§ EARL GRANVILLEMy Lords, I rise for the purpose of making another personal explanation. I am sorry I have to do so, but it is not my fault. Mr. Disraeli is reported in the newspapers 1500 of to-day as having stated last night in the House of Commons that the Papers respecting the purchase of the Suez Canal shares containing letters of Sir Daniel Lange to the late Government with reference to an alleged offer of the purchase of the Canal had been sent to me before publication, and that I sanctioned them. He stated afterwards that he did not wish to be understood as attaching any responsibility to me in respect of their publication. With reference to this explanation, I must say that I do not quite understand why he had alluded to the fact. He then went on to say that the Papers were submitted to me and that I raised no objection to their publication. I took the liberty of giving the noble Earl (the Earl of Derby) private Notice that I should ask him whether in his opinion I incurred any responsibility with respect to the publication of these Papers?
§ THE EARL OF DERBYIf the noble Earl wishes to put to me the question, whether I desire to attach to any one who is not a Member of the Government any part of that responsibility which falls to the person who occupies the position I now fill, I am quite ready to give an answer in the negative to that inquiry. I do not hold the noble Earl responsible for the publication of those Papers. But when I say that, I presume that the noble Earl does not mean to deny that, although not responsible for, he was cognizant of, their publication. Following the precedent of the Department over which I preside, I had the pleasure to forward the noble Earl a Copy of the Papers which were to be submitted to Parliament, inasmuch as they related to business which passed in the Department during his tenure of office there. My noble Friend received them; and he will recollect that he had the thoughtfulness and kindness to offer me a suggestion with respect to one Paper, the publication of which he thought might be injurious to the public service. That suggestion I acted upon. Although I do not answer for the accuracy of what is reported to have been stated in "another place," if any statement was made there which might lead to the belief that the noble Earl is responsible for the publication of those Papers, I am quite willing to say that he was not. What happened was this—The noble Earl was aware of 1501 the publication, and did not object to it. While I say that, I am bound to add that I do not think my noble Friend was bound to express any opinion in the matter, one way or the other. So much for the personal question. But with reference to comments which have been made on the subject of the publication itself, it appears to me that there has been a good deal of misapprehension, and therefore I hope I may be allowed to say a word or two to clear up the matter. I believe that the popular impression out-of-doors is that we published communications which were never meant to be otherwise than confidential, and very naturally the public exclaims "What a monstrous thing to do." But, my Lords, were those communications private and confidential in the ordinary sense of the word? No. If they were of that character, they would have formed part of the private correspondence of the noble Earl who preceded me in the Foreign Office, and would have been taken away with his other private correspondence. But that was not the case. They were received at the Foreign Office as coming to the Secretary for Foreign Affairs; they were registered, and they went through the usual routine observed in the case of all letters sent to the Department. They were letters on public business addressed to the head of a public Department from a person holding an important public position. Those letters form the only reference to an important transaction which we thought it essential the public should be made aware of. They are five in all, and I may mention that two were not marked with any words indicating a private or confidential character, but let me remind your Lordships—though I scarcely need remind any one who has had any experience in public affairs—that the confidential nature of a publication is in nine cases out ten a matter of time. If, as Foreign Secretary, I were made aware of some European event which was going to occur in three or four months, it is possible that the information would be given to me in a letter or despatch marked "confidential," or "private," or "secret." It would, of course, be necessary to regard that communication as confidential for the time; but it does not follow that when the events referred to in such communications 1502 have occurred, and when the reason for secrecy is at an end, there may be any reason whatever why they should not be made public by being laid on the Table of both Houses of Parliament. I do not wish your Lordships or the public out-of-doors to be under the impression that the Papers referred to by the noble Earl were published without valid reasons. They were the only reference to what undoubtedly was a very important public transaction—namely, the offer made to our Predecessors in office for the purchase of the Suez Canal. I ask your Lordships to consider how much heavier would have been our responsibility and what would have been the nature of the inferences which would have been drawn if it could have been said that while we purported to give to Parliament the whole of the Papers having reference to the Suez Canal, we suppressed a portion, and that the most important portion of all—namely, that which contains the fact that an offer had been made to our Predecessors, which they had not thought fit to accept. I think the inference to have been drawn from that would not have been of a very agreeable character. I sum up the matter in this way—In the first place, the letters were not private letters in the ordinary sense of the word; they were communications addressed to a public Department. In the next place, they were confidential at the time they were written and received; but it was for the Department in which they were registered to exercise its own discretion as to whether in five years after the whole matter to which they referred was at an end their confidential character should be maintained. If the gentleman who was so much mixed up in the matter has been in any way injured by the appearance of these documents in print I very much regret it; but looking through them since their publication with a care which I did not give to them before they had been published, I do not see anything in them which is in the least discreditable either to the writer of those communications or to the gentleman on whose conduct they comment. I cannot see anything in them in the slightest degree injurious to the character or to the interests of Sir Daniel Lange or M. de Lesseps, and though I regret the inconvenience which may have resulted from their appearance, I must repeat that I think we should have incurred 1503 a heavier responsibility and exposed ourselves to grave censure if, instead of having published these communications we had suppressed them altogether.
§ EARL GRANVILLEI regret it if I should be putting your Lordships to any inconvenience; but I do not think the practice which was established last year of not allowing a reply to a Member of your Lordships' House who has merely asked a Question, will be held to apply in the present instance; but if it should be I will put myself in Order by making a Motion. Two things in the noble Earl's reply have given me satisfaction. He for one disclaims the system on the part of a Government which, when they are called on to answer for something they have done, leads them to throw the responsibility on third parties—whether ex-Ministers or others. I am also obliged to him for saying that he did not think I was bound to make any observations on the Papers submitted to me. At the same time, it occurs to me that perhaps the noble Earl left on your Lordships' minds the impression that he thought it was a pity I did not make some observations on those Papers. I am, therefore, anxious to make one or two further observations. There is an official in the Foreign Office called a précis writer. It used to be his duty to make a précis of all Papers coming to the Foreign Office which an outgoing Secretary of State might take away with him. That practice was found to be very inconvenient; and when the Foreign Office took to printing almost all the documents, the duty fell to the lot of the précis writer. He is bound to collect all the documents which had been printed and to give them to the retiring Minister. It happened that when I was leaving the Foreign Office Mr. Harvey, the précis writer, with a friendly feeling, and no doubt acting also in the discharge of what he felt to be a duty, claimed those particular Papers for me and sent them to me. I may remark, also, that all the Papers which are printed are not printed for publication. The papers which are printed on blue paper and marked "confidential," are those which are printed for the use only of the office—such was the print which I hold in my hand, and which was forwarded to me. Mr. Harvey wrote to me and said he had made this claim on my behalf, and was 1504 told that the noble Earl (the Earl of Derby) said that as Mr. Harvey claimed those Papers for me he was to have them; but it was clearly to be understood that it was not Lord Derby who sent them. So far, therefore, from the noble Earl sending the Papers to me for my observations as to their publication, if what I have stated to your Lordships had any meaning at all, it must have been to remind me that I had no locus standi. I read them, certainly—not for the purpose of revising them for the Foreign Office, but to see whether they went against my own recollection, which was that no definite proposal to purchase the Suez Canal had ever been made to me. In mentioning the matter to my noble Friend Lord Hartington I alluded to the message sent with those Papers; and I then said to him—"There is something in these Papers which it strikes me ought not to be published. It does not appear to me to refer to the question of the purchase of the Canal, and I should like to mention it to the Secretary of State." It was exceedingly awkward for me to do this, and I felt it to be so. I wrote to the noble Earl, but I gave my note a particular and unusual heading. I headed it "Personal and confidential," meaning thereby to show that I wrote to him, not as Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, but as a personal Friend. I hope the Earl has always regarded me as a personal Friend and that he will always find me one. I think I pointed out to him that the Paper to which I referred in my letter was not one which affected, either for or against the affair of the purchase of the Canal shares. Again, with regard to the Correspondence, I remember one thing—that a letter which was not sent to me at all, but which appears in page 167 of the Correspondence, was more likely to give offence to M. de Lesseps and his colleagues than any of the other letters. I beg your Lordships to remark that the noble Earl says Her Majesty's Government would not have been justified in keeping from the public the offer made to us and declined. Now, I say that Sir Daniel Lange did not make us any offer. He gave us private information as to the probability of such an offer being made; but there was no such offer. I remember, however, that almost as soon as we heard of the purchase of the Suez Canal shares, I was told by friends 1505 —by both Conservative and Liberal Friends—that the Government would make a great point of their having been prompt in a matter in which we had shown ourselves to be dilatory. These rumours have proved not to have been without foundation, for, if I am not misinformed by the public Press, at the beginning of the debates on the subject in "another place" the Prime Minister said to Mr. Gladstone—"It is quite clear from your speech that you would not have bought the shares." Therefore this correspondence may be supposed to bear on the possible controversy between the present and the late Government. Well, the noble Earl wrote me a kind letter, in which he thanked me for the suggestion I had made, and said he would act upon it. But if I had suggested that it was desirable to omit certain parts of the correspondence selected for publication, would he not have said, "Why, he is afraid of this being published!" It may be said that I ought to have referred to the letters which are the subject of this discussion as being marked private and confidential; but I never anticipated that the noble Earl would say that it is a defensible thing for the Department to publish without the permission of the writer letters marked "private and confidential," and containing, not an offer, but the mere gossip of an offer—to erase "private and confidential" and make such letters public without the permission of the writer. I really think, my Lords, that I have stated enough—perhaps too much—to show that I am utterly without responsibility in connection with the publication of these letters, and that Lord Hartington in making that statement last night was perfectly justified.
§ THE EARL OF DERBYI do not want to prolong this discussion, but in respect of the message which the noble Earl says he received with the Papers, I must say there was no such message from me. There must be some misapprehension on the part of my noble Friend. I apprehend that what happened was this—Some communication passed between the gentleman referred to by the noble Earl and a permanent member of the Foreign Office Staff. I repeat that I sent no such message.
§ EARL GRANVILLEI have perfect confidence in Mr. Harvey and I have 1506 perfect confidence in the Private Secretary of the noble Earl also. But I have it in writing from one of those gentlemen that the claim was admitted as Mr. Harvey had made it, but Lord Derby wished it to be clearly understood that the Papers were not sent from him to me.