STREET SCENE, KINGSTON, JAMAICA.
(From a Photograph by J. Valentine and Son, Dundee.)
Now, even supposing the proclamation of martial law to have been legal, which we believe it not to have been, it expressly excluded Kingston from the operation of martial law. What Governor Eyre did, therefore, was to seize a political opponent, to carry him off in a ship of war from a district under civil jurisdiction to a district under military jurisdiction, and then to hand him over to the tender mercies of a court-martial. The court was composed of two naval lieutenants and an ensign lately gazetted; one of the lieutenants being the same Lieutenant Brand who with a couple of "dingy boys" from his ship, had "had the pleasure" (his own words) of hanging the first "rebel," and shooting him with his own revolver as he hung; who had openly said that "nothing would give him greater pleasure than hanging this——Gordon." Mr. Gordon was an old man; he had been barbarously treated; he was wretchedly ill. Before his trial he was called out by Ramsay, the Provost-Marshal, to witness the execution of Grant, who had been a political friend of his. "Look there," said Ramsay; "that is your friend Grant, and you will be hanged like him." A Mr. Joseph G. Smith, a volunteer, thus tells, in his evidence before the Commission, how witnesses were collected against Mr. Gordon:—
"Afterwards I went into the guard-room, and he [Ramsay] was then swearing five of the prisoners, with their hands fastened and a rope round their necks, and he was swearing them in these words, 'You shall well and truly state what G. W. Gordon has to do with the rebellion;' and between each part of this a sailor came down with the whip over their shoulders."
On evidence of this kind, the evidence of men who had had the promise of their lives if they would accuse him, Mr. Gordon was tried. As to the taking of the evidence, we have the words of the Lord Chief Justice of England, Sir Alexander Cockburn, in his famous charge to the grand jury in the case of Nelson and Brand: "He could not be tried on that evidence. No competent judge acquainted with his duties could have received that evidence. Three-fourths—I had almost said nine-tenths—of the evidence upon which that man was convicted and sentenced to death, was evidence which, according to no known rules—not only of ordinary, but of military law—according to no known rules of right or justice, could possibly have been admitted." But even supposing it had been admitted, all that was proved was that Mr. Gordon had written letters to, and been on friendly terms with, some of the rioters; but none of the letters were produced except one, where he said that "the people of Jamaica were very wretched." He was proved to have called the Governor "a bad man." He was proved to have had an action-at-law against the late custos von Kettelholt. Above all, he was proved to have spoken at public meetings, and to have dwelt on the misery of the negroes and the way in which their case was misrepresented to the Colonial Office. For these offences—literally for none other—he was sentenced to death. Lieutenant Brand signed his sentence, and Brigadier Nelson approved it. "He asked to see the Reverend Mr. Panther, Wesleyan minister," wrote Brigadier Nelson; "I considered it inexpedient." Without the consolations of religion, condemned on less than no evidence by an unauthorised and incompetent tribunal, Mr. Gordon was hanged on the 23rd of October, 1865. He had been in life the representative of the negroes of Jamaica in their cry for equal government; in death he was their representative in their cry for justice.
"The total number of deaths caused by those engaged in the suppression amounted to 439, and the total number of dwellings burned was 1,000.... The whole number subjected to the degrading punishment [of flogging], during the continuance of martial law, we think could not be less than 600." These are the words of the Report of the Royal Commission, consisting of General Sir Henry Storks, Governor of Malta, Mr. Russell Gurney, Recorder of London, and Mr. Maule, Recorder of Leeds, who were sent out to Jamaica in the beginning of 1866, and who sat for fifty-one days examining witnesses. Long before the Commission went out, however—in fact, as soon as the news of the "suppression" arrived in England—public opinion had been roused. Public meetings took place, and a committee—the Jamaica Committee—was formed headed by Mr. John Stuart Mill, to see that full investigations were made, and that legal remedies were sought against those who had been guilty of illegal excess. Mr. Carlyle came forward as a champion of Governor Eyre. The Jamaica Committee announced that, "having been advised that the facts disclosed in the Report of the Royal Commissioners afford a proper ground for an indictment for murder to be preferred against Mr. Eyre and the other persons concerned in the trial and execution of Mr. Gordon, and that no other mode of vindicating the law in reference to those facts is open to them, they have instructed their solicitors to proceed forthwith with an indictment against Mr. Eyre." They did proceed with an indictment against Mr. Eyre, Brigadier Nelson, and Lieutenant Brand. Mr. Eyre was domiciled in the country—he had been recalled from Jamaica and superseded—and the question of committing him for trial was argued before a Shropshire bench of magistrates. The Shropshire bench of magistrates declined to commit him. The London stipendiary magistrate, being a trained lawyer, understood his duty differently in the case of Nelson and Brand; he committed them for trial at the Central Criminal Court. The prosecution failed in the end; but not before it had elicited from the Lord Chief Justice a charge to the grand jury so elaborate, so learned, so telling, and so clear, that it may be said to have once for all defined the scope of "martial law," and to have once for all settled the rights and duties of local authorities in dealing with riot or insurrection. Two points stand out clear from the Chief Justice's charge: first, that martial law, exercised in Great Britain or in any of her dependencies, means the law administered by courts-martial—the law, that is to say, which is laid down for the trial of military offenders by military courts; secondly, that, by the Petition of Right and all the statutes and examples which have confirmed it, civilians are in no case amenable to this law. What, then, the Governor and the military authorities in Jamaica had the right to do, was to use all diligence in suppressing what, for a moment—though probably wrongly—appeared to be a formidable insurrection; and to do this by military force. They had undoubtedly the right to put to death or flog any rebel captured with arms in his hands; their justification in this was, that highest law—necessity and the right of self-preservation. They had also the right to seize any dangerous persons and hand them over to the civil courts. But they had no right to assume a jurisdiction over the whole actions of civilians, to hang and flog and burn on mere charges of "complicity" or of past guilt. The trial of Mr. Gordon—all the trials that took place in the county of Surrey in that dreadful time—were no trials at all; they were military cruelty and race tyranny aping the forms of law. The grand jury threw out the bill, but made a formal presentment, "strongly recommending that martial law should be more clearly defined by legislative enactment." Mr. Eyre and his subordinates escaped, and in 1872, numerous suits instituted by his opponents having failed and a considerable revulsion of feeling having taken place in his favour, his expenses were paid by Government. It is a consolation that the changes which followed upon her ordeal of fire were fruitful to Jamaica. After Sir Henry Storks returned from his temporary government of the island, a new Governor was found in a distinguished and able Indian official, Sir John Peter Grant. Under his rule security was established and brought a moderate measure of prosperity in its train.
During the whole of the year 1866 two great subjects occupied everybody's mind—the war in Germany, its antecedents and its consequences, and Parliamentary Reform at home. We may proceed at once to tell the story of the unsuccessful attempt of Lord Russell's Government to carry the Reform Bill, and of the serious popular agitation that followed upon their overthrow. The cause of the defeat of the Bill of 1860 was undoubtedly the indifferent attitude of Lord Palmerston, which represented that of the public. In 1865 Mr. Baines brought in a Bill, which was defeated. Soon afterwards Lord Palmerston died and the principal barrier to a successful Bill was removed. Even before his death, in the months that were spent in canvassing for the general election, "both among Liberal and Tory candidates," said Mr. Bright, "the question of Reform was mentioned in some way or other, either in their written or spoken addresses to their constituents." But when, after the news arrived that the veteran Prime Minister had died, Lord Russell succeeded to his place, and Mr. Gladstone took the position of unfettered leader of the House of Commons, it was known that Reform was to be immediately approached as a Government measure. Many of their colleagues were averse from re-opening the question and to overcome their scruples a mild Bill was promised.
Parliament opened amid general interest and excitement with regard to Reform; and in March Mr. Gladstone brought in his "Bill to extend the Right of Voting at Elections of Members of Parliament in England and Wales." This important Bill, upon which was based so much of the Reform Bill of 1867, was at first sight extremely moderate. In the first place, it advanced the property qualification for the borough franchise which Lord Russell's Bill had fixed at £6 to £7—a step which Mr. Gladstone explained as follows: "A £6 rental, calculated upon the most careful investigation, and after making every allowance and deduction that ought to be made, would give 242,000 new voters, whom I should take as all belonging to the working class. I should then arrive at a gross total of 428,000 persons" (that is, by adding together old and new electors), "which would, in fact, probably place the working classes in a clear majority upon the constituency. Well, that has never been the intention of any Bill proposed in this House. I do not think it is a proposal that Parliament would ever adopt.... I do not think that we are called upon by any overruling or sufficient consideration, under the circumstances, to give over the majority of the town constituencies into the hands of the working class. We therefore propose to take the figure next above that which I have named—namely, a clear annual value of £7." Under the £7 qualification it was calculated that 144,000 voters of the working class would be admitted to the borough franchise—enough to give the artisan class its due weight and share in elections, without swamping the other elements of the constituency. Mr. Gladstone also proposed—by means of the abolition of the ratepaying clauses of the Reform Act of 1832, by registration of compound householders, and by a lodger franchise applicable to persons occupying rooms of the annual value of £10—to further increase the number of borough voters by 60,000, giving a general increase of 204,000. To this increase must be added the proposed number of new county voters, "fourteen-pound tenants," 172,000 in number; and the depositors in saving-banks, etc., 24,000 more. In all, the number of new voters to be added by the Bill was estimated at 400,000, equally divided, according to the belief of the framers of the Bill, between the middle class and the artisans.
Mr. Gladstone introduced his Bill on March 12th, 1866, in a speech worthy of the occasion. At the outset he read the passage in the Queen's Speech which bore upon the question:—"When that information (relative to the existing rights of voting) is complete, the attention of Parliament will be called to the result thus obtained, with a view to such improvement in the laws which regulate the rights of voting in the election of members of the House of Commons as may strengthen our free institutions and conduce to the public welfare." Words like these gave him a good starting-point. He appealed to them and to the numerous occasions on which the same recommendation had been given from the Throne. "By no less than five Administrations, in no less than six Speeches of the Queen anterior to that of the present year," had the need of Reform been suggested to the House. Such an accumulation of authority, he went on to say, seemed to excuse him from the necessity of arguing the abstract question of the advisability of Reform. He took that for granted. Again, Mr. Lambert's work had been so well and quickly done that Government found itself ready to offer the Bill at once, without waiting a year. But—here was the important point—partly with a view to break up the opposition to Government's proposals, partly to prevent the Bill from becoming unwieldy and its progress too slow, it was to consist really of two Bills. The first was a Bill for the Extension of the Franchise; the second, to be considered after the settlement of the first, was to be concerned with the Redistribution of Seats. Into Mr. Gladstone's details we need not follow him, for we have already sketched the main provisions of his Bill. He commended it to the House, hoping that "if, unhappily, issue was to be taken adversely upon the Bill, it would be, above all, a plain and direct issue"—that is, whether or not there ought to be enfranchisement downwards. In other words, Mr. Gladstone, though he had nearly ignored the general question of the need of Parliamentary Reform, courted discussion of that general question. He brought in his Bill, not like a Trojan horse (he said) "approaching the walls of the sacred city, and filled with armed men, bent upon ruin, plunder, and conflagration," but rather as bringing recruits to the Parliamentary army—children to the Parliamentary family. "Give to these persons," ran his peroration, "new interests in the Constitution; new interests which, by the beneficent processes of the law of nature and Providence, shall beget in them new attachment; for the attachment of the people to the Throne, the institutions, and the laws under which they live is, after all, more than gold and silver, and more than fleets and armies; at once the strength, the glory, and the safety of the land."