Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century | Page 9

Liberal party was rent in twain. Lord Hartington,
Joseph Chamberlain, John Bright, and others of less note, deserted their
old chief. Enough of these "Liberal Unionists" seceded to defeat the bill.
In August, 1892, the aged Liberal chieftain again carried the elections
and took the seals of office for the fourth time. Home Rule was again
the principal plank in his platform, and all the energies of the "Grand
Old Man" were mustered to carry a new law differing somewhat from
the bill of 1886. Though it passed the Commons (301 to 267) it was

thrown out by the Lords by 419 to 41, and his successor, Lord
Rosebery, had no mind to renew the contest.
The Gladstonian foreign policy was such as might have been expected
from a leader whose motto was "Peace, Retrenchment, and Reform." It
was never aggressive, and in the opinion of many, it was lacking in the
assertion of British rights. Thus, in 1871, when Russia refused to be
bound longer by the treaty stipulations forbidding her to maintain a war
fleet on the Euxine, Mr. Gladstone did not hold her to her engagement.
In England it was thought to be a sign of weakness in his government
to allow the "Alabama" and "San Juan Boundary" questions to be
settled by arbitrators instead of by diplomacy or a show of force. In
1881, when the Boers of the Transvaal had worsted the British at
Majuba Hill, they received from Gladstone an honorable peace instead
of extermination. The abandonment of the Egyptian Soudan, in 1883,
which carried with it the massacre of General Gordon, at Khartoum,
was perhaps the heaviest load that the Gladstonian foreign policy ever
had to bear.
DISRAELI AND IMPERIALISM
Foreign affairs were the field of Disraeli's most brilliant exploits. "He
had two ruling ideas," says the historian Oman, "the first was the
conception of England as an imperial world- power, interested in
European politics, but still more interested in the maintenance and
development of her vast colonial and Indian empire. This is the notion
which friends and enemies now using the word in different senses call
'imperialism.' The second ruling thought in Disraeli's mind was the
conviction that the Conservative party ought to step forward as rival to
the Liberal party in commanding the sympathies and allegiance of the
masses." In pursuance of this second idea he took the "leap in the
dark," in 1867, carrying a reform bill which was but little short of
democratic in its extension of the right to vote. This was followed up
by legislation favoring the English tenant-farmers, and improving the
condition of workingmen in towns. Even after Disraeli's death, Lord
Salisbury continued his domestic policy, instituting local government
by means of county councils in 1888, making the schools free in 1891,

and refunding the national debt in 1888.
It was a great day for the British empire when Disraeli's telegram to the
hard-pressed Khedive of Egypt, in 1875, bought for England the
controlling interest in the Suez canal, the water-gate to India. It was a
bold stroke of Disraeli's also which, at the close of the Russo-Turkish
War of 1877-78, compelled the victor to take his paw from the throat of
his victim and submit the treaty to a congress of the powers at Berlin,
where its terms were modified and England was admitted to its benefits.
The Second Afghan War (1878-80), and the Zulu War (1878-79), and
the Boer War, which brought little glory to Britain, were the direct
result of the Prime Minister's desire to extend the empire and
strengthen its frontiers. It may have been theatrical, but it was certainly
impressive to the assembled princes of India when Lord Lytton, the
Viceroy, proclaimed Victoria Empress of India in Delhi, the old capital
of the Moguls, on January 1, 1877. And though Disraeli (raised to the
peerage as Lord Beaconsfield) was in his grave, his spirit dominated
the pageantry of 1887 and 1897, when every nation and tribe and
kindred and people of the Greater Britain sent representatives to
London to celebrate the jubilee and diamond jubilee of the
Empress-Queen, to whose aggrandizement he had contributed so
effectively.
AFTER A HUNDRED YEARS
The century closes upon another England than that which was
struggling against Napoleon at its dawn. Instead of the "right little tight
little island," a compact and self-contained nation, it is now the head of
an empire comparable in extent and population with no other since the
Rome of Augustus. Canada, Federal Australia, New Zealand, and
South Africa form a Greater Britain, while the subject lands and islands
dot the globe. The problem which confronts the English at the end of
the century is not whether they can hold their own against a foreign
power as in the days of Waterloo, but whether