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CONFIDENCE IN THE MINISTRY OF LORD MELBOURNE. (JANUARY 29, 1840) A SPEECH DELIVERED IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS ON THE 29TH OF JANUARY 1840

On the twenty-eighth of January 1840, Sir John Yarde Buller moved the following resolution:

"That Her Majesty's Government, as at present constituted, does not possess the confidence of the House."

After a discussion of four nights the motion was rejected by 308 votes to 287. The following Speech was made on the second night of the debate.

The House, Sir, may possibly imagine that I rise under some little feeling of irritation to reply to the personal reflections which have been introduced into the discussion. It would be easy to reply to these reflections. It would be still easier to retort them: but I should think either course unworthy of me and of this great occasion. If ever I should so far forget myself as to wander from the subject of debate to matters concerning only myself, it will not, I hope, be at a time when the dearest interests of our country are staked on the result of our deliberations. I rise under feelings of anxiety which leave no room in my mind for selfish vanity or petty vindictiveness. I believe with the most intense conviction that, in pleading for the Government to which I belong, I am pleading for the safety of the Commonwealth, for the reformation of abuses, and at the same time for the preservation of august and venerable institutions: and I trust, Mr Speaker, that when the question is whether a Cabinet be or be not worthy of the confidence of Parliament, the first Member of that Cabinet who comes forward to defend himself and his colleagues will find here some portion of that generosity and good feeling which once distinguished English gentlemen. But be this as it may, my voice shall be heard. I repeat, that I am pleading at once for the reformation and for the preservation of our institutions, for liberty and order, for justice administered in mercy, for equal laws, for the rights of conscience, and for the real union of Great Britain and Ireland. If, on so grave an occasion, I should advert to one or two of the charges which have been brought against myself personally, I shall do so only because I conceive that those charges affect in some degree the character of the Government to which I belong.

One of the chief accusations brought against the Government by the honourable Baronet (Sir John Yarde Buller.) who opened the debate, and repeated by the seconder (Alderman Thompson.), and by almost every gentlemen who has addressed the House from the benches opposite, is that I have been invited to take office though my opinion with respect to the Ballot is known to be different from that of my colleagues. We have been repeatedly told that a Ministry in which there is not perfect unanimity on a subject so important must be undeserving of the public confidence. Now, Sir, it is true that I am in favour of secret voting, that my noble and right honourable friends near me are in favour of open voting, and yet that we sit in the same Cabinet. But if, on account of this difference of opinion, the Government is unworthy of public confidence, then I am sure that scarcely any government which has existed within the memory of the oldest man has been deserving of public confidence. It is well-known that in the Cabinets of Mr Pitt, of Mr Fox, of Lord Liverpool, of Mr Canning, of the Duke of Wellington, there were open questions of great moment. Mr Pitt, while still zealous for parliamentary reform, brought into the Cabinet Lord Grenville, who was adverse to parliamentary reform. Again, Mr Pitt, while eloquently supporting the abolition of the Slave Trade, brought into the Cabinet Mr Dundas, who was the chief defender of the Slave Trade. Mr Fox, too, intense as was his abhorrence of the Slave Trade, sat in the same Cabinet with Lord Sidmouth and Mr Windham, who voted to the last against the abolition of that trade. Lord Liverpool, Mr Canning, the Duke of Wellington, all left the question of Catholic Emancipation open. And yet, of all questions, that was perhaps the very last that should have been left open. For it was not merely a legislative question, but a question which affected every part of the executive administration. But, to come to the present time, suppose that you could carry your resolution, suppose that you could drive the present Ministers from power, who that may succeed them will be able to form a government in which there will be no open questions? Can the right honourable Baronet the member for Tamworth (Sir Robert Peel.) form a Cabinet without leaving the great question of our privileges open? In what respect is that question less important than the question of the Ballot? Is it not indeed from the privileges of the House that all questions relating to the constitution of the House derive their importance? What does it matter how we are chosen, if, when we meet, we do not possess the powers necessary to enable us to perform the functions of a legislative assembly? Yet you who would turn out the present Ministers because they differ from each other as to the way in which Members of this House should be chosen, wish to bring in men who decidedly differ from each other as to the relation in which this House stands to the nation, to the other House, and to the Courts of Judicature. Will you say that the dispute between the House and the Court of Queen's Bench is a trifling dispute? Surely, in the late debates, you were all perfectly agreed as to the importance of the question, though you were agreed as to nothing else. Some of you told us that we were contending for a power essential to our honour and usefulness. Many of you protested against our proceedings, and declared that we were encroaching on the province of the tribunals, violating the liberty of our fellow citizens, punishing honest magistrates for not perjuring themselves. Are these trifles? And can we believe that you really feel a horror of open questions when we see your Prime Minister elect sending people to prison overnight, and his law officers elect respectfully attending the levee of those prisoners the next morning? Observe, too, that this question of privileges is not merely important; it is also pressing. Something must be done, and that speedily. My belief is that more inconvenience would follow from leaving that question open one month than from leaving the question of the Ballot open ten years.

The Ballot, Sir, is not the only subject on which I am accused of holding dangerous opinions. The right honourable Baronet the Member for Pembroke (Sir James Graham.) pronounces the present Government a Chartist Government; and he proves his point by saying that I am a member of the government, and that I wish to give the elective franchise to every ten pound householder, whether his house be in a town or in the country. Is it possible, Sir, that the honourable Baronet should not know that the fundamental principle of the plan of government called the People's Charter is that every male of twenty-one should have a vote? Or is it possible that he can see no difference between giving the franchise to all ten pound householders, and giving the franchise to all males of twenty-one? Does he think the ten pound householders a class morally or intellectually unfit to possess the franchise, he who bore a chief part in framing the law which gave them the franchise in all the represented towns of the United Kingdom? Or will he say that the ten pound householder in a town is morally and intellectually fit to be an elector, but that the ten pound householder who lives in the open country is morally and intellectually unfit? Is not house-rent notoriously higher in towns than in the country? Is it not, therefore, probable that the occupant of a ten pound house in a rural hamlet will be a man who has a greater stake in the peace and welfare of society than a man who has a ten pound house in Manchester or Birmingham? Can you defend on conservative principles an arrangement which gives votes to a poorer class and withholds them from a richer? For my own part, I believe it to be essential to the welfare of the state, that the elector should have a pecuniary qualification. I believe that the ten pound qualification cannot be proved to be either too high or too low. Changes, which may hereafter take place in the value of money and in the condition of the people, may make a change of the qualification necessary. But the ten pound qualification is, I believe, well suited to the present state of things. At any rate, I am unable to conceive why it should be a sufficient qualification within the limits of a borough, and an insufficient qualification a yard beyond those limits; sufficient at Knightsbridge, but insufficient at Kensington; sufficient at Lambeth, but insufficient at Battersea? If any person calls this Chartism, he must permit me to tell him that he does not know what Chartism is.

A motion, Sir, such as that which we are considering, brings under our review the whole policy of the kingdom, domestic, foreign, and colonial. It is not strange, therefore, that there should have been several episodes in this debate. Something has been said about the hostilities on the River Plata, something about the hostilities on the coast of China, something about Commissioner Lin, something about Captain Elliot. But on such points I shall not dwell, for it is evidently not by the opinion which the House may entertain on such points that the event of the debate will be decided. The main argument of the gentlemen who support the motion, the argument on which the right honourable Baronet who opened the debate chiefly relied, the argument which his seconder repeated, and which has formed the substance of every speech since delivered from the opposite side of the House, may be fairly summed up thus, "The country is not in a satisfactory state. There is much recklessness, much turbulence, much craving for political change; and the cause of these evils is the policy of the Whigs. They rose to power by agitation in 1830: they retained power by means of agitation through the tempestuous months which followed: they carried the Reform Bill by means of agitation: expelled from office, they forced themselves in again by means of agitation; and now we are paying the penalty of their misconduct. Chartism is the natural offspring of Whiggism. From those who caused the evil we cannot expect the remedy. The first thing to be done is to dismiss them, and to call to power men who, not having instigated the people to commit excesses, can, without incurring the charge of inconsistency, enforce the laws."

Now, Sir, it seems to me that this argument was completely refuted by the able and eloquent speech of my right honourable friend the Judge Advocate. (Sir George Grey.) He said, and he said most truly, that those who hold this language are really accusing, not the Government of Lord Melbourne, but the Government of Lord Grey. I was therefore, I must say, surprised, after the speech of my right honourable friend, to hear the right honourable Baronet the Member for Pembroke, himself a distinguished member of the cabinet of Lord Grey, pronounce a harangue against agitation. That he was himself an agitator he does not venture to deny; but he tries to excuse himself by saying, "I liked the Reform Bill; I thought it a good bill; and so I agitated for it; and, in agitating for it, I acknowledge that I went to the very utmost limit of what was prudent, to the very utmost limit of what was legal." Does not the right honourable Baronet perceive that, by setting up this defence for his own past conduct, he admits that agitation is good or evil, according as the objects of the agitation are good or evil? When I hear him speak of agitation as a practice disgraceful to a public man, and especially to a Minister of the Crown, and address his lecture in a particular manner to me, I cannot but wonder that he should not perceive that his reproaches, instead of wounding me, recoil on himself. I was not a member of the Cabinet which brought in the Reform Bill, which dissolved the Parliament in a moment of intense excitement in order to carry the Reform Bill, which refused to serve the Sovereign longer unless he would create peers in sufficient numbers to carry the Reform Bill. I was at that time only one of those hundreds of members of this House, one of those millions of Englishmen, who were deeply impressed with the conviction that the Reform Bill was one of the best laws that ever had been framed, and who reposed entire confidence in the abilities, the integrity, and the patriotism of the ministers; and I must add that in no member of the administration did I place more confidence than in the right honourable Baronet, who was then First Lord of the Admiralty, and in the noble lord who was then Secretary for Ireland. (Lord Stanley.) It was indeed impossible for me not to see that the public mind was strongly, was dangerously stirred: but I trusted that men so able, men so upright, men who had so large a stake in the country, would carry us safe through the storm which they had raised. And is it not rather hard that my confidence in the right honourable Baronet and the noble lord is to be imputed to me as a crime by the very men who are trying to raise the right honourable Baronet and the noble lord to power? The Charter, we have been told in this debate, is the child of the Reform Bill. But whose child is the Reform Bill? If men are to be deemed unfit for office because they roused the national spirit to support that bill, because they went as far as the law permitted in order to carry that bill, then I say that no men can be more unfit for office than the right honourable Baronet and the noble lord. It may be thought presumptuous in me to defend two persons who are so well able to defend themselves, and the more so, as they have a powerful ally in the right honourable Baronet the Member for Tamworth, who, having twice offered them high places in the Government, must be supposed to be of opinion that they are not disqualified for being ministers by having been agitators. I will, however, venture to offer some arguments in vindication of the conduct of my noble and right honourable friends, as I once called them, and as, notwithstanding the asperity which has characterised the present debate, I should still have pleasure in calling them. I would say in their behalf that agitation ought not to be indiscriminately condemned; that great abuses ought to be removed; that in this country scarcely any great abuse was ever removed till the public feeling had been roused against it; and that the public feeling has seldom been roused against abuses without exertions to which the name of agitation may be given. I altogether deny the assertion which we have repeatedly heard in the course of this debate, that a government which does not discountenance agitation cannot be trusted to suppress rebellion. Agitation and rebellion, you say, are in kind the same thing: they differ only in degree. Sir, they are the same thing in the sense in which to breathe a vein and to cut a throat are the same thing. There are many points of resemblance between the act of the surgeon and the act of the assassin. In both there is the steel, the incision, the smart, the bloodshed. But the acts differ as widely as possible both in moral character and in physical effect. So with agitation and rebellion. I do not believe that there has been any moment since the revolution of 1688 at which an insurrection in this country would have been justifiable. On the other hand, I hold that we have owed to agitation a long series of beneficent reforms which could have been effected in no other way. Nor do I understand how any person can reprobate agitation, merely as agitation, unless he is prepared to adopt the maxim of Bishop Horsley, that the people have nothing to do with the laws but to obey them. The truth is that agitation is inseparable from popular government. If you wish to get rid of agitation, you must establish an oligarchy like that of Venice, or a despotism like that of Russia. If a Russian thinks that he is able to suggest an improvement in the commercial code or the criminal code of his country, he tries to obtain an audience of the Emperor Nicholas or of Count Nesselrode. If he can satisfy them that his plans are good, then undoubtedly, without agitation, without controversy in newspapers, without harangues from hustings, without clamorous meetings in great halls and in marketplaces, without petitions signed by tens of thousands, you may have a reform effected with one stroke of the pen. Not so here. Here the people, as electors, have power to decide questions of the highest importance. And ought they not to hear and read before they decide? And how can they hear if nobody speaks, or read if nobody writes? You must admit, then, that it is our right, and that it may be our duty, to attempt by speaking and writing to induce the great body of our countrymen to pronounce what we think a right decision; and what else is agitation? In saying this I am not defending one party alone. Has there been no Tory agitation? No agitation against Popery? No agitation against the new Poor Law? No agitation against the plan of education framed by the present Government? Or, to pass from questions about which we differ to questions about which we all agree: Would the slave trade ever have been abolished without agitation? Would slavery ever have been abolished without agitation? Would your prison discipline ever have been improved without agitation? Would your penal code, once the scandal of the Statute Book, have been mitigated without agitation? I am far from denying that agitation may be abused, may be employed for bad ends, may be carried to unjustifiable lengths. So may that freedom of speech which is one of the most precious privileges of this House. Indeed, the analogy is very close. What is agitation but the mode in which the public, the body which we represent, the great outer assembly, if I may so speak, holds its debates? It is as necessary to the good government of the country that our constituents should debate as that we should debate. They sometimes go wrong, as we sometimes go wrong. There is often much exaggeration, much unfairness, much acrimony in their debates. Is there none in ours? Some worthless demagogues may have exhorted the people to resist the laws. But what member of Lord Grey's Government, what member of the present Government, ever gave any countenance to any illegal proceedings? It is perfectly true that some words which have been uttered here and in other places, and which, when taken together with the context and candidly construed, will appear to mean nothing but what was reasonable and constitutional and moderate, have been distorted and mutilated into something that has a seditious aspect. But who is secure against such misrepresentation? Not, I am sure, the right honourable Baronet the Member for Pembroke. He ought to remember that his own speeches have been used by bad men for bad ends. He ought to remember that some expressions which he used in 1830, on the subject of the emoluments divided among Privy Councillors, have been quoted by the Chartists in vindication of their excesses. Do I blame him for this? Not at all. He said nothing that was not justifiable. But it is impossible for a man so to guard his lips that his language shall not sometimes be misunderstood by dull men, and sometimes misrepresented by dishonest men. I do not, I say, blame him for having used those expressions: but I do say that, knowing how his own expressions had been perverted, he should have hesitated before he threw upon men, not less attached than himself to the cause of law, of order and property, imputations certainly not better founded than those to which he is himself liable.

And now, Sir, to pass by many topics to which, but for the lateness of the hour, I would willingly advert, let me remind the House that the question before us is not a positive question, but a question of comparison. No man, though he may disapprove of some part of the conduct of the present Ministers, is justified in voting for the motion which we are considering, unless he believes that a change would, on the whole, be beneficial. No government is perfect: but some government there must be; and if the present government were worse than its enemies think it, it ought to exist until it can be succeeded by a better. Now I take it to be perfectly clear that, in the event of the removal of Her Majesty's present advisers, an administration must be formed of which the right honourable Baronet the Member for Tamworth will be the head. Towards that right honourable Baronet, and towards many of the noblemen and gentlemen who would probably in that event be associated with him, I entertain none but kind and respectful feelings. I am far, I hope, from that narrowness of mind which makes a man unable to see merit in any party but his own. If I may venture to parody the old Venetian proverb, I would be "First an Englishman; and then a Whig." I feel proud of my country when I think how much ability, uprightness, and patriotism may be found on both sides of the House. Among our opponents stands forth, eminently distinguished by parts, eloquence, knowledge, and, I willingly admit, by public spirit, the right honourable Baronet the Member for Tamworth. Having said this, I shall offer no apology for the remarks which, in the discharge of my public duty, I shall make, without, I hope, any personal discourtesy, on his past conduct, and his present position.

It has been, Sir, I will not say his fault, but his misfortune, his fate, to be the leader of a party with which he has no sympathy. To go back to what is now matter of history, the right honourable Baronet bore a chief part in the restoration of the currency. By a very large proportion of his followers the restoration of the currency is considered as the chief cause of the distresses of the country. The right honourable Baronet cordially supported the commercial policy of Mr Huskisson. But there was no name more odious than that of Mr Huskisson to the rank and file of the Tory party. The right honourable Baronet assented to the Act which removed the disabilities of the Protestant Dissenters. But, a very short time ago, a noble Duke, one of the highest in power and rank of the right honourable Baronet's adherents, positively refused to lend his aid to the executing of that Act. The right honourable Baronet brought in the bill which removed the disabilities of the Roman Catholics: but his supporters make it a chief article of charge against us that we have given practical effect to the law which is his best title to public esteem. The right honourable Baronet has declared himself decidedly favourable to the new Poor Law. Yet, if a voice is raised against the Whig Bastilles and the Kings of Somerset House, it is almost certain to be the voice of some zealous retainer of the right honourable Baronet. On the great question of privilege, the right honourable Baronet has taken a part which entitles him to the gratitude of all who are solicitous for the honour and the usefulness of the popular branch of the legislature. But if any person calls us tyrants, and calls those whom we have imprisoned martyrs, that person is certain to be a partisan of the right honourable Baronet. Even when the right honourable Baronet does happen to agree with his followers as to a conclusion, he seldom arrives at that conclusion by the same process of reasoning which satisfies them. Many great questions which they consider as questions of right and wrong, as questions of moral and religious principle, as questions which must, for no earthly object, and on no emergency, be compromised, are treated by him merely as questions of expediency, of place, and of time. He has opposed many bills introduced by the present Government; but he has opposed them on such grounds that he is at perfect liberty to bring in the same bills himself next year, with perhaps some slight variation. I listened to him as I always listen to him, with pleasure, when he spoke last session on the subject of education. I could not but be amused by the skill with which he performed the hard task of translating the gibberish of bigots into language which might not misbecome the mouth of a man of sense. I felt certain that he despised the prejudices of which he condescended to make use, and that his opinion about the Normal Schools and the Douai Version entirely agreed with my own. I therefore do not think that, in times like these, the right honourable Baronet can conduct the administration with honour to himself or with satisfaction to those who are impatient to see him in office. I will not affect to feel apprehensions from which I am entirely free. I do not fear, and I will not pretend to fear, that the right honourable Baronet will be a tyrant and a persecutor. I do not believe that he will give up Ireland to the tender mercies of those zealots who form, I am afraid, the strongest, and I am sure the loudest, part of his retinue. I do not believe that he will strike the names of Roman Catholics from the Privy Council book, and from the Commissions of the Peace. I do not believe that he will lay on our table a bill for the repeal of that great Act which was introduced by himself in 1829. What I do anticipate is this, that he will attempt to keep his party together by means which will excite grave discontents, and yet that he will not succeed in keeping his party together; that he will lose the support of the Tories without obtaining the support of the nation; and that his government will fall from causes purely internal.

This, Sir, is not mere conjecture. The drama is not a new one. It was performed a few years ago on the same stage and by most of the same actors. In 1827 the right honourable Baronet was, as now, the head of a powerful Tory opposition. He had, as now, the support of a strong minority in this House. He had, as now, a majority in the other House. He was, as now, the favourite of the Church and of the Universities. All who dreaded political change, all who hated religious liberty, rallied round him then, as they rally round him now. Their cry was then, as now, that a government unfriendly to the civil and ecclesiastical constitution of the realm was kept in power by intrigue and court favour, and that the right honourable Baronet was the man to whom the nation must look to defend its laws against revolutionists, and its religion against idolaters. At length that cry became irresistible. Tory animosity had pursued the most accomplished of Tory statesmen and orators to a resting place in Westminster Abbey. The arrangement which was made after his death lasted but a very few months: a Tory government was formed; and the right honourable Baronet became the leading minister of the Crown in the House of Commons. His adherents hailed his elevation with clamorous delight, and confidently expected many years of triumph and dominion. Is it necessary to say in what disappointment, in what sorrow, in what fury, those expectations ended? The right honourable Baronet had been raised to power by prejudices and passions in which he had no share. His followers were bigots. He was a statesman. He was coolly weighing conveniences against inconveniences, while they were ready to resort to a proscription and to hazard a civil war rather than depart from what they called their principles. For a time he tried to take a middle course. He imagined that it might be possible for him to stand well with his old friends, and yet to perform some part of his duty to the state. But those were not times in which he could long continue to halt between two opinions. His elevation, as it had excited the hopes of the oppressors, had excited also the terror and the rage of the oppressed. Agitation, which had, during more than a year, slumbered in Ireland, awoke with renewed vigour, and soon became more formidable than ever. The Roman Catholic Association began to exercise authority such as the Irish Parliament, in the days of its independence, had never possessed. An agitator became more powerful than the Lord Lieutenant. Violence engendered violence. Every explosion of feeling on one side of St George's Channel was answered by a louder explosion on the other. The Clare election, the Penenden Heath meeting showed that the time for evasion and delay was past. A crisis had arrived which made it absolutely necessary for the Government to take one side or the other. A simple issue was proposed to the right honourable Baronet, concession or civil war; to disgust his party, or to ruin his country. He chose the good part. He performed a duty, deeply painful, in some sense humiliating, yet in truth highly honourable to him. He came down to this House and proposed the emancipation of the Roman Catholics. Among his adherents were some who, like himself, had opposed the Roman Catholic claims merely on the ground of political expediency; and these persons readily consented to support his new policy. But not so the great body of his followers. Their zeal for Protestant ascendency was a ruling passion, a passion, too, which they thought it a virtue to indulge. They had exerted themselves to raise to power the man whom they regarded as the ablest and most trusty champion of that ascendency; and he had not only abandoned the good cause, but had become its adversary. Who can forget in what a roar of obloquy their anger burst forth? Never before was such a flood of calumny and invective poured on a single head. All history, all fiction were ransacked by the old friends of the right honourable Baronet, for nicknames and allusions. One right honourable gentleman, who I am sorry not to see in his place opposite, found English prose too weak to express his indignation, and pursued his perfidious chief with reproaches borrowed from the ravings of the deserted Dido. Another Tory explored Holy Writ for parallels, and could find no parallel but Judas Iscariot. The great university which had been proud to confer on the right honourable Baronet the highest marks of favour, was foremost in affixing the brand of infamy. From Cornwall, from Northumberland, clergymen came up by hundreds to Oxford, in order to vote against him whose presence, a few days before, would have set the bells of their parish churches jingling. Nay, such was the violence of this new enmity that the old enmity of the Tories to Whigs, Radicals, Dissenters, Papists, seemed to be forgotten. That Ministry which, when it came into power at the close of 1828, was one of the strongest that the country ever saw, was, at the close of 1829, one of the weakest. It lingered another year, staggering between two parties, leaning now on one, now on the other, reeling sometimes under a blow from the right, sometimes under a blow from the left, and certain to fall as soon as the Tory opposition and the Whig opposition could find a question on which to unite. Such a question was found: and that Ministry fell without a struggle.