CHAPTER VII. THE LAST DAYS OF TORYISM. HILE the struggle for constitutional government was WHI going on in this country, three great questions profoundly stirred the minds of men in the mother land. One of these began thirteen years before within the hallowed walls of Oxford, when the conviction dawned upon the" sweet and saintly Keble," who has been likened to Goethe's star, a soul" without haste and without rest," that the Church of England had wan dered from the apostolic road into the world's by-ways, and that, while the body grew out into fair proportions and decked itself in purple and fine linen, the soul within it languished to the very gasp of death. And Keble, sore in spirit that his beloved church should see such an evil time, told his sorrows, and gathered around him some of the most sincere and lofty spirits in England. Within the college walls, one evening, as the wind murmured through the classic trees, with Richard Hurrell Froude, Dr. Pusey, John Henry Newman and others, he inaugurated the movement that first became manifest by the publication of the series of arguments contained in the "Tracts for the Times." Bold and searching were the arguments in these papers, startling, if not audacious, were their doctrines. As tract after tract appeared, the thinking world became profoundly stirred, and the bishops turned uneasily in their chairs. It would have been easy to hush the voice of the skeptic or the unbeliever within the walls of Oxford, and the church, whether papal or episcopal, has never hesitated to enforce silence by authority, while the nerve remained to her arm; but here the bench of bishops was met by the thrilling appeal of some of the most pure and lofty spirits in the realm, men who neither doubted nor disbelieved, who aimed not to pull down the church, but to build her up, to make her better and not worse, and who had discovered but too many unpleasant truths which they dragged into the light by the aid of a merciless and all-penetrating logic. So they calmly bowed their heads before the storm, though their mighty fabric rocked, and braved the rack till "No. 90" came rolling from the press. This was the most famous of the series, was written by Newman, and was the climax to which the whole current of the argument had hitherto been tending. The bishops at once took the alarm; the vice-chancellor and the heads of houses met; they condemned the tract and censured the writer. The voice you may still by force, but opinion you cannot stifle. Newman had entered upon a vast field of speculation; and those who saw the trend of his thought, must have known that only one church upon earth for him could be a staying-place. He still taught in the college and in the pulpit, and, in the words of Mr. Gladstone, was "all the while, without ostentation or effort, but by simple excellence continually drawing under-graduates more and more around him." He went to the continent, and wandered through classic cities like a man in a dream. In these wanderings the whole world to him seemed dark, and he, himself, as an infant groping his way to find a home. It was then his spirit breathed, and he wrote, that sweetest of our English hymns, that, pealed now upon ten thousand organs through all christendom : "Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom, Lead Thou me on; The night is dark, and I am far from home;— He returned to England teaching with all the sweet earnestness of his nature; and while he knew not where his haven lay, or whither his footsteps tended, the eyes of observant men saw that he was travelling fast to Rome. His secession staggered the church of which he had been the most brilliant star; and twenty-five years afterwards Mr. Disraeli describes his separa tion as having "dealt a blow to the church of England, under which she still reels." While we do not believe that the falling away of any one man could, to this extent, injure a church with a throne and government forming two of its constant bulwarks, we may suppose that the secession was a serious loss. But Newman, in a simple surplice, preaching in a modest episcopal chapel, was a far greater menace to the episcopacy, than Newman with a cardinal's hat, or thundering out of the chair of Peter. When he went over to Rome the danger was past, and the wildly agitated heart of the established church attained its normal, sober beat. While the divines saw with trepidation the movement in the theological world, politicians were filled with interest in the struggles of the giant O'Connell for a repeal of the union. They had heard him say, and they knew the tremendous force he would employ to keep his pledge, "The year 1843 is, and shall be, the repeal year." They saw the whole of Ireland rise as a man at his call and stream from the mountains and out of the cities in thousands, headed by their priests, with the regularity of soldiers, to attend his monster open-air meetings. The fame of the agitator and his movements were known over the world, and distinguished strangers visited Ireland to hear the man in whose word, and voice, and gesture there was some witching power, potent to move to tears or laughter, to pity or indignation, the tens of thousands of his countrymen who gathered in the fields at his call. When Lord Metcalfe began the play the tyrant in Canada, O'Connell was addressing surging crowds among the hills of Kerry, and appealing to "yonder blue mountains where you and I were cradled." The fame of O'Connell and the hopes of his followers were not unknown in Canada; and not a little of the zeal in the cause of Metcalfe and the Crown was kindled on the hustings by the reminder, from some wily tory, that the air was full of the "spirit of this repeal," that they "wanted separation in Ireland, and less would not satisfy them in Canada." But the great fabric that O'Connell raised was destined to pass away as dissolves the picture in a troubled dream. And almost as sudden as the fall of the movement, was the fall of its originator. Now we stand spell-bound in the gallery of the commons listening to "the thunder of his eloquence;" Charles Dickens, while a reporter in the gallery, is so moved by the pathos of one of his speeches that he has to lay his pencil by; the discerning critic, Lord Jeffrey, regards all others whom he hears as "talking schoolboy" compared with the agitator. Yet a little, yea, in three short years, and we see him making his last speechthis giant who so took the fancy of Lord Lytton among his native mountains, that he made him the subject of a poemtottering feebly by a table. "His appearance was of great debility, and the tones of his voice were very still. His words, indeed, reached only those who were immediately around him, the ministers sitting on the other side of the green table, and listening with that interest and respectful attention which became the occasion. It was a strange and touching spectacle to those who remembered the form of colossal energy, and the clear and thrilling tones that had once startled, disturbed and controlled senates. It was a performance in dumb show; a feeble old man muttering before a table."* He longed now to get away to Rome, to soothe his spirit in the shadow of her wing and there lie down to rest. He hurried away just as the shadows of famine began to gather over his beloved land, struggled to Genoa, on his way to the holy city, and there died. The most engrossing movement of the three, perhaps, was that which stirred the whole commercial frame of Great Britain-the question of a tax on corn. This movement had * Disraeli. been set on foot and carried out with a force and a success before unequalled, by those unique and singularly honest and able politicians, Richard Cobden and John Bright. These were the two gifted men who could, in the words of Kinglake, "go bravely into the midst of angry opponents, show them their fallacies one by one, destroy their favourite theories before their very faces, and triumphantly argue them down." This description helps us to understand how a government chosen to maintain the duty on corn should suddenly announce its conversion to the doctrines of free trade; and how Sir Robert Peel could stand boldly up in the parliament four years after his election to maintain the duty, and frankly tell the house: “I will not withhold the homage which is due to the progress of reason and truth by denying that my opinion on the subject of protection has undergone a change." The sudden revolution in English opinion on this question created much surprise and some excitement here, but though Peel fell in the moment of victory, and a young rival seized the occasion to raise himself to eminence, no hand has since succeeded in renewing the life of the corn laws. They are dead, and, we doubt not, will sleep now till the sound of the last trumpet. In the autumn of 1845 a period of chilling winds and wet prevailed in Ireland, and the potato crop, the mainstay of the great majority of the working people, began to rot in the ground. The extent of this calamity will be understood when it is learnt that large numbers of the labouring class received no wages, but tilled the fields of the land-owner on the "cottier-tenant system"; that is, giving their labour for the use of a patch of land in which to plant potatoes. Generations, in many districts in Ireland, had grown up and passed away, and never tasted flesh meat, unless fortune sent a rabbit, perhaps once in year, through the hedge, when it was stealthily dispatched pitchfork, conveyed home under the mother's cloak, and eaten in uneasy silence. So when the long-continued, drizzling days set in, and the potatoes began to rot in the the with a |