determined that Great Britain should not become the tool of the bondholders’ interests. He wrote a memorandum to this effect in October 1882. Our first duty, he insisted, was to our principles and to our supporters and not to other powers; and, if the powers insisted on financial control, we should at least identify ourselves with the legitimate aspirations of Egyptian national sentiment. When, in April 1884, the relief of General Gordon was under consideration, Chamberlain agreed with Dilke and Hartington that, whether Gordon had acted against his instructions or not, an expedition for his relief was necessary. As early as February Chamberlain had proposed to telegraph to Sir Evelyn Baring (afterwards Earl of Cromer, q.v.), giving him authority to concert measures with Sir Evelyn Wood [q.v.] for the relief of the beleaguered garrisons in the Sudan. But Gladstone and Granville broke up a meeting of the Cabinet, so as to prevent the adoption of this policy. Still, though differences in the Cabinet might delay an expedition till it became useless, they could not prevent it. Dilke and Chamberlain were consistently in favour of relieving Gordon, though Chamberlain strongly opposed the grandiose campaign of Lord Wolseley, believing that a small striking force of picked men was all that was required to avert the coming tragedy. He did not intend to be forced any further in the direction of a protectorate. He was in favour of an international guarantee of the neutrality of Egypt, and was ready to declare that country bankrupt. Two subjects, he wrote to Dilke, occupied the time of successive Cabinet councils, the finances of Egypt, and Gordon; but, whereas the former took up some two or three hours, the latter received about five minutes at the fag-end of business. Thus neither by what it did nor by what it left undone did the Egyptian policy of the Gladstone ministry of 1880-1885 win the approval of its radical members.
Chamberlain was even less in sympathy with the prevailing tendencies in other parts of the world. In 1883 a committee of the Cabinet was appointed to deal with affairs on the west coast of Africa; and this committee, according to Dilke, by its delays and hesitations, lost England the Cameroons. ‘The Cameroons!’ wrote Chamberlain to Dilke in September 1884, ‘It is enough to make one sick. As you say, we decided to assume the protectorate eighteen months ago. If the Board of Trade or the Local Government Board managed their business after the fashion of the Foreign Office and the Colonial Office, you and I would deserve to be hung.’ If he had had the direction of affairs, he would have demanded explanations from Germany regarding New Guinea; and he shared Dilke’s resentment at the policy of truckling to Germany, which was adopted in the case of Samoa and of Zanzibar and East Africa.
Nevertheless, while these causes of dissatisfaction were at work, Chamberlain was proving his capacity in his own special department, where his business experience stood him in good stead. In the session of 1880 he had in charge two measures relating to merchant shipping, the one concerning grain cargoes, the other the payment of seamen’s wages. In 1881 he was responsible for an Electric Lighting Bill, which entitled municipalities, with the consent of the Board of Trade, to adopt electric lighting, without the cost and trouble of a private Act of parliament. An Act of 1883 effected a valuable reform in the law of bankruptcy, by subjecting the accounts of trustees to the control of an independent authority, and by setting on foot a searching inquisition into the conduct of insolvent debtors. The Act has been improved by subsequent legislation, but at the time was recognized by lawyers and business men as marking a great advance. The Patent Act of 1883 made easier the road for the inventor, by reducing greatly the scale of provisional fees and subsequent payments. More generally interesting and more adapted to the temperament of a fighting politician was the Merchant Shipping Bill of 1884, directed against shipowners who insured unseaworthy vessels beyond the value of the ships or of their cargoes. In a speech at Newcastle in January 1884 Chamberlain asserted that in the preceding year one seaman in every sixty had met his death by violent means; three thousand five hundred men had thus come to a premature end, many of them in the prime of life and many of them leaving behind them widows and orphans. So strongly did he feel on the subject that, when parliamentary reasons dictated the withdrawal of his measure, he at once proffered his resignation; which, however, he afterwards withdrew in view of the need of a united front until the question of the vote for the agricultural labourers should be finally settled. Moreover, he was able to secure the appointment of a royal commission, which in the end bore good fruit; for subsequent Acts accomplished most of the objects at which the Bill of
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