Autobiography
the party, in the session of 1868, as to require no more from me than an
emphatic adhesion: but the land question was by no means in so advanced
a position; the superstitions of landlordism had up to that time been
little challenged, especially in Parliament, and the backward state of
the question, so far as concerned the Parliamentary mind, was evidenced
by the extremely mild measure brought in by Lord Russell's government in
1866, which nevertheless could not be carried. On that bill I delivered
one of my most careful speeches, in which I attempted to lay down some
of the principles of the subject, in a manner calculated less to
stimulate friends, than to conciliate and convince opponents. The
engrossing subject of Parliamentary Reform prevented either this bill,
or one of a similar character brought in by Lord Derby's Government,
from being carried through. They never got beyond the second reading.
Meanwhile the signs of Irish disaffection had become much more decided;
the demand for complete separation between the two countries had assumed
a menacing aspect, and there were few who did not feel that if there was
still any chance of reconciling Ireland to the British connection, it
could only be by the adoption of much more thorough reforms in the
territorial and social relations of the country, than had yet been
contemplated. The time seemed to me to have come when it would be useful
to speak out my whole mind; and the result was my pamphlet _England and
Ireland_, which was written in the winter of 1867, and published shortly
before the commencement of the session of 1868. The leading features of
the pamphlet were, on the one hand, an argument to show the
undesirableness, for Ireland as well as England, of separation between
the countries, and on the other, a proposal for settling the land
question by giving to the existing tenants a permanent tenure, at a
fixed rent, to be assessed after due inquiry by the State.
The pamphlet was not popular, except in Ireland, as I did not expect it
to be. But, if no measure short of that which I proposed would do full
justice to Ireland, or afford a prospect of conciliating the mass of the
Irish people, the duty of proposing it was imperative; while if, on the
other hand, there was any intermediate course which had a claim to a
trial, I well knew that to propose something which would be called
extreme, was the true way not to impede but to facilitate a more
moderate experiment. It is most improbable that a measure conceding so
much to the tenantry as Mr. Gladstone's Irish Land Bill, would have been
proposed by a Government, or could have been carried through Parliament,
unless the British public had been led to perceive that a case might be
made, and perhaps a party formed, for a measure considerably stronger.
It is the character of the British people, or at least of the higher and
middle classes who pass muster for the British people, that to induce
them to approve of any change, it is necessary that they should look
upon it as a middle course: they think every proposal extreme and
violent unless they hear of some other proposal going still farther,
upon which their antipathy to extreme views may discharge itself. So it
proved in the present instance; my proposal was condemned, but any
scheme for Irish Land reform short of mine, came to be thought moderate
by comparison. I may observe that the attacks made on my plan usually
gave a very incorrect idea of its nature. It was usually discussed as a
proposal that the State should buy up the land and become the universal
landlord; though in fact it only offered to each individual landlord
this as an alternative, if he liked better to sell his estate than to
retain it on the new conditions; and I fully anticipated that most
landlords would continue to prefer the position of landowners to that of
Government annuitants, and would retain their existing relation to their
tenants, often on more indulgent terms than the full rents on which the
compensation to be given them by Government would have been based. This
and many other explanations I gave in a speech on Ireland, in the debate
on Mr. Maguire's Resolution, early in the session of 1868. A corrected
report of this speech, together with my speech on Mr. Fortescue's Bill,
has been published (not by me, but with my permission) in Ireland.
Another public duty, of a most serious kind, it was my lot to have to
perform, both in and out of Parliament, during these years. A
disturbance in Jamaica, provoked in the first instance by injustice, and
exaggerated by rage and panic into a premeditated rebellion, had been
the motive or excuse for taking hundreds of innocent lives by military
violence, or by sentence of what were called courts-martial, continuing
for weeks after the brief disturbance had been put down; with many added
atrocities of destruction of property logging women as well as men, and
a general display of the brutal recklessness which usually prevails when
fire and sword are let loose. The perpetrators of those deeds were
defended and applauded in England by the same kind of people who had so
long upheld negro slavery: and it seemed at first as if the British
nation was about to incur the disgrace of letting pass without even a
protest, excesses of authority as revolting as any of those for which,
when perpetrated by the instruments of other governments, Englishmen can
hardly find terms sufficient to express their abhorrence. After a short
time, however, an indignant feeling was roused: a voluntary Association
formed itself under the name of the Jamaica Committee, to take such
deliberation and action as the case might admit of, and adhesions poured
in from all parts of the country. I was abroad at the time, but I sent
in my name to the Committee as soon as I heard of it, and took an active
part in the proceedings from the time of my return. There was much more
at stake than only justice to the negroes, imperative as was that
consideration. The question was, whether the British dependencies, and
eventually, perhaps, Great Britain itself, were to be under the
government of law, or of military licence; whether the lives and persons
of British subjects are at the mercy of any two or three officers
however raw and inexperienced or reckless and brutal, whom a
panic-stricken Governor, or other functionary, may assume the right to
constitute into a so-called court-martial. This question could only be
decided by an appeal to the tribunals; and such an appeal the Committee
determined to make. Their determination led to a change in the
chairmanship of the Committee, as the chairman, Mr. Charles Buxton,
thought it not unjust indeed, but inexpedient, to prosecute Governor
Eyre and his principal subordinates in a criminal court: but a
numerously attended general meeting of the Association having decided
this point against him, Mr. Buxton withdrew from the Committee, though
continuing to work in the cause, and I was, quite unexpectedly on my own
part, proposed and elected chairman. It became, in consequence, my duty
to represent the Committee in the House of Commons, sometimes by putting
questions to the Government, sometimes as the recipient of questions,
more or less provocative, addressed by individual members to myself; but
especially as speaker in the important debate originated in the session
of 1866, by Mr. Buxton: and the speech I then delivered is that which I
should probably select as the best of my speeches in Parliament.[10] For
more than two years we carried on the combat, trying every avenue
legally open to us, to the Courts of Criminal Justice. A bench of
magistrates in one of the most Tory counties in England dismissed our
case: we were more successful before the magistrates at Bow Street;
which gave an opportunity to the Lord Chief Justice of the Queen's
Bench, Sir Alexander Cockburn, for delivering his celebrated charge,
which settled the law of the question in favour of liberty, as far as it
is in the power of a judge's charge to settle it. There, however, our
success ended, for the Old Bailey Grand jury by throwing out our bill
prevented the case from coming to trial. It was clear that to bring
English functionaries to the bar of a criminal court for abuses of power
committed against negroes and mulattoes was not a popular proceeding
with the English middle classes. We had, however, redeemed, so far as
lay in us, the character of our country, by showing that there was at
any rate a body of persons determined to use all the means which the law
afforded to obtain justice for the injured. We had elicited from the
highest criminal judge in the nation an authoritative declaration that
the law was what we maintained it to be; and we had given an emphatic
warning to those who might be tempted to similar guilt hereafter, that,
though they might escape the actual sentence of a criminal tribunal,
they were not safe against being put to some trouble and expense in
order to avoid it. Colonial governors and other persons in authority,
will have a considerable motive to stop short of such extremities in
future.
As a matter of curiosity I kept some specimens of the abusive letters,
almost all of them anonymous, which I received while these proceedings
were going on. They are evidence of the sympathy felt with the
brutalities in Jamaica by the brutal part of the population at home.
They graduated from coarse jokes, verbal and pictorial, up to threats of
assassination.
Among other matters of importance in which I took an active part, but
which excited little interest in the public, two deserve particular
mention. I joined with several other independent Liberals in defeating
an Extradition Bill introduced at the very end of the session of 1866,
and by which, though surrender avowedly for political offences was not
authorized, political refugees, if charged by a foreign Government with
acts which are necessarily incident to all attempts at insurrection,
would have been surrendered to be dealt with by the criminal courts of
the Government against which they had rebelled: thus making the British
Government an accomplice in the vengeance of foreign despotisms. The
defeat of this proposal led to the appointment of a Select Committee (in
which I was included), to examine and report on the whole subject of
Extradition Treaties; and the result was, that in the Extradition Act
which passed through Parliament after I had ceased to be a member,
opportunity is given to any one whose extradition is demanded, of being
heard before an English court of justice to prove that the offence with
which he is charged, is really political. The cause of European freedom
has thus been saved from a serious misfortune, and our own country from
a great iniquity. The other subject to be mentioned is the fight kept up
by a body of advanced Liberals in the session of 1868, on the Bribery
Bill of Mr. Disraeli's Government, in which I took a very active part. I
had taken counsel with several of those who had applied their minds most
carefully to the details of the subject--Mr. W.D. Christie, Serjeant
Pulling, Mr. Chadwick--as well as bestowed much thought of my own, for
the purpose of framing such amendments and additional clauses as might
make the Bill really effective against the numerous modes of corruption,
direct and indirect, which might otherwise, as there was much reason to
fear, be increased instead of diminished by the Reform Act. We also
aimed at engrafting on the Bill, measures for diminishing the
mischievous burden of what are called the legitimate expenses of
elections. Among our many amendments, was that of Mr. Fawcett for making
the returning officer's expenses a charge on the rates, instead of on
the candidates; another was the prohibition of paid canvassers, and the