'On Tuesday, December 10th, I spoke in the debate, doing my best to calm down a revolt which had broken out below the gangway against Hartington for not having countenanced an amendment to the Address, and for having made on the Address a speech supposed to be too friendly to the Government.
'On the other hand, Edward Jenkins, [Footnote: Author of Ginx's Baby.] who called himself a Radical, and who was a strong Imperialist, was busy drawing amendments which were mere pretexts for voting with the Government, and I noted in my diary my despair at finding such men blaming Hartington for going too far, when Chamberlain was blaming him for not going far enough. While I was speaking on the 10th Wilfrid Lawson passed to me his copy of the Orders of the Day, bearing at the head the lines:
'"Lord Salisbury once was the 'master of jeers,
But now he has met with disaster;
For, on reading the Blue Book, it plainly appears
That Giers is Lord Salisbury's master."
The lines were excellent, and I burst out laughing in the middle of my speech. Giers was the new Russian Minister for Foreign Affairs, and the phrase quoted in Lawson's first line was, of course, an abridgment of Mr. Disraeli's memorable quotation from Shakespeare about his colleague, and the four lines formed a summary of my speech…. [Footnote: On August 5th, 1874, Disraeli, speaking in the debate on the Lords' disagreement to certain amendments made by the House of Commons in the Public Worship Regulation Bill, had described Lord Salisbury as "a great master of gibes and flouts and jeers.">[ It came out clearly in these debates that Northcote had not expected war, and that Lord Lytton had acted directly under the instructions of the Prime Minister, and had not only expected, but intended it. I called Lord Lytton in my speech "a diplomatist rather than a Viceroy, a Secretary of Legation rather than a ruler of men." This was not intended for abuse, but to bring the House to see him as I had seen him in my knowledge of him as Secretary at Paris, in order to show that he had been sent out to India to be an instrument—obedient to a policy dictated to him from home.' [Footnote: Sir Charles had been staying with the Commander-in-Chief at Madras, General Haines, afterwards Field-Marshal, in January, 1876, when the news came of Lord Lytton's appointment as Governor-General. 'The old soldier absolutely refused to credit the information, being a strong Conservative, and unwilling to admit that Mr. Disraeli could have been guilty of so extraordinary a mistake.']
This Afghan War, so lightly begun, and fraught with so much disaster, was the first of a series of events which sapped the credit of the Government that had triumphantly claimed to bring back "peace with honour" from the Congress of Berlin.
Some intimate aspects of that gathering are preserved in Sir Charles's account of a dinner-party at Sir William Harcourt's house on December 11th, the guests including the Russian Ambassador, who had been one of the plenipotentiaries.
'Schouvalof was very funny. He gave us a fancy picture of the whole Congress of Berlin. He described almost every member of the Congress, standing up at the table speaking English when he did Lord Beaconsfield, and mimicking the Prime Minister's grave manner, with absurdly comical effect. At last he came to Lord Salisbury, who, according to him, spoke bad French. He made Lord Salisbury coin an extraordinary phrase, at which he himself (Schouvalof), all the Frenchmen, and Gortschakof, shrugged their shoulders with one accord. Lord Salisbury turned fiercely round, and asked what was the matter with it, to which Saint-Vallier replied that "there was nothing the matter with it except that it was not French." "Not French?" said Lord Salisbury, and rang the electric bell by the button in front of him, and when the door was opened, holding up his hand to show the messenger who had rung, said: "Fetch Mr. Currie." Philip Currie appeared at the door, bowing deeply, whereon Lord Salisbury read his phrase to him, and said, "Mr. Currie, is that good French?" to which Currie replied, "Excellent French, my lord;" whereon Lord Salisbury turned, said Schouvalof, "to our French colleagues, and said: 'There!'" Schouvalof carried on violent discussions between Lord Beaconsfield, speaking English, and Gortschakof, speaking French, about various boundary questions, and brought in Bismarck every minute or two as a chorus, the Chancellor stalking up and down the room with his arms folded, and growling in a deep voice: "Eh bien, messieurs, arrangez-vous; car, si vous ne vous arrangez pas, demain je pars pour Kissingen." Under this Bismarckian pressure Schouvalof, after making us shriek for half an hour, brought his Congress to an end…. In a confidential talk with me afterwards Schouvalof said: "I have known many rude people, but I never knew anyone so rude as was Bismarck at the Congress. I happened to name our poor clients, the Montenegrins, when Bismarck roared at me: "Je ne veux pas entendre parler de ces gens-là." Schouvalof also said of our relations with the Afghans: "You don't understand dealing with Orientals. Compare your letters to the Amir and ours, published in your Blue-Book. We call him the Sun and Moon, and you call him an 'earthen pipkin.'" This last was an allusion to the phrase used to the Amir, "an earthen pipkin between two iron pots," the iron pots being ourselves and Russia.'
II.
Sir Charles Dilke in this year has record of meeting with many interesting
persons, some of them links with a vanishing past, such as the daughter of
Horace Smith, who with his brother wrote Rejected Addresses. Miss "Tizy"
Smith was, he says,
'the last survivor of that school of noisy, frolicsome, boisterous old ladies given to punning and banging people on the back; but she was very witty, and, for those who had spirits to bear her spirits, most entertaining. She was for many years known as the "Queen of Brighton," but her sway was not despotic.'