The Life of William Ewart Gladstone Volume II Part 55

He asked me what I thought of the doctrine of obligation so much pressed upon him by the Queen. I said that in my opinion the case was clear enough. Her Majesty had not always acted on the rule of sending for the leader of the opposition. Palmerston was the known and recognised leader of the opposition in 1859, but the Queen sent for Granville. The leader, if sent for, was in my opinion bound either to serve himself, or to point out some other course to her Majesty which he might deem to be more for the public advantage. And if that course should fail in consequence of the refusal of the person pointed out, the leader of the party could not leave her Majesty unprovided with a government, but would be bound in loyalty to undertake the task.

I did not indicate, nor did he ask, what I should do if sent for.

He did not indicate, nor did I ask, what he should do if the Queen continued to press him to go on, in spite of his advice to her to move in another direction.-_April 23, 1880._

A barren controversy was afterwards raised on the question whether at this exciting moment Lord Hartington tried to form a government. What he did, according to the memorandum, was to advise the Queen to send for Mr.

Gladstone, on the ground of his belief that Mr. Gladstone would join no government of which he was not the head. The Queen then urged him to make sure of this, before she would acquiesce in his refusal to undertake the commission. The Queen, as Mr. Gladstone says, had a right to require positive information, and Lord Hartington had a right, and it was even his duty, to procure this information for her, and to put the direct question to Mr. Gladstone, whether he would or would not act in an administration of which he was not the head. He went back to Windsor, not in the position of a statesman who has tried to form a government and failed, but in the position of one who had refused a task because he knew all along that failure was certain, and now brought proof positive that his refusal was right.(370)

What happened next was easy to foresee:-

_Interview with Lord Granville and Lord Hartington._

_April 23, 1880._-Soon after half-past three to-day, Lord Granville and Lord Hartington arrived from Windsor at my house, and signified to me the Queen's command that I should repair to Windsor, where she would see me at half-past six.

The purport of Lord Hartington's conversation with me yesterday had been signified. They had jointly advised thereupon that I should be sent for with a view to the formation of a government, and her Majesty desired Lord Granville would convey to me the message. I did not understand that there had been any lengthened audience, or any reference to details.

Receiving this intimation, I read to them an extract from an article in the _Daily News_ of yesterday,(371) descriptive of their position relatively to me, and of mine to them, and said that, letting drop the epithets, so I understood the matter. I presumed, therefore, that under the circ.u.mstances as they were established before their audience, they had unitedly advised the sovereign that it was most for the public advantage to send for me. To this they a.s.sented. I expressed, a little later, my sense of the high honour and patriotism with which they had acted; said that I had endeavoured to fulfil my own duty, but was aware I might be subject to severe criticism for my resignation of the leaders.h.i.+p five years ago, which I had forced upon them; but I did it believing in good faith that we were to have quiet times, and for the first years, 1875 and 1876, and to the end of the session I had acted in a manner conformable to that resignation, and had only been driven from my corner by compulsion. They made no reply, but Granville had previously told me he was perfectly satisfied as to my communications with him.

I at once asked whether I might reckon, as I hoped, on their co-operation in the government. Both a.s.sented. Granville agreed to take the foreign office, but modestly and not as of right. I proposed the India office as next, and as very near in weight, and perhaps the most difficult of all at this time, to Hartington, which he desired time to consider. I named Childers as the most proper person for the war office. As I had to prepare for Windsor, our interview was not very long; and they agreed to come again after dinner.

We spoke of the governor-generals.h.i.+p, at least I spoke to Granville who stayed a little after Hartington, and I said Goschen's position as to the franchise would prevent his being in the cabinet now, but he should be in great employ. Granville had had the lead in the conversation, and said the Queen requested _him_ to carry the message to me.

_Audience at Windsor._

_Windsor Castle, April 23, 1880._-At 6.50 I went to the Queen, who received me with perfect courtesy, from which she never deviates.

Her Majesty presumed I was in possession of the purport of her communications with Lord Granville and with Lord Hartington, and wished to know, as the administration of Lord Beaconsfield had been "turned out," whether I was prepared to form a government.

She thought she had acted const.i.tutionally in sending for the recognised leaders of the party, and referring the matter to them in the first instance. I said that if I might presume to speak, nothing could in my views be more correct than her Majesty's view that the application should be so made (I did not refer to the case as _between_ Lord Granville and Lord Hartington), and that it would have been an error to pa.s.s them by and refer to me. They had stood, I said, between me and the position of a candidate for office, and it was only their advising her Majesty to lay her commands upon me, which could warrant my thinking of it after all that had occurred. But since they had given this advice, it was not consistent with my duty to shrink from any responsibility which I had incurred, and I was aware that I had incurred a very great responsibility. I therefore humbly accepted her Majesty's commission.

Her Majesty wished to know, in order that she might acquaint Lord Beaconsfield, whether I could undertake to form a government, or whether I only meant that I would make the attempt. I said I had obtained the co-operation of Lord Granville and Lord Hartington, and that my knowledge and belief as to prevailing dispositions would, I think, warrant me in undertaking to form a government, it being her Majesty's pleasure. I had ascertained that Lord Granville would be willing to accept the foreign office; and I had also to say that the same considerations which made it my duty to accept office, seemed also to make it my duty to submit myself to her Majesty's pleasure for the office of chancellor of the exchequer together with that of first lord of the treasury.

She asked if I had thought of any one for the war office, which was very important. The report of the Commission would show that Lord Cardwell's system of short service had entirely broken down, and that a change must be made at any rate as regarded the non-commissioned officers. Lord Hartington had a.s.sured her that no one was committed to the system except Lord Cardwell, and he was very unwell and hardly able to act. Lord Hartington knew the war office, and she thought would make a good war minister. I said that it seemed to me in the present state of the country the first object was to provide for the difficulties of statesmans.h.i.+p, and then to deal with those of administration. The greatest of all these difficulties, I thought, centred in the India office, and I was very much inclined to think Lord Hartington would be eminently qualified to deal with them, and would thereby take a place in the government suitable to his position and his probable future.

She asked, to whom, then, did I think of entrusting the war office? [Resumed this afternoon, April 24.](372) I said Mr.

Childers occurred to me as an administrator of eminent capacity and conciliatory in his modes of action; his mind would be open on the grave subjects treated by the Commission, which did not appear to me to be even for Lord Cardwell matters of committal, but simply of public policy to be determined by public advantage. She thought that Mr. Childers had not been popular at the admiralty, and that it was desirable the secretary for war should be liked by the army. I said that there was an occurrence towards the close of his term which placed him in a difficult position, but relied on his care and discretion. (She did not press the point, but is evidently under strong professional bias.)

She spoke of the chancellors.h.i.+p, and I named Lord Selborne.

She referred to general action and hoped it would be conciliatory.

I said that every one who had served the crown for even a much smaller term of years than I had the good or ill fortune to reckon, would know well that an incoming government must recognise existing engagements, and must take up, irrespective of its preferences, whatever was required by the character and honour of the country. I referred to the case of Scinde and Sir R. Peel's cabinet in 1843; which she recognised as if it had been recently before her.

She said, "I must be frank with you, Mr. Gladstone, and must fairly say that there have been some expressions"-I think she said some little things, which had caused her concern or pain. I said that her Majesty's frankness, so well known, was a main ground of the entire reliance of her ministers upon her. That I was conscious of having incurred a great responsibility, and felt the difficulty which arises when great issues are raised, and a man can only act and speak upon the best lights he possesses, aware all the time that he may be in error. That I had undoubtedly used a mode of speech and language different in some degree from what I should have employed, had I been the leader of a party or a candidate for office. Then as regarded conciliation, in my opinion the occasion for what I had described had wholly pa.s.sed away, and that so far as I was concerned, it was my hope that her Majesty would not find anything to disapprove in my general tone; that my desire and effort would be to diminish, her cares, in any case not to aggravate them; that, however, considering my years, I could only look to a short term of active exertion and a personal retirement comparatively early. With regard to the freedom of language I had admitted, she said with some good-natured archness, "But you will have to bear the consequences," to which I entirely a.s.sented. She seemed to me, if I may so say, "natural under effort." All things considered, I was much pleased. I ended by kissing her Majesty's hand.

IV

(M200) The usual embarra.s.sments in building a government filled many days with unintermittent labour of a kind that, like Peel, Mr. Gladstone found intensely hara.s.sing, though interesting. The duty of leaving out old colleagues can hardly have been other than painful, but Mr. Gladstone was a man of business, and lie reckoned on a proper stoicism in the victims of public necessity. To one of them he wrote, "While I am the oldest man of my political generation, I have been brought by the seeming force of exceptional circ.u.mstances to undertake a task requiring less of years and more of vigour than my acc.u.mulating store of the one and waning residue of the other, and I shall be a solecism in the government which I have undertaken to form. I do not feel able to ask you to resume the toils of office," etc., but would like to name him the recipient for a signal mark of honour. "I have not the least right to be disappointed when you select younger men for your colleagues," the cheerful man replied. Not all were so easily satisfied. "It is cruel to make a disqualification for others out of an infirmity of my own," Mr. Gladstone wrote to the oldest of his comrades in the Peelite days, but-et cetera, et cetera, and he would be glad to offer his old ally the red riband of the Bath when one should be vacant. The peer to whom this letter with its dubious solatium was addressed, showed his chagrin by a reply of a single sentence: that he did not wish to leave the letter unanswered, lest it should seem to admit that he was in a state of health which he did not feel to be the case; the red riband was not even declined. One admirable man with intrepid _navete_ proposed himself for the cabinet, but was not admitted; another no less admirable was pressed to enter, but felt that he could be more useful as an independent member, and declined-an honourable transaction repeated by the same person on more than one occasion later. To one excellent member of his former cabinet, the prime minister proposed the chairmans.h.i.+p of committee, and it was with some tartness refused. Another equally excellent member of the old administration he endeavoured to plant out in the viceregal lodge at Dublin, without the cabinet, but in vain. To a third he proposed the Indian vice-royalty, and received an answer that left him "stunned and out of breath." As the hours pa.s.sed and office after office was filled up, curiosity grew vivacious as to the fate appointed for the younger generation of radicals. The great posts had gone to patrician whigs, just as if Mr. Gladstone had been a Grey or a Russell. As we have seen, he had secured Lord Granville and Lord Hartington before he went to Windsor, and on the evening of his return, the first person to whom he applied was Lord Derby, one of the most sagacious men of his day, but a great territorial n.o.ble and a very recent convert. He declined office on the ground that if a man changes his party connection, he is bound to give proof that he wishes the change from no merely personal motive, and that he is not a gainer by it.

Mr. Bright had joined, it was true, and Mr. Forster, but Bright the new radicals honoured and revered without any longer following, and with Forster they had quarrelled violently upon education, nor was the quarrel ever healed. One astute adviser, well acquainted with the feeling and expectations of the left wing, now discovered to his horror that Mr.

Gladstone was not in the least alive to the importance of the leaders of the radical section, and had never dreamed of them for his cabinet. His view seems to have been something of this kind, "You have been saved from whig triumph in the person of Lord Hartington; now that you have got me to keep the balance, I must have a whig cabinet." He was, moreover, still addicted to what he called Peel's rule against admitting anybody straight into the cabinet without having held previous office. At last he sent for Sir Charles Dilke. To his extreme amazement Sir Charles refused to serve, unless either himself or Mr. Chamberlain were in the cabinet; the prime minister might make his choice between them; then the other would accept a subordinate post. Mr. Gladstone discoursed severely on this unprecedented enormity, and the case was adjourned. Mr. Bright was desired to interfere, but the pair remained inexorable. In the end the lot fell on Mr.

Chamberlain. "Your political opinions," Mr. Gladstone wrote to him (April 27), "may on some points go rather beyond what I may call the general measure of the government, but I hope and believe that there can be no practical impediment on this score to your acceptance of my proposal." So Mr. Chamberlain took office at the board of trade, where Mr. Gladstone himself had begun his effective career in administration nearly forty years before; and his confederate went as under-secretary to the foreign office. At that time the general feeling was that Sir Charles Dilke, long in parliament and a man of conspicuous mark within its walls, was rather badly used, and that Mr. Gladstone ought to have included both. All this was the ominous prelude of a voyage that was to be made through many storms.(373)

One incident of these labours of construction may ill.u.s.trate Mr.

Gladstone's curious susceptibility in certain kinds of personal contest.

He proposed that Mr. Lowe should be made a viscount, while the Queen thought that a barony would meet the claim. For once it broke the prime minister's sleep; he got up in the middle of the night and dashed off a letter to Windsor. The letter written, the minister went to bed again, and was in an instant sound asleep.

"The new parliament," he told his old friend at school and college, Sir Francis Doyle (May 10), "will be tested by its acts. It will not draw its inspiration from me. No doubt it will make changes that will be denounced as revolutionary, and then recognised as innocent and even good. But I expect it to act in the main on well-tried and established lines, and do much for the people and little to disquiet my growing years, or even yours." All fell out strangely otherwise, and disquiet marked this second administration from its beginning to its end. To lay all the blame on a prime minister or his cabinet for this, is like blaming the navigator for wild weather. In spite of storm and flood, great things were done; deep, notable, and abiding results ensued. The procedure of parliament underwent a profound revolution. So too did our electoral system in all its aspects.

New lines of cleavage showed themselves in the divisions of political party. A not unimportant episode occurred in the chapter of religious toleration. The Irish peasant, after suffering centuries of oppression and tyrannic wrong, at last got the charter of his liberation. In a more distant region, as if to ill.u.s.trate the power of events against the will of a statesman and the contemporary opinion of a nation, England for good or evil found herself planted in the valley of the Nile, and became a land-power on the Mediterranean.

APPENDIX

Budget Of 1860

_Page __26_

_Sir William Heathcote wrote to Mr. Gladstone, May 4, 1861_:-

I understood you in your rebukes of Lewis in 1857, to be aiming not only at a change of his plan of finance in that particular year, but (if that were impossible, or at least could not be carried), at a resumption as early as circ.u.mstances would allow, of what you thought the proper line of action which he insisted on suspending. Income-tax and war duties on tea and sugar were and would continue to be, as I understood, the primary claimants for reduction of taxation, in your judgment.... The very vehemence of your convictions and expressions on _both_ occasions perplexes me.

_Mr. Gladstone replied the same day_:-

... You think, 1. That I bound myself to the reduction of the tea and sugar duties as a policy for future occasions, and not merely for the issue then raised. 2. That in like manner I was bound to the reduction and abolition of the income-tax. 3. That even if there arose in the system of our expenditure a great change, involving an increase of ten or fifteen millions of money over 1853, I was still in consistency bound to hold over the first chance of reduction for income-tax, tea and sugar. 4. That consequently until these duties were remitted I could not propose to prosecute any commercial reforms involving, as nearly all of them do, a sacrifice of revenue for a time. 5. It is because I have departed from these positions by proposing a mult.i.tude of reductions and abolitions of duty, other than the three mentioned, and partly or wholly in preference to them, that you have lost confidence in my judgment on these matters (a confidence to which I do not pretend that I had ever any claim).

If I have interpreted you aright, and I hope you will tell me whether I have done so or not, this is all to me exceedingly curious; such are the differences in the opinions of men formed from their different points of view. Now I will give you mine. To give effect to the pledge of honour, by which I became bound in 1853, I made a desperate effort in 1857, with all the zeal of which I was capable, and with all the pa.s.sion to which I am liable. It was my opinion that the course then taken would be decisive as to the operations in 1860, for the income-tax never can be got rid of except by prospective finance, reaching over several years, and liable to impediment and disturbance accordingly. I therefore protested against the whole scale of expenditure then proposed; as well as against particular kinds of expenditure to which I might refer. I likewise protested against the provision for that expenditure which the government of the day proposed. First, because the expenditure itself was excessive, in my view.

Secondly, because in the mode of that provision I thought the remission of income-tax was large out of all proportion to the remission on indirect taxes; and this disproportion I regarded as highly dangerous. I determined to let no political prejudice stand in my way, and to test to the best of my very feeble power the opinion of parliament with respect to tea and sugar. I stated that if the opinion of parliament were against me I should not factiously prolong the contest but should withdraw from it. Not only was the opinion of parliament against me, but it so happened that the opinion of the country was immediately afterwards taken by a dissolution on that and on other kindred questions. The country affirmed the policy of Lord Palmerston, and the policy of a materially increased expenditure, by an overwhelming majority. I had misjudged public opinion; they had read it aright. After the dissolution of 1857, Sir George Lewis, who had previously raised the tea and sugar duties for one year, proposed to raise them for two more. I immediately followed in debate, and thanked him warmly for doing it. All this of course I can prove. I said, we are going to have more expenditure, we must therefore have more taxation.

As I have gone thus far with my history, I will conclude it.

Notwithstanding what had happened, I did not absolutely abandon at that time the hope that we might still reach in 1860 a state which might enable us to abolish the income-tax. I had a faint expectation of more economy under another government. When Lord Derby's administration came in in 1858, they professed to reduce expenditure by 800,000, and to contemplate further reductions. I expressed my satisfaction, and gave them the extreme of support that I could. But I then clearly pointed out that, even with the scale of expenditure they then proposed, we could not abolish the income-tax in 1860. In a few months, their reductions vanished into air.

In 1859 came the famous "reconstruction." I took office in June, and found a scale of expenditure going on in the treasury far more prodigal and wanton than I had ever charged upon Lord Palmerston's first government. I found also that when the estimates had been completed, I believe entirely on _their_ basis, there was a probable deficiency of four or five millions for a year of which nearly one-third had pa.s.sed. And the expenditure was I think nearly seventy millions, or some fourteen millions more than in 1853. This was not the act only of the government. The opposition halloed them on; and the country, seized with a peculiar panic, was in a humour even more lavish than the opposition.

My view was, and I stated it, that we ought to provide for this expenditure in a due proportion between direct and indirect taxes. I showed that this proportion had not been observed; that we had continued to levy large amounts of war tax on tea and sugar, and had returned to the scale of 1853 for income. I proposed to provide the necessary sums chiefly by an increase of income-tax. But neither then (in July 1859), nor for nearly two and a half years before, had I ever (to my knowledge) presumed to speak of any one as bound to abolish the income-tax or to remit the additional duties on tea and sugar.

I fully expect from _you_ the admission that as to these measures I could not in the altered circ.u.mstances be bound absolutely to the remissions.

But you say I was bound to give them a preference over all other remissions. Nowhere I believe can one word to this effect be extracted from any speech of mine. I found in 1860 that all the reforming legislation, which had achieved such vast results, had been suspended for seven years. We were then raising by duties doomed in 1853, from twelve to thirteen millions. It would in my opinion have been no less than monstrous on my part to recognise the preferences you claim for these particular duties. All of them indeed would have been reliefs, even the income-tax which is I think proved to be the least relief of any. But, though reliefs, they were hardly reforms; and experience had shown us that reforms were in fact double and treble reliefs. I may be wrong, but it is my opinion and I found it on experience, that the prospect of the removal of the three collectively (income, tea extra, and sugar extra) being in any case very remote, it is less remote with than without the reforming measures of the last and (I hope I may add) of the present year. Had the expenditure of 1853 been resumed, there would notwithstanding the Russian war have been, in my opinion, room for all these three things. 1.

Abolition of income-tax by or near 1860; 2. remission of increases on tea and sugar within the same time; 3. the prosecution of the commercial reforms.

It may be said that having set my face against an excess of expenditure I ought to have considered that a holy war, and not to have receded.

Although I place public economy somewhat higher as a matter of duty than many might do, I do not think it would have been right, I do think it would have been foolish and presumptuous in me to have gone beyond these two things: first, making an effort to the utmost of my power at the critical moment (as I took it to be), and secondly, on being defeated to watch for opportunities thereafter. Since it should be remembered I do not recommend or desire sweeping and sudden reductions.