1852 PROTECTION RENOUNCED 939 been Protectionists, shrank from condemning so distinctly a policy which they had formerly defended; but when Palmerston came to their help by proposing in a less offensive form a resolution which meant much the same as that of Villiers, he was supported by the greater number of them, and his motion was carried with only fifty-three dissentients. Disraeli then brought forward an ingenious budget, which was rejected by the House, upon which the Derby ministry resigned. If Disraeli had not succeeded in maintaining his party in power, at least he had freed it from the unpopular burden of attachment to protection, and had made it capable of rising to power in the future. Before he left office Louis Napoleon became, by a popular vote, Napoleon III. Emperor of the French. men. 1. Expectation of Peace. 1852.-Since the accession to power of Lord Grey's ministry in 1830, the opinions of Bentham (see p. 890) had gained the upper hand, and the greatest happiness of the greatest number had become the inspiring thought of statesFree trade was regarded, not merely as desirable because it averted starvation, but as uniting nations together in commercial bonds. Nothing was more common in 1851 and 1852 than to heat sensible men predict that the era of wars was past, and that nations trafficking with one another would have no motive for engaging in strife. The fierce passions evoked by the struggles for nationality in 1848 were forgotten, and a time of peace and prosperity regarded as permanently established. 2. Church Movements. 1827-1853.—There had, indeed, been signs that it was impossible to bring all men to forsake the pursuit of ideal truth. In 1827 Keble published the first edition of the Christian Year, and in the following years a body of writers at Oxford, of whom the most prominent were Newman and Pusey, did their best to inspire the rising generation with the belief that the Church of England had a life of its own independent of the State or of Society, and that its true doctrines were those which had been taught in the earlier centuries of the Church's existence. Their teaching was not unlike that of Laud (see p. 520), though without Laud's leaning upon the State, and with a reverence for the great mediæval ecclesiastics and their teaching which Laud had not possessed. In Scotland, reaction against State interference took another turn. Large numbers of the Scottish clergy and people objected to the system by which lay patrons had in their hands the appointment of ministers to Church livings, and in 1843 no less than 474 ministers threw up their livings and, followed by numerous congregations, formed the Free Church of Scotland. Different as were the movements in the two countries, they had this in common, that they regarded religion as something more than the creature of law and Parliament. 3. Growth of Science. 1830-1859. Other men sought their ideals in science, and though scientific men did not meddle with politics, their work was not only productive of an increase of material comfort, but also permeated the minds of unscientific persons with a belief in natural law and order, which steadied them when they came to deal with the complex facts of human life. The rapid growth of railways, especially after 1844, the introduction of the electric telegraph in 1837, and other practical results of scientific discovery, prepared the way for a favourable reception of doctrines such as those announced in Lyell's Principles of Geology, the first edition of which was published in 1830, where the formation of the earth's surface was traced to a series of gradual changes similar to those in action at the present day. Darwin's Origin of Species, in which the multiplicity of living forms were accounted for by permanent natural causes, did not appear till 1859. 4. Dickens, Thackeray, and Macaulay. 1837-1848. —The feelings and opinions of the age were, as is usually the case, reflected in its literature. Dickens, whose first considerable work, The Pickwick Papers, appeared in 1837, painted humorously the lives of the middle classes, which had obtained political power through the Reform Act of 1832; and Thackeray, whose Vanity Fair was 1837-1856 MODERN LITERATURE 941 published in 1848, lashed the vices of great and wealthy sinners, principally of those who had held a high place in the society of the preceding generations, though he delighted in painting the gentleness and self-denial of men, and still more of women of a lower station. For him the halo of glory with which Scott had crowned the past had disappeared. Amongst the historians of this period, by far the greatest is Macaulay, whose history of England began to appear in 1848, the year in which Vanity Fair was published. In him was to be found a massive common-sense in applying the political judgments of the day to the events of past times, combined with an inability to grasp sympathetically the opinions of those who had struggled against the social and political movements out of which the life of the nineteenth century had been developed. As for the future, Macaulay had no such dissatisfaction with life around him as to crave for further organic change. Piecemeal reforms he welcomed gladly, but he had no wish to alter the political basis of society. The Reform Act of 1832 gave him all that he desired. 5. Grote, Mill, and Carlyle. 1833-1856.---There were not wanting writers who saw the weak points of that rule of the middle classes which seemed so excellent to Macaulay. Grote's History of Greece, which was published at intervals from 1845 to 1856, was in reality a panegyric on the democracy of Athens and, by implication, a pleading in favour of democracy in England. Mill, whose System of Logic appeared in 1843, expounded the utilitarian philosophy of Bentham, accompanying his scientific teaching with the expression of hopefulness in the growth of democracy as likely to lead to better government. The man, however, whose teaching did most to rouse the age to a sense of the insufficiency of its work was Thomas Carlyle, whose Sartor Resartus began to appear in 1833, and who detested alike the middle-class Parliamentary government dear to Macaulay, and the democratic government dear to Grote and Mill. He was the prophet of duty. Each individual was to set himself resolutely to despise the conventions of the world, and to conform to the utmost of his power to the divine laws of the world. Those who did this most completely were heroes, to whom and not to Parliamentary majorities or scientific deductions, reverence and obedience were due. The negative part of Carlyle's teaching-its condemnation of democracy and science-- made no impression. The positive part fixed itself upon the mind of the young, thousands of whom learnt from it to follow the call of duty, and to obey her behests. 1849-1852 LITERATURE AND PAINTING 943 6. Tennyson. 1849.-The best poetry of the time reflected in a milder way the teaching of Carlyle. Tennyson, whose most thoughtful work, In Memoriam, appeared in 1849, is filled with a sense of the pre-eminence of duty, combined with a reverent religious feeling and a respect for the teaching of science which was then bursting on the world. The opening lines of In Memoriam give the key-note of the teaching of a master who held out the hand to Carlyle on the one hand, and to Keble and Newman on the other. Strong Son of God, immortal love Whom we, that have not seen thy face, By faith, and faith alone, embrace, Thou seemest human and divine, The holiest, highest manhood, thou; 7. Turner. 1775-1851.-The pursuit of the knowledge of the secret processes and the open manifestations of nature, which placed its stamp upon the science and the literature of the time, made itself also visible in its art. No man ever revealed in landscape-painting the infinity of the natural world and the subtleness of its gradations, as did Turner in the days of his strength, before his eyes fixed on the glory of the atmosphere and the sky lost perception of the beauty of the earth. 8. The beginning of the Aberdeen Ministry. 1852-1854.-The Derby Ministry was followed by a coalition ministry of Liberals and Peelites under the Earl of Aberdeen. At first it seemed as if Parliament was about to settle down to a series of internal reforms. In 1853, Gladstone, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, produced a budget which proved generally acceptable, and Russell promised a new Reform Bill which was actually brought forward in 1854, though by that time circumstances having become adverse to its consideration caused its prompt withdrawal. 9. The Eastern Question. 1850-1853.—For some time there had been a diplomatic struggle between France and Russia for the possession of certain holy places in Palestine by the clergy of their respective churches, and though in 1852 the Sultan proposed a compromise, neither party was satisfied. In the beginning of 1853, the Tzar Nicholas spoke to Sir Hamilton Seymour of ‘the Turk' as a sick man, and proposed that if he died, that is to say, if the Turkish power fell to pieces, England should take Crete and |