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was in reality not merely a tirade against the cruelties of the Inquisition, but an impassioned protest against religious disabilities in every shape or form. ‘Don Carlos,’ though now practically forgotten, ran through five editions in twelve months, and the people remembered it when its author became the foremost advocate in the House of Commons of the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts. Amongst other minor writings which belong to the earlier years of Lord John Russell, it is enough to name ‘Essays and Sketches of Life and Character,’ ‘The Establishment of the Turks in Europe,’ ‘A Translation of the Fifth Book of the Odyssey,’ and an imitation of the Thirteenth Satire of Juvenal, as well as an essay on the ‘Causes of the French Revolution,’ which appeared in 1832.

It is still a moot point whether ‘Letters Written for the Post, and not for the Press,’ an anonymous volume which appeared in 1820, and which consists of descriptions of a tour in Scotland, interspersed with dull moral lectures on the conduct of a wife towards her husband, was from his pen. Mr. George Elliot believes, on internal evidence, too lengthy to quote, that the book—a small octavo volume of more than four hundred pages—is erroneously attributed to his brother-in-law, and the Countess Russell is of the same opinion. Mr. Elliot cites inaccuracies in the book, and adds that the places visited in Scotland do not correspond with those which Lord John had seen when he went thither in company with the Duke and Duchess in 1807; and there is no evidence that he made another pilgrimage north of the Tweed between that date and the appearance of the book. He adds that his father took the trouble to collect everything which was written by Lord John, and the book is certainly not in the library at Minto. Moreover, Mr. Elliot is confident that either Lord Minto or Lord John himself assured him that he might dismiss the idea of the supposed authorship.

After his final retirement from office, Lord John published, in 1868, three letters to Mr. Chichester Fortescue on ‘The State of Ireland,’ and this was followed by a contribution to ecclesiastical history in the shape of a volume of essays on ‘The Rise and Progress of the Christian Religion in the West of Europe to the Council of Trent.’ The leisure of his closing years was, however, chiefly devoted to the preparation, with valuable introductions, of selections from his own ‘Speeches and Despatches;’ and this, in turn, was followed, after an interval of five years, by a work entitled ‘Recollections and Suggestions, 1813-1873,’ which appeared as late as 1875, and which was of singular personal interest as well as of historical importance. It bears on the title-page two lines from Dryden, which were often on Lord John’s lips in his closing years:

Not Heaven itself upon the past has power,
But what has been has been, and I have had my hour.
A RETROSPECT

The old statesman’s once tenacious memory was failing when he wrote the book, and there is little evidence of literary arrangement in its contents. If, however, Lord John did not always escape inaccuracy of statement or laboured discursiveness of style, the value not only of his political reminiscences, but also of his shrewd and often pithily expressed verdicts on men and movements, is unquestionable, and, on the whole, the vigour of the book is as remarkable as its noble candour. Mr. Kinglake once declared that ‘Lord John Russell wrote so naturally that it recalled the very sound of his voice;’ and half the charm of his ‘Recollections and Suggestions’ consists in the artlessness of a record which will always rank with the original materials of history, between the year in which Wellington fought the battle of Vittoria and that in which, just sixty years later, Napoleon III. died in exile at Chislehurst. In speaking of his own career, Lord Russell, writing at the age of eighty-one, uses words which are not less manly than modest:

‘I can only rejoice that I have been allowed to have my share in the task accomplished in the half-century which has elapsed from 1819 to 1869. My capacity, I always felt, was very inferior to that of the men who have attained in past times the foremost place in our Parliament and in the councils of our Sovereign. I have committed many errors, some of them very gross blunders. But the generous people of England are always forbearing and forgiving to those statesmen who have the good of their country at heart. Like my betters, I have been misrepresented and slandered by those who know nothing of me; but I have been more than compensated by the confidence and the friendship of the best men of my own political connection, and by the regard and favourable interpretation of my motives, which I have heard expressed by my generous opponents, from the days of Lord Castlereagh to these of Mr. Disraeli.’

There were few questions in which Lord John Russell was more keenly interested from youth to age than that of National Education. As a boy he had met Joseph Lancaster, during a visit of that far-seeing and practical friend of poor children to Woburn, and the impression which the humble Quaker philanthropist made on the Duke of Bedford’s quick-witted as well as kind-hearted son was retained, as one of his latest speeches show, to the close of life. At the opening of the new British Schools in Richmond in the summer of 1867, Lord John referred to his father’s association with Joseph Lancaster, and added: ‘In this way I naturally became initiated into a desire for promoting schools for the working classes, and I must say, from that time to this I never changed my mind upon the subject. I think it is absolutely necessary our schools should not merely be secular, but that they should be provided with religious teaching, and that religious teaching ought not to be sectarian. There will be plenty of time, when these children go to church or chapel, that they should learn either that particular form of doctrine their parents follow or adopt one more consistent with their conscientious feelings; but I think, while they are young boys and girls at school, it ought to be sufficient for them to know what Christ taught, and what the apostles taught; and from those lessons and precepts they may guide their conduct in life.’

Lord John put his hand to the plough in the day of small things, and, through good and through evil report, from the days of Lancaster, Bell, and Brougham, to those of Mr. Forster and the great measure of 1870, he never withdrew from a task which lay always near to his heart. It is difficult to believe that at the beginning of the present century there were less than three thousand four hundred schools of all descriptions in the whole of England, or that when the reign of George III. was closing one-half of the children of the nation still ran wild without the least pretence of education. At a still later period the marriage statistics revealed the fact that one-third of the men and one-half of the women were unable to sign the register. The social elevation of the people, so ran the miserable plea of those who assuredly were not given to change, was fraught with peril to the State. Hodge, it was urged, ought to be content to take both the Law and the Commandments from his betters, since a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. As for the noisy, insolent operatives and artisans of the great manufacturing towns, was there not for them the strong hand of authority, and, if they grew too obstreperous, the uplifted sabre of the military as at Peterloo? It was all very well, however, to extol the virtues of patience, contentment, and obedience, but the sense of wrong and of defiance rankled in the masses, and with it—in a dull and confused manner—the sense of power.

THE AWAKENING OF THE PEOPLE

The Reform Bill of 1832 mocked in many directions the hopes of the people, but it at least marked a great social as well as a great political departure, and with it came the dawn of a new day to modern England. As the light broadened, the vision of poets and patriots began to be realised in practical improvements, which came home to men’s business and bosom; the standard of intelligence rose, and with it freedom of thought, and the, sometimes passionate, but more often long-suffering demand for political, social, and economic concessions to justice. It was long before the privileged classes began to recognise, except in platform heroics, that it was high time to awake out of sleep and to ‘educate our masters;’ but the work began when Lord Althorp persuaded the House of Commons to vote a modest sum for the erection of school buildings in England; and that grant of 20,000l. in 1832 was the ‘handful of corn on the top of the mountains’ which has brought about the golden harvest of to-day. The history of the movement does not, of course, fall within the province of these pages, though Lord John Russell’s name is associated with it in an honourable and emphatic sense. The formation, chiefly at his instance, in 1839 of a Council of Education paved the way for the existing system of elementary education, and lifted the whole problem to the front rank of national affairs.

POPULAR EDUCATION

He was the first Prime Minister of England to carry a measure which made it possible to secure trained teachers for elementary schools; and his successful effort in 1847 to ‘diminish the empire of ignorance,’ as he styled it, was one of the events in his public life on which he looked back in after years with the most satisfaction. During the session of 1856 Lord John brought forward in the House of Commons a bold scheme of National Education. He contended that out of four million children of school age only one-half were receiving instruction, whilst not more than one-eighth were attending schools which were subject to inspection. The vast majority were to be found in schools where the standard of education, if not altogether an unknown quantity, was deplorably low. He proposed that the number of inspectors should be increased, and that a rate should be levied by the local authorities for supplying adequate instruction in places where it was unsatisfactory. He contended that the country should be mapped out in school districts, and that the managers should have the power to make provision for religious instruction, and, at the same time, should allow the parents of the children a voice in the matter. Prejudices ecclesiastical and social blocked the way, however, and Lord John was compelled to abandon the scheme, which suggested, and to a large extent anticipated Mr. Forster’s far-reaching measure, which in 1870 met with a better fate, and linked the principles of local authority and central supervision in the harmonious working of public education. When the victory was almost won Mr. Forster, with characteristic kindliness, wrote to the old statesman who had laboured for the people’s cause in years of supreme discouragement:—‘As regards universal compulsory education, I believe we shall soon complete the building. It is hard to see how there would have been a building to complete, if you had not, with great labour and in great difficulty, dug the foundations in 1839.’ Happily Lord John lived to witness the crowning of the edifice by the Gladstone Administration.

CHAPTER XIV

COMING BACK TO POWER

1857-1861

Lord John as an Independent Member—His chance in the City—The Indian Mutiny—Orsini’s attempt on the life of Napoleon—The Conspiracy Bill—Lord John and the Jewish Relief Act—Palmerston in power—Lord John at

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