[Sidenote: 1834—King William and the Irish State Church]

Meanwhile poor old King William was greatly concerned by the attacks which were made upon the State Church in Ireland. William the Fourth had a simple sort of piety of his own, and was perhaps somewhat like the man whom Doctor Johnson commended because, whatever {219} follies or offences he might have committed, he never passed a church without taking off his hat. The King knew little or nothing, we may well suppose, about the Irish Church and the way in which it fulfilled, or had any chance of fulfilling, its sacred office. But he took off his hat to it as a Church, and, more than that, he shed tears and positively blubbered over its hard fate in having to stand so many attacks from its enemies. The King received, on one of his birthdays, a delegation from the prelates of the Irish Church, and to them he poured out his assurances that nothing should ever induce him to abandon that Church to its ungodly foes. He reminded the prelates that he was growing an old man, that his departure from this world must be near at hand, that he had nothing left now to live for but the rightful discharge of his duties as a Protestant sovereign, and he bade them to believe that the tears which were bedewing his countenance were the tears of heartfelt sympathy and sorrow. The King nevertheless did not get into any quarrel with his ministers on the subject of the Irish Church, and when any documents bearing on the question were presented to him for signature he ended by affixing his name and did not allow his tears to fall upon it and blot it out. The Duke of Cumberland, too, stood by the Irish Church to the best of his power. A member of the House of Lords has a privilege which is not accorded to a member of the House of Commons—he can enter on the books of the House his written protest against the passing of any measure which he has not been able to keep out of legislation. The Duke of Cumberland entered his protest against some of the resolutions taken with regard to the Irish State Church, and he declared that the sovereign who affirmed such resolves must do so in defiance of the coronation oath. That coronation oath had not been brought into much prominence since the days of George the Third, when it used to be relied upon as an impassable barrier to many a great measure of political justice and mercy. The Duke of Cumberland was not exactly the sort of man who could quicken it anew into an animating influence, and King {220} William did what his ministers advised him to do, and the world went on its way. The King, however, liked his ministers none the more because he did not see his way to quarrel with them when they advised him to make some concessions to public feeling on the subject of the Irish tithes. Thus far, indeed, the concessions were not very great, and the important fact for this part of our history is only that the tithe question brought up the far more momentous question which called into doubt the right to existence of the Irish State Church itself. The Government went no farther, for the time, than to offer the appointment of a commission to inquire into the incidence and the levying of the tithes, and endeavored to evade the question of appropriation, that is, the question as to the right of Parliament to decide the manner in which the revenues of the Irish State Church ought to be employed. The tithe question itself was finally settled for England before it came to be finally settled for Ireland. But its settlement involved no such consequences to the English State Church as it did to the State Church in Ireland. For our present purposes it is enough to record the fact that the earliest clear indications of the national policy, which in a later generation disestablished the Irish State Church, were given by the first Reform Parliament. Meanwhile the controversy raised as to the position of the Irish Establishment had had the effect of disturbing Lord Grey, who did not like to be driven too rapidly along the path of reform; of greatly angering the sovereign, who grumbled all the more because he could not openly resist; and of dissatisfying men like Ward and Grote and Lord Durham, and even members of the Cabinet like Lord John Russell, who could not regard mere slowness as a virtue when there was an obvious wrong to be redressed.



{221}

CHAPTER LXXVI.

"ONLY A PAUPER."

[Sidenote: 1832—The poor-law system]

The spirit of reform was impelling Lord Grey's Government in other directions as well as in those which led to the abolition of slavery in the Colonies, the improved conditions of the factory works and the introduction of some better method for the collecting of tithes. The state of the poor laws all over the country had long been attracting the attention of thoughtful, philanthropic, and at the same time practical men. The administration of relief to the poor was still conducted, up to Lord Grey's reforming Administration, on the same general principle as that which had been embodied in the famous statute of Queen Elizabeth. The manner in which that principle had been working during the intervening centuries was only another illustration of Burke's maxim about systems founded on the heroic virtues to which we have lately made reference in this volume. The statute of Elizabeth was based on the principle that the State, or at least the local authorities, ought to find relief for all the deserving poor. The duty of making provision for the deserving poor was left in the hands of those who managed the affairs of the parishes, of whom the local clergy and magistrates were the principal personages. The means had to be furnished by the taxpayers, and the influential men of each parish were left to decide as to the claims and the deserts of the applicants. There was no regular body answerable to public opinion, nor was there indeed any practical way in which the public of a district could very effectively express itself. Nothing could be better arranged for the development of that benevolent spirit which Sydney Smith describes as common to all humanity, and {222} under the influence of which no sooner does A hear that B is in distress than he thinks C ought at once to relieve him. Men and women had only to go and say that they were in distress, and some influential persons in the neighborhood were sure to find that the easiest way of doing a benevolent act was to provide them with orders for parochial relief inside or outside the workhouse. There seemed to be a sort of easy-going impression prevailing everywhere that when a man or a woman or a family had once been set down for relief from the rates the enrolment ought to endure as a kind of property for life, and even as an inheritance for future generations. The grant of parish relief under the old ways has been humorously likened to a State pension, which, when it has once been given, is never supposed to be revoked during the lifetime of the privileged pensioner. But the presumption in the case of those relieved by the parish had a still more abiding efficacy, for it was assumed that if a man got parish relief for himself and his family the beneficent endowment was to pass onward from generation to generation. It is quite certain that whole races of paupers began to grow up in the country, one family depending on the rates engendering another family, who were likewise to be dependent on the rates. Thus the vice of lazy and shiftless poverty was bequeathed from pauper sire to son. In the case of the ordinary man or woman there was no incitement to industry and perseverance. The idle pauper would be fed in any case, and no matter how hard he worked at the ordinary labor within his reach he could only hope to be poorly fed. Indeed, even the man who had an honest inclination for honest labor was very much in the condition of the Irish cottier tenant, described many years afterwards by John Stuart Mill as one who could neither benefit by his industry nor suffer by his improvidence.

[Sidenote: 1832—Some defects in the poor-law system]

The system may be said without exaggeration to have put a positive premium on immorality among the poorer class of women in a district, for an unmarried girl who had pauper offspring to show was sure to receive the liberal benefit of parochial relief. Pity was easily aroused for {223} her youth, her fall, her deserted condition when her lover or betrayer had taken himself off to some other district. Any tale of deceived innocence was readily believed, and so far as physical comforts go the unmarried mother was generally better off than the poor toiling and virtuous wife of the hard-worked laborer who found her family growing and her husband's wages without any increase. Then, of course, there was all manner of jobbery, and a certain kind of corruption among parish officials and the local tradesmen and employers of labor generally, which grew to be an almost recognized incident of the local institutions. Labor could be got on cheaper terms than the ordinary market rates if the employers could have men or women at certain seasons of the year whom the parish was willing to maintain in idleness for the rest of the time. Small contracts of all kinds were commonly made, in this sort of fashion, between parish officials and local employers, and the whole system of relief seemed to become converted into a corrupting influence, pervading the social life and showing its effects in idleness, immorality, and an infectious disease of pauperism. Owing to the many misinterpretations of the laws of settlement it was often easy for a rich and populous district to fling much of its floating pauperism on some poorer region, and thus it frequently happened that the more poverty-stricken the parish the greater was the proportion of unsettled pauperism for which it had to provide. In many districts the poorer classes of ratepayers were scarcely a degree better off than the actual paupers whom they were taxed to support. Thus many a struggling family became pauperized in the end because of the increase in the rates which the head of the family could no longer pay, and the exhausted breadwinner, having done his best to keep himself and his family independent, had at last to eat the bread of idleness from parish relief, or to starve with his family by the road-side.

Things had come to such a pass indeed that many earnest and capable observers, like Lord Brougham, Mr. Nassau Senior, and Miss Martineau, were beginning to advocate the doctrine that no remedy could be found for {224} the system of legalized poor relief short of its total abolition. It was gravely contended by many reformers, whose guiding spirit was pure love of humanity, that the best course for the Government to take would be to abolish the poor-relief system altogether, and leave the really deserving poor to the mercy of private benevolence. By such a measure, it was contended, private charity would be left to find out its own, and would, before long, find out its own, and the charity thus given would carry with it no demoralizing effect, but would be bestowed, as all true charity is bestowed, with the object of enabling those whom it helped to help themselves after a while. The owner of an estate, it was argued, can easily find out where there is genuine distress among those who depend upon him, and can sustain them through their time of need, so that when their hour of sickness or enforced idleness is over they may be able to begin again with renewed energy, and work with the honest purpose of making themselves independent. It was urged that the operation of the legalized poor law relief could only create new pauperism wherever its unwholesome touch was felt. It would impress on the well-inclined and the industrious the futility of honest and persevering endeavor, inasmuch as idleness could get itself better cared for than laborious poverty. Idleness and immorality, it was argued, were well housed and fed, while honest independence and virtue were left outside in cold and hunger.

[Sidenote: 1832-33—A commission on poor-law relief]

The study of political economy was even already beginning to be a part of the education of most men who took any guiding place or even any observant interest in the national life. Writers who dealt with such subjects were beginning to find readers among the general public. Some of the members of Lord Grey's own Administration had taken a close interest in such questions. The whole subject of poor relief and its distribution was one of the earliest which came under the consideration of the Liberal Government after the passing of the Reform Bill. It was clear that something would soon have to be done, and, as the Whig ministers had a good deal of other work on their {225} hands, the natural course, at such a time, was to appoint a commission which should inquire into the whole system of poor-law relief, and report to the Government as to the best means for its reorganization. Such a commission was appointed and set at once to its work. Among the commissioners and the assistant-commissioners nominated for the purpose were some men whose names are well remembered in our own days. One of those was Mr. Nassau Senior, a man of great ability and wide practical information, who distinguished himself in many other fields of literary work, as well as that which belonged to what may be called the literature of pure economics. Another was Mr. Edwin (afterwards Sir Edwin) Chadwick, who was a living and an active presence, until a very short time ago, among those who devoted themselves to the study and the propagation of what are called social science principles, and whose work was highly valued by so well qualified a critic as John Stuart Mill. The commission made careful inquiry into the operation of the poor-law relief system, and presented a report which marked an epoch in our social history, and might well have a deep interest even for the casual student of to-day. The result of the inquiries made was such as to satisfy the commissioners that the administration of the poor law had increased the evils of pauperism, wherever it found them already in existence, and had created and fostered evils of the same kind, even in regions which had not known them before they were touched by its contagion. The report of the commissioners pronounced that the existing system of poor law was "destructive to the industry and honesty and forethought of the laborers, to the wealth and morality of the employers of labor and the owners of property, and to the mutual good-will and happiness of all." This may be thought a very sweeping condemnation, but the more closely the evidence is studied the more clearly it will be seen that where the poor-relief system had any effect worth taking into calculation this was the sort of effect it produced. The real objects of the legalized poor-law relief system were well and even liberally described in the report of the {226} commissioners. The object of poor relief, as the commissioners defined it, should be to make provision for that proportion, to be found in almost every community, which is plunged into such a condition of distress that it never can hope to be self-supporting again, and for that more fluctuating proportion made up of those who at the time are unable to support themselves, but whom some temporary relief may enable to return to their former condition of independence. In each class of cases it ought to be made equally clear, before public relief were called in, that those in distress, continuous or temporary, had no near relatives in a condition to afford them reasonable assistance without undue sacrifice. Of course it was understood that these conditions included the men and women who, owing to some temporary lack of employment, were actually unable to find the means of living by their own honest labor. The ideas of the commissioners were not pedantically economical in their range, nor did they insist that public relief must be given only as the reward of personal integrity when visited by undeserved misfortune. It was freely admitted that even where men and women had allowed themselves, by idleness or carelessness, to sink into actual poverty, it was better to give them temporary relief at the public expense than allow them to take up with the ways of crime, or leave them to pay the penalty of their wrongdoings by death from starvation. But it was strictly laid down that a healthy system of public relief was to help men and women for a time, in order that they might be able to help themselves once again, as soon as possible, and to make provision for those who had done their work and could do no more, and who had no near relatives in a condition to keep them from starvation. The report of the commissioners pointed out that the existing system "collects and chains down the laborers in masses, without any reference to the demand for their labor; that, while it increases their numbers, it impairs the means by which the fund for their subsistence is to be reproduced, and impairs the motives for using those means which it suffers to exist; and that every year and every day these evils are becoming {227} more overwhelming in magnitude and less susceptible of cure."

[Sidenote: 1833—Plans to improve the relief system]

The passages which we have quoted are taken from the recommendations of Mr. Chadwick. He goes on to say that, "of those evils, that which consists merely in the amount of the rates—an evil great when considered by itself, but trifling when compared with the moral effects which I am deploring—might be much diminished by the combination of workhouses, and by substituting a rigid administration and contract management for the existing scenes of neglect, extravagance, jobbery, and fraud." Mr. Chadwick points out that "if no relief were allowed to be given to the able-bodied or to their families, except in return for adequate labor or in a well-regulated workhouse, the worst of the existing sources of evil—the allowance system—would immediately disappear; a broad line would be drawn between the independent laborers and the paupers; the numbers of paupers would be immediately diminished, in consequence of the reluctance to accept relief on such terms, and would be still further diminished in consequence of the increased fund for the payment of wages occasioned by the diminution of rates; and would ultimately, instead of forming a constantly increasing proportion of our whole population, become a small, well-defined part of it, capable of being provided for at an expense less than one-half of the present poor rates." And finally it was urged that "it is essential to every one of these improvements that the administration of the poor laws should be intrusted, as to their general superintendence, to one central authority with extensive powers; and, as to their details, to paid officers, acting under the consciousness of constant superintendence and strict responsibility." On these reports and recommendations the new measure for the reorganization of the poor-law system was founded. The main objects of the measure were to divide these countries, for poor-relief purposes, into areas of regular and, in a certain sense, of equal proportions, so that the whole burden of poverty should not be cast for relief on one particular district, while a neighboring and much richer {228} district was able to escape from its fair measure of liability; to have the relief administered not by local justices, or parish clergymen, but by representative bodies duly elected and responsible to public opinion; and by the creation of one great central board charged with the duty of seeing to the proper administration of the whole system. Thus, it will be observed that the main principle of the Reform Bill, the principle of representation, had been already accepted by statesmanship as the central idea of a department of State which had nothing to do with the struggles of political parties.

[Sidenote: 1834—Passage of the Poor-law Bill]

The measure when it came before Parliament met, of course, with strong opposition, first in the House of Commons and then in the House of Lords. Much of the opposition came, no doubt, from men of old-fashioned ways, who dreaded and hated any changes in any institutions to which they had been accustomed, and who held that even pauperism itself acquired a certain sanctity from the fact that it had been fostered and encouraged by the wisdom of so many succeeding generations. Some of the opposition, however, was inspired by feelings of a more purely sentimental, and therefore perhaps of a more respectable order. It was urged that the new system, if carried into law, would bear hardly on the deserving as well as the undeserving people; that the workhouse test would separate the husband from wife, and the father from the children; and, above all, that certain clauses of the new measure would leave the once innocent girl who had been led astray by some vile tempter to bear the whole legal responsibility as well as the public shame of her sin. It is not necessary for us now to go over at any length the long arguments which were brought up on both sides of the controversy. Many capable and high-minded observers were carried away by what may be called the sentimental side of the question, and forgot the enormous extent of the almost national corruption which the measure was striving to remove, in their repugnance to some of the evils which it did not indeed create, but which it failed to abolish. One weakness common to nearly all the arguments employed against the {229} measure came from the facility there was for putting out of sight altogether, during such a process of reasoning, the fact that the daily and hourly effect of the existing system was to force the deserving and hard-working poor to sink into that very pauperism which it was the object of all law-makers to diminish, or to abolish altogether. The wit of man could not devise any system of poor relief which should never go wrong in its application, should never bear harshly on men and women who deserved, and were striving for, an honest and independent subsistence.

The Bill, however, was passed in the House of Commons by a large majority. It was carried after a hard fight through the House of Lords, and received the royal assent in August, 1834. It should be said that the Duke of Wellington, although usually strong and resolute as a party man, had good sense and fair spirit enough to make him a warm supporter of the measure, despite the vehement protestations of many of his own habitual supporters. Since that time it seems to be admitted by common consent that the measure has accomplished all the beneficial results which its promoters anticipated from it, and has, in many of its provisions, worked even better than some of its supporters had expected. Of course, our poor-law system has since that time been always undergoing modifications of one kind or another, and public criticism is continually pointing to the necessity for further improvement. We hear every now and then of cases in which, owing to local maladministration, some deserving men and women, honestly struggling to keep their heads above pauperism, are left to perish of hunger or cold. We read well-authenticated, only too well-authenticated, instances of actual starvation taking place in some wealthy district of a great city. We hear of parochial funds squandered and muddled away; of the ratepayers' money wasted in extravagance, and worse than extravagance; of miserable courts and alleys where the deserving and undeserving poor are alike neglected and uncared for. But it would be utterly impossible that some such defects as these should not be found in the management of any system worked by {230} human mechanism for such a purpose as the relief of a great nation's poverty. The predominant fact is that we have a system which is based on the representative principle, which is open to the inspection and the criticism of the whole country, and which frankly declares itself the enemy of professional beggary and the helper of the poverty which is honestly striving to help itself. Much remains yet to be done for the improvement of our national system of poor relief, but it has, at least, to be said that the reformed Parliament did actually establish a system founded on just principles and responsible to public judgment.

[Sidenote: 1833—The East India Company's charter]

Another of the great reforms which was accomplished in this age of reform found its occasion when the time came for the renewal of the East India Company's charter. The Government and the Houses of Parliament had to deal with the future administration of one of the greatest empires the world had ever seen, brought together by events and forces the like of which had not been at work in any previous chapter of the world's history. We have already traced, in this book, the growth of the East India Company's possessions, a growth brought about by a combination of the qualities which belonged to the Alexanders and the Caesars, and of the qualities also which go to the expansion of peaceful commerce and the opening up of markets for purely industrial enterprise. The charter of the Company had been renewed by legislation at long intervals, and the first reformed Parliament now found itself compelled to settle the conditions under which the charter should be renewed for another period of twenty years. Mr. Molesworth justly remarks that "it was a fortunate circumstance that the Reform Bill had passed, and a Reform Parliament been elected, before the question of the renewal of the Company's charter was decided; for otherwise the directors of this great Company and other persons interested in the maintenance of the monopolies and abuses connected with it would in all probability have returned to Parliament, by means of rotten boroughs, a party of adherents sufficiently large to have effectually prevented the Government and the House of Commons from dealing with {231} this great question in the manner in which the interests of England and India alike demanded that it should be dealt with."

Up to the time at which we have now arrived the East India Company had an almost absolute monopoly of the whole Chinese trade, as well as the Indian trade, and a control over the administration of India such as might well have gratified the ambition of a despotic monarch. The last renewal of the Company's charter had been in 1813, and it was to run for twenty years, so that Lord Grey's Government found themselves charged with the task of making arrangements for its continuance, or its modifications, or its abolition. Some distinction had already been effected between the powers of the Company as the ruler of a vast Empire under the suzerainty of England, and its powers as a huge commercial corporation, or what we should now call a syndicate, but the company still retained its monopoly of the India and China trade. In the mean time, however, the principles of political economy had been asserting a growing influence over the public intelligence, and the question was coming to be asked, more and more earnestly, why a private company should be allowed the exclusive right of conducting the trade between England and India and China. An agitation against the monopoly began, as was but natural, among the great manufacturing and commercial towns in the North of England. Miss Martineau, in her "History of the Thirty Years' Peace," ascribes the beginning of this movement to a once well-known merchant and philanthropist of Liverpool, the late Mr. William Rathbone, whom some of us can still remember having known in our earlier years. Miss Martineau had probably good reasons for making such a statement, and, at all events, nothing is more likely than that such a movement began in Liverpool, and began with such a man. In London the directors and supporters of the East India Company were too powerful to give much chance to a hostile movement begun in the metropolis, and it needed the energy, the commercial independence, and the advanced opinions of the northern cities to give it an effective start.

{232}

When the time came for the renewal of the Company's charter, the Government had made up their mind that the renewal should be conditional on the abolition of the commercial monopoly, and that the trade between the dominions of King William and the Eastern populations should be thrown open to all the King's subjects. The measure passed through both Houses of Parliament with but little opposition. Mr. Molesworth is perfectly right in his remarks as to the different sort of reception which would have been given to such a measure if the charter had come up for renewal before the Act of Reform had abolished the nomination boroughs and the various other sham constituencies. But it is a striking proof of the hold which the representative principle and the doctrines of free-trade were already beginning to have on public opinion that the monopoly of the East India Company should not have been able to make a harder fight for its existence. The wonder which a modern reader will be likely to feel as he studies the subject now is, not that the monopoly should have been abolished with so little trouble, but that rational men should have admitted so long the possibility of any justification for its existence.

The renewal of the Charter of the Bank of England gave an opportunity, during the same session, for an alteration in the conditions under which the Bank maintains its legalized position and its relations with the State, and for a further reorganization of those conditions, which was in itself a distinct advance in the commercial arrangements of the Empire. Other modifications have taken place from time to time since those days, and it is enough to say here that the alterations made by the first reformed Parliament, at the impulse of Lord Grey and his colleagues, were in keeping with the movement of the commercial spirit and went along the path illumined by the growing light of a sound political economy.



{233}

CHAPTER LXXVII.

PEEL'S FORLORN HOPE.

[Sidenote: 1834—Retirement of Lord Grey]

Lord Grey was growing tired of the work of that Administration. It had been incessant work, and its great successes of later years had been checkered by some disappointments, which, although not deep-reaching, were irritating and disturbing. Some of his most capable colleagues had broken away from him, and he probably began to feel that the reformers all over the country expected more of him than he saw his way to accomplish. In 1834 he asked to be relieved from the duties of his office, and the King consented, probably with greater good-will than he had felt in acceding to some of Lord Grey's previous requests, and accordingly Lord Grey ceased to be Prime Minister. With his resignation of office Lord Grey passes out of this history and takes an abiding place in the Parliamentary history of his country. He can hardly be called a great statesman, for he had been mainly instrumental in bringing to success and putting into legislative form the ideas of greater men, but his must be regarded as a distinguished and noble figure among England's Parliamentary leaders. He was especially suited for the work which it was his proud fortune to accomplish at the zenith of his power, for no one could be better fitted than he for the task of discountenancing the wild alarms which were felt by so many belonging to what were called the privileged classes at the thought of any measures of reform which might disturb the existing order of things, and lead to red ruin and the breaking-up of laws. On Lord Grey's retirement he was succeeded as Prime Minister by Lord Melbourne, who had previously been Home Secretary. Lord Melbourne might have been thought just the sort of {234} person with whom King William could easily get on, because such a Prime Minister was not likely to vex his sovereign's unwilling ear by too many demands for rapid and far-reaching reform. Melbourne was a thoroughly easy, not to say lazy, man. He was certainly not wanting in intellect, he had some culture, he was a great reader of books and a great lover of books, and he was often only too glad to escape into literary talk and literary gossip from discussions on political questions and measures to be introduced into Parliament. He was fond of society, made himself generally agreeable to women, and was usually well acquainted with the passing scandals of high social life.

[Sidenote: 1834—Peel to be Premier]

One might, indeed, have thought that such a man was just the minister in whom King William would find a congenial companion and adviser. But the truth was that the King had grown tired of the Whig statesmen, and had long been looking out for an opportunity to get rid of them on easy terms. Perhaps he did not quite like the idea of telling a man of Lord Grey's stately demeanor that he wished to dispense with his services and saw in Lord Melbourne a minister who could be approached on any subject without much sensation of awe. However that may be, the King soon found what seemed to him a satisfactory opportunity for ridding himself of the presence of his Whig advisers. Lord Althorp was suddenly raised to the House of Lords by the death of his father. Earl Spencer, and of course some rearrangement of the Ministry became necessary, as it would not be possible that the Chancellor of the Exchequer should have a ministerial place anywhere but in the House which has the levying of the taxes and the spending of the money. When Lord Melbourne came to advise with his sovereign on the subject the King informed him, in the most direct and off-hand manner, that he contemplated a much more complete rearrangement than Lord Melbourne had suggested, and, in fact, that he had made up his mind to get rid of the present Government altogether. Lord Melbourne, of course, bowed to the will of his master, and, indeed, was not the sort of man to take a {235} dismissal from office greatly to heart, believing it, no doubt, quite likely that some restoration to office might await him, and possibly feeling that life had some enjoyments left for him even though he were never again to be Prime Minister.

The King determined to send for Sir Robert Peel and intrust him with the task of forming an Administration. William had, as might naturally be expected of him, consulted in the first instance with the Duke of Wellington. Wellington, with the practical good sense which was a part of his character, had told the sovereign that at such a time it was futile to think of calling upon any one to become Prime Minister who had not a seat in the House of Commons. As the King was resolved to have a new Administration, Peel was obviously the man to be intrusted with the task of forming it, and therefore the King sent for him at once. But Peel was not in England; he had gone with his wife to Italy, and, as we know from his own published letters, he had not entered into any communication, even with the Duke of Wellington, as to the probable movements of political affairs in his absence, not supposing for a moment that any emergency could arise at home which might make it necessary for him to cut short his holiday and return to the working ground of Westminster. A special messenger had to be sent off at once to convey to Peel the wishes of his sovereign, and one has to stop and think over things a little before he can quite realize what it meant in those days, which seem so near our own, to send a special message from London to the heart of Italy. Peel was at Rome, and had just returned with his wife one night from a great ball given by a celebrated Italian Princess, when he received the letter which urged him to come back and become for the first time Prime Minister of England. Peel's mind was at once made up. That sense of duty which always guided his movements dictated his reply. There was for him no question of personal pride or ambition to be gratified, or of any graceful effort to affect the ways of one who modestly shrinks from a task beyond his power. He saw that his sovereign needed {236} his immediate services, and that was enough for him. He and his wife were just on the eve of what had promised to be a delightful visit to Naples, but the visit to Naples was put off without a second thought to the indefinite future, and the statesman and his wife set out at once on their journey to London. The preparations for such a journey at that time were such as might give pause even to an experienced explorer in our own easy-going and luxurious age. Sir Robert Peel, of course, had to travel by private carriage. He had to traverse more than one State in order to reach the sea at Calais. The roads were dangerous in many places, and Peel had to take some well-armed servants with him. He had to go well provided with the most elaborate official passports. He had even to obtain a special passport for himself, lest, in the event of his wife finding the constant travel too much for her, she might have to take rest at some town on the way, and Peel, if he attempted to continue his journey, might be stopped somewhere until he had satisfactorily accounted for the disappearance of the lady who was described in the original passports as his travelling companion and his wife. The journey was interrupted by unforeseen obstacles in several places. At one spot the rising of a river relentlessly barricaded the progress of the travellers for many hours. At another point a bridge was broken down. In France, Peel and his wife were brought to a stand at the city of Lyons because that city happened just then to be in a state of siege, and the travellers had to furnish satisfactory evidence that they were not emissaries of some revolutionary propaganda. It took twelve days to cover the distance from Rome to Dover, and, except for such delays as have just been mentioned, our travellers had gone on night and day without stopping. Even when they arrived at Dover, Peel took no thought about rest, but journeyed on all night until he reached London.

[Sidenote: 1834—The difficulties that beset Peel]

Peel himself tells us in his memoirs that the long travel had at least the advantage of giving him time enough to think out his course of action and the best way of serving his sovereign and his country. The journey, he says, {237} allowed him to do this coolly and without interruption. He certainly had time enough for the purpose, but it must have needed all Peel's strength of character to enable him to give his mind up to such considerations during a course so toilsome, so rugged, so dangerous, and often so rudely interrupted. He arrived in London at an early hour on the morning of December 9, 1834, and he set off at once to present himself to the King, by whom, it need hardly be said, he was very cordially welcomed. The welcome became all the more warm because he was willing to accept the important task which the King desired to intrust to him, and would enter without delay on the work of endeavoring to form a Ministry. Now, in order to do justice to Peel's patriotic purpose in undertaking this difficult task, we have to bear in mind that he did not personally approve of the King's action in breaking up the Melbourne Administration, or even of the manner in which it had been broken up. He knew well enough that the King had grown tired of the Whig Ministry, but he did not think the King's personal feelings were a complete justification for William's dismissal of a set of men whom he had consented to place in power. Peel did not regard the mere necessity for a rearrangement consequent on Lord Althorp's removal to the House of Lords as anything like a fitting excuse for the break-up of the whole Government. More than that, Peel had no confidence in the chances of a new Conservative Administration just then. It was not encouraging to a statesman about to form his first Cabinet to have to believe, as Peel did, that such a Government would be left very much at the mercy of the Opposition, and in more than one important or even impending question might at any time be outvoted in the House of Commons. None the less, however, was Peel resolved to stand by his sovereign, who appeared to be in a difficulty. The same sense of public duty, according to his conception of public duty, which guided him at every great crisis of his political career decided his action in this instance. He set himself to the work of forming an Administration in which he proposed to take under his own charge the functions of {238} Prime Minister and the office of Chancellor of the Exchequer. He knew that he could count on the support of the Duke of Wellington, and to Wellington he offered the post of Secretary for Foreign Affairs, which was at once accepted. Then he wrote to Sir James Graham and to Lord Stanley. Both refused. Sir James Graham, although he declined to accept office, promised Peel all the support he could give consistently with his own judgment and his own political views. Lord Stanley wrote a letter to Peel which has even still both historical and personal interest. Its historical interest consists in the clear exposition it contains of the various questions which then divided the two great parties in the State. Its personal interest is found in the fact that it shows Lord Stanley as the convinced reformer, who sees no possibility of his joining an Administration about to be created by a statesman whose whole career has been antagonistic to political reform. Those of us who remember the brilliant orator Lord Derby, by whom the office of Prime Minister was three times held, find it hard to think of him as anything but a steady-going Conservative at heart, and may be excused a shock of surprise when they are bidden to remember that in 1834 the same man, then Lord Stanley, declared that he could not serve under Peel because Peel was not reformer enough all round to secure his co-operation. Lord Stanley pointed out, in his letter, that between Peel and himself there had been a complete difference of opinion on almost every great public question except that which concerned the State Church, and he reminded Peel that so lately as on the occasion of Lord Grey's retirement from office the Duke of Wellington had seized the opportunity of publicly condemning the whole policy of the Whig Administration. Under these circumstances Lord Stanley declared that, in his opinion, it would be injurious to his own character and injurious to the new Government as well if he were to accept the offer of a place in such an Administration. He had left Lord Grey's Government because he differed with Lord Grey on one question alone, which then had to be dealt with, and he could not join a Government of which {239} Peel and Wellington were to be the leaders, from whom he had differed on almost every great political question that had engaged the attention of the country during his time.

[Sidenote: 1834—Peel forms his Ministry]

Peel had nothing for it but to go on with his task and form the best Administration he could. Lord Lyndhurst was once again to be Lord Chancellor, and in such a man Peel certainly found a colleague who had no superior either as a lawyer or a debater in the House of Lords. Some of us who can still remember having heard Lord Lyndhurst deliver long and powerful speeches in the House of Lords, compelling the attention and the admiration of every listener when the orator himself had long left his eightieth year behind him, will feel sure that Sir Robert Peel's first Administration was adequately represented in the hereditary chamber. It is not necessary to introduce here a full list of the new Ministry, but there are three names which call for special mention. These are the names of three young men who then entered ministerial office for the first time, and with whom the world afterwards became well acquainted, each according to his different way. One was William Ewart Gladstone, who became Junior Lord of the Treasury, and whom the world has long since recognized as the greatest statesman and the greatest master of the House of Commons known to the reign of Queen Victoria. The second was Sidney Herbert, who was for many years one of the most ready, accomplished, and brilliant debaters in that House, and whose premature death cut short a career that had seemed to be steadily rising from day to day. The third was a man whose political life has long since been forgotten, but whose name is well remembered because of his success in quite a different field—Winthrop Mackworth Praed, the charming author of delightful verses, the founder of that English school of minstrelsy which sings for the drawing-room and the club-room, the feasts and the fashions, the joys and the well-ordered troubles of the West-End. Sidney Herbert and Praed were made joint Secretaries to the Board of Control, the department established by Pitt for directing the Government of India.

{240}

The new Prime Minister believed that it would be in every way more suitable to the convenience of the country that he and his colleagues should submit their political claims and purposes to the judgment of the constituencies by means of a general election. A dissolution accordingly took place, and Peel issued an address to the electors of Tamworth, which will always be regarded as an important political document. Although Peel had been an opponent of the principles embodied in the Reform Bill, no reformer in the country understood better than he did the impossibility, at such a time, of carrying on the work of the Government without a thorough understanding between the Ministry and the Parliament, between the Parliament and the public out-of-doors. No one knew better than Peel that the time had gone by, never to return, when an English minister could rule as an English minister even so lately as in the days of Pitt had done, merely by the approval and the support of a monarch without the approval and support of a majority of the electors. When, therefore, Peel prepared his address to his Tamworth constituents he knew perfectly well that his words were meant, not merely for the friendly ears of the little constituency, but for the consideration of the whole country. The same feeling actuated the great statesman during the entire course of his subsequent career, and the constituency of Tamworth had therefore the advantage of being favored from time to time with election addresses which form chapters of the highest interest and importance in the historical literature of the country. The address which he issued to his constituents before the general election in December, 1834, proclaimed, in fact, the opening of a new political era in England.

[Sidenote: 1834-34—Peel's Tamworth address]

Peel made frank announcement that, so far as he and his friends were concerned, the controversy about Parliamentary reform had come to an end. By him and by them the decision of Parliament, which sanctioned the introduction of the Reform Bill of 1832, was accepted as a final settlement of the question. Peel declared that he regarded it as "a settlement which no friend to the peace {241} of the country would attempt to disturb, either by direct or by insidious means." Of course it was not to be understood that Peel had any intention of describing the Reform Act of 1832 as the last word of the Reformers' creed, and the close of all possible controversy with regard to the construction of the whole Parliamentary system. Peel no more meant to convey any idea of this kind than did Lord John Russell, when he used the word finality in connection with the Reform Act, mean to convey the idea that, according to his conviction, Parliament was never again to be invited to extend the electoral franchise or to modify the conditions under which the votes of the electors were to be given. The announcement which Peel made to the electors of Tamworth, and to the world in general, was that he and his friends recognized the establishment of the representative principle in English political life, accepted the new order of things as a result of a lawful decree, and separated themselves altogether from the antiquated Toryism which enshrined the old ideas of government as a religious faith, and revered the memory of the nomination boroughs, as the Jacobites revered the memory of the Stuarts. With the issue of Peel's Tamworth address in the December of 1834, the antique Tory, the Tory who made Toryism of the ante-reform days a creed and a cult, may be said to disappear altogether from the ranks of practical English politicians. The Tory of the old school appears, no doubt, here and there through all Parliamentary days down to our own time. We saw him in both Houses of Parliament as a heroic, unteachable opponent of Peel himself, of Bright and Cobden, of Gladstone, and sometimes even of Lord Derby and of Lord Salisbury, but he was merely a living protest against the succession of new ideas, and was no longer to be counted as a practical politician.

Sir Robert Peel soon saw that he had not gained much by his appeal to the constituencies. The results of the general election showed that the Conservatives had made a considerable addition to their numbers in the House of Commons, but showed also that they were still in a disheartening minority. The return of the first Reform {242} Parliament had, indeed, exhibited them for the time as completely down in the dust, for there was a majority of more than three hundred against them, and now the Liberal majority was hardly more than one hundred. A very hopeful Conservative, or a Conservative who had a profound faith in the principles of antique Toryism, might fill himself with the fond belief that this increase in the Conservative vote foretold a gradual return to the good old days. But Peel was too practical a statesman to be touched for a moment by any such illusion. He had fully expected some increase in the Tory vote. He knew, as well as anybody could know, that there had been some disappointment among the more advanced and impatient reformers all over the country with the achievements of the first reformed Parliament, and, indeed, with the Act of Reform itself. After victory in a long-contested political battle there comes, almost as a matter of course, a season of relaxed effort among the ranks of the victors, for which allowance would have to be made in the mind of such a statesman as Peel, and, in this instance, allowance also had to be made for a falling off in the enthusiasm of those who had helped to carry the Reform movement to success, and found themselves in the end left out of all its direct advantages.

[Sidenote: 1835—The Office of Speaker]

Peel saw at once that his Government must be absolutely at the mercy of the Opposition when any question arose on which it suited the purposes of the Opposition leaders to rally their whole forces around them and take a party division. So far as the ordinary business of the session was concerned, the Ministry might get on well enough, for there must have been a considerable amount of routine work which would not provoke the Opposition to a trial of strength; but if chance or hostile strategy should bring about at any moment a controversy which called for a strictly party division, then the Government must go down. Nothing can be more trying to a proud-spirited statesman in office than the knowledge that he can only maintain his Government, from day to day, because, for one reason or another, it does not suit the convenience of the Opposition to press some vote which must leave him and his colleagues {243} in a distinct minority. Peel had not long to wait before he found substantial evidence to justify his most gloomy forebodings.

The new Parliament met on February 19, 1835. The first trial of strength was on the election of a new Speaker. The former occupant of the office having been put forward for re-election, the Government were beaten by a majority of ten. Now this was a very damaging event for the ministers, and also an event somewhat unusual in the House of Commons. There is generally a sort of understanding, more or less distinctly expressed, that the candidate put forward by the Government for the office of Speaker is to be a man on whom both sides of the House can agree. It is obviously undesirable that there should be a party struggle over the appointment of the official who is assumed to hold an absolutely impartial position and is not supposed to be the mere favorite of either side of the House. In later years there has often been a distinct arrangement, or, at all events, a clear understanding, between the Government and the Opposition on this subject, and a candidate is not put forward unless there is good reason to assume that he will be acceptable to the two great political parties. In this instance no such understanding existed, or had been sought for. The Opposition set up a candidate of their own, and the nominee of the Government was defeated. There was, however, one condition in this defeat which, although it did not take away from the ominous character of the event, might, to a certain extent, have relieved Peel from the necessity of regarding it as an absolute party defeat. The majority had been obtained for the Opposition by the support of the Irish members who followed the leadership of Daniel O'Connell, and thus Sir Robert Peel saw himself outvoted by a combination of two parties, one of them regarded with peculiar disfavor by the majority of the English public on both sides of the political field. It was something for the followers of the Government to be able to say that their Liberal opponents had only been able to score a success by the help of the unpopular Irish vote, and it became, in fact, a new accusation against the {244} Liberals that they had traded on the favor of O'Connell and his Irish followers. From about this time the Irish vote has always played an important part in all the struggles of parties in the House of Commons; and it will be observed that the English Party, whether Liberal or Tory, against which that vote is directed is always ready with epithets of scorn and anger for the English Party for whom that vote has been given.

[Sidenote: 1835—Peel and the Opposition]

Several other humiliations awaited Peel as the session went on. Sometimes he was saved from defeat on a question of finance by the help of the more advanced Liberals, who came to his assistance when certain of his own Tory followers were prepared to desert him because his views on some question of taxation were much too new-fashioned for their own old-fashioned notions. Every one who has paid any attention to Parliamentary history can understand how distressing is the position of a minister who has no absolute majority at his command, and how more distressing still is the position of a minister who can only look to chance disruptions and combinations of parties for any possible majority. Peel bore himself throughout all the trials of that most trying time with indomitable courage and with unfailing skill. Never during his whole career did he prove himself more brilliant and more full of resource than as the leader of what might be called an utterly hopeless struggle. The highest tribute has been paid to his never-failing tact and temper during that trying ordeal by his principal opponent in the House of Commons, Lord John Russell. Russell was now the leader of the Liberal Opposition in the House of Commons, and the struggle of parties was once again illustrated by a sort of continuous Parliamentary duel between two rival leaders. The same phenomenon had been seen, from time to time, in the days of Queen Anne and in the days of the Georges; and it was seen again, at intervals, during some of the most vivid and fascinating passages of Parliamentary history in the reign of Queen Victoria.

The crisis, however, came soon to this first Ministry of Sir Robert Peel. Peel had announced, in a reasonable and {245} manful spirit, considering how the task of holding together a Ministry had been imposed on him and the temptation which it afforded for the attacks of irresponsible enemies, that he would not resign office on any side issue or question of purely factitious importance, and that he would hold his place unless defeated by a vote of want of confidence or a vote of censure. He challenged the leader of the Opposition to test the feeling of the House by a division on a question of that nature. Lord John Russell refused to take any such course, declaring that he believed it his duty to wait and see what might be the nature of the measures of reform which the Government had promised to introduce before inviting the House to say whether the Government deserved or did not deserve its confidence. Some of the measures announced by the Government had to do with the reform of the ecclesiastical courts and the maintenance of Church discipline, and Sir Robert Peel had himself given notice of a measure to deal with the Irish tithe system, the principal object of which was understood to be the transfer of the liability of the payment of tithes from the shoulders of the tenant to the shoulders of the landlord. It was not unreasonable that the Opposition should proclaim it their policy to wait and see what the Tory ministers really proposed to do before assailing them with a direct and general vote of want of confidence. Even, however, if the Opposition had been inclined to linger before inviting a real trial of strength, there was a feeling growing up all over the country which seemed impatient of mere episodical encounters leading to nothing in particular. The leaders of the Opposition had a very distinct policy in their minds, and on March 30, 1835, it found its formal expression.

Lord John Russell moved a resolution which called upon the House to resolve itself into a committee "in order to consider the present state of the Church established in Ireland, with the view of applying any surplus of revenues not required for the spiritual care of its members to the general education of all classes of the people without distinction of religious persuasion." Now here, it will be seen, {246} was the battle-ground distinctly marked out on which the two political parties must come, sooner or later, to a decisive struggle. About the collection of tithes, about the imposition of tithes, about the class of the community on whom the direct responsibility for the payment of tithes ought to fall, there might possibly be a basis of agreement found between Tories and Whigs. But when there arose a question as to the appropriation of the Church revenues, there the old doctrines and the new, the old Tories and the new Reformers, came into irreconcilable antagonism. The creed of the Tories was that the revenues of the Church belonged to the Church itself, and that if the Church had a surplus of funds here or there for any one particular purpose that surplus could be applied by it to some of its other purposes, but that no legislature had any right to say to the Church, "You have more money here than is needed for your own rights, and we have a right to take part of it away from you and apply it for the uses of the general public." The Government, therefore, accepted Lord John Russell's resolution as a distinct challenge to a trial of strength on an essential question of policy.

[Sidenote: 1835—William Ewart Gladstone]

The debate which followed lasted through four days, and all the members of the House on both sides took part in it. The reports of that momentous debate may be read with the deepest interest even at this day, when some of the prophecies intended as terrible warnings by some of the Conservative orators have long since been verified as facts, and are calmly accepted by all parties as the inevitable results of rational legislation. Sir Robert Peel, Lord Stanley, Sir James Graham, and most others who spoke on the Ministerial side spoke with one voice, in warning the House of Commons that if it claimed a right to touch any of the revenues of the Irish State Church in order to appropriate them for the general education of the Irish people, the result must be that the time would come when the Irish Church itself would no longer be held sacred against the desecrating hand of the modern reformer, would be treated as no longer necessary to the welfare of the Irish people, and would be severed from the State and left upon a level {247} with the Roman Catholic Church and the various dissenting denominations.

One appeal which may be said to run through the whole of the speeches on the side of the Government is familiar to the readers and the audiences of all political debates, whore any manner of Reform is under discussion. "You are asked"—so runs the argument—"to adopt this sort of policy in order to satisfy the demands of a certain class of the population; but how do you know, what guarantee can you give us, that when we have granted these demands they will be content and will not immediately begin to ask for more? We granted Catholic Emancipation in order to satisfy Ireland, and now is Ireland satisfied? It was only the other day we granted Catholic Emancipation, and now already Ireland declares, through her representatives, that she ought to have part of the revenues of the Irish State Church taken away from that Church and applied to the common uses of the Irish people. If she gets even that, will Ireland be contented? Will she not go on to demand repeal of the Union?" We turn with peculiar interest to the speech of a young Tory member which was listened to with great attention during the debate, and was believed to contain unmistakable promise of an important political career. So indeed it did, although the promise that career actually realized was not altogether of the kind which most of its audience were led to anticipate. It was the speech of Mr. William Ewart Gladstone. "The present motion," said Mr. Gladstone, "opens a boundless road—it will lead to measure after measure, to expedient after expedient, till we come to the recognition of the Roman Catholic religion as the national one. In principle, we propose to give up the Protestant Establishment. If so, why not abandon the political government of Ireland and concede the repeal of the legislative union." "There is no principle," he went on to say, "on which the Protestant Church can be permanently upheld, but that it is the Church which teaches the truth." That, he insisted, was the position which the House ought to maintain without allowing its decision to be affected by the mere {248} assertion, even if the assertion were capable of proof, that the revenues of the State Church in Ireland were entirely out of proportion to the spiritual needs of the Protestant population. Mr. Gladstone, however, had the mind of the financier even in those early days of his career, and he was at some pains to argue that the disproportion between the numbers of the Protestant and the Catholic populations in Ireland was not so great as Lord John Russell had asserted. He made out this part of his case ingeniously enough by including in the Protestant population in Ireland all the various members of the dissenting denominations, many or most of whom were as little likely to attend the administrations of the Established Church as the Roman Catholics themselves.

[Sidenote: 1835—Defeat of Peel's Ministry]

Gladstone's speech was thoroughly consistent in its opposition to Lord John Russell's resolution on the ground that that resolution, if pressed to its legitimate conclusion, assailed the whole principle on which the State Church in Ireland was founded. "I hope," he said, "I shall never live to see the day when such a system shall be adopted in this country, for the consequences of it to public men will be lamentable beyond all description. If those individuals who are called on to fulfil the high function of administering public affairs should be compelled to exclude from their consideration the elements of true religion, and to view various strange and conflicting doctrines in the same light, instead of administering those noble functions, they will become helots and slaves." The weakness of Mr. Gladstone's case was found in the fact that he insisted on regarding the State Church in Ireland as resting on precisely the same foundations as those which upheld the State Church in England. The truth was afterwards brought home to him that every argument which could be fairly used to justify the maintenance of the State Church in England was but another argument for the abolition of the State Church in Ireland—a work which it became at last his duty to accomplish. "I shall content myself," said Daniel O'Connell in his speech in the debate, "with laying down the broad principle that the {249} emoluments of a Church ought not to be raised from a people who do not belong to it. Ireland does not ask for a Catholic Establishment. The Irish desire political equality in every respect, except that they would not accept a single shilling for their Church."

Sir Robert Peel made a speech which was at once very powerful and very plausible. It was not, perhaps, pitched in a very exalted key, but it was full of argument, at once subtle and telling. He challenged the accuracy of Lord John Russell's figures, and declaimed against the injustice of inviting the House to pass a resolution founded on statistics which it had as yet no possible opportunity of verifying or even of examining. He pointed out that the Government had already given notice of their intention to bring in measures to deal with the very question concerned in Lord John Russell's resolution; and he asked what sincerity there could be in the purposes of men who professed a desire to amend as quickly as possible the tithe system in Ireland, and who yet were eager to deprive the Government of any chance of bringing forward the measures which they had prepared in order to accomplish that very object. The main argument of the speech was directed not so much against the policy embodied in the resolution of Lord John Russell, as against the manner in which it was proposed to carry out that policy. Sir Robert Peel declared that the object of the Opposition was not to effect any improvement in the relations of the State Church of Ireland and the people of Ireland, but simply and solely to turn out the Government. Why not, he asked, come to the point boldly and at once? Why not bring forward a vote of censure on the Government, or a vote of want of confidence in the Government, and thus compel them, if defeated, to go out of office, instead of endeavoring to enforce on them the adoption of a resolution dealing with questions which the Government had already promised to make the subject of legislation, and without waiting to hear what manner of legislation they were prepared to introduce?

There was an eloquent defiance in the closing words of Peel's speech. The great minister knew that defeat was {250} awaiting him, and he showed himself resolved to meet it half way. At three o'clock on the morning of April 3 the division on the resolution of Lord John Russell took place. There were 322 votes for the resolution and 289 against it. The resolution was therefore carried by a majority of 33. The student of history will observe with interest that the abolition of the Irish State Church was the result of a series of resolutions carried by Mr. Gladstone in the House of Commons in 1868, and afterwards embodied in an act of legislation.

[Sidenote: 1835—Melbourne and Brougham]

The debate on Lord John Russell's resolution was carried on for a few days longer, but it was chiefly concerned with mere questions as to the form in which the Ministry were called upon to give effect to the wish of the majority, and submit the resolution to the King. There was no heart or practical purpose in these debates, for everybody already knew what the end must be. On April 8 Sir Robert Peel announced to the House that he could not take any part in giving effect to the resolution, and that, therefore, he and his colleagues had determined on resigning their offices. The course taken by Peel was thoroughly honest, consistent, and upright, and Lord John Russell bore prompt and willing testimony to the constitutional propriety of the retiring Prime Minister's resolve. The Peel Ministry had come to its end. The country had been put to the trouble and expense of a general election, valuable time had been wasted, legislative preparations had been thrown away, and everything was now back again in just the same condition as when the King made up his mind to dismiss the Melbourne Administration. The whole blame for the muddle rested on the King, who now found himself compelled to take up again with Lord Melbourne just as if nothing had happened. The King, indeed, made an attempt to induce Lord Grey to come out of his retirement and form another Ministry; but Lord Grey was not to be prevailed upon to accept such an invitation, and William had to gulp down his personal objections and invite Lord Melbourne to come back once more and take charge of the Government of the country.

{251}

Lord Melbourne had no difficulty in forming an Administration, and it was on the whole very much the same in its composition as that which King William had so rudely dismissed only a few months before. But there were some new names in the list, and there was one very remarkable omission. Lord Brougham was not one of the members of the new Government. Lord Melbourne had made up his mind that if, perhaps, there could be no living without such a colleague, there certainly could be no living with him, and he preferred the chance to the certainty. The greatest sensation was produced all over the country when it was found that Lord Brougham was to have nothing to do with the new Administration. In and out of Parliament the question became a subject of keen and vehement discussion. The energy and the eloquence of Brougham had held a commanding place among the forces by which Parliamentary reform had been effected, and the wonder was how any Reform Ministry could venture to carry on the work of government, not merely without the co-operation of such a man, but with every likelihood of his active and bitter hostility. At one time the report went abroad, and found many ready believers, that there were periods in Brougham's life when his great intellect became clouded, as Chatham's had been at one time, and that the Liberal Ministry found it therefore impossible to avail themselves of his fitful services. Lord Melbourne himself once made an emphatic appeal to his audience in the House of Lords, after Lord Brougham had delivered a speech there of characteristic power and eloquence. Melbourne invited the House to consider calmly how overmastering must have been the reasons which compelled any body of rational statesmen to deprive themselves of such a man's co-operation. It would appear, however, that the reasons which influenced Melbourne and his colleagues were given by Brougham's own passionate and ungovernable temper, his impatience of all discipline, his sudden changes of mood and purpose, his overmastering egotism, and his frequent impulse to strike out for himself and to disregard all considerations of convenience or compromise, all {252} calculations as to the effect of an individual movement on the policy of an Administration.

[Sidenote: 1835—Melbourne and the Irish Members]

From that time Brougham had nothing more to do with ministerial work. He became merely an independent, a very independent, member of the House of Lords. To the close of his long career he was a commanding figure in the House and in the country, but it was an individual figure, an eccentric figure, whose movements must always excite interest, must often excite admiration, but from whom guidance and inspiration were never to be expected. Even on some of the great questions with which the brightest part of his career had been especially associated he often failed to exercise the influence which might have been expected from a man of such gifts and such achievements. Through the remainder of his life he could always arouse the attention of the country, and indeed of the civilized world, when he so willed, but his work as a political leader was done.

The office of Lord Chancellor was left for a while vacant, or, to describe the fact in more technical language, was put into commission. The commission was made up of the Master of the Rolls, the Vice-Chancellor, and one of the Judges. After a time Lord Cottenham was made Lord Chancellor. Lord John Russell became Home Secretary, and Lord Palmerston was Foreign Secretary. Among the new names on the list of the Administration was that of Sir Henry Parnell, who became Paymaster-General and Paymaster of the Navy, and that of Sir George Grey, who was Under-Secretary of the Colonies, and afterwards rose to hold high office in many a Government, and had at one time the somewhat undesirable reputation of being the rapidest speaker in the House of Commons.

King William must have put a strong constraint upon himself when he found that he had to receive, on terms at least of civility, so many of the men, as ministers, whom he had abruptly dismissed from his service not long before. For a considerable time he put up with them rather than received them, and maintained a merely official relationship with them so far even as not to invite them to dinner. {253} After a time, however, his Majesty somewhat softened in temper; the relations between him and his advisers became less strained; and he even went so far as to invite the members of the Cabinet to dinner, and expressed in his invitation the characteristic wish that each guest would drink at least two bottles of wine. When the construction of the new Ministry had been completed, Parliament reassembled on April 18; but that meeting was little more than of formal character, as the Houses had again to adjourn in order to enable the new members who were members of the House of Commons to resign and seek, according to constitutional usage, for re-election at the hands of their constituents. The only public interest attaching to the meeting of Parliament on April 18 was found in an attempt, made by two Tory peers, to extract from Lord Melbourne some public explanation as to his dealings with O'Connell and the Irish party. Lord Melbourne was quite equal to the occasion, and nothing could be drawn from him further than the declaration that he had entered into no arrangements whatever with O'Connell; that if the Irish members should, on any occasion, give him their support, he should be happy to receive it, but that he had not taken and did not mean to take any steps to secure it. The incident is worth noting because it serves to illustrate, once again, the effect of the new condition which had been introduced into the struggles of the two great political parties by the passing of the Catholic Emancipation Act, and the consequent admission of Irish Catholic members into the House of Commons.

Some of the members of the new Administration were not successful when they made their appeal to their old constituencies. Lord John Russell, for instance, was beaten in South Devonshire by a Tory antagonist, and a vacancy had to be made for him in the little borough of Stroud, the representative of which withdrew in order to oblige the leaders of his party, and obtained, in return for his act of self-sacrifice, an office under Government. Lord Palmerston was placed in a difficulty of the same kind, and a vacancy was made for him in the borough of {254} Tiverton by the good-nature and the public spirit of its sitting representative, and from that time to the end of his long career Lord Palmerston continued to be the member for Tiverton, which indeed won, by that fact alone, a conspicuous place in Parliamentary history. There were other disturbances of the same kind in the relations of the members of the new Government and their former constituents, and it was clear enough that a certain reaction was still working against the political impulse which had carried the Reform measures to success. Still, it was clear that the new Government had come into power as a Government of reformers, and Lord Melbourne found himself compelled to go on with the work of reform. Nothing could be less in keeping with his habits and the inclinations of his easy-going nature. It used to be said of him that whenever he was urged to set about any work of the kind his instinctive impulse always was to meet the suggestion with the question: "Why can't you let it alone?" Now, however, he had in his Cabinet some men, like Lord John Russell, whose earnestness in the cause of Reform was genuine and unconquerable; and if Lord Melbourne was too indolent to press forward reforms on his own account, he was also too indolent to resist such a pressure when put on him by others.

[Sidenote: 1835—Foundation of municipal bodies]

There was one great pressing and obvious reform which remained to be accomplished and ought naturally to follow on the reorganization of the Parliamentary system. That was the reorganization of the municipal system. The municipal work of the country, the management of all the various and complicated relations which concerned the local affairs of the whole community, had become a mere chaos of anomalies, anachronisms, and, in too many instances, of reckless mismanagement and downright corruption. If the sort of so-called representation which prevailed in the Parliamentary constituencies was, up to 1832, an absurdity and a fraud, it was not perhaps on the whole quite so absurd or altogether so fraudulent as that which set itself up for a representative system in the arrangements of the municipal corporations. As in the case of the {255} Parliamentary system, so in the case of the municipal system, the organization had begun with an intelligible principle to guide it; but, during the lapse of years and even of centuries, the original purpose had been swamped by the gradual and always increasing growth of confusion and corruption. The municipal arrangements of England had begun as a practical protest against the feudal system. While the feudal laws or customs still prevailed, the greater proportion of the working-classes were really little better than serfs at the absolute control of their feudal lords and masters. The comparatively small proportion of men who formed the trading class of the community found themselves compelled to devise some kind of arrangement for the security of themselves, their traffic, and their property against the dominion of the ruling class. It was practically impossible that a mere serf could devote his energies to a craft or trade with any hope of independence for himself or any chance of contributing to the prosperity of his working and trading neighbors. The trading, manufacturing, and commercial classes in each locality began to form themselves into groups, or what might be called guilds, of their own, with the object of common protection, in order to secure an opening for their traffic and their industry, and for the preservation of the earnings and the profits which came of their skill and energy. These trading groups asserted for themselves their right to free action in all that regarded the regulation of their work and the secure disposal of their profits, and thus they became what might be called governing bodies in each separate locality. One common principle of these governing bodies was that no one should be allowed to become a craftsman or trader in any district if he were a serf, and they claimed, and gradually came to maintain, the right to invest others with the title and privileges of freemen. This right of freemanship soon became hereditary, and the male children of a freeman were to be freemen themselves. In many communities the man who married a freeman's daughter acquired, if he had not been free before, the right of freemanship. No qualification of residence was necessary to {256} enable a man thus to become free. The self-organized community, whatever it might be, had the right of creating any stranger a freeman according as it thought fit.

[Sidenote: 1835—Reform of municipal corporations]

We find this ancient system still in harmless and graceful illustration when a public man who has distinguished himself in the service of the country is honored by admission to the freedom of some ancient city. But in the far-off days, when the system was in practical operation, the unlimited right of creating freemen came to mean that in many cities, towns, and localities of all descriptions a number of outsiders who had no connection by residence, property, or local interest of any kind with the district, and who were wholly irresponsible to the public opinion of the local community, had the right to interfere in the management of its affairs and to become members of its municipal body. For the local traders soon began to form themselves into councils or committees for the management of the local affairs, and, in fact, became what might be described as self-elected municipal corporations; trustees who had assumed the trust for themselves; local law-makers whose term of office was lifelong, and against whose decision there was no available court of appeal. In some cases these local bodies actually arrogated to themselves the right of passing penal laws, and trying cases and awarding punishments. The local municipalities sometimes exercised the power of appointing Recorders to preside over their courts of law, and it happened in many instances that the municipal body made no condition as to the Recorder being a member of any branch of the legal profession. It is hardly necessary to point out some of the inevitable consequences of such a system. The municipal bodies voted what salaries they pleased out of the local funds, and named according to their pleasure the persons to receive the salaries. They disposed of the corporate revenues in any way they thought fit—and, indeed, in many cases they claimed and annexed as corporate property possessions that had always, up to the time of the annexation, been supposed to belong to the public at large. They usurped for themselves all manner of privileges and {257} so-called rights, and, if they thought fit, offered them for purchase to the highest bidder. The whole governing body often consisted of a very small number of residents who had elected themselves to office, and as they had the power of making themselves very disagreeable to disputants they did not often find individuals public spirited enough to challenge their right of local control. It happened much more frequently that if any man were strong enough to make his opposition inconvenient or uncomfortable for the local rulers, they got over the trouble by prevailing on him to become one of themselves, to share their privileges and profits, and to strengthen their authority. A local magnate, the head of some great family, a peer of old descent, was often thus "nobbled"—to use a modern colloquialism—and was allowed to make as many freemen as he pleased and to take whatever part he would in the control of municipal affairs.