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 constituencies, which returned a substantial liberal majority. A bill to disestablish the Irish Church was then sent up to the lords. Prior to the general election (speech in House of Lords, 26 June 1868) Salisbury had laid down, in words often quoted since, what he conceived to be the function of the peers in the modern state. They must secure for the country, he said, an opportunity of expressing its 'firm, deliberate, and sustained conviction,' whenever that opportunity was denied to it by the lower house. After that opportunity had once been secured, they must abide by the result whichever way it might go. He re-affirmed this doctrine after the general election in an impressive speech, advising them to pass the second reading of the bill (17 June 1869). 'It is no courage,' he said, 'it is no dignity to withstand the real opinion of the nation. All that you are doing thereby is to delay an inevitable issue for all history teaches us that no nation was ever thus induced to revoke its decision and to invite besides a period of disturbance, discontent, and possibly of worse than discontent.' In the ensuing division he went so far as to vote for the bill, which was passed. Difficulties, however, arose between the two houses in respect to the lords' amendments, but these were eventually overcome, mainly by the exertions of Archbishop Tait, but to some extent by his own (Life of Tait, chap. 19).

Towards the two other great Acts of this Parliament the Irish Land Act and the Education Act of 1870 he showed a spirit of benevolent criticism and amendment, and his severest language was reserved for Gladstone's arbitrary abolition of army purchase. That step would produce, he said characteristically, not (as Cardwell had claimed) 'seniority tempered by selection' but 'stagnation tempered by jobbery.' His other activities included the introduction of a measure in March 1869 to carry over into the succeeding session bills which had been passed in one house and had lacked time to reach the other, as well as of a limited owners improvements bill, designed, in the interest of cottagers, to shift the financial burdens of administering an estate from the life-tenant to the corpus of the property. He failed, however, to carry either of them ; nor did Russell's life peerage bill, which he supported, fare any better. He was equally unsuccessful in his resistance to the Universities Tests Abolition Act in 1871, and the lords, who on his advice had inserted in the bill a clause imposing a pledge on tutors, deans, and divinity lecturers to teach nothing contrary to the teaching of the Old and New Testaments, did not insist upon this amendment. A special importance attached to his opinion, as on 12 Nov. 1869 he had been elected to the chancellorship of Oxford University, vacant through Derby's death. He held that dignified office for his life, but took little active part in the university's affairs. In 1876 he made an unsuccessful attempt to get rid of 'idle fellowships.' At his instigation the universities' commissions were appointed in 1877, and on their recommendation important changes were introduced into academic organisation. One reform limited the tenure of prize fellowships to seven years. Salisbury, however, though he approved the report of the commissioners, held aloof from university contentions.

His activities were, indeed, by no means confined to politics. On 16 Jan. 1868 he had been elected to the chairmanship of the Great Eastern railway, which he retained until 1872, and under a special act of parliament he became during part of 1871-2, in conjunction with Lord Cairns (who afterwards bore witness to the admirable character of his work), arbitrator of the disordered affairs of the London, Chatham and Dover Railway Co. But in spite of his political pessimism and discouragement, political interests remained dominant in his nature. In October 1869 he had contributed a striking article to the 'Quarterly' on 'The Past and the Future of Conservative Policy.' He started from the thesis that the religious motive in politics, which has hitherto repressed the class motive, had passed away with the struggle over the Irish Church. The contest of the future would be a contest about material things. The new electorate was incontestably liberal. The conservatives therefore could not look for power at all and only for office on the same ignoble terms as those upon which they had obtained it for three short periods during the previous twenty years that is to say, by allying themselves with the radicals to the discomfiture of the whigs. They would do better to look to nothing but their character and be guided by no rule except that 'of strict fidelity to conviction.'

The diagnosis seemed plausible, but it was nevertheless to prove false. The liberal ascendancy could not survive five years of drastic legislation, and Disraeli returned to office in Feb. 1874. Salisbury