Anonymous

THE REIGN OF VICTORIA (continued).

Army Reform—Mr. Trevelyan's Agitation—The Abolition of Purchase—Mr. Cardwell's Bill—History of Purchase—Military Opposition in the Commons—Rejection of the Bill by the House of Lords—Abolition of Purchase by Royal Warrant—Indignation in Parliament—The cost of Compensation—Mr. Lowe's Budget—The Match-Tax—Its withdrawal—Mr. Goschen succeeds Mr. Childers—The Ballot Bill—The Epping Forest Bill—Rejected Measures—The Religious Tests Bill—Marriage of the Princess Louise—Sir Charles Dilke's Lecture—The real State of the Civil List—Illness of the Prince of Wales—Crises of the Disease—The Prayers of the Nation—The Thanksgiving Service—Unpopularity of the Government—The 25th Clause—Landing of the ex-Emperor of the French—Resignation of Speaker Denison—Riot in Dublin—The Home Rule Movement—Mr. Gladstone at Aberdeen—Assassination of Mr. Justice Norman—Australian Federation—Russia repudiates the Black Sea Clauses—Lord Granville's Despatch—Prince Gortschakoff's Reply—A Conference Suggested—Meeting of the Plenipotentiaries—Their Deliberations—Settlement of the Difficulty—Obituary of the Year—Sir John Burgoyne, Lord Ellenborough, Grote, Sir William Denison, and others.

AT the opening of the year 1871 the German armies were still surrounding Paris, and the raw levies and beaten veterans of France were attempting a hopeless resistance in the Departments of the North, the East, and the West. In England every one saw that the end of the struggle was approaching; and the public mind began uneasily to ask the question, what next? It has often been said that the feeling of England with regard to her own condition alternates between irrational self-confidence and irrational fear. It was now the turn of the latter feeling. The deadly certainty of the German successes and the exhaustion of France drove the minds of Englishmen to consider what would be their state of preparation in the face of Moltke's tactics, supposing they had to face them on English soil. By some the supposition of war with Germany was not held to be unlikely; for, during the later months of 1870 there had been growing in certain quarters a sense of sympathy with France so intense as to give rise to a cry for war in her behalf. But this feeling, although those who entertained it were people who could make themselves heard, never spread widely enough to make the question of an armed alliance a serious one. Still, it was natural and inevitable that a demand for army reform should be loudly made on all sides, and it became apparent that army reform was to be the question of the Session. Moreover, the direction which the reform would take was unmistakable. The speeches that were made throughout the country before the meeting of Parliament and in the early months of the year—notably the speeches of Mr. George Otto Trevelyan, a young Cambridge man who had lately entered public life as member for the Border Boroughs—all struck one note, the note of the abolition of purchase. Up till the year 1871, as is well known, the British Army was officered by men who, with few exceptions, paid for their commissions. The effect of this was that the officers were mostly sons of rich men—for the pay of an officer was never remunerative enough to make poor men pay the price of the commission as an investment—and that the style of living was artificially raised so as to make it eminently undesirable for a poor man to enter the army as an officer, even if he were able to raise money enough to buy his commission. A second effect of the purchase system was that men were admitted to be officers without any special evidence of fitness for the service; if they could pay the price and pass an almost nominal examination, they were admitted without further question. This, then, was the state of things which many Liberals, such as Mr. Trevelyan, wished to alter. They wished to throw open all commissions in the army to competition; let the best-trained man, they said, be made an officer, without any consideration of the length of his purse. As will be seen, this demand prevailed in the end, but not without great difficulty. It was not the only point on which the army reformers touched; for it was not only the officering of the British Army, but its organisation, that began to be severely criticised. Many speakers and writers thought that in face of the enormous armies of the Continent, the principle of voluntary enlistment must be at length given up in favour of that of compulsory service. Many—less thorough-going than these—began to cry out for a more capable militia, and for more Government encouragement to the volunteers. And all agreed that the want of union between the different branches of the service was a fatal hindrance to the efficiency of any of them.

The promised Bill was introduced by Mr. Cardwell, the Secretary at War, very early in the Session; and it was seen that the increased outlay to which the Queen's Speech had referred was to be a reality. The total amount asked for in the estimates was £15,851,700, an increase of £2,886,700 over the vote of 1870; although Mr. Cardwell explained that a million of this would not be wanted in ordinary times. The gross addition to the numerical strength of the regular army was to be 19,980 men, of whom 5,000 were artillery, with a proportionate increase in the number of guns. Mr. Disraeli had on the opening night of the Session made mockery of the "attenuated armaments" to which, he said, the Liberal Government had reduced the forces of the country. But Mr. Cardwell pointed to his proposed figures, which showed a total of 497,000 men under arms: 135,000 regular troops, 139,000 Militia, 14,000 Yeomanry, 9,000 First Army Reserve, 30,000 Second Army Reserve, and 170,000 Volunteers; and guns appropriate to a force of 150,000 men. These forces, Mr. Cardwell said, it was his object to combine into one whole; and the question was, how to achieve that object. As far as men went, were they to be raised by compulsion or voluntarily? As far as officers went, were they to remain under a system of purchase or not? As far as the reserve forces went, were they to be still under the control of the Lords-Lieutenant of counties or not? To the first question, Mr. Cardwell answered that he was not prepared, as yet, to resort to "anything so distasteful as compulsory service." To the second and third he said that the Government had made up its mind that purchase must be abolished, and that the control of the militia and other auxiliary forces must be taken away from the Lords-Lieutenant and given to the Queen. In fact, the abolition of purchase and the increase of the efficiency of the reserve—together with certain provisions for giving a "local connection" to every regiment—were at once seen to be the principal features of the Bill. It is to the way in which these subjects were dealt with by Parliament and the Prime Minister that we may now turn.

The history of purchase in the army is the history of a practice of various degrees of illegality, and of innumerable Royal Commissions designed to solve the contradiction between practice and law. The beginning of it dates from the reign of James II., who in 1683 issued a warrant "ordering the payment of one shilling in the pound on the surrender of a commission to the person surrendering, and by him to whom the surrender is made." William III. made strenuous efforts to stop any traffic in commissions, and his successor forbade it, except with the royal approbation. But as early as 1702 the law courts had begun to declare the lawfulness of purchase, and the Court of Chancery enforced the payment of £600 from a lieutenant to his predecessor in a company. Twenty years later we find the distinction, so familiar in the nineteenth century, between "regulation prices" and "over-regulation prices" clearly marked; and in the middle of the eighteenth century we come to a commission definitely fixing the rate of payment to which officers should be subject—deciding that an ensigncy should cost £400, and a colonelcy £3,500. Royal Commissions continued to be issued at intervals, right up to 1856, and one and all seem to have reported in favour of purchase: partly and ostensibly on the ground that the system helped to quicken promotion and retirement, and partly, of course, that it secured that officers of the army should be persons of "social position." It is hardly too much to say that from the time of the Peace to the time of his death, the purchase system in the British Army was kept up by the influence of the Duke of Wellington, and notably by his celebrated memorandum of the year 1833. In 1856, at the end of the Russian War, when the Duke had been four years dead, and the overpowering weight of his name had a little decreased, the first note of a new policy was heard in the report of that year's commission, which had examined as a witness Sir Charles Trevelyan, the father of the young army reformer of the present year. This report advised that no commissions should be sold above the rank of lieutenant-colonel. About six more Royal Commissions were issued between 1856 and 1871 on army subjects; until finally the war in France brought matters to a point, and taught statesmen that the reform of the army was no longer to be trifled with.

MR. (AFTERWARDS VISCOUNT) CARDWELL. (From a Photograph by Elliott & Fry, London, W.)

When a Government once seriously took up the purchase system and pronounced for its abolition, it was felt that purchase must go. Yet no Government measure within the memory of man received such treatment as this did from the hands of a varied and irritated opposition. Every argument that self-interest could suggest or class feeling prompt was urged with incredible pertinacity by the military members of the House of Commons. It was insisted in vain that these military members did not fairly represent the army, but that by the very fact of their being in the House they showed themselves to be rich men, able to afford to resign active service and to contest elections; "the colonels" still carried on their opposition to every point of the Bill during four weary months. So temperate a Liberal as Sir Roundell Palmer said of the conduct of the military members, that a "course had been taken the like of which he never remembered. Other great measures affecting great interests had been opposed without the minority attempting to baffle the majority by mere consumption of time. The minority who resisted the Irish Church Bill and the Irish Land Bill had recognised the duty of respecting the principle of Parliamentary government, that the decision of the majority shall be binding. Conduct like that was neither in the interest of the country, of the army, nor of Conservative principle." Yet the colonels did their work. They drove Mr. Cardwell to cut down the Bill to the two divisions of the abolition of purchase and the transfer of the powers of Lords-Lieutenant over the militia and volunteer forces to the Crown. In this form the Bill passed the third reading, and went up to the Lords.

In the Lords it met with opposition at once more dignified and more effective. Nearly every eminent Conservative peer who had ever had anything to do with the army said something in favour of purchase: one supported it because it provided a cheap way of retirement, one because the officers liked it, one because abolition would cost so much by way of compensation, one because the old system had prevented the British officer from becoming a "professional man with professional politics." Lord Salisbury, whose tongue on this occasion was as rasping as usual, suggested a new name for the new method: "If purchase had been described as a system of seniority tempered by selection, the more correct formula for the new system was stagnation tempered by jobbery." Lord Derby, alone of the Tory peers, joined with the advocates of the Government in supporting the Bill. As to expense, he said, "the expense of abolishing purchase would be as oppressive years hence as now, and might be even increased. As to delay, is it dignified to delay an inevitable reform—inevitable because no institution is tenable in England unless it admits of defence by arguments intelligible to the partially-educated constituencies?" In the end the Duke of Richmond's motion, "that the House of Lords declined to read the Bill a second time, until it had before it a comprehensive plan," was carried by 150 to 125—a result not quite the same as the rejection of the Bill, but still a grave blow to the Ministry. The way in which Mr. Gladstone met it was original, and caused a throb of excitement unusual in the calm realm of English politics. With that suddenness for which his proceedings were at times famous, he abolished purchase by a coup d'État. It was known beforehand that purchase was only legal so far as the Queen's Regulations allowed it; and clearly therefore all that was technically required for its abolition was that the regulations should be altered so as to forbid it. But no one supposed that, after months of debate and after a hostile vote in the House of Lords, any Minister would have ventured to advise such a stretch of Prerogative. Mr. Gladstone, however, was equal to the situation. Two days after the division in the Lords, he announced to the astonished House of Commons that purchase was already abolished; her Majesty having been advised to cancel the old warrant that allowed it, and to issue a new warrant that forbade it. "Therefore," he said, "after the first of next November, purchase will cease to exist." His defence of this step was that it was necessary to put an end to a state of uncertainty which endangered the discipline of the army; and that, having secured the expression of the opinion of the Commons against purchase, he held himself justified in advising the Queen to exert her statutory right.

The anger of the Opposition at such a high-handed measure as this may be easily conceived. Mr. Disraeli talked of "a shameful conspiracy against the privileges of the other House": the Duke of Richmond moved and carried a vote of censure in the House of Lords, for, as Lord Salisbury said, if the Government Bill was a proper Bill, the abolition of purchase was a question for Parliament to decide and Parliament only; and if the act of the Queen's Ministers was constitutional, then their bringing forward the Bill at all was disrespectful to the House. Therefore Mr. Gladstone was in the dilemma of having either acted unconstitutionally or disrespectfully to the House of Lords. Lord Cairns charged the Government with having "strained and discredited the constitution of the country." And a majority of eighty assented to the Duke of Richmond's proposition, "that the interposition of the executive ... is calculated to depreciate and neutralise the independent action of the Legislature." And in the House of Commons, though no vote of censure was attempted, many Liberals, such as Mr. M'Cullagh Torrens and Mr. Fawcett, sided with Mr. Disraeli in protesting against this resort to prerogative; an act which, said Mr. Fawcett, "if it had been done by a Tory Minister, would have been denounced by Mr. Gladstone with the applause of the whole Liberal party." The cost of the reform was very considerable indeed. Government proposed to compensate the officers fully and liberally, paying them not just the legal "regulation prices" for their commissions, but the "over-regulation prices," which custom had legalised in the teeth of law. This compensation it was estimated would amount to, at the very least, six millions sterling—some said ten millions,—to be spread of course over a number of years: a large sum to take from the shoulders of the benefited class, and lay upon those of the general taxpayer.

The increased estimates for the year which the reform of the army made necessary were a sore perplexity to Mr. Lowe, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. It is true he did not lament the high expenditure of the fighting departments; for, he said, he regarded an efficient army and navy as the best commercial investment in the world; but he had to face a large estimated deficit—no less than £2,713,000. This he proposed to cover, first, by charging the duties on wills and successions so as to make them three times as productive as before; a slightly increased income tax; and, above all, by a tax on matches. It was this last tax which attracted the most attention; and its ultimate fate is a good illustration of the danger of over-cleverness in matters of finance. Mr. Lowe had been afflicted by the thought of the waste going on in the use of matches, and of the perils attending such waste; and he thought that he might by one brilliant stroke lead people to economical habits and add a million to the revenue. For the number of matches annually made is almost inconceivably great; he announced that it was five hundred and sixty millions of boxes, without counting the forty or fifty millions of boxes of wax matches and fusees. He proposed therefore to put a halfpenny tax on every box of matches—a tax which, even if it had the effect of bringing down the manufacture by a third, would contribute nearly a million to the receipts of the year. But Mr. Lowe was either too much preoccupied to remember or too cynical to care that the match-making trade is in the hands of the very poorest of the London poor, and to tamper with it would be to turn many thousands of human beings, most of them children, either into paupers or into criminals. The Chancellor of the Exchequer had invented a motto for the labels that he proposed to affix to every match-box; and to withdraw the tax would be to nullify a good joke—an unanswerable argument against withdrawal. "Ex luce lucellum"—"Out of light a tiny gain"—such was the inscription that every box was to bear; a motto which was a keen delight to the quondam Oxford tutor who proposed the tax, but a sore puzzle to the respectable House of Commons who listened to him, and which would have probably been neither illuminating nor profitable to the housemaids that were to use the matches. As it was, neither tax nor motto ever came to anything. When the amusement at Mr. Lowe's pun had died away, people began to see the serious nature of the proposal and the strong objections to it. A procession of match-makers, squalid and miserable, and some thousands strong, marched from Bethnal Green to Westminster to protest against the tax, and it was withdrawn. The same fate befell Mr. Lowe's proposal to increase the succession duties—a proposal that struck a blow at one of the most cherished interests of the propertied class; nor was there any better destiny awaiting the plan of altering the mode of calculating the income-tax by a percentage, instead of so much in the pound.

Nor were many of the other events of the Session such as to raise the spirits of the Ministry. Mr. Childers, who, after a distinguished career in Australia, had been returned as member for Pontefract and been made First Lord of the Admiralty by Mr. Gladstone, was forced by ill-health to resign. About his work, which at all events had been very thoroughgoing in its way, the most different and extreme opinions prevailed; his friends maintaining that his reforms had been the making of the navy, his enemies that they had almost been its destruction. Mr. Goschen succeeded him; an appointment that was severely criticised by those who thought it—the Admiralty—the wrong place for a member for the City of London, but amply justified by the speed with which the new First Lord mastered the details of his new office, by the vigour of his administration, and by the breadth of his views of public duty.

Only a very few of the remaining measures of this Session of Parliament require notice. The Ballot Bill did not become law until the next year; for Purchase kept it back until towards the end of June; the Opposition carried on a furious warfare against it for five or six weeks; and when at last it was sent up to the Lords, it was rejected by them, by ninety-seven to forty-eight. The conduct of the Opposition was vexatious and could not fail to be damaging to the Government; for no man's endurance can face the loss of so many precious weeks without blaming his own side a little, as well as his opponents. As the Bill was sent to the House of Lords, it was a very different Bill from that which Mr. Forster had introduced; and some considerable alteration was due to the Liberal side. Mr. Henry James, for instance, helped by Mr. William Vernon-Harcourt—two gentlemen who afterwards were, strangely enough, colleagues in Mr. Gladstone's Government as Attorney- and Solicitor-General—threw out the very useful provision, that election expenses should be charged on the rates.

A second, but a fortunate, Ministerial failure was the Epping Forest Bill, in which Government proposed to appoint a commission for settling the respective rights of the Crown, the commoners, and the lords of the manor in Epping Forest. "The Forest" was the favourite holiday-ground of the dwellers in the eastern half of London. For many years a stealthy process of encroachment had been carried on by a few persons who possessed manorial rights over the great common land. Such was the state of the English law, that this kind of appropriation was quite possible and very frequent. The lord of the manor, regarding a common as so much waste land and grieved that so much land should be allowed to go to waste, set to work to "improve" it; and to improve it, he had to enclose it, until by the help of a few posts and rails, and a few years of undisturbed possession, he established a prescriptive right to the land and converted his shadowy manorial rights into absolute ownership. This is exactly what was happening in Epping Forest, where the beauty of the positions and their nearness to London promised immense rents to enterprising lords of the manor who should venture to cut the land up into building lots. Fortunately, however, the Crown has rights over the "Royal Forest of Waltham," as Epping Forest is properly called, and the encroaching lords of the manor had to deal with another body as well as the commoners—namely, the Commissioners of Works. These commissioners, however, had begun the bad practice of selling the rights of the Crown to the lords of the manor. It was against this unpatriotic tampering with encroachment that Mr. Fawcett protested; in the end, the personnel of the Government commission was strengthened by the addition of Mr. Locke, and, on the motion of Mr. Cowper-Temple, the House decided that the Forest ought to be preserved untouched as a recreation ground for the people. The land recovered from the river by means of the Thames Embankment was also preserved for the Londoners against the will of the Government.

The Bill for legalising marriage with a deceased wife's sister made no progress this year; carried by the House of Commons, it was thrown out as usual in the Lords. The Bill for extending the franchise to single women rated to the relief of the poor, though rejected, was rejected by a narrower majority than before; 151 voted for it, and 220 against it. The motion of Mr. Miall for disestablishing the Church of England was thought important enough to call out a strong debate. The Irish Church Act had made the motion not only a possible one, but a motion to be expected; and no fitter man could be found to bring it forward than the editor of the Nonconformist. But the Dissenters were not strong enough in the House to make their success at all probable; not even though, as Mr. Disraeli charged them with being, they were "allied for the moment with revolutionary philosophers." The debate was interesting, as bringing not only a declaration of strong confidence in the Establishment from the leader of the Conservative party, but also as calling out a similar declaration from Mr. Gladstone, whose churchmanship had been thought by friends and foes to be rapidly shifting from the point of view of State-churchmanship he had held so vigorously in his youth. That opinion had been rather encouraged this year by the success of the Government Bill for the Abolition of Religious Tests in the Universities. This subject had been agitated for many years, and it had become a recognised aim of the Liberal party to carry the Bill. The universities—that is, the resident teachers in Oxford and Cambridge—were singularly unanimous in favour of it; and many a meeting had declared how unwilling they were any longer to restrain the freedom of competition and study by retaining any tests whatever. Before the abolition, although any one might be admitted to a Bachelor's degree in Arts without subscribing to any declaration of belief, he could not hold a fellowship, nor qualify himself, by taking a Master's degree, for becoming a member of the governing body of the university, unless he subscribed his assent to the Thirty-nine Articles. It followed that a Dissenter could neither gain the great pecuniary prizes of a student's career, nor could he vote in the Parliamentary elections for the university, nor take any part in the government of the place. At last, mainly perhaps through the efforts of the Solicitor-General, Sir John Duke Coleridge (afterwards Lord Coleridge), the Bill became law, although some restrictions were still kept up. The test at the M.A. degree was abolished entirely, and no test was allowed to be applied in elections to fellowships. But the distinction between lay and clerical fellowships was still retained, in spite of Mr. Fawcett's proposal to merge them. Heads of houses, except in one or two cases, were still to be clergymen of the Establishment; and the test was to be kept up in Divinity degrees. The other Bill of importance that became law this Session was a Trades' Union Bill, designed as a compromise between the extreme views of masters and men. It may also be mentioned that this year saw also the final repeal of the Ecclesiastical Titles Act, passed at the initiative of Lord John Russell at the time of the "Papal Aggressions."

The marriage of her Majesty's fourth daughter, the Princess Louise, to the Marquis of Lorne, the eldest son of the Duke of Argyll, was celebrated with great state at Windsor Castle on the 21st of March, 1871. For the first time since the passing of the Royal Marriage Act in 1772, a descendant of George II. married a commoner with the full consent and approval of the reigning Sovereign. The Queen stood by her daughter's side during the ceremony, which was performed by the Bishop of London, assisted by the Bishop of Winchester, and gave the Princess away.

A lecture given at Newcastle in August by Sir Charles Dilke, one of the members for Chelsea, on the subject of "Representation and Royalty," excited much comment. Desiring to recommend to his hearers republican simplicity and cheapness, and forgetting that there are institutions, as there are public characters, which are dear at any price, Sir Charles Dilke enlarged on the terrible expensiveness of royalty to the nation. The positive and direct cost of the institution he estimated at about a million a year; he complained of the large sums spent on royal yachts, and of the "scandalous exemption" by which, as he said, her Majesty's income was not subject to the payment of income-tax. On all these points full and satisfactory answers were made to the allegations of the honourable baronet. The bulk of the expenditure incurred in the support of British royalty—namely, the Civil List—was really not one bit more an expense to the country than the rental of Woburn Abbey or Trentham Park, or the dividends received by Sir Charles Dilke himself on any India or railway stock he might have inherited from his father. The Queen received nearly £400,000 a year in respect of the Civil List from the general revenue; but she gave up to the general revenue rents that amounted pretty nearly to the same annual total. These were the rents of the Crown lands, which belonged to her Majesty by exactly the same title that Trentham belonged to the Duke of Sutherland; but which, by a fair and equitable bargain, she abandoned to the nation in exchange for the Civil List. With regard to the exemption from income-tax, it appeared on inquiry that there was nothing "scandalous" in the matter, except the assertion of Sir Charles Dilke, which turned out to be absolutely unfounded, the Queen having paid income-tax from the day of its first imposition. Strange to say, the lecture excited in the lower classes rather a disgust of Republicanism than the opposite feeling, as the riotous conduct of the mob at several subsequent gatherings of Sir Charles Dilke's disciples and adherents plainly evinced.

Before the close of the year testimony of the most direct and unimpeachable character was furnished to the popularity of the Queen and the royal family. Early in November the Prince of Wales paid a visit for a few days to Lord Londesborough's seat near Scarborough. It was supposed that there was some defect in the drainage of the house, which stands close to the sea, and that the seeds of typhoid fever were thus implanted in the Prince's frame. After his return to Sandringham he was taken ill, the fever being of a low and lingering type, and he continued in much the same condition for several weeks, during which her Majesty, accompanied by Prince Leopold and Princess Beatrice, visited Sandringham. On the 1st of December, the Prince appearing to be no worse, the Queen returned to Windsor. That some dangerous miasma lurked in the precincts of Londesborough Lodge seemed to be proved by the death, on this same day, of the Earl of Chesterfield, who had been one of the party invited to the house to meet the Prince, and was attacked by a fever of the same kind in so severe a form that he sank from collapse. A groom who had been in attendance on the Prince during the same visit was also attacked.

During November, and till the end of the first week of the following month, no serious symptoms appeared, and the attack was supposed to be passing away; but, on the 8th of December, a decided relapse declared itself, and for several days the life of the Prince of Wales was in the most imminent danger. The Queen, accompanied by some and followed by others of her children, hurried again to Sandringham.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, by the desire of the Queen, composed appropriate forms of prayer, which were used on and after the 10th of December, for several days, in every church and chapel of the Church of England throughout the realm. Archbishop Manning ordered prayers with the like intention to be offered up in all Roman Catholic places of worship; nor was the strain of supplication less fervent in the chapels of the Dissenters or the synagogues of the Jews. With wonderful "petitionary vehemence" was the safety of that life implored from heaven; and that life was spared. On the night of Wednesday, the 14th of December, a slight turn for the better took place in the worse symptoms, and the invalid enjoyed the long-desired boon of refreshing sleep. From that time he gradually, though slowly, rose to convalescence and ultimately to perfect health. The groom who had been attacked by the fever, after progressing favourably for some time, had a relapse, and died on the 18th of December.

After the health of the Prince was completely re-established, on the 27th of February in the following year a solemn service of Thanksgiving, attended both by the Queen and by the Prince himself, was held in St. Paul's Cathedral. The weather was all that could be desired; and although the line of the procession from Buckingham Palace to the Cathedral was thronged by immense multitudes of people, no accident and no mistake occurred. Her Majesty was received by the Lord Mayor at Temple Bar, and by the Bishop of London and the Dean and Chapter at the western gate of the Cathedral. The arrangements for the service were made with great precision of etiquette and pomp of ceremonial. A "Te Deum," composed for the occasion by Mr. (afterwards Sir John) Goss, was first sung by a choir of 250 voices, selected from the best cathedral and chapel choirs in England. Then the special form of Thanksgiving was read, and after a sermon from the Archbishop of Canterbury, the congregation was dismissed, care having been taken to reduce the whole service within such reasonable limits that the Prince's strength might be equal to it. In the evening, St Paul's and the principal streets were magnificently illuminated.

All through the year a growing dissatisfaction with the conduct of the Government exhibited itself in various ways. A portion of the electors of Greenwich, irritated, it would seem, at the continued slackness of the shipbuilding trade at Deptford (though it is difficult to see how the Premier could be made answerable for that), sent a requisition to Mr. Gladstone, their member, couched in most uncomplimentary terms, demanding of him the resignation of his seat. Several public meetings were held and largely attended, while the fate of Paris still hung in the balance, to protest against the Government's apathy and inaction, which had the effect of effacing Great Britain from European politics. In March and April several demonstrations of "Red Republicans" in London aimed at awakening sympathy for their friends who were fighting for the Commune in Paris. But neither their numbers nor the ability of their speakers were in the least formidable. On the other hand, the impartial lover of his country could not but acknowledge that much was due to a Government which had framed and carried a measure that now, for the first time since England was a nation, carried the healthful influences of primary instruction into every corner of the land. During the last half of 1870, and the first months of 1871, the Education Department was actively employed in gaining, through its inspectors and agents, the necessary statistical information required for the effectual working of the Act. Great progress had been made in this respect by the summer of 1871, and nearly three hundred school boards, elected under the provisions of the Education Act, were established in the course of the year. Unfortunately, a little rift of dissidence made its appearance about this time. This divergence of opinion related to the 25th Clause. By this clause it was provided that in districts where there was a school board, if there were any children whose parents pleaded poverty as an excuse for not sending them to school, and the board admitted the plea as a good one, such children should be placed at any Government school within the school-board district which the parent or guardian might prefer, their fees at such schools being paid by the board. On the face of it, there seemed nothing unequal or unfair in such a provision, since it applied equally to all sects and denominations. But the Dissenters considered that the clause would act to the exclusive benefit of the Church of England, to which destitute parents who have no connection with any other religious body naturally gravitate. The children of educational paupers, or nine out of ten of them, would thus be indubitably sent, they thought, to Church schools, where they would be taught the Church Catechism and whatever else is distinctive of Anglicanism at the expense of the rates, which would thus be indirectly drawn upon on behalf of a Church that was too rich and too independent of the laity already. As a matter of fact, the number of these educational paupers, the whole land over, was very small. Circumstances, however, might easily be imagined in which their numbers would greatly increase, and then the grievance resented by the Dissenters would immediately arise.

About the time that the newly-chosen German Emperor was making his triumphal entry into Berlin, another Emperor, exchanging his palace-prison for the land where he was to live as an exile, set foot, not for the first time, on the hospitable shores of England. The war being at an end, and the treaty of peace signed, the Emperor Napoleon was free to leave WilhelmshÖhe. He arrived at Dover by steamer from Ostend on the afternoon of the 20th of March. The day was fine and the Empress and her son, the Prince Imperial had come down from Chislehurst to welcome the exile. The Prince, following the kindly Continental custom, kissed his father on both cheeks. The crowd, though animated by the best and most generous feelings, was a trifle boisterous in its overflowing cordiality; the imperial party were sometimes nearly carried off their feet, so great was the pressure in the street, as they walked up to the Lord Warden Hotel, and the services of the police were called into active exercise. Napoleon was said to be much altered in appearance, his hair and moustache having become quite grey, but to look in good health. The ex-Emperor fixed his permanent residence with the Empress at Chislehurst.

Towards the end of the year, the Speaker of the House of Commons, Mr. Evelyn Denison, feeling the advance of age and the pressure of the arduous and trying duties inseparable from his office, resigned the Speakership, and was soon afterwards elevated to the peerage, taking the title of Lord Ossington. He was succeeded by Mr. Brand, the member for Cambridgeshire, long known as one of the most efficient of Liberal "Whips."

A visit paid this year by Prince Arthur to Ireland, though it elicited much friendly and loyal feeling, was not unattended by painful incidents. The Prince was accompanied by his sister, the Princess Louise, and the Marquis of Lorne. The royal party were received in all public places with the same respect and loyalty as usual, and the visit was nearly coming quietly to an end; but, on the day before the Prince departed, a riot of a serious character took place in the Phoenix Park. The "Irreconcilable" party in Ireland announced their intention of holding a public meeting in the Phoenix Park on the 6th of August, in order to adopt a petition for the liberation of the Irish military prisoners confined for Fenianism. The authorities forbade the meeting to be held; the promoters persisted in holding it; and when the police, in pursuance of their orders, endeavoured to disperse the crowd, and prohibit anything like concerted action or public speaking, a serious affray was the consequence. The police appear to have acted with great and hardly excusable violence; and when it is considered that at this very time the Government did not interfere with the meetings of Red Republicans in Hyde Park and Trafalgar Square, that is, in the heart of London, while the Phoenix Park, a piece of open ground of immense extent, lies at a distance from the busy part of Dublin, the indignation expressed by the Nationalists at the forcible suppression of the meeting cannot be wondered at.

Mr. Gladstone and the Liberal party in general having entered upon the policy of conciliation to Ireland, both in regard to the Irish Church and to the tenure of the land, from a conviction that these important measures were demanded by justice, did not repent of what they did; yet it must be confessed that the sanguine anticipations of seeing peace, union, contentment, and gratitude diffused over the sister island in consequence of this legislation were wofully disappointed. The marked warmth and heartiness with which a French deputation, headed by Count Flavigny, that came over to Ireland in the summer of 1871 to make a public acknowledgment of the services rendered during the war by the Irish ambulance, was received by the masses of the Irish population was understood to cover and indicate at least as much dislike of England as affection for France. Nor was this feeling now confined to the Celtic portion of the population. A section of Protestants, among whom the most prominent figure was a distinguished Fellow of Trinity College, resented so keenly the conduct of England in having sacrificed their Church to, as they deemed, a miserablepolitical expediency, and the clap-trap plea of numbers, that they eagerly joined that large disaffected mass of the native and Roman Catholic population which, about this time (direct agitation for a repeal of the Union being discouraged by the experience of 1844), began to seek the same end under the newly invented name of "Home Rule." The leader of this movement, Mr. Isaac Butt, the member for Limerick, was one, and not the least gifted, of the brilliant band of counsel who rallied round O'Connell on the occasion of his trial for exciting to sedition in January, 1844. The movement for Home Rule which he now took up had this advantage, that while the very name implied a certain degree of separation from England, and therefore insured for it popularity, its vagueness made it more difficult for opponents to grapple with it. All that those who gave in their adhesion to the agitation need necessarily contemplate was the transfer to some legislative body established in Ireland of the management of the purely local concerns of the kingdom. It meant the practical self-government of Ireland, and the exclusion of English influence from the conduct of its affairs, with the exception of a few specified departments, such as the Army and Navy, foreign relations, and the Post Office. While Mr. Butt was leader, however, Home Rule never emerged from a purely academic stage.

Mr. Gladstone delivered an important speech on this question at Aberdeen towards the close of the year, in which he based his opposition to Home Rule, not on prospective or hypothetical dangers, but on consideration of the argument that the Irish, if they would combine together, and become as keenly alive to their own interests as the Scots or the Welsh are, could obtain whatever they might reasonably demand. "You would expect," he said, "when it is said that the Imperial Parliament is to be broken up, that at the very least a case should be made out showing there were great objects of policy, and great demands necessary for the welfare of Ireland, which representatives of Ireland had united to ask, and which the representatives of England, Scotland, and Wales had united to refuse. There is no such grievance. There is nothing which Ireland has asked, and which this country and this Parliament have refused." He proceeded to admit that Ireland had something like a grievance in regard to university education, but urged that a united demand from Ireland would lead immediately to its rectification; and continued: "What are the inequalities of England and Ireland? I declare that I know none, except that there are certain taxes still remaining which are levied over Englishmen and are not levied over Irishmen, and likewise that there are certain purposes for which public money is freely and largely given in Ireland, and for which it is not given in England or Scotland.... But if the doctrines of Home Rule are to be established in Ireland, I protest on your behalf that you will be just as well entitled to it in Scotland; and, moreover, I protest on behalf of Wales, in which I have lived a good deal, and where there are 800,000 people who this day, such is their sentiment of nationality, speak hardly anything but their own Celtic tongue—a larger number than speak the Celtic tongue, I apprehend, in Scotland, and a larger number than speak it, I apprehend, in Ireland—I protest on behalf of Wales that they are entitled to Home Rule there. Can any sensible man, can any rational man, suppose that at this time of day, in this condition of the world, we are going to disintegrate the great capital institutions of this country for the purpose of making ourselves ridiculous in the sight of all mankind, and crippling any power we possess for bestowing benefits through legislation on the country to which we belong?"

A tragic event, the prelude, as it proved, to one still more tragic, was announced in the autumn from Calcutta. Mr. Justice Norman, acting Lord Chief Justice, was assassinated by a fanatical Mussulman while ascending the steps leading to his own court. He had reached the summit of the flight of steps, when a man, who had been concealed in a doorway, sprang out and stabbed him in the back. Mr. Norman turned quickly round, and was stabbed again in front: either wound, being inflicted by one who was an adept in the art of murder, would have been fatal. The assassin was immediately seized. The evidence given on the trial left it doubtful whether pure fanatical hate towards a judge who had lately been enforcing the law against some Mohammedan conspirators at Patna was the cause of the murder, or whether some private grudge supplied a subsidiary motive.

What looked like an important step towards the co-ordination in one confederacy of the Australian colonies was taken in the autumn of this year. A new treaty between Great Britain and the Zollverein was being negotiated; and it would appear that Lord Kimberley, the Colonial Secretary, in a circular despatch to the Australian Governments, used certain expressions in relation thereto which seemed to the colonists to imply the recognition of a right on the part of the mother country to concede, and on the part of a foreign country to claim, certain tariff arrangements as between the different colonies which would be favourable to the interests of the treaty-making Power. Delegates from the Governments of New South Wales, Tasmania, South Australia, and Victoria met at Melbourne, in September, 1871, to consider the question; and having carefully examined Lord Kimberley's despatch, agreed unanimously to the following resolutions:—

1. "That the Australian colonies claim to enter into arrangements with each other, through their respective Legislatures, so as to provide for the reciprocal admission of their respective products and manufactures, either duty free or on such terms as may be mutually agreed upon.

2. "That no treaty entered into by the Imperial Government with any foreign Power should in any way limit or impede the exercise of such right.

3. "That Imperial interference with inter-colonial fiscal legislation should finally and absolutely cease.

4. "That so much of an Act or Acts of the Imperial Parliament as may be considered to prohibit the full exercise of such right should be repealed.

5. "That these resolutions, together with a memorandum from each Government, or a joint memorandum from such Governments as prefer to adopt that method, shall be transmitted to the Secretary of State through the Governors of our colonies respectively." The movement, however, proved premature, so far at least as it concerned inter-colonial (that is, Australian) Federation. Nor had the larger project of Imperial Federation come within the view of the statesmen of the day.

In September, 1870, a circumstance had occurred that gave us the disagreeable certainty that, although secured from the direct risks of war by what Mr. Gladstone called "the silver streak," we too might be injuriously affected by the disturbance of the European equilibrium caused by the prostration of France. A circular note, addressed by Prince Gortschakoff to the representatives of Russia at foreign Courts, and made public at the end of October, declared that it was the intention of his Majesty the Czar no longer to be bound by that clause of the Treaty of 1856, concluded after the Crimean War, which prohibited Russia from keeping up a naval force above a certain strength in the Black Sea. Lord Granville, in a despatch to Sir A. Buchanan dated the 10th of November, 1870, stated that the British Government could give no sanction to the course announced by Prince Gortschakoff.

The concilatory tone adopted by Prince Gortschakoff in his reply to Lord Granville went some way to neutralise the disagreeable impression which the circular had produced. He would not admit that Russia encouraged a laxity of principle in regard to the obligation of treaties; and in the case of this particular treaty he declared that in its main stipulations Russia considered it as binding as ever, although she declined to be bound any longer by the special convention with Turkey which it contained, regulating the number and size of the men-of-war which the two Powers might maintain in the Black Sea. With regard to the objection that Russia had not sought for a modification of the treaty through the medium of a conference, Prince Gortschakoff remarked that Lord Granville well knew that "all the efforts repeatedly made to unite the Powers in a common deliberation, in order to do away with the causes of complication which trouble the general peace, have constantly failed."

There was something deceptive in this way of stating the matter, because it did not follow, if difficulties had arisen in the way of the meeting of congresses to settle all the perplexing questions of Europe, that therefore a proposal by Russia for a conference of the signatory Powers to discuss the comparatively unimportant matter now on the tapis would have encountered any serious opposition. Lord Granville pointed out this distinction, admitting at the same time with satisfaction the moderation and courtesy of tone by which the Russian despatches were distinguished. Here, as between England and Russia, the matter rested. But a doubt remained whether the conduct of Russia had not been previously sanctioned, possibly even instigated, by the Court of Berlin. Mr. Odo Russell was sent to clear up this delicate point, and brought back the tranquillising assurance from Count Bismarck that the German Government had given no sanction to the step. At the same time a proposal was made by Prussia that a conference of the Powers should be summoned, and meet in London, in order to settle the question.

This conference accordingly met in London on the 17th of January. The presence of a French Plenipotentiary at the Conference had been earnestly desired, and M. Jules Favre had been requested to attend it by the Paris Government. But difficulties arose in connection with his obtaining permission to pass out of Paris through the Prussian lines; and when the permission was obtained—or, rather, when through the close of the siege the difficulty no longer existed—M. Favre had his hands so full of the work of negotiating the armistice with Bismarck that it was impossible for him to leave Paris. The plenipotentiaries of the other Powers—Britain, Germany, Austria, Italy, Russia, and Turkey—proceeded, though with reluctance, to the deliberation of the question.

At the first sitting the Conference adopted, unanimously, on the invitation of Lord Granville, the principle that no one of the two or more Powers that may be parties to a treaty can nullify the same, or any part of it, without the consent of the co-signatory Powers. At subsequent meetings, the reasons alleged by Russia for her desire to be liberated from the prohibitory stipulation respecting war-ships contained in the Black Sea Treaty were listened to and considered, as well as the reply of the Turkish Ambassador, who, while repudiating on behalf of Turkey all intention of separating her action from that approved by the majority of the friendly Powers, regretted that the question had ever been raised, and declared that the restrictive clause which Russia now felt to be unendurable still appeared to the Sublime Porte in the light of a prudent and desirable precaution. Upon minute inquiry, it was found that ten cases of infraction of the Convention of 1856, forbidding the navigation of the Black Sea by ships-of-war, had occurred in the intervening period. Most of these were unimportant; but there was one on which Russia laid much stress, having, indeed, protested against it at the time when it occurred. This was the admission into the Black Sea of H.M.S. Gannet, in which Sir Henry Bulwer was conveyed (1864) on a mission to Kustendji. General Ignatieff, the Russian Ambassador at Constantinople, told the British representative there, about the year 1870, that Russia considered the clauses neutralising the Black Sea to have been annulled in practice from the time when H.M.S. Gannet passed through the Bosphorus into the prohibited waters six years before.

The sense of the Conference was, on the whole, in favour of remitting the restriction which Russia complained of; and a new treaty was drawn up, and signed by all the Powers, by virtue of which the articles of the Treaty of 1856 limiting the number and size of the ships-of-war which Russia and Turkey might keep up in the Black Sea were abrogated, and a new provision was introduced, authorising the Sultan to open the straits of the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus in time of peace to the fleets of the friendly and allied Powers, in the event of the execution of the stipulations of the Treaty of 1856 requiring it. The meaning of this stipulation, of course, was, that if Russia took advantage of the liberty which she now had of preparing a large fleet for the ultimate purpose of attacking Turkey, the latter would be entitled, without the breach of any treaty stipulation, to summon the Mediterranean fleet of France or England to her aid.

After the draft of the treaty had been settled, at the sitting of the 13th of March, Earl Granville introduced the Duc de Broglie to the Conference as the representative of France. In a few dignified sentences, the duke, after touching lightly but feelingly on the unhappy condition of France, which had prevented her from being represented at the earlier sittings, stated that, with regard to the principal object of the Conference, the French Government, sharing the feelings expressed by the Turkish Plenipotentiary, would have preferred that the original convention for neutralising the Black Sea should be maintained; but that at the stage at which the affair had now arrived, the new arrangement having been assented to by the Porte, France willingly entered into the feeling of conciliation that had dictated it, and gave its assent to all the decisions of the Conference.

The obituary of the year contains the names of many persons of eminence. Although the death of no statesman of the first rank has to be recorded, the army lost its patriarch, Sir John Burgoyne; the Church of England lost Dean Alford of Canterbury, Dean Mansel of St. Paul's, the once famous preacher, Canon Melvill, and the much-loved missionary bishop, John Coleridge Patteson; science lost Sir John Herschel, Sir Roderick Murchison, Mr. Charles Babbage, and Mr. De Morgan; literature and politics lost the veteran George Grote; and about the same time as the "Philosophical Radical" and historian of Greece there died the famous old Devonshire Tory, Sir Thomas Dyke Acland. Lord Ellenborough, once the much-admired and much-criticised Governor-General of India, Sir W. Denison, once Governor of Tasmania and Madras, Mr. Charles Buxton, an influential Member of Parliament and philanthropist, died in the same year. The death of George Hudson, the "Railway King," gave people an opportunity for moralising on the vicissitudes of life.