Part 101

598. Death of Prince Albert; the American Civil War, 1861.

Not long after the Sepoy rebellion was quelled, Prince Albert (S589) died suddenly (1861). In him the nation lost an earnest promoter of social, educational, and industrial reforms, and the United States a true and judicious friend, who, at a most critical period in the Civil War, used his influence to maintain peace between the two countries.

After his death the Queen held no court for many years, and so complete was her seclusion that Sir Charles Dilke, a well-known Radical, suggested in Parliament (1868) that her Majesty be invited to abdicate or choose a regent. The suggestion was indignantly rejected; but it revealed the feeling, which quite generally existed, that "the real Queen died with her husband," and that only her shadow remained.

In the spring of the year 1861, in which Prince Albert died, the American Civil War broke out between the Northern and Southern States. Lord Palmerston, the Liberal Prime Minister, preferred to be considered the minister of the nation rather than the head of a political party. At the beginning of the war he was in favor of the North. As the conflict threatened to be bitter the Queen issued a proclamation declaring her "determination to maintain a strict and impartial neutrality in the contest between the said contending parties." The rights of belligerents--in other words, all the rights of war according to the law of nations--were granted to the South equally with the North; and her Majesty's subjects were warned against aiding either side in the conflict.

The progress of the war caused terrible distress in Lancashire, owing to the cutting off of supplies of cotton for the mills through the blockade of the ports of the Confederate States. The starving weavers, however, gave their moral support to the North, and continued steadfast to the cause of the Union even in the sorest period of their suffering. The great majority of the manufacturers and business classes generally, and the nobility, with a few exceptions, sympathized with the efforts of the South to establish an independent Confederacy. Most of the distinguished political and social leaders, in Parliament and out, with nearly all the influential journals, were on the same side, and were openly hostile to the Union.

Lord John Russell (Foreign Secretary), Lord Brougham, Sir John Bowring, Carlyle, Ruskin, and the London Times and Punch espouses the cause of the South more or less openly; while others, like Mr. Gladstone, declared their full belief in the ultimate success of the Confederacy. On the other hand, Prince Albert, the Duke of Argyll, John Bright, John Stuart Mill, Professor Newman, Lord Palmerston, at least for a time, and the London Daily News defended the cause of the North. After the death of President Lincoln, Punch manfully acknowledged (see issue of May 6, 1865) that it had been altogether wrong in its estimation of him and his measures; and Mr. Gladstone, in an essay on "Kin beyond Sea" in his "Gleanings of Past Years," paid a noble tribute to the course pursued by America since the close of the war.

Late in Autumn (1861) Captain Wilkes, of the United States Navy, boarded the British mail steamer Trent, and seized two Confederate commissioners (Mason and Slidell) who were on their way to England. When intelligence of the act was conveyed to President Lincoln, he expressed his unqualified disapproval of it, saying: "This is the very thing the British captains used to do. They claimed the right of searching American ships, and taking men out of them. That was the cause of the War of 1812. Now, we cannot abandon our own principles; we shall have to give up these men, and apologize for what we have done."

The British Government made a formal demand that the commissioners should be given up. Through the influence of Prince Albert, and with the approval of the Queen, this demand was couched in most conciliatory language. Slidell and Mason were handed over to Great Britain, and an apology was made by Secretary Seward.

During the progress of the Civil War a number of fast-sailing vessels were fitted out in England, and employed in running the blockade of the Southern ports, to supply them with arms, ammunition, and manufactured goods of various kinds. Later, several gunboats were built in British shipyards by agents of the Confederate government, for the purpose of attacking the commerce of the United States. The most famous of these vessels was the Alabama, built expressly for the Confederate service by the Lairds, of Birkenhead, armed with British cannon, and manned chiefly by British sailors.

Charles Francis Adams, the American Minister at London, notified Lord Palmerston, the Prime Minister, of her true character. But Palmerston permitted the Alabama to leave port (1862), satisfied with the pretext that she was going on a trial trip. She set sail on her career of destruction, and soon drove nearly every American merchant vessel from the seas. Two years later (1864) she was defeated and sunk by the United States gunboat Kearsarge. After the war the Government of the United States demanded damages from Great Britain for losses caused by the Alabama and other English-built privateers.

The Queen's advocate gave his opinion that the Alabama should be detained, but it reached the Foreign Secretary (Lord Russell) just after she had put out to sea.

A treaty was agreed to by the two nations; and by its provisions an international court was held at Geneva, Switzerland (1872), to deal with the demands made by the United States on Great Britain. The court awarded $15,500,000 in gold as compensation to the United States, which was duly paid. One very important result of this decision was that it established a precedent for settling by arbitration on equitable and amicable terms whatever questions might arise in future between the two nations.

This treaty imposed duties on neutral governments of a far more stringent sort than Great Britain had hitherto been willing to concede. It resulted, furthermore, in the passage of an act of Parliament, punishing with severe penalties such illegal shipbuilding as that of the Alabama. See Sheldon Amos's "Fifty Years of the English Constitution, 1830-1880."

599. Municipal Reform (1835); Woman Suffrage; the Jews.

Excellent as was the Reform Bill of 1832 (S582), it did not go far enough. There was also great need of municipal reform, since in many cities the taxpayers had no voice in the management of local affairs, and the city officers sometimes spent the income of large charitable funds in feasting and merrimaking while the poor got little or nothing.

A law was passed (1835) giving taxpayers in cities (except London) control of municipal elections. By a subsequent amendment, the ballot in such cases was extended to women, and for the first time perhaps in modern history partial woman suffrage was formally granted by supreme legislative act. A number of years later the political restrictions imposed on the Jews were removed.

Woman suffrage in municipal elections was granted to single women and widows (householders) in 1869. In 1870 an act was passed enabling them to vote at schoolboard elections, and also to become members of such boards. By act of 1894 women were made eligible to sit and vote in district and parish councils (or local-government elections).

There was a considerable number of Jews in London and in other large cities who were men of wealth and influence. They were entitled to vote and hold municipal office, but they were debarred from election to Parliament by a law which required them to make oath "on the faith of a Christian." The law was now so modified (1859) that a very prominent Jew, Baron Rothschild, took his seat in Parliament. Finally the Oaths Act (1888) abolished all religious tests in Parliament.

600. Second and Third Reform Acts, 1867, 1884; County and Parish Councils (1884, 1894).

In 1867 the pressure of public opinion moved Mr. Disraeli (later Lord Beaconsfield), a member of Lord Derby's Conservative Cabinet (S479), to bring in a second Reform Bill (S582), which became law. This bill provided "household suffrage." It gave the right to vote to all male householders in the English parliamentary boroughs (that is, towns having the right to elect one or more members to Parliament), who paid a tax for the support of the poor, and to all lodgers paying a rental of 10 pounds yearly; it also increased the number of voters among small property holders in counties.

See Summary of Constitutional History in the Appendix, p.xxvi, S31. Lord Derby held the office, but Mr. Disraeli was really Prime Minister.

There still remained, however, a large class in the country districts for whom nothing had been done. The men employed by the farmers to till the soil were wretchedly poor and deplorably ignorant. Joseph Arch, a Warwickshire farm laborer, who had been educated by hunger and toil, succeeded in establishing a national union among men of his class (1872). In 1884 Mr. Gladstone, the Liberal Prime Minister, secured the ballot for agricultural laborers by the passage of the third Reform Act, which gave all residents of counties throughout the United Kingdom the right to vote on the same liberal conditions as the residents of the towns.

It is estimated that this last law added about two and a half millions of voters; this gave one voter to every six persons of the total population, whereas, before the passing of the first Reform Bill in 1832, thre was not over one in fifty. When the new or so-called "People's Parliament" convened (1886), Joseph Arch and several other candidates took their seats in the House of Commons as representatives of classes of the population who, up to that date, had no voice in the legislation of the country.

The next step may bring universal "manhood suffrage." The County Council and Parish Council acts (1888, 1894) greatly extended the power of the people in all matters of local government, so that now every village in England controls its own affairs.

601. Compulsory Church Rates abolished; Disestablishment in Ireland (1869).

While these great reforms were taking place with respect to elections, others of great importance were also being effected. From its origin in 1549 the established Protestant Church of England (S362) had compelled persons of all religious beliefs to pay rates or taxes for the maintenance of the Established Cuhrch in the parish where they resided. Methodists, Baptists, and other Dissenters (SS472, 496, 507) objected to this law as unjust, since, in addition to the expense of supporting their own form of worship, they were obliged to contribute toward maintaining one with which they had no sympathy. So great had the opposition become to paying these "church rates," that in over fifteen hundred parishes in England (1859) the authorities could not collect them. After long debate Mr. Gladstone carried through a bill (1868) which abolished this mode of taxation and made the payment of these rates purely voluntary.

Church rates were levied on all occupiers of land or houses within the parish. The Church of England is now supported by a tax on landowners, by its endowments, and by voluntary gifts.

A similar act of justice was soon after granted to Ireland (1869). At the time of the union of the two countries in 1800 (S562), the maintenance of the Protestant Episcopal Church continued to remain obligatory upon the Irish people, although only a small part of them were of that faith. Mr. Gladstone, now Liberal Prime Minister, succeeded in getting Parliament to enact a law which disestablished this branch of the National Church and left all religious denominations in Ireland to the voluntary support of those who belonged to them. Henceforth the English Protestants residing in that country could no longer claim the privilege of worshiping God at the expense of his Roman Catholic neighbor.