Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 7.djvu/127

Rh of the great agitator was not the retorts of debate, effective though these were, but the beneficial legislation he was instrumental in passing. Two of his measures deserve special mention. He introduced and carried the first national education act for Ireland, one result of which was the remarkable and to many almost incredible phenomenon of a board composed of Catholics, Episcopalians, and Presbyterians, harmoniously administering an efficient education scheme. He was also chiefly responsible for the Irish Church Temporalities Act, though the bill was not introduced into parliament until after he had quitted the Irish secretaryship for another office. By this measure two archbishoprics and eight bishoprics were abolished, and a remedy was provided for various abuses connected with the revenues of the church. As originally introduced, the bill contained a clause authorizing the appropriation of surplus revenues to non-ecclesiastical purposes. This had, however, been strongly opposed from the first by Stanley, and several other members of the cabinet, and it was withdrawn by the Government before the measure reached the Lords. There was therefore no ground for the charge of inconsistency brought against Stanley, when a year later he seceded from the cabinet on the proposal being renewed. In 1833, just before the introduction of the Irish Church Temporalities Bill, Stanley had been promoted to be secretary for the colonies with a seat in the cabinet. In this position it fell to his lot to carry through parliament a measure which is one of the abiding glories of English legislation. The agitation for the emancipation of the slaves had been mainly the work of others whose names have become historical in connection with it; but to Stanley belonged the honour and privilege of bringing it to a successful practical issue in the pages of the statute book. The speech which he delivered on introducing the bill for the emancipation of the slaves in the West Indies, on the 14th May 1833, was one of the finest specimens of his eloquence. It showed a philanthropic spirit and a love of freedom which proved him to be a not unworthy associate of Clarkson, Wilberforce, and Buxton, and it was admirable for the clear statement of the somewhat complicated arrangement by which the all but unanimous wish of the nation was to be carried out. The latter quality was still more conspicuous in committee, through which Stanley carried the measxire with the firmness and tact of true statesmanship. It has already been said that the Irish Church question determined more than one turning-point in Mr Stanley s political career. The most important occasion on which it did so was in 1834, when the proposal of the Government to appropriate the surplus revenues of the church to educational purposes led to his secession from the cabinet, and, as it proved, his complete and final separation from the Whig party. In the former of these steps he had as his companions Sir James Graham, the earl of Eipon, and the duke of Richmond. Soon after it occurred, O Connell, amid the laughter of the House, described the secession in a couplet from Canning s Loves of the Triangles : &quot; Still down thy steep, romantic Ashbourne, glides The Derby dilly carrying six insides.&quot; Stanley was by no means content with marking his disapproval of the conduct of the Government of which he had been a member by the simple act of withdrawing from it. He spoke against the bill to which he objected with a vehemence that showed the strength of his feeling in the matter, and against its authors with a bitterness that he himself is understood to have afterwards admitted to have been unseemly towards those who had so recently been his colleagues. The language of one speech deserves to be quoted as a good specimen of what he could do in the way of invective when he chose. &quot; Plunder,&quot; a term very familiar in more recent debates on the same long-vexed question, was perhaps the mildest word he used. The course followed by the Government was &quot; marked with all that timidity, that want of dexterity, which led to the fail ure of the unpractised shoplifter.&quot; His late colleagues were compared to &quot; thimble-riggers at a country fair,&quot; and their plan was &quot; petty larceny, for it had not the redeeming qualities of bold and open robbery.&quot; In the end of 1834, Lord Stanley, as he was now styled by courtesy, his father having succeeded to the earldom in October, was invited by Sir Robert Peel to join the short-lived Conservative ministry which he formed after the resignation of Lord Melbourne. Though he declined the offer for reasons stated in a letter published in the Peel memoirs, he acted from that date with the Conservative party, and on its next accession to power, in 1841, he accepted the office of colonial secretary, which he had held under Lord Grey. His position and his temperament alike, however, made him a thoroughly inde pendent supporter of any party to which he attached him self. When, therefore, the injury to health arising from the late hours in the Commons led him in 1844 to seek elevation to the Upper House in the right of his father s barony, Sir Robert Peel, in acceding to his request, had the satisfaction of at once freeing himself from the possible effects of his &quot; candid friendship &quot; in the House, and at the same time greatly strengthening the debating power on the Conservative side in the other. If the premier in taking this step had any presentiment of an approaching difference on a vital question, it was not long in being realized. When Sir Robert Peel accepted the policy of free trade in 1846, the breach between him and Lord Stanley was, as might have been anti cipated from the antecedents of the latter, instant and irreparable. Lord Stanley at once asserted himself as the uncompromising opponent of that policy, and he became, as his position warranted, the recognized leader of the Protectionist party, having Lord George Bentinck and Mr Disraeli for his lieutenants in the Commons. They did all that could be done in a case in which the logic of events was against them, but their watch word of Protection was never to become more than a watchword. It is one of the peculiarities of English politics, however, that a party may come into power because it is the only available one at the time, though it may have no chance of carrying the very principle to which it owes its organized existence. Such was the case when Lord Derby, who had succeeded to the earldom on the death of his father in June 1851, was called upon to form his first administration in February 1852. He was in a minority, but the circumstances were such that no other than a minority Government was possible, and he resolved to take the only available means of strengthening his position by dissolving parliament and appealing to the country at the earliest opportunity. The appeal was made in autumn, but its result did not materially alter the position of parties. Parliament met in November, and by the middle of the following monthj the ministry had resigned in consequence of their defeat on the clever but financially unsound budget proposed by Mr Disraeli. For the six following years, during Lord Aberdeen s &quot; ministry of all the talents &quot; and Lord Palmerston s premiership, Lord Derby remained at the head of the opposition, whose policy gradually became more generally Conservative and less distinctively Protectionist as the hopelessness of revers ing the measures adopted in 1846 made itself apparent to all but the most reactionary. In 1855, he was asked to form an administration after the resignation of Lord Aberdeen, but failing to obtain sufficient support, he 