1. in_ernet_dli_2015_173095_2015_173095_A-Modern-History-Of-The-English-People-Vol-I

A

MODERN

HISTORY

OF

THE

ENGLISH

PEOPLE

A

MODERN

HISTORY

OF

THE

ENGLISH

PEOPLE

By

R.

H.

GRETTON

VOLUME

I

1880-1808

SECOND

EDITION

LONDON

GRANT

RICHARDS

LTD.

MDCCCCXIII

First Edition

. November 1912

Second Edition

. February 1913

PRINTED BY THE RIVERSIDE PRESS LIMITED

EDINBURGH

PREFACE

The changes which took place in English life between the years 1880 and 1910 were changes affecting every activity of the nation, corporate and individual. They concerned political ideas, social habits and commercial methods, religious outlook and material equipment, education and the housekeeper's supplies, keeping of holidays and furnishing of houses, philosophical speculation and the pursuits of a clerk's Saturday afternoons. After long incubation, the changes came about so swiftly that their magnitude was not recognised. Yet these thirty years made more difference to England than did the mechanical inventions of the early Victorian period. The locomotive, the telegraph, the innumerable developments of manufacturing machinery had worked obvious transformations; and those who saw them had thought that they saw a changed England. Yet not until a generation arose in whose lives these things were customary, did an England inherently changed come into being. A Rip Van Winkle of 1810, waking, say, in 1850, would have been completely bewildered by the steam-engine; but he might have passed the remainder of his life in conversation which he would have enjoyed and found reasonably familiar. A Rip Van Winkle of 1870, waking in 1910, while he would have grasped the principle of the motor car in twenty minutes, would never have been on conversational terms with his neighbours; he would constantly have found he did not

5

6

PREFACE

know what they were talking about. For in this last period

the subtlest transformation of all had taken place—the

changes had become part of the men themselves. Club

windows were no longer full of old gentlemen who woke

from snoring to deplore the spirit of the age; the old

gentlemen were all playing golf, and doing their best to

understand their sons’ slang.

A few instances will suffice to bring out the contrast

between the conditions of 1880 and those of 1910. The

England of 1880, deep-set in a kind of habit of fighting in

far corners of the globe, held herself aloof from European

politics; it could almost be made an election cry against

Lord Beaconsfield that he was likely to entangle us in

European disputes. The country had its nerves all in its

extremities. The England of 1910, a vital participant in

every European question, summoned from great, self-

governing, almost independent, dominions a conclave of

premiers to be taken into the counsels of her Foreign Secre-

tary. The sensitiveness had shifted back to the heart.

In the Parliament of 1880 a Hertfordshire borough, in

which the total poll was about 700, provided for Mr Balfour

a seat the moral validity of which was unquestioned. In

the Parliament of 1910 he sat as one of the Members for the

City of London; and his constituency of 20,000, being com-

posed in the main of plural voters, was regarded by more

than half the House of Commons as little better than a

rotten borough.

In 1880 the capital expenditure of even the greatest

municipal authorities of the country was limited to such

sums as they could obtain either from the Public Works

Loan Commissioners or from private lenders, such as

banks and insurance companies. The Funded Municipal

PREFACE

7

Loan, subscribed by the public, had not begun to exist.

In 1910 the total of municipal stock approached £600,000,000.

London society of 1880 was so circumscribed that the

lists of the Court presentations filled only two columns

of The Times. South African millionaires were not known

as yet; gold in the Transvaal was but just being dis-

covered, and Kimberley diamonds were in social estimation

poor things beside the Brazilian and Golconda heirlooms

of the old families.

Naturally contrasts in manners do not admit of such

succinct presentation; but what would an old member

of the Cavalry Club in 1880 have said if he could have

foreseen that in 1909 a serious point of rivalry between

the Cavalry Club and the Guards' Club was to be the

quality of their respective recipes for barley-water ?

Music halls, finding their feet after the slow decay of

the remnants of 'Corinthian' London, were in 1880 ap-

pealing to people of the middle class. But the vast tide

of humanity that flowed in and out of them in 1910

differed as much from the music-hall crowd of 1880 as

that had differed from the boon companions at Mott's in

1865. The two latter, far apart in class, were near enough

in a general inclination to dissipation and raffishness.

The Coliseum crowds of 1910, without a vice to divide

among them, represented thousands upon thousands of

petty suburban families, whose younger members were as

free to spend as to earn their sixpences, to stay out late,

and to turn, if so minded, into a hundred bars where no

one would be drunk.

Cheap money, cheap transport, cheap literature worked

so overwhelmingly after 1880 as to produce on all sides

8

PREFACE

a diminution of class consciousness. Society, though a section of it might remain truly aristocratic, and in the counties might be " the county " still, became in London so wide that its fringes were no longer distinguishable.

The social fabric was splitting into the two divisions of capital and labour. After 1880 industrial and trading stocks became a normal field of investment for the surplus money of persons not engaged in commerce or manufacture. This change, uniting the interests of the aristocratic and professional classes with those of the manufacturer, gives the fundamental aspect of that alteration of class feeling which brought the South African millionaire into Park Lane. Even the " social revolution," so burning a gospel in 1880, did not escape the general obliterating of landmarks. Militant republicanism, which could make headway while the House of Commons consisted only of the landowner and the manufacturer, lost ground. The true strength of Fabianism lay in the fact that the great pooling of industrial capital, which began in the eighties, exposed it to all sorts of flank attacks by taxation. Capital was no longer a stronghold to be besieged ; it was a commonwealth to be administered ; and socialism, instead of opening sluice-gates of revolution, ran its force into a hundred administrative channels. Labour entered Parliament and town councils ; and socialism became, in legislative matters, a distinction of degree rather than of kind.

In politics the year 1880 was a real turning-point. Weariness of the dragging wars of thirty years and growing disgust at neglect of the problems at home, induced the hope that a fresh Government would break away from traditional political manœuvring. At the same time the

PREFACE

9

presence of Mr Chamberlain in the new Government seemed to promise, not only attention to domestic affairs, but attention of a newly democratic kind—a fitting sequel to the franchise reform of 1867. On the Conservative side a spirit was stirring which expressed itself in the Fourth Party's critical detachment from its leaders. The Irish, having placed Parnell at their head instead of Butt, came back to Westminster for the first time Nationalist in the sense in which recent generations understand that term. Lastly Labour, which, in the ascendancy of middle-class politics following on the Reform Bill of 1832, had deliberately abandoned political channels, began with the eighties to return its force into those channels. Economic developments cannot be so precisely dated. Yet the first experiments with the telephone in London, the first public use of electric light, the beginning of the importation of meat in mechanically chilled chambers, the establishment of postal orders, the first instance of a funded municipal debt, all belong to the year 1880.

Consideration of social and economic changes has not formed an essential part of the scheme of previous historians of our times. Mr Justin McCarthy, adding three volumes to his notable work, brought it down from 1880 to 1901 ; and the last volume of Dr J. F. Bright's admirable history treats also of these years. Mr Herbert Paul closes with the fall of the Liberal Government in 1895. Each of these writers was, in regard to the period covered by the present work, dealing with the final stage of a long survey. My endeavour has been to string these years on a new thread ; and to this end the prolongation of the survey to a later date is more than the addition of

10

PREFACE

a certain number of years. It is a means of grasping the

whole. The death of Queen Victoria closed an epoch,

but the new epoch was to throw light upon that which

preceded it. A strong political revival was to make

plain what forces had been at work beneath the apparent

lassitude, almost impotence, of parliamentary institutions

in the last twenty years of Queen Victoria's reign; and

in society an equally astonishing self-assertion was to

give the measure of the advance in wealth, in knowledge

(if not in education), in capacity for living, which had

been accumulating behind bounds. The long reign of

Queen Victoria did indeed somewhat chill English life

towards its end. In political affairs it was distinctly too

long for the well-being of Government. To the inevitable

difficulty of serving a sovereign fixed by more weight of

years in a certain inaccessibility to new opinions, was

added the difficulty that the sovereign was a woman.

Society, the intellectual world, the arts, ethical move-

ments, were under a crust of habit which, where it did

not produce complete inertia, distorted the ideas that

broke through it. In family life, in religious thought, in

the pursuits of the people, change during the eighties

and nineties was almost always combative; it became

simpler and more straightforward under King Edward.

The militant agnosticism which was so rife in the periodical

publications of the eighties, the heated discussion of the

"emancipation" of women from a purely domestic exist-

ence—to take only two instances—lost in the later period

most of their violence and something of their terror.

The thirty years of my history fall, then, into two divi-

sions. The first presents us the spectacle of governments

enmeshed in older political habits, bewildered by new de-

mands, besieged by new methods and pursued to the end

by entanglements ; until the fall of Omdurman and the

Peace of Vereeniging English politicians were a House

of Atreus. But it presents us also a people busy at

accumulation, increasing its power, and its capacity for

the absorption of material supplies and of ideas. The

second division gives us, in both the political and the

social world, an explosion of energy, an expression of

stored force, a revelation of movement.

It will be clear from the references given in the text that

I have relied for my dates and facts mainly upon the files

of The Times. As for the popular interests of the moment,

they are always mirrored in the current numbers of

Punch, and to the files of that periodical I am deeply

indebted. I have, of course, drawn upon the notable

biographies of the period. Lastly, I am under a more

personal obligation to several friends, to whom I grate-

fully express my thanks. These are chiefly due to the

Right Hon. G. W. E. Russell and to Sir Robert Hudson,

who have read the proofs of my work, and given me the

kindliest assistance and advice. Mr Charles Sturge also

has been most generous in helping me in my researches.

The Little House,

Burford, Oxfordshire.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

PAGE

I. THE BEGINNING OF THE EIGHTIES

15

II. THE GENERAL ELECTION, 1880

33

III. 1881 : COMMON SENSE

54

IV. 1882 : IRELAND, EGYPT—AND JUMBO

77

V. 1883 : A YEAR OF GROUND SWELL

102

VI. 1884 : GORDON AT KHARTOUM ; MR GLADSTONE

AT OTHER AFFAIRS

124

VII. 1885 : THE DEATH OF GORDON, THE GENERAL

ELECTION, AND THE RISE OF SOCIALISM

150

VIII. 1886 : HOME RULE, THE NAMELESS PARTY,

AND THE LABOUR RIOTS

174

IX. 1887 : THE JUBILEE

198

X. 1888 : THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE

223

XI. 1889 : LONDON AND LABOUR FACE TO FACE

242

XII. 1890 : A YEAR WITH A STORMY ENDING

263

XIII. 1891 : THE ISOLATION OF TRADE UNIONS

285

XIV. 1892 : A HALF-HEARTED ELECTION

305

XV. 1893 : MR GLADSTONE'S LAST FIGHT

324

XVI. 1894 : LE BOURGEOIS ÉPATÉ

342

XVII. 1895 : A RETURN TO SAFE GROUND

362

XVIII. 1896 : THE JAMESON RAID, AND MOTOR CARS

384

XIX. 1897 : JUBILEE POMPS AND VANITIES

408

XX. 1898 : MOSTLY OTHER PEOPLE'S AFFAIRS

431

APPENDIX : GOVERNMENTS FROM 1880 TO 1898

445

13

CHAPTER I

THE BEGINNING OF THE EIGHTIES

THE year 1880 opened in the midst of a fog unparalleled in our annals, which almost without intermission brooded over London from November 1879 to the following February. This gloom—bad for the health, depressing to the spirits, obscuring the outlook—might well have been an emanation of the feelings of Englishmen; for in nearly every department of the national life at that moment were lowered health, depression and uncertainty. Trade, which for several years past had been struggling with falling prices, had reached a point approaching stagnation. A soaking and inclement summer in 1879 had ruined the crops ; in every cornfield the shocks had stood blackened and sprouting, till the farm-hands could scarcely tear the sheaves apart. The complete failure of the harvest, coming after years of steady decline in the price of corn, brought to a head the discontent of agriculturists. It immediately made itself felt in London, where the season of 1880 was marked by a shrunken list of entertainments ; one ball a night, instead of two or three, showed that rent-rolls had been affected. Agricultural depression, as a social grievance, may be said to date from this bad summer. In Ireland such a summer had brought its inevitable result ; famine had taken cruel hold before the Duchess of Marlborough's relief fund was instituted. Hyde Park saw already those gatherings of the unemployed which in the next years were to force upon public attention a problem to which no year brought the solution. In South Wales the ironworks were battling

15

16 BEGINNING OF THE EIGHTIES

with a market in which, between 1873 and 1879, the price of sheet-iron had fallen from £18 to £9 a ton. In Sheffield a survey of the condition of lifty-one limited liability companies showed that only sixteen of them had their shares above par; fifteen had either compounded with their creditors or been wound up; and the total depreciation of their share capital was put at three and a half millions.1 The Potteries were witnessing disputes about wages; in Lancashire there were despondent attempts to set on foot great emigration schemes, or to devise " short time " agreements for working three weeks of the month.

Affairs of State presented no more cheering aspect. The two political parties were wrangling over embroilments abroad that, while heavily burdening the national finances and demanding attention which should have been occupied at home, were beginning to appear to the bulk of the nation as gratuitous and perverse. In Afganistan our arms were engaged in a war that looked like involving us in all the cost and blood of a permanent occupation. In South Africa we were confronting the resentment roused by that first annexation of the Transvaal which was to prove so inadequately considered. In South-Eastern Europe we were entangled in a diplomatic situation which might at any time issue in war. Meanwhile the national finances showed a deficit of six millions; Lord Beaconsfield's Government had increased warlike expenditure from twenty-five millions to thirty-two and a quarter millions a year; the Revenue accounts betrayed gravely decreased spending power in the nation; customs receipts had fallen by a million, excise by nearly two millions, and income tax by a quarter of a million.

Socially, too, though the world of the great did not lack brilliant figures, the season of 1880 was overcast by the prevailing dullness, and was one which put to its record

1 The Times, 23rd December 1880.

BEGINNING OF THE EIGHTIES

17

no great event, "none of the accustomed star progresses

of Shahs, Sultans and Emperors," 1 no great work of art,

and no great novel ; for Beaconsfield's Endymion, though

its publication was an exciting event, did not, in a

literary sense, redeem the year's reputation. Society

was still adorned by Lord Houghton, and occasion-

ally by Lord Beaconsfield and Bernal Osborne ; Sir

William Harcourt and Sir George Trevelyan were at the

height of their dinner-party fame, Mr Gladstone was

"talking shop like a tenth Muse," and Lord Salisbury

was sharpening conversation with his cynicism. This

world was moreover in the very process of being widened,

alike in its interests and its outlook, by that falling of

barriers which, admitting first of all poetry in the persons

of Tennyson and Browning, painting in the persons of

Leighton and Millais, and less defined artistic gifts in the

fascinating and erratic Laurence Oliphant, was on the

verge of something like surrender to the coruscations of

Whistler and Oscar Wilde. The process was not yet

complete, though it had advanced speedily, as anyone

may see who compares Thackeray's Book of Snobs

with Punch for 1880. The direct advance of the middle-

class tide did not appear very great ; its real advance was

by creeks and inlets. Sir Gorgius Midas, returning home

late to find only six footmen awake to open the door to

him, is as easy game for Punch as De Moggyns, with

his flunkeys in peach-coloured liveries and pea-green

plush breeches, had been to Thackeray. Frontal assault

by huge wealth and bad breeding had not advanced far ;

but in subordinate ways change was appearing. A genera-

tion had come up in which not only were the sons of

tradesmen sent to great public schools, but the tradesmen

themselves had been there ; Punch could portray a

duke dining with his tailor, and complaining of the fit of

his trousers, to which the tailor replies that the duke,

1 The Times, 30th July 1880.

B

18 BEGINNING OF THE EIGHTIES

ever since he had been the tailor's fag at Eton, had been

a whimperer. Then again, the old narrow circle of the

well-born was growing bored with itself, and if a woman

like Punch's Mrs Ponsonby de Tomkyns, a social

climber, but a shrewd, decent, capable body, liked to give

great parties, and angle desperately for guests, society

had no objection to providing the guests. A certain

awkward period of transition was past. The old days,

in which the great world had moved on an exalted stage--

all the town--had passed away, with its outward signs

of rich dress, ornate vehicles and footmen on the board.

In those days men of the great world made all kinds of

excursions into other worlds--spent nights in the London

dancing gardens, hours in furtive cockfighting pits, were

patrons of prizefighters, mingled in all the raffish under-

life of jockeys, horse-copers, night-houses, and West End

bars. They disported freely, because their world was

unapproachably theirs; and there were no means of un-

locking its doors from outside. Since those days changing

ideas, growth of immense middle-class wealth, had practi-

cally made an end of the old "high life." It may, in fact,

be said to have died with the sixties. There had followed

a period in which society had still tried to oppose on-

coming forces ; but it had had traitors within its camp.

Men like Lord St Aldegonde in Lolthair had begun

applying ancient self-confidence in new ways. No one

could ever really rival them ; so why should they, for the

sake of separating themselves in appearances, be missing

new openings for pleasure ? A fresh element had been

introduced into national life by the development in the

middle classes on the one hand of a new athleticism and

on the other of an exquisiteness of their own. Society,

"lions of a season," its beards and moustaches of the

Crimea, its exclusive traditions of sport, it was really

BEGINNING OF THE EIGHTIES

19

engaged in things that were vieux jeu. By now, rowing had travelled far outside the universitics, and the veriest Cockney could laugh at Ouida's dandy flinging away his cigar, leaping into an eight, and stroking it to victory. Lawn tennis, which has done more for the mental enfranchisement of the middle class than has been recognised, was at the height of its first popularity in 1880 ; and Punch's title-page for the year shows the Four Seasons carrying racquets, with Toby tightening up a net. Cycling was making headway, football clubs were increasing rapidly. The very sneers which aristocracy aimed at these forms of athleticism show how completely the ordinary people were developing a world of their own ; and were able to forget recent days in which any proclivities towards sport involved for them either pretentiousness, or the parasitic life of a " Mr Sponge." As for the new exquisiteness, society had waked to the spectacle of clean-shaven young men, and women in gowns with no waists but much embroidery, cultivating " intenseness " and " living beautifully." These were the new amusements open to society. The set called " the Souls " came into being, brilliant figures like Mr Arthur Balfour and Lady Granby moving in languid grace, and acquiring " the Grecian Bend," neighboured by the Cimabue Browns, Postlethwaite, and Maudle of Punch. At this time Patience was presented to a delighted world ; and Gorgius Midas Junior complained that his millions brought him less deference in great houses than was shown to "some artist feller." Even a short list of those present at an evening party in 1881 includes the names of Mr Whistler and Mr Oscar Wilde with that of the Prince of Wales.1

Nevertheless in 1880—perhaps because there was so much to make the year a grave one—the tone of the season seems to have been set, not by the new " intensity," but by the old seriousness of that " evangelising " group

1 The Times, 4th June 1881.

20 BEGINNING OF THE EIGHTIES

which was still so strong and occupied a position strange to modern eyes—Lord Shaftesbury, Lord Harrowby, Lord and Lady Mount Temple, Lord Kinnaird, the Buxtons and Samuel Morley.1 Mention of this group is a reminder that, even in the sphere of the Church, the year 1880 was one of gloom and embroilment. The tedious proceedings against ritualistic practices at St Alban's, Holborn, were still, after five years, dragging on ; the Rev. T. P. Dale was haled to prison in November for not complying with the requirements of the Court of Arches in regard to his church in the City; and in the same month prosecutions were set on foot in respect to St Vedast's, London, Bordesley, and Miles Platting. The strength of the Evangelical party at this date was seen also in the appointment of Dr Ryle in March to the vacant Deanery of Salisbury ; this choice of a notable parish priest and writer of tracts, for an office hitherto associated with scholarly and donnish rather than with pastoral distinction, being regarded as a striking departure from custom. It is a mere coincidence, though an interesting one, that in this year, in May, the Young Men's Christian Association purchased for £25,000 Exeter Hall, the very name of which had already become a synonym for Evangelicalism. Indeed the cursory eye regarding the appearances made by the Church in records of current events finds them hardly less out of humour than those of other national activities. Beyond the ritual question the only matter in which the Church bulked largely in the newspapers was in its resentment of the Burial Act ; in September the papers contained long controversies as to the power of parish clergy to charge increased fees to Nonconformists, to refuse the use of the church bells at Nonconformist funerals, and other such pettinesses.

However, when we have recognised all the depression that existed, all the grounds for anxiety, and all the lack

1 Lady St Helier's Memories of Fifty Years.

BEGINNING OF THE EIGHTIES 21

of inspiration, it has to be said that the time was certainly not one of paralysis. At least two inventions of the foremost importance made in this year their first advances in England, and made them with great rapidity. The year had hardly opened before it was announced that Mr. Edison's "carbon electric lamp" had reached the stage of practical serviceableness the world had been awaiting.1 At the end of February Dr Lyon Playfair had partially lighted his town house by electricity ; in April the new light was at work in Aldersgate Street Station, and in December thirty-four lights were installed at Paddington Station. But although this year first established electric lighting in England, and though its development was immediate, some years had to elapse before it became a really practical method of lighting. As yet every installation was an affair of a separate producing plant, with the result that, besides being too expensive for private houses except as a hobby, it was also too tiresome. Thus, when installed in Her Majesty's Theatre in July it annoyed the audience by the persistent "thrumming" of the dynamo. Its other uses in this year were chiefly on the sea. An Orient liner, the Chimborazo, was equipped with it in June, the lights used, though described as "incandescent," being not what were later called incandescent lamps, but arc lights of 70 c.p. The more significant development at the moment was the use of the light for naval purposes ; the potentialities of its high power were at once perceived, and by the middle of April two warships, the Minotaur and the Agincourt, had astounded the dwellers at Gibraltar by suddenly turning upon the Rock beams of a light hitherto unknown. The name of "searchlight" had yet to be invented, and the general opinion among the garrison officers was hardly favourable to the new invention ; it made, they thought, the ships themselves an excellent mark.

1 The Times, 5th January 1880

22

BEGINNING OF THE EIGHTIES

The second invention, which equally found its development somewhat checked, though in a different way, was the telephone. It had already gained so much ground in England that in January 1880 there was talk of action by the Postmaster-General to restrain an enterprise which was likely to cut into the profits of the telegraph service. It was doubtful if he could establish his case that a telephone message was a kind of telegram, and therefore an infringement of monopoly ; but it seemed to be certain that he would make the attempt—certain, indeed, that he could not afford to do otherwise. For at this time the telephone was expected to render telegrams as obsolete as the electric light would make gas ; there was not any idea of the extent to which the two earlier inventions would continue to exist alongside the two new ones.

The Postmaster-General's action was entered, and came on late in November, the Attorney-General, on his behalf, suing the Edison Telephone Company. At the same time the Post Office Authorities could not fail to perceive that it was impossible to deprive the public of the new facilities ; if the telephone were a kind of telegraph then the public would have a right to demand a telephone service from the telegraph authorities. Consequently in December the Post Office was ordering 200,000 Gower-Bell telephones. Meanwhile a good deal of interest was being taken in the first working uses of the invention ; in April, for instance, lines were run from several chambers in the Temple to the Law Courts (then still at Westminster) and the Houses of Parliament, the wires being carried along the District Railway. In some other large towns the new idea had been more extensively taken up ; early in July there were cries of alarm about the danger and inconvenience of the network of overhead telephone wires in Liverpool and other places.1

The Post Office had real ground for anxiety in face of

1 The Times, 9th July 1880.

BEGINNING OF THE EIGHTIES

23

this invention. The State purchase of the telegraph

system had just succeeded, after ten years, in proving

itself a good bargain. The telegraph revenue for 1879

had been £1,452,489, and the expenditure £1,111,547.

But the demand for postal facilities was ever growing.

A favourite scheme at this time was one of pneumatic

despatch-boxes to be set up in the streets, whereby the

public could shoot its telegrams into the post offices.

Then there was a demand for a parcel post, transmitting

small parcels " at uniform rates payable by adhesive

stamps "; and another demand was in process of being

met by the Money Order Bill before Parliament this year.

It is interesting to note that this last proposal had no small

opposition to encounter. Several Chambers of Commerce,

including so important a chamber as that of Manchester,

lodged petitions against it on the ground that the issue

of postal notes would damage certain private enterprises,

like the Cheque Bank, which had hitherto supplied a

form of easily negotiable paper money. Another point

of interest--a side-light on new commercial methods

which we shall have to consider later--was that some

advocates of the demand for money orders argued

that they would promote shopping with big firms, and

give people in the country the chance to avail them-

selves of the lower prices which the large stores then

coming into existence were able, by the size of their

dealings, to offer. In view of the ever-growing re-

quirements of the public the Post Office may well

have been disturbed by anything which threatened its

one source of trading profit. It may be noted here,

though it is not strictly a Post Office matter, that the

" newly opened line of telegraph to South Africa " had

begun working in January 1880. Its first important

message conveyed the news of the arrest of the President

of " the Committee of Boers in the Transvaal " which had

been concentrating the local resentment of annexation--

24 BEGINNING OF THE EIGHTIES

a message ominous of the kind of work which was to fall on that cable in later years.

An invention of a different kind, which in the end affected the spending powers and prosperity of the poorer classes in England to a degree not foreseen at the time, also reached in 1880 the point of practical working. It was announced on 3rd February that the steamship Strathleven had arrived in London from Australia with 70 bullock carcasses, 500 sheep carcasses, and two tons of butter. She had left Sydney and Melbourne in December and had arrived with the supplies in "perfectly sound condition." Now the importation of meat preserved by low temperatures was not a new thing. For some time carcasses had been brought from America, but the chambers in which they had been conveyed were kept cool with blocks of ice. The system of chambers refrigerated by machines practically dates from 1880.1 However, in spite of new methods of storage, the trade would not have developed so rapidly as it did but for a curious and almost accidental circumstance. By enabling meat to be brought from Australia and New Zealand (distances over which ice-cooled chambers could not have been made to pay) refrigeration tapped an astoundingly cheap market. Till this time the great sheep-runs of those colonies had been worked on the wool-profits entirely; the carcasses were regarded as practically worthless. Consequently when sheep carcasses first became, thanks to the new refrigeration, of marketable value, there was no difficulty in obtaining them cheaply enough to allow the importers to face a long period of prejudice and experiment. For some time the meat was criticised, and even abused; the first shipment showed an adverse balance to the importers of £19 on the cargo, the beef having been sold at an average of 5¼d. a lb., and the mutton at an average of 5d. Never-

1 Encyclopædia Britannica, article on Refrigerating, by T. B. Lightfoot.

BEGINNING OF THE EIGHTIES

25

theless in November an " Australian Fresh Meat Company " was floated, with a capital of £300,000 ; and the keenness of the sheep-owner in the Antipodes for a source of profit hitherto undreamt of was at work to break down the prejudices of Smithfield Market, and to give the English workman more butcher's meat in a month than his fathers had in a year.

Nor was it the workman only whose resources were enlarged. The daily menu of comparatively well-to-do families had been extremely limited. The occasion of a trade exhibition in Germany, at which a display of American " canned goods " was made, served The Times for a homily on the lack of variety in English catering.

It wrote 1 : " No nation in the world has so narrow a code of clean articles of food as ours." Householders of moderate means rarely afforded fish, mutton was "suspected and avoided," poultry " lacked flavour and strength," and pork was "less acceptable above stairs than below." Vegetables. moreover, must have been a luxury in small houses.

An indictment of the green-grocer's profits reveals the fact that the retail price of a cucumber in September 1880 was 10d., of a pound of runner beans, 6d., and of a cauliflower, 8d. Even so, the housekeepers had not complained ; the indictment came from the grower, who felt himself to be getting an inadequate share of the profit.2 Dairy produce was hardly procurable at a more reasonable cost, fresh butter being normally at 1s. 7d. a pound.

It is probable, however, that many town families felt this pinch less, since the Margarine Act was not yet in existence, and much must have passed for butter which was not butter at all. It was, for instance, noted as curious that, though oleo-margarine never had a price quoted in the market reports, and was not displayed in shop-windows, a lawsuit about patent royalties elicited the fact that the sale of this

1 The Times, 22nd April 1880: 2 Ditto, 18th September 1880.

26 BEGINNING OF THE EIGHTIES

compound amounted to 98,000,000 lbs.1 But whatever may have been the facts about other foods the question of the meat supply was the only one formulated. The general supply had been restricted by severe Government prohibition imposed on the importation of live animals owing to fears of cattle disease-2 ; and drastic regulations as to the movement of live cattle from the Metropolitan Meat Market had caused real shortage of food in seaside places and country towns.3 It was high time that a new traffic in dead meat should be established ; and it is not difficult to see that the security for a new venture lay in the middle-class demand. There is no mistaking the calibre of the letters on the subject to the newspapers. Certain persons complained of the toughness of the meat, its bad colour ; others wrote of the precise way to treat it, especially the necessity for long and slow thawing ; and in their phrases describing the excellences of the meat when so treated, how it " cut firm and tender under the knife," " the quality of the gravy in the well," there is all the ponderous interest in eating, all the detailed affection for a joint, that Dickens portrayed in his middle-class fathers.

" Sweetness and light " had, as we have seen, affected the upper strata of the middle class with unhealthy violence in the shape of the aesthetic movement. It had led also to advances in education, which were in some respects slightly fevered, and ladies of very distinguished learning-Dr Sophia Jex-Blake, Dr Garrett Anderson, Miss Lucy Harrison, for instance-were becoming perturbed by what they considered to be over-pressure in girls' schools.4 There was sanity enough, however, in the way educational advances were affecting the business man's idea of his business ; and Matthew Arnold might have

1 The Times, 28th April 1880.

2 Ditto, 20th July 1880.

3 Ditto, 23rd May 1881.

4 See, e.g.; The Times, 15th April 1880.

BEGINNING OF THE EIGHTIES

27

begun to feel he had not preached to deaf ears when Professor Huxley, speaking at the opening of Mason College, Birmingham, on 1st October, in this year, celebrated the passing of the day when the men and the methods of science were pooh-poohed by the men of business.

On 13th July the court of the new Victoria University held its first meeting, the characteristics of the University being, first, that for the attainment of its degrees it required attendance at prescribed courses of lectures, thus differing from the University of London; and secondly, that it was designed to federate a number of colleges—Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds and Sheffield.

Akin to the spirit of these matters was the announcement, on 30th July, of the first instance of an offer which was to become in time a familiar, almost a national, institution.

Mr Andrew Carnegie had written from New York to the Provost of Dunfermline, offering to present the town with a free library.

It is not difficult, again, to trace the growing concern for reality in education in the deputation which waited upon the Board of Education in July from the Manchester Kindergarten Society, and other such societies, urging the adoption of kindergarten methods in elementary schools.

The Board, however, had too much other business on hand.

It had not yet succeeded in perfecting its machinery.

School Boards had ten years of existence, but though they had done much they were still far from the ideal of provision for every child.

In London the total child population of school age was reckoned in 1880 at 740,377.

The voluntary schools had accommodation for 269,469, the Board Schools for 225,236, a total of 494,705.

But the average attendance was as yet only 373,701—just about half the juvenile population.

The expansion of provincial university education is a subject which will confront us again later.

It was one aspect of that growing civic activity which, though it might be despised by the fastidious and the aesthetic

28 BEGINNING OF THE EIGHTIES

as a mere exaltation of the material and the parochial, was a very genuine piece of middle-class self-assertion. Such cities as Glasgow, Manchester, Liverpool, and especially Birmingham, had for some time before this history opens been developing their resources and enlarging the scope of the services they offered their citizens. Gas companies, water companies, tramway companies had been made aware that no monopoly would be allowed to remain in private hands ; the principle of ultimate right of purchase by the Corporation was well established. Yet, great as previous developments had been, the year 1880 serves none the less well in this matter too as a fresh starting point. It witnessed the first successful flotation of Consolidated Municipal Stock : and this was a very important departure, for hitherto the capital expenditure of corporations had had to be met by loans from the Public Works Loan Commissioners, from banks, insurance companies and private lenders. These arrangements involved varying rates of interest, from 5 per cent. to 3¾ per cent., the keeping of separate sinking funds, and separate approaches to Parliament or the Local Government Board for powers for new works. In the early seventies some corporations had adopted the idea of a Suspense Account, into which money borrowed at low rates was paid to be used for the liquidation of loans. Then arose the idea of a Corporation Debenture Stock, the Birmingham Finance Committee drawing up a scheme for such an issue in 1876,1 and although the Local Government Board considered itself unable to sanction the proposal, an attempt was made in the following year to raise a million and a half of debenture stock. Prospectuses were published, but only £300,000 were subscribed, and the attempt failed. The first success in the venture was achieved by the Liverpool Corporation, which issued on

1 For this subject I have drawn largely on Mr J. T. Bunce's History of the Corporation of Birmingham.

BEGINNING OF THE EIGHTIES

29

1st September 1880 two millions of stock, under the Liverpool Loans Act. Sir W. B. Forwood, who had been chiefly responsible for the Act, told the Corporation that " it had been a difficult and intricate matter to get the Bill through, because the Liverpool Corporation were the first in the Kingdom to obtain powers to fund their debt in the way proposed." 1 But Birmingham was close on Liverpool's heels with its second attempt. Instead of proceeding by a Loans Act, with all the cost of a private Bill, the Corporation applied to the Local Government Board for a provisional order to amend and partially repeal some local Acts and Orders, so as to enable the Corporation to issue a consolidated stock in which trustees who were empowered to invest in Government securities might invest. This method of procedure nearly wrecked the enterprise, for although the Board, after public inquiry, made the Order, the Bill confirming it was opposed by Lord Redesdale on the ground that the Board was exceeding its powers. However he finally withdrew his opposition on condition that the question of the Board's powers was raised in Parliament. The Bill passed. It had cost the Corporation only £70, and it would save thousands. The calculation in the case of Liverpool was that £25,000 or £30,000 a year would be saved by the raising of a large sum at a single, comparatively low, rate of interest. What was more important from the public point of view was, first, that municipalities had discovered a new form of financial power in the exercise of which the Local Government debt of the United Kingdom rose to six hundred millions in 1910; and, secondly, that they had found a way of attracting the general investor, and had no longer to borrow, in the old sense of the word.

The provision of a new field for investments could not have come at a better time than this. The possibilities

1 The Times, 2nd September 1880;

30 BEGINNING OF THE EIGHTIES

of the new field were not, however, fully perceived at the moment, and its opening did nothing to cure the special source of depression in this depressing year—the state of the money market. The year, as it progressed, brought a revival of trade; the signs were hopeful as early as February, and another summer of rain and flood could not disguise the fact that business was recovering. Yet revival brought with it a new uneasiness. The money market was not comfortable. Not only were Consols very high, but all good stocks were high with them. There had been for long, The Times remarked,1 no war to cause new issues, no great economic changes, such as the invention of railways, or extensive measures of colonisation.

The general result was an accumulation of privately held capital which might, on a recovery of trade, be a temptation to the reckless floating of new enterprises, and consequent financial disturbance. Fears were expressed later on in the year that some of the new impulsion of business was really—in the iron trade, for instance—only speculative. Other conditions, besides prices and production, were affecting the market. It was never decided beyond question, even in all the discussions of the great period of bimetallism, precisely how the shortage of gold, which became so serious between 1880 and 1890, affected trade and industry. That it had some direct effect may be taken for granted, since otherwise the bimetallic theory would never have gained ground. One indirect effect is certain. The “tightness,” so to speak, of the coinage, while producing a nominal lowering of prices, tended to keep wages from rising; and was thus responsible for some of the force which at this time the agitations of working people assumed. Masters of industry in every part of the country were nervous about the strikes that might be expected to accompany a revival of trade.

Not that the working class agitations were entirely a

1 29th July 1880.

BEGINNING OF THE EIGHTIES

31

matter of wages. In one of the great industries, then as

now the most highly organised on the side of the employees

—the cotton industry—observers already thought they

saw signs of a spirit which we shall find at its full activity

later. As yet the idea was only expressed in a vague

and obviously prejudiced form, The Times venturing the

opinion, when labour troubles in Lancashire became

serious in the autumn, that the real cause at the back of

the agitation was not a matter of wages but " a struggle

for mastery." 1 The opinion, though crudely expressed,

was shrewd. The trade unions had attained to such

numbers that they felt the day within sight when they

should command practically all the working hands of the

country. At the Trade Union Congress in September of

this year the delegates represented an aggregate of 600,000

members, the strongest unions being the miners, with

50,000 members ; the engineers, with 45,000 ; the boiler-

makers, with 20,000 ; and the railway workers, with 15,000.

They were already strengthening themselves by alliance

with the Co-operative Societies, a meeting between re-

presentatives of the two movements taking place later

in September. The wages question, arising more acutely

from the shortage of gold coinage, was undoubtedly an

immediate cause of strikes (the cotton trade dispute ended

in December with the masters " risking " an advance in

wages), but there was a predisposing cause of a more

far-reaching nature. We shall have to record, under 1881,

the foundation of the Social Democratic Federation in

London. Whether or no it be true that the British work-

ing man had been affected by contact with the refugees

fleeing to England from the repressive measures taken in

France after the Commune, and by Bismarck a few years

later in Germany, it seems at least certain, as William

Morris put it,2 that " there was no longer, among the mass

1 The Times, 18th September 1880

2 Mackail's Life of William Morris, ii. 81.

32 BEGINNING OF THE EIGHTIES

of the working class in London, any decided hostility to Socialism." But whatever suspicions may have been growing of a spirit among workmen that was looking for more fundamental advances than in wages, nothing seems to have been less present to the minds of politicians in 1880, as they approached and passed through a General Election, than uneasiness about the conditions of the temper of the working man. Yet it is fair to add that the broadly determining influence in that election was such a revulsion of feeling in the direction of domestic and internal politics that the nation might well have looked forward to having its house drastically set in order.

CHAPTER II

THE GENERAL ELECTION, 1880

YET to speak of the General Election of 1880 as offering a prospect of national spring-cleaning is to give a positive description to what was mainly a negative movement. The distinction is necessary, because in the following five years the prevalence of a habit of confounding different matters under the common title of "Beaconsfieldism" was to lead the reforming party into disaster; dislike of the positions in which Beaconsfield had left Great Britain in various parts of the world was to become, in more than one case, a refusal to deal with those positions, hardly distinguishable from carelessness.

The tone and pitch of this election were entirely set by Mr Gladstone; the campaign which was to bring the Liberals triumphantly to power being really begun at the close of 1879. The events of 1878, the Russo-Turkish War, the subsequent inflaming of bellicose spirit in England, and the secret agreements with Russia and Turkey that accompanied the Berlin Conference—had all touched Mr Gladstone in one of his tenderest spots : Turkey and her dependencies in Europe. He had used a phrase very significant of the line his thought was taking —" the people want a little more experience of Beacons-field Toryism "1—before the occurrence of two events which fitted exactly into his case. Affairs in South Africa, already made ticklish enough by the annexation of the Transvaal, were rendered more depressing by a campaign undertaken, as it seemed even to the Government,

1 Morley's Life of Gladstone, ii. 583.

C

33

34 THE GENERAL ELECTION [1880

somewhat wantonly against the Zulus. More serious still,

the Ameer of Afghanistan having failed to accede to

what the Government demanded of him by way of

recognition of the weight of British influence in his affairs,

war had been undertaken in Afghanistan also.

To these developments, which wore to Mr Gladstone's

mind the true Disraelian stamp of cynical disregard of

righteousness, add the inevitable corollary of the burden

on the national finances, and what more burninglv in-

spiring text could a man of Mr Gladstone's political

tradition have found to his hand ? When the Liberal

Committee of Mid-Lothian invited him in 1879 to contest

that division, and he accepted the invitation, he was, by a

sure political instinct, giving himself at once an inspiring

audience and the stimulus of a difficult fight. He had

declined in the previous year to stand again for Greenwich,

his seat at that date ; he had remained unpersuaded by

the offer of a safe seat in Edinburgh. The Mid-Lothian

suggestion gave him the chance of striking the blow at his

own time, and not at what time Lord Beaconsfield might

choose to dissolve. Towards the end of November 1879

he went into Scotland, and the next fortnight witnessed

the historic " Mid-Lothian Campaign." In these days

of far more widely spread newspaper reading, and the

consequent organisation of reporting from outlying centres,

it is necessary to remind ourselves of the violently out-

standing methods of this campaign. Political platform-

speaking then was restricted within limits generally

recognised and accepted. Such speeches as were reported

were placed under the rather odd heading " Parliament

Out of Session," which by itself is enough to suggest that

these efforts were regarded as mere aftermath. There was

one other form in which they were recognised. It was

tacitly admitted that the ordinary practice of members of

the House in addressing themselves to their constituents

once a year or so had in some instances an interest beyond

1880] THE GENERAL ELECTION 35

the bounds of the constituency. Reports of the speeches of such men appeared under the heading: “The Member for Oxford,” or “Westminster,” or “Birmingham,” a form of title which made even Mr Chamberlain's Radical pronouncements somewhat muffled. Nothing approaching the present mobility of notable speakers, or the frequent platform appearances of leading figures outside their own constituencies, existed in those days. In a general election such appearances were made, but not often. Mr Gladstone lived to deplore our modern fashion; but his Mid-Lothian campaign was largely responsible for its origin.1

Further, it was not only the unusualness of such a series of speeches which roused the public mind; it was also the fact that Mr Gladstone was making them. He had retired from the leadership of his party in 1874; he had even intimated that he did not intend to face another general election; and here he was taking the field in a way so marked and so far out of the ordinary political course that the public could only draw one conclusion. Mr Gladstone himself never displayed his intellectual peculiarities more strikingly than in the absence of any such conclusion from his own mind; for some months to come he spoke of the question of the leadership as out of his own hands, in a manner that must have been exasperating to less subtle-minded colleagues. The British public entertained no doubts. The crowds at the principal stations at which his train stopped on the way to Edinburgh, the enthusiasm in Scotland, and the reception of what Beaconsfield called “this drenching rhetoric,” all meant one thing—the ushering back of Mr Gladstone to leadership.

Mr Gladstone's tone, then—his choice of subjects during the Mid-Lothian campaign—set the tone of the election. It was, in spite of its trumpet-call appearance, essentially

1 See Saturday Review, 29th November 1879.

36 THE GENERAL ELECTION [1880

negative.1 The Government's foreign policy, the Government's bad finance and growing deficit, might, indeed, in Mid-Lothian speeches; be the text of the plea for righteousness among nations and a restoration of national resources ;

but practically the appeal was only for that result which Mr Gladstone himself described after the triumph as " the downfall of Beaconsfieldism."2 He might tell one of his audiences that " he had come down expressly to raise effectually before the people of the country the question in which manner they wished to be governed "3 ; but in fact the General Election amounted to no more than asking whether they wished to be governed in the Beaconsfield way, or not. Sir William Harcourt, addressing a great meeting in January, devoted himself entirely to denouncing the Government for " recklessly pursuing an Asiatic policy "; and a week later, in Birmingham, the heart then of Radicalism, devoted his speech to the evils of jingoism (still a new word) and the Afghan War.

This was, obviously, the soundest fighting policy. And as no campaign can be purely negative, in the background of this one were certain promises of domestic legislation. Chief among them was a proposed equalisation of the county franchise with the borough franchise—the charter of the agricultural labourer. There were also schemes for the establishment of representative County Government, amendment of the laws of land transfer and settlement, and a system of municipal government for London. It is plain from this list that the favourite phrase of economic writers of this time, " the era of administration has come," was influencing the politicians. Still it was the negative rather than any positive line of attack which kept--perhaps alone could keep--the Liberal leaders

1 The Times, 1st April, had a leader expressing concern lest the election should be taken by Continental nations as expressing complete repudiation of concern in European interests;

2 Morley's Life of Gladstone, ii; 615.

3 Ditto, ii; 588;

1880] THE GENERAL ELECTION 37

together. Lord Hartington, the leader of the party in

the Commons, was very cool on the extension of the

franchise; Lord Granville, the chief, as an ex-Foreign

Minister, was little interested in domestic affairs ; Har-

court was already Mr Gladstone's staunch lieutenant, and

had his faithful eye mainly on Turkey. The franchise

question, in any case, was one with which the Tories had

coquetted ; and though it may have carried some votes

it can hardly have counted heavily. Beaconsfield, with

his extraordinary prophetic gift, raised in his manifesto to

the country in March 1880 the question of the government

of Ireland, and sought to fasten upon the Liberals five years

before its time the odium of a separatist policy. Ireland,

however, was not as yet a real problem to English electors.

Battle was joined on the ground Mr Gladstone had taken.

Some surprise was felt at its coming when it did. The

Mid-Lothian campaign had lighted such a flare that men

expected Beaconsfield to wait for some chance of damping

it, even if slightly, before a dissolution of Parliament.

The dissolution was announced on 6th March ; and the

accepted explanation of that early date is that Beacons-

field was misled into a false estimate of the feeling of the

country by the results of two bye-elections, in February,

at Liverpool and in Southwark. In both the Liberal

candidate had been beaten, and Southwark moreover was

a seat gained to the Tories. It seems possible, however,

in view of the fact that Beaconsfield's manifesto attempted

to divert the minds of the electors to the Irish question,

that what influenced him was not so much the mere

return of Tories for these seats as the fact that in Liverpool

the Home Rule cry had been employed in the fight. The

Irish had made the Liberal candidate commit himself to

a promise to vote for "an inquiry into the nature and

extent of the Irish demand for self-government." 1 A

storm had been raised at the bare possibility of treating

1 The Times, 5th February 1880.

38 THE GENERAL ELECTION [1880

Home Rule as a valid question. Lord Hartington, moreover, had taken the line that it was a matter for the

individual decision of members; and this indication of uncertainty in the Liberal ranks may have appealed to

Beaconsfield as a useful opening for driving in his wedge. Unfortunately for him this occurrence of the Home Rule

demand was an isolated case. The brief month during which Parliament sat, from 6th February to 6th March,

had not been long enough to give the Irish members the chance for which, under Parnell, they were ready; and

the strategy Beaconsfield attempted proved impracticable. The elections went heavily against him. On the

first day's results, on 31st March, the Liberals had a net gain of 15 seats in 69 constituencies; by the end of the

second week of the election their net gains stood at 99; and finally the new Parliament showed itself com-

posed of 347 Liberals, 240 Conservatives and 65 Irish Nationalists.

Mr Gladstone's own election was, as his speech-making had been, the centre of importance. The interest taken

in it gives us a sidelight on what must have been the last of old electoral methods-a survival due to the absence

of reform from the county franchise. One of the first points that occurred to him in taking up the candidature

for Mid-Lothian was the matter of "faggot" votes The qualification in those days for the county franchise was

the possession of a 40s. freehold, or a £10 copyhold, or a £50 leasehold, or an occupation valued at £12. It

was not difficult, with sufficient money at command, to manufacture these votes; and Mr Gladstone, franchise

reformer though he was, was too old a hand to be a purist; he had fought his first election before the Reform

Bill. So now the answer to Conservative faggotting was Liberal faggotting; and The Times of 27th January 1880

contains a curious and interesting article on the running-up of houses in Edinburgh, but just over the county border,

1880] THE GENERAL ELECTION

39

to give one hundred and sixty new owner and occupier

votes on the Liberal side. The work went on night and

day, and men stood at dusk in the light of the flares

checring for Gladstone. His majority at the declaration

of the poll on 5th April was two hundred and nine-

teen.

Another feature of the election, though not one that

was prominent in the newspapers, was that new ideas in

party organisation were on trial on the Liberal side. In

this, rather than in his legislative projects, is to be found

the basis of the dislike and fear of Mr Chamberlain as

a demagogue. A generation more accustomed than our

own to exalt a classical education used its words nicely,

and "demagogue" to it meant less the producer of

measures appealing to the masses than a man who

organised the masses. Judged merely by his legislative

proposals Mr Chamberlain showed no terrifying face. The

Employers Liability Bill, of which he was in charge as

President of the Board of Trade, was, after all, very much

a corollary of the Factory Acts; and for the rest Mr

Chamberlain's own programme, as announced by him at

Birmingham in October of that year, was devoted to such

eminently middle-class questions as the reform of railway

rates for goods traffic, of the bankruptcy laws, and of the

patent laws. But his organising schemes were a different

matter. In 1877 he had inaugurated a new means of

handling electoral forces. Hitherto the choice of candi-

dates and the management of electoral affairs had been in

the hands of local committees, who corresponded, when

necessary, with the party whips, but were essentially

independent. Mr Chamberlain aimed at making organisa-

tion more democratic and more co-ordinated. The local

associations were to be much larger, and to be popularly

elected; and, secondly, they were to be federated under

a central organisation which would give general orders,

provide candidates, have a sanctioning voice in any local

40

THE GENERAL ELECTION

[1880

choice of candidates, issue literature, and wield an army

of speakers. This was perhaps the first matter in which

his future Cabinet colleagues felt Mr Chamberlain's

determination and force. He invited Lord Hartington

to become the nominal head of the new system. Lord

Hartington did not much take to it, and declined.1 Mr

Chamberlain went on his way, with a warning to his

leader that he could not afford not to be associated

with it. By 1880 the idea was so well advanced that

after the election the "new democratic machinery" be-

came a subject for letters to the newspapers from the

more timid Liberals and the more bitterly disappointed

Conservatives. One of the effects most dreaded was

the enhanced power which such organisation might

give to wealth in an election. Party funds would,

it was thought, unduly turn the day, when they acted

through a highly drilled system.

Lord Beaconsfield resigned on 21st April. The processes

by which Mr Gladstone returned in actuality to that leader-

ship which, in everyone's opinion but his own, he had

assumed five months earlier, need not be set forth.

They have been given to the world in the words of those

who were concerned in them.2 It is sufficient to say here

that Lord Granville and Lord Hartington were so im-

movably agreed upon the impossibility of carrying on a

Government without Mr Gladstone, and the equal im-

possibility of his occupying any but the chief place in a

Government, that Queen Victoria had to give way. Mr

Gladstone's Government3 met the new Parliament on

20th May 1880.

It was a meeting full of enthusiasm, full of hope—and

almost tragic to look back upon now. So fine a career

1 Holland's Life of the Duke of Devonshire, i. 244-249.

2 See Morley's Life of Gladstone, ii. 620-628; Holland's Life

of the Duke of Devonshire, i. 273-293; Fitzmaurice's Life of Lord

Granville.

3 See Appendix.

1880] THE GENERAL ELECTION 41

seemed to open before a Government with a majority clear of the Irish vote, pledged to end the policy which distracted politics with foreign adventure, and headed by a man who was a popular idol. Yet at the very threshold the new House met with a difficulty which, wasting its time, exasperating its temper, and dislocating its procedure, was typical of the barren wrangling in which the new forces were to expend themselves like a river trailing amid a waste of sand. Before it came to work, the House was suddenly divided by the question whether one of the new members for Northampton, Mr Charles Bradlaugh, who had, as an avowed atheist, declined to take the oath, could be allowed to take his seat.

Mr Bradlaugh then professed himself ready to take the oath; but it was easy to rouse the House against the cynicism of such an attitude. The prolonged controversy which followed--continued debates in the House, discussions in the press, proceedings in the law courts, to which Mr Bradlaugh took the question of his rights--may in one respect be passed rapidly over. In this parliament he never sat. So curiously was the House cut asunder by this unforeseen problem that even when, in 1883, an Affirmation Bill, designed to relieve the difficulty, had the eloquent support of Mr Gladstone, it was thrown out by a majority of three. Removed more than once from the House by physical force, Mr Bradlaugh turned to great meetings in public halls and in the parks of London to try to break down the opposition that had such bewildering obstinacy. It was not until eight years later that he may be said to have won the case of principle, and eleven years later the personal case. In 1885 he was allowed to take the oath without any comment. But this silent passing-over of the tempest naturally did not satisfy him. In 1888 he secured the passing of an Affirmation Act, and in 1891, when he was on his death-bed, the resolution of 1881,

42 THE GENERAL ELECTION [1880

by which the House had finally asserted itself in the original controversy, was expunged from the records. But though the facts should be stated as briefly as possible, their significance must not be missed. In the House itself the most striking feature of the controversy was that it revealed the existence of a group on the Tory side which was to attain much notoriety during the life of this Parliament. For the first time members saw the co-operation between Lord Randolph Churchill, Mr Arthur Balfour, Sir John Gorst and Sir Henry Drummond-Wolff which earned them the name of "The Fourth Party." Dissatisfied with the leadership of Sir Stafford Northcote, who seemed to them dull and slow in action, formal in his methods, a slave to the conventions of politics, this group were as ready to scoff at their own Front Bench as to attack the other Front Bench. The formalities of Opposition would not have admitted the seizing of the opportunity offered by the case of Mr Bradlaugh; it exactly suited Lord Randolph's purposes. The existence of the Fourth Party affected the Government seriously throughout its career. The attacks of clever men, who had none of the traditions of holding office, had always to be met after the official answer on any question had been given to the Opposition leaders, and accepted by them in the official spirit which, as ex-Ministers, they were ready to display. Moreover, as was very soon noticed, Lord Randolph Churchill had a peculiar gift for "drawing" Mr Gladstone. The position which the Fourth Party attained was due not only to the scandalous notoriety attaching to a revolt against constituted leaders, but to the fact that Mr Gladstone's colleagues could never induce him to treat the group as irresponsible interlopers. However, the taste of their quality was a comparatively minor aspect of the Bradlaugh controversy. That had also a deeper significance.

1880] THE GENERAL ELECTION

43

It is true that the persistence of the House was largely

due to the mere tactical value to the Opposition of a

question in which the Government could not command

its majority. Sir Stafford Northcote refused in 1881

overtures made to him by the Speaker with a view

to reaching the solution of silence that was accepted

in 1885. But it is beyond doubt that at the time that

solution would only have left open the door of bitterness.

We have to face the spectacle of a House, not without the

approval of a very great part of the country, quite assuming its right to demand some form of religious conviction

in a member; the spectacle, moreover, of intelligent men

convinced that to be an atheist was to be morally un-

trustworthy, that to deny the existence of God was worse

than "that form of opinion which would teach us that,

whatever may be beyond the visible things of this world,

whatever may be beyond this short span of life, you know

and you can know nothing of it, and that it is a bootless

undertaking to attempt to establish relations with it."1

Perhaps after all the Bradlaugh controversy did no less

in the end for genuine religious conviction than for the

freedom of those who have no such conviction. It was

one of the occasional shocks which force the pace of the

whole-hearted in either direction.

But at the moment the effect of the controversy was

one of barrenness and discouragement. The Radicals

in the country perceived their great majority already

"jockeyed." The position of Mr Bradlaugh himself can

now be disentangled from the discussions, and estimated

at its worth. The deep bewilderment of the moment arose

from the almost diabolical cleverness with which the

question was twisted in the House to a problem of religious

liberty. The Times saw what had happened; "Mr

Bradlaugh, admitted to the House, will be of just whatever

account the House pleases. But Mr Bradlaugh and

1 Mr Gladstone on the Affirmation Bill, 26th April 1883.

44

THE GENERAL ELECTION

[1880

religious liberty together are not thus easily to be dealt

with." 1 This was the first baiting of a Government which

was to pass so much of its time with its head down to at-

tacks in the House that it could rarely get a real outlook.

In no matter was this lack of outlook more disastrous

than in the question of the Transvaal. In alarm at the

danger involved by the Boers' apparent inability to cope

with native attacks in 1877—the danger that native

successes against them might light an appalling con-

flagration—Sir Theophilus Shepstone had formally placed

the Transvaal under British sovereignty. He had ex-

ceeded his instructions, which gave him no authority to

proclaim annexation except on assurances that the step

was in consonance with the wishes of the majority of the

Boers. It was immediately made apparent that practic-

ally the whole Boer community was against it; yet the

Conservative Government held to the annexation. Mr

Gladstone expatiated on the wickedness of this in his

Mid-Lothian denunciations; even Lord Hartington as-

serted that annexation in those circumstances could not

be maintained; and public opinion must have been in

some degree represented by The Times which wrote 2 :

" We have to consider the welfare of the whole of

the South African colonies, as well as the interests of

the inhabitants of the Transvaal, and neither of these

can be weighed in the balance against a mere reluctance

to abandon a policy which was justified at one time

by circumstances which have now passed away. . . .

Englishmen will find it difficult to reconcile themselves

to the forcible occupation of a country whose people de-

clare that they have never been and do not wish to be

her Majesty's subjects." The question was forced upon

the Liberal Government's attention publicly in May by a

memorial demanding the recall of Sir Bartle Frere, who

1 Leading article, 29th June 1880;

2 Ditto, 17th January 1880.

1880] THE GENERAL ELECTION

45

was identified with the policy of annexation. The sum

of the Government's action in the matter during this year

is that two months later Sir Bartle Frere was recalled;

but the annexation was not cancelled. What does this

contradictory conclusion mean? By itself it is astonish-

ing; but taken in connexion with those affairs in Egypt

which will confront us later it appears susceptible of

explanation. It may be thrown out here as a suggestion,

to be supported hereafter, that this Cabinet more than

once undertook the more difficult, in preference to the

point-blank, solution of a problem; and then had not time

or sufficient freedom from immediate worries to carry out

adequately the task it had set itself. The Cabinet cer-

tainly undertook a complicated solution of the Transvaal

difficulty, the reasons for which may perhaps be sought

in the Prime Minister's character. Mr Gladstone in

Mid-Lothian might thunder flat opposition to certain acts

of state, to certain lines of policy; Mr Gladstone in

office felt the habit of office close round him, a habit in

which there are no violent and fundamental reversals.

It may also have been, as matters turned out, somewhat

unfortunate that the Turkish difficulty—to the almost

laughable surprise and glee of Mr Gladstone—collapsed

instantly on a tentative application of precisely the kind

of pressure that Beaconsfield might have used; Mr Glad-

stone was capable of being attracted by the prospect of

showing his great rival that mere reversals of policy were

not the only way of governing better than he. At all

events, it is certain that the reversal of the annexation

was set aside in favour of a complicated series of moves

whereby, federation having been first established in South

Africa, local independence should follow; and the Boers

be thus ultimately satisfied.1 The federation schemes

failed; Frere, whose retention in South Africa was for

some weeks justified largely on the ground of his associa-

1

Morley's Life of Gladstone, iii, 30;

46

THE GENERAL ELECTION [1880

tion with the federation plans, was recalled. The com-

plicated moves crumbled at the first stage. To judge by

the later analogy of Egypt, it would appear safe to assert

that Mr Gladstone's interest was diverted, and the matter

was all disastrously left drifting.

What was the diversion of interest? For one thing,

Mr Gladstone was extraordinarily--one might say, for

a Prime Minister, almost deplorably--interested in the

daily proceedings of the House.1 It was not a great ses-

sion, but it bore some fruit : the first Employers Liability

Act, establishing a system of compensation to workmen

for injuries inflicted by defects in works, or machinery

plant, or stock connected with the business, or by default

of fellow-servants having superintendence or direction ;

the change of the Malt Tax into a Beer Duty, effected in

the Budget ; the Burial Bill, establishing the right of

Nonconformists to inter their dead with the services of

their own sect in parish churchyards. Another measure,

introduced in this year, both gave the Prime Minister

trouble in the Cabinet and, being ultimately rejected by

the Lords, brought on, after the session had closed, the

first acute stage of that Irish struggle which in the next

few years was so to drain the energies of both the Govern-

ment and the House of Commons. This was the Com-

pensation for Disturbance Bill. Mr Gladstone had

passed an Act in 1870 to meet the case of hardships suffered

by tenants in Ireland who, on being turned out of their

holdings, received no allowance for improvements they

had made. But the Act had never worked well ; there

was no provision in it for valuing the improvements, and

no provision that the rent should be a fair one, and it did

not apply in cases in which the tenant owed as much as

a year's rent. The case for an improved Act was streng-

thened by the bad harvests of 1878 and, especially, 1879,2

1 Morley's Life of Gladstone, iii. 7, 8.

2 Cf. supra, p. 153.

1880] THE GENERAL ELECTION 47

and the new Bill entitled the tenant to compensation if

he could prove to the court (1) that he was unable to pay

the rent; (2) that this was not from pure thriftlessness

or idleness, but from the bad harvest of the current year,

or of two preceding years; (3) that he was willing to

continue his tenancy on just and reasonable terms as to

rent and otherwise; (4) that these terms were unreason-

ably refused by the landlord.

There were not a few in the House of Commons

who during the passage of this Bill perceived a warn-

ing in the person of a certain silent man. The new

Parliament saw at the head of the Irish party a new

leader, Charles Stewart Parnell. The House had some

knowledge of his fighting power, and some reason to

be disturbed by his accession to leadership. In the

previous Parliament a profound change had come over

the behaviour of the Irish party. Under Isaac Butt's

leadership the Irish had for years pursued the patient

course of introducing measures on Ireland's behalf and

seeing them set by. They produced Bills for some form

of Home Rule year after year, and were told: "Parlia-

ment will not, cannot grant Home Rule. The utmost

favour which the House of Commons can show to its

advocates is to listen to them with patience and courtesy

once a year."1 When the prevailing mind of important

people in England could be stated in that form, something

was bound to happen. Biggar and Parnell happened.

When the latter entered the House in 1875 the former had

already discovered the principle of obstruction; the new

recruit, practically ignorant of politics 2 but full of hatred

of England's attitude towards Ireland, swiftly seized the

rudiments of the new methods, and there followed those

famous all-night sittings in which four or five Irish

members held up the whole business of the House by

1 The Times, 20th April 1877;

2 Barry O'Brien's Life of Parnell.

48

THE

GENERAL

ELECTION

[1880

incessantly moving that progress be reported, or that the chairman leave the chair.

But when the new Parliament met, there was in the minds of those who had eyes to see much more than the fear of mere repetition of these scenes, which in the old Parliament the leader of the party had disliked and disavowed.

The fact that Butt had now ceased to be the leader was more than a menace to Parliamentary order.

Hitherto Irish agitation had had two wholly separate currents.

The Parliamentary agitation was a steady-going plea for self-government on a federal basis.

The absolute separatist agitation, working through the Fenian methods, was carried on by the Clan-na-Gael in America and the Irish Republican Brotherhood in Ireland, Michael Davitt being the chief link between the two.

The leaders of this agitation wholly despised and repudiated the Parliamentary party.

Now between the appearance of obstructive tactics in the House and the meeting of the new Parliament these two currents had ceased to be disconnected.

That it is necessary to use so indefinite an expression is a tribute to the extreme strategic skill of which Parnell was master.

All the enmity he aroused in England, all the watchfulness to catch him tripping, never succeeded in proving that he was a Fenian, or that Irish Nationalism and Fenianism were now one; and yet it was patent that they were no longer two.

In December 1877 Michael Davitt had been released from prison on ticket-of-leave from the end of the sentence passed upon him for complicity in the Fenian outrages of 1867.

Parnell met him in Dublin in January 1878.

By that time the Clan-na-Gael had marked the rise and the effectiveness of the new spirit in the Irish Parliamentary party, to which Mr Barry O'Brien bears testimony: " ' Had Davitt come to America in the beginning of 1877,' said a member of the Clan-na-Gael to me, ' he would have found a few men ready to discuss the new

1

Parnell Commissioners' Report, p. 30.

1880] THE GENERAL ELECTION 49

departure and to favour it. But neither he nor we would

have dared broach it at a public meeting of the League.'

But a change had taken place in a twelvemonth. Parnell's

action in Parliament had made people think that some-

thing might be done with Parliamentarianism after all." 1

Davitt went to America after that change, in August

1878. Moreover he went with a plan which provided a

channel whereby the two currents of agitation might

communicate. He had already devised the Land

Campaign.

We shall miss the strength of this move if we do

not recognise that the land question in Ireland was,

if not actually different, susceptible of being made

very different from any such question in England. In

England land nationalisation is a political ideal on exactly

the same footing as other political ideals. In Ireland the

possession of land by the landlords could be represented

as a form of English garrisoning. Parnell more than once

spoke of the destruction of English landlordism as the

key to Home Rule. The landlords were indeed for the

most part English, and their relations with their tenants

had in general none of that idealism which even at the

worst has never been absent from these relations in

England. Too often the landlord's attitude suggested

that the Irish lived on a conquered land, and had no

rights save such as the landlord chose to allow. This

had been so obvious that there had been sufficient strength

of feeling in England to carry more than one Land Act.

"The landlord," wrote a chief secretary in the middle of

last century, "had a monopoly of the means of existence.

. . . 'The landlords in Ireland,' said Lord Donough-

more in 1854, 'have been in the habit of letting land, not

farms.' " 2 These words sum up the problems of Irish

land tenure—exorbitant rents, and eviction without

1 Barry O'Brien's Life of Parnell, 1. 165.

2 Thomas Drummond's Life and Letters

D

50 THE GENERAL ELECTION [1880

compensation. Therefore the land agitation could be intimately associated with Home Rule; a subject—and this was the brilliant point of the conception—which the Clan-na-Gael could approach from one side, and the Parliamentary party from another, meeting no doubt in the middle, but never marching to it along the same line. The conception had immediate success. While Davitt was in America in 1878 a telegram was sent to Parnell offering the support of the Clan-na-Gael for the Parliamentary party on the conditions: (a) of the party’s abandoning Butt’s federal proposals and making a general declaration for self-government; (b) of the party’s agitating the land question on a peasant proprietary basis, while accepting concessions tending to abolish arbitrary eviction; (c) of the party’s voting together on all questions, adopting an aggressive policy, and energetically resisting coercive legislation.1 Was not such a proposal, it may be asked, a complete conjunction of the two currents of agitation? It might have been—but Parnell never answered the telegram. It was the first occasion on which his famous gift of silence came into play. He did not accept the Clan-na-Gael’s offer overtly. But on 7th June 1879 he appeared on a platform in Ireland with members of the Land League, which Davitt had founded at a meeting at Irishtown on 20th April, and on 21st October 1879 he was at the Dublin Conference at which the League was organised finally into the National Land League. Its main working clause set up an organisation among tenant farmers for defending those who might be threatened with eviction, for facilitating the working of the Land Act of 1870, and for obtaining such reform as would enable the tenant to become owner of the land by paying a fair rent for a limited number of years. Parnell was at first reluctant to accept the scheme; he saw, much as he disliked the

1 Parnell Commissioners’ Report, p 9;

1880] THE GENERAL ELECTION 51

purely constitutional spirit of Isaac Butt, that the party's

effectiveness in Parliament depended in no small degree

upon not coming into contact with the law. But he

decided that he must " take the risk," 1 and it is a point

of some importance that the Land League constitu-

tion contained no demand for the self-government of

Ireland. That made it merely a weapon, and not, so

to speak, a different impersonation of the Parliamentary

party. The last point for this brief summary is that

Parnell himself went to America in December 1879, and

was hurriedly recalled for the General Election of

When the new Parliament met, there must therefore

have been every ground for regarding the Irish party,

thirty-five members of which were pledged Parnellites,

with new apprehension. Yet it may be doubted whether

actual apprehension was felt. The intervention of the

Home Rule question in the Liverpool bye-election had,

as we have said, been without any parallel in the General

Election. Liberals had beaten Home Rulers in some

Irish constituencies—Dundalk, Athlone, and Mallow, for

instance. One cause of possible discomfort, which had

been foreseen, was avoided by the fact that the Liberal

majority did not depend upon the Irish ; and no un-

easiness was shown in the summary statement that " the

Government may even approach once more the question

of Irish university education ; and it will certainly be

expected to deal effectively in some way with the present

condition of Ireland." 2 The serene reliance of the

Ministerial party on Mr Gladstone's confidence in his own

mission floated the Compensation for Disturbance Bill

successfully through the House, and there were none but

momentary qualms in face of Parnell's silence. That

silence was obstinate. He was ready to see what the

1 Parnell Commissioners' Report, p. 15.

2 The Times, leading article, 17th April 1880.

52 THE GENERAL ELECTION [1880

new Government would do, but he would take no single

step towards it. He would not answer the Clan-na-

Gael's telegram, but he would equally not answer any

signals from the English. He took practically no part in

the proceedings on the Bill. It was thrown out, as has

been recorded, by the House of Lords. Then the new

force for which Parnell stood revealed itself. Nothing

could have done more to strengthen the new Land League

than this event. The League was instantly at work in

every case that offered it a foothold. Rents were refused

above the "valued rent" scale, any man who paid more

was banned. Every farm where there had been an

eviction became a centre of activity, and any man who

took such a farm, or did anything for the landlord or the

agent concerned, was banned. On 15th September 1880

Lord Mountmorres was murdered near Clontarf. A week

later an agent—whose name came afterwards to stand for

the campaign, Captain Boycott—was put under the ban.

The police could get no information, and the banning of

men was accompanied by the shooting of those who held

on their way in spite of the League, by the maiming of

cattle placed on evicted farms, and by all sorts of minor

violences. Parnell and Biggar denounced all violent

action, and the Parnell Commission, examining later

all the evidence that was brought by Parnell's most

convinced and determined opponents, had to conclude

that these denunciations were not insincere.1 The other

current of agitation was operating, and the figures of cases

of agrarian crime rose from 863 in 1879 to 2589 in 1880,

although the acute agitation had not begun until Sep-

tember in the latter year ; evictions rose from 6239 in

1879 to 10,457 in 1880. The figures of crime for separate

months in 1880 show that from 67 in May the cases rose

to 165 in September, 269 in October, 559 in November,

and 865 in December. The crimes thus scheduled were

1 Parnell Commissioners' Report, p. 76.

1880] THE GENERAL ELECTION 53

chiefly those of sending threatening letters, killing or maiming cattle, arson, firing into houses or at the person, and murder.1

In face of this onrush of events the first thought of the executive in Dublin was one of regret that the new Government had allowed the Coercion Act of the late Government to lapse. Lord Cowper, the Viceroy, and Mr Forster, the Chief Secretary, were insistent with the Cabinet to promise renewal of the Act, and all through the later months of the year were threatening resignation unless the Habeas Corpus Act were suspended. Meanwhile Lord Cowper was urging that the Land League should be treated as an illegal conspiracy and its leading members arrested. Mr Gladstone, who had already lost the Duke of Argyll from his Cabinet, and Lord Lansdowne from a minor place in his Government, over the Compensation Bill, and who knew that Lord Hartington had never liked it, was not disposed to see much reason at the moment to be at the pains of dissociating the Irish party from these disturbances. He announced at the Guildhall banquet on 9th November that the Government would stipulate that order must be restored in Ireland before grievances could be considered, returning thus to the old over-logical position that England cherished. A week earlier, with dramatic effect, the Government in Ireland had arrested five Irish members, Parnell, Biggar, Dillon, Sullivan and Sexton ; and nine other Land Leaguers, including Patrick Egan and Brennan. So the year ended with the Government deeply into the first of its quagmires.

1 These figures are taken fiom the Parnell Commissioners' Report:

CHAPTER III

1881 : COMMON SENSE

IN reviewing the events of 1880 there was occasion to make allowance for a general depression. In 1881 it is possible to trace, as a prevailing influence, a tendency towards "common-sense" views, which may be the natural British reaction from a period of self-pity.

The return to sturdiness arose primarily from a revival of trade. The railways gave the first distinct note of the improvement, the half-yearly dividends declared in February being much better than had been anticipated. The favouring conditions recorded were "lowness of wages and prices coupled with a good steady trade."1 Sheffield's exports to America had in the previous year risen to over a million pounds in value; and there seemed to be no serious prospect of strikes to disturb output. The year 1881 was, in fact, fairly free of such troubles. Strikes occurred in the month of June among the colliers in some districts, the blast-furnace men and the nail-makers; but, though 30,000 men were out in the last case, the only real menace came from the colliers; and as they were conferring on the extension to all districts of the sliding scale, already at work in the northern districts, Staffordshire and York-shire, there was no great alarm. The general confidence must have been well restored; for the early part of 1881 saw that large call for capital which the financial experts had been foretelling in 1880. In the first three months of 1881 about a hundred companies were floated, and the capital asked for was thirty-three and a quarter millions

1 The Times, 8th February 1881.

1881] COMMON SENSE 55

sterling. Two millions of this were in Birmingham Corporation 3½ pcr cent. Stock; and the changed conditions since that corporation's last attempt 1 were sufficiently indicated by the subscription of the whole amount at an average of £98. 2s. 1d.2 Over twelve millions were in railway issues of preference stock, bonds and dehentures. But it is evident that the City believed the public to be in a mood now for more than solid disposal of savings, for the remaining nineteen millions were asked for in more speculative ventures. Still the timidity of the orthodox observer of the money market remained very great. The Times, for instance, considered that only about six millions of real capital were called for beyond the corporation and railway issues. The Stock Exchange was not as yet a normal field for middle-class savings, which were "as a rule invested as they are made in houses or land, new plant, increase of stocks, etc." 3 In accordance with this state of things we find the stock and share list of the chief daily papers at this time no more than a column long—a typical instance showing, besides home and foreign Government securities, twenty-four mining companies, twenty-six Colonial securities, eighteen industrial companies, twelve tram companies, five gas companies, three shipping companies, and one land company. Even this moderate compilation was not regarded as quite healthy. Seventeen gold-mining companies appeared among these early prospectuses of the year, and a month or two later The Times was commenting on the "inundation of gold-mining companies since 1879." 4 To modern eyes it hardly looks like an inundation : the total capital of all the companies amounted to only three millions, and of those floated in the year now under discussion only two asked for as

1 Cf. p 28.

2 Bunce's History of the Corporation of Birmingham, ii; 34.

3 The Times, 4th April 1881:

4 Leading article, 5th May.

56

COMMON SENSE

[1881

much as a quarter of a million; the majority were

floated at from £50,000 to £80,000. It is curious and

interesting to follow in these years all the effects

of the shortage of gold, all the complicated projects for

meeting the shortage, all the puny efforts to increase the

supply, knowing, as we do now know, what an immense

source was all the time awaiting exploitation in South

Africa. Both from the political and the financial point

of view it should be borne in mind, in reading of the events

of the succeeding three years, that the British public as

yet knew practically nothing of the mineral wealth of the

Transvaal; and the world of high politics and high finance,

some members of which must have had the information,

did not believe in it. The public knew no more than the

occasional rumours of a nugget having been found here

and there—"a fine little nugget from the north side of the

Tugela," or "undoubtedly payable gold in the Lydenburg

district"—and the rumours were generally accompanied

by a warning that opinion in Pretoria was very wild, and

that there was nothing to warrant a gold "rush." In

fact, similar rumours from the head waters of the River

Yukon, in Alaska, were much more hopefully regarded.

That ministers had more knowledge than this is certain;

Sir Garnet Wolseley, the Administrator of the Transvaal,

in a despatch to Sir Michael Hicks Beach on the question of

annexation, at the end of 1879, had written : "The Trans-

vaal is rich in minerals; gold has already been found in

quantities, and there can be little doubt that larger and

still more valuable goldfields will sooner or later be dis-

covered." Yet this emphatic statement appears to have

made no more impression on the Cabinet than the news-

paper rumours had made on the public. Goschen, for

example, laboured long at the Exchequer to devise solu-

tions of the gold problem without any apparent expecta-

tion of relief from a new supply. Scientists worked at

1 Morley's Life of Gladstone, iii. 26.

1881] COMMON SENSE 57

new methods of treating auriferous ores, which had been sent to them from South Africa—one of such methods, the

use of hydrochloric acid, for refractory orcs, was exhibited in London on 19th August 1881. But did even they

know the significance of the task they had been set ? At any rate, for the present no new supply was in contempla-

tion ; and the prevailing consciousness of the problem is sufficiently indicated by the meeting in Paris in May of this

year of an international conference to deal with it. But as the bimetallic theory did not attain its full height in

England until a year or two later we may leave that conference with the bare mention of its meeting. In this

country the more active economic theory was of another kind. Early in May the question of the new French tariff

became acute. Existing commercial treaties with France had determined by lapse of time; and the new proposals

of that country showed a considerable, and even grave, enhancement of import duties. The cotton and woollen

trades were the most seriously disturbed, the previous taxes on their products having been 20 per cent. ad valorem,

and the new taxes being 44 per cent. The Protectionist party, numbering still many of the surviving opponents

of Repeal, was not slow to take this opportunity. By the month of September the Fair Trade League was in

existence, with a programme singularly like a famous programme of twenty-two years later. It opened its

campaign with emphasis on " retaliation " against high duties in other countries ; and, again as happened later,

the idea of enabling these detached islands to take as downright a line as countries with large and varied re-

sources by the formation of an Imperial Bund was early affixed to the programme, and in the end became more

prominent than the original idea. The movement attracted and on 18th September he was laying before an audience

at Oldham the desirability of taxing all foreign manu-

58

COMMON SENSE

[1881

factured goods to relieve the burdens on land, and dilating

on "the antagonism set up by the Liberal party between

manufacturing and agricultural interests." In November

he was even so near the later spirit as to be expending his

sarcasm on "the commercial edifice constructed by the

immortal Cobden and the divine Bright." In October

the movement was being presented less aristocratically

to the working man, a meeting at Sheffield passing a

resolution to deplore "the failure of the present system

of free trade so called . . . endangering the steady em-

ployment, the fair wages, and the future well-being of

our working classes."

However, such trade problems as there were in this year

did not disturb the general sense of restored comfort.

The great middle class, convinced of its mission as the

repository of "progress," had enough to engross it.

Electricity was the new god of progress, and it continued

its advances. Among public buildings two more railway

stations, Charing Cross and Liverpool Street, installed the

new light in January; the General Post Office began

using it in the same month; in June the Prudential Assur-

ance Company had nine lights of 150 c.p. in its offices;

and the House of Commons first did its work under electric

light. Among great private houses Trentham was fitted

with the light in November. But the novelty in this year

was the application of the invention to street lighting.

Bristol appears to have been the first town to make the

experiment, which it did in some of its principal thorough-

fares in January; and Brighton followed with an installa-

tion on the sea-front in February. Liverpool set up sixty

lamps over two and a half miles of its streets in April.

London, more able to command the rivalry of inventors,

offered the lighting of the City to be divided between three

companies for an experimental period of twelve months,

with a view to selecting one of them at the end of the

period. Great interest was taken, even from the artistic

1881] COMMON SENSE 59

point of view of "seeing London in a new light," though a sarcastic person wrote to the Press to remark that the City was the worst part of London for the experiment, since 685,000 of its 800,000 inhabitants were not there at night, and only "the cats and the caretakers" would enjoy the fun. For the first time the gas companies took alarm ; they had somewhat unwisely raised their charges at the beginning of the year, and the best comfort that could be offered them was that there was still a great future for gas as a heating and power agent. Their panic subsided later owing to an unexpected slowness of pace in the development of the new illuminant. Meanwhile one of the most useful applications of electricity was in its extreme infancy. In May Mr Alexander Siemens was lecturing at the Society of Arts on the transmission of vehicles by electric power. The system he lectured upon was the use of a positive and a negative rail, replacing the customary tram-rails : after consideration, Mr Siemens told his audience, the authorities had decided to class the vehicle as a tramcar. But this was obviously too dangerous a method to last ; "live" rails would be impossible on the road surface. For several years yet invention failed at this problem. An "electric railway" was opened at the Crystal Palace in April, and towards the end of the year an electric tram was running on the Giant's Causeway and Portrush line ; but both these were worked with live rails. The latter, however, must have stimulated the inventors, for it was announced that it could be worked at a cost of a penny a mile, whereas the steam-trams, to which, in spite of their noisiness and dirt, corporations in large centres of population were finding themselves forced to consent, cost from 1s. to 1s. 9d. a mile. It may be added here that the general advances in electrical invention were summed up in an Electrical Exhibition opened in Paris in September of this year. Beyond its more common uses the delicate developments of electricity were attracting

60

COMMON SENSE

[1881

the medical profession. An "induction balance" had been

used in the case of President Garfield in August to locate

the bullet that had been fired at him; and at the end of

the year experiments were made with a needle fitted with

a kind of telephone attachment fixed to the surgeon's ear,

which might, it was hoped, supersede the old probe.

The particular medical interest of the year, however,

so far as general knowledge went, was the new theory

of bacteria. The researches of Pasteur had for some

time been closely watched from England; and although,

as we shall have occasion to see later, it was chiefly the

immediate and palpable cause of his researches, the treat-

ment of hydrophobia, which interested the public mind,

yet incidentally the more profound results were known

even to the newspapers. In February telegrams from

Paris stated that in investigating a case of hydrophobia

Pasteur had found "a small organism or microbe," and

the question had been raised whether this was a new form

of disease, or whether rabies was caused by a microscopic

organism. The ensuing months saw much discussion,

the existence of these small organisms being admitted,

but one school of medical thought maintaining a theory of

"spontaneous generation," and holding that if water were

put into a bottle living organisms would be "evolved"

by putrefaction, but were not themselves the putrefaction.

Again, the idea of progress was at the root of all the

interest taken in ballooning at this time. Some of it,

indeed, was merely a matter of fashion. The gatherings

at Hurlingham and Ranclagh nowadays to see the start

of balloon races had their origin in 1881 in a garden-party

given by the new Balloon Society at Lillie Bridge; the

company was content with the spectacle of a single

balloon, and its passengers made the report that London,

owing to the people in the streets being indistinguishable,

looked like a city of the dead. On 1st June two Guardsmen

1 See, for instance, The Times, 18th March and 9th August 1881:

1881] COMMON SENSE 61

went to the Derby by balloon, starting from the Crystal

Palace and landing at Epsom, in a field a quarter of a mile

from the grand stand. But the real impetus of the

balloon craze of these years was the serious middle-class

enthusiasm. It was most ingeniously enlisted. A scheme

would be propounded for reaching the Pole by triple

balloons " lashed together for mutual aid," and launched

on a " wind-curve " calculated to carry them in eighteen

hours from a ship's chosen winter-quarters to the Pole.

There would be devices for using balloons for army signal-

ling ; for sending them up in fogs to explode dynamite

and blow off the vapours ; for employing them to

illuminate large surfaces with electric light.

It is all rather solemn ; and indeed the middle-class

of England, conscious of itself as a class for some time

now, had not yet been penetrated by self-consciousness

in the subtler sense. Sport and the worship of exercise

never filled more than a couple of columns of the daily

papers ; there were considerable intervals between race

meetings ; the word " polo " was printed in inverted

commas ; there was no golf ; football was still open to

antagonism, for the Mayor of Southampton issued in

September 1880 an appeal to the heads of families and

schools to prevent the game of football " being played

according to Rugby Union, Association, and other rules

of a dangerous character," and the winter of 1881 brought

another outcry, accompanied with specimen lists of

casualties. The appearance of cycling in the sporting

columns marks the first approach of a new era. Yet

however distinctly we may see the middle-class as still

ponderous and solid, it is no less a shock to come upon

a perfectly grave notice in The Times 1 to this effect :

" Fashion seems to have decreed that photographic albums

are in future to be ornamented on each page. We have

the 'Mikado' album with Japanese scenes, the 'Language

1 4th February 1881.

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COMMON SENSE

[1881

of Flowers,' and the 'Picturesque ' with copies of etchings

of quaint and pretty places." We are indeed in the days

yet of albums ; and it was not a hopelessly old-fashioned

member of the aristocracy who had presented to the

Princess Frederica of Hanover at her wedding " a plush

table "

The most depressing circumstance, however, was not

the impenetrability of the middle-class, but the fact that

when penetrated, as on some matters of taste it was

beginning to be, by new ideas, it sucked them up in a

thoroughly wrong-headed way. The laying of the founda-

tion stone of the City and Guilds of London Institute at

South Kensington was accompanied by the reflection that

the time of shoddy and bad work was over. " Think,"

wrote the impassioned leader-writer, " what a museum of

horrors a furniture shop was before 1851. That was the

beginning of our renaissance." And a month or two

earlier we find papier-maché imitations of stamped leather

seriously commended by the same newspaper as a form of

decorative art. The death of Decimus Burton in December

of this year called forth genuine and not ill-balanced

appreciations of his architectural work in London—the

Atheneum Clubhouse, the Hyde Park Corner screen, and

the Constitution Hill Arch—yet at the same time the

beautiful and dignified old building in Lincoln's Inn Fields,

which our own generation rejoices to have seen saved from

demolition, was described as " that large, dull, heavy-

looking mansion, Newcastle House." A still more de-

plorable tendency is seen in a sarcastic leading article of

this year on the conference of master builders, in which

the builders are implored to consider " the pitiful elevation

of the lengthy roads from the market gardens of Tyburnia

or South Kensington " and to reflect " how very far its

monotonous doors and windows fall short of the ideal

street in which each dwelling shall look as if it could stand

by itself with a character of its own." So lamentably was

1881] COMMON SENSE 63

the middle class taking at a gulp its own interpretation of what " artistic " meant, and longing to translate the genuine town architecture of London—the not unworthy attempt to treat the street, rather than the house, as the essential consideration in massed centres of population—into prettiness and picturesqueness. This was the year which saw the formation of the Bedford Park Company in July, with a capital of £125,000, to develop that estate.

The most forceful influences in matters of taste at this time—influences destined in the end to spread through every social level—had turned their backs upon the middle class. One voice that had long raised itself against that class in this year fell silent. In February Thomas Carlyle died : the world lost in him not only a writer of history, but even more a prophet of the social conscience, a man of genius to whom the masses of the people were real. A teacher yet with years of life before him who had in no small measure reached his democratic feeling by way of revolt against the lack of a sense of responsibility, the lack of light, in the middle classes, was John Ruskin ; he was by now addressing himself almost entirely to the working man. Matthew Arnold, starting from yet a third position, was reaching the same end, and in carrying his gospel of the humaneness of education to the working men's colleges he was taking part in the new movement. We are at the period of conjunction between art and socialism, of which William Morris is the typical exponent. In May 1881 various Radical clubs of working men in London combined, forming the Democratic Federation : and, although the working man's circumstances in the ensuing years would in any case have endued such an organisation with power, it is none the less true that the presence in the movement of such men as Morris made it more formidable. He had a voice that was unwearying and was listened to. No one has expressed more tersely

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than he the theory that was behind the alliance of art

with socialism. "I know," he said, referring to a recent

demonstration by working men, "what these men want :

employment which would foster their self-respect, and

win the praise and sympathy of their fellows, and dwellings

which they could come to with pleasure, surroundings

which would soothe and elevate them ; reasonable labour,

reasonable rest. There is only one thing that can give

them this--Art." 1 The self-respect of the workman

coming from labour that was reasonable was the heart of

Morris's social creed ; and it had this soundness--that

he had come to it not from a theoretical consideration of

the workman, but from his own experience in dealing with

the world. He wanted to have, and to make for other

people, beautiful things. He was roused to fury, not by

blank impenetrability on the part of the middle class, but

by the quality of its susceptibility. It allowed itself to

be told that many of its surroundings were ugly, and it

substituted for them others of a different taste with exactly

the same superficial attention. In his own work as

a craftsman he was " confronted everywhere with the

double barrier of material that would not take good colour,

and colour which in its own substance was uniformly bad."2

Worst of all, he saw his gospel running to waste among

people who bought things made in that inadequate way

and were satisfied with them. It was to his mind the same

spirit that showed itself in lack of regulation of employ-

ment ; in the blundering semi-charitable movement for

workmen's dwellings ; in such groping efforts on the

workman's behalf as the Coffee-house movement, now

very active.

In this spirit art as the gospel of genuineness, of reason-

ableness and of reality was being preached to the workman.

In 1881 the first Whitechapel art show was held in a school-

1 Speech delivered at Burslem, 13th October 1881.

2 Mackail's Life of William Morris, I ,311.

1881] COMMON SENSE 65

room, with pictures by Leighton, Watts, Burne-Jones and Walter Crane, and an exhibition of pottery and embroideries. More directly the building of the City and Guilds of London Institute was heralding a fresh era in industrial art ; the new Natural History Museum, opened on Easter Monday in this year, began to put order into the educational chaos of South Kensington ; and the Ruskin Museum at Sheffield was far advanced. The opening of the University College at Nottingham on 28th June led to a gratified survey of an educational movement which, beginning with the University of London, had expanded to the Queen's Colleges of Ireland, the University of Durham, with its offshoot in the Science College at Newcastle, the Victoria University, the Science College at Leeds, Mason College at Birmingham, and the most recent university colleges of Liverpool and Nottingham. The vigour of educational interest in the provinces was matter for comment. The School Boards were making progress towards secondary education, and, though the teaching of domestic economy had as yet but limited support, the movement for including in the code such subjects as cooking, heating and ventilation had come into existence.

We may see the effect of the year's access of common-sense in the state of ecclesiastical controversy. Mr Dale was transferred from the conspicuousness of his city church to a country living ; and early in the year an attempt was made, by means of a memorial to the Archbishop of Canterbury, to set up a policy of "live and let live." The memorial pleaded for " recognised toleration of even wide diversities of ceremonial," and also petitioned that the courts for ecclesiastical causes should be "such as to secure the conscientious obedience of clergymen who believe the constitution of the Church of Christ to be of divine appointment." The memorial was signed by five deans : Dr Church of St Paul's, Dr Lake of Durham, Dr Cowie of Manchester, Lord Alwyne Compton of Worcester, and Dr

E

66

COMMON SENSE

[1881

Purey Cust of York ; by several archdeacons ; and among the canonry by Gregory, Liddon and Stubbs of St Paul's, and Dr King of Christ Church. What, again, could be more sensible than the comment made upon that notoriety which the attacks of strect roughs were bringing upon the Salvation Army ?

The disturbances had produced a question in Parliament, to which Sir William Harcourt, as Home Seerctary, had replied that, if the Salvation Army complained of attacks, it was fair to remind the Army that its methods were somewhat provocative. The comment made on this was that such a doctrine might easily go too far. " We need not assist the roughs to put the Salvation Army down. Another course lies before us all. It is to do the Army's work in a better way." 1 These disturbances became more deliberate and more organised later on ; but they are mentioned here because, although the Army had been in existence since 1865, this year was the first in which it attracted widespread attention.

Even the world of fashion seems to show us in 1881 the working of common-sense. It is a small but not quite insignificant fact that " Evans's " this year ceased to be even a name. It had previously come to the end of its too lingering career as the only survival of the " night houses " of the sixties ; and now the last familiar name of that rowdy high life of Lord Hastings, and his friends disappeared, and the place became the Falstaff Club. An event, however, of more importance is the indication that the great world was changing its habits in regard to the old-fashioned London season. The idea was being mooted that the time had come to be done with the old sharp distinction between " the season " and " out of season."

The modern comfort of railway travelling—dining cars, for instance, had appeared this year on the Great Northern and Midland railways—was making it unnecessary, and

1 The Times, 13th October 1881.

1881] COMMON SENSE 67

indeed almost silly, to keep up a fashion due to a time

when the journey to London of a great household was too

large an affair to be undertaken more than once a year.1

Common-sense seemed too to be colouring very strongly

the relation of great families to their territories. Rents

had had to be reduced on account of the combination

of general agricultural depression with particularly bad

harvests ; and while on the one hand this led to a perverse

and peevish kind of common-sense in the deliberate turning

of some large tracts into rabbit warrens,2 it led also to a

new hardheadedness in the forwarding of agricultural

associations to make experiments in crops, fertilisers and

soils. Rectors complained that their glebe could find no

tenants ; yet land could hardly have been valueless when

a farm of 190 acres in Sussex fetched £7200, and 103 acres

of marsh pastureland fetched £7500. It is significant also

of a new feeling in society that the sale of game by great

landlords was taken quite calmly. Preserving was al-

ready a business.

The season of 1881 was again chronicled as one devoid

of notable interest. It had its “ lion,” of the kind usual in

those days, in the shape of the King of the Sandwich Islands,

who came to Claridge’s in July, and was at all the parties

in London and elsewhere for a month. A “ lion ” more

interesting to us now was Ivan Turgenieff, who came, as

was fitting for the writer of A Sportsman’s Sketches,

in the autumn, and was shooting partridges in Cambridge-

shire in October. The season had its mild sensation in

the marriage of the Baroness Burdett-Coutts in February

to an American ; and it is a coincidence that one of the

marks of the season was a new impulse of friendliness

between this country and the United States. The linger-

ing soreness of the Alabama claims was dispelled by the

1 The Times, 30th July 1880;

2 Cf the case of a large estate of a thousand acres in Hampshire,

The Times, 23rd July 1881;

68

COMMON SENSE

[1881

feelings of sympathy aroused by the assassination of President Garfield. New York became once more a subject of interest free of afterthoughts, and the British public read this year of the "costly house" of Mr Vanderbilt, which had absorbed only the sum, petty to a millionaire of these days, of £300,000; and of the advance of high buildings, which now sound equally petty; houses were being put up actually of seven or nine storeys high, and the New York correspondents prophesied that in a few years the streets would "tower to the height of ten or eleven storeys."

Early in the year the season had been overcast by two events. In March the papers began to contain intimations of Beaconsficld's failure of health. On 19th April he died; and modern generations, to whom his domination appears to have been absolute, will find the leading articles at the time of his death singularly reserved, and not obscurely tinged by a mistrust that he never surmounted. Perhaps the reason was that, as an old man, he had relapsed into those characteristics of the alien—the avowed alien—which were partly racial and partly the Dæmon of his genius. That strange figure, with the dyed hair, the sunken, smouldering eyes and parchment cheeks, which only broke its silence at London dinner-tables to launch some levin of an epigram, must have reminded the great world that, after all, the new spirit of Imperialism, the new regime in India, and almost all such power as the Tories had of appealing to the working man, were the achievement of an individual whom people yet alive could remember in a fringed waistcoat and green velvet trousers, affronting in person and manner every canon of their tastes. Perhaps, too, in the later years of his power the absorption of English energies in foreign affairs, the apprehension that it raised of entanglement in European disputes, had savoured of a cosmopolitanism not English in the great man, a quality, it may be, which

1881] COMMON SENSE 69

his eminence had kept out of sight, until age brought back the ineradicable trait of his race. At any rate the strangeness of him sounded its note at the end as at the beginning; at the sale of his effects three months after his death people crowded the house in Curzon Street to stare at the bedroom walls hung with blue silk embroidered with roses in bloom, the crimson satin damask dining-room, the brocades of the drawing-room. Even in the formal tributes of the Press the strangeness is more commented on than anything else :

" His secret lay perhaps," The Times wrote, " in the magnetic influence of a dauntless will, in his unrivalled power of patience, in his impenetrable reserve and detachment." " Magnetic " and " impenetrable " were curious epitaphs for a Prime Minister of England.

The other shadow on the year was one which afterwards became so heavy that it is somewhat difficult to recall the spirit in which it was first met. On 28th February the telegrams announcing the British defeat on Majuba Hill were published in London. Bitter as the news was, prompt as the outcry was in some sections of the community, yet the country did not as a whole forget how ready it had been in the previous year to accede to the Boer demand for the withdrawal of the annexation. On the whole it was conscious that it had slipped into this disaster by something approaching carelessness. True, the outbreak of hostile operations by the Boers had at the beginning of the year somewhat dimmed that consciousness ; and there were not lacking signs of a very different kind when, on Lord Roberts's departure to take command in South Africa, ladies strewed his path from his carriage to the train with flowers. But prevailing influences were in the main for the steadying of opinion. It was affected partly by the old spirit towards Colonial responsibilities—the pre-Disraelian spirit " There are," The Times wrote, " some thirty-five millions of people in these islands. . . . Can it be said that any one of these is benefited by the sacrifices that all

70

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[1881

have made on behalf of South Africa ? We cannot but be

proud of the heroism displayed by Englishmen at Rorke's

Drift, or at Ulundi, but can we honestly say that a quarrel

with Cetewayo or the Boers of the Transvaal is one in which

it is worth while for a single Englishman to shed his blood ?

. . . Are we indeed the weaker or the stronger, the richer

or the poorer, the happier or the reverse, for our vast

Colonial possessions ?"1 Of course after Majuba, opinion

underwent modification. But the attitude even then was

not one of reasserting annexation, but only of insisting on

a considerable measure of control of the Transvaal's affairs.

The doctrine of suzeraintly, appearing in answer to this

demand, was but coldly received. The word, it was felt,

was virtually invented for the occasion, and had no real

meaning. "To style the Quecn suzerain is not to specify

her relations to the feudatory republic"2 What was

required was "a practical reconciliation, which to some

persons seems at present impossible, between the liberty

of a population of sequestered farmers to select their own

magistrates and determine their own taxation, and their

privation of right to irritate the sea of native life on their

borders into periodical storms and tempests of war." 3

Most important of all is it to realise that the Government's

announced policy of not pursuing the war, and of meeting

the Boers to decide the status of the Transvaal, had strong

support. The idea was placed beside the withdrawal from

Candahar, which had taken place quietly early in this

year, as the most sensible course to pursuc. In the month

of June Mr Chamberlain, speaking at Birmingham, ex-

posed some of the errors of the preceding months. Even

to the beginning of December 1880, in spite of all that had

become publicly known about the Boer hatred of annexa-

tion, Sir Owen Lanyon, the Administrator, was still telling

1 The Times, 6th January 1881;

2 Ditto, 8th March 1881.

3 Ditto, 5th April 1881;

1881] COMMON SENSE 71

the Government that three-quarters of the Boer population

had ceased to care about it. After the insurrection had

broken out there were more blunders. Mr Kruger had

spoken of submitting the question to a Royal Commission,

and Sir George Colley had been instructed to arrange a

settlement on the first condition that the Boers must lay

down their arms. " While the correspondence was going

on," said Mr Chamberlain, " and in the midst of the negotia-

tions, the British troops unfortunately on three several

occasions marching in inferior numbers to attack the

strong position of the Boers met with a repulse." In

the midst of rumours, disquieting and reassuring, as to

the progress in South Africa of the commission which had

been appointed to arrange the terms of settlement, the

persistent story of error was recalled. " We know now

that we were wrong, that the annexation was unpopular

from the first, and that the injudicious way in which it

was carried out only served to fan the smouldering dis-

content. It is not the fact that they have defeated us

that has opened our eyes, for that taken by itself would

rather have tended to keep them closed, but the fact that

they have satisfied us of the substantial justice of their

case. . . . Nor is it possible to acquit the present Govern-

ment for declining to do a year ago what it had subse-

quently admitted the justice and necessity of doing. . . .

We were misinformed and misled from the outset."1

There was a genuine wish that the settlement now should

not be hedged about by conditions that could only lead

to spite and irritation. Nothing, in fact, it was thought,

could be better than to have done with the whole matter,

and the news that the Convention was signed was received

with relief. " England can now have no desire to intrude

herself upon the Transvaal. The more completely its

people can get on without interference of any kind the

better pleased we shall be. . . . The fact is that between

1 The Times, 12th July 1881;

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[1881

England and the Transvaal there is no natural connection whatever." 1 " I am sure," Mr Gladstone said, speaking at the Mansion House two or three days after the signature, " that there are no rival interests between us and the Boers." Lord Salisbury, who had been elected at a meeting at Lord Abergavenny's house on 10th May to succeed Lord Beaconsfield as leader of the Tory peers, might make speeches about the loyal minority in the Transvaal, and say that everything in South Africa would now happen " under the shadow of Majuba Hill "; but the question practically dropped out of English political life for some years.

Indeed only with difficulty could it have continued to occupy a place. Parliament had found itself reduced to a lamentable barrenness. After the turn that events had taken in Ireland, men knew what to expect in England, and before Parliament met there was much discussion about the forms of closure of debate (the idea was still so new that the word for it retained its French form—clôture) 2 in operation in the parliaments of other countrics. The blow struck by the executive in the arrests of Parnell, Biggar and others in November 1880 was misliked ; the accused were brought for trial in January, and on the disagreement of the jury were all discharged. Lord Cowper and Mr Forster, backed by Lord Hartington, had never relaxed their demand for renewal of the Coercion Act ; and they could now bring to bear on the Cabinet discussions the effect of this futile trial. Yet it was not believed that the Government would agree; they were supposed to be too much under the control of the Radical wing. " Mr Chamberlain and Mr Bright will not vindicate the law ; they will dismember the Empire, and Mr Gladstone and the rest will consent to register their decrees." 3

1 The Times, 5th August 1881.

2 It was Matthew Arnold who first pointed out that the English language contained the word " closure," which quite met the need.

3 Quarterly Review, January 1881.

1881] COMMON SENSE 73

That view was mistaken. The Queen's speech at the opening of Parliament hinted at suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act ; and almost immediately Mr Forster introduced a Coercion Bill, giving power to arrest suspected persons and keep them in prison for any period up to 30th September 1882. Irish obstruction met this at once in such force that the first stage, the leave of the House to introduce the Bill, was only attained by a course of action which remains one of the historic incidents of Parliament. When the debate had lasted several days the Speaker cut across all forms of procedure by putting the question on his own responsibility. The House was taken by surprise, and the debate was ended. The Crimes Act became law in March, and the old attitude towards Ireland was in full sway in Mr Gladstone's idea of producing, concurrently with the Coercion measure, a Land measure, establishing the " Three F's "-fair rent, fixity of tenure, and freedom of sale. The Bessborough Commission had just reported in favour of such legislation ; but it was unfortunate that it had not reported a year earlier. In 1880 the Bill might have changed the face of the Irish situation ; in 1881 it was doggedly wrangled over by Irishmen infuriated by the revival of coercion, Conservatives displeased with any land legislation, and Liberals sore and angry at the conditions which had driven them into coercion. Moreover, the moment the Land Act was passed it was cleverly taken over by the Land League. Instead of weakening that body it strengthened it. Parnell contrived that no one should apply to the Land Court without consulting, and obtaining the consent of, the local branch of the League.

These two measures, and bewildered discussions of the paralysis of debate and the forms of procedure in the face of obstruction, occupied almost the whole of a very long session. The Judicature Act, taking the opportunity of the approaching transfer of the Law Courts from West-

74

COMMON SENSE

[1881

minster to their new site at Temple Bar, made changes in the organisation of legal administration ; and the Chief Baron, the Serjeants at Law, and other dignitaries were abolished. The Bankruptcy Act did away with old methods of liquidation, which had led to much corrupt bargaining with creditors and to fraudulent arrangements ; and provided for the establishment of a new Bankruptcy Court, for public examination of debtors, and an audit of accounts in liquidation.

The place Ireland had been taking during the session was not in the least out of proportion to the urgency and gravity of the Irish problem. Already the Land League was achieving the end set before it by Irish newspapers, notably The Irish World and The Irishman, which had been fond of saying that Ireland could not hope to beat England in battle, but she might render the work of government " nervous and distracted."1 The House of Commons had cheered the announcement early in February that Michael Davitt had been arrested on his unexpired ticket-of-leave ; but those who cheered expected a counterstroke in the shape of dynamite, and the precautions adopted are exemplified in the care taken when a heavy parcel addressed to Sir William Harcourt was delivered at the Home Office. Removed by the police and opened by them it was found to contain an old pistol. Davitt's arrest itself was a sign of the confusion of thought that had set in. He had been the first and the most energetic in the condemnation of the violence that broke out in 18802 ; but his name stood in the popular mind for Fenianism, and Government followed the popular mind. For some months no other spectacular step was taken. But agrarian crime in Ireland was making another great increase ; the figures for 1880 were 2590 ; for 1881 they were 4439. Boycotting was rife, with its accompaniments of shooting,

1 Cf. Parnell Commissioners' Report, p. 70.

2 Ibid., p. 88.

1881] COMMON SENSE 75

cattle-maiming, and murder. For a while the Government hesitated on the subject of the Land League. Their law officers had given opinions on its vulnerability as a conspiracy ; but there were other considerations summed up in a letter of Lord Cowper's to the Cabinet. "If," he wrote, "the restraining influences of the central body were withdrawn, and the local branches driven to become secret societies, crime, particularly assassination, might increase, for though the central body gives unity and strength to the movement it does to a certain extent restrain crime." 1 This is very close to what Parnell himself had said in a speech at New Ross, co. Wexford, in September 1880, when he took the line that violence was a corollary of lack of organisation, and that if the Land League were completely organised no man would dare abuse his rights as a landlord. 2 But the Government could see only one step to take. In October 1881 it suppressed the Land League, and under the Crimes Act lodged Parnell, Sexton, O'Kelly, O'Brien and Dr Kenny in Kilmainham gaol. The Land League, its responsible heads removed, transferred its headquarters, under Patrick Egan, to Paris, and left in Ireland the Ladies' Land League, which had been founded, in February 1881, under the command of Miss Anna Parnell. Mr Forster had had his way, and one incident of this autumn must have gratified him. Parnell, against the advice of Dillon, issued from Kilmainham the "No Rent" manifesto, urging tenants to refuse all rent until constitutional rights were restored. But the priests were against this open defiance of law, and the manifesto " fell absolutely flat." 3 The arrests may therefore have seemed for the moment to be a successful move. Yet Mr Gladstone admitted in after years that the policy of the Government had been a mistake ; and John Bright confessed that

1 Quoted in Barry O'Brien's Life of Parnell, i. 287.

2 Parnell Commissioners' Report, p. 88.

3 Barry O'Brien's Life of Parnell, i. 320.

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[1881

the mistake was due to a misapprehension of the forces of

the Land League.1

The brewing of another storm was at present un-

noticed by the British public. In August rumours began

to reach England of disaffection among the native

troops of Egypt. These rumours were denied by the

Khedive; and even when, a month later, circumstantial

reports followed of an émeute in Cairo, in which the palace

had been surrounded by troops and guns, and demands

had been made on the army's behalf by one whose name

was given as "Achmet el Ourabi," the ordinary English-

man was not much stirred. He knew only vaguely of

Egypt as a country whose ruler by extravagant expendi-

ture and reckless borrowing had run his nation into

hopeless debt, and had had to submit to the appointment

of a joint French and English control, which worked

badly owing to mutual jealousies. He saw these jealousies

breaking out now, French newspapers suggesting that

the military rising was in some way engineered by England

as a step towards intervention, English newspapers suggest-

ing, when (in exercise of her supremacy) Turkey sent

commissioners to investigate the outbreak, that this was

some Machiavellian stroke of Bismarck's, and that there

might be worse things than anarchy in Egypt. The year

ended with the Turkish commissioners, whose arrival had

caused immense excitement in Cairo, going peaceably to

dinner-parties, but doing little else ; and with an interview

in which Arabi, now arrived at the familiar spelling, pro-

tested to Sir William Gregory his loyalty to the Sultan,

his faithfulness to religion, his sole desire to improve the

conditions and efficieny of the Egyptian army, and his

lack of any intention to undermine the joint control.

1 Barry O'Brien's Life of Parnell, i. 331 ; ii. 360.

CHAPTER IV

1882 : IRELAND, EGYPT—AND JUMBO

THE Liberal Government of 1880-1885 was itself conscious of carrying certain handicaps. The

worship of Mr Gladstone, useful though it may have been in holding the party together, was apt

to become a dead weight when problems arose in which he took but a perfunctory interest. Mistrust

of Mr Chamberlain caused such members of the Cabinet as Lord Hartington and Lord Granville to feel

uncomfortable and uncertain in their work. In Parliament the Irish disaffection and the harassing activity of

the " Fourth Party " incessantly hampered the progress of public business. But there was a heavier handicap

than any of these. The forces of idealism in the national life—the forces making for reconsideration of social duties,

for readjustment of social conceptions—were to a very large extent divorced from politics and political creeds.

They had been drained off along several channels. There was the Socialist view, that Parliament was in the hands

of the professional and manufacturing middle class, and worked solely from the standpoint of that class. There

was the view of the ardent social reformer, who, though he may be said actually to date from a famous piece of

Parliamentary action—the Factory Acts—had grown impatient, and preferred almost any nostrum to the hope

of reforming legislation. There was the somewhat chilly ethical enthusiasm, born of the new religion of science,

which held that sanitary inspection could cure more evils than the most drastic Act of Parliament. There was the

77

78 IRELAND, EGYPT—AND JUMBO [1882

Christian zeal, whether of the type of Charles Kingsley or of Father Dolling, which, seeing with new eyes the terrible state of its vineyard, called aloud for labour that would never have time to look beyond the immediate day's work. All this diversion of idealism the Government did not number among its handicaps; yet it was certainly the heaviest. The bad effect was twofold. On the one hand social problems accumulated such a force of highly educated opinion that they became exasperatingly thorny to handle; and on the other hand much of the Radical strength in the country was sapped by the easy habit of looking on, detached from the necessity of distinguishing between right and wrong, so long as one Government was as good or as bad as another. So far the Government had displayed no capacity for drawing to itself the vitality of all that independent enthusiasm.

At the beginning of 1882 it nearly achieved, however, a great clearing of its path. Mr Gladstone never showed more brilliant political instinct than in the masterly conception of a stroke of Irish policy by which he could sweep influences, apparently hostile at the time and weakening to his power, into a single whole-hearted purpose. Within the Cabinet his own disappointment at having been obliged to revive coercion coincided in some measure with the Radical feeling of Mr Chamberlain. Coercion was also, for very different reasons, the especial object at the moment of the attacks of the 'Fourth Party' in the House. Mr W. H. Smith was hinting at the possibility of a Conservative scheme of land purchase for Ireland; and Lord Hartington was in a mood which he expressed thus to Lord Granville: 'It seems to me that an effort ought to be made to unite the two great parties on an Irish policy. . . . Though we go on talking about local government, and about the county franchise and redistribution of seats, and though Chamberlain thinks that we are on the eve of great political changes, I do not believe that one of them

1882] IRELAND, EGYPT—AND JUMBO 79

will be made while the Irish difficulty lasts."1 All these influences were at sixes and sevens. Hartington's union

of the two parties would have been rather repressive than otherwise, so the idea had no reality ; Smith was only

making the kind of remark which is safe and comforting out of office ; the " Fourth Party " was merely scoring debat-

ing points about the inconsistency and failure of Ministerial professions. But, whatever the separate intentions, they

all expressed one opinion—that the present situation of the Irish question was hopeless. The day-to-day method

of meeting it had produced such a tangle that it was time to attempt a wider and longer view, if Government was

to escape suffocation. Mr Gladstone's brilliance lay in seeing that these very different lines of criticism made a

kind of current on which he might set floating a policy of genuine advance in Ireland ; and it fell out that an oppor-

tunity was not unwelcome to the Irish leaders. Parnell in gaol was feeling that the direction of events in Ireland was

in danger of slipping from his hands. The co-operation between the extremist section and the Parliamentary

party was his work, and nobody but he could manage it ; his silence, his refusal to be " drawn " either by the ex-

tremists or by his own party, his capacity for locking up the precise threads of co-operation in his single mind, and

keeping that mind impenetrable, were the only conditions on which the co-operation could be safely worked. In gaol

he was out of touch, and was growing nervous. He mistrusted the Ladies' Land League and lived in dread

of the party's being publicly and irredeemably associated with Fenianism. He was therefore in a mood not to hold

off from the intimations which presently reached him of Mr Gladstone's desire to make a fresh start. Intimations

had previously reached Mr Gladstone of Parnell's state of mind.2 These exchanges (never acknowledged as such by

1 Holland's Life of the Duke of Devonshire, i. 344.

2 Morley's Life of Gladstone, iii. 64.

80 IRELAND, EGYPT—AND JUMBO [1882

either of the two men) took place in April 1882 ; and to Parnell they must have been strengthened by the fact

that the Arrears of Rent Bill, introduced originally by an Irish member, Mr Redmond, to supplement and amel-

orate the Land Act of 1881, had been taken up by the Government, and passed into law on 18th April.

It pro- vided that, in cases in which the tenant could satisfy the legal tribunal of his inability to pay the whole of his

arrears of rent, he should be called upon to pay the rent for 1881, but only half the arrears of preceding years, the

State paying the other half. Mr Gladstone, as his nature was, having seen a picce of rectification to perform, moved

very rapidly in his opinions. There is a famous letter of his to Mr Forster, dated in this month (it became famous

later in the discussion of whether the trend of his mind towards Home Rule could have been foreseen by his

party), in which he showed this rapidity very clearly. He asserted that, until there were seriously responsible bodies

in Ireland, every plan framed by the Government came as an English plan, and was as such condemned, and that

there must therefore be some form of local self-government. This was the passage afterwards most canvassed ; but

the passage most to our immediate purpose, as showing how far Mr Gladstone had moved, was this: " If we say

we must postpone the question till the state of the country is more fit for it, I should answer that the least danger

is in going forward at once. It is liberty alone which fits men for liberty. This proposition, like every other in

politics, has its bounds ; but it is far safer than the counter-doctrine, wait till they are fit." 1 This was a

fairly swift change in eighteen months from the position he had taken at the Guildhall Banquet on 9th November

1880, that order must be restored before grievances could be considered.

As Gladstone and Parnell never admitted the exchange

1 Morley’s Life of Gladstone, iii. 58.

1882] IRELAND, EGYPT—AND JUMBO 81

of preliminary intimations in April 1882, so neither of them would ever admit the implication contained in the words " The Kilmainham Treaty." But when Parnell and the others were released from gaol, on 2nd May, it was fairly well understood that, if the Government would continue to consider sympathetically the difficulties of the Irish tenant, there would be a diminution of agrarian crime. Parnell's side of the bargain was variously stated. The fact probably was that he merely meant to prove the truth of what he had said in 1880, that violence was really lack of organisation, and that the Land League, if he were free to control it, would neither murder men nor maim cattle. Though on the release of the prisoners Lord Cowper re-signed the Viceroyalty, and Mr Forster the Chief Secretaryship, the Cabinet on the whole was with Mr Gladstone, even Lord Hartington holding the opinion that enough had been done to reassert the law, and that no danger was involved in the releasc.1 A new hopefulness pervaded the political atmospherc. Lord Spencer succeeded to the Viceroyalty and Lord Frederick Cavendish undertook the Chief Secretaryship.

Before a week had passed, the Phoenix Park murders took place. Lord Frederick Cavendish was walking with Mr Burke, the Under Secretary, across the park on 6th May, after a long consultation with Lord Spencer at the castle, when they were set upon and stabbed to death. " It has been said," Lord Morley writes, " that the nine-teenth century had seen the course of its history twenty-five times diverted by actual or attempted crime. In that sinister list the murders in the Phoenix Park have a tragic place." 2 For one horrified moment every eye turned to Parnell ; but there could be no mistaking his innocence. He bore too obviously the marks of having received from the crime a blow which seemed to him nothing less than

1 Holland's Life of the Duke of Devonshire, i. 353;

2 Life of Gladstone, iii. 68.

F

82 IRELAND, EGYPT—AND JUMBO [1882

fatal; prostrated and despairing he called on Mr Gladstone

on the morning after the murders to tell him that he felt

unable to do any more for Ireland; he was with real

difficulty restrained from resigning his seat. That first

horror relieved, there emerged from the inevitably re-

newed conflict of political views a dignity of spirit which

forbade any bandying to and fro of the tragedy. Whether

in the bearing of those whose personal loss was cruel or of

those whose political work was for the time ruined, whether

in the language of the Press or of the House of Commons,

there was no reckless accusation, no bitterness of re-

crimination. Years afterwards it could even be written

that "the crime cleared the air like a disastrous storm,

and made possible the beginning of better relations be-

tween the English and Irish." 1 That is not true of the

state of feeling at the moment. The murders did certainly

produce a softening, even a wonderful softening, of hearts,

in which no wild words were permitted; but English

feeling returned at once to its fixed point. On 11th May

Sir William Harcourt introduced a new Crimes Bill, and

Ireland was put back under coercion and abnormal pro-

cesses of law for the detection of the murderers. Irish

members fought the Bill, even with violence in the House,

but it was quickly passed. Indeed, the condition of

Ireland seemed to justify the most stern Tory view.

Parnell's worst fears of what might happen while he was

in prison were realised. He had lost control, and for the

time being was too bitterly stricken to attempt to regain

it. The Land League without his guidance plunged help-

lessly. The Invincibles, a Fenian organisation which

hardly affected to conceal its responsibility for the murders,

" roved with knives about the streets of Dublin. Dis-

content had stirred in the ranks of the Royal Irish Con-

abulary. . . . Over half the country the demoralisation

of every class, the terror, the fierce hatred, the universal

1 Holland's Life of the Duke of Devonshire, i. 353.

1882] IRELAND, EGYPT—AND JUMBO

83

distrust, had grown to an incredible pitch. . . . The

power of random arrest and detention under the Coercion

Act of 1881 had not improved the moral of magistrates

and police." 1

In such conditions vaguely informed public opinion con-

centrated upon Ireland could only do harm. It happened

fortunately that popular interest was suddenly drawn off,

by the discovery that a riot in Alexandria on 12th June

was an affair of the utmost seriousness. Fifty Europeans

had been killed, and the troops under Arabi were raising

new batteries round the harbour. The great mass of

commonplace people in England never penetrated, during

the ensuing events, much beyond the figure of Arabi him-

self. He was a rebel of some sort, and the reason for our

being engaged in suppressing him gave no pause to the

ordinary man. He knew that three years earlier, in June

1879, the Khedive Ismail of Egypt had been deposed in

order to make way for a complete reconstruction of the

financial position of his country. He knew also that

in this reconstruction England had taken a leading

part among the European Powers; and it was obvious

that the work could not go forward if the peace

were disturbed. Roughly speaking, such a simplifica-

tion of the facts had actually occurred by this time; but

for the authorities both in England and in Egypt the pro-

gress of events during the past eighteen months had been

extremely baffling. The International Commission of

Liquidation, whose main work had been to unify at a fixed

rate of interest the immense mass of irregular unrelated

loans raised by Ismail, had naturally been obliged, in

securing the administration of the finances, to overhaul

some departments of the public life of the country. The

army, for very good reasons, had not been dealt with. For

one thing, it was more unequivocally a Turkish affair than

most of the questions in Egypt. The suzerainty of Turkey,

1 Morley's Life of Gladstone, iii, 70.

84 IRELAND, EGYPT—AND JUMBO [1882

a mere shadow in most respects, had been maintained over

the army, and the permission to keep a standing army of

18,000 men was specifically given in the Sultan's new

firman after Ismail's deposition. Any attempt, there-

fore, to bring the army into relation with the new life of

Egypt was bound to be a delicate matter; and unluckily,

when the attempt was made, it was unwisely handled.

The presentation to the Khedive in January 1881 of a

petition from the army seems to have been such an attempt,

since it complained not only of arrears of pay, but also of a

system of promotion based on anything but merit. But

the petition further demanded the dismissal of Osman Rifki

Pasha, the Turk who was Minister for War in the Egyptian

Government, and showed generally so much anti-Turkish

feeling that Riaz Pasha, the Khedive's Prime Minister,

treated it as mutiny. Technically, no doubt, it was mutiny,

but the plain course in that case was to take steps to secure

some part of the army, and arrest the ringleaders. Riaz

took the foolish step of sending for the two officers known

to be chiefly responsible for the petition to appear before a

Council of Ministers, hoping that his intention of conveying

them from the council to prison would not be divined,

and that the army, left leaderless, could then be reduced to

discipline. Of course, the troops saw through the device,

broke into the room where the Ministry was sitting, and

rescued the two officers. They were Arabi Bey and Ali

Bey Fehmi. The Khedive, caught with no force at his

back, was compelled to overlook completely the rescue of

the two colonels, and the army was given a sudden new

sense of power. In fact, the collapse of authority was

so thorough that the army itself was scared, as people

are apt to be when a door which they were making

ready to force suddenly opens from within. The question

arises : what is behind the door ? This nervousness, the

fear of retribution at any moment, had produced the

émeute of September 1881, which had vaguely brought

1882] IRELAND, EGYPT—AND JUMBO 85

Egypt back to the mind of the English public. An order issued to the 3rd Regiment of Infantry—Arabi's regiment —to proceed to Alexandria had been interpreted as a first step towards punishment, by separating the leaders of the movement. Arabi with 2500 men and some artillery marched to the Abdin palace, demanding to see the Khedive. The Khedive was at another palace, but under the advice of Sir Auckland Colvin, the British Agent in Cairo, he returned to Cairo—displaying no little courage—and met Arabi, who dictated to him the dismissal of the Ministry, the summoning of a parliament, and the raising of the army to thefull establishment allowed by the Sultan's firman. The Khedive acceded at once to the first demand, on the condition that the two others were referred to Turkey.

It will be noticed that in these demands a new element appeared. The phrase about summoning a parliament was an open profession of co-operation between the army and the Nationalist party in Egypt ; and this brings us up to the year of our present survey—1882. The Nationalist party was not strong ; it was a group which had come together in the days when Ismail's rather crude interest in European progress had created an expectation of experiments in constitutional government. At the beginning of 1882 the group had, however, attained some importance, because, on the dismissal of the Riaz Ministry, Cherif Pasha had been appointed Prime Minister, and he had imbibed deeply the idea of constitutional experiments. He had therefore persuaded the Khedive to agree to the summoning of a Chamber of Notables, one of Ismail's schemes, and it met in 1882. The question of how far Arabi's movement was a Nationalist one is at the root of much of the controversy that has since taken place in England. Mr Wilfrid Blunt was in Egypt at this time, and he wrote a letter to The Times, published on 6th February, in which he asserted that the army had not made a political

86 IRELAND, EGYPT--AND JUMBO [1882

move, and did not intend to make one. At the same time

the two movements could hardly be kept apart. Arabi

himself had remarked in a statement of his case that " the

army was the only power able to protect the growing

liberty of Egypt " 1; and before many months were past

Mr Blunt was championing Arabi on the widest Nationalist

grounds. There was indeed some fusion of the two move-

ments ; and it is traced by Lord Cromer to an unfortunate

mistake by the British Government.2 In January 1882

Gambetta was still in power in France, and his ambition led

him to try to keep pace with British energy in Egypt.

He suggested a Joint Note to the Khedive, in which Lord

Granville, agreeing after some demur to its presentation,

let pass a phrase harmless enough in appearance but dis-

astrous in effect. It was this : " The two governments,

being closely associated in the resolve to guard by their

united efforts against all cause of complication, internal

or external, which might menace the order of things

established in Egypt . . . " etc. Now the Chamber of

Notables had just met for the first time when the Note was

presented, and inevitably it saw the word " internal " in

the phrase just quoted as aimed at itself. In the resent-

ment thus aroused the Arabists and the Nationalists were

thrown into one another's arms ; and the tone of the whole

Note, as thrusting back the Sultan's prerogative in

Egyptian affairs, took on a deeper colour. At that

moment Gambetta fell, and confusion was made worse

confounded by a sudden reversal of French policy. Under

M. de Freycinct, his successor, the party which believed

the whole Egyptian question to be a device of Germany's

for locking up French troops in Egypt prevailed ; the pro-

pulsion due to Gambetta in the direction of an Anglo-French

occupation ceased, and was replaced by a policy of inviting

Turkish intervention. It was a policy singularly difficult

1 The Times, 3rd January 1882.

2 Modern Egypt, i., cap. 13.

1882] IRELAND, EGYPT—AND JUMBO

87

to direct at a time when the earlier policy had been carried

far enough to irritate the Porte; but the British Govern-

ment did its best. A conference of the Powers was in-

vited to meet at Constantinople, to enter into consultation

with the Porte with a view to military action by Turkey

against Arabi under Anglo-French instructions. But the

Porte at first refused to take part in the consultations;

and when at length it did agree to do so, it wasted weeks

in considering, altering, accepting, and withdrawing from

the Anglo-French proposals. Meanwhile it had sent two

more commissioners to Egypt with contradictory in-

structions, one to repudiate Arabi and the other to

intrigue with him. Not unnaturally the "nerves" of

the leading spirits in Egypt grew worse and worse under

the delay.

Arabi, suspecting plots against himself, had forty-two

officers and men arrested on a charge of conspiracy, and

had Osman Rifki Pasha and forty others exiled to the

furthest Soudan. The army was out of hand, its pay

had been increased with no reference to the ability of the

Budget to provide the money, and officers were being pro-

moted absurdly. The riots in Alexandria in June, and

Arabi's feverish entrenchment of himself in the forts,

showed that the nervousness had become uncontrollable.

The Powers, not being possessed of nerves, continued to

confer, but a message was sent from the Sultan ordering

discontinuance of work on the forts, and England invited

the Powers generally to send ships to make an inter-

national demonstration off Alexandria, from which and

from all the Delta the Christians were taking flight.

The invitation was not accepted; and when, a month

later, Arabi was defying the Sultan and mounting guns

again in new forts, only a British squadron lay off the

port.

The public at home, little concerned as to the origin of

such a situation, waited on the tiptoe of excitement. It

88 IRELAND, EGYPT—AND JUMBO [1882

was not disappointed. At daybreak on 10th July Admiral

Seymour, in command of the squadron, gave notice that,

failing Arabi's compliance with the Sultan's orders and

surrender of the forts within twenty-four hours, he should

open fire. A night or two before, the ships had suddenly

turned their electric lights upon the forts, and the startled

gunners, not knowing but that the new flash might be some

deadly form of gunnery, stampeded from the batterics.1

When the bombardment began on 11th July they were far

from stampeding, and their reply from the forts was not

ineffective ; they had big and powerful guns to handle.

But by five o'clock in the afternoon the bombardment had

done its work, and Arabi's troops were in flight. A certain

irresoluteness on the part of the British Government

showed itself in the absence of any orders to the fleet

beyond the bombardment. No force was landed, and in

the general disaster of the fleet Alexandria was set on fire,

and immense damage done. However, on the whole the

policy of merely taking each question as it arose was for

the present not unsuccessful. When it became clear that

Turkey's suspicions and dilatoriness were unsurmountable,

the British Government made ready more ad interim steps.

Sir Garnet Wolseley was sent out to Egypt before July was

over, with an expeditionary force, the line taken now being

the necessity of protecting the Suez Canal, as the Egyptian

troops were practically at large in the Delta. Arabi had

in fact written a letter to Mr Gladstone, offering him an

allied Egypt which would keep open England's road to

India, but threatening, if he were attacked, to bring about

a general Mohammedan rising and the destruction of the

Canal.

In little more than two years this Government, which

had come into power to end foreign embroilments, had

become engaged in war, and involved in a conflict of

interests as hazardous as any of Beaconsfield's. France,

1 The Times, 10th July 1882.

1882] IRELAND, EGYPT—AND JUMBO 89

at the time of Wolseley's operations, " resumed her liberty

of action in Egypt," and England recognised the end of

the Dual Control 1 ; so that a very present source of inter-

national disagreement had definitely opened. The measure

of this distortion of the hopes and intentions of Liberals in

1880 was given by the resignation of John Bright from the

Government. He declined on his Quaker principles to be

a party to the prosecution of war ; and though Mr Glad-

stone felt that Bright had shown insufficient appreciation

of the "facts of the case with the obligations that they

appeared to entail," 2 it is not difficult to see the general

justification of his action. The mind of England was

running again on the barren glorifications that he hated.

The rare spectacle of a fleet in action had stimulated

popular imagination, and the armoured train with its

Gatling guns, which was used for reconnaissances from

Alexandria, was almost like a new toy to the public. Later

in the year there was great disappointment because the

authorities refused a request from the City of London that

British and Indian soldiers from Egypt might be allowed

to take part in the Lord Mayor's Show. It was

a condition of popular temper which might well be

too much for John Bright. Nor could it but confirm

that detachment of idealistic forces from politics which

has been mentioned. This Government seemed indeed

indistinguishable from any other Government; and Parlia-

ment had at the same time a curiously helpless aspect.

A peculiarity of its work just now, which was commented

upon with some gloom, was the number of temporary

measures of legislation.3 The Employers' Liability Act

of 1880 was to terminate in 1887 ; the Corrupt Practices

Acts were all limited in duration ; the powers of the Rail-

way Commissioners were not perpetual ; a measure to

1 Cromer's Modern Egypt.

2 Morley's Life of Gladstone, iii. 83.

3 The Times, 12th July 1882.

90 IRELAND, EGYPT—AND JUMBO [1882

remove restrictions on the negotiation of promissory notes was valid for only three years; a measure dealing with habitual drunkards was to remain in force until 1890. Parliament seemed to mistrust its own efforts. Moreover it did its work with great difficulty, and had to face this year a profound alteration of its procedure. Closure of debate, so much discussed in the previous year, took shape in a new Standing Order permitting the Speaker or Chairman of Committee to bring debate to an end by putting the question on a motion being made to that effect, provided that division on the motion showed not less than two hundred members for the closure, or not less than a hundred when the opposition to the motion showed less than forty members. It was not a severe resolution, in view of later steps of the same kind. Yet it was much disliked; and Lord Randolph Churchill found it a good stick for beating the Government. That it was necessary is clear enough, when we find the Government programme again “carrying over” such measures as the Bankruptcy Bill, the County Government Bill, and the Municipality of London Bill. Other questions, too, were accumulating for Ministers. For instance, several great inland towns were pressing for an assimilation of excise procedure with that of customs, the grievance being that, whereas at ports the customs arrangements allowed “bonding” on a large scale, there was no such possibility in inland towns, except in some “wet” trades. A few towns—Manchester, Leeds, Halifax and Bradford—were by a fiction treated as ports; other big places like Birmingham, Sheffield and Wolverhampton had no way of “bonding” dry goods.

However, while idealists were standing so far aloof from the proceedings of Parliament, an Act was passed which was to give them the widest possible scope in that sphere of “administration” which they so much affected—the Municipal Corporations Act 1882. It did not attract notice at the time, being‘nominally designed for the con—

1882] IRELAND, EGYPT--AND JUMBO 91

solidation of all the amending and supplementary Acts which had been passed since the Municipal Corporations Act 1835. Some such consolidation was indeed necessary, owing to the perpetual accretion of duties under laws like the Public Health Act of 1875, the Contagious Diseases (Animals) Act 1878, and the Weights and Measures Act 1878. Moreover reform was still called for in the matter of old, sometimes corrupt, corporations which had survived the Act of 1835. There were still bodies like the Mayor and Burgesses of Dunwich, an almost extinct village, who were entitled to receive copies of all public documents from the Stationery Office; the Mayor and Barons of Corfe Castle, who had the patronage of a number of sinecure salaries; and the Corporation of New Romney, who disposed among themselves of an income of £800 from municipal lands. The new Act, by making burgess-ship purely a franchise, and not an office, effected a final reform. The important feature of the Act, however, was that, while specifying the obligatory work of a municipality (such as the provision of necessary establishments, the maintenance of local police, etc.), the Act did not circumscribe its functions. In other words, while setting forth what a corporation must do—not on any exacting scale—it refrained from putting any statutory limit to what it might do. The limitations in that respect were judiciously left to the natural human objection to paying heavy rates. This stroke of peculiarly English genius arouses the enthusiasm of a foreign observer like Professor Redlich.1 The things that a corporation might do, instead of being subject to the approval of a bureaucratic department, remained in the sphere of private bill legislation; and thus Parliament, and not a department, is the final authority. The wide democratic franchise under the Act, including all ratepayers of twelve months' residence before 15th July in any year, and not excluding women, pro-

1 In his book, The Local Government of England.

92 IRELAND, EGYPT—AND JUMBO [1882

vided both a stimulus and a check; the corporation would

be anxious to retain the support of the citizens by pro-

gressive measures, and at the same time any overloading

of the town with debt would show its result in the ballot

boxes. " Rate collectors far more than any central Boards

of Control are the real schoolmasters of municipal policy." 1

In the national life generally the year was marked by a

return of better temper. Trade was good; reconsidera-

tion of rents had somewhat eased the farmer; the cereal

harvest was fair, and the root harvest good. The social

world was enlivened by a greater disposition on the part

of the Queen to be seen. It may be mentioned in passing

that the last of the few attempts on her life took place on

2nd March, when a man, who was subsequently adjudged

a lunatic, fired a pistol at her as she was driving out of

Windsor station. There was, it is true, a singularly heavy

death-roll of notable men. On 3rd January Harrison

Ainsworth died, out of humour with a world which his

later novels had failed to attract, and in which he had not

succeeded as the man of fashion he wished to be. On 4th

January Bernal Osborne made his exit from a London

where he had kept alive the witty traditions of the days

of Alvanley. Dante Gabriel Rossetti died on 11th April,

in the midst of the period when the Pre-Raphaelite move-

ment was being violently spread abroad by the general

æsthetic craze. The death of Darwin on 20th April

brought from abroad such unprecedented appreciations

of an Englishman's work that this country became con-

scious in a new way of the achievement represented by the

evolutionary theory; and this may account in some degree

for that outbreak of extreme antagonism between scientific

research and orthodox theology which reverberated

through the middle eighties. Dr Pusey died on 17th

September; and the occasion served for articles reminding

a generation much entangled in Ritualist controversies,

1 Redlich's Local Government, i. 393.

1882] IRELAND, EGYPT—AND JUMBO 93

in the imprisonment of recalcitrant clergymen, that only a vulgar confusion could have made the word “ Puseyism ” synonymous with advanced ritualism ; his mystical conception of the Church and her work, founded on a wonderful knowledge of early Christian writers, remained throughout his life indissolubly linked with a piety of the Wesleyan rather than the Tractarian spirit. On 4th December died a very different Churchman, Archbishop Tait. He had had stormy years of rule, yet he preserved to the end that belief in a sweet reasonableness which he was always ready to apply. His last application of it came before public notice within a week of his death. He had effected a compromise in the St Alban's case, by which Mr Makonochie was transferred to St Peter's, London Docks. It did not in the least conciliate anti-ritualists.

In the revival of trade the shortage of gold grew more troublesome. Some of the responsibility for it was put down to the prosperity of the working classes, which caused “ a large absorption of gold ” ; and it was this aspect of the problem which brought to the front this year a proposal for issuing one-pound Bank of England notes. Another aspect which worried the financial authorities was the question of meeting the wear and tear of the gold currency. Short supplies of the metal caused the coins to remain long in circulation ; and the result was that the currency was falling dangerously in real value. This point, however, may be postponed until the time when the Treasury at last attacked it. The South African goldfields were coming more into the public eye ; there had been a “ rush ” to the De Kaap fields, and “ placer ” mining was not unsuccessful. But the men with money were showing themselves more cautious than the men without, although it was pretty well known that only mining on a large scale, with heavy machinery, could work the deposits thoroughly. For the time being fortunes were made in other ways.

94 IRELAND, EGYPT—AND JUMBO [1882

Nitrates just then were making millionaires ; and the experience of American farmers in fattening stock was causing

almost a boom here in oilcake, and new speculations

in cotton-seed oil works.

It is not, after all, these signs of a solid prosperity that

most give the year its air of better spirits. That is to be

found rather in such a revelalion as is provided by the

immense and serious interest taken in the removal of

Jumbo to America. Jumbo was the great elephant at the

Zoological Gardens—the largest that had ever been seen

out of the native lands of elephants—but he might have

been thought to be otherwise an ordinary elephant until

it was suddenly announced at the end of January that

Barnum, an American showman, had bought him for

£2000, and was going to transport him across the water.

The whole nation was stirred. Some disputed furiously

as to whether he had or had not been a difficult animal to

handle, and whether his keeper's statement that his temper

had grown queer was or was not a mere excuse to cover his

removal. Others, equally serious, called in question the

legal right of the “Zoo” to dispose of animals without

obtaining in some way the consent of the nation. Lighter-

hearted folk jested, often as ponderously as the subject

could require ; songs sprang up in the streets, and Jumbo

practically filled the ordinary man's mind until, two months

later, the departure took place. It was described as

fully as if it had been the departure of a prince. The

adventures of the enormous crate in which Jumbo was

drawn to the docks by a long string of horses, the quarters

provided for him on board ship, were all set forth by every

newspaper in the land ; and Lady Burdett-Coutts went

on board to give him his last London bun. The public's

cheerful readiness to be amused had another opportunity

in August, when Cetewayo came to England. Responsible

people were shaking their heads about his visit, and it had,

in fact, been once postponed ; it was not long since he and

1882] IRELAND, EGYPT—AND JUMBO 95

his Zulu people had been in arms against us, and the

question of his restoration to the chieftainship, which he

undoubtedly hoped to forward by his visit, caused some

nervousness. But London only saw in him a stout, genial,

black potentate, whose bellicose prestige they could

pardon because, if it had cost the English something to

beat him, he had at any rate very handsomely worried the

Boers. So people gathered in crowds at Melbury House,

Kensington, where he stayed, to see him drive out. He paid

visits to both the Queen and the Prince of Wales ; and he

managed to keep up his imperturbability until he was taken

to Woolwich Arsenal, and then he confessed that he had

really been overwhelmed with astonishment at the sights

and sounds and resources of England ever since he had

landed.

The newest marvels of civilisation were continuing their

advances. The year is notable in the history of electric

lighting for the fact that a new step, described by Professor

Sylvanus Thompson in a scientific lecture in March, had

been taken by the invention of “ little electric lamps made

by enclosing in glass bulbs thin wires of platinum or thin

strips of carbon which on the passage of an electric current

grow white hot ” ¹; the importance of the invention for

domestic lighting was at once seen. The immediate sequel

was a series of disputes as to patents between rival in-

ventors, chiefly Mr Edison and Mr Swan. The use of arc

lamps for street lighting had meanwhile so thoroughly

established itself (Birmingham, Brighton, Canterbury,

Newbury, Sheffield and East London had installed it) that

the great corporations, led by Manchester, were on the

alert against possible monopolies; and the Government

had in hand an Electric Lighting Bill designed to regulate

the foundation of companies. The Bill ultimately included

a clause giving local authorities power of compulsory

purchase of electric light undertakings at the end of twenty-

¹ The Times, 18th March 1882.

96 IRELAND, EGYPT—AND JUMBO [1882

one years. The telephone was conquering long distances ;

in July experiments were made in speaking from Brussels

to Paris, and in December a line was working between

Brighton and London. But as yet the National Telephone

Company's revenue was no more than £27,000 in the

year, and its profits £4217.1 Tramway experiments moved

more slowly ; a car, worked from accumulators under the

seats, was tried at Leytonstone in March. A minor in-

vention of the year which should not miss a place in this

record is the fountain pen ; the stylograph had been in

use for some time, but late in this year descriptions were

published of the application of the reservoir principle to

a pen with a detachable double-pointed nib.2 Nor need

one hesitate to attach to the march of progress the tenta-

tive prominence attained this year by the advocates of

"rational dress." A lecture in February by Mr Frederick-

Treves on the unhygienic dress of women was followed in

March by an exhibition organised by the National Health

Society of hygienic dresses, the patterns being gathered

chiefly from America and Germany ; they included

"divided skirts," but the mocker was not yet aroused.

So much indeed was progress in the air that the

Londoner's dissatisfaction with his own local government

grew acute. A month could not pass without some com-

plaint either against vestries or against the Metropolitan

Board of Works ; of the former this one or that was slow

to lay down wooden paving (1880 had seen much activity

in that work), while the latter was attacked because of the

smell of sewers, or petty interference with private building

projects. From this atmosphere of complaint about the

merest trivialities of local control the Londoner looked

out and saw the provincial corporations, not niggling over

petty duties, but launching out into all sorts of public

services. He found himself under a form of government

1 The Times, 19th August 1882.

2 Ditto, 6th December 1882.

1882] IRELAND, EGYPT—AND JUMBO 97

which derived no fresh strength from the new Municipal

Corporations Act, because it was not a corporation ; and

for the same reason had but the meanest responsibility

towards the citizens. The demand for a municipality of

London became therefore one of the items of regular appear-

ance in political speeches of this time. It happened that

the autumn provided two striking examples of the courage

of provincial corporations. In October the Manchester

Ship Canal project first became of interest to the country

at large ; Alderman Bosdin Leech, of that city, was

writing letters to the Press to enlist the public attention.

'The scheme was unanimously approved at a town's meet-

ing held in Manchester on 14th November, and although

there was naturally some apprehension as to the cost of

the undertaking, the prospect of direct importation of

goods to Manchester was a powerful argument, especially

as only in the previous year the cotton trade had been

seriously hampered by a " cornering " of cotton in Liver-

pool, and a period of gambling which had raised the price

of raw cotton by 10 to 20 per cent. The other piece of

remarkable municipal energy was the progress of the

scheme for supplying Liverpool with water from the Welsh

hills ; the laying of the great mains through Delamere

Forest at the end of this year was a picturesque period of

the work. But the provincial corporations were by now

influencing the community in more subtle ways than these.

A great Art and Industrial Exhibition was held this year in

Manchester ; and William Morris, speaking at the opening

ceremony, was able to point to a general improvement in

industrial art. The work of all the local schools of manual

art, which had slowly been established in the large

industrial centres, of the Workmen's Institutes, the

Athenaeums, and other such places, was beginning to

tell. A Royal Commission was sitting, which, imper-

fectly appreciated though it was at the time, ended by

altering entirely the aims and scope of national education

G

98 IRELAND, EGYPT—AND JUMBO [1882

—the Commission on Technical Instruction. It was the recognition of all the local schools, and so the first step towards their expansion into a system of higher education.

General Wolseley did not keep the nation waiting long for news from Egypt. Moving rapidly, he attacked Arabi at Tel-el-Kebir on 13th September—one of the notable night attacks of military history—inflicting a complete defeat on his troops, and taking him prisoner, with other leaders of his army. No memory remained now of a Nationalist character in the movement; Arabi was called a mere military adventurer, Egypt had had to be “rescued from him,” his foot had been “on her throat”; and a general impression that the war was over led to the commutation a few months later of the sentence of death passed upon Arabi by the court martial in Cairo on 3rd December. He and six of his associates left Egypt for exile on 26th December. It seemed that the Government, pottering on from point to point, had come out of the business fairly well after all. They directed their agent in Cairo, now Lord Dufferin, to proceed with a rehabilitation of Egyptian finances in view of a speedy withdrawal of the British troops. But their lack of a clear purpose in Egypt showed itself now in the fact that, while speaking of withdrawal, they were lending an ear to considerations which could not possibly be reconciled with withdrawal. Upper Egypt was the last great stronghold, it was thought, of slavery, and the licences to trade in the Soudan, which were issued by the Egyptian Government, were more or less open licences for slave-raiding. Consequently even those Liberals who had been least inclined to continue a policy of interference in Lower Egypt now began to confuse Mr Gladstone’s mind by pressing upon him duties in Upper Egypt. We miss much of the difficulty of the Egyptian struggles of the next few years, and the true nature of Gordon’s mission to Khartoum, unless we see

1882] IRELAND, EGYPT—AND JUMBO 99

that Mr Gladstone's lack of any real interest in the Egyptian question rendered him peculiarly open to conflicting

impulsions from different sections of his followers. The suppression of slavery was an old ideal, and the zeal to

pursue it in the Soudan is one of the reasons why Tel-el-Kebir is the beginning, and not the end, of a story.

Another reason had recently been causing anxiety in Egypt itself. Just at the time when Arabi's movement had been

growing strongest in Cairo, in August 1881, a man in the Soudan had proclaimed himself Mahdi—an assumption of

direct spiritual kinship with Mohammed, and divine inspiration—and the universal hatred there of the Egyptian

Government secured him an immediate following. But no real knowledge of what was going on in Upper Egypt

prevailed among those well-intentioned people who were pressing the slave trade upon Mr Gladstone's attention.

On the whole the year ended not amiss for him and his colleagues, and the foundation of the National Liberal Club

at a large meeting on 5th November was an enthusiastic mustering of new forces. In Ireland the Crimes Act, putting an end to those activities of the Land League which

had survived in the Ladies' Land League, had been helped in its effect by the loss of heart in the Irish party after the

Phoenix Park murders. It may be mentioned here, since Patrick Egan rendered his accounts of the Land League

funds to Parnell in October of this year, that the League had handled the sum of £244,820. Of this, in round

figures, £50,000 had gone to relief of distress ; £15,000 to the expenses of trials ; £148,000 had been spent by

the League and the Ladies' League in support of evicted tenants, the erection of wooden houses for them, defence

against ejectments, etc.1 The cases of agrarian crime now fell from 4439 in 1881 to 3432 in 1882 ; but the

true state of the case is better shown by the fact that for 1883 the figures dropped with a run to 870. We see

1 Parnell Commissioners' Report, p 96,

100 IRELAND, EGYPT—AND JUMBO [1882

Mr Gladstone himself, according to one of his Cabinet, taking a " couleur-de-rose view " of the condition of Ire-land.1 Egypt appcared to have bcen successfully dealt with ; and the summing up of the Government's position on the traditional occasion of the Guildhall Banquet was that they had done well, and that the Conservatives had no good fighting ground ; Lord Randolph Churchill's " Balaclava charges " were magnificent, but not war.2 The autumn and winter were singularly free from labour troubles. In the carly part of the year there had been some anxiety in London; a large deputation of unemployed men waited upon the Lord Mayor, representing printers, carpenters, bricklayers, painters, warehousemen, navvies and smiths. Except in its combination of a number of unrelated trades, this deputation hardly amounted to the faintest mutter of the storms of a few years later; and the winter brought no distressing signs of lack of employment. The vitality of the Socialist movement was, however, apparent in the revival of the newspaper Freiheit, in spite of a general refusal of printing firms to publish it. At the same time the prosecution of a paper called The Freethinker on a charge of blasphemous libel was attended by comments which showed that even the respectable world was inclined to think that it was a mistake to aim at suppressing such organs of opinion. " Whether from growth of charity, or indiffercnce, or perplexity, or experience of the mischievousness of persecution," The Times remarked, " most men are not inclined to put in prison the apostles of the views which they most detest, and they are rather at a loss what to do with persecuting laws which remain unrepealed." 3 The socialists, fighting for their own freedom of speech, have often since fought for freedom in other than political matters; and in the

1 Holland's Life of the Duke of Devonshire, i. 369

2 The Times, 10th November 1882

3 19th July 1882.

1882] IRELAND. EGYPT—AND JUMBO 101

struggles of the eighties for the liberty of street-corner meetings socialism and irreligion were confused together,

as we have already seen them confused in the case of Mr Bradlaugh's seat in Parliament.

A subject which attained no little public discussion in the autumn of 1882 was the idea of cremating the dead. Two

persons who died about that time had left instructions in their wills that their bodies were to be burned. No

facilities existed for carrying out the instructions ; never-theless the bodies were burned, and the subject continued

to be so much written about that within a few years the difficulties experienced in regard to these early cremations

were entirely removed.

CHAPTER V

1883 : A YEAR OF GROUNDSWELL

As the Government's tenure of office extended, it became more and more clear that the Liberal victory of 1880 had been due rather to a revulsion from Disraeliian policy than to any arraying by the Liberal leaders of the progressive forces of the country. By this time the temporary bond had fallen asunder, and the year was marked in every direction by a futile restlessness. The Egyptian question had brought about a coolness with France, an atmosphere in which any subject of dispute might become very dangerous. The Irish question reeked once more of dynamite. The forces of social reform and moral effort moved in a world agitated by strikes, and those of material reform saw the spectre of cholera looming across the waste of bad housing and sanitary deficiencies.

The "resumption of liberty" in Egypt, which had been the French attitude towards the bombardment of Alexandria, revealed itself in certain respects at the beginning of the year in Cairo as a complete breaking up of the Control. Unfortunately Baring, who had displayed a peculiar gift for investing the Control with a loose working equipment in which points of punctilio could not arise, was in India.1 He did not return to Egypt until June 1883. Meanwhile a quarrel was brewing in regard to the Sucz Canal. The irritation of shipowners at what they regarded as excessive levies for the passage of the Canal had issued in a proposal that application should be made to the Khedive for a concession for a second canal, parallel with the existing one,

1 He was Financial Member of the Viceroy's Council.

1883] A YEAR OF GROUNDSWELL 103

the idea being rendered plausible by the argument that

in any case the amount of the traffic demanded a second

waterway. This, however, did not help the shipowners, for

M. de Lesseps, the builder of the existing canal, claimed a

monopoly for his enterprise, and a prior right to any con-

cession for a second ; he had a draft agreement in readiness

for its construction at a cost of eight millions.1 The

French authorities saw in the proposal another sign of

England's determination to secure to herself every advan-

tage in Egypt, by tricking them out of their chief remaining

source of power there. Towards the close of the year the

dispute took a different direction, the English demand

being now for the acceptance by the Suez Canal Board of an

advisory committee of shipowners. De Lesseps was him-

self in England at the time, and was being entertained in

Manchester, where the citizens hoped for the support of his

name for the Ship Canal project. He avoided committing

himself to that ; and took instead every opportunity of

insisting upon the autonomy of the Suez Canal Board.

It was, indeed, a period of bad blood between the two

nations in which an amicable settlement of such a question,

however much either side may have had its legitimate

grievances, was impracticable. In July there was an ugly

outburst of feeling in England, caused by rumours that the

French flag had been hoisted in the New Hebrides ; the

demand was instantly raised that the New Hebrides should

be formally annexed to Australia, and that, to make

complete use of the opportunity, New Guinea should be

annexed at the same time. Barely a week later reports

reached England of the arrest of a British subject by a

French admiral at Tamatave, in Madagascar. The island

had been under French influence for two hundred years,

but this treatment of it as a French possession was not to

be allowed to pass. Luckily the British subject, who had

been deported to Réunion, was released six weeks later,

1The Times, 24th July 1883

104 A YEAR OF GROUND SWELL [1883

and that incident was closed.1 It may be noted here that

the state of our relations with France in 1883 settled a

question which of late years had agitated a good many

minds. Early in 1881 the scheme for a tunnel under the

Channel to connect England and France by railway had

made a sudden advance. Borings had been undertaken

at Dover, and as a result detailed estimates of cost had

been made possible. Now the English military authorities,

headed by Sir Garnet Wolseley, declared against the

project; they said they could not assure the country

against invasion by the tunnel, and an Anti-Channel-

Tunnel Association was formed. The promoters, however,

went forward, and introduced a private Bill into Parlia-

ment, which came before a Joint Committee of the two

Houses in April 1883. It reported in July against the Bill,

though not unanimously. The military evidence had

carried the day.2

The distortion which had been given to the Irish

situation by the Phoenix Park murders only became fully

apparent in this year. In Ireland itself difficulties

diminished; the statistics of agrarian crime fell, as has

already been mentioned, to 870; evictions fell from 5201

to 3643; and agitation by speeches and all the forms

of boycotting diminished greatly. But alarm and panic

shifted to England; dynamite explosions occurred in

London, and there were a number of seizures of explosives

by the police. The 'Kilmainham Treaty' had been

disliked by the Clan-na-Gael; and Parnell's attitude after

the Phoenix Park murders would have led to an open

repudiation of him but for his useful gift of never being

agreeable to the English.3 We have seen that he had felt

in Kilmainham gaol the danger of leaving the field to less

cautious persons; and the helplessness that overwhelmed

1 The Times, 1st September 1883

2 Ditto, 19th July 1883.

3 Barry O'Brien's Life of Parnell, i. 37.

1883] A YEAR OF GROUNDSWELL 105

him at the news of the Phoenix Park murders prevented his

recovering his influence over the Clan-na-Gael. Therefore,

whilc he could and did moderate the pace of agitation in

Ireland, he had lost for the moment his general hold on

violence ; and the London explosions were the result.

It was the Invincibles' year, and it opened with one of the

most famous dramatic moments in criminal records. The

Crimes Act of 1882 had rendered possible processes of

arrest which had placed under lock and key a number of

men suspected of complicity in the Phoenix Park murders.

By the middle of January nineteen men were in detention.

Two informers had given assistance to the police, but the

prisoners did not really fear the evidence of these two.

Then, as they filed into the dock one day during the pre-

liminary proceedings, they saw one of their own number

divert his steps, and their defiant confidence was over.

The scene when James Carey took the witness-stand has

been described by more capable pens, and need not be

retold here. His evidence convicted six men, and two

pleaded guilty. Six were sentenced to death, but the

sentence on one was commuted. Five men were hanged,

Brady, Curley, Fagan, Kelly and Caffrey ; and Delaney,

Mullet and Fitzharris were sent to penal servitude for life.

The Invincibles were not men to sink into obscurity after

such events. Throughout the first half of the year they

were the bogey at which suburban England continued to

shiver. The newspapers canvassed the identity of the

terrible " Number One," who had appeared in the Kilmain-

ham evidence to be a power horribly supreme. The British

Government made friendly representations to the Govern-

ment of the United States on the hatching of Irish-American

plots in that country; Fenian brotherhoods were reported

to be devoting Sunday excursions up the Hudson River to

the amiable purpose of experimenting with explosives. The

Home Office stimulated local authorities in England to a

more vigorous search for dynamite, and more alertness to

106 A YEAR OF GROUNDSWELL [1883

its possible manufacture in their districts; and prohibited

in the public interest an exhibition of explosives which

was to have been held in all innocence in Sheffield. On

the top of all this the Invincibles showed that the popular

notion of their organisation was not exaggerated. On July

30th a man, who had attracted no notice among his fellow-

passengers, was shot dead on board a liner which had just

reached East London, Natal. He was Carey the Informer.

The police protection which had sufficed to screen him

entirely from the eyes of the world at large, and ship him

off in complete secrecy to South Africa, had not saved him

from the Invincibles. Beside this coup their other vio-

lences of the year seemed almost tame. On 15th March

an explosion took place at the Local Government Board

offices; it caused no loss of life or serious injury, and not

much damage to any part of the building beyond the

windows; but it remains a famous explosion, because it

was the return of a terror that men had begun to forget.

On 30th October two explosions occurred on the Under-

ground Railway, one at Praed Street Station, and one

between Charing Cross and Westminster. In both cases

some persons were injured, but no one was killed.

If Parnell had lost his grip on this current of Irish

agitation, he had certainly not lost the confidence of Ire-

land. It became known during this year that in his zeal

for the cause he had let his family estates and his own

financial position become heavily encumbered. A public

subscription was set on foot, and it acquired a more than

passing interest, because it was the means of bringing into

public notice what has been known as the Errington

incident. In 1881 the English Government had had the

curious notion of getting aid from the Vatican in dealing

with Ireland. At first the idea was only that the Vatican

might restrain priests in Ireland from supporting agitation;

and Mr Gladstone, in a letter to Cardinal Newman,

expressed the opinion that it was the Pope's positive duty

1888] A YEAR OF GROUNDSWELL 107

to exercise this restraint.1 With that object, documents detailing the attitude of certain priests had been conveyed to Rome by Mr George Errington, an Irish Roman Catholic gentleman, who had gone there for the purpose. He was not, Mr Gladstone was careful to explain, an official emissary, but a volunteer in the matter. However, as he had gone with letters from Lord Granville, and as his despatches were deposited in the Foreign Office, the distinction is insignificant. It would be hard to find any real difference between the position of Mr Errington at Rome in 1881 and the position of, say, Lord Odo Russell in the late sixties. No representative of the British Government could be acknowledged an " official " representative at the Vatican, since that would have implied a recognition of the temporal power of the Pope. But just as Lord Odo Russell was to all intents and purposes a Minister Plenipotentiary, so Mr Errington was an Envoy Extraordinary in all but the name. Cardinal Newman had held out little encouragement to Mr Gladstone to look for Papal intervention, and none came at that time. It did come in 1883, in connection with this national tribute to Parnell, and the result of it showed that the Vatican's first decision had been the wiser. A Papal rescript against the tribute was issued. Up to that moment the sum collected had been £7000, and six months after the rescript it was £37,000. Mr Gladstone in after days told Mr Barry O'Brien that the acceptance by the Government of the Errington mission had been chiefly due to Lord Spencer.2

The influence of the Irish question on the Parliamentary year of 1883 was rather indirect. The obstruction of recent years had been met for the moment with the Closure resolutions ; but the effect of it had gone deeper than the immediate result. The House, in long and trying sessions, had been feeling that it must strike out some new lines of

1 Morley's Life of Gladstone, iii. 52

2 Barry O'Brien's Life of Parnell, ii. 126.

108 A YEAR OF GROUNDSWELL [1883

dividing its work, if it was to have time for real discussions of policy. It had the high ideal of not bounding its view by the legislative necessities of the day: “Parliament is not merely a legislative body. It is the Grand Inquest of the nation charged, in addition to its legislative duties, with the custody of Imperial interests, and called upon to lead and to form the public opinion of the time.1 ” The institution of Grand Committees, to relieve the House of some of its work, was the first attempt of Parliament to keep its head, so to speak, above water. These Committees, empanelled by the Committee of Selection, were two in number—the Grand Committee on Law and the Grand Committee on Trade.2 They were sanctioned by the Commons in 1882, but went to work for the first time in 1883, relieving the House of the necessity under which it had hitherto laboured of forming itself into committee on every Bill other than a private Bill. By the new arrangement a considerable quantity of work was delegated. Two other attempts to save time were now in progress. In 1882 a Department of Agriculture had been proposed, and in 1883 a Department for Scotland was a prominent subject of discussion. Both were the butts for somewhat easy sarcasm; the Board of Agriculture, it was said, would not know what to do with itself, and as for a Department for Scotland, there was not more logical reason for setting it up than for setting up a Department for Yorkshire. However, the scheme went forward ; and Lord Rosebery’s assistance in working out the details was perhaps his first important public service. For the rest Parliament had but a stale bill of fare. Bankruptcy legislation was still before it, a reforming Act being passed this year; County Government (with its attendant subjects of London Municipal

1 The Times, 6th January 1881.

2 The committees were not altogether invented at this time. Sir T. Erskine May found precedents, upon which the committees were designed.

1883] A YEAR OF GROUND SWELL 109

reform, and especially a reform of the water supply author-

ity) and the county franchise had not yet been touched.

The last was the most vital of the subjects, for Lord Ran-

dolph Churchill was devoting himself to it. He was argu-

ing that the enfranchisement of the agricultural labourer

was not called for, even by the labourer himself, and that

a rearrangement of boroughs and a redistribution of seats

would be the trucr franchise reform at the moment.1 The

failure of the Affirmation Bill of this session has been

recorded 2; it was the last expenditure of the time of this

Parliament on the controversy that had arisen about Mr

Bradlaugh's right to take his seat. In spite of Mr Glad-

stone's eloquence, in spite of a widely spread feeling that it

was unwise to mix dislike of Mr Bradlaugh's opinions with

the general question of preserving in Parliament a religious

test which had elsewhere disappeared, the Bill was rejected

on 3rd May. But at least this particle of good resulted--

that there was agreement henceforth to leave time to do

the work--time and the ultimate disappearance of condi-

tions in which the question was useful to an Opposition

somewhat poorly equipped. How ready the Opposition

was to adopt weapons from any quarter is seen in their

immediate following of the Liberals' idea of a huge political

club, which should give the social amenities of such insti-

tutions to men of political inclinations who could not hope

for admission to the older clubs. Two months after the

meeting for the promotion of the National Liberal Club,

one was held by the Conservatives to found the Constitu-

tional Club. Both places may be, and have been, regarded

cynically by those of Pall Mall and St James's Street.

The historian's interest in them is that they were the first

clubs in which considerations other than those of social

fitness were recognised in the election of candidates, and

in which political opinions became a qualification.3

1 The Times, 12th April 1883 2 See p. 41.

3 The Carlton and the Reform, though broadly Tory and Liberal,

do not technically require the holding of certain political opinions

110 A YEAR OF GROUNDSWELL [1888

It is remarkable that the year saw no fewer than eight Sunday Closing Bills before Parliament, three of them applicable to the whole country and five to separate localities. This, like the growing strength of the Local Veto movement, is an interesting reminder that the Blue Ribbon Army was at the time making great strides. It had been founded in 1878 on the model of an organisation which had been very successful in the United States. Mr William Noble, who had for some years before that date been a prominent platform speaker in the cause of temperance, on returning from a tour in the States enlisted the interest of several philanthropists and took the Standard Theatre, Shoreditch, which was then untenanted. His ardent zeal was so contagious that for nearly two years, from February 1878 till January 1880, he continued to fill that place with audiences; and when he was compelled to leave it, because of its approaching demolition, the Blue Ribbon Army was already a great force, and the pledge cards used by Mr Noble were in demand all over the country. English distaste for the parading of opinions must have been undergoing curious modifications when it was possible to note, among the striking events of a year, the spread of two such organisations as the Blue Ribbon Army and the Salvation Army.1 The latter, indeed, was fighting its way in a very literal sense. We have already had occasion to note the hostility it called forth, and an actual organisation of a sort had arisen to combat it. The "Skeleton Army" has been forgotten now; it appeared in 1883, fighting the Salvation Army outside the Eagle Tavern in the City Road, and these encounters occurred persistently, Sunday after Sunday. Both the Salvation Army and the Blue Ribbon Army (and we may perhaps as a qualification. Brooks's, again, is broadly Liberal, but that is a survival of its original character as the Whigs' Club, and Whiggism was always as much a social as a political qualification.

1 The Times, 30th December 1882.

1883] A YEAR OF GROUNDSWELL 111

mention with these the missions of Moody and Sankey,

who returned to England in 1883, and were in Liverpool

and Manchester in March and in London in November)

were elements in that reconsideration of a nation's duty

towards its less fortunate members, which was replacing

the individualism of the great industrial expansion. Crude

as the Salvation Army's methods appeared, the way for

educated people to meet them was seen to be by doing the

work better ; and this was more than an intellectual retort.

`The death of Arnold Toynbee, on 11th March 1883, served

to bring to light suddenly a whole world of sociological

enthusiasm, of zeal and affection for the unfortunate,

which had been steadily modifying the trend of politico-

economical thought; and when the knowledge of Toynbee's

own efforts turned men's minds to the poorer parts of our

great citics, it was with the result of making them conclude

that the Church of England was not behindhand in the new

spirit, and that " in forty years the clergy had advanced

immensely in public esteem," by their devotion to the

practical as well as the spiritual work at their doors. Two

distinct lines of thought were, in fact, tending towards the

same end. The spiritual revival which began with Wesley

and Whitefield, as an evangelising movement not parochial

in its scope, had been followed by the more parochial,

because more strictly canonical, revivalism of the Oxford

Tractarians. While the religious spirit of the universities

had been thus modified, the philosophical outlook under-

went a change almost as profound under the domination

of T. H. Green. He had but lately died—on 26th March

1882—and his lectures had been spoken of at his death as

"the very heart of the philosophical education of Oxford."1

The effect of his work had been to quicken the sense of

social responsibility, and to raise up a school which both

hastened the distrust of the old individualism, and pre-

sented a very guarded front to the new theories which the

1 The Times, 27th March 1882:

112 A YEAR OF GROUNDSWELL. {1883

popular mind was summing up in the phrase "the survival

of the fittest." The forces that came into view on the

death of Arnold Toynbee therefore were combined forces

of religious and secular impulse, and this dual character

has continued to be displayed in the Social Settlement

movement that arose with the foundation of Toynbee

Hall in 1884. There was, indeed, an earlier settlement

in existence. The Ancoats Brotherhood had been founded

in 1877 in Manchester by a devoted citizen, Mr Charles

Rowley. It was not specifically a University settlement,

but drew upon the services of any one who could be

attracted to the work. It was an isolated enterprise,

and not until after the death of Toynbee can there be

said to have been a Settlement movement. The move-

ment crystallises for us several of the somewhat inchoate

aspirations of a new day. The settlements were to be

centres in the poorest parts of great cities for the dis-

semination of that humane education without which

the improved conditions that were the workman's goal

would be but a barren achievement. They were to

help the educated classes to see that a sound Liberalism

must hope, not to raise the working man out of his class

but to produce a community of mental outlook between

classes. They were to help the masses of the poor to see

in knowledge their truest leadership, and to learn to

distinguish between knowledge and frothy acquisition

of political dogmas. Thus the Settlement movement

was partly, at least, the reply of the intellectual middle

class to the attitude of the artist-socialists. "Radical-

ism," William Morris wrote in this year, "is made by

and for the middle classes ; they will have no objection

to its political development, if they think they can

stop it there ; but as to real social changes they will

not allow them if they can help it." And again : "It is

obvious that the support to be looked for for constructive

socialism from the working classes at present is nought

1883] A YEAR OF GROUNDSWELL 113

. . . What we want is real leaders, themselves working men, and content to be so till classes are abolished. But you see when a man has gifts for that kind of thing he finds himself tending to rise out of his class." 1 University settlements were the denial of both of these positions. Such advances as the Socialist movement made in 1883 were not spectacular. Some knowledge of the propagandist work that was being done may be gathered from the fact that late in August the question of the power of public authorities to prohibit meetings in such places as the London parks was being raised. Nervousness about these meetings was certainly growing, assisted perhaps by the dynamite explosions, which had nothing to do with them; for, when it was announced that the site of the disused Tothill Fields prison at Westminster had been bought by the Roman Catholics for their cathedral, the Government was sharply criticised for not keeping the site as a central depot for troops in case of rioting. Something of the same nervousness is visible also in the withdrawal of several members from the Cobden Club this year, because of the admission of one or two foreign politicians " of an advanced, not to say revolutionary, character." 2 But though the socialists were clearly mustering some of the unemployed waste lives of London streets, they were not yet definitely mobilising them. In January Louise Michel came to England to lecture on the oppression and sweating of women in France, and to urge English people not to let the education of the girls of the working classes fall behind that of the boys. She spoke, as it happened, at a moment when women in this country had achieved a notable amelioration of their status. The Married Women's Property Act came into force at the beginning of this year, abolishing the old system under which a woman's property passed on her marriage into

1 Mackail's Life of William Morris, ii. 103, 111; 2 The Times, 18th June 1883.

H

114 A YEAR OF GROUNDSWELL [1883

her husband's control. Henceforward a married woman could hold property and carry on business in her own right. One of the minor effects of the measure was to give particular interest to the debate on a Woman Suffrage Bill introduced by a private member in July. The question arose whether married women were also to have this form of liberty, but the mover of the Bill repudiated any such intention, confining his proposals to single women who would be able to qualify as householders. The Bill was rejected by a majority of 16 in a House of 245 members.

Meanwhile the advanced woman was interested in a subject which came to be attached, like a kind of label, to the feminist movement—a Rational Dress Association, with Lady Harberton as a moving spirit, offered prizes for a design of a suitable knickerbocker costume for women.

One of the most prominent items in the programme of social reform, the better housing of the poor and the destruction of insanitary areas, was forced upon public attention this year by a scare which was to be repeated in ensuing summers. Early in July the ravages of cholera in Egypt grew alarming. The disease did not on this occasion spread as far north in Europe as it did in a later year ; but our traffic with Egypt was sufficient to cause the issue of most stringent regulations in this country.

These were aimed less at setting up quarantine than at making the amplest provision for dealing with any cases that might make their appearance here, the idea being that, if energy went too much to quarantine preparations, which could hardly be relied upon to exclude infection absolutely, we might be caught behind the barriers with inadequate isolation arrangements. A Cholera Bill was hurriedly passed through Parliament ; in effect it constituted the local managers of the Metropolitan Asylums Board separate authorities under the Public Health Act, and it suspended certain Acts of Parliament and extended others so as to give the fullest powers everywhere for

1883] A YEAR OF GROUNDSWELL 115

making hospital provision. The more lasting result of the

alarms was a new concern in this country for sanitation

in every town, and especially in the ports. In November

Sir William Forwood was calling the attention of the

Liverpool Corporation to the fact that there were at that

moment 15,000 houses in that town, containing 60,000

people, which were all unfit for human habitation. At this

time no section of the community was under any responsi-

bility in the matter of house sanitation, nor was any

authority charged with enforcing a general standard. In

1880 there was a proposal to set up in London a society

which should provide for its members, at a subscription of

a guinea, expert inspection of the drainage of their houses ;

and peculiar point was given to the proposal a few months

later by a doctor, who related the disastrous processes by

which he had discovered that his own house, in one of the

wealthy quarters of London and on an estate which had

been developed not haphazard, but deliberately as a region

of the well-to-do, was actually not connected with the main

sewers, but was built over old cesspools.1 Medical men

generally were disturbing the public apathy in such mat-

ters. The bacterial theory was a fresh and forcible ally ;

and in 1883, even before the cholera alarm spread, the pro-

blem of housing and sanitation was being attacked from a

new angle—that of the infectious nature of tuberculosis.

One reason, no doubt, for the advance which medical

opinion was making in affairs of public health was the

feeling—a somewhat complacent feeling, perhaps—that

this was a scientific age. The same spirit which put

Agnosticism and Religion into the lists, and watched them

fight out their battles in the public prints, predisposed men

to attend to the gospel of the doctors. The theory of the

survival of the fittest justified every exhortation to being

on the side of the fit. Incidentally it sent the Londoner

and his country cousin to gaze at a creature exhibited this

1 The Times, 20th April 1881.

116 A YEAR OF GROUNDSWELL [1883

year at the Westminster Aquarium, a very hairy child brought from the territory north of Siam and said to have a slight tail ! To call this creature " the missing link " was enough to make it the talk of the town. The Aquarium was still prospering in the curious career which made it in itself a historical link. Some of the old free promenad-

ing and some of the old impropriety of Ranelagh and Vauxhall lingered in its large spaces and its vague atmosphere of side-shows ; while the performances of such people as " Zaeo," who was much advertised during 1880 and 1881 in the programme on the central stage, was a sign of the changes that were turning the old cellars and halls of song into the modern variety music-hall. The Aquarium clung to its character, and thereby to its public, even though the music-halls had developed entirely on their own lines. Mere singing no longer sufficed for their programmes. They had even a public which made them rebel, at this date, against the restrictions preventing them from producing stage plays ¹ ; and which caused the observant to reflect on the division of classes which was growing up in amusements as in everything else. It was a somewhat superficial reflection, but at the moment it was easy to think that there were divisions, just because the places to which people of any class might go were easy to single out. One of them was St James's Hall, and its chief entertainment in this year was of a kind that had

taken a curious hold of the public caprice. It was a thought-reading performance ; and the exposures in previous years of the fraudulent character of the grosser forms of " spiritualism " had caused those who made their living out of this kind of interest to turn to the less material devices. In 1881 there had been two prosecutions on charges of false pretences arising out of the older sort of performance ; one an affair of " slate-writing," and the other of crystal-gazing and table-turning. The thought-

¹ The Times, 3rd February 1883.

1883] A YEAR OF GROUNDSWELL 117

reading which succeeded those exposed tricks did not long go unattacked ; the performer at St James's Hall was challenged by Mr Labouchere to "read " the number on a banknote deposited by him in an envelope held by a certain Member of Parliament. The thought-reader demanded conditions on his own side, and for weeks the fairness or unfairness of the challenge, and the real nature of the performance, were under discussion in the newspapers, even scientists like Professor Ray Lankester coming forward with theories. The challenge never developed beyond a contest of wits as to the conditions.

Another event in the amusement calendar of this year was the Fisheries Exhibition, the first of a series of specialised exhibitions which had great success, and became annual London entertainments. The Fisheries Exhibition was said at the time to have done much to popularise the eating of fish, but probably its success could be attributed to the exhibition of strange kinds of boats and boating gear. The centre of attraction was the display of equipment for Arctic exploration, which at this time shared with ballooning the first place in the popular admiration of adventure. It was even a craze which could be mildly scoffed at, for The Times, writing in April of the opening of the Arctic "season," said it had become as regular as the University Boat Race or the Twelfth of August.1 Exploring parties of various nationalities were annually engaged in taking observations round the Polar basin.

Aeronauts, perhaps fired with a desire to be taking the popular eye with definite performances, were devising oversea flights. An attempt made in 1881 had been disastrous, Mr Walter Powell, M.P., having lost his life in the Channel while crossing to France. It was not until 1883 that the first success was achieved. On 13th June of this year the news arrived that a Frenchman had made an ascent, and at first it was thought he too had perished ;

1 4th April 1883:

118 A YEAR OF GROUNDSWELL [1883

but a few days later he was landed by a fishing boat, having

been picked up in the Channel; he had come near enough

to the English shore to hear the waves breaking. On 1st

August a voyage was at last accomplished, Sir Claude

de Crespigny and others crossing from Maldon in Essex

to Flushing; and in September the English Channel was

crossed twice—on 10th September by a Frenchman who

landed near Folkestone, and a week later by an English

party which started from Hastings and landed at Cher-.

bourg. To the year's record of adventure belongs also the

news published in London on 26th July that Captain Webb

had been drowned in attempting to swim the rapids below

Niagara Falls. It was a foolhardy enterprise, but the

world could anticipate anything from the man who had

achieved the feat of swimming the English Channel, with

its baffling tidal currents. On that former occasion

Webb had been in the water for twenty-one hours and

three-quarters, and the distance he swam was estimated

variously at from thirty-nine to forty-five miles.

Mention may be made here of the death of another man

who stood in a different way for daring and romance.

Captain Mayne Reid died in London on 23rd September.

He was the last writer of those immense and fluent tales

of adventure, of which he and Fenimore Cooper and

G. P. R. James had the secret. Their works were already

"books for boys," and taste for the long novel in masculine

hands had gone back into the main channel of English

fiction, from which the writers of adventure stories had for

a time partially diverted it. John Inglesant had been pub-

lished in 1881, and won its instant success; the work of

George Meredith had certainly accomplished no insignifi-

cant advance when it was spoken of, not as obscure, but

as "dazzling with excess of light"; Mr Henry James's

art was already classed as "exquisite."1

A survey of the state of trade at the beginning of the

1 The Times, 13th August 1883.

1883] A YEAR OF GROUNDSWELL 119

year gave rise to the warning that a time of restricted

profits was at hand ¹; and there can be no doubt that the

warning was based largely on the uneasiness of the labour

market. The Trade Unions took a new step this year

by joining in an International Congress of workmen's

organisations. In one sense the Congress was not taken

very seriously; it was thought that there could be little

real co-operation between labour movements in this

country and those in other countries, since the latter aimed

rather at producing direct State action upon industrial

problems than at assisting sectional efforts of the

workmen for better conditions. But even without inter-

national agreement there was enough to make employers

anxious, and Mr Henry Fawcett, urging them to take up

profit-sharing as a means of steadying the industrial situa-

tion, expressed the opinion that it was "vain to expect any

marked improvement of general economic conditions as

long as the production of wealth involves a keen conflict

of opposing pecuniary interests." What effect any wide

adoption of the profit-sharing principle might have had at

this time, before Trade Unionism underwent the vigorous

development of the later eighties, it is vain to conjecture.

It was not attempted. In January the year saw its first

strike, a serious one on the Caledonian Railway, in which

long hours and an exacting system of fines were the chief

complaints of the men. The passenger traffic was carried

on with difficulty, and the goods traffic was practically

suspended, a state of things which was bound to lead to

an early settlement. The strike was over before the end of

the month. The autumn brought other strikes. Late in

August the weavers in Lancashire came out, and their

dispute lasted over a month. The Darlington iron and

steel workers were also out, and so were the Sunderland

engineers; and by the end of November there was daily

expectation that the cotton spinners and the Yorkshire

¹ The Times, 10th January 1883.

120 A YEAR OF GROUNDSWELL [1883

miners would strike. Masters and men were at loggerheads as to the reality or otherwise of the trade revival,

the latter demanding a share of increased profits, while the former denied that the revival had brought any real profits.

The coinage problem was a baffling element in such disagreements. For the moment the bank rate, which had

been 6 per cent. at the beginning of 1882, had gone down to 4 per cent., though no one believed it could long remain

there. The lightness of gold coins, owing to wear and tear,—

was becoming too serious to be set aside, and in February there was talk of a steady calling-in of sovereigns. How-

ever, this year saw the first distinct expectation of relief from a new supply of the metal. In May Mr Goschen

suggested that the Treasury authorities could perhaps afford to wait, in view of “ the rumours, apparently well-

founded, of a great discovery of gold in the territories north-west of the Transvaal.” This shows how curiously

the real area of mineral wealth—the Rand—was still in the background ; and a communication a few weeks later

from South Africa shows the same thing. It spoke at large of the “ Transvaal goldfields,” but the details were

all of nugget-mining in the Lydenburg and Spitzkop districts, and on certain farms where old Portuguese

workings, long overgrown, were being opened up. The scale of mining which was in the public eye can be judged

from the statement that two claims worked quietly for twelve months past had actually yielded £6000 worth of

gold ; and that claims owned by Cape Town adventurers had gone up in value from £24 to £50. Yet before the

year closed, telegrams from South Africa were beginning to be couched in terms which can easily be seen, in the light

of subsequent developments, to give the first hints of the truth. A Transvaal mining law was promulgated on 18th

August ; and in November it was announced that certain “ rotten quartz leads ” were being opened, and crushing

operations commenced. The “ placer ” miners had been

1883] A YEAR OF GROUNDSWELL 121

throwing away quartz that would have crushed out at four

ounces to the ton. Their day, and the day of four-figure

annual returns, was almost over. Naturally, however, there

was some reluctance to risk money in mines situated in the

territory of the Boers. No friendliness on their part could

be relied upon to protect mining rights, or to encourage the

production of gold to the profit of British shareholders.

It happened that delegates from the Transvaal were in

England at the end of the year, laying before the Govern-

ment a request for the abolition of the indeterminate

" suzerainty " of Great Britain, and the establishment of

the absolute freedom of the Transvaal. Their presence

was put to service by the exploiters of one or two gold

companies, floated in December. The delegates were

appealed to on the subject of the Transvaal Government's

attitude, and they replied in some indignation that that

Government had no desire with regard to the goldfields

except " to see the mineral resources of the country de-

veloped to their fullest extent." But as yet only some

rather shoddy enterprises made their appearance, with

so much accompaniment of quarrelling as to the real

vendors and the real owners of claims that the public

remained cautious.

In a year of restricted business spirit new ventures were

not likely to advance far. Electric lighting was checked

by the non-existence as yet of any system of supply from

a central generating station ; the inventors were for the

time being in their laboratories again, trying to work out

such a system. The only event of the year worth record-

ing under this head is the first use of the light in a church ;

it was installed at St Matthew's, Brixton, in September.

No advance was made in the use of electric power for

propulsion, though a tramcar working on storage batteries

was put into service on the Acton lines, and did regular

duty among the horse cars. The extent of the field open

to the inventor of a practicable method of propulsion was

122 A YEAR OF GROUNDSWELL [1883

seen to be great ; trams had become so general that

London now had seventy miles of line working, Manchester

and its suburbs had forty-two miles, and the total length

of tram lines in the kingdom was four hundred and forty-

four miles.

Almost at the end of the year came a piece of news which

was the opening of a most unsatisfactory chapter in

Egyptian affairs. On 22nd November information reached

Cairo that Hicks Pasha, the British officer who was in

command of the Egyptian forces in the Soudan, had been

completely overwhelmed by the Mahdi, and his army de-

stroyed, during a march undertaken by him from Khartoum

to attack the Mahdi. He ought never to have been in the

Soudan ; but the English Government were now displaying

the foolish attitude of supposing that, when they had said

they did not intend to be drawn into difficulties in Egypt,

they had settled their part in the matter. They had

thought this enough when, in the spring of 1883, General

Hicks had been appointed to the Soudan army. The

dangers in the Soudan were obvious to the English authori-

ties in Egypt. It was a vast territory of provinces with

widely separated headquarters under various governors ;

it was garrisoned by an army undisciplined, unpaid,

thoroughly unsoldierly ; its provinces were nearly all

cut off from one another by the Mahdi's forces ; one pro-

vince, Kordofan, had fallen completely into his hands in

February 1883. Darfur, under Slatin Bey, was practically

beyond defence. What could there be, it might well be

asked, to entangle the British Government in a war in the

Soudan, when the utmost that could reasonably concern

them was the existence of sufficiently stable conditions in

Lower Egypt to keep the Canal open and the bondholders'

interest regularly paid, and when even to preserve that

minimum they had become impatient of maintaining

military responsibility ? After the annihilation of Hicks

Pasha's force it was too late to ask that question. It was

1883] A YEAR OF GROUNDSWELL 123

indeed possible even then to determine upon withdrawal

of the Soudan garrisons, and the establishment of a firm

frontier against the Mahdi between Upper and Lower

Egypt. But it was not possible for the Government to

leave the work to either the Egyptian or the Turkish

authorities. The Mahdi had seized the popular imagina-

tion. Ministers had put off determined consideration of

their duty until the humanitarian pressure not to leave

the field to slave-raiding—a pressure which they might,

with a little clear sight and plain speaking, have overcome

—was reinforced by public outcry against the supremacy

of a barbarous ruffian. The Government moved now in

a series of jerks, communicated by successive outcries,

having missed once for all the opportunity to establish a

purpose of their own.

The record of this year may be coloured by mention

of a curious phenomenon which filled many evenings

with beauty. The sunsets of the summer and autumn

were so magnificent that they became the general topic

of conversation. The reason for them appeared to be

an eruption of the volcano Krakatoa, in the South

Pacific. This, according to the scientific view of the

phenomenon, had loaded the whole atmosphere of the

globe with impalpable dust, which caught brilliantly

the level rays of the setting sun.

CHAPTER VI

1884: GORDON AT KHARTOUM; MR GLADSTONE AT OTHER AFFAIRS

N 8th January 1884 it was announced in the London newspapers that General Gordon was leaving England for the Congo to take up an appointment offered him by the King of the Belgians; and there ensued gratified comments on the possibility that the slave trade through Upper Egypt might be checked at its source by a firm hand in the Congo territory. But there were other comments, far from gratified, on allowing Gordon of all people to pass into the service of a foreign state at such a time, when, if anything was to be done in Upper Egypt itself, he was, in the popular opinion, the man to do it. By 18th January the Congo appointment had been declined, and Gordon and Colonel Stewart left London for Egypt.

In the ten days' interval there had been another public outcry, vigorously gathered to a head by The Pall Mall Gazette. It has an interest beyond the immediate circumstances, because it was probably the first occasion on which a newspaper set itself, by acting as the organiser of opinion on a particular detail of policy, to change a Government's mind at high speed. However strongly newspapers had spoken before this on political subjects, they had not adopted the method of hammering, day in, day out, at a single detail, and turning policy into a catchword. That was almost what happened now. The cry of 'Gordon for Khartoum' was raised to such a pitch that the Government decided they had after all been right in their first idea. For they had been thinking of him a month earlier. In December 1883 they had suggested to

124

1884] GORDON AT KHARTOUM 125

Sir Evelyn Baring in Cairo that Gordon might be sent to Khartoum. Baring had rejected the suggestion, and he rejected it again when it was repeated. He was for withdrawal from the Soudan, establishing the Egyptian frontier either at Berber or at Wady Halfa ; and was maintaining that attitude in the face of the resignation of Cherif Pasha, the Egyptian Prime Minister, and the refusal of Riaz Pasha to form a ministry ; and he did not wish anyone to be appointed to carry out the withdrawal who might be moved by conflicting ideas. He mistrusted Gordon in that respect. But unfortunately the Belgian appointment brought Gordon's name into prominence at the moment. He had been in the Soudan before, having only retired from command at Khartoum in January 1880, with a fine record of energetic action against the slave dealing along the White Nile 1 ; he was a hero both to the general public and to the Anti-Slavery Society ; and as the Government had not previously adopted the only indefeasible line, that of forbidding any English officer to go to the Soudan, it failed to stand up against the clamour for sending Gordon. The Cabinet had had its warning from its representative in Cairo. Baring had been perfectly explicit against sending any Englishman to the Soudan at this crisis, and especially against sending Gordon. No Englishman could be left unsupported at Khartoum, so that to send one was bound to mean a Soudan expedition ; and to send a popular hero would mean also an unmanageable heat of feeling in England.2

Mr Gladstone's reputation has suffered heavily for the blunder. His great age, which he seemed to bear so easily, inevitably appeared in his inability to deal with subjects that failed to interest him, in over-absorption in the subjects that did interest him. One member of the

1 See an article on his work there in The Times, 22nd January 1880.

2 Lord Cromer's Modern Egypt, i. 428.

126 GORDON AT KHARTOUM [1884

Government used to say afterwards that Mr Gladstone took virtually no notice of public affairs between the Irish Land Act of 1881 and the Home Rule Bill of 1886; in the House he often appeared quite torpid during debates on any subject remote from Ireland. At the same time his great reputation and popularity with his party made the state of his thoughts and feelings the final consideration in the Government. He disliked having any responsibility to Egypt ; the undertaking of it was to his mind the worst piece of "Beaconsfieldism." The result of this was that those who saw the gravity of the situation—saw that Mr Gladstone was neither turning his back on the whole question, nor facing it clearly—could not against the weight of his personality compel the Cabinet to consider the question. In the critical months of 1882 Lord Hartington had written : "I wonder whether any human being (out of Downing Street) would believe that not a word has been said in the Cabinet about Egypt for a fortnight, and I suppose will not be for another week, if then"; or again : "I am afraid that there is no chance of a Cabinet or of getting Mr Gladstone to pay any attention to Egypt while the Arrears Bill is going on."1 The same conditions existed in 1884. In the summer, directly after the preliminary credit for the Khartoum expedition had been voted, the Cabinet dispersed over the country, even though no one definitely knew the facts of Gordon's situation ; and a few days earlier Mr Gladstone, drawing nice distinctions between Khartoum "surrounded" and Khartoum "hemmed in," had blandly proposed "to collect the sum of the evidence as to Gordon's position"2—a position as to which some of Mr Gladstone's colleagues had for months been in correspondence with the Government's representative in Cairo. The passionate resentment against Mr Gladstone after the death of Gordon was not quite justly based. It

1 Holland's Life of the Duke of Devonshire, i. 353, 365:

2 Ibid. i. 477.

1884] GORDON AT KHARTOUM 127

was not the single—and to some extent debatable—

question of the delay in the Khartoum expedition which

provides the most serious charge ; it was the extent to

which a Prime Minister allowed his distaste for the whole

Egyptian complication to prejudice his mind against

dealing with detail.

The situation in the Soudan was in itself complicated

enough to demand steady attention ; it demanded more,

once Gordon had been despatched. Possibly the con-

siderable amount of service which he had undertaken for

foreign Powers, in circumstances which had emphasised

his personal responsibility, combined with a strongly

marked religious strain which in any case made his sense

of that responsibility high, had rendered him by this

time ill-fitted for the mere carrying out of orders. It is

at any rate certain that before he was finally shut up in

Khartoum he had virtually refused to act on orders, and

was pursuing a policy of his own. The apprehension

which Lord Cromer had felt in regard to the appointment

was to be fully justified. Even on the way out to Egypt

Gordon had procured the first modification in his in-

structions. He had in his interview with the Cabinet in

London undertaken no more than the duty of reporting

upon the situation in the Soudan, with a view to evacuation.

While on the voyage he thought that he could do the work

better if he had definite official status, and he induced

the British Government to secure from the Egyptian

Government his nomination as Governor-General of the

Soudan, believing the evacuation could be carried out

with more dignity if it were accompanied by a restoration

of the petty sultans of the Soudan provinces, instead of

leaving the country openly to the Mahdi. This was not in

one sense a great change of policy, especially as Gordon,

on receiving his written instructions at Cairo, himself in-

sisted on the insertion of a most emphatic clause binding

him to evacuation ; but it was a great departure from the

128

GORDON AT KHARTOUM

[1884

British Government's previous determination. An Englishman as Governor-General was far from a non-committal attitude.

On his way up to Khartoum Gordon made a strange and serious mistake. At Berber he proclaimed the intention of evacuating the Soudan. It was characterised by Lord Wolseley as " a fatal announcement "; he wrote to Lord Hartington (13th April 1884) : " This has prevented all men of any influence from helping. . . . Knowing that anarchy, or possibly anarchy plus the Mahdi, must follow upon Gordon's departure, every one thought only of his own safety. . . . To help Gordon under such circumstances would have been suicidal on any man's part." 1 The proclamation was particularly ill-timed, since the Mahdi's influence was being extended by Osman Digna dangerously close to Berber. Valentine Baker Pasha, who had been sent to reinforce the Suakin garrison when the defeat of Hicks Pasha threatened the Suakin-Berber route, had moved out rather hastily with Egyptian troops against Osman,2 and his force had been cut up on 5th February. Consequently when Gordon reached Khartoum, on 18th February, the surrounding of that place had become more than a possibility. Luckily the Egyptian Government was able to send up to Suakin at once 4000 British troops under General Graham, whose two defeats of Osman Digna at El Teb on 29th February and Tamai on 13th March kept that warrior for a while from assisting in the isolation of Khartoum.

The news of these battles, with all the picturesque detail of fighting in squares with Gatling guns at the corners, and of the wild charges of the " Fuzzies," as the Mahdi's troops were being called, was followed by the first of the eagerly awaited news from Khartoum itself, messages reaching London on 21st March from Khartoum by way of Berber.

1 Holland's Life of the Duke of Devonshire.

2 Lord Cromer's Modern Egypt, i. 400.

1884] GORDON AT KHARTOUM 129

They were dated 14th and 15th March, and conveyed the information that Gordon had been engaged in small

military operations round Khartoum, chiefly for the purpose of extricating the garrison of Halfiyeh ; it was also intim-

ated that Khartoum was practically surrounded by the enemy. To the British public the affair was already a war ;

they had in their own simple view pitted Gordon against the Mahdi ; and in the constant meetings held throughout the

summer to protest against the " abandonment of Gordon " (for as early as the month of May the situation was so

regarded) there was one continuous note of bewildered amazement at the Government's failure to conceive the

position in this plain sense. Unfortunately to Gordon also it was by that time a war. He had passed through another

of the changes of mind which so perplexed the Government at home, and their representative in Cairo. He had not

yet entirely declined (as he was to do before long) the policy of evacuation which he had so emphatically accepted in the

beginning ; he had only got as far as a new and more complicated version of " evacuation, but not abandon-

ment." He was asking in March that an Egyptian Governor-General with a British Commission (his own

being technically an Egyptian Commission) should be appointed ; and he asked for a particular man—Zobeir

Pasha. Now although to the general public in England this was an incident of no such vividness as battles in the

desert, it is not too much to say that it made the Government gasp. Moreover it upset that humanitarian opinion

which had worked so ardently for Gordon's appointment Zobeir had been the greatest and most unscrupulous of the

slave traders of the Soudan and had been deported for that reason to Cairo ; and here was the idol of the Anti-Slavery

Society demanding his appointment as Governor-General !

As a matter of fact this was exactly one of those strange quixotic pieces of fearlessness which had made Gordon a

popular hero. In his former period of office in the Soudan

I

130

GORDON AT KHARTOUM

[1884

he had had occasion to approve of the execution by one of

his lieutenants of Zobeir's son. Yet believing now that

Zobeir was a man who could hold Khartoum against the

Mahdi, and even recover a large part of the Soudan, he

declined to be influenced by any possible danger to himself

in bringing Zobeir up to Khartoum. He was, no doubt,

right in his belief. The experiment would, indeed, have

been a risky one. Zobeir might join the Mahdi ; or, if he

did not, he might become as troublesome to Lower Egypt

as the Mahdi could. But of his warlike reputation in the

Soudan, of his ability to rally the natives to him and hold

Khartoum if he chose to, there could be no possible

doubt.1 However, Gordon's wish never got beyond the

stage of suggestion. The general proposition that the

Soudan should not be abandoned had support in England ;

Khartoum left to be the capital of a slave-trading state was

not a pretty picture. But the difficulty was that no one

could think of any person capable of holding it except

Zobeir ; and the only practicable policy was that of sending

him. The Anti-Slavery Society hotly opposed it, and they

found the Government especially ready to listen to them,

since Gordon's proposal involved a direct British Com-

mission to Zobeir and a subsidy of money. At the same

time it was distinctly implied that the policy of evacuation

was beginning to slip into the background in Gordon's

mind. Two or three weeks after this Gordon finally

abandoned the idea. Towards the end of March two of his

pashas were defeated, by the treachery of their own troops,

in engagements near Khartoum ; Berber was seized with

panic, and all who could left the place. The fighting spirit

in Gordon was roused, and those in England and in Cairo

whose minds had been wholly set on withdrawing from the

Soudan to a point of safe defence for Lower Egypt were

staggered by receiving from him furious telegrams in which

he announced his intention of "smashing the Mahdi "

1 Lord Cromer's Modern Egypt, i 450.

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before considering anything else. His change of mind was complete. It is fair to pause here for a moment to consider how differently the situation must have appeared to him and to the Government at home. It is probable that only he knew the extent to which the Soudan provinces were at that moment mere detached headquarters amid a sea of Mahdism, islands incapable of communication. It may be doubted whether even before Gordon arrived the garrisons of the southern provinces—Darfur, under Slatin Bey, Bahr-el-Ghazal, under Lupton Bey, and Equatoria, under Emin Pasha—could possibly have made their way north. Their predicament weighed heavily on Gordon's mind; he could see no way of saving them and at the same time saving the garrisons of the eastern and northern provinces, Sennar, Kassala, Berbera, Khartoum and Dongola. The Soudan was cut in two halves by the Mahdi; and this explains the historic telegram despatched by Gordon on 7th April 1884, announcing his intention of retiring to the Equator, and leaving to the British Government "the indelible disgrace" of abandoning the northern and eastern garrisons. He intended evidently to gather up Lupton, Slatin and Emin on his way, and withdraw by the Congo, since he could see no possibility of conveying them northwards. It could hardly be of much profit now to speculate on what might have been done. Gordon, as we have seen, began by a proclamation which set the whole disaffected population of the Soudan on the alert for withdrawal movements, and went on to a misleading distinction between evacuation and abandonment. By the time that he sent the telegram of 7th April the situation had changed as completely as his own mind had changed. Khartoum was cut off from Dongola and Berber, and no relieving movement towards Berber from Suakin could be undertaken, because the weather was too hot for the marching of troops. The only thing that had not changed was the attitude of the British Government; and the

132 GORDON AT KHARTOUM [1884

result was a hopeless interplay of cross purposes for two or three months. Gordon, feeling himself shut up in Khartoum, was confident that, as his isolation was known, a relief expedition would be on the way to him, and he issued, therefore, whenever opportunity offered, intimations of his ability to hold out. The Government, never having had any intention of sending British troops to the Soudan, and interpreting Gordon's messages in a wholly different spirit from that in which they were sent, held to instructing him to withdraw, and awaited his appearance. Mr Gladstone's view, as late as 31st July 1884, was that to send an expedition either to Dongola or to Khartoum would be "to act in the teeth of evidence as to Gordon, which, however imperfect, is far from trivial."1 That Lord Hartington was as much bewildered as anybody by Gordon's behaviour and his contradictory telegrams may be seen from his letters to Lord Granville. "I have read Gordon's telegrams again," he wrote, "and I confess that I am utterly unable to understand them. . . . I think that all we can do is to look at the position as it is known to us from other sources, and to pay no attention to what he says." Granville was inclined to conclude, from the fact that messages were passing from Gordon to the Mudir of Dongola, that the Cabinet's messages were equally reaching Gordon and that he would not answer them.2 In the end it was "looking at the position as it is known from other sources"3 which at last moved the Government to undertake an expedition. The preliminary credit was voted on 8th August; and Lord Wolseley drew up a plan of campaign. This did not commend itself to General Stephenson, who was then in command at Cairo, and Lord Wolseley had to be sent out to take command. He left Cairo with his force on 5th October. By that time there had been no communication with Gordon for six months, except that on two or

1 Holland's Life of the Duke of Devonshire, i. 477.

2 Ibid. i. 489, 492

1884] GORDON AT KHARTOUM 133

three occasions in June and July messages had come from him asking as to the whereabouts of the relief expedition.

It had been a long delay ; but, as we have said, the blame which the Government has to bear should be placed further

back than these events, and on more general grounds. The confusion of ideas at the time must have been extreme,

and the blame must rest on the mistakes of omission and commission alike which led up to the events of 1884. It

is, for instance, worth recalling that Mr H. M. Stanley, who happened to reach London in July of this year from

the Congo, expressed himself in an interview as perfectly confident about Gordon. He derided the whole idea of a

Nile expedition in the summer (for which popular opinion in England was pressing), saying that the men would die

like flies; and he asserted that Gordon could leave Khartoum when he liked, and withdraw by the Congo—that he only needed “ to act like a soldier,” and rescue

would be unnecessary.1

With the undertaking of the expedition popular attention slackened. Little news was coming through from

Egypt, and what came was not of importance. It is more interesting to us now than it was to people then to know

that Major Kitchener was at Dongola, whence there was some hope of his making communication with Gordon.

If in the pause that ensued English people looked at affairs nearer home, they must have decided that, if their

attention had not been so taken up with Egypt, they would still have had a sufficiently exciting year. An earthquake

had occurred, which was distinctly felt in London and the Midlands, but was quite serious in Essex, where so much

damage was done in the villages that a fund had to be started for rebuilding houses. There was a succession of

dynamite explosions, generally occurring two or three at a time in different places, which gave the appearance of a

regular campaign. The long-expected County Franchise

1 Interview published in The Times, 29th July 1884.

134 GORDON AT KHARTOUM [1884

Bill had been produced, and over it Lords and Commons were flatly at war. The dynamite explosions began with a railway station series : on 27th February there was one at Victoria Station; fortunately it occurred in the small hours of the morning, and there was no loss of life. A day or two later infernal machines were discovered, before they went off, at Charing Cross and Paddington. On 31st May there were explosions at Scotland Yard, the Junior Carlton Club in Pall Mall, and a frustrated attempt at the Military Education Office in St James's Square; at the same time a bag of dynamite was found near the Nelson Column in Trafalgar Square. In September the alarm spread outside London, a quantity of dynamite being found at Sunderland and on the 13th, and an explosion taking place in the Council Chamber at Salishury on the 29th. Nervous as the public had become, there was by good fortune so little loss of life, or even injury, in these explosions that there was no panic ; nevertheless black bags without obvious owners were for a year or two regarded with extreme disfavour and suspicion.

The County Franchise Bill, which would in any case have given the Government plenty of work, found itself early in the year dragging an unexpected weight. On 7th February a meeting of members of Parliament was held at the House of Commons to consider the moving of a Woman Suffrage amendment to the Bill. One was drawn up, and the moving of it was undertaken by Mr Woodall ; it proposed to enfranchise women householders. The movement for enfranchising women was at this date influential, but limited. It had been in existence for some twenty years, and was almost exclusively a movement of educated women who, having found their own careers hampered by the absence of arrangements for admitting women to university courses and examinations, to professional diplomas and professional practice, naturally went on to contemplate the general position of women under the law and under

1884] GORDON AT KHARTOUM 135

social custom; and came thence to the conclusion, expressed for them most efficiently by J. S. Mill, that until women had the same political status as men they must continue to labour under disabilities in any society politically constituted. Theoretically the movement was not confined to the more highly educated classes of women; but practically, although its leaders spoke and wrote to some extent of the wage-earners, the active suffragists were women who had had a university training, or had qualified as doctors, or were distinguished writers. The pledged supporters of the movement were not very numerous, the annual income of the principal suffrage society being about £350 ¹; but its members were mostly women of proved capacity, and the suffragist cause did not lose by the limitation. Mr Woodall's amendment gave the movement an occasion such as it had not yet enjoyed. Since it had attained force and publicity its only opportunities, and they but rare ones, had been in the shape of private members' Bills, which no one took seriously. Now, however, an opening of a different kind presented itself, and frequent public meetings were held in support of Mr Woodall's amendment. Whether it was a genuine opportunity is questionable; it could hardly in cold blood be considered possible that a measure dealing only with a certain class of constituencies, and proceeding on lines already tried, should be the vehicle for an experiment in a wholly new principle over the entire kingdom. Moreover the subject fell instantly into the vortex of party. A good many Conservatives were said, indeed, to be convinced supporters of the movement—Lord Salisbury, Sir Stafford Northcote, Lord John Manners and Sir Michael Hicks Beach among them—and it is interesting to find The Times speaking of a Woman Suffrage measure as "the trump Conservative card which Lord Beaconsfield kept

¹ See, e g., report of the annual meeting of the society, The Times, 10th July 1880;

136 GORDON AT KHARTOUM [1884

in his hand." 1 But the honesty of general Conservative

support for the amendment was decply suspect. Mr Glad-

stone had announced that if the clause were carried he

would throw up the Bill, and thus a great deal of the

Opposition vote for it was purely opportunist. On 12th

June the amendment came up for discussion, and was

rejected by 271 votes to 135.

This adventure was speedily lost sight of in the gathering

of a far more considerable storm in regard to the Bill.

By assimilating the county franchise to that created in

the boroughs by the Acts of 1832 and 1867, the Bill

swept away the old property limitations of the vote in

country places, and gave it, as in boroughs, to the

occupiers of rated dwelling-houses. It thus enfranchised

the labourer; and the change, both in the number and

in the educational level of the electorate, was great. In

July the House of Lords rejected the Bill, some warning of

such an event being perhaps conveyed by the action of the

Opposition in the Commons who, on the third reading, did

not go into the Lobby at all, but walked out of the House.

The ground which the Lords alleged for their rejection of

the measure was that it was only half a scheme, and that a

redistribution of seats should have accompanied so large

an alteration of the electoral basis. Mr Gladstone, while

agreeing that the two operations should come into action

together, asserted roundly that to have grappled with them

in one Bill would have been an insane attempt. He

informed a party meeting, held at the Foreign Office

immediately after the vote in the House of Lords, of an

offer made to the Tories that, if the Bill passed, both Houses

should adopt an identical resolution saying that they had

passed the Franchise Bill in reliance on a promise that the

accompanying Redistribution Bill should be introduced

and passed the next year. The offer was characteristic

of the moderation with which Mr Gladstone handled the

1 13th June 1884.

1884] GORDON AT KHARTOUM 137

whole situation. There was not lacking a quantity of

strong feeling against the House of Lords which might,

if he had chosen, have been worked into passion. Indeed,

the summer and autumn saw some very downright

meetings in the country—in Chatsworth Park, at Leicester

and Manchester especially—and some violent ones; there

was a regular riot at Bournemouth at the end of July, and

another at Birmingham in October, when Sir Stafford

Northcote and Lord Randolph Churchill were refused a

hearing, and their platform was stormed after a free

fight. A Democratic Committee for the Abolition of the

House of Lords was established in London, Sir Wilfrid

Lawson, Mr Labouchere, Professor Beesly and Mr Brad-

laugh at its head—and it absorbed no doubt an earlier

body quaintly named “The Society for Removing Bishops

from the House of Lords.” But all this feeling did not in

the least hustle Mr Gladstone out of his chosen path. He

had set his mind on carrying his Bill, and he did not intend

to have it swamped in a general campaign between the two

Houses, or a general test of the constitutional privileges

of the Peers. The Tories were not in a strong position;

whatever may have been their real dislike of the new

franchise they had paid too much lip-service to it to

confront easily the indignation the Peers had roused.

“The Conservatives,” Mr Goschen wrote about this time,

“never pronounce against the Franchise; they have

never had a meeting against it; never spoken except

as regards the time of yielding.” 1 Moreover Mr Glad-

stone had a valuable ally in Queen Victoria, who,

dreading as she always did the Radical element in the

Cabinet, was only too ready to assist Mr Gladstone in

any course alternative to a wholesale attack upon the

House of Lords. She feared above all things the atti-

tude expressed by a most interesting new recruit of the

Ministerial benches in the House of Commons, Mr John

1 Ellyt's Life of Lord Goschen, i 227.

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[1884

Morley,1 who had said to a political audience : " Be sure

that no power on earth can henceforth separate the ques-

tion of mending the Commons from the other question of

ending or mending the House of Lords."2 The Queen's

influence was active throughout the months of recess, and

Mr Gladstone made handsome acknowledgment of its

patient and prosperous application.3

A session which had opened with the expectation that it

would be entirely concerned with Egypt and the Franchise

ended by fulfilling that prophecy. Various Bills were dis-

cussed ; a Merchant Shipping Bill, extending the Em-

ployers' Liability Act to shipping, and setting a limit upon

insurance of ships and cargo ; a London Government Bill,

setting up a single Municipality (a Common Council of 240

members to take over the powers of the City Corporation,

the Metropolitan Board of Works, the Commissioners of

Sewers, the magistrates for Middlesex, Kent and Surrey

within the limits, and the Burial Boards and Vestries,

reserving only the poor law, education and the police for

other control, and enjoining the acquisition by the new

body of the undertakings of the gas and water companies) ;

and finally a more curious Bill, designed to relieve the gold

shortage by turning the half-sovereign, which suffered

more than the sovereign from wear and tear, into a token

coin, and making sovereigns the only legal tender on Bills

of Exchange. But all three proposals were dropped.

A considerable measure, however, was the attempted

conversion this year of the National Debt. The scheme

was to convert six hundred millions of 3 per cent. stock into

2¾ per cent. stock, by issuing £108 of the new for every

£100 of the old. The high price of Consols for so many

years justified the belief that the interest was more than

the nation need pay, and a lower price would, it was argued,

1 He had been elected for Newcastle in 1883.

2 The Times, 31st July 1884.

3 Morley's Life of Gladstone, iii 138.

1884] GORDON AT KHARTOUM 139

have the advantage of making the security more market-able. The conversion scheme was gazetted on 8th August, but did not attain any great success; the public converted about nine and a half millions, and twelve millions which the Government held were also converted, but this was a very small proportion of the total.1

It was not altogether a happy year for such an attempt. The stock markets, disturbed by the uncertainty of our foreign relations, and by a heavy selling of Suez Canal shares, were too nervous for experiments. The bank rate had been reduced to 3 per cent., but only by a strictness on the part of the bank in fixing definite occasions for making advances to bill brokers. Trade was slack, except in the woollen industry; an abundance of shipping had depressed freights and checked shipbuilding; railway traffic returns were poor, and a coal strike was threatening in the Midlands. The competition of foreign manufactures was growing with the growing solidity of the German Empire and the growing immigrant population of the United States; the militant Tory spirits in England were divided between abusing foreign imports and abusing the demands of Trade Unionism.2 The new Bankruptcy Act was a source of some uneasiness; for while working well on the whole, and putting an end to the vicious private compositions with creditors, it was also keeping in existence firms of a somewhat shaky solvency, which shrank from the publicity of the new arrangements. The cotton strike begun in 1883 overshadowed the beginning of 1884. It may even have had some damping effect upon the progress of the Manchester Ship Canal scheme, which came before Parliament in a private Bill this year, and was discussed by a Select Committee of the House of Lords in the spring. The scheme had to meet the opposition of Liverpool, which

1 The Times, 18th October 1884

2 E.g Lord Dunraven and Sir E. Beckett (Lord Grimthorpe) in The Times, 4th November 1884.

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[1884

was expressed in the form of anxiety as to the possible

effect of the new waterway upon the existing channels of

the Mersey. The Bill passed its second reading in the

Commons; but came to grief in the general abandonment

of legislation during the Franchise controversy ; though

the determination of Manchester in the matter was seen in

the decision, taken later in the year, to promote another Bill

in the following session.

Manchester figured also in a remarkable controversy

which arose in the early autumn. It was said that the

corporation wished to undertake the management of a

hotel in the city. The truth at the back of the story was

that a hotel built on some land leased from the corporation

had been suddenly thrown on the corporation's hands by

the financial failure of the lessee, before its completion ;

and, rather than leave the place idle, a licensee had been

put in as the corporation's tenant. Birmingham had,

however, attempted before this to obtain the leave of

Parliament to carry on the business of a licensed victualler,

so that it was natural to suppose that Manchester was on

the same track. The controversy on the subject, which

was raised by a licensed victuallers' organisation, is chicfly

interesting because it revealed no intellectual objection to

municipal trading, as such ; the only argument was that

including hotel-keeping was going rather far. Meanwhile

the snormous impulse given to municipal affairs by the new

power to issue stock may be judged from a report published

early in 1884 of the towns which had already obtained the

power 1 ; they numbered no less than twenty-seven, and

the amount of authorised municipal stock had gone up

from five and a quarter millions to about seventy-five

millions. The local government debt of the country at

this time was already over a hundred millions.

In the region of social reform the year is notable for the

appointment of the Royal Commission on the Housing

1 The Times, 18th January 1884:

1884] GORDON AT KHARTOUM 141

of the Poor, which was gazetted on 4th March. The presence on the Commission of the Prince of Wales as chairman expressed strikingly the degree to which the general national conscience was aroused on the subject. The housing conditions in London were most prominently discussed (in January the Local Government Board had sent round a circular to the local authorities of London, pointing out their powers and duties under various Acts, as to the inspection of houses, the abatement of nuisances, and the demolition of unsuitable dwellings); but the public was well aware that sanitary conditions in country places were exceedingly bad. Some committees of private people in the richer parts of London had been investigating conditions in such districts as Southwark; so that in every way the commission came at a time likely to render it fruitful. It coincided with an event which, if as much designed for pleasure as for business, was likely in a small way to be of some assistance, the Health Exhibition, the successor to the Fisheries Exhibition of the previous year. Conferences on sanitary matters were held in connection with the exhibition; and both to them and to the housing question a renewed alarm of cholera gave great importance. The first anxiety arose from a case discovered at Port Said on board a homeward-bound troopship in April; at the end of June the disease appeared at Toulon, and spread to Marseilles, to Spain and to Italy; it continued to ravage the south of Europe almost until the winter set in. The precautions taken in England still followed the principle of improved sanitation, cleanliness, etc.; and out of this attitude grew the sharp attacks made in this year on the Duke of Bedford on account of the shameful condition of Covent Garden Market, where vegetables lay about rotting, and no standard of cleanliness had ever been enforced. "Mud-Salad Market" was the name Punch gave to it at this time. A somewhat odder, and yet no less lasting, result of the Health Exhibition was the sudden impulsion

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it gave to the consideration of healthy clothing. From

this year dates the rise of Dr Jaeger's teachings in England ;

and The Times somewhat rashly committed itself to the

assertion that Englishmen would not be ashamed of wearing

a comfortable coat because it was ugly.1 But healthiness

does not necessitate the colours in clothing which the

enthusiasts adopted ; and they remained, therefore, when

the first ardour of the movement waned, a somewhat

conspicuous snuff-brown band. The ordinary man had

not as a whole displayed much interest in the sanitary

conferences of the Health Exhibition ; but it was some

consolation to record that by its means he had learned

again to walk in gardens of an evening and listen to a band.

Indeed the ordinary man's pursuit of health was opening

up everywhere fresh avenues. Cycling was giving access

to country places, and the National Cyclists' Union and

the 'Cyclists' Touring Club were in their second year of

existence. Swimming was much in vogue, and the Beck-

withs' entertainment had for a season or two been one

of the most popular in London ; it was announced in the

summer of 1884 that Miss Beckwith was going to attempt

to swim the Channel. The family visit to the seaside in

the summer had ceased by now to be a subject for superior

jokes ; and Punch's butt had become the Cockney tourist

at 'Bullong.' However, Boulogne had no objection to

receiving him, and was in this year dredging its harbour to

allow of a fixed-hour steamship service across the Channel,

Lord Radnor at the same time being approached for

foreshore rights for a corresponding deep-sea harbour

at Folkestone.

At a great demonstration in July against the House of

Lords, after the rejection of the Franchise Bill, there was

a small group which, while joining in the demonstration,

preferred to have its own platform. It was a group of

socialists, and it attracted little attention until a speaker

4th October 1884.

1884] GORDON AT KHARTOUM 143

referred contemptuously to John Bright (who had been roused to battle again by the action of the Peers); whereupon the group was broken up by wrathful bystanders.

Yet though socialism was as yet contemptible to the London populace it was already giving rise to some anxiety.

Henry George was lecturing in London in January of 1884 on Land Nationalisation; and the frequent references to him, spiteful or humorous, in newspapers and comic prints throughout the year give some measure of the great impression he had made.

His theories coloured the whole of the Radical programme.

The first number of a new socialist paper, Justice, was published on 9th January 1884.

Meanwhile middle-class attempts to do what was just by the poor and the oppressed were increasing.

There was some inclination to perceive the rise of a "new Radicalism," humanitarian and courageous, but distinctly inclined to interference; trade unions were warned that it was not wise to invoke too much State interference.

But this was a misreading of the signs.

The fault of the trade unions was rather, as Mr Chamberlain saw, a more marked tendency to exclude politics from their sphere of work.

In a letter to a correspondent published early in the year Mr Chamberlain deplored this tendency, as "a practical abnegation of the most vital interests of the working classes."

There is in this an interesting indication that the disjunction of official Liberalism from the main current of social change was causing some anxiety to Radical leaders.

But the latter had no opportunity of keeping their minds with any continuity upon a restoration of understanding.

They missed such chances as were offered them, for instance, by the prolonged discussion of the condition of the Friendly Societies, some of which were not financially above suspicion; they did not see in the earnest work of the societies' most prominent critic, Canon Blackley, the nucleus of a scheme of national insurance for workmen.

They missed even such chances of action in the

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GORDON AT KHARTOUM [1884

socialist direction as were offered by the middle-class

themselves ; the railway companies, exhausted by com-

petition, were tentatively expressing, through some of their

chairmen, the opinion that increased control by the Board

of Trade would not be unwelcome, if it would limit the

competition. The Government had, in fact, come to office

with an imperfect appreciation of the spirit of advanced

sections of the community, and it never had leisure to

obtain a clearer view. Meanwhile the sense of the increased

power of the working classes in the community, their

improved economic and, consequently, civic weight, so to

speak, is shown by a certain tendency to call in question

the whole basis of taxation. It was urged that the corol-

lary of all the efforts being made for a social amelioration

should be a greater union in responsibility ; and the

debates on the County Franchise Bill were accompanied

by the criticism that we were multiplying the voters

without increasing the number of taxpayers. Hence arose

the plea that there should be less reliance on indirect

taxation ; the days had passed when we “ drank ourselves

out of the Alabama indemnity ” ; and that there should be

no exceptions from direct taxation. Another idea was that

the Income Tax should be abolished, and money raised by

stamps on every sale of goods. However, social ideas of

any kind failed to penetrate into the rather narrow circle

of the politicians’ outlook, and remained in the region of

private effort, where the benevolent spirit was more active

than the critical. New ideas, for instance, in connection

with elementary education showed to what astonishing

lengths the departure from the old individualism was

proceeding. Thoughtful people had begun to perceive

in the elementary schools not mere machines for giving

knowledge, after the operation of which children must sink

or survive, as they could, but also fresh opportuni-

ties for dealing with poverty and the inadequacies of

poor homes. Thus we find a New Education Code showing

1884] GORDON AT KHARTOUM 145

signs of an inclination to lay less stress on examination results, and more on a classification of children with proper regard to their health, and at the same time a movement of private philanthropy for providing the children of the very poor with decent clothing and with cheap meals at school. Compulsory education was having its indirect effect in bringing to the light of day children whose lack of clothing and nourishment would otherwise have been concealed in the swarming courts of town slums. It is curious to find that an early difficulty in the way of feeding children was the distrust they showed of such food as macaroni, lentils, haricot beans, and even of soup 1; so strong remained the British feeling that only meat made a meal, even among those who could hardly ever have meat. The fact that other forms of food were being used in this work may be an indication that the more well-to-do people were becoming aware of that narrowness of range in catering which was remarked a year or two earlier. The limitation of the meat supply by the embargo on imported cattle was still very great; but the chilled meat trade was steadily advancing. The largest cargo yet landed in England arrived on 26th September in a shipment of 22,000 carcasses, and 1000 pieces of beef, from New Zealand ; cold storage warehouses had been constructed under Cannon Street Railway Station in order to handle large consignments. It was fortunate that the leaders of this enterprise were persistent, for the impossibility under the existing regulations of moving live cattle was leading to some atrocious experiments in conserving dead meat ; thus a system had been devised of injecting boracic acid into an animal before killing it, the circulation of the blood conveying the preservative over the body ; and other experiments were made with carbonic acid.2 The new inventions which had so enlivened the past three or four years were

1 The Times, 13th December 1884.

2 Ditto, 31st January and 26th July 1884.

K

146 GORDON AT KHARTOUM [1884

in 1884 a little at a standstill. Electric lighting had not yet reached the stage of central supply stations, and to install it still meant buying a complete producing plant. The slowness of development was put down in some measure to the provisions of the Electric Lighting Act ; it was beginning to be felt that empowering local authorities to purchase lighting undertakings at the end of twenty-one years was rather too drastic, since the companies could not expect to cut out the gas companies with such speed as to recoup themselves within that period. In electric traction the year witnessed a distinct change of method. The " live rail " was replaced by the first practical " feed " system for street use, the employment of a sunk conduit carrying the current rail. It was tried at Blackpool, and with no small success. But it was expensive, and so many other experiments were being made in America that most of the tramway companies preferred to hold their hands for the present.

The opening of the new University College for Wales in September carried on the advance of provincial university education. About the same time the question of over-pressure in girls' schools, which had become a somewhat heated item in a general discussion of the emancipation of women and their entry into occupations hitherto exclusively masculine, came up again in the form of a report by Dr Crichton Browne. The report was considered somewhat rhetorical, and weak in evidence, and likely therefore to put an end to genuine discussion.

Autumn brought an unprecedented return of life to London. Instead of an adjourned session, such as had previously been the means of finishing a heavy year's work, the Government opened a new session in November. The reason, of course, was that the Franchise Bill, having been rejected by the Lords, could only reappear in a new session, and as a Redistribution Bill was ahead it was necessary to take at once the chances of a new attempt with the

1884] GORDON AT KHARTOUM 147

Franchise Bill—chances which the Queen's influence had, as we have said, rendered much brighter. The great world made the best of the business, decided to have an autumn season, and to amuse itself in London until Christmas—a thing it had never done before. In any case, the relations between the two Houses were exciting enough to make hostesses sure of vivacious dinner-tables and gossipy evening parties. The Tadpoles and Tapers came back to town discussing the propriety or otherwise of a creation of peers to pass the Bill, a course Mr Gladstone preferred to avoid1; and meanwhile two men from the opposing sides who could hardly have been better chosen—Lord Hartington and Sir Michael Hicks Beach—were parleying on possible means of adjustment. Outwardly there was to the last minute uncertainty as to the attitude of the House of Lords, Lord Salisbury still demanding the actual production of the Redistribution Bill before he would undertake to pass the Franchise Bill. But on 18th November the crisis was passed. The Franchise Bill was read a second time in the Lords, the committee stage being postponed for the Tory leaders to see in private the Redistribution Bill. All went well; on 27th November the Franchise Bill passed its committee stage; the Redistribution Bill was introduced in the Commons on 2nd December, and on the 6th Parliament adjourned until the following February. The Redistribution Bill, discussed as it had been in private between leaders of the two parties, promised an easy passage; but it, like the other Bill, raised at the outset a kind of corollary discussion. The advocates of Proportional Representation saw their opportunity, just as the advocates of Woman Suffrage had seen theirs, and held meetings in December to commend their views to the electorate. But they did not succeed in persuading Mr Gladstone; and Mr Courtney, the chief advocate of the new idea, resigned his post in the Government.

1 Morley's Life of Gladstone, vi. 130.

148 GORDON AT KHARTOUM [1884

The Redistribution Bill, in order to bring about the proper digestion of a large accession of voters, had to readjust drastically the electoral areas. Boroughs of less than 15,000 inhabitants were disfranchised, and thrown into county constituencies, to balance the new rural vote. Towns with a population of less than 50,000 were to have only one member; and in general, save for the very large towns, the constituencies were all to be single-member areas. By these means 160 seats were set free, to be allotted to the new constituencies produced by the re-division of the county areas.

Mr Gladstone had steered his Bills through after his own fashion. Only the boldest members of the party ventured to remark that he had done exactly what he said he would not do; he had let the Lords see the Redistribution Bill as a condition of passing the Franchise Bill. So unquestioned was his supremacy that his party accepted what he had done; indeed, they hardly realised it. But the true Radicals in after years put down to Mr Gladstone's action on this occasion the confidence with which the House of Lords rejected Liberal Bills. No other business had occupied Parliament, though there was at this time some discussion of our naval strength, and a demand for extensive building of torpedo boats. This class of boat, with its swiftness and deadliness of attack, was at the moment the idol of a navy which only four years before had seen the disappearance from the active list of the last of the wooden armour-clads.

Yet even the political excitement about the Franchise Bill could not conceal the more general anxiety about Gordon. In September news of gloomy omen had come. Colonel Stewart, Gordon's companion in Khartoum, on whose cool judgment the British authorities in Cairo had relied much in their bewilderment about Gordon himself, left Khartoum on 10th September, with some other Englishmen, in an attempt to reach Lower Egypt by way

1884] GORDON AT KHARTOUM 149

of the Nile. Their steamer was wrecked sixty miles below

Abu Hamed, and Stewart and his companions, having been

lured into a village, were murdered there. After this an-

other long silence ensued. Wolseley was making his way

up the Nile, but was not ready until December for the move

across the desert from Korti. There he divided his force

into two columns, one under Sir Herbert Stewart starting

to take the desert route, and the other under General Earle

to take the Nile route. On the day that Herbert Stewart

set out a message arrived from Gordon, on a scrap of paper

about the size of a postage stamp : "Khartoum all right.

14. 12. 84. C. G. GORDON." A verbal message accompanied

it to the effect that Khartoum was in great straits. But at

least Gordon was still alive, relief was approaching him,

and the year ended in good hope.

CHAPTER VII

1885: THE DEATH OF GORDON, THE GENERAL ELECTION,

AND THE RISE OF SOCIALISM

IT was a remarkable stroke of Fate which placed the Government at the beginning of 1885 in the position

of not having to "meet Parliament." As the session had been opened in November, and only adjourned over

Christmas, the reassembling in 1885 was not accompanied with the formalities of a Speech from the Throne, an Ad-

dress in either House, and a general engagement of forces. On the contrary, there was at the critical moment all the

natural instinct of the politician to carry through a large piece of half-finished work ; and, as the holding-over of the

important stages of the Redistribution Bill provided that condition,the Government did not actually have to go to the

country until the popular mind had undergone no slight change from a temper on the subject of Gordon, which

would beyond a doubt have wrecked the Liberal party at the beginning of the year.

The first news of the year from the Soudan was cheering. On 16th January it was announced in London that Herbert

Stewart had reached Metemmeh, and on the 22nd the papers had the news of the battle of Abu Klea. The story

of the fight was one to soothe ruffled popular pride ; the British square had been broken in the battle, but by

sheer fighting courage, sheer pluck, the troops had restored their formation, and it was reported that when the

enemy had drawn off 1100 of their dead had been counted on the field. Nevertheless the battle cost the life

of one who was a hero of adventure, Colonel Burnaby. The next piece of news was a blow. Herbert Stewart

150

1885] THE DEATH OF GORDON 151

himself had been shot on 18th January, while his force was advancing through bush the day after the battle, and his wound was grave. But the force pushed on, and on 21st January reached the Nile at Gubat. Here it met four steamers, the river fleet which Gordon had had at Khartoum, and with them was one more tiny scrap of paper. It bore the words : "Khartoum is all right. Could hold out for years. C. G. GORDON. 29. 12. 84." The decision to use the steamers for a hasty advance to Khartoum was instantly taken, but Sir Charles Wilson, who had succeeded Herbert Stewart in command, ordered certain reconnaissances to be made before they moved. They actually started up the Nile again on 24th January.

On 6th February England had the news that Khartoum had fallen, and the relief force had been too late. In official quarters it had been known twenty-four hours earlier. Sir Charles Wilson's little advance force, steaming up the Nile, had come in sight of Khartoum, and simultaneously under heavy firing from the river-sides, on 28th January. Their eyes searched for the flag that should have been flying. A man had shouted from the bank on the previous day that Khartoum had fallen, and Gordon was killed. The flag was not there. After satisfying himself by other observations that Khartoum was wholly in the Mahdi's hands Sir Charles Wilson turned his steamers and went downstream. For a few days England refused to believe the worst ; rumours about Gordon were rife among the natives around Wolseley's camp at Korti, and for ten days England remained in suspense. Then on 16th February was published a telegram from Wolseley, saying that Gordon had been killed. Just before sunrise on 26th January, with the steamers so close at hand, he had faced at the entrance to his residence the spears of the Mahdi's horde, and died as fearlessly as he had lived.

152 THE DEATH OF GORDON 1885

The angry excitement in England was intense. From the Queen herself, who sent her Ministers a sharp telegram of rebuke without observing the ordinary custom of putting the message in cypher,1 down to the humblest of her subjects, the outcry against Mr Gladstone and his Government arose. Gordon had indeed become almost a figure of legend in the popular mind; men told how he had gone through the whole of the campaign of the Ever-Victorious Army in China with no weapon but a cane, how little he had cared for danger in his earlier days in the Soudan.

His religious fervour, his disregard for himself, his missionary enthusiasm, all contributed to produce a kind of idealisation of him against which no amount of knowledge of the inner history of his last mission could have prevailed. Be this at least said to the honour of those most bitterly attacked on account of his death—that no word was uttered by them to destroy the character which the prevalent hero-worship built up. It is true that no contrary word would have been likely to carry weight; but the many that might have been said in heat or exasperation by those who were now held responsible were left unsaid.

In the nation's hour of bitterness the news published on 21st February that Herbert Stewart had died of his wound was a real additional grief. Gallant, frank and sweetnatured, he was in the opinion of many the finest soldier of them all. Parliament had just met again; and in spite of its not meeting with the usual discussion of the Government's work in a debate on an Address, it could not of course proceed far without an opportunity for arraigning Ministers. On 27th February a Vote of Censure was moved, and was only defeated by 302 votes to 288. The Government had to face a double disaffection among its followers, the greater one contained in the reason for the motion of censure, and a lesser one arising from the hostility of one group of Liberals to the announced policy of not allowing

1 Morley's Life of Gladstone, 111 167

1885] AND THE GENERAL ELECTION 153

the Mahdi to hold Khartoum. The latter led to a number

of abstentions from the division. But, as we have said, the

existence of a great piece of work, half-accomplished, tided

the Cabinet over the internal dissensions which followed

such a vote. It was agreed in the Cabinet that the Redis-

tribution Bill should be carried through. There was also

reason to believe that the Conservatives were not at the

moment very anxious to come into office, and shoulder the

thankless task of taking secondary decisions about the

Soudan.1 Indeed the Conservatives were in no sense in

a strong position; the reproaches for the death of Gordon

had not been aimed entirely in one direction, and Con-

servatives were reminded that they had at no period in the

past year displayed the possession of any policy of their

own which might have helped to guide events ; their work

of criticism and of extracting from the Ministry at any

given moment its intentions had been so ill-done that

there was even room for asking, with what would in

easier circumstances have been comical bewilderment,

whether we were actually at war, and if so, with whom.2

For one half of England these were the events that

shadowed and embittered the opening of 1885. There was

another half which had not at this time heart or strength

to look beyond its own urgent need. The winter was full

of distress and unemployment. Early in January three or

four thousand men in Birmingham presented themselves,

orderly, quiet, but near starvation, before the mayor,

asking for work. From every great town came a similar

cry, and in London the distress was as much greater as the

poor streets spread further. Deputations had gone to the

Lord Mayor in earlier years, and a few thoughtful people

had paid attention to them. Now with the more bitter

need came a new and more menacing frame of mind

among the men. On 16th February a deputation of

unemployed went to the Local Government Board, where

1 The Times, 2nd March 1885. 2 Ditto, 14th February 1885.

154 THE DEATH OF GORDON [1885

they were received by Mr George Russell, the Parliamentary Secretary. He could make them no more than an official reply; the problem they represented could hardly be said officially to have any existence. That fact was, to the men concerned, the heart of their reproach ; and this was what they meant when they asserted at the end of their fruitless visit that the Board and the Government would be responsible for the deaths that destitution would bring in the next few weeks. " Responsible for murder " was the exaggerated phrase they used ; but they saw strong and willing men being pushed out of life, and if it were not a deliberate process, such as might fairly be called murder, then the sooner someone began to deliberate about it the better.

As the men left the Local Government Board they distributed a manifesto fiercely worded against a Government which had acknowledged its helplessness ; the manifesto bore the names of John Burns, J. E. Williams, William Henry, and James Macdonald. Round the corner in Downing Street they held a defiant meeting before the police had gathered force to stop them, and a man spoke hanging to the cross-bar of a lamp-post. We may picture him there-the first portent of a series of troubled years.

The problem of the unemployed had, we have remarked, no official existence. Yet at this very moment it came nearer to having one than it was to come again for some years. At the end of January a conference, extraordinary to look back upon, took place in London. It was called the Industrial Remuneration Conference, and it had been rendered possible by an anonymous gift of £1000 for the purpose. The fact is significant of how much the social unrest had begun to impress thoughtful people, however little appearance it made on the surface of things. The proceedings of the conference are a most interesting index of the state of sociological opinion at the time of the dissolution of the old individualism. The intellectuals of

1885] AND THE GENERAL ELECTION 155

the official and political world met face to face the teachers of socialism, and those leaders of the trade unions who were introducing profound changes into the theory of trade combination. Sir Charles Dilke presided over the meeting. Lord Bramwell read a paper against socialism; Mr Bernard Shaw joyously defended a thesis that the landlord, the capitalist and the burglar were equally damaging to the community. Mr Arthur Balfour criticised Henry George's Progress and Poverty; Mr Shaw Lefevre spoke of the English land system as "relics of feudalism" which should be swept away; Mr Williams, of the Social Democratic Federation, retorted that when Mr Chamberlain spoke of nationalising the land, but avoided saying anything about manufactures, he was but an "Artful Dodger." Mr John Morley, with a watchful eye upon the proceedings of the Fair Trade League, warned the Conference of the fallacies of the Imperial Zollvercin school, and of the hopelessness of expecting any colony to give up its tariff. In the less controversial hours of the conference the Rev. H. Solly preached the doctrine, more familiar to our day than to his, of avoiding congestion of labour by the institution of industrial villages; and Mr John Burns, with no little common-sense, pointed out how much the principle of socialism was already embodied in the normal activity of great and advanced municipalities.

There was leaven enough here, and some of it seemed to be already at work in the community. Mr Shaw Lefevre's references to the land had this additional point—that he had been Chairman of a Departmental Committee which had reported in the middle of January in favour of an allotment system for labourers; and Mr Jesse Collings was at the height of his advocacy of small holdings, while Mr Chamberlain was making speeches which were thought to point not obscurely to a special taxation of landed property such as might advance a break-up of big estates.1 Again

1 The Times, 5th February 1885.

156 THE DEATH OF GORDON [1885

the hostility visible on one side of the conference to the middleman and the capitalist had its practical counterpart in the advancing work of the co-operative movement. It was already including both production and distribution, though it was more engaged in the latter. Mr Burns's reference to municipalities was also full of significance. The opinion of the social reformers of the period that " the era of administration had come " issued in January 1885 in the formation of the Fabian Society, whose principle was the advancement of socialistic ideals at every opportunity afforded by the existing machinery of the State, in contradistinction to those socialists who wished to begin by recreating the machinery. Mr Bernard Shaw had appeared at the Industrial Remuneration Conference as a representative of this new society. The Fabians based their hopes mainly on Local Government. The great municipalities had at the moment not much further to expand ; the chief project of the year, that of Manchester's water-supply from Thirlmere, had been really settled when parliamentary powers for the work had been obtained in 1879, though six years had intervened before the Water Committee of the Council resolved to commence the undertaking. But the lesser municipalities might still be aroused ; and in any case there remained the prospect of reorganisation of county government, which was still an unfulfilled promise.

Once again, just when a domestic problem had gathered force and impetus which might have moved Parliament, an urgent distraction intervened, and again it was a bequest of "Beaconsfieldism." It came this time from Afghanistan. Russia, advancing her possessions in Central Asia, had annexed Turcoman territory ; and the necessary consequence had been a commission to delimit the frontier between that territory and Afghanistan. The British relations with the Ameers were such that the commission consisted of British and Russian diplomats. While they

1885] AND THE GENERAL ELECTION 157

were at work Russian troops came into conflict with Afghan troops at Penjdeh, routed them after a heavy fight, and occupied the place. On this question Mr Gladstone showed none of the lack of interest which had been so fatal in Egypt. Partly, no doubt, this was due to the detached sharpness of the incident; there was no ambiguity as to England's position. But at the same time, however serious the matter was at the moment, however anxious the diplomatic problem, the fact remains that the Penjdeh incident could be looked back upon afterwards as " a perfect godsend " from a Liberal politician's point of view.1 England was so much roused that a vote of credit was passed with no difficulty, the reserves were called out, and every eye was turned upon the possibility of war with Russia. Mr Gladstone, seizing the opportunity to deplore a distraction of our forces, was able to abandon quietly the whole of the Khartoum problem, and in addition to meet the remaining costs of the Soudan expedition, amounting to four and a half millions, out of a vote of credit already obtained, instead of having to move a separate vote and thereby definitely raise the question of abandoning Khartoum. Thus Mr Gladstone achieved the feat of satisfying at one and the same time the Radicals, by removing the possibility of more bloodshed in Egypt, and the Whigs, by opposing Russian aggression. The result rewarded his admirable party skill. The Russian menace subsided, and by the beginning of May an agreement had been reached which removed all danger. Wolseley was ordered home from Dongola, the decision was taken to establish the Egyptian frontier at Wady Halfa, and the hot fit in England passed as opportunely as in one sense it had arisen. Baring's despatches from Egypt were to the effect that, while he could not pretend to agree in all the decisions that had been taken, he was sure that the general lines of the Government's policy were perfectly practicable, and

1 Holland's Life of the Duke of Devonshire, iii. 31.

158 THE DEATH OF GORDON [1885

would, if persevered in, lead to success. On 30th June the Mahdi died, and his place in the Soudan was taken by the Khalifa.

A minor interest brought out by the return of the troops was the fact that, for the first time, colonial troops joined the British regular forces in an affair in which their colony was not directly concerned, and took, as it were, Imperial status. An Australian contingent had been landed at Suakin, and had taken part in operations under Sir Gerald Graham. With this development of colonial spirit may be linked a speech made by Mr Goschen at Manchester in February, which marks the beginning of the most striking change of our time in the hierarchy of Government departments. He pointed out that colonising, both by the British and by other nations, had now spread so widely that in every part of the world Britain had civilised neighbours ; therefore statesmanship, which had never found a home at the Colonial Office, would have to be brought to bear upon our colonial relations and upon the foreign relations springing out of them. For the moment this pronouncement lost its value amid the difficulties of the year, but it deserves to be recorded in its place.

The Government appeared now to have ridden out another storm. But the Cabinet was working uncomfortably ; Mr Chamberlain was making speeches which his less Radical colleagues disliked ; coercion was holding Ireland down ; and the question of relieving its severity and at the same time introducing some measure of local self-government was a constant source of friction amongst Ministers. On 8th June the Government fell, being defeated on an amendment to the second reading of the Budget, dealing with the proposed increase of the beer duty. It was common knowledge that the Government Whips had deliberately permitted the defeat. Mr Gladstone resigned. His action has a place in

1885] AND THE GENERAL ELECTION 159

constitutional history, since it had not hitherto been customary for defeat on a minor point to involve resignation, while a government had a majority for its general policy.1 But on the other hand the smallness of the majority on the Vote of Censure would have been sufficient cause for a change of government, if the desire to pass the Redistribution Bill had not operated. The step that was now taken caused some difficulty. A dissolution of Parliament was impossible until both the new franchise and the new distribution of seats were in operation; and it became necessary therefore for Lord Salisbury to consider taking office without a majority in the Commons. Not unnaturally he began by stipulating for a promise of support from the outgoing Liberals. In the end he took office without any definite promise, but with an understanding that necessary matters, such as supply, would not be contested. Yet the brief remainder of the life of this Parliament was not to be devoid of interest or importance. Now that the party balance was again in question the Irish vote recovered that power of swaying the scales, which since 1882 it had largely ceased to possess. For some time coercion, which at the period of the Phœnix Park murders had been restored without compunction, had been afflicting Radical consciences; though the revival of dynamite outrages had blurred sensitiveness on the subject. Those outrages had not ceased. At the very beginning of January 1885 there was another explosion on the Underground Railway, this time between Gower Street and King's Cross stations; only slight personal injuries resulted. On 24th January there was another group of simultaneous explosions, such as the previous year had seen, and these were the most notorious explosions of this period of Fenianism. They occurred in Westminster Hall, in the House of Commons itself, and in the White Tower

1 See an article on English Public Life in The Edinburgh Review, July 1911.

160 THE DEATH OF GORDON [1885

of the Tower of London. In Westminster Hall two

policemen were very seriously injured, but practically no

damage, save to the stone flooring, was inflicted on the

building; the concussion had the extraordinary effect

of shaking down from the timbers of the roof the

dust of ages, and those who entered the hall directly

afterwards walked on a thick grey carpet of it. Parlia-

ment had not yet met ; consequently the explosion in the

House of Commons, beyond half-wrecking the seats and

galleries, had no result, except the natural alarm at the

thought that dynamite could be deposited in a spot

normally so well policed. In the Tower of London several

people were injured, and damage done by a fire which

followed the explosion. Yet when party exigencies

required it, politicians did not find that difficulty in keeping

their minds clear of a confusion between Fenianism and the

Home Rule movement, which they were equally ready on

other occasions to indulge. Some of them displayed

certainly after the change of government a suppleness

which those who were not politicians found unaccountable.

The spectacle of Lord Randolph Churchill supporting, and

even Sir Michael Hicks Beach regarding benevolently,

a motion by Parnell calling attention to Lord Spencer's

" maladministration of the law " under the Coercion Act,

was bewildering to most, and repugnant to many. Lord

Randolph Churchill's reputation stamped his share in

the matter as being purely tactical. But what was to be

thought of the speech delivered in the House of Lords

by the new Viceroy of Ireland, Lord Carnarvon ? 1 He

had been Governor-General of British colonies, and in his

speech he remarked that, as he had seen those communities

living in loyal obedience to the law and the Crown, so he

could not see at home " any irreconcilable bar to the unity

and amity " of English and Irish. It was a hint, rather

than a statement ; the only positive part of the speech was

1 The Times, 7th July 1885

1885] AND THE GENERAL ELECTION 161

its repudiation of coercion. But since it was a speech made

by the new Viceroy in the presence of the new Prime

Minister (and a speech by a viceroy was in any case so un-

usual that it had had but two precedents since the Union)1

no slight interpretation of its meaning could easily be

formed. It was not an unfair conclusion that the precedent

of the self-governing colonies was in the Ministry's mind.

What had the Liberals to set against it ? The answer is,

a policy of local self-government, for which at this moment

Mr Chamberlain stood most prominently. He was taking

a strong line, and in June 1885, just after the defeat of

Mr Gladstone's Ministry, had shown his sense of the

suddenly restored importance of the Irish vote by making

the famous speech in which he compared the existing rule

of Ireland to the rule of oppressed Poland; an Irishman

"could not move without an official controlling him."

At the same time his policy amounted not to a separate

government for Ireland, but only to a system of local

councils, under a central board in Dublin. Even that

degree of Irish independence had not been accepted by

most of his colleagues ; and meanwhile on the Conservative

side Lord Randolph Churchill's fair words to Ireland were

so much disliked that at a great meeting at Liverpool,

which he addressed at the end of July, the two members

for the constituency in which he spoke took the serious

step of declining to appear on the platform. The Irish

party was thus confronted with a situation in which

two conciliatory policies were being expressed, but neither

with such authority that it could be definitely selected at

the expense of the other. Strong as Lord Carnarvon's

speech had been, it could not be used to pin the new

Government down. As soon as Liberals began to for-

mulate the idea that between Lord Salisbury, Lord

Randolph Churchill, and Parnell there was an understand-

ing as to the support of the Irish vote, it was seen that

1 Morley's Life of Gladstone, iii. 211.

L

162

THE DEATH OF GORDON

[1885

nothing had happened to render impossible a flat denial

of any such understanding.1

A summer of most unusual heat interrupted political

warfare. The thermometer more than once reached

90° in the shade; and trade, which had begun the

year somewhat slackly, had no chance of recovery when

the heat combined with the collapse of the session to send

people at an early date out of town. The sight of the

unemployed at the beginning of the year had given some

measure of the commercial conditions. There were those

among business men who thought that one cause of weak-

ness was that means of production had outstripped means

of distribution; this was a Lancashire view. Trade was

bad not only in England, but all over the world, largely

because of the appreciation of gold; and at the same time,

although capital was cheap, there was little encouragement

towards speculation.2 A Royal Commission on Trade

had been asked for, and was believed to be in process of

formation; but its actual appearance was delayed, and

many people felt that after all, with the various nostrums

then in the market—Bimetallism, Fair Trade, and the

repeal of the Bank Act, for example—a commission might

be but a hotbed for faddists. Its best work would prob-

ably lie in inquiring into the relations between British

traders and foreign customers, and into the possibility of

more assistance to those relations from the Foreign Office.

Meanwhile so much change was beginning in the banking

world that it seems to be fair to conclude that the struggle

of trade with enlarged competition and narrowed coinage

supply was leading to a reconsideration of the principles

of banking. In 1885 Glyn, Mills, Currie & Co. decided

to register themselves under the Companies Acts (though

not with limited liability), and so undertake the statutory

duty of publishing a balance sheet; this was thought to be

1 See The Times, 8th and 10th August 1885.

2 See a speech by Mr Goschen, The Times, 24th June 1885.

1885] AND THE GENERAL ELECTION 163

a good example for private banks to follow. An equally important change is seen in the commencement about this time of the absorption of small banks into larger combinations; the Capital and Counties Bank took over the Gloucestershire Banking Company in 1885; and there had previously been one or two amalgamations in the Birmingham district. The relief of the gold supply had not yet begun, though the progress of events in the Transvaal is marked by the description of the new "slimes" process for dealing with gold from deep levels.1

Early in the summer the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Poor issued a first interim report. It recommended for the time being a more active enforcement of the existing law; but it proposed also the purchase of three prison sites-those of Coldbath Fields, Pentonville, and Millbank-and setting them free for housing purposes by demolishing the prisons. That at Coldbath Fields was already out of use, and Millbank was shortly to be abandoned as a place of detention. A Bill to forward these recommendations was passed by Parliament after the change of Government. It also strengthened and made applicable to the whole country certain powers of the Local Government Board hitherto confined to London, and contained a provision that anyone letting a house to a tenant without taking reasonable precautions for the health of the inmates would be liable for any death due to his negligence. A more remarkable provision (especially as events had placed the Bill in Tory hands) was a stipulation that the two prison sites which it had been decided to take over should not be taken at their market value; this was regarded as a step towards State socialism.2 Still more curious in the mouth of Lord Salisbury, who moved the second reading of the Bill in the House of Lords, was a clause deciding that the price of land

1 The Times, 12th August 1885.

2 Ditto, 17th July 1885.

164 THE DEATH OF GORDON [1885

for housing purposes was not to be the best that could be got, but the best that in all the circumstances could reasonably be obtained. So easy a thing was the Fair Rent principle when its field of operation was not Ireland ! Oddly enough, there was less comment on the clause empowering the Local Government Board to set Housing Acts in operation, a duty hitherto left to local authorities.

Society lost in this year two or three notable figures. Lord Houghton died in August with one of the most famous and most charming of death-bed sayings on his lips : " Yes, I am going to join the majority, and, you know, I have always preferred minorities." Both the charm and the truth of the saying were characteristic of him ; he was never prone to take the facile view of things ; and under his typically English appearance there lay an essentially un-English nature, alike in his ease of manner and in his wide tolerance.

At the beginning of October died Lord Shaftesbury, a man whose natural goodness directed him, as perhaps natural goodness seldom does, into the very paths where he could most fulfil himself. He was proud, somewhat intolerant of opposition, unyielding in principle, and for those reasons unlikely to have made his life successful in the normal paths of office ; but, diverted by his passionate sympathy and eager mind into philanthropic paths, he found every quality he had work together for good.1 He died before he had seriously to measure his zeal for doing what he thought right by the working poor against the working men's new inclination to judge what they themselves thought to be their due from the community. But his advocacy of the Factory Laws had been the first assault upon individualism—an assault made much more effective by the support of his great name. A person socially less lofty, but none the less a real figure of the

1 For the characters of Lord Houghton and Lord Shaftesbury see Mr G. W. E. Russell's Collections and Recollections, chapters iii. and v.

1885] AND THE GENERAL ELECTION 165

London world, was Sir Moses Montefiore, who died in July, well past his hundredth year; he was associated with the Rothschilds, and had been the second Jewish sheriff of London, just after the days of Emancipation.

Of material progress the year offers little to record. The Manchester Ship Canal Bill at last was law, after having had to be promoted three times. The enormous cost of these preliminary stages raised the whole question of the oppressiveness of private bill procedure, and the futility of a separate inquiry before a committee of each House; but the criticism died down in the face of more stirring parliamentary events. Before the end of the year it was said that the project had already reduced railway freights between Manchester and Liverpool from 9s. 2d. a ton to 8s. a ton.1 Naval experts were excited by the trials of the first submersible boat. It had been invented by Nordenfeldt, the gunmaker, and it was sixty-four feet long, constructed of steel plates varying from five-eighths of an inch in thickness at the centre to three-eighths of an inch at the ends. It was submerged partly by filling water-tanks and partly by the action of vertical propellers, and when under water its fire-box was sealed, and pressure was obtained from tanks previously heated. Its best performance was staying down for six hours with a crew of four men.2 The invention gave fresh point to the advocacy of liquid fuel for the navy, which Admiral Selwyn started this year. But a steam submarine was not a very practicable machine, and the idea made no real advances till electricity had become much more potent. A new electric locomotive made its appearance in November, the fresh principle being a revolving motor rendering belt transmission unnecessary, which was one more step toward electric trams. Meanwhile the steam tram at last invaded London, and one was running on the North

1 The Times, 30th October 1885

2 Ditto, 1st October 1885

166 THE DEATH OF GORDON [1885

Metropolitan lines. A strange new method of propelling vehicles must be modestly recorded at this point. A Mr Butler constructed a vehicle, in the form of a tricycle, which was driven by an internal combustion engine. Ever since the days of Trevethick's steam carriage, in 1802, mechanical propulsion of carriages had interested inventors. Against a dead weight of opposition they pursued their schemes, and for heavy haulage steam traction engines had long been in use, under the strict limitations of the Act of 1865, which forbade a speed of more than four miles an hour, and enjoined that every such vehicle must be preceded by a man carrying a red flag. Even this discouragement did not wholly extinguish invention, and in 1881 an attempt, though a vain one, had been made to prove that the Act did not apply to a steam tricycle. Mr Butler's was a completely fresh start. He applied to his machine the principle of exploding vapour—benzoline vapour was the one he used—inside the piston cylinder by means of an electric spark. At the same time Gottlieb Daimler in France was applying the same principle, but using petroleum spirit to provide the vapour.1 As far as England is concerned the subject has to be left for the present, with Mr Butler's isolated idea useless in face of the Act of 1865, and commercially still-born.

The demand for sixpenny telegrams had been acceded to,2 but the details required no little arrangement, since under the old minimum of a shilling the names and addresses of the receiver and the sender had been transmitted free of charge, and the Post Office declined to continue this practice with a sixpenny minimum. This year also saw the completion of the Revised Version of the Bible, the version of the Old Testament having been finished on 1st May, after fifteen years' work. The New Testament version had been finished and published two or three years

1 See the article on Motors in the Encyclopædia Britannica.

2 The new system came into force on 1st October 1885.

1885] AND THE GENERAL ELECTION 167

carlier. The Church of England was at present in smoother

water, and the Ritual controversy had largely declined.

Evangelicalism, indeed, had not weakened; for a year or

two earlier the Church Army had been founded (it held its

first large annual meeting on 28th May 1884) to take up

in the streets and byways the same kind of work as the

Salvation Army was doing. The latter still met with

strong opposition; dragoons had to be called out to quell

a fight between it and the Skeleton Army at Worthing,

and there were savage riots at Derby, in which stones flew

and the band instruments were used as weapons. A

somewhat old-fashioned outbreak of morality in this year

was the discussion of the nude in art which accompanied the

course of the Royal Academy Exhibition in the summer.1

A more important event in the history of art is that in 1885

was founded the New English Art Club. There had been

until now hardly any opportunity for an artist not in accord

with the theory and practice of the Royal Academy to set

his work before the public. The Grosvenor Gallery had,

indeed, attached to itself the Pre-Raphaelite group and

the æsthetic movement. But it had no inclination to

pass outside the safe financial ground provided by a craze.

Meanwhile there had been growing up in England a school

of painters, trained for the most part in Paris, whose work,

not so mannered as to take the ecstatic fancy of the

æsthetic, nor so consciously original as to have a public of its

own, like Whistler's, was nevertheless vital and revolution-

ary enough to fail altogether of entrance to the Academy.

The work of this school had been the most notable feature

of the Glasgow Exhibition of 1881, and it was high time

that it should be seen in London. The New English Art

Club gathered genius and talent which has ever since

sapped the reputation of the Royal Academy.

In the world of education the year 1885 is significant

as showing the first signs of a general acceptance of

1 The Times, 22nd May, and other dates, 1885.

168 THE DEATH OF GORDON [1885

new duties. At a conference in Manchester it was stated

with some pride that Owens College was in a position

to offer to the working man a choice of three hundred

lectures, the cost of which was voluntarily met by Man-

chester residents. Towards the end of the year the

People's Palace scheme took shape, the object again being

the provision of advanced education for working men and

women; and something of the same sort is to be traced

in the movement for making the London University a

teaching body, instead of a merely examining body.

The year saw also a notable step forward in science,

photography being for the first time successfully applied

to astronomical purposes. The value of this was promptly

seen in the proposal, emanating in the first instance from

Dr Gill, Astronomer Royal at the Cape, for international

co-operation in a great work of charting the heavens.

The autumn brought with it the uproar of a general

election, in which one great issue was obscured by con-

flicting half-lights. Over the field of politics there were

issues enough. Mr Chamberlain's speeches outlined the

whole range of the Radical programme, including bank-

ruptcy reform, a reform of the Charity Commission with

a view to enlarging the social area of educational endow-

ments, county government reform, free education, cottages

and land for labourers, shipping measures, a graduated

income tax; and some form of self-government for Ireland,

and disestablishment of the Church of England. Mr Glad-

stone's manifesto was naturally less far-reaching. On his

own side critics called it a "rather weak production," and

opined that "if it was not that the party are ready to take

anything from him, it would fall rather flat." 1 He placed

first reform of the procedure of the House of Commons, and

on county government reform avoided committing himself

to a definite scheme; on the land question he proposed the

1 Lord Hartington to Mr Goschen : Elliot's Life of Lord Goschen,

ii. 2;

1885] AND THE GENERAL ELECTION

169

abolition of entail and a system of freer transfer, adding

that he " would rejoice if these or other means in them-

selves commendable led to a large increase in the owners

of the soil"; on disestablishment he spoke oracularly, and

seemed to regard it as but a distant possibility ; on free

education he was careful to point out the disadvantages ;

on Ireland he expressed himself in favour of the greatest

possible extension of self-government consistent with

maintenance of the authority of the Crown and Parliament.

Of these proposals one—that of county government

reform—was as prominent in the programme of the other

side. The existing confusion of the spheres of local

authorities was extreme, the justices administering some

Acts, the local Health Boards others, the Guardians of the

Poor and the School Boards still others. Disestablishment

had appeared somewhat unexpectedly as a very forcible

item in the election ; apparently there was some hope that

the newly enfranchised might be moved on the subject,1

and it was at any rate found, as the polling time approached,

that nothing more interested the electors. Mr Chamber-

lain had by this time rather drawn in his horns ; he had had

an interview with Mr Gladstone at Hawarden on 8th

October, and by the end of the month was saying that

disestablishment could hardly be dealt with in the coming

Parliament. But many candidates were already com-

mitted to it, and churchmen were roused in every constitu-

ency. Against the general Liberal programme the Tories

had not, beyond county government, much positive line

of their own. But they made a good fight out of the

differences between Mr Gladstone and the advanced

Radicals. Lord Randolph Churchill vastly increased his

reputation at this sort of warfare, and did not shrink from

competing with Mr Chamberlain on his own caucus ground.

He became president of the Conservative News Agency,

an organisation for supplying caricatures and pamphlets

1 See, e.g., The Times, 11th April 1885.

170

THE DEATH OF GORDON

[1885

to candidates in all constituencies, and for supplementing

the resources of local newspapers. The mistake of raising

the disestablishment question enough to irritate the clergy,

and then dropping it enough to discourage Nonconformists,

was a notable score for the Tories. It may be added here

that the Woman Suffrage movement had been so far

forwarded by the opportunities it had received for debate

in the House that it had been able to exact after the

General Election more precise information of the position

occupied by the question in the opinions of the new House.

Out of 495 members for England and Wales 253 were in

favour of Woman Suffrage and 102 against; of the 72

Scottish members 24 were in favour and 18 against; of

the 86 Irish members 25 were in favour and 3 against.

Behind all the electoral conflict was that issue which we

have described as obscured by half-lights. The Liberals

offered Ireland local government by councils. The Tories

made no specific offer; but it was fairly well known that

Parnell had spoken of having got "something better"

than the Liberal offer.1 He himself had declared outright

for national independence in a speech at Dublin in August

1885; but no one in England supposed the "something

better" to amount to this ideal. The final disposal of the

Irish vote in English constituencies turned on a matter

that involved no revelations. Mr Gladstone in a speech at

Edinburgh had spoken of the "dangers of a situation in

which either party would be liable to be seduced from the

right path by the temptation which might be offered to

it by the vote of the Irish members," and exhorted the

electors of Great Britain to return one party or the other

by a majority which would make it independent of the Irish

vote. Some of his followers were dismayed; they ex-

pected Parnell instantly to denounce Gladstone as insincere

in his promises to Ireland, if he was so anxious for an

independent majority. But Parnell still used no language

1 Barry O'Brien's Life of Parnell, ii. 137.

1885] AND THE GENERAL ELECTION 171

but that of attempting to persuade Mr Gladstone to formulate precisely his proposals with regard to Ireland. Mr Gladstone replied with, a rather bantering speech, to the effect that he was not in office, and that it did not lie with him to make proposals. This it was that stirred Parnell to fury, and he issued the sharp manifesto by which the Irish vote went to Conservative candidates.

It did not, however, carry the day in Great Britain : the result of the election showed a return of 333 Liberals against 251 Tories. But the pledged Home Rule party, the unquestioning adherents of Parnell, who had been but 35 in 1880, were now a solid block of 86 ; they had carried every seat in Ireland that was not Conservative. As for the newly enfranchised electorate, analysis showed that the Tory fears had been singularly unfounded, and their opposition to the Franchise Bill, as a piece of party legislation, singularly foolish. Of a county electorate of 2,303,133 voters no less than 1,837,088 had gone to the poll, and of these votes 1,020,774 had been Liberal, and 816,314 Conservative. It was a fair deduction that party divisions ran now to the bottom of English life, and that there was no such class feeling as had made the sweeping results after the Reform Bill of 1832. A minor interest of the election, but one which closes for the time a subject of prominence in the few previous years, was the general defeat of the " Fair Trade " party. Its leader, Mr Ecroyd, had been beaten in Lancashire ; Mr James Lowther lost his seat in Lincolnshire, and four or five other candidates committed to the policy had been beaten. A general criticism of the results on the Tory side was that apathy among their leaders on domestic questions, and the activity and force of the trade unions, had largely turned the election.1

Almost immediately, however, this second start for the Liberals was gravely compromised. On 18th December was published the famous rumour that Mr Gladstone was con-

1 The Times, 15th December 1885.

172 THE DEATH OF GORDON [1885

sidering a scheme of complete Home Rule for Ireland ; the denial which followed was cautious, amounting to no more than that the statement was unauthorised. It was enough to set at work the liveliest speculations as to the position of Lord Hartington, Mr Chamberlain, Mr Goschen, and other Liberal leaders, whose repudiation of any measure of real independence for Ireland had been emphatic ; and the political year ended in uncertainty and disturbance.

Socially, too, it ended in apprehension. The approach of winter revived all the distressing evidences of unemployment, and a new militant atmosphere had been aroused by the determined campaign of the police against street meetings. In September occurred the first of the cases to attract much attention. The police arrested a banner-bearer in the midst of a socialist procession, and in the police-court case which followed William Morris was fined for interference. This drew attention to the Social Democratic Federation, which in April had hardly succeeded in interesting even the casual crowd of a Hyde Park meeting.

The free speech campaign grew before the end of the year to a size which caused The Times to pronounce upon it as very dangerous and ominous, when it was taken in conjunction with the Irish agitation, the Crofter movement in Scotland, and the whole programme of advanced Liberalism.1 Within twelve months its ominousness depended on no conjunction with other movements. In general elections labour had as yet no large direct share ;

but the Trade Union Congress issued in September an election address to the trades bidding them demand of the candidates promises of land for allotments, of free elementary education, and of the removal of " all unnecessary obstacles to civil and magisterial work." In this last direction a step had already been taken by the appointment of the first working-men magistrates 2—a printer,

1 3Ist December 1885.

2 Announced by The Manchester Guardian in May 1885.

1885] AND THE GENERAL ELECTION 173

a spinner and a weaver, all secretaries of trade unions,

being appointed to the Bench of the Duchy of Lancaster

in May, and a miners' agent being appointed in June.

In the closing days of 1885 occurred the last Soudan fight

that was to take place for some years. The withdrawal

to Wady Halfa was not quite completed when, on 30th

December, the Khalifa attacked the troops at Ginniss.

He was badly beaten, 800 of his men being killed; and

the chief satisfaction growing out of the battle was that

Egyptian troops had been engaged, as well as British, and

had thus had some of their fear of the dervishes removed.

The general policy in regard to the Soudan had been carried

on by Lord Salisbury without alteration.

CHAPTER VIII

1886 : HOME RULE, THE NAMELESS PARTY, AND THE LABOUR RIOTS

FVEN at the very dawn of 1886 the great Home Rule "split" was in the making. The published

rumours of Mr Gladstone's intentions were as much an effect as a cause of popular speculation about

them ¹; speculation had begun, because everyone was sure that he must have intentions; and assurance arose

from the fact that everyone was pretty certain Lord Salisbury had some. However, the actual publication

of the ideas which Mr Gladstone was said to have in his mind did undoubtedly create a new situation; and the

excitement it caused was not in the least out of proportion to the gravity of what was taking place behind the scenes.

Lord Hartington and Mr Goschen were already half alienated. At this crisis, as at the time of the Mid-Lothian

campaign, Mr Gladstone displayed his curious custom of regarding the real factors in a situation as materially

affected by the formal political factors. He was not in office, and Lord Salisbury was; therefore the circum-

stances of the election results warranted an understanding between the Tories and the Nationalists, in order to keep

the former in office; therefore Mr Gladstone felt himself justified in awaiting a Tory plan of Irish legislation, and

his own ideas were not a project in the real sense. This was an attitude much like his conviction that even after

the Mid-Lothian Campaign he was free to accept or refuse the Premiership. To Lord Hartington both these

¹ Morley's Life of Gladstone, iii. 265.

174

1886] HOME RULE 175

cases were equally an empty adherence to forms. What-ever might be the political theory of the situation, the truth was that Mr Gladstone was considering a plan of Irish self-government. This fact dominated the situation.

If the Tories had any intentions of concession to Ireland, they could not now be known; whenever Mr Gladstone moved, his unrivalled position in politics and in the public view gave him the field, and the other party merely reacted automatically in the opposite durection.

Mr Glad-stone did not himself recognise this; he made an offer to the Tories, in December 1885, of leaving the field to them; and the argument was used on the Tory side that the Irish were Conservative people, only accidentally thrown in 1880 on to the Liberal side.1

But in truth the return of the importance of the Irish vote had revived as much of old prejudice as of new energy; and there were already complaints of the Irish question being " thrust to the forefront," when local government in England, land transfer, and the procedure of the House of Commons were the qucstions awaiting decision.2

Besides, the nature of the exchange of opinion among Liberal leaders must have been shrewdly gauged by the Tory leaders, for by the time Parliament met the latter had decided upon a course in which no glimmer of their last year's temper of tentative concession to Ireland was to be found.

Not only were they leaving the field to Mr Gladstone, but they were going to drive him into it. They must have known the instant cost to him.

Parliament met for the Queen's speech on 21st January; on 26th January notice was given in the House of Commons of the Government's intention to introduce a Coercion Bill for Ireland, and on the same day the Government fell. Mr Jesse Collings carried an amendment to the address on the

1 See a letter by Mr Wilfrid Blunt in The Times, 1st January 1886.

2 The Times, 1st January 1886:

176

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[1886

subject of Labourers' Allotments—the " three acres and a cow " amendment—on which the Irish party voted with the Liberals. But the significant point was that eighteen Liberals, including Hartington, Goschen, Courtney, Henry James, Lubbock, Arthur Elliot and Albert Grey, voted against the amendment; and more than fifty Liberals, including John Bright, abstained from the division. Governments have often been overthrown by more or less irrelevant votes ; but what was there in Mr Collings's victory to cause The Times at once to start the idea that " a sagacious Liberal Leader "—Lord Hartington, for choice —should seize the opportunity to construct a new party out of equally dissatisfied Liberals and Conservatives ? To that degree had the " split " already become notorious. Meanwhıle, on 28th January, Lord Salisbury resigned office, and on 1st February Mr Gladstone became Prime Minister for the third time.

As if the year were not opening in sufficiently unusual circumstances, a thoroughly startling event now interrupted the bent of public attention. The troubles and distress of the unemployed had failed to attract notice amid the political excitement. On 8th February a meeting was being held in Trafalgar Square, which appears to have been chiefly an occasion taken by the Fair Trade speakers to call attention to unemployment as a product of Free Trade. Suddenly the meeting was invaded by men from branches of the Social Democratic Federation, headed by Hyndman, John Burns, and Champion. To them such a gathering seemed a mere exploiting of the sufferings of it. In an instant its temper was wholly and violently changed. A seething mob left the Square, marched through Pall Mall, St James's Street, and Piccadilly, smashed the club windows from which men were looking, as they had looked before, at the woeful procession, overturned and smashed broughams and other private carriages

1886] HOME RULE 177

and then divided into raiding parties, which went breaking

windows and doors along South Audley Street, Oxford

Street and Regent Street. For a couple of hours the

mob held these sacred precincts in terror. The police

had been entirely taken by surprise, and could not muster

in time. No life was lost, no personal injuries were in-

flicted ; the crowd was admitted next day to have had

"forbearance," and to have included a large proportion

of men who though poor and distressed had no thought of

crime 1 : but all the same London at large felt that it had

had its glimpse of revolution. This, it said to itself, was

at the back of the vague mutterings it had heard about

street-corner meetings and the right of free speech ; and

it proceeded to draw the distinction, which has always

comforted the respectable classes, between the genuine

unemployed and the agitator. The latter was pronounced

a "moral dynamiter," and the former class was said to

be made up of the "inevitable" products of casual labour,

bad housing and laziness. Yet fright remained strong

enough to cause the ventilation of some rather vague

plans for undertaking "public works" to give employ-

ment ; and from letters written to the newspapers by

various employers it is plain that they at least knew better

than to blind themselves by drawing facile distinctions

in regard to the temper of labouring men. While no

one was arrested on account of the startling incidents

in London, trouble was brewing elsewhere. There was

rioting in Bristol ; and in Gateshead, Glasgow, Manchester,

Norwich, Nottingham and Sheffield there was such acute

distress that at any moment outbreaks might occur.2

In Manchester, indeed, there was a small riot, which had

a curious origin ; it began not with the mere holding of a

1 The Times, 10th February 1886.

2 In Leicester, where the battle between vaccination and its

opponents was raging, prosecutions were suspended at this time,

because of the prevailing distress

M

178

HOME RULE

[1886

socialist meeting one Sunday at the end of February, but with the gathering of a crowd after the public-houses closed in the afternoon, to attack the socialists.

Those menaces, however, died down again for a time. They had not yet, so far as could be seen, affected the trade unions; and the trouble was regarded as merely an unfortunate conjunction of theories in themselves negligible with the existence of an unusual degree of destitution. Interest swung back to politics, but practically to only one subject in politics. The annexation of Burma, announced on 2nd January, passed almost unnoticed; a military expedition from India had occupied Mandalay early in December 1885, and King Theebaw and his army had surrendered; the stories of his cruelties and excesses made him for a short time a kind of popular ogre.

On the same date it was announced that an envoy had started for Abyssinia, with autograph letters from the Queen, a mission which, issuing first in the withdrawal under agreement with King Menelik of the Soudan garrisons near his frontier, established relations with him important to many British interests. On the same date, again, were published rumours that Bishop Hannington had been killed by the King of Uganda. But Central Africa could not attract any attention while Mr Gladstone was gathering a new Cabinet about him. Of his old colleagues, Lord Hartington, Lord Derby, Lord Northbrook and Mr Bright were absent from it; and Mr Goschen had not taken that place in it which a few months before would certainly have been his. Mr Chamberlain had joined; but both he and Sir George Trevelyan allowed it to be known that they committed themselves no further than to an examination of proposed legislation for Ireland; it was the public belief that Mr Chamberlain intended to try for his own solution of local councils for Ireland; but no one knew whether he had still in mind that Central Board in Dublin which had previously been the suspected

1886] HOME RULE 179

feature of the scheme.1 Cabinet meetings throughout

February and March were of unprecedented frequency.

The public speculated on the possibility of Mr Gladstone's

resignation, and the construction of a new Liberal Cabinet

under Lord Hartington, with Lord Wolseley as Lord

Lieutenant of Ireland, to carry out a policy of severe

repression, with local government to follow. Then on

26th March Mr Chamberlain and Sir George Trevelyan

resigned ; Mr Gladstone remained in office, and the nation

knew that it would have to consider a full Home Rule

proposal. The death of Mr W. E. Forster, occurring on

5th April, caused at this moment a recalling of recent

Liberal relations with Ireland, which may well have con-

firmed in their opinion both those Liberals who were

determined to make a new effort, and those who felt that

for the present there could be no new way. Each group

read in its own fashion the life-story of the most bitterly

disillusioned of them all.

The concentration of interest on the one subject was

assisted in some measure by proceedings which for the

time being held the socialist movement in suspended

animation. Four of its leaders—Hyndman, Burns,

Champion and J. E. Williams—were put on their trial

for sedition. The failure of the authorities to make any

arrests after the riotous proceedings of 8th February

in London had produced a newspaper agitation, which

finally forced them into taking such steps as could be taken

to meet the pressure of opinion. Socialist meetings were

continually going on, and the speeches at them provided

sufficient excuse for some Government action. But not,

as proved, sufficient evidence to support a heavy charge.

The trial was a long one, the defendants being, of course,

committed to the Old Bailey. They were acquitted,

though the jury allowed themselves the expression of a

rider to the effect that Burns and Champion had used

1 Morley's Life of Gladstone, iii. 194.

180

HOME RULE

[1886

language inflammatory and greatly to be condemned. The importance of the trial lay in the new view that it gave to people of superficial thought of the quality of these leaders of socialism. Such men as Morris and Edward Aveling, indeed, the respectable world had heard of ; it dismissed the rest as " ranters." But four men who could conduct their own case at the Old Bailey to an acquittal, men of whom only one was in the middle-class sense educated, were a new portent ; and from that day the ordinary view of working-class disaffection took a different turn. In general, the trial, by removing the whole matter from the streets to courts of justice, took it for the time out of the foreground of the popular mind.

The House of Commons at the moment practically marked time, awaiting the Home Rule Bill ; but it had one interesting incident when a Woman Suffrage Bill came up (of course, a private member's Bill) at the very end of the sitting on 19th February. Only an hour of time remained, and that was largely occupied by the protests of members against the mere idea of considering such a Bill in such a way. But it ended in the Bill being given a second reading ; and, though a vote taken in the small hours of the morning in a more than half empty House could not be regarded as of genuine importance, the supporters of Woman Suffrage were jubilant at having established the fact that a second reading for their Bill was not an impossibility. This was the first time one had ever been given. An academic triumph scored by the movement this year was the qualification of the first woman surgeon ; Mrs M. E. Dowson, the wife of a London engineer, obtained her diploma from the Irish College of Surgeons in June.

The long and frequent Cabinet meetings achieved a result which, whether politically good or bad, was beyond cavil remarkable ; for they had in six weeks constructed from the keel-plate a Bill of the utmost magnitude and the

1886] HOME RULE 181

very first order. In the early days of April it was suffi-

ciently advanced for Parnell to be privately in consulta-

tion with Mr Morley, the new Irish Secretary; and on

8th April it was introduced upon a stage in every way

worthy of it. The House of Commons was crowded to the

doors, and even the floor space between the table and the

Bar was covered with benches; every gallery was full;

and many members had come at daybreak to secure their

seats. Mr Gladstone rose magnificently to the occasion,

and spoke for three and a half hours. The Bill as it stood

set up a legislature of two Houses in Dublin 1 to deal with

Irish, as distinct from Imperial, affairs, and as a corollary

excluded Irish members from Westminster; it left the

control of customs to the Imperial Parliament, fixing the

Irish contribution to Imperial funds at one-fourteenth of

the total sum collected, the rest being handed over to the

Irish Parliament; it left the control of the police for two

years in British hands; the Viceroy was to continue to

exist, but not as a party appointment, and in his Privy

Council was to be formed a Cabinet which, as in Great

Britain, would be the real executive, and would be re-

sponsible to Parliament.

The first reading of the Bill took place without a division

on 13th April. Before it reached its next stage the effect

of its policy on party balance was given an unexpectedly

swift propulsion. Mr Chamberlain, with that instinct for

handling the electoral machine which had so distinguished

him in 1880, went down to Birmingham on 25th April to

discuss the new situation with the Liberal Two Thousand;

they wished to delay their vote, but Mr Chamberlain

induced them to decide at once, with the result that, by an

overwhelming majority, they refused their support to the

1 The Upper House was to consist of 28 representative peers and

75 elected members, and the Lower House of 206 elected members.

The two were to sit together, but either House might demand

a separate vote.

182

HOME RULE

[1886

Home Rule Bill. The cleverness of this move lay in its preparation of the way for the compact whereby the scats of Liberal Anti-Home-Rulers might be left unattacked by Conservatives ; this course was, in fact, propounded before a month had passed.

On 10th May the second reading debate on the Bill opened, and Lord Hartington moved an amendment of simple rejection. Parnell, speaking for his party, expressed his intention to attack in committee certain points of detail, such as the control of the police, and the exact amount of Ireland's contribution to Imperial funds.

This may have given a vague sense that after all the Irish might not be satisfied, and may have turned a few waverers. Others quailed before the proposals contained in the Bill for buying out the landlords ; and Mr Chamberlain had given notice of moving the rejection of the Land Purchase Bill which was introduced on 16th April to carry out these proposals.

Finally, Lord Randolph Churchill in the middle of May was inciting Ulster to take arms against the Bill, and the position of the " loyal minority " was turning yet other votes.

For a month the fight went on ; calculations of the result grew more and more tense, and the most sanguine hope on the day before the division was that the Bill might have a majority of about six. In that case the presumption was that it would be carried no further on such a slight majority, but would be taken merely as an assertion of the principle of autonomy for Ireland; the session would be prorogued, and the Cabinet would set itself to drafting a new Bill which might conciliate some of those who at the present stage were objecting only to details.

Parnell disliked this prospect, which he thought would discourage Home Rule Liberals. It never became a practical question. In the small hours of 8th June the Bill was rejected by 341 votes to 311.

In effect the vital decision had been made a week earlier, when a meeting of dissentient

1 The Times, 17th May 1886.

1886] HOME RULE 183

Liberals, with Mr Chamberlain in the chair, decided not to abstain from the division, but to vote against the Bill ; this decision gave 93 votes to the Opposition. The meeting was finally swayed by the influence which, outside as well as inside Parliament, most deeply affected Liberals who had an uncertain mind on the question—the influence of John Bright. When he declared against the Bill he greatly sharpened the immediate issue.

London was at the height of the season, and a season of such excitement as it had not known for years. In every drawing-room the split had made itself felt. One of the greatest Liberal peers, the Duke of Westminster, ostentatiously sold the portrait of Mr Gladstone, which Millais had painted for him ; and Birmingham Radicals were guests in great Whig houses. Men were blackballed at clubs for no other reason than their opinions on Home Rule. Hostesses had a new terror to face, for they hardly knew from day to day what old friends would no longer sit at the same table. To a large part of society Home Rule was not only a political tenet : it became a social barrier ; and the tendency to regard differences in political opinions as implying differences of class—a tendency entirely the product of the last hundred years—was considerably enhanced. For Mr Gladstone himself, even in the first outbursts, there was some pity, and some kindly feeling. That so unrivalled a political life should end in such a scattering of his own forces had an obvious touch of melancholy. But on the other hand it was clear that only Mr Gladstone could have raised Home Rule to the pitch of a party test, and therefore there was little room for pity in the general view. Meanwhile, from the standpoint of commercial London, the net result of the struggle was that town had not for a long time been so full or so busy ; and that across the middle of the money-making fell dissolution and a general election, the second within seven months. The resolution to dissolve was taken by the

184 HOME RULE [1886

Government on 10th June, but the agreement of Queen Victoria to a somewhat tiresome course was only obtained with some difficulty; she yielded finally to Mr Gladstone's representations that a year of embittered Home Rule controversy would do more harm than a second dis-solution. Complaints from the public were loud; Mr Gladstone was accused of "springing the election on an absolutely unprepared country," and was warned that he would find Scotland and Wales, those Liberal strong-holds, far less in his favour than he supposed. Some Liberals were complaining that the production of the Home Rule Bill had rendered any alternative policy of peace towards Ireland extremely difficult ¹; others wailcd in a barren controversy as to whether or no Mr Gladstone had done wrong to the party by "concealing his thoughts." ² The truest word came, as so often, from a looker-on; Professor Goldwin Smith, writing from Canada to chastise a Liberal Government for bringing in a Bill with no reasoned defence of it, but only sentimentalities about Ireland and the "G.O.M.," remarked also that there was a suspicion, "which, unfortunately, after what has taken place, cannot be said to be fantastic," that the Conservatives had not been far from a Home Rule Bill of their own.³ The recalling of that suspicion was the best answer both to those who talked of the election being "sprung" upon the country, and to those who complained of Mr Gladstone's silence. Events had moved so fast that politicians had forgotten how much Home Rule had been talked in the previous year, and the rumours of Tory intrigues, as well as of Liberal manœuvrings. The election went rapidly forward; in spite of some acrimony the general compact that the seats of dissentient

¹ See, e g., Mr Goschen in The Times, 18th June 1886.

² See, e.g., the correspondence between Bright and Gladstone in The Times, 3rd July 1886.

³ The Times, 7th July 1886.

1886] HOME RULE 185

Liberals should not be attacked by Tories held good ; the party was so divided that, although the central electoral organisation declared for Mr Gladstone, its big new club, the National Liberal, promoted a subscription for candidates standing against Home Rule. Before the end of July the new House had been returned with 196 Liberals instead of 235, 316 Tories instead of 251, and 74 dissentient Liberals. Only against Home Rule could there be said to be a majority ; and the question was how far that meant a majority against a Liberal Cabinet in general—how far, in other words, Home Rule in future was to be a permanent Liberal attitude.

It is more than likely that the damage done to trade by a dissolution at the height of the season had some slight effect upon the polls. To business men it was peculiarly exasperating, since their affairs were not in a condition to bear disturbance. The smallness of the bank reserves was a standing cause of uneasiness ; and the stock market had been restless in face of a railway-rate war in America and the “capturing” of line after line by financial magnates there. Copper had been a badly falling market, too, but was felt by this time to have reached a level which, if low, was probably healthier than its recent heights ; the tin market had had a revival, and so had the sugar market, which throughout the early eighties was never in quite a normal condition owing to the disturbing effects of the bounty system.1 The shipping trade, if not at the moment prosperous, was looking forward more cheerfully, since it had just passed through a period of change, and triple-expansion engines had now established themselves firmly.2 When business men took a rather wider view of commercial conditions than those afforded by the London exchanges they could not help seeing that, although in their own narrower sense business was not yet good, there

1 Deputations to Ministers on this subject were frequent.

2 The Times, 2nd January 1886.

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had been a great change since 1880. The consuming power

of the people had distinctly improved ; the consumption of

tea and sugar had risen strongly, and the income-tax

assessments were also rising. People began in fact to

ask in some bewilderment, as they faced these signs, what

was the trade depression ? It is possible that some of the

apparent depression throughout these years may be traced

to the steady growth of the limited liability principle in

trading. In every town businesses were being put upon

this basis, and with the increased capital thus obtained

were absorbing or squeezing out of the market the smaller

middlemen. Great department shops, like the Army and

Navy Stores, the Civil Service Supply Association,

Whiteley's, Lewis's, were at their busiest expansion in the

early eighties. The result was a diminution in the number

of the channels of trade, without diminution of the volume.

The bankruptcy statistics were depressing, and individual

traders in almost every part of the country could speak

of bad times ; but the broad statistics of the nation's

housekeeping showed at any rate more financial elasticity

than it had possessed for years previously. Much might be

hoped from a period of political steadiness; and the amount

of capital which was waiting for employment may be

gathered from the fact that in October, when Guinness's

made the first of that series of brewery flotations which

we shall have to deal with later, the capital offered was so

much over-subscribed that no less than 13,000 letters of

regret were posted.

Every trade undertaking seemed in this year to be

busy at turning itself into a limited liability company.

Punch described the tendency as a new fashion. At the

same time capitalists were not losing their caution ; the

first attempt to float the Manchester Ship Canal, which

was made in this year, met with failure. The prospectus,

backed by Rothschilds', was issued on 21st July. The

contractors, Lucas & Aird, undertook the work for five

1886] HOME RULE 187

and three quarter millions, which was less than the engineers' original estimates ; the estimated gross revenue was put at £885,000 a year ; and interim dividends of 4 per cent. payable out of capital had been allowed by Parliament.1 But the public proved shy ; Lancashire was already full of expensive means of transit, and the cotton mills had been built everywhere in accordance with railway facilities, and might not, it was thought, easily adjust themselves to the canal. The apparent coolness of Lancashire investors was remarked, and for the present the flotation failed. A trade problem which attained some prominence this year, but waited long for a solution, was the absence of any power to compel the working in this country of patents taken out by foreigners ; the only possible procedure was to issue a mandamus to compel the patentee to grant licences for manufacture of his patent ;

but as the mandamus could not reach him the power was useless. As for the gold problem, it still sought solution. The bimetallists' theories began to gather more force. Lord Grey in February of this year brought the whole subject forward again, relating it to the most startling difficulties of the moment by arguing that the labour troubles were largely due to the shortage of gold, since the wages bills of employers were in fact going up by the appreciation of the sovereign, and the masters, without knowing the real reason, felt only that they must cut wages down ;

while the workman, whose sovereign bought him no more than before, could not see why he should be paid less. The bimetallist proposal which Lord Grey revived was for the issue of one-pound notes payable in silver ; and that for a limited period these notes should be issued at the bank in exchange for sovereigns, whatever the weight of the latter.

1 This method of tempting capitalists to put their money into large projects was noted by the socialists, who suggested, in deputations to Ministers, that it might be applied to relief works set on foot for the unemployed ;

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But there were two objections to this—the first that, if you

were to escape the ultimate necessity of reconverting the

silver into gold, you must come to an international agree-

ment that gold should cease to be the only valid exchange ;

and the second (a serious objection which the bimetallists

never really overcame), that there was no unanimity as to

the basis of calculation of the relative value at which silver

was to be coined. The knowledge of the gold supply in

South Africa was still wide of the mark. The air was full

of rumours: about one thousand Europeans were said to

be at the goldfields, and Delagoa Bay and Cape Town were

alike full of adventurers. Yet the most authoritative

article of the moment on the goldfields 1 dealt entirely with

the Barberton and James Town districts, with the opera-

tions of companies no one of which had a capital of more

than £200,000, and most had only £25,000 or £30,000; and

the article concluded with the opinion that the whole

industry was insignificant in comparison with the great

days of the Australian fields. The Rand was still being

kept out of sight by those who knew of it. In the autumn

a Currency Commission was appointed, with Mr Balfour,

one of the foremost bimetallists, as its chairman.

A striking feature of the year was the interest aroused

by the announcement that Pasteur had discovered a cure

for hydrophobia. The England of to-day, to which rabies

is unknown, has forgotten the recurrent horror of deaths

from the bites of dogs, for which no alleviation had ap-

peared until Pasteur's system of injection was believed

to have provided one. Fortunately, in this matter, as in

that of cholera, medical opinion was by now so sane that re-

liance upon cure was not allowed to weaken the arguments

for preventive measures. The public was warned that, until

the first element of novelty had passed away, it would

be impossible really to sift the evidence of cures, or to be

certain that in the cases treated the dogs had been actually

1 The Times, 23rd September 1886.

1886] HOME RULE 189

rabid ; and meanwhile the wisdom of muzzling orders was being steadily emphasised.

It was not, on the whole, a year of great interest in science ; the æsthetic movement was beginning to have

the effect of shifting middle-class interest from progress to literature. Electricity had fallen upon dull times.

A slight fillip was given to the ballooning craze by the voyage across the Channel of a French balloon fitted with

steering gear, wherewith the aeronauts had manœuvred over ships in the Channel, and dropped imitation torpedoes.

But a controversy between rival publishers about their respective libraries of cheap literature showed the true

tendency just then of middle-class culture. The controversy revealed how large and profitable a sale there

was for cheap standard books. The originator of this form of enterprise, Mr. H. G. Bohn, had died two years

before (on 25th August 1884), just as his idea was becoming a popular success. The contrasts presented to the

world in Patience were being repeated in the less exalted ranks of the community. In society they had already

begun to fade, and women, instead of hanging on the utterances of the exquisite, were filling the schools of arms,

and devoting themselves to boxing and fencing. Young ladies were distressing their parents by travelling on the

tops of omnibuses ; and playing the banjo was the most desirable accomplishment in Mayfair drawing-rooms. The

elegant pale poets and the massive heavy dragoons of Patience were now being repeated ad infinitum at suburban

tea-parties, in young men who conversed with a finger to the brow, and other young men who played lawn tennis,

and rode high bicycles, and were muscular and obtuse. Theosophy began this year to have a rather large and ill-

informed following, with the result that " astral bodies " became a current joke ; and telepathy and phantasms

occupied the smatterers in science, as well as the Psychical Research Society.

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The promoters of annual exhibitions in London were again as successful as they had been with the " Fisheries " and the " Healtheries " in attaching their provision of mere amusement to a serious subject. This year the exhibition was of Colonial and Indian products and industries; and it fitted very cleverly with that new view of the importance of the Colonies to which Mr Goschen had given expression.1 The Secretary for the Colonics announced that he would be At Home in his department on certain days to Colonial representatives ; and the latter, arriving in England in July in connection with the exhibition, were given an official round of entertainments, the Queen receiving them at Windsor, the Admiralty giving them a day with the fleet at Portsmouth, and various banquets being arranged. Permanent results followed ; at the end of the year the Colonial Secretary (Mr E. Stanhope) made proposals for a Colonial Conference, to be attended by the Agents-General in London, and any leading public men from the colonies who might happen to be able to come to England—a more informal affair than the later developments of the kind ; colonial defence and telegraphic and postal services were the subjects proposed for discussion. It was also largely due to the Colonial and Indian Exhibition that, when interest in Queen Victoria's approaching Jubilee began to be strong, the Prince of Wales suggested the foundation of the Imperial Institute, to give permanence to the kind of presentation of colonial activities this year had achieved. The main sporting event of the year was the racing for the America Cup, for which, after a long interval, a challenge had been sent from England. The British representative was the Galatea, and the winds proved far too light for her. Her rival, the Mayflower, had been given the " skimming-dish " form, which was then so new that it had not been ventured upon for the boat that had to

1 See p. 158.

1886] HOME RULE 191

cross the Atlantic before the contest; the Galatea's beam was 15 feet, the Mayflower's 23·5 feet, and the Galatea's draught was 13·5 feet, while the Mayflower's was only 9 feet.

The sporting world was shocked later in the year by the suicide of Fred Archer, the most popular jockey of his day.1 He rode in the course of his career no less than 2746 winners, and his great gift was in riding horses that could not possibly have won with any other jockey. The sensation caused by the news of his suicide has, too, more than a personal importance; it marks, and was felt at the time to mark, the enormous increase in the popularity of racing, which had been growing up almost unobserved. The interest in Fred Archer reached households which twenty years before would have paid no attention to his death; and his pleasant steady character had done much to break down the old view of the turf as a disreputable interest for anyone but owners. His suicide was attributed to depression of spirits caused by the incessant "wasting" to keep down his weight.

When the new Parliament met there was in it a party which as yet was no party. What were dissentient Liberals to do? The Liberal headquarter organisation had exiled them; and indeed after the results of the election they were not likely to want to attach themselves to a party standing for Home Rule. Yet were they going to abandon all Liberal principles? The only answer to this question was that when asked, towards the end of July, to formulate a new Radical programme of reform, and found a new club upon it, Mr Chamberlain replied that after such an upheaval it would be better to wait a few months before taking any definite steps.2 Mr Chamberlain, there can be little doubt, was feeling solitary at the moment. He had political satellites, but no political friend. Lord Hartington acted with him in regard to Home Rule, but the gulf between the two on other topics

1 8th November 1886. 2 The Times, 28th July 1886.

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was too great to be easily bridged. It happened unfortunately that at the same time Mr Chamberlain, by another current of events, lost the help of a genuine political friendship. Sir Charles Dilke, whose own entrance into the Government of 1886 had been, owing to his great ability and wide democratic sympathies, combined with an unusual knowledge of foreign affairs, quite beyond question, had secured Mr Chamberlain's presence in that Government by refusing to serve himself unless Mr Chamberlain were invited to join. Now at the crisis of the latter's career, Sir Charles Dilke withdrew from Parliament, his personal honour and morality having been brought into question by a case in the law courts. Thus isolated, Mr Chamberlain decided to travel abroad for some time, leaving politics and Liberal Unionism behind him. The Government had in the end been formed on a purely Conservative basis. Lord Salisbury had offered (though at the time this was not definitely known) to stand aside in favour of Lord Hartington, and to serve under him if he would form a Government. But Lord Hartington was not a man who moved at that speed, and the offer was declined. A Cabinet was formed in which there was only one appointment that excited comment. Lord Randolph Churchill, the bane of his leaders, the rash apostle of Tory Democracy, the incalculable element in the party, was made Chancellor of the Exchequer, with the leadership of the Commons. No wonder men thought that old political traditions were perishing, if the path to office was to make yourself obnoxious to your leaders, and a will-o'-the-wisp to your constituents. At the same time no one doubted Lord Randolph's brilliancy; and as it was now evident that the Conservative working man was a reality, there might be less temptation to embark on "Tory Democracy" as a policy. The only doubt was whether he would manage well the somewhat delicate relations with the dissentient Liberals. For some weeks the latter were too much taken up with

1886] HOME RULE 193

their own difficulties to be critical. By August they had acquired a name. The Liberal Unionist Association had been formed outside Parliament; but it was ultimately announced that Mr Chamberlain and all the dissentients were joining it.1 During the autumn sitting the new party were sufficiently established to be showing signs of offence at their treatment in the House of Commons; there were complaints that the Tories howled them down, but were afraid of the real Home Rulers. A sign of very strained relations was given in the Birmingham municipal elections, where the Liberal Unionists supported Gladstonian Liberal candidates, with Mr Chamberlain's approval, because of the Tory attitude in the town.

These ins and outs were supposed to be the only legitimate interest of politicians. The heavy hand shut down again upon Ireland, the new Government's first step being pretty sharply criticised even by many of their friends. Sir Robert Hamilton, the Permanent Under Secretary for Ireland, was removed from his post, because he had been identified with Mr Gladstone's proposals. It was felt that this was a serious blow at the principles of public service. An agitation for a revision of judicial rents in Ireland was being pressed upon the Government, partly because the summer of 1886 had seen another failure of harvest, and partly on the more general plea that the appreciation of gold made the judicial rents unfair; it was pointed out that even in England the rent-roll was calculated to have dropped from sixty millions to forty-five millions a year, and the evidence before the Royal Commission on Trade had tended in the same direction.2 The Government refused to take any steps; evictions increased; "moonlighting" began once more to aggravate

1 The name was in existence some years earlier (see, for instance, an article in The Fortnightly Review, vol. i, 1880), but it was now first definitely adopted, as a party name.

2 See The Pall Mall Gazette " Extra " on Irish Rents, 1886:

N

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the figures of agrarian crime ; and the Plan of Campaign was launched in November.

Party difficulties blinded politicians once again to the very serious trouble at their doors. The temper which had broken out in the brief street fury of 8th February, and had been suspended for a while by the trial of the socialist leaders, was bad enough in June to cause people to say that the excitement of elections in London was really to be dreaded. Nor was the nervousness confined to London ; at Cardiff, for instance, the police were so perturbed that, having had to deal with a crowd which had given them some difficulty, they went on to fall upon a perfectly harmless one, listening to speeches at the Liberal Club, and very nearly batoned the new member ; and in Liverpool socialist meetings were acting as sparks to the magazine of Orange fever which is always in store there.

Nevertheless London was naturally the centre of anxiety. When a big socialist demonstration was held in Trafalgar Square at the end of August no less than 2000 police were on duty : they had warning enough then to be ready. But a new danger was revealed when the socialists took to invading other meetings, such as a demonstration in favour of Free Education at the beginning of October, which had naturally appeared to call for less policing.

Nor was London allowed to forget the real misery which was issuing in these disturbances. A manifesto was published by the Social Democratic Federation calling on the destitute and unemployed to follow the Lord Mayor's Show, silently, in thousands. This was, of course, instantly forbidden by the police, and the result was that, after the Lord Mayor's Show had turned as usual from the Strand down to the Embankment, there was a sudden rush of men to Trafalgar Square, and a defiant meeting began. But troops were at hand which had been on duty for the procession. Suddenly a line of Life Guards appeared trotting round the square to a strategic position, and with

1886] HOME RULE 195

this force in reserve the police marched into the crowd and set to work to scatter it. The energies of the leaders of upper-class opinion at this time were turned to attempting to separate the distressed from those who were organising and leading them. The accepted point of view was that open-air meetings were wholly unnecessary, and that the socialist demand for free speech was only being craftily attached to a genuine trouble, and should be firmly handled.1 The distress, at any rate, had been so pressed upon public notice that the closing months of the year were full of suggestions for meeting it. There were appeals for charity, signed by men of such different views as the Bishop of London, Cardinal Manning and Mr Spurgeon ; there were requests for a mitigation of the rules of outdoor relief, and appeals for funds to enable public bodies to set on foot relief works ; a Mansion House Committee was appointed to collect information as to the unemployment, and to consider schemes to meet it. But as a political question the trouble was not allowed to rank ; it was held to be “ undignified ” to expect any reference to it at the Lord Mayor's banquet ; and the single exception to this attitude, which can be quoted as of any importance, is the plea by one whose early death deprived the poor of a good friend, Lord Sydney Godolphin Osborne. He was busy in October urging the Government to attend as a Government to the matter. Though not strictly affairs of the unemployed, the trouble at this time in Skye, where the military were called out against the disaffected crofters, and the tithe riots in Lancashire and Wales, should have added to the general uneasiness about the temper of the working people. It was a time too much disturbed by poverty and

1 An interesting side-issue was that large new hotels, such as the Grand, opened in 1880, and the Metropole, opened in 1885, were attracting many visitors, especially Americans, to the neighbourhood of Trafalgar Square, which was therefore peculiarly unsuitable for public meetings.

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hardship for any very immediate interest to be taken by

working men in their representation on the benches of the

House of Commons. Joseph Arch was returned as the first

agricultural labourer in the House, and the Labour

members at the beginning of the year numbered nine—

Messrs Abraham, Arch, Broadhurst, Burt, W. R. Cremer,

Fenwick, Leicester, Pickard and J. Wilson.

At the end of the year the party problem was suddenly

galvanised again into prominence. To everyone's amazement,

Lord Randolph Churchill resigned the Chancellorship

of the Exchequer. His reason was that he had been unable

to carry his declared policy of economy against the demands

of the Admiralty and the War Office. Even those

who sympathised with him felt his resignation, before he

had so much as produced a Budget, an extraordinarily

hasty step. It is known now that he calculated on the

Government being obliged to ask him to resume his post,

and so give him a vastly strengthened position. But he had

been too sure that the Liberal Unionists were not yet ready

for coalition—he had considered his possible Conservative

successors alone. He can hardly be blamed for this.

On the very day of his resignation, for instance, Mr Chamberlain

had been asserting himself "unchanged" on such a

Radical proposal as that of Disestablishment; and although

on 17th December Mr Chamberlain had a great meeting in

Birmingham, as a counter-blast to a Home Rule meeting

in November at which Morley and Parnell had spoken,

it was rumoured on 23rd December that he was considering

a rapprochement with the Liberal leaders. The

revival of coercion had held the dissentient Liberals at a

distance from the Conservatives; and the truth at which

the rumours guessed was that Sir William Harcourt, Lord

Herschell, Mr Chamberlain, Sir George Trevelyan and

Mr Morley were meeting quietly at Sir William Harcourt's

house. But the most important person was not there;

Lord Hartington had refused to attend; and meanwhile

1886] HOME RULE 197

the Conservatives, really anxious about their position in the Commons, were moving heaven and earth to get him to accept the leadership there. He would not consent to that, but he would do what was at the moment almost as much help to the Tories—he would persuade Mr Goschen to take the Exchequer. The results were considerable; the Tories got a Chancellor of the Exchequer who as a financier commanded everyone's respect, and were really better off in that regard than before Lord Randolph Churchill resigned; but they also got what they valued still more, an admission that Liberal Unionists could serve under a Conservative Prime Minister.

The public mind slipped back comfortably into those varied plans for celebrating the Queen's Jubilee which largely occupied the newspapers in December 1886; and expended some of its leisure in speculating about Emin Pasha. News had filtered through that he alone of all the provincial governors of the Soudan was still holding out; and proposals were being made for sending him relief.

CHAPTER IX

1887 : THE JUBILEE

THE report of the Royal Commission on Trade, which was one of the first events of the New Year,1 proved to be a much more balanced attempt to diagnose industrial difficulties than had been anticipated at the time of the Commission's appointment. The " Fair Trade " remedy was, indeed, recommended by a small minority of four commissioners ; but was dismissed by the majority on the ground that it was " hardly worth while to discuss a scheme which involves at once a total upset of our present Budget arrangements, a reversal of our trade policy, and a breach with our foreign customers." The report dwelt upon some of those inconsistent features of the trade situation which had already puzzled the observant. There was no falling off in the volume of our foreign trade, or in the amount of capital engaged in it, or in the accumulation of capital throughout the country, or in the aggregate of production. Yet something certainly was amiss. The commissioners put part of the responsibility down to over-production ; they also suggested, but only in tentative terms, that the rise in the value of gold was a source of difficulty ; they asserted more confidently that the workman was getting wages which were perhaps too little affected by falling prices. Their recommendations moved, as was to be expected, on extremely official lines ; they advised, for instance, that traders should be exhorted to cheapen production and so widen the market, and should realise that as competition became keener business methods

1 Published on 17th January 1887: 198

1887] THE JUBILEE 199

must become better ; higher education, and a more

attentive collection of statistics were corollaries of this

proposition. But some of the recommendations were

rather less academic ; they called for re-examination of

railway traffic rates, for the freeing of canals from railway

ownership and control, for light railways to assist agricul-

ture and make possible an industrial decentralisation ; and

for legislation "against counterfeit marking, and for some

improvement of the Limited Liability Acts.

Such a document could not mean much to the thousands

out of employment ; and what it meant to their leaders

was not conciliatory. Kindly people were ready enough

to feel sympathetic, and hold drawing-room meetings to

discuss whether the distress was exceptional or chronic ;

that distinction was at the time a favourite method of

attacking the "agitators." the argument being that there

was always inevitable distress, as a sort of "waste product"

of an industrial age, and that the prominence given to it

was only a move of the socialists. The latter were repre-

sented as objecting to philanthropic inquiry, and resenting

"inquisition" ; this was, no doubt, one way of describing

the socialist's impatience at seeing the whole question

shuffled off into a philanthropic atmosphere against all

their endeavours to keep it in a political one. But it is

possible that, like most reformers, they had their eyes so

firmly set upon the goal that they failed to observe how

many laps in the race they had already run. It was Lord

Salisbury, to continue the metaphor, who rang the bell in

one of those moments of frankness with which he was apt

to disturb his friends and allies. He was replying to a

correspondent on the subject of State-aided emigration—

a favourite project of the time for relieving industrial

congestion ; private effort had already established a settle-

ment of East Londoners in Manitoba. Lord Salisbury

wrote that until this remedy was more demonstrably a

success Parliament would not adopt it ; but when it was,

200 THE JUBILEE [1887

Parliament would not be frightened by any socialist quality in the scheme. "If it is convinced that a measure is likely to answer," he said, "it never troubles itself about the school of thought from which the measure is drawn." 1

This is in its way a version of the Fabian position; but the socialists, in contact with the problem of the unemployed, demanded for it a political formulation; and the apparently impregnable habit of treating trade questions as a middle-class affair exasperated them into making their demand one for separate formulation. They pursued their campaign of street meetings, and early in February there was more rioting, not only in London, where windows were broken in Clerkenwell and up Goswell Road, but also at Blantyre and Coatbridge; in April John Williams was arrested again, with some others, after a socialist meeting at the Marble Arch.

One immediate effect of the report of the Commission on Trade makes this year peculiarly notable. The insistence upon the need for better trade methods and higher education provided a rallying point for all the energy which had been going into municipal art schools and training classes. Here was a piece of work which Parliament might well undertake for the business community, the more easily as that community had already created the skeleton of a system. Lord Hartington, to whom technical education in this country owes more than to anyone else, was the first prominent public man to take up the idea. In a speech at the London Polytechnic on 16th March he urged the great municipalities to organise technical education on a large scale in subjects suitable to the industrial needs of their districts; as yet, no suggestion was made of any other than private provision of the necessary funds. On 21st March a deputation waited upon Lord Cranbrook at the Education Department to ask for departmental action; he, too, attributed the duty of taking action to the local

1 Letter published in The Times, 22nd February 1885.

1887] THE JUBILEE 201

authorities, on the fairly sound principle that they could go on to " that real secondary education which can never be reached by the Elementary Education Department "; he added a quotation from a speech some years earlier by Mr Mundella, to the effect that the idea of giving technical education to the whole working class was an entire mistake, the inference being that local authorities could move in a partial way that would be impossible to a public department. Meanwhile the stirring of a new spirit in education was seen in a growing revolt of teachers against " the Juggernaut of percentages "; they wished for a little more flexibility in method, and a little less rigid judgment by examination results ; there was, perhaps, something in the dry comment that their revolt was from one point of view a confession that the system got a great deal of work out of them.

The death of Sir Joseph Whitworth on 23rd January may have helped to awaken men to some understanding of what modern trade exacted—what alertness, what high degree of technical knowledge. For he had made his immense fortune by certain mechanical inventions which were thoroughly of the new movement—accurate measuring machines, true planes, standard gauges, and other such implements. He himself had had no technical education beyond that which he picked up in engineering shops ; personally he was in the tradition of the story-book men of business who build up a fortune on a foundation stone of half-a-crown, and was to the end of his life a rather rough man, with a passion for trotting horses. But his work made such education more than ever necessary for other men. In the end, he also made it more attainable in his own city, for he left the greater part of his huge fortune on trust for public purposes in Manchester, and to his bequest.

The greatest fillip of all to technical education was given

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by the fortunate association of it with the great affair in all men's minds this year—the Jubilee. When the celebration was only a month away, and popular enthusiasm for the Queen at its height, she went down to open the Queen's Hall of the People's Palace in Mile End Road, and to lay the foundation stone of the Technical and Handicraft Schools of that institution. It had grown from a long-buried seed. In 1841 Mr Barber Beaumont left a large sum of money "for the intellectual improvement and the rational recreation and amusement of the people of the East End." There had been no organised means of applying the bequest, and for forty years it lay practically idle. Then a novel by Walter Besant, All Sorts and Conditions of Men, drew an imaginary picture of a great palace of education and recreation in East London; men recalled the dormant bequest, and the scheme for the People's Palace sprang to life. Besant worked hard for it; Mr Beaumont's money did not suffice for the purpose, and subscriptions were raised, the great City companies, especially the Drapers' Company, contributing largely; and the project was sufficiently advanced by May 1887 to be able to gather to itself some of the Jubilee enthusiasm. Besant was presented to the Queen after she had laid the foundation stone. Meanwhile the City justifiably reminded the world that it was doing a good deal already. The City and Guilds of London Institute at South Kensington was advancing towards completion; the Finsbury Technical College was teaching 169 day students and 764 evening students, a large majority of whom were artisans, and 200 of whom were apprentices; the South London School of Technical Art had 187 pupils; and the guilds also made grants to the schools of engineering and chemical technology at University College, and the school of metallurgy at King's College.

The public was ready to be interested in social affairs. The uneasiness among the Conservative leaders at the

1887] THE JUBILEE 203

time of Lord Randolph Churchill's resignation was one of those curious political alarms which belong to pure politics and not to real life at all. In point of fact, although people were startled and interested by that event, there was in the nation at large none of that canvassing of its effect upon party relations which Lord Salisbury seemed to fear.

The nation had had its fill of politics for a while. The new Franchise and the quarrel between the two Houses of Parliament, the death of Gordon, and the Home Rule Bill had given it two years in which political subjects were the prime interest. The ordinary man was quite ready to let them slip into the background. One event, however, of the beginning of the year touched him. On 12th January Lord Iddesleigh died suddenly in an ante-room while waiting to see Lord Salisbury. It was sad even from the most casual point of view.

As Sir Stafford Northcote, Lord Iddesleigh had had to see his position in the House of Commons slowly but remorselessly weakened ; he had been too old, too slow, too formal in his leadership of the Opposition from 1880 to 1885 to hold his own in a Parliament fresh and active. Lord Randolph Churchill's gadfly activities had been as damaging to Sir Stafford Northcote as to Mr Gladstone ; and in the brief Government of Lord Salisbury from June 1885 to February 1886 Northcote found no place at all ; his leadership in the Commons was taken away, and he accepted the consolation of a title, going to the House of Lords as Lord Iddesleigh.

When Lord Salisbury returned to power in July 1886 he made Lord Iddesleigh Foreign Secretary ; but in the disturbance caused by Lord Randolph Churchill's resignation Lord Salisbury changed his mind again, and did it somewhat unkindly. Lord Iddesleigh read in the newspapers one morning that Lord Salisbury had decided to take his place at the Foreign Office. It was no wonder that when the news came that the old man, tired, disappointed, but patient and loyal to the end, had died in a

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chair in Lord Salisbury's ante-room, people who had

never known him felt grieved.

His last piece of work at the Foreign Office had been in

connection with the expedition for the relief of Emin

Pasha. Mr H. M. Stanley left London towards the end

of January to reach the Soudan by way of the Congo.

With the approach of the Queen's Jubilee, the national

pride in her was reviving the feeling that the British were

a fine race, and their Empire a noble achievement. Perhaps

because this form of patriotism had but poor sustenance

in recent affairs, it grew somewhat self-conscious and ag-

gressive, and a little inclined to "trail its coat." It made

much of the Colonial Conference which assembled early

in April. Imperial Federation was proposed as a subject

for debate, but beyond a rather empty discussion of the

types of ship that colonies might keep up in a general

system of Imperial Defence little was accomplished, except

that Australia definitely undertook a payment for the

maintenance of a British squadron on her coasts. Other

debates of the conference were on the desirability of

making colonial guaranteed stocks legal trustee invest-

ments, and on commercial relations, and postal and tele-

graphic facilities. The last point had already been adopted

as his own by Mr Henniker Heaton, and his advocacy of

an Imperial Penny Post was well under way. These were

the kind of assertive but not immediately pressing affairs

for which the ordinary man was in the mind. His view

of the political situation was simple : Gladstone had been

beaten, Salisbury was in, therefore there would be nothing

searching or subversive to bother about, and he might,

politically speaking, take a spell off. He was suddenly

wrenched from his security in April by a newspaper

bombshell.

To those more vitally concerned political parties were

still in no small confusion. When the first flush of

Goschen's acceptance of the Chancellorship of the Ex-

1887] THE JUBILEE 205

chequer had passed off, men asked, What, after all; would

his position exactly amount to ? They felt that, whatever

might be the readiness for a coalition among some of the

dissentient Liberals, there was a strong Conservative feeling

against it ; Mr Chamberlain had not ceased to be regarded

as a dangerous Radical. Yet on the other hand it appeared

with some suddenness that he would never again be a

Gladstonian ; the Round Table conference which had met

in December to attempt to patch up the Liberal split had

not achieved its object. An article from Mr Chamberlain's

pen, speaking of the Irish people as "disloyal," 1 revealed

a temper which was so remote from that of the Gladstonians

that the hopes of a rapprochement were extinguished. Yet,

again, Mr Chamberlain was believed to entertain still his

own scheme of concession to Ireland—some fair rent pro-

posals and a system of local governing bodies, without any

control of the administration of justice or of the police—

and was not likely, therefore, even if his general Radical

views did not stop the way, to pull in harmony with the

Government. The Crimes Bill was a serious obstacle to

coalition; its production was a reply to the Plan of

Campaign. The Plan was another stage in the dis-

integration of Parnell's control of Irish agitation. It was

that tenants in Ireland, carefully organised by estates,

and acting under committees for each estate, should cease

entirely to deal with the landlord's agent as individuals ;

should offer as a body, through the committee, the half-

yearly rent subject to the reduction they demanded ; and,

if this were refused, should fund the money, drawing upon

it for relief when the agent had put in force all the tedious

and objectionable processes of eviction, sale, and distress.

Parnell condemned the Plan, which was first published as

a supplement to United Ireland on 20th November 1886 ;

it was over that border of obvious illegality which he had

always refused to cross. But it went forward in spite of

1 Published in The Baptist, February 1887.

206 THE JUBILEE [1887

him; and he was driven back to fighting in the House of Commons against the inevitable coercion measures. Practically he was where he had been before 1880, with the two currents of Irish agitation again wholly separate, and the Irish party handicapped by the odium of violences with which it had no connection. Moreover he was now often ill, and he moved about the precincts of the House carelessly dressed, with lank hair, a wild dark figure, his old silence and reserve turned into a new and mystifying habit of disappearing entirely from sight for days or even weeks at a time; no one knew where he was at such times, but there were already many who suspected in what company he was. Both his own circumstances and the political circumstances of the moment must be taken into account as we come to the sensational blow struck in April of this year. In politics we have the only hope of a stable and continuous Government held in check by the delay of the coalition, a great cause of delay being the reluctance of dissentient Liberals to accept the Government's Irish policy; at the end of March separate meetings of Conservatives and Liberal Unionists were being held on the Crimes Bill. On the personal side we have Parnell still in control of his party, but clearly, by reason of the persistence in the Plan of Campaign, less able to maintain his old attitude of aloofness from violence; and also, for other reasons, in a position which might be reckoned on as making him less ready to resent attack. It was a tempting occasion for a stroke which should so deeply discredit him as to brush away the last reluctance of Liberal Unionists, and also render co-operation with the Irish Nationalists a killing handicap to the Liberals. So the stroke was dealt. The Times began publishing a series of articles entitled "Parnellism and Crime," in which extracts from speeches by members of the Parnellite party were so conjoined with the story of agrarian crime in Ireland as to make the parliamentary agitation and Fenian

1887] THE JUBILEE 207

lawlessness one thing. But these articles would not have accomplished the object in view. The final attack was the publication on 18th April of a facsimile of a letter purporting to have been written by Parnell soon after the Phoenix Park murders. The text left no doubt of the insinuation. The letter—dated “ 15/5/82,” a fortnight after the murders —ran thus :

" Dear Sir,—I am not surprised at your friend's anger, but he and you should know that to denounce the murders was the only course open to us. To do that promptly was plainly our best policy. But you can tell him, and all others concerned, that though I regret the accident of Lord F. Cavendish's death, I cannot refuse to admit that Burke got no more than his deserts. You are at liberty to show him this, and others whom you can trust also, but let not my address be known. He can write to the House of Commons. Yours very truly,

" Chas. S. Parnell."

No one who at this interval of time opens that famous number of the newspaper, and sees the middle of one of its central pages occupied by the facsimile, can fail to respond to the thrill that its publication caused, especially in days when in the normal course nothing interrupted the plain typography of newspapers, when there were no photographic illustrations or any other efforts of “ process ” reproduction. It was the sight of the handwriting which swept away all suspension of judgment. To the world at large it was clear enough that at the very time when he had been denouncing and repudiating completely the Phoenix Park murders, Parnell had been writing to a Fenian leader to say that these repudiations were merely diplomatic—that he only regretted Lord F. Cavendish's death as an accident, and had less than no regret for the death of Mr Burke.

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The publication of the facsimile was carefully timed.

The day of its appearance was the day of the second reading

division on the Government's Coercion Bill. No one

could say that Parnell lacked occasion for an immediate

denial, and members of Parliament, who had brought to the

Lobby that excitement which had run like wildfire over

the country during the day, clustered silent in the House

when Parnell rose immediately before the division. He

gave the most downright denial to the authenticity of the

letter; he was as calm as ever, and he put his denial

in the plainest, simplest terms. But even in this assembly

the power of the reproduced handwriting was strong, and

the high standing of the newspaper concerned was a con-

siderable element in the estimation of the worth of the

denial. The Conservatives openly derided it; the Liberal

Unionists, if less jubilant, felt it so inadequate that they

could act as if the letter were genuine. They had been

assisted over their scruples, and the Coercion Bill got its

second reading. It was a measure severe even in the

history of coercion; for its operation had no time-limit.

It gave the usual powers to the executive to proclaim dis-

turbed districts and dangerous associations, to order in-

quiries upon oath even when no one was actually on trial,

and to suspend trial by jury for a list of offences that

practically covered all the operations of the Plan of

Campaign. Yet once again the old rule held good, that

with a Coercion Bill a Land Bill should pass. So great

had been the hurry for coercion that the Government did

not appear to mind what variations of purpose it went

through on the land question. In 1885 it had refused all

reconsideration of judicial rents; in 1886 the Cowper

Commission and the Government's own envoy, Sir Redvers

Buller, alike reported that the demand for a reduction of

rents was an honest demand, and that the Irish tenants, as

a whole, genuinely could not pay the old rents. Still the

Government held to its refusal, evictions went forward (the

1887] THE JUBILEE 209

famous Woodford evictions on the Clanricarde estate took place in the winter of 1886-1887); and then in July 1887

Lord Salisbury calmly accepted the evidence he had been steadily refusing, and established new judicial rents under

a land court. These two Bills, it may be remarked in passing, were Mr Balfour's introduction as a member of

Government to the House of Commons. He had succeeded Sir Michael Hicks Beach as Chief Secretary at the be-

ginning of March.

The Coercion Bill is memorable as having led to one of the most drastic alterations of procedure in the House of

Commons. It was the first Bill to which " guillotine " closure was applied. Curiously enough, the Bill had not

been subjected to the purely obstructive tactics of the Irish party. But on 10th June the Government carried a

resolution that a week later the committee stage of the Bill should end, and clauses still undiscussed should be

put forthwith without debate. This was a violent answer to the growing bewilderment, which was expressed at

the opening of this session (and at the opening of every session for the past six or seven years), as to how the House

of Commons was to get through its work. Before the guillotine closure was adopted the House had already made

the existing closure resolutions more readily applicable. The stipulation in the resolution of 1882 for a majority of a

certain size was abolished, and closure of debate by a bare majority was authorised, provided the chairman accepted

a motion to that effect and not less than two hundred members supported it. Parliament made very little pro-

gress this year with anything but its Irish legislation. The Government accepted from a private member a Truck

Bill dealing with certain methods of paying workmen in kind, which had escaped earlier Acts; it was still, for

instance, the custom in some districts to pay agricultural labourers partly in supplies of cider. The passing of the

First Offenders Bill, introduced by Sir Howard Vincent, not

o

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[1887

for the first time, was a good piece of work rather hastily

done ; gloomy critics predicted that it would lead to such

espionage as this country had never tolerated. A Technical

Education Bill was introduced, givingpower to local author-

ities to set up technical schools and to combine for this

purpose with other localities in order to save overlapping

and spread the cost ; but the Bill was dropped to make

way for other legislation. An Allotments Bill was more

fortunate, and became law ; the authority to administer

it was the Local Sanitary Authority, appealing to Quarter

Sessions, but there was a strong disposition to eliminate

the latter and set up the Local Government Board as the

supreme authority. This disposition (and indeed the

production of the Bill itself) indicated that the legislation

on County Government, long promised by the Liberal

Ministry of 1880 but always postponed by the various

complications of that Ministry's career, was going to be

taken up by their opponents. One of the reasons given

by Mr W. H. Smith (who had succeeded Lord Randolph

Churchill as Leader of the Commons) for the abandonment

of certain Bills in August was the necessity for passing a

Local Boundaries Bill to clear the way for a Local Govern-

ment Bill in the following year.

Nothing shows better the suspension of public interest

in politics than the curious history of the Government's

Irish legislation of this year. A Coercion Bill for the first

time permanently at the disposal of the Executive, a Land

Bill which was a bland " doubling " on all Lord Salisbury

had said the year before, and incidentally a drastic inno-

vation in the procedure of the House-all accomplished

without any disturbance. Mr Gladstone could not have

attempted one quarter of such changes without rousing the

country. Partly this was due to his great personal position.

What he did stood in the popular mind for the fiery, the

exalted, the breath of the future. His defeat had been

enough to make men settle down in their normal ways

1887] THE JUBILEE 211

again ; and the men who defeated him were free to do almost anything without risk of disturbance. Partly too the supposed Parnell letter in The Times had had on the normal Englishman the effect it was intended to have on the Liberal Unionists. Parnell had always despised English public opinion, and, as we have seen, part of the secret of his power in Ireland was his avoiding any friendliness from England. His curt denial of the authenticity of the letter therefore was taken to be his usual contemptuous way of treating this country, the result being that in the general sense no one felt himself called upon to have any conscience about the Irish party or the Irish. The public after a week or two dropped the letter as it had dropped all politics, and gave itself to a summer of heightened gaiety, a holiday summer.

Everything was done—even to the appropriation of a Parisian popular tune for street and barrel-organ use—to make people think of the Jubilee and nothing else. Shops placarded it, villages feasted it, errand-boys whistled it. Last of all the weather rose to it. On 20th June the Queen proceeded to a great thanksgiving service in Westminster Abbey, where her venerable figure was enthroned upon a dais on the very spot on which fifty years before she had received the homage of her realm. Her procession to the Abbey was such as had never in the world's history accompanied a crowned head. Three kings were in it—the King of Denmark, the King of the Belgians, and the King of the Hellenes—and the Crown Princes of every throne in Christendom, and of some outside Christendom. Three sons, five sons-in-law, and nine grandsons and grandsons-in-law rode behind her carriage ; midmost in the line of sons-in-law rode the tall Crown Prince of the German Empire, his silver helmet, his long fair beard, and his white tunic making him the princeliest figure of the whole. The day was a universal holiday, and there was not a town or village which had not the means of making festival, and

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of giving it lasting commemoration in some monument, however modest. At nightfall bonfires were lit on all high hills. A new coinage was struck, chiefly remarkable, after the first novelty had passed away, for the fact that the sixpence was identical in design with the half-sovereign, so that a little gilding was sufficient for the perpetration of frauds.1

The Jubilee was an occasion which prompted retrospects, and every newspaper and review fell to taking stock of England's progress during fifty years. Developments of machinery and means of communication belong in the main to a period earlier than that of this history. They provided ground for almost unmitigated satisfaction. Yet the social condition of the country gave some pause ; it hardly seemed to express the results of a general advance, except in the broadest kind of material well-being. Even in that respect, though the country as a whole was vastly richer, there seemed to be forms of poverty more acute than the old days had known ; and there were still horrible slums, horrible corners in country villages, hovels on the thresholds of mansions. Wealth had indeed been more widely distributed ; but the distribution had run in channels. The growth of industrialism had, since the passing of the Limited Liability Acts, begun to carry the profits of industry out into the professional middle classes, as a return for the investment of savings. Professor Leone Levi, one of the greatest political economists of the day, writing soon after the publication of the Report of the Royal Commission on Trade, to contest the view that the fall in prices was due to the shortage of gold, pointed out that the fall might easily be an apparent one, due to the fact that the increase of Limited Liability Companies diminished apparent profits, spreading them more widely ; private shareholders looked for less return on their money than the manufacturing capitalists. Again, that same growth, by calling for

1 These sixpenny pieces were called in.

1887] THE JUBILEE 213

a corresponding expansion of means of distribution, had profoundly affected the middleman class ; and here also the Limited Liability Acts came into the field. Large " Stores " were in existence ; and the shareholders in them were a kind of sleeping middlemen. This feature of English commercial life was already important enough to have attracted the notice of the taxation experts of the country.1 Industrialism had not adjusted itself to the new weights it had to carry ; and its periods of production were being governed rather by the call for dividends than by considerations of steady trade. It could not fail to be remarked at the same time that, as the spread of wealth had increased, the standard of living had gone up. In education, in material comforts, in amusements, the upper middle class were now approximating to the habits of Society ; and the lower middle class, the smaller professional men and the shopkeepers, were coming into the position of the upper middle class. The consciousness of this, working in the artisan and the labourer, who had not yet shared as much in the growing wealth as in the spreading intelligence of the community, was no small element in the new uprising of labour, the new demands for something more than mere advancement of wages.

It is interesting to find in this very year of the Jubilee signs of another change, incalculable in effect. Compulsory education and the abolition of the stamp duty on newspapers had begun to make England a newspaper-reading nation. This had been seen in one respect in the influence which a newspaper agitation had had in the sending of Gordon to the Soudan.2 In 1887 it disturbed the minds of the respectable by its obvious fruitfulness in new forms of gambling. In January one cheap print had set on foot the

1 Elliot's Life of Lord Goschen, ii 158.

2 See page 124 ; and Mr G. W. E Russell's One Look Back, p. 246.

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[1887

form of competition which has ever since been readily

worked into a craze; it offered prizes for discovering

certain easy words in a series of pictures, the prizes to go

to the first correct solution which happened to be opened.

Other kinds of gambling due to the spread of newspapers

appeared in the autumn. There was a riot at Lillie

Bridge on 19th September, where a crowd of five or six

thousand had gathered to see a race; the race did not take

place, and the crowd wrecked the stands and railings of the

ground, and burned the fragments. It was pretty well

known that the stoppage of the race was really brought

about to suit some betting-books1; and the riot drew

attention, first, to the immense crowds which were

attracted to sporting events, and, secondly, to the cheap

newspapers which sent them there. The riot was followed

by a police raid on a gambling club in London; and these

were the first steps in a somewhat ineffectual attack during

the late eighties and early nineties upon the betting

tendencies of the workman. Another effect of cheap

newspapers on ideas of sport was observed about this

time. A famous old cricketer, signing himself “F. G.,”

wrote to The Times2 to complain of a new school

of cricket reporting which classified counties into first

and second class counties, and talked of “championships”

and “premierships”; the cricket enthusiast, he thought,

was becoming a mere statistician, with “records” at his

fingers' ends. The football mania had not yet begun; but

the same spirit was evidently at work to create it.

The Jubilee, not overshadowed by parliamentary battles,

was equally free of social shadows. The palpable exist-

ence of unemployment was rendered less pressing by the

warmth of the summer weather; yet in various minor

ways a certain financial pinch left its marks. Thus

the trade in meat was slack, and the importers of the

1 The Times, 24th September 1887.

2 5th September 1887.

1887] THE JUBILEE 215

chilled supply found it a depressing year; however it may be mentioned that even a depressed market now took 76,000 cwt. a month, which gives some measure of the growth of this industry in seven years. While we are on the subject of food, it may be mentioned that 1887 saw at last the passing of the Margarine Act, by which the word "margarine" had to be stamped on all packets containing that substance; the makers and purveyors had fought hard to alter the legal description to "butterine." If the meat market was not as good as a festival year seemed to imply, there were other means of jollity; and when the Chancellor of the Exchequer introduced his next Budget he commented gratefully on the large increase in the product of the beer and spirit duties, which the Jubilee festivities had put into his pocket. Tobacco duties also were becoming more productive, and for this there was an interesting reason. Anyone who turns over the newspapers for 1887 will be struck by an outbreak of advertisements of cigarettes. Of course cigarettes had been smoked in England for some time previously, but they were still looked upon as rather outlandish. Mr Labouchere's incessant smoking of them was enough to mark him out, and the æsthetes affected them as a piece of elegance. It was not until about 1887 that their use became common; and the change had been caused by the Sudan expedition. Officers and men alike had learned to enjoy cigarettes in Egypt, and as they brought their new habit home it spread among people, both high and low, who would never have picked it up from the æsthete or the dandy.

An event of the summer which was almost as popular as the Jubilee was the "Wild West" Show at Brompton. Colonel Cody, with his romantic past of fighting Indians and his troupe of picturesque cowboys, became the rage. Even the most grown-up persons recalled their boyhood and went to see the show. Meanwhile a sign of some uneasiness about the standing amusements of London was

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seen in the strong opposition to the application made

this year by the Empire Theatre for a music-hall licence in

place of its previous theatre licence ; the application was

granted, but not without a great deal of public criticism

of the condition of music-hall entertainments.

Parliament had an unusually long session, and had not

risen when, in September, a sudden violent occurrence took

place in Ireland. But again the withdrawal of public

interest showed itself in the comparative coolness and ease

with which the Government were able to take the affair.

A meeting at Mitchelstown, co. Cork, at which Mr Dillon

was speaking, was turned into a riot by the determination

of the police to force their official note-taker through the

midst of the crowd. In the end three men were killed

by rifle fire from the police barracks. Yet so little was

the British public inclined to care for such things at the

moment that Mr Balfour was able to answer indignant

questions in the House by merely giving the police version

of the affair ; and even Mr Gladstone's cry, " Remember

Mitchelstown," roused no one who would not have been

ready to be roused by less tragic events.

Mr Balfour was able to carry out through the executive

in Dublin the severest kind of repression. Some two

hundred branches of the National League were suppressed ;

the Lord Mayor of Dublin was prosecuted for publishing

in a newspaper, owned by him, reports of League meetings ;

Mr William O'Brien was sent to gaol as a common criminal

for speaking at proclaimed meetings ; Mr Wilfrid Blunt

was similarly treated for trying to address a gathering

on the Clanricarde estate. Mr O'Brien's refusal to wear

prison dress drew some flippant attention, for his own

clothes had been taken away, and his demand for their

restoration was echoed in British jests about " O'Brien's

trousers." Mr Blunt's arrest also caused a slight stir, be-

cause, being an English squire, he was appalled into strong

language by the discovery that a policeman could positively

1887] THE JUBILEE 217

prevent him from making a speech. But otherwise no

one in England paid much heed to Mr Balfour's rule;

even though the Irish problem took one of its curious

twists when in August there came loud complaints from

Ulster because the large London Livery Companies, taking

advantage of the Land Purchase Act, were clearing out of

their Irish estates, and leaving to their fate all religious

and charitable institutions to which, as landlords, they

had hitherto subscribed. Private landlords were not

clearing out in quite this conscienceless way ; and in-

dignant Ulstermen were inclined to question whether under

the terms of the Plantation it was legal for the Livery

Companies to act as they were acting. In any case Mr

Balfour's policy did not interfere with the progress of the

Conservatives and the Liberal Unionists towards coalition.

One prominent Unionist, Sir George Trevelyan, had

returned to the Gladstonians in May, when he knew that

Mr Gladstone was not of fixed mind on the question of re-

taining Irish members at Westminster. Lord Hartington,

on the other hand, was speaking more strongly than ever

against all the proposed or hinted forms of self-government

for Ireland, and against the Parnellite party. A flicker of

the spirit of the previous year arose upon a speech by Sir

George Trevelyan in July, which caused Liberal Unionists

to ask him by what right he "took upon himself to

excommunicate Bright, Hartington and Chamberlain."

But the plain man's view of the situation was the true one :

the coalition would take place by a process of driftings,

and letters were even being written to the papers to prove

that before common opposition to Home Rule united the

two groups they had had a bond of union in a common

policy, Mr Chamberlain and Lord Randolph Churchill being

almost as near together in democratic schemes as, say,

Mr Goschen and Sir Michael Hicks Beach were in distrust

of such schemes. Before the end of the year the Liberal

Unionists held a great meeting which virtually amounted

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[1887

to adherence to the Conservative side; and when Mr

Chamberlain left England in December for New York, to

act as British Commissioner in the Canadian Fisheries

dispute, he was not only taking a post offered by Lord

Salisbury, but was also arranging a convenient absence,

on the further side of which he might with less emphasis

take the final step of severance from his old party. It is

curious, considering how events developed sixteen years

later, that at this time one of the reasons given by the Tory

newspapers for welcoming Mr Chamberlain was that he

and his Liberal Unionist allies might be expected to

counteract a tendency towards Protection in the Conserva-

tive party. The Fair Trade cry had been, after all, less

damaged by its defeats at the polls than many people

thought, and it was vigorous towards the end of the year.

The papers which deplored it as a reactionary movement

looked to the democratic ideas of Mr Chamberlain as a

useful influence against it.

Nothing that modern retrospect can add would make

the Home Rule split more serious, more damaging, than

it was at the time. Yet we can perceive now concurrent

effects of it unperceived at the time. Events had so

fallen that both Lord Randolph Churchill and Mr

Chamberlain were out of office, and out of influence, at

a time when a politician in any sort of touch with the

working poor might have diverted the whole course of

social history. As it was, the world at large continued to

satisfy itself by mentally separating the socialist speaker

from the mass of working people. The latter, politicians

thought they understood. When in May a deputation

of pit-brow women waited upon the Home Secretary to

protest against the attempt which was being made to put

a stop to the work of women at colliery pit-mouths, he

expressed his readiness to accede to their views, and re-

joiced in the opportunity of showing that a Conservative

Government was open to the reasoned requests of labour.

1887] THE JUBILEE 219

When the Parliamentary Committee of the Trade Union Congress decided in June against taking part in an Inter-

national Conference of Labour they were commended for maintaining the independence of the British artisan, and

keeping him clear of associations with foreign workmen who founded their programme upon more State intervention

than men in this country demanded.1 Nor was there any misgiving about the conference in the autumn on the

conditions of working women, when a strong committee, on which Miss Maude Stanley, Mrs Barnett, Mrs Hickford,

Mrs Allison, Mrs Verney, Canon Barnett, Lord Meath, Mr G. R. Sims and Professor Stuart served, met to con-

sider the relation of women's work to social life, and more specifically the hours, wages and conditions of women's

work. This conference, again, was largely due to a novel of Walter Besant's, Children of Gibeon, which had depicted

the circumstances of sweated women in the East End; Besant served as honorary treasurer of the committee.

All these movements were supposed to be separable from London street meetings, which again began to be trouble-

some in October. In one sense they were separable; even William Morris himself was thinking at this time

that the free speech campaign was beginning to take on an importance of its own, apart from the subject of the

speaking. He thought he discerned in the leaders of the campaign a desire to figure as heroes.2 But in the deeper

sense there was no line of division. What was happening was the birth of a new school of labour aspiration, which

was not satisfied to see all political economy brushed aside, because the individualist form of it had been dethroned.

The tendency of even thoughtful men in other classes just now was to replace political science by a humanitar-

ian spirit in administration; and the knowledge that such a spirit was abroad made men the more ready to be

1 The Times, 15th June 1887.

2 Mackail's Life of William Morris, ii. 179.

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[1887

impatient with the London street meetings. As these

meetings had become a battle-ground the socialist leaders

were disposed to keep them going; they could not be

blamed for seeing the opportunity. Having tried to hold

one in Trafalgar Square, and caused the authorities to take

action on the somewhat absurd legal point that the Square

was Crown territory, and could therefore be arbitrarily

closed, the socialists called a large meeting in Hyde

Park on 20th October, and thence led a mass of men as a

deputation to the Home Office; the police devoted them-

selves to riding constantly through and through the march-

ing men, and breaking up the ranks. Two or three days

later, on a Sunday, there was a march of the unemployed

to Westminster Abbey. Some months earlier they had

similarly attended service in St Paul's; on both occasions

the men sat for the most part quite quietly amid the

nervous congregation, though one or two shouted remarks

during the sermon. The closing of Trafalgar Square

was rescinded, and a meeting was held there on 24th

October, after which men paraded the West End

streets, but nothing occurred beyond the excusable panic

of the shopkeepers. Hyndman had issued a programme

of demands, including an eight hours' day in all Govern-

ment workshops, the opening to cultivation of all waste

lands in Crown or Government possession, and the

establishment of relief works at State or local charges.

For the moment the reopening of Trafalgar Square ap-

peared to have had its effect in causing the demonstrations

there to dwindle by the removal of a grievance. But some

arrests in the Square early in November for using threaten-

ing language led to a fresh prohibition of meetings there,

and the result was the fight of 'Bloody Sunday,' 13th

November. The unemployed and their leaders made a

determined attack on the Square, which was held by a

strong barrier of police. Police vedettes met the oncoming

processions from every direction, and had broken them

1887] THE JUBILEE 221

up before they reached the main cordon. The chief fight took place at the corner of the Strand. “No one who saw it will ever forget the strange and indeed terrible sight of that grey winter day, the vast, sombrecoloured crowd, the brici but fierce struggle at the corner of the Strand, and the river of steel and scarlet that moved slowly through the dusky swaying masses, when two squadrons of the Life Guards were summoned up from Whitehall.” 1 Before the columns of the unemployed were finally headed off, the upper side of the Square was lined by a battalion of Foot Guards with bayonets fixed and ball cartridge in their pouches. After the affray two of the stoutest fighters remained in custody—Cunningham Graham, then a Member of Parliament, and John Burns. For weeks the alarm caused by this wild scene lasted; special constables were enrolled as for a revolution, and Trafalgar Square was held daily by pickets of police. There was no further attack; but there was one other socialist manifestation. In December a man named Alfred Linnell, who had been injured in the fight, died. His funeral on 18th December was attended by a huge but perfectly orderly crowd, and William Morris and Henry Quelch, of the Social Democratic Federation, spoke at the graveside. Cunningham Graham, John Burns, the Rev. Stewart Headlam, and Mrs Annie Besant were in the procession. No one knew what effect a man's death might have on the agitation; it made an anxious close to the year. Moreover in the Western Isles of Scotland the crofters were raiding the deer forests, declaring they were starving, and the tithe riots in Wales had not ceased.

In December the British public learned for the first time where the real wealth of gold in the Transvaal lay. A Board of Trade report on the Witwatersrand district was published on 15th December. The Rand had been pro-

1 Mackail's Life of William Morris, ii. 191.

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claimed a goldfield in March, but for all effective purposes the secret had been kept until the industry was under way ; and by this time eighty or ninety companies had been registered in connection with the Rand, and 1400 stamps were already working. The discovery of the gold there was attributed to a Mr Struben, an English-man long resident in Johannesburg.1 Smaller fields still continued to be opened up, as at Luipaard's Vlei ; and altogether the export of gold from South Africa was expected to approach £200,000 in this year ; in 1885 it had been £69,543. A hint of the monopolising of wealth by a large ring at work in South Africa was given by the announcement in August 1887 that the De Beers Company were buying out the French Diamond Mining Company at Kimberley. A mining subject of a somewhat different kind had caused scandal in political quarters in the summer. The recent annexation of Burma had brought under British control the rich ruby mines which had belonged to King Theebaw. It became known that a lease to work these mines was being granted, and there were circumstances connected with the grant which caused Lord Cross, the Secretary for India, to cut short the pending negotiations, and reserve the subject for inquiry.

Late in the year the final stage of an undertaking, which has made several appearances in these pages, was inaugurated. The first sod of the Manchester Ship Canal was cut on 11th November at Eastham Ferry by Lord Egerton of Tatton. Shares to the value of five millions had been issued in the summer, three millions having been taken up in Lancashire before the prospectus was published for the second time,2 and Barings and Rothschilds had under-written a considerable amount. The raising of the three millions was a fine piece of local patriotism.

1 It has also been attributed to Sir J. B. Robinson

2 See p 186

CHAPTER X

1888 : THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE

IN the year 1888 it seemed that the many currents of restlessness—the restlessness not only of working people and the people on the "starvation line," but of educated and thoughtful people also in regard to the responsibilities of citizenship—were producing a genuine effect. The body politic of England stirred uneasily, and could not quite go to sleep again. There was no cause for anxieties abroad. For the moment our relations with France were patched up ; in October 1887 the Government had announced simultaneously the conclusion of an agreement neutralising the Suez Canal in time of war, and the withdrawal of all French claims on the New Hebrides.1 Germany lay under a double oppression : her famous old Emperor William, first wearer of the crown of a united Germany, was at the end of his long life (he died on 9th March) ; and his heir, the Crown Prince who had taken all London's eyes in the Jubilee procession, was a stricken man. He only reigned three months, dying on 15th June, of cancer in the throat.

So England practically spent the year with its own conscience. In January the horrors of sweated labour were for the first time systematically revealed by a Board of Trade report, coinciding with the work of the private committee investigating the conditions of women's industry. The subject was approached without

1 See page 103. The subject of the New Hebrides had provided the livelest passages of discussion at the Colonial Conference; See The Times, 27th July 1887.

223

224 THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE [1888

any sentimental excess. Sweating was diagnosed as an evil largely due to the extreme subdivision of labour in certain trades ; for instance, a single subdivision of the tailor's trade, coatmaking, was further subdivided into the work of cutters, basters, machinists, pressers, fellers, buttonhole makers, and general workers. It was urged on behalf of the various sub-contractors in trades so divided that they worked as hard as any of the grades below them, and that care should be taken to distinguish between a system itself and excesses in a system. When Lord Dunraven a month later raised the question in the House of Lords, and obtained the appointment of a Select Committee, the same careful spirit was at work ; the mere system of manufacture of cheap clothing (which was the trade mostly impugned) was, after all, it was said, the same as the system in other industrial work; cheap pens and cheap cotton goods were equally made possible by subdivision of labour ; and with an export trade of four millions a year in clothing it behoved reformers to be cautious. An increase of inspectors might be desirable. But was it not a matter in which a general improvement of tone in the community would be the only valid method of reform ? So sharply was public attention roused that the Salvation Army was attacked for producing, by its charitable system of providing work for those in need of food and shelter, an undercutting of the market in laundry-work and match-making ; the accusation was strenuously denied. The subject ran off into all sorts of side-issues. Was the middleman to be blamed ? But the middleman must be a necessary and not un-economic link in the social fabric. Was alien immigration a chief source of sweating ? But, if that were stopped, would the underpaid work be refused by English people ? Was not the fault as much with the purchaser as with anybody else ? No direct legislation against sweating would avail, if the purchaser insisted on extreme cheapness. The

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private committee on women's work formed itself into a larger and more immediately philanthropic body, called the Women's Protective and Provident League, which was active in collecting evidence for the Select Committee. A more important step was taken in July, when the match-making girls of a large factory in the East End were encouraged to strike by the outcry against sweating; Miss Clementina Black at once devoted herself to forming a Match-makers' Union; the girls won their fight themselves, and wrote a new chapter in the history of women's labour. It was altogether no wonder that in the autumn Lord Sydney Godolphin Osborne should express rather sombre gratification in the reflection that at last some knowledge of the awful conditions of the East End and of provincial slums was penetrating an England which with these horrors at its doors went on subscribing half-a-million a year for foreign missions, spent its money lavishly on the buildingof a Church House,1 and its time on a Pan-Anglican conference of bishops from all over the world.

The sarcastic implication of this reflection, as well as its main purport, was thoroughly in the spirit of the year. In religious matters too the nation was singularly stirred. A focussing point for much new thought, some of it very yeasty, was provided by the publication early in April of a novel, Robert Elsmere, by Mrs Humphry Ward. Reference has been made to that conflict between divines and men of science, which arose out of enthusiastic acceptance of the evolutionary theory, and was sharply revived in the eighties by the death of Charles Darwin and the consequent recapitulation of his achievements. As it happened, the controversy found the Church of England in a phase of slight, perhaps too slight, attention to purely doctrinal and historical work. That had become associated chiefly with the Tractarians; and in the reaction against

1 The Church House at Westminster was begun in 1887, after a great deal of discussion

P

226 THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE [1888

High Church methods and practices, which centred in F. D. Maurice and Charles Kingsley, there had been a tendency to feel that ecclesiastical learning was not altogether a healthy pursuit. To show to the world that passion for the poor and afflicted, devotion to parish work, and zealous care of souls were not necessarily bound up with a sacramental interpretation of priesthood and an ascetic life tending to monasticism, was the object of the Maurice group ; and as the priestliness and asceticism were founded on the historical teachings of the Tractarians, the group had a tendency to avoid learning which was, so to speak, technical Church learning. The muscular curate was the prevailing type of young clergyman. When the attack came, when new scientific schools of thought, new theories of the origin of life, assailed the whole Christian cosmogony, and thereby raised the searching problem of Christian evidences, men of religious faith retired into more than one camp. The High Church, secure in its own mysticism, held no parley at all from its citadel. Churchmen of the Maurice and Kingsley type became the Broad Church, and started throwing up earthworks to enclose a portion of the debatable ground, from whence they might answer the shots aimed at them ; in other words, they rationalised certain regions of evidence, especially in the Old Testament. Meanwhile a strong intellectual movement among lay churchmen rationalised the whole body of Christianity, and these people, ceasing thereby in mere honesty to call themselves churchmen, yet called themselves Christians. The Evangelicals, with a section of Nonconformity (one portion of which was in the broadest Church position), rejecting the extreme ground of the mystics, battled faithfully with the exponents of the higher criticism, and gave not the least convincing proof of the reality of their religious feeling in the firmness with which they refused to yield an inch of ground. A controversy of some fame took place just at this time ; Dr Henry Wace,

1888] THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 227

Principal of King's College, London, engaged in an argumentative duel with Professor Huxley in the pages of The Nineteenth Century, and this type of discussion never received a better summing-up than on this occasion. The question of the origin of life seriously disturbed dinner-parties, and protoplasm was a word that could destroy the friendships of years. If the theologians' position showed some obstinacy, the scientists on their side laid themselves open to the biting comment that "nothing is infallible now, except science." Floating somewhat vaguely in the welter was the recent school of taste in art and life. Æstheticism in its worst aspect offered a cynical kind of support to the Ritualists; in its best it held a large part of the intellectual world aloof from destructive criticism and from an exaggerated emphasis on the exercise of the intellect.

Matthew Arnold, who had, if often indirectly, borne so large a part in this drastic reconsideration of belief, hardly lived to see it become (though the phrase is rather inappropriate) a popular affair. He died on 16th April, just after Mrs Ward, whose uncle he was, had published her novel. Mr Gladstone found himself at leisure to take up the ecclesiastical discussions which always interested him even more than politics ; and an article by him on this novel ¹ set all the country talking. It is ancient history now; the modern world would not be stirred by the spectacle of a parish priest, who has resigned his living owing to an inability to believe in miracles, founding in the East End a sect based on an indeterminate mixture of Positivism, social enthusiasm, and sacramental phrases without the Sacraments. But the appearance of the book remains a monument of that searching of the social conscience which had so strikingly come to light every now and then in the early eighties, and in 1888 was the predominant influence.

Housing reform was at work. Large private benefactions

¹ In The Nineteenth Century, 1888.

228 THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE [1888

were being projected to supplement the work of public bodies, and at least one great ground landlord, whose leases were falling in, was setting aside, in his plans for rebuilding, sites for workmen's dwellings.1 Educational reform was advanced a stage in this year by the Report of the Royal Commission on the Education Acts. It had nothing to say about making education entirely free, though Mr Chamberlain in his new surroundings maintained that ideal more frankly than any other part of his former Radical programme. The commission was indeed Conservative in essence, a majority of fifteen supporting the voluntary school system and recommending a development of religious education, from which a minority of five, including Sir John Lubbock, Mr Lyulph Stanley and Dr Dale dissented. But on more general topics some useful recommendations were made, as, for instance, that teachers' salaries should befixed,instead of being dependent on the grant ; and that, while the system of payment by results in the Government grant could not be entirely abolished, it might be subject to much relaxation. An improvement of the training colleges was also recommended.

A movement was on foot earlier in the year to ease the conditions under which elementary schools might enter on technical education. It was beginning to be felt that it would be difficult to lay down the line at which elementary education ends and technical instruction should begin, so that the sounder policy might be a wide and deep improvement of elementary education. The Associated Chambers of Commerce, on the other hand, preferred that the two forms of teaching should be kept separate. The subject in general had a year of helpful ventilation and discussion.

Events had so fallen out that the chief parliamentary work of 1888 was also in the spirit of the year. The Local Government Bill gave the representative principle a new sphere hitherto occupied by non-elective authorities.

1 Lord Cadogan, on his Chelsea estates.

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Not only had "the era of administration" come, but the power of administration was placed within reach of all. Until this time the authority in the counties had been the justices in Quarter Sessions; it was now to be a body similar to the great popular municipalities, elected on the same household suffrage, with some modifications, such as the removal of the disqualification of clergymen and ministers. But more important still from the democratic point of view was the amount of delegation of work which the Bill was framed to permit. Practically all county work might be delegated to committees, with the provision that they must report to the council, and that the council had the sole power of expenditure. Two committees were compulsory under the Bill—the Finance Committee (which was not only a watching committee, as in the existing municipalities, but an estimating committee, without whose sanction no sum over fifty pounds could be expended); and a Standing Joint Committee, formed of councillors and justices, for police purposes. But any number of other committees might be formed, and in order to save wasteful expenditure from overlapping in such matters as drainage, roads, etc., a council might unite with other councils in setting up joint committees with delegated powers. The result of all the delegation was that the council as a whole need not meet often (four meetings a year was the statutory minimum), and thus membership was open to men who had not much time to spare from their work, and at the same time county business was not hampered with incessant debating. A general county rate was authorised by the Bill. The Bill did not apply to Ireland; but Liberal Unionists congratulated themselves on having an instrument the possible extension of which might undermine the Home Rule movement. Conservatives indeed regarded the measure as savouring far too strongly of Liberal Unionism, and the Government had to face much resentment among

230 THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE [1888

their supporters in the country. Tory critics pointed out that administration by Quarter Sessions had been economical, fairly efficient, and, above all, free from jobbery. Other critics, while more friendly to the principle, objected that much more ought to have been done to unify rating, that interference with the old control of the police might endanger the efficiency of the service, that triennial elections were not frequent enough to keep up local interest, and so on. Liberals regretted the exclusion of Poor Law administration from the work of the new councils; but the creation of a County of London, with the consequent abolition of the Metropolitan Board of Works, was no small consolation to them. All was going well with the Bill, when suddenly a controversy sprang up on the clauses detailing the licensing powers of the new authority. The councils were to be allowed to refuse the renewal of licences to public-houses, on payment of compensation to the licence-holder. Temperance reformers detected danger in the implication contained in this clause, that an interest in a licence was a valuable interest; they maintained hotly that a licence was an annual grant, and that the licensing authority had a right in any year to refuse renewal. Less extreme men were puzzled by the absence of any basis for computation of the value of a licence. Brewers and licence-holders for their part disliked any change which would place them under new and popularly elected bodies. So great an outcry arose from all these conflicting interests that the Government decided to withdraw the licensing clauses altogether. The Bill then made a prosperous passage, and was law before the House rose in August.

The licensed victualling trade was at a critical point in its history. We have recorded the first large brewery flotation, that of Guinness's, in 1886. Others followed, notably that of Samuel Allsopp & Sons, in February 1887, with a capital of £1,100,000; and that of Bass, Ratcliff

1888] THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 231

& Gretton, in January 1888, with a capital of £2,720,000. For some time breweries all over the kingdom had been buying public-houses, in order to avoid the expense and uncertainty of constant competition for the custom of licensed victuallers. The possession of a large number of licensed premises gave a brewery a regular and steady trade. But the acquisition of them was an extremely expensive affair, and the standard of price for such premises constantly rose. Brewing firms had therefore been obliged to raise a large number of mortgages and loans, and had only been waiting for an easy investment market to come to the public for capital to consolidate these liabilities. It was natural that they should at the same time decide to put their businesses under the Limited Liability Acts ; the old private partnership was apt to be a tiresome arrangement in businesses so large in scale.

But apart from the legal and financial convenience of limited liability the only object which it was wise to have in view was the consolidation of the mortgages and loans. Even a moderate call for new ordinary capital would not have done any harm. But the Guinness flotation had been so eagerly taken up, and brewing profits at the moment were such a temptation to the investor, that some breweries put their whole capital on the market. The two courses of action were exemplified in the cases of Allsopp's and Bass's. The former brewery offered all classes of its shares for subscription ; the public demand was almost entirely for the ordinary and preference shares. Bass's on the other hand kept the ordinary and preference shares in the possession of the old shareholders, and offered the public £910,000 of debentures. They were taking the course that really represented the actual requirements of breweries at the time ; Allsopp's were using the opportunity of those requirements for a wholly different operation.

The amount of money waiting for investment was enormous. The application for Allsopp's shares amounted

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[1888

to something like a hundred millions, and Bass's debentures were issued at 107 per cent. The rush of prospectuses was becoming so lively as to cause a fresh scrutiny of the limited liability laws, and a fear that the company promoter was not sufficiently under control. Suggestions were made that the law should demand two registrations, an initial one, which might be easy enough to keep the ball rolling, and a final one of a much more stringent kind in respect to paid-up capital and the proportion borne to it by preliminary expenses. Besides brewery flotations, this year saw also the formation of several Trusts, the chief one being the Cheshire Salt Trust, with a capital of three millions ; and—a more exciting affair—the beginning of the South African gold "boom." The industry on the Rand was going ahead fast. The gold exports for a single month (February) were £75,647—more than the whole year's export in 1885 ; and from the Rand alone the export for March was 14,706 oz., and for April 15,853 oz. There seemed to be no cloud on the promising outlook. An article in The Times 1 on the Rand conditions dwelt on the absence of any disturbance such as the inrush of capitalists and labour had been expected to produce. President Kruger had appointed as Landrost of the district not a Boer unlikely to be in sympathy with the work, but a naturalised Austrian "of agreeable manners" ; and the Englishmen on the Rand were saying that they were better off than at Cape Town. The monthly output by the end of the year was about 21,000 oz., though it was believed that for private reasons a good deal of gold was being kept back.2 The connection which has already been spoken of between the new goldfield and the immensely wealthy diamond mines of South Africa came out clearly at a meeting of the Goldfields of South Africa Ltd. in

1 22nd May 1888

2 Board of Trade Report on the Witwatersrand Published 17th December 1888.

1888] THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 233

October, when the shareholders expressed themselves as so confident in the gold industry that they wished to get rid of their De Beers shares, and put the money into the Rand. De Beers had in May amalgamated with the Kimberley Central Diamond Mining Company, and was now a virtual monopoly.

The already prolific output of the Rand took the wind from the sails of the Currency Commission's report, which was published in November. The commission was equally divided in its recommendations, neither of which was original. One half recommended the issue of banknotes of small values; the other half were for the bimetallist solution, and for an international agreement fixing the ratio at which coins of either metal should be available for the payment of debts, at the option of the debtor. No action was taken on the report. The Treasury was otherwise occupied, for Mr Goschen, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, had decided to carry out compulsorily the conversion of the Three-per-cents., which Mr Childers had attempted on voluntary lines in 1884. That attempt had not been useless. The twenty millions or so of stock, which had since that time borne 2¾ per cent. interest instead of 3 per cent., afforded an extremely useful indication of the real position of public credit; they stood at 102. It was obvious that, if the lower rate of interest could still command a premium, it was absurd for the country to be going on paying 3 per cent. The fact that municipalities had been reconsidering their rate of interest must also have influenced Mr Goschen. In 1887 the Birmingham Corporation found its 3½ per cent. stock standing at a premium of 3 to 4½; and decided that the issue it was about to make should be at 3 per cent. only. It had obtained for an issue late in the year an average price of £98, 15s. Consequently Mr Goschen had double reason to feel confidence in the lowering of the national rate of interest, and he did not hesitate to apply it to the whole of

234 THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE [1888

the national stock. His Budget of 1888 contained a scheme by which five hundred and fifty-eight millions of Three-per-cents. were to fall after the current year to 2¾ per cent., and after a further fourteen years to 2½ per cent., at which they were to stand for twenty years. Some portion of the stock could legally be converted without notice; and in order to induce stockholders who were entitled to notice to bring their holdings rapidly into the scheme, Mr Goschen offered a premium of 5s. per £100 on stock converted before 12th April, and also a brokerage of 1s. 6d. per £100 to brokers converting before that date. The result was that by 12th April the new stock amounted to four hundred and fifty millions, and the success of the scheme was assured. It too had profited by the better business conditions.

To say, as we have said, that this was a year in which the public conscience was stirred must not be allowed to carry too sombre an implication. The passion of the year for coster songs (" 'E's all right when you know 'im, But you've got to know 'im fust " was of this date) reveals depths of innocent ease. Strenuous ideas, social con-ventions, had in many directions been relaxed. People of exalted birth were going almost ostentatiously into trade; impoverished younger sons were taking positions in city businesses, and noble ladies were opening millinery shops. With the decline of fashionable æstheticism, artists had taken to dressing in the ordinary smart clothes of men about town, and velvet and long hair were no more the mode. The New Gallery, opened this year, found itself taking over from the Grosvenor Gallery a school of taste in art which had already become respectably traditional; and Mr Whistler had so far ceased to infuriate the ordinary citizen that he had become to Punch " the licensed Vistler." Advanced artistic taste was now occupying itself with William Morris's special gospel of " reasonable labour," and work in which the workman could take interest. The Arts and Crafts Guild, which had been

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founded in 1884, held this year its first exhibition. The

restoration of the individual hand and brain to the chief

place in manufacture was destined, in Morris’s view, to

chasten industrial art, wherein the domination of the

machine was producing a gulf betwixt utility and orna-

mentation ; the latter was becoming an excrescence,

and increasingly meaningless in design.

The great excitement of the summer was the railway

“ Race to the North.” It began in July, when the London

& North-Western and Caledonian Railways announced

an eight-and-a-half-hours run to Edinburgh. As the

journey had been one of ten hours this was an effective

advertisement ; but the Great Northern and North-

Eastern Railways promptly replied by announcing an eight-

hours run. The North-Western and Caledonian did the

same early in August ; and the race hit the public fancy.

Men surrendered like children to the fascination of railway

engines ; and rejoiced in this colossal duel of locomotive

monsters, hurtling across England through the night, and

pantingly comparing times in Edinburgh in the morning.

After the respective routes had shaved down their

difference to a matter of a minute or two, the rivals took

a rest, and the public travelled by whichever route it had

backed. Historically the principal interest of the struggle

lies in the obvious deduction that the passenger traffic to

Scotland was becoming very valuable ; which is another

indication of the spread of wealth in the middle classes,

and the readiness to expend it. Scientifically too the race

had a special interest. Such tremendous rates of speed

with such heavy loads meant firstly that the modern

engineering tools had succeeded in producing large surfaces

with a minimum of liability to destructive friction, and

secondly that Bessemer steel rails would bear an astonish-

ing amount of shock and strain.

The other craze of the summer was neither useful nor

scientific. It was in 1888 that Mr Baldwin first performed

236 THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE [1888

the feat of dropping from a balloon with a parachute, which opened as he fell and floated him to earth. It gave a fresh impetus to the rather failing interest in ballooning.

Electric lighting had at length made the advance which enabled it to take its share in the busy company-promoting of the year. House-to-house supply had been rendered possible, and at the same time an Act was passed extending the duration of Provisional Electric Lighting Orders to forty-two years. This made the enterprise commercially profitable, and two companies were at once formed in London. They prudently undertook districts which contained enough theatres, clubs, and large hotels to secure a steady consumption—the districts of Pall Mall, St James’s and St Martin-in-the-Fields. A new process for making aluminium, reducing the cost from forty shillings a pound to about fifteen shillings a pound; more experiments with a “ spirit motor ”; and a successful employment of wax instead of tinfoil for the cylinders of phonographs, were minor activities of the inventors. Phonographs of the new kind were a great interest of the year.

The Local Government Bill was the only parliamentary business to which the public paid much heed. The movement for setting up a Department of Agriculture was revived, and, as was natural, began to have more weight under a Government strong in the landed interest. Reform of the House of Lords was in the air. The case of a peer who had been warned off the turf late in 1887 had led The Times to remark that such a case brought us “ nearer to the highly necessary reform of the House of Lords ”; but a motion in the House by Lord Rosebery proposing a Second Chamber of 200 members, some elected by the Peers, others by the town and county councils, others provided by an increase of life peerages, was but tamely debated, and was rejected by a majority of more than two to one. However, a few Conservative peers and several Liberal Unionist peers voted for it. The real interest of

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the session, after the Local Government Bill, was a vivid re-

crudescence in the House of Commons of Irish controversy.

Since his complete denial of the authenticity of the letter

published in The Times in April 1887 Parnell, true to his

constant disregard of English opinion, and little inclined,

in a state of poor health, to give himself trouble, had taken

no further steps in the matter. He had declined all advice

to proceed against The Times for libel. But at the end of

1887 a member of his party, finding what he considered to

be ground for action on his own part in the articles on

"Parnellism and Crime," had entered a libel suit. It came

on for trial in July 1888, and a verdict was given against

him. The trial was used to strike another blow at Parnell.

Counsel for The Times was the Attorney-General; and in

consequence, when he produced and read in court further

incriminating letters alleged to have been signed by Parnell,

his speech was not far removed from an official indictment.

Even Parnell could hardly treat this with contempt, and

he moved in the House of Commons for a Select Committee.

The Government offered him instead a commission of three

judges, set up by an Act of Parliament. Feeling in the

House ran very strong 1; it was said by the Liberals and

the Irish that the proposal to set the Bench to work meant

the hope of a prejudiced English verdict, and when the Bill

was found to empower the commission to consider charges

against "other persons" besides Parnell there was great

indignation at the idea of placing virtually the whole

question of Irish government before a legal tribunal.

Mr Gladstone was in his most impassioned mood, and

the committee stage of the Bill was marked by violent

scenes in the House. The temper of Irish Nationalist

members had been rather hot throughout the year. They

were indignant at what they considered an insulting

nonchalance in Mr Balfour, and from the beginning of the

session they had accused him of deliberately absenting

1 Cf. Morley's Life of Gladstone, iii. 390.

238 THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE [1888

himself from the House when Irish questions bulked largely on the notice paper. This smouldering resentment was partly responsible for the violence that accompanied the Parnell Commission Bill debates. The world outside cannot be said to have cared very much about the details of the affair, and when the commission met, in October 1888, no one paid great attention to the immense production of evidence. The terms of reference to the commission practically necessitated an examination into the speeches of Irish members and all disturbing events in Ireland for years past. Nor was there even as much popular interest as there would have been a few years later, when it was announced that Mr Cecil Rhodes, an ex-Cabinet Minister in Cape Colony, and a principal shareholder in De Beers, had been in correspondence with Parnell, and, in order to mark his view of Home Rule as a possible commencement of Devolution and Imperial Federation, had subscribed £10,000 to the Irish party funds. Mr Rhodes expressed his own conviction, from his experience with the Dutch in Cape Colony, that the difficulty of the loyal minority in Ulster was one that would settle itself.

Parliament assembled for an autumn sitting. It had an Employers' Liability Bill to deal with, modifying the doctrine of " common employment " in the workman's favour, introducing the responsibility of sub-contractors, and extending the benefits to seamen. Mr Chamberlain was evidently making his presence felt in the Coalition, for this was one of the measures of his Radical days. The session was also notable for some changes in procedure ; the House began meeting at three o'clock in the afternoon, instead of at four o'clock, and the Standing Committees on Law and Trade, which had been allowed to lapse, were again set up. This revived the idea of an Estimates Committee, but a Conservative Government was not likely to take so new a step. Its advocates found some cogent arguments in the agitation which was beginning about the defences of the

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country. It was clear that there would be strong pressure

to increase the Naval Estimates, and an Estimates

Committee might, it was pleaded, bring about that co-

ordination of naval and military expenditure which was

surely to be desired. The pressure was fully at work in a

meeting at the Mansion House in May, when Admiral

Hornby asked if England was really able to keep the sea ;

and gave as his own reply the opinion that she would

require 186 cruisers for the purpose. A committee had

reported upon the state of the defences of our naval ports,

and, cautious as its official phrases were, men discerned in

the report a real concern about the existing circumstances.

In every suburban railway carriage of a morning the navy,

new battleships, new men, new methods, were the pre-

vailing topic of conversation ; and Lord Charles Beresford,

who had made a fighting reputation for himself at the

bombardment of Alexandria, and Lord Randolph Churchill

raised the subject on every possible occasion. The

celebrations of the tercentenary of the Armada were a

rallying ground for the agitators ; they were also an early

instance of the local pageant, for the historic game of bowls

on Plymouth Hoe was re-enacted, and was followed by a

procession of all the sovereigns of England. The discussion

of our defences gave some prominence also to an agitation

persistent throughout these years for giving better atten-

tion to the Volunteer movement, which was feeling itself

neglected and very inadequately supported in funds by the

War Office. This year saw it in peculiar difficulty owing

to the necessity of abandoning its old training and shooting

ground at Wimbledon. A year or two passed before it was

in possession of new ground at Bisley. Volunteers, it may

be remarked, were introducing cycling into their service,

but the high bicycle did not lend itself well to such uses.

In the world of labour there was a singular lull. To

some extent, no doubt, the better trade conditions had

absorbed unemployed labour ; and street meetings were

240 THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE [1888

not so severely under the ban of the police. Organisation was taking the energies of the most prominent labour leaders, and the Independent Labour Party was set on foot. The removal of all restrictions upon combination was the one item of the International Trade Union Congress upon which there was harmony. But the year is chiefly remarkable in this connection for the appearance of a newspaper which, though not formally associated with the labour movement, aimed at becoming a power among working men. This newspaper was The Star, a halfpenny evening paper, first published in January 1888. Several towns in the north had had such papers for some time; and London had one, The Echo, designed like The Star to be a democratic organ. But The Echo displayed a rather undiluted idealism, which tended to limit its public to men already possessing energetic political opinions. The purpose of The Star was rather, by providing an attractive and readable staple of news, to instil politics and other interests of the mind into readers who would never buy a paper for such things in the first place. It appealed also to the new generation at large, by starting with a galaxy of subversive talent in its staff of critics. Mr Bernard Shaw contributed the musical criticism, Mr Walkley, the dramatic, Mr John Davidson, and later Mr Richard Le Gallienne, the literary criticism.

December brought round again a deputation of unemployed men to the Lord Mayor, but no one expected a very anxious winter. Public alarm about the East End was given a very different, and a much more gruesome, turn; the notorious Whitechapel murders began this autumn. A woman was found murdered in the backyard of a house in Whitechapel on 31st August, and another on 8th September; two more similar murders took place on 30th September, and on 15th October the incident occurred which introduced a peculiar horror, the police receiving postcards and letters signed “Jack the Ripper.” The mutilations

1888] THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 241

which accompanied the murders were atrocious, and

seemed to prove that they were all the work of one man,

and that he must have had a training in surgery. It

was incredible that such things should continue with the

hue and cry that was raised, and yet a fifth murder took

place on 8th November. They even continued into 1889,

and then the terrible series suddenly came to an end.

The perpetrator was never brought to justice.

At the end of the year news arrived of Stanley's progress

on the expedition for the relief of Emin Pasha. The news

was a whole year late; the messages received from him

reported the expedition safe and well in November 1887.

As a matter of fact, reports had already reached England

which rather dimmed the satisfaction. Stanley had left

part of his force under Major Barttelot encamped at a

certain point, to maintain his communications. He

had trusted to a well-known chief of an Arab tribe,

Tippoo Tib, an old slave-raider, to supply the camp

with provisions, and Tippoo Tib had undertaken to do so.

He failed to keep his word, and in July rumours had come

to England that Barttelot and his force were in the greatest

straits. In October word came of Barttelot's death, and

no one knew then where Stanley was. The messages from

him in November were followed by some in December,

from Zanzibar, to the effect that the meeting between

Stanley and Emin had taken place in January 1888, and

that both were safe.

Just at the time when this happy appendix was being

placed to the history of the Soudan war, there was fighting

once more at Suakin. Sir F. Grenfell was in command in

Egypt, and he inflicted a defeat upon some dervish forces

which had been inclined to press Suakin too closely. The

battle revived in England discussion of our position at

Suakin, but Lord Salisbury made no declaration of policy

beyond the determination to retain the place.

Q

CHAPTER XI

1889 : LONDON AND LABOUR FACE TO FACE

IT was natural that after a year such as 1888 men should come to the next with good heart. Trade was cheerful, and may for the moment stand personified in jolly Colonel North, then at the height of his fame, spending his money on his great house at Eltham, on his greyhounds, and on large genial benefactions—a millionaire playing up to his character. The Stock Exchange found the way to middle-class pockets, and the investors who had surrendered to the fascinations of the brewery boom and the gold boom were ready for all sorts of further adventures. An underground railway from St James's Street to Holborn Circus, with a capital of £750,000 ; a tramway, working on the conduit system in an experimental stage at Northfleet, Kent ; a number of electric light companies ; an amalgamation of the two chief telephone companies—the National and the United—into one concern, with an enlarged capital; and an incessant conversion of private trading companies into limited liability concerns—all flooded the market with prospectuses, but did not exhaust the money awaiting investment. Another sign of the greater distribution of wealth is to be found in Mr Goschen's Budget speech of the year, when he pleaded for a new policy of taxing a much greater number of articles of consumption, since the old policy of taxing a small number no longer spread taxation fairly according to wealth.1 There were also indications of prosperity, however deplorable from the strictly ethical point of view, in the steady increase of the return from duties on intoxicants, which helped to keep up the Budget surpluses of

1 Elliot's Life of Lord Goschen, ii. 158.

1889] LONDON AND LABOUR 243

these years, and in the growth of betting and gambling.

This latter subject greatly exercised respectable minds at

this time; raids upon gambling clubs by the police were

frequent; the Convocation of Canterbury had a report

on the subject made to it by a committee; and legislation

was vaguely demanded. It was felt that clubs were not

the only point at which the police might strike. Cheaper

newspapers had produced so large a betting population

that a regular professional class of bookmakers had sprung

up to meet the requirements of those who were from their

circumstances unable to go to race meetings, but found

in betting from newspaper reports the kind of excitement

which could colour their monotonous lives by being

crammed into factory dinner-hours. Meanwhile one of the

countless prospectuses of the year can be seen now to have

been a promise of yet more cheap newspapers to come; it

asked for a capital to run wood-pulp paper-mills in Norway.

Some moralists, contemplating this result of news-

paper reading, were inclined to deplore the teaching of so

many people to read. But on the whole the movement

for free education advanced strongly, with the argument

that, if education had led to difficulties, this only meant

that education must be fuller. The Technical Education

Act was passed this year, with very little discussion; its

provisions have been already noted.1 In this year also

University "Extension" teaching took a new form; a

meeting of Extension Students at Oxford had been tried

as an experiment in the summer of 1888, and had been so

successful that it was now decided to establish the idea on

a more complete and definite scale. Courses of lectures were

to be so arranged that students could come into residence

for either a fortnight or a month at choice; and in the more

continuous association of tutors and students the extension

system would acquire, as it were, the additional value of a

brief university term.

1 See page 2101

244

LONDON AND LABOUR

[1889

An unfortunate incident in the general revival of cheerful interest in all kinds of subjects was that ecclesiastical controversies also revived. Dr Benson was now Archbishop of Canterbury, and he allowed himself to be induced to cite the Bishop of Lincoln, Dr King, before him for ritualistic practices. No one had much belief in this res-toration of a form of procedure, the validity of which was more than doubtful, and the enforcing power nil. Dean Church described the precedents as "fishy." The "Lincoln Judgment" which issued from the case remained, failing appeal to a tribunal which had enforcing power, an expression of opinion from which each side was free to extract what it liked and neglect the rest. But the proceedings served to irritate a number of old sores; and, as it happened at the time that the new and very elaborate reredos in St Paul's Cathedral had been attacked as papistical, another centre was provided for disagreement. How radically general public opinion had altered since the old days of ritualistic prosecutions may be seen in the tendency to be more interested in æsthetic than in doctrinal criticism of the reredos. The change may also be seen under another aspect in the report of a joint committee of both Houses of the Convocation of Canterbury, which recommended the establishment of brotherhoods of celibate clergy as the most useful way of supplementing the work of the Church in large towns.1

The elections to the first county councils took place in the spring, and, although the social stirrings of the previous year had given some indication of the new spirit, no one was prepared for the astonishing energy aroused by the elections to the London County Council. It may in some lights be seen as pathetic that London should thus confess its backwardness in municipal development, should be genuinely excited by the prospect of activities which were

1 One brotherhood, called the Order of St Paul, was founded, but came to a premature end.

1889] LONDON AND LABOUR 245

an old story in every other large centre of population ; Manchester and Glasgow men might have smiled as a grown man smiles at a child. But at least, when the elections were over, London had such a council as probably had never been gathered for municipal work anywhere in the world. Some of the most capable members of the House of Lords were on it—Lord Hobhouse, Lord Rosebery, Lord Monkswell ; Radical scions of great houses, like Mr George Russell and Mr Richard Grosvenor ; philanthropists like Mr Quintin Hogg ; some of the most notable economists, such as Sir Thomas Farrer, Sir Reginald Welby, and Sir John Lubbock ; men of letters like Mr Frederic Harrison ; City magnates, barristers and, above all, a very powerful force of working men, among them John Burns, who had shown in fighting his election at Battersea that his recent exploits in London streets were not those of a mere ranter, but those of a man whose power with workmen was almost what he chose to make it. Altogether the elections blew a blast of new air into every corner of London. The doctrine that the working man had little to expect from the ceaseless strife of party in Parliament was hasty ; but it did far more good than harm in turning the minds of the labouring men to the possibilities of the London County Council. " Practicable Socialism " was the motto with which Burns entered the council.

The novel which we have already mentioned as having borne a great share in the foundation of the People's Palace, Walter Besant's All Sorts and Conditions of Men, gives us the real key to the enthusiasm with which the first London County Council was elected. One of the characters in that book is pleading with a club of working men to turn from barren political theories : " Has any Government," he cries, " ever done anything for you ? Has it raised your wages ? Has it shortened your hours ? Has it protected you against rogues and adulterators ? . . . Listen. You want clean streets and

246

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[1889

houses in which decent folk can live. The Government has appointed sanitary officers. Yet look about you. Put your heads into the courts of Whitechapel—what has the sanitary officer done ? You want strong and well-built houses. There are Government inspectors. Yet look at the lath and plaster houses that a child could kick over. You want honest food. All that you eat and drink is adulterated. How does the Government help you there ?

. . . You want your own Local Government. What every little town has you have not." 1 Seven years later London had its Local Government, and rose to the occasion as keenly as the most ardent reformer could desire. There is no more important landmark for the social historian of the last thirty years than that election. The point is not that there was a large majority on the more democratic side—the Progressives, as they were ultimately called—but that the keenness displayed is a measure of the quantity of thought and activity which was at this time deliberately diverted from parliamentary politics, because of the opinion that better work could be done elsewhere. The deliberateness must be borne in mind, because when that activity returned at last into political channels it was in some quarters mistaken for a new force.

Another event of the early months of 1889 which sprang from the introspections of 1888 was the foundation of the Christian Social Union. Its aim was to take full account of the changes which were occurring in the social system, the immense nexus which was replacing the old relations of employer and employed, of salesman and purchaser, and to awaken a new kind of responsibility. In a word, it asked afresh the question, Who is my neighbour ?—and suggested that only the widest possible answer could now satisfy a Christian.

The parliamentary session of 1889 was chiefly interesting for the triumph of the party which had been agitating the

1 All Sorts and Conditions of Men, chapter xxxviii;

1889] LONDON AND LABOUR 247

question of our naval defences. The naval estimates

provided for a new construction programme of the

enormous size of twenty-one and a half millions, ten of

which were to be drawn from the Consolidated Fund over

a period of seven years, the remaining eleven and a half

to fall on the estimates over a period of five years. Ten

new battleships were to be laid down under this programme,

the truth being that one of the great changes in ideas of

naval construction was taking place. The introduction

of armour-plating had, quite naturally, turned the minds

of naval constructors rather to the defensive side of ship-

building; armour was to protect the ship from destruc-

tion. It now occurred to the authorities—or perhaps

especially to Mr White, the Chief Constructor—that the

offensive duties of a fleet had fallen too much into the

background; and these ten battleships were to inculcate

the new doctrine of offensive power. The voice which

might most honestly have been raised against this great

expenditure was stilled. On 27th March John Bright died,

after a long illness. He must for years have felt himself

but little in accord with political developments; and the

support his name gave to the Unionist Coalition must have

been as sad to him as his own inability to remain in the

Government which bombarded Alexandria. It was by an

impulse little short of inspiration that The Times applied

as his epitaph the words written by Matthew Arnold of

Byron :

" He taught us little, but our soul

Had felt him like the thunder's roll."

Beyond naval affairs the session had only minor

interests. The long-talked-of Department of Agriculture

was at length set up, with Mr Chaplin as its first President.

The Scottish Local Government Act, extending the

establishment of County Government to Scotland, was

found to be more remarkable than had at first sight

248 LONDON AND LABOUR [1889

appeared, since it gave permission to apply part of the Exchequer grant to the county authority for the payment of school fees, and so established the principle of free education. Mention must also be made of the Cruelty to Children Act, passed this year, since it extended the protection given under the old Act so as to include the exposure of children for begging purposes in the streets, and also added an improvement by permitting the issue of a search warrant by a magistrate on sworn information, instead of leaving the duty of prosecution to Poor Law Guardians only. There was some hope that Parliament might also face in this year the problem of the light gold coinage, by applying part of the Budget surplus to the calling-in of light gold coins at no loss to the holders of them, provided they were paid in before a certain time. It was fairly clear by now that if once the gold coinage could be restored to its value there was every prospect of such a supply from the Rand that for a very long time to come there would be bullion enough to maintain the value. Any man may see for himself to-day what the new supply meant. Out of every ten sovereigns that he receives in ordinary transactions he will probably not find one more than fifteen years old; it is quite possible that no one of any given ten would be more than eight or nine years old; and three or four of them would be only a year or two old. In 1889, when the Light Coinage Bill was introduced, it was quite a common thing for people to have sovereigns of more than one previous reign in their pockets—and the nearest previous reign was fifty-two years away. There had been such a shortage of bullion that new coinage had fallen hopelessly behind the demand. But the Bill was dropped. Even in 1889 the solution provided by the new supply of gold was of course less of a certainty than it afterwards became; and the bimetallists held their ground, while those who were against them felt it necessary to express, as that conservative financier, Mr

1889] LONDON AND LABOUR 249

Gladstone, did at this time, a readiness to permit the issue

of small banknotes. Meanwhile the Rand output rose

until it reached a monthly average in this year of some

35,000 oz. ; the white population of the Transvaal was

about 100,000, but the Boers were said to be treating the

new industry fairly, and no ominous sounds came from

that part of the world. The relations between the two

groups of the Ministerial Coalition were still uneasy. Mr

Chamberlain was difficult for the Conservatives to absorb.

He was advocating the production of some "substitute

for Mr Gladstone's rejected Bill," 1 when the Government

preferred to let the grass grow over the whole question of

alternative measures for Ireland ; his idea was the pro-

duction of a large and final scheme of land purchase, by

which the difficulties in the way of a generous grant of

local government would be, he thought, much lessened.

The Tories, on the other hand, were talking of abolishing

the Viceroyalty, as the logical conclusion of the Act of

Union, and were drawing careful distinctions between the

state of things on the Clanricarde estate—the extreme

case of an absentee landlord—and that on the Massereene

"worsted at close quarters," and boycotting had failed.

A Cabinet Committee did indeed sit on the question of

land purchase at the end of the year ; the price of coalition

had to be paid, and Mr Chamberlain possessed the means

of enforcing payment. He returned during the year to

his old occupation of constructing electoral machines. A

Central Organising Committee for the Liberal Unionist

party, on which representatives from all portions of the

country were to sit, was formed in March. A Liberal

Unionist van campaign over the country, with speech-

makers, magic lanterns, and pamphlets, was opened in

October ; and a Government which had lost five seats at

bye-elections could not afford to offend the master hand

1 Letter to his constituents in Birmingham, 20th March 1889.

250

LONDON AND LABOUR

[1889

at campaigning. A quarrel between Mr Chamberlain and

Lord Randolph Churchill over the question whether the

latter had, or had not, the first reversion of John Bright's

seat in Birmingham showed that there was plenty of touchi-

ness in the Coalition ; and Lord Salisbury's speech to the

conference of Conservative Organisations, in which he

again offered to make way for another Premier, if that

would advance the progress of the Coalition, was a signi-

ficant confession. The quarrel mentioned was afterwards

looked back upon as the beginning of the end of Lord

Randolph's career ; Mr Chamberlain had his way in the

matter completely.

But all this was, to the general public, taking place

comparatively behind the scenes. Its only interest in

Ireland had more spectacular opportunities. The Parnell

Commission suddenly turned dramatic at the beginning

of the year. After weeks of evidence the judges came to

the question of the letters alleged to have been written

by Parnell, and demanded the production of the man who

supplied them to The Times. The moment he appeared

Irishmen were on the alert ; he proved to be a broken-

down journalist named Pigott, whom every Irish member

knew as ready to do anything for money. To Englishmen

the sensation came a few days later, when Sir Charles

Russell, who was counsel for Parnell, made Pigott write

certain words in the witness-box, confronted him with the

same misspellings in the notorious letters as he now made

in court, and thundered him into a total breakdown and a

confession. He had forged the letters. He made a full

confession next day, and fled to Madrid. Detectives

followed him, and the news published on 2nd March that

he had shot himself in a hotel there on the arrival of the

detectives was, for the ordinary man, the end of the drama.

The Parnell Commission might again relapse into the

patient taking of evidence ; it had at least provided a

genuine excitement. However, there was another small

1889] LONDON AND LABOUR 251

excitement of a different kind to come. A warrant was

out for the arrest of Dr Tanner, an Irish member, on

account of a speech he had delivered in Ireland. He had

escaped the police for some time, and suddenly appeared

in the House of Commons, when no one but his friends

had for weeks known where he was. London enjoyed the

comedy of his Jack-in-the-box appearance enormously, and

when he left the House in the middle of a close bodyguard

of members the group grew into a kind of hilarious pro-

cession to a neighbouring hotel. There Dr Tanner sub-

mitted to arrest ; and the whole affair was too much of a

joke for anyone but Radical members to labour the point

that this kind of execution of an Irish warrant was a

new piece of Mr Balfour's tyranny. It was to the

Londoner a gay beginning to a season which brought him

visits from General Boulanger, who flaunted himself as a

Republican hero; the Shah of Persia, who got himself

instantly into street songs ; and Barnum's show.

The summer brought also one of those baffling criminal

trials which have the power of absorbing the whole nation's

attention. Early in August Mrs Maybrick was condemned

on a charge of poisoning her husband, and it was said at once

that " not one in three of the thousands who have followed

the case expected a verdict of guilty." 1 Mr Maybrick

was a man who had taken all sorts of drugs-eighteen

different kinds within a single fortnight—and the doctors

called during the case differed hopelessly as to the cause

of death. A great popular agitation followed the verdict,

and public meetings were held all over the country. The

sentence of death was commuted, and very distinguished

lawyers devoted themselves to the task of trying to secure

Mrs Maybrick's release. The agitation was unsuccessful.

The case must find a place in history because it focussed

anew all the strong feeling in favour, first, of a reform

of procedure which should allow prisoners to be put on

1 The Times, 8th August 1889.

252 LONDON AND LABOUR [1889

oath and give evidence, and, secondly, of the establishment of a Court of Criminal Appeal.

Thus in a full tide of interests the country swept on to a profound shock. On 14th August 2500 dock labourers at the East and West India Dock and South London Docks struck work. For a day or two no interest was taken in the matter. Then the large but orderly crowd at the West India Dock gates began to draw people's attention, and, as an uneasy temper manifested itself in other docks, the cause of the strike became known. The men, working at the most casual kind of casual labour, attending daily at the dock gates, getting perhaps an hour's work one day, and no work for three days, and then two or three hours again, had struck on a demand that hiring of labour should not be for less than four hours at a time, and that there should be a uniform rate of pay of sixpence an hour. A necessary corollary of these demands was that the "contract" system of work at the docks should be abandoned—that is to say, instead of letting out separately the job of loading or unloading this or that ship to a contractor, who then hired men as he needed them, the dock companies should themselves be responsible for the labour in their docks, and by not splitting up the various jobs should be able to hire men for a decent period, transferring them, as needed, to different ships. Dock labour was an extreme case of unregulated interaction of supply and demand. It was unskilled labour, crowds of men were always ready for it, and the dock companies had acted accordingly. By letting out the work on contract they made their money without any responsibility, and the contractor made his profit on the basis of the overwhelming supply of the labour he needed. The men's demands amounted to a minimum wage of two shillings a day for those who were lucky enough to be taken on. This implied no weekly minimum, because no man was sure of being taken on two days running, much less for

1889] LONDON AND LABOUR 253

a week. It implied no general wage-earning standard,

because no man could be sure of being taken on at all.

There can be little wonder that a strike begun by men of

such casual employment was not expected to last long.

On 17th August 2000 men marched from the docks

to the offices of the West India Dock Committee in

the City, and a deputation of them saw the chairman, Mr

Norwood, a Member of Parliament, who told them that

their demands should have attention, but that he could

promise them nothing until they were in a different state

of mind. He made the great mistake of miscalculating not

only the possibility of organisation among the men, but

also the change in public opinion about the operation

of laws of supply and demand. The organisation began

to show at once what had been happening in the past few

years at those street meetings, which had from time to

time broken the surface routine of London; men of the

most casual type of workman had come to recognise certain

leaders and to be accustomed to listen to them. In other

parts of the country, where a single industry was dominant

—on the coalfields, in the cotton towns in Lancashire,

Clyde—workmen had for years had their leaders. But

in the great welter of London, where there were so many

small industries that there was no common industrial

feeling, there had been no opportunity for such concentra-

tion, until the lack of employment, due to a period of de-

pressed trade, threw together in the streets workmen of all

kinds ; and men of force and capacity seized the chance to

give a general basis to labour movements. The fact that

this had been accomplished was of immense importance

now when a specific case arose. John Burns instantly

came back upon the East End scene, and found ready to

work with him a dock labourer with an extraordinary hold

on his fellows, Ben Tillett.

By 20th August the strike had extended to all the docks.

254 LONDON AND LABOUR [1889

Pickets from Millwall, Victoria Docks, and Albert Docks reported that all the men there were out, and from Tilbury 1000 had come out. The dock companies had attempted to get the work done by coolies from the ships, but these men had refused to do it. More important still was the announcement which Burns was able to make to the men, that he had received virtual promises from other great ports--Liverpool, Glasgow, Grimsby and Hull--that the dock labourers there would support the London men by striking for an equivalent rise in wages, if ships were sent round from London to those ports for loading or unloading.

Next day the dock directors placarded their docks with posters offering men twenty shillings a week to come in behind the strikers' backs. The average wage of a London dock labourer had rarely reached ten shillings a week. But the strike leaders were confident that "blacklegging" would be impossible on a large enough scale to break the strike. They picketed the docks; and then another procession went to the City, with 20,000 men in it this time, quiet, and giving no trouble to the police. Not the least remarkable fact about the whole affair is that already it was clear that the general feeling in the City was on the side of the men; the dock companies' attitude had been so careless an exploiting of the mass of unskilled labour that even the City man felt uncomfortable.

When another large procession marched up, on 22nd August, various business men brought pressure to bear on the dock directors, to induce them to meet the men's leaders again. On this occasion the directors said they would agree to a four-hours minimum engagement, when as much as four hours of the working day were left; but they would not give up the right to engage men at any hour they chose (which meant that the minimum wage would not always be earned), nor would they agree to the payment of sixpence an hour, except with the maintenance of the contract system. The interview therefore came to nothing.

1889] LONDON AND LABOUR 255

The companies now tried importing labour from other places, and a number of men were hired from Liverpool. But the pickets successfully brought them out next day, and telegrams from the strike leaders stopped an attempt to get men from Southampton. Two shillings an hour was now being offered to "blacklegs," but the picketing was effective, and although a few men were smuggled into the docks, and kept there continuously, being fed and lodged in the sheds, the companies were baffled. Meanwhile the lightermen on the river, whose services might have been used to unload ships out in the stream and land the cargoes at wharves, had also come out on strike for better conditions. By 25th August, when a great meeting took place in Hyde Park, it was clear that public opinion was very largely with the men, the contract system having been one of the recognised forms of sweating condemned by the House of Lords Committee; the "docker's tanner" made its appearance in music-hall songs, always to a burst of applause ; and a fund was set on foot—Dr Liddon taking a large share in the work—to provide food for the wives and children of the men on strike. More important still, the shipowners were against the dock companies, who charged shipping companies heavy prices for handling cargoes, and then proved themselves such inefficient middlemen that they lost the means of doing the work. The organisation of the strike now included a regular daily programme. There was always a huge meeting of men on Tower Hill, a procession to the City with collecting boxes, which never came back empty, and a meeting afterwards at the West India Dock gates. Money was shared out by the leaders in the evening. Before the end of August the streets around the docks had been emptied of almost all traffic ; there was no work for waggons or carts to do. The Corn Exchange and the Coal Exchange were practically idle, the wool salerooms and the Mincing Lane rooms were idle too. On 26th August a new element

256 LONDON AND LABOUR [1889

came into the struggle, Mr Sydney Buxton, Member of Parliament for Poplar, the dockers' division, joining in the interviews between the dock directors and the strike leaders.

On 28th August the directors said that, if the sixpence an hour was not insisted upon, they might meet the other demands ; but the men kept firmly to that minimum. If the directors had believed in the men's power of continuing the fight, they might by this time perhaps have taken warning from the sound of the cheers which greeted Burns and Tillett as they left the dock offices after that interview. The two leaders had come this time without the customary procession ; the cheers were from sober City men in the street, who had happened to recognise them as they left the dock offices. Mr Buxton now suggested that the shipowners might deal with the men directly, engaging the labour to handle their own cargoes, and Sir Thomas Sutherland, chairman of the Peninsular & Oriental line, was ready to take up the suggestion, if the dock companies would stand aside altogether. But some ship-owners, chiefly men in a small way of business, did not care for this solution.

September opened with a new interposition of negotiators. Cardinal Manning, whose father and brother had been chairmen of dock companies, had been to see the Lord Mayor, and to suggest an attempt at intervention. The two of them went to interview Mr Norwood, and spoke to him plainly of " the isolated and untenable position of the dock companies "; Mr Norwood now argued that it was impossible in the existing state of the dock finances to accede to the men's demands. It may be noted that a sidelight on this view of the question can be gained from the angry comment of the shipowners, to the effect that the " stupid rivalries " of the dock companies had caused them to overweight themselves with capital. For a day or two after the intervention of the Cardinal

1889] LONDON AND LABOUR 257

and the Lord Mayor public opinion was in suspense, and the proceedings of the strikers were more critically watched

The issue of a manifesto by Burns and Cunningham Graham, threatening a " general strike," was condemned as a rather hectoring proceeding ; and the work of the

strikers' pickets was so jealously scrutinised that accusations of incitement to violence began to be made. Then the dock directors foolishly threw opinion against them

once more by refusing to recognise Burns and Tillett at all in the negotiations, which had now narrowed themselves down to the single question of the extra penny an hour.

On 6th September a new move was made. A conference was called at the Mansion House, consisting of the Lord

Mayor, Cardinal Manning, the Bishop of London, Mr Sydney Buxton, John Burns and Tillett. There seemed to be a possible line of negotiation in a resumption of

work at fivepence an hour, on condition that within a certain period the rate should rise to sixpence an hour.

Burns and Tillett refrained from pressing for recognition by the dock directors, and the Lord Mayor, the Cardinal, and Mr Buxton conducted interviews with the directors.

This led to an unfortunate hitch. By some misunderstanding the three negotiators thought that, if the sixpence an hour were granted on 1st January, the men would

accept those terms, and they succeeded in making the dock directors agree to this. But as the extra penny was not, in this agreement, applied also to overtime payment,

the men refused to accept so long a delay, and the terms were rejected at a mass meeting. The negotiators, who

had believed that they could on their part offer the definite adherence of the men, were offended, and it seemed likely that public sympathy would be alienated.

Probably one thing that prevented such a change of opinion was the unswerving energy which the leaders of the strike were

devoting to the suppression of tendencies to violence. Burns, interposing his sturdy shoulders and fists between

R

258 LONDON AND LABOUR [1889

strikers and blacklegs whenever a fight seemed imminent, deserved all the credit he got for riding the storm. More- over the sharing-out of relief had been admirably organised; the pickets were on the whole showing excellent discipline ; and the strike was altogether being conducted with no little dignity.

On 13th September, when it had lasted four weeks, settlement at last began to appear within sight. The conference of negotiators had begun again on 9th September, and Cardinal Manning and Mr Buxton were in communication with the dock directors. The announce- ment that the lightermen were willing to return to work, pending arbitration in their case, was the first real relief ; and it was accompanied by a rumour that the dock negotia- tions were proceeding on the basis of the payment of six- pence an hour beginning on 1st November. On Saturday, 15th September, the dock settlement was signed on those lines. The men had won practically all their demands, and a huge triumphant meeting was held in Hyde Park.

The dock directors undertook not to discriminate against strikers, and the strikers not to discriminate against blacklegs. The latter undertaking had behind it, as everyone knew, the strength of the fact that the strike had organised at last some of the most casual labour in the country. The Dock, Wharf, and Riverside Labourers Union had grown out of it, and under one of the most prominent of the strike lieutenants, Tom Mann, it grew rapidly into a body formidable enough to be sure that the ground gained would not be lost. Within a month many of those who had been blacklegs in the strike were members of the union. The dock directors held a peevish meeting, complaining of the attitude during the strike of the clergy and the big shipowners, and even of the public.

The Strike Committee published their accounts, duly audited,1 and showed the world that, out of £46,499 re-

1 The Times, 4th December 1889.

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ceived in subcriptions (£4000 had come in one sum from Australia, and large sums from Germany and France) there was only a sum of £192, 11s. for which the auditors could not account. This minute failure was due to a natural difficulty in keeping accounts at the beginning of the strike. That it was so minute, in an average distribution of over £11,000 a week to a great number of men not at the time bound together in a regular organisation, is an astonishing tribute, alike to the leaders who carried it out, and to the men's acceptance of their leaders' control.

London had at last seen organised labour at war ; and, because things that happen in London have the newspapers at their service, the whole country had seen it too, in a way in which it had never yet seen a strike. This may partly account for the friendliness of the London public to the strikers ; London is always ready to be carelessly genial towards something that is fresh. In one sense indeed the strike did inaugurate a new chapter. The trade unions all over the kingdom had supported men as yet unorganised, and that unrest in London, which had appeared to casual observers so vague and so easily to be distinguished from the recognised—even, by contrast, respectable—labour movements, had coalesced with Trade Unionism. For the most unskilled and casual labour the laws of supply and demand were no longer to be in control of the market. The dock strike had done effectively for men what the Committee on Sweating was trying to do for women ; and political economy as the elder generation understood it had been dethroned. The organised strength of the workmen, with public opinion acting to some extent as the " governor " on the engine, had introduced the new element of regulation. As long as strikes were confined to skilled trades the change was not so apparent, for, after all, the willingness of the skilled men was a vital feature of the supply ; it could not be regarded as such in an unskilled labour market.

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Barely had the dock strike been settled when another serious one occurred in London, at the South Metropolitan Gas Works. Then came a regular crop of strikes : the workers at the Silvertown Rubber Works came out, and so did bakers, omnibus men and tramcar men. The engineers at the Maxim-Nordenfeldt Works followed, and the employees in the gas department of the Manchester Corporation. Philosophical observers noted two distinct forms of strike among those going on in the last portion of the year. One form—that, for instance, of the strikes of bakers, omnibus men and tramcar men—was for the lightening of a heavy load of work ; the other—that of the gas employees and the engineers—arose from the men's claim to a voice in the control of the work, on such points as the abolition of overtime and the regulation of piecework. The latter came to be called the " New Trade Unionism," and people, who had never had enough bitter things to say of the old straightforward strikes for more wages, began now to think of them as almost praiseworthy in contrast with the new kind of strike. The South Metropolitan Gas Strike was rendered notable by the policy which the directors adopted ; they offered to apply the co-operative principle to the work, the men to participate in the profits on a sliding scale, receiving 1 per cent. on their wages for every penny by which the price fell below two and eight-pence per thousand cubic feet.1 The Union objected to this arrangement, as likely to weaken the men's allegiance to the Union, and the dispute went on. It lasted until well into the new year, and then in February 1890 ended in the complete surrender of the men, who accepted the profit-sharing principle, and returned to the hours in force before the strike. The serious outbreak of strikes caused considerable discussion of the possibility of setting

1 'The price of gas in London is regulated by an Act of Parliament, under which a fall of price accompanies every advance of a certain magnitude in profits.

1889] LONDON AND LABOUR 261

up conciliation boards. They had been working well for twenty years in the north of England,1 and the London Chamber of Commerce appointed a committee to consider the introduction of the principle as part of the chamber's work. A Blue Book on strikes, published in November, showed that, out of 509 strikes in 1888, 332 had been settled by arbitration.

One or two other interests at the end of the year diverted the public mind from industrial experiences. Late in October a meeting was held at St James's Hall to urge the Government to action in the matter of rabies among dogs. In 1870 eight counties had been affected by it ; in 1889 thirty-three were affected, and the number of deaths from hydrophobia had amounted in thirty-eight years to 939. There was a movement for founding a Pasteur Institute in London for the treatment of cases ; but the desire for prophylactic treatment was kept subordinate to a demand for a general muzzling order to be enforced for twelve months. Even Pasteur himself was strong on the point that by such regulations hydrophobia could be entirely stamped out. Moreover prophylaxis by inoculation was at the moment somewhat on its trial in England. There has always been a strong opposition to the vaccination laws, and so many people had been going to prison rather than conform to them that the Government had this year to set up a Royal Commission on the subject.

In November Stanley and Emin Pasha were at last approaching civilisation, and in December they reached Zanzibar. Emin had been ill, but his health was improving, and it seemed likely that his long years in the Soudan, his extreme danger, and the anxieties he must have suffered when the fall of Khartoum left him utterly alone, would not lastingly have injured him. Stanley was returning, not only with the rescued man, but with new geographical

1 See a letter by Dr Spence Watson in The Times, 5th October 1889.

262 LONDON AND LABOUR [1889

knowledge as to the extent of the great Victoria Nyanza. There was, however, reservation in the enthusiasm over the news of the arrival in Zanzibar. The affair of Major Barttelot and the rearguard of the expedition was still awaiting elucidation.

In the closing days of the year Robert Browning died in Venice. A well-known and well-liked figure in London society, he was in advance of his day in his refusal to play the poet, and his taste for passing among his fellow-men as one of themselves. Yet those with whom he had least association—the over-earnest and the over-intense—had done most to foster admiration of his work.

CHAPTER XII

1890 : A YEAR WITH A STORMY ENDING

TEN years of the new social spirit, of the revolt against political economy, may not have achieved much for the poorest and most oppressed forms of labour. Sweating, the knowledge of which had gone to the hearts of decent people, remained almost undiminished, though here and there workgirls had combined. Yet those who could see further than their own pet remedies (and pet remedies abounded to a degree that makes the innocence of the eighties almost as remarkable as their warm heart) had cause to rejoice. Labour had not grown tidier in its habits, more elevated in its amusements, more thoughtful in its leisure. On the contrary it was betting and drinking rather faster than before. But it was far on the road to being able to bargain for its wages ; and, slow though the visible differences may have been, it was none the less a vast change that has put the great majority of labouring men in the position formerly occupied by the most skilled and most intelligent alone. Moreover even among the intelligent and the well-organised workmen there was new force of will. One of the strikes of the early part of 1890 was a coal-mining strike in the Midland district. It lasted only four days, the men obtaining their demands ; but it aroused its share of comment. " Twenty or even ten years ago," said The Times,1 " it would have been out of the question for 300,000 workmen to combine so perfectly as to stop work at one given moment and to resume it at another." The importance

1 21st March 1890.

263

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of a big strike having occurred in London is nowhere better seen than in the greatly enlarged interest which was now taken in all labour disputes. Much of it ceased to be a sympathetic interest. The world, pursuing its custom of making distinctions satisfactory to itself, was careful to separate sweating and bad housing conditions from the general labour movement ; it thought it could hold up its hands at the latter while devising remedies for the former. But at least it was more aware of the general movement than it had ever been, and the summer brought it sufficient reason to hold up its hands.

Financially the year opened with the " cold fit " which not unnaturally followed the company-promoting booms of the past year or two. After three years of its new existence Allsopp's brewery was in difficulties, and a shareholders' committee was appointed in February ; the committee decided that there had been no misrepresentation in the prospectus, but a large body of shareholders adhered to their opinion that the goodwill had been greatly over-estimated. In any case the policy followed in the flotation, of placing all the ordinary and preference stock on the market, had thrown a heavy burden on the profit-making, which owing to increased agency charges from the severity of competition had failed to respond to the need. But apart from the rights and wrongs of the case, the mere fact of the discontent of shareholders was enough to cool the speculative mood. One of the principal business activities of the year was the advance in the amalgamation of the banking companies. The Capital and Counties, the Birmingham and Midland, the Union, and Prescott Dimsdale's carried out several absorptions in 1890 ; Williams Deacon's combined with the Manchester and Salford Bank ; and Lloyd's Bank, which had taken up several local banks in Worcestershire and Warwickshire in 1889, was growing into a widespread business. The reasons for these amalgamations were, no doubt, sound

1890] A STORMY ENDING 265

enough. The shortage of gold made the maintenance of a number of separate bank reserves increasingly difficult, while the advance of wealth depending more and more upon paper exchanges made the burden of disjointed re-sponsibilities much heavier. Moreover one bank depended so much upon the solvency of another that the separate stability of each had almost ceased to exist, and large amalgamations hardly altered the reality of the situation. At the same time they undoubtedly lessened the elasticity of local trade. Personal character ceased to be valid security for loans and overdrafts when the old local bankers, with their individual knowledge of all their clients, were replaced by distant directors whose lack of such knowledge compelled them to confine their loan business within hard and fast rules. Many a merchant and tradesman, who could once have pulled through a difficult time by the help of a banker who knew his recti-tude, fails under the present system, which demands more formal securities. Meanwhile, the gold difficulty brought about a vigorous revival of bimetallism, and of discussion of the true relation between money and gold and prices. The Rand continued to enlarge its output, reaching in this year 43,000 oz. a month. But the Treasury proposals to deal with the coinage still hung fire, and made no appearance in Parliament this year.

The London County Council, if late in the field of muni-cipal enterprise, distinguished itself in its very first year of existence by a policy new in conception. This became famous in private Bill controversy a little later as "the betterment principle." The principle, for which oppor-tunity was given by the necessity confronting the council of making up the deficiencies of the Metropolitan Board of Works in the sphere of street improvements, was that enhancements of the value of premises, such as might accrue from better frontages, better means of approach, and better surroundings, should go by rights not to the

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owner, who had done nothing to bring about the new

conditions, but to the public body, which had done all.

The principle was an old one in America, but there the

enhancement of value was paid down by the owner in

a lump sum; the London County Council proposed to

make it a tax on the premises. The idea was at once as-

sailed, the Duke of Argyll being its most prominent critic ;

and it appeared that not the least drawback to the scheme

was going to be its distortion of the English tongue.

" Betterment " was bad enough ; but the duke did worse

when he wrote that the tax was illogical and unjust because

the " goodment " of a house in a small street was no more

due to the owner or occupier than the " betterment "

of a house in a big new street. Other critics followed with

a further atrocity of language, arguing that if " better-

ment " applied to some houses, " worsement " might be

claimed against a municipal authority by the owners of

premises unfavourably affected by the diversion of traffic

to new streets, or by tradesmen compelled to move else-

where. The opponents of the scheme as a whole treated

the affair as one of the property market ; the council's

experts, notably Sir Thomas Farrer, took the higher and

less disputable line that a public authority had a right of

taxation, and, as street improvements cost money, taxation

should fall to a special extent on those benefited by the

expenditure. An attempt, however, to introduce the

principle in the Strand Improvement Bill, promoted by

the council this year for pulling down Holywell Street

and opening up the " bottle-neck " of the Strand at that

point, failed ; the clause was thrown out by the House

of Commons Committee, chiefly owing to the objectors'

arguments that the council made no estimate of the

amount of " betterment," and that the definition of the

principle and the limitations of its application were

arbitrary.

Before the session opened, one of the heroes of the

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Irish conflict had passed from the scene. On 19th January

J. G. Biggar, the inventor of obstruction, died. On 22nd

April 1875 he had first baffled the House of Commons,

holding back an important debate by the simple process

of reading enormous extracts from volumes bearing more

or less remotely on the subject, and adding brief

comments of his own. Later on he invented the more

subtle method of endlessly moving the Chairman out of

the Chair in Committee. His name stood for fifteen years

of constant fear of parliamentary paralysis.

Hardly had the House met in February when the

Report of the Parnell Commission was published.1 Lord

Morley has given us a vivid picture of the members during

a dull debate all poring over the Blue Book just put into

their hands 2; but, hard as both sides tried, with cheap

1 The chief findings of the commission were, briefly :

(a) That the Invincibles were not a branch of the Land League,

nor organised nor paid by the League ; nor did any of the Irish

party associate with known Invincibles The Pigott letters were

all forgeries. Parnell and the rest of the party had no knowledge

beforehand of the Phoenix Park murders and were not insincere

in condemning them.

(b) That there was no ground for the charge made by The Times

that the leaders of the Land League based their scheme on a system

of assassination, or, even in the case of the most dangerous

language, intended to procure murder ; though such language did

cause an excitable peasantry to carry out the Land League's laws

even by assassination.

(c) That the Land League leaders never denounced boycotting

and intimidation, and never took any steps to assist the police in

detecting crime.

(d) That there was ground for suspicion that Land League funds

were used to compensate persons injured in the commission of

crime.

(e) That the Irish Party funds had received large sums of money

from the Irish National League of America, which was controlled

by the Clan-na-Gael, the dynamiters' organisation.

2 Life of Gladstone, iii. 408:

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[1890

annotated editions of the report, to whip up feeling on the

subject, it cannot be said that outside the political world

anyone cared very much for detailed decisions of the

commission as to whether Parnell and his followers

had in this, that, or the other way sanctioned or been

encouraged by violence and the party of violence. The

ordinary man's interest was only aroused when, in the

debate on the report, a month later, Lord Randolph

Churchill electrified everybody by roundly attacking the

Conservative Government. He was at this time rather

erratic in his political appearances, and the remonstrance

which his constituents at Paddington addressed to him

shows no little anxiety.

Parnell himself was hardly ever seen during the session.

Since his illness in 1886 he had grown more and more

mysterious, and the piles of letters and telegrams awaiting

him from time to time at the House of Commons were a

strange spectacle. In his absence—and in the uneasiness

which his absence caused to those who knew the circum-

stances—the Irish party were faced with the necessity of

making up their minds about what looked like a large in-

stalment of Mr Chamberlain's alternative to Home Rule.

Mr Balfour introduced in March an Irish Land Purchase

Bill, setting up a scheme of voluntary transfer of owner-

ship from landlord to tenant, purchase money being

advanced to the latter from a Government loan at 2¾

per cent., the total amount being limited to thirty-three

millions. At the same time Mr Balfour proposed to set

up a Congested Districts Board, with power to create

small holdings, and to promote migration within Ireland

or emigration from it.

Fortunately for the practically leaderless Irish members

the two proposals were not pressed forward at the time.

The House was engaged on other matters—notably the

Tithe Rent Charge Bill, which removed the duty of paying

tithes from the occupier of land to the owner, and the

1890] A STORMY ENDING 269

Employers' Liability Bill ; amending Bills on this subject were, it was said, becoming a " hardy annual," but the need for this one was shown by the fact that on an average 62 per cent. of the workmen's claims under existing Acts failed on some technical point. The present Bill made the great step of placing the liability entirely on the employer, removing sub-contractors out of the case. The work of the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Poor was finally met this year by a Housing of the Working Classes Act, which for twenty years was to govern the activity of public authorities in this direction.

The final report of that commission had been a fairly drastic document. In the sphere of administration it recommended that a statutory duty should be laid upon local authorities of enforcing the powers they possessed in the matter of insanitary dwellings ; that medical officers of health should reside within, or within a mile of, their districts, and give their whole time to their work ; that the staffs of sanitary inspectors should be increased, and should consist of men acquainted with the principles of building construction ; that for London the Home Secretary should appoint special inspectors to report at once ; and that any vestries and district boards which had not made by-laws should be obliged to do so immediately. Secondly, the report recommended the consolidation and amendment of existing Health and Housing Acts. Thirdly, in the direction of new proposals, it recommended that local authorities should have greater facilities for the erection of workmen's dwellings, and compulsory powers for purchase of land for dwellings ; that vacant sites should be rated at 4 per cent. of their selling value ; that compensation for land acquired under Housing Acts should be reduced to market value and no more ; that there should be a system of cheap Government loans for municipal housing schemes ; that railway companies destroying houses in extending their lines should be obliged to provide

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accommodation for the number of persons so displaced,

and to provide it concurrently with the destruction of the

original houses ; and that cheap transit to outlying districts

should be facilitated, the Government initiating provision

of cheap trains. There were also some recommendations

as to easier methods of securing damages against owners

of property by those who had suffered from the owners'

neglect in sanitary matters ; as to small holdings ; and

as to Mr Chamberlain's new doctrine of loans to enable

workmen to become owners of their houses.

The report was too sweeping to be embodied all at once

in legislation, but the Act of this year was quite energetic.

The first part re-enacted and consolidated earlier Acts,

and the second part created new powers of buying up

insanitary areas, demolishing unfit dwellings and ob-

structive dwellings (so as to permit the opening of closed

courts and culs-de-sac), and of erecting new houses on

those sites. Power was given in this part of the Act to

deal with smaller areas than those for which powers were

given by the Artisans' Dwellings Act.

Two Acts dealing with infectious diseases should also

be mentioned. That of 1889 empowered local authorities

to make by-laws for the notification of infectious diseases

by the head of the family concerned and by the doctor

attending the case. That of 1890 gave powers for stopping

the sale of milk from dairies notified as infectious, and for

undertaking the disinfection of houses. To some Con-

servatives all this social legislation seemed excessive, and

again the Liberal Unionist influence was blamed. Even

those who were not of this mind felt that Parliament was

overloading itself. Its real difficulty, however, lay in

none of these things, but in a second attempt to create a

policy of extinguishing public-house licences with payment

of compensation. Mr Goschen in the Budget proposed

to allot a sum raised by extra duties on beer and spirits

to the local authorities. The ground was prepared by

1890] A STORMY ENDING 271

a return of licensed houses, showing that the proportion

of them to population ranged in county districts from

2·2 per thousand inhabitants, in Cornwall, Middlesex,

Northumberland, Surrey and the West Riding, to 7·9

per thousand in Cambridgeshire; and in boroughs from

1·6 per thousand in Jarrow to 7·6 per thousand in

Canterbury and 10 per thousand in St Pancras. The

statistics had many curious features, but the whole

subject was fought out again on the broad question of

whether a licence was really and actually an annual thing,

or included a genuine presumptive value.

It happened that at the moment a suit was in progress

which brought the question to the proof of law—the

famous case of Sharp v. Wakefield. It was a case in which

the renewal of a licence had been refused point-blank by

licensing authorities on the evidence of the police, and

the licence-holder based a claim for compensation on the

argument that, though a licence was nominally only

given for a year, it carried implicitly the expectation of

renewal, since without that no one would spend money

on a public-house, or have any interest in maintaining it

decently. The brewers (who were of course behind the

case) had made a tactical mistake. They had chosen to

fight on the claim of a public-house remote from any

ordinary population that might need it, far from police

supervision, and suspected of being a haunt of poachers

and bad characters. Consequently when the Court of

Appeal upheld the magistrates’ decision—as in the end

the House of Lords also upheld it—the party which refused

to recognise any right to compensation had been given a

handsome weapon. Mr Gladstone pronounced that the

annual power of non-renewal was “the one healthy spot

in our licensing law”; and the Liberal Unionist wing of

the Ministerial party refused to admit the compensation

principle except subject to a ten years’ time-limit, after

which the absolute power of non-renewal should hold

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[1890

good.1 The net result was that the Government dropped

the whole proposal; but, as the extra tax on liquor was

established, the money had to be used. It was therefore

attached to technical education. In the latter subject

the year was not without importance. The Act of 1889

had proved to be obscure on certain points, and a

conference between local authorities and the education

authorities was held to clear up doubts. It had the great

result of establishing the right of local authorities to grant

scholarships, which infinitely increased the value of the Act.

An Act securing this point, and also definitely including

manual instruction under the terms of the earlier Act, was

passed in 1891. It is not without interest to note that

the London School Board caused an outcry in 1890 by

providing pianos for its schoolgirls.

With the summer came the sequel to the dock

strike of 1889—a stirring among wage-earners. Profit-

sharing schemes succeeded to conciliation board projects

as the most widely discussed methods of meeting

the new unrest, but the workmen, as they had

already shown in the South Metropolitan Gas Strike,

were extremely suspicious of any weakening of their

attachment to their unions. The Labour Electoral As-

sociation, which had been founded a year or two earlier,

was beginning to receive the adherence of the large trade

unions, and this political tendency puzzled the kindly

people who had been telling the workman that Parliament

was useless to him. The association opened a special

fund to support candidatures of labouring men for Par-

liament; and the idea of paying salaries to members of

Parliament, which was brought forward from time to time

during these years, received additional argument. Dis-

missal of the idea took usually the grimly brief form that

few young men of parts and ambition would be tempted

1 See a statement by Mr W. H. Smith in The Times, 24th June

1890] A STORMY ENDING 273

by £400 a year, and no working men were worth it. As

May day approached, it looked as if the old struggle with

the police might revive ; the socialist bodies arranged

a demonstration, which the police prohibited ; but the

affair proved in the end too small to fight over. Two

books just at this period were the means of conveying

socialist visions to the public outside the socialist

ranks. Bellamy's Looking Backward, a presentation of

the phalanstère system in its logical completeness, was

published in 1889 ; and William Morris's News from

Nowhere, a charming fiction of an England without capital-

ists or landlords, pervaded with the golden afternoon light

of the wide meadows of the Upper Thames, where he had

made his home, was published in 1890. But neither book

had any relation to the working activities of the moment.

John Burns was extraordinarily energetic, addressing

meetings of workmen almost every day, and enlarging the

number of trade unions ; while Ben Tillett, his colleague

of the year before, was upholding the need for keeping

all the unions national in scope, so that in any given

case not the local men alone would have to be dealt

with. Women workers were also on the way to vigorous

combination. Certain associations of ladies in various

towns for the care of friendless girls had been developing

under pressure of the growing concern for working women

into local unions of women workers. In 1890 the Bir-

mingham Union held a conference at which papers on

various subjects connected with the industries of women

and girls were read. It was an important conference,

because it led to a succession of others, from which in the

end the National Union of Women Workers arose. In one

of the hardest of women's trades, that of chain-making,

there was an endeavour to set up a trade union. Un-

fortunately the Sweating Committee was ending in dis-

appointment. On the Conservative as well as the Liberal

side there was some indignation when it was announced in

s

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the summer of 1889 that the committee was postponing

its report ; and when, early in 1890, Lord Dunraven dis-

charged himself from the chairmanship, because his draft

report had been unanimously rejected, there was little

hope of light or help from the inquiry. The report was

a cautious document, which made no proposals for legisla-

tion. The state of public feeling, however, prevented the

disappearance of the subject, now that it had been

effectively raised.

At the Trade Union Congress of the year Burns

triumphed in the mingling of the new men with the old

in the labour movement, the new men being wholly and

solely working men ; and in the fact that in 1889 forty-

five new unions had been established, and seventy-two

more in the nine months of 1890. The total income of

trade unions in 1890 was very nearly a million pounds.

The gospel of the Eight Hours' Day largely occupied the

congress ; and even prominent politicians like Mr Courtney

and Mr Morley—nay, Mr Gladstone himself—had to weigh

very seriously their opposition to it.

Strikes were frequent. Boot and shoe makers, brick

makers, railway porters and quay labourers, Liverpool

dock labourers and bargemen were all out in April ; and

ironworkers and colliers in South Wales during the summer.

Such manifestations aroused much more than purely local

anxiety. But at the height of that anxiety, relief was

given by an event which could only be taken as vastly

diverting—the police struck ! They demanded in June

more wages and allowances, and although a month later

their strike had collapsed to an affair concerning some

forty men, the story had roused such hilarious excitement

that Life Guards had to be called up to disperse the mob

which hung about Bow Street. Less amusing, but equally

shocking to the official mind, was a strike of postmen

which followed. In this the principle of Union labour

in a Government department was at stake, and the

1890] A STORMY ENDING 275

authorities only won a temporary victory, after great inconvenience to the public, by the dismissal of 400 men. Though probably without relation to labour troubles, an outbreak of insubordination in the Grenadier Guards added to the respectable citizen's indignation at the general spirit of revolt ; the matter was at any rate serious enough to cause the second battalion of the regiment to be ordered to Bermuda as a punishment. It must be added that the new Trade Unionism showed that it had no small control of its men in the case of a strike at some of the London docks in September, concerned with the unloading of grain ships. Tom Mann and the Dockers' Union ordered the men back to work, and they went. It is interesting to find the British Association at its meeting this year diagnosing the social condition very shrewdly ; in a discussion on " Some Typical Economic Fallacies of Social Reform " its members gave the first signs of knowledge that the humaneness which had usurped the place of political economy was not the force of the future ; and there was an astonishing tendency to accept the doctrine that the problem of socialism was only one of degree, and not of kind. One of the greatest of the older political economists, Professor Thorold Rogers, was just at the end of his life ; he died on 13th October.

At one moment in the summer foreign policy laid hold of the public mind in such a way as it rarely does in England during peaceful times. In June an agreement between Great Britain and Germany was published, by which, in return for recognition of our status in various parts of Africa, we ceded Heligoland. The cession was violently criticised, and there was a momentary recrudescence of Jingoism. The young Kaiser was not popular in England, as his father had been. He was regarded as over-ambitious, impatient, self-willed ; and his acquiescence in Bismarck's retirement from the Imperial Chancellorship this year was thought to have been rather too ready. The British public,

276 A STORMY ENDING [1890

crediting the Kaiser with self-assertion and dreams of German expansion, was in no mood for cessions of territory. However, Lord Salisbury's reputation survived the momentary outburst. Our profit from the German agreement was the establishment of our interest in Zanzibar, Somaliland, and Uganda. When the Anglo-Portuguese agreement followed, later in the year, it was remarked that Africa was now "pretty well parcelled out." It was not quite. Trouble was brewing in the Transvaal, where some Europeans at Johannesburg in March pulled down the flag of the Republic, and three arrests were made for high treason. A reminder that the filling up of the map of Africa did not necessarily mean the end of adventure was afforded by the life-story of Sir Richard Burton, who died in October. Whatever might happen to the map, Arabs remained on the earth, and a man who could live with them, as Burton had lived, need never want for romance. Virile, emphatic, impatient, uncontrolled, Burton was one of the most picturesque figures of his day. Outside Arab life and literature his great interest was swordsmanship; and he was the first to stand out in England against the over-elaboration of style in fencing.

Among the domestic interests of the year the most remarkable was a wave of self-consciousness in regard to British art. The æsthetes had themselves to blame, but they must have shuddered when they saw the newly aroused sensibility of England expressing itself as a John Bull kind of appreciativeness. In one art this new sort of Jingoism did not advance very far. The announcement in 1890 that Sir Arthur Sullivan was engaged in the composition of grand opera on the subject of Ivanhoe marked one of the least happy moments of British art. But British painting was a different affair, and it had recently followed a trend genuinely national. There was therefore much enthusiasm behind the proposal to found a National Gallery of British Art; the movement first

1890] A STORMY ENDING 277

acquired force in March and April 1890; and in June

Mr Henry Tate, a millionaire sugar merchant, offered his

collection of modern British pictures, fifty-one in number,

as the nucleus for the Gallery. But he had stipulations

to make. He maintained that the authorities of the

National Gallery were not to be trusted with a new collec-

tion of pictures, since they kept buried out of sight in the

basement of the Gallery a large number of paintings,

especially the Turner water-colours, which ought to be in

the public view. He would therefore only offer his pictures

on the understanding that satisfactory arrangements

should be made for keeping them on exhibition. This was

bound to mean a new building; and the whole project

was for the time held back by negotiations between the

Government and Mr Tate.

The Church of England mourned in 1890 the loss of Dr

Liddon, who died in September. His preaching in St

Paul's was one of the most powerful instruments in that

restoration of the cathedral to a living agency in the life

of London, which had been proceeding under Dean Church.

But, great as his preaching had been, his influence upon

young men at Oxford and in London was greater. A little

earlier the Roman Catholics in England had lost Cardinal

Newman, who died in August. He had always been rather

a great convert than a great Roman Catholic. The story

of his spiritual struggle was so intimately the story of

many souls of his time, whether the goal reached had been

the same for them or not, that he became a figure almost

of legend. For the greater part of his life he failed to

find favour at the Vatican for any of his plans or his ideas

for extending the Roman Catholic influence in England.

Manning appeared to suspect him of Liberalising tendencies

of thought. But late in his life a change came at the

Vatican, and from Leo XIII. Newman received the

cardinal's hat; Manning, who had received his from

Pius IX., may have felt that Newman's was easily earned.

278 A STORMY ENDING [1890

The national concern, which had expressed itself so largely in 1889, about the increase of betting, showed no diminution. It was augmented by the very natural readiness to point an obvious moral, from the fact that, while on the one hand the workmen were fighting for more wages and more control of their lives, they were at the same time spending more money on gambling, and more of their hours in a barren form of excitement. The real secret of the spread of betting on horse races was rightly discerned to be the originating of the " Starting Price " idea. It was impossible for bookmakers not on the course itself, and therefore unaware of the run of the betting at the last moment, to make a profitable business of betting until there was some fixed form of the odds to be laid. The invention of a starting price provided this. The chief sporting papers arranged that their reporters at races should establish, just before each race started, the most commonly offered odds in the ring, and these were telegraphed to London as the starting prices of the horses named. Then all that the backer had to do was to pay his money to the bookmaker, the understanding being that he took these odds. The publication of the odds by the evening papers completed the setting up of a regular racing system for those who need never go near a race. Nor was this the only form of popular gambling. Prize competitions in newspapers, which had already attracted the attention of the police, were enormously enlarged by the violent rivalry of two penny weekly papers just at this time. The proprietors, or their advisers, made the ingenious discovery that all the advantages of a lottery—namely, the temptation of an enormous prize, drawing so many small sums that handsome profit would still be left—could be gained by a penny publication with this extra advantage, that the sale of tickets was the sale of the paper. A prize of several hundred pounds, a freehold house and garden, even of "£1 a week for life," sounded magnificent;

1890] A STORMY ENDING 279

but hundreds of thousands of sixpences would cover the cost several times over. A bald lottery being illegal, prizes were offered for some competition easy enough to make hundreds of thousands of persons enter for it. But as the early efforts of this kind were so easy that the selection of a winner had to depend upon pure chance, the authorities had ground for action under the Lottery Acts, and the papers concerned took alarm. Not, however, before the main popular demand for amusement had been attracted into this new channel. Outdoor pursuits took one or two new turns. In 1890 golf had become so popular that for the first time it seemed to challenge the supremacy of lawn tennis; golf clubs rather than tennis racquets were the smart thing to carry on a Saturday afternoon. "Safety" bicycles too were making their way fast. They had been invented in Coventry in 1885, but had not at first displaced the high machine. Now they were beginning to be seen everywhere. In regard to more passing interests of the ordinary man it may be mentioned that the famous forty days' fast of Succi was successfully completed this year, and drew crowds to the Westminster Aquarium, where Succi sat in a glass-sided room, melancholy and nervous-looking, and smoked cigarettes. An old craze of the early eighties was revived by Dr Nansen's plans for reaching the North Pole; he proposed to give up the earlier plan of establishing the ship in winter quarters somewhere out of the ice-pack, and to shorten the sledge-marching, by having the ship built with a V-shaped hull, so that she could be taken right into the ice-pack, and would, when the pack closed, be merely lifted up and wedged, instead of being crushed. A glance at other scientific interests shows us that the telephone was by now so greatly improved that lines were opened this year from London to Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester. The frozen meat trade, too, had issued finally from its probation; the New Zealand traffic, which in 1882 had

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[1890

amounted to £19,000 in value, touched in 1890 a million sterling. Nor was the meat market the only gainer.

Whereas there had formerly been no direct service of steamers to New Zealand, there were in 1890 ten mail

steamers and twenty-two cargo steamers all on the New Zealand service, and all buying coal and stores there as

well as their cargoes.

The year is also memorable in science as having seen the publication of Dr Koch's theory of tuberculosis and its

remedy ; in the closing months of the year a most vigorous discussion of it took place in the British medical profession.

The clinical use of hypnotism attracted some attention ; experiments at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris were

being watched carefully.

The year had a strange and wild ending. Early in November the contests of employers and workmen

threatened to rise into a savage war in the shipping trade. Everyone was expecting at this time a labour war on

a great scale—railways, mines or shipping seemed most likely to provide the battlefield ; and shipping gave the

first menace. The establishment of unions had spread to it, and under J. H. Wilson the Seamen's and Firemen's

Union had been set up. Inevitably there had followed an objection on the part of union men to working with

non-union men; the microcosm of a ship could not but intensify differences. The shipowners not only expressed

their feelings with more violence than most employers, asserting that they would "lay up" all British shipping

at need, but also immediately formed a combination of their own, the Shipping Federation. For the time being

neither side fired the first shot; but a dock strike at Southampton, issuing in disorder and riotousness, which

had been markedly absent from the London strike, kept uneasiness very much alive.

Then the affair of the Stanley expedition to relieve Emin broke out into that bitter controversy which had long

1890] A STORMY ENDING 281

been vaguely in the air. Stanley had come to England in

the summer, and gave public lectures to crowded audiences.

For a time he was the lion of the season. Then his

popularity cooled a little on the discovery that he did

not at all take the ordinary Briton's view of Germany's

ambitions. Emin Pasha, after having been rescued, had

actually entered the German service; and Stanley not

only failed to see any fault in this, but even revealed a wish

to behold German enterprise at work in different parts of

Africa. People remembered that the fate of his rearguard

still called for explanation. In November he made the first

move himself by attacking his critics; he accused

Major Barttelot and his companion, Mr Jameson, of having

resorted to cannibalism and cruelty to the natives round

their camp. His critics replied by a plain charge against

him of carelessness and gross mismanagement, amounting

to sheer abandonment of his rearguard, in order to push

on to the personal glory of relieving Emin.

Stanley had published an account of his journey under

the title of In Darkest Africa. At the time when the

quarrel arose England was being stirred by a book

which, cleverly taking a cue from this title, was called

In Darkest England. It was written by General Booth,

the head of the Salvation Army, and was an extreme pre-

sentation of that misery of poverty and sweating in great

towns which had so many presentations of late years.

Booth's plea was that the Salvation Army was able to reach

lower strata than any other organisation had attempted

to reach; and he wrote the book as an appeal to the

country to provide him with so large a sum of money that

his Army could set on foot what amounted to permanent

relief works, refuges, night shelters, and a whole network

of institutions. He threw over all economic considera-

tions, to a degree which even the most ardent reformer

had as yet shrunk from; his relief work had already been

accused of doing more harm than good by undercutting the

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[1890

market. His present challenge was instantly taken up ;

prominent people pointed out his ignorance of the work

that was already being done, his failure to guarantee

adequate administration of the funds he asked for, and

the danger of diverting to one object, and that largely

untried, the money which at present was flowing in

many useful channels. His statistics were disputed too.

But before the year closed his fund had reached £90,000.

The scheme was unfortunately launched. It had small

chance of public attention against the two shattering events

of November 1890. When men opened their newspapers

on the 14th all the mysteriousness of Parnell's recent life,

all the hints and suggestions which had gathered round his

first refusal to bring The Times to trial, fused to a thunder-

clap in the report of the divorce case of O'Shea v. O'Shea

and Parnell. The case was undefended. Parliament, as

it happened, had met again this month, and by a stroke of

Fate Irish business was the work before the House. The

Irish Land Purchase Bill, postponed from the summer,

and the Irish Relief Bill, setting up the Congested Districts

Board, were resumed. The Irish party was not in the

House to discuss them ; it was sitting upstairs, in Com-

mittee Room 15, which those days rendered famous, with

Parnell in the chair presiding, sometimes cynically, some-

times tyrannously, over discussions of his retention of the

leadership. His constant absences from London had led

to a confusion at the beginning of these sittings. Mr

Gladstone, acting on the unmistakable sense of the Liberal

party organisations, had intimated that, while Parnell

remained leader, he could not himself lead a party whose

chief work, as long as he led it, would be Home Rule;

therefore either Parnell must resign, or he must. This

intimation could not be conveyed to Parnell immediately ;

it was the moment of one of his disappearances. It could

hardly be conveyed first to anyone but him; and so it

fell out that the Irish party met, and expressed confidence

1890] A STORMY ENDING 283

in him as leader, before Mr Gladstone's attitude was known.

The party had met far too hastily, and their resolution was

rather an expression of their feelings towards British re-

ception of the disastrous news than a considered decision.

No party largely Roman Catholic, and representing a

country preponderantly Roman Catholic, could have

remained under a Protestant leader in such circumstances.

But the resolution delivered them into Parnell's hands.

He fought his ground in a way which was the final revela-

tion of his contempt for public opinion in England.

He refused sympathetic and influential advice to retire

for the moment, and trust to the storm blowing over. He

drove his party into such a position that, in order to avoid

the ultimate reproof to him, the majority, forty-four in

number, at last walked out of the committee-room. Then

he dashed over to Ireland, suppressed an issue of United

Ireland which would have been fatal to his position, and

made speeches in Dublin as if he were still leader. He

fairly took his opponents' breath away. Parliament only

sat for a fortnight, and in that time the two Irish Bills

were passed. The effect of the O'Shea case on the de-

meanour of the House was extraordinary. All spirit

seemed to have gone from it, and it was spoken of as "The

Long-faced Parliament." The affair was such a complete

disaster, and was ending in such a desperate struggle, that

the men not immediately concerned felt it like a cloud

upon them.

In consequence Parliament had perhaps too little atten-

tion to spare for the other shattering event. On 15th

November financial London was shaken to its foundations

by the news that the great banking firm of Barings had

come to grief, its difficulty being attributed to imprudent

commitments for public loans and private enterprises in

Argentina and Uruguay. The one hopeful element in the

situation, to which tottering credit clung, was that the

announcement of the disaster was not made until it could

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A STORMY ENDING

[1890

be accompanied by intimations that the Bank of England

had the firm's affairs in hand, with a guarantee of twelve

millions to meet the liabilities. Everyone trusted that

this meant that in the last resort the Treasury would be

behind the bank. As a matter of fact it was not. Mr

Goschen had been summoned to town by the governor of

the bank directly the danger became known, but he had

seen no course to pursue except to throw the responsibility

of meeting the crisis entirely on the City. He could not

run the risk of pledging the Treasury to a guarantee, and

then perhaps having to defend in Parliament the use of

public money in support of a private firm. Yet he was

much distressed, and some of the visits he paid to financiers

in the City did not encourage him ; he found most of them

near panic. But the governor of the Bank of England

rose to the occasion, and gathered sober men around him.

He borrowed a million and a half in gold from Russia,

Rothschilds' secured the assistance of the Bank of France

to the extent of three millions, and the bankers and

merchants of London guaranteed seven millions. Thus the

Bank of England was able, when the announcement of

Barings' situation had to be made, to convey reassurances.

The firm's liabilities were about twenty millions, and the

whole object at stake was to give time for the realisation

of assets without such a panic as would have depreciated

them beyond remedy. This the guarantee fund did.

Immediate liquidation was staved off, and the firm was

quietly reconstructed as a limited liability company, and

registered on 21st November. Consols dropped to 93,

but that was a small penalty to pay. If the shock had

added to the storminess of events, it had at least been

prevented from ending the year in chaos.

CHAPTER XIII

1891 : THE ISOLATION OF TRADE UNIONS

ONE of the most baffling difficulties of the Home Rule question was that, while on the one hand it provided an ideal capable of calling out all that was high-minded and devoted in the Liberal forces, it was at the same time so entirely a question by itself, and so detachable from all normal social advance in Great Britain, that a party committed to it was not thereby committed to anything else. More—Mr Gladstone was an old man, and the enormous plan for Irish self-government had not been constructed until he was old. The result was that he frankly remained in leadership for that single purpose only, so that the Liberal party stood committed to a policy which not merely did not include, but positively precluded, other activities. The downfall of Parnell, disturbing as it was, did not affect the Liberal party's position altogether adversely. No harm was ever done to an ideal by events which force its supporters to uphold its righteousness beyond and above all personal failings. It was of little concern in the end that opponents of Home Rule should now be saying that the O'Shea divorce case amounted morally to a reversing of the Parnell Commission's Report. But that Parnell should have refused the Liberal party's tactical decisions, that Home Rule should no longer be the united demand of a homogeneous force in Parliament, but a bone of contention between two groups, who were capturiug and recapturing one another's newspapers, one another's platforms, one another's seats in Parliament—all this was of serious concern. The cause was further

285

286 ISOLATION OF TRADE UNIONS [1891

weakened by statements which Parnell was making, to .

the effect that he and his party had never really liked

the Home Rule Bill of 1886, and only accepted it on Mr

Gladstone's threat of resignation. The Unionists were

able to gain much ground by pointing out what a serious

difference it made if the Irish party had not genuinely

accepted the Bill of 1886, and the Liberal party were not

really in accord with their supposed allies. From the

Liberal point of view the worst of these recriminations

was that, since Mr Gladstone remained where he had been

for Home Rule, and Home Rule alone, these wrangles

demanded the best brains of the Liberal party to overrule

them. This in turn meant that the party was not taking

its share in other affairs, and had too little attention for

social reform. Trade Unionism was left to fight its

battles alone. Whether, if circumstances had been other

than they were, the development of the labour movement

would have been different—whether any politicians would

have been ready at this time to see that the purely social

consideration of wages and labour conditions was now as

impossible as the old purely economic consideration, and

that the problem was becoming political—must remain

an open question. At any rate one example on each side

in politics can be quoted as showing a perception of the

new conditions. Mr Courtney, speaking in February of

this year, remarked upon the change in labour aspirations

from an inclination towards isolated socialist experiments

to a conviction that the goal must be reached by legislation.

Lord Dunraven, a little later, was expressing himself in

favour of a State Department of Industry.

That industrial conditions formed a very large and in-

sistent question was admitted in the establishment in 1891

of a Royal Commission on Labour Problems. Wage dis-

putes were for the moment in the background. Trade

union leaders believed in the power of organised labour to

mend many flaws in the industrial system, which employers

1891] ISOLATION OF TRADE UNIONS 287

had so far failed to cure. Unemployment and irregularity of employment came, they thought, largely from the fact that labour was almost as helpless as raw material; a master could pour both alike into his factory at high speed in a time of demand, and leave both alike outside when the demand was slack. Fully organised labour, on the other hand, could secure that an employer's prudence for his own profits should necessarily imply prudence also for his employees' wages and conditions. Consequently, practically all the labour struggles of this time were rather on questions either of working conditions or of the recognition of unions than on questions of wages. There were not a few of such struggles. In January the miners in the Silksworth Colliery struck on a demand that the 'deputies' should be union men. The managers refused to have union men in that position, and for two months the fight went on. It was complicated by the decision of the managers to evict men on strike from cottages owned by the colliery, a course which caused a sympathetic strike to spread in pits which had taken no part in the original dispute. The settlement reached in March was that while the men would not insist on the 'deputies' being union men, the managers would not forbid them to be. A railway strike in Scotland, affecting the Glasgow & South Western Railway, the North British Railway, and the Caledonian Railway turned on complaints of overwork and heavy overtime exactions. It failed, because although the business community agreed that the men were overworked they would give no support to the strike. The companies held out against receiving any representatives of the men's union as such, and against entering on any negotiations before the men returned to work. At Cardiff the Seamen's and Firemen's Union struck against the issue by the shipping firms of a 'ticket' which insisted on union men not refusing to work with non-union men. This also failed, partly because the dockers, stevedores,

288 ISOLATION OF TRADE UNIONS [1891

and coal-porters were not in alliance with the seamen and

firemen. In London tailors struck on three points—

better workshops, a uniform " time-log " (the existing

system of payment being a complicated one) and the

abolition of partnership in a piece of work; the masters

conceded the first and third points, reserving the second

for consideration, and the men returned to work after a

ten days' strike distinguished by the elaboration of its

picketing. In June there was an omnibus strike in

London, and again the picketing was good—hardly a 'bus

was on the streets for a week. Overwork was the chief

complaint, and the men won a seventy-hours week, a

minimum wage of six-and-sixpence a day for drivers and

five shillings a day for conductors, the right to a day off

in the week at their own charges, and an understanding that

if the companies' dividends rose there would be an advance

in wages. An interesting effort of the year, apart from

strikes, was the attempt made by the Dockers' Union, which

was also a General Labourers' Union, to bring into its ranks

the agricultural labourer. The idea was that a pooling of

interests might lead to an improvement of conditions in

the country—an increase of allotments, as well as advances

in wages—and that this, in turn, would react on the dockers'

conditions, by diminishing the flocking of rural labour to

the towns, where it became for the most part casual labour

at the dock gates.

It was no wonder that Trade Unionism of this nature

roused fresh opposition. It was denounced as an attempt

to set up a new monopoly, and the special point of attack

was the policy adopted by Trade Unionists of intimating

to employers their intention not to work with non-union

men. This was described as " intimidation," and was

actually held to be so in a county court judgment delivered

this year, but overridden by a decision of the Queen's

Bench in July. Other opponents argued that the attempt

to set up a monopoly would have a bad effect on prices;

1891] ISOLATION OF TRADE UNIONS 289

that, for instance, higher wages in trades which were

absolutely necessary to the public, such as shipping,

docks, railways and collieries, would only mean that less

money would be spent in other directions in which there

was no compulsion for the public to spend, so that wages

in the cotton and other such industries would decrease.

A more curious criticism was that, if men by success-

ful development of their unions forced their wages

up, women's wages would suffer, because, being outside

unions, they would get no work unless they consented to

take a poor wage. On the whole the first feeling in the

labour world when it became known that the Government

contemplated setting up a Royal Commission was one of

anxiety ; it seemed probable that the object of the com-

mission, whether acknowledged or not, would be a

restriction of the rights of combination. The commission

was appointed in April. It was said at the time that the

Prince of Wales, who had been deeply interested in all the

sidelights on life in great towns which the Housing Com-

mission had produced, would have liked to serve on this

new commission, but had been persuaded that it would

be unwise. The members of the commission were: Lord

Hartington, Lord Derby, Sir M. Hicks Beach, Sir John

Gorst, Mr Mundella, Mr Courtney, Sir H. Fowler, Mr Jesse

Collings, Mr Gerald Balfour, Mr T. Burt and Mr W.

Abraham, from the two Houses of Parliament; Mr

Harland, of the Belfast shipbuilding firm, Mr Bolton of

the Caledonian Railway, Sir F. Pollock, Professor of

Jurisprudence at Oxford, Professor Marshall, Professor

of Political Economy at Cambridge, Sir W. Lewis, of the

Cardiff Docks, Mr T. H. Ismay, of the White Star Line,

Mr David Dale, an ironmaster, Mr G. Livesey, managing

director of the South Metropolitan Gas Works, Mr Tunstall,

a cotton employer, and Mr Hewlett, managing director of

the Wigan Coal and Iron Company—for the masters of

industry ; and for the men, J. Mawdsley, of the Operative

T

290 ISOLATION OF TRADE UNIONS [1891

Cotton Spinners, Tom Mann, of the Dockers' Union, E. Trow, of the Conciliation Board of the Iron and Steel Trades, H. Tait, of the Glasgow United Trades Council, S. Plimsoll, and M. Austin of the Irish Democratic Labour Federation. The reference to the commission was wide and simple; it was "to inquire into questions affecting the relations between employers and employed and the conditions of labour, which have been raised during the recent trade disputes in the United Kingdom, and to report whether legislation, and if so what, could be directed to good ends." The commission divided itself into three groups; Group A undertook inquiry into mining, iron-works, engineering, shipbuilding, and cognate industries. Group B undertook, roughly speaking, the transport industries; and Group C undertook the textile and chemical industries, and building, and other miscellaneous trades. In the last group two women "sub-commissioners" were appointed late in the year to investigate the conditions of women's labour. The work was enormous, and it was difficult for the commissioners, in the mass of detailed complaints and petty vexations brought before them, to keep any general view of their task. But some main lines of Trade Union policy were prominent enough to provide landmarks. At the Trade Union Congress, for example, which now represented over a million and a quarter workmen, the most prominent subjects were an eight-hours day, and an amendment of the law of conspiracy so that technical conspiracy should only be if directed to an object criminal in itself, and intimidation should only consist in actual threats of violence. The plea for limitation of work, in particular, provided a rallying-point for the evidence of employers before the commission.

One of the strongest proofs of a prevailing unconsciousness of the reality of the new forces at work is provided by the comments on the doings of the London County Council.

1891] ISOLATION OF TRADE UNIONS 291

When the first council came into existence the comments even of Conservative organs were wholly favourable. So incredible had it been thought that the new social movement, the new labour forces, should actually issue in any administrative act. Barely twelve months later the tone had changed completely, and by 1891 hardly anything was too bad to say of the council. It proposed to set up bands in the parks, and was stormed at for wasting money on pastimes for the poor ; it proposed to purchase tramways, and to take over the London Fire Brigade, and was told that its career was a long succession of "absurdities which have humiliated London." Yet there was so little objection in principle to any of these proposals that the real offence of the council seemed to be that it proposed to do things for itself, instead of waiting to be given what the governing classes thought good for it. This was the worse offence, since these classes at the moment were in a liberal mood. The Conservative Ministry had set up County Government, they had passed a great Housing Act, and in 1891 they accomplished another of the tasks which the Liberal party had for years promised to undertake : they made elementary education free of charges. It was done by a simple process of adding ten shillings a year per pupil to the capitation grant. This sum was based on an average school fee of threepence per week. If any school charged more than that, it was at liberty to go on charging the difference. But in effect this was a Free Education Bill ; and so the Liberal party's committal to Home Rule was made still more exclusive of other interests by the removal of another traditional item of its programme. The Bill was not such as a Liberal Government would have introduced ; there would almost certainly have been some provision for increased public control over voluntary schools in a Liberal measure.1 But in the discussion of the Bill the Opposition were content not to

1 See The Daily News, 24th April 1891.

292 ISOLATION OF TRADE UNIONS [1891

press that point. The Act came into operation in September of this year. Mr Goschen had a sufficient surplus

in his Budget to provide at once the half-year's cost of the change, so that there was no need to delay its introduction.

He had also enough money at last to press through the reform of the gold coinage which had been projected two

years earlier. The Light Coinage Bill allotted a sum of £400,000 to the cost of withdrawing light gold coins at

their face value. Parcels of gold coin of not less than £100 in value were to be received at the Bank of England without

any light-weight deduction. It was decided that the average life of a sovereign before falling “below the

remedy ” was twenty years, and that of a half-sovereign about ten years; so that, if the South African gold supply

proved to be as good as was said, the object of the Treasury would be in future not to allow gold coins to return from

the bank into circulation after they had served for those periods.

The Factory Act of this year, though it had nothing to do with current labour movements, was an important

piece of work. By setting up the local authorities as the inspecting power for sanitary purposes in connection with

workshops, a position from which the appointment of factory inspectors in 1871 had deposed them, it created

a dual supervision of industrial places, the inspectors being still charged with the supervision of hours of labour and

age of employment; the inspector and the local authority were put into a situation in which there was bound to be

a good deal of intercommunication, with a chance of excellent results.1 Provision was made for the Home

Secretary to have power to enforce the law, in the case of inaction on the part of a local authority; and workshops

where adult men only were at work were brought under regulation. The Home Secretary was also given powers

for certifying dangerous and unhealthy trades—a provision

1 Cf The Factory System, by R. W. Cooke-Taylor, p. 121.

1891] ISOLATION OF TRADE UNIONS

293

which year after year proved more fruitful of good ; and

an echo, somewhat feeble, but important, of the increased

concern for sweated industries was to be found in the

clause requiring every occupier of a workshop, and every

contractor for work, to keep lists of their outworkers.

The same kind of influence too may be seen in the provision

that all piece-workers in textile factories should be supplied

with information to enable them to understand their scale

of payment. These regulations were, however, the work

of the social conscience, and in the tradition of the last

twenty years, rather than in the spirit of the coming time.

That spirit may perhaps be detected in the restoration of

important work to the local authorities, through which, as we have seen, the socialists hoped to operate most

effectively. The new Act paid no attention to one popular

demand : it appointed no women inspectors.

Parliament was prorogued at the beginning of August,

which gave a comfortable sense that the national affairs

were at last returning to a normal high-water mark. The

London season had not been a very cheerful one. Influenza,

which had hitherto been only a winter scourge, attacked

London in May, and as a summer fever it caused nervous-

ness. Dinner-parties failed, because people were really

afraid of infection ; the after-effects of the disease seemed

to be worse than they had been in previous years. In ad-

dition to this, the notorious " Baccarat scandal " had

damped society's spirits, because when the name of a very

great personage, almost the highest in the land and quite

the highest in active social life, was brought into the case,

there was an uneasy feeling that society had better tread

gently for the moment. It was pretty generally known

before the case came to trial that the Prince of Wales was

concerned in it. Sir William Gordon Cumming brought

an action for slander against Mr and Mrs Arthur Wilson

of Tranby Croft, and against others members of a house-

party there, for having said that he cheated at cards. The

294 ISOLATION OF TRADE UNIONS [1891

Prince was called as a witness. He appeared in the box, the packed court gazed breathlessly, counsel in the case were appropriately submissive and respectful, and the law emerged from the ordeal of a wholly unprecedented event without a stain on its reputation for inimitable blandness. Outside the courts the results of the case were rather more lasting. Even those little inclined to notice such gossip as had long been current about the Prince of Wales felt the difference made by such a public revelation that " his 'set' was a baccarat 'set.' " 1

Materially, as well as morally, the season was damped. Though the Baring disaster had been staved off, the effect of the strain was visible in a general contraction of financial activity. Flotations decreased; the Bankers' Clearing House returns fell 12½ per cent. The Baring crisis had raised again in Mr Goschen's mind the question of the country's gold reserves ; and he took up once more the suggestion of banknotes of small values. He let it be known that he was ready to consider authorising the Bank of England to issue twenty-five millions in one-pound notes against a reserve four-fifths in gold and one-fifth in Consols. But the hint was not favourably taken ; and the banks pursued their own policy of entering into amalgamations ; Parr's in 1891 became one of the prominent absorbing banks. In spite of the financial stringency the general purchasing power of the people remained good, as far as official figures showed. But there was no enterprise in amusements, no cheerful craze. When a new music hall in London, the Tivoli, was put up to auction, the reserve was not reached ; however, as the bidding rose to £100,000 there must have been sufficient belief in the popular support for such places. In the autumn the gambling mania received an encouragement which must have seemed deplorable to those who were trying to wean the workman from betting. This was the year of the famous " man that broke the bank at

1 The Times, 10th June 1891.

1891] ISOLATION OF TRADE UNIONS 295

Monte Carlo," and he was hymned on every barrel organ.

He was a Mr Wells, and he first rose to fame by winning

£20,000 at roulette within a week. When his luck at

that table stopped he turned to trente et quarante, and in a

few stakes made £6400 more. He was playing for months,

and his success gave rise to a great discussion of gambling

" systems." In November his net winnings were said to be

£30,000, and occasionally he " broke " a table in half-an-

hour from the opening of play. His career relieved a

somewhat dull year.

Hardly even in science is any notable event to be found.

Electric light had made at last its final stride ; and it was

said in 1891 that the number of incandescent lamps in

London was greater than in any one of the five largest

cities of America. One or two events of engincering

history may be recorded. In August the last of the

old broad-gauge lines of the Great Western Railway were

taken up, and replaced by lines of the standard gauge.

At the beginning of the year naval experts were greatly

interested by a system of tubular boilers which Yarrow's

had fitted in a torpedo boat built for the Argentine navy ;

the firm had been for three years experimenting with them

as a rapid means of getting up steam, and also, it was

hoped, a safer method of keeping up the high pressures

demanded ; but this Argentine boat was the first practical

trial of the system. The Manchester Ship Canal was

well advanced ; in June water was admitted to the section

from Ellesmere Port to Eastham, and a second section,

making a total of eleven miles, was open by the end of

September. The first attempt to bring the Manchester,

Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway—now the Great Central

Railway—to London was also made, but the private Bill

for the purpose was rejected by the Select Committee of

the House of Commons.

We come this year for the first time in our period upon

a really popular demand in fiction. The field since 1880 had

296 ISOLATION OF TRADE UNIONS [1891

been held by writers more or less established, more or less conscientious artists—Meredith, Hardy and Henry James ; Besant and Mrs Humphry Ward ; Edna Lyall, Mrs Lynn Linton, Miss Braddon and Wilkie Collins. But when we read in a review of a new book by Mr Rudyard Kipling, The Light that Failed, a protest against " his apparent power—the affectation of barbarity," and the remark that " the public read him, so his dissatisfied critics must wait to be justified by an unborn generation," we recognise that here was a demand wholly beyond the normal guides of literary taste. It was a new impulse, a new British self-consciousness. The story told of battles of the Egyptian campaigns, and although the phrase had yet to be invented (by that same author) the idea of " the white man's burden " had been initiated. It had an impulsion of a practical kind this year in the first annual meeting in December of the British South Africa Company, which in a halo of romance was beginning its pioneer work north of the Transvaal. Mr Cecil Rhodes was already a figure of note in the London world, a figure lacking in social flexibility, positive, greatly given to argument, but wielding a large fortune, tireless, not afraid of the social sin of being a bore with his schemes of advancing British frontiers in the land of his adoption. He had by now made the British South Africa Company so important a body that the whole question of the position of chartered companies was being discussed. Some of those who most strongly approved of the existence of such companies thought that they should be set up by Act of Parliament rather than by Royal Charter, and should be compelled to keep their commercial and their administrative accounts separately. The informality of this method of governing uncivilised races was naturally popular with a generation which, through Mr Kipling's Indian stories, was learning to see itself as peculiarly gifted for the shouldering of responsibility in remote places of the earth.

1891] ISOLATION OF TRADE UNIONS

297

Drama, as well as literature, has an important date in

1891. During the autumn Mr J. T. Grein set up the organ-

isation which he called " The Independent Theatre." He

asked for two hundred subscribers of £2, 10s. each, for the

production of plays of serious interest, which, from lack of

elements of popular appeal, were unlikely ever to appear in

the English theatres of the time. The theatrical adver-

tisements in newspapers of the eighties had been certainly

barren reading. At the head of the profession Irving was

playing chicly Shakespeare, varying it with somewhat

disastrous experiments in Tennyson's verse plays, and with

frankly money-making productions of popular pieces, like

Wills's Charles I., or The Bells, or The Corsican Brothers.

Other leading actors confined themselves to old-fashioned

comedies, such as Money and Caste, to new melodramas,

to farces, generally taken from French originals. The

Bancrofts, Charles Wyndham, John Hare, William Terriss,

Toole and Edward Terry rang their changes on

a paltry list. Mr Grein's object was principally to

produce plays by Ibsen, and the Independent Theatre

did in fact first introduce those plays to British audiences.

But the venture was regarded askance by most of the

London world. To many, Ibsen stood for an unhealthy

analysis of subjects better left unanalysed; to others he

stood for a foreign impropriety, different from the old

kind, but still not to be encouraged; to the advanced

æsthetes he stood for a deplorable solemnity, very hamper-

ing to the gracefulness of life. But a sufficient appeal

could be made to the middle-class culture, which somewhat

heavily pursued the difficult life of appreciative enjoyment,

and the Independent Theatre might perhaps have lasted

longer if its efforts had not revealed the fact that the field

of drama it affected was not a very wide one.

Educated taste at this time was much engrossed with

"applied art." Furniture, wall-papers, hangings were

all subjected to anxious, even over-anxious, canons of

298 ISOLATION OF TRADE UNIONS [1891

beauty ; the great period of the " hand-made " was being ushered in with rather barbaric chairs and tables, and silver implements speckled with little hammer-marks. In 1891 William Morris added printing to his many accomplishments, and set up the Kelmscott Press, working with founts of type designed by himself, after a laborious study of early models of typography.

During the parliamentary recess the Liberal party made up its mind to overhaul its electoral banners. How dilapidated they were we have already seen. That the great leader should have devoted himself exclusively to one overmastering purpose would have been less serious if he had not been at the same time, by belonging to a much earlier generation, incapable of estimating new conditions in domestic politics. There is no evidence that Mr Gladstone in these years took any interest in the new forces and the new mind of labour. He had made Mr Broadhurst a member of his short-lived Government in 1886, but Mr Broadhurst was not, in the official view, a Labour representative ; he was only a Liberal with an unusual and interesting career. A Member of Parliament of a democratic turn, who was not a Liberal in name as well as outlook, would have had no meaning whatever for Mr Gladstone. But it might have been thought that this disability on Mr Gladstone's part was rendered less serious by his very frank and constantly repeated declaration that he had now only one object in political life. Did not this lay upon other important members of the party the duty of keeping the party in the forefront of advanced thought on social questions ? In their defence it must be said, first, that Mr Gladstone was apt to be masterful in regard to the formation of public opinion by his colleagues. Moreover, most of those colleagues went back to the days when schemes of social reform were usually coupled with the name of Mr Chamberlain, and regarded as impracticable Radicalism. Therefore when Mr Chamber-

1891] ISOLATION OF TRADE UNIONS 299

.. Iain took himself and his programme elsewhere no heat was left among the leaders in which new ideas might germinate.

Consequently, when the approach of the next General Election became imminent the party managers had to take that most futile step, the construction--not the selection--of a programme of legislation.

County Government, Factory Legislation, Employers' Liability, and even Free Education had been taken away. What could be put in their place ?

One prominent item, indeed, of Mr Chamberlain's programme had not been even nibbled at by his new friends--Disestablishment of the Church.

But Mr Gladstone would never lead a general assault on the Church he loved and magnified, and any wholesale measure of disestablishment must commit him at least to countenancing accusations against that Church.

But he had shown in the case of the Irish Church that he could make distinctions.

Statistics and local grievances could plausibly be used to make distinctions in the case of the Church of England in Wales, and perhaps also in that of the Presbyterian Church in Scotland.

The disestablishment of those two Churches therefore was a possible item in the programme.

Next, a backward glance over the carcer of the Conservative Government discovered its weakest moment in the licensing proposals which it had tried to attach to the duties of the new Local Governments.1

The decision in Sharp v. Wakefield had given the sanction of the highest legal tribunals to the opponents of those proposals.

Here then was another possible party advantage.

In a non-party way the legal decision had already had its effect.

No less Conservative a person than Sir Michael Hicks Beach had announced at the licensing sessions in his part of the country--Fairford, in Gloucestershire--that the licensing magistrates would be ready to hear testimony as to any public-house which was felt to be unnecessary ; in other words, that they were prepared to

1 See pp. 330, 370

300 ISOLATION OF TRADE UNIONS [1891

enforce the purely annual existence of a licence, by refusing

it on grounds other than those of misconduct. He also

revealed a less direct result of recent controversies in an

announcement that in future managers of "tied" houses,

when asking for renewal of licences, must produce their

agreements with brewers—a sign that public opinion was

not at the moment friendly to the idea of licence-holders

as the mere nominees of brewers. But stronger stuff was

needed for a programme in vacuo than for processes of

administration. The idea of Local Veto had already been

made familiar by the apostles of total abstinence; it was

now seen to combine the question of licensing with the

new spirit of Local Government in a way that qualified

it for a prominent place in party politics, and it became

another element in the programme. Extension of the

Local Government principle by district and parish councils

with considerable powers for acquiring land for allotments,

erecting cottages, and establishing small holdings; electoral

reforms, including the abolition of plural voting, the pay-

ment of members, and State payment of returning officers'

expenses; land reforms, with the abolition of primogeniture

and entail, and the taxation of land values; and lastly,

reform of the House of Lords—these miscellaneous pro-

posals completed the party outfit.

Mr Gladstone was to speak at Newcastle on 2nd

October. He accepted his conventional duty, and

enunciated the doctrinaire list which had been evolved

from the minds of party organisers. It fell flat. No one

had any difficulty in deciding that Mr Gladstone cared

about none of the speech, until he came to Home Rule.1

The mass of Liberal agents saw the Church roused against

them on Disestablishment, the brewers against them on

Local Veto; and no real force roused for them. The Pro-

gramme could only command the habitual and traditional

1 In Morley's Life of Gladstone (ii. 462) the whole speech is

dismissed with a dozen lines of distant reference.

1891] ISOLATION OF TRADE UNIONS 301

Liberals, and such enthusiasm as might exist would be personal enthusiasm for Mr Gladstone. He after all was their beacon, and the programme only a disagreeable necessity. Home Rule was a reality: the other proposals were not. Nor was a minor factor in the speech, which was Mr Gladstone's own. He insisted on an early evacuation of Egypt. On the old lines of policy in regard to Egypt he was justified. Early in this year a battle fought by Sir Francis Grenfell at Tokar, in which Osman Digna was totally defeated, put the finishing touch to that restoration of confidence and security which had been decided upon as the governing consideration after the fall of Khartoum. Three battles had now had the result of establishing the frontier and relieving it from dervish pressure, and also of giving confidence to the Egyptian soldiers and making them into a real army. The battle before Suakin in 1888 has been mentioned.1 In 1889 Grenfell defeated at Toski a threatening force under a warrior named Wad El Nejumi, who was believed by those qualified to know to be the really great soldier of the Mahdi's and the Khalifa's power.2 The defeat of Osman Digna completed this stage of our work in Egypt; and Mr Gladstone therefore had some ground for reintroducing the question of evacuation. But of recent years temper in England had changed. The new sentiment for the British burden of responsibility was in the air; Mr Kipling was inflaming recollections of the Soudan campaigns; and Egypt under Baring and Grenfell was a satisfactory subject for national contemplation. Mr Gladstone had better have left it alone.

Even in that portion of his speech which dealt with Home Rule some observers thought that Mr Gladstone was troubled and embarrassed. He was indeed distressed by the spectacle of Parnell fighting, in a way he thought

1 See p. 241.

2 Lord Cromer's Modern Egypt, ii. 64, 65.

302 ISOLATION OF TRADE UNIONS [1891

mad, for control in Irish affairs. Bye-elections had occurred

in Ireland, and Parnell had put up candidates against

other Home Rule candidates; they had been beaten

disastrously, but he would not give in. On his marriage

with the lady who had been Mrs O'Shea the last powerful

force in Ireland, which had not yet declared against him,

The Freeman's Journal, submitted to the Roman Catholic

view, and threw him over. He was to and fro between

England and Ireland almost every week; each time his

return showed him more haggard, more hoarse. Suddenly,

a few days after the Newcastle speech, it was announced

that he was lying desperately ill of pneumonia in his house

at Brighton, having taken to his bed on his latest return

from Ireland. The next day it was announced that he was

dead. He was only in his forty-sixth year. The desperate

strain and effort of the last twelve months of his life, the

struggle, not against England directly, but against his

late colleagues, seemed to the normal English mind to be

aptly summed up by The St James's Gazette, in a quotation

from the scene of Brian de Bois Guilbert's death in Ivanhoe:

"Unscathed by the lance of his enemy, he had died a

victim to his own contending passions." Some time

afterwards, when the Irish party became once more

united under one leader, the enduring work of Parnell

could be perceived. He had roused Ireland to a

single enthusiasm, which, though centred in himself

while he yet led the party, was so burningly alive that it

could centre finally in the party as a whole. His tactical

work failed, because it depended too much on his own cast

of mind; it was a balancing of policies which no one else

could successfully imitate. But his conception of his work,

his unwearying refusal to present the Home Rule case as

other than a demand, built up a spirit in Ireland which

neither fell with him nor died with him. Not by the party

as he left it, any more than by the party as he found it,

could he be judged; but by the crystalline compactness

1891] ISOLATION OF TRADE UNIONS 303

with which for twenty years past the main Irish question

has been kept free of all the legislation that was once

supposed to be alternative to Home Rule.

On other benches too Parliament was to see gaps, when

it met. On 6th October died Mr W. H. Smith, a more

perfect type of the bourgeois than England has since pro-

duced. Methodical, capable, not without solid dignity, he

left a stronger tradition behind him than his contemporaries

expected. His upbringing made him less sensitive than

his almost as solid predecessor, Stafford Northcote ; but

he also suffered less from the goading of Lord Randolph

Churchill, who had in the later eighties begun to fall

out of parliamentary life, and in this year left England

for a hunting tour in South Africa. Another great figure

passed out of the House of Commons upon the death, late

in December, of the Duke of Devonshire, Lord Hartington

succeeding to the title. Had he remained in the Commons

he would have had to face the strongest pressure to identify

himself finally with the Conservative party by taking the

leadership there ; as it was, he was able once more to move

as deliberately as he always liked to move.

The lapse of a year since the inception of the Salvation

Army scheme, known as the Darkest England scheme,

provided an occasion for further criticism of it. It ap-

peared that the year's expenditure of £17,000 had been

taken from the capital sum subscribed; and the work had

not been regulated on the basis of an income from the sum.

General Booth had asked for much more, and was pro-

ceeding on the assumption that the larger sum was assured.

He was considering a method of assisted emigration to

South Africa, and here also was somewhat hampered by

fairly direct intimations that the class of persons he pro-

posed to send would not be welcomed in the Colonies, or

in the British South Africa territories. His scheme,

instead of being launched complete, had grown into

little more than an enlargement of the Army's charit-

304 ISOLATION OF TRADE UNIONS [1891

able work, which might or might not be prolonged, according as its power of appeal to the public was maintained. Meanwhile the Army was in the midst of some of the worst—and some of the last—of its street battles. It had been received with violent resentment in Eastbourne, a town which prided itself upon its manners and its social amenities. Every Sunday the Salvation Army fought with rowdies in the streets, and another kind of hostility confronted it in an attempt by the town authority to enforce a section of a local Improvement Act against street processions. The warfare raged undiminished through the winter.

London at the same time saw a revival of police action against socialist meetings. In Chelsea, Hoxton, Peckham, Southwark, Mile End, and Wanstead meetings of the Social Democratic Federation were broken up, and speakers were arrested. But this singling out of one form of meeting among the many that were held every Sunday had now no public opinion to back it. The winter was passing without any serious strikes, or grievous distress. But the insistence with which unemployment had been kept in the eye of London, and the new spirit of investigation of labour problems, had secured a patient and genuine interest for a great work which at this time was being published, Mr Charles Booth's Life and Labour in London. Mr Booth had himself been led on by his investigations into pauperism to propose, in a paper read before the Statistical Society in December, a system of Old Age Pensions of five shillings a week, which would not, in his opinion, be enough to discourage thrift, but enough to keep the deserving aged poor from the workhouse. It is characteristic of the Liberal paralysis of the time that, within twenty-four hours of that paper being read, Mr Chamberlain was adopting the subject as an urgent piece of domestic reform, and that no prominent Liberal seized upon it as a more vital appeal to the country than anything in the Newcastle Programme.

CHAPTER XIV

1892 : A HALF-HEARTED ELECTION

THE year in which "Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay" over-ran the streets of our towns may well give pause to the observer of English habits. The tasteless and irrepressible air was at the time a universal annoyance ; it appears now almost a portent. It was such an affront to English respectability as had never yet been administered, not only because it flaunted a vision of a high-kicking dancer on a music-hall stage, but because the very sound of the tune was jeering, as well as ludicrous. The sudden absurd jolt of its high note became a grin at the gait and carriage of a respectable man. Its penetrating shrillness warned people that nothing was going to be taken seriously. The street boy whistled it ; the junior clerk sang it in suburban drawing-rooms ; the gay dog went to see Lottie Collins dance it ; even the cashier and the junior partner thought it. It was essentially different from any popular song which had from time to time ruled the pavement. The wildest of comic songs hitherto had been something said, which might appeal to you individually as funny, or be dismissed as nonsense. This one said nothing ; it was a mere conspiracy against gravity of deportment, which every errand boy challenged you to join. It had no individual interest whatever ; it was the voice of the crowd asserting itself. That overriding of the British self-consciousness of behaviour which had begun--and had been resented--in the Blue Ribbon Army and the Salvation Army, and had been forced forward by circumstances in the struggles of the unemployed, and the

U

305

306 A HALF-HEARTED ELECTION [1892

more flamboyant side of socialist street meetings, now invaded the mass of the careless. Cheerful blatancy was

as ready to parade the streets as profound conviction was ; and the year of " Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay " contained the

germ of the "Mafficker." The origin of the tune was gravely discussed in a law suit concerning copyright in it;

it came from America, where it was said to have sprung either from lower-class negroes, or from disreputable

haunts in St Louis. Certainly in its peculiarly idiotic quality of sound it has never been equalled.

To say that a street tune substantially modified the course of politics would be, in spite of Fletcher of Saltoun,

to treat popular melody rather too gravely. Yet there certainly was at this time a tendency on the part of the

plain average man, without much interest in politics or social reform, to make a little more of his own interests,

and rather less of the labour revolt, the state of Ireland, the blessings of education, than he had been obliged to

make in recent years. He advanced his own amusements with vigour. Golf attained in this year so much of a

position in England that for the first time the Amateur Championship competition was held outside Scotland ;

it took place in May at Sandwich. The popularity of the game was felt to be "bewilderingly sudden." 1 Cycling

had been receiving an immense impetus from the invention of the safety bicycle, which, besides being far handier, and

easier to ride, than the old high bicycle, had rendered cycling practicable for women. In its evening hours half

England was crazily intent upon " missing word " competitions ; later in the year, when it was decided at Bow

Street that these were lotteries, it appeared in the evidence that the coupons sent in by competitors ran into hundreds

of thousands every week. The world of art was diverted by the publication of Whistler's Gentle Art of Making

Enemies ; but found some more serious interests in the

1 The Times, 14th May 1892.

1892] A HALF-HEARTED ELECTION 307

successful issue of the negotiations with Mr Tate for the

foundation of the National Gallery of British Art, and in a

considerable protest against the growing disfigurement of

towns by sky signs, and of country districts by advertise-

ment boards. In literature the publication of Tess of

the D'Urbervilles awoke a livelier interest in modern

novelists ; and the work of William Watson encouraged

people to believe that the death of Browning and Tennyson

would not leave the nation without a poet of the grand

scale. Tennyson's death occurred in October of this

year. Even the heavy ground of the drama was stirred ;

comedies by Oscar Wilde and J. M. Barrie blew over it a

breath of wit and native high spirits such as England had

not been known to possess. Finally, Paderewski's first

appearances in London created a wild enthusiasm which,

if at the time exaggerated, and often lacking in genuine

appreciation, did nevertheless make music a subject of

common interest, and prepared the way for a removal of

the reproach that England as a nation cared nothing for it.

The year opened with sorrow. A form of influenza, apt

to lead on to pneumonia, was again prevalent during the

winter months ; and on 14th January the Duke of Clarence,

eldest son of the Prince of Wales, died from it. On the

same day Cardinal Manning died. He had filled for a

long time with tact, but with unflinching assertion, a

difficult position in a society which could not admit the

claim to princely rank, which he could not forgo. Every

opportunity of position and power was to him a means of

advancing the ends of his Church. His secession from

the Church of England had been at the time more alarming

than that of Newman, because he was a greater preacher

and a greater administrator. His intervention in the dock

strike of 1889 was part of an increased activity during his

later years in the cause of reform at home. This activity

has been attributed to the decline of his influence at

Rome, which had, under Pius IX., been considerable ;

308 A HALF-HEARTED ELECTION [1892

with Leo XIII. he was less in sympathy.1 The Free Churches also lost this year a very prominent figure by the death of the Rev. C. H. Spurgeon. His preaching at the great building in Newington, known as the Metropolitan Tabernacle, had for many years attracted enormous crowds to the place; and his sermons, being always reprinted in pamphlet form, probably reached a wider public than was in the compass of any other popular preacher. Homely, positive, charged with an amazing vigour of appeal and of denunciation, and delivered with marvellously effective control of the voice, these sermons were profoundly satisfying to Free Churchmen. They did not at this time look for such direct political quality in their preachers as the later fashion demanded.

The Church of England was involved in the final bout of controversy with the Agnostics on Biblical inspiration. From the staid pages of monthly reviews the battle had spread to the newspapers; and the Duke of Argyll, Mr Gladstone, and Professor Huxley were solemnly debating whether men should or should not believe in God, since the Book of Genesis shows no knowledge of the existence of kangaroos, and the story of Creation is demonstrably unsound in the matter of the greater saurians. This kind of controversy was doomed by the approach of a new spirit, which, if in many respects too light-hearted, was sane in its inclination to think that a Church stood or fell by other tests than those of reason, just as it had learned to feel that a social structure stood or fell by other tests than those of strictly logical principles.

One of the most striking instances of this spirit was provided now by the second election for the London County Council, which took place in March. All the criticism which the council's work had brought upon it from Conservatives, from irritable rich householders, from any who disliked and feared democratic administration, was con-

1See Mr G. W. E. Russell's Collections and Recollections, chap. iv.

1892] A HALF-HEARTED ELECTION 309

centrated in a great attack during the early weeks of 1892.

The strange result was that resentment of carping criticism

was expressed not only by the advanced side of the council,

but by the whole body of menibers. Even the leaders of

the Moderate party complained of grumblings and growl-

ings which were meant to " grab " the council, and might

have the effect of frightening uscful men from joining

it. It was a Moderate member, too, who went so far in

his admiration for the council as to say that it had in

London so great and important a charge that it ought

to have a permanent organisation, somewhat on the scale of

Government departments. This was exactly the kind of

large view of the council's duties which fussy ratepayers

detested. At any rate, the attacks proved futile, and the

new body elected this year had almost as large a Pro-

gressive majority as the original council had had. It made

the first attempt to run trams along the Embankment,

but failed to obtain powers from Parliament. Late in the

year it accomplished an advanced piece of administration

by setting up a works department of its own, and thus

giving itself a strong hand against the contractors for

public works. This was distinctly the most socialistic

step that any municipal authority had yet taken, and was

on quite a different plane from the provision of public

services, such as gas and water, which in their day had

made stir enough. Discussion of the water-supply, which

from time to time was a pressing subject in London, when

a dry summer revealed the inadequacy of the Water

Companies' services, arose this year in a new form. The

Birmingham Corporation promoted a Bill for powers to

obtain a water-supply from certain mountain valleys in

Wales, at a cost of six millions. The question whether

London did not need that particular source of supply was

raised. But it was not a matter on which there was as yet

any commanding force of public opinion, and Birmingham

secured the right to the valleys. The water-supply of all

310 A HALF-HEARTED ELECTION [1892

large towns was becoming a more serious problem, not only from the perpetual increase of domestic demands, but from at least two other demands. One was the demand for public swimming baths and washhouses, and the other was the great extension of the use of lifts in big buildings. To take one example alone : in Birmingham the requirements of water for the latter purpose had amounted to 30,000 gallons daily, even in 1885, and by 1890 the amount had risen to 80,000 gallons. Another municipal interest of the year 1892 was the first instance of an electric tramway worked by a municipality.1 At Blackpool the local authority took over the lines of tramway which had for some years been working on the conduit system. In this year Mrs Rylands, the widow of an immensely wealthy cotton-spinner, bought complete the famous Althorp Library, belonging to Lord Spencer, a library rich in every kind of treasure of book-collecting, and gave it to the citizens of Manchester.

Early in the year events began to be coloured by the prospect of a parliamentary election. The Government, having been in office for six years, had come to the customary time for a dissolution. The London County Council election was considered by the Liberal party organisers to be of good omen, and Liberal leaders talked County Council politics (Mr Gladstone even going so far as to suggest that the council might have control of the police), until the other side scoffed at them for " throwing Imperial questions into the background," though no one seemed very clear as to what Imperial questions there were at the moment. The advocacy of Old Age Pensions remained chiefly with the Conservatives, and was cautiously handled ; Mr Chamberlain had persuaded both Lord Salisbury and Mr Balfour that it was not a matter to be neglected, and they wrote letters supporting the idea of a contributory scheme

1 See The Municipal Journal, 2nd September 1910 : article on the Jubilee of Trams.

1892] A HALF-HEARTED ELECTION

311

of pensions, in which the State would have no concern beyond the setting-up of the machinery. Liberals were

critical, both of this and of more general schemes of industrial insurance, which had been brought into the

political atmosphere of the moment by the recent establishment of the German system of workmen's insurance.

Allotments again provided matter for speech-making, and here, too, with the Act of 1887 to their credit, Government

speakers took a high line. Mr Chamberlain asserted that 100,000 labourers now had allotments; and the

Duke of Devonshire, going as usual to the root of the matter, even when the root was rather deep digging

for a noble landford, advised his party, besides making efforts to increase the effectiveness of the Allotments Act,

not to neglect "those other and older objects of Liberal policy that were directed towards the freeing of the land

from those encumbrances and difficulties under which our existing laws place it, as to inheritance and transfer."

In the end this matter turned less to Conservative advantage than was expected; but in the preliminary rounds

it was of more value to them than to Liberals. For a short time Woman Suffrage came to the front again.

During the brief session before the dissolution Sir Albert Rollit introduced a Woman Suffrage Bill, and the question

was discovered to have a new kind of vitality, when the platform at a meeting in St. James's Hall in support of

the Bill was stormed by a section who objected to the class limitations in the Bill. Hitherto Woman Suffrage measures

had been so remote from practical politics that precise terms of enfranchisement had never been in dispute. The

Bill was defeated in the House by 175 votes to 152. The most direct pronouncement on the position of labour from

either great party came from Lord Randolph Churchill, who had returned to England in January. He upheld

once more that form of democracy which consisted in trying to excise the middle class from the body politic.

312 A HALF-HEARTED ELECTION [1892

In a letter to a candidate he remarked that political power had passed from the landlords and the landed interest to the capitalist and the manufacturer, who made laws to suit themselves ; why, he asked, should not the Conservatives combine regulation of all conditions of labour by the State, under the guidance of the Labour vote, with " a foreign policy which sought to extend, by means of tariff reforms, over our colonies and even over other friendly states the area of profitable barter of produce ? "

But Lord Randolph Churchill had already ceased to be a real force in politics, and newspapers no longer made much of any suggestions from him. Besides, Labour had completed the turn of thought by which it had come back to faith in parliamentary work, and a determination to signalise in that, as well as in municipal affairs, the coming of the era of administration. Leaders on both sides had to take account of a new kind of Labour candidature. Mr Balfour took account of it, genuinely enough, by asserting that Liberals were always more interested in political reform than in social reform, and were therefore not the truest friends of labour. Mr Gladstone took account of it, not altogether happily, by deprecating independence of candidatures on the Labour side, as distinct from independence of action in Parliament ; in other words he preferred a member nominally Liberal, whose votes might occasionally go against the party, to a candidate whose poll must inevitably weaken the Liberal poll in any constituency.

But indeed, whatever had been said on either side, the Labour candidatures would have remained detached from both. Two or three times in the spring and early summer the power of trade unions shook the country. Early in March there was a strike of colliers, and although it only affected one-third of the coalfields it caused a panic at the thought of the possible laying-idle of factories and furnaces everywhere. Fortunately that strike was over in a fortnight, though it was followed by a more serious one

1892] A HALF-HEARTED ELECTION 313

on the Durham coalfields, which lasted for twelve weeks.

The two strikes were on wages conditions, the masters

claiming the right, in view of the state of the market, to

reduce wages by 13½ per cent. The men won a point in

getting the reduction put at 10 per cent. In each case

the working of the Union organisation was of a kind to

make Labour little inclined to rely on any party but itself.

Amid all these political excursions Home Rule lost none

of its party importance. Even in 1891 there had been

lively discussion of whether Mr Gladstone should or should

not be giving the country some details of the shape that

Home Rule was then taking in his mind. One of the

most prominent of the young men of his party, Mr Asquith,

was pressing him on the point in public speeches. In

1892 all that was known was that the retention of a con-

siderable number of Irish members at Westminster had

been decided upon. The Conservatives, besides boasting

of the effect of their five years of “ resolute government ”

of Ireland, introduced this year an Irish Local Government

Bill. But it was not very seriously intended; the clective

nature of the bodies it set up was “ bulwarked,” as the

ingenious phrase had it, in every possible way; and the

Bill in the end was dropped. It had never been worth

while for Liberals to give it serious opposition. Yet they

went to the country in the end with their own policy to the

last degree vague in such vital points as the control of the

police and the judiciary and the treatment of the land

question; and relied to no small extent upon attacking

Mr Balfour's coercion, instead of explaining their own

proposals.

Coercion, indeed, and the comparative failure of the

Allotments Act proved in the end the two most pointed

weapons for the use of Liberals. The employment of

them, combined with a certain weakness in Conservative,

as distinct from Liberal Unionist, electoral organisation,

provided the Tories' excuse for their defeat. Parliament

314 A HALF-HEARTED ELECTION [1892

was dissolved in June; and although the Government had

been losing seats continually at bye-elections, probably no

one on the Liberal side, except Mr Gladstone, had expected

a complete Liberal victory. He expressed the most ex-

travagant anticipations. In an article published in The

Nineteenth Century1 he tried to persuade the country

to expect a Liberal majority of at least 100, and to be

prepared even for the possibility of a Tory "landslide."

Not only was he wrong, but his disillusionment took

a peculiarly personal turn; his majority in Mid-Lothian,

which had been over 3000 in 1885, and unassailed in 1886,

fell to 690. In the country generally the only sign of

opinion which could be called at all striking was the

comparative failure of the Liberal Unionists. They had

numbered 74 after the election of 1886; they numbered

after the election of 1892 only 47; it seemed therefore

that the attachment of the word "Liberal" to a position

which did not include Home Rule was of no value as an

appeal to electors; and to that extent Home Rule became

a more firmly settled point of Liberal policy. The new

House, which assembled in August, contained 274 Liberals,

81 Home Rulers (72 Anti-Parnellites and 9 Parnellites),

268 Conservatives and 47 Liberal Unionists. This gave a

Home Rule majority of 40. It was not a strong majority,

but it was remarkable, if the purely political circumstances

alone be considered, that there should have been such

a majority at all. The Conservative Government had

passed a very considerable quantity of democratic legisla-

tion, and their record in that respect was far more satis-

factory than that of the Liberal Government of 1880.

One of their final pieces of work was a Shop Hours Act,

prohibiting the employment of young persons under

eighteen years of age for more than seventy-four hours

in a week, including meal times. The Act required

amendment later, as no provision was made in it for the

1 September 1891.

1892] A HALF-HEARTED ELECTION 315

expenses of administering it. But it was another instance

of the kind of social legislation of these five years.

Much of this, no doubt, was due to Mr Chamberlain's

influence. But Lord Salisbury was quite as much alive

to democratic demands as anyone of his time, for all

the cynicism with which he occasionally presented them

to his party. He was probably more alive to them than

Mr Gladstone, who never successfully separated in his mind

constitutional reforms and social advancement. Lord

Salisbury had but little patience with the rights of man or

the rights of citizenship; but he could see any given claim

when it was presented to him apart from abstractions.

Thus he had been able to move far in social reform since

1886. But he could not move in the spirit of the rights

of democracy, and this spirit was what most distinguished,

next to his own legislation, the past six years. Herein we

may find some part of the reason for the defeat of the

Conservatives. Much though they had done, they held

themselves capable of either giving or withholding; and

political Trade Unionism was bent upon breaking down

that attitude. The fact that the Conservatives and

Liberal Unionists failed to obtain against the Liberals

alone a majority sufficient to counterbalance the Irish vote

may be attributed firstly to the personal popularity of

Mr Gladstone, and secondly to the new Trade Unionism.

Incidentally new journalism had its share in the result. It

is beyond doubt that The Star already wielded a formidable

power; and in the spring of 1892 it was followed by the

establishment of two halfpenny morning papers, The

Morning Herald and The Morning Leader, the latter being

published by the proprietors of The Star. These were the

first halfpenny morning papers in the kingdom, and they

came in time to help sway the election. The working man

could not yet return many members of his own class to

Parliament. His sense that Tories, even when they had

passed Factory Acts and a Local Government Act and a

316 A HALF-HEARTED ELECTION [1892

Free Education Act, were still Tories, could for the most

part only express itself in voting for Liberals. This, with

the persistent Liberalism of Scotland and Wales, just

defeated the Unionists. Lord Salisbury did not im-

mediately resign ; he was not, until a vote was taken,

in a minority. But the vote came speedily. Mr Asquith

moved a motion of No Confidence on 8th August, and it

was carried by 350 votes to 310. Then Lord Salisbury

resigned, and Mr Gladstone formed his fourth Government.

It included some new men, Mr Asquith becoming Home

Secretary, Sir H. H. Fowler, President of the Local Govern-

ment Board, and Mr James Bryce, Chancellor of the Duchy

of Lancaster.

There were new men in the House also. In some

respects newness was perhaps unnecessarily self-conscious.

The brass band which accompanied Mr Keir Hardie to

Westminster when he took his seat gave some offence ; his

tweed cap hardly less. He was elected for South-West

Ham ; and if the band and the cap were intended to

announce that a Labour member had arrived who did not

call himself a Liberal, expected no favour from Liberals,

and did not want the patronising kindliness which had

been shown to previous members from the ranks of labour-

ing men, they were not altogether out of place. Mr John

Burns, too, was returned to Parliament, sitting for

Battersea. These two stood for a change in the political

spirit of labour, not unlike that which Parnell had made in

the case of Ireland. The other Labour members had, like

Isaac Butt, accepted the forms of the House, and parlia-

mentary action to them meant all the old forms ; they

sat with the Liberals, and their hope lay in moving

Liberals to action.

Meanwhile outside the House advanced Labour men,

in the same way as the Clan-na-Gael, had begun to despise

parliamentarianism, and preferred to rely upon their own

organisations acting directly on the social body. The

1892] A HALF-HEARTED ELECTION 317

Independent Labour Party proposed now, as Parnell had done, to have at its back all the energy of these outside forces, while employing parliamentary action. At the moment, indeed, the outside forces showed some tendency to become as detached from all normal and lawful methods of agitation as the Clan-na-Gael was. Some members of the Social Democratic Federation developed anarchist leanings, abolished the chairman at their conferences, and held frankly revolutionary meetings in Hyde Park. Four men were arrested at Walsall, for manufacturing bombs, and were sentenced to penal servitude. The publisher and proprietor of The Commonweal, the organ of socialism, were indicted for publishing a violent article, after this trial, denouncing the Home Secretary, the judge who tried the case, and the inspector of police who conducted it. They were sentenced to eighteen months' hard labour for incitement to murder.

But on the whole the Labour forces outside Parliament were not likely to become as embarrassing to their leaders as Irish dynamiters had been to Parnell, and the Trade Union Congress in the autumn, while it showed the vigorous influence of the new movement, confined itself to an effective and not at all extravagant programme. It instructed its Parliamentary Committee to prepare a scheme for Independent Labour representation ; and it passed resolutions demanding an easier franchise qualification (of three months' residence, instead of a year's) ; the appointment as factory inspectors of men who had worked not less than five years in factories ; and an eight-hours day. The last demand received an unexpected encouragement from a vote in favour of it given by the cotton operatives' trade unions. This was a great surprise, because the cotton hands had never hitherto favoured the movement ; there were some who were inclined to attribute the vote less to conviction on a Trade Union theory than to a knowledge that there had been a good deal of over

318 A HALF-HEARTED ELECTION [1892

production in the trade, and that an eight-hours day would be a form of short time convenient to the operatives.

Unfortunately the winter in Lancashire was to pass under the shadow of something worse than short time. Affairs there had not been going well. The Ship Canal was proving disastrously costly ; instead of the eight and a half millions which were to have covered all the cost of construction and the purchase of other undertakings, ten millions had already been spent, and it seemed likely that fourteen millions would be swallowed before the work was finished. Then depressed trade turned the cotton-masters to thinking of bimetallism, and seeking in that a cure for ills that had no connection with currency.

Finally at the beginning of November the masters decided that they must make a 5 per cent. reduction in wages, and the operatives struck, asking for a short-time agreement instead. Fifty or sixty thousand operatives were out before the first week of the strike was over. It was expected to be a tough fight, because for some years the alternatives of short time or lowered wages in a trade crisis had been in dispute between masters and men, and now had come to trial; but that it would be a fight through the whole dark winter no one supposed.

The strike added a sharper interest to the Conference of Women Workers at Bristol in November, which gave much of its time to the consideration and advocacy of womens' trade unions ; the Women's Trade Union Association, meeting about the same time, had to confess to a year of poor results, although great efforts had been made.1 The Bristol Conference, a sequel to the Conference of the Birmingham Union of Women Workers in 1890, also pressed forward the question of the appointment of women factory inspectors; and one of the first services of the new Liberal Government was to accede to this pressure,

1 This was the Association's third yearly meeting.

1892] A HALF-HEARTED ELECTION 319

Mr Asquith as Home Secretary appointing several women inspectors.

Naturally the new Government also went to work early in Ireland. Mr Morley, who had again taken the Chief Secretaryship, set up in October a Royal Commission to investigate the conditions induced by the steady course of evictions under the recent "resolute government."

The bitterness of feeling was seen in the assertions of landlords that they would have nothing to do with the commission. The first petulance passed away, and the work seemed likely to proceed fairly smoothly, when a breeze between the judge who presided over the commission and certain lawyers who appeared for landlords brought ill-feeling back again ; and in the end the landlords carried out their original threat, and declined to appear. Another matter in which the Ministry seized its new opportunities was the question of allotments. So much of their Social Reform programme had been taken from them that any point in which the arrogance of the other side might be pricked was of no small value.

A return was at once prepared, and was published in August, showing how poor a thing the Allotments Act of 1887 had proved to be in the working. Instead of Mr Chamberlain's 100,000 men, it appeared from the returns that only 2891 tenants had been set up under the Act ; and the perfunctory character of the Act was shown by the discovery that only fifty-six rural sanitary authorities (the local bodies which administered the Act) had acquired land, while five hundred and eighteen authorities had taken no steps at all.

There was some apprehension of distress as the winter approached. But in one sense the worst struggle of the unemployed appeared to be over ; they no longer had to rouse the comfortable world to the fact of their existence and their starvation. The new Home Secretary speedily removed one of the old grievances by opening Trafalgar Square to meetings on Sundays, Saturdays and Bank

320 A HALF-HEARTED ELECTION [1892

Holidays ; though he ventured on ground which might have been provocative when he spoke of the mischief of holding meetings there day after day—the very thing which in extreme states of popular feeling was the most impressive means of action. But the concession was well received ; all the energy of those who concerned themselves with the problem of unemployment could go to trying to devise remedies, and the Local Government Board was urged again to relax the rigidities of the Poor Law, and to sanction some form of relief organisation. It was at last being admitted that a neglected state of unemployment brought a terrible train of consequences, in that it finally submerged workmen who could never recover from a fortnight's failure of work, and were thrust down into pauperism beyond remedy. The official response was not very fruitful, but it was some acknowledgment of the difficulty. A Royal Commission on the Poor Law was set up. It was less concerned with immediate labour problems than with the subject of Old Age Pensions, to which it was obvious that the new Government must pay attention. The commission's work gradually narrowed itself down to this, and no effort was made to devise modifications of the Poor Law to meet the case of the unemployed. The commission did not represent in any way the new labour forces ; John Burns declined to serve on it. The only Labour members were of the old school—Joseph Arch, and Henry Broadhurst. Mr Chamberlain was one of the commissioners ; he had lately promulgated a "labour programme" which showed him for the first time out of real touch with those democratic movements which ten years before he had pre-eminently represented. He proposed to shorten hours of labour in mines and other dangerous employments ; to set up arbitration tribunals ; to found a system of contributory insurance for compensation for injuries, and for old age pensions ; to limit pauper immigration ; to increase the powers of local

1892] A HALF-HEARTED ELECTION 321

authorities in matters of housing and town improvements ;

and to empower such authorities to advance money to

working men to enable them to become owners of their

houses. This last item, curious as it sounds now, was

ardently advocated by Mr Chamberlain for a year or two.

He had in fact undergone the inevitable change from his

environment. He had not become a Tory; but he had

missed the contact with the new element in democratic

feeling by which such a man as he would have profited,

if he had remained on the Liberal side. Even on his

present side he did not overlook the existence of the new

element ; but he could have no contact with it, and the

result was that he miscalculated it. He denied that the

new Labour members represented any real force in the

labour world, and that led him to mistake an advanced

programme in the spirit of 1880 for an appeal to advanced

labour.

Meanwhile the Salvation Army scheme was showing

itself as founded rather on experience of destitution than

on a proper understanding of the problem of unemploy-

ment. The honesty of the administration of the fund,

and the adequate keeping of accounts, were established

by the investigations of a committee which had under-

taken the work at General Booth's request. But the

committee found that the relief works of the Army were

really underselling the market in lines of cheap labour,

and were thus creating as much destitution as they relieved.

It may be added here that the Salvation Army's years of

street struggles now came virtually to an end ; the clause

in a Local Act, under which the Eastbourne authorities

had repressed the Army's activities, was repealed by

Parliament in this year; and when the Town Council

tried to make by-laws permitting repression the Home

Secretary refused his sanction. Active persecution of the

Salvation Army may from this time be said to have ceased.

By the end of the year it was becoming terribly evident

x

322 A HALF-HEARTED ELECTION [1892

that distress of a grievous kind, even if it did not amount

to starvation, was at thousands of doors where no such

visitatnt had been expected. In October a business with

vast ramifications, called the Liberator Building Society,

went into bankruptey. The small savings of an immense

number of people were in it; it had, indeed, never been

an affair for large investments, but had acquired practically

all its capital from the artisan and the small shopkeeper.

The first announcement of its failure left, perhaps,

some hope; the announcement in November that the

Public Prosecutor had been approached in the matter

began to put a different complexion on the state of the

society's business.

As for the large investor, a bad trade year in Great

Britain had kept his new interest in South Africa alive.

The gold boom continued in a milder form, and Mr

Rhodes was a stalwart figure to give the investor confidence

in the possibilities of the territories he so largely controlled.

He was in England again in the winter, rousing a great

meeting of the British South Africa Company to en-

thusiasm for his schemes, which were now being revealed

at their height. He spoke of telegraph lines from south

to north of Africa by way of Uganda and Wady Halfa, and

of an advance of civilisation by that route, which should,

so to speak, take the dervishes in the rear, and remove

the necessity of having to fight them. The idea was that

other interruptions of the magnificent whole might also

be removed without fighting. Complaints about the

Boers' treatment of the gold industry, which had been

making a slight appearance from time to time, were

growing rather more loud. However, the hope was

expressed that the backward nation which occupied the

Transvaal might be removed from it ultimately without

war; though references to " gratuitous germs of race

bitterness " betray glimpses of the real feelings at work.

Alarm about cholera, from which England had been

1892] A HALF-HEARTED ELECTION 323

free for some years, returned in the summer, when the presence of the disease at St Petersburg and Hamburg led to fears that it might be introduced into this country by immigrants. In the autumn there were a few cases in the ports on the English as well as on the French side of the Channel. The authorities had the more reason to be uncomfortable since a fever epidemic in London in the summer, 4000 cases being under treatment in September, had shown once again the prevalence of insanitary conditions. However, the cholera was success-

fully kept within bounds. The cases in England were limited to thirty-five, and the isolation arrangements were so good that in no single instance did the disease extend to other persons than those who landed in England with it upon them. That is to say, there was no spread of infection at all.

CHAPTER XV

1893 : MR GLADSTONE'S LAST FIGHT

ALTHOUGH the Liberal majority was unreal for any purpose but that of Home Rule, the Government entered on its first serious session amid as much obloquy and fear from Conservatism as if it were a revolutionary junta in command of absolute power. Mr Gladstone was the sole cause of this attitude. In the clash of violent feeling roused during the Home Rule controversy of 1886 the personal dislike of him, active enough in the late seventies, had assumed an almost superstitious form. For a few years before the election of 1880 it was actually difficult for a London hostess to gather a dinner-party to meet Mr Gladstone, unless she was content to confine herself to his known adherents. His power of moving great audiences, his desire to move them, and the directions in which he wished to move them, appeared as a terrible break with the old gentleman-like politics in which he had been reared. Dread of his power grew to be a very large element in Queen Victoria's obvious mistrust of him ; and she was only reflecting the feelings of the higher social ranks of the country. When he took up the cause of Home Rule, dislike was inflamed into hatred. He alone at that time could have created and held together a party against the furious attacks of the Tories and the Unionists ; therefore the fact that he was there to do it focussed upon him the intense bitterness of feeling. A yet more amazing stage remained. That adoration of him on his own side which took such affectionate pride in the vigour of his old age, which gloried

324

1893] MR GLADSTONE'S LAST FIGHT 325

in his capacity at eighty-three to lead one more Government to attempt Home Rule, which pinned its faith so

fiercely to him as the " Grand Old Man," was answered

on the other side by a belief, ridiculous as it might seem,

that such a spirit in so old a man could only be attributed

to some form of demoniac possession. Numbers of people,

otherwise sensible, actually believed that there was something satanic in Mr Gladstone; and, once that superstitious feeling was aroused, his constant expression of his

deeply religious convictions only made the case worse.

The working of his mind, often involved, and showing

such expertness in mental processes that the result was

frequently a balanced pronouncement, in which simpler

minds could see no finality, became in the eyes of the

superstitious another sign of " possession "; they took

it as a form of gathering into his toils those who, if they

had read his real thoughts, would have ceased from following him. In the two Mr Gladstones of popular fancy--

the Grand Old Man who would perform a miracle, and

the Terrible Old Man who would ruin the Empire--the

ordinary person's interest in politics was centred, not

upon the new Government as a Government.

The times were not propitious. The great strike in

Lancashire, which had begun in November, showed no

signs of coming to an end, and hunger stalked through the

cotton towns. Other industries were in a nervous, irrit-

able condition which portended more strikes. At the

same time the full effects of the Liberator bankruptcy

began to be apparent ; early in January it was said that

the examination of the society's affairs was leading to the

conclusion that the shareholders would lose everything,

and the depositors would be fortunate if they got three or

four shillings in the pound. Angry discussions raged as

to the responsibility of prominent persons who had allowed

their names to figure on the prospectus ; but there were

individuals upon whom it soon appeared that direct

326 MR GLADSTONE'S LAST FIGHT [1893

punishment would fall. The man who was supposed

to have been chiefly responsible for fraudulent handling

of the funds, Jabez Spencer Balfour, had fled the country

at an early stage of the disaster, and no one knew where

he was. But three men were put on their trial, Hobbs,

Wright and Newman, and though the evidence of the

financial juggling which had gone on—the interweaving

of building speculation with private borrowings which

had, for instance, the prosecution alleged, transferred two

millions sterling to the pockets of Hobbs from the

Liberator's funds—was extremely complicated, the end

of the trial was plain enough. Hobbs and Wright were

sentenced to twelve years' penal servitude, and Newman

to five years. In April, a month after the trial was over,

news at last arrived of Balfour; he had been recognised

at Buenos Ayres, and application had been made for his

extradition. He was regarded as the real villain of the

piece. Hobbs had only aspired to be Mayor of Croydon;

but Balfour had posed as a financial magnate, with a great

extravagant country house, a seat in Parliament, and a

reputation for benevolence. He proceeded now to prove

that at any rate the cleverness at the back of the Liberator

frauds had been largely his contribution. His extradition

was formally granted by the Argentine authorities on

17th April; he invented ingenious processes of the law by

which he delayed for two whole years the carrying out of

the extradition order, and almost caused his victims to

despair of his ever being brought to justice. But mean-

while some vengeance had been taken; and energy was

now turned to setting on foot a Relief Fund for those who

had been ruined.

The cotton strike terminated on 24th March in the

famous Brooklands agreement, which has ever since

governed the relations of employers and employed in

that industry. It provided that the immediate reduction

of wages should be, not 5 per cent., against which the mill-

1893] MR GLADSTONE'S LAST FIGHT 327

hands had struck, but 3 per cent. The more important feature of the agreement was that in future no changes

should take place at intervals less than a year from the date of the last change, and that no single change should

exceed 5 per cent. either of advance or of reduction ; machinery for consultation and arbitration was also set

up, and an arrangement made for establishing committees of the masters' and the men's organisations, two com-

mittees on either side, a lower and a higher, each of which should have not less than seven days, in a case of dispute,

to consider its attitude. The agreement was hailed as a credit to Lancashire; it was also a remarkable sign of

the new relations which labour was setting up with its employers. A strike was no longer an isolated affair; and

it was almost always now a declaration of unity of which masters might take account, if they wished. The statistics

of strikes showed an increasing number of disputes which were not about wages ; thus in 1890 wages disputes were

62 per cent. of the whole, and in 1891 were 54 per cent. An equally significant fact was that in strikes undertaken

purely to defend Trade Union principles, although the masters won rather more than half the battles, the cases

which the strikers won were the far more important ones. These statistics of the industrial world had been published

for several years past, and in this year the work of collecting and presenting them was put under a special branch

of the Board of Trade, the Labour Department, which Mr Mundella, President of the Board, created.

During the winter the new education was of as much interest as the new Unionism. The two subjects were not

devoid of a remote connection, because upper middle-class people, seeing prices disturbed, and conveniences of life

affected, by the demands of workmen, began to question why they should at the same time be paying more for the

education of those workmen. It was not a very reasonable

328 MR GLADSTONE'S LAST FIGHT [1893

train of thought, but it was an enticing one. Local taxa-

tion, according to a Local Government Board report

published in April of this year, was certainly tending

to fall more heavily on the house-occupier and less

on the landowner. Sometimes the grievance was

put differently; the ratepayer complained that he was

being mulcted for the education of the working classes,

who then used their education to form unions, and

endanger dividends. People grumbled increasingly at the

effect of compulsory education in making the educated

less content with their station in life; to meet them with

more education was in this view deplorable. A time of

uncertain trade and a wet, depressing winter made these

grievances louder, so that it behoved the champions of

education to bestir themselves. It was useless to blink

the fact that the new education would not only go on

making demands upon the national pocket, but would make

ever-increasing demands. There was already a dearth of

teachers in technical schools, and the state of the teaching

staff of elementary schools cried aloud for more and better

training colleges. The Duke of Devonshire, in his level-

headed way, attacked the most prevalent ground of com-

plaint; he argued that, instead of increasing the attempt

to migrate from one class to another, technical education

would diminish the "black-coat fetish," would set up an

ideal of workmanship in place of the feeling that the desk-

worker was a more respectable person than the skilled

artisan, and so would diminish the tendency to congestion

in the world of clerks and shop assistants. The answer

made to this argument was that technical schools showed

a danger of turning out bad artists rather than good crafts-

men. It fell to Mr Balfour, speaking at Manchester, to

remind the country that, after all, a progressive and

energetic community like Manchester had had a

Mechanics' Institute twenty years ago and a School of Art

fifty-six years ago; the Technical Education Act had

1893] MR GLADSTONE'S LAST FIGHT 329

only put upon a national basis work which the great industrial towns had found so desirable, that they had instituted private efforts to set it on foot long before anyone dreamed of it as proper work for public authorities. Meanwhile other speakers like Lord Justice Bowen reminded the public that education (which he called "the cultivation for market-purposes of brute brain power") was not thought of by its best supporters as supplanting morality and religion; a leaven had been set to work, and time must be given for its operation.

Parliament met on 31st January for what became the longest session that had ever been known. It sat till the third week in September, and then, with only five weeks' recess, sat again until the beginning of March 1894—a session of thirteen months. The Government introduced rapidly three large measures. The Home Rule Bill was produced in February, the Welsh Disestablishment Bill in the same month, and the Local Veto Bill at the beginning of March. But of these only the Home Rule Bill counted for the moment in the Liberal forces. The introduction of the other two might have been thought to have been designed, in some extraordinary failure of judgment, to serve as irritants during several months in which the Liberal party would be too much occupied to defend them in the country. The licensed victualling trade at once organised meetings against the Local Veto Bill; and even people well affected towards licensing reform were cooled by the production of a measure, which made no alterations in the system of licensing, but was devoted solely to such projects as establishing polls of districts, to be taken on the demand of ten persons, on the question of prohibiting the sale of liquor in the district, and setting up a form of public management of licensed houses with a bonus to the resident manager on the sale of non-intoxicants. It was little wonder that Mr Chamberlain saw as much profit in attacking this measure as in com-

330

MR GLADSTONE'S LAST FIGHT [1893

bating Home Rule.1 The Welsh Disestablishment Bill

also provoked meetings against the Government all over

England; and, as neither Bill was advanced a single stage

in all this year, their production seemed a gratuitous

rousing of opposition. Practically the whole of the time

until the adjournment for the short recess in September

was taken up by the Home Rule Bill. Its only novel feature

as compared with the previous Bill 2 was the retention

at Westminster of Irish members, their numbers being

reduced from a hundred and three to eighty. But exactly

what their position was to be, whether they were to vote on

all subjects or only on Irish subjects, and what was to be

said in the former case of a situation in which Irishmen

might govern England, by holding the balance between

parties, but Englishmen could not govern Ireland—

these were the points of hottest dispute in the inter-

minable debates in Committee. The second reading

debate was a long one, and at the beginning of it the

Opposition were not wholly united in their policy. A

party meeting had to be called at the Carlton Club (it was

notable as marking Lord Randolph Churchill's return to

the fold of the orthodox on Irish questions); and, though

some strong differences of opinion as to the method of

fighting the Bill were expressed, the decision was ultimately

taken for a solid vote against the second reading on 22nd

April. Then the long Committee stage began; it occupied

sixty-three sittings, and Mr Gladstone himself was not

free from some responsibility for the inordinate length of

the proceedings. The concentration of the past seven

years upon the subject of Ireland had so preserved his

energy, besides enlarging his store of knowledge, that he

brought to these debates an incredible vigour. Unfortu-

nately vigour with him meant copiousness; he maintained,

in a House of Commons which had learned obstructive

arts, the tradition of a day when these were unknown,

1The Times, 7th April 1893.

2See p. 181.

1893] MR GLADSTONE'S LAST FIGHT 331

and the result was that his speeches offered a thousand points of petty debate, in sentences which he threw in merely for purposes of illustration or amplification.1 Dull though the whole debate became to the world outside the walls of Parliament, there was little else to talk about. The introduction of the Bill had intensified the animosities in society, which were so bad for the spirit of the London season.

Then the business world was depressed by a disastrous failure of credit in Australia. In March banks began to suspend payment there, and the whole structure of credit in the colony was found to depend to a dangerous degree upon land speculation, which at a time of crisis dropped with a run. Banks had also been engaged in direct trading, and their capital was insufficiently paid up. Moreover, though the gold reserves were larger than in England, being on an average 20 to 25 per cent. of the deposits, as against an average of about 12 per cent. in England, they were not large enough for a country in which, owing to its isolation, securities were necessarily almost impossible to realise in a moment of difficulty. Out of fifteen large banks in Australia seven had suspended payment in April, and the crash had the more serious effects in England, because, oddly enough, there were few British shareholders, but a very large number of British depositors ; one bank alone, the Commercial Bank of Australia, held British deposits to the amount of five or six millions. Such a disaster as this, following on the disaster to a less speculative class in the Liberator Society's downfall, disposed the country very ill to the reception of a Budget showing a deficit of a million and a half, and demanding an extra penny on the Income Tax. The alcohol revenue, which had been so strong a support of Mr Goschen's management of national finances, had fallen off heavily, as was usual in years of bad trade ; and that enhancement of revenue which Sir

1 Morley's Life of Gladstone, iii. 502.

332 MR GLADSTONE'S LAST FIGHT [1893

William Harcourt was known to have in mind, the Death Duties, could not be proposed in a session so over- whelmingly occupied as this was by the Home Rule Bill.

At this moment, too, a strike occurred which was more menacing and disturbing than recent strikes had been.

It was a dock strike at Hull, and it arose out of unionists' refusal to work with non-unionists.

We have had occasion to remark that the first threat of a shipping strike on these lines had been accompanied by peculiarly sharp exchanges from either side.1

It was now to be seen that such appearances were not empty.

The struggle at once became a severe one.

The Seamen's and Firemen's Union joined the dockers ; the Shipping Federation, now a virtually complete organisation of shipowners, would not yield an inch.

The careful keeping of order which had distinguished other strikes gave way, and fires occurred at the docks which could hardly have been caused by any- thing but incendiarism.

The military were called out.

But the strike never became a widespread movement affecting other ports, and it ended after six weeks in the defeat of the men.

In June a trouble of a different kind descended upon the nation.

While the fleet in the Mediterranean was carrying out some tactical exercises, the flagship, the Victoria, was rammed broadside by the Camperdown, and sank so rapidly that the Admiral in command, thirty-three officers, and three hundred and twenty men were drowned.

The reason for the accident appeared to be that orders given for a certain turning movement of the two lines, in which the fleet was being handled, had been based on an error in calculating the distance between the lines, and the Victoria and the Camperdown, the leading ships, instead of clearing one another in the turn, came into collision.

The news appalled the country, and was a grievous spot in a somewhat sorry year.

1 See p1 2801

1893] MR GLADSTONE'S LAST FIGHT 333

In July temper in the House of Commons grew pugna-

cious. The committee stage of the Home Rule Bill was

placed under the operation of a closure resolution, bringing

discussion to an end on successive sections of the Bill at

certain hours. Considering the time that had been spent

on the Bill, the Government seemed to have no alternative;

but the resentment shown was far greater than in the

previous applications of that kind of closure under the

late Government. It flamed up at the end of the com-

mittee stage into a free fight on the floor of the House.

Words had been used which created an uproar, and a

Nationalist member, who had been shouting at an Ulster

member, and could not make him hear in the noise, went

to sit by him, to make sure of his hearing. A neighbour of

the Ulster member pushed the Nationalist away, and that

let loose the fight. The Speaker was sent for, and, as his

dignified presence fortunately caused the fighting to die

down, the incident terminated there and then. But it

seemed to many people in the country characteristic of a

misguided session, and of a year of irritable feelings. The

summer witnessed a second strike which led to rioting,

and this time with more serious results than had occurred

at Hull. The prices of coal had been adversely affected

by the prevailing weakness of trade, and the masters

demanded a reduction of 25 points of the 40 per cent.

advances in wages which had been conceded between

1880 and 1890. The strike against the reduction was not

universal ; the Northumberland and Durham miners

never joined it, and the South Wales miners were only in-

volved for a time. The Midlands, Yorkshire and Lan-

shire were the heart of the strike, and it was in Yorkshire

that its most deplorable incident occurred. Men had been

imported to work mines in South Wales and South York-

shire, and the determination of the strikers to prevent this

led to violent riots. Soldiers were drafted into those

districts, and it happened that at Featherstone in South

334 MR GLADSTONE'S LAST FIGHT [1893

Yorkshire a fight against blacklegging occurred on a day during Doncaster Races, The authorities had unwisely pursued their usual method of mustering police at Doncaster from other districts, making no special allowance for the disturbed state of the colliery regions. The result was that the strikers were able to move far too rapidly, and did so much damage to the colliery that, when the military arrived, the mob was completely out of hand. Orders were given to fire, and two men were killed. This brought a sharp attack upon Mr Asquith from Mr Keir Hardie, and an official inquiry was opened. But of course no blame could be attached ; the colliery was in danger of being entirely wrecked, and the action of the mob, whatever its excuse, was not technically defensible. The report made by the committee of inquiry was that the soldiers were justified in firing ; and the whole matter could only survive as one more grievance of the socialists against capital. Capital on its own side was not blind to the suggestions of counter-combination which the strike conveyed. In September there was no little talk of the formation of a huge Coal Trust, which should maintain the prices of coal. The ordinary point of view was that it was all very well for the miners to talk about a living wage, but, if the public would not buy the commodity, how could an artificial standard of wages be kept up ? This gave a very plausible argument for a coal trust; by controlling prices, and establishing a sliding scale of wages in relation to the market, the trust could secure the men's position. But in point of fact the coalowners were so far from a spirit of combination that they could not even stand together during the strike. As the dispute lengthened out, and the price of coal rose, some of the masters found the temptation too much for them, and broke away from their own side, conceding the miners' terms, in order to have their pits at work. Those who did so were said to have made fortunes ; but incidentally

1893] MR GLADSTONE'S LAST FIGHT 335

they embittered the dispute on both sides. It dragged on throughout the autumn, with various side-issues. A Labour Disputes Bill was introduced at the end of July, to enable the Board of Trade to appoint a conciliator or inquirer in a dispute ; no power was given to enforce any award that might be made, and the Bill was therefore regarded as bloodless. The great work that might be done by an official, inquiring into the two points of view, and acting as a channel of communication, was hardly likely to be foreseen at a time when strikes were at their sharpest. A more curious concomitant of the present strike was the spirit displayed at the annual meeting of the Chambers of Commerce in September. Never before had the gradual change from the old idea of free competition to a desire for State interference shown itself so clearly. The resolution in favour of compulsory arbitration boards had a fairly obvious connection with recent events. But it was curious to see the same spirit which animated working men moving now in the trading classes, in resolutions in favour of a State system of secondary education, of a reduction of railway rates, of graduated taxation designed to relieve the trading middleman, and of the creation of a department of Government for commercial affairs. It was small wonder that the philosophical economists, looking on, should say that socialism was now only a question of the degree to which State action was invoked, and was no longer a battle-ground between classes. This kind of comment was rendered much more possible by a change in the attitude of the leaders of professed socialism, a change which corrected the somewhat violent swinging of the pendulum during the disputes of the late eighties in London. May day of 1893 was made the occasion for the issue of a new socialist manifesto. It was the work rather of Mr Bernard Shaw, Mr Sidney Webb, and the Fabians, than of William Morris and the older school. It formulated definitely the return to political

336 MR GLADSTONE'S LAST FIGHT [1893

economy in its pronouncement that moralisation of the conditions of a capitalist society would not serve as an ideal. Complete ownership by the community of the means of wealth, and the end of the wage-system, must be the goal. At the same time the manifesto repudiated the anarchist tendencies which had made their appear-

ance, not so much in actual violence, as in the doctrine that all tinkering reform should be opposed, in order that the flood might gather for revolution. The new manifesto, on the contrary, urged that all ameliorative measures should be accepted, as giving the workman more leisure and more equipment to work for a new social order. In practice, therefore, socialists would use their efforts for an eight-hours day, for the establishment of a minimum living wage, for the suppression of sweating and sub-contracting, and for universal suffrage. In other words,

the socialist would not stand outside politics, but would be in the midst of them, distinguishable from a Radical only by the end he kept in view, and not at all by his conduct at any given time. Fifteen years later it was to be difficult for many Liberals to say whether they were socialists or not.

An immediate sequel to this new attitude on the part of the socialists was the formation of the Independent Labour Party. An earlier attempt to form such a party in 1888 had failed. In 1893 a conference was held in Bradford, with better results, and the I.L.P. was con-stituted, " with the object of securing the collective ownership of all the means of production, distribution and exchange, by means of direct Labour representation in Parliament and on local authorities." It was the natural outcome of the arrival in Parliament of the new spirit infused into trade unions during the eighties—of Mr Keir Hardie's tweed cap and brass band. He was elected the first President of the party.

When the Home Rule Bill at last went to the House of

1893] MR GLADSTONE'S LAST FIGHT 337

Lords, at the beginning of September, its course was speedily run. There had already been one small brush between the two Houses. The London County Council, in its Bill for constructing a proper approach to the south side of the Tower Bridge, attempted once more to establish the " betterment " principle. It had asked for the support of other corporations, and so much ground had been won for the idea since its inception that its advocates in the House were not confined to one side. The clause, after passing the Commons, was cut out of the Bill by the Lords. But on the return of the Bill, the Commons insisted by a majority of 221 to 88 on the retention of the clause, many Unionists voting for it, although the stronghold of Unionism—Birmingham—had not been persuaded to support the principle. The Lords, however, were in no mood for agreement, and again struck out the clause.

For the Irish Bill they mustered in astonishing force. Lord Spencer moved the second reading on 5th September ; the Duke of Devonshire moved the rejection of the Bill ; and on 8th September the House divided. There were 41 votes for the Bill, and 419 against it. The division has certainly one feature of interest. Some measure of the almost passionate feeling against Home Rule is given by the great size of the vote. That in September, sacred month of sport, the House of Lords should have felt it necessary not only to reject the Bill—fifty men could have done that—but to overwhelm it, to obliterate it, to stamp it out of existence, shows what kind of opposition had been aroused.

Mr Gladstone had let it be known, before the Bill was introduced, that he did not intend to make its inevitable rejection by the House of Lords a ground for immediate dissolution. The Commons had turned to other work. They took up, not the two large and controversial measures which had been formally introduced early in the session, but two of a sound popular appeal. One was the Parish

Y

338 MR GLADSTONE'S LAST FIGHT [1893

Councils Bill, extending the system of local government to smaller areas than the counties, and the other, which chiefly occupied the remainder of the year in Parliament, was an Employers' Liability Bill, one more amendment of the existing Acts. It brought domestic servants under the Act; and it also cleared away the last confusions about " common employment," making the employer liable for accidents due to the negligence of a fellow-workman. A more doubtful provision was that allowing the removal to the High Court of a claim for more than £100; the value of compensation to a workman's family would be seriously diminished by months of delay. The real point of struggle, however, was in the repeal of the power of " contracting out " of liability. The chief justification for " contracting out " had been the existence in very many cases of accident insurance societies, maintained by large firms for the benefit of their workmen; it was reasonably argued that, if employers were to be liable, without distinction, to actions for compensation, none of them would add to their burden the maintenance of such societies.

In October the distress and disturbance of the coal strike grew so serious that the mayors of the Midland towns met to try to arrange a settlement. As this was just the period at which some of the masters were giving way, the opportunity was hardly favourable, and the attempt failed. For another month the dispute remained as it was. Then the Government was moved to intervene, and was able to arrange a conference of fourteen coal-owners and fourteen representatives of the miners, to meet at the Foreign Office under the chairmanship of Lord Rosebery. Not only did the conference succeed in coming to terms, but it laid the foundation of a system which was to prove as lasting an instrument of negotiation between masters and men as the Brooklands agreement in the cotton trade. Their immediate point the men won;

1893] MR GLADSTONE'S LAST FIGHT

339

they were to return to work at their old wages, not subject

to the deduction the masters originally claimed, until 1st

February 1894 ; and meanwhile a Conciliation Board of

fourteen from each side, under an impartial chairman,

was to consider the position and make an award.

For the moment, however, the advanced labour men

were concerning themselves with " the right to work."

The directions to Poor Law authorities under the Act of

1818 were recalled, and in December Mr Keir Hardie

moved a resolution in the House expressing the new idea.

But he found only thirty-three to support him, and the

general opinion was that the efforts of Poor Law authorities

to deal with unemployment by providing work were in-

evitably wasteful. A Mansion House Conference reported

at the end of the year against the notion of relief works,

saying that the employment which could be provided in

that way was only intermittent, and the knowledge that

it was being provided attracted men out of work in other

places, so producing a worse congestion of labour. A

deputation to Mr Gladstone on the subject took place on

28th December, and received a reply on lines similar to

those of the report.

Far more directly profitable was a widely spread dis-

cussion which arose out of the debates on the Employers'

Liability Bill. The question of what could fairly be called

ground for compensation brought up the case of trade

injuries, which were not, strictly speaking, accidents.

The most flagrant instance was that of lead poisoning,

caused by glazing processes in the manufacture of china

and earthenware, which had in the previous year been

declared by the Home Secretary a dangerous trade, under

the terms of the Act of 1891. Mr John Burns and other

Labour members had spoken very strongly in the course of

the debates, and a committee had been appointed by the

Home Office. It reported that it was unable to recommend

the prohibition by law of the use of white lead in such pro-

340 MR GLADSTONE'S LAST FIGHT [1893

cesses ; but it endorsed to the full the terrible charges which

had been made. Certain administrative rules were pro-

posed, and it was hoped that by insistence on better ventila-

tion, to carry off the powdered lead in the air, and better

provisions for cleanliness on the part of the workers en-

gaged, the use of white lead might be rendered almost, if

not quite, innocuous.

In truth the mind of the ordinary public was not con-

cerned with the doings of this long-lingering session. Its

real interest in December was the Ardlamont murder trial.

A baffling case had arisen out of the death at the end of

August of a young man of considerable possessions in

Scotland. He had been found one day shot on his estate

at Ardlamont, and his tutor, a man named Monson, was

arrested. The trial took place in Scotland, and ended in

the Scottish verdict of "not proven." It expressed prob-

ably the feelings of most of those who had followed the

case ; and they were by far the greater part of the popula-

tion.

Those who hardly found the murder a subject to their

taste had enough to discuss in a new play, The Second Mrs

Tanqueray, which made its appearance in the autumn of

this year. It seemed at the time to be a portentous change

in native drama, which had hitherto shown no inclination

towards a theatrical presentation of social or moral

problems. Such indigenous character as it had shown

hitherto was rather in the vein of caricature, and, at the

best, of comedy. The burlesques of notable operas,

which succeeded one another steadily at the famous

Gaiety Theatre, were an imported idea ; but the Gilbert

and Sullivan " comic operas " were an entirely native

product, and in the early nineties a new form of enter-

tainment, more loosely constructed, and amounting

sometimes to little more than a series of " star "

turns connected by a vague thread of story, had

grown up out of the " comic operas. " It was so suc-