Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 5.djvu/822

Rh 808 CLARENDON later, inevitable. Lord Clarendon, on the contrary, regarded France as a rival, but a friend ; he relied on the good sense and common interests of the two nations to maintain amicable relations ; and he succeeded in drawing closer for a period of thirty years, from 1840 to 1870, the ties which still happily remain unbroken between them. That was his great object, and the proudest result of his political life ; and the difficulties he had to encounter were at times as great on his own side of the Channel as on the other. The interval of Sir Robert Peel s great administration (1841-1846) was to the leaders of the Whig party a period of repose ; but Lord Clarendon took the warmest interest in the progressive triumph of the principles of free trade and in the ultimate repeal of the corn-laws, of which his brother, Mr Charles Pelham Villiers, had been the earliest, the most constant, and the most able advo cate. For this reason, upon the formation of Lord John Russell s first administration, Lord Clarendon accepted the office of Pre sident of the Board of Trade. Twice in his career the Governor- Generalship of India was offered him, and once the Governor- Generalship of Canada ; these he refused from reluctance to withdraw from the politics of Europe. But in 1847 a sense of duty compelled him to take a far more laborious and uncongenial appoint ment. The desire of the cabinet was to abolish the Lord Lieutenancy of Ireland, and Lord Clarendon was prevailed upon to accept that office, with a view to transform it ere long into an Irish Secretaryship of State. But he had not been many months in Dublin before he acknowledged that the difficulties then existing in Ireland could only be met by the most vigilant and energetic authority, exercised on the spot. The crisis was one of extraordin ary peril. Agrarian crimes of horrible atrocity had increased three fold. The Catholic clergy were openly disaffected. This was the second year of a famine which had desolated Ireland. The popula tion, decimated by starvation and disease, lived upon the poor-rate and the alms of England, and extraordinary measures were required to regulate the bounty of the Government and the nation. In 1848 the French Revolution let loose fresli elements of discord, which culminated in an abortive insurrection, and for a lengthened period Ireland was a prey to more than her wonted symptoms of disaffection and disorder. During those five years Lord Clarendon held the reins of the vice-regal government ; a task more entirely repugnant to his own predilections and more certain to be repaid with un merited obloquy could not have been imposed upon him. But he bore up against that flood of hostile passions and difficulties with unshaken firmness. He fed the starving ; he subdued the factious ; he crushed the rebellious. He left behind him permanent marks of improvement in .the legislation of Ireland ; and he practised, as far as possible, the broadest toleration of races and of creeds. If any name is associated in Ireland with the recollection of a government at once firm, far-sighted, and liberal, it should be that of Lord Clarendon. His services were expressly acknowledged by her Majesty in the Speech to both Houses of Parliament from the throne, on September 5, 1848, this being the first time that any civil services obtained that honour ; and he was made a Knight of the Garter (retaining also the Grand Cross of the Bath by special order of her Majesty) on the 23d March 1849. Looking back to that period, after an interval of more than twenty years, it must be acknowledged that from this crisis dates the regeneration of Ireland. The population, reduced in numbers, has never ceased to advance in prosperity ; wages have risen ; the land has been freed from secular incumbrances ; crime has diminished ; and treason itself has never recovered the crashing defeat of Smith O Brien and Meagher. Lord Clarendon had a large share in promoting these results ; but he hailed with no common satisfaction the change of Government which released him from those arduous duties in 1852. Upon the formation of the coalition ministry between the Whigs and the Peelites, in 1853, under Lord Aberdeen, the premier placed, without hesitation, the foreign office in the hands of Lord Clarendon ; but incredulous himself of the peril of war, which was already casting its dark shadow over the East, Lord Aberdeen sought rather to check than to stimulate the decisions which might possibly have arrested the course of hostilities. It can hardly now be doubted that the hesitation which appeared to mark the successive steps of the Western allies encouraged the czar to more daring aggressions; and Lord Clarendon confessed, in an expression which was never forgotten, that we &quot; drifted&quot; into war, which a more prompt defiance and an open alliance between the Western powers and the Porte might have arrested. But the war once begun Lord Clarendon con tinually urged the prosecution of it with the greatest energy. He employed every means in his power to stimulate and assist the war departments, and above all he maintained the closest relations with our French allies, on whose co operation everything depended. The Emperor Nicholas had speculated on the impossibility of the sustained joint action of France and England in council and in the field. It was mainly by Lord Clarendon at Whitehall and by Lord Eaglan before Sebastopol that such a combination was rendered practicable, and did eventually triumph over the enemy. The diplomatic conduct of such an alliance for three years between two great nations jealous of their military honour and fighting for no separate political advantage, tried by excessive hardships and at moments on the verge of defeat, was certainly one of the most arduous, duties ever performed by a minister. No one will ever know all the labour it cost ; but the result was due in the main to the confidence with which Lord Clarendon had inspired the emperor of the French, and to the affection and regard of the empress, whom he had known in Spain from her childhood. In 1856 Lord Clarendon took his seat at the Congress of Paris convoked for the restoration of peace, as first British Plenipotentiary, invested with full powers. It was the first time since the appearance of Lord Castlereagh at Vienna that a secretary of state for foreign affairs had been present in person at a congress on the Continent. Lord Clarendon s first care was to obtain the admission of Italy to the council chamber as a belligerent power, and to raise the barrier which still excluded Prussia as a neutral one. But in the general anxiety of all the powers to terminate the war there was no small clanger that the objects for which it had been undertaken would bo abandoned or forgotten. It is due, we may say, en tirely to the firmness of Lord Clarendon that the principle of the neutralization of the Black Sea was preserved, that the Russian attempt to trick the allies out of the cession in Bessarabia was defeated, and that the results of tL^war were for a time secured. 1 The Congress was eaaer to turn to other subjects, and perhaps the most important result of its deliberations was the celebrated Declaration of th& Maritime Powers, which abolished privateering, defined the right of blockade, and limited the right of capture to- enemy s property in enemy s ships. Lord Clarendon has been accused of an abandonment of what are termed the belligerent rights of this country, which were undoubtedly based on the old maritime laws of Europe. But he acted in strict conformity with tho views of the British cabinet, and the British cabinet adopted those views because it was satisfied that it was not for the benefit of the country to adhere to practices which exposed the vast mercantile interests of Britain to depredation, even by the cruisers of a secondary maritime power, and which, if vigorously enforced against neutrals, could not fail to embroil her with every maritime state in the world. The experi ence of 1780, when the armed neutrality of the North reacted so fatally on the American war, is the most con clusive demonstration of the fatal results of such a system of policy ; and the more enlightened views of the present day have shown that a commercial belligerent nation would lose far more than she would gain by the suppression of the neutral trade, even if such a suppression were possible. Upon the reconstitution of the Whig administration in. 1 The Crimean War and the peace of 1856 had results highly bene ficial to the politics of Europe. They rescued Turkey from the inimical grasp of Russia, and gave to the Ottoman empire twenty years of peace and security, which might, under abler rulers, have restored it to real independence and prosperity. They overthrew the preponderance which the Emperor Nicholas had asserted in Europe ; they cemented the alliance of France and England ; and they led the way to the sub sequent changes which followed in Italy and Germany. These were all objects which Lord Clarendon had at heart, and although no minister can hope to have a permanent influence on the course of human affairs, the events of the last twenty-five years have not been uninfluenced by his liberal and conciliatory views.