The legislative record of 1836 was creditable to the government, nor was the action of the upper house in amending certain of their bills so purely mischievous as it has been described. For instance, a strange clause had found its way into the newspaper stamp bill, requiring all the proprietors of newspapers, however numerous, to be registered at the stamp office. This clause was struck out in the house of lords, at the instance of Lyndhurst, though Melbourne declared it to be a vital part of the measure, which, however, passed without it, and was the better for the loss of it. But the same cannot be said of Lyndhurst's conduct at the "open conference" between the two houses on a supplementary bill for remedying defects in the operation of the municipal corporations act. There no question of principle was involved, and the only motive for resisting every attempt to improve the new machinery already established by law was one unworthy of a statesman. At the close of the session, Lyndhurst delivered a masterly vindication of his own proceedings, but he was answered by Melbourne in a speech of great ability, and the position now occupied by the whigs appeared stronger than when they came into office in 1835.
In this year complaints of agricultural distress once more became urgent, and a committee was appointed by the house of commons, as in 1833, to inquire into its cause. Strange to say, the immediate occasion for the second inquiry was the occurrence of three magnificent harvests in succession, which brought down the average price of wheat from 58s. 8d. in 1832 to 53s. in 1833, 46s. 2d. in 1834, and 39s. 4d. in 1835, whence it rose to 48s. 6d. after the harvest of 1836. The average gazette price of 1835 was the lowest touched in the nineteenth century until 1884, and was simply due to excess of production. It was stated before the committee of 1836, by the comptroller of corn returns, that in the period between 1814 and 1834 the quantity of home-grown wheat only fell short of the consumption, on the average, by about 1,000,000 quarters a year, of which at least half was contributed by Ireland. The committee published its evidence without making a report, but this fact is highly significant as marking the later revolution in British agriculture. If the area then devoted to wheat crops almost sufficed to feed an estimated population of 14,500,000, when the yield per acre was relatively small, we may safely infer, in the absence of trustworthy statistics, that it must have been very much greater than at present.
AGITATION IN IRELAND.
At the opening of 1837 there was a marked stagnation in home politics, mainly due to an equipoise of parties and serious divisions in the ranks of the ministerialists as well as of the opposition. Not only was there a very strong conservative majority in the house of lords, with a sufficient though dwindling liberal majority in the house of commons, but neither majority was amenable to party discipline. The aggressive policy and vexatious tactics of Lyndhurst were distasteful to his nominal leader, the Duke of Wellington, and still more so to Peel, the only possible conservative premier, who eschewed the very name of tory. There was greater unity of counsels between Melbourne and Russell, but Russell, who had learned moderation, was dependent on the support of his extreme left, composed of violent radicals and Irish repealers. The king, though he did not carry his repugnance to his ministers so far as he once threatened, yet almost excluded them from social invitations, and made no secret of his preference for the opposite party. During the winter of 1836-37 O'Connell and his satellites were busy in organising monster meetings to demand the abolition of tithes and municipal reform. A national association was formed on this basis, and a certain number of protestants were induced to join it. The government dared not show vigour in checking it lest they should estrange their Irish allies, and Mulgrave, the lord-lieutenant, was openly accused of favouring sedition and discouraging loyalty by his exercise of patronage and the royal prerogative of pardon. At last, a very large and influential meeting was held in Dublin, at which the discontent of loyalists and patriots was expressed with truly Irish vehemence. Still, Ireland was less disturbed than in several previous years. About the same time, Peel, having been elected lord rector of Glasgow University, was entertained there at dinner by a company including many old reformers, and made one of his greatest speeches. Its spirit was that of his Tamworth manifesto, but he was far more outspoken in his declaration of unswerving adhesion to the protestant cause and to the independence of the upper house.
Such were the political conditions when parliament met on January 31. The king's speech, delivered by commission, though singularly colourless, indicated the importance of legislating on Irish tithes, Irish corporations, and Irish poor relief. The debate on the address was enlivened by a furious attack of Roebuck on the whigs, but was otherwise devoid of importance. On February 7, however, Russell introduced a new Irish corporations bill, invoking the authority of Fox for the doctrine that "Irish government should be regulated by Irish notions and Irish prejudices," and avowing a faith in the efficacy of unlimited concession which has not been justified by later experience. He further intimated the resolution of the government to stand or fall by this measure. No serious resistance was offered by the opposition to its first or second reading, but Peel took occasion to protest against a transparent inconsistency which seems to beset the advocacy of Irish claims. It is generally assumed, and with too much justice, that Ireland is so backward and helpless a country as to require exceptional treatment; in short, that it must be governed by Irish ideas, with little regard to English principles of sound policy or economy. Such was, in effect, Fox's contention, adopted by Russell; and yet, like future supporters of "Ireland for the Irish," he argued in the same breath that every liberal institution suitable to Englishmen, with their long training in self-government and instinctive reverence for law, must needs be extended to Irishmen, with their long training in anarchy and instinctive propensity to lawlessness. He prevailed, however, in the house of commons, where a hostile amendment was decisively rejected, and the bill, having passed rapidly through committee, was read a third time by a large though reduced majority.
Had it been possible to isolate the Irish municipal bill, and to compel the house of lords to deal with it singly, the peers might possibly have shrunk from another collision with the commons. But it had been coupled in the king's speech with two other projects of Irish legislation, a new tithe bill, and an Irish poor law. Both of these were, in fact, introduced, the former by Russell in February, the latter by Morpeth early in May. The course to be taken by the conservative party was the subject of anxious consultation between Peel and Wellington, and that ultimately adopted had the full sanction of both. They regarded the separate presentation of the municipal bill as a "manœuvre," and, while they overruled the wish of Lyndhurst to defeat it by an adverse vote on the second reading, they resolved to meet it by a counter-manœuvre. Accordingly Wellington induced the house of lords to postpone the committee on the municipal bill until they should have the other two bills before them, and Peel not only approved of his action but stated reasons for regarding them as essentially connected with each other. June 9 was originally fixed as the date for going into committee, but this stage was afterwards deferred until July 3, before which unforeseen events arrested all further progress.
CHURCH RATES.
In the meantime, the prestige of the government had been weakened by the failure of their scheme for abolishing Church rates. The dissenters, no longer content with religious liberty, were beginning to demand religious equality. In the forefront of their grievances was that of paying rates for the repair of parish churches which they did not attend, except as members of the annual "vestry," where they could object to a rate but might be out-voted by a majority of their fellow-parishioners. Althorp had proposed a scheme for the removal of this grievance in 1834, involving a parliamentary grant of £250,000. Setting aside this alternative, as well as that of a special contribution, voluntary or otherwise, from members of the Church, Spring Rice now proposed a solution of his own. It consisted in vesting the property of bishops and chapters in a commission which, by improved management, might raise the necessary sum for church repairs, without impairing the incomes of these ecclesiastical dignitaries. Before the government plan was discussed in the house of commons, Howley, archbishop of Canterbury, entered a strong protest against it in the house of lords on the ground that it would reduce the bishops and chapters from the position of landowners to that of "mere annuitants". Melbourne complained of his protest somewhat angrily as premature, and provoked a vehement reply from Blomfield, bishop of London, who, though a member of the ecclesiastical commission, denounced any such diversion of revenues as "a sacrilegious act of spoliation". In the elaborate debates on the resolutions moved by Spring Rice in the house of commons Peel took his stand partly on financial objections and partly on the injustice of taking away from the Church a fund belonging to it by immemorial usage, and in the main willingly contributed. Amendment after amendment was proposed by members of the opposition, and, though each was defeated, the government resolutions were ultimately carried by so narrow a majority in May that no further action was taken.
The conservative reaction, now in visible progress, was typified by the open secession of Burdett from the ranks of the reformers. This sincere but indiscreet radical, who had once enjoyed a popularity similar to that of Wilkes as a political martyr, became estranged from his party when it accepted O'Connell as an auxiliary, if not as an ally. Having failed in procuring the exclusion of the great Irish demagogue from Brooks's club, in 1835, he withdrew his own name. Soon afterwards he became irregular in his parliamentary attendance, and more than lukewarm in his allegiance. Early in 1837 he was, like Stanley and Graham, so much suspected of gravitating towards conservatism, that some of his Westminster constituents publicly called upon him to resign. He took up the challenge, and was re-elected against a radical opponent by a substantial majority. It was his last re-election for a borough which he had represented for thirty years. In the Church-rate debate he rose from the opposition side of the house, and lamenting his separation from his old associates, did not spare them either reproaches or hostile criticism.
Another desertion from the whig camp took place during this session, but in an opposite direction. Roebuck, originally one of the philosophical radicals, had become more and more violent in his attacks on his own leaders, whom he accused of having deceived the people. According to him, they were "aristocratic in principle, democratic in pretence," and all the resources of his incisive rhetoric were exhausted in exposing their incapacity, in a motion for a committee to consider the state of the nation. This motion, so advocated, met with no support, and gave Russell the opportunity of once more vindicating the wisdom of moderation in statesmanship. But there were many besides Roebuck who were eager to complete the work of the reform act by further organic changes, and the notice book of the house of commons in 1837 embodied several proposals of this kind. One was Grote's annual motion for the ballot, on which an interesting debate took place. Among the others were two motions of Sir William Molesworth for a reform of the upper house and for the abolition of a property qualification for the lower house, a motion of Tennyson, who had taken the additional name of D'Eyncourt, for the repeal of the septennial act, and another of Hume for household suffrage, overshadowing that of Duncombe for repealing the rate-paying clauses of the reform act itself. Nearly all of these contained the germs of future legislation, but they formed no part of the whig programme, nor could any whig government have carried them against so powerful an opposition, with an invincible reserve in the house of lords, during the last session of William IV. Only seventeen public acts were actually passed in this session.