settlement of Europe. The governments to which the invitation was addressed had for the most part returned as civil acceptance, while knowing the project would come to nothing. Lord Russell refused to have anything to do with the Congress, and gave some excellent reasons for the refusal. The Emperor Napoleon was somewhat hurt by the chill common sense of Lord Russell's reply. The Emperor's invitation was evidently meant to be a document of historical and monumental interest. It was drawn up in the spirit of what Burke calls a proud humility. It made allusion to the early misfortunes and exile of the writer, and put him forward as the one sovereign of Europe on whose face the winds of adversity had severely blown. It must have been painful to find that so much eloquence and emotion had been put into a state paper for nothing. The Emperor's turn had now come, and he would not join with England in sustaining the cause of Denmark. There was absolutely nothing for it, but to leave the Danes to fight out their battle in the best way they could. Lord Palmerston put the matter very plainly in a letter to Lord Russell. The truth is, he wrote, that to enter into a military conflict with all Germany on continental ground would be a serious undertaking. If Sweden and Denmark were actively cooperating with us, our twenty thousand men might do a great deal. But Austria and Prussia could bring two hundred thousand, or three hundred thousand into the field, and would be joined by the smaller German states. At a later period of the struggle Lord Palmerston spoke with full frankness to Count Apenni, the Austrian ambassador. He explained that the English government had abstained from taking the field in defence of Denmark for many reasons. From the season of the year, from the smallness of our army, and the great risk of failure in a struggle with all Germany by land. But Lord Palmerston pointed out, with regard to operations by sea, the positions would be reversed. We are strong, Germany is weak, and the German ports in the Baltic, North Sea and Adriatic would be greatly at our command. Therefore, Lord Palmerston warned the Austrian ambassador that a collision between England and Austria might happen if an Austrian squadron were to enter the Baltic in order to help the operations against Denmark. The Austrian ambassador explained that his government did not intend to send a squadron into the Baltic. This was an unofficial conversation between Palmerston and Count Apenni, and had no effect on the fortunes of the war or on the diplomacy that brought it to an end. The Danes fought with a great deal of spirit, but they were extravagantly outnumbered, and their weapons were miserably unfit to contend against their powerful enemies. The Prussian needle-gun came into play with terrible effect in the campaign, and it soon made all attempts at resistance on the part of the Danes utterly hopeless. The Danes lost their ground and their fortresses. They won one little fight on the sea, defeating some Austrian vessels in the German Ocean off Heligoland. The news was received with wild enthusiasm in England. Its announcement in the House of Commons drew down the unwonted manifestation of a round of applause from the Strangers' Gallery. But the struggle had ceased to be anything like a serious campaign. The English government kept up active negotiations on behalf of peace, and at length succeeded in inducing the belligerents to agree to a suspension of arms, in order that a conference of the great powers might be held in London. The conference was called together. The populations of the Duchies, about whom the whole dispute had taken place, were beginning now to suspect that their claims to independent existence would very probably be overlooked altogether, and that they were only about to be passed from one ruler to another. They sent a deputation to London and claim to be represented directly at the conference. Their claim was rejected. They, the very people whose national existence was the question in dispute, were informed that diplomacy made no account of them. They had no right to a voice, or even to a hearing, in the councils which were to dispose of their destinies. The Saxon minister, Count Boist, who afterwards transferred his abilities and energies to the services of Austria, did the best he could for them, and acted so far as lay in his power as the representative of their claims, but they were not allowed any acknowledged representation at the conference. The deliberations of the conference came to nothing. Curiously enough the final rejection of all compromise came from the Danes. Whether they had still some lingering hope that by prolonging the war they could induce some great power to intervene on their behalf, or whether they were merely influenced by the doggedness of sheer desperation we cannot pretend to know, but they proved suddenly obstinate. At the last hour they rejected a proposal which Lord Palmostin described as reasonable in itself, and the conference came to an end. The war broke out again. The renewed hostilities lasted however but a short time. It was plain now even to the Danes themselves that they could not hold their ground alone, and that no one was coming to help them. The Danish government sent Prince John of Denmark direct to Berlin to negotiate for peace. They had had enough, perhaps, of foreign diplomatic intervention, and terms of peace were easily arranged. Nothing could be more simple. Denmark gave up everything she had been fighting for, and agreed to bear part of the expense which had been entailed upon the German powers by the task of chastising her. The Dutchies were surrendered to the disposal of the Allies, and nothing more was heard of the claims of the heir of Augustenburg. That claimant only got what is called in homely language the cold shoulder when he endeavored to draw the attention of the hair-fun Bismarck to his alleged right of succession. A new war was to settle the ownership of the Dutchies, and some much graver questions of German interest at the same time. It was obviously impossible that the conduct of the English government should pass unchallenged. They were quite right, as it seems to us, in not intervening on behalf of Denmark. But they were not right in giving Denmark the least reason to believe that they ever would intervene in her behalf. It would have been a calamity if England had succeeded in persuading Louis Napoleon to join her in a war to enable Denmark to keep the Dutchies. It would not be to the credit of England that her ministers had invited Louis Napoleon to join them in such a policy and had been refused. We cannot see any way of defending Lord Palmerston and Lord Russell against some sort of censure for the part they had taken in this transaction. It would have been a discredit to England if she had become the means of coercing the Dutchies into subjection to Denmark, supposing such a thing possible on the long run. But her ministers could claim no credit for not having done so. It would have done it if they could. They had thus given Europe full evidence at once of their desire and their incapacity. Their political opponents could not be expected to overlook such a chance of attack. Accordingly in the two houses of Parliament, notices were given of a vote of censure on the government. Lord Malmsbury, in Lord Darby's absence, proposed the resolution in the House of Lords and it was carried by a majority of nine. The government made little account of that. The Lords always had a Tory majority. As Lord Palmerston himself had put it on a former occasion, the government knew when they took office that their opponents had a larger pack of cards in the Lords than they had, and that whenever the cards came to be all dealt out, the opposition pack must show the greater number. In the House of Commons however the matter was much more serious. On July 4, 1864, Mr. Disraeli himself moved the resolution condemning the conduct of the government. The resolution invited the House to express its regret that while the course pursued by Her Majesty's government has failed to maintain their avowed policy of upholding the integrity and independence of Denmark, it has lowered the just influence of this country and the capitals of Europe and thereby diminished the securities for peace. Mr. Disraeli's speech was ingenious and telling. He had a case which even a far less capable rhetorician than he must have made impressive, but he contrived more than once by sheer dexterity to make it unexpectedly stronger against the government. Thus for example he went on during part of his opening observations to compare the policy of England and France. He proceeded to show that France was just as much bound by the Treaty of Vienna, by the London Convention, by all the agreements affecting the integrity of Denmark as England herself. Some of the ministry sitting just opposite the orator caught at this argument as if it were an admission telling against Mr. Disraeli's case. They met his words with loud and emphatic cheers. The cheers meant to say, just so. France was responsible for the integrity of Denmark as much as England. Why then do you find fault with us? This was precisely what Mr. Disraeli wanted. Perhaps he had deliberately led up to this very point. Perhaps he had purposely allured his opponents on and to the belief that he was making an admission in order to draw from some of them some note of triumph. He seized his opportunity now and turned upon his antagonists at once. Yes, he exclaimed. France is equally responsible. And how comes it, then, that the position of France in relation to Denmark is so free from embarrassment and so dignified? That no word of blame is uttered anywhere in Europe against France for what she has done in regard to Denmark, while your position is one of infinite perplexity, while you are everywhere accused and unable to defend yourselves? How could this be but because of some fatal mistake, some terrible mismanagement? In truth it was not difficult for Mr. Disraeli to show mistakes in abundance. No sophist could have undertaken to defend all that the ministers had done. Such a defense would involve sundry paradoxes, for they had in some instances done the very thing today which they had declared the day before it would be impossible for them to do. The government did not make any serious attempt to justify all they had done. They were glad to seize upon the opportunity offered by an amendment which Mr. Kingleg proposed and which merely declared the satisfaction with which the house had learned that at this conjuncture her majesty had been advised to abstain from armed interference in the war now going on between Denmark and the German powers. This amendment, it will be seen at once, did not meet the accusations raised by Mr. Disraeli. It did not say whether the ministry had or had not failed to maintain their avowed policy of upholding the integrity and independence of Denmark, or whether their conduct had or had not lowered the just influence of England in the capitals of Europe and thereby diminished the securities for peace. It gave the go-by to such inconvenient questions and simply asserted that the house was at all events glad to hear there was to be no interference in the war. Many doubted at first whether the government would condescend to adopt Mr. Kingleg's amendment, or whether they would venture upon a distinct justification of their conduct. Lord Palmoson, however, had an essentially practical way of looking at every question. He was of O'Connell's opinion that after all, the verdict is the thing. He knew he could not get the verdict on the particular issues raised by Mr. Disraeli, but he was in good hope that he would get it on the policy of his administration generally. The government therefore adopted Mr. Kingleg's amendment. Still the controversy was full of danger to Lord Palmoson. The advanced liberals disliked him strongly for his lavish expenditure and fortification schemes, and for the manner in which he had thrown over the reform bill. They were not coerced morally or otherwise to support him, merely because he had not gone into the war against Germany, for no responsible voice from the opposition had said that the conservatives, if in office, would have adopted a policy of intervention. On the contrary, it was from Lord Stanley that there came during the debate the most unwarlike sentiment uttered during the whole controversy. Lord Stanley bluntly declared that to engage in a European war for the sake of these duchies would be an act not of impolicy but of insanity. There were members of the peace society itself probably who would have hesitated before adopting this view of the duties of a nation. If war be permissible at all, they might have doubted whether the oppression of a small people is not as fair a ground of warlike intervention as the grievance of a numerous population. When however such sentiments came from a leader of the party proposing the vote of censure, it is clear that the men who were for non-intervention as a principle were left free to vote on one side or the other as they pleased. Mr. Disraeli did not want to pledge them to warlike action any more than Lord Palmoson. Many of them perhaps would rather have voted with Mr. Disraeli than with Lord Palmoson if they could see their way fairly to such a course, and on the votes of even a few of them the result of the debate depended. They held the fate of Lord Palmoson's ministry in the hollow of their hand. Lord Palmoson seems to have decided the question for them. His speech closing the debate was a masterpiece not of eloquence, not of political argument, but of practical parliamentary tactics. He spoke as was his fashion without the aid of a single note. It was a wonderful spectacle, that of the man of eighty, thus in the growing morning pouring out his unbroken stream of easy, effective eloquence. He dropped the particular questions connected with the vote of censure almost immediately, and went into a long review of the whole policy of his administration. He spoke as if the resolution before the house were a proposal to impeach the government for the entire course of their domestic policy. He passed in triumphant review all the splendid feats which Mr. Gladstone had accomplished in the reduction of taxation. He took credit for the commercial treaty with France, and for other achievements in which at the time of their accomplishment he had hardly even affected to feel any interest. He spoke directly at the economical liberals, the men who were for sound finance and freedom of international commerce. The regular opposition, as he well knew, would vote against him. The regular supporters of the ministry would vote for him. Nothing could alter the course to be taken by either of these parties. The advanced liberals, the men whom possibly Palmerston in his heart rather despised as calculators and economists, these might be affected one way or the other by the manner in which he addressed himself to the debate. To these, and at these, he spoke. He knew that Mr. Gladstone was the one leading man in the ministry whom they regarded with full trust and admiration, and on Mr. Gladstone's exploits he virtually rested his case. His speech said in plain words, If you vote for this resolution proposed by Mr. Disraeli, you turn Mr. Gladstone out of office. You give the Tories who understand nothing about free trade, and who opposed the French commercial treaty, an opportunity of marring all that he has made. Some of Lord Palmerston's audience were a little impatient now and then. What has all this to do with the question before the House? It was murmured from more than one bench. It had everything to do with the question that was really before the House. That question was, shall Palmerston remain in office or shall he go out and the Tories come in? The advanced liberals had the decision put into their hands. As Lord Palmerston reviewed the financial and commercial history of his administration, they felt themselves morally coerced to support the ministry which had done so much for the policy that was especially the offspring of their inspiration. When the division was taken, it was found that there were 295 votes for Mr. Disraeli's resolution and 313 for the amendment. Lord Palmerston was saved by a majority of 18. It was not a very brilliant victory. There were not many votes to spare. But it was a victory. The conservative miss by a foot was as good for Lord Palmerston as a miss by a mile. It gave him a secure tenure of office for the rest of his life. Such as it was, the victory was won mainly by his own skill, energy, and astuteness by the ready manner in which he evaded the question actually in debate and rested his claim to acquittal on services which no one proposed to disparage. The conclusion was thoroughly illogical, thoroughly practical, thoroughly English. Lord Palmerston knew his time, his opportunity, and his men. That was the last great speech made by Lord Palmerston. That was the last great occasion on which he was called upon to address the House of Commons. The effort was worthy of the emergency, and at least in an artistic sense, deserved success. The speech exactly served its purpose. It had no brilliant passages. It had no hint of an elevated thought. It did not trouble itself with any profession of exalted purpose or principle. It did not contain a single sentence which anyone could care to remember after the emergency had passed away. But it did for Lord Palmerston what great eloquence might have failed to do. What a great orator by virtue of his very genius and oratorical instincts might only have marred. It took captive the wavering minds and it carried the division. And of section 37. Section 38 of a history of our own times, volume three by Justin McCarthy. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, recording by Pamela Nagami. Chapter 46, Ebb and Flow, part one. One cannot study English politics even in the most superficial way without being struck by the singular regularity with which they are governed by the law of action and reaction. The succession of Ebb and Flow in the tides is not more regular and more certain. A season of political energy is sure to come after a season of political apathy. After the sleeping comes the waking, after the day of work, the night of repose. A liberal spirit is abroad and active. It carries all before it for a while. It pushes great reforms through. It projects others still greater. Suddenly a pause comes and a whisper is heard that we have had too much of reform and the whisper grows into a loud remonstrance and the remonstrance into what seems to be an almost universal declaration. Then sets in a period of reaction during which reform is denounced as if it were a treason and shuddered at as though it were a pestilence. For a season people make themselves comfortable and say to each other that England has attained political perfection, that only fools and traders would ask her to venture on any further change and that we are all going now to have a contented rest. Just as this condition of things seems to have become a settled habit and state of existence, the new reaction begins and before men can well note the change, the country is in the fervor of a reform fit again. It is so in our foreign policy. We seem to have settled down to a Washingtonian principle of absolute isolation from the concerns and complications of foreign countries until suddenly we become aware of a rising sea of reaction and almost in a moment we are in the thick of a policy which involves itself in the affairs of every state from Finland to Sicily and from Japan to the Caspian Sea. It is the same with our colonies. We are just on the eve of a blunt and cool dismissal of them from all dependence on us when suddenly we find that they are the strength of our limbs and the light of our eyes and that to live without them would be only death and life. And for another season the patriotism of public men consists in professions of unalterable attachment to the colonies. It is so with regard to warlike purpose and peaceful purpose with regard to armaments, fortifications, law reform, everything. An ordinary observer ought to be able almost always to forecast the weather of the coming season in English politics. When action has run its course, pretty nearly reaction is sure and it ought not to be very difficult to foresee when the one has had its season and the other is to succeed. The explanation of this phenomenon is not to be found in the fact that the people of these countries are, as Mr. Carlisle says, mostly fools. They do not all thus change their opinions in sudden mechanical springs of alternation. The explanation is not to be sought in any change of national opinion at all but rather in a change in the ascendancy between two tolerably well-balanced parties in politics and thought. The people of these countries, or perhaps it should be said of England especially, are born into liberalism and conservatism. In Ireland and in Scotland, the condition of things is modified by other facts and the same general rule will hardly apply. But in England this is, roughly speaking, the law of life. Men as a rule remain in the political condition, we can hardly speak of the political convictions, to which they were born. But the majority give themselves little trouble about the matter. If there is a great stir made by those just above them in politics and to whom they look up, they will take some interest and will exhibit it in any desirable way. But they do not move of themselves and when their leaders appear to acquiesce in anything for a season, they withdraw their attention altogether. Many a man is hardly conscious of whether he is liberal or conservative until he gets into a crowd somewhere and hears his neighbors shouting. Then he shouts with those whom he knows to be of the opinions he is understood to hold and he shouts himself into political conviction. This is the condition of the majority on both sides. It takes immense trouble on the part of the leaders to rouse the mass of their followers into a condition of genuine activity. The majority are like some of the heavy-winged insects who hardly ever use their wings and who when for some reason they are anxious to hoist themselves into the air may be seen of a summer twilight making their preparation so long and slowly that a passing observer would never suppose they meant any such unwanted movement as a flight. The political leaders and the followers immediately within hearing of their voices have for the most part the direction of affairs in their hands, these and the newspapers. The leaders, the House of Commons and the act of local men in cities and boroughs, these and the newspapers make up what we commonly understand to be public opinion. The change in public opinion or what seems to be such is when one set succeeds for a time in getting predominance over the other. The predominance is usually transferred when one set has done or said all it is quite prepared to do or say for the moment. Then the other, having lost patience or gained courage, rushes in and gets his turn. It is like a contest in some burlesque act log in which each singer has his chance only when the rival is out of breath and can strike in and keep singing until he too feels his lungs fail him and has to give way. The liberals are in power and they carry some measures by the strength of their parliamentary majority. The moment comes when they go further than the patience of their opponents will bear or when they have nothing more to suggest at the moment. In either case, the managers of the opposition rouse themselves and they say, we cannot endure any more of this or they ask each other why they have endured so much. They stir up their whole party with all the energy they can muster and at last, after tremendous effort, they get their shard-born beetle hoisted for his drowsy flight. The others have sunk into comparative languor. They have done what they wanted to do. They have, according to the French phrase, exhausted their mandate and there is nothing by which they can call the whole strength of their party into action. They do not any longer see their way as well as their opponents do. They are not so angry or so resolute. Perhaps they think they have gone a little too far. The conservative newspapers are all a stir and a flame. The conservative passion is roused. The conservative lungs are fresh and strong. Their rivals are out of breath. In a word, the conservatives get what American politicians call the floor and this is conservative reaction. All the time it is probable that not one man in every 10,000 of the population has really changed his opinion. The conservatives hold their place for a certain time until their opponents have recovered their energies and have lost their patience. Until their passion to attack is more thorough and genuine than the power of the men in possession to resist. Then the liberal beetle has got upon his wings and liberalism has its time again. During all these changes, however, the liberal movement is necessarily gaining ground. Reaction in English politics never now goes the length of undoing what has been done. It only interposes a delay and a warning against moving too far and too fast in the same direction. Therefore, after each flux and reflux, it is a matter of practical necessity that the cause which means movement of some kind must be found to have gained upon the cause which would prefer to stand still. It is almost needless to say that the liberal party have not always been the actual means of carrying a liberal movement. All great conservative leaders have recognized in good time the necessity of accepting some principle of reform. In a practical country like England, the conservatives could not maintain a party of any kind if it were absolutely certain that their mission was to oppose every reform and the mission of the liberals to promote it. As a principle, the business of liberalism is to cry forwards, that of conservatism, to cry back. The action and reaction of which we speak is that of liberalism and conservatism, not of the leaders of liberal and Tory administrations. The movement of reaction against reform in domestic policy was in full force during the earlier years of Lord Palmerston's government. In home politics and where finance and commercial legislation were not concerned, Palmerston was a conservative minister. He was probably on the whole more highly esteemed among the rank and file of the opposition in the House of Commons than by the rank and file on his own side. Not a few of the conservative country gentlemen would in their hearts have been glad if he could have remained Prime Minister forever. His thoroughly English ways appealed directly to their sympathies. His instincts went with theirs. They liked his courage and his animal spirits. He was always ready to fling cheery defiance in the face of any foreign foe, just as they had been taught to believe that their grandfathers used to fling defiance in the face of Bonaparte in France. He was a faithful member of the Church of England, but his certainly was not an austere Protestantism and he allowed religion to come no further into the affairs of ordinary life than suited a country gentleman's idea of the fitness of things. There were among Tory country gentlemen also a certain doubt or dread as to the manner in which eccentric and exoteric genius might manage the affairs of England when the conservatives came to have a government of their own and when Lord Darby could no longer take command. These therefore all liked Palmerston and helped by their favor to swell the sales of his popularity. Many of those who voted with their characteristic fidelity to party for Mr. Disraeli's resolution of censure were glad in their hearts that Lord Palmerston came safely out of the difficulty. But as the years went on, there were manifest signs of the coming and inevitable reaction. One of the most striking of these indications was found in the position taken by Mr. Gladston. For some time Mr. Gladston had been more and more distinctly identifying himself with the opinions of the advanced liberals. The advanced liberals themselves were of two sections or fractions, working together almost always, but very distinct in complexion. And it was Mr. Gladston's fortune to be drawn by his sympathies to both alike. He was of course drawn toward the Manchester School by his economic views, by his agreement with them on all subjects relating to finance and to freedom of commerce. But the Manchester Liberals were for non-intervention in foreign politics and they carried this into their sympathies as well as into their principles. They had never shown much interest in the struggles of other nations for political liberty. They did not seem to think it was the business of Englishmen to make demonstrations about Italians or Poles or French Republicans. The other section of the advanced liberals were sometimes even flightily eager in their sympathies with the liberal movements of the continent. Mr. Gladston was in communion with the movements of foreign liberals as he was with those of English free traders and economists. He was therefore qualified to stand between both sections of the advanced liberals of England and give one hand to each. During the debates on Italian questions of 1860 and 61, he had identified himself with the cause of Italian unity and independence. In the year 1864, Gaudibaldi came on a visit to England and was received in London with an outburst of enthusiasm. The like whereof had not been seen since Kosciut first passed down Cheapside and which perhaps was not seen even then. It was curious to notice how men of opposing parties were gradually swept or sucked into this whirlpool of enthusiasm and how aristocracy and fashion which had always held aloof from Kosciut soon crowded round Gaudibaldi. At first the leading men of nearly all parties held aloof except Mr. Gladston. He was among the very first and most cordial in his welcome to Gaudibaldi. Then the liberal leaders in general thought they had better consult for their popularity by taking Gaudibaldi up. A lady of high rank and great political influence frankly expressed her opinion that Gaudibaldi was nothing more than a respectable brigand. But she joined in doing public honor to him nevertheless acknowledging that it would be inconvenient for her husband to keep aloof and risk his popularity. Then the conservative leaders too began to think it would never do for them to hold back when the prospect of a general election was so closely overshadowing them and they plunged into the Gaudibaldi welcome. Men of the class of Lord Palmerston cared nothing for Gaudibaldi. Men like Lord Darby disliked and despised him. But the crowd ran after him and the leaders on both sides after having looked on for a moment with contempt and another moment with amazement fairly pulled off their hats and ran with the crowd shouting and hallowing like the rest. The peerage then rushed at Gaudibaldi. He was beset by dukes, mobbed by countesses. He could not by any possibility have so divided his day as to find time for accepting half the invitations of the noble and new friends who fought and scrambled for him. It was a perpetual trouble to his secretaries and his private friends to decide between the rival claims of a prince of the blood and a prime minister, an archbishop and a duchess, the Lord Chancellor and the leader of the opposition. The Tories positively outdid the liberals in the competition. The crowd in the streets were perfectly sincere. Some acclaiming Gaudibaldi because they had a vague knowledge that he had done brave deeds somewhere and represented a cause. Others, perhaps the majority, because they assumed that he was somehow opposed to the Pope. The leaders of society were for the most part not sincere. Three out of every four of them had always previously spoken of Gaudibaldi when they spoke of him at all as a mere buccaneer and filibuster. The whole thing ended in a quarrel between the aristocracy and the democracy and Gaudibaldi was got back to his island somehow. Had he ever returned to England he would probably have found himself unembarrassed by the attentions of the Windsor uniform in the order of the garter. The whole episode was not one to fill the soul of an unconcerned spectator with great respect for the manner in which crowds and leaders sometimes act in England. Mr. Gladstone was one of the few among the leaders who were undoubtedly sincere and the course he took made him a great favorite with the advanced radicals. Mr. Gladstone had given other indications of a distinct tendency to pass over altogether from conservatism and even from pelism into the ranks of the radical reformers. On May 11th, 1864, Mr. Baines brought on a motion in the House of Commons for the reduction of the Borough franchise from 10 pounds rental to six pounds. During the debate that followed, Mr. Gladstone made a remarkable declaration. He contended that the burden of proof rested upon those who would exclude 49 50ths of the working classes from the franchise. It is for them to show the unworthiness, the incapacity and the misconduct of the working class. I say, he repeated, that every man who is not presumably incapacitated by some consideration of personal unfitness or political danger is morally entitled to come within the pale of the Constitution. The bill was rejected as everyone knew it would be. A franchise bill introduced by a private member on a Wednesday is not supposed to have much prospect of success. But the speech of Mr. Gladstone gave an importance to the debate and to the occasion which it would not be easy to overrate. The position taken up by all conservative minds, no matter to which side of politics their owners belonged, had been that the claim must be made out for those seeking an extension of the suffrage in their favor. That they must show imperative public need, immense and clear national and political advantage to justify the concession. That the mere fact of their desire and fitness for the franchise ought not to count for anything in the consideration. Mr. Gladstone's way of looking at the question created enthusiasm on the one side, consternation and anger on the other. This was the principle of Rousseau's social contract, many voices exclaimed. The principle of the rights of man, the red republic, the social and democratic revolution, anything, everything that is subversive and anarchical. Early in the following session, there was a motion introduced by Mr. Dilwin, a staunch and persevering reformer, declaring that the position of the Irish state church was unsatisfactory and called for the early attention of Her Majesty's government. Mr. Gladstone spoke on the motion and drew a contrast between the state church of England and that of Ireland, pointing out that the Irish church ministered only to the religious wants of one eighth or one ninth of the community amid which it was established. In reply to a letter of her monstrance, Mr. Gladstone explained, not long after, that he had not recommended any particular action as a consequence of Mr. Dilwin's resolution regarding the question as yet remote and apparently out of all bearing on the practical politics of the day. It was evident, however, that his mind would be found to be made up at any time when the question should become practical and it was highly probable that his own speech had greatly hastened the coming of that time. The eyes of all radical reformers therefore turned to Mr. Gladstone as the future minister of reform in church and state. He became from the same moment an object of distrust and something approaching to detestation in the eyes of all steady going conservatives. End of section 38. Section 39 of a history of our own times, volume three by Justin McCarthy, this LibriVox recording is in the public domain, recording by Pamela Nagami. Chapter 46 Ebb and Flow, Part 2. Meanwhile, there were many changes taking place in the social and political life of England. Many eminent men passed away during the years that Lord Palmerston held his almost absolute sway over the House of Commons. One man we may mention in the first instance, although he was no politician, and his death in no way affected the prospects of parties. The attention of the English people was called from questions of foreign policy and of possible intervention in the Danish quarrel by an event which happened on Christmas Eve, 1863. That day it became known throughout London that the author of Vanity Fair was dead. Mr. Thackeray died suddenly at the house in Kensington which he had lately had built for him in the fashion of that Queen Anne period which he loved and had illustrated so admirably. He was still in the very prime of life. No one had expected that his career was so soon to close. It had not been in any sense a long career. Success had come somewhat late to him and he was left but a short time to enjoy it. We have already spoken of his works and his literary character. Since the publication of the Newcombs he had not added to his reputation. Indeed it hardly needed any addition. He had established himself in a very foremost rank of English novelists with Fielding and Goldsmith and Miss Austin and Dickens. He had been a literary man and hardly anything else having had little to do with politics or political journalism. Once indeed he was seized with a sudden ambition to take a seat in the House of Commons and at the general election of 1857 he offered himself as a candidate for the city of Oxford in opposition to Mr. Cardwell. He was not elected and he seemed to accept failure cheerfully as a hint that he had better keep to literary work for the future. He would go back to his author's desk, he said, good-humoredly and he kept his word. It is not likely that he would have been a parliamentary success. He had no gift of speech and had but little interest in the details of party politics. His political views were sentiments rather than opinions. Most of his admirers would probably have been sorry to see him involved in the partisan debates of the House of Commons where any practiced official trained to glibness or any overbearing declaimer would have been far more than a match for him and where he had no special need or call to go. It is not true that success in parliament is incompatible with literary distinction. Macaulay and Grote and two of Thackeray's own craft, Lord Beckinsfield and Lord Lytton, may be called as recent witnesses to disprove that common impression. But these were men who had a distinctly political object or who loved political life and were only following their star when they sought seats in the House of Commons. Thackeray had no such vocation and would have been as much out of place in parliamentary debate as a painter or a musician. He had no need to covet parliamentary reputation. As it was well said, when the news of his defeat at Oxford reached London, the Houses of Lords and Commons together could not have produced Barry Linden and Pendennis. His early death was a source not only of national but of worldwide regret. It eclipsed the Christmas gaiety of nations. Thackeray was as much admired and appreciated in America as in England. Mr. Russell, the correspondent of the Times, has given an amusing account of a Southern Confederate leader engaged in an attempt to run the Northern blockade who kept talking all the time and even at the most exciting and perilous moments about the various characters in Thackeray's novels. If Thackeray died too soon, it was only too soon for his family and his friends. His fame was secure. He could hardly with any length of years have added a cubit to his literary stature. A whole group of statesmen had passed prematurely away. Sir James Graham had died after several years of a quiet career, still a celebrity in the House of Commons, but not much in the memory of the public outside it. One of his latest speeches in Parliament was on the Chinese War of 1860, on the last day of the session of 1861, when almost all the other members had left the House, he remained for a while talking with a friend and former colleague, and as they were separating, Sir James Graham expressed a cheery hope that they should meet on the first day of the next session in the same place. But Graham died the following October. Sidney Herbert had died a few weeks before in the same year. Sidney Herbert had been raised to the peerage as Lord Herbert of Lee. He had entered the House of Lords before his breaking health rendered it impossible to stand the wear and tear of life in the Commons, and he loved politics and public affairs and could not be induced to renounce them and live in quiet. He was a man of great gifts and was looked upon as a prospective Prime Minister. He had a graceful and gracious bearing. He was an able administrator and a very skillful and persuasive debater. His style of speaking was what might be called, if it is lawful to coin an expression for the purpose, the pointed conversational. He never declined, never even tried to be what is commonly called eloquent, but his sentences came out with a singularly expressive combination of force and ease, every argument telling, every stroke having the lightness of an Eastern champion's sword play. He had high social station and was in every way fitted to stand at the head of English public affairs. He was but 51 years of age when he died. The country for some time looked on Sir George Lewis as a man likely to lead at administration, but he too passed away before his natural time. He died two years after Sir James Graham and Sidney Herbert, and was only some 57 years old at his death. Lord Elgin was dead and Lord Canning and Lord Dalhousie had been some years dead. The Duke of Newcastle died in 1864. Mr. Gladstone, speaking at Glasgow, said of these, that they had been swept away in the full maturity of their faculties and in the early stages of middle life. A body of men strong enough of themselves and all the gifts of wisdom and knowledge of experience and of eloquence to have equipped a cabinet for the service of the country. Nor must we omit the mention of the death of Cardinal Wiseman on February 15th, 1865. Cardinal Wiseman had outlived the popular clamor once raised against him in England. There was a time when his name would have set all the pulpit drums of no pulpery rattling. He came at length to be respected and admired everywhere in England as a scholar and a man of ability. He was a devoted ecclesiastic whose yield for his church was his honor and whose earnest labor in the work he was set to do it shortened his busy life. During the time from the first outbreak of the Civil War in the United States to its close all these men were removed from the scene and the Civil War was hardly over when Richard Cobden was quietly laid in an English country churchyard. Mr. Cobden paid a visit to his constituents of Rochdale in November, 1864 to address them on public affairs. He was at the time struggling against a bronchial attack which made it imprudent for him to attend a public meeting especially imprudent to try to speak in public. He had to travel a long way in bad weather. His friends endeavored to dissuade him from going to Rochdale but he was convinced that the condition of political affairs was so full of seriousness that he could not consistently with his strong sense of duty put off addressing his constituents. He had had probably some pre-sentiment of his death for not long before he had passed in company with his friend Mr. Bright the place where his only son lay buried and he told Mr. Bright that he should soon be laid beside him. He went to Rochdale and spoke to a great public meeting and he did not appear to have lacked any of his usual ease and energy. This speech, the last he ever made, contained the famous passage so often quoted and criticized which compared the undergraduate's knowledge of Chicago with his knowledge of the Alisuz. I will take any undergraduates at Cobden, now at Oxford or Cambridge, and I will ask this young gentleman to walk up to a map of the United States and put his finger upon the city of Chicago and I will undertake to say that he will not go within a thousand miles of it. When I was at Athens I sallied forth one summer morning to see the far famed river the Alisuz and after walking some hundred yards up what appeared to be the bed of a winter torrent I came up to a number of Athenian laundresses and I found that they had damned up this far famed classic river and that they were using every drop of the water for their linen and such sanitary purposes. I say, why should not the young gentleman who are taught all about the geography of the Alisuz know something about the geography of the Mississippi, the Ohio and the Missouri? Mr. Cobden has always been charged on the faith of this contrast with the desire to throw contempt on the study of the classics and with an intention to measure the comparative value of ancient and modern literature by the relative commercial importance of Chicago and the Alisuz. He had no such purpose. He merely meant to show that the men who dogmatized about modern countries and politics ought to know something of the subject before they spoke and wrote. He contended that it is ridiculous to call a modern political writer educated because he knows something about classic Greece and nothing about the United States. The humorous illustration about the Alisuz, Mr. Cobden had used in a former speech and curiously enough something to much the same purpose had been said by Byron about the Alisuz before without anyone falling foul of the author of Child Herald and accusing him of disparaging the culture of Greece. Byron wrote that places without a name and rivers not laid down on maps may one day when more known be justly esteemed superior subjects for the pencil and the pen to the dry ditch of the Alisuz and the bogs of Biosia. Cobden had been a good deal provoked as most sensible persons were by the flood of writing poured out on the country during the American Civil War in which citations from Thucydides were habitually introduced to settle questions of military and political controversy in the United States. That was the day for public instructors of the inspired schoolboy type who sometimes to say the truth knew little of the Greek literature from which they paraded their quotations but who knew still less about the geography and the political conditions of America. Who were under the impression that the Mississippi flowed east and west and talked complacently of English war steamers getting into Lake Erie apparently making no account of so considerable an obstacle as the falls of Niagara. This was Cobden's last speech. He did not come up to London until the March of 1865 and the day on which he traveled was so bitterly cold that the bronchial affection from which he was suffering became cruelly aggravated. One of the last private letters he ever wrote enclosed to a friend an unsolicited contribution for the relief of a poor young English woman whose husband, an American seamen, had just died in London leaving her with a newly born infant. He sank rapidly and on April 2nd he died. The scene in the House of Commons next evening was very touching. Lord Palmerston and Mr. Disraeli both spoke of Cobden with genuine feeling and sympathy but Mr. Bright's few and broken words were as noble and epitaph as friendship could wish for the grave of a great and good man. Some critics found fault with Lord Palmerston for having spoke of Cobden's as demysthenic eloquence. That simple conversational style it was asked does Lord Palmerston call that demysthenic? Did he not use the word as a piece of unmeaning praise merely because it came first to his lips? On the contrary, it is probable that Palmerston thought the word expressed exactly what he wished to say. We are apt to think of the eloquence of demysthenes as above all things energetic, commanding, overbearing by its strength and its action. But this is a superficial way of regarding the great orator. What is the essential characteristic of the oratory of demysthenes in which it differs from that of almost every other orator ancient and modern? Surely it's intensely practical nature, the fact that nothing is spoken without a present and determinant purpose, that no word is used which does not bear upon the argument the speaker would enforce. Cobden had not the power or the polish of demysthenes nor can his manner have been at all like that of the Athenian. But his eloquence was always molded naturally and unconsciously in the true spirit of demysthenes. It was the eloquence of one who claimed only to be heard for his cause and for the arguments with which he should commend it to the intelligence of his audience. Those who found fault with Lord Palmerston's epithet only failed to understand its application. The liberal party then found themselves approaching a general election with their ranks thinned by many severe losses. The government had lost one powerful member by an event other than death. The Lord Chancellor, Lord Westbury, had resigned his office in consequence of a vote of the House of Commons. Lord Westbury had made many enemies. He was a man of great capacity and energy into whose nature the scorn of forms and of lesser intellects entered far too freely. His character was somewhat wanting in the dignity of moral elevation. He had a tongue of marvelous bitterness. His sarcastic power was probably unequaled in the House of Commons while he sat there, and when he came into the House of Lords he fairly took away the breadth of stately and formal peers by the unsparing manner in which he employed his most dangerous gift. His style of cruel irony was made all the more effective by the peculiar suavity of the tone in which he gave out his sarcasms and his epithets, with a face that only suggested soft bland benevolence, with eyes half closed as those of a medieval saint, and in accents of subdued, malifluous benignity, the Lord Chancellor was wont to pour out a stream of irony that corroded like some deadly acid. Such a man was sure to make enemies, and the time came when in the scriptural sense they found him out. He had been lax in the manner of using his patronage. In one case he had allowed an official of the House of Lords to retire and to receive a retiring pension while a grave charge connected with his conduct in another public office was to Lord Westbury's knowledge impending over him, and Lord Westbury had appointed his own son to the place thus vacated. Thus at first sight it naturally appeared that Lord Westbury had sanctioned the pensioning off of a public servant against whom a serious charge was still awaiting decision, in order that a place might be found for the Lord Chancellor's own son. In the other case, that of an appointment to the Leeds Bankruptcy Court, the authority of Lord Westbury had been made use of via member of his family to sanction a very improper arrangement. In this case, however, it was shown that Lord Westbury knew nothing of the proposal and had never had any idea of assisting any member of his family by his influence in the matter. No one believed that even in the former case he had been influenced by any corrupt motive. He had been led into error by a too easy good nature towards certain members of his family, and by a carelessness which the engrossing character of his other duties might at least have excused if it could not have justified. Still there could be no doubt that the manner in which he had exercised his patronage or allowed it to be exercised was deserving of reprehension. End of Section 39 Section 40 of a history of our own times, Volume 3 by Justin McCarthy. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by Pamela Nagami. Chapter 46 Ebb and Flow, Part 3 The question was taken up by the House of Commons and somewhat unfortunately taken up in the first instance by a strong political opponent of the government. On July 3rd, 1865, Mr. Ward Hunt moved a distinct vote of censure on the Lord Chancellor. The House did not agree to the resolution which would have branded the Lord Chancellor's conduct as highly reprehensible and calculated to throw discredit on the administration of the high offices of the state. It however accepted an amendment which, while acquitting Lord Westbury of any corrupt motive, declared that the granting of the pension showed a laxity of practice and a want of caution with regard to the public interests on the part of the Lord Chancellor. The government were not able to resist this resolution. Mr. Palmerston made the best effort he could to save the Lord Chancellor, but the common feeling of the House held that the words of the resolution were not too strong and the government had to bow to it. The Lord Chancellor immediately resigned his office. No other course was fairly open to him. The government lost a man of singular ability and energy. Lord Westbury's fall was not, perhaps, so much the result of the one or two transactions for which the censure was passed, as of the growing dislike which both houses had come to feel for an intellect too keen to be scrupulous, and a nature which brought even to the uninspiring business of law reforms some of the fierce animosities to which the tongue of swift would hardly have given a more bitter expression. Many thought, when all was done, that he had been somewhat harshly used. He would perhaps have been greatly surprised himself to know how many kindly things were said of him. The hour of political reaction was evidently near at hand. Five years had passed away since the withdrawal of Lord John Russell's reform-bill, and five years may represent, in ordinary calculation, the ebb or flow of the political tide. The dissolution of Parliament was near. Lord Darby described the speech from the throne at the opening of the session of 1865 as a sort of address very proper to be delivered by an aged minister to a moribund Parliament. The Parliament had run its course. It had accomplished the rare feat of living out its days and having to die by simple efflux of time. On July 6, 1865, Parliament was dissolved. Mr. Disraeli's address to the electors of Buckinghamshire, sent out before the dissolution, distinctly declared that the issue which the country would have to decide concerned the national church and the franchise. The maintenance of a national church, he said, involves the question whether the principle of religion shall be an element of our political constitution, whether the state shall be consecrated, or whether dismissing the sanctions that appeal to the higher feelings of man, our scheme of government should degenerate into a mere system of police. I see nothing, he proclaimed, in such a result, but the corruption of nations and the fall of empires. As regards the franchise he was vaguely grandiloquent, and both the vagueness and the grandiloquence were doubtless deliberate and to serve a purpose. On the extension of the electoral franchise, he observed, depends the distribution of power. He was of opinion that the primary plan of our ancient constitution, so rich in various wisdom, indicates the course we ought to pursue. What that course was, Mr. Disraeli took good care, not to explain too clearly. The ancient constitution he showed had secured our popular rights by entrusting power not to an indiscriminate multitude, but to the estate or order of the commons, and a wise government should be careful that the elements of that estate should bear a due relation to the moral and material development of the country. His public opinion, he suggested, might not be yet ripe enough to legislate on the subject, but the country might ponder over it with advantage so that when the time comes for action we may legislate in the spirit of the English constitution which would absorb the best of every class and not fall into a democracy which is the tyranny of one class and that one the least enlightened. Mr. Disraeli said in plain English these pompous generalities meant clearly enough, although perhaps men did not all see it just then, that Mr. Disraeli would be prepared, if his turn should arrive, to bring in a reform bill, and that he still had hopes of being able to satisfy the country without going too far in the direction of popular suffrage. But it seems evident now that he had left it open to him to take even that course should it come in his way. No matter how wide the extension of the franchise which he found himself driven to make, he could always say that in his opinion it only absorbed the best of a class and did not allow us to fall into democracy, which spills the foremost fulmin's life that party conquers in the strife. The first blow was struck in the city of London and the Liberals carried all the seats. Four Liberals were elected. In Westminster the contest was somewhat remarkable. The constituency of Westminster always had the generous ambition to wish to be represented by at least one man of distinction. Westminster had been represented by Fox. It had more lately had Sir Francis Burdett for one of its representatives and Cochran for another. Byron's friend Hobhouse long represented Westminster. More lately still it had had Sir Delacy Evans, not much of a politician to be sure, but a very gallant soldier, a man whose name was at all events to adopt the French phrase in the Playbill. This time Mr. Mill was induced to come out of his calm retirement in Avignon and accept the candidature for Westminster. He issued an address embodying his well-known political opinions. He declined to look after local business and on principle he objected to pay any part of the expenses of election. It was felt to be a somewhat bold experiment to put forward such a man as Mill among the candidates for the representation of a popular constituency. His opinions were extreme. He was not known to belong to any church or religious denomination. He was a philosopher and English political organizations do not love philosophers. He was almost absolutely unknown to his countrymen in general. Until he came forward as the leader of the agitation in favor of the northern cause during the Civil War, he had never so far as we know been seen on an English political platform. Even of the electors of Westminster very few had ever seen him before his candidature. Many were under the vague impression that he was a clever man who wrote wise books and died long ago. He was not supposed to have any liking or capacity for parliamentary life. More than ten years before it was known to a few that he had been invited to stand for an Irish county and had declined. That was at the time when his observations on the Irish land tenure system and the condition of Ireland generally had filled the hearts of many Irishmen with the light and wonder. to find that a cold English philosopher and economist should form such just and generous opinions about Irish questions and should express them with such a noble courage. Since that time he had not been supposed to have any inclination for public life, nor we believe had any serious effort been made to tempt him out of his retirement. The idea now occurred to Mr. James Beal, a popular Westminster politician, and he pressed it so earnestly on Mill as a public duty that Mill did not feel that liberty to refuse. Mill was one of the few men who have only to be convinced that a thing was incumbent on them as a public duty to set about doing it forthwith, no matter how distasteful it might be to them personally, or what excellent excuses they might offer for leaving the duty to others. He had written things which might well make him doubtful about the prudence of courting the suffrages of an English popular constituency. He was understood to be a rationalist. He was a supporter of many political opinions that seemed to ordinary people much like fads or crotchets or even crazes. He had once said in his writings that the working classes in England were given to lying. He had now to stand up on platforms before crowded and noisy assemblies where everything he had ever written or said could be made the subject of question and of accusation, and with enemies outside capable of torturing every explanation to his disadvantage. A man of independent opinions and who has not been ashamed to change his opinions when he thought them wrong or afraid to put on record each opinion in the time when he held it is at much disadvantage on the hustings. He will find out there what it is to have written books and to have enemies. Mill triumphed over all the difficulties by downright courage and honesty. When asked at a public meeting chiefly composed of working men, whether he had ever said the working classes were given to lying, he answered straight out, Why did? A bold, blunt admission without any qualification. The boldness and frankness of the reply struck home to the manhood of the working men who listened to him. Here they saw a leader who would never shrink from telling them the truth. Mr. Mill has himself described what followed his answer. Scarcely were these two words out of my mouth when vehement applause resounded through the whole meeting. It was evident that the working people were so accustomed to expect equivocation and evasion from those who sought their suffrages that when they found, instead of that, a direct avowal of what was likely to be disagreeable to them, instead of being affronted they concluded at once that this was a person they could trust. The first working man who spoke after the incident I have mentioned, it was Mr. Adger, said that the working classes had no desire not to be told their faults. They wanted friends, not flatterers, and felt under obligation to anyone who told them anything in themselves which he sincerely believed to require amendment, and to this the meeting heartily responded. One is in doubt whether to admire more the frankness of the speaker or the manly good sense of those to whom he spoke. As much to my surprise, says Mr. Mill, as to that of anyone, I was returned to Parliament by a majority of some hundreds over my conservative competitor. In many other instances there was a marked indication that the political tide had turned in favour of liberal opinions. Mr. Thomas Hughes, author of Tom Brown's School Days, a radical of the muscular Christianity order, as it was called, was returned for Lambeth. Mr. Duncan Mulleran, brother-in-law of Mr. Bright, and an advanced radical, was elected for Edinburgh, unseating a mild wick. Mr. Gio Trevelyan, a brilliant young radical, nephew of Macaulay, came into Parliament. In Ireland some men of strong opinions, of ability and of high character found seats in the House of Commons for the first time. One of these was Mr. J. B. Dillon, a man who had been concerned in the Irish Rebellion of 1848. He had long opposed the idea of an armed rising, believing it inopportune and hopeless. But nevertheless, when the movement was precipitated by events, he went and took his place in the front of it with his leader. Mr. Dillon had lived for some years in the United States and had lately returned to Ireland under an amnesty. He had once re-assumed a leading part in Irish politics and won a high reputation for his capacity and his integrity. He promised to have an influential part in bringing together the Irish members and the English Liberals, but his untimely death cut short what would unquestionably have been a very useful career. Wherever there was a change in the character of the new Parliament, it seemed to be in favour of advanced reform. It was not merely that the Tories were left in a minority, but that so many mild wigs had been removed to give place to genuine Liberals. There seemed to be little doubt that this new Parliament would do something to make its existence memorable. No one surely could have expected that it would vindicate its claim to celebrity in the peculiar manner that its short history illustrates. Mr. Disraeli himself expressed his opinion of the new Parliament after it had been but a short time sitting. He spoke of it as one which had distinctly increased the strength and the following of Mr. Bright. No one could fail to see, he pointed out, that Mr. Bright occupied a very different position now from that which he held in the late Parliament. New men had come into the House of Commons. Men of integrity and ability, who were above all things, advanced reformers. The position to Mr. Gladstone was markedly changed. He had been defeated at the University of Oxford by Mr. Gathorn Hardy, but was at once put in nomination for South Lancashire, which was still open and he was elected there. His severance from the University was regarded by Liberals as his political emancipation. The reformers then would have at their head the two great Parliamentary Orators, one of them undoubtedly the future Prime Minister, and the greatest philosophical writer and thinker of the day. This liberal triumvirate, as they were called, would have behind them many new and earnest men to whom their words would be law. The alarmed Tory said to themselves that between England and the democratic flood there was left but one barrier and that was in the person of the old statesman, now in his 81st year of whom more and more doubtful rumors began to arrive in London every day. CHAPTER 47 THE DEATH OF LORD PALMASTON, PART I UNARM IRRAS, THE LONG DAY'S TASK IS DONE AND WE MUST SLEEP A long, very long day's task was nearly done. A marvellous career was fast drawing to its close. Down in Hertfordshire, Lord Palmerston was dying. As Mirabeau said of himself so Palmerston might have said, he could already hear the preparations for the funeral of Achilles. He had enjoyed life to the last as fully as ever Churchill did, although in a different sense. As long as his life was, if counted by mere years, it seems much longer still, when we consider what it had compassed and how active it had been from the earliest to the very end. Many men were older than Lord Palmerston. He left more than one senior behind him. But they were for the most part men whose work had long been done, men who had been consigned to the arm chair of complete inactivity. Byron was a hard-working statesman until within a very few days of his death. He had been a member of Parliament for nearly sixty years. He entered Parliament for the first time in the year when Byron, like himself a harrow boy, published his first poems. He had been in the House of Commons for thirty years when the Queen came to the throne. He used to play chess with the unfortunate Caroline of Brunswick, wife of the Prince Regent, when she lived at Kensington as Princess of Wales. In 1808, being then one of the lords of the Admiralty, he had defended the Copenhagen expedition of the year before and insisted that it was a stroke indispensable to the defeat of the designs of Napoleon. During all his political career he was only out of office for rare and brief seasons. To be a private member of Parliament was a short occasional episode in his successful life. In the words of Sadi the Persian poet he had obtained an ear of corn from every harvest. It was only during the session of 1865 that Lord Palmerston began to give evidence that he was suffering severely at last from that affliction which has been called the most terrible of all diseases, old age. Up to the beginning of that year he had scarcely shown any signs of actual decay. He had indeed been for a long time a sufferer from occasional fits of gout, lately in hands as well as feet. During the winter of the Trent's seizure he had been much disabled and tortured by a visitation of this kind which almost entirely crippled him. But in this country the gout has long ceased to be an evidence of old age. Only only too commonly accompanies middle life and indeed like black care in the poet's verse seems able to cling on to any horseman. But during the session of 1865 Lord Palmerston began to show that he was receiving the warnings which death in Mrs. Thrail's pretty poem is made to give of his coming. He suffered much for some of the later months. His eyesight had become very weak and even with the help of strong glasses he found it difficult to read. He was getting feeble in every way. He ceased to have that joy of the strife which inspired him during parliamentary debate even up to the attainment of his eightieth year. He had kept up his bodily vigor and the youthful elasticity of his spirit so long that it must have come on him with the shock of a painful surprise when he first found that his frame and his nerves were beyond doubt giving way and that he too must succumb to the cruel influence of years. The collapse of his vigor came on almost at a stroke. On his eightieth birthday, in October 1864, he started, Mr. Ashley tells us, at half past eight from Broadlands, taking his horses by train to Ferrum, was met by engineer officers and rode along the ports down in hill-sea lines of forts, getting off his horse and inspecting some of them, crossing over to the Anglesey forts and Gosport, and not reaching home till six in the evening. Earlier in the same year he rode one day from his house in Piccadilly to Harrow, trotting the distance of nearly twelve miles within one hour. Such performances testified to an energy of what one would almost call youthful vitality, rare indeed even in the history of our long living time. But in 1865 the change set in all at once. Lord Palmerston began to discontinue his attendances at the house. When he did attend, it was evident that he went through his parliamentary duties with difficulty and even with pain. The Tiverton election on the dissolution of parliament was his last public appearance. He went from Tiverton to Brockett and Hartfordshire, a place which Lady Palmerston had inherited from Lord Melbourne her brother, and there he remained. The gout had become very serious now. It had flown to a dangerous place, and Lord Palmerston had made the danger greater by venturing with his two youthful energy to ride out before he had nearly recovered from one severe attack. On October 17 a bulletin was issued announcing that Lord Palmerston had been seriously ill in consequence of having taken cold, but that he had been steadily improving for three days and was then much better. Somehow this announcement failed to reassure people in London. Many had only then for the first time heard that Palmerston was ill, and the bare mention of the fact fell ominously on the ear of the public. The very next morning these suspicions were confirmed. It was announced that Lord Palmerston's condition had suddenly altered for the worse, and that he was gradually sinking. Then everyone knew that the end was near. There was no surprise when the news came next day that Palmerston was dead. He died on October 18. Had he lived only two days longer he would have completed his eighty first year. He was buried in Westminster Abbey with public honors on October 27. No man, since the death of the Duke of Wellington had filled so conspicuous a place in the public mind. No man had enjoyed anything like the same amount of popularity. He died at the moment when that popularity had reached its very zenith. It had become the fashion of the day to praise all he said and all he did. It was the settled canon of the ordinary Englishman's faith that what Palmerston said England must feel. To stand forward as the opponent or even the critic of anything done or favoured by him was to be unpopular and unpatriotic. Lord Palmerston had certainly lived long enough in years, in enjoyment, in fame. It seems idle to ask what might have happened if a man of more than eighty could have lived and held his place in active public life for a few years more. But if one were to indulge in such speculation the assumption would be that in such an event there must have been some turn in the tide of that almost unparalleled popularity and success. Fortunate in everything during his later years Lord Palmerston was withdrawn from chance and change just when his fortune had reached its flood. It is hardly necessary to say that the regret for Palmerston was very general and very genuine. Privately he can hardly have had any enemies. He had a kindly heart which won on all people who came near him. He had no enduring emnities or capricious dislikes and it was therefore very hard for ill feeling to live in his beaming friendly presence. He never disliked men merely because he had often to encounter them in political war. He tried his best to give them as good as they brought, anybore no malice. There were some men whom he disliked as we have already mentioned in these volumes. But they were men who for one reason or another stood persistently in his way and who he fancied he had reason to believe it acted treacherously toward him. He liked a man to be English and he liked him to be what he considered a gentleman. But he did not restrict his definition of the word gentleman to the mere qualifications of birth or social rank. His manners were frank and genial rather than polished and his is one of the rare instances in which a man contrived always to keep up his personal dignity without any stateliness of bearing in tone. He was a model combatant when the combat was over. He was ready to sit down by his antagonist's side and be his friend and talk over their experiences and exploits. He was absolutely free from affectation. This very fact gave sometimes an air almost of roughness to his manners. He could be so plain-spoken and downright when suddenly called on to express his mind. He was not on the highest sense of the word a truthful man. That is to say, there were episodes of his career in which for purposes of statecraft he allowed the House of Commons and the country to become the dupes of an erroneous impression. Personally truthful and honorable, of course, it would be superfluous to pronounce him. A man of Palmerston's bringing up is as certain to be personally truthful as he is to be brave and to be fond of open-air exercise and the cold bath. But Palmerston was too often willing to distinguish between the personal and the political integrity of a statesman. The distinction is common to the majority of statesmen, so much the worse for statesmanship. But the gravest errors of this kind which Palmerston had committed were committed for an earlier generation. The general public of 1865 took small account of them. Not many would have cared much then about the grim story of Sir Alexander Burns's dispatches or the manner in which Palmerston had played with the hopes of foreign liberalism, conducting it more than once rather to its grave than to its triumph. These things lived only in the minds of a few at the time when the news of his death came, and even of that few not many were anxious to dwell upon them. It was noticed at the time that the London newspaper which had persistently attacked his policy and himself since the hour when it came into existence appeared in deep mourning the day after his death. Some thought this show of regret inconsistent, some declared it hypocritical. There is no reason to think it either the one or the other. Without retracting one word of condemnation uttered concerning Palmerston's policy, it was surely natural to feel sincere regret for the death of one who had filled so large a space in the public eye, a man of extraordinary powers and whose love for his country had never been denied. Dead? That quits all scores. Is the exclamation of the gypsy and guy mannering? Only a simple, untaught version of the swanth-la crumairerum of Virgil, which Fox quoted to explain his feelings when he grieved for the death of the rival whose public actions he could not even at such a moment pretend to approve. Whether Lord Palmerston belonged to the first order of statesmen can be only matter of speculation and discussion. He was not afforded any opportunity of deciding the question. It was the happy fortune of his country during all his long career to have never been placed in any position of organic danger. Not for one moment was there any crisis of the order which enables a man to prove that he is a statesman of the foremost class. It would be almost as profitable to ask ourselves whether the successful captain of one of the Canard steamers might have been in Nelson or Columbus, as to ask whether under the pressure of great emergency Palmerston might have been a really great statesman. If we were to test him by his judgment in matters of domestic policy we should have to rate him somewhat low. The description which Gratton gave of Burke would have to be reversed in Lord Palmerston's case. Instead of saying that he saw everything, he foresaw everything, we would have to say that he saw nothing, he foresaw nothing. He was hardly dead when the great changes which he had always scoffed at and declared impossible came to pass. Marsha McMon once said that in some given contingency the chassepot of the French soldiers would go off of themselves. Such seemed to be the condition of the very reforms which Palmerston had persuaded himself to regard as un-English and impossible. They went off of themselves, one might say, the moment he was gone. Nor was it that his strength had withstood them. If he had been ten years younger they would have probably gone off in spite of him. They waited, out of courtesy to him, to his age and to the certainty that before long he must be out of the way. But of course Lord Palmerston is not to be judged by his domestic policy. We might as well judge of Frederick the Great by his poetry, or Richelieu by his play. Palmerston was himself only in the Foreign Office and in the House of Commons. In both alike the recognition of his true capacity came very late. His parliamentary training had been perfected before its success was acknowledged. He was therefore able to use his faculties at any given moment to their fullest stretch. He could always count on them. They had been so well drilled by long practice that they would instantly come at call. He understood the moods of the House of Commons to perfection. He could play upon those moods as a performer does upon the keys of an instrument. The doctor in one of Dickens's stories contrives to seem a master of his business by simply observing what those around the patient had been doing and wished to do and advising that just those things shall be done. Lord Palmerston often led the House of Commons after the same fashion. He saw what men were in the mood to do and he did it, and they were clear that he must be a great leader who led them just wither they fell inclined to go. The description which Burke gave of Charles Townsend would very accurately describe what Lord Palmerston came to be in his later days. He became the spoiled child of the House of Commons. Only it has to be added that as the spoiled child usually spoils the parent, so Palmerston did much to spoil the House that petted him. He would not allow it to remain long in the mood to tolerate high principles or any talk about them. Much earnestness he knew bored the House, and he took care never to be much in earnest. He left it to others to be eloquent. It was remarked at the time that the Prime Minister who is now and has been for years far more influential in England than ever Bollingbrook was, wielding a political power as great as any ever owned by Chatham or Pitt, as supreme in his own country as Cavour was in Sardinia, holding a position such as no French statesman has held for generations in France, has scarcely any pretension whatever to be considered an orator, and has not, during the whole course of his long career, affixed his name to any grand act of successful statesmanship. Lord Palmerston never cared to go deeper in his speeches than the surface in everything. He had no splendid phraseology and probably would not have cared to make any display of splendid phraseology even if he had the gift. No speech of his would be read except for the present interest of the subject. No passages from Lord Palmerston are quoted by anybody. He always selected, and doubtless by a kind of instinct. Not the arguments which were most logically cogent, but those which were most likely to suit the character and the temper of the audience he happened to be addressing. He spoke, for his hearers, not for himself. To affect the votes of those to whom he was appealing, not for the sake of expressing any deep, irrepressible convictions of his own. He never talked over the heads of his audience, or compelled them to strain their intellects in order to keep pace with his flights. No other statesman of our time could interpose so dexterously, just before the division, to break the effect of some telling speech against him, and to bring the house into a frame of mind for regarding all that had been done by the opposition as mere piece of political ceremonial, gone through in deference to the traditions or the formal necessities of party, on which it would be a waste of time, to bestow serious thought. A writer quoted by Mr. Ashley has remarked upon Lord Palmerston's habit of interjecting occasionally a sort of guttural sound between his words which must necessarily have been fatal to anything like true oratorical effect, but which somehow seemed to enhance the peculiar effectiveness of his unprepared, easy colloquial style. The writer goes on to say that this occasional hesitation often did much to increase the humor of some of the jocular hits in which Lord Palmerston so commonly delighted. The joke seemed to be so entirely unpremeditated, the audience were kept for a moment in such amusing suspense, while the speaker was apparently turning over the best way to give the hit, that when at last it came, it was enjoyed with the keener relish. CHAPTER 47 The Death of Lord Palmerston, Part 2 Nothing is more rash than to attempt to convey in cold words an idea of the effect which a happy phrase from Lord Palmerston could sometimes produce upon a hesitating audience, and how it could throw ridicule upon a very serious case. Let us, however, make one experiment. Mr. Disraeli had once made a long and heavy attack on the ministry, opened quite a battery of argument and sarcasm against them for something they had done or had left undone. Toward the close of his speech he observed that it was no part of his duty to suggest to the ministry the exact course they ought to pursue, he would abstain from endeavouring to influence the house by offering any opinion of his own on that subject. Lord Palmerston began his reply by seizing on this harmless bit of formality. The right honourable gentleman, he said, has declared that he abstained from endeavouring to influence the house by any advice of his own. Well, Mr. Speaker, I think that is indeed patriotic. The manner in which Palmerston spoke the words, the peculiar pause before he found the exact epithet with which to commend Mr. Disraeli's conduct, the twinkle of the eye, the tone of the voice, all made this ironical commendation more effective than the finest piece of satire would have been just then. Lord Palmerston managed to put it as if Mr. Disraeli, conscious of the impossibility of his having any really sound advice to offer, had out of combined modesty and love of country, deliberately abstained from offering an opinion that might perhaps have misled the ignorant. The effect of Mr. Disraeli's elaborate attack was completely spoiled. The house was no longer in a mood to consider it seriously. This it may be said, was almost in the nature of a practical joke. Not a few of Palmerston's clever instantaneous effects partook to a certain extent of the nature of a good-humored practical joke. But Palmerston only had recourse to these oratorical artifices when he was sure that the temper of the house and the condition of the debate would make them serve his momentary purpose. It was hardly better than a mere joke when Palmerston, charged with having acted unfairly in China by first favoring the Great Rebellion and then indirectly helping the Chinese government to put it down, blandly asked what could be more impartial conduct than to help the rebels first and the government after. It was a mere joke to declare that a member who had argued against Palmerston's scheme of fortifications had himself admitted the necessity of such a plan by saying that he had taken care to fortify himself with facts in order to debate the question. These were not, however, the purely frivolous jests that, when thus told, they may seem to be. They had all of them the distinct purpose of convincing the house that Lord Palmerston thought nothing of the arguments urged against him, that they did not call for any serious consideration, that a careless jest was the only way in which it would be worth his while to answer them. It is certain that not only was the opponent, not only were other possible opponents, disconcerted by this way of dealing with the question, but that many listeners became convinced by it that there could be nothing in the case which Lord Palmerston treated with such easy levity. They had all and more than all the effect of pits throwing down his pen and ceasing to take notes during Erskine's speech, or O'Connell's smile and amused shake of the head at the earnestness of an ambitious young speaker who thought he was making a damaging case against him and compelling a formidable and elaborate reply. The jests of Lord Palmerston always had a purpose in them and were better adapted to the occasion and the moment than the repartees of the best debater in the house. At one time indeed he flung his jests and personalities about in somewhat too reckless a fashion and he made many enemies, but of late years, whether from growing discretion or kindly feeling, he seldom indulged in any pleasantries that could wound or offend. During his last parliament he represented to the full the average head and heart of a house of commons singularly devoid of high ambition or steady purpose, a house peculiarly intolerant of eccentricity, especially if it were that of genius, impatient of having its feelings long strained in any one direction, delighting only in ephemeral interests and excitements, hostile to anything which drew heavily on the energy or the intelligence. Such a house naturally acknowledged a heavy debt of gratitude to the statesmen who never either puzzled or bored them. Men who distressed at Mr. Disraeli's antithesis and were frightened by Mr. Gladston's earnestness found as much relief in the easy, pleasant, straightforward talk of Lord Palmerston as a schoolboy finds in a game of marbles after a problem or a sermon. We have not now to pronounce upon Lord Palmerston's long career. Much of this history of our own times is necessarily the history of the life and administration of a statesman who entered parliament shortly after Austerlitz. We have commented so far as comment seemed necessary on each passage of his policy as it came under our notice. His greatest praise with Englishmen must be that he loved England with a sincere love that never abated. He had no predilection, no prejudice, that did not give way where the welfare of England was concerned. He ought to have gone one step higher in the path of public duty. He ought to have loved justice and right even more than he loved England. He ought to have felt more tranquilly convinced that the cause of justice and of right must be the best thing which an English minister could advance even for England's sake in the end. Lord Palmerston was not a statesman who took any lofty view of a minister's duties. His statesmanship never stood on any high moral elevation. He sometimes did things in the cause of England which we may well believe he would not have done for any consideration in any cause of his own. His policy was necessarily shifting, uncertain, and inconsistent, for he molded it always on the supposed interests of England as they showed themselves to his eyes at the time. His sympathies with liberty were capricious guides. Sympathies with liberty must be so, always where there is no clear principle defining objects and guiding conduct. Lord Palmerston was not prevented by his liberal sympathies from sustaining the policy of the coup d'etat, nor did his hatred of slavery, one of his few strong and genuine emotions apart from English interests, inspire him with any repugnance to the cause of the southern slaveholders. But it cannot be doubted that his very defects were a main cause of his popularity and his success. He was able always with a good conscience to assure the English people that they were the greatest and the best, the only good and great people in the world, because he had long taught himself to believe this and had come to believe it. He was always popular because his speeches invariably conveyed this impression to the English crowd whom he addressed in or out of Parliament. Other public men spoke for the most part to tell English people of something they ought to do which they were not doing, something which they had done and ought not to have done. It is not in the nature of things that such men should be as popular as those who told England that whatever she did must be right. Nor did Palmerston lay on his praise with coarse and palpable artifice. He had no artifice in the matter. He believed what he said, and his very sincerity made it the more captivating and the more dangerous. A phrase sprang up in Palmerston's days which was employed to stigmatize certain political conduct beyond all ordinary reproach. It was meant to stamp such conduct as outside the pale of reasonable argument or patriotic consideration. That was the word un-English. It was enough with certain classes to say that anything was un-English in order to put it utterly out of court. No matter to what principles, higher, more universal, and more abiding than those that are merely English, it might happen to appeal, the one word of condemnation was held to be enough for it. Some of the noblest and the wisest men of our day were denounced as un-English. A stranger might have asked in wonder at one time whether it was un-English to be just, to be merciful, to have consideration for the claims and the rights of others, to admit that there was any higher object in a nation's life than a diplomatic success. All that would have made a man odious and insufferable in private life was apparently held up as belonging to the virtues of the English nation. Rude self-assertion, blunt disregard for the feelings and the claims of others, a self-sufficiency which would regard all earth's interests as made for England's special use alone, the yet more outrageous form of egotism which would fancy that the moral code, as it applies to others, does not apply to us. All this seemed to be considered the becoming national characteristic of the English people. It would be almost superfluous to say that this did not show its worst in Lord Palmerston himself. As in art, so in politics, we never see how bad some peculiar defect is until we see it in the imitators of a great man's style. A school of Palmerstons, had it been powerful in lasting, would have made England a nuisance to other nations. Certainly a statesman's first business is to take care of the interests of his own country. His duty is to prefer her interest to those of any other country. In our rough and ready human system he is often compelled to support her in a policy, the principle of which he did not cordially approve in the first instance. He must do his best to bring her with honour out of a war, even though he would not himself have made or sanctioned the war if the decision had been in his power. He cannot break sharply away from the traditions of his country. It is rarely often succeeded in throwing a certain amount of disrepute on some of his opponents by calling them the advocates of Cosmopolitanism. If the word had any meaning it meant we presume that the advocates of Cosmopolitanism were men who had no particular prejudices in favour of their country's interests and were as ready to take an enemy's side of a question as that of their own people. If there were such politicians, and we have never heard of any since the execution of anarchist clutes, we could not wonder that their countrymen should dislike them and draw back from putting any trust in them at a critical moment. They might be held to resemble some of the pragmatical sentimentalists who at one time used to argue that the ties of family are of no account to the truly wise and just and that a good man should love all his neighbours as well as he loved his wife and children. Such people are hopeless in practical affairs. Taking no account of the very springs of human motive, they are sure to go wrong in everything they try to do or to estimate. An English minister must be an English minister, first of all, but he will never be a great minister if he does not, in all his policy, recognise the truth that there are considerations of higher account for him and for England, too, than England's immediate interests. If he deliberately or heedlessly allows England to do wrong, he will prove an evil counsellor for her. He will do her harm that may be estimated some day, even by the most practical and arithmetical calculation. There is a great truth in the fine lines of the Cavalier poet, which remind his mistress that he could not love her so much, that he loved he not honour more. It is a truth that applies to the statesman as well as to the lover. No man can truly serve his country to the best of his power who has not in his mind all the time a service still higher than that of his country. In many instances Lord Palmerston allowed England to do things which if a nation had an individual conscience he and everyone else would say were wrong. It has to be remembered, too, that what is called England's interest comes to be defined according to the minister's personal interpretation of its meaning. The minister who sets the interest of his country above the moral law is necessarily obliged to decide according to his own judgment at the moment what the interests of his country are, and so it is, not even the state which is above the moral law, but only the statesman. We have no hesitation in saying that Lord Palmerston's statesmanship on the whole lowered the moral tone of English politics for a time. This consideration alone, if there were nothing else, forbids us to regard him as a statesman whose deeds were equal to his opportunities and to his genius. To serve the purpose of the hour was his policy. To succeed in serving it was his triumph. It is not thus that a great fame is built up, unless indeed where the genius of the man is like that of some Caesar or Napoleon which can convert its very ruins into monumental records. Lord Palmerston is hardly to be called a great man. Perhaps he may be called a great man of the time. End of THE THIRD VOLUME, END OF SECTION 43, Recording by Pamela Nagami-MD in Encino, CA, February 2020. END OF A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES FROM THE ACCESSION OF QUEEN VICTORIA TO THE GENERAL ELECTION OF 1880, VOLUME 3, BY JUSTON MCCARTHY