1851 A MORIBUND MINISTRY 937 and an excited public opinion saw in this an attack on the Queen's authority. In 1851 Russell introduced an Ecclesiastical Titles Bill, declaring all acts done by the Roman Catholic bishops, and all deeds bestowing property to them under the new titles, to be null and void. This Bill alienated the Peelites and advanced Liberals like Bright and Cobden. In February the ministry resisted a proposal to lower the county franchise, and resigned. Lord Stanley, however, declined to form a ministry, and Russell and his followers returned to office. The Ecclesiastical Titles Bill was passed in a The Britannia Tubular Railway Bridge over the Menai Strait: designed by modified form, but it was never in a single instance put in execu- 23. The Great Exhibition. 1851.-In 1851 people thought less of politics than of the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, where the produce of the world was to be seen in the enormous glass house known as the Crystal Palace-afterwards removed to Penge Hill. The Exhibition was a useful undertaking suggested by Prince Albert, and it served its purpose in teaching English manufacturers that they might improve their own work by studying the work of foreigners. Many people thought that crowds of revolutionists, who would come under pretence of seeing the exhibition, would set London on fire. Others thought that the nations of Europe would III 3 P be so knit together by commercial interests that there would be no more wars. 24. The End of the Russell Ministry. 1851—1852.-On December 2, 1851, Louis Napoleon dissolved the Assembly, put most of the leading French politicians in prison, and marched soldiers into the streets of Paris to shoot all who resisted him. He then asked the French people to name him President for ten years, with institutions which made him practically the master of the State. The French people, frightened at anarchy, gave him what he asked. In England, Lord Palmerston not only approved of the proceeding, but expressed his approval to the French ambassador, though the Cabinet was for absolute neutrality; whereupon he was dismissed from office. Early in 1852 he took his revenge by declaring against the ministry on a detail in a militia bill. The ministers, finding themselves in a minority, resigned office. 25. The First Derby Ministry. 1852.-Lord Stanley, who had recently become Earl of Derby by his father's death, now formed a ministry out of the Protectionist party, and declared that the question whether free-trade or protection should prevail was one to be settled by a new parliament to be elected in the summer of 1852. The real master of the government was Disraeli, who had succeeded to the nominal as well as to the actual leadership of his party in the House of Commons upon the death of Lord George Bentinck in 1848, and who now became Chancellor of the Exchequer. Disraeli knew well that the feeling of the country was in favour of free-trade, and he astonished his colleagues and sup porters by declaring his admiration of its blessings. The elections, when they took place, left the government in a minority. On the meeting of the new Parliament, the first question needing solution was whether the dissensions between Russell and Palmerston, and between the Whigs and Peelites, could be made up so as to form a united opposition, and the second, whether the government could contrive to renounce Protection without complete loss of dignity. The Duke of Wellington had died before Parliament met, and his death served to remind people how he had again and again abandoned political positions with credit, by stating with perfect frankness that his opinions were unchanged, but that circumstances made it no longer possible or desirable to give effect to them. 26. The Burial of Protection. 1852.-Soon after the meeting of Parliament, Villiers, the old champion of free-trade (see p. 924), brought forward a resolution, declaring the repeal of the Corn Laws to have been wise, just, and beneficial.' Those who had once 1852 PROTECTION RENOUNCED 939 been Protectionists, shrank from condemning so distinctly a policy which they had formerly defended; but when Palmerston came to their help by proposing in a less offensive form a resolution which meant much the same as that of Villiers, he was supported by the greater number of them, and his motion was carried with only fifty-three dissentients. Disraeli then brought forward an ingenious budget, which was rejected by the House, upon which the Derby ministry resigned. If Disraeli had not succeeded in maintaining his party in power, at least he had freed it from the unpopular burden of attachment to protection, and had made it capable of rising to power in the future. Before he left office Louis Napoleon became, by a popular vote, Napoleon III. Emperor of the French. CHAPTER LIX THE CRIMEAN WAR AND THE INDIAN MUTINY. 1852-1858 LEADING DATES men. 1. Expectation of Peace. 1852.-Since the accession to power of Lord Grey's ministry in 1830, the opinions of Bentham (see p. 890) had gained the upper hand, and the greatest happiness of the greatest number had become the inspiring thought of statesFree trade was regarded, not merely as desirable because it averted starvation, but as uniting nations together in commercial bonds. Nothing was more common in 1851 and 1852 than to hear sensible men predict that the era of wars was past, and that nations trafficking with one another would have no motive for engaging in strife. The fierce passions evoked by the struggles for nationality in 1848 were forgotten, and a time of peace and prosperity regarded as permanently established. 2. Church Movements. 1827-1853.--There had, indeed, been signs that it was impossible to bring all men to forsake the pursuit of ideal truth. In 1827 Keble published the first edition of the Christian Year, and in the following years a body of writers at Oxford, of whom the most prominent were Newman and Pusey, did their best to inspire the rising generation with the belief that the Church of England had a life of its own independent of the State or of Society, and that its true doctrines were those which had been taught in the earlier centuries of the Church's existence. Their teaching was not unlike that of Laud (see p. 520), though without Laud's leaning upon the State, and with a reverence for the great medieval ecclesiastics and their teaching which Laud had not possessed. In Scotland, reaction against State interference took another turn. Large numbers of the Scottish clergy and people objected to the system by which lay patrons had in their hands the appointment of ministers to Church livings, and in 1843 no less than 474 ministers threw up their livings and, followed by numerous congregations, formed the Free Church of Scotland. Different as were the movements in the two countries, they had this in common, that they regarded religion as something more than the creature of law and Parliament. 3. Growth of Science. 1830-1859.-Other men sought their ideals in science, and though scientific men did not meddle with politics, their work was not only productive of an increase of material comfort, but also permeated the minds of unscientific persons with a belief in natural law and order, which steadied them when they came to deal with the complex facts of human life. The rapid growth of railways, especially after 1844, the introduction of the electric telegraph in 1837, and other practical results of scientific discovery, prepared the way for a favourable reception of doctrines such as those announced in Lyell's Principles of Geology, the first edition of which was published in 1830, where the formation of the earth's surface was traced to a series of gradual changes similar to those in action at the present day. Darwin's Origin of Species, in which the phenomena of life were accounted for by permanent natural causes, did not appear till 1859. 1837-1848.-The feel 4. Dickens, Thackeray, and Macaulay. ings and opinions of the age were, as is usually the case, reflected in its literature. Dickens, whose first considerable work, The Pickwick Papers, appeared in 1837, painted humorously the lives of the middle classes, which had obtained political power through the Reform Act of 1832; and Thackeray, whose Vanity Fair was 1837-1856 MODERN LITERATURE 941 published in 1848, lashed the vices of great and wealthy sinners, principally of those who had held a high place in the society of the preceding generations, though he delighted in painting the gentleness and self-denial of men, and still more of women of a lower station. For him the halo of glory with which Scott had crowned the past had disappeared. Amongst the historians of this period, by far the greatest is Macaulay, whose history of England began to appear in 1848, the year in which Vanity Fair was published. In him was to be found a massive common-sense in applying the political judgments of the day to the events of past times, combined with an inability to grasp sympathetically the opinions of those who had struggled against the social and political movements out of which the life of the nineteenth century had been developed. As for the future, Macaulay had no such dissatisfaction with life around him as to crave for further organic change. Piecemeal reforms he welcomed gladly, but he had no wish to alter the political basis of society. The Reform Act of 1832 gave him all that he desired. 5. Grote, Mill, and Carlyle. 1833-1856.--There were not wanting writers who saw the weak points of that rule of the middle classes which seemed so excellent to Macaulay. Grote's History of Greece, which was published at intervals from 1845 to 1856, was in reality a panegyric on the democracy of Athens and, by implication, a pleading in favour of democracy in England. Mill, whose System of Logic appeared in 1843, expounded the utilitarian philosophy of Bentham, accompanying his scientific teaching with the expression of hopefulness in the growth of democracy as likely to lead to better government. The man, however, whose teaching did most to rouse the age to a sense of the insufficiency of its work was Thomas Carlyle, whose Sartor Resartus began to appear in 1833, and who detested alike the middle-class Parliamentary government dear to Macaulay, and the democratic government dear to Grote and Mill. He was the prophet of duty. Each individual was to set himself resolutely to despise the conventions of the world, and to conform to the utmost of his power to the divine laws of the world. Those who did this most completely were heroes, to whom and not to Parliamentary majorities or scientific deductions, reverence and obedience were due. The negative part of Carlyle's teaching-its condemnation of democracy and science---made no impression. The positive part fixed itself upon the mind of the young, thousands of whom learnt from it to follow the call of duty, and to obey her behests. |