THE ROYAL PALACE, ATHENS. (From a Photograph by Rhemaidez Frères, Athens.)
Mr. Cardwell's army proposals need not be described at length, for they merge into the far more comprehensive proposals of the next year, when the war had compelled the country to look its military affairs in the face, and to consent to a thoroughgoing scheme of reorganisation. Still, even in this year, Mr. Cardwell struck the note of a very decided reform. He proposed reductions both in the colonial and the home army, and laid down the two principles, though he did not fully work them out, upon which the reorganisation of 1871 was based—namely, short service and abolition of purchase. He abolished the rank of ensign and cornet, as a first step towards the latter; he announced his plan of enlistments for twelve years, six to be passed in the regular army and six in the reserve, as a preparation for the former. He proposed to disband the Canadian Rifles, the Cape Mounted Rifles, the 3rd West Indian Regiment, and the African Artillery. He reduced the Indian establishment, and proposed an elaborate method of reducing the strength of all home regiments. By all these measures he brought about a reduction of £1,136,900 on the estimates of the previous year, and of £2,330,800 on those of the year before. The figures by which he described the strength of the army at the beginning of this year were:—Regulars and others available for all services, home and foreign, 109,225; second army of reserve, 20,000; militia, 63,000; yeomanry, 15,300; volunteers, 168,477. In other words, a total of 376,002, nearly half of them being volunteers—figures that tempt one to speculate what would have been the result of all this reduction and economy had the German armies made their appearance before London instead of before Paris!
The revenue of the year, as Mr. Lowe announced in his Budget speech, amounted to £76,505,000; a sum of which nearly four millions were due to the new mode of collecting taxes instituted by the Chancellor of the Exchequer—a mode that for the first year caused the revenue to appear far greater than it really was. The expenditure was £68,223,000; and the surplus was devoted to paying about half the cost of the Abyssinian War, to a reduction of the income tax by a penny in the pound, to a reduction of the sugar duties, and to various smaller reductions. In finance, at least, the annus mirabilis cannot be pronounced unfortunate, so far as England was concerned.
The history of Parliament in 1870 must be completed by a mention of a few Bills that became law, and a few that did not. This year saw the passing of a Bill that practically repealed the law that Pitt had carried in order to exclude Horne Tooke from the House of Commons—a Bill, moved by Mr. Hibbert, to remove the civil disabilities of clergymen. This provided that any clergyman wishing to relinquish the office of priest or deacon might do so by signing a deed, to be registered by the bishop. From the moment of his signing, he was to become free to practise any trade or profession, and to sit in Parliament—to become, in fact, a layman. It may be added that a considerable number of distinguished clergy took advantage of the Act soon after it was passed. Mr. Russell Gurney's Married Women's Property Bill was another of great practical importance; but unfortunately its success was only partial. It proposed to give married women the absolute control of their own earnings, instead of allowing the husband to seize them at his pleasure. The Bill was of course directed mainly towards the class of wage-earning people, where the wife often contributed largely to the family stock by the labour of her hands; and no one who had any knowledge of this class could be ignorant of the fearful amount of misery that a drunken or worthless husband might cause by compelling his wife to keep him in drink and idleness. Mr. Russell Gurney's Bill aimed at curing this state of things; and, in spite of the difficulties of the question, the advantage of protecting married women in the possession of their actual earnings was evident to almost everybody. But in the House of Lords, where there were no members pledged to support women's rights, the Bill was severely handled by the law lords and others. The unbelief of Lord Westbury, the peculiar experience of Lord Penzance, induced them to "amend" the Bill in its most essential points. It passed, but passed mutilated; yet its advocates had helped to familiarise the public mind with its principle, and a measure much more consistent and comprehensive became law in a later year. The House of Lords also threw out for this Session the Bill of Sir John Coleridge for abolishing religious tests in the Universities, and also the Deceased Wife's Sister Bill, which the House of Commons had passed. This Bill, which has been described as "a Bill to enable a woman to marry her deceased sister's husband," found great favour with the Dissenters, and was pushed through the Lower House mainly by their exertions. But the House of Lords was more open to High Church influence—Lord Salisbury was a greater power there than Mr. Beresford Hope in the Commons—and was never too willing to pass Bills for the simple removal of disabilities, matrimonial or other.
In the first month of the year, before Parliament met, a terrible catastrophe occurred in the Eastern seas, through which a fine ship-of-war belonging to a friendly nation was run down by an English mail steamer and sunk, the accident being attended by a lamentable loss of life. The United States steam corvette Oneida left the anchorage at Yokohama, the port of Yedo, in Japan, at about five o'clock on the evening of the 24th of January, 1870. Two hours later the noble vessel had sunk beneath the waves and the greater part of her crew had been swept into eternity. It was nearly 7 P.M.; the officers were at dinner below, when the look-out man shouted, "Steamer lights ahead," and the midshipman on watch gave the order to port the helm. The approaching vessel (which proved to be the Peninsular and Oriental Company's steamship Bombay) was steering due north, and making for the port of Yokohama; the Oneida appears to have been steering a south-easterly course. Captain Eyre, commanding the Bombay, afterwards deposed on oath, that when the Oneida was first sighted, she was about a mile distant, and that he immediately ported his helm, and kept porting it for a considerable time, in order to clear her. While the Bombay was still heading off to starboard, Captain Eyre deposed that he saw the stranger putting her helm hard a-starboard, and crossing the bow of the Bombay with full sails and steam. The night being dark, the vessels were at that moment not more than a hundred feet apart. Captain Eyre instantly stopped his engines, and put his helm hard a-starboard, hoping to go clear of the approaching vessel. Unfortunately the vessels were too close together for this, and a collision occurred, the bows of the Bombay cutting into the starboard side of the Oneida, about the mizen rigging. Neither ship was entangled with the other; and Captain Eyre, not hearing or seeing, as he said, any signal of distress from the other ship, and being informed that the Bombay was making water, ordered the engines to be set going at full speed and made the best of his way for Yokohama. The unfortunate crew of the Oneida felt themselves to be cruelly abandoned; for, besides the shock and the danger of the collision itself—in consideration of which the unharmed or slightly harmed vessel ought in common humanity to have waited to ascertain the effects of the accident upon the other, before proceeding on her course—several of the Oneida's guns, which happened to be loaded at the time, were almost instantly fired to attract the attention of the Bombay and bring her back. Two of the ship's boats, containing fifty-six men, floated after she had gone down, and were picked up and brought safely to Yokohama; the rest of the officers and crew—a hundred and twenty in number—went down with the ship. A court of inquiry was held at Kanagawa, in Japan, to investigate the circumstances of the collision, and the result was that Captain Eyre's certificate was suspended for six months. The Board of Trade afterwards ratified the finding of the court of inquiry, and expressed their opinion that the sentence of suspension was "inadequate to the gravity of the offence."
We must now turn to the obituary of the year, omitting, however, according to our custom, the domains of literature and art, which are reserved for a later chapter. A statesman of high rank, a judge of great and long-lived reputation, some illustrious soldiers, were among those who died. Of several of these—of Sir De Lacy Evans, of Sir G. F. Seymour, of Sir William Gordon, and of General Windham—it is not necessary to speak; nor of Dr. Gilbert, the cultivated Bishop of Chichester, once the well-known Principal of Brasenose College. More famous than these was Sir Frederick Pollock, formerly Chief Baron of the Exchequer, who began his public career by coming out as Senior Wrangler at Cambridge in 1806, and ended it sixty-four years later as a judge who had carried into his retirement the respect and affection of his colleagues and the bar. He was, too, a member of a notable family—for Sir David Pollock, once Chief Justice of Bombay, and Field-Marshal Sir George Pollock, the famous Indian soldier, were his brothers. It is rare for three brothers to reach, as they did, the very highest posts in their different professions, especially if, like these, they start with no advantages of wealth or birth. Lord Clarendon, who died on the 27th of June, had started with those advantages, but he had turned them to good account. He was the head of the Clarendon branch of the Villiers family, which has for a long time been Whig; and he carried out through a long official life the best traditions of Whig policy as a diplomatist, Foreign Secretary, and Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, though the chief responsibility for the Crimean War must always rest upon his memory.