Chapter 10 - Page 2

Italy. The campaign was short and successful; but rejoice as we might for the cause of Italian unity, the French emperor's activity suggested his future invasion of Britain; and to this period belongs the development, if not the beginning, of our Volunteer army, which, from 150,000 in 1860, increased to upwards of 200,000 in twenty-five years. Still, a commercial treaty with France, on free-trade lines, was negotiated between Louis Napoleon and Mr Cobden; and Mr Gladstone carried it through parliament in the face of strong opposition. Lord John Russell again introduced a Reform Bill, but the apathy of Lord Palmerston, and the pressure of other business, led to its quiet withdrawal. The rejection by the Lords of a bill to abolish the duty on paper seemed likely at one time to lead to a collision between the two Houses. Ultimately the Commons contented themselves with a protest against this unwonted stretch of authority, and the paper-duty was removed in 1861.

From 1861 to 1865, a civil war raged in America, between the slave-holding Southern States (the Confederates) and the abolitionist Northern States (the Federals). At first, British feeling was strongly in favour of the Northerners; but it changed before long, partly in consequence of their seizure of two Confederate envoys on a British mail-steamer, the Trent, and of the interruption of our cotton trade, which caused a cotton famine and great distress in Lancashire. With the war itself, and the final hard-won triumph of the North, we had no immediate connection; but the Southern cause was promoted by five privateers being built in England. These armed cruisers were not professedly built for the Southerners, but under false pretences were actually equipped for war against Northern commerce. One of them, the Alabama, was not merely built in a British dockyard, but manned for the most part by a British crew. In her two years' cruise she burned sixty-five Federal merchantmen. The Federal government protested at the time; but it was not till 1872 that the Alabama question was peacefully settled by arbitration in a conference at Geneva, and we had to pay three millions sterling in satisfaction of the American claims.

Other events during the Palmerston administration were a tedious native rebellion in New Zealand (1860-65); the marriage of the Prince of Wales to the Princess Alexandra of Denmark (1863); the cession of the Ionian Isles to Greece (1864); and on the Continent there was the Schleswig-Holstein War (1864), in which, beset by both Prussia and Austria, Denmark looked, but looked vainly, for succour from Britain.

As the Reform Bill of 1832 excluded the great bulk of the working classes from the franchise, it was felt by many that it could not be a final measure; and no long time had passed before agitation for further reform had commenced.

In the year 1854 the veteran Lord John Russell once more brought the subject before the House of Commons; but the