squires" voted almost solidly against him. Peel nobly assigned the merit of the change to the "unaffected and unadorned eloquence of Richard Cobden." 11. "The field is lost," said the real leader of the Protectionists, "but at any rate there should be retribution upon those who had betrayed it." A chance for The Coercion vengeance was soon found. Peel brought for- Bill and fall ward a Coercion Bill to put down disorder in of Peel, 1846. Ireland, and on 25th June the Protectionists joined with the Whigs and Radicals in voting against its second reading, though both alike had supported the measure when first introduced. The result was inevitable. "They say we are beaten by 73," whispered a Cabinet minister to Peel. "Peel looked very grave, and extended his chin, as his habit was when he was annoyed and cared not to speak. He began to comprehend his position, and that 'the emperor was without his army.' 66 A few days later the great ministry came to an end. "We felt so safe with them," wrote the Queen; never during five years did they recommend to me what was not for the country's best, and never for the party's advantage only." But in a state governed by party the indignation of the Protectionists was intelligible, if not excusable. Yet the people had got cheap bread. CHAPTER IV. Victoria-Russell and Palmerston, 1846-1865. 1. The Conservative host, which Peel had so carefully drilled and successfully led to victory, had now broken hopelessly with its leaders, and for the next State of twenty years there were three parties in English Parties, 1846. politics. The Peelites were the small, able, and experienced, but not very popular, party that gathered round the fallen leader. The Protectionists still held together under Bentinck, Stanley, and Disraeli. The Liberals (a name borrowed from continental politics, more used henceforth than the rather discredited word Whig) now formed the largest single band in the Commons; but they were wanting in unity, owing to the rivalry of Russell and Palmerston, and the loose party allegiance of the Irish and Radical members. The latter included the shrewd and able, but impracticable and doctrinaire, Philosophical Radicals, under George Grote, banker and historian, and Sir William Molesworth, and the Manchester Radicals under Bright and Cobden, who with much zeal for reform, honest indifference to political clique, and special knowledge in trading questions, were ignorant and careless of foreign policy, and tied down by narrow notions of the business of the state and by middle-class prejudices that made them oppose many measures for the welfare of the people. The Liberals now formed a ministry, which, however, was not a strong one, nor were its acts brilliant. Yet it kept in office till 1852, and then only broke up through internal quarrels. Ministry, 1846-52. Lord John Russell became Prime Minister. He was "small in stature, slenderly made, and weakly in appearance," a poor speaker, The Russell but a dexterous tactician, shrewd politician, and a consistent Whig, with fixed though fairly liberal views, but "miserably wanting in amenity and the small arts of gaining popularity, and with a reputation both for obstinacy and lack of firmness," and with no very great claim to the higher merits of statesmanship. Charles Wood was Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir George Grey Home Secretary, Lord Cottenham Chancellor, and Macaulay Paymaster. Palmerston was again Foreign Secretary, and Lord Grey, accepting the inevitable, became Secretary for the Colonies. The Potato Famine of 1845-47. 2. The first business of the new ministry was Ireland, where the evils of the old cottier system still lived on, and the wretchedness of the people became more extreme with the rapid growth of the population, now mounting up to nearly nine millions. Except in the manufacturing districts of the north-east, and the rich grazing lands of the midlands, the land was filled with hungry peasants, paying a monstrous rent for a miserable patch of potato-ground, always in arrears, and as hopeless as in the old days of the Penal Code. The main food of the cottiers was the potato, because it was the cheapest way of keeping body and soul together. But in 1845 the potato crop was a partial failure, and great misery followed. Again in July 1846 a sudden blight destroyed the potato crop. "I beheld with sorrow," wrote Father Mathew, the earnest advocate of temperance, "one wild waste of putrifying vegetation, and the wretched people seated on the fences of their decaying gardens, and bewailing the destruction that left them foodless." For the rich corn harvest was sent out of the country, while hundreds of thousands were dying like flies, of famine, and of the deadly fever which few of the starving souls could bear up against. The poets of Young Ireland lamented their pitiable plight : : Weary men, what reap ye? Golden corn for the stranger. England was deeply moved by the tale of Irish suffering, and the Government bestirred itself to help the faminestricken land. But the ministers were ignorant and timid, and afraid of the cry of the Radicals and Economists that State interference with trade and the food-supply went against the teachings of Adam Smith and Ricardo. So they started relief-works, such as road-making, and paid the workers; but they took care that the roads should lead nowhere, and they left the food-supply to the ordinary traders, who made disgraceful fortunes by speculating in Indian meal and flour. The worn-out victims of famine were forced to waste their scanty strength on useless work, and to drag their weary frames for miles to the nearest shop of the food speculator. The land lay untilled, because better wages could be got from the Government works. All sorts of jobbery went on among the Government officials, contractors, and tradesfolk. The misery still remained, and famine and fever still raged. In 1847 Government dropped its fears of the Economists, and opened soup-kitchens and gave away Indian-corn meal. Ships of any country were allowed to take in corn duty free. Large sums were advanced to the bankrupt boards of guardians, who had been quite powerless to meet the rush of the whole people to the workhouses. Lavish private charity did something more. All sorts of schemes were now brought forward for permanently improving the state of Ireland. But Government rejected Lord George Bentinck's wise scheme Results of the for building railways with State money, and did Famine. nothing but alter the poor-law in a way that made it the direct interest of the landlords to get rid of the poor from their estates. Many landlords, seeing the cottier system did not pay, set to work to turn out the poor tenants, and turn their little holdings into large farms. "I have seen,” wrote a poor-law officer, "ruthless acts committed by drivers and sub-agents, wretched hovels pulled down when the inmates were helpless from fever and nakedness." The ignorant and helpless poor "linger The Clearances. about for weeks or months, burrowing behind the ditches under a few broken rafters of their former dwelling." England was horrified at such misdeeds, but misplaced regard for the rights of property prevented anything being done to stop the evictions. The landlords were in many cases almost as badly off as their tenants, and their estates were often so encumbered and mortgaged, that they excused their harshThe Encumbered Estates ness under the plea of poverty. To prevent Act, 1849. this, Government passed in 1849 the Encumbered Estates Act, which allowed the broken-down landlord to sell his property, and gave the buyer a parliamentary title. This measure did but partial good, for the new landlords, though richer and more energetic, were quite out of touch with the people. But it sealed the doom of the cottier system, except in the barren highlands of the west, where it still lingers on. Yet the bringing in of English ways and English capital made the Irish more bitter than ever, though the mass of the people slowly but steadily got better off. A vast emigration completed the depopulation which famine and fever had begun. Fever followed the miserable wanderers to the filthy and closely packed emigrant ships. The survivors could not fail to hand down to their children the fiercest hatred of the English name. 1848: 3. In 1848 a general revolutionary movement upset half the thrones of Europe. Louis Philippe was driven from France, and a republic set up. In Italy the The year of Revolutions, Liberal movement for national unity was revived, headed by a new and reforming Pope, Pius IX., and by Charles Albert, King of Sardinia. Metternich, the prop of the Holy Alliance, was turned out of office at Vienna, but Hungary rose in revolt under the eloquent and energetic Kossuth. In Germany the Liberals sought unity by getting rid of the princelings, bringing together a Parliament at Frankfort, and wresting sea-girt Schleswig-Holstein from its Danish masters. In Switzerland the Catholic cantons formed the Sonderbund, and went to war against the radical Diet of the Confederation. Popular revolts broke out everywhere. Palmerston believed that "Governments were wise to pursue improvements and remodel their institutions, and that no other state had a right to restrain them in such an inherent attribute of independent sovereignty." So he strongly favoured the general constitutional and national movement, and got himself hated by men of the old school as a firebrand and a revolutionary. But his policy of mediation was not very successful. Spain and Eng- Palmerston's land broke off diplomatic relations because Policy and Fall, Palmerston backed up the Progressistas against Dec. 1851. Narvaez, the Moderado minister. He failed to prevent war between Sardinia and Austria, and the defeat of the former at Novara postponed the unity of Italy (1849). But as time went on the Liberal movement became a revolutionary one. A mob rising bathed Paris in blood, and street-fighting went on in half the great cities of Europe. The Pope was turned out of Rome, and a republic set up under the highsouled Mazzini and the fearless, warm-hearted Garibaldi. The worst of the old rulers gave up their thrones to younger and less hated kinsmen. In great alarm Frederick William IV. of Prussia backed out of the national movement in Germany. Russia helped Francis Joseph, the new Austrian Emperor (his uncle Ferdinand I. had resigned), to restore his despotic rule in Hungary. Reaction followed revolution, and the national and Liberal cause seemed undone. At last Austria renewed its hold on Italy, and Germany returned to the obedience of its many rulers. Finally a needy and cunning adventurer, Louis Napoleon, the son of Hortense Beauharnais, and Louis, sometime King of Holland, Napoleon I.'s brother, had got himself elected President of the French Republic, upset the Constitution he had sworn to observe, murdered or imprisoned his chief opponents by the coup d'état of 2d December 1851, and brought in a military despotism, under a ring of vulgar fortune-hunters of the lowest type, headed by his halfbrother Morny, which was a corrupt copy of the worst side of the great Emperor's reign. Palmerston was so disgusted with revolutions ending in anarchy that, in his jaunty way, he privately expressed the fullest approval of what had been done. But it is hard to draw a line between a minister's private and official acts, and he practically pledged the Queen, the Cabinet, and the nation to approving perjury, robbery, and violence. Russell was delighted at his rival's mistake, for Palmerston had long disgusted Queen and colleagues by acting entirely on his own authority. The Prince disliked his anti-German policy in backing up Denmark in the Schleswig-Holstein affair (1850). His high-handed, blustering blockade of the Peiræus in 1850, because the king of the Hellenes had seized on the garden of the historian Finlay, and the Athens mob had sacked the |
