Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century | Page 8

enlisted in all
these troubles, but Palmerston would not allow her to proceed to the
point of breaking the peace. From 1861 to 1865, while the Civil War
was being fought out in America, his government was prompt to
recognize the belligerent status of the Confederacy, and to favor the
South by allowing privateers like the "Alabama" to be built and
manned in English ports. But the actual break with Mr. Lincoln's
government did not come, and the old Whig statesman lived to see the
South overpowered.
Through the middle reaches of the century the political power in
England remained for the most part in the hands of the Whig, latterly
called Liberal, ministries. The impulse for reform-- political, economic,
and social--had spent itself before 1850, and the older statesmen who
guided the public policies had no sympathy with the demands for

radical legislation, church disestablishment, universal suffrage, and
what not, which came up from many parts of the nation. With the death
of Palmerston, and the retirement of Russell, a new era was inaugurated,
and new actors stepped to the front of the stage.
GLADSTONE AND DISRAELI
At the head of the Liberals was William Ewart Gladstone, who in his
younger days had followed his master, Peel, out of the old Tory lines
into the camp of the free traders, and had been Russell's chief lieutenant,
and Palmerston's financial minister for the last half-dozen years. He
was a man of splendid intellectual power, sterling morality, an adept at
parliamentary management, a shrewd financier, and held a deep
conviction that it was the part of statesmanship to embody in law what
he conceived to be the proper demands of the nation. His opponent for
a generation was Benjamin Disraeli, the young Jewish novelist, who
had first won a following in the House of Commons by voicing the
venom of the old-line protectionist Tories against the recreant Peel.
Versatile, shifty, brilliant, this adventurous politician made himself
indispensable to the Conservatives, and overcame by political moves
which were little short of genius, the leadership of the opposition.
Indeed, he may be said to have transformed Conservatism, giving it a
new rallying cry, and inscribing great achievements upon its banner.
LIBERAL REFORMS
"Whenever that man gets my place we shall have strange doings,"
Palmerston had said toward the end of his life, alluding to the
open-minded Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. Gladstone, and had he
remained on earth for another generation, he would indeed have seen
much done by his erstwhile followers under Gladstone's direction
which he would have accounted passing strange. Admitting the
democratic principle that the state owed it to itself to provide every
man's child with an education, Gladstone inaugurated (1870) a
beneficent system of free public schools. An old popular grievance, the
viva voce method of voting at parliamentary elections, was done away
and the secret ballot substituted (1872), a change which struck a heavy
blow at the prevalent bribery and intimidation. He corrected one of the

worst abuses in the army by abolishing the purchase system, under
which a junior officer was accustomed to buy his promotion by
compensating his seniors, a practice which had closed the higher grades
to men of small means. The extension of the suffrage to the agricultural
laborers was finally reached by his Reform Bill of 1884, the last class
being thus admitted to the body politic.
THE CAUSE OF IRELAND
But it was to the grievances of Ireland that Gladstone bent the readiest
ear, and it was upon that reef that his political career made shipwreck at
the last. In his first ministry he undertook and carried the
disestablishment of the Irish Church, by which the Irish Catholics were
relieved of an odious burden. His Irish Land Act of 1870 aimed to give
the tenant-farmer certain valuable rights in the land which he rented.
The result was rather to redouble the cry against "landlordism," with its
corollary of agrarian crime. A second Land Act (1881) provided a land
court for adjusting rents. Instead of quieting the disorders this indulgent
legislation was the signal for a fresh outburst of crime. The Irish Land
League was organized to secure the abolition of landlordism, and when
the Irish leader, Charles Stewart Parnell, was imprisoned he exhorted
the tenants to cease paying rent altogether until the government should
grant all their demands. The Liberals were forced for the moment to use
strong measures to restore order to Ireland, but the Home Rule party in
Parliament, skillfully led by Mr. Parnell, continued to embarrass
legislation and obstruct the ordinary functions of government. In April,
1886, Mr, Gladstone, having become Prime Minister for the third time,
asked Parliament to grant home rule to Ireland through an Irish
Parliament sitting at Dublin. Parnell and his following supported the
measure, but the