petty sessional division were first to determine 1871. how many licences the inhabitants required, and were then to confer them upon the highest respectable bidders. The money thus obtained would be applied to the public purposes of the district, and the rate-payers might by a majority of three-fifths reduce the number of licences down to a limit fixed by the Bill as reasonably required for a specified population. The appeal to against the Quarter Sessions, which has always stood in the way of diminishing public houses, was wisely abolished. Had this Bill become law an immense stride would have been taken in the path of rational temperance, and the controversy about compensation to publicans would have disappeared forever. But fate was adverse. Sir Wilfrid Lawson, and the other champions of local option, looked coldly upon a scheme which did not give entire control of licences to the rate-payers, and which did give the publican ten years' grace. They might have Agitation been enlightened by the attitude of the brewers Bl and licensed victuallers, who held angry meetings throughout the country in the Easter recess, and threatened members voting members voting for the Bill with the certain loss of their seats. A single trade The Bill proved too strong for a Government supposed to represent the country, and the Bill, introduced in April, was dropped in May. By this pusillanimity the Cabinet gained nothing. The trade never forgave those who had attempted to diminish the value of what they called their property by a sum estimated at nearly one-half, and they could not have been more indignant if the attempt had happily succeeded. But Mr. Bruce was too like Mr. Walpole to be a good Home Secretary. An amiable and accomplished scholar and gentleman, he was a prey to the softer emotions, and he lacked the power of making himself disagreeable which dropped. 1871. speech at the holder of his office requires, unless he be a very strong man indeed. The repeal of the Ecclesiastical Titles Act was a personal triumph for Mr. Gladstone. Soon after the close of the session, when the fame of the Government was somewhat tarnished by legislative failures, he performed a feat then almost without precedent in the annals of English politics. The occasion was commonplace enough. Even Prime Ministers have to remember their constituents, and Mr. Gladstone was thought, thought, especially at Gladstone's Greenwich, to have neglected Greenwich too long. Blackheath. Accordingly he arranged to speak on the 28th of October in the open air at Blackheath. The audience, roughly estimated at twenty thousand, was not all friendly. At that time the Parliamentary borough of Greenwich included Woolwich, and the Government, in their zeal for economy, had discharged a number of men from the Woolwich dock yards. "It was," says Mr. Gladstone's biographer, "one of the marked scenes of his life. In the cold mist of the October afternoon he stood bareheaded, pale, resolute, before a surging audience of many thousands, few of them enthusiastically his friends, a considerable mass of them dockyard workmen, furious at discharge or neglect by an economising Government.' At first even Mr. Gladstone could scarcely make himself heard, and almost any other man would have given up the task in despair. But Mr. Gladstone's voice, his eloquence, and above all his courage, conquered at last. For half an hour he was, more or less, interrupted. Then the desire to hear him strengthened the British instinct of fair play, and he was allowed to explain in something like calm that whereas his Government had discharged fewer than fifteen hundred men from the dockyards, his predecessors, 1 Morley's Life of Gladstone, vol. ii. p. 380. whom he did not blame, had discharged more than 1871. four thousand. The figures are a conclusive answer to critics of greater personal pretension than the electors of Greenwich, for they show that neither the Prime Minister of that day, nor the Cabinet as a whole, were so bent upon economy as to disregard efficiency. The rest of the speech, which lasted for nearly two hours, was not otherwise remarkable than as a rare display of mental energy conquering physical obstacles. But it showed that the man who presided over the Cabinet, and led the House of Commons, was the equal of Daniel O'Connell himself in that severest of all ordeals for the Parliamentary debater, a mass meeting under the canopy of heaven. 1 and the Of such solace as his success on Blackheath could give Mr. Gladstone had need. His office was not a bed of roses, and in the struggle for economy which brought him so much abuse he did not always receive the support he had a right to expect. He has himself entered in his diary for the 14th of December 1871: "Cabinet 3-7. For two and a half hours we discussed Army estimates, mainly on reduction, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer did not speak one word." The Court gave him even more anxiety than the Gladstone Cabinet. There can be no doubt that a wave of Court. Republicanism was in those days sweeping over the country. The seclusion of the Queen was misunderstood. Every one could see that Her Majesty lived at Balmoral during the busiest part of the political year and the fullest part of the London season. Few people were aware that the Sovereign had no real holiday, and never ceased for twenty-four hours to read public papers of importance. A period of mourning which had lasted almost ten years seemed excessive to ordinary folk, 1 Morley's Life of Gladstone, vol. ii. p. 374. 1871. who did not know that after the death of her not a courtier, and he only irritated the Queen. 1 Morley, vol. ii. p. 427, CHAPTER VIII THE SETTLEMENT WITH AMERICA THE relations of the United Kingdom with the 1871. United States had not improved since the fall of Richmond. For although many Englishmen, from Mr. Gladstone downwards, had manifested for the triumphant Union a friendship which they never displayed to the struggling North, the indiscreet language of English sympathisers with the South still rankled in the minds of the victors, and the more substantial grievance against the British Government which allowed Confederate cruisers to be equipped in British ports was still unredressed. The fact that the failure of previous negotiations had been the fault of American statesmen, who raised unfounded pretensions and pressed impossible claims, did not conciliate American opinion. The diplomacy of the old world was not the less exasperating because it had truth and reason on its side. Along with preposterous demands of compensation for acknowledging a belligerency without which there could have been no recognised blockade, appeared a sound claim for damage done to American shipping by the Alabama, and a resentment which could not be expressed in figures for the random utterances of prejudiced ignorance. Happily there was on the British side a sincere desire to be just with and conciliatory, shared alike by both parties in Treaty of Arbitration America. |