Railway and Canal Traffic Bill considered in Congested Districts Board (Ireland) Bill read Prize Courts Bill read third time. 13. Equalisation of Rates Bill read third time. Railway and Canal Traffic Bill passed through Committee. Mines (Eight Hours) Bill in Committee. 14. Mines (Eight Hours) Bill-Committee Stage. An amendment applying the principle of local option having been carried by a majority of five, the promoters withdrew the Bill. Congested Districts Board (Ireland) Bill passed Committee. Short discussion on Indian affairs. Expiring Laws Continuance Bill was passed; also the Prevention of Cruelty to Children Bill and the Quarries Bill. 15. Adjourned debate on Mr. S. Smith's motion for Congested Districts Board (Ireland) Bill, Railway and Canal Traffic Bill, and the Juries (Ireland) Acts Amendment Bill were read a third time. 16. The Chancellor of the Exchequer's motion to expedite remainder of business carried by 130 to 23. Mr. Fowler introduced the Indian Budget. Statute Law Revision Bill-Committee stage. Statute Law Revision Bill read third time. 18. Committee of Supply.-Votes for the Colonial Office, Stationery Office, and Woods and Forests Office agreed to. 20. Chancellor of the Exchequer stated that the Government proposed to deal with the House of Lords next Session. Mr. Morley presented the Report of the Irish Remaining Civil Service Votes were all agree l a full inquiry into the condition of the people of India. No division taken. Mr. Bickerton, Town Clerk of Oxford. Admiral Robt. Jenkins, 69. THE LATE LORD DENMAN (From a photograph by J. Horsburgh and son.) 24. Dr. Stephen Piper, Darlington, 81. 26. Rev. Henry Curwen, of Workington, 82. 27. Dr. Henry Bond Bowlby, Bishop Suffragan of Coventry, 71. Prebendary R. M. Grier, of Lichfield. Canon Baghot. 28. Earl of Albemarle, 62. 29. Sir John Cowell, 62. The death is also announced of the following Michael Lessona, botanist, 71; Rev. J. Clark, Rector of Kegworth, 80; Hon. Mrs. Pakenham, 90; Mr. Cecil Roberts, 34; Mr. J. L. G. Mowat, Oxford, 48; Auguste Cain, sculptor, 73; Mr. T. C. Sandars, 69; Commander Sampson, R.N.; Geo. Inness, sen., 69; Dr. Alder Wright; Maj.Gen. J. R. Mackenzie, 72; Lieut.-Gen. G. N. K. A. Yonge, 81; Mr. Chas. Liddell, engineer, 81; Mrs. Tolman, M.D.; Mrs. John Forster; MajorGen. F. C. Trench, 60; Surgeon-Gen. Murphy, 80; John Quincy Adams, Boston, U.S.A., 61; W. C. Levey; Rear-Admiral H. N. Hippesley: Rev. Wm. Powell, 80; Mrs. James Lindsay, of Balcarres, 91; James Allan, J.P.. 68; Lady Pigott; Prof. Carl Müller, Frankfort, 76; William Charles Levey, composer; Rev. W. Hope Davison; Mrs. Celia Thaxter, American poetess. MR. FOWLER AND THE N the India office sits the Right Hon. H. H. Fowler, M.P., Secretary for India. On his right hand, looking down upon him from the wall near the entrance are a series of exquisite miniature portraits of the Great Moguls. On his left from his capacious leather-covered chair the Wesleyan solicitor who is member for Wolverhampton, now exercising more than all the power of all the Moguls over a vaster territory than ever owned their sway, looks out over the parks and palaces of the great city which Lord Beaconsfield rightly declared to be "the key of India." A plain, unpretentious, sturdy, upright, middle class Englishman, Mr. Fowler in the India Office is significant of much,-among other things of the upheaval of the nouvelles couches sociales of which Gambetta used to speak, of the ascendency of the Black Coat over the Red, of the advent of the conscientious Nonconformist in the very central citadel of Imperial Power. For although the Indian Viceroy reigns in India, the Indian Secretary rules in Downing Street, and unassuming and unpresumptuous as Mr. Fowler may appear, he is the last man in the world to shrink from the necessary assertion of all the authority of his office. But it is not of Mr. Fowler as Indian Secretary that I have to speak, but rather of Mr. Fowler, the President of the Local Government Board, and the author of the Parish Councils Act. As Indian Secretary he has still to earn his spurs. He has made an admirably lucid statement of the complicated question of Indian Finance, but he has not as yet convinced the highfliers of Anglo-India that both in dealing with the Cantonment Acts and with the opium trade, the will of the Indian Secretary is law. They will find it out in due season, but of that it is at present premature to speak, although this timely word of caution may not be thrown away even in the secret conclaves of medico-military conspirators against the authority of Parliament. Mr. Fowler may or may not be a great Indian Secretary. Nothing that can happen in the future can rob him of the right to be considered a great administrative reformer. He was but a year and a half at the Local Government Board, but in that brief period he made his mark in every parish, in every union, and in every county of England. In face of unprecedented difficulties-difficulties occasioned quite as much by the over zeal of intemperate supporters as by the opposition of his political opponents-he succeeded in carrying through Parliament a measure, conferring for the first time upon all rural householders, without distinction of sect, sex, or station, an equal right to share in the administration of their local affairs. English rural government has long been a byeword and a reproach for its flagrant defiance of every principle of modern democracy or of scientific bureaucracy. France, Germany, even Russia, were far in advance of England in the recognition of the civil rights of the rural householders. Out of the midst of this chaos of anachronism and confusion Mr. Fowler set himself to evoke order and system, and to replace the slightly veiled oligarchy of the squire and the parson by the authority of the elected representatives of the whole nation. That he has succeeded, even his political opponents admit. How far and wide and deep will be the effect of his great measure of Local Government Reform the future alone can show. But the Mr. Fowler is one of the typical men whose character well deserves the attentive study of the political philosopher. In type of mind, in the serious cast of his thoughts, in his devotion to books, and his entire indifference to almost all the amusements of the average Englishman, Mr. Fowler bears considerable resemblance to his colleague and friend Mr. Morley. The two men between them have inherited the mantle of John Bright, and upon them, and almost upon them alone, has fallen the burden of maintaining that fervour of moral indignation which was the distinctive note of the platform oratory of Mr. Gladstone. But between Mr. Morley and Mr. Fowler, these great twin brethren of the serious politician, there is almost as great a contrast as there is a resemblance. A PARALLEL AND A CONTRAST. The contrast, however, is superficial, the resemblance is essential. The difference between them is due almost entirely to their training. Mr. Fowler, the son of a Methodist minister, represents the result of practical Nonconformist upbringing, whereas Mr. Morley, the son of a Lancashire doctor, a graduate of Oxford, and a disciple of John Stuart Mill, is the product of influences very different from those of the Sunday-school and the class-meeting. The one is cast in the mould of the conventicle, the other by nature not less religious, never enjoyed the austere discipline which compels the young Methodist to close personal contact and comradeship with the uneducated poor. A second great cause of difference between them is that Mr. Fowler was trained in municipal administration, whereas Mr. Morley spent his life in the study. The Nonconformist and the Mayor necessarily differed widely from the philosopher and the man of letters. Mr. Morley had been the Mayor and Mr. Fowler the Saturday Reviewer, the result would probably have been to equalise the differences set up by their divergent religious creeds. But as the philosopher was the littérateur, while the Nonconformist served a long apprenticeship to the municipality, the difference between them widened. MR. FOWLER AND MR. MORLEY. If Mr. Fowler represents the practical experience of the cautious administrator, who has all his life been dealing with the affairs of his fellow-men in gross and in detail. Mr. Morley represents the more brilliant and more theoretical exponent of general principles applicable to mankind in the abstract. Hence, while the one always gives even his opponents the impression of being of the Gironde, Mr. Morley as invariably suggests to his assailants the reproach of Jacobinism. In reality the reproach is unfounded. No one is so little of a Jacobin as Mr. Morley, who has made Edmund Burke his patron saint. But the fact that no one even in the wildest flights of party invective ever accused Mr. Fowler of Jacobinism, although he is in many things more disposed to go far than Mr. Morley, is the direct result of his Nonconformist training and his municipal experience. THE CONSERVATISM OF NONCONFORMITY. Mr. Spurgeon once told me that Nonconformists were all Conservatives by nature, and that it was nothing but the rankling sense of injustice occasioned by the Establishment that kept them in the Liberal ranks. Hence he argued with considerable force that the most Conservative measure that party exigencies could conceive would be the Disestablishment of the Church. There is no doubt that there is a strong element of truth in what he said. As against anarchy, lawless violence, and arbitrary plunder, Nonconformity is a Conservative force. The whole training of the Nonconformist makes him the most formidable foe of the Jacobin or Anarchist. He imbibes with his mother's milk an invincible prejudice in favour of the Ten Commandments, which alone is enough to make him worthless from the point of view of the criminal conspirator. Free from all superstitions as to the Divine right either of monarchs or of majorities, and supremely indifferent to the fetish of the law, if that law happens to be unjust, the Nonconformist is, nevertheless, unable to emancipate himself from the constant restraint of his own conception of Justice and of Right. MR. CHAMBERLAIN. There are Nonconformists and Nonconformists, and the name of a Nonconformist who is also a municipal statesman naturally recurs to the mind. Mr. Chamberlain is a Unitarian, and Mr. Fowler is a Methodist, and both of them have brought the bias and tendency of their respective sects into politics. Mr. Chamberlain as a Unitarian is more uncompromising than Mr. Fowler, who although one of the most liberal of Methodists, is nevertheless the spiritual child of the Wesleyan revival of the last century, and who by birth and re-birth sympathises more with the established order than Mr. Chamberlainhis devotion to the Duchesses notwithstanding. But both men, despite those differences of detail, are typical of English dissent. Many Liberals seem to imagine that it is fair to accuse Mr. Chamberlain of almost every conceivable enormity; but as a matter of fact no one doubts that the Liberal Unionist leader is sincerely and honestly convinced that he was acting in accordance with his highest conception of right, alike when he was parading the country with his friend Jesse's standard of three acres and a cow, and to-day when he is the fidus Achates of Mr. Balfour and the Tory Opposition. The sense of rectitude, of honesty, and of fair dealing which is more or less ingrained in the English nature, is made the object of special culture in Nonconformist Churches; and in these changeful times of unrest and of revolution, the presence in our midst of an exceeding great multitude trained to regard their conscience as king, even in the midst of party strife, is one of the most important, if not the most important, of the securities which England possesses against shipwreck and disaster. Mr. Carnegie. MR. BRIGHT AND MR. W. H. SMITH. The other great Nonconformist who obtained Cabinet rank the first, indeed, of the three-was Mr. Bright, and in many respects he bore more conspicuously the mark of his spiritual up-bringing than either Mr. Chamberlain or Mr. Fowler. The three men, however, are sufficiently distinctive in character to be accepted as among the best types of the Churches to which they belong. John Bright the Quaker, Henry Fowler the Methodist, and Joseph Chamberlain the Unitarian, constitute a significant addition to the ranks of English statesmanship in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. To these may be added Mr. W. H. Smith, who, although he became a Churchman, had his character moulded and his life shaped in a Methodist home. It is worthy of note that Mr. Fowler and Mr. W. H. Smith were both members of Great Queen Street Chapel at a time when the Rev. Joseph Fowler was the senior minister of that Cathedral of Metropolitan Methodism. NOTABLE "CHILDREN OF THE MANSE." Mr. Fowler was not only a Methodist, he was born in the purple, having been the son of a Methodist minister, and a minister, too, of sufficient note to occupy the responsible position of secretary to the Conference. The son of a Nonconformist minister is of necessity born poor, and enters the world by way of the school of adversity. Yet it is noteworthy that in the Cabinet there are to be found no fewer than three Ministers who are what in Scotland would be called "Children of the Manse." Lord Herschell, the Lord Chancellor, was the son of a Congregational minister; Mr. Bryce, President of the Board of Trade, the grandson of a Presbyterian minister; and Mr. Fowler, the son of a Methodist minister. Mr. Asquith, although the son of a Congregationalist, is not a "Child of the Manse." Another characteristic of the present Ministry is, that it is composed very largely of North-countrymen. In this Mr. Fowler resembles the majority of his colleagues. BIRTH AND EDUCATION. He was born in Sunderland; but the life of a Methodist minister being more or less that of a pilgrim who has no abiding city in any part of the world, he can hardly be regarded as a North-countryman other than by birth. He was educated at Woodhouse Grove School, an institution maintained exclusively for the sons of Wesleyan ministers; he afterwards went to the Newcastle Grammar School, and finished his school education under Dr. Sharpe, of St. Saviour's, Southwark. He now sits for the Midland borough of Wolverhampton, of which town he has been a resident, and to whose service he has dedicated his life. The fact that he was not educated at any of our great public schools may explain the lack of that keen interest in field sports and athletics which is characteristic of most of our public men. Mr. Fowler has always been a man of the study rather than of the fields. In this respect he is almost as bad as John Morley, whose indifference to amusement otherwise than by meditation, music, and reading, is notorious. Mr. Bright was a devotee of salmon fishing; Lord Spencer is, or was, Master of the Hounds; Mr. Balfour, who has long been a devotee of golf, is now learning the delights of cycling, and there are few among our public men who do not take that more or less keen interest in manly sports which is a characteristic of the race; but Mr. Fowler is nowhere so much at home as in his own library, and he would prefer a book by his own fireside, in the bosom of his family, to all the delights of the turf, the chase, or the field. APPRENTICED TO THE LAW. From his youth up, young Fowler was fired by the ambition natural to a young man in his circumstances. It was the dream of his youth to go to the Bar, and in his waking dreams he aspired to the Woolsack, which a young man, the son of another Dissenting minister, was ultimately to occupy. In mapping out his future, young Fowler calculated upon graduating at one of our universities, but the death of his father rendered it impossible for him to gratify his juvenile ambition. It was a great heart-break to him-possibly the disappointment which he felt the most keenly in his life-when he had to give up all thought of a university career and all hope of going to the Bar. Instead of going to the university and eating his dinners at Lincoln's Inn, he was articled to a solicitor; little dreaming that when he betook himself to the lower branch of the legal profession, that he was destined to be famous as the first solicitor in England who ever entered the Cabinet of Her Majesty. Whether as solicitor or as barrister, it became him to do with his might whatever work lay ready to his hand, and as young Fowler was a demon for work, a peripatetic reservoir of human energy, he soon made his way. For the cultivation of readiness of speech, self-possession, quickness of perception of the points in discussion, there are few schools more efficient than such a home as that in which he was brought up, where public affairs, in the shape of the concerns of the local chapel or of the general connexion, are continually being debated, as if they were-as in truth they are-part and parcel of the domestic affairs of the household. Then it came to pass that he was admitted as a solicitor when he was only twenty-two, and in time became a member of the firm of Fowler, Perks, Hopkinson and Co., of Clement's Inn, and Fowler and Langley, of Wolverhampton. IN CIVIC SERVICE IN THE MIDLANDS. From this time onward, Wolverhampton became the centre from which Mr. Fowler was destined to work. It is not exactly an ideal Utopia, nor can it be said to be like another famous city," the joy of the whole earth.” It is, however, the only city in the Black Country which can, even at a distance, vie with the leadership of Birmingham, and it has always maintained a character of its own for independence and public spirit. Into the local life of this Midland capital young Fowler threw himself with characteristic energy; he was elected to the Town Council and became alderman before he was thirty, and in 1863, when he was only thirty-three years of age, he was elected mayor of the borough. He was at that time the youngest mayor in England. The mayoralty of English cities is not by any means equivalent in importance or in power to the position of a mayor in a great American city, over which he reigns more like a French prefect or elective Cæsar than as a mere chairman of the town council. Still the post carries with it a seat on the local Bench, and compels its holder to busy himself with all the departments into which municipal life is divided. WOLVERHAMPTON AND BIRMINGHAM. Mr. Chamberlain in Birmingham, and Mr. Fowler in Wolverhampton, each represents the new and rising school of municipal statesmen of whom we have subsequently had a perfect nest in the London County Council. They were the pioneers, and first familiarised the British public with the fact that in our municipal life there were opportunities for the training of statesmen, certainly not in any way interfering with the ordinary curriculum of the diplomatic or military service, from which in old times cadets used to pass to the Legislature. Mr. Fowler admired Mr. Chamberlain, and the two emulated each other in all good works; but in one respect Mr. Fowler differed from his Birmingham contemporary. The difference was characteristic of the temperaments of the two men. Mr. Chamberlain believed that it was absolutely necessary to subordinate municipal life to political partisanship, or, as he would put it, it was necessary to use the engine of party government in order to regenerate municipal life. This being translated into practical English, meant that in Mr. Chamberlain's day the whole of the municipal administration of Birmingham was vested in the hands of the Radicals. Mr. Chamberlain established the caucus which sat like Cerberus at the door of the town council, and refused admission to all those who were not of the regulation Radical stripe. As a result, the Birmingham Town Council hardly contained half a dozen Conservatives, and a Tory was as much tabooed in the headquarters of the new municipalism as Catholics are in the Town Council of Belfast. CITY BEFORE PARTY. Mr. Fowler, on the other hand, went upon exactly the opposite tack. He maintained, as he still maintains, that it is a mistake to subordinate a great question of civic government and municipal administration to the issues of national politics with which very often they are very remotely connected. "Where you find a good man and a true, a capable man, and one who is ready and willing to do good service to his fellow-citizens, that man," said Mr. Fowler, "should be elected, all considerations of party and of sect notwithstanding." This principle he always carried out, and to the strenuousness with which he has insisted upon regarding local government as distinct from national party issues, is largely due the success which has attended his greatest administrative achievement-the establishment and the passing of the Parish Councils Act. After serving as mayor, his next important post was that of chairman of the first School Board that was elected in Wolverhampton. It was a difficult post, but it was one which he filled with conspicuous ability, and with that sweet reasonableness which is not usually supposed to be a distinctive note of the militant Nonconformist. THE TYPICAL METHODIST LAYMAN. Although active in public service, busily engaged in his own profession, Mr. Fowler never ceased, nor has he to this day ceased, to take an active interest in the welfare of the great denomination within which he was born. His father, the Rev. Joseph Fowler, occupied a very distinguished position in the Connexion. In those days Wesleyan Methodism was a hot-bed of Toryism, and what appears even to the Conservative Wesleyan of to-day of a very extreme and prosperous type. When Mr. Fowler was a boy it was quite an established article of faith in many Methodist circles that there was something ungodly in political life, and such a portent as the Rev. Hugh Price Hughes in those days would have seemed to a very large number of Methodists nothing short of an apparition of Antichrist. In the midst of such a conservative and reactionary generation, the Rev. Joseph Fowler shone forth as a pillar of light. He was a man of education, broad views, of unimpeachable orthodoxy, and such a general favourite, that after being Secretary of the Conference, he would certainly have been elected President, but for his unfortunate and premature death. It was from him that Mr. Fowler inherited that stalwart Liberalism that has always distinguished him ever since he first took part in political life. His mother came from a Conservative camp; one of her brothers was Mr. James Hartley, of Sunderland, a well-known Conservative M.P., who was at one time heading fair for a seat in the Conservative administration; while another brother was Tory candidate in East Staffordshire. In the Connexion Mr. Fowler took his fair measure of denominational work, and exercised a steady and constant influence in favour of the liberalising of a denomination sorely in need of it. He represented the Wesleyan laymen. He is perhaps at this moment the typical Wesleyan layman, and as such took a leading part in the efforts that had been made to open the Conference to the laity. HIS POLITICAL LIFE. In all religious and moral questions he has taken a prominent part, and to him the country owes a debt of gratitude for the constant manner in which he has supported Mrs. Butler in her long struggle against the official patronage and regulation of prostitution. In England, and in any other democratic country which is in a healthy condition, the manifestation of efficiency in local administration leads to transfer sooner or later to the House of Commons. Mr. Fowler was no exception to the rule. Although refusing to subordinate municipal to national issues, he had always taken an active part in party political strife, and in 1880, when the great Liberal revival took place which resulted in the discomfiture of the jingoes of Lord Beaconsfield, Mr. Fowler was elected as colleague of Mr. Villiers, the aged Nestor of Liberalism, whose name was always associated with the repeal of the Corn Laws. Mr. Fowler's reminiscences in political life go back to the beginning of that great struggle. While a mere boy he attended one of the famous meetings at Covent Garden when the Corn Law League was founded, but he was too far away from the centre to hear anything that was said. In his fiftieth year he became parliamentary colleague of the veteran statesman whose annual motion for the repeal of the Corn Laws had paved the way for the agitation of Messrs. Cobden and Bright. On entering Parliament, Mr. Fowler soon made his mark. IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. A long practice of public speaking in the town council had given him fluency and address and a choice of diction which he turned to good account in the House of Commons. He soon made his mark. His maiden speech on the Burials Bill and another speech in favour of the exclusion of the Bishops in the House of Lords attracted the attention of John Bright, and one or two other speeches on similar subjects soon led to his recognition in the House and in the country as one of the coming men of the party. Although sitting below the Gangway, he devoted himself with great assiduity to the mastery of the business of the House, he paid special attention to questions of legal and local Government reform, and in the discussion of the Irish Land Act and the Coercion Act, more than once indicated his readiness on occasion to take up an independent although strictly friendly attitude to the Liberal Government. After being appointed first to serve on one Commission and then on another, he made his début as a Liberal official by becoming UnderSecretary for the Home Office in 1884. The post suited him, and he was in many respects a very useful foil of the brusque manners of his chief. He became a great House of Commons man-that is to say, he lived and breathed and had his being in the lobbies, and became an idolator of its forms and customs, and at the same time he did his fair share, and more, perhaps, than his fair share, of stump oratory in the country. He took up the question of the Free Breakfast Table, and did yeoman service in connection with the extension of the suffrage. AT THE TREASURY. In 1885 he was returned at the head of the poll for Wolverhampton, and on the re-constitution, in 1886, of the Liberal party on a Gladstonian and Home Rule basis, he became Financial Secretary |