If 1880 opened cheerfully, it was solely because men felt a sense of relief at getting rid of what they called “the bad old year.” It had begun with bitter frosts, varied by black fogs. Its spring was a prolonged winter. Cold gloom marked its dog-days. There was no summer worth recording, and as for autumn, October and November saw the crops rotting in the fields. Farmers and squires, like Sheridan, were striving “to live on their debts.” Two great bank failures—that of the City of Glasgow Bank and that of the West of England Bank—had shaken the fabric of credit and reduced thousands of the well-to-do middle class to penury, while trade seemed going from bad to worse. Even science and invention appeared to be in a conspiracy to ruin people, for Edison’s contrivance of the electric lamp frightened investors in gas shares into a panic, which seriously depreciated the value of their property. Disasters in war, which are courteously called blunders, were followed by catastrophes by flood and field, which it is customary to call accidents. The ghastly tale of misfortunes was completed by the frightful hurricane that swept over the country on the last Sunday of the old year. At half-past seven of the evening of that day a furious gust swept down the Firth of Tay and cut a section out of the great railway bridge that spanned the estuary. A train crossing at the moment was blown, with the wreckage of the bridge and its precious freight of human life, into the surly waters of the Firth.[151] Very promptly did the Queen instruct Sir Henry Ponsonby to telegraph from Osborne a sympathetic message from her to the relatives of the dead.[152] Her Majesty had herself crossed the bridge on her way to Balmoral, and the shock of the disaster struck her to the heart.
It was when the people were moodily pondering over the evil fate of England under the Government that was to have given it rest and prosperity, that Lord Beaconsfield’s opponents became unusually active. Mr. Gladstone reprinted his speech on Finance which he had delivered in Edinburgh in November (1879), and reminded the electors how Lord Beaconsfield, after promising to repeal the Income Tax in 1874, had raised it; how in bad times he had increased expenditure, whereas in good times the Liberals had reduced it; how he had imposed £6,000,000 more taxes than he remitted, whereas the Liberals remitted £12,500,000 more than they imposed; how he had transformed a surplus into a deficit, and kept on rolling up debt, instead of paying off the nation’s liabilities as they were incurred. There was a stroke of high art in publishing this sombre speech when the New Year opened. Sir Stafford Northcote had, at Leeds, essayed a mild and apologetic reply to it. Mr. Gladstone thus considered it necessary, when men were beginning to suspect that they were ruled by a Government of bad luck, to answer Sir Stafford in an appendix to the November speech, which tended to deepen the prevailing depression of spirits. Sir William Harcourt, in his New Year orations at Oxford, on the other hand, dealt with the Government from a comic point of view. He touched with caustic wit on their incongruities and inconsistencies, and by contrasting their swelling words with their small deeds, their affluence of promise with their poverty of performance, contrived to create an impression that Ministers were making the country the laughing-stock of the world. When Mr. Gladstone showed that the nation was being ruined, Sir William Harcourt immediately followed up by declaring, in speeches which everybody read, because they were amusing and personal, that it was being ruined by a group of mountebanks. To him succeeded Mr. Bright, who, at a Liberal banquet at Birmingham (20th of January), elaborately explained how that which had happened was only what might have been looked for. He exhibited, from the treasure-house of his memory, an interminable series of examples to illustrate one simple thesis. It was that the history of England had ever been a tragic conflict between the Spirits of Good and Evil—the Tory Party representing the Spirit of Evil. His political Manichæism would not have influenced the country if it had not been downhearted. Inasmuch as it manifestly affected public opinion, it ought to have warned Lord Beaconsfield that the people were out of humour with him. The Tories, however, had eyes and ears for nothing, save Sir William Harcourt’s jokes and gibes, and flouts and sneers. These were not highly refined or polished, but they were just what was wanted to make the average voter laugh at Imperialism. The Imperialists being sensitive, not to say short-tempered persons, instead of pleading their own case rationally before the country, spent their force in vituperative attacks on Sir William Harcourt. It was also the misfortune of Lord Beaconsfield, that at this juncture he became nervous over the growing hostility of the clergy of all denominations to his foreign policy, the tone of which they deemed anti-Christian.
A desperate effort which was made to counteract this impression, displayed Sir Henry Layard at Constantinople—an Envoy who was supposed to be more Turkish than the Turks—figuring as a champion of the Cross against the Crescent. People, in fact, were startled at the beginning of the year to learn that the Government had suspended diplomatic relations with Turkey, because the Turkish authorities had threatened to execute a Mussulman schoolmaster for helping an Anglican missionary to translate the Bible.[153] Sir Henry Layard had been unmoved by the massacre and judicial murder of thousands of Christian subjects of the Sultan in Epirus, Macedonia, and Armenia, in defiance of Treaty law. It was, therefore, amazing that he should have suddenly burst into a convulsion of diplomatic wrath because a Turkish Court
THE FIRST TAY BRIDGE, FROM THE SOUTH.
passed on a Turkish Mussulman the sentence appointed by the law of his race and creed for an act which, when done by him, was legally a crime. Still, from the point of view of the practical statesman on the eve of a General Election, the step taken by Sir Henry Layard would not have been open to criticism merely because of its inconsistency and injustice. The fatal objection to it was that, whilst it failed to conciliate the religious world, it made the Government seem ineffably ridiculous to the electors. The foreign policy that was to give England ascendency in the councils of Europe, had reduced her to such a poor pass that, at Constantinople, Sir Henry Layard had to threaten war ere the Porte would even listen to his appeal for clemency to the obscurest of offenders against the letter of a harsh and obsolete law. Nor was the situation improved as the quarrel developed. The Turks resolutely refused even to deliver up Dr. Köller’s MSS., which they hardly had any right to keep, and it was not till the German Ambassador interfered on behalf of the English missionary that they were restored. When Sir Henry Layard pressed for the dismissal of Hafiz Pasha, he was foiled by the Sultan averring that he, and not the Minister, had ordered the arrest of Ahmed Tewfik. After Lord Beaconsfield’s Guildhall eulogies on the Sultan, Ministers were seriously embarrassed by this new turn in the affair. Ultimately the intervention of Germany and Austria induced the Sultan, who listened to the menaces of the British Government with imperturbable serenity, to offer concessions. He still refused Sir Henry Layard’s demand for the annulment of the sentence of death on Ahmed Tewfik. But he offered to commute it by exiling Ahmed to a remote Turkish island with a Christian population. He also ordered Hafiz Pasha, the Minister of Police, to apologise.[154] The commutation of Ahmed’s sentence meant that, though England had saved him from the gallows, “Kismet” had destined him for a premature grave. The apology from Hafiz was immediately converted into a further insult to the British Government, for, as soon as it had been delivered, the Sultan decorated him with the Grand Cordon of the Medjidie. Nor was this act quite atoned for by the issue of an Imperial edict forbidding the Mohammedan Press to laugh at the British Ambassador. It was, therefore, easy to predict that the Queen’s Speech would be demure, if not actually meek in tone, when it touched on Foreign Affairs.
WINDSOR CASTLE: A PEEP FROM THE DEAN’S GARDEN.