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As already indicated, I was
far from being out of
work during the breakdown period, when I had to
lie most of my time on my back, for besides the
monthly budget for the Cape, I wrote many leading
articles and reviews of books for other papers. I
chose my own subjects, and wrote as I honestly
thought on those subjects. Before I went to South
Africa I was by habit and conviction what I may
call a Palmerstonian Whig. So, at the time of my
editorial connection with it, was the Bradford
Observer, and its proprietor, Mr William Byles.
There was only one subject on which he and I
agreed to differ, and that was the aggressive policy
of Mr Edward Miall and the Liberation Society
towards the Established Churches of England and
Scotland. Dissenters, I knew, had grievances which
ought to be redressed, and were by degrees being
redressed, in rural districts where squire and parson
looked upon themselves as monarchs of all they
surveyed, but Mr Byles, who belonged to the old
class of religious Dissenters, was ready enough to
admit that the two National Established Churches
had done, and were doing work which, if they were
levelled down, Voluntaryism could not undertake to
do, and he did not deny that their work and
historical continuity were the backbone of Protestant
strength not only at home but in the United States,
where there was no Established Church. On this
one subject I never wrote in his paper, nor did he
want me to do so. The truly religious Dissenters of
his generation and training did not realise how
among the younger generation political dissent was
already eating out the heart of puritanic belief,
although happily to a large extent the old standard
of morality was still upheld. Mr Byles, with his long business experience,
was far less sanguine than I that co-operation and limited liability would
go far to solve the capital and labour difficulty. Co-operation stores, with
their assured customers and ready money payments, under ordinary good
management, cannot help being comparatively successful. But co-operation
mills and other works have not stood the test of many fair trials.
Individual management in competent hands must always beat collective
management, however careful and free from the
corruption of secret commissions and scandals such
as those of Poplar, West Ham, and Mile End. I
always valued the colonies and dependencies as the
Greater Britain there was to be, and always resented
the tone adopted towards them by Messrs Cobden
and Bright, and all their Manchester School followers. I came back from the Cape a stronger
Imperialist than when I went there, and with new
doubts about the abiding value of the free import
policy which we glorified by calling it free trade
when it never got to be anything of the kind.
A political era closed with
the death of Lord
Palmerston and the going to the House of Lords of
old Lord John Russell. The leaders who came
after them, Mr Disraeli and Mr Gladstone, had
began public life, the former as a flashy, philosophical
Radical, and the latter as a High Church Anglican
Tory. After Mr Disraeli's democratic Reform Bill,
establishing household suffrage in boroughs, and ten
pound suffrage in the counties, and Mr Gladstone's
disestablishment of the Irish Church, the old designation of parties as
Whigs and Tories lost their meaning ; and the new ones of Liberals and Conservatives
became more appropriate. As for the disestablishment of the Irish Church,
the only thing I deeply regretted myself was that the confiscated
ecclesiastical funds were not retained and proportionately shared among Catholic parish priests
and Protestant ministers of all denominations for
permanent endowment purposes as far as they
would go. The Protestant Episcopal Church of
Ireland was in very truth "A garrison church," which represented
English domination, and a half conquest, which was much more irritating and
ten times less beneficial than a settlement on complete conquest might have been. 1 had read all Mr
Disraeli's published works, and while fully aware of
the genius displayed in them, I did not like their
foreign-like glitter, superlatives, and class and caste
limitations in regard to his subjects and the way he
treated them. But on questions of foreign and
colonial policy his views seemed always to be as far-
seeing and truly patriotic as those of Mr Gladstone
were hazy and unreliable. It was after the time I
am writing about that Mr Gladstone took to having
special revelations like Mahomet, which suited
personal and party interests. When he disestablished the Irish Church, he was yet far enough from
Irish Home Rule, and from the passionate claptrap
of the Bulgarian atrocity agitation. He had, with
wonderful gifts of oratory and financial talents, the
singular faculty of persuading himself as well as
others that on every occasion of his making a new
departure in politics he was acting on the highest
motives, as if he had a revelation and order from
heaven. No one could listen to his glowing oratory
without being to some degree mesmerised, but when
his speeches, with their bursting sentences so
troublesome to reporters were read in print, the
mesmerism of tone and personality disappeared, and
one wondered how the sought-for impression could
have been produced at the public meeting or in the
House of Commons by a flow of words, which were
in sense frequently elusive, however imposing in
form. 1 think I must admit that I got an early
prejudice against Mr Gladstone, because he was the
only House of Commons member of Sir Robert Peel's
Government in 1842-3 who understood the dispute
which ended in the Disruption, and who, instead of
doing all he could to prevent the catastrophe, joined
with Manning and others in setting up the Glen-
almond College, for Anglicanising the sons of the
Scotch nobility and gentry.
On returning from South
Africa, I found myself,
like many more of the Ne quid nimis Palmerstonian Whigs, out of sympathy and
general agreement with the new Liberalism, and filled with distrust of Mr
Gladstone's tendency to heroically plunge into all sorts of domestic policy
innovations, and of his capacity for blundering in foreign affairs, and for
neglecting the colonies and British Empire consolidation. So henceforward I was, like others of
my kind, ranked as a Conservative, and as the years
passed got accustomed in words and writings to
express my fears and ever increasing convictions of
the dangers ahead, with Highland forcibleness of
language. I lost, no doubt, professional chances by
refusing to float with the current of Gladstonian
Liberalism, but I lost none of my old friends, not-
withstanding political separation at the parting
of the ways, and in after years not a few of them
were driven by Mr Gladstone's Home Rule plunge
to join the ranks of the Unionists. This is all
preliminary to what I have to say about our eleven
years' residence at Thwaites House, within a mile of
Keighley, but by a small field's breadth inside the
parish of Bingley.
I returned from the Highlands
on the second
visit with health so much improved that we forth-
with began to look out for a house in the country,
where we should for the third time since our marriage
set up our penates. Ere long we heard of Thwaites
House. My wife and her mother went to see it,
and their report was so favourable that I took it
without having first visited it. I was delighted
with it when I did see it. It had been built in
succession to an older homestead by one of a line of
Rishworth proprietors about 1780. The houses then put up, like this one,
were built to last as it were for ever. The fold of farm buildings claimed a
much higher antiquity than the homestead, which consisted of a broader main building and a narrower
kitchen end, with plenty room for the farmer, Mr
William Wilkinson, and his wife, and the wife's
father, who resided with them until his death, a few
years later. The Wilkinsons had no family, and
when the wife died the husband's niece came to
keep house for him. Worthy, hard-working, and
excellent neighbours they all were. With the
exception of one upstairs room, we had all the main
building five rooms, two of which were very large,
with a kitchen, cellar, and broad staircase. Our front
door and the face of the whole house faced the mid-
day sun, while the door of the farmer's part of the
building was at the other side. When there was
level ground so near, it was a strange fancy of the
old proprietors to have stuck in their homestead at
the foot of a steep grassy brae, over which the larks
delighted to sing like mad, while they rose and fell
in the air as if dancing to their own music. The
farmer had the better and more level half of the old
garden, our part being an intake from the steep
hillside. But it was enough for our needs, and,
besides vegetables for the pot, and salad stuffs,
produced plums, apples, gooseberries, rasps, and
strawberries. I was always fond of gardening, and
it did me good to spend spare hours in fighting this
unlevel piece of ground. The house roofs were covered,
not by slates, but by Yorkshire grit flags, as was
the case with most of the old buildings of the whole
district. A later Rishworth built, some time in the
early half of last century, three cottages at the end
of the homestead, with their fronts and doors facing
away from the mid-day sun. Slate, I believe, was
not much known, or at any rate much used, before
the making of the Leeds and Liverpool Canal. In
the fifties or early sixties, the Rishworths sold
their Thwaites House property, and went to Tuam,
in Galway, where they established themselves as
manufacturers. Their history was like that of many
others of the old class of small landowners who were
tempted to sell in order to launch out in new careers,
or to divide capital among a numerous family of
children. The area of the Thwaites House property
was just enough for a snug farm, which, before the
arable and level part was sold and cut off' for the
Keighley Gasworks, Mr Wilkinson and his wife,
with a servant man's aid in spring and autumn, were
able to manage very well.
We went to Thwaites House
with two children,
the boys we brought back with us from Africa.
We left it with a family of nine, and two more were
born to us at Inverness.
Between Keighley and Bingley,
on the Thwaites
or west side of the Aire, the scenery is exceedingly
pretty, being varied by low fields, and some boggy
still lower nooks, where willows for basket-work
were profitably cultivated an industry which
ought to be introduced into many places in the
Highlands, which are undoubtedly suitable for
willow cultivation. Besides Bingley wood, trees
and hedges abounded everywhere. By rising
abruptly from the plain, the upper grazings, with
their trees, bushes, and hedges, made a successful
attempt to produce the impression of being rather
lofty, or at least very picturesque hills. But when
we climbed the abrupt little hill above our house,
so beloved of larks, starlings, and other birds, we
came to a fairly level farm, above which rose the
higher small and romantic rocky hill which had at
some unknown date acquired the name of the Druid
altar. Rights-of-way, by roads and footpaths, had
been carefully preserved, throughout all the varia-
tions brought about by encroachments of towns and
changes of industrial and social life. So there was
free access to a lovely scenery, rich in flower and
fauna, where the air was pure, and smoky towns
and polluted streams could be forgotten. On the
east or Rumbold Moor side of the river, the scene
was less varied, and the much higher hill was less
interesting until the heather was reached and the
open lower slopes, with ancient halls, were lost
sight of.
While we could fancy
ourselves out of the world
in this rural retreat, we were yet in it, not only
because of my work for various newspapers, but
likewise because we had many callers, such as
friends and acquaintances of various classes,
politicians, and clergymen of different Churches,
Episcopalians, Nonconformists, and my good friend
Father Kiernan from Tipperary, whose Gaelic, to
his huge regret, had in the days of his youth
been neglected. Political opponents liked to have
arguments with me. Among these was Mr
Moggridge, who succeeded me as editor of the
Observer, and flung himself conscientiously into
the Radicalism from which I had determinedly
revolted. Mr Moggridge was the son and heir
of a Welsh landowner. While at the University
he had fallen under the influence of John Stuart
Mill's economical theories, Herbert Spencer's
metaphysics, and Goldwin Smith's shallow
political philosophy. He made sacrifices for his
opinions. He had studied for being a clergyman
of the Church of England, and drifting into
Agnosticism, renounced his church connection and sure
prospects of promotion, disappointed his father and
relatives, flung himself into journalism, and married
a nice lady of the fair Saxon type, who was the
niece of the enemy of grouse and game Mr Peter
Taylor, for a long time the Radical M.P. for
Blackburn, but who drew the line at Irish Home
Rule, and died a firm Unionist. Mr Moggridge
himself was a dark Welshman, and so was their
daughter the brightest, sylph-like, of young lassies
that could be found, while their boy was like the
mother. Mr Moggridge and I had many discussions
on the evolution theory and kindred subjects. He
admitted it was not at that time fully proved, but
believed that it was wholly true, and expected that
the missing links would soon be found. I admitted
that for generalisation and classification purposes it
might have its usefulness, but contended that, rightly
defined, the distinction of species was on this planet,
as far as men knew or could know, immutable and
eternal, and that the history of hybrids in plants
and animals sustained my contention. We both
realised the far-reaching consequences of the evolu-
tion doctrine if accepted for proved truth. Mr
Moggridge, I always felt, could not find rest all
his life in the cold atmosphere of Agnosticism. He
was too fond of Homer, Plato, and even the
Arthurian stories, and naturally too religious for
becoming rooted in his thin unbeliefs. High aspirations and ideals connected him too closely, despite
reasoning and will, with the soul side of the universe
to be satisfied with the materialism, which science
can only dissect like a dead corpse, leaving the soul
side alone. It would not have been impossible
for him, I thought, to find, when averted from
Christianity, something to suit his imagination in
Buddhism or the creed of Pythagoras, but I deemed
it far more likely that he would rather, when he
revolted from materialism and found out that human
nature was, for good and evil, not what he had
dreamed of, like Cardinal Newman, put himself
under the authority and discipline of the Church of
Rome. But he contented himself with return to the
Church of England. He left Bradford several years
before we left Thwaites House. I missed his visits
many a day, but as I always disliked to keep up
correspondence by letters with friends as much as I
liked to talk with them face to face, I lost sight of
him for a long time. It was a good while after we
came to Inverness that I was one day startled by
reading in an Aberdeen or Elgin paper news of his
death on the Moray Firth coast, where he had been
in charge of an Episcopal Church and congregation.
Had I known sooner that he was there, I would
certainly have gone to see him, and to invite him
and his to come and see me and mine at Inverness. |
