"To purchase land for the State, and let for co-operative agriculture under conditions of efficiency and to smallholders on durable cultivating interests."
He adds a reference to his own Bill "for utilizing public and quasi-
public lands under public management, with repeal of the Statute of
Mortmain and forbidding of alienation."
This Bill was introduced by him in the early seventies, but obtained
no support till 1875 (see Chapter XIII., p. 192).]
Within the previous twenty-five years over six hundred thousand acres of common land had been enclosed, under Orders sanctioned by Parliament. Of this vast amount only four thousand had been set apart for public purposes. In 1866 the commons near London were threatened, and a Society for their preservation was formed, in which Mr. Shaw Lefevre was the moving spirit. [Footnote: Now Lord Eversley.] Sir Charles became in 1870 Chairman of the Society. Among the latest of his papers is a note from Lord Eversley accompanying an early copy of the new edition of his Commons and Forests "which I hope will remind you of old times and of your own great services to the cause." 'We saved Wisley Common and Epping Forest,' says the Memoir. It was more important that on April 9th, 1869, the annual Enclosure Bill was referred to a Select Committee, notwithstanding the determined opposition of the Government. The date is memorable in the history of the question, for the Committee recommended that all further enclosures should be suspended until the general Act had been amended, as it was in 1876.
About the same time Sir Charles became publicly committed to another cause, barren of political advantage, into which he put, first and last, as much labour as might have filled the whole of a creditable career. He began to take an active part in connection with the Aborigines Protection Society and presided at its Annual Meeting in 1870. This, says the Memoir laconically, 'threw on me lifelong duties.'
II.
The Franco-German War broke upon Europe in July, 1870. Later, it became one of the chief interests of Sir Charles's mind to track out the workings of those few men who prepared what seemed a sudden outburst; here it is important only to outline his attitude towards the combatants. In that period of European history every politician was of necessity attracted or repelled by the personality of the Emperor of the French. In Sir Charles's case there was no wavering between like and dislike: he carried on his grandfather's detestation of the lesser Napoleon. The chapter in Greater Britain which is devoted to Egypt shows this feeling; and when news of Sadowa reached him during his American journey in the autumn of 1866, he wrote home to say that he rejoiced in Prussia's triumph, and hoped "Louis Napoleon would quarrel with the Germans over it, and get well thrashed, with the result that German unity might be brought about."
'This' (he notes in the Memoir) 'is somewhat curious at a time when everybody believed (except myself and Moltke and Bismarck, not including, I think, the King of Prussia) that the French Army was superior to the armies of all Germany.'
In coming down the Mexican coast he touched at Acapulco, which was under Mexican fire, as the French still held the bay and city; and he had then, later in 1866, 'begun to hope for the fall of Louis Napoleon, who was piling up debt for France at the average rate of ten millions sterling every year, and whose prestige was vanishing fast in the glare of the publicity given to the actions of Bazaine.'
Before Sir Charles returned to Europe in 1867, Maximilian, the Austrian Archduke sent by Napoleon III to be 'Emperor of Mexico,' had fallen, an unlucky victim of French intrigue. But Paris was still the centre of Europe; and the traveller on his way home from Egypt—where he had seen French enterprise opening the Suez Canal, French language and influence dominant—saw Louis Napoleon preside at a pageant, already darkened by the rising storm-cloud: