to the general award, Sir Alexander Cockburn made a sort of historical vindication, or apologia, of the conduct of the English Government during the Civil War. It was an eloquent, patriotic, and impassioned plaidoyer, which seemed oddly out of place in the somewhat dry and business-like records of the tribunal's transactions. It occupied 250 pages of the London Gazette. Many readers admired it; some smiled at it. The great majority of Englishmen did not read it. It was not so much preserved as entombed in the ponderous pages of the official journal.

The German Emperor was left to decide as to the ownership of the small island of San Juan, near Vancouver's Island, a question remaining unsettled since the Oregon Treaty, and already explained in this work. The Emperor decided that the American claim to the island was just. San Juan had for years been in a somewhat hazardous condition of joint occupation by England and the United States. It was evacuated by England, in consequence of the award, at the close of November, 1873.

The principle of arbitration had not thus far worked in a manner calculated greatly to delight the English people. In each case the award had gone decidedly against them. No doubt it had gone against them because the right of each case was against them; and those who submit to arbitration have no business to complain because the decision is not given in their favour. England had in any which submitted the

case gained much by the policy

dispute to a peaceful tribunal. She had saved her

1872-3.

'KNUCKLING DOWN.'

347

own people and her opponents as well from the terrible ordeal of a war in which victory would have been only one degree better than defeat. She had avoided all the legacy of reciprocal hate which is the inevitable penalty of war. She had done her part towards the establishment of a great principle for the benefit of all coming generations. Yet it would be impossible to say that the feeling of the English people was one of unmixed satisfaction. The bulk of a population is not made up of moral philosophers; and what most of the English people saw was that England had been compelled in homely phrase to 'knuckle down' to America. The policy which accepted the arbitration seems to us to have been entirely wise, honourable, statesmanlike and just. The fault to be found was with that earlier policy which gave the United States only too fair a ground for asserting their claims. But it is certain that Mr. Gladstone and his colleagues suffered in public esteem by the mere fact of their having accepted the arbitration which went so signally against England. They were somewhat in the position of a Government who have to submit to rigorous and humiliating terms of peace. They may not have been responsible for the war. It may have been no act of theirs which made the acceptance of the harsh terms a cruel necessity. It may not be open to any one to say that they had any practical alternative but to submit to the demands of the occasion. All this may be true. Yet none the less is the Government to be pitied which has to submit to any terms of peace by which its people

seem to be humbled. The Conservative party made it for a long time a great point against Mr. Gladstone's Government that he had accepted the treaty of Washington. They did not always seem to reflect that a leading Conservative, Sir Stafford Northcote, had been made one of the joint commissioners in order that the arrangement might not seem the mere act of a political party. Perhaps in one or two instances the manner in which the Treaty was vindicated may have helped to embitter the sacrifice. Mr. Lowe, for instance, put it as a clear saving of money, pointing out that a war would have cost much more than the expense of paying off the award. This was not the happiest way of commending the transaction to the sympathies of a proud and somewhat unreasoning public. However that may be, it is certain that the effect of the Geneva arbitration was to create a sore and angry feeling among Englishmen in general. The feeling found expression with some ; smouldered in sullenness with others. It was unreasonable and unjust; but it was not altogether unnatural; and it had its effect on the popularity of Mr. Gladstone's Government.

The opening of the Session of 1872 was made melancholy by the announcement that Lord Mayo, the Viceroy of India, had been killed by a fanatical assassin in a convict settlement, on one of the Andaman Islands which the Viceroy was inspecting. Lord Mayo had borne himself well in his difficult position, and had won the admiration of men of all parties by his firmness, his energy, his humanity, and his justice.

CHAPTER LXI.

THE TIDE ON THE TURN.

THE Liberal Ministry continued somehow to fall off in popularity. They made a great many enemies. This fact was for the most part rather to their credit than otherwise. They came into office pledged to carry out certain reforms, and they did carry them out regardless of the offence they gave to class privileges and vested interests. A great reforming administration must always count on making enemies, and enemies whose hostility will be subtle and enduring. The Prime Minister himself was personally too much absorbed in the zeal of his cause not sometimes to run counter to the feelings, the prejudices, the sensitive jealousies of men less earnest and less self-forgetting. Mr. Gladstone was profoundly serious in his purposes of reform; and very serious men are seldom popular in a society like that of London. The long series of bold and vigorous reforms was undoubtedly causing the public to lose its breath. People were getting tired of going on, as an ordinary walker gets tired of trying to keep up with some man who is bent on walking as fast and as far as he possibly can without rest or interruption. The inevitable reaction was setting in. It must have come in any

case. No popularity, no skill, no çunning in the management of men, no quality or endowment on the part of the Prime Minister, could have wholly prevented that result. Mr. Gladstone was not cunning in the management of men. He would probably have despised himself for availing of such a craft had he possessed it. He showed his feelings too plainly. If men displeased him he seldom took the trouble to conceal his displeasure. He was too often 'preoccupied,' as the French phrase puts it, to think of petty courtesies and small social arts. It was murmured among his followers that he was dictatorial ;; and no doubt he was dictatorial in the sense that he had strong purposes himself, and was earnest in trying to press them upon other men. His very religious opinions served to interfere with his social popularity. He seemed to be a curious blending of the English High Churchman and the Scottish Presbyterian. He displeased the ordinary English middle class by leaning too much to Ritualism, and on the other hand, he often offended the Roman Catholics by his impassioned diatribes against the Pope and the Church of Rome. One or two appointments made by or under the authority of Mr. Gladstone gave occasion to considerable controversy and to something like scandal. One of these was the appointment of the Attorney-General, Sir Robert Collier, to a Puisne Judgeship of the Court of Common Pleas, in order technically to qualify him for a seat on the bench of a new Court of Appeal-that is to say, to become one of the paid members of the Judicial Com