was 1876. The strong point of this Government certainly not its finance. The splendid surplus Shipping which Sir Stafford Northcote inherited in 1874 had disappeared altogether in 1875, and in 1876 there was a deficit of eight hundred thousand pounds. With the Income Tax at twopence, the temptation The Budget. was irresistible, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer raised it again to threepence, at which it stood when he came into office. But as this would give him more money than he wanted, he repaired Mr. Gladstone's blunder of 1853 by raising the limit of total exemption from a hundred pounds to a hundred and fifty, the exempted margin of all incomes under four hundred pounds being also increased from eighty pounds to a hundred and twenty. Whatever might be the cause of the deficit, the Budget was in the circumstances unassailable, and passed with ease. So did a permanent measure for the Merchant protection of merchant seamen, to replace the Act. temporary makeshift procured by Mr. Plimsoll's "disorderly " conduct the previous year, and an excellent Bill to restrict the enclosure of commons, for which Mr. Cross was responsible. This Act Commons did much to promote the popularity of the Conservative Government with the working classes, who did not forget, especially if they lived in London, that Epping Forest, neglected by a Liberal Administration, had been preserved to the public in 1874 by Sir George Jessel, Master of the Nov. 15, Rolls, at the suit of the Lord Mayor and Common Council, the embodiment of political Conservatism.1 A useful Act to check the pollution of rivers, and Rivers Act. one to regulate the performance of experiments upon living animals, were also passed during this fruitful, if uneventful session. Although the Vivi- Vivisection section Act did not satisfy extreme humanitarianism 1 See Commissioner of Sewers v. Glasse, L. R. Equity Cases, xix. 134166. The real plaintiff was the Corporation. Act. 1874. Act. 1876. Appellate Act. by prohibiting the practice altogether, it required every experimentalist to hold a personal licence from the Secretary of State, and forbade the vivisection of any animal which had not been rendered insensible to pain. These measures were initiated in the House of Commons. In the House of Lords a Bill was introduced which passed both Houses, and completed the reform of legal procedure. Lord Cairns had been quite willing to abandon the appellate jurisdiction of the Peers. But professional opinion, and the prevailing Conservatism, had been too much for him. He therefore, like a sensible man, did his best to strengthen the tribunal he could not abolish, and proposed the immediate creation of two Lords of Appeal with high salaries, who would assist the Chancellor in the judicial business of the House. They would be Peers only while they held office, and their titles would not be hereditary. Being Privy Councillors, they would be able to sit on the Judicial Committee, and their number would be increased to four, as the paid members of that body vacated their places. At the same time the intermediate Court of Appeal was strengthened by the transference thereto from the High Court of three puisne Judges, and a most rational reform was made by allowing every Judge of first instance to sit alone, as the Vice-Chancellors had always sat. Thus the work begun by Lord Selborne was finished by Lord Cairns, and the two political parties shared the credit between them. An Elementary Educa 3 1 The first two Lords of Appeal were Mr. Justice Blackburn of the Queen's Bench Division, whose reputation as a lawyer was unsurpassed, and the Lord Advocate of the day, Mr. Gordon, whose qualifications were less obvious. 2 Sir George Bramwell, Sir Baliol Brett, and Sir Richard Amphlett. 8 Contrary to the wish of the High Churchmen, represented by Mr. Beresford Hope, it was provided that Episcopal Assessors should sit with the Judicial Committee at the hearing of ecclesiastical appeals. But they were to sit as Assessors only, not as Judges, and this made it Sandon's Act. tion Bill, brought in by Lord Sandon, led to much 1876. confused fighting in the House of Commons. From the educational point of view the chief argument against it was that it did not provide for compulsory attendance at a time when, out of three million children who should have been at school, only two million were million were actually there. Some of its clauses were beneficial, such as the Lord absolute rule against employing any child under Education ten. Others were harmless, such as the provision that casual vacancies in School Boards should be filled by the Boards themselves. Some, again, were attacked as unduly favourable to the Church, which profited largely by a clause enacting that the Parliamentary grant might exceed the amount of voluntary subscriptions and fees if it did not come to more than seventeen shillings and sixpence for each child. On the other hand, the Nonconformists were gratified by Mr. Forster's success in procuring the repeal of the twenty-fifth clause in his own Act, which they considered as a bribe for attendance at voluntary schools, subject to a proviso that, in England and Scotland alike, the guardians should pay the fees of parents too poor to pay them themselves. They were to be paid whatever school the child was attending, and the father was not to be disfranchised by this form of relief. There was a sharp battle over an amendment moved by an agricultural Member, Mr. Pell, and accepted by Lord Sandon, for the dissolution of School Boards where there were no Board Schools. If a School Board could do nothing else, it could enforce attendance; and what Mr. Pell really disliked was compulsory education in the rural districts, for which the Bill provided no adequate machinery, though it possible to summon other Bishops than the Bishop of London, who alone, besides the Archbishops, is a Privy Councillor. 1876. expressly recognised the principle of compulsion. The amendment, however, was ultimately carried, with the conditions that two-thirds of the ratepayers must agree to dissolve a School Board, and that the Department in London must approve. The annual debate on Home Rule, always regularly and patiently set going by Mr. Butt, was varied and enlivened in 1876 by a speech of surpassing eloquence from Mr. Patrick Smyth, who denounced with much energy, as an old Repealer, a system of Federalism unsuited to Ireland, and not demanded by the Irish people. Consummate rhetorician as Mr. Smyth was, his principles were obsolete, and his brilliant display was a mere academic exercise, which made scarcely a ripple on the surface of Irish politics. Home Rule was a genuine movement. Physical force was always in the background. O'Connellite Repeal was, in Neglect of scriptural language, a dead corpse. The Prime Minister knew, and had long known, that the condition of Ireland was profoundly and vitally disturbed. He had known it, and proclaimed it, thirty years before. He never professed to believe that Mr. Gladstone's remedial measures, though the Church Act removed one of the grievances which he himself specified in 1844, would go to the root of the disease. But he had no other policy to propose. He did nothing, and left the witches' cauldron to boil. Ireland. CHAPTER XIII INTELLECTUAL AND SOCIAL PROGRESS AFTER the session of 1874, Mr. Gladstone found 1874-76. himself with time on his hands, and theological matters which he thought of much moment in his head. The Public Worship Act had convinced him that the interference of Parliament with ecclesiastical affairs was endangering not merely the peace of the Church, but the existence of the Establishment. He expressed this opinion very strongly in the Contemporary Review for October, arguing that fear of Romanism, which lay at the root of hostility to Ritualism, was especially unreasonable at a time. "when Rome had substituted for the proud boast of semper eadem a policy of violence and change in faith; when she had refurbished and paraded anew every rusty tool she was fondly thought to have disused; when no one could become her convert without renouncing his moral and mental freedom, and placing his civil loyalty and duty at the mercy of another; and when she had equally repudiated modern thought and ancient history." The dogma of Papal Infallibility, thus emphatically denounced, Mr. Gladwas four years old. But besides the attack upon Papal In Ritualism, in which he saw the hated Erastian spirit, two events brought the position of the Roman Church in England forcibly before Mr. Gladstone's mind. The first was the conversion to Romanism of his friend and colleague Lord Ripon, stone and fallibility. |