Imperialism and Mr. Gladstone

Extract from a Letter by Lord Grey

Some portion of public attention ought to be given to a subject of very pressing importance – that of the "scarcity of gold." The share which the enhancement of the value of gold has probably had in producing these disastrous strikes seems not to have attracted sufficient notice. The fall of prices from the growing scarcity of gold has necessarily made the same wages for labour really higher than they formerly were, while at the same time this fall of prices has diminished the total return from labour and capital employed in production… Probably this has not been sufficiently well understood by either masters or men, but the masters have practically felt that they could no longer afford to pay the same money wages they used to do, while the men have not understood the necessity for such a reduction. What I would propose is that £1 notes, payable in silver bullion, should be issued, but only in exchange for the same bullion after a certain fixed amount of them had been sent into circulation. But this bullion I should propose to give or receive in exchange for notes, not at any fixed price for silver, but at the market price of the metal, which should be published weekly in the Gazette. By this arrangement it will be perceived that silver would be largely used as an instrument for carrying on the business of exchange, without incurring the inconvenience which seems to be inseparable from the scheme of the bimetallists, who would establish by law a fixed price for silver and for gold. As the cost of producing these metals is liable to variation, I cannot understand how the bimetallists can expect that fixing their comparative prices by law could prevent that which could at the moment be most cheaply produced from driving the other out of circulation, since all who had to pay money would naturally make use of the cheapest money they could get.

PASTEUR AND HYDROPHOBIA (1886)

Source.—The Times, January 8

Extract from an Article on "Science in 1885."

We may here refer to the momentous work of M. Pasteur in connection with hydrophobia. That he has discovered a remedy for one of the most terrible afflictions to which humanity is liable it would probably be premature to say; but that he has taken every precaution against self-deception must be admitted, and so far as he has gone it is difficult to discredit his results.

THE FINAL HOME RULE RUPTURE (1886)

Source.– Morley's Life of Gladstone, vol. iii., pp. 364-368. (Macmillans.)

As it happened, all this [Randolph Churchill's resignation of the Exchequer, and Goschen's appointment] gave a shake to both of the Unionist wings. The ominous clouds of coercion were sailing slowly but discernibly along the horizon, and this made men in the Unionist camp still more restless and uneasy. Mr. Chamberlain, on the very day of the announcement of the Churchill resignation, had made a speech that was taken to hold out an olive-branch to his old friends. Sir William Harcourt … thought the break-up of a great political combination to be so immense an evil as to call for almost any sacrifices to prevent it. He instantly wrote to Birmingham to express his desire to co-operate in reunion, and in the course of a few days five members of the original Liberal Cabinet of 1886 met at his house in what is known as the Round Table Conference (Sir W. Harcourt, Mr. Chamberlain, Lord Herschell, Sir George Trevelyan, and myself)… Mr. Gladstone gave the Round Table his blessing, his "general idea being that he had better meddle as little as possible with the Conference, and retain a free hand." Lord Hartington would neither join the Conference nor deny that he thought it premature… On the other side, both English Liberals and Irish Nationalists were equally uneasy lest the unity of the party should be bought by the sacrifice of fundamentals… Mr. Parnell, though alive to the truth that when people go into a conference it usually means that they are willing to give up something, was thoroughly awake to the satisfactory significance of the Birmingham overtures.

Things at the Round Table for some time went smoothly enough. Mr. Chamberlain gradually advanced the whole length. He publicly committed himself to the expediency of establishing some kind of legislative authority in Dublin in accordance with Mr. Gladstone's principle, with a preference, in his own mind, for a plan on the lines of Canada. This he followed up, also in public, by the admission that of course the Irish legislature must be allowed to organize their own form of executive government, either by an imitation on a small scale of all that goes on at Westminster and Whitehall, or in whatever other shape they might think proper… Then the surface became mysteriously ruffled. Language was used by some of the plenipotentiaries in public, of which each side in turn complained as inconsistent with conciliatory negotiations in private. At last, on the very day on which the provisional result of the Conference was laid before Mr. Gladstone, there appeared in a print called The Baptist an article from Mr. Chamberlain containing an ardent plea for the disestablishment of the Welsh Church, but warning the Welshmen that they and the Scotch crofters, and the English labourers – thirty-two millions of people – must all go without much-needed legislation because three millions were disloyal, while nearly six hundred members of Parliament would be reduced to forced inactivity because some eighty delegates, representing the policy and receiving the pay of the Chicago Convention, were determined to obstruct all business until their demands were conceded. Men naturally asked what was the use of continuing a discussion when one party to it was attacking in this peremptory fashion the very persons and the policy that in private he was supposed to accept. Mr. Gladstone showed no implacability … he said … "I am inclined to think we can hardly do more now… We are quite willing that the subject should stand over for resumption at a convenient season."

The resumption never happened. Two or three weeks later Mr. Chamberlain announced that he did not intend to return to the Round Table. No other serious and formal attempt was ever made on either side to prevent the Liberal Unionists from hardening into a separate species. When they became accomplices in coercion they cut off the chances of reunion.

THE COMING OF TECHNICAL EDUCATION (1887)

Source.—The Times, March 17

Lord Hartington made a striking speech last night to the Polytechnic Young Men's Christian Institute. In the presence of such an audience a text was perhaps needed, and he took as his text some remarks made by Professor Huxley, who lately pointed out the instructive likeness between warfare and industry. If we are well advised – and Lord Hartington has no misgivings on the subject – in spending freely to protect ourselves against aggression, it is equally our duty to be not niggardly in providing industrial education, and diffusing scientific knowledge. It is the condition of industrial supremacy, and it is not an unattainable condition. A Watt or even an Edison is born, not made. But the knowledge of drawing, mechanics, mathematics, and chemistry, and other sciences or arts, which aid the artisan in his daily work, may be imparted, and on the spread of such knowledge may depend the continuance of industrial supremacy. Great commanders cannot be called into being; but in the main it depends on the rank and file of the army of industry whether its battles are lost or won. How is the work to be accomplished? In answer to this question Lord Hartington let fall one or two remarks which, though not offering a complete solution, are, if we mistake not, likely to be fruitful in consequences. The State, he is satisfied, cannot do all or much; and he is struck with the inability of purely voluntary efforts to meet the demand. He finds the necessary assistance, if anywhere, in our municipal institutions. "I hope the time is not far distant when our town councils or local governing bodies will establish in every considerable centre industrial and technical schools, suitable to the wants of the district, and supported out of local funds." The institutions which now imperfectly do the work of diffusing technical instruction "are playing the same part in relation to technical and industrial education that was played by the voluntary schools in relation to elementary education." This points to a national system of technical education; it is the largest and clearest conception of the subject which any public man of importance has put forth.

THE FIRST "GUILLOTINE" CLOSURE (1887)

Source.—Hansard, Third Series, vol. 315, col. 1674, June 10

Ordered: That at ten o'clock p.m. on Friday, the 17th day of June, if the Criminal Law Amendment (Ireland) Bill be not previously reported from the Committee of the whole House, the Chairman shall put forthwith the Question or Questions on any amendment or motion already proposed from the Chair. He shall next proceed and successively put forthwith the Question that any clause then under consideration, and each remaining clause in the Bill, stand part of the Bill, unless progress be moved as hereinafter provided. After the clauses are disposed of, he shall forthwith report the Bill, as amended, to the House.

From and after the passing of this Order, no motion that the Chairman do leave the Chair, or do report progress, shall be allowed, unless moved by one of the members in charge of the Bill, and the Question on such motion shall be put forthwith.

If progress be reported on 17th June the Chairman shall put this Order in force in any subsequent sitting of the Committee.

JUBILEE RETROSPECTS (1887)

I

Source.– An article by Mr. Gladstone in The Nineteenth Century, vol. xxi., p. 1

The Prophet of the new Locksley Hall records against us many sad, and even shameful, defaults. They are not to be denied, and the list might probably be lengthened. The youngest among us will not see the day in which new social problems will have ceased to spring up as from the depths, and vex even the most successful solvers of the old; or in which this proud and great English nation will not have cause, in all its ranks and orders, to bow its head before the Judge Eternal, and humbly to confess to forgotten duties, or wasted and neglected opportunities. It is well to be reminded, and in tones such as make the deaf man hear, of city children who "soak and blacken soul and sense in city slime"; of maidens cast by thousands on the street; of the sempstress scrimped of her daily bread; of dwellings miserably crowded; of fever as the result. But take first the city child as he is described. For one such child now there were ten, perhaps twenty, fifty years back. A very large, and a still increasing proportion of these children have been brought under the regular teaching and discipline of the school. Take the maidens who are now, as they were then, cast by thousands on the streets. But then, if one among them were stricken with penitence, and sought for a place in which to hide her head, she found it only in the pomp of paid institutions, and in a help well meant, no doubt, yet carrying little of what was most essential, sympathetic discrimination, and mild, nay even tender care. Within the half-century a new chapter has opened. Faith and love have gone forth into the field. Specimens of womankind, sometimes the very best and highest, have not deemed this quest of souls beneath them. Scrimping of wages, no doubt, there is and was. But the fair wage of to-day is far higher than it was then, and the unfair wage is assumably not lower. Miserable and crowded dwellings, again, and fever as their result, both then and now. But legislation has in the interval made its attempts in earnest; and if this was with awkward and ungainly hand, private munificence or enterprise is dotting our city areas with worthy dwellings. Above all, have we not to record in this behalf martyred lives, such as those of Denison and Toynbee? Or shall we refuse honourable mention to not less devoted lives, happily still retained, of such persons as Miss Octavia Hill? With all this there has happily grown up not only a vast general extension of benevolent and missionary means, but a great parochial machinery of domestic visitation, charged with comfort and blessing to the needy, and spread over so wide a circle, that what was formerly an exception may now with some confidence be said to be the rule. If insufficiencies have come to be more keenly felt, is that because they are greater, or because there is a bolder and better trained disposition to feel them?..

I will refer as briefly as may be to the sphere of legislation. Slavery has been abolished. A criminal code, which disgraced the Statute Book, has been effectually reformed. Laws of combination and contract, which prevented the working population from obtaining the best price for their labour, have been repealed. The lamentable and demoralizing abuses of the Poor Law have been swept away. Lives and limbs, always exposed to destruction through the incidents of labour, formerly took their chance, no man heeding them, even when the origin of the calamity lay in the recklessness or neglect of the employer. They are now guarded by preventive provisions, and the loss is mitigated, to the sufferers or their survivors, by pecuniary compensation. The scandals of labour in mines, factories, and elsewhere, to the honour, first and foremost, of the name of Shaftesbury, have been either removed, or greatly qualified and reduced. The population on the sea-coast is no longer forced wholesale into contraband trade by fiscal follies; and the Game Laws no longer constitute a plausible apology for poaching. The entire people have good schools placed within the reach of their children, and are put under legal obligation to use the privileges and contribute to the charge. They have also at their doors the means of husbanding their savings, without the compromise of their independence by the inspection of the rector or the squire, and under the guarantee of the State to the uttermost farthing of the amount. Information through a free press, formerly cut off from them by stringent taxation, is now at their easy command. Their interests at large are protected by their votes, and their votes are protected by the secrecy which screens them from intimidation either through violence, or in its subtler forms.

It is perhaps of interest to turn from such dry outlines as may be sketched by the aid of almanacs to those more delicate gradations of the social movement, which in their detail are indeterminate and almost fugitive, but which in their mass may be apprehended, and made the subject of record. Pugilism, which ranges between manliness and brutality, and which in the days of my boyhood, in its greatest celebrations, almost monopolized the space of journals of the highest order, is now rare, modest, and unobtrusive. But, if less exacting in the matter of violent physical excitements, the nation attaches not less but more value to corporal education, and for the schoolboy and the man alike athletics are becoming an ordinary incident of life. Under the influence of better conditions of living, and probably of increased self-respect, mendicity, except in seasons of special distress, has nearly disappeared. If our artisans combine (as they well may) partly to uphold their wages, it is also greatly with the noble object of keeping all the members of their enormous class independent of public alms. They have forwarded the cause of self-denial, and manfully defended themselves even against themselves, by promoting restraints upon the traffic in strong liquors. In districts where they are most advanced, they have fortified their position by organized co-operation in supply. Nor are the beneficial changes of the last half-century confined to the masses. Swearing and duelling established until a recent date almost as institutions of the country, have nearly disappeared from the face of society… At the same time the disposition to lay bare public mischiefs and drag them into the light of day, which, though liable to exaggeration, has perhaps been our best distinction among the nations, has become more resolute than ever…

The sum of the matter seems to be that, upon the whole and in a degree, we who lived fifty, sixty, seventy years back, and are living now, have lived into a gentler time; that the public conscience has grown more tender, as indeed was very needful; and that, in matters of practice, at sight of evils formerly regarded with indifference, or even connivance, it now not only winces, but rebels; that upon the whole the race has been reaping, and not scattering; earning, and not wasting.

II

Source.—The Times, June 21

The men of the Victorian age have lived in the midst of almost cataclysmic mental changes. New facts have rained upon them with a rapidity that baffles hypothesis, and stamps theory as obsolete before half the world has become reconciled to its existence. In such a time of intellectual flux anything like monumental art is impossible, since neither the artist nor the age possesses the permanence of mood required for a true presentment. Although, however, the Victorian era has not produced much that the most liberal charity can conceive as belonging to all time, it has shown immense fertility and vigour in supplying the intellectual wants of the present. In all but those supreme manifestations of the human intellect which we ascribe to genius, its products are at least equal, and in most cases superior, to those of any period of our history, while in quantity and variety of intellectual effort, and in diffusion of intellectual interest, it is entirely unapproachable.

"REMEMBER MITCHELSTOWN" (1887)

Source.—The Times, October 19

(Mr. Gladstone at Nottingham): The case I have now to mention goes further than that. It is the Mitchelstown case. I was responsible for putting in a telegraphic answer to a telegram the words, "Remember Mitchelstown," and Mitchelstown will and must be remembered, and the meeting has an account to settle with the Government in respect to Mitchelstown. I should have been glad to have sealed my own lips, had not the Government sent forth its testimony, its solemn, downright, unequivocal judgment that the proceeding at Mitchelstown were right… What did Mr. Balfour say, when the Irish Nationalist members brought up the question of the proceedings at Mitchelstown? He said that the whole action of the police was in the face of the most tremendous provocation, and absolutely in self-defence. He said that when the order to fire was given the order was to fire only on those portions of the crowd who were engaged in throwing stones… Three human beings lost their lives under the fire of the police. I cannot say three men, for in the ordinary sense of the word they were not men. Two of them had been men, and were in harmless old age. The other was growing to be a man, and was still in harmless boyhood. Not one of these three persons is even alleged to have thrown a stone. Not one of them, if I recollect aright, is even alleged to have carried a stick… Is not this a melancholy and a miserable farce – tragic, too, in the highest degree, when we consider that these trumpery proceedings, perhaps of some casual boys or men, who are only able in the utmost of their wrath and in the supply of stones that they could command to break two or three windows in the police barracks – that these are to be represented as leading and heading an attack which caused a humane and intelligent body of the representatives of the Government to fire out of windows, to kill three persons, one of them distant 100 yards away, and two others sixty yards away. I have said, and say again, "Remember Mitchelstown!"

"BLOODY SUNDAY" (1887)

Source.– Mackail's Life of William Morris, vol. ii., p. 190

The restlessness among the working classes culminated in the famous scenes of the 13th of November (1887), "Bloody Sunday," in and round Trafalgar Square. A meeting in the Square had been announced to protest against the Irish policy of the Government; it had been proclaimed by the police, and became converted into a demonstration on a huge scale. No one who saw it will ever forget the strange, and indeed terrible, sight of that grey winter day, the vast sombre-coloured crowd, the brief but fierce struggle at the corner of the Strand, and the river of steel and scarlet that moved slowly through the dusky swaying masses when two squadrons of the Life Guards were summoned up from Whitehall. Only disorganized fragments straggled into the Square, to find that the other columns had also been headed off or crushed, and that the day was practically over. Preparations had been made to repel something little short of a popular insurrection. An immense police force had been concentrated, and in the afternoon the Square was lined by a battalion of Foot Guards, with fixed bayonets and twenty rounds of ball cartridge. For an hour or two the danger was imminent of street-fighting such as had not been known in London for more than a century. But the organized force at the disposal of the civil authorities proved sufficient to check the insurgent columns and finally clear the streets without a shot being fired. For some weeks afterwards the Square was garrisoned by special drafts of police. Otherwise London next day had resumed its usual aspect. Once more the London Socialists had drawn into line with the great mass of the London Radicals, and a formidable popular movement had resulted, which, on that Sunday, was within a very little of culminating in a frightful loss of life and the practical establishment of a state of siege in London. But the English spirit of compromise soon made itself felt… Measures were taken for the relief of the unemployed. Political Radicalism resumed its normal occupations; and by the end of the year the Socialist League had dropped back into its old place, a small body of enthusiasts among whom an Anarchist group were now beginning to assume a distinct prominence.

FIRST REPORT ON THE RAND (1887)

Source.—The Board of Trade Journal, December

Extracts from a Report, dated 4th October, by Mr. Ralph Williams, British Officer at Pretoria

On the 20th September, 1886, the Witwatersrand district was declared a public goldfield, and from that date the history of Johannesburg begins. For some months the town was known as Ferreira's Camp, and the Natal Camp, and it was not till, perhaps, March last that the present town of Johannesburg became recognized as the central point of the goldfields of the district. From that date the growth of the town has been almost unprecedented… Large hotels exist which equal in accommodation anything in South Africa. Warehouses are full of all that can be obtained even at Cape Town. A theatre – rough, it is true, but of considerable capacity – is in full working order. Four banks are at work. Three newspapers are published every other day… The actual number of the population I can hardly estimate, opinions differing so greatly. In the town of Johannesburg itself I am disposed to think there are about 4,000 people. The outlying districts also contain a very large population, probably nearly equalling that of the town.

The reefs which constitute the wealth of the Witwatersrand are entirely different from any development which has yet been worked… The principal reef, which has now been traced to a distance of between twenty-five and thirty miles, is called the "main reef." It may be taken to have an average breadth of from 3 feet 6 inches to 15 feet. It has in several places been tested to a depth of 70 feet, in every case being proved to be better and richer at the lower levels than at the surface.

An inspection of the properties and inquiry into the cost of production cannot fail to impress one with the fact that, if these reefs are found to have sufficient depth, one of the richest goldfields in the world has now come to light.

notes

1

General Sir Neville Chamberlain.