Sir Charles notes here that on June 29th, when he was to second, as usual,
Mr. Trevelyan's annual motion concerning franchise and redistribution, he
'had a conference with Chamberlain on the question whether we could possibly get together a small knot of young peers to help us in the House of Lords. Rosebery seemed the only one that we could find worth thinking of, and we had him to dinner, and went to stay with him, and generally tried to join forces, but without any very marked effect.'
Dilke and Chamberlain also sounded the Home Rulers to see if they could find any basis of co-operation; and about this date Sir Charles, with Lord and Lady Francis Conyngham and Butt, and 'in their sitting-room, full of perennial clouds of smoke,' where a captive nightingale sang ('thinking the gas the moon unless he took Butt's face for that luminary of the heavens'), settled with the Irish leader that in following years they should amend Mr. Trevelyan's franchise resolution by moving for the extension of the franchise in counties throughout the United Kingdom; not even Radicals had previously proposed to enlarge the electorate in Ireland.
But in these days the Irish party were beginning to apply and develop that use of Parliamentary forms for obstructive purposes which had been first systematically attempted by the "Colonels" in opposition to Mr. Cardwell's Bill for abolishing purchase in the Army, and Liberals were a little scandalized by their allies. In the close of July Sir John Lubbock, then a Liberal, 'foreshadowed his future Unionism by observing that "the obstructive Irish were the Bashi Bazouks, who did more harm to us by their atrocities than good by their fighting."' A couple of days later, when Liberals supported an Irish amendment, Dilke himself agreed with Mr. Rylands's pun that "they would have had a bigger vote if it hadn't been Biggar." Upon this matter Sir Charles's attitude was naturally affected by that of Butt, in whose company he delighted. The great advocate believed in his own power to effect by eloquence and reasoned argument that change of mind in the British House of Commons which five-and-twenty years' experience of Ireland had wrought in himself since the days when he opposed O'Connell on Repeal, and this led him to resent the methods of unreason. Mr. Parnell, who never believed that England was open to reason in the matter of Ireland, was only beginning to impress his personality on the House; there is but one incidental mention of his name in the Memoir for 1877.
But notwithstanding all the claims of home politics, in Sir Charles's judgment every statesman had, under existing conditions, to study the details of modern warfare, and he kept closely in touch with naval armament:
'On February 24th I suddenly went down to Portsmouth to go over the dockyard and see the ships building there, taking letters from Childers and from Sir Edward Reed to Admiral Sir Leopold McClintock, the Arctic explorer (Superintendent), and to Mr. Robinson, the Chief Constructor. I went over the Inflexible, the Thunderer, and the Glatton, which were lighted up for me. Noting the number of sets of engines, and the number of the separate watertight compartments of the Inflexible, I wrote: "All these extremely complicated arrangements are handed over to a captain, of whom … is a favourable example, and to engineers who are denied their due rank in command."'
Nearly thirty years later the necessary reform which the last words indicate was carried out by Lord Fisher.
CHAPTER XVI
THE EASTERN QUESTION—TREATY OF SAN STEFANO AND CONGRESS OF BERLIN
At the beginning of 1878 Parliament was summoned a month earlier than usual to tranquillize public feeling—a result not thereby attained, for the Russians, now completely victorious, were but a short distance from Constantinople.