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THE QUEEN'S SPIRITED ANSWER.

were directly contrary to its meaning. Your majesty's envoy has taken part in this conference and its decision, and when your majesty says, 'Where the vocation of diplomacy ends, there that of the sovereign may with propriety begin,' I cannot concur in any such line of demarcation, for what my ambassador does he does in my name, and consequently I feel myself not only bound in honour, but also constrained by an imperative obligation to accept the consequences, whatever they may be, of the line which he has been directed to adopt.

"The consequences of a war, frightful and incalculable as they are, are as distressing to me to contemplate as they are to your majesty. I am also aware that the Emperor of Russia does not wish for war. But he makes demands upon the Porte which the united European powers, yourself included, have solemnly declared to be incompatible with the independence of the Porte and the equilibrium of Europe. In view of this declaration, and of the presence of the Russian army of invasion in the principalities, the powers must be prepared to support their words by acts. If the Turk now retires into the background, and the impending war appears to you to be a 'war for an idea,' the reason is simply this, that the very motives which urge on the emperor, in spite of the protest of all Europe, and at the risk of a war that may devastate the world, to persist in his demands, disclose a determination to realize a fixed idea, and that the grand ulterior consequences of the war must be regarded as far more important than its original ostensible cause, which in the beginning appeared to be neither more nor less than the key of the back-door of a mosque.

"Your majesty calls upon me 'to probe the question to the bottom in the spirit and love of peace, and to build a bridge for the imperial honour.' ... All the devices and ingenuity of diplomacy and also of goodwill have been squandered during the last nine months in vain attempts to build up such a bridge! Projets de notes, conventions, protocols, &c. &c., by the dozen have emanated from the chanceries of the different powers,

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and the ink that has gone to the penning of them might well be called a second Black Sea. But every one of them has been wrecked upon the self-will of your imperial brother-inlaw.

"When your majesty tells me that you are now determined to assume an attitude of complete neutrality,' and that in this mind you appeal to your people, who exclaim with sound practical sense, 'It is to the Turk that violence has been done; the Turk has plenty of good friends, and the emperor has done us no harm,'-I do not understand you. Had such language fallen from the King of Hanover or of Saxony I could have understood it. But up to the present hour I have regarded Prussia as one of the five Great Powers, which since the peace of 1815 have been the guarantors of treaties, the guardians of civilization, the champions of right, and ultimate arbitrators of the nations; and I have for my part felt the holy duty to which they were thus divinely called, being at the same time perfectly alive to the obligations, serious as these are and fraught with danger, which it imposes. Renounce these obligations, my dear brother, and in doing so you renounce for Prussia the status she has hitherto held. And if the example thus set should find imitators, European civilization is abandoned as a plaything for the winds; right will no longer find a champion, nor the oppressed an umpire to appeal to.

.

"Let not your majesty think that my object in what I have said is to persuade you to change your determination. So little have I it in my purpose to seek to persuade you, that nothing has pained me more than the suspicion expressed through General von der Gröben in your name, that it was the wish of England to lead you into temptation by holding out the prospect of certain advantages. The groundlessness of such an assumption is apparent from the very terms of the treaty which was offered to you, the most important clause of which was that by which the contracting parties pledged themselves under no circumstances to seek to obtain from the war any advantage to themselves. Your majesty could not possibly have given any

your signature to this treaty.

"But now to conclude! You think that war might even be declared, yet you express the hope that, for all that, it might still not break out. I cannot, unfortunately, give countenance to the hope that the declaration will not be followed by immediate action. Shakspere's words:-

'Beware

Of entrance to a quarrel; but, being in, Bear it, that the opposer may beware of thee' have sunk deeply into every Englishman's heart. Sad that they should find their application here, where, in other circumstances, personal friendship and liking would alone prevail! What must be your majesty's state of mind at seeing them directed against a beloved brother-in-law, whom yet, much as you love him, your conscience cannot acquit of the crime of having, by his arbitrary and passionate bearing, brought such vast misery upon the world!”

stronger proof of your unselfishness than by implied charge of bad faith, and appealing to the confidential communications between the two governments to show how open and sincere were the intentions of the czar. This was too much. As the challenge was given it was accepted, and the memoranda were published. They led to other revelations, for directly the French government learned with surprise what had been the course Russia had pursued, they informed their representatives throughout Europe, that, from the moment Russia saw that England would not fall in with her views, she had tried to sow discord between England and France. Prince Gortschakoff had, in November, 1853, proposed to Count Béarn, the French minister at Stuttgart, a solution of the Eastern question by means of an understanding between Russia and France. In the course of what passed Prince Gortschakoff had declared, that he knew England would throw over the Eastern question as soon as she had got France fairly committed. "She will in fact have helped you to compromise yourselves, and will leave you all the embarrassment of a false and difficult position. We have all grievances of our own against this power. What a nice trick to play her would it be to come to an arrangement among ourselves without her! Trust me! Distrust perfidious Albion!" This language, and much more to the same effect, Prince Gortschakoff stated that he was officially authorized to hold. "I need not say," M. Drouyn de Lhuys writes in the circular note from which these quotations are made, "that our loyalty towards England and towards Europe forbade us to lend an ear to these insinuations."1

This reply is a fair representation of the situation as it appeared, not only to English ministers, but to the majority of thoughtful Englishmen at the time; but there were other thoughtful Englishmen--beside Richard Cobden and John Bright-who, though they were not on the side of the czar, and would not have endorsed either the conduct or the mode of expression of the King of Prussia, would not accept these representations as sufficient reasons for a war which they believed was neither necessary, justifiable, nor even expedient for the country.

The attitude of the queen and of the ministry with regard to the Emperor of Russia may well be attributed to the knowledge, that while professing to be anxious to conclude a treaty with England after failing to induce its government to conspire with him against the existence of Turkey, he was using efforts with Austria, Prussia, and France, to prevent them from maintaining an alliance with us. Lord John Russell had spoken in parliament implying the bad faith of the Russian government, and this had led to an article in the Journal de St. Pétersbourg, which evidently came from the Russian chancery, repudiating the

But there was nearly an end to all thought of negotiations or of further parley when on the 6th of March, 1854, Mr. Gladstone rose to propose what was in reality a war budget. His position was in many respects a painful one, for both on financial and on much higher grounds he had a real objection to the war; but at the same time he could not take the view of Mr. Cobden or of Mr. Bright, nor, the grounds of England's intervention being

Life of the Prince Consort, by Sir Theodore Martin.

GLADSTONE'S NEW BUDGET.

at the time what they were, could he dissociate himself from the government on account of it. Of course Mr. Kinglake, in his narrative of the exciting events connected with the invasion of the Crimea, has something to say about Mr. Gladstone's position, and the words are neither altogether true, nor, as they have been often quoted, are they any longer new. "He had once," says the pungent historian of the war, "imagined it to be his duty to quit a government and to burst through strong ties of friendship and gratitude by reason of a thin shade of difference on the subject of white or brown sugar. It was believed that if he were to commit even a little sin or to imagine an evil thought he would instantly arraign himself before the dread tribunal which awaited him within his own bosom, and that his intellect being subtle and microscopic, and delighting in casuistry and exaggeration, he would be very likely to give his soul a very harsh trial, and treat himself as a great criminal for faults too minute to be visible to the naked eyes of laymen. His friends lived in dread of his virtues as tending to make him whimsical and unstable, and the practical politicians perceiving that he was not to be depended upon for party purposes, and was bent upon none but lofty objects, used to look upon him as dangerous, used to call him behind his back a good man,-a good man in the worst sense of the term."

After all, this criticism, when analysed, amounts to little other than an admission that Mr. Gladstone was constantly influenced by conscientious motives, against which neither ambition, nor the desire for place, nor the supposed claims of party, had any abiding influence. There are readers who will see in the smart estimate of the satirist something which may remind them of the utterances of the prophet, who, going out to curse, used what was really the language of blessing. At all events when the chancellor of the exchequer rose to propose the new budget there was no paltering with the difficulties which were presented to him, though he had to abandon the hopes that he had entertained of a policy of retrenchment and the further

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He

relief of the country from taxation. utterly repudiated the "convenient, cowardly, and perhaps popular" course, as it was afterwards called, of making up for the coming extra expenditure by extensive borrowing.

It was impossible to say that the estimate for the war would suffice for the wants of the whole year. That was the reason for proposing to vote for extraordinary military expenditure a sum of £1,250,000. There was a deficiency of nearly three millions to provide for, and even this did not exhaust the whole cost of

the war. But while he hoped that this sum might be raised without returning to the higher duties, which had recently been diminished on various articles, he urged strongly that it should not be raised by resorting to a loan, and so throwing the burden on posterity. Such a course was not required by the necessities of the country, and was therefore not worthy of its adoption. No country had played so much as England at this dangerous game of mortgaging the industry of future generations. It was right that those who make war should be prepared to make the sacrifices needed to carry it on; the necessity for so doing was a most useful check on mere lust of conquest, and would lead men to make war with the wish of realizing the earliest prospects of an honourable peace.

We had entered upon a great struggle, but we had entered upon it under favourable circumstances. "We have proposed to you to make great efforts, and you have nobly and cheerfully backed our proposals. You have already by your votes added nearly 40,000 men to the establishments of the country; and taking into account changes that have actually been carried into effect with regard to the return of soldiers from the colonies, and the arrangements which, in the present state of Ireland, might be made-but which are not madewith respect to the constabulary force, in order to render the military force disposable to the utmost possible extent, it is not too much to say that we have virtually an addition to the disposable forces of the country, by land and by sea, at the present moment, as compared with our position twelve months ago, to the extent of nearly 50,000 men. This looks like

an intention to carry on your war with vigour, | £17,750,000, as compared with £16,000,000, to which it had been reduced for the current period.

and the wish and hope of her majesty's government is, that that may be truly said of the people of England, with regard to this war, which was, I am afraid, not so truly said of Charles II. by a courtly but great poet, Dry

den

He without fear a dangerous war pursues, Which without rashness he began before.'

That, we trust, will be the motto of the people of England; and you have this advantage, that the sentiment of Europe, and we trust the might of Europe, is with you. These circumstances though we must not be sanguine, though it would be the wildest presumption for any man to say, when the ravages of European war had once begun, where and at what point it would be stayed-these circumstances justify us in cherishing the hope that possibly this may not be a long war."

The plan was, as we have seen, to increase the income-tax, levying the whole addition for and in respect of the first moiety of the year, which was in effect to double the tax for the half year. The amount of the tax for 1854-55 was calculated at £6,275,000, and a moiety of that sum was £3,137,500; but as the cost of collection diminished in proportion to the amount obtained the real moiety would be £3,307,000, so that the whole produce of the income-tax would be £9,582,000. The aggregate income for the year would be £56,656,000, and as the expenditure was estimated at £56,186,000 this would leave a small probable surplus of £470,000. There were other changes of commercial importance, one of which was to abolish the distinction between home and foreign drawn bills, which were thenceforward to pay the same rate of duty. As the additions to the revenue could not be realized before the end of the year, and a large sum was immediately required to meet the expenses of the war, he brought forward a resolution for a vote of £1,750,000 for an issue of exchequer bills. It was not expected that it would be necessary to exercise this permission to its full extent, but should the necessity arise the unfunded debt would only stand as it stood twelve months before, when its amount was

This financial scheme, bold, simple, and effectual, met with the support of men who were keen judges of finance, and among them was Joseph Hume, who accepted it on the ground that those who had urged the government to a war, the propriety of which could not yet be judged, should bear their share of its burdens. This was one of the latest votes of the veteran reformer, financier, and political economist. He was seventy-eight years old, and died in February of the following year (1855) after a parliamentary career of forty-four years, during which he did the country inestimable service in watching the national expenditure and pointing out the means of reducing taxation. The resolution for doubling the income-tax was passed without discussion or division, but on the following day an amendment was moved by Sir H. Willoughby to the effect that the collection of the additional moiety should extend over the whole year; and Mr. Disraeli, who had previously stated that he should not oppose the vote, as the house was bound to support her majesty in all just and necessary wars, came forward with a contention that the government was only justified in levying increased taxes if they could prove the war to be unavoidable. It was of course pointed out that this argument was equivalent to an expression of want of confidence and should have been followed by a proposed vote to that effect, but the leader of the opposition would not listen to this argument, urged that the government apparently had no confidence in the house or in themselves, quoted ministerial utterances to show what divergence of opinion had existed on the question whether there should be peace or war, and declared that these differences had in fact produced the present state of affairs. The war, he said, was "a coalition war," and had the cabinet been united it would have been prevented altogether. Obviously if these arguments were potent against voting in favour of the budget they more than justified want of confidence, and Mr. Gladstone, in reply, challenged that issue, saying that Mr. Disraeli

EXTENSION OF GLADSTONE'S FINANCIAL SCHEME.

defended his omission to propose a vote of want of confidence on the very grounds that should have prompted it, and that his argument had therefore reached an "illogical and recreant" conclusion. He concluded by defending the various provisions of his financial scheme, which was agreed to, the amendment being negatived.

But war had not yet been actually declared, and the caution which he had exercised in pointing out that the provisions might be only temporary was soon afterwards justified. On the 8th of May, almost directly after the rejection of Lord John Russell's Reform Bill, Mr. Gladstone had to bring forward additional proposals for meeting the enormous expenditure which it was seen would be necessary for equipping and maintaining our army in the Crimea. It had been known that the first demand made on the country would not be adequate, and now it was evident that there must be a further claim made in order to meet the daily increasing cost, if we were to carry on the struggle upon which the nation had entered with such unanimous determination. Again Mr. Disraeli opposed the means that were proposed to augment the revenue, and took the opportunity of defending the financial scheme of the former government when he was chancellor of the exchequer. With no little acerbity he attacked Mr. Gladstone with an accusation of having been mistaken in paying off the South Sea stock, and with having doubled the malt-tax to the detriment of those whose interests he had deserted; but these accusations were not altogether new, and some of them had been met already. That which it was necessary to consider was that a computed extra expenditure of £6,800,000 had to be provided for, of which £500,000 was for the militia. In a speech which lasted three hours, and aroused the ministry and the house to the fact that this was more than a mere supplementary budget, and that it rose to the height of a new masterly plan for meeting the extraordinary expenditure, the chancellor of the exchequer explained his scheme. He proposed to repeat the augmentation of the incometax, which had already yielded from this

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source £9,582,000, and the addition would give £3,250,000, amounting altogether to £12,832,000. This augmentation would last during the continuance of the war, and should the war terminate during the existence of the tax under the Act of 1853, the augmentation would cease. The difficulty was to raise the remainder without either proposing any other direct tax or reimposing taxes which had been removed. To meet this difficulty, and to go to the consumer in the least oppressive and injurious way, it was proposed to repeat the operation of the previous year on Scotch and Irish spirits, and to augment the duty in Scotland by 18. per gallon, and in Ireland by 8d. This would be a gain to the exchequer of £450,000. By a readjustment of the sugar duties and a postponement of their reduction £700,000 would be raised. To the proposal to augment the duty on malt considerable antagonism was manifested by the opposition; but Mr. Gladstone went on to say that he considered we might fairly come upon the wealthy for the first charges of the war, but that a national war ought to be borne by all classes. This (ignoring the first part of the remark) Mr. Disraeli afterwards referred to as a kind of communism. The argument in favour of increasing the malt-tax, however, was that it pressed on all, and as it was easily collected, and required no increased staff for the purpose, it seemed to fulfil the conditions which should be sought for. The malt-tax stood, in round figures, at 28. 9d. per bushel, and Mr. Gladstone proposed to raise it to 4s., which would still leave it lower than it was in 1810, and less than half what it was from 1804 to 1816, during the great war struggle. Taking the consumption at forty million bushels, this would give £2,450,000. The united amounts thus to be obtained by increased income-tax, spirit duty, sugar duty, and malt duty, would be £6,850,000, which was the required sum. Mr. Gladstone next stated that it was necessary to have a resource for extraordinary contingencies, and for a possible rapid increase in the rate of war expenditure. He explained and vindicated his policy with regard to the issue of exchequer bonds, and unfolded his plan for providing the further interim funds which would be

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