Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography
consequence which the Providential order commonly allots to such error
is not compensation, but retribution."
But, though Providence eventually allotted "retribution" to our crimes
and follies in Egypt, and though they were always unpopular with the
Liberal Party out of doors, it was curious to observe that the position
of the Government in the House of Commons was stronger at the end of
1882 than it was at the beginning. That this was so was due, I think, in
part to the fact that for the moment we were victorious in Egypt,[37]
and in part to admiration for the vigour with which Lord Spencer was
fighting the murderous conspiracy in Ireland. The Government enjoyed the
dangerous praise of the Opposition; obstruction collapsed; and some new
Rules of Procedure were carried by overwhelming majorities. Here let me
interpolate an anecdote. Mr. M---- L---- was a barrister, an obsequious
supporter of the Government, and, as was generally surmised, on the
lookout for preferment. Mr. Philip Callan, M.P. for County Louth, was
speaking on an amendment to one of the new Rules, and Mr. M---- L----
thrice tried to call him to order on the ground of irrelevancy. Each
time, the Chairman of Committee ruled that, though the Honourable Member
for Louth was certainly taking a wide sweep, he was not out of order.
Rising the third time from the seat Callan said: "I may as well take the
opportunity of giving notice that I propose to move the insertion of a
new Standing Order, which will read as follows: 'Any Hon. Member who
three times unsuccessfully calls another Hon. Member to order, shall be
ineligible for a County Court Judgeship.'" Mr. M---- L---- looked coy,
and everyone else shouted with glee.
The Session of 1883 opened very quietly. The speech from the Throne
extolled the success of the Ministerial policy in Ireland and Egypt, and
promised a series of useful but not exciting measures. Meanwhile the
more active Members of the Liberal Party, among whom I presumed to
reckon myself, began to agitate for more substantial reforms. We had
entered on the fourth Session of the Parliament. A noble majority was
beginning to decline, and we felt that there was no time to lose if we
were to secure the ends which we desired. Knowing that I felt keenly on
these subjects, Mr. T. H. S. Escott, then Editor of the _Fortnightly_,
asked me to write an article for his Review, and in that article I spoke
my mind about the Agricultural Labourers' Suffrage, the Game Laws, the
reform of the City of London, and an English Land Bill. "The action of
the Peers," I said, "under Lord Salisbury's guidance will probably force
on the question of a Second Chamber, and those who flatter themselves
that the Liberal Party will shrink from discussing it will be grievously
disillusioned. Disestablishment, begun in Ireland, will inevitably work
round, by Scotland, to England. And who is to preside over these
changes?"
I returned to the charge in the June number of the _Nineteenth Century_,
and urged my points more strongly. I pleaded for social reform, and for
"a Free Church in a Free State." I crossed swords with a noble Lord who
had pronounced dogmatically that "A Second Chamber is absolutely
necessary." I gave my reasons for thinking that now-a-days there is very
little danger of hasty and ill-considered legislation, and I pointed out
that, when this danger disappears, the reason for a Second Chamber
disappears with it. "But," I said, "granting, for the sake of argument,
that something of this danger still survives, would it not be fully met
by limiting the power of the Lords to a Veto for a year on a measure
passed by the Commons?"
These articles, coupled with my speeches in the House and in my
constituency, gave dire offence to the Whigs; and I was chastened with
rebukes which, if not weighty, were at any rate ponderous. "Not this
way," wrote the _St. James's Gazette_, in a humorous apostrophe, "not
this way, O Junior Member for Aylesbury, lies the road to the Treasury
Bench," and so, indeed, it seemed. But, on returning from an evening
party at Sir Matthew Ridley's, on the 5th of June, 1883, I found a
letter from Mr. Gladstone, offering me the post of Parliamentary
Secretary to the Local Government Board. One sentence of that letter I
may be allowed to quote:
"Your name, and the recollections it suggests, add much to the
satisfaction which, independently of relationship, I should have felt in
submitting to you this request." It was like Gladstone's courtesy to
call his offer a "request."
Thus I became harnessed to the machine of Government, and my friends,
inside the House and out of it, were extremely kind about the
appointment. Nearly everyone who wrote to congratulate me used the same
image: "You have now set your foot on the bottom rung of the ladder."
But my staunch friend George Trevelyan handled the matter more
poetically, in the following stanza:
"As long as a plank can float, or a bolt can hold together,
When the sea is smooth as glass, or the waves run mountains high,
In the brightest of summer skies, or the blackest of dirty weather,
Wherever the ship swims, there swim I."
The part of "the ship" to which I was now fastened was certainly not the
most exalted or exciting of the public offices. The estimation in which
it was held in official circles is aptly illustrated by a pleasantry of
that eminent Civil Servant, Sir Algernon West. When the Revised Version
of the New Testament appeared, Gladstone asked Sir Algernon (who had
begun life in the Treasury), if he thought it as good as the Authorized
Version. "Certainly not," was the reply. "It is so painfully lacking in
dignity." Gladstone, always delighted to hear an innovation censured
(unless he himself had made it), asked for an illustration. "Well," said
West, "look at the Second Chapter of St. Luke. _There went out a decree
from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed._ Now that always
struck me as a sublime conception--a tax levied on the whole world by a
stroke of the pen--an act worthy of an Imperial Treasury. But I turn to
the Revised Version, and what do I read? _That all the world should be
enrolled_--a census--the sort of thing the Local Government Board could
do. That instance, to my mind, settles the question between Old and
New."
But in the office thus contemned by the Paladins of the Treasury, there
was plenty of interesting though little-observed work. In the autumn of
1883 I undertook, in conjunction with the President of the Board, a
mission of enquiry into the worst slums in London. There is no need to
recapitulate here all the horrors we encountered, for they can be read
in the evidence given before the Royal Commission on the Housing of the
Poor which was appointed in the following year; but one incident made a
peculiar impression on my mind. The Sanitary Officer reported some
underground dwellings in Spitalfields as being perhaps the worst
specimens of human habitation which we should find, and he offered to be
my guide. I entered a cellar-like room in a basement, which, till one's
eyes got used to the dimness, seemed pitch-dark. I felt, rather than
saw, the presence of a woman, and, when we began to talk, I discerned by
her voice that she was not a Londoner. "No, sir," she replied, "I come
from Wantage, in Berkshire." Having always heard of Wantage as a kind of
Earthly Paradise, where the Church, the Sisterhood, and the "Great
House" combined to produce the millennium, I said, involuntarily, "How
you must wish to be back there!" "Back at Wantage!" exclaimed the Lady
of the Cellar. "No, indeed, sir. This is a poor place, but it's better
than Wantage." It was instructive to find this love of freedom, and
resentment of interference, in the bowels of the earth of Spitalfields.
An incident which helps to illustrate Gladstone's personal ascendancy
belongs to this period. Those were the days of agitation for and
against a Channel Tunnel, eagerly promoted by speculative tunnel-makers,
and resolutely opposed by Mr. Chamberlain, then President of the Board
of Trade. Gladstone, when asked if he was for or against the Tunnel,
said very characteristically, "I am not so much in favour of the Tunnel,
as opposed to the opponents of it"; and this of course meant that he was
really in favour of it. About this time I met him at dinner, and after
the ladies had gone, I think we were eight men round the table.
Gladstone began praising the Tunnel; one of the hearers echoed him, and
the rest of us were silent. Looking round triumphantly, Gladstone said,
"Ah, this is capital! Here we are--eight sensible men--and all in favour
of the Tunnel." Knowing that several of us were against the Tunnel, I
challenged a division and collected the votes. Excepting Gladstone and
his echo, we all were anti-tunnelites, and yet none of us would have had
the hardihood to say so.
In this year--1883--Gladstone's Government had regained some portion of
the popularity and success which they had lost; but when the year ran
out, their success was palpably on the wane, and their popularity of
course waned with it. The endless contradictions and perplexities,
crimes and follies, of our Egyptian policy became too obvious to be
concealed or palliated, and at the beginning of 1884 the Government
resolved on their crowning and fatal blunder. On the 18th of January,
Lord Hartington (Secretary of State for War), Lord Granville, Lord
Northbrook, and Sir Charles Dilke had an interview with General Gordon,
and determined that he should be sent to evacuate the Soudan. Gladstone
assented, and Gordon started that evening on his ill-starred errand. In
view of subsequent events, it is worth recording that there were some
Liberals who, from the moment they heard of it, condemned the
undertaking. The dithyrambics of the _Pall Mall Gazette_ drew from
William Cory[38] the following protest:
"January 21, 1884.
"It's really ludicrous--the P. M. G. professing a clearly
suprarational faith in an elderly Engineer, saying that he will
cook the goose if no one interferes with him ... as if he could go
to Suakim, 'summon' a barbarous potentate, make him supply his
escort to Khartoum, and, when at Khartoum, issue edicts right and
left; as if he could act without subaltern officers, money, stores,
gold, etc.; as if he were an _homme drapeau_, and had an old army
out there ready to troop round him, as the French veterans round
Bonaparte at Frejus."
In Parliament, the principal work of 1884 was to extend the
Parliamentary Franchise to the Agricultural Labourer. A Tory Member said
in debate that the labourers were no more fit to have the franchise than
the beasts they tended; and Lord Goschen, who had remained outside the
Cabinet of 1880 sooner than be party to giving them the vote, used to
say to the end of his life that, if the Union were ever destroyed, it
would be by the agricultural labourers. I, however, who had lived among
them all my life and knew that they were at least as fit for political
responsibility as the artisans, threw myself with ardour into the
advocacy of their cause. (By the way, my speech of the Second Reading of
the Franchise Bill was answered by the present Speaker[39] in his maiden
speech.) All through the summer the battle raged. The Lords did not
refuse to pass the Bill, but said that, before they passed it, they must
see the accompanying scheme of Redistribution. It was not a very
unreasonable demand, but Gladstone denounced it as an unheard-of
usurpation. We all took our cue from him, and vowed that we would smash
the House of Lords into atoms before we consented to this insolent
claim. Throughout the Parliamentary recess, the voices of protest