A Short History of English Liberalism

by W. Lyon Blease

In two years the war was at an end. Hundreds of thousands of lives had been lost. Hundreds of millions of pounds had been blown away. The Emperor of the French had strengthened his seat upon his throne. The Sultan of Turkey was enabled, for twenty years more, to murder, flay, beat, and ravish his Christian subjects. Russia, rebuffed for the time being in the Balkans, began to move eastwards, and threatened us more directly in Persia. The gains of England were of the vaguest kind. If she had succeeded, after a war which was chiefly due to the folly of her representative at Constantinople, in preventing Russia from appropriating part of the Sultan's dominions, she had succeeded at the cost of committing herself to the support of an ally who was as untrustworthy as he was vicious. The most solid and permanent acquisition of the war was probably not understood at the time by one Englishman in a thousand. It was accidental, and had nothing to do with the objects of British policy. It consisted in the work of Florence Nightingale. This had finally proved two things: the value of trained nursing in the regulation of health, and the capacity of women to construct and control complicated organizations of human beings. Miss Nightingale's work in the Crimea gave her an authority which made her subsequent organization of trained nursing a comparatively easy task. Few statesmen of the nineteenth century can claim to have done more than she to make life worth living for their fellow-creatures, and if the war had produced no result but this it might almost have been worth its cost. The importance of Miss Nightingale's success in its bearings on the general condition of women will appear greater fifty years hence than now. It was certainly very great. Mary Somerville had

already acquired a reputation as an astronomer. Harriet Martineau had been an acknowledged champion of Free Trade. But Florence Nightingale was the first woman who obtained for her public work that degree of publicity which catches the imagination of a people. Contemporary opinion, after assailing her with that abuse and ridicule to which all pioneers are accustomed, consecrated her as "The Angel with the Lamp." A wiser generation declines to identify her merely with those gentle qualities in which she is rivalled by many thousands of her sex, and sees in her strong and imperious temper, her capacity for reducing order out of chaos, and her power of enforcing her wishes upon her subordinates, qualities in which she has seldom been surpassed even by the greatest men. No English statesmen engaged in the conduct of the war displayed in a higher degree than she the attributes of a great administrator, and the impression of her statesmanlike qualities can never be effaced. It has not been possible, since her day, for any reasonable man to argue that women, as such, are constitutionally incapable of managing large affairs.

The deeper significance of the Crimean War was not perceived for another generation, and in domestic affairs at least a decade elapsed before any Government displayed activity. The whole nation seemed resigned into the hands of Palmerston. Ireland continued in its sullen course. The artisans, whose political agitation had collapsed in 1848, were consolidating their Trade Unions and making successful experiments in co-operation. John Bright occasionally spoke on Parliamentary Reform, and denounced government by aristocracy with a contempt as hearty as that of Paine. But he admitted that he was "flogging a dead horse." Apathy in domestic politics pervaded all classes. Except in foreign affairs, where Palmerston kept alive his peculiar conceptions of Liberalism, Parliament showed little activity. The Cabinet, partly Whig and partly Peelite, was animated by no general principle. Gladstone, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, already on his way from the Peelite camp to the Liberal, confessed that in domestic matters his colleagues of 1860 were far

less Liberal than those of 1841,[^[274]] and when the Lords rejected his Bill for the repeal of the Paper Duty in that year, it was with the utmost difficulty that he dragged his chief into a fight for the privileges of the Commons.

One or two measures, which excited little public interest, and required little effort from the easy-going Premier, marked the slow advance of Liberalism. The Settlement Duty Act of 1853 reduced the privileges of the landed interest by imposing the same duties on land passing under a settlement as had previously been paid by personal property. The Oxford University Act of 1854 and the Cambridge University Act of 1856 opened the two ancient Universities to Nonconformists, though the highest degrees and all the important offices were still retained by the Establishment. The Jewish Relief Bill, which had passed the Commons and been rejected by the Lords seven times since 1832, became law in 1859, and the Christian monopoly of Parliament came to an end. In 1857 the Divorce Act was carried in the face of clerical opposition, and enabled any person to obtain the dissolution of an unhappy marriage in a civil court. This was an essentially Liberal measure, in that it freed the individual from an ecclesiastical institution, but it emphasized on the other hand that sexual Toryism which is worse than the Toryism of creed or class. One of the most barbarous rules of a male society was preserved by the Act, and while a man was permitted to divorce his wife for a single act of infidelity, a woman could only divorce her husband if he were also guilty of cruelty or desertion. Implicitly the Act permitted a man to indulge freely in vice so long as he chose to live with his wife and not to beat her, at the same time that it sentenced her to social extinction for a single fault. Moral standards have risen since that time, and the use of women is no longer recommended by medical men to their patients as a means of maintaining health. But the legal privilege preserved by the Divorce Act is enjoyed by the dominant sex to this day. The Act had other faults, the chief of which was that the procedure under it was so expensive that it was almost useless for the

poor. But it was at least an advance towards liberty.[^[275]] One other measure of a Liberal sort has already been mentioned. In 1860 the Lords rejected the Bill for the repeal of the duty on paper. In 1861 it was forced through, the price of paper was reduced, and the cheap newspaper and the cheap book, with their enormous influence upon the habits of the mass of the people, were made possible. This was the work of Gladstone alone, and he and Cobden together contrived the great French Commercial Treaty which completed the reform of the tariff, and left the country with no import duties except those which were imposed on goods not produced in England, and those which a countervailing excise robbed of all protective character.

With these exceptions, the important events of the Palmerston period took place abroad, where the Prime Minister's foreign policy pursued its pretentious course. It presented its usual alternation of generous but risky interference on behalf of oppressed nationalities with arrogant assertions of the British ego. A war with China in 1856 exhibited it at its very worst. A ship called the Arrow had obtained a licence from our representative to fly the British flag in the China seas. Like others which enjoyed the same privilege, the Arrow seems to have used it for very dubious purposes. After the period for which the licence was granted had expired the Chinese Governor Yeh of Canton boarded the ship and arrested some of its crew on a charge of piracy. Though his conduct at a later stage was more violent, it seems clear that at the beginning of the quarrel he acted with dignity, and strictly within the law. But Sir John Bowring, the British Minister on the spot, chose to treat his action as a wanton and unprovoked insult to the British flag. He demanded the surrender of the prisoners and an apology, and when Yeh did what Bowring himself would have done if their positions had been reversed, and refused to give way, he proceeded to employ all the ships and troops at his disposal in warlike operations. It was the

affair of Don Pacifico over again, with an even less specious excuse. In this case there was no legal justification even for diplomatic remonstrance.

The affair was atrocious enough in itself. But its atrocity was increased by the language and the methods of the English representatives. The Arrow had been entitled by licence to hoist the British flag. The period covered by the licence had expired. "But," argued Sir John Bowring, "the Chinese did not know that the time had expired, so that the insult to the flag is no less, and our pretext no worse." Macchiavelli himself could not have argued more shamelessly than this Utilitarian, and Cobden, who was a personal friend of Bowring, rightly denounced it as the most dishonest thing that had ever been written in a British official letter. The British agents were in fact dealing with people whom they thought to be barbarians, and they were not concerned to stand upon the points of honour which were commonly observed by civilized men. One of the incidents of the war expressed this unworthy discrimination between Europeans and Asiatics no less clearly than the methods of the diplomatists. During the Crimean War the Government had been very careful to avoid the bombardment of unfortified towns. However reckless they had been in going to war, they had had sufficient moral discipline to refrain from the wanton injury of defenceless persons. This rule, now universally adopted by all civilized peoples, was abandoned by the British Government in China, and half Canton was laid in ruins and some hundreds of its peaceful inhabitants were shot or burnt to death, in order to assert the superiority of the civilized Western nation over these insolent barbarians.

These outrageous proceedings were brought before the House of Lords by Lord Derby and before the House of Commons by Cobden, in speeches which in sheer force of argument have never been surpassed. Every man of eminence, except the few who were in office under Palmerston, spoke on the same side, and even Lord Lyndhurst, whose Toryism dated from the days of Eldon, took the Liberal view. Lord John Russell echoed the language of the Copenhagen debate of half a century before.