The Putumayo — The Devil’s Paradise
Travels in the Peruvian Amazon Region and an account of the Atrocities committed upon the Indians therein.
By W. E. Hardenburg, C.E.
Edited and with an Introduction by
C Reginald Enock, F.R.G.S.
With a Map and many Illustrations.
The Globe says:
“This tale of Mr. Hardenburg’s is no fancy sketch. It is true; it bears the impress of truth on every line, and it is confirmed by independent testimony at almost every point. So awful an indictment has never before been framed against men claiming to have even the rudiments of civilization, and even the atrocities laid to the charge of the most cold-blooded tyrants of the Congo pale before the horrors to which Mr. Hardenburg and Consul Casement speak.”
The Daily Chronicle says:
“The author gives us one of the most terrible pages in the history of trade.... Included in the book is a summary of Sir Roger Casement’s report on the atrocities which Mr. Hardenburg brought to light. The whole forms a volume of such horror that to read it is pain.”
The Daily News says:
“Those who read this book will not merely be moved to compassion for the wretched Indians, but thrilled with the story it tells of heroism on the part of two splendid young Americans—the author and his colleague, Mr. Perkins.”
T. FISHER UNWIN, 1 Adelphi Terrace, London
Notes
1 T. H. Green, Works, iii. 367.
2 L. T. Hobhouse, Liberalism, 122.
3 L. T. Hobhouse, Liberalism, 126, 127, 133.
4 L. T. Hobhouse, Democracy and Reaction (2nd edition), 166.
5 Bulwer’s Life of Palmerston, i. 278. Palmerston’s list of “Liberals” of June, 1828, includes 11 Peers and 37 Commoners.
6 Representative Government, chap. xvi.
7 J. A. Hobson, Imperialism (1905 edition), 319.
8 Morley’s Life of Cobden (popular edition), 529. The reference is to Russia’s assistance of Austria against the Hungarians.
9 Daily News, 16th February, 1912.
10 There are few modern expressions of a general theory of Tory politics. The Letters of an Englishman (Constable, 1911, 1912) are almost pure Toryism. Lord Hugh Cecil’s Conservatism is tinged with Liberal ideas on Free Trade and Foreign Affairs. Mr. Pierse Loftus’s Conservative Party and the Future is essentially Tory, but is rather suggestion for the future than an expression of the present mind of Toryism. Mr. J. M. Kennedy’s Tory Democracy is the philosophy of Nietzsche masquerading in political dress, and bears no relation to practical politics, past, present, or future. Mr. Price Collier’s England and the English is the Toryism of an American who has enjoyed the hospitality of the leisured class, and has read the Times with some diligence. The cheap reprint is introduced by a characteristic eulogy from the pen of Lord Rosebery, who seems to have spent the last twenty-five years, if not in a castle in Spain, at least in an eighteenth-century nobleman’s country house. Neither he nor Mr. Collier seems to have any knowledge of the industrial North. The Standard has now opened its columns to a discussion of the principles and proposals of Toryism, but I have not yet (December, 1912) detected much system in what has been published. Various periodicals express various shades of Toryism, from the purity of Mr. W. S. Lilly, through the individualism of Mr. A. Baumann, to the Protectionist-Social Reform School of “Curio.”
11 But most of the Tory Suffragists stop at a narrow property franchise.
12 Mr. Lewis Harcourt at the Albert Hall, 28th February, 1911.
13 T. H. Green, Works, iii. cxii.
14 T. H. Green, Political Obligation, § 122.
15 Hansard, III. cxxiv. 602.
16 Letters to a Friend on Votes for Women.
17 Speeches reprinted from the Times, 47.
18 National Review, May, 1912, 420.
19 Observer, leading article, 15th September, 1912.
20 At the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce, 13th November, 1896.
21 Morning Post, leading article, 22nd August, 1912. The most startling feature of this passage is its assumption that patriotism can be bought, and, indeed, cannot be made secure except by being bought. If it be true that patriotism follows the cash, we are bound to the Argentine Republic and the United States by as close ties as to Canada, and if the present flow of British capital continues, our hearts will soon warm towards Russia. For the Liberal view of Empire, half a century old, see Gladstone’s speech (1855), quoted in Morley’s Life of Gladstone, i. 363.
22 See, for example, leading articles in the Morning Post, 18th July, 1912, and Daily Telegraph, 12th July, 1912.
23 Morley’s Burke (English Men of Letters), 136.
24 Cole shot a black man because he suspected him of stealing sheep. Lewis shot another because his daughter said he had insulted her. Both acts were done in cold blood, and with the approval of local whites. There was no suggestion in either case that the law was inadequate or could not have been enforced.
25 Morning Post, leading article, 14th May, 1912.
26 The grossest modern example of Tory Imperialism is Mr. Bonar Law’s proposal, while claiming the right to close English markets to foreign manufacturers, to keep those of India, whether Indians like it or not, open to English manufacturers. It is matched by his proposal that it should be left to the Dominions to say whether or not our own food supplies should be free or taxed.
27 The Times recently spoke of “insolence” when a meeting of East Lancashire manufacturers and Members of Parliament criticized Sir Edward Grey’s policy in Persia. We may be wrong in the North. But we shall always think for ourselves. The same journal has made a vicious attack upon the Supreme Court of India, because it interferes with the arbitrary acts of executive officers.
28 Moray’s Life of Cobden, ii. 361. The Review of Reviews furnished another example of this vicious reaction when it urged (October, 1912) that England must not put pressure upon Turkey to reform its government of Macedonia, because such action would impair our authority over the Moslem of India. In other words, because of our Empire, we must connive at murder, rape, and every form of brigandage.
29 Parliamentary History, xxv. 472.
30 Wilberforce Correspondence, i. 219.
31 Annual Register, 1793, 113.
32 Parl. Hist., xxx. 810.
33 Walpole’s Life of Lord John Russell, i. 56.
34 The first exception to this rule was Mr. Smith the banker, who was made Earl Carrington in 1797.
35 Scottish borough members were exempt. But Scottish boroughs were the most rotten of all rotten boroughs. An English county member must have £600 a year, a borough member £300. The qualifications were often fictitious.
36 Annual Register, 1796, 52.
37 Parl. Hist., xxii. 422.
38 State Trials, xxiii. 229.
39 Speech on Seditious Societies, 17th November, 1795.
40 Londonderry to Brougham, 31st August, 1829, Castlereagh Correspondence, i. 121.
41 Speech on Revolutionary Principles, 13th December, 1792. Compare the argument which is used to-day against the enfranchisement of working women. Toryism knows no sex.
42 Speech on Bull-baiting, 24th May, 1802.
43 Ibid.
44 Speech, 24th April, 1807.
45 Parl. Hist., xxxiv. 162, 165 (1798). The publication of reports of debates began in 1771, or rather, was then first permitted.
46 Hansard, I. xli. 1045 (1819).
47 Hansard, I. xxxviii. 1171 (1818).
48 Hansard, I. xli. 388 (1819).
49 Hansard, I. xli. 914. The resolutions were no more “disgraceful” than those of the ordinary Trade Union Congress of to-day.
50 Arnould’s Life of Denman, i. 253.
51 In 1817 no less than 1,200 persons were sent to prison for offences against the Game Laws.
52 Hansard, I., xxxix. 1435, 1439.
53 Beaufoy’s speech, Annual Register, 1787.
54 Burke’s Memoirs of the English Catholics, ii. 459, 466.
55 Speeches: On Repeal of the Test Act, 2nd March, 1790.
56 Strictures on Female Education (1799), i. 106.
57 Legacy to Young Ladies (1826).
58 Legacy to his Daughters (1784).
59 Lucy Aikin’s Memoir of Mrs. Barbauld (1825), xvi.
60 See further, the writer’s Emancipation of English Women, ch. 3.
61 Speeches, 26th May, 1797.
62 Hansard, I. xli. 391.
63 Parl. Hist., xxxi. 1384.
64 Fitzmaurice’s Life of Shelburne, ii. 367.
65 Parl. Hist., xxxiv. 416.
66 Parl. Hist., xix. 1100.
67 Leviathan, ii. ch. xvii.
68 On Civil Government, ch. viii.
69 Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe (1792). Compare his Speech at Bristol previous to the Election (1780).
70 Speeches, vol. vi. 310 (23rd March, 1797). Compare Granville, in the Annual Register, 1808, 196.
71 Burke, French Revolution.
72 Parl. Hist., xxxii. 961 (1796).
73 Parl. Hist., xxxiv. 1429.
74 Fitzmaurice’s Life of Shelburne, iii. 88, 435. His ideas on education he tried to enforce on his own estates. But “the clergy opposed his lordship’s intentions, lest the children should become Dissenters, although it was engaged that the children of Church people should go to Church with their parents.” Ibid., 438 n.
75 Fitzmaurice, iii. 497, 498.
76 Ibid., ii. 329.
77 Ibid., 360.
78 Ibid., iii. 438.
79 Ibid., iii. 365.
80 Letter to Lord Holland, 12th October, 1792.
81 Speeches, vi. 383.
82 M. Halévy suggests that the Wesleyan revival, which began in the middle of the eighteenth century, was largely if not wholly responsible for the social changes. But, except in so far as it increased dissent in religion, the liberating influence of Wesleyanism was small. The Wesleyans are, to this day, the most conservative of Nonconformists, and their mystical piety was utterly opposed to the rationalistic freethinking of the Revolution.
83 Arthur Young’s Annals, xxv. passim.
84 39 Geo. III, c. 81; 39 & 40 Geo. III, c. 106.
85 Letters to his Son, 19th December, 1767.
86 Walpole’s George III, iii. 197; Chesterfield’s Letters, 12th April, 1768.
87 Annual Register, 1770, 72.
88 Annual Register, 1769, 125.
89 Annual Register, 1769, 197 et seq.
90 Stephen’s Memoirs of Horne Tooke, passim.
91 William Knox, in a letter to Grenville, Grenville Papers, iv. 336. Knox wrote the pamphlet State of the Nation, to which Burke replied in his celebrated Observations.
92 For the views of Fox, see Lord Russell’s Correspondence of C. J. Fox, I. 146; Walpole’s Last Journals, ii. 241; and for those of the elder Pitt, Chatham Correspondence, ii. 367. The Duke of Richmond set up a claim to an old French peerage, by way of preparing an asylum for himself when George III had finally established his despotism. Burke’s Correspondence, ii. 112.
93 Speech at Bristol previous to the Election (1780). The union between English reformers and American rebels was marked by deeds as well as words. In 1770 the Assembly of South Carolina subscribed £1,500 to the Society of the Friends of the Bill of Rights. A. R. 1770, 224.
94 A. R. 1780, 51. See also Sir George Savile’s Address to the Freeholders of York, 169.
95 A. R. 1780, 55.
96 Watson’s Anecdotes of His Own Time.
97 Parl. Hist., xxix. 509.
98 See, for instance, Luxford’s case, mentioned by Fox in Parl. Hist., xxix. 557, and contrast the judge and the juries in William Hone’s trials (1817).
99 See the speech of Calcagus to the British, in Tacitus’ Agricola, c. 30.
100 In her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).
101 Political Arithmetic (1774), 95.
102 Thoughts on Scarcity (1795).
103 Wealth of Nations, Bk. IV., cix.
104 Reports, 1806, iii. 2.
105 On Civil Liberty (1776), 72.
106 Political Justice (1793), ii. 190.
107 Memoir of Major Cartwright, i. 244.
108 I use the term “Radicals” for these early extremists because it is the most convenient. But the word was not actually introduced till the end of the French War in 1816.
109 P. 3.
110 P. 22.
111 P. 37.
112 Memoir, i. 191.
113 In 1793 the Society published a Report on the State of the Representation, which showed that 309 members were returned by private patronage, 163 of them by Peers (Annual Register, 1793).
114 Parl. Hist., xxxi. 793.
115 Speeches, v. 97, 115 (1795).
116 Hansard, I. xxxviii. 1118. The voting on Burdett’s resolution was 106 to 0. Ibid., 1185.
117 Speeches, 17th May, 1794.
118 The minority in the Commons ranged between forty and sixty. In the Lords it was sometimes only three or four.
119 Appeal to the Nation (1812), 78.
120 A Problem (1824).
121 Preface to Rights of Man, Part II.
122 Part I.
123 Ibid., Conclusion.
124 Part II., Preface.
125 Part II., c. i.
126 See for example the resolutions of the London Wards in the Annual Register, 1792.
127 Rights of Man, Part II.
128 Part II., Preface.
129 Part II.
130 Rights of Man, Part II., c. 3.
131 So late as 1840 Cook, a Whig, described the Rights of Man as “a fountain of evil,” and denounced its “licentiousness and impiety.” See his History of Party, iii. 399.
132 Parl. Hist. (1799), xxxi. 467. Compare Colonel Cawthorne’s speech, xxx. 1440.
133 Hansard, I. xli. 434 (1819).
134 Speeches, 24th May, 1802.
135 Annual Register, 1782. There is an admirable account of these different societies in Mr. G. S. Veitch’s Genesis of Parliamentary Reform (1913).
136 Annual Register, 1792. The Association soon got into difficulties. Its president, Mr. John Reeves, published a pamphlet so violently Tory in tone that the House of Commons ordered him to be prosecuted for sedition involved in contempt of itself. He was acquitted.
137 Government spies were sometimes involved in their own net. Two of them took part in treasonable proceedings at Edinburgh, and were hanged, drawn, and quartered (Annual Register, 1793, Chronicle, 53, 58).
138 These cases are taken from the Chronicle in the Annual Register, 1792.
139 State Trials, xxiii.; Annual Register, 1794, 32.
140 State Trials, xxiii.
141 Report of Secret Committee of Commons; Parl. Hist., xxxi. 727.
142 Reports of Secret Committees of 1795 and 1799 in the Parl. Hist., xxxi. 475, 574, 688; xxxiv. 579, 1000, and the consequent debates. Dr. J. Holland Rose and Mr. G. S. Veitch come to the same conclusion as that reached in the text.
143 Shelburne became Lord Lansdowne in 1784.
144 Speeches, vi. 61.
145 Parl. Hist., xxxiv. 992.
146 Hansard, I. xli. 7, 8.
147 Parl. Hist., xxxiv. 248.
148 During their brief tenure of office in 1807 they stopped the Slave Trade, which Pitt’s Government, while always condemning it, had never suppressed. This was the last and the noblest of the public acts of Fox.
149 Parl. Hist., xxxiv. 213.
150 Letter to Lord Holland, in the Correspondence of C. J. Fox, 23rd February, 1799.
151 Parl. Hist., xxxiv. 244. Cf. Granville and Auckland at pp. 668, 717.
152 To Charles Grey, 8th August, 1803, 6th January, 1804; Correspondence of C. J. Fox.
153 Parl. Hist., xxxi. 684 (1793).
154 Ibid., xxx. 422 (1792).
155 Speeches, v. 496.
156 Ibid., 84.
157 Ibid., 174.
158 Alison’s Life of Castlereagh, i. 21, 23.
159 Parl. Hist., xxxi. 1367 (1795).
160 Speeches, vi. 620 (1805).
161 Hansard, I. x. 290.
162 Hansard, I. 354.
163 Ibid., I. x. 365.
164 Ibid., 376.
165 The descent upon Copenhagen is to-day used as an argument for a powerful German Navy. Our old immoralities pursue us still.
166 Life and Opinions of Earl Grey, by Colonel Grey, 220.
167 Ibid., 332.
168 Yonge’s Life of Lord Liverpool, ii. 26.
169 Alison’s Castlereagh, i. 500 et seq.; Castlereagh’s speech in Hansard, I. xxx. 292.
170 Walpole’s Life of Russell, i. 110.
171 Hansard, I. xxvii. 850.
172 Ibid., 862.
173 Ibid., 790, 791
174 Hansard, I. xxvii. 773.
175 Ibid., I. xxvii. 782.
176 Hansard, I. xl. 338, 671; xli. 421, 892.
177 Tooke’s History of Prices, ii. 4, 18.
178 Hansard, I. xli. 924.
179 Pellew’s Life of Sidmouth, iii. 276. The name “Radical” was just coming into use. It was explained in the Commons as a new word in 1817 (Hansard, I. xxxvi. 761).
180 Yonge’s Life of Liverpool, ii. 429. There were one or two flashes of imagination. Peel, just rising into prominence in the Tory party, thought that Reform could not be long delayed. “Public opinion is growing too large for the channels that it has been accustomed to run through” (Croker Papers, i. 170).
181 Hansard, I. xxxvii. 570, 680, 682; xli. 230. Bamford’s Passages in the Life of a Radical, passim.
182 Castlereagh Correspondence, xii. 162, 259.
183 Annual Register, 1819, Hist. 107. Hunt and his associates were afterwards sentenced to imprisonment for conspiracy, Hunt for two and a half years. A. R., 1820; Chron., 898.
184 See the speech of Lord Grenville in Hansard, I. xli. 448.
185 Burdett’s motion of 1818 for Radical Reform was beaten, as already described, by 106 votes to 0. See ante, p. 105, and Hansard, I. xxxviii. 1185. For the official Whig view see Brougham, ante, p. 105.
186 Yonge’s Liverpool, ii. 365. Wilberforce supported State grants in aid of education from a similar motive. See ante, 52.
187 Hansard, I. xli. 1212.
188 Twiss, Life of Eldon, ii. 124.
189 Hansard, II. xvi. 397.
190 Hansard, II. xxi. 1632.
191 Wellington Despatches, v. 409.
192 Hansard, II. xxi. 1646, 1655. For the Liberal arguments see ibid., xix. 1719; xxi. 1601, 1795; xxii. 591; xxiii. 75, 738; xxiv. 126.
193 Catechism of Parliamentary Reform (1817).
194 Theory of Legislation, ch. xiii. § 10.
195 Constitutional Code.
196 It was Macaulay who, during the debates on the Reform Bill, contrasted “the beauty, the completeness, the speed, the precision with which every process is performed in our factories, and the awkwardness, the rudeness, the slowness, the uncertainty of the apparatus by which offences are punished and rights vindicated” (Speeches, 5th July, 1831). This is pure Utilitarianism.
197 Hansard, I. xxiii. 1166.
198 Report of Lords’ Committee on the State of Ireland (1825), 558.
199 Commons’ Committee (1825), 414.
200 Ibid., 810.
201 Catholics were expressly excluded from the places of Lord Chancellor and Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland. These disabilities still exist.
202 Hansard, II. xviii. 711.
203 Ibid., II. xviii. 869.
204 A declaration was substituted for the old tests, that the candidate for office would never attempt “to injure or subvert” the Established Church. The Lords added the words “upon the true faith of a Christian.” In freeing the Dissenters they disabled the Jews.
205 Macaulay’s Miscellaneous Writings; Westminster Reviewer’s Defence of Mill.
206 Macaulay’s Speeches: Speech on Reform, 16th December, 1832.
207 Ibid.
208 Macaulay’s Miscellaneous Writings; Mill on Government.
209 Macaulay, Speeches, on Reform, 20th September, 1831.
210 Works (1869), 670 (written in 1830).
211 Speeches, on Reform, 16th December, 1831.
212 Speech on the People’s Charter, 3rd May, 1842.
213 Hansard, III. xxiii. 101, 102.
214 Bulwer’s Palmerston, ii. 174, 178. See also his Memoirs, iii. 322, 323; Torrens’ Life of Melbourne, i. 437; Walpole’s Life of Russell, i. 264; and the Edinburgh Review, July, 1834. The King included the Catholic Association, the Orangemen, the Political Unions and the Trade Unions in one dislike, and wished they could all be put down by law (Walpole’s Russell, ubi sup.).
215 See, for instance, Webb’s Local Government; The Parish and the County; Peet’s Liverpool Vestry Books, vol. i.
216 Speeches, on Ten Hours Bill, 22nd May, 1846.
217 Morley’s Life of Cobden, i. 464.
218 Hodder’s Life of Shaftesbury, passim; Oastler’s letters on Slavery in Yorkshire (1830); Hutchin and Harrison’s History of Factory Legislation, ch. iii.-vi.
219 The Acts were the Common Law Procedure Act (1832) and the Fines and Recoveries Act (1833).
220 The House of Lords did its utmost to maintain the old abuses. The Bill was sent back to the Commons “with the title altered but the preamble changed.... Out of 140 clauses 106 have been in substance omitted, 18 other clauses have been introduced, and of the whole purport and intention of the original Bill little is to be found in the Bill which is now come down to us” (Lord John Russell in Hansard, III. xxxiv. 218). The Government stood firm, and, with the help of Peel, obtained the greater part of what they wanted.
221 The contending principles were most clearly expressed in the Lords. The Duke of Richmond and Lord Wharncliffe supported the Bill because it abolished a class distinction. Wellington opposed it for precisely that reason (Hansard, III. vii. 129).
222 Romilly, Memoirs, iii. 252; Memoir of Earl Spencer, 185.
223 Hansard, III. xlviii. 1252.
224 Ibid., 1304, 1305.
225 Hansard, III. xlviii. 1321.
226 Ibid., 1322.
227 Ibid., xlviii. 1263.
228 Speeches, on Education, 18th April, 1847.
229 He was very ably supported by his secretary, Charles Buller.
230 Parliamentary Papers, 1839, xvii. 53.
231 Adderley, in Hansard, III. cx. 578 (1850).
232 In ten days 5,884 petitions were presented against this “endowment of error.”
233 Hansard, III. cxxxi. 1123.
234 Cobden to Peel; Morley’s Life of Cobden (Popular Edition), 395.
235 Quoted in F. W. Hirst’s Manchester School, 491.
236 Hirst, 229.
237 Speeches, ii. 397.
238 Hirst’s Manchester School, 251.
239 Morley’s Cobden, 396.
240 Speeches, i. 470; ii. 397, 399.
241 Cobden, England, Ireland, and America (1835).
242 The Three Panics; Russia, c. iv.
243 Speeches, i. 463.
244 Cobden, Hansard, III. cxii. 671.
245 England, Ireland, and America.
246 Hansard, III. clxxvi. 832.
247 Hirst, xii.
248 See e.g., Hansard, I. xli. 456 (1819). A few Whig members like Lord Grenville (ibid., 456) and Ellice (ibid., 931) pressed the same point.
249 The whole petition is set out in Hirst’s Manchester School, 117 et seq.
250 Hirst, 123 (1833).
251 Cobden, Speeches, i. 256 (1845).
252 Bright, in Hirst, 218.
253 W. J. Fox, in Hirst, 175.
254 Prentice’s History of the League, i. 129, 140.
255 A meeting of Birmingham women on the 2nd April, 1838, protested against the Corn Law and the new Poor Law. It was connected with the Chartist agitation.
256 Prentice, i. 171.
257 Hansard, III. cx. 1248.
258 After 1867 Factory Bills were often opposed by women and their champions, in the same logical spirit, as an interference by men with women’s “liberty.”
259 Hansard, III. cx. 566.
260 It is perhaps worth noting here that there is no trace to-day in the character of Australian colonists of any unusual taint in origin. Many of the transported criminals were made criminal simply by their surroundings, and when they obtained a new chance became as energetic, as resourceful, and as valuable to the community at large as the most respectable people in the Colony. This experience should always give pause to those who argue that the inhabitants of our slums are naturally degenerate, and that the process of “selection” which has reduced them to the depths has anything accurate or scientific about it.
261 Hansard, III. ciii. 383; cviii. 161, 777; cxvii. 543; cxxiv. 554. Convicts were until 1867 occasionally sent to Western Australia, but only at the request of the inhabitants, who needed cheap labour.
262 Hansard, III. cx. 559, 566.
263 Ibid., 1170. Compare Bright at p. 661, and Russell, ibid., cviii. 549.
264 Lord Grey, Hansard, III. cx. 657.
265 Archbishop of Canterbury, Hansard, III. liii. 959.
266 Hansard, III. cxxiv. 1150.
267 Hansard, III., ccxliv. 1313.
268 Lytton Bulwer’s Palmerston, i., 139.
269 Ibid., 346.
270 Hansard, III. cxii. 583, 584.
271 Ibid., 508, 509.
272 Hansard, III. cxii. 586.
273 Fitzmaurice’s Life of Granville, i. 49.
274 Morley’s Life of Gladstone, ii. 37.
275 The two great blemishes, the inequality of the sexes, and the difficulty of giving redress to the poor, have now been unanimously condemned by a Royal Commission (1913).
276 Hansard, III. cxliv. 1476.
277 Ibid., 1784.
278 Hansard, III. clxxvi. 709.
279 Ibid., 829.
280 Morley’s Life of Gladstone, ii. 431.
281 Webb’s History of Trade Unionism (1902), 495.
282 Speeches, ii. 100.
283 Hansard, III. cx. 464. Compare Viscount Duncan’s speech on the Window Tax, ibid., 68.
284 Ibid., III. li. 537.
285 Speeches, on re-election to Parliament, 2nd November, 1852.
286 Sartor Resartus (1833) Bk. III. c. v. Compare his Past and Present (1843) and Latter Day Pamphlets (1850).
287 Thirty Years’ Peace, iv. 454.
288 Essay on Coleridge.
289 Subjection of Women, c. i.
290 Autobiography; Political Economy, Bk. V. c. xi.
291 Sir Henry Craik, The State in its Relation to Education, 84, 85.
292 Fortnightly Review (1865); reprinted in National and Social Problems (1908).
293 England, Ireland, and America.
294 Hansard, III. lxxii. 1016.
295 Speeches, on the Coercion Bill, i. 308.
296 Speeches, i. 425, 369 (1866).
297 Hansard, III. cxciv. 2071.
298 Ibid., 1955, 1963.
299 See the Report of the Royal Commission appointed to inquire into the condition of education in England (1869-70). So little importance was attached to the education of girls that the Commission at first proposed to confine its work entirely to boys’ schools!
300 Morley’s Gladstone, ii. 318.
301 For a statement of Gladstone’s views on war and the Manchester doctrine, see his speech at Edinburgh on the 17th March, 1880, quoted in Morley’s Gladstone, iii. 182.
302 Times, 25th September, 1870.
303 He succeeded Lord Clarendon at the Foreign Office just before the outbreak of the war.
304 Morley’s Gladstone, ii. 350.
305 Ibid., 353.
306 Ibid., ii. 346.
307 Morley’s Gladstone, ii. 347.
308 Ibid., 348.
309 The Prime Minister estimated these at more than the whole National Debt (Lord Selborne’s Memorials, II. i. 231.)
310 One of his resolutions advocating intervention was beaten by 131 votes, a far greater majority than the Government could expect on any party measure.
311 Lord Derby and Lord Carnarvon resigned their posts in the Ministry rather than share the responsibility of such a crime. The former suspended his resignation for a few weeks.
312 Afterwards Marquis of Salisbury.
313 Beaconsfield did not stop at this point. He made a treaty with Turkey, binding us to defend her possessions in Asia, and her to reform her system of government. The reforms were never carried out, and fifteen years later the Armenian massacres showed what Turkish promises were worth. One omission was made in these arrangements. Bismarck offered to support a British occupation of Egypt. Beaconsfield refused thus to impair the integrity of the Ottoman Empire, and took a worthless “lease” of the island of Cyprus instead. The sanction of Europe for our incursion into Egypt was thus lost.
314 Lord Mayo, quoted in Hansard, III. ccxliii. 312. Lady Betty Balfour’s Lord Lytton’s Indian Administration is a very good account of the Viceroy’s aims and methods. See also the Blue Book, Papers Relating to Afghanistan (1878).
315 Balfour, 30.
316 For the Parliamentary debates see Hansard, III. ccxliii. 245 (Lords), and 310 (Commons). Lord Lawrence’s views were quoted from a dispatch of his (1869) at p. 311.
317 Hansard, III. ccxliii. 349.
318 Hansard, 380. Mr. Chamberlain’s defence of the claim to criticize a war while it is in progress (p. 382) is the best possible comment on his treatment of Pro-Boers twenty years later.
319 The best Liberal speeches are in Hansard, III. ccxliii., Lords Halifax (245), Lawrence (261), and Grey (406); Whitbread (310), Chamberlain (380), and Gladstone (541).
320 The Midlothian Campaign (speeches in 1879 and 1880), 113.
321 Ibid., 194.
322 The Midlothian Campaign, 19.
323 Ibid., 66.
324 Ibid., 131.
325 The Midlothian Campaign, 58.
326 The Midlothian Campaign, 63.
327 Lord Randolph Churchill, Mr. Arthur Balfour, Sir John Gorst, and Sir Henry Drummond Wolff.
328 Hansard, III. cclxxviii. 1174. Bright’s best speech is at cclx. 1199.
329 Times, 21st November, 1883; Nineteenth Century, January and February, 1884. Miss Octavia Hill, who knew more about the subject than anybody else, was not appointed a member of the Commission, though she gave evidence. Twenty years elapsed before a woman sat on a Royal Commission.
330 Report of Lord Bessborough’s Commission (1881), 21.
331 Lord Morley’s Miscellanies, iv. 306.
332 Midlothian Campaign, 44.
333 See Hansard, III. ccxcviii. 1659; ccxcix. 1085, 1098, 1119. Lord Salisbury spoke at Newport on the 7th October, 1885, three months after Lord Carnarvon had, with his knowledge, communicated with Parnell.
334 Hansard, III. ccciv. 1050.
335 Ibid., 1372.
336 At Nottingham, 31st January, 1913.
337 Hansard, III. ccciv. 1268.
338 At Bristol, 17th January, 1888.
339 Aspects of Home Rule (speech of 22nd April, 1893), 170. Mr. Balfour succeeded Sir Michael as Irish Secretary on the 7th March, 1887.
340 Hansard, III. ccccix. 66, 1191; cccxii. 183; cccxiii. 1608.
341 Lord Hugh Cecil, Lord St. Aldwyn, and Mr. Bonar Law have recently suggested that the Crown itself should once more take an active and open part in politics and veto legislation.
342 See his Popular Government.
343 J. A. Hobson’s Imperialism, chap. i.; Meredith Townsend in Liberalism and the Empire, 341.
344 Lord Wolseley’s Soldier’s Pocket Book. His lordship would probably not poison his enemy’s wells, or burn him alive, or kill him with explosive bullets, or massacre his women and children. But why not?
345 See, for instance, L. T. Hobhouse’s Democracy and Reaction; J. A. Hobson’s Imperialism; and Norman Angell’s Great Illusion.
346 See Fitzpatrick’s Transvaal from Within; Sir E. T. Cook’s Rights and Wrongs of the Transvaal War; Mr. Bryce’s Impressions of South Africa; and Sir Francis Younghusband’s South Africa of To-day (1897), 246, 250.
347 Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman’s Speeches reprinted from the Times, 167.
348 It has been suggested that without the war this would have been impossible. Even if this were true, the case against the war would still stand. Material success cannot be balanced against morality. It might similarly be argued that an eruption on the skin is a good thing, because it rids the body of poisonous matter. Clean living would have prevented the accumulation of the poison, and made the violent means of discharge unnecessary.
349 The questions of limiting the number of “pickets,” and of making Unions liable for the wrongful acts of their central executive committees are not yet finally settled. The Acts of 1871 and 1874 did not, I think contemplate an absolute immunity.
350 Lord Morley’s Miscellanies, iv. 311. The same principles are of course being applied in all civilized countries. See Mr. Jethro Brown’s Underlying Principles of Modern Legislation.
351 In a very remarkable article in the Edinburgh Review for January, 1912, an anonymous writer declares that the better sort of workmen are now not merely politically, but actually, in character and ability, the superiors of the middle class. The shameless ignorance and hostility to ideas, which he discovers in the latter, are due partly to the increase of luxury and partly to the public-school system. The reform of the latter, which is now in progress, is probably as urgent a need of the middle, as industrial insurance is of the working class.
352 Herbert Samuel’s Liberalism, 8, 11.
353 The Labour Exchange at Liverpool has actually decasualized the whole of the system of dock labour in that port. Credit for this is due to Mr. Rowland Williams, of the Exchange, and Mr. Lawrence D. Holt, a local shipowner. The machinery established by the Act has done what private effort had for a generation found beyond its strength.
354 Liberalism and the Social Problem, 316. These speeches are by far the best expression of the philosophy of the new Liberalism.
355 Churchill, op. cit., 82.
356 Mr. Harold Spender, in Mr. Philip Snowden’s Living Wage, x.
357 It should be remembered that in the peculiar case of women Trade Unionism is almost impossible. Without the State, they have no means of raising their wages as men have raised theirs by combination.
358 Social Statics (1851), 325.
359 A great proportion of this surplus wealth is spent on giving fictitious values to works of art and curiosities. A china jar which cost £500 fifty years ago may be bought for £5,000 to-day. The increase represents no real increase in value, but simply an increased capacity of millionaires to bid against each other. The price will again fall, as incomes are reduced.
360 Accusations of moral corruption are most rarely made by those who are best acquainted with political history. But what other term is to be applied to this action, of which I am informed on the best possible authority? For several days before the day on which the Woman Suffrage amendment was moved to the Franchise Bill, a Liberal Member, who had refused to pledge himself to either side, was “bombarded” with requests from pledged Suffragist Members that he would vote against them and defeat the amendment. We hang soldiers who commit this offence in military warfare.
361 Sir Almroth Wright’s notorious pamphlet has of course been repudiated by the saner women Anti-Suffragists. But it certainly represents the opinions of the average man Anti-Suffragist.
362 I cannot deal seriously with the argument that the vote is merely an expression of physical force, that a minority only yields to a majority because it would be beaten in a civil war, that substantially all women might vote on one side at an election and substantially all men on the other, that the women outnumber the men and would therefore be able to procure the legislation which they wanted, that the men would refuse to obey the law, that civil war would follow, that the women would be beaten, and that society would be dissolved. Those politicians who believe in the possibility of such a succession of miracles had better retire each to a separate desert island. They will not find in any society of human beings a constitution which does not admit, on similarly logical grounds, of the same dreadful disasters. Such an absurd and pedantic example of reasoning away from human nature has not been seriously maintained in England since the time of Cartwright.
363 I use these terms as a convenient way of referring to the general movements for and against emancipation. They may mean anything in themselves. So far as I am concerned, I believe neither in that sexual promiscuity which some Anti-Suffragists charge against their opponents, nor on the other hand in that theory of a primitive matriarchate upon which some Suffragists base their claims.
364 For the history of the agitation see Mrs. Fawcett’s Women’s Suffrage (“The People’s Books” series); and for its philosophical basis, Mrs. Olive Schreiner’s Women and Labour, and my own Emancipation of English Women.
365 I refer those who believe that the militant women were suffering from hysteria or other sexual disorder to the deliberate contradiction of Mr. H. L. Carre-Smith, in the Standard of the 9th April, 1912. Mr. Smith is a competent physician, and an Anti-Suffragist, and he has made a careful study of the militant type. “As a rule,” he says, “I have been struck by their normal demeanour.”
366 The only Government department which acted wisely in dealing with the women was the Irish Office. The first offenders against the law in Dublin were promptly placed in the first division. Unhappily, this was after Mr. McKenna had revived forcible feeding, and too late to produce any effect. The next Irish offences were attempts at arson and murder, committed by one of Mr. McKenna’s prisoners. Had Mr. Birrell been at the Home Office in 1906, we should still be far from arson and explosives.
367 I received a letter from a Cabinet Minister in 1909, in which he said that he expected vitriol-throwing at any moment. Vitriol is, of course, the weapon of an outraged sex instinct, the injured wife or discarded mistress.
368 I refer my readers to the grave and responsible report of Sir Victor Horsley, Dr. Mansell Moulin, and Dr. Agnes Saville, three physicians of unquestioned competence and probity, which appeared in the Lancet of the 24th August, 1912.
369 One of the charges, that a large number of plain-clothes policemen had mingled with the crowd for the purpose of attacking the women, was no more a subject for investigation in a court of law than the subject of the Parnell Commission. On this point Mr. Churchill denied the charges without inquiring of anybody but police officers, whose evidence, even if it was perfectly honest, was of little value. For a police officer to say that he did not see a fact, one of a large number of facts, is not sufficient proof that a private person is lying when he states that he did see it. Two gentlemen known to me say that they saw a large number (one says “more than a hundred”) of plain-clothes men march back into Scotland Yard after the disturbance. Mr. Churchill says that there were “not more than a dozen” on duty. My informants may be lying or mistaken. But Mr. Churchill is not in a position to say so, because he never attempted to cross-examine them. Both appear to me to be honest witnesses.
370 For a naïve and illuminating statement of the militant women’s case see The Suffragette, by Sylvia Pankhurst; and for a fuller statement of my own opinions, my Emancipation of English Women (1913 edition). For the case against Mr. Churchill see the pamphlet Treatment of the Women’s Deputations by the Metropolitan Police (The Woman’s Press, 1911). See also my pamphlet Political Prisoners (National Political League, 1912). During the London Dock strike of 1912 charges similar to those above mentioned were made against the police. Mr. McKenna granted a public inquiry at once.
371 No Liberal questions Sir Edward Grey’s honesty or good will. His record in connection with Woman’s Suffrage, no bad touchstone, is conspicuously pure.
372 The action of Austria in establishing formal sovereignty over Bosnia and Herzegovina was not such a gross violation of moral rules as it appears at first sight. Austria had been in occupation of these territories, with European sanction, for more than a generation, and there is no question that they had been well governed. It was only in taking advantage of the revolution in Turkey, without obtaining the formal consent of the Powers, that she acted immorally.
373 It should be remembered that the whole of the Foreign Service is recruited from among people with minimum incomes of £400 a year. This ensures a Tory bias among permanent officials.
374 There is great need of a history of foreign policy which shall trace in a satisfactory way the various currents which have brought us to our present situation. For the present we have to rely on detached studies like Mr. E. D. Morel’s Morocco in Diplomacy, Mr. E. H. Perris’s Our Foreign Policy and Sir Edward Grey’s Failure, Mr. J. A. Spender’s pamphlet reprinted from the Westminster Gazette, Mr. Morgan Shuster’s Strangling of Persia, Professor E. G. Browne’s pamphlets on the same subject, and the Hon. George Peel’s Friends of England, Enemies of England, and Future of England. There is no general historical survey, and until there is, foreign policy will remain as much the monopoly of a caste as ancient legal systems. It is time that this mysterification of such important affairs was ended. At this moment (February, 1913), though the French Government has published a huge Yellow Book on the Morocco crisis, Sir Edward Grey still refuses to the English people any explanation of the reason why he nearly led them into war eighteen months ago.
375 An article in the Times of the 15th March, 1913 seems to endorse all our Liberal protests and criticisms.
376 See, for example, the article by Mr. Sydney Brooks in the Fortnightly Review for January, 1913. The suggestion was also made in a leading article in the Daily Telegraph, the date of which I forget.