(From the Photograph by S. A. Walker.)
to be handed over to the Irish Church, but when the Duke of Cleveland proposed that the same provision should be made for the clergy of other churches in Ireland, he was defeated by a combination of Ministerialists and Orangemen, who thereby destroyed the principle of religious equality on which the Bill was founded.[303] On no single amendment, save one, did the Bishops vote for the Government, and on that one—the amendment delaying the division of the surplus sine die—the only Bishop who voted for the Ministry was Wilberforce. “Some one,” writes Lord Malmesbury, “observing him going out with them [Ministers] in the division, said, ‘The Bishop of Oxford is going the wrong way.’ ‘No,’ observed Lord Chelmsford, ‘it is the road to Winchester.’”[304] After the Third Reading of the Bill the Lords, however, accepted a re-amendment by Lord Devon that Irish Bishops should cease to sit in the Upper House, and Lord Stanhope carried another restoring the principle of religious equality by granting residences and glebes to Catholics and Presbyterians. The House of Commons rejected all the important amendments of the Lords, Mr. Gladstone contemptuously observing that the Peers seemed to judge affairs from a balloon. A bitter and protracted struggle between the two Houses was averted by Lord Cairns, who privately negotiated a compromise with Lord Granville. Its main point was that in return for the concession of an additional 5 per cent. on the commutation of life interests (making it 12½ per cent.), the Tory Peers would let the Bill pass. In plain English, Lord Granville bought off the opposition of the Peers by a re-endowment of £500,000 for the Free Protestant Church of Ireland, and the Act received the Royal Assent by Commission on the 26th of July. It was understood that the Queen was prepared to use her influence to bring about a compromise less humiliating to the House of Lords. But the matter was taken out of her hands. Lord Malmesbury says, “Lord Cairns settled it with Lord Granville, taking the whole responsibility upon himself, for he never consulted any of his party, and a great many are much displeased. Lord Derby was so angry that he left the House.”
Great interest attached this Session to Mr. Lowe’s first Budget. Mr. Ward Hunt had been mistaken in his estimate of income, for while he anticipated a revenue of £73,180,000, only £72,591,991 had been received. But a saving in expenditure of £511,000 almost balanced this loss of revenue. Mr. Lowe estimated his expenditure for the coming year at £68,223,000, and, as taxes then stood, his income at £72,855,000, so that he had a surplus to handle of £4,632,000. Unfortunately, the cost of the Abyssinian War had been sadly under-estimated by Mr. Disraeli’s Government, and £4,600,000 of Lord Napier’s bill was still outstanding. Mr. Lowe’s plan for replenishing reduced balances and meeting unexpected liabilities whilst still remitting taxes was at once original and ingenious. Long credit is given for taxes in England. By abolishing this credit and exacting the full tax within the financial year—that is to say, by collecting in 1869-70 the half of the tax that in ordinary circumstances stood over to 1870-71—Mr. Lowe estimated he would have what he called “windfalls” of £600,000 on assessed taxes, £950,000 on the land and house tax, and £1,800,000 on income tax, which gave him £3,350,000. Applying this to the reduction of the Abyssinian War debt he left of it only £500,000 standing. But the estimated surplus was £4,632,000, so that even after deducting the Abyssinian debt, he still had in hand £4,100,000 for remission of taxes, and the replenishment of the Exchequer balances which Mr. Ward Hunt’s policy had exhausted. Mr. Lowe therefore remitted the shilling duty on corn, the duty on fire insurances, the hair powder tax, the duty on tea licences, and a penny of income tax. The carriage duty he simplified and reduced. The duty on horses he reduced—an announcement that gave infinite satisfaction to the House of Commons—and he abolished the special duty on post-horses. He said that as he could not take off the duty on armorial bearings, “it appeared to him the best thing he could do was to increase it.” The perplexing and complex discussion which the scheme provoked, and the indignation of the small traders at being called upon to pay all their taxes in full instead of in two half-yearly instalments obscured the real issue. The real point to consider, however, was whether it was worth while to pay the April quarter’s taxes in January, in order to get the remissions which Mr. Lowe promised. The House thought that the gain was commensurate with the sacrifice, and so the Budget passed without serious opposition.[305]
That the new House of Commons was leavened by a spirit of reform was manifest from the record of its legislative achievements. In March Mr. Forster introduced his Endowed Schools Bill, the gist of which was the appointment of a Commission, empowered, if need be, to reorganise compulsorily old endowed schools, and to adapt them to modern requirements. One curious feature in it marked the growth of opinion on the education of women. Girls, as well as boys, were to have a fair share of these endowments. Mr. Austin Bruce, the Home Secretary, passed an Habitual Criminals Act, in deference to the growing feeling of the people that the large class who lived by crime were far too gently treated by the authorities. It put habitual criminals, or persons twice convicted of crime, under police supervision for seven years, and in cases of fresh charges threw on them and on receivers of stolen goods the burden of proving their innocence, a burden that heretofore was laid on Society. Lord Hartington’s Bill for purchasing the telegraphs carried out a bad bargain, to which Mr. Ward Hunt had committed the nation.[306] But all other legislation of importance was wrecked by the House of Lords. For example, the Commons in 1869 passed a Bill giving married women control over their own property; the Lords threw it out. The Commons affirmed the principle of abolishing University Tests; the Lords again stopped the way. The Commons passed a Bill abolishing the law of primogeniture; the Lords rejected it. The Commons accepted a Bill rating all Scottish landowners for the support of a universal unsectarian compulsory system of education in Scotland; the Lords quashed the project, which was denounced even by so Liberal a newspaper as the Daily Telegraph because it was “too revolutionary, too full of compulsion, and too Scotch.” The Commons passed a Bill legalising marriage with a deceased wife’s sister; here again the Lords undid the work of the Commons. The questions relating to purity of election, forced on the country by the revelations made at trials of election petitions during the recess, were by the Commons referred to a Select Committee, on the understanding that it would report, as it did report, in favour of the ballot; but the Lords did not disguise their hostility to that project either. The first Parliament that met under household suffrage therefore demonstrated alike the intense devotion of the Commons and the intense hostility of the Lords to all progressive legislation.
And yet any shrewd observer could see that the Ministry, despite its reforming zeal, was not gaining strength in a reforming House of Commons. The belief in Mr. Gladstone’s ability and earnestness had not decayed; but his colleagues were busy accumulating a baneful crop of private hatreds. Mr. Cardwell and Mr. Childers cut down expenditure in the army and navy, and Mr. Baxter, as Secretary to the Admiralty, insisted on buying stores for the public on the economical business-like principles that guide private firms. Mr. Childers found the Admiralty in a state of chaos. When anything went wrong everybody was generally responsible, but nobody in particular could be punished. Mr. Childers fixed responsibility for patronage and discipline, for building and equipping ships, and for finance on three subordinates. To reduce the redundant officers he offered to give them a lump sum down, instead of half-pay, if they would retire. He, or rather Mr. Baxter, laid down the rule that it was better to buy stores in the open market instead of contracting for them. As to the fleet, he introduced the principle of reducing it as much as possible at foreign stations, where it was difficult to control, and concentrating it as much as possible at home, where it was easily within reach of his arm. In ship-building he insisted on concentrating expenditure, not on repair, but on construction, and on building, not a great many ships of a semi-obsolete type, but a few heavily-armed and armoured swift vessels, which would be guaranteed to beat any craft afloat. The Tory Opposition somewhat unpatriotically joined in the “hue and cry” which every incompetent official and every useless clerk who was shelved by these reforms raised against Mr. Childers. The dockyard men actually assaulted Sir C. Wingfield, Member for Gravesend, because he defended reductions. The words and deeds of Mr. Childers and Mr. Baxter were misrepresented by Tory partisans,
THE VICTORIA EMBANKMENT, LONDON.
who tried to make political capital out of the storm of prejudice which dispossessed jobbers raised against them. Yet, as a matter of fact, whereas the Tory Ministry discharged 3,948 dockyard hands, and pensioned 411, Mr. Childers merely pensioned 617 men, aided 666 to emigrate, and gave gratuities to 117. Forthwith a powerful body of officials, most of whom had the means of influencing the newspaper press, foreseeing that the corrupt spending departments were in danger of being reorganised, began to wage a “paper war” against the Ministry. Mr. Lowe’s vitriolic insolence to deputations who came to do business with him, his quarrel with the legal profession over the site of the New Law Courts, his contemptuous criticism of the Money Market, his proposal to coin a new sovereign with enough alloy to cover the cost of mintage, and his determination to collect the income-tax in a lump sum in the January quarter of the year, also raised up hosts of enemies. Mr. Bruce annoyed people by his obstinate officialism, and Mr. Ayrton by his overweening niggardliness, his too obvious desire to effect mean savings meanly, and his foolish fancy for rubbing pepper into the wounds of those whom he cut by his sharp tongue. Mr. Bright’s speeches on the Irish Church Bill should have vastly augmented his reputation; but his indolence as an administrator was notorious. His resolve to prevent the Board of Trade from doing any work for the people which it could avoid doing disgusted Tories and Radicals alike. His opposition to Lord Edward Cecil’s Resolution in favour of a Bill to check adulteration, based as it was upon the ideas of the old Whigs, and informed as it was by the prejudices of the vulgarest type of small tradesman, did much to destroy his popularity. Adulteration, he said, was only another form of competition. The use of false weights, as a rule, was a pure inadvertency, and if traders were to be spied on every hour by inspectors he (Mr. Bright) would advise them to emigrate. All his arguments, curiously enough, were those by which the coining of counterfeit money might be defended, and the effect of them on the public mind was not favourable to the Cabinet of which he was a member. Lord Granville, too, had sadly mismanaged the Colonial Office. His policy of gradually withdrawing Imperial troops from the self-governing colonies, and teaching them to rely on themselves and their territorial militias for defence was wise and prudent. But it was carried out with a lack of tact that irritated the susceptibilities of the Colonists. Lord Granville hardly concealed his approval of the wild doctrines of Professor Goldwin Smith to the effect that colonies were a burdensome nuisance, and that the best thing to do with them was to cut them adrift. The tone of Colonial Office despatches at this time was studiously impertinent. As for Lord Granville’s subordinates at Whitehall, they prided themselves on treating eminent Colonists as if they were returned convicts. Lord Granville’s refusal to permit a British regiment to remain in New Zealand, then engaged in a Maori war, and his recommendation to the Colonists to recognise the independence of the Maori king, naturally rendered his Colonial policy hateful to all colonists.
Foreign affairs alone seem to have been prudently managed. The only serious question with which the Foreign Office had to deal was that of the Alabama Claims. The Tory Ministry, reversing the somewhat defiant policy of Lord Russell, had conceded to the American Minister—Mr. Reverdy Johnson—every claim he was instructed to prefer.[307] This policy was continued by Lord Clarendon. Mr. Johnson’s method of working was to stupefy the English nation with gross flattery and with ecstatic post-prandial outbursts of brotherly love, and then cajole it into immeasurable concessions. He was a professional diner-out, and he took in his hosts as well as their dinners. But the American democracy ignored the concessions their Minister had obtained. Their attention was fixed on his exaggerated assurances of their goodwill, at a time when they desired him to convey the impression that they still regarded with dignified displeasure the unfriendly attitude of England during the Civil War. The Convention negotiated between Mr. Johnson and the Foreign Secretary was accordingly denounced by Mr. Sumner in the Senate in a speech in which he not only demanded an apology from England for recognising the Confederate States as belligerents, but consequential damages for all injuries to America, that were indirectly as well as directly due to the escape of the Confederate cruisers from British ports. When the Senate refused to ratify the Convention, the reply of Lord Clarendon was a courteous and decisive refusal to conduct negotiations on the absurd basis put forward by Mr. Sumner. Mr. Johnson was recalled. Mr. Motley, the eminent historian, was sent in his stead to the Court of St. James’s, and towards the end of the year American public opinion began to favour a reopening of the negotiations on a more reasonable basis, but at Washington, and not in London.[308]