Page:Dictionary of National Biography. Sup. Vol I (1901).djvu/450

 to the roll-call of the living and the dead;' true the opposition was weak, but 'we have not been repulsed indeed by what is called a fire of precision; we have been beaten rather by a sort of Zulu rush. We have been mobbed and assegaied right and left.' Yet Lord Salisbury was not at ease; 'the other night when he came down to explain in dulcet tones the entire fulfilment of the treaty of Berlin, he shone like the peaceful evening star. But sometimes he is like the red planet Mars, and occasionally he flames in the midnight sky, not only perplexing nations but perplexing his own nearest friends and followers.' What had it all been about, these 'ringing cheers and imperial perorations'? There was the wonderful blue-book, giving 'the territory restored to Turkey' on one page, 'like the advertisement of a second-rate theatre.' The treaty of Berlin was 'nothing but a copy, with slight, comparatively unimportant, and sometimes mischievous modifications of the treaty of San Stefano.' As for 'peace with honour,' it was really 'retreat with boasting.' In the earlier stages of the Eastern question 'this government was no better than a respectable committee of the society of friends, with all its helplessness but without its principles.' Later we armed 'at the wrong time and in a wrong cause.' And then came the startling and prophetic close: 'My lords, you are beginning to be found out. Time is your great accuser; the course of events is summing up the case against you.' Whether correct in its conclusions or not, it was a speech of which Bright might have been proud, the reference to the society of friends always excepted.

In 1880 the conservative government fell. The duke had taken a strenuous line against it on the Afghan crisis, and to few men, Gladstone excepted, could the result of the elections be more correctly attributed. In 1879 he had published his important political work 'The Eastern Question,' a survey of eastern policy since the Crimean war. Its conclusion was: 'Unjust and impolitic as I think the conduct of the government has been in the east of Europe, it has been wisdom and virtue itself in comparison with its conduct in India' (ii. 516). He returned to his former post of privy seal, since his health, always delicate, did not admit of a more arduous office. A compensation for disturbance bill was introduced; he supported it with reluctance, as a temporary and charitable measure. In March 1881 the duke, who had created the phrase 'Mervousness,' attacked the 'forward' policy of the late government in Afghanistan, and it was in reply to 'one whose ability is equal to any emergency, and who invariably delights the audience which he addresses,' that Lord Beaconsfield uttered the phrase, 'The key of India is not Merv, or Herat, or Candahar. The key of India is London.' On 8 April 1881 the duke closed his ministerial career with a personal explanation. It was very brief; the subject was the Irish land bill. His ground for objecting to it was pithily expressed: 'I am opposed to measures which tend to destroy ownership altogether, by depriving it of the conditions which are necessary to the exercise of its functions.' 'In Ireland ownership will be in commission or in abeyance.' Then followed a tribute to Gladstone; it was an old connection of twenty-nine years, 'a connection on my part of ever-increasing affection and respect.' Long after, in 1887, he broke out against this land act: 'I ask. Was there ever such accursed legislation? Conquerors have wronged the cities of a country and plundered its princes, but you have cursed Ireland with a perpetual curse.'

In the month succeeding his retirement the Transvaal question came forward, and the government's policy after Majuba, following upon the annexation in 1877, was discussed. The duke had approved of the annexation, because he understood that the Boers assented to the measure. 'There is no public man in this country, belonging to any party, who would have cared to annex the Transvaal if he had believed that it was against the assent of the population.' The battle of Laing's Nek, he stated, occurred when Gladstone's government had already 'entered into indirect communications with a view to peace' (Hansard, 10 May 1881). Later in the year he moved for papers on the subject of landlord and tenant in Ireland. 'I am myself a Celt, and, more than that, in our country we are Irish Celts. The time when our people in the western highlands of Scotland came over from Ireland still lives in the memory of the people. I have often stood on the shore of my own country looking to the opposite coast of Ireland, divided by a strait so narrow that on a clear day we see the houses, the divisions of the fields, and the colours of the crops; and I often wondered at the marvellous difference in the development of the two kindred peoples.' The secret of the progress of Scotland and of the stagnation of Ireland was that in the former 'nothing now remains of that old Celtic character except a certain sentiment of the clan feeling, which still sweetens our society very much as the clouds on a stormy morning are the brightest