(From a Photograph by Russell and Sons.)
CHAPTER XXI.
THE REIGN OF JINGOISM.
Opening of Parliament—Sir Stafford Northcote’s Leadership—The Prisons Bill—Mr. Parnell’s Policy of Scientific Obstruction—The South Africa Confederation Bill—Mr. Parnell’s Bout with Sir Stafford Northcote—A Twenty-six Hours’ Sitting—The Budget—The Russo-Turkish Question—Prince Albert’s Eastern Policy—Opinion at Court—The Sentiments of Society—The Feeling of the British People—Outbreak of War—Collapse of Turkey—The Jingoes—The Third Volume of the “Life of the Prince Consort”—The “Greatest War Song on Record”—The Queen’s Visit to Hughenden—Early Meeting of Parliament—Mr. Layard’s Alarmist Telegrams—The Fleet Ordered to Constantinople—Resignation of Lord Carnarvon—The Russian Terms of Peace—Violence of the War Party—The Debate on the War Vote—The Treaty of San Stefano—Resignation of Lord Derby—Calling Out the Reserves—Lord Salisbury’s Circular—The Indian Troops Summoned to Malta—The Salisbury-Schouvaloff Agreement—Lord Salisbury’s Denials—The Berlin Congress—The Globe Disclosures—The Anglo-Turkish Convention—Occupation of Cyprus—“Peace with Honour”—The Irish Intermediate Education Bill—Consolidation of the Factory Acts—The Monarch and the Multitude—Outbreak of the Third Afghan War—The “Scientific Frontier”—Naval Review at Spithead—Death of the Ex-King of Hanover—Death of the Princess Alice.
The “green Yule,” which bodes ill-luck, ushered in the year 1877. The attitude of the Ministry to the Eastern Question was still one of indecision; but there was joy in City circles when, on the 11th of January, it was announced that Lord Derby had recalled the British Fleet from Besika Bay. This was a warning to the Sultan that England had no sympathy with the contumacy of the Porte, which still refused to concede the guarantees for reform in its European provinces that the Conference insisted on.
On the 8th of February the Queen opened Parliament in person, and was well received in the crowded streets, but Mr. Gladstone, Lord Beaconsfield, and the Chinese Ambassador and his suite were for the time the real heroes of the mob. The scene in the House of Lords was one of exceptional brilliancy, and after the Speech, was read by Lord Cairns, the Queen, descending the steps of the Throne, left the Chamber, the ceremony, so far as her Majesty was concerned, not occupying more than fifteen minutes. It need not be said that in both Houses the debates on the Address centred round the Eastern Question. The Conference had been a failure, and the Government were seriously embarrassed. Logically, Ministers, as men of spirit, were bound to make the demands of the Conference effective, for was it not their own device for settling the Eastern Question, and were not its demands their demands? That was the view which Lord Hartington vindicated in a speech of great power and cogency.
On the other hand, it was clear that the Cabinet had no fixed aim when it organised the Conference—that if it ever contemplated the contingency of failure, which its supporters by their fierce attacks on Lord Salisbury had virtually manufactured, it had hoped to tide over the difficulty by letting matters drift. Lord Derby had begun by assuming that it was not the right or duty of England to insist on Turkey conceding reforms to Bulgaria. The autumnal agitation about the atrocities induced him to change front, and to admit that it was alike the duty and right of England, as one of the Powers whose support maintained the Turkish Empire, to demand that its European Provinces should not be submerged in barbarism. He had organised the Powers in support of this demand, and now, when the Turks refused to yield to it, he reverted to his original theory that England had no more right to interfere with Turkey, than with Austria or France. What made matters worse for the Cabinet was the prevailing belief that, though they sent Lord Salisbury to Constantinople to insist on reforms, their agents privily assured Midhat Pasha, then Grand Vizier, that no harm would come if Turkey upset the Conference. The State Papers furnish no confirmation of this belief. Indeed, they show that Lord Derby told Lord Salisbury to warn the Turks that though England would take no part in coercive measures against them, the Porte “is to be made to understand that it can expect no assistance from England in the case of war.”[99] The Turks, however, had a fixed conviction that England would help them in a war with Russia. Nothing but a strong statement from Lord Beaconsfield would have eradicated this belief, and all that the English Government can be blamed for is, that Lord Beaconsfield failed or refused to make this statement. According to Prince Bismarck, no statesman who aspires to influence abroad will permit his Government to be associated with a failure in diplomacy. Yet not only had Lord Beaconsfield and Lord Derby permitted their project of the Conference to be laughed to pieces by the Turks, but all they had to say to Parliament was that they were sorry that Turkey had misunderstood her own interests. They were quite contented to accept the defeat of their scheme meekly. Their position appears rather abject to those who look at it critically, and yet no other was practically open to them. Only a small faction, led by Lord Hartington and Mr. Gladstone, were for coercing Turkey. A still smaller faction of idle loungers, whose favourite phrase was that “Piccadilly wanted a little wholesome blood-letting,” were for joining Turkey in a war against the Slav States headed by Russia. The people were divided between their spasmodic fear of Russia and their equally spasmodic loathing for the Turks, and Radical Russophobes, like Mr. Joseph Cowen, were just as loud in demanding non-intervention as Radical Russophiles like Mr. Bright. Thus the policy of the Government—that of demanding concessions from Turkey from a love of Humanity, and tamely submitting to a contemptuous refusal, from fear of Russia, fairly well reflected the mind of the English democracy.
Sir Stafford Northcote’s leadership of the House of Commons was not promising. He tolerated the obstruction of a small group of members, who caused the Bill which closed public-houses in Ireland on Sundays to be abandoned, after Ministers stood pledged to its principle, and all parties in the House were willing to pass it. He permitted his more devoted followers to oppose a Resolution moved by Mr. Clare Read—who had left the Government because he considered that they neglected agricultural interests—in favour of County Government Reform. But at the last moment he put forward Mr. Sclater-Booth to accept the Resolution in a speech which was evidently meant as a conclusive argument against it. Mr. Cross’s Prisons Bills, too, spread disaffection among the squirearchy. These measures reduced the management of gaols in the three kingdoms to something like uniformity. But they made the prisons national and not local institutions, centralised their administration in the hands of the Imperial Government, deposed the local justices from their position of control over them, and charged their cost to the Consolidated Fund.
The debates in Parliament were rendered memorable by the appearance of a cool and adroit gladiator on the Irish benches, whose business-like methods of attacking the Prisons Bill in Committee extorted admiration from all old Parliamentary hands. This was Mr. Charles Stewart Parnell. It was known to be his intention to obstruct the Prisons Bill, in defiance of the wishes of Mr. Butt, the leader of the Irish Party. But it was assumed that a combination of the two great English Parties would easily crush opposition of the frivolous and factious order with which Mr. Beresford Hope and a section of the Tories had met Mr. Forster’s Ballot Bill.[100] But Mr. Parnell had evidently foreseen this contingency, and he met it by inventing a higher and more scientific type of obstruction than Mr. Hope had been capable of devising. His obstruction paralysed the two front benches, because he took care that it was not frivolous. He had evidently spent many nights and days in the minute dissection of the Bill, and he had manifestly toiled without stint in reading up the whole question of Prison discipline. It was not till he had made himself master of the entire subject that he intervened in the Debates, and then the House, to its amazement, found that the Home Secretary himself, when pitted against this bland young Irish squire with his soft voice, his lugubrious intonation, his funereal manner, and dull, prosaic Gradgrind-like form of speech, was but a poor amateur wriggling in the firm grip of a pitiless expert. To the dismay of the three leaders of the House—Sir Stafford Northcote, Lord Hartington, and Mr. Butt—there was no easy means of getting rid of Mr. Parnell, simply because his amendments—and their name was legion—were not vamped up. Nay, with Machiavelian ingenuity he had draughted them so skilfully that most of them appealed strongly to the sympathies of other sections of the House than those connected with Ireland. Indeed, but for the persistency with which Mr. Parnell and one or two of his friends “bored” the House with the sufferings of certain Fenian prisoners under discipline, one would have thought that his treatment of the Bill was simply that of an English country gentleman, who had made himself an authority on the question, and had a genuine desire to eliminate from it stupid provisions which had been palmed off on a credulous Home Secretary. Nor was it in mastery of detail and skill of draughtsmanship alone that Mr. Parnell showed himself formidable. His ingenuity in inventing amendments drawn on lines that appealed to English popular feeling was inexhaustible. If at one moment the Home Secretary found himself contending with Mr. Parnell in the guise of a healthy-minded Tory squire, who was a hater of centralisation and a champion of the rights of visiting justices, at another he found himself battling with a philanthropist in whom the spirit of Howard lived again. Few who witnessed the long duel between Mr. Cross and Mr. Parnell will ever forget the pitiful and perturbed embarrassment of the Home Secretary when he found himself at every turn so maliciously cornered by his enemy, that he must either surrender, offend the prejudices of the rural magistracy, who hated the Bill, or raise up hosts of enemies in Exeter Hall and other centres of philanthropic activity, where any proposal to humanise Prison Discipline was hailed with delight. And when the duel was over it was impossible to deny that whatever might be Mr. Parnell’s motive, he had by his opposition extorted from Mr. Cross a series of concessions, which not only improved the Bill, but converted it from a bad one into a good one.
One more point remains to be noted. Mr. Parnell’s party practically consisted of one—namely, Mr. Joseph Gillies Biggar. If it was Mr. Parnell’s desire “to scorn delights and live laborious days” in reforming the administration of English prisons, it was the firm and austere resolve of Mr. Biggar that this great work should be done with a solemnity of deliberation