INDIAN MUTINY.) The Orsini Plot and Palmerston's Last Government.—In 1858 an Italian named Orsini attempted to assassinate Napoleon with bombs made in Birmingham. The French government de spatched a rude remonstrance, and when Palmerston made the retort courteous of a bill increasing the penalties for conspiracy, the "patriotism" of which he had hitherto been the mouthpiece turned against him. He was defeated and succeeded by Derby, with Disraeli as leader in the Commons. The Derby government admitted Jews to parliament, terminated the existence of the East India Company, and incurred defeat over an attempt to ex tend the parliamentary franchise.
The general election of 1859 restored Palmerston to power, which he retained till his death, strengthened by the inclusion in his cabinet of the Peelite leaders, whose separate organization now came to an end. Gladstone returned to the Treasury and resumed the tale of his Budgets. A commercial treaty with France (186o), negotiated by Cobden, seemed to many the beginning of the conversion of the continental nations to free trade, and Glad stone's name, afterwards annexed by a bag, was temporarily at tached to the cheap clarets made available by the treaty. Another item of 186o, the repeal of the paper duties, had an important constitutional consequence. The Lords rejected the bill in which it was embodied, and henceforth all the Budget measures of the year were included in a single Finance Bill. As the Lords could not, by custom, amend financial bills, they could henceforth interfere with taxation only by rejecting the whole of the revenue measures of the year, a course on which they did not venture till 1909.
The years of Palmerston's last government (1859-65) saw the union of modern Italy, the American civil war, and the Danish war with which Bismarck opened his momentous career as the maker of Prussianized Imperial Germany. To the Italian cause the government gave "moral support" which had a distinct though easily exaggerated value ; but it is impossible to admire their part in the American and Danish crises. A peremptory despatch about the affair of the Trent (when an American naval officer improperly arrested the "Southern" envoys in a British ship) might have led to an unforgivable war had not the Prince Consort altered the document—the last public action of an admirable and unappreci ated foreigner. As for the Danes, the British Government en couraged them to fight believing that Prussia would thereby be induced not to fight ; but bluff was wasted on Bismarck, and Denmark paid the penalty.
It was a relatively quiet period in the world of labour, but among the miners and the builders trade unionism made a marked advance. In 1863 Alexander Macdonald succeeded in assembling, at Leeds, the first really representative Miners' Conference, and an organization to assist the building trade workers in the lock out of 1859 was a first foreshadowing of the national Trade Union Congress. During these years also a group of trade union secretaries resident in London became an informal clearing house for labour policies, and a means of establishing contact with friendly journalists and politicians: the group is commonly known as "the Junta." At about the same time Ruskin, who had secured the attention of a large public by his books on art and architecture, began to denounce in impassioned lectures the im morality of orthodox capitalist economics.
In 1859 the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species brought to a head the long pending controversy between "faith" and "science." Bishop Wilberforce disposed of the book as "atheisti cal" in the Quarterly Review, and was unwise enough to en counter Huxley in debate at the annual meeting of the British Association. Strong controversies arose within the church itself over Essays and Reviews (186o), a volume by several clerical hands, and Bishop Colenso's rationalistic examination of the Pentateuch (1862). The year of The Origin of Species (1859) also saw the publication of the first big novels by George Eliot and George Meredith. Almost all the poetry of Matthew Arnold belongs to the "Palmerstonian age," and its last year witnessed the publication of Atalanta in Calydon. Its author, Swinburne, was closely associated with the Pre-Raphaelite group of painters, whose theories and practice, whatever their merits, were about to stimulate a more vivid interest in the problems of pictorial art.