WINDSOR CASTLE: QUEEN ELIZABETH’S LIBRARY, FROM THE QUADRANGLE.
took a long time to carry it out. At the end of July business was seriously in arrear, and yet Ministers said that they were determined to push on all their Bills. Towards the end of August no great progress had been made, and the proposal of a Session which might be prolonged into October was seriously discussed. The obstructive strategy devised by Mr. Parnell in Lord Beaconsfield’s Parliament was now developed with great success by the little band of Tories called the Fourth Party, under the leadership of Lord Randolph Churchill. Their method differed from Mr. Parnell’s in one point. He obstructed great measures in mass, so to speak. The Fourth Party organised persistent and systematic obstruction in detail, that is to say, they wasted small scraps of time all through a sitting at odd moments, the cumulative effect of which was most serious. Nor did they on this account refrain from obstruction on the system practised by Mr. Parnell when occasion served, only they carried it on without raising the clamant scandals that spring from prolonged and melodramatic sittings. At the end of August their efforts provoked Lord Hartington into revealing the fact that in the course of the Session Mr. Gorst had made 105 speeches and asked 18 questions, that Lord Randolph Churchill had made 74 speeches and asked 21 questions, that Sir H. Drummond Wolff had made 68 speeches and asked 34 questions, while three Irish Members had delivered 160 speeches and asked 30 questions. In fact, six Members (Lord Randolph Churchill, Mr. Gorst, Sir H. D. Wolff, Mr. Biggar, Mr. O’Connor, and Mr. Finigan) had delivered during the Session 407 speeches. Still, the Government persevered and, after Lord Hartington’s exposure of the tactics of the Opposition, business progressed more rapidly. A Burials Bill, allowing Dissenting ministers to hold services in parish churchyards at the burial of their dead, was passed. Sir William Harcourt passed a Bill giving farmers an inalienable right to kill hares and rabbits. Mr. Dodson’s Employers’ Liability Bill was fiercely obstructed, but it passed and gave great satisfaction to the working classes. It made employers responsible for accidents to their work-people where the accident was traceable to the conduct of the master’s representative, or any workman or person who might reasonably be supposed to be his representative. In the House of Lords, it is true, Lord Beaconsfield succeeded in limiting the operation of the Bill to two years, but this period was extended to seven years by the Commons. The Supplementary Estimates had devoured the small surplus which Sir Stafford Northcote’s Budget showed in March. Hence on the 10th of June Mr. Gladstone brought in a Supplementary Budget, in which he abolished the Malt Tax, substituting for it a Beer Duty, reduced the duties on light foreign wines, increased and readjusted the licence duties on the sale of spirits, and added a penny to the Income Tax. The general result was that a final surplus of £381,000 could be shown on the year’s accounts.
Nothing could be more embarrassing than the condition of Ireland when Mr. Gladstone became Prime Minister. The Home Rulers returned sixty-eight members to the House of Commons, and, though a few of them were lukewarm Nationalists, they had organised themselves into a separate Party, under the leadership of Mr. Parnell. He plainly indicated that they would make use of the feuds between the Opposition and the Government to further their own cause. Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Forster first of all decided to rule Ireland without coercive legislation. But during the debates on the Address to the Crown it was made manifest that they had no clear idea of the extent to which agrarian distress prevailed in Ireland; that they ignored the alarming increase of harsh evictions, which were certain to excite the peasantry to savage deeds of retaliation; that they failed to understand how famine had been averted solely by the charitable funds raised during the previous year; and that they accordingly did not mean to reopen the Land Question. The Irish Party, therefore, at the outset ranged themselves with the Opposition, and even sat beside the Tories below the gangway on the left side of the Speaker’s chair. They began operations by bringing in a Bill to suspend evictions for non-payment of rent, which the Government opposed. But the case presented by the Irish Members seemed too serious to be put aside.
It was at last admitted that there was a crisis in Ireland to be dealt with, and Mr. Forster therefore introduced a short Bill, which so far amended the Act of 1870 as to make disturbance for non-payment of rent, where the tenant was too poor to pay, a case for compensation. The Bill passed through the House of Commons after violent recriminatory debates, in the course of which Mr. Gladstone declared that in the distressed districts eviction was “very near to a sentence of death.”[164] The measure was promptly rejected by the House of Lords. Ministers acquiesced in this rebuff, and from that moment they lost their hold over rural Ireland. They had publicly declared that 15,000 persons were to be evicted that year, in circumstances which rendered eviction tantamount to a sentence of death. They had publicly admitted that it was wicked to extort rack rents from these persons by threats of eviction, and that, unless they were protected from the rapacity of their landlords, the peace of Ireland would be imperilled. And then they permitted the Peers to reject the protective Bill, which Mr. Forster had pressed forward as necessary for the preservation of tranquillity! Either the Government was wrong in introducing the Bill, or it was wrong to remain responsible for the peace of Ireland after the Bill had been rejected. All that Mr. Forster did in this crisis was to promise a new Land Bill next year, and appoint a Commission to inquire into Irish distress. Rural Ireland had by this time been completely organised into a Land League by Mr. Michael Davitt, and this Land League was really a gigantic trades-union, to promote a strike against rack rents. Incidentally, its organisation was also used to further the Home Rule cause. The leaders of the League advised the people to resist eviction, and Mr. John Dillon used words to which Sir W. Barttelot called attention in the House of Commons on the 17th of August, that seemed to advise a general strike against rent. Acrimonious debates followed day after day, in the course of which the hostility between the Parnellites and the Ministry deepened with every turn. Mr. Parnell’s cynical argument that as Ministers could not, because of a Parliamentary defeat, carry the Disturbance Bill, which they admitted was essential for the good government of Ireland, they ought, as men of honour, to free Ireland from the mischievous interference of the Imperial Parliament, seemed to cut Mr. Forster to the quick. At last, in Committee of Supply on the 26th of August, it was clear that an organised attempt to coerce the Government by obstruction was to be made. On the motion for going into Supply, Lord Randolph Churchill raised an irrelevant and discursive debate on the Irish policy of the Government, which had already been under bitter discussion for the best part of a fortnight. This set the Parnellites and the Ministerialists by the ears, and consumed a great part of the sitting. Then, when the vote for the Irish Police was moved, Lord Randolph Churchill and the Fourth Party vanished into the background, and left the work of obstruction to the Parnellites, who kept it up till one o’clock in the afternoon of the following day (Friday, the 27th of August). The debate was at this stage adjourned till next Monday, when, after further discussion, the vote was carried. During these exciting and troublous scenes Mr. Gladstone was absent from the House of Commons. He had fallen ill on the 4th of July, and had gone for a cruise in one of Sir Donald Currie’s steamers, the Grantully Castle, to recover his health. During his absence his duties were taken up by Lord Hartington, who led the House till Mr. Gladstone was able to reappear on the 3rd of September. On the 6th of September Parliament was prorogued. But during the recess the condition of Ireland grew worse and worse. The landlords, dreading the forthcoming Land Bill, pressed on evictions. The Land League urged the people to refuse to pay rack rents, and the League had by this time become so powerful, that it could enforce its decrees almost as surely as if it had been the regular Government of the country. Its favourite weapon of coercion was to pronounce against bailiff or landlord, land agent or “land grabber”—i.e., a man who offered to take a farm from which the tenant had been unjustly evicted—sentence of social ostracism. The victim of this sentence was not assaulted or outraged, but he was treated as if he were a leper by his neighbours, and the system came to be known as “boycotting.”[165] Boycotting was indignantly assailed in England, and yet it was in itself a mark of progress. Just as slavery in primitive warfare was an improvement on cannibalism as a means of disposing of prisoners, so boycotting, carefully carried out within the law, was an improvement on assassination as a means of agrarian coercion. But the demand for retaliatory measures against the Parnellites was loud and strong among the upper and middle classes. Mr. Forster at last yielded to it, and it was in vain that Mr. Bright protested in one of his speeches that “force was no remedy.” Outrages increased in Ireland. The ladies of the Tory aristocracy, and some of the great Whig families, made arrangements for devoting their salons during the coming Session, to a social campaign against Mr. Chamberlain and the Radical section of the Cabinet. On the 2nd of November, 1880, the Irish Attorney-General filed an indictment of nineteen counts, against Mr. Parnell, Mr. Dillon, and various leaders of the Land League, for conspiring to incite tenants not to pay rent or take farms from which the occupiers had been evicted, but the trial, after lasting for twenty days, broke down, because the jury could not agree on a verdict. Ere the year ended it was known that the Cabinet, though it had nearly been broken up by the decision, had at last consented to let Mr. Forster bring in a strong Coercion Bill next Session.
THE QUEEN PRESENTING THE ALBERT MEDAL TO GEORGE OATLEY, OF THE COASTGUARD.
The year was not an eventful one in the family life of the Court. Before Parliament was dissolved the Queen arranged to visit her relatives in Germany. The time had come when her granddaughters, the Princesses Victoria and Elizabeth of Hesse, were to be confirmed, and she desired to be present at the ceremony. Her Majesty and the Princess Beatrice (travelling as the Countess of Balmoral and the Countess Beatrice of Balmoral), attended by Sir H. F. Ponsonby, Viscount Bridport, and Lady Churchill, left Windsor Castle on the 25th of March, and embarked at one o’clock on the royal yacht Victoria and Albert. It was intended that the Queen should proceed to Darmstadt to visit the Grand Duke of Hesse and the tomb of Princess Alice. There the Queen would be joined by the Prince and Princess of Wales. On the 25th the Queen and her suite landed at five o’clock at Cherbourg, and entered their special train. The public were excluded from the stations on