Sixty Years a Queen Part 14

Be he alive or be he dead, I'll grind his bones to make my bread!"

(Mr. Punch's idea of the policy of Lord Derby and Mr. Disraeli.)]

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE WELLINGTON MONUMENT IN ST. PAUL'S CATHEDRAL,

AS IT IS TO BE WHEN COMPLETED.

From a Photograph taken in the Cathedral, to which the statue has been added from the sculptor's model in the Architectural Court of the South Kensington Museum. The lower ill.u.s.tration represents the sarcophagus in the Crypt which contains the body of the Duke; the Funeral Car is also preserved in the Crypt. The tomb in the background is that of Nelson.]

[Sidenote: The Haynau Incident.]

There was the precedent of the obsequies of Nelson to justify the Queen in commanding a funeral of the Great Duke at the public expense; but Her Majesty was desirous to a.s.sociate her people with herself in doing honour to the memory of her greatest subject. The body of the Duke, therefore, was put in charge of a guard of honour till the meeting of Parliament in November, when the consent of both Houses was immediately given to a funeral at the public expense and the interment of Wellington in St. Paul's Cathedral, beside the tomb of Nelson. All the Great Powers of Europe, save one, sent representatives to the ceremony. It would have caused no surprise had France, with a Napoleon once more in supreme power, refused to allow her Amba.s.sador to attend the funeral of her ancient foe, but Louis Napoleon told Count Walewski he wished to forget the past and to continue on the best of terms with England. It was not France, but Austria, who was conspicuous by the absence of her Amba.s.sador from St. Paul's on this November day; and the reason was found in an extraordinary circ.u.mstance which had occurred a few weeks previously. An Austrian notable, General Haynau, arrived in England early in September, on an unofficial visit. He had earned an unenviable reputation for cruelty in putting down insurrections in Italy and Hungary; ugly stories had been circulated about the flogging of Hungarian women and other barbarities, enough, whether true or not, to make his name detested by all who sympathised with the national movement on the Continent. One day he went to inspect Barclay's brewery, and as soon as his ident.i.ty with the "Austrian butcher" became known to the workmen there, they rushed at him with loud cries, pelted him, tore his coat and tried to cut off his long moustaches. Escaping from the brewery, he was a.s.sailed with equal fury in the street, and had to take refuge in a public house till the police came to his a.s.sistance. The Austrian Charge d'Affaires appealed for redress, and Lord Palmerston called in person to express the deep regret of Her Majesty's Government at the outrage.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _From a Photograph_} {_by Thiele, Chancery Lane._

WEIGHING ANCHOR ON A MODERN WARSHIP.

This Photograph was taken on board H.M.S. _Repulse_, off the Isle of Portland. A portion of the anchor, covered with mud, is seen just over the ship's side. The ships in the background are H.M.S. _Resolution_ (on the left), and H.M.S. _Royal Sovereign_ (in the centre).]

[Ill.u.s.tration: _From a Photograph_} {_by Symonds, Portsmouth._

H.M.S. "WARRIOR," THE FIRST ENGLISH IRONCLAD.

The first ironclad built was the _Gloire_, designed by M. Dupuy-de-Lome for the French Government. It was regarded by the English Naval Authorities as of doubtful practical value; but it soon became necessary for them to adopt the principle of defensive armour for our own ships.

The _Warrior_, built by private contract at a cost of 376,000, was completed in October, 1861. She has a length of 380 feet, breadth 58 feet, displacement 9,210 tons, horse-power 1,250; and, whilst she has the general form of a wooden ship, with overhanging bows and stern, she embodied many of the ideas--such as that of watertight compartments--which have been adopted in all the more recent warships.]

[Sidenote: Disraeli's First Budget.]

Parliament had been prorogued on July 1 by the Queen in person and dissolved immediately after by Royal Proclamation. The elections which followed left the relative strength of parties nearly the same as in the old Parliament, that is, with no working majority on either side. The new Parliament met on November 4, and on December 3 Mr. Disraeli introduced his Budget in a speech which lasted five hours. The debate which followed is memorable as the occasion of the first encounter between two men who, for a quarter of a century afterwards, were to be as conspicuously the protagonists of their respective parties as Pitt and Fox had been at the beginning of the century. Disraeli--by this time fully conscious, and embittered by the consciousness, that he was fighting for a losing cause--concluded a speech full of stinging invective at two o'clock on the morning of December 11. To answer him rose one whom Macaulay had described in 1838 as "the rising hope of those stern and unbending Tories who follow reluctantly and mutinously a leader (Peel) whose experience is indispensable to them, but whose cautious temper and moderate opinions they abhor." Mr. Gladstone had been a Member of Parliament for more than twenty years, and was already distinguished for power and poignancy in debate; but the moment had come when, for the first time, the House of Commons was to come under the full influence of his superb command of language, his impressive use of gesture and his singularly resonant voice.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _From a Photograph_} {_by Gregory & Co., Strand._

THE GREAT STEAM-HAMMER AT WOOLWICH a.r.s.eNAL.

Maximum striking power, 1,000 tons.]

Gladstone's speech closed the debate on Disraeli's First Budget, and it was decisive. The Government suffered defeat by nineteen votes, and next day Lord Derby went to Osborne to tender his resignation. Her Majesty laid her commands on the Earl of Aberdeen who, as a Peelite Conservative, a.s.sisted by the Whig Marquis of Lansdowne, proceeded to form a Coalition Cabinet.

[Sidenote: Expansion of British Colonies.]

Before entering upon a review of the events which brought to a violent close the peace which Great Britain had maintained for thirty-nine years with the other European Powers, the present seems a fitting place to give a sketch of salient points in the expansion of British Colonies in various parts of the world--Colonies which, for the greater part, had no existence before Queen Victoria came to the throne. It was in 1858 that the discoveries of gold in British territory, as well as in California, had begun to fill the channels of trade and enrich the manufacturers of the home country in a degree beyond all previous experience. The great Continent of Australia, discovered by Captain Cook in 1770 and by him named New South Wales, was hardly known to people in England during the first forty years of the present century except as a penal settlement, although a number of British emigrants found their way there when the Army and Navy were reduced after the long European wars had come to an end in 1815. But it was not until the gold-fields were discovered in 1851 that the full tide of immigration set in. The growth and development of the European community since that time have been immense.

From the original settlement at Botany Bay in 1788 have arisen the States of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Queensland, and Western Australia, each with its separate representative const.i.tution and legislature, and a governor appointed by the Queen. The population, rapidly increasing, already amounts to three millions and a quarter, with an annual export trade of more than 70,000,000. The gold-fields, since their discovery in 1851, have added about 300,000,000 to the wealth of the world, nor is there any near prospect of the supply failing. On the contrary, the newly-opened mines at Coolgardie, in Western Australia, promise to prove the richest field in the whole island.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _From a Photograph_} {_by Gregory & Co., Strand._

THE SOUTH BORING MILL AT WOOLWICH a.r.s.eNAL.

Showing the machinery for boring and rifling heavy ordnance.]

New Zealand was first colonised in 1839, though Europeans had settled there as far back as 1814, and in 1841 it was created by letters patent a colony distinct from New South Wales. The chief wealth of this island is pastoral and agricultural, though New Zealand contributes also to the Pactolus flowing north, having exported gold to the value of more than a million sterling in 1895.

Tasmania, formerly Van Diemen's Land, is another insular possession of Great Britain in the South Pacific, originally occupied in 1803 as a penal settlement; and the Australasian Dominions of the Crown were completed by the annexation of the Fiji group of islands in 1874, and British New Guinea in 1888. This vast territory, with its almost inexhaustible mineral wealth and fertility, may be said with almost literal accuracy to be the peculiar creation of the reign of Queen Victoria.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Walker & Boutall sc._

THE BRITISH EMPIRE, 1897.

British possessions shaded or underlined. Views of the princ.i.p.al Colonial towns are given on subsequent pages. * Egypt under British occupation since 1882.]

[Sidenote: Repeal of the Transportation Act.]

In 1853 an important change in the penal code of Great Britain was effected by the Act altering the punishment of transportation of convicts into that of penal servitude. The Lord Chancellor admitted, in moving the Second Reading of the Bill, that transportation answered the end of punishment better than anything else which could be devised; it was the strongest deterrent, short of a capital sentence, which could be employed without the infliction of physical pain, and, had the United Kingdom only been concerned, no alteration in the law would have been proposed. But the interests of the Colonies must be taken into account also; the strong representations laid before the Government by the Colonists, coupled with the extraordinary discoveries of gold in Australia, made it imperative that these growing communities should cease to be the slumping ground for the refuse of British civilisation, and other provision must be made for the disposal of criminals. The measure became law, and the Australasian settlements, relieved from the slur which had become wellnigh intolerable, entered on a career of expansion and profitable industry of which no man can yet foretell the ultimate result.

Besides British India, of which the growth and consolidation is described elsewhere, the chief expansion of the Empire and its protectorate during the present reign has taken place in South Africa.

The Cape Colony was ceded to the British Crown in 1814; the Colony of Natal was added to it in 1843, was erected into a separate Colony in 1856, and was made self-governing in 1893. Basutoland was annexed to the Cape Colony in 1871, but in 1884 it was const.i.tuted a separate Crown Colony, and neither it nor Bechua.n.a.land, which, having been annexed in 1885, is governed from the Cape, have yet developed representative inst.i.tutions.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _From a Photograph_} {_by Gregory & Co., Strand._

TORPEDO STORES AT PORTSMOUTH.

Containing Torpedoes to the value of 150,000.]

In dealing with its great Dominion in South Africa the British Government is confronted with a problem which has never presented itself in Australasia. There the aboriginal population has died out everywhere, except in New Zealand, from the mere contact with civilisation, and, except in the Island of New Guinea of which the Germans possess a moiety, British influence is not hampered by any competing European race. But it is far otherwise in South Africa. There, also, what may be regarded as the aboriginal races, the Hottentots and Bushmen, have been crushed wellnigh out of existence, but they have been replaced on the one hand by the powerful Bantu people, consisting of Kaffirs, Zulus, Bechuanas, and other Negroid tribes, and on the other by the Boers, descended from Dutch settlers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Administration of South Africa has to provide for the development of British enterprise and to secure peaceful relations between the diverse elements of the population. It cannot be doubted that South Africa contains the material of enormous wealth. The climate of the high veldt, a wide belt of land ranging between 4,000 and 5,000 feet above sea-level, is exceedingly salubrious. Diamonds and gold already have been worked in large quant.i.ties, though a few years ago their very existence was unsuspected. At the present time the yield of gold is equal to that of either Australia or America, amounting to one-fifth of the total annual output of the world. Should the gold ever be worked out there is abundant mineral wealth of other kinds, including an almost virgin coal-field, covering an area of nearly a thousand square miles between Pretoria and Delagoa Bay.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _From a Photograph_} {_by Thiele, Chancery Lane._

A LANDING-PARTY OF SEAMEN.

_Punch_, at the time of the Siege of Sebastopol, depicted a couple of seamen, on board a man-of-war off that town, asking for a day's holiday "to go shooting with them soldiers." On the same principle of sharing the fun it has come to be the practice to include a party of bluejackets among the forces engaged in any of our "little wars."]

In America, the most notable feature in the recent history of the British possessions is found in the growth of wealth and population in the Dominion of Canada. It has been shown how that Colony rose in rebellion in the first year of the present reign, and how Lord Durham framed a Const.i.tution for it in his report. Lord Durham died, and his scheme lay in a pigeon-hole of the Colonial Office till 1867, when it was virtually carried into effect by Lord Carnarvon's Act for the Confederation of the British North American Provinces. Upper and Lower Canada, the English and French territories of the rebellion, are now known as the Provinces of Ontario and Quebec, and with them are confederated New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, British Columbia, Manitoba, and the North-West Territories. The population of Canada has risen from about one million and a half in 1841 to five millions at the present day, and progress in commerce and wealth has been equally rapid.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Carl Haag, R.W.S._} {_From the Royal Collection._

EVENING AT BALMORAL OLD CASTLE--THE STAGS BROUGHT HOME.--September 1853.]

CHAPTER VIII.

1853-1854.

The "Sick Man"--Position of the Eastern Question--Projects of the Emperor Nicholas--The Custody of the Holy Places--Prince Menschikoff's Demand--Russian Invasion of Moldo-Wallachia--The Vienna Note--Declaration of War by the Porte--Destruction of the Turkish Fleet--Resignation of Lord Palmerston--Great Britain and France Declare War with Russia--State of the British Armaments.