“It is supposed [said Mr. Disraeli] to be an act which can be performed with very great promptitude, and that it is a resource to which any Minister may recur with the utmost facility. That is a grave mistake. Dissolution of Parliament is a different instrument in different hands. It is an instrument of which a Minister who is in office, with his Government established, can avail himself with a facility which a Minister who is only going to accede to office is deprived of. There may be circumstances which may render it imperative on a Minister in office to advise the Sovereign to exercise the prerogative of dissolving Parliament; but he always has the opportunity of disposing of the public business before that dissolution takes place. The position of the Minister who is about to accede to office is very different. In the first place he has to form his Administration. This is a work of great time and of heavy responsibility. It is not confined merely to the construction of a Cabinet. Before a Ministry can be formed, whoever undertakes the task of its construction must see some fifty individuals whom he has to appoint to offices of trust and consideration. It is a duty which he can delegate to no one. He must see each of those individuals personally, and must communicate with them by himself. And this is a matter which—irrespective of the knowledge of human nature, which whoever undertakes to form a Cabinet ought to possess—requires time, and materially affects the business of the country. In the present case it would not have been possible to form a Government before Easter. Then the holidays would have intervened. After the holidays we might, by having recourse to measures of which I greatly disapprove—namely, provisional finance, the taking votes on credit and votes on account, and by accepting the estimates of my predecessors—have been able to dissolve Parliament in the early part of May. But when the month of May arrived, this question would have occurred: What are you going to dissolve Parliament about? There was no issue before the country. At least, it cannot be pretended for a moment that there was one of those issues before the country which would justify an extraordinary dissolution of Parliament—that is, some question upon which the country would passionately wish to decide. I ask the House to consider impartially what was the real condition of affairs. Her Majesty’s Ministers had resigned; the Queen had called upon a member of this House to form a Ministry in a house in which he had nearly ninety majority arrayed against him. Suppose it was in his opinion necessary to appeal to the country, by which the majority might be returned—probably of ninety—in his favour.
“Well, the Irish University Bill was not a Bill on which any Ministry could resign. But we could not carry on affairs without appealing to the country; and is it not clear that we could not appeal to the country without having a policy? (Laughter.) Hon. gentleman may laugh at the word ‘policy,’ but I maintain that it is totally impossible for gentlemen sitting on the Opposition bench suddenly to have a matured policy to present to the people of this country in case Parliament dissolves. The position of any party in opposition is essentially a critical position. On all great questions of the day gentlemen on this side of the House have certain principles which guide them on the subjects before Parliament; but on these questions we cannot rival in the possession of information those who hold the seals of Government.”
This point Mr. Disraeli elaborated at some length, mentioning Central Asia, the Three New Rules, and the French Treaty of Commerce as matters on which no body of men, suddenly created a Government, could have any policy until they had studied the official information. Local taxation, too, was a question which they must have fully considered before going to the country; but the strongest obstacle to an immediate dissolution would have been the necessity of carefully scrutinising the estimates, which, he maintained, were just as large as his own which were so vehemently denounced in 1868. The upshot was that the session would have been one of ordinary length, and he knew, from experience, the consequences to a party and to the public interests of endeavouring to carry on the Government in the face of a hostile majority.
“I know well (added Mr. Disraeli), and those around me know well, what will occur when a Ministry takes office and attempts to carry on Government with a minority during the session, with a view of ultimately appealing to the people. A right hon. gentleman will come down here, he will arrange his thumb-screws and other instruments of torture, and we shall never ask for a vote without a lecture; we shall never perform the most ordinary routine office of Government without there being annexed to it some pedantic and ignominious condition. (No, no.) I wish to express nothing but what I know from painful personal experience. No observation of the kind I have encountered could divest me of the painful memory; I wish it could. I wish it was not my duty to take this view of the case. For a certain time we should enter into the paradise of abstract motions. One day hon. gentlemen cannot withstand the golden opportunity of asking the House to assert that the income-tax should no longer form one of the features of Ways and Means. Of course, a proposition of that kind would be scouted by the right hon. gentleman and all his colleagues; but they might dine out on that day, and the resolution might be carried, as resolutions of that kind have been. Perhaps another gentleman, distinguished for his knowledge of ‘men and things’ (Mr. Rylands), moves that the Diplomatic Service should be abolished. While hon. gentlemen opposite may laugh in their sleeves at the mover, they vote for the motion in order to put the Government into a minority. So it would go very hard with us if on some sultry afternoon some member should ‘rush in where angels fear to tread’ (Mr. Trevelyan) and successfully assimilate the borough and the county franchise. And so things would go on until the bitter end—until at last even the Appropriation Bill has passed, Parliament is dissolved, and we appeal to those millions who, perhaps, six months before might have looked upon us as the vindicators of their intolerable grievances, but who now receive us as a defeated, discredited, and a degraded Ministry, whose services can no longer be of value to the Crown or a credit to the nation.”
Under these circumstances, with the concurrence of all his friends, he had represented to the Queen that it was not for the public interest that he should attempt to form a Government.
FIRST LONDON HOSPITAL SUNDAY (1873).
Source.—The Times, Monday, June 16, 1873.
The Metropolis has just witnessed the success of an undertaking without parallel in the social and religious history of modern times. The congregations of the great majority of the places of worship in London and its suburbs, reinforced moreover by many who do not habitually attend places of worship at all, were united in the pursuit of a common object, and in the acknowledgment of a common obligation. The claims of the sick poor were urged from several hundred pulpits, not on any ground of expediency, or of economy, or even of benevolence, but mainly on the broad principle that their recognition forms an essential part of the life dictated by every form of Christianity.
The appeal had gone home to the hearts of all classes of the community, and in the Metropolitan Cathedral the eye ranged easily from the Heir Apparent, and from the representatives of civic wealth and munificence, to an assemblage largely composed of persons manifestly of humble station, but who were neither less devout nor less liberal than those whom fortune had more highly favoured.