Gleanings of Past Years: 1843-1878.By the Right Hon. W. E.Gladstone, M.P. Seven vols. London: John Murray.
Gleanings of Past Years: 1843-1878.By the Right Hon. W. E.Gladstone, M.P. Seven vols. London: John Murray.
Lord Beaconsfield and his party are still holding on. All the over-praised Disraelian craft has dwindled somehow to this merely muscular operation. An attempt is, indeed, made to disguise the attitude by keeping strict silence, and arranging the facial expression of the Cabinet, if not of the Party, in a way not agreeing with the strain; but the country is fast finding out that the real posture of the Conservatives at this moment is that of clutching at office, and nothing more. However, no amount of not talking about the elections will put them off finally. In his most efficient days Lord Beaconsfield was hardly clever enough to operate upon the almanack, and a certain terrible date is approaching upon him with increasing swiftness. It will be rather humiliating at last for a Premier to be brought up by the day of the month, and to be reminded by the great officials of Parliament what year of Our Lord it is. But these latter personages are partly paid for watching the efflux of time, and no doubt they will do their duty. It may be unpleasant for them to have to tell Lord Beaconsfield that dates make it impossible for him to go on any longer, but they must get what consolation they can from the remembrance that it is the first time they ever had to say this to a Minister. Several Parliaments in our history have been nicknamed rather uglily, but it is likely that the Beaconsfield House of Commons will be known under a description more humiliating than any, because so inescapeably accurate. It will literally be the run-to-the-last-dregs Parliament, and when, on there not being another moment left, the dissolution has necessarily to be ordered, the not-any-longer-to-be-put-off elections will take place.
When that unpostponeable day comes, it is very well known beforehand whose will be the most towering figure on the hustings, whose the form towards which all eyes must turn. It will be that of him whose name iswritten at the head of this paper—Mr. Gladstone. Most Englishmen will at first feel a crick in the neck in having to look behind them so far north as Midlothian. But Liberals and Conservatives alike understand that wherever Mr. Gladstone chooses to take up his position that becomes the centre of the fight. If he stood for the Orkneys, he would still be too near for his opponents; and, as for his friends, they remember that with Ulysses' bow it did not greatly signify whether the hero was a few yards further off or nearer. The bolts will reach. It is, indeed, not unlikely that Mr. Gladstone may force on the conflict, and, after the speech at Chester, the other side cannot say that they were left without warning. The Conservative leaders have, in fact, a nearer date to calculate than the final one of the Parliamentary calendar—that, namely, of Mr. Gladstone's appearance in Midlothian. It may be supposed that they are already anxiously counting the days of the dwindling interval. Whenever he gives instructions for his hustings to be put up, the Conservatives will have to send for their own carpenters, and order planks.
The present moment, while he is temporarily absent, and just before he again necessarily reappears in the very front of the public stage, may not be an ill time for taking a hasty review of him and his career. It is, in fact, a favourable chance. Mr. Gladstone, by stress of glorious hard work and sheer public efficiency, has so unceasingly filled the passing hour, always being fully occupied himself in dealing with a special matter, and enforcing the attention of the nation to it, that he has left people very little at leisure to take in a retrospect of him. The result is, that there is great inadequacy in the public appreciation of the dimensions of his career; it stretches back further, expands wider, rises higher than most of us commonly keep in our minds. Lately, it is true, Mr. Gladstone has taken great pains to remind the country of his years; he has rather ostentatiously postured as an old man. But without meaning to impugn his veracity, or to dispute the register, we may say that he has scarcely got anybody to believe it. He has gone on felling trees, writing letters and articles, and publishing volumes, with utterances of more and better speeches between than anybody else can make, in a way which has led not a few to congratulate themselves that he was not any younger. In particular, his opponents, so soon as they found out that his announcement of retirement into ease meant that he was going to take the truest rest of all, to work a little harder in another kind of way, positively made an outcry as if he had pledged himself to gratify them by doing nothing. They seem rather to complain that he has retired into greater publicity; but there is something to be said about that matter. The implied bargain on Mr. Gladstone's side at the time obviously was that the Conservatives were themselves not to do anything in particular. It was to be a time of stagnation, and they have not kept to that understanding; no sooner had he turned his back than they began to swagger up and down the world as Imperialists. They have risked the highest interests of the empire andhave made England figure on the wrong side, arrayed against the oppressed and blustering for war. Mr. Gladstone could only keep quiet by foregoing all patriotism. It was too much to ask from an old-fashioned English statesman, who had always himself stood on the side of freedom and peace, and had grown accustomed to seeing his country ranged there too. However, we will speak again a little later on this point of his announced retirement.
It is nearly superfluous to remind any one that there is no statesman now before the public with an official record which can in any way be set beside Mr. Gladstone's even in the mere matters of length of time and diversity of parts. There are a number of men in the House of Commons older than Mr. Gladstone; there are some, though not many, who have had a seat in it longer than he has; but there is no one whose Ministerial life goes back nearly so far. He held office forty-five years ago. Nearly a score of years had to pass after his first appointment to a post before Mr. Disraeli joined a Ministry, and then he stepped into the place which had been refused by Mr. Gladstone. The latter's range of official experience excels others in breadth even more than in length. Before he became Prime Minister he had been Under-Secretary for the Colonies, Vice-President of the Board of Trade and Master of the Mint, President of the Board of Trade, full Secretary for the Colonies, and Chancellor of the Exchequer more than once. There is no other journeyman politician with a stroke of work left in him who has anything like this list of credentials of apprenticeship to show. Mr. Gladstone learnt his craft under Peel, Aberdeen, Palmerston, Russell; and then himself became the selecter and instructor of a group of younger men for whom renewed office is only biding a not very distant date. It is an honour alike to name the men he served under and those whom he commanded; including in the association with him some whom he attracted, and to whom the latter phrase might scarcely fully apply; for Mr. Cobden worked with him without an office, and Mr. Bright in one. These latter were achievements of personal influence which may fairly rank a trifle higher than merely taking precedence of a Duke in a Cabinet. If we go on to consider what has happened in his time in the way of legislation and social reform, and his connection with it, it may be said, speaking generally, that he has witnessed the political and economical remoulding of this kingdom; and, taking all things together, has helped it forward in more ways than anybody else who still survives. If while Mr. Bright lives his name must always have the honour of first mention when the Repeal of the Corn Laws is spoken of, it was Mr. Gladstone who wrought out all the details of Peel's fiscal reforms. He too it was who, much later, gave effect to Cobden's negotiation of the French Commercial Treaty; and also, again, made the best bargain that could be made when that first international arrangement lapsed. Every amelioration bearing on taxation and trade in our time has been naturally fated in someway to touch the hands of Mr. Gladstone. So, too, it was his conversion, or rather his progress, on the question of the Franchise—proved by his bringing in of the Russell measure—which made the immediate granting of the vote certain, and challenged the Tory trick of the last Reform Bill. The Ballot Act, without which the vote was but a sinister gift, came from his Ministry. But let us turn from England to the sister country. If Ireland is ever pacified, it will be then seen that it was Mr. Gladstone who, by the Disestablishment of the Irish Church and by his Land Act, laid the foundations of the peace. If the Roman Catholics get a University now, they will only get what he offered them years ago. The prosperity of Ireland is, indeed, sure some day to give to Mr. Gladstone's memory a splendid revenge for the ingratitude she showed to the man who brought legislating for Ireland into vogue. If we shift our regard to diplomacy, the future is still clearly with him in several of the chiefest international arrangements this generation has witnessed. When the Berlin Treaty is cobwebbed, and forgotten by everybody but historians and bookworms, the Treaty of Washington will be a living, ruling precedent between the mighty English-speaking nations on both sides of the Atlantic; and on the day that the Turks are thrust out of Europe, and the peoples of those regions are settling the Eastern Question finally for themselves, the then British Government, in begging somebody to take Cyprus off our hands, will hear a larger Greece gratefully couple Mr. Gladstone's name with the cession of the Ionian Islands.
In every one of these matters Mr. Gladstone gets his good fortune with posterity, as we believe, from having acted on Liberal principles. It is the merit of those principles that, to borrow a phrase of his own, they put Time on a man's side. He has trusted himself to the popular impulses, which are the breezes blowing towards the future, giving auspicious omens by the very working out of the world's events. But if, apart from Liberalism, he would have had not much more significance for the coming generations than Lord Beaconsfield will have when his foreign policy has once been undone and set aside, Mr. Gladstone must not be defrauded of a tittle of his due credit. He who has done all this was once a Conservative, and, to make it still more wonderful, a Peelite. Of that pale group of a Parliamentary section, which never could be a party, he is the only one who escaped from the vain middle region of ineffectiveness. For a man who was once a Peelite and has never ceased to be a High Churchman to have gained supreme power in this country is a political miracle. It was worked by sheer mental force. Mr. Gladstone's greatest feat, making all the rest possible, was the slowly but ever-ripeningly turning himself into a good, sound, robust Liberal; but he not only had the wit to appreciate the inevitableness of popular progress, he made himself a shaper and a helper of it in ways which showed a willing adoption of its cause. For we may scrutinize his career more closely than in the above rapid sketch, may look down lower than these great pictorial incidents we have been recapitulating;and, if we do so, we shall see a set of administrative reforms, less showy, but very hard to carry, and which exhibit genuine Liberalism in the grain of every one of them. It was under his auspices that the Civil Service was thrown open to unlimited competition; he, in spite of the Lords, with Earl Derby at their head, took the duty off paper, giving us cheap newspapers; he consolidated the Law Courts, doing away a whole web of legal artificialities; it was as his colleague that Mr. Forster gave to the country its first national educational scheme; but for him Mr. Cardwell would never have succeeded in altering the principle of our military organization from long-period enlistments to the short-term service; while Mr. Gladstone's opponents are willing to thrust upon him the whole honour of abolishing purchase in the army, because they think the issue of the Royal Warrant which, thanks to their resistance of the reform, was the only means of effecting it, lends itself to a taunt. Add to this list, the fact that although he, at first, for easily seen reasons of mere habit of mind, going back to the earlier days when he was Conservative, did not favour University Reform, yet he finally lent himself fully to it, and it is not difficult to understand the successive outcries raised against him in the higher social quarters. He gave all the "interests" splendidly sufficient reasons for their dislike, since wherever there was an abuse Mr. Gladstone was as certain in the end to confront it as he is to appear, axe on his shoulder, before any tree in Hawarden woods which has lived past its time.
But there is another way, more compendious still, of summing up his political chronicle. His opponents at times exult over the fact of his having often changed his constituencies. It is true, but it was always for his growing Liberalism. Certainly, there are those who once ensconced in a shire—say, in Buckinghamshire—remain there as long as they need a seat. They never offend any one by progress of view. Mr. Gladstone has not acted by that rule; he has got himself turned out of constituency after constituency; but, we repeat, it was always for the same reason—he became too big for them. Among his highest distinctions are these,—he is the resigner of Newark, the rejected of Oxford, the loser of South Lancashire. The thing has occurred too often to admit of a casual explanation. It was not for Liberalism, as it is now understood, that he, when still in his youth, offended the mighty Duke of Newcastle and had to give up Newark, but it was for reasoned-out consistency which gave hope of Liberalism. He would not stultify his intellect by voting for Peel's proposed increase of the Maynooth Grant in contradiction of his own book on Church and State. But all the world knows that it was for Liberalism somewhat developed that he quitted Oxford; and the cause of his defeat in Lancashire was that he had for years been too busy in pushing forward reforms on all hands. It was a noble vanquishment for him, whatever it was for his party, for Lancashire, or for the country. Test his careerhow we will, the result still comes out to his honour. He, for conscience' sake, offended the great patron on whom his whole prospects then depended, remaining out of Parliament for a time; later, he went over with Peel, knowing that it meant an ineffective hanging between two parties for an indefinite time, sharing the hopes and chances of neither; when Lord Derby came into power, he refused office on its being offered. In a word, he has evidenced his sincerity and proved his patriotism in every way for which it is allowed to other men to claim honour. When a man has risked personal prospects, refused place, held office in all its kinds, left one lagging constituency after another behind him, and finally, by sheer insisting on rapid progress, temporarily wearied the weak and lazy of his countrymen throughout the whole nation, as the last general election showed that he had, what more is there left for him to do for his country? Only one thing remained: the sacrificing his retirement after the formal announcement of the close of his career, and, afresh taking up his old post in the front of the battle as if he were still young and had place and public life to secure, striving his hardest a last time for the sake of his principles and his party. It is this final possibility of sacrificing ease and renewing labour which Mr. Gladstone undertakes in the Midlothian campaign now so very soon to be opened by him.
The above is the merest bird's-eye glance at his career, but it seemed to us a retrospect which all Liberals should have in their minds more completely than is common when he again draws to him the national gaze, as he of necessity will do.
But on reading back, how inadequate does the above record seem for Mr. Gladstone! It is simply the background of the picture; a field of industry and achievements, on which the portraiture of the man himself needs yet making to stand out. We have been speaking of the ex-Premier, for instance, just as we might talk of any politician, and Mr. Gladstone, though our chiefest politician, has throughout been so much more than that. It is perfectly true that there is no public man among us who has projected less of a special atmosphere of personality than he has through which his doings are to be beheld. He has been too busy with his work to think of any attitudinizing or trick in doing it. Mr. Gladstone's only mannerism has been that of superior excellence of thinking, speaking, and doing. Anybody else might have done and said what he has uttered and effected, if only they had had the same ability and industry. His one comprehensive distinction, summing up all the others, lies in his having developed more of these two simple, old-fashioned things than his best contemporaries. He has invented no mysteries, traded in no artificialities, given us no pyrotechnics; only a plain common air lies along his track, in which, if we perhaps except two or three points where a little mist hangs, everything can be clearly seen in white light, without exaggeration or distortion. His whole style has been the oldtraditionary English one, accentuated only by Scotch earnestness and seriousness of religious feeling. If Mr. Gladstone, however, has not made any eccentric or theatrical impression on the public mind, he has done something larger and better. He has kept all the three kingdoms continuously aware of him as an element in our general thinking, as well as being a power in our practical affairs. If we put aside Mr. Carlyle, Mr. Mill, and Mr. Ruskin, scarcely any one has had so much to do with the general mental activity of the last two generations as Mr. Gladstone. The result is what we have just pointed out,—that if we sketch him as a statesman only, everybody sees that the canvas is not big enough. It is a sufficiently full description of most men who have been politicians to ascribe to them statesmanship; but in Mr. Gladstone's case we want a yet larger phrase; his business has not been politics merely, it has been patriotism; and he has made time, nobody quite knows how, to do nearly as much work outside Parliament as within it. We may cut a scholar able to adorn a university out of Mr. Gladstone, and then carve from him a fine student and reverencer of Art; next mark off a reviewer and generallittérateurwhom professed authors will respectfully make room for in their ranks; and not only is there still left, solid and firm, the great Parliamentary Minister, but of the scattered fragments a couple of Bishops might easily be made, with, if nothing at all is to be wasted, several preachers for the denominations. The latter would be derived from a morsel or two of material which Mr. Gladstone himself is not fully aware of as being in his composition. It is not very easy to give a complete impression offhand of such a multiform personage as this. We must take him a little simpler. The general effect of it all has been, as we said above, that the mental activity of the community in all matters relating to politics and practical affairs has had to take its rate and much of its scale largely from him, and he has been thinking with the speed, not of the old jog-trot political life, but with the rapidity of ethical and religious cogitation, and has insisted on giving thought to everything. In fact, the ultimate impression which Mr. Gladstone has made upon the community has been that of an intellect weaponed with a perfectly fluent tongue, and a hand holding the quickest of pens, occupying the very highest national posts, ceaselessly going on reasoning, insisting upon doing it, whether the reasoning might occasionally go wrong or not, just as if thinking, speaking, and writing were man's right employment. His chief opponents would, perhaps, hesitate in flatly saying that they were not; but, at any rate, they have continually been wanting him to stop. Nearly all the complaint that was ever made of Mr. Gladstone resolves itself into a charge that he has thought and spoken and written too much. The accusation is one which it would task a great many men to lay themselves open to; it is never thought of in the case of the bulk of us. Above all, he has kept on thinking; he would use his mind. Possibly the other side mighthave forgiven it, if only he had not done it so well; if only this promptest, quickest ratiocination on the part of a practical politician in our times had not, as it progressed, brought him ever nearer to the conclusions of Liberalism. He has, we are, however, rather ashamed to admit, had to suffer from his own party for this unusualness of mental activity. Our practical politics for generations past had been carried on upon such shallow reasoning, on such a hand-to-mouth principle of mere party expediency, that even some Liberals were surprised when he brought a little subtlety of intellect into public life. It was enough to make a smaller man despair of his countrymen's sanity when he found that for years many of them could not distinguish between an Anglican High Churchman and an admirer of Rome.
To speak plainly, there was never such a humiliating spectacle of public stolidity as that which for so long a time was witnessed in the popular mystification as to Mr. Gladstone's religious position. It went for nothing that his first critical Parliamentary step was to give up his seat rather than vote more money to Maynooth; nobody seemed to bear in mind that as far back as 1852 he both predicted and publicly hoped for the downfall of the temporal power of the Papacy, and that ten years later Sir George Bowyer openly attacked him on that very point in Parliament; it did not avail that he it was who paved the way for the unification of Italy by dragging into the light before all Europe the prison secrets of Neapolitan tyranny. Because he had the good sense to oppose the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill, and the loyalty to remain on terms of friendship with the companions of his youth after they became Puseyites, and avowed that he held the same views as to Church doctrine which some of the greatest Church of England divines taught, he was called on to explain, every month or so, that he was not a Jesuit. Not until he published his pamphlet on the Vatican Decrees, and by so doing threw all the Roman Catholics in England and elsewhere into a white heat of rage, was the silliness quite exploded. It is true that the dull public might plead that a real profession of religiousness on the part of a leading politician was such a novelty that it might be excused being a little puzzled, and believing the worst in its perplexity. Worst or best, Mr. Gladstone has gone on speaking and writing about his religion just as if a man's ethics and faith ought to have some connection with his politics, and, as time has passed, people appear to think it less strange. This non-reticence on the score of religion has made more serious the impression Mr. Gladstone has produced upon the public mind; but in reality it is no specialty in his mode of public thinking, but only a necessary part of it. He tracks his commonest politics to their fundamental principles, and makes of them a system. He has always in his reasoning to go back to history, and this has delayed his advance in comparison with men who dispense with that; but there never yet was a public man who explained sofully as Mr. Gladstone the reasons of his changes. All the progress of his mind is to be traced in speeches, articles, pamphlets, volumes. He has given too much explanation, not too little, for his mind has an insatiability for reasons. Most people are content when they get hold of a good one; but he wants three or four—in fact, all that can be got by searching for; and if it be true, as it certainly is, that he likes the last to have a little subtlety about it, long-sustained thinking cannot take people too deep in politics, whatever it may do now and then in religion. For instance, on the question of Reform Mr. Gladstone has certainly exhausted the process, having at last got at the final ideal argument. It turns out, as he stated it to Mr. Lowe, to be this,—that, apart from, or rather in addition to, all the hard reasons of justice and safety that Mr. Bright can urge for extending the franchise, the vote ought to be given because it has an educative power, and will make our humbler fellow-countrymen better citizens. It is open to any one, who is stupid enough, to call that argument subtle, but no one can deny that it is truly Liberal. There is not a man among us to-day who keeps the main Liberal issues so broad and clear as Mr. Gladstone does, and this simply because he will get to a principle. He adds a tremendous multiplicity of ideas in the way of side issues, but, as we above put it, they are all reasons in addition. There is a very simple test of it,—he has never recanted a single article of his Liberal progress, never gone back a single step. This hardly can be said of either Mr. Lowe or a few others who might be named. It could not even be said of so thorough a Liberal as Earl Russell. Mr. Gladstone's alleged over-refining has ended in placing and keeping him in the practical lead of his party, at a time of life when many born in the faith grow faint-hearted. Even the one bit of mysticism which his political feeling has developed—namely, the belief that the popular judgment is truest of all in very large matters—is only the full flowering of the popular trust which every Liberal professes to have. The bulk of the nation will forgive him that excess of political belief, if it be an excess, for it is the last compliment a statesman can pay them, and they have but to merit it, and it then turns to Mr. Gladstone's praise as well as theirs. But, at any rate, it will not do for Liberals to set out to argue the point with Mr. Gladstone, or they will quickly find themselves tripped up by a principle; for it is no sentimentality in him which underlies the view, but completed logic and wide recollection of historical instances.
Indeed, although it was necessary in trying to reproduce the general impression Mr. Gladstone has made upon his contemporaries to speak of this alleged over-refining, what is meant by it has been after all a kind of superfluity of mental operation. His intricacy of thinking has never hindered his activity; least of all living men has Mr. Gladstone been a dreamer. He stands in history as a reviser of fiscal policies; an introducer of new administrative modes; a widener of the boundaries of political rights; a ceaseless overthrower of public abuses. From first tolast he has been, as the hatred of his opponents has too well witnessed, a man of practice. You may add to this that he reasons too minutely, if you like; but it was not by a transcendental casuistry of politics that he wearied the country: it was by his enormous energy in ceaselessly proposing wide sweeping measures. The casuistry was all in addition. The over-refining of Mr. Gladstone has, in fact, been of a wholly different kind from what is common among men; it has consisted in finding justifications afterwards for very prompt vigorous doing. Examine, if any one thinks it worth while at this time of day, the Ewelme Rectory case, or the issue of the Royal Warrant on Purchase, or the Collier appointment, and it will appear that it was for bold decision in taking a practical step that he was arraigned as much as for subsequently finding too many reasons for it. For ourselves, as we have not set out to apologize for Mr. Gladstone (men of his dimensions must be taken as they are), but simply to put down hints recalling more fully than is usual the great features of his career, there is no need for our not saying that we wish he had in some cases dispensed with these arguments in excess of the conclusion. In some instances it is as wise after all, though not so clever, to be satisfied with urging one good reason, and not to confuse ordinary people by adding five or six more not so good, the risk being that there will be a bad one among them. But the fact remains that Mr. Gladstone has not busied himself in tying mental knots for the purpose of entanglement; he has indulged in no such waste of time. The mental puzzle has always referred to some practical doing. Owing to this, his opponents have had to admit his mental sincerity, while accusing him of over-subtlety. It nearly all turned, in fact, into the psychological question of whether Mr. Gladstone's mind had not at one part of its machinery a twist, and in the meantime while this point was being discussed he went on carrying his measures. If there were Liberals who did not quite follow him in his defence of the issue of the Royal Warrant, when he drew distinctions between prerogative and statutory power, they had not the least doubt that in abolishing purchase he had effected a capital Liberal reform, and they might hope that his reasoning as well as his practice was right. Is Mr. Gladstone to be the only one to whose idiosyncrasy nothing is to be allowed? The hullabaloo which was raised when somebody could say that he had broken through a technicality seemed very like, after all, as though from this one politician perfection was expected, which was not an ill compliment at bottom; and any admirers who may admit that perfection was not always got, do not, in granting that, depreciate him much as this world goes, and may still think him the most upright of our public men. His mental machinery is complicated, whilst there is no apparatus like it for rapidity, and once set going he himself cannot always stop it; his mind, as we have said, riots in ratiocination, and will multiply arguments to the last shred of the material which any case in hand affords.But, to return to the main point,—it never leaves go of the real business. Even what has seemed to some persons his off-work, his voluminous writing, has, with the one exception of his classical studies, been no mere leisurely literature, but persistent advocacy of special objects. These productions have been meant to frame public opinion, and to give him openings for legislation, if that became possible. He has used the press because it had become the hugest instrument of the time he lived in; but it was not for the purpose of multiplying books that Mr. Gladstone wrote, but with a view to practically influencing men.
This relentless subordination of everything to practical ends—this iron determination to keep doing, even while ready frankly to depend upon his power of speaking and writing to produce conviction and popular persuasion as the means for effecting his objects, gives as the final imprint of Mr. Gladstone on one's mind that he was always meant for a Liberal. A man of this kind might be born a Conservative; it might take him time to break fully with old ties; but for him to stay finally in the ranks where thought was allowed to remain muddled, where abuses were looked on with toleration, and ease was enjoyed at the cost of others, was an impossibility. Mr. Gladstone, if only from the fact that he was a born financier and an inveterate thinker, and a man with a passion for publicly talking, belonged to the Liberals from the first. His whole life, too, has consistently lent itself to that style. If it has had in it a touch of austerity, that excellently befitted the social condition of the masses of our people. His gaze has been fixed too much upon them to be attracted by the glitter of the narrow upper circle, which so foolishly persists, amidst its gaudy splendour, in believing itself the nation. That silliness was not for Mr. Gladstone. He has been subjected to some tests. If his family was not highly placed, his father was a baronet, and he himself was educated at Eton and Oxford. Nobles have been among his friends at all periods of his life, as well as his official subordinates more than once in it. But he has passed the whole of his long career without a sparkle of the glitter of adventitious display: that proudest title of all, which it is not in the power of the Crown to bestow but only to take away—"the Great Commoner"—has descended upon him, and is still his. Then he has fenced himself off with no stiffness of manner; the only dignity he has assumed has been the natural seriousness of ardent sincerity, warning off triflers only. To everybody else he has been accessible; any person could impose on him the trouble of a written reply. His post-cards were known to be public property. But putting aside that joke, which is now worn bare, scarcely has any one so fully and ungrudgingly accepted the responsibilities of his position. He has been the public's faithful, ready servant in every particular. Nor has it been mere complaisance, or a drudging of mechanical industry; he has exhibited a real faculty of interesting himself in all that anybody has been doing activelyand well. To say that he is the only statesman who, while clinging to the Church of England, has commanded the sympathies of the Dissenters, might provoke an enemy, embittered by the fact, to reply that he had tactical reasons for trying to do that; but it could have been nothing else than real width of mind and a robust versatility which enabled this High Churchman largely to divide impartial admiration between the Evangelical party and the Romanists, pointing out fully and exactly what is to be praised in each. Any one who wishes it can find the estimates set out in detail in the third and seventh volumes of "The Gleanings." This wide range of intellectual appreciation is really as much a characteristic of Mr. Gladstone as has been his unyielding tenacity and doctrinal hold within the limits of his personal confession of belief. He, a firm acceptor of the tenets of sacramental efficacy, apostolical succession, and the authority of the Church in her own sphere, could take up the semi-rationalistic book "Ecce Homo," and turn it round-and-round admiringly as a most curious and valuable mental production. Nothing in which thought was really shown has escaped his notice, or failed to arouse his interest. He has bent his look on Secularism, as a scientific inquirer might scrutinize a new species, and he has stooped to quote Mr. Bradlaugh. In one place you will find him, very likely on the page after giving a passage from Isaiah or the Psalms, citing the old poet Dunbar, or speaking of Rowe or Swift, or alluding to Rousseau; while long before it became a fashion he had words of sympathizing praise for Shelley, selecting, of all other places,The Quarterly Reviewto print them in. But, perhaps, the clearest proof of all, alike of his power to bear testimony in spite of personal disliking, and his standing hard and fast upon a principle when he has reached it, is that he, whom Macaulay nearly half a century ago described as "a young man of unblemished character," and whom his Lordship, if he were now alive, would speak of as "the old man with personal fame unspotted," could step aside in one of his articles to recognize the public debt due to Jack Wilkes as a helper forward of our freedom. Wherever a national service has been done, Mr. Gladstone's eulogy always has been ready.
Down to this point we have not spared so much as a hint to his magnificent oratory, his unsurpassed debating skill, his not infrequent successes in literary style. These were not the things that anybody needed reminding of, and that necessity was the prescribed limit of our self-imposed task. Who has forgotten when the expounding of the Budget was the greatest intellectual treat of the Session, when sugar and railway duties and tea became natural themes for eloquence, and the unfolding of the surplus was breathlessly waited for like thedénouementof a novelist's plot? Those scenes are long past, it is true, but the echoes of them can still be heard, for each year since has brought a disappointing reminder to awaken them. But the matchless vigour and splendour of his debating fence has never slackened, never weakened; the only privilege of the older generation in respect of it, is that theycan boast to have witnessed more of it, not to have seen better displays. As to his writings, there least of all is any reminder wanted, for he presents the public with an improving specimen each month. If any one laid themselves out to find fault with Mr. Gladstone's literature, the very worst thing they could discover to say of it, would be that it still was oratory, only written down.
This is the man who, after a few weeks of leisure, reappears next month in Midlothian; first in the field, as if that appearance was his by right of custom. How well he compares with the rest of our older party leaders! Mr. Bright, grown a little pursy, though also stricken by domestic misfortune, rests rather inertly on his laurels, which certainly are plentiful enough to invite repose; Mr. Forster has never succeeded in quite finding his way out of the clauses of his own Education Act, where he sees himself confronted with the Church of England at the end of so many vistas, that he is lost in admiration of its architecture; Mr. Goschen, by some strange weakness (which, let us hope, is only temporary) has got a scare from meeting the County Franchise wearing Joseph Arch's coat and hat; while Mr. Lowe is riding hobbies, bicycle-wise, in and out before the very select constituency of the London University, with readers ofThe Fortnightly Reviewfor outside spectators, just by way of showing off his little feats of mental gymnastic. In the meanwhile, Mr. Gladstone, the veteran of them all, is putting on his harness for a fresh contest, a riper, better Liberal to-day than on any previous day of fight. It is for the younger men to rally round him.
But, before taking our leave of Mr. Gladstone, we have finally to enlarge our view of him. Early in these remarks it seemed well to give a very hasty summary of his whole career; but there remains to be attempted an exact sketch of his actual position in respect of opinions and practical relations at the moment when he ceased to be Minister. Let us, first of all, at this moment when a Brummagem Imperialism is only yet half-faded, recall what was Mr. Gladstone's opinion of the historic position and natural function of England among the nations; for it has been craftily made to appear that he was willing, and indeed anxious, for this country to efface itself. In 1870, when he was still at the height of power, he published inThe Edinburgh Reviewhis article on "Germany, France, and England," and the following was the view he then put forward of the international obligations and duties of his country, in spite of the sea dividing us from other lands:—
"Yet we are not isolated.... With vast multitudes of persons in each of the Continental countries we have constant relations, both of personal and commercial intercourse, which grow from year to year; and as, happily, we have no conflict of interests, real or supposed, nor scope for evil passions afforded by our peaceful rivalry, there is nothing to hinder the self-acting growth of concord.... So far from this implying either a condition or a policy of isolation, it marks out England as the appropriate object of the general confidence.... All that iswanted is that she should discharge the functions, which are likely more and more to accrue to her, modestly, kindly, impartially.... But in order that she may act fully up to a part of such high distinction, the kingdom of Queen Victoria must be in all things worthy of it. The world-wide cares and responsibilities with which the British people have charged themselves are really beyond the ordinary measure of human strength; and until a recent period it seemed the opinion of our rulers that we could not do better than extend them yet further, wherever an opening could easily, or even decently, be found. With this avidity for material extension was joined a preternatural and morbid sensibility. Russia at the Amoor, America at the Fee-jee or the Sandwich Islands, France in New Caledonia or Cochin China—all these, and the like, were held to be good reasons for a feverish excitement lest other nations should do for themselves but the fiftieth part of what we have done for ourselves.... The secret of strength lies in keeping some proportion between the burden and the back."
Is it necessary to ask whether this is a policy combining dignified patriotism and prudently-restrained common sense? Compare it for a moment with the gewgaw skimble-skamble diplomatic sensationalism with which we have been presented since. But let us go a little more into detail as to Mr. Gladstone's standing with reference to international relations. This present Government has perhaps forgotten that there is such a nation in the world as the United States of America; but Mr. Gladstone kept it well in mind, and we suppose every one will admit that he, of all statesmen, stands well with that people of our own blood, who very shortly will be the most powerful community upon the earth, and the one with whom we shall, for all time, have most to do. However, we will keep within the bounds of Europe. It is the fashion now to give precedence to Germany. Well, Mr. Gladstone was among the first to predict the success of Prussia, and she is not likely to forget who it was who preserved neutrality at a moment most critical to her. Is it France that he is not on good relations with? Why this Minister, who invited her wine trade, and strove unceasingly to increase commerce to and fro across the Channel, and who is for giving further and further political rights to his countrymen, is the only English statesman whom the bulk of Frenchmen can understand. To them our Tories must be as antiquated as their own Royalists. Italy is a growing Power in the European comity, and who is there among our statesmen who can in her fair cities arouse half the enthusiasm he can? He is, literally, the only English politician they familiarly know. With Austria, it is true, he during the recent war lost patience for a moment, but her conduct since has told that her rulers must at the time have known that he had good reasons for it; and no one has more fully appreciated the difficulties of Austria's position than he has done, or was more early in giving her, years ago, the very counsel which she has since proved was the wisest for her. There remains one other great Power to be named—Russia; the Statewith whom we shall have directly of necessity to stand face to face in the far East, and with whom terms will in the end have somehow to be made. It is urged against Mr. Gladstone that he has not rendered himself obnoxious enough to this remaining Power—that is, that he did not incapacitate himself for negotiating with her, and, having postponed defiance of her, might make some peaceful arrangement. Can any friend of peace think this a very grievous accusation? Mr. Gladstone has gained this position of goodwill all round at what cost?—that of having fallen into disfavour with the Turks. That is his one terrible disqualification for affairs; or, if you wish to be precisely exhaustive, and at the same time to elicit the absurdity fully, you may add to it that he has irritated the Bourbons. It is quite true, and we, indeed, wish to put it clearly forward, that he was for abating a little of our national swagger, and was prepared to see, and to welcome, advancement in other nations. But every well-grounded Liberal knows that it is only on those two conditions that England can permanently pursue her own paths of industrial development, and the world make progress. Mr. Gladstone's single sin in reference to our external relations was his readiness to favour those two results.
But how does he show when a last view is taken of him from within our politics? Here, again, first look to the circumference. In dealing with the colonies, he was for all being put in possession of a free autonomy, and then urging them to self-reliance—in those ways welding them into the integrity of the empire; and as to India, he insisted that we should strive more and more to realize what he termed the generous conception of a moral trusteeship, to be administered for the benefit of those over whom we rule. Here, once more, we get the true ring of a sound Liberalism, for those are the only principles, we venture to affirm, on which such an empire as this of ours can ever be made permanent. Treating the colonies as babies and biting the thumb at Russia, even from the most scientific frontier India can furnish, though you shout "Empress" from it as loudly as you will, has nothing truly English about it. Empire is not kept in such a mawkish, artificial manner.
But now narrow the gaze within our own home limits. The chief domestic questions for the British public are these,—extension of the County Franchise, the Redistribution of Seats, the Disestablishment of the Church, and Retrenchment of Expenditure. The Land Question will yet have to grow, and may not ripen in his time. But on three of the above pending matters Mr. Gladstone stands at the very front. He is for making our field cultivators citizens no less than our artizans; he is for re-allotting members in a manner which will give us a Parliament truly representative; and it is hardly necessary to speak of economical benefits in connection with the Minister who used the nation to reduction of taxation and surpluses arriving together, and whose last promise under that head was the total abolition of the Income Tax. On the other of these great domestic matters, that which stands thirdin the above list, the Disestablishment of the Church, it has seemed to advanced Liberals that Mr. Gladstone has lagged. But the lively fear of his opponents on this very matter is full of hope. Since he last dissented from Mr. Miall's motion, he has written a very significant phrase in an article in this Review. In treating of "The Courses of Religious Thought," when reviewing the churches of the United States and of the British Colonies he spoke of their vigorous growth, "far from the possibly chilling shadow of National Establishments of Religion." In that phrase, for a man so practical as is Mr. Gladstone, Disestablishment seems to cast its shadow before, and not a few persons on the other side of the question shivered from the chilliness it made. But these topics of the first class do not depend upon any one statesman; the biggest of men have these capital problems thrust upon them; all that you can do is to take note how a leader stands in reference to them. And the above is Mr. Gladstone's standing. But there was another class of legislative reforms which he was the man to have gone in search of. In one of his most recent articles he has given us a hint of a dream of this kind which was in his mind. He stated it thus:—"Our currency, our local government, our liquor laws, portions even of our taxation, remain in a state either positively disgraceful, or at the least inviting and demanding improvement." That programme of the further benefits which we should have owed to Mr. Gladstone was put aside by the giddiness of twenty-five or thirty constituencies at the last elections, but it will fittingly serve to give the finishing touch to our presentation of him in this paper. Liberals have, in fact, to thank him for offering more of reform and of benefit than the country would let him give it. Splendid as his achievements have been, he really had others in reserve.
Is it too late? is the question that naturally arises. Certainly there is no hope of having the five years of administration by him which we have lost since 1874. That is irretrievable; and if Mr. Gladstone felt then his growing years, and had a wish to finish other tasks apart from politics, he is no younger now; while the aims of his purposed leisure must have been greatly interfered with by his partial recall to affairs owing to the dangers to which freedom in Bulgaria and our own national credit were exposed. It is wholly a matter for Mr. Gladstone to decide. If the next elections go in favour of the Liberals, all the world knows that office is there for him to take or to leave. Earl Granville, the Duke of Argyll, Lord Hartington would, we need not say, be among the first even to urge it as far as it was right to do so, and the whole party would welcome him back to power with a shout of joy. Who knows? Mr. Gladstone's patriotism is great, and our financial muddle will, also, be very great about that time. Between the two he might be tempted; he may yet do us the final service of putting the national finances right again. It is, we repeat, wholly for him to say. Earlier in this paper a further word was promised on the subject of his retirement; but, upon second thoughts, it scarcely seems necessary.Mr. Gladstone was too experienced in Parliamentary doings not to know that the Conservatives would take care to keep enough of their majority until time itself forced them back to the unwished-for hustings. He did his party not an atom of practical injury by retiring; rather, it was a good opportunity for giving a younger leader practice. It would be quite idle, on the other hand, to argue with his opponents for complaining that he did not retire enough. He has made speeches, they say; he has written articles in every organ there is; he has even republished previous writings. As we before said, they have themselves to blame for it in great measure: if they wanted Mr. Gladstone to stay in retirement, they should have carefully kept quiet. Instead of that they made a noise before his door, disturbing him in his studies. What more natural than that he should come out? He did so, and found that, disguised like harlequins in the flimsy bedizenment which they call Imperialism, they were playing high jinks with Britain's reputation and the chances of freedom for the oppressed in the East. It was too much for him; but if they complain of the number of the weapons he attacked them with, we know that it would have been impossible for him to please them there. They never have been satisfied on that score. What they really find fault with are the blows they got.
And there are more to come. Directly we shall have them complaining that he has chosen a constituency so far away as Scotland; the real fact being that they wish he had gone much farther still. They never are sincere with Mr. Gladstone; he cannot please them. We leave them anxiously listening for his approach again unto these shores, knowing very well that to their thinking they will hear his voice all too soon.
A Liberal.
Description is said to be only possible by comparing, and when one is asked to sketch Mr. Gladstone, how is it to be set about? His admirers will have it that he has been a very great Minister, so that if we adopt the comparative method, we ought to look high for standards. Shall we match him alongside Bismarck or Cavour? The latter, to give him precedence, stands renowned for building up his country in evil days, when every omen was against her. But Mr. Gladstone, succeeding to power when England was in the full tide of prosperity and at the height of fame, gave up her prospects, and would have acquiesced in her decadence. There is no likeness whatever between him and Cavour. Then take Bismarck. The great German Chancellor shares with the Italian Minister the glory of having widenedthe bounds and raised the position of his land, and he stands now head and shoulders above all in the midst of the diplomatic world a very Colossus. But Mr. Gladstone is and has always been outside that world altogether. Prince Bismarck has his hand on all the springs of action, and will let pass no chance of exalting his country. Mr. Gladstone, we repeat, never made the slightest impression in the regions of diplomacy; Courts did not know him, foreign statesmen left him out of their reckoning of the men that had to be dealt with. The great international achievements for which he has alone been talked of have been the surrender of British territory and the paying down of English money lavishly to another State for preposterous claims. But it will be said that it is not fair to Mr. Gladstone to compare him to Prince Bismarck and Count Cavour, for they were men who found their country in unusual circumstances. Look, then, to names in our own history. Pitt must not be spoken of for the reasons just allowed in the other cases; but there are Canning and Palmerston. How does Mr. Gladstone look alongside them? He has himself more than once alluded to Canning, as if not unwilling to be thought to have received his mantle. It was, however, always only in connection with Greece that he spoke of Canning; but that Minister looked much farther than the Mediterranean. One would have thought that so fine a rhetorician as Mr. Gladstone would not have forgotten the famous phrase in which Canning claimed to have called the New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old. Lord Palmerston was without any such fine phrases, but in foreign affairs he acted boldly, though he had to fall back on a musty Latin quotation to describe it. Every Englishman, however, understood Latin when their Minister said,Civis Romanus sum. Yet neither of these Ministers at any part of their career lived in times more stirring than Mr. Gladstone has done, nor when the interests of England were more endangered. He has still later had magnificent opportunities, but he did worse than lose them.
From all this, it would seem that, whether we look abroad or at home, there is no possibility of describing Mr. Gladstone by hints of comparison with these historical personages. What is said in that way appears, in fact, to turn into contrast; which is, also, itself a mode of delineation, though not usually of the kind the chief object of it wishes. We can find no Minister to couple along with him as having deliberately despaired of his country. However, Mr. Gladstone is certainly great in some way, for although other nations while we were under his sway were gradually losing sight of England herself as well as of him, he was making plenty of noise all the time at home. If it should turn out, as we go on, that he was not a great Minister but a great orator, that would seem to account for both the things. If Bismarck and Cavour have made affairs, Mr. Gladstone has made speeches, beating them as much in that as they did him in the other respect. But it is not exactly the same thing to the countries the men represent.
It is, therefore, under a humbler, more domestic aspect than that of this high supreme style of Minister which we have first tried that we must begin Mr. Gladstone's portraiture. The task may be divided into two portions. There is the opinion which we Conservatives hold of the general influence and effect he has had upon our national interests, in which we may be credited with at least trying to estimate his acts and measures on their merits; and, besides that, there is a judgment of him from a narrower party view, arising out of his historic relation to ourselves. We will take the latter first.
To hear Liberals talk, one might suppose that Conservatives had always cherished a special hatred against Mr. Gladstone simply for ceasing to be a Tory and becoming a Radical. That the Conservatives rather late in his career came to show much irritation against Mr. Gladstone is perfectly correct; but it was, as I hope to show as I go on, for very different reasons than simply because he had made one Conservative less and one Liberal more. A great political party has no such immortal animosities as that supposes: party feeling is not based on merely sentimental grounds. Both sides are used to losing men. It is the common fate of Parliamentary warfare. Now and then, some rather idle person who has time to waste in going back a long way in his recollections bethinks himself that Lord Beaconsfield was not always a Conservative; but we never yet heard of any one among the party challenging sympathy for him on the score that he had been hunted by the Liberals through half a century or so for having deserted them. Yet it will be admitted that Lord Beaconsfield has injured the Liberals more than ever Mr. Gladstone has done the Conservatives. What is the reason, then, of this difference of alleged treatment in the two cases? The answer may be given in half a sentence,—Lord Beaconsfield, alike when he was Mr. Disraeli and since, has always fought fair. That is enough in politics to make your opponents acquiesce in your being such; but Mr. Gladstone as his career developed surprised and puzzled everybody, his own friends included; and those who blame the Conservatives for, in the end, losing temper and showing exasperation, should bear in mind that he finally produced the very same effect upon the country at large.
It is worth while following this point a little further, for it would not be of much use attempting to sketch Mr. Gladstone if we are supposed to dislike him from some mere party instinct. Will anybody be good enough to tell us when this inscrutable emotion of hatred of Mr. Gladstone arose? Liberals are not supposed to be strong in history, but they have very short memories indeed if they have forgotten both their own career and his. Why, in 1852—that is, in the twentieth year of Mr. Gladstone's Parliamentary life—the Conservatives were offering him office, which was not refused by him with over-much promptness. For nearly fourteen years after that he was retained as the representative of the University of Oxford. It is, in fact, not yet verymuch more than a dozen years since this victim of political persecution, and present champion of the Radicals, was quietly ensconced in a seat for what is sometimes spoken of as the head-quarters of Toryism. He has roved a good deal among the constituencies since, but he was then willing to have gone on remaining at Oxford, if his constituents had also been willing to have been made laughing-stocks by letting him remain. Surely a man who represented Tory electors until he was getting fast on for sixty could scarcely up to that point have been much hunted and worried for Liberal principles. To speak plainly, there never was so late a conversion made of so much histrionic use as this of Mr. Gladstone's. But though it has suited both his and his present party's ends, it rather puzzles plain people who have kept their recollections a little trim to think that if he lives on into senatorial decrepitude, he will never have sat for Radical constituencies anything like so long a time as he did for Conservative ones. For between thirty and forty years this Liberal ex-Premier was a Tory member.
In fact, a glance at the right honourable gentleman's wonderfully prosperous career will show that in the list of our public men he has of all others made the fewest, the briefest, the least sacrifices either for principle or party. There are very simple ways of testing it; Mr. Gladstone has not been out of office long enough for a man who was innocent of business prudence in his career. He has, in fact, reaped the official spoils of two parties, if not of three. The dates and appointments are on record for anybody to trace out. On the very face of it, a man who has served under Peel, Aberdeen, Palmerston, and Russell, and then come out as a full-blown Liberal Prime Minister himself, must of necessity be said to offer rather a miscellaneous career. His warmest admirer must admit that he has been either the most fortunate or else the most prudent of men; and, as we do not wish to be stingy in our recognition of his skill, we prefer to compliment him by attributing his great prosperity throughout so many years and under so many different chiefs to his prudence.
If this very hasty review of Mr. Gladstone's chronicle does not agree with the impression of him which is the prevailing one on the Liberal side, it is the one which the bare facts of his career would produce on every side if they could be seen without the misleading effect of his very fine words and exceedingly solemn attitudes. Very fortunately for him it is only the Conservatives who have a full and accurate recollection of Mr. Gladstone. They have necessarily observed him continuously from their own unshifting party position, and so have been able to perceive in a way that hardly was practicable to the Liberals, who were always shifting and struggling among themselves, how invariably and consistently his announcements of change of view have hit with the opportunities for improvement of his Parliamentary position. On every occasion, to the very moment, so soon as a Liberal question had fully ripened, Mr. Gladstone presented himself to pluck it. It was so with Reform, itwas so with Church Rates, it was so with University Reform, it was so with the Ballot, it was so with the spoliation of the Irish Church and the unsettling of the Irish landowners, and it is so with the County Franchise, and it will be so once more, if the Liberals ever get into power again, with the English Church and the English Land Laws. Mr. Bright, Mr. Miall, and all the Radicals have drudged for many a year for Mr. Gladstone, who, when all the outdoor work has been done, has always allowed himself to be persuaded to bring in the Measure just in the nick of time, and, by expounding it in a very fine speech, has robbed its actual originators of two-thirds of the credit of making it possible.
Luckily for the Conservatives, though he never had the courage to attack a question of the very first class himself in the way of initiative, he had an insatiable ambition for meddling with smaller ones, and by making vents in these ways for his restlessness and his ambition, he finally ruined all that his skilful prudence in the larger affairs had gained him, disgusting the country till it determined to get him off its hands at any price. Still, that is not just now the point in question.
Mr. Gladstone's so slowly passing through all the stages from Conservatism to Radicalism has had this effect,—that while all other public men of his standing have grown more or less antiquated in steady loyal service to their party, and by presenting a fixed if monotonous aspect to the public, this one Parliamentary personage kept a perennial freshness, simply by skilfully dividing his prolonged career into distinct periods and going on changing. Some political section has been always welcoming Mr. Gladstone newly into its ranks and to its spoils, for, as we have said, the two things unfailingly went together; and the shouts with which he was received were always strengthened by fainter murmurs of applause from other sections more advanced along the line, who hoped to receive him themselves later on. They did so. Really to each one of them he was a recruit from the last party. To the Palmerstonians he ought at the most to have been only a Peelite; to the Liberals at worst only a Palmerstonian. But by a surprising adroitness, it was always made to appear that in all his migrations from party to party, he joined each successive group as a new retreater from the Tories. It certainly was true in one sense; he was always going further away from them. But for all party purposes and reckoning, he had as much left them when he joined Palmerston as when he shook hands with Mr. Bright and took his place in front of the Radicals.
These are only a first handful of specimens of a certain unfairness in Mr. Gladstone's position and career from first to last, from which he has largely profited, and which very naturally irked his opponents, who have had to suffer its inconveniences. He has posed as a sort of political orphan left lonely in the Parliamentary world at the death of Peel, who has been persecuted by wicked Tories from one Chancellorship of the Exchequer to another, until they finally drove him into the Premiership, but all this time he was successfully seceding from them, though theycontinued in pursuit. It must have been Mr. Gladstone's portentous earnestness of demeanour which has covered up from the general public a joke so huge and prolonged as this, preventing everybody from seeing that such a tale did not agree with his unprecedented prosperity. But if in these ways he has kept himself interesting to the country, and fresh and surprising for every group he has in rotation joined, both he and his changes have long been stale to the Conservatives. They are able to look along his whole track, and seeing him from behind, know him as a Peelite, a follower of Aberdeen, a Palmerstonian, a Russellite, and a Radical. They are debarred from applying his own name to the last stage, and calling him a Gladstonian. Strangely enough, and indeed very significantly, that term has never taken root in our politics. There really have never been any Gladstonians: no one ever was or ever will be called by that title. Mr. Gladstone will end his days and depart without founding any school; he will stand recorded only as the acceptor of office from those who did so, and the passer of other people's measures. But in political life a man who attains the first rank of conspicuousness without founding a line may fairly be suspected. It will be found that he has been too busy in a narrower way,—looking after not questions but himself. To that very small party, numerically reckoned, consisting of only one member, Mr. Gladstone has been consistently and untiringly faithful. He has challenged for it sympathy in all the ways to which his very fine oratory has lent itself, and he has not neglected the humbler art of perpetual advertisement, keeping it by means of the press and the platform ever before the public eye. But when he finally leaves us it is certain to vanish entirely.
Very likely some ardent Radical, whose mind is so full of having got Mr. Gladstone at last that he forgets, or perhaps never knew, how many grades and shades of politicians have in succession enjoyed him before, will say that in all this we are only railing at Mr. Gladstone's success. His success! In order to describe Mr. Gladstone, we had first to write retrospectively, take in his earlier phases, and to look generally at his whole history. In that retrospect, down to a late point in it, he was exceedingly prosperous; but we never meant to say that he had been very successful since the beginning of 1874. There is not the slightest need for any Conservative to feel bitter against Mr. Gladstone now on any grounds of personal envy. He has done them the greatest service of any public man for three generations; and at any time he might have individually prospered as much as he liked for them, if it had been possible for him to do it without injuring his country. It is to this more serious examination of his career that we now go.
Not that we propose to entangle ourselves in the minute details of it, for that is in no way necessary. We have already in part explained why we may, in such a sketch as this, drop out many years of his political life. For a great length of time Mr. Gladstone was only a Budget-maker.It is true he made them for Governments that were not Conservative, but he still was considered nearly a Conservative outside his financial handicraft. And here, again, part of the explanation we earlier gave applies. There is not the slightest reason why any Conservative should pause long to consider Mr. Gladstone as the passer of the Ballot, or even as the disestablisher of the Irish Church and the interferer with the rights of landed property in Ireland. The only thing special to be said about him in connection with these things as distinguishing him from the ruck of Liberals would be, that he was a very late ex-Tory, and at the time a professed High Churchman. He somehow got the Liberals to let him write his name across every one of those measures so soon as it was seen that they would pass, and he has made the legislation in that way seem to be his; but the Conservatives know with whom they had really to deal in the inception and the pushing forward of those movements, and it was not Mr. Gladstone. The real men were Mr. Bright, Mr. Dillwyn, Mr. Miall, and those who for many a year worked with them while Mr. Gladstone was never heard of, never thought of, in connection with the matters they had always matured before he had anything to do with them.
Nor was it on account of these affairs that Mr. Gladstone's fall occurred when it came, which is another reason why it would be waste of time to discuss them in connection with him. Who is proposing to alter these things now that they have been fought out between the great parties of the State and decided? As a supplement to his Irish Land Bill, we now have the Irish peasants refusing to pay any rent at all: but in these days when a thing is done in our Parliament it is done. The Conservatives, in spite of the majority at their back, have never put forward a finger to touch those settlements, nor do they mean to do so; and yet not only our own country, but all Europe, and indeed realms farther away still, have been keenly aware that the Beaconsfield Ministry has been very busy for years undoing something that Mr. Gladstone had done.
What was this gigantic task, which was not the repealing of legislation, or the passing of statutes of any kind, but which required courage and effort more arduous than those things? There must have been some cause for the bursts of applause which have again and again echoed on our shores from all parts of the civilized globe at something that was going on. It was, we hasten to answer, the rehabilitation of England in the eyes of the world,—the restoration of her ancient power as a factor in the enforcement and administration of public right among the nations. Somehow, coincidently with Mr. Gladstone's prosperity as a Minister, England, his country, had sunk, and in exactly answering ratio, and was sinking lower and lower still daily. He was very famous, or at least very notorious, at home, but the renown of Britain abroad was clouding; and our people never will bear that, as history had shown before. This man, who at heartwas but a financier, and who ought in the fitness of things never to have risen higher in office than a Chancellor of the Exchequer, whose function it should have been to find funds for some one else as a Prime Minister capable of a policy in the higher international politics befitting an Empire, was conducting our foreign affairs in the spirit of a commercial traveller; willing to effect a little saving by giving up a group of islands in one part or a bit of territory in another, and to effect an economy at another time by backing out of a treaty. Though, at the same time, if anybody insisted, and there loomed, however distantly, a possibility of war, he would pay the money down in a hurry by millions, as he did in the Alabama case. We should have had all the world insisting very soon, making peace more costly than war itself, besides the shame of unjustifiable surrender.
But we were spared all this; though the undoing of the humiliation, as far as it had gone, has fully occupied Mr. Gladstone's successors ever since.
This is the great accusation which the Conservatives have to bring against Mr. Gladstone—that of having degraded the position of his country; and an arraignment more fatal than this cannot be made in the case of a chief Minister. It is not alone the Conservatives who make it. Did not Earl Russell, Liberal though he was, find enough English blood in his aged veins when writing his last book, to say that Mr. Gladstone had dragged the name of England through the mire? But it would not be quite accurate to put this forward as the full explanation of Mr. Gladstone's sudden tumble from office; for it was not until after that occurred that the bulk of people quite knew the whole extent of the injury he had worked in this respect. The Conservative leaders guessed it, but they knew more about foreign affairs than the rank and file of the nation. Everybody, of course, high and low, was aware that he had unasked given up the Ionian Islands because of some literary reasons which he had come upon in writing books about Homer, that he had surrendered territory in the San Juan Boundary Question, and that he had quietly gone to Geneva and paid America, not indeed all she asked,—for even with Britain's wealth the whole of the first modest request would only have been found with difficulty,—but he had counted down a sum that made Brother Jonathan's shrewd eyes twinkle with joy. The country, from these events following one another, had come to have a very uneasy feeling that somehow under his auspices everything was going against us abroad. Still it was only later that it was made fully apparent how completely England was effaced; not until the three Emperors had begun to settle the rearrangement of Eastern Europe, without so much as saying to Great Britain, "By your leave." There is difficulty when looking back now to prevent oneself from suffering some illusion in this respect; but it is a fact, and we may be glad of it, that Englishmen did not until it was roughly forced upon them suppose beforehand that their position had dwindled to quite so low an ebb.
At the elections of 1874, there was no distinct foreign policy before the public, for though there were many on the Conservative side who sympathized with France in her adversity, and saw clearly that Germany's mutilation of her territory meant trouble in time to come, not a voice was raised in deprecation of our neutrality. But, for the matter of that, it may be just as correctly said that there was no matured domestic question before the country, for it will not be supposed that there was a single Tory any more than a Liberal who wished the Income Tax to be retained on his shoulders. It was hardly for proposing to do away with that impost that everybody voted so unanimously against Mr. Gladstone; they only did so at the polling-booths in spite of his proposing it, which somehow seems rather mysterious. If his opponents were not proposing to recall any of the recent legislation, and if there was no special question of foreign affairs pending, and if nobody had any desire not to be lightened of taxation, how was it, pray, that Mr. Gladstone was so ignominiously hurled from power? In reality, there is not the slightest difficulty about it—Mr. Gladstone was decisively rejected by his countrymen, not on any question of policy, either home or foreign, but because of thepersonal impressionhe had slowly but surely imprinted on their minds. The real issue before the country was whether it would have any more of Mr. Gladstone, and it said No.
It is a common artifice on the part of his apologisers to insinuate that he had wearied the nation by offering it too many things for its good. But neither individuals nor communities are much in the habit of refusing gifts; it is the one thing, and nearly the only thing, in this world for which there is an excellent reason whenever so strange a proceeding happens. There is another way of representing the matter, one much less complimentary but far more true—the country was sick of Mr. Gladstone. Even the sight of Mr. Lowe standing at his side with four millions of surplus in his hands was not enough to tempt them. The promise to abolish the Income Tax was the most tremendous bribe ever offered to the constituencies, but, to their credit, it did not corrupt them. They would not accept Mr. Gladstone any longer at any price whatever. The believers in democracy, and Mr. Gladstone in particular, according to some of his very latest reasonings, ought to have accepted this universal disgust as being a popular inspiration. However, they have done nothing of the kind, but avow that it was a public delusion, which they at first hinted would be temporary; but if the public is liable to delusions, and to fits of them which continue for seven or eight years at a stretch, for that is now the duration of this one, what becomes of these very radical gentlemen's democracy? For it is not really open to them to plead, though they will go on doing it, that the people's eyes were dazzled by a glitter of diplomatic success, and their blood infuriated by a skilfully aroused anti-Russian feeling. It is not open to them for a simple reason, but a very conclusive one: the elections camebefore anything of this could have happened; and the elections themselves arrived with the suddenness they did owing to something which had preceded them—namely, a steady run of Ministerial defeats in the by-contests, wherever a vacancy occurred in a constituency. Mr. Gladstone avowed all this in the address with which he startled the Greenwich electors and the whole country, though he and his friends have never mentioned the fact since. It was for the purpose of putting all things right that the elections which put them all more wrong still were so unexpectedly ordered. It was not because of being intoxicated by the diplomatic triumph of Lord Beaconsfield and Lord Salisbury at Berlin—which did not occur till years after—that the constituencies rejected Mr. Gladstone. We have no wish to be unnecessarily impolite, but the true reason for it was that which we have named already—they had come not to like Mr. Gladstone. If we trace that fact backwards in a natural way, we shall find that one cause of it was that they felt the honour and the interest of England were not safe in his hands; but this was only one among other causes. It swelled afterwards into the biggest reason of all, and now practically includes all the others; but, at the moment, it was not actually known that the safety of England was about to be imperilled.