 Chapter 11 The Disasters at Kabul, Part 4 During this time a new Governor-General had arrived in India. Lord Auckland's time had run out, and during its latter months he had become nervous and despondent because of the utter failure of the policy which in an evil hour for himself and his country he had been induced to take. It does not seem that it ever was at heart a policy of his own, and he knew that the East India Company were altogether opposed to it. The company were well aware of the vast expense which our enterprises in Afghanistan must impose on the revenues of India, and they looked forward eagerly to the earliest opportunity of bringing it to a close. Lord Auckland had been persuaded into adopting it against his better judgment and against even the whisperings of his conscience, and now he too longed to be done with it, but he wished to leave Afghanistan as a magnanimous conqueror. He had in his own person discounted the honors of victory. He had received an earldom for the services he was presumed to have rendered to his sovereign and his country. He had therefore in full sight that mournful juxtaposition of incongruous objects which a great English writer has described so touchingly and tersely, the trophies of victory in the battle lost. He was an honourable and kindly gentleman, and the news of all the success of calamities fell upon him with a crushing and overwhelming weight. In plain language the Governor-General lost his head. He seemed to have no other idea than that of getting all our troops as quickly as might be out of Afghanistan and shaking the dust of the place off our feet forever. It may be doubted whether if we had pursued such a policy as this we might not as well have left India itself once for all. If we had allowed it to seem clear to the Indian populations and princes that we could be driven out of Afghanistan with humiliation and disaster, and that we were unable or afraid to strike one blow to redeem our military credit, we should before long have seen in Hindustan many in attempt to enact there the scenes of Kabul and Kandahar. Thus a moralist is prepared to say that a nation which has committed one error of policy is bound and conscious to take all the worst and most protracted consequences of that error and never make any attempt to protect itself against them. Even a moralist of the most scrupulous character can hardly deny that we were bound, for the sake of our interests in Europe as well as in India, to prove that our strength had not been broken nor our councils paralyzed by the disasters in Afghanistan. Yet Lord Auckland does not appear to have thought anything of the kind either needful or within the compass of our national strength. He was, in fact, a broken man. His successor came out with the brightest hopes of India and the world, founded on his energy and strength of mind. His successor was Lord Ellenborough, the son of that Edward Law, afterwards Lord Ellenborough, Chief Justice of the King's Bench, who had been leading council for Warren Hastings when the latter was impeached before the House of Lords. The second Ellenborough was at the time of his appointment filling the office of President of the Board of Control, an office he had held before. He was therefore well acquainted with the affairs of India. He had come into office under Sir Robert Peel on the resignation of the Melbourne Ministry. He was looked upon as a man of great ability and energy. It was known that his personal predilections were for the career of a soldier. He was fond of telling his hearers then and since that the life of a camp was that which he should have loved to lead. He was a man of great and in certain lights, apparently, splendid abilities. There was a certain Orientalism about his language, his aspirations and his policy. He loved gorgeousness and dramatic, ill-natured persons said, theatric, effects. Life arranged itself in his eyes as a superb and showy pageant, of which it would have been his ambition to form the central figure. His eloquence was often of a lofty and noble order. Men who are still hardly of middle age can remember Lord Ellenborough on great occasions in the House of Lords and can recollect their having been deeply impressed by him, even though they had but lately heard such speakers as Gladstone or Bright in the other house. It was not easy indeed sometimes to avoid the conviction that in listening to Lord Ellenborough one was listening to a really great orator of a somewhat antique and stately type, who attuned his speech to the pitch of an age of loftier and less prosaic aims than ours. When he had a great question to deal with and when his instincts, if not his reasoning power, had put him on the right, or at least the effective side of it, he could speak in a tone of poetic and elevated eloquence to which it was impossible to listen without emotion. But if Lord Ellenborough was in some respects a man of genius, he was also a man whose love of mere effects often made him seem like a quack. There are certain characters in whom a little of unconscious quackery is associated with some of the elements of true genius. Lord Ellenborough was one of these. Far greater men than he must be associated in the same category. The elder pit, the first Napoleon, Mirabot, Bollingbrook, and many others were men in whom undoubtedly some of the charlatan was mixed up with some of the very highest qualities of genius. In Lord Ellenborough this blending was strongly and sometimes even startlingly apparent. To this hour there are men who knew him well in public and private, on whom his weakness made so disproportionate an impression that they can see in him little more than a mere charlatan. This is entirely unjust. He was a man of great abilities and earnestness who had in him a strange dash of the play actor, who at the most serious moment of emergency always thought of how to display himself effectively and who would have met the peril of an empire as poor Narcissa met death, with an over-mastering desire to show to the best personal advantage. Lord Ellenborough's appointment was hailed by all parties in India as the most auspicious that could be made. Here people said, is surely the great stage for a great actor, and now the great actor is coming. There would be something fascinating to a temper like his in the thought of redeeming the military honour of his country and standing out in history as the avenger of the shames of Kabul. But those who thought in this way found themselves suddenly disappointed. Lord Ellenborough uttered and wrote a few showy sentences about revenging our losses and re-establishing in all its original brilliancy our military character, but when he had done this he seemed to have relieved his mind and to have done enough. With him there was a constant tendency to substitute grandiose phrases for deeds or perhaps to think that the phrase was the thing of real moment. He said these fine words and then at once he announced that the only object of the government was to get the troops out of Afghanistan as quickly as might be and almost on any terms. The whole of Lord Ellenborough's conduct during this crisis is inexplicable, except on the assumption that he really did not know at certain times how to distinguish between phrases and actions. A general outcry was raised in India and among the troops in Afghanistan against the extraordinary policy which Lord Ellenborough propounded. Englishmen in fact refused to believe in it, took it as something that must be put aside. English soldiers could not believe that they were to be recalled after defeat. They persisted in the conviction that let the Governor General say what he might, his intention must be that the army should retrieve its fame and retire only after complete victory. The Governor General himself after a while quietly acted on this interpretation of his meaning. He allowed the military commanders in Afghanistan to pull their resources together and prepare for inflicting signal chest tisement on the enemy. They were not long in doing this. They encountered the enemy wherever he showed himself and defeated him. They recaptured town after town. Until at length, on September 15, 1842, General Pollock's force entered Kabul. A few days after, as a lasting mark of retribution for the crimes which had been committed there, the British commander ordered the destruction of the great bazaar of Kabul, where the mangled remains of the unfortunate Anvay McNaughton had been exhibited in brutal triumph and joy to the Afghan populace. It is not necessary to enter into detailed descriptions of the successful progress of our arms. The war may be regarded as over. It is, however, necessary to say something of the fate of the captives or hostages who were carried away that terrible January night at the command of Akbar Khan. One thing has first to be told which some may now receive within casualty, but which is nevertheless true. There was a British general who was disposed to leave them to their fate and take no trouble about them, and who declared himself, under the conviction, from the tenor of all Lord Ellenborough's dispatches, that the recovery of the prisoners was a matter of indifference to the government. There seems to have been some unhappy spell working against us in all this chapter of our history, by virtue of which even its most brilliant pages were destined to have something ignoble or ludicrous written on them. Better councils, however, prevailed. General Pollock insisted on an effort being made to recover the prisoners before the troops began to return to India, and he appointed to this noble duty the husband of one of the hostage ladies, Sir Robert Sayle. The prisoners were recovered with greater ease than was expected, so many of them, as were yet alive. Poor General Elphinstone had long before succumbed to disease and hardship. The ladies had gone through strange privations. Thirty-six years ago the tale of the captivity of Lady Sayle and her companions was in every mouth all over England, nor did any civilised land fail to take an interest in the strange and pathetic story. They were hurried from fort to fort, as the designs and the fortunes of Akbar Khan dictated his disposal of them. They suffered almost every fierce alternation of cold and heat. They had to live on the coarsest fare. They were lodged in a manner which would have made the most wretched prison accommodation of a civilised country seem luxurious by comparison. They were in constant uncertainty and fear, not knowing what might befall. Yet they seemed to have held up their courage and spirits wonderfully well, and to have kept the hearts of the children alive with mirth and sport at moments of the utmost peril. Gradually it became more and more suspected that the fortunes of Akbar Khan were falling. At last it was beyond doubt that he had been completely defeated. Then they were hurried away again. They knew not wither, through ever ascending mountain passes under a scorching sun. They were being carried off to the wild rugged regions of the Indian Caucasus. They were bestowed in a miserable fort at Bamiyan. They were now under the charge of one of Akbar Khan's soldiers of fortune. This man had begun to suspect that things were well nigh hopeless with Akbar Khan. He was induced by gradual and very cautious approaches to enter into an agreement with the prisoners for their release. The English officer signed an agreement with him to secure him a large reward and a pension for life if he enabled them to escape. He accordingly declared that he renounced his allegiance to Akbar Khan, all the more readily seeing that news came in of the chief's total defeat in flight no one knew wither. The prisoners and their escort, lately their jailer and guards, set forth on their way to General Pollock's camp. On their way they met the English party sent out to seek them. Sir Robert Sayle found his wife again. Our joy says one of the rescued prisoners was too great, too overwhelming for tongue to utter. Description indeed could do nothing for the effect of such a meeting but to spoil it. There is a very different ending to the episode of the English captives in Bokhara. Colonel Stoddart, who had been sent to the Persian camp in the beginning of all these events, to insist that Persia must desist from the siege of Herat, was sent subsequently on a mission to the Amir of Bokhara. The Amir received him favorably at first, but afterwards became suspicious of English designs of conquest and treated Stoddart with marked indignity. The Amir appears to have been the very model of a melodramatic eastern tyrant. He was cruel and capricious as another Caligula, and perhaps in truth quite as mad. He threw Stoddart into prison. Captain Connolly was appointed two years later to proceed to Bokhara and other countries of the same region. He undertook to endeavor to effect the liberation of Stoddart, but could only succeed in sharing his sufferings and at last his fate. The Amir had written a letter to the Queen of England and the answer was written by the Foreign Secretary, referring the Amir to the Governor-General of India. The savage tyrant redoubled the ill treatment of his prisoners. He accused them of being spies and of giving help to his enemies. The Indian Government were of opinion that the envoys had in some manner exceeded their instructions and that Connolly in particular had contributed by indiscretion to his own fate. Nothing therefore was done to obtain his release beyond diplomatic efforts and appeals to the magnanimity of the Amir, which had not any particular effect. Dr. Wolf, the celebrated traveller and missionary, afterwards undertook an expedition of his own in the hope of saving the unfortunate captives, but he only reached Bokhara in time to hear that they had been put to death. The moment and the actual manner of their death cannot be known to positive certainty, but there was little doubt that they were executed on the same day by the orders of the Amir. The journals of Connolly have been preserved up to an advanced period of his captivity, and they relieve so far the melancholy of the fate that fell on the unfortunate officers by showing that the horrors of their hopeless imprisonment were so great that their dearest friends must have been glad to know of their release even by the knife of the executioner. It is perhaps not the least bitter part of the story that in the belief of many, including the unfortunate officers themselves, the course pursued by the English authorities in India had done more to hand them over to the treacherous cruelty of their captor than to release them from his power. In truth the authorities in India had had enough of intervention. It would have needed a great exigency indeed to stir them into energy of action soon again in Central Asia. This thrilling chapter of English history closes with something like a piece of Harlequinad. The curtain fell amid general laughter. Only the genius of Lord Ellenbara could have turned the mood of India and of England to mirth on such a subject. Lord Ellenbara was equal to this extraordinary feat. The never-to-be-forgotten proclamation about the restoration to India of the gates of the Temple of Somnouth, redeemed at Lord Ellenbara's orders when Guzny was retaken by the English, was first received with incredulity as a practical joke. Then with one universal burst of laughter, then with indignation, and then again when the natural anger had died away with laughter again. "'My brothers and my friends,' wrote Lord Ellenbara, "'to all the princes, chiefs, and people of India, our victorious army bears the gates of the Temple of Somnouth in triumph from Afghanistan and the disfoil tomb of Sultan Mahmud looks upon the ruins of Guzny. The insult of eight hundred years is at last avenged. The gates of the Temple of Somnouth, so long the memorial of your humiliation, are become the proudest record of your national glory, the proof of your superiority and arms over the nations beyond the Indus. No words of pompous man could possibly have put together greater absurdities. The brothers and friends were Mohammedans and Hindus who were about as likely to agree as to the effect of these symbols of triumph as a fenian and an orangeman would be to fraternize in a toast to the glorious pious and immortal memory. To the Mohammedans the triumph of Lord Ellenbara was simply an insult. To the Hindus the offer was ridiculous, for the Temple of Somnouth itself was in ruins and the ground had covered was trodden by Mohammedans. To finish the absurdity the gates proved not to be genuine relics at all. On October 1st, 1842, exactly four years since Lord Auckland's proclamation, announcing and justifying the intervention to restore Shah Suja, Lord Ellenbara issued another proclamation announcing the complete failure and the revocation of the policy of his predecessor. Lord Ellenbara declared that to force a sovereign upon a reluctant people would be as inconsistent with the policy as it is with the principles of the British government, that therefore they would recognize any government approved by the Afghans themselves, that the British arms would be withdrawn from Afghanistan and that the government of India would remain content with the limits nature appears to have assigned to its empire. Dast Muhammad was released from his captivity and before long was ruler of Kabul once again. Thus ended the story of our expedition to reorganize the internal condition of Afghanistan. After four years of unparalleled trial and disaster everything was restored to the condition in which we found it, except that there were so many brave Englishmen sleeping in bloody graves. The Duke of Wellington ascribed the causes of our failure to making war with a peace establishment, making war without a safe base of operations, carrying the native army out of India into a strange and cold climate, invading a poor country which was unequal to the supply of our wants, giving undue power to political agents, want of forethought and undue confidence in the Afghans on the part of Sir W. McNaughton, placing our magazines, even our treasure, in indefensible places, great military neglect and mismanagement after the outbreak. Doubtless these were in a military sense the reasons for the failure of an enterprise which cost the revenues of India an enormous amount of treasure, but the causes of failure were deeper than any military errors could explain. It is doubtful whether the genius of a Napoleon and the forethought of a Wellington could have won any permanent success for an enterprise founded on so false and fatal a policy. Nothing in the ability or devotion of those entrusted with the task of carrying it out could have made it deserve success. Our first error of principle was to go completely out of our way for the purpose of meeting mere speculative dangers. Our next and far greater error was made when we attempted, in the words of Lord Ellenborough's proclamation, to force a sovereign upon a reluctant people. Early year 1843, at all events, O'Connell and his repeal agitation was entitled to the foremost place. The character of the man himself well deserved some calm consideration. We are now perhaps in a condition to do it justice. We are far removed in sentiment and political association, if not exactly in years, from the time when O'Connell was the idol of one party and the object of all the bitterest scorn and hatred of the other. No man of his time was so madly worshipped and so fiercely denounced. No man in our time was ever the object of so much abuse in the newspapers. The fiercest and coarsest attacks that we can remember to have been made in the English journals on Cobden and Bright during the heat of the anti-corn law agitation seemed placid, gentle, and almost complementary. Even compared with the criticism daily applied to O'Connell. The only vituperation which could equal in vehemence and scurrility that poured out upon O'Connell was that which O'Connell himself poured out upon his assailants. His hand was against every man, if every man's hand was against him. He asked for nor quarter, and he gave none. We have outlived not the time merely but the whole spirit of the time so far as political controversy is concerned. We are now able to recognize the fact that a public man may hold opinions which are distasteful to the majority and yet be perfectly sincere and worthy of respect. We are well aware that a man may differ from us even on vital questions and yet be neither fool nor naive. But this view of things was not generally taken in the days of O'Connell's great agitation. He and his enemies alike acted in their controversies on the principle that a political opponent is necessarily a blockhead or a scoundrel. It is strange and somewhat melancholy to read the strictures of so enlightened a woman as Miss Martino upon O'Connell. They are all based upon what a humorous writer has called the fiend in human shape theory. Miss Martino not merely assumes that O'Connell was absolutely insincere and untrustworthy, but discourses of him on the assumption that he was knowingly and purposely a villain. Not only does she hold that his repeal agitation was an unqualified evil for his country, and that repeal if gained would have been a curse to it, but she insists that O'Connell himself was thoroughly convinced of the facts. She devotes whole pages of lively and accurate argument to prove not only that O'Connell was ruining his country, but that he knew he was ruining it, and persevered in his wickedness out of pure self-seeking. No writer possessed of one tenth of Miss Martino's intellect and education would now reason after that fashion about any public man. If there is any common delusion of past days which may be taken as entirely exploded now, it is the idea that any man ever swayed vast masses of people and became the idle and the hero of a nation by the strength of a conscious hypocrisy and imposture. O'Connell in this repeal year, as he called it, was by far the most prominent politician in these countries who had never been in office. He had been the patron of the Melbourne Ministry, and his patronage had proved baneful to it. One of the great causes of the detestation in which the Melbourne Whigs were held by a vast number of English people was their alleged subservancy to the Irish agitator. We cannot be surprised if the English public just then was little inclined to take an impartial estimate of O'Connell. He had attacked some of their public men in language of the fiercest denunciation. He had started an agitation which seemed as if it were directly meant to bring about a break-up of the imperial system so lately completed by the Act of Union. He was opposed to the existence of the State Church in Ireland. He was the bitter enemy of the Irish landlord class of the landlords that is to say who took their title in any way from England. He was familiarly known in the graceful controversy of the time as the Big Beggar Man. It was an article of faith with the general public that he was enriching himself at the expense of a poor and foolish people. It is a matter of fact that he had given up a splendid practice at the bar to carry on his agitation, that he lost by the agitation pecuniarily far more than he ever got by it, that he had not himself received from first to last anything like the amount of the noble tribute so becomingly and properly given to Mr. Cobden, and so honourably accepted by him, and that he died poor leaving his sons poor. Indeed, it is a remarkable evidence of the purifying nature of any great political cause, even where the object sought is but a phantom, that it is hardly possible to give a single instance of a great political agitation carried on in these countries and in modern times by leaders who had any primary purpose of making money. But at the same time the general English public were firmly convinced that O'Connell was simply keeping up his agitation for the sake of pocketing the rent. Some of the qualities, too, that specially endeared him to his Celtic countrymen made him particularly objectionable to Englishmen, and Englishmen have never been famous for readiness to enter into the feelings and accept the point of view of other peoples. O'Connell was a thorough kelp. He represented all the impulsiveness, the quick changing emotions, the passionate exaggerated loves and hatreds, the heedlessness of statement, the tendency to confound impressions with facts, the abdullient humour, all the other qualities that are especially characteristic of the kelp. The Irish people were the audience to which O'Connell habitually played. It may indeed be said that even in playing to this audience he commonly played to the gallery. As the orator of a popular assembly, as the orator of a monster meeting, he probably never had an equal in these countries. He had many of the physical endowments that are especially favourable to success in such a sphere. He had a herculean frame, a stately presence, a face capable of expressing easily and effectively the most rapid alternations of mood and a voice which all hearers admit to have been almost unrivaled for strength and sweetness. Its power, its pathos, its passion, its music have been described in words of positive rapture by men who detested O'Connell and who would rather, if they could, have denied to him any claim on public attention even in the matter of voice. He spoke without studied preparation and, of course, had all the defects of such a style. He fell into repetition and into carelessness of construction. He was hurried away into exaggeration and sometimes into mere bombast. But he had all the peculiar success, too, which rewards the orator who can speak without preparation. He always spoke right to the hearts of his hearers. On the platform or in Parliament whatever he said was said to his audience and was never in the nature of a discourse delivered over their heads. He entered the House of Commons when he was nearly fifty-four years of age. Most persons supposed that the style of speaking he had formed, first in addressing juries and next in rousing Irish mobs, must cause his failure when he came to appeal to the unsympathetic and fastidious House of Commons. But it is certain that O'Connell became one of the most successful parliamentary orators of his time. Mr. Geoffrey, a professional critic, declared that all other speakers in the House seemed to him only talking schoolboy talk after he had heard O'Connell. No man we now know of is less likely to be carried away by any of the claptrap arts of a false demagogic style than Mr. Roebuck, and Mr. Roebuck has said that he considers O'Connell the greatest orator he ever heard in the House of Commons. Charles Dickens, when a reporter in the gallery where he had few equals of any in his craft, put down his pencil once when engaged in reporting a speech of O'Connell's on one of the tithe riots in Ireland, and declared that he could not take notes of the speech, so moved was he by its pathos. Lord Beckinsfield, who certainly had no great liking for O'Connell, has spoken in terms as high as anyone could use about his power over the House. But O'Connell's eloquence only helped him to make all the more enemies in the House of Commons. He was reckless even there in his denunciation, although he took care never to obtrude on parliament the extravagant and unmeaning abuse of opponents which delighted the Irish mob meetings. O'Connell was a crafty and successful lawyer. The Irish peasant, like the Scottish is, or at least then was, remarkably fond of litigation. He delighted in the quirks and quibbles of law, and in the triumphs won by the skill of lawyers over opponents. He admired O'Connell all the more when O'Connell boasted and proved that he could drive a coach in six through any act of parliament. One of the pet heroes of Irish legend is a personage whose cleverness and craft procure for him a sobriquet which has been rendered into English by the words twists upon twists and tricks upon tricks. O'Connell was in the eyes of many of the Irish peasantry and embodiment of twists upon twists and tricks upon tricks, enlisted in their cause for the confusion of their adversaries. He had borne the leading part in carrying Catholic emancipation. He had encountered all the danger and responsibility of the somewhat aggressive movement by which it was finally secured. It is true that it was a reform which in the course of civilization must have been carried. It had in its favor all the enlightenment of the time, the eloquence of the greatest orators, the intellect of the truest philosophers, the prescience of the wisest statesmen had pleaded for it and helped to make its way clear. No one can doubt that it must in a short time have been carried if O'Connell had never lived. But it was carried just then by virtue of O'Connell's bold agitation and by the wise resolve of the Tory government not to provoke a civil war. It is deeply to be regretted that Catholic emancipation was not conceded to the claims of justice. Had it been so yielded, it is very doubtful whether we should ever have heard much of the repeal agitation. But the Irish people saw, and indeed all the world was made aware of the fact, that emancipation would not have been conceded, just then at least, but for the fear of civil disturbance. To an Englishman looking coolly back from a distance, the difference is clear between granting to-day, rather than provoke disturbance that which everyone sees must be granted sometime, and conceding what the vast majority of the English people believe can never with propriety or even safety be granted at all. But we can hardly wonder if the Irish peasant did not make such distinctions. All he knew was that O'Connell had demanded Catholic emancipation and had been answered at first by a direct refusal, that he had said he would compel its concession and then in the end it was conceded to him. When, therefore, O'Connell said that he would compel the government to give him repeal of the union, the Irish peasant naturally believed that he could keep his word. Nor is there any reason to doubt that O'Connell himself believed in the possibility of accomplishing his purpose. We are apt now to think of the union between England and Ireland as of time-honored endurance. It had been scarcely thirty years in existence when O'Connell entered Parliament. The veneration of ancient lineage, the majesty of custom, the respect due to the wisdom of our ancestors, none of these familiar claims could be urged on behalf of the legislative union between England and Ireland. To O'Connell it appeared simply as a modern innovation which had nothing to be said for it except that a majority of Englishmen led by threats and bribery forced it on a majority of Irishmen. Mr. Lecky, the author of the History of European Morals, may be cited as an impartial authority on such a subject. Let us see what he says in his work on the leaders of public opinion in Ireland with regard to the movement for repeal of the union of which it seems almost needless to say he disapproves. O'Connell perceived clearly, says Mr. Lecky, that the tendency of affairs in Europe was toward the recognition of the principle that a nation's will is the one legitimate rule of its government. All rational men acknowledged that the union was imposed on Ireland by corrupt means contrary to the wish of one generation. O'Connell was prepared to show, by the protest of the vast majority of the people, that it was retained without the acquiescence of the next. He had allied himself with the parties that were rising surely and rapidly to power in England, with the democracy whose gradual progress is he facing the most venerable landmarks of the Constitution, with the free traders whose approaching triumph he had hailed and exalted in from afar. He had perceived the possibility of forming a powerful party in Parliament which would be free to co-operate with all English parties, without coalescing with any, and might thus turn the balance of factions and decide the fate of ministries. He saw, too, that while England in a time of peace might resist the expressed will of the Irish nation, its policy would be necessarily modified in time of war, and he predicted that should there be a collision with France while the nation was organized as in 1843, repeal would be the immediate and inevitable consequence. In a word, he believed that under a constitutional government the will of four-fifths of a nation, if peacefully, perseveringly, and energetically expressed, must sooner or later be triumphant. If a war had broken out during the agitation, if the life of O'Connell had been prolonged ten years longer, if any worthy successor had assumed his mantle, if a fearful famine had not broken the spirit of the people, who can say that the agitation would not have been successful. No one we fancy except those who are always convinced that nothing can ever come to pass which they think ought not to come to pass. At all events if an English political philosopher surveying the events after a distance of thirty years is of opinion that repeal was possible, it is not surprising that O'Connell thought its attainment possible at the time when he set himself to agitate for it. Even if this be not conceded, it will at least be allowed, that it is not very surprising if the Irish peasant saw no absurdity in the movement. Our system of government by party does not lay claim to absolute perfection. It is an excellent mechanism on the whole. It is probably the most satisfactory that the wit of man is yet devised for the management of the affairs of a state, but its greatest admirers will bear to be told that it has its drawbacks and disadvantages. One of these undoubtedly is found in the fact that so few reforms are accomplished in deference to the claims of justice in comparison to those that are yielded to the pressure of numbers. End of Section 27. Section 28 of the history of our own times, Volume 1 by Justin McCarthy. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, recording by Pamela Nagami, Chapter 12, The Repeal Gear, Part 2. A great English statesman in our own day once said that Parliament had done many just things, but few things because they were just. O'Connell and the Irish people saw that Catholic Emancipation had been yielded to pressure rather than to justice. It is not wonderful if they thought that pressure might prevail as well in the matter of repeal. In many respects, O'Connell differed from more modern Irish nationalists. He was a thorough liberal. He was a devoted opponent of Negro slavery. He was a staunch free trader. He was a friend of popular education. He was an enemy to all excess. He was opposed to strikes. He was an advocate of religious equality everywhere, and he declined to receive the commands of the Vatican in his political agitation. I am a Catholic, but I am not a Papist. Was his own definition of his religious attitude? He preached the doctrine of constitutional agitation strictly and declared that no political reform was worth the shedding of one drop of blood. It may be asked how it came about that with all these excellent attributes, which all critics now allow to him, O'Connell was so detested by the vast majority of the English people. One reason undoubtedly is that O'Connell deliberately revived and worked up for his political purposes the almost extinct national hatreds of Kelt and Saxon. As a phrase of political controversy he may be said to have invented the word Saxon. He gave a terrible license to his tongue. His abuse was outrageous. His praise was outrageous. The very effusiveness of his loyalty told to his disadvantage. People could not understand how one who perpetually denounced the Saxon could be so enthusiastic and rapturous in his professions of loyalty to the Saxon's queen. In the common opinion of Englishmen all the evils of Ireland, all the troubles attaching to the connection between the two countries, had arisen from this unmitigated, rankling hatred of Kelt for Saxon. It was impossible for them to believe that a man who deliberately applied all the force of his eloquence to revive it could be a genuine patriot. It appeared intolerable that while thus laboring to make the Kelt hate the Saxon he could yet profess an extravagant devotion to the Sovereign of England. Yet O'Connell was probably quite sincere in his professions of loyalty. He was in no sense a revolutionist. He had, from his education in a French college acquired an early detestation of the principles of the French Revolution. Of the Irish rebels of ninety-eight he spoke with his savage and intolerance as the narrowest English Tories could show in speaking of himself. The tones and emits and Fitzgeralds, whom so many of the Irish people adored, were in O'Connell's eyes and in his words, only a gang of miscreants. He grew angry at the slightest expression of an opinion among his followers that seemed to denote even a willingness to discuss any of the doctrines of Communism. His theory and his policy evidently were that Ireland was to be saved by a dictatorship entrusted to himself with the Irish priesthood acting as his officers and agents. He maintained the authority of the priests and his own authority by means of them and over them. The political system of the country for the purposes of agitation was to be a sort of hierarchy, the parish priests occupying the lowest grade, the bishops standing on the higher steps, and O'Connell himself supreme as the pontiff overall. He had a parliamentary system by means of which he proposed to approach more directly the question of repeal of the union. He got seats in the House of Commons for a number of his sons, his nephews, and his sworn retainers. O'Connell's tail was the precursor of the Pope's brass band in the slang of the House of Commons. He had an almost supreme control over the Irish constituencies, and whenever a vacancy took place he sent down the repeal candidate to contest it. He always inculcated and insisted on the necessity of order and peace. Indeed, as he proposed to carry on his agitation altogether by the help of the bishops and the priests, it is not possible for him, even, were he so inclined, to conduct it on any other than peaceful principles. The man who commits a crime gives strength to the enemy was a maxim which he was never weary of impressing upon his followers. The temperance movement, set on foot with such remarkable and sudden success by Father Matthew, was at once turned to account by O'Connell. He was himself in his later years at all events a very temperate man, and he was delighted at the prospect of good order and discipline which the temperance movement afforded. Father Matthew was very far from sharing all the political opinions of O'Connell. The sweet and simple friar, whose power was that of goodness and enthusiasm only, and who had but little force of character or intellect, shrank from political agitation and was rather conservative than otherwise in his views. But he could not afford to repudiate the support of O'Connell, who on all occasions glorified the temperance movement, and called upon his followers to join it, and was always boasting of his noble army of teetotalers. It was probably when he found that the mere fact of his having supported the Melbourne government did so much to discredit that government in the eyes of Englishmen, and to bring about its fall, that O'Connell went deliberately out of the path of mere parliamentary agitation, and started that system of agitation by monster meeting, which has since his time been regularly established among us as a principal part of all political organization for a definite purpose. He founded in Dublin a repeal association, which met in a place on Burr-Key, and which he styled, Conciliation Hall. Around him in this association he gathered his sons, his relatives, his devoted followers, priestly in lay. The nation newspaper, then in its youth and full of a fresh literary vigor, was one of his most brilliant instruments. At a later period of the agitation it was destined to be used against him and with severe effect. The famous monster meetings were usually held on a Sunday, on some open spot, mostly selected for its historic fame, and with all the picturesque surroundings of hill and stream. From the dawn of the summer day the repealers were thronging to the scene of the meeting. They came from all parts of the neighbouring country for miles and miles. They were commonly marshaled and guided by their parish priests. They all attended the services of their church before the meeting began. The influence of his religion and of his patriotic feelings was brought to bear at once upon the impressionable and emotional Irish Celt. At the meeting O'Connell and several of his chosen orators dressed the crowd on the subject of the wrongs done to Ireland by the Saxon, the claims of Ireland to the restoration of her old parliament and college green, and the certainty of her having it restored if Irishmen only obeyed O'Connell and their priests were sober and displayed their strength and their unity. O'Connell himself, it is needless to say, was always the great orator of the day. The agitation developed a great deal of literary talent among the younger men of education, but it never brought out a man who was even spoken of as a possible successor to O'Connell and eloquence. His magnificent voice enabled him to do what no genius or no eloquence, less aptly endowed could have done. He could send his lightest word thrilling to the extreme of the vast concourse of people whom he desired to move. He swayed them with the magic of an absolute control. He understood all the moods of his people to address himself to them came naturally to him. He made them roar with laughter. He made them weep. He made them thrill with indignation. As the shadow runs over a field, so the impression of his varying eloquence ran over the assemblage. He commanded the emotions of his hearers as a consummate conductor sways the energies of his orchestra. Every illusion told. When in one of his meetings, health and his native Kerry, he turned solemnly round and appealed to yonder blue mountains where you and I were cradled, or in sight of the objects he described he apostrophised Ireland as the land of the green valley in the rushing river, an admirably characteristic and complete description, or recalled some historical association connected with the scene he surveyed. Each was some special appeal to the instant feelings of his peculiar audience. Sometimes he indulged in the grossest in what ought to have been the most ridiculous flattery of his hearers, flattery which would have offended and disgusted the dullest English audience, but the Irish peasant with all his keen sense of the ridiculous and others is singularly open to the influence of an appeal to his own vanity. There is a great deal of the eternal womanly in the Celtic nature, and it is not easy to overflatter one of the race. Doubtless O'Connell knew this and acted purposely on it, and this was a peculiarity of his political conduct, which it would be hard indeed to commend or even to defend. But in truth he adopted in his agitation the tactics he had employed at the bar. A good speech is a good thing, he used to say, but the verdict is the thing. His flattery of his hearers was not grosser than his abuse of all those whom he did not like. His dispraise often had absolutely no meaning in it. There was no sense whatever in calling the Duke of Wellington a stunted corporal, one might as well have called Mont Blanc a molehill. Nobody could have shown more clearly than O'Connell did, that he did not believe the times to be an obscure rag. It would have been as humorous and as truthful to say that there was no such paper as the times. But these absurdities made an ignorant audience laugh for the moment, and O'Connell had gained the only point he just then wanted to carry. He would probably have answered anyone who remonstrated with him on the disingenuousness of such sayings, as Mrs. Thrail says Burke once answered her when she taxed him with a want of literary accuracy by quoting Odds Life, Must One Swear to the Truth of a Song? But this recklessness of epithet and description did much to make O'Connell distrusted and disliked in England, where in whatever heat, of political controversy, words are supposed to be the expressions of some manner of genuine sentiment. Of course, many of O'Connell's abusive epithets were not only full of humor, but did to some extent fairly represent the weaknesses at least of those against whom they were directed. Some of his historical illusions were of more mischievous nature than any mere personalities could have been. Peel and Wellington, he said, at Kilkenny, may be second Cromwells. They may get Cromwells' blunted truncheon, and they may, O sacred heavens, enact on the fair occupants of that gallery, pointing to the ladies' gallery, the murder of the Wexford women. Let it not be supposed that when I made that appeal to the ladies, it was but a flight of my imagination. No, when Cromwell entered the town of Wexford by treachery, three hundred ladies, the beauty and loveliness of Wexford, the young and the old, the maid and the matron, were collected round the cross of Christ. They prayed to heaven for mercy, and I hope they found it. They prayed to the English for humanity, and Cromwells slaughtered them. I tell you this, three hundred women, the grace and beauty and virtue of Wexford, were slaughtered by the English Ruffians, sacred heaven. He went on then to assure his hearers that the Ruffianly sacks in paper the times in the number received by me today presumes to threaten us again with such a scene. One would like to see the copy of the times which contains such a threat, or indeed any words that could be tortured into a semblance of any such hideous meaning. But the great agitator when he found that he had excited enough the horror of his audience, proceeded to reassure them by the means of all others most objectionable and dangerous at such a time, I am not imaginative, he said, when I talk of possibility of such scenes anew, but yet I assert that there is no danger to our women now, for the men of Ireland would die to the last in their defense. Here the whole meeting broke into a storm of impassioned cheering. I, the order exclaimed, when the storm found the momentary hush, we were a paltry remnant then, we are millions now. At Moulimast, O'Connell made an impassioned allusion to the massacre of Irish chieftains, said to have taken place on that very spot in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Three hundred and ninety Irish chieftes perished here. They came confiding in Saxon honour, relying on the protection of the Queen to a friendly conference. In the midst of revelry, in the cheerful light of the banquet house, they were surrounded and butchered. None returned save one. Their wives were widows, their children fatherless. In their homestead was heard the shrill shriek of despair, the cry of bitter agony. O Saxon cruelty, how it cheers my heart to think that you dare not attempt such a deed again. It is not necessary to point out what the effect of such descriptions and such allusions must have been upon an excitable and an ignorant peasant audience. On men who were ready to believe in all sincerity that England only wanted the opportunity to re-enact in the reign of Queen Victoria the scenes of Queen Elizabeth's or Cromwell's Day. The late Lord Lytton has given in his poem St. Stephen's a picturesque description of one of these meetings and of the effect produced upon himself by O'Connell's eloquence. Once to my sight he says the giant thus was given, walled by wide air and roofed by boundless heaven. He describes the human ocean lying spread out at the giant's feet, its wave on wave flowing into space away. None unnaturally, Lord Lytton thought, no clarion could have sent its sound even to the center of that crowd. And, as I thought, rose the sonorous swell as from some church tower swings the silvery bell, aloft and clear from airy tide to tide, it glided easy as a bird may glide. To the last verge of that vast audience sent it played with each wild passion as it went. Nor stirred the uproar, now the murmur stilled, and sobs and laughter answered as it willed. Then did I know what spells of infinite choice to rouse our lull has the sweet human voice. Then did I learn to seize the sudden clue to the grand troubleous life antique, to view, under the rock stand of Demosthenes, unstable Athens, heave her noisy seas. Once who attended the monster meetings came in a sort of military order and with a certain parade of military discipline. At the meeting held on the hill of Tara, where O'Connell stood beside the stone, said to have been used for the coronation of the ancient monarchs of Ireland, it is declared on the authority of careful and unsympathetic witnesses that a quarter of a million people must have been present. The government naturally felt that there was a very considerable danger in the massing together of such vast crowds of men in something like military array, and under the absolute leadership of one man, who openly avowed that he had called them together to show England what was the strength her statesmen would have to fear if they continued to deny repeal to his demand. It is certain now that O'Connell did not at any time mean to employ force for the attainment of his ends, but it is equally certain that he wished the English government to see that he had the command of an immense number of men, and probably even to believe that he would, if needs were, hurl them in rebellion upon England if ever she should be embarrassed with a foreign war. It is certain, too, that many of O'Connell's most ardent admirers, especially among the young men, were fully convinced that some day or other their leader would call on them to fight, and were much disappointed when they found that he had no such intention. The government at last resolved to interfere. A meeting was announced to be held at Clontarf on Sunday, October 8th, 1843. Clontarf is near Dublin and is famous in Irish history as the scene of a great victory of the Irish over their Danish invaders. It was intended that this meeting should surpass in numbers and in earnestness the assemblage at Tara. On the very day before the 8th the Lord Lieutenant issued a proclamation, prohibiting the meeting as calculated to excite reasonable and well-grounded apprehension, in that its object was to accomplish alterations in the laws and constitutions of the realm by intimidation and the demonstration of physical force. O'Connell's power over the people was never shown more effectively than in the control which at that critical moment he was still able to exercise. The populations were already coming to Clontarf in streams from all the country round when the proclamation of the Lord Lieutenant was issued. No doubt the Irish government ran a terrible risk when they delayed so long the issue of their proclamation. With the people already assembling in such masses, the risk of a collision with the police and the soldiery and of a consequent massacre is something still shocking to contemplate. It is not surprising perhaps if O'Connell and many of his followers made it a charge against the government that they intended to bring about such a collision in order to make an example of some of the repealers and thus strike terror through the country. Some sort of collision would almost undoubtedly have occurred but for the promptitude of O'Connell himself, he at once issued a proclamation of his own to which the populations were likely to pay far more attention than they would to anything coming from Dublin Castle. O'Connell declared that the orders of the Lord Lieutenant must be obeyed, that the meeting must not take place, and that the people must return to their homes. The uncrowned king as some of his admirers loved to call him was obeyed and no meeting was held. From that moment, however, the great power of the repeal agitation was gone. The government had accomplished far more by their proclamation than they could possibly have imagined at the time. They had, without knowing it, compelled O'Connell to show his hand. It was now made clear that he did not intend to have resort to force. From that hour there was virtually aschism between the elder repealers and the younger, the young and fiery followers of the great agitator lost all faith in him. It would in any case have been impossible to maintain for any very long time the state of national tension in which Ireland had been kept. It must soon come either to a climax or to an anticlimax. It came to an anticlimax. All the imposing demonstrations of physical strength lost their value when it was made positively known that they were only demonstrations and that nothing was ever to come of them. The eye of an attentive foreigner was then fixed on Ireland and on O'Connell. The eye of one destined to play a part in the political history of our time which none other has surpassed. Count Corur had not long returned to his own country from a visit made with the express purpose of studying the politics and the general condition of England and Ireland. He wrote to a friend about the crisis then passing in Ireland. When one is at a distance, he said, from the theatre of events, it is easy to make prophecies which have already been contradicted by facts. But according to my view O'Connell's fate is sealed. On the first vigorous demonstration of his opponents he has drawn back. From that moment he has ceased to be dangerous. Corur was perfectly right. It was never again possible to bring the Irish people up to the pitch of enthusiasm which O'Connell had wrought them to before the suppression of the Clontarf meeting, and before long the Irish national movement had split in two. The government had once proceeded to the prosecution of O'Connell and some of his principal associates. Daniel O'Connell himself, his son John, the late Sir John Gray, and Sir Charles Gavin Duffy, were the most conspicuous of those against whom the prosecution was directed. They were charged with conspiring to raise and excite disaffection among her Majesty's subjects, to excite them to hatred and contempt of the government and constitution of the realm. The trial was in many ways a singularly unfortunate proceeding. The government prosecutor objected to all the Catholics whose names were called as jurors. An error of the sheriffs and the construction of the jury lists had already reduced by a considerable mold number the role of Catholics entitled to serve on the juries. It therefore happened that the greatest of Irish Catholics, the representative Catholic of his day, the principal agent in the work of carrying Catholic emancipation, was tried by a jury composed exclusively of Protestants. It has only to be added that this was done in the metropolis of a country essentially Catholic, a country five-sixths of whose people were Catholics, and on a question affecting indirectly if not directly the whole position and claims of Catholics. The trial was long. O'Connell defended himself, and his speech was universally regarded as wanting the power that had made his defense of others so effective in former days. It was for the most part a sober and somewhat heavy argument to prove that Ireland had lost instead of gained by her union with England. The jury found O'Connell guilty, along with most of his associates, and he was sentenced to twelve months imprisonment and a fine of two thousand pounds. The others received lighter sentences. O'Connell appealed to the House of Lords against the sentence. In the meantime he issued a proclamation to the Irish people commanding them to keep perfectly quiet and not to commit any offense against the law. Every man, said one of his proclamations, who was guilty of the slightest breach of the peace is an enemy of me and of Ireland. The Irish people took him at his word and remained perfectly quiet. O'Connell and his principal associates were committed to Richmond prison in Dublin. The trial had been delayed in various ways, and the sentence was not pronounced until May 24, 1844. The appeal to the House of Lords, we may pass over intermediate stages of procedure, was heard in the following September. Five new Lords were present, though Lord Chancellor, Lord Lindhurst, and Lord Broome were of opinion, that the sentence of the court below should be affirmed. Lord Denman, Lord Cottenham, and Lord Campbell were of opposite opinion. Lord Denman in particular condemned the manner in which the jury lists had been prepared. Some of his words on the occasion became memorable and passed into a sort of proverbial expression. Such practice, as he said, would make of the law a mockery, a delusion, and a snare. A strange and memorable scene followed. The Constitution of the House of Lords, then and for long after, made no difference between law lords and others in voting on a question of appeal. As a matter of practice and a fairness the lay peers hardly ever interfered in the voting on an appeal. But they had an undoubted right to do so, and it is even certain that in one or two peculiar cases they had exercised the right. If the lay lords were to vote in this instance, the fate of O'Connell and his companions could not be doubtful. O'Connell had always been the bitter enemy of the House of Lords. He had vehemently denounced its authority, its practices, and its leading members. Nor, if the lay peers had voted and confirmed the judgment of the court below, could it have been positively said that an injustice was done by their interference. The majority of the judges on the writ of error had approved the judgment of the court below. In the House of Lords itself, the Lord Chancellor and Lord Broome were of opinion that the judgment ought to be sustained. There would therefore have been some ground for maintaining that the substantial justice of the case had been met by the action of the lay peers. On the other hand, it would have afforded a ground for a positive outcry in Ireland if a question purely of law had been decided by the votes of lay peers against their bitter enemy. One peer, Lord Warncliffe, made a timely appeal to the better judgment and feeling of his brethren. He urged them not to take a course which might allow anyone to say that political or personal feeling had prevailed in a judicial decision of the House of Lords. The appeal had its effect. A moment before, one lay peer at least had openly declared that he would insist on his right to vote. When the Lord Chancellor was about to put the question in the first instance to ascertain in the usual way whether a division would be necessary, several lay peers seemed as if they were determined to vote. But the appeal of Lord Warncliffe settled the matter. All the lay peers at once withdrew and left the matter according to the usual course in the hands of the law lords. The majority of these being against the judgment of the court below, it was accordingly reversed, and O'Connell and his associates were set at liberty. The propriety of a lay peer voting on a question of judicial appeal was never raised again so long as the appellate jurisdiction of the House of Lords was still exercised in the old and now obsolete fashion. Nothing could well have been more satisfactory and more fortunate in its results than the conduct of the House of Lords. The effect upon the mind of the Irish people would have been deplorable if it had been seen that O'Connell was convicted by a jury on which there were no Roman Catholics, and that the sentence was confirmed not by a judicial but by a strictly political vote of the House of Lords. As it was, the influence of the decision which proved that even in the assembly most bitterly denounced by O'Connell, he could receive fair play, was in the highest degree satisfactory. It cannot be doubted that it did something to weaken the force of O'Connell's own denunciations of sacks and treachery and wrongdoing. The influence of O'Connell was never the same after the trial. Many causes combined to bring about this result. Most writers ascribe it above all to the trial itself, and the evidence that afforded that the English government were strong enough to prosecute and punish even O'Connell if he provoked them too far. It is somewhat surprising to find intelligent men, like Mr. Green, the author of a short history of the English people, countenancing such a belief. If the House of Lords had by the votes of the lay peers confirmed the sentence on O'Connell, he would have come out of his prison at the expiration of his period of sentence more popular and more powerful than ever. Had his strength and faculty of agitation lasted, he might have agitated thenceforth with more effect than ever. If the Clontarf meeting had not disclosed to a large section of his followers that his policy, after all, was only to be one of talk, he might have come out of prison just the man he had been, the leader of all classes of Catholics and nationalists. But the real blow given to O'Connell's popularity was given by O'Connell himself. The moment it was made clear that nothing was to be done but agitate, and that all the monster meetings, the crowds and banners and bands of music, the marshalling and marching and reviewing, meant nothing more than Father Matthew's temperance meetings meant, that moment all the youth of the movement fell off from O'Connell. The young men were very silly as after events proved. O'Connell was far more wise and had an infinitely better estimate of the strength of England than they had. But it is certain that the young men were disgusted with the kind of gigantic sham which the great agitator seemed to have been conducting for so long a time. It would have been impossible to keep up for ever such an excitement as that which got together the monster meetings. Such heat cannot be brought up to the burning point, and kept there at will. A reaction was inevitable. O'Connell was getting old, and had lived the life of work and wear and tear, enough to break down even his constitution of iron. He had kept a great part of his own followers in heart as he had kept the government in alarm by leaving it doubtful whether he would not in the end make an appeal to the reserve of physical force which he so often boasted of having at his back. When the whole secret was out, he ceased to be an object of fear to the one and of enthusiasm to the other. It was neither the Lord Lieutenant's proclamation nor the prosecution by the government that impaired the influence of O'Connell. It was O'Connell's own proclamation declaring for submission to the law that dethroned him. From that moment the political monarch had to dispute with rebels for his crown, and the crown fell off in the struggle, like that which Ullin tells of in the Pretty Poem. For the Klontarf meeting had been the climax. There was all manner of national rejoicing when the decision of the House of Lords said O'Connell and his fellow prisoners free. There were illuminations, and banquets, and meetings, and triumphal processions, renewed declarations of allegiance to the great leader, and renewed protestations on his part that repeal was coming, but his reign was over. His death may as well be recorded here as later. His health broke down, and the disputes in which he became engaged with the young Irelanders dividing his party into two hostile camps were a grievous burden to him. In Lord Beckinsfield's Life of Lord George Bentech, a very touching description is given of the last speech made by O'Connell in Parliament. It was on April 3, 1846. His appearance, says Mr. Disraeli, was of great debility, and the tones of his voice were very still. His words indeed only reached those who were immediately around him, and the ministers sitting on the other side of the green table and listening with that interest and respectful attention which became the occasion. O'Connell spoke for nearly two hours. It was a strange and touching spectacle to those who remembered the form of colossal energy and the clear and thrilling tones that had once startled, disturbed, and controlled senates. To the House generally, it was a performance in dumb show, a feeble old man muttering before a table. But respect for the great parliamentary personage kept all as orderly as if the fortunes of a party hung upon his rhetoric, and though not an accent reached the gallery, means were taken that next morning the country should not lose the last and not the least interesting of the speeches of one who had so long occupied and agitated the minds of nations. O'Connell became seized with a profound melancholy. Only one desire seemed left to him, the desire to close his stormy career in Rome. The eternal city is the capital of the shrine, the mecca of the church, to which O'Connell was undoubtedly devoted with all his heart. He longed to lie down in the shadow of the Dome of St. Peter's, and rest there and there die. His youth had been wild in more ways than one, and he had long been under the influence of a profound penitence. He had killed a man in a duel, and was through all his afterlife haunted by regret for the deed, although it was really forced on him, and he had acted only as any other man of his time would have acted in such conditions. But now in his old and sinking days all the errors of his youth and his strong manhood came back upon him, and he longed to steep the painful memories in the sacred influences of Rome. He hurried to Italy at a time when the prospect of the famine darkening down upon his country cast an additional shadow across his outward path. He reached Genoa and he went no farther. His strength wholly failed him there, and he died, still far from Rome, on May 15, 1847. The close of his career was a mournful collapse. It was like the sudden crumbling in of some stately and commanding tower. The other day it seemed he filled a space of almost unequaled breadth and height in the political landscape, and now he is already gone, even with a thought the wrack dislimbs and makes it indistinct as water is in water. CHAPTER XIII. PEELS ADMINISTRATION. Part 1. Some important steps in the progress of what may be described as social legislation are part of the history of Peel's government. The act of parliament, which prohibited absolutely the employment of women and girls in minds and collieries, was rendered unavoidable by the fearful exposures made through the instrumentality of a commission appointed to inquire into the whole subject. This commission was appointed on the motion of the then Lord Ashley, since better known as the Earl of Shaftesbury, a man who during the whole of a long career has always devoted himself, sometimes wisely and successfully, sometimes indiscreetly and to little purpose, always with disinterested and benevolent intention, to the task of brightening the lives and lightening the burdens of the working classes and the poor. The commission found many hideous evils arising from the employment of women and girls underground, and Lord Ashley made such effective use of their disclosures that he encountered very little opposition when he came to propose restrictive legislation. In some of the coal mines, women were literally employed as beasts of burden. Where the seam of coal was too narrow to allow them to stand upright, they had to crawl back and forth on all fours for 14 or 16 hours a day, dragging the trucks laden with coals. The trucks were generally fastened to a chain which passed between the legs of the unfortunate women and was then connected with a belt which was strapped round to their naked wastes. Their only clothing often consisted of an old pair of trousers made of sacking, and they were uncovered from the waist up. Uncovered, that is to say, except for the grime and filth that collected and clotted around them. All manner of hideous diseases was generated in these unsexed bodies. Unsexed almost literally some of them became, for their chests were often hard and flat as those of men, and not a few of them lost all reproductive power. A happy condition truly under the circumstances where women who bore children only went up to the higher air for a week during their confinement and then were back at their work again. It would be superfluous to say that the immorality engendered by such a state of things was an exact keeping with the other evils which it brought about. Lord Ashley had the happiness and the honor of putting a stop to this infamous sort of labor forever by the act of 1842 which declared that after a certain period no woman or girl whatever should be employed in minds and collieries. Lord Ashley was less completely successful in his endeavor to secure a 10 hours limitation for the daily labor of women and young persons in factories. By a vigorous annual agitation on the general subject of factory labor in which Lord Ashley had followed in the footsteps of Mr. Michael Thomas Sadler, he brought the government up to the point of undertaking legislation on the subject. They first introduced a bill which combined a limitation of the labor of children in factories with a plan for compulsory education among the children. The educational clauses of the bill had to be abandoned in consequence of a somewhat narrow-minded opposition among the dissenters who feared that too much advantage was given to the church. Afterwards the government brought in another bill which became in the end the factories act of 1844. It was during the passing of this measure that Lord Ashley tried unsuccessfully to introduce his 10 hours limit. The bill diminished the working hours of children under 13 years of age and fixed them at six and a half hours each day, extending somewhat the time during which they were to be under daily instruction, and did a good many other useful and wholesome things. The principle of legislative interference to protect youthful workers in factories had been already established by the act of 1833, and Lord Ashley's agitation only obtained for it a somewhat extended application. It has since that time again and again received further extension, and in this time, as in the former, there is a constant controversy going on as to whether its principles ought not to be so extended as to guard in almost every way the labor of adult women and even of adult men. The controversy during Lord Ashley's agitation was always warm and often impassioned. Many thoroughly benevolent men and women could not bring themselves to believe that any satisfactory and permanent results could come of a legislative interference with what might be called the freedom of contract between employers and employed. They argued that it was idle to say the interference was only made or sought in the case of women and boys, for if the women and boys stop off working, they pointed out, the men must perforce in most cases stop off working, too. Some of the public men afterwards, most justly popular among the English artisan classes, were opposed to the measure on the ground that it was a heedless attempt to interfere with fixed economic laws. It was urged to and with much semblance of justice that the interference of the state for the protection or the compulsory education of children in factories would have been much better employed, and was far more loudly called for, in the case of the children employed in agricultural labor. The lot of a factory child, it was contended, is infinitely better in most respects than that of the poor little creature who is employed in the hollowing at the crows on a farm. The mill hand is well cared for, well paid, well able to care for himself and his wife and his family, it was argued, but what of the miserable Giles Grogans of Dorseture or Somerseture, who never has more in his life than just enough to keep body and soul together, and for whom, at the close, the workhouse is the only haven of rest? Why not legislate for him, at least for his wife and children? Neither point requires much consideration from us at present. We have to recognize historical facts, and it is certain that this country has made up its mind that for the present, and for a long time to come, Parliament will interfere in whatever way seems good to it with the conditions on which labor is carried on. There has been indeed a very marked advance or retrogression, whichever men may please to call it, in public opinion since the ten hours agitation. At that time, compulsory education and the principles of Mr. Gladston's Irish Land Act would have seemed alike impossible to most persons in this country. The practical mind of the Englishman carries to an extreme the dislike and contempt for what the French call les principes in politics. Therefore, we oscillate a good deal, the pendulum swinging now very far in the direction of non-interference with individual action, and now still farther in the direction of universal interference and regulation. What was once humorously described as grandmotherly legislation. With our recent experiences, we can only be surprised that a few years ago there was such a repugnance to the modest amount of interference with individual rights which Lord Ashley's extremist proposals would have sought to introduce. As regards the other point, it is certain that Parliament will at one time or another do for the children in the fields something very like that which it has done for the children in the factories. It is enough for us to know that practically the factory legislation has worked very well, and that the non-interference in the fields is a far heavier responsibility on the conscience of Parliament than interference in the factories. Many other things done by Sir Robert Peel's government aroused bitter controversy and agitation. In one or two remarkable instances, the ministerial policy went near to producing that discord in the Conservative Party which we shall presently see break out into passion and schism when Peel came to deal with the Corn Laws. There was, for example, the grant to the Roman Catholic College of Menuth, a college for the education especially of young men who sought to enter the ranks of the priesthood. The grant was not a new thing, since before the active union a grant had been made for the college. The government of Sir Robert Peel only proposed to make that which was insufficient, sufficient, to enable the college to be kept in repair and to accomplish the purpose for which it was founded. As Macaulay put it, there was no more question of principle involved than there would be in the sacrifice of a pound instead of a pennyweight on some particular altar. Yet the ministerial proposition called up a very tempest of clamorous bigotry all over the country. What Macaulay described in fierce scorn as the Bray of Exeter Hall was heard resounding every day and night. Peel carried his measure, although nearly half his own party in the House of Commons voted against it on the second reading. The whole controversy has little interest now. Perhaps it will be found to live in the memory of many persons, chiefly because of the quarrel it caused between Macaulay and his Edinburgh constituents, and of the annual motion for the withdrawal of the grant which was for so long afterwards one of the regular boars of the House of Commons. Many of us can well remember the venerable form of the late Mr. Spooner as year after year he addressed an apathetic scanty and half-amused audience, pottering over his papers by the light of two candles specially placed for his convenience on the table in front of the speaker, and endeavouring in vain to arouse England to serious attention on the subject of the awful fate she was preparing for herself by her toleration of the principles of Rome. The Meneuth grant was abolished indeed not long after Mr. Spooner's death, but the manner of its abolition would have given him less comfort even than its introduction. It was abolished when Mr. Gladstone's government abolished the State Church in Ireland. Another of Peel's measures which aroused much clamour on both sides was that for the establishment of what was afterwards called the Godless Colleges in Ireland. O'Connell has often had the credit of applying this nickname to the new colleges, but it was in fact from the extremist of all no-popery men Sir Robert Henry Ingalls that the expression came. It was indeed from Sir Robert Ingalls' side that the first note sounded of opposition to the scheme, although O'Connell afterwards took it vigorously up, and the Pope and the Irish bishops condemned the colleges. There was objection within the ministry as well as without to the Meneuth grant. Mr. Gladstone who had been doing admirable work, first as Vice President and afterwards as President of the Board of Trade, resigned his office because of this proposal. He acted perhaps with a too sensitive chivalry. He had written a book, as all the world knows, on the relations of church and state, and he did not think the views expressed in that book left him free to cooperate in the ministerial measure. Some staid politicians were shocked, many more smiled, not a few sneered. The public in general applauded the spirit of disinterestedness which dictated the Young Statesmen's Act. Mr. Gladstone, however, supported the Queen's College scheme by voice and vote. The proposal of the government was to establish in Ireland three colleges, one in Cork, the second in Belfast, and the third in Galway, and to affiliate these to a new university to be called the Queen's University in Ireland. The teaching in these colleges was to be purely secular. Nothing could be more admirable than the intentions of Peel and his colleagues, nor could it be denied that there might have been good seeming hope for a plan which thus proposed to open a sort of neutral ground in the educational controversy. But from both sides of the house and from the extreme party in each church came an equally fierce denunciation of the proposal to separate secular from religious education. Nor surely could the claim of the Irish Catholics be said even by the warmest advocate of undenominational education to have no reason on its side. The small minority of Protestants in Ireland had their college and their university established as a distinctively Protestant institution. Why should not the great majority who were Catholics ask for something of the same kind for themselves? Peel carried his measure but the controversy has gone on ever since and we have yet to see whether the scheme is a success or a failure. One small installment of justice to a much injured and long suffering religious body was accomplished without any trouble by Sir Robert Peel's government. This was the bill for removing the test by which Jews were excluded from certain municipal offices. A Jew might be high sheriff of a county or sheriff of London but with an inconsistency which was as ridiculous as it was narrow-minded he was prevented from becoming a mayor or an alderman or even a member of the Common Council. The oath which had to be taken included the words on the true faith of a Christian. Lord Lindhurst, the Lord Chancellor, introduced the measure to get rid of this absurd anomaly and the House of Lords who had firmly rejected similar proposals of relief before passed it without difficulty. It was of course passed by the House of Commons which had done its best to introduce the reform in previous sessions and without success. The Bank Charter Act separating the issue from the banking department of the Bank of England limiting the issue of notes to a fixed amount of securities and requiring the whole of the further circulation to be on a basis of bullion and prohibiting the formation of any new banks of issue is a characteristic and important measure of Peele's government. To Peele too we owe the establishment of the income tax on its present basis a doubtful boon. The copyright question was at last advanced this stage. Railways were regulated. The railway mania and railway panic also belong to this active period. The country went wild with railway speculation. The South Sea scheme was hardly more of a bubble or hardly burst more suddenly or disastrously. The vulgar and flashy successes of one or two lucky adventurers turned the heads of the whole community. For a time it seemed to be a national article of faith that the capacity of the country to absorb new railway schemes and make them profitable was unlimited and that to make a fortune one had only to take shares in anything. An odd feature of the time was the outbreak of what were called the Rebecca riots in Wales. These riots arose out of the anger and impatience of the people at the great increase of toll bars and tolls on the public roads. Someone it was supposed had hit upon a passage in Genesis which supplies a model for their grievance and their complaint and they blessed Rebecca and said unto her let thy seed possess the gate of those which hate them. They said about accordingly to possess very effectually the gates of those which hated them. Mobs assembled every night, destroyed turnpikes and dispersed. They met with little molestation in most cases for a while. The mobs were always led by a man in women's clothes, supposed to represent the typical Rebecca. As the disturbances went on it was found that no easier mode of disguise could be got than a woman's clothes and therefore in many of the riots petticoats might almost be said to be the uniform of the insurgents' force. Night after night for months these midnight musterings took place. Rebecca and her daughters became the terror of many regions. As the work went on it became more serious. Rebecca and her daughters grew bold. There were conflicts with the police and with the soldiers. It is to be feared that men and even women died for Rebecca. At last the government succeeded in putting down the riots and had the wisdom to appoint a commission to inquire into the cause of so much disturbance and the commission as will readily be imagined found that there were genuine grievances at the bottom of the popular excitement. The farmers and the laborers were poor. The tolls were seriously oppressive. The government dealt lightly with most of the rioters who had been captured and introduced measures which removed the grievances most seriously complained of. Rebecca and her daughters were heard of no more. They had made out their case and done in their wild, mumming way something of good work. Only a short time before the rioters would have been shot down and the grievances would have been allowed to stand. Rebecca and her short career mark an advancement in the political and social history of England. Sir James Graham, the Home Secretary, brought himself and the government into some trouble by the manner in which he made use of the power invested in the administration for the opening of private letters. Mr. Duncombe, the radical member for Finsbury, presented a petition from Joseph Mazzini and others complaining that letters addressed to them had been opened in the post office. Many of Mazzini's friends and perhaps Mazzini himself believed that the contents of these letters had been communicated to the Sardinian and Austrian governments and that as a result, men who were supposed to be implicated in projects of insurrection on the continent had actually been arrested and put to death. Sir James Graham did not deny that he had issued a warrant authorizing the opening of some of Mazzini's letters, but he contended that the right to open letters had been specially reserved to the government on its responsibility, that it had been always exercised, but by him with special caution and moderation, in that it would be impossible for any government absolutely to deprive itself of such a right. The public excitement was at first very great, but it soon subsided. The reports of parliamentary committees appointed by the two houses showed that all governments had exercised the right, but naturally with decreasing frequency and greater caution of late years, and that there was no chance now of its being seriously abused. No one, not even Thomas Carlisle, who had written to the Times in generous indignation at the opening of Mazzini's letters, went so far as to say that such a right should never be exercised. Carlisle admitted that he would tolerate the practice when some new gunpowder plot may be in the wind. Some double-dyed high treason or imminent national wreck not avoidable otherwise. In the particular case of Mazzini, it seemed an odious trick, and everyone was ashamed of it. Such a feeling was the surest guard against abuse for the future, and the matter was allowed to drop. The minister is to be pityed who was compelled even by legitimate necessity to have recourse to such an expedient. He would be despised now by every decent man if he turned to it without such justification. Many years had to pass away before Sir James Graham was free from innuendos and attacks on the ground that he had tampered with the correspondence of an exile. One remark on the other hand it is right to make. An exile is sheltered in a country like England, on the assumption that he does not involve her in responsibility and danger by using her protection as a shield behind which to contrive plots and organize insurrections against foreign governments. It is certain that Mazzini did make use of the shelter England gave him for such a purpose. It would in the end be to the heavy injury of all fugitives from despotic rule if to shelter them brought such consequences on the countries that offered them a home. The Peel administration was made memorable by many remarkable events at home as well as abroad. It had, as we have seen, inherited wars and brought them to a close. It had wars of its own. Sinned was annexed by Lord Ellenborough in consequence of the disputes which had arisen between us and the Amirs, whom we accused of having broken faith with us. They were said to be in correspondence with our enemies, which may possibly have been true, and to have failed to pay up our tribute which was very likely. Anyhow we found occasion for an attack on Sinned and the result was the total defeat of the princes and their army and the annexation of the territory. Sir Charles Napier won a splendid victory, splendid that is in a military sense, over an enemy outnumbering him by more than twelve to one at the Battle of Miani, and Sinned was ours. Peel and his colleagues accepted the annexation, none of them liked it, but none saw how it could be undone. There was nothing to be proud of in the matter except the courage of our soldiers and the genius of Sir Charles Napier, one of the most brilliant, daring, successful, eccentric, and self-conceited captains who had ever fought in the service of England since the days of Peterborough. Later on the Sikhs invaded our territory by crossing the Sutledge in great force. Sir Hugh Goff, afterwards Lord Goff, fought several fierce battles with them before he could conquer them, and even then they were only conquered for the time. We were at one moment apparently on a very verge of what must be proved a far more serious war much nearer home, in consequence of the dispute that arose between this country and France about Tahiti and Queen Pomeray. Queen Pomeray was sovereign of the island of Tahiti in the South Pacific, the Otaheide of Captain Cook. She was a pupil of some of our missionaries and was very friendly to England and its people. She had been induced or compelled to put herself and her dominion under the protection of France, a step which was highly displeasing to her subjects. Some ill-feeling toward the French residents of the island was shown, and the French admiral who had induced or compelled the Queen to put herself under French protection now suddenly appeared off the coast and called on her to hoist the French flag above her own. She refused, and he instantly effected a landing on the island, pulled down her flag, raised that of France in its place, and proclaimed that the island was French territory. The French admiral appears to have been a hot-headed, thoughtless sort of man, the Commodore Wilkes of his day. His act was at once disavowed by the French government and condemned in strong terms by Monsieur Guiseau, but Queen Pomerée had appealed to the Queen of England for assistance. Do not cast me away, my friend, she said. I run to you for refuge to be covered under your great shadow, the same that afforded relief to my fathers, by your fathers, who are now dead and whose kingdoms have descended to us the weaker vessels. A large party in France allowed themselves to become inflamed, with the idea that British intrigue was at the bottom of the Tahiti people's dislike to the protectorate of France, and that England wanted to get Queen Pomerée's dominions for herself. They cried out therefore that to take down the flag of France from its place in Tahiti would be to insult the dignity of the French nation and to insult it at the instance of England. The cry was echoed in the shrillest tones by a great number of French newspapers. Where the flag of France has once been hoisted they screamed, it must never be taken down, which is about equivalent to saying that if a man's officious servant carries off the property of someone else and gives it to his master, the master's dignity is lowered by his consenting to hand it back to its owner. In the face of this clamor the French government, although they disavowed any share in the filibustering of their admiral, did not show themselves in great haste to undo what he had done. Possibly they found themselves in something of the same difficulty as the English government in regard to the annexation of Sindh. They could not perhaps with great safety to themselves have ventured to be honest all at once, and in any case they did not want to give up the protectorate of Tahiti. While the more hot-headed on both sides of the English Channel were thus snarling at each other, the difficulty was immensely complicated by the seizure of a missionary named Prichard who had been our consul in the island up to the deposition of Pomeré. A French sentinel had been attacked or was said to have been attacked in the night, and in consequence the French commandant seized Prichard in reprisal, declaring him to be the only mover and instigator of disturbances among the natives. Prichard was flung into prison and only released to be expelled from the island. He came home to England with his story, and his arrival was the signal of an outburst of indignation all over the country. Sir Robert Peele and Lord Aberdeen alike stigmatized the treatment of Prichard as a gross and intolerable outrage, and satisfaction was demanded of the French government. The King and Monsieur Guiseaux were both willing that full justice should be done, and both anxious to avoid any occasion of ill-feeling with England. The King had lately been receiving with effusive show of affection a visit from our Queen in France and was about to return it. But so hot was popular passion on both sides that it would have needed stronger and juster natures than those of the King and his minister to venture at once on doing the right thing. It was on the last day of the session of 1844, September 5, that Sir Robert Peele was able to announce that the French government had agreed to compensate Prichard for his sufferings and losses. Queen Pomeré was nominally restored to power, but the French protection proved as stringent as if it were a sovereign rule. She might as well have pulled down her flag for all the sovereign right it secured to her. She died 34 years after, and her death recalled to the memory of the English public the long-forgotten fact that she had once so nearly been the cause of a war between England and France. The Ashburton Treaty and the Oregon Treaty belong alike to the History of Peele's administration. The Ashburton Treaty bears date August 9, 1842, and arranges finally the north-western boundary between the British provinces of North America and the United States. For many years the want of any clear and settled understanding as to the boundary line between Canada and the state of Maine had been a source of some disturbance and of much controversy. Arbitration between England and the United States had been tried and failed, both parties declining the award. Sir Robert Peele sent out Lord Ashburton, formerly Mr. Bering, as plenipotentiary to Washington in 1842, and by his intelligent exertions an arrangement was come to which appears to have given mutual satisfaction ever since, despite of the sinister prophesying of Lord Palmerston at the time. The Oregon question was more complicated and was the source of a longer controversy. More than once the dispute about the boundary line in the Oregon region had very nearly become an occasion for war between England and the United States. In Canning's time there was a crisis during which to quote the words of an English statesman, war could have been brought about by the holding up of a finger. The question in dispute was as to the boundary line between English and American territory west of the Rocky Mountains. It had seemed a matter of little importance at one time when the country west of the Rocky Mountains was regarded by most persons as little better than a desert idol. But when the vast capacities and the splendid future of the Pacific slope began to be recognized and the importance to us of some station and harbor there came to be more and more evident, the dispute naturally swelled into a question of vital interest to both nations. In 1818 an attempt at arrangement was made but failed. The two governments then agreed to leave the disputed regions to joint occupation for ten years after which the subject was to be opened again. When the end of the first term came near Canning did his best to bring about a settlement but failed. The dispute involved the ownership of the mouth of the Columbia River and of the noble island which bears the name of Vancouver off the coast of British Columbia. The joint occupancy was renewed for an indefinite time but in 1843 the President of the United States somewhat peremptorily called for a final settlement of the boundary. The question was eagerly taken up by excitable politicians in the American House of Representatives. For more than two years the Oregon question became a party cry in America. With a large proportion of the American public including of course nearly all citizens of Irish birth or extraction, any President would have been popular beyond measure who had forced a war on England. Calmer and wiser councils prevailed however on both sides. Lord Aberdeen, our Foreign Secretary, was especially moderate and conciliatory. He offered a compromise which was at last accepted. On June 15, 1846 the Oregon treaty settled the question for that time at least. The dividing line was to be the 49th degree of latitude from the Rocky Mountains West to the middle of the channel separating Vancouver Island from the mainland, then southerly through the middle of the channel and the Fouca straits to the Pacific. The channel and the straits were to be free as also the great northern branch of the Columbia River. In other words, Vancouver's Island remained to Great Britain and the free navigation of the Columbia River was secured. We have said that the question was settled for that time because an important part of it came up again for settlement many years after. The commissioners appointed to determine that portion of the boundary which was to run southerly through the middle of the channel were unable to come to any agreement on the subject and the divergence of the claims made on one side and the other constituted a new question, which became a part of the famous Treaty of Washington in 1871 and was finally settled by the arbitration of the Emperor of Germany. But it is much to the honor of the Peel administration that a dispute which had for years been charged with possibilities of war and had become a stock subject of political agitation in America should have been so far settled as to be removed forever after out of the category of disputes which suggest an appeal to arms. This was one of the last acts of Peel's government and it was not the least of the great things he had done. We have soon to tell how it came about that it was one of his latest triumphs and how an administration which had come into power with such splendid promise and had accomplished so much in such various fields of legislation was brought so suddenly to a fall. The story is one of the most remarkable and important chapters in the history of English politics and parties. During Peel's time we catch a last glimpse of the famous Arctic navigator Sir John Franklin. He sailed on the expedition which was doomed to be his last on May 26th 1845 with his two vessels Arabus and Terror. Not much more is heard of him as among the living. We may say of him as Carlile says of La Peruse. The brave navigator goes and returns not. The seekers search far seas for him in vain. Only some mournful mysterious shadow of him hovers long in our heads and hearts. End of section 31.