“What seemed its head,
The likeness of a kingly crown had on.”
At first the Bill was very well received, and there was a general disposition to admit that, in view of the limiting conditions of the problem, it was impossible to find a solution less offensive to the Protestants, and more generous to the Catholics of Ireland. But in a few days it became apparent that the measure was doomed. Ministers had been led to believe by their colleague, Mr. Monsell, who was the spokesman of the Catholic clergy, that the compromise would be accepted by them. But the Catholic Bishops met in secret, and decided to oppose the Bill.[50] As the Catholics opposed it for giving them too little, the Protestants opposed it because it gave the Catholics too much. The apostles of culture opposed it because it cut History and Philosophy out of the University curriculum, and in doing so they furnished all discontented Liberals with a good non-political excuse for voting against the Government. The Bill was defeated on the 12th of March by a vote of 287 to 284, the votes of 36 Catholic Members and 9 Liberals[51] having turned the scale. To the very last moment the issue was uncertain, because it was known that if Mr. Gladstone had offered to abandon the teaching clauses of the Bill, he would have won over a sufficient number of Catholic votes to carry it.[52]
Mr. Gladstone’s defeat was followed by the resignation of his Ministry, and the crisis was a most embarrassing one for the Queen. Mr. Disraeli, when sent for by the Sovereign, attempted to form a Cabinet, but did not succeed, mainly because Mr. Gathorne-Hardy objected to the party holding office on sufferance. When Mr. Disraeli reported his failure to the Queen, she again consulted Mr. Gladstone, who, however, suggested that some other Conservative leader—obviously hinting at Lord Derby—might succeed where Mr. Disraeli had failed. But Lord Derby was at Nice when the crisis became acute; and though the Tory Party felt that he was in a special sense their natural leader at such a juncture,[53] they knew that it was decidedly inconvenient for the Prime Minister to be a member of the Upper House, and that he would refuse to enter into anything like rivalry with Mr. Disraeli. Yet a restful Ministry, competent in administration, under a cool-headed, sensible Conservative aristocrat, was what the majority of the people, alarmed by harassed “vested interests,” desired at the time. Be that as it may, Mr. Disraeli, when appealed to a second time by the Queen, refused to assist her out of the difficulty, and Mr. Gladstone was again summoned to the rescue. He returned to power with his Cabinet unchanged and disavowed any intention to dissolve Parliament. Mr. Disraeli’s refusal to take office had given the Queen infinite anxiety, and his defence of his conduct was lame and halting. He was, he said, in a minority; he had not a policy, and could not get one ready till he had been for some time in office, so that he might see what was to be done. He did not desire to experience the humiliation of governing the country under a régime of hostile resolutions. The Queen and the country were alike conscious of the flimsiness of these excuses. Mr. Disraeli never met the question—which, to the Queen, seemed unanswerable—Why did he paralyse the existing Administration, if he was not prepared to put another in its place?
QUEEN’S COLLEGE, GALWAY.
Mr. Disraeli in refusing to govern England himself whilst he prevented Mr. Gladstone from governing it, was pursuing a policy which was as unconstitutional as it was unpatriotic. When he said he could not take office because he must dissolve in May in any case, and that he could not dissolve because he had not a policy to go to the country with, and when he explained that till he had time to study the archives of the Foreign Office he could not tell what ought to be done with questions such as the Russian advance on Khiva, and the Three Rules of the Washington Treaty, men smiled cynically. They asked each other if Lord Palmerston in 1869 was afraid to take the place of the Tory Government because he wanted time to form an opinion on Lord Malmesbury’s policy towards the Italian war of Liberation. Yet Mr. Disraeli gave a truthful account of his motives. He had no policy. Hence when he dissolved Parliament, as he was bound to do after winding up the business of the Session, he must have gone to the country on a purely personal issue between himself and Mr. Gladstone. Doubtless at a time when the nation was getting wearied of restless statesmen, a contest of the sort would have been disastrous to Mr. Gladstone, but not when raised by Mr. Disraeli, who was notoriously even flightier than his antagonist. To have won a General Election on such an issue the Tories must have fought under Lord Derby’s banner. Mr. Disraeli, however, had no intention of giving way to Lord Derby, and his followers did not dare to put him aside, more especially as he had in view a clever scheme of strategy. His idea was to force Mr. Gladstone to dissolve on a positive programme, and then to defeat him by a running fire of destructive criticism. These tactics might bring the Tories back to office under his own leadership, absolutely uncommitted to any definite policy whatever.
When Mr. Gladstone resumed office it was soon seen that he had not only wrecked his party, but compromised the prestige of the House of Commons. His was admittedly a weakened and discredited Ministry. It had been one of Mr. Disraeli’s favourite theories that whenever a feeble Ministry attempted to govern England, power passed from Parliament to the Crown. At one time, no doubt, the theory seemed plausible enough, but the Session of 1873 completely upset it. No sooner had Mr. Gladstone returned to office than power passed from the Crown and the House of Commons to the House of Lords. The will of the Peers was supreme over all. They said or did what they pleased, and quashed Bill after Bill without the least regard to the sentiments of the Queen, the desire of the Commons, or the interests of the country. The Peers rejected the Bill improving Church organisation contemptuously, though it had passed the Commons without a division. By asserting obsolete privileges of appellate jurisdiction over Scotland and Ireland, they disfigured the Judicature Bill, which consolidated the law courts and constituted a high court of appeal. They destroyed Mr. Stansfeld’s useful Rating Bill almost without debate. They opened a way for the reintroduction of purchase in the army, rejected the Landlord and Tenant Bill without even seeing it, and quashed a Bill, promoted by Mr. Vernon Harcourt and supported by the Government, to protect working men against being imprisoned under the law of conspiracy for non-statutable offences committed in the course of a strike. And the curious thing was that from the day Mr. Gladstone returned to office to lead a moribund Ministry and a disorganised House of Commons, the people submitted without a murmur to the resolute and decisive despotism of the Peers. Thus it came to pass that when the Session ended the Ministry seemed to have sunk into a dismal swamp of humiliation—a humiliation which was intensified by administrative scandals and internal feuds. It was shown that Mr. Lowe, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, prepared plans of his own for public works, without consulting the Public Works Office. Mr. Ayrton, as head of that Department, in his place in the House of Commons, repudiated all responsibility for the votes of money for his department which were altered without his knowledge and consent by Mr. Lowe. There was a painful “scene” in the House of Commons at the end of July when these disclosures were made, and when Mr. Ward Hunt formally asked the Government if its Chancellor of the Exchequer and Chief Commissioner of Works were on speaking terms. Mr. Baxter created another scandal by suddenly resigning office as Financial Secretary to the Treasury, because Mr. Lowe had ignored him in the matter of the Zanzibar mail contract. Mr. Lowe was proved to have given the contract for carrying letters from the Cape to Zanzibar to the Union Steam Company for £26,000, whereas the British India Steam Company had offered to do the work for £16,000. Mr. Lowe declared he had never heard of the offer; yet Lord Kimberley, the Secretary for the Colonies, knew of it, and the tender was transmitted by the Indian Postmaster-General to Mr. Monsell, the British Postmaster-General, who passed it on to the Treasury. At the Treasury Mr. Lowe concealed the papers relating to the contract from Mr. Baxter, avowedly because he was known to be hostile to it. A Committee of the House investigated the scandal, and disallowed the contract. This affair was also accompanied by the final revelation of the truth as to what was known as the telegraph scandal.
In spring the working classes were profoundly disturbed by a rumour that the Government had seized the Savings Banks balances, and were building great extensions of telegraph lines with the money without consulting Parliament on the subject. The foundation for the story was a discovery made by the Auditor-General of Public Accounts. He reported that the Telegraph Department of the Post Office had for some time evaded the control of the House of Commons over its expenditure. Instead of submitting to the House estimates for proposed works, and asking for a vote on account, Mr. Scudamore, the Chief of the Department, a brilliant but too zealous official, took whatever money he wanted from the Post Office receipts, and spent it as he pleased on works of extension and improvement. He submitted no estimates in detail, but always asked the House of Commons for a sum for new works, which enabled him to replace the Post Office receipts which he had used. A large portion of the money thus spent was taken from the Savings Banks balances which everybody understood were always paid in for safety to the Commissioners of National Debt, who invested them in Consols. Though no money was missing, it shook public confidence in the Government to find its administrative power so feeble that it could not prevent its own servants from tampering with the Savings Banks Deposits, and further investigation aggravated the scandal. It was shown that Lord Hartington when Postmaster-General had, like Mr. Monsell, allowed Mr. Scudamore to manage the Telegraph Department without any supervision, and that the Treasury had so far condoned this gross and culpable negligence that when it did business with Mr. Scudamore it communicated with him directly, and not through either Lord Hartington or Mr. Monsell, who had meekly submitted to be treated as official “dummies.” It was shown that the Treasury knew of Mr. Scudamore’s irregularities in 1871, and condoned them; that in 1872 it knew of them again, and acted so feebly that even Mr. Lowe admitted he regretted his lack of firmness. It was utterly impossible to defend the conduct of Mr. Lowe, Lord Hartington, Mr. Monsell, and the Chief Commissioner of National Debt, for countenancing these grave irregularities, and the scandal was simply disastrous to the administrative prestige of the Ministry.
The Queen was alarmed at the dismal prospect of ruling England by means of a Cabinet so hopelessly discredited, and Mr. Gladstone was equally conscious of the gravity of the situation. Whenever Parliament was prorogued he tried to parry attacks on the administrative incapacity of his Cabinet by reconstructing it. To the great relief of the Queen, he himself took the Chancellorship of the Exchequer into his own hands, so that the public might have a guarantee that the era of chaos at the Treasury was closed.[54] Mr. Bruce was elevated to the Peerage as Lord Aberdare, and became President of the Council, Lord Ripon having retired for private reasons. Mr. Childers (also for private reasons) vacated the Chancellorship of the Duchy of Lancaster, and Mr. Bright took his place and re-entered the Cabinet. Mr. Lowe was removed to the Home Office, and ere the year closed Mr. Adam became Chief Commissioner of Works, Mr. Ayrton taking the office of Judge-Advocate-General. Mr. Monsell also retired from the Postmaster-Generalship, and was succeeded by Dr. Lyon Playfair. The death of Sir William Bovill, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, in November, elevated Sir J. D. Coleridge to the Bench. Mr. Henry James accordingly became Attorney-General, and, to the amazement of the Bar, he was succeeded as Solicitor-General by Mr. Vernon Harcourt, whose attacks on the Ministry had thus met with their reward.