CHAPTER FIVE
PALMERSTON
PALMERSTON, THOUGH NOW IN HIS SEVENTIES, PRESIDED
OVER THE English scene. With one short interval of Tory government,
he was Prime Minister throughout the decade that began in 1855. Not
long after the signing of peace with Russia he was confronted with
another emergency which also arose in the East, but this time in
Asia. India had been basking under the administration of the East
India Company, with only a moderate degree of supervision from
London. The Company had its critics in Parliament and elsewhere,
but their words had little effect upon its practices. Suddenly
there occurred a disturbing outbreak against British rule.
The Indian Mutiny made, in some respects, a more
lasting impact on England than the Crimean War. It paved the way
for Empire. After it was over Britain gradually and consciously
became a world-wide Imperial Power. The causes of the Mutiny lay
deep in the past. About the beginning of the nineteenth century a
new generation of British administrators and soldiers appeared in
India, austere, upright, Bible-reading men, who dreamed of
Christianising and Europeanising the sub-continent, and for a while
gained a brief promise of success. Hitherto the English, like the
Romans in the provinces of their empire, had a neutral policy on
religion and no policy at all on Indian education. Regiments held
ceremonial parades in honour of Hindu deities, and Hindu and Muslim
holidays were impartially and publicly observed. But in England
missionary zeal was stirring, and respect for alien creeds
gradually succumbed to the desire for proselytisation. For a time
enlightened Hindu opinion seemed not unreceptive to elements of the
Christian faith. Suttee, the burning of widows,
Thugee, the strangling of travellers by fanatics who deemed
it a religious duty, and female infanticide were suppressed.
Largely owing to Macaulay, when he was a member of the
Governor-General’s council, measures were taken to make English
learning available to the higher-ranking and more wealthy Indians.
All this was unsettling, and played its part in the terrible events
which now occurred.
A more immediate cause of the rising was a series
of defeats and reverses suffered by the British. The Russian threat
to India had begun to overhang the minds of Englishmen. It was in
fact a gross exaggeration to suppose that Russian armies could have
crossed the ranges of the Hindu-Kush in force and arrived in the
Indus valley. But the menace seemed real at the time. When it was
learnt that a small body of Russians had penetrated into the
fringes of Afghanistan a British expedition was dispatched in 1839
to Kabul and a British candidate placed on the Afghan throne. The
result was disaster. The country rose up in arms. In December 1841,
under a promise of safe-conduct, the British garrison of some four
thousand troops, accompanied by nearly three times as many women,
children, and Afghan camp-followers, began to withdraw through the
snow and the mountain passes. The safe-conduct was violated, and
nearly all were murdered or taken prisoners. A single survivor
reached India on January 13. A second expedition avenged the
treachery in the following year, but the repute of European arms
was deeply smitten and the massacre resounded throughout the
peninsula.
Another defeat soon followed in the Punjab, the
most northerly of the Indian provinces at that time. Here the
warrior Sikhs, a reformed Hindu sect, forbidden to touch tobacco or
cut their hair above the waist, had long held sway. Encouraged by
the news from Afghanistan, and restless after the death of their
great leader, Ranjit Singh, who had hitherto held them in check,
they resolved to try their hand at invading the Company’s
territory. In 1845 they crossed the boundary river of the Sutlej,
and were met and repulsed two hundred miles north of Delhi. The
British installed a regency. Three years later the Sikhs tried to
overthrow it. There was a desperate drawn battle deep within the
province at Chilianwala, in which three British regiments lost
their colours. Shortly afterwards the British forces redeemed their
name and the Sikh army was destroyed. The Punjab was pacified by
John and Henry Lawrence. These famous brothers ruled with absolute
power, untrammelled by the Company and splendidly resourceful. They
made landowners take a threefold oath: “Thou shalt not burn thy
widow, thou shalt not kill thy daughters, thou shalt not bury alive
thy lepers.” They sent the Koh-i-noor diamond to Queen Victoria,
and gained from the formidable warriors of the province an
affection and loyalty for the British Crown which was to endure for
nearly a century. One of their subordinates, John Nicholson, who
was to be for ever famous as the liberator of Delhi, was even
worshipped by some Punjabis as a deity. Nevertheless, among the
ill-informed and ill-disposed in other regions of India “Remember
Chilianwala!” became a battle-cry and a bloodstained slogan in the
upheaval which was to come.
This was a period of confident expansion in India,
generally undertaken by men on the spot and not always approved by
opinion in Britain. Two other major annexations completed the
extension of British rule. Possession of Sind, in the lower Indus
valley, had been judged necessary to safeguard the command of the
north-west coast. It was conquered by Sir Charles Napier, a veteran
who had fought at Corunna and in the American war of 1812. In
England the magazine Punch commented sourly on this
operation. It represented Napier as reporting the matter in a
one-word telegram, “Peccavi ” (“I have sinned”). Napier,
unperturbed, proceeded to rule with absolute and benevolent power.
He dealt with widow-burning by the simple expedient of placing a
gibbet beside every pyre. “When men burn women alive we hang them”
he said. Like the Punjab, Sind remained peaceful for many years.
The other annexation was that of Oudh, on the borders of Bengal,
where an Indian king had long oppressed his subjects. The Marquis
of Dalhousie, appointed Governor-General at the age of thirty-five,
had no doubts about the benefits conferred on India by British rule
and British skill. During his eight years of office he added
principalities to the Company’s dominion by applying what was
called the “doctrine of lapse.” This meant that when an Indian
ruler died without an heir of his own blood his territory was
forfeited. Adopted heirs were not allowed to inherit, though this
had long been Hindu custom. In Oudh Dalhousie was more forthright.
He bluntly declared that “the British Government would be guilty in
the sight of God and man if it were any longer to aid in sustaining
by its countenance an administration fraught with suffering to
millions.” He deposed the king and seized his province in 1856.
Next year came the Mutiny, and much of the blame for provoking it
was laid at Dalhousie’s door.
The East India Company’s army of Bengal had long
been of ill-repute. Recruited mainly in the North, it was largely
composed of high-caste Hindus. This was bad for discipline. Brahmin
privates would question the orders of officers and N.C.O.s of less
exalted caste. Power and influence in the regiments frequently
depended on a man’s position in the religious rather than the
military hierarchy. The Company’s British officers were often of
poor quality, for the abler and more thrusting among them sought
secondment to the more spacious fields of civil administration.
Many of those who remained at regimental headquarters were out of
touch with their men, and showed no desire to improve matters.
Troops were needed for a war with Burma, but if they crossed the
high seas they lost caste. Dalhousie nevertheless made recruits
liable for service anywhere in the world. There were grievances
about pay and pensions. Other developments, unconnected with this
military unrest, added their weight. By the 1850’s railways, roads,
posts, telegraphs, and schools were beginning to push and agitate
their way across the countryside, and were thought by many Indians
to threaten an ancient society whose inmost structure and spirit
sprang from a rigid and unalterable caste system. If everyone used
the same trains and the same schools, or even the same roads, it
was argued, how could caste survive? Indian monarchs were
apprehensive and resentful of the recent annexations. Hatred
smouldered at the repression of Suttee. Unfounded stories
spread that the Government intended to convert India forcibly to
Christianity. The disasters in Afghanistan and the slaughter of the
Sikh wars cast doubt on the invincibility of British arms. Many of
the sepoys, or Indian soldiers, considered themselves equal or
superior to European troops. Thus a legacy of troubles confronted
Dalhousie’s successor, Lord Canning. He had been in India little
more than a year when the introduction of a new type of ammunition
provided a spark and focus for the mass of discontent.
In the year of the centenary of Plassey rumours
began to flow that the cartridges for the new Enfield rifle were
greased with the fat of pigs and cows, animals which Moslem and
Hindu respectively were forbidden to eat. The cartridges had to be
bitten before they could be inserted in the muzzle. Thus sepoys of
both religions would be defiled. There was some truth in the story,
for beef-fat had been used in the London arsenal at Woolwich,
though it was never used at the Indian factory at Dum-Dum, and as
soon as the complaints began no tainted missiles were issued.
Nevertheless the tale ran through the regiments in the spring of
1857 and there was much unrest. In April some cavalry troopers at
Meerut were court-martialled and imprisoned for refusing to touch
the cartridges, and on May 9 they were publicly stripped of their
uniforms. An Indian officer told his superiors that the sepoys were
planning to break open the jail and release the prisoners. His
warning was disbelieved. Next night three regiments mutinied,
captured the prison, killed their British officers, and marched on
Delhi.
There was nothing at hand to stop them. South of
the Punjab fewer than eleven full-strength battalions and ancillary
forces, comprising in all about forty thousand British soldiers,
were scattered across the vast peninsula, and even these were not
on a war footing. The Indian troops outnumbered them by five to one
and had most of the artillery. The hot weather had started,
distances were great, transport was scarce, the authorities were
unprepared. Nevertheless, when the British power was so weak, and
India might have been plunged once again into the anarchy and
bloodshed from which she had been gradually and painfully rescued
most of the populace remained aloof and at peace, and none of the
leading Indian rulers joined the revolt. Of the three armies
maintained by the Company only one, that of Bengal, was affected.
Gurkhas from Nepal helped to quell the rising. The Punjab remained
loyal, and its Sikhs and Moslems respected the colours and disarmed
wavering regiments. The valley of the Ganges was the centre of the
turmoil.
But at first all went with a rush. The magazine at
Delhi was guarded by two British officers and six soldiers. They
fought to the last, and when resistance was hopeless they blew it
up. The mutineers killed every European in sight, seized the aged
King of Delhi, now living in retirement as the Company’s pensioner,
and proclaimed him Moghul Emperor. The appeal failed and few
Moslems rose to support it. For three weeks there was a pause, and
then the mutiny spread. British officers would not believe in the
disloyalty of their troops and many were murdered. At Cawnpore, on
the borders of Oudh, the garrison left the citadel to guard the
road. They trusted to the loyalty of the Nana Sahib, the
dispossessed adopted son of an Indian ruler, but still a powerful
figure. They were mistaken, and a terrible fate was soon to befall
them. At Lucknow, the capital, Henry Lawrence prepared the
Residency for what was to be a long and glorious defence.
Meanwhile, rightly perceiving that the key to the revolt lay in
Delhi, the British mustered such forces as they could and seized
the ridge overlooking the city. They were too few to make an
assault, and for weeks in the height of summer three thousand
troops, most of whom were British, held the fifty-foot eminence
against an enemy twenty or thirty times their number. Early in
August Nicholson arrived with reinforcements from the Punjab,
having marched nearly thirty miles a day for three weeks. Thus
animated, the British attacked on September 14, and after six days’
street-fighting, in which Nicholson was killed, the city fell. The
poor King was sent to Burma. His two sons were taken prisoners, and
shot after an attempt had been made to rescue them. This created a
fresh grievance in Indian eyes.
At Cawnpore there was a horrible massacre. For
twenty-one days nine hundred British and loyal Indians, nearly half
of them women and children, were besieged and attacked by three
thousand sepoys with the Nana Sahib at their head. At length, on
June 26, they were granted safe-conduct. As they were leaving by
boat they were fired upon, and all the men were killed. Such women
and children as survived were cast into prison. On the night of
July 15 a relieving force under Sir Henry Havelock, a veteran of
Indian warfare, was barely twenty miles away. The Nana Sahib
ordered his sepoys to kill the prisoners. They refused. Five
assassins than cut the captives to death with knives and threw the
bodies into a well. Two days later Havelock arrived. “Had any
Christian bishop visited that scene of butchery when I saw it,”
wrote an eyewitness long afterwards, “I verily believe that he
would have buckled on his sword.” Here and elsewhere the British
troops took horrible vengeance. Mutineers were blown from the
mouths of cannon, sometimes alive, or their bodies sewn up in the
skins of cows and swine.
The rebels turned on Lucknow. Here also there was a
desperate struggle. Seventeen hundred troops, nearly half of them
loyal sepoys, held the Residency, under Henry Lawrence, against
sixty-thousand rebels, for in Oudh, unlike most of India, the
population joined the revolt. Food was short and there was much
disease. On September 25 Havelock and Outram fought their way in,
but were beset in their turn, Havelock dying of exhaustion a few
days later. In November the siege was raised by Sir Colin Campbell,
the new Commander-in-Chief appointed by Lord Palmerston. Campbell
had seen service against Napoleon and had a distinguished record in
the Crimean War. A fresh threat to Cawnpore compelled him to move
on. Outram, reinforced, continued to hold out, and Lucknow was not
finally liberated till the following March. No one knows what
happened to the Nana Sahib. He disappeared for ever into the
Himalayan jungle.
Elsewhere the rising was more speedily crushed. The
recapture of Delhi had destroyed all semblance and pretence that
the mutiny was a national revolt. Fighting, sporadic but often
fierce, continued in the Central Provinces until the end of 1858,
but on November 1 the Governor-General, “Clemency” Canning,
derisively so called for his mercifulness, proclaimed with truth
that Queen Victoria was now sovereign of all India. The first
Viceroy, as Canning became, was a son of the renowned Foreign
Secretary and Prime Minister. The rule of the East India Company,
which had long ceased to be a trading business in India, was
abolished. This was the work of the short Conservative Government
of Derby and Disraeli. Thus, after almost exactly a century the
advice which Clive had given to Pitt was accepted by the British
Government. Henceforward there were to be no more annexations, no
subsidiary treaties, no more civil wars. Religious toleration and
equality before the law were promised to all. Indians for a
generation and more were to look back on the Queen’s Proclamation
of 1858 as a Magna Carta.
The scale of the Indian Mutiny should not be
exaggerated. Three-quarters of the troops remained loyal; barely a
third of British territory was affected; there had been risings and
revolts among the soldiery before; the brunt of the outbreak was
suppressed in the space of a few weeks. It was in no sense a
national movement, or, as some later Indian writers have suggested,
a patriotic struggle for freedom or a war of independence. The idea
and ideal of the inhabitants of the sub-continent forming a single
people and state was not to emerge for many years. But terrible
atrocities had been committed by both sides. From now on there was
an increasing gulf between the rulers and the ruled. The easy-going
ways of the eighteenth century were gone for ever, and so were the
missionary fervour and reforming zeal of the early Victorians and
their predecessors. The English no longer looked on India as
“home,” or themselves as crusaders called to redeem and uplift the
great multitudes. British administration became detached,
impartial, efficient. Great progress was made and many material
benefits were secured. The frontiers were guarded and the peace was
kept. Starvation was subdued. The population vastly increased. The
Indian army, revived and reorganised, was to play a glorious part
on Britain’s side in two world wars. Nevertheless the atrocities
and reprisals of the bloodstained months of the Mutiny left an
enduring and bitter mark in the memory of both countries.
While these events unrolled in India the political
scene in England remained confused. Issues were not clear-cut.
Peel’s conversion to Free Trade had destroyed the party lines which
he had done much to draw, and for twenty years in England
Governments of mixed complexion followed one another. Disraeli and
Derby, having broken Peel, found that it took a long time to muster
the remnant of the former Tory Protectionists into an effective
political party. Rising men like Gladstone, who remained faithful
to the Peel tradition, would have nothing to do with them, though
on at least one occasion Disraeli tried hard to enlist Gladstone’s
co-operation. It is an interesting speculation what might have
happened had these two bitter opponents and future Prime Ministers
at this stage joined hands. The Whigs, under Russell and
Palmerston, felt that their main aims had already been
accomplished. Palmerston was willing to make improvements in
government, but large-scale changes were not to his mind. Russell
hankered after a further measure of electoral reform, but that was
the limit of his programme. Both conceived of themselves as
guardians of the system that they had the fortune to head. In this
attitude the two leaders, and Palmerston especially, were probably
in harmony with mid-Victorian opinion. Radicalism in these years
made little appeal to the voters. Prosperity was spreading through
the land, and with it went a lull in the fiercer forms of political
agitation. Dignity and deference were the values of the age. If the
gentleman was still the admired ideal, the self-made man was also
deeply respected. The doctrine of industrious self-help, preached
by Samuel Smiles, was widely popular in the middle classes and
among many artisans as well. The lessons of the Chartist failure
had been learnt, and educating the manual labourer began to seem
more important than rousing him to revolution. With this view large
numbers of working men happily concurred. All this made for a
feeling of stability, with which a sense of steady progress was
allied.
Religion in its numerous varieties cast a soothing
and uplifting influence on men’s minds. Many millions, more than
half the total population, were regular attenders at church or
chapel, though church-goers were fewer among the very poor.
Religious debate was earnest, sometimes acrimonious, but the
contests it bred were verbal. Civil strife for the sake of religion
was a thing of the past. The virtues of toleration had been learnt,
though toleration did not mean lukewarmness. The churches and
sects, and their flocks, took leave to disapprove of one another,
occasionally with vigour. When the Roman Catholic Church
re-established its hierarchy of bishops in England there was
vehement commotion and protest in London, but nothing amounting to
riot.
The Church of England, earlier in the century, had
been stirred from slumber by Evangelical zeal and the lofty ideals
of the Oxford Movement. The Low Church and High Church parties, as
they were called, strove eloquently for men’s souls. About half the
church-goers of England were members of the Anglican communion.
Dissent also flourished, and Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian,
Congregational, and Unitarian preachers gained a wide allegiance.
The Church of Rome in England had revived under the impulse of
Catholic Emancipation, and was reinforced by the accession of a
number of High Anglican clergy, including John Henry Newman, a
profound and subtle thinker, later created a Cardinal.
Religious preoccupations were probably more
widespread and deeply felt than at any time since the days of
Cromwell. But thinking men were also disturbed by a new theory,
long foreshadowed in the work of scientists, the theory of
evolution. It was given classic expression in The Origin of
Species, published by Charles Darwin in 1859. This book
provoked doubt and perplexity among those who could no longer take
literally the Biblical account of creation. But the theory of
evolution, and its emphasis on the survival of the fittest in the
history of life upon the globe, was a powerful adjunct to
mid-Victorian optimism. It lent fresh force to the belief in the
forward march of mankind.
Palmerston seemed to his fellow-countrymen the
embodiment of their own healthy hopes. He had lost none of his old
vigour in chastising foreign Governments, and his patriotic
sentiments appealed to the self-confidence of the nation. They did
not always appeal to the Queen and Prince Albert, who resented his
habit of sending off sharply worded dispatches without consulting
them. But it was Palmerston’s desire, for all his strong language
and sometimes hasty action, to keep the general peace in Europe.
For this reason the Liberal movements in foreign countries which
engaged his sympathy also sometimes gave him reason for
anxiety.
The greatest of the European movements in these
years was the cause of Italian unity. This long-cherished dream of
the Italian peoples was at last realised, though only partially, in
1859 and 1860. The story is well known of how the Italians secured
the military aid of Napoleon III for the price of ceding Nice and
Savoy to France, and how, after winning Lombardy from the
Austrians, the French Emperor left his allies in the lurch. Venice
remained unredeemed; still worse, a French army protected the rump
of the Papal State in Rome, and for ten years deprived the Italians
of their natural capital. But as one small Italian state after
another cast out their alien rulers, and merged under a single
monarchy, widespread enthusiasm was aroused in England. Garibaldi
and his thousand volunteers, who overturned the detested Bourbon
Government in Sicily and Naples with singular dash and speed, were
acclaimed as heroes in London. These bold events were welcome to
Palmerston and his Foreign Secretary, Russell. At the same time the
British leaders were suspicious of Napoleon III’s designs and
fearful of a wider war. Congratulation but non-intervention was
therefore their policy. It is typical of these two old Whigs that
they applauded the new Italian Government for putting into practice
the principles of the English Revolution of 1688. Russell in the
House of Commons compared Garibaldi to King William III. History
does not relate what the Italians made of this.
In home politics meanwhile a sublime complacency
enveloped the Government. Palmerston, like Melbourne before him,
did not believe in too much legislation. Good-humour and common
sense distinguished him. As the novelist Trollope well said, he was
“a statesman for the moment. Whatever was not wanted now, whatever
was not practicable now, he drove quite out of his mind.” This
practical outlook found no favour among the younger and more
thrusting Members of the House of Commons. Disraeli, chafing on the
Opposition benches, vented his scorn and irritation on this last of
the eighteenth-century politicians. “His external system,” he once
told the House, “is turbulent and aggressive that his rule at home
may be tranquil and unassailed. Hence arise excessive expenditure,
heavy taxation, and the stoppage of all social improvement. His
scheme of conduct is so devoid of all political principle that when
forced to appeal to the people his only claim to their confidence
is his name.” Peel’s disciples and followers were no less
despairing and powerless. So long as leadership remained in the
hands of Palmerston, Russell, and the Whig nobility there could be
little hope of advance towards the Liberalism of which they
dreamed. “The Whigs,” said Sidney Herbert at a moment when they
were temporarily out of office, “are incurable in their
superstitions about ducal houses. I see no prospect of the
formation of an efficient party, let alone Government, out of the
chaos on the Opposition benches. No one reigns over or in it but
discord and antipathy. The aristocratic Whigs seem to be nearly
used up, and the party produces no new men, but at the same time
complains of the old ones. Middle-aged merchants, shrewd men of
business, feel their vanity hurt that they have not the refusal of
office.”
The Tories were little better off. Their nominal
head was Lord Derby, who could be brilliant in debate, but was apt
to regard politics as an unpleasant duty imposed upon the members
of his class. His real interest lay in horse-racing, and he also
produced an excellent translation of Homer. Disraeli had become the
leader of his party in the House of Commons. His struggle for power
was hard and uphill. A Jew at the head of a phalanx of country
gentlemen was an unusual sight in English politics. After the
repeal of the Corn Laws protection was not only dead, but, as
Disraeli himself said, damned, and he and Derby had agreed to
discard it as a party principle. But the search for a new theme was
long, painful, and frustrating. Meanwhile he had to play the part
of Derby’s lieutenant, and their spells of office in 1852 and 1858
were brief and uneventful. Disraeli more than once sought an
alliance with the Radicals, and promised them that he would oppose
armaments and an aggressive foreign policy. Colonies, he even
declared, were “millstones round our necks.” But their chief
spokesman, John Bright, was under no illusions. The shrewd Quaker
was not to be caught. “Mr Disraeli,” he said, “is a man who does
what may be called the conjuring for his party. He is what among a
tribe of Red Indians would be called the medicine-man.” And that
was the end of that. Thus foiled, Disraeli returned to his attack
on the Whigs. He was convinced that the only way to destroy them
was by extending the franchise yet further so as to embrace the
respectable artisans and counter the hostility of the middle
classes. Patiently he worked on Derby and his colleagues. In his
youth he had dreamed of uniting the two nations, the rich and the
poor, as the world of his novel Sybil shows, and the 1850’s
saw the slow emergence of a practical doctrine of Tory democracy.
But Disraeli’s ideas took time to find acceptance.
Standing apart both from the Whigs and Derby’s
Tories were the Peelites, of whom the most notable was William
Gladstone. Having started his Parliamentary career in 1832 as a
strict Tory, he was to make a long pilgrimage into the Liberal
camp. The death of Peel had destroyed his allegiance to Toryism and
he too was in search of a new theme. The son of a rich Liverpool
merchant with slave-owning interests in the West Indies, Gladstone
came from the same class as his old leader, and believed, like him,
in the new arguments for Free Trade. Though admired as an
administrator and an orator, his contemporaries considered him
wanting in judgment and principle, but in fact, as Palmerston
perceived, he was awaking to the political potentialities of the
English middle class. “He might,” he said, “be called one of the
people; he wished to identify himself with them; he possessed
religious enthusiasm, and made it powerful over others from the
force of his own intellect.” Despite his preoccupations with
theology, he comprehended the minds of the new voters better than
his colleagues and understood the workings of party better than
Peel. “Oxford on the surface, but Liverpool underneath”—such was a
contemporary judgment. But, like Disraeli, his progress was slow.
He was Chancellor of the Exchequer at the beginning of the Crimean
War; then he faded into Opposition. It was fortunate for him that
supreme power did not come too soon. Peel had been frustrated by
early experience of high office, which prevented him from putting
his ideas to the test. Long years of waiting made Gladstone sure of
himself.
In 1859, at the age of fifty, Gladstone joined the
Whigs and the pilgrimage was over. His decision was made on an
issue of foreign policy, but he again concentrated on finance. As
Chancellor of the Exchequer under Palmerston his golden period
began—great Budget speeches in the House of Commons, a superb
handling of administrative detail, a commercial treaty with France,
which opened a new era in Free Trade, and demands for retrenchment
in military affairs, which brought him into conflict with his Prime
Minister. His finance was a remarkable success. Three brilliant
Budgets reduced taxation. Trade was rapidly expanding, and it was
soon apparent who would succeed to the leadership of the party. In
1865, in his eighty-first year Palmerston died. “Gladstone,” he
declared in his last days, “will soon have it all his own way, and
whenever he gets my place we shall have strange doings.” The old
Whig was right. The eighteenth century died with him. The later
Victorian age demanded a new leader, and at long last he had
arrived. When Gladstone next appeared before his electors he opened
his speech by saying, “At last, my friends, I am come among you,
and I am come among you unmuzzled.” But the Whigs still hesitated.
Gladstone, like Disraeli, wanted to extend the franchise to large
sections of the working classes: he was anxious to capture the
votes of the new electorate. He prevailed upon the Government, now
headed by Russell, to put forward a Reform Bill, but the Cabinet
were so divided that they resigned. A minority administration under
Derby and Disraeli followed, which lasted for two and a half
years.
Disraeli now seized his chance. He introduced a
fresh Reform Bill in 1867, which he skilfully adapted to meet the
wishes of the House, of which he was Leader. There was a
redistribution of seats in favour of the large industrial towns,
and nearly a million new voters were added to an existing
electorate of about the same number. The Tories were nervous at
this startling advance from their original plan. In many towns the
working classes would now be in the majority at elections. Derby
called it “a leap in the dark.” The recent civil war in America
seemed a poor recommendation for democracy, and even the Radicals
were anxious about how the uneducated masses would behave. But this
immediately became clear. The carrying of the second Reform Bill so
soon after the death of Palmerston opened a new era in English
politics. New issues and new methods began to emerge. As Walter
Bagehot, the banker and economist, said, “A political country is
like an American forest; you have only to cut down the old trees
and immediately new trees come up to replace them.” In February
1868 Derby resigned from the leadership of the party and Disraeli
was at last Prime Minister—as he put it, “at the top of the greasy
pole.” He had to hold a General Election. The new voters gave their
overwhelming support to his opponents, and Gladstone, who had
become leader of the Liberal Party, formed the strongest
administration that England had seen since the days of Peel.