II
In May 1861 Mr. Gladstone notes “a day of over fourteen hours: thank God for the strength.” The atmosphere around him would have depressed a weaker man. “At Brooks's,” says Phillimore, “they hate Gladstone worse than at the Carlton.” In the summer the strife upon expenditure was renewed. Eventually Mr. Gladstone was able to write to Graham from the cabinet room (July 20, 1861) that Castor and Pollux appeared aloft at the right moment, and the clouds had disappeared. In a letter to his close friend, Sir Walter James, in 1871 Mr. Gladstone says: “The storm of criticism and rebuke does not surprise nor discourage me. Doubtless much must be just; and what is not, is what we call in logic an ‘inseparable accident’ of politics. Time and reflection will, please God, enable us to distinguish between them. For my own part I never was so abused as in 1860; but it was one of the most useful or least useless years of my life.” The battle was as severe in 1861 as it had been the year before. In the middle of the session (May 9) Phillimore reports: “Found Gladstone in good spirits; he spoke with real greatness of mind of the attacks made on him.”
Correspondence With The Prime Minister
The next year Lord Palmerston wrote to express his concern at something that he came upon in a railway journey. “I read with much interest,” he wrote to his chancellor of the exchequer (April 29, 1862), “your able and eloquent speeches at Manchester, but I wish to submit to you some observations upon the financial part of the second speech.” He did not agree with Mr. Gladstone that the [pg 049] nation had forced the cabinet and parliament into high expenditure, but if it were so, he regarded it not as matter of reproach, but as a proof of the nation's superior sagacity. Panic there had been none; governors and governed had for a long time been blind and apathetic; then they awoke. There was on the other side of the channel a people who, say what they may, hate us and would make any sacrifice to humiliate us, and they had now at their head an able, active, wary, council-keeping, but ever-planning sovereign [Napoleon III.]. “Have the parliament and the nation been wrong, and have Bright and Cobden and yourself been right?” All this being so, he could not but regret that Mr. Gladstone should by speeches in and out of parliament invite agitation to force the government of which he was a member, to retrace its steps taken deliberately and with full sense of responsibility.[33] To Palmerston's eight quarto pages, written in one of the finest hands of the time, Mr. Gladstone replied in twelve.
In all good humour, he said, I prefer not being classed with Mr. Bright, or even Mr. Cobden; first, because I do not know their opinions with any precision; and secondly, because as far as I do know or can grasp them, they seem to contemplate fundamental changes in taxation which I disapprove in principle, and believe also to be unattainable in practice, and reductions of establishment and expenditure for which I am not prepared to be responsible.... I think it a mean and guilty course to hold out vague and indefinite promises of vast retrenchment, but I think it will be a healthful day, both for the country and for the party over which you so ably preside, when the word retrenchment, of course with a due regard to altered circumstances, shall again take its place among their battle cries.
A spirited correspondence followed, for Lord Palmerston knew his business, and had abundant faculty of application; while Mr. Gladstone, for his part, was too much in earnest to forego rejoinder and even surrejoinder. “No claptrap reductions,” cried the prime minister. “You are feeding not only expenditure,” rejoined the chancellor of the exchequer, “but [pg 050] what is worse, the spirit of expenditure.” “You disclaim political community of opinion with Bright and Cobden, and justly,” said Lord Palmerston, “but you cannot but be aware that owing to various accidental circumstances many people at home and abroad connect you unjustly with them, and this false impression is certainly not advantageous.”
“My dear Gladstone,” he wrote good-humouredly on another occasion, “You may not have seen how your name is taken in vain by people with whom I conceive you do not sympathise,—Yours sincerely,
Palmerston.”
Enclosed was a placard with many large capital letters, notes of exclamation, italics, and all the rest of the paraphernalia of political emphasis:—
TAX PAYERS! Read Mr. Cobden's new pamphlet, the “Three Panics,” and judge for yourselves. How long will you suffer Yourselves to be Humbugged by PALMERSTONIANISM, and Robbed by the “Services,” and others interested in a War Expenditure, even in times of Peace? ... The Chancellor of the Exchequer appeals to you to help him. You have the power in your own hands if you will only exert it. Reform the House of Commons, and do it thoroughly this time.
Of the continuance of the struggle in 1862, a few items from the diary give an adequate picture:—
Jan. 30, 1862.—A heavy blow in the announcement of increased military estimates from Sir George Lewis gave me a disturbed evening. 31.—Worked on the formidable subject of the estimates, and made known to the cabinet my difficulties. Feb. 1.—Cabinet 3-½—6. It went well; the tenth penny [on the income-tax] proved to be a strong physic; £750,000 of reductions ordered. 12.—Wrote mem. on possible reductions, etc., to dispense with income-tax. The whole question, I think, is, can we be satisfied (I think we ought and will) with 21 millions for army and navy instead of 27? March 1.—Cabinet 3-3/4—6-1/4, very stiff, on the Belgian negotiations I had to go to the ultima ratio. 31.—H. of C. The fortifications got their first blow.
By midsummer public feeling veered a little: “The tide has turned. Lord Palmerston is now ‘the strong swimmer in his agony.’ ”[34]
A candid and friendly observer has told us the situation: “When I was private secretary to Lord Palmerston,” he says, “and Mr. Gladstone was his chancellor of the exchequer, it was a constant source of sorrow to me, and a perpetual cause of mystery, to note how they misunderstood one another, and how evidently each mistrusted the other, though perfectly cordial and most friendly in their mutual intercourse.... If the proposal was adhered to, Mr. Gladstone gave way. This seemed to Lord Palmerston a case of gratuitous difficulties put in his way, and attempts to thwart without the courage to resist.”[35]
In closing this chapter, let us note that in spite of Lord Palmerston, he won no inconsiderable success. When 1866 came, and his financial administration ended, he had managed, with the aid of the reduction of debt charge after the lapse of the long annuities, to carry expenditure back to the level of 1857. Naval expenditure rose until 1861, and then began to fall; army expenditure rose until 1863, and then began to fall. In 1859, when he went to the exchequer, the total under these two heads was nearly twenty-six millions; when he quitted office in 1866 the total was twenty-four millions. In the middle years it had swelled to twenty-eight. After half a dozen years of panic and extravagance, all sedulously fostered by a strong prime minister, that he should still have left the cost of government little higher than he found it was no defeat, but an extremely satisfactory performance. “We must follow the nature of our affairs,” Burke says, “and conform ourselves to our situation. Why should we resolve to do nothing because what I propose to you may not be the exact demand of the petition? If we cry, like children, for the moon, like children we must cry on.”[36]