Justin McCarthy

“ He was one of the comparatively few men in our modern history who have made a mark in the Law Courts and in Parliament. As a Parliamentary orator he was the rival of Brougham, and the rivalry was all the more exciting to the observers because it was a rivalry of styles as well as of capacities. Lyndhurst was always polished, smooth, refined, endowed with a gift of argumentative eloquence, which appealed to the intellect rather than to the feelings, was seldom impassioned, and even when impassioned kept his passion well within conventional bounds. ”

“ It would not be too much to say for Earl Grey that he might have been the ideal orator for an ideal House of Lords, if we assume the ideal House of Lords to be an assembly in which appeal {169} was always made to high principle, to reason, and to justice, not to passion, to prejudice, or to party. Lord Grey, so far as we can judge from contemporary accounts, never spoke better than in the debate on the second reading of the Reform Bill, and it was evident that he spoke with all the sincere emotion of one whose mind and heart alike were filled with the cause for which he pleaded. ”

“ The policy of Castlereagh made as strong a contrast with the policy of Canning as even the contrast which was brought under the notice of every listener by the Parliamentary speeches of the two men. Canning was master of a polished eloquence which, at the time, had no rival in either House of Parliament. Castlereagh was one of the most singular and striking illustrations of the fact that a man may sometimes become a power in the House of Commons without the slightest gift of eloquence. Canning was a master of phrase, tone, and gesture. ”

“ But a hard fortune had condemned him to be a king, and to begin by being the son of a king, and thus to find as the years went on increasing opportunity of gratifying all his meanest tastes and finding always around him the ready homage which accords its applause to the most ignoble caprices and the most wanton self-indulgence. The reign of George the Fourth saw great deeds and great men; it could have seen few men in all his realm less deserving a word of praise than George the Fourth. ”

“ It would, of course, have been hard to dispose of it completely if it could be shown that there was no possible way by which the expenses of elections could be reduced to a reasonable amount; if it could be shown that there was any human system so bad as to have no compensating advantages whatever; and finally if it could be shown that with the spread of education and the growth of popular intelligence a man of great and commanding ability without money would not have a much better chance of election at the hands of a large constituency than by the mere favor of some discerning patron. ”

“ Peel bore himself throughout all the trials of that most trying time with indomitable courage and with unfailing skill. Never during his whole career did he prove himself more brilliant and more full of resource than as the leader of what might be called an utterly hopeless struggle. The highest tribute has been paid to his never-failing tact and temper during that trying ordeal by his principal opponent in the House of Commons, Lord John Russell. ”

“ The Duke of Cumberland, as we have already seen, was a Tory of the most extreme order; an inveterate enemy to every kind of reform and every progressive movement, a man who was not merely unpopular but thoroughly detested among all classes who valued political freedom, religious liberty, and the spread of education. Soon after William the Fourth's accession to the throne a new impulse was given to Orangeism by the King's yielding to the demand for popular reform, and by the measures and the movements which began to follow the passing of Lord Grey's Reform Bill. ”

“ The time, in fact, had not come for the adoption of so great a reform. Forty years had to pass before the mind of the English public could be brought to recognize the necessity for such a change. Statesmanship had still to learn how much the value of a popular suffrage was diminished or disparaged by the system which left the voter at the absolute mercy of some landlord or some patron who desired that the vote should be given for the candidate whom he favored. The ballot even then was demanded by the whole body of the Chartists. ”

“ Sir Robert also indulged in the most gloomy prophecies about the evils which must come upon England as the direct result of the Reform Bill if that Bill were to be passed into law. The influence of rank and property would suddenly and completely cease to prevail; education would lose its power to teach and to guide; the House of Commons would no longer be the place for men of rank, culture, and statesmanship, but would be occupied only by mob orators. Art after art would go out and all would be night, if we may adopt the famous line of Pope's which Sir Robert somehow failed to introduce. ”

“ Canning had always been a sympathizer with the cause of Greece. In his early days his sympathy had taken poetic form, and now at last it had an opportunity of assuming a more practical shape. He would have wished well to any effort made by Russia for the emancipation of Greece, but he feared that if the effort were to be left to Russia alone the result might be a great European war, and his policy was above all things a policy of peace. His idea was to form an alliance which should exercise so commanding an influence as to render any prolonged resistance impossible. ”

“ A man with a more malevolent turn of mind would very likely have acted as public expectation seemed to foreshadow, but William, as we have seen, soon made it clear that he had no fault to find with the Duke of Wellington, that he cherished no ill-will and was quite ready to let bygones be bygones. There can be no doubt that William, although he had no great defects of any deep or serious nature, no defects at least which are not common enough among the sovereigns of his time, was yet as undignified a figure for a throne as even the modern comic opera itself could imagine. ”

“ But it might have been clear to reflective men that the days of unconditional loyalty to the will of a monarch had nearly run their course in England, and that the demand for a reform in the criminal law, a relaxation of the repression of free speech, the establishment of some system of popular education, and the adoption of a really representative principle in the construction of Parliament was destined before long to prove irresistible. ”

“ Every great reform, it may almost literally be said, is heralded in Parliament by the motions of independent members, who are sure to be defeated, but whose determined efforts have success enough to make the leader of the Government, or the leader of the Opposition, feel that the time is near at hand when the cause must be taken up by one or other of the great parties in the State. ”

“ The Greeks, even in their lowest degree of national decadence, were far too intelligent, too ready-witted, and too persevering ever to become the mere slaves of an Ottoman ruler. There was something inextinguishable in the national life of the country, and it seemed as if no pressure of tyranny, no amount of humiliation, could make the Greeks forget the history of their glorious days and the deeds of their ancestry, or compel them to stifle, even for a season, their hopes of national independence. ”

“ Inglis, although a man of ability and education, as collegiate education then went, was so thorough a Tory of the old school that the most extravagant arguments he used came as naturally and clearly to his mind as if they had been dictated to him by inspiration. But a man of Peel's high order of intellect, a man who had been gifted by nature with the mind of a statesman, must sometimes have found it hard indeed to convince himself that some of the arguments he used against reform {147} were arguments which the history of the future would be likely to maintain. ”

“ Lord Grey's Government had to deal with two classes of men who were naturally and almost relentlessly opposed to each other—the more clamorous reformers and the enemies of all reform. It was of immense importance that the latter class should, if possible, be prevailed upon to see—at least the more intelligent and reasonable among them—that the Government had not gone so far in the direction of reform as to make it seem a threatened revolution. ”

“ Peel was not a philosopher or a dreamer, but above all things a practical statesman, and when he had to choose between civil war and the concession of a claim which was admitted to be right and just by some of the most enlightened Englishmen and Scotchmen who sat near him on the benches of the House of Commons, and by some of the most enlightened Englishmen and Scotchmen outside the House, he could not bring himself to believe that claims thus advocated could be so essentially unjust or unreasonable as to make their continued refusal worth the cost of so terrible a struggle. ”

“ The arguments in favor of Catholic Emancipation were just as strong, and ought to have been just as clear, to all rational men before it became evident to Wellington and Peel that there was no choice but between emancipation and civil war. The plain duty of a civilized government is to redress injustice at the earliest possible moment, and not to wait idly or ignorantly until the danger of a popular uprising makes instant redress inevitable. ”

“ In most other legislative halls, on the Continent or in the United States or in Canada, each member has his own seat, and finds it ready for his occupation at any time; but in the House of Commons on great occasions the ordinary member has to come to the House at the earliest moment when its doors are open, hours and hours before the business begins, in order to have even a chance of obtaining a seat during the debate, and a large number of members are fated, whatever their energy and their early rising, to sigh for a seat in vain. ”

“ The House of Commons is to be in that sense representative; it is to be the interpreter to the King of all that his people wish him to know. Then the stranger is naturally anxious to learn how the constituencies are formed, by whose selection the representatives are sent to Parliament, in order to render to the King a faithful message from his people. The stranger is taken to a grassy mound, let us say, in the midst of an expanse of silent, unpeopled fields, and he is told that that grassy mound sends two members to the House of Commons. ”

“ There was a popular belief at the time that Queen Adelaide, the wife of King William, cherished a strong hatred against reform such as Lord Grey and his colleagues were pressing on, and that she was secretly influencing the mind of her husband her own way, and so it was that O'Connell's allusion got home to the feelings and the passions of the multitude who listened to his words. Never, in the nineteenth century, had England gone through such a period of internal storm. ”

“ Much of the opposition came, no doubt, from men of old-fashioned ways, who dreaded and hated any changes in any institutions to which they had been accustomed, and who held that even pauperism itself acquired a certain sanctity from the fact that it had been fostered and encouraged by the wisdom of so many succeeding generations. Some of the opposition, however, was inspired by feelings of a more purely sentimental, and therefore perhaps of a more respectable order. It was urged that the new system, if carried into law, would bear hardly on the deserving as well as the undeserving people ”

“ Canning soon recognized the fact, obvious enough, one might have thought, even to a man of intellect far lower than that of Canning, that the traditions, the instincts, and the feelings of a people must count for something in the form and manner of their government, and that there are forces at work in the hearts and minds of peoples which can no more be governed by imperial and royal decrees than can the forces of physical nature itself. ”

“ The funeral of Canning in Westminster Abbey, although it was in name a private ceremonial, was followed by a throng of sorrowing admirers, among whom were princes and nobles, statesmen and prelates, politicians of all orders, and men and women of all ranks down to the very poorest, who thus bore their spontaneous tribute to the services and the memory of the great Prime Minister, and expressed in the only way left to them their sense of the loss which his country and the cause of peace and freedom had sustained by his death. ”

“ But the record of his career as history gives it to us is that of a life almost absolutely surrendered to self-indulgence. It is only fair to remember when we consider all the unworthy acts of his manhood that the unwise and harsh restraints imposed upon him in his early years are accountable, at least to a certain extent, for the follies and the vices to which he yielded himself up when he became, as Byron says of one of his characters, "Lord of himself, that heritage of woe." ”

“ Seldom, indeed, has the death of a public man in modern times been received with any such demonstrations as those which in many places followed the news that Castlereagh had done himself to death. In every community all over the country, and indeed all over Europe and the civilized world, there were those who proclaimed that the death of such a man was a positive blessing to the human race. Wherever men were struggling against despotism and suffering from tyranny, there were those who felt and who declared that the departure of Castlereagh from this world was a benefit to humanity at large. ”

“ A great struggle broke out against the Ottoman rule, and it roused the passionate sympathy of the lovers of freedom all over the world. Byron threw his whole soul into the cause, and stirred the hearts of his countrymen by his appeals on behalf of the Greek struggle for independence. Numbers of brave Englishmen gladly risked their lives to help the Greeks. Lord Cochrane, who was afterwards described as the last of the English sea-kings, rushed over to Greece to give his genius and his daring to the help of the Greeks in their struggle against overwhelming odds. ”

“ If education had not yet made much way among the masses of the people, at least the belief in popular education was becoming a quickening force in the minds of all intelligent men. Then, as ever since, the agitation for each great new reform began outside the walls of Parliament, and had to take an organized shape before it became a question for the House of Commons. ”

“ It may well be questioned whether any population is disturbed for very long by mere sentimental grievances, and it may be doubted also whether the true instinct of statesmanship does not always regard the existence of what is called a sentimental grievance as the best reason for trying to find out whether there is not some practical evil at the root of the complaint. Certainly, in Lord Grey's time, the grievances were open and palpable enough to have attracted the attention of any man whose mind was not as well contented with the wisdom of his ancestors as that of King William himself. ”