No sooner had Parliament met, on the 29th of April, than it was apparent that one gentleman had read aright the lesson to be derived from Mr. Chamberlain’s successful career. To prove that one’s capacity for obstruction was not inferior to that of Mr. Parnell, to reform on a popular basis the organisation of one’s Party, and to flout openly on fitting occasions the authority of one’s leader, these, argued Lord Randolph Churchill, are the keys that unlock the doors of the Cabinet. He, together with Sir H. D. Wolff, Mr. A. J. Balfour, and Mr. Gorst, organised a small band of Tory obstructionists called the Fourth Party, who hoped, by their unscrupulous tactics in embarrassing Mr. Gladstone, that their gibes at Sir Stafford Northcote’s prudent leadership would be forgiven. Their first opportunity for wasting the time of the House arrived when Mr. Bradlaugh, the Member for Northampton, came forward to be sworn on the 3rd of May. Mr. Bradlaugh was notoriously an Atheist, and he claimed to make an affirmation. At first the Fourth Party did not move in the matter, but the Speaker doubted if he could affirm, and a Select Committee appointed to consider the question, reported that he could not. Lord Frederick Cavendish had, in nominating the Committee, included several members who being Ministers would have to stand for re-election, and Sir Drummond Wolff and his friends raised an acrimonious debate by objecting to the names of gentlemen who were not technically members of the House being appointed to the Committee. On the 21st of May Mr. Bradlaugh came forward and claimed to take the oath. This the Fourth Party opposed as revolting to their consciences, for had not Mr. Bradlaugh publicly declared that as he was an Atheist the religious sanction in the oath was to him meaningless? There was no precedent for refusing to swear a member. The law seemed to be that it was his duty to his constituents to get himself sworn. But the point was referred to another Committee, and they reported that Mr. Bradlaugh could not be sworn. The absurdity of this proceeding is easily illustrated. In the Parliament of 1886, Mr. Bradlaugh was allowed to take the oath without a word of protest from the conscience-seared pietists of the Fourth Party. But by that time most of them had become Ministers, and were not anxious to encourage the obstruction of public business. On the 21st of June Mr. Labouchere, the senior member for Northampton, moved that Mr. Bradlaugh be allowed to affirm. The motion was rejected on the 22nd of June by a vote of 275 to 230, and when Mr. Bradlaugh, after speaking in his defence, refused to leave the bar, Sir Stafford Northcote carried a motion that he be imprisoned in the Clock Tower. This step made the House the laughing-stock of the nation, and the Tories promptly released Mr. Bradlaugh from his luxurious retreat. On the 1st of July Mr. Gladstone moved and carried a resolution allowing Mr. Bradlaugh to affirm at his own risk, and subject to any penalties he might incur by doing so, if it were found by the Courts that he had broken the law. Three points had been gained. Lord Randolph Churchill and his friends had forced Sir Stafford Northcote to follow their lead. They had blocked Government business. They had, to some extent, disseminated an impression abroad that the Cabinet was a champion of Atheism—and no doubt there were many good people who looked with suspicion on Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Bright for endeavouring to prevent Northampton from being disfranchised by a combination of faction and bigotry in the House of Commons.
During the interval between the appointment of the Ministry and the reading of the Queen’s Speech, a last attempt was made by the foreign allies of Lord Beaconsfield—and not without some success—to damage the new Government. One of the strange incidents of the Election had been the appearance every morning in the London papers of extracts from the Continental Press urging the English people to vote for Lord Beaconsfield’s supporters. Lord Beaconsfield, as the candidate of the foreigner, was pressed on the constituencies with abject servility by Tory speakers, who, if they had reflected for a moment, must have seen that they were deeply offending the insular instincts and prejudices of Englishmen. But the zenith of imprudence was attained when one morning a semi-official telegram purporting to emanate from the British Embassy at Vienna, appeared in a Ministerial organ informing Englishmen that it was the august desire of the Emperor of Austria that Mr. Gladstone should be defeated in Midlothian. No Englishman will tolerate, even from a foreign Emperor, any interference between him and his constituents during a contested election. Mr. Gladstone accordingly treated the Emperor of Austria as if he had been an interloper from the Carlton Club, who had come down to Midlothian to give extraneous aid to Lord Dalkeith, the Conservative candidate. He snubbed the successor of the Cæsars mercilessly, and greatly to the delight of the British Democracy. This called forth a denial from Sir Henry Elliot that the Emperor of Austria had ever used the words attributed to him, though Sir Henry did not explain how the correspondent of the Standard had come to publish them. Mr. Gladstone retorted that the interest of Austria in preventing his election lay in his known determination to upset her plans for absorbing the heritage of the rising nationalities in Turkey. Austria had always shown herself to be an incompetent tyrant in dealing with subject races, and his warning to the Austrian intriguers, who hoped, if Lord Beaconsfield were returned to power, to make a dash for Salonica, was “Hands Off.” When Mr. Gladstone became Premier this speech was brought up for dissection. Would his Ministry quarrel with Austria? Would Count Karolyi ask for his papers? Then two long telegrams from Vienna were published in the Times, of date 28th of April and 6th of May, semi-officially denying that Austria was conspiring to make a dash for Salonica. Her sole desire now was to stand by the Treaty of Berlin. Count Karolyi had some interviews with Lord Granville on the subject, and in return for assurances of Austrian loyalty and goodwill, he pressed for some expression of opinion from Mr. Gladstone that would allay irritation in Vienna. Mr. Hayward seems to have been asked to use his influence over Mr. Gladstone to get him to make this explanation. Mr. Gladstone accordingly, in a letter to Count Karolyi (4th of May), declared that since he had become a Minister he had resolved not to defend by argument polemical language which he had used in a position of “greater freedom and less responsibility.” He wished Austria well. He had threatened to thwart her policy solely because the evidence at his command indicated that she was hostile to the freedom of the rising nationalities of Turkey. But he accepted the assurances of Count Karolyi that Austria had no designs against that freedom, and added, “Had I been in possession of such an assurance as I have now been able to receive, I never would have uttered any one of the words which your Excellency justly describes as of a painful and wounding character.” The moment this letter was published, the Austrian organs in England, indeed, every Tory speaker and writer, made political capital out of it. The Premier was held up to odium for having humiliated England by an apology which was, undoubtedly, somewhat too exuberant. The people would have been better pleased if Mr. Gladstone had replied that an explanation should have been sought when it was possible for him to give it as the candidate for Midlothian. To ask for it now was to assume that a foreign potentate had a right to expect the Prime Minister of England to apologise for what he might choose to say, as a private person, fighting a contested election.
OLD PALACE OF THE PRINCE OF MONTENEGRO, CETTIGNE.
Difficulties of a more serious character soon gathered round the Ministry. The Turks refused to make those concessions of territory to Montenegro and Greece which had been recommended by the Treaty of Berlin. Lord Granville succeeded in uniting the European Powers in a vain attempt to induce Turkey to fulfil her obligations. The Porte was warned that, unless Dulcigno was given up to Montenegro by a certain date, the Powers would resort to coercion. When that date arrived the European Fleets assembled at Ragusa, under the command of Sir Beauchamp Seymour, to make a naval demonstration against Turkey, but, as the captains of the ships were prohibited from firing a shot, the naval demonstration amused rather than alarmed the Porte. At this point Mr. Gladstone hit on a happy expedient for bringing the Sultan to reason. He threatened to send a British fleet to Smyrna, and, though France refused to join in the scheme, Russia and Italy were willing to act with England. The mere threat was sufficient. The customs dues of the port of Smyrna supplied the only ready money on which the Sultan could depend for the payment of his household expenses. Mr. Gladstone’s intention plainly was to intercept or impound these moneys till Turkey fulfilled her obligations; and the Sultan, alarmed at the prospect, instructed Dervish Pasha to hand over Dulcigno to the Montenegrins. The Greeks were less fortunate. Finding that they could get no concessions from Turkey by diplomacy, they threatened war. But, under pressure from the European Powers, they were held down, and the diplomatists again undertook to reconsider their claims.
In India Lord Lytton resigned. One of his last acts was to deliver a contemptuous speech refuting Mr. Gladstone’s suggestion that the finances of that Dependency were in a state of confusion. To the very last Lord Lytton endeavoured to persuade the English people that the Afghan War had cost only six millions of money, and his Finance Minister (Sir John Strachey) produced a most comforting “Prosperity Budget.” It had, however, one defect. As Lord Hartington discovered when he went to the India Office, a trifling sum of £9,000,000 sterling had been dropped out of the expenditure side of the Afghan War accounts; in other words, a mistake which would have been called by a very ugly name indeed had it been made in the office of a bank or of a railway company, had been made at the expense of the British taxpayer by the Indian Government. While Lord Lytton was assuring England that the war was costing £200,000 a month, it was costing £500,000. Nay, for two years he had been paying away this excess of expenditure over estimates without knowing it, or getting from the Treasury a monthly statement of the money spent on the war! But the position of affairs in Afghanistan was rapidly becoming unendurable. England held Cabul as the Emperor Augustus held Rome—like a man who had a wolf by the ear. Lord Lytton recognised Shere Ali Khan as independent Wali of Candahar, and the ex-Ameer Yakoob was a prisoner in India. But Abdurrahman Khan (a grandson of Dost Mahommed, and an exile in Russia) was a pretender for the throne; and so was the warlike Ayoob Khan, a son of the ex-Ameer, Shere Ali. Ayoob was, moreover, marching from Herat against the British at Candahar with a force of fierce irregular troops.
When Mr. Gladstone’s Government took office they began by trying to discover a Prince who could take Afghanistan off their hands, and for that purpose they tried to treat with Abdurrahman Khan. Unfortunately, Candahar was not only held by a weak force under General Primrose, but it had been decided by the Indian authorities to still further weaken it by sending General Burrows with a moiety of its garrison—some 2,000 men—to meet Ayoob Khan, and co-operate with the troops of the Wali of Candahar in checking the advance of the Heratees. The troops of the Wali, however, deserted to Ayoob Khan, and on the 27th of July Burrows and his small force were overwhelmed by the Heratees at Maiwand. The line of their retreat was covered with the bodies of those who perished by the way, and comparatively few survivors arrived to tell the tale of their terrible disaster. Of course Candahar was now at the mercy of Ayoob Khan, and it was known that the fall of that stronghold would shake the foundations of the British Empire in India. At this critical moment Sir Frederick Roberts saved the situation. He set forth from Cabul with a picked force of 10,000 men, and by a marvellous series of forced marches he arrived in time to defeat Ayoob Khan and rescue Candahar. Ere this crowning victory was won, it had been settled that Abdurrahman was to be the new Ameer of Afghanistan, and as the year closed the British Army of occupation had quitted Sherpore on its homeward march to India.
The mischievous policy of annexation which had been pursued in South Africa was now bearing fruit. When the Transvaal Republic was annexed Englishmen were told that the Boers desired annexation. As a matter of fact, the Boers never meant to submit to the loss of their independence. When the Boers in the Transvaal asked for the restoration of their rights, they were told by Sir Bartle Frere that England would never concede their claims; though, as a matter of fact, no sane Englishman had ever dreamt of holding the Transvaal Republic by an army of occupation against the will of its people. The effect of these misrepresentations was somewhat neutralised by Boer deputations who visited England, by Radicals like Mr. Courtney, and Home Rulers like Mr. Parnell and Mr. F. H. O’Donnell, who warned Englishmen that the Boers were discontented, and that they would rise in insurrection. Mr. Gladstone, too, in his election speeches kept alive Boer aspirations for independence, by condemning their enforced subjection to a British Colonial bureaucracy. The Boers ultimately rebelled, the occasion of the revolt being the refusal of a citizen at Pretoria to pay an illegal claim made on him by the Treasury. On the 13th of December, 1880, at Heidelberg, they proclaimed a Republic under the Triumvirate of Kruger, Joubert, and Pretorius. A collision between the insurgents and British troops under Colonel Anstruther occurred at Bronkhorst Spruit, which ended in the defeat of the latter; and as the year closed, General Sir George Pomeroy Colley was making a futile effort to quell the rising and reconquer the Transvaal.
The Ministerial programme of domestic legislation was popular, but it