offence to his colleagues, who rightly considered that, following precedent, he should have called a Cabinet meeting before communicating with the Sovereign. The Duke of Marlborough, indeed, insisted on resigning, but was dissuaded from taking that step by Lord Malmesbury.[282] Then there came a series of sensational “scenes” in the House of Commons. The position was most embarrassing, for several reasons. To suspend the creation of fresh interests in the Irish Church was to interfere with the prerogative of the Queen, who appointed bishops and archbishops. It was therefore impossible to proceed by Bill to disestablish the Irish Church. Resolutions had to be first adopted as the basis of an Address, praying the Queen to permit a measure, retrenching the prerogatives of the Crown in respect of Irish Church patronage, to be debated. This prevented the Government from accepting defeat in the Commons on a Bill, which they could have quashed in the Lords, on the plea that it would be better to refer the matter to the new constituencies. In view of the Address to the Crown, which was now inevitable, Mr. Disraeli had, however, to advise the Queen either to accept or reject it. If the Queen were advised to accept it, the Tory Party would be disheartened. It would be said that such advice implied the Queen’s sanction to some form of disendowment. If the Queen, on the other hand, were advised to reject the Address, then the Minister would be responsible for embroiling the Sovereign with a House of Commons, the majority in which had been rendered aggressive by Parliamentary victories and popular sympathy. Lord Derby, in a moment of passionate unwisdom, urged the Ministry to reject the Address when it was drawn up. The lobbies of the House of Commons and the political clubs were then electrical with excitement. The leaders of parties almost came into personal collision with each other. Charges of “treason” were bandied about, when Tory partisans foolishly declared in private that the Queen was with them, and would never let the Radicals despoil the Irish Church. As for the Radicals, they retorted by saying that at the General Election when they marched to the polls, they would substitute Ebenezer Elliott’s hymn, “God Save the People,” for the National Anthem, “God Save the Queen.”
The management of the business by the Prime Minister must have been maladroit indeed, when it raised such fierce and passionate antagonisms. But the question was—What advice did Mr. Disraeli really give the Queen when he saw her at Osborne? His own statement, on Monday the 4th of May, was so ambiguous that it further compromised the Sovereign, by dragging her into a war of factions. He said he had a constitutional right to dissolve a Parliament “elected when he was in Opposition,” and he had advised the Queen on the previous Friday to dissolve. To render this course easy he had tendered the resignation of the Ministry—an offer made, it is now known, without consultation with his colleagues. The Queen had asked him to give her a day for consideration. Then she had ordered him not to resign, but had given him permission to dissolve as soon as the state of public business permitted it. The vital part of the statement occupied ten minutes in delivery. In it the name of the Queen was mentioned thirteen times, and it was so used as to convey the idea that it was her Majesty, and not her Minister, who had decided that a Cabinet which had lost the confidence of the House of Commons should hold office in the teeth of a hostile majority. What made matters worse was that the Duke of Richmond in the Upper House said that the Queen, in refusing Mr. Disraeli’s resignation, had given him permission to dissolve “in the event of any difficulties arising.” Again, by the stupidity or unfaithfulness of her Ministers, was the Queen held up to public odium. It was immediately inferred from the Duke of Richmond’s statement that the Sovereign had delegated to her Minister the highest of her prerogatives—that of dissolving Parliament—not for a special occasion, all the circumstances of which had been studied by her, but in a vague general kind of way, to enable him to coerce the Commons of England, whenever he thought fit. All through the week passionate conflicts raged in the House, greatly to the vexation of the Queen, whose attitude had been misrepresented as unconstitutional. On Thursday, the 7th of May, the two last Resolutions on the Irish Church passed without a division.[283] In the debate, however, Mr. Disraeli got up a turbulent “scene,” by dropping quite casually a quiet sarcastic remark to the effect that those who introduced the Resolutions after throwing the country into confusion, were already quarrelling over the spoil. Mr. Bright could no longer restrain himself. He accused Mr. Disraeli of now abandoning, for the sake of office, the Irish Ecclesiastical policy he had advocated twenty-five years before.[284] He had talked of his interviews with the Queen “with a mixture of pompousness and servility,” but he had deceived his Queen, if he still held the views which he advocated twenty-five years ago, and he had been guilty of a crime in skulking behind her authority, after he had pushed her to the front in a great party struggle. This turned the House into a scene of dreadful strife, and Mr. Disraeli retorted to the effect that Mr. Bright was not a gentleman. If Mr. Disraeli really desired to dissolve at this time it is strange that he missed this opportunity. Mr. Bright’s vituperation, together with the growing rancour of Mr. Gladstone and his supporters, might have enabled the Premier to plead the factious violence of his opponents as an excuse for a penal dissolution. But he did not dissolve. It was thenceforward clear that if it be a vital principle of the constitution that the Government must enjoy the confidence and support of a majority of the House of Commons, the country was without any constitutional Government at all. Though it was expected up to the last moment that the Queen would give an evasive reply to the Address on the Irish Church, her answer was a frank declaration that she did not desire her interest in the temporalities of the Irish Church to obstruct the discussion of a Bill for dealing with them. A Suspensory Bill, preventing the creation of new personal interests, was accordingly passed by the Commons, though it was rejected by the House of Lords. At length Mr. Disraeli, after the Whitsuntide holidays, agreed to dissolve Parliament in October, and Mr. Ward Hunt passed a Bill to facilitate registration, so that the lists of new voters might be made up on the 1st of November, the new writs for the General Election being issued on the 9th.
Little remains to be said as to the political events of the year. Mr. Ward Hunt, in producing his Budget on the 24th of April, admitted that the expenditure had increased from £66,780,000 in 1866-67 to £71,236,242 in 1867-68. The revenue received in the past year having only amounted to £69,600,000, there was a deficit of £1,636,000. Of course the £2,000,000 voted for the Abyssinian War accounted for part of the increased expenditure. For the rest, most of it arose from the carelessness of the Government in not insisting on keeping down the expenditure within the fixed limit of the estimates.[285] As for the coming year, Mr. Ward Hunt’s estimated expenditure was £70,428,000. To this had to be added £3,000,000 for the Abyssinian War. From Revenue he expected to get £71,350,000, so that there was a deficit to make good. He therefore added twopence to the Income Tax, which within the year he expected to yield £1,800,000, but which still left him with a probable deficit to carry over of £278,000. Apart from the increased expenditure the Budget was a sensible one. On the 9th of June Mr. Hunt also moved the Second Reading of a Bill enabling the Government to buy all the telegraph lines in the hands of private companies at their highest price before the 25th of May next, estimating the cost at between £3,000,000 and £4,000,000.
Reference has already been, made to the Abyssinian Expedition. At first the public took a dismal view of the enterprise. It was said that the mixed native and European force would fight well, but that on the road from the sea to King Theodore’s fortress, it would be bled to death by mismanagement and maladministration. The result of the expedition was entirely satisfactory; indeed, there was but one fault to find with it, namely, that it had cost too much. The Viceroy of India and the Duke of Cambridge selected one of the ablest engineers in India—Sir Robert Napier—as Commander-in-Chief, and gave him carte blanche. His task was described as that of building a bridge four hundred miles long between Annesley Bay and Magdala. As to the road he had to traverse, when one of the soldiers was told he was marching over the table-land of Abyssinia, he replied, “Well, the table must have been turned upside down, and we’re now a-marching over the legs!” Between Napier and his enemy there were many formidable native chiefs, who could only be conciliated by consummate diplomatic skill. How he succeeded in doing that, and in dragging his guns over the mountains by means of elephants, then used for the first time in African warfare since the days of Carthage; how he supplied his
THE QUEEN REVIEWING THE VOLUNTEERS IN THE GREAT PARK, WINDSOR. (See p. 318.)
army with water by boring Artesian wells; how he stormed Magdala with an impetuous rush on the 12th of April, when King Theodore, having previously released the captives, committed suicide, need not be now dwelt on. It was a brilliant little achievement, and the story of it was read with pride and emotion by the Queen. Napier’s skilful adaptation of means to ends, and the nicety of his calculations may be simply illustrated. At the beginning of the war he was asked when he could be at Magdala. He replied, “About the end of March.” He was asked when he could get back to Zoulla. He said, “Early in June.” As a matter of fact, he was at Magdala on the 10th of April, and he returned to Zoulla on the 18th of June, after which the country was at once evacuated. The thanks of both Houses of Parliament were voted to Sir Robert Napier on the 2nd of July, Mr. Disraeli complimenting him on having “planted the standard of St. George on the mountains of Rasselas,” and “led the elephants of Asia, bearing the artillery of Europe, over African passes which might have startled the trapper and appalled the hunter of the Alps.” As trappers hunt the beaver, which lives in water and not in mountains, the metaphor was a little mixed; but the orator’s intention was good, and his gaudy phrases served to divert the town during the languor of perhaps the sultriest London season on record. On the 9th of July Mr. Disraeli brought to the House a message from the Queen conferring a Peerage on the leader of the Expedition—who thus became Lord Napier of Magdala—together with an annuity of £2,000 a year for two lives. As Napier’s eldest son was an adult, and the usual grant in such cases had hitherto been for three lives, the Queen’s message was a distinct concession to the economists.
Parliament was prorogued on the last day of July, and a curious passage in the Queen’s Speech referred with satisfaction to the fact that the Government had not seen cause to use the power given them for suspending Habeas Corpus in Ireland. Then came the struggle for power in the new democratic constituencies. The usual preparation, said Mr. John Morley, in a Jeremiad in the Fortnightly Review, was made for the unlimited consumption of beer all over the land. Candidates of the old sort were put up. Reactionary Whigs, like Mr. Horsman, were suddenly transformed into iconoclastic Radicals, and were pledging themselves, not merely to abolish the Irish Church, but even to reform the House of Lords. Tories boasted that they were the only true democrats. Hardly any new men were brought to the front, and rich nobodies in many cases thrust aside true and tried servants of the people. Bloodshed was expected at Blackburn, and cavalry were drafted into the district. In short, Reform appeared to have changed nothing, and the first General Election under it seemed painfully like all its predecessors.