April 8.—Gladstone looked worn and fagged. Very affectionate and confidential, Gladstone feels keenly the want of support in debate. Bright ill. Lowe no moral weight. “I feel when I have spoken, that I have not a shot in my locker.”
As a very accomplished journalist of the day wrote, there was something almost painful in the strange phenomenon of a Prime Minister fighting as it were all but single-handed the details of his own great measure through the ambuscades and charges of a numerous and restless enemy—and of an enemy determined apparently to fritter away the principle of the measure under the pretence of modifying its details. “No Prime Minister has ever attempted any task like it—a task involving the most elaborate departmental readiness, in addition to the general duties and fatigues of a Prime Minister, and that too in a session when questions are showered like hail upon the Treasury bench.”[A] Then the Government put on pressure and the majority sprang up to eighty.
The debate in the Commons lasted over three and a half months; or about a fortnight longer than had been taken by the Church Bill. The third reading was carried without a division. In the Lords the Bill was read a second time without a division. Few persons clearly foresaw that it was the first step of a vast transfer of property, and that in a few years it would become customary for Ministers of the Crown to base all their legislation on the doctrine that Irish land is not an undivided ownership, but a simple partnership.[B]
[A] Spectator.
[B] Lecky, Democracy and Liberty, vol. i., p. 165.
EDUCATION BILL: THE COWPER-TEMPLE CLAUSE (1870).
Source.—Life of the Right Hon. W. E. Forster, M.P., by T. Wemyss Reid, vol. i., pp. 501–503. (Chapman and Hall, 1888.)
The fate of the Bill was still in suspense. No one could be quite sure that Mr. Gladstone intended to press forward with it during that session. Mr. Gladstone himself held strongly to the Bill in the shape in which it had first been introduced; but he had been startled and alarmed by the rising of the Liberal party against it, and he did not appear to share the robust self-confidence with which Mr. Forster faced the formidable flank attacks that were being delivered upon the Government from the benches below the gangway. On June 12 Mr. Forster submitted to Mr. Gladstone a Memorandum on the subject of the measure and the rival amendments which had been proposed by the representatives of the different sections of their own party.
“The first question which suggests itself,” said Mr. Forster in this Memorandum, “is, Why listen to either of their amendments? Why not stick to our Bill as it stands? Our proposal that the majority should have what religious teaching it pleases, while the minority is protected, is logical and impartial in theory, and would work well in practice. Can we not, then, carry it? Yes, with the help of the Opposition; but I fear a majority of our side of the House would vote against it. All the Radicals—not merely men like Fawcett, but earnest supporters of the Bill like Mundella—all the Dissenters from Baines to Richards, would find themselves forced to oppose us, and they would be followed, or rather led, into the lobby by the Whigs, by Sir George Grey and Whitbread; and all our best friends, like Brand, would beg us to prevent a division which would break up the party.”
Clearly Mr. Forster, when he penned this Memorandum, had no liking for the idea of carrying the Bill by means of the votes of the Opposition and against those of his party. After discussing the various amendments, he declared himself in favour of one proposed by Mr. Cowper-Temple, which was virtually identical with his own suggestion to Lord Ripon in the letter of May 18. By this amendment it was ordered that no catechism or religious formulary distinctive of any particular denomination should be taught in the public schools.