Phineas Finn, the Irish Member
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95. (p. 663) in the abstract so generous: this play on ‘abstract’ is almost certainly a reference to Gladstone's notorious assertion to the House in 1864 that ‘every man who is not presumably incapacitated by some consideration of personal unfitness or of political danger, is morally entitled to come within the pale of the constitution’. In 1866 the memory of this proclamation was still alive. In its edition of 24 March of that year the Saturday Review, in a hostile article on Gladstone, makes much of ‘his famous saying about the abstract right of all humanity to the franchise’. Trollope appears to have had second thoughts about including this passage: over it in the MS are two question marks.
96. (p. 664) do not believe it: this news, so astounding that Phineas cannot believe it, and Gresham's comments about ‘arms’ in the next sentence suggest that what is referred to here is the Fenian raid of May 1866. About a thousand conspirators invaded Canada from the United States in what the Annual Register calls a ‘wicked and absurd attempt’ to make themselves masters of the province. The raid failed though it caused alarm in England and impaired relations with both Ireland and the United States. As an Irish Catholic with responsibility for Canada the embarrassment caused Phineas would be acute. I suspect that Trollope may have toyed with the idea of making the situation more instrumental in the plot and Phineas's reluctance to held office (see M. W. Bloomfield, ‘Trollope's use of Canadian History in Phineas Finn’, N.C.F, v, 1951).
97. (p. 685) Amantium Irae: (amoris integratione): ‘lovers' quarrels (are renewals of love)’, Terence, Andria, 595.
98. (p. 703) by a majority of twenty-three: as the Liberal Government came to its end in June 1866 Samuel Chichester Fortescue brought a bill to improve the relations of landlord and tenant in Ireland. It was debated but eventually dropped because of the change of government. The details do not fit exactly but this coincidence of a dissolution and an Irish land bill suggest that Trollope was thinking of the recent events in parliament in these last pages of his novel. Chichester-Fortescue (1823–98) was Irish, Catholic, a fashionable young man and had been Secretary for Ireland since 1865; previous to this he had been Under-Secretary for the Colonies. The similarity between him and Phineas, as between their last-minute attempts to get Irish land reform, are obvious.