THE BISHOP OF PETERBOROUGH (DR. MAGEE) ADDRESSING THE HOUSE OF LORDS.
a Corporation it was confiscated without compensation. The idea of the Government was that Presbyterians outside the Established Church were deterred from joining it by the existence of lay Patronage. When this was abolished it was supposed that they would immediately go over to the State Church, whose services they could command gratuitously, and leave their own pastors, whose stipends they had to pay out of their own pockets, to starve. Mr. Disraeli did not understand that lay Patronage, by bringing the Church courts and civil courts into collision, was merely the occasion and not the cause of the Disruption, and that what separated the Free Churchmen from the State Church was a difference of opinion on the relative position of Church and State, as wide as that which separated Dr. Pusey from an Erastian like Sir William Harcourt. But the Patronage Bill was passed in spite of Mr. Gladstone’s opposition, though, like the Public Worship Regulation Bill, it failed in its object. The congregations of the non-established Presbyterian churches refused to justify Mr. Disraeli’s cynical estimate of their character, and therefore did not desert their pastors. The powerful Free Kirk of Scotland, representing the principle that the Church should be established and endowed but left free from State control, had been debarred from joining in the Disestablishment movement. It now, however, cast in its lot with those Presbyterian dissenters who clamoured for Disestablishment in Scotland, which thus for the first time came within the range of practical politics. Perhaps, if Mr. Disraeli had insisted on the rights of patrons being transferred to all parishioners his policy might have been more successful. But by transferring these rights to the congregations in actual attendance at established churches, he gave the Free Churchmen a pretext for arguing that he had sectarianised the national ecclesiastical endowments, and that, therefore, the State Church could no longer be defended on principle. These endowments were not sectarianised, but secularised, when controlled by private patrons and civil courts, for patron and judge could alike be regarded in theory as legal trustees for the nation. They were bad trustees according to the Free Churchmen, but then they represented the nation officially, and did not, like their successors, the congregations of the parish churches, constitute a sect.
Academic debates on Parliamentary Reform and Home Rule varied the monotony of ecclesiastical controversy which Ministers seemed to take a morbid delight in stirring up. Their next achievement in this direction led to a defeat. Lord Sandon unexpectedly introduced in July an Endowed Schools Bill, which virtually undid the work of 1869. It restored the ascendency of the Church of England in Grammar Schools, and substituted the authority of the Charity Commissioners for that of the Endowed Schools Commission. The Bill would probably have done much to conciliate the clergy who had been offended by the Public Worship Regulation Act, but, on the other hand, it closed the ranks of the Opposition, and recalled the Dissenters to the Liberal colours. The result was that, after fierce controversy in both Houses, Mr. Disraeli professed himself satisfied with the appointment of the Charity Commission to superintend the working of Mr. Forster’s Act, and postponed the contentious clauses till the following year. They were never heard of again. Mr. Stansfeld’s Rating Bill, which the Lords had rejected in the previous Session, was adopted by the Ministry and passed. Mr. Mundella’s Bill for consolidating the Factory Acts, which had been shelved in 1873, was adopted by Mr. Cross and carried.
The popular verdict on the Ministry, when the Session closed on the 8th of August, was, that as administrators they had done nothing brilliant, and as legislators they were timidly reactionary, when they did not adopt the ideas and measures of their predecessors. The Premier, perhaps, suffered most in reputation. It was impossible to admire the strategy that brought into prominence Church questions which divided his Cabinet, and were uninteresting to the populace, or which, like the Endowed Schools Bill, when they were of great popular interest, were dealt with in an offensively reactionary spirit. On the other hand, the success with which the famine in Bengal and Behar was arrested, and indeed the whole tone of the administration at the India Office, greatly increased Lord Salisbury’s prestige. Lord Carnarvon’s management of the Colonies was sympathetic and popular. Foreign affairs had been conducted by Lord Derby with admirable prudence. This was aptly illustrated by his skill in avoiding entangling engagements committing England to approve of changes in international law which would have greatly extended the powers of invading armies in an enemy’s country. These changes were proposed at a Conference at Brussels, which had been promoted by Russia and Germany ostensibly to mitigate the evils of modern warfare.
Only one cloud shadowed the Foreign policy of the Cabinet during this uneventful year. The contest between Prince Bismarck and the Roman Catholic Church was raging in Germany, and the personal rivalry of the German Chancellor and Count Harry Arnim—who had been German Ambassador at Paris—had ended in the arrest of the latter on the charge of embezzling State documents. This arrest had been effected after Count Harry Arnim’s house had been ransacked by the police, and the Continent rang with the scandal. Mr. Disraeli, at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet, on the 9th of November, congratulated the country on the Conservatism of the British working classes, who, he said, enjoyed so many liberties that they were naturally loyal to the institutions under which their freedom was safeguarded. “They are not,” said he, “afraid of political arrests or domiciliary visits.” The Queen was somewhat pained at an utterance which the German Government regarded as an impertinent interference with its domestic affairs, but a few days afterwards the wrath of Prince Bismarck was appeased by an official explanation in the Times to the effect that Mr. Disraeli had not meant to refer to the affairs of Germany, or to the arbitrary conduct of the Berlin police. In this unfortunate speech Mr. Disraeli, however, struck a popular note when he referred to the extension of the Empire by the annexation of the Fiji islands, in terms that foreshadowed a policy of Colonial expansion.
As for the Opposition, it remained in a state of disorganisation, under Mr. Gladstone’s desultory leadership. Its prospects were not improved by his publication of two pamphlets, in which he attacked what he called “Vaticanism,” and attempted to prove that good Catholics, who were mostly Liberals, must be incapable of reasoning, if they were not traitors. That was the sum and substance of his amazing tirades against the extravagant pretensions of the Papacy under Pius IX.
During the year the Queen seldom appeared in public, which was, perhaps, one reason why a marked deterioration in the moral tone of society was discernible. A curious languor crept over the upper classes. They were consumed with a quenchless thirst for amusement, and the genius who could have invented a new pleasure would have had the world at his feet. Frivolity seemed to prey like a cancer on the vitality of the nation. When the Prince of Wales gave a State Fancy Ball in July, the Times actually devoted three columns of space to an elaborate description of the dresses. Sport became a serious business to all classes of society, and even grave and earnest men of affairs like Mr. Gladstone wasted their lives in the laborious idleness of ecclesiastical controversies. The more vigorous youth of the aristocracy now began to make their “grand tour,” not as did their ancestors to study foreign affairs and institutions, but merely to kill big game. Fashionable life became so costly that rents had to be exacted with unusual rigour, and the strikes among the agricultural labourers that mitigated the advantages of a good harvest, were accordingly spoken of in West End drawing-rooms as if they had revived the horrors of the Jacquerie. Though prices had begun to fall, the mercantile classes vied with the aristocracy in the ostentatious extravagance of their personal expenditure, and in the City the old and substantial Princes of Commerce were pushed aside by gamblers who termed themselves “financial agents,” and who had suddenly grown rich by “placing” Foreign Loans and floating fabulously successful Joint-Stock Companies. The pace of life was too rapid even for the Prince of Wales, whose financial embarrassments during a dull autumn formed the subject of some discussion. It was publicly stated that he had incurred liabilities to the extent of £600,000, and that the Queen, disgusted with Mr. Gladstone’s refusal to apply to Parliament for money to discharge them, had paid them herself. From what has already been said on this delicate subject it is hardly necessary to point out here that this statement was not quite accurate. It was true that the debts of the Heir Apparent amounted to one-third of his income, but it was equally true that on the 1st of October his Controller’s audit showed that he had a balance to his credit sufficient to meet them. At the same time there could be no doubt that the Prince’s expenditure far exceeded his resources, for sums varying from £10,000 to £20,000, taken from the great fund accumulated for him by the Prince Consort’s thrifty administration of the revenues of the Duchy of Cornwall, were sacrificed every year to prevent his debts from becoming unmanageable.[75]
His brothers were more fortunately situated. Prince Arthur, who had been created, in May, Duke of Connaught and Strathearn and Earl of Sussex,[76] was able to devote himself quietly to his military studies, and lead a life of dignified simplicity. “Many thanks,” writes the Princess Louis of Hesse to the Queen (May 4th, 1874), “for your last dear letter, written on dear Arthur’s birthday, of which, though late, I wrote you joy. Such a good, steady, excellent boy as he is! What a comfort it must be to you never to have had any cause of uneasiness or annoyance in his conduct! He is so much respected, which for one so young is doubly praiseworthy. From St. Petersburg, as from Vienna, we heard the same account of the steady line he
