SIDNEY HERBERT. (After the Statue by Foley.)
The new Government promised the Queen that they would wind up the affairs of the Session as quickly as possible, and as a dissolution was objectionable at that critical moment, they assured her that they would bring forward no contentious business. They introduced a Militia Bill, designed to meet the objections of Lord Palmerston to the measure of Lord John Russell. Though Mr. Walpole, the Minister in charge of the Bill, covered the Cabinet with ridicule by proposing that every militiaman who served two years should get a vote for the county in which he was enrolled, public contempt was diverted from the Ministry to the Opposition. By an inconceivable blunder, Lord John Russell, without consulting with his colleagues, came down to the House of Commons and opposed the second reading of a Bill, to the principle of which he knew the majority were already committed by the vote that had expelled him from office. He thus gave Lord Palmerston an opportunity of making a bitter attack on him. He also led his Party to a defeat as sure as it was disastrous. He discovered dissensions and divisions of opinion among his followers, the exposure of which not only demoralised them, but weakened public confidence in them as a competent governing organisation. This blunder settled the destiny of Lord John Russell. All sections of the Opposition now joined Mr. Bright in saying that Lord John must never again be permitted to lead the Liberal Party. The incident, unimportant as it seems, was of high historic significance. It rendered the Coalition Ministry under Lord Aberdeen inevitable. It rendered Whig Cabinets henceforth impossible in England.
ST. ALBANS, FROM VERULAM.
Mr. Disraeli’s Budget speech was a brilliant performance which pleased everybody but his own Party. Its principal point was to provide for the continuance of the Income Tax for one year. But what made it interesting was its glowing eulogy of the Free Trade measures of Sir Robert Peel, not to mention the elaborate statistics by which Mr. Disraeli, while silent on the Corn Duties, proved that incomparable benefits had been conferred on the country by Peel’s tariffs, and by his reductions of import duties. The oration was, of course, a bid for the accession of Palmerston and the Peelites to the Tory Party. “Disraeli’s speech on introducing his Budget,” writes Lord Malmesbury, “has produced a bad effect in the country, for the farmers, though reconciled to giving up Protection, expected relief in other ways, and he does not give a hint at any measure for their advantage.”[54] A night or two afterwards, Mr. Disraeli had therefore to make a vague recantation of his change of opinions, and at a Mansion House dinner Lord Derby did his best to explain away the Budget speech of his embarrassing colleague, by an elaborate exposition of the doctrine of compromise, on which he said British institutions were founded.
During the first part of the Parliamentary Session of 1852 the cause of Parliamentary Reform made but little progress. Mr. Hume, on the 25th of March, moved for leave to bring in a Bill for the extension of the Franchise. Though he tried to galvanise his party into vigorous life by a scornful and defiant retort to Lord Derby’s recent attack on democracy,[55] the discussion of the subject was felt to be academic rather than practical, and his motion was rejected by a vote of 244 to 39. A similar fate attended Mr. Locke King when he, too, brought in his motion to assimilate the County and Borough Franchise. Several debates were devoted to the question of the prevalence of bribery at elections, and Lord John Russell’s Bill, empowering the Crown to direct a Commission of Inquiry into any place at which an Election Committee reported the existence of bribery, was carried through both Houses of Parliament. The disfranchisement of Sudbury and St. Albans for corrupt practices had left four seats in the House of Commons to dispose of. Mr. Disraeli’s scheme for allocating them to the West Riding of Yorkshire and the Southern Division of Lancashire was, however, rejected on Mr. Gladstone’s amendment—a defeat which was a sharp reminder to the Ministry that, so long as they were in a minority and refused to dissolve Parliament, they could not hope to control the House of Commons when contentious business came before it.
An attack on the endowment of Maynooth College by Mr. Spooner, who demanded an inquiry into the system of education pursued at that seminary, wasted much time. Both parties, with a General Election impending, shrank from offending the Roman Catholic voters too deeply. Yet they were equally afraid of displeasing the aggressive Protestantism of the country. After repeated adjournments the matter dropped, chiefly owing to a significant threat from Mr. Gladstone and Lord John Russell, that to attack Maynooth was to reopen the whole question of the distribution of ecclesiastical endowments in Ireland, a question the discussion of which could not be advantageous to the Anglican minority in that kingdom. A barren debate on the remission of the Hop Duty, and Mr. Milner Gibson’s failure to carry resolutions condemning the Paper Duty, the Duty on advertisements, and the Stamp Duty on newspapers, together with Mr. Disraeli’s success in carrying his provisional Budget, continuing the Income Tax for one year, sum up the financial business of the Session. By the end of June all the measures which the Government had proposed to pass were disposed of.