From a Photograph] [by Annan &
Sons, Glasgow.
DAVID LIVINGSTONE,
1813–1873.
African Missionary and Explorer. Born at Blantyre, near Glasgow, and in his youth worked in cotton-mills in that town. Sent to Africa by the London Missionary Society in 1838, he thenceforth spent his life in exploring and evangelizing that continent. In 1865 and 1870 expeditions were sent in search of him. He died at Ilala. His body was brought to England, and buried in Westminster Abbey.
In choosing the Established Protestant Church of Ireland for attack, Mr. Gladstone selected the weakest spot in the Constitution; one, nevertheless, which the Conservative party were bound to defend to their last man. The Irish peasantry, except those of the greater part of Ulster, were Roman Catholics, and Roman Catholics of a peculiarly devout and enthusiastic kind. The Protestant Establishment was an alien Church, and could never be anything else; a monument of conquest which it had been unwise to set up. It presented itself to Mr. Gladstone as the very core and pillar of disaffection, and it was very easy to make out a strong case for its abolition. In March 1868 he brought forward three resolutions, declaring that it was the opinion of the House of Commons that the Established Church of Ireland should cease to exist, and the first division showed a majority of sixty-one in favour of the project and against the Government. In consequence of this Disraeli advised the Queen to dissolve Parliament, which was done in July. Writs were made returnable in November, and the interval was spent in such canvassing and platform work as the country had never experienced before. |Liberal Triumph.| Mr. Gladstone was beaten in Lancashire, Mr. W. H. Smith ousted Mr. Mill from Westminster, and Mr. Roebuck lost his seat at Sheffield; nevertheless, the general result of the polls was an immense gain to the Liberals, showing a majority for them of 120 in the New Parliament. Mr. Gladstone, having found a seat at Greenwich, set to work to obey the Queen’s bidding in forming a Ministry. |Mr. Gladstone’s Cabinet.| The most notable accession to the Cabinet was that of Mr. Bright, who became Secretary of State for India, thus marking an epoch in Parliamentary history by the formal recognition of the extreme Radicals as a party in the State. The great business of the session of 1869 was, of course, the Bill to disestablish and disendow the Irish Church. No Irish question can be touched without releasing the springs of oratory of a quality beside which the most impassioned appeals of average English or Scottish speakers seem tame and halting. In the Commons the fight was a foregone conclusion; but the Irish Church was an exceedingly wealthy corporation, and the disposal of its possessions, to the value of sixteen millions sterling, afforded matter for long and complicated debates in Committee. The Lords could not be persuaded even to delay the Act on which the country and the House of Commons had spoken with so much decision. The Bill passed its second reading by a majority of thirty-three, and received the Royal Assent on July 26, 1869. Lord Derby had made his last speech on the second reading of this measure, which he resisted with much of his ancient vigour and all his splendid eloquence. |Death of Lord Derby.| He died in October of the same year, and, in the opinion of most men qualified to form one, Parliament lost in him its most polished orator.
J. Ballantyne, R.S.A.] [In the National Portrait Gallery.
SIR EDWIN LANDSEER, R.A., 1802–1873.
This distinguished animal painter was born in London. He was knighted in 1850, and in 1865 was offered and declined the office of President of the Royal Academy. The picture represents him in the studio of Baron Marochetti, at work on one of the lions for the Nelson column. These were cast in bronze, and placed in position in January 1867.
The Irish people at first showed few signs of gratitude for the disestablishment of their State Church. The Fenians were giving fresh signs of activity, agrarian crime was of frightful frequency during the winter of 1869–70, and the virulence of the anti-British press became day by day more intense. Troops were poured into the country to repress disturbance, and Mr. Gladstone set about preparing fresh measures of conciliation. The Irish land system, theoretically almost identical in general principles to that of Great Britain, not only differed from it in important details, but had come to be worked on wholly different lines from those pursued by English and Scottish landlords. |Irish Land Legislation.| In Great Britain the tendency had been to throw small unprofitable holdings into substantial farms which should be worth the efforts of energetic men of means to cultivate. The landlord, as a rule, equipped the farm with suitable buildings and fences, and frequently lived on his estates during most of the year. In Ireland, with few exceptions, buildings and improvements of every sort were executed by the tenant, who was allowed to subdivide his holding into mere patches of land, with a hovel run up at the expense of the occupant. The peasantry were bound to their holdings by the capital they had sunk in them; they could not in every season wring the rent out of the land; huge masses of arrears accumulated, often ending in eviction, which meant practical confiscation of such permanent improvements as had been effected. All the evil effects and bitter feelings arising out of this decrepid mode of tenure were intensified by the ever-increasing tendency of landowners to absenteeism, and by the prevailing difference in the religion of proprietors and peasantry.