Page:Once a Week Volume V.djvu/42

6, 1861.] Ernest Adair sprang to his feet, and his heart beat with terrible quickness—in the stillness of the chamber he could hear the throb. Another moment, and he dashed his hand across his eyes with an impatient gesture, and listened intently.

He heard, or thought he heard, the sound of retreating feet, and a word, or rather a growl, signifying that some order was understood. Then, Ernest laid his hand for a moment upon his heart, but with the danger had come the courage, and it was not to count the beatings that he placed his hand there.

Next, and unmistakably, he heard a key in the lock of the front door. He darted to the door of the apartment in which he stood, nearly closed it, and, holding it with a firm hand, listened.

is a curious thing at this time of day to have one’s memory directed back to the period when we were struggling with confused ideas about what sort of men should govern us. Very confused our ideas were as to the proper quality of Ministers of State. From school lessons on history we brought notions of the peril of rule by the minions of Courts, of whom old-fashioned histories have so much to tell. We thought nothing could be so dangerous as a low-born favourite, undertaking all sorts of political offices, and setting his poor relations to govern the people. Then, again, we read and heard a good deal of the evil of aristocratic assumption in the sphere of political action. Great old families, or great families who were not old, or venerable in their origin, had a way which should be well watched of taking for granted that they were to govern the country, without any question of their fitness to do so. The time was just coming in when some new question occasionally arose which aristocratic statesmen were ignorant of, and which might apparently have been better managed by some clever and well-informed middle-class man who understood it in its true bearings; and then we asked one another why we never had that sort of minister. Those were the days when Lord Eldon would boast in the same hour that England was a country in which “every man”—not merely any but every man—might raise himself from the lowest origin to the highest offices in the State—avowing himself a proof of the fact—and yet that the British Constitution was the best in the world because it kept out low people from meddling with State affairs, and gave all substantial power to the élite of the nation. The confusion in Lord Eldon’s mind was a type of that in the general mind. I have known the most opposite moods and views held on successive days by the same persons at that period. A reformer whom Lord Eldon would have called revolutionary for a speech about Old Sarum, might be heard grumbling in Westminster Abbey at the admittance of a monument to Watt among the Edwards and the Henrys. One of the commonest forms of the confusion was ill-usage of Mr. Canning and Mr. Huskisson as “political adventurers,” almost in the same breath with complaints that the country was governed by men who could have no knowledge of popular needs and interests.

That Mr. Canning and Mr. Huskisson were in the Government in defiance of slights and of talk about their being political adventurers, showed to those who could read the signs of the times that a period of political progression had set in. There were other people besides Lord Eldon who were spending their lives in trying to hold back society, at least, if they could not move it back. Metternich was three years younger than Canning and Huskisson. They were born on the 11th of March and the 11th of April, 1770, and Metternich in 1773. We have seen, in an earlier retrospect, what became of Metternich’s passion for standing still when it was not possible to go back. We will now glance at the state of affairs which arose from our having statesmen who were able to see that they must move on.

It might be, and it was, alleged that there was much nonsense in the cry about these men being political adventurers. If they had not independent fortune, no more had Pitt, who was living on less than 300l. a-year when he first became a minister, and who had made preparations for resuming his career at the bar when, at seven-and-twenty, he expected to go out of office. But he was the son of a minister. A minister might get into office either by hereditary propriety, or by great claims of birth or fortune; but Canning and Huskisson had neither the one sort of qualification nor the other. If ability was suggested as a third resource, there was a good deal of hesitation about admitting it, because, if free access to the seats of power was allowed to sheer ability, there was no saying what changes might not follow. A set of low people from the regions of trade and manufactures might seat themselves in places hitherto regarded as reserved for the aristocracy of the country. It was too late for practical objection, however. There they were—Mr. Canning and his friend; and they were there because there was work to be done for which they were the right men.

George Canning’s lot was that of the orphan. His father, who was of a good old provincial family, died when the child was only a year old; and his mother’s position was not equally good: so that there was some colour for the talk of his being of low origin. Mr. Huskisson’s father was a farmer of fair landed estate. Neither of them had any tendency to political fortune-hunting. Canning was educated for the bar; and it is said to have been Sheridan who persuaded him to leave it for politics; and Huskisson’s connections, tastes, and habits of business fitted him so precisely for filling posts of public business which were financial or administrative, if not political, that his vocation seemed as natural as that of any member of any of the professions.

When he was only twenty, he had a considerable name in Paris for his opposition to the great paper-money scheme of the day. He was in Paris through his uncle being physician to the embassy there. He was invited to be the ambassador’s secretary; and when he returned with the embassy to England in 1792, he was at once thrown among