Ex Libris ' C. K. OGDEN

THE LIBRARY

OF

THE UNIVERSITY

OF CALIFORNIA

LOS ANGELES

DAVID URQUHART

ZUcuruL 1 1 in ttl\ (i rt

DAVID URQUHART

►ME CHAPTERS I VICTORIAN KNIGHT ERF

OF JUSTICE

GERTRUDE ROB

F, URQUHA

DA

IS

DAVID URQUHART

SOME CHAPTERS IN THE LIFE OF A VICTORIAN KNIGHT-ERRANT OF JUSTICE AND LIBERTY

BY

GERTRUDE ROBINSON

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

F. F. UROUHART

FELLOW OF BALLIOL COLLEGE

OXFORD BASIL BLACKWELL

1920

E>ec-icateD

TO THE MEMORY OF THE

MEN AND WOMEN OF THE FOREIGN AFFAIRS COMMITTEES

AND OF ALL THOSE

LOYAL AND SELF-SACRIFICING FRIENDS OF DAVID URQUHART

FROM WHOM HE EXPECTED SO MUCH

AND IN WHOM

HE WAS NOT DISAPPOINTED

PREFACE

This study of a great though little-known personality of the last century is not presented to the reading public as in any sense an adequate biography. It may be regarded as a preparation for a Life which still remains to be written. The immense mass of material to be dealt with, involving all the most vital diplomatic and international questions of the last century, would have made the preparation of such a Life a matter of time, and could only have been successfully undertaken by an able historian.

David Urquhart during a long life never ceased to preach doctrines and make claims which the world derided. The last five years have set the seal on the truth of those doctrines, and justified many of those claims. But the man himself has been forgotten. It seems now a fitting time when, in common gratitude for his life of toil and self-sacrifice, his memory should be revived.

AH the manuscript and most of the other materials used in the preparation of this book have been very kindly placed at the author's disposal by Mr. David Urquhart, Mr. Urquhart's eldest son. She owes more than she can adequately acknowledge to the help and co-operation of Miss Urquhart and Mr. F. F. Urquhart of Balliol College. Most of the drudgery involved in the reading, selection, and

viii PREFACE

tabulation of a great mass of almost unarranged corres- pondence was undertaken by Miss Urquhart, as well as a great deal of necessary research at the Record Office and the British Museum. Apart from this, the book in one respect at least owes whatever psychological interest it may possess to her. Her mind, probably unconsciously to herself, reproduced in that of the author the impression made on her, while still a sensitive and imaginative child, by her father's unique personality.

Mr. F. F. Urquhart, in addition to the constant and valuable advice and criticism which he gave during the whole time the book was in preparation, made himself responsible for the whole of the indexing. To him the author is also indebted for the correction of the proof- sheets, as well as to Mrs. V. M. Crawford, who with her knowledge of the technicalities of printing has been of invaluable help.

Oxford,

December, 1919.

CONTEXTS

PAOk PREFACE - vii

PROLOGUE - - - xi

INTRODUCTION --.... 1

PART I.— THE KNIGHT

CHAPTER

I. WHAT MANNER OF MAN HE WAS - - - 19

II. URQUHART AT CONSTANTINOPLE - - - 44

III. THE EAST AND MEDIAEVAL INSTITUTIONS - - 64

PART IT.— HOW HE FOUGHT FOR JUSTICE IN ENGLAND

IV. CHARTISM - - - ... - 81

V. FOREIGN AFFAIRS ASSOCIATIONS - - - 104

VI. THE FORMATION OF THE FOREIGN AFFAIRS COMMITTEES - 120

VH. THE AIMS AND WORK OF THE COMMITTEES - - 141

VIII. WHY THE COMMITTEES SUCCEEDED AND WHY THEY

FAILED ...... 166

PART III.— HOW HE WENT TO ROME

IX. URQUHART AND HIS EARLIER RELATIONS TO ROME - 179

X. " UNITED ITALY " ..... 194

XI. URQUHART IN SAVOY ..... 205

XII. URQUHART'S ATTITUDE TOWARDS THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 218

XIH. THE APPEAL TO THE POPE - - - - 231

XIV. THE VATICAN COUNCIL .... 250

XV. THE LAST CHAPTER ..... 274

APPENDIXES - - - - - - 301

INDEX ... ... 323

LIST OF PLATES

david urquhart, MT. CIRCA 69 Frontispiece

TO FACE PAGE

DAVID URQUHART, ^T. 12 AND 63 - - - - 20

DAVID URQUHART SHORTLY AFTER HIS MARRIAGE - - 121

POSTER ISSUED BY THE PRESTON FOREIGN AFFAIRS COMMITTEE 134

CHALET DES MELEZES ------ 206

PROLOGUE

Then the Kings having denied Christ, made new gods and idols, and exposed them to the sight of nations, and ordered men to fall down and worship and fight for them.

And they made for the French an idol, and they called it Honour — and it was the same idol that in former times was called the Golden Calf.

And for the Spaniards they made an idol and called it Political Preponderance, and it was the same idol that the Assyrians adored under the name of Baal, and the Philis- tines under the name of Dagon, and the Romans under that of Jupiter.

And for the English their King made an idol, and called it Sovereignty of the Seas, and it was the same god that was formerly named Mammon.

And for the Germans they made an idol which they called Well-Being, the same that formerly had the names of Moloch and Comus.

And the people adored their idols.

And the King said to the French: "Be up and fight for Honour."

And the people arose and combated for 500 years.

And the King said to the English: " Get up and fight for Mammon." And they arose and combated for 500 years.

And so the other nations, each for his idol.

And in Europe idolatry flourished — and as the Pagans had first adored different virtues under the forms of idols and afterwards so adored different vices, and then men, and beasts, and finally trees, and stones, and figures, and geometry, so also did it happen in Europe.

For the Italians created for themselves an idol, which

Xll

PROLOGUE

they named Political Equilibrium. Now this was an idol which the ancient Pagans had never known ; and the Italians were the first to invent its worship, and in combating for it they became weak and stupid, and fell into the hands of petty tyrants.

Then the Kings of Europe, seeing that this idol had exhausted the Italian nation, caused it to be brought into their States and rn-opagated its worship, and ordered men to combat for it.

After this the King of Prussia traced a circle and said, " Behold a new God "; and the circle was adored, and the worship was* henceforth called Arrondissement.

Then came three Kings whose names were Blasphemy, who, seeing that the people were not sufficiently corrupted, raised on high a new idol, the most terrible of all; and that idol was called Interest. That idol was not known to the Pagans of Antiquity.

However, all the people adored Interest, and the Kings said: "If we propagate the worship of this idol, it will happen that, as there is to-day between nation and nation, so will there happen, then, war between town and town, between man and man.

" And men will become savages again."

Adam Mickiewicz: The Book of Polish Pilgrim?.

These idols have all been broken, and a greater one has now taken their place. This Idol is Chance — he is pro- pitiated with wave offerings and burnt offerings of laws, rights, usages, and traditions — his high-priest is Diplomacy, his temple was Congress — is Cabinet. By lohispers he sears the heart of man. He changes all things past, corrupts all things present, and disposes all things to come. He w,i -; known among the ancient Pagans as Iniquity, but was considered a Demon and not a God.

The Portfolio (New Scries), vol. ii., No. V.

DAVID URQUHART

INTRODUCTION

It is not easy to write about the life and work of a man who set himself consciously and diametrically against the opinion of his time. A biographer has but two courses open to him, either to argue that in im- portant matters, at any rate, opinion was wrong and his view right, an undertaking of perilous length and difficulty, or to " explain " his hero, to put in a plea, in other words, for extenuating circumstances. The second alternative is a confession of failure, and no one who knows and admires David Urquhart would be so poor-spirited as to adopt it. Silence would be preferable, silence until the enemy had surrendered, until opinion had so changed that much which had seemed preposterous paradox had become accepted or at least acceptable.

The opinions which Urquhart attacked have not yet been entirely abandoned, they have not yet been trans- formed, as he would have said, into judgments. They have, however, shifted their ground, and much that he wrote and said would be better understood now than in his lifetime.

The catastrophe which he foretold has come upon us. It may not have come from the quarter from which he expected it, but it has been the result of those principles of international iniquity against which his voice was

l

2 DAVID URQUHART

lifted in season and out of season. The purpose of this book is mainly to show the moral principles which underlay his many activities, and it would be impossible within a reasonable compass to examine his convictions about the international events and the leading states- men of his time. Yet principle was with him so closely connected with facts, so much of his life and energy were spent in battling against Russia and all her deeds, that it is essential at least to show that his whole conception of the international history of his time was not the in- credible thing it seemed to most of his contemporaries. When they saw the workings of popular forces, of national movements or of mere chance, David Urquhart detected the deliberate policy of Russia. Russia was to him a Power essentially weak and inorganic which had yet by the semblance of strength, by the extreme intelligence of her ministers, and by her unhesitating rejection of all scruple, been able to pursue, since the days of Peter the Great, a policy of almost uninter- rupted conquest. Her success was due not to military achievements, but to diplomacy, to the skill with which she weakened the other European States by setting them against one another or by using against them, though herself the most autocratic of Powers, the weapon of Revolution. Every European State was threatened by the Russian danger, but her immediate victim was the Turkish Empire. Once established on the Bos- phorus and the Dardanelles she could control South- Eastern Europe and the Near East, she could interpose her portentous bulk between Europe and Asia. The Mediterranean would be her path to power in the West, while in the East she would threaten the Indian Empire. Among the Turks, however, were to be found not only

INTRODUCTION 3

great military qualities, but certain convictions on the essential connection between righteousness and public action, between religion and politics which had been almost forgotten in the West. The Turks were therefore the appointed antagonists of Russia because they were diametrically opposed to her policy of systematic injus- tice, and it was an essential article in David Urquhart's creed that Turkey, left to herself, was more than a match for Russia. The great object of Russian diplomacy was therefore to secure the help of the Powers in disorganising or breaking up the Turkish Empire — and this, he maintained, they had frequently done even when they professed to be acting as her friends. Con- temporary history was to him a tremendous living drama in which the greatest moral issue was at stake. Russia was the great adversary, working for her end by the gradual demoralisation of Europe. She repre- sented the principle of evil in international affairs, the attempt to exclude them altogether from the domain of the Moral Law. Before her day other countries and sovereigns had acted unjustly. She acted on the principle of injustice. And she worked in secret, by her hold over individual statesmen in other countries, by the press, by revolutionary influences, by men and movements often enough intentionally opposed to her. Her power lay in her one, single, Satanic vision of her aims, while the feeble men in whose hesitating hands lay the defence of the Moral Law were confused by uncertain aims, by hazy views of national justice, and by words which they used without understanding them, such words as democratic government, ministerial responsibility, nationality and the rest. " Our An- tagonist," Urquhart wrote, " scrutinises the earth for

4 DAVID URQUHART

talents, and having found them, disciplines them to an order which has never been matched, and inspires them with the prospects of a triumph never yet attained. There are united superiority of mind, unity of system, permanency of purpose, the coercion of an iron rule, the inspiration of a golden harvest and the doubly fortifying sense of confidence in themselves and con- tempt for the rest of mankind. . . . For those who manage the affairs of Russia every branch of science, every field of knowledge, and every motive of the human mind is equally possessed and mastered, and the com- bination of the whole is — Diplomacy."*

To the immense majority of his contemporaries this conception of Russia and of the character of her power seemed the imaginings of a distorted if not of a diseased brain. Have we any reason after sixty years to ques- tion this verdict ?

To begin with, most men would admit the truth of David Urquhart's passionate conviction, underlying all his conception of " foreign politics," that there was a fundamental antagonism between two principles, one which required in the acts of the State merely the pursuit of a policy, the other which demanded before all else that they should conform to the eternal principles of justice, and they would agree that the triumph of the former would mean an absolute perversion of the very basis on which human society is built. Thoughtful men had long realised the existence of this antagonism, and dreaded the consequences of the apparently growing indifference to all issues save those of national advantage; and the war has opened the eyes of many more to the fatal consequences of unrestrained national ambition.

* Progress of Russia, Fifth Editiou, pp. lxv.-vi. and lxix.

INTRODUCTION 5

For one thing we are beginning to understand that the national movements, which were welcomed so enthusiastically in England, contained much that was evil, at least in their methods. It was the custom a few years back to admire Bismarck and to excuse his methods of blood and iron because they had been success- ful in bringing about German unity. Immediate success clouded the judgments of his contemporaries even in England. Indeed the whole popular verdict on " Nationality/' which Urquhart distrusted intensely, is already being revised in the light of increasing national ambitions and national hatreds.

It may be claimed, then, that time has confirmed David Urquhart 's moral judgments; can it be said to have justified his political insight ? He is obviously open to the charge of having mistaken the real enemy, of having made Russia the Antagonist when it should have been Prussia. As a matter of fact he always insisted on the close connection between the two Powers, though Prussia, and even Bismarck, he considered to be the tools of Russia. The international policy of both countries was based on the same principle of injustice, the difference lay in the means. Russia, fundamentally weak, internally divided, was driven to use the weapon of diplomacy, Germany in the years after '70 was strong enough to be frankly brutal. In any case the Prussianising of Germany in the late years of the nineteenth century does not immediately affect the historical question of Russian policy and influence in the period between 1815 and 1870.

Certainly no contemporary historian would be pre- pared to accept in its entirety David Urquhart 's account of the international politics amid which he lived.

6 DAVID URQUHART

Perhaps future revelations may confirm a number of his convictions, but too much must not be expected from further publications of documents. It is one of the difficulties of the history of the last century that so much of importance was communicated in private correspondence and may never be at the historian's disposal. At any rate all that is possible now is to point out how mysterious a great deal of nineteenth- century history still remains, and how in a number of cases increased knowledge has only deepened the mystery.

The period of the Congresses, the years following the Congress of Vienna, has been the object of much re- search and many books, and yet two diametrically opposite explanations are still facing each other. The explanation more commonly accepted by English writers makes Metternich the soul of the system. In the interests of " legitimacy," of the counter-Eevolution, he persuaded Alexander of Russia to abandon his liberalism, to throw himself into the Conservative camp and to use the Holy Alliance for the purpose of suppress- ing revolutions in Spain, Italy, and elsewhere. The rival theory makes Russia not only the inaugurator, but also the motive power behind the Alliance; and the object of Russia throughout is to promote intervention in other countries in order to set the Western nations against one another and to profit by the confusion. To bring about intervention, revolutions had first to be set afoot, and writers of this school are prepared to show that Russian agents were at work both in Spain and Italy before the insurrection of 1820. It would seem at first sight incredible that a country like Russia, the embodiment of conservatism and autocracy, should

INTRODUCTION 7

be stirring up revolutionary fires ; yet the very fact that Russia was so much outside the European system, so remote from the flame, made it safer for her statesmen to promote revolution in other countries. Sorel has himself pointed out how Alexander I. contrived to be " the hidden deity of the Revolutionaries while re- maining the public god of the Conservatives ." And what Sorel said of Alexander, most idealistic of the Czars, is only what David Urquhart said all his life of the general policy of Russia. Certain it is that whether Russia was to any degree responsible for the Revolution of 1820, it was Russia, and not Metternich, who first proposed intervention, and it was Russia who at the Congress of Verona ultimately forced it on the French Government by using Chateaubriand. As it turned out, French intervention was not resented by the Spaniards as a people, and the general peace of Europe, which a prolonged war in Spain would certainly have destroyed, was preserved.

In the East again it is to the personal influence of Metternich over the impressionable Alexander that Russia's abandonment of the Greeks during the earlier years of their rebellion is usually attributed. It is pleasant to substitute for a difficult study of facts and documents a lively discussion of Alexander's character and of the temperament which so exercised the chan- celleries of Europe, but in Russian history the direct influence of a Czar's personality is nearly always exag- gerated. The real control of events has generally been in the hands of a much less impressionable minister. The connection of Russia with the Greek Revolt is of primary importance in David Urquhart 's life. It was his first great lesson in the power of diplomacy; it

8 DAVID URQUHART

convinced him of the ignorance which prevailed in the West about all Eastern matters. The scene of the drama was one with which he was familiar. He had fought for the Greeks and he knew their detestation of Russia. He had lived with the Turks and realised their great military qualities. In his inquiries into the diplomatic forces which brought about the destruction of the Turkish fleet at Navarino and the Peace of Adrianople, so disastrous to Turkey, he was assisted by a strange and almost unique discovery. The Polish rebellion of 1830 placed the Poles for some time in command of Warsaw, and there they found a number of diplomatic documents; these were copies of despatches which had been sent to the Russian Viceroy Constantine, Nicholas I/s elder brother, the man who had given up his right to the throne and was therefore treated with great consideration by the Russian Government. These despatches were ultimately sent to England, and some of them appeared, with the consent of the Government, in The Portfolio, edited by Urquhart and some of his friends. To the casual reader these Russian secret despatches do not contain any startling revelations, but every here and there phrases are met with which bring out the point of view of the Russian ministers and are full of meaning to one who knows the facts. They certainly confirmed Urquhart in the judgments he had formed about Russian policy.

He started with the conviction of the inherent weak- ness of Russia on the one hand, in spite of the com- manding position which she held at the time, and of the military strength of Turkey on the other. Russia therefore could not afford to attack Turkey single- handed. It was not sufficient for her to get a free

INTRODUCTION 9

hand in the East by embroiling the Western Powers with one another; she must secure the help of one or more of them in her attack on Turkey. This she ultimately succeeded in doing, partly owing to the sympathy felt in the West towards the Greeks, partly owing to the very fear with which Western statesmen regarded the independent action of Russia in the East. Canning was anxious to settle the Greek question by arbitration between Greeks and Turks. If he had acted single-handed he might have done so, and it is obvious that Russia feared his independent action. She therefore threatened Turkey in a quarrel of her own, disconnected with the Greek question, and Canning then came to terms with Russia, hoping to check her by working with her. But union with Russia made a friendly settlement between Greeks and Turks im- possible, and step by step the English and French Governments were led on till, without declaration of war, and while they still professed to be allies of Turkey, the fleets of England, France, and Russia destroyed the Turkish Fleet at Navarino. Russia was now in a position to attack Turkey. Navarino had given her the command of the Black Sea and of the iEgean. Yet in spite of this advantage the Russo-Turkish War of 1828-29 would probably have ended in a Russian disaster if the Sultan had not been persuaded by disloyal ministers and the ill-informed and timid representatives of England and France to sign in a panic the Peace of Adrianople. It is true that Diebitch was in Adrianople with a Russian army, but his troops were dying of fever and he could not advance on Constantinople. Behind him there was a Turkish army north of the Balkans; another was advancing from the west under the Pasha

10 DAVID URQUHART

of Widdin. The destruction of Diebitch's army seemed almost inevitable if the Sultan had held out, and so signal a Russian disaster might have had almost in- calculable consequences. Even as it was the Poles were able in the following year to keep the field for ten months against the Czar's armies. The victory of Turkey would probably have meant the emancipation of Poland and a complete and wholesome change in the history of Russia.

An inner knowledge of this phase of the Eastern Question not only strengthened Urquhart's convictions on the relative strength of Russia and Turkey, it also confirmed his suspicions about Russia's diplomatic methods. Pozzo di Borgo, the Corsican, was, for instance, just one of those able foreigners who became the most efficient servants of Russia. As an ambassador at Paris he had a great personal share in the success of the Russian policy. Such were his relations with the French Court that at one moment it was seriously proposed that he should be appointed French War Minister. A more enigmatic position still was that held in London by Countess Lieven, the wife of the Russian Ambassador. She was at different times with the Duke of Wellington, with Lord Grey, with Palmerston and other prominent men on terms of intimacy which seem to us incredible, especially as she never forgot that she represented Russia. It was at a private meeting between Canning and the Lievens that he seems first to have abandoned that isolated action in the Greek question which Russia disliked. Countess Lieven's own point of view is perhaps best expressed in a postscript to one of her letters to her brother, written in the winter of 1828, when the comparative

INTRODUCTION 11

failure of the first campaign against the Turks had astonished Europe. " Defeat the Turks, for the love of God ! Europe is growing insubordinate since it thinks we cannot do so."

The subsequent history of the Near East, as Urquhart saw it, was not likely to diminish his sense of the power and danger of Russian diplomacy. He saw her states- men use the rise of Mehemet Ali in Egypt first, to secure what was practically a protectorate of Turkey in 1833 and, when that too brilliant success roused the hostility of the Western Powers, he saw her use the same weapon in 1840 in order to break up, with the help of Lord Palmerston, the Anglo-French Entente of 1830. The crisis, which had brought England and France to the verge of war, was over in 1841, but by making Mehemet Ali an hereditary Pasha of Egypt the Powers which had come to Turkey's help combined to inflict on her a blow more serious, perhaps, than the ephemeral pre- dominance of an over mighty subject. The success of a rebellious Pasha had been a fairly frequent phenomenon in the history of the Ottoman Empire, but the establishment of a dynasty in Egypt was a step towards the permanent loss of that province.

The Crimean War might seem at first sight to be the fulfilment of David Urquhart 's ambitions. Now at last England and France were united with Turkey in a war against Russia's attempt to ruin the Turkish Empire by securing a protectorate over three-quarters of her subjects in Europe. And yet this war, though it began with a Russian defeat by the unaided Turks, ended in what was practically a drawn fight between Russia on the one side, and the two Western Powers, Turkey and Sardinia, on the other. Sebastopol itself

12 DAVID URQUHART

was never taken in a military sense, and we had to have a clause inserted in the Preliminaries of Peace to allow us to use its harbour for the embarkation of our troops. It is hardly too much to say that the prestige with which the Crimean War endowed Russia gave her a decisive voice in all questions concerned with the East until her war with Japan. It is a period full of historical mysteries. Why did the war break out ? Why did the Allies when they were at Varna never make the least attempt to help the Turks in Silistria ? Why did we attack Sebastopol, almost the only fortified Russian port in the Black Sea ? Why did we prevent the Turks from helping the Circassians in the Caucasus ? Why, during the whole of the war, was Russian trade allowed to pass unmolested through the Bosphorus ? The list of such questions could be extended almost indefinitely. The Crimean War was not likely to diminish Urquhart 's intense suspicion of the current diplomatic methods and his conviction that Russia had agents, whether conscious or unconscious, in the ministries of Europe.

To most of his contemporaries the maddest thing about David Urquhart was his belief in the treason of Lord Palmerston, and it is most unlikely that time will ever justify that belief. Yet it is now much easier to see how a man of Urquhart 's knowledge of the inner world of diplomacy could be absolutely sincere in such a conviction. Palmerston is certainly one of the most remarkable enigmas of our nineteenth-century history. At first all is simple enough. A representative of the ideas and prejudices of the English middle class, a man without inspiration and with little scruple, yet eminently efficient, his political success is easily ex-

INTRODUCTION 13

plained. He pleased the Tories by the vigour of his foreign policy, the Whigs by his spirit of compromise at home, the Eadicals by the support he gave to national movements and extreme parties abroad. He had, in addition, a very good " press/' he came to be on terms of great intimacy with Delane of The Times. The cheerful optimist of the cartoons of Punch is still the Palmerston of tradition as he was the Palmerston whom most Englishmen knew and liked. He certainly enjoyed the fruits of popularity, and during the fifty- five years of his political life he was only about ten years out of office. Even when, in 1857, the House of Commons revolted against the iniquities of the China War the constituencies returned him with a substantial majority. His importance in our history, however, depends more on his control of our foreign affairs than on his Whig leadership. During the middle years of the century the relations between England and the rest of the world depended far more upon Lord Palmerston than on any other man, and to the Continent he was a figure very unlike that of the genial Whig. To foreigners he seemed arrogant, offensive, passionate. That is the picture we get of him in the letters of the eminently moderate Leopold I. of Belgium. The foreign Liberals he alienated by his bullying methods even when they profited by his policy, while the Con- servatives could explain the alliance between this English aristocrat and continental revolutionary forces only by a deliberate bargain: the revolutionaries were to leave England undisturbed in return for support abroad. After all, what could be more offensive to a foreigner than the famous " Civis Komanus sum " speech % A speech which won Palmerston immense

14 DAVID URQUHART

popularity in England. It apparently claimed for an Englishman in a foreign country the rights which a Koman citizen enjoyed within the bounds of the Roman Empire. The wiser men of his time realised the injury that Palmerston was doing to the peace of Europe and the position of England, and Peel's last speech in the House of Commons was a grave protest against a diplomacy which was used " to fester every wound, to provoke, instead of soothing, resentments/'* A study of the crisis of 1840 when Palmerston shattered the Anglo-French Entente and brought the two countries to the brink of war would confirm every word of Peel's protest.

It is extraordinary that there should be no adequate Life of Palmerston, no attempt to replace the partial portraits of more or less " official " biographies by a real picture, and to explain the contradiction of his character and career. Passion probably accounted for much. He had real, deeply felt, personal resentments towards the rulers of other States, towards Metternich and Louis Philippe, for instance; and even towards other countries, especially Austria. But such personal resentments do not account for everything, and much remains in his foreign policy that is puzzling. Fortu- nately materials for a real biography are slowly accumulating. Queen Victoria's Letters and Lord Fitzmaurice's Life of Lord Granville have revealed Palmerston's attitude towards the Queen and his fellow-ministers, but it is by his relations with the idealism of his time that he will ultimately stand or fall. In any final judgment the charges brought against him by David Urquhart with such intensity of con-

* Parker' a Life of Peel, iii., 543.

INTRODUCTION 15

viction will have to be considered. To Urquhart Palmerston was the representative of the great Adver- sary, of that immoral principle in the affairs of nations which he identified with Kussia; and he was prepared to prove that in spite of the appearances of hostility Palmerston's policy had always in the long run been to the advantage of Kussia. Whether this was so or not is a matter of evidence, and much of his criticism is of the highest value. But it is a long step from failure, and even from injustice, to treason. Urquhart's whole character and life had tended to make him attribute to deliberate purpose much that is due, in the actions of men, to passion, or ambition, or mere thoughtlessness and want of foresight. He placed Palmerston on too high a level intellectually, made him too much of a Satan, and did not recognise that even he had a good deal of " l'homme moyen, sensuel " in his nature.

On the whole, then, it may be said that Urquhart's judgments on the events of his day would be listened to with more respect now than they were by the majority of his contemporaries, and that much still remains very obscure in the diplomatic history of the last century. Certainly no student of those times can afford to neglect the mass of material, the evidence drawn from unex- pected sources, and the startling and impressive judg- ments which are to be found in David Urquhart's writings, and in the reviews or papers which he inspired and to which he contributed.

PART I

THE KNIGHT

"My soul breaketh out for the very fervent desire: that it hath alway unto Thy judgments." — Psalm cxix. (Prayer-Book version.)

" Et custodiam legem tuam semper, In sseculum et in saeculun sajculi. Et ambulabam in latitudine,

Quia mandata tua exquisivi. Et loquebar in testimoniis tuis in conspectu regum Et non confundebar."

Psalm cxvii. 44, 46 (Vulgate).

CHAPTER I

WHAT MANNER OF MAN HE WAS

" Libera me de sanguinibus, Deus, Deus salutis meae, Et exultabit lingua mea justitiam tuam."

Psalm 1. (Vulgate).

This book does not profess to be a Life of David Urquhart.

It is merely a story of his two greatest attempts to avert the ruin which was already hanging over Europe, though only seers like himself, or Cobbett, or William Morris could discern its dark and sinister signs.

Urquhart saw them more clearly than the others of tho Brotherhood, because he had an opportunity, which they had not, of comparing things as they were with things as they had been in a more healthful state of society

Many attempts have been made to write his Life, but they have all failed because his biographers were so blinded with admiration for their hero that they could not see his defects.

Let us begin, therefore, by pointing out what Urquhart was not.

He was not a statesman, in spite of his great knowledge of statecraft.

He was not a historian, in spite of his wide knowledge of history; for he was neither logical nor accurate, nor had he any idea of the value of evidence.

He was not a psychologist, in spite of his interest in and love for human nature; his mind was always at work comparing men with what they ought to be rather than realising them as they were.

But he was a prophet. His historical next of kin are Cassandra and Jeremiah. For it is only after the catas- trophe has come that his countrymen can see how true were the words he spoke. Indeed, we hear them now on

19

20 DAVID URQUHART

all sides, though most of those who utter them do not know their origin. Labour leaders, religious teachers, Medievalists, Guild Socialists, promoters of Leagues of Nations, those who hate the Peace terms, all speak his language now.

Born ten years before the battle of Waterloo on his family estate in the Scottish Highlands, Urquhart started life with that fiercest form of aristocracy, Scottish pride of race; and an aristocrat he remained to the day of his death. But, thanks to his cosmopolitan education,1 his interest in commerce and his close and intimate friendship with men of the working classes on his Foreign Affairs Committees, the aristocratic spirit he had inherited was counterbalanced by a democratic conscience, which he acquired and which was none the less true and sincere because he was, and always remained, a monarchist. His knowledge of the East taught him the respect and courtesy due from one man to another, irrespective of class distinc- tions, and a dramatic incident of his early manhood, which

1 Urquhart's education was conducted by his mother in an altogether original manner. He was delicate as a child, and at ten years old she took him abroad with a tutor. They lived in France, Switzerland, and Italy, and Urquhart's studies were superintended by first one tutor, then another, more or less unsatisfactorily.

His first real settled education took place at the College of Soreze, famous later as the scene of Lacordaire's labours amongst his beloved " jeunesse."

Soreze was interesting enough in its history to fire the imagination of such a boy as David Urquhart.

Founded in 757, under Pepin le Bref, as an abbey, it became a military school about 1,000 years later, under the Benedictines. Secularised at the Revolution, it still retained its original character because it remained in the hands of its old superiors, who became laymen for the time being. It was still under this regime when Urquhart was sent there in 1817. In 1854 it became a Dominican school under Lacordaire.

At Soreze Urquhart's education began in earnest. He was at school as an extern from 5.30 a.m. until 7 at night, and often sat up till midnight preparing his lessons for the next day.

He had a tutor to help him with Latin and Greek, but Mrs. Urqu- hart describes him as a " heavy burden." " His master," she says in a letter to David's half-sister, Henrietta, " does not even raise him. I have had him so often vexed that I have a woman to come on purpose to wake him. We keep the fire in, and sometimes his anxiety is snch that he gets up at 3 o'clock and studies."

No wonder an old friend writes to Mrs. Urquhart: " I cannot think that it is good for our darling David to study such long hours."

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WHAT MANNER OF MAN HE WAS 21

took place there, aroused into vigorous life a passion for justice, which upheld him through years of almost hopeless struggle against national and social injustice and im- morality.

For David Urquhart was a crusader first and foremost. It is true that he was many other things as well: a diplo- matist too honest for the diplomatic world of his day; a politician with aims too lofty to succeed in politics; a philosopher, who rose above the barren intellectuality and utilitarianism of the utilitarian school of his day, though Jeremy Bentham was a friend of his impressionable youth; a writer, whose writings, in spite of the careless diction which too often mars them, rose sometimes to heights of poetic beauty; a prophet, who fifty years ago foretold the woes which have fallen on this generation. But all these noble qualities were burnt to a white heat in the furnace of his passion for the re-establishment of justice in the world. That is the key which unlocks all the chambers of a mind full of interests and gifts. That is the torch which lights all the secret recesses of a personality at once complex and contradictory. That was the one dream, the one hope of his life. For that he spent money recklessly, lavishly, heedless not only of his own future, but, later on, of that of his children. For that he laboured night and day in spite of sufferings, which were a " baptism of pain." For that, with a nature affectionate and sensitive to an almost inconceivable degree, he put aside the natural desire of a man for a home and human love till his fiftieth year, and offered after his marriage, not himself alone, but the wife to whom he was devoted, a willing sacrifice to the cause.

Few people have been so misjudged. David Urquhart was a " megalo-maniac." His unceasing hostility and opposition to Lord Palmerston was the result of " dis- appointed ambition." The political aim of a man who loathed parties was " to form a party, that should be called after his own name." He, the bitterest foe of Russia, was in her pay, or if he was not, his friends were. All his convictions were the result of " insensate vanity," of " wounded pride," of " mad extravagance."

22 DAVID URQUHART

On the other hand, men of all classes, of all shades of religious and political opinion, of all nations and of all grades of intellect were attracted to him. But in all these there was a certain nobility and simplicity, which enabled them to recognise the same nobility in his freedom from self-seeking, his absolute justice, and the sincerity and purity of his character, through all the many and con- spicuous faults that marred it, his extravagance, his some- times apparent and sometimes real egoism, and his over- bearing manner, which alienated many who would have been his friends and gave to his enemies many very welcome occasions of scandal.

His influence was by no means confined to men of his own country.

Alone almost of Englishmen, he was admitted to intimacy with the Turks. He might live in a Mohammedan house, eat at a Mohammedan table, receive the " Temena " or Mohammedan greeting.

It was no secret that he might, while still a young man, had he chosen, have remained in Turkey as confidential adviser to the Sultan. The Circassians, seeing in him at first sight a simplicity and nobility akin to their own, wished to make him their Chief, and, because of him, placed in English honour and in English arms a confidence which tended to their undoing.

" Daoud Bey " they called him, and in the East " Daoud Boy " was a name to conjure with to the last year of his life, when, sick almost to death, ho travelled through Egypt, "en prince," receiving the homage of Pashas and peasants, to some of whom that name had been from their youth a household word.

A Protostant to tho last, in spito of his conviction that the Papacy was " the only moral force in Europe," he won and kept the whole-hearted respect of prominent Catholic ecclesiastics, German, Italian and French, as well as English. So great an impression did he make on the Papal Legato Cappaccini in 18 14 that Pope Gregory XVI. summoned him to the Vatican to confer with him about the foundation of a diplomatic College in Rome. Pere Gratry,

WHAT MANNER OF MAN HE WAS 23

M. le Play, the General of the Jesuits, Monsignor, after- wards Cardinal, Franchi, the Bishop of Geneva, the famous Dupanloup, Bishop of Orleans, were on terms of friendship, in some cases of intimacy, with him. " God has inspired you with very great ideas on the greatest of subjects," said Pius IX. to him at a private audience.

And yet the majority of English statesmen were either entirely indifferent or actively hostile to him. There were notable exceptions. As quite a young man on his return from Constantinople he was high in the favour and con- fidence of William IV. Disraeli recognised his greatness as he recognised Disraeli's possibilities, and there was a great and striking unanimity between his point of view and that of Disraeli at his loftiest and best. Lord Ponsonby, who was at least partly responsible for the wreck of his diplot matic career in 1837, became reconciled to him after years of estrangement, and admitted that he had been right from the beginning, and that he alone could save England.

The barrier between Urquhart and the statesmen of his time is due very largely to his unremitting and intense hostility to Russia. By his enemies this hostility was sneered at as a form of mono-mania; even by many disposed to sympa- thise with him his politics were deemed unsound because he proposed to humble Russia by the exaltation of Turkey. In 1834 Urquhart published his pamphlet Turkey and Her Resources, showing the military and commercial strength of that country, with its rich lands and free trade; where the hearth was the factory; where every citizen had the right to wear the sword, which he might only wield, how- ever, in the cause of right and justice. The knowledge he had gained of her people and her commerce enabled him to draw up his Commercial Treaty, whose object was to encourage trade between Great Britain and Turkey. Tha- this Commercial Treaty was so altered as to defeat the end he had in view, he was doubtless right in putting down to Russian intrigue, and he pointed out with great clearness to the working classes of England that the dearness of their food was due to Russian astuteness and English— particu- larly Palmerstonian — complacency.

24

DAVID URQUHART

This is no place to inquire how far he was right in regard- ing every political move in Europe as due to the machina- tions of the Russian Cabinet. We must remember, how- ever, that not only was the Russian foreign policy of an entirely unbroken uniformity, and her Foreign Ministers, unlike those of the rest of Europe, quite independent of political parties, but that, however we may account for it, within one hundred and fifty years the Russian power had advanced with frightening rapidity. At the time of the Crimean War she was one thousand miles nearer Teheran, seven hundred miles nearer Vienna and Berlin, and five hundred miles nearer Constantinople than she had been at the death of Tsar Peter.1 Urquhart was not alone in his bitter mistrust of Russia. The Poles looked upon her as their undoing, Turkey was like a fly helpless in her web, and M. Thiers looked forward with dismal prognostications to the time " when the Russian Colossus, with one foot in the Dardanelles and the other in the .Sound, will make the whole world his slave and liberty will have fled to America." Urquhart, in the concentration of his mind on Russia, did not, perhaps, lay enough stress on the growing power of Prussia.2 The separation of the Duchies he regarded not so much as a rung, set by Bismarck, in the ladder of Prussia's rise to power, but as the result of Russian machination.

Mr. Behrens, who helped him in his commercial investi- gations, gives a remarkable instance of Urquhart 's almost supernatural prevision.

" We were walking along the Elbe conversing upon the state of England and Mr. Urquhart 's then accomplished career in the East. We sat down on an eminence to enjoy the view, and Mr. Urquhart asked me the name of the country spread out before us. I said, ' Holstein.' He oxclaimed, with great excitement, Ms that Holstein?' and interrupting our conversation he remained with his gaze

1 Progress of Russia, West, Smith, and East, 1>. Urquhart, (second Edition ]*:<::. It reached five editions. Sir John McNeil, who knew Hi': I. .i~t almost as well as Drquhart, La even more emphatic about the Russian menace in his Progress of Russia in tl<<- East.

2 See, however, Portfolio, OKI Scries, vols. i. and Hi., on rmssia's Policy.

!>

WHAT MANNER OF MAX HE WAS

25

intently fixed upon it. I was surprised, and at last answered, and said to him : ' That is Holstein you see. not Timbuctoo.' He turned upon me and said, ' Yes, Holstein ! and I was thinking of the day when that name would ring through Europe !' I was desirous to know what all this meant, and he then told me a great deal about the Oldenburgh Line, the renunciations of Peter, and a number of other antiquated matters, which really did not appear to me as much connected with the nineteenth century as the stories of Charlemagne and Barbarossa. I had for a moment misgivings as to whether or not his head had been turned, and I said to myself : ' How extraordinary that a man should understand as he does commercial matters and the East and England, and yet become wild whenever he can bring in Russia !' But when the insurrection came in the Duchies and then the Mediations, and then the interminable fight- ings about no one knew what, until it came to the Russian Protocols and Reservations, I remembered those words, and often mentioned them; I found it was I. not he, that had been mad. And I came to be considered a prophet at Hamburg by recollecting what he had told me a dozen years before."1

His prophecy of the results of the German Zollverein we have seen fulfilled in our day.2

" At midnight on January 1, 1834," he says, " the barriers between sixteen States were knocked down. . . . Sixteen States are added to the Prussian system and agglomerated around her disjointed and unconnected territory. ... It will make Germany indeed one, but that unity will, we fear, be no less disastrous to the parts of which it is com- posed than to the general interests of the European com- munity of which it is a member. . . . From the moment that Prussia collects and distributes the revenues she places herself, not in the position of a feudal lord, whose revenue was received from his vassals, but in the position of a proprietor, who distributes the means of subsistence to his agents and dependents. . . . Prussian custom-house collectors, her roads, weights, measures, coins, extended throughout the twenty-five millions, now composing the union, will soon be followed by her laws, by State papers,

1 Private Letter.

2 See Article by D. U. in the British and Foreign Review on " The Prussian Commercial League."'

24 DAVID URQUHART

This is no place to inquire how far he was right in regard- ing every political move in Europe as due to the machina- tions of the Russian Cabinet. We must remember, how- ever, that not only was the Russian foreign policy of an entirely unbroken uniformity, and her Foreign Ministers, unlike those of the rest of Europe, quite independent of political parties, but that, however we may account for it, within one hundred and fifty years the Russian power had advanced with frightening rapidity. At the time of the Crimean War she was one thousand miles nearer Teheran, seven hundred miles nearer Vienna and Berlin, and five hundred miles nearer Constantinople than she had been at the death of Tsar Peter.1 Urquhart was not alone in his bitter mistrust of Russia. The Poles looked upon her as their undoing, Turkey was like a fly helpless in her web, and M. Thiers looked forward with dismal prognostications to the time " when the Russian Colossus, with one foot in the Dardanelles and the other in the Sound, will make the whole world his slave and liberty will have fled to America." Urquhart, in the concentration of his mind on Russia, did not, perhaps, lay enough stress on the growing power of Prussia.2 The separation of the Duchies he regarded not so much as a rung, set by Bismarck, in the ladder of Prussia's rise to power, but as the result of Russian machination.

Mr. Behrens, who helped him in his commercial investi- gations, gives a remarkable instance of Urquhart 's almost supernatural prevision.

" We were walking along the Elbe conversing upon the state of England and Mr. Urquhart 's then accomplished career in the East. We sat down on an eminence to enjoy the view, and Mr. Urquhart asked me the name of the country spread out before us. I said, ' Holstein.' He exclaimed, with great excitement, 'Is that Holstein?' and interrupting our conversation he remained with his gaze

1 Progress of Russia, West, South, and East, D. Urquhart, second Edition 1853. It reached five editions. Sir John McNeil, who knew the East almost as well as Urquhart, is even more emphatic about the Russian menace in Ins Progress of Russia in the East.

2 See, however, Portfolio, Old Series, vols. i. and iii., on Prussia's Policy.

WHAT MANNER OF MAN HE WAS 25

intently fixed upon it. I was surprised, and at last answered, and said to him : ' That is Holstein you see, not Timbuctoo.' He turned upon me and said, ' Yes, Holstein ! and I was thinking of the day when that name would ring through Europe !' I was desirous to know what all this meant, and he then told me a great deal about the Oldenburgh Line, the renunciations of Peter, and a number of other antiquated matters, which really did not appear to me as much connected with the nineteenth century as the stories of Charlemagne and Barbarossa. I had for a moment misgivings as to whether or not his head had been turned, and I said to myself : ' How extraordinary that a man should understand as he does commercial matters and the East and England, and yet become wild whenever he can bring in Russia !' But when the insurrection came in the Duchies and then the Mediations, and then the interminable fight- ings about no one knew what, until it came to the Russian Protocols and Reservations, I remembered those words, and often mentioned them; I found it was I, not he, that had been mad. And I came to be considered a prophet at Hamburg by recollecting what he had told me a dozen years before."1

His prophecy of the results of the German Zollverein we have seen fulfilled in our day.2

" At midnight on January 1, 1834," he says, " the barriers between sixteen States were knocked down. . . . Sixteen States are added to the Prussian system and agglomerated around her disjointed and unconnected territory. ... It will make Germany indeed one, but that unity will, we fear, be no less disastrous to the parts of which it is com- posed than to the general interests of the European com- munity of which it is a member. . . . From the moment that Prussia collects and distributes the revenues she places herself, not in the position of a feudal lord, whose revenue was received from his vassals, but in the position of a proprietor, who distributes the means of subsistence to his agents and dependents. . . . Prussian custom-house collectors, her roads, weights, measures, coins, extended throughout the twenty-five millions, now composing the union, will soon be followed by her laws, by State papers,

1 Private Letter.

2 See Article by D. IT. in the British and Foreign Review on " The Prussian Commercial League."

26 DAVID URQUHART

State loans, and finally by conscription, and even at this moment, were the peace of Europe to be disturbed, the Federation would fly to arms at the bidding of Prussia, assemble under her banners, be paid by her from the common treasury, and obey her generals."

In denouncing the folly of the Crimean War Urquhart foretold that Russia would not suffer from it, but that, whether she lost or won, it would be a step on the down- ward path for Turkey. The Declaration of Paris proved to France in the war of 1870-71 what in 1860 he had said it would prove in the event of a war with Prussia — dire disaster.

This prophetic power of his Urquhart himself called ' ' the power of being right." There was nothing supernatural or extraordinary about it. It was simply the result of a system.

" Look at me," he said to his old friend, the Prince of Samos in 1862, " a man without position, with only mediocre talents, beginning with nothing, and yet I am always right. I cannot conceive the circumstances under which I should be wrong. For if an insoluble position arose I should stop. I should do nothing. Yet I tell you there is nothing in all that I have done that any other man might not have done, might not do. I have only hit upon a method — a method of procedure."

He differed from other men, he would have said, simply in this, his determination to be always right. It was within the power of every man to be right, and therefore his duty.

He could not, he said, believe in a God unless he could believe that a man had in himself this power of being right.

A man can be right, therefore he must be right, or he is not a man.

No allowance is made in the Urquhart philosophy for human weakness. The standard he set for himself he set for others also, without distinction of persons, class or sex. Such an evidence of trust and respect accounts in part for the honour and devotion he met with from his friends of every class, princes and working men alike, in

WHAT MANNER OF MAN HE WAS 27

spite of the harshness, even violence, with which he often treated them.1 His treatment of them was often as in- comprehensible to those who suffered under it as it was to the onlookers. He explained it himself as " the result of his working on men."

Starting from the axiom that it is within the power, and therefore the duty, of every man to be right, he asks, "Why, then, are they not right ?" " Because," he answers, " their eyes are blinded by self-love. Men of this corrupt age prefer seeming right to being right. They are furious when they are shown to be wrong; their self-love is hurt."

Therefore Urquhart's first object was to kill the self-love in those who were possible disciples, and so enable them to see themselves as he had once seen himself. In other words he believed he could effect nothing without a real conversion or new birth. To this end he often, at first, so infuriated men by his scathing and contemptuous lan- guage that they left him, determined to have no more to do with him. But he says that, thinking over his words calmly, they invariably found out that he was right, and if they had sufficient courage and truth in them they re- turned to him and were won. This was the way he won the Chartists; and later on Socialists and Atheists, who came to scoff, were drawn into his net by being shown, as one of them afterwards said, " that they had never been right in their lives."

This was the first step ; the second was the development of a conscience in public affairs. Man was born part of a community. He could not live to himself. If wrong were done by the State to which he belonged he could not say, " The Government has done this," and think no more about it.

" You have done it," said Urquhart, " and you will be punished in this world and the next. When national in- justice is done, who suffers ? Each individual in the State

1 His letters show that lie reproved as whole -hear tedly and severely his friends, Prince Czartoryski and Prince Frederick of Augustenberg, as he did his working-men disciples; they show also that he was just as respectful to a working-man as to any Crowned Head of Europe with whom he came in contact.

28 DAVID URQUHART

sooner or later, and the working-man first of all, for he is bound to his country and cannot get away from it. And yet people go on thinking that they can be right while the nation of which they are a part is wrong. They do this because they hide their responsibility under an abstraction and say, ' The State does this or that,' not ' I and my fellow-countrymen do this or that.' "

So we come to the third part of Urquhart's system, the cultivation of a right judgment, the first and most important part of which was the right use of words. " Men suppose that their reason has authority over words ; but it happens that words in return exercise power over reason," says Francis Bacon. The way to prevent a fact being under- stood and realised is to clothe it in abstract terms, to enunciate it under a general proposition, to use some term that is so common and yet so loose that it really conveys a false meaning to the minds of people, who think they understand it. Political and philosophical language is full of such terms. Urquhart applied the Socratic method1 to show their emptiness to all who glibly used them, without regard to their meaning or no -meaning.

The last and most important of all the means of being right was the acquisition of real first-hand knowledge, not someone's opinions, not loose and inaccurate information, but real knowledge. This means hard and self-denying labour. Such labour is everyone's duty, especially in the things that concern the government of his country, which it is the constant concern of all politicians to keep from him, particularly in relation to foreign affairs.

Such was Urquhart's system. In brief, it amounted to this: a man to be right must first cast aside the self he received from his age, and must set his true self to work at the acquisition of knowledge and self -discipline, striving all the time against allowing himself to be infected by the modern spirit and public opinion; when he was himself instructed he must teach others.

The pursuance of this method was as painful and uphill for the master as for the disciples. If the treatment meted

1 For Urquhart's method of teaching dialectic, see Appendix II.

WHAT MANNER OF MAN HE WAS 29

out, in their training, to men who were devoting life and substance to the great cause seems almost like cruelty, David Urquhart himself spent sleepless nights over their education. But he never flinched in what he conceived to be his duty. " One living soul," he says, " is to me the universe."

" My striving for your soul," he writes to a lady, whom he had convicted of want of intellectual sincerity, "is to get it clear-sighted and upright. It cannot be the last unless it is the first, for at every second of time, with an active mind such as yours, the slightest flaw in an intel- lectual operation gives a foothold for self-love. My life, alas ! is spent in watching these operations. There is scarcely a friend I have from whom the letter I receive may not be the last. I can retain them only by putting them beyond the reach of error and failure, for in that their self-love is offended by being told that they may have been wrong. And yet this alone is the condition on which I can hold intercourse with my fellow-creatures."

This crushing of self-love, " the entire abnegation of self," as he expresses it, was essential for every man among his followers. The little band was leading a forlorn hope. Hitherto their acquaintance with public questions had con- sisted " in floating on the top of a public frenzy aided by an assenting Government." Joined to his company, how- ever, they were " struggling against the stream." " There were no passions to be worked on, only right to be main- tained." No man could put his hand to the plough, not only without a perfect abnegation of every selfish end, but also without entire knowledge of the matter in hand. The aim of the ploughing was nothing less than the casting down of the evil of injustice and public immorality which was enthroned in the world, which found its complete expression in unjust war, and whose most perfect incarna- tion was Russia.

His followers must not only be, they must know. To that end they must labour, to that end they must study. They must spare themselves no toil or trouble. He who said this practised what he preached. His labour was incessant.

30 DAVID URQUHART

" There is nothing in the whole world," he says, " equal in my eyes to one man being always perfect, always able to convict, always indignant against wrong, whose mind ever occupies the judgment seat, who, in a word, is — judgment. That God created us for this is evident in our being the reverse; for what pushes each into the mire is the desire to appear to be right, that disposition which we familiarly designate among ourselves as self-love. Now this is the sure effect of failing to be right. Such an aspiration planted in the breast of all (as well as the necessary faculties them- selves) shows that being right is the end for which we were created. Here too lies the evidence of immortality revealed in man himself, the greatest of all revelations."

" Those only who see are honest. Those only can hope who work. Forget yourself. That is the first condition of good greatness and of real enjoyment."

If Urquhart had been asked to explain his moral point of departure he would doubtless have cited his extensive and sympathetic knowledge of the East. He went to Turkey from Greece, and was at first most unfavourably impressed respecting the character of Eastern countries by the Turkish Government and people.

It was after six years' work and experience that he felt forced to change his opinions. Obviously, though we may pass by for the moment the question of Turkish adminis- tration, he was qualified to form a judgment about Eastern life. It is the moral aspect of that judgment which affects us here. David Urquhart considered he had been convicted by a Mussulman of the crime of murder in unjust war, and that he had learnt from the Mussulmans the first principles, unknown in Europe, of cleanliness, courtesy, self-denial and sincere speech.

" If I take this musket unblessed by God, then I take it of the devil," said a simple Mussulman soldier, explaining why he and his companions had allowed themselves to be driven out of a redoubt, without firing a shot, by Russian soldiers. War had not been declared by the Fetva, there- fore to fight would have been murder. A Christian might do such a thing, a Mussulman never. Urquhart, whose own hands were reddened with the blood of men with

WHAT MANNER OF MAN HE WAS 31

whom his country was not at war (he had fought against the Turks in the Greek War of Independence), was brought up short against an overwhelming sense of guilt. " I would gladly have given myself up to justice," he says, " had there been a tribunal to deal with such cases." Instead thereof, he gave himself up to a lifelong struggle to re-establish the cause of law and justice between nation and nation.

This first lesson was followed by others, for it must be remembered that the Turkey he studied was not the Turkey of Constantinople, but the Turkey of the country villages unspoiled by European civilisation. The veil of European convention fell from his eyes. The mist of European language and ideas fell from his mind. He saw that there is something better than so-called progress, and that is " stationariness," when the latter means " the free right to property of every man, and the equality of all men before the law." When the status quo is good, man, especi- ally the Eastern, mistrusts all departure from it. Again, if government in the East is despotism, it is frank despotism, not legal tyranny; " men are not exasperated by the con- version into law, through the decisions of an accidental and numerical majority, of opinions they repudiate." It was in the East that Urquhart learnt the effect of manner and words on character. He saw a country where all classes mixed together in closest relationship, without familiarity on the one side, without haughtiness on the other; where the master addressed his servant in terms of respect and affection without fear of loss of dignity, because a common rule of respect and courtesy, unquestioned and irrefragible, governed all intercourse. Children brought up under that regime were neither cowed nor unruly. They were treated with respect and yielded obedience. He saw social inter- course free from the idle chatter and flippancy of European society, because politeness forbade anyone to speak unless he had something to say, and because it was the height of bad manners to tell anyone what he already knew. He found cleanliness carried to a pitch unknown in Europe, for the bath, as among the Romans, really carried away

32 DAVID URQUHART

the impurities of the skin, and even the hands must be washed by clean water being poured over them. And, lastly, he saw a state of society where an excuse was the worst of bad form, where a man must either prove himself right or admit himself wrong. In short, as he said towards the end of his life, he found a state of society in which all the ceremonies of the Catholic Church in her most solemn act of worship are part of the daily life of the people: the ablutions, the prayer of the priest1 when censing the Altar, the reverential posture of the ministers, not only towards God, but towards each other, and finally the ceremonial and ancient form of salutation given under the very eye of God made Man.

David Urquhart's contemporaries found his religious position very difficult to define. Like most other things about him, it seemed to most men a paradox. On the one hand, his code of ethics, at first sight, seems diametrically opposed to that which we are inclined to consider as dis- tinctively Christian. There is hardly anything in it which we can recognise as humility, or dependence on God. The fate of nations, according to it, depends entirely on the conduct of those who compose them. National catastrophes are always the direct result of stupidity or wrong-doing — the wrong-doing of every individual in the nation. Man will profit if he does his task with wisdom, knowledge and diligence. Man will suffer for carelessness, ignorance and folly. Man's first duty is to be right.

On the other hand, Urquhart says that the only end of his existence is to serve God, which service consists in being just— that is, in having a right judgment in all things. In a letter to an unbeliever he declares :

"lam daily and hourly engaged in the endeavour to lead the life of a Christian — that is, to be right in all things. That ' all things ' includes the minutest operation of the mind and perception of the senses."

He maintained that most so-called Christians were not

Christians.

1 Pone Domine custodiain ori meo . . . ut non declinet cor meurn in verba malitise ad excusandas excusationes in peccatis.

WHAT MANNER OF MAN HE WAS 33

" To know a Christian," he says, " there is the simplest of rules, which is also a Divine Commandment; it is ' By their fruits ye shall know them.' You must surely know that in this land there are no longer Christians, and with- out Christians how can there be Christianity ? . . . If there were amongst the missionaries a single Christian, he would not be found in China or Hindoostan, but in England, denouncing a race of malefactors and calling them to repentance."

There can indeed be no doubt of the depth and absolute sincerity of his religious convictions. They are manifest in every action of his life. His religious history is a singular one. Brought up by a clever and original mother,1 whose piety took the form of extreme Evangelicalism, his educa- tion threw him during the most impressionable time of his young life into contact with Catholics in foreign schools. No strong impression seems, however, to have been made on him till he came under the influence of Caesar Malan of Geneva. Under the spell of this famous Calvinistic teacher and his friends, the latent Calvinism Urquhart had inherited from his forbears burst forth in the youth of fifteen. He went about from village to village with Malan's " mission- aries," denouncing the Catholic religion as anti-Christ, setting forth the Gospel, and " desiring nothing so much as to become one of that zealous band, who had given up all to spread the pure word of God in the dark places of the earth "—i.e., in the Catholic Cantons of Switzerland ! " Constance," he says, "is so much under the curse of God for the burning of John Huss that there is scarcely one Christian known of in the town !"

But even under this strong Calvinistic influence his natural instinct for right action comes out.

" How curious is fate," he wrote to his mother in 1820. " We cannot pass, I really believe, a thousandth part of a hand-breadth of our chain. Not that I think we are blindly

1 Urquhart had been his mother's constant companion from infancy. Left a widow while he was still a young child, all her devo- tion was centred upon him. Her great desire was that he should gain a knowledge of men and things before " he went into abstruse studies," which she had observed "hardened the feelings and destroyed the heart."

3

34 DAVID URQUHART

to follow without consideration; we must make use of our judgment and do all for the best. That is our part, and things will only be blessed to us in so far as we act after these principles, but still our allotted part will be the unchangeable same. For the determination of the Almighty is unchangeable."

In order to break the Malan influence Mrs. Urquhart sent David to travel in Spain for six months with a tutor.

When the lad was close upon sixteen mother and son returned to England. Coming back to his native land must have been a new experience for young David, who had been abroad since his eleventh year.

We have little means of knowing how his inner self developed amidst the strenuous activities of his early manhood, which extended from engineering work as an operative at Woolwich Arsenal to farming operations. These works were evidently among the recreations of his vacations, for at sixteen he matriculated at St. John's College, Oxford. His career was interrupted by ill-health, which drove him to the South of France before he had completed his course. Instead of returning he embarked for Greece with Lord Cochrane, with whom his half- brother Charles was serving as a Naval Captain.

At the susceptible age of seventeen he began an intimate friendship with Jeremy Bentham, in whose affections from that time " our David," as he always calls him in writing to his mother, held a high place. That the old Sage appre- ciated fully his unusual mental endowments is evident in a letter answering one of Mrs. Urquhart's in 1830. " David has for years been better able to judge for himself than anyone at such a distance [he was then in Greece] can judge for him. The advice I submit to you is to leave the matter altogether to himself, accompanied with information of the utmost you are able to do or obtain for him in the way of money." In 1825 he had written a letter of introduction for him, beginning: " The bearer, David Urquhart, though rather too constitutionally born and bred, which he cannot help, poor fellow ! is an intimate and most worthy friend of mine, in whom I have entire confidence."

Probably close friendship with the old utilitarian de-

WHAT MANNER OF MAN HE WAS 35

veloped Urquhart's strong sense of the place of law in morality. Perhaps he unconsciously absorbed from him that belief in and dependence upon reason, that scornful contempt for stupidity or loose thought, that characterised him all his life. There was always about him a clear-cut hardness and a secure superiority which recall Bentham and his school.

His real spiritual awakening Urquhart dates from the rebuke given to him by the Mussulman soldier at a time when, " fortunately," he says, " I was young enough for the sense of shame not to be extinguished, and not having passed through the ordinary routine of education, nor having learnt to sneer at what is different to ourselves, . . . I found for the first time the perception of a human being." It is on the " perception of a human being " that David Urquhart afterwards takes his stand. "It is merely the natural law which makes men men and not beasts, that I ask you to observe," he says.

Her position as a great lawgiver and disciplinarian attracted him nearly all his life to the Catholic Church. But the attraction was on the intellectual side; no allow- ance is made for feeling.

This probably accounts for the curious sense of aridity with which, in spite of our admiration, Urquhart's life and writings so often inspire us. Even his wife, with her evan- gelical piety, did not dispel it.

To the end of his life Urquhart remained apparently aloof from human emotion, human passions, human weak- ness; the homely and comfortable things which surround other men's public work had no place in his. The gracious play of feeling, of sympathjr, the delicate light and shade which make the lives of so many great men like pleasant green hills, down which the streams bubble, on which flocks feed and lambs play, and which shelter in their folds little dwellings, whose blue smoke rises into the blue heavens, seem to have no place in that life of stern austerity and unremitting work. Urquhart stood like a clean-cut rock, alone, inaccessible, unsmiling, unaffected by rain or sun- shine, yet all the while bearing in nooks and crannies flowery treasures for those who knew where to look,

36 DAVID URQUHART

touching memories, unexpected tendernesses and sensitive affections. Little remarks here and there will show how the really human heart of the man suffered and loved. He and his wife were all in all to each other. "We are most happy," he writes, when nearly at the end of his life, to a friend in England, " and often wonder if there ever lived on earth two persons as happy as we are."

The people whom he admitted to his friendship had great power to hurt him. He could spend sleepless nights over the sorrows of a working-man friend whom he had not seen for twelve years.

" Do you think that I am destitute of human feelings," he writes to a friend, " that I could receive a letter with all those suppositions about myself from one to help whom in the discharge of his duty I have been labouring both by night and day, with any other feelings than those of great pain and extreme surprise ?"

As a child he was affectionate and sensitive to an almost inconceivable degree. A story is told that when he was still an infant in his nurse's arms, his father came in hurriedly and went out again without noticing him. The little David burst into a passion of grief which nearly cost him his life.

Nevertheless, David Urquhart, to most men of his time, stood strange, uncompromising, unadorned, the preacher of righteousness, that comes by the works of the law in an age which preferred to believe only in such righteousness as could be had without works. For those were the days when English statesmen could openly avow that Inter- national Law was no concern of theirs; they were the days when capitalists grew rich on the labour of babes, put to work as soon as they could totter, while Pharisees of the school of Hannah Moore were preaching to the poor their duty of submission and respect to their betters.

The love of International and National Justice was dead. The one had been slowly dying since the Peace of West- phalia, the other had received its death blow when, at the demolition of the monasteries, lands, which had kept many in contentment, were seized to enrich those whom the King delighted to honour.

And the nations were blindly content with this state of

WHAT MANNER OF MAN HE WAS 37

things. To arouse them a seer was wanted. That seer David Urquhart undoubtedly was. But he was the voice of one crying in the wilderness. Like Jeremiah he stood and cried aloud to the inhabitants of Europe. He told them of their iniquities, of which they were filling up the measure. He told them of the woe that would come upon them : nothing short of a universal catastrophe which would involve the whole of Europe.

And who can say to-day that he was not a true prophet ? " I see as clearly with the eye of the mind as others do with the eye of the body," he said. He belonged by birth to that mysterious race of the Celt which, for whatever reason, possesses psychic sight, from whom realities are wont to be hidden by the thinnest of veils. In Urquhart even that scarcely existed. The account he gives of his dream life shows how abnormally his sub-consciousness was developed.

" In my dreams," he says in a letter to a friend, "lam a being of a higher order than in my waking state, for I can not only imagine what is beyond my power to imagine when I am awake, but also can represent those imagined things to the senses as if real. I see the landscape and its colours, I see endless vistas of statues never seen with the waking eyes, and groves of bas-reliefs of the most exquisite beauty. I see the most intricate designs, endless, never the same, and as entirely original in conception as they are perfect in execution. They convey the most exquisite enjoyment, and to that extent, that when my waking eye takes in an object with pleasure, it seems but the faint reflection or memory of what I have enjoyed in sleep. That sleep existence is infinitely more intense than the waking one. I labour more, I never rest, I see more, understand more, enjoy more, and suffer more. I am the while causing myself to suffer, to enjoy, to understand, and all this in various persons at the same time. I can do things when asleep that I cannot do when awake. I can do that which when awake I can only appreciate. If, then, in another state I can accomplish what I cannot in this, there needs must be a faculty in the mind higher than its own powers of apprehension. It is in me all the time, only latent at some time, and that sometime is our normal state when awake."

38 DAVID URQUHART

This subconsciousness that worked constantly in his sleep worked unconsciously in his waking hours and made of David Urquhart a mystic. It is easy to recognise in his description of his dream state the mystical tempera- ment. It showed itself in other ways, notably in his extra- ordinary perception of what was in man. In conversation with his friends he would startle them by answering aloud their thought rather than their speech. One very remark- able story is told of his supernatural power of discernment. A great friend was anxious to bring his son to see and be introduced to the great man. The meeting had been arranged with difficulty; Urquhart was in England only for a short time, for the incident took place towards the end of his life, when his permanent home was in Savoy. But the youth must not be deprived of an interview he would remember all his life. When the day came David Urquhart was in a somewhat suffering state, and was lying on the couch in his sitting-room at the hotel. The sofa was in such a position that the person entering could not at once see it, so that when the youth came into the room Urquhart could only see his hand opening the door. But that was enough for him. Quick as lightning he left his couch and darted into his bedroom, whence no persuasions or entreaties of his wife could withdraw him. " No," ho said, " I will not see him; I will not be in the same room with that young man. The hand I saw is the hand of a criminal !" Not long after the youth brought himself within reach of the law for forgery .

Urquhart had that true and delicate perception of evil and strong (almost physical) loathing of it, which we are accustomed to associate with the Saints and mystics of the Catholic Church. Of such we hear how they faint in the presence of sin ; how they can see into the heart of a sinner ; how the sight of one venial sin is to them torment un- speakable. At first sight Urquhart seems to have little in common with a Catholic Saint. We look in vain for the shrinking from notice, the dependence on Divine help, the rapt states of prayer, the patience, meekness and out- ward humility that seem inseparable from the saintly character. But looking more closely there is more likeness

WHAT MANNER OF MAN HE WAS 39

than appears at first sight. The unique sign of the saintly life is the crucifixion of self. " I die daily," says St. Paul. To kill self-love was the first step in Urquhart's training of his disciples. The entire abnegation of self was his own ideal. " Be ye therefore perfect," is the standard set before the Saint. " To be a Christian is to be right in all things," said Urquhart. But with him harshness towards himself was not joined with leniency towards others. He exacted from others what he exacted from himself. And there lies the secret both of his power and of his failure, his power with the few, his failure with the many. For it is only the few who are what Professor James calls the twice-born, and one of these was Urquhart himself. He had been born again and washed and made whole ; he never returned to his wallowing in the mire. Having seen, like the souls of Plato's myth, one of the attributes of God, His eternal righteousness and justice, with the clear vision of the mystic, he could never again take man's counterfeits and call them righteousness and justice. Such to him were always base and evil, even the least noxious of them, and he counted them as sin, and to him there was no such thing as venial sin. Sin was always base and without excuse.

Had Urquhart had the full vision of the Saint, had he been beaten to the ground as St. Paul was in his journey to Damascus beneath the full rays of the Sun of Righteous- ness, he would have known the gentleness and patience, the almost infinite love and tenderness of the saintly soul. But hidden in a cleft of the rock he had seen but the skirt of God's garment of justice that covers the world and hides as well as reveals Him. Therefore he became a seer and a prophet; he missed being a saint. " I do not understand good," he says, " I only understand evil. I know I must resist sin in myself and evil in others." He saw this with his whole being, and he did it to the death.

But his idea of evil was very concrete. He would not allow that a man should accuse himself of cowardice, or avarice, or injustice in the abstract. That conduced to false humility and indolence. After all there is a comfort in labelling oneself and saying: " W7ell there it is; that is

40 DAVID URQUHART

what I am. What else can you expect of me but such things V But a man can be guilty of a coward act, of an unjust act, of an avaricious act. It is of these that he has to repent, and the proof of his repentance will be, Urquhart maintained, as in his own case, the impossibility of committing such an act again. It is so with all the brotherhood of the twice-born, and Urquhart knew no other.

" He (one of his disciples) said to me that he was cowardly and could not do this. I said to him : ' You are not cowardly, because there is no such thing as courage. It is not a thing — courage: it is merely the character of an act. The act has reference to the means of judging of the thing. If a man understands, he does that which is right to do, and he will therefore neither be courageous, nor will he be timid, and there will be no idea either of bravery or of cowardice. A man must err in act and err in judgment of that act, when he refers to the presence of cowardice for the deficiency of the performance of his duty. Not understanding what you have got to do, if you do less than, with such a know- ledge as you do possess, you might effect; or, not under- standing what you have to do, if you attempt more than you can accomplish you will have erred in both cases. And he who looks to the highest part of his own soul will think of that error. It is only he, who does not go to it but who hangs behind, who will speak of courage or cowardice. Not going to the source, not only will he not correct himself, but he will have his mind carried away from attention to those means by which he would correct himself, which was by better knowledge of the matter upon which he has to act, or a better arrangement of that mind by which he has to judge."

" To attribute character and tendencies to the mind, and to judge of the capacities of a man by them is," he goes on to say, "as if one found abstract ideas of the ills suffered by a man in sickness and tried thereby to remedy the disease. It is by this fatal habit that disease and decay go unchecked in men and nations, and such decay is, as a rule, only arrested by means of someone simple-minded and uninstructed."

Here speaks the age-long passion for reality of the twice- born, the getting at the thing which lies behind the ab- stractions which veil it from our crooked minds, the simple

WHAT MANNER OF MAN HE WAS 41

and direct vision of one who knows, who remembers what he saw in the heavens.

In the same conversation Urquhart tells how he had himself once had to write down at the request of a phren- ologist whom, with great reluctance, probably at the urgent request of his mother, he had consulted, what he considered to be his own mental and moral characteristics. He passed in review, he says, various qualifications and various de- ficiencies he thought he might possess, and in every instance that might prove the possession of such a quality or de- ficiency he found that they were all due to knowledge or ignorance of facts, of judgment, or misjudgment. And on the quality of judgment, on which all depended, he could not speak at all, because it was himself, and he could not see it because through that he saw other things. He was therefore reduced to presenting the phrenologist with a sheet of blank paper.

Self-examination was one of the first things that Urquhart taught his disciples, but it was their acts and omissions they were to examine. They were not allowed to take refuge from them in generalities. The religion of the ordinary religious person was, he declared, a mockery, because, instead of binding to his soul the commandments of God and fulfilling them in his public as well as in his private life, he hugged to himself generalities, among them the dangerous heresy that religion was an affair of a man's own soul and had nothing to do with politics or public affairs. It was by indulging in generalities that people could thank God for the conclusion of an unjust peace, that wealthy coal-owners could speak at meetings for the aboli- tion of negro slavery, while little girls of four and five were working for more than twelve hours a day as trappers in their mines.

Anyone can see this now; how many people saw it when Urquhart denounced the Chinese War and declaimed against the social conditions of his day ?

A most vivid and illuminating description of Urquhart in the full tide of his power and work is contained in a letter by a still living writer. Her husband, a member of one of the great Polish families whose life was spent in

42 DAVID URQUHART

struggling for the freedom of his people, found in Urquhart a friend ever stanch and faithful to the cause of Poland.

The letter was written from London in 1862 to a friend in Poland.

" You have probably heard the name of Urquhart. That man is a phenomenon, and to have met him makes an epoch in one's life. I do not know how to express, for I do not understand myself the impression he has made upon me. I heard a lecture of his on the Law of Nations; he spoke for nearly three hours, and I was sorry when he had done. I think he did not hesitate once or repeat a single time the same thought. He was repeatedly interrupted and drawn into a new current of thought. These thoughts flowed again, and to an unobservant listener it would have seemed he had hardly time to collect or develop them. He followed them up in the same way as if he were ascending a flight of steps, straight before him, not turning right or left, but at each step disclosing new horizons. I said to myself: 'This man is a genius, but strange to say, for all that he is disagreeable.' He has stayed with us three days; it is the third time he has done so since we have been here. He left to-day. However strong is the feeling that I could hate him, I know there are wonderful depths in him and that there is something which God must have put in the heart of man at the beginning of the world, which our civilisation has destroyed and corrupted. He is as learned as a Lexicon; this is a help, but not his principal weapon. His strongest argument is ' justice,' or, rather, ' truth.' He says that all trouble and disquiet in this world originate in the confusions of the notions of right and wrong in every man's mind. That Russia is most to be blamed for this confusion. That formerly people did wrong, but there was a judgment upon them, that now no one has any inde- pendence of judgment. That Russia has corrupted and loosened politics and diplomacy in the whole world, and that, in consequence, anyone who wishes to serve truth is bound to wage war without mercy with her and with all that serves her views, whether consciously or unconsciously. This is why he got acquainted with my husband. He upbraids everyone with being untruthful, and when he begins to convince you of some prevarication or cowardice, or concession to wrong, or turning aside from the right path, such as bowing to the golden calf, or prejudice, etc., etc., without end, willingly or not one enters into one's

WHAT MANNER OF MAN HE WAS 43

conscience and looks at it in a new light. And it is im- possible to deny that he is in the right in many, many ways. He told me : ' Vous aviez un fond de caractere (I think he meant honesty) qui etait une force mais qui est devenue, n'etant pas bien dirigee, un embarras, et ce qui vous etait donne comme une force n'est qu'une faiblesse maintenant.' And he speaks in this way to everyone, when he does not say a thousand times stronger things. The shades of right and wrong which are very delicately pencilled in the very depths of one's soul and do not show at the surface ' il vous somme de les faire paraitre.'

" But it is quite useless my trying to write about him, he is impossible to describe. He goes about like a comet with an immense tail of followers from every possible class of society, who believe in him as in the Gospel. And whoever is not with him is against him. He is called 'madman,' 'charlatan,' I know not what. He is known by everyone, but it is sufficient to name him in society here to be classed as a fool. You are laughed at in the face and asked, ' Oh, you are Urquhartite ? Very well !' But not only is one looked at as a fool, but also as a spy in the camp, for people are afraid of him. He brings to light and shows to the public view all the mean dealings and bribery of the English Ministers. He is ready to work night and day, to sacrifice health and property for the sake of Poland. He will thunder out to you, ' What is Poland to me % Poland is nothing to me : it is justice that I am seeking and working for.' Someone asked him why he was friends with my husband. ' We are never of the same opinion,' he answered, ' but it is a man who has given up everything that is personal for the sake of what is right, and that is why I am his friend.' That Lord R. who is being sent to Berlin is his pupil, but does not equal his master by far ; he is in love with him, though often disappoint- ing. Mr. Urquhart says of him that for fear of his con- stituents he (Lord R.) dare not speak out or act as his conscience bids, and adds : ' I do not trust him for a moment ; I have had to struggle with his ambition (in office), and now I have to struggle with his cowardice ' ; and that he says not only of him but to him.

"I do not know why I write all this, but I will have to meet him all along, and I cannot well write when you know nothing of the people we have to deal with. When his course of lectures come out I will send them to you ; please read them with attention."

CHAPTER II

THE EAST AND THE WEST: URQUHART AT CONSTANTINOPLE

" Still eyes look coldly upon me; Cold voices whisper and say — He is crazed with the spell of far Arabia, They have stolen his wits away."

Walter de la Mare.

Urquhart's knowledge of the East, his love for the Turk and hatred of the Russian began with the Greek War of Independence.

After the Treaty of Adrianople,1 though Capodistrias had offered him the command of a civil Province, he spent his time in studying the ancient Municipal Institutions, first in Greece and afterwards in Turkey. During a visit to Constantinople the knowledge of mineralogy which he acquired in vacation excursions from his private tutor at Oxford, Gerald Smith, brought him to the notice of the Sultan. This knowledge which had been to him a form of recreation stood him in good stead, for it introduced him to the Seraglio, and was the beginning of his subsequent and often intimate relationships with successive members of the Turkish Government.

Like M. Le Play, he applied the methods of scientific investigation to the study of the East.

Returning in 1830 to England through Albania, which had broken out into revolution, he published his observa- tions in a series of articles in the Courier. They attracted the notice of William IV., who had already heard much of this brilliant youth through his private secretary, Sir Herbert Taylor, a lifelong friend of his mother.

It seemed as though Urquhart's career was made.

1 See Biographical Sketch in the Conversations Lexicon.

44

URQUHART AT CONSTANTINOPLE 45

In the year 1831 Sir Stratford Canning, Envoy Extra- ordinary to Constantinople, sent the young man, then only twenty-six, on a secret mission to Albania to induce the Grand Vizier, Rescind Mohammed Pasha, to renounce his intention of carrying the power of Albania against Greece, a measure which would probably have resulted in the complete subjugation of that country. Urquhart met Rescind Mohammed at Scodra, and was successful in his enterprise. His mission accomplished, he returned home through Wallachia, Moldavia, Austria and Germany, making observations all the way. He was much struck with the German Customs Union,1 and seems to have seen at a glance the probable effects on English, indeed on European, commercial interests. More clearly still were his eyes opened to the deliberate hostility of Russia to European development. With these ideas in his mind he determined to travel through Europe and Asia, and to make far-reaching observations as to the political and com- mercial conditions prevailing in the countries most exposed to Russian influences.

His plan involved a journey through Prussia and Austria down the Danube to Trebizond, through Persia and Central Asia, and finally through Tartary to China.

Through his friends at Court, Urquhart succeeded in commending his scheme to the Secretary of the Board of Trade, and was sent out again with a practically free hand to make commercial investigations in Europe and Asia.

But arriving in Turkey he was struck with the growing hostility of the Sublime Porte to England — due, as he believed he had discovered, largely to Russian machinations. He renounced, therefore, for the present, his plan of proceeding to the Far East and settled down in Turkey, determined to bring about as good an understanding between the Otto- man Empire and his own country as existed between himself and the Sultan.

To this end he made himself as a Turk. He lived in a Turkish house, surrounded himself with Turks, both as

1 He published his impressions on the jnobable effect of that Union in an article in th.9 British and Foreign Review, Oct. 1835.

46 DAVID URQUHART

servants and as friends, became complete master of the language, and rose so high in the esteem of his adopted countrymen that they treated him in all respects as one of themselves, even to giving him the Turkish Temena or salutation, which as a rule they bestow upon none but the sons of the Prophet.

One result of the long residence in the East was the Turkish Commercial Treaty which he drew up and sub- mitted to both the English and Turkish Governments.

Diplomatist as he was by choice, he saw in commerce the firmest bond for the union of Peoples, as well as one of the most powerful weapons for world dominion in the hands of an unscrupulous Government. In a close commer- cial union with Turkey there was, he maintained, not only the possibility of a vast increase of trade with England, but a most effectual means of combating that insidious method of conquest by diplomacy and trade whereby Russia was enlarging her borders and increasing her sphere of influence.

In 1833 he published Turkey and her Resources, an epoch- making work in the history of the Eastern Question.1 The Conversations Lexicon speaks of it as " one of the most surprising productions in literature," and there is no doubt that the amount of fresh knowledge brought by it within reach of Europeans, and the originality of its conclusions turned the thoughts of many of the thinkers

1 Urquhart's "Turkey" has never been approached, far less superseded.

Sir William White, the British Ambassador in Constantinople from 1885 to 1891, was wont to say that no one could pretend to know the East who did not know his " Urquhart "; and to this day those who have attained to anything beyond a superficial knowledge of the baffling intricacies of the Eastern Question echo his words.

Sir William White's opinion is, from his first-hand knowledge of the East, of great value. Indeed, so far was that knowledge and experience beyond that of any of his contemporaries in the Diplo- matic Service, that, notwithstanding his having been a mere consul, and in spite of his faith (he was a Catholic, and there had been no Ambassador of that religion since the Reformation), the Govern- ment could not avoid sending him as Ambassador to Constantinople.

His policy was to build up the Balkan States as a bulwark against Russia.

Sir William White furnished the rare — perhaps, in Constantinople, the unique — example of an Ambassador whose appointment was due solely to his being a skilled and honest diplomatist.

URQUHART AT CONSTANTINOPLE 47

among politicians towards the hitherto much misunder- stood East. The entire falsity of European ideas on the whole Eastern Question was one which Urquhart never ceased to impress on statesmen.

In 1834 he published his pamphlet England and Russia, which he sent to the Duke of Wellington with a letter1 pointing out that the whole treatment of Turkey had been systematically calculated to throw her, where of herself she never wished to be, into the arms of Russia, that England's neglect had been the opportunity of the Power which made use of any and every means for gaining in- fluence and control. " Her agents," he said, " speak the language, have access to every office, and to the intimacy of the Sultan. Their opportunities are seized for the propagation of opinions which, being reiterated day by day without contradiction, are more or less believed, and are so far accepted as to have introduced into the Government a feeling on foreign politics . . . that no reliance can be placed on her promises, that the power of England is verging to its decline, that Russia is about to upset its dominion in India, that the power and resources of the Russian Government are unlimited, save by the moderation of the Emperor." He pointed out how ready the mass of the Turkish people were to believe the contrary of " this, to them, afflicting picture." " I have," he says, " been within the last year on the Western and Eastern frontiers of Turkey, and I can bear witness to the universality of the hopes that to my utter amazement I found placed in England by every tribe and in every hamlet."

Urquhart saw and never tired of saying that Turkey with her teeming soil ought to be England's market. He also saw, and said it to the constant discomfiture of the English Government and of the Russian merchants, that Russia was working to shut her out of that market. He pointed not only to the Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi, but to the blockade of the free and independent state of Circassia by Russia and to the newly created provinces of Wallachia and Moldavia which she was trying to get into her net.

1 Foreign Office Papers, 26G.

48 DAVID URQUHART

It was not only Urquhart who was alive to this attitude of Russia. The British Consul at Belgrade wrote in 1838 to Her Majesty's Government that the Russian Agent was insistent in his demands on Prince Milosch of Servia to give no credence to the assurances of any English Agent as regards the settlement of the Servian Question at Constantinople if he wished for Russia's friendship and protection. But Prince Milosch replied that " he should choose his own friends," and the Consul earnestly impressed on Lord Palmerston that " if Her Majesty's Government should abandon the interests of Servia and expose Prince Milosch to the vengeance which awaits him at the hands of Russia, British influence would cease throughout Euro- pean Turkey, and all future assurances of Her Majesty's Government would be received with suspicion."1

It was Urquhart 's great anxiety about the establish- ment of right relations between Britain and the East that led him to ask for an official post in the Embassy at Con- stantinople, where he hoped that his friendship with Lord Ponsonby, the Ambassador, on the one hand, and with the Sultan and his ministers on the other, would enable him to attain his object. In 1836, thanks to the offices of the old sailor King, William IV., who had a warm place in his heart for the young officer of his own Service,2 Palmerston found himself obliged, evidently with great reluctance, to appoint Urquhart to the Embassy of Constantinople as First Secretary. Having given him the post he was ex- tremely anxious to get him safely out of London, but Urquhart declined to move until he had obtained certain concessions from the English Government, which would make his work possible and his post not a sinecure.

These were : an immediate increase in the Navy, a closer connection with France against Russia, the re-establishment of friendly relations between Persia and Turkey, the aboli- tion of the system of Dragomans in Constantinople and the conclusion of three Commercial Treaties, one between England and Turkey, which was, as it seemed, practically

1 Foreign Office Papers, 266, Oct. 10, 1838.

2 Urquhart had a Lieutenant's Commission under Lord Cochrane.

URQUHART AT CONSTANTINOPLE 49

settled; another between England and Persia, to place a limit on Russian influence in the East, and another between England and Austria, which was practically a defensive alliance against Russia in the West.

Of these points, two, the increase of the Navy and the Commercial Treaty with Turkey, were conceded without diffi- culty. The Navy increase took place almost at once, thanks to the support of William IV. Of the other points none wag refused; the question of the Dragomans, which seemed to Urquhart most important, for he declared the English Drago- man was brother to the Russian, was promised careful con- sideration, as were also the Treaties with Persia and Austria.

It seemed as though anything was possible to a young man who could so obtain the confidence of two Govern- ments before he was thirty, and Urquhart departed to his post at Constantinople full of hope.

Never was there a more disastrous ending to an under- taking which promised so well.

Urquhart's short diplomatic career was a conspicuous failure. That the failure was in some measure attributable to himself there is little doubt. He had obviously no idea that it was part of his duty to fulfil the conventional func- tions of a Secretary of Embassy. Instead of sedulously attending ambassadorial functions, attired as a Secretary of Embassy should be attired, and ready to enliven them with the brilliant conversation in which he was a past master, he retired with a friend to a cottage near the Embassy, where he spent his time in conversing with Turks, in study and in writing. Only four times in two months did he appear at the Ambassador's dinner-table. " The English mission " was singularly and collectively shocked at finding one of its official representatives adopting Turkish dress and Turkish habits, and eating Turkish food in the Turkish manner.

What a blow to the English prestige in Constantinople !

What an unpardonable lowering of the flag of English superiority in the face of the Heathen I1

1 See Foreign Office Papers, 309, 78. Memorandum by Mr. Frazer, on the differences between Lord Ponsonby and Mr. Urquhart, July 27, 1837.

4

50 DAVID URQUHART

Far more serious, however, than the social stigma which he brought upon himself was the attitude which Lord Ponsonby adopted towards the young diplomatist with whom he had previously been on the most friendly and even affectionate terms.1 When Urquhart arrived in

1 The correspondence found among Urquhart's private letters between himself and Lord Ponsonby, during his visit to England in 1835-36, is like the correspondence between an affectionate and intimate father and son.

The following account of his position in Turkey, however, from a MSS. Life found among his papers, is enough to show that even if it is here exaggerated, his position as a Secretary to Embassy was quite incompatible with it.

The writer was a barrister, a friend of Urquhart's, and the account is a conversation that he had with a Greek commercial agent, who had known Urquhart during his sojourn in Turkey.

" Mr. Lovi {the Agent): ' The first thing he did was to adopt the dress and customs as near as possible, and, knowing the customs so perfectly, he used to go into Turkish houses, and was received the same as a Turk, taking care never to infringe upon the Turkish customs, that is to say, always leaving the shoes at the door, and other tilings of that kind. . . . The consequence was that he was courted by all the great men; so much so that even the Pashas would come and beg him to introduce them to one another ! . . . He gained so much ground, that a general order was given in all the forts and fortresses that whenever he came a guard was turned out, and he was received as if he had been a Field -Marshal. . . . Lord and Lady Ponsonby dined with Mr. Urquhart to see the Turkish mode of living.'

"Mr. Westmacott: ' In fact, Lord Ponsonby gained his knowledge of the East, and of Turkish manners, from what he observed in Mr. Urquhart's house V

"Mr. Lovi: 'Exactly. . . . There is a kind of officer sent by the Government to see that there is no riot. He was stationed in the Hall of the Palace. When the Ambassador would pass through he would take no notice, but if Mr. Urquhart came he jumped up in a moment; and this because a Turk holds himself superior to any Frank. The lowest Turk will never get up to receive any Frank. Mr. Urquhart was always received as one of themselves, and with even a great deal more respect. ... On Mr. Urquhart's departure after a visit to Mustapha Pasha, he turned out his body-guard and lined the streets down to Mr. Urquhart's house. He could not have done more if it had been the Sultan. . . . The Ministers were always very much afraid that the Russians would get to know that he (Mr. Urquhart) communicated with them — I know that Achmet Pasha used to send his boat generally at midnight for him to avoid observation. . . . When he went away to England the impression was that he was coming back as Ambassador; that Lord Ponsonby intended to resign and that Mr. Urquhart was to take his place. They look to him as the regenerator of Turkey up to the present day.' "

With such a position as this at his feet in Turkey, with the con-

URQUHART AT CONSTANTINOPLE 51

Constantinople in July, 1836, as Secretary, it was to find his relations with the Ambassador suddenly and entirely changed : the archives of the Embassy were closed to him, his work was thwarted, and his person treated with con- tempt, contempt that increased with the lapse of time, until at last Lord Ponsonby refused to acknowledge his official existence or to communicate with him except through the Dragoman Pisani. No greater insult cou'.d have been put upon him, for Urquhart had always pro- tested against the presence of the Dragomans at the Em- bassy, and had refused to employ them as intermediaries. He felt this treatment so acutely that his health suffered, and the only way in which he could endure it was to with- draw himself to a Turkish village and there carry on that intercourse with the Turks which he had found impossible in Constantinople.

Meanwhile the estrangement between the Ambassador and the First Secretary was common talk.

Urquhart himself in after years refused to believe that Lord Ponsonby was really responsible for his incompre- hensible behaviour.1 He attributed it to the deliberate

fideuce of the King in England, with his great knowledge ox the possibilities and resources of the East, and his full conviction of what we are just beginning to discover, the rottenness of the so-called civilisation of the West, what a martyrdom must Urquhart have suffered, when at 30 years old the gate to the way of usefulness both to Turkey and his own country was suddenly shut upon him by the suspicion and dislike of one man, and he was bidden, so far as the Government service was concerned, to eat out his heart in silence and inaction !

1 Mrs. Urquhart, in a letter written shortly before Lord Ponsonby's death, in 1855, gives a very touching account of the resumption of their relations. " Yesterday," she says, " we went to Brighton by appointment to call on Lord and Lady Ponsonby. He was the Ambassador at Constantinople under whom David served when he was Secretary of Embassy there. Since then, the year 1837, they have never met. You have heard of David's being recalled at that time. Some months ago Lord Ponsonby said with much emotion in the presence of two or three friends of D.'s: 'He is the most generous of men. I ruined him and he has never spoken a word against me.' At the same time he bore testimony to his accurate judgment and his wonderful power of action.

" But now I have heard with my own ears what he thinks of my husband. He has been very ill, and he said something to me of his invalid state. I replied that we never wanted him so much as now. On which he turned to David, and said, ' There is the man. He has

52 DAVID URQUHART

misrepresentations made to the Ambassador by Lord Palmerston, who was afraid of Urquhart's anti-Russian policy, and had adopted the plan of making him harmless by blighting at once and for ever his diplomatic career in lieu of the more direct means which he would have adopted had it not been for the King's affection for the young diplomatist.

At the same time it must be admitted that Urquhart at large amongst the conflicting interests and inflammable materials of Constantinople was " like a fire-ship let loose in the Bosphorus." With his versatile genius, his extra- ordinary knowledge, his private friendship for the Sultan, his great influence in the Turkish Government, he stood forth the most conspicuous figure in Constantinople. It began to be whispered abroad that he had come out en- trusted with special powers from the English Government, which were to supersede those of ordinary diplomatists. Everyone knew that he was responsible for the Commercial Treaty, from which such great things were hoped, and he was respected accordingly. It was of no avail that he withdrew into obscurity during the first weeks of his return to Constantinople, and ran the risk of offending many of his most influential Turkish friends by refusing to see them. " Daoud Bey " was in everyone's eyes, and his name on

been at work since the beginning, and has been always right. He has never iailed to point out both the wrong done and what ought to have been done.' More than once he returned to the subject, and expressed the most complete concurrence with him. He can think of nothing but the state of the country, which he believes to be desperate. He said he had too good reason to know that the upper classes are fearfully worthless, and believes that the only hope of safety is in some one man being found fit to rescue the State as Dictator.

" But what we were able to tell him of the work going on in the North gave him new conceptions of what might still be done.

'• I am sure he lay down easier in his bed that night, not only from the evident gratification of seeing David, but also from what we told him. He is a magnificent old man, just 84 he told me. I have never been in the presence of any one like him. I fear he does not leave one like him behind. There is no trace in others of such scorn and disgust for wickedness or wrong, or that same feeling for his country that a man has for what is most dear to him.

" David and he will henceforth take counsel together for England, as of old they did for Turkey."

URQUHART AT CONSTANTINOPLE 53

everyone's lips, and doubtless the Ambassador heard from all quarters what great things he was to do. He would not have been human had such a state of things been pleasing to him. Matters were not improved by indiscretions of one of Urquhart's friends who, in letters to English papers, combined strictures on the effete methods of the Embassy with admiration for Urquhart's knowledge and talents.

Moreover, it must be admitted that neither then nor at any other time of his life did Urquhart shine in a subordi- nate position. Before he went out to Constantinople he wrote with all the air of a plenipotentiary to Backhouse, the Permanent Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs: "I saw the Turkish Ambassador in Paris, and conferred with him on the possibility of obtaining Firmans from the Porte for the passage of an English line of battleship through the Dardanelles." Backhouse was left gasping, and Lord Palmerston sent the following very justifiable snub: "Mr. Urquhart must learn to submit himself to the discipline of the Service to which he belongs. A private person may act on his own impulse, but a Commissioned Officer must wait till he is told to act. . . . This is a very important point, and unless Mr. Urquhart fully comprehends this principle of duty, and is prepared to attend to it, I should think it highly inconvenient for the Public Service that he should go to Constantinople. For the reason above stated I must desire that Mr. Urquhart be apprised that I highly disapprove of his having held communication upon Public Matters with the Turkish Ambassador at Paris without having been instructed or authorised by me to do so."1

Mr. Urquhart took the rebuke in a proper and submissive spirit. It is, however, scarcely likely that this was the only occasion on which he exceeded the very limited powers of a Secretary of Embassy. It is as easy to imagine Pegasus meekly submitting to be harnessed to the carriage which took the Ambassador for his daily airing as David Urquhart patiently trotting along in the appointed routine of a Secretary of Embassy in early Victorian days.

It is not, therefore, surprising that his diplomatic career

1 Foreign Office Papers, 307.

54 DAVID URQUHART

came to an untimely end, under circumstances which pre- cluded any hopes of its resumption. In March, 1837, he was recalled and his papers cancelled, Lord Palmerston refusing to give any reason beyond that of his open dis- agreement with the Ambassador. There is, however, one circumstance in particular that serves to confirm Urquhart's idea that his removal was due to Russian influence in the English Cabinet, and that is, the confiscation by a Russian warship of the merchant ship Vixen, sent through his agency to the coast of Circassia, and the acquiescence by Lord Palmerston in Russia's refusal to pay any compensation to her owners.

The story of David Urquhart's dealings with Circassia is one of the most romantic episodes in his life. He was the first Englishman to land on her shores, and on his visit he went there quite alone. The beauty and splendid physique of those mountain tribes, living a simple, primitive life, rich in noble tradition and in rare and fine craftsmanship, impressed him, no less than his intellect, the fire of his energy and his unique and fascinating personality attracted them. They begged him to become their chief and to lead them, in council as in war, against the Russians, who, by wile and cruelty were depopulating their country and stealing their territory. He refused, thinking to serve them better in his own country, and even though he failed in his aim, the Circassians never lost faith in him. Twenty years later, in the supreme hour of their country's last agony, they sent three of their chiefs to England, hoping still in the power and influence of " Daoud Bey " and the great nation in which they still believed because it was his.

All Urquhart's chivalry was engaged on behalf of these patriarchal tribes of the Caucasus, who, possessing a country but the size of Scotland, had yet successfully resisted the " million bayonets " which Russia declared Providence had entrusted to her. " Russia," said Urquhart, " has never been able to conquer the Circassians of the Black Sea. Still in sight of the Russian fishers of Anapa peasant girls tend their flocks, and warriors meet in the open air in solemn deliberation. No title could be obtained by con-

URQUHART AT CONSTANTINOPLE 55

quest. No other State had ever possessed Circassia. Cir- cassia, therefore, could never be obtained by cession. The device hit upon in this difficulty was simple. Russia ceded Circassia, which she did not possess, to Turkey, in order that a few years later she might compel Turkey, which in like manner did not possess it, to cede it to Russia."

This cession took place under the Treaty of Adrianople. Russia henceforth set to work to subdue the Caucasus, which was an effectual bar to her progress in the East. In 1831 she instituted what was practically a blockade of the Circassian coast, under pretext of plague quarantine, pro- hibiting trade with any place, except two stations where she had custom-houses.

Such was the position when Urquhart visited Circassia in 1834. His indignation was aroused at the injustice done to this small nation, while England, the defender of the oppressed, looked on unmoved. Lord Ponsonby was entirely in sympathy with him. :£ Your visit has been the occasion of great emotions," he wrote in September, 1834. "I think it is important that the Government should be put in ample possession of the political state of the Circassian nations without any delay. Will you draw up a memoir on the subject ? I will send it in a despatch. It is right that you should receive the credit due to the exposition of the facts, which have been hitherto only generally and superficially known. ... If we do not take care, Russia will possess the Caucasus and all the power which that possession will give her over Turkey and Persia."

In November, 1834, the Ambassador wrote to Lord Palmerston :

Lord Ponsonby to Lord Palmerston re Circassia and Mr. David Urquhart.

Therapia,

Nov. 24, 1834.

My dear Palmerston,

I have a few words to say in reply to your letter of the 10th, wherein you express some alarm respecting Urquhart 's conduct towards the Circassians. It is evident to me that you have not attended to the facts, and I feel confident you will be quite at your ease when you have

56 DAVID URQUHART

examined them. . . . The Circassians could not be excited to revolt, because they were at the time, and had long been, in arms against Russia, and had just defeated the Russian corps. There are 4 or 6 millions of people determined not to be transferred like herds of swine to the Russians, but resolved to assert their rights and liberty. I do not know the Englishman alive who would not, when asked, have given advice to such people how to act to render legitimate their virtuous, noble, and just resistance to a yoke which Russia has no right to impose upon them.

Urquhart counselled those who sought counsel from him to assert their right to independence by the declaration that they were not the subjects of Russia, had never been so, and would not be so. All of which was comprised in the declaration of then national independence, and which, if maintained de facto, would be esteemed by many (the Americans to wit) as sufficient ground for our acknowledg- ment, which in the case of South America was by ourselves held to be sufficient ground for treating with that country, and which, in the older case of North America, authorised France to acknowledge that country. Urquhart is not a diplomatic agent of His Majesty's Government.1 He has no character whatever as a public servant. He, I believe, has been employed merely to collect what may be called statistical information. His words nor his acts could not implicate Her Majesty's Government, and lastly, it is wholly a secret to everybody that he is employed at all by the British Government.

Now, in addition to the above, I have to add that I learned from Capt. Lyon, who accompanied Mr. U., that so far from urging on the Circassians to encounter risks, he said the strongest things possible when replying to their ques- tions, to persuade them to act with caution and the most careful attention to consequences dangerous to themselves from their isolated and destitute situation, and the hope- lessness and improbability of their receiving aid from any foreign Power.

I have said this much in part from a feeling of what is just, in part from a feeling generated in my bosom by the thing itself.

I leave to Urquhart the proofs of the facts.

Believe me, (Signed) Ponsoxby.2

1 He was on a secret commercial mission tour.

2 Foreign Office Papers, 266.

URQUHART AT CONSTANTINOPLE 57

David Urquhart 's championship of Circassia was, how- ever, by no means favourably regarded at home, and the Ambassador received letters requiring the removal from Constantinople of the " gentleman who had visited Cir- cassia," because he was " endangering the peace of Europe." " What can I say," wrote Lord Ponsonby to Urquhart, referring to these letters, " but that curs will bark and rogues he and fools believe, and time show the cowardice of the one, the falsehood of the other, and vary the folly of the last."

Since Urquhart had a friend at home in the person of William IV. as well as one at that time in Constantinople in the person of the Ambassador, it was two years before his enemies could get rid of the man who was " endanger- ing the peace of Europe." They, however, succeeded in preventing any action by England in defence of Circassia. The coast of Circassia continued to be blockaded by Russia and all trade with her stopped.

Urquhart adopted another plan. In 183G, in order to assert the commercial right of England to trade with Circassia, he induced his friends the Bells, a firm of English merchants with a commercial house in Constantinople, to fit out a small ship laden with salt for a voyage to the Circassian coast. The vessel reached its destination and was for two days in trade with the inhabitants, when a Russian warship entered the harbour and seized her on the pretext of a breach of blockade. Redress was de- manded by the owners from the British Government, and Lord Palmerston entered into correspondence with the Russian Government, who, in a high-handed manner, justified her action on the ground, not of blockade, but that the port where the vessel lay was Russian territory. This was absolutely no justification, because if it had been so, which it was not, there was a Commercial Treaty between England and Russia, and England had a right to trade with Russian ports. But Lord Palmerston, who had purposely postponed the whole matter till the Session of Parliament was at an end, pretended to accept it; the owners of the Vixen received no compensation for their

53 DAVID URQUHART

loss, and were ruined in consequence. William IV. was now dead, and Urquhart was at the mercy of Palmerston, who made this affair one of the causes of complaint against him when pressed hard for reasons for his dismissal, and refused to allow him any opportunity to justify his action. When the question was brought by Sir Stratford Canning before the House, Palmerston refused to read the letter which Urquhart had written to him in his defence, saying it was a lengthy tissue of mis-statements and misrepresenta- tions, which he had not had the time to answer, and indeed had not properly read.1

So ended Urquhart 's short and stormy diplomatic career. He had flashed like a meteor through the Foreign Office, seriously disturbing its peace, and no doubt the officials, permanent or otherwise, sighed with relief when he had gone.

Successive Governments, however, discovered to their cost that Urquhart at large was a more disturbing element than Urquhart bound by the slight trammels of the Diplomatic Service. In July, 1838, the Turkish Treaty came out.

" This treaty," says Mr. Urquhart in a letter to The Times, " was originally a suggestion of my own to the Turkish Government. Adopted by it, it was in the first instance rejected by the English Government, and after a year of truly laborious efforts it was finally admitted. The object of the treaty was so to lower the export and import tariff on Turkish goods, particularly those in which she came into competition with Russia, as to increase considerably Turkey's trade and cheapen England's com- modities, notably corn and oil and raw silk. In the original draft the duty was three per cent, on both exports and imports, and transport duty and harbour duty were not to raise it above five per cent."

When the treaty finally came out, however, though Palmerston maintained that it was the same which Urquhart had drafted, a few adroit additions had so altered it as to destroy any possibility of Turkey's being able to compete

1 See Parliamentary Papers relating to the seizure and confisca- tion of the Vixen by the Russian Government, presented to both Houses of Parliament, 1837.

URQUHART AT CONSTANTINOPLE 59

with Russia in trade with Britain. British commerce was, in fact, charged with an additional duty of two per cent, import and nine per cent, export, an aggregate duty nomi- nally of eleven per cent., which was in reality augmented to seventeen per cent, above the rate paid by Russian commerce, and Britain was excluded from equality of rights with Russia.1

1 Treaty of Commerce with Turkey, 1838. The following account of the negotiation of the Treaty of Commerce recently concluded with Turkey is given by " a Levant Merchant," in a letter to the editor of The Times, who acknowledges the respecta- bility and extensive knowledge of the writer: In 1834, Mr. Urqu- hart, being then in Constantinople, was called upon by one of the ministers of the Sultan to give his advice upon a question of internal administration connected with the duties on import and export commerce, on which occasion he suggested to the Turkish Govern- ment that they should propose to Great Britain a new treaty of commerce, based upon precisely those principles which are contained in the one lately signed. Obstacles were at first raised, but after much discussion, his views prevailed, and he was requested to bo the mediator between the two Governments for the negotiation of the matter. He consulted various British merchants in Constan- tinople on the subject, in order to hear their opinions, but, so far from viewing it as they now do, their perceptions were so darkened by prejudiced favour of the old system of things, and fear, perhaps, lest any change might render commerce more easy for new-comers, that, with hardly an exception, they condemned the project as dangerous, impossible and absurd. However, strong in his own convictions, Mr. Urquhart came to London, followed by a Turkish Ambassador, who was to support his project, and whom I then often heard express his coincidence in Mr. Urquhart's views. Overtures were made to the Foreign Office, but for a long time total apathy and apparent or pretended ignorance of the value of the proposition closed the door to all progress, until in the autumn and winter of 1835 the matter began to be attended to, entirely through the influence of his late Majesty, who saw the true value of Mr. Urquhart's views with regard to Turkey, and commanded that they should be carefully discussed. Mr. Urquhart was appointed Secretary of Embassy at Constantinople; the question of the treaty was regularly brought before the members of the Cabinet, and was the subject of discussion for several weeks. Lord Palinerston showed little dispo- sition to adopt the new and remarkable views of one whom he con- sidered a junior and a novice in diplomacy, and he handed the matter over to the President of the Board of Trade for examination. He at first declared, verbally and in writing, that the scheme was the production of a master mind, but by and by light broke in upon him, as he saw that if it was carried out in the manner that was projected, his family interests in the Baltic trade must be irretrievably damaged by Turkey being elevated to the position of a competitor in the supply of those articles which Russia alone furnishes to this country, for I well remembar remarking, while in conversation with him at that

60 DAVID URQUHART

Urquharfc was not slow to point out the difference between the original treaty and this one finally produced. He

time, the bias of Ms observations on this subject. Being among the number of those Levant merchants whose opinions were asked, and differing, as I did, from others who desired the continuance of the monopolies in Turkish commerce, I saw much of the minis- terial manoeuvres, which for a time prevailed. Lord Palmerston and Mr. Poulett Thomson then spoke of Mr. Urquhart's treaty and opinions as mere Utopian chimeras, and the subordinate officers, who had become their advocates from conviction, received hints to keep quiet. At length our late noble-minded Monarch, having heard of what was going on, and despising the paltry chicanery which he saw was standing opposed to the advancement of the true interests of his people, took one of those noble stands which he knew so properly how to assume when duty called upon him, and I dare the Government scribes to deny (what I knew at that time through the medium of more than one inmate of the Palace) that the option given to Lord Palmerston and Mr. Poulett Thomson was the adop- tion of the present much-lauded treaty or their dismissal from office, and that matters hung in the balance, those ministers being more out of than in office for two or three days on this very account. But place and pension were dear things to part with; the affront was pocketed, revenge was set aside for another day, and the treaty was adopted in the spring of 1836. All things then went on ap- parently very smoothly, although I must say that, knowing all I did of the preceding events, I had many suspicions as to the future conduct of these men in this matter. They soon after embarked Lord Ponsonby in their boat, evidently by showing him that if the treaty (having been projected by Mr. Urquhart) were concluded with the Turkish Government while he was at Constantinople, the credit would be given to him (Mr. Urquhart), and pro tanto not to his lordship. A misunderstanding between his lordship and Mr. Urquhart (who had, as I know, been for long previously on terms of the most intimate friendship with him) was raised and fostered. Lord Ponsonby then expressed his opinion openly in Constantinople that the draught of the treaty sent from London was a piece of monstrous absurdity which never could be carried into effect, and he accordingly set to work to prevent its being even proposed to the Turkish Government. The extraordinary correspondence published in your paper some months ago disclosed this and other disgraceful proceedings, for it is evident that Mr. Urquhart was sent to Constan- tinople with the predetermination of the Foreign Secretary to destroy his character in public life by leading him on to encourage the voyage of the Vixen, which in due season was to be disavowed, as contrary to the wish of his superiors, and by placing him in apparent opposition to his chief. When these disclosures came before the public, the existence of the treaty as a measure in abeyance became known; its conclusion was, of course, looked for with some expectation by mercantile men; but all the influence with the Porte which was requisite for that purpose was by that time absorbed by Russia, until at last Redschid Pasha (the most able Turkish minister that has filled the office of Reis Effendi for many years), aware of the deep importance of the treaty as a measure of salvation for his

URQUHART AT CONSTANTINOPLE Gl

published the two in parallel columns, and so evident to the commercial world was the superiority of the original draft, that he gained the confidence of many important men of the mercantile class who had already been attracted to him by his books and pamphlets and by the articles which for six months continuously he had contributed to The Times, showing an amazing grasp of wide-reaching com- mercial questions and a most original way of dealing with them. Through George Bell, of Vixen renown, he got a hearing at Glasgow, and was invited by the merchants to a large public dinner. His after-dinner speech, which lasted two hours, finished the work. " Henceforth," says one of his friends, " he may pursue as an amusement the career of gaining towns, which I presume to be no less interesting than instructive an occupation, and will come to tell power- fully on our national position."

Glasgow having fallen, the next town to be taken was Newcastle. Hull, Sheffield, Manchester, Leeds and Bir- mingham followed in quick succession. Everywhere Urqu- hart struck a new note — that international justice and commercial prosperity must go together.1

" Why," said he, " are half the markets which were open to British trade now closed ? Because we, the cham- pion of the oppressed, have allowed injustice to be done and cared naught. We had an open market in Poland. Our goods are now taxed sixty per cent, because, by our supine and criminal disregard of the Law of Nations, we have allowed her to be crushed out of existence. We have cut ourselves off from free commerce with Turkey by sacrificing her to Russia's aggression. We have almost

country, obtained the consent of the Sultan to adopt it, through despite of the opposition of the interim Russian minister, Baron Ruckman, and of the apathy of Lord Ponsonby, who had repeatedly declared that it would not and could not be adopted by the Turkish Government, and therefore left it neglected.

1 The connection between Commerce and International relations is a familiar one in these days. It was new to the world when Urqu- hart insisted upon it.

In September, 1853, he published in the Morning Herald an article on "Diplomacy injurious to Trade," in which he gave a table showing the approximate loss to England in cash alone, not to speak of credit and influence, by her neglect of such treaties.

62 DAVID URQUHART

ruined our leather trade by allowing the blockade of Mexico by France in time of peace, an infraction of maritime law which we, the British Nation, who are the guardians of the Freedom of the Seas, should have maintained at all costs."

" The power of England," he said in his Glasgow speech, " does not reside in her bayonets, and is not shadowed by her pennants; it resides in the confidence which men have placed in her firmness and integrity. Her supremacy can only be endangered by the conquests of independent States, and aggression but rallies strength around her as the de- fender of endangered nationalities. When she proclaims herself the lover of peace at the expense of honour, when she asserts herself the friend of the powerful and the ally of the aggressor, she ceases to have a situation among mankind, not because her fleets are disarmed, but because her character has sunk.

"'My idea of the power of England has not been derived from the inspection of her dockyards, or of any of her barracks, but from the veneration with which her name is pronounced on the Atlas, on the glaciers of the Alps, on the heights of Pindus, and in the vales of the Caucasus, on the plains of Poland, and the steppes of Astrakan."

Such speeches as this put Urquhart at once in opposition to the policy of " peace and retrenchment " of the Whigs, which was, as he very truly said, making the name of England a by-word among the nations who had once revered her, and justified the merchants in claiming him as a Conserva- tive. The idea of a man who neither belonged nor wished to belong to any political party never entered their minds. He must enter Parliament in the Conservative interest, said his friends. Robert Monteith of Carstairs,1 who was about to contest Glasgow, offered to retire in his favour. Sir George Sinclair, the Governor of the Bank of England, Sir Francis Burdett2 and Mr. Somerset Beaumont would back

1 A son of the Monteith who had welcomed Sir Robert Peel to Glasgow, a member of the Cambridge "Apostles," and David Urqu- hart's lifelong friend.

2 Sir Francis Burdett was himself ever the sturdiest of fighters. To him " was confessedly due the merit of making free speech again possible in England."

As a member of the House of Commons he indicted the Govern-

URQUHART AT CONSTANTINOPLE 63

him up if he would stand for Mary leo one. Sheffield was open to him. The little coterie of devoted friends, who were faithful to him amidst many trials and, in spite of much that would have killed friendship for a lesser man or in less single-minded people, were insistent that he should enter Parliament, and placed time, money, health, and interest at his disposal.1

ment on every possible occasion for its encroachments on popular rights.

He took up the scandal of the Coldbath Fields Prison, and raised such a storm about their ears that the Prison Commissioners suc- ceeded in getting him forbidden to visit any prison within the United Kingdom. In spite of this inhibition, however, his cause finally triumphed.

The most dramatic point in his career was his arrest on a question of breach of Parliamentary Privilege. After some days' hesitation, during which his house was garrisoned by Volunteers, with Francis Place at their head, a forcible entry was made, and Sir Francis was conveyed to the Tower.

His release, which took place after several months, was only prevented being made an occasion for a great popular demonstration by his slipping away unnoticed by water, to the great disgust of his partisans, especially Francis Place, who was so angry that he would not speak to him for years.

1 I am indebted to Miss L. I. Guiney for the following note: Notes and Queries, 12 S. vol. iv., January, 1918, p. 4. (In a paper signed " M. Beza," on English Travellers among the Vlachs.)

"In 1838 appeared The Spirit of The East, by D. Urquhart. A special interest attaches to this, in his time, most influential political author. A Roumanian statesman and writer of note, I. Ghica, for many years representative at the Court of St. James, knew him well. In a letter he portrays him as ' a young man of short stature, delicate complexion, with pale face, long golden hair over his back, blue piercing eyes,'* and he further speaks of Urquhart's noble character, of his ardour in espousing tlie great causes for freedom. Indeed his Spirit of the East breathes in a large degree the tumul- tuous, fiery atmosphere of the Greek revolution. He deals in it with chiefs like Catchiandoni and Tchionga,, both of the Vlach race; or, as Urquhart puts it, of ' these hardy mountaineers, nowhere fixed, but ever to be found where the wolves have dens and eagles nests ' (Vol. I., 122)."

* Scrisori ale lui I. Ghica catre V. Alexandri. Bucuresti, p. 144. No date given.

CHAPTER III

THE EAST AND MEDIAEVAL INSTITUTIONS

" We speak in unknown Tongues; the years Interpret everything aright."

Alice Meynell: Builders of Ruins.

The chief of a Highland clan combines in himself the essential qualities of aristocracy and democracy. He is an aristocrat by position and a democrat by virtue of his blood-relation- ship with every member of his clan.

Though David Urquhart left the Highlands when he was eight years old and straightway, for the rest of his life, became a citizen of the world, he was always the chief of his clan and brother of all his clansmen. When he no longer possessed a rood of the lands of his forefathers there was nothing he loved better than to be called in Highland fashion by the name of the lands that had been theirs; and never did he lose the sense of kinship with the men of his clan. Pointing to the barefoot boy who drove the pigs, he would say with pride, " He is an Urquhart too."

Taken away as a child from amongst his own people, the feeling of human brotherhood, which would have spent itself on his clansmen, was widened to include not only his own countrymen, but all the human race: "Homo sum; humani nihil a me alienum puto." All men were his brethren, bound to him by common ties and duties. They owed to him, and they had a right to expect from him, courtesy and justice. With his countrymen he had still stronger ties. It did not matter how lowly their condition, they were all, from the King to the humblest peasant, members of the State, and all alike were bound together by virtue of their duties to it, duties arising not from any accidental cause such as the franchise, or a position in the Legislature,

64

THE EAST AND MEDIEVAL INSTITUTIONS 65

but just in the same way as the duties of individuals towards one another arose from their common partnership in the same society. For the ideal State has, like the family, been bound together by mutual courtesy and justice. Class distinctions were official; they were like rank in the army, to be respected and kept up, but they made no man another man's real superior or inferior.

It was not, however, till Urquhart went to the East that the strength of this aristo-democratic instinct of his revealed itelf to his consciousness. And, curiously enough, it was the East, the despotic East, as it seemed to most people, which awoke it.

He went to Turkey, as he tells us, full of prejudice, and what he saw there did not seem, at first sight, calculated to break down that prejudice. The heterogeneous Turkish Empire, composed of many nations, many religions, with its tyrannical jannisaries, its ruling and blood-sucking Pashas, each under the thumb of his attendant Armenian, its apparently complicated and yet loose financial system, which kept from seven to nine hundred clerks in continual occupation in the immense financial bureaux at Con- stantinople with so little apparent result, seemed at first sight an apotheosis of bad government.

It was some time before he found reason to modify his judgment.

" It was after three years of diligent statistical inquiries," he says in the Introduction to the Spirit of the East, " that I began to perceive that there were institutions connected with the East. From the moment that I did perceive the existence of peculiar, though distinct, principles, an intense interest was awakened in my mind, and I commenced a collection of financial details with a view to understanding the rules upon which they were based. Three more years were spent in this laborious uncertainty, and I collected and noted down the administration of two hundred and fifty towns and villages before I was struck with the common principles that guided their administration."1

During those three years was laid the foundation of all Urquhart 's knowledge and love of the East. " They were," 1 Spirit of the East; Introductory chapter.

66 DAVID URQUHART

he says, " dumb years," because " when in the considera- tion of nations you come to ideas which cannot be accu- rately expressed by the symbols of your own language, you must revert to first principles, you must come back to the consideration of human nature."

This was exactly what the ordinary Eastern traveller could not do, or at any rate did not choose to do, and there- fore he never learned the secret of Eastern administration.

" The ordinary Englishman," Urquhart says, " goes to the East convinced that he is a professor of political economy, who has possession of the science of government, and that in all respects he is a free man of an understanding mind. He discovers that the Turk considers a public debt a bad thing. 'The ignoramus!' he exclaims. That the Turk regards this debt as contrary to religion. ' Ah ! the fanatic !' He discovers again that the Turk has a repugnance to the idea of an Assembly which makes laws. ' Ah ! the slave !' That the Turk despises a representative chamber. ' Ah ! the tool of despotism !' and so on to the end of the chapter. But if the Turk were to reveal to him his own ideas of the duties of a sovereign and the obligation of dethroning him when he does not fulfil them, or the necessity for every civil and military subordinate to be sure of the legality of an order before executing it, the European would lose him- self in conjectures and astonishment, and would exclaim, ' These Turks are revolutionists and communists.' He would be a hundred leagues from perceiving that science and liberty, as he understands them, are only perversions arising from the impotence of past ages to resist the en- croachments of authority, which has succeeded in sub- jugating the nations of Europe and putting them in handcuffs administrative, financial and intellectual."1

The first, and perhaps the most important, thing that Urquhart discovered was that Eastern nations did not consist of rulers and ruled: one part of the nation did not continually sit to legislate for the other part. The founda- tions of government and legislation rested on inviolate and inviolable custom, by which all were equally bound. The Sultan himself could not retain his throne did he attempt

1 Diplomatic Review, vol. xxiv., p. 178: "Islam and the Constitutional System."

THE EAST AND MEDIAEVAL INSTITUTIONS 67

to override them. Moreover, the Government took no account of details. The people were not bound under penalties to obey rules and regulations quite independent of moral law.

The taxes were imposed, not on individuals, but on the municipia, for these were the units of the Eastern State. The municipalities were responsible for apportioning the taxes and for taxing themselves for their own necessary- expenses. They maintained order within their own limits. They provided schools and schoolmasters. They organised their own trade, and thus industry and commerce were free. Indirect taxation was a thing unknown. In the East, said Urquhart, might still be seen feudalism in its earliest and uncorrupt stage. For in the East the military fief did not, as in Europe, involve possession of the soil, but only a right to one-tenth of its fruits, and that right carried with it the duty of protecting the cultivators, who had " an indefeasible right of property in the soil, as un- controllably their own, as that of the blade of grass to the earth from which it springs." Such a right was of itself enough to raise the peasant proprietors of the East far above the unlanded and disinherited peasant of England, who had nothing he could call his own but his labour, and that he must sell, not at his own price, but at that of its purchaser.

Each municipality was a family, of which all the members were bound together by ties of mutual interdependence. If there was outside tyranny, as too often there was, under a corrupted1 Mussulman Government, it was borne, and often resisted, by the whole community. Like the members of a Highland clan, the members of the municipality had each his own place and his own rank, and each his own human value equal to that of any Prince or Pasha. There- fore the active principles of Eastern municipal life we*e necessarily those vital principles of justice and courtesy which thus leavened the whole of Eastern society. All ranks, whether in the community or the family, associated

1 Its corruption was largely due to Western interference with Eastern institutions.

68 DAVID URQUHART

without familiarity or condescension, but with mutual respect and courtesy, for human dignity was by no means affected by the accident of rank or position. Custom regulated manners as well as law, and by reason of custom all classes could associate with an ease and dignity which is almost unknown in Western life, except in the remoter parts of Ireland and Scotland. The master could use affectionate expressions towards his servant without evoking either presumption or suspicion, and servants, children and friends could, and did, perform the lowliest offices for their masters, parents or friends without any real or fancied loss of dignity. The class hatred which was springing up to devastate Europe was unknown in the East which Urquhart discovered in his early manhood.

It was an East of wide extent, for he was not content with knowing the Turkey of Constantinople, which his official duties necessitated his knowing; he had lived in the villages of Servia, he had travelled more than once through the Balkan Principalities and the parts of Greece still under the Turkish rule. He had lived as a Mussulman in the villages of Asiatic Turkey and in the tents of Arab sheikhs in the deserts. He visited Mount Lebanon, and first of any Englishman he penetrated into the mountain fast- nesses of the Caucasus, where the Circassians were still fighting stubbornly to protect their country from the paw of the Russian bear. Everywhere he found the same characteristic features: freedom of trade, agriculture and craft going on side by side in the villages, strong inde- pendent municipalities which contained within themselves all the essentials of a republic, and, however great might be the poverty, no pauperism.

In 1838 Urquhart returned to England. It would not have been surprising had he forgotten all else in the con- sideration of his own private misfortunes. His diplomatic career had been unjustly and suddenly wrecked; he found himself involved in huge expenses for an undertaking for which he had had every reason1 to believe the Government considered itself responsible, and he was struggling under 1 The publication of the Portfolio.

THE EAST AND MEDIEVAL INSTITUTIONS 69

one of those attacks of ill-health to which his sensitive temperament and abnormally active brain rendered him constantly liable.

But the ills of his country very soon absorbed him to the entire exclusion of his own. He had come back to a state of society the very antipodes of that which he had been studying for the past six years. He had come back from Eastern despotism to " a free and enlightened country," to find it, in his own words, " a nation of slaves." The over- whelming majority of the people had not as much as a foot of the ground of England they could call their own, even the right to feed cattle on the common lands they had lost.

They were entirely without a voice in the government of the country. The introduction of machinery had thrown thousands out of work, and had reduced the old handloom weavers of many once prosperous districts to absolute starvation. The old Poor Law, by giving relief in aid of wages, had enabled the farmer to pay to his labourers con- siderably less than a living wage, and the new Poor Law, by stopping this relief while trade was still disorganised and wages at starvation rate, had roused the people to a state of frenzy. The Reform Bill, from which the people had anticipated such great results, had, they declared, only made matters worse by putting the power into the hands of the Whigs, who proved themselves less sympathetic to working-class desires and aims than the Tories had been. The Whigs it was who brought in the hated Poor Law; who threw out the Factory Bill, which was intended greatly to diminish, if not abolish, child-labour; who steadily refused any further extension of the franchise. Poverty and dis- tress were everywhere rife ; with a population of seventeen millions, eight million pounds were spent yearly in poor relief. The people were in a state of smouldering discontent and class-hatred, which might break out at any time into open flame. The moment that the prohibition to combine was removed from the working men, and even before that, large organisations were founded all over the country. The Political Unions, the Trade Unions, and the " Asso-

70 DAVID URQUHART .

ciations of the Useful Classes," were all animated by hatred more or less intense of the classes above them, and all determined, some by moral force, some by violence, to make their voices heard in the government of the country.

Urquhart had not at first any intention of interfering in the Labour troubles of his time. He had come home to settle scores -with Palmerston over the Turkish Commercial Treaty, and his own recall from the Turkish Embassy, and to try to bring before the country generally the importance of right and just relations with other countries. Probably the deplorable condition, both moral and physical, of the working classes had not especially struck him, but in his journeys from one large commercial centre to another, where he spoke to large meetings at the invitation of mer- chants and manufacturers, he could not fail to be impressed by the contrast between the general prosperity of the country and the poverty of the poor. It was not, however, till he had been invited to stand in the Tory interest for St. Marylebone, that Urquhart came in contact with the movement which is now known as Chartism.

He never was a Tory; in fact, he never belonged to any party except that of his country. But as Disraeli indicated in his speech against Attwood's Petition in July, 1839, the Tory party had shown more practical sympathy than the Whigs for the working classes. It was but natural. The old landed proprietors belonged to the soil; so did the peasant, though his right in it had been lost. There was still a bond which connected together the landed proprietor and the peasant, a remnant of the feudal relations of pro- tector and protected. But in the middle-class parvenus, who had come to power with the Reform Bill of 1832, this bond was absent, and the working class bitterly realised that their " shopocrat " masters, as they contemptuously called them, were worse tyrants than the aristocrats had been. Therefore, if Urquhart could be said to have had anything in common with any party it was with the Tories. He probably recognised this when he consented to stand for Marylebone. But the candidature did not go farther than a public meeting. He was very soon engrossed in other work.

THE EAST AND MEDIEVAL INSTITUTIONS 71

At that meeting three leading Chartists were present. They had been attracted by the soundness and originality of his views upon commerce, and had come to this meeting partly to hear what he had to say and partly to heckle. But when it was over they begged him to attend a private meeting of their own. He went; he met them and their friends, not once but many times, and his lifelong and affectionate connection with the working classes began.

It must not be forgotten that the Chartists were by no means a united body with unanimous aims. As a matter of fact they had sprung from at least three distinct sources : the National Political Union, which had agitated for the Reform Bill and had practically died down after it was passed; the Trades Unions, closely connected with the European Societies of Trades Unions, which organised the riots of 1834; and the "Association for the Moral, Social, and Political Improvement of the Industrious Classes." This last was the most important of all as regards real working-class advance, for it was an attempt on the part of the operatives to be their own organisers and leaders. The political unions had been very largely supported and led by merchants, manufacturers, and shopkeepers. The working men's association, organised at the beginning by an American, Doctor Black, and his friend Detroisier, who took in hand and attempted to carry through the repeal of the stamp duty on newspapers, began in a back room at Francis Place's shop in Charing Cross Road.

It took Dr. Black some time to overcome the suspicions of the working men, who, since the collapse of the Political Unions, were thoroughly mistrustful of the middle classes, but he overcame this mistrust by devoting evening after evening to their instruction in " common school subjects." Detroisier and Henry Hetherington,1 with some of Black's evening-class pupils, founded the first Working Men's Association. The Associations spread with very great rapidity, and their rules forbade any but working men to be in any official position in them. They had, however,

1 The champion of the unstamped Press, and editor of The Poor Matis Guardian.

72 DAVID URQUHART

many sympathisers among the middle classes, and the London meetings were attended by Members of Parliament, such as Sir William Molesworth, Fielden and Roebuck. Their aims were perhaps at first more educational than political. They established libraries, opened reading-rooms, and brought out elaborate plans for national education, which was not to be in the hands of the Government, but of local authorities.

But they soon became aware that to carry out any success- ful schemes they must have more political power. Lord John Russell's speech in 1837, in which he expressed him- self against all that the working classes had been working for since the passing of the Reform Bill — •Triennial Parlia- ments, the Extension of the Franchise and Voting by Ballot — finally roused them to action. The London Asso- ciation appointed six members of its committee in con- junction with six sympathetic Members of Parliament to draw up a Bill embodying the rights which the people demanded, the People's Charter which it now was for the first time called. To further their aims the Associations combined with the Birmingham Political Union, which had revived under the leadership of Mr. Thomas Attwood, and the Trades Unions to call a monster Convention in London, to which delegates were to be sent from all towns and villages in the United Kingdom. Addresses were sent to all the Radical Associations, missionaries were sent out, subscriptions or " rents " were collected, monster meetings were held. In some places more than thirty thousand people assembled, and in spite of the growing fear of the Government, and the vexatious, and in many cases unjust, methods adopted to repress it, the movement steadily grew in numbers and determination. So powerful did it become that the Chartists might have carried all before them had it not been that their house was divided against itself. One party, the moral force party, desired to use only con- stitutional means to gain their ends; Law, Peace and Order was their motto. The other, the physical force party, declared that nothing could be done with peaceful methods unless behind them they had the means and the will to adopt force.

THE EAST AND MEDIEVAL INSTITUTIONS 73

Such was the position of the Chartists when Mr. Urquhart first came in contact with them and gained the friendship of many of their prominent men, at the same time that he showed himself to be an enemy of the movement.

Urquhart's attitude towards the working man was entirely unique. There was in it not a touch of familiarity or of condescension; he met them on the terms of the most complete equality, while at the same time he maintained his own position and expected them to maintain theirs. He had no sympathy with the philanthropist or the economist, both of whom apparently believed that between the classes favoured by God with all that made life desir- able and those deprived of them, obviously by the same Agency, there was a great gulf fixed.

The philanthropist tried to mend their condition by some slight efforts to supply here and there the most obvious and crying needs of the poor, but more especially by preach- ing contentment with their lot and submission to their betters.

The economist regarded the state of things as an inevit- able result of fixed laws. The poverty of the poor, said he, is the result of the laws of demand and supply; we are over-peopled, let us limit our population. The dislocation of trade arises from the want of division of labour. Economic laws cannot be altered ; they must be studied and we must live according to them.

But David Urquhart could not deal with the problem either as a philanthropist or as an economist. He must deal with it as a man, or not at all. And it seemed to him that in the East he had learnt the secret of so doing.

But was it possible that Eastern methods could be applied to Western peoples ? The ordinary observer would have said "No"; Urquhart said "Yes"; for he maintained that the methods of government which the East had retained were, broadly speaking, the methods of the whole of Europe in the Middle Ages.1 In mediaeval

1 The Guild Socialists are Urquhart's direct descendants in plead- ing for a return to Mediaevalism. See H. J. Penty, Guilds and the Social Crisis.

74 DAVID URQUHART

Europe moral law was the recognised basis of government, as it was still in the East. The effect of that recognition was justice in public relations and courtesy in private life; for justice and courtesy are but different aspects of the recognition of law. A man who gives, in his private rela- tions, to children and servants, to inferiors and- superiors, that courtesy which is their due, will not withhold, in his public dealings, the justice which is the foundation of public life. And a nation whose social life is built on courtesy will not fail in its public relations with other nations. That virtue in the Turk which prevents his drawing his sword against an enemy until he is convinced that the cause is just is the same virtue which makes him courteous in all his relationships. So in the Middle Ages all relationships, from the relation of nation to nation to the relation of a servant to his master, rested on the same broad principles of moral law and unwritten custom. All men knew that law; it did not follow that they obeyed it, but no one questioned it. And over all there was an authority capable of visiting its infringement with penalties. Within the wide bounds of that law individuals were free; they were not subject, as under modern government, to rules and restrictions having no moral force but the will of the ruling majorities.

Taxation moreover was open and direct. The Public Revenue was not drawn from taxes on the necessaries of life. Communities not only apportioned but assessed their own taxes; and they were only asked to pay extraordinary taxes. Ordinary taxes were paid out of Crown lands and by the Feudal Lord. It was his demesne, not the poor man's few acres, which paid the expenses of government.

As in the East, moreover, so in the Middle Ages pauperism was a thing unknown, for hospitality was a religious duty. No man might be without food and lodging within the bounds of a Christian parish. Of all the Church property in England one-third was devoted to the care of the acci- dental poor in the different parishes.1

But the most important point, and the one in which

i For Feudalism and Pauperism see Urquhart's pamphlet, Wealth and Want.

THE EAST AND MEDIEVAL INSTITUTIONS 75

modern England diverged most widely, not only from the England of the Middle Ages, but from the whole ancient world, was the practice of domestic industry. Before the days of Morris and Ruskin, when the whole of England was rejoicing in the wonderful invention of power-looms, and only the working men talked of the factory system as " damnable," Urquhart declared that the new industrial system was but the beginning of the end of the greatness of the nation.

" The loss of the spinning-wheel was like the loss of the shoe, after that the horse went, and after that — there was no longer a State but only a jumble. . . .

" Before the subdivision of labour was known as a process of science, the people of England, then called ' merry,' manufactured at home, in the intervals of field labour, the clothing requisite for their families out of the produce of their land and their flocks. England was consequently a self-subsisting country, and neither depended herself for existence on the accidents of war, and a bolstered-up credit at home, nor infected remote regions with her flimsy stuff and vulgar patterns. The millions did not live in trembling dependence from hand to mouth, nor were there cotton lords to revel in coarse and ungainly luxury. This change was brought by science; men could produce more when their industry was confined to a pin's point, and the great idol, Cheapness, was set up; distant lands adored, but the people at home were crushed.

" Civilisation draws everything to the towns and makes each family dependent on the factory; to that den is not transferred the sanctification of the household by its easy tasks and varied occupations, which has now departed. In addition to the rest you divide the people into two hostile camps of clownish boors and emasculated dwarfs. Good heavens ! a nation divided into agricultural and commercial interests calling herself sane ! nay, styling herself en- lightened and civilised, not only in spite of but in conse- quence of this monstrous and unnatural division.

" A family engaged in field work will have sufficient idle time upon its hands to spin, weave, make up the stuffs wherever the practice of those civilising arts is pursued, at no cost at all.1

1 " Twenty pounds of wool, converted unobtrusively into the yearly clothing of a labouring family, makes no show, but bring it to market, send it to the factory, bring it thence to the broker, send it

76 DAVID URQUHART

" The cost, or gain, is healthful industry. It is a matter of habit, not of reasoning; where the habit of preparing these articles exists there is no reasoning about it — neither is there where it is the custom to go to the slop shop.

" A people in the first condition would be horrified at the idea of expending money for what they could do them- selves. A people in the second would be confounded at the proposal to spin their own yarn and knit their stockings, and conceive it to be a furious encroachment on the gin shop for the man and the slop shop for the woman.

"... England, the wealthiest of lands and the first in the scale of industry, is the country in which, above all others, domestic industry has disappeared. It is also the home of pauperism and panics. Other countries in various degrees approach to her in the subdivision of labour and in an equal degree in the extinction of domestic industry. In like proportion are they afflicted with pauperism and panic.

" Pauperism and panic are unknown to-day in the East. They were unknown throughout the whole of the ancient world.

" Domestic industry is practised in the East. It was practised in ancient times in every portion of the globe. The opposite plan was the discovery of England; it has been, in her own estimation, her greatness. It has given to her colossal riches as the gain of a few, and unparalleled misery as the gain of the rest.

" Could the hard breathings and choking thoughts of a second of time in these realms be condensed into one utterance, it would overcome the concentrated groan of the misery endured throughout the remaining eight hundred millions of the human race throughout the course of the present and many preceding generations."1

In all these ways, Urquhart maintained, in respect for the moral law, self-government, freedom of trade and the

to the dealer, and it will represent commercial operations and apparent capital to the amount of twenty times its value, and costs to the labourer when returned to him twice as much as it would cost him in dyeing, spinning, and weaving. The working class is thus amerced to support a wretched factory population, a parasitical shop-keeping class and a fictitious monetary and financial system. The landlord", for his share, pays five shillings per acre Poor Rates. All this is the result not of cheapness but of delusion.

" The people of England were better clothed and fed when there was no commerce and when there were no factories."

1 Free Press, December 1, 1855: "Domestic Manufactures."

THE EAST AND MEDIEVAL INSTITUTIONS 77

love for and skill in craft, did the East show what the Middle Ages had been and what Modern Europe had lost. And with this loss, nay, because of this loss, she had suffered a far greater loss, the loss of idealism and the loss of in- dividual character. Underneath the life of the Middle Ages lay the basic principle of a strong religious faith. Above all earthly rule there stood, its model and its monitor, the spiritual rule of the Papacy, the Grand Justiciary of Europe. Individual popes might be ambitious, criminal and self-seeking. The ideal of the spiritual State to which all temporal sovereignty must bow was never attained, but who that looks on the world now must not see that the world was the better for such an ideal ? It affected not only the policy of statesmen, but the lives of indi- viduals. Private character was stronger, more self-reliant, better developed. Men did not prostitute their judgment to public opinion, or get any idea they might possess from a newspaper article. Idealism, obedience, respect for authority, all the things that a vain and shallow pretence at independence professes to scorn, developed, instead of stultifying, character, stimulated thought, and safeguarded freedom. In the Middle Ages men were really free. " Liberty is ancient; it is despotism that is modern." It was, said Urquhart, this idealism, this strength of character, this power of being right, that the working men must strive to gain. Nothing else that they had lost could they regain, no advance could the nation make till they had this. They must divest themselves of the spirit of the age with all its corruption, injustice and want of thought, they must divest themselves of themselves, for they partook of the spirit of the age. Each man must go back to the simple self, to the man that lay beneath all the corruption which his age had fastened on him, to the elemental virtue and simplicity which makes the true man. Then, and then only, might they hope for a real change in the life and social condition of the Nations.

Of course the ideal was, like all great ideals, impossible of attainment. The attempt failed, but it was a failure greater than many a success.

PART II

HOW HE FOUGHT FOR JUSTICE IN ENGLAND

" And the Mills of Satan were separated into a moony Space Among the rocks of Albion's Temples, and Satan's Druid Sons Offer the human Victims throughout all the Earth."

Blake: Milton, folio 9, lines 6-8.

" And did those feet in ancient time

Walk upon England's mountains green % And was the holy Lamb of God

On England's pleasant pastures seen ?

" And did the Countenance Divine Shine forth upon our clouded hills ? And was Jerusalem builded here Among these dark Satanic Mills ?

" Bring me my bow of burning gold ! Bring me my arrows of desire ! Bring me my spear ! 0 clouds, unfold ! Bring me my chariot of fire !

" I will not cease from mental fight,

Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand, Till we have built Jerusalem

In England's green and pleasant land."

Blake: Hilton, folio 2.

CHAPTER IV

CHARTISM

" Woe unto him that buildeth his house by unrighteousness and his chambers by wrong." — Jeremiah xxii. 13.

Urqtjhart came to the working men of England in 1839 with what seemed to them a new Social Gospel.

It was indeed that by which their forefathers had shaped their lives in the Middle Ages; but it was the East which had revealed it to him.

It was the East, moreover, which had taught him the rottenness of a civilisation based on injustice and a so-called economic system.

During his journeys from town to town in his connection with the mercantile class, the wrongs of the English operative classes were opened to his keen sight. It was apparently in 1838, during a visit to Glasgow, that he first came into personal contact with them, when he and his fellow-workers succeeded in getting together small bodies of operatives as well as merchants to discuss the commercial relations of England to other countries.

In some places operatives and merchants sat at the same table and discussed the same subjects. At Newcastle his friend William Cargill, a member of one of the prominent merchant families of the town, carrying on an important trade with the East, greatly aided him, and succeeded in gaining the confidence of many working men. George Eyler, a young barrister with commercial connections, seconded his efforts in London, while Robert Monteith, David Ross of Bladensburg, and Charles Attwood, did the same thing in Glasgow, Birmingham, and Lancashire. Urquhart himself, as time went on, became gradually more

81 0

82 DAVID URQUHART

and more convinced that any hope for the future of England lay with the working man, oppressed, poverty-stricken, disenfranchised as he was.

" I speak to the operatives because my interest is in working men," he said in a speech at Stafford. " I care not for the gentlemen: they have means, power, possessions, wealth, and all those things which would secure existence, if not honour, in any country, if not in this; but in address- ing the operatives I speak to those whom fate has fixed on the soil upon which we live, who can have no interest except in its prosperity. The higher orders may be corrupt and the nation sound. But in addressing the operatives I speak to those who, if their heart is cold to their country and their ears closed to reason, leave to their State no hope whatever of regeneration or restoration."

We who live in a time when the working man is coming, if he has not already come, to his own, can scarcely realise the political insight and the grasp of future possibilities which such a point of view indicated in a man, young, without prestige or influence, who could stand up and speak so to a society which regarded the working man, struggling for justice, as some sort of wild beast; at a time when a judge on the bench could, without condemnation, stigmatise the " lower orders " as " wholly vicious"; at a time when the police harried them with spies and informers, and the Government, whether Whig or Tory, treated their most legitimate criticisms on its methods of procedure as sedition and conspiracy.

Urquhart's relation to the working classes was intensely human; it was entirely unpolitical, and it culminated during the Chartist rising in a situation of extreme interest.

It was in 1839 that he first came into contact with the Chartist leaders; that this man on fire with the love of justice and hatred of oppression, the stern upholder of moral law as the highest thing he knew, came into con- tact with men in whose souls the iron of injustice was rankling, many of whom were smarting under recent and unjust punishment, and were ready to cast aside all law, moral and civil, in order to attain to the liberty they felt

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was their due. An electric spark was lit, apparently oppo- site elements became united, and David Urquhart was joined to the operatives by a bond that was to last to the end of a long life.

The Scottish aristocrat, the polished cosmopolitan, drew to his side and linked his career finally and entirely, not with the respectable mechanics and artisans of the twentieth century, but with the starved, despised, and, as his soi- disant betters called him, the " degraded " factory hand, with the potters, the weavers, and the labourers of early Victorian days. Not as a superior did he join forces with them, but as an equal, a fellow-citizen, a fellow-English- man, a man with common duties and common rights. He had his position in society, they had theirs. He had some- thing to teach them, but when they had learnt it, their duty, no less than his, was to go and put the lessons into practice, to serve their country and to teach others what they had learnt. The relationship between Urquhart and the operatives never degenerated into familiarity on their side or to patronage and philanthropy on his. On both sides it was always respectful, simple, and sincere. To his working-men friends he meted out the same treatment as he did to his social equals. Neither escaped the fiery furnace of indignation and scorn which followed any dis- play of insincerity or stupidity. But if there was any distinction it was in favour of the working man. It was against smug, wealthy, middle-class self-satisfaction, or political self-seeking, that his most fiery darts were hurled. His devoted adherents were often reduced to despair, because he alienated by fierce denunciations wealthy and influential people, whom it seemed to them all-important to gain, while he would spend patient hours trying to convince one or two working men or instructing a young girl. "My best converts, apart from working men," he was wont to say, " are men of genius and young girls."

In 1839, when Urquhart first came into contact with the Chartists as Chartists, they were in a very dangerous mood. The monster Petition with 2,000,000 signatures, their last hope of obtaining their demands by peaceful means, had

84 DAVID URQUHART

been contemptuously set aside by the Government. Those of them who had always maintained that in the end they must resort to physical force to obtain their ends were in the ascendancy, and there is no doubt that the preparations for a universal armed rising were wide and well-organised. Mr. Urquhart's conviction that foreign agents had a large share in these preparations is not unsupported by inde- pendent evidence.

The English Trades Unions had always been in very close connection with the foreign Unions.1 There was a Central Democratic Association composed of Poles, Italians, Ger- mans, and French, which was strong enough to provide that Haynau, the notoriously cruel Austrian General, when he paid a visit to Barclay and Perkins's Brewery should be set upon, pursued and so frightened, that he was forced to take refuge in a dust -bin.

Information of great and extensive revolutionary pre- parations reached the Government by side winds. The police heard from their spies and informers of orders for as many as 10,000 powder cans being given to jobbing tin- workers- in Bethnal Green,2 and an informer writes that it has come to his knowledge that many thousand pikes and weapons are being made, also triangular forked instru- ments, for placing across the streets to injure the feet of cavalry horses.

In 1839 an informer in a secret report3 writes from Manchester :

" My Lord, the Radicals in Manchester muster thirty-six divisions of one hundred men each, subdivided into sections of twenty each under staunch leaders, who bind themselves by certain rules and regulations to stand by one another even unto death. They are ruled by a Council of Twelve in each district. Ashton-under-Lyne, including Dunker- field, has fifty-two divisions, Stalybridge seventeen divisions,

1 When the type-founders employed by Messrs. Caster in Chiswell Street, E.C., struck work on account of a reduction of 20 per cent, in their wages, word was immediately sent round to the Trades Unions of France and Belgium, with the result that Messrs. Caster, who sent for men to both these countries, could only get nine French workmen, and that at 30s. a week higher wages than they had been paying.

2 Home Office Papers, 64, 15, 1834. 3 Ibid., 64, 15.

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all sub-divided as above. The whole of these men have arms of some sort. My Lord, I must say that I find the working classes almost to a man determined Republicans and extremely discontented. . . . Thousands of them will join the Union men when a break-out takes place. There have been plans prepared to make the Government yield. The one was for all the Unions and others that would join them to march up to London and by force of numbers to compel the Government to grant the Charter. In the Union last night1 I asked how we could subsist on the journey; their answer was, 'There is plenty of money in the banks of which we can take possession.' This morning a letter was read from Richardson, one of the Manchester deputies, now in London, advising all the Unions to hold themselves in readiness for simultaneous meetings all over the country on the same day, and ordering the Manchester flag that bears the inscription ' Annual Parliaments ' to be altered to ' The People's Parliament.' He seems to have no hopes of the present Government granting their requests."

It was Urquhart's idea that underneath the ordinary Chartist body there was a secret organisation governed by foreign agents. None of the rank and file of the Chartists knew of the whole conspiracy, which was so thorough and well-laid as to be a great menace to the Government. Of this he became convinced at his first meeting with the Chartist leaders at Marylebone in 1839, and in his own account of the event written thirty-three years afterwards he maintained it with absolute certainty.

Urquhart's connection with the Chartist movement dates from his nomination as Tory candidate for the Borough of Marylebone in September, 1839, to which, at the urgent entreaty of his friends, he had consented. In order to prepare the way a meeting was called by his friends' in the Mechanics' Institute, New Road, " to take into con- sideration the Commercial, Domestic, and Foreign Affairs of the Nation." It was attended by a large body of Chartists, headed by William Cardo, the delegate for Marylebone at the Convention, who acted as spokesman.

1 It was a usual plan for spies to join the Trades Unions. Some- times they rose to eminent positions, where they were extremely useful to the Government.

86 DAVID URQUHART

George Fyler, a London barrister and disciple of Urquhart's, who was present at the meeting, was already acquainted with the Chartist Westrup,1 who had approached him on the subject of the formation of a London Chamber of Com- merce. Having got into conversation with Cardo through "Westrup at the meeting, Fyler determined to pursue his acquaintance.

The Chartists on their side had been struck by the views of Mr. Urquhart and his friends which they had heard, for the first time, fairly stated.

" It appears," writes Fyler, " that my speech created a sensation among the Chartists, that you and your views have been the subject of discussion with the Convention at Marylebone. The result of this was my sending Westrup, who has become most valuable, back to Cardo, ready primed. He saw him and had a conversational discussion with the Convention about you, which has terminated satisfactorily, and Cardo is to be with me to-morrow night. I had Westrup to breakfast with me this morning, and he was to have brought a Mr. O'Brien, an Irish barrister of good family, a Chartist of great influence, and a man, Westrup says, of great talent. O'Brien, however, could not come: I expect him to-night, about ten."

Fyler met Bronterre O'Brien, that fiery advocate of physical force, as well as Cardo. But he did not succeed in converting them.

" Mr. Cardo still did not see in what I said the means of solving these internal difficulties which he felt, or of raising the poor and industrious man from the miserable state of dependence and oppression in which he stood. Mr. O'Brien had not quite made up his mind that we should not be all the better without foreign trade. ... I left him with no other impression than appears in the willing expression that he should be very happy to co-operate or give effect to the labours of such gentlemen as Mr. Urquhart. . . . But Mr. Urquhart, at my request, came up to London, and the scene was changed. Mr. Westrup and Mr. Cardo called on me; I took them to Colonel Pringle Taylor's, where Mr. Urquhart was, and, to use Mr. Cardo's expressive

1 Hovell, in The ChaHist Movement, calls him Westrapp, but he signs himself in his letters Westrop or Westrup indiscriminately.

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words the next day, ' in less than five minutes Mr. Urquhart had solved all these difficulties without my having felt it necessary to state them.' ... In the evening O'Brien came to the Colonial Society with Messrs. Cardo and Westrup. It was not in language to convey what passed on that occasion, the extensive range of subjects which, in the two hours it lasted, Mr. Urquhart grasped, laying bare the character, the injurious and deleterious effects of our boasted institutions, and, in a few simple words, not alone leading the hearer to understand the bearings of the subject but to the reception of similar convictions to his own. He pointed out the source of the evils under which the nations groaned, and that the only remedy is in return- ing to the simple institutions of our forefathers, and he showed the effect of indirect taxation on the character of the people, the influence of local government in the de- velopment of powers of the human mind, its effect on the internal state of the country, rendering a police, poor laws, custom-houses, and all those other adjuncts of what is called a civilised people unnecessary. . . . On Thursday morning they came again. Lord Dudley Stuart and Mr. Carey were likewise present. It is impossible to go through these extraordinary conversations, or, rather, addresses. I can only convey their effect to the mind of another, by stating the deep silence and continued attention and in- terest with which Mr. Urquhart was listened to, an occa- sional remark made being rather to elucidate a further explanation than the statement of any objection."

At the public meeting held soon after, Mr. Cardo " with great simplicity, intelligence, and power " communicated to his audience that he had at length found a means of arriving at truth, that he perceived a certainty of accomplishing the great object for which they had been struggling, not by the triumph of one party, but by the sinking of all those dis- sensions and party differences that existed among them.

Cardo and Westrup were won, and with them the delegate from Bolton, Warden, a man unlike Cardo, opposed to physical force for gaining the ends of labour, intelligent, gentle, and conscientious. These and other of their friends at last felt impelled to lay before Urquhart, this new friend who had inspired them with such confidence, the danger to the country which was involved in the Chartist plot.

88 DAVID URQUHART

" The Chartists," they said, " disappointed in the hopes they had entertained of realising their projects peaceably, were now, to the amount of nearly two millions throughout the land, aroused and ready to accomplish their objects by national convulsion; all their numerous armies in the North, in the West, as well as in the South, had intended some early day before the first of January to put themselves in motion. They had already shells and rockets which were explosive, spikes for the feet of cavalry horses, and other ammunitions of war prepared in secret in Bir- mingham."

Urquhart and his friends took action on this information ; they not only laid the whole before Lord Normanby, but without trusting to anything the Government (which was, or affected to be, sceptical of the extent of the Chartist conspiracy) might or might not do, they went themselves from town to town, seeing the leaders, and if they did not win them over to their side, at least making them afraid to act, from the knowledge that their plans were known.

Mr. Urquhart, writing in 1854 to a working men's asso- ciation in Manchester, gives his own account of these strange happenings.

" Having accepted the proposal to stand for Marylebone, and several meetings having been held, the Chartists came in a body to interrupt them, having somehow been informed that I was a dangerous person, as representing trade, diplomacy and Toryism. I was not present at the meeting, but after it one of them, a friend of mine, said to the leader of the Chartists : ' I see you are an able man. Would it not suit those qualities better to try and understand Mr. Urquhart first and reserve your denunciations for afterwards ? '

" Accordingly he (the Chartist) came to me and asked what I considered were the evils of England and what I proposed as a remedy.

" But when I had begun to tell him he rose and said: ' I cannot listen to this alone. Will you allow me to bring some of my friends to-morrow night ? '

" They came, and returned again and again.

" The Charter was never mentioned, nor the suffrage, nor any meanness of that kind.

" I think it was the third time, at between two and three in the morning, they said they could not lay their heads

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on their pillows till they had revealed to me the fate pre- pared for the doomed city sunk in slumber. They had not gone far in their narrative before we came upon a Russian1 agent as mover a,nd director of the whole plan. Not an instant was lost. With the aid of these men and others which they brought, and collecting all my available friends, amounting to about twenty or thirty individuals in all, we proceeded to deal with the confederacy, now broken in London, throughout the provinces.

" I visited every district, saw every leader.

" There was no change in my language because of what I had learnt. The Charter was never mentioned from beginning to end.

" It was by showing another and a better way that doubts came over them as to the judiciousness of continuing in that in which they were engaged, and men in doubt do not risk property, liberty and life.

" Frost was missed by half an hour; otherwise this danger would have been averted without leaving a trace behind of its existence."

The campaign against Chartism started with great hopes.

The working men would be won, and with them the country.

Urquhart was deeply impressed with the intelligence and the sincerity of the operatives.

" There are in this body," he said, " immense resources; they are individually more simple, more honest, and more thoughtful than the upper orders; there is a consciousness among them of community of interests, and there is sym- patic for each other; they consider themselves as a class and not as a party; their minds are set to work to inquire and to investigate; and therefore it is that my hopes for the salvation of their country are centred on them."

The line he took in his first dealings with the Chartists was

1 Benyouski. (See Northern Liberator, November and December, 1840.) He bad been an officer in tbe Polish Lancers. He was a Russian Pole whom Urquhart believed to have been in the employ of the Russian Secret Service.

There is little doubt but that he was one of the principal leaders of the Chartist Movement and his presence was always followed by revolution. Urquhart's life was twice attempted during his crusade against Chartism; once he had to escape from a house over the roofs of the neighbouring houses.

90 DAVID URQUHART

that to gain the six points of the Charter would do them no good so long as the whole nation persisted in its down- ward course.

Class injustice and class distress were but symptoms.

The real disease lay deeper. It was to the unjust and foolish Foreign Policy of England and the disloyalty of her Governments to her ancient Constitution and to the principles of justice, both in international and national affairs, that the present distress of the operatives was due.

The nation had gone astray. It was declining more and more from the old paths of justice and honour. This was the fault of the whole people, not of a few; it was the fault of each individual. It had come about gradually, and its primary cause was the loss of municipal government, which had produced loss of the sense of responsibility. Men had come to think that affairs of state were no concern of theirs. They had committed the Government to representatives, to whom they had also committed their thinking. Instead of thought-out opinions they had adopted party catch- words, and so had got into a vicious circle, wherein loose thought had debased speech, and this in turn had corrupted thought, until men neither knew what they thought nor how they ought to act. They had lost the faculty of judgment.

" If you, the nation, judge soundly," he said to a little body of Chartists who came to ask his counsel, " it would not matter what the form of government might be. . . . It is the knowledge and simplicity of the men which constitute the value of the accidental institutions under which they live. Monarchy, Despotism, Democracy and Oligarchy have all been base and baneful as they have all been great and beneficial. The form of government has no more to do with your conclusions than the fashion of your clothes. The fashion of your clothes, as the form of your govern- ment, may react upon you, but again it is but the reaction of your own thoughts upon yourselves. . . . Government can do no people any good. Government is always a load to bear, but it is necessary as a curb to place upon the evil passions of men, whether those passions are exhibited in individual acts of injustice, or in international assaults, which have to be resisted abroad. These are the legitimate objects of government, and all else is bad. . . ."

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Such was the foundation of Urquhart's teaching, and so he drew the nobler spirits among the Chartists to himself. Those who were frankly revolutionary, or wished to be the leaders of a great party, like O'Brien1 and Feargus O'Connor, and those to whom the Charter was an end in itself, beyond which they could not see, held aloof or were openly hostile. Many of them seriously thought that David Urquhart was a Tory, that the whole movement had been " hatched in the Carlton Club," and that the " Foreign Policy cry was a red herring drawn across the trail to draw off the attention of the operatives from the Charter." The Government took another view. Lord Normanby considered Mr. Urqu-

1 Bronterre O'Brien, however, in after years found that he had many points of agreement with Urquhart.

On February 12, 1856, in a speech which he delivered on the Crimean War at the John Street Institute, Fitzroy Square, he said:

"Let it not be pretended, then, that Turkey needed our assistance, or that of France. If left to her own resources the whole Turkish population would have risen en masse, and no power that Russia could have brought into the field could have availed against such a force on Turkish soil.

" Mr. Urquhart was quite right when he said, it was not Turkey's weakness but Turkey's strength that the Allies really feared; and that, instead of going to save her, they sent their fleets and armies to prevent her from saving herself.

" Every incident of the War, every measure and fact of our policy towards Turkey, goes to prove the truth of Mr. Urquhart's assevera- tions.

" France and England have done more to destroy the independence of Turkey in one year, by their pretended alliance, than Russia could have done by fifty years of war.

" We have, by our Machiavellian policy, destroyed her three principal armies ; we have caused one part of her fleet to be destroyed at Synope, and the rest to be either used as transports or left to rot in their harbours. We have caused 3,000 of her seamen to perish for lack of pay and necessaries. We left the brave garrison of Kars to capitulate for want of bread and powder, after all their heroic sacrifices, not sending them a single regiment, when the Allies could have spared at least twenty from the Crimea (where they had nothing to do), not sending them a single ration of bread, or a parah, when we had immense stores accumulated within a few days' sail of them, and while it was known to us that nearly three years' arrears of pay were due to that brave garrison.

" To talk of helping Turkey under such circumstances was only a cruel mockery.

" We have only taken the place of Russia, in order to do to Turkey what we charged Nicholas with having designed to do.

" We have left her literally without a fleet, also without an army, except the miserable remnant of some 30,000. . . . This is what is called helping Turkey !"

92 DAVID URQUHART

hart " nothing but a Chartist with the Foreign Policy added."

But the anger of the Chartists was strongly directed towards their old leaders who had joined the " Foreign Policy men," when some of them, like Cardo, Lowery, Warden, Westrup, Thomason, and Richards, went about the various towns and districts where Chartists had lost hold, trying, not to destroy Chartism, but to show the Chartists a more excellent way. Many of them were quite ready for such showing; for the better sort were full of fear as to the way in which things were going. The members of the Convention seem to have felt that plans were being laid and plots hatched by small coteries of desperate men who had no patience to wait for the slow workings of petitions which were disregarded and appeals which were ignored.

None of the converted Chartists showed more enthusiasm, ability, and power of absorbing and reproducing the new ideas than William Cardo. Two months after his first meeting with David Urquhart we find him conducting a public meeting at Birmingham, of which this is his account :

" In my first address to the people of Birmingham after showing them the injury done to the labour and capital of this country by the expansion of the Russian Empire and the almost universal exercise of Russian influence, all directed to the destruction of British commerce, likewise the blockades carried out by France, through which one Button Manufacturer told me he had lost a market that he used to supply annually with hundreds of thousands gross of buttons, the men that made them he was compelled to discharge, and they were reduced to all the sufferings and privations consequent on want of employment. They have since been compelled to find employment in other trades that were already overstocked with workmen. Also the large import duties allowed to be put on British goods, having the effect of entirely destroying the Trade, or otherwise com- pelling the manufacturer to reduce considerably the wages of his workmen to enable the merchants to pay them. I have given you this outline to show how I connect the interests of industry with the Foreign Policy of the Country."1

1 The letters and speeches of the working men have heen given without alteration ol any kind, either of diction, grammar, or spelling.

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At a Chartist meeting which took place when he was in Birmingham, Cardo opposed to the suggestion of an anti- Corn Law agitation the Russo-Turkish policy of the Govern- ment, pointing out how it increased the price of corn, and took the opportunity to speak of Eastern municipal in- stitutions. He seems to have made some impression, for he was invited to attend a Committee and argue out the matter with the supporters of the anti-Corn Law agitators.

" I have determined," he said, " that no individual with whom I am in contact, whether in public or in private, shall remain ignorant of the designs of Russia and the treason of Lord Palmerston, not forgetting those institu- tions that Mr. Urquhart has made known to the world, and the existence of which I trust I shall live to see in this country, for it is then I look forward to the eman- cipation of that class to which I belong and the general happiness and prosperity of society."

In April, 1840, Cardo was the principal speaker at a public meeting at Newcastle, the immediate and very important result of which was the re-embodiment of the Northern Political Union,1 a distinctly Chartist body with a policy of Universal Suffrage.

It was reorganised with an addition of seventy new members " for the express purpose of inquiring into matters of which they had previously no knowledge."

" The facts stated at the meeting," says Cargill in a letter to Monteith, "came upon them like a clap of thunder; and as the Northern Political Union is a leading one, the subject taken up energetically by them will not fail also to be considered with attention by the rest of the working classes."

A day or two before this meeting Cardo, Taylor and Julius Harney had spoken together at a meeting at Carlisle,2

1 See Northern Liberator, April, 1840.

2 The meeting was a highly respectable one for the " Promotion of Sabbath Observance" ; but Cardo and his followers took possession of it by force and used it for a very different purpose. They had been refused the use of the Town Half by the Mayor. The full account of it is given in the Northern Liberator, which strongly sympathised with the Urquhart movement. The NoHhern Star was, on the other hand, fierce in its abuse of the " Foreign Policy Men."

04 DAVID URQUHART

denouncing the treasonable Foreign Policy of the Govern- ment which had brought the country into its condition of distress. Cardo was already becoming known as belonging to the " Foreign Policy " party. He was a shoemaker by trade, and evidently a man of quick intelligence and much personal attraction, with the powers and temperament of an orator. Robert Monteith says, in describing the effect he produced at a public meeting : "He was firm, earnest and sonorous to a degree I had no notion of, a Danton without his ferocity." In the Convention he was on the side of physical force, and opposed James Cobbett's resolution that the Convention should oppose any contempt of law and confine itself to presenting the People's Petition. Cardo said that the resolution " amounted to a gagging bill," and maintained that the people " should not be dictated to."

He took a prominent part in the meeting of Chartists at Birmingham to protest against the summary and despotic arrest of Dr. Taylor. Even after his conversion he by no means gave up his Chartist friends. He brought many of them with him to the Urquhart camp. Of these one of the most valuable was Warden, a man of very different nature to himself.

Warden was the first chairman of the Metropolitan Trades Union, a society of men which had broken away from the Owenites, and whose programme combined Radical reform with a moderate amount of co-operation. William Benbow was among its members and Henry Hetherington, the editor of the Poor Man's Guardian, which alone reports its first meeting. This society merged into the "National Union of the Working Classes," out of which the Chartist move- ment sprang. Warden was the delegate for Bolton at the Convention, a man of delicate health, sensitive conscience and rich intelligence. He was first a carpenter then a gardener by trade, and for his recreation he studied the Dialogues of Plato. Warden gave in his allegiance to David Urquhart, because he it was, he said, through whom he had found the truth.

" Since the time I met with Mr. Urquhart," he wrote to Montieth six months after the opening of the campaign,

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" I have been endeavouring to gain a clearer conception of the truths which were then for the first time revealed to me. My perceptions, though dim and indistinct, are sufficiently clear to convince me, that in the course we have pursued for the past two years we have been radically wrong; we have been pursuing a political phantom while England was rapidly sinking into the grave of nations. My object was (and I entered into the struggle with the most perfect self-abnegation) to restore to the working classes that privilege which they had lost, and which I conceived the other classes possessed — self-government; but I did not perceive that in losing its simplicity of character, in allowing its perceptions to be clouded by error, it had also lost the faculty of self-government as completely as the man who, having lost his eyes, has lost the faculty of sight; and that simply to add to the number of electors, when all alike were ignorant of the causes of national greatness or national decay, would only have the effect of leaving us where we were, or perhaps make our downfall more certain, since all classes from their common ignorance must have