Part 18

The following incident may be worth recording for the information of such as are interested in the antiquities of Parliament. I first took my seat on the highest bench above and behind the Treasury Bench, under the shadow of the Gallery. A few days later, an old Parliamentarian said to me, "That's quite the wrong place for you. That belongs to ancient Privy Councillors, and they sit there because, if any difficulty arises, the Minister in charge of the business can consult them, without being observed by everyone in the House." That was the tradition in 1880, but it has long since died out.

Afterwards Lord Gladstone.

Gladstone's own phrase.

Afterwards Lord Morley of Blackburn.

The Right Hon. Hugh Law.

POLITICS

"Ne'er to these chambers, where the mighty rest, Since their foundation came a nobler guest; Nor e'er was to the bowers of bliss conveyed A fairer spirit, or more welcome shade." T. TICKELL, On the death of Mr. Addison.

Lord Frederick Cavendish was laid to rest with his forefathers at Edensor, near Chatsworth, on the 11th of May, 1882--and on the evening of that day the Home Secretary, Sir William Harcourt, brought in a "Prevention of Crimes Bill" for Ireland, designed to supersede the Coercion Act which had proved such a dismal failure. The new Bill provided for the creation of special tribunals composed of Judges of the Superior Courts, who could sit without juries; and gave the police the right of search at any time in proclaimed districts, and authorized them to arrest any persons unable to give an account of themselves. The Bill was succinctly described as "Martial Law in a Wig," and, as such, it was exactly adapted to the needs of a country in which social war had raged unchecked for two years. The murderous conspiracy died hard, but experience soon justified those who had maintained that, as soon as a proper tribunal was constituted, evidence would be forthcoming. The Act was courageously administered by Lord Spencer and Sir George Trevelyan, under circumstances of personal and political peril which the present generation can hardly realize. In less than two years the murderers of Lord Frederick Cavendish and Mr. Burke had been hanged; the conspiracy which organized the murders had been broken up; and social order was permanently re-established.

Such were the excellent effects of the Crimes Act of 1882, and annalists treating of this period have commonly said that the Act was due to the murders in the Phoenix Park. Some years ago Lord James of Hereford, who, as Attorney-General, had been closely associated with these events, placed in my hands a written statement of the circumstances in which the Act originated, and begged that, if possible, the truth of the matter might be made known. This may be a convenient opportunity for giving his testimony.

"The Bill of 1882 was designed, and on the stocks, during the month of April. I saw F. Cavendish as to some of its details almost immediately before his starting for Ireland. As Chief Secretary, he discussed with me the provisions the Bill should contain. On Sunday, May 7, 1882, when the news of F. Cavendish's murder became known, I went to see Harcourt. He begged me to see that the drawing of the Bill was hastened on. About 2 o'clock I went to the Irish Office, and found the Irish Attorney-General hard at work on the Bill. The first draft of it was then in print. No doubt F. Cavendish's death tended to affect the subsequent framing of the Bill. Harcourt came upon the scenes. T---- and J---- were called to the assistance of the Irish draftsmen, and no doubt the Bill was rendered stronger in consequence of the events of May 6.

"I also well remember the change of front about the power of Search. The Irish Members in the most determined manner fought against the creation of this power.... Harcourt, who had charge of the Bill, would listen to none of these arguments, but Mr. Gladstone was much moved by them. There was almost a crisis produced in consequence of this disagreement; but Harcourt gave way, and the concession was announced."

It is not my purpose in these chapters to speak about my own performances in Parliament, but the foregoing allusion to the concession on the Right of Search tempts me to a personal confession. In the Bill, as brought in, there was a most salutary provision giving the police the right to search houses in which murders were believed to be plotted. After making us vote for this clause three times--on the First Reading, on the Second Reading, and in Committee--the Government, as we have just seen, yielded to clamour, and proposed on Report to alter the clause by limiting the Right of Search to day-time. I opposed this alteration, as providing a "close time for murder," and had the satisfaction of helping to defeat the Government. The Big-Wigs of the Party were extremely angry, and Mr. R. H. Hutton, in The Spectator, rebuked us in his most grandmotherly style. In reply, I quoted some words of his own. "There is nothing which injures true Liberalism more than the sympathy of its left wing with the loose ruffianism of unsettled States." "Such a State," I said, "is Ireland; and if, under the pressure of extraordinary difficulties, Ministers vacillate or waver in their dealings with it, the truest Liberalism, I believe, is that which holds them firmly to their duty."

In that sad Session of 1882 the troubles of the Government "came not single spies, but in battalions," and the most enduring of those troubles arose in Egypt. For the benefit of a younger generation, let me recall the circumstances.

Ismail Pasha, the ruler of Egypt, had accumulated a national debt of about L100,000,000, and the pressure on the wretched peasants who had to pay was crushing. Presently they broke out in revolt, partly with the hope of shaking off this burden, and partly with a view to establishing some sort of self-government. But the financiers who had lent money to Egypt took fright, and urged the Government to interfere and suppress the insurrection. A meeting of Tories was held in London on June 29th and the Tory Leaders made the most inflammatory speeches. Unhappily, the Government yielded to this show of violence. It was said by a close observer of Parliamentary institutions that "When the Government of the day and the Opposition of the day take the same side, one may be almost sure that some great wrong is at hand," and so it was now. On July 10th our fleet bombarded Alexandria, smashing its rotten forts with the utmost ease, and killing plenty of Egyptians. I remember to this day the sense of shame with which I read our Admiral's telegraphic despatch: "Enemy's fire weak and ineffectual."

The protest delivered on the following day, by Sir Wilfrid Lawson, the most consistent and the most disinterested politician whom I ever knew, deserves to be remembered.

"I say deliberately, and in doing so I challenge either Tory or Liberal to contradict me, that no Tory Government could have done what the Liberal Government did yesterday in bombarding those forts. If such a thing had been proposed, what would have happened? We should have had Sir William Harcourt stumping the country, and denouncing Government by Ultimatum. We should have had Lord Hartington coming down, and moving a Resolution condemning these proceedings being taken behind the back of Parliament. We should have had Mr. Chamberlain summoning the Caucuses. We should have had Mr. Bright declaiming in the Town Hall of Birmingham against the wicked Tory Government; and as for Mr. Gladstone, we all know that there would not have been a railway-train, passing a roadside station, that he would not have pulled up at, to proclaim non-intervention as the duty of the Government."

On the 12th of July John Bright retired from the Government, as a protest against the bombardment, and made a short speech full of solemn dignity. "I asked my calm judgment and my conscience what was the path I ought to take. They pointed it out to me, as I think, with an unerring finger, and I am humbly endeavouring to follow it."

But it was too late. The mischief was done, and has not been undone to this day. I remember Mr. Chamberlain saying to me: "Well, I confess I was tired of having England kicked about all over the world. I never condemned the Tory Government for going to war; only for going to war on the wrong side." It was a characteristic saying; but this amazing lapse into naked jingoism spread wonder and indignation through the Liberal Party, and shook the faith of many who, down to that time, had regarded Gladstone as a sworn servant of Peace. The Egyptian policy of 1882 must, I fear, always remain the blot on Gladstone's scutcheon; and three years later he gave away the whole case for intervention, and threw the blame on his predecessors in office. In his Address to the Electors of Midlothian before the General Election of 1885 he used the following words: "We have, according to my conviction from the very first (when the question was not within the sphere of Party contentions), committed by our intervention in Egypt a grave political error, and the consequence which the Providential order commonly allots to such error is not compensation, but retribution."

But, though Providence eventually allotted "retribution" to our crimes and follies in Egypt, and though they were always unpopular with the Liberal Party out of doors, it was curious to observe that the position of the Government in the House of Commons was stronger at the end of 1882 than it was at the beginning. That this was so was due, I think, in part to the fact that for the moment we were victorious in Egypt, and in part to admiration for the vigour with which Lord Spencer was fighting the murderous conspiracy in Ireland. The Government enjoyed the dangerous praise of the Opposition; obstruction collapsed; and some new Rules of Procedure were carried by overwhelming majorities. Here let me interpolate an anecdote. Mr. M---- L---- was a barrister, an obsequious supporter of the Government, and, as was generally surmised, on the lookout for preferment. Mr. Philip Callan, M.P. for County Louth, was speaking on an amendment to one of the new Rules, and Mr. M---- L---- thrice tried to call him to order on the ground of irrelevancy. Each time, the Chairman of Committee ruled that, though the Honourable Member for Louth was certainly taking a wide sweep, he was not out of order. Rising the third time from the seat Callan said: "I may as well take the opportunity of giving notice that I propose to move the insertion of a new Standing Order, which will read as follows: 'Any Hon. Member who three times unsuccessfully calls another Hon. Member to order, shall be ineligible for a County Court Judgeship.'" Mr. M---- L---- looked coy, and everyone else shouted with glee.

The Session of 1883 opened very quietly. The speech from the Throne extolled the success of the Ministerial policy in Ireland and Egypt, and promised a series of useful but not exciting measures. Meanwhile the more active Members of the Liberal Party, among whom I presumed to reckon myself, began to agitate for more substantial reforms. We had entered on the fourth Session of the Parliament. A noble majority was beginning to decline, and we felt that there was no time to lose if we were to secure the ends which we desired. Knowing that I felt keenly on these subjects, Mr. T. H. S. Escott, then Editor of the Fortnightly, asked me to write an article for his Review, and in that article I spoke my mind about the Agricultural Labourers' Suffrage, the Game Laws, the reform of the City of London, and an English Land Bill. "The action of the Peers," I said, "under Lord Salisbury's guidance will probably force on the question of a Second Chamber, and those who flatter themselves that the Liberal Party will shrink from discussing it will be grievously disillusioned. Disestablishment, begun in Ireland, will inevitably work round, by Scotland, to England. And who is to preside over these changes?"

I returned to the charge in the June number of the Nineteenth Century, and urged my points more strongly. I pleaded for social reform, and for "a Free Church in a Free State." I crossed swords with a noble Lord who had pronounced dogmatically that "A Second Chamber is absolutely necessary." I gave my reasons for thinking that now-a-days there is very little danger of hasty and ill-considered legislation, and I pointed out that, when this danger disappears, the reason for a Second Chamber disappears with it. "But," I said, "granting, for the sake of argument, that something of this danger still survives, would it not be fully met by limiting the power of the Lords to a Veto for a year on a measure passed by the Commons?"

These articles, coupled with my speeches in the House and in my constituency, gave dire offence to the Whigs; and I was chastened with rebukes which, if not weighty, were at any rate ponderous. "Not this way," wrote the St. James's Gazette, in a humorous apostrophe, "not this way, O Junior Member for Aylesbury, lies the road to the Treasury Bench," and so, indeed, it seemed. But, on returning from an evening party at Sir Matthew Ridley's, on the 5th of June, 1883, I found a letter from Mr. Gladstone, offering me the post of Parliamentary Secretary to the Local Government Board. One sentence of that letter I may be allowed to quote:

"Your name, and the recollections it suggests, add much to the satisfaction which, independently of relationship, I should have felt in submitting to you this request." It was like Gladstone's courtesy to call his offer a "request."

Thus I became harnessed to the machine of Government, and my friends, inside the House and out of it, were extremely kind about the appointment. Nearly everyone who wrote to congratulate me used the same image: "You have now set your foot on the bottom rung of the ladder." But my staunch friend George Trevelyan handled the matter more poetically, in the following stanza:

"As long as a plank can float, or a bolt can hold together, When the sea is smooth as glass, or the waves run mountains high, In the brightest of summer skies, or the blackest of dirty weather, Wherever the ship swims, there swim I."

The part of "the ship" to which I was now fastened was certainly not the most exalted or exciting of the public offices. The estimation in which it was held in official circles is aptly illustrated by a pleasantry of that eminent Civil Servant, Sir Algernon West. When the Revised Version of the New Testament appeared, Gladstone asked Sir Algernon (who had begun life in the Treasury), if he thought it as good as the Authorized Version. "Certainly not," was the reply. "It is so painfully lacking in dignity." Gladstone, always delighted to hear an innovation censured (unless he himself had made it), asked for an illustration. "Well," said West, "look at the Second Chapter of St. Luke. There went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed. Now that always struck me as a sublime conception--a tax levied on the whole world by a stroke of the pen--an act worthy of an Imperial Treasury. But I turn to the Revised Version, and what do I read? That all the world should be enrolled--a census--the sort of thing the Local Government Board could do. That instance, to my mind, settles the question between Old and New."

But in the office thus contemned by the Paladins of the Treasury, there was plenty of interesting though little-observed work. In the autumn of 1883 I undertook, in conjunction with the President of the Board, a mission of enquiry into the worst slums in London. There is no need to recapitulate here all the horrors we encountered, for they can be read in the evidence given before the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Poor which was appointed in the following year; but one incident made a peculiar impression on my mind. The Sanitary Officer reported some underground dwellings in Spitalfields as being perhaps the worst specimens of human habitation which we should find, and he offered to be my guide. I entered a cellar-like room in a basement, which, till one's eyes got used to the dimness, seemed pitch-dark. I felt, rather than saw, the presence of a woman, and, when we began to talk, I discerned by her voice that she was not a Londoner. "No, sir," she replied, "I come from Wantage, in Berkshire." Having always heard of Wantage as a kind of Earthly Paradise, where the Church, the Sisterhood, and the "Great House" combined to produce the millennium, I said, involuntarily, "How you must wish to be back there!" "Back at Wantage!" exclaimed the Lady of the Cellar. "No, indeed, sir. This is a poor place, but it's better than Wantage." It was instructive to find this love of freedom, and resentment of interference, in the bowels of the earth of Spitalfields.

An incident which helps to illustrate Gladstone's personal ascendancy belongs to this period. Those were the days of agitation for and against a Channel Tunnel, eagerly promoted by speculative tunnel-makers, and resolutely opposed by Mr. Chamberlain, then President of the Board of Trade. Gladstone, when asked if he was for or against the Tunnel, said very characteristically, "I am not so much in favour of the Tunnel, as opposed to the opponents of it"; and this of course meant that he was really in favour of it. About this time I met him at dinner, and after the ladies had gone, I think we were eight men round the table. Gladstone began praising the Tunnel; one of the hearers echoed him, and the rest of us were silent. Looking round triumphantly, Gladstone said, "Ah, this is capital! Here we are--eight sensible men--and all in favour of the Tunnel." Knowing that several of us were against the Tunnel, I challenged a division and collected the votes. Excepting Gladstone and his echo, we all were anti-tunnelites, and yet none of us would have had the hardihood to say so.