March 15.—Not being aware that there can be a question of any intermediate party or combination of parties which would be available at the present juncture, he presumes that your Majesty, if denied the assistance of the conservative or opposition party, might be disposed to recur to the services of a liberal government. He is of opinion, however, that either his late colleagues, or any statesman or statesmen of the liberal party on whom your Majesty might call, would with propriety at once observe that it is still for the consideration of your Majesty whether the proceeding which has taken place between your Majesty and Mr. Disraeli can as yet be regarded as complete. The vote of the House of Commons on Wednesday morning was due to the deliberate and concerted action of the opposition, with a limited amount of adventitious numerical aid. The division was a party division, and carried the well-known symbol of such divisions in the appointment of tellers of the opposition and government respectively. The vote was given in the full knowledge, avowed in the speech of the leader of the opposition, that the government had formally declared the measure on which the vote was impending to be vital to its existence. Mr. Gladstone humbly conceives that, according to the well-known principles of our parliamentary government, an opposition which has in this [pg 451] manner and degree contributed to bring about what we term a crisis, is bound to use and to show that it has used its utmost efforts of counsel and inquiry to exhaust all practicable means of bringing its resources to the aid of the country in its exigency. He is aware that his opinion on such a subject can only be of slight value, but the same observation will not hold good with regard to the force of a well-established party usage. To show what that usage has been, Mr. Gladstone is obliged to trouble your Majesty with the following recital of facts from the history of the last half century.... [This apt and cogent recital the reader will find at the end of the volume, see [Appendix].]... There is, therefore, a very wide difference between the manner in which the call of your Majesty has been met on this occasion by the leader of the opposition, and the manner which has been observed at every former juncture, including even those when the share taken by the opposition in bringing about the exigency was comparatively slight or none at all. It is, in Mr. Gladstone's view, of the utmost importance to the public welfare that the nation should be constantly aware that the parliamentary action certain or likely to take effect in the overthrow of a government; the reception and treatment of a summons from your Majesty to meet the necessity which such action has powerfully aided in creating; and again the resumption of office by those who have deliberately laid it down,—are uniformly viewed as matters of the utmost gravity, requiring time, counsel, and deliberation among those who are parties to them, and attended with serious responsibilities. Mr. Gladstone will not and does not suppose that the efforts of the opposition to defeat the government on Wednesday morning were made with a previously formed intention on their part to refuse any aid to your Majesty, if the need should arise, in providing for the government of the country; and the summary refusal, which is the only fact before him, he takes to be not in full correspondence either with the exigencies of the case, or as he has shown, with the parliamentary usage. In humbly submitting this representation to your Majesty, Mr. Gladstone's wish is to point out the difficulty in which he would find himself placed were he to ask your Majesty for authority to inquire from his late colleagues whether they or any of them were prepared, if your [pg 452] Majesty should call on them, to resume their offices; for they would certainly, he is persuaded, call on him, for their own honour, and in order to the usefulness of their further service if it should be rendered, to prove to them that according to usage every means had been exhausted on the part of the opposition for providing for the government of the country, or at least that nothing more was to be expected from that quarter.

This statement, prepared after dinner, Mr. Gladstone took to Lord Granville that night (March 14). The next morning he again saw Lord Granville and Colonel Ponsonby, and despatched his statement to the Queen. “At 2.45,” he writes to Granville:—

I saw the Queen, not for any distinct object, but partly to fill the blank before the public. H.M. was in perfect humour. She will use the whole or part of my long letter by sending it to Disraeli. She seemed quite to understand our point of view, and told me plainly what shows that the artful man did say, if it came back to him again at this juncture, he would not be bound by his present refusal. I said, “But, ma'am, that is not before me.” “But he told it to me,” she said.

Further Discussions

The Queen sent Mr. Gladstone's long letter to Mr. Disraeli, and he replied in a tolerably long letter of his own. He considered Mr. Gladstone's observations under two heads: first, as an impeachment of the opposition for contributing to the vote against the bill, when they were not prepared to take office; second, as a charge against Mr. Disraeli himself that he summarily refused to take office without exhausting all practicable means of aiding the country in the exigency. On the first article of charge, he described the doctrine advanced by Mr. Gladstone as being “undoubtedly sound so far as this: that for an opposition to use its strength for the express purpose of throwing out a government which it is at the time aware that it cannot replace—having that object in view and no other—would be an act of recklessness and faction that could not be too strongly condemned.” But this, he contended, could not be imputed to the conservative opposition of 1873. The Irish bill was from the first strongly [pg 453] objected to by a large section of the liberal party, and on the same grounds that led the conservative opposition to reject it, namely, that it sacrificed Irish education to the Roman catholic hierarchy. The party whom the bill was intended to propitiate rejected it as inadequate. If the sense of the House had been taken, irrespective of considerations of the political result of the division, not one-fourth of the House would have voted for it. Mr. Gladstone's doctrine, Disraeli went on, amounted to this, that “whenever a minister is so situated that it is in his power to prevent any other parliamentary leader from forming an administration likely to stand, he acquires thereby the right to call on parliament to pass whatever measures he and his colleagues think fit, and is entitled to denounce as factious the resistance to such measures. Any such claim is one not warranted by usage, or reconcilable with the freedom of the legislature. It comes to this: that he tells the House of Commons, ‘Unless you are prepared to put some one in my place, your duty is to do whatever I bid you.’ To no House of Commons has language of this kind ever been addressed; by no House of Commons would it be tolerated.”

As for the charge of summary refusal to undertake government, Mr. Disraeli contented himself with a brief statement of facts. He had consulted his friends, and they were all of opinion that it would be prejudicial to the public interests for a conservative ministry to attempt to conduct business in the present House of Commons. What other means were at his disposal? Was he to open negotiations with a section of the late ministry, and waste days in barren interviews, vain applications, and the device of impossible combinations? Was he to make overtures to the considerable section of the liberal party that had voted against the government? The Irish Roman catholic gentlemen? Surely Mr. Gladstone was not serious in such a suggestion. The charge of deliberate and concerted action against the Irish bill was 'not entirely divested of some degree of exaggeration.' His party was not even formally summoned to vote against the government measure, but to support an amendment which was seconded from the liberal benches, [pg 454] and which could only by a violent abuse of terms be described as a party move.

On Saturday afternoon Mr. Gladstone had gone down to Cliveden, and there at ten o'clock on the Sunday evening (March 16) he received a message from the Queen, enclosing Mr. Disraeli's letter, and requesting him to say whether he would resume office. This letter was taken by Mr. Gladstone to show that “nothing more was to be expected in that quarter,” and at eleven o'clock he sent off the messenger with his answer in the affirmative:—

March 16, 1873, 10-3/4 p.m.—It is quite unnecessary for him to comment upon any of the statements or arguments advanced by Mr. Disraeli, as the point referred by your Majesty for him to consider is not their accuracy, sufficiency, or relevancy, but simply whether any further effort is to be expected from the opposition towards meeting the present necessity. Your Majesty has evidently judged that nothing more of this kind can be looked for. Your Majesty's judgment would have been conclusive with Mr. Gladstone in the case, even had he failed to appreciate the full cogency of the reason for it; but he is bound to state that he respectfully concurs with your Majesty upon that simple question, as one not of right but of fact. He therefore does not hesitate at once to answer your Majesty's gracious inquiry by saying that he will now endeavour to prevail upon your Majesty's late advisers generally to resume their offices, and he again places all such service as it is in his power to offer, at your Majesty's disposal. According to your Majesty's command, then, he will repair to London to-morrow morning, and will see some of the most experienced members of the late government to review the position which he regards as having been seriously unhinged by the shock of last Wednesday morning; to such an extent indeed, that he doubts whether either the administration or parliament can again be what they were. The relations between them, and the course of business laid down in the royal speech, will require to be reconsidered, or at least reviewed with care.

II

Tuesday, March 18.—[To the Queen] The cabinet met informally at this house [11 Carlton House Terrace] at 2 p.m., and sat till 5-½.