A.D. 1871.] ABOLITION OF PURCHASE BY ROYAL WARRANT. Duke had been four years dead, and the overpowering weight of his name had a little decreased, the first note of a new policy was heard in the report of that year's commission, which had examined as a witness Sir Charles Trevelyan, the father of the "young army reformer" of the present year. This report advised that no commis sions should be sold above the rank of lieutenant-colonel. About six more Royal Commissions were issued between 1856 and 1871 on army subjects; until finally the war in France brought matters to a point, and taught our statesmen that the reform of the army was no longer to be trifled with. When a Government once seriously took up the purchase system and pronounced for its abolition, it was felt that purchase must go. Yet no Government measure within the memory of man has received such treatment as this did from the hands of a varied and irritated opposition. Every argument that self-interest could suggest or class-feeling prompt was urged with incredible pertinacity by the military members of the House of Commons. It was insisted in vain that these military members did not fairly represent the army, but that by the very fact of their being in the House they showed themselves to be rich men, able to afford to resign active service and to contest elections; "the colonels" still carried on their opposition to every point of the bill during four weary months. So temperate a Liberal as Sir Roundell Palmer said of the conduct of the military members, that "a course had been taken the like of which he never remembered. Other great measures affecting great interests had been opposed without the minority attempting to baffle the majority by mere consumption of time. The minority who resisted the Irish Church Bill and the Irish Land Bill had recognised the duty of respecting the principle of parliamentary government, that the decision of the majority shall be binding. Conduct like that was neither in the interest of the country, of the army, nor of Conservative principle." Yet the colonels did their work. They drove Mr. Cardwell to cut down the bill to the two divisions of the abolition of purchase and the transfer of the powers of Lords Lieutenant over the militia and volunteer forces to the Crown. In this form the bill passed the third reading, and went up to the Lords. In the Lords it met with opposition at once more dignified and more effective. Nearly every eminent Conservative peer who had ever had anything to do with the army said something in favour of purchase: one supported it because it provided a cheap way of retirement, one because the officers liked it, one because abolition would cost so much by way of compensation, one because the old system had prevented the British officer from becoming a "professional man with professional politics." Lord Salisbury, whose tongue on this occasion was as rasping as usual, suggested a new name for the new method: "If purchase had been described as a system of seniority tempered by selection, the more correct formula for the new system was stagnation tempered by jobbery." Lord Derby, alone of the Tory peers, joined with the advocates of the Government in supporting the 66 485 bill. As to expense, he said, "the expense of abolishing purchase would be as oppressive years hence as now, and might be even increased. As to delay, is it dignified to delay an inevitable reform-inevitable because no institution is tenable in England unless it admits of defence by arguments intelligible to the partiallyeducated constituencies ?" In the end, the Duke of Richmond's motion, that the House of Lords declined to read the bill a second time, until it had before it a comprehensive plan," was carried by 150 to 125-a result not quite the same as the rejection of the bill, but still a grave blow to the Ministry. The way in which Mr. Gladstone met it was original, and caused a throb of excitement unusual in the calm realm of English politics. With that suddenness for which his proceedings have at times been fatally famous, he abolished purchase by a coup d'état. It was known beforehand that purchase was only legal so far as the Queen's Regulations allowed it; and clearly, therefore, all that was technically required for its abolition was that the regulations should be altered so as to forbid it. But no one supposed that, after months of debate and after a hostile vote in the House of Lords, any minister would have ventured to advise such a stretch of prerogative. Mr. Gladstone, however, was equal to the situation. Two days after the division in the Lords, he announced to the astonished House of Commons that purchase was already abolished; Her Majesty having been advised to cancel the old warrant which allowed it, and to issue a new warrant which forbade it. "Therefore," he said, "after the first of next November, purchase will cease to exist." His defence of this step was that it was necessary to put an end to a state of uncertainty which endangered the discipline of the army; and that, having secured the expression of the opinion of the Commons against purchase, he held himself justified in advising the Queen to exert her statutory right.* *The following is the Royal Warrant-a document of such importance that it may be printed entire : "Victoria R.-Whereas by the Act passed in the session holden in the 5th and 6th years of the reign of King Edward VI., chapter 16, intituled 'Against buying and selling of offices,' and the Act passed in the 49th year of the reign of George III., chapter 126, intituled 'An Act for the prevention of the sale and brokerage of offices,' all officers in our forces are prohibited from selling or bargaining for the sale of any commission in our forces, and from taking or receiving any money for the exchange of any such commission, under the penalty of forfeiture of their commissions and of being cashiered, and of divers other penalties, but the last-mentioned Act exempts from the penalties of the said Acts, purchases or sales, or exchanges of any commissions in our forces, for such prices as may be regulated and fixed by any regulation made or to be made by us in that behalf. "And whereas we think it expedient to put an end to all such regulations, and to all sales and purchases, and all exchanges for money of commissions in our forces, and all dealings relating to such sales, purchases, or exchanges. "Now, our will and pleasure is that on and after the First day of November, in this present year, all regulations made by us or any of our Royal predecessors, or any officers acting under our authority, regulating or fixing the prices at which any commissions in our forces may be purchased, sold, or exchanged, or in any way authorising the purchase, or sale, or exchange for money of any such commission, shall be cancelled and determined. "Given at our Court at Osborne, this 20th day of July, in the 35th year of our reign. By Her Majesty's Command, EDWARD CARDWELL." such as Mr. M'Cullagh Torrens and Mr. Fawcett, sided with Mr. Disraeli in protesting against this resort to prerogative; an act which, said Mr. Fawcett, "if it had been done by a Tory Ministry, would have been denounced by Mr. Gladstone with the applause of the whole Liberal party." There can, in fact, be no doubt that the step, or the necessity which caused it, was most unfortunate, and especially unfortunate to Mr. Gladstone himself. It was highly expedient that purchase should be abolished; but it was most desirable that this should be done in a regular manner. Whether the blame of the irregular act is to be laid to the door of the House of Lords or to that of Mr. Gladstone, it was he that got all the unpopularity. Such stretches of exceptional prerogative as the issue of the Royal Warrant, or as the Collier promotion, did very much to lessen that personal loyalty to the Liberal leader which had been one of the great causes of his success in 1868. People took up Lord Salisbury's phrase, and talked of "the dictator," rather than of the leader; and the ordinary Englishman makes it a point of honour that he will not be dictated to. And so, although the object of the Government was attained, and the army "reconveyed from the officers to the nation," the Government and its leader were a good deal discredited; especially as the cost of the reform was very considerable indeed. The Government proposed to compensate the officers fully and liberally, paying them not only the legal "regulation prices" for their commissions, but the "over-regulation prices," which custom had legalised in the teeth of law. This compensation it was estimated would amount to, at the very least, six millions sterling-some said ten millions, to be spread, of course, over a number of years: a large sum to take from the shoulders of the benefited class, and lay upon those of the general taxpayer. The increased estimates for the year which the reform of the army made necessary were a sore perplexity to Mr. Lowe, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. It is true he did not lament the high expenditure of the fighting departments; for, he said, he regarded an efficient army and navy as the best commercial investment in the world; but he had to face a large estimated deficit-no less than £2,713,000. This he proposed to cover, first, by charging the duties on wills and successions so as to make them three times as productive as before; a slightly increased income tax; and, above all, by a tax on matches. It was this last tax which attracted the most attention; and its ultimate fate is a good illustration of the danger of over-cleverness in matters of finance. Mr. Lowe had been afflicted by the thought of the waste going on in the use of matches, and of the perils at tending such waste; and he thought that he might by one brilliant stroke lead people to economical habits and add a million to the revenue. For the number of matches annually made is almost inconceivably great; he announced that it was five hundred and sixty millions of boxes, without counting the forty or fifty millions of boxes of wax matches and fusces. He proposed, therefore, to put a halfpenny tax on every box of matches-a tax which, even if it had the effect of bringing down the manufacture by a third, would contribute nearly a million to the receipts of the year. But Mr. Lowe was either too much preoccupied to remember or too cynical to care that the match-making trade is in the hands of the very poorest of the London poor, and that to tamper with it would be to turn many thousands of human beings, most of them children, either into paupers or into criminals. The Chancellor of the Exchequer had invented a motto for the labels that he proposed to affix to every match-box; and to withdraw the tax would be to nullify a good joke-an unanswerable argument against withdrawal. Ex luce lucellum "-"Out of light a tiny gain "—such was the inscription that every box was to bear; a motto which was a keen delight to the quondam Oxford tutor who proposed the tax, but which was a sore puzzle to the respectable House of Commons who listened to him, and which would have probably been neither illuminating nor profitable to the housemaids that were to use the matches. As it was, neither tax nor motto ever came to anything. When the amusement at Mr. Lowe's pun had died away, people began to see the serious nature of the proposal and the strong objections to it. A procession of match-makers, squalid and miserable, and some thousands strong, marched from Bethnal Green to Westminster to protest against the tax, and it was withdrawn. The same fate befell Mr. Lowe's proposal to increase the succession duties, a proposal which struck a blow at one of the most cherished interests of the propertied class: nor was there any better destiny awaiting the plan of altering the mode of calculating the income tax by a percentage, instead of so much in the pound. On the whole, the Budget of the year may be said to have been a conspicuous failure, and to have done serious harm to the Government that proposed it. Nor were many of the other events of the session such as to raise the spirits of the Ministry. Mr. Childers, who, after a distinguished career in Australia, had come home and been returned for Pontefract, and been made First Lord of the Admiralty by Mr. Gladstone, was forced by ill-health to resign. About his work, which at all events had been very thorough-going in its way, the most different and extreme opinions prevailed; his friends maintaining that his reforms had been the making of the navy, his enemies that they had almost been its destruction. Mr. Goschen succeeded him; an appointment which was severely criticised by those who thought it-the Admiralty-the wrong place for a member for the City of London, but amply justified by the speed with which the new First Lord mastered the details of his new office, by the vigour of his administration, and by the breadth of his views of public duty. Nothing could have been more telling than the speech which he made soon after his appointment, nominally to an after-dinner audience at the Mansion House, but really to the English public, on the foreign policy which England had observed during the war, and which we ought to continue to observe. A policy of isolation," he said, "need not be a policy of selfishness; and many a country in Europe would prefer the disinterested neutrality of England to the sinister policy of some continental states. Among foreign peoples, who are accustomed to a more complicated diplomacy, England is never credited with simple honesty in her foreign relations. Some Machiavelian design is always attributed to her. Europe would have it that we abolished the slave trade because we were jealous of the competition of the French and Spanish colonies, and that we sided with Denmark because we feared what would happen supposing Kiel and its harbour fell into German hands. But, really, we are more single-minded in our 66 A.D. 1871.] VARIOUS BILLS BEFORE THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. foreign policy than any other nation; and the policy of the future ought to be based on single-mindedness and self-reliance. Recent events in Europe should teach us to rely, not on treaties and alliances, which often fail when the pinch comes; not on the word of statesmen-for secret treaties shake confidence in that-but upon ourselves. We ought to take the measure of ourselves, and, if necessary, to hold every man to his duty of maintaining the honour and glory of England at the same height at which it has been held through so many generations." 489 their nearness to London promised immense rents to enterprising lords of the manor who should venture to cut the land up into building lots. Fortunately, however, the Crown has rights over the "Royal Forest of Waltham," as Epping Forest is properly called; and the encroaching lords of the manor had to deal with another body as well as the commoners-namely, the Commissioners of Works. These commissioners, however, had begun the bad practice of selling the rights of the Crown to the lords of the manor. It was against this unpatriotic tampering with encroachment that Mr. Fawcett protested; and, in the end, both the personnel of the Government commission was strengthened by the addition of Mr. Locke, and, on the motion of Mr. CowperTemple (a former First Commissioner of Works, before the days of Mr. Ayrton), the House decided that the Forest ought to be preserved untouched as a recreation ground for the people. The land recovered from the river by means of the Thames Embankment was also preserved for the Londoners against the will of the Government. Only a very few of the remaining measures of this session of Parliament require notice. The Ballot Bill did not become law until the next year; for Purchase kept it back until towards the end of June: the Opposition carried on a furious warfare against it for five or six weeks; and when at last it was sent up to the Lords, it was rejected by them, by ninety-seven to forty-eight. The history of the bill may therefore be deferred until we come to chronicle its success. The conduct of the Opposition was vexatious, and could not fail to be damaging to the Government; for no man's endurance can face the The bill for legalising marriage with a deceased loss of so many precious weeks without blaming his own wife's sister made no progress this year; carried by side a little, as well as his opponents. As the bill was the House of Commons, it was thrown out as usual sent to the House of Lords, it was a very different bill in the Lords. The bill for extending the franchise from that which Mr. Forster had introduced; and some to single women rated to the relief of the poor, though considerable alteration was due to the Liberal side. Mr. rejected, was rejected by a narrower majority than before; Henry James, for instance, helped by Mr. William Vernon 151 voted for it, and 220 against it-among the latter Harcourt-two gentlemen who afterwards were, strangely being that same Mr. Henry James whom Mr. Gladstone enough, colleagues in Mr. Gladstone's Government as afterwards rewarded by the post of Attorney-General Attorney and Solicitor General-threw out that most for his frequent and bitter attacks upon himself. The unpopular, but most admirable, provision, that election motion of Mr. Miall for disestablishing the Church of expenses should be charged on the rates. This provision, England was thought important enough to call out a without which purity of election will never be attained strong debate. The Irish Church Act had made the in England, was rejected; and the Government were motion not only a possible one, but even a motion to be content to leave it out in the bill of 1872. expected; and no fitter man could be found to bring it forward than the editor of the Nonconformist newspaper. But the Dissenters were not strong enough in the House to make their success at all probable; not even though, as Mr. Disraeli charged them with being, they were "allied for the moment with revolutionary philosophers." The debate was interesting, as bringing not only a declaration of strong confidence in the Establishment from the leader of the Conservative party, but also as calling out a similar declaration from Mr. Gladstone, whose churchmanship had been thought by friends and foes to be rapidly shifting from the point of view of state-churchmanship which he had held so vigorously in his youth. That opinion had been rather encouraged this year by the success of the Government bill for the abolition of religious tests in the universities. This subject had been agitated for many years, and it had become a recognised aim of the Liberal party to carry the bill. The universities-that is, the resident teachers in Oxford and Cambridge—were singularly unanimous in favour of it; and many a meeting had declared how unwilling they were any longer to restrain the freedom of competition and study by retaining any tests whatever. Before the abolition, although any one might be admitted to a Bachelor's degree in Arts without subscribing to any declaration of belief, he could A second, but a fortunate, ministerial failure was the Epping Forest Bill, in which the Government proposed to appoint a commission for settling the respective rights of the Crown, the commoners, and the lords of the manor in Epping Forest. Londoners do not require to be told that "the Forest," with its fine trees and stretches of wooded slopes, is the favourite holiday-ground of the dwellers in the eastern half of London. For many years a stealthy process of encroachment has been carried on by a few persons who possess manorial rights over the great common land. Such is the state of the English law, that this kind of appropriation is quite possible and very frequent. The lord of the manor, regarding a common as so much waste land, and grieved that so much land should be allowed to go to waste, sets to work to "improve" it; and to improve it, he has to enclose it, until, by the help of a few posts and rails, and a few years of undisturbed possession, he establishes a prescriptive right to the land, and converts his shadowy manorial rights into absolute ownership. And as what is everybody's business is nobody's, the body of the commoners look on and grumble a little, but take no action until it is too late. This is exactly what was happening in Epping Forest, where the beauty of the positions and |