Lord Palmerston in 1850 had declared in his highest style that Corfu was a very important position for Mediterranean interests in the event of a war, and it would be great folly to give it up. A year later he repeated that though he should not object to the annexation of the southern islands to Greece, Corfu was too important a military and naval post ever to be abandoned by us.[384] As Lord Palmerston changed, so did Mr. Gladstone change. 'Without a good head for Greece, I should not like to see the Ionian protectorate surrendered; with it, I should be well pleased for one to be responsible for giving it up.' Among many other wonderful suggestions was one that he should himself become that 'good head.' 'The first mention,' he wrote to a correspondent in parliament (Jan. 21, 1863), 'of my candidature in Greece some time ago made me laugh very heartily, for though I do love the country and never laughed at anything else in connection with it before, yet the seeing my own name, which in my person was never meant to carry a title of any kind, placed in juxtaposition with that particular idea, made me give way.'
Meanwhile it is safe to conjecture, for the period with which in this chapter we are immediately concerned, that in conceiving and drawing up his Ionian scheme, close contact with liberal doctrines as to free institutions and popular government must have quickened Mr. Gladstone's progress in liberal doctrines in our own affairs at home. In 1863[385] Lord Palmerston himself, in spite of that national aversion to anything like giving up, of which he was himself the most formidable representative, cheerfully handed the Ionians over to their kinsfolk, if kinsfolk they truly were, upon the mainland.[386]
FOOTNOTES:
[375] Virg. Aen. iv. 344.
[376] See Sir C. Napier's The Colonies: treating of their value generally and of the Ionian Islands in particular.
[377] Parliamentary Papers, relative to the mission of the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone to the Ionian Islands in 1858. Presented in 1861. Finlay's History of Greece, vii. p. 305, etc. Letters by Lord Charles Fitzroy, etc., showing the anomalous political and financial Position of the Ionian Islands. (Ridgway, 1850.) Le Gouvernement des Iles Ioniennes. Lettre à Lord John Russell, par Francois Lenormant. (Paris, Amyot, 1861.) The Ionian Islands in relation to Greece. By John Dunn Gardner, Esqr., 1859. Four years in the Ionian Islands. By Whittingham. Pamphlet by S. G. Potter, D.D. See also Gleanings, iv. p. 287.
[378] This and his alleged attendance at mass, and compliance with sundry other rites, were often heard of in later times, and even so late as 1879 Mr. Gladstone was subjected to some rude baiting from doctors of divinity and others.
[379] Finlay, History of Greece, vii. p. 306, blames both Bulwer and Mr. Gladstone because they 'directed their attention to the means of applying sound theories of government to a state of things where a change in the social relations of the inhabitants and modifications in the tenure and rights of property were the real evils that required remedy, and over these the British government could exercise very little influence if opposed by the Ionian representatives.' But is not this to say that the real remedy was unattainable without political reform?
[380] May 7, 1861. Hans. 3rd Ser. 162, p. 1687. The salaries of the deputies struck him as especially excessive, and on the same occasion he let fall the obiter dictum; 'For my part I trust that of all the changes that may in the course of generations be made in the constitution of this country, the very last and latest will be the payment of members of this House.'
[381] On Feb. 7, the secretary of the treasury moved the writ, and the next day the vice-chancellor notified that there would be an election, Mr. Gladstone having 'vacated his seat by accepting the office of lord high commissioner of the Ionian Islands, which he no longer holds.' He was re-elected (Feb. 12) without opposition.