The First Reform Ministry of Gladstone

Dissolution of parliament in 1868 was followed by new elections under the reform act of 1867. The great change that had come over Great Britain at once became manifest. New voters appeared, elections were contested as they never had been before, and electors scanned carefully the legislative programmes of the two parties. The new Liberals; Liberals and Radicals, won by a majority of one hundred and twenty, and Gladstone at once formed a ministry committed to an important programme of reform.

The first measures that were introduced concerned Ireland. From 1865 to 1868 the Irish people had been engaged in a struggle, known as the Fenian movement, for separation from England. Many Fenians, members of an Irish secret society, had been arrested, and three hanged for murder. In a speech in Lancashire, Gladstone said that the Irish upas tree had three branches : the established church, the system of land tenure, and the system of national education.

WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE.From an engraving.

The first and second of these evils he attacked immediately. In July, 1869, after a long and wearisome struggle, parliament passed a bill disestablishing the Irish state church. In May, 1870, it passed an Irish land bill, which was designed to protect tenants from eviction as long as they paid their rent and to compel landlords to compensate evicted tenants for improvements made; the bill also provided for government loans for the purchase of tenancies, the loan to be paid back to the government by the tenant in annual instalments.

After the Irish measures had been passed, Forster, acting minister of education, brought in a bill for the national control of elementary education. The bill was finally passed, August 9, 1870, and provided for a system of local schools for children. Though private schools still existed, this act established public schools in the districts, and required that under certain conditions children between five and twelve years of age should be obliged to attend. The next year the universities of Oxford and Cambridge were thrown open to Roman Catholics and Dissenters alike, by the abolition of all religious tests. These measures proved very beneficial to education in England.

Reform followed reform. Cardwell, the minister of war, attacked some of the abuses in the army. Two very important changes were made. First, the system of purchasing commissions in the army was abolished, and promotion was made dependent, not on rank, but on merit and industry. Secondly, the long term service of twenty-five years was replaced by a short term service, whereby a man after serving at least six years actively in the army was to pass into the reserve, though he was liable at any time during a succeeding six years to be called to the front. In 1871, in order to conciliate the working classes, Gladstone put through a measure incorporating trade unions and legalizing strikes, but forbidding all acts of intimidation.

But Gladstone was trying to do too much, and each measure alienated some part of the British people. A licensing act angered the liquor dealers; the army reform aroused the Conservatives; the elementary education act incensed the Nonconformists; the Irish land laws embittered the landlords ; and the trade unions act failed to satisfy the workingmen. In 1873 the ministry, having been defeated on a measure concerning the Dublin University, resigned, and, when the new elections of 1874 were held, the Conservatives were victorious, with a majority of fifty. Disraeli became prime minister and Derby minister of foreign affairs. For the first time in thirty-two years the Conservatives controlled in the House of Commons a majority upon which they could rely.

Disraeli's Imperial Policy: the Indian Empire

The new ministry interested itself to a certain extent in legislation for the benefit of the working classes, but in the main was content with the inauguration of a brilliant foreign policy. Gladstone had cared but little for affairs abroad, and had rigidly kept free from all foreign entanglements. As far as the colonies were concerned, the relations between them and the British government were not at all friendly in the years 1869-1870, and the Gladstone ministry would probably have let them go had they expressed a desire for separation. Neither Gladstone nor Disraeli seems to have been interested in the colonies as such at this time, and ten years passed before British statesmen awoke to a realization of the future importance of the colonies. Disraeli was interested in India, and he determined to make that possession, in a new and vivid sense, an appanage of the crown.

The Suez Canal had been constructed in 1869, and at once had given a new importance to the Mediterranean route to India. In order to control this canal, Disraeli, in 1875, purchased, for L4,000,000, the one hundred and seventy-six thousand shares which the Khedive of Egypt owned in the canal. The same year he despatched the Prince of Wales to India, ostensibly to hunt tigers, but in reality to awaken a new enthusiasm for Great Britain and to build up a closer connection between Great Britain and India. The next year Disraeli sent, as viceroy to India, Lord Lytton, a man with imperial ideas like his own, and pushed through parliament a measure called the Royal Titles Bill, conferring on the British sovereign the title of Emperor or Empress of India. The climax of this policy came when, in a great durbar at Delhi, the old capital of the Mongols, January 1, 1877, in the presence of a great concourse of sovereigns, Indian nobles and potentates, ambassadors and soldiers, Queen Victoria was formally proclaimed Empress of India.

THE SUEZ CANAL.

In dealing with India a strict regard was shown for all their native customs and prejudices and every effort was made to arouse the enthusiasm of the Indian peoples for Great Britain. Natives were employed on the same footing with Englishmen in the departments of police, finance, and justice; local councils were created; liberty of the press was allowed; and later, an Indian national congress,

composed of high-caste Brahmins, was permitted to meet to propose and discuss reforms in administration. This method of treating the native peoples of India, which had first been tried by Lord Mayo in 1872, marked a great change from the centralized system of Dalhousie in the days before the Sepoy mutiny.