My Memory of Gladstone

Since the appearance of the first volumes of Macaulay’s History there has not been such an event in the publishing world as the appearance of a Life of Gladstone by Mr. Morley. Nor has public expectation been disappointed.

Though I saw a good deal of Gladstone, both in the way of business and socially, I never was nor could I have been, like Mr. Morley, his colleague and a partner of his counsels. On the other hand, I lived in the closest intimacy with men who were his associates in public life, and saw him through their eyes.

This man was a wonderful being, physically and mentally, the mental part being well sustained by the physical. His form bespoke the nervous energy with which it was surcharged. His eye was intensely bright, though in the rest of the face there was nothing specially indicative of genius. His physical and mental force was such that he could speak for more than four hours at a stretch, and with vigour and freshness so sustained that George Venables, an extremely fastidious and not over-friendly critic, after hearing him for four hours, and on a financial subject, wished that he could go on for four hours more. His powers of work were enormous. He once called me to him to help in settling the details of a University Bill. He told me that he had been up over the Bill late at night. We worked at it together from ten in the morning till six in the afternoon, saving an hour and a half which he spent at a Privy Council, leaving me with the Bill. When we parted, he went down to the House, where he spoke at one o’clock the next morning. Besides his mountain of business, he was a voluminous writer on other than political subjects, and did a vast amount of miscellaneous reading. As a proof of his powers of acquisition, he gained so perfect a mastery of the Italian language as to be able to make a long speech, in which Professor Villari could detect only two mistakes, and those merely uses of a poetical instead of the ordinary word.

Like Pitt, Gladstone was a first-rate sleeper. At the time when he had exposed himself to great obloquy and violent attacks by his secession from the Palmerston Government, in the middle of the Crimean War, one of his intimate friends spoke of him to me as being in so extreme a state of excitement that he hardly liked to go near him. Next day, I had business with him. He went out of the room to fetch a letter, leaving me with Mrs. Gladstone, to whom I said that I feared he must be severely tried by the attacks. She replied that he was, but that he would come home from the most exciting debate and fall at once into sound sleep. A bad night, she said, if ever he had one, upset him. But this was very rare. He chronicles his good and bad nights, showing how thoroughly he felt the necessity of sound sleep. In extreme old age he took long walks and felled trees, conversed with unfailing vivacity, and seemed to be the last of the party in the evening to wish to go to bed. At the same time he was doing a good deal of work.

The hero was fond of dwelling on his Scottish extraction. His domicile, however, was Liverpool, and his father was a West Indian proprietor and slave-owner; a circumstance perhaps not wholly without influence on one or two passages of his life. To his Scottish shrewdness and aptitude for business, Eton and Oxford added the highest English culture. Eton in those days would teach him only classics. But there was a good deal of interest in public affairs among the boys, many of whom were scions of political houses. There was a lively debating club, called “Pop,” of which Gladstone was the star. At Oxford he added mathematics to classics, taking the highest honours in both. There, also, he was the star of the debating club. It was a fine time for budding debaters, being the epoch of the great struggle about the Reform Bill. Gladstone led vehemently and gloriously on the Tory side. The result was that his fellow collegian, Lord Lincoln, introduced him as a most promising recruit to his father the old Duke of Newcastle, the highest of Tories, and Gladstone was elected to Parliament for Newark, a borough under the Duke’s influence. I have been allowed to read the correspondence, and there is nothing in it derogatory to the young man’s independence.

Oxford was the heart of clericism as well as Toryism, and the advance of Liberalism threatened the Anglican State Church, as well as the oligarchy of rotten boroughs. The Tractarian movement of sacerdotal reaction was already on foot. Gladstone imbibed the ecclesiastical as well as the political spirit of the place, and formed a friendship, which proved lasting, with the authors of the mediævalising movement. He published a defence of the Anglican State Church, which, as we know, was terribly cut up by Macaulay. The Reviewer, however, ends with a defence of religious establishments really weaker than anything in Gladstone. The State, according to Macaulay, though religion is not its proper business, has some time and energy to spare which it may usefully devote to the regulation of religion.

Gladstone cast off by degrees his extreme Establishmentarianism. He came at last to disestablishing the Church in Ireland and pledging himself to disestablishment in Wales. But he remained firmly attached to the Church of England, encircled by High Church friends, who were really nearer to his heart than anybody else, deeply, even passionately, interested in all their questions, and an assiduous writer on their side. He was suspected of being a Papist. A Papist he certainly was not. No one could be more opposed to Papal usurpation. His special sympathy was with anti-Papal and anti-Infallibilist Catholics, such as Döllinger and Lord Acton. His religious faith was simple and profound; so simple that he continued in this sceptical age to believe in the plenary inspiration of the Bible, and in the Mosaic account of the Creation. He retained unshaken faith in Providence and in the efficacy of prayer. This in his meditations constantly and clearly appears. At the same time, he grew tolerant of free inquiry as a conscientious quest of truth. Many Nonconformists, the leaders especially, notwithstanding his Anglicanism and his suspected leanings to Rome, were drawn to him on broad grounds of religious sympathy, and lent him their political support. Lord Salisbury called him “a great Christian.” He could not have been more truly described. He had thought of taking Holy Orders. From this he had been happily deterred, but he seems to have been fond of officiating in a semi-clerical way by reading the lessons in Hawarden Church.

Gladstone’s zeal in the service of his nation and humanity, his loyalty to right and hatred of tyranny and injustice, and his conscientious industry, were sustained by spiritual influences, and Christianity has a right to appeal to his character in support, not of its dogmas, but of its principles.

The first step in emancipation from bondage to the State Church theory was curious and characteristic. Peel, in whose Government Gladstone then was, proposed an increase of the grant to Maynooth. Gladstone paid a tribute to the principle of the “Church in its Relation to the State” by resigning his office. Then, on the ground that the other principle had prevailed, he voted for the grant and went back into the Government. It is thus possible to see how the idea of a certain tortuosity became connected with his career. Bitter enemies even accused him of duplicity. He had a habit, of which his biographer seems aware, of making his words open to a double construction, the consequence, perhaps, of consciousness that his mind was moving and that his position might be changed. He had also a dislike of owning change, and a habit of setting his retroactive imagination at work to prove that there was no inconsistency, which had a bad effect, especially in such a case as his sudden coalition with Parnell.

The value of the recruit was at once recognized and the door of office was presently opened to him by Peel, who was always on the look-out for youthful promise, and set himself, perhaps more than any other Prime Minister ever did, to train up a succession of statesmen for the country. Though himself the least eccentric of mankind, Peel showed in more than one case that he could overlook a touch of eccentricity where there was real merit and genuine work. Set, as Vice-President of the Board of Trade, to deal with a subject entirely new to him, Gladstone at once justified Peel’s confidence and discernment. Perhaps the office had been chosen for him as one in which his eccentricity had no play. He served Peel admirably well, and was perfectly true to his chief. But, from things that I have heard him say, I rather doubt whether he greatly loved Peel. Peel detested the Tractarians; the Tractarians hated Peel; and some of the Tractarians were nearest of all men to Gladstone’s heart.

Peel’s Government having been overthrown on the question of the Corn Laws by a combination which the Duke of Wellington characterized with military frankness, of Tory Protectionists, Whigs, Radicals, and Irish Nationalists, the whole under Semitic influence, its chief, for the short remainder of his life, held himself aloof from the party fray, encouraging no new combination, and content with watching over the safety of his great fiscal reform; though, as Greville says, had the Premiership been put to the vote, Peel would have been elected by an overwhelming majority. His personal following, Peelites as they were called, Graham, Gladstone, Lincoln, Cardwell, Sidney Herbert, and the rest, remained suspended between the two great parties. When Disraeli had thrown over protection, as he meant from the beginning to do, the only barrier of principle between the Peelites and the Conservatives was removed. Overtures were made by the Conservative leader, Lord Derby, to Gladstone, whose immense value as a financier was well established, and the common opinion was that Gladstone would have accepted had Disraeli not been in the way. But Disraeli, though he offered to waive his claims, was in the way, and the result was that the Peelites, Gladstone at their head, coalesced with the Whigs and helped to form the coalition Government of Lord Aberdeen.

Mr. Morley has said rightly that an impulse in the Liberal direction was lent to Gladstone’s mind by the crusade into which his humanity impelled him against the iniquities and cruelties of the Bourbon government at Naples. Though it was not revolutionary sentiment but zeal for righteousness and hatred of iniquity that moved him, his heart could not be closed against the loud and passionate acclaim of the Mazzinians and all who were struggling against the traditions of the Holy Alliance in Europe, while all the powers of reaction, political or ecclesiastical, denounced him, and even the good Lord Aberdeen shrank from anything which appeared to encourage revolution or to imply that the treaties of Vienna were effete. The famous letters sent a thrill through Europe and made all the powers of tyranny and iniquity tremble on their thrones. Seldom, if ever, has a private manifesto had such effect. Combined with humanity and zeal for righteousness, in Gladstone’s heart was a strong feeling in favour of nationality, which he showed in promoting, as he did, the emancipation of the Ionian Islands and their union with Greece.

Once launched in any career, Gladstone was sure to imbibe the full spirit of the movement and lead the way. His Liberalism presently outstripped that of the Whigs. As the most conspicuous seceder from the Tory camp, he became the special object of antipathy to the Carlton Club, which was fond of speaking of him as insane. A member of the Carlton was reported to have said to a member of the Reform Club, “I am much better off for a leader than you are, my leader is only an unscrupulous intriguer; yours is a dangerous lunatic.” The story was current that Gladstone had bought the whole contents of a toyshop and ordered them to be sent to his house. This came to me once in so circumstantial a form, that I asked Lady Russell whether she thought it could be true. Her answer was: “I begin to think it is, for I have heard it every session for ten years.”

It must be owned that Gladstone was impulsive, and that impulsiveness was the source not only of gibes to his enemies, but sometimes of anxiety to his friends. “What I fear in Gladstone,” said Archbishop Tait, “is his levity.” That he could easily throw off responsibility, I think I have myself seen. But a man on whom so heavy a load of responsibility rests, if he felt its full weight would be killed by it, and want of conscientiousness is not to be inferred from lightness of heart.

It must have been, indeed it evidently was, much against the grain that the great Minister of peace and economy went into the Crimean War. He seems to have tried to persuade himself that the result, after all, would be the bringing of Turkey under control. More substantial was his resolution, as Chancellor of the Exchequer and holder of the purse, to make the generation which waged the war, as far as possible, pay for it by taxes, not cast the burden upon posterity by loans. Mr. Morley is right in pointing to Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, then unhappily Ambassador at Constantinople, as largely responsible for the war. Besides his hatred of Russia, the ambassador had a personal grudge against the Czar. But conspiring with him were Palmerston, intensely anti-Russian, the father of Jingoism, perhaps not unwilling to replace the pacific Lord Aberdeen; and the Emperor of the French, who wanted glory to gild his usurped throne and a better social footing in the circle of Royalties, which he gained by publicly embracing the British Queen. In the middle of the war, Gladstone seceded from the Ministry, reconstructed under Palmerston after its fall under Lord Aberdeen; not, I suspect, so much because Palmerston failed to oppose Roebuck’s motion of inquiry, against which it was useless to contend, as because he was himself thoroughly sick of the war. I happened just then to be with him one morning on business, at the conclusion of which he began to talk to me, or rather to himself, about the situation, saying, in his Homeric way, that if the Trojans would have given back Helen and her treasures, his Homeric phrase for the Vienna terms, the Greeks would have raised the siege of Troy. I had not had the advantage of being at the Greek headquarters; but I could not help seeing in what mood the British people were, and how hopeless it was then to talk to them about reasonable terms of peace. Had Gladstone, instead of bolting in the middle of the war, mustered courage, of which he generally had a superabundance, to oppose it at the outset, he might have incurred obloquy at the moment, but he would have found before long that, to use Salisbury’s metaphor reversed, he had laid his money on the right horse. The grass had hardly grown over the graves on the heights of Sebastopol before everybody condemned the war.

After some turns of the political wheel, we find Gladstone Chancellor of the Exchequer under Palmerston, making the fortune of that Government by his masterly Budgets and splendid expositions of them in the House. If Palmerston was the father of Jingoism, Gladstone was its arch-enemy. Of the two things for which the Prime Minister said he lived, the extinction of slavery, and the military defence of England, Gladstone looked not with special zeal upon the first and very cautiously on the second. Palmerston was a commercial Liberal, and he saw the immense value of such a Chancellor of the Exchequer to his Government. But he was believed to have said that, when he was gone, Gladstone would in two years turn their majority of seventy into a minority, and in four be himself in a lunatic asylum. It was known that he wanted as his successor in the leadership, not Gladstone, but Cornewall Lewis. Very pleasant would have been the situation of that highly respected scholar and statesman, leading the House with Gladstone on his flank!

One fruit, distinctly Gladstonian, the Palmerston Government bore. That fruit was the commercial treaty with France, negotiated through Cobden, who shared, with Bright, Palmerston’s particular dislike. Cobden even suspected that Palmerston would not have been sorry if the treaty had miscarried, and that he betrayed his feeling in his bearing and language towards France while negotiations were going on. There was nothing in the treaty which could militate against a rational policy of free trade. Some Liberals were inclined to demur to it, not because it was inconsistent with free trade, but because it made us to some extent accomplices in a stretch of prerogative on the part of the Emperor of the French, who used the treaty-making power to accomplish, without the authority of his Legislature, a change in the fiscal system of France.

The objections which some might perhaps take to Gladstone’s fiscal system are, that it retains, though it reduces, the income tax, originally imposed only for the purpose of shoring up the fiscal edifice while a great change was taking place, with a promise that when the change should be effected the tax should cease; and that it rests so much upon the consumption of a few important articles. Suppose tobacco, for instance, were to go out of fashion, as some sanitary authorities say it ought, there would be a serious gap in the Budget.

The great master of finance, while he was dealing with it on the largest scale, was conscientiously mindful of the public interest in the most minute details of expenditure. He regarded public money as sacred, and any waste of it, however trifling, as criminal. His biographer has given us amusing instances of his conscientious parsimony in small things. In one case, however, his parsimony was misplaced. He grudged the judges their large salaries. Public money cannot be better expended than in taking the best men from the Bar to the Bench. The expedition of business assured by their command of their courts would in itself be worth the price, apart from the security for justice.

Among other relics of Gladstone’s Conservatism was his clinging to his seat in Parliament for the University of Oxford, in which he was supported by a rather strange and precarious alliance of High Churchmen voting for the High Churchman and Liberals voting for the progressive Liberal; a combination the strain upon which became extreme when Palmerston, in whose Government Gladstone was, made Shaftesbury, the lay leader of the Evangelicals, his Minister for ecclesiastical affairs, and allowed him to go on promoting Low Churchmen. But the Tories never made a greater mistake than the ejection of Gladstone from his Oxford seat. By sending him from Oxford to Liverpool, they, to use his own phrase, unmuzzled him. It is true, I believe, that, on the day of his rejection, the Bible fell out of the hand of the statue of James I. on the gate tower of the Bodleian, an omen of the separation of the Church from the State. The stone being very friable, the fall was not miraculous; although it was curiously apt.

It was a mistake, however, to say that the disestablishment of the Irish Church had been an issue in the Oxford election. I compared notes on that point with my friend, Sir John Mowbray, who had been the chairman of the Tory committee, and agreed with me in saying that the Irish Church was not an issue. Gladstone took up disestablishment for Ireland, which had been long on the Liberal programme, when he had been thrown out of power by Disraeli on the question of extension of the suffrage. He was ambitious, happily for the country; and he wanted to recover the means of doing great things. His admirers need not shrink from that avowal. But he was also sincerely convinced, as well he might be, and as all Liberals were, that the State Church of Ireland was about the most utterly indefensible institution in the world. He framed his measure, expounded it, and carried it through Parliament, in his usual masterly way; and the Anglican Church in Ireland, it is believed, has felt herself the better for the operation ever since. Gladstone’s High Church friends in England forgave him with a sigh. The State Church of Ireland was separate from that of England, and was Low Church and opposed to everything Catholic from local antagonism to the Church of Rome.

Before his junction with the Liberals, Gladstone had deprecated the interference of Parliament with the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge on the ground that they were private foundations with which Parliament had no right to interfere; and when he brought on his Oxford Reform Bill he had to perform one of his feats of retrospective explanation. But, as usual, he did his work well, though he still left more to be done. By his legislation, clerical as his sympathies were, the universities were set free from clericism, reopened to science, and reunited to the nation. Our Oxford Bill was badly cut up in the Commons, some misguided Liberals playing into the hands of Disraeli, who of course meant mischief. When the Bill in its mutilated state went up to the Lords, it appeared that the Tory leader, Lord Derby, though he felt bound to speak against the Ministerial measure, was not really prepared to throw it out, and that consequently there had not been a whip upon his side. It was then suggested to the Ministers in charge of the Bill that the Commons amendments might be thrown out in the Lords, and the Bill might be sent back in its original state to the Commons, where our friends might by that time be better advised, and the Opposition benches, as it was the end of the session, might be thinned. Russell, then the leader in the Commons, condemned the suggestion as most rash and not unlikely to be the death of the Bill. Gladstone was lying sick of an attack, strange to say, of the chicken-pox. On appeal to him, the signal for battle was at once held out, as I felt sure it would be; and the result was just what we desired.

In connection with this legislative dealing with the endowed colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, the principle may be said to have been practically adopted, though not formally laid down, that, after the lapse of fifty years from the death of a Founder, the Legislature may deal freely with all his regulations, saving the main object of his foundation. The assumption that the wills of Founders were for ever inviolable, in spite of the lapse of ages and the total change of circumstances, had led, as it must always lead, to a perpetuity of perversion and to the defeat of the main object of the Founders themselves.

He who in his youth had won the favour of the most bigoted of Tory patrons and entrance to public life by his rhetorical opposition to the Reform Bill of 1832, was destined in his maturity to father a Reform Bill at the thought of which the reformers of 1832 would have shuddered. The Reform Bill of 1832 had enfranchised the middle-class, but by abolishing the scot-and-lot borough, had deprived the working-class of the little representation which it possessed. Moreover, the legislative preponderance of the landed interest, which had the House of Lords to itself and a large section of the Commons, was too great for the general good. These were the best reasons for an extension of the suffrage, while the Whig party and its leader Russell, perhaps, as is the way of parties, finding their sails flapping against the mast, wished to raise a little popular wind. It is by the bidding of parties against each other for popularity, largely, that the suffrage has been extended. Russell had for some time been busy with reform, and had more than once moved in that direction, but had been deftly put aside by Palmerston, who, though a Liberal by profession, and revolutionary or affecting that character in foreign affairs, was in home politics a Tory at heart, and met general assertions of the right of men to the suffrage as “partakers of our flesh and blood” and presumptively entitled to a place “within the pale of the constitution,” with the aphorism that “the one right of every man, woman, and child was to be well governed.” It could not be said that the reform agitation, at all events south of Birmingham, was very strong. The large measure of extension brought in by Gladstone was opposed, in some very memorable speeches, by Robert Lowe, a high aristocrat not of birth but of intellect, who made the last stand against democracy and in favour of government by mind. He and his section, dubbed by regular party men “the Cave of Adullam,” helped Disraeli to kill the Bill. Disraeli then brought in and carried a Bill, not less radical, of his own, to which the Conservative gentry under the party whip, styled by Disraeli “education,” lent a doleful support; while Robert Lowe appealed to their consistency almost with tears, but in vain. Disraeli thus carried off the popularity of the measure, and enabled himself to say that the Tories were the true friends of the masses. But, besides this, Disraeli looked out of window, which Gladstone’s critics, perhaps not wholly without ground for their gibes, said that he did not, and had perceived and laid to heart the great fact that there were many in the masses who cared little for Liberalism or progress, and who would be apt under skilful management to vote Tory.

Such a subject as the French war lent transcendent interest to the great speeches of Pitt and Fox. Otherwise, their best efforts are not superior to Gladstone’s speech in favour of extension of the suffrage, though Gladstone’s style is different from theirs. Gladstone’s speeches are not literature. He spoke without notes, and no man can speak literature ex tempore. Nor are there any passages of extraordinary brilliancy. For such he had not imagination. But the speeches are masterly expositions of the measure and of the case in its favour, always dignified, impressive, and persuasive. The language is invariably good and clear; wonderfully so, considering the absence of notes, though it is somewhat diffuse, and had perhaps rather lost freshness by over-practice in debating-clubs when the speaker was young. The voice, the manner, the bearing of the orator were supreme, and filled even the most adverse listener with delight.

Gladstone’s multifarious reading does not seem to have included a large proportion of history or political philosophy. He has left among his writings nothing of importance in the way of political science, nor does he seem even to have formed any clear conception of the polity which he was seeking to produce. His guiding idea, when once he had broken loose from his early Toryism, was liberty which he appeared to think would of itself be the parent of all that was good. He had, perhaps, derived something from Russell, whose leading principle it was that the people needed only responsibility to make them act wisely and rightly. He had, apparently, no notion of any system of government other than party, which he seemed to treat as though it had been immemorial and universal, whereas it was born of the struggle for constitutional government against the Stuarts. Even as to the working of the British Constitution, his opinions are not very clear. He professed, and probably felt, the highest respect for the Lords; yet, when they played their constitutional part by throwing out Bills of his of which they did not approve, he denounced them as violators of the Constitution. Did he intend to vest supreme power absolutely in an assembly elected by manhood, or nearly manhood, suffrage?

For the Crown, Gladstone’s reverence went at least as far as to any but believers in political fetichism would seem meet, or as we feel to be perfectly consistent with the dignity of one so eminent and the real head of the State. Yet, it was understood that he was not a favourite at Court, and it is pretty evident that Her Majesty did not eagerly embrace the opportunity of calling on him to form a Government. With all her personal virtues and graces, she was a true granddaughter of George III., cherishing, as we have been told, apparently on the best authority, ideas of Divine Right, and liking to connect herself not so much with the Hanoverians as with the Stuarts. To her, progressive Liberalism could hardly be very congenial. Moreover, she was a woman, and in a competition in flattery Gladstone would have had no chance with his rival.

It is rather startling to learn from this Life how much there is of interference on the part of irresponsibility with the responsible Government of the Kingdom, and what drafts are made upon the time and energy of one who has the burden of Atlas on his shoulders by the demands of correspondence with the Court. Another thing of which the friends of personal government, who have been labouring so hard by pageantry and personal worship to stimulate the monarchical sentiment, may well take note, is the confidential employment of Court Secretaries, like Sir Herbert Taylor under George IV., in communications between the Sovereign and the Minister. They might find, when they had revived the personal power, that it was really wielded, not by Royalty itself, but by some aspiring member or members of the household.

Gladstone’s declaration, at a critical juncture of the American War, that Jefferson Davis had made a nation, gave deep offence to the friends of the North both in the United States and in England. But he atoned for it by frank and honourable repentance. As a statement of fact, it lacked truth only in so far that Davis, instead of making the South a nation, had found it one already made. The schism between the Free and Slave States was inevitable, and the war was from the outset one between nations. That Gladstone subscribed to the Confederate loan was false, nor is there the slightest reason for believing that he was less faithful than any of his colleagues to the policy of strict neutrality, however ready he may have been, in common with the rest, to tender good offices in a contest in which, as it deprived millions of British artisans of the materials of their industry, Great Britain had a manifest and pressing interest. It might be rash to assert that the son of a slave-owner felt the same intense abhorrence of slavery as Wilberforce, or that a High Churchman fully equalled in his zeal for emancipation the Evangelicals whose special heritage it was. But Gladstone’s actuating motives, certainly, were his regard for the bread of the British artisan, and his sympathy with all who were struggling to be free. With a view, probably, to the satisfaction of mortified friends of the North in England, he wrote to me suggesting that, if the North thought fit to let the South go, it might in time be indemnified by the union of Canada with the Northern States. As the letter, on consideration, seemed unlikely to have the desired effect, and not unlikely at some future time to prove embarrassing to the writer, no use was made of it, and it was destroyed.

Had it been possible for the son of a Jamaica proprietor to be an ardent emancipationist and a warm friend of the negro, Gladstone could hardly have failed to show his feelings on the occasion of the Jamaica massacre, that most atrocious outpouring of white hatred, rage, and panic on the black peasantry of Jamaica. However, he had the general sentiment of the upper classes and of the clergy upon his side.

Peel, as Premier, had been master of the Government, as well as head, in the last resort, of every Department. His habit had been to hear what all the members of his Cabinet had to say, and then make up his mind. In his time, there was no voting in the Cabinet nor any disclosure of Cabinet proceedings. Disclosure of Cabinet proceedings is, in fact, at variance with the Privy Councillor’s oath. Gladstone, it appears, put questions to the vote. He also allowed a member of the Cabinet to set forth on a political adventure of his own and proclaim a policy independent of that of his chief and his colleagues, as the same politician is now again doing. The Cabinet system itself under Gladstone’s Premiership was apparently beginning to give way. There was a commencement of the change which has now made the Cabinet an unwieldy body, meeting at long intervals and almost publicly, while the real power and the direction of policy centre in an inner conclave, something like that which, in the reign of Charles II., was called the Cabal.

Not only the Cabinet system but the party system, on which the Cabinet system was based, had begun to show signs of disintegration. Sectionalism had set in, as it was pretty sure to do when political speculation had grown more free and there was no controlling issue, like that of Parliamentary Reform in 1832, to hold a party together. Personal ambition was also becoming restless and difficult to control. More than once, Gladstone’s Government was defeated by the bolting of its own supporters. The task of a Premier was not easy. Allowance must be made for this, when we compare the measure of Gladstone’s success as head of the Government with that of his predecessors, and with the measure of his own success as Chancellor of the Exchequer, giving life and force to the Government by his triumphs in finance.

Of the truth of the charges of want of knowledge of men and of personal tact, often brought against Gladstone as Premier, I cannot pretend to judge. There was certainly no lack in him of social affability or charm. He may not have practised the jovial familiarities of Palmerston or had a counterpart of Lady Palmerston’s salon. But the lack of such things, or a want of what is called personal magnetism, will hardly deprive a great leader, such as Pitt or Peel, of the devotion of partisans, much less of the trust and attachment of the people.

Once, however, it must be owned, Gladstone as Premier was guilty of a mistake in tactics at anyrate, which could not fail to shake the confidence of his party. I happened to be revisiting England and was at Manchester, when, like a bolt out of the blue, without notice or warning of any kind, came upon us the dissolution of 1874. All Liberals saw at once that it was ruin. It seems that the leader himself contemplated, and almost counted on, defeat. What was it, then, that moved him to this desperate act? His Chancellor and devoted friend, Lord Selborne (Roundell Palmer), did not doubt that it was a legal dilemma in which he had involved himself, by taking the Chancellorship of the Exchequer in addition to the First Lordship of the Treasury without going to his constituents for re-election, a violation, there was reason to apprehend, of the law. The only escape from that dilemma, according to the Chancellor, was dissolution. Mr. Morley, to whose authority I should willingly defer, strenuously repels this explanation, and points to another ground, assigned by Mr. Gladstone. Mr. Gladstone was, of course, sure to assign another ground, and equally sure to persuade himself that it was the real one. But what was that other ground? It was, in fact, that the Government was sick, and that the election would put it out of its misery, thereby declaring the situation. But did Mr. Gladstone overlook the fact that he would be depriving a number of his followers of their seats? Why was the stroke so sudden? On the other hand, the charge of bribing the constituencies by promising to repeal the income tax, Mr. Morley is perfectly right in dismissing as baseless. Such expectations are held out by all competitors for power. What is the game of party but that of outbidding the other side?

After this defeat, Achilles retired in dudgeon to his tent. Gladstone insisted on resigning the leadership. But everybody foresaw that his return to it was inevitable; and it was difficult to fix on a man of sufficient eminence to take his place, and yet not too eminent to give it up when the great man might see fit to return. Lord Hartington was chosen as one whose comparative youth would make the surrender easy in his case, while his high rank would continue to sustain his position.

Whenever there was fighting to be done for the party, either in Parliamentary debate or on the stump, Gladstone was the man. His Midlothian campaign displayed his almost miraculous powers as a speaker, while it called forth the enthusiastic feeling of the people for the man in whom they thought, and rightly, that they saw their heartiest friend and the most powerful advocate of their interests. Three speeches in one day and an address this prodigy of nature could deliver, and the speeches were not flummery and clap-trap, but addressed to the intelligence of the people. Yet one cannot help being rather sorry that the stump should have been so much dignified by Gladstone’s practice. It is a great evil. To say nothing of its effect upon the passions of the audience, it wears out the statesman; it deprives him, in the intervals of Parliament, of leisure for study and reflection; worst of all, it tempts him imprudently to commit himself.

In the case of armed intervention in Egypt, Gladstone seemed to swerve from his usual fidelity to a policy of moderation and peace. It lost him Bright, to whom as he advanced in Liberalism he had been drawing closer, and who had been induced to take office in his Government. Bright would have nothing to do with aggrandizement or war, and in private his words were strong, though in public he showed chivalrous forbearance towards his friends. Seeing that Egypt lay on the road to India and commanded the Suez Canal, it does not appear that the illustrious Quaker would have had much reason for finding fault with Gladstone and his Government, so far as the main scope of their policy was concerned. The fatal mistake, as it turned out, was the employment of Gordon, a heroic enthusiast, whose action no one could well foresee, who perhaps could hardly foresee his own, and who was not the best agent to be selected for carrying out a policy of retreat. That Gladstone went to the opera after receiving news of Gordon’s death, as his malignant enemies said, was denied. But, even if he had, would any real want of feeling have been implied in his continuing to take his ordinary relief from the load of toil and anxiety which he bore?

In the case of the Transvaal Republic, Gladstone had the moral courage, in face of the agitation caused by Majuba Hill, to avow that he shrank from “blood-guiltiness,” and to keep the nation in the path of honour and justice. His biographer, in dealing with this case and its sequel, has been evidently restrained by his desire not to multiply points of controversy. He might otherwise have greatly strengthened his proof that the claim of suzerainty was a fraud. Not such would have been the treatment of a breach of the plighted faith of the nation had Gladstone lived.

The last act of this wonderful life and its closing scene connect themselves with the history of Ireland, and are scarcely of a brighter hue than the rest of that sad story. The history of the case with which, at this juncture, statesmanship had to deal, if it was clearly apprehended, was never, so far as I remember, very clearly set forth, either by Mr. Gladstone or by anyone who took part in the discussion. Cromwell had given Ireland, with union, the indispensable boon of free trade with Great Britain. Succeeding Governments, less wise and magnanimous, had allowed British protectionism to kill the great Irish industries, the cattle trade and the wool trade. The people were thus thrown for subsistence entirely on the cultivation of the soil, in an island far the greater part of which is too wet for profitable tillage, and lends itself only to grazing. Then came the Penal Code, and to economical destitution was added utter social degradation. The people were reduced to a state bordering on absolute barbarism, a state in which they could look for nothing beyond bare food, while even bare food, the treacherous potato being its staple, periodically failed. In such a condition, all social and prudential restraints on the increase of population were lost, and the people multiplied with animal recklessness far beyond the capacity of the island to maintain them. Desperately contending for the soil on which they solely depended for their maintenance, they became, in the most miserable sense, tenants-at-will, prædial serfs of the landlord, who ground them through his middleman, and sometimes through a series of middlemen forming a hierarchy of extortion, while what the middleman had left was taken by the tithe-proctor. All the improvements of the tenant were confiscated by the owner of the soil. The only remedy for over-population, apart from the fell agencies of famine and disease, was emigration. The remedy for the agrarian evil and grievance, so far as it could be reached by legislation, apparently was some measure which would give the Irish tenant-at-will the same security for his holding which had been given to the English copyholder by custom and the favour of the courts. To buy out the Irish landlord was hardly just to the British people, and was a measure in itself of dangerous import. The abolition of the Irish gentry by any means, if it could be avoided, was a social mistake. The peasantry would thereby be deprived of the social chiefs, whose influence it specially needed, and there would be danger of handing the island over to the demagogue or the priest.

The political part of the problem, which concerned the relations between the two islands, had, when Mr. Gladstone came to deal with the question, assumed the aspect of a struggle for Home Rule. This was an ostensibly reduced and mitigated version of the struggle for the repeal of the Union, which had been set on foot by O’Connell, and, passing from him into more violent hands, had in 1848, under Smith O’Brien, come after a feeble outbreak to an unhappy end. The political movement, apart from the agrarian insurrection, had never shown much force. It was not on political change that the heart of the Irish people was set, but on the secure possession of their holdings and their deliverance from the grasp of famine. But the new leader, Charles Stewart Parnell, a real statesman in his way, combined the two objects, and the movement, carrying the people with it, became formidable in its political as well as in its agrarian form.

There had been, as we know, an immense Irish emigration to the United States. This, while it had somewhat relieved the pressure of population, had in another respect greatly added to the difficulty of the case. It had given birth to American Fenianism, with its Clan-na-Gael, an agitation wholly political, sanguinary in spirit, formidable from the influence of the Irish vote on American politicians, having its headquarters and its centre beyond the reach of British repression.

Gladstone had been in Ireland only for three weeks, and then, Mr. Morley says, he had not gone beyond a very decidedly English circle. There is, at all events, no trace of his having studied on the spot the character of the people with whom he had to deal, the influences which were at work, the various forces, political, ecclesiastical, social, and economical, to the play of which he was going to deliver the island. Had he done this, he might have known why it was that Irish Liberals, like Lord O’Hagan and Sir Alexander Macdonald, while they were Irish patriots to the core, and because they were Irish patriots to the core, shrank with horror from the dissolution of the legislative Union. He might have seen the probable futility of any clause of a Home Rule Act forbidding preference of a particular religion, and the ease with which it could have been practically nullified by the Roman Catholic hierarchy and priesthood, wielding the influence which they possessed over the people and over popular elections. He might also have more vividly realized the danger attending the relation of Protestant and Saxon Ulster to the Celtic and Catholic part of Ireland, when they came to face each other in a separate arena and their conflict was uncontrolled.

With the agrarian grievance Mr. Gladstone undertook to deal by means of land legislation, purchasing for the people, or giving them the means of purchasing, the freehold of their lots. The operation, as has been said, was perilous, as it involved exceptional dealing with contracts, as well as an unusual employment of public money; and in its course it exposed Mr. Gladstone to angry charges, not only of violent legislation, but of deception, to which colour may have been given by some shifting of his ground. A simple Act of the character above suggested, if it had been practicable, might possibly have solved the problem with less of a shock to the sanctity of contracts and less disturbance of any kind.

The political part of the Parnell movement Mr. Gladstone had for some time strenuously and vehemently opposed. He denounced Parnell’s policy as leading through rapine to dismemberment. He applied coercion vigorously to Irish outrage, imprisoned a number of Parnellites as suspects, and himself proclaimed the arrest of Parnell to an applauding multitude at Guild Hall. He allowed his colleague to rise night after night from his side, and denounce the Home Rule movement in language even stronger than his own. But, having been defeated in the election of 1885 by the combined forces of Conservatives and Parnellites, he suddenly, to the amazement of everybody, and the general consternation of his party, turned round, declared in favour of Home Rule, and coalesced with Parnell, by whose assistance he ousted the Conservative Government of Lord Salisbury, and reinstalled himself in power. It is not necessary to charge him with being actuated by love of power, or to say that his conversion was not sincere. It is due to him to bear in mind that the Conservative leaders, in what was called the Maamtrasma debate, had unquestionably coquetted with Parnellism, one of them, Sir Michael Hicks Beach, courting Parnellite favour by censuring Lord Spencer; and that by this conduct on their part the aspect of the question had undergone a certain change. On the other hand, it is impossible to forget that Gladstone’s position was that of leader of the Opposition, wishing to reinstate his party in power, and seeing that this could be done only by the help of the Irish vote. Nor can we easily bring ourselves to accept the account of his gradual conversion to Home Rule put forth in his History of an Idea. If he felt that his mind was moving on the subject, how could he have deemed it right not only to mask his own misgivings by vehement denunciations of Home Rule, but to lead his party and the nation on what he had begun to feel might prove to be the wrong line? His honesty, I repeat, need not be questioned. But neither his consistency nor the perfect singleness of his motive can very easily be maintained. He was a party leader; a full believer in the party system; and his party wanted to prevail over its rival. It is only by contention for power that party government can be carried on.

Gladstone proposed in effect to break the legislative Union by giving Ireland a Parliament of her own. This Parliament he styled “statutory.” Restrictions were to be laid upon it which would have made its relation to the British Parliament one of vassalage, and against which it would almost certainly have commenced, from the moment of its birth, a struggle for equality and independence. If it was baffled in that struggle, it might even have held out its hands for aid to the foreign enemies of Great Britain. The framer of the measure apparently had not distinctly made up his mind whether he would include the Irish in the Parliament of Great Britain or exclude them from it. That he should have rushed into legislation so momentous, legislation affecting the very existence of the United Kingdom, without having thoroughly made up his mind on the vital point, is surely a proof that, great as he was in finance, mighty as he was in debate, powerful as he was in framing and carrying measures of reform, when, as in dealing with Irish Disestablishment or the Universities, a clear case was put into his hands, he was hardly one of those sure-footed statesmen to whom can be safely intrusted the supreme destinies of a nation.

If after the equitable settlement of the agrarian question and the reduction of the population to the number which the island can maintain, the political enmity generated by the long struggle continues unassuaged, and the Irish contingent remains, as it has now for many years been, an alien and rebellious element in the British Parliament, disturbing and distracting British councils, there may be a sufficient reason for letting Ireland go. It would be folly to keep her as a mere thorn in the side of Great Britain. It would be more than folly to attempt to hold her in bondage. It is not unlikely that, after a trial of independence, she might of her own accord come back to the Union. But all wise statesmen have united in saying that there must be legislative Union or independence. Two Parliaments, two nations.[1]

The announcement of Gladstone’s plan was followed by terrible searching of heart in his party, ending in a split. Lord Hartington undertook the leadership of the Unionist-Liberals, and showed energy and striking ability in his new part. The fatal blow was the declared opposition of Bright, the great pillar of political righteousness, and the lifelong advocate of justice to Ireland.

The stoutest opposition and that which did most to save the integrity of the United Kingdom was made, as I shall always hold, by The Times. The error into which it fell with regard to the Parnell Letters was a trifling matter compared with the memorable service which it rendered on the whole to the Unionist cause.

When the contest had begun, Gladstone’s pugnacity broke all bounds. He appealed to separatist sentiment in Scotland and Wales, as well as in Ireland. He appealed to the “masses” against the “classes.” He appealed to ignorance against intelligence and the professions. One of the most eminent of his lifelong friends and admirers, who had held high office in his Government, said of him in a letter to me, “Gladstone is morally insane.” He had lost the personal influences by which his impulses had been controlled. Graham, Newcastle, Sidney Herbert, Cardwell, all were gone. Cardwell especially, a man eminently sure-footed and cool-headed, had, I suspect, while he lived, exercised an important and salutary though unfelt restraint.

Carried away by his excitement, Gladstone traduced the authors of the Union and their work, a work which he had once coupled with the treaty of commerce with France as supremely honourable to Pitt. “A horrible and shameful history, for no epithets weaker than these can in the slightest degree describe or indicate ever so faintly the means by which, in defiance of the national sentiment of Ireland, consent to the Union was attained.” Such is his language, and he compares the transaction in atrocity to the worst crimes in history. Consent to the Union was attained by the absolute necessity, plain to men of sense, of putting an end to murderous anarchy and averting a renewal of ’98. It has been clearly shown that there was no serious bribery of a pecuniary kind. The indemnities for the owners of pocket boroughs were paid, in accordance with the notions of the day and under an Act of Parliament, alike to those who had voted for the Union and to those who had voted against it. The oligarchy to whose local reign the measure put an end was appeased with peerages and appointments, the scramble for which might well disgust a high-minded man like Cornwallis. This was probably inevitable in those days. Satisfactorily to obtain the national consent was impossible. The Parliament was a Protestant oligarchy, the Catholics being still excluded, and it was deeply stained with the atrocities of repression. Ireland, in fact, was not a nation, or capable of giving a national consent; it was a country divided between two races antagonistic in religion and at deadly enmity with each other. The submission of the question to the constituencies by the holding of a general election, five-sixths of the population being excluded from Parliament, would have been futile, and would very likely have revived the civil war. Pitt, it is true, held out to the Catholics a hope of political emancipation. That hope he did his best to fulfil, but he was prevented by the fatuous obstinacy of the King; and Mr. Gladstone, who was a devout monarchist, might have been challenged to say what, when met by the Royal veto, Pitt could have done. The promise remained in abeyance for one generation, at the end of which it was fulfilled. These bitter appeals to Irish hatred of the Union and belief that it was a deadly and inexpiable wrong, did not come well from the author of a measure intended, as he professed, to pluck the thorn out of the Irish heart.

The Bill was defeated in the House of Commons by a majority of thirty votes; and, on an appeal to the country, the Liberal-Unionists combining with the Conservatives on the special question, the Opposition won by upwards of a hundred. Six years afterwards, by another turn of the wheel, the Salisbury Government losing strength, Gladstone found himself again at the head of the Government, but with a weak majority made up largely of the Irish vote. Then came the catastrophe of Parnell, who, at the critical moment, was convicted of crim. con. It is impossible to read Mr. Morley’s account of the scene of distraction which ensued, matrimonial morality struggling with political convenience, and of the sorrowful decision that crim. con. would be an awkward thing to carry in face of the Nonconformist conscience, without feeling the presence of a comic element in the narrative.

Home Rule, however, was again put to the vote, and in its strangest form, Ireland being given a Parliament of her own, and, at the same time, a representation in the British Parliament with full liberty of voting on all British questions. That the Irish delegation would barter its vote to British parties for Irish objects, and especially for the relaxation of restrictions on its plenary power, was what nobody could fail to foresee. A more extraordinary proposal, surely, never was made to any legislature. The one recommendation that Home Rule had was, that it would rid the British Parliament of an alien and hostile element. That element Gladstone’s Bill would have retained in its worst form. The Bill, however, was carried in the Commons by a majority of thirty-four, some of the English members probably giving a party vote in the assurance that the Bill would be thrown out by the House of Lords.

The use of the clôture in forcing through the House of Commons such a measure as Home Rule surely could not be defended. The clôture by which our overbearing Government is able to gag the House of Commons, even on the most vital question, remains a mark of Gladstone’s impetuousity and inability to brook opposition when what seemed to him an object of prime importance was in view.

After trying to raise a storm against the Lords, Gladstone resigned, as was reported, on a difference with the Admiralty about naval expenditure. One of the most memorable careers in English history came to an end. The party which Gladstone led was utterly shattered, and shattered it still remains. Palmerston, could he have looked upon the scene, might have said that his cynical prophecy had been really fulfilled.

Gladstone, in addition to his immense amount of public work, was a voluminous author; the more voluminous because his style, formed by public and ex tempore speaking, though perfectly clear and correct, was certainly diffuse. His biographer shows good judgment by dwelling no more than he can help on this part of the subject. Readers of Homeric Studies and Juventus Mundi must wonder how such things can have been written and given to the press by so great a man. Stranger things have seldom come from any pen than the pages of the Traditive Element in Homeric Theo-Mythology, connecting Latona with the Virgin, Apollo with the Deliverer of mankind, and Ate with the Tempter. All these volumes are full of fantastic and baseless speculation. The fancy that there was an Egyptian epoch in the early history of Greece appears to be partly suggested by an accidental similarity between the name of an Egyptian and that of a Bœotian city. Not on such reasonings were the famous budgets based.

I was with Gladstone one day, when, our business having been done, he began to talk of Homer, and imparted to me a theory which he had just woven out of some fancied philological discovery. I felt sure that the theory was baseless, and tried to convince him that it was. But he was never very open to argument. Just as I had succumbed, the door opened and his brother-in-law, Lord Lyttelton, came in. Lord Lyttelton was a first-rate classical scholar, and I felt sure that he would see the question aright and prevail. See the question aright he did; prevail he did not; and the discovery has probably taken its place beside that of the Traditive Element.

Before the publication of Juventus Mundi, I think it was, there was a Homeric dinner at which, with Cornewall Lewis, Milman, and some other scholars I had the honour of being present. It was a very delightful reunion. No one could be more charming socially than our host. But I doubt whether the critical result was great.

Gladstone had in part put off his Establishmentarianism, but his orthodoxy and belief in the inspiration of the Bible remained unimpaired. This deprives his theological writings of serious value, though they still have interest as the work of a mind at once powerful and intensely religious, dealing with topics of the highest concern. It is not difficult to meet Hume’s philosophic objection to miracles, which seems little more than an assumption of the absolute impossibility of a sufficient amount of evidence. If the death of a man and his restoration to life were witnessed and certified by a great body of men of science, in circumstances such as to preclude the possibility of imposture, we should not withhold our belief, however contrary the occurrence might be to the ordinary course of nature. But we cannot believe anything contrary to the ordinary course of nature on the testimony of an anonymous gospel of uncertain authorship, of uncertain date, the product of an uncritical age, containing matter apparently mythical, and written in the interest of a particular religion. From considering the authenticity and sufficiency of the evidence, Gladstone, by his faith in the Bible, is debarred. So, in his critical work on Butler, he is debarred from free and fruitful discussion by the assumption, which he all the time carries with him, of the authenticity of Revelation. His faith in the inspiration of the Bible seems to go so far as to include belief in the longevity of the Patriarchs before the flood.[2]

Venturing to break a lance with Huxley about the truth of the account of creation in Genesis, he could not fail to be overthrown. His apology seems to amount to this; that the Creator in imparting an account of the creation to Moses, was so near the truth that the account could, by dint of very ingenious interpretation, be made not wholly irreconcilable with scientific fact. Gladstone continued greatly to venerate Newman, and apparently allowed himself to be influenced in his reasoning by the Grammar of Assent, a sort of vade mecum of self-illusion, the characteristic purport of the Cardinal’s very subtle but not very masculine and very flexible mind.

To me, Gladstone’s life is specially interesting as that of a man who was a fearless and powerful upholder of humanity and righteousness in an age in which faith in both was growing weak, and Jingoism, with its lust of war and rapine, was taking possession of the world. The man who, breaking through the restraints of diplomatic prudery, pleaded before Europe with prevailing eloquence the cause of oppressed Italy; who dared, after Majuba Hill, in face of public excitement, to keep the path of justice and honour in dealing with the Transvaal; whose denunciation of the Bulgarian atrocities made the Turkish Assassin tremble on his throne of iniquity; who, if he had lived so long, would surely have striven to save the honour of the country by denouncing the conspiracy against the liberty of the South African republics; who, if he were now living, would be protesting, not in vain, against the indifference of England to her responsibility for Turkish horrors; has a more peculiar hold on my veneration and gratitude than the statesman whose achievements and merits, very great as they were, have never seemed to me quite so great as, in Mr. Morley’s admirably executed picture, they appear. Not that I would undervalue Gladstone’s statesmanship or its fruits. Wonderful improvements in finance, great administrative reforms, the opening of the Civil Service, the Postal Savings Bank, the liberation of the newspaper press from the paper duty, the abolition of purchase in the army, the reform of the Universities followed by that of the endowed schools, the disestablishment of the Irish Church, and the commercial treaty with France, make up a mighty harvest of good work; even if we leave the re-settlement of the franchise open to question and carry Home Rule to the wrong side of the account. Very striking is the contrast, in this respect, between Gladstone’s career and that of his principal rival, who gave his mind little to practical improvement, and almost entirely to the game of party and the struggle for power. Moreover, Gladstone filled the nation with a spirit of common enthusiasm and hopeful effort for the general good, especially for the good of the masses, to which there was nothing corresponding on the part of his rival for power, whose grand game was that of setting two classes, the highest and the lowest, against the third. Gladstone was, in the best sense, a man of the people; and the heart of the people seldom failed to respond to his appeal. As an embodiment of some great qualities, especially of loyalty to righteousness, he has left no equal behind him, and deeply in this hour of trial we feel his loss.