DEFEAT OF COBDEN, BRIGHT, AND THE LIBERALS. attending the election, lost his seat at Manchester; Sir J. Potter and Mr. J. A. Turner taking the places of him and Mr. Milner Gibson. Mr. Bright's illness had, it was said, little or no effect on the result; but perhaps it was on the whole a good thing for him that he had not at that time to resume arduous parliamentary duties, or to be compelled to neglect them. As it was, he retired with a certain sad dignity which was eloquent in the address issued to his former constituents. Here are two or three passages from it:-"I have received a telegraphic despatch informing me of the result of the election contest in which you have just been engaged. The result has not greatly surprised me, and as far as I am personally concerned-inasmuch as it liberates me from public life in a manner that involves on my part no shrinking from my duty -I cannot seriously regret it. I lament it on public grounds, because it tells the world that many among you have abandoned the opinions you professed to hold in the year 1847, and even so recently as the year 1852. I believe that slander itself has not dared to charge me with having forsaken any of the principles on the honest support of which I offered myself twice, and was twice accepted as your representative. The charge against me has rather been that I have too warmly and too faithfully defended the political views which found so much favour with you at two previous elections. ... I have esteemed it a high honour to be one of your representatives, and have given more of mental and physical labour to your service than is just to myself. I feel it scarcely less an honour to suffer in the cause of peace, and on behalf of what I believe to be the true interests of my country, though I could have wished that the blow had come from other hands, at a time when I could have met face to face those who dealt it. In taking leave of you and of public life, let me assure you that I can never forget the many, the innumerable kindnesses I have received from my friends among you. No one will rejoice more than I shall in all that brings you prosperity and honour; and I am not without a hope that, when a calmer hour shall come, you will say of Mr. Gibson and of me, that, as 205 colleagues in your representation for ten years, we have not sacrificed our principles to gain popularity, or bartered our independence for the emoluments of office or the favours of the great. I feel that we have stood for the rights and interests and freedom of the people, and that we have not tarnished the honour or lessened the renown of your eminent city." Lord John Russell maintained his seat for the city of London along with three other Liberals, Baron Rothschild, Sir James Duke, and Mr. R. W. Crawford, but he was last on the poll. Mr. Ayrton and Mr. Butler were elected for the Tower Hamlets, and Sir W. Clay rejected. Mr. Lowe was re-elected for Kidderminster, but he and his friends were savagely attacked by a mob as they were leaving a polling-booth. There were 189 new members, and it was computed that the Liberals in the new parliament were 371, the Conservatives 284-only two of Palmerston's supporters were defeated--Admiral Berkeley at Gloucester, and Mr. Frederick Peel at Bury. Parliament met on the 30th of April (1857), and Mr. John Evelyn Denison, M.P. for North Nottinghamshire, was unanimously elected speaker. It may be mentioned that during the dissolution two officers, Major-general Stalker and Commodore Ethersey, apparently unable to bear the responsibilities which lay upon them in relation to the Persian expedition, committed suicide at Bushire. Major-general Stalker was the first to shoot himself, and three days afterwards Commodore Ethersey followed the sad example. The proceedings in parliament had chiefly related to the prosecution of the great and the little wars, and there had consequently been little direct legislation for the promotion of social progress. Lord Elgin was soon sent as our representative to China. The principal measure which occupied the early attention of the new House of Commons was what was known as the Divorce Act-which meant not an act for permitting divorce, for divorce already existed as a possible thing for people who were wealthy enough to bring a cause before the ecclesiastical courts-but for estab lishing a regular court for the trial of appli- | the Lords and several members of the govcations for divorce and for "matrimonial causes," the decisions in which would be less cumbrous and far less costly than those of the tribunal which it was intended to supersede. In a word, the Divorce Act did not introduce the power of obtaining a divorce, it only extended it to people who had hitherto been unable to avail themselves of the means that had been provided for trying causes between husband and wife. The effect of this was to remove the discussion of divorce cases from parliament, to which they were referred before the passing of the act, when wealthy or titled suitors would move for a trial. The unedifying details of some gross or painful case would no longer be discussed in an assembly unqualified to conduct the inquiry, and often unable either to discriminate or to follow the evidence which alone could secure a reasonable verdict. Many of the reports of divorce cases at the present day are bad enough, but they are harmless as compared to those of similiar trials in the House of Lords at a date previous to the time of which we are now speaking. "Bills will be submitted to you for improving the laws relating to the testamentary and matrimonial jurisdiction now exercised by the ecclesiastical courts, and also for checking fraudulent breaches of trust," was almost the only paragraph in the royal speech referring to domestic legislation. Parliament assembled in May. It had been determined to carry the Divorce Court Bill if possible, and Lord Palmerston was accused of hurrying it through parliament, to which he retorted that he was quite ready to sit through September, if it was desired to have a full discussion of all the details, and, much to the amusement of the house, added, "One prominent opponent of the bill said to me on one occasion, 'You never shall pass the bill.' I replied, 'Won't we!" This opponent was perhaps Lord Redesdale, who afterwards tried to throw out the measure by a motion that it should be considered that day three months. As this was on the 21st of August, such a decision would have sealed the fate of the bill, and the decision was nearly secured. At that date most of ernment had left town, but it was thought there were a sufficient number of their adherents remaining to carry the bill. But the Conservatives hurried back to town to support Lord Redesdale's amendment, which must have been carried had not the ministerialists moved, and insisted on, an adjournment without mentioning the bill. This gave time for their forces to be recalled, and the amendment was rejected by a majority of two only, the bill being passed on the 25th. In the House of Commons the most determined opponent of the measure was Mr. Gladstone, who objected to it from conscientious motives. Doubtless the proposed act had greatly altered the position of applicants and appellants in divorce cases, but it had done more. The Bishop of Oxford had endeavoured to introduce a clause making it lawful to pass on the guilty parties, or either of them, a sentence of fine or imprisonment, as though such parties had been guilty of a misdemeanour at common law, and this was carried in committee but omitted in the third reading; while an amendment by the lord chancellor permitting a woman to marry after divorce was carried, and an addition by Lord Wensleydale against the adulterer and adulteress marrying with each other was rejected. It would appear, therefore, that the case was not completely stated by Mr. Walpole, who, in supporting the government, not only said that the relations of marriage were in no degree loosened by the bill, but that the only object of it was to substitute one good tribunal for three tribunals, one of which was a scandal and a disgrace to the country. Mr. Gladstone, at all events, took the ground that divorce was prohibited by Scripture and was a social evil. For nearly two centuries the legislature had, from time to time, granted divorce a vinculo in certain cases where there was enough wealth to sustain the heavy charge necessary for the preliminary suits and for a private act of parliament; but he held that the passing of from one to half-adozen divorce bills per annum, and the occasional occurrence of a practical solecism through the variance of the Scotch law from our own, THE DIVORCE BILL-GLADSTONE'S OPINIONS THEREON. did not practically affect the state either of facts or of feelings for the mass of the community in England and Ireland, with their two hundred thousand marriages a year. "It was not the law of marriage which brought itself into danger," wrote Mr. Gladstone in the Quarterly Review for July, 1857, "but rather it was the feeling entertained, whether justly or unjustly, about the court by which that law was administered. The disposal of a large part of the testamentary business of the country under episcopal authority was a clear anomaly, and what was much more it was one of those anomalies which most powerful bodies of men were interested in attacking, while only a feeble one was arrayed in its defence. Attention readily passed from the court to the law in its different branches; and when once that branch of it which dealt with the contract of marriage as a lifelong engagement was brought under criticism, its existence could not long remain undisturbed; it was too Spartan and severe for the relaxed tone of modern society, and the other principal Protestant countries had long ago set us the example of its surrender. A commission was accordingly appointed to inquire into the law of marriage; and in the year 1853 the commission reported in favour of a change in the law which should embody the principle of divorce a vinculo for adultery." There had, as he remarked, already been a surrender of that strict view of the marriagecontract, which, it must be admitted, appears to be the divine meaning of what marriage should really become. The difference in the law in England and Scotland was a constant source of inconvenience. "Gretna Green" marriages at the little village" over the border" in Dumfriesshire, where the ceremony was, it was said, performed by a blacksmith for runaway couples-had been declared illegal only on the 1st of January in that very year (1857), but legal marriage in Scotland could be upheld by the mere fact of a woman and a man having called each other husband and wife in the presence of witnesses. We cannot enter into Mr. Gladstone's arguments on the scriptural and historical grounds of his opposition to the bill, and it will suffice 207 to say that the social grounds on which he denounced it were founded on his religious-one might perhaps say his spiritual-convictions of what marriage really implied, and what was probably included by St. Paul when he spoke of it as "a great mystery." Nor did Mr. Gladstone hesitate to condemn Milton as the advocate of easy divorce at a time when, during the Commonwealth, adultery was made a capital offence, but the marriage-contract remained indissoluble. Milton doubtless advocated separation, equivalent to divorce, for aversion or incompatibility, and even declared that to forego an unfit, ungodly, and discordant wedlock was according to perfection rather than to infirmity. "That for which he pleads," says Mr. Gladstone, "is a license of divorce for aversion or incompatibility; the wildest libertine, the veriest Mormon, could not devise words more conformable to his ideas, if indeed we are just to the Mormon sages in assuming that they alienate as freely as they acquire. And all this energetic emotion of Milton's betrays its selfish origin by the fact that it is man only whose sufferings in unhappy marriages he commiserates; the wrongs and sorrows of women seem to have been, in his view, a very secondary affair; indeed, he but faintly shows that he was even conscious of their existence." These views of Mr. Gladstone1 were the foundation of his resistance to the bill, but he also pointed emphatically to the momentous character of the change as it regarded women. He says, "One of the noblest social achievements of the gospel has been to elevate the 'ministering angel' of the world to a position of perfect equality with a man in all that relates to the essential prerogatives of personal and spiritual being. It is the most splendid example, without exception, which history affords of the triumph on a large scale of the law of right over the law of force, and of the law of love over the law of lust. This equality, which the piercing sagacity of Aristotle could not discern, nor the ethereal imag 1 Republished in Gleanings of Past Years, vol. vi., to which the reader would do well to refer as an exhaustive essay on the subject from the point of view here indicated. ination of Plato conceive, is now the simplest | Gladstone held, during his antagonism to the elementary conception of every Christian child; for our nurseries know no distinction between the reverence due to the one parent and to the other. Many and many a long century did it take to work out this great result, and those who reproach the English law of marriage with its having subsisted under papal guardianship, should remember that the same period, and the same tract of Christendom, which brought it down in safety, delivered to us along with it that precious legacy of customs and ideas which has established woman upon the very highest levels of our moral and spiritual existence, for man's benefit no less than for her own." In reference to the religious rite Mr. Gladstone argued,— 66 bill, which soon afterwards passed into law, and in a footnote to the republication of this essay in 1878 he adds, "I record with regret, after twenty-one years, my conviction, that the general soundness of these arguments and anticipations has been too sadly illustrated by the mischievous effect of the measure on the conjugal morality of the country." It may be noted, however, that the observations made by the distinguished essayist on the subject of marriage by registration, do not include the whole question. Such marriages have vastly increased during the twenty-one years which have elapsed, and the registrar is now, in fact, the only officer appointed by the state to perform the legal ceremony of marriage; but even before this change had taken place there were numbers of persons professing a fervent belief in religion who yet did not conceive that the "marriage service" of the Church of England was the only "way properly Christian" by which they could enter into matrimony, and many of them failing to find any ceremonial ordained in the New Testament, and yet believing somewhat in the spirit of marriage, were content to adopt the "letter" of the legal social contract, not as all that was necessary, but as all that was merely formally necessary or publicly necessary. Of course Mr. Gladstone never would have denied that Christians not conforming to the rites and to some of the doctrines of the Church of England, and conscientiously dissenting from the "Establishment," were yet capable of a truly Christian marriage in the high interpretation which he claims for it; but it may seem to some readers that he had overlooked the ob "A time may come when society cannot bear the strictness of the Christian law, and will reject the drill that is necessary to make the soldier. It will then, doubtless, largely fall back upon that lower conception of marriage which treats it as a purely civil contract between individuals. It may be said that that time has already come, in a country like England, where, according to the last returns, out of one hundred and sixty thousand marriages, seven thousand six hundred, a number relatively small but absolutely considerable, were celebrated by the registrar, and therefore with no special religious authority. We are far from saying that the law offends by permitting such marriages as these to persons whose consciences do not enable them to enter into marriage by the way properly Christian. So, then, if there must be remarriage, let that too be the registrar's privilege. The day when marriage is made dissoluble by law injection that the religious authority which he England will at best be noted in our calendar with charcoal, not with chalk. But if we are not strong enough to hold the lower portion of society up to Christianity, let us not be mad enough to drag the very rites of Christianity down to the lowered and lowering level of society. Let the salt of the earth still keep its savour, and the darkness of the body be illumined, so far as it may, by the eye that still wakes within it." These then were the opinions by which Mr. claims for marriage itself need not be confined to the authority of the "Church of England," or of any one Christian Church, but the authority of the Christian spirit in the hearts of those who regard the marriage as in the highest sense binding, in whatever way it may be formally and legally celebrated. It is not necessary to do more than refer to Mr. Gladstone's well-known scholarship as being conspicuous in the essay to which we have just referred. It had long been as well GLADSTONE AND THE IONIAN ISLANDS-INDIA. known to his friends, and to all those who were able to form an estimate of such attainments, as his intense earnestness in upholding, what he regarded as essential principles of conduct or of policy, was known to those who acted with him in public affairs. In a somewhat remarkable manner these two qualities led to his being selected to fulfil a mission to which we shall have to refer in another chapter. By the Treaty of Vienna the Ionian Islands, the inhabitants of which had a restless desire to be made a portion of the Kingdom of Greece, were constituted a kind of commonwealth under British protection, with a senate of six and a legislative assembly of forty members, who probably exercised less power than one of our colonial assemblies and not much more than a provincial corporation or board of works. They were placed under the control of a British lord high commissioner, and we had the right to maintain garrisons in the islands, of which he therefore would almost necessarily become civil governor and, in case of urgency, military commander. This was, of course, a very different thing to self-government, and the name of republic was not so satisfactory to the Ionians as the hope of becoming a part of the Greek kingdom and sharing in the Greek independent nationality. For some time before Lord Palmerston's vic VOL. III. 209 tory on the Chinese question there had been great excitement on this subject, and it was not destined to be allayed until some time afterwards, when far graver matters had been settled, arising out of the condition of our possessions in India. The government of India had already undergone some important changes by the operation of the ministerial measure brought in by Sir Charles Wood in 1853, which considerably modified the relative positions of the government and the East India Company. The relations between the directors and the Board of Control were not altered, but the constitution of the former was considerably changed and its patronage curtailed. The number of the members of the court was reduced from twenty-four to eighteen, of whom twelve were to be elected as before, and six nominated by the crown from Indian servants who had been ten years in the service of the crown or the company. One-third of this number was to go out every second year, but to be eligible for reappointment. Nominations by favour were abolished. The governorship of Bengal was separated from the office of governor-general, and the legislative council was improved and its number enlarged to twelve. This was the scheme of government, when sudden and startling events to which we shall presently refer called attention to India. 56 |