IMPERIALISM AND MR. GLADSTONE (continued 3)

THE FIRST SUBMARINE (1885).

Source.—The Times, October 1.

The interest excited by the recent trials of the Nordenfeldt submarine boat is sufficiently shown by the presence at Landskrona of thirty-nine officers, representing every European Power, together with Brazil and Japan. The Nordenfeldt boat, the first of its class, was built at Stockholm about two years ago. The boat is cigar-shaped, with a coffin-like projection on the top amidships, formed by vertical combings supporting a glass dome or conning tower, 1 foot high, which enables the commander to see his way. The dome, with its iron protecting cover, stands on a horizontal lid, which can be swung to one side to allow the crew of three men to get in or out without difficulty. The length of the hull is 64 feet, and the central diameter 9 feet. It is built of Swedish mild steel plates ⅝ inch thick at the centre, tapered to ⅜ inch at the ends.... In order to prepare for action, enough sea-water is taken in to reduce the buoyancy to 1 cwt., which suffices to keep the conning tower well above the surface. In order to sink the boat further, the vertical propellers are set in motion, and by their action it is held at the required depth. Thus to come to the surface again it is merely necessary to stop the vertical propellers, in which case the reserve of buoyancy at once comes into play.... The motive power is steam alone. For submarine work, as stoking is, of course, impossible, the firebox has to be sealed. It is therefore necessary to store the requisite power beforehand, and this is done by heating the water in two tanks placed fore and aft, till a pressure of about 150 pounds per square inch is obtained. With about this initial pressure the boat has been driven for sixteen miles at a speed of three knots.... No compressed air is carried, and the crew depend therefore for existence on the amount of air sealed up in the hull. With this amount of air only, four men have remained for a period of six hours without any special inconvenience.

THE UNAUTHORIZED PROGRAMME (1885).

Source.—Morley's Life of Gladstone, vol. iii., pp. 173, 174, 220-226. (Macmillans.)

Mr. Chamberlain had been rapidly advancing in public prominence, and he now showed that the agitation against the House of Lords was to be only the beginning and not the end. At Ipswich (January 14) he said this country had been called the paradise of the rich, and warned his audience no longer to allow it to remain the purgatory of the poor. He told them that reform of local government must be almost the first reform of the next Parliament, and spoke in favour of allotments, the creation of small proprietors, the placing of a small tax on the total property of the taxpayer, and of free education. Mr. Gladstone's attention was drawn from Windsor to these utterances, and he replied that though he thought some of them were "on various grounds open to grave objection," yet they seemed to raise no "definite point on which, in his capacity of Prime Minister, he was entitled to interfere and lecture the speaker." A few days later, more terrible things were said by Mr. Chamberlain at Birmingham. He pronounced for the abolition of plural voting, and in favour of payment of members, and manhood suffrage. He also advocated a bill for enabling local communities to acquire land, a graduated income-tax, and the breaking up of the great estates as the first step in land reform....

Mr. Gladstone made a lenient communication to the orator, to the effect that "there had better be some explanations among them when they met." ... He recognized by now that in the Cabinet the battle was being fought between old time and new. He did not allow his dislike of some of the new methods of forming public opinion to prevent him from doing full justice to the energetic and sincere public spirit behind them....

The address to his electors ... was given to the public on September 17. It was, as he said, as long as a pamphlet.... The Whigs, we are told, found it vague, the Radicals cautious, the Tories crafty; but everybody admitted that it tended to heal feuds.... Mr. Chamberlain, though raising his own flag, was respectful to his leader's manifesto. The surface was thus stilled for the moment; yet the waters ran very deep....

[Gladstone] goes on to say that the ground had now been sufficiently laid for going to the election with a united front, that ground being the common profession of a limited creed or programme in the Liberal sense, with an entire freedom for those so inclined to travel beyond it, but not to impose their own sense upon all other people.... If the party and its leaders were agreed as to immediate measures ... were not these enough to find a Liberal administration plenty of work ... for several years?...

An advance was made in the development of a peculiar situation by important conversations with Mr. Chamberlain [at Hawarden: these] did not materially alter Mr. Gladstone's disposition [but the first crisis which promptly developed tended to obscure the direct issue].

THE IRISH VOTE (1885).

Source.—Morley's Life of Gladstone, vol. iii., pp. 188-245. (Macmillans.)

On May 15 Mr. Gladstone announced ... that they proposed to continue what he described as certain clauses of a valuable and equitable description in the existing Coercion Act.

No Parliamentary situation could be more tempting to an astute Opposition. The signs that the Cabinet was not united were unmistakable.... The key to an operation that should at once, with the aid of the disaffected Liberals and the Irish, turn out Mr. Gladstone and secure the English elections, was an understanding with Mr. Parnell.... Lord Salisbury and his confidential friends had resolved [previous to the defeat of the Government], subject to official information, to drop coercion, and the only visible reason why they should form the resolution at that particular moment was its probable effect upon Mr. Parnell. [Meanwhile] the policy of the Central Board [for Ireland], of which Mr. Gladstone so decisively approved, had been killed.... When it came to the full Cabinet it could not be carried. [June 6. Government defeated on an amendment to the Budget by 264 to 252.] The defeat of the Gladstone Government was the first success of a combination between Tories and Irish that proved of cardinal importance to policies and parties for several critical months to come.... The new Government were not content with renouncing coercion for the present. They cast off all responsibility for its practice in the past.... In July a singular incident occurred, nothing less strange than an interview between the new Lord-Lieutenant [Lord Carnarvon] and the leader of the Irish party. To realize its full significance we have to recall the profound odium that at this time enveloped Mr. Parnell's name in the minds of nearly all Englishmen.... The transaction had consequences, and the Carnarvon episode was a pivot. The effect on the mind of Mr. Parnell was easy to foresee.... Why should he not believe that the alliance formed in June ... had really blossomed from a mere lobby manœuvre and election expedient into a policy adopted by serious statesmen?

[In Midlothian, on November 9, Mr. Gladstone said:] "It will be a vital danger to the country and to the empire, if at a time when a demand from Ireland for larger powers of self-government is to be dealt with, there is not in Parliament a party totally independent of the Irish vote." ... Mr. Gladstone's cardinal deliverance in November had been preceded by an important event. On October 7, 1885, Lord Salisbury made that speech at Newport which is one of the tallest and most striking landmarks in the shifting sands of this controversy.... Some of the more astute of the Minister's own colleagues were delighted with his speech, as keeping the Irishmen steady to the Tory party.... The question on which side the Irish vote in Great Britain should be thrown seems not to have been decided until after Mr. Gladstone's speech. It was then speedily settled. On November 21 a manifesto was issued, handing over the Irish vote in Great Britain solid to the orator of the Newport speech. The tactics were obvious. It was Mr. Parnell's interest to bring the two contending British parties as near as might be to a level, and this he could only hope to do by throwing his strength upon the weaker side. It was from the weaker side, if they could be maintained in office, that he would get the best terms.... Some estimated the loss to the Liberal party in this island at twenty seats, others at forty. Whether twenty or forty, these lost seats made a fatal difference in the division on the Irish Bill a few months later.... But this was not all, and was not the worst of it.... Passions were roused, and things were said about Irishmen that could not at once be forgotten; and the great task of conversion in 1886, difficult in any case, was made a thousand times more difficult still by the antipathies of the electoral battle of 1885. Meanwhile it was for the moment, and for the purposes of the moment, a striking success.

THE NEW ELECTORATE (1885).

Source.—The Times, December 11.

From a carefully prepared statistical abstract of the election it appears that in the English counties, out of a total electorate of 2,303,133 voters, 1,937,988 votes were recorded, in the proportion of 1,020,774 Liberal votes to 916,314 Conservative.

THE OPENING OF THE RIFT (1886).

Source.—Morley's Life of Gladstone, vol. iii., pp. 292-295. (Macmillans.)

What Mr. Gladstone called the basis of his new government was set out in a short memorandum, which he read to each of those whom he hoped to include in his Cabinet: "I propose to examine whether it is or is not practicable to comply with the desire widely prevalent in Ireland, and testified by the return of eighty-five out of one hundred and three representatives, for the establishment by statute of a legislative body to sit in Dublin, and to deal with Irish as distinguished from Imperial affairs, in such a manner as would be just to each of the three kingdoms, equitable with reference to every class of the people of Ireland, conducive to the social order and harmony of that country, and calculated to support and consolidate the unity of the Empire on the continued basis of Imperial authority and mutual attachment." No definite plan was propounded or foreshadowed, but only the proposition that it was a duty to seek a plan. The cynical version was that a Cabinet was got together on the chance of being able to agree. To Lord Hartington Mr. Gladstone applied as soon as he received the Queen's commission. The invitation was declined on reasoned grounds (January 30th). Examination and inquiry, said Lord Hartington, must mean a proposal. If no proposal followed inquiry, the reaction of Irish disappointment would be severe, as it would be natural. He could not depart from the traditions of British statesmen, and he was opposed to a separate Irish legislature. At the same time, he concluded, in a sentence afterwards pressed by Mr. Gladstone on the notice of the Queen: "I am fully convinced that the alternative policy of governing Ireland without large concessions to the national sentiment, presents difficulties of a tremendous character, which in my opinion could now only be faced by the support of a nation united by the consciousness that the fullest opportunity had been given for the production and consideration of a conciliatory policy...." The decision was persistently regarded by Mr. Gladstone as an important event in English political history. With a small number of distinguished individual exceptions, it marked the withdrawal from the Liberal party of the aristocratic element....

Mr. Goschen, who had been a valuable member of the great Ministry of 1868, was invited to call, but without hopes that he would rally to a cause so startling; the interview, while courteous and pleasant, was over in a very few minutes. Lord Derby, a man of still more cautious type, and a rather recent addition to the officers of the Liberal staff, declined, not without good nature. Most lamented of all the abstentions was the honoured and trusted name of Mr. Bright.

"ULSTER WILL FIGHT" (1886).

Source.—Winston Churchill's Life of Lord Randolph Churchill, vol. ii., pp. 60-65. (Macmillans.)

Lord Randolph crossed the Channel and arrived at Larne early on the morning of February 22. He was welcomed like a king.... That night the Ulster Hall (in Belfast) was crowded to its utmost compass. In order to satisfy the demand for tickets all the seats were removed, and the concourse—which he addressed for nearly an hour and a half—heard him standing. He was nearly always successful on the platform, but the effect he produced upon his audience at Belfast was one of the most memorable triumphs of his life.... "Now may be the time," he said, "to show whether all these ceremonies and forms which are practised in Orange lodges are really living symbols or only idle and meaningless ceremonies; whether that which you have so carefully fostered is really the lamp of liberty, and its flame the undying and unquenchable fire of freedom.... Like Macbeth before the murder of Duncan, Mr. Gladstone asks for time. Before he plunges the knife into the heart of the British Empire, he reflects, he hesitates.... The Loyalists in Ulster should wait and watch—organize and prepare. Diligence and vigilance ought to be your watchword; so that the blow, if it does come, may not come upon you as a thief in the night, and may not find you unready, and taken by surprise. I believe that this storm will blow over, and that the vessel of the Union will emerge with her Loyalist crew stronger than before; but it is right and useful that I should add that if the struggle should continue, and if my conclusions should turn out to be wrong, then I am of opinion that the struggle is not likely to remain within the lines of what we are accustomed to look upon as constitutional action. No portentous change such as the Repeal of the Union, no change so gigantic, could be accomplished by the mere passing of a law. The history of the United States will teach us a different lesson; and if it should turn out that the Parliament of the United Kingdom was so recreant from all its high duties, and that the British nation was so apostate to traditions of honour and courage, as to hand over the Loyalists of Ireland to the domination of an Assembly in Dublin, which must be to them a foreign and an alien assembly, if it should be within the design of Providence to place upon you and your fellow-Loyalists so heavy a trial, then, gentlemen, I do not hesitate to tell you most truly that in that dark hour there will not be wanting to you those of position and influence in England who would be willing to cast in their lot with you, and who, whatever the result, will share your fortunes and your fate. There will not be wanting those who, at the exact moment, when the time is fully come—if that time should come—will address you in words which are perhaps best expressed by one of our greatest English poets:

... A few weeks later, in a letter to a Liberal-Unionist member, he repeated his menace in an even clearer form: "If political parties and political leaders, not only Parliamentary but local, should be so utterly lost to every feeling and dictate of honour and courage as to hand over coldly, and for the sake of purchasing a short and illusory Parliamentary tranquillity, the lives and liberties of the Loyalists of Ireland to their hereditary and most bitter foes, make no doubt on this point—Ulster will not be a consenting party; Ulster at the proper moment will resort to the extreme arbitrament of force; Ulster will fight, Ulster will be right; Ulster will emerge from the struggle victorious, because all that Ulster represents to us Britons will command the sympathy and support of an enormous section of our British community, and also, I feel certain, will attract the admiration and the approval of free and civilized nations."

SALISBURY ON HOME RULE (1886).

Source.—The Times, April 14.

Demonstration at Her Majesty's Theatre against the Home Rule Bill.

Lord Salisbury: ... The great result which I hope from the brilliant debates that have taken place is that the conviction will be carried home to the British people that there is no middle term between government at Westminster and independent and entirely separate government at Dublin. If you do not have a Government in some form or other issuing from the centre you must have absolute separation. Now I ask you to look at what separation means. It means the cutting off from the British Islands of a province tied to them by the hand of Nature. It is hard to find a parallel instance in the contemporary world, because the tendency of events has been in the opposite direction. In every country you find that consolidation, and not severance, has been the object which statesmen have pursued. But there is one exception. There is a State in Europe which has had very often to hear the word "autonomy," which has had more than once to grant Home Rule, and to see separation following Home Rule. The State I have referred to is Turkey. Let anyone who thinks that separation is consistent with the strength and prosperity of the country look to its effect, its repeated effect, when applied to a country of which he can judge more impartially.... Turkey is a decaying Empire; England, I hope, is not. But I frankly admit that this is not the only reason which urges me. The point that the Government have consistently ignored is that Ireland is not occupied by a homogeneous and united people. In proportions which are variously stated, which some people state as four-fifths to one-fifth, but which I should be more inclined to state as two-thirds to one-third, the Irish people are deeply divided, divided not only by creed, which may extend into both camps, but divided by history and by a long series of animosities, which the conflicts that have lasted during centuries have created. I confess that it seems to me that Whiteboy Associations, and Moonlight Associations, and Riband Associations, and murder committed at night and in the open day, and a constant disregard to all the rights of property—these things make me doubt the angelic character which has been attributed to the Irish peasantry. I do not for a moment maintain that they are in their nature worse than other people. But I say there are circumstances attaching to Ireland—circumstances derived from history that is past and gone through many generations—which make it impossible for us to believe that, if liberty, entire liberty, were suddenly given to them, they would be able to forget the animosities of centuries and to treat those who are placed in their power for the first time with perfect justice and equity. You must not imagine that with a wave of a wand by any Minister, however powerful, the effects of centuries of conflict and exasperation will be wiped away.... My belief is that the future government of Ireland does not involve any unmanageable difficulty. We want a wise, firm, continuous administration of the law. We want a steady policy. But you must support it, or it will not take place. There has been a great contest between England and the discontented portion of the Irish people. It is a contest that has lasted through many generations past, through many vicissitudes, and now you are asked to submit to a measure which is placed before you, and to end that contest by a complete and ignominious surrender. It is not a surrender marked by the mere ordinary circumstances of ignominy. It is a painful thing for a great nation to lose a battle and have to acknowledge defeat. It is a painful thing if defeat involves loss of territory, and the nation has to be content with a restricted Empire. But these things do not represent the depth of infamy to which you will descend. There is something worse than all this, and that is when defeat is marked by the necessity of abandoning to your enemies those whom you have called upon to defend you, and who have risked their all on your behalf. That is an infamy below which it is impossible to go; that is an infamy to which you are asked to submit yourselves now. Your enemies in every part of the world will be looking on what you do with exultation. Your friends, your supporters, your partisans, will view it with shame, with confusion, and with dismay in every quarter of the globe.

MR. GLADSTONE'S APPEAL (1886).

Source.—Hansard, Third Series, vol. 295, col. 649. Second reading of the Home Rule Bill, June 7th.

Ireland stands at your bar expectant, hopeful, almost suppliant. Her words are the words of truth and soberness. She asks a blessed oblivion of the past, and in that oblivion our interest is deeper even than hers. You have been asked to-night to abide by the traditions of which we are the heirs. What traditions? By the Irish traditions? Go into the length and breadth of the world, ransack the literature of all countries, find if you can a single voice, a single book, in which the conduct of England towards Ireland is anywhere treated except with profound and bitter condemnation. Are these the traditions by which we are exhorted to stand? No; they are a sad exception to the glory of our country. They are a broad and black blot upon the pages of its history, and what we want to do is to stand by the traditions of which we are the heirs in all matters except our relations with Ireland, and to make our relation with Ireland conform to the other traditions of our country. So we treat our traditions, so we hail the demand of Ireland for what I call a blessed oblivion of the past. She asks also a boon for the future; and that boon for the future, unless we are much mistaken, will be a boon to us in respect of honour, no less than a boon to her in respect of happiness, prosperity, and peace. Such, sir, is her prayer. Think, I beseech you; think well, think wisely, think, not for the moment, but for the years that are to come, before you reject this Bill.

LIBERAL UNIONISM (1886).

Source.—The Times, May 17.

The Conservative leaders will do well to say plainly that they will not attack any Liberal seats held by representatives who have voted against the Home Rule Bill, whatever prospect there may have otherwise been of displacing the sitting members, or whatever provocation may have been given in former contests. By this course Conservatives can insure the return, with very few exceptions, of all the Liberal members who have declared against the Bill. It is open to them to assail the seats held by Gladstonian Liberals, and on the principle of conjoint action they will be entitled, in assailing those seats, and in defending those they at present occupy, to the support of all Liberal Unionists.

THE UNEMPLOYED RIOTS (1886).

Source.—The Times, February 9.

There is serious work before the new Home Secretary and his working-man colleague, Mr. Broadhurst. Yesterday there occurred the most alarming and destructive riot that has taken place in London for many years, or perhaps we may say the most destructive that has taken place within living memory. The destruction of the Hyde Park railings in 1866 was in some respects a more threatening affair, as being the work of a bigger mob; but that, unlike the present business, was not accompanied by the wholesale destruction of property and the looting of shops. Yesterday a mob some thousands strong marched along Pall Mall, St. James's Street, and Piccadilly to Hyde Park, then broke into several sections, and returned by South Audley Street, Oxford Street, Regent Street, and other routes, smashing windows, wrecking private carriages, and robbing jewellers' and other shops, utterly unchecked by the police, and leaving only one or two of their number in the hands of the authorities.... The occasion of all this lamentable affair was the great meeting of the unemployed which took place in Trafalgar Square. As our readers are aware, this meeting was but the culmination of many attempts that have been made lately to attract public attention to what is a very real difficulty and hardship. At last the time came for the men to gather in Trafalgar Square. But unfortunately there was not that perfect harmony in their proceedings which might have been desired. Some groups were simply unemployed labourers, come in all honesty of purpose to hear what could be said for them, and their chances of finding work. Some were fair-traders, anxious to impress on the Government that foreign bounties and other tariff enormities were at the root of the mischief. But with these moderately pacific bodies were the more dangerous element brought into the meeting by Messrs. Hyndman, Burns, and Champion. The Revolutionary Social Democrats were there, with the express object of breaking up the meeting called by Mr. Kenny and his friends, and of "preventing people being made the tools of the paid agitators who were working in the interests of the Fair Trade League." It cannot be too clearly understood that it was to the proceedings of these men—of Mr. Burns and Mr. Hyndman and their colleagues—that all the subsequent destruction was due.... Already on several occasions the fanatic Hyndman has done his best to break the peace, from the time when, a year or two ago, he told the crowd on the Thames Embankment that their principle should be a life for a life—the life of a Minister for that of every working-man who starved—down to the time when at the Holborn Town Hall he offered to head "the Revolution." Burns is as vehement, and his voice carries further. He yesterday told the mob that "the next time they met it would be to go and sack the bakers' shops in the West of London," and that "they had better die fighting than starving." He and his red flag led the mob yesterday in their march.

BIMETALLISM AND LABOUR DISPUTES (1886).

Source.—The Times, February 19.

Extract from a Letter by Lord Grey.

Some portion of public attention ought to be given to a subject of very pressing importance—that of the "scarcity of gold." The share which the enhancement of the value of gold has probably had in producing these disastrous strikes seems not to have attracted sufficient notice. The fall of prices from the growing scarcity of gold has necessarily made the same wages for labour really higher than they formerly were, while at the same time this fall of prices has diminished the total return from labour and capital employed in production.... Probably this has not been sufficiently well understood by either masters or men, but the masters have practically felt that they could no longer afford to pay the same money wages they used to do, while the men have not understood the necessity for such a reduction. What I would propose is that £1 notes, payable in silver bullion, should be issued, but only in exchange for the same bullion after a certain fixed amount of them had been sent into circulation. But this bullion I should propose to give or receive in exchange for notes, not at any fixed price for silver, but at the market price of the metal, which should be published weekly in the Gazette. By this arrangement it will be perceived that silver would be largely used as an instrument for carrying on the business of exchange, without incurring the inconvenience which seems to be inseparable from the scheme of the bimetallists, who would establish by law a fixed price for silver and for gold. As the cost of producing these metals is liable to variation, I cannot understand how the bimetallists can expect that fixing their comparative prices by law could prevent that which could at the moment be most cheaply produced from driving the other out of circulation, since all who had to pay money would naturally make use of the cheapest money they could get.

PASTEUR AND HYDROPHOBIA (1886).

Source.—The Times, January 8.

Extract from an Article on "Science in 1885."

We may here refer to the momentous work of M. Pasteur in connection with hydrophobia. That he has discovered a remedy for one of the most terrible afflictions to which humanity is liable it would probably be premature to say; but that he has taken every precaution against self-deception must be admitted, and so far as he has gone it is difficult to discredit his results.

THE FINAL HOME RULE RUPTURE (1886).

Source.—Morley's Life of Gladstone, vol. iii., pp. 364-368. (Macmillans.)

As it happened, all this [Randolph Churchill's resignation of the Exchequer, and Goschen's appointment] gave a shake to both of the Unionist wings. The ominous clouds of coercion were sailing slowly but discernibly along the horizon, and this made men in the Unionist camp still more restless and uneasy. Mr. Chamberlain, on the very day of the announcement of the Churchill resignation, had made a speech that was taken to hold out an olive-branch to his old friends. Sir William Harcourt ... thought the break-up of a great political combination to be so immense an evil as to call for almost any sacrifices to prevent it. He instantly wrote to Birmingham to express his desire to co-operate in reunion, and in the course of a few days five members of the original Liberal Cabinet of 1886 met at his house in what is known as the Round Table Conference (Sir W. Harcourt, Mr. Chamberlain, Lord Herschell, Sir George Trevelyan, and myself).... Mr. Gladstone gave the Round Table his blessing, his "general idea being that he had better meddle as little as possible with the Conference, and retain a free hand." Lord Hartington would neither join the Conference nor deny that he thought it premature.... On the other side, both English Liberals and Irish Nationalists were equally uneasy lest the unity of the party should be bought by the sacrifice of fundamentals.... Mr. Parnell, though alive to the truth that when people go into a conference it usually means that they are willing to give up something, was thoroughly awake to the satisfactory significance of the Birmingham overtures.

Things at the Round Table for some time went smoothly enough. Mr. Chamberlain gradually advanced the whole length. He publicly committed himself to the expediency of establishing some kind of legislative authority in Dublin in accordance with Mr. Gladstone's principle, with a preference, in his own mind, for a plan on the lines of Canada. This he followed up, also in public, by the admission that of course the Irish legislature must be allowed to organize their own form of executive government, either by an imitation on a small scale of all that goes on at Westminster and Whitehall, or in whatever other shape they might think proper.... Then the surface became mysteriously ruffled. Language was used by some of the plenipotentiaries in public, of which each side in turn complained as inconsistent with conciliatory negotiations in private. At last, on the very day on which the provisional result of the Conference was laid before Mr. Gladstone, there appeared in a print called The Baptist an article from Mr. Chamberlain containing an ardent plea for the disestablishment of the Welsh Church, but warning the Welshmen that they and the Scotch crofters, and the English labourers—thirty-two millions of people—must all go without much-needed legislation because three millions were disloyal, while nearly six hundred members of Parliament would be reduced to forced inactivity because some eighty delegates, representing the policy and receiving the pay of the Chicago Convention, were determined to obstruct all business until their demands were conceded. Men naturally asked what was the use of continuing a discussion when one party to it was attacking in this peremptory fashion the very persons and the policy that in private he was supposed to accept. Mr. Gladstone showed no implacability ... he said ... "I am inclined to think we can hardly do more now.... We are quite willing that the subject should stand over for resumption at a convenient season."

The resumption never happened. Two or three weeks later Mr. Chamberlain announced that he did not intend to return to the Round Table. No other serious and formal attempt was ever made on either side to prevent the Liberal Unionists from hardening into a separate species. When they became accomplices in coercion they cut off the chances of reunion.

THE COMING OF TECHNICAL EDUCATION (1887).

Source.—The Times, March 17.

Lord Hartington made a striking speech last night to the Polytechnic Young Men's Christian Institute. In the presence of such an audience a text was perhaps needed, and he took as his text some remarks made by Professor Huxley, who lately pointed out the instructive likeness between warfare and industry. If we are well advised—and Lord Hartington has no misgivings on the subject—in spending freely to protect ourselves against aggression, it is equally our duty to be not niggardly in providing industrial education, and diffusing scientific knowledge. It is the condition of industrial supremacy, and it is not an unattainable condition. A Watt or even an Edison is born, not made. But the knowledge of drawing, mechanics, mathematics, and chemistry, and other sciences or arts, which aid the artisan in his daily work, may be imparted, and on the spread of such knowledge may depend the continuance of industrial supremacy. Great commanders cannot be called into being; but in the main it depends on the rank and file of the army of industry whether its battles are lost or won. How is the work to be accomplished? In answer to this question Lord Hartington let fall one or two remarks which, though not offering a complete solution, are, if we mistake not, likely to be fruitful in consequences. The State, he is satisfied, cannot do all or much; and he is struck with the inability of purely voluntary efforts to meet the demand. He finds the necessary assistance, if anywhere, in our municipal institutions. "I hope the time is not far distant when our town councils or local governing bodies will establish in every considerable centre industrial and technical schools, suitable to the wants of the district, and supported out of local funds." The institutions which now imperfectly do the work of diffusing technical instruction "are playing the same part in relation to technical and industrial education that was played by the voluntary schools in relation to elementary education." This points to a national system of technical education; it is the largest and clearest conception of the subject which any public man of importance has put forth.

THE FIRST "GUILLOTINE" CLOSURE (1887).

Source.—Hansard, Third Series, vol. 315, col. 1674, June 10.

Ordered: That at ten o'clock p.m. on Friday, the 17th day of June, if the Criminal Law Amendment (Ireland) Bill be not previously reported from the Committee of the whole House, the Chairman shall put forthwith the Question or Questions on any amendment or motion already proposed from the Chair. He shall next proceed and successively put forthwith the Question that any clause then under consideration, and each remaining clause in the Bill, stand part of the Bill, unless progress be moved as hereinafter provided. After the clauses are disposed of, he shall forthwith report the Bill, as amended, to the House.

From and after the passing of this Order, no motion that the Chairman do leave the Chair, or do report progress, shall be allowed, unless moved by one of the members in charge of the Bill, and the Question on such motion shall be put forthwith.

If progress be reported on 17th June the Chairman shall put this Order in force in any subsequent sitting of the Committee.

JUBILEE RETROSPECTS (1887).

I.

Source.—An article by Mr. Gladstone in The Nineteenth Century, vol. xxi., p. 1.

The Prophet of the new Locksley Hall records against us many sad, and even shameful, defaults. They are not to be denied, and the list might probably be lengthened. The youngest among us will not see the day in which new social problems will have ceased to spring up as from the depths, and vex even the most successful solvers of the old; or in which this proud and great English nation will not have cause, in all its ranks and orders, to bow its head before the Judge Eternal, and humbly to confess to forgotten duties, or wasted and neglected opportunities. It is well to be reminded, and in tones such as make the deaf man hear, of city children who "soak and blacken soul and sense in city slime"; of maidens cast by thousands on the street; of the sempstress scrimped of her daily bread; of dwellings miserably crowded; of fever as the result. But take first the city child as he is described. For one such child now there were ten, perhaps twenty, fifty years back. A very large, and a still increasing proportion of these children have been brought under the regular teaching and discipline of the school. Take the maidens who are now, as they were then, cast by thousands on the streets. But then, if one among them were stricken with penitence, and sought for a place in which to hide her head, she found it only in the pomp of paid institutions, and in a help well meant, no doubt, yet carrying little of what was most essential, sympathetic discrimination, and mild, nay even tender care. Within the half-century a new chapter has opened. Faith and love have gone forth into the field. Specimens of womankind, sometimes the very best and highest, have not deemed this quest of souls beneath them. Scrimping of wages, no doubt, there is and was. But the fair wage of to-day is far higher than it was then, and the unfair wage is assumably not lower. Miserable and crowded dwellings, again, and fever as their result, both then and now. But legislation has in the interval made its attempts in earnest; and if this was with awkward and ungainly hand, private munificence or enterprise is dotting our city areas with worthy dwellings. Above all, have we not to record in this behalf martyred lives, such as those of Denison and Toynbee? Or shall we refuse honourable mention to not less devoted lives, happily still retained, of such persons as Miss Octavia Hill? With all this there has happily grown up not only a vast general extension of benevolent and missionary means, but a great parochial machinery of domestic visitation, charged with comfort and blessing to the needy, and spread over so wide a circle, that what was formerly an exception may now with some confidence be said to be the rule. If insufficiencies have come to be more keenly felt, is that because they are greater, or because there is a bolder and better trained disposition to feel them?...

I will refer as briefly as may be to the sphere of legislation. Slavery has been abolished. A criminal code, which disgraced the Statute Book, has been effectually reformed. Laws of combination and contract, which prevented the working population from obtaining the best price for their labour, have been repealed. The lamentable and demoralizing abuses of the Poor Law have been swept away. Lives and limbs, always exposed to destruction through the incidents of labour, formerly took their chance, no man heeding them, even when the origin of the calamity lay in the recklessness or neglect of the employer. They are now guarded by preventive provisions, and the loss is mitigated, to the sufferers or their survivors, by pecuniary compensation. The scandals of labour in mines, factories, and elsewhere, to the honour, first and foremost, of the name of Shaftesbury, have been either removed, or greatly qualified and reduced. The population on the sea-coast is no longer forced wholesale into contraband trade by fiscal follies; and the Game Laws no longer constitute a plausible apology for poaching. The entire people have good schools placed within the reach of their children, and are put under legal obligation to use the privileges and contribute to the charge. They have also at their doors the means of husbanding their savings, without the compromise of their independence by the inspection of the rector or the squire, and under the guarantee of the State to the uttermost farthing of the amount. Information through a free press, formerly cut off from them by stringent taxation, is now at their easy command. Their interests at large are protected by their votes, and their votes are protected by the secrecy which screens them from intimidation either through violence, or in its subtler forms.

It is perhaps of interest to turn from such dry outlines as may be sketched by the aid of almanacs to those more delicate gradations of the social movement, which in their detail are indeterminate and almost fugitive, but which in their mass may be apprehended, and made the subject of record. Pugilism, which ranges between manliness and brutality, and which in the days of my boyhood, in its greatest celebrations, almost monopolized the space of journals of the highest order, is now rare, modest, and unobtrusive. But, if less exacting in the matter of violent physical excitements, the nation attaches not less but more value to corporal education, and for the schoolboy and the man alike athletics are becoming an ordinary incident of life. Under the influence of better conditions of living, and probably of increased self-respect, mendicity, except in seasons of special distress, has nearly disappeared. If our artisans combine (as they well may) partly to uphold their wages, it is also greatly with the noble object of keeping all the members of their enormous class independent of public alms. They have forwarded the cause of self-denial, and manfully defended themselves even against themselves, by promoting restraints upon the traffic in strong liquors. In districts where they are most advanced, they have fortified their position by organized co-operation in supply. Nor are the beneficial changes of the last half-century confined to the masses. Swearing and duelling established until a recent date almost as institutions of the country, have nearly disappeared from the face of society.... At the same time the disposition to lay bare public mischiefs and drag them into the light of day, which, though liable to exaggeration, has perhaps been our best distinction among the nations, has become more resolute than ever....

The sum of the matter seems to be that, upon the whole and in a degree, we who lived fifty, sixty, seventy years back, and are living now, have lived into a gentler time; that the public conscience has grown more tender, as indeed was very needful; and that, in matters of practice, at sight of evils formerly regarded with indifference, or even connivance, it now not only winces, but rebels; that upon the whole the race has been reaping, and not scattering; earning, and not wasting.

II.

Source.—The Times, June 21.

The men of the Victorian age have lived in the midst of almost cataclysmic mental changes. New facts have rained upon them with a rapidity that baffles hypothesis, and stamps theory as obsolete before half the world has become reconciled to its existence. In such a time of intellectual flux anything like monumental art is impossible, since neither the artist nor the age possesses the permanence of mood required for a true presentment. Although, however, the Victorian era has not produced much that the most liberal charity can conceive as belonging to all time, it has shown immense fertility and vigour in supplying the intellectual wants of the present. In all but those supreme manifestations of the human intellect which we ascribe to genius, its products are at least equal, and in most cases superior, to those of any period of our history, while in quantity and variety of intellectual effort, and in diffusion of intellectual interest, it is entirely unapproachable.

"REMEMBER MITCHELSTOWN" (1887).

Source.—The Times, October 19.

(Mr. Gladstone at Nottingham): The case I have now to mention goes further than that. It is the Mitchelstown case. I was responsible for putting in a telegraphic answer to a telegram the words, "Remember Mitchelstown," and Mitchelstown will and must be remembered, and the meeting has an account to settle with the Government in respect to Mitchelstown. I should have been glad to have sealed my own lips, had not the Government sent forth its testimony, its solemn, downright, unequivocal judgment that the proceeding at Mitchelstown were right.... What did Mr. Balfour say, when the Irish Nationalist members brought up the question of the proceedings at Mitchelstown? He said that the whole action of the police was in the face of the most tremendous provocation, and absolutely in self-defence. He said that when the order to fire was given the order was to fire only on those portions of the crowd who were engaged in throwing stones.... Three human beings lost their lives under the fire of the police. I cannot say three men, for in the ordinary sense of the word they were not men. Two of them had been men, and were in harmless old age. The other was growing to be a man, and was still in harmless boyhood. Not one of these three persons is even alleged to have thrown a stone. Not one of them, if I recollect aright, is even alleged to have carried a stick.... Is not this a melancholy and a miserable farce—tragic, too, in the highest degree, when we consider that these trumpery proceedings, perhaps of some casual boys or men, who are only able in the utmost of their wrath and in the supply of stones that they could command to break two or three windows in the police barracks—that these are to be represented as leading and heading an attack which caused a humane and intelligent body of the representatives of the Government to fire out of windows, to kill three persons, one of them distant 100 yards away, and two others sixty yards away. I have said, and say again, "Remember Mitchelstown!"

"BLOODY SUNDAY" (1887).

Source.—Mackail's Life of William Morris, vol. ii., p. 190.

The restlessness among the working classes culminated in the famous scenes of the 13th of November (1887), "Bloody Sunday," in and round Trafalgar Square. A meeting in the Square had been announced to protest against the Irish policy of the Government; it had been proclaimed by the police, and became converted into a demonstration on a huge scale. No one who saw it will ever forget the strange, and indeed terrible, sight of that grey winter day, the vast sombre-coloured crowd, the brief but fierce struggle at the corner of the Strand, and the river of steel and scarlet that moved slowly through the dusky swaying masses when two squadrons of the Life Guards were summoned up from Whitehall. Only disorganized fragments straggled into the Square, to find that the other columns had also been headed off or crushed, and that the day was practically over. Preparations had been made to repel something little short of a popular insurrection. An immense police force had been concentrated, and in the afternoon the Square was lined by a battalion of Foot Guards, with fixed bayonets and twenty rounds of ball cartridge. For an hour or two the danger was imminent of street-fighting such as had not been known in London for more than a century. But the organized force at the disposal of the civil authorities proved sufficient to check the insurgent columns and finally clear the streets without a shot being fired. For some weeks afterwards the Square was garrisoned by special drafts of police. Otherwise London next day had resumed its usual aspect. Once more the London Socialists had drawn into line with the great mass of the London Radicals, and a formidable popular movement had resulted, which, on that Sunday, was within a very little of culminating in a frightful loss of life and the practical establishment of a state of siege in London. But the English spirit of compromise soon made itself felt.... Measures were taken for the relief of the unemployed. Political Radicalism resumed its normal occupations; and by the end of the year the Socialist League had dropped back into its old place, a small body of enthusiasts among whom an Anarchist group were now beginning to assume a distinct prominence.

FIRST REPORT ON THE RAND (1887).

Source.—The Board of Trade Journal, December.

Extracts from a Report, dated 4th October, by Mr. Ralph Williams, British Officer at Pretoria.

On the 20th September, 1886, the Witwatersrand district was declared a public goldfield, and from that date the history of Johannesburg begins. For some months the town was known as Ferreira's Camp, and the Natal Camp, and it was not till, perhaps, March last that the present town of Johannesburg became recognized as the central point of the goldfields of the district. From that date the growth of the town has been almost unprecedented.... Large hotels exist which equal in accommodation anything in South Africa. Warehouses are full of all that can be obtained even at Cape Town. A theatre—rough, it is true, but of considerable capacity—is in full working order. Four banks are at work. Three newspapers are published every other day.... The actual number of the population I can hardly estimate, opinions differing so greatly. In the town of Johannesburg itself I am disposed to think there are about 4,000 people. The outlying districts also contain a very large population, probably nearly equalling that of the town.

The reefs which constitute the wealth of the Witwatersrand are entirely different from any development which has yet been worked.... The principal reef, which has now been traced to a distance of between twenty-five and thirty miles, is called the "main reef." It may be taken to have an average breadth of from 3 feet 6 inches to 15 feet. It has in several places been tested to a depth of 70 feet, in every case being proved to be better and richer at the lower levels than at the surface.

An inspection of the properties and inquiry into the cost of production cannot fail to impress one with the fact that, if these reefs are found to have sufficient depth, one of the richest goldfields in the world has now come to light.

BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD