The Life Of

                         William Ewart Gladstone

                                    By

                               John Morley

                        In Three Volumes—Vol. II.

                               (1859-1880)

                                 Toronto

                   George N. Morang & Company, Limited

                             Copyright, 1903

                         By The Macmillan Company





CONTENTS


Book V. 1859-1868
   Chapter I. The Italian Revolution. (1859-1860)
   Chapter II. The Great Budget. (1860-1861)
   Chapter III. Battle For Economy. (1860-1862)
   Chapter IV. The Spirit Of Gladstonian Finance. (1859-1866)
   Chapter V. American Civil War. (1861-1863)
   Chapter VI. Death Of Friends—Days At Balmoral. (1861-1884)
   Chapter VII. Garibaldi—Denmark. (1864)
   Chapter VIII. Advance In Public Position And Otherwise. (1864)
   Chapter IX. Defeat At Oxford—Death Of Lord Palmerston—Parliamentary
   Leadership. (1865)
   Chapter X. Matters Ecclesiastical. (1864-1868)
   Chapter XI. Popular Estimates. (1868)
   Chapter XII. Letters. (1859-1868)
   Chapter XIII. Reform. (1866)
   Chapter XIV. The Struggle For Household Suffrage. (1867)
   Chapter XV. Opening Of The Irish Campaign. (1868)
   Chapter XVI. Prime Minister. (1868)
Book VI. 1869-1874
   Chapter I. Religious Equality. (1869)
   Chapter II. First Chapter Of An Agrarian Revolution. (1870)
   Chapter III. Education—The Career And The Talents. (1870)
   Chapter IV. The Franco-German War. (1870)
   Chapter V. Neutrality And Annexation. (1870)
   Chapter VI. The Black Sea. (1870-1871)
   Chapter VII. “Day’s Work Of A Giant”. (1870-1872)
   Chapter VIII. Autumn Of 1871. Decline Of Popularity. (1871-1872)
   Chapter IX. Washington And Geneva. (1870-1872)
   Chapter X. As Head Of A Cabinet. (1868-1874)
   Chapter XI. Catholic Country And Protestant Parliament. (1873)
   Chapter XII. The Crisis. (1873)
   Chapter XIII. Last Days Of The Ministry. (1873)
   Chapter XIV. The Dissolution. (1874)
Book VII. 1874-1880
   Chapter I. Retirement From Leadership. (1874-1875)
   Chapter II. Vaticanism. (1874-1875)
   Chapter III. The Octagon.
   Chapter IV. Eastern Question Once More. (1876-1877)
   Chapter V. A Tumultuous Year. (1878)
   Chapter VI. Midlothian. (1879)
   Chapter VII. The Eve Of The Battle. (1879)
   Chapter VIII. The Fall Of Lord Beaconsfield. (1880)
   Chapter IX. The Second Ministry. (1880)
Appendix
Footnotes






                  [Frontispiece: Portrait of Gladstone.]

 William Ewart Gladstone; from a painting by Sir J. E. Millais, P.R.A, in
                          the National Gallery.





BOOK V. 1859-1868




Chapter I. The Italian Revolution. (1859-1860)


    Rarely, if ever, in the course of our history has there been such
    a mixture of high considerations, legislative, military,
    commercial, foreign, and constitutional, each for the most part
    traversing the rest, and all capable of exercising a vital
    influence on public policy, as in the long and complicated session
    of 1860. The commercial treaty first struck the keynote of the
    year; and the most deeply marked and peculiar feature of the year
    was the silent conflict between the motives and provisions of the
    treaty on the one hand, and the excitement and exasperation of
    military sentiment on the other.—GLADSTONE.(1)


This description extends in truth much beyond the session of a given year
to the whole existence of the new cabinet, and through a highly important
period in Mr. Gladstone’s career. More than that, it directly links our
biographic story to a series of events that created kingdoms, awoke
nations, and re-made the map of Europe. The opening of this long and
complex episode was the Italian revolution. Writing to Sir John Acton in
1864 Mr. Gladstone said to him of the budget of 1860, “When viewed as a
whole, it is one of the few cases in which my fortunes as an individual
have been closely associated with matters of a public and even an historic
interest.” I will venture to recall in outline to the reader’s memory the
ampler background of this striking epoch in Mr. Gladstone’s public life.
The old principles of the European state-system, and the old principles
that inspired the vast contentions of ages, lingered but they seemed to
have grown decrepit. Divine right of kings, providential pre-eminence of
dynasties, balance of power, sovereign independence of the papacy,—these
and the other accredited catchwords of history were giving place to the
vague, indefinable, shifting, but most potent and inspiring doctrine of
Nationality. On no statesman of this time did that fiery doctrine with all
its tributaries gain more commanding hold than on Mr. Gladstone. “Of the
various and important incidents,” he writes in a memorandum, dated
Braemar, July 16, 1892, “which associated me almost unawares with foreign
affairs in Greece (1850), in the Neapolitan kingdom (1851), and in the
Balkan peninsula and the Turkish empire (1853), I will only say that they
all contributed to forward the action of those home causes more continuous
in their operation, which, without in any way effacing my old sense of
reverence for the past, determined for me my place in the present and my
direction towards the future.”



I


(M1) At the opening of the seventh decade of the century—ten years of such
moment for our western world—the relations of the European states with one
another had fallen into chaos. The perilous distractions of 1859-62 were
the prelude to conflicts that after strange and mighty events at Sadowa,
Venice, Rome, Sedan, Versailles, came to their close in 1871. The first
breach in the ramparts of European order set up by the kings after
Waterloo, was the independence of Greece in 1829. Then followed the
transformation of the power of the Turk over Roumanians and Serbs from
despotism to suzerainty. In 1830 Paris overthrew monarchy by divine right;
Belgium cut herself asunder from the supremacy of the Dutch; then Italians
and Poles strove hard but in vain to shake off the yoke of Austria and of
Russia. In 1848 revolts of race against alien dominion broke out afresh in
Italy and Hungary. The rise of the French empire, bringing with it the
principle or idiosyncrasy of its new ruler, carried this movement of race
into its full ascendant. Treaties were confronted by the doctrine of
Nationality. What called itself Order quaked before something that for
lack of a better name was called the Revolution. Reason of State was
eclipsed by the Rights of Peoples. Such was the spirit of the new time.

The end of the Crimean war and the peace of Paris brought a temporary and
superficial repose. The French ruler, by strange irony at once the sabre
of Revolution and the trumpet of Order, made a beginning in urging the
constitution of a Roumanian nationality, by uniting the two Danubian
principalities in a single quasi-independent state. This was obviously a
further step towards that partition of Turkey which the Crimean war had
been waged to prevent. Austria for reasons of her own objected, and
England, still in her Turcophil humour, went with Austria against France
for keeping the two provinces, although in fiscal and military union,
politically divided. According to the fashion of that time—called a comedy
by some, a homage to the democratic evangel by others—a popular vote was
taken. Its result was ingeniously falsified by the sultan (whose ability
to speak French was one of the odd reasons why Lord Palmerston was
sanguine about Turkish civilisation); western diplomacy insisted that the
question of union should be put afresh. Mr. Gladstone, not then in office,
wrote to Lord Aberdeen (Sept. 10, 1857):—


    The course taken about the Principalities has grieved me. I do not
    mean so much this or that measure, as the principle on which it is
    to rest. I thought we made war in order to keep Russia out, and
    then suffer life, if it would, to take the place of death. But it
    now seems to be all but avowed, that the fear of danger, not to
    Europe, but to Islam,—and Islam not from Russia, but from the
    Christians of Turkey,—is to be a ground for stinting their
    liberties.


In 1858 (May 4) he urged the Derby government to support the declared wish
of the people of Wallachia and Moldavia, and to fulfil the pledges made at
Paris in 1856. “Surely the best resistance to be offered to Russia,” he
said, “is by the strength and freedom of those countries that will have to
resist her. You want to place a living barrier between Russia and Turkey.
_There is no barrier like the breast of freemen._” The union of the
Principalities would raise up antagonists to the ambitions of Russia more
powerful than any that could be bought with money. The motion was
supported by Lord John Russell and Lord Robert Cecil, but Disraeli and
Palmerston joined in opposing it, and it was rejected by a large majority.
Mr. Gladstone wrote in his diary: “May 4.—H. of C.—Made my motion on the
Principalities. Lost by 292:114; and with it goes another broken promise
to a people.” So soon did the illusions and deceptions of the Crimean war
creep forth.

In no long time (1858) Roumania was created into a virtually independent
state. Meanwhile, much against Napoleon’s wish and policy, these
proceedings chilled the alliance between France and England. Other powers
grew more and more uneasy, turning restlessly from side to side, like sick
men on their beds. The object of Russia ever since the peace had been,
first to break down the intimacy between England and France, by flattering
the ambition and enthusiasm of the French Emperor; next to wreak her
vengeance on Austria for offences during the Crimean war, still pronounced
unpardonable. Austria, in turn, was far too slow for a moving age; she
entrenched herself behind forms with too little heed to substance; and
neighbours mistook her dulness for dishonesty. For the diplomatic air was
thick and dark with suspicion. The rivalry of France and Austria in Italy
was the oldest of European stories, and for that matter the
Lombardo-Venetian province was a possession of material value to Austria,
for while only containing one-eighth of her population, it contributed
one-fourth of her revenue.

(M2) The central figure upon the European stage throughout the time on
which we are now about to enter was the ruler of France. The Crimean war
appeared to have strengthened his dynasty at home, while faith in the
depth of his political designs and in the grandeur of his military power
had secured him predominance abroad. Europe hung upon his words; a
sentence to an ambassador at a public audience on new year’s day, a
paragraph in a speech at the opening of his parliament of puppets, a
pamphlet supposed to be inspired, was enough to shake Vienna, Turin,
London, the Vatican, with emotions pitched in every key. Yet the mind of
this imposing and mysterious potentate was the shadowy home of vagrant
ideals and fugitive chimeras. It was said by one who knew him well,
_Scratch the emperor and you will find the political refugee_. You will
find, that is to say, the man of fluctuating hope without firm calculation
of fact, the man of half-shaped end with no sure eye to means. The sphinx
in our modern politics is usually something of a charlatan, and in time
the spite of fortune brought this mock Napoleon into fatal conflict with
the supple, positive, practical genius of Italy in the person of one of
the hardiest representatives of this genius that Italy ever had; just as
ten years later the same nemesis brought him into collision with the
stern, rough genius of the north in the person of Count Bismarck.
Meanwhile the sovereigns of central and northern Europe had interviews at
Stuttgart, at Teplitz, at Warsaw. It was at Warsaw that the rulers of
Austria and Prussia met the Czar at the end of 1860,—Poland quivering as
she saw the three crowned pirates choose the capital city of their victim
for a rendezvous. Russia declined to join what would have been a coalition
against France, and the pope described the conference of Warsaw as three
sovereigns assembling to hear one of them communicate to the other two the
orders of the Emperor of the French. The French empire was at its zenith.
Thiers said that the greatest compensation to a Frenchman for being
nothing in his own country, was the sight of that country filling its
right place in the world.

The reader will remember that at Turin on his way home from the Ionian
Islands in the spring of 1859, Mr. Gladstone saw the statesman who was
destined to make Italy. Sir James Hudson, our ambassador at the court of
Piedmont, had sounded Cavour as to his disposition to receive the
returning traveller. Cavour replied, “I hope you will do all you can to
bring such a proceeding about. I set the highest value on the visit of a
statesman so distinguished and such a friend of Italy as Mr. Gladstone.”
In conveying this message to Mr. Gladstone (Feb. 7, 1859), Hudson adds, “I
can only say I think your counsels may be very useful to this government,
and that I look to your coming here as a means possibly of composing
differences, which may, if not handled by some such calm unprejudiced
statesman as yourself, lead to very serious disturbances in the European
body politic.” Mr. Gladstone dined at Cavour’s table at the foreign
office, where, among other things, he had the satisfaction of hearing his
host speak of Hudson as _quel uomo italianissimo_. Ministers, the
president of the chamber, and other distinguished persons were present,
and Cavour was well pleased to have the chance of freely opening his
position and policy to “one of the sincerest and most important friends
that Italy had.”(2)

Among Cavour’s difficulties at this most critical moment was the attitude
of England. The government of Lord Derby, true to the Austrian sympathies
of his party, and the German sympathies of the court, accused Italy of
endangering the peace of Europe. “No,” said Cavour, “it is the statesmen,
the diplomatists, the writers of England, who are responsible for the
troubled situation of Italy; for is it not they who have worked for years
to kindle political passion in our peninsula, and is it not England that
has encouraged Sardinia to oppose the propaganda of moral influences to
the illegitimate predominance of Austria in Italy?” To Mr. Gladstone, who
had seen the Austrian forces in Venetia and in Lombardy, he said, “You
behold for yourself, that it is Austria who menaces us; here we are
tranquil; the country is calm; we will do our duty; England is wrong in
identifying peace with the continuance of Austrian domination.” Two or
three days later the Piedmontese minister made one of those momentous
visits to Paris that forced a will less steadfast than his own.

The French Emperor in his dealings with Cavour had entangled himself, in
Mr. Gladstone’s phrase, with “a stronger and better informed intellect
than his own.” “Two men,” said Guizot, “at this moment divide the
attention of Europe, the Emperor Napoleon and Count Cavour. The match has
begun. I back Count Cavour.” The game was long and subtly played. It was
difficult for the ruler who had risen to power by bloodstained usurpation
and the perfidious ruin of a constitution, to keep in step with a
statesman, the inspiring purpose of whose life was the deliverance of his
country by the magic of freedom. Yet Napoleon was an organ of European
revolution in a double sense. He proclaimed the doctrine of nationality,
and paid decorous homage to the principle of appeal to the popular voice.
In time England appeared upon the scene, and by his flexible management of
the two western powers, England and France, Cavour executed the most
striking political transformation in the history of contemporary Europe.
It brought, however, as Mr. Gladstone speedily found, much trouble into
the relations of the two western powers with one another.

The overthrow of the Derby government and the accession of the whigs
exactly coincided in time with the struggle between Austria and the
Franco-Sardinian allies on the bloody fields of Magenta and Solferino. A
few days after Mr. Gladstone took office, the French and Austrian emperors
and King Victor Emmanuel signed those preliminaries of Villafranca (July
11, 1859), which summarily ended an inconclusive war by the union of
Lombardy to the Piedmontese kingdom, and the proposed erection of an
Italian federation over which it was hoped that the pope might preside,
and of which Venetia, still remaining Austrian, should be a member. The
scheme was intrinsically futile, but it served its turn. The Emperor of
the French was driven to peace by mixed motives. The carnage of Solferino
appalled or unnerved him; he had revealed to his soldiers and to France
that their ruler had none of the genius of a great commander; the clerical
party at home fiercely assailed the prolongation of a war that must put
the pope in peril; the case of Poland, the case of Hungary, might almost
any day be kindled into general conflagration by the freshly lighted torch
of Nationality; above all, Germany might stride forward to the Rhine to
avenge the repulse of Austria on the Po and the Mincio.(3)

Whatever the motive, Villafranca was a rude check to Italian aspirations.
Cavour in poignant rage peremptorily quitted office, rather than share
responsibility for this abortive end of all the astute and deep-laid
combinations for ten years past, that had brought the hated Austrian from
the triumph of Novara down to the defeat of Solferino. Before many months
he once more grasped the helm. In the interval the movement went forward
as if all his political tact, his prudence, his suppleness, his patience,
and his daring, had passed into the whole population of central Italy. For
eight months after Villafranca, it seemed as if the deep and politic
temper that built up the old Roman Commonwealth, were again alive in
Bologna, Parma, Modena, Florence. When we think of the pitfalls that lay
on every side, how easily France might have been irritated or estranged,
what unseasonable questions might not unnaturally have been forced
forward, what mischief the voice and spirit of the demagogue might have
stirred up, there can surely be no more wonderful case in history of
strong and sagacious leaders, Cavour, Farini, Ricasoli, the Piedmontese
king, guiding a people through the ferments of revolt, with discipline,
energy, legality, order, self-control, to the achievement of a
constructive revolution. Without the sword of France the work could not
have been begun; but it was the people and statesmen of northern and
central Italy who in these eight months made the consummation possible.
And England, too, had no inconsiderable share; for it was she who secured
the principle of non-intervention by foreign powers in Italian affairs; it
was she who strongly favoured the annexation of central Italy to the new
kingdom in the north. Here it was that England directly and unconsciously
opened the way to a certain proceeding that when it came to pass she
passionately resented. In the first three weeks of March (1860) Victor
Emmanuel legalised in due form the annexation of the four central states
to Piedmont and Lombardy, and in the latter half of April he made his
entry into Florence. Cavour attended him, and strange as it sounds, he now
for the first time in his life beheld the famed city,—centre of undying
beauty and so many glories in the history of his country and the genius of
mankind. In one spot at least his musings might well have been
profound—the tomb of Machiavelli, the champion of principles three
centuries before, to guide that armed reformer, part fox part lion, who
should one day come to raise up an Italy one and independent. The
Florentine secretary’s orb never quite sets, and it was now rising to a
lurid ascendant in the politics of Europe for a long generation to come,
lighting up the unblest gospel that whatever policy may demand justice
will allow.(4)

(M3) On March 24 Cavour paid Napoleon a bitter price for his assent to
annexation, by acquiescing in the cession to France of Savoy and Nice,
provinces that were, one of them the cradle of the royal race, the other
the birthplace of Garibaldi, the hero of the people. In this transaction
the theory of the _plébiscite_, or direct popular vote upon a given
question, for the first time found a place among the clauses of a
diplomatic act. The _plébiscite_, though stigmatised as a hypocritical
farce, and often no better than a formal homage paid by violence or
intrigue to public right, was a derivative from the doctrines of
nationality and the sovereignty of the people then ruling in Europe. The
issue of the operation in Savoy and Nice was what had been anticipated.
Italy bore the stroke with wise fortitude, but England when she saw the
bargain closed for which she had herself prepared the way, took fierce
umbrage at the aggrandisement of France, and heavy clouds floated into the
European sky. As we have seen, the first act of the extraordinary drama
closed at Villafranca. The curtain fell next at Florence upon the fusion
of central with upper Italy. Piedmont, a secondary state, had now grown to
be a kingdom with eleven or twelve millions of inhabitants. Greater things
were yet to follow. Ten millions still remained in the south under the
yoke of Bourbons and the Vatican. The third act, most romantic, most
picturesque of all, an incomparable union of heroism with policy at double
play with all the shifts of circumstance, opened a few weeks later.

The great unsolved problem was the pope. The French ambassador at the
Vatican in those days chanced to have had diplomatic experience in Turkey.
He wrote to his government in Paris that the pope and his cardinals
reminded him of nothing so much as the sultan and his ulemas—the same
vacillation, the same shifty helplessness, the same stubborn
impenetrability. The Cross seemed in truth as grave a danger in one
quarter of Europe as was the Crescent in another, and the pope was now to
undergo the same course of territorial partition as had befallen the head
of a rival faith. For ten years the priests had been maintained in their
evilly abused authority by twenty thousand French bayonets—the bayonets of
the empire that the cardinals with undisguised ingratitude distrusted and
hated.(5) The Emperor was eager to withdraw his force, if only he were
sure that no catastrophe would result to outrage the catholic world and
bring down his own throne.

Unluckily for this design, Garibaldi interposed. One night in May (1860),
soon after the annexation to Piedmont of the four central states, the hero
whom an admirer described as “a summary of the lives of Plutarch,” sailed
forth from Genoa for the deliverance of the Sicilian insurgents. In the
eyes of Garibaldi and his Thousand, Sicily and Naples marked the path that
led to Rome. The share of Cavour as accomplice in the adventure is still
obscure. Whether he even really desired the acquisition of the Neapolitan
kingdom, or would have preferred, as indeed he attempted, a federation
between a northern kingdom and a southern, is not established. How far he
had made certain of the abstention of Louis Napoleon, how far he had
realised the weakness of Austria, we do not authentically know. He was at
least alive to all the risks to which Garibaldi’s enterprise must
instantly expose him in every quarter of the horizon—from Austria, deeming
her hold upon Venetia at stake; from the French Emperor, with hostile
clericals in France to face; from the whole army of catholics all over the
world; and not least from triumphant Mazzinians, his personal foes, in
whose inspirations he had no faith, whose success might easily roll him
and his policy into mire and ruin. Now as always with consummate
suppleness he confronted the necessities of a situation that he had not
sought, and assuredly had neither invented nor hurried. The politician, he
used to tell his friends, must above all things have the tact of the
Possible. Well did Manzoni say of him, “Cavour has all the prudence and
all the imprudence of the true statesman.” Stained and turbid are the
whirlpools of revolution. Yet the case of Italy was overwhelming. Sir
James Hudson wrote to Mr. Gladstone from Turin (April 3, 1859)—“Piedmont
cannot separate the question of national independence from the accidental
existence of constitutional liberty (in Piedmont) if she would.
Misgovernment in central Italy, heavy taxation and dearth in Lombardy,
misgovernment in Modena, vacillation in Tuscany, cruelty in Naples,
constitute the famous _grido di dolore_. The congress of Paris wedded
Piedmont to the redress of grievances.”

(M4) In August (1860) Garibaldi crossed from Sicily to the mainland and
speedily made his triumphant entry into Naples. The young king Francis
withdrew before him at the head of a small force of faithful adherents to
Capua, afterwards to Gaeta. At the Volturno the Garibaldians, meeting a
vigorous resistance, drove back a force of the royal troops enormously
superior in numbers. On the height of this agitated tide, and just in time
to forestall a fatal movement of Garibaldi upon Rome, the Sardinian army
had entered the territories of the pope (September 11).



II


In the series of transactions that I have sketched, the sympathies of Mr.
Gladstone never wavered. From the appearance of his Neapolitan letters in
1851, he lost no opportunity of calling attention to Italian affairs. In
1854 he brought before Lord Clarendon the miserable condition of Poerio,
Settembrini, and the rest. He took great personal trouble in helping to
raise and invest a fund for the Settembrini family, and elaborate accounts
in his own handwriting remain. In 1855 he wrote to Lord John Russell, then
starting for Vienna, as to a rumour of the adhesion of Naples to the
alliance of the western powers: “In any case I can conceive it possible
that the Vienna conferences may touch upon Italian questions; and I
sincerely rely upon your humanity as well as your love of freedom, indeed
the latter is but little in question, to plead for the prisoners in the
kingdom of the two Sicilies detained for political offences, real or
pretended. I do not ask you to leave any greater duty undone, but to bear
in mind the singular claims on your commiseration of these most unhappy
persons, if occasion offers.”

As we have already seen, it was long before he advanced to the view of the
thoroughgoing school. Like nearly all his countrymen, he was at first a
reformer, not a revolutionary. To the Marquis Dragonetti, Mr. Gladstone
wrote from Broadstairs in 1854:—


    Naples has a government as bad as anarchy; Rome unites the evils
    of the worst government and the most entire anarchy. In those
    countries I can hardly imagine any change that would not be for
    the better. But in the wild opinions of some of your political
    sectaries, I see the best and most available defence of the
    existing system with its hideous mischiefs. Almost every Italian
    who heartily desires the removal from Italy and from the face of
    the earth of the immeasurable evils which your country now suffers
    through some of its governments, adopts Italian union and national
    independence for his watchwords.... Do not think it presumption,
    for it is the mere description of a fact, if I say, we in England
    cannot bring our minds to this mode of looking at the Italian
    question. All our habits, all our instincts, all our history lead
    us in another direction. In our view this is not building from the
    bottom upwards, but from the top downwards.... All our experience
    has been to the effect that the champion of liberty should take
    his ground, not upon any remote or abstract proposition, but upon
    the right of man, under every law divine and human, first to good
    government, and next to the institutions which are the necessary
    guarantees of it.... We sympathise strongly, I believe, with the
    victims of misgovernment, but the English mind is not shocked _in
    limine_ at the notion of people belonging to one race and
    language, yet politically incorporated or associated with another;
    and of Italian unity, I think the language of this nation would
    be, We shall be glad if it proves to be feasible, but the
    condition of it must be gradually matured by a course of
    improvement in the several states, and by the political education
    of the people; if it cannot be reached by these means, it hardly
    will be by any others; and certainly not by opinions which closely
    link Italian reconstruction with European disorganisation and
    general war.


So far removed at this date was Mr. Gladstone from the glorified democracy
of the Mazzinian propaganda. He told Cobden that when he returned from
Corfu in the spring of 1859, he found in England not only a government
with strong Austrian leanings, but to his great disappointment not even
the House of Commons so alive as he could have wished upon the Italian
question. “It was in my opinion the authority and zeal of Lord Palmerston
and Lord John Russell in this question, that kindled the country.”

While Europe was anxiously watching the prospects of war between France
and Austria, Mr. Gladstone spoke in debate (April 18, 1859) upon the
situation, to express his firm conviction that no plan of peace could be
durable which failed to effect some mitigation of the sore evils
afflicting the Italian peninsula. The course of events after the peace
speedily ripened both his opinions and the sentiment of the country, and
he was as angry as his neighbours at the unexpected preliminaries of
Villafranca. “I little thought,” he wrote to Poerio (July 15, 1859), “to
have lived to see the day when the conclusion of a peace should in my own
mind cause disgust rather than impart relief. But that day has come. I
appreciate all the difficulties of the position both of the King of
Sardinia and of Count Cavour. It is hardly possible for me to pass a
judgment upon his resignation as a political step: but I think few will
doubt that the moral character of the act is high. The duties of England
in respect to the Italian question are limited by her powers, and these
are greatly confined. But her sentiments cannot change, because they are
founded upon a regard to the deepest among those principles which regulate
the intercourse of men and their formation into political societies.” By
the end of the year, he softened his judgment of the proceedings of the
French Emperor.

(M5) The heavy load of his other concerns did not absolve him in his
conscience from duty to the Italian cause:—


    _Jan. 3, 1860._—I sat up till 2 A.M. with my letter to Ld. J.
    Russell about Italy, and had an almost sleepless night for it.
    4.—2-½ hours with the Prince Consort, _à deux reprises_, about the
    Italian question, which was largely stated on both sides. I
    thought he admitted so much as to leave him no standing ground.
    5.—Went down to Pembroke Lodge and passed the evening with Lord
    John and his family. Lord John and I had much conversation on
    Italy.


In a cabinet memorandum (Jan. 3, 1860), he declared himself bound in
candour to admit that the Emperor had shown, “though partial and
inconsistent, indications of a genuine feeling for the Italians—and far
beyond this he has committed himself very considerably to the Italian
cause in the face of the world. When in reply to all that, we fling in his
face the truce of Villafranca, he may reply—and the answer is not without
force—that he stood single-handed in a cause when any moment Europe might
have stood combined against him. We gave him verbal sympathy and
encouragement, or at least criticism; no one else gave him anything at
all. No doubt he showed then that he had undertaken a work to which his
powers were unequal; but I do not think that, when fairly judged, he can
be said to have given proof by that measure of insincerity or
indifference.” This was no more than justice, it is even less; and both
Italians and Englishmen have perhaps been too ready to forget that the
freedom of Italy would have remained an empty hope if Napoleon iii. had
not unsheathed his sword.

(M6) After discussing details, Mr. Gladstone laid down in his memorandum a
general maxim for the times, that “the alliance with France is the true
basis of peace in Europe, for England and France never will unite in any
European purpose which is radically unjust.” He put the same view in a
letter to Lacaita a few months later (Sept. 16): “A close alliance between
England and France cannot be used for mischief, and cannot provoke any
dangerous counter combination; but a close alliance between England and
other powers would provoke a dangerous counter combination immediately,
besides that it could not in itself be trusted. My own leaning, therefore,
is not indeed to place reliance on the French Emperor, but to interpret
him candidly, and in Italian matters especially to recollect the great
difficulties in which he is placed, (1) because, whether by his own fault
or not, he cannot reckon upon strong support from England when he takes a
right course. (2) Because he has his own ultramontane party in France to
deal with, whom, especially if not well supported abroad, he cannot afford
to defy.”

As everybody soon saw, it was the relation of Louis Napoleon to the French
ultramontanes that constituted the tremendous hazard of the Piedmontese
invasion of the territories of the pope. This critical proceeding
committed Cavour to a startling change, and henceforth he was constrained
to advance to Italian unity. A storm of extreme violence broke upon him.
Gortchakoff said that if geography had permitted, the Czar would betake
himself to arms in defence of the Bourbon king. Prussia talked of reviving
the holy alliance in defence of the law of nations against the overweening
ambition of Piedmont. The French ambassador was recalled from Turin. Still
no active intervention followed.

One great power alone stood firm, and Lord John Russell wrote one of the
most famous despatches in the history of our diplomacy (October 27, 1860).
The governments of the pope and the king of the Two Sicilies, he said,
provided so ill for the welfare of their people, that their subjects
looked to their overthrow as a necessary preliminary to any improvement.
Her Majesty’s government were bound to admit that the Italians themselves
are the best judges of their own interests. Vattel, that eminent jurist,
had well said that when a people for good reasons take up arms against an
oppressor, it is but an act of justice and generosity to assist brave men
in the defence of their liberties. Did the people of Naples and the Roman
States take up arms against their government for good reasons? Upon this
grave matter, her Majesty’s government held that the people in question
are themselves the best judges of their own affairs. Her Majesty’s
government did not feel justified in declaring that the people of Southern
Italy had not good reasons for throwing off their allegiance to their
former governments. Her Majesty’s government, therefore, could not pretend
to blame the King of Sardinia for assisting them. So downright was the
language of Lord John. We cannot wonder that such words as these spread in
Italy like flame, that people copied the translation from each other,
weeping over it for joy and gratitude in their homes, and that it was
hailed as worth more than a force of a hundred thousand men.(6)

The sensation elsewhere was no less profound, though very different. The
three potentates at Warsaw viewed the despatch with an emotion that was
diplomatically called regret, but more resembled horror. The Prince Regent
of Prussia, afterwards the Emperor William, told Prince Albert that it was
a tough morsel, a disruption of the law of nations and of the holy ties
that bind peoples to their sovereigns.(7) Many in England were equally
shocked. Even Sir James Graham, for instance, said that he would never
have believed that such a document could have passed through a British
cabinet or received the approval of a British sovereign; India, Ireland,
Canada would await the application of the fatal doctrine that it
contained; it was a great public wrong, a grave error; and even Garibaldi
and Mazzini would come out of the Italian affair with cleaner hands. Yet
to-day we may ask ourselves, was it not a little idle to talk of the holy
ties that bind nations to their sovereigns, in respect of a system under
which in Naples thousands of the most respectable of the subjects of the
king were in prison or in exile; in the papal states ordinary justice was
administered by rough-handed German soldiers, and young offenders shot by
court-martial at the drumhead; and in the Lombardo-Venetian provinces
press offences were judged by martial law, with chains, shooting, and
flogging for punishment.(8) Whatever may be thought of Lord John and his
doctrine, only those who hold to the converse doctrine, that subjects may
never rise against a king, nor ever under any circumstances seek succour
from foreign power, will deny that the cruelties of Naples and the
iniquities connected with the temporal authority of the clergy in the
states of the church, constituted an irrefragable case for revolt.

(M7) Within a few weeks after the troops of Victor Emmanuel had crossed
the frontier (Sept. 1860), the papal forces had been routed, and a popular
vote in the Neapolitan kingdom supported annexation to Piedmont. The papal
states, with the exception of the patrimony of St. Peter in the immediate
neighbourhood of Rome itself, fell into the hands of the king. Victor
Emmanuel and Garibaldi rode into Naples side by side (Nov. 7). The Bourbon
flag after a long stand was at last lowered at the stronghold of Gaeta
(Feb. 14, 1861); the young Bourbon king became an exile for the rest of
his life; and on February 18 the first parliament of united Italy
assembled at Turin—Venice and Rome for a short season still outside. A few
months before, Mr. Gladstone had written a long letter to d’Azeglio. It
was an earnest exposition of the economic and political ideals that seemed
to shine in the firmament above a nation now emerging from the tomb. The
letter was to be shown to Cavour. “Tell that good friend of ours,” he
replied, “that our trade laws are the most liberal of the continent; that
for ten years we have been practising the maxims that he exhorts us to
adopt; tell him that he preaches to the converted.”(9) Then one of those
disasters happened that seem to shake the planetary nations out of their
pre-appointed orbits. Cavour died.(10)




Chapter II. The Great Budget. (1860-1861)


    It was said that by this treaty the British nation was about
    blindly to throw herself into the arms of this constant and
    uniform foe.... Did it not much rather, by opening new sources of
    wealth, speak this forcible language—that the interval of peace,
    as it would enrich the nation, would also prove the means of
    enabling her to combat her enemy with more effect when the day of
    hostility should come? It did more than this; by promoting habits
    of friendly intercourse and of mutual benefit, while it
    invigorated the resources of Britain, it made it less likely that
    she should have occasion to call forth these resources.—PITT
    (February 12, 1787).



I


As we survey the panorama of a great man’s life, conspicuous peaks of time
and act stand out to fix the eye, and in our statesman’s long career the
budget of 1860 with its spurs of appendant circumstance, is one of these
commanding points. In the letter to Acton already quoted (p. 1), Mr.
Gladstone says:—


    Before parliament met in 1860, the ’situation’ was very greatly
    _tightened_ and _enhanced_ by three circumstances. First, the
    disaster in China.(11) Secondly, a visit of Mr. Cobden’s to
    Hawarden, when he proposed to me in a garden stroll, the French
    treaty, and I, for myself and my share, adopted it (nor have I
    ever for a moment repented or had a doubt) as rapidly as the
    tender of office two months before. Thirdly, and the gravest of
    all, the Savoy affair. If, as is supposed, I have Quixotism in my
    nature, I can assure you that I was at this juncture much more
    than satiated, and could have wished with Penelope that the
    whirlwind would take me up, and carry me to the shore of the great
    stream of Ocean.(12) And the wish would in this point not have
    been extravagant: the whirlwind was there ready to hand. In and
    from the midst of it was born the budget of 1860.


The financial arrangements of 1859 were avowedly provisional and
temporary, and need not detain us. The only feature was a rise in the
income tax from fivepence to ninepence—its highest figure so far in a time
of peace. “My budget,” he wrote to Mrs. Gladstone (July 16), “is just
through the cabinet, very kindly and well received, no one making
objection but Lewis, who preached low doctrine. It confirms me in the
belief I have long had, that he was fitter for most other offices than for
that I now hold.” “_July 21 or rather 22, one A.M._—Just come back from a
long night and stiff contention at the House of Commons.... It has been
rather nice and close fighting. Disraeli made a popular motion to trip me
up, but had to withdraw it, at any rate for the time. This I can say, it
was not so that I used him. I am afraid that the truce between us is over,
and that we shall have to pitch in as before.”

The only important speech was one on Italy (August 8),(13) of which
Disraeli said that though they were always charmed by the speaker’s
eloquence, this was a burst of even unusual brilliance, and it gave
pleasure in all quarters. “Spoke for an _oretta_ [short hour],” says the
orator, “on Italian affairs; my best offhand speech.” “The fish dinner,”
Mr. Gladstone writes, “went off very well, and I think my proposing Lord
Palmerston’s health (without speech) was decidedly approved. I have had a
warm message from Lord Lansdowne about my speech; and Lord P. told me that
on Tuesday night as he went upstairs on getting home he heard Lady P.
spouting as she read by candle-light; it turned out to be the same
effusion.”

Another incident briefly related to Mrs. Gladstone brings us on to more
serious ground: “_Hawarden, Sept. 12._—Cobden came early. Nothing could be
better than the luncheon, but I am afraid the dinner will be rather strong
with local clergy. I have had a walk and long talk with Cobden who, I
think, pleases and is pleased.” This was the garden walk of which we have
just heard, where Cobden, the ardent hopeful sower, scattered the good
seed into rich ground. The idea of a commercial treaty with France was in
the air. Bright had opened it, Chevalier had followed it up, Persigny
agreed, Cobden made an opportunity, Gladstone seized it. Cobden’s first
suggestion had been that as he was about to spend a part of the winter in
Paris, he might perhaps be of use to Mr. Gladstone in the way of inquiry.
Conversation expanded this into something more definite and more
energetic. Why should he not, with the informal sanction of the British
government, put himself into communication with the Emperor and his
ministers, and work out with them the scheme of a treaty that should at
once open the way to a great fiscal reform in both countries, and in both
countries produce a solid and sterling pacification of feeling? Cobden saw
Palmerston and tried to see Lord John Russell, and though he hardly
received encouragement, at least he was not forbidden to proceed upon his
volunteered mission.(14) “Gladstone,” wrote Cobden to Mr. Bright, “is
really almost the only cabinet minister of five years’ standing who is not
afraid to let his heart guide his head a little at times.” The Emperor had
played with the idea of a more open trade for five or six years, and
Cobden, with his union of economic, moral, and social elements, and his
incomparable gifts of argumentative persuasion, was the very man to strike
Napoleon’s impressionable mind. Although, having alienated the clericals
by his Italian policy, the ruler of France might well have hesitated
before proceeding to alienate the protectionists also, he became a convert
and did not shrink.


    Both Cobden and I, says Mr. Gladstone, were keenly in favour of
    such a treaty (I myself certainly), without intending thereby to
    signify the smallest disposition to the promotion of tariff
    treaties in general. I had been an active party to the various
    attempts under Sir Robert Peel’s government to conclude such
    treaties, and was as far as possible removed from any disposition
    to the renewal of labour which was in itself so profitless, and
    which was dangerously near to a practical assertion of a false
    principle, namely that the reductions of indirect taxation,
    permitted by fiscal considerations, are in themselves injurious to
    the country that makes them, and are only to be entertained when a
    compensation can be had for them.(15) ... The correspondence which
    would in the ordinary course have been exchanged between the
    foreign offices of the two countries, was carried through in a
    series of personal letters between Mr. Cobden and myself. I
    remember indeed that the Emperor or his government were desirous
    to conceal from their own foreign minister (Walewski) the fact
    that such a measure was in contemplation. On our side, the method
    pursued was only recommended by practical considerations. I
    contemplated including the conditions of the French treaty in a
    new and sweeping revision of the tariff, the particulars of which
    it was of course important to keep from the public eye until they
    were ready to be submitted to parliament.


At the end of 1859 the question of the treaty was brought into the
cabinet, and there met with no general opposition, though some objection
was taken by Lewis and Wood, based on the ground that they ought not to
commit themselves by treaty engagements to a sacrifice of revenue, until
they had before them the income and the charges of the year. Writing to
his wife about some invitation to a country house, Mr. Gladstone says
(Jan. 11, 1860):—


    I cannot go without a clear sacrifice of public duty. For the
    measure is of immense importance and of no less nicety, and here
    it all depends on me. Lord John backs me most cordially and well,
    but it is no small thing to get a cabinet to give up one and a
    half or two millions of revenue at a time when all the public
    passion is for enormous expenditure, and in a case beset with
    great difficulties. In _fact_, a majority of the cabinet is
    indifferent or averse, but they have behaved very well. I almost
    always agree with Lewis on other matters, but in trade and finance
    I do not find his opinions satisfactory. Till it is through, this
    vital question will need my closest and most anxious attention.
    [Two days later he writes:] The cabinet has been again on the
    French treaty. There are four or five zealous, perhaps as many who
    would rather be without it. It has required pressure, but we have
    got sufficient power now, if the French will do what is
    reasonable. Lord John has been excellent, Palmerston rather
    neutral. It is really a great European operation. [A fortnight
    later (_Jan. 28_):] A word to say I have opened the fundamental
    parts of my budget in the cabinet, and that I could not have hoped
    a better reception. Nothing decided, for I did not ask it, and
    indeed the case was not complete, but there was no general
    [resistance], no decided objection; the tone of questioning was
    favourable, Granville and Argyll delighted, Newcastle, I think,
    ditto. Thank God.

    _To Cobden, Jan. 28._—Criticism is busy; but the only thing really
    formidable is the unavowed but strong conflict with that
    passionate expectation of war, which no more bears disappointment
    than if it were hope or love. _Feb. 6._—Cobbett once compared an
    insignificant public man in an important situation to the
    linch-pin in the carriage, and my position recalls his very apt
    figure to my mind.


Of course in his zeal for the treaty and its connection with tariff
reform, Mr. Gladstone believed that the operation would open a great
volume of trade and largely enrich the country. But in one sense this was
the least of it:—


    I had a reason of a higher order. The French Emperor had launched
    his project as to Savoy and Nice. It should have been plain to all
    those who desired an united Italy, that such an Italy ought not to
    draw Savoy in its wake; a country severed from it by the
    mountains, by language, by climate, and I suppose by pursuits. But
    it does not follow that Savoy should have been tacked on to
    France, while for the annexation of Nice it was difficult to find
    a word of apology. But it could scarcely be said to concern our
    interests, while there was not the shadow of a case of honour. The
    susceptibilities of England were, however, violently aroused. Even
    Lord Russell used imprudent language in parliament about looking
    for other allies. A French panic prevailed as strong as any of the
    other panics that have done so much discredit to this country. For
    this panic, the treaty of commerce with France was the only
    sedative. It was in fact a counter-irritant; and it aroused the
    sense of commercial interest to counteract the war passion. It was
    and is my opinion, that the choice lay between the Cobden treaty
    and not the certainty, but the high probability, of a war with
    France. (_Undated memo._)



II


Out of the commercial treaty grew the whole of the great financial scheme
of 1860. By his first budget Mr. Gladstone had marked out this year for a
notable epoch in finance. Happily it found him at the exchequer. The
expiry of certain annuities payable to the public creditor removed a
charge of some two millions, and Mr. Gladstone was vehemently resolved
that this amount should not “pass into the great gulf of expenditure there
to be swallowed up.” If the year, in such circumstances, is to pass, he
said to Cobden, “without anything done for trade and the masses, it will
be a great discredit and a great calamity.” The alterations of duty
required for the French treaty were made possible by the lapse of the
annuities, and laid the foundation of a plan that averted the discredit
and calamity of doing nothing for trade, and nothing for the masses of the
population. France engaged to reduce duties and remove prohibitions on a
long list of articles of British production and export, iron the most
important,—“the daily bread of all industries,” as Cobden called it.
England engaged immediately to abolish all duties upon all manufactured
articles at her ports, and to reduce the duties on wine and brandy. The
English reductions and abolitions extended beyond France to the
commodities of all countries alike. Mr. Gladstone called 1860 the last of
the cardinal and organic years of emancipatory fiscal legislation; it
ended a series of which the four earlier terms had been reached in 1842,
in 1845, in 1846, and 1853. With the French treaty, he used to say, the
movement in favour of free trade reached its zenith.

(M8) The financial fabric that rose from the treaty was one of the boldest
of all his achievements, and the reader who seeks to take the measure of
Mr. Gladstone as financier, in comparison with any of his contemporaries
in the western world, will find in this fabric ample material.(16) Various
circumstances had led to an immense increase in national expenditure. The
structure of warships was revolutionised by the use of iron in place of
wood. It was a remarkable era in artillery, and guns were urgently
demanded of new type. In the far East a quarrel had broken out with the
Chinese. The threats of French officers after the plot of Orsini had bred
a sense of insecurity in our own borders. Thus more money than ever was
required; more than ever economy was both unpopular and difficult. The
annual estimates stood at seventy millions; when Mr. Gladstone framed his
famous budget seven years before, that charge stood at fifty-two millions.
If the sole object of a chancellor of the exchequer be to balance his
account, Mr. Gladstone might have contented himself with keeping the
income-tax and duties on tea and sugar as they were, meeting the
remissions needed by the French treaty out of the sum released by the
expiry of the long annuities. Or he might have reduced tea and sugar to a
peace rate, and raised the income-tax from ninepence to a shilling.
Instead of taking this easy course, Mr. Gladstone after having
relinquished upwards of a million for the sake of the French treaty, now
further relinquished nearly a million more for the sake of releasing 371
articles from duties of customs, and a third million in order to abolish
the vexatious excise duty upon the manufacture of paper. Nearly one
million of all this loss he recouped by the imposition of certain small
charges and minor taxes, and by one or two ingenious expedients of
collection and account, and the other two millions he made good out of the
lapsed annuities. Tea and sugar he left as they were, and the income-tax
he raised from ninepence to tenpence. Severe economists, not quite
unjustly, called these small charges a blot on his escutcheon. Time soon
wiped it off, for in fact they were a failure.

The removal of the excise duty upon paper proved to be the chief
stumbling-block, and ultimately it raised more excitement than any other
portion of the scheme. The fiscal project became by and by associated with
a constitutional struggle between Lords and Commons. In the Commons the
majority in favour of abolishing the duty sank from fifty-three to nine;
troubles with China caused a demand for new expenditure; the yield from
the paper duty was wanted; and the Lords finding in all this a plausible
starting-point for a stroke of party business, or for the assertion of the
principle that to reject a repealing money bill was not the same thing as
to meddle with a bill putting on a tax, threw it out. Then when the Lords
had rejected the bill, many who had been entirely cool about taking off
the ’taxes upon knowledge’—for this unfavourable name was given to the
paper duty by its foes—rose to exasperation at the thought of the peers
meddling with votes of money. All this we shall see as we proceed.

This was the broad outline of an operation that completed the great
process of reducing articles liable to customs duties from 1052, as they
stood in 1842 when Peel opened the attack upon them; from 466 as Mr.
Gladstone found them in 1853; and from 419 as he found them now, down to
48, at which he now left them.(17) Simplification had little further to
go. “Why did you not wait,” he was asked, “till the surplus came, which
notwithstanding all drawbacks you got in 1863, and then operate in a quiet
way, without disturbing anybody?”(18) His answer was that the surplus
would not have come at all, because it was created by his legislation.
“The principle adopted,” he said, “was this. We are now (1860) on a high
table-land of expenditure. This being so, it is not as if we were merely
meeting an occasional and momentary charge. We must consider how best to
keep ourselves going during a _period_ of high charge. In order to do
that, we will aggravate a momentary deficiency that we may thereby make a
_great and permanent addition to productive power_.” This was his
ceaseless refrain—the steadfast pursuit of the durable enlargement of
productive power as the commanding aim of high finance.



III


At the beginning of the year the public expectation was fixed upon Lord
John Russell as the protagonist in the approaching battle of parliamentary
reform, and the eager partizans at the Carlton Club were confident that on
reform they would pull down the ministry. The partizans of another sort
assure us that “the whole character of the session was changed by Mr.
Gladstone’s invincible resolution to come forward in spite of his friends,
and in defiance of his foes, for his own _aristeia_ or innings.” The
explanation is not good-natured, and we know that it is not true; but what
is true is that when February opened, the interest of the country had
become centred at its highest pitch in the budget and the commercial
treaty. As the day for lifting the veil was close at hand, Mr. Gladstone
fell ill, and here again political benevolence surmised that his disorder
was diplomatic. An entry or two from Phillimore’s journal will bring him
before us as he was:—


    _Jan. 29._—Gladstone’s emaciation in the past fortnight alarms me,
    as it has, I find, many other persons. _Feb. 5._—Gladstone
    seriously ill; all the afternoon in Downing Street; a slight
    congestion of the lungs. Great treaty and financial speech put off
    till Thursday. Was to have been to-morrow. Gladstone wished to see
    me, but I would only stay a minute by his bedside. He looked very
    pale. He must not speak for ten days, or Ferguson (his doctor)
    said, he will meet Canning’s fate. _Feb. 6._—With Gladstone in the
    evening. He is still in bed, but visibly better. _Feb. 7._—With
    Gladstone a long time in the morning. Found him much better though
    still in bed. Annoyed at the publication of the new treaty with
    France in the Belgian papers, it being part of the scheme of his
    finance measure. _Feb. 8._—Gladstone drove out to-day; bent on
    speaking the day after to-morrow. Ferguson allows him. I again
    protested. _Feb. 9._—Saw Gladstone; he is better. But I am
    frightened at the proposed exertion of Friday. _Feb. 10._—Saw
    Gladstone in the morning, radiant with expected success, and again
    at night at 10 o’clock in Downing Street still more radiant with
    triumph. Spoke for three hours and fifty minutes without
    suffering. Thinks that the House will accept all that is material
    in his finance scheme. _Feb. 13._—Dined with Gladstone; ordered
    not to leave the house this week. _Feb. 25._—Called on the
    Gladstones at breakfast time. Found them both exceedingly happy at
    the immense majority of 116 which affirmed last night the
    principle of his grand budget.(19) His hard dry cough distresses
    me. Gladstone thinks he has done what Pitt would have done but for
    the French Revolution. With characteristic modesty he said, “I am
    a dwarf on the shoulders of a giant.”


Mr. Gladstone’s own entries are these:—


    _Feb. 10, ’60._—Spoke 5-9 without great exhaustion; aided by a
    great stock of egg and wine. Thank God! Home at 11. This was the
    most arduous operation I have ever had in parliament. _March
    9._—Spoke on various matters in the Treaty debate; voted in
    282:56; a most prosperous ending to a great transaction in which I
    heartily thank God for having given me a share. _March 23._—A long
    day of 16-½ hours’ work.


Of the speech in which the budget was presented everybody agreed that it
was one of the most extraordinary triumphs ever witnessed in the House of
Commons. The casual delay of a week had raised expectation still higher;
hints dropped by friends in the secret had added to the general
excitement; and as was truly said by contemporaries, suspense that would
have been fatal to mediocrity actually served Mr. Gladstone. Even the
censorious critics of the leading journal found in the largeness and
variety of the scheme its greatest recommendation, as suggesting an accord
between the occasion, the man, and the measure, so marvellous that it
would be a waste of all three not to accept them. Among other hearers was
Lord Brougham, who for the first time since he had quitted the scene of
his triumphs a generation before, came to the House of Commons, and for
four hours listened intently to the orator who had now acquired the
supremacy that was once his own. “The speech,” said Bulwer, “will remain
among the monuments of English eloquence as long as the language lasts.”
Napoleon begged Lord Cowley to convey his thanks to Mr. Gladstone for the
copy of his budget speech he had sent him, which he said he would preserve
“as a precious souvenir of a man who has my thorough esteem, and whose
eloquence is of a lofty character commensurate with the grandeur of his
views.” Prince Albert wrote to Stockmar (March 17), “Gladstone is now the
real leader of the House, and works with an energy and vigour almost
incredible.”(20)

Almost every section of the trading and political community looked with
favour upon the budget as a whole, though it was true that each section
touched by it found fault with its own part. Mr. Gladstone said that they
were without exception free traders, but not free traders without
exception. The magnitude and comprehensiveness of the enterprise seized
the imagination of the country. At the same time it multiplied sullen or
uneasy interests. The scheme was no sooner launched, than the chancellor
of the exchequer was overwhelmed by deputations. Within a couple of days
he was besieged by delegates from the paper makers; distillers came down
upon him; merchants interested in the bonding system, wholesale
stationers, linen manufacturers, maltsters, licensed victuallers, all in
turn thronged his ante-room. He was now, says Greville (Feb. 15), “_the_
great man of the day!” The reduction of duties on currants created lively
excitement in Greece, and Mr. Gladstone was told that if he were to appear
there he could divide honours with Bacchus and Triptolemus, the latest
benefactors of that neighbourhood.

(M9) Political onlookers with whom the wish was not alien to their
thought, soon perceived that in spite of admiration for splendid eloquence
and incomparable dexterity, it would not be all sunshine and plain
sailing. At a very early moment the great editor of the _Times_ went about
saying that Gladstone would find it hard work to get his budget through;
if Peel with a majority of ninety needed it all to carry his budget, what
would happen to a government that could but command a majority of
nine?(21) Both the commercial treaty and the finance speedily proved to
have many enemies. Before the end of March Phillimore met a parliamentary
friend who like everybody else talked of Gladstone, and confirmed the
apprehension that the whigs obeyed and trembled and were frightened to
death. “We don’t know where he is leading us,” said Hayter, who had been
whipper-in. On the last day of the month Phillimore enters: “_March
30._—Gladstone has taken his name off the Carlton, which I regret. It is a
marked and significant act of entire separation from the _whole_ party and
will strengthen Disraeli’s hands. The whigs hate Gladstone. The moderate
conservatives and the radicals incline to him. The old tories hate him.”
For reasons not easy to trace, a general atmosphere of doubt and
unpopularity seemed suddenly to surround his name.

The fortunes of the budget have been succinctly described by its author:—


    They were chequered, and they were peculiar in this, that the
    first blow struck was delivered by one of the best among its
    friends. Lord John Russell, keenly alive to the discredit of any
    tampering as in former years with the question of the franchise,
    insisted on introducing his Reform bill on March 1, when the
    treaty and the financial proposals of the year, numerous and
    complex as they were, had not proceeded beyond their early stages.
    This was in flat violation of a rule of Lord Bacon’s, even more
    weighty now than in his time, which Sir James Graham was fond of
    quoting: “Never overlap business.” The enemies of the treaty were
    thus invited to obstruct it through prolonged debating on reform,
    and the enemies of reform to discharge a corresponding office by
    prolonged debating on the finance. A large majority of the House
    were in disguised hostility to the extension of the franchise. The
    discussions on it were at once protracted, intermittent, and
    languid. No division was taken against it. It was defeated by the
    pure _vis inertiæ_ of the House skilfully applied: and it was
    withdrawn on June 11. But it had done its work, by delaying the
    _tail_ of the financial measures until a time when the marriage
    effected by the treaty between England and France had outlived its
    parliamentary honeymoon. There had intervened the Savoy and Nice
    explosion; settlement with China was uncertain; the prospects of
    the harvest were bad; French invasion was apprehended by many men
    usually rational. The Paper Duty bill, which would have passed the
    Commons by a large majority in the beginning of March, only
    escaped defeat on May 8 by a majority of nine.(22)


When Lord John had asked the cabinet to stop the budget in order to fix a
day for his second reading, Mr. Gladstone enters in an autobiographic
memorandum of his latest years(23):—


    I said to him, “Lord John, I will go down on my knees to you, to
    entreat you not to press that request.” But he persevered; and
    this although he was both a loyal colleague and a sincere friend
    to the budget and to the French treaty. When reform was at last
    got rid of, in order to prosecute finance we had much to do, and
    in the midst of it there came upon us the news of hostilities in
    China, which demanded at once an increase of outlay ... sufficient
    to destroy my accruing balance, and thus to disorganise the
    finance of the year. The opposition to the Paper bill now assumed
    most formidable dimensions.... During a long course of years there
    had grown up in the House of Commons a practice of finally
    disposing of the several parts of the budget each by itself. And
    the House of Lords had shown so much self-control in confining
    itself to criticism on matters of finance, that the freedom of the
    House of Commons was in no degree impaired. But there was the
    opportunity of mischief; and round the carcass the vultures now
    gathered in overwhelming force. It at once became clear that the
    Lords would avail themselves of the opportunity afforded them by
    the single presentation of financial bills, and would prolong, and
    virtually re-enact a tax, which the representatives of the people
    had repealed.


On May 5 the diary reports: “Cabinet. Lord Palmerston spoke 3/4 hour
against Paper Duties bill! I had to reply. Cabinet against him, except a
few, Wood and Cardwell in particular. Three wild schemes of foreign
alliance are afloat! Our old men (2) are unhappily our youngest.”
Palmerston not only spoke against the bill, as he had a right in cabinet
to do, but actually wrote to the Queen that he was bound in duty to say
that if the Lords threw out the bill—the bill of his own cabinet—“they
would perform a good public service.”(24)

                  ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐

Phillimore’s notes show that the intense strain was telling on his hero’s
physical condition, though it only worked his resolution to a more
undaunted pitch:—


    _May 9._—Found Gladstone in good spirits in spite of the narrow
    majority on the paper duty last night, but ill with a cough. _May
    15._—The whigs out of office, and perhaps in, abusing Gladstone
    and lauding G. Lewis. I had much conversation with Walpole. Told
    me he, Henley, and those who went with them would have followed
    Gladstone if he had not joined this government, but added he was
    justified in doing so. _May 18._—Gladstone is _ill_; vexed and
    _indignant_ at the possible and probable conduct of the peers on
    Monday. Nothing will prevent him from denouncing them in the
    Commons, if they throw out the paper bill, as having violated in
    substance and practically the constitution. Meanwhile his
    unpopularity flows on.



IV


The rejection of the bill affecting the paper duty by the Lords was
followed by proceedings set out by Mr. Gladstone in one of his political
memoranda, dated May 26, 1860:—


    Though I seldom have time to note the hairbreadth ’scapes of which
    so many occur in these strange times and with our strangely
    constructed cabinet, yet I must put down a few words with respect
    to the great question now depending between the Lords and the
    English nation. On Sunday, when it was well known that the Paper
    Duties bill would be rejected, I received from Lord John Russell a
    letter which enclosed one to him from Lord Palmerston. Lord
    Palmerston’s came in sum to this: that the vote of the Lords would
    not be a party vote, that as to the _thing done_ it was right,
    that we could not help ourselves, that we should simply acquiesce,
    and no minister ought to resign. Lord John in his reply to this,
    stated that he took a much more serious view of the question and
    gave reasons. Then he went on to say that though he did not agree
    in the grounds stated by Lord Palmerston, he would endeavour to
    arrive at the same conclusion. His letter accordingly ended with
    practical acquiescence. And he stated to me his concurrence in
    Lord Palmerston’s closing proposition.

    Thereupon I wrote an immediate reply. We met in cabinet to
    consider the case. Lord Palmerston started on the line he had
    marked out. I think he proposed to use some meaningless words in
    the House of Commons as to the value we set on our privileges, and
    our determination to defend them if attacked, by way of garniture
    to the act of their abandonment. Upon this I stated my opinions,
    coming to the point that this proceeding of the House of Lords
    amounted to the establishment of a revising power over the House
    of Commons in its most vital function long declared exclusively
    its own, and to a divided responsibility in fixing the revenue and
    charge of the country for the year; besides aggravating
    circumstances upon which it was needless to dwell. In this
    proceeding nothing would induce me to acquiesce, though I
    earnestly desired that the mildest means of correction should be
    adopted. This was strongly backed in principle by Lord John; who
    thought that as public affairs would not admit of our at once
    confining ourselves to this subject, we should take it up the
    first thing next session, and send up a new bill. Practical, as
    well as other, objections were taken to this mode of proceeding,
    and opposition was continued on the merits; Lord Palmerston keen
    and persevering. He was supported by the Chancellor, Wood,
    Granville (in substance), Lewis, and Cardwell, who thought nothing
    could be done, but were ready to join in resigning if thought fit.
    Lord John, Gibson, and I were for decided action. Argyll leaned
    the same way. Newcastle was for inquiry to end in a declaratory
    resolution. Villiers thought some step necessary. Grey argued
    mildly, inclined I think to inaction. Herbert advised resignation,
    opposed any other course. Somerset was silent, which I conceive
    meant inaction. At last Palmerston gave in, and adopted with but
    middling grace the proposition to set out with inquiries, and with
    the intention to make as little of the matter as he could.

    His language in giving notice, on Tuesday, of the committee went
    near the verge of saying, We mean nothing. An unsatisfactory
    impression was left on the House. Not a syllable was said in
    recognition of the gravity of the occasion. Lord John had
    unfortunately gone away to the foreign office. I thought I should
    do mischief at that stage by appearing to catch at a part in the
    transaction. Yesterday all was changed by the dignified
    declaration of Lord John. I suggested to him that he should get
    up, and Lord Palmerston, who had intended to keep the matter in
    his own hands, gave way. But Lord Palmerston was uneasy and said,
    “You won’t pitch it into the Lords,” and other things of the same
    kind. On the whole, I hope that in this grave matter at least we
    have turned the corner.


As we know, even the fighting party in the cabinet was forced to content
itself for the moment with three protesting resolutions. Lord Palmerston
and his chancellor of the exchequer both spoke in parliament. “The tone of
the two remonstrances,” says Mr. Gladstone euphemistically, “could not be
in exact accord; but by careful steering on my part, and I presume on his,
all occasion of scandal was avoided.” Not altogether, perhaps. Phillimore
says:—


    _July 6._—A strange and memorable debate. Palmerston moving
    resolution condemnatory of the Lords, and yet speaking in defence
    of their conduct. Gladstone most earnestly and eloquently
    condemning them, and declaring that action and not resolutions
    became the House of Commons, and that though he agreed to the
    language and spirit of the resolutions, if action were proposed he
    would support the proposal, and taunted the conservatives with
    silently abetting “a gigantic innovation on the constitution.”
    Loudly and tempestuously cheered by the radicals, and no one else.
    Yet he was the true conservative at this moment. But ought he to
    have spoken this as chancellor of the exchequer, and from the
    treasury bench, after the first lord of the treasury had spoken in
    almost totally opposite sense? The answer may be that it was a
    House of Commons, and not a government question. I fear he is very
    unwell, and I greatly fear killing himself. 17.—“I have lived,” he
    said, speaking of the debate on the Lords and the paper duty, “to
    hear a radical read a long passage from Mr. Burke amid the jeers
    and scoffs of the so-called conservatives.”


The struggle still went on:—


    _July 20._—H. of C. Lost my Savings Bank Monies bill; my _first_
    defeat in a measure of finance in the H. of C. This ought to be
    very good for me; and I earnestly wish to make it so.

    _Aug. 6._—H. of C. Spoke 1-½ hour on the Paper duty; a favourable
    House. Voted in 266-233. A most kind and indeed notable reception
    afterwards.

    _Aug. 7._—This was a day of congratulations from many kind M.P.’s.


The occasion of the notable reception was the moving of his resolutions
reducing the customs duty on imported paper to the level of the excise
duty. This proceeding was made necessary by the treaty, and was taken to
be, as Mr. Gladstone intended that it should be, a clear indication of
further determination to abolish customs duty and excise duty alike. The
first resolution was carried by 33, and when he rose to move the second
the cheering from the liberal benches kept him standing for four or five
minutes—cheering intended to be heard the whole length of the corridor
that led to another place.(25)

(M10) The great result, as Greville says in a sentence that always amused
the chief person concerned, is “to give some life to half-dead,
broken-down, and tempest-tossed Gladstone.” In this rather tame fashion
the battle ended for the session, but the blaze in the bosom of the
chancellor of the exchequer was inextinguishable, as the Lords in good
time found out. Their rejection of the Paper Duties bill must have had no
inconsiderable share in propelling him along the paths of liberalism. The
same proceeding helped to make him more than ever the centre of popular
hopes. He had taken the unpopular side in resisting the inquiry into the
miscarriages of the Crimea, in pressing peace with Russia, in opposing the
panic on papal aggression, on the bill for divorce, and on the bill
against church rates; and he represented with fidelity the constituency
that was least of all in England in accord with the prepossessions of
democracy. Yet this made no difference when the time came to seek a
leader. “There is not,” Mr. Bright said, in the course of this quarrel
with the Lords, “a man who labours and sweats for his daily bread, there
is not a woman living in a cottage who strives to make her home happy for
husband and children, to whom the words of the chancellor of the exchequer
have not brought hope, and to whom his measures, which have been defended
with an eloquence few can equal and with a logic none can contest, have
not administered consolation.”

At the end of the session Phillimore reports:—


    _Aug. 12._—Gladstone is physically weak, requires rest, air, and
    generous living. He discoursed without the smallest reserve upon
    political affairs, the feebleness of the government, mainly
    attributable to the absence of any effective head; Palmerston’s
    weakness in the cabinet, and his low standard for all public
    conduct. He said in Peel’s cabinet, a cabinet minister if he had a
    measure to bring forward consulted Peel and then the cabinet.
    Nobody thought of consulting Palmerston first, but brought his
    measure at once to the cabinet. Gladstone said his work in the
    cabinet had been so constant and severe that his work in the House
    of Commons was refreshing by comparison. I never heard him speak
    so strongly of the timidity and vacillation of his comrades. The
    last victory, which alone preserved the government from dropping
    to pieces, was won in spite of them.



V


In a contemporary memorandum (May 30, 1860) on the opinions of the cabinet
at this date Mr. Gladstone sets out the principal trains of business with
which he and his colleagues were called upon to deal. It is a lively
picture of the vast and diverse interests of a minister disposed to take
his cabinet duties seriously. It is, too, a curious chart of the currents
and cross-currents of the time. Here are the seven heads as he sets them
down:—


    (1) The Italian question—Austrian or anti-Austrian; (2) Foreign
    policy in general—leaning towards calm and peace, or brusqueness
    and war; (3) Defences and expenditure—alarm and money charges on
    the one side, modest and timid retrenchment with confidence in our
    position on the other; (4) Finance, as adapted to the one or the
    other of these groups of ideas and feelings respectively; (5)
    Reform—ultra-conservative on the one side, on the other, no fear
    of the working class and the belief that something _real_ though
    limited, should be done towards their enfranchisement; (6) Church
    matters may perhaps be also mentioned, though there has been no
    collision in regard to them, whatever difference there may be—they
    have indeed held a very secondary place amidst the rude and
    constant shocks of the last twelve months; (7) Lastly, the _coup
    d’état_ on the paper duties draws a new line of division.


(M11) “In the many passages of argument and opinion,” Mr. Gladstone adds,
“the only person from whom I have never to my recollection differed on a
serious matter during this anxious twelvemonth is Milner Gibson.” The
reader will find elsewhere the enumeration of the various parts in this
complex dramatic piece.(26) Some of the most Italian members of the
cabinet were also the most combative in foreign policy, the most martial
in respect of defence, the most stationary in finance. In the matter of
reform, some who were liberal as to the franchise were conservative as to
redistribution. In matters ecclesiastical, those who like Mr. Gladstone
were most liberal elsewhere, were (with sympathy from Argyll) “most
conservative and church-like.”


    On the paper duties there are, I think, only three members of the
    cabinet who have a strong feeling of the need of a remedy for the
    late aggression—Lord John Russell, Gibson, W. E. G.—and Lord John
    Russell leans so much upon Palmerston in regard to foreign affairs
    that he is weaker in other subjects when opposed to him, than
    might be desired. With us in feeling are, more or less, Newcastle,
    Argyll, Villiers. On the other side, and pretty decidedly—first
    and foremost, Lord Palmerston; after him, the Chancellor,
    Granville, Lewis, Wood, Cardwell, Herbert. It is easy to judge
    what an odd shifting of parts takes place in our discussions. We
    are not Mr. Burke’s famous mosaic, but we are a mosaic in
    solution, that is to say, a kaleidoscope.(27) When the instrument
    turns, the separate pieces readjust themselves, and all come out
    in perfectly novel combinations. Such a cabinet ought not to be
    acephalous.


Before he had been a year and a half in office, Mr. Gladstone wrote to
Graham (Nov. 27, ’60): “We live in anti-reforming times. All improvements
have to be urged in apologetic, almost in supplicatory tones. I sometimes
reflect how much less liberal as to domestic policy in any true sense of
the word, is this government than was Sir Robert Peel’s; and how much the
tone of ultra-toryism prevails among a large portion of the liberal
party.” “I speak a literal truth,” he wrote to Cobden, “when I say that in
these days it is more difficult to save a shilling than to spend a
million.” “The men,” he said, “who ought to have been breasting and
stemming the tide have become captains general of the alarmists,” and he
deplored Cobden’s refusal of office when the Palmerston government was
formed. All this only provoked him to more relentless energy. Well might
Prince Albert call it incredible.



VI


After the “gigantic innovation” perpetrated by the Lords, Mr. Gladstone
read to the cabinet (June 30, 1860) an elaborate memorandum on the paper
duty and the taxing powers of the two Houses. He dealt fully alike with
the fiscal and the constitutional aspects of a situation from which he was
“certain that nothing could extricate them with credit, except the united,
determined, and even authoritative action of the government.” He wound up
with a broad declaration that, to any who knew his tenacity of purpose
when once roused, made it certain that he would never acquiesce in the
pretensions of the other House. The fiscal consideration, he concluded,
“is nothing compared with the vital importance of maintaining the
exclusive rights of the House of Commons in matter of supply. There is
hardly any conceivable interference of the Lords hereafter, except sending
down a tax imposed by themselves, which would not be covered by this
precedent. It may be said they are wise and will not do it. Assuming that
they will be wise, yet I for one am not willing that the House of Commons
should hold on sufferance in the nineteenth century what it won in the
seventeenth and confirmed and enlarged in the eighteenth.”

The intervening months did not relax this valiant and patriotic
resolution. He wrote down a short version of the story in the last year of
his life:—


    The hostilities in China reached a rather early termination, and
    in the early part of the session of 1861 it appeared almost
    certain that there would be a surplus for 1861-2 such as I thought
    would make it possible again to operate on the paper duties.
    Unfortunately, the income tax was at so high a rate that we could
    not reasonably hope to carry paper duty repeal without taking a
    penny off the tax. The double plan strained the probable means
    afforded by the budget. In this dilemma I received most valuable
    aid from the shrewd ingenuity of Milner Gibson, who said: Why not
    fix the repeal of the paper duty at a later date than had been
    intended, say on the 10th of October, which will reduce the loss
    for the year? I gladly adopted the proposition, and proposed a
    budget reducing the income tax by one penny, and repealing the
    paper duties from October 10, 1861. With this was combined what
    was more essential than either—the adoption of a new practice with
    respect to finance, which would combine all the financial measures
    of the year in a single bill. We had separate discussions in the
    cabinet on the constitutional proposal [the single bill]. It was
    not extensively resisted there, though quietly a good deal
    misliked. I rather think the chancellor, Campbell, took strong
    objection to it; and I well remember that the Duke of Newcastle
    gave valuable and telling aid. So it was adopted. The budget was
    the subject of a fierce discussion, in which Lord Palmerston
    appeared to me to lose his temper for the first and only time. The
    plan, however, to my great delight, was adopted. It was followed
    by a strange and painful incident. I received with astonishment
    from Lord Palmerston, immediately after the adoption of the
    budget, a distinct notice that he should not consider it a cabinet
    question in the House of Commons, where it was known that the
    opposition and the paper makers would use every effort to destroy
    the plan. I wrote an uncontroversial reply (with some
    self-repression) and showed it to Granville, who warmly approved,
    and was silent on the letter of Lord Palmerston. The battle in
    parliament was hard, but was as nothing to the internal fighting;
    and we won it. We likewise succeeded in the plan of uniting the
    financial proposals in one bill. To this Spencer Walpole gave
    honourable support; and it became a standing rule. The House of
    Lords, for its misconduct, was deservedly extinguished, in effect,
    as to all matters of finance.


Of the “internal fighting” we have a glimpse in the diary:—


    _April 10, ’61._—Saw Lord Palmerston and explained to him my
    plans, which did not meet his views. A laborious and anxious day.
    11.—Cabinet. Explained my case 1-3. Chaos! 12.—Cabinet 1-3. Very
    stiff. We ’broke up’ in one sense and all but in another.
    13.—Cabinet 3-3/4-6. My plan as now framed was accepted, Lord
    Palmerston yielding gracefully; Stanley of Alderley almost the
    only kicker. The plan of one bill was accepted after fighting.
    15.—H. of C., financial statement for three hours. The figures
    rather made my head ache. It was the discharge of a long pent-up
    excitement. _May 13._—Lord J.R. again sustained me most handsomely
    in debate. Lord P. after hearing Graham amended his speech, but
    said we must not use any words tending to make this a vote of
    confidence. 30.—H. of C. Spoke one hour on omission of clause IV.
    [that repealing the paper duty], and voted in 296-281. One of the
    greatest nights in the whole of my recollection. _June
    1._—Yesterday was a day of subsiding excitement. To-day is the
    same. Habit enables me to expel exciting thought, but not the
    subtler nervous action which ever comes with a crisis. 7.—To-day’s
    debate in the H. of L. was a great event for me.


The abiding feature of constitutional interest in the budget of 1861 was
this inclusion of the various financial proposals in a single bill, so
that the Lords must either accept the whole of them, or try the impossible
performance of rejecting the whole of them. This was the affirmation in
practical shape of the resolution of the House of Commons in the previous
year, that it possessed in its own hands the power to remit and impose
taxes, and that the right to frame bills of supply in its own measure,
manner, time, and matter, is a right to be kept inviolable. Until now the
practice had been to make the different taxes the subject of as many
different bills, thus placing it in the power of the Lords to reject a
given tax bill without throwing the financial machinery wholly out of
gear. By including all the taxes in a single finance bill the power of the
Lords to override the other House was effectually arrested.

(M12) In language of that time, he had carried every stitch of free-trade
canvas in the teeth of a tempest that might have made the boldest
financial pilot shorten sail. Many even of his friends were sorry that he
did not reduce the war duty on tea and sugar, instead of releasing paper
from its duty of excise. Neither friends nor foes daunted him. He
possessed his soul in patience until the hour struck, and then came forth
in full panoply. Enthusiastic journalists with the gift of a poetic pen
told their millions of readers how, after weeks of malign prophecy, that
the great trickster in Downing Street would be proved to have beggared the
exchequer, that years of gloom and insolvency awaited us, suddenly, the
moment the magician chose to draw aside the veil, the darkness rolled
away; he had fluttered out of sight the whole race of sombre Volscians;
and where the gazers dreaded to see a gulf they beheld a golden monument
of glorious finance; like the traveller in the Arabian fable who was
pursued in the Valley of Shadows by unearthly imprecations, he never
glanced to right or left until he could disperse the shadows by a single
stroke. “He is,” says another onlooker, “in his ministerial capacity,
probably the best abused and the best hated man in the House; nevertheless
the House is honestly proud of him, and even the country party feels a
glow of pride in exhibiting to the diplomatic gallery such a transcendent
mouthpiece of a nation of shopkeepers. The audacious shrewdness of
Lancashire married to the polished grace of Oxford is a felicitous union
of the strength and culture of liberal and conservative England; and no
party in the House, whatever may be its likings or antipathies, can sit
under the spell of Mr. Gladstone’s rounded and shining eloquence without a
conviction that the man who can talk ‘shop’ like a tenth Muse is, after
all, a true representative man of the market of the world.”

In describing the result of the repeal of the paper duty a little after
this,(28) he used glowing words. “Never was there a measure so
conservative as that which called into vivid, energetic, permanent, and
successful action the cheap press of this country.” It was also a common
radical opinion of that hour that if the most numerous classes acquired
the franchise as well as cheap newspapers, the reign of peace would
thenceforth be unbroken. In a people of bold and martial temper such as
are the people of our island, this proved to be a miscalculation.
Meanwhile there is little doubt that Mr. Gladstone’s share in thus
fostering the growth of the cheap press was one of the secrets of his
rapid rise in popularity.




Chapter III. Battle For Economy. (1860-1862)


    The session of 1860, with its complement in the principal part of
    1861, was, I think, the most trying part of my whole political
    life.—GLADSTONE (1897).

    In reading history, we are almost tempted to believe that the
    chief end of government in promoting internal quiet has been to
    accumulate greater resources for foreign hostilities.—CHANNING.



I


All this time the battle for thrifty husbandry went on, and the bark of
the watch-dog at the exchequer sounded a hoarse refrain. “We need not
maunder in ante-chambers,” as Mr. Disraeli put it, “to discover
differences in the cabinet, when we have a patriotic prime minister
appealing to the spirit of the country; and when at the same time we find
his chancellor of the exchequer, whose duty it is to supply the ways and
means by which those exertions are to be supported, proposing votes with
innuendo, and recommending expenditure in a whispered invective.”

(M13) Severer than any battle in parliament is a long struggle inside a
cabinet. Opponents contend at closer quarters, the weapons are shorter, it
is easier to make mischief. Mr. Gladstone was the least quarrelsome of the
human race; he was no wrestler intent only on being a winner in Olympic
games; nor was he one of those who need an adversary to bring out all
their strength. But in a cause that he had at heart he was untiring,
unfaltering, and indomitable. Parallel with his contention about budget
and treaty in 1860 was persistent contention for economy. The financial
crisis went on with the fortifications crisis. The battle was incessant.
He had not been many months in office before those deep differences came
prominently forward in temperament, tradition, views of national policy,
that continued to make themselves felt between himself and Lord Palmerston
so long as the government endured. Perhaps I should put it more widely,
and say between himself and that vast body of excited opinion in the
country, of which Lord Palmerston was the cheerful mouthpiece. The
struggle soon began.

Sidney Herbert, then at the war office, after circulating a memorandum,
wrote privately to Mr. Gladstone (Nov. 23, 1859), that he was convinced
that a great calamity was impending in the shape of a war provoked by
France. Officers who had visited that country told him that all thinking
men in France were against war with England, all noisy men for it, the
army for it, and above all, the government for it. Inspired pamphlets were
scattered broadcast. Everything was determined except time and occasion.
The general expectation was for next summer. French tradesmen at St. Malo
were sending in their bills to the English, thinking war coming. “We have
to do with a godless people who look on war as a game open to all without
responsibility or sin; and there is a man at the head of them who combines
the qualities of a gambler and a fatalist.”

Mr. Gladstone replied in two letters, one of them (Nov. 27) of the stamp
usual from a chancellor of the exchequer criticising a swollen estimate,
with controversial doubts, pungent interrogatories, caustic asides, hints
for saving here and paring there. On the following day he fired what he
called his second barrel, in the shape of a letter, which states with
admirable force and fulness the sceptic’s case against the scare. This
time it was no ordinary exchequer wrestle. He combats the inference of an
English from an Italian war, by the historic reminder that a struggle
between France and Austria for supremacy or influence in Italy had been
going on for four whole centuries, so that its renewal was nothing
strange. If France, now unable to secure our co-operation, still thought
the Italian danger grave enough to warrant single-handed intervention, how
does that support the inference that she must certainly be ready to invade
England next? He ridicules the conclusion that the invasion was at our
doors, from such contested allegations as that the Châlons farmers refused
the loan of horses from the government, because they would soon be wanted
back again for the approaching war with England. What extraordinary
farmers to refuse the loan of horses for their ploughing and seed time,
because they might be reclaimed for purposes of war before winter! Then
why could we not see a single copy of the incendiary and anti-English
pamphlets, said to be disseminated broadcast among the troops? What was
the value of all this contested and unsifted statement? Why, if he were
bent on a rupture, did the Emperor not stir at the moment of the great
Mutiny, when every available man we had was sent to India, and when he had
what might have passed for a plausible excuse in the Orsini conspiracy,
and in the deliberate and pointed refusal of parliament to deal with it?
With emphasis, he insists that we have no adequate idea of the
predisposing power which an immense series of measures of preparation for
war on our own part, have in actually begetting war. They familiarise
ideas which when familiar lose their horror, and they light an inward
flame of excitement of which, when it is habitually fed, we lose the
consciousness.

This application of cool and reasoned common sense to actual probabilities
seldom avails against imaginations excited by random possibilities; and he
made little way. Lord Palmerston advanced into the field, in high anxiety
that the cabinet should promptly adopt Herbert’s proposal.(29) They soon
came to a smart encounter, and Mr. Gladstone writes to the prime minister
(Feb. 7, 1860): “There are, I fear, the most serious differences among us
with respect to a loan for fortifications.... My mind is made up, and to
propose any loan for fortifications would be, on my part, with the views I
entertain, a betrayal of my public duty.” A vigorous correspondence
between Mr. Gladstone and Herbert upon military charges followed, and the
tension seemed likely to snap the cord.

(M14) If I may judge from the minutes of the members of the cabinet on the
papers circulated, most of them stood with their chief, and not one of
them, not even Milner Gibson nor Villiers, was ready to proceed onward
from a sort of general leaning towards Mr. Gladstone’s view to the further
stage of making a strong stand-up fight for it. The controversy between
him and his colleagues still raged at red heat over the whole ground of
military estimates, the handling of the militia, and the construction of
fortifications. He wrote memorandum upon memorandum with untiring energy,
pressing the cabinet with the enormous rate in the increase of charge;
with the slight grounds on which increase of charge was now ordinarily
proposed and entertained; and, most of all, with the absence of all
attempt to compensate for new and necessary expenditure by retrenchment in
quarters where the scale of outlay had either always been, or had become
unnecessary. He was too sound a master of the conditions of public
business to pretend to take away from the ministers at the head of the
great departments of expenditure their duty of devising plans of
reduction, but he boldly urged the reconsideration of such large general
items of charge as the military expenditure in the colonies, then standing
at an annual burden of over two millions on the taxpayers of this country.
He was keen from the lessons of experience, to expose the ever
indestructible fallacy that mighty armaments make for peace.

Still the cabinet was not moved, and in Palmerston he found a will and
purpose as tenacious as his own. “The interview with Lord Palmerston came
off to-day,” he writes to the Duke of Argyll (June 6, 1860). “Nothing
could be more kind and frank than his manner. The _matter_ was first to
warn me of the evils and hazards attending, for me, the operation of
resigning. Secondly, to express his own strong sense of the obligation to
persevere. Both of these I told him I could fully understand. He said he
had had two great objects always before him in life—one the suppression of
the slave trade, the other to put England in a state of defence. In short,
it appears that he now sees, as he considers, the opportunity of attaining
a long cherished object; and it is not unnatural that he should repel any
proposal which should defraud him of a glory, in and by absolving him from
a duty.... I am now sure that Lord Palmerston entertained this purpose
when he formed the government; but had I been in the slightest degree
aware of it, I should certainly, but very reluctantly, have abstained from
joining it, and helped, as I could, from another bench its Italian
purposes. Still, I am far indeed from regretting to have joined it, which
is quite another matter.”

Now labouring hard in Paris month after month at the tariff, Cobden plied
Mr. Gladstone with exhortations to challenge the alarmists on the facts;
to compare the outlay by France for a dozen years past on docks,
fortifications, arsenals, with the corresponding outlay by England; to
show that our steam navy, building and afloat, to say nothing of our vast
mercantile marine, was at least double the strength of France; and above
all, to make his colleagues consider whether the French Emperor had not,
as a matter of self-interest, made the friendship of England, from the
first, the hinge of his whole policy. Cobden, as always, knew thoroughly
and in detail what he was talking about, for he had sat for three
successive sessions on a select committee upon army, navy, and ordnance
expenditure. In another letter he turned personally to Mr. Gladstone
himself: “Unconsciously,” he says, “you have administered to the support
of a system which has no better foundation than a gigantic delusion” (June
11, 1860). “You say unconsciously,” Mr. Gladstone replies (June 13), “I am
afraid that in one respect this is too favourable a description. I have
consciously, as a member of parliament and as a member of the government,
concurred in measures that provide for an expenditure beyond what were it
in my power I would fix.... But I suppose that the duty of choosing the
lesser evil binds me; _the difficulty is to determine what the lesser evil
is_.”

(M15) My story grows long, and it ends as such stories in our politics
usually end. A compromise was arranged on the initiative of the Duke of
Somerset, keeping clear, as Mr. Gladstone supposed, of the fortification
scheme as a whole, and not pledging future years.(30) “Never at any time
in my life,” Mr. Gladstone told Graham, “have I had such a sense of mental
and moral exhaustion.” The strain was not ended by the compromise, for in
moving the resolution for a vote of two millions for fortifications (July
23), Lord Palmerston not only declared that he held it to be absolutely
necessary to carry the whole scheme into effect—the very proposition which
the compromise put aside—but defended it by a series of stringent
criticisms particularly fitted to offend and irritate France. Mr.
Gladstone was not present,(31) but he felt strongly that he had good
grounds of complaint, and that faith had not been strictly kept. “Much
dismayed,” he wrote in his diary (July 24), “at the terms of Lord
Palmerston’s resolution.” It was now, however, too late to draw back.(32)
Mr. Bright made a weighty and masterly attack (Aug. 2), hinting plainly
that the thing was “a compromise to enable the government to avoid the
rock, or get over the quick-sand, which this question has interjected into
their midst,” and quoting with excellent effect a pregnant passage from
Peel: “If you adopt the opinion of military men, naturally anxious for the
complete security of every available point; naturally anxious to throw
upon you the whole responsibility for the loss in the event of war
suddenly breaking out of some of our valuable possessions,—you would
overwhelm this country with taxes in time of peace.” But this was a
Palmerstonian parliament. The year before, a remarkable debate (July 21,
1859) had promised better things. Disraeli had opened it with emphatic
declarations: “There is no country,” he said, “that can go on raising
seventy millions in time of peace with impunity. England cannot, and if
England cannot, no country can.” Bright followed with the assurance that
Cobden and he might now consider Mr. Disraeli a convert to their views.
Lord John Russell came next, agreeing with Bright; and even Palmerston
himself was constrained to make a peace speech.



II


In May 1861 Mr. Gladstone notes “a day of over fourteen hours: thank God
for the strength.” The atmosphere around him would have depressed a weaker
man. “At Brooks’s,” says Phillimore, “they hate Gladstone worse than at
the Carlton.” In the summer the strife upon expenditure was renewed.
Eventually Mr. Gladstone was able to write to Graham from the cabinet room
(July 20, 1861) that Castor and Pollux appeared aloft at the right moment,
and the clouds had disappeared. In a letter to his close friend, Sir
Walter James, in 1871 Mr. Gladstone says: “The storm of criticism and
rebuke does not surprise nor discourage me. Doubtless much must be just;
and what is not, is what we call in logic an ‘inseparable accident’ of
politics. Time and reflection will, please God, enable us to distinguish
between them. For my own part I _never_ was so abused as in 1860; but it
was one of the most useful or least useless years of my life.” The battle
was as severe in 1861 as it had been the year before. In the middle of the
session (May 9) Phillimore reports: “Found Gladstone in good spirits; he
spoke with real greatness of mind of the attacks made on him.”

(M16) The next year Lord Palmerston wrote to express his concern at
something that he came upon in a railway journey. “I read with much
interest,” he wrote to his chancellor of the exchequer (April 29, 1862),
“your able and eloquent speeches at Manchester, but I wish to submit to
you some observations upon the financial part of the second speech.” He
did not agree with Mr. Gladstone that the nation had forced the cabinet
and parliament into high expenditure, but if it were so, he regarded it
not as matter of reproach, but as a proof of the nation’s superior
sagacity. Panic there had been none; governors and governed had for a long
time been blind and apathetic; then they awoke. There was on the other
side of the channel a people who, say what they may, hate us and would
make any sacrifice to humiliate us, and they had now at their head an
able, active, wary, council-keeping, but ever-planning sovereign [Napoleon
III.]. “Have the parliament and the nation been wrong, and have Bright and
Cobden and yourself been right?” All this being so, he could not but
regret that Mr. Gladstone should by speeches in and out of parliament
invite agitation to force the government of which he was a member, to
retrace its steps taken deliberately and with full sense of
responsibility.(33) To Palmerston’s eight quarto pages, written in one of
the finest hands of the time, Mr. Gladstone replied in twelve.


    In all good humour, he said, I prefer not being classed with Mr.
    Bright, or even Mr. Cobden; first, because I do not know their
    opinions with any precision; and secondly, because as far as I do
    know or can grasp them, they seem to contemplate fundamental
    changes in taxation which I disapprove in principle, and believe
    also to be unattainable in practice, and reductions of
    establishment and expenditure for which I am not prepared to be
    responsible.... I think it a mean and guilty course to hold out
    vague and indefinite promises of vast retrenchment, but I think it
    will be a healthful day, both for the country and for the party
    over which you so ably preside, when the word retrenchment, of
    course with a due regard to altered circumstances, shall again
    take its place among their battle cries.


A spirited correspondence followed, for Lord Palmerston knew his business,
and had abundant faculty of application; while Mr. Gladstone, for his
part, was too much in earnest to forego rejoinder and even surrejoinder.
“No claptrap reductions,” cried the prime minister. “You are feeding not
only expenditure,” rejoined the chancellor of the exchequer, “but what is
worse, the spirit of expenditure.” “You disclaim political community of
opinion with Bright and Cobden, and justly,” said Lord Palmerston, “but
you cannot but be aware that owing to various accidental circumstances
many people at home and abroad connect you unjustly with them, and this
false impression is certainly not advantageous.”

“My dear Gladstone,” he wrote good-humouredly on another occasion, “You
may not have seen how your name is taken in vain by people with whom I
conceive you do not sympathise,—Yours sincerely,

PALMERSTON.”

Enclosed was a placard with many large capital letters, notes of
exclamation, italics, and all the rest of the paraphernalia of political
emphasis:—


    TAX PAYERS! Read Mr. Cobden’s new pamphlet, the “THREE PANICS,”
    and judge for yourselves. How long will you suffer Yourselves to
    be Humbugged by PALMERSTONIANISM, and Robbed by the “Services,”
    and others interested in a War Expenditure, even in times of
    Peace? ... THE CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUER APPEALS TO YOU TO HELP
    HIM. You have the power in your own hands if you will only exert
    it. Reform the House of Commons, AND DO IT THOROUGHLY THIS TIME.


Of the continuance of the struggle in 1862, a few items from the diary
give an adequate picture:—


    _Jan. 30, 1862._—A heavy blow in the announcement of increased
    military estimates from Sir George Lewis gave me a disturbed
    evening. 31.—Worked on the formidable subject of the estimates,
    and made known to the cabinet my difficulties. _Feb. 1._—Cabinet
    3-½—6. It went well; the tenth penny [on the income-tax] proved to
    be a strong physic; £750,000 of reductions ordered. 12.—Wrote mem.
    on possible reductions, etc., to dispense with income-tax. The
    whole question, I think, is, can we be satisfied (I think we ought
    and will) with 21 millions for army and navy instead of 27? _March
    1._—Cabinet 3-3/4—6-1/4, very stiff, on the Belgian negotiations I
    had to go to the ultima ratio. 31.—H. of C. The fortifications got
    their first blow.


By midsummer public feeling veered a little: “The tide has turned. Lord
Palmerston is now ‘the strong swimmer in his agony.’ ”(34)

A candid and friendly observer has told us the situation: “When I was
private secretary to Lord Palmerston,” he says, “and Mr. Gladstone was his
chancellor of the exchequer, it was a constant source of sorrow to me, and
a perpetual cause of mystery, to note how they misunderstood one another,
and how evidently each mistrusted the other, though perfectly cordial and
most friendly in their mutual intercourse.... If the proposal was adhered
to, Mr. Gladstone gave way. This seemed to Lord Palmerston a case of
gratuitous difficulties put in his way, and attempts to thwart without the
courage to resist.”(35)

In closing this chapter, let us note that in spite of Lord Palmerston, he
won no inconsiderable success. When 1866 came, and his financial
administration ended, he had managed, with the aid of the reduction of
debt charge after the lapse of the long annuities, to carry expenditure
back to the level of 1857. Naval expenditure rose until 1861, and then
began to fall; army expenditure rose until 1863, and then began to fall.
In 1859, when he went to the exchequer, the total under these two heads
was nearly twenty-six millions; when he quitted office in 1866 the total
was twenty-four millions. In the middle years it had swelled to
twenty-eight. After half a dozen years of panic and extravagance, all
sedulously fostered by a strong prime minister, that he should still have
left the cost of government little higher than he found it was no defeat,
but an extremely satisfactory performance. “We must follow the nature of
our affairs,” Burke says, “and conform ourselves to our situation. Why
should we resolve to do nothing because what I propose to you may not be
the exact demand of the petition? If we cry, like children, for the moon,
like children we must cry on.”(36)



III


(M17) Ruminating in the late evening of life over his legislative work,
Mr. Gladstone wrote: “Selecting the larger measures and looking only to
achieved results, I should take the following heads: 1. The Tariffs,
1842-60. 2. Oxford University Act. 3. Post Office Savings Banks. 4. Irish
Church Disestablishment. 5. Irish Land Acts. 6. Franchise Act. Although
this excludes the last of all the efforts, viz., the Irish Government
bill.” The third item in the list belongs to the period (1861) at which we
have now arrived.


    The points to be noted are three. 1. The whole of my action in
    1859-65 was viewed with the utmost jealousy by a large minority
    and a section of the very limited majority. It was an object to me
    to get this bill passed _sub silentio_, a full statement of my
    expectations from it would have been absolutely fatal. I admit
    they have been more than realised. 2. The Trustee Savings Banks
    were doubly defective, nay trebly, for they sometimes broke. (1)
    Their principle was left in doubt—were the general funds in trust,
    or cash at a banker’s? This was vital. (2) They never got or could
    get within the doors of the masses, for they smelt of class. It
    was necessary to provide for the savings of the people with (_a_)
    safety, (_b_) cheapness, (_c_) convenience. The banks _cost_ money
    to the State. The Post Office Savings Banks bring in a revenue. 3.
    Behind all this I had an object of first-rate importance, which
    has been attained: to provide the minister of finance with a
    strong financial arm, and to secure his independence of the City
    by giving him a large and certain command of money.


A sequel to this salutary measure was a bill three years later with the
apparently unheroic but really beneficent object of facilitating the
acquisition of small annuities, without the risk of fraud or
bankruptcy.(37) An eyewitness tells how (March 7, 1864) “Mr. Gladstone
held the house for two hours enchained by his defence of a measure which
avowedly will not benefit the class from which members are selected; which
involves not only a ‘wilderness of figures,’ but calculations of a kind as
intelligible to most men as equations to London cabdrivers; and which,
though it might and would interest the nation, would never in the nature
of things be made a hustings cry. The riveted attention of the House was
in itself a triumph; the deep impression received by the nation on the
following day was a greater one. It was felt that here was a man who
really could lead, instead of merely reflecting the conclusions of the
popular mind.” The measure encountered a pretty stiff opposition. The
insurance companies were vexed that they had neglected their proper
business, others feared that it might undermine the poor law, others again
took the pessimist’s favourite line that it would be inoperative. But the
case was good, Mr. Gladstone’s hand was firm, and in due time the bill
became law amid a loud chorus of approval.

(M18) Thus he encouraged, stimulated, and facilitated private and personal
thrift, at the same time and in the same spirit in which he laboured his
fervid exhortations to national economy. He was deeply convinced, he said
and kept saying, “that all excess in the public expenditure beyond the
legitimate wants of the country is not only a pecuniary waste, but a great
political, and above all, a great moral evil. It is a characteristic of
the mischiefs that arise from financial prodigality that they creep
onwards with a noiseless and a stealthy step; that they commonly remain
unseen and unfelt, until they have reached a magnitude absolutely
overwhelming.” He referred to the case of Austria, where these mischiefs
seemed to threaten the very foundations of empire.




Chapter IV. The Spirit Of Gladstonian Finance. (1859-1866)


    Nations seldom realise till too late how prominent a place a sound
    system of finance holds among the vital elements of national
    stability and well-being; how few political changes are worth
    purchasing by its sacrifice; how widely and seriously human
    happiness is affected by the downfall or the perturbation of
    national credit, or by excessive, injudicious, and unjust
    taxation.—LECKY.



I


In finance, the most important of all the many fields of his activity, Mr.
Gladstone had the signal distinction of creating the public opinion by
which he worked, and warming the climate in which his projects throve. In
other matters he followed, as it was his business and necessity to follow,
the governing forces of the public mind; in finance he was a strenuous
leader. He not only led with a boldness sometimes verging on improvidence;
apart from the merits of this or that proposal, he raised finance to the
high place that belongs to it in the interest, curiosity, and imperious
concern of every sound self-governing community. Even its narrowest
technicalities by his supple and resplendent power as orator were suffused
with life and colour. When ephemeral critics disparaged him as mere
rhetorician—and nobody denies that he was often declamatory and
discursive, that he often over-argued and over-refined—they forgot that he
nowhere exerted greater influence than in that department of affairs where
words out of relation to fact are most surely exposed. If he often carried
the proper rhetorical arts of amplification and development to excess, yet
the basis of fact was both sound and clear, and his digressions, as when,
for example, he introduced an account of the changes in the English taste
for wine,(38) were found, and still remain, both relevant and extremely
interesting.

(M19) One recorder who had listened to all the financiers from Peel
downwards, said that Peel’s statements were ingenious and able, but dry;
Disraeli was clever but out of his element; Wood was like a cart without
springs on a heavy road; Gladstone was the only man who could lead his
hearers over the arid desert, and yet keep them cheerful and lively and
interested without flagging. Another is reminded of Sir Joshua’s picture
of Garrick between tragedy and comedy, such was his duality of attitude
and expression; such the skill with which he varied his moods in a single
speech, his fervid eloquence and passion, his lightness and buoyancy of
humour, his lambent and spontaneous sarcasm. Just as Macaulay made
thousands read history who before had turned from it as dry and repulsive,
so Mr. Gladstone made thousands eager to follow the public balance-sheet,
and the whole nation became his audience, interested in him and his themes
and in the House where his dazzling wonders were performed. All this made
a magnificent contribution to the national spirit of his time. Such
extraordinary power over others had its mainspring in the depths and zeal
of his own conviction and concern. “For nine or ten months of the year,”
he told Sir Henry Taylor in 1864, “I am always willing to go out of
office, but in the two or three that precede the budget I begin to feel an
itch to have the handling of it. Last summer I should have been delighted
to go out; now [December] I am indifferent; in February, if I live as
long, I shall, I have no doubt, be loath; but in April quite ready again.
Such are my signs of the zodiac.” The eagerness of his own mind
transmitted itself like an electric current through his audience.

Interest abroad was almost as much alive as the interest felt in England
itself. We have already seen how keenly Cavour followed Mr. Gladstone’s
performances. His budget speeches were circulated by foreign ministers
among deputies and editors. Fould, one of the best of Napoleon’s finance
ministers, kept up a pretty steady correspondence with the English
chancellor: appeals to him as to the sound doctrine on sugar drawbacks; is
much struck by his proposals on Scotch banks; says mournfully to him
(April 28, 1863), in a sentence that is a whole chapter in the history of
the empire: “You are very fortunate in being able to give such relief to
the taxpayers; if it had not been for the war in Mexico, I should perhaps
have been able to do something of the same sort, and that would have been,
especially in view of the elections, very favourable to the government of
the Emperor.’”

When Mr. Gladstone came to leave office in 1866, he said to Fould (July
11): “The statesmen of to-day have a new mission opened to them: the
mission of substituting the concert of nations for their conflicts, and of
teaching them to grow great in common, and to give to others by giving to
themselves. Of this beneficent work a good share has fallen to the
departments with which we have respectively been connected.” Fould had
already deplored his loss. “I counted,” he says, “on the influence of your
wise doctrines in finance, to help me in maintaining our country in that
system of order and economy, of which you were setting the example.” Alas,
in France and in continental Europe generally at that time, selfish
material interests and their class representatives were very strong,
popular power was weak; in most of them the soldier was the master.
Happily for our famous chancellor of the exchequer, England was different.

It has often been said that he ignored the social question; did not even
seem to know there was one. The truth is, that what marks him from other
chancellors is exactly the dominating hold gained by the social question
in all its depth and breadth upon his most susceptible imagination. Tariff
reform, adjustment of burdens, invincible repugnance to waste or
profusion, accurate keeping and continuous scrutiny of accounts,
substitution of a few good taxes for many bad ones,—all these were not
merely the love of a methodical and thrifty man for habits of business;
they were directly associated in him with the amelioration of the hard lot
of the toiling mass, and sprang from an ardent concern in improving human
well-being, and raising the moral ideals of mankind. In his “musings for
the good of man,” Liberation of Intercourse, to borrow his own larger name
for free trade, figured in his mind’s eye as one of the promoting
conditions of abundant employment. “If you want,” he said in a pregnant
proposition, “to benefit the labouring classes and to do the maximum of
good, it is not enough to operate upon the articles consumed by them; you
should rather operate on the articles that give them the maximum of
employment.” In other words, you should extend the area of trade by
steadily removing restrictions. He recalled the days when our predecessors
thought it must be for man’s good to have “most of the avenues by which
the mind, and also the hand of man conveyed and exchanged their respective
products,” blocked or narrowed by regulation and taxation. Dissemination
of news, travelling, letters, transit of goods, were all made as costly
and difficult as the legislator could make them. “I rank,” he said, “the
introduction of cheap postage for letters, documents, patterns, and
printed matter, and the abolition of all taxes on printed matter, in the
catalogue of free trade legislation. These great measures may well take
their place beside the abolition of prohibitions and protective duties,
the simplifying of revenue laws, and the repeal of the Navigation Act, as
forming together the great code of industrial emancipation.”(39)

(M20) It was not unnatural that fault should be found with him for not
making a more resolute effort to lighten the burden of that heavy mortgage
which, under the name of the National Debt, we have laid upon the industry
and property of the nation. In 1866 he was keenly excited by Jevons’s
argument from the ultimate shrinkage of our coal supply, and he accepted
the inference that we should vigorously apply ourselves by reduction of
the debt to preparation for the arrival of the evil day. But, as he wrote
to Jevons (March 16, 1866), “Until the great work of the liberation of
industry was in the main effected, it would have been premature or even
wrong to give too much prominence to this view of the subject. Nor do I
regard that liberation as yet having reached the point at which we might
say, we will now cease to make remission of taxes a principal element and
aim in finance. But we are in my judgment near it. And I am most anxious
that the public should begin to take a closer and more practical view of
the topics which you have done so much to bring into prominence.”

He was always thinking of the emancipation of commerce, like Peel and
Cobden. His general policy was simple. When great expenditure demanded
large revenue, he raised his money by high income-tax, and high rates of
duty on a few articles, neither absolute necessities of life nor raw
materials of manufacture. He left the income-tax at fourpence. In 1866, he
told the House that the new parliament then about to be elected might
dispense with the tax. “If,” he said, “parliament and the country
preferred to retain the tax, then the rate of fourpence is the rate at
which in time of peace and in the absence of any special emergency, we
believe it may be most justly and wisely so retained.” While cordially
embracing Cobden’s policy of combining free trade with retrenchment, he
could not withstand a carnal satisfaction at abundant revenue. Deploring
expenditure with all his soul, he still rubs his hands in professional
pride at the elasticity of the revenue under his management.



II


When it is asked, with no particular relevancy, what original contribution
of the first order was made by Mr. Gladstone to the science of national
finance, we may return the same answer as if it were asked of Walpole,
Pitt, or Peel. It was for Adam Smith from his retreat upon the sea-beach
of distant Kirkcaldy to introduce new and fruitful ideas, though he too
owed a debt to French economists. The statesman’s business is not to
invent ideas in finance, but to create occasions and contrive expedients
for applying them. “What an extraordinary man Pitt is,” said Adam Smith;
“he understands my ideas better than I understand them myself.”
Originality may lie as much in perception of opportunity as in invention.
Cobden discovered no new economic truths that I know of, but his
perception of the bearings of abstract economic truths upon the actual and
prospective circumstances of his country and the world, made him the most
original economic statesman of his day. The glory of Mr. Gladstone was
different. It rested on the practical power and tenacity with which he
opened new paths, and forced the application of sound doctrine over long
successions of countless obstacles.

(M21) If we probe his fame as financier to the core and marrow, it was not
his power as orator, it was not his ingenuity in device and expedient, it
was his unswerving faith in certain fixed aims, and his steadfast and
insistent zeal in pursuing them, that built up the splendid edifice. Pitt
performed striking financial feats, especially in the consolidation of
duties, in reformed administration, and in the French treaty of 1786. But
ill-fortune dragged him into the vortex of European war, and finance sank
into the place of a secondary instrument, an art for devising aliments,
some of them desperate enough, for feeding the war-chest of the nation.
Sir Robert Walpole, Mr. Gladstone wrote, “had not to contend with like
difficulties, and I think his administration should be compared with the
early years of Pitt, in which way of judging he would come off second,
though a man of cool and sagacious judgment, while morally he stood
low.”(40)

In the happier conditions of his time, Mr. Gladstone was able to use wise
and bold finance as the lever for enlarging all the facilities of life,
and diffusing them over the widest area. If men sometimes smile at his
extraordinary zeal for cheap wines and cheap books and low railway fares,
if they are sometimes provoked by his rather harsh views on privileges for
patents and copyrights for authors, restrictive of the common enjoyment,
it is well to remember that all this and the like came from what was at
once clear financial vision and true social feeling. “A financial
experience,” he once said, “which is long and wide, has profoundly
convinced me that, as a rule, the state or individual or company thrives
best which dives deepest down into the mass of the community, and adapts
its arrangements to the wants of the greatest number.” His exultation in
the stimulus given by fiscal freedom to extended trade, and therefore to
more abundant employment at higher wages, was less the exultation of the
economist watching the intoxicating growth of wealth, than of the social
moralist surveying multiplied access to fuller life and more felicity. I
always remember, in a roving talk with him in 1891, when he was a very old
man and ill, how he gradually took fire at the notion—I forget how it
arose—of the iniquities under which the poor man suffered a generation
ago. “See—the sons and daughters went forth from their homes; the cost of
postage was so high that correspondence was practically prohibited; yet
the rich all the time, by the privilege of franking, carried on a really
immense amount of letter-writing absolutely free. Think what a softening
of domestic exile; what an aid in keeping warm the feel of family
affection, in mitigating the rude breach in the circle of the hearth.”
This vigorous sympathy was with Mr. Gladstone a living part of his
Christian enthusiasm. “If you would gain mankind,” said old Jeremy
Bentham, “the best way is to appear to love them, and the best way of
appearing to love them, is to love them in reality.” When he thought of
the effect of his work at the exchequer, he derived “profound and
inestimable consolation from the reflection that while the rich have been
growing richer, the poor have become less poor.” Yet, as my readers have
by this time found out, there never was a man less in need of Aristotle’s
warning, that to be forever hunting after the useful befits not those of
free and lofty soul.(41) As was noted by contemporaries, like all the
followers of Sir Robert Peel he never thought without an eye to
utilitarian results, but mixed with that attitude of mind he had “a
certain refinement and subtlety of religiousness that redeemed it from the
coldness, if it sometimes overshadowed the clearness, of mere
statesmanlike prudence.” On the other hand, he had “the Lancashire
temperament.”



III


(M22) This thought and feeling for the taxpayer was at the root of another
achievement, no less original than the peculiar interest that he was able
to excite by his manner of stating a financial case. Peel was only prime
minister for five years, and only four months chancellor. Mr. Gladstone
was prime minister for twelve—ten years short of Sir Robert Walpole in
that office, seven years short of Pitt. But he was also chancellor of the
exchequer under three other prime ministers for ten years. Thus his
connection with the treasury covered a longer period than was attained by
the greatest of his predecessors. His long reign at the treasury, and his
personal predominance in parliament and the country, enabled him to stamp
on the public departments administrative principles of the utmost breadth
and strength. Thrift of public money, resolute resistance to waste, rigid
exactitude in time, and all the other aspects of official duty, conviction
that in the working of the vast machinery of state nothing is a
trifle—through the firm establishment of maxims and principles of this
sort, Mr. Gladstone built up a strong and efficacious system of
administrative unity that must be counted a conspicuous part of his very
greatest work. “No chancellor of the exchequer,” he once said, “is worth
his salt who makes his own popularity either his first consideration, or
any consideration at all, in administering the public purse. In my
opinion, the chancellor of the exchequer is the trusted and confidential
steward of the public. He is under a sacred obligation with regard to all
that he consents to spend.”(42) This tone of thinking and feeling about
the service of the state spread under his magisterial influence from
chancellors and the permanent officers that bear unobtrusive but effective
sway in Whitehall, down to tide waiters and distributors of stamps. As
Burke put the old Latin saw, he endeavoured to “give us a system of
economy, which is itself a great revenue.” The Exchequer and Audit Act of
1866 is a monument of his zeal and power in this direction. It converted
the nominal control by parliament into a real control, and has borne the
strain of nearly forty years.

He was more alive than any man at the exchequer had ever been before, to
the mischiefs of the spirit of expenditure. As he told the House of
Commons in 1863 (April 16): “I mean this, that together with the so-called
increase of expenditure there grows up what may be termed a spirit of
expenditure, a desire, a tendency prevailing in the country, which,
insensibly and unconsciously perhaps, but really, affects the spirit of
the people, the spirit of parliament, the spirit of the public
departments, and perhaps even the spirit of those whose duty it is to
submit the estimates to parliament.” “But how,” he wrote to Cobden (Jan.
5, 1864), “is the spirit of expenditure to be exorcised? Not by my
preaching; I doubt if even by yours. I seriously doubt whether it will
ever give place to the old spirit of economy, as long as we have the
income-tax. There, or hard by, lie questions of deep practical moment.”
This last pregnant reference to the income-tax, makes it worth while to
insert here a word or two from letters of 1859 to his brother Robertson,
an even more ardent financial reformer than himself:—


    Economy is the first and great article (economy such as I
    understand it) in my financial creed. The controversy between
    direct and indirect taxation holds a minor though important place.
    I have not the smallest doubt we should at this moment have had a
    smaller expenditure if financial reformers had not directed their
    chief attention, not to the question how much of expenditure and
    taxes we shall have, but to the question how it should be
    raised.... I agree with you that if you had only direct taxes, you
    would have economical government. But in my opinion the indirect
    taxes will last as long as the monarchy; and while we have them, I
    am deeply convinced that the facility of recurring to, and of
    maintaining, income-tax has been a main source of that
    extravagance in government, which I date from the Russian war (for
    before that a good spirit had prevailed for some twenty-five
    years).


Bagehot, that economist who united such experience and sense with so much
subtlety and humour, wrote to Mr. Gladstone in 1868: “Indirect taxation so
cramps trade and heavy direct taxation so impairs morality that a large
expenditure becomes a great evil. I have often said so to Sir G. Lewis,
but he always answered, ‘Government is a very rough business. You must be
content with very unsatisfactory results.’ ” This was a content that Mr.
Gladstone never learned.

(M23) It was not only in the finance of millions that he showed himself a
hero. “The chancellor of the exchequer,” he said, “should boldly uphold
economy in detail; and it is the mark of a chicken-hearted chancellor when
he shrinks from upholding economy in detail, when because it is a question
of only two or three thousand pounds, he says that is no matter. He is
ridiculed, no doubt, for what is called candle-ends and cheese-parings,
but he is not worth his salt if he is not ready to save what are meant by
candle-ends and cheese-parings in the cause of the country.”(43) He held
it to be his special duty in his office not simply to abolish sinecures,
but to watch for every opportunity of cutting down all unnecessary
appointments. He hears that a clerk at the national debt office is at
death’s door, and on the instant writes to Lord Palmerston that there is
no necessity to appoint a successor. During the last twenty years, he said
in 1863, “since I began to deal with these subjects, every financial
change beneficial to the country at large has been met with a threat that
somebody would be dismissed.” All such discouragements he treated with the
half scornful scepticism without which no administrative reformer will go
far.

He did not think it beneath his dignity to appeal to the foreign office
for a retrenchment in fly-leaves and thick folio sheets used for docketing
only, and the same for mere covering despatches without description; for
all these had to be bound, and the bound books wanted bookcases, and the
bookcases wanted buildings, and the libraries wanted librarians. “My idea
is that it would be quite worth while to appoint an official committee
from various departments to go over the ‘contingencies’ and minor charges
of the different departments into which abuse must always be creeping,
from the nature of the case and without much blame to any one.” Sir R.
Bethell as attorney-general insisted on the duty incumbent on certain high
officials, including secretaries of state, of taking out patents for their
offices, and paying the stamp duties of two hundred pounds apiece thereon.
“I shall deal with these eminent persons,” he wrote to the chancellor of
the exchequer, “exactly as I should and do daily deal with John Smith
accused of fraud as a distiller, or John Brown reported as guilty of
smuggling tobacco.” Mr. Gladstone replies (1859):—


    I rejoice to see that neither the heat, the stench, nor service in
    the courts can exhaust even your superfluous vigour; and it is
    most ennobling to see such energies devoted to the highest of all
    purposes—that of replenishing her Majesty’s exchequer. I hope,
    however, that in one point the case stands better than I had
    supposed. The proof of absolute contumacy is not yet complete,
    though, alas, the _animus furandi_ stands forth in all its hideous
    colours. I spoke yesterday to Lord Palmerston on the painful
    theme; and he confessed to me with much emotion that he has not
    yet resorted to those mild means of exhortation—what the
    presbyterians call dealing with an erring brother—from which we
    had hoped much. The unhappy men may therefore yet come to their
    senses; in any case I rejoice to think that you, in the new
    capacity of mad doctor, are sure to cure them and abate the
    mischief, if the which do not happen (I quote the new Tennyson):—

    “some evil chance
    Will make the smouldering scandal break and blaze
    Before the people and our Lord the King.”(44)


After a due amount of amusing correspondence, the recusant confederacy
struck their colours and paid their money.


    When he went to Corfu in the _Terrible_ in 1858, some two or three
    sleeping cabins were made by wooden partitions put up round spaces
    taken off the deck. Thirteen years after, his unslumbering memory
    made this an illustrating point in an exhortation to a first lord
    of the admiralty not to disregard small outgoings. “I never in my
    life was more astonished than upon being told the sum this had
    cost; I think it was in hundreds of pounds, where I should have
    expected tens.” Sometimes, no doubt, this thrift descended to the
    ludicrous. On this same expedition to Corfu, among the small
    pieces of economy enjoined by Mr. Gladstone on the members of his
    mission, one was to scratch out the address on the parchment label
    of the despatch bags and to use the same label in returning the
    bag to the colonial office in London. One day while the secretary
    was busily engaged in thus saving a few halfpence, an officer came
    into the room, having arrived by a special steamer from Trieste at
    a cost of between seven and eight hundred pounds. The ordinary
    mail-boat would have brought him a very few hours later. We can
    hardly wonder that the heroical economist denounced such pranks as
    “profligate” and much else. Though an individual case may often
    enough seem ludicrous, yet the system and the spirit engendered by
    it were to the taxpayer, that is to the nation, priceless.



IV


One of the few failures of this active and fruitful period was the
proposal (1863) that charities should pay income-tax upon the returns from
their endowments. What is their exemption but the equivalent of a gift to
them from the general taxpayer? He has to make good the sum that ought in
reason and equity to have been paid by them, as by other people, to the
government that protects them. Why should this burden be compulsorily laid
upon him? What is the quality of an endowment for a charitable purpose
that constitutes a valid claim for such a boon? Into this case Mr.
Gladstone threw himself with full force. The opposition to him was as
heated and as vigorous as he ever provoked, and the violence of the
resistance roused an answering vehemence in him. He speaks in his diary of
his “deadly encounter with the so-called charities.” “I was endeavouring,”
he says, “to uphold the reality of truth and justice against their
superficial and flimsy appearances.” “Spoke from 5.10 to 8.20, with all my
might, such as it was.” This speech, with its fierce cogency and trenchant
reasoning, was counted by good judges who heard it, to be among the two or
three most powerful that he ever made, and even to-day it may be read with
the same sort of interest as we give to Turgot’s famous disquisition on
Foundations. It turns a rude searchlight upon illusions about charity that
are all the more painful to dispel, because they often spring from pity
and from sympathy, not the commonest of human elements. It affects the
jurist, the economist, the moralist, the politician. The House was
profoundly impressed by both the argument and the performance, but the
clamour was too loud, all the idols of market-place and tribe were marched
out in high parade, and the proposal at last was dropped.

(M24) Though the idea of putting a tax on the income of charitable
endowments was rejected, the budget of 1863 was the record of a triumph
that was complete. The American civil war by arresting the supply of
cotton had half ruined Lancashire. The same cause had diminished the
export trade to America by six millions sterling. Three bad seasons
spoiled the crops. There was distress in Ireland. Yet the chancellor had a
revenue in excess of expenditure by the noble figure of three millions and
three quarters. Mr. Gladstone naturally took the opportunity of surveying
the effects of four years of his financial policy. He admitted that they
had been four years of tension, and this tension had been enhanced by his
large remissions of duty, and by taking in hand the completion of the
great work of commercial legislation. The end of it all was a growth of
wealth, as he called it, almost intoxicating. The value of British goods
sent to France had risen from four millions and three quarters to nearly
nine millions and one quarter, in other words had about doubled under the
operations of the treaty of commerce.(45) If to this were added foreign
and colonial produce sent through us, and acquired by us in exchange for
our own produce, the value had risen from nine and a half in 1859 to
twenty-one and three quarters in 1862. In Mr. Gladstone’s own description
later, the export trade of 1860, in spite of a bad harvest, was so
stimulated by the liberating customs act, that it rose at once from a
hundred and thirty millions to a hundred and thirty-five. The next year it
fell to a hundred and twenty-five, and in 1862 it fell by another million
owing to the withdrawal, by reason of the American war, of the material of
our greatest manufacture. In 1866 it rose to a hundred and eighty-eight
millions.(46) Then under the head of income-tax, and comparing 1842 with
1862, over the same area, and with the same limitations, the aggregate
amount of assessed income had risen from one hundred and fifty-six
millions to two hundred and twenty-one. Other tests and figures need not
detain us.


    _April 16, 1863._—My statement lasted three hours, and this with a
    good deal of compression. It wound up, I hope, a chapter in
    finance and in my life. Thanks to God. 17.—The usual sense of
    relaxation after an effort. I am oppressed too with a feeling of
    deep unworthiness, inability to answer my vocation, and the desire
    of rest. 18.—To Windsor, had an audience of the Queen; so warm
    about Sir G. Lewis, and she warned me not to overwork.


Lewis had died five days before (April 13), and this is Mr. Gladstone’s
entry:—


    _April 14._—Reached C.H.T. at 11-1/4, and was met by the sad news
    of the death of Sir George Lewis. I am pained to think of my
    differences with him at one time on finance; however, he took
    benefit by them rather than otherwise. A most able, most learned,
    most unselfish, and most genial man.


To Sir Gilbert Lewis, he wrote (April 18):—


    Like several eminent public men of our time, he had many qualities
    for which the outer world did not perhaps, though it may not have
    denied them, ever give him full positive credit. For example, his
    singular courtesy and careful attention to others in all
    transactions great and small; his thoroughly warm and most
    forthcoming and genial disposition; his almost unconsciousness of
    the vast stores of his mind, and of the great facility and
    marvellous precision with which he used them; and, if I may so
    say, the noble and antique simplicity of character which he united
    with such knowledge of men and of affairs.


The final budget of this most remarkable series was that of 1866, when he
swept away the last of the old vexatious duties on timber. It contained
another element as to which, as I have said, some thought he had not been
keen enough. In the budget of 1866 he first started the scheme of a
sinking fund, which, when amplified, and particularly when simplified by
his successors, did so much to reduce the dead weight of debt.(47) The
complication of his scheme was due to his desire to make sure of its
stability, and undoubtedly he would have carried it if he had remained in
office through the session. He is, however, entitled to credit for laying
the foundation of an effective sinking fund.

One word more may be added on Mr. Gladstone as financier. He was far too
comprehensive in his outlook to suppose that the great outburst of
material prosperity during the years in which he controlled the exchequer
and guided parliament in affairs of money, was wholly and without
qualification due to budgets alone. To insist on ascribing complex results
to single causes is the well-known vice of narrow and untrained minds. He
was quite alive to the effects of “the enormous, constant, rapid, and
diversified development of mechanical power, and the consequent saving of
labour by the extension of machinery.” He was well aware of the share of
new means of locomotion in the growth of industrial enterprise. But the
special cause of what was most peculiar to England in the experience of
this period he considered to be the wise legislation of parliament, in
seeking every opportunity for abolishing restrictions upon the application
of capital and the exercise of industry and skill. In this wise
legislation his own energetic and beneficent genius played the master
part.




Chapter V. American Civil War. (1861-1863)


    Then came the outbreak which had been so often foretold, so often
    menaced; and the ground reeled under the nation during four years
    of agony, until at last, after the smoke of the battlefield had
    cleared away, the horrid shape which had cast its shadow over a
    whole continent had vanished, and was gone for ever.—JOHN BRIGHT.



I


Sir Cornewall Lewis in a memorandum printed for the use of his colleagues
both truly and impressively described the momentous struggle that at this
time broke upon the family of civilised nations in both hemispheres. “It
may be fairly asserted,” says the particularly competent writer of it,
“that the war in America is the greatest event that has occurred in the
political world since the definitive fall of Napoleon in 1815. The
expulsion of the elder branch of the Bourbons in 1830; the expulsion of
Louis Philippe in 1848; the re-establishment of a republic, and the
subsequent restoration of a Bonaparte to the imperial throne—were all
important events, both to France and to the rest of Europe; but (with the
exception of the recent annexation of Savoy and Nice) they have not
altered the boundaries of France; and Europe still, in spite of minor
changes, substantially retains the form impressed upon it by the treaty of
Vienna.(48) With respect to the internal consequences of these changes, a
French revolution has become a fight in the streets of Paris, in order to
determine who shall be the occupant of the Tuileries. The administrative
body and the army—the two great governing powers of France—remain
substantially unaffected; whereas the American civil war threatens a
complete territorial re-arrangement of the Union; it also portends a
fundamental change in the constitution, by which both its federal and
state elements will be recast.”

Of this immense conflict Mr. Gladstone, like most of the leading statesmen
of the time, and like the majority of his countrymen, failed to take the
true measure. The error that lay at the root of our English misconception
of the American struggle is now clear. We applied ordinary political
maxims to what was not merely a political contest, but a social
revolution. Without scrutiny of the cardinal realities beneath, we
discussed it like some superficial conflict in our old world about
boundaries, successions, territorial partitions, dynastic preponderance.
The significance of the American war was its relation to slavery. That war
arose from the economic, social, and political consequences that flowed
from slavery—its wasteful cultivation, the consequent need for extension
of slave territory, the probable revival of the accursed African trade,
the constitution of slave-holders as the sole depositaries of social
prestige and political power. Secession was undertaken for the purpose of
erecting into an independent state a community whose whole structure was
moulded on a system that held labour in contempt, that kept the labourer
in ignorance and cruel bondage, that demanded a vigilant censorship of the
press and an army of watchmen and spies. And this barbaric state was to
set itself up on the border of a great nation, founded on free industry,
political equality, diffused knowledge, energetic progress. Such was the
meaning of secession. “The rebellion,” as Charles Sumner well said to Mr.
Gladstone in 1864, “is slavery in arms, revolting, indecent, imperious.”
Therefore those who fought against secession fought against slavery and
all that was involved in that dark burden, and whatever their motives may
at different times have been, they rendered an immortal service to
humanity.(49)

(M25) At a very early period Mr. Gladstone formed the opinion that the
attempt to restore the Union by force would and must fail. “As far as the
_controversy_ between North and South,” he wrote to the Duchess of
Sutherland (May 29, 1861) “is a controversy on the principle announced by
the vice-president of the South, viz. that which asserts the superiority
of the white man, and therewith founds on it his right to hold the black
in slavery, I think that principle detestable, and I am wholly with the
opponents of it.... No distinction can in my eyes be broader than the
distinction between the question whether the Southern ideas of slavery are
right, and the question whether they can justifiably be put down by war
from the North.” To Cyrus Field he wrote (Nov. 27, 1862): “Your frightful
conflict may be regarded from many points of view. The competency of the
Southern states to secede; the rightfulness of their conduct in seceding
(two matters wholly distinct and a great deal too much confounded); the
natural reluctance of Northern Americans to acquiesce in the severance of
the union, and the apparent loss of strength and glory to their country;
the bearing of the separation on the real interests and on the moral
character of the North; again, for an Englishman, its bearing with respect
to British interests;—all these are texts of which any one affords ample
matter for reflection, but I will only state as regards the last of them,
that I for one have never hesitated to maintain that, in my opinion, the
separate and special interests of England were all on the side of the
maintenance of the old union, and if I were to look at those interests
alone, and had the power of choosing in what way the war should end, I
would choose for its ending by the restoration of the old union this very
day.”

In a letter to the Duchess of Sutherland (Nov. 7, 1862), he says: “A
friendly correspondent writes to say he is sorry the South has my
sympathies. But the South has not my sympathies, except in the sense in
which the North has them also. I wish them both cordially well, which I
believe is more than most Englishmen can at present say with truth. In
both I see the elements of future power and good; in both I see also the
elements of danger and mischief.’ To another correspondent: ’I have never
to my knowledge expressed any sympathy with the Southern cause in any
speech at Newcastle or elsewhere, nor have I passed any eulogium upon
President Davis. In dealing whether with South or North I have thought it
out of my province to touch in any way the complicated question of praise
and blame.”

At a very early stage the Duke of Argyll sent him some letter of Mrs.
Beecher Stowe’s, and Mr. Gladstone in acknowledging it from Penmaenmawr
(Aug. 26, 1861) writes expressing all possible respect for her character
and talents, but thinks that she has lost intellectual integrity:—


    It seems to me that the South has two objects in view: firstly the
    liberation of its trade and people from the law of tribute to the
    North; secondly and perhaps mainly, the maintenance of the slave
    system without fear or risk of Northern interference. That on the
    other hand it is very difficult to analyse that movement of the
    North which Mrs. Stowe finds sublime, but which in my eyes is
    tumultuous. There is the anti-slavery motive impelling with great
    vehemence a small section, which she rather offensively calls the
    Christian people of the union; there is the spirit of protection
    and monopoly, unwilling to surrender future booty; there is the
    unquietness in the great towns, found in America as in all
    countries, and ever ready for a row; there is the fear which Mr.
    Motley described, that unless a firm front were shown against
    secession it would not stop where it had begun; there is last and
    (relatively to this subject matter) best of all the strong
    instinct of national life, and the abhorrence of nature itself
    towards all severance of an organised body. This last sentiment,
    as well as the first, deserved to be treated by us with great
    tenderness and respect.... As to the authority and title of the
    North it must be granted _primâ facie_, but on examination it is
    subject to a good deal of doubt, and I think it seems to have been
    the intention of the framers of the constitution not to lay down a
    rule for the solution of a great question of this kind, but to
    leave it open. And if so, I think they were wise; for such a
    question could only arise for any practical purpose at a time when
    the foundations of the great social deep are broken up, and when
    the forces brought into unrestrained play are by far too gigantic
    to be controlled by paper conventions.


So much for his view of the case in its general aspect.



II


At one dangerous moment in the conflict it seemed possible that Great
Britain might be forced to take a part. The commander of an American
man-of-war boarded the _Trent_ (Nov. 8, 1861), a British mail-boat, seized
two emissaries from the Southern confederacy on their way to Europe, and
carried them off to his own ship, whence they were afterwards landed and
thrown into prison. This act was in direct violation of those rights of
neutrals of which the United States hitherto had been the strictest
champion against Great Britain; and nothing was to be gained by it, for
the presence of the two commissioners was not in the least likely to
effect any change in the policy of either England or France. Violent
explosions of public feeling broke out on both sides of the Atlantic; of
anger in England, of exultation in America. Mr. Gladstone’s movements at
this critical hour are interesting. On Nov. 27, says Phillimore,
“Gladstones dined here. Gladstone, with the account in his pocket from the
evening papers of the capture of the Southern envoys out of the English
mail-ship.” The next two nights he was at court.


    _Nov. 28._—Off at 6.30 to Windsor. The Queen and Prince spoke much
    of the American news.

    _Nov. 29_ (Friday).—Came up to town for the cabinet on American
    news. Returned to Windsor for dinner, and reported to Queen and
    Prince.


Of this important cabinet, Mr. Gladstone wrote an account to the Duke of
Argyll, then absent from London:—


    _Dec. 3, ’61._—The cabinet determined on Friday to ask reparation,
    and on Saturday they agreed to two despatches to Lord Lyons of
    which the one recited the facts, stated we could not but suppose
    the American government would of itself be desirous to afford us
    reparation, and said that in any case we must have (1) the
    commissioners returned to British protection; and (2) an apology
    or expression of regret. The second of these despatches desired
    Lyons to come away within seven days if the demands are not
    complied with. _I thought and urged that we should hear what the
    Americans had to say before withdrawing Lyons, for I could not
    feel sure that we were at the bottom of the law of the case, or
    could judge here and now what form it would assume. But this view
    did not prevail._


We may assume that Mr. Gladstone, in reporting these proceedings at
Windsor, did not conceal his own arguments for moderation which had been
overruled. On the following day the cabinet again met. “Nov. 30 (Sat.).
Left Windsor at 11.25. Cabinet 3-5-½. Lord Russell’s draft softened and
abridged.” That is to say the draft was brought nearer, though not near
enough, to the temper urged upon the cabinet and represented at court by
Mr. Gladstone the day before.

The story of the first of these two critical despatches is pretty well
known; how the draft initialled by Lord Russell was sent down the same
night to Windsor; how the Prince Consort—then as it proved rapidly sinking
down into his fatal illness—found it somewhat meagre, and suggested
modifications and simplifications; how the Queen returned the draft with
the suggestions in a letter to the prime minister; how Palmerston thought
them excellent, and after remodelling the draft in the more temperate
spirit recommended by the Prince, though dropping at least one irritating
phrase in the Queen’s memorandum,(50) sent it back to the foreign office,
whence it was duly sent on (Dec. 1) to Lord Lyons at Washington. It seems,
moreover, that a day’s reflection had brought his colleagues round to Mr.
Gladstone’s mind, for Lord Russell wrote to Lord Lyons a private note
(Dec. 1) in effect instructing him to say nothing about withdrawing in
seven days.(51)

(M26) The British despatches were delivered to Lord Lyons at Washington at
midnight on December 18; the reparation despatch was formally read to Mr.
Seward on the 23rd; and on Christmas Day Lincoln had a meeting of his
cabinet. Sumner was invited to attend, and he read long letters from
Cobden and Bright. “At all hazards,” said Bright, “you must not let this
matter grow to a war with England. Even if you are right and we are wrong,
war will be fatal to your idea of restoring the union.... I implore you
not, on any feeling that nothing can be conceded, and that England is
arrogant and seeking a quarrel, to play the game of every enemy of your
country.”(52) A French despatch in the English sense was also read. Seward
and Sumner were in favour of giving up the men. The president, thinking of
popular excitement, hesitated. In the end, partly because the case was bad
on the merits, partly because they could not afford to have a second great
war upon their hands, all came round to Seward’s view.(53)



III


By the autumn of 1862 the war had lasted a year and a half. It was already
entailing a cost heavier than our war with Napoleon at its most expensive
period. The North had still failed to execute its declared purpose of
reducing the South to submission. The blockade of the Southern ports, by
stopping the export of cotton, was declared to have produced worse
privations, loss, and suffering to England and France than were ever
produced to neutral nations by a war. It was not in Mr. Gladstone’s nature
to sit with folded hands in sight of what he took to be hideous and
unavailing carnage and havoc. Lord Palmerston, he tells Mrs. Gladstone
(July 29, 1862), “has come exactly to my mind about some early
representation of a friendly kind to America, if we can get France _and_
Russia to join.” A day or two later (Aug. 3) he writes to the Duke of
Argyll: “My _opinion_ is that it is vain, and wholly unsustained by
precedent, to say nothing shall be done until both parties are desirous of
it; that, however, we ought to avoid sole action, or anything except
acting in such a combination as would morally represent the weight of
impartial Europe; that with this view we ought to communicate with France
and Russia; to make with them a friendly representation (if they are ready
to do it) of the mischief and the hopelessness of prolonging the contest
in which both sides have made extraordinary and heroic efforts; but if
they are not ready, then to wait for some opportunity when they may be
disposed to move with us. The adhesion of other powers would be desirable
if it does not encumber the movement.”

“In the year 1862,” says Mr. Gladstone in a fragment of autobiography, “I
had emerged from very grave financial [budget] difficulties, which in 1860
and 1861 went near to breaking me down. A blue sky was now above me, and
some of the Northern liberals devised for me a triumphant visit to the
Tyne, which of course entailed as one of its incidents a public dinner.”
Seeing a visit to Newcastle announced, Lord Palmerston wrote (Sept. 24) to
Mr. Gladstone, begging him on no account to let the chancellor of the
exchequer be too sympathetic with the tax-payer, or to tell the country
that it was spending more money than it could afford. A more important
part of the letter was to inform Mr. Gladstone that he himself and Lord
Russell thought the time was fast approaching when an offer of mediation
ought to be made by England, France, and Russia, and that Russell was
going privately to instruct the ambassador at Paris to sound the French
government. “Of course,” Lord Palmerston said, “no actual step would be
taken without the sanction of the cabinet. But if I am not mistaken, you
would be inclined to approve such a course.” The proposal would be made to
both North and South. If both should accept, an armistice would follow,
and negotiations on the basis of separation. If both should decline, then
Lord Palmerston assumed that they would acknowledge the independence of
the South. The next day Mr. Gladstone replied. He was glad to learn what
the prime minister had told him, and for two reasons especially he desired
that the proceedings should be prompt. The first was the rapid progress of
the Southern arms and the extension of the area of Southern feeling. The
second was the risk of violent impatience in the cotton-towns of
Lancashire, such as would prejudice the dignity and disinterestedness of
the proffered mediation.(54) On September 17 Russell had replied to a
letter from Palmerston three days earlier, saying explicitly, “I agree
with you that the time is come for offering mediation to the United States
government, with a view to the recognition of the independence of the
Confederates. I agree further, that in case of failure, we ought ourselves
to recognise the Southern states as an independent state.”(55) So far,
then, had the two heads of the government advanced, when Mr. Gladstone
went to Newcastle.

(M27) The people of the Tyne gave him the reception of a king. The prints
of the time tell how the bells rang, guns thundered, a great procession of
steamers followed him to the mouth of the river, ships flew their gayest
bunting, the banks were thronged with hosts of the black-handed toilers of
the forges, the furnaces, the coal-staiths, chemical works, glass
factories, shipyards, eager to catch a glimpse of the great man; and all
this not because he had tripled the exports to France, but because a sure
instinct had revealed an accent in his eloquence that spoke of feeling for
the common people.(56)


    _Oct. 7, 1862._—Reflected further on what I should say about
    Lancashire and America, for both these subjects are critical....
    At two we went to Newcastle and saw the principal objects,
    including especially the fine church and lantern, the gem of an
    old castle, and Grey Street—I think our best modern street. The
    photographer also laid hands on me. At six we went to a crowded
    and enthusiastic dinner of near 500. I was obliged to make a long
    oration which was admirably borne. The hall is not very easy to
    fill with the voice, but quite practicable. 8.—Reached Gateshead
    at 12, and after an address and reply, embarked in the midst of a
    most striking scene which was prolonged and heightened as we went
    down the river at the head of a fleet of some 25 steamers, amidst
    the roar of guns and the banks lined or dotted above and below
    with multitudes of people. The expedition lasted six hours, and I
    had as many speeches as hours. Such a pomp I shall probably never
    again witness; circumstances have brought upon me what I do not in
    any way deserve.... The spectacle was really one for Turner, no
    one else. 9.—Off to Sunderland. Here we had a similar reception
    and a progress through the town and over the docks and harbour
    works. I had to address the naval men, and then came a large
    meeting in the hall. Thence by rail to Middlesborough. At
    Darlington we were met by Lord Zetland, the mayor, and others.
    Middlesborough was as warm or even warmer. Another progress and
    steamboat procession and incessant flood of information respecting
    this curious place. The labour, however, is too much; giddiness
    came over me for a moment while I spoke at Sunderland, and I had
    to take hold of the table. At Middlesborough we had an address and
    reply in the town hall, then a public dinner, and we ended a day
    of over fifteen hours at Upleatham before midnight. C. again
    holding out, and indeed she is a great part of the whole business
    with the people everywhere. I ought to be thankful, still more
    ought I to be ashamed. It was vain to think of reading, writing,
    or much reflecting on such a day. I was most happy to lie down for
    fifteen minutes at Mr. Vaughan’s in Middlesborough. 11.—Off at 8
    A.M. to take the rail at Guisbro. At Middlesborough many friends
    had gathered at the station to give us a parting cheer. We came on
    to York, went at once to the mansion-house, and then visited the
    minister. At two came the “luncheon,” and I had to address another
    kind of audience.


Unhappily, the slave must still go in the triumphal car to remind us of
the fallibilities of men, and here the conqueror made a grave mistake. At
the banquet in the town hall of Newcastle (Oct. 7), with which all these
joyous proceedings had begun, Mr. Gladstone let fall a sentence about the
American war of which he was destined never to hear the last: “We know
quite well that the people of the Northern states have not yet drunk of
the cup—they are still trying to hold it far from their lips—which all the
rest of the world see they nevertheless must drink of. We may have our own
opinions about slavery; we may be for or against the South; but there is
no doubt that Jefferson Davis and other leaders of the South have made an
army; they are making, it appears, a navy; and they have made what is more
than either, they have made a nation.”

Here the speaker was forgetful of a wholesome saying of his own, that “a
man who speaks in public ought to know, besides his own meaning, the
meaning which others will attach to his words.” The sensation was
immediate and profound. All the world took so pointed an utterance to mean
that the government were about to recognise the independence of the South.
The cotton men were thrown into a position of doubt and uncertainty that
still further disturbed their trade. Orders for cotton were countermanded,
and the supply of the precious material for a moment threatened to become
worse than ever. Cobden and Bright were twitted with the lapse of their
favourite from a central article of their own creed and commandments.
Louis Blanc, then in exile here, describing the feeling of the country,
compares the sympathy for the North to a dam and the sympathy for the
South to a torrent, and says he fears that Gladstone at Newcastle had
yielded to the temptation of courting popularity.(57) The American
minister dropped a hint about passports.(58)

To the numerous correspondents who complained of his language Mr.
Gladstone framed a form of reply, disclaiming responsibility for all the
various inferences that people chose to draw from his language. “And
generally,” his secretary concluded, in phrases that justly provoked plain
men to wrath, “Mr. Gladstone desires me to remark that to form opinions
upon questions of policy, to announce them to the world, and to take or to
be a party to taking any of the steps necessary for giving them effect,
are matters which, though connected together, are in themselves distinct,
and which may be separated by intervals of time longer or shorter
according to the particular circumstances of the case.”(59) Mr. Gladstone
sent a copy of this enigmatical response to the foreign secretary, who was
far too acute not to perceive all the mischief and the peril, but had his
full share of that generosity of our public life that prevents a minister
from bearing too hardly on a colleague who has got the boat and its crew
into a scrape. Lord Russell replied from Walmer (Oct. 20): “I have
forwarded to your private secretary your very proper answer to your very
impertinent correspondent. Still, you must allow me to say that I think
you went beyond the latitude which all speakers must be allowed, when you
said that Jeff. Davis had made a nation. Recognition would seem to follow,
and for that step I think the cabinet is not prepared. However, we shall
soon meet to discuss this very topic.” A week after the deliverance at
Newcastle, Lewis, at Lord Palmerston’s request as I have heard, put things
right in a speech at Hereford. The Southern states, he said, had not _de
facto_ established their independence and were not entitled to recognition
on any accepted principles of public law.

(M28) It is superfluous for any of us at this day to pass judgment. Mr.
Gladstone has left on record in a fragmentary note of late date his own
estimate of an error that was in truth serious enough, and that has since
been most of all exaggerated by those sections of society and opinion who
at the time most eagerly and freely shared the very same delusion.


    I have yet to record, he writes (July 1896) in the fragment
    already more than once mentioned, an undoubted error, the most
    singular and palpable, I may add the least excusable of them all,
    especially since it was committed so late as in the year 1862,
    when I had outlived half a century. In the autumn of that year,
    and in a speech delivered after a public dinner at
    Newcastle-upon-Tyne, I declared in the heat of the American
    struggle that Jefferson Davis had made a nation, that is to say,
    that the division of the American Republic by the establishment of
    a Southern or secession state was an accomplished fact. Strange to
    say, this declaration, most unwarrantable to be made by a minister
    of the crown with no authority other than his own, was not due to
    any feeling of partizanship for the South or hostility to the
    North. The fortunes of the South were at their zenith. Many who
    wished well to the Northern cause despaired of its success. The
    friends of the North in England were beginning to advise that it
    should give way, for the avoidance of further bloodshed and
    greater calamity. I weakly supposed that the time had come when
    respectful suggestions of this kind, founded on the necessity of
    the case, were required by a spirit of that friendship which, in
    so many contingencies of life, has to offer sound recommendations
    with a knowledge that they will not be popular. Not only was this
    a misjudgment of the case, but even if it had been otherwise, I
    was not the person to make the declaration. I really, though most
    strangely, believed that it was an act of friendliness to all
    America to recognise that the struggle was virtually at an end. I
    was not one of those who on the ground of British interests
    desired a division of the American Union. My view was distinctly
    opposite. I thought that while the Union continued it never could
    exercise any dangerous pressure upon Canada to estrange it from
    the empire—our honour, as I thought, rather than our interest
    forbidding its surrender. But were the Union split, the North, no
    longer checked by the jealousies of slave-power, would seek a
    partial compensation for its loss in annexing, or trying to annex,
    British North America. Lord Palmerston desired the severance as a
    diminution of a dangerous power, but prudently held his tongue.

    That my opinion was founded upon a false estimate of the facts was
    the very least part of my fault. I did not perceive the gross
    impropriety of such an utterance from a cabinet minister, of a
    power allied in blood and language, and bound to loyal neutrality;
    the case being further exaggerated by the fact that we were
    already, so to speak, under indictment before the world for not
    (as was alleged) having strictly enforced the laws of neutrality
    in the matter of the cruisers. My offence was indeed only a
    mistake, but one of incredible grossness, and with such
    consequences of offence and alarm attached to it, that my failing
    to perceive them justly exposed me to very severe blame. It
    illustrates vividly that incapacity which my mind so long
    retained, and perhaps still exhibits, an incapacity of viewing
    subjects all round, in their extraneous as well as in their
    internal properties, and thereby of knowing when to be silent and
    when to speak.

    I am the more pained and grieved, because I have for the last
    five-and-twenty years received from the government and people of
    America tokens of goodwill which could not fail to arouse my
    undying gratitude. When we came to the arbitration at Geneva, my
    words were cited as part of the proof of hostile _animus_.
    Meantime I had prepared a lengthened statement to show from my
    abundant declarations on other occasions that there was and could
    be on my part no such _animus_. I was desirous to present this
    statement to the arbitrators. My colleagues objected so largely to
    the proceeding that I desisted. In this I think they probably were
    wrong. I addressed my paper to the American minister for the
    information of his government, and Mr. Secretary Fish gave me, so
    far as intention was concerned, a very handsome acquittal.

    And strange to say,_post hoc_ though, perhaps not _propter hoc_,
    the United States have been that country of the world in which the
    most signal marks of public honour have been paid me, and in which
    my name has been the most popular, the only parallels being Italy,
    Greece, and the Balkan Peninsula.


Among the many calumnies poured upon him in this connection was the charge
that he had been a subscriber to the Confederate Loan. “The statement,” he
wrote to a correspondent (Oct. 17, 1865), “is not only untrue, but it is
so entirely void of the slightest shadow of support in any imaginable
incident of the case, that I am hardly able to ascribe it to mere error,
and am painfully perplexed as to the motives which could have prompted so
mischievous a forgery.”



IV


As I have already said, the American minister had hinted at passports. Ten
days after Mr. Gladstone’s speech Mr. Adams saw Lord Russell. Having
mentioned some minor matters he came to the real object of the interview.
“If I had trusted,” he said, “to the construction given by the public to a
late speech, I should have begun to think of packing my carpet bag and
trunks. His lordship at once embraced the allusion, and whilst
endeavouring to excuse Mr. Gladstone, in fact admitted that his act had
been regretted by Lord Palmerston and the other cabinet officers. Still he
could not disavow the sentiments of Mr. Gladstone; so far as he understood
them (his meaning) was not that ascribed to him by the public. Mr.
Gladstone was himself willing to disclaim that. He had written to that
effect to Lord Palmerston.... His lordship said that the policy of the
government was to adhere to a strict neutrality, and to leave this
struggle to settle itself.... I asked him if I was to understand that
policy as not now to be changed. He said, Yes.”(60)

If this relation be accurate, then the foreign secretary did not construe
strict neutrality as excluding what diplomatists call good offices. On
October 13, Lord Russell circulated a memorandum to the cabinet setting
out in an argumentative tone all the adverse and confused aspects of the
situation and outlook in America, and ending in the emphatic conclusion
that it had now become a question for the great Powers of Europe whether
it was not their duty to ask both parties to agree to a suspension of arms
for the purpose of weighing calmly the advantages of peace. Cornewall
Lewis (Oct. 17), while expressing an opinion that a peaceful separation
between North and South would in the end have been best for the North, and
while apparently believing that the war must one day end in Southern
independence, met Russell’s suggestion by cogent arguments against action
on our part.(61) A week later (Oct. 24), Mr. Gladstone circulated a
rejoinder to Lewis, arguing for representation to the two combatants from
England, France, and Russia—a representation with moral authority and
force, of the opinion of the civilised world upon the conditions of the
case.

(M29) This pretty nearly concludes all that need be said upon the attitude
taken by Mr. Gladstone in that mighty struggle. We may at least add that
if, and where, it differed from that of the majority of his countrymen, it
did not differ for the worse. In November (1862) the French Emperor
renewed proposals of joint mediation. The Emperor had objects of his own
to serve. He was entangled in the coils of the Mexican adventure that was
to give the first shock to his throne and to add another to the long
scroll of tragedies in the house of Hapsburg. From the first the
government of the American Union had scowled upon the intervention of
Europe in the affairs of Mexico, just as the same government had refused
to intervene in a European protest on behalf of Poland. The civil war
between North and South kept American hands tied, and Napoleon well knew
that the success of the North and the consolidation of the Union would
overthrow his designs in Mexico. He cast restlessly about for any
combination that promised aid to the Southern confederates, who, whether
they should emerge strong or weak from the struggle, would be a useful
instrument for his future purposes. So now he pressed England and Russia
to join him in a project of mediation. Russia declined. The London cabinet
was divided.(62) Mr. Gladstone writes home in these important days.—“_Nov.
11._ We have had our cabinet to-day and meet again to-morrow. I am afraid
we shall do little or nothing in the business of America. But I will send
you definite intelligence. Both Lords Palmerston and Russell are
_right_.—_Nov. 12._ The United States affair has ended and not well. Lord
Russell rather turned tail. He gave way without resolutely fighting out
his battle. However, though we decline for the moment, the answer is put
upon grounds and in terms which leave the matter very open for the
future.—_Nov. 13._ I think the French will make our answer about America
public; at least it is very possible. But I hope they may not take it as a
positive refusal, or at any rate that they may themselves act in the
matter. It will be clear that we concur with them, that the war should
cease. Palmerston gave to Russell’s proposal a feeble and half-hearted
support. As to the state of matters generally in the cabinet, I have never
seen it smoother; and they look pretty well, I think, as regards my
department, though the distress tells upon me.”

The only speech, I believe, delivered by Mr. Gladstone upon the war in
parliament, while resisting the motion for the recognition of the
confederacy, was curiously balanced.(63) As to the South, he said, not a
few must sympathise with a resistance as heroic as ever was offered in the
history of the world on the part of a weaker body against the overpowering
forces of a stronger. On the other hand, the cause of the South was so
connected with slavery that a strong counter-current of feeling must arise
in the mind. Then again, it is impossible for any Englishman not to have a
very strong feeling of sympathy with those in the North who saw exalted
visions of the great future of their country, now threatened with
destruction. He had never agreed with those who thought it a matter of
high British interest that the old American union should be torn in
pieces. He had always thought that, involved as England was both in
interest and in duty and honour with Canada, the balanced state of the
American union which caused the whole of American politics to turn on the
relative strength of the slavery and Northern interests, was more
favourable to our colonial relations in North America, than if the said
union were to be divided into a cluster of Northern and a cluster of
Southern states. The North would endeavour to re-establish their
territorial grandeur by seeking union with the British possessions in
North America. He dwelt upon the horrid incidents of war. He insisted once
more that the public opinion of this country was unanimous that the
restoration of the American union by force was unattainable. Some cries of
“No” greeted this declaration about unanimity, but he would not qualify it
further than to say that at any rate it was almost unanimous. The other
chief speakers that night were Mr. Forster (who played a brave and
clear-sighted part throughout), Lord Robert Cecil, who attacked the “vague
and loose” arguments of the chancellor of the exchequer, and Mr. Bright,
who made perhaps the most powerful and the noblest speech of his life.




Chapter VI. Death Of Friends—Days At Balmoral. (1861-1884)


    Itaque veræ amicitiæ difficillime reperiuntur in iis qui in
    honoribus reque publica versantur.—CICERO.

    True friendships are hard to find among men who busy themselves
    about politics and office.



I


Within a few months of one another, three of Mr. Gladstone’s closest
friends and allies were lost to him. Lord Aberdeen died at the end of
1860. The letter written by Mr. Gladstone to the son of his veteran chief
is long, but it deserves reproduction.(64) As a writer, though an alert
and most strenuous disputant, he was apt to be diffuse and abstract.
Partly, these defects were due to the subjects with which, in his literary
performances, he mostly chose to deal. Perhaps one secret was that he
forgot the famous word of Quintilian, that the way to write well is not to
write quickly, but if you take trouble to write well, in time you can
write as quickly as you like.(65) His character of Lord Aberdeen, like his
beautiful letter in a similar vein about Hope-Scott,(66) where also his
feelings were deeply moved, is very different from his more formal manner,
and may claim high place among our literary portraits. It is penetrating
in analysis, admirable in diction, rich in experience of life and human
nature, and truly inspiring in those noble moralities that are the
lifeblood of style, and of greater things than mere style can ever be.

Then, in the autumn of 1861, both Graham and Sidney Herbert died; the
former the most esteemed and valued of all his counsellors; the latter, so
prematurely cut off, “that beautiful and sunny spirit,” as he called him,
perhaps the best beloved of all his friends. “Called on Gladstone,” says
Phillimore on this last occasion (Aug. 3); “found him at breakfast alone;
very glad to see me. His eyes filled with tears all the time he spoke to
me in a broken voice about his departed friend. The effect upon him has
been very striking, increased no doubt by recent political differences of
opinion.” “It is difficult to speak of Herbert,” Mr. Gladstone said later,
“because with that singular harmony and singular variety of gifts—every
gift of person, every gift of position, every gift of character with which
it pleased Providence to bless him—he was one of whom we may well recite
words that the great poet of this country has applied to a prince of our
early history, cut off by death earlier than his countrymen would have
desired:—


    “A sweeter and a lovelier gentleman,
    Framed in the prodigality of nature,
    The spacious world cannot again afford.”(67)


The void thus left was never filled. Of Graham he wrote to the Duchess of
Sutherland:—


    _Oct. 26._—This most sad and unexpected news from Netherby rises
    up between me and your letter, I have lost a friend whom I seem to
    appreciate the more because the world appreciated him so
    inadequately; his intellectual force could not be denied, but I
    have never known a person who had such signal virtues that were so
    little understood. The remainder of my political career be it what
    it may (and I trust not over long) will be passed in the House of
    Commons without one old friend who is _both_ political and
    personal. This is the gradual withdrawal of the props preparing
    for what is to follow. Let me not, however, seem to complain, for
    never, I believe, was any one blessed so entirely beyond his
    deserts in the especial and capital article of friendships.


Not many months later (June 1862) he had to write to Mr. Gordon, “We are
all sorely smitten by Canning’s death,” whose fame, he said, would “bear
the scrutinising judgment of posterity, under whose keen eye so many
illusions are doomed to fade away.”(68)

(M30) In the December of 1861 died the Prince Consort. His last
communication to Mr. Gladstone was a letter (Nov. 19) proposing to
recommend him as an elder brother of the Trinity House in place of Graham.
Of Mr. Gladstone’s first interview with the Queen after her bereavement,
Dean Wellesley wrote to him that she was greatly touched by his evidence
of sympathy. “She saw how much you felt for her, and the mind of a person
in such deep affliction is keenly sensitive and observant. Of all her
ministers, she seemed to me to think that you had most entered into her
sorrows, and she dwelt especially upon the manner in which you had parted
from her.” To the Duchess of Sutherland Mr. Gladstone writes:—


    _March 20, 1862._—I find I must go out at four exactly. In any
    case I do not like to trust to chance your knowing or not knowing
    what befell me yesterday. Your advice was excellent. I was really
    bewildered, but that all vanished when the Queen came in and kept
    my hand a moment. All was beautiful, simple, noble, touching to
    the very last degree. It was a meeting, for me, to be remembered.
    I need only report the first and last words of the personal part
    of the conversation. The first (after a quarter of an hour upon
    affairs) was (putting down her head and struggling) “the nation
    has been very good to me in my time of sorrow”; and the last, “I
    earnestly pray it may be long before you are parted from one
    another.”(69)


In the spring he took occasion at Manchester to pronounce a fine panegyric
on the Prince,(70) for which the Queen thanked him in a letter of
passionate desolation, too sacred in the anguish of its emotion to be
printed here. “Every source of interest or pleasure,” she concludes,
“causes now the acutest pain. Mrs. Gladstone, who, the Queen knows, is a
most tender wife, may in a faint manner picture to herself what the Queen
suffers.” Mr. Gladstone replies:—


    It may not be impertinent in him to assure your Majesty that all
    the words to which your Majesty refers were received with deep
    emotion by the whole of a very large assembly, who appeared to
    feel both your Majesty’s too conspicuous affliction, and the
    solemnity of its relation to the severe and, alas! darkening
    circumstances of the district.(71)

    In presuming to touch upon that relation, and in following the
    direction which his subject gave him towards very sacred ground,
    he was especially desirous to avoid using even a phrase or a word
    of exaggeration, and likewise to speak only as one who had seen
    your Majesty’s great sorrow in no other way than as all your
    Majesty’s subjects beheld it.

    In speaking thus he knew that he must fall short of the truth; and
    indeed, even were it becoming to make the attempt, he would in
    vain labour to convey the impression made upon his mind by the
    interview to which he was admitted at Windsor, and by the letter
    now in his hands.


More follows in the vein and on the topics that are usual in letters of
mourning sympathy, and the effect was what the writer sought. From
Balmoral came a note (May 6, 1862): “The Queen wishes Princess Alice to
thank Mr. Gladstone in her name for the kind letter he wrote to her the
other day, which did her aching heart good. Kind words soothe, but nothing
can lessen or alleviate the weight of sorrow she has to bear.”

Many years later he sat down to place on record his thoughts about the
Prince Consort, but did not proceed beyond a scanty fragment, which I will
here transcribe:—


    My praise will be impartial: for he did not fascinate, or command,
    or attract me through any medium but that of judgment and
    conscience. There was, I think, a want of freedom, nature, and
    movement in his demeanour, due partly to a faculty and habit of
    reflection that never intermitted, partly to an inexorable
    watchfulness over all he did and said, which produced something
    that was related to stillness and dullness in a manner which was
    notwithstanding, invariably modest, frank, and kind, even to one
    who had no claims upon him for the particular exhibition of such
    qualities. Perhaps I had better first disburden myself of what I
    have to set down against him. I do not think he was a man without
    prejudices, and this particularly in religion. His views of the
    church of Rome must, I think, have been illiberal. At any rate, I
    well remember a conversation with him at Windsor respecting the
    papal decree imposing the belief in the immaculate conception,
    somewhere about the time when it came forth. He said he was glad
    of it, as it would tend to expose and explode the whole system. I
    contended, with a freedom which he always seemed to encourage,
    that we all had an interest in the well being and well doing,
    absolute or relative, of that great Christian communion, and that
    whatever indicated or increased the predominance of the worse
    influences within her pale over the better was a thing we ought
    much to deplore. No assent, even qualified, was to be got.(72)


The death of the Prince Consort was a greater personal calamity to Mr.
Gladstone than he could then foresee. Perhaps the disadvantage was almost
as real as the death of the consort of King George II. to Sir Robert
Walpole. Much as they might differ in political and religious opinion, yet
in seriousness, conscience, and laborious temperament, the Prince and he
were in exact accord, and it is impossible to doubt that if the Prince had
survived at the Queen’s right hand, certain jars might have been avoided
that made many difficulties for the minister in later times.



II


I may as well here gather into a chapter some short pieces, mainly from
letters to Mrs. Gladstone during the period covered by this fifth book.
The most interesting of them, perhaps, are the little pictures of his life
as minister in attendance at Balmoral; but there are, besides, two or
three hints of a simplicity in his faculty of enjoyment in regions outside
of graver things, that may shock critics of more complex or fastidious
judgment. Readers will benevolently take them all as they come. He made a
curious entry in his diary upon his birthday at the end of 1860: “_’Dec.
29._ Began my fifty-second year. I cannot believe it. I feel within me the
rebellious unspoken word, I will not be old. The horizon enlarges, the sky
shifts, around me. It is an age of shocks; a discipline so strong, so
manifold, so rapid and whirling that only when it is at an end, if then,
can I hope to comprehend it.” Yet nearly all the most conspicuous scenes
still lay before him.


    _October 18, 1860._—I did not get to the play last night from
    finding _The Woman in White_ so very interesting. It has no dull
    parts, and is far better sustained than _Adam Bede_, though I do
    not know if it rises quite as high. The character drawing is
    excellent.

    _Downing Street, Dec. 15._—The chancellor says (keep this from
    view) that Prince Albert said to him at Windsor: “We Germans have
    no boundaries; our only boundary is the Quadrilateral,” _i.e._
    fortress in the heart of Italy. This, I fear, must be true, and,
    if so, is sad enough, because he evidently spoke his mind out
    unsuspiciously.

    _Dec. 18._—I actually went last night five mortal miles to Hoxton
    to see “Eily O’Connor,” the Colleen Bawn in another shape! It was
    not without interest, though very inferior, and imitated in some
    cases with a ludicrous closeness. The theatre is a poor working
    man’s theatre. I paid 1s. for a very aristocratic place. To-night
    I am going with Phillimore to the Westminster play, a Latin one,
    which I am afraid is rather long.

    _Jan. 18, 1861._—I write a few lines to you in the train, near
    Harrow. We shall not be in till four; all safe; and immense care
    evidently taken on account of the frost, though I do not feel it
    much in the air. I have had other matters to keep me warm. Among
    the letters given me this morning at Hawarden was one from Lord
    John, in which he quietly informs me that since the cabinet
    separated _he_ has agreed to guarantee a loan, and for Morocco!
    This I mean to resist, and have managed to write a letter in the
    carriage to tell him so. What will come of it, I do not know. It
    is a very serious affair. I am afraid he has committed himself
    egregiously. I am very bad now; but what _shall_ I be at
    sixty-eight?

    _Jan. 19._—Indeed, this is a strange world. Yesterday it seemed
    Lord J. Russell might go out, or more likely I might, or even the
    cabinet might go to pieces. To-day he writes to me that he
    supposes he must find a way out of his proposal! So that is over.

    _Jan. 23._—You seem to have taken great pains about stable
    affairs, and I am quite satisfied. The truth indeed, alas, is, I
    am not fit at this critical time to give any thought to such
    matters. The embarrassment of our vast public expenditure,
    together with the ill effects of the bad harvest, are so thick
    upon me, together with the arrangements for next year and the
    preparation of my own bills for improvements, which, though a
    laborious, are a healthy and delightful part of my work.

    _Jan. 24._—I expect Argyll to share my mutton to-night, and we
    shall, I dare say, have a comfortable talk. Last night I saw
    Herbert. I think he looks much better. He did not open the subject
    of estimates, nor did I, before _her_, but I told him what I am
    sorry to say is true, that the prospects of revenue grow much
    worse. Up to a certain point, I must certainly make a stand. But I
    think he is rather frightened about expenditure, and not so
    panic-stricken about France; so that we may come together.

    _Jan. 25._—I write from the cabinet. I am in the midst of a deadly
    struggle about the estimates; the only comfort this year is, that
    I think the conflict will be more with the navy than the army.
    Herbert has told me to-day, with a simplicity and absence of
    egotism, which one could not but remark in his graceful character,
    the nature of his complaint. You will quickly guess. As to
    cabinets, Lord John says we had better meet frequently, and it
    will be on Tuesday _if_ I am able to come down next week, but this
    is full of uncertainty. I hear that the Prince is _wild_ about the
    Danish question.

    _Jan. 26._—Another cabinet on Monday. It is just possible they may
    relax after that day. I have had two long days of hard fighting.
    By dint of what, after all, might be called threat of resignation,
    I have got the navy estimates a little down, and I am now _in_ the
    battle about the army. About the reduction in the navy, Palmerston
    criticised, Lord John protested, and Cardwell! I think went
    farther than either. Never on any single occasion since this
    government was formed has his voice been raised in the cabinet for
    economy. What a misfortune it is that Herbert has no nerve to
    speak out even in a private conversation. He told me yesterday of
    his reduction, but did not tell me that more than half of it was
    purely nominal! The article in the _Quarterly_ is clever; and what
    it says, moreover, on the merits of the income-tax is true. I
    suspect, I might say I fear, it is written by Northcote.

    _Feb. 5._—Yesterday, in the carriage from Kidderminster, I heard
    in part a dialogue, of which I gathered so much. _First worthy_,
    “I suppose we shall have to pay twopence or threepence more
    income-tax.” _Second worthy_, “Gladstone seems to be a totally
    incompetent man.” _Third_, “Then he always wraps himself in such
    mystery. But now I do not see what else he can do; he has cut away
    the ground from under his feet”—with a growl about the
    conservative party. Such is the public opinion of Worcestershire
    beyond all doubt.

    _Hawarden, May 24._—The house looks cleanliness itself, and
    altogether being down here in the fresh air, and seeing nature all
    round me so busy with her work so beneficent and beautiful, makes
    me very sick of London and its wrathful politics, and wish that we
    were all here, or hereabouts once more.

    _July 20._—The political storm has blown over, but I do not think
    it seems an evening for riding to Holly House, nor can I honestly
    say that a party there would be a relaxation for my weary bones,
    and wearier nerves and brain.

    _Aug. 4._—I have been at All Saints this morning. Though London is
    empty, as they say, it was absolutely crammed. Richards preached
    an excellent sermon. But I certainly should not wish to be an
    habitual attendant there. The intention of the service is most
    devout, but I am far from liking wholly the mode of execution. My
    neighbour in church whispered to me, “Is the Bishop of London’s
    jurisdiction acknowledged here?” I think he seemed to wish it
    should not be.

    _Oct. 22._—Tell Harry [his son] he is right, Latin is difficult,
    and it is in great part because it is difficult that it is useful.
    Suppose lie wanted to make himself a good jumper; how would he do
    it? By trying _first_, indeed, what was easy, but after that
    always what was difficult enough to make him exert himself to the
    uttermost. If he kept to the easy jumps, he would never improve.
    But the jumps that are at first difficult by and bye become easy.
    So the Latin lessons, which he now finds difficult, he will find
    easy when once his mind has been improved and strengthened by
    those very lessons. See if he understands this.

    _Dec. 29._—The strangest feeling of all in me is a rebellion (I
    know not what else to call it) against growing old.

    _Cliveden, Maidenhead, Jan. 14, 1862._—I have written to John [his
    brother], and if he is in town I shall go up and see him tomorrow.
    Meantime I have mentioned Locock, as recommended by you. I fear
    the dark cloud is slowly gathering over him [his wife’s illness],
    as we have seen it lately gather over so many and then break. I am
    amazed at the mercy of God towards us, and towards me in
    particular. I think of all the children, and of their health in
    body and in mind. It seems as if it could not last; but this is
    all in God’s hand.

    Here are the Argylls, Lady Blantyre and a heap of young. We have
    been busy reading translations of Homer this morning, including
    some of mine, which are approved. Tennyson has written most noble
    lines on the Prince. Lord Palmerston is reported well.

    _Jan. 18._—I lifted Hayward last night back from dinner. He is
    full of the doctrine that Lord Palmerston is not to last another
    year. Johnny is then to succeed, and I to lead (as he says by the
    universal admission of the whigs) in the H. of C. It is rather
    hard before the death thus to divide the inheritance. But that we
    may not be too vain, it is attended with this further
    announcement, that when that event occurs, the government is
    shortly to break down.

    _Cabinet Room, Feb. 1._—The cabinet has gone well.(73) It is
    rather amusing. I am driving the screw; Lewis yields point by
    point. I think in substance the question is ruled in my favour.
    Thank God for the prospect of peace; but it will not positively be
    settled till Monday. Lewis’s last dying speech, ’Well, we will see
    what can be done.’

    _Bowden, Wilts., Feb. 19._—The funeral is over [the wife of his
    brother]. Nothing could be better ordered in point of taste and
    feeling. It was one of the most touching, I think the most
    touching, scene I ever witnessed, when the six daughters weeping
    profusely knelt around the grave, and amidst their sobs and tears
    just faltered out the petitions of the Lord’s Prayer in the
    service. John, sensible of his duty of supporting others, went
    through it all with great fortitude. On the whole, I must say I
    can wish no more for any family, than that when the stroke of
    bereavement comes, they meet it as it has been met here.

    _Nov. 18._—I have sat an hour with Lord Lyndhurst. He is much
    _older_ than when I saw him last, but still has pith and life in
    him, as well as that astonishing freshness of mind which gives him
    a charm in its way quite unrivalled. He was very kind, and what is
    more, he showed, I think, a seriousness of tone which has been
    missed before.

    Last night I saw “Lord Dundreary.” I think it—the part and the
    player, not the play—quite admirable. It is a thoroughly refined
    piece of acting, such as we hardly ever see in England; and it
    combines with refinement intense fun. My face became with laughing
    like what Falstaff says he will make Prince Henry’s face, “like a
    wet cloak ill laid up”(74) (_Phillimore_).

    _Windsor Castle, Dec. 10._—Here I am with six candles blazing! of
    which I shall put out a larger proportion when no longer afraid of
    a visit from the great people about the passages. I got your
    letter this morning, but I am amazed at your thinking I have the
    pluck to ask the Princess of Wales! or the Queen!!! about
    photographs promised or not promised.

    In came the Dean; after that, a summons to the Queen, with whom I
    have been an hour. She is well in health and in spirits, and when
    she speaks of the Prince does it with a free, natural, and healthy
    tone, that is most pleasing. I am to see the Prince of Wales after
    dinner. I now therefore make sure of leaving to-morrow. The Queen
    asked kindly about you, and I saw little Princess Beatrice.



III


    _Aug. 31, 1863._—Walked 24-3/4 miles. Found it rather too much for
    my stiffening limbs. My day of long stretches is, I think, gone
    by.

    _Balmoral, Sept. 26._—This place is on the whole very beautiful
    and satisfactory; and Deeside at large has lost for me none of its
    charms, with its black-green fir and grey rock, and its boundless
    ranges of heather still almost in full bloom. The Queen spends a
    good many hours out, and looks well, but older. I had a long
    conversation or audience to-day, but as regards the form and mode
    of life here, so far as I see, it does not differ for visitors
    from Windsor. All meals and rooms are separate, but sometimes, it
    appears, some are invited to dine with the Queen. The household
    circle is smaller here than at Windsor, and so less formal and
    dull. I doubt your doctrine about your message, but I will give it
    if a good opportunity occurs. She talked very pleasantly and well
    upon many matters public and other—(Do not go on reading this
    aloud or give it to others). As to politics, she talked most of
    America and Germany; also some Lancashire distress. She feels an
    immense interest in Germany, her recollections of the Prince’s
    sentiments being in that, as in other matters, a barometer to
    govern her sympathies and affections. She said (when I hoped she
    had received benefit from the air here) that she thought she had
    been better in Germany than anywhere, though it was excessively
    hot. She asked where I had been, and about our living at Hawarden,
    and where it was. I told her I thought she had been there, at
    least driving through from Eaton (was it not so?) when she was
    Princess, and at last she seemed to remember it, and said it was
    thirty-one years ago. Princess Alice has got a black boy here who
    was given to her, and he produces a great sensation on the
    Deeside, where the people never saw anything of the kind and
    cannot conceive it. A woman, and an intelligent one, cried out in
    amazement on seeing him, and said she would certainly have fallen
    down but for the Queen’s presence. She said nothing would induce
    her to wash his clothes _as the black would come off_! This story
    the Queen told me in good spirits.

    She said that some people after heavy bereavement disliked seeing
    those whom they had known well before, and who reminded them of
    what had been, but with her it was exactly the opposite; it was
    the greatest effort and pain to her to see any one who had [not]
    known _them_ before, and their mode of living. As an instance, she
    said it cost her much to see the Emperor of Austria, whom the
    Prince had never known. Evidently this clinging to things old will
    form itself into a habit, but I am afraid it may hereafter, when
    more have died off, be a matter of difficulty to her. It is
    impossible to help seeing that she mistrusts Lord Russell’s
    judgment in foreign affairs, indeed I have already had clear proof
    of this. She likes Lord Palmerston’s better; thinks he looks very
    old, and will not allow that it is all owing to an accident. But
    dinner is drawing near, so good-bye. We have had a good day, and
    have been up to the pyramid put on a hill-top as a memorial to the
    Prince, with the beautiful inscription.

    _Sept. 27._—I do not think Sunday is the best of days here. I in
    vain inquired with care about episcopal services; there did not
    seem to be one within fifteen miles, if indeed so near. We had
    something between family prayer and a service in the dining-room
    at ten; it lasted about forty minutes. Dr. Caird gave a short
    discourse, good in material, though over florid in style for my
    taste. The rest of the day I have had to myself. The Prince and
    Princess of Hesse I think went to the parish church. You are
    better off at Penmaenmawr.... I saw the two princes last night.
    They were playing billiards. The Prince of Wales asked
    particularly, as always, about you and Willy.

    _Sept. 28._—I must be brief as I have been out riding with Sir C.
    and Miss Phipps to Alt-na-Guisach (the Queen’s cottage), and came
    in _late_. Be assured all is very comfortable and restful here. I
    think too that I feel the air very invigorating, my room is
    pleasant and cheerful on the ground floor, with a turret
    dressing-room. ... I am pretty much master of my time. To-day I
    have heard nothing of the Queen. Last evening I was summoned to
    dine, as was Lady Churchill. It was extremely interesting. We were
    but seven in all, and anything more beautifully domestic than the
    Queen and her family it was impossible to conceive. The five were
    her Majesty, Prince and Princess Louis, Prince Alfred, and
    Princess Helena. Princess Louis (whom the Queen in speaking of
    still calls Princess Alice) asked about you all. I had the
    pleasure of hearing the good report of Lucy altogether confirmed
    from her lips and _the Queen’s_. The Queen thinks her like her
    dear mother. She talked about many things and persons; among
    others the Lyttelton family, and asked about the boys _seriatim_,
    but pulled me up at once when, in a fit of momentary oblivion, I
    said the New Zealander was the third. She spoke of the chancellor
    and of Roundell Palmer; I had a good opportunity of speaking him
    _up_, and found she had his book of hymns. She spoke very freely
    about the chancellor; and I heard from her that the
    attorney-general resigns on the score of health—of course Palmer
    succeeds. Prince Alfred is going to Edinburgh to study; he is a
    smart fellow, and has plenty of go in him.

    _Sept. 29._—I have just come in at 6-½ from a fine hill walk of
    over three hours, quite ready for another were there light and
    opportunity.

    _Sept. 30._—I am come in from a nineteen mile walk to the Lake of
    Lochnagar with Dr. Bekker, as fresh as a lark! Very wet. The Queen
    sent me a message not to go up Lochnagar (top) if there was mist;
    and mist there was, with rain to boot. I find the resemblance to
    Snowdon rather striking. It is 3800 feet; we went up about 3300.
    You forgot to tell me for what pious object you picked Lord P.’s
    pocket. Nor do you distinctly tell me where to address, but as you
    say three nights I suppose it should be Penmaenmawr. Last night we
    went down to Abergeldie to the gillies’ ball. There was a dance
    called the perpetual jig, nearly the best fun I ever witnessed.
    The princes danced with great activity after deer-stalking, and
    very well; Prince Alfred I thought beautifully. They were
    immensely amused at having passed me on the way home and offered
    me a lift, to which I replied (it was dark) thinking they were
    General Grey and a household party. The Princess did not
    dance—asked about you—is taking great care, and the Prince very
    strict about it also. She does not ride or fatigue herself. The
    event, according to Dr. Jenner, should take place in March or
    early in April. You see his authority and yours are at variance.
    The Queen was (according to Mrs. Bruce, who dined with her) very
    low last night, on account of the ball, which naturally recalled
    so much.

    _Oct. 3._—It happened oddly yesterday I was sent for while out. I
    had had a message from the Queen in the morning which made me
    think there would be no more, so I went out at a quarter past
    three. I am very sorry this happened. I am to see her, I believe,
    this evening.

    _Oct. 4._—The service at Ballater has made a great difference in
    favour of this Sunday. It was celebrated in the Free Kirk
    school-room for girls! and with a congregation under twenty, most
    attentive though very small, and no one left the room when we came
    to the Holy Communion. The Knollys family and people were one half
    or so. I gave Mrs. Knollys and one daughter a lift in _my_ drag
    back to Birkhall (2-½ miles which they all loyally walk to and
    fro) and had luncheon there. I had Thomas with me. The sermon was
    _extremely_ good; but the priest had a _few_ antics. I believe
    this is about the first expedition ever made from Balmoral to an
    episcopal service. Perhaps encouraged by my example, Captain W.
    got a drag to Castleton this morning, being a Roman. There was
    _no_ chaplain here to-day, and so no dining-room service, which
    for many I fear means no service at all.

    I dined with the Queen again last night; also Lady Augusta
    Bruce—seven, again, in all. The Crown Princess had a headache, as
    well she might, so they were not there. The same royalties as
    before, and everything quite as pleasing. The Queen talked
    Shakespeare, Scott, the use of the German language in England (and
    there I could not speak out _all_ my mind), Guizot’s translation
    of the Prince’s speeches, and his preface (which the Queen has
    since sent me to look at), the children’s play at Windsor (when
    Princess Alice acted a high priest, with great success—in
    “Athalie,” I think), the Prussian children (the Queen says the
    baby is not pretty—the little boy on coming yesterday called them
    all stumpfnase, pugnose), handwritings, Lord Palmerston’s to wit,
    Mr. Disraeli’s style in his letters to the Queen, the proper mode
    of writing, on what paper, etc., and _great_ laudation of Lady
    Lyttelton’s letters. Princess Alice declares her baby is pretty,
    and says she shall show it me. The Queen was very cheerful, and
    seemed for the time happy. A statue of the Prince is about to be
    set up at Aberdeen, and she is then to attend and receive an
    address, with Sir G. Grey present in due form. The household life
    is really very agreeable when one comes to know them. One way and
    another they have a great deal in them.

    _Oct. 5._—I have been riding to Invercauld House and up above it.
    The beauty there even surpassed my high expectations, and made
    everything here look quite pale in comparison. They were very
    kind, and offered me deer-stalking; we drank tea and ate scones.

    I have only time to tell you two things. First, the Queen is on
    Friday to do her first public act, to attend at the ’inauguration’
    of the statue of the Prince, and to receive an address. I am to be
    there officially. I have telegraphed for my uniform. I go on to
    Aberdeen and Trinity College at night, and on Saturday evening to
    Edinburgh. There was fear that it might be on Saturday, and that I
    should be kept, but this could not be, as Saturday is a ’fast’ for
    the periodical sacrament on Sunday. I told you the Queen talked
    about German on Saturday at dinner, among other things Schiller’s
    and Coleridge’s _Wallenstein_. Next morning she sent me, through
    Lady A. Bruce, the book, with a passage of which I have hastily
    translated the most important part. It is easy to conceive how it
    answers to her feelings.

    “Too well I know the treasure I have lost.
    From off my life the bloom is swept away;
    It lies before me cold and colourless;
    For he, that stood beside me like my youth,
    He charmed reality into a dream,
    And over all the common face of things
    He shed the golden glow of morning’s blush;
    And in the fire of his affection
    Dull forms, that throng the life of every day,
    Yea to mine own amazement, tow’red aloft.
    Win what I may henceforth, the Beautiful
    Is gone, and gone without return.”(75)

    You will say this was an opening. In reading another part of the
    book I found lines which I have turned as follows, no better than
    the others:—

    “For nothing other than a noble aim
    Up from its depths can stir humanity;
    The narrow circle narrows, too, the mind,
    And man grows greater as his ends are great.”(76)

    Now, I thought, can I in reply call the Queen’s attention to these
    significant words, a noble sermon? I asked Lady Augusta (of course
    I mean the German words) and she would not venture it. Had I a
    _viva voce_ chance, I would try.

    _Oct. 6._—I am sorry you quitted Penmaenmawr in the sulks—I mean
    him in the sulks, not you. Your exploit was great; was it not
    rather over-great? I have been out to-day for a real good seven
    hours in the open air, going up Lochnagar. The day was glorious.
    We went five gentlemen, at least men. E. H. was keen to go, but
    the Queen would not let her. Thomas also went up with a party from
    here, and his _raptures_ are such as would do you good. He says
    there is nothing it was not worth, and he has no words to describe
    his pleasure. Our party drove to Loch Muich, and then went up,
    some of us on ponies, some riding. I walked it all, and am not in
    the least tired, but quite ready, if there were need, to set out
    for it again. We saw towards the north as far as Caithness. I
    could not do all that the others did in looking down the
    precipices, but I managed a little. We had a very steep side to
    come down, covered with snow and very slippery; I was put to it,
    and had to come very slow, but Lord C. Fitzroy, like a good
    Samaritan, kept me company. The day was as lovely (after frost and
    snow in the night) as anything could be, and the whole is voted a
    great success. Well, there is a cabinet fixed for Tuesday; on the
    whole, this may be better than having it hang over one’s head.

    _Oct. 7._—The Queen’s talk last night (only think, she wants to
    read the French Jesuit—don’t know this) was about Guizot’s
    comparison of the Prince and King William, about Macaulay, America
    and the ironclads, where she was very national and high-spirited;
    and Schleswig-Holstein, in which she is intensely interested,
    because the Prince thought it a great case of justice on the side
    rather opposite to that of Lord Palmerston and the government
    policy. She spoke about this with intense earnestness, and said
    she considered it a legacy from him.

    Princess Alice’s baby lives above me, and I believe never cries. I
    never hear it. We have been out riding to Birkhall to-day, and I
    had much talk with Lady Churchill about the Queen. She (Lady C.)
    feels and speaks most properly about her. I told Lady Augusta last
    night, _à propos_ to the lines I wanted to mention, that I had
    been a great coward, _and she too_. She was very submissive at
    dinner in her manner to the Queen, and I told her it made me feel
    I had been so impudent. Only think of this: both through her and
    through General Grey it has come round to me that the Queen thinks
    she was too cheerful on the night I last dined. This she feels a
    kind of sin. She said, however, to Lady Augusta she was sure I
    should understand it.... I am very glad and a little surprised
    that Mrs. Bruce should say I have a good name here. The people
    are, one and all, very easy to get on with, and Windsor, I
    suppose, stiffens them a little.

    _Oct. 8._—The Queen has had a most providential escape. The
    carriage, a sociable, very low and safe, was overturned last night
    after dark, on her way back from an expedition of seven or eight
    hours. Princesses Louis of Hesse and Helena were with her. They
    were undermost, and not at all hurt. The Queen was shot out of the
    carriage, and received a contusion on the temple and sprained a
    thumb. When she got in, I think near ten o’clock, Dr. Jenner
    wished her to go to bed, but she said it was of no use, and she
    would not. She was very confident, however, about performing the
    duties of the ceremonial in Aberdeen to-morrow. But now this
    evening it is given up, and I do not doubt this is wise, but much
    inconvenience will be caused by so late a postponement. I have
    been up to the place to-day.... The Queen should give up these
    drives after dark; it is impossible to guarantee them. But she
    says she feels the hours from her drive to dinner such weary
    hours.

    Little Princess Victoria paid me a visit in my bedroom, which is
    also sitting-room, to-day. She is of sweet temper, decidedly
    pretty, very like both the Queen and her mother. Then I went to
    see the three Prussian children, and the two elder ones played
    with my rusty old stick of twenty or twenty-five years’ standing.

    _Holyrood, Oct. 11._—On Friday morning, as I expected, I talked to
    the Queen until the last moment. She did give me opportunities
    which might have led on to anything, but want of time hustled me,
    and though I spoke abruptly enough, and did not find myself timid,
    yet I could [not] manage it at all to my satisfaction. She said
    the one purpose of her life was gone, and she could not help
    wishing the accident had ended it. This is hardly qualified by
    another thing which she said to Lady Churchill, that she should
    not like to have died in that way. She went on to speak of her
    life as likely to be short. I told her that she would not give
    way, that duty would sustain her (this she quite recognised), that
    her burden was altogether peculiar, but the honour was in
    proportion, that no one could wonder at her feeling the present,
    which is near, but that the reward is _there_, though distant....
    Then about politics, which will keep. She rowed me for writing to
    Lord Palmerston about her accident, and said, “But, dear Mr.
    Gladstone, that was quite wrong.” The secret is kept wonderfully,
    and you must keep it. I hinted that it would be a very bad thing
    to have G. Grey away from such a cabinet on Tuesday, but all I
    could get was that I might arrange for any other minister (some
    one there certainly ought to be). I lectured her a little for
    driving after dark in such a country, but she said all her habits
    were formed on the Prince’s wishes and directions, and she could
    not alter them.

    _Hawarden, Dec. 29._—I am well _past half_ a century. My life has
    not been inactive. But of what kind has been its activity?
    Inwardly I feel it to be open to this general observation: it
    seems to have been and to be a series of efforts to be and to do
    what is beyond my natural force. This of itself is not
    condemnation, though it is a spectacle effectually humbling when I
    see that I have not according to Schiller’s figure enlarged with
    the circle in which I live and move. [_Diary._]



IV


    _Jan. 2, 1864._—The cabinet was on matters of great importance
    connected with Denmark, and has decided rightly to seek the
    co-operation of France and other powers before talking about the
    use, in any event, of force.(77) Lord Palmerston has gout sharply
    in the hand. The Queen wrote a letter, which I think did her great
    credit. Her love of truth and wish to do right prevent all
    prejudices from effectually warping her.

    The Queen talked much about the Danish question, and is very
    desirous of a more staid and quiet foreign policy. For the first
    time I think she takes a just credit to herself for having
    influenced beneficially the course of policy and of affairs in the
    late controversy.

    _Balmoral, Sept. 28._—I thought the Queen’s state of health and
    spirits last night very satisfactory. She looks better, more like
    what she used to look, and the spirits were very even; with the
    little references to the Prince just as usual. Whenever she quotes
    an opinion of the Prince, she looks upon the question as
    completely shut up by it, for herself and all the world. Prince
    Alfred is going to Germany for nine weeks—to study at Bonn, and to
    be more or less at Coburg. The Queen asked for you, of course. She
    has not said a syllable about public affairs to me since I came,
    but talked pleasantly of all manner of things.

    _Sept. 29._—The Queen sent to offer a day’s deer-stalking, but I
    am loth to trust my long eyesight.

    _Oct. 2._—At dinner last night there was a great deal of
    conversation, and to-day I have been near an hour with the Queen
    after coming back from Ballater. She was as good and as gracious
    as possible. I can hardly tell you all the things talked
    about—Prince Humbert, Garibaldi, Lady Lyttelton, the Hagley boys,
    Lucy, smoking, dress, fashion, Prince Alfred, his establishment
    and future plans, Prince of Wales’s visit to Denmark, revenue,
    Lancashire, foreign policy, the newspaper press, the habits of the
    present generation, young men, young married ladies, clubs,
    Clarendon’s journey, the Prince Consort on dress and fashion,
    Prince of Wales on ditto, Sir R. Peel, F. Peel, Mrs. Stonor, the
    rest of that family, misreading foreign names and words, repute of
    English people abroad, happy absence of foreign office disputes
    and quarrels.

    _Oct. 3._—I am just in from a sixteen mile walk, quite fresh, and
    pleased with myself! for having in my old age walked a measured
    mile in twelve minutes by the side of this beautiful Dee.

    _Oct. 7._—I have just come in from a delightful twenty-five miles
    ride with General Grey and another companion. I had another long
    interview with the Queen to-day. She talked most, and very freely
    and confidentially, about the Prince of Wales; also about Lord
    Russell and Lord Palmerston, and about Granville and Clarendon,
    the latter perhaps to an effect that will a little surprise you.
    Also the Dean of Windsor. It was a kind of farewell audience.




Chapter VII. Garibaldi—Denmark. (1864)


    There are in Europe two great questions: the question called
    social and the question of nationalities.... The map of Europe has
    to be re-made.... I affirm with profound conviction that this
    movement of nationalities has attained in Italy, in Hungary, in
    Vienna, in a great part of Germany, and in some of the Slavonian
    populations, a degree of importance that must at no distant period
    produce decisive results.... The first war-cry that arises will
    carry with it a whole zone of Europe.—MAZZINI (1852).



I


“My confidence in the Italian parliament and people,” Mr. Gladstone wrote
to Lacaita at the end of 1862, “increases from day to day. Their
self-command, moderation, patience, firmness, and forethought reaching far
into the future, are really beyond all praise.” And a few days later,
again to Lacaita—“Your letter proves that the king has not merely got the
constitutional lesson by rote—though even this for an Italian king would
be much; but that the doctrine has sunk into the marrow and the bone.” The
cause was won, and the work of construction went forward, but not on such
lines as Cavour’s master-hand was likely to have traced. Very early Mr.
Gladstone began to be uneasy about Italian finance. “I am sure,” he wrote
to Lacaita in April 1863, “that Italian freedom has no greater enemy in
the Triple Crown or elsewhere, than large continuing deficits.”

As events marched forward, the French occupation of Rome became an ever
greater scandal in Mr. Gladstone’s eyes. He writes to Panizzi (October 28,
1862):—


    My course about the Emperor has been a very simple one. It is not
    for me to pass gratuitous opinions upon his character or that of
    French institutions, or on his dealings with them. I believe him
    to be firmly attached to the English alliance, and I think his
    course towards us has been, on almost every occasion, marked by a
    friendliness perhaps greater and more conspicuous than we have
    always deserved at his hands. It is most painful to me to witness
    his conduct with regard to Italy.... He conferred upon her in 1859
    an immense, an inestimable boon. He marred this boon in a way
    which to me seemed little worthy of France by the paltry but
    unkind appropriation of Nice in particular. But in the matter of
    Rome he inflicts upon Italy a fearful injury. And I do not know by
    what law of ethics any one is entitled to plead the having
    conferred an unexpected boon, as giving a right to inflict a gross
    and enduring wrong.(78)


It was in 1862 that Mr. Gladstone made his greatest speech on Italian
affairs.(79) “I am ashamed to say,” he told the House, “that for a long
time, I, like many, withheld my assent and approval from Italian
yearnings.” He amply atoned for his tardiness, and his exposure of Naples,
where perjury was the tradition of its kings; of the government of the
pope in the Romagna, where the common administration of law and justice
was handed over to Austrian soldiery; of the stupid and execrable
lawlessness of the Duke of Modena; of the attitude of Austria as a
dominant and conquering nation over a subject and conquered race;—all this
stamped a decisive impression on the minds of his hearers. Along with his
speech on Reform in 1864, and that on the Irish church in the spring of
1865, it secured Mr. Gladstone’s hold upon all of the rising generation of
liberals who cared for the influence and the good name of Great Britain in
Europe, and who were capable of sympathising with, popular feeling and the
claims of national justice.



II


(M31) The Italian sentiment of England reached its climax in the reception
accorded to Garibaldi by the metropolis in April 1864. “I do not know what
persons in office are to do with him,” Mr. Gladstone wrote to Lord
Palmerston (March 26), “but you will lead, and we shall follow suit.” The
populace took the thing into their own hands. London has seldom beheld a
spectacle more extraordinary or more moving. The hero in the red shirt and
blue-grey cloak long associated in the popular mind with so many thrilling
stories of which they had been told, drove from the railway at Vauxhall to
Stafford House, the noblest of the private palaces of the capital, amid
vast continuous multitudes, blocking roadways, filling windows, lining
every parapet and roof with eager gazers. For five hours Garibaldi passed
on amid tumultuous waves of passionate curiosity, delight, enthusiasm. And
this more than regal entry was the arrival not of some loved prince or
triumphant captain of our own, but of a foreigner and the deliverer of a
foreign people. Some were drawn by his daring as a fighter, and by the
picturesque figure as of a hero of antique mould; many by sight of the
sworn foe of Giant Pope; but what fired the hearts of most was the thought
of him as the soldier who bore the sword for human freedom. The western
world was in one of its generous moments. In those days there were
idealists; democracy was conscious of common interests and common
brotherhood; a liberal Europe was then a force and not a dream.

“We who then saw Garibaldi for the first time,” Mr. Gladstone said nearly
twenty years after, “can many of us never forget the marvellous effect
produced upon all minds by the simple nobility of his demeanour, by his
manners and his acts.... Besides his splendid integrity, and his wide and
universal sympathies, besides that seductive simplicity of manner which
never departed from him, and that inborn and native grace which seemed to
attend all his actions, I would almost select from every other quality
this, which was in apparent contrast but real harmony in Garibaldi—the
union of the most profound and tender humanity with his fiery valour.”(80)
He once described the Italian chief to me as “one of the finest
combinations of profound and unalterable simplicity with
self-consciousness and self-possession. I shall never forget an occasion
at Chiswick; Palmerston, John Russell, and all the leaders were awaiting
him on the _perron_; he advanced with perfect simplicity and naturalness,
yet with perfect consciousness of his position; very striking and very
fine.” Garibaldi dined with Mr. Gladstone, and they met elsewhere. At a
dinner at Panizzi’s, they sat by one another. “I remember,” said Mr.
Gladstone, “he told a story in these words: ‘When I was a boy,’ he said,
‘I was at school in Genoa. It was towards the close of the great French
Revolution. Genoa was a great military post—a large garrison always in the
town, constant parades and military display, with bands and flags that
were beyond everything attractive to schoolboys. All my schoolfellows used
to run here and there all over the town to see if they could get sight of
one of these military parades and exhibitions. I never went to one. It
struck me then as a matter of pain and horror, that it should be necessary
that one portion of mankind should be set aside to have for their
profession the business of destroying others.’ ”

Another side of Garibaldi was less congenial. A great lady wrote to Mr.
Gladstone of a conversation with him. “I talked to Garibaldi with regret
that Renan was so much read in Italy. He said ‘_Perche?_’ and showed that
he did not dislike it, and that he has also in leaving Rome left very much
else. I know that woman’s words are useless: the more men disbelieve, the
more they think it well that women should be ‘superstitious.’ You are not
likely to have _arguments_ with him, but I would give much that he should
take away with him some few words that would bring home to him the fact
that the statesman he cares for most would think life a miserable thing
without faith in God our Saviour.” To another correspondent on this point
Mr. Gladstone wrote:—


    The honour paid him was I think his due as a most singularly
    simple, disinterested, and heroic character, who had achieved
    great things for Italy, for liberty well-understood, and even for
    mankind. His insurrection we knew and lamented, and treated as
    exceptional. No Mazzinian leanings of his were known. I read the
    speech at the luncheon with surprise and concern.(81) As to his
    attenuated belief, I view it with the deepest sorrow and concern,
    I need not repeat an opinion, always painful to me to pronounce,
    as to the principal causes to which it is referable, and as to the
    chief seat of the responsibility for it. As to his Goddess Reason,
    I understand by it simply an adoption of what are called on the
    continent the principles of the French Revolution. These we
    neither want nor warmly relish in England, but they are different
    from its excesses, and the words will bear an innocent and even in
    some respects a beneficial meaning.


The diary records:—


    _April 12._—To Chiswick and met Garibaldi. We were quite satisfied
    with him. He did me much more than justice. 14.—Went by a
    desperate push to see Garibaldi welcomed at the opera. It was
    good, but not like the _people_. 17.—At Stafford House 5-1/4—6-½
    and 9-1/4—12-½ on Garibaldi’s movements. In a conversation he
    agreed to give up the provincial tour. 20.—In the evening the
    great entertainment to Garibaldi came off. Before the door at
    night say a thousand people all in the best of humour, the hall
    and stair full before dinner. A hostile demonstration invaded us
    at ten, but we ejected them. I settled about to-morrow with
    Garibaldi, the Duke of Sutherland, Lord Palmerston, and Lord
    Shaftesbury. My nerves would not let me—hardened as I am—sleep
    till after five.


(M32) Suddenly one morning the country was surprised to learn that
Garibaldi was at once departing. Dark suspicions rose instantly in the
minds of his more democratic friends. It had always been rather bitter to
them that he should be the guest of a duke. They now insisted that the
whig aristocrats were in a panic lest he should compromise himself with
the radicals, and that he was being hustled out of the country against his
will. This suspicion next grew into something blacker still. A story
spread that the Emperor of the French had taken umbrage, and signified to
the government that the reception of Garibaldi was distasteful to France.
Lord Clarendon promptly denied the fable. He told the House of Lords that
the Emperor (of whom he had recently had an audience) had even expressed
his admiration for the feeling of which the reception was a sign. Lord
Palmerston in the other House explained that Garibaldi was going away
earlier than had been expected, because at home he went to bed at eight
and rose at five, and to a person of these habits to dine at half past
eight and to remain in a throng of admirers until midnight must
necessarily be injurious. Still the fog hung heavy on the public mind. A
rider was now added to the tale, that it was the chancellor of the
exchequer who out of deference to the Emperor, or to please the whigs, or
out of complaisance to the court, had induced the hero to take his hurried
leave. Mr. Gladstone was forced to explain to the House of Commons, seldom
reluctant to lighten its graver deliberations with a personal incident,
that the Duke of Sutherland had carried him to Stafford House; there he
found that Garibaldi had accepted invitations to thirty provincial towns
and that the list was growing longer every day; the doctors declared that
the general’s strength would never stand the exhaustion of a progress on
such a scale; and the friends there present begged him to express his own
opinion to Garibaldi. This Mr. Gladstone accordingly did, to the effect
that the hero’s life and health were objects of value to the whole world,
and that even apart from health the repetition all over England of the
national reception in London would do something to impair a unique
historical event.(82) The general was taken to show excellent sense by
accepting advice not to allow himself to be killed by kindness. At any
rate he firmly declared that if he could not go to all the places that
invited him, it was impossible for him to draw a line of preference, and
therefore he would go to none. His radical friends, however, seem to have
instilled some of their own suspicions into his mind, for two days later
(April 23) Mr. Gladstone writes to Lord Clarendon: “I am to see Garibaldi
at Cliveden this evening, and it is possible that some occasion may offer
there for obtaining from him a further declaration. But since I received
your note the following circumstance has occurred. Clarence Paget has been
to me, and reports that Mrs. ——, a well-known and zealous but
anti-Mazzinian liberal in Italian matters, who is also a friend of
Garibaldi’s, has acquainted him that Garibaldi himself has made known to
her that according to his own painful impression the English government do
consider the prolongation of his stay in England very embarrassing, and
are very anxious that he should go. What a pity, if this be so, that this
simple and heroic man could not speak his mind plainly out to me, but
wrapped himself in the depths of diplomatic reserve, instead of acting
like Lord Aberdeen, who used to say, ‘I have a habit of believing
people.’ ”(83) After three or four days at Cliveden the general still held
to his purpose. “_April 24._—Cliveden. Conversation with Garibaldi. The
utmost I could get from him was that it would be sad if the Italian people
should lose its faith.” So Garibaldi forthwith sailed away from our
shores.(84)

When all was over, an Italian statesman wrote to Panizzi that though he
thought Garibaldi one of the choicest natures ever created,—enterprising,
humane, disinterested, eminent in national service, yet neither he nor any
other citizen was entitled to set himself above the laws of his country,
and that such a man should be officially received by the heir to the
throne and by secretaries of state, was a thing to be bitterly deplored by
every sensible man.(85) Still history can afford to agree with Mr.
Gladstone when he said of Garibaldi—“His name is indeed illustrious, it
remains inseparably connected with the not less illustrious name of the
great Cavour, and these two names are again associated with the name of
Victor Emmanuel. These three together form for Italians a tricolour as
brilliant, as ever fresh, and I hope as enduring for many and many
generations, as the national flag that now waves over united Italy.”



III


The tide of vast events in this momentous period now rolled heavily away
from the Danube and the Bosphorus, from Tiber and Po and Adriatic sea, to
the shores of the Baltic and the mouths of the Elbe. None of the
fascination of old-world history lends its magic to the new chapter that
opened in 1863. Cavour had gone. Bismarck with sterner genius, fiercer
purpose, more implacable designs, and with a hand as of hammered iron,
strode into the field. The Italian statesman was the author of a singular
prediction. In 1861 when Cavour was deprecating angry protests from the
European powers against his invasion of the Marches, he used words of
extraordinary foresight to the representative of Prussia. “I am sorry,” he
said, “that the cabinet of Berlin judges so severely the conduct of the
King of Italy and his government. I console myself by thinking that on
this occasion I am setting an example that probably in no long time,
Prussia will be very glad to imitate.”(86) So the world speedily found
out.

(M33) The torch of nationality reached material for a flame long
smouldering in two duchies of the remote north, that had been incorporated
in Denmark by solemn European engagements in 1852, but were inhabited by a
population, one of them wholly and the other mainly, not Scandinavian but
German. Thus the same question of race, history, language, sentiment, that
had worked in Italy, Poland, the Balkan states, rose up in this miniature
case. The circumstances that brought that case into such fatal prominence
do not concern us here. The alleged wrongs of her brethren in
Schleswig-Holstein unchained such a tempest of excitement in central
Germany, that the German courts could hardly have resisted if they would.
Just as powerless was the Danish government in face of the Scandinavian
sentiment of its subjects and their neighbours of the race. Even the
liberals, then a power in Germany and Bismarck’s bitter foes, were
vehemently on the national side against the Danish claim; and one of the
most striking of all Bismarck’s feats was the skill with which he now used
his domestic enemies to further his own designs of national
aggrandisement. How war broke out between the small power and the two
great powers of Austria and Prussia, and how the small power was
ruthlessly crushed; by what infinite and complex machinations the
diplomacy of Europe found itself paralysed; how Prussia audaciously
possessed herself of territory that would give her a deep-water port, and
the head of a channel that would unite two great seas; how all this ended
in Prussia, “the Piedmont of the north,” doing what Cavour in his Piedmont
of the south had foretold that she would be glad to do; how at Sadowa
(July 3, 1866) Austria was driven out of her long hegemony, and Hanover
incorporated; and to what a train of amazing conflicts in western Europe,
to what unexpected victories, territorial change, dynastic ruin, this so
resistlessly led up—here is a narrative that belongs to the province of
history. Yet it has a place in any political biography of the Palmerston
administration.

In such an era of general confusion, the English cabinet found no powerful
or noble part to play. Still they went far—almost too far to
recede—towards embarking in a continental war on behalf of Denmark, that
would have been full of mischief to herself, of little profit to her
client, and could hardly have ended otherwise than in widespread disaster.
Here is one of the very few instances in which the public opinion of the
country at the eleventh hour reined back a warlike minister. Lord
Palmerston told the House of Commons in the summer of 1863 that, if any
violent attempt were made to overthrow the rights of Denmark or to
interfere with its independence and integrity, he was convinced that those
who made the attempt would find in the result that “it would not be
Denmark alone with which they would have to contend.”(87) This did indeed
sound like a compromising declaration of quite sufficient emphasis.


    It seems, says Mr. Gladstone,(88) that this statement was
    generally and not unnaturally interpreted as a promise of support
    from England. Lord Palmerston does not seem to have added any
    condition or reservation. Strange as it may appear, he had spoken
    entirely of his own motion and without the authority or knowledge
    of his cabinet, in which indeed, so far as my memory serves,
    nothing had happened to render likely any declaration of any kind
    on the subject. I have no means of knowing whether he spoke in
    concert with the foreign secretary, Earl Russell, with whom his
    communications, agreeably to policy and to established usage,
    were, I believe, large and constant. When the question was
    eventually disposed of by the war which Prussia and Austria waged
    against Denmark, there was much indignation felt against England
    for the breach of her engagement to give support in the case of
    war, to the small power so egregiously in need of it. And there
    was no one to raise a voice in our favour.

    As the year advanced (1863) and the prospect of war came nearer,
    the subject was very properly brought before the cabinet. I
    believe that at the time I was not even aware of Lord Palmerston’s
    declaration, which, owing to the exhausted period of the session,
    had I believe attracted no great amount of attention in England.
    Whether my colleagues generally were as little aware of what
    happened as myself I do not know, but unquestionably we could not
    all have missed learning it. However we did not as a body
    recognise in any way the title of the prime minister to bind us to
    go to war. We were, however, indignant at the conduct of the
    German powers who, as we thought, were scheming piracy under cover
    of pacific correspondence. And we agreed upon a very important
    measure, in which Lord Palmerston acquiesced, when he had failed,
    if I remember right, in inducing the cabinet to go farther. We
    knew that France took the same view of the question as we did, and
    we framed a communication to her to the following effect. We were
    jointly to insist that the claim of the Duke of Augustenburg
    should be peacefully settled on juridical grounds; and to announce
    to Prussia and Austria that if they proceeded to prosecute it by
    the use of force against Denmark, we would jointly resist them
    with all our might.(89)

    This communication was accordingly made to Louis Napoleon. He
    declined the proposal. He said that the question was one of
    immense importance to us, who had such vast interests involved,
    and that the plan was reasonable from our point of view; but that
    the matter was one of small moment for France, whom accordingly we
    could not ask to join in it. The explanation of this answer, so
    foolish in its terms, and so pregnant with consequences in this
    matter, was, I believe, to be found in the pique of Louis Napoleon
    at a reply we had then recently given to a proposal of his for an
    European conference or congress.(90) We all thought that his plan
    was wholly needless and would in all likelihood lead to mischief.
    So we declined it in perfect good faith and without implying by
    our refusal any difference of policy in the particular matter.


Throughout the session of 1864 the attention of the country was fixed upon
this question whether England should or should not take part in the war
between Germany and Denmark. The week before the time arrived for the
minister to announce the decision of the cabinet, it became clear that
public opinion in the great English centres would run decisively for
non-intervention. Some of the steadiest supporters of government in
parliament boldly told the party whips that if war against Germany were
proposed, they would vote against it. The cabinet met. Palmerston and Lord
Russell were for war, even though it would be war single-handed. Little
support came to them. The Queen was strongly against them. They bemoaned
to one another the timidity of their colleagues, and half-mournfully
contrasted the convenient ciphers that filled the cabinets of Pitt and
Peel, with the number of able men with independent opinions in their own
administration. The prime minister, as I have heard from one who was
present, held his head down while the talk proceeded, and then at last
looking up said in a neutral voice, “I think the cabinet is against war.”
Here is Mr. Gladstone’s record:—


    _May 7, ’64._—Cabinet. The war “party” as it might be called—Lord
    Palmerston, Lord Russell, Lord Stanley of Alderley, and the
    chancellor (Lord Westbury). All went well. _June 11._—Cabinet.
    Very stiff on the Danish question, but went well. _June
    24._—Cabinet. A grave issue well discussed. _June 25._—Cabinet. We
    divided, and came to a tolerable, not the best, conclusion.


It seems almost incredible that a cabinet of rational men could have
debated for ten minutes the question of going to war with Prussia and
Austria, when they knew that twenty thousand men were the largest force
that we could have put into the field when war began, though moderate
additions might have been made as time went on—not, however, without
hazardous denudation of India, where the memories of the mutiny were still
fresh. The Emperor of the French in fact had good reason for fearing that
he would be left in the lurch again, as he thought that he had been left
before in his attempts for Poland. Your intervention, he said to England,
will be naval; but we may have to fight a people of forty millions on
land, and we will not intervene unless you engage to send troops.(91) The
dismemberment of Denmark was thought an odious feat, but the localisation
of the war was at least a restriction of the evils attending it.

(M34) A high parliamentary debate followed (July 4) on a motion made by
Mr. Disraeli, “to express to Her Majesty our great regret that while the
course pursued by the government had failed to maintain their avowed
policy of upholding the independence and integrity of Denmark, it has
lowered the just influence of this country in the councils of Europe, and
thereby diminished the securities for peace.”(92) Cobden taunted both
front benches pretty impartially with the equivocal and most dishonourable
position into which their policy had brought the country, by encouraging a
small power to fight two great ones and then straightway leaving her to
get out as best she might. The government was only saved by Palmerston’s
appeal to its financial triumphs—the very triumphs that he had himself
made most difficult to achieve. The appeal was irrelevant, but it was
decisive, and ministers escaped a condemnation by no means unmerited on
the special issue, by a majority of eighteen. The Manchester men agreed to
help in the result, because in Cobden’s words they were convinced that a
revolution had been at last wrought in the mischievous policy of incessant
intervention. Mr. Disraeli’s case was easy, but to propound an easy case
when its exposition demands much selection from voluminous blue-books is
often hard, and the orator was long and over-elaborate. The excitement of
an audience, aware all the time that actual danger hovered over the
ministry, revived afresh when Disraeli sat down and Gladstone rose. The
personal emulation of powerful rivals lends dramatic elements to
disputation. Lord Palmerston had written to Mr. Gladstone beforehand—“We
shall want a great gun to follow Disraeli. Would you be ready to follow
him?”


    _July 3._—I was happy enough, aided by force of habit, to drive
    bodily out of my head for the whole day everything Dano-German.
    But not out of my nerves. I delivered during the night a speech in
    parliament on the Roman question.

    _July 4._—H. of C. Replied to Disraeli. It took an hour and
    thirty-five minutes. I threw overboard all my heavy armament and
    fought light.


Nobody who is not historian or biographer is likely to read this speech of
Mr. Gladstone’s to-day, but we may believe contemporary witnesses who
record that the orator’s weight of fact, his force of argument, his
sarcastic play of personal impulse and motive, his bold and energetic
refutation of hostile criticism, his defiant statement of the ministerial
case, so impressed even a sceptical and doubting House that, though his
string of special pleas did not amount to a justification, “they almost
reached the height of an excuse,” and they crushed the debate. The basis
was the familiar refrain upon Mr. Gladstone’s lips,—“The steps taken by
the government, what were they but endeavours to bind together the powers
of Europe for fulfilment and maintenance of an important European
engagement?” Still history, even of that sane and tempered school that is
content to take politics as often an affair of second-best, will probably
judge that Mr. Disraeli was not wrong when he said of the policy of this
era that, whether we looked to Russia, to Greece, to France, there had
been exhibited by ministers a confusion, an inconsistency of conduct, a
contrariety of courses with regard to the same powers and a total want of
system in their diplomacy.(93) It is true, however, that just the same
confusion, inconsistency, and contrariety marked Russia, France, and
Austria themselves. Another speaker of the same party, as mordant as
Disraeli, and destined like him to rise to the chief place in the councils
of the nation, went further, and said, in following Cobden in the debate,
“If Mr. Cobden had been foreign secretary, instead of Lord Russell, I
fully believe this country would occupy a position proud and noble
compared to that which she occupies at this moment. She would at least
have been entitled to the credit of holding out in the name of England no
hopes which she did not intend to fulfil, of entering into no engagements
from which she was ready to recede.”(94) Well might Mr. Gladstone enter in
his diary:—


    _July 8._—This debate ought to be an epoch in foreign policy. We
    have all much to learn. Lord Palmerston’s speech was unequivocally
    weak in the mental and the bodily sense. I think it was to-day
    that the Prince of Wales rode with Granville and me; he showed a
    little Danism.




Chapter VIII. Advance In Public Position And Otherwise. (1864)


    The best form of government is that which doth actuate and dispose
    every part and member of a state to the common good. If, instead
    of concord and interchange of support, one part seeks to uphold an
    old form of government, and the other part introduce a new, they
    will miserably consume one and other. Histories are full of the
    calamities of entire states and nations in such cases. It is,
    nevertheless, equally true that time must needs bring about some
    alterations.... Therefore have those commonwealths been ever the
    most durable and perpetual which have often formed and recomposed
    themselves according to their first institution and
    ordinance.—PYM.



I


A rapid and extraordinary change began to take place in Mr. Gladstone’s
position after the year 1863. With this was associated an internal
development of his political ideas and an expansion of social feeling,
still more remarkable and interesting. As we have seen, he reckoned that a
little earlier than this he had reached his lowest point in public
estimation. He had now been more than thirty years in parliament. He had
sat in three cabinets, each of a different colour and different
connections from the other two. It was not until he had seen half a
century of life on our planet, and more than quarter of a century of life
in the House of Commons, that it was at all certain whether he would be
conservative or liberal, to what species of either genus he would attach
himself, or whether there might not from his progressive transmutations be
evolved some variety wholly new.

I have already given his picture of the Palmerston cabinet as a
kaleidoscope, and the same simile would be no bad account of his own
relation to the political groups and parties around him. The Manchester
men and the young radicals from the West Riding of Yorkshire were his
ardent adherents when he preached economy and peace, but they were chilled
to the core by his neutrality or worse upon the life and death struggle
across the Atlantic. His bold and confident finance was doubted by the
whigs, and disliked by the tories. But then the tories, apart from their
wiser leader, were delighted by his friendly words about the Confederates,
and the whigs were delighted with his unflagging zeal for the deliverance
of Italy. Only, zeal for the deliverance of Italy lost him the friendship
of those children of the Holy Father who came from Ireland. Then again the
City was not easy at the flash of activity and enterprise at the
exchequer, and the money-changers did not know what disturbance this
intrepid genius might bring into the traffic of their tables. On the other
hand, the manufacturers and the merchants of the midlands and the north
adored a chancellor whose budgets were associated with expanding trade and
a prosperity that advanced by leaps and bounds. The nonconformists were
attracted by his personal piety, though repelled by its ecclesiastical
apparel. The high churchmen doubtless knew him for their own, yet even
they resented his confederacy with an erastian and a latitudinarian like
John Russell, or a Gallio like Lord Palmerston, who distributed mitres and
crown benefices at the ultra-evangelical bidding of Lord Shaftesbury. To
borrow a figure from a fine observer of those days,—the political
molecules were incessantly forming and re-forming themselves into shifting
aggregates, now attracted, now repelled by his central force; now the
nucleus of an organised party, then resolved again in loose and distant
satellites.

The great families still held ostensibly the predominance in the liberal
party which they had earned by their stout and persistent fidelity to
parliamentary reform. Their days of leadership, however, were drawing
towards an end, though the process has not been rapid. They produced some
good administrators, but nobody with the gifts of freshness and political
genius. The three originating statesmen of that era, after all, were
Cobden, Gladstone, Disraeli, none of them (M35) born in the purple of the
directing class. A Yorkshire member, destined to a position of prominence,
entered the House in 1861, and after he had been there a couple of years
he wrote to his wife, that “the want of the liberal party of a new man was
great, and felt to be great; the old whig leaders were worn out; there
were no new whigs; Cobden and Bright were impracticable and un-English,
and there were hardly any hopeful radicals. There was a great prize of
power and influence to be aimed at.”(95)

This parliamentary situation was the least part of it. No man could guide
the new advance, now so evidently approaching, unless he clearly united
fervour and capacity for practical improvements in government to broad and
glowing sympathies, alike with the needs and the elemental instincts of
the labouring mass. Mr. Gladstone offered that wonderful combination. “If
ever there was a statesman,” said Mill, about this time, “in whom the
spirit of improvement is incarnate, and in whose career as a minister the
characteristic feature has been to seek out things that require or admit
of improvement, instead of waiting to be pressed or driven to do them, Mr.
Gladstone deserves that signal honour.” Then his point of view was lofty;
he was keenly alive to the moving forces of the hour; his horizons were
wide; he was always amply founded in facts; he had generous hopes for
mankind; his oratory seized vast popular audiences, because it was the
expression of a glowing heart and a powerful brain. All this made him a
demagogue in the same high sense in which Pericles, Demosthenes, John Pym,
Patrick Henry were demagogues.

It is easy to see some at any rate of the influences that were bringing
Mr. Gladstone decisively into harmony with the movement of liberal
opinions, now gradually spreading over Great Britain. The resurrection of
Italy could only be vindicated on principles of liberty and the right of a
nation to choose its own rulers. The peers and the ten-pound householders
who held power in England were no Bourbon tyrants; but just as in 1830 the
overthrow of the Bourbon line in France was followed by the Reform bill
here, so the Italian revolution of 1860 gave new vitality to the popular
side in England. Another convulsion, far away from our own shores, was
still more directly potent alike in quickening popular feeling, and by a
strange paradox in creating as a great popular leader the very statesman
who had failed to understand it. It was impossible that a man so vigilant
and so impressionable as Mr. Gladstone was, should escape the influence of
the American war. Though too late to affect his judgment on the issues of
the war, he discerned after the event how, in his own language, the wide
participation of the people in the choice of their governors, by giving
force and expression to the national will in the United States, enabled
the governors thus freely chosen to marshal a power and develop an amount
of energy in the execution of that will, such as probably have never been
displayed in an equal time and among an equal number of men since the race
of mankind sprang into existence.(96) In this judgment of the American
civil war, he only shared in a general result of the salvation of the
Union; it reversed the fashionable habit of making American institutions
English bugbears, and gave a sweeping impulse to that steady but
resistless tide of liberal and popular sentiment that ended in the
parliamentary reform of 1867.

The lesson from the active resolution of America was confirmed by the
passive fortitude of Lancashire. “What are the questions,” Mr. Gladstone
asked in 1864, “that fit a man for the exercise of a privilege such as the
franchise? Self-command, self-control, respect for order, patience under
suffering, confidence in the law, regard for superiors; and when, I should
like to ask, were all these great qualities exhibited in a manner more
signal, even more illustrious, than in the conduct of the general body of
the operatives of Lancashire under the profound affliction of the winter
of 1862?” So on two sides the liberal channel was widened and deepened and
the speed of its currents accelerated.

Besides large common influences like these, Mr. Gladstone’s special
activities as a reformer brought him into contact with the conditions of
life and feeling among the workmen, (M36) and the closer he came to them,
the more did his humane and sympathetic temper draw him towards their
politics and the ranks of their party. Looking back, he said, upon the
years immediately succeeding the fall of Napoleon in 1815, he saw the
reign of ideas that did not at all belong to the old currents of English
history, but were a reaction against the excesses of the French
revolution. This reaction seemed to set up the doctrine that the masses
must be in standing antagonism to the law, and it resulted in severities
that well justified antagonism. “To-day the scene was transformed; the
fixed traditional sentiment of the working man had become one of
confidence in the law, in parliament, even in the executive government.”
In 1863 he was busy in the erection of the post office savings banks. A
deputation of a powerful trades union asked him to modify his rules so as
to enable them to place their funds in the hands of the government. A
generation before, such confidence would have been inconceivable. In
connection with the Government Annuities bill a deputation of workmen came
to him, and said, “If there had been any suspicion or disinclination
towards it on the part of the working classes, it was due to the
dissatisfaction with parliament as to suffrage.” When he replied with
something about the alleged indifference and apparent inaction of the
working classes as to suffrage, they said, “Since the abolition of the
corn laws we have given up political agitation; we felt we might place
confidence in parliament; instead of political action, we tried to spend
our evenings in the improvement of our minds.” This convinced him that it
was not either want of faith in parliament, or indifference to a vote,
that explained the absence of agitation.



II


The outcome of this stream of new perceptions and new feeling in his mind
was a declaration that suddenly electrified the political world. A
Yorkshire liberal one afternoon (May 11, 1864) brought in a bill for
lowering the franchise, and Mr. Gladstone spoke for the government. He
dwelt upon the facts, historic and political. The parliamentary history of
reform for the thirteen years, since Locke King’s motion in 1851 upset a
government, had been most unsatisfactory, and to set aside all the solemn
and formal declarations from 1851 down to the abortive Reform bill of 1860
would be a scandal. Then, was not the state of the actual case something
of a scandal, with less than one-tenth of the constituencies composed of
working men, and with less than one-fiftieth of the working men in
possession of the franchise? How could you defend a system that let in the
lower stratum of the middle class and shut out the upper stratum of the
working class? In face of such dispositions as the workmen manifested
towards law, parliament, and government, was it right that the present
system of almost entire exclusion should prevail? Then came the sentence
that, in that stagnant or floundering hour of parliamentary opinion,
marked a crisis. “I call upon the adversary to show cause, and _I venture
to say that every man who is not presumably incapacitated by some
consideration of personal unfitness or of political danger, is morally
entitled to come within the pale of the constitution_. Of course, in
giving utterance to such a proposition, I do not recede from the protest I
have previously made against sudden, or violent, or excessive, or
intoxicating change.”

He concluded in words that covered much ground, though when closely
scrutinised they left large loopholes. “It is well,” he said, “that we
should be suitably provided with armies and fleets and fortifications; it
is well, too, that all these should rest upon and be sustained, as they
ought to be, by a sound system of finance, and out of a revenue not wasted
by a careless parliament or by a profligate administration. But that which
is better and more weighty still is that hearts should be bound together
by a reasonable extension, at fitting times and among _selected_ portions
of the people, of every benefit and every privilege that can be justly
conferred upon them.”

The thunderbolt of a sentence about every man’s moral title to a vote
startled the House with an amazement, half delight and half consternation,
that broke forth in loud volleys of cheering and counter-cheering. It was
to little (M37) purpose that the orator in the next breath interposed his
qualifications. One of the fated words had been spoken that gather up
wandering forces of time and occasion, and precipitate new eras. A
conservative speaker instantly deplored the absence of the prime minister,
and the substitution in his stead of his “intractable chancellor of the
exchequer.” An important liberal speaker, with equal promptitude, pointed
out that one effect of the speech would be, in the first place, loss of
conservative support to the government, and, in the second place, a very
great gain to the health and vigour of the liberal party. Two whigs ran
off to tell Phillimore that Gladstone had said something that would make
his hair stand on end. Speculations began to hum and buzz whether the
oracular deliverance would not upset the government. In the press a
tremendous storm broke. Mr. Gladstone was accused of ministering aliments
to popular turbulence and vanity, of preaching the divine right of
multitudes, and of encouraging, minister of the crown though he was, a
sweeping and levelling democracy. They charged him with surveying mankind
in the abstract and suffrage in the abstract, and in that kingdom of
shadows discovering or constructing vast universal propositions about
man’s moral rights. Mr. Disraeli told him that he had revived the doctrine
of Tom Paine. The radicals were as jubilant as whigs and tories were
furious. They declared that the banner he had raised aloft was not what
the tories denounced as the standard of domestic revolution, but the long
lost flag of the liberal party. “There is not a statesman in England of
the very first rank,” said one newspaper, “who has dared to say as much,
and Mr. Gladstone, in saying it, has placed himself at the head of the
party that will succeed the present administration.” This was true, but in
the meantime the head of the existing administration was still a marvel of
physical vigour, and though at the moment he was disabled by gout,
somebody must have hurried to Cambridge House and told him the desperate
tidings. On the very instant he sent down a note of inquiry to Mr.
Gladstone, asking what he had really said. A brisk correspondence
followed, neither heated nor unfriendly.

In the morning Lord Palmerston had written him a premonitory note, not to
commit himself or the government to any particular figure of borough
franchise; that a six pound franchise had gone to the bottom; that if they
should ever have to bring in a reform bill, they ought to be free from
fresh pledges; that the workmen would swamp the classes above them; that
their influx would discourage the classes above from voting at all; and
that the workmen were under the control of trade unions directed by a
small number of agitators. All this was the good conservative common form
of the time. The speech itself, when the prime minister came to see it,
proved no sedative.


    _Lord Palmerston to Mr. Gladstone._

    _May 12, 1864._—I have read your speech, and I must frankly say,
    with much regret; as there is little in it that I can agree with,
    and much from which I differ. You lay down broadly the doctrine of
    universal suffrage which I can never accept. I entirely deny that
    every sane and not disqualified man has a moral right to a vote. I
    use that expression instead of “the pale of the constitution,”
    because I hold that all who enjoy the security and civil rights
    which the constitution provides are within its pale. What every
    man and woman too has a right to, is to be well governed and under
    just laws, and they who propose a change ought to show that the
    present organisation does not accomplish those objects....

    You did not pronounce an opinion in favour of a specified
    franchise; but is there any essential difference between naming a
    six pound franchise and naming the additional numbers which a six
    pound franchise was calculated to admit? I am not going to perform
    the duty which Whiteside assigned to me of answering your speech,
    but, if you will not take it amiss, I would say, that it was more
    like the sort of speech with which Bright would have introduced
    the Reform bill which he would like to propose, than the sort of
    speech which might have been expected from the treasury bench in
    the present state of things. Your speech may win Lancashire for
    you, though that is doubtful, but I fear it will tend to lose
    England for you.

    _Mr. Gladstone to Lord Palmerston._

    _11 Carlton House Terrace, May 13, 1864._—It is not easy to take
    ill anything that proceeds from you; and, moreover, frankness
    between all men, and especially between those who are politically
    associated, removes, as I believe, many more difficulties than it
    causes. In this spirit I will endeavour to write. I agree in your
    denial “that every sane and not disqualified man has a moral right
    to vote.” But I am at a loss to know how, as you have read my
    speech, you can ascribe this opinion to me. My declaration was,
    taken generally, that all persons ought to be admitted to the
    franchise, who can be admitted to it with safety.... I hold by
    this proposition. It seems to me neither strange, nor new, nor
    extreme. It requires, I admit, to be construed; but I contend that
    the interpretation is amply given in the speech, where I have
    declared (for example) that the admission I desire is of the same
    character or rather extent as was proposed in 1860.... I have
    never exhorted the working man to agitate for the franchise, and I
    am at a loss to conceive what report of my speech can have been
    construed by you in such a sense.

    Having said this much to bring down to its true limits the
    difference between us, I do not deny that difference. I regret it,
    and I should regret it much more if it were likely to have (at
    least as far as I can see) an early bearing upon practice. In the
    cabinet I argued as strongly as I could against the withdrawal of
    the bill in 1860, and in favour of taking the opinion of the House
    of Commons upon that bill. I think the party which supports your
    government has suffered, and is suffering, and will much more
    seriously suffer, from the part which as a party it has played
    within these recent years, in regard to the franchise. I have no
    desire to press the question forward. I hope no government will
    ever again take it up except with the full knowledge of its own
    mind and a reasonable probability of carrying it. But such
    influence as argument and statement without profession of
    political intentions can exercise upon the public mind, I heartily
    desire to see exercised in favour of extension of the
    franchise....


On the following day Lord Palmerston wrote to him, “I have no doubt that
you have yourself heard a great deal about the bad effect of your speech,
but I can assure you that I hear from many quarters the unfavourable
impression it has produced even upon many of the liberal party, and upon
all persons who value the maintenance of our institutions.”

To others, Mr. Gladstone wrote in less formal style, for instance to an
eminent nonconformist minister: “May 14. I have unwarily, it seems, set
the Thames on fire. But I have great hopes that the Thames will, on
reflection perceive that he had no business or title to catch the flame,
and will revert to his ordinary temperature accordingly.” And to his
brother Robertson, he writes from Brighton, three days later:—


    Many thanks for all you say respecting my speech on the franchise
    bill. I have been astounded to find it the cause or occasion of
    such a row. It would have been quite as intelligible to me had
    people said, “Under the exceptions of personal unfitness and
    political danger you exclude or may exclude almost everybody, and
    you reduce your declaration to a shadow.”


In the diary he says: “_May 11._—Spoke on the franchise bill. Some
sensation. It appears to me that it was due less to me, than to the change
in the hearers and in the public mind from the professions at least if not
the principles of 1859.” Much against Lord Palmerston’s wish, the speech
was published, with a short preface that even staunch friends like
Phillimore found obscure and not well written.

(M38) An address, significant of the general feeling in the unenfranchised
classes, was presented to him from the workmen of York a month after his
speech in parliament. They recalled his services to free trade when he
stood by the side of Peel; his budget of 1860; his conspicuous and
honourable share in abolishing the taxes on knowledge. “We have marked,”
they said, “your manifestations of sympathy with the down-trodden and
oppressed of every clime. You have advanced the cause of freedom in
foreign lands by the power and courage with which you have assailed and
exposed the misdeeds and cruelties of continental tyrants. To the
provident operative you have by your Post Office Savings Bank bill given
security for his small savings, and your Government Annuities bill of this
session is a measure which will stimulate the people to greater thrift and
forethought. These acts, together with your speeches on the last named,
and on the Borough Franchise bill, make up a life that commands our
lasting gratitude.” Such was the new popular estimate of him. In framing
his reply to this address Mr. Gladstone did his best to discourage the
repetition of like performances from other places; he submitted the draft
to Lord Palmerston, and followed his advice in omitting certain portions
of it. It was reduced to the conventional type of such acknowledgment.



III


In the autumn of 1864 Mr. Gladstone made a series of speeches in his
native county, which again showed the sincerity and the simplicity of his
solicitude for the masses of his countrymen. The sentiment is common. Mr.
Disraeli and the Young Englanders had tried to inscribe it upon a party
banner twenty years before. But Mr. Gladstone had given proof that he knew
how to embody sentiment in acts of parliament, and he associated it with
the broadest ideas of citizenship and policy. These speeches were not a
manifesto or a programme; they were a survey of the principles of the
statesmanship that befitted the period.

At Bolton (Oct. 11) he discoursed to audiences of the working class upon
the progress of thirty years, with such freshness of spirit as awoke
energetic hopes of the progress for the thirty years that were to follow.
The next day he opened a park with words from the heart about the modern
sense of the beauties of nature. The Greeks, he said, however much beauty
they might have discerned in nature, had no sympathy with the delight in
detached natural objects—a tree, or a stream, or a hill—which was so often
part of the common life of the poorest Englishman. Even a century or less
ago “communion with nature” would have sounded an affected and unnatural
phrase. Now it was a sensible part of the life of the working classes.
Then came moralising, at that date less trite than it has since become,
about the social ties that ought to mark the relations between master and
workman.

(M39) The same night at a banquet in Liverpool, and two days later at
Manchester, he advanced to high imperial ground. He told them how, after
an experience now becoming long, the one standing pain to the political
man in England is a sense of the inequality of his best exertions to the
arduous duty of government and legislation. England had undertaken
responsibilities of empire such as never before lay on the shoulders or
the minds of men. We governed distant millions many times outnumbering
ourselves. We were responsible for the welfare of forty or forty-five
separate states. Again, what other nation was charged with the same
responsibility in the exercise of its moral influence abroad, in the
example it is called upon to set, in the sympathy it must feel with the
cause of right and justice and constitutional freedom wherever that cause
is at issue? As for our fellow subjects abroad, we had given them
practical freedom. It was our duty to abstain as far as may be from
interference with their affairs, to afford them the shelter and protection
of the empire, and at the same time to impress upon them that there is no
grosser mistake in politics than to suppose you can separate the blessings
and benefits of freedom from its burdens. In other words, the colonies
should pay their own way, and if the old dream of making their interests
subservient to those of the mother country had passed away, it was just as
little reasonable that the mother country should bear charges that in
equity belonged to them, and all the more if the colonies set up against
the industry and productions of England the mischiefs and obstructions of
an exploded protective system. On foreign policy he enforced the
principles that, after all, had given to Europe forty years of peace, and
to England forty years of diplomatic authority and pre-eminence. “It is
impossible that to a country like England the affairs of foreign nations
can ever be indifferent. It is impossible that England, in my opinion,
ever should forswear the interest she must naturally feel in the cause of
truth, of justice, of order, and of good government.” The final word was
an admonition against “political lethargy.” For the first time, I think,
he put into the forefront the tormenting question that was to haunt him to
the end. “They could not look at Ireland,” he told them, “and say that the
state of feeling there was for the honour and the advantage of the united
kingdom.”


    _Oct. 14, ’64._—So ended in peace an exhausting, flattering, I
    hope not intoxicating circuit. God knows I have not courted them.
    I hope I do not rest on them. I pray I may turn them to account
    for good. It is, however, impossible not to love the people from
    whom such manifestations come, as meet me in every quarter....
    Somewhat haunted by dreams of halls, and lines of people, and
    great assemblies.


It was observed of this Lancashire tour, by critics who hardly meant to
praise him, that he paid his hearers the high compliment of assuming that
they could both understand his arguments, and feel his appeal to their
moral sympathies. His speeches, men said, were in fact lay sermons of a
high order, as skilfully composed, as accurately expressed, as if they
were meant for the House of Commons. This was singularly true, and what an
eulogy it was for our modern British democracy that the man whom they made
their first great hero was an orator of such a school. Lord Lyttelton, his
brother-in-law, informed him of the alarm and odium that his new line of
policy was raising. Mr. Gladstone (April, 1865) replied: “After all, you
are a peer, and Peel used to say, speaking of his peer colleagues, that
they were beings of a different order. Please to recollect that we have
got to govern millions of hard hands; that it must be done by force,
fraud, or good will; that the latter has been tried and is answering; that
none have profited more by this change of system since the corn law and
the Six Acts, than those who complain of it. As to their misliking me, I
have no fault to find with them for that. It is the common lot in similar
circumstances, and the very things that I have done or omitted doing from
my extreme and almost irrational reluctance to part company with them,
become an aggravation when the parting is accomplished.” “Gladstone, I
think,” says Bishop Wilberforce (Dec. 7), “is certainly gaining power. You
hear now almost every one say he must be the future premier, and such
sayings tend greatly to accomplish themselves.”



IV


(M40) It was about this time that Mr. Gladstone first found himself
drawing to relations with the protestant dissenters, that were destined to
grow closer as years went on. These relations had no small share in the
extension of his public power; perhaps, too, no small share in the more
abiding work upon the dissenters themselves, of enlarging what was narrow,
softening what was hard and bitter, and promoting a healing union where
the existence of a church establishment turned ecclesiastical differences
into lines of social division. He had alarmed his friends by his action on
a measure (April 15, 1863) for remedying an old grievance about the burial
of dissenters. Having served on a select committee appointed in the rather
quixotic hope that a solution of the difficulty might be found by the
somewhat unparliamentary means of “friendly conversation among candid and
impartial men,” he had convinced himself that there was a wrong to be set
right, and he voted and spoke accordingly. “It will most rudely shake his
Oxford seat,” says Phillimore. The peril there was becoming daily more
apparent. Then in 1864 and on later occasions he met leading nonconformist
clergy at the house of Mr. Newman Hall—such men as Binney, Allon, Edward
White, Baldwin Brown, Henry Reynolds, and that most admirable friend,
citizen, and man, R.W. Dale, so well known as Dale of Birmingham. Their
general attitude was described by Mr. Newman Hall as this: they hoped for
the ultimate recognition of the free church theory, and meditated no
political action to bring it about; they looked for it to come as the
result of influence within the church of England, not of efforts from
without. “Many dissenters,” one of them told him (Nov. 20, 1864), “would
enter the church whatever their theory about establishment, if such slight
modifications were made as would allow them to do so
conscientiously—holding the essentials of the faith far more soundly than
many within the established church.” Another regretted, after one of these
gatherings, that they never got to the core of the subject, “namely that
there run through the prayer-book from beginning to end ideas that are not
accepted by numbers who subscribe, and which cannot _all_ be admitted by
any one.”

All this once more brought Mr. Gladstone into a curious position. Just as
at Oxford he had in 1847 been the common hope of ultra-clericals on one
hand and ultra-liberals on the other, so now he was the common hope of the
two antagonistic schools of religious comprehension—the right, who looked
towards the formularies, system, discipline, and tradition either of the
Orthodox church or the Latin, and the left, who sought reunion on the
basis of puritanism with a leaven of modern criticism. Always the devoted
friend of Dr. Pusey and his school, he was gradually welcomed as ally and
political leader by men like Dale and Allon, the independents, and
Spurgeon, the baptist, on the broad ground that it was possible for all
good men to hold, amid their differences about church government, the more
vital sympathies and charities of their common profession. They even
sounded him on one occasion about laying the foundation stone of one of
their chapels. The broad result of such intercourse of the nonconformist
leaders with this powerful and generous mind, enriched by historic
knowledge and tradition, strengthened by high political responsibility,
deepened by meditations long, strenuous, and systematic, was indeed
remarkable. Dr. Allon expressed it, with admirable point, in a letter to
him some fourteen years after our present date (April 15, 1878):—


    The kind of intercourse that you have kindly permitted with
    nonconformists, has helped more consciously to identify them with
    movements of national life, and to diminish the stern feeling of
    almost defiant witness-bearing that was strong a generation or two
    ago. It is something gained if ecclesiastical and political
    differences can he debated within a common circle of social
    confidence and identity.... Their confidence in you has made them
    amenable to your lead in respect of methods and movements needing
    the guidance of political insight and experience.



V


A man’s mind seldom moves forward towards light and freedom on a single
line, and in Mr. Gladstone’s case the same impulses that made him tolerant
of formal differences as to church government led slowly to a still wider
liberality in respect of far deeper differences. Readers may remember the
shock with which in his youth he found that one person or another was a
Unitarian. To Mr. Darbishire, a member of the Unitarian body who was for
many years his friend, he wrote about some address of James Martineau’s
(Dec. 21, 1862):—


    From, time to time I have read works of Mr. Martineau’s, or works
    that I have taken for his, with great admiration, with warm
    respect for the writer, and moreover, with a great deal of
    sympathy. I should greatly like to make his acquaintance. But
    attached as I am to the old Christian dogma, and believing it as I
    do, or rather believing the Person whom it sets forth, to be the
    real fountain of all the gifts and graces that are largely strewn
    over society, and in which Mr. Martineau himself seems so amply to
    share, I fear I am separated from him in the order of ideas by an
    interval that must be called a gulf. My conviction is that the old
    creeds have been, and are to be, the channel by which the
    Christian religion is made a reality even for many who do not hold
    it, and I think that when we leave them we shall leave them not
    for something better, but something worse. Hence you will not be
    surprised that I regard some of Mr. Martineau’s propositions as
    unhistorical and untrue.


And to the same gentleman a year or two later (Jan. 2, 1865):—


    I am sorry to say I have not yet been able to read Mr. Martineau’s
    sermon, which I mean to do with care. I am, as you know, one
    altogether attached to dogma, which I believe to be the skeleton
    that carries the flesh, the blood, the life of the blessed thing
    we call the Christian religion. But I do not believe that God’s
    tender mercies are restricted to a small portion of the human
    family. I dare not be responsible for Dr. Newman, nor would he
    thank me; but I hope he does not so believe, and this the more
    because I have lately been reading Dr. Manning’s letter to Dr.
    Pusey; and, though Dr. Manning is far more exaggerated in his
    religion than Dr. Newman, and seems to me almost to caricature it,
    yet I think even he has by no means that limited view of the
    mercies of God.

    I have no mental difficulty in reconciling a belief in the Church,
    and what may be called the high Christian doctrine, with that
    comforting persuasion that those who do not receive the greatest
    blessings (and each man must believe his religion to be greatest)
    are notwithstanding the partakers, each in his measure, of other
    gifts, and will be treated according to their use of them. I admit
    there are schools of Christians who think otherwise. I was myself
    brought up to think otherwise, and to believe that salvation
    depended absolutely upon the reception of a particular and a very
    narrow creed. But long, long have I cast those weeds behind me.
    Unbelief may in given conditions be a moral offence; and only as
    such, only like other disobedience, and on like principles, can it
    be punishable.


To not a few the decisive change in Mr. Gladstone’s mental history is the
change from the “very narrow creed” of his youth to the “high Christian
doctrine” of his after life. Still more will regard as the real transition
the attainment of this “comforting persuasion,” this last word of
benignity and tolerance. Here we are on the foundations. Tolerance is far
more than the abandonment of civil usurpations over conscience. It is a
lesson often needed quite as much in the hearts of a minority as of a
majority. Tolerance means reverence for all the possibilities of Truth; it
means acknowledgment that she dwells in diverse mansions, and wears
vesture of many colours, and speaks in strange tongues; it means frank
respect for freedom of indwelling conscience against mechanic forms,
official conventions, social force; it means the charity that is greater
than even faith and hope. Marked is the day for a man when he can truly
say, as Mr. Gladstone here said, “Long, long have I cast those weeds
behind me.”




Chapter IX. Defeat At Oxford—Death Of Lord Palmerston—Parliamentary
Leadership. (1865)


    In public life a man of elevated mind does not make his own self
    tell upon others simply and entirely. He must act with other men;
    he cannot select his objects, or pursue them by means
    unadulterated by the methods and practices of minds less elevated
    than his own. He can only do what he feels to be second-best. He
    labours at a venture, prosecuting measures so large or so
    complicated that their ultimate issue is uncertain.—CARDINAL
    NEWMAN.



I


The faithful steward is a chartered bore alike of the mimic and the
working stage; the rake and spendthrift carries all before him. Nobody
knew better than Mr. Gladstone that of all the parts in public life, the
teasing and economising drudge is the most thankless. The public only half
apprehends, or refuses to apprehend at all; his spending colleagues
naturally fight; colleagues who do not spend, have other business and
prize a quiet life. All this made Mr. Gladstone’s invincible tenacity as
guardian of the national accounts the more genuinely heroic. In a long
letter from Balmoral, in the October of 1864, he began what was destined
to be the closing battle of the six years’ war. To Mrs. Gladstone he
wrote:—


    I have fired off to-day my letter to Lord Palmerston about
    expenditure. For a long time, though I did not let myself worry by
    needlessly thinking about it, I have had it lying on me like a
    nightmare. I mean it to be moderate (I shall have the copy when we
    meet to show you), but unless he concurs it may lead to
    consequences between this time and February. What is really
    painful is to believe that he will not agree unless through
    apprehension, his own leanings and desires being in favour of a
    large and not a moderate expenditure....


Figures, details, points, were varied, but the issue was in essence the
same, and the end was much the same. Lord Palmerston took his stand on the
demands of public opinion. He insisted (Oct. 19) that anybody who looked
carefully at the signs of the times must see that there were at present
two strong feelings in the national mind—the one a disinclination to
organic changes in our representative system, the other a steady
determination that the country should be placed and kept in an efficient
condition of defence. He pointed to the dead indifference of the workmen
themselves to their own enfranchisement as evidence of the one, and to the
volunteer movement as evidence of the other.

Mr. Gladstone rejoined that it was Lord Palmerston’s personal popularity,
and not the conviction or desire of the nation, that kept up estimates.
Palmerston retorted that this was to mistake cause and effect. “If I have
in any degree been fortunate enough to have obtained some share of the
goodwill and confidence of my fellow-countrymen, it has been because I
have rightly understood the feelings and opinion of the nation.... You may
depend upon it that any degree of popularity that is worth having can be
obtained only by such means, and of that popularity I sincerely wish you
the most ample share.” The strain was severe:—


    _Oct. 1, 1864._—I still feel much mental lassitude, and not only
    shrink from public business, but from hard books. It is uphill
    work. _Oct. 21._—A pamphlet letter from Lord Palmerston about
    defence holds out a dark prospect. _Oct. 22._—Wrote, late in the
    day, my reply to Lord Palmerston in a rather decisive tone, for I
    feel conscious of right and of necessity.

    _To Mrs. Gladstone._

    _Nov. 9._—After more than a fortnight’s delay, I received
    yesterday evening the enclosed very unfavourable letter from Lord
    Palmerston. I send with it the draft of my reply. Please to return
    them to-morrow by Willy—for they ought not to be even for that
    short time out of my custody, but I do not like to keep you in the
    dark. I suppose the matter may now stand over as far as debate is
    concerned until next month, or even till the middle of January. I
    fear you will not have much time for reading or writing to-morrow
    before you start for Chatsworth.

    This _sort_ of controversy keeps the nerves too highly strung. I
    am more afraid of running away than of holding my ground. But I do
    not quite forget how plentifully I am blessed and sustained, and
    how mercifully spared other and sorer trials.

    To-morrow comes the supper of the St. Martin’s Volunteers; and
    after that I hope to close my lips until February. The scene last
    night(97) was very different from that of Monday; but very
    remarkable, and even more enthusiastic. I was the only layman
    among five hundred lawyers; and it made me, wickedly, think of my
    position when locked alone in the Naples gaol.

    _Jan. 19, 1865._—The cabinet has been to-day almost as rough as
    any of the roughest times. In regard to the navy estimates, I have
    had no effective or broad support; platoon-firing more or less in
    my sense from Argyll and Gibson, four or five were silent, the
    rest hostile. Probably they will appoint a committee of cabinet,
    and we may work through, but on the other hand we may not. My
    _opinion_ is manifestly in a minority; but there is an
    unwillingness to have a row. I am not well able to write about
    other things—these batterings are sore work, but I must go
    through. C. Paget and Childers hold their ground.

    _Jan. 28._—The morning went fast but wretchedly. Seldom, thank
    God, have I a day to which I could apply this epithet. Last night
    I could have done almost anything to shut out the thought of the
    coming battle. This is very weak, but it is the effects of the
    constant recurrence of these things. Estimates always settled at
    the dagger’s point.—(_Diary._)

    _Osborne, Jan. 31._—I hope you got my note last night. The weather
    here is mild, and I sit with open window while writing. The Queen
    and Princess both ask about you abundantly. I have been most
    pertinacious about seeing the baby prince. I tried to make the
    request twice to the Princess, but I think she did not understand
    my words. Determined not to be beat, I applied to the Prince, who
    acceded with glee, but I don’t know what will come of it. He
    talked with good sense last night about Greece, Ionian Islands,
    and Canada; and I was his partner at whist. We came off quits. I
    dined last night, and also saw the Queen before dinner, but only
    for a quarter of an hour or so. She talked about Japan and Lord
    Palmerston, but there was not time to get into swing, and nothing
    said of nearer matters.


The sort of success that awaited his strenuous endeavour has been already
indicated.(98)



II


In the spring Mr. Gladstone made the first advance upon what was to be an
important journey. All through February and March he worked with
Phillimore and others upon the question of the Irish church. The thing was
delicate, for his constituency would undoubtedly be adverse. His advisers
resolved that he should speak on a certain motion from a radical below the
gangway, to the effect that the present position of the Irish church
establishment was unsatisfactory, and called for the early attention of
the government. It is hard to imagine two propositions on the merits more
indisputable, but a parliamentary resolution is not to be judged by its
verbal contents only. Dillwyn’s motion was known to mean disestablishment
and nothing less. In that view, Mr. Gladstone wrote a short but pregnant
letter to Phillimore—and this too meant disestablishment and nothing less.
It was the first tolerably definite warning of what was to be one of the
two or three greatest legislative acts of his career.


    _To Robert Phillimore._

    _Feb. 13, 1865._—I would treat the Irish church, as a religious
    body, with the same respect and consideration as the church of
    England, and would apply to it the same liberal policy as regards
    its freedom of action. But I am not loyal to it as an
    establishment. It exists, and is virtually almost unchallenged as
    to its existence in that capacity; it may long (I cannot quite say
    long may it) outlive me; I will never be a party, knowingly, to
    what I may call frivolous acts of disturbance, nor to the
    premature production of schemes of change: but still comes back
    the refrain of my song: “_I am not loyal to it as an
    Establishment._” I could not renew the votes and speeches of
    thirty years back. A quarter of a century of not only fair but
    exceptionally fair trial has wholly dispelled hopes to which they
    had relation; and I am bound to say I look upon its present form
    of existence as no more favourable to religion, in any sense of
    the word, than it is to civil justice and to the contentment and
    loyalty of Ireland.


Lord Palmerston got wind of the forthcoming speech, and wrote a short
admonitory note. He had heard that Mr. Gladstone was about to set forth
his views as an individual, and not as a member of the government, and
this was a distinction that he reckoned impracticable. Was it possible for
a member of a government speaking from the treasury bench so to sever
himself from the body corporate to which he belonged, as to be able to
express decided opinions as an individual, and leave himself free to act
upon different opinions, or abstain from acting on those opinions, when
required to act as a member of the government taking part in the divisions
of the body? And again, if his opinions happened not to be accepted by a
colleague on the same bench, would not the colleague have either to
acquiesce, or else to state in what respect his own opinion differed? In
this case would not differences in a government be unnecessarily and
prematurely forced upon the public? All this was the sound doctrine of
cabinet government. Mr. Gladstone, replying, felt that “he could not as a
minister, and as member for Oxford, allow the subject to be debated an
indefinite number of times and remain silent.” His indictment of the Irish
church was decisive. At the same time he was careful to explain in public
correspondence that the question was out of all bearing on the practical
politics of the day. Meanwhile, as spokesman for the government, Mr.
Gladstone deprecated the responsibility of raising great questions at a
time when they could not be seriously approached. One acute observer who
knew him well, evidently took a different view of the practical politics
of the day, or at any rate, of the morrow. Manning wrote to Mr. Gladstone
two days after the speech was made and begged to be allowed to see him: “I
read your speech on the Irish church, which set me musing and forecasting.
It was a real grapple with the question.”



III


(M41) Not many days after this speech Cobden died. To his brother,
Robertson, Mr. Gladstone wrote:—


    _April 5._—What a sad, sad loss is this death of Cobden. I feel in
    miniature the truth of what Bright well said yesterday—ever since
    I really came to know him, I have held him in high esteem and
    regard as well as admiration; but till he died I did not know how
    high it was. I do not know that I have ever seen in public life a
    character more truly simple, noble, and unselfish. His death will
    make an echo through the world, which in its entireness he has
    served so well.

    _April 7._—To Mr. Cobden’s funeral at W. Lavington. Afterwards to
    his home, which I was anxious to know. Also I saw Mrs. Cobden. The
    day was lovely, the scenery most beautiful and soothing, the whole
    sad and impressive. Bright broke down at the grave. Cobden’s name
    is great; it will be greater.—(_Diary._)


A few months before this Mr. Gladstone had lost a friend more intimate.
The death of the Duke of Newcastle, he says (Oct. 19, 1864), “severs the
very last of those contemporaries who were also my political friends. How
it speaks to me ‘Be doing, and be done.’ ”


    _To Mrs. Gladstone._

    _Oct. 19._—Dr. Kingsley sent me a telegram to inform me of the sad
    event at Clumber; but it only arrived two hours before the papers,
    though the death happened last night. So that brave heart has at
    last ceased to beat. Certainly in him more than in any one I have
    known, was exhibited the character of our life as a dispensation
    of pain. This must ever be a mystery, for we cannot see the
    working-out of the purposes of God. Yet in his case I have always
    thought some glimpse of them seemed to be permitted. It is well to
    be permitted also to believe that he is now at rest for ever, and
    that the cloud is at length removed from his destiny.

    _Clumber, Oct. 26._—It is a time and a place to feel, if one could
    feel. He died in the room where we have been sitting before and
    after dinner—where, thirty-two years ago, a stripling, I came over
    from Newark in fear and trembling to see the duke, his father;
    where a stiff horseshoe semi-circle then sat round the fire in
    evenings; where that rigour melted away in Lady Lincoln’s time;
    where she and her mother sang so beautifully at the pianoforte, in
    the same place where it now stands. The house is full of local
    memories.



IV


On July 6 (1865) parliament was dissolved. Four years before, Mr.
Gladstone had considered the question of retaining or abandoning the seat
for the university. It was in contemplation to give a third member to the
southern division of Lancashire, and, in July 1861, he received a
requisition begging his assent to nomination there, signed by nearly 8000
of the electors—a number that seemed to make success certain. His letters
to Dr. Pusey and others show how strongly he inclined to comply. Flesh and
blood shrank from perpetual strife, he thought, and after four contested
elections in fourteen years at Oxford, he asked himself whether he should
not escape the prolongation of the series. He saw, as he said, that they
meant to make it a life-battle, like the old famous college war between
Bentley and the fellows of Trinity. But he felt his deep obligation to his
Oxford supporters, and was honourably constrained again to bear their
flag. In the same month of 1861 he had declined absolutely to stand for
London in the place of Lord John Russell.

At Oxford the tories this time had secured an excellent candidate in Mr.
Gathorne Hardy, a man of sterling character, a bold and capable debater, a
good man of business, one of the best of Lord Derby’s lieutenants. The
election was hard fought, like most of the four that had gone before it.
The educated residents were for the chancellor of the exchequer, as they
had always been, and he had both liberals and high churchmen on his side.
One feature was novel, the power of sending votes by post. Mr. Gladstone
had not been active in the House against this change, but only bestowed
upon it a parting malediction. It strengthened the clerical vote, and as
sympathy with disestablishment was thrust prominently forward against Mr.
Gladstone, the new privilege cost him his seat. From the first day things
looked ill, and when on the last day (July 18) the battle ended, he was
one hundred and eighty votes behind Mr. Hardy.(99)


    _July 16, ’65._—Always in straits the Bible in church supplies my
    needs. To-day it was in the 1st lesson, Jer. i. 19, “And they
    shall fight against thee, but they shall not prevail against thee,
    for I am with thee, saith the Lord, to deliver thee.”

    _July 17._—Again came consolation to me in the Psalms—86:16; it
    did the same for me April 17, 1853. At night arrived the telegram
    announcing my defeat at Oxford as virtually accomplished. A dear
    dream is dispelled. God’s will be done.


(M42) His valedictory address was both graceful and sincere: “After an
arduous connection of eighteen years, I bid you respectfully farewell. My
earnest purpose to serve you, my many faults and shortcomings, the
incidents of the political relation between the university and myself,
established in 1847, so often questioned in vain, and now, at length,
finally dissolved, I leave to the judgment of the future. It is one
imperative duty, and one alone, which induces me to trouble you with these
few parting words—the duty of expressing my profound and lasting gratitude
for indulgence as generous, and for support as warm and enthusiastic in
itself, and as honourable from the character and distinctions of those who
have given it, as has in my belief ever been accorded by any constituency
to any representative.”

He was no sooner assured of his repulse at Oxford, than he started for the
Lancashire constituency, where a nomination had been reserved for him.


    _July 18._—Went off at eleven ... to the Free Trade Hall which was
    said to have 6000 people. They were in unbounded enthusiasm. I
    spoke for 1-1/4 hr., and when the meeting concluded went off to
    Liverpool.... Another meeting of 5000 at the Amphitheatre, if
    possible more enthusiastic than that at Manchester.


In the fine hall that stands upon the site made historic by the militant
free-traders, he used a memorable phrase. “At last, my friends,” he began,
“I am come among you, and I am come among you ‘unmuzzled.’ ” The audience
quickly realised the whole strength of the phrase, and so did the people
of the country when it reached them. Then he opened a high magnanimous
exordium about the Oxford that had cast him out. The same evening at
Liverpool, he again dwelt on the desperate fondness with which he had
clung to the university seat, but rapidly passed to the contrast. “I come
into South Lancashire, and find here around me different phenomena. I find
the development of industry. I find the growth of enterprise. I find the
progress of social philanthropy. I find the prevalence of toleration. I
find an ardent desire for freedom. If there be one duty more than another
incumbent upon the public men of England, it is to establish and maintain
harmony between the past of our glorious history and the future that is
still in store for her.”


    _July 20._—Robertson and I went in early and polled. He was known,
    and I through him, and we had a scene of great popular enthusiasm.
    We then followed the polls as the returns came in, apparently
    triumphant, but about midday it appeared that the figures of both
    parties were wrong, ours the worst. Instead of being well and
    increasingly at the head I was struggling with Egerton at 1 P.M.,
    and Turner gaining on me.... Off to Chester. In the evening the
    figures of the close came in and gave me the second place. The
    volunteers in the park cheered loudly, the church bells rung, the
    people came down with a band and I had to address them.

    _To the Duchess of Sutherland._

    I am by far too sorry about Oxford to feel the slightest
    temptation to be angry, even were there cause. I only feel that I
    love her better than ever. There is great enthusiasm here,
    stimulated no doubt by the rejection. I have just been polling
    amid fervid demonstrations. The first return at nine o’clock—but
    you will know all when this reaches you—is as follows.... This of
    course says little as to the final issue. Ten o’clock. My majority
    so far increases, the others diminish. But it is hard running.
    Eleven. My majority increases, the others diminish. Egerton is
    second. One of our men third. Twelve thousand four hundred have
    polled. My seat looks well.

    I interrupt here to say you would have been _pleased_ had you
    heard Willy, at a moment’s notice, on Tuesday night, address five
    thousand people no one of whom had ever seen him; he was (forgive
    me) so modest, so manly, _so ready_, so judicious.

    Since writing thus far everything has been overset in a chaos of
    conflicting reports. They will all be cleared up for you before
    this comes. I hope I am not in a fool’s paradise. All I yet know
    is an apparently hard fight between Egerton and me for the head of
    the poll, but my seat tolerably secure. I have had _such_ letters!


When the votes were counted Mr. Gladstone was third upon the poll, and so
secured the seat, with two tory colleagues above him.(100)

The spirit in which Mr. Gladstone took a defeat that was no mere
electioneering accident, but the landmark of a great severance in his
extraordinary career, is shown in his replies to multitudes of
correspondents. On the side of his tenacious and affectionate attachment
to Oxford, the wound was deep. On the other side, emancipation from
fetters and from contests that he regarded as ungenerous, was a profound
relief. But the relief touched him less than the sorrow.

Manning wrote:—


    Few men have been watching you more than I have in these last
    days; and I do not know that I could wish you any other result.
    But you have entered upon a new and larger field as Sir It. Peel
    did, to whose history yours has many points of likeness. You say
    truly that Oxford has failed to enlarge itself to the progress of
    the country. I hope this will make you enlarge yourself to the
    facts of our age and state—and I believe it will. Only, as I said
    some months ago, I am anxious about you, lest you should entangle
    yourself with extremes. This crisis is for you politically what a
    certain date was for me religiously.


Mr. Gladstone replied:—


    _Hawarden, July 21._—I thank you very much for your kind letter,
    and I should have been very glad if it had contained all that it
    merely alludes to. From Oxford and her children I am overwhelmed
    with kindness. My feelings towards her are those of sorrow,
    leavened perhaps with pride. But I am for the moment a stunned
    man; the more so because without a moment of repose I had to
    plunge into the whirlpools of South Lancashire, and swim there for
    my life, which as you will see, has been given me.

    I do not think I can admit the justice of the caution against
    extremes. The greatest or second greatest of what people call my
    extremes, is one which I believe you approve. I profess myself a
    disciple of Butler: the greatest of all enemies to extremes. This
    indeed speaks for my intention only. But in a cold or lukewarm
    period, and such is this in public affairs, everything which moves
    and lives is called extreme, and that by the very people (I do not
    mean or think that you are one of them) who in a period of
    excitement would far outstrip, under pressure, those whom they now
    rebuke. Your caution about self-control, however, I do accept—it
    is very valuable—I am sadly lacking in that great quality.

    At both Liverpool and Manchester, he writes to Dr. Jacobson, I had
    to speak of Oxford, and I have endeavoured to make it
    unequivocally clear that I am here as the same man, and not
    another, and that throwing off the academic cap and gown makes no
    difference in the figure.

    “Vixi, et quem dederat cursum fortuna peregi.”(101)

    And when I think of dear old Oxford, whose services to me I can
    never repay, there comes back to me that line of Wordsworth in his
    incomparable Ode, and I fervently address her with it—

    “Forbode not any severing of our loves.”

    _To Sir Stafford Northcote, July 21._—I cannot withhold myself
    from writing a line to assure you it is not my fault, but my
    misfortune, that you are not my successor at Oxford. My desire or
    impulse has for a good while, not unnaturally, been to escape from
    the Oxford seat; not because I grudged the anxieties of it, but
    because I found the load, added to other loads, too great. Could I
    have seen my way to this proceeding, had the advice or had the
    conduct of my friends warranted it, you would have had such notice
    of it, as effectually to preclude your being anticipated. I mean
    no disrespect to Mr. Hardy; but it has been a great pain to me to
    see in all the circulars a name different from the name that
    should have stood there, and that would have stood there, but for
    your personal feelings.

    _Ibid. July 22._—The separation from friends in politics is indeed
    very painful.... I have been instructed, perhaps been hardened, by
    a very wide experience in separation.—No man has been blessed more
    out of proportion to his deserts than I have in friends: in
    πολυφιλία, in χρηστοφιλία;(102) but when with regard to those of
    old standing who were nearest to me, I ask where are they, I seem
    to see around me a little waste, that has been made by politics,
    by religion, and by death. All these modes of severance are sharp.
    But the first of them is the least so, when the happy conviction
    remains that the fulfilment of duty, such as conscience points to
    it, is the object on both sides. And I have suffered so sorely by
    the far sharper partings in death, and in religion after a fashion
    which practically almost comes to death, that there is something
    of relief in turning to the lighter visitation. It is, however, a
    visitation still.

    _To the Bishop of Oxford, July 21._—... Do not join with others in
    praising me, because I am not angry, only sorry, and that deeply.
    For my revenge—which I do not desire, but would battle if I
    could—all lies in that little word “future” in my address, which I
    wrote with a consciousness that it is deeply charged with meaning,
    and that that which shall come will come. There have been two
    great deaths or transmigrations of spirit in my political
    existence. One, very slow, the breaking of ties with my original
    party. The other, very short and sharp, the breaking of the tie
    with Oxford. There will probably be a third, and no more....
    Again, my dear Bishop, I thank you for bearing with my
    waywardness, and manifesting, in the day of need, your confidence
    and attachment.


The bishop naturally hinted some curiosity as to the third transmigration.
“The oracular sentence,” Mr. Gladstone replied, “has little bearing on
present affairs or prospects, and may stand in its proper darkness.” In
the same letter the bishop urged Mr. Gladstone to imitate Canning when he
claimed the post of prime minister. “I think,” was the reply (July 25)
“that if you had the same means of estimating my position, jointly with my
faculties, as I have, you would be of a different opinion. It is my fixed
determination never to take any step whatever to raise myself to a higher
level in official life, and this not on grounds of Christian self-denial
which would hardly apply, but on the double ground, first, of my total
ignorance of my capacity, bodily or mental, to hold such a higher level,
and, secondly—perhaps I might say especially—because I am certain that the
fact of my seeking it would seal my doom in taking it.”(103)

Truly was it said of Mr. Gladstone that his rejection at Oxford, and his
election in Lancashire, were regarded as matters of national importance,
because he was felt to have the promise of the future in him, to have a
living fire in him, a capacity for action, and a belief that moving on was
a national necessity; because he was bold, earnest, impulsive; because he
could sympathise with men of all classes, occupations, interests,
opinions; because he thought nothing done so long as much remained for him
to do. While liberals thus venerated him as if he had been a Moses
beckoning from Sinai towards the promised land, tories were described as
dreading him, ever since his suffrage speech, as continental monarchs
dreaded Mazzini—“a man whose name is at once an alarm, a menace, and a
prediction.” They hated him partly as a deserter, partly as a disciple of
Manchester. Throughout the struggle, the phrase “I believe in Mr.
Gladstone” served as the liberal _credo_, and “I distrust Mr. Gladstone”
as the condensed commination service of the tories upon all manner of
change.(104)



V


(M43) On October 18, the prime minister died at Brocket. The news found
Mr. Gladstone at Clumber, in performance of his duties as Newcastle
trustee. For him the event opened many possibilities, and his action upon
it is set out in two or three extracts from his letters:—


    _To Lord Russell. Clumber, Oct. 18, 1865._—I have received tonight
    by telegraph the appalling news of Lord Palmerston’s decease. None
    of us, I suppose, were prepared for this event, in the sense of
    having communicated as to what should follow. The Queen must take
    the first step, but I cannot feel uncertain what it will be. Your
    former place as her minister, your powers, experience, services,
    and renown, do not leave reason for doubt that you will be sent
    for. Your hands will be entirely free—you are pledged probably to
    no one, certainly not to me. But any government now to be formed
    cannot be wholly a continuation, it must be in some degree a new
    commencement.

    I am sore with conflicts about the public expenditure, which I
    feel that other men would have either escaped, or have conducted
    more gently and less fretfully. I am most willing to retire. On
    the other hand, I am bound by conviction even more than by credit
    to the principle of progressive reduction in our military and
    naval establishments and in the charges for them, under the
    favourable circumstances which we appear to enjoy. This I think is
    the moment to say thus much in subject matter which greatly
    appertains to my department. On the general field of politics,
    after having known your course in cabinet for eight and a half
    years, I am quite willing to take my chance under your banner, in
    the exact capacity I now fill, and I adopt the step, perhaps a
    little unusual, of saying so, because it may be convenient to you
    at a juncture when time is precious, while it can, I trust, after
    what I have said above, hardly be hurtful.

    _To Mr. Panizzi, Oct. 18._—_Ei fu!_(105) Death has indeed laid low
    the most towering antlers in all the forest. No man in England
    will more sincerely mourn Lord Palmerston than you. Your warm
    heart, your long and close friendship with him, and your sense of
    all he had said and done for Italy, all so bound you to him that
    you will deeply feel this loss; as for myself I am stunned. It was
    plain that this would come; but sufficient unto the day is the
    burden thereof, and there is no surplus stock of energy in the
    mind to face, far less to anticipate, fresh contingencies. But I
    need not speak of this great event—to-morrow all England will be
    ringing of it, and the world will echo England. I cannot forecast
    the changes which will follow; but it is easy to see what the
    first step should be.

    _To Mrs. Gladstone, Oct. 20._—I received two letters from you
    today together. The first, very naturally full of plans, the
    second written when those plans had been blown into the air by the
    anticipation (even) of Lord Palmerston’s death. This great event
    shakes me down to the foundation, by the reason of coming trouble.
    I think two things are clear. 1. The Queen should have come to
    London. 2. She should have sent for Lord Russell. I fear she has
    done neither. Willy telegraphs to me that a letter from Lord
    Russell had come to Downing Street. Now had he heard from the
    Queen, he would (so I reason) either have telegraphed to me to go
    up, or sent a letter hither by a messenger instead of leaving it
    to kick its heels in Downing Street for a day. And we hear nothing
    of the Queen’s moving; she is getting into a groove, out of which
    some one ought to draw her.

    _Oct. 21._—As far as political matters are concerned, I am happier
    this morning. Lord Russell, pleased with my letter, writes to say
    he has been commissioned to carry on the present government as
    first lord, wishes me to co-operate “in the capacity I now fill as
    a principal member of the administration.” I think that I have
    struck a stroke for economy which will diminish difficulty when we
    come to estimates for the year. I _hope_ from his letter that he
    means to ask George Grey to lead, which would be very acceptable
    to me. Though he does not summon me to London, I think I ought to
    go, and shall do so accordingly to-day. I am sorry that this is
    again more vexation and uncertainty for you.

    _Oct. 22._—I came up last night and very glad I am of it. I found
    that Lord Palmerston’s funeral was almost to be private, not
    because the family wished it, but because nothing had been
    proposed to them. I at once sent—down to Richmond and Pembroke
    Lodge with a letter, and the result is that Evelyn Ashley has been
    written to by Lord Russell and authorised to telegraph to Balmoral
    to propose a funeral in Westminster Abbey. It is now very late,
    and all the preparations must have been made at Romsey. But in
    such a matter especially, better late than never.

    You will have been amused to see that on Friday the _Times_
    actually put me up for prime minister, and yesterday knocked me
    down again! There is a rumour that it was the old story, Delane
    out of town. I was surprised at the first article, not at the
    second. All, I am sorry to say, seem to take for granted that I am
    to lead the House of Commons. But this is not so simple a matter.
    First, it must be offered to Sir George Grey. If he refuses, then
    secondly, I do not think I can get on without a different
    arrangement of treasury and chancellor of exchequer business,
    which will not be easy. But the worst of all is the distribution
    of offices as between the two Houses. It has long been felt that
    the House of Commons was too weak and the House of Lords too
    strong, in the share of the important offices, and now the
    premiership is to be carried over, unavoidably. No such thing has
    ever been known as an administration with the first lord, foreign
    secretary, secretary for war, and the first lord of the admiralty,
    in the House of Lords.(106) _This_ is really a stiff business.

    _To Lord Russell. Carlton House Terrace, Oct. 23._—You having
    thought fit to propose that I should lead the House of Commons, I
    felt it necessary first to be assured that Sir George Grey, who
    was in constructive possession of that office, and under whom I
    should have served with perfect satisfaction, could not be induced
    to accept the duty. Of this your letter seemed to contain
    sufficient proof. Next, I felt it to be necessary that some
    arrangement should be made for relieving me of a considerable and
    singularly disabling class of business, consisting of the cases of
    real or supposed grievance, at all times arising in connection
    with the collection of the public revenue under its several
    heads.... The third difficulty which I named to you in the way of
    my accepting your proposal, is what I venture to call the
    lop-sided condition of the government, with the strain and stress
    of administration in the House of Commons, and nearly all the
    offices about which the House of Commons cares, represented by
    heads in the House of Lords. It weighs very seriously on my mind,
    and I beg you to _consider_ it.... I have rather particular
    engagements of a public nature next week; at Edinburgh on the 2nd
    and 3rd in connection with the university business, and at Glasgow
    on the 1st, to receive the freedom. I am anxious to know whether I
    may now finally confirm these engagements?

    _To Mrs. Gladstone, Oct. 23._—I think I see my way a little now.
    Lord Russell agrees that cabinets should be postponed after
    Saturday, for a good fortnight. I can therefore keep my
    engagements in Scotland, and write to-day to say so.

    Lord Palmerston is to be buried in the Abbey on Friday; the family
    are pleased. I saw W. Cowper as well as Evelyn Ashley to-day. They
    give a good account of Lady Palmerston.... Lord Russell offers me
    the lead—I must probably settle it to-morrow. His physical
    strength is low, but I suppose in the Lords he may get on. The
    greatest difficulty is having almost all the important offices in
    the Lords.

    _Oct. 24._—Lord Russell now proposes to adjourn the cabinets till
    Nov.14th, but I must be here for the Lord Mayor’s dinner on the
    9th. You will therefore see my programme as it now stands. I send
    you a batch of eight letters, which please keep carefully to
    yourself, and return in their bundle forthwith. There are divers
    proposals on foot, but I think little will be finally settled
    before Friday. Sir R. Peel will probably have a peerage offered
    him. I have not yet accepted the lead formally, but I suppose it
    must come to that. The main question is whether anything, and
    what, can be done to improve the structure of the government as
    between the two Houses.

    _Oct. 25._—Nothing more has yet been done. I consider my position
    virtually fixed. I am afraid of Lord Russell’s rapidity, but we
    shall try to rein it in, There seems to be very little venom in
    the atmosphere. I wish Sir G. Grey were here. The Queen’s keeping
    so long at Balmoral is a sad mistake.


(M44) He received, as was inevitable, plenty of letters from admirers
regretting that he had not gone up higher. His answer was, of course,
uniform. “It was,” he told them, “my own impartial and firm opinion that
Lord Russell was the proper person to succeed Lord Palmerston. However
flattered I may be, therefore, to hear of an opinion such as you report
and express, I have felt it my duty to co-operate to the best of my power
in such arrangements as might enable the government to be carried on by
the present ministers, with Lord Russell at their head.”

On the other hand, doubts were abundant. To Sir George Grey, one important
friend wrote (Oct. 30): “I think you are right on the score of health, to
give him [Gladstone] the lead of the House; but you will see, with all his
talents, he will not perceive the difference between leading and driving.”
Another correspondent, of special experience, confessed to “great
misgivings as to Gladstone’s tact and judgment.” “The heart of all Israel
is towards him,” wrote his good friend Dean Church; “he is very great and
very noble. But he is hated as much as, or more than, he is loved. He is
fierce sometimes and wrathful and easily irritated; he wants knowledge of
men and speaks rashly. And I look on with some trembling to see what will
come of this his first attempt to lead the Commons and prove himself fit
to lead England.”(107) It was pointed out that Roundell Palmer was the
only powerful auxiliary on whom he could rely in debate, and should the
leader himself offend the House by an indiscretion, no colleague was
competent to cover his retreat or baffle the triumph of the enemy. His
first public appearance as leader of the House of Commons and associate
premier was made at Glasgow, and his friends were relieved and exultant.
The point on which they trembled was caution, and at Glasgow he was
caution personified.

The changes in administration were not very difficult. Lowe’s admission to
the cabinet was made impossible by his declaration against any lowering of
the borough franchise. The inclusion of Mr. Goschen, who had only been in
parliament three years, was the subject of remark. People who asked what
he had done to merit promotion so striking, did not know his book on
foreign exchanges, and were perhaps in no case competent to judge it.(108)
Something seems to have been said about Mr. Bright, for in a note to Lord
Russell (Dec. 11) Mr. Gladstone writes: “With reference to your remark
about Bright, he has for many years held language of a studious moderation
about reform. And there is something odious in fighting shy of a man, so
powerful in talent, of such undoubted integrity. Without feeling, however,
that he is permanently proscribed, I am under the impression that in the
present critical state of feeling on your own side with respect to the
franchise, his name would sink the government and the bill together.” When
Palmerston invited Cobden to join his cabinet in 1859, Cobden spoke of
Bright, how he had avoided personalities in his recent speeches. “It is
not personalities that we complained of,” Palmerston replied; “a public
man is right in attacking persons. But it is his attacks on _classes_ that
have given offence to powerful bodies, who can make their resentment
felt.”(109)

Mr. Gladstone’s first few weeks as leader of the House were almost a
surprise. “At two,” he says (Feb. 1, 1867), “we went down to choose the
Speaker, and I had to throw off in my new capacity. If mistrust of self be
a qualification, God knows I have it.” All opened excellently. Not only
was he mild and conciliatory, they found him even tiresome in his
deference. Some onlookers still doubted. Everybody, they said, admired and
respected him, some loved him, but there were few who understood him. “So
far,” said a conservative observer, “Gladstone has led the House with
great good temper, prosperity, and success, but his rank and file and some
of his colleagues, seem to like him none the better on that account.”(110)
Meanwhile, words of friendly encouragement came from Windsor. On Feb. 19:
“The Queen cannot conclude without expressing to Mr. Gladstone her
gratification at the accounts she hears from all sides of the admirable
manner in which he has commenced his leadership in the House of Commons.”

He found the speech for a monument to Lord Palmerston in the Abbey “a
delicate and difficult duty” (Feb. 22). “It would have worn me down
beforehand had I not been able to exclude it from my thoughts till the
last, and then I could only feel my impotence.” Yet he performed the duty
with grace and truth. He commemorated Palmerston’s share in the extension
of freedom in Europe, and especially in Italy, where, he said,
Palmerston’s name might claim a place on a level with her most
distinguished patriots. Nor had his interest ever failed in the rescue of
the “unhappy African race, whose history is for the most part written only
in blood and tears.” He applauded his genial temper, his incomparable tact
and ingenuity, his pluck in debate, his delight in a fair stand-up fight,
his inclination to avoid whatever tended to exasperate, his incapacity of
sustained anger.




Chapter X. Matters Ecclesiastical. (1864-1868)


    ὦ γῆς ὄχημα κὰπὶ γῆς ἔχων ἕδραν,
    ὅστις ποτ᾽ εἶ σύ, δυστόπαστος εἰδέναι,
    Ζεὺς, εἴτ᾽ ἀνάγκη φύσεος εἴτε νοῦς βροτῶν,
    προσηυξάμην σε; πάντα γὰρ δι᾽ ἀψόφου
    βαίνων κελεύθου κατὰ δίκην τὰ θνήτ᾽ ἄγεις.

    —EUR., _Troades_, 884.

    O thou, upholder of the earth, who upon earth hast an abiding
    place, whosoever thou art, inscrutable, thou Zeus, whether thou be
    necessity of nature, or intelligence of mortal men, on thee I
    call; for, treading a noiseless path, in righteousness dost thou
    direct all human things.



I


The reader will have surmised that amidst all the press and strain in
affairs of state, Mr. Gladstone’s intensity of interest in affairs of the
church never for an instant slackened. Wide as the two spheres stood
apart, his temper in respect of them was much the same. In church and
state alike he prized institutions and the great organs of corporate life;
but what he thought of most and cared for and sought after most, was not
their mechanism, though on that too he set its value, but the living
spirit within the institution. In church and state alike he moved
cautiously and tentatively. In both alike he strove to unite order,
whether temporal order in the state or spiritual order in the church, with
his sovereign principle of freedom. Many are the difficulties in the way
of applying Cavour’s formula of a free church in a free state, as most
countries and their governors have by now found out. Yet to have a vivid
sense of the supreme importance of the line between temporal power and
spiritual is the note of a statesman fit for modern times. “The whole of
my public life,” he wrote to the Bishop of Oxford in 1863, “with respect
to matters ecclesiastical, for the last twenty years and more, has been a
continuing effort, though a very weak one, to extricate her in some degree
from entangled relations without shock or violence.”

(M45) The general temper of his churchmanship on its political side during
these years is admirably described in a letter to his eldest son, and some
extracts from it furnish a key to his most characteristic frame of mind in
attempting to guide the movements of his time:—


    _To W. H. Gladstone._

    _April 16, 1865._—You appeared to speak with the supposition, a
    very natural one, that it was matter of duty to defend all the
    privileges and possessions of the church; that concession would
    lead to concession; and that the end of the series would be its
    destruction.... Now, in the first place, it is sometimes necessary
    in politics to make surrenders of what, if not surrendered, will
    be wrested from us. And it is very wise, when a necessity of this
    kind is approaching, to anticipate it while it is yet a good way
    off; for then concession begets gratitude, and often brings a
    return. The _kind_ of concession which is really mischievous is
    just that which is made under terror and extreme pressure; and
    unhappily this has been the kind of concession which for more than
    two hundred years, it has been the fashion of men who call (and
    who really think) themselves “friends of the church” to make.... I
    believe it would be a wise concession, upon grounds merely
    political, for the church of England to have the law of church
    rate abolished in all cases where it places her in fretting
    conflict with the dissenting bodies.... I say all this, however,
    not to form the groundwork of a conclusion, but only in
    illustration of a general maxim which is applicable to political
    questions.

    But next, this surely is a political question. Were we asked to
    surrender an article of the creed in order to save the rest, or to
    consent to the abolition of the episcopal order, these things
    touch the faith of Christians and the life of the church, and
    cannot in any measure become the subject of compromise. But the
    external possessions of the church were given it for the more
    effectual promotion of its work, and may be lessened or abandoned
    with a view to the same end.... Now we have lived into a time when
    the great danger of the church is the sale of her faith for
    gold.... In demanding the money of dissenters for the worship of
    the church, we practically invest them with a title to demand that
    she should be adapted to their use in return, and we stimulate
    every kind of interference with her belief and discipline to that
    end. By judiciously waiving an undoubted legal claim, we not only
    do an act which the understood principles of modern liberty tend
    to favour and almost require, but we soothe ruffled minds and
    tempers, and what is more, we strengthen the case and claim of the
    church to be respected as a religious body.... I am convinced that
    the only hope of making it possible for her to discharge her high
    office as stewardess of divine truth, is to deal tenderly and
    gently with all the points at which her external privileges
    _grate_ upon the feelings and interests of that unhappily large
    portion of the community who have almost ceased in any sense to
    care for her. This is a principle of broad application, broader
    far than the mere question of church rates. It is one not
    requiring precipitate or violent action, or the disturbance
    prematurely of anything established; but it supplies a rule of the
    first importance for dealing with the mixed questions of temporal
    and religious interest when they arise. I am very anxious to see
    it quietly but firmly rooted in your mind. It is connected with
    the dearest interests not only of my public life, but as I believe
    of our religion.... I am in no way anxious that you should take my
    opinions in politics as a model for your own. Your free
    concurrence will be a lively pleasure to me. But above all I wish
    you to be free. What I have now been dwelling upon is a matter
    higher and deeper than the region of mere opinion. It has fallen
    to my lot to take a share larger than that of many around me,
    though in itself slight, in bringing the principle I have
    described into use as a ground of action. I am convinced that if I
    have laboured to any purpose at all it has been in great part for
    this. It is part of that business of reconciling the past with the
    new time and order, which seems to belong particularly to our
    country and its rulers.


He then goes on to cite as cases where something had been done towards
securing the action of the church as a religious body, Canada, where
clergy and people now appointed their own bishop; a recent judgment of the
privy council leading to widespread emancipation of the colonial church;
the revival of convocation; the licence to convocation to alter the
thirty-sixth canon; the bestowal of self-government on Oxford. “In these
measures,” he says, “I have been permitted to take my part; but had I
adopted the rigid rule of others in regard to the temporal prerogatives,
real or supposed, of the church, I should at once have lost all power to
promote them.”

“As to disruption,” he wrote in these days, “that is the old cry by means
of which in all times the temporal interests of the English church have
been upheld in preference to the spiritual. The church of England is much
more likely of the two, to part with her faith than with her funds. It is
the old question, which is the greater, the _gold_ or the altar that
sanctifies the gold. Had this question been more boldly asked and more
truly answered in other times, we should not have been where we now are.
And by continually looking to the gold and not the altar, the dangers of
the future will be not diminished but increased.”(111)

(M46) In 1866 Mr. Gladstone for the first time voted for the abolition of
church rates. Later in the session he introduced his own plan, not in his
capacity as minister, but with the approval of the Russell cabinet. After
this cabinet had gone out, Mr. Gladstone in 1868 introduced a bill,
abolishing all legal proceedings for the recovery of church rates, except
in cases of rates already made, or where money had been borrowed on the
security of the rates. But it permitted voluntary assessments to be made,
and all agreements to make such payments on the faith of which any expense
was incurred, remained enforcible in the same manner as contracts of a
like character. Mr. Gladstone’s bill became law in the course of the
summer, and a struggle that had been long and bitter ended.

In another movement in the region of ecclesiastical machinery, from which
much was hoped, though little is believed to have come, Mr. Gladstone was
concerned, though I do not gather from the papers that he watched it with
the zealous interest of some of his friends. Convocation, the ancient
assembly or parliament of the clergy of the church of England, was
permitted in 1852 to resume the active functions that had been suspended
since 1717. To Mr. Gladstone some revival or institution of the corporate
organisation of the church, especially after the Gorham judgment, was ever
a cherished object. Bishop Wilberforce, long one of the most intimate of
his friends, was chief mover in proceedings that, as was hoped, were to
rescue the church from the anarchy in which one branch of her sons
regarded her as plunged. Some of Mr. Gladstone’s correspondence on the
question of convocation has already been made public.(112) Here it is
enough to print a passage or two from a letter addressed by him to the
bishop (Jan. 1, 1854) setting out his view of the real need of the time.
After a generous exaltation of the zeal and devotion of the clergy, he
goes on to the gains that might be expected from their effective
organisation:—


    First as to her pastoral work, her warfare against sin, she would
    put forth a strength, not indeed equal to it, but at least so much
    less unequal than it now is, that the good fight would everywhere
    be maintained, and she would not be as she now is, either hated or
    unknown among the myriads who form the right arm of England’s
    industry and skill. As to her doctrine and all that hangs upon it,
    such questions as might arise would be determined by the
    deliberate and permanent sense of the body. Some unity in belief
    is necessary to justify association in a Christian communion. Will
    that unity in belief be promoted or impaired by the free action of
    mind within her, subjected to order? If her case really were so
    desperate that her children had no common faith, then the sooner
    that imposture were detected the better; but if she has, then her
    being provided with legitimate, orderly, and authentic channels,
    for expressing and bringing to a head, as need arises, the
    sentiments of her people, will far more clearly manifest, and
    while manifesting will extend, deepen, and consolidate, that
    unity. It is all very well to sneer at councils: but who among us
    will deny that the councils which we acknowledge as lawful
    representatives of the universal church, were great and to all
    appearance necessary providential instruments in the establishment
    of the Christian faith?

    But, say some, we cannot admit the laity into convocation, as it
    would be in derogation of the rights of the clergy; or as others
    say, it would separate the church from the state. And others, more
    numerous and stronger, in their fear of the exclusive constitution
    of the convocation, resist every attempt at organising the church,
    and suffer, and even by suffering promote, the growth of all our
    evils. I will not touch the question of convocation except by
    saying that, in which I think you concur, that while the present
    use is unsatisfactory and even scandalous, no form of church
    government that does not distinctly and fully provide for the
    expression of the voice of the laity either can be had, or if it
    could would satisfy the needs of the church of England. But in my
    own mind as well as in this letter, I am utterly against all
    premature, all rapid conclusions.... It will be much in our day
    if, towards the cure of such evils, when we die we can leave to
    our children the precious knowledge that a beginning has been
    made—a beginning not only towards enabling the bishops and clergy
    to discharge their full duty, but also, and yet more, towards
    raising the real character of membership in those millions upon
    millions, the whole bulk of our community, who now have its name
    and its name alone.



II


In 1860 a volume appeared containing seven “essays and reviews” by seven
different writers, six of them clergymen of the church of England. The
topics were miscellaneous, the treatment of them, with one exception,(113)
was neither learned nor weighty, the tone was not absolutely uniform, but
it was as a whole mildly rationalistic, and the negations, such as they
were, exhibited none of the fierceness or aggression that had marked the
old controversies about Hampden, or Tract Ninety, or Ward’s _Ideal_. A
storm broke upon the seven writers, that they little intended to provoke.
To the apparent partnership among them was severely imputed a sinister
design. They were styled “the Septem contra Christum”—six ministers of
religion combining to assail the faith they outwardly professed—seven
authors of an immoral rationalistic conspiracy. Two of them were haled
into the courts, one for casting doubt upon the inspiration of the Bible,
the other for impugning the eternity of the future punishment of the
wicked. The Queen in council upon appeal was advised to reverse a hostile
judgment in the court below (1864), and Lord Chancellor Westbury delivered
the decision in a tone described in the irreverent epigram of the day as
“dismissing eternal punishment with costs.” This carried further, or
completed, the principle of the Gorham judgment fourteen years before, and
just as that memorable case determined that neither the evangelical nor
the high anglican school should drive out the other, so the judgment in
the case of _Essays and Reviews_ determined that neither should those two
powerful sections drive out the new critical, rationalistic, liberal, or
latitudinarian school. “It appears to me,” Mr. Gladstone wrote to the
Bishop of London (April 26, 1864), “that the spirit of this judgment has
but to be consistently and cautiously followed up, in order to establish,
as far as the court can establish it, a complete indifference between the
Christian faith and the denial of it. I do not believe it is in the power
of human language to bind the understanding and conscience of man with any
theological obligations, which the mode of argument used and the
principles assumed [in the judgment] would not effectually unloose.” To
Bishop Hamilton of Salisbury, who had taken part in one of the two cases,
he wrote:—


    _Feb. 8, 1864._—This new and grave occurrence appertains to a
    transition state through which the Christian faith is passing. The
    ship is at sea far from the shore she left, far from the shore she
    is making for. This or that deflection from her course, from this
    or that wind of heaven, we cannot tell what it is, or whether
    favourable or adverse to her true work and destination, unless we
    know all the stages of the experience through which she has yet to
    pass. It seems to me that these judgments are most important in
    their character as illustrations of a system, or I should rather
    say, of the failure of a system, parts of a vast scheme of forces
    and events in the midst of which we stand, which seem to govern
    us, but which are in reality governed by a hand above. It may be
    that this rude shock to the mere scripturism which has too much
    prevailed, is intended to be the instrument of restoring a greater
    harmony of belief, and of the agencies for maintaining belief. But
    be that as it may, the valiant soldier who has fought manfully
    should be, and I hope will be, of good cheer.


In the same connection he wrote to Sir W. Farquhar, a friend from earliest
days:—


    _Jan. 31, 1865._—I have never been much disposed to a great
    exaltation of clerical power, and I agree in the necessity of
    taking precautions against the establishment, especially of an
    insular and local though in its sphere legitimate authority, of
    new doctrines for that Christian faith which is not for England or
    France but for the world; further, I believe it has been a mistake
    in various instances to institute the coercive proceedings which
    have led to the present state of things. I remember telling the
    Archbishop of York at Penmaenmawr, when he was Bishop of
    Gloucester, that it seemed to me we had lived into a time when,
    speaking generally, penal proceedings for the maintenance of
    divine truth among the clergy would have to be abandoned, and
    moral means alone depended on. But, on the other hand, I feel that
    the most vital lay interests are at stake in the definite teaching
    and profession of the Christian faith, and the general tendency
    and effect of the judgments has been and is likely to be hostile
    to that definite teaching, and unfavourable also to the moral tone
    and truthfulness, of men who may naturally enough be tempted to
    shelter themselves under judicial glosses in opposition to the
    plain meaning of words. The judgments of the present tribunal
    continued in a series would, I fear, result in the final triumph
    (in a sense he did not desire) of Mr. Ward’s non-natural sense;
    and the real question is whether our objection to non-natural
    senses is general, or is only felt when the sense favoured is the
    one opposed to our own inclinations.



III


No theological book, wrote Mr. Gladstone in 1866, that has appeared since
the _Vestiges of Creation_ twenty years before (1844), had attracted
anything like the amount of notice bestowed upon “the remarkable volume
entitled _Ecce Homo_,” published in 1865. It was an attempt, so Mr.
Gladstone described it, to bring home to the reader the impression that
there is something or other called the Gospel, “which whatever it may be,”
as was said by an old pagan poet of the Deity,(114) has formidable claims
not merely on the intellectual condescension, but on the loyal allegiance
and humble obedience of mankind. The book violently displeased both sides.
It used language that could not be consistently employed in treating of
Christianity from the orthodox point of view. On the other hand, it
constituted “a grave offence in the eyes of those to whom the chequered
but yet imposing fabric of actual Christianity, still casting its majestic
light and shadow over the whole civilised world, is a rank eyesore and an
intolerable offence.” Between these two sets of assailants Mr. Gladstone
interposed with a friendlier and more hopeful construction.(115) He told
those who despised the book as resting on no evidence of the foundations
on which it was built, and therefore as being shallow and uncritical, that
we have a right to weigh the nature of the message, apart from the
credentials of the messenger. Then he reassured the orthodox by the hope
that “the present tendency to treat the old belief of man with a
precipitate, shallow, and unexamining disparagement” is only a passing
distemper, and that to the process of its removal the author of the book
would have the consolation and the praise of having furnished an earnest,
powerful, and original contribution.(116) Dean Milman told him that he had
brought to life again a book that after a sudden and brief yet brilliant
existence seemed to be falling swiftly into oblivion. The mask of the
anonymous had much to do, he thought, with its popularity, as had happened
to the _Vestiges of Creation_. Undoubtedly when the mask fell off,
interest dropped.

(M47) Dr. Pusey found the book intensely painful. “I have seldom,” he told
Mr. Gladstone, “been able to read much at a time, but shut the book for
pain, as I used to do with Renan’s.” What revolted him was not the
exhibition of the human nature of the central figure, but of a human
nature apart from and inconsistent with its divinity; the writer’s
admiring or patronising tone was loathsome. “What you have yourself
written,” Pusey said, “I like much. But its bearings on _Ecce Homo_ I can
hardly divine, except by way of contrast.” Dr. Newman thought that here
was a case where _materiam superabat opus_, and that Mr. Gladstone’s
observations were more valuable for their own sake, than as a
recommendation or defence of the book:—


    _Jan. 9, 1868._—I hope I have followed you correctly, says Newman:
    your main proposition seems to be, that whereas both Jew and
    Gentile had his own notion of an heroic humanity, and neither of
    them a true notion, the one being political, the other even
    immoral, the first step necessary for bringing in the idea of an
    Emmanuel into the world, was to form the human mould into which it
    ’might drop,’ and thus to supplant both the Judaic and the heathen
    misconception by the exhibition of the true idea. Next, passing
    from antecedent probabilities to history, the order of succession
    of the synoptical and the fourth gospels does in fact fulfil this
    reasonable anticipation. This seems to me a _very great_ view, and
    I look forward eagerly to what you have still to say in
    illustration of it. The only objection which I see can be made to
    it is, that it is a clever controversial expedient after the event
    for accounting for a startling fact. This is an objection not
    peculiar to it, but to all explanations of the kind. Still, the
    question remains—whether it is a fact that the sacred writers
    recognise, however indirectly, the wise economy which you assert,
    or whether it is only an hypothesis?


As to the specific principles and particular opinions in Mr. Gladstone’s
criticism of what we now see to have been a not very effective or deeply
influential book, we may think as we will. But the temper of his review,
the breadth of its outlook on Christian thought, tradition, and society,
show no mean elements in the composition of his greatness. So, too, does
the bare fact that under the pressure of office and all the cares of a
party leader in a crisis, his mind should have been free and disengaged
enough to turn with large and eager interest to such themes as these. This
was indeed the freedom of judgment with which, in the most moving lines of
the poem that he loved above all others, Virgil bidding farewell to Dante
makes him crowned and mitred master of himself—_Perch’ io te sopra te
corono e mitrio._(117)



IV


(M48) Other strong gusts swept the high latitudes, when Dr. Colenso,
Bishop of Natal, published certain destructive criticisms upon the
canonical Scriptures. His metropolitan at Cape Town pronounced sentence of
deprivation; Colenso appealed to the Queen in council; and the Queen in
council was advised that the proceedings of the Bishop of Cape Town were
null and void, for in law there was no established church in the colony,
nor any ecclesiastical court with lawful jurisdiction.(118) This triumph
of heresy was a heavy blow. In 1866 Bishop Colenso brought an action
against Mr. Gladstone and the other trustees of the colonial bishoprics
fund, calling upon them to set aside a sum of ten thousand pounds for the
purpose of securing the income of the Bishop of Natal, and to pay him his
salary, which they had withheld since his wrongful deprivation. “We,” said
Mr. Gladstone to Miss Burdett Coutts, “founding ourselves on the judgment,
say there is no see of Natal in the sense of the founders of the fund, and
therefore, of course, no bishop of such a see.” Romilly, master of the
rolls, gave judgment in favour of Colenso. These perplexities did not
dismay Mr. Gladstone. “Remembering what the churches in the colonies were
some forty years back, when I first began (from my father’s having a
connection with the West Indies), to feel an interest in them, I must own
that they present a cheering, a remarkable, indeed a wonderful spectacle.”
“I quite feel with you,” he says to Miss Burdett Coutts, “a great
uneasiness at what may follow from the exercise of judicial powers by
synods merely ecclesiastical, especially if small, remote, and unchecked
by an active public opinion. But in the American episcopal church it has
been found practicable in a great degree to obviate any dangers from such
a source.” Ten years after this, in one of the most remarkable articles he
ever wrote, speaking of the protestant evangelical section of the
adherents of the Christian system, he says that no portion of this entire
group seems to be endowed with greater vigour than this in the United
States and the British colonies, which has grown up in new soil, “_and far
from the possibly chilling shadow of national establishments of
religion_.”(119)




Chapter XI. Popular Estimates. (1868)


    Die Mitlebenden werden an vorzüglichen Menschen gar leicht irre;
    das Besondere der Person stört sie, das laufende bewegliche Leben
    verrückt ihre Standpunkte und hindert das Kennen und Anerkennen
    eines solchen Mannes.—GOETHE.

    The contemporaries of superior men easily go wrong about them.
    Peculiarity discomposes them; the swift current of life disturbs
    their points of view, and prevents them from understanding and
    appreciating such men.



I


It must obviously be interesting, as we approach a signal crisis in his
advance, to know the kind of impression, right or wrong, made by a great
man upon those who came nearest to him. Friends like Aberdeen and Graham
had many years earlier foreseen the high destinies of their colleague.
Aberdeen told Bishop Wilberforce in 1855 that Gladstone had some great
qualifications but some serious defects. “The chief, that when he has
convinced himself, perhaps by abstract reasoning of some view, he thinks
that every one else ought at once to see it as he does, and can make no
allowance for difference of opinion.”(120) About the same time Graham said
of him that he was “in the highest sense of the word _Liberal_; of the
greatest power; very much the first man in the House of Commons; detested
by the aristocracy for his succession duty, the most truly conservative
measure passed in my recollection.... He must rise to the head in such a
government as ours, even in spite of all the hatred of him.” Three years
later Aberdeen still thought him too obstinate and, if such a thing be
possible, too honest. He does not enough think of what other men think.
Does not enough look out of the window. “Whom will he lead?” asked the
bishop.(121) “Oh! it is impossible to say! Time must show, and new
combinations.” By 1863 Cardwell confidently anticipated that Mr. Gladstone
must become prime minister, and Bishop Wilberforce finds all coming to the
conclusion that he must be the next real chief.(122)

(M49) On the other side Lord Shaftesbury, to whom things ecclesiastical
were as cardinal as they were to Mr. Gladstone, ruefully reflected in 1864
that people must make ready for great and irrevocable changes. Palmerston
was simply the peg driven through the island of Delos: unloose the peg,
and all would soon be adrift. “His successor, Gladstone, will bring with
him the Manchester school for colleagues and supporters, a hot tractarian
for chancellor, and the Bishop of Oxford for ecclesiastical adviser. He
will succumb to every pressure, except the pressure of a constitutional
and conservative policy.” “He is a dangerous man,” was one of Lord
Palmerston’s latest utterances, “keep him in Oxford and he is partially
muzzled; but send him elsewhere and he will run wild.”(123) “The long and
short of our present position is,” said Shaftesbury, “that the time has
arrived (_novus sœclorum nascitur ordo_) for the triumph of the Manchester
school, of which Gladstone is the disciple and the organ. And for the
nonce they have a great advantage; for, though the majority of the country
is against them, the country has no leaders in or out of parliament;
whereas they are all well provided and are equally compact in purpose and
action.”(124) Somewhat earlier cool observers “out of hearing of the
modulation of his voice or the torrent of his declamation” regarded him
“in spite of his eloquence unsurpassed in our day, perhaps in our century,
in spite of his abilities and experience, as one most dangerous to that
side to which he belongs. Like the elephant given by some eastern prince
to the man he intends to ruin, he is an inmate too costly for any party to
afford to keep long.”(125)

“One great weight that Gladstone has to carry in the political race,”
wrote his friend Frederick Rogers (Dec. 13, 1868), “is a _character_ for
want of judgment, and every addition to that is an impediment.” And indeed
it is true in politics that it often takes more time to get rid of a
spurious character, than to acquire the real one. According to a letter
from Lord Granville to Mr. Gladstone (Feb. 11, 1867):—


    Lowe described as perfectly unjust and unfounded the criticisms
    which had been made of your leadership. You had always been
    courteous and conciliatory with the whole House and with
    individual members, including himself. He had seen Palmerston do
    and say more offensive things every week, than you have during the
    whole session.


Still people went on saying that he had yet to gain the same hold over his
party in parliament that he had over the party in the nation; he had
studied every branch of government except the House of Commons; he
confounded the functions of leader with those of dictator; he took counsel
with one or two individuals instead of conferring with the party; he
proclaimed as edicts what he ought to have submitted as proposals; he
lacked “the little civilities and hypocrisies” of political society. Such
was the common cant of the moment. He had at least one friend who dealt
faithfully with him:—


    _T. D. Acland to Mr. Gladstone._

    _Jan. 24, 1868._—Now I am going to take a great liberty with you.
    I can hardly help myself. I have heard a lot of grumbling lately
    about you, and have several times asked myself whether it would be
    _tanti_ to tease you by repeating it. Well, what is pressed on me
    is, that at the present time when every one is full of anxiety as
    to the future, and when your warmest supporters are longing for
    cohesion, there is an impression that you are absorbed in
    questions about Homer and Greek words, about _Ecce Homo_, that you
    are not reading the newspapers, or feeling the pulse of followers.
    One man personally complained that when you sought his opinion,
    you spent the whole interview in impressing your own view on him,
    and hardly heard anything he might have to say. It is with a
    painful feeling and (were it not for your generous and truly
    modest nature it would be) with some anxiety as to how you would
    take it that I consented to be the funnel of all this grumbling.
    As far as I can make out, the feeling resolves itself into two
    main points: 1. Whatever your own tastes may be for literature,
    and however strengthening and refreshing to your own mind and
    heart it may be to dig into the old springs, still the people
    don’t understand it; they consider you their own, as a husband
    claims a wife’s devotion; and it gives a bad impression if you are
    supposed to be interested, except for an occasional slight
    recreation, about aught but the nation’s welfare at this critical
    time, and that it riles them to see the walls placarded with your
    name and _Ecce Homo_.... 2. (_a_) The other point is (pray forgive
    me if I go too far, I am simply a funnel) a feeling that your
    entourage is too confined, and too much of second-rate men; that
    the strong men and the _rising_ men are not gathered round you and
    known to be so; (_b_) and besides that there is so little easy
    contact with the small fry, as when Palmerston sat in the
    tea-room, and men were gratified by getting private speech with
    their leader. But this is a small matter compared with (_a_).

    _Mr. Gladstone to T. D. Acland._

    _Hawarden, Jan. 30, ’68._—Be assured I cannot feel otherwise than
    grateful to you for undertaking what in the main must always be a
    thankless office. It is new to me to have critics such as those
    whom you represent under the first head, and who complain that I
    do not attend to my business, while the complaint is illustrated
    by an instance in which, professing to seek a man’s opinion, I
    poured forth instead the matter with which I was overflowing. Nor
    do I well know how to deal with those who take out of my hands the
    direction of my own conduct on such a question as the question
    whether I ought to have undertaken a mission to Sheffield to meet
    Roebuck on his own ground. I am afraid I can offer them little
    satisfaction. I have been for near thirty-six years at public
    business, and I must myself be the judge how best to husband what
    little energy of brain, and time for using it, may remain to me.
    If I am told I should go to Sheffield instead of writing on _Ecce
    Homo_, I answer that it was my Sunday’s work, and change of work
    is the chief refreshment to my mind. It is true that literature is
    very attractive and indeed seductive to me, but I do not
    _knowingly_ allow it to cause neglect of public business.
    Undoubtedly it may be said that the vacation should be given to
    reading up and preparing materials for the session. And of my nine
    last vacations _this one only_ has in part been given to any
    literary work, if I except the preparation of an address for
    Edinburgh in 1865. But I am sincerely, though it may be
    erroneously, impressed with the belief that the quantity of my
    public work cannot be increased without its quality being yet
    further deteriorated. Perhaps my critics have not been troubled as
    I have with this plague of quantity, and are not as deeply
    impressed as I am with the belief that grinding down the mental
    powers by an infinity of detail, is what now principally dwarfs
    our public men, to the immense detriment of the country. This
    conviction I cannot yield; nor can I say more than that, with
    regard to the personal matters which you name, I will do the best
    I can. But what I have always supposed and understood is that my
    business in endeavouring to follow other and better men, is to be
    thoroughly open to all members of parliament who seek me, while my
    seeking them must of necessity be limited.... We have before us so
    much business that I fear a _jumble_. Reform, Education, and
    Ireland each in many branches will compete; any of these alone
    would be enough. The last is in my mind the imperious and
    overpowering subject.... The aspect of this letter is, I think,
    rather combative. It would have been much less so but that I trust
    entirely to your indulgence.


In a second letter, after mentioning again some of these complaints,
Acland says: “On the other hand I know you are held by some of the best
men (that dear, noble George Grey I am thinking of) to have the great
quality of leadership: such clear apprehension of the points in council,
and such faithful exactness in conveying the result agreed on, truly a
great power for one who has such a _copia verborum_, with its
temptations.” He still insists that a leader should drop into the tea-room
and have afternoon chats with his adherents; and earnestly wishes him to
belong to the Athenæum club, “a great centre of intellect and criticism,”
where he would be sure to meet colleagues and the principal men in the
public service.

(M50) All this was good advice enough, and most loyally intended. But it
was work of supererogation. The House of Commons, like all assemblies, is
even less affected by immediate displays than by the standing impression
of power. Mr. Gladstone might be playful, courteous, reserved, gracious,
silent, but the House always knew that he had a sledge-hammer behind his
back, ready for work on every anvil in that resounding forge. His sheer
intellectual strength, his experience and power in affairs, the tremendous
hold that he had now gained upon the general public out of doors, made the
artful genialities of the tea-room pure superfluity. Of the secret of the
rapidity with which his star was rising, and of the popular expectations
thereby signified, an admirable contemporary account was traced by an
excellent observer,(126) and it would be idle to transcribe the pith of it
in words other than his own:—


    Mr. Gladstone’s policy is coming to be used as the concrete
    expression of a whole system of thought, to mean something for
    itself, and something widely different from either the policy
    pursued by whigs, or the policy attributed to Lord Palmerston.
    This is the more remarkable because Mr. Gladstone has done less to
    lay down any systematised course of action than almost any man of
    his political standing, has a cautiousness of speech which
    frequently puzzles his audience even while they are cheering his
    oratory, and perceives alternatives with a clearness which often
    leaves on his own advice an impression of indecision.... Those who
    are applauding the chancellor of the exchequer, in season and out
    of season, seem, however they may put their aspirations, to
    expect, should he lead the House of Commons, two very important
    changes. They think that he will realise two longings of which
    they are deeply conscious, even while they express their
    hopelessness of speedy realisation. They believe, with certain
    misgivings, that he can offer them a new and more satisfactory
    system of foreign policy; and, with no misgivings, that he will
    break up the torpor which has fallen upon internal affairs. Mr.
    Gladstone, say his admirers, may be too much afraid of war, too
    zealous for economy, too certain of the status of England as a
    fact altogether independent of her action. But he is sure to
    abandon those traditional ideas to which we have adhered so long:
    the notion that we are a continental people, bound to maintain the
    continental system, interested in petty matters of boundary,
    concerned to dictate to Germany whether she shall be united or
    not, to the Christians of Servia whether they shall rebel against
    the Turk or obey him, to everybody whether they shall or shall not
    develop themselves as they can. He is sure to initiate that
    temporary policy of abstention which is needed to make a breach in
    the great chain of English traditions, and enable the nation to
    act as its interests or duties or dignity may require, without
    reference to the mode in which it has acted heretofore. Mr.
    Gladstone, for example, certainly would not support the Turk as if
    Turkish sway were a moral law, would not trouble himself to
    interfere with the project for cutting an Eider Canal, would not
    from very haughtiness of temperament protest in the face of Europe
    unless he intended his protests to be followed by some form of
    action.... That impression may be true or it may be false, but it
    exists; it is justified in part by Mr. Gladstone’s recent
    speeches, and it indicates a very noteworthy change in the
    disposition of the public mind: a weariness of the line of action
    called “a spirited foreign policy.” ... The expectation as to
    internal affairs is far more definite and more strong.... All his
    speeches point to the inauguration of a new activity in all
    internal affairs, to a steady determination to improve, if
    possible, both the constitution and the condition of the millions
    who have to live under it. Most ministers have that idea in their
    heads, but Mr. Gladstone has more than the idea, he has plans, and
    the courage to propose and maintain them. He is not afraid of the
    suffrage, as he indicated in his celebrated speech; he is not
    alarmed at risking the treasury as his reductions have proved;
    does not hesitate to apply the full power of the state to
    ameliorate social anomalies, as he showed by creating state banks,
    state insurance offices, and state annuity funds for the very
    poor. He of all men alive could most easily reduce our anarchical
    ecclesiastical system into something like order; he, perhaps,
    alone among statesmen would have the art and the energy to try as
    a deliberate plan to effect the final conciliation of
    Ireland....(127)


(M51) A letter from Francis Newman to Mr. Gladstone is a good illustration
of the almost passionate going out of men’s hearts to him in those days:—


    Until a practical reason for addressing you arose out of ... I did
    not dare to intrude on you sentiments which are happily shared by
    so many thousands of warm and simple hearts; sentiments of warm
    admiration, deep sympathy, fervent hope, longing expectation of
    lasting national blessing from your certain elevation to high
    responsibility. The rude, monstrous, shameful and shameless
    attacks which you have endured, do but endear you to the nation.
    In the moral power which you wield, go on to elevate and purify
    public life, and we shall all bless you, dear sir, as a
    regenerator of England. Keep the hearts of the people. _They_ will
    never envy you and never forsake you.


Church, afterwards the dean of St. Paul’s, a man who united in so
wonderful a degree the best gifts that come of culture, sound and just
sense, and unstained purity of spirit, said of Mr. Gladstone at the moment
of accession to power, “There never was a man so genuinely admired for the
qualities which deserve admiration—his earnestness, his deep popular
sympathies, his unflinching courage; and there never was a man more deeply
hated both for his good points and for undeniable defects and failings.
But they love him much less in the House than they do out of doors. A
strong vein of sentiment is the spring of what is noblest about his
impulses; but it is a perilous quality too.”(128) An accomplished woman
with many public interests met Mr. Bright in Scotland sometime after this.
“He would not hear a word said against Mr. Gladstone. He said it was just
because people were not good enough themselves to understand him that he
met such abuse, and then he quoted the stanza in the third canto of
_Childe Harold_:—


    “He who ascends to mountain-tops, shall find
    The loftiest peaks most wrapt in clouds and snow;
    He who surpasses or subdues mankind,
    Must look down on the hate of those below.”


I asked if he did not think sometimes his temper carried Mr. Gladstone
away. He said, ‘Think of the difference between a great cart horse, and
the highest bred most sensitive horse you can imagine, and then, under
lashing of a whip, think of the difference between them.’ ” After a stay
with Mr. Gladstone in a country house, Jowett, the master of Balliol, said
of him, “It is the first time that any one of such great simplicity has
been in so exalted a station.”(129)

In one of his Lancashire speeches, Mr. Gladstone described in interesting
language how he stood:—


    I have never swerved from what I conceive to be those truly
    conservative objects and desires with which I entered life. I am,
    if possible, more attached to the institutions of my country than
    I was when, as a boy, I wandered among the sandhills of Seaforth,
    or frequented the streets of Liverpool. But experience has brought
    with it its lessons. I have learnt that there is a wisdom in a
    policy of trust, and folly in a policy of mistrust. I have not
    refused to acknowledge and accept the signs of the times. I have
    observed the effect that has been produced upon the country by
    what is generally known as liberal legislation. And if we are
    told, as we are now truly told, that all the feelings of the
    country are in the best and broadest sense conservative—that is to
    say, that the people value the country and the laws and
    institutions of the country—honesty compels me to admit that this
    happy result has been brought about by liberal legislation.
    Therefore, I may presume to say that since the year 1841, when Sir
    Robert Peel thought fit to place me in a position that brought me
    into direct, immediate, and responsible contact with the
    commercial interests of the country, from that time onward I have
    never swerved nor wavered, but have striven to the best of my
    ability to advance in the work of improving the laws, and to
    labour earnestly and fearlessly for the advantage of the
    people.(130)


(M52) Five-and-twenty years later, when his course was almost run, and the
achievements of the long laborious day were over, he said:—


    I have been a learner all my life, and I am a learner still; but I
    do wish to learn upon just principles. I have some ideas that may
    not be thought to furnish good materials for a liberal politician.
    I do not like changes for their own sake, I only like a change
    when it is needful to alter something bad into something good, or
    something which is good into something better. I have a great
    reverence for antiquity. I rejoice in the great deeds of our
    fathers in England and in Scotland. It may be said, however, that
    this does not go very far towards making a man a liberal. I find,
    however, that the tories when it suits their purpose have much
    less reverence for antiquity than I have. They make changes with
    great rapidity, provided they are suitable to the promotion of
    tory interests. But the basis of my liberalism is this. It is the
    lesson which I have been learning ever since I was young. I am a
    lover of liberty; and that liberty which I value for myself, I
    value for every human being in proportion to his means and
    opportunities. That is a basis on which I find it perfectly
    practicable to work in conjunction with a dislike to unreasoned
    change and a profound reverence for everything ancient, provided
    that reverence is deserved. There are those who have been so happy
    that they have been born with a creed that they can usefully
    maintain to the last. For my own part, as I have been a learner
    all my life, a learner I must continue to be.(131)




Chapter XII. Letters. (1859-1868)


    There is no saying shocks me so much as that which I hear very
    often; that a man does not know how to pass his time. ’Twould have
    been but ill spoken by Methusalem, in the nine hundred sixty-ninth
    year of his life; so far it is from us, who have not time enough
    to attain to the utmost perfection of any part of any science, to
    have cause to complain that we are forced to be idle for want of
    work.—COWLEY.


(M53) As I said in our opening pages, Mr. Gladstone’s letters are mostly
concerned with points of business. They were not with him a medium for
conveying the slighter incidents, fugitive moods, fleeting thoughts, of
life. Perhaps of these fugitive moods he may have had too few. To me, says
Crassus in Cicero, the man hardly seems to be free, who does not sometimes
do nothing.(132) In table-talk he could be as disengaged, as marked in
ease and charm, as any one; he was as willing as any one to accept topics
as they came, which is the first of all conditions for good conversation.
When alone in his temple of peace it was not his practice to take up his
pen in the same sauntering and devious humour. With him the pen was no
instrument of diversion. His correspondence has an object, and a letter
with an object is not of a piece with the effusions of Madame de Sévigné,
Cowper, Scott, FitzGerald, and other men and women whose letters of genial
satire and casual play and hints of depth below the surface, people will
read as long as they read anything. We have to remember a very
intelligible fact mentioned by him to Lord Brougham, who had asked him to
undertake some public address (April 25, 1860):—


    You have given me credit for your own activity and power of work:
    an estimate far beyond the truth. I am one of those who work very
    hard while they are at it, and are then left in much exhaustion. I
    have been for four months overdone, and though my general health,
    thank God, is good, yet my brain warns me so distinctly that it
    must not be too much pressed, as to leave me in prudence no course
    to take except that which I have reluctantly indicated.


We might be tempted to call good letter-writing one of “the little
handicraft of an idle man”; but then two of the most perfect masters of
the art were Cicero and Voltaire, two of the most occupied personages that
ever lived. Of course, sentences emerge in Mr. Gladstone’s letters that
are the fruits of his experience, well worthy of a note, as when he says
to Dr. Pusey: “I doubt from your letter whether you are aware of the
virulence and intensity with which the poison of suspicion acts in public
life. All that you say in your letter of yesterday I can readily believe,
but I assure you it does not alter in the slightest degree the grounds on
which my last letter was written.”

He thanks Bulwer Lytton for a volume of his republished poems, but chides
him for not indicating dates:—


    This I grant is not always easy for a conscientious man, for
    example when he has almost re-written. But I need not remind you
    how much the public, if I may judge from one of its number, would
    desire it when it can be done. For in the case of those whom it
    has learned to honour and admire, there is a biography of the mind
    that is thus signified, and that is matter of deep interest.


On external incidents, he never fails in a graceful, apt, or feeling word.
When the author of _The Christian Year_ dies (1866), he says: “Mr. Liddon
sent me very early information of Mr. Keble’s death. The church of England
has lost in him a poet, a scholar, a philosopher, and a saint. I must add
that he always appeared to me, since I had the honour and pleasure of
knowing him, a person of most liberal mind. I hope early steps will be
taken to do honour to his pure and noble memory.”

To the widow of a valued official in his financial department he writes in
commemorative sentences that testify to his warm appreciation of zeal in
public duty:—


    The civil service of the crown has beyond all question lost in Mr.
    Arbuthnot one of the highest ornaments it ever possessed. His
    devotion to his duties, his identification at every point of his
    own feelings with the public interests, will, I trust, not die
    with him, but will stimulate others, and especially the inheritors
    of his name, to follow his bright example.... Nor is it with a
    thought of anything but thankfulness on his account, that I
    contemplate the close of his labours; but it will be long indeed
    before we cease to miss his great experience, his varied powers,
    his indefatigable energy, and that high-minded loyal tone which he
    carried into all the parts of business.


In another letter, by the way, he says (1866): “I am far from thinking
very highly of our rank as a nation of administrators, but perhaps if we
could be judged by the post office alone, we might claim the very first
place in this respect.” In time even this ’most wonderful establishment’
was to give him trouble enough.

(M54) Among the letters in which Mr. Gladstone exhibits the easier and
less strenuous side, and that have the indefinable attraction of intimacy,
pleasantness, and the light hand, are those written in the ten years
between 1858 and 1868 to the Duchess of Sutherland. She was the close and
lifelong friend of the Queen. She is, said the Queen to Stockmar, “so
anxious to do good, so liberal-minded, so superior to prejudice, and so
eager to learn, and to improve herself and others.”(133) The centre of a
brilliant and powerful social circle, she was an ardent sympathiser with
Italy, with Poland, with the Abolitionists and the North, and with humane
causes at home. She was accomplished, a lover of books meritorious in aim
though too often slight in work—in short, with emotions and sentiments
sometimes a little in advance of definite ideas, yet a high representative
of the virtue, purity, simplicity, and sympathetic spirit of the
Tennysonian epoch. Tennyson himself was one of her idols, and Mr.
Gladstone was another. Bishop Wilberforce too was often of the company,
and the Duke of Argyll, who had married a daughter of the house. Her
admiration for Gladstone, says the son of the duchess, “was boundless, and
the last years of her life were certainly made happier by this friendship.
His visits to her were always an intense pleasure, and even when suffering
too much to receive others, she would always make an effort to appear
sufficiently well to receive him. I find in a letter from her written to
me in 1863, after meeting Mr. Gladstone when on a visit to her sister,
Lady Taunton, at Quantock, in Somersetshire, the following: ‘The
Gladstones were there; he was quite delightful, pouring out such floods of
agreeable knowledge all day long, and singing admirably in the evening.
Nobody makes me feel more the happiness of knowledge and the wish for it;
one must not forget that he has the happiness of the peace which passeth
all understanding.’ ”(134) The Gladstones were constant visitors at the
duchess’s various princely homes—Stafford House in the Green Park,
Trentham, Cliveden, and Chiswick on the Thames, Dunrobin on the Dornoch
Firth.

A little sheaf of pieces from Mr. Gladstone’s letters to her may serve to
show him as he was, in the midst of his labours in the Palmerston
government—how little his native kindliness of heart and power of sympathy
had been chilled or parched either by hard and ceaseless toil, or by the
trying atmosphere of public strife.


    _1859_

    _Aug. 30._—I am much concerned to lose at the last moment the
    pleasure of coming to see you at Trentham—but my wife, who was not
    quite well when I came away but hoped a day’s rest would make her
    so, writes through Agnes to say she hopes I shall get back to-day.
    The gratification promised me must, therefore, I fear, stand over.
    I will write from Hawarden, and I now send this by a messenger
    lest (as you might be sure I should not fail through carelessness)
    you should think anything very bad had happened. Among other
    things, I wanted help from you through speech about Tennyson. I
    find _Maud_ takes a good deal of trouble to understand, and is
    hardly worth understanding. It has many peculiar beauties, but
    against them one sets the strange and nearly frantic passages
    about war; which one can hardly tell whether he means to be taken
    for sense or ravings. Frank Doyle, who is essentially a poet
    though an unwrought one, declares _Guinevere_ the finest poem of
    modern times.

    _1860_

    _Hawarden, Oct. 3._—We are exceedingly happy at Penmaenmawr,
    between Italy, health, hill, and sea all taken together. I do not
    know if you are acquainted with the Welsh coast and interior; but
    I am sure you would think it well worth knowing both for the
    solitary grandeur of the Snowdon group, and for the widely
    diffused and almost endless beauty of detail. It is a kind of
    landscape jewellery.

    The Herberts send us an excellent account of Lord Aberdeen. I have
    a very interesting letter from Lacaita, fresh from Panizzi, who
    again was fresh from Italy, and sanguine about the Emperor. But
    what a calamity for a man to think, or find himself forced to be
    double faced even when he is not double minded; and this is the
    best supposition. But Warsaw is surely the point at which for the
    present we must look with suspicion and aversion. To-day’s papers
    give good hope that Garibaldi has been misrepresented and does not
    mean to play into Mazzini’s hands.

    Thanks for your condolences about the _Times_. I have had it both
    ways, though more, perhaps, of the one than the other. Some of the
    penny press, which has now acquired an enormous expansion, go
    great lengths in my favour, and I read some eulogies quite as wide
    of fact as the interpretations.

    _Oct. 19._—I think Mr. or Sir something Burke (how ungrateful!)
    has been so kind as to discover the honours of my mother’s descent
    in some book that he has published on royal descents. But the
    truth is that time plays strange tricks backwards as well as
    forwards, and it seems hardly fair to pick the results. The
    arithmetic of those questions is very curious: at the distance of
    a moderate number of centuries everybody has some hundred thousand
    ancestors, subject, however, to deduction.

    _Nov. 1._—... There is one proposition which the experience of
    life burns into my soul; it is this, that man should beware of
    letting his religion spoil his morality. In a thousand ways, some
    great some small, but all subtle, we are daily tempted to that
    great sin. To speak of such a thing seems dishonouring to God; but
    it is not religion as it comes from Him, it is religion with the
    strange and evil mixtures which it gathers from abiding in us.
    This frightful evil seems to rage in the Roman church more than
    anywhere else, probably from its highly wrought political spirit,
    the virtues and the vices of a close organisation being much
    associated with one another. That same influence which keeps the
    mother from her child teaches Montalembert to glorify the
    corruption, cruelty, and baseness which in the government of the
    papal states put the gospel itself to shame.

    _1861_

    _11 Carlton H. Terrace, March 5._—I dare scarcely reply to your
    letter, for although the scene at Trentham [the death of the Duke
    of Sutherland] is much upon my mind, it is, amidst this crowd and
    pressure of business, an image reflected in ruffled waters, while
    it is also eminently one that ought to be kept true. A sacred
    sorrow seems to be profaned by bringing it within the touch of
    worldly cares. Still I am able, I hope not unnaturally, to speak
    of the pleasure which your letter has given me, for I could not
    wish it other than it is.

    I am not one of those who think that after a stroke like this, it
    is our duty to try and make it seem less than it is. It is great
    for all, for you it is immense, for there has now been first
    loosened and then removed, the central stay of such a continuation
    of domestic love as I should not greatly exaggerate in calling
    without rival or example; and if its stay centred in him, so did
    its fire in you. I only wish and heartily pray that your sorrow
    may be a tender and gentle one, even as it is great and strong. I
    call it great and strong _more_ than sharp, for then only the
    fierceness of Death is felt when it leaves painful and rankling
    thoughts of the departed, or when it breaks the kindly process of
    nature and reverses the order in which she would have us quit the
    place of our pilgrimage, by ravishing away those whose life is but
    just opened or is yet unfulfilled. But you are now yearning over a
    Death which has come softly to your door and gone softly from it;
    a death in ripeness of years, ripeness of love and honour and
    peace, ripeness above all in character.... A part of your letter
    brings to my mind a letter of St. Bernard on the death of his
    brother (remember he was a monk and so what a brother might be to
    him) which when I read it years ago seemed to me the most touching
    and beautiful expression of a natural grief that I had ever
    known—I will try to find it, and if I find it answers my
    recollection, you shall hear of it again.(135) I always think
    Thomas à Kempis a golden book for all times, but most for times
    like these; for though it does not treat professedly of sorrow, it
    is such a wonderful exhibition of the Man of Sorrows....

    _1862_

    _April 4._—I am grateful to you and to your thoughts for the
    quality they so eminently possess; the Latins have a word for it,
    but we have none, and I can only render it by a rude conversion
    into “sequacious,” or thoughts given to following.

    My labours of yesterday [budget speech] had no title to so kind a
    reception as they actually met with. Quiet my office in these
    times cannot be, but this year it promises me the boon of
    comparative peace, at least in the outer sphere. The world
    believes that this is what I cannot endure; I shall be glad of an
    opportunity of putting its opinion to the test.

    All words from you about the Queen are full of weight and value
    even when they are not so decidedly words of consolation. In her,
    I am even glad to hear of the little bit of symbolism. That
    principle like others has its place, and its applications I
    believe are right when they flow from and conform to what is
    within. I cannot but hope she will have much refreshment in
    Scotland. Such contact with Nature’s own very undisguised and
    noble self, in such forms of mountain, wood, breeze, and water!
    These are continual preachers, and so mild that they can bring no
    weariness. They come straight from their Maker’s hand, and how
    faithfully they speak of Him in their strength, their majesty, and
    their calm.

    As for myself I am a discharged vessel to-day, A load of figures
    has a suffocating effect upon the brain until they are well
    drilled and have taken their places. Then they are as digestible
    as other food of that region; still it is better when they are
    off, and it is always a step towards liberty.

    I must at some time try to explain a little more my reference to
    Thomas à Kempis. I have given that book to men of uncultivated
    minds, who were _also_ presbyterians, but all relish it. I do not
    believe it is possible for any one to read that book earnestly
    from its beginning, and think of popish, or non-popish, or of
    anything but the man whom it presents and brings to us.

    _May 8._—Unfortunately I can give you no light on the question of
    time. I, a bear chained to a stake, cannot tell when the principal
    run will be made at me, and as I can only scratch once I must wait
    if possible till then. The only person who could give you _des
    renseignements suffisants_ is Disraeli. Tennyson’s note is
    charming. I return it, and with it a touching note from Princess
    Alice, which reached me this evening. Pray let me have it again.

    _1863_

    _Jan. 23._—I am so sorry to be unable to come to you, owing to an
    engagement to-night at the admiralty. I am ashamed of being
    utterly destitute of news—full of figures and all manner of
    dulnesses.... I went, however, to the Drury Lane pantomime last
    night, and laughed beyond measure; also enjoyed looking from a
    third row, unseen myself, at your brother and the Blantyre party.

    _Bowden Park, Chippenham, Feb. 7._—I feel as if your generous and
    overflowing sympathies made it truly unkind to draw you further
    into the sorrows of this darkened house. My brother [John] closed
    his long and arduous battle in peace this morning at six o’clock;
    and if the knowledge that he had the love of all who knew him,
    together with the assurance that he is at rest in God, could
    satisfy the heart, we ought not to murmur. But the visitation is
    no common one. Eight children, seven of them daughters, of whom
    only one is married and most are young, with one little boy of
    seven, lost their mother last February, and now see their father
    taken. He dies on his marriage day, we are to bury him on the
    first anniversary of his wife’s death. Altogether it is piteous
    beyond belief. It was affectionate anxiety in her illness that
    undermined his health; it was reluctance to make his children
    uneasy that made him suffer in silence, and travel to Bath for
    advice and an operation when he should have been in his bed. In
    this double sense he has offered up his life. The grief is very
    sharp, and as yet I am hardly reconciled to it.... But enough and
    too much. Only I must answer your question. He was the brother
    next above me; we were not brothers only but very intimate friends
    until we married, and since then we have only been separated in
    the relative sense in which our marriages and my public life in
    particular, implied. He was a man of high spirit and uncommon
    goodness, and for _him_ I have not a thought that is not perfect
    confidence and peace.

    _March 1._—Even you could not, I am persuaded, do otherwise than
    think me rather a savage on Wednesday evening, for the opinion I
    gave about helping a bazaar for the sisters of charity of the
    Roman community at some place in England. Let me say what I meant
    by it and what I did not mean. I did not mean to act as one under
    the influence of violent anti-Roman feeling. I rejoice to think in
    community of faith among bodies externally separated, so far as it
    extends, and it extends very far; most of all with ancient
    churches of the greatest extent and the firmest organisation. But
    the proselytising agency of the Roman church in this country I
    take to be one of the worst of the religious influences of the
    age. I do not mean as to its motives, for these I do not presume
    to touch, nor feel in any way called upon to question. But I speak
    of its effects, and they are most deplorable. The social misery
    that has been caused, not for truth, but for loss of truth, is
    grievous enough, but it is not all, for to those who are called
    converts, and to those who have made them, we owe a very large
    proportion of the mischiefs and scandals within our own communion,
    that have destroyed the faith of many, and that are I fear
    undermining the very principle of faith in thousands and tens of
    thousands who as yet suspect neither the process nor the cause.
    With this pernicious agency I for my own part wish to have nothing
    whatever to do; although I am one who thinks lightly, in
    comparison with most men, of the _absolute_ differences in our
    belief from the formal documents of the church of Rome, and who
    wish for that church, on her own ground, as for our own, all
    health that she can desire, all reformation that can be good for
    her. The object, however, of what I have said is not to make an
    argument, but only to show that if I spoke strongly, I was not
    also speaking lightly on such a subject.

    _April 20._—I am afraid I shall not see you before Wednesday—when
    you are to do us so great a kindness—but I must write a line to
    tell you how exceedingly delighted we both are with all we have
    seen at Windsor. The charm of the princess, so visible at a
    distance, increases with the increase of nearness; the Queen’s
    tone is delightful. All seems good, delighted, and happy in the
    family. As regards the Queen’s physical strength, it must be
    satisfactory. What is more fatiguing than interviews? Last night,
    however, I saw her at half-past seven, after a long course of them
    during the day. She was quite fresh.

    _May 10._—I can answer you with a very good conscience. The affair
    of Friday night [his speech on Italy] was on my part entirely
    drawn forth by the speech of Disraeli and the wish of Lord
    Palmerston. It is D.’s practice, in contravention of the usage of
    the House, which allows the minister to wind up, to lie by until
    Lord Palmerston has spoken, and then fire in upon him. So on this
    occasion I was a willing instrument; but my wife, who was within
    ten minutes’ drive, knew nothing.

    We dined at Marlborough House last night. The charm certainly does
    not wear off with renewed opportunity. Clarendon, who saw her for
    the first time, _fully_ felt it. Do you know, I believe they are
    actually disposed to dine with us some day. Do you think you can
    _then_ be tempted? We asked the Bishop of Brechin to meet you on
    Thursday. Another bishop has volunteered: the Bishop of Montreal,
    who is just going off to America. You will not be frightened. Both
    are rather notable men. The other guests engaged are Cobden,
    Thackeray, and Mr. Evarts, the new U.S. coadjutor to Adams.

    _July 10._—I knew too well the meaning of your non-appearance, and
    because I knew it, was sorry for your indisposition as well as for
    your absence. We had the De Greys, Granville, Sir C. Eastlake,
    Fechter(136) and others, with the Comte de Paris, who is as simple
    as ever, but greatly developed and come on. He talked much of
    America. I hope we may come to-morrow, not later than by the 5.5
    train, to which I feel a kind of grateful attachment for the
    advantage and pleasure it has so often procured me. We are glad to
    have a hope of you next week. All our people are charmed with Mr.
    Fechter.—Yours affectionately.

    _July 29._—I am greatly concerned to hear of your suffering. You
    are not easily arrested in your movements, and I fear the time has
    been sharp. But (while above all I trust you will not stir without
    free and full permission) I do not abandon the hope of seeing you
    ... I have been seeing Lady Theresa Lewis. It was heartrending
    woe; such as makes one ashamed of having so little to offer. She
    dwells much upon employing herself.... I greatly mistrust
    compulsion in the management of children, and under the
    circumstances you describe, I should lean as you do. ... Many
    thanks for the carnations you sent by my wife; they still live and
    breathe perfume.... You spoke of our difference about slavery. I
    hope it is not very wide. I stop short of war as a means of
    correction. I have not heard you say that you do otherwise.

    _11 Carlton House Terrace_ (_no date_).—I am glad my wife saw you
    yesterday, for I hope a little that she may have been bold enough
    to lecture you about not taking enough care of yourself. If this
    sounds rather intrusive, pray put it down to my intense confidence
    in her as a doctor. She has a kind of divining power springing
    partly from a habitual gift and partly from experience, and she
    hardly ever goes wrong. She is not easy about your going to Vichy
    alone. The House of Commons, rude and unmannerly in its
    arrangements at all times, is singularly so in its last kicks and
    plunges towards the death of the session; but after to-morrow we
    are free and I look forward to seeing you on Wednesday according
    to the hope you give.... Soon after this reaches you I hope to be
    at Hawarden. On Wednesday I am to have luncheon at Argyll Lodge to
    meet Tennyson. Since I gave him my translation of the first book
    of the _Iliad_, I have often remembered those words of Kingsley’s
    to his friend Mr.——, “My dear friend, your verses are not good but
    bad.” The Duc d’Aumale breakfasted with us on Thursday and I had
    some conversation about America. He is, I think, pleased with the
    good opinions which the young princes have won so largely, and
    seems to have come very reluctantly to the conclusion that the war
    is hopeless. Our children are gone and the vacant footfall echoes
    on the stair. My wife is waiting here only to see Lady Herbert.

    _Hawarden, Aug. 21._—We have had Dr. Stanley here with his sister.
    He was charming, she only stayed a moment. He gave a good account
    of the Queen. They go to Italy for September and October. When any
    one goes there I always feel a mental process of accompanying
    them. We have got Mr. Woolner here too. He took it into his head
    to wish to make a bust of me, and my wife accepted his offer, at
    least by her authority caused me to accept it. He has worked very
    quickly and I think with much success, but he bestows immense
    labour before closing. He is a poet too, it seems, and generally a
    very good companion.... My journey to Balmoral will not be for
    some five weeks. I am dreadfully indolent as to any exertion
    beyond reading, but I look forward to it with interest.... Indeed
    your scruples about writing were misplaced. There is no holiday of
    mine to leave unbroken so far as post is concerned, and well would
    it be with me, even in the time of an exhaustion which requires to
    be felt before it can pass away, if the words of my other letters
    were, I will not say like, but more like, yours. However, the
    murmur which I thus let escape me is ungrateful. I ought to be
    thankful for the remission that I get, but treasury business is
    the most odious that I know, and hence it is that one wishes that
    the wheel would for a little time cease its drive altogether,
    instead of merely lowering it.

    _Penmaenmawr, Sept. 20._—It was so kind of you to see our little
    fellows on their way through town. I hope they were not
    troublesome. Harry is rather oppressed, I think, with the
    responsibilities of his captainship—he is the head of seven boys!

    We went yesterday to visit the Stanleys, and saw the South Stack
    Lighthouse with its grand and savage rocks. They are very
    remarkable, one part for masses of sheer precipices descending in
    columns to the sea, the other for the extraordinary contortions
    which the rocks have undergone from igneous action and huge
    compressing forces. Our weather has been and continues cold for
    the season, which draws onwards, however, and the gliding days
    recall to mind the busy outer world from which we are so well
    defended.

    _1864_

    _Jan. 4._—Often as I have been struck by the Queen’s extraordinary
    integrity of mind—I know of no better expression—I never felt it
    more than on hearing and reading a letter of hers on Saturday (at
    the cabinet) about the Danish question. Her determination in this
    case as in others, not inwardly to “sell the truth” (this is
    Robert Pollok) overbears all prepossessions and longings, strong
    as they are, on the German side, and enables her spontaneously to
    hold the balance, it seems to me, tolerably even.

    _Jan. 14._—I am glad you were not scandalised about my laxity as
    to the “public house.” But I expected from you this liberality. I
    really had no choice. How can I who drink good wine and bitter
    beer every day of my life, in a comfortable room and among
    friends, coolly stand up and advise hardworking fellow-creatures
    to take “the pledge”? However, I have been reading Maguire’s _Life
    of Father Matthew_, with a most glowing admiration for the Father.
    Every one knew him to be good, but I had no idea of the extent and
    height of his goodness, and his boundless power and thirst not for
    giving only but for loving.

    _June 27._—Just at this time when the press and mass of ordinary
    business ought to be lessening, the foreign crisis you see comes
    upon us, and drowns us deeper than ever. I fully believe that
    England _will_ not go to war, and I am sure she _ought_ not. Are
    you not a little alarmed at Argyll on this matter? Of the fate of
    the government I cannot speak with much confidence or with much
    anxious desire; but on the whole I _rather_ think, and _rather_
    hope, we shall come through.

    Three marriages almost in as many weeks among your own immediate
    kin! I look for a dinner at Woolner’s with Tennyson to-day: _a sei
    occhi_. Last night Manning spent three hours with me; the
    conversation must wait. He is sorely anti-Garibaldian. How
    beautiful is the ending of Newman’s _Apologia_, part VII.

    _Oct. 23._—Singularly happy in my old and early political
    friendships, I am now stripped of every one of them. It has indeed
    been my good lot to acquire friendships in later life, which I
    could not have hoped for; but at this moment I seem to see the
    spirits of the dead gathered thick around me, “all along the
    narrow valley,” the valley of life, over and into which the sun of
    a better, of a yet better life, shines narrowly. I do not think
    our political annals record such a removal of a generation of
    statesmen before its time as we have witnessed in the last four
    years. I could say a great deal about Newcastle. He was a high and
    strong character, very true, very noble, and, I think,
    intelligible, which (as you know) I think rare in politicians. My
    relations with him will be kept up in one sense by having to act,
    and I fear act much, as his executor and trustee, with De Tabley,
    an excellent colleague, who discharged the same duty for the Duke
    of Hamilton and for Canning.

    _Dec. 28._—I cannot give you a full account of Lord Derby’s
    translation [of the _Iliad_], but there is no doubt in my mind
    that it is a very notable production. He always had in a high
    degree the inborn faculty of a scholar, with this he has an
    enviable power of expression, and an immense command of the
    English tongue; add the quality of dash which appears in his
    version quite as much as in his speeches. Undoubtedly if he
    _wrought_ his execution as Tennyson does, results might have been
    attained beyond the actual ones; but, while I will not venture to
    speak of the precision of the version, various passages in the
    parts I have read are of very high excellence. Try to find out
    what Tennyson thinks of it.

    _1865_

    _Aug. 8._—My reading has been little, but even without your
    question I was going to mention that I had caught at the name of
    “_L’Ami Fritz_,” seeing it was by the author of the _Conscrit_,
    and had read it. I can recommend it too, though the subject does
    not at first sight look ravishing: it tells how a middle-aged
    middle-class German bachelor comes to marry the daughter of his
    own farm bailiff. Some parts are full of grace; there is a
    tax-gatherer’s speech on the duty of paying taxes, which came home
    to _my_ heart. Though it a little reminds me of a sermon which I
    heard preached in an aisle of the Duomo of Milan to the boys of a
    Sunday school (said to have been founded by St. Charles Borromeo)
    on the absolute necessity of paying tithes! The golden breadths of
    harvest are now a most lively joy to me. But we have had great
    official troubles in the death of Mr. Arbuthnot, a _pillar_ of the
    treasury, and a really notable man.

    _Sept. 12._—I am working off my post as well as I can with the
    bands playing and flags fluttering outside. By and by I am going
    to carve rounds of beef for some part of four hundred diners. The
    ladies are only allowed tea. Our _weather_ anxieties are great,
    but all is going well. The new telegram and announcement that you
    will come on Friday is very welcome. Indeed, I did not say
    anything about the marriage, because, without knowing more, I did
    not know what to say, except that I most sincerely wish them all
    good and all happiness. The rest must keep till Friday. The
    characters you describe are quite, I think, on the right ground.
    It was the great glory of the Greeks that they had those full and
    large views of man’s nature, not the narrow and pinched ones which
    are sometimes found even among Christians. Lord Palmerston’s
    abandoning his trip to Bristol is rather a serious affair. There
    is more in it, I fear, than gout.

    _Oct. 24._—If you were well enough, and I had wings, there is
    nothing I should more covet at this moment than to appear at
    Inveraray and compare and correct my impressions of Lord
    Palmerston’s character by yours. Death of itself produces a
    certain tendency to view more warmly what was before admired, and
    more slightly anything that was not. And by stirring the thought
    of the nation through the press it commonly throws lights upon the
    subject either new in themselves or new in their combination.
    _Twelve_ cabinet ministers I have already reckoned in my mind, all
    carried off by the rude hand of death in the last five years,
    during which three only have been made. They are: Lord Dalhousie,
    Lord Aberdeen, Lord Herbert, Sir J. Graham, Lord Canning, Lord
    Elgin, Sir G. Lewis, Lord Campbell, Lord Macaulay, Mr. Ellice,
    Lord Lyndhurst, Lord Palmerston. This, in the political world, and
    to me especially, is an extraordinary desolation.

    I hope you are at least creeping on. It was so kind of you to
    think about my little neuralgic affairs; thank God, I have had no
    more.

    _1866_

    _Hawarden, Jan. 4._—We have been pleased with some partial
    accounts of improvement, and I can the better speak my wish to you
    for a happy new year. Next Wednesday I hope to inquire for myself.
    I have been much laden and a good deal disturbed. We have the
    cattle plague in full force here, and it has even touched my small
    group of tenants. To some of them it is a question of life and
    death; and my brother-in-law, who is by nature one of the most
    munificent persons I ever knew, is sorely straitened in mind at
    not being able to do all he would like for his people. But do not
    let this sound like complaint from me. Few have such cause for
    ceaseless and unbounded thankfulness.

    ...If you come across Armstrong’s poems(137) pray look at them. An
    Irish youth cut off at twenty-four. By the by, Wortley’s children
    have admirable acting powers, which they showed in charades very
    cleverly got up by his wife as stage manager. Grosvenor seconds
    the speech, and F. Cavendish moves the address. We have had divers
    thrushes singing here, a great treat at this season. I like them
    better than hothouse strawberries.

    _July 7._—I cannot feel unmixedly glad for yourself that you are
    returning to Chiswick. For us it will be a great gain.... Disraeli
    and I were affectionate at the Mansion House last night. Poor
    fellow, he has been much tried about his wife’s health. The King
    of the Belgians pleases me, and strikes me more as to his personal
    qualities on each successive visit. God bless you, my dear duchess
    and precious friend, affectionately yours.

    _1867_

    _Hawarden, April 29.—We both_ hope to have the pleasure of dining
    at Chiswick on Wednesday. We assume that the hour will be 7.30 as
    usual. I shall be so glad to see Argyll, and to tell him the
    little I can about the literary department of the _Guardian_. I
    write from the “Temple of Peace.” It is a sore wrench to go away.
    But I am thankful to have had such a quiet Easter. The false
    rumour about Paris has had a most beneficial effect, and has
    spared me a multitude of demands. The birds are delightful here.
    What must they be at Cliveden.—Ever affectionately yours.

    _Holker Hall, Sept. 22._—We find this place very charming. It
    explains at once the secret of the great affection they all have
    for it. It has a singular combination of advantages—sea, hill,
    home ground, and views, access, and the house such an excellent
    living house; all the parts, too, in such good keeping and
    proportion. We much admire your steps. The inhabitants would be
    quite enough to make any place pleasant. We have just been at that
    noble old church of Cartmel. These churches are really the best
    champions of the men who built them.

    _Nov. 23._—I cannot let the moment pass at which I would have been
    enjoying a visit to you after your severe illness without one word
    of sympathy.... Our prospects are uncertain; but I cling to the
    hope of escaping to the country at the end of next week, unless
    the proposals of the government as to the mode of providing for
    the expense of this unhappy war should prove to be very
    exceptionable, which at present I do not expect. I saw Lord
    Russell last night. He seemed very well but more deaf. Lady
    Russell has had some partial failure of eyesight. Lord R. is
    determined on an educational debate, and has given notice of
    resolutions; all his friends, I think, are disposed to regret it.
    I am told the exchequer is deplorably poor. Poor Disraeli has been
    sorely cut up; and it has not yet appeared that Mrs. Disraeli is
    out of danger, though she is better. Her age seems to be at the
    least seventy-six. I have been to see my china exhibited in its
    new home at Liverpool, where it seemed pretty comfortable.

    _1868_

    _31 Bloomsbury Square, Jan. 3._—I promised to write to you in case
    I found matters either bad or good. I lament to say they are bad.
    He [Panizzi] is weaker, more feverish (pulse to-day at 122 about
    noon), and very restless. The best will be a severe struggle and
    the issue is _likely_ to be unfavourable. At the same time he is
    not given over. I said, I shall come to-morrow. He said, You will
    not find me alive. I replied that was wrong. I believe there is no
    danger to-morrow, but what next week may do is another matter. He
    is warm and affectionate as ever, and very tender. He is firm and
    resigned, not stoically, but with trust in God. I am very sad at
    the thought of losing this very true, trusty, hearty friend. I
    must go to-morrow, though of course I should stay if I could be of
    any use.(138)


This year the end came, and a few lines from his diary show the loss it
was to Mr. Gladstone:—


    _Oct. 28._—The post brought a black-bordered letter which
    announced the death of the Dowager Duchess of Sutherland. I have
    lost in her from view the warmest and dearest friend, surely, that
    ever man had. Why this noble and tender spirit should have had
    such bounty for me and should have so freshened my advancing
    years, my absorbed and divided mind, I cannot tell. But I feel,
    strange as it might sound, ten years the older for her death. May
    the rest and light and peace of God be with her ever more until
    _that day_. None will fill her place for me, nor for many worthier
    than I.




Chapter XIII. Reform. (1866)


    L’aristocratie, la démocratie ne sont pas de vaines doctrines
    livrées a nos disputes; ce sont des puissances, qu’on n’abat
    point, qu’on n’élève point par la louange ou par l’injure; avant
    que nous parlions d’elles, elles sont ou ne sont
    pas.—ROYER-COLLARD.

    Aristocracy, democracy, are not vain doctrines for us to dispute
    about; they are powers; you neither exalt them nor depress them by
    praise or by blame; before we talk of them, they exist or they do
    not exist.



I


Mr. Denison, the Speaker, had a conversation with Mr. Gladstone almost
immediately after the death of Lord Palmerston, and he reported the drift
of it to Sir George Grey. The Speaker had been in Scotland, and found no
strong feeling for reform or any other extensive change, while there was a
general decline of interest in the ballot:—


    Gladstone said, “Certainly, as far as my constituents go, there is
    no strong feeling for reform among them. And as to the ballot, I
    think it is declining in favour.” He spoke of the difficulties
    before us, of the embarrassment of the reform question. “With a
    majority of 80 on the liberal side, they will expect some action.”
    I answered, “No doubt a majority of 80, agreed on any point, would
    expect action. At the time of the first Reform bill, when the
    whole party was for the bill, the course was clear. But is the
    party agreed now? The point it was agreed upon was to support Lord
    Palmerston’s government. But was that in order to pass a strong
    measure of reform? Suppose that the country is satisfied with the
    foreign policy, and the home policy, and the financial policy, and
    wants to maintain these and their authors, and does not want great
    changes of any kind?” I was, on the whole, pleased with the tone
    of Gladstone’s conversation. It was calm, and for soothing
    difficulties, not for making them.... I should add that Gladstone
    spoke with great kindness about yourself, and about your
    management of the House of Commons, and said that it would be his
    wish that you should lead it.(139)


(M55) The antecedents of the memorable crisis of 1866-7 were curious.
Reform bills had been considered by five governments since 1849, and
mentioned in six speeches from the throne. Each political party had
brought a plan forward, and Lord John Russell had brought forward three.
Mr. Bright also reduced his policy to the clauses of a bill in 1858. In
1859 Lord Derby’s government had introduced a measure which old whigs and
new radicals, uniting their forces, had successfully resisted. This move
Mr. Gladstone—who, as the reader will recollect, had on that occasion
voted with the tories(140)—always took to impose a decisive obligation on
all who withstood the tory attempt at a settlement, to come forward with
proposals of their own. On the other hand, in the new parliament, the tory
party was known to be utterly opposed to an extension of the franchise,
and a considerable fringe of professing liberals also existed who were
quite as hostile, though not quite as willing to avow hostility before
their constituents. All the leaders were committed, and yet of their
adherents the majority was dubious or adverse. The necessity of passing a
Reform bill through an anti-reform parliament thus produced a situation of
unsurpassed perplexity. Some thought that formidable susceptibilities
would be soothed, if the government were reconstructed and places found
for new men. Others declared that the right course would be first to weld
the party together by bills on which everybody was agreed; to read a good
Reform bill a first time; then in the recess the country would let
ministers see where they were, and the next session would find them on
firm ground. But Lord Russell knew that he had little time to spare—he was
now close upon seventy-four—and Mr. Gladstone was the last man to try to
hold him back.

The proceedings of the new government began with a familiar demonstration
of the miserable failure of English statesmen to govern Ireland, in the
shape of the twentieth coercion bill, since the union. This need not
detain us, nor need the budget, the eighth of the series that made this
administration so memorable in the history of national finance. It was
naturally quite enough for parliament that the accounts showed a surplus
of £1,350,000; that the last tax on raw material vanished with the repeal
of the duty on timber; that a series of commercial treaties had been
successfully negotiated; and that homage should be paid to virtue by the
nibbling of a mouse at the mountain of the national debt. The debt was
eight hundred millions, and it was now proposed to apply half-a-million a
year towards its annihilation. Reform, however, was the fighting question,
and fighting questions absorb a legislature.

(M56) The chancellor of the exchequer introduced the Reform bill (March
12) in a speech that, though striking enough, was less impassioned than
some of his later performances in the course of this famous contest. He
did not forget that “the limbo of abortive creations was peopled with the
skeletons of reform bills”; and it was his cue in a House so constituted
as the one before him, to use the language and arguments of moderation and
safety. Franchise was the real question at stake, and to that branch of
reform the bill was limited. The other question of redistributing seats he
likened to fighting in a wood, where there may be any number of partial
encounters, but hardly a great and deciding issue. The only point on which
there was a vital difference was the figure of the borough franchise. In
1859 Mr. Disraeli invented a quackish phrase about lateral extension and
vertical extension, and offered votes to various classes who mainly had
them already, without extending downwards; but whatever else his plan
might do, it opened no door for the workmen. In 1860 the Palmerston
government proposed a six pound occupation franchise for boroughs, and ten
pounds for counties. The proposal of 1866 was seven pounds for boroughs,
and fourteen for counties. We may smile at the thought that some of the
most brilliant debates ever heard in the House of Commons now turned upon
the mighty puzzle whether the qualification for a borough voter should be
occupancy of a ten, a seven, or a six pound house;—nay, whether the ruin
or salvation of the state might not lie on the razor-edge of distinction
between rating and rental. Ministers were taunted with having brought in
Mr. Bright’s bill. Mr. Bright replied that he could not find in it a
single point that he had recommended. He was never in favour of a six
pound franchise; he believed in a household franchise; but if a seven
pound franchise was offered, beggars could not be choosers, and seven
pounds he would take. In a fragmentary note of later years Mr. Gladstone,
among other things, describes one glittering protagonist of the hour:—


    Lord Russell adhered with great tenacity to his ideas, in which he
    was strongly supported by me as his leader in the Commons, and by
    Granville and others of the cabinet. Bright, the representative
    man of popular ideas, behaved with an admirable combination of
    discretion and loyalty. Lowe was an outspoken opponent, so
    superstitiously enamoured of the ten pound franchise as to be
    thrown into a temper of general hostility to a government which
    did not recognise its finality and sanctity. He pursued our modest
    Reform bill of 1866 with an implacable hostility, and really
    supplied the whole brains of the opposition. So effective were his
    speeches that, during this year, and this year only, he had such a
    command of the House as had never in my recollection been
    surpassed. Nor was there any warrant for imputing to him
    dishonesty of purpose or _arrière-pensée_. But his position was
    one, for the moment, of personal supremacy, and this to such an
    extent that, when all had been reconciled and the time for his
    peerage came, I pressed his viscountcy on the sovereign as a
    tribute to his former elevation, which, though short-lived, was
    due to genuine power of mind, as it seemed to me that a man who
    had once soared to those heights trodden by so few, ought not to
    be lost in the common ruck of official barons.


The first trial of strength arose upon a device of one of the greatest of
the territorial whigs, seconded by a much more eminent man in the ranks of
territorial tories. Lord Grosvenor announced a motion that they would not
proceed with the franchise, until they were in possession of the
ministerial intentions upon seats. Lord Stanley, the son of the tory
leader, seconded the motion. Any other form would have served equally well
as a test of conflicting forces. The outlook was clouded. Mr. Brand, the
skilful whip, informed the cabinet, that there were three classes of
disaffected liberals, who might possibly be kept in order; first, those
who, although opposed to reform, were averse to a change of government;
next, those who doubted whether ministers really intended to deal with the
seats at all; and finally, those who felt sure that when they came to deal
with seats, they would be under the baleful influence of Bright. The first
of the three sections could best be kept right by means of a stiff line
against Grosvenor and Stanley, and the other two sections by the simple
production of the seats bill before taking the committee on franchise. The
expert’s counsels were followed. Mr. Gladstone told the House that Lord
Grosvenor’s motion would be treated as a vote of want of confidence, but
that he would disclose the whole plan as soon as the franchise bill had
passed its second reading. The mutterings only grew louder. At a great
meeting in Liverpool (April 6), accompanied by some of his colleagues Mr.
Gladstone roused the enthusiasm of his audience to the utmost pitch by
declaring that the government would not flinch, that they had passed the
Rubicon, broken the bridges, burned their boats. Still the malcontents
were not cowed.

(M57) The leader himself rose in warmth of advocacy as the struggle went
on. The advocates of privilege used language about the workers, that in
his generous and sympathetic mind fanned the spark into a flame. Lowe
asked an unhappy question, that long stood out as a beacon mark in the
controversy—whether “if you wanted venality, ignorance, drunkenness—if you
wanted impulsive, unreflecting, violent people—where do you look for them?
Do you go to the top or to the bottom?” Harsh judgments like this of the
conditions of life and feeling in the mass of the nation—though Lowe was
personally one of the kindest of men—made Mr. Gladstone stand all the more
ardently by the objects of such sweeping reproach. In a discussion upon
electoral statistics, he let fall a phrase that reverberated through the
discussion inside parliament and out. Some gentlemen, he said, deal with
these statistics, as if they were ascertaining the numbers of an invading
army. “But the persons to whom their remarks apply are our
fellow-subjects, our fellow-Christians, _our own flesh and blood_, who
have been lauded to the skies for their good conduct.”(141) This was
instantly denounced by Lord Cranborne(142) as sentimental rant, and
inquiries soon followed why kinship in flesh and blood should be strictly
limited by a seven pound rental. Speedily Mr. Gladstone passed from steady
practical argument in the ministerial key, to all the topics of popular
enthusiasm and parliamentary invective. His impulsiveness, said critical
observers, “betrays him at times into exaggeration or incaution; but there
is a generous quality in it.” Mr. Bright once talked of his own agitation
for reform as no better than flogging a dead horse. The parliamentary
struggle, led by Mr. Gladstone, brought the dead horse to life, stirred
the combative instincts, and roused all the forces of reform. Lowe was
glittering, energetic, direct, and swift. Mr. Disraeli, contented to watch
his adversaries draw their swords on one another, did not put forth all
his power. In a moment of unwisdom he taunted Mr. Gladstone with his
stripling’s speech at the Oxford Union five-and-thirty years before. As
Aberdeen once said, “Gladstone is terrible on the rebound,”(143) and
anybody less imperturbable than Disraeli would have found his retort
terrible here. His speech on the second reading (April 27), as a whole,
ranks among the greatest of his performances. “Spoke,” he says, “from one
to past three, following Disraeli. It was a toil much beyond my strength,
but I seemed to be sustained and borne onwards I knew not how.” The party
danger, the political theme, the new responsibility of command, the joy of
battle, all seemed to transfigure the orator before the vision of the
House, as if he were the Greek hero sent forth to combat by Pallas Athene,
with, flame streaming from head and shoulders, from helmet and shield,
like the star of summer rising effulgent from the sea. One personal
passage deserves a biographic place:—


    My position, Sir, in regard to the liberal party, is in all points
    the opposite of Earl Russell’s.... I have none of the claims he
    possesses. I came among you an outcast from those with whom I
    associated, driven from them, I admit, by no arbitrary act, but by
    the slow and resistless forces of conviction. I came among you, to
    make use of the legal phraseology, _in formâ pauperis_. I had
    nothing to offer you but faithful and honourable service. You
    received me, as Dido received the shipwrecked Æneas—

    “... Ejectum littore, egentem
    Excepi,”

    and I only trust you may not hereafter at any time have to
    complete the sentence in regard to me—

    “Et regui demens in parte locavi.”(144)

    You received me with kindness, indulgence, generosity, and I may
    even say with some measure of confidence. And the relation between
    us has assumed such a form that you can never be my debtors, but
    that I must for ever be in your debt.


The closing sentences became memorable: “You cannot fight against the
future,” he exclaimed with a thrilling gesture, “time is on our side. The
great social forces which move onwards in their might and majesty, and
which the tumult of our debates does not for a moment impede or
disturb—those great social forces are against you; they are marshalled on
our side; and the banner which we now carry in this fight, though perhaps
at some moment it may droop over our sinking heads, yet it soon again will
float in the eye of Heaven, and it will be borne by the firm hands of the
united people of the three kingdoms, perhaps not to an easy, but to a
certain and to a not far distant victory.”

(M58) A drama, as good critics tell us, is made not by words but by
situations. The same is the truth of the power of the orator. Here the
speaker’s trope was a sounding battle-cry, not a phrase; it disclosed both
a cause and a man. For the hour neither man nor cause prospered. Neither
fervour nor force of argument prevailed against the fears and resentments
of the men of what Mr. Bright called the Cave of Adullam, “to which every
one was invited who was distressed, and every one who was discontented.”
After eight nights of debate (April 27) Lord Grosvenor was beaten, and
ministers were saved—but only by the desperate figure of five. Some thirty
of the professed supporters of government voted against their leaders. A
scene of delirious triumph followed the announcement of the numbers, and
Mr. Lowe believed for the moment that he had really slain the horrid
Demogorgon. Two men knew much better—the leader of the House and the
leader of the opposition.

The cabinet, which was not without an imitation cave of its own, hesitated
for an hour or two, but the two chief men in it stood firm. Mr. Gladstone
was as resolute as Lord Russell, that this time nobody should say reform
was only being played with, and they both insisted on going on with the
bill. The chances were bad, for this was a Palmerstonian parliament, and
the Gladstonian hour had not yet struck. As an honourable leader among the
conservatives admitted, not one of the divisions against the bill was
taken in good faith. If Mr. Gladstone gave way, he was taunted with
cringing; if he stood his ground, it was called bullying; if he expressed
a desire to consult the views of the House, Mr. Disraeli held up ministers
to scorn as unhappy men without minds of their own. In introducing the
bill, says Mr. Gladstone, “I struggled with studious care to avoid every
word that could give offence.” The only effect of this was to spread the
tale that he was not in earnest, and did not really care for the bill.
Such was the temper in which ministers were met. And the whole operation
was conducted upon the basis of a solemn, firm, and formal understanding
between the regular opposition and the cave men, that were it proposed to
reduce the ten pound qualification no lower than nine pounds nineteen
shillings and sixpence, even that change should be resisted.

Meanwhile, for the leader of the House vexation followed vexation. “The
worst incident in the history of our reform struggle,” Mr. Gladstone wrote
to the prime minister from the House, on May 28, “has occurred to-night. A
most barefaced proposal further to load the bill by an instruction to
insert clauses respecting bribery has been carried against us by a
majority of 10; the numbers were 248 to 238. This is extremely
discouraging, and it much reduces the usual strength and authority of the
government. This defeat alters our position with reference to fresh
defeats.” The air was thick with ideas and schemes for getting rid of the
bill and yet keeping the ministers. “I cannot,” Mr. Gladstone says to Lord
Russell (June 4), “divest such ideas and proposals of the aspect of
dishonour.” They were told, he said, to introduce an amended plan next
year. How would the case be altered? They would have to introduce a plan
substantially identical, to meet the same invidious opposition, made all
the more confident by the success of its present manœuvres.

At length an end came. On June 18, on a question raised by Lord Dunkellin,
of rateable value as against gross estimated rental for the basis of the
new seven-pound franchise, ministers were beaten. The numbers were 315
against 304, and in this majority of 11 against government were found no
fewer than 44 of their professed supporters. The sensation was almost
beyond precedent. “With the cheering of the adversary there was shouting,
violent flourishing of hats, and other manifestations which I think novel
and inappropriate,” Mr. Gladstone says. The next morning, in a note to a
friend, he observed: “The government has now just overlived its seven
years: a larger term than the life of any government of this country since
that of Lord Liverpool. Many circumstances show that it was time things
should come to a crisis—none so much as the insidious proceedings, and the
inconstant and variable voting on this bill.”

(M59) It had been decided in the cabinet a couple of days before this
defeat, that an adverse vote on the narrow issue technically raised by
Lord Dunkellin was not in itself to be treated in debate as a vital
question, for the rating value could easily have been adjusted to the
figure of rental proposed by the government. The debate, however, instead
of being confined to a narrow question raised technically, covered the
whole range of the bill. Taken together with the previous attempts to get
rid of the thing, and the increasing number of the disaffected, all this
seemed to extinguish hope, and after what had been said about crossing
Rubicons and burning boats, most thought no course open but resignation.
They might appeal to the country. But Mr. Brand, the expert whip, told the
prime minister that he felt so strongly on the impolicy of dissolution
that he could not bring himself to take a part in it. The proceeding would
be unpopular with their own friends, who had been put to great expense at
their election only a few months before. It would, moreover, break the
party, because at an election they would have to bring out men of more
extreme views to fight the whigs and liberals who had deserted them on
reform, and who might thus be driven permanently to the other side. Such
were the arguments, though Mr. Gladstone seems not to have thought them
decisive. At hardly any crisis in his life, I think, did Mr. Gladstone
ever incline to surrender, short of absolute compulsion. To yield was not
his temper. When he looked back upon this particular transaction in later
years, he blamed himself and his colleagues for too promptly acquiescing
in advice to throw down the reins.


    I incline to believe that we too readily accepted our defeat by an
    infinitesimal majority, as a ground for resignation. There were at
    least four courses open to us: first, resignation; secondly,
    dissolution; thirdly, to deny the finality of the judgment and
    reverse the hostile vote on report; fourthly, to take shelter
    under a general vote of confidence which Mr. Crawford, M.P. for
    the City of London, was prepared to move. Of these, the last was
    the worst, as disparaging to political character. Lord Russell,
    secretly conscious, I suppose, that he had arrived at the last
    stage of his political existence, and desirous that it should not
    be forcibly abbreviated, inclined to adopt it. Granville and I
    were so decidedly set against it that we allowed ourselves, I
    think, to be absorbed in its defeat, and set up against it what
    was undoubtedly the readiest and simplest expedient, namely,
    immediate withdrawal. To dissolve would have been a daring act, an
    appeal from a shuffling parliament to an unawakened people. Yet it
    is possible, even probable, that such an appeal, unhesitatingly
    made, would have evoked a response similar, though not equal, to
    that of 1831. Or again, a re-trial of the question, with a call of
    the House, would in all likelihood have resulted in victory. By
    our retirement we opened the door for that series of curious
    deceptions and intrigues within the tory party, which undoubtedly
    accelerated the arrival of household suffrage.


(M60) Lord Russell tendered their resignation to the Queen, then far away
at Balmoral. The Queen received the communication with the greatest
concern, and asked them to reconsider. “The state of Europe,” she said,
“was dangerous; the country was apathetic about reform; the defeat had
only touched a matter of detail; the question was one that could never be
settled unless all sides were prepared to make concessions.” In London
three or four days were passed in discussing the hundred ingenious
futilities by which well-meaning busy-bodies on all such occasions
struggle to dissolve hard facts by soft words. In compliance with the
Queen’s request, the cabinet reopened their own discussion, and for a day
or two entertained the plan of going on, if the House would pass a general
vote of confidence. Mr. Gladstone, as we have seen, was on the morrow of
the defeat for resignation, and from the first he thought ill of the new
plan. The true alternatives were to try either a fresh parliament or a
fresh ministry. Bright—not then a member of the government—wrote to Mr.
Gladstone (June 24) in strong terms in favour of having a new parliament.
Mr. Brand, he says, “makes no allowance for the force of a moral contest
through the country for a great principle and a great cause. Last Easter
showed how much feeling your appeals could speedily arouse.... I do not
believe in your being beaten. Besides there is something far worse than a
defeat, namely to carry on your government with a party poisoned and
enfeebled by the baseness of the forty traitors [elsewhere in the same
letter called the ‘forty thieves’]. In great contingencies something must
be risked. You will have a great party well compacted together, and great
future. Mr. Brand’s figures should be forgotten for the moment.... You
must not forget the concluding passage of your great speech on the second
reading of the bill. Read it again to nerve you to your great duty.” The
Duke of Argyll was strong in the same sense. He saw no chance of
“conducting opposition with decent sincerity or possible success, except
in a parliament in which we know who are our friends and who are our
enemies on this question.” In the end resignation carried the day:—


    _June 25._—Cabinet 2-½-4-½ .... The final position appeared to be
    this, as to alternatives before the cabinet. 1. Dissolution, only
    approved by three or four. 2. A vote of confidence with vague
    assurances as to future reform—desired by seven, one more
    acquiescing reluctantly, six opposing. _W. E. G. unable to act on
    it._ 3. Lord Russell’s proposal to rehabilitate the
    clause—disapproved by seven, approved by six, two ready to
    acquiesce. 4. Resignation generally accepted, hardly any strongly
    dissenting. I have had a great weight on me in these last days,
    and am glad the matter draws near its close.


This decision greeted the Queen on her arrival at Windsor on the morning
of June 26. Both the prime minister and the chancellor of the exchequer
had audiences the same day. “Off at 11.30 to Windsor with Lord Russell,
much conversation with him. Single and joint audiences with the Queen, who
showed every quality required by her station and the time. We had warm
receptions at both stations.” Mr. Gladstone’s memorandum of the interview
is as follows:—


    _Windsor Castle, June 26._—H.M. expressed her regret that this
    crisis could not be averted; stated she had wished that this
    question could have been postponed altogether to another year; or
    that upon finding the strength and tenacity of the opposition to
    the measure, it could have been withdrawn. I reminded H.M. that
    she had early expressed to me her hope that if we resumed the
    subject of the reform of parliament, we should prosecute it to its
    completion. Also, I said that in my opinion, from all the
    miscarriages attending the past history of this question, not
    ministries alone, and leaders of parties, nor parties alone, but
    parliament itself and parliamentary government were discredited.
    The Queen was impressed with this, and said there was certainly
    great force in it. She had previously seen Lord Russell, and spoke
    of his proposal further to amend the clause. Such a proposal she
    considered advisable, subject to two conditions: (1.) The general
    assent and concurrence of the cabinet; (2.) The reasonable chance
    of its being carried. If the proposal were made she was quite
    willing it should be said, with the approval of the cabinet, that
    she had observed that the issue taken was on a point apparently
    one of detail, and that it was just to the H. of C. that it should
    have an opportunity of voting upon the substance. Lord Russell
    wished in any case to state, and H.M. approved, that the Queen had
    founded her hesitation to accept the resignation (1.) on the fact
    that the decision was on a matter of detail; (2.) on the state of
    the continent(145) (and the difficulty of bringing a new ministry
    in such a state of things at once into the position of the old).
    The Queen offered to write what she had said about Lord Russell’s
    proposed amendment. Lord Russell waived this. But thinking it
    desirable, I afterwards revived the question, and H.M. said she
    thought it would be better, and went to do it.

    I said to Lord Russell, “It is singular that the same members of
    the cabinet (generally speaking) who were prematurely eager for
    resignation after the division on Lord Grosvenor’s motion, are now
    again eager to accept almost anything in the way of a resolution
    as sufficient to warrant our continuing in office.” He replied,
    “Yes, but I am afraid at the root of both proceedings there is a
    great amount of antipathy to our Reform bill. They were anxious to
    resign when resignation would have been injurious to it, and now
    they are anxious to avoid resignation because resignation will be
    beneficial to it.” Lord Russell showed me a letter he had written
    to Clarendon justifying me for my unwillingness to accept Mr.
    Crawford’s motion of confidence. He also said that if the Queen
    should desire the revival of his plan for a further vote, he
    thought it ought to be proposed.


“On returning,” Mr. Gladstone enters in the diary, “we went to consult
Brand and then to the cabinet, when resignation was finally decided on,
and a telegram was sent to Windsor. At six I went down and made my
explanation for the government. I kept to facts without epithets, but I
thought as I went on that some of the words were scorching. A crowd and
great enthusiasm in Palace Yard on departure.” Lord Derby was sent for,
accepted the royal commission, and finding Mr. Lowe and the Adullamites
not available, he formed his third administration on regular conservative
lines, with Mr. Disraeli as its foremost man.


    _July 6._—Went to Windsor to take my leave. H.M. short but kind.
    H. of C. on return, took my place on the opposition bench, the
    first time for fifteen years.(146) ... Finished in Downing Street.
    Left my keys behind me. Somehow it makes a void. _July 19._—H. of
    C. Made a little dying speech on reform. _Sept. 14_—. Woburn.
    Morning _sederunt_ with Lord Russell and Brand on reform and other
    matters. We agreed neither to egg on the government nor the
    reverse.


(M61) Turbulent scenes had already occurred in the metropolis, and it
speedily became evident that whatever value the workmen might set on the
franchise for its own sake, they would not brook the refusal of it. They
chose Mr. Gladstone for their hero, for, as a good observer remarked, he
was the first official statesman who had convinced the working classes
that he really cared for them. On the occasion of one popular assemblage
the crowd thronged (June 28) to Carlton House Terrace, shouting for
Gladstone and liberty. The head of the house was away. Police officers
sent up word to Mrs. Gladstone that the multitude would speedily disperse
if she would appear for a moment or two on the balcony. In compliance with
their request and for the public convenience, she appeared, and all passed
off. The incident was described by newspapers that ought to have known
better, as the ladies of his family courting an ovation from persons of
the lowest class. Mr. Gladstone was compared to Wilkes and Lord George
Gordon. With characteristic tenacity he thought it worth while to
contradict the story, but not in the columns where the offensive tale had
been invented. In July, declining an invitation to speak at a
demonstration in Hyde Park Mr. Gladstone said he believed the resignation
of the government to be a fresh and important step towards final success.
“In the hour of defeat I have the presentiment of victory.”

An interesting glimpse of Mr. Gladstone in the height of these
distractions is given in a passage from the diaries of Mr. Adams, still
the American minister:—(147)


    _Thursday, 7th June 1866._—The other evening at the Queen’s ball
    Mrs. Gladstone asked me as from her husband, to come to breakfast
    this morning, at the same time that Colonel Holmes,(148) was
    invited.... I decided to go. I found no cause to regret the
    decision, for the company was very pleasant. The Duke and Duchess
    of Argyll, Lord Lyttelton, Lord Houghton, Lord Frederick Cavendish
    with his wife, and one of his uncles, and several whom I did not
    know. I forgot Lord Dufferin. We sat at two round tables, thus
    dividing the company; but Mr. Gladstone took ours, which made all
    the difference in the world. His characteristic is the most
    extraordinary facility of conversation on almost any topic, with a
    great command of literary resources, which at once gives it a high
    tone. Lord Houghton, if put to it, is not without aptness in
    keeping it up; whilst the Duke of Argyll was stimulated out of his
    customary indifference to take his share. Thus we passed from
    politics, the House of Commons, and Mr. Mill, to English prose as
    illustrated from the time of Milton and Bacon down to this day,
    and contrasted with German, which has little of good, and with
    French. In the latter connection Mr. Gladstone asked me if I had
    read the _Conscrit_ of Erckmann-Chatrian. Luckily for me, who have
    little acquaintance with the light current literature, I could say
    “Yes,” and could contrast it favourably with the artificial manner
    of Hugo. It is a cause of wonder to me how a man like Gladstone,
    so deeply plunged in the current of politics, and in the duties of
    legislation and official labour, can find time to keep along with
    the ephemeral literature abroad as well as at home. After an hour
    thus spent we rose, and on a question proposed by Colonel Holmes
    respecting a group of figures in china which stood in a corner,
    Mr. Gladstone launched forth into a disquisition on that topic,
    which he delights in, and illustrated his idea of the art by
    showing us several specimens of different kinds. One a grotesque
    but speaking figure in Capo di Monte, another a group of
    combatants, two of whom were lying dead with all the aspect of
    strained muscle stiffening; and lastly, a very classical and
    elegant set of Wedgwood ware, certainly finer than I ever saw
    before. This is the pleasantest and most profitable form of
    English society.


Towards the close of the session (July 21) Mr. Gladstone presided over the
annual dinner of the club founded in honour of Cobden, who had died the
year before. As might have been foretold, he emphasised the moral rather
than the practical results of Cobden’s work. “Public economy was with
Cobden,” he said, “nothing less than a moral principle. The temper and
spirit of Mr. Cobden in respect to questions of public economy was a
temper and a spirit that ought to be maintained, encouraged, and
propagated in this country—a temper and spirit far more in vogue, far more
honoured and esteemed and cultivated by both political parties twenty or
thirty years ago than it is at the present moment.” An intense love of
justice, a singleness of aim, a habit of judging men fairly and estimating
them favourably, an absence of the suspicion that so often forms the bane
of public life—these elements and all other such elements were to be found
in the character of Cobden abundantly supplied. Mr. Cobden’s was a mind
incapable of entertaining the discussion of a question without fully
weighing and estimating its moral aspects and results. In these words so
justly applied to Cobden, the orator was doubtless depicting political
ideals of his own.



II


In the autumn Mr. Gladstone determined on going abroad with his wife and
daughters. “One among my reasons for going,” he told Mr. Brand, “is that I
think I am better out of the way of politics during the recess. In England
I should find it most difficult to avoid for five minutes attending some
public celebration or other, especially in Lancashire. I think that I have
said already in one way or other, all that I can usefully say, perhaps
more than all. So far as I am concerned, I now leave the wound of the
liberal party to the healing powers of nature.... If we cannot arrive in
sufficient strength at a definite understanding with respect to the mode
of handling the question of the franchise, then our line ought to be great
patience and quietude in opposition. If we can, then certainly the
existing government might at any time disappear, after the opening of the
session I mean, with advantage.” “The journey to Italy,” says Phillimore,
“was really a measure of self-defence, to escape the incessant persecution
of correspondence, suggestions, and solicitations.”

(M62) They left England in the last week of September, and proceeded
direct to Rome. The Queen had given as one good reason against a change of
ministers the dangerous outlook on the continent of Europe. This was the
year of the Seven Weeks’ War, the battle of Sadowa (July 3), and the
triumph of Prussia over Austria, foreshadowing a more astonishing triumph
four years hence. One of the results of Sadowa was the further
consolidation of the Italian kingdom by the transfer of Venetia. Rome
still remained outside. The political situation was notoriously
provisional and unstable, and the French troops who had gone there in 1849
were still in their barracks at the Castle of St. Angelo. But this was no
immediate concern of his. “Nothing can be more unlikely,” he wrote to
Acton (Sept. 11), “than that I should meddle with the prisons, or anything
else of the kind. The case of Rome in 1866 is very different from that of
Naples in 1850, when the whole royal government was nothing but one gross
and flagrant illegality. I have seen Archbishop Manning repeatedly,” he
continues, “and my impression is that he speaks to me after having sought
and received his cue from Rome. He is to put me in communication with
Cardinal Antonelli and others. I consider myself bound to good conduct in
a very strict sense of the word.” We now know that the archbishop took
pains to warn his friends at Rome to show their visitor all the kindness
possible. “Gladstone,” he wrote, “does not come as an enemy, and may be
made friendly, or he might become on his return most dangerous.” The
liberals would be very jealous of him on the subject of the temporal power
of the pope. Meanwhile Gladstone fully held that the Holy Father must be
independent. “Towards us in England,” said Manning, “and towards Ireland
he is the most just and forgiving of all our public men. He is very
susceptible of any kindness, and his sympathies and respect religiously
are all with us.”(149)


    _To the Duchess of Sutherland._

    _Rome, Oct. 13._—We had for five days together last week, I will
    not say a surfeit or a glut, for these imply excess and satiety,
    but a continuous feast of fine scenery; all the way from
    Pontarlier by Neuchâtel to Lucerne, and then by the St. Gothard to
    Como. Since then we have had only the passage of the Apennines by
    the railway from Ancona to Rome. This is much finer than the old
    road, according to my recollection. It has three grand stages, one
    of them rising from the north and east, the others through close
    defiles from Foligno to Terni, and from Spoleto to Narni, where we
    went close by the old bridge. As to the St. Gothard I think it the
    finest in scenery of all the Alpine passes I have seen, and I have
    seen all those commonly traversed from the Stelvio downwards (in
    height) to the Brenner, except the Bernardina. A part of the
    ascent on the Italian side may perhaps compete with the Via Mala
    which it somewhat resembles. We were also intensely delighted with
    the Lake of Lugano, which I had never seen before, and which
    appeared to me the most beautiful of the Italian lakes.

    Here we find Rome solitary, which we wished, but also wet and
    dirty, which we did not. We hope it will soon be clear and dry. No
    scenery and no city can stand the stripping off its robe of
    atmosphere. And Rome, which is not _very_ rich in its natural
    features, suffers in a high degree. We caught sight of the pope
    yesterday on the steps of St. Peter’s, made our obeisance, and
    received that recognition with the hand which is very appropriate,
    and I imagine to him not at all troublesome. Next week I hope to
    see Cardinal Antonelli. We have been to-day to St. Paul’s. Its
    space is amazing, and at particular points it seems to vie with or
    exceed St. Peter’s. But there can be no real comparison in
    magnificence, and St. Peter’s is the more churchlike of the two.
    The exterior of St. Paul’s [beyond the walls] is very mean indeed,
    and is in glaring contrast with the gorgeousness within.

    _Rome, Oct. 30._—... I observe reserve in conversation, except
    with such persons as cardinals. To two of them who wished me to
    speak freely I have spoken without any restraint about the great
    question immediately pending here. And next to them my most free
    and open conversation has been with the pope, but of course I did
    not go further than he led me, and on the affairs of Italy this
    was nearly all the way. I have seen him twice, once in an audience
    _quattr’ occhi_, and once with my wife and daughters, Lady A.
    Stanley accompanying us. Nothing can be more pleasant than the
    impression made by his demeanour and language. He looks well and
    strong, but seems to have a slight touch of deafness.(150) You ask
    about our “apartment,” and I send you (partly to inform the
    Argylls, in the hope that they might take one of the floors) first
    a sketch of our general position, nearly opposite the Europa, and
    secondly a rude plan of the rooms. Half a bedroom unfortunately is
    cut off from bad management, and the Frattina rooms are much too
    small. Besides three rooms which we occupy there is another which
    we do not. We are boarded too, which saves much trouble, and we
    have the Stanleys here. We go quietly about our work of seeing
    Rome. The Vatican has been much enriched since I was here. The
    sculpture gallery is really wonderful in its superiority to all
    others. I think if I were allowed to choose two pieces I should
    perhaps take the Demosthenes and the Torso. The pictures have also
    secured valuable additions. The Palace of the Caesars since the
    French _scavi_, not by any means finished yet, offers a new world
    to view, and we expect to see another, probably next week, in the
    catacombs. Among modern works seen as yet I am most pleased with
    Tenerani’s Psyche fainting. A German, Löwenthal, has done a very
    good picture of Gibson, and there has come up a singularly
    interesting portrait believed to be of Harvey. But it is idle to
    attempt to write of all the beauties and the marvels. The church
    here is satisfactory; the new clergyman, Mr. Crowther, introduced
    himself on Sunday with an admirable sermon. We expect the
    Clarendons to-night. We do Dante every morning, and are in the
    sixteenth canto.

    _Dec 4._—At last we have got the Argylls, and I need not say what
    an addition they are, even amidst the surpassing and absorbing
    interests that surround us. I hope for your approbation in that I
    have recommended to his notice a beautiful set of old Sèvres
    dinner plates, soft paste, which with great spirit he has
    purchased for little more, I believe, than half what the
    proprietor refused for them a while ago. I shall be much
    disappointed if you do not think them a valuable acquisition. I
    own that I should never have passed them on to a second purchaser
    had I not, when I first saw them, already got much too near the
    end of my own little tether. But Sèvres plates and all other
    ’objects’ are of small interest in comparison with the great
    events that hang as great thick clouds in the heaven around us,
    yet tipped with broad gleams of light. To-day we are at length
    assured unconditionally of the departure of the French; in which I
    believed already on some grounds, including this, that General
    Count Montebello had ordered sixteen boxes to be packed with the
    spoils of Rome, or his share of them. This departure of the might
    of France represented in the garrison, takes a weight off Roman
    wills and energies, which has for seventeen years bowed them to
    the ground. With what kind of bound will they spring up again, and
    what ugly knocks may be given in the process?


The trip was not in every respect successful. On Christmas day, he writes
to Brand: “We have had some discomforts. Our apartments twice on fire, a
floor burnt through each time. Then I was laid down with a most severe
influenza: very sore throat, a thing quite new to me. The Roman climate is
as bad for me as can be.” I have been told by one who saw much of the
party during the Roman visit, that Mr. Gladstone seemed to care little or
not at all about wonders of archaeology alike in Christian and pagan Rome,
but never wearied of hearing Italian sermons from priests and preaching
friars. This was consonant with the whole temper of his life. He was a
collector of ivories, of china, of Wedgwood, but in architecture in all
its high historic bearings I never found him very deeply interested. I
doubt if he followed the controversies about French, Gothic and Italian,
about Byzantine and Romanesque, with any more concern than he had in the
controversies of geology. He had two audiences of Pope Pius IX., as we
have seen, as had others of his colleagues then in Rome; and Mr. Gladstone
used to tell with much glee in what diverse fashion they impressed the
pontiff. “I like but I do not understand Mr. Gladstone,” the pope said;
“Mr. Cardwell I understand, but I do not like; I both like and understand
Lord Clarendon; the Duke of Argyll I neither understand nor like.” He saw
ten of the cardinals, and at Florence he had an audience of the king “who
spoke very freely”; he had two long interviews with Ricasoli; and some
forty or fifty members of the Italian parliament gave him the honour of a
dinner at which Poerio made a most eloquent speech. To the Duchess of
Sutherland he wrote:—


    _Florence, Jan. 13, 1867._—Yesterday Argyll, Cardwell, and I went
    to the king. He spoke with an astounding freedom; freely
    concerning the pope and the emperor, hopeful about Italy in
    general, rather feebly impressed with the financial difficulty,
    and having his head stuffed full of military notions which it
    would be very desirable to displace. We have rumours from England
    of reform and of no reform; but we do not trouble ourselves
    overmuch about these matters. To-morrow I am to be entertained by
    a number of the deputies in memory especially of the Naples
    letters. I shrank from this, as I have long ago been much
    overpraised and overpaid for the affair, but I could not find a
    proper ground for refusing. The dinner is to be a private one, but
    I suppose some notice of it will find its way into the journals.
    It is a curious proof of the way in which a free and open press
    has taken hold here, that the newspapers are ordinarily habitually
    cried in the streets until near midnight!


(M63) Among other objects of his keen and active interest was the
preservation for its established uses of the famous monastery founded by
St. Benedict thirteen centuries before at Monte Cassino,—the first home of
that great rule and institute which for long ages played so striking part
in the history of civilisation in the western world. He now visited Monte
Cassino in the company of Padre Tosti. The historian of this venerable
nursery of learning was his friend long before now—they met first at
Naples in 1850—and he had induced Mr. Gladstone to subscribe for the
reparation of the tomb of the founder. In 1863 Dean Stanley visited the
monastery with a letter from Mr. Gladstone: “It secured for me not only
the most hospitable reception, but an outpouring of Padre Tosti’s whole
soul on pope and church, and Italy and Europe, past and present, in an
almost unbroken conversation of three hours.” In 1866, it seemed as if the
hand of the Italian government were about to fall as heavily on Monte
Cassino as on any other monastic establishment. Mr. Gladstone besides
doing his best with Ricasoli and others, wrote a letter of admirable
spirit to his friend Sir James Lacaita:—


    It seems, he said, as if one of the lamps of learning were put
    out; much promise for the future extinguished; and a sacred link
    of union, with the past broken. If it be asked why Englishmen
    should speak and feel on this Italian subject, my answer would be
    this: that the foundation and history of Monte Cassino have the
    interest for us which the Americans of the States feel in Alfred,
    in Edward III., in Henry V. They are part of the great current of
    Italian civilisation which has been diffused and distributed over
    all European lands. Much of my life has been devoted to the
    promotion of public wealth, and of that vast exterior activity
    which distinguishes the age; but I am deeply anxious for the
    preservation of all those centres, not too numerous, at which the
    power of thought may be cultivated, and the inner and higher life
    of man maintained. It has, as you know, been pressed upon me that
    I should endeavour to make a respectful appeal to the Italian
    government on this subject through the medium of a discussion in
    the House of Commons. But I shrink from taking such a course, as I
    fear that the general effect might be to present all appearance of
    intrusive and impertinent interference with the affairs of a
    foreign country, and that the very country towards which I should
    least wish to offer the appearance of a slight I cannot likewise
    refuse to cherish, the hope that the enlightened mind of Baron
    Ricasoli and his colleagues may lead them either to avert or
    mitigate this blow.


On his return he passed through Paris. The previous year a signal honour
had been bestowed upon him by the illustrious Institute of France—founded
on that Academy, in which Richelieu had crowned the fame of arms and
statesmanship by honour to purity in national language and competence in
letters.(151) In acknowledging the election, he wrote to Mignet, the
historian, then perpetual secretary:—


    _11 Carlton House Terrace, March 9, 1865._—I have already
    expressed although in an imperfect manner to your distinguished
    colleagues Count Wolowski and M. Guizot, the sentiments of
    gratitude with which I accept the signal and most unexpected
    honour of my election as a foreign associate of the Institute of
    France. Even the pressure, and what I might call the tumult, of my
    daily occupations do not render me insensible to the nature of
    this distinction, which carries with it a world-wide fame. I will
    not, however, dwell further on the nature of the honour, or on my
    own unworthiness to receive it: except to refer for a moment to
    the gentleman whose name was placed in competition with my own. I
    cannot but be aware of his superior claims. I fear that, for once,
    the judgment of the Academy has erred, and that in preferring me
    to Mr. Mill, its suffrages have taken a wrong direction. I am only
    consoled by reflecting that such a body, with such renown, and
    with its ranks so filled, can afford to suffer the detriment
    attaching to a single mistake. I have the honour to be, etc.


(M64) This distinction brought with it the duty of attending the funeral
of a writer eminent among the philosophers and men of letters of his day.
It had been said of him that three days in the week he was absurd, three
days mediocre, and one day sublime. The verdict seems to be confirmed.


    _Jan. 23._—From 10 to 3.45 at the successive stages of Victor
    Cousin’s interment, in my character of member of the Institute. It
    was of great interest. I saw many most eminent Frenchmen, so many
    that they remained as a cloud upon my recollection, except
    Berryer, Thiers, and some whom I had known before. _Jan.
    26._—Attended the meeting of the Institute 12-2. Spent the rest of
    the afternoon with M. Jules Simon in seeing certain quarters of
    Paris.


“Yesterday,” he wrote to Mr. Brand (Jan. 27), “a dinner was given to
Cardwell and me at the Grand Hotel, by the Society of Political Economists
of France, and I did my best to improve the occasion in terms which might
imply censure on the military measures here and the new turn of affairs.
Also I am a known accomplice of M. Fould’s. So I let all this be balanced
by dining with the Emperor to-day, and with Rouher to-morrow.” Of the
reception at court, he says, “Dined at the Tuileries, and was surprised at
the extreme attention and courtesy of both their majesties, with whom I
had much interesting conversation.” The fates with no halting foot were
drawing near. The palace was a heap of ashes, host and hostess were
forlorn exiles, before in no long span of time they met their guest again.




Chapter XIV. The Struggle For Household Suffrage. (1867)


    First of all we had a general intimation and promise that
    something would be done; then a series of resolutions, which
    strutted a brief hour upon the stage and then disappeared; then
    there was a bill, which we were told, on the authority of a
    cabinet minister, was framed in ten minutes, and which was
    withdrawn in very little more than ten minutes; and lastly, there
    was a bill which—undergoing the strangest transformations in its
    course through parliament—did, I will not say, become the law of
    the land, but was altered into something like that which became
    the law of the land.—GLADSTONE.



I


From Rome Mr. Gladstone kept a watchful eye for the approaching political
performances at Westminster. He had written to Mr. Brand a month after his
arrival:—


    _51 P. di Spagna, Oct. 30, ’66._—The Clarendons are to be here
    this evening to stay for a fortnight or three weeks. Dean and Lady
    A. Stanley are in the house with us. I doubt if there are any
    other English parties in Rome.

    The reform movement is by degrees complicating the question. It is
    separating Bright from us, and in one sense thus clearing our way.
    But then it may become too strong for us; or at least too strong
    to be stayed with our bill of last year. I do not envy Lord Derby
    and his friends their reflections this autumn on the course they
    have pursued. Meanwhile I wish that our press, as far as we may be
    said to have one, would write on this text: _that a bill from
    them, to be accepted by the people, must be larger, and not
    smaller, than would have been, or even would be, accepted from
    us_. For confidence, or credit, stands in politics in lieu of
    ready money. If, indeed, your enemy is stronger than you are, you
    must take what he gives you. But in this case he is weaker, and
    not stronger. A good bill from them would save us much trouble and
    anxiety. A straightforward bill, such an £8 franchise without
    tricks, would be easily dealt with. But their bill will be neither
    good nor straightforward. The mind of Disraeli, as leader of the
    House of Commons, and standing as he does among his compeers, will
    predominate in its formation. Now he has made in his lifetime
    three attempts at legislation—the budget of 1852, the India bill
    of 1858, the Reform bill of 1859. All have been thoroughly
    tortuous measures. And the Ethiopian will not change his skin. His
    Reform bill of 1867 will be tortuous too. But if you have to drive
    a man out of a wood, you must yourself go into the wood to drive
    him. We may have to meet a tortuous bill by a tortuous motion.
    This is what I am afraid of, and what I am, for one, above all
    things anxious to avoid. In 1859 the liberal party had to play the
    obstructive, and with evil consequences. It would be most
    unfortunate if they should be put into such a position again. Pray
    consider this. I do not like what I see of Bright’s speeches. We
    have no claim upon him, more than the government have on us; and I
    imagine he will part company the moment he sees his way to more
    than we would give him.



II


(M65) The general character of the operations of 1867, certainly one of
the most curious in our parliamentary history, was described by Mr.
Gladstone in a fragment written thirty years after. Time had extinguished
the volcanic fires, and the little outline is sketched with temper and a
sort of neutrality:—


    When the parliament reassembled in 1867, parties and groups were
    curiously distributed. The two great bodies were the regular
    supporters of the Tory ministry, and those grouped around us who
    had been expelled. The first did not know what course they would
    have to take; that depended on the secret counsels of another
    mind. To keep to the _drapeau_ was the guiding motive, as has been
    since the creed and practice of Peel were subverted by the
    opposite principles of Disraeli, who on a franchise question had
    his peer colleagues at his feet. Besides these, other divisions
    had to be recognised. The Salisbury secession from the government,
    supported by Sir W. Heathcote and Beresford Hope, was high in
    character, but absolutely insignificant in numbers. There was
    Lowe, so great among the Adullamites of 1866, but almost alone
    among them in the singleness and strength of his opposition to
    reform. There was the bulk of the Adullamite body, unable to place
    themselves in declared opposition to the liberal mass, but many of
    them disposed to tamper with the question, and to look kindly on
    the tory government as the power which would most surely keep down
    any enlargement of the franchise to its minimum. It would be idle
    to discuss the successive plans submitted by the government to the
    House of Commons with an unexampled rapidity. The governing idea
    of the man who directed the party seemed to be not so much to
    consider what ought to be proposed and carried, as to make sure
    that, whatever it was, it should be proposed and carried by those
    now in power. The bill on which the House of Commons eventually
    proceeded was a measure, I should suppose, without precedent or
    parallel, as, on the other hand it was, for the purpose of the
    hour, and as the work of a government in a decided minority, an
    extraordinary stroke of parliamentary success. Our position, on
    the other hand, was this: (1) We felt that if household suffrage
    were to be introduced into the boroughs, it ought to be a real
    household suffrage. (2) The existing state of our legislation,
    under which a large majority of the householders made no
    disbursement of rates, but paid them without distinction in their
    rent, showed that a bill professedly for household suffrage, but
    taking no notice of compounding, would be in the first place a
    lottery, and in the second an imposture. Some towns would have
    large enfranchisement, some none at all, and no principle but the
    accidental state of local law would determine on which side of the
    line any town was to be found. And the aggregate result would be
    ludicrously small as a measure of enfranchisement. Of such a
    measure we could not approve. We did not wish to make at once so
    wide a change as that involved in a genuine household suffrage
    (always in our minds involving county as well as town), and we
    could not fairly separate ourselves from Bright on such a point.
    (3) So we adhered to our idea of an extension, considerable but
    not violent, and performing all it promised.

    But the Adullamite spirit went to work, and finding that the bill
    had the popular recommendation of a great phrase [household
    suffrage], combined with the recommendation to them of a narrow
    sphere of practical operation, determined to support the principle
    of the bill and abandon our plan, although our mode of operation
    had been warmly approved at party meetings held at my house. The
    result was in a tactical sense highly damaging to us. Perhaps we
    ought to have recognised that the idea of household suffrage, when
    the phrase had once been advertised by a government as its
    battle-ground, was irresistible, and that the only remaining
    choice was whether it should be a household suffrage cribbed,
    cabined, and confined by the condition of personal ratepaying, or
    a household suffrage fairly conforming in substance and operation
    to the idea that the phrase conveyed. The first was in our view
    totally inadmissible; the second beyond the wants and wishes of
    the time. But the government, it must be admitted, bowled us over
    by the force of the phrase; and made it our next duty to bowl them
    over by bringing the reality of the bill into correspondence with
    its great profession. This we were able to do in some degree, when
    we reached the committee, for some of the restrictions included in
    the measure were such as the double-facing liberal fringe did not
    venture to uphold against the assaults of their own party. But the
    grand question of compound householding, which was really to
    determine the character of our legislation, was one on which we
    could not reckon upon either the conscientious or the intimidated
    and prudential support of our liberal fringe. The government were
    beyond all doubt, at least for the moment, masters of the
    situation. The question was raised, if not in its fullest breadth
    yet in a form of considerable efficiency, by a proposal from Mr.
    Hodgkinson, member for Newark, and a local solicitor little known
    in the House.(152) He went there to support it, but without an
    idea that it could be carried, and anticipating its defeat by a
    majority of a hundred. Never have I undergone a stranger emotion
    of surprise than when, as I was entering the House, our whip met
    me and stated that Disraeli was about to support Hodgkinson’s
    motion. But so it was, and the proposition was adopted without
    disturbance, as if it had been an affair of trivial importance.

    How it came about I partially learned at a later date. A cabinet
    was held after the fact, which Sir John Lambert, the great
    statistician of the day, was summoned to attend. The cabinet had
    had no idea that the Hodgkinson amendment was to be accepted; the
    acceptance was the sole act of Mr. Disraeli; and when it had been
    done the ministers assembled in order to learn from Sir John
    Lambert what was the probable addition that it would make to the
    constituency.

    I do not suppose that in the whole history of the ’mystery-man,’
    this proceeding can be surpassed. The tories, having been brought
    to accept household suffrage on the faith of the limitation
    imposed by personal payment of the rates, found at a moment’s
    notice that that limitation had been thrown overboard, and that
    their leader had given them a bill virtually far larger than any
    that Mr. Bright had sought to impose upon them. It was certainly
    no business of ours to complain, and they made it no business of
    theirs. I imagine that they still relied upon rectification of the
    bill by the House of Lords. And the Lords did rectify it largely;
    but these rectifications were all rejected when the bill returned
    to us, except the minority [representation], which Mr. Disraeli
    was strong enough to secure by means of the votes of a body of
    liberals who approved it, and which he accepted to humour or
    comfort the Lords a little, while he detested it, and made, as
    Bright said, the best speech ever delivered against it. So came
    about the establishment of an effective household suffrage in the
    cities and boroughs of England.



III


(M66) The process effecting this wide extension of political power to
immense classes hitherto without it, was in every respect extraordinary.
The great reform was carried by a parliament elected to support Lord
Palmerston, and Lord Palmerston detested reform. It was carried by a
government in a decided minority. It was carried by a minister and by a
leader of opposition, neither of whom was at the time in the full
confidence of his party. Finally, it was carried by a House of Commons
that the year before had, in effect, rejected a measure for the admission
of only 400,000 new voters, while the measure to which it now assented
added almost a million voters to the electorate.(153)

We always do best to seek rational explanations in large affairs. It may
be true that “if there were no blunders there would be no politics,” but
when we have made full allowance for blunder, caprice, chance, folly,
craft, still reason and the nature of things have a share. The secret of
the strange reversal in 1867 of all that had been said, attempted, and
done in 1866, would seem to be that the tide of public opinion had
suddenly swelled to flood. The same timidity that made the ruling classes
dread reform, had the compensation that very little in the way of popular
demonstration was quite enough to frighten them into accepting it. Here
the demonstration was not little. Riots in Hyde Park, street processions
measured by the mile in the great cities from London up to Glasgow,
open-air meetings attended by a hundred, two hundred, two hundred and
fifty thousand people at Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, showed that even
though the workmen might not be anxious to demand the franchise, yet they
would not stand its refusal. In the autumn of 1868 Mr. Bright led a
splendid campaign in a series of speeches in England, Scotland, and
Ireland, marked by every kind of power. It is worthy of remark that not
one of the main changes of that age was carried in parliament without
severe agitation out of doors. Catholic emancipation was won by O’Connell;
the reform act of 1832 by the political unions; free trade by the league
against the corn law. Household suffrage followed the same rule.

It was undoubtedly true in a sense that Mr. Gladstone was at the head of a
majority in 1866, and now again in. 1867. But its composition was
peculiar. Sir Thomas Acland (April 10, 1867) describes Mr. Gladstone as
hampered by three sets of people: “1. Radicals, who will vote for
household suffrage, but don’t want it carried. 2. Whigs (aristocrats), who
won’t risk a collision with the government, and hope that very little
reform will be carried, and want to discredit Gladstone. 3. A large body
who care for nothing except to avoid a dissolution.” “There is a fresh
intrigue,” he adds, “every twelve hours.”

The trenchant and sardonic mind of the leader of the revolt that had
destroyed the bill of 1866, soon found food for bitter rumination. On the
eve of the session Lowe admitted that he had very little hope of a
successful end to his efforts, and made dismal protests that the reign of
reason was over. In other words, he had found out that the men whom he had
placed in power, were going to fling him overboard in what he called this
miserable auction between two parties, at which the country was put up for
sale, and then knocked down to those who could produce the readiest and
swiftest measure for its destruction.

The liberal cave of the previous year was broken up, Lowe and the ablest
of its old denizens now voting with Mr. Gladstone, but the great majority
going with the government. The place of the empty cave was taken by a new
group of dissidents, named from their habitat the party of the Tea-Room.
Many, both whigs above the gangway and even radicals below, were averse to
bringing Lord Russell and Mr. Gladstone back again; they thought a bill
would have a better chance with the tories than with the old leaders.
Insubordination and disorganisation were complete. “I have never seen
anything like it,” says the new Lord Halifax;(154) “but the state of
things this year enables me to understand what was very inexplicable in
all I heard of last year.” We can hardly wonder that the strain was often
difficult to bear. A friend, meeting Mr. Gladstone at dinner about this
time (March 25), thought that he saw signs of irritated nerve. “What an
invaluable gift,” he reflects, “a present of phlegm from the gods would
be! If we could roll up Thompson [master of Trinity] or Bishop Thirlwall
with him and then bisect the compound, we should get a pair as invincible
as the Dioscuri.” An accomplished observer told his constituents that one
saw the humour of the great parliamentary chess tournament, looking at the
pieces on the board and the face of Disraeli; its tragic side in a glimpse
of the face of Gladstone; in the mephistophelian nonchalance of one, the
melancholy earnestness of the other.(155)

(M67) Everybody knew that Disraeli, as he watched the scene from behind
his mask, now and again launching a well-devised retort, was neither liked
nor trusted, though more than a little feared; and that Gladstone, with
his deeply lined face, his “glare of contentious eagerness,” his seeming
over-righteousness, both chafed his friends and exasperated his foes. As
it was excellently put by a critic in the press,—the House was
indifferent, and Mr. Gladstone was earnest; the House was lax and he was
strict; it was cynical about popular equality, and he was enthusiastic; it
was lazy about details, he insisted upon teaching it the profoundest
minutiæ.(156) About this time, Lord Russell told Lord Halifax that he had
gone down to see his brother the Duke of Bedford when he was dying, and
had said to him that things were drifting into the country being governed
by Disraeli and Gladstone, and the Duke observed that neither of them was
fit for it. And Halifax himself went on to say that Gladstone had, in
truth, no sympathy or connection with any considerable party in the House
of Commons. For the old whig party remembered him as an opponent for many
years; the radicals knew that on many points, especially on all church
matters, he did not agree with them, and though they admired his talents,
and hailed his recent exertions in favour of reform, they had no great
attachment to him, nor did he seem to be personally popular with any of
them.

Far away from the world of politics, we have an estimate of Mr. Gladstone
at this time from the piercing satirist of his age. “Is not he at any rate
a man of principle?” said a quaker lady to Carlyle. “Oh, Gladstone!” the
sage replied, “I did hope well of him once, and so did John Sterling,
though I heard he was a Puseyite and so forth; still it seemed the right
thing for a state to feel itself bound to God, and to lean on Him, and so
I hoped that something might come of him. But now, he has been declaiming
that England is such a wonderfully prosperous state, meaning that it has
plenty of money in its breeches pocket.... But that’s not the prosperity
we want. And so I say to him, ‘You are not the life-giver to England. I go
my way, you go yours, good morning (with a most dramatic and final
bow).’ ”(157) England however thought otherwise about life-givers, and
made a bow of a completely different sort. Yet not at once. It was Mr.
Disraeli who played the leading part in this great transaction, not by
inventing the phrase of household suffrage, for that principle was Mr.
Bright’s; nor by giving his bill the shape in which it ultimately became
law, for that shape was mainly due to Mr. Gladstone, but as the mind by
whose secret counsels the arduous and intricate manœuvre was directed.
“The most wonderful thing,” wrote Bishop Wilberforce at the end of the
session, “is the rise of Disraeli. It is not the mere assertion of talent.
He has been able to teach the House of Commons almost to ignore Gladstone,
and at present lords it over him, and, I am told, says that he will hold
him down for twenty years.”(158) If Mr. Disraeli said this, he proved
almost as much mistaken as when Fox was confident of holding the young
Pitt down in 1783. Still he impressed his rival. “I met Gladstone at
breakfast,” says Lord Houghton (May), “he seems quite awed by the
diabolical cleverness of Dizzy.” Awe, by no means the right word, I fancy.



IV


(M68) On April 12 the first act of the Reform question of 1867 ended in an
awkward crisis for Mr. Gladstone. The details of the story are intricate
and not much to our purpose. Mr. Gladstone’s version printed above
discovers its general features. Some particulars, properly biographic,
will fill up his sketch. “If you have to drive a man out of a wood,” Mr.
Gladstone said, “you must yourself go into the wood to drive him.” The
bystander of a later time, however, may be content to keep outside the
thicket until the driver and the driven both emerge. Mr. Disraeli began by
preparing a series of resolutions—platitudes with little relation to
realities. He told the House that reform should no longer be allowed to
determine the fate of cabinets, and the House laughed. Yet if Mr. Disraeli
had only at this time enjoyed the advantage of a better character—if he
had been Althorp, Russell, Peel—instead of laughing, his hearers would
perhaps have recognised good sense and statesmanship. As he said later,
whig prime ministers, coalition prime ministers, coalition chancellors of
the exchequer, had one after another had their innings, and with a
majority at their back; was it not well now to try something that might be
carried by consent? Under pressure from Mr. Gladstone the government
explained their plan, dropped the resolutions, and brought in a bill.(159)
Men were to have votes who had university degrees, or were members of
learned professions, or had thirty pounds in a savings bank, or fifty
pounds in the funds, or paid a pound in direct taxes; but the fighting
point was that every householder who paid rates should have a vote. A
scheme for seats accompanied. To comfort his party for giving so wide a
suffrage, the minister provided checks by conferring a double vote on
certain classes of citizens, and imposing strict terms as to residence.
Three members of his cabinet, of whom Lord Cranborne was the most
important, refused the unsubstantial solace and resigned. But Mr. Disraeli
saw that he would regain by disorganising his opponents more than he would
lose by dislocating his friends.

Mr. Gladstone flew down upon the plan with energy, as a measure of
illusory concessions, and securities still more illusory. His speech was
taken in some quarters in a conservative sense, for Lowe at once wrote to
him (March 21) urging him to follow it up by resisting the second reading
on the principle of righting rent against rating. Since Callimachus, the
Athenian polemarch, had to give the casting vote at Marathon when the ten
generals were equally divided on the question of fighting the Persians or
not fighting, “no one,” cried Lowe, “ever had a weightier case to decide”
than Mr. Gladstone now. He forgot that the brave Callimachus was slain,
and Mr. Gladstone would in a political sense have been slain likewise if
he had taken Lowe’s advice, for, as he says, Disraeli had by talk of
household suffrage “bowled them over.” A meeting of 278 liberals was held
at his house, and he addressed them for nearly an hour, concurring not
over-willingly in the conclusion that they should not resist the second
reading.(160) He had a long conversation with Mr. Bright two days before,
whom he found ’sensible, moderate, and firm,’ and whose view was no doubt
the opposite of Lowe’s. The bill was read a second time without a division
(March 26).

A few entries in Sir Robert Phillimore’s journal help us to realise the
state of the case during this extraordinary session:—


    _April 9._—Entire collapse of Gladstone’s attack on government
    yesterday. _Tea-room_ schism of liberal members, including the H.
    of C. Russell. Disraeli’s insolent triumph. 10.—Returned to the
    Coppice with Ld. Richard Cavendish. He tells me Hastings Russell
    and his brother cannot bear Gladstone as their leader. 12.—In the
    middle of the day saw Gladstone and Mrs. Gladstone. His _disgust_
    and _deep mortification_ at the defection of his party, mingled
    with due sense of the loyalty of the greater number, and
    especially of his old cabinet. The expression of my wish that, if
    deserted, he will abdicate and leave them to find another leader
    fully responded to by him. 13.—Defeat of the opposition last
    night; great triumph of Disraeli; a surprise, I believe, to both
    parties; 289 voted with Gladstone. What will he do? _Query._—Ought
    he on account of the defection of 20 to leave so considerable a
    party?


(M69) The occasion just mentioned marked a climax. Mr. Gladstone moved an
amendment to remove the personal payment of rates as an essential
qualification, and to confer the franchise on the householder whether he
paid the rate direct or through the landlord. The next day the diary
records: _April 12._—“Spoke in reply and voted in 289-310. A smash perhaps
without example. A victory of 21 for ministers.” A new secession had taken
place, and 43 liberal members voted with the government, while nearly 20
were absent. The Cranborne secession was small, and some who had been
expected to stay away voted with the government. “Gladstone expressed
himself strongly to five or six members of the late government whom he
summoned to his house in the morning. He spoke of retiring to a back
bench, and announcing that he would give up the ostensible post of leader
of the opposition. He was dissuaded from doing this at the present moment,
and went out of town, as indeed did almost everybody else.”(161) Still the
notion of a back bench did lodge itself in his mind for long. The “smash”
was undoubtedly severe. As Mr. Gladstone wrote to one of the members for
the City, a supporter, it showed that the liberals whose convictions
allowed united action upon reform were not a majority but a minority of
the House of Commons. Considering the large number who supported his
proposal, he told his correspondent that though he would move no further
amendment of his own, he was not less willing than heretofore to remain at
the service of the party. “The friendly critics,” he said to Brand, “note
a tone of despondency in my letter to Crawford. That is all owing to
Granville and others who cut off a fine peacock’s tail that I had
appended.” So day after day amid surf and breakers he held to his oar. If
Mr. Gladstone was much buffeted in the house of his friends, he was not
without valiant backers, and among them none was more stout than Mr.
Bright, the least effusive of all men in the direction of large panegyric.
Speaking to his constituents at Birmingham, “Who is there in the House of
Commons,” he demanded, “who equals Mr. Gladstone in knowledge of all
political questions? Who equals him in earnestness? Who equals him in
eloquence? Who equals him in courage and fidelity to his convictions? If
these gentlemen who say they will not follow him have any one who is
equal, let them show him. If they can point out any statesman who can add
dignity and grandeur to the stature of Mr. Gladstone, let them produce
him.” A deputation against the bill from some popular body came to him
(May 11). Mr. Disraeli at once regretted that these “spouters of stale
sedition,” these “obsolete incendiaries,” should have come forward to pay
their homage to one who, wherever he may sit, must always remain the pride
and ornament of the House—


    “Who but must laugh if such a man there be?
    Who would not weep if Atticus were he?”



V


To the Duchess of Sutherland Mr. Gladstone wrote (July 9):—


    I do not plead guilty to the indictment for “non-attendance.” I
    think that for three months I have been in the House for more
    hours than the Speaker. I have heard every important word that has
    been spoken on the Reform bill, and at least nine-tenths of all
    the words. True, outside the Reform bill I only attend when I
    think there is a chance of being useful; and in the present state
    of the House these opportunities are few. I act from no personal
    motive. But for me to be present and interfere continuously, or so
    far continuously as I might in other circumstances, would exhibit
    needlessly from day to day the divisions and consequent weakness
    of the liberal party. I admit also that time tells on a man of my
    age and temperament; and my brain tells me that I want more rest
    and not less. Is this unreasonable? I am against all needless
    waste of life or anything else. Everything should be husbanded. I
    must add that more attendance would but aggravate the
    susceptibility which depends on nerves rather than will, and
    already makes my attendance less useful.


The Phillimore diary gives us one or two glimpses more:—


    _May 9._—Carnarvon delighted with Gladstone’s speech at S.P.G.
    meeting. 10.—Called on Gladstone in bed at 1.30. Ill from effect
    of the great exertion of yesterday—S.P.G. in the morning, H. of C.
    in the evening.... The effect of these defeats of Gladstone in the
    H. of C. has been to bind the whigs closer to him. 24.—The dinner
    to Brand and presentation of plate deferred, ostensibly on the
    ground of his health and necessity of going to German waters,
    really because at present Gladstone refuses to take the chair at
    the dinner, though attached to Brand, because many who had
    deserted him (G.) would attend the dinner. Gladstone will not
    countenance the appearance of a sham union when the party is
    discredited. _June 7._—Attack on Gladstone as being in debt “hard
    pressed by creditors,” and therefore wishing for office. The
    malice against him is wonderful. _29._—Dined at Newspaper Press
    Fund. Gladstone in the chair, made a really faultless speech.
    Never did I hear his voice better, nor the flow of his eloquence
    more unbroken.


Two or three items more from Mr. Gladstone’s diary are worth recording:—


    _May 6._—The underground tone of the House most unsatisfactory.
    _May 9._—Spoke earnestly and long for compound householders, in
    vain. Beaten by 322-256. Much fatigued by heat and work. _May
    28._—Spoke (perforce) on Disraeli’s astonishing declaration of
    consistency. _July 15._—Third reading of Reform bill. A remarkable
    night. Determined at the last moment not to take part in the
    debate, for fear of doing mischief on our own side.


The conservative leader himself was exposed to onslaughts from his
followers and confederates of the previous year as severe as have ever
fallen on the head of an English party. “Never,” cried Mr. Lowe, in
desolation and chagrin, “never was there tergiversation so complete. Such
conduct may fail or not; it may lead to the retention or the loss of
office; but it merits alike the contempt of all honest men, and the
execration of posterity.” Lord Cranborne, the chief conservative seceder,
described the bill in its final shape, after undergoing countless
transformations, as the result of the adoption of the principles of Bright
at the dictation of Gladstone. It was at Mr. Gladstone’s demand that
lodgers were invested with votes; that the dual vote, voting papers,
educational franchise, savings-bank franchise, all disappeared; that the
distribution of seats was extended into an operation of enormously larger
scale. In his most biting style, Lord Cranborne deplored that the House
should have applauded a policy of legerdemain; talked about borrowing
their ethics from the political adventurer; regretted, above all things,
that the Reform bill should have been purchased at the cost of a political
betrayal that had no parallel in our parliamentary annals, and that struck
at the very root of that mutual confidence which is the very soul of our
party government.

Merciless storms of this kind Mr. Disraeli bore imperturbably. He
complained of the intolerant character of the discussions. “Everybody who
does not agree with somebody else is looked upon as a fool, or as being
mainly influenced by a total want of principle in the conduct of public
affairs.” He doubted whether Mr. Bright or anybody else could show that
the tory party had changed their opinions. He had not changed his own
opinions; the bill was in harmony with the general policy they had always
maintained, though adapted, of course, to the requirements of the year. On
Mr. Lowe’s “most doleful vaticinations that ever were heard,” about the
new voters repudiating the national debt and adopting an inconvertible
paper currency, he poured easy ridicule. Yet only a year before this Mr.
Disraeli himself had prophesied that the end of a seven pound franchise
would be a parliament of no statesmanship, no eloquence, no learning, no
genius. “Instead of these you will have a horde of selfish and obscure
mediocrities, incapable of anything but mischief, and that mischief
devised and regulated by the raging demagogue of the hour.”

Mr. Gladstone summed the matter up in a sentence to Dr. Pusey: “We have
been passing through a strange and eventful year: a deplorable one, I
think, for the character and conduct of the House of Commons, but yet one
of promise for the country, though of a promise not unmixed with evils.”




Chapter XV. Opening Of The Irish Campaign. (1868)


    “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that
    events have controlled me. Now at the end of three years’
    struggle, the nation’s condition is not what either party or any
    man desired or expected.”—ABRAHAM LINCOLN (1864).



I


Writing to his brother-in-law, Lord Lyttelton, in April 1865, Mr.
Gladstone sets out pretty summarily the three incidents that had been
taken to mark the line of his advance in the paths of extreme and
visionary politics. When it was written, his speech on the franchise the
previous year had not ripened,(162) and his speech on the Irish church was
only on the eve, nor did he yet know it, of taking shape as a deliberate
policy of action.


    _To Lord Lyttelton._

    _11 Carlton House Terrace, S.W., April 9, ’65._—Our interesting
    conversation of Wednesday evening, which looked before and after,
    and for your share in which I heartily thank you, has led me to
    review the subject matters, a process which every man in public
    life as well as elsewhere ought often to perform, but which the
    pressure of overwork, and the exhaustion it leaves behind, sadly
    hinder. But I sum up in favour of a verdict of “Not guilty,” on
    the following grounds.

    As far as I know, there are but three subjects which have exposed
    me to the charge of radicalism: the Irish church, the franchise,
    the paper duty, and the consequent struggle with the House of
    Lords.

    My opinions on the Irish church were, I know, those of Newcastle
    and Sidney Herbert twenty years ago; and they were not radicals.
    Ever since Maynooth, in 1845, I have seen that resistance _in
    principle_ was gone. That was the main reason which led me to make
    such a serious affair of my own case about the Maynooth grant in
    that year. But I held this embryo opinion in my mind as there was
    no cause to precipitate it into life, and waited to fortify or
    alter or invalidate it by the teachings of experience. At last the
    time for speaking, and therefore for formulating my ideas came,
    and I have spoken according as I believe to be the sense of all
    the leading men with whom I acted from Peel’s death onwards, and
    within the sense not only of Lord Macaulay, but of the present
    Lord Grey.

    With respect to the franchise, my belief is that the objection
    taken to my speech really turned not upon the doctrine of _prima
    facie_ title, but upon the fact that it was a speech decisively
    and warmly in favour of the £6 franchise or something equivalent
    to it. That is to say, of the very franchise which as a member of
    the cabinet I had supported in 1860, on the credit and promise of
    which Lord Derby had been put out in 1859, and which, if it did
    not appear in the Aberdeen Reform bill of 1852, was represented
    there by other concessions equally large. The truth is this, that
    ever since the Aberdeen Reform bill, I have remained just where it
    placed me; but many seem to think that it is a subject to be
    played with or traded on. In thinking and acting otherwise I feel
    myself to be upholding principles essential to the confidence of
    the people in governments and parliaments, and also a measure
    which promises by reasonably widening the basis of our
    institutions to strengthen the structure above.

    To the repeal of the paper duty the House of Commons, when led by
    the Derby government, chose to commit itself unanimously, and this
    at a time when the tea duty was at 17d. per lb. In 1860 and 1861
    the cabinet considered the respective claims, and took the same
    course which the Derby government had assisted the House of
    Commons to take before. Upon this it was found that the measure
    which they had approved had become in my hands a radical one; the
    House of Lords was encouraged to rescue the finance of the country
    from the hands of the House of Commons; and the claims of tea were
    declared to be paramount to those of paper. In proposing the
    repeal of the last remaining excise duty upon a simple article of
    manufacture, I adopted a principle which had already received an
    unanimous acceptance. In resisting to the uttermost of my power
    the encroachment of the House of Lords, I acted, as I believe, on
    the only principle which makes it practicable to defend the true,
    legitimate, and constitutional powers of that House itself against
    encroachment from other quarters.

    Now let me look at the other side of the question. On church
    rates, on university tests, on clerical subscription (the two last
    being the only two questions really of principle which, as far as
    I remember, have been raised), I have held my ground; and on the
    two last the cabinet of which I form a part has in the main
    adopted a course essentially (but with a little _c_) conservative.


The question of franchise was settled, the question of the powers of the
Lords in matters of taxation was settled. The Irish church held its
ground. In 1865 Mr. Gladstone voted against a radical member who had moved
that the case of the Irish church “called for the early attention of the
government.” He agreed with the mover on the merits, but did not believe
that the time had come. In 1866, when he was leader of the House, he
concurred with Lord Russell, then first minister, in meeting a motion
against the Irish church with a direct negative. “In meeting a question
with a negative,” he wrote to the Irish secretary (April 7), “we may
always put it on the ground of time, as well as on the merits. To meet a
motion of this kind with the previous question only, implies almost an
engagement to take it up on some early occasion, and this I take it we are
not prepared for.” In the summer of 1865 he wrote to the warden of
Glenalmond that the question was “remote and apparently out of all bearing
on the practical politics of the day.” So far as his own judgment went, he
had told Sir Roundell Palmer in 1863, that he had made up his mind on the
subject, and should not be able to keep himself from giving expression to
his feelings. Why did he say that he did not then believe that the
question would come on in his time? “A man,” he replied, “who in 1865
completed his thirty-third year of a laborious career, who had already
followed to the grave the remains of almost all the friends abreast of
whom he had started from the university in the career of public life; and
who had observed that, excepting two recent cases [I suppose Palmerston
and Russell], it was hard to find in our whole history a single man who
had been permitted to reach the fortieth year of a course of labour
similar to his own within the walls of the House of Commons; such a man
might be excused ... if he formed a less sanguine estimate of the fraction
of space yet remaining to him, than seems to have been the case with his
critics.”(163)

It was Maynooth that originally cut from under his feet the principle of
establishment in Ireland as an obligation of the state. When that went,
more general reflections arose in his mind. In 1872 he wrote to Guizot:—


    It is very unlikely that you should remember a visit I paid you, I
    think at Passy in the autumn of 1845, with a message from Lord
    Aberdeen about international copyright. The Maynooth Act had just
    been, passed. Its author, I think, meant it to be final. I had
    myself regarded it as _seminal_. And you in congratulating me upon
    it, as I well remember, said we should have the sympathies of
    Europe in the work of giving Ireland justice—a remark which
    evidently included more than the measure just passed, and which I
    ever after saved and pondered. It helped me on towards what has
    been since done.


“I must own,” he wrote to Lord Granville (April 11, 1868), “that for years
past I have been watching the sky with a strong sense of the obligation to
act with the first streak of dawn.” He now believed the full sun was up,
and he was right. In an autobiographic note, undated but written near to
the end of his days, he says:—


    I am by no means sure, upon a calm review, that Providence has
    endowed me with anything that can be called a striking gift. But
    if there be such a thing entrusted to me it has been shown at
    certain political junctures, in what maybe termed appreciations of
    the general situation and its result. To make good the idea, this
    must not be considered as the simple acceptance of public opinion,
    founded upon the discernment that it has risen to a certain height
    needful for a given work, like a tide. It is an insight into the
    facts of particular eras, and their relation one to another, which
    generates in the mind a conviction that the materials exist for
    forming a public opinion and for directing it to a particular end.
    There are four occasions of my life with respect to which I think
    these considerations may be applicable. They are these: 1. The
    renewal of the Income-tax in 1853; 2. The proposal of religious
    equality for Ireland, 1868....


The remaining two will appear in good time. It is easy to label this with
the ill-favoured name of opportunist. Yet if an opportunist be defined as
a statesman who declines to attempt to do a thing until he believes that
it can really be done, what is this but to call him a man of common sense?



II


(M70) In 1867 Ireland was disturbed by bold and dangerous Fenian plots and
the mischief flowed over into England. In September, at Manchester, a body
of armed men rescued two Fenian prisoners from a police van, and shot an
officer in charge, a crime for which three of them were afterwards hanged.
In December a Fenian rolled a barrel of gunpowder up to the wall of a
prison in London where a comrade was confined, and fired it. The explosion
that followed blew down part of the wall and cost several lives.


    In my opinion,—Mr. Gladstone said afterwards in parliament, and
    was much blamed for saying,—and in the opinion of many with whom I
    communicated, the Fenian conspiracy has had an important influence
    with respect to Irish policy; but it has not been an influence in
    determining, or in affecting in the slightest degree, the
    convictions which we have entertained with respect to the course
    proper to be pursued in Ireland. The influence of Fenianism was
    this—that when the habeas corpus Act was suspended, when all the
    consequent proceedings occurred, when the tranquillity of the
    great city of Manchester was disturbed, when the metropolis itself
    was shocked and horrified by an inhuman outrage, when a sense of
    insecurity went abroad far and wide ... when the inhabitants of
    the different towns of the country were swearing themselves in as
    special constables for the maintenance of life and property—then
    it was when these phenomena came home to the popular mind, and
    produced that attitude of attention and preparedness on the part
    of the whole population of this country which qualified them to
    embrace, in a manner foreign to their habits in other times, the
    vast importance of the Irish controversy.(164)


This influence was palpable and undoubted, and it was part of Mr.
Gladstone’s courage not to muffle up plain truth, from any spurious
notions of national self-esteem. He never had much patience with people
who cannot bear to hear what they cannot fail to see. In this case the
truth was of the plainest. Lord Stanley, then a member of his father’s
government, went to a banquet at Bristol in the January of 1868, and told
his conservative audience that Ireland was hardly ever absent from the
mind of anybody taking part in public affairs. “I mean,” he said, “the
painful, the dangerous, the discreditable state of things that unhappily
continues to exist in Ireland.” He described in tones more fervid than
were usual with him, the “miserable state of things,” and yet he asked,
“when we look for a remedy, who is there to give us an intelligible
answer?” The state of Ireland, as Mr. Gladstone said later,(165) was
admitted by both sides to be the question of the day. The conservatives in
power took it up, and they had nothing better nor deeper to propose than
the policy of concurrent endowment. They asked parliament to establish at
the charge of the exchequer a Roman catholic university; and declared
their readiness to recognise the principle of religious equality in
Ireland by a great change in the status of the unendowed clergy of that
country, provided the protestant establishment were upheld in its
integrity. This was the policy of levelling up. It was met by a
counter-plan of religious equality; disestablishment of the existing
church, without establishing any other, and with a general cessation of
endowments for religion in Ireland. Mr. Disraeli’s was at bottom the
principle of Pitt and Castlereagh and of many great whigs, but he might
have known, and doubtless did know, how odious it would be to the British
householders, who were far more like King George III. than they at all
supposed.



III


(M71) In May 1867, Mr. Gladstone had told the House that the time could
not be far distant when parliament would have to look the position of the
Irish church fairly and fully in the face. In the autumn Roundell Palmer
visited Mr. Cardwell, and discovered clearly from the conversation that
the next move in the party was likely to be an attack upon the Irish
church. The wider aspects of the Irish case opened themselves to Mr.
Gladstone in all their melancholy dimensions. At Southport (Dec. 19) he
first raised his standard, and proclaimed an Irish policy on Irish lines,
that should embrace the promotion of higher education in a backward
country, the reform of its religious institutions, the adjustment of the
rights of the cultivator of the soil. The church, the land, the college,
should all be dealt with in turn.(166) It might be true, he said, that
these things would not convert the Irish into a happy and contented
people. Inveterate diseases could not be healed in a moment. When you have
long persevered in mischief, you cannot undo it at an instant’s notice.
True though this might be, was the right conclusion that it was better to
do nothing at all? For his own part he would never despair of redeeming
the reproach of total incapacity to assimilate to ourselves an island
within three hours of our shores, that had been under our dominating
influence for six centuries.

At Christmas in 1867 Lord Russell announced to Mr. Gladstone his intention
not again to take office, in other words to retire from the titular
leadership of the liberal party. Mr. Gladstone did not deny his claim to
repose. “Peel,” he said, “in 1846 thought he had secured his dismissal at
an age which, if spared, I shall touch in three days’ time.”(167) Lord
Russell was now seventy-five. He once told Lord Granville that “the great
disappointment of his life had been Grey’s refusal to join his government
in December 1845, which had prevented his name going down in history as
the repealer of the corn laws.” “A great reputation,” wrote Mr. Gladstone
to Granville in 1868, “built itself up on the basis of splendid public
services for thirty years; for almost twenty it has, I fear, been on the
decline. The movement of the clock continues, the balance weights are
gone.”(168)

A more striking event than Lord Russell’s withdrawal was the accession of
Mr. Disraeli to the first place in the counsels of the crown. In February
1868 Lord Derby’s health compelled him to retire from his position as head
of the government. Mr. Gladstone found fault with the translator of
Stockmar’s _Memoirs_ for rendering “leichtsinnig” applied to Lord Derby as
“frivolous.” He preferred “light-minded”:—


    The difference between frivolous and light-minded is not a broad
    one. But in my opinion a man is frivolous by disposition, or as
    people say by nature, whereas he is light-minded by defect or
    perversity of will; further he is frivolous all over, he may be
    light-minded on one side of his character. So it was in an eminent
    degree with Lord Derby. Not only were his natural gifts
    unsurpassed in the present age, but he had a serious and earnest
    side to his character. Politics are at once a game and a high art;
    he allowed the excitements of the game to draw him off from the
    sustained and exhausting efforts of the high art. But this was the
    occasional deviation of an honourable man, not the fixed mental
    habit of an unprincipled one.


(M72) Mr. Disraeli became prime minister. For the moment, the incident was
more dramatic than important; it was plain that his tenure of office could
not last long. He was five years older (perhaps more) than Mr. Gladstone;
his parliamentary existence had been four or five years shorter. During
the thirty-one years of his life in the House of Commons, up to now he had
enjoyed three short spells of office (from 1852 to 1868), covering little
more than as many years. He had chosen finance for his department, but his
budgets made no mark. In foreign affairs he had no policy of his own
beyond being Austrian and papal rather than Italian, and his criticisms on
the foreign policy of Palmerston and Russell followed the debating needs
of the hour. For legislation in the constructive sense in which it
interested and attracted Mr. Gladstone, he had no taste and little
capacity. In two achievements only had he succeeded, but in importance
they were supreme. Out of the wreckage left by Sir Robert Peel twenty-two
years before he had built up a party. In the name of that party, called
conservative, he had revolutionised the base of our parliamentary
constitution. These two extraordinary feats he had performed without
possessing the full confidence of his adherents, or any real confidence at
all on the part of the country. That was to come later. Meanwhile the
nation had got used to him. He had culture, imagination, fancy, and other
gifts of a born man of letters; the faculty of slow reflective brooding
was his, and he often saw both deep and far; he was artificial, but he was
no pharisee, and he was never petty. His magniloquence of phrase was the
expression of real size and spaciousness of character; as Goethe said of
St. Peter’s at Rome, in spite of all the rococo, there was _etwas
grosses_, something great. His inexhaustible patience, his active
attention and industry, his steadfast courage, his talent in debate and
the work of parliament; his genius in espying, employing, creating
political occasions, all made him, after prolonged conflict against
impediments of every kind, one of the imposing figures of his time. This
was the political captain with whom Mr. Gladstone had contended for some
sixteen years past, and with whom on a loftier elevation for both, he was
to contend for a dozen years to come.

On a motion about the state of Ireland, proceeding from an Irish member
(March 16, 1868) Mr. Gladstone at last launched before parliament the
memorable declaration that the time had come when the church of Ireland as
a church in alliance with the state must cease to exist. This was not a
mere sounding sentence in a speech; it was one of the heroic acts of his
life. Manning did not overstate the case when he wrote to Mr. Gladstone
(March 28, ’68): “The Irish establishment is a great wrong. It is the
cause of division in Ireland, of alienation between Ireland and England.
It embitters every other question. Even the land question is exasperated
by it. The fatal ascendency of race over race is unspeakably aggravated by
the ascendency of religion over religion.” But there were many pit-falls,
and the ground hid dangerous fire. The parliament was Palmerstonian and in
essence conservative; both parties were demoralised by the strange and
tortuous manœuvres that ended in household suffrage; many liberals were
profoundly disaffected to their leader; nobody could say what the majority
was, nor where it lay. To attack the Irish church was to alarm and
scandalise his own chosen friends and closest allies in the kindred church
of England. To attack a high protestant institution “exalting its mitred
front” in the catholic island, was to run sharp risk of awaking the
sleuth-hounds of No-popery. The House of Lords would undoubtedly fight, as
it did, to its last ditch. The legislative task itself was in complexity
and detail, apart from religious passion and the prejudice of race,
gigantic.

Having once decided upon this bold campaign, Mr. Gladstone entered upon it
with military promptitude, and pursued it with an intrepidity all his own
among the statesmen of his day, and not surpassed by Pym in 1640, nor
Chatham in 1758, nor Chatham’s son in 1783, nor anybody else in days gone
by. Within a week of this historic trumpet-blast, he gave notice of three
resolutions to the effect that the established church of Ireland should
cease to exist as an establishment. Attendant and consequential changes
were appended. Within a week of giving notice, he opened the first
resolution, and carried the preliminary motion by a majority of 61. The
cheering at this demonstration of a united and victorious party was
prodigious, both within the House and in Westminster Hall, and an
enthusiastic crowd followed the leader and his two sons as they walked
home to Carlton House Terrace. “This,” he wrote to the Duchess of
Sutherland, “is a day of excitement—almost of exultation. We have made a
step, nay a stride, and this stride is on the pathway of justice, and of
peace, and of national honour and renown.”(169)

(M73) The first resolution was carried (April 30) by a majority of 65, and
a week later the second and third went through without a division. Mr.
Disraeli fought his battle with much steadiness, but did not go beyond a
dilatory amendment. If Mr. Gladstone had old deliverances to reconcile
with new policy, so had his tory antagonist. Disraeli was reminded of that
profound and brilliant oracle of 1844, when he had described the root of
mischief in Ireland as a weak executive, an absentee aristocracy, and an
alien church. He wasted little time in trying to explain why the alien
church now found in him its champion. “Nobody listened,” he said, “at that
time. It seemed to me that I was pouring water upon sand, but it seems now
that the water came from a golden goblet.” The sentiment may have been
expressed, he said, “with the heedless rhetoric which, I suppose, is the
appanage of all who sit below the gangway; but in my historical
conscience, the sentiment of that speech was right.” The prime minister
did not escape taunts from those in his own camp who thought themselves
betrayed by him upon reform the year before. He repaid the taunts by
sarcasm. He told Lord Cranborne that there was vigour in his language and
no want of vindictiveness, what it wanted was finish. Considering that
Lord Cranborne had written anonymous articles against him before and since
they were colleagues—“I do not know whether he wrote them when I was his
colleague”—they really ought to have been more polished. Mr. Lowe, again,
he described as a remarkable man; especially remarkable for his power of
spontaneous aversion; he hates the working classes of England; he hates
the Roman catholics of Ireland; he hates the protestants of Ireland; he
hates ministers; and until Mr. Gladstone placed his hand upon the ark, he
seemed almost to hate Mr. Gladstone.

After Mr. Gladstone’s first resolution was carried, the prime minister
acknowledged the change in the relations of the government and the House.
He and his party had conducted the business of the country though in a
minority, just as Lord John Russell between 1846 and 1851 had conducted
business for five or six years, though in a minority, “but being morally
supported by a majority, as we have been supported by a majority.” In this
crisis he pursued a peculiar course. He advised the Queen to dissolve the
parliament; but at the same time he told her Majesty that if she thought
the interests of the country would be better served, he tendered his
resignation. The Queen did not accept it, he said; and the ministerial
decision was to dissolve in the autumn when the new constituencies would
be in order. The statement was not clear, and Mr. Gladstone sought in vain
to discover with precision whether the prime minister had begun by
resigning, or had presented two alternatives leaving the decision to the
Queen, and did he mean a dissolution on existing registers? The answer to
these questions was not definite, but it did not matter.

This episode did not check Mr. Gladstone for a moment in his course; in a
week after the resolutions were carried, he introduced a bill suspending
the creation of new interests in the Irish church. This proof of vigour
and resolution rapidly carried the suspensory bill through the Commons.
The Lords threw it out by a majority of 95 (June 29). If we sometimes
smile at the sanguine prediction of the optimist, the gloom of his
pessimist opponent is more ludicrous. “If you overthrow the Irish
established church,” cried the Archbishop of Dublin, “you will put to the
Irish protestants the choice between apostasy and expatriation, and every
man among them who has money or position, when he sees his church go will
leave the country. If you do that, you will find Ireland so difficult to
manage that you will have to depend on the gibbet and the sword.” The
Bishop of Chester and Bishop Thirlwall, whom Mr. Gladstone described as
“one of the most masculine, powerful, and luminous intellects that have
for generations been known among the bishops of England,” were
deliberately absent from the division. The effect of the bill was not
impaired, perhaps it was even heightened; for it convinced the public that
its author meant earnest and vigorous business, and the air was instantly
alive with the thrill of battle. For it is undoubted that if the country
cares for a thing, the resistance to it of the hereditary House seems to
add spice and an element of sport.




Chapter XVI. Prime Minister. (1868)


    Geworden ist ihm eine Herrsoherseele,
    Und ist gestellt auf einen Herrscherplatz.
    Wohl uns, dass es so ist!...
          Wohl dem Ganzen, findet
    Sich einmal einer, der ein Mittelpunkt
    Für viele Tausend wird, ein Halt.
                           —SCHILLER.

    He is possessed by a commanding spirit,
    And his, too, is the station of command.
    And well for us it is so....
    Well for the whole if there be found a man
    Who makes himself what Nature destined him,
    The pause, the central point of thousand thousands.
                        —_Coleridge’s Translation._



I


During the election (Nov. 23) Mr. Gladstone published his _Chapter of
Autobiography_, the history of his journey from the book of 1838 to the
resolutions thirty years later.(170) Lord Granville told him frankly that
he never liked nor quite understood the first book; that the description
of it in the new “Chapter” gave him little pleasure; that he had at first
a feeling that the less a person in Mr. Gladstone’s position published,
the better; and that unnecessary explanation would only provoke fresh
attacks. But as he read on, these misgivings melted away; he thought the
description of a certain phase of the history of the English church one of
the most eloquent and feeling passages he ever read; the reference to the
nonconformists was a graceful amend to them for being so passionate an
Oxonian and churchman; the piece of controversy with Macaulay rather an
exaggeration and not easy to understand; the closing pages admirable. In
short, he was all for publication. Another close friend of Mr.
Gladstone’s, Sir Robert Phillimore, told him (Nov. 29): “I am satisfied
that you have done wisely and justly both with reference to the immediate
and future influence of your character as a statesman. It is exactly what
a mere man of the world would not have done. His standard would have been
the ephemeral opinion of the clubs, and not the earnest opinion of the
silent but thoughtful persons to whom the moral character of their chief
is a matter of real moment and concern.” Newman wrote to him from the
Oratory at Birmingham, “It is most noble, and I can congratulate you with
greater reason and more hearty satisfaction upon it, than I could upon a
score of triumphs at the hustings.” The man of the world and the man at
the club did not hide their disgust, but Phillimore was right, and great
hosts of people of the other sort welcomed in this publication a sign of
sincerity and simplicity and desire to take the public into that full
confidence, which makes the ordinary politician tremble as undignified and
indecorous.

That Mr. Gladstone had rightly divined the state of public feeling about
Ireland was shown by the result. Manning put the case in apt words when he
wrote to him: “I have been much struck by the absence of all serious
opposition to your policy, and by the extensive and various support given
to it in England and Scotland. It is not so much a change in men’s
thoughts, but a revelation of what they have been thinking.” Heart and
soul he flung himself into the labours of his canvass. The constituency
for which he had sat in the expiring parliament was now divided, and with
Mr. H. R. Grenfell for a colleague, he contested what had become
South-West Lancashire. The breadth, the elevation, the freshness, the
power, the measure, the high self-command of these speeches were never
surpassed by any of his performances. When publicists warn us, and rightly
warn us, that rash expenditure of money extracted from the taxpayer and
the ratepayer is the besetting vice and peril of democracy, and when some
of them in the same breath denounce Mr. Gladstone as a demagogue pandering
to the multitude, they should read the speech at Leigh, in which he
assailed the system of making things pleasant all round, stimulating local
cupidity to feed upon the public purse, and scattering grants at the
solicitation of individuals and classes. No minister that ever lived
toiled more sedulously, in office and out of office, to avert this curse
of popular government. The main staple of his discourse was naturally the
Irish case, and though within the next twenty years he acquired a wider
familiarity with detail, he never exhibited the large features of that
case with more cogent and persuasive mastery. He told the story of the
transformation of the franchise bill with a combined precision,
completeness and lightness of hand that made his articles of charge at
once extremely interesting and wholly unanswerable. In a vein of pleasant
mockery, on the accusation that he was going to ruin and destroy the
constitution, he reminded them that within his own recollection it had
been wholly ruined and destroyed eight times: in 1828 by the repeal of the
Corporation and Test acts; in 1829 by admitting Roman catholics to
parliament; in 1832 by reform; in 1846 by free trade; in 1849 by repeal of
the navigation law; in 1858 when Jews were allowed to sit in parliament;
in 1866 when the government of Lord Russell had the incredible audacity to
propose a reform bill with the intention of carrying it or falling in the
attempt.

(M74) It was a magnificent campaign. But in South-West Lancashire the
church of England was strong; orange prevailed vastly over green; and Mr.
Gladstone was beaten. Happily he had in anticipation of the result, and by
the care of friends, already been elected for Greenwich.(171) In the
kingdom as a whole he was triumphant. The liberal majority was 112. When
the gross votes were added up, it was calculated that the liberals had a
million and a half and the conservatives less than a million.(172) After a
long era of torpor a powerful party thus once more came into being. The
cause was excellent, but more potent than the cause was the sight of a
leader with a resolute will, an unresting spirit of reform, and the genius
of political action. This ascendency Mr. Gladstone maintained for quarter
of a century to come.



II


On the afternoon of the first of December, he received at Hawarden the
communication from Windsor. “I was standing by him,” says Mr. Evelyn
Ashley, “holding his coat on my arm while he in his shirt sleeves was
wielding an axe to cut down a tree. Up came a telegraph messenger. He took
the telegram, opened it and read it, then handed it to me, speaking only
two words, ‘Very significant,’ and at once resumed his work. The message
merely stated that General Grey would arrive that evening from Windsor.
This of course implied that a mandate was coming from the Queen charging
Mr. Gladstone with the formation of his first government.... After a few
minutes the blows ceased, and Mr. Gladstone resting on the handle of his
axe, looked up and with deep earnestness in his voice and with great
intensity in his face, exclaimed, ‘My mission is to pacify Ireland.’ He
then resumed his task, and never said another word till the tree was
down.”(173) General Grey reached Hawarden the next day, bringing with him
the letter from the Queen.


    _From the Queen._

    _December 1st_, 1868.—Mr. Disraeli has tendered his resignation to
    the Queen. The result of the appeal to the country is too evident
    to require its being proved by a vote in parliament, and the Queen
    entirely agrees with Mr. Disraeli and his colleagues in thinking
    that the most dignified course for them to pursue, as also the
    best for the public interests, was immediate resignation. Under
    these circumstances the Queen must ask Mr. Gladstone, as the
    acknowledged leader of the liberal party, to undertake the
    formation of a new administration. With one or two exceptions, the
    reasons for which she has desired General Grey (the bearer of this
    letter) to explain, the Queen would impose no restrictions on Mr.
    Gladstone as to the arrangement of the various offices in the
    manner which he believes to be best for the public service, and
    she trusts that he will find no difficulty in filling them up, or
    at least the greater part of them, so that the council may be held
    before the 13th. Mr. Gladstone will understand why the Queen would
    wish to be spared making any arrangements of this nature for the
    next few days after the 13th. The Queen adds what she said on a
    similar occasion two years and a half ago to Lord Derby, that she
    will not name any time for seeing Mr. Gladstone, who may wish to
    have an opportunity of consulting some of his friends, before he
    sees her; but that, as soon as he shall have done so, and
    expresses a desire to see the Queen, she will be ready to receive
    him.


(M75) One of his first letters after undertaking to form a government was
to Lord Russell, to whom he said that he looked forward with hope and
confidence to full and frequent communications, and to the benefit of his
friendship and advice. “There remains, however, a question,” he went on;
“you have an experience and knowledge to which no living statesman can
pretend; of the benefit to be derived from it, I am sure that all with
whom I can be likely to act would be deeply sensible. Would it be too
great an invasion of your independence to ask you to consider whether you
could afford it as a member of the cabinet without the weight of any other
responsibility?” Lord Russell replied in cordial terms, but said that the
servitude of a cabinet, whether with or without a special office, was what
he did not wish to encounter. “What I should have said,” he added at a
later date (Dec. 28), “if the office of the president of the council or
the privy seal had been offered me, I do not know: at all events I am
personally very well satisfied to be free from all responsibility.” Sir
George Grey also declined, on the ground of years: he was within one of
the threescore and ten allotted to mortal man. Lord Halifax, on whose
ability and experience both the Queen and Mr. Gladstone set special value,
declined the Irish viceroyalty, and stood good-naturedly aside until 1870
when he joined as privy seal. The inclusion in the same cabinet of Mr.
Bright, who had been the chief apostle of reform, with Mr. Lowe, its
fiercest persecutor, startled the country. As for Lowe, Lord Acton told me
that he once informed Mr. Gladstone that Lowe had written the review of
his _Financial Statements_ in the periodical of which Acton was editor.
“He told me at Grillion’s that I thereby made him chancellor of the
exchequer.” With Bright he had greater difficulties. He often described
how he wrestled with this admirable man from eleven o’clock until past
midnight, striving to overcome his repugnance to office. The next day
Bright wrote to him (Dec. 5): “Since I left you at midnight I have had no
sleep, from which you may imagine the mental disturbance I have suffered
from our long conversation last night. Nevertheless I am driven to the
conclusion to take the step to which you invite me, surrendering my
inclination and my judgment to your arguments and to the counsel of some
whom I have a right to consider my friends.... I am deeply grateful to you
for the confidence you are willing to place in me, and for the many kind
words you spoke to me yesterday.” In the parched air of official politics
the relation of these two towards one another is a peculiar and a
refreshing element. In the case of Lord Clarendon, some difficulty was
intimated from Windsor before Mr. Gladstone began his task. Mr. Gladstone
says in one of his late notes:—


    Clarendon had already held with credit and success for a
    lengthened period the seals of the foreign office, and his
    presumptive title to resume them was beyond dispute. He was a man
    of free and entertaining and almost jovial conversation in
    society, and possibly some remark culled from the dinner hour had
    been reported to the Queen with carelessness or malignity. I do
    not know much, of the interior side of court gossip, but I have a
    very bad opinion of it, and especially on this ground, that while
    absolutely irresponsible it appears to be uniformly admitted as
    infallible. In this case, it was impossible for me to recede from
    my duty, and no grave difficulty arose. So far as I can recollect
    the Queen had very little to say in objection, and no keen desire
    to say it. Clarendon was the only living British statesman whose
    name carried any influence in the councils of Europe. Only
    eighteen or twenty months remained to him; they were spent in
    useful activity. My relations with him were, as they were
    afterwards with Granville, close, constant, and harmonious.


(M76) Of this cabinet Mr. Gladstone always spoke as one of the best
instruments for government that ever were constructed.(174) Nearly
everybody in it was a man of talent, character, and force, and showed high
capacity for public business. In one or two cases, conformably to the old
Greek saying, office showed the man; showed that mere cleverness, apart
from judgment and discretion is only too possible, and that good intention
only makes failure and incapacity in carrying the intention out, so much
the more mortifying. The achievements of this cabinet as a whole, as we
shall see, are a great chapter in the history of reform and the prudent
management of national affairs. It forms one of the best vindications of
the cabinet system, and of the powers of the minister who created, guided,
controlled, and inspired it.

“And so,” Manning, the close friend of other years, now wrote to him, “you
are at the end men live for, but not, I believe, the end for which you
have lived. It is strange so to salute you, but very pleasant.... There
are many prayers put up among us for you, and mine are not wanting.” At an
earlier stage sympathetic resolutions had been sent to him from
nonconformist denominations, and in writing to Dr. Allon who forwarded
them, Mr. Gladstone said: “I thank you for all the kind words contained in
your letter, but most of all for the assurance, not the first I am happy
to say which has reached me, that many prayers are offered on my behalf. I
feel myself by the side of this arduous undertaking a small creature; but
where the Almighty sends us duties, He also sends the strength needful to
perform them.” To Mr. Arthur Gordon, the son of Lord Aberdeen, he wrote
(Jan. 29, 1869):—


    As regards my own personal position, all its interior relations
    are up to this time entirely satisfactory. I myself, at the period
    of the Aberdeen administration, was as far as the world in general
    could possibly be, from either expecting or desiring it. I thought
    at that time that when Lord Russell’s career should end, the Duke
    of Newcastle would be the proper person to be at the head of the
    government. But during the government of Lord Palmerston, and long
    before his health broke down, I had altered this opinion; for I
    thought I saw an alteration both in his tone of opinion, and in
    his vigour of administration and breadth of view. Since that time
    I have seen no alternative but that which has now come about,
    although I am sensible that it is a very indifferent one.


On December 29 he enters in his diary: “This birthday opens my sixtieth
year. I descend the hill of life. It would be a truer figure to say I
ascend a steepening path with a burden ever gathering weight. The Almighty
seems to sustain and spare me for some purpose of His own, deeply unworthy
as I know myself to be. Glory be to His name.” In the closing hours of the
year, he enters:—


    This month of December has been notable in my life as follows:
    _Dec. 1809._—Born. 1827.—Left Eton. 1831.—Classes at Oxford.
    1832.—Elected to parliament. 1838.—Work on Church and State
    published. 1834.—Took office as lord of the treasury.
    1845.—Secretary of state. 1852.—Chancellor of exchequer.
    1868.—First lord. Rather a frivolous enumeration. Yet it would not
    be so if the love of symmetry were carried with a
    well-proportioned earnestness and firmness into the higher parts
    of life. I feel like a man with a burden under which he must fall
    and be crushed if he looks to the right or left or fails from any
    cause to concentrate mind and muscle upon his progress step by
    step. This absorption, this excess, this constant ἄγαν is the
    fault of political life with its insatiable demands, which do not
    leave the smallest stock of moral energy unexhausted and available
    for other purposes.... Swimming for his life, a man does not see
    much of the country through which the river winds, and I probably
    know little of these years through which I busily work and
    live.... It has been a special joy of this December that our son
    Stephen is given to the church, “whose shoe latchet I am not
    worthy to unloose.”





BOOK VI. 1869-1874




Chapter I. Religious Equality. (1869)


    In the removal of this establishment I see the discharge of a debt
    of civil justice, the disappearance of a national, almost a
    worldwide reproach, a condition indispensable to the success of
    every effort to secure the peace and contentment of that country;
    finally relief to a devoted clergy from a false position, cramped
    and beset by hopeless prejudice, and the opening of a freer career
    to their sacred ministry.—GLADSTONE.



I


Anybody could pulverise the Irish church in argument, and to show that it
ought to be disestablished and disendowed was the easiest thing in the
world. But as often happens, what it was easy to show ought to be done,
was extremely hard to do. Here Mr. Gladstone was in his great element. It
was true to say that “never were the wheels of legislative machinery set
in motion under conditions of peace and order and constitutional
regularity to deal with a question greater or more profound,” than when
the historic protestant church in Ireland was severed from its sister
church in England and from its ancient connection with the state. The case
had been fully examined in parliament. After examination and decision
there, it was discussed and decided in the constituencies of the United
Kingdom. Even then many held that the operation was too gigantic in its
bearings, too complex in the mass of its detail, to be practicable. Never
was our political system more severely tested, and never did it achieve a
completer victory. Every great organ of the national constitution came
into active play. The sovereign performed a high and useful duty. The
Lords fought hard, but yielded before the strain reached a point of
danger. The prelates in the midst of anger and perturbation were forced
round to statesmanship. The Commons stood firm and unbroken. The law, when
at length it became law, effected the national purpose with extraordinary
thoroughness and precision. And the enterprise was inspired, guided,
propelled, perfected, and made possible from its inception to its close by
the resource, temper, and incomparable legislative skill of Mr. Gladstone.
That the removal of the giant abuse of protestant establishment in Ireland
made a deeper mark on national well-being than other of his legislative
exploits, we can hardly think, but—quite apart from the policy of the act,
as to which there can now be scarcely two opinions—as a monument of
difficulties surmounted, prejudices and violent or sullen heats overcome,
rights and interests adjusted, I know not where in the records of our
legislation to find its master.

(M77) With characteristic hopefulness and simplicity Mr. Gladstone tried
to induce Archbishop Trench and others of the Irish hierarchy to come to
terms. Without raising the cry of no surrender, they declined all
approaches. If Gladstone, they said, were able to announce in the House of
Commons a concordat with the Irish clergy, it would ruin them both with
the laity of the Irish establishment, and with the English conservatives
who had fought for them at the election and might well be expected, as a
piece of party business if for no better reasons, to fight on for them in
the House of Lords. Who could tell that the Gladstone majority would hold
together? Though “no surrender” might be a bad cry, it was even now at the
eleventh hour possible that “no popery” would be a good one. In short,
they argued, this was one of the cases where terms could only be settled
on the field of battle. There were moderates, the most eminent being
Bishop Magee of Peterborough, who had an interview with Mr. Gladstone at
this stage, but nothing came of it. One Irish clergyman only, Stopford the
archdeacon of Meath, a moderate who disliked the policy but wished to make
the best of the inevitable, gave Mr. Gladstone the benefit of his
experience and ability. When the work was done, Mr. Gladstone wrote to the
archdeacon more than once expressing his sense of the advantage derived
from his “thorough mastery of the subject and enlightened view of the
political situation.” He often spoke of Stopford’s “knowledge, terseness,
discrimination, and just judgment.”

Meanwhile his own course was clear. He did not lose a day:—


    _Dec. 13, 1868._—Saw the Queen at one, and stated the case of the
    Irish church. It was graciously received. 24.—At night went to
    work on draft of Irish church measure, feeling the impulse.
    25.—Christmas Day. Worked much on Irish church _abbozzo_. Finished
    it at night. 26.—Revised the Irish church draft and sent it to be
    copied with notes.


The general situation he described to Bishop Hinds on the last day of the
year:—


    We cannot wait for the church of Ireland to make up her mind. We
    are bound, nay compelled, to make up ours. Every day of the
    existence of this government is now devoted to putting forward by
    some step of inquiry or deliberation the great duty we have
    undertaken. Our principles are already laid in the resolutions of
    the late House of Commons. But in the mode of applying them much
    may depend on the attitude of resistance or co-operation assumed
    by the Irish church. It is idle for the leading Irish churchmen to
    think “we will wait and see what they offer and then ask so much
    more.” Our mode of warfare cannot but be influenced by the troops
    we lead. Our three _corps d’armée_, I may almost say, have been
    Scotch presbyterians, English and Welsh nonconformists, and Irish
    Roman catholics. We are very strong in our minority of clerical
    and lay churchmen, but it is the strength of weight not of
    numbers. The English clergy as a body have done their worst
    against us and have hit us hard, as I know personally, in the
    counties. Yet we represent the national force, tested by a
    majority of considerably over a hundred voices. It is hazardous in
    these times to tamper with such a force.


The preparation of the bill went rapidly forward:—


    _Hawarden, Jan. 13, 1869._—Wrote out a paper on the plan of the
    measure respecting the Irish church, intended perhaps for the
    Queen. Worked on Homer. We felled a lime. 14.—We felled another
    tree. Worked on Homer, but not much, for in the evening came the
    Spencers [from Dublin], also Archdeacon Stopford, and I had much
    Irish conversation with them. 15.—We felled an ash. Three hours
    conversation with the viceroy and the archdeacon. I went over much
    of the roughest ground of the intended measure; the archdeacon
    able and helpful. Also conversation with the viceroy, who went
    before 7. Worked on Homer at night. 19.—One hour on Homer with Sir
    J. Acton. Whist in evening. 20.—Further and long conversations on
    the Irish church question and its various branches with Granville,
    the attorney-general for Ireland, and in the evening with Dean
    Howson, also with Sir J. Acton. 21.—Wrote a brief abstract of the
    intended bill. Woodcutting. 23.—Saw the Queen [at Osborne] on the
    Irish church especially, and gave H.M. my paper with explanation,
    which appeared to be well taken. She was altogether at ease. We
    dined with H.M. afterwards. 24.—Saw her Majesty, who spoke very
    kindly about Lord Clarendon, Mr. Bright, Mr. Lowe, the Spanish
    crown, Prince Leopold, Mr. Mozley, and so forth, but not a word on
    the Irish church. _Feb. 4._—A letter from H.M. to-day showed much
    disturbance, which I tried to soothe.


In February Lord Granville thought that it might do good if the Queen were
to see Bishop Magee. Mr. Gladstone said to him in reply (Feb. 7, ’69):—


    The case is peculiar and not free from difficulty. On the whole I
    think it would be wrong to place any limit upon the Queen’s
    communications to the Bishop of Peterborough except this, that
    they would doubtless be made by H.M. to him for himself only, and
    that no part of them would go beyond him to any person whatever.


(M78) On Feb. 12, the Queen wrote to Mr. Gladstone from Osborne:—


    The Queen has seen the Bishop of Peterborough according to the
    suggestion made by Lord Granville with the sanction of Mr.
    Gladstone, and has communicated to him in the strictest confidence
    the correspondence which had passed between herself and Mr.
    Gladstone on the subject of the Irish church. She now sends Mr.
    Gladstone a copy of the remarks made by the bishop on the papers
    which she placed in his hands for perusal, and would earnestly
    entreat Mr. Gladstone’s careful and dispassionate consideration of
    what he says. She would point especially to the suggestion which
    the bishop throws out of the intervention of the bench of English
    bishops. The country would feel that any negotiation conducted
    under the direction of the Archbishop of Canterbury would be
    perfectly safe, and from the concessions which the Bishop of
    Peterborough expresses his own readiness to make, the Queen is
    sanguine in her hope that such negotiations would result in a
    settlement of the question on conditions which would entirely
    redeem the pledges of the government and be satisfactory to the
    country. The Queen must therefore strongly deprecate the hasty
    introduction of the measure, which would serve only to commit the
    government to proposals from which they could not afterwards
    recede, while it is _certain_ from what the bishop says, that they
    would not be accepted on the other side, and thus an acrimonious
    contest would be begun, which, however it ended, would make any
    satisfactory settlement of the question impossible.


He replied on the following day:—


    _Feb. 13._—First the bishop suggests that the endowments posterior
    to the Reformation should be given to the church, and those
    preceding it to the Roman catholics. It would be more than idle
    and less than honest, were Mr. Gladstone to withhold from your
    Majesty his conviction that no negotiation founded on such a basis
    as this could be entertained, or, if entertained, could lead to
    any satisfactory result. Neither could Mr. Gladstone persuade the
    cabinet to adopt it, nor could the cabinet persuade the House of
    Commons, nor could cabinet and House of Commons united persuade
    the nation to acquiesce, and the very attempt would not only
    prolong and embitter controversy, but would weaken authority in
    this country. For the thing contemplated is the very thing that
    the parliament was elected not to do.

    _Osborne, Feb. 14._—The Queen thanks Mr. Gladstone for his long
    letter, and is much gratified and relieved by the conciliatory
    spirit expressed throughout his explanations on this most
    difficult and important question. The Queen thinks it would indeed
    be most desirable for him to see the Archbishop of Canterbury—and
    she is quite ready to write to the archbishop to inform him of her
    wish and of Mr. Gladstone’s readiness to accede to it, should he
    wish it.


“My impression is,” Mr. Gladstone wrote to Lord Granville (Feb. 14), “that
we should make a great mistake if we were to yield on the point of time.
It is not time that is wanted; we have plenty of time to deal with the
Bishop of Peterborough’s points so far as they can be dealt with at all.
Sir R. Palmer has been here to-day with overtures from persons of
importance unnamed. I think probably the Archbishop of Canterbury and
others.(175) I do not doubt that on the other side they want time, for
their suggestions are crude.”

(M79) On the following day (Feb. 15) the Queen wrote to the archbishop,
telling him that she had seen Mr. Gladstone, “who shows the most
conciliatory disposition,” and who at once assured her “of his
readiness—indeed, his anxiety—to meet the archbishop and to communicate
freely with him.” The correspondence between the Queen and the archbishop
has already been made known, and most of that between the archbishop and
Mr. Gladstone, and I need not here reproduce it, for, in fact, at this
first stage nothing particular came of it.(176) “The great mistake, as it
seems to me,” Mr. Gladstone writes to Archdeacon Stopford (Feb. 8), “made
by the Irish bishops and others is this. They seem to think that our
friends are at the mercy of our adversaries, whereas our adversaries are
really at the mercy of our friends, and it is to these latter that the
government, especially in the absence of other support, must look.”
Meanwhile the bill had made its way through the cabinet:—


    _Feb. 8._—Cabinet, on the heads of Irish Church bill.. 9.—Cabinet,
    we completed the heads of the Irish Church measure to my great
    satisfaction. 19.—At Lambeth, 12-1-½ explaining to the archbishop.
    22.—Conclave on Irish church, 3-4-½ and 5-½-7-3/4. After twenty
    hours’ work we finished the bill for this stage.



II


On March 1, Mr. Gladstone brought his plan before a House of Commons eager
for its task, triumphant in its strength out of doors, and confident that
its leader would justify the challenge with which for so many months the
country had been ringing. The details are no longer of concern, and only
broader aspects survive. A revolutionary change was made by the complete
and definite severance of the protestant episcopal church in Ireland alike
from the established church of England and from the government of the
United Kingdom. A far more complex and delicate task was the winding up of
a great temporal estate, the adjustment of many individual and corporate
interests, and the distribution of some sixteen millions of property among
persons and purposes to be determined by the wisdom of a parliament, where
rival claims were defended by zealous and powerful champions influenced by
the strongest motives, sacred and profane, of party, property, and church.
It was necessary to deal with the sums, troublesome though not
considerable, allotted to the presbyterians and to the catholic seminary
at Maynooth. Machinery was constructed for the incorporation of a body to
represent the emancipated church, and to hold property for any of its uses
and purposes. Finally, the residue of the sixteen millions, after all the
just demands upon it had been satisfied, computed at something between
seven and eight millions, was appropriated in the words of the preamble,
“not for the maintenance of any church or clergy, nor for the teaching of
religion, but mainly for the relief of unavoidable calamity and suffering”
not touched by the poor law.

The speech in which this arduous scheme was explained to parliament was
regarded as Mr. Gladstone’s highest example of lucid and succinct
unfolding of complicated matter. Mr. Disraeli said there was not a single
word wasted. So skilfully were the facts marshalled, that every single
hearer believed himself thoroughly to comprehend the eternal principles of
the commutation of tithe-rent-charge, and the difference in the justice
due to a transitory and a permanent curate. Manning said that the only two
legislative acts in our history that approached it in importance for
Ireland were the repeal of the penal laws and the Act of Union. However
this may be, it is hardly an excess to say that since Pitt, the author of
the Act of Union, the author of the Church Act was the only statesman in
the roll of the century, capable at once of framing such a statute and
expounding it with the same lofty and commanding power.(177)

(M80) In a fugitive note, Mr. Gladstone named one or two of the speakers
on the second reading: “Ball: elaborate and impressive, answered with
great power by Irish attorney-general. Bright: very eloquent and striking.
Young George Hamilton: a first speech of great talent, admirably
delivered. Hardy: an uncompromising defence of laws and institutions as
they are, with a severe picture of the character and civil conduct of the
Irish population.” Mr. Disraeli’s speech was even more artificial than
usual. It was Mr. Hardy and Dr. Ball who gave cogent and strenuous
expression to the argument and passion of the church case. When the
division came, called by Mr. Gladstone “notable and historic” (March 24),
the majority in a crowded house was 118.(178) “Our division this morning,”
Mr. Gladstone wrote to Lord Granville, “even exceeded expectations, and
will powerfully propel the bill.” The size of this majority deserves the
reader’s attention, for it marked the opening of a new parliamentary era.
In 1841 Peel had turned out the whigs by a majority of 91. Lord John
Russell was displaced in 1852 by 9. The Derby government was thrown out in
December 1852 by 19. The same government was again thrown out seven years
later by 13. Palmerston was beaten in 1857 by 14, and the next year by 19.
In 1864 Palmerston’s majority on the Danish question was only 18. The
second reading of the Franchise bill of 1866 was only carried by 5, and
ministers were afterwards beaten upon it by 11. With Mr. Gladstone’s
accession the ruling majority for a long time stood at its highest both in
size and stability.

With invincible optimism, Mr. Gladstone believed that he would now have
“material communications from the heads of the Irish church”; but letters
from Lord Spencer at Dublin Castle informed him that, on the contrary,
they were angrier after they knew what the majority meant, than they were
before. At the diocesan conferences throughout Ireland the bill was
denounced as highly offensive to Almighty God, and the greatest national
sin ever committed. The Archdeacon of Ossory told churchmen to trust to
God and keep their powder dry, though he afterwards explained that he did
not allude to carnal weapons. The cabinet was called a cabinet of
brigands, and protestant pastors were urged to see to it that before they
gave up their churches to an apostate system a barrel of gunpowder and a
box of matches should blow the cherished fabrics to the winds of heaven.

Even Mr. Disraeli’s astuteness was at fault. The Archbishop of Canterbury
perceived from his conversation that he was bent on setting the liberals
by the ears, that he looked for speeches such as would betray utter
dissension amid professed agreement, that he had good hopes of shattering
the enemy, and “perhaps of playing over again the game that had destroyed
Lord Russell’s Reform bill of 1866.” The resounding majority on the second
reading, he told the archbishop, was expected; it created no enthusiasm;
it was a mechanical majority.(179)

The bill swept through the stages of committee without alteration of
substance and with extraordinary celerity, due not merely to the “brute
majority,” nor to the confidence that all was sure to be undone in another
place, but to the peculiar powers developed by the minister. From the
speech in which he unfolded his plan, down to the last amendment on
report, he showed a mastery alike of himself and of his project and of the
business from day to day in hand, that routed opposition and gave new
animation and ardour to the confidence of his friends. For six or seven
hours a day he astonished the House by his power of attention, unrelaxed
yet without strain, by his double grasp of leading principle and intricate
detail, by his equal command of legal and historic controversy and of all
the actuarial niceties and puzzles of commutation. “In some other
qualities of parliamentary statesmanship,” says one acute observer of that
time, “as an orator, a debater, and a tactician he has rivals; but in the
powers of embodying principles in legislative form and preserving unity of
purpose through a multiplicity of confusing minutiae he has neither equal
nor second among living statesmen.”(180) The truth could not be better
summed up. He carried the whole of his party with him, and the average
majority in divisions on the clauses was 113. Of one dangerous corner, he
says:—


    _May 6._—H of C, working Irish Church bill. Spoke largely on
    Maynooth. [Proposal to compensate Maynooth out of the funds of the
    Irish church.] The final division on the pinching point with a
    majority of 107 was the most creditable (I think) I have ever
    known.


By a majority of 114 the bill was read a third time on the last day of
May.



III


(M81) The contest was now removed from the constituencies and their
representatives in parliament to the citadel of privilege. The issue was
no longer single, and the struggle for religious equality in Ireland was
henceforth merged before the public eye in a conflict for the supremacy of
the Commons in England. Perhaps I should not have spoken of religious
equality, for in fact the establishment was known to be doomed, and the
fight turned upon the amount of property with which the free church was to
go forth to face its new fortunes. “I should urge the House of Lords,”
wrote the Archbishop of Canterbury to Mr. Gladstone (June 3), “to give all
its attention to saving as large an endowment as possible.”

As at the first stage the Queen had moved for conciliatory courses, so now
she again desired Archbishop Tait to communicate with the prime minister.
To Mr. Gladstone himself she wrote from Balmoral (June 3): “The Queen
thanks Mr. Gladstone for his kind letter. She has invariably found him
most ready to enter into her views and to understand her feelings.” The
first question was whether the Lords should reject the bill on the second
reading:—


    It is eminently desirable, Mr. Gladstone wrote to the archbishop
    (June 4), that the bill should be read a second time. But if I
    compare two methods, both inexpedient, one that of rejection on
    the second reading, the other that of a second reading followed by
    amendments inconsistent with the principle, I know no argument in
    favour of the latter, except what relates to the very important
    question of the position and true interest of the House of Lords
    itself.


At the same time he promised the archbishop that any views of his upon
amendments would have the most careful attention of himself and his
colleagues, and “they would be entertained in a spirit not of jealousy but
of freedom, with every desire to bring them into such a shape that they
may be in furtherance, and not in derogation, of the main design of the
bill.”

General Grey, the Queen’s secretary, told Mr. Gladstone that she had
communicated with the archbishop, “having heard that violent counsels were
likely to prevail, and that in spite of their leaders, the opposition in
the House of Lords was likely to try and throw out the measure on the
second reading.” Her own feeling was expressed in General Grey’s letter to
the archbishop of the same date, of which a copy was sent to the prime
minister:—


    Mr. Gladstone is not ignorant (indeed the Queen has never
    concealed her feeling on the subject) how deeply her Majesty
    deplores the necessity, under which he conceived himself to lie,
    of raising the question as he has done; or of the apprehensions of
    which she cannot divest herself, as to the possible consequences
    of the measure which he has introduced. These apprehensions, her
    Majesty is bound to say, still exist in full force; but
    considering the circumstances under which the measure has come to
    the House of Lords, the Queen cannot regard without the greatest
    alarm the probable effect of its absolute rejection in that House.
    Carried, as it has been, by an overwhelming and steady majority
    through a House of Commons, chosen expressly to speak the feeling
    of the country on the question, there seems no reason to believe
    that any fresh appeal to the people would lead to a different
    result. The rejection of the bill, therefore, on the second
    reading, would only serve to bring the two Houses into collision,
    and to prolong a dangerous agitation on the subject.


Mr. Gladstone replied:—


    _June 5._—From such information as has indirectly reached Mr.
    Gladstone, he fears that the leaders of the majority in the House
    of Lords will undoubtedly oppose the second reading of the Irish
    Church bill, of which Lord Harrowby is to propose the rejection.
    He understands that Lord Salisbury, as well as Lord Carnarvon,
    decidedly, but in vain, objected to this course at the meeting
    held to-day at the Duke of Marlborough’s. Very few of the bishops
    were present. Lord Derby, it is said, supported the resolution.
    Although a division must now be regarded as certain, and as very
    formidable, all hope need not be abandoned that your Majesty’s
    wise counsels through the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the
    sagacity of the peers themselves with reference to the security
    and stability of their position in the legislature, may avail to
    frustrate an unwise resolution.


“How much more effectually,” Mr. Gladstone wrote to Hawarden, “could the
Queen assist in the settlement of this question were she not six hundred
miles off.” As it was, she took a step from which Mr. Gladstone hoped for
“most important consequences,” in writing direct to Lord Derby, dwelling
on the danger to the Lords of a collision with the Commons. In a record of
these proceedings prepared for Mr. Gladstone (August 4, ’69), Lord
Granville writes:—


    Before the second reading of the Irish Church bill in the House of
    Lords, I was asked by the Archbishop of York to meet him and the
    Archbishop of Canterbury. They said it was impossible for them to
    vote for the second reading in any case, but before they decided
    to abstain from voting against it they wished to know how far the
    government would act in a conciliatory spirit. I made to them the
    same declaration that I afterwards made in the House, and after
    seeing you I had another interview with the Archbishop of
    Canterbury. I told his grace that it was impossible for the
    government to suggest amendments against themselves, but I gave a
    hint of the direction in which such amendments might be framed,
    and, without mentioning that the suggestion came from you, I said
    that if his grace would tell Dr. Ball that he only wished to
    propose amendments which it would be possible for the government
    to accept, that learned gentleman would know better than others
    how it could be done. The archbishop, however seems chiefly to
    have made use of Dr. Ball to supply him with arguments against the
    government.


The result was doubtful to the very end. It was three o’clock in the
morning (June 19) before the close of a fine debate—fine not merely from
the eloquence of the speakers and cogency of argument on either side, but
because there was a deep and real issue, and because the practical
conclusion was not foregone. It was the fullest House assembled in living
memory. Three hundred and twenty-five peers voted. The two English
archbishops did not vote, and Thirlwall was the only prelate who supported
the second reading. It was carried by a majority of 33. In 1857 Lord
Derby’s vote of censure on Palmerston for the China war was defeated by
36, and these two were the only cases in which the conservatives had been
beaten in the Lords for twenty years. Thirty-six conservative peers,
including Lord Salisbury, voted away from their party in favour of the
second reading.



IV


(M82) For the moment ministers breathed freely, but the bill was soon in
the trough of the sea. The archbishop wrote to the Queen that they had
decided if they could not get three million pounds to float the new church
upon, they would take their chance of what might happen by postponing the
bill until next year. Asked by the Queen what could be done (July 10),
Lord Granville, being at Windsor, answered that the cabinet would not make
up their mind until they knew how far the Lords would go in resistance,
but he thought it right to tell her that there was no chance of ministers
agreeing to postpone the bill for another year. The day after this
conversation, the Queen wrote again to the archbishop, asking him
seriously to reflect, in case the concessions of the government should not
go quite so far as he might himself wish, whether the postponement of the
settlement for another year would not be likely to result rather in worse
than in better terms for the church. She trusted that he would himself
consider, and endeavour to induce others to consider, any concessions
offered by the House of Commons in the most conciliatory spirit, rather
than to try and get rid of the bill. “The amendments,” said Mr. Gladstone,
“seem to mean war to the knife.”

After the second reading a tory lady of high station told Lord Clarendon
and Mr. Delane that in her opinion a friendly communication might have
great influence on Lord Salisbury’s course.


    I therefore wrote to him (Lord Granville says in the memorandum
    already referred to), stating why on public and personal grounds
    it was desirable that he should meet you. I said that although it
    would be difficult for us to initiate suggestions, yet from your
    personal regard for him such a conversation would advance matters.
    He consented, stating that he was in communication as to
    amendments with Lord Cairns and the archbishop. He was extremely
    desirous that no one should know of the interview. You were of
    opinion that the interview had done good, and I wrote to ask Lord
    Salisbury whether he would like me to put dots on some of your
    i’s. He declined, and considered the interview had been
    unsatisfactory, but gave me an assurance of his desire to avoid a
    conflict.... On the 4th of July I wrote again suggesting a
    compromise on Lord Carnarvon’s clause. He declined, that clause
    being the one thing they cared about. He ended by telling me his
    growing impression was, that there would be no Church bill this
    session.


The general result of the operations of the Lords was to leave
disestablishment complete, and the legal framework of the bill
undisturbed. Disendowment, on the other hand, was reduced to a shadow. An
additional sum of between three and four millions was taken for the
church, and the general upshot was, out of a property of sixteen millions,
to make over thirteen or fourteen millions to an ecclesiastical body
wholly exempt from state control. This, Mr. Gladstone told the Queen, the
House of Commons would never accept, and the first effect of persistence
in such a course would be a stronger move against the episcopal seats in
the House of Lords than had been seen for more than two hundred years. He
ridiculed as it deserved the contention that the nation had not passed
judgment on the question of disendowment, and he insisted that the
government could not go further than three quarters of a million towards
meeting the extravagant claims of the Lords. Confessing his disappointment
at the conduct of the episcopal body, even including the archbishop, he
found a certain consolation in reflecting that equally on the great
occasions of 1829 and 1831, though ’the mild and wise Archbishop Howley
was its leader,’ that body failed either to meet the desires of the
country, or to act upon a far-sighted view of the exigencies of the
church. One point obstinately contested was the plan for the future
application of the surplus. A majority of the Lords insisted on casting
out the words of the preamble providing that the residue should not be
applied for purposes of religion, and substituting in one shape or another
the principle of concurrent endowment, so hostile, as Mr. Gladstone judged
it, to the peace of Ireland, and so irreconcilable with public feeling in
England and Scotland.

On July 12, the bill came back to the Commons. The tension had hardly yet
begun to tell upon him, but Mr. Gladstone enters on these days:—


    _July 11._—Formidable accounts from and through Windsor. 12.—The
    time grows more and more anxious. 15.—This day I received from a
    Roman catholic bishop the assurance that he offered mass, and that
    many pray for me; and from Mr. Spurgeon (as often from others), an
    assurance of the prayers of the nonconformists. I think in these
    and other prayers lies the secret of the strength of body which
    has been given me in unusual measure during this very trying year.


This was the day on which, amid the ardent cheers of his party, he arose
to announce to the House the views of the government. He was in no
compromising mood. In a short speech he went through the amendments made
by men so out of touch with the feeling of the country that they might
have been “living in a balloon.” One by one he moved the rejection of all
amendments that involved the principle of concurrent endowment, the
disposal of the surplus, or the postponement of the date of
disestablishment. He agreed, however, to give a lump sum of half a million
in lieu of private benefactions, to readjust the commutation terms, and
make other alterations involving a further gift of £280,000 to the church.
When the Commons concluded the consideration of the Lords’ amendments
(July 16), Mr. Gladstone observed three things: first, that the sentiment
against concurrent endowment in any form was overwhelming; second, that
not only was no disposition shown to make new concessions, but concessions
actually made were sorely grudged; and third, that the tories were eager
to postpone the destination of the residuary property.



V


(M83) On July 16, the bill, restored substantially to its first shape, was
again back on the table of the Lords, and shipwreck seemed for five days
to be inevitable. On July 20, at eleven o’clock, by a majority of 175 to
93, the Lords once more excluded from the preamble the words that the
Commons had placed and replaced there, in order to declare the policy of
parliament on matters ecclesiastical in Ireland. This involved a meaning
which Mr. Gladstone declared that no power on earth could induce the
Commons to accept. The crisis was of unsurpassed anxiety for the prime
minister. He has fortunately left his own record of its phases:(181)—


    _Saturday, July 17._—On the 16th of July the amendments made by
    the Lords in the Irish Church bill had been completely disposed of
    by the House of Commons. The last division, taken on the disposal
    of the residue, had, chiefly through mere lazy absences, reduced
    the majority for the government to 72. This _relative_ weakness
    offered a temptation to the opposition to make play upon the
    point. The cabinet met the next forenoon. We felt on the one hand
    that it might be difficult to stake the bill on the clause for the
    disposal of the residue, supposing that to be the single remaining
    point of difference; but that the postponement of this question
    would be a great moral and political evil, and that any concession
    made by us had far better be one that would be of some value to
    the disestablished church.

    By desire of the cabinet I went to Windsor in the afternoon, and
    represented to H.M. what it was in our power to do; namely,
    although we had done all we could do upon the merits, yet, for the
    sake of peace and of the House of Lords, [we were willing], (_a_)
    to make some one further pecuniary concession to the church of
    sensible though not very large amount; (_b_) to make a further
    concession as to curates, slight in itself; (_c_) to amend the
    residue clause so as to give to parliament the future control, and
    to be content with simply declaring the principle on which the
    property should be distributed. The Queen, while considering that
    she could not be a party to this or that particular scheme, agreed
    that it might be proper to make a representation to the archbishop
    to the general effect that the views of the government at this
    crisis of the measure were such as deserved to be weighed, and to
    promote confidential communication between us. She intimated her
    intention to employ the Dean of Windsor as a medium of
    communication between herself and the archbishop, and wished me to
    explain particulars fully to him. I went to the deanery, and, not
    finding the dean, had written as much as here follows on a scrap
    of paper, when he came in....

    The object of this paper was to induce the archbishop to
    discountenance any plan for pressing the postponement of the
    provisions respecting the residue, and to deal with us in
    preference respecting any practicable concession to the church.
    When the dean came in, I explained this further, recited the
    purport of my interview with the Queen, and on his asking me
    confidentially for his own information, I let him know that the
    further pecuniary concession we were prepared to recommend would
    be some £170,000 or £180,000.

    _Sunday, July 18._—In the afternoon Lord Granville called on me
    and brought me a confidential memorandum, containing an overture
    which Mr. Disraeli had placed in the hands of Lord Bessborough for
    communication to us. [Memorandum not recoverable.] He had
    represented the terms as those which he had with much difficulty
    induced Lord Cairns to consent to. While the contention as to the
    residue was abandoned, and pecuniary concessions alone were
    sought, the demand amounted, according to our computation, to
    between £900,000 and £1,000,000.... This it was evident was
    utterly inadmissible. I saw no possibility of approach to it; and
    considered that a further quarter of a million or thereabouts was
    all that the House of Commons could be expected or asked further
    to concede. On the same afternoon Lord Granville, falling in with
    Mr. Goschen, asked him what he thought the very most that could be
    had—would it be £500,000? Goschen answered £300,000, and with this
    Glyn agreed. Mr. Disraeli desired an answer before three on
    Monday.

    _Monday, July 19._—Those members of the government who had acted
    as a sort of committee in the Irish church question met in the
    afternoon. We were all agreed in opinion that the Disraeli
    overture must be rejected, though without closing the door; and a
    reply was prepared in this sense, which Lord Granville undertook
    to send. [_Draft, in the above sense that no sum approaching
    £1,000,000 could be entertained._]

    Meantime the archbishop had arrived in Downing Street, in
    pursuance of the arrangements of Saturday; and a paper was either
    now drawn, or sanctioned by my colleagues, I do not remember
    which, in order to form the basis of my communication to the
    archbishop. I returned from my interview, and reported, as I
    afterwards did to the Dean of Windsor, that his tone was friendly,
    and that he appeared well disposed to the sort of arrangement I
    had sketched.

    _Tuesday, July 20._—The archbishop, who had communicated with Lord
    Cairns in the interval, came to me early to-day and brought a
    memorandum as a basis of agreement, which, to my surprise,
    demanded higher terms than those of Mr. Disraeli.(182) I told the
    archbishop the terms in which we had already expressed ourselves
    to Mr. Disraeli.... Meantime an answer had come from Mr. Disraeli
    stating that he could not do more. Then followed the meeting of
    the opposition peers at the Duke of Marlborough’s.

    On the meeting of the Houses, a few of us considered what course
    was to be taken if the Lords should again cast out of the preamble
    the words which precluded concurrent endowment; and it was agreed
    to stay the proceedings for the time, and consider among ourselves
    what further to do. [Lord Granville has a pencil note on the
    margin, “The first order I received was to throw up the bill, to
    which I answered that I could not do more than adjourn the
    debate.”] Lord Granville made this announcement accordingly after
    the Lords had, upon a hot debate and by a large majority, again
    excluded our words from the preamble [173: 95]. This had been
    after a speech from Lord Cairns, in which he announced his
    intention of moving other amendments which he detailed, and which
    were in general conformable to the proposals already made to us.
    The first disposition of several of us this evening, myself
    included, was to regard the proceeding of the opposition as now
    complete; since the whole had been announced, the first stroke
    struck, and the command shown of a force of peers amply sufficient
    to do the rest.(183) ... The idea did not, however, include an
    absolute abandonment of the bill, but only the suspension of our
    responsibility for it, leaving the opposition to work their own
    will, and with the intention, when this had been done, of
    considering the matter further....

    _Wednesday, July 21._—The cabinet met at 11; and I went to it in
    the mind of last night. We discussed, however, at great length all
    possible methods of proceeding that occurred to us. The result was
    stated in a letter of mine to the Queen, of which I annex a copy.
    [_See __Appendix__. He enumerates the various courses considered,
    and states that the course adopted was to go through the endowment
    amendments, and if they were carried adversely, then to drop their
    responsibility._]

    Most of the cabinet were desirous to go on longer; others, myself
    included, objected to proceeding to the end of the bill or
    undertaking to remit the bill again to the House of Commons as of
    our own motion. It occurred to me, however, that we might proceed
    as far as to the end of the many amendments, about the middle of
    the bill; and this appeared to meet the views of all, even of
    those who would have preferred doing more, or less.

    _Thursday, July 22._—I was laid up to-day, and the transactions
    were carried on by Lord Granville, in communication with me from
    time to time at my house. First he brought me a note he had
    received from Lord Cairns.


(M84) This, dated July 22, was to the effect that Lord Cairns had no right
and no desire to ask for any information as to the course proposed that
night; but that if the statements as to the intention of the government to
proceed with the consideration of the amendments were correct, and if Lord
Granville thought any advantage likely to result from it, Lord Cairns
would be ready, “as you know I have throughout been, to confer upon a mode
by which without sacrifice of principle or dignity upon either side the
remaining points of difference might be arranged.” The proceedings of this
critical day are narrated by Lord Granville in a memorandum to Mr.
Gladstone, dated August 4:—


    After seeing you I met Lord Cairns at the colonial office. He
    offered me terms.(184) ... I asked him whether, in his opinion,
    he, the archbishop, and I could carry anything we agreed upon. He
    said, “Yes, certainly.” After seeing you I met Lord Cairns a
    second time in his room at the House of Lords. I asked as a
    preliminary to giving any opinion on his amendments, how he
    proposed to deal with the preamble. He said, “to leave it as
    amended by the Lords.” I then proposed the words which were
    afterwards adopted in the 68th clause. He was at first taken
    aback, but admitted that he had personally no objection to them.
    He asked what was the opposition to be feared. I suggested some
    from Lord Grey. He believed this to be certain, but immaterial. I
    objected _in toto_ to Lord Salisbury’s clause or its substitute.
    He was unwilling to yield, chiefly on Lord Salisbury’s account,
    but finally consented. We agreed upon the commutation clause if
    the 7 and the 5 per cent. were lumped together. On the curates
    clause we could come to no agreement. He proposed to see Lord
    Salisbury and the archbishop, and to meet again at four at the
    colonial office. He spoke with fairness as to the difficulty of
    his position, and the risk he ran with his own party. I again saw
    you and asked the Irish attorney-general to be present at the last
    interview. I stated to him in Lord Cairns’s presence how far we
    agreed, and expressed my regret that on the last point—the
    curates—our difference was irreconcilable. Lord Cairns said he
    hoped not, and proceeded to argue strongly in favour of his
    proposal. He at last, however, at 4.30, compromised the matter by
    accepting five years instead of one. I shook his hand, which was
    trembling with nervousness. We discussed the form of announcing
    the arrangement to the House. We at once agreed it was better to
    tell the whole truth, and soon settled that it would be better for
    its success that he should announce the details. I was afterwards
    apprehensive that this latter arrangement might be disadvantageous
    to us, but nothing could be better or fairer than his statement. I
    cannot finish this statement, which I believe is accurate, without
    expressing my admiration at the firmness and conciliation which
    you displayed in directing me in all these negotiations.


“The news was brought to me on my sofa,” Mr. Gladstone says, “and between
five and six I was enabled to telegraph to the Queen. My telegram was
followed up by a letter at 7 P.M., which announced that the arrangement
had been accepted by the House of Lords, and that a general satisfaction
prevailed.” To the Queen he wrote (July 22):—


    Mr. Gladstone is at a loss to account for the great change in the
    tone and views of the opposition since Sunday and Monday, and even
    Tuesday last, but on this topic it is needless to enter. As to the
    principal matters, the basis of the arrangement on the side of the
    government is much the same as was intended when Mr. Gladstone had
    the honour of an audience at Windsor on Saturday; but various
    minor concessions have been added. Mr. Gladstone does not doubt
    that, if the majority of the House of Lords should accede to the
    advice of Lord Cairns, the government will be able to induce the
    House of Commons to agree on the conditions proposed. Mr.
    Gladstone would in vain strive to express to your Majesty the
    relief, thankfulness, and satisfaction, with which he contemplates
    not only the probable passing of what many believe to be a
    beneficent and necessary measure, but the undoubted and signal
    blessing of an escape from a formidable constitutional conflict.
    The skill, patience, assiduity, and sagacity of Lord Granville in
    the work of to-day demand from Mr. Gladstone the tribute of his
    warm admiration.


On reviewing this whole transaction, and doing full justice to the
attitude both of the Queen and the archbishop, the reader will be inclined
to agree with old Lord Halifax: “I think we owe a good turn to Cairns,
without whose _decision_ on Thursday I hardly think that the settlement
could have been effected. Indeed Derby’s conduct proves what difficulty
there would have been, if Cairns had not taken upon himself the
responsibility of acting as he did.”

Among interesting letters was one from Manning (July 24): “My joy over the
event is not only as a catholic, though that must be, as it ought to be,
my highest motive, but as an Englishman to whom, as I remember your once
saying, the old English monarchy is dear next after the catholic church.
But at this time I will only add that I may wish you joy on personal
reasons. I could hardly have hoped that you could so have framed,
mastered, and carried through the bill from first to last so complete, so
unchanged in identity of principle and detail, and let me add with such
unwearying and sustained self-control and forbearance.”

The diary gives us a further glimpse of these agitating days:—


    _July 20._—Conclave of colleagues on Irish church proceedings. An
    anxious day, a sad evening. 21.—Cabinet 11-2-1/4, stiff, but good.
    22.—I was obliged to take to my sofa and spent the day so in
    continual interviews with Granville, Glyn, West,
    Sullivan—especially the first—on the details and particulars of
    the negotiations respecting the Irish Church bill. The favourable
    issue left me almost unmanned in the reaction from a sharp and
    stern tension of mind. 23.—My attack did not lessen. Dr. Clark
    came in the morning and made me up for the House, whither I went
    2-5 P.M., to propose concurrence in the Lords’ amendments. Up to
    the moment I felt very weak, but this all vanished when I spoke
    and while the debate lasted. Then I went back to bed. 25.—Weak
    still. I presumed over much in walking a little and fell back at
    night to my lowest point.


Sir Robert Phillimore records:—


    _July 21._—Found Gladstone at breakfast, calm, pale, but without a
    doubt as to the course which the government must pursue, viz.: to
    maintain upon every important point the bill as sent back by the
    Commons, probably an autumn session, a bill sternly repeated by
    the Commons, too probably without the clauses favourable to the
    Irish church. 23.—Nothing talked or written of but the political
    marvel of yesterday. Gladstone in a speech universally praised
    proposed to the House of Commons the bill as now modified, and it
    passed with much harmony, broken by an Orange member. Gladstone
    very unwell, and ought to have been in bed when he made his
    speech. 24.—Gladstone still very weak but in a state of calm
    happiness at the unexpected turn which the Irish bill had taken.
    Does not now know the origin or history of the sudden resolution
    on the part of the leaders of the opposition. I am satisfied that
    Disraeli was alarmed and thoroughly frightened at the state of the
    House of Commons and the country, that Cairns was determined to
    regain what he had practically lost or was losing, the leadership
    of the Lords, and that many of his party were frightened at the
    madness and folly of Tuesday night considered after a day’s
    reflection.... Above all there was a well-grounded alarm on the
    part of Cairns and his immediate supporters in the Lords, that
    their order was in imminent danger. Bluster disappeared, and a
    retreat, as decent as well could be expected, was made from a
    situation known to be untenable. They had never expected that
    Gladstone would drop the bill. 25.—Much conversation with
    Gladstone, who is still very weak. He wrote to the Archbishop of
    Dublin to say in effect, that as a private churchman he would be
    glad to assist in any way the archbishop could point out in the
    organising of the voluntary church in Ireland.


Sir Thomas Acland writes, August 3, 1869:—


    I stayed at House of Commons perforce till about 1.30 or 2, and
    then walked away with Gladstone through the Park. It is beautiful
    to see his intense enjoyment of the cool fresh air, the trees, the
    sky, the gleaming of light on the water, all that is refreshing in
    contrast to the din of politics.


A month later the Archbishop of Canterbury found Mr. Gladstone at Lord
Granville’s at Walmer Castle:—


    Reached Walmer Castle about 6.30. Found Gladstone lying in
    blankets on the ramparts eating his dinner, looking still very
    ill.... He joined us at night full of intelligence. His fierce
    vigour all the better for being a little tempered.... Much
    interesting conversation about the state of the church and
    morality in Wales, also about leading ecclesiastics. I gather that
    he will certainly nominate Temple for a bishopric.(185)




Chapter II. First Chapter Of An Agrarian Revolution. (1870)


    The Irish Land Act of 1870 in its consequences was certainly one
    of the most important measures of the nineteenth century.—LECKY.



I


In the beginning of 1870 one of Mr. Gladstone’s colleagues wrote of him to
another, “I fear that he is steering straight upon the rocks.” So it might
well seem to any who knew the unplumbed depths on which he had to shape
his voyage. Irish history has been said to resemble that of Spain for the
last three centuries,—the elaboration of all those ideas of law and
political economy most unsuited to the needs of the nation concerned. Such
ideas, deeply cherished in Britain where they had succeeded, Mr. Gladstone
was now gradually drawn forward to reverse and overthrow in Ireland where
they had ended in monstrous failure. Here a pilot’s eye might well see
jagged reefs. The occasion was the measure for dealing with the land of
Ireland, that he had promised at the election. The difficulty arose from
the huge and bottomless ignorance of those in whose hands the power lay.
Mr. Gladstone in the course of these discussions said, and said truly, of
the learned Sir Roundell Palmer, that he knew no more of land tenures in
Ireland than he knew of land tenures in the moon. At the beginning much
the same might have been observed of the cabinet, of the two houses of
parliament, and of the whole mass of British electors. No doubt one effect
of this great ignorance was to make Mr. Gladstone dictator. Still
ignorance left all the more power to prejudice and interests. We may
imagine the task. The cabinet was in the main made up of landlords,
lawyers, hardened and convicted economists,—not economists like Mill, but
men saturated with English ideas of contract, of competitive rent, of
strict rule of supply and demand. Mr. Bright, it is true, had a profound
conviction that the root of Irish misery and disorder lay in the land
question. Here he saw far and deep. But then Mr. Bright had made up his
mind that the proper solution of the land question was the gradual
transformation of the tenants into owners, and this strong preconception
somewhat narrowed his vision. Even while Mr. Gladstone was in the middle
of his battle on the church, Bright wrote to him (May 21, ’69):—


    When the Irish church question is out of the way, we shall find
    all Ireland, north and south alike, united in demanding something
    on the land question much broader than anything hitherto offered
    or proposed in compensation bills. If the question is to go on
    without any real remedy for the grievance, the condition of
    Ireland in this particular will become worse, and measures far
    beyond anything I now contemplate will be necessary. I am most
    anxious to meet the evil before it is too great for control, and
    my plan _will meet_ it without wrong to any man.


(M85) “I have studied the Irish land question,” said Bright, “from a point
of view almost inaccessible to the rest of your colleagues, and from which
possibly even you have not had the opportunity of regarding it.... I hope
you are being refreshed, as I am, after the long nights in the House—long
nights which happily were not fruitless. I only hope our masters in the
other House will not undo what we have done.” Mr. Gladstone replied the
next day, opening with a sentence that, if addressed to any one less
revered than Bright, might have seemed to veil a sarcasm: “I have this
advantage for learning the Irish land question, that I do not set out with
the belief that I know it already; and certainly no effort that I can make
to acquire the mastery of it will be wanting.” He then proceeds to express
his doubts as to the government embarking on a very large operation of
land-jobbing, buying up estates from landlords and reselling them to
tenants; and whether the property bought and sold again by the state would
not by force of economic laws gradually return again to fewer hands. He
then comes still closer to the pith of the matter when he says to Mr.
Bright: “Your plan, if adopted in full, could only extend, to a small
proportion of the two or three hundred millions worth of land in Ireland;
and I do not well see how the unprotected tenants of the land in general
would take essential benefit from the purchase and owning of land by a few
of their fortunate brethren.” If the land question was urgent, and Bright
himself, like Mill, thought that it was, this answer of Mr. Gladstone’s
was irrefragable. In acknowledging the despatch of this correspondence
from Mr. Gladstone, Lord Granville says to him (May 26, 1869):—


    This question may break us up. Bright is thin-skinned; the attacks
    in the Lords ruffle him more than he chooses to admit. I cannot
    make out how far he likes office, the cabinet, and his new
    position. It will be particularly disagreeable to him to have this
    plan, of which he is so much enamoured and for which he has
    received so much blame and a little praise, snuffed out by the
    cabinet. And yet how is it possible to avoid it, even putting
    aside the strong opinions of Lowe, Cardwell, and others? My only
    hope is that you have got the germ of some larger and more
    comprehensive plan in your head, than has yet been developed.


The plan ultimately adopted, after a severe struggle and with momentous
consequences, did not first spring from Mr. Gladstone’s brain. The idea of
adapting the law to custom in all its depth and breadth, and extending the
rooted notion of tenant-right to its furthest bearings, was necessarily a
plant of Irish and not of English growth. Mr. Chichester Fortescue, the
Irish chief secretary and an Irishman, first opened a bold expansion of
the familiar principle of many tenant-right bills. He had introduced such
a bill himself in 1866, and the conservative government had brought in
another in 1867. It is believed that he was instigated to adopt the new
and bolder line by Sir Edward Sullivan, then the Irish attorney-general.
Away from Sullivan, it was observed, he had little to say of value about
his plan. In the cabinet Fortescue was not found effective, but he was
thoroughly at home in the subject, and his speeches in public on Irish
business had all the cogency of a man speaking his native tongue, and even
genius in an acquired language is less telling. What is astonishing is the
magic of the rapid and sympathetic penetration with which Mr. Gladstone
went to the heart of the problem, as it was presented to him by his Irish
advisers. This was his way. When acts of policy were not of great or
immediate concern, he took them as they came; but when they pressed for
treatment and determination, then he swooped down upon them with the
strength and vision of an eagle.



II


His career in the most deeply operative portion of it was so intimately
concerned with Ireland, that my readers will perhaps benignantly permit a
page or two of historic digression. I know the subject seems uninviting.
My apology must be that it occupied no insignificant portion of Mr.
Gladstone’s public life, and that his treatment of it made one of his
deepest marks on the legislation of the century. After all, there is no
English-speaking community in any part of the wide globe, where our tragic
mismanagement of the land of Ireland, and of those dwelling on it and
sustained by it, has not left its unlucky stamp.

(M86) If Englishmen and Scots had not found the theme so uninviting, if
they had given a fraction of the attention to the tenure and history of
Irish land, that was bestowed, say, upon the Seisachtheia of Solon at
Athens, or the Sempronian law in ancient Rome, this chapter in our annals
would not have been written. As it was, parliament had made laws for
landlord and tenant in Ireland without well understanding what is either
an Irish landlord or an Irish tenant. England has been able to rule India,
Mill said, because the business of ruling devolved upon men who passed
their lives in India, and made Indian interests their regular occupation.
India has on the whole been governed with a pretty full perception of its
differences from England. Ireland on the contrary, suffering a worse
misfortune than absentee landlords, was governed by an absentee
parliament. In England, property means the rights of the rent-receiver who
has equipped the land and prepared it for the capital and the skill of the
tenant. In Ireland, in the minds of the vast majority of the population,
for reasons just as good, property includes rights of the cultivator,
whose labour has drained the land, and reclaimed it, and fenced it, and
made farm-roads, and put a dwelling and farm buildings on it, and given to
it all the working value that it possesses. We need suppose no criminality
on either side. The origin of the difference was perfectly natural. In
Ireland the holdings were small and multitudinous; no landlord who was not
a millionaire, could have prepared and equipped holdings numbered by
hundreds or thousands; and if he could, the hundreds and thousands of
tenants had not a straw of capital. This peculiarity in social
circumstances made it certain, therefore, that if the moral foundation of
modern ideas of property is that he who sows shall reap, the idea of
property would grow up in the mind of the cultivator, whenever the outer
climate permitted the growth in his mind of any ideas of moral or
equitable right at all.

In 1843 the Devon Commission had reported that it is the tenant who has
made the improvements; that large confiscations of these improvements had
been systematically practised in the shape of progressive enhancements of
rent; that crime and disorder sprang from the system; and that parliament
ought to interfere. A bill was proposed by the Peel government in 1845 for
protecting the rightful interests of the tenant against the landlord. It
was introduced in the House mainly composed of landlords. There it had
such contumelious greeting, that it was speedily dropped. This was a
crowning illustration of the levity of the imperial parliament dealing
with Irish problems. The vital necessity for readjusting the foundations
of social life demonstrated; a half measure languidly attempted; attempt
dropped; bills sent to slumber in limbo; dry rot left quietly alone for a
whole generation, until bloody outrage and murder awoke legislative
conscience or roused executive fear. The union was seventy years old
before the elementary feature in the agrarian condition of Ireland was
recognised by the parliament which had undertaken to govern Ireland.
Before the union Ireland was governed by the British cabinet, through the
Irish landed gentry, according to their views, and in their interests.
After the union it was just the same. She was treated as a turbulent and
infected province within the larger island; never as a community with an
internal economy peculiarly her own, with special sentiments, history,
recollections, points of view, and necessities all her own. Between the
union and the year 1870, Acts dealing with Irish land had been passed at
Westminster. Every one of these Acts was in the interest of the landlord
and against the tenant. A score of Insurrection Acts, no Tenant-right Act.
Meanwhile Ireland had gone down into the dark gulfs of the Famine
(1846-7).

Anybody can now see that the true view of the Irish cultivator was to
regard him as a kind of copyholder or customary freeholder, or whatever
other name best fits a man who has possessory interests in a piece of
land, held at the landlord’s will, but that will controlled by custom. In
Ulster, and in an embryo degree elsewhere, this was what in a varying and
irregular way actually had come about. Agrarian customs developed that
undoubtedly belong to a backward social system, but they sprang from the
necessities of the case. The essence of such customs in Ulster was first,
a fair rent to be fixed not by competition, but by valuation, and
exclusive of tenant’s improvements; second, the right of the tenant to
transfer to somebody else his goodwill, or whatever else we may call his
right of occupancy in the holding.

Instead of adapting law to custom, habit, practice, and equity, parliament
proceeded to break all this down. With well-meaning but blind violence it
imported into Ireland after the famine the English idea of landed property
and contract. Or rather, it imported these ideas into Ireland with a
definiteness and formality that would have been impracticable even in
England. Just as good people thought they could easily make Ireland
protestant if only she could be got within earshot of evangelical truth,
so statesmen expected that a few clauses on a parchment would suffice to
root out at a stroke the inveterate habits and ideas of long generations.
We talk of revolutionary doctrinaires in France and other countries.
History hardly shows such revolutionary doctrinaires anywhere as the whig
and tory statesmen who tried to regenerate Ireland in the middle of the
nineteenth century. They first of all passed an Act (1849) inviting the
purchase of the estates of an insolvent landlord upon precisely the same
principles as governed the purchase of his pictures or his furniture. We
passed the Encumbered Estates Act, Mr. Gladstone said, “with lazy,
heedless, uninformed good intentions.” The important rights given by
custom and equity to the cultivator were suddenly extinguished by the
supreme legal right of the rent-receiver. About one-eighth of the whole
area of the country is estimated to have changed hands on these terms. The
extreme of wretchedness and confusion naturally followed. Parliament
thought this must be due to some misunderstanding. That there might be no
further mistake, it next proceeded formally to declare (1860) that the
legal relations between landlord and tenant in Ireland were to be those of
strict contract.(186) Thus blunder was clenched by blunder. The
cultivators were terror-struck, and agitation waxed hot.

Oliver Cromwell had a glimpse of the secret in 1649. “These poor people,”
he said, “have been accustomed to as much injustice and oppression from
their landlords, the great men, and those who should have done them right,
as any people in that which we call Christendom. Sir, if justice were
freely and impartially administered here, the foregoing darkness and
corruption would make it look so much the more glorious and beautiful.” It
was just two hundred and twenty years before another ruler of England saw
as deep, and applied his mind to the free doing of justice.



III


Almost immediately after recovering from the fatigues of the session of
1869, Mr. Gladstone threw himself upon his new task, his imagination
vividly excited by its magnitude and its possibilities. “For the last
three months,” he writes to the Duke of Argyll (Dec. 5), “I have worked
daily, I think, upon the question, and so I shall continue to do. The
literature of it is large, larger than I can master; but I feel the
benefit of continued reading upon it. We have before us a crisis, and a
great crisis, for us all, to put it on no higher ground, and a great
honour or a great disgrace. As I do not mean to fail through want of
perseverance, so neither will I wilfully err through precipitancy, or
through want of care and desire at least to meet all apprehensions which
are warranted by even the show of reason.”

It was not reading alone that brought him round to the full measure of
securing the cultivator in his holding. The crucial suggestion, the
expediency, namely, of making the landlord pay compensation to the tenant
for disturbing him, came from Ireland. To Mr. Chichester Fortescue, the
Irish secretary, Mr. Gladstone writes (Sept. 15):—


    I heartily wish, it were possible that you, Sullivan, and I could
    have some of those preliminary conversations on land, which were
    certainly of great use in the first stages of the Irish Church
    bill. As this is difficult, let us try to compare notes as well as
    we can in writing. I anticipate that many members of the cabinet
    will find it hard to extend their views to what the exigencies of
    the time, soberly considered, now require; but patience, prudence,
    and good feeling will, I hope, surmount all obstacles.

    Like you, I am unwilling to force a peasant proprietary into
    existence.... The first point in this legislation, viz., that the
    presumption of law should give improvements to the tenant, is now,
    I suppose, very widely admitted, but no longer suffices to settle
    the question.... Now as to your “compensation for disturbance.”
    This is indeed a question full of difficulty. It is very desirable
    to prevent the using of augmentation of rent as a method of
    eviction. I shall be most curious to see the means and provisions
    you may devise, without at present being too sanguine.


(M87) Meanwhile he notes to Lord Granville (Sept. 22) how critical and
arduous the question is, within as well as without the cabinet, and
wonders whether they ought not to be thinking of a judicious cabinet
committee:—


    The question fills the public mind in an extraordinary degree, and
    we can hardly avoid some early step towards making progress in it.
    A committee keeps a cabinet quiet. It is highly necessary that we
    should be quite ready when parliament meets, and yet there is so
    much mental movement upon the question from day to day, as we see
    from a variety of curious utterances (that of the _Times_
    included), that it is desirable to keep final decisions open. Much
    information will be open, and this a committee can prepare in
    concert with the Irish government. It also, I think, affords a
    means of bringing men’s minds together.


He tells the Irish secretary that so far as he can enter into the
secretary’s views, he “enters thoroughly into the spirit of them.” But
many members of the cabinet, laden sufficiently with their own labours,
had probably not so closely followed up the matter:—


    The proposition, that _more_ than compensation to tenants for
    their improvements will be necessary in order to settle the Irish
    land laws, will be unpalatable, or new, to several, and naturally
    enough. You will have observed the total difference in the
    internal situation between this case and that of the Irish church,
    where upon all the greater points our measure was in a manner
    outlined for us by the course of previous transactions.


At the end of October the question was brought formally before the
cabinet:—


    _Oct. 30._—Cabinet, 2-5-½.... We broke ground very satisfactorily
    on the question of Irish land. _Nov. 3._—Cabinet. Chiefly on Irish
    land, and stiff. 9.—To Guildhall, where I spoke for the
    government. The combination of physical effort with measured words
    is difficult. 22.—Worked six hours on my books, arranging and
    re-arranging. The best brain rest I have had, I think, since
    December last.


The brain rest was not for long. On Dec. 1 he tells Lord Granville that
Argyll is busy on Irish land, and in his views is misled by “the rapid
facility of his active mind.” “It is rather awkward at this stage to talk
of breaking up the government, and that is more easily said than done.” I
know no more singular reading in its way than the correspondence between
Mr. Gladstone and the Duke of Argyll; Mr. Gladstone trying to lead his
argumentative colleague over one or two of the barest rudiments of the
history of Irish land, and occasionally showing in the process somewhat of
the quality of the superior pupil teacher acquiring to-day material for
the lesson of to-morrow. Mr. Gladstone goes to the root of the matter when
he says to the Duke: “What I would most earnestly entreat of you is not to
rely too much on Highland experience, but to acquaint yourself by careful
reading with the rather extensive facts and history of the Irish land
question. My own studies in it are very imperfect, though pursued to the
best of my ability; but they have revealed to me many matters of fact
which have seriously modified my views, most of them connected with and
branching out of the very wide extension of the idea and even the practice
of tenant right, mostly perhaps _un_recognised beyond the limits of the
Ulster custom.”

Then Lord Granville writes to him that Clarendon has sent him two letters
running, talking of the certainty of the government being broken up. “The
sky is very far from clear,” Mr. Gladstone says to Mr. Fortescue (Dec. 3),
“but we must bate no jot of heart or hope.” The next day it is Mr. Bright
to whom he turns in friendly earnest admonition. His words will perhaps be
useful to many generations of cabinet ministers:—


    It is not the courageous part of your paper to which I now object,
    though I doubt the policy of the reference to feebleness and
    timidity, as men in a cabinet do not like what may _seem_ to imply
    that they are cowards. It is your argument (a very over-strained
    one in my opinion) against Fortescue’s propositions, and your
    proposal (so it reads) to put them back in order of discussion to
    the second place _now_, when the mind of the cabinet has been upon
    them for six weeks.... Had the cabinet adopted at this moment _a
    good and sufficient scheme for dealing with the Irish tenants as
    tenants_, I should care little how much you depreciated such a
    scheme in comparison with one for converting them into owners. But
    the state of things is most critical. This is not a time at which
    those who in substance agree, can afford to throw away strength by
    the _relative_ depreciation of those parts of a plan of relief, to
    which they do not themselves give the first place in importance.
    It is most dangerous to discredit _propositions which you mean to
    adopt_, in the face of any who (as yet) do not mean to adopt them,
    and who may consistently and honourably use all your statements
    against them, nay, who would really be bound to do so. No part of
    what I have said is an argument against your propositions.... If
    your seven propositions were law to-day, you would have made but a
    very small progress towards settling the land question of Ireland.
    For all this very plain speech, you will, I am sure, forgive me.


A letter from Mr. Gladstone to Fortescue (Dec. 5) shows the competition
between Bright’s projects of purchase by state-aid, and the scheme for
dealing with the tenants as tenants:—


    I am a good deal staggered at the idea of any interference with
    present rents. But I shall not speak on this subject to others. It
    will be difficult enough to carry the substance of the plan you
    proposed, without any enlargement of it. I hope to see you again
    before the question comes on in the cabinet.... Bright is very
    full of waste lands, and generally of his own plans, considerably
    (at present) to the detriment of yours. He wants the government to
    buy waste lands, and says it is not against political economy, but
    yours is. I think he will come right. It appears to me we might in
    the case of waste lands lend money (on proper conditions) to _any
    buyers_; in the case of other lands we are only to lend to
    occupiers. What do you think of this?


(M88) At this date he was still in doubt whether anybody would agree to
interference with existing rents, but he had for himself hit upon the
principle that became the foundation of his law. He put to Fortescue (Dec.
9) as a material point:—


    Whether it is expedient to adopt, wherever it can be made
    available, _the custom of the country as the basis for
    compensation on eviction and the like_. I cannot make out from
    your papers whether you wholly dissent from this. I hoped you had
    agreed in it. I have acquired a strong conviction upon it, of
    which I have written out the grounds; but I shall not circulate
    the paper till I understand your views more fully.


Lowe, at the other extremity, describes himself as more and more
“oppressed by a feeling of heavy responsibility and an apprehension of
serious danger,” and feeling that he and the minority (Clarendon, Argyll,
and Cardwell—of whom he was much the best hand at an argument)—were being
driven to choose between their gravest convictions, and their allegiance
to party and cabinet. They agreed to the presumption of law as to the
making of improvements; to compensation for improvements, retrospective
and prospective; to the right of new tenants at will to compensation on
eviction. The straw that broke the camel’s back was compensation for
eviction, where no custom could be proved in the case of an existing
tenancy. Mr. Gladstone wrote a long argumentative letter to Lord Granville
to be shown to Lowe, and it was effectual. Lowe thought the tone of it
very fair and the arguments of the right sort, but nevertheless he added,
in the words I have already quoted, “I fear he is steering straight upon
the rocks.”

What might surprise us, if anything in Irish doings could surprise us, is
that though this was a measure for Irish tenants, it was deemed heinously
wrong to ascertain directly from their representatives what the Irish
tenants thought. Lord Bessborough was much rebuked in London for
encouraging Mr. Gladstone to communicate with Sir John Gray, the owner of
the great newspaper of the Irish tenant class. Yet Lord O’Hagan, the
chancellor, who had the rather relevant advantage of being of the same
stock and faith as three-fourths of the nation concerned, told them that
“the success or failure of the Land bill depends on the _Freeman’s
Journal_; if it says, We accept this as a fixity of tenure, every priest
will say the same, and _vice versâ_.” It was, however, almost a point of
honour in those days for British cabinets to make Irish laws out of their
own heads.

(M89) Almost to the last the critical contest in the cabinet went on.
Fortescue fought as well as he could even against the prime minister
himself, as the following from Mr. Gladstone to him shows (Jan. 12):—


    There can surely be no advantage in further argument between you
    and me at this stage—especially after so many hours and pages of
    it—on the recognition of usage beyond the limit of Ulster custom
    as a distinct head. You pressed your view repeatedly on the
    cabinet, which did not adopt it. Till the cabinet alters its mind,
    we have no option except to use every effort to get the bill drawn
    according to its instructions.


How much he had his Irish plans at heart, Mr. Gladstone showed by his
urgency that the Queen should open parliament. His letter to her (Jan. 15)
on the subject, he told Lord Granville, “expresses my desire, not founded
on ordinary motives, nor having reference to ordinary circumstances”:—


    We have now to deal with the _gros_ of the Irish question, and the
    Irish question is in a category by itself. It would be almost a
    crime in a minister to omit anything that might serve to mark, and
    bring home to the minds of men, the gravity of the occasion.
    Moreover, I am persuaded that the Queen’s own sympathies would be,
    not as last year, but in the same current as ours. To this great
    country the state of Ireland after seven hundred years of our
    tutelage is in my opinion so long as it continues, an intolerable
    disgrace, and a danger so absolutely transcending all others, that
    I call it the only real danger of the noble empire of the Queen. I
    cannot refrain from bringing before her in one shape or another my
    humble advice that she should, if _able_, open parliament.



IV


Public opinion was ripening. The _Times_ made a contribution of the first
importance to the discussion, in a series of letters from a correspondent,
that almost for the first time brought the facts of Irish land before the
general public. A pamphlet from Mill, then at the height of his influence
upon both writers and readers, startled them by the daring proposition
that the only plan was to buy out the landlords. The whole host of whig
economists and lawyers fell heavily upon him in consequence. The new
voters showed that they were not afraid of new ideas. It was not until
Jan. 25 that peril was at an end inside the government:—


    _Jan. 25, ’70._—Cabinet. The great difficulties of the Irish Land
    bill _there_ are now over. Thank God! _Feb. 7._—With the Prince of
    Wales 3-1/4-4-1/4 explaining to him the Land bill, and on other
    matters. He has certainly much natural intelligence. 15.—H. of C.
    Introduced the Irish Land bill in a speech of 3-1/4 hours. Well
    received by the House at large. _Query_, the Irish popular party?


Lord Dufferin, an Irish landlord, watching, as he admits, with
considerable jealousy exceptional legislation in respect to Ireland, heard
the speech from the peers’ gallery, and wrote to Mr. Gladstone the next
day: “I feel there is no one else in the country who could have
recommended the provisions of such a bill to the House of Commons, with a
slighter shock to the prejudices of the class whose interests are chiefly
concerned.” He adds: “I happened to find myself next to Lord Cairns. When
you had done, he told me he did not think his people would oppose any of
the leading principles of your bill.”

The policy of the bill as tersely explained by Mr. Gladstone in a letter
to Manning, compressing as he said eight or ten columns of the _Times_,
was “to prevent the landlord from using the terrible weapon of undue and
unjust eviction, by so framing the handle that it shall cut his hands with
the sharp edge of pecuniary damages. The man evicted without any fault,
and suffering the usual loss by it, will receive whatever the custom of
the country gives, and where there is no custom, according to a scale,
besides whatever he can claim for permanent buildings or reclamation of
land. Wanton eviction will, as I hope, be extinguished by provisions like
these. And if they extinguish wanton eviction, they will also extinguish
those demands for _unjust_ augmentations of rent, which are only
formidable to the occupier, because the power of wanton or arbitrary
eviction is behind them.” What seems so simple, and what was so necessary,
marked in truth a vast revolutionary stride. It transferred to the tenant
a portion of the absolute ownership, and gave him something like an estate
in his holding. The statute contained a whole code of minor provisions,
including the extension of Mr. Bright’s clauses for peasant proprietorship
in the Church Act, but this transfer was what gave the Act its place in
solid legal form.

(M90) The second reading was carried by 442 to 11, the minority being
composed of eight Irish members of advanced type, and three English
tories, including Mr. Henley and Mr. James Lowther, himself Irish
secretary eight years later. The bill was at no point fought high by the
opposition. Mr. Disraeli moved an amendment limiting compensation to
unexhausted improvements. The government majority fell to 76, “a result to
be expected,” Mr. Gladstone reports, “considering the natural leanings of
English and Scotch members to discount in Ireland what they would not
apply in Great Britain. They are not very familiar with Irish land
tenures.” One fact of much significance he notes in these historic
proceedings. Disraeli, he writes to the Duke of Argyll (April 21, 1870),
“has not spoken one word against valuation of rents or perpetuity of
tenure.” It was from the house of his friends that danger came:—


    _April 4._—H. of C. Spoke on Disraeli’s amendment. A majority of
    76, but the navigation is at present extremely critical. 7.—H. of
    C. A most ominous day from end to end. Early in the evening I gave
    a review of the state of the bill, and later another menace of
    overturn if the motion of Mr. William Fowler [a liberal banker],
    which Palmer had unfortunately (as is too common with him) brought
    into importance, should be carried. We had a majority of only 32.


To Lord Russell he writes (April 12):—


    I am in the hurry-scurry of preparation for a run into the country
    this evening, but I must not omit to thank you for your very kind
    and welcome letter. We have had a most anxious time in regard to
    the Irish Land bill.... The fear that our Land bill may cross the
    water creates a sensitive state of mind among all tories, many
    whigs, and a few radicals. Upon this state of things comes Palmer
    with his legal mind, legal point of view, legal aptitude and
    inaptitude (_vide_ Mr. Burke), and stirs these susceptibilities to
    such a point that he is always near bringing us to grief. Even
    Grey more or less goes with him.


Phillimore records a visit in these critical days:—


    _April 8._—Gladstone looked worn and fagged. Very affectionate and
    confidential. Annoyed at Palmer’s conduct. Gladstone feels keenly
    the want of support in debate. Bright ill. Lowe no moral weight.
    “I feel when I have spoken, that I have not a shot in my locker.”


As a very accomplished journalist of the day wrote, there was something
almost painful in the strange phenomenon of a prime minister fighting as
it were all but single-handed the details of his own great measure through
the ambuscades and charges of a numerous and restless enemy—and of an
enemy determined apparently to fritter away the principle of the measure
under the pretence of modifying its details. “No prime minister has ever
attempted any task like it—a task involving the most elaborate
departmental readiness, in addition to the general duties and fatigues of
a prime minister, and that too in a session when questions are showered
like hail upon the treasury bench.”(187)

Then the government put on pressure, and the majority sprang up to 80. The
debate in the Commons lasted over three and a half months, or about a
fortnight longer than had been taken by the Church bill. The third reading
was carried without a division. In the Lords the bill was read a second
time without a division. Few persons “clearly foresaw that it was the
first step of a vast transfer of property, and that in a few years it
would become customary for ministers of the crown to base all their
legislation on the doctrine that Irish land is not an undivided ownership,
but a simple partnership.”(188)

In March Mr. Gladstone had received from Manning a memorandum of ill omen
from the Irish bishops, setting out the amendments by them thought
necessary. This paper included the principles of perpetuity of tenure for
the tiller of the soil and the adjustment of rent by a court. The reader
may judge for himself how impossible it would have been, even for Mr.
Gladstone, in all the plenitude of his power, to persuade either cabinet
or parliament to adopt such invasions of prevailing doctrine. For this,
ten years more of agitation were required, and then he was able to
complete the memorable chapter in Irish history that he had now opened.



V


(M91) Neither the Land Act nor the Church Act at once put out the hot
ashes of Fenianism. A Coercion Act was passed in the spring of 1870. In
the autumn Mr. Gladstone tried to persuade the cabinet to approve the
release of the Fenian prisoners, but it was not until the end of the year
that he prevailed. A secret committee was thought necessary in 1871 to
consider outrages in Westmeath, and a repressive law was passed in
consequence. Mr. Gladstone himself always leaned strongly against these
exceptional laws, and pressed the Irish government hard the other way.
“What we have to do,” he said, “is to defy Fenianism, to rely on public
sentiment, and so provide (as we have been doing) the practical measures
that place the public sentiment on our side, an operation which I think is
retarded by any semblance of _severity_ to those whose offence we admit
among ourselves to have been an ultimate result of our misgovernment of
the country. I am afraid that local opinion has exercised, habitually and
traditionally, too much influence in Ireland, and has greatly compromised
the character of the empire. _This_ question I take to be in most of its
aspects an imperial question.” The proposal for a secret committee was the
occasion of a duel between him and Disraeli (Feb. 27, 1871)—“both,” said
Lord Granville, “very able, but very bitter.” The tory leader taunted Mr.
Gladstone for having recourse to such a proceeding, after posing as the
only man capable of dealing with the evils of Ireland, and backed by a
majority which had legalised confiscation, consecrated sacrilege, and
condoned high treason.




Chapter III. Education—The Career And The Talents. (1870)


    He that taketh away-weights from the motions, doth the same as he
    that addeth wings.—PYM.



I


Amid dire controversies that in all countries surround all questions of
the school, some believe the first government of Mr. Gladstone in its
dealing with education to have achieved its greatest constructive work.
Others think that, on the contrary, it threw away a noble chance. In the
new scheme of national education established in 1870, the head of the
government rather acquiesced than led. In his own words, his
responsibility was that of concurrence rather than of authorship. His
close absorption in the unfamiliar riddles of Irish land, besides the mass
of business incident to the office of prime minister, might well account
for his small share in the frame of the education bill. More than this,
however, his private interest in public education did not amount to zeal,
and it was at bottom the interest of a churchman. Mr. Gladstone afterwards
wrote to Lord Granville (June 14, ’74), “I have never made greater
personal concessions of opinion than I did on the Education bill to the
united representations of Ripon and Forster.” His share in the adjustments
of the Act was, as he said afterwards, a very simple one, and he found no
occasion either to differ from departmental colleagues, or to press upon
them any proposals of his own. If they had been dealing with an untouched
case, he would have preferred the Scotch plan, which allowed the local
school board to prescribe whatever religious education pleased it best.
Nor did he object to a strict limitation of all teaching paid for in
schools aided or provided out of public money, whether rate or tax, to
purely secular instruction. In that case, however, he held strongly that,
subject to local consent, the master who gave the secular teaching should
be allowed to give religious teaching also at other times, even within the
school-house.(189)

(M92) What Mr. Gladstone cared for was the integrity of religious
instruction. What he disliked or dreaded was, in his own language, the
invasion of that integrity “under cover of protecting exceptional
consciences.” The advance of his ideas is rather interesting. So far back
as 1843,(190) in considering the education clauses of the Factory bill of
that year, he explained to Lord Lyttelton that he was not prepared to
limit church teaching in the schools in the exposition of scripture. Ten
years later, he wrote to his close friend, Bishop Hamilton of Salisbury:—


    I am not friendly to the idea of constraining by law either the
    total or the partial suppression of conscientious differences in
    religion, with a view to fusion of different sects whether in
    church or school. I believe that the free development of
    conviction is upon the whole the system most in favour both of
    truth and of charity. Consequently you may well believe that I
    contemplate with satisfaction the state of feeling that prevails
    in England, and that has led all governments to adopt the system
    of separate and independent subsidies to the various religious
    denominations.


As for the government bill of that year (1853), he entirely repudiated the
construction put upon some of its clauses, namely, “that people having the
charge of schools would be obliged to admit children of all religious
creeds, as well as that having admitted them, they would be put under
control as to the instruction to be given.” Ten years later still, we find
him saying, “I deeply regret the aversion to ‘conscience clauses,’ which I
am convinced it would be most wise for the church to adopt. As far back as
1838 I laboured hard to get the National Society to act upon this
principle permissively; and if I remember right, it was with the approval
of the then Bishop of London.” In 1865 he harps on the same string in a
letter to Lord Granville:—


    ... Suppose the schoolmaster is reading with his boys the third
    chapter of St. John, and he explains the passage relating to
    baptism in the sense of the prayer book and articles—the
    dissenters would say this is instruction in the doctrine of the
    church of England. Now it is utterly impossible for you to tell
    the church schoolmaster or the clergyman that he must not in the
    school explain any passage of scripture in a sense to which any of
    the parents of the children, or at least any sect objects; for
    _then you would in principle entirely alter the character of the
    religious teaching for the rest of the scholars, and in fact upset
    the whole system_. The dissenter, on the other hand, ought (in my
    opinion) to be entitled to withdraw his child from the risk (if he
    considers it such) of receiving instruction of the kind I
    describe.


Mr. Gladstone had therefore held a consistent course, and in cherishing
along with full freedom of conscience the integrity of religious
instruction, he had followed a definite and intelligible line. Unluckily
for him and his government this was not the line now adopted.



II


When the cabinet met in the autumn of 1869, Mr. Gladstone wrote to Lord de
Grey (afterwards Ripon) (Nov. 4):—


    I have read Mr. Forster’s able paper, and I follow it very
    generally. On one point I cannot very well follow it.... Why not
    adopt frankly the principle that the State or the local community
    should provide the secular teaching, and either leave the option
    to the ratepayers to go beyond this _sine quâ non_, if they think
    fit, within the limits of the conscience clause, or else simply
    leave the parties themselves to find Bible and other religious
    education from voluntary sources?


Early in the session before the introduction of the bill, Mr. Gladstone
noted in his diary, “Good hope that the principal matters at issue may be
accommodated during the session, but great differences of opinion have
come to the surface, and much trouble may arise.” In fact trouble enough
arose to shake his ministry to its foundations. What would be curious if
he had not had the Land bill on his hands, is that he did not fight hard
for his own view in the cabinet. He seems to have been content with
stating it, without insisting. Whether he could have carried it in the
midst of a whirlwind of indeterminate but vehement opinions, may well be
doubted.

(M93) The Education bill was worked through the cabinet by Lord de Grey as
president of the council, but its lines were laid and its provisions in
their varying forms defended in parliament, by the vice-president, who did
not reach the cabinet until July 1870. Mr. Forster was a man of sterling
force of character, with resolute and effective power of work, a fervid
love of country, and a warm and true humanity. No orator, he was yet an
excellent speaker of a sound order, for his speaking, though plain and
even rough in style, abounded in substance; he always went as near to the
root of the matter as his vision allowed, and always with marked effect
for his own purposes. A quaker origin is not incompatible with a militant
spirit, and Forster was sturdy in combat. He had rather a full share of
self-esteem, and he sometimes exhibited a want a tact that unluckily
irritated or estranged many whom more suavity might have retained. Then,
without meaning it, he blundered into that most injurious of all positions
for the parliamentary leader, of appearing to care more for his enemies
than for his friends. As Mr. Gladstone said of him, “destiny threw him on
the main occasions of his parliamentary career into open or qualified
conflict with friends as well as foes, perhaps rather more with friends
than foes.” A more serious defect of mind was that he was apt to approach
great questions—Education, Ireland, Turkey—without truly realising how
great they were, and this is the worst of all the shortcomings of
statesmanship. There was one case of notable exception. In all the stages
and aspects of the American civil war, Forster played an admirable part.

The problem of education might have seemed the very simplest. After the
extension of the franchise to the workmen, everybody felt, in a happy
phrase of that time, that “we must educate our masters.” Outside events
were supposed to hold a lesson. The triumphant North in America was the
land of the common school. The victory of Prussians over Austrians at
Sadowa in 1866 was called the victory of the elementary school teacher.
Even the nonconformists had come round. Up to the middle of the sixties
opinion among them was hostile to the intervention of the state in
education. They had resisted Graham’s proposals in 1843, and Lord John
Russell’s in 1847; but a younger generation, eager for progress, saw the
new necessity that change of social and political circumstance imposed.
The business in 1870 was to provide schools, and to get the children into
them.(191)

It is surprising how little serious attention had been paid even by
speculative writers in this country to the vast problem of the relative
duties of the State and the Family in respect of education. Mill devoted a
few keen pages to it in his book upon political economy. Fawcett, without
much of Mill’s intellectual power or any of his sensitive temperament, was
supposed to represent his principles in parliament; yet in education he
was against free schools, while Mill was for them. All was unsettled;
important things were even unperceived. Yet the questions of national
education, answer them as we will, touch the moral life and death of
nations. The honourable zeal of the churches had done something, but most
of the ground remained to be covered. The question was whether the system
about to be created should merely supplement those sectarian, private,
voluntary schools, or should erect a fabric worthy of the high name of
national. The churchman hoped, but did not expect, the first. The
nonconformist (broadly speaking), the academic liberal, and the hard-grit
radical, were keen for the second, and they were all three well
represented in the House of Commons.

(M94) What the government proposed was that local boards should be called
into existence to provide schools where provision was inadequate and
inefficient, these schools to be supported by the pence of the children,
the earned grant from parliament, and a new rate to be levied upon the
locality. The rate was the critical element. If the boards chose, they
could make bye-laws compelling parents to send their children to school;
and they could (with a conscience clause) settle what form of religious
instruction they pleased. The voluntary men were to have a year of grace
in which to make good any deficiency in supply of schools, and so keep out
the boards. The second reading was secured without a division, but only on
assurances from Mr. Gladstone that amendments would be made in committee.
On June 16, the prime minister, as he says, “explained the plans of the
government to an eager and agitated house.”

Two days before, the cabinet had embarked upon a course that made the
agitation still more eager. Mr. Gladstone wrote the pregnant entry: “_June
14._ Cabinet; decided on making more general use of machinery supplied by
voluntary schools, avoidance of religious controversy in local boards.”
This meant that the new system was in no way to supersede the old
non-system, but to supplement it. The decision was fatal to a national
settlement. As Mr. Forster put it, their object was “to complete the
voluntary system and to fill up gaps.” Lord Ripon used the same language
in the Lords. Instead of the school boards being universal, they should
only come into existence where the ecclesiastical party was not strong
enough in wealth, influence, and liberality to keep them out. Instead of
compulsory attendance being universal, that principle could only be
applied where a school board was found, and where the school board liked
to apply it. The old parliamentary grant to the denominational schools was
to be doubled. This last provision was Mr. Gladstone’s own. Forster had
told him that it was impossible to carry a proposal allowing school boards
to contribute to denominational schools, and the only compensation open
was a larger slice of the grant from parliament.



III


The storm at once began to rage around the helmsman’s ears. Some days
earlier the situation had been defined by Mr. Brand, the whip, for his
leader’s guidance. The attempt, he said, made by Fawcett, Dilke, and
others, to create a diversion in favour of exclusively secular education
has signally failed; the opinion of the country is clearly adverse. On the
other hand, while insisting on the religious element, the country is just
as strongly opposed to dogmatic teaching in schools aided by local rates.
“You ask me,” said Mr. Gladstone to Mr. Brand (May 24), “to solve the
problem in the words ‘to include religion, and to exclude dogma,’ which,
as far as I know, though it admits of a sufficient practical handling by
individuals acting for themselves, has not yet been solved by any state or
parliament.” Well might he report at Windsor (June 21) that, though the
auspices were favourable, there was a great deal of crude and
indeterminate opinion on the subject in the House as well as elsewhere,
and “the bill, if carried, would be carried by the authority and
persistence of the government, aided by the acquiescence of the
opposition.” It was this carrying of the bill by the aid of the tory
opposition that gave fuel to the liberal flame, and the increase of the
grant to the sectarian schools made the heat more intense. The most
critical point of the bill, according to Mr. Gladstone, was a proposal
that now seems singularly worded, to the effect that the teaching of
scriptures in rate schools should not be in favour of, or opposed to,
tenets of any denomination. This was beaten by 251 to 130. “The minority
was liberal, but more than half of the liberal party present voted in the
majority.”

(M95) “We respect Mr. Forster,” cried Dale of Birmingham, “we honour Mr.
Gladstone, but we are determined that England shall not again be cursed
with the bitterness and strife from which we had hoped that we had for
ever escaped, by the abolition of the church rate.”(192) Writing to a
brother nonconformist, he expresses his almost unbounded admiration for
Mr. Gladstone, “but it is a bitter disappointment that his government
should be erecting new difficulties in the way of religious equality.”
Under the flashing eye of the prime minister himself the nonconformist
revolt reared its crest. Miall, the veteran bearer of the flag of
disestablishment, told Mr. Gladstone (July 22) that he was leading one
section of the liberal party through the valley of humiliation. “Once bit,
twice shy. We can’t stand this sort of thing much longer,” he said. In a
flame of natural wrath Mr. Gladstone replied that he had laboured not to
gain Mr. Miall’s support, but to promote the welfare of the country. “I
hope my hon. friend will not continue his support to the government one
moment longer than he deems it consistent with his sense of right and
duty. For God’s sake, sir, let him withdraw it the moment he thinks it
better for the cause he has at heart that he should do so.” The
government, he said, had striven to smooth difficulties, to allay
passions, to avoid everything that would excite or stimulate, to endeavour
to bring men to work together, to rise above mere sectional views, to
eschew all extremes, and not to make their own narrow choice the model of
the measure they were presenting to parliament, but to admit freely and
liberally into its composition those great influences which were found
swaying the community. Forster wrote to a friend, “it does not rest with
me now whether or no the state should decree against religion—decree that
it is a thing of no account. Well, with my assent the state shall not do
this, and I believe I can prevent it.”(193) Insist, forsooth, that
religion was not a thing of no account against men like Dale, one of the
most ardent and instructed believers that ever fought the fight and kept
the faith; against Bright, than whom no devouter spirit breathed, and who
thought the Education Act “the worst Act passed by any liberal parliament
since 1832.”

The opposition did not show deep gratitude, having secured as many favours
as they could hope, and more than they had anticipated. A proposal from
the government (July 14) to introduce secret voting in the election of
local boards was stubbornly contested, in spite, says Mr. Gladstone, “of
the unvarying good temper, signal ability and conciliatory spirit of Mr.
Forster,” and it was not until after fourteen divisions that a few
assuaging words from Mr. Gladstone brought the handful of conservative
opposition to reason. It was five o’clock before the unflagging prime
minister found his way homewards in the broad daylight.

It is impossible to imagine a question on which in a free government it
was more essential to carry public opinion with the law. To force parents
to send children to school, was an enterprise that must break down if
opinion would not help to work it. Yet probably on no other question in
Mr. Gladstone’s career as law-maker was common opinion so hard to weigh,
to test, to focus and adjust. Of the final settlement of the question of
religious instruction, Mr. Gladstone said to Lord Lyttelton when the
battle was over (Oct. 25, ’70):—


    ... I will only say that it was in no sense my choice or that of
    the government. Our first proposition was by far the best. But it
    received no active support even from the church, the National
    Society, or the opposition, while divers bishops, large bodies of
    clergy, the Education Union, and earliest of all, I think,
    Roundell Palmer in the House of Commons, threw overboard the
    catechism. We might then have fallen back upon the plan of
    confining the application of the rate to secular subjects; but
    this was opposed by the church, the opposition, most of the
    dissenters, and most of our own friends. As it was, I assure you,
    the very utmost that could be done was to arrange the matter as it
    now stands, where the exclusion is limited to the formulary, and
    to get rid of the popular imposture of undenominational
    instruction.


(M96) At bottom the battle of the schools was not educational, it was
social. It was not religious but ecclesiastical, and that is often the
very contrary of religious. In the conflicts of the old centuries whence
Christian creeds emerged, disputes on dogma constantly sprang from
rivalries of race and accidents of geography. So now quarrels about
education and catechism and conscience masked the standing jealousy
between church and chapel—the unwholesome fruit of the historic mishaps of
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that separated the nation into two
camps, and invested one of them with all the pomp and privilege of social
ascendency. The parent and the child, in whose name the struggle raged,
stood indifferent. From the point of party strategy, the policy of this
great statute was fatal. The church of England was quickened into active
antagonism by Irish disestablishment, by the extinction of sectarian tests
at Oxford and Cambridge, and by the treatment of endowed schools. This
might have been balanced by the zeal of nonconformists. Instead of zeal,
the Education Act produced refrigeration and estrangement.

We may be sure that on such a subject Mr. Gladstone looked further than
strategies of party. “I own to you,” said he to a correspondent before the
battle was quite over, “that the history of these last few months leaves
upon my mind some melancholy impressions, which I hope at some fancied
period of future leisure and retirement to study and interpret.” He soon
saw how deep the questions went, and on what difficult ground the state
and the nation would be inevitably drawn. His notions of a distinctive
formula were curious. Forster seems to have put some question to him on
the point whether the three creeds were formularies within the Act. It
appears to me, Mr. Gladstone answered (October 17, 1870):—


    It is quite open to you at once to dispose of the Nicene and
    Athanasian Creeds and to decline inquiring whether they are
    distinctive, upon the ground that they are not documents employed
    in the instruction of young children.... Obviously no one has a
    right to call on you to define the distinctive character of a
    formulary such as the Thirty-nine Articles, or of any but such as
    are employed in schools. With respect to the Apostles’ Creed, it
    appears to me not to be a distinctive formulary in the sense of
    the Act. Besides the fact that it is acknowledged by the great
    bulk of all Christendom, it is denied or rejected by no portion of
    the Christian community; and, further, it is not controversial in
    its form, but sets forth, in the simplest shape a series of the
    leading facts on which Christianity, the least abstract of all
    religions, is based.


Manning plied him hard (September, October, November, 1871). The state of
Paris (Commune blazing that year, Tuileries and Hôtel de Ville in ashes,
and the Prussian spiked helmets at the gates) was traceable to a godless
education—so the archbishop argued. In England the Christian tradition was
unbroken. It was only a clique of doctrinaires, Huxley at the head of
them, who believing nothing trumpeted secular education. “Delighted to see
Mr. Forster attacked as playing into the hands of the clergy.” Mr.
Gladstone should stimulate by every agency in his power the voluntary
religious energies of the three kingdoms. “The real crisis is in the
formation of men. They are as we make them, and they make society. The
formation of men is the work you have given to the school boards. God gave
it to the parents. Neither you nor Mr. Forster meant this; you least of
all men on your side of the House. Glad to see you lay down the broad and
intelligible line that state grants go to secular education, and voluntary
efforts must do the rest. Let us all start fair in this race. Let every
sect, even the Huxleyites, have their grant if they fulfil the conditions.
As for the school-rate conscience, it is a mongrel institution of
quakerism.” How Mr. Gladstone replied on all these searching issues, I do
not find.



IV


The passing of the Act did not heal the wound. The nonconformist revolt
was supported in a great conference at Manchester in 1872, representing
eight hundred churches and other organizations. Baptist unions and
congregational unions were unrelenting. We may as well finish the story.
It was in connection with this struggle that Mr. Chamberlain first came
prominently into the arena of public life—bold, intrepid, imbued with the
keen spirit of political nonconformity, and a born tactician. The issue
selected for the attack was the twenty-fifth section of the Education Act,
enabling school boards to pay in denominational schools the fees of
parents who, though not paupers, were unable to pay them. This provision
suddenly swelled into dimensions of enormity hitherto unsuspected. A
caustic onlooker observed that it was the smallest ditch in which two
great political armies ever engaged in civil war. Yet the possibility
under cover of this section, of a sectarian board subsidising church
schools was plain, and some cases, though not many, actually occurred in
which appreciable sums were so handed over. The twenty-fifth section was a
real error, and it made no bad flag for an assault upon a scheme of error.

(M97) Great things were hoped from Mr. Bright’s return to the government
in the autumn of 1873. The correspondence between Mr. Gladstone and him
sheds some interesting light upon the state into which the Education Act,
and Mr. Forster’s intractable bearing in defence of it, had brought
important sections of the party:—


    _Mr. Bright to Mr. Gladstone._

    _Aug. 12, 1873._—So far as I can hear, there is no intention to
    get up an opposition at Birmingham, which is a comfort, as I am
    not in force to fight a contested election. I am anxious not to go
    to the election, fearing that I shall not have nerve to speak to
    the 5000 men who will or may crowd the town hall. Before I go, if
    I go, I shall want to consult you on the difficult matter—how to
    deal frankly and wisely with the education question. I cannot
    break with my “noncon.” friends, the political friends of all my
    life; and unless my joining you can do something to lessen the
    mischief now existing and _still growing_, I had better remain as
    I have been since my illness, a spectator rather than an actor on
    the political field.... I hope you are better, and that your
    troubles, for a time, are diminished. I wish much you could have
    announced a change in the education department; it would have
    improved the tone of feeling in many constituencies.


Mr. Gladstone himself had touched “the watchful jealousy” of Bright’s
nonconformist friends by a speech made at the time at Hawarden. This
speech he explained in writing to Bright from Balmoral (Aug. 21):—


    The upshot, I think, is this. My speech could not properly have
    been made by a man who thinks that boards and public rates ought
    to be used for the purpose of putting down as quickly as may be
    the voluntary schools. But the recommendation which I made might
    have been consistently and properly supported by any one whose
    opinions fell short of this, and did not in the least turn upon
    any preference for voluntary over compulsory means.(194)


As he said afterwards to Lord Granville, “I personally have no fear of the
secular system; but I cannot join in measures of repression against
voluntary schools.”

“There is not a word said by you at Hawarden,” Bright replied (Aug. 25),
“that would fetter you in the least in considering the education question;
but at present the general feeling is against the idea of any concession
on your part.... What is wanted is some definite willingness or resolution
to recover the goodwill and confidence of the nonconformist leaders in the
boroughs; for without this, reconstruction is of no value.... Finance is
of great moment, and people are well pleased to see you in your old office
again; but no budget will heal the soreness that has been created—it is
not of the pocket but of the feelings.... I want you just to know where I
am and what I feel; but if I could talk to you, I could say what I have to
say with more precision, and with a greater delicacy of expression. I ask
you only to put the best construction on what I write.”

If Forster could only have composed himself to the same considerate
spirit, there might have been a different tale to tell. Bright made his
election speech at Birmingham, and Forster was in trouble about it. “I
think,” said the orator to Mr. Gladstone, “he ought rather to be thankful
for it; it will enable him to get out of difficulties if he will improve
the occasion. There is no question of changing the policy of the
government, but of making minor concessions.... I would willingly change
the policy of irritation into one of soothing and conciliation.” Nothing
of great importance in the way even of temporary reconciliation was
effected by Mr. Bright’s return. The ditch of the twenty-fifth clause
still yawned. The prime minister fell back into the position of August.
The whole situation of the ministry had become critical in every
direction. “Education must be regarded as still to a limited extent an
open question in the government.”

When the general election came, the party was still disunited. Out of 425
liberal candidates in England, Scotland, and Wales, 300 were pledged to
the repeal of the 25th clause. Mr. Gladstone’s last word was in a letter
to Bright (Jan. 27, 1874):—


    The fact is, it seems to me, that the noncons. have not yet as a
    body made up their minds whether they want unsectarian religion,
    or whether they want simple secular teaching, so far as the
    application of the rate is concerned. I have never been strong
    against the latter of these two which seems to me impartial, and
    not, if fairly worked, of necessity in any degree unfriendly to
    religion. The former is in my opinion glaringly partial, and I
    shall never be a party to it. But there is a good deal of leaning
    to it in the liberal party. Any attempt to obtain definite pledges
    now will give power to the enemies of both plans of proceeding. We
    have no rational course as a party but one, which is to adjourn
    for a while the solution of the grave parts of the education
    problem; and this I know to be in substance your opinion.



V


(M98) The same vigorous currents of national vitality that led to new
endeavours for the education of the poor, had drawn men to consider the
horrid chaos, the waste, and the abuses in the provision of education for
the directing classes beyond the poor. Grave problems of more kinds than
one came into view. The question, What is education? was nearly as hard to
answer as the question of which we have seen so much, What is a church?
The rival claims of old classical training and the acquisition of modern
knowledge were matters of vivacious contest. What is the true place of
classical learning in the human culture of our own age? Misused charitable
trusts, and endowments perverted by the fluctuations of time, by lethargy,
by selfishness, from the objects of pious founders, touched wakeful
jealousies in the privileged sect, and called into action that adoration
of the principle of property which insists upon applying all the rules of
individual ownership to what rightfully belongs to the community. Local
interests were very sensitive, and they were multitudinous. The battle was
severely fought, and it extended over several years, while commission upon
commission explored the issues.

In a highly interesting letter (1861) to Lord Lyttelton Mr. Gladstone set
out at length his views upon the issue between ancient and modern, between
literary training and scientific, between utilitarian education and
liberal. The reader will find this letter in an appendix, as well as one
to Sir Stafford Northcote.(195) While rationally conservative upon the
true basis of attainments in “that small proportion of the youth of any
country who are to become in the fullest sense educated men,” he is
rationally liberal upon what the politics of the time made the burning
question of the sacrosanctity of endowments. “It is our habit in this
country,” he said, “to treat private interests with an extravagant
tenderness. The truth is that all laxity and extravagance in dealing with
what in a large sense is certainly public property, approximates more or
less to dishonesty, or at the least lowers the moral tone of the persons
concerned.”

The result of all this movement, of which it may perhaps be said that it
was mainly inspired and guided by a few men of superior energy and social
weight like Goldwin Smith, Temple, Jowett, Liddell, the active interest of
the classes immediately concerned being hardly more than middling—was one
of the best measures in the history of this government of good measures
(1869). It dealt with many hundreds of schools, and with an annual income
of nearly six hundred thousand pounds. As the Endowed Schools bill was one
of the best measures of the government, so it was Mr. Forster’s best piece
of legislative work. That it strengthened the government can hardly be
said; the path of the reformer is not rose-strewn.(196)



VI


(M99) In one region Mr. Gladstone long lagged behind. He had done a fine
stroke of national policy in releasing Oxford from some of her antique
bonds in 1854;(197) but the principle of a free university was not yet
admitted to his mind. In 1863 he wrote to the vice-chancellor how entirely
the government concurred in the principle of restricting the governing
body of the university and the colleges to the church. The following year
he was willing to throw open the degree; but the right to sit in
convocation he guarded by exacting a declaration of membership of the
church of England.(198) In 1865 Mr. Goschen—then beginning to make a mark
as one of the ablest of the new generation in parliament, combining the
large views of liberal Oxford with the practical energy of the city of
London, added to a strong fibre given him by nature—brought in a bill
throwing open all lay degrees. Mr. Gladstone still stood out, conducting a
brisk correspondence with dissenters. “The whole controversy,” he wrote to
one of them, “is carried on aggressively, as if to disturb and not to
settle. Abstract principles urged without stint or mercy provoke the
counter-assertion of abstract principles in return. There is not power to
carry Mr. Goschen’s speech either in the cabinet, the parliament, or the
country. Yet the change in the balance of parties effected by the
elections will cast upon the liberal majority a serious responsibility. I
would rather see Oxford level with the ground, than its religion regulated
in the manner which would please Bishop Colenso.”

Year by year the struggle was renewed. Even after the Gladstone government
was formed, Coleridge, the solicitor-general, was only allowed in a
private capacity to introduce a bill removing the tests. When he had been
two years at the head of administration, Mr. Gladstone warned Coleridge:
“For me individually it would be beyond anything odious, I am almost
tempted to say it would be impossible, after my long connection with
Oxford, to go into a new controversy on the basis of what will be taken
and alleged to be an absolute secularisation of the colleges; as well as a
reversal of what was deliberately considered and sanctioned in the
parliamentary legislation of 1854 and 1856. I incline to think that this
work is work for others, not for me.”

It was not until 1871 that Mr. Gladstone consented to make the bill a
government measure. It rapidly passed the Commons and was accepted by the
Lords, but with amendments. Mr. Gladstone when he had once adopted a
project never loitered; he now resolutely refused the changes proposed by
the Lords, and when the time came and Lord Salisbury was for insisting on
them, the peers declined by a handsome majority to carry the fight
further. It is needless to add that the admission of dissenters to degrees
and endowments did not injuriously affect a single object for which a
national university exists. On the other hand, the mischiefs of
ecclesiastical monopoly were long in disappearing.



VII


(M100) We have already seen how warmly the project of introducing
competition into the civil service had kindled Mr. Gladstone’s enthusiasm
in the days of the Crimean war.(199) Reform had made slow progress. The
civil service commission had been appointed in 1855, but their
examinations only tested the quality of candidates sent before them on
nomination. In 1860 a system was set up of limited competition among three
nominated candidates, who had first satisfied a preliminary test
examination. This lasted until 1870. Lowe had reform much at heart. At the
end of 1869, he appealed to the prime minister: “As I have so often tried
in vain, will you bring the question of the civil service before the
cabinet to-day? Something must be decided. We cannot keep matters in this
discreditable state of abeyance. If the cabinet will not entertain the
idea of open competition, might we not at any rate require a larger number
of competitors for each vacancy? five or seven or ten?”

Resistance came from Lord Clarendon and, strange to say, from Mr. Bright.
An ingenious suggestion of Mr. Gladstone’s solved the difficulty. All
branches of the civil service were to be thrown open where the minister at
the head of the department approved. Lowe was ready to answer for all the
departments over which he had any control,—the treasury, the board of
works, audit office, national debt office, paymaster-general’s office,
inland revenue, customs and post-office. Mr. Cardwell, Mr. Childers, Mr.
Goschen, and Lord de Grey were willing to do the same, and finally only
Clarendon and the foreign office were left obdurate. It was true to say of
this change that it placed the whole educated intellect of the country at
the service and disposal of the state, that it stimulated the acquisition
of knowledge, and that it rescued some of the most important duties in the
life of the nation from the narrow class to whom they had hitherto been
confided.




Chapter IV. The Franco-German War. (1870)


    Of all the princes of Europe, the king of England alone seemed to
    be seated upon the pleasant promontory that might safely view the
    tragic sufferings of all his neighbours about him, without any
    other concernment than what arose from his own princely heart and
    Christian compassion, to see such desolation wrought by the pride
    and passion and ambition of private persons, supported by princes
    who knew not what themselves would have.—CLARENDON.



I


During the years in which England had been widening the base of her
institutions, extending her resources of wealth and credit, and
strengthening her repute in the councils of Christendom, a long train of
events at which we have glanced from time to time, had slowly effected a
new distribution of the force of nations, and in Mr. Gladstone’s phrase
had unset every joint of the compacted fabric of continental Europe. The
spirit in which he thought of his country’s place in these transactions is
to be gathered from a letter addressed by him to General Grey, the
secretary of the Queen, rather more than a year before the outbreak of the
Franco-German war. What was the immediate occasion I cannot be sure, nor
does it matter. The letter itself is full of interest, for it is in truth
a sort of charter of the leading principles of Mr. Gladstone’s foreign
policy at the moment when he first incurred supreme responsibility for our
foreign affairs:—


    _Mr. Gladstone to General Grey._

    _April 17, 1869._—... Apart from this question of the moment,
    there is one more important as to the tone in which it is to be
    desired that, where matter of controversy has arisen on the
    continent of Europe, the diplomatic correspondence of this country
    should be carried on. This more important question may be the
    subject of differences in the country, but I observe with joy that
    her Majesty approves the general principle which Lord Clarendon
    sets forth in his letter of the 16th. I do not believe that
    England ever will or can be unfaithful to her great tradition, or
    can forswear her interest in the common transactions and the
    general interests of Europe. But her credit and her power form a
    fund, which in order that they may be made the most of, should be
    thriftily used.

    The effect of the great revolutionary war was to place England in
    a position to rely upon the aid of her own resources. This was no
    matter of blame to either party; it was the result of a desperate
    struggle of over twenty years, in which every one else was down in
    his turn, but England was ever on her feet; in which it was found
    that there was no ascertained limit either to her means, or to her
    disposition to dispense them; in which, to use the language of Mr.
    Canning, her flag was always flying “a signal of rallying to the
    combatant, and of shelter to the fallen.” The habit of appeal and
    of reliance thus engendered by peculiar circumstances, requires to
    be altered by a quiet and substantial though not a violent
    process. For though Europe never saw England faint away, _we_ know
    at what a cost of internal danger to all the institutions of the
    country, she fought her way to the perilous eminence on which she
    undoubtedly stood in 1815.

    If there be a fear abroad that England has forever abjured a
    resort to force other than moral force, is that fear justified by
    facts? In 1853, joining with France, we made ourselves the
    vindicators of the peace of Europe; and ten years later, be it
    remembered, in the case of Denmark we offered to perform the same
    office, but we could get no one to join us. Is it desirable that
    we should go further? Is England so uplifted in strength above
    every other nation, that she can with prudence advertise herself
    as ready to undertake the general redress of wrongs? Would not the
    consequence of such professions and promises be either the
    premature exhaustion of her means, or a collapse in the day of
    performance? Is _any_ Power at this time of day warranted in
    assuming this comprehensive obligation? Of course, the answer is,
    No. But do not, on the other hand, allow it to be believed that
    England will never interfere. For the eccentricities of other
    men’s belief no one can answer; but for any reasonable belief in
    such an abnegation on the part of England, there is no ground
    whatever. As I understand Lord Clarendon’s ideas, they are fairly
    represented by his very important diplomatic communications since
    he has taken office. They proceed upon such grounds as these: That
    England should keep entire in her own hands the means of
    estimating her own obligations upon the various states of facts as
    they arise; that she should not foreclose and narrow her own
    liberty of choice by declarations made to other Powers, in their
    real or supposed interests, of which they would claim to be at
    least joint interpreters; that it is dangerous for her to assume
    alone an advanced, and therefore an isolated position, in regard
    to European controversies; that, come what may, it is better for
    her to promise too little than too much; that she should not
    encourage the weak by giving expectations of aid to resist the
    strong, but should rather seek to deter the strong by firm but
    moderate language, from aggressions on the weak; that she should
    seek to develop and mature the action of a common, or public, or
    European opinion, as the best standing bulwark against wrong, but
    should beware of seeming to lay down the law of that opinion by
    her own authority, and thus running the risk of setting against
    her, and against right and justice, that general sentiment which
    ought to be, and generally would be, arrayed in their favour. I am
    persuaded that at this juncture opinions of this colour being true
    and sound, are also the only opinions which the country is
    disposed to approve. But I do not believe that on that account it
    is one whit less disposed than it has been at any time, to cast in
    its lot upon any fitting occasion with the cause it believes to be
    right.... I therefore hope and feel assured her Majesty will
    believe that Lord Clarendon really requires no intimation from me
    to ensure his steadily maintaining the tone which becomes the
    foreign minister of the Queen.


(M101) Heavy banks of cloud hung with occasional breaks of brighter sky
over Europe; and all the plot, intrigue, conspiracy, and subterranean
scheming, that had been incessant ever since the Crimean war disturbed the
old European system, and Cavour first began the recasting of the map, was
but the repulsive and dangerous symptom of a dire conflict in the depths
of international politics. The Mexican adventure, and the tragedy of
Maximilian’s death at Queretaro, had thrown a black shadow over the
iridescent and rotten fabric of Napoleon’s power. Prussian victory over
Austria at Sadowa had startled Europe like a thunderclap. The reactionary
movement within the catholic fold, as disclosed in the Vatican council,
kindled many hopes among the French clericals, and these hopes inspired a
lively antagonism to protestant Prussia in the breast of the Spanish-born
Empress of the French. Prussia in 1866 had humiliated one great catholic
power when she defeated the Austrian monarchy on the battlefields of
Bohemia. Was she to overthrow also the power that kept the pope upon his
temporal throne in Rome? All this, however, was no more than the fringe,
though one of the hardest things in history is to be sure where substance
begins and fringe ends. The cardinal fact for France and for Europe was
German unity. Ever since the Danish conflict, as Bismarck afterwards told
the British government,(200) the French Emperor strove to bring Prussia to
join him in plans for their common aggrandisement. The unity of Germany
meant, besides all else, a vast extension of the area from which the
material of military strength was to be drawn; and this meant the relative
depression of the power of French arms. Here was the substantial fact,
feeding the flame of national pride with solid fuel. The German
confederation of the Congress of Vienna was a skilful invention of
Metternich’s, so devised as to be inert for offence, but extremely
efficient against French aggression. A German confederation under the
powerful and energetic leadership of Prussia gave France a very different
neighbour.

In August 1867, the French ambassador at Berlin said to the ambassador of
Great Britain, “We can never passively permit the formation of a German
empire; the position of the Emperor of the French would become untenable.”
The British ambassador in Paris was told by the foreign minister there,
that “there was no wish for aggrandisement in the Emperor’s mind, but a
solicitude for the safety of France.” This solicitude evaporated in what
Bismarck disdainfully called the policy of _pourboires_, the policy of
tips and pickings—scraps and slips of territory to be given to France
under the diplomatic name of compensation. For three years it had been no
secret that peace was at the mercy of any incident that might arise.

The small Powers were in trepidation, and with good reason. Why should not
France take Belgium, and Prussia take Holland? The Belgian press did not
conceal bad feeling, and Bismarck let fall the ominous observation that if
Belgium persisted in that course, “she might pay dear for it.” The Dutch
minister told the British ambassador in Vienna that in 1865 he had a long
conversation with Bismarck, and Bismarck had given him to understand that
without colonies Prussia could never become a great maritime nation; he
coveted Holland less for its own sake, than for her wealthy colonies. When
reminded that Belgium was guaranteed by the European Powers, Bismarck
replied that “a guarantee was in these days of little value.” This remark
makes an excellent register of the diplomatic temperature of the hour.

Then for England. The French Emperor observed (1867), not without an
accent of complaint, that she seemed “little disposed to take part in the
affairs of the day.” This was the time of the Derby government. When war
seemed inevitable on the affair of Luxemburg, Lord Stanley, then at the
foreign office, phlegmatically remarked (1867) that England had never
thought it her business to guarantee the integrity of Germany. When
pressed from Prussia to say whether in the event of Prussia being forced
into war by France, England would take a part, Lord Stanley replied that
with the causes of that quarrel we had nothing to do, and he felt sure
that neither parliament nor the public would sanction an armed
interference on either side. Belgium, he added, was a different question.
General non-intervention, therefore, was the common doctrine of both our
parties.

(M102) After Mr. Gladstone had been a year in power, the chance of a
useful part for England to perform seemed to rise on the horizon, but to
those who knew the racing currents, the interplay of stern forces, the
chance seemed but dim and faint. Rumour and gossip of a pacific tenor
could not hide the vital fact of incessant military preparation on both
sides—steadfast and scientific in Prussia, loose and ill-concerted in
France. Along with the perfecting of arms, went on a busy search by France
for alliances. In the autumn of 1869 Lord Clarendon had gone abroad and
talked with important personages. Moltke told him that in Prussia they
thought war was near. To Napoleon the secretary of state spoke of the
monster armaments, the intolerable burden imposed upon the people, and the
constant danger of war that they created. The Emperor agreed—so Lord
Clarendon wrote to Mr. Gladstone (Sept. 18, ’69)—but went on to say that
during the King of Prussia’s life, and as long as the present Prussian
system lasted, he thought no change of importance could be effected. Still
the seed by and by appeared to have fallen on good ground. For in January
1870, in a conversation with the British ambassador, the French foreign
minister (Daru) suggested that England might use her good offices with
Prussia, to induce a partial disarmament in order that France might disarm
also. The minister, at the same time, wrote a long despatch in the same
sense to the French ambassador at St. James’s. Lord Clarendon perceived
the delicacy of opening the matter at Berlin, in view of the Prussian
monarch’s idolatry of his army. He agreed, however, to bring it before the
king, not officially, but in a confidential form. This would compromise
nobody. The French ambassador in London agreed, and Lord Clarendon wrote
the draft of a letter to Loftus in Berlin. He sent the draft to Mr.
Gladstone (Jan. 31, 1870) for “approval and criticism.” Mr. Gladstone
entered eagerly into Lord Clarendon’s benevolent correspondence:—


    _Mr. Gladstone to Lord Clarendon._

    _31 Jan. 1870._—The object of your letter on disarmament is noble,
    and I do not see how the terms of the draft can be improved. I
    presume you will let the Queen know what you are about, and
    possibly circumstances might arrive in which she could help?

    _7 Feb._—The answer to your pacific letter as reported by Loftus
    throws, I think, a great responsibility on the King of Prussia.

    _12 Feb._—I hope, with Daru, that you will not desist from your
    efforts, whatever be the best mode of prosecuting the good design.
    I thought Bismarck’s case, on Loftus’s letter, a very bad one. I
    do not think Lyons’s objections, towards the close of his letter,
    apply in a case where you have acted simply as a friend, and not
    in the name and on behalf of France.

    _18 Feb._—I return Bismarck’s confidential letter on disarmament.
    As the matter appears to me, the best that can be said for this
    letter is that it contains matter which might be used with more or
    less force in a conference on disarmament, by way of abating the
    amount of relative call on Prussia. As an argument against
    entertaining the subject, it is futile, and he ought at any rate
    to be made to feel his responsibility,—which, I daresay, you will
    contrive while acknowledging his civility.

    _9 April._—I presume you have now only in the matter of
    disarmament to express your inability to recede from your
    opinions, and your regret at the result of the correspondence. If
    inclined to touch the point, you might with perfect justice say
    that while our naval responsibilities for our sea defence have no
    parallel or analogue in the world, we have taken not far short of
    two millions off our estimates, and have not announced that the
    work of reduction is at an end: which, whether satisfactory or
    not, is enough, to show that you do not preach wholly without
    practising.


It is a striking circumstance, in view of what was to follow, that at this
moment when Mr. Gladstone first came into contact with Bismarck,—the
genius of popular right, and free government, and settled law of nations,
into contact with the genius of force and reason of state and blood and
iron—the realist minister of Prussia seemed to be almost as hopeful for
European peace as the minister of England. “The political horizon,”
Bismarck wrote (Feb. 22), “seen from Berlin appears at present so
unclouded that there is nothing of interest to report, and I only hope
that no unexpected event will render the lately risen hope of universal
peace questionable.”(201) The unexpected event did not tarry, and
Bismarck’s own share in laying the train is still one of the historic
enigmas of our time.



II


(M103) Ever since 1868 the statesmen of revolutionary Spain had looked for
a prince to fill their vacant throne. Among others they bethought
themselves of a member of a catholic branch of the house of Hohenzollern,
and in the autumn of 1869 an actual proposal was secretly made to Prince
Leopold. The thing lingered. Towards the end of February, 1870, Spanish
importunities were renewed, though still under the seal of strict secrecy,
even the Spanish ambassador in Paris being kept in the dark.(202) Leopold
after a long struggle declined the glittering bait. The rival pretenders
were too many, and order was not sure. Still his refusal was not
considered final. The chances of order improved, he changed his mind, and
on June 28 the Spanish emissary returned to Madrid with the news that the
Hohenzollern prince was ready to accept the crown. The King of Prussia,
not as king, but as head of the house, had given his assent. That Bismarck
invented the Hohenzollern candidature the evidence is not conclusive. What
is undoubted is that in the late spring of 1870 he took it up, and was
much discontented at its failure in that stage.(203) He had become aware
that France was striving to arrange alliances with Austria, and even with
Italy, in spite of the obnoxious presence of the French garrison at Rome.
It was possible that on certain issues Bavaria and the South might join
France against Prussia. All the hindrances to German unity, the jealousies
of the minor states, the hatred of the Prussian military system, were
likely to be aggravated by time, if France, while keeping her powder dry,
were to persevere in a prudent abstention. Bismarck believed that Moltke’s
preparations were more advanced than Napoleon’s. It was his interest to
strike before any French treaties of alliance were signed. The Spanish
crown was an occasion. It might easily become a pretext for collision if
either France or Germany thought the hour had come. If the Hohenzollern
candidate withdrew, it was a diplomatic success for France and a
humiliation to Germany; if not, a king from Prussia planted across the
Pyrenees, after the aggrandizements of north German power in 1864 and
1866, was enough to make Richelieu, Mazarin, Louis XIV., Bonaparte, even
Louis Philippe, turn in their graves.

On June 27, 1870, Lord Clarendon died, and on July 6 Lord Granville
received the seals of the foreign department from the Queen at Windsor.
The new chief had visited his office the day before, and the permanent
under-secretary coming into his room to report, gave him the most
remarkable assurance ever received by any secretary of state on first
seating himself at his desk. Lord Granville told the story in the House of
Lords on July 11, when the crash of the fiercest storm since Waterloo was
close upon them:—


    The able and experienced under-secretary, Mr. Hammond, at the
    foreign office told me, it being then three or four o’clock, that
    with the exception of the sad and painful subject about to be
    discussed this evening [the murders by brigands in Greece] he had
    never during his long experience known so great a lull in foreign
    affairs, and that he was not aware of any important question that
    I should have to deal with. At six o’clock that evening I received
    a telegram informing me of the choice that had been made by the
    provisional government of Spain of Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern,
    and of his acceptance of the offer. I went to Windsor the
    following day, and had the honour of receiving the seals of the
    foreign office from her Majesty. On my return I saw the Marquis de
    Lavalette, who informed me of the fact which I already knew, and
    in energetic terms remarked on the great indignity thus offered to
    France, and expressed the determination of the government of the
    Emperor not to permit the project to be carried out. M. Lavalette
    added that he trusted that her Majesty’s government, considering
    its friendly relations with France and its general desire to
    maintain peace, would use its influence with the other parties
    concerned. I told M. de Lavalette that the announcement had taken
    the prime minister and myself entirely by surprise.(204)


Yet two days before Mr. Hammond told Lord Granville that he was not aware
of anything important to be dealt with at the foreign department, a
deputation had started from Madrid with an invitation to Prince Leopold.
At the moment when this singular language was falling from our
under-secretary’s lips, the Duc de Gramont, the French foreign minister,
was telling Lord Lyons at Paris that France would not endure the insult,
and expressing his hope that the government of the Queen would try to
prevent it. After all, as we have seen, Bismarck in February had used
words not very unlike Mr. Hammond’s in July.

On July 5, the Emperor, who was at St. Cloud, sent for Baron Rothschild
(of Paris), and told him that as there was at that moment no foreign
minister in England, he wished to send through him a message to Mr.
Gladstone. He wanted Mr. Gladstone to be informed, that the council of
ministers at Madrid had decided to propose Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern
for the Spanish throne, that his candidature would be intolerable to
France, and that he hoped Mr. Gladstone would endeavour to secure its
withdrawal. The message was telegraphed to London, and early on the
morning of July 6, the present Lord Rothschild deciphered it for his
father, and took it to Carlton House Terrace. He found Mr. Gladstone on
the point of leaving for Windsor, and drove with him to the railway
station. For a time Mr. Gladstone was silent. Then he said he did not
approve of the candidature, but he was not disposed to interfere with the
liberty of the Spanish people to choose their own sovereign.

Lord Granville put pressure on the provisional government at Madrid to
withdraw their candidate, and on the government at Berlin “effectually to
discourage a project fraught with risks to the best interests of Spain.”
The draft of this despatch was submitted by Lord Granville to Mr.
Gladstone, who suggested a long addition afterwards incorporated in the
text. The points of his addition were an appeal to the magnanimity of the
King of Prussia; an injunction to say nothing to give ground for the
supposition that England had any business to discuss the abstract right of
Spain to choose her own sovereign; that the British government had not
admitted Prince Leopold’s acceptance of the throne to justify the
immediate resort to arms threatened by France; but that the secrecy with
which the affair had been conducted was a ground for just offence, and the
withdrawal of the prince could alone repair it.(205) Austria made
energetic representations at Berlin to the same effect. In sending this
addition to Lord Granville, Mr. Gladstone says (July 8), “I am doubtful
whether this despatch should go till it has been seen by the cabinet,
indeed I think it should not, and probably you mean this. The Queen
recollects being told something about this affair by Clarendon—without
result—last year. I think Gramont exacts too much. It would never do for
us to get up a combination of Powers in this difficult and slippery
matter.”

Events for a week—one of the great critical weeks of the century—moved at
a dizzy speed towards the abyss. Peace unfortunately hung upon the
prudence of a band of statesmen in Paris, who have ever since, both in
their own country and everywhere else, been a byword in history for
blindness and folly. The game was delicate. Even in the low and broken
estate into which the moral areopagus of Europe had fallen in these days,
it was a disadvantage to figure as the aggressor. This disadvantage the
French Empire heedlessly imposed upon itself. Of the diplomacy on the side
of the government of France anterior to the war, Mr. Gladstone said that
it made up “a chapter which for fault and folly taken together is almost
without a parallel in the history of nations.”(206)

On July 6 the French Ministers made a precipitate declaration to their
Chambers, which was in fact an ultimatum to Prussia. The action of Spain
was turned into Prussian action. Prussia was called to account in a form
that became a public and international threat, as Bismarck put it, “with
the hand on the sword-hilt.” These rash words of challenge were the first
of the French disasters. On July 8 the Duc de Gramont begged her Majesty’s
government to use all their influence to bring about the voluntary
renunciation by Prince Leopold of his pretensions. This he told Lord Lyons
would be “a most fortunate solution” of the question. Two days later he
assured Lord Lyons that “if the Prince of Hohenzollern should, on the
advice of the King of Prussia, withdraw his acceptance of the crown the
whole affair would be at an end.”

On July 10 Lord Granville suggests to Mr. Gladstone: “What do you think of
asking the Queen whether there is any one to whom she could write
confidentially with a view to persuade Hohenzollern to refuse?” Mr.
Gladstone replies:—


    1. I should think you could not do wrong in asking the Queen, as
    you propose, to procure if she can a refusal from Hohenzollern,
    through some private channel. 2. I suppose there could be no
    objection to sounding the Italian government as to the Duke of
    Aosta. 3. If in the meantime you have authentic accounts of
    military movements in France, would it not be right formally to
    ask their suspension, if it be still the desire of the French
    government that you should continue to act in the sense of
    procuring withdrawal?


The ambassador at Paris was instructed to work vigorously in this sense,
and to urge self-possession and measure upon the Emperor’s council. On
July 12, however, the prospects of peace grew more and more shadowy. On
that day it became known that Prince Leopold had spontaneously renounced
the candidature, or that his father had renounced it on his behalf. The
French ministers made up their minds that the defeat of Prussia must be
more direct. Gramont told Lyons (July 12) that the French government was
in a very embarrassing position. Public opinion was so much excited that
it was doubtful whether the ministry would not be overthrown, if it went
down to the Chamber and announced that it regarded the affair as finished,
without having obtained some more complete satisfaction from Prussia. So
the Emperor and his advisers flung themselves gratuitously under
Bismarck’s grinding wheels by a further demand that not only should the
candidature be withdrawn, but the King should pledge himself against its
ever being at any time revived. Mr. Gladstone was not slow to see the
fatal mischief of this new development.


    _Mr. Gladstone to Lord Granville._

    _July 12_, 11.30 P.M.—I have seen, since Rothschild’s
    telegram,(207) that of Lyons, dated 7.55 P.M. It seems to me that
    Lyons should be supplied with an urgent instruction by telegram
    before the council of ministers to-morrow. France appealed to our
    support at the outset. She received it so far as the immediate
    object was concerned. It was immediately and energetically given.
    It appears to have been named by the French minister in public
    inclusively with that of other Powers. Under these circumstances
    it is our duty to represent the immense responsibility which will
    rest upon France, if she does not at once accept as satisfactory
    and conclusive, the withdrawal of the candidature of Prince
    Leopold.


The substance of this note was despatched to Paris at 2.30 A.M. on the
morning of July 13. It did not reach Lord Lyons till half-past nine, when
the council of ministers had already been sitting for half an hour at St.
Cloud. The telegram was hastily embodied in the form of a tolerably
emphatic letter and sent by special messenger to St. Cloud, where it was
placed in M. de Gramont’s hand, at the table at which he and the other
ministers were still sitting in council in the presence of the Emperor and
the Empress.(208) At the same time Lord Granville strongly urged M. de
Lavalette in London, to impress upon his government that they ought not to
take upon themselves the responsibility of pursuing the quarrel on a
matter of form, when they had obtained what Gramont had assured Lord Lyons
would put an end to the dispute. Though Mr. Disraeli afterwards imputed
want of energy to the British remonstrances, there is no reason to suppose
that Lord Lyons was wanting either in directness or emphasis. What
warnings were likely to reach the minds of men trembling for their
personal popularity and for the dynasty, afraid of clamour in the streets,
afraid of the army, ignorant of vital facts both military and diplomatic,
incapable of measuring such facts even if they had known them, committed
by the rash declaration of defiance a week before to a position that made
retreat the only alternative to the sword? At the head of them all sat in
misery, a sovereign reduced by disease to a wavering shadow of the will
and vision of a man. They marched headlong to the pit that Bismarck was
digging for them.

(M104) On July 14 Mr. Gladstone again writes to Lord Granville, suggesting
answers to questions that might be asked that night in parliament. Should
they say that the candidature was withdrawn, and that with this withdrawal
we had a right to hope the whole affair would end, but that communications
were still continued with Prussia? In duty to all parties we were bound to
hope that the subject of complaint having disappeared, the complaint
itself and the danger to the peace of Europe would disappear also. Then he
proceeds: “What if you were to telegraph to Lyons to signify that we think
it probable questions may be asked in parliament to-day; that having been
called in by France itself, we cannot affect to be wholly outside the
matter; and that it will be impossible for us to conceal the opinion that
the cause of quarrel having been removed, France ought to be satisfied.
While this might fairly pass as a friendly notice, it might also be useful
as admonition. Please to consider. The claim in the telegrams for more
acknowledgment of the conduct of Prussia in parliament, seems to me to
deserve consideration.”

On July 13 Gramont asked Lord Lyons whether he could count upon the good
offices of England in obtaining the prohibition of any future candidature,
at the same time giving him a written assurance that this would terminate
the incident. Lord Lyons declined to commit himself, and referred home for
instructions. The cabinet was hastily summoned for noon on the 14th. It
decided that the demand could not be justified by France, and at the same
time took a step of which Gramont chose to say, that it was the one act
done by the English government in favour of peace. They suggested to
Bismarck that as the King of Prussia had consented to the acceptance by
Prince Leopold of the Spanish crown, and had thereby, in a certain sense,
become a party to the arrangement, so he might with perfect dignity
communicate to the French government his consent to the withdrawal of the
acceptance, if France waived her demand for an engagement covering the
future. This suggestion Bismarck declined (July 15) to bring before the
King, as he did not feel that he could recommend its acceptance. As he had
decided to hold France tight in the position in which her rulers had now
planted her, we can understand why he could not recommend the English
proposal to his master. Meanwhile the die was cast.



III


(M105) The King of Prussia was taking the waters of Ems. Thither
Benedetti, the French ambassador to his court, under instructions followed
him. The King with moderation and temper told him (July 11) he had just
received a telegram that the answer of Prince Leopold would certainly
reach him the next day, and he would then at once communicate it.
Something (some say Bismarck) prevented the arrival of the courier for
some hours beyond the time anticipated. On the morning of the 13th the
King met Benedetti on the promenade, and asked him if he had anything new
to say. The ambassador obeyed his orders, and told the King of the demand
for assurances against a future candidature. The King at once refused this
new and unexpected concession, but in parting from Benedetti said they
would resume their conversation in the afternoon. Meanwhile the courier
arrived, but before the courier a despatch came from Paris conveying the
suggestion that the King might write an apologetic letter to the French
Emperor. This naturally gave the King some offence, but he contented
himself with sending Benedetti a polite message by an aide-de-camp that he
had received in writing from Prince Leopold the intelligence of his
renunciation. “By this his Majesty considered the question as settled.”
Benedetti persevered in seeking to learn what answer he should make to his
government on the question of further assurances. The King replied by the
same officer that he was obliged to decline absolutely to enter into new
negotiations; that what he had said in the morning was his last word in
the matter. On July 14, the King received Benedetti in the railway
carriage on his departure for Berlin, told him that any future
negotiations would be conducted by his government, and parted from him
with courteous salutations. Neither king nor ambassador was conscious that
the country of either had suffered a shadow of indignity from the
representative of the other.

Bismarck called upon the British ambassador in those days, and made what,
in the light of later revelations, seems a singular complaint. He observed
that Great Britain “should have forbidden France to enter on the war. She
was in a position to do so, and her interests and those of Europe demanded
it of her.”(209) Later in the year he spoke in the same sense at
Versailles: “If, at the beginning of the war, the English had said to
Napoleon, ‘There must be no war,’ there would have been none.”(210) What
is certain is that nobody would have been more discomfited by the success
of England’s prohibition than Count Bismarck. The sincerity and substance
of his reproach are tested by a revelation made by himself long after.
Though familiar, the story is worth telling over again in the biography of
a statesman who stood for a type alien to policies of fraud.

(M106) Bismarck had hurried from Varzin to Berlin on July 12, in profound
concern lest his royal master should subject his country and his minister
to what, after the menace of Gramont and Ollivier on July 6, would be
grave diplomatic defeat. He had resolved to retire if the incident should
end in this shape, and the chief actor has himself described the strange
sinister scene that averted his design. He invited Moltke and Roon to dine
with him alone on July 13. In the midst of their conversation, “I was
informed,” he says, “that a telegram from Ems in cipher, if I recollect
rightly, of about 200 ‘groups’ was being deciphered. When the copy was
handed me it showed that Abeken had drawn up and signed the telegram at
his Majesty’s command, and I read it out to my guests, whose dejection was
so great that they turned away from food and drink. On a repeated
examination of the document I lingered upon the authorisation of his
Majesty, which included a command, immediately to communicate Benedetti’s
fresh demand and its rejection to our ambassadors and to the press. I put
a few questions to Moltke as to the extent of his confidence in the state
of our preparations, especially as to the time they would still require in
order to meet this sudden risk of war. He answered that if there was to be
war he expected no advantage to us by deferring its outbreak.... Under the
conviction that war could be avoided only at the cost of the honour of
Prussia, I made use of the royal authorisation to publish the contents of
the telegram; and in the presence of my two guests I reduced the telegram
by striking out words, but without adding or altering, to the following
form: ‘After the news of the renunciation of the hereditary Prince of
Hohenzollern had been officially communicated to the imperial government
of France by the royal government of Spain, the French ambassador at Ems
further demanded of his Majesty the King that he would authorise him to
telegraph to Paris that his Majesty the King bound himself for all future
time never again to give his consent if the Hohenzollerns should renew
their candidature. His Majesty the King thereupon decided not to receive
the French ambassador again, and sent to tell him through the aide-de-camp
on duty that his Majesty had nothing further to communicate to the
ambassador.’ The difference in the effect of the abbreviated text of the
Ems telegram, as compared with that produced by the original, was not the
result of stronger words but of the form, which made this announcement
appear decisive, while Abeken’s version would only have been regarded as a
fragment of a negotiation still pending and to be continued at Berlin.
After I had read out the concentrated edition to my two guests, Moltke
remarked: ‘Now it has a different ring; it sounded before like a parley;
now it is like a flourish in answer to a challenge.’ I went on to explain:
‘If in execution of his Majesty’s order I at once communicate this text,
which contains no alteration in or addition to the telegram, not only to
the newspapers, but also by telegraph to all our embassies, it will be
known in Paris before midnight, and not only an account of its contents,
but also an account of the manner of its distribution, will have the
effect of a red rag upon the Gallic bull. Fight we must, if we do not want
to act the part of the vanquished without a battle. Success, however,
essentially depends upon the impression which the origination of the war
makes upon us and others; it is important that we should be the party
attacked, and that we fearlessly meet the public threats of France.’ This
explanation brought about in the two generals a revulsion to a more joyous
mood, the liveliness of which surprised me. They had suddenly recovered
their pleasure in eating and drinking, and spoke in a more cheerful vein.
Roon said: ‘Our God of old lives still, and will not let us perish in
disgrace.’ ”(211)

The telegram devised at the Berlin dinner-party soon reached Paris. For a
second time the 14th day of July was to be a date of doom in French
history. The Emperor and his council deliberated on the grave question of
calling out the reserves. The decisive step had been pressed by Marshal
Lebœuf the night before without success. He now returned to the charge,
and this time his proposal was resolved upon. It was about four o’clock.
The marshal had hardly left the room before new scruples seized his
colleagues. The discussion began over again, and misgivings revived. The
Emperor showed himself downcast and worn out. Towards five o’clock
somebody came to tell them it was absolutely necessary that ministers
should present themselves before the Chambers. Gramont rose and told them
that if they wished an accommodation, there was still one way, an appeal
to Europe. The word congress was no sooner pronounced than the Emperor,
seized by extraordinary emotion at the thought of salvation by his own
favourite chimera, was stirred even to tears. An address to the Powers was
instantly drawn up, and the council broke off. At six o’clock Lebœuf
received a note from the Emperor, seeming to regret the decision to call
out the reserves. On Lebœuf’s demand the council was convoked for ten
o’clock that night. In the interval news came that the Ems telegram had
been communicated to foreign governments. As Bismarck had calculated, the
affront of the telegram was aggravated by publicity. At ten o’clock the
council met, and mobilisation was again considered. By eleven it was
almost decided that mobilisation should be put off. At eleven o’clock a
foreign office despatch arrived, and was read at the council. What was
this despatch, is not yet known—perhaps from the French military agent at
Berlin, with further news of Prussian preparations. It was of such a kind
that it brought about an instant reaction. The orders for mobilisation
were maintained.(212)

(M107) An inflammatory appeal was made to the Chambers. When a
parliamentary committee was appointed, a vital document was suppressed,
and its purport misrepresented. Thus in point of scruple, the two parties
to the transaction were not ill-matched, but Bismarck had been watchful,
provident, and well informed, while his opponents were men, as one of them
said, “of a light heart,” heedless, uncalculating, and ignorant and wrong
as to their facts.(213)

On July 15 Mr. Gladstone reported to the Queen:—


    Mr. Disraeli made inquiries from the government respecting the
    differences between France and Prussia, and in so doing expressed
    opinions strongly adverse to France as the apparent aggressor. Mr.
    Gladstone, in replying, admitted it to be the opinion of the
    government that there was no matter known to be in controversy of
    a nature to warrant a disturbance of the general peace. He said
    the course of events was not favourable, and the decisive moment
    must in all likelihood be close at hand.


“At a quarter past four,” says a colleague, “a cabinet box was handed down
the treasury bench to Gladstone. He opened it and looking along to us,
said—with an accent I shall never forget—‘_War declared against
Prussia._’ ”(214) “Shall I ever forget,” says Archbishop Tait,
“Gladstone’s face of earnest care when I saw him in the lobby?”(215)

The British cabinet made a final effort for peace. Lord Granville
instructed our ambassadors to urge France and Prussia to be so far
controlled by the treaty of Paris that before proceeding to extremities
they should have recourse to the good offices of some friendly Power,
adding that his government was ready to take any part that might be
desired in the matter. On the 18th Bismarck replied by throwing the onus
of acceptance on France. On the 19th France declined the proposal.

Just as Bismarck said that England ought to have prevented the war,
Frenchmen also said that we ought to have held the Emperor back. With what
sanction could Mr. Gladstone have enforced peremptory counsel? Was France
to be made to understand that England would go to war on the Prussian
side? Short of war, what more could she have done? Lord Granville had told
Gramont that he had never in despatch or conversation admitted that after
the French had received satisfaction in substance, there was a case for a
quarrel on pure form. The British cabinet and their ambassador in Paris
had redoubled warning and remonstrance. If the Emperor and his advisers
did not listen to the penetrating expostulations of Thiers, and to his
vigorous and instructed analysis of the conditions of their case, why
should they listen to Lord Granville? Nor was there time, for their
precipitancy had kindled a conflagration before either England or any
other Power had any chance of extinguishing the blaze.(216)

To Michel Chevalier Mr. Gladstone wrote a few days later:—


    I cannot describe to you the sensation of pain, almost of horror,
    which, has thrilled through this country from end to end at the
    outbreak of hostilities, the commencement of the work of blood. I
    suppose there was a time when England would have said, “Let our
    neighbours, being, as they are, our rivals, waste their energies,
    their wealth, their precious irrevocable lives, in destroying one
    another: they will be the weaker, we shall be relatively the
    stronger.” But we have now unlearned that bad philosophy; and the
    war between France and Prussia saddens the whole face of society,
    and burdens every man with a personal grief. We do not pretend to
    be sufficient judges of the merits: I now mean by “we” those who
    are in authority, and perhaps in a condition to judge least ill.
    We cannot divide praise and blame as between parties. I hope you
    do not think it unkind that I should write thus. Forgive the
    _rashness_ of a friend. One of the purposes in life dear to my
    heart has been to knit together in true amity the people of my own
    country with those of your great nation. That web of concord is
    too tender yet, not to suffer under the rude strain of conflicts
    and concussions even such as we have no material share in. I think
    that even if I err, I cannot be without a portion of your
    sympathy: now when the knell of the brave begins to toll. As for
    us, we have endeavoured to cherish with both the relations of
    peace and mutual respect. May nothing happen to impair them!


Though good feeling prevented Mr. Gladstone from dividing praise and blame
between the two governments, his own judgment was clear. The initial
declaration of July 6, followed by the invention of a second demand by
France upon Prussia after the first had been conceded, looked to him, as
it did to England generally, like a fixed resolution to force a quarrel.
In September he wrote of the proceedings of the French government:—


    Wonder rises to its climax when we remember that this feverish
    determination to force a quarrel was associated with a firm belief
    in the high preparation and military superiority of the French
    forces, the comparative inferiority of the Germans, the
    indisposition of the smaller states to give aid to Prussia, and
    even the readiness of Austria, with which from his long residence
    at Vienna the Duc de Gramont supposed himself to be thoroughly
    acquainted, to appear in arms as the ally of France. It too soon
    appeared that, as the advisers of the Emperor knew nothing of
    public rights and nothing of the sense of Europe, so they knew
    nothing about Austria and the mind of the German states, and less
    than nothing about not only the Prussian army, but even their
    own.(217)




Chapter V. Neutrality And Annexation. (1870)


    The immediate purpose with which Italians and Germans effected the
    great change in the European constitution was unity, not liberty.
    They constructed not securities but forces. Machiavelli’s time had
    come.—ACTON.



I


(M108) “The war is a grievous affair,” Mr. Gladstone said to Brand, “and
adds much to our cares, for to maintain our neutrality in such a case as
this, will be a most arduous task. On the face of the facts France is
wrong, but as to personal trustworthiness the two moving spirits on the
respective sides, Napoleon and Bismarck, are nearly on a par.” His
individual activity was unsparing. He held almost daily conferences with
Lord Granville at the foreign office; criticised and minuted despatches;
contributed freely to the drafts. “There has not, I think,” he wrote to
Bright (Sept. 12), “been a single day on which Granville and I have not
been in anxious communication on the subject of the war.” When Lord
Granville went to Walmer he wrote to Mr. Gladstone, “I miss our
discussions here over the despatches as they come in very much.” “I hope I
need not say that while you are laid up with gout at Walmer,” Mr.
Gladstone wrote in October, “I am most ready to start at a few hours’
notice at any time of day or night, to join you upon any matter which you
may find to require it. Indeed I could not properly or with comfort remain
here upon any other terms.” Details of this agitating time, with all its
convulsions and readjustments, belong to the history of Europe. The part
taken by Mr. Gladstone and his cabinet was for several months in pretty
close harmony with the humour of the country. It will be enough for us to
mark their action at decisive moments.

On July 16 he wrote to Cardwell at the war office:—


    If, unhappily, which God forbid, we have to act in this war, it
    will not be with six months’, nor three months’, nor even one
    month’s notice. The real question is, supposing an urgent call of
    honour and of duty in an emergency for 15,000 or 20,000 men, what
    would you do? What answer would the military authorities make to
    this question, those of them especially who have brains rather
    than mere position? Have you no fuller battalions than those of
    500? At home or in the Mediterranean? If in the latter, should
    they not be brought home? Childers seemed to offer a handsome
    subscription of marines, and that the artillery would count for
    much in such a case is most probable. What I should like is to
    study the means of sending 20,000 men to Antwerp with as much
    promptitude as at the Trent affair we sent 10,000 to Canada.


The figures of the army and navy were promptly supplied to the prime
minister, Cardwell adding with, a certain shrillness that, though he had
no wish to go either to Antwerp or anywhere else, he could not be
responsible for sending an expedition abroad, unless the army were fitted
for that object by measures taken now to increase its force.


    I entirely agree with you, Mr. Gladstone replied, that _when_ it
    is seriously intended to send troops to Antwerp or elsewhere
    abroad, “immediate measures must be taken to increase our force.”
    I feel, however, rather uneasy at what seems to me the extreme
    susceptibility on one side of the case of some members of the
    cabinet. I hope it will be balanced by considering the effect of
    any forward step by appeal to parliament, in compromising the true
    and entire neutrality of our position, and in disturbing and
    misdirecting the mind of the public and of parliament. I am afraid
    I have conveyed to your mind a wrong impression as to the state of
    my own. It is only a far outlook which, in my opinion, brings into
    view as a possibility the sending a force to Antwerp. Should the
    day arrive, we shall then be on the very edge of war, with
    scarcely a hope of not passing onward into the abyss.


Cardwell sent him a paper by a high military authority, on which Mr.
Gladstone made two terse ironic comments. “I think the paper,” he said,
“if it proves anything proves (1) That generals and not ministers are the
proper judges of those weights in the political scales which express the
likelihood of war and peace; (2) That there is very little difference
between absolute neutrality and actual war. I advise that Granville should
see it.”

On July 25 the _Times_ divulged the text of a projected agreement in 1869
(it was in truth 1867) between the French and Prussian governments in five
articles, including one that the incorporation of Belgium by France would
not be objected to by Prussia. The public was shocked and startled, and
many were inclined to put down the document for a forgery and a hoax. As a
matter of fact, in substance it was neither. The Prussian ambassador a few
days before had informed Mr. Gladstone and Lord Granville personally and
in strict secrecy, that the draft of such a project existed in the
handwriting of M. Benedetti. This private communication was taken by Mr.
Gladstone to have been made with the object of prompting him to be the
agent in producing the evil news to the world, and thus to prejudice
France in the judgment of Europe. He thought that no part of his duty, and
took time to consider it, in the expectation that it was pretty sure to
find its way into print by some other means, as indeed soon happened. “For
the sake of peace,” Bismarck explained to Lord Granville (July 28, 1870),
“I kept the secret, and treated the propositions in a dilatory manner.”
When the British ambassador on one occasion had tried to sound him on the
suspected designs of France, Bismarck answered, “It is no business of mine
to tell French secrets.”

(M109) There were members of the cabinet who doubted the expediency of
England taking any action. The real position of affairs, they argued, was
not altered: the draft treaty only disclosed what everybody believed
before, namely that France sought compensation for Prussian
aggrandisement, as she had secured it for Italian aggrandisement by taking
Savoy and Nice. That Prussia would not object, provided the compensations
were not at the expense of people who spoke German, had all come out at
the time of the Luxemburg affair. If France and Prussia agreed, how could
we help Belgium, unless indeed Europe joined? But then what chance was
there of Russia and Austria joining against France and Prussia for the
sake of Belgium, in which neither of them had any direct interest? At the
same time ministers knew that the public in England expected them to do
something, though a vote for men and money would probably suffice. The
cabinet, however, advanced a step beyond a parliamentary vote. On July 30
they met and took a decision to which Mr. Gladstone then and always after
attached high importance. England proposed a treaty to Prussia and France,
providing that if the armies of either violated the neutrality of Belgium,
Great Britain would co-operate with the other for its defence, but without
engaging to take part in the general operations of the war. The treaty was
to hold good for twelve months after the conclusion of the war. Bismarck
at once came into the engagement. France loitered a little, but after the
battle of Wörth made no more difficulty, and the instrument was signed on
August 9.

                  ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐

The mind of the government was described by Mr. Gladstone in a letter to
Bright (August 1):—


    Although some members of the cabinet were inclined on the outbreak
    of this most miserable war to make military preparations, others,
    Lord Granville and I among them, by no means shared that
    disposition, nor I think was the feeling of parliament that way
    inclined. But the publication of the treaty has altered all this,
    and has thrown upon us the necessity either of doing something
    fresh to secure Belgium, or else of saying that under no
    circumstances would we take any step to secure her from
    absorption. This publication has wholly altered the feeling of the
    House of Commons, and no government could at this moment venture
    to give utterance to such an intention about Belgium. But neither
    do we think it would be right, even if it were safe, to announce
    that we would in any case stand by with folded arms, and see
    actions done which would amount to a total extinction of public
    right in Europe.


The idea of engagements that might some day involve resort to force made
Bright uneasy, and Mr. Gladstone wrote to him again (August 4):—


    It will be a great addition to the domestic portion of the griefs
    of this most unhappy war, if it is to be the cause of a political
    severance between you and the present administration. To this I
    know you would justly reply that the claims of conviction are
    paramount. I hope, however, that the moment has not quite
    arrived.... You will, I am sure, give me credit for good faith
    when I say, especially on Lord Granville’s part as on my own, who
    are most of all responsible, that we take this step in the
    interest of peace.... The recommendation set up in opposition to
    it generally is, that we should simply declare _we_ will defend
    the neutrality of Belgium by arms in case it should be attacked.
    Now the sole or single-handed defence of Belgium would be an
    enterprise which we incline to think Quixotic; if these two great
    military powers combined against it—that combination is the only
    serious danger; and this it is which by our proposed engagements
    we should I hope render improbable to the very last degree. I add
    for myself this confession of faith. If the Belgian people desire,
    on their own account, to join France or any other country, I for
    one will be no party to taking up arms to prevent it. But that the
    Belgians, whether they would or not, should go ’plump’ down the
    maw of another country to satisfy dynastic greed, is another
    matter. The accomplishment of such a crime as this implies, would
    come near to an extinction of public right in Europe, and I do not
    think we could look on while the sacrifice of freedom and
    independence was in course of consummation.



II


(M110) By the end of the first week of August the storm of war had burst
upon the world. “On the 2nd of August, in the insignificant affair of
Saarbrück, the Emperor of the French assumed a feeble offensive. On the
4th, the Prussians replied energetically at Wissemburg. And then what a
torrent, what a deluge of events! In twenty-eight days ten battles were
fought. Three hundred thousand men were sent to the hospitals, to
captivity, or to the grave. The German enemy had penetrated into the
interior of France, over a distance of a hundred and fifty miles of
territory, and had stretched forth everywhere as he went the strong hand
of possession. The Emperor was a prisoner, and had been deposed with
general consent; his family wanderers, none knew where; the embryo at
least of a republic, born of the hour, had risen on the ruins of the
empire, while proud and gorgeous Paris was awaiting with divided mind the
approach of the conquering monarch, and his countless host.”(218) This was
Mr. Gladstone’s description of a marvellous and shattering hour.

Talleyrand was fond in the days of 1815 at Vienna, of applying to any
diplomatist who happened to agree with him the expression, “a good
European.” He meant a statesman who was capable of conceiving the
state-system of the western world as a whole. The events of August made
the chief minister of Austria now exclaim, “I see no longer any Europe.”
All the notions of alliance that had so much to do with the precipitation
of the war were dissipated. Italy, so far from joining France, marched
into Rome. Austria ostentatiously informed England that she was free from
engagements. The Czar of Russia was nephew of the Prussian king and German
in his leanings, but Gortchakoff, his minister, was jealous of Bismarck,
and his sympathies inclined to France, and Czar and minister alike nursed
designs in the Black Sea. With such materials as these Mr. Pitt himself
with all his subsidies could not have constructed a fighting coalition.
Even the sons of stricken France after the destruction of the empire were
a divided people. For side by side with national defence against the
invader, republican and monarchic propagandism was at work, internecine in
its temper and scattering baleful seeds of civil war.

“Many,” Mr. Gladstone wrote to Chevalier in September, “seem so
over-sanguine as to suppose that it is in our power at any moment, by
friendly influence of reasoning, to solve the problem which has brought
together in the shock of battle the two greatest military powers of
Europe.... I do not see that it is an offence on our part not to interfere
when the belligerents differ so widely, when we have not the hope of
bringing them together, and when we cannot adopt without reserve the
language and claims of either.” Material responsibility and moral
responsibility both pointed to a rigid equity between the combatants, and
to strict neutrality. The utmost to be done was to localise the war; and
with this aim, the British cabinet induced Italy, Austria, Russia, and
smaller powers to come to a common agreement that none of them would
depart from neutrality without a previous understanding with the rest.
This league of the neutrals, though negative, was at least a shadow of
collective action, from which good might come if the belligerents should
some day accept or invite mediation. To this diplomatic neutrality the
only alternative was an armed neutrality, and armed neutrality has not
always served pacific ends.

To the German contention at one stage after the overthrow of the empire,
that the Empress was still the only authority existing legally for France,
Mr. Gladstone was energetically opposed. “It embodied,” he said, “the
doctrine that no country can have a new government without the consent of
the old one.” “Ought we,” he asked Lord Granville (Sept. 20), “to witness
in silence the promulgation of such a doctrine, which is utterly opposed
to the modern notions of public right, though it was in vogue fifty years
back, and though it was acted on with most fatal consequences by the
Prussians of eighty years back?” Then as for mediation, whether isolated
or in common, he saw no hope in it. He said to the Duke of Argyll (Sept.
6), “I would not say a word ever so gently. I believe it would do great
mischief. As at present advised, I see but two really safe grounds for
mediation, (1) a drawn battle; (2) the request of both parties.” Ever
since 1862, and his error in the American war—so he now wrote to Lord
Granville—“in forming and expressing an opinion that the Southerners had
virtually established their independence, I have been very fearful of
giving opinions with regard to the proper course of foreign nations to
pursue in junctures, of which, after all, I think they have better means
of forming a judgment than foreigners can possess.”

In the middle of September Thiers, in the course of his valiant mission to
European courts, reached London. “Yesterday,” Mr. Gladstone writes (Sept.
14), “I saw Thiers and had a long conversation with him; he was very clear
and touching in parts. But the purpose of his mission is vague. He seems
come to do just what he can.” The vagueness of Thiers did but mirror the
distractions of France. Not even from his ingenious, confident, and
fertile mind could men hope for a clue through the labyrinth of European
confusions. Great Britain along with four other powers recognised the new
government of the Republic in France at the beginning of February 1871.

(M111) It was about this time that Mr. Gladstone took what was for a prime
minister the rather curious step of volunteering an anonymous article in a
review, upon these great affairs in which his personal responsibility was
both heavy and direct.(219) The precedent can hardly be called a good one,
for as anybody might have known, the veil was torn aside in a few hours
after the _Edinburgh Review_ containing his article appeared. Its object,
he said afterwards, was “to give what I thought needful information on a
matter of great national importance, which involved at the time no
interest of party whatever. If such interests had been involved, a rule
from which I have never as a minister diverted would have debarred me from
writing.” Lord Granville told him that, “It seemed to be an admirable
argument, the more so as it is the sort of thing Thiers ought to have said
and did not.” The article made a great noise, as well it might, for it was
written with much eloquence, truth, and power, and was calculated to
console his countrymen for seeing a colossal European conflict going on,
without the privilege of a share in it. One passage about happy
England—happy especially that the wise dispensation of Providence had cut
her off by the streak of silver sea from continental dangers—rather
irritated than convinced. The production of such an article under such
circumstances was a striking illustration of Mr. Gladstone’s fervid
desire—the desire of a true orator’s temperament—to throw his eager mind
upon a multitude of men, to spread the light of his own urgent conviction,
to play the part of missionary with a high evangel, which had been his
earliest ideal forty years before. Everybody will agree that it was better
to have a minister writing his own articles in a respectable quarterly,
than doctoring other people’s articles with concomitants from a reptile
fund.



III


On the vital question of the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine, Mr.
Gladstone’s view was easy to anticipate. He could not understand how the
French protests turned more upon the inviolability of French soil, than on
the attachment of the people of Alsace and North Lorraine to their
country. The abstract principle he thought peculiarly awkward in a nation
that had made recent annexations of her own. Upon all his correspondents
at home and abroad, he urged that the question ought to be worked on the
basis of the sentiments of the people concerned, and not upon the
principle of inviolability. He composed an elaborate memorandum for the
cabinet, but without effect. On the last day of September, he records:
“_Sept. 30_: Cabinet 2-1/4-6. I failed in my two objects. 1. An effort to
speak with the other neutral Powers against the transfer of Alsace and
Lorraine without reference to the populations. 2. Immediate release of
Fenian prisoners.”

To Mr. Bright, who was still prevented by illness from attending cabinets,
and who had the second of the two objects much at heart, he wrote the next
day:—


    I send for your private perusal the enclosed mem. which I proposed
    to the cabinet yesterday, but could not induce them to adopt. It
    presupposes the concurrence of the neutral Powers. They agreed in
    the opinions, but did not think the expression of them timely. My
    opinion certainly is that the transfer of territory and
    inhabitants by mere force calls for the reprobation of Europe, and
    that Europe is entitled to utter it, and can utter it with good
    effect.


The ground taken by him in the cabinet was as follows:—


    A matter of this kind cannot be regarded as in principle a
    question between the two belligerents only, but involves
    considerations of legitimate interest to all the Powers of Europe.
    It appears to bear on the Belgian question in particular. It is
    also a principle likely to be of great consequence in the eventual
    settlement of the Eastern question. Quite apart from the subject
    of mediation, it cannot be right that the neutral Powers should
    remain silent, while this principle of consulting the wishes of
    the population is trampled down, should the actual sentiment of
    Alsace and Lorraine be such as to render that language applicable.
    The mode of expressing any view of this matter is doubtless a
    question requiring much consideration. The decision of the cabinet
    was that the time for it had not yet come. Any declaration in the
    sense described would, Mr. Gladstone thought, entail, in fairness,
    an obligation to repudiate the present claim of France to obtain
    peace without surrendering “either an inch of her territory or a
    stone of her fortresses.”


Mr. Bright did not agree with him, but rather favoured the principle of
inviolability. In November Mr. Gladstone prepared a still more elaborate
memorandum in support of a protest from the neutral Powers. The Duke of
Argyll put what was perhaps the general view when he wrote to Mr.
Gladstone (Nov. 25, 1870), “that he had himself never argued in favour of
the German annexation of Alsace and Lorraine, but only against our having
any right to oppose it otherwise than by the most friendly dissuasion.”
The Duke held that the consent of populations to live under a particular
government is a right subject to a great many qualifications, and it would
not be easy to turn such a doctrine into the base of an official
remonstrance. After all, he said, the instincts of nations stand for
something in this world. The German did not exceed the ancient
acknowledged right of nations in successful wars, when he said to Alsace
and Lorraine, “Conquest in a war forced upon me by the people of which you
form a part, gives me the _right_ to annex, if on other grounds I deem it
expedient, and for strategic reasons I do so deem it.”

Mr. Gladstone, notwithstanding his cabinet, held to his view energetically
expressed as follows:—


    If the contingency happen, not very probable, of a sudden
    accommodation which shall include the throttling of Alsace and
    part of Lorraine, without any voice previously raised against it,
    it will in my opinion be a standing reproach to England. There is
    indeed the Russian plan of not recognising that in which we have
    had no part; but it is difficult to say what this comes to.


On December 20 he says to Lord Granville what we may take for a last word
on this part of the case: “While I more and more feel the deep culpability
of France, I have an apprehension that this violent laceration and
transfer is to lead us from bad to worse, and to be the _beginning_ of a
new series of European complications.”

While working in the spirit of cordial and even eager loyalty to the prime
minister, Lord Granville disagreed with him upon the question of
diplomatic action against annexation. Palmerston, he said to Mr. Gladstone
in October, “wasted the strength derived by England by the great war by
his brag. I am afraid of our wasting that which we at present derive from
moral causes, by laying down general principles when nobody will attend to
them, and when in all probability they will be disregarded. My objection
to doing at present what you propose is, that it is impossible according
to my views to do so without being considered to throw our weight into the
French scale against Germany, with consequent encouragement on one side
and irritation on the other.”

Like Thiers, Mr. Gladstone had been leaning upon the concurrence of the
neutral Powers, and active co-operation at St. Petersburg. Russian objects
were inconsistent with the alienation of Germany, and they made a fatal
bar to all schemes for lowering the German terms. This truth of the
situation was suddenly brought home to England in no palatable way.




Chapter VI. The Black Sea. (1870-1871)


    “You are always talking to me of principles. As if your public law
    were anything to me; I do not know what it means. What do you
    suppose that all your parchments and your treaties signify to me?”

    —ALEXANDER I. To TALLEYRAND.



I


At the close of the Crimean war in 1856 by the provisions of the treaty of
Paris, Russia and Turkey were restrained from constructing arsenals on the
coast of the Euxine, and from maintaining ships of war on its waters. No
serious statesman believed that the restriction would last, any more than
Napoleon’s restraint on Prussia in 1808 against keeping up an army of more
than forty thousand men could last. Palmerston had this neutralisation
more at heart than anybody else, and Lord Granville told the House of
Lords what durability Palmerston expected for it:—


    General Ignatieff told me that he remarked to Lord Palmerston,
    “These are stipulations which you cannot expect will last long,”
    and Lord Palmerston replied, “They will last ten years.” A learned
    civilian, a great friend of mine, told me he heard Lord Palmerston
    talk on the subject, and say, “Well, at all events they will last
    my life.” A noble peer, a colleague of mine, an intimate friend of
    Lord Palmerston, says Lord Palmerston told him they would last
    seven years.(220)


In 1856 Mr. Gladstone declared his opinion, afterwards often repeated,
that the neutralisation of the Black Sea, popular as it might be in
England at the moment, was far from being a satisfactory arrangement.(221)
Were the time to come, he said, when Russia might resume aggressive
schemes on Turkey, he believed that neutralisation would mean nothing but
a series of pitfalls much deeper than people expected.(222) These pitfalls
now came into full view. On the last day of October Prince Gortchakoff
addressed a circular to the Powers, announcing that his imperial master
could “no longer consider himself bound to the terms of the treaty of
March 1856, in so far as these limit his rights of sovereignty in the
Black Sea.” On the merits there was very little real dispute in Europe. As
Lord Granville once wrote to Mr. Gladstone: “There was no doubt about
Germany having at Paris, and subsequently, always taken the Russian view.
France made an intimation to the same effect very soon after the
conclusion of the treaty. And Austria later. Italy did the same, but not
in so decided a manner.... I have frequently said in public that with the
exception of ourselves and the Turks, all the co-signatories of the treaty
of Paris had expressed views in favour of modifying the article, previous
to Prince Gortchakoff’s declaration.”(223)

(M112) To have a good case on the merits was one thing, and to force it at
the sword’s point was something extremely different. As Mr. Gladstone put
it in a memorandum that became Lord Granville’s despatch, “the question
was not whether any desire expressed by Russia ought to be carefully
examined in a friendly spirit by the co-signatory powers, but whether they
are to accept from her an announcement that by her own act, without any
consent from them, she has released herself from a solemn covenant.”(224)
Mr. Gladstone, not dissenting on the substance of the Russian claim, was
outraged by the form. The only parallel he ever found to Gortchakoff’s
proceedings in 1870 was a certain claim, of which we shall soon see
something, made by America in 1872. “I have had half an idea,” he wrote to
Lord Granville, “that it might be well I should see Brunnow [the Russian
ambassador] either with you or alone. All know the mischief done by the
Russian idea of Lord Aberdeen, and the opposition are in the habit of
studiously representing me as his double, or his heir in pacific
traditions. This I do not conceive to be true, and possibly I might
undeceive Brunnow a little.”

In this country, as soon as the news of the circular was made known, the
public excitement was intense. Consols instantly dropped heavily. Apart
from the form of the Russian claim, the public still alert upon the
eastern question, felt that the question was once more alive. As Mr.
Gladstone had said to Lord Granville (Oct. 4, 1870), “Everybody at a time
like this looks out for booty; it will be hard to convince central Europe
that Turkey is not a fair prize.” From France Lord Lyons wrote to Mr.
Gladstone (Nov. 14) that the Russian declaration was looked upon with
complacency, because it might lead to a congress, and at all events it
might, by causing a stir among the neutrals, give a check to Prussia as
well as to Russia.

Lord Granville wrote to Mr. Gladstone, who was at Hawarden (Nov. 21):—


    I am very sorry to hear that you are not well. Of course, you must
    run no risk, but as soon as you can you will, I hope, come up and
    have a cabinet. Childers has been here. He tells me there is a
    perfect howl about ministers not meeting. He is more quiet in his
    talk than I hear some of our colleagues are. But he says if there
    is to be war, every day lost is most injurious. I have told him
    that it is impossible to say that we may not be driven into it by
    Russia, or by other foreign powers, or by our own people; that we
    must take care of our dignity; but if there ever was a cabinet
    which is bound not to drift into an unnecessary war, it is ours.


Mr. Gladstone replied next day:—


    I will frankly own that I am much disgusted with a good deal of
    the language that I have read in the newspapers within the last
    few days about immediate war with Russia. I try to put a check on
    myself to prevent the reaction it engenders. Your observation on
    drifting into war is most just: though I always thought
    Clarendon’s epithet in this one case inapplicable as well as
    unadvisable. I know, however, nothing more like drifting into war
    than would be a resort to any military measures whatever, except
    with reference either to some actual fact or some well defined
    contingency....



II


The courses open to the British Government in the face of the circular
were these. They might silently or with a protest acquiesce. Or they might
declare an offensive war (much deprecated by Turkey herself) against a
nation that had peculiar advantages for defence, and for an object that
every other signatory power thought in itself a bad object. Third, they
might, in accordance with a wonderfully grand scheme suggested to
ministers, demand from Germany, all flushed as she was with military
pride, to tell us plainly whether she was on our side or Russia’s; and if
the German answer did not please us, then we should make an offensive
alliance with France, Austria, Italy, and Turkey checking Russia in the
east and Germany in the west. A fourth plan was mutely to wait, on the
plea that whatever Russia might have said, nothing had been done. The
fifth plan was a conference. This was hardly heroic enough to please
everybody in the cabinet. At least it saved us from the insanity of a war
that would have intensified European confusion, merely to maintain
restraints considered valuable by nobody. The expedient of a conference
was effectively set in motion by Bismarck, then pre-occupied in his
critical Bavarian treaty and the siege of Paris. On November 12, Mr. Odo
Russell left London for Versailles on a special mission to the Prussian
king. The intrepidity of our emissary soon secured a remarkable success,
and the episode of Bismarck’s intervention in the business was important.

(M113) Mr. Odo Russell had three hours’ conversation with Count Bismarck
on November 21. Bismarck told him that the Russian circular had taken him
by surprise; that though he had always thought the treaty of 1856 too hard
upon Russia, he entirely disapproved both of the manner and time chosen
for forcing on a revision of it; that he could not interfere nor even
answer the circular, but to prevent the outbreak of another war he would
recommend conferences at Constantinople.(225) The conversation broke off
at four o’clock in the afternoon, with this unpromising cast. At ten in
the evening it was resumed; it was prolonged until half an hour beyond
midnight. “I felt I knew him better,” Mr. Russell in an unofficial letter
tells Lord Granville (Nov. 30), “and could express more easily all that I
had determined to say to convince him that unless he could get Russia to
withdraw the circular, we should be compelled with or without allies to go
to war.” Bismarck remained long obstinate in his professed doubts of
England going to war; but he gradually admitted the truth of the
consequences to which a pacific acceptance of “the Russian kick must
inevitably lead. And so he came round to the British point of view, and
felt that in our place he could not recede.”

It was not hard to see Bismarck’s interests. The mischief to Germany of
another European war before Paris had fallen; the moral support to be
derived by the Tours government from a revival of the old Anglo-French
alliance; the chances of Beust and other persons fishing in the troubled
waters of an extended European conflict; the vital importance of peace to
the reconstruction of Germany—these were the disadvantages to his own
country and policy, of a war between England and Russia; these worked the
change in his mind between afternoon and midnight, and led him to support
the cause of England and peace against Gortchakoff and his circular.
Characteristically, at the same time he strove hard to drive a bargain
with the English agent, and to procure some political advantages in
exchange for his moral support. “In politics,” he said, “one hand should
wash the other” (_eine Hand die andere waschen muss_). In Mr. Odo Russell,
however, he found a man who talked the language, kept the tone and was
alive to all the arts of diplomatic business, and no handwashing followed.
When Mr. Russell went to his apartment in the Place Hoche at Versailles
that night, he must have felt that he had done a good day’s work.

In the following year, papers were laid before parliament, and attention
was drawn to the language used by Mr. Russell to Bismarck, in the pregnant
sentence about the question being of a nature in its present state to
compel us with or without allies, to go to war with Russia.(226) Mr.
Gladstone, when directly challenged, replied (Feb. 16) that the agent had
used this argument without specific authority or instruction from the
government, but that the duty of diplomatic agents required them to
express themselves in the mode in which they think they can best support
the proposition of which they wish to procure acceptance. Mr. Odo Russell
explained to Mr. Gladstone (Feb. 27) that he was led to use the argument
about England being compelled to go to war with or without allies by these
reasons: that we were bound by a definite treaty to regard any
retractation of the stipulations of March 30, 1856, as a cause of
war;(227) that Gortchakoff’s assumption of a right to renounce provisions
directly touching Russian interests seemed to carry with it the assumption
of a right to renounce all the rest of the treaty; that Mr. Gladstone’s
government had declared (Nov. 10) that it was impossible to sanction the
course announced by Gortchakoff; that, therefore, France being otherwise
engaged, and Austria being unprepared, we might be compelled by our joint
and several obligations under the tripartite treaty, to go to war with
Russia for proceedings that we pronounced ourselves unable to sanction;
finally, that he had never been instructed to state to Prussia, that the
question was not one compelling us ever to go to war, notwithstanding our
treaty engagements. What was Mr. Gladstone’s reply to this I do not find,
but Lord Granville had very sensibly written to him some weeks before
(Dec. 8, 1870):—


    I am afraid our whole success has been owing to the belief that we
    would go to war, and to tell the truth, I think that war in some
    shape or other, sooner or later, was a possible risk after our
    note. In any case, I would reassure nobody now. Promising peace is
    as unwise as to threaten war. A sort of instinct that the bumps of
    combativeness and destructiveness are to be found somewhere in
    your head, has helped us much during the last five months.



III


(M114) Having undertaken to propose a conference, Bismarck did the best he
could for it. The British cabinet accepted on condition that the
conference was not to open with any previous assumption of Gortchakoff’s
declaration, and they objected to Petersburg as the scene of operations.
Mr. Gladstone in some notes prepared for the meeting of his colleagues
(Nov. 26), was very firm on the first and main point, that “Her Majesty’s
government could enter into no conference which should assume any portion
of the treaty to have been already abrogated by the discretion of a single
Power, and it would be wholly out of place for them, under the present
circumstances, to ask for a conference, as they were not the parties who
desire to bring about any change in the treaty.” Russia made difficulties,
but Bismarck’s influence prevailed. The conference assembled not at
Petersburg but in London, and subject to no previous assumption as to its
results.(228)

The close of a negotiation is wont to drop the curtain over embarrassments
that everybody is glad to forget;(229) but the obstacles to an exact
agreement were not easily overcome. Lord Granville told Mr. Gladstone that
no fewer than thirteen or fourteen versions of the most important protocol
were tried before terms were reached. In the end Lord Granville’s
conclusion was that, as no just rights had been sacrificed, it was a
positive advantage that Russia should be gratified by the removal of
restraints naturally galling to her pride.

The conference opened at the foreign office on Dec. 17, and held its final
meeting on March 13. Delay was caused by the difficulty of procuring the
attendance of a representative of France. Jules Favre was appointed by the
government at Bordeaux, but he was locked up in Paris, and he and Bismarck
could not agree as to the proper form of safe-conduct. What was even more
important, the governing men in France could not agree upon his
instructions; for we must remember that all this time along with the
patriotic struggle against the Prussians, there went on an internal
struggle only a degree less ardent between republicans and monarchists. It
was not until the final meeting of the conference, that the Duc de Broglie
was accredited as representative of his country.(230) At the first formal
meeting a special protocol was signed recording it as “an essential
principle of the law of nations that no Power can liberate itself from the
engagements of a treaty, nor modify the stipulations thereof, unless with
the consent of the contracting Powers by means of an amicable
arrangement.”

To give a single signatory Power the right of forbidding a change desired
by all the others, imposes a kind of perpetuity on treaty stipulations,
that in practice neither could nor ought to be insisted upon. For instance
it would have tied fast the hands of Cavour and Victor Emmanuel in the
Italian transactions which Mr. Gladstone had followed and assisted with so
much enthusiasm, for Austria would never have assented. It is, moreover,
true that in the ever recurring eras when force, truculent and unabashed,
sweeps aside the moral judgments of the world, the mere inscription of a
pious opinion in a protocol may seem worth little trouble. Yet it is the
influence of good opinion, tardy, halting, stumbling, and broken, as it
must ever be, that upholds and quickens the growth of right. The good
rules laid down in conferences and state-papers may look tame in the glare
of the real world of history as it is. Still, if we may change the figure,
they help to dilute the poisons in the air.



IV


(M115) In England opinion veered round after Sedan. The disappearance of
the French empire had effectively dispelled the vivid suspicions of
aggression. The creation of the empire of a united Germany showed a new
Europe. The keen word of an English diplomatist expressed what was dawning
in men’s minds as a new misgiving. “Europe,” he said, “has lost a mistress
and got a master.” Annexation wore an ugly look. Meetings to express
sympathy with France in her struggle were held in London and the
provinces. Still on the whole the general verdict seemed to be decisively
in favour of a resolute neutrality, for in fact, nobody who knew anything
of the state of Europe could suggest a policy of British intervention that
would stand an hour of debate.

One proposal favoured by Mr. Gladstone, and also, I remember, commended by
Mill, was the military neutralisation of Alsace and Lorraine, and the
dismantling of the great border fortresses, without withdrawing the
inhabitants from their French allegiance. The idea was worked out in a
pamphlet by Count Gasparin. On this pamphlet Mr. Max Müller put what Mr.
Gladstone called the fair question, whether its author was likely to
persuade the European powers to guarantee border neutrality. “I will try
to give you a fair answer,” Mr. Gladstone said (Jan. 30, 1871). “You will
not think it less fair because it is individual and unofficial; for a man
must be a wretch indeed, who could speak at this most solemn juncture,
otherwise than from the bottom of his heart. First, then, I agree with you
in disapproving the declaration, or reputed declaration, of Lord Derby
(then Stanley) in 1867, about the Luxemburg guarantee. I have in
parliament and in my present office, declined or expressly forborne to
recognise that declaration.(231) Secondly, as to the main question. It is
great. It is difficult. But I should not despair. I may add I should
desire to find it practicable; for I think it would be a condition fair to
both parties, and one on which Germany would have an absolute title to
insist. Some of the most excusable errors ever committed,” he said, in
closing the letter, “have also been the most ruinous in their
consequences. The smallest in the forum of conscience, they are the
greatest in the vast theatre of action. May your country, justly indignant
and justly exultant, be preserved from committing one of these errors.”
Three months later, when all was at an end, he repeated the same thought:—


    The most fatal and in their sequel most gigantic errors of men are
    also frequently the most excusable and the least gratuitous. They
    are committed when a strong impetus of right carries them up to a
    certain point, and a residue of that impetus, drawn from the
    contact with human passion and infirmity, pushes them beyond it.
    They vault into the saddle; they fall on the other side. The
    instance most commonly present to my mind is the error of England
    in entering the Revolutionary war in 1793. Slow sometimes to go
    in, she is slower yet to come out, and if she had then held her
    hand, the course of the revolution and the fate of Europe would in
    all likelihood have been widely different. There might have been
    no Napoleon. There might have been no Sedan.


The changes in the political map effected by these dire months of
diplomacy and war were almost comparable in one sense to those of the
treaty of Münster, or the treaty of the Pyrenees, or the treaties of
Vienna, save that those great instruments all left a consolidated Europe.
Italy had crowned her work by the acquisition of Rome. Russia had wiped
out the humiliation of 1856. Prussia, after three wars in six years, had
conquered the primacy of a united Germany. Austria had fallen as Prussia
rose. France had fallen, but she had shaken off a government that had no
root in the noblest qualities of her people.




Chapter VII. “Day’s Work Of A Giant”. (1870-1872)


    We have not been an idle government. We have had an active life,
    and that is substantially one of the conditions of a happy
    life.... I am thankful to have been the leader of the liberal
    party at a period of the history of this country, when it has been
    my privilege and my duty to give the word of advance to able
    coadjutors and trusty and gallant adherents.—GLADSTONE.



I


The most marked administrative performance of Mr. Gladstone’s great
government was the reform and reorganisation of the army. In Mr. Cardwell
he was fortunate enough to have a public servant of the first order; not a
political leader nor a popular orator, but one of the best disciples of
Peel’s school; sound, careful, active, firm, and with an enlightened and
independent mind admirably fitted for the effective despatch of business.
Before he had been a month at the war office, the new secretary of state
submitted to Mr. Gladstone his ideas of a plan that would give us an
effective force for defence at a greatly reduced cost. The reorganisation
of the army was one of the results of that great central event, from which
in every direction such momentous consequences flowed—the victory of
Prussian arms at Sadowa. The victory was a surprise, for even Lord Clyde,
after a close inspection of the Prussian army, had found no more to report
than that it was a first-rate militia. Sadowa disclosed that a soldier,
serving only between two and three years with the colours, could yet show
himself the most formidable combatant in Europe. The principle of
Cardwell’s plan was that short enlistment is essential to a healthy
organisation of the army, and this reform it was that produced an
efficient reserve, the necessity for which had been one of the lessons of
the Crimean war. A second, but still a highly important element, was the
reduction of the whole force serving in the colonies from fifty thousand
men to less than half that number.(232) “To this change,” said Mr.
Cardwell, “opposition will be weak, for the principle of colonial
self-reliance is very generally assented to.” The idea, as Lord Wolseley
says, that a standing army during peace should be a manufactory for making
soldiers rather than either a costly receptacle for veterans, or a
collection of perfectly trained fighters, “had not yet taken, hold of the
military mind in England.”(233) The details do not concern us here, and
everybody knows the revolution effected by the changes during Mr.
Gladstone’s great administration in the composition, the working, and the
professional spirit of the army.

(M116) Army reform first brought Mr. Gladstone into direct collision with
reigning sentiment at court. In spite of Pym and Cromwell and the untoward
end of Charles I. and other salutary lessons of the great rebellion, ideas
still lingered in high places that the sovereign’s hand bore the sword,
and that the wearer of the crown through a commander-in-chief had rights
of control over the army, not quite dependent on parliament and secretary
of state. The Queen had doubted the policy of disestablishing the church
in Ireland, but to disestablish the commander-in-chief came closer home,
and was disliked as an invasion of the personal rights of the occupant of
the throne. This view was rather firmly pressed, and it was the first of a
series of difficulties—always to him extremely painful, perhaps more
painful than any other—that Mr. Gladstone was called upon in his long
career to overcome. The subject was one on which the temper of a reforming
parliament allowed no compromise, even if the prime minister himself had
been inclined to yield. As it was, by firmness, patience, and that tact
which springs not from courtiership but from right feeling, he succeeded,
and in the June of 1870 the Queen approved an order in council that put an
end to the dual control of the army, defined the position of the
commander-in-chief, and removed him corporeally from the horse guards to
the war office in Pall Mall.(234) This, however, by no means brought all
the military difficulties to an end.

One particular incident has a conspicuous place on the political side of
Mr. Gladstone’s life. Among the elements in the scheme was the abolition
of the practice of acquiring military rank by money purchase. Public
opinion had been mainly roused by Mr. Trevelyan, who now first made his
mark in that assembly where he was destined to do admirable work and
achieve high eminence and popularity. An Act of George III. abolished
selling of offices in other departments, but gave to the crown the
discretion of retaining the practice in the army, if so it should seem
fit. This discretion had been exercised by the issue of a warrant
sanctioning and regulating that practice; commissions in the army were
bought and sold for large sums of money, far in excess of the sums fixed
by the royal warrant; and vested interests on a large scale grew up in
consequence. The substitution, instead of this abusive system, of
promotion by selection, was one of the first steps in army reform. No
effective reorganisation was possible without it. As Mr. Gladstone put it,
the nation must buy back its own army from its own officers. No other
proceeding in the career of the ministry aroused a more determined and
violent opposition. It offended a powerful profession with a host of
parliamentary friends; the officers disliked liberal politics, they rather
disdained a civilian master, and they fought with the vigour peculiar to
irritated caste.

The first question before parliament depended upon the Commons voting the
money to compensate officers who had acquired vested interests. If that
were secure, there was nothing to hinder the crown, in the discretion
committed to it by the statute, from cancelling the old warrant. Instead
of this, ministers determined to abolish purchase by bill. Obstruction was
long and sustained. The principle of the bill was debated and re-debated
on every amendment in committee, and Mr. Gladstone reported that “during
his whole parliamentary life, he had been accustomed to see class
interests of all kinds put themselves on their defence under the
supposition of being assailed, yet he had never seen a case where the
modes of operation adopted by the professing champions were calculated to
leave such a painful impression on the mind.” Credible whispers were heard
of the open hostility of high military personages. In one of the debates
of this time upon the army (Mar. 23, 1871), speakers freely implied that
the influence of what was called the horse guards was actively adverse to
reform. Mr. Gladstone, taking this point, laid it down that “military
authorities without impairing in the slightest degree the general
independence of their political opinions, should be in full harmony with
the executive as to the military plans and measures which it might
propose; and that only on this principle could the satisfactory working of
our institutions be secured.”

The correspondence with the Queen was copious. In one letter, after
mentioning that parliament had been persuaded to extend the tenure of the
commander-in-chief’s office beyond five years, and to allow the patronage
and discipline of the army to be vested in him, though the secretary of
state was responsible, Mr. Gladstone proceeds:—


    It would have been impossible to procure the acquiescence of
    parliament in these arrangements, unless they had been accompanied
    with the declaration of Mr. Cardwell, made in the name of the
    cabinet, and seen and approved by your Majesty, that “it is of
    course necessary for the commander-in-chief to be in harmony with
    the government of the day” (Feb. 21, 1871), and with a similar
    declaration of Mr. Gladstone on March 23, 1871, also reported to,
    and approved by your Majesty, that while all political action
    properly so called was entirely free, yet the military plans and
    measures of the government must always have the energetic
    co-operation of the military chiefs of the army.


(M117) The end was of course inevitable.(235) The bill at last passed the
Commons, and then an exciting stage began. In the Lords it was immediately
confronted by a dilatory resolution. In view of some such proceeding, Mr.
Gladstone (July 15) wrote to the Queen as to the best course to pursue,
and here he first mentioned the step that was to raise such clamour:—


    As the government judge that the illegality of over-regulation
    prices cannot continue, and as they can only be extinguished by
    putting an end to purchase, what has been chiefly considered is
    how to proceed with the greatest certainty and the smallest shock,
    and how to secure as far as may be for the officers all that has
    hitherto been asked on their behalf. With this view, the
    government think the first step would be to abolish the warrant
    under which prices of commissions are fixed. As the resolution of
    the House of Lords states the unwillingness of the House to take
    part in abolishing purchase until certain things shall have been
    done, it would not be applicable to a case in which, without its
    interposition, purchase would have been already abolished.


Two days later (July 17) the Lords passed what Sir Roundell Palmer called
“their ill-advised resolution.” On July 18 the cabinet met and resolved to
recommend the cancelling of the old warrant regulating purchase, by a new
warrant abolishing purchase. It has been said or implied that this
proceeding was forced imperiously upon the Queen. I find no evidence of
this. In the language of Lord Halifax, the minister in attendance, writing
to Mr. Gladstone from Osborne (July 19, 1871), the Queen “made no sort of
difficulty in signing the warrant” after the case had been explained. In
the course of the day she sent to tell Lord Halifax, that as it was a
strong exercise of her power in apparent opposition to the House of Lords,
she should like to have some more formal expression of the advice of the
cabinet than was contained in an ordinary letter from the prime minister,
dealing with this among other matters. Ministers agreed that the Queen had
a fair right to have their advice on such a point of executive action on
her part, recorded in a formal and deliberate submission of their opinion.
The advice was at once clothed in the definite form of a minute.

On July 20 Mr. Gladstone announced to a crowded and anxious House the
abolition of purchase by royal warrant. The government, he said, had no
other object but simplicity and despatch, and the observance of
constitutional usage. Amid some disorderly interruptions, Mr. Disraeli
taunted the government with resorting to the prerogative of the crown to
get out of a difficulty of their own devising. Some radicals used the same
ill-omened word. After a spell of obstruction on the ballot bill, the
bitter discussion on purchase revived, and Mr. Disraeli said that what had
occurred early in the evening was “disgraceful to the House of Commons,”
and denounced “the shameful and avowed conspiracy of the cabinet” against
the House of Lords. The latter expression was noticed by the chairman of
committee and withdrawn, though Mr. Gladstone himself thought it the more
allowable of the two.

In a letter to his brother-in-law, Lord Lyttelton, Mr. Gladstone
vindicated this transaction as follows:—


    _July 26, ’71._—I should like to assure myself that you really
    have the points of the case before you. 1. Was it not for us an
    indispensable duty to extinguish a gross, wide-spread, and most
    mischievous illegality, of which the existence had become certain
    and notorious? 2. Was it not also our duty to extinguish it in the
    best manner? 3. Was not the best manner that which, (_a_) made the
    extinction final; (_b_) gave the best, _i.e._ a statutory, title
    for regulation prices; (_c_) granted an indemnity to the officers;
    (_d_) secured for them compensation in respect of over-regulation
    prices? 4. Did not the vote of the House of Lords stop us in this
    best manner of proceeding? 5. Did it absolve us from the duty of
    putting an end to the illegality? 6. What method of putting an end
    to it remained to us, except that which we have adopted?


(M118) Sir Roundell Palmer wrote, “I have always thought and said that the
issuing of such a warrant was within the undoubted power of the crown....
It did and does appear to me that the course which the government took was
the least objectionable course that could be taken under the whole
circumstances of the case.”(236) I can find nothing more clearly and more
forcibly said upon this case than the judgment of Freeman, the historian—a
man who combined in so extraordinary a degree immense learning with
precision in political thought and language, and added to both the true
spirit of manly citizenship:—


    I must certainly protest against the word “prerogative” being
    used, as it has so often been of late, to describe Mr. Gladstone’s
    conduct with regard to the abolition of purchase in the army. By
    prerogative I understand a power not necessarily contrary to law,
    but in some sort beyond law—a power whose source must be sought
    for somewhere else than in the terms of an act of parliament. But
    in abolishing purchase by a royal warrant Mr. Gladstone acted
    strictly within the terms of an act of parliament, an act so
    modern as the reign of George III. He in truth followed a course
    which that act not only allowed but rather suggested.... I am not
    one of those who condemn Mr. Gladstone’s conduct in this matter;
    still I grant that the thing had an ill look. The difference I
    take to be this. Mr. Gladstone had two courses before him: he
    might abolish purchase by a royal warrant—that is, by using the
    discretion which parliament had given to the crown; or he might
    bring a bill into parliament to abolish purchase.... What gave the
    thing an ill look was that, having chosen the second way and not
    being able to carry his point that way, he then fell back on the
    first way. I believe that it was better to get rid of a foul abuse
    in the way in which it was got rid of, than not to get rid of it
    at all, especially as the House of Commons had already decided
    against it. Still, the thing did not look well. It might seem that
    by electing to bring a bill into parliament Mr. Gladstone had
    waived his right to employ the royal power in the matter.... I
    believe that this is one of those cases in which a strictly
    conscientious man like Mr. Gladstone does things from which a less
    conscientious man would shrink. Such a man, fully convinced of his
    own integrity, often thinks less than it would be wise to think of
    mere appearances, and so lays himself open to the imputation of
    motives poles asunder from the real ones.(237)


These last words undoubtedly explain some acts and tendencies that gave a
handle to foes and perplexed friends.



II


Next let us turn to reform in a different field. All the highest abstract
arguments were against secret voting. To have a vote is to have power; as
Burke said, “liberty is power, when men act in bodies”; but the secret
vote is power without responsibility. The vote is a trust for the
commonwealth; to permit secrecy makes it look like a right conferred for a
man’s own benefit. You enjoin upon him to give his vote on public grounds;
in the same voice you tell him not to let the public know how he gives it.
Secrecy saps the citizen’s courage, promotes evasion, tempts to downright
lying. Remove publicity and its checks, then all the mean motives of
mankind—their malice, petty rivalries, pique, the prejudices that men
would be ashamed to put into words even to themselves—skulk to the polling
booth under a disguising cloak. Secrecy, again, prevents the statesman
from weighing or testing the forces in character, stability, persistency,
of the men by whom a majority has been built up, and on whose fidelity his
power of action must depend. This strain of argument was worked out by J.
S. Mill(238) and others, and drew from Mr. Bright, who belonged to a
different school of liberals, the gruff saying, that the worst of great
thinkers is that they so often think wrong.

Though the abstract reasoning might be unanswerable, the concrete case the
other way was irresistible. Experience showed that without secrecy in its
exercise the suffrage was not free. The farmer was afraid of his landlord,
and the labourer was afraid of the farmer; the employer could tighten the
screw on the workman, the shopkeeper feared the power of his best
customers, the debtor quailed before his creditor, the priest wielded
thunderbolts over the faithful. Not only was the open vote not free; it
exposed its possessor to so much bullying, molestation, and persecution,
that his possession came to be less of a boon than a nuisance.

(M119) For forty years this question had been fought. The ballot actually
figured in a clause of an early draft of the Reform bill of 1832. Grote,
inspired by James Mill whose vigorous pleas for the ballot in his
well-known article in 1830 were the high landmark in the controversy,
brought it before parliament in an annual motion. When that admirable man
quitted parliament to finish his great history of Greece, the torch was
still borne onwards by other hands. Ballot was one of the five points of
the charter. At nearly every meeting for parliamentary reform between the
Crimean war and Disraeli’s bill of 1867, the ballot was made a cardinal
point. General opinion fluctuated from time to time, and in the sixties
journals of repute formally dismissed it as a dead political idea. The
extension of the franchise in 1867 brought it to life again, and Mr.
Bright led the van in the election of 1868 by declaring in his address
that he regarded the ballot as of the first importance. “Whether I look,”
he said, “to the excessive cost of elections, or to the tumult which so
often attends them, or to the unjust and cruel pressure which is so
frequently brought to bear upon the less independent class of voters, I am
persuaded that the true interest of the public and of freedom will be
served by the system of secret and free voting.” J. S. Mill had argued
that the voter should name his candidate in the polling booth, just as the
judge does his duty in a court open to the public eye. No, replied Bright,
the jury-room is as important as the judge’s bench, and yet the jury-room
is treated as secret, and in some countries the verdict is formally given
by ballot. Some scandals in the way of electoral intimidation did much to
ripen public opinion. One parliamentary committee in 1868 brought evidence
of this sort to light, and another committee recommended secret voting as
the cure.

Among those most ardent for the change from open to secret voting, the
prime minister was hardly to be included. “I am not aware,” he wrote to
Lord Shaftesbury (Dec. 11, 1871), “of having been at any time a vehement
opponent of the ballot. I have not been accustomed to attach to it a vital
importance, but at any time, I think, within the last twenty or
twenty-five years I should have regarded it as the legitimate complement
of the present suffrage.”(239) In the first speech he made as prime
minister at Greenwich (Dec. 21, 1868) be said that there were two subjects
that could not be overlooked in connection with the representation of the
people. “One of them is the security afforded by the present system for
perfect freedom in the giving of the vote, which vote has been not only
not conferred as a favour, but imposed as a duty by the legislature on the
members of the community. I have at all times given my vote in favour of
open voting, but I have done so before, and I do so now, with an important
reservation, namely, that whether by open voting or by whatsoever means,
free voting must be secured.”

A bill providing for vote by ballot, abolishing public nominations and
dealing with corrupt practices in parliamentary elections was introduced
by Lord Hartington in 1870. Little progress was made with it, and it was
eventually withdrawn. But the government were committed to the principle,
and at the end of July Mr. Gladstone took the opportunity of explaining
his change of opinion on this question, in the debate on the second
reading of a Ballot bill brought in by a private member. Now that great
numbers who depended for their bread upon their daily labour had acquired
the vote, he said, their freedom was threatened from many quarters. The
secret vote appeared to be required by the social conditions under which
they lived, and therefore it had become a necessity and a duty to give
effect to the principle.

(M120) Yet after the cabinet had decided to make the ballot a ministerial
measure, the head of the cabinet makes a rather pensive entry in his
diary: “_July 27, 1870._—H. of C. Spoke on ballot, and voted in 324-230
with mind satisfied, and as to feeling, a lingering reluctance.” How far
this reluctance was due to misgivings on the merits of the ballot, how far
to the doubts that haunt every ministerial leader as to the possibilities
of parliamentary time, we do not know. The bill, enlarged and reintroduced
next year, was entrusted to the hands of Mr. Forster—himself, like Mr.
Gladstone, a latish convert to the principle of secret voting—and by
Forster’s persistent force and capacity for hard and heavy labour, after
some eighteen days in committee, it passed through the House of Commons.

After obstruction had been at last broken down, other well-known resources
of civilisation remained, and the Lords threw out the bill.(240) It was
novel, they said; it was dangerous, it had not been considered by the
country or parliament (after eighteen days of committee and forty years of
public discussion), it was incoherent and contradictory, and to enact vote
by ballot was inevitably to overthrow the monarchy. Even the mightiest of
American orators had said as much. “Above all things,” Daniel Webster had
adjured Lord Shaftesbury, “resist to the very last the introduction of the
ballot; for as a republican, I tell you that the ballot can never co-exist
with monarchical institutions.”

The rejection by the Lords stimulated popular insistence. At Whitby in the
autumn (Sept. 2), Mr. Gladstone said the people’s bill had been passed by
the people’s House, and when it was next presented at the door of the
House of Lords, it would be with an authoritative knock. He told Lord
Houghton that he was sorry to see the agitation apparently rising against
the House of Lords, though he had a strong opinion about the imprudence of
its conduct on the Army bill, and especially on the Ballot bill. “There is
no Duke of Wellington in these days. His reputation as a domestic
statesman seems to me to rest almost entirely on his leadership of the
peers between 1832 and 1841.”

The bill was again passed through the Commons in 1872. Mr. Gladstone was
prepared for strong measures. The cabinet decided that if the House of
Lords should hold to what the prime minister styled “the strange provision
for optional secrecy,” the government would withdraw the bill and try an
autumn session, and if the Lords still hardened their hearts, “there would
remain nothing but the last alternative to consider,”—these words, I
assume, meaning a dissolution. Perhaps the opposition thought that a
dissolution on the ballot might give to the ministerial Antæus fresh
energy. This time the Lords gave way, satisfied that the Measure had now
at last been more adequately discussed,—the said discussion really
consisting in no more than an adequate amount of violent language out of
doors against the principle of a hereditary legislature.(241)

The results of the general election two years later as they affected
party, are an instructive comment on all this trepidation and alarm. In
one only of the three kingdoms the ballot helped to make a truly vital
difference; it dislodged the political power of the Irish landlord. In
England its influence made for purity, freedom, and decency, but it
developed no new sources of liberal strength. On this aspect of things the
first parliamentary precursor of the ballot made remarks that are worth a
few lines of digression. “You will feel great satisfaction,” his wife said
to Grote one morning at their breakfast, “at seeing your once favourite
measure triumph over all obstacles.” “Since the wide expansion of the
voting element,” the historian replied, “I confess that the value of the
ballot has sunk in my estimation. I don’t, in fact, think the elections
will be affected by it one way or another, as far as party interests are
concerned.” “Still,” his interlocutor persisted, “you will at all events
get at the genuine preference of the constituency.” “No doubt; but then,
again, I have come to perceive that the choice between one man and another
among the English people, signifies less than I used formerly to think it
did. The English mind is much of one pattern, take whatsoever class you
will. The same favourite prejudices, amiable and otherwise; the same
antipathies, coupled with ill-regulated though benevolent efforts to
eradicate human evils, are well-nigh universal. A House of Commons cannot
afford to be above its own constituencies in intelligence, knowledge, or
patriotism.”(242) In all this the element of truth is profound enough. In
every change of political machinery the reformer promises and expects a
new heaven and a new earth; then standing forces of national tradition,
character, and institution assert their strength, our millennium lags, and
the chilled enthusiast sighs. He is unreasonable, as are all those who
expect more from life and the world than life and the world have to give.
Yet here at least the reformer has not failed. The efficacy of secret
voting is negative if we will, but it averts obvious mischiefs alike from
old privileged orders in states and churches and from new.



III


(M121) In finance the country looked for wonders. Ministers were called
the cabinet of financiers. The cabinet did, in fact, contain as many as
five men who were at one time or another chancellors of the exchequer, and
its chief was recognised through Europe as the most successful financier
of the age. No trailing cloud of glory, as in 1853 or 1860, attended the
great ministry, but sound and substantial results were achieved,
testifying to a thrifty and skilful management, such as might have
satisfied the ambition of a generation of chancellors. The head of the new
government promised retrenchment as soon as the government was formed. He
told his constituents at Greenwich (Dec. 21, 1868) that he was himself
responsible for having taken the earliest opportunity of directing the
public mind to the subject of expenditure at an opening stage of the late
election; for “although there may be times when the public mind may become
comparatively relaxed in regard to the general principles of economy and
thrift, it is the special duty of public men to watch the very beginnings
of evil in that department. It is a very easy thing to notice these
mischiefs when they have grown to a gigantic size; but it commonly happens
that when financial error has arisen to those dimensions, the case has
become too aggravated for a remedy.” He reminded them of the addition that
had been made to the standing charges of the country in the ordinary and
steadily recurring annual estimates presented to parliament. He said that
he knew no reason why three millions should have been added during the two
years of tory government to the cost of our establishments:—


    It is one thing, I am very well aware, to put on three millions;
    it is another thing to take them off. When you put three millions
    on to the public expenditure, you create a number of new
    relations, a number of new offices, a number of new claims, a
    number of new expectations. And you can’t, and what is more, you
    ought not to, destroy all these in a moment. And, therefore, the
    work of retrenchment must be a well-considered and a gradual work.
    But I ask you to look at the names of the men who have been,
    placed in charge of the great spending departments of the country.
    The study, the idea that has governed the formation of the present
    administration has been to place able and upright men in charge of
    the public purse—men of administrative experience, men of proved
    ability, men, lastly, holding their seats in the House of Commons,
    and, therefore, immediately responsible to the representatives of
    the people. It would not become me to promise what we can do; but
    this I can tell you, that my friends connected with the various
    departments most concerned in the public expenditure have, even
    before the early moment at which I speak, directed their very
    first attention to this subject, and that I, for one, shall be as
    deeply disappointed as you can be, if in the estimates which it
    will be our duty to present in February you do not already
    perceive some results of their opening labours.


One of Mr. Gladstone’s first letters to a colleague was addressed to Mr.
Lowe, containing such hints and instructions upon treasury administration
as a veteran pilot might give about lights, buoys, channels, currents, to
a new captain. “No man wants so much sympathy,” he said, “as the
chancellor of the exchequer, no man gets so little. Nor is there any
position so lamentable for him as to be defeated in proposing some new
charge on the public conceived or adopted by himself. He is like an
ancient soldier wounded in the back. Whereas even defeat in resisting the
raids of the House of Commons on the public purse is honourable, and
always turns out well in the end.” He sent Mr. Lowe a list of the subjects
that he had tried in parliament without success, and of those that he had
in his head but was not able to take in hand. They make a fine example of
an active and reforming mind.(243) “What commonly happened, in cases of
this kind, in my time, was as follows: The opposition waited for a
development of discontent and resistance among some small fraction of
liberal members. When this was compact in itself, or was at all stimulated
by constituencies, they sent out habitually strong party whips, and either
beat me, or forced me to withdraw in order to avoid beating, or exposing
our men to local disadvantage. This game, I hope, will not be quite so
easy now.”

(M122) The first two of Mr. Lowe’s budgets were on the lines thus traced
beforehand. The shilling duty on a quarter of corn was abolished—“an
exceeding strong case,” as Mr. Gladstone called it—taxes on conveyances
were adjusted, and the duty on fire insurance was removed. The only
notable contribution to the standing problem of widening the base of
taxation was the proposal to put a tax on matches.(244) This was a notion
borrowed from the United States, and much approved by Mr. Wells, the
eminent free-trade financier of that country. In England it was greeted
with violent disfavour. It was denounced as reactionary, as violating the
first principles of fiscal administration, and as the very worst tax that
had been proposed within recent memory, for is not a match a necessary of
life, and to tax a necessary of life is to go against Adam Smith and the
books. The money, it was said, ought to have been got either by raising
the taxes on tea and sugar, or else by putting the shilling duty back on
corn again, though for that matter, tea, sugar, and corn are quite as much
necessaries of life as, say, two-thirds of the matches used.(245) No care,
however, was given to serious argument; in fact, the tax was hardly argued
at all. Some hundreds of poor women employed at a large match factory in
the east end of London trooped to protest at Westminster, and the tax was
quickly dropped. It was perhaps unlucky that the proposal happened to be
associated with Mr. Lowe, for his uncomplimentary criticisms on the
working class four or five years before were neither forgotten nor
forgiven. A Latin pun that he meant to print on the proposed halfpenny
match stamp, _ex luce lucellum_, “a little gain out of a little light,”
was good enough to divert a college common room, but it seemed flippant to
people who expected to see the bread taken out of their mouths.

On the other side of the national account Mr. Gladstone was more
successful. He fought with all his strength for a reduction of the public
burdens, and in at least one of these persistent battles with colleagues
of a less economising mind than himself, he came near to a breach within
the walls of his cabinet. In this thankless region he was not always
zealously seconded. On Dec. 14, 1871, he enters in his diary: “Cabinet,
3-7. For two and a half hours we discussed army estimates, mainly on
reduction, and the chancellor of exchequer did not speak one word.” The
result is worth recording. When Mr. Gladstone was at the exchequer the
charge on naval, military, and civil expenditure had been reduced between
1860 and 1865 from thirty-eight millions to thirty-one. Under the
Derby-Disraeli government the figure rose in two or three years to
thirty-four millions and three-quarters. By 1873 it had been brought down
again to little more than thirty-two millions and a quarter.(246) That
these great reductions were effected without any sacrifice of the
necessary strength and efficiency of the forces, may be inferred from the
fact that for ten years under successive administrations the charge on
navy and army underwent no substantial augmentation. The process had been
made easier, or made possible, by the necessity under which the German war
laid France, then our only rival in naval force, to reduce her expenditure
upon new ships. The number of seamen was maintained, but a reduction was
effected in the inefficient vessels in the foreign squadrons; two costly
and almost useless dockyards were suppressed (much to the disadvantage of
Mr. Gladstone’s own constituents), and great abuses were remedied in the
dockyards that were left. In the army reduction was made possible without
lessening the requisite strength, by the withdrawal of troops from Canada,
New Zealand, and the Cape. This was due to the wise policy of Lord
Granville and Mr. Gladstone. In spite of the increased cost of education,
of army purchase, of the rise of prices, and all the other causes that
swell estimates, the country was still spending no more in 1873 than when
Mr. Gladstone took office in 1868.(247) To this story we have to add that
nearly thirty millions of debt were paid off in the five years. Well might
men point to such a record, as the best proof that the promises of economy
made at the hustings had been seriously kept.(248)

(M123) When the time came for him to take stock of his own performances,
Mr. Lowe, who was apt to be cleverer than he was wise, made a speech at
Sheffield, in September 1873, that almost recalls the self-laudation of
Cicero over the immortal glories of his consulate. He disclaimed any share
of the admirable genius for finance that had been seen in Pitt, Peel, or
Gladstone, but he had read in the Latin grammar that economy was a great
revenue, and he thought that he could at least discharge the humble task
of hindering extravagance. “The first thing I did as chancellor of the
exchequer,” he said, “was to issue an order that no new expenditure
whatever would be allowed without my opinion first being taken upon it....
In an evil hour for my own peace and quietness I took upon myself—I
believe it was never taken upon himself by any chancellor of the exchequer
before—the duty of protecting the revenue, instead of leaving it to be
done by an inferior official.” After reciting his figures, he wound up
with a resounding pæan: “So far as I am aware, up to the present time
there is no one who can challenge comparison with what has been done
during these years. Sir R. Peel and Mr. Gladstone routed out protection in
your trade, a measure that conferred immortal honour on them, but so far
as relieving you from taxation is concerned, I believe you would seek in
vain in British history for anything like what has been done during these
last four years.” This strange vein was more than a little distasteful to
the prime minister, as a letter to Lord Granville upon it shows (Sept. 9,
1873):—


    Lowe’s speech at Sheffield is really too bad, and free as it is
    from all evil intention, it illustrates the invariable solecisms
    of his extraordinary mind.... He says no chancellor of the
    exchequer before did treasury business, but left it to a
    subordinate official.... Some have done more, some less. No one,
    probably, as much as Lowe, but some almost as much. I did less,
    perhaps much less. But I hold that the first duties of the
    chancellor of the exchequer are outside the treasury. One of them
    is to look after and control the great expenditures and estimates.
    In this duty I am sorry to say he was wretchedly deficient; yet he
    coolly takes to himself the credit of army and navy reductions,
    which is due to Cardwell and Childers (who, in his admirable
    speech, did not say a word, I think, for himself), and with which
    every member of the cabinet had almost as much to do as he had. I
    can speak from experience, for I know what it has been to have had
    cast upon my shoulders the most important and most offensive duty
    of the financial minister.... He has ample merit to stand on, in a
    great amount of labour done, and generally well done, and with
    good results for the public. Much of the unpopularity is unjust; a
    little patience would set all right.




Chapter VIII. Autumn Of 1871. Decline Of Popularity. (1871-1872)


    For the present at least the reformation will operate against the
    reformers. Nothing is more common than for men to wish, and call
    loudly too, for a reformation, who when it arrives do by no means
    like the severity of its aspect. Reformation is one of those
    pieces which must be put at some distance in order to please. Its
    greatest favourers love it better in the abstract than in the
    substance.

    —BURKE.



I


In July, 1871, Mr. Gladstone paid a Sunday visit to Tennyson among the
Surrey hills. They had two interesting days, “with talk ranging
everywhere.” The poet read the _Holy Grail_, which Mr. Gladstone admired.
They discussed the Goschen parish council plan, and other social reforms;
Lacordaire and liberal collectivism; politics and the stormy times ahead.
Mr. Gladstone assured them that he was a conservative, and feared extreme
measures from the opposition. “A very noble fellow,” Tennyson called him,
“and perfectly unaffected.”(249) Mr. Gladstone, for his part, records in
his diary that he found “a characteristic and delightful abode. In
Tennyson are singularly united true greatness, genuine simplicity, and
some eccentricity. But the latter is from habit and circumstance, the
former is his nature. His wife is excellent, and in her adaptation to him
wonderful. His son Hallam is most attractive.”

After a laborious and irksome session, “in which, we have sat, I believe,
150 hours after midnight,” the House rose (Aug. 21). Mr. Gladstone spent
some time at Whitby with his family, and made a speech to his eldest son’s
constituents (Sept. 2) on the ballot, and protesting against the spirit of
“alarmism.” Towards the end of the month he went on to Balmoral. On
September 26 he was presented with the freedom of Aberdeen, and made a
speech on Irish home rule, of which, as we shall see, he heard a great
deal fifteen years later:—


    _To Mrs. Gladstone._

    _Balmoral, Sept. 28._—The time is rolling on easily at this
    _quiet_ place.... We breakfast six or eight. The Prince and
    Princess Louis of Hesse dine most days. To-day I walked with her
    and her party. She is quick, kind, and well informed. I got her
    to-day on the subject of the religious movement in the Roman
    catholic church in Germany. She is imbued with her father’s ideas,
    and, I think, goes beyond them. She quoted Strauss to me, as
    giving his opinion that the movement would come to nothing. She
    said the infallibility was the legitimate development of the Roman
    system. I replied that the Roman system had grown up by a
    multitude of scarcely perceptible degrees out of the earliest form
    of Christianity, and if we adopted this notion of legitimate
    development, we ran a risk of making Saint Paul responsible for
    the Vatican council. She talked much about the hospitals, in which
    she worked so hard while nursing her baby, a very fine one, whom
    she introduced to me, with two flourishing elder children. She
    hates war; and is not easy as to the future.

    _Sept. 29._—I have had a twelve-mile stretch to-day, almost all on
    wild ground, and so solitary! not a living creature except three
    brace of grouse all the way. I am glad to report that I came in
    very fresh. ... What a mess the Bishop of Winchester has made of
    this Glengarry kirk business.

    _Sept. 30._—Last night we dined ten at Abergeldie. The Prince of
    Wales had his usual pleasant manners. He is far lighter in hand
    than the Duke of Edinburgh. After dinner he invited me to play
    whist. I said, “For love, sir?” He said, “Well, shillings and
    half-a-crown on the rubber,” to which I submitted. Ponsonby and I
    against the Prince and Brasseur, a charming old Frenchman, his
    tutor in the language. The Prince has apparently an _immense_
    whist memory, and plays well accordingly. To-day the Queen was to
    have seen me at six, but sent to postpone it till to-morrow on
    account of expecting the Princess of Wales, who was to come over
    and pay her a visit from Abergeldie. I think she is nervous, and
    shrinks from talk; but I do not mean to say a word that would give
    her trouble, as there would be no good in it at this moment.

    _Oct. 3._—I have seen the Queen again this morning. She conversed
    longer, near an hour, and was visibly better and stronger, and in
    good spirits. She told me much about her illness. ... She wished
    me a pleasant journey.

    _Ballater, Oct. 4._—Here am I ensconced in the station-master’s
    box at Ballater, after a 15 or 16 mile walk round through the
    hills, the regular train being postponed for an hour or more to
    let the couple from Mar Lodge go off special. They had two
    carriages laden with luggage, besides their own carriage! I hope
    to be at Colwyn soon after six. These solitary walks among the
    hills, I think, refresh and invigorate me more than anything else.
    To-day the early part of the day was glorious, and the wind most
    bracing as it came over the mass of mountains. I bade farewell
    reluctantly to Balmoral, for it is as homelike as any place away
    from home can be, and wonderfully safe from invasions. I had all
    the grand mountains in view at once, with their snow caps; the
    lowest, about the same as Snowdon. I came by the falls of the
    Muich, which, after the rain, were very fine. I had an interesting
    conversation with Princess Louise about the Queen this morning.

    _Oct. 4._—Nothing sets me up in mind and body like a mountain
    solitude, not even, perhaps, the sea. Walked from Balmoral to
    Ballater, 15 miles, in 4 hrs. 5 m. 6.—Walked 20 miles in 5 hrs.
    and 45 minutes. 7.—Walked 15 miles.—(_Diary._)

    _To Mrs. Gladstone._

    _Ainslie Place, Edinburgh, Oct. 8, 1871._—I got here last night
    before seven, and had the most affectionate welcome from the dean
    that you can conceive; a dinner-party followed, and now I have for
    the _first time_ since the government was formed had a holiday of
    two whole days. Last night the lord advocate tried to talk to me
    about the Scotch endowed schools and I refused to have anything to
    say to him. I have no time to write about my walk, beyond this,
    that it was quite successful. The dean [Ramsay] preached at St.
    John’s this morning about Ruth. The sermon was beautiful, and the
    voice and manner with his venerable age made it very striking. He
    put an astonishing energy into it, and his clear melodious tones
    rang through and through as they did when I first heard him 43½
    years ago. It was altogether most touching, and he told me
    afterwards that he had wished to preach to me once more before he
    died. But I rejoice to say his life seems a very good one. I would
    not have missed the occasion for much.

    _London, Oct. 27._—Went to Sir R. Murchison’s funeral, the last of
    those who had known me or of me from infancy. And so a step
    towards the end is made visible. It was a great funeral. 28.—My
    expedition to Greenwich, or rather, Blackheath. I spoke 1 h. 50
    m.; too long, yet really not long enough for a full development of
    my points. Physically rather an excess of effort. All went well,
    thank God!—(_Diary._)


(M124) This speech at Blackheath was a fine illustration both of Mr.
Gladstone’s extraordinary power, and of the sure respect of a British
audience for manful handling and firm dealing in a minister, if only the
appeal be high enough. It was one of the marked scenes of his life. In the
cold mist of the October afternoon he stood bareheaded, pale, resolute,
before a surging audience of many thousands, few of them enthusiastically
his friends, a considerable mass of them dockyard workmen, furious at
discharge or neglect by an economising government. He was received with
loud and angry murmurs ominous of storm, but curiosity, interest, and a
sense that even a prime minister should have fair play prevailed. His rich
tones and clear articulation—and Mr. Gladstone had studied all the arts
for husbanding vocal resources—carried his words beyond the five or six
thousand persons that are commonly understood to be the limit of possible
hearers in the open air. After half an hour of struggle he conquered a
hold upon them that became more intense as he went on—touching topic after
topic, defending all that had been done for the reform and efficiency of
the army, denouncing extreme opinions on the Education Act, vindicating
the ballot bill, laughing at various prescriptions of social
quackery—until at the close of a speech nearly two hours long, he retired
amid sustained hurricanes of earnest applause. Well might he speak of
rather an excess of physical effort, to say nothing of effort of mind.

On his return to Hawarden he had a visit from Mr. Bright, whom he
earnestly hoped to bring back into the cabinet.(250)


    _Nov. 13._—Hawarden. Two long conversations with Mr. Bright, who
    arrived at one. 14.—Some five hours in conversation with Mr.
    Bright; also I opened my proposal to him, which he took kindly
    though cautiously. My conversation with him yesterday evening kept
    me awake till four. A most rare event; but my brain assumes in the
    evening a feminine susceptibility, and resents any unusual strain,
    though, strange to say, it will stand a debate in the H. of C.
    15.—Forenoon with Bright, who departed, having charmed everybody
    by his gentleness. Began the cutting of a large beech. #/

    _To Lord Granville._

    _Nov. 15, 1871._—Bright has been here for forty-eight hours, of
    which we passed I think more than a fourth in conversation on
    public affairs. Everything in and everything out of the cabinet I
    told him as far as my memory would serve, and I think we pretty
    well boxed the political compass. On the whole I remained
    convinced of two things: first, that his heart is still altogether
    with us; secondly, that his health, though requiring great care,
    is really equal to the moderate demands we should make upon him.
    The truth is I was quite as much knocked up with our conversation
    as he was, but then I had the more active share. In the whole
    range of subjects that we travelled over, we came to no point of
    sharp difference, and I feel confident that he could work with the
    cabinet as harmoniously and effectually as before. In saying this
    I should add that I told him, with respect to economy, that I
    thought we should now set our faces in that direction. I told him
    that we should not expect of him ordinary night attendance in the
    House of Commons, and that his attendance in the cabinet was the
    main object of our desire. He was pleased and touched with our
    desire, and he has not rejected the proposal. He has intimated
    doubts and apprehensions, but he reserves it for consideration,
    and seemed decidedly pleased to learn that the question _might_ be
    held open until the meeting of parliament in case of need.... I
    did not think it fair to put to him the request by which I
    endeavoured to hold him in December 1868, viz.: that he would not
    determine in the matter without seeing me again; but I begged and
    pressed that he should in no case refuse without taking the
    opinion of a first-rate London physician, as these are the people
    whose wide experience best enables them to judge in such cases.
    Altogether my experience of him was extremely pleasant, and he was
    popular beyond measure in the house, where the guests were one or
    two ladies and four gentlemen, Sir G. Prevost, a high church (but
    most excellent) archdeacon, John Murray, the tory publisher, and
    Hayward—whom to describe it needs not. One and all were charmed
    with Bright. In his character the mellowing process has continued
    to advance, and whatever he may have been thirty years ago, he is
    now a gentle and tender being. Yesterday he had five hours of
    conversation with me and much with others, also an hour and a half
    walk in the rain, which seemed to do him no harm whatever. I will
    add but one word. He was deeply impressed with the royalty
    question.... Details I will report to the cabinet.


Mr. Bright did not yet feel able to return, and an important year, the
third of the administration, drew to its close.



II


Two stubborn and noisy scuffles arose in the autumn of 1871, in
consequence of a couple of appointments to which Mr. Gladstone as prime
minister was a party. One was judicial, the other was ecclesiastical.

(M125) Parliament, authorising the appointment of four paid members of the
judicial committee of the privy council, had restricted the post to
persons who held at the date of their appointment, or had previously held,
judicial office in this country or in India.(251) Difficulty arose in
finding a fourth member of the new court from the English bench. The
appointment being a new one, fell to the prime minister, but he was
naturally guided by the chancellor. The office was first offered by Mr.
Gladstone to Lord Penzance, who declined to move. Application was then
made to Willes and to Bramwell. They also declined, on the ground that no
provision was made for their clerks. Willes could not abandon one who had
been “his officer, he might say friend, for thirty years.” Bramwell spoke
of the pecuniary sacrifice that the post would involve, “for I cannot let
my clerks, who between them have been with me near half a century, suffer
by the change.” The chancellor mentioned to Mr. Gladstone a rumour that
there was ’an actual strike among the judges’ in the matter. Nobody who
knew Bramwell would impute unreasonable or low-minded motives to him, and
from their own point of view the judges had a sort of case. It was
ascertained by the chancellor that Blackburn and Martin had said expressly
that they should decline. Mr. Gladstone felt, as he told Lord Hatherley,
that “it was not right to hawk the appointment about,” and he offered it
to Sir Robert Collier, then attorney-general. Collier’s claim to the
bench, and even to the headship of a court, was undisputed; his judicial
capacity was never at any time impugned; he acquired no additional
emolument. In accepting Mr. Gladstone’s offer (Oct. 1871) he reminded him:
“You are aware that in order to qualify me it will be necessary first to
make me a common law judge.” Three days later, the chancellor told Mr.
Gladstone, “It would hardly do to place the attorney-general on the common
law bench and then promote him.” Still under the circumstances he thought
it would be best to follow the offer up, and Collier was accordingly made
a judge in the common pleas, sat for a few days, and then went on to the
judicial committee. The proceeding was not taken without cabinet
authority, for Lord Granville writes to Mr. Gladstone: “Nov. 12, ’71: The
cabinet completely assented to the arrangement. Sufficient attention was
perhaps not given to the technical point. For technical it only is.... I
think you said at the cabinet that Collier wished to have three months’
tenure of the judgeship, and that we agreed with you that this would have
been only a sham.”

Cockburn, the chief justice of the Queen’s bench, opened fire on Mr.
Gladstone (Nov. 10) in a long letter of rather over-heroic eloquence,
protesting that a colourable appointment to a judgeship for the purpose of
getting round the law seriously compromised the dignity of the judicial
office, and denouncing the grievous impropriety of the proceeding as a
mere subterfuge and evasion of the statute. Mr. Gladstone could be
extremely summary when he chose, and he replied in three or four lines,
informing the chief justice that as the transaction was a joint one, and
as “the completed part of it to which you have taken objection, was the
official act of the lord chancellor,” he had transmitted the letter for
his consideration. That was all he said. The chancellor for his part
contented himself with half a dozen sentences, that his appointment of
Collier to the puisne judgeship had been made with a full knowledge of Mr.
Gladstone’s intention to recommend him for the judicial committee; that he
thus “acted advisedly and with the conviction that the arrangement was
justified as regards both its fitness and its legality”; and that he took
upon himself the responsibility of thus concurring with Mr. Gladstone, and
was prepared to vindicate the course pursued. This curt treatment of his
Junius-like composition mortified Cockburn’s literary vanity, and no
vanity is so easily stung as that of the amateur.

(M126) Collier, when the storm was brewing, at once wrote to Mr. Gladstone
(Nov. 13) proposing to retain his judgeship to the end of the term, then
to resign it, and act gratuitously in the privy council. He begged that it
might not be supposed he offered to do this merely as matter of form.
“Though I consider the objection to my appointment wholly baseless, still
it is not pleasant to me to hold a salaried office, my right to which is
questioned.” “I have received your letter,” Mr. Gladstone replied (Nov..
14), “which contains the offer that would only be made by a high-spirited
man, impatient of suspicion or reproval, and determined to place himself
beyond it.... I have not a grain of inclination to recede from the course
marked out, and if you had proposed to abandon the appointment, I should
have remonstrated.”

What Mr. Gladstone called “a parliamentary peppering” followed in due
course. It was contended that the statute in spirit as in letter exacted
judicial experience, and that formal passing through a court was a breach
of faith with parliament. As usual, lawyers of equal eminence were found
to contend with equal confidence that a fraud had been put upon the law,
and that no fraud had been put upon it; that the law required judicial
status not experience, and on the other hand that what it required was
experience not status. Lord Hatherley and Roundell Palmer were all the
virtues, whether public or private, personified; they were at the top of
the legal ladder; and they agreed in Palmer’s deliberate judgment
that—after other judges with special fitness had declined the terms
offered by parliament—in nominating the best man at the bar who was
willing to take a vacant puisne judgeship upon the understanding that he
should be at once transferred to the judicial committee, the government
were innocent of any offence against either the spirit or substance of the
law.(252)

Yet the escape was narrow. The government only missed censure in the Lords
by a majority of one. In the Commons the evening was anxious. “You will
see,” says Mr. Bruce (Feb. 20, 1872), “that we got but a small majority
last night. The fact is that our victory in the Lords made men slack about
coming to town, and Glyn got very nervous in the course of the evening.
However, Palmer’s and Gladstone’s speeches, both of which were excellent,
improved the feeling, and many who had announced their intention to go
away without voting, remained to support us.” At one moment it even looked
as if the Speaker might have to give a casting vote, and he had framed it
on these lines: “I have concluded that the House while it looks upon the
course taken by government as impolitic and injudicious, is not prepared
at the present juncture to visit their conduct with direct parliamentary
censure.”(253) In the end, ministers had a majority of twenty-seven, and
reached their homes at three in the morning with reasonably light hearts.



III


(M127) The ecclesiastical case of complaint against Mr. Gladstone was of a
similar sort. By an act of parliament passed in 1871 the Queen was
entitled to present to the rectory of Ewelme, but only a person who was a
member of convocation of the university of Oxford. This limitation was
inserted by way of compensation to the university for the severance of the
advowson of the rectory from a certain chair of divinity. The living fell
vacant, and the prime minister offered it (June 15) to Jelf of Christ
Church, a tory and an evangelical. By Jelf it was declined. Among other
names on the list for preferment was that of Mr. Harvey, a learned man who
had published an edition of Irenæus, a work on the history and theology of
the three creeds, articles on judaism, jansenism, and jesuitism, and other
productions of merit. As might perhaps have been surmised from the nature
of his favourite pursuits, he was not a liberal in politics, and he had
what was for the purposes of this preferment the further misfortune of
being a Cambridge man. To him Mr. Gladstone now offered Ewelme, having
been advised that by the process of formal incorporation in the Oxford
convocation the requirement of the statute would be satisfied. Mr. Harvey
accepted. He was told that it was necessary that he should become a member
of convocation before he could be appointed. A little later (Aug. 1) he
confessed to the prime minister his misgivings lest he should be
considered as an “interloper in succeeding to the piece of preferment that
parliament had appropriated to bona-fide members of the university of
Oxford.” These scruples were set aside, he was incorporated as a member of
Oriel in due form, and after forty-two days of residence was admitted to
membership of convocation, but whether to such plenary membership as the
Ewelme statute was taken to require, became matter of dispute. All went
forward, and the excellent man was presented and instituted to his rectory
in regular course. There was no secret about operations at Oxford; the
Oriel men were aware of his motive in seeking incorporation, and the
vice-chancellor and everybody else concerned knew all about it. Mr.
Gladstone, when squalls began to blow, wrote to Mr. Harvey (Feb. 26, ’72)
that he was advised that the presentation was perfectly valid.

The attack in parliament was, as such attacks almost always are, much
overdone. Mr. Gladstone, it appeared, was far worse than Oliver Cromwell
and the parliament of the great rebellion; for though those bad men forced
three professors upon Oxford between 1648 and 1660, still they took care
that the intruders should all be men trained at Oxford and graduates of
Oxford. Who could be sure that the prime minister would not next appoint
an ultramontane divine from Bologna, or a Greek from Corfu? Such
extravagances did as little harm as the false stories about Mr. Harvey
being jobbed into the living because he had been at Eton with Mr.
Gladstone and was his political supporter. As it happened he was a
conservative, and Mr. Gladstone knew nothing of him except that a number
of most competent persons had praised his learning. In spite of all this,
however, and of the technical validity of the appointment, we may wish
that the rector’s doubts had not been overruled. A worthy member regaled
the House by a story of a gentleman staying in the mansion of a friend;
one morning he heard great noise and confusion in the yard; looking out he
saw a kitchen-maid being put on a horse, and so carried round and round
the yard. When he went downstairs he asked what was the matter, and the
groom said, “Oh, sir, ’tis only that we’re going to take the animal to the
fair to sell, and we want to say he has carried a lady.” The apologue was
not delicate, but it conveyed a common impression. “Gladstone spoke,” says
Mr. Bruce (March 9, 1872), “with great vigour and eloquence on the Ewelme
case; but I think that, with the best possible intentions, he had placed
himself in a wrong position.”



IV


In 1872 the wide popularity of the government underwent a marked decline.
The award at Geneva caused lively irritation. The most active
nonconformists were in active revolt. The Licensing bills infuriated the
most powerful of all trade interests. The Collier case and the Ewelme case
seemed superfluous and provoking blunders. A strong military section
thirsted for revenge on the royal warrant. Mr. Goschen’s threatened bill
on local rating spread vague terrors. Individual ministers began to excite
particular odium.

As time went on, the essentially composite character of a majority that
was only held together by Mr. Gladstone’s personality, his authority in
the House, and his enormous strength outside, revealed itself in awkward
fissures. The majority was described by good critics of the time, as made
up of three sections, almost well defined enough to deserve the name of
three separate parties. First were the whigs, who never forgot that the
prime minister had been for half his life a tory; who always suspected
him, and felt no personal attachment to him, though they valued his
respect for property and tradition, and knew in any case that he was the
only possible man. Then came the middle-class liberals, who had held
predominance since 1832, who were captivated by Mr. Gladstone’s genius for
finance and business, and who revered his high moral ideals. Third, there
was the left wing, not strong in parliament but with a certain backing
among the workmen, who thought their leader too fond of the church, too
deferential to the aristocracy, and not plain enough and thorough enough
for a reforming age. The murmurs and suspicions of these hard and logical
utilitarians of the left galled Mr. Gladstone as ungrateful. Phillimore
records of him at this moment:—


    _Feb. 21, 1872._—Gladstone in high spirits and in rather a
    conservative mood. 29.—Gladstone sees that the time is fast coming
    when he must sever himself from his extreme supporters. He means
    to take the opportunity of retiring on the fair plea that he does
    not like to oppose those who have shown such great confidence in
    him, or to join their and his opponents. The plea seems good for
    retirement, but not for refraining in his individual capacity from
    supporting a government which is liberal and conservative.


Here is a sketch from the Aberdare papers of the temper and proceedings of
the session:—


    _April 19._—We have had a disastrous week—three defeats, of which
    much the least damaging was that on local taxation, where we
    defended the public purse against a dangerous raid. There is no
    immediate danger to be apprehended from them. But these defeats
    lower prestige, encourage the discontented and envious, and
    animate the opposition. I think that Gladstone, who behaved
    yesterday with consummate judgment and temper, is personally very
    indifferent at the result. He is vexed at the ingratitude of men
    for whom he has done such great things which would have been
    simply impossible without him, and would not be unwilling to leave
    them for a while to their own guidance, and his feeling is shared
    by many of the ministry. Our measures must for the most part be
    taken up by our successors, and we should of course be too happy
    to help them. But I don’t see the end near, although, of course,
    everybody is speculating.


Yet business was done. Progress of a certain kind was made in the thorny
field of the better regulation of public houses, but Mr. Gladstone seems
never to have spoken upon it in parliament. The subject was in the hands
of Mr. Bruce, the home secretary, an accomplished and amiable man of the
purest public spirit, and he passed his bill; but nothing did more to
bring himself and his colleagues into stern disfavour among the especially
pagan strata of the population. An entry or two from Mr. Bruce’s papers
will suffice to show Mr. Gladstone’s attitude:—


    _Home Office, Dec. 9, 1869._—I am just returned from the cabinet,
    where my Licensing bill went through with flying colours. I was
    questioned a great deal as to details, but was ready, and I think
    that Gladstone was very well pleased.

    _Jan. 16, 1871._—I called upon Gladstone yesterday evening. He was
    in high spirits and full of kindness. He said that he had told
    Cardwell that I must be at the bottom of the abuse the press was
    pouring upon him, as I had contrived to relieve myself of it.
    “Some one minister,” he added, “is sure to be assailed. You caught
    it in the autumn, and now poor Cardwell is having a hard time of
    it.” I went with him afterwards to the Chapel Royal, which he
    never fails to attend.

    _Dec. 14._—We have a cabinet to-day, when I hope to have my
    Licensing bill in its main principles definitely settled.
    Unfortunately Gladstone cares for nothing but “free trade” [in the
    sale of liquor], which the House won’t have, and I cannot get him
    really to interest himself in the subject.


This is Speaker Brand’s account of the general position:—


    Throughout the session the opposition, ably led by Disraeli, were
    in an attitude of watchfulness. He kept his eye on the proceedings
    of the government day by day on the Alabama treaty. Had that
    treaty failed, no doubt Disraeli would have taken the sense of the
    House on the conduct of the government. For the larger part of the
    session the Alabama question hung like a cloud over the
    proceedings, but as soon as that was settled, the sky cleared. It
    has been a good working session.... Of the two leading men,
    Gladstone and Disraeli, neither has a strong hold on his
    followers. The radicals below the right gangway are turbulent and
    disaffected, and the same may be said of the independent
    obstruction below the left gangway.... B., E., H., L. avowedly
    obstruct all legislation, and thus bring the House into discredit.


(M128) It was now that Mr. Disraeli discerned the first great opportunity
approaching, and he took the field. At Manchester (April 3) he drew the
famous picture of the government, one of the few classic pieces of the
oratory of the century:—


    Extravagance is being substituted for energy by the government.
    The unnatural stimulus is subsiding. Their paroxysms end in
    prostration. Some take refuge in melancholy, and their eminent
    chief alternates between a menace and a sigh. As I sit opposite
    the treasury bench, the ministers remind me of one of those marine
    landscapes not very unusual on the coasts of South America. You
    behold a range of exhausted volcanoes. Not a flame flickers upon a
    single pallid crest. But the situation is still dangerous. There
    are occasional earthquakes, and ever and anon the dark rumblings
    of the sea.


On midsummer day he essayed at the Crystal Palace a higher flight, and
first struck the imperialist note. He agreed that distant colonies could
only have their affairs administered by self-government. “Self-government,
when it was conceded, ought to have been conceded as part of a great
policy of imperial consolidation. It ought to have been accomplished by an
imperial tariff, by securities for the people of England, for the
enjoyment of the unappropriated lands which belonged to the sovereign as
their trustee, and by a military code which should have precisely defined
the means and the responsibilities by which the colonies should have been
defended, and by which, if necessary, this country should call for aid
from the colonies themselves. It ought further to have been accompanied by
the institution of some representative council in the metropolis which
would have brought the colonies into constant and continuous relations
with the home government.” He confessed that he had himself at one time
been so far caught by the subtle views of the disintegrationists, that he
thought the tie was broken. Opinion in the country was at last rising
against disintegration. The people had decided that the empire should not
be destroyed. “In my judgment,” he said, “no minister in this country will
do his duty who neglects any opportunity of reconstructing as much as
possible our colonial empire, and of responding to those distant
sympathies which may become the source of incalculable strength and
happiness to this land.” Toryism now sought three great objects: “the
maintenance of our institutions, the preservation of our empire, and the
improvement of the condition of the people.” The time was at hand when
England would have to decide between national and cosmopolitan principles,
and the issue was no mean one. “You must remember,” he concluded, “that in
fighting against liberalism or the continental system, you are fighting
against those who have the advantage of power—against those who have been
high in place for nearly half a century. You have nothing to trust to but
your own energy and the sublime instinct of an ancient people.”

Disraeli’s genius, at once brooding over conceptions and penetrating in
discernment of fact, had shown him the vast tory reserves that his
household suffrage of 1867 would rally to his flag. The same genius again
scanning the skies read aright the signs and characteristics of the time.
Nobody would seriously have counselled intervention in arms between France
and Germany, yet many felt a vague humiliation at a resettlement of Europe
without England. Nobody seriously objected to the opening of the Black
Sea, yet many were affected by a restive consciousness of diplomatic
defeat. Everybody was glad that—as I am about to describe in the following
chapter—we had settled the outstanding quarrel with America, yet most
people were sore at the audacity of the indirect claims, followed by the
award of swingeing damages. National pride in short was silently but
deeply stirred; the steady splendour of the economic era for a season
paled in uncalculating minds. This coming mood the tory leader, with his
rare faculty of wide and sweeping forecast, confidently divined, and he
found for it the oracle of a party cry in phrases about Empire and Social
Reform. When power fell into his hands, he made no single move of solid
effect for either social reform or imperial unity. When Mr. Gladstone
committed himself to a policy, he brought in bills to carry it out.
Forecast without a bill is interesting, but not to be trusted.




Chapter IX. Washington And Geneva. (1870-1872)


    Although I may think the sentence was harsh in its extent, and
    unjust in its basis, I regard the fine imposed on this country as
    dust in the balance compared with the moral value of the example
    set when these two great nations of England and America—which are
    among the most fiery and the most jealous in the world with regard
    to anything that touches national honour—went in peace and concord
    before a judicial tribunal rather than resort to the arbitrament
    of the sword.—GLADSTONE.(254)



I


One morning in the summer of 1862 a small wooden sloop, screw and steam,
of a little over a thousand tons register dropped slowly down the waters
of the Mersey. The decks were rough and unfinished, but guests on board
with bright costumes made a gay picture, flags were flying, and all wore
the look of a holiday trial trip. After luncheon in the cabin, the scene
suddenly changed. At a signal from the vessel a tug came alongside, the
cheerful visitors to their surprise were quickly transferred, and the
sloop made off upon her real business. She dropped anchor in a bay on the
coast of Anglesey, where she took twenty or thirty men mostly English on
board from a tug sent after her from Liverpool, with or without the
knowledge of the officials. Thence she sailed to the Azores, where a
steamer from London and a steamer from Liverpool brought officers,
armaments, and coal. As soon as these were trans-shipped, the British
ensign was hauled down, the Confederate flag run up, and the captain
opened sealed orders directing him to sink, burn, or destroy, everything
that flew the ensign of the so-called United States of America. These
orders the captain of the rover faithfully executed, and in a few months
the _Alabama_—for that was henceforth her memorable name—had done much to
sweep the commercial marine of America from the ocean.

(M129) On the day on which she sailed (July 29), the government made up
its mind that she should be detained, on the strength of affidavits that
had been almost a week in their hands. The bird of prey had flown. The
best definition of due diligence in these matters would seem to be, that
it is the same diligence and exactness as are exercised in proceedings
relating to imposts of excise or customs. We may guess how different would
have been the vigilance of the authorities if a great smuggling operation
had been suspected. This lamentable proceeding, for which the want of
alacrity and common sense at the foreign office and the bias or blundering
of the customs agents at Liverpool, may divide the grave discredit, opened
a diplomatic campaign between England and the United States that lasted as
long as the siege of Troy, and became an active element in the state of
moral war that prevailed during that time between the two kindred
communities. Mr. Gladstone, like other members of the Palmerston
administration, held for several years that the escape of the _Alabama_
was no wrong done by us. Lord Russell admitted (1863) that the cases of
the _Alabama_ and the _Oreto_ were “a scandal and in some degree a
reproach to our laws,” though he stated in the same sentence that the
cabinet thought the law sufficient where legal evidence also was
sufficient. It was true that Britain is the greatest shipbuilding country
in the world; that to interfere with ships or any other article of
commerce is in so far to impose on a neutral some of the calamities of a
belligerent; and that restriction of trade was no element in the policy
and spirit of foreign enlistment acts either here or in America, which was
the first country that by positive legislation sought to restrain its
citizens within definite limits of neutrality. By a law of this kind
parliament intended to forbid all subjects within its jurisdiction to make
war on people at peace with the British sovereign. It is only, in the
words of Canning, when the elements of armament are combined, that they
come within the purview of such law. This is not by way of controversy,
but to define an issue. Chief Justice Cockburn, an ardent champion of his
country if ever there was one, pronounced in his judgment at Geneva, when
the day for a verdict at length arrived, that the cruiser ought to have
been detained a week before; that the officials of customs were misled by
legal advice “perhaps erroneous”; and that the right course to take was
“plain and unmistakable.” Even Lord Russell after many years of obdurate
self-defence, at last confessed in manly words: “I assent entirely to the
opinion of the lord chief justice that the _Alabama_ ought to have been
detained during the four days I was waiting for the opinion of the law
officers. But I think that the fault was not that of the commissioners of
customs; it was my fault as secretary of state for foreign affairs.”(255)

Before the _Alabama_ some ten vessels intended for Confederate service had
been detained, inquired into, and if released, released by order of a
court for want of evidence. After the _Alabama_, no vessel on which the
American minister had made representation to the foreign office succeeded
in quitting a British port. But critical cases occurred. Emboldened by the
successful escape of the _Alabama_, the Confederate agents placed two
ironclad rams upon the stocks at the Birkenhead shipyard; Mr. Adams, the
American minister in London, renewed his bombardment of the foreign office
with proof of their object and design; the foreign office repeated its
perplexed pleas against interference, made still more difficult by a
colourable transfer of the rams to a French owner; and the whole dreary
tragi-comedy of the _Alabama_ seemed likely to be acted over again. By the
autumn of 1863 the rams were ready to take the water, and the builders
were again talking of a trial trip. This time Lord Russell gave orders
that the rams were to be stopped (Sept. 3). He felt the mortification of
an honourable man at the trick, of which he had allowed himself to be made
the dupe in the case of the _Alabama_. Perhaps also he had been impressed
by language used by Mr. Adams to a member of the cabinet, and more
formally to himself, to the effect that the departure of the rams would
mean the practical opening to the Southern Confederates of full liberty to
use this country as a base for hostile expeditions against the North.
“This,” said Mr. Adams, “is war.”(256)

The affair of the rams was followed by Mr. Gladstone with absorbed
attention. He confessed to the Duke of Argyll (Sept. 30, 1863) that he
could not get the ironclads out of his head, and his letter shows with
what exhaustive closeness he argued the case. The predicament was exactly
fitted to draw out some of his most characteristic qualities—minute
precision, infinite acuteness, infinite caution, the faculty of multiplied
distinction upon distinction, an eye for the shadows of a shade. The
points are no longer of living interest, but they exhibit a side of him
that is less visible in his broader performances of parliament or
platform.

As might have been expected, Mr. Adams was instructed to solicit redress
for the doings of the _Alabama_. Lord Russell (Dec. 19, 1862), declaring
that government had used every effort to stop her, refused to admit that
we were under any obligation whatever to make compensation. Two years
later (Aug. 30, 1865) he still declined both compensation and a proposal
for arbitration. This opened a long struggle of extreme interest in the
ministerial life of Mr. Gladstone, and, what was more, in the history of
civilised nations. It was arbitration upon these issues that now began to
divide politicians both inside the cabinet and outside, just as mediation
and recognition had divided them in the earlier stages of the American
conflict.

(M130) In 1863 Mr. Adams was the first to point to what after a long
struggle became the solution of these difficulties, by assuring Lord
Russell that there was “no fair and equitable form of conventional
arbitrament or reference” to which America would not be willing to submit.
In 1865 (Sept. 2) Mr. Gladstone wrote a letter to Lord Russell, the reply
to which has already been published.(257) Always jealous for cabinet
authority, he began by submitting to Lord Russell that he had no idea that
a despatch refusing arbitration was to be written, without a cabinet being
held upon a subject so important. As it was, they had not disposed of the
question or even discussed it. On the merits, he inclined to believe that
the demand for arbitration was highly unreasonable; still though not
disposed to say “Yes” to the demand, he doubted “No.” The proper course
would be to lead the Americans to bring out the whole of their case, so
that the cabinet might have all the pleas before them previously to coming
to “a decision of great delicacy and moment.”

Lord Russell stood to his guns. “The question,” he said, “has been the
principal object of my thoughts for the last two years, and I confess I
think that paying twenty millions down would be far preferable to
submitting the case to arbitration.” England would be disgraced for ever
if a foreign government were left to arbitrate whether an English
secretary of state had been diligent or negligent in his duties, and
whether an English law officer was partial and prejudiced in giving his
opinion of English law. There the matter stood, and the moral war
smouldered on.



II


In 1870, the time arrived when Mr. Gladstone himself, no longer a minister
third in standing in a Palmerston government, was called upon to deal with
this great issue as a principal in his own administration. In 1868 the
conservative government had agreed to a convention, by which a mixed
commission, British and American, sitting in London should decide upon the
settlement of all claims by the subjects of either country upon the other;
and in respect of what were known generically as the _Alabama_ Claims,
proposing to refer these to the arbitration of the head of some friendly
state, in case the mixed commission should not agree. The idea of a
composite court or tribunal, as distinguished from a single sovereign
arbitrator, had not yet risen above the horizon. Before this project
ripened, Mr. Disraeli was out of government, Lord Clarendon had taken Lord
Stanley’s place at the foreign office, and the convention, with some
modifications, was signed by him (Jan. 14, 1869), and in due course
despatched to Washington. There the Senate, not on the merits but for
party and personal reasons, refused to ratify. Though this attempt failed,
neither of the two English political parties was in a position any longer
to refuse arbitration in principle.

Agreement in principle is of little avail, without driving force enough
for practice. The driving force was found mainly from a gradual change in
English sentiment, though the difficulties with Russia also counted for
something. Even so early as 1863 the tide of popular opinion in England
had begun slowly to swell in favour of the Northern cause. In 1866 victory
across the Atlantic was decided, the union was saved, and slavery was
gone. A desire to remove causes of difference between ourselves and the
United States grew at a remarkable speed, for the spectacle of success is
wont to have magical effects even in minds that would indignantly reject
the standards of Machiavelli. While benevolent feeling gained volume in
this country, statesmen in America took ground that made the satisfaction
of it harder. They began to base their claim for reparation on the
original proclamation of British neutrality when the American conflict
began. First made in 1866, this new pretension was repeated in despatches
of 1867, and in 1869 the American secretary formally recorded the
complaint that the Southern insurrection obtained its enduring vitality by
resources drawn from England, and as a consequence of England’s imperfect
discharge of her duties as neutral. England became, they said, the
arsenal, the navy-yard, and the treasury of the insurgent Confederacy.

In the discussion of the Clarendon convention of 1869 Mr. Sumner—a man of
some great qualities, but too often the slave of words where he thought
himself their master—made an extravagant speech against the British
government in the senate, assessing the claim of the United States upon
this country on principles that would have raised it to the modest figure
of some four hundred million pounds sterling due from us to them, or, as
Mr. Gladstone himself estimated it, to sixteen hundred millions. It does
not matter which. This was only a violent and fantastic exaggeration of an
idea of constructive claims for indirect damages that lay slumbering, but
by no means extinct, in American minds, until, as we shall see, in 1872 it
very nearly led to a disastrous explosion. This idea first found distinct
and official utterance in the despatch of 1869. Besides compensating
individuals for depredations, we were to pay for the cost to America of
chasing the cruisers; for the transfer of most of the American commercial
marine to the British flag; for enhanced insurance; and generally for the
increased difficulty of putting down the rebellion.

All through 1870 a rather troublesome exchange of letters went on between
Washington and the foreign office, and Mr. Gladstone took an active
concern in it. “I grieve to trouble you with so much manuscript,” Lord
Clarendon writes him on one occasion (Mar. 17, 1870), “but I don’t venture
single-handed to conduct a correspondence with the United States.... All
this correspondence can do nothing but harm, and I have made my answer as
short as is consistent with courtesy. I should like to send it on
Saturday, but if you have not time to look at it, or think it ought to be
seen by the cabinet, I could, make an excuse for the delay to Motley.” All
this was in entire conformity to Mr. Gladstone’s enduring conception of
the right relations between a prime minister and the foreign secretary. We
need not follow details, but one must not be omitted. In 1868 a royal
commission recommended various material changes in the Foreign Enlistment
Act, and in 1870 accordingly a new law was passed, greatly strengthening
the hands of the executive, and furnishing due means of self-protection
against such nefarious manœuvres as those of the _Alabama_.(258) By this
Act, among other things, it was made an offence to build a ship with
reasonable cause to believe that it would be employed in the service of a
foreign state at war with a friendly state.

As the year 1870 went on, the expediency of an accommodation with America
strengthened in Mr. Gladstone’s mind. One member of the cabinet pointed
out to the foreign secretary that if there was any chance of a war with
Russia about the Black Sea, it would be as well to get causes of
differences with America out of the way; otherwise, however unprepared the
United States might be at the moment, we should undoubtedly have them on
our hands sooner or later.(259) With Mr. Gladstone the desire was not a
consequence of the possible troubles with Russia. His view was wider and
less specific. He was alive to the extent to which England’s power in
Europe was reduced by the smothered quarrel with America, but he took even
higher ground than this in his sense of the blessing to the world of an
absolute reconciliation in good faith between the old England and the new.
At first the government proposed (Nov. 28, 1870) to send over Sir John
Rose to America. He was one of the many Scots who have carried the British
flag in its best colours over the face of the globe; his qualities had
raised him to great prominence in Canada; he had enjoyed good
opportunities of measuring the American ground; he was shrewd, wise, well
read in the ways of men and the book of the world, and he had besides the
virtue of being pleasant. Rose himself did not formally undertake the
mission, but he applied himself with diligence and success to bring the
American government to the project of a joint high commission to examine
and consider a situation that there was a common desire to terminate.

(M131) On Feb. 1, 1871, Mr. Gladstone was able to report to the Queen the
arrival of news that the government of the United States were willing to
concur in a commission for the discussion of international questions at
present depending, without a previous understanding that liability in
respect of the _Alabama_ was to be acknowledged by this country. The
cabinet naturally thought that on this they might close, and they at once
considered the composition of the commission and the proper instructions.
Lord de Grey consented to be its president. Lord Derby, on being invited
to join the commission, was very grateful for the compliment but declined,
being of opinion that firmness and not concession to the Americans was
what was wanted. Sir George Grey declined; so did Lord Halifax. “I asked
Northcote,” Lord Granville reports to Mr. Gladstone, “his eyes twinkled
through his spectacles. But he said he must ask Lady Northcote, and
requested permission to consult Dizzy. The former consented, ditto Dizzy,
which looks well.” So the commission was made up of Lord de Grey as the
head of it, Northcote, Thornton (the British minister at Washington), Sir
John Macdonald, as the representative of Canada, and Mr. Mountague
Bernard, a theoretic jurist, who had written a book about our neutrality
the year before.(260)



III


The personal relations of Lord de Grey and his brethren with their
American colleagues were excellent. They worked hard all day, and enjoyed
Washington hospitality in its full strength every night. In business, Mr.
Fish occasionally advanced or supported contentions thought by the
Englishmen to be almost amusing. For instance, Mr. Sumner in a memorandum
(Jan. 17, 1871) to Mr. Fish, had submitted a singular species of political
syllogism. He desired nothing so much, he said, as that entire goodwill
should prevail between Great Britain and the United States, and that the
settlement should be complete. Now the greatest trouble and peril in the
way of a complete settlement was Fenianism; Fenianism was excited by the
proximity of the British flag over the Canadian border; therefore, the
British flag should be withdrawn from the whole hemisphere, including the
islands, and the American flag should fly in its stead. In conformity with
this tight and simple chain of reasoning, Mr. Fish threw out a hint to
Lord de Grey that the cession of Canada might end the quarrel. The English
envoy contented himself with the dry remark that he did not find such a
suggestion in his instructions.(261)

Though sometimes amused, the commissioners soon understood that at heart
the American negotiators desired to settle. Difficulties with their own
people were great. A presidential campaign with all its necessities
approached. A settlement of outstanding accounts with England might be a
good card to play in the election; on the other hand, if the peace card
were not available, it was just possible that a war card might do nearly
as well. Mr. Fish was mortally afraid of Sumner, who had been chairman of
the foreign relations committee in the senate, and whose anti-English
temper, as we have seen, was red-hot. The constitutional requirement of a
two-thirds majority in the senate for the ratification of a treaty was
awkward and menacing, and it was necessary to secure dubious senators by
the exhibition of high national temper on the public stage. It is
interesting to note, in passing, that the English visitors were persuaded
how much better it would have been if, according to our own parliamentary
system at Westminster, the American system had allowed Mr. Fish to meet
Mr. Sumner on the floor of congress, and instead of seeking victory by
unseen manipulation, fight the battle out before the country.

(M132) The British commissioners were almost as much embarrassed by their
friends at home as by their friends or foes at Washington. Both ministers
and lawyers, from the safe distance of Downing Street, were sometimes
excessive in pressing small and trivial alterations, which the Americans
after the diplomatist’s manner insisted on treating as if they were not
small but great. The sharp corner in the London cabinet was the more
serious proposal, that certain rules as to the duty of neutrals should be
laid down, and should be made guiding principles for the arbitrators,
although the rules themselves had not been formally established when
England’s alleged breaches of neutral obligation had been committed. This
retro-active or _ex-post-facto_ quality, when the cabinet considered it
(March 18), gave trouble, and it was used by passionate and impolitic
persons to tarnish the whole policy in this country. Much heat was evoked,
for a cabinet of many talents is not always the same thing as a cabinet of
plain minds. One clever man objected at large to the commission, to
concession, to obtaining any principle of settlement for future
contingencies. A second was violent against all such arbitration as this,
and thought they had much better pay up at once and have done with it. A
third clever man even let fall some high words about “national dishonour.”
Granville, Argyll, Forster (the last described by a colleague as “a tower
of strength”), were steadfast and unfaltering for conciliation. Mr.
Gladstone agreed, but eager though he was for a settlement, he “agreed
with reluctance.” Sir Roundell Palmer had now great influence with him,
and Palmer had come round to the conclusion that the risk from translating
retrospectively into the form of a hypothetical international convention,
not existing when the events happened, a duty that we had recognised as
incumbent on us under our own law, might be safely run.(262) In plain
English, the adverse way of describing this peculiar substitute for a free
and open arbitration, was that Great Britain owed the Americans nothing,
and if she had not consented to accept a set of new-fangled rules, and to
be judged retro-actively by them, she could not possibly have been made to
pay anything. To this the short answer was that though the rules might or
might not be new-fangled as principles of international law, yet they were
not new as principles of English municipal law, which, as construed by the
British government itself, was coincident in substance with those rules.
Was it in fact reasonable to contend that ironclads might be built in the
Mersey, sent out a few miles beyond the river mouth, there armed from
lighters, and sent off to bombard New York? If not, was it reasonable that
England should invite the arbitrators to judge the _Alabama_ case
according to one rule in the past, and then to lay down another rule for
the future?

A minor objection raised by Mr. Gladstone gave much alarm to his
commissioners, and it is too characteristic to be omitted. Speaking of the
ardently desired treaty, he writes to Lord Granville (April 12, 1871):—


    With regard to the preamble, it designates the late war in America
    as “the rebellion.” I do not think it is right for us now to adopt
    a mode of speech different from that which we maintained
    throughout the struggle. Further, it tends to discredit our
    recognition of belligerency. And if we declare it a rebellion, we
    have given an example available to be quoted hereafter for the
    dealings of a foreign power with rebels as belligerents. If, on
    the other hand, the Americans object to speaking of the “civil
    war,” it is quite easy (so I think) to leave out the words “during
    the recent rebellion in the U.S.” altogether, and to say in the
    years 186—or even to begin “Whereas H.B.M.” perhaps inserting in
    after “U.S.” “in respect of such depredations.”


This is an instance of the tenacity with which he sometimes held his
ground after its relations and bearings had entirely changed. Something
too may doubtless be set down to the lingering remains of his old feeling,
of the strength of the constitutional argument of the South that sovereign
states had a right to withdraw from the union if they pleased. If the
proposal to drop the word “rebellion” had been brought without warning or
preparation before the full commission, assent would have been hopeless,
but by the discretion of informal interviews, the matter was canvassed
beforehand, the obnoxious word was silently left out, Mr. Gladstone’s
point was gained, and things went prosperously forward. “I am quite sure,”
wrote Sir Stafford Northcote to Mr. Gladstone (March 17), “that there was
no other way in which you could have hoped to settle these questions than
by such a commission as ours.... What may be our fate I do not presume to
guess, but if we succeed, it will be mainly due to de Grey’s excellent
sense, tact, and temper.” In the end, notwithstanding the power of the
senate over treaties, the want of control by the American government over
its party, and the exigencies of Canada, all at last fell into decent
shape, and the substantial objects in view were effectively maintained.
Canadian fishery questions were adjusted, and the boundary of San Juan
remitted to the arbitration of the newly made German Emperor.

(M133) After thirty-seven sittings, spread over a period of two months,
the treaty was signed on May 8, in a room decorated with flowers, with the
good omen of brilliant sunshine, and everybody in such good humour that
the American secretary of the commission tossed up with Lord Tenterden
which should sign first,—the Englishman happily winning. The treaty began
by the declaration that her Britannic Majesty authorised the commissioners
to express in a friendly spirit the regret felt by her Majesty’s
government for the escape, under whatever circumstances, of the _Alabama_
and other vessels from British ports, and for the depredations committed
by these vessels. It embraced a definition of the rules of maritime
neutrality, which some legal text-writers have applauded, and other legal
text-writers have therefore condemned. Finally, and most important of all,
whether we look at the immediate purpose or at its contribution to a great
though slow-moving cause, the treaty of Washington secured a judgment by
the arbitration of a tribunal, of all claims growing out of acts committed
by the cruisers, “and generically known as the _Alabama_ Claims.” The
tribunal was to consist of five members named by Great Britain, the United
States, Switzerland, Italy, and Brazil.

The effect of the rules of Washington as applied at Geneva remains, as I
have said, a topic of controversy. Maine, for example, while admitting
that the result for the occasion was good, holds that by making the rule
of neutral duty more severe, it marked reaction rather than progress in
the general drift of international law.(263) Others maintain that the
amended foreign enlistment Act of 1870, which is in fact a partial
incorporation of the Washington rules, went far beyond what international
law requires, and made a new crime out of an act, namely the building of a
ship, which is not forbidden either by the law of nations or by other
municipal laws.(264)



IV


(M134) Once, after some crowning mercy in the war, President Lincoln said
to his cabinet, “Now, gentlemen, we have got our harpoon into the monster,
but we must still take uncommon care, or else by a single flop of his tail
he will send us into all eternity.” This wholesome caution, too often
overlooked by headlong politicians, was suddenly found to be much needed
at the eleventh hour of the treaty of Washington. At the end of 1871, Mr.
Gladstone experienced a severe shock, for he found that the case put in by
America for the arbitrators insisted upon an adjudication by them not only
upon the losses suffered by individual American citizens, but upon the
indirect, constructive, consequential, and national claims first
propounded in their full dimensions by Mr. Sumner. A storm at once arose
in England, and nobody was more incensed than the prime minister. In
reporting to the Queen, he used language of extreme vehemence, and in the
House of Commons (Feb. 9, 1872) when Mr. Disraeli spoke of the indirect
claims as preposterous and wild, as nothing less than the exacting of
tribute from a conquered people, Mr. Gladstone declared that such words
were in truth rather under the mark than an exaggeration, and went on to
say that “we must be insane to accede to demands which no nation with a
spark of honour or spirit left could submit to even at the point of
death.” Speaking of the construction put upon the treaty by the
government, he declared such a construction to be “the true and
unambiguous meaning of the words, and therefore the only meaning
admissible, whether tried by grammar, by reason, by policy, or by any
other standard.” Some persons argued that this was to accuse the Americans
of dishonesty. “I learn really for the first time,” exclaimed Mr.
Gladstone to Lord Granville (Feb. 8), “that a man who affirms that in his
opinion a document is unambiguous in his favour, thereby affirms that one
who reads it otherwise is dishonest.” His critics retorted that surely a
construction that could not stand the test of grammar, of reason, of
policy, or any other test, must be due either to insanity or to
dishonesty; and as we could hardly assume General Grant, Mr. Fish, and the
others to be out of their wits, there was nothing for it but dishonesty.

For five anxious months the contest lasted. The difficulties were those of
time and form, often worse than those of matter and substance. Nor would
this have been the first case in which small points hinder the settlement
of great questions. The manner of proceeding, as Mr. Gladstone reports to
the Queen, was of such complication that hours were given almost every day
for many weeks, to the consideration of matter which on the day following
was found to have moved out of view. Suggestions came from Washington,
mostly inadmissible, whether their faults were due to accident and haste
or to design. Sometimes refusals of this suggestion or that from our side
were couched in “terms of scant courtesy and bordering upon harshness.”
Still the cabinet persisted in husbanding every chance of saving the
treaty. They charitably judged the attitude of the Washington government,
in Mr. Gladstone’s ample language, “to be directed by considerations
belonging to the sphere of its own domestic policy, and to the contentions
of party in that sphere. But they will attempt by patient consideration,
avoidance of self-laudation and of irritating topics, and a steady
endeavour to be right, to attain the great end in view of an honourable
settlement which it would be a sad disgrace as well as misfortune to both
countries now to miss.” And here occurs a consideration as we pass, upon
the American constitution. “The fact remains indisputable (June 1), that
there is no conclusive evidence of any serious subject the substance of
which is at present in dispute between the two governments, but the
difficulties arising on the American side from what may be termed
electioneering considerations are greatly aggravated by the position of
the American senate and the reference to that body for previous counsel,
for which it seems to be miserably unsuited, as it takes days and almost
weeks for debate, where a cabinet would require only hours.”

The opposition in parliament was patriotic, and as a rule made no
difficulties. “Mr. Disraeli,” reports Mr. Gladstone (June 3), “behaved
with the caution and moderation which have generally marked his conduct
with, regard to the Washington treaty.... On the whole the House of
Commons showed the same dignified self-command for which it has been
remarkable during the whole period since the opening of the session with
reference to this question; although the more inflammatory expressions,
which fell from a few members, were warmly cheered by a portion, and a
portion only, of the opposition.”

The cabinet was unanimous against the submission of the indirect claims,
but there were marked differences of leaning, as in fact there had been
throughout. All accepted Lord Ripon’s(265) view that if he had insisted on
getting into the treaty nothing less than a formal and express repudiation
of the indirect claims, no treaty at all would have been possible. Both
sides in the Washington conferences had been more anxious to submit to the
arbitrators the principle of allowing indirect claims, than to embark on
any discussion of them. The American commissioners knew this principle to
be unsound, but knowing also that their own people expected the claims to
be referred, they could only abstain from insisting on their inclusion.
The British commissioners were willing silently to waive an express
renunciation of them, being confident that the terms of the protocols and
the language of the treaty would be so construed by the arbitrators as to
exclude the indirect claims.(266) All this was a rational and truly
diplomatic temper on both sides; but then the immortal events of a hundred
years before had shown too plainly that Englishmen at home cannot always
be trusted to keep a rational and diplomatic temper; and many events in
the interval had shown that English colonists, even when transfigured into
American citizens, were still chips of the old block. The cabinet agreed
that a virtual waiver of the claims was to be found both in the protocols
of the conference, and in the language of the treaty. Lord Ripon and Mr.
Forster, however, thought it would be safe to go on at Geneva, in the
assurance that the arbitrators would be certain to rule the indirect
claims out. At the other extreme of the cabinet scale, the view was urged
that England should not go on, unless she put upon record a formal
declaration that did she not, and never would, assent to any adjudication
upon the indirect claims. To a certain minister who pressed for some
declaration in this sense,—also formulated in a motion by Lord Russell in
parliament, himself responsible for so much of the original
mischief(267)—Mr. Gladstone wrote as follows:—


    _June 17._—... I doubt whether the cabinet can legitimately be
    asked, as a cabinet, to make these affirmations, inasmuch as,
    according to my view, they are not within the purview of its
    present undertaking—that undertaking has reference exclusively to
    the scope of the arbitration. We have contended all along that the
    claims would not legitimately come before the arbitrators.... But
    we had never demanded the assent of the Americans to our
    reasoning, only to our conclusion that the claims were not within
    the scope of the arbitration. It is my view (but this is quite
    another matter) that they lie cast aside, a dishonoured carcass,
    which no amount of force, fraud, or folly can again galvanise into
    life. You will see then, in sum, that (if I rightly understand
    you) I accept for myself broadly and freely what may be called the
    extreme doctrine _about_ the indirect claims; but I think the
    cabinet cannot fairly be challenged for an official judgment on a
    matter really not before it.


The little entries in the diary give us a good idea of the pressure on the
prime minister:—


    _Feb. 6, 1872._—Spoke an hour after Disraeli on the address....
    The _Alabama_ and Washington question lay heavy on me till the
    evening. Even during the speech I was disquieted, and had to
    converse with my colleagues. _March 16._—Cabinet 2¾-7; laborious
    chiefly on the Washington treaty. _17th._—Worked on part of the
    despatch for America. _18th._—In conclave. Much heavy work on
    _Alabama_. _22nd._—Severe bronchial attack. Transacted business
    through West, W. H. G. [his son] Mr. Glyn, Lord Granville, and
    Cardwell, who went to and fro between the cabinet below-stairs and
    me. To all of them I whispered with some difficulty. _April
    5._—Conclave on countercase. First with Cardwell and Lowe, then
    with Tenterden and Sanderson. Much confusion. _May 12._—Saw Lord
    Granville, who brought good news from America. _27th._—U.S.
    question bristles with difficulties. _30th._—H. of C. During the
    evening two long conferences on Washington treaty with Lord G. and
    the lawyers, and a cabinet 10-1. Worked Uniformity bill through
    committee at intervals. _June 3._—Cabinet 3-4-1/4. H. of C. Made a
    statement on the treaty of Washington. The house behaved _well_.
    Also got the Act of Uniformity bill read a third time. Its
    preamble is really a notable fact in 1872. _6th._—H. of C. Spoke
    on Washington treaty and Scots Education—the House _too_ well
    pleased as to the former. _11th._—The cabinet met at 2. and sat
    intermittently with the House to 5¾, again 9-1/4-1.


(M135) The arbitrators were to meet on June 15. Yet no break in the clouds
seemed likely. Mr. Gladstone and his colleagues had a meeting at the
foreign office, and did not separate until after midnight on June 11. The
British agent was to be directed to apply for an immediate adjournment,
and without lodging the summary of our case as provided by the treaty. If
the arbitrators declined to adjourn, either because the Americans
objected, or from a belief that they had no title to adjourn without a
formal opening of business by lodging summaries, then was or was not our
agent to change tack and lodge his summary? Or was the arbitration, and
with the arbitration the whole treaty, to fall to the ground for want of
it? On this question Mr. Gladstone thought it his duty to mention to the
Queen that it had not yet (June 13) been found possible to bring the
cabinet to a decision. For a day or two it looked as if the ministry might
fall to pieces, but the head of it was indomitable:—


    _June 13_ (Thursday).—Since Tuesday morning I have constantly
    resolved or discussed this proposition: that we should not be
    justified in breaking off the proceedings at Geneva (if an
    adjournment can be had after presentation of the summary), upon a
    refusal to present it. My determination upon it is now firmly
    rooted and tested by all the mental effort I can apply, and the
    time I thought had come to-day for looking forward as well as
    backward. I therefore wrote to the Queen in terms which might a
    little prepare her for difficulties in the cabinet. I saw
    Granville first, who had not reached my point, but seemed to come
    up to it; then arranged for him to see Halifax, Ripon to see
    Kimberley, and the chancellor [Lowe] to see Cardwell; as the
    _knot_ of the probable difficulty is in these three. On the whole,
    I hope we shall, in one way or another, work through. _At any
    rate, if anything like a government can be held together, I will
    not shrink._

    _June 15._—Cabinet 12-2-1/4, and with brief intervals to 7-½.
    Dined with Princess Louise. After dinner Granville and I went to
    see Mr. Hammond, then on to the F. 0., where we got (before
    midnight) the protocol of to-day from Geneva. Thank God that up to
    a certain point the indications on this great controversy are
    decidedly favourable.

    _June 16._—Sunday (Bunker Hill anniversary? [No—June 17]). Cabinet
    here 1-½-3-1/4. We sent off a telegram, which I hope may finish
    the good work at Geneva.


What happened at Geneva was this. When the day came, the British agent did
not lodge his summary, but asked for an adjournment for eight months, as
the two governments did not agree upon the scope of the arbitration. This
looked dark enough, and the treaty seemed doomed. It was saved by Mr.
Adams, the American nominee on the tribunal. When he reached Geneva and
learned how things stood, he decided that the knot which they could not
untie must be cut.(268) His golden idea was this: the arbitrators should
make a spontaneous declaration that on the principles of international law
the indirect claims ought to be excluded from their consideration. Adams
saw his colleagues one by one, and brought them round to his view. The
English chief justice had made up his mind that the whole thing was dead,
as he had for many months been loudly telling all London that it ought to
be. But when asked by Mr. Adams whether the spontaneous extra-judicial
declaration would remove all obstacles to progress, Cockburn answered that
he thought it would. “I said,” Mr. Adams continued, “that in that event I
was prepared to make a proposition. I should be assuming a heavy
responsibility; but I should do so, not as an arbitrator representing my
country, but as representing all nations.” So the indirect claims were
summarily ruled out, and the arbitration proceeded. In some notes prepared
for the cabinet on all these proceedings (Feb. 4, 1873), Lord Tenterden,
the clever and experienced British agent at Geneva, writes, “I cannot
conclude this part of the memorandum without saying that the dignity,
tact, self-command, and moderation with which Mr. Adams discharged his
functions as arbitrator, did honour to his country.”

(M136) In September (1872) the five arbitrators at Geneva gave their
award. They were unanimous in finding Great Britain liable for the acts of
the _Alabama_; all save the British representative found her liable for
the _Florida_; the Italian, the Swiss, and the American against the
Englishman and the Brazilian found her liable for the _Shenandoah_ after
leaving Melbourne. They awarded in satisfaction and final settlement of
all claims, including interest, a gross sum of about three and a quarter
million pounds sterling. The award, though hardly a surprise, still
inflicted a lively twinge of mortification on the masterful and confident
people of this island. Opinion was divided, but the decision was not one
of those that cut deep or raise the public temperature to fever. The
prints of the opposition insisted that the result was profoundly
vexatious, it was a bungled settlement, and the arguments used in favour
of it were “wild sentimental rubbish.” On the other hand, the _Times_
regarded it with profound satisfaction, and ministerial writers with a
lyric turn hailed it as a magnificent victory, though we had to pay a
heavy bill. A little balm was extracted from the fact that the Americans
had preferred before the tribunal a demand of nine millions and a half,
and thus got little more than one-third of what they had asked. So ended
what has been called the greatest of all arbitrations, extinguishing the
embers that could not have been left to smoulder without constant peril of
a vast and fratricidal conflagration. The treaty of Washington and the
Geneva arbitration stand out as the most notable victory in the nineteenth
century of the noble art of preventive diplomacy, and the most signal
exhibition in their history of self-command in two of the three chief
democratic powers of the western world. For the moment the result did
something to impair the popularity of Mr. Gladstone’s government, but his
association with this high act of national policy is one of the things
that give its brightest lustre to his fame.




Chapter X. As Head Of A Cabinet. (1868-1874)


    Rational co-operation in politics would be at an end, if no two
    men might act together, until they had satisfied themselves that
    in no possible circumstances could they be divided.—GLADSTONE.



I


The just complacency with which Mr. Gladstone regarded his cabinet on its
first construction held good:—


    I look back with great satisfaction on the internal working of the
    cabinet of 1868-74. It was a cabinet easily handled; and yet it
    was the only one of my four cabinets in which there were members
    who were senior to myself (the lord chancellor Hatherley, Lord
    Clarendon), with many other men of long ministerial experience.
    When this cabinet was breaking up in 1874, I took the opportunity
    of thanking them for the manner in which they had uniformly
    lightened my task in the direction of business. In reply, Halifax,
    who might be considered as the senior in years and experience
    taken jointly, very handsomely said the duty of the cabinet had
    been made more easy by the considerate manner in which I had
    always treated them. Some of them were as colleagues absolutely
    delightful, from the manner in which their natural qualities
    blended with their consummate experience. I refer especially to
    Clarendon and Granville.


(M137) If we may trust some of those who were members of it, no cabinet
ever did its business with livelier industry or effect. Under Mr.
Gladstone’s hand it was a really working cabinet, not an assemblage of
departmental ministers, each minding his own affairs, available as casual
members of this or the other sub-committee, and without an eye for the
general drift and tendency of their proceedings. Of course ministers
differed in importance. One was pleasant and popular, but not forcible.
Another overflowed with knowledge and was really an able man, but somehow
he carried no guns, and nobody cared what he said. One had aptitude
without weight—perhaps the true definition of our grossly overworked
epithet of clever. Another had weight and character, without much
aptitude. The cabinet as a whole was one of extraordinary power, not
merely because its chief had both aptitude and momentum enough for a
dozen, but because it was actively homogeneous in reforming spirit and
purpose. This solidarity is the great element in such combinations, and
the mainspring of all vigorous cabinet work.

Of Mr. Gladstone as head of his first cabinet, we have a glimpse from Mr.
Stansfeld:—


    Mr. Gladstone’s conduct in the cabinet was very curious. When I
    first joined in 1871, I naturally thought that his position was so
    commanding, that he would be able to say, “This is my policy;
    accept it or not as you like.” But he did not. He was always
    profuse in his expressions of respect for the cabinet. There was a
    wonderful combination in Mr. Gladstone of imperiousness and of
    deference. In the cabinet he would assume that he was nothing. I
    thought he should have said, “This is my policy. What do you think
    of it?” and then have fought it out until they had come to an
    agreement. He always tried to lead them on by unconscious steps to
    his own conclusions.(269)


To this we may add some words of Lord Granville used in 1883, but
doubtless just as true of 1868-74:—


    I have served under several prime ministers, men for whom I had
    high respect and to whom I had the greatest attachment, but I can
    say that I never knew one who showed a finer temper, a greater
    patience, or more consideration for his colleagues than Mr.
    Gladstone in all deliberations on any important subject. In his
    official position, with his knowledge, with his ability, and with
    the wonderful power of work that characterises him, he of course
    has an immense influence on the deliberations of the cabinet; but
    notwithstanding his tenacity of purpose and his earnestness, it is
    quite extraordinary how he attends to the arguments of all, and,
    except on any question of real vital principle, he is ready to
    yield his own opinion to the general sense of the colleagues over
    whom he presides.(270)


Imputing his own qualities to others, and always keen to make the best of
people and not the worst, if he had once invited a man to office, he held
on to him to the last possible moment. “The next most serious thing to
admitting a man into the cabinet,” he said, “is to leave a man out who has
once been in.” Not seldom he carried his invincible courtesy, deference,
and toleration even beyond the domain where those qualities ought to be
supreme. This was part of what men meant, when they said that life was to
him in all its aspects an application of Christian teaching and example.
To this we must add another consideration of first importance, and one
that vulgar criticism of great statesmen too commonly ignores. In the
words of Lord Aberdeen (1856), who knew from sharp experience how much his
doctrine might cost a man: “A prime minister is not a free agent. To break
up a government, to renounce all the good you hoped to do and leave
imperfect all the good you have done, to hand over power to persons whose
objects or whose measures you disapprove, even merely to alienate and
politically to injure your friends, is no slight matter.”(271)

A member of this first cabinet wrote to Mr. Gladstone long after it had
come to an end: “I suppose there was no one of your then colleagues less
sympathetic with you, less in tune with your opinions and enthusiasms than
Lowe. Nevertheless this happened to me with him—after you had resigned.
Lowe opened to me one day, on the subject of your relations with your
colleagues. He spoke in terms of warm admiration, and to my great
surprise, ended by saying, ‘I have the same kind of feeling towards him
that I can suppose must be the feeling of a dog for his master.’ Lowe is a
perfectly sincere man. He would not have said this if he had not felt it.”
“In everything personal,” Mr. Gladstone replied, “Lowe was an excellent
colleague and member of cabinet. But I had never been in personal
relations with him before, and at the outset of the ministry of 1868 I
knew very little of him. Moreover, he was the occasion of much trouble to
me by his incessant broils with ——, who was an awkward customer.” In sheer
intellect Mr. Gladstone held that Lowe had not many equals, but in nobody
else did he discover so many mixed and contradictory qualities—“splendid
in attack, but most weak in defence, at times exhibiting pluck beyond
measure, but at other times pusillanimity almost amounting to cowardice;
one day headstrong and independent, and the next day helpless as a child
to walk alone; capable of tearing anything to pieces, but of constructing
nothing.”(272)

(M138) When Lord Clarendon died,—“An irreparable colleague,” Mr. Gladstone
notes in his diary, “a statesman of many gifts, a most lovable and genial
man.” Elsewhere he commemorates his “unswerving loyalty, his genial
temper, his kindness ever overflowing in acts yet more than in words, his
liberal and indulgent appreciation of others.” In the short government of
1865-6, Lord Granville had described Clarendon to Mr. Gladstone as
“excellent, communicating more freely with the cabinet and carrying out
their policy more faithfully, than any foreign secretary I have known.”
Mr. Gladstone himself told me twenty years after, that of the sixty men or
so who had been his colleagues in cabinet, Clarendon was the very easiest
and most attractive. It is curious to observe that, with the exception of
Mr. Bright, he found his most congenial adherents rather among the
patrician whigs than among the men labelled as advanced.

Mr. Bright, as we have seen, was forced by ill-health to quit the
government. Thirty years of unsparing toil, more than ten of them devoted
especially to the exhausting, but in his case most fruitful, labours of
the platform, had for the time worn down his stock of that energy of mind,
which in the more sinewy frame of the prime minister seemed as boundless
as some great natural element. To Mrs. Bright Mr. Gladstone wrote:—


    It is not merely a selfish interest that all his colleagues feel
    in him on account of his great powers, just fame, and political
    importance; but it is one founded on the esteem and regard which,
    one and all, they entertain towards him. God grant that any
    anxieties you may entertain about him may soon be effectually
    relieved. I wish I felt quite certain that he is as good a patient
    as he is a colleague. But the chief object of my writing was to
    say that the Queen has signified both by letter and telegraph her
    lively interest in Mr. B.’s health; and she will not forgive me
    unless I am able to send her frequent reports.


He is quite capable of dealing faithfully with colleagues breaking rules.
To a member of the cabinet who had transgressed by absence from a division
of life and death:—


    I should not act frankly by you if I did not state it, without
    hesitation as a general and prospective proposition, that, without
    reference to the likelihood or unlikelihood of defeat, upon
    motions which must from their nature be votes of confidence,
    [there can] be but one rule for the members of the government, and
    that is to give the votes themselves which at the same time the
    government with less strong title is asking from the members of
    their party.


He scolds a leading minister pretty directly for placing him in a
disagreeable and rather ludicrous position, by failing to give the proper
information about a government bill containing an important change, so
that nobody could explain the reason for it to the House. His own personal
example of absolutely unremitting attendance on the scene of action,
entitled him to rebuke slackness. Nothing escaped him. Here is the way in
which he called defaulters to their duty:—


    _April 8, 1873._—The chancellor of the exchequer thinks he has
    some reason to complain of your having quitted London on Thursday,
    without any prior communication with him or Glyn, four days before
    the budget. I have heard with regret that the state of your health
    has compelled you to spend your vacation abroad; but scarcely even
    a direct medical order, and certainly in my opinion nothing less,
    could render such an example innocent in its effects, as is set by
    a departure from London under such circumstances. Although it has
    been a great pleasure to me to admit and recognise your
    parliamentary services and distinctions, and though I have always
    thought your accession to the government an acquisition of great
    value, I must frankly avow my opinion that it is hardly possible
    for the chancellor of exchequer to discharge his duties without
    your constant and sedulous co-operation, or for the official corps
    in general to avoid suffering, if the members of it make
    themselves the judges of the question when and under what
    circumstances their absence may be permitted during the sittings
    of the House.

    _June 25, 1870._—I am led to suppose by your absence from the
    division yesterday, that there may not be a perfectly clear
    understanding between us as to the obligations of members of the
    government on these occasions. Yesterday gave occasion of much
    inconvenience on account of the entertainment at Windsor, but all
    the members of the government who could be expected to attend
    voted in the division, except yourself. I can say from my own
    recollection that as far as regards political officers, the
    sovereign always permits the claim of the House of Commons to
    prevail.


Changes among subordinate members of the government came early. Of one of
these ministers Mr. Gladstone writes to Lord Granville (August 18, 1869):
“He has great talent, and is a most pertinacious worker, with a good deal
of experience and widely dispersed knowledge of public affairs. But he
seems to be somewhat angular, and better adapted for doing business within
a defined province of his own, than in common stock or partnership with
others.” Unfortunately the somewhat angular man shared his work with a
chief who had intellectual angularities of his own, not very smoothly
concealed. As it happened, there was another minister of secondary rank
who did not come up to the expected mark. “Though he has great talents,
remarkable power of speech, and some special qualifications for his
department, he has not succeeded in it with the House of Commons, and does
not seem very thoroughly to understand pecuniary responsibility and the
management of estimates, and there is no doubt whatever that in his
department the present House of Commons will be vigilant and exacting,
while the rapid growth of its expenditures certainly shows that it should
be filled by some one capable of exercising control.” Not thoroughly “to
understand pecuniary responsibility” was counted a deadly sin in those
halcyon days. So the transgressor accepted a diplomatic mission, and this
made room to plant his angular colleague in what seemed a “province of his
own.” But few provinces are definite enough to be independent of the
treasury, and the quarrels between this minister and the chancellor of the
exchequer became something of a scandal and a weakness to the government.
One of the fiercest battles of the time (1872) broke out in respect of Kew
Gardens between the minister with a definite province of his own and a
distinguished member of “a scientific fraternity, which, valuable as it
is, has been unduly pampered of late from a variety of causes into a
somewhat overweening idea of its own importance.” The premier’s pacifying
resources were taxed by this tremendous feud to the uttermost; he holds a
stiffish tone to the minister, and tries balm for the _savant_ by
propitiatory reminder of “a most interesting fact made known to me when I
had the pleasure and advantage of seeing you at Kew, namely the
possibility of saving for purposes of food a portion of the substance of
the diseased potato. The rescue of a sensible percentage of this valuable
esculent will be a noble service rendered by scientific knowledge and
skill to the general community.” But science is touchy, and wounds are
sometimes too deep to be healed by words.

(M139) A point worth noting is his strict limitation of his own rights as
head of a government. “Hope you will not think,” he wrote to a colleague,
“I am evading my duties, but while it is my duty to deal with all
difficulties arising between members of the government, it is wholly
beyond my power, and in no way belongs to my province, to examine and
settle the controversies which may arise between them and civil servants
who are employed under them.” He is careful to distinguish his own words
from the words of the cabinet; careful both to lean upon, and to defer to,
the judgment of that body; and when the decision is taken, it is in their
name that he writes to the vexatious colleague (July 24, 1872): “The
cabinet have come to their conclusion, and directed me to make it known to
you.... If you think proper to make the announcement of these intentions
of the government, they are quite willing that you should do so. If
otherwise, Mr. Bruce will do it as home minister. Thus far as to making
known what will be done. As to the doing of it, the rules will have to be
cancelled at once by you.”

The reader of an authoritarian or arbitrary cast of mind may ask why he
did not throw a handful of dust upon the angry combatants. “It is easy,”
he wrote to Cardwell (Nov. 20, 1871) “to talk of uprooting X., but even if
it were just, it will, as Glyn [the party whip] would tell you, be very
difficult. But Y. perhaps proceeds more like Moloch, and X. in the manner
of Belial. Why cannot they follow the good example of those worthies, who
co-operated in pandemonium? If you thought you could manage Y., I would
try to tackle X. I commend this subject to your meditations.” Sulphureous
whiffs from this pandemonium were pretty copiously scented both by
parliament and the public, and did the ministry some harm.

Of a peer of much renown in points of procedure, private business, and the
like, he says, “he looks at everything out of blinkers, and has no side
lights.” Of one brilliant and able colleague in the first administration
he writes, that “he has some blank in his mental constitution, owing to
which he receives admonitions most kindly, and then straightway does the
same thing over again.” Of another colleague, “though much nearer the
rights of the case than many who were inclined to object, he is thin and
poor in the cabinet.” Some one else is “a sensitive man, given beyond most
men to speak out his innermost and perhaps unformed thoughts, and thereby
to put himself at a disadvantage.” Another public servant is “not
unmanageable, but he needs to be managed.” In the same letter he speaks of
the Hibernian presbyterian as “that peculiar cross between a Scotchman and
an Irishman.”

Of his incessant toil the reader has already a good idea. Here are a few
items. To one correspondent (Jan. 21, 1869) he writes: “I hope you do not
think my ‘holiday’ at Hawarden has proved my idleness, for I think ten
hours a day has been a moderate estimate of my work there on public
business, to which some other matters have had to be added.” To the
attorney-general he says when he has had three years more of it (Sept. 18,
1872): “I cannot say with you that my office never gives me a day without
business, for in the four ‘vacations’ so far as they have gone, I think I
have had no less than five days. This vacation has thus far been the best;
but heavy and critical work impends.” In October, 1871, he writes to Mrs.
Gladstone from Edinburgh: “I have for _the first time_ since the
government was formed, had a holiday of two whole days.” To Lord Clarendon
he writes from Lord Granville’s at Walmer (Sept. 2, 1869): “At the end of
a holiday morning of work, since I breakfasted at nine, which has lasted
till near four, I have yet to say a few words about....” To Archdeacon
Harrison, May 25, 1873: “As you may like to have the exact anatomy of my
holiday on the Queen’s birthday, I will give it you: 2-1/4 A.M., return
home from the H. of C. 10 A.M., two hours’ work in my room. 2-7, the
cabinet. Three-quarters of an hour’s walk. 8-12, thirty-two to dinner and
an evening party. 12, bed!” To Sir R. Phillimore, July 23, 1873: “Not once
this year (except a day in bed) have I been absent from the hours of
government business in the House, and the rigour of attendance is far
greater now than at earlier periods of the session.”

His colleagues grudged his absence for a day. On one occasion, in
accordance with a lifelong passion and rooted habit, he desired to attend
a funeral, this time in Scotland, and Lord Granville’s letter of
remonstrance to him is interesting in more points than one; it shows the
exacting position in which the peculiarities of some colleagues and of a
certain section of his supporters placed him:—


    It is the unanimous desire of the cabinet that I should try to
    dissuade you.... It is a duty of a high order for you to do all
    you can for your health.... You hardly ever are absent from the
    House without some screw getting loose. I should write much more
    strongly if I did not feel I had a personal interest in the
    matter. In so strained a state as Europe is now in, the slightest
    thing may lead to great consequences, and it is possible that it
    may be a disadvantage to me and to the _chose publique_ if
    anything occurs during the thirty-six hours you are absent.


This letter of Lord Granville’s was written on July 10, 1870, just five
days before war was declared between France and Prussia.

He wrote to the _Spectator_ (May 1873) to correct a report “that every day
must begin for me with my old friend Homer.” He says: “As to my beginning
every day with Homer, as such a phrase conveys to the world a very untrue
impression of the demands of my present office, I think it right to
mention that, so far as my memory serves me, I have not read Homer for
fifty lines now for a quarter of an hour consecutively for the last four
years, and any dealings of mine with Homeric subjects have been confined
to a number of days which could be readily counted on the fingers.” Yet at
the end of 1869, he winds up a letter of business by saying, “I must
close; I am going to have a discussion with Huxley on the immortality of
the soul!”

Who can wonder that after a prolonged spell of such a strain as this, he
was found laying down strong doctrine about the age of a prime minister?
Bishop Wilberforce met him twice in the May of 1873. “Gladstone much
talking how little real good work any premier had done after sixty: Peel;
Palmerston, his work really all done before; Duke of Wellington added
nothing to his reputation after. I told him Dr. Clark thought it would be
physically worse for him to retire. ‘Dr. Clark does not know how
completely I should employ myself,’ he replied.” Four days later:
“Gladstone again talking of sixty as full age of premier.”(273)



II


In words already quoted, Mr. Gladstone spoke of most of his life having
been given to working the institutions of his country. Of all these
institutions—House of Commons, Lords, cabinet, church, stern courts of
law—that which he was most apt to idealise was the throne. His sense of
chivalry and his sense of an august tradition continuously symbolised by a
historic throne, moved him as the sight of the French Queen at Versailles
had moved the majestic political imagination of Burke a century before.
About the throne he sometimes used language that represented almost at its
highest the value set upon it in text-books of the constitution, and in
the current conventions of ceremonial speech.(274) Although what he called
the iron necessities of actual business always threw these conventions
into the background when the time came, yet his inmost feeling about the
crown and the person of its wearer was as sincere as it was fervid. In
business, it is true, he never yielded, yet even in his most anxious and
pressing hours he spared neither time nor toil in endeavours to show the
Queen why he could not yield. “Though decisions,” he said, “must
ultimately conform to the sense of those who are to be responsible for
them, yet their business is to inform and persuade the sovereign, not to
overrule him.” One writer describes the Queen as “superb in standing
sentry over the business of the empire.” This is obsequious phrase-making.
But I will borrow the figure in saying what is more real, that Mr.
Gladstone from beginning to end stood sentry over the interests, whether
profound and enduring or trivial and fleeting, of the ancient monarchy of
this kingdom. None who heard it will ever forget the moving and energetic
passage in which when he was the doughty veteran of eighty years, speaking
against his own followers on some question of a royal annuity, he moved
the whole House to its depths by the passionate declaration, “I am not
ashamed to say that in my old age I rejoice in any opportunity that
enables me to testify that, whatever may be thought of my opinions,
whatever may be thought of my proposals in general politics, I do not
forget the service that I have borne to the illustrious representative of
the British monarchy.”(275)

(M140) My readers have had opportunity enough of judging Mr. Gladstone’s
estimate of the Queen’s shrewdness, simplicity, high manners. Above all,
he constantly said how warmly he recognised her sincerity, frankness,
straight-forwardness, and love of truth. On the other side, his own eager
mobility, versatility, and wide elastic range was not likely to be to the
taste of a personage with a singular fixity of nature. Then the Queen was
by the necessity of her station a politician, as was Elizabeth or George
III., although oddly enough she had a bitter dislike of what she thought
the madness of “women’s rights.” As politician, she often took views that
were not shared either by the constituencies or by the ministers whom the
constituencies imposed upon her. The Queen in truth excellently
represented and incorporated in her proper person one whole set of those
qualities in our national character, on which the power of her realm had
been built up. Mr. Gladstone stood for a different and in some aspects and
on some occasions almost an antagonistic set of national qualities. The
Queen, according to those who knew her well,(276) dreaded what in the
eighteenth century they called enthusiasm: she dreaded or disdained it in
religion, and in politics almost more. Yet her Englishmen are full of
capacity for enthusiasm, and the Scots for whom she had such cordial
affection have enthusiasm in measure fuller still. Unhappily, in the case
of Ireland that occupied so much of Mr. Gladstone’s life, her sympathies
with his long and vigorous endeavour notoriously stood at zero. The
Queen’s loyalty to the constitution and to ministers in office was
unquestioned, but she was not well placed, nor was she perhaps by
character well fitted, to gauge the fluctuating movements of an age of
change, as it was the duty of her statesmen to gauge and plumb them. If a
cabinet with the confidence of the House of Commons decides upon a policy,
it must obviously be a premier’s duty to persist, and in that duty Mr.
Gladstone was resolute. If he had been otherwise, he knew that he would be
falling short in loyalty to the country, and to its chief magistrate most
of all.

In 1871 a wave of critical feeling began to run upon the throne. An
influential journalist of that day, singularly free from any tincture of
republican sentiment, thus describes it. “A few weeks ago,” he says, “a
deep and universal feeling of discontent at the Queen’s seclusion (or
rather at its consequences) found voice in the journals of the country. No
public print of any importance failed to take part in the chorus; which
was equally remarkable for its suddenness, fulness, and harmony. Indeed,
the suddenness of the cry was surprising—till we remembered that what was
then said had lain unexpressed in the minds of the whole community for
years, with annual increment; and that when popular feeling gathers in
that way, it is generally relieved at last by something of the nature of
an explosion.” He then goes on to speak of “republicanism of a very
revolutionary form flooding in,” and says that such a complexion of
affairs could be viewed with pleasure by no friend of the monarchy.(277)
The details of this movement are no longer of much interest, and they only
concern us here because they gave Mr. Gladstone real anxiety. For him it
was one of the special duties of a prime minister, as distinguished from
his cabinet, to watch and guard relations between the crown and the
country. Whether in office or in opposition, he lost no opportunity of
standing forth between the throne and even a faint shadow of popular or
parliamentary discontent. He had done it in the case of Prince
Albert,(278) and he did it now. When the end came after nearly thirty
years from our present date, the Queen wrote: “I shall ever gratefully
remember his devotion and zeal in all that concerned my personal welfare
and that of my family.” In 1871 his zeal went beyond the Queen’s personal
welfare, and his solicitude for the institution represented by the Queen
undoubtedly took a form of deferential exhortation—an exhortation that she
should return to a fuller discharge of public duty, which the Queen found
irksome. The Queen was as fond of Balmoral as Mr. Gladstone was fond of
Hawarden. The contrast between the formality of Windsor and the atmosphere
of simple attachment and social affection that surrounded her in Scotland,
was as delightful to her as the air and the scenery. A royal progress
through applauding multitudes in great cities made her ill. Hence, when
Mr. Gladstone pressed her to defer a northern journey, or to open
parliament, or to open a bridge, or otherwise emerge from seclusion, the
Queen, though well aware that he had not, and could not, have any motive
save her own and the public interest, undoubtedly felt that her energetic
minister was attempting to overwork her. This feeling, as most of us know,
breeds resistance, and even in time resentment. To say, however, that “in
his eagerness Mr. Gladstone pressed her to do what she knew to be not her
work so much as his,” is misleading and a little ludicrous.(279) Mr.
Gladstone had persuaded himself that in the humour of the day persistence
in seclusion did harm; it was his duty to give advice accordingly, and
this duty he could not consent to shirk.

In other ways his very awe of the institution made him set an exacting
standard for the individual who represented it. The letters contain a
hundred instances. One may suffice. On the occasion of the Irish Church
bill of 1869, the prime minister sent to the Queen a print of its clauses,
and along with this draft a letter, covering over a dozen closely-written
quarto pages, in explanation. Himself intensely absorbed and his whole
soul possessed by the vital importance of what he was doing, he could not
conceive that the sovereign, nursing a decided dislike of his policy,
should not eagerly desire to get to the bottom of the provisions for
carrying the policy out. The Queen read the letter, and reread it, and
then in despair desired a gentleman practised in dealing with
parliamentary bills, happening at that time to be at Osborne, to supply
her with a summary.(280) The gaunt virtues of a _précis_—a meagre thing
where qualifying sentences drop off, parentheses are cut out, adverbs
hardly count, the noun stands denuded of its sheltering adjective—were
never congenial to Mr. Gladstone’s copious exactitude in hypothesis,
conditions, and contingencies. Neither of these two illustrious personages
was without humour, and it seems at once a wonder and a pity that the
monarch did less than justice to this laborious and almost military sense
of discipline and duty in the minister; while the minister failed in
genial allowance for the moderation of a royal lady’s appetite for bread
and honey from the draftsman’s kitchen. If failing there were, it was
natural to a man of earnest and concentrated mind. Be all this as it may,
he became more and more conscious that the correspondence and occurrences
of 1871-2 had introduced a reserve that was new. Perhaps it recalled to
him the distance and formality that marked the relations between King
George III. and the proudest, the most intrepid, and the greatest of his
prime ministers.



III


Once in a conversation with Mr. Gladstone I asked him whether he
remembered Peel’s phrase to Cobden about the odious power that patronage
confers. He replied, “I never felt that, when I was prime minister. It
came in the day’s work like the rest. I don’t recall that I ever felt
plagued by improper applications. Peel was perhaps a little over fond of
talking of the sacrifices of office. A man has no business to lay himself
out for being prime minister, or to place himself in the way of it, unless
he is prepared to take all the incidents of the post whether disagreeable
or not. I’ve no sympathy with talk of that kind.” He was far from the mind
of Carteret. “What is it to me,” cried that glittering minister, “who is a
judge or who is a bishop? It is my business to make kings and emperors,
and to maintain the balance of Europe.”

(M141) To the bestowal of honours he brought the same diligent care as to
branches of public business that to men of Peel’s type seemed worthier of
care. He treated honours on fixed considerations. Especially in the
altitudes of the peerage, he tried hard to find solid political ground to
go upon. He noted the remarkable fact that though a very large majority of
the peerages granted since 1835 had been made on the advice of liberal
ministers, yet such is the influence of wealth and privileged station that
the liberal minority in the Lords had decreased. In 1869 the conservative
majority was between sixty and seventy, without counting bishops or
nominal liberals. Yet household suffrage at this very time had immensely
increased the moral strength of the House of Commons. The crisis upon the
Irish church had been borne with impatience, and Mr. Gladstone discerned a
combustible temper at the action of the Lords that might easily have burst
into flame. Still he saw no signal plan for improving the upper House. The
appointment of life peers might be desirable, he said, but it was not easy
to arrange, nor could its effect be great. The means of action therefore
for bringing the Lords into more conformity or better proportions to the
Commons, were very moderate. But that made it all the more important that
they should not be overlooked. The governing idea in respect of both
classes of hereditary honours was in his judgment the maintenance of a due
relation between the members in those elevated ranks, and the number of
persons offering the proper conditions for promotion of this kind, in a
country so rapidly growing in wealth and population.

With characteristic love of making knowledge quantitative—one definition,
I rather think, of science—Mr. Gladstone caused returns to be prepared for
him, which showed that in 1840 there were about seventeen peers for every
million of the population, while in 1869 this number had fallen to
fourteen (in 1880 it was about the same). Lord Palmerston in his second
government appears to have recommended sixteen peerages, and Lord Derby in
little more than a quarter of the time recommended fourteen. Mr. Gladstone
himself, during his first administration, excluding royal, non-political
and _ex-officio_ peerages, added thirty members to the House of Lords,
besides making five promotions. In the same period twelve peerages became
extinct. Lord Beaconsfield (counting the same exclusions) created between
1874 and 1880 twenty-six new peers, and made nine promotions.(281)

In two directions Mr. Gladstone made an honourable innovation. He
recommended a member of the Jewish faith for a peerage, and in the first
list of his submissions to the Queen two Roman catholics were included. No
catholic peer had been created within living memory. One of these two was
Lord Acton, afterwards so intimate a friend, whose character, he told the
Queen, “is of the first order, and he is one of the most learned and
accomplished, though one of the most modest and unassuming, men of the
day.” If religious profession was not in his eyes relevant in making
peers, neither was the negation of profession, for at the same time he
proposed a peerage to Grote. “I deeply and gratefully appreciate,” he
wrote to Mr. Gladstone, “the sentiments you are pleased to express
respecting my character and services. These I shall treasure up never to
be forgotten, coming as they do from a minister who has entered on the
work of reform with a sincerity and energy never hitherto paralleled. Such
recognition is the true and sufficient recompense for all useful labours
of mine.”(282)

At the same time the prime minister thought that some honour ought to be
tendered to Mr. Mill, but Lord Granville, whom he consulted, thought
otherwise, “merely on the ground that honours should go as much as
possible with general acceptance.” Lord Granville was a man of thoroughly
liberal and even generous mind; still not particularly qualified to be a
good judge either of the merits of a man like Mill, or of his “acceptance”
in circles well worth considering.



IV


It was to be expected that preferments in the church should get a special
share of Mr. Gladstone’s laborious attention, and so they did. As member
for Oxford he had been so much importuned in Lord Palmerston’s time, that
he wrote in a moment of unusual impatience (1863), “I think these church
preferments will be the death of me.” Palmerston favoured the
evangelicals, and Mr. Gladstone was mortified that Church did not succeed
Stanley in the chair of ecclesiastical history at Oxford, and that
Wilberforce was not elevated to the throne of York in 1862.

(M142) During his first administration he recommended for no fewer than
twelve bishoprics and eight deaneries. He was not unprepared to find, as
he put it to Acland, that “saints, theologians, preachers, pastors,
scholars, philosophers, gentlemen, men of business,—these are not to be
had every day, least of all are they to be commonly found in combination.
But these are the materials which ought to be sought out, and put forward
in the church of England, if she is to stand the trials, and do her work.”

According to his fashion, he wrote down upon a fragmentary piece of paper
what qualifications he ought to look for in a bishop, and this is the
list:—


    Piety. Learning (sacred). Eloquence. Administrative power.
    Faithful allegiance to the Church and to the church of England.
    Activity. Tact and courtesy in dealings with men: knowledge of the
    world. Accomplishments and literature. An equitable spirit.
    Faculty of working with his brother bishops. Some legal habit of
    mind. Circumspection. Courage. Maturity of age and character.
    Corporal vigour. Liberal sentiments on public affairs. A
    representative character with reference to shades of opinion
    fairly allowable in the Church.


One of his earliest preferments, that of Dr. Temple to the bishopric of
Exeter, created lively excitement. He had been a contributor to _Essays
and Reviews_:—


    On some of the papers contained in the volume, Mr. Gladstone wrote
    to the Bishop of Lichfield, I look with a strong aversion. But Dr.
    Temple’s responsibility prior to the publication was confined to
    his own essay. The question whether he ought to have disclaimed or
    denounced any part of the volume afterwards is a difficult one,
    and if it was a duty, it was a duty in regard to which a generous
    man might well go wrong. As regards his own essay, I read it at
    the time of publication, and thought it of little value, but did
    not perceive that it was mischievous.


In speaking of him to Acland in 1865, Mr. Gladstone had let fall a truly
remarkable saying, going deep down to the roots of many things:—


    You need not assure me of Dr. Temple’s Christian character. I have
    read his sermons, and if I had doubted—but I never did—they would
    have removed the doubt. Indeed I think it a most formidable
    responsibility, at the least, in these times to doubt any man’s
    character on account of his opinions. The limit of possible
    variation between character and opinion, ay, between character and
    belief, is widening, and will widen.


How could the leading mark of progress made in Mr. Gladstone’s age be more
truly hit, how defined with more pith and pregnancy? How could the
illumination of his own vigorous mind in forty years of life and thought
be better demonstrated? It would even be no bad thing if those who are
furthest removed from Mr. Gladstone’s opinions either in religion or
politics could lay this far-reaching dictum of his to heart. By many men
in all schools his lesson is sorely needed. Shrill was the clamour. Dr.
Pusey, in Mr. Gladstone’s own phrase, was “rabid.” He justified his anger
by reputed facts, which proved to be no facts at all, but the anger did
not die with the fable. Even Phillimore was disquieted. “It has cut very
deep indeed,” he said. Mr. Gladstone, confident of his ground, was not
dismayed. “The movement against Dr. Temple is like a peculiar cheer we
sometimes hear in the House of Commons, vehement but thin.”

No appointment proved so popular and successful as that of Bishop Fraser
to Manchester. He was the first person named by Mr. Gladstone for the
episcopate without some degree of personal knowledge. A remarkable
concurrence of testimony established the great breadth of his sympathies,
a trait much in his favour for the particular see of Manchester. Yet
strange to say when by and by Stanley died, Mr. Gladstone was a party to
trying to remove Fraser from the north to Westminster.

When in 1883 Mr. Gladstone was challenged as confining his recommendations
to the high church side, he defended himself to sufficient purpose. He had
a list made out of appointments to bishoprics, deaneries, and the most
important parishes:—


    There have been thirty important appointments. Out of them I have
    recommended eleven who would probably be called high churchmen
    (not one of them, so far as I know, unsympathetic towards other
    portions of the clergy) and nineteen who are not. On further
    examination it will appear that the high churchmen whom I take to
    be a decided majority of the clergy as well as a decided minority
    of my recommendations, have gone as a rule to the places of hard
    work and little pay. For example, they have got five out of ten
    _parochial_ recommendations; but, out of sixteen appointments to
    deaneries and canonries, they have received four, and those, with
    the exception of Mr. Furse, the worst. I could supply you with the
    lists in detail.

    One admission I must make; the evidently broad churchmen are too
    large a proportion of the non-high, and the low churchmen rather
    too small, a disproportion which I should hope to remove, but
    undoubtedly the low churchman of the present day has a poorer
    share than half a century ago of the working energy of the church.

    All these terms, High, Low, and Broad, are rather repugnant to me,
    but I use them as a currency of tokens with which it is difficult
    to dispense.


Turning from this point of view to the recognition of learning and genius,
in the course of his first administration we find that he made Church dean
of St. Paul’s, and Scott of the Greek lexicon dean of Rochester, Liddon
and Lightfoot canons of St. Paul’s, Kingsley first canon of Chester, and
then of Westminster, Vaughan master of the Temple.




Chapter XI. Catholic Country And Protestant Parliament. (1873)


    It is all very well to establish united education, but if the
    persons to be educated decline to unite, your efforts will be
    thrown away. The question then occurs whether it is best to
    establish a system, rejected by those concerned, in the hope that
    it will gradually work its way into acceptance in spite of the
    intolerance of priests, or to endow the separate denominational
    bodies on the ground that even such education is better than none,
    or, finally, to do nothing. The question is one of statesmanship
    enlightened by a knowledge of facts, and of the sentiments of the
    population.—LESLIE STEPHEN.



I


Descending from her alien throne, the Irish church had now taken her place
among the most prosperous of free communions. To Irish cultivators a
definite interest of possession had been indirectly confirmed in the land
to which most of its value had been given by their own toil. A third
branch of the upas tree of poisonous ascendency described by Mr. Gladstone
during the election of 1868, still awaited his axe. The fitness of an
absentee parliament to govern Ireland was again to be tested. This time
the problem was hardest of all, for it involved direct concession by
nations inveterately protestant, to a catholic hierarchy having at its
head an ultramontane cardinal of uncompromising opinions and inexorable
will.

Everybody knew that the state of university education in Ireland stood in
the front rank of unsettled questions. Ever since the establishment of
three provincial colleges by Peel’s government in 1845, the flame of the
controversy had been alight. Even on the very night when Graham introduced
the bill creating them, no less staunch a tory and protestant than Sir
Robert Inglis had jumped up and denounced “a gigantic scheme of godless
education.” The catholics loudly echoed this protestant phrase. The three
colleges were speedily condemned by the pope as fatal to faith and morals,
and were formally denounced by the synod of Thurles in 1850. The
fulminations of the church did not extinguish these modest centres of
light and knowledge, but they cast a creeping blight upon them. In 1865 a
demand was openly made in parliament for the incorporation by charter of a
specifically catholic university. Mr. Gladstone, along with Sir George
Grey, then admitted the reality of a grievance, namely, the absence in
Ireland of institutions of which the catholics of the country were able to
avail themselves. Declining, for good reasons or bad, to use opportunities
of college education by the side of protestants, and not warmed by the
atmosphere and symbols of their own church and faith, catholics contended
that they could not be said to enjoy equal advantages with their
fellow-citizens of other creeds. They repudiated a system of education
repugnant to their religious convictions, and in the persistent efforts to
force ’godless education’ on their country, they professed to recognise
another phase of persecution for conscience’ sake.

In 1866, Lord Russell’s government tried its hand with a device known as
the supplemental charter. It opened a way to a degree without passing
through the godless colleges. This was set aside by an injunction from the
courts, and it would not have touched the real matter of complaint, even
if the courts had let it stand. Next year the tories burnt their fingers,
though Mr. Disraeli told parliament that he saw no scars. For a time, he
believed that an honourable and satisfactory settlement was possible, and
negotiations went on with the hierarchy. The prelates did not urge
endowment, Mr. Disraeli afterwards said, but “they mentioned it.” The
country shrank back from concurrent endowment, though, as Mr. Disraeli
truly said, it was the policy of Pitt, of Grey, of Russell, of Peel, and
of Palmerston. Ever since 1794, catholic students had been allowed to
graduate at Trinity College, and ever since the disestablishment of the
Irish church in 1869, Trinity had asked parliament for power to admit
catholics to her fellowships and emoluments. This, however, did not go to
the root, whether we regard it as sound or unsound, of the catholic
grievance, which was in fact their lack of an endowed institution as
distinctively catholic in all respects as Trinity was protestant.

Such was the case with which Mr. Gladstone was called upon to grapple, and
a delicate if not even a desperate case it was. The prelates knew what
they wished, though they lay in shadow. What they wanted a protestant
parliament, with its grip upon the purse, was determined that they should
not have. The same conclusion as came to many liberals by prejudice, was
reached by the academic school on principle. On principle they held
denominational endowment of education to be retrograde and obscurantist.
Then there was the discouraging consideration of which Lord Halifax
reminded Mr. Gladstone. “You say with truth,” he observed when the
situation had developed, “that the liberal party are behaving very ill,
and so they are. But liberal majorities when large are apt to run riot. No
men could have stronger claims on the allegiance of their party than Lord
Grey and Lord Althorp after carrying the Reform bill. Nevertheless, the
large majority after the election of 1832-3 was continually putting the
government into difficulty.” So it befell now, and now as then the
difficulty was Irish.



II


(M143) Well knowing the hard work before him, Mr. Gladstone applied
himself with his usual indomitable energy to the task. “We go to Oxford
to-morrow,” he writes to Lord Granville (Nov. 12), “to visit Edward Talbot
and his wife; forward to London on Thursday, when I dine with the
Templars. My idea of work is that the first solid and heavy bit should be
the Irish university—some of this may require to be done in cabinet. When
we have got that into shape, I should be for taking to the yet stiffer
work of local taxation—most of the cabinet take a personal interest in
this. I think it will require immeasurable talking over, which might be
done chiefly in an open informal cabinet, before any binding resolutions
are taken. But I propose to let Palmer have his say (general) about law
reform on Friday.” At Oxford he saw Dr. Pusey, “who behaved with all his
old kindness, and seemed to have forgotten the Temple(283) business, or
rather as if it had never been.” On November 20, he records, “Cabinet
2-3/4-6-½. Some heads of a measure on Irish university education.” No
communications were opened with the Irish bishops beforehand, probably
from a surmise that they would be bound to ask more than they could
obtain.


    _Jan. 16, 1873, Hawarden._—Dr. Ingram [the distinguished fellow of
    Trinity College] came in afternoon, and I was able to spend
    several hours with him on the university question. 17.—Many hours
    with Dr. Ingram on the bill and scheme; in truth, almost from
    breakfast to dinner. Conversation with him in evening on Homer and
    ancient questions. Read _Old Mortality_. 20.—Drew an abstract of
    historical facts respecting Dublin university and college. 21.—Off
    at 11. At 11 C.H.T. at 6 P.M. 25.—Mr. Thring 3-5-½ on Irish bill.
    Attended Lord Lytton’s funeral in the Abbey. The church lighted in
    a frost-fog was sublime. 31.—Cabinet spent many hours in settling
    Irish university bill. _Feb._ 2.—Paid a mournful visit to the
    death-bedside of my old friend Milnes Gaskell.... Death has been
    very busy around me. 8.—Cabinet 2-½-6-½. Passed the Irish
    university bill. 13.—Worked until three upon my materials. Then
    drove and walked. H. of C. 4-1/4-8-½. I spoke three hours in
    introducing the Irish university bill with much detailed
    explanation. (_Diary._)


Phillimore has an interesting note or two on his friend at this critical
time:—


    _Feb. 2._—Gladstone looking well, but much aged. Spoke of anxiety
    to retire when he could do so with honour, said he had _forced_
    himself into the study of the whole question relating to Trinity
    College, Dublin, and that he was sure that his enemies did not
    understand the very curious facts relative to the university. It
    seemed as if he meant to frame the government measure on a
    historical and antiquarian basis. This will not satisfy the
    country if the practical result is to place more power in the
    hands of the papists. 10.—Gladstone looked very worn and anxious.
    Spoke about the relief he should experience after Thursday, the
    weight of the matter which he had to deal with, and the general
    misapprehension which prevailed; thought the tide was turning in
    their favour. 11.—Gladstone in high spirits, confident of success
    on Thursday. 14.—Dined at Gladstone’s. Our host in high spirits at
    his achievement of yesterday.


The leading provisions of the measure, though found by the able and expert
draftsman unusually hard to frame, may be very shortly stated, for the
question by the way is still in full blast. A new university of Dublin was
to rise, a teaching as well as an examining body, governed by a council
who were to appoint officers and regulate all matters and things affecting
the university. The constitution of this governing council was elaborately
devised, and it did not make clerical predominance ultimately impossible.
The affiliation of colleges, not excluding purely denominational
institutions, was in their hands. There were to be no religious tests for
either teachers or taught, and religious profession was to be no bar to
honours and emoluments. Money was provided by Trinity College, the
consolidated fund, and the church surplus, to the tune of £50,000 a year.
The principle was the old formula of mixed or united education, in which
protestants and catholics might side by side participate.

(M144) What many found intolerably obnoxious were two “gagging clauses.”
By one of these a teacher or other person of authority might be suspended
or deprived, who should in speaking or writing be held to have wilfully
given offence to the religious convictions of any member. The second and
graver of them was the prohibition of any university teacher in theology,
modern history, or moral and mental philosophy. The separate affiliated
colleges might make whatever arrangements they pleased for these subjects,
but the new university would not teach them directly and authoritatively.
This was undoubtedly a singular limitation for a university that had sent
forth Berkeley and Burke; nor was there ever a moment when in spite of the
specialisation of research, the deepest questions in the domain of thought
and belief more inevitably thrust themselves forward within common and
indivisible precincts.



III


On Feb. 14, Mr. Gladstone reported to the Queen:—


    The general impression last night appeared to be that the friends
    of Trinity College were relieved; that the liberal party and the
    nonconformists were well satisfied with the conformity between the
    proposed measure and the accepted principles of university
    organisation in England; but that the Roman catholics would think
    themselves hardly or at least not generously used. All that Mr.
    Gladstone has heard this morning through private channels, as well
    as the general tone of the press, tends to corroborate the
    favourable parts of what he gathered last night, and to give hope
    that reasonable and moderate Roman catholics may see that their
    real grievances will be removed; generally also to support the
    expectation that the bill is not likely to pass.


Delane of the _Times_ said to Manning when they were leaving the House of
Commons, “This is a bill made to pass.” Manning himself heartily
acquiesced. Even the bitterest of Mr. Gladstone’s critics below the
gangway on his own side agreed, that if a division could have been taken
while the House was still under the influence of the three hours’ speech,
the bill would have been almost unanimously carried.(284) “It threw the
House into a mesmeric trance,” said the seconder of a hostile motion.
Effects like these, not purple passages, not epigrams nor aphorisms, are
the test of oratory. Mr. Bruce wrote home (Feb. 15): “Alas! I fear all
prospect of ministerial defeat is over. The University bill is so well
received that people say there will not be even a division on the second
reading. I see no other rock ahead, but sometimes they project their
snouts unexpectedly, and cause shipwreck.”

Soon did the projecting rocks appear out of the smooth water. Lord Spencer
had an interview with Cardinal Cullen at Dublin Castle (Feb. 25), and
found him though in very good humour and full of gratitude for fair
intentions, yet extremely hostile to the bill. It was in flat opposition,
he said, to what the Roman catholics had been working for in Ireland for
years; it continued the Queen’s Colleges, and set up another Queen’s
College in the shape of Trinity College with a large endowment; it
perpetuated the mixed system of education, to which he had always been
opposed, and no endowment nor assistance was given to the catholic
university; the council might appoint professors to teach English
literature, geology, or zoology who would be dangerous men in catholic
eyes. Lord Spencer gathered that the cardinal would be satisfied with a
sum down to redress inequality or a grant for buildings.

Archbishop Manning wrote to Cardinal Cullen the day after the bill was
produced, “strongly urging them to accept it.” It seemed to him to rest on
a base so broad that he could not tell how either the opposition or the
radical doctrinaires could attack it without adopting “the German
tyranny.” He admitted that he was more easily satisfied than if he were in
Ireland, but he thought the measure framed with skill and success. After a
fortnight the archbishop told Mr. Gladstone, that he still saw reason to
believe that the Irish hierarchy would not refuse the bill. On March 3rd,
he says he has done his utmost to conciliate confidence in it. By the 7th
he knew that his efforts had failed, but he urges Mr. Gladstone not to
take the episcopal opposition too much to heart. “Non-endowment, mixed
education, and godless colleges, are three bitter things to them.” “This,”
he wrote to Mr. Gladstone, when all was over (March 12) “is not your
fault, nor the bill’s fault, but the fault of England and Scotland and
three anti-catholic centuries.”

(M145) The debate began on March 3rd, and extended to four sittings. The
humour of the House was described by Mr. Gladstone as “fitful and
fluctuating.” Speeches “void of real argument or point, yet aroused the
mere prejudices of a section of the liberal party against popery and did
much to place the bill in danger.” Then that cause of apprehension
disappeared, and a new change passed over the shifting sky, for the
intentions of Irish members were reported to be dubious. There was not a
little heat and passion, mainly from below the ministerial gangway. The
gagging clauses jarred horribly, though they were trenchantly defended by
Mr. Lowe, the very man to whose line of knowledge and intellectual freedom
they seemed likely to be most repugnant. It soon appeared that neither
protestant nor catholic set any value on these securities for conscience,
and the general assembly of the presbyterians declared war upon the whole
scheme. The cabinet—“most harmonious at this critical time,”—still held
firmly that the bill was well constructed, so that if it once reached
committee it would not be easy to inflict mortal wounds. On March 8th the
prime minister reported to the Queen:—


    Strange to say, it is the opposition of the Roman catholic bishops
    that brings about the present difficulty; and this although they
    have not declared an opposition to the bill outright, but have
    wound up their list of objections with a resolution to present
    petitions praying for its amendment. Still their attitude of what
    may be called growling hostility has had these important results.
    Firstly, it has deadened that general willingness of the liberal
    party, which the measure itself had created, to look favourably on
    a plan such as they might hope would obtain acquiescence, and
    bring about contentment. Secondly, the great majority of the
    bishops are even more hostile than the resolutions, which were
    apparently somewhat softened as the price of unanimity; and all
    _these_ bishops, working upon liberal Irish members through their
    political interest in their seats, have proceeded so far that from
    twenty to twenty-five may go against the bill, and as many may
    stay away. When to these are added the small knot of discontented
    liberals and mere fanatics which so large a party commonly
    contains, the government majority, now taken at only 85,
    disappears....

    It is not in the power or the will of your Majesty’s advisers to
    purchase Irish support by subserviency to the Roman bishops. Their
    purpose has been to offer justice to all, and their hope has been
    that what was just would be seen to be advantageous. As far as the
    Roman catholics of Ireland are concerned, the cabinet conceive
    that they are now at perfect liberty to throw up the bill. But
    they are also of opinion that its abandonment would so impair or
    destroy their moral power, as to render it impossible for them to
    accept the defeat. There are whispers of a desire in the liberal
    party, should the catastrophe arrive, to meet it by a vote of
    confidence, which would probably be carried by a still larger
    majority. But the cabinet look with extreme disfavour upon this
    method of proceeding, which would offer them the verbal promise of
    support just when its substance had been denied.


He then proceeds to more purely personal aspects and contingencies:—


    What lies beyond it would be premature to describe as having been
    regularly treated or even opened to-day. Mr. Gladstone considers
    himself far more tied to the bill and the subject than his
    colleagues; and if they upon a defeat were disposed to carry on
    the government without him, he would with your Majesty’s sanction
    take effectual means to provide at least against his being an
    impediment in the way of an arrangement eligible in so many points
    of view. But his colleagues appear at present indisposed to adopt
    this method of solution. There would then remain for them the
    question whether they should humbly tender their resignations to
    your Majesty, or whether they should advise a dissolution of the
    parliament, which was elected under other auspices. This would be
    a matter of the utmost gravity for consideration at the proper
    time. Mr. Gladstone as at present advised has no foregone
    conclusion in favour of either alternative, and would act with his
    colleagues as between them. But he does not intend to go into
    opposition, and the dissolution of this government, brought about
    through languor and through extensive or important defections in
    the liberal party which has made him its leader, would be the
    close of his political life. He has now for more than forty years
    striven to serve the crown and country to the best of his power,
    and he is willing, though with overtaxed faculties and diminishing
    strength, to continue the effort longer, if he sees that the
    continuance can be conducive to the objects which he has
    heretofore had at heart; but the contingency to which he has last
    referred, would be for him the proof that confidence was gone,
    that usefulness was at an end, and that he might and ought to
    claim the freedom which best befits the close of life.


The next day, in reporting that the estimates of the coming division were
far from improving, Mr. Gladstone returned in a few words to the personal
point:—


    Mr. Gladstone is very grateful for your Majesty’s caution against
    being swayed by private feelings, and he will endeavour to be on
    his guard against them. He has, however, always looked to the
    completion of that commission, so to call it, which events in a
    measure threw into his hands five years ago, as the natural close
    of the main work of the present government; and many circumstances
    have combined to impress him with the hope that thus an honourable
    path would be opened for his retirement. He ought, perhaps, to add
    that he has the strongest opinion, upon political grounds and
    grounds other than political, against spending old age under the
    strain of that perpetual contention which is inseparable from his
    present position; and this opinion could only be neutralised by
    his perceiving a special call to remain: that is to say, some
    course of public service to be done by him better than if it were
    in other hands. Such a prospect he neither sees nor anticipates.
    But it is premature to trouble your Majesty on this minor subject.


On the 9th Cardinal Cullen blazed forth in a pastoral that was read in all
the churches. He described the bill as richly endowing non-catholic and
godless colleges, and without giving one farthing to catholics, inviting
them to compete in their poverty, produced by penal laws and
confiscations, with those left in possession of enormous wealth. The new
university scheme only increased the number of Queen’s Colleges, so often
and so solemnly condemned by the catholic church and by all Ireland, and
gave a new impulse to that sort of teaching that separates education from
religion and its holy influences, and banishes God, the author of all
good, from our schools. The prelate’s pastoral had a decisive effect in
regions far removed from the ambit of his crosier. The tory leader could
not resist a temptation thus offered by the attitude of the Irish
cardinal, and the measure that had been much reviled as a dark concordat
between Mr. Gladstone and the pope, was now rejected by a concordat
between the pope’s men and Mr. Disraeli.

The discussion was on a high level in Mr. Gladstone’s judgment. Lyon
Playfair criticised details with some severity and much ability, but
intended to vote for the bill. Miall, the nonconformist leader, supported
the second reading, but required alterations that were admissible enough.
On March 10 Mr. Harcourt, who was not yet an old member, “opened the
discussion by a speech in advance of any he has yet delivered as to effect
upon the House. Severe in criticism on detail, he was favourable to the
substance of the bill.” One significant incident of the debate was a
declaration by Bentinck, a conservative ultra, that he would vote against
the bill in reliance on the declaration of Mr. Hardy, which he understood
to be a pledge for himself and others near him, not to take office during
the existence of the present parliament. “Mr. Hardy remained silent during
this appeal, which was several times repeated.” Then the end came (March
11-12):—


    Mr. Disraeli rose at half-past ten, and spoke amidst rapt
    attention till midnight. Mr. Gladstone followed in a speech of two
    hours, and at two o’clock the division was called. During the
    whole evening the greatest uncertainty had prevailed; for himself
    Mr. Gladstone leaned to expecting an unfavourable result. The
    numbers were, Ayes (for the government), 284; Noes, 287; majority
    against the government, 3. It is said that 45 adherents of the
    government, or thereabouts, voted against them. It was the Irish
    vote that grew continually worse.(285)


(M146) Of the speech in which the debate was wound up Forster says in his
diary: “Gladstone, with the House dead against him and his bill, made a
wonderful speech—easy, almost playful, with passages of great power and
eloquence, but with a graceful play, which enabled him to plant deep his
daggers of satire in Horsman and Co.”(286) Speaker Brand calls it “a
magnificent speech, generous, high-minded, and without a taint of
bitterness, although he was sorely tried, especially by false friends.” He
vindicated the obnoxious clauses, but did not wish to adhere to them if
opinion from all quarters were adverse, and he admitted that it was the
opposition of members from Ireland that principally acted on his hearers.
His speech contained a remarkable passage, pronouncing definitely against
denominational endowment of university education.




Chapter XII. The Crisis. (1873)


    .. alla fortuna, come vuol, son presto..
    Pero giri fortuna la sua rota,
    Come le piace, e il villan la sua marra.
                     —_Inferno_, xv. 93.

    For fortune as she wills I am ready.. so
    let her turn her wheel as she may please,
    and the churl his spade.



I


A week of lively and eventful interests followed,—not only interesting in
the life of Mr. Gladstone, but raising points with important
constitutional bearings, and showing a match between two unsurpassed
masters of political sword-play. The story was told generally and
partially in parliament, but the reader who is curious about either the
episode itself, or Mr. Gladstone’s modes of mind and action, will find it
worth a little trouble to follow details with some closeness.


    _March 11._—H. of C. Spoke 12-2, and voted in a division of
    284-287—which was believed to cause more surprise to the opposite
    side than it did to me. At 2.45 A.M. I apprised the Queen of our
    defeat.

    _Thursday, March 12._—Saw the Queen at 12.15. Failed to find
    Granville. Cabinet 1-2-3/4. We discussed the matter with a general
    tendency to resignation rather than dissolving. Confab. on my
    position with Granville and Glyn, then joined by Bright. To the
    Queen again at six to keep her informed. Large dinner party for
    the Duke of Edinburgh, and an evening party afterwards, to hear
    Joachim.

    _Friday, March 13._—After seeing Mr. Glyn and Lord F. Cavendish, I
    went at 10.40 to see Dr. Clark. He completed his examination, and
    gave me his careful judgment. I went to Lord Granville, sketched
    out to him and Glyn my views, and went to the cabinet at 12.15.
    Stated the case between the two alternatives of resignation and
    dissolution as far as regarded myself. On the side of resignation
    it would not be necessary to make any final announcement [of his
    retirement from the leadership]. I am strongly advised a temporary
    rest. On the other hand, if we now dissolve, I anticipate that
    _afterwards_ before any long time difficulties will arise, and my
    mission will be terminated. So that the alternatives are not so
    unequally weighed. The cabinet without any marked difference, or
    at least without any positive assertion to the contrary,
    determined on tendering their resignations.(287) After cabinet saw
    Hartington and others respecting honours. At 2.45 saw the Queen
    and resigned. The Queen informed me that she would send for Mr.
    Disraeli; suggested for consideration whether I would include the
    mention of this fact in my announcement to parliament, and added
    as I was leaving the room, without looking (apparently) for an
    answer, that she would inform me of what might take place. At 3.45
    saw Granville respecting the announcements. Made announcement in
    House of Commons at 4.30. More business at Downing Street, and
    home at six.

    At a quarter to seven, or a little later, Colonel Ponsonby called
    with a communication from her Majesty. “Any news?” I said. “A
    great deal,” he replied; and informed me as follows. Mr. Disraeli
    had been with the Queen; did not see the means of carrying on the
    government by the agency of his party under present circumstances;
    did not ask for the dissolution of parliament (this was understood
    to mean did not offer to become minister on condition of being
    permitted to dissolve); did not say that his renunciation of the
    task was final; recommended that the Queen should call for my
    advice. Upon this the Queen sent Colonel Ponsonby, and he said,
    “She considers this as sending for you anew.” I replied that I did
    not regard the Queen’s reference of this intelligence to me, as
    her calling upon me anew to undertake the work of government; that
    none of my obligations to the sovereign were cancelled or impaired
    by the resignation tendered and accepted; that I was still the
    minister for the purpose of rendering any service she might be
    pleased to call for in the matter on which she is engaged, exactly
    as before, until she has a new minister, when my official
    obligations will come to an end. That I felt there was great
    inconvenience and danger of misapprehension out of doors in
    proceeding over-rapidly with a matter of such gravity, and that
    each step in it required to be well measured and ascertained
    before proceeding to consider of the next following step. That I
    had great difficulty in gathering any precise idea of Mr.
    Disraeli’s account of what he could not do, and what he either
    could or did not say that he could not. That as this account was
    to present to me the state of facts on which I was commanded to
    advise, it was quite necessary for me to have an accurate idea of
    it, in order that I might do justice to her Majesty’s commands. I
    would therefore humbly suggest that Mr. Disraeli might with great
    propriety be requested to put his reply into writing. That I
    presumed I might receive this reply, if it were her Majesty’s
    pleasure to make it known to me, at some not late hour to-morrow,
    when I would at once place myself in a condition to tender my
    humble advice. This is an account of what Colonel Ponsonby might
    fairly consider as my answer to her Majesty’s communication. I
    enlarged the conversation, however, by observing that the division
    which overthrew us was a party division. It bore the express
    authentic symbol of its character in having party tellers on the
    opposition as well as on the government side; that we were aware
    of the great, even more than ordinary, efforts of Colonel Taylor,
    with Mr. Disraeli’s countenance, to bring members to London and to
    the House; that all this seemed to impose great obligations on the
    opposition; and if so, that it would be the duty of the leader of
    the opposition to use every exertion of consultation with his
    friends and otherwise before declining the task, or in any manner
    advising the Queen to look elsewhere. To Colonel Ponsonby indeed,
    I observed that I thought Mr. Disraeli was endeavouring, by at
    once throwing back on me an offer which it was impossible for me
    at the time and under the circumstances to accept, to get up a
    case of absolute necessity founded upon this refusal of mine, and
    thus, becoming the indispensable man and party, to have in his
    hands a lever wherewith to overcome the reluctance and resistance
    of his friends, who would not be able to deny that the Queen must
    have a government.


(M147) Mr. Disraeli’s reply to the Queen’s inquiry whether he was prepared
to form a government, was put into writing, and the two operative
paragraphs of it were sent through Colonel Ponsonby to Mr. Gladstone. They
ran as follows:—


    In answer, Mr. Disraeli said he was prepared to form an
    administration which he believed would carry on her Majesty’s
    affairs with efficiency, and would possess her confidence; but he
    could not undertake to carry on her Majesty’s government in the
    present House of Commons. Subsequently, her Majesty having
    remarked that Mr. Gladstone was not inclined to recommend a
    dissolution of parliament, Mr. Disraeli stated that he himself
    would not advise her Majesty to take that step.


Viewing these paragraphs as forming the answer offered by Mr. Disraeli to
the Queen, Mr. Gladstone reported to her (March 14) that “he did not find
himself able to gather their precise effect”:—


    The former of the two, if it stood alone, would seem to imply that
    Mr. Disraeli was prepared to accept office with a view to an
    immediate dissolution of parliament, but not otherwise; since it
    states that he believes himself able to form a suitable
    administration, but not “to carry on your Majesty’s government in
    the present House of Commons.” In the latter of the two paragraphs
    Mr. Disraeli has supposed your Majesty to have remarked that “Mr.
    Gladstone was not inclined to recommend a dissolution of
    parliament,” and has stated that “he himself would not advise your
    Majesty to take that step.” Your Majesty will without doubt
    remember that Mr. Gladstone tendered no advice on the subject of
    dissolution generally, but limited himself to comparing it with
    the alternative of resignation, which was the only question at
    issue, and stated that on the part of the cabinet he humbly
    submitted resignation of their offices, which they deemed to be
    the step most conformable to their duty. Mr. Gladstone does not
    clearly comprehend the bearing of Mr. Disraeli’s closing words; as
    he could not tender advice to your Majesty either affirmatively or
    negatively on dissolution, without first becoming your Majesty’s
    adviser. Founding himself upon the memorandum, Mr. Gladstone is
    unable to say to what extent the apparent meaning of the one
    paragraph is modified or altered by the other; and he is obliged
    to trouble your Majesty, however reluctantly, with this
    representation, inasmuch as a perfectly clear idea of the tenor of
    the reply is a necessary preliminary to his offering any remark or
    advice upon it; which, had it been a simple negative, he would
    have felt it his duty to do.


Between six and seven in the evening Colonel Ponsonby came with a letter
from the Queen to the effect that Mr. Disraeli had unconditionally
declined to undertake the formation of a government. In obedience to the
Queen’s commands Mr. Gladstone proceeded to give his view of the position
in which her Majesty was placed:—


    _March 15._—Not being aware that there can be a question of any
    intermediate party or combination of parties which would be
    available at the present juncture, he presumes that your Majesty,
    if denied the assistance of the conservative or opposition party,
    might be disposed to recur to the services of a liberal
    government. He is of opinion, however, that either his late
    colleagues, or any statesman or statesmen of the liberal party on
    whom your Majesty might call, would with propriety at once observe
    that it is still for the consideration of your Majesty whether the
    proceeding which has taken place between your Majesty and Mr.
    Disraeli can as yet be regarded as complete. The vote of the House
    of Commons on Wednesday morning was due to the deliberate and
    concerted action of the opposition, with a limited amount of
    adventitious numerical aid. The division was a party division, and
    carried the well-known symbol of such divisions in the appointment
    of tellers of the opposition and government respectively. The vote
    was given in the full knowledge, avowed in the speech of the
    leader of the opposition, that the government had formally
    declared the measure on which the vote was impending to be vital
    to its existence. Mr. Gladstone humbly conceives that, according
    to the well-known principles of our parliamentary government, an
    opposition which has in this manner and degree contributed to
    bring about what we term a crisis, is bound to use and to show
    that it has used its utmost efforts of counsel and inquiry to
    exhaust all practicable means of bringing its resources to the aid
    of the country in its exigency. He is aware that his opinion on
    such a subject can only be of slight value, but the same
    observation will not hold good with regard to the force of a
    well-established party usage. To show what that usage has been,
    Mr. Gladstone is obliged to trouble your Majesty with the
    following recital of facts from the history of the last half
    century.... [_This apt and cogent recital the reader will find at
    the end of the volume, see _Appendix_._]... There is, therefore, a
    very wide difference between the manner in which the call of your
    Majesty has been met on this occasion by the leader of the
    opposition, and the manner which has been observed at every former
    juncture, including even those when the share taken by the
    opposition in bringing about the exigency was comparatively slight
    or none at all. It is, in Mr. Gladstone’s view, of the utmost
    importance to the public welfare that the nation should be
    constantly aware that the parliamentary action certain or likely
    to take effect in the overthrow of a government; the reception and
    treatment of a summons from your Majesty to meet the necessity
    which such action has powerfully aided in creating; and again the
    resumption of office by those who have deliberately laid it
    down,—are uniformly viewed as matters of the utmost gravity,
    requiring time, counsel, and deliberation among those who are
    parties to them, and attended with serious responsibilities. Mr.
    Gladstone will not and does not suppose that the efforts of the
    opposition to defeat the government on Wednesday morning were made
    with a previously formed intention on their part to refuse any aid
    to your Majesty, if the need should arise, in providing for the
    government of the country; and the summary refusal, which is the
    only fact before him, he takes to be not in full correspondence
    either with the exigencies of the case, or as he has shown, with
    the parliamentary usage. In humbly submitting this representation
    to your Majesty, Mr. Gladstone’s wish is to point out the
    difficulty in which he would find himself placed were he to ask
    your Majesty for authority to inquire from his late colleagues
    whether they or any of them were prepared, if your Majesty should
    call on them, to resume their offices; for they would certainly,
    he is persuaded, call on him, for their own honour, and in order
    to the usefulness of their further service if it should be
    rendered, to prove to them that according to usage every means had
    been exhausted on the part of the opposition for providing for the
    government of the country, or at least that nothing more was to be
    expected from that quarter.


This statement, prepared after dinner, Mr. Gladstone took to Lord
Granville that night (March 14). The next morning he again saw Lord
Granville and Colonel Ponsonby, and despatched his statement to the Queen.
“At 2.45,” he writes to Granville:—


    I saw the Queen, not for any distinct object, but partly to fill
    the blank before the public. H.M. was in perfect humour. She will
    use the whole or part of my long letter by sending it to Disraeli.
    She seemed quite to understand our point of view, and told me
    plainly what shows that the artful man _did_ say, if it came back
    to him again at this juncture, he would not be bound by his
    present refusal. I said, “But, ma’am, that is not before me.” “But
    he told it to me,” she said.


(M148) The Queen sent Mr. Gladstone’s long letter to Mr. Disraeli, and he
replied in a tolerably long letter of his own. He considered Mr.
Gladstone’s observations under two heads: first, as an impeachment of the
opposition for contributing to the vote against the bill, when they were
not prepared to take office; second, as a charge against Mr. Disraeli
himself that he summarily refused to take office without exhausting all
practicable means of aiding the country in the exigency. On the first
article of charge, he described the doctrine advanced by Mr. Gladstone as
being “undoubtedly sound so far as this: that for an opposition to use its
strength for the express purpose of throwing out a government which it is
at the time aware that it cannot replace—having that object in view and no
other—would be an act of recklessness and faction that could not be too
strongly condemned.” But this, he contended, could not be imputed to the
conservative opposition of 1873. The Irish bill was from the first
strongly objected to by a large section of the liberal party, and on the
same grounds that led the conservative opposition to reject it, namely,
that it sacrificed Irish education to the Roman catholic hierarchy. The
party whom the bill was intended to propitiate rejected it as inadequate.
If the sense of the House had been taken, irrespective of considerations
of the political result of the division, not one-fourth of the House would
have voted for it. Mr. Gladstone’s doctrine, Disraeli went on, amounted to
this, that “whenever a minister is so situated that it is in his power to
prevent any other parliamentary leader from forming an administration
likely to stand, he acquires thereby the right to call on parliament to
pass whatever measures he and his colleagues think fit, and is entitled to
denounce as factious the resistance to such measures. Any such claim is
one not warranted by usage, or reconcilable with the freedom of the
legislature. It comes to this: that he tells the House of Commons, ‘Unless
you are prepared to put some one in my place, your duty is to do whatever
I bid you.’ To no House of Commons has language of this kind ever been
addressed; by no House of Commons would it be tolerated.”

As for the charge of summary refusal to undertake government, Mr. Disraeli
contented himself with a brief statement of facts. He had consulted his
friends, and they were all of opinion that it would be prejudicial to the
public interests for a conservative ministry to attempt to conduct
business in the present House of Commons. What other means were at his
disposal? Was he to open negotiations with a section of the late ministry,
and waste days in barren interviews, vain applications, and the device of
impossible combinations? Was he to make overtures to the considerable
section of the liberal party that had voted against the government? The
Irish Roman catholic gentlemen? Surely Mr. Gladstone was not serious in
such a suggestion. The charge of deliberate and concerted action against
the Irish bill was ’not entirely divested of some degree of exaggeration.’
His party was not even formally summoned to vote against the government
measure, but to support an amendment which was seconded from the liberal
benches, and which could only by a violent abuse of terms be described as
a party move.

On Saturday afternoon Mr. Gladstone had gone down to Cliveden, and there
at ten o’clock on the Sunday evening (March 16) he received a message from
the Queen, enclosing Mr. Disraeli’s letter, and requesting him to say
whether he would resume office. This letter was taken by Mr. Gladstone to
show that “nothing more was to be expected in that quarter,” and at eleven
o’clock he sent off the messenger with his answer in the affirmative:—


    _March 16, 1873_, 10-3/4 P.M.—It is quite unnecessary for him to
    comment upon any of the statements or arguments advanced by Mr.
    Disraeli, as the point referred by your Majesty for him to
    consider is not their accuracy, sufficiency, or relevancy, but
    simply whether any further effort is to be expected from the
    opposition towards meeting the present necessity. Your Majesty has
    evidently judged that nothing more of this kind can be looked for.
    Your Majesty’s judgment would have been conclusive with Mr.
    Gladstone in the case, even had he failed to appreciate the full
    cogency of the reason for it; but he is bound to state that he
    respectfully concurs with your Majesty upon that simple question,
    as one not of right but of fact. He therefore does not hesitate at
    once to answer your Majesty’s gracious inquiry by saying that he
    will now endeavour to prevail upon your Majesty’s late advisers
    generally to resume their offices, and he again places all such
    service as it is in his power to offer, at your Majesty’s
    disposal. According to your Majesty’s command, then, he will
    repair to London to-morrow morning, and will see some of the most
    experienced members of the late government to review the position
    which he regards as having been seriously unhinged by the shock of
    last Wednesday morning; to such an extent indeed, that he doubts
    whether either the administration or parliament can again be what
    they were. The relations between them, and the course of business
    laid down in the royal speech, will require to be reconsidered, or
    at least reviewed with care.



II


    _Tuesday, March 18._—[_To the Queen_] The cabinet met informally
    at this house [11 Carlton House Terrace] at 2 P.M., and sat till
    5-½.

    The whole of the cabinet were ready to resume their offices. It
    was decided to carry on the government in the present parliament,
    without contemplating any particular limit of time for existence
    in connection with the recent vote.

    _Wednesday, March 19._—Went down to Windsor at midday; 3/4 hour
    with the Queen on the resignation, the statement tomorrow, the
    Duke of Edinburgh’s marriage, royal precedence, Tennyson’s honour;
    also she mentioned railway accidents and an assault on a soldier,
    and on luxury in food and dress. Dined with the Duke of Cambridge.
    Speaker’s levee, saw Mr. Fawcett [who had been active in fomenting
    hostility] and other members. Then Mrs. Glyn’s party.

    _Thursday, March 20._—H. of C. Made my explanation. Advisedly let
    pass Mr. Disraeli’s speech without notice.


Mr. Gladstone said among other things:—


    I felt reluctance personally from a desire for rest, the title to
    which had possibly been ... earned by labour. Also politically,
    because I do not think that as a general rule the experience we
    have had in former years of what may be called returning or
    resuming governments, has been very favourable in its
    character.... The subsequent fortunes of such governments lead to
    the belief that upon the whole, though such a return may be the
    lesser of two evils, yet it is not a thing in itself to be
    desired. It reminds me of that which was described by the Roman
    general according to the noble ode of Horace:—

        ... Neque amissos colores
      Lana refert medicata fuco,
    Nec vera virtus cum semel excidit
    Curat reponi deterioribus.(288)


Mr. Disraeli made a lengthy statement, covering a much wider field. The
substance of the whole case after all was this. The minister could not
dissolve for the reason that the defeat had strengthened all the forces
against the bill and against the government, and the constituencies who
had never looked on it with much favour after its rejection by the Irish
to satisfy whom it had been invented, now regarded it with energetic
disfavour. The leader of the opposition, on the other hand, produced a
long string of ingenious reasons for not abiding by the result of what was
his own act: as, for example, that dissolution could not be instant; to
form a government would take time; financial business must be arranged; a
policy could not be shaped without access to official information; in this
interval motions would be made and carried on plausible questions, and
when the election came, his friends would go to the country as discredited
ministers, instead of being a triumphant opposition. In writing to his
brother Robertson, Mr. Gladstone glances at other reasons:—


    _March 21._—We have gone through our crisis; and I fear that
    nobody is much the better for it. For us it was absolutely
    necessary to show that we did not consider return, as we had not
    considered resignation, a light matter. As to the opposition, the
    speech of Disraeli last night leaves it to be asked why did he not
    come in, wind up the business of the session, and dissolve? There
    is no reason to be given, except that a portion of his party was
    determined not to be educated again, and was certain that if he
    got in he would again commence this educating process. The
    conservative party will never assume its natural position until
    Disraeli retires; and I sometimes think he and I might with
    advantage pair off together.


Speaker Brand says: “Disraeli’s tactics are to watch and wait, not showing
his hand nor declaring a policy; he desires to drive Gladstone to a
dissolution, when he will make the most of Gladstone’s mistakes, while he
will denounce a policy of destruction and confiscation, and take care to
announce no policy of his own. His weakness consists in the want of
confidence of some of his party.”




Chapter XIII. Last Days Of The Ministry. (1873)


    ὤσπερ ἂν εἴ τις ναύκληρον πάντ᾽ ἐπὶ σωτηρίᾳ πράξαντα, καὶ
    κατασκευάσαντα τὸ πλοῖον ἀφ᾽ ὧν ὑπελάμβανε σωθήσεσθαι, εἶτα
    χειμῶνι χρησάμενον καὶ πονησάντων αὐτῷ τῶν σκευῶν ἤ καὶ
    συντριβέτων ὅλως, τῆς ναυαγίας αἰτιῷτο.—DEMOSTHENES.

    As if, when a shipmaster had done all he could for safety, and
    fitted his vessel with everything to make her weathertight, then
    when he meets a storm and all his tackle strains and labours until
    it is torn to pieces, we should blame him for the wreck.



I


The shock of defeat, resignation, and restoration had no effect in
lessening ministerial difficulties. The months that followed make an
unedifying close to five glorious years of progress and reform. With
plenty of differences they recall the sunless days in which the second
administration of the younger Pitt ended that lofty career of genius and
dominion. The party was divided, and some among its leaders were centres
of petty disturbance. In a scrap dated at this period Mr. Gladstone wrote:
“Divisions in the liberal party are to be seriously apprehended from a
factious spirit on questions of economy, on questions of education in
relation to religion, on further parliamentary change, on the land laws.
On these questions generally my sympathies are with what may be termed the
advanced party, whom on other and general grounds I certainly will never
head nor lead.”

The quarrel between the government and the nonconformists was not
mitigated by a speech of Mr. Gladstone’s against a motion for the
disestablishment of the church. It was described by Speaker Brand as “firm
and good,” but the dissenters, with all their kindness for the prime
minister, thought it firm and bad.(289) To Dr. Allon, one of the most
respected of their leaders, Mr. Gladstone wrote (July 5):—


    The spirit of frankness in which you write is ever acceptable to
    me. I fear there may be much in your sombre anticipations. But if
    there is to be a great schism in the liberal party, I hope I shall
    never find it my duty to conduct the operations either of the one
    or of the other section. The nonconformists have shown me great
    kindness and indulgence; they have hitherto interpreted my acts
    and words in the most favourable sense; and if the time has come
    when my acts and words pass beyond the measure of their patience,
    I contemplate with repugnance, at my time of life especially, the
    idea of entering into conflict with them. A political severance,
    somewhat resembling in this a change in religion, should at most
    occur not more than once in life. At the same time I must observe
    that no one has yet to my knowledge pointed out the expressions or
    arguments in the speech, that can justly give offence.


A few personal jottings will be found of interest:—


    _April 7, 1873._—H. of C. The budget and its reception mark a real
    onward step in the session. 23.—Breakfast with Mr. C. Field to
    meet Mr. Emerson. 30.—I went to see the remains of my dear friend
    James Hope. Many sad memories but more joyful hopes. _May 15._—The
    King and Queen of the Belgians came to breakfast at ten. A party
    of twenty. They were most kind, and all went well.

    _To the Queen_ (May 19).—Mr. Gladstone had an interview yesterday
    at Chiselhurst with the Empress. He thought her Majesty much
    thinner and more worn than last year, but she showed no want of
    energy in conversation. Her Majesty felt much interest, and a
    little anxiety, about the coming examination of the prince her son
    at Woolwich.

    _June 8._—Chapel royal at noon. It was touching to see Dean Hook
    and hear him, now old in years and very old I fear in life; but he
    kindled gallantly. 17.—Had a long conversation with Mr. Holloway
    (of the pills) on his philanthropic plans; which are of great
    interest. 25.—Audience of the Shah with Lord Granville and the
    Duke of Argyll. Came away after 1-1/4 hours. He displayed abundant
    acuteness. His gesticulation particularly expressive. 26.—Sixteen
    to breakfast. Mme. Norman Neruda played for us. She is also most
    pleasing in manner and character. Went to Windsor afterwards. Had
    an audience. _July 1._—H. of C. Received the Shah soon after six.
    A division on a trifling matter of adjournment took place during
    his Majesty’s presence, in which he manifested an intelligent
    interest. The circumstance of his presence at the time is singular
    in this view (and of this he was informed, rather to his
    amusement) that until the division was over he could not be
    released from the walls of the House. It is probably, or possibly,
    the first time for more than five hundred years that a foreign
    sovereign has been under personal restraint of any kind in
    England. [_Query, Mary Queen of Scots._]


(M149) Then we come upon an entry that records one of the deepest griefs
of this stage of Mr. Gladstone’s life—the sudden death of Bishop
Wilberforce:—


    _July 19._—Off at 4.25 to Holmbury.(290) We were enjoying that
    beautiful spot and expecting Granville with the Bishop of
    Winchester, when the groom arrived with the message that the
    Bishop had had a bad fall. An hour and a half later Granville
    entered, pale and sad: “It’s all over.” In an instant the thread
    of that very precious life was snapped. We were all in deep and
    silent grief. 20.—Woke with a sad sense of a great void in the
    world. 21.—Drove in the morning with Lord Granville to Abinger
    Hall. Saw _him_, for the last time in the flesh, resting from his
    labours. Attended the inquest; inspected the spot; all this cannot
    be forgotten. 23.—Gave way under great heat, hard work, and
    perhaps depression of force. Kept my bed all day.


“Of the special opinions of this great prelate,” he wrote to the Queen,
“Mr. Gladstone may not be an impartial judge, but he believes there can be
no doubt that there does not live the man in any of the three kingdoms of
your Majesty who has, by his own indefatigable and unmeasured labours,
given such a powerful impulse as the Bishop of Winchester gave to the
religious life of the country.” When he mentioned that the bishop’s family
declined the proposal of Westminster Abbey for his last resting place, the
Queen replied that she was very glad, for “to her nothing more gloomy and
doleful exists.”

“Few men,” Mr. Gladstone wrote later in this very year, “have had a more
varied experience of personal friendships than myself. Among the large
numbers of estimable and remarkable people whom I have known, and who have
now passed away, there is in my memory an inner circle, and within it are
the forms of those who were marked off from the comparative crowd even of
the estimable and remarkable, by the peculiarity and privilege of their
type.”(291) In this inner circle the bishop must have held a place, not
merely by habit of life, which accounts for so many friendships in the
world, but by fellowship in their deepest interests, by common ideals in
church and state, by common sympathy in their arduous aim to reconcile
greetings in the market-place and occupation of high seats, with the
spiritual glow of the soul within its own sanctuary.

(M150) While still grieving over this painful loss, Mr. Gladstone suddenly
found himself in a cauldron of ministerial embarrassments. An inquiry into
certain irregularities at the general post office led to the discovery
that the sum of eight hundred thousand pounds had been detained on its way
to the exchequer, and applied to the service of the telegraphs. The
persons concerned in the gross and inexcused irregularities were Mr.
Monsell, Mr. Ayrton, and the chancellor of the exchequer. “There probably
have been times,” Mr. Gladstone wrote to the Queen (Aug. 7), “when the
three gentlemen who in their several positions have been chiefly to blame
would have been summarily dismissed from your Majesty’s service. But on
none of them could any ill-intent be charged; two of them had, among
whatever errors of judgment, done much and marked good service to the
state.” Under the circumstances he could not resort to so severe a course
without injustice and harshness. “The recent exposures,” Mr. Gladstone
wrote to Lord Russell, “have been gall and wormwood to me from day to
day.” “Ever since the failure of the Irish University bill,” he said, “the
government has been in a condition in which, to say the least, it has had
no strength to spare, and has stood in need of all the strength it could
derive from internal harmony and vigorous administration.” The post office
scandal exposed to the broad light of day that neither harmony nor vigour
existed or could be counted on. It was evident that neither the postmaster
nor the chancellor of the exchequer could remain where they were. In
submitting new arrangements to the Queen, Mr. Gladstone said that he would
gladly have spared her the irksome duty of considering them, had it been
“in his power either on the one side to leave unnoticed the scandals that
have occurred, or on the other to have tendered a general resignation, or
to have advised a dissolution of parliament.” The hot weather and the
lateness of the session made the House of Commons disinclined for serious
conflict; still at the end of July various proceedings upon the scandals
took place, which. Mr. Gladstone described to the Queen as of “a truly
mortifying character.” Mr. Ayrton advanced doctrines of ministerial
responsibility that could not for a moment be maintained, and Mr.
Gladstone felt himself bound on the instant to disavow them.(292)

Sir Robert Phillimore gives a glimpse of him in these evil days:—


    _July 24._—Gladstone dined here hastily; very unwell, and much
    worn. He talked about little else than Bishop Wilberforce’s
    funeral and the ecclesiastical appeals in the Judicature bill.
    29th.—Saw Gladstone, better but pale. Said the government deserved
    a vote of censure on Monsell and Lowe’s account. Monsell ought to
    resign; but Lowe, he said, ought for past services to be defended.
    30th..—Dined at Gladstone’s. Radical M.P.’s ... agreed that
    government was tottering, and that Gladstone did everything.
    Gladstone walks with a stick. _Aug. 7._—An interview with
    Gladstone. He was communicative. A great reform of his government
    has become necessary. The treasury to be swept out. He looked much
    better.


Nothing at any time was so painful, almost intolerably painful, to Mr.
Gladstone as personal questions, and cabinet reconstruction is made up of
personal questions of the most trying and invidious kind. “I have had a
fearful week,” he wrote to the Duke of Argyll (Aug. 8), “but have come
through. A few behave oddly, most perfectly well, some incomparably well;
of these last I must name _honoris causâ_, Bright, Bruce, and F.
Cavendish.” To Mr. Bright he had written when the crisis first grew
acute:—


    _Aug. 2._—You have seen the reports, without doubt, of what has
    been going on. You can hardly conceive the reality. I apprehend
    that the House of Commons by its abstinence and forbearance, must
    be understood to have given us breathing time and space to
    consider what can be done to renovate the government in something
    like harmony and something like dignity. This will depend greatly
    upon men and partly upon measures. Changes in men there must be,
    and some without delay. A lingering and discreditable death, after
    the life we have lived, is not an ending to which we ought to
    submit without effort; and as an essential part of the best effort
    that can be made, I am most desirous to communicate with you here.
    I rely on your kindness to come up. Here only can I show you the
    state of affairs, which is most dangerous, and yet not unhopeful.


From the diary:—


    _Aug. 1._—Saw Lord F. Cavendish, also Lord Granville, Lord
    Wolverton, Mr. Cardwell, repeatedly on the crisis. 2.—An anxious
    day. The first step was taken, Cardwell broke to Lowe the
    necessity of his changing his office. Also I spoke to Forster and
    Fortescue. 4.—A very anxious day of constant conversation and
    reflection, ending with an evening conclave. 5.—My day began with
    Dr. Clark. Rose at eleven.... Wrote.... Most of these carried much
    powder and shot. Some were Jack Ketch and Calcraft [the public
    executioner] letters. 6.—Incessant interviews.... Much anxiety
    respecting the Queen’s delay in replying. Saw Lord Wolverton late
    with her reply. 9.—To Osborne. A long and satisfactory audience of
    H.M. Attended the council, and received a third time the seals of
    my old office.


This resumption of the seals of the exchequer, which could no longer be
left with Mr. Lowe, was forced upon Mr. Gladstone by his colleagues. From
a fragmentary note, he seems to have thought of Mr. Goschen for the vacant
post, “but deferring to the wishes of others,” he says, “I reluctantly
consented to become chancellor of the exchequer.” The latest instance of a
combination of this office with that of first lord of the treasury were
Canning in 1827, and Peel in 1884-5.(293)

The correspondence on this mass of distractions is formidable, but,
luckily for us it is now mere burnt-out cinder. The two protagonists of
discord had been Mr. Lowe and Mr. Ayrton, and we may as well leave them
with a few sentences of Mr. Gladstone upon the one, and to the other:—


    Mr. Ayrton, he says, has caused Mr. Gladstone so much care and
    labour on many occasions, that if he had the same task to
    encounter in the case of a few other members of the cabinet, his
    office would become intolerable. But before a public servant of
    this class can properly be dismissed, there must be not only a
    sufficient case against him, but a case of which the sufficiency
    can be made intelligible and palpable to the world. Some of his
    faults are very serious, yet he is as towards the nation an
    upright, assiduous, and able functionary.


To Mr. Lowe, who had become home secretary, he writes (Aug. 13):—


    I do not know whether the word “timid” was the right one for L——,
    but, at any rate, I will give you proof that I am not “timid”;
    though a coward in many respects I may be. I always hold that
    politicians are the men whom, as a rule, it is most difficult to
    comprehend, _i.e._ understand completely; and for my own part, I
    never have thus understood, or thought I understood, above one or
    two, though here and there I may get hold of an isolated idea
    about others. Such an idea comes to me about you. I think the
    clearness, power, and promptitude of your intellect are in one
    respect a difficulty and a danger to you. You see everything in a
    burning, almost a scorching light. The case reminds me of an
    incident some years back. Sir D. Brewster asked me to sit for my
    photograph in a black frost and a half mist in Edinburgh. I
    objected about the light. He said, This is the best light; it is
    all diffused, not concentrated. Is not your light too much
    concentrated? Does not its intensity darken the surroundings? By
    the surroundings, I mean the relations of the thing not only to
    other things but to persons, as our profession obliges us
    constantly to deal with persons. In every question flesh and blood
    are strong and real even if extraneous elements, and we cannot
    safely omit them from our thoughts.

    Now, after all this impudence, let me try and do you a little more
    justice. You have held for a long time the most important office
    of the state. No man can do his duty in that office and be popular
    _while_ he holds it. I could easily name the two worst chancellors
    of the exchequer of the last forty years; against neither of them
    did I ever hear a word while they were in (I might almost add, nor
    for them after they were out). “Blessed are ye, when men shall
    revile you.” You have fought for the public, tooth and nail. You
    have been under a storm of unpopularity; but not a fiercer one
    than I had to stand in 1860, when hardly any one dared to say a
    word for me; but certainly it was one of my best years of service,
    even though bad be the best. Of course, I do not say that this
    necessity of being unpopular should induce us to raise our
    unpopularity to the highest point. No doubt, both in policy and in
    Christian charity, it should make us very studious to mitigate and
    abate the causes as much as we can. This is easier for you than it
    was for me, as your temper is good, and mine not good.

    While I am fault-finding, let me do a little more, and take
    another scrap of paper for the purpose. (I took only a scrap
    before, as I was determined, then, not to “afflict you above
    measure.”) I note, then, two things about you. Outstripping others
    in the race, you reach the goal or conclusion before them; and,
    being there, you assume that they are there also. This is
    unpopular. You are unpopular this very day with a poor wretch,
    whom you have apprised that he has lost his seat, and you have not
    told him _how_. Again, and lastly, I think you do not get up all
    things, but allow yourself a choice, as if politics were a
    flower-garden and we might choose among the beds; as Lord
    Palmerston did, who read foreign office and war papers, and let
    the others rust and rot. This, I think, is partially true, I do
    not say of your reading, but of your mental processes. You will, I
    am sure, forgive the levity and officiousness of this letter for
    the sake of its intention and will believe me always and sincerely
    yours.


Then at last he escaped from Downing Street to Hawarden:—


    _Aug. 11._—Off at 8.50 with a more buoyant spirit and greater
    sense of relief than I have experienced for many years on this,
    the only pleasant act of moving to me in the circuit of the year.
    This gush is in proportion to the measure of the late troubles and
    anxieties.



II


The reader will perhaps not thank me for devoting even a short page or two
to a matter that made much clatter of tongue and pen in its day. The
points are technical, minute, and to be forgotten as quickly as possible.
But the thing was an episode, though a trivial one enough, in Mr.
Gladstone’s public life, and paltry use was made of it in the way of
groundless innuendo. Being first lord of the treasury, he took besides the
office of chancellor of the exchequer. Was this a fresh acceptance of a
place of profit under the crown? Did he thereby come within the famous
statute of Anne and vacate his seat? Or was he protected by a provision in
the Act of 1867, to the effect that if any member had been duly re-elected
since his acceptance of any office referred to in the Act of Anne, he
should be free to accept any other such office without further
re-election? Mr. Gladstone had been re-elected after being first lord of
the treasury; was he free to accept the office of chancellor of the
exchequer in addition, without again submitting himself to his
constituents? The policy and object of the provision were obvious and they
were notorious. Unluckily, for good reasons not at all affecting this
object, Mr. Disraeli inserted certain words, the right construction of
which in our present case became the subject of keen and copious
contention. The section that had been unmistakable before, now ran that a
member holding an office of profit should not vacate his seat by his
subsequent acceptance of any other office “_in lieu of and in immediate
succession_ the one to the other.”(294) Not a word was said in the debate
on the clause as to the accumulation of offices, and nobody doubted that
the intention of parliament was simply to repeal the Act of Anne, in
respect of change of office by existing ministers. Was Mr. Gladstone’s a
case protected by this section? Was the Act of 1867, which had been passed
to limit the earlier statute, still to be construed in these circumstances
as extending it?

Unsuspected hares were started in every direction. What is a first lord of
the treasury? Is there such an office? Had it ever been named (up to that
time) in a statute? Is the chancellor of the exchequer, besides being
something more, also a commissioner of the treasury? If he is, and if the
first lord is only the same, and if there is no legal difference between
the lords of the treasury, does the assumption of the two parts by one
minister constitute a case of immediate succession by one commissioner to
another, or is the minister in Mr. Gladstone’s circumstances an
indivisible personality as commissioner discharging two sets of duties?
Then the precedents. Perceval was chancellor of the exchequer in 1809,
when he accepted in addition the office of first lord with an increased
salary, and yet he was held not to have vacated his seat.(295) Lord North
in 1770, then chancellor of the exchequer, was appointed first lord on the
resignation of the Duke of Grafton, and he at the same time retained his
post of chancellor; yet no writ was ordered, and no re-election took
place.

Into this discussion we need not travel. What concerns us here is Mr.
Gladstone’s own share in the transaction. The plain story of what proved a
complex affair, Mr. Gladstone recounted to the Speaker on August 16, in
language that shows how direct and concise he could be when handling
practical business:—


    I had already sent you a preliminary intimation on the subject of
    my seat for Greenwich, before I received your letter of the 14th.
    I will now give you a more complete account of what has taken
    place. Knowing only that the law had been altered with the view of
    enabling the ministers to change offices without re-election, and
    that the combination of my two offices was a proper and common
    one, we had made no inquiry into the point of law, nor imagined
    there was any at the time when, deferring to the wish of others, I
    reluctantly consented to become C. of E. On Saturday last (Aug. 9)
    when I was at Osborne, the question was opened to me. I must
    qualify what I have stated by saying that on Friday afternoon some
    one had started the question fully into view; and it had been, on
    a summary survey, put aside. On Monday I saw Mr. Lambert, who I
    found had looked into it; we talked of it fully; and he undertook
    to get the materials of a case together. The Act throws the
    initiative upon me; but as the matter seemed open to discussion, I
    felt that I must obtain the best assistance, viz., that of the law
    officers. I advisedly abstained from troubling or consulting Sir
    E. May, because you might have a subsequent and separate part to
    take, and might wish to refer to him. Also the blundering in the
    newspapers showed that the question abounded in nice matter, and
    would be all the better understood from a careful examination of
    precedents. The law officers were out of town; but the
    solicitor-general [Jessel] was to come up in the later part of the
    week. It was not possible in so limited a time to get a case into
    perfect order; still I thought that, as the _adverse_ argument lay
    on the surface, I had better have him consulted. I have had no
    direct communication with him. But Mr. Lambert with his usual
    energy put together the principal materials, and I jotted down all
    that occurred to me. Yesterday Mr. Lambert and my private
    secretary, Mr. Gurdon, who, as well as the solicitor to the
    treasury, had given attention to the subject, brought the matter
    fully before the solicitor-general. He has found himself able to
    write a full opinion on the questions submitted to him: 1. My
    office as C. of E. is an office of profit. 2. My commissionership
    of the treasury under the new patent in preparation is an “other
    office” under the meaning of the late Act. 3. I cannot be advised
    to certify to you any avoidance of the seat. Had the opinion of
    Sir G. Jessel been adverse, I should at once have ceased to urge
    the argument on the Act, strong as it appears to me to be; but in
    point of form I should have done what I now propose to do, viz.,
    to have the case made as complete as possible, and to obtain the
    joint opinion of the law officers. Perhaps that of the chancellor
    should be added. Here ends my narrative, which is given only for
    your information, and to show that I have not been negligent in
    this matter, the Act requiring me to proceed “forthwith.”


Speaker Brand replied (Aug. 18) that, while speaking with reserve on the
main point at issue, he had no hesitation in saying that he thought Mr.
Gladstone was taking the proper course in securing the best legal advice
in the matter. And he did not know what more could be done under present
circumstances.

(M151) The question put to Jessel was “Whether Mr. Gladstone, having
accepted the office of chancellor of the exchequer is not, under the
circumstances stated, protected by the provision contained in section 52
of the Representation of the People Act, 1867, from vacating his seat?”
Jessel answered “I am of opinion that he is so protected.” “I may be
wrong,” this strong lawyer once said, “and sometimes am; but I have never
any doubts.” His reasons on this occasion were as trenchant as his
conclusion. Next came Coleridge, the attorney-general. He wrote to Mr.
Gladstone on Sept. 1, 1873:—


    I have now gone carefully through the papers as to your seat, and
    looked at the precedents, and though I admit that the case is a
    curious one, and the words of the statute not happily chosen, yet
    _I have come clearly and without doubt to the same conclusion as
    Jessel_, and I shall be quite prepared if need be to argue the
    case in that sense in parliament. Still it may be very proper, as
    you yourself suggest, that you should have a written and formal
    opinion of the law officers and Bowen upon it.(296)


Selborne volunteered the opposite view (Aug. 21), and did not see how it
could be contended that Mr. Gladstone, being still a commissioner of the
treasury under the then existing commission, took the office of the
chancellor (with increase of pay) in lieu of, and in immediate succession
to, the other office which he still continued to hold. A day or two later,
Selborne, however, sent to Mr. Gladstone a letter addressed to himself by
Baron Bramwell. In this letter that most capable judge and strong-headed
man, said: “As a different opinion is I know entertained, I can’t help
saying that I think it clear Mr. Gladstone has not vacated his seat. His
case is within neither the spirit nor the letter of the statute.” He then
puts his view in the plain English of which he was a master. The lord
advocate (now Lord Young) went with the chancellor and against the English
law officers. Lowe at first thought that the seat was not vacated, and
then he thought that it was. “Sir Erskine May,” says Mr. Gladstone (Feb.
2, 1874), “has given a strong opinion that my seat is full.” Well might
the minister say that he thought “the trial of this case would fairly take
as long as Tichborne.” On September 21, the chancellor, while still
holding to his own opinion, wrote to Mr. Gladstone:—


    You have followed the right course (especially in a question which
    directly concerns the House of Commons) in obtaining the opinion
    of the law officers of the crown.... But having taken this proper
    course, and being disposed yourself to agree to the conclusions of
    your official advisers, you are clearly free from all personal
    fault, if you decide to act upon those conclusions and leave the
    House, when it meets, to deal with them in way either of assent or
    dissent, as it may think fit.


Coleridge and Jessel went on to the bench, and Sir Henry James and Sir
William Harcourt were brought up from below the gangway to be attorney and
solicitor. In November the new law officers were requested to try their
hands. Taking the brilliant and subtle Charles Bowen into company, they
considered the case, but did not venture (Dec. 1) beyond the singularly
shy proposition that strong arguments might be used both in favour of and
against the view that the seat was vacated.

Meanwhile the _Times_ had raised the question immediately (Aug. 11),
though not in adverse language. The unslumbering instinct of party had
quickly got upon a scent, and two keen-nosed sleuth hounds of the
opposition four or five weeks after Mr. Gladstone had taken the seals of
the exchequer, sent to the Speaker a certificate in the usual form (Sept.
17) stating the vacancy at Greenwich, and requesting him to issue a writ
for a new election. The Speaker reminded them in reply, that the law
governing the issue of writs during the recess in cases of acceptance of
office, required notification to him from the member accepting; and he had
received no such notification.(297) Everybody knew that in case of an
election, Mr. Gladstone’s seat was not safe, though when the time came he
was in fact elected. The final state and the outlook could not be better
described than in a letter from Lord Halifax to Mr. Gladstone (Dec. 9):—


    _Lord Halifax to Mr. Gladstone._

    _Dec. 9, 1873._—On thinking over the case as to your seat, I
    really think it is simple enough. I will put my ideas shortly for
    your benefit, or you may burn them. You did not believe that you
    had vacated your seat on accepting the office of chancellor of the
    exchequer, and you did not send notice to the Speaker as required
    by the Act of 1858. Were you right? The solicitor-general said
    that you were, in a deliberate opinion. The attorney-general
    concurred. The present law officers consider it so very doubtful
    that they will not give an opinion. The Speaker either from not
    having your notice, or having doubts, has not ordered a new writ.
    These are the facts. What should you do? _Up to the meeting_ of
    parliament you clearly must act as if there was no doubt. If you
    do not, you almost admit being wrong. You must assume yourself to
    be right, that you are justified in the course which you have
    taken, and act consistently on that view. When parliament meets, I
    think the proper course would be for the Speaker to say that he
    had received a certificate of vacancy from two members, but not
    the notice from the member himself, and having doubts he referred
    the matter to the House, according to the Act. This ensures the
    priority of the question and calls on you to explain your not
    having sent the notice. You state the facts as above, place
    yourself in the hands of the House, and withdraw. I agree with
    what Bright said that the House of Commons will deal quite fairly
    in such a case. A committee will be appointed. I don’t think it
    can last very long, and you will be absent during its sitting. No
    important business can be taken during your absence, and I do not
    know that any evil will ensue from shortening the period of
    business before the budget. They may vote estimates, or take minor
    matters.


This sensible view of Lord Halifax and Mr. Bright may be set against Lord
Selborne’s dogmatic assertion that a dissolution was the only escape. As
for his further assertion about his never doubting that this was the
determining cause of the dissolution, I can only say that in the mass of
papers connected with the Greenwich seat and the dissolution, there is no
single word in one of them associating in any way either topic with the
other. Mr. Gladstone acted so promptly in the affair of the seat that both
the Speaker of the House of Commons and Lord Selborne himself said that no
fault could be found with him. His position before the House was therefore
entirely straightforward. Finally Mr. Gladstone gave an obviously adequate
and sufficient case for the dissolution both to the Queen and to the
cabinet, and stated to at least three of his colleagues what was “the
determining cause,” and this was not the Greenwich seat, but something
wholly remote from it.(298)



III


The autumn recess began with attendance at Balmoral, of which a glimpse or
two remain:—


    _To Mrs. Gladstone._

    _Balmoral, Aug. 22, 1873._—The Queen in a long conversation asked
    me to-day about you at Holyhead. She talked of many matters, and
    made me sit down, because odd to say I had a sudden touch of my
    enemy yesterday afternoon, which made me think it prudent to beg
    off from dining with her, and keep on my back taking a strong dose
    of sal volatile.... The Queen had occasion to speak about the
    Crown Princess, lauded her talents, did not care a pin for her
    (the Queen’s) opinion, used to care only for that of her
    father....

    _Aug. 24._—To-day I had a long talk. Nothing can be better than
    her humour. She is going to Fort William on the 8th. I leave on
    Saturday, but if I make my Highland walk it cannot be till Monday,
    and all next week will probably be consumed in getting me home.

    _Aug. 27._—I enclose a copy of my intimation to the Queen [the
    engagement of his eldest daughter], which has drawn forth _in a
    few minutes_ the accompanying most charming letter from her. I
    think the original of this should be given to Agnes herself, as
    she will think it a great treasure; we keeping a copy. Is it not a
    little odd on our part, more than his, that (at least so far as I
    am concerned) we have allowed this great Aye to be said, without a
    single word on the subject of the means of support forthcoming? It
    is indeed a proceeding worthy of the times of the Acts of the
    Apostles! You perhaps know a little more than I do. _Your_ family
    were not very worldly minded people, but you will remember that
    before our engagement, Stephen was spirited up, most properly, to
    put a question to me about means. Yesterday I was not so much
    struck at hearing nothing on the subject of any sublunary
    particular; but lo! again your letter of to-day arrives with all
    about the charms of the orphanage, but not a syllable on beef and
    mutton, bread and butter, which after all cannot be altogether
    dispensed with.


Of this visit Lord Granville wrote to him (Sept. 20): “The Queen told me
last night that she had never known you so remarkably agreeable.” The
journey closed with a rather marked proof of bodily soundness in a man
nearly through his sixty-fourth year, thus recorded in his diary:—


    _Aug. 25._—[At Balmoral]. Walked thirteen miles, quite fresh.
    26.—Walked 8-½ miles in 2 h. 10 m. _Sept. 1._—Off at 9.15 [from
    Invercauld] to Castleton and Derry Lodge, driving. From the Lodge
    at 11.15, thirty-three miles to Kingussie on foot. Half an hour
    for luncheon, 1/4 hour waiting for the ponies (the road so rough
    on the hill); touched a carriageable road at 5, the top at 3. Very
    grand hill views, floods of rain on Speyside. Good hotel at
    Kingussie, but sorely disturbed by rats.


“Think,” he wrote to his daughter Mary from Naworth, “of my walking a good
three and thirty miles last Monday, some of it the roughest ground I ever
passed.” He was always wont to enjoy proofs of physical vigour, never
forgetting how indispensable it is in the equipment of the politician for
the athletics of public life. On his return home, he resumed the equable
course of life associated with that happy place, though political
consultations intruded:—


    _Sept. 6._—Settled down again at Hawarden, where a happy family
    party gathered to-day. 13.—Finished the long and sad but
    profoundly interesting task of my letter to Miss Hope-Scott [on
    her father]. Also sent her father’s letters (105) to her.... We
    finished cutting down a great beech. Our politicians arrived.
    Conversations with Bright, with Wolverton, with Granville, and
    with all three till long past twelve, when I prayed to leave off
    for the sake of the brain. 14.—Church morning and evening.... A
    stiff task for a half exhausted brain. But I cannot desist from a
    sacred task. Conversation with Lord Granville, Lord Wolverton, Mr.
    Bright. 15.—Church, 8-½ A.M. Spent the forenoon in conclave till
    two, after a preliminary conversation with Bright. Spent the
    evening also in conclave, we have covered a good deal of
    ground.... Cut down the half-cut alder. 16.—Final conversation
    with Granville, with Wolverton, and with Bright, who went last.
    18.—Wood-cutting with Herbert, then went up to Stephen’s school
    feast, an animated and pretty scene. 21.—Read Manning’s letter to
    Archbishop of Armagh. There is in it to me a sad air of unreality;
    it is on stilts all through. 27.—Conversation with Mr. Palgrave
    chiefly on Symonds and the Greek mythology.... Cut a tree with
    Herbert. 28.—Conversation with Mr. Palgrave. He is tremendous, but
    in all other respects good and full of mental energy and activity,
    only the vent is rather large. 29.—Conversation with Mr. Palgrave,
    pretty stiff. Wood-cutting with Herbert. Wrote a rough mem. and
    computation for the budget of next year. I want eight millions to
    handle! _Oct. 2._—Off at 8, London at 3.


The memorial letter on the departed friend of days long past, if less rich
than the companion piece upon Lord Aberdeen, is still a graceful example
of tender reminiscence and regret poured out in periods of grave
melody.(299) It is an example, too, how completely in the press of turbid
affairs, he could fling off the load and at once awake afresh the thoughts
and associations that in truth made up his inmost life.

(M152) Next came the autumn cabinets, with all their embarrassments, so
numerous that one minister tossed a scrap across the table to another, “We
ought to have impeached Dizzy for not taking office last spring.” Disraeli
had at least done them one service. An election took place at Bath in
October. The conservative leader wrote a violent letter in support of the
conservative candidate. “For nearly five years,” said Mr. Disraeli, “the
present ministers have harassed every trade, worried every profession and
assailed or menaced every class, institution, and species of property in
the country. Occasionally they have varied this state of civil warfare by
perpetrating some job which outraged public opinion, or by stumbling into
mistakes which have been always discreditable and sometimes ruinous. All
this they call a policy and seem quite proud of it; but the country has I
think made up its mind to close this career of plundering and
blundering.”(300) Mr. Gladstone described this curious outburst as “Mr.
Disraeli’s incomparable stroke on our behalf,” and in fact its effect on
public opinion was to send the liberal candidate to the head of the poll.
But the victory at Bath stood solitary in the midst of reverses.

As for the general legislative business of the coming session, Mr.
Gladstone thought it impossible to take up the large subject of the
extension of the county franchise, but they might encourage Mr. Trevelyan
to come forward with it on an early day, and give him all the help they
could. Still the board was bare, the meal too frugal. They were afraid of
proposing a change in the laws affecting the inheritance of land, or
reform of London government, or a burials bill, or a county government
bill. The home secretary was directed to draw up a bill for a group of
difficult questions as to employers and employed. No more sentences were
to be provided for Mr. Disraeli’s next electioneering letter.

December was mainly spent at Hawarden. A pleasant event was his eldest
daughter’s marriage, of which he wrote to the Duke of Argyll:—


    The kindness of _all_ from the Queen down, to the cottagers and
    poor folks about us, has been singular and most touching. Our
    weather for the last fortnight has been delightful, and we
    earnestly hope it may hold over to-morrow. I have not yet read
    Renan’s _apôtres_. My opinion of him is completely dual. His life
    of Our Lord I thought a piece of trumpery; his work _Sur les
    langues sémitiques_ most able and satisfactory in its manner and
    discussion.


The notes in the diary bring us up to the decision that was to end the
great ministry:—


    _Dec. 1._—Dined at Mr. Forster’s and went to Drury Lane to see in
    _Antony and Cleopatra_ how low our stage has fallen. Miss K. V. in
    the ballet, dressed in black and gold, danced marvellously. 2.—To
    Windsor, and had a long audience of the Queen. Dined with H.M.
    Whist in evening. 3.—Castle. Prayers at 9; St. George’s at 10.30.
    Off to Twickenham at 11.25. Visited Mr. Bohn, and saw his
    collection; enormous and of very great interest. Then to Pembroke
    Lodge, luncheon and long conversation with Lord Russell.... Read
    _The Parisians_. 6.—Packing, etc., and off to Hawarden. 13.—Walked
    with Stephen Glynne. I opened to him that I must give up my house
    at or about the expiry of the present government. 15.—Read
    Montalembert’s _Life_; also my article of 1852 on him. Mr. Herbert
    (R.A.) came and I sat to him for a short time. 17.—Finished _Life_
    of Montalembert. It was a pure and noble career personally; in a
    public view unsatisfactory; the pope was a worm in the gourd all
    through. His oratory was great. 19.—With Herbert set about making
    a walk from Glynne Cottage to W. E. G. door. 20.—Sat to Mr.
    Herbert. Worked on version of the “Shield” [_Iliad_]. Worked on
    new path. 23.—Sat 1-3/4 hours to Mr. Herbert. Worked on correcting
    version of the Shield and finished writing it out. Read
    Aristophanes. 26.—24 to dinner, a large party gathered for the
    marriage. 27.—The house continued full. At 10.30 the weather broke
    into violent hail and rain. It was the only speck upon the
    brightness of the marriage. 29.—Sixty-four years completed
    to-day—what have they brought me? A weaker heart, stiffened
    muscles, thin hairs; other strength still remains in my frame.
    31.—Still a full house. The year ends as it were in tumult. My
    constant tumult of business makes other tumult more sensible.... I
    cannot as I now am, get sufficiently out of myself to judge
    myself, and unravel the knots of being and doing of which my life
    seems to be full.

    _Jan. 1, 1874._—A little _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_. 2.—Tree-cutting.
    Read Fitzjames Stephen on _Parliamentary Government_, not
    wizard-like. (No. 2.) 6.—Read _The Parisians_, vol. iv., Muir’s
    beautiful version of Gray’s _Elegy_, and the Dizzy pamphlet on the
    crisis. 8.—Revised and sent off the long letter to Lord Granville
    on the political situation which I wrote yesterday. Axe work.
    9.—Tree-cutting with Herbert. Sent off with some final touches my
    version of the Shield and preface. 10.—Mr. Burnett [his agent]
    died at one A.M. Requiescat. I grieve over this good and able man
    sincerely, apart from the heavy care and responsibility of
    replacing him, which must fall on me of necessity. 15.—Worked with
    Herbert; we finished gravelling the path. It rather strains my
    chest. 16.—Off to town after an early breakfast. Reached C. H. T.
    about 3 P.M. Saw Lord Granville and others.




Chapter XIV. The Dissolution. (1874)


    ... Cette prétendue sagacité qui se croit profonde, quand elle
    suppose partout des intrigues savantes, et met de petits drames
    arrangés a la place de la vérité. II n’y a pas tant de
    préméditation dans les affaires humaines, et leur cours est plus
    naturel, que ne le croit le vulgaire.—GUIZOT.

    The spurious sagacity that thinks itself deep, because it
    everywhere takes for granted all sorts of knowing intrigues, and
    puts little artful dramas in the place of truth. There is less
    premeditation in human affairs, and their course is more natural
    than people commonly believe.



I


In the summer of 1873 before leaving London for Hawarden, Mr. Gladstone
sent for the chairman of the board of inland revenue and for the head of
the finance department of the treasury; he directed them to get certain
information into order for him. His requests at once struck these
experienced officers with a surmise that he was nursing some design of
dealing with the income-tax. Here are two entries from his diary:—


    _Aug. 11, 1873._—Saw Mr. Cardwell, to whom at the war office I
    told in deep secrecy my ideas of the _possible_ finance of next
    year, based upon the abolition of income-tax and sugar duties,
    with partial compensation from spirit and death duties. _Sept.
    29._—Wrote a rough mem. and computation for budget of next year. I
    want eight millions to handle!


So much for the charitable tale that he only bethought him of the
income-tax, when desperately hunting for a card to play at a general
election.

The prospect was dubious and dark. To Mr. Bright he wrote from Hawarden
(Aug. 14):—


    MY DEAR BRIGHT,—(Let us bid farewell to _Misters_.) ... As to the
    parliamentary future of the question of education, we had better
    talk when we meet. I remember your saying well and wisely how we
    should look to the average opinion of the party. What we want at
    present is a _positive_ force to carry us onward as a body. I do
    not see that this can be got out of local taxation, or out of the
    suffrage (whether we _act_ in that matter or not, and individually
    I am more yes than no), or out of education. It may possibly, I
    think, be had out of _finance_. Of course I cannot as yet see my
    way on that subject; but until it is cleared, nothing else will to
    me be clear. If it can be worked into certain shapes, it may
    greatly help to mould the rest, at least for the time. I think the
    effect of the reconstruction may be described as follows: First,
    we have you. Secondly, we have emerged from the discredit and
    disgrace of the exposures by an administration of mild penal
    justice, which will be complete all round when Monsell has been
    disposed of. Thirdly, we have now before us a clean stage for the
    consideration of measures in the autumn. We must, I think, have a
    good bill of fare, or none. If we differ on the things to be done,
    this may end us in a way at least not dishonourable. If we agree
    on a good plan, it must come to good, _whether_ we succeed or fail
    with it. Such are my crude reflections, and such my outlook for
    the future. Let me again say how sensible I am of the kindness,
    friendship, and public spirit with which you have acted in the
    whole of this matter.


In the early part of the year his mind was drawing towards a decision of
moment. On January 8, 1874, he wrote a letter to Lord Granville, and the
copy of it is docketed, “First idea of Dissolution.” It contains a full
examination of the actual case in which they found themselves; it is
instructive on more than one constitutional point, and it gives an
entirely intelligible explanation of a step that was often imputed to
injurious and low-minded motives:—


    _Hawarden, Jan. 8, 1874._—The signs of weakness multiply, and for
    some time have multiplied, upon the government, in the loss of
    control over the legislative action of the House of Lords, the
    diminution of the majority in the House of Commons without its
    natural compensation in increase of unity and discipline, and the
    almost unbroken series of defeats at single elections in the
    country.(301) In truth the government is approaching, though I
    will not say it has yet reached, the condition in which it will
    have ceased to possess that amount of power which is necessary for
    the dignity of the crown and the welfare of the country; and in
    which it might be a godsend if some perfectly honourable
    difference of opinion among ourselves on a question requiring
    immediate action were to arise, and to take such a course as to
    release us collectively from the responsibilities of office.

    The general situation being thus unfavourable, the ordinary
    remedies are not available. A ministry with a majority, and with
    that majority not in rebellion, could not resign on account of
    adverse manifestations even of very numerous single
    constituencies, without making a precedent, and constitutionally a
    bad precedent; and only a very definite and substantive difficulty
    could warrant resignation without dissolution, after the
    proceedings of the opposition in March last, when they, or at any
    rate their leaders and their whips, brought the Queen into a
    ministerial crisis, and deserted her when there. If then we turn
    to consider dissolution, what would be its results? In my opinion
    the very best that could happen would be that we should come back
    with a small majority composed of Irish home rulers and a decided
    minority without them; while to me it seems very doubtful whether
    even with home rulers counted in, we should command a full half of
    the House of Commons. In a word, dissolution means either
    immediate death, or at the best death a little postponed, and the
    party either way shattered for the time. For one I am anxious to
    continue where we are, because I am very loath to leave the party
    in its present menacing condition, without having first made every
    effort in our power to avert this public mischief.

    If I have made myself intelligible up to this point, the question
    that arises is, can we make out such a course of policy for the
    session, either in the general conduct of business, or in some
    departments and by certain measures, as will with reasonable
    likelihood reanimate some portion of that sentiment in our favour,
    which carried us in a manner so remarkable through the election of
    1868? I discuss the matter now in its aspect towards party: it is
    not necessary to make an argument to show that our option can only
    be among things all of which are sound in principle. First, then,
    I do not believe that we can find this recovery of vital force in
    our general administration of public business. As men,
    notwithstanding the advantage drawn from Bright’s return, the
    nation appears to think that it has had enough of us, that our
    lease is out. It is a question of measures then: can we by any
    measures materially mend the position of the party for an
    impending election?...

    Looking to legislation, there are but three subjects which appear
    to me to be even capable of discussion in the view I have
    presented. They are local taxation, the county suffrage, and
    finance. I am convinced it is not in our power to draw any great
    advantage, as a party, from the subject of local taxation....
    Equally strong is my opinion with respect to the party bearings of
    the question of the county franchise. We have indeed already
    determined not to propose it as a government. Had we done so, a
    case would have opened at once, comfortably furnished not with men
    opposing us on principle, like a part of those who opposed in
    1866, but with the men of pretext and the men of disappointment,
    with intriguers and with egotists. And I believe that in the
    present state of opinion they would gain their end by something
    like the old game of playing redistribution against the
    franchise....

    Can we then look to finance as supplying what we want? This is the
    only remaining question. It does not admit, as yet, of a positive
    answer, but it admits conditionally of a negative answer. It is
    easy to show what will prevent our realising our design through
    the finance of the year. We cannot do it, unless the circumstances
    shall be such as to put it in our power, by the possession of a
    very wide margin, to propose something large and strong and
    telling upon both the popular mind and the leading elements of the
    constituency.... We cannot do it, without running certain risks of
    the kind that were run in the budget of 1853: I mean without some
    impositions, as well as remissions, of taxes. We cannot do it,
    without a continuance of the favourable prospects of harvest and
    of business. Lastly, we cannot do it unless we can frame our
    estimates in a manner to show our desire to adhere to the
    principles of economy which we proposed and applied with such
    considerable effect in 1868-70. But, subject to the fulfilment of
    these conditions, my opinion is that we _can_ do it: can frame a
    budget large enough and palpably beneficial enough, not only to do
    much good to the country, but sensibly to lift the party in the
    public view and estimation. And this, although a serious sum will
    have to be set apart, even in the present year, for the claims of
    local taxation....

    If we can get from three-quarters of a million upwards towards a
    million off the naval and military estimates jointly, then as far
    as I can judge we shall have left the country no reason to
    complain, and may proceed cheerily with our work; though we should
    not escape the fire of the opposition for having failed to
    maintain the level of Feb. 1870; which indeed we never announced
    as our ultimatum of reduction. I have had no communication with
    those of our colleagues who would most keenly desire reductions; I
    might say, with any one.... I will only add that I think a broad
    difference of opinion among us on such a question as this would be
    a difference of the kind which I described near the opening of
    this letter, as what might be in certain circumstances, however
    unwelcome in itself, an escape from a difficulty otherwise
    incapable of solution.

    Let me now wind up this long story by saying that my desire in
    framing it has been simply to grasp the facts, and to set aside
    illusions which appear to me to prevail among sections of the
    liberal party, nowhere so much as in that section which believes
    itself to be the most enlightened. If we can only get a correct
    appreciation of the position, I do not think we shall fail in
    readiness to suit our action to it; but I am bound to confess
    myself not very sanguine, if the _best_ come to the best, as to
    immediate results, though full of confidence, if we act aright, as
    to the future and early reward.



II


(M153) In notes written in the last year of his life, Mr. Gladstone adds a
detail of importance to the considerations set out in the letter to Lord
Granville. The reader will have observed that among the conditions
required for his operation on the income-tax he names economic estimates.
In this quarter, he tells us, grave difficulties arose:—


    No trustworthy account of the dissolution of parliament which took
    place early in 1874 has ever been published. When I proposed the
    dissolution to the cabinet, they acceded to it without opposition,
    or, I think, even discussion. The actual occasion of the measure
    was known, I think, only to Lord Granville and Lord Cardwell with
    myself, it having a sufficient warrant from other sources.

    In 1871, the year of the abolition of purchase and other important
    army reforms, I had, in full understanding with Cardwell, made a
    lengthened speech, in which I referred to the immediate
    augmentations of military expenditure which the reforms demanded,
    but held out to the House of Commons the prospect of compensating
    abatements at early dates through the operation of the new system
    of relying considerably upon reserves for imperial defence.

    When Cardwell laid before me at the proper time, in view of the
    approaching session, his proposed estimates for 1874-5, I was
    strongly of opinion that the time had arrived for our furnishing
    by a very moderate reduction of expenditure on the army, some
    earnest of the reality of the promise made in 1871 which had been
    so efficacious in procuring the enlargement that we had then
    required. Cardwell, though not an extravagant minister, objected
    to my demand of (I think) £200,000. I conferred with Granville,
    who, without any direct knowledge of the subject, took my side,
    and thought Cardwell would give way. But he continued to resist;
    and, viewing the age of the parliament, I was thus driven to the
    idea of dissolution, for I regarded the matter as virtually
    involving the whole question of the value of our promises, an
    anticipation which has proved to be correct. Cardwell entered
    readily into the plan of dissolving, and moreover thought that if
    my views carried the day with the constituencies, this would
    enable him to comply.


The papers in my hands confirm Mr. Gladstone’s recollection on this part
of the transaction, except that Mr. Goschen, then at the head of the
admiralty, was to some extent in the same position as Mr. Cardwell. The
prime minister was in active controversy with both the great spending
departments, and with little chance of prevailing. It was this controversy
that opened the door for immediate dissolution, though the general grounds
for dissolution at some near time were only too abundant. Here is his note
of the position,—in a minute addressed to Mr. Cardwell and Mr. Goschen:—


    _Jan. 22, 1874._—We arrived yesterday at the conclusion that,
    apart from this or that shade of view as to exact figure of the
    estimates, the measure now proposed stood well on its own general
    grounds. This being so, after consulting Lord Granville, and
    indeed at his suggestion, I have in a preparatory letter to the
    Queen founded myself entirely on general grounds. This being so, I
    would propose to consider the point raised between us as one
    adjourned, though with a perfect knowledge in each of our minds as
    to the views of the others. My statement to the cabinet must be on
    the same basis as my statement to the Queen. The actual decision
    of the estimates would stand over from to-morrow’s cabinet, until
    we saw our way as to their position and as to the time for their
    production. I am sure I might reckon on your keeping the future as
    far as possible open, and unprejudiced by contracts for works or
    for building or construction. Any reference to economy which I
    make to-morrow will be in general terms such as I propose to use
    in an address. If I have made myself clear and you approve, please
    to signify it on this paper, or to speak to me as you may prefer.
    I am reluctant to go out, with my chest still tender, in the fog.


Cardwell, in the few words of his minute in reply makes no objection. Mr.
Goschen says: “I quite take the same view as you do. Indeed, I had
proposed myself to ask you whether what had passed between us had not
better remain entirely confidential for the present, as it is best not to
state differences where the statement of them is not indispensable.”

The diary for these important days is interesting:—


    _Jan.17, ’74._—The prospects of agreement with the two departments
    on estimates are for the present bad. 18.—This day I thought of
    dissolution. Told Bright of it. In evening at dinner told
    Granville and Wolverton. All seemed to approve. My first thought
    of it was as an escape from a difficulty. I soon saw on reflection
    that it was the best thing in itself. 19.—Confined all day in bed
    with tightness on the chest. Much physicking. 20.—Bed all day. I
    spent the chief part of the day and evening in reflection on our
    “crisis,” and then in preparing a letter to go to the Queen for
    her information at once, and a long address for an unnamed
    constituency—almost a pamphlet—setting out the case of the
    government in an immediate appeal to the country. 21.—Altered and
    modified letter to the Queen, which went off. Came down at two.
    Much conversation to-day on the question of my own seat.
    23.—Cabinet 12-1/4-4. Address further amended there on partial
    perusal. In evening corrected proofs of address, which runs well.
    A very busy stirring day of incessant action.


In the letter of Jan. 21 to the Queen, Mr. Gladstone recapitulates the
general elements of difficulty, and apprises her Majesty that it will be
his duty at the meeting of the cabinet fixed for the 23rd, to recommend
his colleagues humbly and dutifully to advise an immediate dissolution, as
the best means of putting an end to the disadvantage and the weakness of a
false position. He trusts that the Queen may be pleased to assent. The
Queen (Jan. 22) acknowledged the receipt of his letter “with some
surprise,” as she had understood him to say when last at Windsor that he
did not think of recommending a dissolution until the end of the session
or later. But she expressed her “full appreciation of the difficulties of
Mr. Gladstone’s position,” and assented, thinking that “in the present
circumstances it would be desirable to obtain an expression of the
national opinion.”

The next day (23rd) the cabinet met, and Mr. Gladstone in the evening
reported the proceedings to the Queen:—


    _To the Queen._

    _Jan. 23, 1874._—... Mr. Gladstone laid before the cabinet a
    pretty full outline of the case as to the weakness of the
    government since the crisis of last March, and the increase of
    that weakness, especially of late, from the unfavourable character
    of local indications; as to the false position in which both the
    crown and the House of Commons are placed when there can be no
    other government than the one actually existing; finally, as to
    the present calls of business and prospects of the country,
    especially as to its finance, which are such as in Mr. Gladstone’s
    judgment, to warrant the presentation of a very favourable picture
    of what may be effected with energy and prudence during the
    present year. In this picture is included, as Mr. Gladstone on
    Wednesday intimated might be the case, the total repeal of the
    income-tax. The cabinet unanimously concurred, upon a review of
    its grounds, in the wisdom of the proposed measure. It is as yet
    profoundly secret, but to-morrow morning it will be placed before
    the world with a lengthened and elaborate exposition, in the shape
    of an address from Mr. Gladstone to his constituents at Greenwich.
    There can be no doubt that a large portion of the public will at
    first experience that emotion of surprise which your Majesty so
    very naturally felt on receiving Mr. Gladstone’s letter. But,
    judging from such indications as have reached them, the cabinet
    are disposed to anticipate that this course will be approved by
    all those who are in any degree inclined to view their general
    policy with sympathy or favour. Large portions, and the most
    important portions, of Mr. Gladstone’s address were read to and
    considered by the cabinet, and it was in some respects amended at
    the suggestion of his esteemed colleagues. It is, however, so
    framed as not to commit them equally with himself, except only as
    to the remissions of taxes and aid to local rates contemplated in
    the finance of the year. This method of stating generally the case
    of the government in substance corresponds to the proceedings of
    Sir R. Peel in 1834-5, when he addressed the electors of Tamworth.
    Before concluding, Mr. Gladstone will humbly offer to your Majesty
    a brief explanation. When he last adverted to the duration of the
    present parliament, his object was to remind your Majesty of the
    extreme point to which that duration might extend. When he had the
    honour of seeing your Majesty at Windsor,(302) the course of the
    local elections had been more favourable, and Mr. Gladstone had
    not abandoned the hope of retaining sufficient strength for the
    due conduct of affairs in the present House. On this question, the
    events of the last few weeks and the prospects of the present
    moment have somewhat tended to turn the scale in his mind and that
    of his colleagues.(303) But finally it was not within his power,
    until the fourth quarter of the financial year had well begun, to
    forecast the financial policy and measures which form a necessary
    and indeed the most vital part of the matter to be stated to the
    public. Immediately after he had been able sufficiently to ripen
    his own thoughts on the matter, he did not scruple to lay them
    before your Majesty; and your Majesty had yourself in one sense
    contributed to the present conclusion by forcibly pointing out to
    Mr. Gladstone on one or more occasions that in the event of
    difficulty, under the present peculiar circumstances, no
    alternative remained except a dissolution. The mild weather is
    very favourable to Mr. Gladstone, and if as he has prayed there
    shall be a council on Monday, he hopes to have the honour of
    coming down to Osborne.


To his eldest son he wrote on the following day:—


    We here of the cabinet(304) and the whips are in admirable
    spirits. We dissolve on Finance. The surplus will be over five
    millions. We promise as in our judgment practicable,—1. Pecuniary
    aid to local taxation, but with reform of it. 2. Repeal of the
    income-tax. 3. Some great remission in the class of articles of
    consumption. (This last remission probably means sugar, but
    nothing is to be said by any member of the government as to choice
    of the article.) We make it a question of confidence on the
    _prospective_ budget. As far as we can judge, friends will much
    approve our course, although for the public there may at first be
    surprise, and the enemy will be furious.



III


The prime minister’s manifesto to his constituents at Greenwich was
elaborate and sustained. In substance it did no more than amplify the
various considerations that he had set forth in his letter to Lord
Granville. The pith of it was a promise to diminish local taxation, and to
repeal the income-tax. At the same time marked relief was to be given to
the general consumer in respect of articles of popular consumption. One
effective passage dealt with the charge that the liberal party had
endangered the institutions of the country. “It is time,” said Mr.
Gladstone, “to test this trite and vague allegation. There has elapsed a
period of forty, or more exactly forty-three years, since the liberal
party acquired the main direction of public affairs. This followed another
period of about forty years beginning with the outbreak of the
revolutionary war, during which there had been an almost unbroken rule of
their opponents, who claimed and were reputed to be the great preservers
of the institutions of the country.” He then invited men to judge by
general results, and declared that the forty years of tory rule closing in
1830 left institutions weaker than it had found them, whereas the liberal
term of forty years left throne, laws, and institutions not weaker but
much stronger. The address was a fine bold composition, but perhaps it
would have been more effective with a public that was impatient and out of
humour, if it had been shorter.

(M154) The performance was styled by his rival “a prolix narrative,” but
it is said that in spite of this Mr. Disraeli read it with much alarm. He
thought its freshness and boldness would revive Mr. Gladstone’s authority,
and carry the elections. His own counter-manifesto was highly artificial.
He launched sarcasms about the Greenwich seat, about too much energy in
domestic legislation, and too little in foreign policy; about an act of
folly or of ignorance rarely equalled in dealing with the straits of
Malacca (though for that matter not one elector in a hundred thousand had
ever heard of this nefarious act). While absolving the prime minister
himself, “certainly at present,” from hostility to our national
institutions and the integrity of the empire, he drew a picture of
unfortunate adherents—some assailed the monarchy, others impugned the
independence of the House of Lords, while others would relieve parliament
altogether from any share in the government of one portion of the United
Kingdom; others, again, urged Mr. Gladstone to pursue his peculiar policy
by disestablishing the anglican as he has despoiled the Irish church; even
trusted colleagues in his cabinet openly concurred with them in their
desire altogether to thrust religion from the place which it ought to
occupy in national education. What is remarkable in Disraeli’s address is
that to the central proposal of his adversary he offered no objection. As
for remission of taxation, he said, that would be the course of any party
or any ministry. As for the promise of reduced local burdens and the
abolition of the income-tax, why, these “were measures which the
conservative party have always favoured and which the prime minister and
his friends have always opposed.”

By critics of the peevish school who cry for better bread than can be made
of political wheat, Mr. Gladstone’s proffer to do away with the income-tax
has been contumeliously treated as dangling a shameful bait. Such talk is
surely pharisaic stuff. As if in 1852 Disraeli in his own address had not
declared that the government would have for its first object to relieve
the agricultural interest from certain taxes. Was that a bribe? As if Peel
in 1834-5 had not set forth in the utmost detail all the measures that he
intended to submit to parliament if the constituencies would give him a
majority. Was this to drive an unprincipled bargain? As if every minister
does not always go to the country on promises, and as if the material of
any promise could be more legitimate than a readjustment of taxation. The
proceeding was styled a sordid huckstering of a financial secret for a
majority. Why was it more sordid to seek a majority for abolition of the
income-tax, than it was sordid in Peel in 1841 to seek a majority for corn
laws, or in whigs and Manchester men to seek to win upon free trade? Why
is it an ignoble bargain to promise to remove the tax from income, and
pure statesmanship to remove the tax from bread? “Give us a majority,”
said Mr. Gladstone, “and we will do away with income-tax, lighten local
burdens, and help to free the breakfast table.” If people believed him,
what better reason could they have than such a prospect as this for
retaining him in the place of their chief ruler?



IV


Parliament was dissolved on January 26, and the contending forces
instantly engaged. Mr. Gladstone did not spare himself:—


    _Jan. 26, ’74._—8-3/4-5-3/4. To Osborne. Audience of H.M. who
    quite comprehends the provisional character of the position. ...
    Boundless newspaper reading. 28.—2-5. To Greenwich. Spoke an hour
    to 5000. An enthusiastic meeting, but the general prospects are
    far from clear.(305) 31.—-Woolwich meeting. The meeting disturbed
    by design was strangely brought round again. _Feb. 2._—Third great
    meeting and speech of an hour at New Cross for Deptford. Much
    enthusiasm and fair order. 3.—Many telegrams and much conversation
    with Granville and Wolverton in the evening. The general purport
    was first indifferent, then bad. My own election for Greenwich
    after Boord the distiller, is more like a defeat than a victory,
    though it places me in parliament again. A wakeful night, but more
    I believe from a little strong coffee drunk incautiously, than
    from the polls, which I cannot help and have done all in my power
    to mend.


The Greenwich seat, the cause of such long perturbation, was saved after
all, but as Mr. Gladstone wrote to a defeated colleague, “In some points
of view it is better to be defeated outright, than to be pitched in like
me at Greenwich.” The numbers were Boord (C.) 6193, Gladstone (L.) 5968,
Liardet (C.) 5561, Langley (L.) 5255.

(M155) The conservative reaction was general. Scotland and Wales still
returned a liberal majority, but even in these strongholds a breach was
made—a net loss of 3 in Wales, of 9 in Scotland. From the English counties
145 tories were returned, and no more than 27 liberals, a loss of 13. In
the greater boroughs, hitherto regarded as staunchly ministerial, some of
the most populous returned tories. The metropolitan elections went against
the government, and 7 seats were lost—three in the city, one in
Westminster, in both cases by immense majorities. The net liberal loss in
the English boroughs was 32. In England and Wales the tory majority was
105; in Great Britain it stood at 83. When all was over, the new House
contained a conservative majority of 48, or on another estimate, of 50,
but really, in Mr. Gladstone’s words, “of much greater strength.”

Numbers, as Mr. Gladstone said afterwards, did not exhibit the whole
measure of the calamity. An extraordinary portent arose in that quarter
from which so many portents spring. “The liberal majority reckoned to have
been returned from Ireland was at once found to be illusory. Out of the
105 members the liberals were little more than a dozen. The period
immediately following the Church Act and Land Act had been chosen as one
appropriate for a formal severance of the Irish national party from the
general body of British liberals. Their number was no less than
fifty-eight, an actual majority of the Irish representation. They assumed
the name of home rulers, and established a separate parliamentary
organisation. On some questions of liberal opinion co-operation was still
continued. But, as regards the party, the weight of the home rulers
clearly told more in favour of the conservative ministry than of the
opposition; and the liberal party would have been stronger not weaker had
the entire body been systematically absent.”(306) Before the election was
over, Mr. Chichester Fortescue had warned him that he expected defeat in
the county of Louth, for which he had sat ever since 1847; the defeat
came. Mr. Gladstone wrote to him (Feb. 11):—


    I receive with great concern your dark prognostication of the
    result of the Louth election. It would be so painful in a public
    view with regard to the gratitude of Irishmen, that I will still
    hope for a better result. But with reference to the latter part of
    your letter, I at once write to say that in the double event of
    your rejection and your wish, I consider your claim to a peerage
    indisputable. It would be hard to name the man who has done for
    Ireland all that you have done, or any man that knew the greatest
    Irish questions as you know them.


Mr. Parnell, by the way, was not elected for Meath until April 1875.



V


As the adverse verdict became more and more emphatic, Mr. Gladstone stated
to the Queen (Feb. 13) what was the bias of his mind, on the question
whether the expiring government should await its sentence from parliament.
He had no doubt, he said, that this course was the one most agreeable to
usage, and to the rules of parliamentary government; any departure from it
could only be justified upon exceptional grounds. He was not, however,
clear that this case, like that of 1868, was to be treated as exceptional,
partly by reason of prevalent opinion, partly because it should be
considered what is fair to an incoming administration with reference to
the business, especially the financial business, of the year. Lord
Granville from the first seems to have been against waiting for formal
decapitation by the new House of Commons. To him Mr. Gladstone wrote (Feb.
7):—


    I presume you will answer Bismarck’s kind telegram. Please to
    mention me in your reply or not as you think proper. As to the
    impending crisis of our fate, one important element, I admit, will
    be the feeling of the party. I have asked Peel (whose first
    feeling seems rather to be with you) to learn what he can. I tend
    to harden in my own view, principle and precedent seeming to me
    alike clear. There are four precedents of our own time—1835, 1841,
    1852, 1859, under three ministers. The only case the other way is
    that of 1868 of which the circumstances were altogether peculiar.
    But I admit it to be very doubtful whether we should get beyond
    the address. On the other hand I admit freely that I have no title
    to press my view beyond a certain point.


(M156) “It is parliament,” he argued, “not the constituencies, that ought
to dismiss the government, and the proper function of the House of Commons
cannot be taken from it without diminishing somewhat in dignity and
authority.” There would be reproach either way, he said; either it would
be clinging to office, or it would be running away. To run away was in
every circumstance of politics the thing to Mr. Gladstone most unbearable.
According to Sir Robert Phillimore (Feb. 8) “Gladstone would have met
parliament but his colleagues objected, though it seems they would have
stood by him if he had pressed them to do so; but as he did not mean, or
was not going, to fight in the van of opposition, he thought it unfair to
press them.”


    _Feb. 16, ’74._—Cabinet dinner 8-12. It went well. I did something
    towards snapping the ties and winding out of the coil.
    Conversation afterwards with Granville, on the flags up and down.
    Then with Wolverton. To bed at 1-3/4, but lay three hours awake
    (rare with me) with an overwrought brain. ... 17.—12-½-6. Went to
    Windsor, and on behalf of the cabinet resigned. Took with me
    _Merchant of Venice_ and _Thomas à Kempis_, each how admirable in
    its way!(307) 20.—Went by 5.10 to Windsor, final audience and
    kissed hands. Her Majesty very kind, the topics of conversation
    were of course rather limited. 21.—I cleared my room in Downing
    Street and bade it farewell, giving up my keys except the cabinet
    key. 28.—Set aside about 300 vols. of pamphlets for the shambles.
    _March 3._—I have given up all my keys; quitted Downing Street a
    week ago; not an official box remains. But I have still the daily
    visit of a kind private secretary; when that drops all is over.
    5.—Hamilton paid me his last visit. To-morrow I encounter my own
    correspondence single-handed.


The Queen repeated a former proposal of a peerage. In returning some
submissions for her approval, she wished “likewise to record her offer to
Mr. Gladstone of a mark of her recognition of his services which, however,
he declines from motives which she fully appreciates.” Mr. Gladstone
writes to his brother Sir Thomas (Feb. 13):—


    Accept my best thanks for your kind note of yesterday. My reply to
    the Queen was first made twelve months ago when we proposed to
    resign simply from the failure of a great measure in H. of C. I
    repeated it this year with similar expressions of gratitude, but
    with the remark that even if my mind had been open on the
    question, I did not think I could have accepted anything while
    under that national condemnation which has been emphatically
    enough pronounced at the elections. I may be wrong in my view of
    the matter generally; but I can only judge for the best. I do not
    see that I am wanted or should be of use in the House of Lords,
    and there would be more discrepancy between rank and fortune,
    which is a thing on the whole rather to be deprecated. On the
    other hand, I know that the line I have marked out for myself in
    the H. of C. is one not altogether easy to hold; but I have every
    disposition to remain quiet there, and shall be very glad if I can
    do so.



VI


Letters from two of his colleagues explain the catastrophe. The shrewd
Lord Halifax says to him (Feb 12):—


    As far as I can make out people are frightened—the masters were
    afraid of their workmen, manufacturers afraid of strikes,
    churchmen afraid of the nonconformists, many afraid of what is
    going on in France and Spain—and in very unreasoning fear have all
    taken refuge in conservatism. Ballot enabled them to do this
    without apparently deserting their principles and party. Things in
    this country as elsewhere are apt to run for a time in opposite
    directions. The reaction from the quiet of Palmerston’s government
    gave you strength to remove four or five old-standing abuses which
    nobody had ventured to touch for years. The feelings of those who
    suffer from the removal of abuses are always stronger than those
    of the general public who are benefited. Gratitude for the Reform
    bill and its sequel of improvements hardly gave a liberal majority
    in 1835, and gratitude for the removal of the Irish church,
    purchase, etc., has not given us a majority in 1874.


(M157) Mr. Bright wrote to him that as things had turned out, it would
perhaps have been wiser first to secure the budget; with that and better
organisation, the result might have been better three or six months later.
In Lancashire, said Bright, publicans and Irishmen had joined together,
one for delirium tremens and the other for religious education. The 25th
clause and Mr. Forster’s obstinacy, he added, had done much to wreck the
ship. Mr. Gladstone’s own diagnosis was not very different. To his brother
Robertson he wrote (Feb. 6):—


    For many years in the House of Commons I have had more fighting
    than any other man. For the last five years I have had it almost
    all, and of it a considerable part has been against those
    “independent” liberals whose characters and talents seem to be
    much more appreciated by the press and general public, than the
    characters and talents of quieter members of the party. I do not
    speak of such men as ——, who leave office or otherwise find
    occasion to vindicate their independence, and vote against us on
    the questions immediately concerned. These men make very little
    noise and get very little applause. But there is another and more
    popular class of independent liberals who have been represented by
    the _Daily News_, and who have been one main cause of the weakness
    of the government, though they (generally) and their organ have
    rallied to us too late during the election. We have never
    recovered from the blow which they helped to strike on the Irish
    Education bill.

    But more immediately operative causes have determined the
    elections. I have no doubt what is the principal. We have been
    borne down in a torrent of gin and beer. Next to this has been the
    action of the Education Act of 1870, and the subsequent
    controversies. Many of the Roman catholics have voted against us
    because we are not denominational; and many of the dissenters have
    at least abstained from voting because we are. Doubtless there
    have been other minor agencies; but these are the chief ones. The
    effect must be our early removal from office. For me that will be
    a very great change, for I do not intend to assume the general
    functions of leader of the opposition, and my great ambition or
    design will be to spend the remainder of my days, if it please
    God, in tranquillity, and at any rate in freedom from political
    strife.


When a short idle attempt was made in the new parliament to raise a debate
upon the date and circumstances of the dissolution, Disraeli used language
rightly called by Mr. Gladstone “generous.” “The right honourable
gentleman’s friends,” he said, “were silent, and I must confess I admire
their taste and feeling. If I had been a follower of a parliamentary chief
as eminent, even if I thought he had erred, I should have been disposed
rather to exhibit sympathy than to offer criticism. I should remember the
great victories which he had fought and won; I should remember his
illustrious career; its continuous success and splendour, not its
accidental or even disastrous mistakes.”(308)

                  ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐

One word upon the place of this election in our financial history. In
1874, the prosperity of the country and the movement of the revenue gave
an opportunity for repeal of the income-tax. That opportunity never
recurred. The election of 1874 was the fall of the curtain; the play that
had begun in 1842 came to its last scene. It marked the decision of the
electorate that the income-tax—introduced in time of peace by Peel and
continued by Mr. Gladstone, for the purpose of simplifying the tariff and
expanding trade—should be retained for general objects of government and
should be a permanent element of our finance. It marked at the same time
the prospect of a new era of indefinitely enlarged expenditure, with the
income-tax as a main engine for raising ways and means. Whether this
decision was wise or unwise, we need not here discuss.





BOOK VII. 1874-1880




Chapter I. Retirement From Leadership. (1874-1875)


    “ἐγὼ μὲν, ὧναξ, πρεσβύτερός τε ἤδη εἰμὶ καὶ βαρὺς ἀείρεσθαι; σὺ δέ
    τινα τῶνδε τῶν νεωτέρων κέλευε ταῦτα ποιέειν.”—HERODOTUS iv. 150.

    “I am too old, O king, and slow to stir; so bid thou one of the
    younger men here do these things.”


A member of the great government of 1868, in a letter to one of his
family, gave an account of the final meeting of the cabinet:—


    _Feb. 17, 1874._—I doubt—he says—whether I ever passed a more
    eventful evening than yesterday. The whole cabinet was assembled.
    We resolved after full discussion of pros and cons, and some
    slight difference of opinion, to resign at once. After which came
    the startling announcement that Gladstone would no longer retain
    the leadership of the liberal party, nor resume it, unless the
    party had settled its differences. He will not expose himself to
    the insults and outrages of 1866-8, and he has a keen sense of the
    disloyalty of the party during the last three years. He will sit
    as a private member and occasionally speak for himself, but he
    will not attend the House regularly, nor assume any one of the
    functions of leader. He does this not from anger, but because he
    says that it is absolutely necessary to party action to learn that
    all the duties and responsibilities do not rest on the leaders,
    but that followers have their obligations too. As a consequence of
    this Cardwell retires to the House of Lords. He will not take the
    leadership, nor will he consent to serve under any one but
    Gladstone. He is too old, he says. Lowe protests against the
    anarchical experiment, and talks of Hartington as leader. As
    neither Lowe, nor Bright, nor Goschen, nor Forster is in a
    position to act as leader, it may come to this, so that the
    liberal front benches of the two Houses will be entirely
    remodelled.(309)


Here is Mr. Gladstone’s own account, written twenty-three years later, and
confirmed by all other accessible papers of the moment:—


    I was most anxious to make the retirement of the ministry the
    occasion of my own. I had served for more than forty years. My
    age—65—was greater than that of Sir Robert Peel at his retirement
    in 1846, or at his death in 1850, and was much beyond that at
    which most of the leading commoners of the century had terminated
    their political career, together with their natural life. I felt
    myself to be in some measure out of touch with some of the
    tendencies of the liberal party, especially in religious matters.
    Sir A. Clark, whom I consulted, would give me on medical grounds
    no encouragement whatever. But I deeply desired an interval
    between parliament and the grave. In spite of the solicitations of
    my friends I persisted. For 1874 there was a sort of compromise
    “without prejudice.” As having a title to some rest I was not a
    very regular attendant, but did not formally abdicate.


(M158) He found specific reasons for withdrawal in the state of the party
(Feb. 12):—


    1. The absence of any great positive aim (the late plan [budget]
    having failed) for which to co-operate. 2. The difficulty of
    establishing united and vigorous action in the liberal party for
    the purposes of economy. 3. The unlikelihood of arriving at any
    present agreement respecting education.


In another fragment of the same date, he says:—


    I do not forget that I am in debt to the party generally for
    kindness, indulgence, and confidence, much beyond what I have
    deserved. Deeming myself unable to hold it together from my
    present position in a manner worthy of it, I see how unlikely it
    is that I should hereafter be able to give any material aid in the
    adjustment of its difficulties. Yet if such aid should at any time
    be generally desired with a view to arresting some great evil or
    procuring for the nation some great good, my willingness to enter
    into counsel for the occasion would follow from all I have said.
    But always with the understanding that as between section and
    section I could not become a partisan, and that such interference
    even in the case of its proving useful would entail no obligation
    whatever on those accepting it, and carry with it no disturbance
    of any arrangement subsisting at the time.


The situation proved, as Lowe had foreseen, an anarchic experiment. Mr.
Gladstone went up to London for the session, and followed his ordinary
social course:—


    _March 9, 1874._—Off at 4.45 to Windsor for the fête. We dined at
    St. George’s Hall. I was presented to the Duchess of C. by the
    Queen, and had a few kind words from H.M. 11.—Archbishop Manning,
    9-11. It is kind in him to come, but most of it is rather hollow
    work, limited as we are. 16.—Dined at Marlborough House. A civil
    talk with Disraeli. 20.—Finished _Vivian Grey_. The first quarter
    extremely clever, the rest trash.

    _May 15._—Emperor of Russia’s reception at 3.15. He thanked me for
    my conduct to Russia while I was minister. I assured his Majesty I
    had watched with profound interest the transactions of his reign,
    and the great benefits he had conferred upon his people. He hoped
    the relations of the two countries would always be good.... Dined
    at Marlborough House. Stafford House ball afterwards. The emperor
    complained of the burden and late hours of evening entertainments.
    Princess of Wales so nice about her picture. D[israeli] complained
    of my absence, said they could not get on without me. 20.—Dined at
    the F.O. to meet the emperor. It was very kind of Derby. Much work
    at Hawarden in arranging books and papers.


The House of Commons is hardly attractive to an irregular and perfunctory
attendant; and Mr. Gladstone’s thoughts all turned to other fields. To
Mrs. Gladstone he wrote early in April:—


    The anti-parliamentary reaction has been stronger with me even
    than I anticipated. I am as far as possible from feeling the want
    of the House of Commons. I could cheerfully go there to do a work;
    but I hope and pray to be as little there as possible, except for
    such an aim. In London I think we were too much hustled to speak
    leisurely or effectually of the future. It will open for us by
    degrees. I shall be glad when the matter of money, after all a
    secondary one, is disentangled, but chiefly because it seems to
    put pressure upon you. I spoke to Stephen about these matters on
    Saturday; he was kind, reasonable, and in all ways as satisfactory
    as possible. There is one thing I should like you to understand
    clearly as to my view of things, for it is an essential part of
    that view. I am convinced that the welfare of mankind does not now
    depend on the state or the world of politics; the real battle is
    being fought in the world of thought, where a deadly attack is
    made with great tenacity of purpose and over a wide field, upon
    the greatest treasure of mankind, the belief in God and the gospel
    of Christ.


In June Sir Stephen Glynne died,—“a dark, dark day.” “My brother-in-law,”
wrote Mr. Gladstone at a later date, “was a man of singular refinement and
as remarkable modesty. His culture was high and his character one of deep
interest. His memory was on the whole decidedly the most remarkable known
to me of the generation and country. His life, however, was retired and
unobtrusive; but he sat in parliament, I think, for about fifteen years,
and was lord-lieutenant of his county.”


    I thank you much—Mr. Gladstone said to the Duke of Argyll—for your
    kind note. Your sympathy and that of the duchess are ever ready.
    But even you can hardly tell how it is on this occasion needed and
    warranted. My wife has lost the last member of a family united by
    bonds of the rarest tenderness, the last representative of his
    line, the best of brothers, who had ever drawn closer to her as
    the little rank was thinned. As for me, no one can know what our
    personal relations were, without knowing the interior details of a
    long family history, and efforts and struggles in common carried
    on through a long series of years, which riveted into the closest
    union our original affection. He was a very rare man, but we
    grieve not for him; he sleeps the sleep of the just. The event is
    a great one also to the outward frame of our life here.(310)


(M159) In the same letter he says it is most painful to him to be dragged
into ecclesiastical turmoil, as for example by the Scotch patronage bill,
which he considers precipitate, unwise, and daring, or the bill directed
against the endowed schools commissioners, of whom his brother-in-law,
Lord Lyttelton, was one. In the last case he acted as a leader of an
organised party, but in the more important instance of a bill devised, as
Mr. Disraeli said, to put down ritualism, his dissent from most of those
around him fulfilled all the anticipations that had pointed to retirement.
The House was heartily in favour of the bill, and what is called the
country earnestly supported it, though in the cabinet itself at least four
ministers were strenuously hostile. Mr. Gladstone writes to his wife a
trenchant account of his vigorous dealing with a prominent colleague who
had rashly ventured to mark him for assault. He sent word to the two
archbishops that if they carried a certain amendment he should hold
himself “altogether discharged from maintaining any longer the
establishment of the church.” He wrote to Lord Harrowby when the recess
came:—


    I think, or rather I am convinced, that the effect _either_ of one
    or two more ecclesiastical sessions of parliament such as the
    last, or of any prolonged series of contentious proceedings under
    the recent Act, upon subjects of widespread interest, will be to
    disestablish the church. I do not feel the dread of
    disestablishment which you may probably entertain: but I desire
    and seek so long as standing ground remains, to avert, not to
    precipitate it.


To another correspondent—


    Individually I have serious doubts whether the whole of the penal
    proceedings taken in this country with respect to church matters
    from the day of Dr. Hampden downwards, have not done considerably
    more harm than good. There is no doubt at all that all the evils,
    of whatever kind, at which they were aimed, exist at this moment
    among us in a far more aggravated shape than when they began....
    My object and desire has ever been and still is, to keep the
    church of England together, both as a church and as an
    establishment. As a church, I believe she is strong enough, by
    virtue of the prayer-book, to hold together under all
    circumstances; but as an establishment, in my opinion, she is not
    strong enough to bear either serious secession or prolonged
    parliamentary agitation.


Finally, in a letter dated from Whittinghame (Nov. 17)—


    There are already too many causes of demoralisation operating upon
    the House of Commons. If it is also to become a debased copy of an
    ecclesiastical council, all the worst men and worst qualities of
    the worst men will come to the front, and the place will become
    intolerable.


Even any member of parliament who shares none of Mr. Gladstone’s theology,
may sympathise to the full with his deep disgust at theologic and
ecclesiastical discussions as conducted in that secular air. We can easily
understand how detestable he found it, and how those discussions fortified
his sense of estrangement from the ruling sentiments of the parliamentary
party of which he was still the titular leader.

Of course the whigs, always for keeping a parliamentary church in its
proper place, disliked his line. Liberals like Thirlwall read his speeches
“with great pain and suspicion,” and declared their confidence to be
shaken. Hardly any section was completely satisfied. His mind in the
autumn and winter of 1874 was absorbed, as we shall see within a few
pages, in an assault upon the decrees of the Vatican Council of 1870. This
assault, as he told Lord Granville (Dec. 7, 1874), while tending “to
hearten” the party generally, was against his resumption of formal
leadership, because it widened the breach with the Irishmen in the House
of Commons. Apart from this there were many questions, each with a group
of adherents to a special view, but incapable of being pursued by common
and united action. He ran through the list in writing to Lord Granville.
It has historic interest:—


    1. Extension of the suffrage, with redistribution of seats abreast
    or in the rear. 2. Disestablishment in Scotland, England. 3. Land
    laws. 4. Retrenchment. 5. Colonial policy, territorial extension
    of the empire. 6. Reform of local government taxation. 7. Secular
    education. 8. Undenominational education. 9. Irish affairs. On no
    one of these is there known to exist a plan desired by the entire
    party, or by any clear and decisive majority of it.


On the whole, he was persuaded that neither the party generally nor the
country desired another period of active reforms, even if he were fit to
conduct them. Besides this he confessed his “apprehension that differences
would spring up, and great shrinking from any breach with the party, and a
determination, often expressed, never, if he could help it, to lead one
branch of it against another.” In many forms he carried Lord Granville
with him round the circle of his arguments. He once sent his points on
half-a-dozen scraps of paper. Granville playfully replied, “I should like
to treat them as old Lord Bessborough used to treat his playing-cards when
luck was adverse—tear them up into small bits and toss them in the fire.”
Nothing shook him, not even Mrs. Gladstone’s misgivings. To her he wrote
from Carlton House Terrace on the eve of the session of 1875:—


    Now for the grave matter about the leadership. I have had much
    conversation with Granville and Cardwell, and I am going to see
    Hartington, also Goschen, to-morrow. My letter is rewritten and
    improved, but I am obliged to stand to my conclusion, for many
    reasons. Among them the church reason is one of the most serious,
    and the other the undefined and prolonged character of the service
    if now undertaken. This, while arguing and deprecating, they admit
    I think to a great extent. Our old colleagues are inclined to come
    up on Thursday if they can, and this will be rather to hear than
    to debate. Hartington will succeed. I am indeed sorry that you and
    I have not been able to take the same view of this important
    subject, but you know that I am acting on convictions very long
    entertained, and will I am sure believe that I have probed myself
    deeply, and used all the means in my power to get at a right
    conclusion. Nay, I think you will be more reconciled, when I tell
    you that Granville did not really see his way either to a nominal
    leadership, or to making any arrangement by which I could after a
    short time with some certainty have escaped. I saw Clark last
    night and this morning; he gives an excellent account of me and
    makes it impossible for me to plead health as my reason.


The drama went rapidly forward:—


    _Jan. 12._—I find that the agreement made yesterday that I should
    meet my former colleagues on Monday will require me to remain
    until this day, though after a pretty busy morning the pressure is
    less. I have, however, to preside in the evening at the meeting of
    the Metaphysical Society, and to listen, though I hope nothing
    more, to a tough discussion. Manning, I am sorry to say, will be
    there. His pamphlet is at length going to press, and will extend
    he says to 150 pages. Newman is not out yet.

    _11 Carlton House Terrace, Jan. 14, ’75._—This great affair is
    nearly arranged. My old colleagues all submit under protest; and I
    shall be free. An article in the _Times_ this morning is
    undisguisedly aimed at getting rid of me; but it does not express
    any of their feelings. We have had a morning at Granville’s;
    Halifax, Granville, Cardwell, Hartington, Aberdare, Forster,
    Carlingford, Stansfeld, Selborne, Goschen, Lowe, Kimberley,—in
    short all, I think, except Argyll and Bright. There was argument
    and exhortation, and much kindness. My letter to Granville will be
    accompanied by a short reply from him expressing difference of
    opinion and regret. They are afraid of being blamed by the party
    if they seem to show indifference.


The Queen thanked Mr. Gladstone for communicating to her his resolution of
retiring from the more active duties of parliamentary life. She was not
entirely unprepared for it after what he told her himself last year. “She
knows that his zeal and untiring energy have always been exerted with the
desire of advancing the welfare of the nation and maintaining the honour
of the crown, and she thanks him for his loyal assurances of support on
all occasions when it may become necessary.”

(M160) The Duke of Argyll wrote “sincerely to congratulate” him upon his
withdrawal. Bright on the other hand (Jan. 17) said he could not applaud,
yet he would not blame: Mr. Gladstone’s course seemed so unfortunate if
not disastrous to the great public interests committed to him:—


    For myself, says Bright, if I could have foreseen either the
    result of the election of last year, or your retirement from the
    conduct of the party, I should certainly have withdrawn from
    parliament, where now I seem to have quite as little of duty or of
    a mission as you have. The front opposition bench is full of
    discord, and when you are not there full of jealousy, and I find
    myself without any particular attraction to any particular part of
    the House. However, I will not complain; some door of escape may
    open for me, and I can become a spectator as you are proposing to
    be.

    I hope on some occasion I may have the chance of seeing you when
    you come to town. I have had so much pleasure in your friendship,
    and have gained so much from it, that I would fain hope it need
    not cease now, when our association will necessarily be less
    frequent than it has been of late years. Whether you come back to
    the political field or turn wholly to study and to literature, I
    am sure you will be usefully employed, and I hope that nothing but
    blessing may rest upon all your labours.


The feeling among liberals in the country was of deep dismay. Some of the
whigs doubtless found solace in the anticipation that a new middle party
might be formed, with “a recovery of the old liberal position demolished
for the time by John Mill, Gladstone, and Cobden.”(311) But this was
limited to a narrow circle. “All sunshine is gone out of politics,” was a
general phrase. The news was compared by one correspondent to Gelon’s
message to the Greeks, that the spring was taken out of their year.(312)

An organ of the stiff nonconformists said,(313) “Against his government we
felt that we had a great grievance; for himself, the nonconformists of
this country have long cherished a loyalty more fervent, we are inclined
to imagine, than that with which he has been regarded by any other section
of the community. He, beyond all other modern statesmen, with perhaps here
and there a doubtful exception, gave us the impression of a man who
regarded politics as a part of Christian duty.” And the same writers most
truly added, “We do not know what the English people have done for Mr.
Gladstone that can be compared for a moment with what Mr. Gladstone has
done for them. Claims on him we have none. He has far more than discharged
any debt that he could have owed to the nation.” These words are a just
remonstrance against the somewhat tyrannical conventions of English public
life.

When the session began, he wrote to Mrs. Gladstone (Feb. 15): “I came down
to the House and took my seat nearly in the same spot as last year,
finding Bright my neighbour, with which I was very well pleased. Granville
and Hartington both much preferred my continuing _on_ the front bench to
my going elsewhere.” Lord Hartington, strongly encouraged against his own
inclinations by Mr. Gladstone, accepted a thankless and unpromising post,
and held it with honour and credit for five difficult years to come.




Chapter II. Vaticanism. (1874-1875)


    Let no susceptibilities, puritan, protestant, anglican, or other,
    be startled if we observe that Rome is, and may long be, in some
    important respects, the centre of the Christian world. It is
    indeed a centre which repels as well as attracts; which probably
    repels even more than it attracts; but which, whether repelling or
    attracting, influences.—-GLADSTONE (1875).



I


One question, as the reader by this time well knows, living deepest in Mr.
Gladstone’s heart and mind from his first book in 1838 onwards, was the
relation of the churches to modern society. English statesmen are wont to
be either blind to the existence of such a question, or else they seek an
easy refuge from it in a perfunctory erastianism, sometimes intellectually
refined, sometimes a little brutish, but always shallow. In all the three
great branches of Christianity, the Latin, the Greek or orthodox, the
protestant, Mr. Gladstone’s interest was incessant, sincere, and profound.
It covered their theology, their organisation, their history and
principles of growth, the bearings of their system upon individual
character and social well-being all over Europe. He was one of the very
few public men capable of discerning that the fall of the temporal power
of the pope marked a more startling change and a profounder crisis in
human history, than the unification of Italy, the unification of Germany,
the reconstructed republic in France, perhaps even than the preservation
of the American union. He knew the force of ideas in the world; he
realised the vast transformations that had in their succession swept over
the minds of men since cardinal dogmas had been established; he
comprehended the motion in articles of faith, as men made their “voyagings
through strange seas of thought”; he was alive to the fact that moral
crises brought on by change in intellectual outlook and temperature, are
of deeper concern than questions of territory, or dynasty, or form of
government. The moral crisis is what reaches furthest and matters most. A
movement of the first magnitude was accentuated by Pius IX., when by the
Syllabus of 1864 he challenged modern society in all its foundations, its
aims, its principles, in the whole range of its ideals. Some called this
daring ultimatum the gravest event since the French uprising in 1789. The
Syllabus prepared the way for a more elaborately organised operation on
behalf of papal authority. The train was secretly laid for a grand
reaction, a grand re-installation of the Christian faith.(314)

(M161) The pope had been despoiled of territory, his sway within the walls
of Rome itself was in constant danger, his most powerful protector north
of the Alps had been weakened and humiliated by protestant Prussia. He was
now to be compensated for his calamities by a majestic demonstration of
his hold upon the spiritual allegiance of millions of adherents in every
portion of the habitable globe. The twentieth ecumenical council assembled
in St. Peter’s at Rome on December 8, 1869. In this gathering of catholic
prelates from both hemispheres, two antagonistic schools confronted one
another. The ultramontanes held that the revolutionary welter and
confusion of the modern world could only be healed by solemn affirmation
of the principle of sovereign authority lodged in an infallible pope, with
absolute power to define by that apostolic authority what ought to be held
as articles of faith or morals. The assumptions, the standards, the ruling
types of the modern age, they boldly encountered with rigid iteration of
maxims of old time, imposing obedience and submission to a fixed social
order and a divinely commissioned hierarchy. Inflexibility was to be the
single watchword by which the church could recover a world that, from
Naples even to Mexico, seemed to be rapidly drifting away from her. The
opposing school took other ground. Perhaps they saw that supremacy is one
thing, and infallibility another thing quite different. The liberal
catholics did not contest the dogma of papal infallibility; they
questioned the expediency of its proclamation; they were for associating
ideas of religion with ideas of liberty; they were not for extending the
domain of miracle and the supernatural.

Then as in the old historic councils, influence of race and nation had
decisive effects. It could not be otherwise in what was in essence a
conflict between a centralised doctrinal authority on the one hand, and
the inextinguishable tendency towards national churches on the other. The
Italian bishops went with the pope. The Germans, as of old they had been
for emperor against priest, were now on the side of freedom against what
certain of them did not hesitate to call tyranny and fraud. Some of the
ablest of the French were true to Gallican tradition and resisted the
decree. Among the most active and uncompromising of all the ultramontane
party was our English Manning.(315)



II


At the end of November 1869, Acton had written to Mr. Gladstone from Rome.
“Your letter is a very sad one,” Mr. Gladstone answered. “I feel as deep
and real an interest in the affairs of other Christian communions as in my
own; and most of all in the case of the most famous of them all, and the
one within which the largest number of Christian souls find their
spiritual food.” Before Manning left for Rome, an amiable correspondence
took place between Mr. Gladstone and him. “How sad it is for us both”—this
was Mr. Gladstone’s starting-point—“considering our personal relations,
that we should now be in this predicament, that the things which the one
looks to as the salvation of faith and church, the other regards as their
destruction.”

To Mr. Odo Russell, now the informal agent of the British government in
Rome, the prime minister wrote:—


    It is curious that Manning has so greatly changed his character.
    When he was archdeacon with us, all his strength was thought to
    lie in a governing faculty, and in its wise moderation. Now he is
    ever quoted as the _ultra_ of ultras, and he seems greatly to have
    overshot his mark. The odds seem to be that the child yet unborn
    will rue the calling of this council. For if the best result
    arrive in the triumph of the fallibilitarians, will not even this
    be a considerable shock to the credit and working efficacy of the
    papal system? You must really be _all_ eyes and ears, a very Argus
    in both organs, until the occasion has gone by.


As for the issue of the council, Acton, having Mr. Odo Russell in
agreement with him, from the first conveyed to Mr. Gladstone his opinion
that the pope would prevail.


    The only hope in my mind, said Mr. Gladstone in reply, is that
    there may be a real minority, and that it may speak plainly. A few
    bold men would easily insure themselves a noble immortality. But
    will _any_ have the courage? The Italian government have one and
    only one method in their hands of fighting the pope: and that is
    to run, against nomination from Rome, the old and more popular
    methods of choosing bishops by clerical election, with the
    _approbation of the flock_.(316) Unless they resort to this they
    can do nothing.

    All the accounts from Rome, he tells Lacaita (Jan. 2, 1870), are
    as bad as possible. For the first time in my life, I shall now be
    obliged to talk about popery; for it would be a scandal to call
    the religion they are manufacturing at Rome by the same name as
    that of Pascal, or of Bossuet, or of Ganganelli. The truth is that
    ultramontanism is an anti-social power, and never has it more
    undisguisedly assumed that character than in the Syllabus.


(M162) The French government wrote despatches of mild protest but said
nothing of withdrawing their garrison. Mr. Gladstone and Lord Clarendon
were for informing the Roman court that they were cognizant of the French
despatches, and approved of their tenour. The Queen and the cabinet,
however, were entirely averse to meddling with the council, and nothing
was done officially. This did not prevent Mr. Gladstone from telling
Archbishop Manning what impediments would be placed in the way of Irish
legislation by the state of English feeling as to the Syllabus and other
papal proceedings. “_My_ feelings and convictions,” he says (April 16),
“are as you well know decidedly with your ‘opposition,’ which I believe to
be contending for the religious and civil interests of mankind against
influences highly disastrous and menacing to both. But the prevailing
opinion is that it is better to let those influences take their course,
and work out the damage which they will naturally and surely entail upon
the see of Rome and upon what is bound to it.” In parliament there was an
utter aversion to the Roman policy, and he gives instances, noting even a
change of opinion about the Irish land bill. “What I have described is no
matter of speculation. I know it by actual and daily touch. I am glad you
have moved me to state it in some detail. It is to me matter of profound
grief, especially as regards land in Ireland.”

To Lord Acton:—


    Of all the prelates at Rome, none have a finer opportunity, to
    none is a more crucial test now applied, than to those of the
    United States. For if there, where there is nothing of covenant,
    of restraint, or of equivalent between the church and the state,
    the propositions of the Syllabus are still to have the countenance
    of the episcopate, it becomes really a little difficult to
    maintain in argument the civil rights of such persons to
    toleration, however conclusive be the argument of policy in favour
    of granting it. I can hardly bring myself to speculate or care on
    what particular day the foregone conclusion is to be finally
    adopted. My grief is sincere and deep, but it is at the whole
    thing, so ruinous in its consequences as they concern faith. In my
    view, the size of the minority, though important, is not nearly so
    important as the question whether there will be a minority at all.


There was a minority. In a division taken at a late stage, 451 composed
the majority, 88 resisted, and 62 were for a new examination. Then the
minority turned their backs on Rome; and on July 18 the definition of
infallibility was acclaimed in St. Peter’s in presence of the pope by 533
against 2.

Mr. Gladstone is very glad when Clarendon instructs Mr. Russell to turn
his back on the festivities at Rome. “The whole proceeding has been
monstrous, and it will hereafter become one of the laughing-stocks of
history. The fanaticism of the middle ages is really sober compared with
that of the nineteenth century.” “The proclamation of Infallibility,” he
said to Bishop Moriarty, “I must own I look upon as the most portentous
(taking them singly), of all events in the history of the Christian
church.”



III


The next day, as we know, war was declared by France against Germany, the
French garrison left Rome, and on September 20 the Italians marched in.

A month before the war broke out, Mr. Gladstone wrote to Lord Clarendon:
“I would avoid any official support of the Italian application to France
for the evacuation of Rome, by saying that this country had always
abstained from mixing in that question; and that we were the more induced
to persevere in that policy from being well convinced that the French
government is perfectly aware that in this country the occupation of any
part of the pontifical territories by French troops is regarded with
regret, pain, and disapproval. Further, that those who most strongly
entertain these sentiments, are generally the persons who most highly
value, and have most striven to promote, the good understanding between
France and England.”

The occupation of Rome by the Italian government brought upon Mr.
Gladstone various demands and movements from different parts of the
country. His cabinet agreed that the proper course was to decline all
interference with a view to the restoration of the temporal power, though
they accepted the task of promoting, by means of friendly representations,
arrangements to secure the pontiff’s freedom and becoming support. Then
some of his presbyterian friends asked him why he should even do so much
as this, when he would take no such steps for the moderator of the free
church. Now consider, Mr. Gladstone replied: “the pope is a sovereign who
was in lawful possession of large revenues, and who had charged himself
with the support of a body of cardinals, ministers, nuncios, servants, and
guards out of those revenues. He has been dispossessed, not for any fault
of his own, but because clerical dominion was deemed intolerable. In the
maintenance of the pope and his court, followers and agents, six millions
of our fellow-subjects or thereabouts are deeply interested; and they are
making demands upon us which we are forced to decline. But I should for
one be ashamed to deny that there are the strongest equitable claims upon
the Italian government growing out of the past state of things; that in
these equitable claims the six millions I speak of have a real interest
and share; and as the matter is international, and they have no _locus
standi_ with the Italian government, it is our part so far to plead their
cause if need be.”



IV


(M163) Four years elapsed before Mr. Gladstone was in a position to follow
up his strong opinions on the injury done, as he believed, to human
liberty by the Vatican decrees. But the great debate between ultramontanes
and old catholics was followed by him with an interest that never
slackened. In September 1874 he went to Munich, and we can hardly be wrong
in ascribing to that visit the famous tract which was to make so lively a
stir before the end of the year. His principal object was to communicate
with Dr. Döllinger, and this object, he tells Mrs. Gladstone, was fully
gained. “I think,” he says, “I have spent two-thirds of my whole time with
Dr. Döllinger, who is indeed a most remarkable man, and it makes my blood
run cold to think of _his_ being excommunicated in his venerable but,
thank God, hale and strong old age. In conversation we have covered a wide
field. I know no one with whose mode of viewing and handling religious
matters I more cordially agree.... He is wonderful, and simple as a
child.”

“I think it was in 1874,” Döllinger afterwards mentioned, “that I remember
Gladstone’s paying me a visit at six o’clock in the evening. We began
talking on political and theological subjects, and became, both of us, so
engrossed with the conversation, that it was two o’clock at night when I
left the room to fetch a book from my library bearing on the matter in
hand. I returned with it in a few minutes, and found him deep in a volume
he had drawn out of his pocket—true to his principle of never losing
time—during my momentary absence.”(317) “In the course of a walk out of
Munich in the travelling season of 1874,” Mr. Gladstone wrote sixteen
years later, “Dr. Döllinger told me that he was engaged in the work of
retrial through the whole circle of his Latin teaching and knowledge. The
results were tested in his proceedings at Bonn, when he attempted to
establish a _formula concordiae_ upon the questions which most gravely
divided Christendom.”(318) Among other topics Mr. Gladstone commended to
his mentor the idea of a republication in a series, of the best works of
those whom he would call the Henotic or Eirenic writers on the differences
that separate Christians and churches from one another. He also read
Pichler on the theology of Leibnitz, not without suspicion that it was
rather Pichler than Leibnitz. But neither Leibnitz nor Pichler was really
in his mind.

After the session of 1874, when the public ear and mind had been possessed
by the word Ritualism, he had as usual sought a vent in a magazine article
for the thoughts with which he was teeming.(319) He speaks with some
disdain of the question whether a handful of the clergy are or are not
engaged in “an utterly hopeless and visionary effort to Romanise the
church and people of England.” At no time, he says, since the sanguinary
reign of Mary has such a scheme been possible. Least of all, he proceeds,
could the scheme have life in it “when Rome has substituted for the proud
boast of _semper eadem_ a policy of violence and change in faith; when she
has refurbished and paraded anew every rusty tool she was fondly thought
to have disused; when no one can become her convert, without renouncing
his moral and mental freedom, and placing his civil loyalty and duty at
the mercy of another; and when she has equally repudiated modern thought
and ancient history.” If these strong words expressed his state of mind
before he went abroad, we may readily imagine how the Bavarian air would
fan the flame.

Though Dr. Döllinger himself—“so inaccessible to religious passions”—was
not aware of the purpose of his English friend, there can be little doubt
that Mr. Gladstone returned from Munich with the same degree of internal
ferment as that which had possessed his mind on his return from Naples
three-and-twenty years before. In October he writes to Lord Acton from
Hawarden:—


    What you have said on the subject of ultramontanism and of the
    mode in which it should be handled, appears to me to be as wise
    and as good as is possible. It is really a case for hitting hard,
    but for hitting the right men. In anything I say or do on the
    subject, I would wish heartily and simply to conform to the spirit
    of your words. But I feel myself drawn onwards. Indeed some of
    your words help to draw me. The question with me now is whether I
    shall or shall not publish a tract which I have written, and of
    which the title would probably be, “The Vatican Decrees in their
    bearing on Civil Allegiance: a Political Expostulation.” I incline
    to think that I ought to publish it. If it were in your power and
    will to run over here for a night or two I should seek to profit
    by your counsel, and should ask you to read as much of the MS. as
    your patience would endure. A more substantial attraction would be
    that I could go over much of my long and interesting conversations
    with Döllinger.



V


(M164) The pamphlet(320) appeared in November, and was meant for an
argument that the decree of infallibility aimed a deadly blow at the old
historic, scientific, and moderate school; it was a degradation of the
episcopal order; it carried to its furthest point that spirit of
absolutist centralisation, which in its excesses is as fatal to vigorous
life in the church, as in the state; it overthrew the principle not even
denied by the council of Trent in the sixteenth century, that the pope and
his judgments were triable by the assembled representatives of the
Christian world.

Thrice in history it seemed as if the constitutional party in the church
was about to triumph: at the council of Constance in the fifteenth
century; in the conflict between the French episcopate and Innocent XI. in
the days of Bossuet; and thirdly, when Clement XIV., exactly a hundred
years before now, dealt with the Jesuits and “levelled in the dust the
deadliest foes that mental and moral liberty have ever known.” From July
1870 all this had passed away, and the constitutional party had seen its
death-warrant signed and sealed. The “myrmidons of the apostolic chamber”
had committed their church to revolutionary measures. The vast new claims
were lodged in the reign of a pontiff, who by the dark Syllabus of 1864
had condemned free speech, a free press, liberty of conscience, toleration
of nonconformity, the free study of civil and philosophic things
independently of church authority, marriage unless sacramentally
contracted, and all definition by the state of the civil rights of the
church.

(M165) “It has been a favourite purpose of my life,” Mr. Gladstone said,
“not to conjure up, but to conjure down, public alarms. I am not now going
to pretend that either foreign foe or domestic treason can, at the bidding
of the court of Rome, disturb these peaceful shores. But although such
fears may be visionary, it is more visionary still to suppose for one
moment that the claims of Gregory VII., of Innocent III., and of Boniface
VIII. have been disinterred in the nineteenth century, like hideous
mummies picked out of Egyptian sarcophagi, in the interests of archæology,
or without a definite and practical aim.” What, then, was the clear and
foregone purpose behind the parade of all these astonishing reassertions?
The first was—by claims to infallibility in creed, to the prerogative of
miracles, to dominion over the unseen world—to satisfy spiritual
appetites, sharpened into reaction and made morbid by “the levity of the
destructive speculations so widely current, and the notable hardihood of
the anti-Christian writing of the day.” This alone, however, would not
explain the deliberate provocation of all the “risks of so daring a raid
upon the civil sphere.” The answer was to be found in the favourite
design, hardly a secret design, of restoring by the road of force when any
favourable opportunity should arise, and of re-erecting, the terrestrial
throne of the popedom, “even if it could only be re-erected on the ashes
of the city, and amidst the whitening bones of the people.”

And this brings the writer to the immediate practical aspects of his
tract. “If the baleful power which is expressed by the phrase _Curia
Romana_, and not at all adequately rendered in its historic force by the
usual English equivalent ‘Court of Rome,’ really entertains the scheme, it
doubtless counts on the support in every country of an organised and
devoted party; which, when it can command the scales of political power,
will promote interference, and while it is in a minority, will work for
securing neutrality. As the peace of Europe may be in jeopardy, and as the
duties even of England, as one of its constabulary authorities, might come
to be in question, it would be most interesting to know the mental
attitude of our Roman catholic fellow-countrymen in England and Ireland
with reference to the subject; and it seems to be one on which we are
entitled to solicit information.” Too commonly the spirit of the convert
was to be expressed by the notorious words, “a catholic first, an
Englishman afterwards”—words that properly convey no more than a truism,
“for every Christian must seek to place his religion even before his
country in his inner heart; but very far from a truism in the sense in
which we have been led to construe them.” This, indeed, was a new and very
real “papal aggression.” For himself, Mr. Gladstone said, it should not
shake his allegiance to “the rule of maintaining equal civil rights
irrespectively of religious differences.” Had he not given conclusive
indications of that view, by supporting in parliament as a minister since
the council, the repeal in 1871 of the law against ecclesiastical titles,
whose enactment he had opposed twenty years before?

That the pamphlet should create intense excitement, was inevitable from
the place of the writer in the public eye, from the extraordinary
vehemence of the attack, and above all from the unquenchable fascination
of the topic. Whether the excitement in the country was more than
superficial; whether most readers fathomed the deep issues as they stood,
not between catholic and protestant, but between catholic and catholic
within the fold; whether in fastening upon the civil allegiance of English
Romanists Mr. Gladstone took the true point against Vaticanism—these are
questions that we need not here discuss. The central proposition made a
cruel dilemma for a large class of the subjects of the Queen; for the
choice assigned to them by assuming stringent logic was between being bad
citizens if they submitted to the decree of papal infallibility, and bad
catholics if they did not. Protestant logicians wrote to Mr. Gladstone
that if his contention were good, we ought now to repeal catholic
emancipation and again clap on the fetters. Syllogisms in action are but
stupid things after all, unless they are checked by a tincture of what
seems paradox.(321) Apart from the particular issue in his Vatican
pamphlet, Mr. Gladstone believed himself to be but following his own main
track in life and thought in his assault upon “a policy which declines to
acknowledge the high place assigned to liberty in the counsels of
Providence, and which upon the pretext of the abuse that like every other
good she suffers, expels her from its system.”

Among the names that he was never willing to discuss with me—Machiavelli,
for instance—was Joseph de Maistre, the hardiest, most adventurous, most
ingenious, and incisive of all the speculative champions of European
reaction.(322) In the pages of de Maistre he might have found the reasoned
base on which the ultramontane creed may be supposed to rest. He would
have found liberty depicted less as a blessing than a scourge; even
Bossuet denounced as a heretic with dubious chances of salvation, for his
struggle on behalf of a national church against Roman centralisation; the
old Greeks held up to odium as a race of talkers, frivolous, light, and
born incorrigible dividers. In dealing with de Maistre, Mr. Gladstone
would have had a foeman worthier of his powerful steel than the authors of
the Syllabus, Schema, Postulatum, and all the rest of what he called the
Vaticanism of 1870. But here, as always, he was man of action, and wrote
for a specific though perhaps a fugitive purpose.



VI


(M166) At the end of the year the total number printed of the tract was
145,000, and of these 120,000 were in a people’s edition. “My pamphlet,”
he tells Lacaita, “has brought upon me such a mass of work as I can hardly
cope with, and I am compelled to do all things as succinctly as possible,
though my work is with little intermission from morning till night. I
agree with you that the pamphlet in the main tells its own story; and I am
glad there is no need to select in a hurry some one to write on the
difference between papism and Catholicism.... There is no doubt that the
discussion opens, _i.e._ makes a breach in the walls of the papal
theology, and it ought to be turned to account. But I shall have enough to
do with all my hands, if I am to work properly through the task I have
undertaken. Not, I trust, for long, for I think another pamphlet should
suffice to end it on my side. But I am vexed that Manning (as if he had
been pulled up at Rome), after having announced his formal reply six weeks
ago, hangs fire and now talks of delaying it.” The result, he assures Lord
Granville (Nov. 25), “must be injurious to the pestilent opinions that
have so grievously obtained the upper hand in that church, and to the
party which _means_ to have a war in Europe for the restoration of the
temporal power. To place impediments in their way has been my principal
purpose.”

He told Acton (Dec. 18), “When you were putting in caveats and warnings,
you did not say to me, ‘Now mind, this affair will absorb some, perhaps
many, months of your life.’ It has been so up to the present moment, and
it evidently will be so for some time.” With Acton he carried on elaborate
correspondence upon some of the questions raised by the Syllabus, notably
on the effect of the pope’s disciplinary judgment on anglican marriages,
converting them into relations that were not marriage at all. He fears
that he has conceded too much to the papal party in not treating the
Syllabus as _ex cathedra_; in allowing that the popes had been apt to
claim dogmatic infallibility for wellnigh a thousand years; as to the
ecumenicity of the Vatican council. Among other matters he was reading
“the curious volumes of _Discorsi di Pio IX._, published at Rome, and he
might find it his duty to write collaterally upon them.” This duty he
performed with much fidelity in the _Quarterly Review_ for January 1875.
He is active in interest about translations; keen to enlist auxiliaries in
every camp and all countries; delighted with all utterances from Italy or
elsewhere that make in his direction, even noting with satisfaction that
the agnostic Huxley was warm in approval. “I pass my days and nights,” he
tells the Duke of Argyll (Dec. 19), “in the Vatican. Already the pope has
given me two months of incessant correspondence and other hard work, and
it may very well last two more. Nor is this work pleasant; but I am as far
as possible from repenting of it, as no one else to whom the public would
listen saved me the trouble. It is full of intense interest. Every post
brings a mass of general reading, writing, or both. Forty covers of one
kind or another to-day, and all my time is absorbed. But the subject is
well worth the pains.” The Italians, Lord Granville told him, “generally
approved, but were puzzled why you should have thought it necessary.”
Retorts and replies arose in swarms, including one from Manning and
another from Newman. He was accused by some of introducing a Bismarckian
_Kulturkampf_ into England, of seeking to recover his lost popularity by
pandering to no-popery, of disregarding the best interests of the country
for the sake of his own restoration to power.(323)


    I have now finished reading—he said at the beginning of
    February—the 20th reply to my pamphlet, They cover 1000 pages. And
    I am hard at work preparing mine with a good conscience and I
    think a good argument. Manning has been, I think, as civil as he
    could. _Feb. 5._—All this morning I have had to spend in hunting
    up one important statement of Manning’s which I am almost
    convinced is a gross mis-statement.... _Feb. 6._—Manning in his
    200 pages has not, I venture to say, made a single point against
    me. But I shall have to show up his quotations very seriously. We
    have exchanged one or two friendly notes. 8.—Worked on Vaticanism
    nearly all day and (an exception to my rule) late at night.
    14.—Eight hours’ work on my proof sheets. 15.—Went through Acton’s
    corrections and notes on my proofs. 19.—Worked much in evening on
    finishing up my tract, Dr. Döllinger’s final criticisms having
    arrived. He thinks highly of the work, which he observes will cut
    deeper than the former one, and be more difficult to deal with. By
    midnight I had the revises ready with the corrections.
    20.—Inserted one or two references and wrote “Press” on the 2nd
    revises. May the power and blessing of God go with the work.


The second tract was more pungent than the first, and it gave pleasure to
an important minister abroad who had now entangled himself by Falk laws
and otherwise in a quarrel with the papacy. “I have had a letter of
thanks,” Mr. Gladstone writes to Hawarden (March 6), “from Bismarck. This
pamphlet is stouter, sharper, and cheaper than the last, but is only in
its eleventh thousand, I believe.” Among others who replied to
_Vaticanism_ was Dr. Newman; he appended a new postscript of
four-and-twenty pages to his former answer to the first of Mr. Gladstone’s
pamphlets. Its tone is courteous and argumentative—far too much so to
please the ultras who had the pope’s ear—and without the wild hitting that
Mr. Gladstone found in Manning.

Newman wrote to thank him (Jan. 17, 1875) for a letter that he described
as “forbearing and generous.” “It has been a great grief to me,” said
Newman, “to have had to write against one whose career I have followed
from first to last with so much (I may say) loyal interest and admiration.
I had known about you from others, and had looked at you with kindly
curiosity, before you came up to Christ Church, and from the time that you
were launched into public life, you have retained a hold on my thoughts
and on my gratitude by the various marks of attention which every now and
then you have shown me, when you had an opportunity, and I could not fancy
my ever standing towards you in any other relation than that which had
lasted so long. What a fate it is, that now when so memorable a career has
reached its formal termination [retirement from leadership], I should be
the man, on the very day on which it closed, to present to you amid the
many expressions of public sympathy which it elicits, a controversial
pamphlet as my offering.” But he could not help writing it, he was called
upon from such various quarters; and his conscience told him that he who
had been in great measure the cause of so many becoming catholics, had no
right to leave them in the lurch, when charges were made against them as
serious as unexpected. “I do not think,” he concluded, “I ever can be
sorry for what I have done, but I never can cease to be sorry for the
necessity of doing it.”



VII


(M167) This fierce controversial episode was enough to show that the habit
and temperament of action still followed him in the midst of all his
purposes of retreat. Withdrawal from parliamentary leadership was
accompanied by other steps, apparently all making in the same direction.
He sold the house in Carlton House Terrace, where he had passed
eight-and-twenty years of work and power and varied sociability. “I had
grown to the house,” he says (April 15), “having lived more time in it
than in any other since I was born, and mainly by reason of all that was
done in it.” To Mrs. Gladstone he wrote (Feb. 28):—


    I do not wonder that you feel parting from the house will be a
    blow and a pang. It is nothing less than this to me, but it must
    be faced and you will face it gallantly. So much has occurred
    there; and thus it is leaving not the house only but the
    neighbourhood, where I have been with you for more than
    thirty-five years, and altogether nearly forty. The truth is that
    innocently and from special causes we have on the whole been
    housed better than according to our circumstances. All along
    Carlton House Terrace I think you would not find any one with less
    than £20,000 a year, and most of them with, much more.


He sold his collection of china and his Wedgwood ware.(324) He despatched
his books to Hawarden. He can hardly have resolved on retirement that
should be effective and complete, or else he must have arranged to quit
the House of Commons. In his diary he entered (March 30, 1875):—


    Views about the future and remaining section of my life. In
    outline they are undefined but in substance definite. The main
    point is this: that setting aside exceptional circumstances which
    would have to provide for themselves, my prospective work is not
    parliamentary. My ties will be slight to an assembly with whose
    tendencies I am little in harmony at the present time; nor can I
    flatter myself that what is called the public out of doors is more
    sympathetic. But there is much to be done with the pen, all
    bearing much on high and sacred ends, for even Homeric study as I
    view it, is in this very sense of high importance; and what lies
    beyond this is concerned directly with the great subject of
    belief.


To Mrs. Gladstone he wrote (May 19, 1875): “I am feeling as it were my way
towards the purposes of the rest of my life. It will I dare say clear by
degrees. For the general business of the country, my ideas and temper are
thoroughly out of harmony with the ideas and temper of the day, especially
as they are represented in London.”

The movement of negation had been in full swing for a dozen years before
the force and weight of it had, amid the stress and absorption of daily
business, reached his inner mind. In May 1872, in a speech as member of
the council of King’s College—“averse from, and little used to platform
speaking,” as he described himself to Manning—he used some strong language
about those who promulgate as science what is not science and as religion
what is not religion; but he took care to sever himself from the recent
Roman decrees, which “seemed much to resemble the proclamation of a
perpetual war against the progress and the movement of the human
mind.”(325) In December 1872, he caused a marked sensation by an address
at Liverpool, in which he spoke of Strauss’s book on _New and Old
Belief_.(326) He had become a member of the metaphysical society, where
eminent representatives of every faith and of no faith discussed every
aspect of the foundations of human creeds. He was of too masculine and
energetic a cast of mind to feel mere shock as he listened to Huxley,
Tyndall, Clifford, Harrison, firmly arguing materialism or positivism or
agnosticism or other unhistoric forms. That his whole soul was
energetically oppugnant, I need not say. His reverence for freedom never
wavered. He wrote to an editor who had criticised his Liverpool address
(Jan. 3, 1873):—


    In the interest of my address, I wish to say that not a word to my
    knowledge fell from me limiting the range of free inquiry, nor
    have I ever supposed St. Paul to say anything so silly as “Prove
    all things: but some you must not prove.” Doubtless some obscurity
    of mine, I know not what, has led to an error into which the able
    writer of the article has fallen, not alone.


To the Duke of Argyll he wrote:—


    _Dec. 28, ’72._—I have been touching upon deep and dangerous
    subjects at Liverpool. Whether I went beyond my province many may
    doubt. But of the extent of the mischief I do not doubt any more
    than of its virulence. All that I hear from day to day convinces
    me of the extension of this strange epidemic, for it is not,
    considering how it comes, worthy of being called a rational or
    scientific process. Be it however, what it may, we politicians are
    children playing with toys in comparison to that great work of and
    for manhood, which has to be done, and will yet be done, in
    restoring belief.


Sir Robert Morier sent him from Munich Frohschammer’s reply to Strauss.
“If I understand him aright,” said Mr. Gladstone, “he is a Unitarian,
minus Miracle and Inspiration.” The whole book seemed to him able, honest,
and diligent:—


    But, he adds, I am one of those who think the Christianity of
    Frohschammer (as I have described it) is like a tall tree
    scientifically prepared for the saw by the preliminary process,
    well known to wood-cutters, of clearing away with the axe all
    projecting roots, which as long as they remained rendered the
    final operation impossible. This first process leaves the tree
    standing in a very trim condition, much more mathematical in form,
    as it is more near a cylinder, than in its native state. The
    business of the saw, when the horse and the man arrive, is soon
    accomplished.


To his article on ritualism he prefixed as motto two short lines of
Pindar, about days that are to come being wisest witnesses.(327) In spite
of retreat, it was impossible that he should forget the vast
responsibility imposed upon him, both by his gifts and by the popular
ascendency into which they had brought him. His was not the retreat of
self-indulgence, and the days that were to come speedily brought him
duties that were to bear him far into regions of storm and conflict now
unforeseen. Meanwhile, with occasional visits to Westminster, he lived
even and industrious days at Hawarden, felling trees, working at Greek
mythology and ethnology, delighting in the woods and glades of the park,
above all delighting in the tranquillity of his “temple of peace.” Besides
being the bookroom of a student, this was still a far-shining beacon in
the popular eye. If sages, scholars, heroes, saints, with time’s serene
and hallowed gravity looked upon him from their shelves, yet loud echoes
sounded in his ear from roaring surges of an outer world—from turbid ebb
and flow of all the struggle and clamorous hopes and half-blind mysterious
instincts of the nations.




Chapter III. The Octagon.


    It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is
    easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he
    who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the
    independence of solitude.—EMERSON.


Near the end of the eighties, Mr. Gladstone built for himself a fire-proof
room at the north-western corner of his temple of peace. In this
Octagon—“a necessity of my profession and history”—he stored the letters
and papers of his crowded lifetime. He estimated the “selected letters”
addressed to himself at sixty thousand, and the mass of other letters that
found their way into the Octagon without selection, along with more than a
score of large folios containing copies of his own to other people, run to
several tens of thousands more. There are between five and six hundred
holographs from the Queen, afterward designated by him in his will to be
an heirloom. “It may amuse you,” he told Lord Granville, who always wrote
the shortest letters that ever were known, “to learn that your letters to
me weigh fifteen pounds and a-half.” Probably no single human being ever
received sixty thousand letters worth keeping, and of these it is safe to
say that three-fourths of them might as well have been destroyed as soon
as read, including a certain portion that might just as well never have
been either written or read. This slightly improvident thrift recalls the
jealous persons who will not suffer the British Museum to burn its
rubbish, on the curious principle that what was never worth producing must
always be worth preserving.

(M168) As for Mr. Gladstone’s own share, he explains his case in what he
says (1865) to the widow of Mr. Cobden: “Of the kind of correspondence
properly called private and personal, I have none: indeed for many long
long years it has been out of my power, except in very few instances, to
keep up this kind of correspondence.” The exceptions are few indeed. Half
of the contents of this crowded little chamber are papers of
business,—nightly letters to the Queen, telling her what had gone on in
the House and what sort of figure had been cut by its debaters, reports of
meetings of the cabinet, memoranda for such meetings, notes for speeches,
endless correspondence with colleagues, and all the other operations
incident to the laborious machinery of government in the charge of a
master engineer. In this region of his true calling, all is order,
precision, persistency, and the firmness and ease of the strong. For many
years in that department all was action, strength, success. Church leaders
again contribute considerable piles, but these, too, mainly concern church
business for the hour, and the business has now even for adherents
naturally fallen out of memory. The more miscellaneous papers are
different. There a long and strange procession flits before our
eye—dreams, “little bustling passions,” trivialities, floating like a
myriad motes into the dim Octagon. We are reminded how vast a space in our
ever-dwindling days is consumed by social invitations and the discovery of
polite reasons for evading them. “Bona verba” is a significant docket
prompting the secretary’s reply. It is borne in upon us how grievously the
burden of man’s lot is aggravated by slovenly dates, illegible signatures,
and forgetfulness that writing is something meant to be read. There is a
mountain of letters from one correspondent so mercilessly written, that
the labour of decyphering them would hardly be justified, even if one
could hope to recover traces of the second decade of Livy or the missing
books of the _Annals_ of Tacitus. Foreign rulers, Indian potentates,
American citizens, all write to the most conspicuous Englishman of the
time. In an unformed hand a little princess thanks him for a photograph,
and says, “I am so glad to have seen you at Windsor, and will try and
remember you all my life.” There are bushels of letters whose writers “say
all that they conscientiously can” for applicants, nominees, and
candidates in every line where a minister is supposed to be able to lend a
helping hand if he likes. Actors send him boxes, queens of song press on
him lozenges infallible for the vocal cords, fine ladies dabbling in
Italian seek counsel, and not far off, what is more to the point, are
letters from young men thanking him for his generosity in aiding them to
go to Oxford with a view to taking orders. Charles Kean, a popular
tragedian of those times, and son of one more famous still, thanks Mr.
Gladstone for his speech at a complimentary dinner to him (March 1862),
and says how proud he is to remember that they were boys at Eton together.
Then there are the erudite but unfruitful correspondents, with the
melancholy docket, “_Learning thrown away_”; and charming professors of
poetry—as though the alto should insist on singing the basso
part—impressively assure him how dreadfully uneasy they are about the
weakness of our army, and how horribly low upon the security of our Indian
Empire.

(M169) Some have said that to peruse the papers of a prime minister must
lower one’s view of human nature. Perhaps this may partly depend upon the
prime minister, partly on the height of our expectations from our
fellow-creatures. If such a survey is in any degree depressing, there can
be no reason why it should be more so than any other large inspection of
human life. In the Octagon as in any similar repository we come upon
plenty of baffled hopes, chagrin in finding a career really ended, absurd
over-estimates of self, over-estimates of the good chances of the world,
vexation of those who have chosen the wrong path at the unfair good luck
of those who have chosen the right. We may smile, but surely in
good-natured sympathy, at the zeal of poor ladies for a post for husbands
of unrecognised merit, or at the importunity of younger sons with large
families but inadequate means. Harmless things of this sort need not turn
us into satirists or cynics.

All the riddles of the great public world are there—why one man becomes
prime minister, while another who ran him close at school and college ends
with a pension from the civil list; why the same stable and same pedigree
produce a Derby winner and the poor cab-hack; why one falls back almost
from the start, while another runs famously until the corner, and then his
vaulting ambition dwindles to any place of “moderate work and decent
emolument”; how new competitors swim into the field of vision; how suns
rise and set with no return, and vanish as if they had never been suns but
only ghosts or bubbles; how in these time-worn papers, successive
generations of active men run chequered courses, group following group,
names blazing into the fame of a day, then like the spangles of a rocket
expiring. Men write accepting posts, all excitement, full of hope and
assurance of good work, and then we remember how quickly clouds came and
the office ended in failure and torment. In the next pigeon-hole just in
the same way is the radiant author’s gift of his book that after all fell
still-born. One need not be prime minister to know the eternal tale of the
vanity of human wishes, or how men move,


    Thundering like ramping hosts of warrior horse
    To throw that faint thin line upon the shore.(328)


Nor are things all one way. If we find Mr. Gladstone writing to the Queen
of “the excellent parliamentary opening” of this man or that, who made the
worst possible parliamentary close, there is the set-off of dull unmarked
beginnings to careers that proved brilliant or weighty. If there are a
thousand absurdities in the form of claims for place and honours and steps
in the peerage, all the way up the ladder, from a branch post-office to
the coveted blue riband of the garter, “with no infernal nonsense of merit
about it,” there are, on the other hand, not a few modest and considerate
refusals, and we who have reasonable views of human nature, may set in the
balance against a score of the begging tribe, the man of just pride who
will not exchange his earldom for a marquisate, and the honest peer who to
the proffer of the garter says, with gratitude evidently sincere, “I
regret, however, that I cannot conscientiously accept an honour which is
beyond my deserts.” Then the Octagon contains abundant material for any
student of the lessons of a parliamentary crisis, though perhaps the
student knew before how even goodish people begin to waver in great
causes, when they first seriously suspect the horrid truth that they may
not after all be in a majority. Many squibs, caricatures, and malicious
diatribes, dated in Mr. Gladstone’s own hand, find shelter. But then
compensation for faintheartedness or spite abounds in the letters of the
staunch. And these not from the party politicians merely. Mr. Gladstone
stirred different and deeper waters. The famous fighting bishop,
Phillpotts of Exeter, then drawing on towards ninety and the realms of
silence, writes to him on the Christmas Day of 1863: “A Christian
statesman is a rare object of reverence and honour. Such I entirely
believe are you. I often remember the early days of my first intercourse
with you. Your high principles gave an early dignity to your youth, and
promised the splendid earthly career which you are fulfilling. I shall not
live to witness that fulfilment.” A whole generation later, General Booth
wrote: “Throughout the world no people will pray more fervently and
believingly for your continued life and happiness than the officers and
soldiers of the salvation army.” Here is Mr. Spurgeon, the most popular
and effective of the nonconforming preachers and workers of the time,
writing:—


    I felt ready to weep when you were treated with so much contumely
    by your opponent in your former struggle; and yet I rejoiced that
    you were educating this nation to believe in conscience and
    truth.... I wish I could brush away the gadflies, but I suppose by
    this time you have been stung so often that the system has become
    invulnerable.... You are loved by hosts of us as intensely as you
    are hated by certain of the savage party.


And when Mr. Gladstone was to visit Spurgeon’s tabernacle (Jan. 1882):—


    I feel like a boy who is to preach with his father to listen to
    him. I shall try not to know that you are there at all, but just
    preach to my poor people the simple word which has held them by
    their thousands these twenty-eight years. You do not know how
    those of us regard you, who feel it a joy to live when a premier
    believes in righteousness. We believe in no man’s infallibility,
    but _it is restful to be sure of one man’s integrity_.


That admirable sentence marks the secret.

All the religious agitations of the time come before us. Eminent foreign
converts from the Roman church still find comfort in warning this most
unshaken of believers against “a superficial and sceptical liberalism.”
Others, again, condemned for heresy hail him as “dear and illustrious
master”—with no cordial response, we may surmise. Relying on Mr.
Gladstone’s character for human-heartedness and love of justice, people
submit to him some of the hard domestic problems then and so often forced
upon the world by the quarrels of the churches. One lady lays before him
(1879) with superabundant detail a case where guardians insisted on the
child of a mixed marriage being brought up as a protestant, against the
fervid wishes of the surviving parent, a catholic. Mr. Gladstone masters
the circumstances, forms his judgment, elaborates it in a closely argued
memorandum, and does not evade the responsibility of advising. In another
of these instances the tragedy is reversed; the horrid oppression is
perpetrated on the protestant mother by the catholic father, and here too
it is Mr. Gladstone to whom the sufferer appeals for intercession.

His correspondents have not always so much substance in them. One lady of
evangelical strain, well known in her time, writes to him about turbulence
in Ireland on the last day of 1880. The private secretary dockets: “Wishes
you a blessed new year; but goes on in a very impertinent strain
attributing your ‘inaction’ in Ireland to unprincipled colleagues, and to
want of heavenly guidance. Encloses suggestions for prayer.” In such
instances, even when the appeal came near to raving, Mr. Gladstone
whenever he thought the writer’s motives sincere, seems to have replied
with patience, and at a length very different from the pithy brevity of
the Iron Duke upon the like occasions. Sometimes we may assume that the
secretary’s phlegmatic docket sufficed, as on an epistle thus described:
“1. Sends review in —— on his book. 2. Would like you to read —— and ——
(his poems). 3. Will send you soon his prose on ——. 4. Hopes you will not
overwork yourself. 5. His children call you St. William.” Sometimes we
know not whether it is simplicity or irony that inspires the grave
politeness of his replies. He seems to be in all sincerity surprised at
the view taken by somebody “of the reluctance of public men to hold
interviews for unexplained and indefinite purposes, and their preference
for written communications.” Somebody writes a pamphlet on points of the
ministerial policy, and suggests that each member of the government might
order and distribute a competent number of copies. Mr. Gladstone
immediately indicates two serious difficulties, first that the ministers
would then make themselves responsible for the writer’s opinion in detail
no less than in mass, and second their intervention would greatly detract
from its weight. Even importunity for a subscription never makes him curt:
“I am sure you will not misconstrue me, when I beg respectfully to state
that your efforts will stand better without my personal co-operation.”

(M170) The correspondence is polyglot. In one little bundle, Cavour writes
in Italian and French; the Archbishop of Cephalonia congratulates him in
Greek on the first Irish Land bill; and in the same tongue the Archbishop
of Chios gives him a book on the union of the Armenian with the Anatolian
communion; Huber regales him with the luxury of German _cursivschrift_.
The archimandrite Myrianthes forwards him objects from the Holy Land. The
patriarch of Constantinople (1896) sends greetings and blessings, and
testifies to the bonds of fellowship between the eastern and anglican
churches undisturbed since the days of Cyril Lukaris. Dupanloup, the
famous Bishop of Orleans (1869), applauds the plan of _Juventus Mundi_,
its grandeur, its beauty, its moral elevation; and proceeds to ask how he
can procure copies of the articles on _Ecce Homo_, as to which his
curiosity has been aroused. A couple of notes (1864 and 1871) from
Garibaldi, the great revolutionist, are neighbours to letters (1851-74)
from Guizot, the great conservative. Three or four lines in French from
Garibaldi were given to Mr. Gladstone the day before leaving Cliveden and
England (April 24, 1864): “In leaving you pray accept a word of
recognition for all the kindness you have heaped upon me, and for the
generous interest you have at all times shown for the cause of my
country.—Your devoted G. GARIBALDI.” The other shorter still (1871) begs
him to do something for a French refugee. Minghetti, Ricasoli, and others
of that celebrated group commemorate his faithful and effective good will
to Italy. Daniel Manin the Venetian thanks him in admirable English for
some books, as well as for his energetic and courageous act in drawing a
perfidious king (Naples) before the bar of public opinion. Manzoni gives
to a friend a letter of introduction (1845), and with Italian warmth of
phrase expresses his lively recollection of the day on which he made Mr.
Gladstone’s acquaintance, and the admiration with which his name is
followed. Mérimée, the polished and fastidious genius, presents to him a
French consul at Corfu (1858) who in his quality of philhellene and
hellenist desires ardently to make the acquaintance of Homer’s learned and
eloquent commentator. Lesseps, whose hand gave so tremendous and
impressive a turn to forces, policies, currents of trade, promises (1870)
to keep an appointment, when he will have the double honour of being
presented to the Princess Louise by a man so universally respected for the
high services he has rendered to the Queen, to his country, and to the
progress of the world.

If the language is polyglot, the topics are encyclopædic. Bishops send him
their charges; if a divine translates a hymn, he submits it; if he hits
upon an argument on the mysteries of the faith, or the vexed themes of
theological debate, he despatches pages and pages to Hawarden, and
receives page upon page in reply. Young authors, and especially young
authoresses pestered him to review their books, though his patience and
good nature make ’pester’ seem an inapplicable word. A Scotch professor
for some reason or another copies out and forwards to him one of Goethe’s
reflections and maxims:—


    How may a man attain to self-knowledge? By Contemplation?
    certainly not: but by Action. Try to do your Duty and you will
    find what you are fit for. But what is your Duty? The Demand of
    the Hour.


As if of all men then living on our planet, Mr. Gladstone were not he to
whom such counsel was most superfluous. He replies (Oct. 9, 1880), “I feel
the immense, the overmastering power of Goethe, but with such limited
knowledge as I have of his works, I am unable to answer the question
whether he has or has not been an evil genius of humanity.”

(M171) In 1839 Spedding, the Baconian, to whom years later the prime
minister proposed that he should fill the chair of history at Cambridge,
wrote to him that John Sterling, of whom Mr. Gladstone already knew
something, was prevented by health from living in London, and so by way of
meeting his friends on his occasional visits, had proposed that certain of
them should agree to dine together cheaply once a month at some stated
place. As yet Sterling had only spoken to Carlyle, John Mill, Maurice, and
Bingham Baring. “I hope,” says Spedding, “that your devotion to the more
general interests of mankind will not prevent your assisting in this
little job.” Mr. Gladstone seems not to have assisted, though his friend
Bishop Wilberforce did, and fell into some hot water in consequence. A
veteran and proclaimed freethinker sets out to Mr. Gladstone his own
recognition of what ought to be a truism, that he is for every man being
faithful to his faith; that his aggressive denial of the inspiration of
the Bible did not prevent him from sending a copy in large type to his old
mother to read when her eyes were dim; that he respected consolations
congenial to the conscience. “I hope,” he says to Mr. Gladstone, “there is
a future life, and if so, my not being sure of it will not prevent it, and
I know of no better way of deserving it than by conscious service of
humanity. The Universe never filled me with such wonder and awe as when I
knew I could not account for it. _I admit ignorance is a privation. But to
submit not to know where knowledge is withheld, seems but one of the
sacrifices that reverence for truth imposes on us._” The same
correspondent speaks (1881) of “the noble toleration which you have
personally shown me, notwithstanding what you must think seriously
erroneous views of mine, and upon which I do not keep silence.” Mr.
Gladstone had written to him six years before (1875): “Differing from you,
I do not believe that secular motives are adequate either to propel or to
restrain the children of our race, but I earnestly desire to hear the
other side, and I appreciate the advantage of having it stated by sincere
and high-minded men.” There is a letter too from the son of another
conspicuous preacher of negation, replying to some words of Mr. Gladstone
which he took to be disparaging of his parent, and begging him, “a
lifelong idealist yourself,” to think more worthily and sympathetically of
one whom if he had known he would have appreciated and admired.

A considerable correspondence is here from the learned Bishop Stubbs
(1888) on the character of Bishop Fisher of Rochester, the fellow-sufferer
of More; on the Convocation Act of 1531 and the other Convocation Acts of
Elizabeth; on Father Walsh’s letters, and other matters of the sixteenth
century. In fact, it is safe to assume that Mr. Gladstone has always some
ecclesiastical, historical, theological controversy running alongside of
the political and party business of the day. Nobody that ever lived tried
to ride so many horses abreast. Another prelate puts a point that is worth
remembering by every English school of foreign policy. “In 1879,” writes
Bishop Creighton (Feb. 15, 1887), “when foreign affairs were much before
the public, I suggested to a publisher a series of books dealing quite
shortly and clearly with the political history and constitution of the
chief states of Europe from 1815. I designed them for popular instruction,
thinking it of great importance that people in general should know what
they were talking about, when they spoke of France or Russia.... The
result of my attempt was to convince me that our ignorance of the last
sixty years is colossal.”

Lord Stanhope has been reading (1858) the “Tusculan Questions,” and
confides to Mr. Gladstone’s sympathetic ear Cicero’s shockingly faulty
recollection of Homer,—mistaking Euryclea for Anticlea, the nurse for the
mother, and giving to Polyphemus a speech that Polyphemus never spoke. A
bishop says Macaulay told him that one of the most eloquent passages in
the English language is in Barrow’s Seventy-Fifth Sermon, on the
Nativity—“Let us consider that the Nativity doth import the completion of
many ancient promises....”(329) Letters abound and over-abound on that
most movable of topics—“the present state of the Homeric controversy.”
Scott, the lexicographer, sends him Greek epigrams on events too fugitive
to be now worth recalling—discusses Homeric points, and while not
surrendering at discretion, admits them worthy of much consideration.
There are many pages from Thirlwall, that great scholar and enlightened
man, upon points of Homeric ethnology, Homeric geography, and such
questions as whether a line in the _Iliad_ (xiv. 321) makes the mother of
Minos to be a Phœnician damsel or the daughter of Phœnix, or whether it is
possible to attach a meaning to ἐννέωρος that would represent Minos as
beginning his reign when nine years old—a thing, the grave bishop adds,
even more strange than the passion of Dante for Beatrice at the same age.

(M172) Huxley sends him titles of books on the origin of the domestic
horse; Sir Joseph Hooker supplies figures of the girth of giant trees; the
number of annual rings in a fallen stump which would seem to give it 6420
years; tells him how the wood of another was as sound after 380 years as
if just felled. Somebody else interests him in Helmholtz’s experiments on
the progression of the vibrations of the true vowel sounds. Letters pass
between him and Darwin (1879) on colours and names for colours. Darwin
suggests the question whether savages have names for shades of colours: “I
should expect that they have not, and this would be remarkable, for the
Indians of Chili and Tierra del Fuego have names for every slight
promontory and hill to a marvellous degree.” Mr. Gladstone proposes to
nominate him a trustee of the British Museum (April 1881), and Darwin
replies, “I would gladly have accepted, had my strength been sufficient
for anything like regular attendance at the meetings.” Professor Owen
thanks him for the honour of Knight of the Bath, and expresses his true
sense of the aid and encouragement that he has uniformly received from Mr.
Gladstone throughout the course of the labours from which he is now
retiring.

He corresponds with a learned French statesman, not on the insoluble
Newfoundland problem, turning so much on the nice issue whether a lobster
is a fish, and not on the vexed Egyptian question, but on the curious
prohibition of pork as an article of food—a strange contradiction between
the probable practice of the Phœnicians and that of the Jews, perpetuated
in our times through all Mussulman countries, and a prohibition not to be
explained on sanitary grounds, because to the present day Christians in
the East all indulge in pork and are none the worse for it. A young member
of parliament one night fell into conversation with him, as a branch from
the subject of the eating of bovine flesh by the Greeks, on the eating of
horseflesh, and the next day writes to mention to him that at a council in
785 with the Bishop of Ostia as president, it was decreed, “Many among you
eat horses, which is not done by any Christians in the East: avoid this;”
and he asks Mr. Gladstone whether he believed that by reason of the high
estimation in which the Greeks held the horse, they abstained from his
flesh. Mr. Gladstone (August 1889) replies that while on his guard against
speaking with confidence about the historic period, he thought he was safe
in saying that the Greeks did not eat the horse in the heroic period, and
he refers to passages in this book and the other. “It was only a
conjecture, however, on my part that the near relation of the horse to
human feeling and life may probably have been the cause that prevented the
consumption of horse-flesh.” In a further letter he refers his
correspondent to the closing part of the _Englishman in Paris_ for some
curious particulars on hippophagy. Then he seems to have interested
himself in a delicate question as to the personal claims of Socrates in
the light of a moral reformer, and the sage’s accommodation of moral
sentiment to certain existing fashions in Athenian manners. But as I have
not his side of the correspondence, I can only guess that his point was
the inferiority of the moral ideals of Socrates to those of Christ.
Gustave d’Eichthal, one of the celebrated group of Saint-Simonians who
mingled so much of what was chimerical with much that was practical and
fruitful, draws the attention of Mr. Gladstone, statesman, philosopher,
and hellenist, to writings of his own on the practical use of Greek, as
destined to be the great national language of humanity, perhaps even
within the space of two or three generations. Guizot begs him to accept
his book on Peel; and thanking him for his article on the “Royal
Supremacy” (Feb. 9, 1864), says further what must have given Mr. Gladstone
lively satisfaction:—


    Like you, I could wish that the anglican church had more
    independence and self-government; but such as it is, and taking
    all its history into account, I believe that of all the Christian
    churches, it is that in which the spiritual régime is best
    reconciled with the political, and the rights of divine tradition
    with those of human liberty.... I shall probably send you in the
    course of this year some meditations on the essence and history of
    the Christian religion. Europe is in an anti-Christian crisis; and
    having come near the term of life, I have it much at heart to mark
    my place in this struggle.


(M173) For some reason Henry Taylor encloses him (April 5, 1837) “a letter
written by Southey the other day to _a wild girl_ who sent him some
rhapsodies of her writing, and told him she should be in an agony till she
should receive his opinion of them.” This recalls a curious literary
incident, for the “wild girl” was Charlotte Brontë, and Southey warned her
that “literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life and ought not to
be,” and yet his letter was both sensible and kind, though as time showed
it was a bad shot.(330) Thackeray has been asked to breakfast but “I only
got your note at 2 o’clock this afternoon, when the tea would have been
quite cold; and next Thursday am engaged to lecture at Exeter, so that I
can’t hope to breakfast with you. I shall be absent from town some three
weeks, and hope Mrs. Gladstone will permit me to come to see her on my
return.” Froude, who was often at his breakfasts, gives him a book (year
doubtful): “I took the liberty of sending it you merely as an expression
of the respect and admiration that I have felt towards you for many
years,”—sentiments that hardly stood the wear and tear of time and
circumstance.

In 1850 what Macaulay styles a most absurd committee was appointed to
devise inscriptions for medals to be given to the exhibitors at the great
world-show of next year. Its members were, besides Macaulay himself and
Gladstone, Milman, Liddell, Lyttelton, Charles Merivale. Milman bethought
him of looking into Claudian, and sent to Mr. Gladstone three or four
alternative lines fished out from the last of the poets of Roman paganism.
Macaulay had another idea;—


    MY DEAR GLADSTONE,—I am afraid that we must wait till Thursday. I
    do not much, like taking words from a passage certainly obscure
    and probably corrupt. Could we not do better ourselves? I have
    made no Latin verses these many years. But I will venture. I send
    you three attempts:—

    Pulcher et ille labor, pulchros ornare labores.
    Pulchrum etiam, pulchros palma donare labores.
    Pulchrum etiam, pulchris meritam decernere palmam.

    You will easily make better. If we can produce a tolerable line
    among us, we may pretend, as Lardner did, that it is in
    Haphorstrus or Masenius.—Yours ever,      T. B. MACAULAY.


Francis Newman, the cardinal’s high-minded and accomplished brother,
writes to Mr. Gladstone (1878) in a strain of exalted recognition of his
services to the nation, and quotes (a little oddly perhaps) the beautiful
lines in Euripides, foretelling the approaching triumph of Dionysus over
his mortal foe.(331)

The poets are not absent. Wordsworth, as we have already seen (i. p. 269
_n._), sends to him at the board of trade his remonstrance and his sonnet
on the railway into Windermere. Tennyson addresses to him for his personal
behoof the sonnet upon the Redistribution bill of 1884—


    “Steersman, be not precipitate in thine act
    Of steering ...”


and on a sheet of note-paper at a later date when Irish self-government
was the theme, he copies the Greek lines from Pindar, “how easy a thing it
is even for men of light weight to shake a state, how hard to build it up
again.”(332) Rogers (1844) insists that, “if one may judge from
experience, perhaps the best vehicle in our language for a translator of
verse is prose. He who doubts it has only to open his Bible.... Who could
wish the stories of Joseph and of Ruth to be otherwise than they are? Or
who but would rejoice if the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ were so translated?
I once asked Porson to attempt it, and he seemed to like the idea, but
said that it would be a labour of ten or twelve years.”

(M174) There was one true poet, and not only a poet but a man, as we now
see, with far truer insight into the intellectual needs of his countrymen
than any other writer of the closing quarter of the century, who is
sometimes supposed to have been overlooked by Mr. Gladstone. And here in
the Octagon is Matthew Arnold’s letter soliciting his recommendation
(1867) for the strictly prosaic post of librarian of the House of Commons,
which happily he did not obtain. The year before, Arnold had wished to be
made a commissioner under the Endowed Schools Act, but a lawyer was
rightly thought necessary by Lord Russell or his advisers, and there is no
good reason to suppose that Mr. Gladstone meddled either way. He was
responsible in 1882 for a third disappointment, but here again it has been
truly said that to appoint to the charity commission a man of sixty, who
had no intimate knowledge of charity law, and who had recently in his
articles irritated all the nonconformists in England by his ironical
references to dissent and dissenters, would not have been conducive to the
efficient transaction of public business. A year later Mr. Gladstone
proffered him, and his friends made him accept, a civil list pension of
two hundred and fifty pounds a year, “in public recognition of service to
the poetry and literature of England.” Arnold in a letter here tries to
soften Mr. Gladstone’s heart on the subject of copyright, on which, as I
often made bold to tell him, he held some rather flagrant heresies. Here
the poet begs the minister to consider whether an English author ought not
to have property in his work for a longer time than he has now. “For many
books the sale begins late, the author has to create, as Wordsworth said,
the taste by which he is to be enjoyed. Such an author is surely the very
man one would wish to protect.” I fear he made no convert.

Another poet, with no eye on patronage or pension, hopes to be permitted
to say (1869), “how very many of your countrymen whom you have forgotten
or never saw, follow your noble and courageous development of legislation
with the same personal devotion, gratitude, and gladness that I feel.”
Then five years later he still assures him that among men of letters he
may have antagonists but he cannot have enemies—rather a fine distinction,
with painfully little truth in it as things happened.

To Miss Martineau, who had done hard work in more than one good cause, he
proposes a pension, which she honourably declines: “The work of my busy
years has supplied the needs of a quiet old age. On the former occasions
of my declining a pension I was poor, and it was a case of scruple
(possibly cowardice). Now I have a competence, and there would be no
excuse for my touching the public money. You will need no assurance that I
am as grateful for your considerate offer, as if it had relieved me of a
wearing anxiety.”

In 1885 he wrote to Mr. Watts, the illustrious painter, to request, with
the sanction of the Queen, that he would allow himself to be enrolled
among the baronets of the United Kingdom. “It gives me lively pleasure,”
he said, “to have the means of thus doing honour to art in the person of
so distinguished a representative of the noble pursuit.” Mr. Watts, in
words that I am permitted to transcribe, declined; as he did also a second
time in 1894 when the proposal was repeated.


    While I feel very strongly, and acknowledge with sincere
    gratitude, that you have honoured in my person, making me a sort
    of standard bearer, the pursuit of art for its own sake, and have
    so afforded an enduring encouragement to those who, like myself,
    may be willing to relinquish many good and tangible things for
    purposes believed to be good, but not likely to meet with general
    sympathy, still, I feel it would be something like a real disgrace
    to accept for work merely attempted, reward and payment only due
    to work achieved.... I should have the ghost of the Lycian chief
    reproaching me in my dreams! Also the objects to which I wish to
    dedicate the rest of my life will best be carried out in quiet and
    obscurity, so please do not be vexed with me if I again beg
    respectfully and gratefully to decline.... Sarpedon’s words(333)
    always ring in my ears, and so I think you will understand the
    things I cannot attempt to say.... I am so far from undervaluing
    distinctions that I should like to be a Duke, and deserve the
    title.... Still, it is true that, living mainly in a world of my
    own, my views are narrowed (I hope I may also say simplified),
    till a sense of the four great conditions which to my mind
    comprise all that can be demonstrated of our existence, Life and
    Death, Light and Darkness, so dominate my mental vision that they
    almost become material entities and take material forms, dwarfing
    and casting into shadow ordinary considerations. Over the two
    first, human efforts broadly speaking avail nothing; but we have
    it in our power to modify the two last (of course I include in the
    terms all that belongs to good and bad, beauty and ugliness).
    Labouring by the side of the poet and the statesman, the artist
    may deal with those great issues, and here I think the art of
    England has been at fault.... Your overestimate of my work has
    hastened the execution of an intention I have long had, and which
    indeed amounts to retirement from the ranks of professional men. I
    have concluded, dating from June, to undertake no portraits and
    accept no commissions, but, contented with the little I have to
    live upon, work only with the idea of making my efforts worthy, at
    least as efforts, of the nation’s acceptance alike before and
    after my death.


“You have adopted a resolution,” said Mr. Gladstone in his reply, “of the
kind that makes the nineteenth century stare or blink, as those blink who
stand in a great brightness and have not eyes for it. The course that you
purpose is indeed a self-denying, an unworldly, and a noble one.”

(M175) One packet touches a matter that at the moment did Mr. Gladstone
some harm in the judgment of men whose good opinion was worth having. In
1873 John Stuart Mill died, and a public memorial was proposed. Mr.
Gladstone intimated that he was willing to co-operate. Then a liberal
clergyman attacked the obituary notice in the _Times_ as too frigid, and
the author of the notice retorted by tales of Mill’s early views on the
question of population. He was well acquainted with Mr. Gladstone, and set
busily to work to persuade him that Mill in his book on political economy
advocated obnoxious checks, that he was vaguely associated with American
publications on the matter, and that he did not believe in God, which was
not to the point. Mr. Gladstone passed on this tissue of innuendo to the
Duke of Argyll. The Duke reported that he had consulted men thoroughly
conversant both with Mill and his writings; that he was assured no passage
could bear the construction imputed, and that the places which he had
himself looked into, clearly referred to prudential restraints on
marriage. Certainly a school of social economy that deals only with
foreign exchanges and rent and values and the virtues of direct taxes and
indirect, and draws the curtain around the question of population, must be
a singularly shallow affair. The Duke of Argyll manfully brushed wasps
aside, and sent his subscription. So did men as orthodox as Lord
Salisbury, and as cautious as Lord Derby. Mr. Gladstone on the other hand
wrote to the promoters of the memorial: “In my view this painful
controversy still exists. I feel that it is not possible for me, situated
as I am at the present time, to decide it or to examine it with a view to
decision. The only course open to me is to do no act involving a judgment
either way, and, therefore, while I desire to avoid any public step
whatever, I withdraw from co-operation, and request that my name may be no
further mentioned.” Unfortunately, the withdrawal of such a name could not
be other than a public step. To say, moreover, that the controversy still
existed, was to go a longish way in public opinion towards deciding it.
The curious thing is that Mr. Gladstone had known Mill so well—his
singleminded love of truth, his humanity, his passion for justice—as to
call him by the excellent name of “the Saint of Rationalism.” A saint of
any sort is surely uncommon enough in our fallen world, to claim an equity
that is not refused to sinners. Yet fifteen years later he wrote a letter
doing Mill more justice. “Of all the motives, stings, and stimulants,” he
wrote, “that reach men through their egoism in parliament, no part could
move or even touch him. His conduct and his language were in this respect
a sermon. Again, though he was a philosopher he was not, I think, a man of
crotchets. He had the good sense and practical tact of politics, together
with the high independent thought of a recluse.”(334)

A learned Unitarian (Beard) sends him a volume of Hibbert lectures. “All
systems,” Mr. Gladstone writes in acknowledging it, “have their _slang_,
but what I find in almost every page of your book is that you have none.”
He complains, however, of finding Augustine put into a leash with Luther
and Calvin. “Augustine’s doctrine of human nature is substantially that of
Bishop Butler; and he converted me about forty-five years ago to Butler’s
doctrine.” Of far earlier date than this (1839) is an interesting letter
from Montalembert:—


    _London, July 4, 1839._—It seems to me that amidst many
    _dissentimens_, and although you pass generally in this country
    for an enemy to my faith and my church, there is a link between
    us; since admitting every superiority of talent and influence on
    your side, we stand on the same ground in public life—that of the
    inalienable rights of spiritual power. I have, therefore, received
    your book with gratitude, and read it with the sincerest interest.
    I now take the liberty of offering you a portion of the work I
    have published, not on matter of actual controversy, but on an
    unknown and delightful subject of religious history. If you ever
    find leisure enough to throw a glance on the _History of St.
    Elizabeth_, and more particularly on the _Introduction_, which is
    a rapid _résumé_ of the thirteenth century, you will perhaps gain
    some slight information on what the Rev. Hugh McNeile so
    appropriately called “the filth and falsehood of the middle ages,”
    in his splendid speech on church extension, at Freemasons’ Hall a
    few days ago. And allow me to add, my dear sir, with the utter
    frankness which I cannot divest myself of, that what you seem to
    me to stand the most in need of at present, is a deeper and more
    original knowledge of the laws and events of Catholic Europe.


Then come others, recalling illustrious names and famous events in English
history. There are a dozen letters of business (1837-1846) from the Duke
of Wellington. The reader may be curious to see the earliest communication
between two such men—


    _London, Nov. 27, 1837._—I have by accident mislaid the petition
    from the Cape of Good Hope, if it was ever sent me. But I shall be
    happy to see you and converse with you upon the subject; and
    consider whether it is desirable or possible that I can bring the
    subject before the consideration of the House of Lords at the same
    time that you will in the H. of C. I would propose to you to come
    here, or that I should go to you to-morrow, Tuesday, at any hour
    you will name.—I have the honour to be, dear sir, your most
    faithful, humble servant,

    WELLINGTON.(335)


Once he uses his well-known laconic style—


    _Strathfieldsaye, January 3, 1842._—F. M. the Duke of Wellington
    presents his compliments to Mr. Gladstone. He has received Mr.
    Gladstone’s letter of the 1st inst. He begs leave to decline to
    interfere in any manner in the matter to which Mr. Gladstone’s
    letter refers.


What the matter was we cannot tell; but we may guess that it was perhaps
less tersely propounded. The rest touch military affairs in the colonies,
and are now of no concern.

Here we have a last vision of one of the forlorn shadows of ruined power:—


    _Chislehurst, le 5 Juillet, 1871._—Monsieur le Ministre, j’ai reçu
    la copie du nouveau Ballot bill que votre excellence a bien voulu
    m’envoyer et je profite de cette occasion pour vous dire combien
    je suis touché des marques d’attention que je reçois en
    Angleterre. Je vous prie de recevoir l’assurance de mes sentimens
    de haute estime.

    NAPOLÉON.


Notes from and to his illustrious adversary in the stirring arena of
public life are not without a delicate accent of pathos and sincerity. The
first was on some occasion of Mrs. Disraeli’s illness,(336) the second on
her death:—


    _Nov. 20, 1867._—I was incapable yesterday of expressing to you
    how much I appreciate your considerate sympathy. My wife had
    always a strong personal regard for you, and being of a vivid and
    original character, she could comprehend and value your great
    gifts and qualities. There is a ray of hope under this roof since
    the last four and twenty hours: round your hearth, I trust, health
    and happiness will be ever present.—Yours sincerely, B. DISRAELI.


Six years later when Lady Beaconsfield died, Mr. Gladstone wrote (Jan. 19,
1873):—


    DEAR MR. DISRAELI,—My reluctance to intrude on the sacredness and
    freshness of your sorrow may now, I think, properly give way to a
    yet stronger reluctance to forego adding our small but very
    sincere tribute of sympathy to those abundant manifestations of it
    which have been yielded in so many forms. You and I were, as I
    believe, married in the same year. It has been permitted to both
    of us to enjoy a priceless boon through a third of a century.
    Spared myself the blow which has fallen on you, I can form some
    conception of what it must have been and must be. I do not presume
    to offer you the consolation which you will seek from another and
    higher quarter. I offer only the assurance which all who know you,
    and all who knew Lady Beaconsfield, and especially those among
    them who like myself enjoyed for a length of time her marked,
    though unmerited regard, may perhaps tender without impropriety,
    the assurance that in this trying hour they feel deeply for you
    and with you.—Believe me, sincerely yours,

    W. E. GLADSTONE.

    _Hughenden Manor, Jan. 24, 1873._—DEAR MR. GLADSTONE,—I am much
    touched by your kind words in my great sorrow. I trust, I
    earnestly trust, that you may be spared a similar affliction.
    Marriage is the greatest earthly happiness, when founded on
    complete sympathy. That hallowed lot was mine, and for a moiety of
    my existence; and I know it is yours.—With sincere regard, D.


A last note, with the quavering pen-strokes of old age (Nov. 6, 1888),
comes from the hand, soon to grow cold, of one who had led so strange a
revolution, and had stood for so much in the movement of things that to
Mr. Gladstone were supreme:—


    It is a great kindness and compliment your wishing to see me. I
    have known and admired you so long. But I cannot write nor talk
    nor walk, and hope you will take my blessing, which I give from my
    heart.—Yours most truly, JOHN H. CARD. NEWMAN.


So the perpetual whirl of life revolves, “by nature an unmanageable
sight,” but—


    Not wholly so to him who looks
    In steadiness; who hath among least things
    An under-sense of greatest; sees the parts
    As parts, but with a feeling of the whole.(337)


Such steadiness, such under-sense and feeling of the whole, was Mr.
Gladstone’s gift and inspiration, never expending itself in pensive
musings upon the vain ambitions, illusions, cheats, regrets of human
life—such moods of half-morbid moralising were not in his temperament—but
ever stirring him to duty and manful hope, to intrepid self-denial and
iron effort.




Chapter IV. Eastern Question Once More. (1876-1877)


    The dead have been awakened—shall I sleep?
      The world’s at war with tyrants—shall I crouch?
    The harvest’s ripe—and shall I pause to reap?
      I slumber not—the thorn is in my couch:
    Each day a trumpet soundeth in mine ear,
      Its echo in my heart.

    —BRYON.



I


Preserved in the Octagon is a large packet of notes on “Future
Retribution,” and on them is the docket, “_From this I was called away to
write on Bulgaria._” In the spring of 1876 the Turkish volcano had burst
into flame. Of the Crimean war the reader has already seen enough and too
much.(338) Its successes, in Mr. Gladstone’s words, by a vast expenditure
of French and English life and treasure, gave to Turkey, for the first
time perhaps in her bloodstained history, twenty years of a repose not
disturbed either by herself or by any foreign power. As Cobden and Bright
had foreseen, as even many European statesmen who approved the war on
grounds of their own had foreseen, Turkish engagements were broken, for
this solid reason if for no other that Turkey had not in the resources of
her barbaric polity the means to keep them.

Fierce revolt against intolerable misrule slowly blazed up in Bosnia and
Herzegovina, and a rising in Bulgaria, not dangerous in itself, was put
down by Turkish troops despatched for the purpose from Constantinople,
with deeds described by the British agent who investigated them on the
spot, as the most heinous crimes that had stained the history of the
century. The consuls of France and Germany at Salonica were murdered by
the Turkish mob. Servia and Montenegro were in arms. Moved by these
symptoms of a vast conflagration, the three imperial courts of Russia,
Austria, and Germany agreed upon an instrument imposing on the Turk
certain reforms, to be carried out under European supervision. To this
instrument, known as the Berlin memorandum, England, along with France and
Italy, was invited to adhere (May 13). The two other Powers assented, but
Mr. Disraeli and his cabinet refused,—a proceeding that, along with more
positive acts, was taken by the Turk and other people to assure the moral
support of Great Britain to the Ottoman, and probably to threaten military
support against the Russian.

(M176) This rejection of the Berlin memorandum in May marked the first
decisive moment in British policy. The withdrawal of England from the
concert of Europe, the lurid glare of the atrocities in Bulgaria, and his
abiding sense of the responsibility imposed upon us by the Crimean war and
all its attendant obligations, were the three main elements in the mighty
storm that now agitated Mr. Gladstone’s breast. Perhaps his sympathies
with the Eastern church had their share. In a fragment of reminiscence
twenty years after, he says:—


    When, in 1876, the eastern question was forced forward by the
    disturbances in the Turkish empire, and especially by the cruel
    outrages in Bulgaria, I shrank naturally but perhaps unduly from
    recognising the claim they made upon me individually. I hoped that
    the ministers would recognise the moral obligations to the subject
    races of the east, which we had in honour contracted as parties to
    the Crimean war and to the peace of Paris in 1856. I was slow to
    observe the real leanings of the prime minister, his strong
    sympathy with the Turk, and his mastery in his own cabinet. I
    suffered others, Forster in particular, to go far ahead of me. At
    the close of the session [1876] a debate was raised upon the
    subject, and I had at length been compelled to perceive that the
    old idol was still to be worshipped at Constantinople, and that,
    as the only person surviving in the House of Commons who had been
    responsible for the Crimean war and the breaking of the bulwark
    raised by the treaty of Kainardji on behalf of the eastern
    Christians, I could no longer remain indifferent. Consequently in
    that debate Mr. Disraeli had to describe my speech as the only one
    that had exhibited a real hostility to the policy of the
    government. It was, however, at that time an opposition without
    hope. I went into the country, and had mentally postponed all
    further action to the opening of the next session, when I learned
    from the announcement of a popular meeting to be held in Hyde Park
    that the question was alive.(339) So I at once wrote and published
    on the Bulgarian case. From that time forward, till the final
    consummation in 1879-80, I made the eastern question the main
    business of my life. I acted under a strong sense of individual
    duty without a thought of leadership; nevertheless it made me
    again leader whether I would or no. The nation nobly responded to
    the call of justice, and recognised the brotherhood of man. But it
    was the nation, not the classes. When, at the close of the session
    of 1876, there was the usual dispersion in pursuit of recreation,
    I thought the occasion was bad. It was good, for the nation did
    not disperse and the human heart was beating. When the clubs
    refilled in October, the Turkish cause began again to make head.
    Then came a chequered period, and I do not recollect to have
    received much assistance from the “front bench.” Even Granville
    had been a little startled at my proceedings, and wished me to
    leave out the “bag and baggage” from my pamphlet.


Before the end of the session of 1876 Mr. Disraeli quitted the House of
Commons and became the Earl of Beaconsfield. Lord Granville informed Mr.
Gladstone, on the authority of a high personage, that Disraeli had said to
the Queen he must resign; “that the peerage was then suggested; that at
first he said, ‘Yes, but accompanied with resignation,’ but was told that
in the present state of Europe that was impossible.” In reporting to Sir
Arthur Gordon, then abroad, what was not merely a piece of news but an
event, Mr. Gladstone says (Aug. 16):—


    Disraeli assumes his earldom amidst loud acclaims. I had better be
    mute about him and his influence generally, except as to a full
    acknowledgment of his genius and his good points of character. His
    government is supposed now to stand mainly upon its recent foreign
    policy: the most selfish and least worthy I have ever known.
    Whatever was open to any degree of exception in Palmerston, has
    this year received a tenfold development in Disraeli. Derby’s
    influence, I think, has been for good; but too little of it.


To the Duke of Argyll a couple of days before, he had written:—


    I am entirely in harmony with you as to your view of the eastern
    policy. It has been depressing and corrupting to the country; a
    healthier air has been generated by indignation at the Bulgarian
    massacres, which have thrown us back on our rather forgotten
    humanity. I hope the subject will not slumber through the recess.
    Dizzy’s speech (so I call him with all due respect to the peerage)
    in the Turkish debate gave me a new light on his views. He is not
    quite such a Turk as I had thought. What he hates is Christian
    liberty and reconstruction. He supports old Turkey, thinking that
    if vital improvements can be averted, it must break down; and his
    fleet is at Besika Bay, I feel pretty sure, to be ready to lay
    hold of Egypt as his share. So he may end as the Duke of Memphis
    yet.



II


Then came the pamphlet. The story of this memorable publication is told in
the diary:—


    _Aug. 28, 1876._—Church 8-½ A.M. Worked on a beginning for a
    possible pamphlet on the Turkish question. I stupidly brought on
    again my lumbago by physical exertion. Was obliged to put off my
    pamphlet. Read _The Salvation of all Men_ ... 29.—Kept my bed
    long. Wrote to Lord Granville, etc. ... and as a treat began
    _Waverley_ once more. Lumbago bad. 30.—Much bed; forswear all
    writing. Read St. Thomas Aquinas on the Soul.... _Waverley_. A
    snug evening in the Temple of Peace. 31.—Kept my bed till four,
    and made tolerable play in writing on Bulgarian horrors. _Sept.
    1._—Wrote [16 letters]. Again worked hard in bed and sent off more
    than half to the printers. Read _Waverley_. Short drive with C.
    2.—This day I wrote again a good piece of the pamphlet in bed, but
    improved considerably. Rose at four. Read _Waverley_ in the
    evening. 3.—Hawarden Church 11 A.M. and 6-½ P.M. Wrote [16
    letters]. Off at 10.15 P.M. for London. 4.—Reached 18 C.H.T. at
    five in the morning by limited mail; bed till nine. Saw Lord
    Granville, Mr. Delane, Sir A. Panizzi, Mr. Clowes, Messrs. Murray,
    the American minister. In six or seven hours, principally at the
    British Museum, I completed my MS., making all the needful
    searches of papers and journals. Also worked on proof sheets.

    _To Mrs. Gladstone._—We had an interesting little party at
    Granville’s. I had a long talk with Delane. We, he and I, are much
    of one mind in thinking the Turks must go out of Bulgaria, though
    retaining a titular supremacy if they like. Between ourselves,
    Granville a little hangs back from this, but he could not persuade
    me to hold it back.

    5.— ... Saw Lord Granville, Lord Hartington.... Finished the
    correction of revises before one, discussing the text with Lord
    Granville and making various alterations of phrase which he
    recommended. At seven I received complete copies. We went to the
    Haymarket theatre. Arranged my papers after this, and sent off
    copies in various directions.


(M177) The pamphlet spread like fire.(340) Within three or four days of
its first appearance forty thousand copies had gone. It was instantly
followed up by a tremendous demonstration among his constituents. “Sept.
9, 1876.—Thought over my subject for Blackheath. Off at two. A very large
meeting. The most enthusiastic far that I ever saw. Spoke over an hour.”
This is his very prosaic story of the first of those huge and excited
multitudes of which for months and years to come he was to confront so
many. The pamphlet and the Blackheath speech were his rejoinder to the
light and callous tones of Mr. Disraeli, and the sceptical language of his
foreign secretary, “I have a strong suspicion,” he told the Duke of
Argyll, who was a fervent sympathiser, “that Dizzy’s crypto-Judaism has
had to do with his policy. The Jews of the east _bitterly_ hate the
Christians; who have not always used them well.” This suspicion was
constant. “Disraeli,” he said to Mr. Gladstone, “may be willing to risk
his government for his Judaic feeling,—the deepest and truest, now that
his wife has gone, in his whole mind.”

The tract beats with a sustained pulse and passion that recall Burke’s
letters on the _Regicide Peace_. The exhortation against moral complicity
with “the basest and blackest outrages upon record within the present
century, if not within the memory of man”; the branding of the Turkish
race as “the one great anti-human specimen of humanity”; the talk of “fell
satanic orgies”; the declaration that there was not a criminal in a
European gaol nor a cannibal in the South Sea Islands, whose indignation
would not rise at the recital of that which had been done, which remained
unavenged, which had left behind all the foul and all the fierce passions
that produced it, and might again spring up in another murderous harvest,
from the soil soaked and reeking with blood, and in the air tainted with
every imaginable deed of crime and shame,—all this vehemence was hailed
with eager acclamation by multitudes who felt all that he felt, and found
in his passionate invective words and a voice. Mr. Gladstone was not the
man, his readers and his public were not the men, for mere denunciation.
They found in him a policy. Indignation, he said in a thoroughly
characteristic sentence, indignation is froth, except as it leads to
action; mere remonstrance is mockery. There are states of affairs, he told
them, in which human sympathy refuses to be confined by the rules,
necessarily limited and conventional, of international law. Servia and
Montenegro in going to war against Turkey might plead human sympathies,
broad, deep, and legitimate, and that they committed no moral offence. The
policy of the British government was the _status quo_, “as you were.” This
meant the maintenance of Turkish executive authority. What was really
needed was the total withdrawal of the administrative rule of the Turk.
And here he used words that became very famous in the controversy:—


    But I return to, and end with, that which is the omega as well as
    the alpha of this great and most mournful case. An old servant of
    the crown and state, I entreat my countrymen, upon whom far more
    than perhaps any other people of Europe it depends, to require and
    to insist that our government which has been working in one
    direction shall work in the other, and shall apply all its vigour
    to concur with the other states of Europe in obtaining the
    extinction of the Turkish executive power in Bulgaria. Let the
    Turks now carry away their abuses in the only possible manner,
    namely by carrying off themselves. Their Zaptiehs and their
    Mudirs, their Bimbashis and their Yuzbashis, their Kaimakams and
    their Pashas, one and all, bag and baggage, shall I hope clear out
    from the province they have desolated and profaned.


At Blackheath, under dripping rain clouds, he said the same, though with
the invective tempered. “You shall receive your regular tribute,” he said
in slow sentences to imaginary Ottomans, whom he seemed to hold before his
visual eye, “you shall retain your titular sovereignty, your empire shall
not be invaded, but never again as the years roll in their course, so far
as it is in our power to determine, never again shall the hand of violence
be raised by you, never again shall the flood-gates of lust be open to
you, never again shall the dire refinements of cruelty be devised by you
for the sake of making mankind miserable.”

Once again, it was not words that made the power of the orator, it was the
relation in purpose, feeling, and conviction between him and his audience.
He forced them into unity with himself by the vivid strength of his
resolution and imagination; he could not believe that his own power of
emotion was not theirs too:—


    On Monday morning last between four and five o’clock, I was
    rattling down from Euston station through the calm and silent
    streets of London, when there was not a footfall to disturb them.
    Every house looked so still, that it might well have been a
    receptacle of the dead. But as I came through those long lines of
    streets, I felt it to be an inspiring and a noble thought that in
    every one of these houses there were intelligent human beings, my
    fellow-countrymen, who when they woke would give many of their
    earliest thoughts, aye and some of their most energetic actions,
    to the terrors and sufferings of Bulgaria.


All this was the very spirit of Milton’s imperishable sonnet upon the late
Massacre in Piedmont; the spirit that made Cromwell say that the slaughter
in the Waldensian valleys “came as near to his heart as if his own nearest
and dearest had been concerned.”

(M178) Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, who had been one of the most
responsible promoters of the policy of the Crimean war, told Mr. Gladstone
of his own strong impression (Sept. 10), that the formidable crisis would
not have arisen, had England in the first instance taken part with the
other Powers. Not that he believed that Russia was always and fully
trustworthy, but she was so circumstanced then as to be open to the full
bearing of our moral influence. Six weeks later Lord Stratford again
expressed his unaltered opinion that if in the beginning England had taken
her place at the side of the three emperors, the cloud on the horizon
would never have swelled out into its present colossal proportions. “It
seems to me,” he said, “that Russia has been gradually drawn into a
position from which she can hardly retreat with credit.” “Whatever shades
of difference appear in our opinions,” he told Mr. Gladstone in September,
“may be traced in a great measure to your having made Bulgaria the main
object of your appeal, whereas the whole eastern question was my theme,
and the Bulgarian atrocities, execrable as they were, only a part of it.”
The truth was that in making the atrocious doings in Bulgaria the main
object of his appeal, Mr. Gladstone had both displayed a sure instinct as
to the most effective method of popular approach, and at the same time did
justice to his own burning and innate hatred of all cruelty and
oppression, whether in Bourbon or Bashi-Bazouk. Humanity was at the root
of the whole matter; and the keynote of this great crusade was the
association of humanity with a high policy worthy of the British name.

October was passed in a round of visits to great houses, the popular tide
in the north still appearing to rise around him. To Lord Granville he
writes:—


    _Alnwick Castle, Oct. 3, 1876._—We have advanced thus far in a
    northern and eastern tour, and we hope to be at Castle Howard on
    Wednesday. I left home at this particular time partly with ideas
    of health and relaxation, partly because I thought that being
    everywhere and nowhere I should escape a little from the turmoil
    of the time. Through Cheshire and Lancashire we accomplished the
    first stage of our journey to Raby without witnessing any
    particular indication of public sentiment; and this rather
    encouraged our extending a little the circle of our visits, which
    I am now half tempted to regret. For at every point I have had the
    greatest difficulty in maintaining any show of privacy, and
    avoiding strong manifestations. I never saw such keen exhibitions
    of the popular feeling, appearing so to pervade all ranks and
    places. A tory county member said to my wife two days ago, “If
    there were a dissolution now, I should not get a vote.” This may
    be in some degree peculiar to the northerners with their strong
    character and deep emotions....

    _Castle Howard, Oct. 7, 1876._—Before receiving your letter of the
    5th, I had been driven to the conclusion that I must make a
    further utterance, following the actual course of the
    transactions. And upon the whole I adhere to this conclusion,
    notwithstanding your opinion, to which I attach great weight.
    There is a great difference in our situations, which I think
    accounts for this difference of view. I found Ailesbury, of
    course, full of friendship and loyalty to you, but disposed to
    regret that you had not been able to see your way to a more
    advanced and definite policy. I told him that I found no cause for
    surprise in your reserve, and thought you held yourself in hand
    for the purpose of holding your party in hand—a view which I think
    he more or less embraced. Now, I have not your responsibilities to
    the party, but I have for the moment more than your
    responsibilities to the country, in this sense that I feel myself
    compelled to advise from time to time upon the course of that
    national movement which I have tried hard to evoke, and assist in
    evoking. I regard myself as an outside workman, engaged in the
    preparation of materials, which you and the party will probably
    have to manipulate and then to build into a structure. For though
    I do not wish to shut the door upon the government, I despair of
    them, after so many invitations and so many refusals....


(M179) To Madame Novikoff, a Russian lady who at this time began to
exercise a marked influence upon the opinions of important men with much
influence on the opinions of many other people,(341) he indicated some
doubtful symptoms:—


    _Hawarden, Oct. 17, 1876._—There is an undoubted and smart rally
    on behalf of Turkey in the metropolitan press. It is in the main
    representative of the ideas and opinions of what are called the
    upper ten thousand. From this body there has never on any occasion
    within my memory proceeded the impulse that has prompted, and
    finally achieved, _any_ of the great measures which in the last
    half century have contributed so much to the fame and happiness of
    England. They did not emancipate the dissenters, Roman catholics,
    and Jews. They did not reform the parliament. They did not
    liberate the negro slave. They did not abolish the corn law. They
    did not take the taxes off the press. They did not abolish the
    Irish established church. They did not cheer on the work of
    Italian freedom and reconstitution. Yet all these things have been
    done; and done by other agencies than theirs, and despite their
    opposition. When I speak of _them_, I speak of course of the
    majority among them. Unhappily, the country is understood abroad
    mainly through the metropolitan press.


He was no sooner back at Hawarden than he fell to work on subsidiary
branches of the question of questions.


    _Oct. 22._—Worked hard and finished my paper on Russia in
    Turkestan, and sent it off. Criminal justice on Sunday! But it is
    for peace. 24.—To London. 27.—Up at 6. Went with Harry to Dover,
    saw him off on board the packet and pier [on his way to India].
    Drove over to Walmer, reviewed the place, saw Lord Granville and
    Sir W. James. Returned to London, and at 9.30 to the Gaiety, saw a
    miserable burlesque of which I had heard a most inviting but false
    account. 28.—To Hawarden. 31.—Tennyson and H. T. came. _Nov.
    1._—Tennyson read to us his _Harold_. It took near 2-½ hours. Walk
    with him and a party. 2.—Read Bagehot on Lord Spencer’s
    _Life_—very clever, very imperfect. Conversation with Tennyson on
    future retribution and other matters of theology. He has not
    thought, I conceive, systematically or thoroughly upon them, but
    is much alarmed at the prospect of the loss of belief. He left us
    at one. Walk and long conversation with Lord Acton, who seems in
    opinion to go beyond Döllinger, though in certain things he stops
    short of him. 8.—Read aloud the debate of the first _Iliad_ from
    Pope. 9.—Read aloud my version of the Assembly—_Iliad_ i. 10.—Read
    aloud Lord Derby’s and Cowper’s version of the Assembly. 14.—The
    Olympian part of _Iliad_ I. in Pope’s version aloud, and then my
    own. 17.—We went to Liverpool, where we attended the theatre to
    see Pennington in _Hamlet_. It was really excellent. I never was
    so well received in that town. 21.—Finished revision of my MS.,
    “The Hellenic Factor in the Eastern Problem,” and sent it to
    press.



III


At the Lord Mayor’s feast in November, the prime minister used menacing
language. The policy of England, he said, was peace, but no country was so
well prepared for war as ours. If England were to enter into a righteous
war, her resources were inexhaustible. “She is not a country that, when
she enters into a campaign, has to ask herself whether she can support a
second or a third campaign. She enters into a campaign which she will not
terminate till right is done.” This was a hardly veiled threat to Russia,
it was encouragement to Turkey, it was incitement to a war party in Great
Britain. “The provocation offered by Disraeli at the Guildhall,” wrote Mr.
Gladstone, “is almost incredible. Some new lights about his Judaic feeling
in which he is both consistent and conscientious have come in upon me.”

Still the general feeling was strongly adverse to any action on behalf of
Turkey. Mr. Gladstone eagerly noted even the most trivial incident that
pointed this way. “Yesterday night,” he wrote (Nov. 26), “in the tory town
of Liverpool, when Othello was being acted, and the words were reached
‘The Turks are drowned,’ the audience rose in enthusiasm and interrupted
the performance for some time with their cheering. These things are not
without meaning.” Men who commonly stood aside from political activity
were roused. “Mr. Carlyle,” says Mr. Ruskin, “Mr. Froude, and several
other men of creditable name gathered together at call of Mr. Gladstone as
for a great national need, together with other men of more retired
mind—Edward Burne-Jones for one, and myself for another.”

(M180) The reply to the Guildhall speech was a conference at St. James’s
Hall (Dec. 8), one of the most remarkable gatherings of representative men
of every type and from every part of the kingdom ever held in this
country. “I have most flourishing accounts of the progress of preparations
for the conference of which I have been a promoter from the beginning.
They urge me to speak on the 8th, but I should much prefer that others
should put themselves in the foreground.” Besides the eminent politicians,
great territorial magnates were there, and men of letters, and divines of
various churches, and men who had never been to a militant assembly in
their lives before,—all with a resolute purpose expressed by Mr.
Trevelyan, “No matter how the prime minister may finger the hilt of the
sword, the nation will take care that it never leaves the scabbard.” Mr.
Gladstone reached London a day or two before. On the 8th, he enters:—


    8.—Made notes and extracts for speech. Attended the meetings at
    St. James’s Hall, 12-1-½ and 4-8. Spoke (I fear) 1-½ hours with
    some exertion, far from wholly to my satisfaction. The meetings
    were great, notable, almost historical.

    The day after this important and impressive gathering he was back
    at Hawarden, busy at his article upon the life of the Prince
    Consort. Then came Christmas day,—“The most solemn I have known
    for long; I see that eastward sky of storm and of underlight!”


At a suggestion from the London foreign office, a conference of the great
Powers met at Constantinople in the middle of December. Lord Salisbury
went as the representative of England. To a correspondent Mr. Gladstone
spoke of this as an excellent selection:—


    I think it right at once to give you my opinion of Lord Salisbury,
    whom I know pretty well in private. He has little foreign or
    eastern knowledge, and little craft; he is rough of tongue in
    public debate, but a great gentleman in private society; he is
    very remarkably clever, of unsure judgment, but is above anything
    mean; has no Disraelite prejudices; keeps a conscience, and has
    plenty of manhood and character. In a word the appointment of Lord
    Salisbury to Constantinople is the best thing the government have
    yet done in the eastern question.


As the conference met, so it ran a usual course, and then vanished. The
Powers were in complete accord as to the demands that were to be made upon
Turkey for the protection of the unfortunate Christian rayahs. The Turk in
just confidence that he should find a friend, rejected them, and the
envoys departed to their homes. Mr. Gladstone, however, found comfort in
the thought that by the agitation two points had been gained: the
re-establishment of the European concert, and extrication from a
disgraceful position of virtual complicity with Turkey.

In the spring of 1877 he wrote a second pamphlet,(342) because a speech in
the House could not contain detail enough, and because parliamentary
tradition almost compelled a suspension of discussion while ministers were
supposed to be engaged in concert with other Powers in devising a
practical answer to Russian inquiry. He found that it “produced no great
impression,” the sale not going beyond six or seven thousand copies.
Still, the gala remained from the proceeding in the autumn, that the
government dared not say they had nothing to do with the condition of the
Christian rayahs of Turkey, and any idea of going to war for Turkey was
out of the question.

Public feeling had waxed very hot, yet without any clear precision of
opinion or purpose on the side opposed to Mr. Gladstone’s policy of
emancipation. Dean Church (Dec. 1876) describes how “everybody was very
savage with everybody about Turks and Russians: I think I never remember
such an awkward time for meeting people (until you know you are on the
same side) except at the height of the Tractarian row.”(343)

(M181) A little later we have one of the best pictures of him that I know,
from the warm and vivid hand of J. R. Green, the historian:—


    _Feb. 21, 1877._—Last night I met Gladstone—it will always be a
    memorable night to me; Stubbs was there, and Goldwin Smith, and
    Humphry Sandwith, and Mackenzie Wallace, whose great book on
    Russia is making such a stir, besides a few other nice people; but
    one forgets everything in Gladstone himself, in his perfect
    naturalness and grace of manner, his charming abandon of
    conversation, his unaffected modesty, his warm ardour for all that
    is noble and good. I felt so proud of my leader—the chief I have
    always clung to through good report and ill report—because, wise
    or unwise as he might seem in this or that, he was always noble of
    soul. He was very pleasant to me, and talked of the new historic
    school he hoped we were building up as enlisting his warmest
    sympathy. I wish you could have seen with what a glow he spoke of
    the Montenegrins and their struggle for freedom; how he called on
    us who wrote history to write what we could of that long fight for
    liberty! And all through the evening not a word to recall his
    greatness amongst us, simple, natural, an equal among his equals,
    listening to every one, drawing out every one, with a force and a
    modesty that touched us more than all his power.


In another letter, says the same ardent man, “I begin to see that there
may be a truer wisdom in the ‘humanitarianism’ of Gladstone than in the
purely political views of Disraeli. The sympathies of peoples with
peoples, the sense of a common humanity between nations, the aspirations
of nationalities after freedom and independence, _are_ real political
forces; and it is just because Gladstone owns them as forces, and Disraeli
disowns them, that the one has been on the right side, and the other on
the wrong in parallel questions such as the upbuilding of Germany or
Italy. I think it will be so in this upbuilding of the Sclave.”(344)

It was my own good fortune to pass two days with him at this moment at
High Elms. Huxley and Playfair were of the party. Mr. Gladstone had with
him the printer’s proofs of his second pamphlet, and was in full glow
against Turkish terrorism and its abettors. This strong obsession could
not be concealed, nor was there any reason why it should be; it made no
difference in his ready courtesy and kindness of demeanour, his
willingness to enter into other people’s topics, his pliant force and
alacrity of mind. On the Sunday afternoon Sir John Lubbock, our host, took
us all up to the hilltop whence in his quiet Kentish village Darwin was
shaking the world. The illustrious pair, born in the same year, had never
met before. Mr. Gladstone as soon as seated took Darwin’s interest in
lessons of massacre for granted, and launched forth his thunderbolts with
unexhausted zest. His great, wise, simple, and truth-loving listener,
then, I think, busy on digestive powers of the drosera in his green-house,
was intensely delighted. When we broke up, watching Mr. Gladstone’s erect
alert figure as he walked away, Darwin, shading his eyes with his hand
against the evening rays, said to me in unaffected satisfaction, “What an
honour that such a great man should come to visit me!” Too absorbed in his
own overwhelming conflict with the powers of evil, Mr. Gladstone makes no
mention of his afternoon call, and only says of the two days that “he
found a notable party, and made interesting conversation,” and that he
“could not help liking” one of the company, then a stranger to him. In his
absence at church, we were talking of the qualities that send men forward
and keep them back. “I should like to know,” cried Huxley, “what would
keep such a man as that back,” pointing to where Mr. Gladstone had been
sitting; “why, put him in the middle of a moor, with nothing in the world
but his shirt, and you could not prevent him from being anything he
liked.” And Huxley was as far as possible from being a Gladstonian.



IV


(M182) Events meanwhile had moved. The failure of the conference in
December, and the futility of an instrument known as the London protocol
devised in March, led up to a declaration of war by Russia against Turkey
in April. We now come to an episode in this controversy, that excited
lively passions at the moment, and subjected Mr. Gladstone’s relation to
his party to a strain that would have been profoundly painful, if his
heroic intensity had not for the time taken him beyond the region of pain
and pleasure.


    _To Lord Granville. 73 Harley Street, April 23, 1877._—The
    protocol, the refusal of Turkey, the insistence of Russia, have
    been followed to-night by the announcement that the Russian Chargé
    has suspended relations with Turkey. Is not the moment now come
    for raising the rather stiff question whether a policy, or a
    substantive motion, is to be submitted to parliament? I hold back
    from a conclusion as long as I can, that I may benefit by the
    views of others. But it is perfectly plain that Salisbury is at a
    discount, and that the government grow more Turkish every day;
    reasonably plain that some grave arguments against moving have now
    lost their force. My own inclination is towards a series of
    resolutions with such points as are rudely indicated on the
    enclosed scrap. Please to let me have it again at some time; I
    have no copy.

    _To the Duke of Argyll. April 26, 1877._—I have drawn some
    resolutions of which I intend to give notice to-day unless the
    leaders will move. If they will move, though they may say much
    less, I can support them and express my fuller ideas in a speech.
    I cannot leave my bed, but notice will be given in my name.

    _From the Diary. April 27, 1877._—Ill in the night; kept my bed.
    Saw Dr. Clark twice. Saw Mr. Goschen, Lord Wolverton, Mr. Bright,
    Lord Frederick Cavendish. This day I took my decision, a severe
    one, in face of my not having a single approver in the _upper_
    official circle. But had I in the first days of September asked
    the same body whether I ought to write my pamphlet, I believe the
    unanimous answer would have been No. Arranged for the first
    (general) notice to be given, in my absence.


The resolutions were five in number, and the pith of them was, first, an
expression of complaint against the Porte; second, a declaration that, in
the absence of guarantees on behalf of the subject populations, the Porte
had lost all claim to support, moral or material; third, a desire that
British influence should be employed on behalf of local liberty and
self-government in the disturbed provinces; fourth, this influence to be
addressed to promoting the concert of the Powers in exacting from the
Porte such changes as they might deem to be necessary for humanity and
justice; fifth, an address to the crown accordingly. On the expediency of
these resolutions, at a moment when a war with many complexities had just
broken out, opinion in the party was divided. The official liberals and
their special adherents doubted. The radicals below the gangway, headed by
Mr. Chamberlain and Sir Charles Dilke, supported the resolutions with
enthusiasm. Adverse notices of the previous question were put upon the
paper. Lord Granville wrote to Mr. Gladstone (May 2) that his colleagues
on the front opposition bench had met, and were still of opinion, “that it
was not opportune at this moment to move resolutions, and thought that the
least antagonistic course as regarded you would be to vote for one of the
motions announced for the previous question.” To the Duke of Argyll Mr.
Gladstone wrote on the 4th:—


    Our friends of the late cabinet have fallen into a sad series of
    errors, some of which I fear will be greatly resented in the
    country. To meet on Wednesday; to use the private pressure which
    is being used, as I am told, against the resolutions; and above
    all to have announced the result of the meeting in the papers of
    yesterday; these form a combination, in my opinion, deplorable and
    almost incredible. I shall do all in my power to avert
    consequences, but my difficulties are greatly increased.


It looked as if a mortal split within the party were inevitable.


    _From the Diary. May 5._—The post brought me near 140 letters
    to-day which took some hours to examine, but they are most
    remarkable. Saw Lord Granville with Lord Wolverton. They opened
    the means of bridging over the chasm inadvertently made; and I
    readily went into the scheme. It was carried through by Granville
    at a meeting of his friends after the Academy dinner, and he came
    to me at Wolverton’s with Hartington to make known the result and
    consider some details of execution. What they ask of me is really,
    from my point of view, little more than nominal. They have in
    truth been awakened as from a slumber by the extraordinary
    demonstrations in the country. 3—4-½ attended the Academy
    exhibition. 6-½-10-1/4 at the dinner; spoke for literature! My
    reception surprised me, it was so good.


(M183) What was asked was that he should consent to an amended form of his
second resolution, declaring more simply and categorically that the Turk,
by his misgovernment, had lost his claims. As to the other resolutions,
according to a common usage, it was at his choice to accept a division on
the first or first two, and not divide upon the rest. His speech, of
course, would cover the ground of all the resolutions. This reduction was,
as he truly said, “little more than nominal.” A friendly question was to
be put when the time came, and in reply he would state how things stood.

The critical day arrived, and not often has parliamentary excitement been
so high. It was a battle of high national and even European policy, for
England was now at the front; it was a battle between two sections of a
party; it was the ordeal of a man admitted to be the greatest in the
House, and perhaps some of the onlookers felt much like the curious
Florentines, as they wondered what would happen to Savonarola and the
monks in the great Trial by Fire.


    _From the Diary. May 7._—This day came in about 100 meetings and
    say 200 letters or 250. Worked hard upon the blue book, and
    references and notes for speech. House at 4-1/4. For over two
    hours I was assaulted from every quarter, except the opposition
    bench, which was virtually silent. Such a sense of solitary
    struggle I never remember. At last I rose on the main question
    nearly in despair as to the result; but resolved at least not to
    fail through want of effort. I spoke 2-½ hours, voice lasting
    well. House gradually came round and at the last was more than
    good. It was over at 9.30. Never did I feel weaker and more
    wormlike. Dinner at Sir W. James’s and H. of C. again
    10-3/4-12-3/4. 8.—I am the spoiled child of sleep. This night was
    an exception.


The scene began with the question as preconcerted, put by Mr. Trevelyan.
Such moves never fail to provoke some measure of mockery, and this time
both regular opponents and opponents in more or less disguise thought that
they had got the monarch of the forest down. The situation was one that
opened the way for Mr. Gladstone’s love of over-precision, and his various
explanations prolonged the wrangle. It lasted until the dinner-hour.
“While many members,” says one observer, “were streaming out to dine and
those who remained looked dejectedly at their watches, Mr. Gladstone, who
is sixty-eight years of age, sprang again to his feet, and without any
sign of diminished spirit delivered a noble speech lasting two hours and a
half. It was perhaps the greatest triumph of irrepressible moral and
physical vitality over depressing conditions that was ever won in the
House of Commons.”(345)

The record of a distinguished eyewitness, himself one day to be prime
minister, ought not to be omitted:—


    There was one of those preliminary parliamentary debates—or series
    of debates—which preceded the main business of the evening. In
    this Mr. Gladstone had to speak not once or twice, but several
    times, and it was not until hour after hour had passed in this
    preliminary skirmish in a House hostile, impatient, and utterly
    wearied, that he got up to present his case with that conviction
    that he was right, which was his great strength as a speaker in
    and out of the House. I never shall forget the impression that
    speech left on my mind. As a mere feat of physical endurance it
    was almost unsurpassed; as a feat of parliamentary courage,
    parliamentary skill, parliamentary endurance, and parliamentary
    eloquence, I believe it will always be unequalled.(346)


As he drew to his close, he looked according to Mr. Forster, “_like an
inspired man_,” and I have heard many hearers of cool temperament declare
the passage about the Montenegrins and onwards, to have been the most
thrilling deliverance that could ever be conceived. Here is this noble
peroration:—


    Sir, there were other days when England was the hope of freedom.
    Wherever in the world a high aspiration was entertained, or a
    noble blow was struck, it was to England that the eyes of the
    oppressed were always turned—to this favourite, this darling home
    of so much privilege and so much happiness, where the people that
    had built up a noble edifice for themselves would, it was well
    known, be ready to do what in them lay to secure the benefit of
    the same inestimable boon for others. You talk to me of the
    established tradition and policy in regard to Turkey. I appeal to
    an established tradition older, wider, nobler far—a tradition not
    which disregards British interests, but which teaches you to seek
    the promotion of these interests in obeying the dictates of honour
    and justice. And, sir, what is to be the end of this? Are we to
    dress up the fantastic ideas some people entertain about this
    policy and that policy in the garb of British interests, and then,
    with a new and base idolatry, fall down and worship them? Or are
    we to look, not at the sentiment, but at the hard facts of the
    case, which Lord Derby told us fifteen years ago—viz., that it is
    the populations of those countries that will ultimately possess
    them—that will ultimately determine their abiding condition? It is
    to this fact, this law, that we should look. There is now before
    the world a glorious prize. A portion of those unhappy people are
    still as yet making an effort to retrieve what they have lost so
    long, but have not ceased to love and to desire. I speak of those
    in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Another portion—a band of heroes such
    as the world has rarely seen—stand on the rocks of Montenegro, and
    are ready now, as they have ever been during the 400 years of
    their exile from their fertile plains, to sweep down from their
    fastnesses and meet the Turks at any odds for the re-establishment
    of justice and of peace in those countries. Another portion still,
    the 5,000,000 of Bulgarians, cowed and beaten down to the ground,
    hardly venturing to look upwards, even to their Father in heaven,
    have extended their hands to you; they have sent you their
    petition, they have prayed for your help and protection. They have
    told you that they do not seek alliance with Russia, or with any
    foreign power, but that they seek to be delivered from an
    intolerable burden of woe and shame. That burden of woe and
    shame—the greatest that exists on God’s earth—is one that we
    thought united Europe was about to remove; but to removing which,
    for the present, you seem to have no efficacious means of offering
    even the smallest practical contribution. But, sir, the removal of
    that load of woe and shame is a great and noble prize. It is a
    prize well worth competing for. It is not yet too late to try to
    win it. I believe there are men in the cabinet who would try to
    win it, if they were free to act on their own beliefs and
    aspirations. It is not yet too late, I say, to become competitors
    for that prize; but be assured that whether you mean to claim for
    yourselves even a single leaf in that immortal chaplet of renown,
    which will be the reward of true labour in that cause, or whether
    you turn your backs upon that cause and upon your own duty, I
    believe, for one, that the knell of Turkish tyranny in these
    provinces has sounded. So far as human eye can judge, it is about
    to be destroyed. The destruction may not come in the way or by the
    means that we should choose; but come this boon from what hands it
    may, it will be a noble boon, and as a noble boon will gladly be
    accepted by Christendom and the world.



V


The division, after a debate that lasted five days, resulted in 354 for
ministers, against 223 for Mr. Gladstone.


    Of course if you had gone on alone, Lord Granville told him, you
    would only have had either more or less than half the liberal
    party. If Hartington had moved the first two resolutions, the
    government would certainly have had some 160 or 170 majority. All
    the malcontents behind the opposition front benches were obliged
    to vote on Monday, in consequence of having so vigorously preached
    allegiance during the previous ten days. As it is, the party voted
    pretty well.


(M184) “The assumed laughter of the conservatives,” he adds, “showed their
vexation, and _some_ of the radicals showed their cards—that it is not the
eastern question, but the hopes of breaking up the party that really
excites them.” The radicals on their part were extremely sore at the
withdrawal of the resolutions. “Your goodness,” wrote their leading man to
Mr. Gladstone the following day, “has been abused in the interests of a
section of the party who deserve least at your hands. The current report
in the lobbies last night, spread by these gentlemen, and easily believed
by their friends, was that you had ‘caved in.’ ” Could he not take some
further opportunity of showing that he had not abandoned the policy of
joint intervention, and that the liberal party in the country had no
reason to regret that they rose almost as one man to his call?

At first it was thought that the discussion had done good by impressing
the government with the desire of the country, if not for coercion at
least for real neutrality, and that Lord Beaconsfield had submitted to the
better influences in the cabinet. It soon appeared that this had not
happened. “The fidelity of the party,” said Lord Granville, “and the large
majority have given Beaconsfield the lead, of which he has not been slow
to avail himself. It is very serious.” The war in the Balkans went on; the
Turks fought with valour and constancy: sufferings on both sides were
frightful. In England the sympathy with the miserable victims of Turkish
misrule became modified by the re-awakened jealousy of Russian power. Mr.
Gladstone held his ground with invincible tenacity against all comers. He
took his share in such parliamentary operations as were possible, but
these operations were necessarily fruitless, and the platform now for the
first time became the effective field for moving national opinion.

Great parties of tourists from the northern and midland towns began to
make it a fashion to go on high pilgrimage to Hawarden, where besides a
fine park they saw the most interesting man in the country, and had a good
chance of hearing an eloquent speech, or watching a tree fall under the
stroke of his vigorous arm. If they brought him the tribute of a casket or
an axe or some cunning walking-stick, he was obliged to thank them, and if
he opened his lips to thank them, the all-engrossing theme was sure to
well up. Some of these earnest utterances jarred even on his admirers in
the press and out of it. Just so would critics in colleges and cathedral
closes have found Wesley and Whitefield in their evangelising mission
north, south, east, and west, excessive, exaggerated, indiscreet, and
deficient in good taste. They could not understand how one supposed to be
so knowing in all the manœuvres of parliament and party, was at the same
time so naïf. This curious simplicity in fact marked him in all the
movements into which he put his heart. Like every other grand
missionary—the abolitionist, the gospel missionary, the free trader, the
peace man, the temperance man—he could not believe that the truths,
arguments, and appeals, of which he was the bearer, could fail to strike
in all who heard them the same fire that blazed in bosoms fervid as his
own.

He went to Birmingham and was received with tumultuous acclamations by
many tens of thousands:—


    _May 31._—[Hawarden.] Off before 11. Reached Birmingham at 3-1/4.
    A triumphal reception. Dinner at Mr. Chamberlain’s. Meeting 7 to
    9-½, half occupied by my speech. A most intelligent and duly
    appreciative audience—but they were 25,000 and the building I
    think of no acoustic merits, so that the strain was excessive. A
    supper followed. _June 1._—Breakfast party 9.30. Much conversation
    on the Birmingham school board system. Off at 10.45 to Enfield
    factory, which consumed the forenoon in a most interesting survey
    with Colonel Dickson and his assistants. Then to the fine (qy.
    overfine?) board school, where addresses were presented and I
    spoke over half an hour on politics. After luncheon to the town
    hall; address from the corporation, made a municipal speech of say
    20 minutes. A good deal of movement in the streets with us even
    to-day. Thence to the Oratory and sat with Dr. Newman.(347) Saw
    Mr. Chamberlain’s very pleasing children. Then to the dinner,
    spoke again. To Hagley at 11.5.


Well was, it said of this visit by Dale, that strenuous whole-hearted man,
“Forsaken or but feebly supported by many of those with whom he had shared
many glorious conflicts, and who owed to him their place and fame, his
courage remained undaunted, and his enthusiasm for righteousness and
freedom unquenched.”

Mr. Gladstone described, the general situation in a letter to a
correspondent out of England:—


    I cannot say much for the conduct of the Powers. That of the pope
    and his court has been vile; Manning and most part of Ireland have
    followed suit; France and Germany are thinking of themselves and
    one another; and Italy, for fear of the pope, is obliged to look
    very much to Germany. Austria is to some extent in a false
    position. For us there is no excuse: there was no difficulty
    whatever in our doing our duty. I have said in parliament, and I
    deeply feel, it is the most deplorable chapter of our foreign
    policy since the peace of 1815. The good cause has been further
    weakened by the bad conduct, in varying degrees, of many races,
    Magyars and Jews above all. You see I cannot help filling up my
    paper with this subject.


In July he made a pleasure trip in one of Sir Donald Currie’s steamers,
from London to Dartmouth. “We set out at 10.20,” he says, “for the docks.
Started in the _Dublin Castle_ at noon. We spent the night at the Nore,
good weather, kind reception, splendid fare. The Cape deputies came with
us as far as Gravesend.” Among these deputies was Mr. Kruger.

In October he paid his first and only visit to Ireland. It lasted little
more than three weeks, and did not extend beyond a very decidedly English
Pale. He stayed in great houses, was feasted by the provost of Trinity, in
spite of disestablishment, and he had a friendly conversation with
Cardinal Cullen, in spite of Vaticanism. “You know, Mr. Gladstone,” said
the Cardinal, “we could have given you a warmer reception if it had not
been for certain pamphlets which we in Ireland did not like very well.” He
received the freedom of the city of Dublin, broke bread with the Duke of
Marlborough at the vice-regal lodge, admired the picturesque site of the
castle at Kilkenny, enjoyed sympathetic talks with host and hostess at
Abbeyleix, and delighted in the curious antiquities and exquisite natural
beauties of the county of Wicklow. Of the multitudes of strange things
distinctively Irish, he had little chance of seeing much.




Chapter V. A Tumultuous Year. (1878)


    On these great questions, which cut so deep into heart and mind,
    the importance of taking what they think the best course for the
    question will often seem, even to those who have the most just
    sense of party obligation, a higher duty than that of party
    allegiance.—GLADSTONE (_to Granville_, 1878).



I


Of 1878 Mr. Gladstone spoke as “a tumultuous year.” In January, after a
fierce struggle of five months in the Balkan passes, the Russian forces
overcame the Turkish defence, and by the end of January had entered
Adrianople and reached the Sea of Marmora. Here at San Stefano a treaty of
peace was made at the beginning of March. The last word of the eastern
question, as Lord Derby said in those days, is this: Who is to have
Constantinople? No great Power would be willing to see it in the hands of
any other great Power, no small Power could hold it at all, and as for
joint occupation, all such expedients were both dangerous and
doubtful.(348) This last word now seemed to be writing itself in capital
letters. Russia sent the treaty to the Powers, with the admission that
portions of it affecting the general interests of Europe could not be
regarded as definitive without general concurrence. A treaty between
Russian and Turk within the zone of Constantinople and almost in sight of
St. Sophia, opened a new and startling vista to English politicians.
Powerful journalists, supposed to be much in the confidence of ministers,
declared that if peace were ultimately concluded on anything like the
terms proposed, then beyond all doubt the outworks of our empire were
gone, and speedy ruin must begin. About such a situation there had been
but one opinion among our statesmen for many generations. Until Mr.
Gladstone, “all men held that such a state of things [as the Russians at
Constantinople] would bring the British empire face to face with
ruin.”(349)

(M185) Before the treaty of San Stefano, an angry panic broke out in parts
of England. None of the stated terms of British neutrality were violated
either by the treaty or its preliminaries, but even when no Russian force
was within forty miles of Constantinople, the cabinet asked for a vote of
six millions (January), and a few days later the British fleet passed the
Dardanelles. Two years earlier, Mr. Gladstone had wished that the fleet
should go to Constantinople as a coercive demonstration against the Porte;
now, in 1878, the despatch of the fleet was a demonstration against
Russia, who had done alone the work of emancipation that in Mr.
Gladstone’s view should have been done, and might have been done without
war by that concert of the Powers from which England had drawn back. The
concert of the Powers that our withdrawal had paralysed would have revived
quickly enough, if either Austria or Germany had believed that the Czar
really meant to seize Constantinople. “I have done my best,” wrote Mr.
Gladstone to a friend, “against the vote of six millions; a foolish and
mischievous proposition. The liberal leaders have, mistakenly as I think,
shrunk at the last moment from voting. But my opinion is that the liberal
party in general are firmly opposed to the vote as a silly, misleading,
and mischievous measure.” He both spoke and voted. The opinion of his
adherents was that his words, notwithstanding his vote, were calculated to
do more to throw oil on the troubled waters, than either the words or the
abstention of the official leader.

The appearance of the British fleet with the nominal object of protecting
life and property at Constantinople, was immediately followed by the
advance of Russian troops thirty miles nearer to Constantinople with the
same laudable object. The London cabinet only grew the wilder in its
Projects, among them being a secret expedition of Indian troops to seize
Cyprus and Alexandretta, with the idea that it would be fairer to the Turk
not to ask his leave. Two ministers resigned in succession, rather than
follow Lord Beaconsfield further in designs of this species.(350)

“It is a bitter disappointment,” Mr. Gladstone wrote to Madame Novikoff,
“to find the conclusion of one war, for which there was a weighty cause,
followed by the threat of another, for which there is no adequate cause at
all, and which will be an act of utter wickedness—if it comes to pass,
which God forbid—on one side or on both. That unhappy subject of the bit
of Bessarabia,(351) on which I have given you my mind with great freedom
(for otherwise what is the use of my writing at all?) threatens to be in
part the pretext and in part the cause of enormous mischief, and in my
opinion to mar and taint at a particular point the immense glory which
Russia had acquired, already complete in a military sense, and waiting to
be consummated in a moral sense too.”

Public men do not withstand war fevers without discomfort, as Bright had
found in the streets of Manchester when he condemned the Crimean war. One
or two odious and unusual incidents now happened to Mr. Gladstone:—


    _Feb. 24._—Between four and six, three parties of the populace
    arrived here, the first with cheers, the two others hostile.
    Windows were broken and much hooting. The last detachment was only
    kept away by mounted police in line across the street both ways.
    This is not very sabbatical. There is strange work behind the
    curtain, if one could only get at it. The instigators are those
    really guilty; no one can wonder at the tools.


One Sunday afternoon a little later (March 4):—


    Another gathering of people was held off by the police. I walked
    down with C., and as a large crowd gathered, though in the main
    friendly, we went into Dr. Clark’s, and then in a hansom off the
    ground.


Stories were put about that Lord Beaconsfield reported the names of
dissentient colleagues to the Queen. Dining with Sir Robert Phillimore
(Jan. 17), Mr. Gladstone—


    was emphatic and decided in his opinion that if the premier
    mentioned to the Queen any of his colleagues who had opposed him
    in the cabinet, he was guilty of great baseness and perfidy.
    Gladstone said he had copies of 250 letters written by him to the
    Queen, in none of which could a reference be found to the opinion
    of his colleagues expressed in cabinet.


On the same occasion, by the way, Sir Robert notes: “Gladstone was careful
to restrain the expression of his private feelings about Lord
Beaconsfield, as he generally is.”



II


(M186) In the summer the famous congress assembled at Berlin (June 13 to
July 13), with Lord Beaconsfield and Lord Salisbury as the representatives
of Great Britain, to sanction, reject, or modify the treaty of San
Stefano. Before the congress met, the country received a shock that made
men stagger. While in London it was impossible to attempt to hold a
meeting in favour of peace, and even in the northern towns such meetings
were almost at the mercy of anybody who might choose to start a jingo
chorus; while the war party exulted in the thought that military
preparations were going on apace, and that the bear would soon be rent by
the lion; a document was one afternoon betrayed to the public, from which
the astounding fact appeared that England and Russia had already entered
into a secret agreement, by which the treaty of San Stefano was in
substance to be ratified, with the single essential exception that the
southern portion of Bulgaria was to be severed from the northern. The
treaty of Berlin became in fact an extensive partition of the Turkish
empire, and the virtual ratification of the policy of bag and baggage. The
Schouvaloff memorandum was not the only surprise. Besides the secret
agreement with Russia, the British government had made a secret convention
with Turkey. By this convention England undertook to defend Turkey against
Russian aggression in Asia, though concessions were made to Russia that
rendered Asiatic Turkey indefensible; and Turkey was to carry out reforms
which all sensible men knew to be wholly beyond her power. In payment for
this bargain, the Sultan allowed England to occupy and administer Cyprus.

At the end of the session Mr. Gladstone wound up his labours in parliament
with an extraordinarily powerful survey of all these great transactions.
Its range, compass, and grasp are only matched by the simplicity and
lucidity of his penetrating examination. It was on July 30:—


    Finished the protocols and worked up the whole subject. It loomed
    very large and disturbed my sleep unusually. H. of C. Spoke 2-½
    hours. I was in body much below par, but put on the steam
    perforce. It ought to have been far better. The speech exhausted
    me a good deal, as I was and am below par.


He sketched, in terse outline, the results of the treaty—the independence
of Roumania, Servia, and Montenegro; the virtual independence of northern
Bulgaria; the creation in southern Bulgaria (under the name of Eastern
Roumelia) of local autonomy, which must soon grow into something more.
Bosnia and Herzegovina, though Mr. Gladstone would have hoped for their
freedom from external control, had been handed over to Austria, but they
were at any rate free from the Ottoman. The cardinal fact was that eleven
millions of people formerly under Turkish rule, absolute or modified, were
entirely exempted from the yoke. “Taking the whole of the provisions of
the treaty of Berlin together, I most thankfully and joyfully acknowledge
that great results have been achieved in the diminution of human misery
and towards the establishment of human happiness and prosperity in the
East.” A great work of emancipation had been achieved for the Slavs of the
Turkish empire. He deplored that equal regard had not been paid to the
case of the Hellenes in Thessaly and Epirus, though even in 1862,
Palmerston and Russell were in favour of procuring the cession of Thessaly
and Epirus to Greece. As for the baffling of Russian intrigue, it was true
that the Bulgaria of Berlin was reduced from the Bulgaria of San Stefano,
but this only furnished new incentives and new occasions for
intrigue.(352) Macedonia and Armenia were left over.

(M187) On the conduct of the two British plenipotentiaries at Berlin he
spoke without undue heat, but with a weight that impressed even adverse
hearers:—


    I say, sir, that in this congress of the great Powers, the voice
    of England has not been heard in unison with the institutions, the
    history, and the character of England. On every question that
    arose, and that became a subject of serious contest in the
    congress, or that could lead to any important practical result, a
    voice has been heard from Lord Beaconsfield and Lord Salisbury
    which sounded in the tones of Metternich, and not in the tones of
    Mr. Canning, or of Lord Palmerston, or of Lord Russell. I do not
    mean that the British government ought to have gone to the
    congress determined to insist upon the unqualified prevalence of
    what I may call British ideas. They were bound to act in
    consonance with the general views of Europe. But within the limits
    of fair differences of opinion, which will always be found to
    arise on such occasions, I do affirm that it was their part to
    take the side of liberty; and I do also affirm that as a matter of
    fact they took the side of servitude.


The agreement with Russia had in truth constantly tied their hands. For
instance, Lord Beaconsfield and Lord Salisbury might make to Russia as
many eloquent speeches as they liked against the restoration of
Bessarabia, but everybody in the room knew that the British government had
taken the lead in virtually assuring Russia that she had only to hold to
her point and Bessarabia should again be hers. Most effective of all was
his exposure of the convention with Turkey, a proceeding by which we had
undertaken, behind the back of Europe and against the treaty of Paris, to
establish a sole protectorate in Asiatic Turkey.(353) We had made a
contract of such impossible scope as to bind us to manage the reform of
the judicature, the police, the finances, the civil service of Turkey, and
the stoppage of the sources of corruption at Constantinople. The load, if
we took it seriously, was tremendous; if we did not take it seriously,
then what was the whole story of the reform of Asiatic Turkey, but a blind
to excuse the acquisition of Cyprus? This great presentation of a broad
and reasoned case contained a passage near its close, that had in it the
kernel of Mr. Gladstone’s policy in the whole controversy that was now
drawing to an end:—


    I think we have lost greatly by the conclusion of this convention;
    I think we have lost very greatly indeed the sympathy and respect
    of the nations of Europe. I do not expect or believe that we shall
    fall into that sort of contempt which follows upon weakness. I
    think it to be one of the most threadbare of all the weapons of
    party warfare when we hear, as we sometimes hear, on the accession
    of a new government, that before its accession the government of
    England had been despised all over the world, and that now on the
    contrary she has risen in the general estimation, and holds her
    proper place in the councils of nations. This England of ours is
    not so poor and so weak a thing as to depend upon the reputation
    of this or that administration; and the world knows pretty well of
    what stuff she is made.... Now, I am desirous that the standard of
    our material strength shall be highly and justly estimated by the
    other nations of Christendom; but I believe it to be of still more
    vital consequence that we should stand high in their estimation as
    the lovers of truth, of honour, and of openness in all our
    proceedings, as those who know how to cast aside the motives of a
    narrow selfishness, and give scope to considerations of broad and
    lofty principle. I value our insular position, but I dread the day
    when we shall be reduced to a moral insularity.... The proceedings
    have all along been associated with a profession as to certain
    British interests, which although I believe them to be perfectly
    fictitious and imaginary, have yet been pursued with as much zeal
    and eagerness as if they had been the most vital realities in the
    world. This setting up of our own interests, out of place, in an
    exaggerated form, beyond their proper sphere, and not merely the
    setting up of such interests, but the mode in which they have been
    pursued, has greatly diminished, not, as I have said, the regard
    for our material strength, but the estimation of our moral
    standard of action, and consequently our moral position in the
    world.


(M188) Lord Beaconsfield lost some of his composure when Mr. Gladstone
called the agreement between England and Turkey an insane convention. “I
would put this issue,” he said, “to an intelligent English jury: Which do
you believe most likely to enter into an insane convention? A body of
English gentlemen, honoured by the favour of their sovereign and the
confidence of their fellow-subjects, managing your affairs for five
years—I hope with prudence, and not altogether without success—or a
sophistical rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own
verbosity,”(354)—and so forth, in a strain of unusual commonness, little
befitting either Disraeli’s genius or his dignity. Mr. Gladstone’s speech
three days later was as free from all the excesses so violently described,
as any speech that was ever made at Westminster.

No speech, however, at this moment was able to reduce the general
popularity of ministers, and it was the common talk at the moment that if
Lord Beaconsfield had only chosen to dissolve, his majority would have
been safe. Writing an article on “England’s Mission” as soon as the House
was up, Mr. Gladstone grappled energetically with some of the impressions
on which this popularity was founded. The _Pall Mall Gazette_ had set out
these impressions with its usual vigour. As Mr. Gladstone’s reply
traverses much of the ground on which we have been treading, I may as well
transcribe it:—


    The liberals, according to that ably written newspaper, have now
    imbibed as a permanent sentiment a “distaste for national
    greatness.” This distaste is now grown into matter of principle.
    “The disgust at these principles of action ever grew in depth and
    extent,” so that in the Danish, the American, and the
    Franco-German wars, there was “an increasing portion of the nation
    ready to engage in the struggle on almost any side,” as a protest
    against the position that it was bound not to engage in it at all!
    The climax of the whole matter was reached when the result of the
    Alabama treaty displayed to the world an England overreached,
    overruled, and apologetic. It certainly requires the astounding
    suppositions, and the gross ignorance of facts, which the
    journalist with much truth recites, to explain the manner in which
    for some time past pure rhodomontade has not only done the work of
    reasoning, but has been accepted as a cover for constant
    miscarriage and defeat; and doctrines of national self-interest
    and self-assertion as supreme laws have been set up, which, if
    unhappily they harden into “permanent sentiment” and “matter of
    principle,” will destroy all the rising hopes of a true public law
    for Christendom, and will substitute for it what is no better than
    the Communism of Paris enlarged and exalted into a guide of
    international relations. It is perhaps unreasonable to expect that
    minds in the condition of the “increasing portion” should on any
    terms accept an appeal to history. But, for the sake of others,
    not yet so completely emancipated from the yoke of facts, I simply
    ask at what date it was that the liberal administrations of this
    country adopted the “permanent sentiment” and the “matter of
    principle” which have been their ruin? Not in 1859-60, when they
    energetically supported the redemption and union of Italy. Not in
    1861, when, on the occurrence of the Trent affair, they at a few
    days’ notice despatched ten thousand men to Halifax. Not when, in
    concert with Europe, they compelled the sultan to cut off the head
    of his tyrannical pasha, and to establish a government in the
    Lebanon not dependent for its vital breath on Constantinople. Not
    when in 1863 they invited France to join in an _ultimatum_ to the
    German Powers, and to defend Denmark with us against the intrigues
    which Germany was carrying on under the plea of the Duke of
    Augustenburg’s title to the Duchies; and when they were told by
    Louis Napoleon in reply that that might be a great British
    interest, but that it had no significance for France. Not when in
    1870 they formed in a few days their double treaty for the defence
    of Belgium. Does, then, the whole indictment rest on this—that, in
    conformity with the solemn declaration of the European Powers at
    Paris in 1856, they cured a deep-seated quarrel with America by
    submitting to the risk of a very unjust award at Geneva; and
    reconciled a sister nation, and effected a real forward step in
    the march, of civilisation at about half the cost which the
    present administration has recently incurred (but without paying
    it) in agitating and disturbing Europe? Or is it that during all
    those years, and many more years before them, while liberty and
    public law were supported, and British honour vindicated,
    territorial cupidity was not inflamed by the deeds or words of
    statesmen, British interests were not set up as “the first and
    great commandment,” and it was thought better to consolidate a
    still undeveloped empire, which might well satisfy every ambition,
    as it assuredly taxes to the utmost every faculty.



III


(M189) Though this was a “tumultuous year,” he noted with some complacency
that the work of his pen produced a thousand pounds. He laboured hard at
his Homeric primer, “just contriving to squeeze the completion of it into
the Easter recess”; wrote articles on the “Peace to Come,” on the “Paths
of Honour and of Shame,” on the Abbé Martin, on “England’s Mission,” on
“Electoral Statistics,” the “Friends and Foes of Russia,” and other
matters. He finished a paper on Iris, “a charming little subject, and for
once I am a little pleased with my work.” He toiled diligently at a
collection of old articles, which he christened _Gleanings_:—


    _November 14._—Worked on articles for reprint. Reperusal of
    Patteson moves me unto tears.(355) What a height he reached! What
    he did for God and the church. Praise to the Highest in the
    height! 21.—This morning the rain on the trees was wonderful and
    lovely. When it fell under the trees in the afternoon it was like
    snow or small icicles an inch deep. 25.—Read _Maud_ once more,
    and, aided by Doyle’s criticism, wrote my note of apology and
    partial retractation.(356) The fact is I am wanting in that higher
    poetical sense, which distinguishes the true artist.


Again and again he gives himself the delightful refreshment of arranging
his books. He finds that he has 700 volumes of English poetry. “After 30
hours my library is now in a passable state, and I enjoy, in Ruskin’s
words, ‘the complacency of possession and the pleasantness of order.’ ” He
sat to Millais in the summer for what was to be the most popular of his
portraits. “_July 5._—Went with C. to examine the Millais portrait, surely
a very fine work. 6—Sat once more to Millais, whose ardour and energy
about his picture inspire a strong sympathy.” On Good Friday he hears
Bach’s passion music, “most beautiful, yet not what I like for to-day.” In
the afternoon: “We drove down to Pembroke Lodge. For a few minutes saw
Lord Russell at his desire—a noble wreck. He recognised us and overflowed
with feeling.”

In December the Argylls and Mr. Ruskin came to Hawarden:—


    _Dec. 12._—Mr. Ruskin’s health better, and no diminution of charm.
    14.—Mr. Ruskin at dinner developed his political opinions. They
    aim at the restoration of the Judaic system, and exhibit a mixture
    of virtuous absolutism and Christian socialism. All in his
    charming and modest manner.


From a pleasing account of Ruskin at Hawarden privately printed, we may
take one passage:—


    Something like a little amicable duel took place at one time
    between Ruskin and Mr. G., when Ruskin directly attacked his host
    as a “leveller.” “You see _you_ think one man is as good as
    another and all men equally competent to judge aright on political
    questions; whereas I am a believer in an aristocracy.” And
    straight came the answer from Mr. Gladstone, “Oh dear, no! I am
    nothing of the sort. I am a firm believer in the aristocratic
    principle—the rule of the best. I am an out-and-out
    _inequalitarian_,” a confession which Ruskin treated with intense
    delight, clapping his hands triumphantly.


The true question against Ruskin’s and Carlyle’s school was how you are to
get the rule of the best. Mr. Gladstone thought that freedom was the
answer; what path the others would have us tread, neither Ruskin nor his
stormy teacher ever intelligibly told us.



IV


Writing on November 1 to Madame Novikoff, Mr. Gladstone said:—


    _Nov. 1, ’78._—My opinion is that this government is moving to its
    doom, and I hope the day of Lord Granville’s succession to it may
    be within a twelvemonth. It is not to be desired that this should
    take place at once. The people want a little more experience of
    Beaconsfield toryism.


Unfortunately this experience, whatever be the precise name for it, now
came with disastrous promptitude, and the nation having narrowly escaped
one war, found itself involved in two. The peril of a conflict in Europe
had hardly passed, before the country found itself committed to an attack
for which the government themselves censured their high-handed agent, upon
the fiercest of the savage tribes of South Africa. A more formidable
surprise was the announcement that, by a headlong reversal of accepted
Indian policy, war had been declared against the Ameer of Afghanistan.




Chapter VI. Midlothian. (1879)


    μηδὲ μαλθακὸς γένῃ.
    τί δρᾴς? ἀνίστω, μή σε νικάτω κόπος.

    ÆSCH. _Eum._, 74-128.

    Turn not faint of heart. What doest thou? Let not weariness
    overcome thee.



I


(M190) After the general election of 1874, Mr. Gladstone resolved not
again to offer himself as candidate for Greenwich, and in 1878 he formally
declined an invitation from the liberals in that constituency. At the end
of the year it was intimated to him that he might have a safe seat in the
city of Edinburgh without a contest. In January 1879, more ambitious
counsels prevailed, and it was resolved by the liberal committee of
Midlothian, with Lord Rosebery in the front, and amid infinite resolution,
enthusiasm, and solid sense of responsibility, that Mr. Gladstone should
be invited to contest the metropolitan county of Scotland. Mr. Adam, the
Scotch whip, entered into the design, Lord Wolverton approved, and Lord
Granville sent Adam a letter assenting. The sitting member was Lord
Dalkeith, eldest son of that Duke of Buccleuch who had been Mr.
Gladstone’s colleague in Peel’s cabinet nearly forty years before, and who
had left it in the memorable December of 1845. Parties had always been
closely balanced, although the tories had held their own pretty firmly,
and only two contests had been fought for forty years. The Midlothian tory
was described to Mr. Gladstone as of the hardest and narrowest type, and
the battle was therefore sure to be fierce. Some of the voters, however,
told the canvassers that they would no longer support ministers. “If the
government continues much longer,” they said, “the whole nation will be in
the poorhouse.” The delight of the constituency was intense at the
prospect of having for their champion one whom they described as the
greatest living Scotchman, and Adam (January 10, 1879) predicted a
majority of two hundred. Mr. Gladstone rapidly, but not without
deliberation, entered into the project. “I am now only anxious,” he wrote
to Mr. Adam (January 11), “under your advice and Wolverton’s, about making
the ground sure before the plunge is taken; after it is taken, you may
depend on me.” On the same day he wrote to Lord Granville:—


    I believe you have been cognizant of the proceedings about the
    county of Midlothian, which are now beginning to bear a practical
    aspect. Generally, when one knows the tree is a large tree, yet on
    coming close up to the trunk it looks twice as large as it did
    before. So it is with this election. If it goes on, it will gather
    into itself a great deal of force and heat, and will be very
    prominent. Thus far I am not sure whether I have put the matter
    pointedly before you, or have been content to assume your approval
    of what I found Adam pressing strongly upon me. It will be a tooth
    and nail affair.


Lord Granville replied, that he was doing a “very plucky and
public-spirited thing.” “Your friends,” he said, “must begin working the
coach at once, but I should think you had better not appear too early in
the field. Act Louis XIV.” “Having received your approval,” Mr. Gladstone
told Lord Granville, “I wrote on the same day to Adam accordingly.” He
then went into details with his usual care and circumspection. When the
public were made aware of what was on foot, the general interest became
hardly less lively all over the island than it was in the constituency
itself. It was observed at the time how impossible many people seemed to
find it to treat anything done by Mr. Gladstone as natural and reasonable.
Nothing would appear to be a more simple and unobjectionable act than his
compliance with the request of the electors of Midlothian, yet “he was
attacked as if he were guilty of some monstrous piece of vanity and
eccentricity.”(357) Relentless opponents amused themselves by saying that
“Mr. Gladstone lives personally in Wales and intends to live politically
in Scotland; and his most fervently held opinions, like the Celtic
population of the island, have very much followed the same line of
withdrawal.”

Mr. Gladstone described the general outlook in a letter to his son Henry
in India (May 16):—


    The government declines, but no one can say at what rate.
    Elections are tolerably satisfactory to us—not, I think, more. A
    sure though evil instinct has guided them in choosing rather to
    demoralise our finance, than to pay their way by imposing taxes,
    but I do not see how they are long to escape this difficulty....
    Our people look forward comfortably to the election. The
    government people say they will not have it this year. But if we
    come to the conclusion that we ought to have it, I am by no means
    sure but that though a minority, we can force it by putting our
    men into the field, and making it too uncomfortable for them to
    continue twelve or fifteen months in hot water. I am safe in
    Midlothian, unless they contrive a further and larger number of
    faggot votes.


Adam looked forward with alarm to the mischief that might be done if the
general election were to be protracted beyond the autumn of 1880. “In
order to neutralise the present majority,” he told Mr. Gladstone, “they
will have to create faggots to a _disgraceful_ extent, but they are not
troubled by scruples of conscience.” The charity that thinketh no evil is
perhaps less liberally given to party whips than even to other
politicians.

Apart from Midlothian Mr. Adam, in January 1879, said to Mr. Gladstone
that the liberals were helpless even in the best agricultural counties of
England; that he saw no hope of improvement; they had neither candidates
nor organisation in most of them, and there was no means that he knew of
(and he had done all that he could) to wake them up. By November 1879, he
reported that he had been carefully over the list, taking a very moderate
calculation of the chances at the coming election; and he believed they
ought to have a majority of 20 to 30, independent of home rulers. Mr.
Gladstone wrote to Lord Granville:—


    _Aug. 6, ’79._—Salisbury’s speech indicates, and for several
    reasons I should believe, that they intend sailing on the quiet
    tack. Having proved their spirit, they will now show their
    moderation. In other words they want all the past proceedings to
    be in the main “stale fish” at the elections. Except financial
    shuffling they will very likely commit no new enormity before the
    election. In my view that means they will not supply any new
    matter of such severe condemnation as what they have already
    furnished. Therefore, my idea is, we should keep the old alive and
    warm. This is the meaning of my suggestion as to autumn work,
    rather than that I expect a dissolution. It seems to me good
    policy to join on the proceedings of 1876-9 by a continuous
    process to the dissolution. Should this happen, which I think
    likely enough about March, there will have been no opportunity
    immediately before it of stirring the country. I will not say our
    defeat in 1874 was owing to the want of such an opportunity, but
    it was certainly, I think, much aggravated by that want.



II


(M191) It was on November 24 that Mr. Gladstone soon after eight in the
morning quitted Liverpool for Edinburgh, accompanied by his wife and Miss
Gladstone. “The journey from Liverpool,” he enters, “was really more like
a triumphal procession.” Nothing like it had ever been seen before in
England. Statesmen had enjoyed great popular receptions before, and there
had been plenty of cheering and bell-ringing and torchlight in individual
places before. On this journey of a bleak winter day, it seemed as if the
whole countryside were up. The stations where the train stopped were
crowded, thousands flocked from neighbouring towns and villages to main
centres on the line of route, and even at wayside spots hundreds
assembled, merely to catch a glimpse of the express as it dashed through.
At Carlisle they presented addresses, and the traveller made his first
speech, declaring that never before in the eleven elections in which he
had taken part, were the interests of the country so deeply at stake. He
spoke again with the same moral at Hawick. At Galashiels he found a great
multitude, with an address and a gift of the cloth they manufactured. With
bare head in the raw air, he listened to their address, and made his
speech; he told them that he had come down expressly to raise effectually
before the people of the country the question in what manner they wished
to be governed; it was not this measure or that, it was a system of
government to be upheld or overthrown. When he reached Edinburgh after
nine hours of it, the night had fallen upon the most picturesque street in
all our island, but its whole length was crowded as it has never been
crowded before or since by a dense multitude, transported with delight
that their hero was at last among them. Lord Rosebery, who was to be his
host, quickly drove with him amidst tumults of enthusiasm all along the
road to the hospitable shades of Dalmeny. “I have never,” Mr. Gladstone
says in his diary, “gone through a more extraordinary day.”

All that followed in a week of meetings and speeches was to match. People
came from the Hebrides to hear Mr. Gladstone speak. Where there were six
thousand seats, the applications were forty or fifty thousand. The weather
was bitter and the hills were covered with snow, but this made no
difference in cavalcades, processions, and the rest of the outdoor
demonstrations. Over what a space had democracy travelled, and what a
transition for its champion of the hour, since the days half a century
back when the Christ Church undergraduate, the disciple of Burke and
Canning, had ridden in anti-reform processions, been hustled by reform
mobs, and had prayed for the blessing of heaven on the House of Lords for
their honourable and manly decision in throwing out the bill. Yet the
warmest opponent of popular government, even the Duke of Buccleuch
himself, might have found some balm for this extraordinary display of
popular feeling, in the thought that it was a tribute to the most splendid
political career of that generation; splendid in gifts and splendid in
service, and that it was repaid, moreover, with none of the flattery
associated with the name of demagogue. Mr. Gladstone’s counsels may have
been wise or unwise, but the only flattery in the Midlothian speeches was
the manly flattery contained in the fact that he took care to address all
these multitudes of weavers, farmers, villagers, artisans, just as he
would have addressed the House of Commons,—with the same breadth and
accuracy of knowledge, the same sincerity of interest, the same scruple in
right reasoning, and the same appeal to the gravity and responsibility of
public life. An aristocratic minister, speaking at Edinburgh soon after,
estimated the number of words in Mr. Gladstone’s Midlothian speeches in
1879 at 85,840, and declared that his verbosity had become “a positive
danger to the commonwealth.” Tory critics solemnly declared that such
performances were an innovation on the constitution, and aggravated the
evil tendencies of democracy.(358) Talk of this kind did not really impose
for an instant on any man or woman of common sense.

(M192) Oratory ever since the days of Socrates, and perhaps long before,
has been suspected as one of the black arts; and both at the time and
afterwards Mr. Gladstone’s speeches in his first Midlothian campaign were
disparaged, as I have just said, as sentiment rather than politics, as
sophistry not sound reason, as illusory enchantment not solid and
subsisting truth. We are challenged to show passages destined to
immortality. With all admiration for the effulgent catalogue of British
orators, and not forgetting Pitt on the slave trade, or Fox on the
Westminster scrutiny, or Sheridan on the begums of Oude, or Plunket on the
catholic question, or Grattan, or Canning, or Brougham, we may perhaps ask
whether all the passages that have arrived at this degree of fame and
grandeur, with the exception of Burke, may not be comprised in an
extremely slender volume. The statesman who makes or dominates a crisis,
who has to rouse and mould the mind of senate or nation, has something
else to think about than the production of literary masterpieces. The
great political speech, which for that matter is a sort of drama, is not
made by passages for elegant extract or anthologies, but by personality,
movement, climax, spectacle, and the action of the time. All these
elements Midlothian witnessed to perfection.

It was my fortune to be present at one whole day of these performances.
“An overpowering day,” Mr. Gladstone calls it in his diary (December 5,
1879). “After a breakfast-party,” he says, “I put my notes in order for
the afternoon. At twelve delivered the inaugural address as lord rector of
the university” [Glasgow]. This discourse lasted an hour and a half, and
themes, familiar but never outworn nor extinct, were handled with vigour,
energy, and onward flow that made them sound as good as novel, and even
where they did not instruct or did not edify, the noble music pleased. The
great salient feature of the age was described as on its material side the
constant discovery of the secrets of nature, and the progressive
subjugation of her forces to the purposes and will of man. On the moral
side, if these conquests had done much for industry, they had done more
for capital; if much for labour, more for luxury; they had variously and
vastly multiplied the stimulants to gain, the avenues of excitement, the
solicitations to pleasure. The universities were in some sort to check all
this; the habits of mind formed by universities are founded in sobriety
and tranquillity; they help to settle the spirit of a man firmly upon the
centre of gravity; they tend to self-command, self-government, and that
genuine self-respect which has in it nothing of mere self-worship, for it
is the reverence which each man ought to feel for the nature that God has
given him, and for the laws of that nature. Then came an appeal, into
which the speaker’s whole heart was thrown, for the intellectual dignity
of the Christian ministry. If argument failed to the great Christian
tradition, he would set small value on the multitude of uninstructed
numerical adhesions, or upon the integrity of institutions and the
unbroken continuity of rite. “Thought,” he exclaimed,—“_thought is the
citadel_.” There is a steeplechase philosophy in vogue—sometimes
specialism making short cuts to the honours of universal knowledge;
sometimes by the strangest of solecisms, the knowledge of external nature
being thought to convey a supreme capacity for judging within the sphere
of moral action and of moral needs. The thing to do is to put scepticism
on its trial, and rigorously to cross-examine it: allow none of its
assumptions; compel it to expound its formulæ; do not let it move a step
except with proof in its hand; bring it front to front with history; even
demand that it shall show the positive elements with which it proposes to
replace the mainstays it seems bent on withdrawing from the fabric of
modern society. The present assault, far from being destined to final
triumph, is a sign of a mental movement, unsteady, though of extreme
rapidity, but destined, perhaps, to elevate and strengthen the religion
that it sought to overthrow. “_In the meantime_,” he said, in closing this
branch of his address, “_I would recommend to you as guides in this
controversy, truth, charity, diligence, and reverence, which indeed may be
called the four cardinal virtues of all controversies, be they what they
may_.” This was followed by an ever-salutary reminder that man is the
crown of the visible creation, and that studies upon man—studies in the
largest sense of humanity, studies conversant with his nature, his works,
his duties and his destinies—these are the highest of all studies. As the
human form is the groundwork of the highest training in art, so those
mental pursuits are the highest which have man, considered at large, for
their object. Some excellent admonitions upon history and a simple, moving
benediction, brought the oration to an end.

Blue caps as well as red cheered fervently at the close, and some even of
those who had no direct interest in the main topics, and were not much or
not at all refreshed by his treatment of them, yet confessed themselves
sorry when the stream of fascinating melody ceased to flow. Then followed
luncheon in the university hall, where the principal, in proposing the
lord rector’s health, expressed the hope that he had not grudged the time
given to the serene, if dull, seclusion of academic things. “I only
quarrel with your word dull,” said Mr. Gladstone in reply. “Let me assure
you, gentlemen, nothing is so dull as political agitation.” By this time
it was four o’clock. Before six he was at St. Andrew’s Hall, confronting
an audience of some six thousand persons, as eager to hear as he was eager
to speak; and not many minutes had elapsed before they were as much aflame
as he, with the enormities of the Anglo-Turkish convention, the spurious
harbour in Cyprus, the wrongful laws about the press in India, the heavy
and unjust charges thrown upon the peoples of India, the baseless quarrel
picked with Shere Ali in Afghanistan, the record of ten thousand Zulus
slain for no other offence than their attempt to defend against our
artillery with their naked bodies their hearths and homes.

Once mentioning a well-known member of parliament who always showed fine
mettle on the platform, Mr. Gladstone said of him in a homely image, that
he never saw a man who could so quickly make the kettle boil. This was
certainly his own art here. For an hour and a half thus he held them, with
the irresistible spell of what is in truth the groundwork of every
political orator’s strongest appeal—from Athenians down to Girondins, from
Pericles to Webster, from Cicero to Gambetta—appeal to public law and
civil right and the conscience of a free and high-minded people. This
high-wrought achievement over, he was carried off to dine, and that same
night he wound up what a man of seventy hard-spent years might well call
“an overpowering day,” by one more address to an immense audience
assembled by the Glasgow corporation in the city hall, to whom he
expressed his satisfaction at the proof given by his reception in Glasgow
that day, that her citizens had seen no reason to repent the kindness
which had conferred the freedom of their city upon him fourteen years
before.

(M193) The audience in St. Andrew’s Hall at Glasgow was, we may presume,
like his audiences elsewhere, and the sources of his overwhelming power
were not hard to analyse, if one were in analytic humour. For one thing,
the speeches were rallying battle-cries, not sermons, and everybody knew
the great invisible antagonist with whom the orator before them was with
all his might contending. It was a gleaming array of the political facts
of a political indictment, not an aerial fabric of moral abstractions.
Nor, again, had the fashion in which Mr. Gladstone seized opinion and
feeling and personal allegiance in Scotland, anything in common with the
violent if splendid improvisations that made O’Connell the idol and the
master of passionate Ireland. One of the most telling speeches of them all
was the exposure of the government finance in the Edinburgh corn-exchange,
where for an hour and a half or more, he held to his figures of surplus
and deficit, of the yield of bushels to the acre in good seasons and bad,
of the burden of the income-tax, of the comparative burden per head of new
financial systems and old, with all the rigour of an expert accountant. He
enveloped the whole with a playful irony, such as a good-humoured master
uses to the work of clumsy apprentices, but of the paraphernalia of
rhetoric there is not a period nor a sentence nor a phrase. Fire is
suppressed. So far from being saturated with colour, the hue is almost
drab. Yet his audience were interested and delighted, and not for a moment
did he lose hold,—not even, as one observer puts it, “in the midst of his
most formidable statistics, nor at any point in the labyrinthine evolution
of his longest sentences.”

Let the conclusion be good or let it be bad, all was in groundwork and in
essence strictly on the plane and in the tongue of statesmanship, and
conformable to Don Pedro’s rule, “What need the bridge much broader than
the flood?”(359) It was Demosthenes, not Isocrates. It was the orator of
concrete detail, of inductive instances, of energetic and immediate
object; the orator confidently and by sure touch startling into
watchfulness the whole spirit of civil duty in a man; elastic and supple,
pressing fact and figure with a fervid insistence that was known from his
career and character to be neither forced nor feigned, but to be himself.
In a word, it was a man—a man impressing himself upon the kindled throngs
by the breadth of his survey of great affairs of life and nations, by the
depth of his vision, by the power of his stroke. Physical resources had
much to do with the effect; his overflowing vivacity, the fine voice and
flashing eye and a whole frame in free, ceaseless, natural and spontaneous
motion. So he bore his hearers through long chains of strenuous periods,
calling up by the marvellous transformations of his mien a strange
succession of images—as as if he were now a keen hunter, now some eager
bird of prey, now a charioteer of fiery steeds kept well in hand, and now
and again we seemed to hear the pity or dark wrath of a prophet, with the
mighty rushing wind and the fire running along the ground.

All this was Mr. Gladstone in Midlothian. To think of the campaign without
the scene, is as who should read a play by candle-light among the ghosts
of an empty theatre. When the climax came, it was found that Mr.
Gladstone’s tremendous projectiles had pounded the ministerial citadel to
the ground, and that he had a nation at his back. What had been vague
misgiving about Lord Beaconsfield grew into sharp certainty; shadows of
doubt upon policy at Constantinople or Cabul or the Cape, became
substantive condemnation; uneasiness as to the national finances turned to
active resentment; and above all, the people of this realm, who are a
people with rather more than their share of conscience at bottom, were led
to consider whether when all is said, there is not still a difference
between right and wrong even in the relations of states and the problems
of empire. It was this last trait that made the atmosphere in which both
speaker and his hearers drew their inspiration. It may be true, if we
will, that, as a great critic sardonically hints, “eloquence, without
being precisely a defect, is one of the worst dangers that can beset a
man.”(360) Yet after all, to disparage eloquence is to depreciate mankind;
and when men say that Mr. Gladstone and Midlothian were no better than a
resplendent mistake, they forget how many objects of our reverence stand
condemned by implication in their verdict; they have not thought out how
many of the faiths and principles that have been the brightest lamps in
the track of human advance they are extinguishing by the same unkind and
freezing breath. One should take care lest in quenching the spirit of
Midlothian, we leave sovereign mastery of the world to Machiavelli.

I need not here go through the long list of topics. As an attack upon
ministers Mr. Gladstone made out the upshot to be finance in confusion,
legislation in arrear, honour compromised by breach of public law, Russia
aggrandized and yet estranged, Turkey befriended, as they say, but sinking
every year, Europe restless and disturbed; in Africa the memory of
enormous bloodshed in Zululand, and the invasion of a free people in the
Transvaal; Afghanistan broken; India thrown back. He disclaimed all
fellowship with those who believe that the present state of society
permits us to make any vow of universal peace, and of renouncing in all
cases the policy of war. He enumerated the six principles that he thought
to be the right principles for us: to foster the strength of the empire by
just laws and by economy; to seek to preserve the world’s peace; to strive
to the uttermost to cultivate and maintain the principle of concert in
Europe; to avoid needless and entangling engagements; to see that our
foreign policy shall be inspired by such love of freedom as had marked
Canning, Palmerston, Russell; to acknowledge the equal right of all
nations. He denounced “the policy of denying to others the rights that we
claim ourselves” as untrue, arrogant, and dangerous. The revival of the
analogy of imperial Rome for the guidance of British policy he held up as
fundamentally unsound and practically ruinous. For have not modern times
established a sisterhood of nations, equal, independent, each of them
built up under the legitimate defence which public law affords to every
nation living within its own borders, and seeking to perform its own
affairs? He insisted that we should ever “remember the rights of the
savage, as we call him.” “Remember,” he exclaimed, “that the sanctity of
life in the hill villages of Afghanistan, among the winter snows, is as
inviolable in the eye of Almighty God as can be your own. Remember that He
who has united you as human beings in the same flesh and blood, has bound
you by the law of mutual love; that that mutual love is not limited by the
shores of this island, is not limited by the boundaries of Christian
civilisation; that it passes over the whole surface of the earth, and
embraces the meanest along with the greatest in its unmeasured scope.”

It was this free movement and pure air that gave to the campaign its
marking character. The campaign had a soul in it. Men were recalled to
moral forces that they had forgotten. In his last speech at Edinburgh, Mr.
Gladstone’s closing words were these:—


    I am sustained and encouraged, and I may almost say driven on in
    public life, by the sentiment believed and entertained by me most
    sincerely, whether erroneously or not, that the principles at
    issue are much broader than those of ordinary contention.... I
    humbly ask for confidence when I state my own belief that the
    objects we have in view at the present time are objects connected
    with the welfare of mankind upon the widest scale.... Whatever we
    may say amidst the clash of arms and amidst the din of preparation
    for warfare in time of peace—amidst all this yet there is going on
    a profound mysterious movement, that, whether we will or not, is
    bringing the nations of the civilised world, as well as the
    uncivilised, morally as well as physically nearer to one another,
    and making them more and more responsible before God for one
    another’s welfare.... I do most heartily thank you for having
    given me the credit of being actuated by the desire to consider in
    public transactions the wider interests of mankind, and I venture
    to assure you that so far as my objects and intentions are
    concerned, objects of that nature, and nothing meaner or narrower,
    will ever be taken as the pole-star of my life.



III


(M194) Two days after a departure from Glasgow which he calls royal, the
unwearied warrior made his way through scenes of endless stir all along
the journey, back to his temple of peace at Hawarden (December 8). There
he at once resumed his habits of daily industry, revising proofs of
speeches “reaching 255 pages!” placing books and reading them—Catullus,
Hodgson’s _Turgot_, somebody on Colour Sense, somebody else on Indian
finance, Jenkins on Atheism, Bunbury’s Geography—and so forth. Also,
“wrote on mythology and on economics; together rather too much. I am not
very fit for composition after 5 P.M.” Meanwhile Christmas arrived, and
then the eve of his birthday, with its reflections—reflections of one—


    “Who though thus endued as with a sense
    And faculty for storm and turbulence
    Is yet a Soul whose master-bias leans ...
    Where what he most doth value must be won.”

    _December 28._ ... And now I am writing in the last minutes of the
    seventh decade of my life. This closing is a great event. The days
    of our life are three score years and ten. It is hardly possible
    that I should complete another decade. How much or how little of
    this will God give me for the purposes dear to my heart? Ah! what
    need have I of what I may term spiritual leisure, to be out of the
    dust and heat and blast and strain, before I pass into the unseen
    world. But perhaps this is a form of self-love. For the last three
    and a half years I have been passing through a political
    experience which is, I believe, without example in our
    parliamentary history. I profess to believe it has been an
    occasion when the battle to be fought was a battle of justice,
    humanity, freedom, law, all in their first elements from the very
    root, and all on a gigantic scale. The word spoken was a word for
    millions, and for millions who for themselves cannot speak. If I
    really believe this, then I should regard my having been morally
    forced into this work as a great and high election of God. And
    certainly I cannot but believe that He has given me special gifts
    of strength on the late occasion, especially in Scotland.... Three
    things I would ask of God over and above all the bounty which
    surrounds me. This first, that I may escape into retirement. This
    second, that I may speedily be enabled to divest myself of
    everything resembling wealth. And the third—if I may—that when God
    calls me He may call me speedily. To die in church appears to be a
    great euthanasia, but not at a time to disturb worshippers. Such
    are some of an old man’s thoughts, in whom there is still
    something that consents not to be old.


Among the other books that he had been reading was the biography of one of
the closest of his friends, and in the last hours of this _annus
mirabilis_ he writes:—


    Read the _Life of Bishop Wilberforce_. It is indeed an edifying
    book. I knew him, admired him, loved him living. But the laying
    out of his full character from early days onwards tells me much I
    did not know, and lifts upwards my conception of him both in
    greatness and in goodness.




Chapter VII. The Eve Of The Battle. (1879)


    Perhaps no man has ever had a mighty influence over his fellows
    without having the innate need to dominate, and this need usually
    becomes the more imperious in proportion as the complications of
    life make Self inseparable from a purpose which is not
    selfish.—GEORGE ELIOT.



I


It is interesting to get what light we may on Mr. Gladstone’s frame of
mind between his first astounding triumph in Midlothian and the crowning
mercy of the general election. In October he had written to his son Henry
in India as to the probable date of the dissolution, that the government
had in his opinion “to choose between a minor or a less smashing defeat
now, or probably a more smashing one after the disclosure and real
presentation of their most discreditable finance, which can hardly be
delayed beyond the spring.” They had a chance of better trade, but the
likelihood also of worse revenue. The great reason against dissolution was
that they were in possession, and every day’s delay was another day’s
exercise of power. He then proceeds to mention his personal position:—


    They are beginning to ask _who_ is to succeed if Beaconsfield is
    displaced. Voices are coming up here and there, some of them very
    confident, that the people will call for me. Nothing, however, but
    a very general, a nearly unanimous, call from the liberals, with
    the appearance of a sort of national will, could bring this demand
    to a form in which it could or ought to be obeyed. The reasons
    against my coming forward are of immense force; those against my
    indicating any shadow of desire or willingness to come forward are
    conclusive. Nor do I at present see any indication of a state of
    things which would bring it about.


(M195) Before leaving Dalmeny at the end of his campaign, Mr. Gladstone
wrote a letter to Mr. Bright, a copy of which, along with the reply, and
two letters from Lord Wolverton, he left tied up in a separate packet.


    _To Mr. Bright._

    _Nov. 28, 1879._—You will probably recollect that during your last
    visit to Hawarden you suggested to me in a walk the expectation or
    the possibility that when the return of liberals to power seemed
    probable, there might be a popular call for my resuming the
    leadership of the party, and that I stated to you what I believed,
    and you I think admitted, to be the reasons against it. These, if
    I remember right, were four, and I attached to them differing
    degrees of weight.

    The first was that my health and strength would be unequal to the
    strain at my time of life.

    The second, that the work to be done was so formidable that hardly
    any amount of courage availed to look it in the face.

    The third, weightier than these, was that a liberal government
    under me would be the object from the first of an amount and kind
    of hostility, such as materially to prejudice its acts and weaken
    or, in given circumstances, neutralise its power for good.

    The fourth, that I was absolutely precluded under present
    circumstances, being bound by the clearest considerations of
    honour and duty to render a loyal allegiance to Granville as
    leader of the party, and to Hartington as leader in the Commons,
    and was entirely disabled from so much as entertaining any
    proposition that could directly or indirectly tend to their
    displacement.

    There is a fifth consideration that now presses me, of which the
    grounds had hardly emerged in regard to myself personally at the
    time when we conversed together. Nothing could be so painful, I
    may almost say so odious to me, as to force myself, or to be
    forced, upon the Queen, under circumstances where the choice of
    another from the ranks of the same party would save her from being
    placed in a difficulty of that peculiar kind. This, it may be
    said, belongs to the same category as my first and second
    objections; but there it is.

    The enthusiasm of Scotland is something wonderful. As to the
    county of Midlothian, I doubt whether the well-informed tories
    themselves in the least expect to win. We go to Taymouth on
    Monday. I hope you are well and hearty and see cause to be
    contented with the progress of opinion. The more I think about the
    matter, the more strange and mysterious does it seem to me that
    any party in this free nation should be found to sanction and
    uphold policy and proceedings like those of the last two years in
    particular. I have written this because I am desirous you should
    have clearly before you the matter of my conversation with you,
    and the means of verifying it.

    _Mr. Bright to Mr. Gladstone._

    _Rochdale, Dec. 12, 1879._—Perhaps I ought to have written to you
    sooner to acknowledge the receipt of your letter of the 28th ult.,
    but I preferred to let you get home before I wrote, and I was in
    truth rather puzzled as to what I ought to say.

    You, with sufficient accuracy, describe the purport of your
    remarks during our conversation when I was with you a year ago. I
    saw the difficulty, then in the future, now perhaps near upon us.
    But it is one in which nothing can be done, and “a masterly
    inactivity” seems the only wise course. If a break-up of the
    present concern comes, the Queen will be advised to send, for
    Granville or Hartington. The one sent for will accept and attempt
    to form a government, or he may have grave doubts, and say that
    you are the only man, etc.; he will consult the other, and will
    consult you. Meantime there may be a “pronouncement” on the part
    of the people, through the press and public meetings, which will
    have a sudden effect on negotiations and on the views of the
    Queen, and may decide the question. If such a time should come,
    then you will have to say what is possible, and I hope you will be
    able to decide rightly, and with reference solely to the interests
    of the country and the service you owe to the crown as
    representing the nation. You will act with a most strict honour to
    Granville and Hartington, as I believe they will act to you. If,
    as I hope for and believe, no selfish ambition will come in to
    make mischief, the question will be determined in such a manner as
    to content all honest men, and what is best for all will be done.
    I am often asked as to the future. I reply only so as to say
    nothing to add to the evident difficulty of the situation.

    Your Scotch expedition has been one of discovery and of conquest.
    The tory press and partizans are evidently astonished at it. The
    government speakers have no new defence, and they want the past to
    be forgotten. Mr. Smith, first lord, I see, entirely rejoices in
    what has been done in South Africa, though “a few lives” have been
    lost by it. This official life seems sorely to demoralise some
    homely and decent people. I am fairly well so far during the
    winter, but I seem feeble when I compare myself with your activity
    and power.... We are to have meetings in Birmingham during
    January. I should prefer the quiet of obscurity to these meetings.
    I hope Mrs. Gladstone and your daughter have enjoyed their Scotch
    trip and are well after it.


Five days later came Lord Wolverton’s report of the state of feeling on
these delicate topics in high places in London. He had seen Lord Granville
on the evening of the 16th:—


    To most affectionate inquiries as to your health and powers, I
    gave a most satisfactory account, and the conversation then went
    to the question as to the effect which your recent triumphant
    progress in Midlothian and the North had produced upon your mind.
    I frankly said that you had in my opinion not anticipated such a
    marked expression of public feeling, and that it had doubtless
    tended to lead your mind to the consideration of the position of
    the party, and to the fact that public opinion might call upon you
    to an extent which no one could have looked for. I then (with
    anxiety to convey what I know to be your desire) most earnestly
    impressed upon Lord Granville that you had upon every occasion
    when the subject was alluded to, prefaced all you had to say with
    the strongest expressions of loyalty to Hartington and himself.
    That I felt convinced that nothing would induce you to encourage,
    or to even listen to, any attempt which others might make to
    disturb the existing state of things as to the leadership, unless
    the wish was very clearly expressed to you by Hartington and
    himself, and you would demand full proof that their interests and
    that of the party strongly pointed to the reconsideration of your
    own position. I need hardly say that, though I felt it my duty to
    take care that I did not understate your feelings, it was not
    necessary to reassure Granville upon that point.

    The conversation then went to the state of the party and its
    present position. I learnt that a private meeting had been held at
    Devonshire House in the morning. I believe Hartington, Granville,
    Cardwell, Adam, and Harcourt were present. My _impression_ is that
    the advice Adam gave as to the elections, was that “union in the
    party at this moment would not be promoted by a change of front.”
    I do not mean to say that the question of leadership was _actually
    discussed_, but I _suspect_ the conversation turned somewhat upon
    the point which you place “_third_” in your letter to Bright. To
    sum it all up, I do not think you will at present be troubled by
    any application to you from Granville and Hartington.(361)


The third point in the letter to Mr. Bright was the question whether a
liberal government under Mr. Gladstone would not be exposed to a special
degree of hostility, due to the peculiar antagonism that his personality
excited. In a later letter (December 20), Wolverton tells Mr. Gladstone
that in the conversation of the 16th, “Lord Granville raised the point you
made your third in your note to Bright, and that he did converse upon at
_some length_, evidently having real fears that many of our weak-kneed
ones would feel some alarm if Hartington went from the front _now_, and
that the tories would intensify this to the uttermost. I think this was
all.” Another sentence indicates Lord Wolverton’s own view:—


    Lord Granville is not sanguine as to the future. As you know, he
    is always inclined to “temporise”; this is his line now, and he is
    perhaps right. You know my fear was that without your name in
    front, the battle at the election would be fought at a great
    disadvantage. But I see the immense difficulty of a change of
    front _now_, even if they desired it and you consented to it. This
    you also feel, I know.


To all this Mr. Gladstone replied to Wolverton as follows:—


    _Hawarden, December 18, 1879._—I thank you much for your letter.
    What you report yourself to have said is quite satisfactory to me.
    If Granville said more than you had mentioned, anything that fell
    from him would be acceptable to me. When I saw your envelope, I
    felt a dread lest the contents should be more substantive; a
    relief came on reading them. But these communications are useful,
    as they give distinctness to ideas, and through ideas to
    intentions. I may state mine as follows: 1. My ears are shut
    against all the world, except it were Granville and Hartington. 2.
    And even to them unless they spoke together, and in clear and
    decisive language. 3. They are the judges whether to speak, as
    well as when to speak. But as an individual, I am of opinion that
    there is not a case for their speaking _now_. 4. Were they to
    speak now, and as I have defined above, I should then say let us
    have nothing more than a formula, and let the substance of it be
    that by the nature of things no man in my position could make
    beforehand an absolute renunciation, and that the leadership in
    the next parliament must, like everything else, be considered in
    connection with what may appear at the dissolution to be the sense
    of the country, but that my action individually has been and will
    continue to be that of a follower of Lord Granville and Lord
    Hartington. One thing I would ask of you as a fast friend. If you
    think that in anything I fall short by omission or commission of
    perfect loyalty as a member of the party, I beg you to tell me.



II


As usual with him, these grave political preoccupations were not
engrossing, but only a part of the day’s task. He carried on a pretty
profuse correspondence, he worked hard on his favourite diversion of
arranging books and papers, he gave much thought and time to estate
matters with his eldest son, with him too he felled now a chestnut, now a
sycamore; he corrected the proofs of his speeches and wrote an article for
Mr. Knowles; he read books and articles about Eleusis, and the Hebrew
migration from Egypt, and the Olympian system, and Newman on the
Eirenicon, and Westcott on St. John, and somebody else upon St. Thomas
Aquinas. For two or three days he was partially disabled by “a low
face-ache: the reaction after heavy pressure, under which I received from
the mercy of God such remarkable support.” In the middle of January
alarming accounts came from his sister Helen, who lay dying at Cologne.
Thither he sped with his eldest brother and his sister-in-law. They found
life fast ebbing, and four days after their arrival the end came, in the
midst of pious exercises and affectionate care. They were satisfied that
she had been “freely restored to the unity of spirit and the bond of
peace,” and had died not in the actual Roman communion. A few days after
his return home he records: “Wrote a long memorandum of the evidence in
regard to dear Helen’s religious profession.” The remains they bore to
Fasque, and by the end of the month he was again at Hawarden, once more at
work with his eldest son upon the “accumulated disorder,” and the rest of
the round of his familiar employments. Among other things he read Cowper’s
_Task_—“the fifth book very noble in its moral strain”; and another entry
will interest many,—“_Feb. 15._—Read the biography of noble Dora Pattison.
How by reflex action it stings.... Yet even to her (like Bishop Butler),
death was terrible.” “He was haunted,” he writes, “with recollections of
Sister Dora.” Then after a Sunday passed in church exercises, and
“skimming many theological books,” on February 23 he “left Hawarden with a
heavy heart.”

He quickly found himself in the London whirlpool, attending conclaves of
his political friends, dining out, seeing Irving in the _Merchant of
Venice_ (“his best, I think”), speaking once or twice in the House, and
twice at London meetings in St. Pancras and Marylebone, where the popular
enthusiasm made even his most hardened critics begin to suspect that the
tide had really turned since the days when the Londoners mobbed him in the
street and broke his windows.




Chapter VIII. The Fall Of Lord Beaconsfield. (1880)


    In causa facili cuivis licet esse disertum,
      Et minimae vires frangere quassa valent;
    Subruere est arces et stantia moenia virtus.

    —Ov. _Trist._, iii. XI. 21.

    In an easy case any man can plead, and against shattered walls the
    puniest strength prevails; ’tis the overthrow of standing towers
    and frowning ramparts that tests manhood.



I


At last one day (March 8) when Mr. Gladstone was “writing a little on
Homer,” he heard the fated news that the dissolution was announced. Lord
Beaconsfield published the famous letter to the lord lieutenant of
Ireland, and in deep accents and sonorous sentences endeavoured to make
home rule the issue of the election. Shrewd politicians, with time to
reflect, found it not easy to divine why the government had chosen the
particular moment. It might be, as some supposed, that they thought the
opposition had lately got into bad odour with the country by coquetting
with home rulers, as shown by the elections at Liverpool and Southwark.
But, in fact, little importance was to be attached to these two defeats of
the opposition, for Liverpool had always been conservative, and Southwark
was thoroughly disorganised by liberal divisions. “The general opinion
seems to be,” says Speaker Brand (Mar. 15), “that the opposition may gain
slightly at the general election, but not to an extent to break down
altogether the conservative majority.”

In what was in effect his election address, Lord Beaconsfield warned the
country that a danger, in its ultimate results scarcely less disastrous
than pestilence and famine, distracted Ireland. A portion of its
population was endeavouring to sever the constitutional tie that united it
to Great Britain in that bond which was favourable to the power and
prosperity of both. “It is to be hoped,” he went on, “that all men of
light and leading will resist this destructive doctrine. The strength of
this action depends on the unity of feeling which should pervade the
United Kingdom and its widespread dependencies. The first duty of an
English minister should be to consolidate that co-operation which renders
irresistible the community educated, as our own, in an equal love of
liberty and law. And yet there are some who challenge the expediency of
the imperial character of this realm. Having attempted and failed to
enfeeble our colonies by their policy of decomposition, they may perhaps
now recognise in the disintegration of the United Kingdom, a mode which
will not only accomplish, but precipitate their purpose.... Rarely in this
century has there been an occasion more critical. The power of England and
the peace of Europe will largely depend upon the verdict of the
country.... Peace rests on the presence, not to say the ascendency of
England in the councils of Europe. Even at this moment the doubt supposed
to be inseparable from popular elections, if it does not diminish,
certainly arrests her influence, and is a main reason for not delaying an
appeal to the national voice.”

To this manifesto Mr. Gladstone, with his usual long pains in the drafting
of such pieces, prepared his counterblast. He went with direct force to
what Lord Beaconsfield had striven to make the centre of his appeal:—


    In the electioneering address which the prime minister has issued,
    an attempt is made to work upon your fears by dark allusions to
    the repeal of the union and the abandonment of the colonies.
    Gentlemen, those who endangered the union with Ireland were the
    party that maintained there an alien church, an unjust land law,
    and franchises inferior to our own; and the true supporters of the
    union are those who firmly uphold the supreme authority of
    parliament, but exercise that authority to bind the three nations
    by the indissoluble tie of liberal and equal laws. As to the
    colonies, liberal administrations set free their trade with all
    the world, gave them popular and responsible government, undertook
    to defend Canada with the whole strength of the empire, and
    organised the great scheme for uniting the several settlements of
    British North America into one dominion, to which, when we quitted
    office in 1866, it only remained for our successors to ask the
    ready assent of parliament. It is by these measures that the
    colonies have been bound in affection to the empire, and the
    authors of them can afford to smile at baseless insinuations.
    Gentlemen, the true purpose of these terrifying insinuations is to
    hide from view the acts of the ministry, and their effect upon the
    character and condition, of the country.


To those ministerial misdeeds he proceeded to draw the attention of the
electors, though he declared with threescore years and ten upon his head,
how irksome he felt the task. “At home,” he said, “the ministers have
neglected legislation, aggravated the public distress by continual shocks
to confidence which is the life of enterprise, augmented the public
expenditure and taxation for purposes not merely unnecessary but
mischievous, and plunged the finances, which were handed over to them in a
state of singular prosperity, into a series of deficits unexampled in
modern times.” After shooting this heavy bolt he looked abroad. “Abroad
they have strained, if they have not endangered, the prerogative by gross
misuse, and have weakened the empire by needless wars, unprofitable
extensions, and unwise engagements, and have dishonoured it in the eyes of
Europe by filching the island of Cyprus from the Porte under a treaty
clause distinctly concluded in violation of the treaty of Paris, which
formed part of the international law of Christendom.” As to the domestic
legislation of the future, it was in the election address of the prime
minister a perfect blank. It was true that in default of reform in this
kingdom, the nation was promised the advantages of “presence, not to say
ascendency,” in the councils of Europe.


    There is indeed, he said, an ascendency in European councils to
    which Great Britain might reasonably aspire, by steadily
    sustaining the character of a Power no less just than strong;
    attached to liberty and law, jealous of peace, and therefore
    opposed to intrigue and aggrandizement, from whatever quarter they
    may come; jealous of honour, and therefore averse to the
    clandestine engagements which have marked our two latest years. To
    attain a moral and envied ascendency such as this, is indeed a
    noble object for any minister or any empire.



II


Mr. Gladstone wrote to Lord Acton on March 14:—


    On Tuesday I am to set out for Midlothian and my _last_ general
    election. My general elections have been 1832, 1835, 1837, 1841,
    1847, 1852, 1857, 1859, 1865, 1874, and now 1880—what a list! I
    believe that among the official men of this century I am now
    beaten only by Lord Palmerston in the length of my career in the
    House of Commons. A clear answer from the nation, a clear answer
    in the right sense, and a decisive accession of the liberal party
    to power without me, this is what I hope and pray. I think that
    the experts and the party generally are pretty sanguine. None
    doubt that the government are to lose; a few doubt whether they
    will be weaker than liberals and home rulers; very many whether
    weaker than liberals alone. All agree that Scotland will do its
    duty.


On the morning of the 16th, Mr. Gladstone started. Hundreds of people grew
to thousands long before his train left King’s Cross, and all the way to
Edinburgh he found the same vivid interest and acclamation on the east
coast that had greeted him in November on the west. At Grantham the mayor
and a crowd estimated by nimble statisticians at two thousand, awaited him
at the station; at York the lord mayor and six thousand; at
Newcastle-on-Tyne too many thousands to count. The little addresses made
at these stopping-places were described as a sort of table of contents of
the more elaborate speeches to be delivered in Midlothian itself. As he
crossed the Tweed the fervour did not cool, and when at last he reached
Edinburgh, he encountered a scene almost as wonderful as that which had
met him four months before.

Again he was the guest at Dalmeny, and again he renewed his prodigious
exertions amid a vehemence of admiration and delight that became more
intense as the days passed. Here is an entry or two from the diary:—


    Travelled forty miles and delivered three speeches of forty-five
    or fifty minutes each, at Juniper Green, Colinton, and Mid Calder.
    Enthusiasm unabated.... Corrected and despatched proofs of
    _Religion, Achaian and Semitic_. _Mar. 21, Palm Sunday._—Drove to
    Edinburgh cathedral; service 11-1-½. Free St. George’s in the
    afternoon. Walked out seven miles with Lord Rosebery. 22.—To
    Edinburgh (after working as usual on my papers) at 1.15. Short
    complimentary address at liberal club. Then to George Street and
    on to the city election committee; short speech. Then by train to
    Gilmerton; spoke forty-five or fifty minutes; next after tea to
    Loanhead, and after more tea, spoke again for some time on Russian
    aggrandizement. Everywhere the greatest enthusiasm. Mr. C[owan]
    gave me interesting details about Magyar and Bohemian students.
    Back to Dalmeny at 7.20.


And so day after day did panting time toil after him in vain. Many of us
have known long spells of hard electioneering—but not in one’s
seventy-first year, with every single word as it fell into print on the
morrow watched with the lynx eyes of party scrutiny, and all loaded with
the heaviest personal responsibility.

(M196) On March 24 the parliament was dissolved. On March 30 the first
elections took place, and the first pollings on the day following. From
the early returns it was pretty evident that the liberals would have a
majority. On the first day they made a net gain of fifteen seats in
sixty-nine constituencies. By the end of the fourth day a total net gain
of fifty seats was recorded. The ministerial majority was already gone.
The county elections brought new surprises, and by the end of the second
week the liberal gains were reckoned at ninety-nine.

Mr. Gladstone’s fortnight of discourse ended on the 2nd of April. “So,” he
records, “ends the second series of the speeches in which I have hammered
with all my poor might at the fabric of the present tory power. _April
3._—Cut down a Spanish chestnut in Dalmeny Park by order. The day was
quiet, but my papers and letters and the incoming news made it busy. It
seemed as if the arm of the Lord had bared itself for work that He has
made His own. 4.—A lull in election news, but the reflections on what has
passed are overpowering.” Here are his closing words, and they are not
without historic import:—


    The great trial, gentlemen, proceeds. You have great forces
    arrayed against you. I say “You”; if you will permit me to
    identify myself with you, I will say, We have great forces arrayed
    against us, and apparently we cannot make our appeal to the
    aristocracy, excepting that which must never be forgotten, the
    distinguished and enlightened minority of that body of able,
    energetic, patriotic, liberal-minded men, whose feelings are with
    those of the people, and who decorate and dignify their rank by
    their strong sympathy with the entire community. With that
    exception, in all the classes of which I speak, I am sorry to say
    we cannot reckon upon what is called the landed interest, we
    cannot reckon upon the clergy of the established church either in
    England or in Scotland, subject again and always in each case to
    the most noble exceptions—exceptions, I trust, likely to enlarge
    and multiply from day to day. On none of these can we place our
    trust. We cannot reckon on the wealth of the country, nor upon the
    rank of the country, nor upon the influence which rank and wealth
    usually bring. In the main these powers are against us, for
    wherever there is a close corporation, wherever there is a spirit
    of organised monopoly, wherever there is a narrow and sectional
    interest apart from that of the country, and desiring to be set up
    above the interest of the public, there, gentlemen, we, the
    liberal party, have no friendship and no tolerance to expect.
    Above all these, and behind all these, there is something greater
    than these—there is the nation itself. This great trial is now
    proceeding before the nation. The nation is a power hard to rouse,
    but when roused, harder still and more hopeless to resist.... I
    figure to myself those who have constituted the majority of the
    late House of Commons as the persons arraigned, and the
    constituencies of the country as those who are called together in
    the solemn order of the constitution to hear the evidence, and to
    pronounce the verdict. That evidence has been pretty largely
    given. That verdict we await. We have none of the forms of a
    judicial trial. There are no peers in Westminster Hall, there are
    no judges on the woolsack; but if we concentrate our minds upon
    the truth of the case as apart from its mere exterior, it is a
    grander and a more august spectacle than was ever exhibited either
    in Westminster Hall or in the House of Lords. For a nation, called
    to undertake a great and responsible duty,—a duty which is to
    tell, as we are informed from high authority, on the peace of
    Europe and on the destinies of England,—has found its interests
    mismanaged, its honour tarnished, and its strength burdened and
    weakened by needless, mischievous, unauthorised, and unprofitable
    engagements, and it has resolved that this state of things shall
    cease, and that right and justice shall be done.(362)


(M197) Mr. Gladstone was already member for Leeds. So far back as the
March of 1878 Sir James Kitson had written to ask him to become a
candidate for the great city of the West Siding, but Mr. Gladstone
declined the proposal. Then a deputation came to him in Harley Street, and
he made them a speech on the Eastern question, but avoided any reference
to the subject which they had come to handle. The stout Yorkshiremen were
not to be baffled, and Mr. Gladstone, nominated without action of his own,
was now returned by the unprecedented vote of 24,622.(363) He was right in
calling the Leeds election “one of the most conspicuous and imposing
victories ever won for the liberal cause.”(364) Still public interest was
concentrated upon Midlothian, and the might with which he prevailed over
men’s minds there, was admitted by his foes to be the most impressive
tribute ever paid to political man and his vast powers as orator and
popular leader. In Midlothian the crusade had been opened, and in
Midlothian its triumph was sealed.

The poll was declared in Edinburgh soon after seven on the evening of
April 5, and a few minutes later the result, amid every demonstration of
extravagant delight from the triumphant multitude as they rushed away from
the courthouse, was made known to Mr. Gladstone at a house in George
Street taken by Lord Rosebery for the occasion. A couple of candles were
brought from the dining-table and held on each side of him, so that his
face might be seen, as from the balcony he spoke a few words of
thanks.(365) “Drove into Edinburgh about four,” Mr. Gladstone records. “At
7.20 Mr. Reid brought the figures of the poll—Gladstone, 1579; Dalkeith,
1368; quite satisfactory. Soon after, 15,000 people being gathered in
George Street, I spoke very shortly from the windows, and Rosebery
followed, excellently well. Home about 10. Wonderful and nothing less has
been the disposing guiding hand of God in all this matter.” The majority
was not of great dimensions, but it was adequate and sufficient, and the
victory was celebrated half through the night with bonfires,
illuminations, fireworks, and all the other fashions of signifying public
joy, throughout Scotland and the north of England. The astrologers,
meteorologists, and prognosticators of Pall Mall and Fleet Street felt
that this time at least they had not rightly plumbed the depths of the
democratic seas.

Lord Beaconsfield was staying alone at that time in the historic halls of
Hatfield, their master being then abroad. There, hour by hour and day
after day, news of the long train of disasters reached him. From one in
confidential relations with him, and who saw much of him at this moment, I
have heard that the fallen minister, who had counted on a very different
result, now faced the ruin of his government, the end of his career, and
the overwhelming triumph of his antagonist, with an unclouded serenity and
a greatness of mind, worthy of a man who had known high fortunes and
filled to the full the measure of his gifts and his ambitions.



III


(M198) Some writers complained that the language of Midlothian was as
solemn as if the verdict of the country were about to settle the issues of
the battle of Armageddon. It was not exactly the battle of Armageddon, but
the election of 1880 was, at any rate, one of the most remarkable in party
history. For one thing, activity was unprecedented, and Mr. Gladstone’s
fiery spirit seemed to have spread over the country. A list prepared by
the liberal whips, and preserved by Mr. Gladstone, describes the new
parliament as composed of 347 liberals, 240 conservatives, and 65
nationalists. Looking at the divisions of the three kingdoms, we find
England and Wales contributing 282 liberals against 207 tories; Scotland
52 liberals against 8 tories; and Ireland, 13 liberals against 25 tories.
The Irish nationalists were of two shades: 35 followers of Mr. Parnell, 26
moderate home rulers who followed Mr. Shaw, and 4 dubious. In England and
Wales therefore the liberal majority was 75, and in Scotland it was 44.
Turning to electoral aspects with special social significance, we note
that of the county constituencies 63 sent liberal members as against 124
tories. In the metropolis, as a whole, the government gained one seat and
lost four, with the result that London was represented in the new
parliament by 8 tories and 14 liberals. One victory of real importance was
won by the government, for they beat the liberal by two to one in the City
of London, the heart and centre of many of those powerful influences that
Mr. Gladstone had described in his last speech in the Midlothian election
as determined foes from whom the liberal party had no tolerance to expect.
“The tory party,” Mr. Gladstone noted, “has never had a majority on any
one of its own four dissolutions—1852, 1859, 1868, 1880.”


    _Mr. Gladstone to Lord Rosebery._

    _Hawarden, April 10, 1880._—... I should like to write about these
    marvellous events, but how can I? The romance of politics which
    befel my old age in Scotland, has spread over the whole land. You
    remember perhaps my series of fractions, comparing daily the net
    gains with the gross returns. The first day began with 1/13 or
    thereabouts. It had got to 1/10 or 1/9 when we left you. It is now
    1/6. How idle to talk about the caprice of household suffrage; the
    counties have given quite as remarkable results as the boroughs. I
    was stunned at the end of the first night; and I am still out of
    breath from the endeavour to keep up with the rapidity of events.
    I suppose the conservative Scotch will fill the first class
    compartment, or nearly so, but no more. Wales, I beg you to
    observe, has not (as I think) been behind Scotland in her
    achievements. Most of the wretched percentage of compensation on
    “tory gains” on the general list is wretched in quality as well as
    quantity, and consists of the _district_ places. To scarcely one
    of these gains can they point with any keen satisfaction. As to
    Midlothian the moral effect, before and after, has I think
    surpassed all our hopes. The feeling until it was over (since
    which there has justly been a centring of thought on E.
    Lancashire) was so fastened on it, that it was almost like one of
    the occasions of old when the issue of battle was referred to
    single combat. The great merit of it I apprehend lay in the
    original conception, which I take to have been yours, and to
    overshadow even your operations towards the direct production of
    the result. But one thing it cannot overshadow in my mind: the
    sense of the inexpressible aid and comfort derived day by day from
    your considerate ever-watchful care and tact. [_Latin not to be
    identified._] Let me apply these same words (calling on you for a
    translation if needful) to Lady Rosebery. I should feel profoundly
    ashamed of the burdens we brought you, had I not seen how truly
    they were borne in the spirit, which alone makes all burdens
    light. It is a very pleasant subject of reflection to me that the
    riveting effect of companionship in a struggle like this, does not
    pass away with the struggle itself but abides.

    Our stratagem for a quiet exit was on the whole successful. At
    Carlisle there was perfect quiet. At most of the few places where
    the train stopped there were a score or two of people and no more.
    At Hawarden, arriving between 9 and 10 A.M., we cheated the
    triumphal preparations; but made amends by carrying them over to
    Herbert the following day. We now become eager for the East
    Worcestershire election and are sanguine about my son’s return. At
    Warrington we got over the three hours wonderfully, and succeeded
    in sleeping, though not exactly μαλθακῶς κατακείμενος through a
    succession of the most violent and unearthly noises, banging,
    crashing, roaring, squealing, that a railway station traversed by
    innumerable goods’ trains can supply..... I will not trouble you
    with, more words of thanks, I feel them so poor and idle.


Two days later Mr. Gladstone wrote to the Duke of Argyll:—


    _April 12, 1880._—All our heads are still in a whirl from the
    great events of the last fortnight, which have given joy, I am
    convinced, to the large majority of the civilised world. The
    downfall of Beaconsfieldism is like the vanishing of some vast
    magnificent castle in an Italian romance. It is too big, however,
    to be all taken in at once. Meantime, while I inwardly rejoice, I
    am against all outward signs, beyond such as are purely local, of
    exultation, for they are not chivalrous, and they would tend to
    barbarise political warfare. We may be well content to thank God
    in silence. But the outlook is tremendous! The gradual unravelling
    of the tangled knots of the foreign and Indian policy will indeed
    be a task for skilled and strong hands, if they can be found; and
    these can hardly be found such as the case requires.




Chapter IX. The Second Ministry. (1880)


    There is indeed one great and critical act, the responsibility for
    which falls momentarily or provisionally on the Sovereign: it is
    the dismissal of an existing Ministry, and the appointment of a
    new one. This act is usually performed with the aid drawn from
    authentic manifestations of public opinion, mostly such as are
    obtained through the votes or conduct of the House of
    Commons.—GLADSTONE.


The day after the declaration of the poll in Midlothian, Mr. Gladstone and
his wife and daughter quitted Dalmeny, and made their way homewards, as we
have just seen.


    _April 6._—A heavy day with post, incessant telegrams, and
    preparations for departure. We drove, however, to Linlithgow, saw
    the beautiful church and fine old castle, and I made a short
    non-polemical speech to the people.... Careful concealment of the
    plans of departure until well on in the evening. Left this most
    hospitable of all houses at 8.30, and got into the 9.25, escaping
    by secrecy all demonstration except from some 200 who seemed to
    gather on the instant. Travelled all night, and had time to
    ruminate on the great hand of God, so evidently displayed.

    _April 7, Wed._—After three hours of successful sleep amid
    frightful unearthly noises at Warrington, we went off to Chester
    and Hawarden, saluted enthusiastically, but escaping all
    crowds.... Set to work at once on a mass of letters and papers....
    The day occupied with papers, letters, and telegrams, and reading
    my Vatican tracts.... The triumph grows and grows; to God be the
    praise.

    _April 9._—Letters passed 100. _April 10, Sat._—Church, 8-½ A.M.
    Wrote to ... Postal arrivals, 140; terrible! Wolverton arrived to
    dinner, and I spent the evening in full conversation with him. He
    threatens a request from Granville and Hartington. Again, I am
    stunned, but God will provide.

    _April 11, Sun._—Church, 8-½ A.M., Holy Communion; 11 A.M. Wrote
    etc. Read _Gospel for the 19th Century_. Examined liturgical
    books. Further conversation with Wolverton on the London
    reception, on Leeds, and on the great matter of all. _April
    12._—Wolverton went off in the morning, and is to see Granville
    and Hartington to-day. Read Brugsch’s _Hist. Egypt_. _Guy
    Mannering._ Wrote some memoranda of names applicable to this
    occasion. Hard day. But all are pretty hard in this my
    “retirement.” _April 13._—Began tentatively an anonymous letter on
    the Conservative Collapse,(366) really drawn forth by the letter
    of Lord Bath.... Read _Guy Mannering_ and that most heavenly man
    George Herbert.... _April 16._—Mr. Bright came over from
    Llandudno, and we spent nearly all the time in conversing on the
    situation. He is most kind and satisfactory. _April 17._—Finished
    my letter and revision of it. Cut down a sycamore with W. H. G.
    _April 18, Sun._—Holy Communion 8 A.M.; morning service and
    evening. Wrote to [17 letters]. _Read Divine Veracity or Divine
    Justice_, Caird on the _Philosophy of Religion_. _April 19._—A
    reluctant goodbye before 1. London at 6.30. A secret journey, but
    people gathered at Chester station and Euston. I vaguely feel that
    this journey is a plunge out of an atmosphere of peace into an
    element of disturbance. May He who has of late so wonderfully
    guided, guide me still in the critical days about to come. _April
    20._—This blank day is, I think, probably due to the Queen’s
    hesitation or reluctance, which the ministers have to find means
    of [covering].


One joyous element in these days at Hawarden was the arrival first of the
youngest son of the house, then of the eldest, the latter of them having
won a seat in Worcestershire, and the former having failed in Middlesex,
after a display of qualities that delighted his family and friends much
more than mere victory could have done. “About one,” Mr. Gladstone marks
on the 8th, “Herbert entered in triumph. We were there, and could not but
be much moved.” And on the 14th, “Willy made his triumphal entry at four,
and delivered a very good speech. Neville Lyttelton, too, spoke well from
the carriage.” As Lord Acton wrote to Miss Gladstone about Middlesex, “The
picture of the young, untried son bursting into sudden popularity, and
turning men’s thoughts from the absorbing exploits of his father, adds an
affecting domestic feature to that great biography. That meeting at
Hawarden, after such a revolution and such a growth, is a thing I cannot
think of without emotion.” A little later, when Mr. Gladstone’s option of
Midlothian left the Leeds seat vacant, his son was elected without
opposition to fill it. Mr. Gladstone’s letters on this operation, which
had its delicacies, are an excellent example of his habits of careful and
attentive judgment in handling even secondary affairs.




II


(M199) From the moment when it became clear that Lord Beaconsfield would
be swept out of office, it was just as clear to sensible men that only one
successor was possible. It was Mr. Gladstone, as everybody knew and said,
who had led and inspired the assault. A cabinet without him would hold its
councils without the most important of the influences on which it
depended. If the majorities that carried the election could have been
consulted on the choice of a minister, nobody doubted upon whom with
unanimity their choice would fall. Even those who most detested the
result, even those who held that a load of anxiety would be lifted from
the bosoms of many liberals of official rank if they were to hear of Mr.
Gladstone’s definite retirement from public life, still pronounced that it
was Mr. Gladstone’s majority, and that was what the contributors to that
majority intended to vote for was, above all else, his return to office
and his supremacy in national affairs. If he would not lay down his power,
such persons said, it was best for everybody that he should exercise it
openly, regularly, and responsibly as head of the government.(367) The
very fact that he had ceased to be the leader of the opposition five years
before, was turned into an argument for his responsibility now; for it was
his individual freedom that had enabled him to put forth all his strength,
without any of that management and reserve that would have been needed in
one who was titular leader of a party, as well as real leader of the
nation. The victory would have been shorn of half its glory if any other
chief had been given to the party. In short, no minister, not Pitt in
1784, nor Grey in 1831, nor Peel ten years later, nor Palmerston in 1855,
was ever summoned by more direct and personal acclaim. Whatever liberty of
choice the theory of our constitution assigned to the Queen, in practice
this choice did not now exist. It was true that in the first of his
Midlothian speeches Mr. Gladstone had used these words, “I hope the
verdict of the country will give to Lord Granville and Lord Hartington the
responsible charge of its affairs.”(368) But events had wrought a
surprise, and transformed the situation.

Some, indeed, there were whom a vision of another kind possessed; a vision
of the moral grandeur that would attend his retirement after putting
Apollyon and his legions to flight, and planting his own hosts in triumph
in the full measure of their predominance. Some who loved him, might still
regretfully cherish for him this heroic dream. Retirement might indeed
have silenced evil tongues; it would have spared him the toils of many
turbid and tempestuous years. But public life is no idyll. Mr. Gladstone
had put himself, by exertions designed for public objects, into a position
from which retreat to private ease would have been neither unselfish nor
honourable. Is it not an obvious test of true greatness in a statesman,
that he shall hold popularity, credit, ascendency and power such as Mr.
Gladstone now commanded, as a treasure to be employed with regal profusion
for the common good, not guarded in a miser’s strong-box? For this outlay
of popularity the coming years were to provide Mr. Gladstone with
occasions only too ample.

If retreat was impossible, then all the rest was inevitable. And it is
easy to guess the course of his ruminations between his return from
Midlothian and his arrival in Harley Street. Mr. Gladstone himself,
looking back seventeen years after, upon his refusal in 1880 to serve in a
place below the first, wrote: “I conceive that I was plainly right in
declining it, for had I acted otherwise, I should have placed the facts of
the case in conflict with its rights, and with the just expectations of
the country. Besides, as the head of a five years’ ministry, and as still
in full activity, I should have been strangely placed as the subordinate
of one twenty years my junior, and comparatively little tested in public
life.”

As the diary records, on Monday, April 12, Lord Wolverton left Hawarden,
and was to see the two liberal leaders the same day. He did so, and
reported briefly to his chief at night:—


    I hope the Plimsoll matter(369) is at an end. The clubs to-night
    think that Lord Beaconsfield will meet parliament, and that when
    the time comes, if asked, he will advise that Hartington should be
    sent for. I do not believe either. I have seen Lord Granville and
    Hartington; both came here upon my arrival, and Adam with them.
    Lord Granville hopes you may be in London on Friday. I told him I
    thought you would be. He has gone to Walmer, and will come up on
    Friday. He has a good deal to think of in the meantime as to “the
    position of the party.” I need not say more than this, as it
    embraces the whole question, which he _now quite appreciates_....
    Nothing could be more cordial and kind than Granville and
    Hartington, but I hardly think till to-day they _quite_ realised
    the _position_, which I confess seems to me as clear as the sun at
    noon. They will neither of them speak to any one till Friday, when
    Lord Granville hopes to see you. Adam is much pleased with your
    kind note to him. He has gone home till Friday. It is well to be
    away just now, for the gossip and questioning is unbearable.


Acknowledging this on the following day (April 13), Mr. Gladstone says to
Lord Wolverton:—


    The claim, so to speak, of Granville and Hartington, or rather, I
    should say, of Granville with Hartington as against me, or rather
    as compared with me, is complete. My labours as an individual
    cannot set me up as a Pretender. Moreover, if they should on
    surveying their position see fit to apply to me, there is only one
    form and ground of application, so far as I see, which could be
    seriously entertained by me, namely, their conviction that on the
    ground of public policy, all things considered, it was best in the
    actual position of affairs that I should come out. It cannot be
    made a matter of ceremonial, as by gentlemen waiving a precedence,
    or a matter of feeling, as by men of high and delicate honour
    determined to throw their bias against themselves. They have no
    right to throw their bias against themselves—they have no right to
    look at anything but public policy; and this I am sure will be
    their conviction. Nothing else can possibly absolve them from
    their presumptive obligation as standing at the head of the party
    which for the time represents the country.


As a matter of fact, I find no evidence that the two leaders ever did
express a conviction that public policy required that he should stand
forth as a pretender for the post of prime minister. On the contrary, when
Lord Wolverton says that they “did not quite realise the position” on the
12th, this can only mean that they hardly felt that conviction about the
requirements of public policy, which Mr. Gladstone demanded as the
foundation of his own decision.




III


The last meeting of the outgoing cabinet was held on April 21. What next
took place has been described by Mr. Gladstone himself in memoranda
written during the days on which the events occurred.


    _Interview with Lord Hartington._

    _April 22, 1880._ At 7 P.M. Hartington came to see me at
    Wolverton’s house and reported on his journey to Windsor.

    The Queen stood with her back to the window—which _used_ not to be
    her custom. On the whole I gathered that her manner was more or
    less embarrassed but towards him not otherwise than gracious and
    confiding. She told him that she desired him to form an
    administration, and pressed upon him strongly his duty to assist
    her as a responsible leader of the party now in a large majority.
    I could not find that she expressed clearly her reason for
    appealing to him as _a_ responsible leader of the party, and yet
    going past _the_ leader of the party, namely Granville, whom no
    one except himself has a title to displace. She however indicated
    to him her confidence in his moderation, the phrase under which he
    is daily commended in the _Daily Telegraph_, at this moment I
    think, Beaconsfield’s personal organ and the recipient of his
    inspirations. By this moderation, the Queen intimated that
    Hartington was distinguished from Granville as well as from me.

    Hartington, in reply to her Majesty, made becoming
    acknowledgments, and proceeded to say that he did not think a
    government could be satisfactorily formed without me; he had not
    had any direct communication with me; but he had reason to believe
    that I would not take any office or post in the government except
    that of first minister. Under those circumstances he advised her
    Majesty to place the matter in my hands. The Queen continued to
    urge upon him the obligations arising out of his position, and
    desired him to ascertain whether he was right in his belief that I
    would not act in a ministry unless as first minister. This, he
    said, is a question which I should not have put to you, except
    when desired by the Queen.

    I said her Majesty was quite justified, I thought, in requiring
    positive information, and he, therefore, in putting the question
    to me. Of my action he was already in substantial possession, as
    it had been read to him (he had told me) by Wolverton. I am not
    asked, I said, for reasons, but only for Aye or No, and
    consequently I have only to say that I adhere to my reply as you
    have already conveyed it to the Queen.

    In making such a reply, it was my duty to add that in case a
    government should be formed by him, or by Granville with him, whom
    the Queen seemed to me wrongly to have passed by—it was to
    Granville that I had resigned my trust, and he, Hartington, was
    subsequently elected by the party to the leadership in the House
    of Commons—my duty would be plain. It would be to give them all
    the support in my power, both negatively, as by absence or
    non-interference, and positively. Promises of this kind, I said,
    stood on slippery ground, and must always be understood with the
    limits which might be prescribed by conviction. I referred to the
    extreme caution, almost costiveness, of Peel’s replies to Lord
    Russell, when he was endeavouring to form a government in December
    1845 for the purpose of carrying the repeal of the Corn Law. In
    this case, however, I felt a tolerable degree of confidence,
    because I was not aware of any substantive divergence of ideas
    between us, and I had observed with great satisfaction, when his
    address to North-East Lancashire came into my hands, after the
    writing but before the publication of mine to Midlothian, that
    they were in marked accordance as to opinions, if not as to form
    and tone, and I did not alter a word. In the case of the first
    Palmerston government I had certainly been thrown into rather
    sharp opposition after I quitted it, but this was mainly due to
    finance. I had not approved of the finance of Sir George Lewis,
    highly as I estimated his judgment in general politics; and it was
    in some ways a relief to me, when we had become colleagues in the
    second Palmerston government, to find that he did not approve of
    mine. However, I could only make such a declaration as the nature
    of the case allowed.

    He received all this without comment, and said his conversation
    with her Majesty had ended as it began, each party adhering to the
    ground originally taken up. He had not altered his advice, but had
    come under her Majesty’s command to learn my intentions, which he
    was to make known to her Majesty returning to Windsor _this_ day
    at one.

    He asked me what I thought of the doctrine of obligation so much
    pressed upon him by the Queen. I said that in my opinion the case
    was clear enough. Her Majesty had not always acted on the rule of
    sending for the leader of the opposition. Palmerston was the known
    and recognised leader of the opposition in 1859, but the Queen
    sent for Granville. The leader, if sent for, was in my opinion
    bound either to serve himself, or to point out some other course
    to her Majesty which he might deem to be more for the public
    advantage. And if that course should fail in consequence of the
    refusal of the person pointed out, the leader of the party could
    not leave her Majesty unprovided with a government, but would be
    bound in loyalty to undertake the task.

    I did not indicate, nor did he ask, what I should do if sent for.
    He did not indicate, nor did I ask, what he should do if the Queen
    continued to press him to go on, in spite of his advice to her to
    move in another direction.—_April 23, 1880._


A barren controversy was afterwards raised on the question whether at this
exciting moment Lord Hartington tried to form a government. What he did,
according to the memorandum, was to advise the Queen to send for Mr.
Gladstone, on the ground of his belief that Mr. Gladstone would join no
government of which he was not the head. The Queen then urged him to make
sure of this, before she would acquiesce in his refusal to undertake the
commission. The Queen, as Mr. Gladstone says, had a right to require
positive information, and Lord Hartington had a right, and it was even his
duty, to procure this information for her, and to put the direct question
to Mr. Gladstone, whether he would or would not act in an administration
of which he was not the head. He went back to Windsor, not in the position
of a statesman who has tried to form a government and failed, but in the
position of one who had refused a task because he knew all along that
failure was certain, and now brought proof positive that his refusal was
right.(370)

What happened next was easy to foresee:—


    _Interview with Lord Granville and Lord Hartington._

    _April 23, 1880._—Soon after half-past three to-day, Lord
    Granville and Lord Hartington arrived from Windsor at my house,
    and signified to me the Queen’s command that I should repair to
    Windsor, where she would see me at half-past six.

    The purport of Lord Hartington’s conversation with me yesterday
    had been signified. They had jointly advised thereupon that I
    should be sent for with a view to the formation of a government,
    and her Majesty desired Lord Granville would convey to me the
    message. I did not understand that there had been any lengthened
    audience, or any reference to details.

    Receiving this intimation, I read to them an extract from an
    article in the _Daily News_ of yesterday,(371) descriptive of
    their position relatively to me, and of mine to them, and said
    that, letting drop the epithets, so I understood the matter. I
    presumed, therefore, that under the circumstances as they were
    established before their audience, they had unitedly advised the
    sovereign that it was most for the public advantage to send for
    me. To this they assented. I expressed, a little later, my sense
    of the high honour and patriotism with which they had acted; said
    that I had endeavoured to fulfil my own duty, but was aware I
    might be subject to severe criticism for my resignation of the
    leadership five years ago, which I had forced upon them; but I did
    it believing in good faith that we were to have quiet times, and
    for the first years, 1875 and 1876, and to the end of the session
    I had acted in a manner conformable to that resignation, and had
    only been driven from my corner by compulsion. They made no reply,
    but Granville had previously told me he was perfectly satisfied as
    to my communications with him.

    I at once asked whether I might reckon, as I hoped, on their
    co-operation in the government. Both assented. Granville agreed to
    take the foreign office, but modestly and not as of right. I
    proposed the India office as next, and as very near in weight, and
    perhaps the most difficult of all at this time, to Hartington,
    which he desired time to consider. I named Childers as the most
    proper person for the war office. As I had to prepare for Windsor,
    our interview was not very long; and they agreed to come again
    after dinner.

    We spoke of the governor-generalship, at least I spoke to
    Granville who stayed a little after Hartington, and I said
    Goschen’s position as to the franchise would prevent his being in
    the cabinet now, but he should be in great employ. Granville had
    had the lead in the conversation, and said the Queen requested
    _him_ to carry the message to me.

    _Audience at Windsor._

    _Windsor Castle, April 23, 1880._—At 6.50 I went to the Queen, who
    received me with perfect courtesy, from which she never deviates.
    Her Majesty presumed I was in possession of the purport of her
    communications with Lord Granville and with Lord Hartington, and
    wished to know, as the administration of Lord Beaconsfield had
    been “turned out,” whether I was prepared to form a government.
    She thought she had acted constitutionally in sending for the
    recognised leaders of the party, and referring the matter to them
    in the first instance. I said that if I might presume to speak,
    nothing could in my views be more correct than her Majesty’s view
    that the application should be so made (I did not refer to the
    case as _between_ Lord Granville and Lord Hartington), and that it
    would have been an error to pass them by and refer to me. They had
    stood, I said, between me and the position of a candidate for
    office, and it was only their advising her Majesty to lay her
    commands upon me, which could warrant my thinking of it after all
    that had occurred. But since they had given this advice, it was
    not consistent with my duty to shrink from any responsibility
    which I had incurred, and I was aware that I had incurred a very
    great responsibility. I therefore humbly accepted her Majesty’s
    commission.

    Her Majesty wished to know, in order that she might acquaint Lord
    Beaconsfield, whether I could undertake to form a government, or
    whether I only meant that I would make the attempt. I said I had
    obtained the co-operation of Lord Granville and Lord Hartington,
    and that my knowledge and belief as to prevailing dispositions
    would, I think, warrant me in undertaking to form a government, it
    being her Majesty’s pleasure. I had ascertained that Lord
    Granville would be willing to accept the foreign office; and I had
    also to say that the same considerations which made it my duty to
    accept office, seemed also to make it my duty to submit myself to
    her Majesty’s pleasure for the office of chancellor of the
    exchequer together with that of first lord of the treasury.

    She asked if I had thought of any one for the war office, which
    was very important. The report of the Commission would show that
    Lord Cardwell’s system of short service had entirely broken down,
    and that a change must be made at any rate as regarded the
    non-commissioned officers. Lord Hartington had assured her that no
    one was committed to the system except Lord Cardwell, and he was
    very unwell and hardly able to act. Lord Hartington knew the war
    office, and she thought would make a good war minister. I said
    that it seemed to me in the present state of the country the first
    object was to provide for the difficulties of statesmanship, and
    then to deal with those of administration. The greatest of all
    these difficulties, I thought, centred in the India office, and I
    was very much inclined to think Lord Hartington would be eminently
    qualified to deal with them, and would thereby take a place in the
    government suitable to his position and his probable future.

    She asked, to whom, then, did I think of entrusting the war
    office? [Resumed this afternoon, April 24.](372) I said Mr.
    Childers occurred to me as an administrator of eminent capacity
    and conciliatory in his modes of action; his mind would be open on
    the grave subjects treated by the Commission, which did not appear
    to me to be even for Lord Cardwell matters of committal, but
    simply of public policy to be determined by public advantage. She
    thought that Mr. Childers had not been popular at the admiralty,
    and that it was desirable the secretary for war should be liked by
    the army. I said that there was an occurrence towards the close of
    his term which placed him in a difficult position, but relied on
    his care and discretion. (She did not press the point, but is
    evidently under strong professional bias.)

    She spoke of the chancellorship, and I named Lord Selborne.

    She referred to general action and hoped it would be conciliatory.
    I said that every one who had served the crown for even a much
    smaller term of years than I had the good or ill fortune to
    reckon, would know well that an incoming government must recognise
    existing engagements, and must take up, irrespective of its
    preferences, whatever was required by the character and honour of
    the country. I referred to the case of Scinde and Sir R. Peel’s
    cabinet in 1843; which she recognised as if it had been recently
    before her.

    She said, “I must be frank with you, Mr. Gladstone, and must
    fairly say that there have been some expressions”—I think she said
    some little things, which had caused her concern or pain. I said
    that her Majesty’s frankness, so well known, was a main ground of
    the entire reliance of her ministers upon her. That I was
    conscious of having incurred a great responsibility, and felt the
    difficulty which arises when great issues are raised, and a man
    can only act and speak upon the best lights he possesses, aware
    all the time that he may be in error. That I had undoubtedly used
    a mode of speech and language different in some degree from what I
    should have employed, had I been the leader of a party or a
    candidate for office. Then as regarded conciliation, in my opinion
    the occasion for what I had described had wholly passed away, and
    that so far as I was concerned, it was my hope that her Majesty
    would not find anything to disapprove in my general tone; that my
    desire and effort would be to diminish, her cares, in any case not
    to aggravate them; that, however, considering my years, I could
    only look to a short term of active exertion and a personal
    retirement comparatively early. With regard to the freedom of
    language I had admitted, she said with some good-natured archness,
    “But you will have to bear the consequences,” to which I entirely
    assented. She seemed to me, if I may so say, “natural under
    effort.” All things considered, I was much pleased. I ended by
    kissing her Majesty’s hand.




IV


(M200) The usual embarrassments in building a government filled many days
with unintermittent labour of a kind that, like Peel, Mr. Gladstone found
intensely harassing, though interesting. The duty of leaving out old
colleagues can hardly have been other than painful, but Mr. Gladstone was
a man of business, and lie reckoned on a proper stoicism in the victims of
public necessity. To one of them he wrote, “While I am the oldest man of
my political generation, I have been brought by the seeming force of
exceptional circumstances to undertake a task requiring less of years and
more of vigour than my accumulating store of the one and waning residue of
the other, and I shall be a solecism in the government which I have
undertaken to form. I do not feel able to ask you to resume the toils of
office,” etc., but would like to name him the recipient for a signal mark
of honour. “I have not the least right to be disappointed when you select
younger men for your colleagues,” the cheerful man replied. Not all were
so easily satisfied. “It is cruel to make a disqualification for others
out of an infirmity of my own,” Mr. Gladstone wrote to the oldest of his
comrades in the Peelite days, but—et cetera, et cetera, and he would be
glad to offer his old ally the red riband of the Bath when one should be
vacant. The peer to whom this letter with its dubious solatium was
addressed, showed his chagrin by a reply of a single sentence: that he did
not wish to leave the letter unanswered, lest it should seem to admit that
he was in a state of health which he did not feel to be the case; the red
riband was not even declined. One admirable man with intrepid _naïveté_
proposed himself for the cabinet, but was not admitted; another no less
admirable was pressed to enter, but felt that he could be more useful as
an independent member, and declined—an honourable transaction repeated by
the same person on more than one occasion later. To one excellent member
of his former cabinet, the prime minister proposed the chairmanship of
committee, and it was with some tartness refused. Another equally
excellent member of the old administration he endeavoured to plant out in
the viceregal lodge at Dublin, without the cabinet, but in vain. To a
third he proposed the Indian vice-royalty, and received an answer that
left him “stunned and out of breath.” As the hours passed and office after
office was filled up, curiosity grew vivacious as to the fate appointed
for the younger generation of radicals. The great posts had gone to
patrician whigs, just as if Mr. Gladstone had been a Grey or a Russell. As
we have seen, he had secured Lord Granville and Lord Hartington before he
went to Windsor, and on the evening of his return, the first person to
whom he applied was Lord Derby, one of the most sagacious men of his day,
but a great territorial noble and a very recent convert. He declined
office on the ground that if a man changes his party connection, he is
bound to give proof that he wishes the change from no merely personal
motive, and that he is not a gainer by it.

Mr. Bright had joined, it was true, and Mr. Forster, but Bright the new
radicals honoured and revered without any longer following, and with
Forster they had quarrelled violently upon education, nor was the quarrel
ever healed. One astute adviser, well acquainted with the feeling and
expectations of the left wing, now discovered to his horror that Mr.
Gladstone was not in the least alive to the importance of the leaders of
the radical section, and had never dreamed of them for his cabinet. His
view seems to have been something of this kind, “You have been saved from
whig triumph in the person of Lord Hartington; now that you have got me to
keep the balance, I must have a whig cabinet.” He was, moreover, still
addicted to what he called Peel’s rule against admitting anybody straight
into the cabinet without having held previous office. At last he sent for
Sir Charles Dilke. To his extreme amazement Sir Charles refused to serve,
unless either himself or Mr. Chamberlain were in the cabinet; the prime
minister might make his choice between them; then the other would accept a
subordinate post. Mr. Gladstone discoursed severely on this unprecedented
enormity, and the case was adjourned. Mr. Bright was desired to interfere,
but the pair remained inexorable. In the end the lot fell on Mr.
Chamberlain. “Your political opinions,” Mr. Gladstone wrote to him (April
27), “may on some points go rather beyond what I may call the general
measure of the government, but I hope and believe that there can be no
practical impediment on this score to your acceptance of my proposal.” So
Mr. Chamberlain took office at the board of trade, where Mr. Gladstone
himself had begun his effective career in administration nearly forty
years before; and his confederate went as under-secretary to the foreign
office. At that time the general feeling was that Sir Charles Dilke, long
in parliament and a man of conspicuous mark within its walls, was rather
badly used, and that Mr. Gladstone ought to have included both. All this
was the ominous prelude of a voyage that was to be made through many
storms.(373)

One incident of these labours of construction may illustrate Mr.
Gladstone’s curious susceptibility in certain kinds of personal contest.
He proposed that Mr. Lowe should be made a viscount, while the Queen
thought that a barony would meet the claim. For once it broke the prime
minister’s sleep; he got up in the middle of the night and dashed off a
letter to Windsor. The letter written, the minister went to bed again, and
was in an instant sound asleep.

“The new parliament,” he told his old friend at school and college, Sir
Francis Doyle (May 10), “will be tested by its acts. It will not draw its
inspiration from me. No doubt it will make changes that will be denounced
as revolutionary, and then recognised as innocent and even good. But I
expect it to act in the main on well-tried and established lines, and do
much for the people and little to disquiet my growing years, or even
yours.” All fell out strangely otherwise, and disquiet marked this second
administration from its beginning to its end. To lay all the blame on a
prime minister or his cabinet for this, is like blaming the navigator for
wild weather. In spite of storm and flood, great things were done; deep,
notable, and abiding results ensued. The procedure of parliament underwent
a profound revolution. So too did our electoral system in all its aspects.
New lines of cleavage showed themselves in the divisions of political
party. A not unimportant episode occurred in the chapter of religious
toleration. The Irish peasant, after suffering centuries of oppression and
tyrannic wrong, at last got the charter of his liberation. In a more
distant region, as if to illustrate the power of events against the will
of a statesman and the contemporary opinion of a nation, England for good
or evil found herself planted in the valley of the Nile, and became a
land-power on the Mediterranean.





APPENDIX




Budget Of 1860


_Page __26_

_Sir William Heathcote wrote to Mr. Gladstone, May 4, 1861_:—

I understood you in your rebukes of Lewis in 1857, to be aiming not only
at a change of his plan of finance in that particular year, but (if that
were impossible, or at least could not be carried), at a resumption as
early as circumstances would allow, of what you thought the proper line of
action which he insisted on suspending. Income-tax and war duties on tea
and sugar were and would continue to be, as I understood, the primary
claimants for reduction of taxation, in your judgment.... The very
vehemence of your convictions and expressions on _both_ occasions
perplexes me.

_Mr. Gladstone replied the same day_:—

... You think, 1. That I bound myself to the reduction of the tea and
sugar duties as a policy for future occasions, and not merely for the
issue then raised. 2. That in like manner I was bound to the reduction and
abolition of the income-tax. 3. That even if there arose in the system of
our expenditure a great change, involving an increase of ten or fifteen
millions of money over 1853, I was still in consistency bound to hold over
the first chance of reduction for income-tax, tea and sugar. 4. That
consequently until these duties were remitted I could not propose to
prosecute any commercial reforms involving, as nearly all of them do, a
sacrifice of revenue for a time. 5. It is because I have departed from
these positions by proposing a multitude of reductions and abolitions of
duty, other than the three mentioned, and partly or wholly in preference
to them, that you have lost confidence in my judgment on these matters (a
confidence to which I do not pretend that I had ever any claim).

If I have interpreted you aright, and I hope you will tell me whether I
have done so or not, this is all to me exceedingly curious; such are the
differences in the opinions of men formed from their different points of
view. Now I will give you mine. To give effect to the pledge of honour, by
which I became bound in 1853, I made a desperate effort in 1857, with all
the zeal of which I was capable, and with all the passion to which I am
liable. It was my opinion that the course then taken would be decisive as
to the operations in 1860, for the income-tax never can be got rid of
except by prospective finance, reaching over several years, and liable to
impediment and disturbance accordingly. I therefore protested against the
whole scale of expenditure then proposed; as well as against particular
kinds of expenditure to which I might refer. I likewise protested against
the provision for that expenditure which the government of the day
proposed. First, because the expenditure itself was excessive, in my view.
Secondly, because in the mode of that provision I thought the remission of
income-tax was large out of all proportion to the remission on indirect
taxes; and this disproportion I regarded as highly dangerous. I determined
to let no political prejudice stand in my way, and to test to the best of
my very feeble power the opinion of parliament with respect to tea and
sugar. I stated that if the opinion of parliament were against me I should
not factiously prolong the contest but should withdraw from it. Not only
was the opinion of parliament against me, but it so happened that the
opinion of the country was immediately afterwards taken by a dissolution
on that and on other kindred questions. The country affirmed the policy of
Lord Palmerston, and the policy of a materially increased expenditure, by
an overwhelming majority. I had misjudged public opinion; they had read it
aright. After the dissolution of 1857, Sir George Lewis, who had
previously raised the tea and sugar duties for one year, proposed to raise
them for two more. I immediately followed in debate, and thanked him
warmly for doing it. All this of course I can prove. I said, we are going
to have more expenditure, we must therefore have more taxation.

As I have gone thus far with my history, I will conclude it.
Notwithstanding what had happened, I did not absolutely abandon at that
time the hope that we might still reach in 1860 a state which might enable
us to abolish the income-tax. I had a faint expectation of more economy
under another government. When Lord Derby’s administration came in in
1858, they professed to reduce expenditure by £800,000, and to contemplate
further reductions. I expressed my satisfaction, and gave them the extreme
of support that I could. But I then clearly pointed out that, even with
the scale of expenditure they then proposed, we could not abolish the
income-tax in 1860. In a few months, their reductions vanished into air.
In 1859 came the famous “reconstruction.” I took office in June, and found
a scale of expenditure going on in the treasury far more prodigal and
wanton than I had ever charged upon Lord Palmerston’s first government. I
found also that when the estimates had been completed, I believe entirely
on _their_ basis, there was a probable deficiency of four or five millions
for a year of which nearly one-third had passed. And the expenditure was I
think nearly seventy millions, or some fourteen millions more than in
1853. This was not the act only of the government. The opposition halloed
them on; and the country, seized with a peculiar panic, was in a humour
even more lavish than the opposition.

My view was, and I stated it, that we ought to provide for this
expenditure in a due proportion between direct and indirect taxes. I
showed that this proportion had not been observed; that we had continued
to levy large amounts of war tax on tea and sugar, and had returned to the
scale of 1853 for income. I proposed to provide the necessary sums chiefly
by an increase of income-tax. But neither then (in July 1859), nor for
nearly two and a half years before, had I ever (to my knowledge) presumed
to speak of any one as bound to abolish the income-tax or to remit the
additional duties on tea and sugar.

I fully expect from _you_ the admission that as to these measures I could
not in the altered circumstances be bound absolutely to the remissions.
But you say I was bound to give them a preference over all other
remissions. Nowhere I believe can one word to this effect be extracted
from any speech of mine. I found in 1860 that all the reforming
legislation, which had achieved such vast results, had been suspended for
seven years. We were then raising by duties doomed in 1853, from twelve to
thirteen millions. It would in my opinion have been no less than monstrous
on my part to recognise the preferences you claim for these particular
duties. All of them indeed would have been reliefs, even the income-tax
which is I think proved to be the least relief of any. But, though
reliefs, they were hardly reforms; and experience had shown us that
reforms were in fact double and treble reliefs. I may be wrong, but it is
my opinion and I found it on experience, that the prospect of the removal
of the three collectively (income, tea extra, and sugar extra) being in
any case very remote, it is less remote with than without the reforming
measures of the last and (I hope I may add) of the present year. Had the
expenditure of 1853 been resumed, there would notwithstanding the Russian
war have been, in my opinion, room for all these three things. 1.
Abolition of income-tax by or near 1860; 2. remission of increases on tea
and sugar within the same time; 3. the prosecution of the commercial
reforms.

It may be said that having set my face against an excess of expenditure I
ought to have considered that a holy war, and not to have receded.
Although I place public economy somewhat higher as a matter of duty than
many might do, I do not think it would have been right, I do think it
would have been foolish and presumptuous in me to have gone beyond these
two things: first, making an effort to the utmost of my power at the
critical moment (as I took it to be), and secondly, on being defeated to
watch for opportunities thereafter. Since it should be remembered I do not
recommend or desire sweeping and sudden reductions.

The chief errors that I see myself to have committed are these. In 1853
when I took the unusual course of estimating our income for seven years,
and assuming that our expenditure would either continue as it was, or only
move onwards gradually and gently, I ought no doubt to have pointed out
explicitly, that a great disturbance and increase of our expenditure would
baffle my reckonings. Again in 1857 the temper of the public mind had
undergone a change which I failed to discern; and I attacked the
government and the chancellor of the exchequer of that day for doing what
the country desired though I did not. I name these as specific errors,
over and above the general one of excess of heat.

The budget of last year I cannot admit to have been an error. People say
it should have been smaller. My belief is that if it had been a smaller
boat it would not have lived in such a sea. I speak of the period of the
session before the China war became certain. When it did so, we were in a
great strait about the paper duty. We felt the obligation incurred by the
vote on the second reading, and we construed it according to the
established usage. We took the more arduous, but I think the more
honourable course for a government to pursue. Had we abandoned the bill, I
know not how we could have looked in the face those who had acted and
invested on the faith of an unbroken practice. I admit that political
motives greatly concurred to recommend the budget of last year. It was a
budget of peace, and peace wanted it. The budget of this year followed
from the budget of last, given the other circumstances. At the same time I
can understand how the claim of tea could be set up, but not well after
the occurrences of last year how it could be supported.

This is a long egotistical story. But when you consider that it contains
my whole story (except _pièces justificatives_) in answer to so many
speeches in both Houses and elsewhere, for never to this hour have I
opened my lips in personal defence, you will understand why I might be
garrulous....

Notwithstanding the mild doctrine I have held about expenditure I admit it
may be said I ought not to have joined a government which had such
extended views in that direction, even though they were the views of the
nation. Much may be said on this. I may, however, remark that when the
government was formed I did not fully conceive the extent to which we
should proceed.




The Cabinet. 1860


_Page __36_

_Mr. Gladstone’s memorandum on the currents of opinion in the cabinet of
1860 concludes as follows_:—

1. The most Italian members of the cabinet have been: Lord Palmerston,
Lord John Russell, W.E.G., Gibson, Argyll. The least Italian: Lewis, Wood,
Grey, Herbert, Villiers (especially).

2. In foreign policy generally the most combative have been: Lord
Palmerston, Lord John Russell, Duke of Newcastle, the chancellor. The
least combative: Duke of Somerset, Duke of Argyll, Granville, Gibson,
Herbert, Lewis, Grey, W.E.G., Wood, the same in feeling but not active.

3. In defences and expenditure, the most alarmed, or most martial (as the
case may be), have been: Lord Palmerston, Lord John Russell, Duke of
Newcastle, S. Herbert, followed by Duke of Somerset, the chancellor,
Granville, Cardwell. Inclined the other way: Gibson, W.E.G., Lewis, Grey,
Duke of Argyll (Elgin, I think).

4. In finance some are for movement, some stationary or retrograde so as
to be ready for immediate war. Yet here we are not divided simply as
combative or anti-combative. The onward men in finance are: Lord John
Russell, Duke of Newcastle, Granville, Argyll, Gibson, W.E.G., and, I
think, the chancellor. The stationary men are, first and foremost: Sir
George Lewis, Sir C. Wood; next to these, Lord Palmerston, Cardwell, and,
I think, Villiers, Herbert.

5. On reform I must distinguish between (_a_) extension of the franchise
and (_b_) redistribution of seats. In the first the more liberal men are:
Lord John Russell, Duke of Somerset, Duke of Newcastle, Duke of Argyll,
Gibson, W.E.G. The fearful or opposed are: Lord Palmerston, C. Villiers,
S. Herbert. In the second, for small disfranchisement were, I think, all
the first except Newcastle. For larger disfranchisement: Newcastle,
Villiers, and Lord Palmerston, I think not greatly averse. In fact, I
think that larger disfranchisement of places may have been favoured by
him, 1. as a substitute for enlargement of the franchise, which he chiefly
dreads; 2. as perhaps an obstacle to the framing of a measure.

6. In church matters Herbert, Newcastle, and I are the most conservative
and the most church-like; with a sympathy from Argyll. But, as I said,
there is no struggle here: patronage, the sore subject, not being a
cabinet affair.




Session Of 1860


_Page __47_

_Extract from a Letter to the Duke of Argyll._

_Penmaen., September 3, 1860._—The session has been one to make all of us
thoughtful, and me perhaps most of all. It is indeed much before my mind,
but my head has not ceased to whirl, so that I cannot get a clear view of
what Seward would call my position. Two things I know, one is that it
produced the greatest pleasures and the greatest pains I have ever known
in politics; the other that 1 have had to take various decisions and
perform acts that could neither be satisfactory to others, nor from the
doubt attaching to one side or the other of the alternative, even to
myself. To have been the occasion of the blow to the House of Commons, or
as I call it the “gigantic innovation,” will be a grief to me as long as I
live; if by wildness and rashness I have been its cause, it will be a much
greater grief. Of that I am not yet able to judge. On the whole when I
think of the cabinet, I always go back to Jacob and Esau fighting in their
mother’s womb; only here there have been many Jacobs and Esaus, by which I
do not mean the sixteen members of the cabinet, but the many and very
unhandy causes of division. Perhaps I should find it easiest in the work
of confession to own my neighbour’s faults, _i.e._ to dwell upon those
strange sins of foreign policy which have happily for the most part been
nipped in the bud almost _à l’unanimité_ (yet with what exceptions!); but
avoiding that task, I will make my own confession. I cannot justify the
finance of the year as a whole.... As to the amount of the final demand
[for the China war], what it really demonstrates is _one_ among the
follies and dangers of our high-handed policy, our want of control over
proceedings at the other end of the world. But the weak point is the
fortification plan; I do not now speak of its own merits or demerits, but
I speak of it in relation to the budget.... It is a vile precedent to give
away money by remission, and borrow to supply the void; and in the full
and _chief_ responsibility for having established this precedent I am
involved, not by the budget of February but by the consent of July to the
scheme which involved the borrowing. No doubt there are palliating
circumstances; and lastly the grievous difficulty of choice between
mischievous [_illegible_] and mischievous resignation. Still I must say,
it is in retrospect, as the people and parliament have a right to judge
it, a bad and unworkmanlike business, and under a skilful analysis of it
in the House of Commons (which there is no one opposite fit to make,
except it be Northcote, who perhaps scruples it) I should wince. All these
things and others more inward than these, make sore places in the mind;
but on the other hand, that I may close with a gleam of sunshine like that
which is now casting its shadow on my paper from Penmaenmawr after a rough
morning, I am thankful in the highest degree to have had a share in
resisting the alarmist mania of the day by means of the French treaty, to
which, if we escape collision, I think the escape will have been mainly
due; and likewise in one at least negative service to the great Italian
cause, which is not Italian merely but European.




Mr. Pitt’s War Finance


_Page __59_

_Mr. Gladstone to Herbert Gladstone_

_March 10, 1876._—Mr. Pitt’s position in the Revolutionary war was, I
think, a false one. To keep out of that war demanded from the people of
this country an extraordinary degree of self-control, and this degree of
it they did not possess. The consequence of our going into it was to give
an intensity and vitality to the struggle, which but for the tenacity of
English character it would not have possessed. Mr. Pitt did not show the
great genius in war which he possessed as a peace minister. Until the
epoch of the Peninsula our military performances were small and poor, and
the method of subsidy was unsatisfactory and ineffective. The effect of
borrowing money in three per cents. was to load us with a very heavy
capital of national debt. I think at one time we only got £46, or some
such amount, for the £100. It must, however, be taken into view that a
perpetual annuity of £3, redeemable upon paying £100, brought _more_ than
3/4 of what a perpetual annuity of £4, similarly redeemable, would have
brought; or than 3/5 of what a £5 annuity, similarly redeemable, would
have brought. It is not easy to strike the balance. Mr. Newmarch, a living
economist of some authority, I believe, thinks Mr. Pitt was right. I do
not think the case is so clear against him as to _detract_ from his great
reputation. But were I in the unhappy position of having to call for a
large loan, I should be disposed to ask for the tender in more than one
form, _e.g._, to ask for a tender in three per cents, pure and simple, and
an alternative in 4 or 5 per cents., with that rate of interest guaranteed
for a certain number of years. Sir Robert Walpole had not to contend with
like difficulties, and I think his administration should be compared with
the _early years_ of Pitt’s, in which way of judging he would come off
second, though a man of cool and sagacious judgment, while morally he
stood low.




French Commercial Treaty. 1860


_Page __66_

_Mr. Gladstone at Leeds, October 8, 1881_:—

I, for my part, look with the deepest interest upon the share that I had
in concluding—I will not say so much in concluding, but in conducting on
this side of the water, and within the walls of parliament as well as in
administration—the proceedings which led to the memorable French treaty of
1860. It is quite true that that treaty did not produce the whole of the
benefits that some too sanguine anticipations may possibly have expected
from it, that it did not produce a universal smash of protective duties,
as I wish it had, throughout the civilised world. But it did something. It
enormously increased the trade between this country and France. It
effectually checked and traversed in the year 1860 tendencies of a very
different kind towards needless alarms and panics, and tendencies towards
convulsions and confusion in Europe. There was no more powerful instrument
for confining and controlling those wayward and angry spirits at that
particular crisis, than the commercial treaty with France. It produced no
inconsiderable effect for a number of years upon the legislation of
various European countries, which tended less decisively than we could
have desired, but still intelligibly and beneficially, in the direction of
freedom of trade.




Lord Aberdeen


_Page __87_

_Mr. Gladstone to Sir Arthur Gordon (Lord Stanmore)_

_Downing Street, April 21, 1861._—MY DEAR ARTHUR,—When, within a few days
after your father’s death, I referred in conversation with you to one or
two points in his character, it was from the impulse of the moment, and
without any idea of making my words matter of record. Months have now
passed since you asked me to put on paper the substance of what I said.
The delay has been partly, perhaps mainly, owing to the pressure of other
demands upon my time and thoughts. But it has also been due to this, that
an instinct similar to that which made me speak, has made me shrink from
writing. It is enough in conversation to give the most partial and hasty
touches, provided they be not in the main untrue. Those same touches when
clothed in a form of greater assumption have but a meagre and
unsatisfactory appearance, and may do even positive injustice. Most of all
in the case of a character which was not only of rare quality, but which
was so remarkable for the fineness of its lights and shadows. But you have
a right to my recollections such as they are, and I will not withhold
them.

I may first refer to the earliest occasion on which I saw him; for it
illustrates a point not unimportant in his history. On an evening in the
month of January 1835, during what is called the short government of Sir
Robert Peel, I was sent for by Sir Robert Peel, and received from him the
offer, which I accepted, of the under-secretaryship of the colonies. From
him I went on to your father, who was then secretary of state in that
department, and who was thus to be, in official home-talk, my master.
Without any apprehension of hurting you, I may confess, that I went in
fear and trembling. [_Then follows the passage already quoted in vol. i.
p. 124._] I was only, I think, for about ten weeks his under-secretary.
But as some men hate those whom they have injured, so others love those
whom they have obliged; and his friendship continued warm and
unintermitting for the subsequent twenty-six years of his life.

Some of his many great qualities adorned him in common with several, or
even with many, other contemporary statesmen: such as clearness of view,
strength of the deliberative faculty, strong sense of duty, deep devotion
to the crown, and the most thorough and uncompromising loyalty to his
friends and colleagues. In this loyalty of intention many, I think, are
not only praiseworthy but perfect. But the loyalty of intention was in him
so assisted by other and distinctive qualities, as to give it a peculiar
efficacy; and any one associated with Lord Aberdeen might always rest
assured that he was safe in his hands. When our law did not allow
prisoners the benefit of counsel, it was commonly said that the judge was
counsel for the prisoner. Lord Aberdeen was always counsel for the absent.
Doubtless he had pondered much upon the law, “Thou shalt love thy
neighbour as thyself.” It had entered profoundly into his being, and
formed a large part of it. He was strong in his self-respect, but his
respect for others, not for this man or that but for other men as men, was
much more conspicuous. Rarely indeed have I heard him utter a word
censuring opponents, or concerning those who actually were or had been
friends, that could have given pain. If and when it was done, it was done
so to speak judicially, upon full and reluctant conviction and with
visible regret.

If I have said that he had much in common with other distinguished men who
were like him statesmen by profession, it has been by way of preface to
what I have now to say; namely, that what has ever struck me in his
character as a whole, was its distinctiveness. There were several mental
virtues that he possessed in a degree very peculiar; there were, I think,
one or two in which he stood almost alone. I am not in myself well
qualified for handling a subject like this, and also my life has been too
hurried to give me the most favourable opportunities. Still I must try to
explain my meaning. I will name then the following characteristics, one
and all of which were more prominent in him than in any public man I ever
knew: mental calmness; the absence (if for want of better words I may
describe it by a negative) of all egoism; the love of exact justice; a
thorough tolerance of spirit; and last and most of all an entire absence
of suspicion.

There was something very remarkable in the combination of these qualities,
as well as in their separate possession. Most men who might be happy
enough to have one half his love of justice, would be so tossed with
storms of indignation at injustice as to lose the balance of their
judgment. But he had or seemed to have all the benefits, all the ennobling
force of strong emotion, with a complete exemption from its dangers. His
mind seemed to move in an atmosphere of chartered tranquillity, which
allowed him the view of every object, however blinding to others, in its
true position and proportion.

It has always appeared to me that the love of justice is one of the rarest
among all good qualities, I mean the love of it with full and commanding
strength. I should almost dare to say there are five generous men to one
just man. The beauty of justice is the beauty of simple form; the beauty
of generosity is heightened with colour and every accessory. The passions
will often ally themselves with generosity, but they always tend to divert
from justice. The man who strongly loves justice must love it for its own
sake, and such a love makes of itself a character of a simple grandeur to
which it is hard to find an equal.

Next to Lord Aberdeen, I think Sir Robert Peel was the most just of the
just men I have had the happiness to know. During the years from 1841 to
1846, when they were respectively foreign secretary and prime minister, as
I was at the board of trade for much of the time, I had occasion to watch
the two in the conduct of several negotiations that involved commercial
interests, such as that on the Stade Dues and that on the project of a
commercial treaty with Portugal. Now and then Sir Robert Peel would show
some degree of unconscious regard to the mere flesh and blood, if I may so
speak, of Englishmen; Lord Aberdeen was invariably for putting the most
liberal construction upon both the conduct and the claims of the other
negotiating state.

There is perhaps no position in this country, in which the love of justice
that I have ascribed in such extraordinary measure to your father, can be
so severely tested, as that very position of foreign minister, with which
his name is so closely associated. Nowhere is a man so constantly and in
such myriad forms tempted to partiality; nowhere can he do more for
justice; but nowhere is it more clear that all human force is inadequate
for its end. A nation is rarely just to other nations. Perhaps it is never
truly just, though sometimes (like individuals) what may be called more
than just. There can be no difficulty in any country, least of all this,
in finding foreign ministers able and willing to assert the fair and
reasonable claims of their countrymen with courage and with firmness. The
difficulty is quite of another kind; it is to find the foreign minister,
first, who will himself view those claims in the dry light both of reason
and of prudence; secondly, and a far harder task, who will have the
courage to hazard, and if need be to sacrifice himself in keeping the mind
of his countrymen down to such claims as are strictly fair and reasonable.
Lord Aberdeen was most happy in being secretary of state for foreign
affairs in the time and in the political company of two such men as the
Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel. He was also happy in the general
prevalence of a spirit of great sobriety in the country, which was
singularly free under the government of Sir Robert Peel, from the opposite
but sometimes associated extremes of wantonness and fear. I am glad to
think that his administration of his department earned a decided public
approval. So just a man will, I think, rarely attain in that department to
the same measure of popularity, while a less just man might easily obtain
one far greater.

To fall short of perfect candour would deprive all I have said of the
little value it can possess, as that little value is all summed up in its
sincerity. On one subject to which my mind has been directed for the last
twelve or fourteen years, I had the misfortune to differ from your father.
I mean the state of Italy and its relation to Austria in particular. I
will not pretend to say that his view of the case of Italy appeared to me
to harmonize with his general mode of estimating human action and
political affairs. It seemed to me as if, called in early youth to deal
with a particular combination of questions which were truly gigantic, his
mind had received from their weight and force at an impressible period, a
fixed form in relation to them, while it ever remained open and elastic in
a peculiar degree upon all others. But my mode of solution for what
appeared to me an anomaly is immaterial. I thankfully record that the
Italian question was almost the only one within my recollection, quite the
only one of practical importance, on which during the twenty-six years I
have named, I was unable to accept his judgment. I bear witness with yet
greater pleasure that, when I returned from Naples in 1851 deeply
impressed with the horrible system that I had witnessed, his opinions on
Italian politics did not prevent his readily undertaking to read the
statement I had drawn, nor his using, when he had read it, more strong
words on the subject, which came from lips like his with such peculiar
force. As readily did he undertake to invoke the aid of the court of
Vienna; to which, if I remember right, he transmitted the statement in
manuscript.

Though I feel that I cannot by any effort do justice to what I have termed
his finely-shaded character, I also feel that I might be drawn onwards to
great length on the subject. I must resist the impulse, but I cannot stop
without saying a word on the quality which I regard as beyond all others
his own, I mean the absence from his nature of all tendency to suspicion.
Those who have read his state papers, and have admired their penetrating
force and comprehensive scope, will not misunderstand me when I say that
he was, in this respect, a little child; not from defect of vision, but
from thorough nobleness of nature.

I do not think it was by effort and self-command that he rid himself of
suspicion. In the simple and strong aim of the man to be good himself, it
belonged to the very strength and simplicity of that aim, that he should
also think others good. I recollect, and I dare say you better recollect,
one of his sayings: “I have a habit of believing people.” To some these
words may not seem to import a peculiarity. But as descriptive of him they
indicate what of all the points of his character seemed to me most
peculiar. I have known one man as free from suspicions as was Lord
Aberdeen, but he was not a politician. I am far from thinking statesmen,
or politicians, less honourable than other men, quite the reverse; but the
habit of their life renders them suspicious. The vicissitudes of politics,
the changes of position, the changes of alliance, the sharp transitions
from co-operation to antagonism, the inevitable contact with revolting
displays of self-seeking and self-love; more than all these perhaps, the
constant habit of forecasting the future and shaping all its contingencies
beforehand, which is eminently the merit and intellectual virtue of the
politician, all these tend to make him, and commonly do make him,
suspicious even of his best friend. This suspicion may be found to exist
in conjunction with regard, with esteem, nay with affection. For it must
be recollected that it is not usually a suspicion of moral delinquency,
but at least as it dwells in the better and higher natures, of
intellectual error only, in some of its numerous forms, or at most of
speaking with a reserve that may be more or less or even wholly
unconscious. None of these explanations are needed for Lord Aberdeen. He
always took words in their direct and simple meaning, and assumed them to
be the index of the mind; and its full index too, so that he did not
speculate to learn what undiscovered residue might still remain in its
dark places. This entire immunity from suspicion, which makes our minds in
general like a haunted place, and the sense of the immunity that he
conveyed to his friends in all his dealings with them, combined with the
deep serenity of his mind, which ever seemed to beguile and allay by some
kindly process of nature excitement in others, gave an indescribable charm
to all intercourse with him in critical and difficult circumstances. Hence
perhaps in great part, and not merely from his intellectual gifts, was
derived the remarkable power he seemed to me to exercise in winning
confidences without seeking to win them; and, on the whole, I believe that
this quality, could we hold it as it was held in him, would save us from
ten erroneous judgments for one into which it might lead. For the grand
characteristic of suspicion after all, as of superstition, is to see
things that are not.

I turn now to another point: Lord Aberdeen was not demonstrative; I do not
suppose he could have been an actor; he was unstudied in speech; and it is
of interest to inquire what it was that gave such extraordinary force and
impressiveness to his language. He did not deal in antithesis. His sayings
were not sharpened with gall. In short, one might go on disclaiming for
him all the accessories to which most men who are impressive owe their
impressiveness. Yet I never knew any one who was so impressive in brief
utterances conveying the sum of the matter....

History has also caught and will hold firmly and well the honoured name of
your father. There was no tarnish upon his reputation more than upon his
character. He will be remembered in connection with great passages of
European policy not only as a man of singularly searching, large, and calm
intelligence, but yet more as the just man, the man that used only true
weights and measures, and ever held even the balance of his ordered mind.
It is no reproach to other statesmen of this or other periods, to say that
scarcely any of them have had a celebrity so entirely unaided by a
transitory glare. But if this be so, it implies that while they for the
most part must relatively lose, he must relatively and greatly gain. If
they have had stage-lights and he has had none, it is the hour when those
lights are extinguished that will for the first time do that justice as
between them which he was too noble, too far aloft in the tone of his
mind, to desire to anticipate. All the qualities and parts in which he was
great were those that are the very foundation-stones of our being; as
foundation-stones they are deep, and as being deep they are withdrawn from
view; but time is their witness and their friend, and in the final
distribution of posthumous fame Lord Aberdeen has nothing to forfeit, he
has only to receive.

I see on perusing what I have written, that in the endeavour to set forth
the virtues and great qualities of your father, I seem more or less to
disparage other men, including even Sir Robert Peel whom he so much
esteemed and loved. I had no such intention, and it is the fault of my
hand, not of my will. He would not have claimed, he would not have wished
nor borne, that others should claim for him superiority, or even parity in
all points with all his contemporaries. But there was a certain region of
character which was, so to speak, all his own; and there other men do seem
more or less dwarfed beside him. In the combination of profound feeling
with a calm of mind equally profound, of thorough penetration with the
largest charity, of the wisdom of the serpent with the harmlessness of the
dove, in the total suppression and exclusion of self from his reckonings
and actions—in all this we may think him supreme, and yet have a broad
array of good and noble qualities in which he may have shared variously
with others. There are other secrets of his character and inner life into
which I do not pretend to have penetrated. It always seemed to me that
there was a treasure-house within him, which he kept closed against the
eyes of men. He is gone. He has done well in his generation. May peace and
light be with him, and may honour and blessing long attend his memory upon
earth.—Believe me, my dear Arthur, affectionately yours, W. E. GLADSTONE.




Cabinet Of 1868-1874


_Page __255_

_First lord of the treasury_,         W. E. Gladstone.
_Lord chancellor_,                    Lord Hatherly (Page Wood).
_President of the council_,           Earl de Grey (created Marquis of
            Ripon, 1871).
_Lord privy seal_,                    Earl of Kimberley.
_Chancellor of the exchequer_,        Robert Lowe.
_Home secretary_,                     Henry Austin Bruce.
_Foreign secretary_,                  Earl of Clarendon.
_Colonial secretary_,                 Earl Granville.
_War secretary_,                      Edward Cardwell.
_First lord of the admiralty_,        H. C. E. Childers.
_Indian secretary_,                   Duke of Argyll.
_President of the board of trade_,    John Bright.
_Chief secretary for Ireland_,        Chichester Fortescue.
_Postmaster general_,                 Marquis of Hartington.
_President of the poor law board_,    George J. Goschen.

On Lord Clarendon’s death in June 1870, Lord Granville became foreign
secretary; Lord Kimberley, colonial secretary; Viscount Halifax (Sir C.
Wood), lord privy seal; and Mr. Forster, vice-president of the privy
council, entered the cabinet.

On Mr. Bright’s resignation in December 1870, Mr. Chichester Fortescue
became president of the board of trade; Lord Hartington succeeded him as
chief secretary for Ireland; Mr. Monsell was appointed postmaster general
without a seat in the cabinet.

On Mr. Childers’s resignation in March 1871, Mr. Goschen became first lord
of the admiralty, and Mr. James Stansfeld president of the poor law board.

In August 1872 Mr. Childers rejoined the cabinet, succeeding Lord Dufferin
as chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster. In October Sir Roundell Palmer
(created Lord Selborne) became lord chancellor on the retirement of Lord
Hatherley.

In August 1873 Lord Ripon and Mr. Childers retired, Mr. Gladstone became
chancellor of the exchequer as well as first lord; Mr. Bright rejoined the
cabinet as chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster; Mr. Lowe became home
secretary and Mr. Bruce (created Lord Aberdare) president of the council.




Irish Church Bill


_Page __276_

_Mr. Gladstone to the Queen_

_July 21, 1869._—Mr. Gladstone presents his humble duty to your Majesty
and reports that the cabinet met at 11 this day, and considered with
anxious care its position and duty in regard to the Irish Church bill. The
vote and declaration of the House of Lords last night were regarded as
fatal if persisted in; and the cabinet deemed it impossible to meet
proceedings of such a character with any tender of further concessions.
The cabinet, however, considered at much length a variety of courses; as
(1) To announce at once that they could no longer, after the vote and
announcement of last night, be responsible for further proceedings in
connection with the bill, but that they would leave it to the majority of
the House of Lords to take such steps as it might think proper; (2) To go
through the whole of the amendments of the bill [_i.e._ in the House of
Lords], and then if they were adversely carried to declare and proceed as
above; (3) To go through not the whole of the amendments but the endowment
amendments, and to conclude that when these had been adversely decided,
they could (as before) assume no further responsibility, but must leave
the matter to the majority to consider; (4) To send the bill back to the
House of Commons with the declaration that it would not be accepted there,
and with the intention of simply moving the House to adhere to its
amendments as last adjusted.

Your Majesty has already been apprized by Mr. Gladstone’s telegram in
cipher of this afternoon, that (under the influence of a strong desire to
exhibit patience, and to leave open every opportunity for
reconsideration), the third of these courses had been adopted; although
there was no doubt that the House of Commons was fully prepared to approve
and sustain the first. Lord Granville deemed it just possible that the
peers might be prepared to give way before another return of the bill from
the House of Commons; and the question therefore was left open whether, if
evidence to this effect should appear, the government should then fall in
with that course of proceeding. Although the government have felt it to be
impossible to make biddings in the face of the opposition, the Archbishop
of Canterbury has been apprised, in strict confidence, of the nature and
extent of the concession, which for the sake of peace they would be
prepared to recommend. Sir R. Palmer is also substantially aware of it,
and has expressed his opinion that on such terms the opposition ought to
be ready to conclude the matter.




Board And Voluntary Schools


_Page __310_

_Mr. Gladstone to M. Bright_

_Aug. 21, 1873._—An appeal to me was made to introduce board schools into
Hawarden on account of my share in the Education Act. I stated the two
views held by different supporters of the Act, respectively on the
question of board schools and voluntary schools. For myself, I said, not
in education only but _in all things including education, I prefer
voluntary to legal machinery, when the thing can be well done either way_.
But this question is not to be decided by a general preference or a
general formula. Parliament has referred it to the choice of the local
communities. They should decide according to the facts of the case before
them. What are the facts in Hawarden? Four-fifths are already provided
for; were it only one-fifth or were it two-fifths the case for the board
(I said) would be overwhelming. But besides the four-fifths, arrangements
are already made for a further provision in a voluntary school. Nothing
remains to be done except to build three _infant_ schools. The voluntary
schools will be governed by a committee, including the churchwardens, and
having a majority of laymen. The machinery of a board is of necessity
cumbrous, and the method costly in comparison. I hold that we ought not to
set up this machinery, in order to create three infant schools, where all
the other wants of some 2000 people are already provided for.




Views On A Classical Education


_Page __312_

_Mr. Gladstone to Lord Lyttelton_

_Penmaenmawr, Aug. 29, 1861._—-Thanks for the brief notice which you
recently took of the Public Schools Commission. I was heartily glad to
hear that you had formed a drastic set of questions. I take the deepest
interest in the object of the commission, and I have full confidence in
its members and organs; and at all times I shall be very glad to hear what
you are doing. Meantime I cannot help giving you, to be taken for what it
is worth, the sum of my own thoughts upon the subject.... The _low_
utilitarian argument in matter of education, for giving it what is termed
a practical direction, is so plausible that I think we may on the whole be
thankful that the instincts of the country have resisted what in argument
it has been ill able to confute. We still hold by the classical training
as the basis of a liberal education; parents dispose of their children in
early youth accordingly; but if they were asked why they did so, it is
probable they would give lamentably weak or unworthy reasons for it, such
for example as that the public schools and universities open the way to
desirable acquaintance and what is termed “good society.” Your commission
will not I presume be able to pass by this question, but will have to look
it in the face; and to proceed either upon a distinct affirmative, or a
substantial negative, of the proposition that the classical training is
the proper basis of a liberal education. I hope you will hold by
affirmation and reject negation.

But the reason why I trouble you upon the subject is this, that I think
the friends of this principle have usually rather blinked the discussion,
and have been content with making terms of compromise by way of buying off
the adversary, which might be in themselves reasonable unless they were
taken as mere instalments of a transaction intended in the long run to
swallow up the principle itself. What I feel is that the relation of pure
science, natural science, modern languages, modern history, and the rest
of the old classical training ought to be founded on a principle and ought
not to be treated simply as importunate creditors, that take a shilling in
the £ to-day, because they hope to get another shilling to-morrow, and in
the meantime have a recognition of their title. This recognition of title
is just what I would refuse. I deny their right to a parallel or equal
position; their true position is auxiliary, and as auxiliary it ought to
be limited and restrained without scruple, as a regard to the paramount
matter of education may dictate.

But why after all is the classical training paramount? Is it because we
find it established? because it improves memory or taste, or gives
precision, or develops the faculty of speech? All these are but partial
and fragmentary statements, so many narrow glimpses of a great and
comprehensive truth. That truth I take to be that the modern European
civilisation from the middle age downwards is the compound of two great
factors, the Christian religion for the spirit of man, and the Greek, and
in a secondary degree the Roman discipline for his mind and intellect. St.
Paul is the apostle of the Gentiles, and is in his own person a symbol of
this great wedding—the place, for example, of Aristotle and Plato in
Christian education is not arbitrary nor in principle mutable. The
materials of what we call classical training were prepared, and we have a
right to say were advisedly prepared, in order that it might become not a
mere adjunct but (in mathematical phrase) the complement of Christianity
in its application to the culture of the human being formed both for this
world and for the world to come.

If this principle be true it is broad and high and clear enough, and
supplies a key to all questions connected with the relation between the
classical training of our youth and all other branches of their secular
education. It must of course be kept within its proper place, and duly
limited as to things and persons. It can only apply in full to that small
proportion of the youth of any country, who are to become in the fullest
sense educated men. It involves no extravagant or inconvenient assumptions
respecting those who are to be educated for trades and professions in
which the necessities of specific training must limit general culture. It
leaves open every question turning upon individual aptitudes and
inaptitudes and by no means requires that boys without a capacity for
imbibing any of the spirit of classical culture are still to be
mechanically plied with the instruments of it after their unfitness has
become manifest. But it lays down the rule of education for those who have
no internal and no external disqualification; and that rule, becoming a
fixed and central point in the system, becomes also the point around which
all others may be grouped.

_Mr. Gladstone to Sir S. Northcote_

_Nov. 12, 1861._—The letter I wrote to Lyttelton about the classical
education suggested topics, which as you justly perceive are altogether
esoteric. They have never to my knowledge been carefully worked out, and I
think they well deserve it; but clearly your report is not the place. I
will not say you are not prudent in suggesting that you should not even
give an opinion upon the great question: What is the true place of the old
classical learning in the human culture of the nineteenth century? I am
far from venturing to say the contrary. But one thing I do think, namely,
that it is desirable that, as far as may be, the members of the commission
should have some answer to that question in their minds, and should write
their report with reference to it. For centuries, through the lifetime of
our great schools this classical culture has been made the _lapis
angularis_ of all secular culture of the highest class. Was this right or
was it wrong, aye or no? I think it much to be desired that the commission
should, if they will, proceed upon the affirmative or negative of that
proposition, and should also make their choice for the former. This would
be a long note to their report; but it need not be distinctly and
separately heard in it. Such is my notion. As to particulars I have little
to say that is worth hearing; but I think these three things. First, that
we give much too little scope for deviation from what I think the normal
standard to other and useful branches, when it has become evident that the
normal standard is inapplicable; just as was the case in Oxford before the
reform of the examinations, or let me rather say the new statutes.
Secondly, I am extremely jealous of any invasion of modern languages which
is to displace classical culture, or any portion of it in minds capable of
following that walk. (I take it that among the usual modern tongues
Italian has by far the greatest capacity for strict study and scholarship;
whereas it is the one least in favour and the whole method of dealing with
them is quite alien to strict study.) Lastly, I confess I grieve over the
ignorance of natural history which I feel in myself and believe to exist
in others. At some time, in some way, much more of all this ought to be
brought in, but clearly it would serve in a great degree as recreation,
and need not thrust aside whatever hard work boys are capable of doing.




Position Of The Commander-In-Chief In Parliament


_Page __362_

_Mr. Gladstone to the Queen_

_July 8, 1871._—Mr. Gladstone believes that according to precedent the
commander-in-chief, when a peer, has not shrunk from giving his opinion on
measures submitted to the House of Lords. In 1847, the government of that
day introduced the Short Service bill, of which on the merits it is
believed that the Duke of Wellington, then commander-in-chief, did not
approve. Indeed he expressed in debate on April 26th, 1847, his doubts
whether the measure would produce the advantages which were anticipated
from it; nevertheless, while having no political connection with the
government, he spoke and voted in a division for the bill. It is probable,
as the numbers were only 108 to 94, that his speech and vote alone carried
the bill. Your Majesty will not fail to bear in mind that until 1855,
there was always a very high military authority who was in political
connection with the government, namely, the master of the ordnance.
Indeed, unless Mr. Gladstone’s recollection deceives him, Lord Beresford
was required by the Duke of Wellington in 1829, as master of the ordnance,
to support the Roman Catholic Relief bill. And it is still regretted by
many that ministries have not since comprehended any such officer. All
question, however, as to the political support of a ministry by the
military chiefs of the army is now at an end.




A Soldier At The War Office


_Page __363_

_Mr. Gladstone to Mr. Cardwell_

_Jan. 5, 1871._—It was a great advantage before 1854, that there was
always a considerable soldier either in the cabinet or at least at the
head of an important military department, and politically associated with
the government. This we lost by the crude and ill-advised reconstructions
of ’55. But you, following in this point a wise initiative of your
predecessor, have endeavoured to bring the appointment of Sir H. Storks
into a position which makes it probably the best substitute for the former
plan that can be had at present. The demand that a soldier shall be
appointed at the present time would hold good _a fortiori_ for all periods
of greater emergency. I know not where that principle has been admitted in
our military administration. If we have committed gross errors, it has
been owing to an excess much more than to a defect of professional
influence and counsel. In my opinion the qualities of a good administrator
and statesman go to make a good war minister, especially at this juncture,
far more than those of a good soldier. Show me the soldier who has those
equally with you, and then let him take your place as S.S. But not till
then. You were chosen for your office, not because you would do tolerably
for easy times, and then could walk out, but because you were the best man
the party could supply for the post. The reproaches aimed at you now are
merely aimed at the government through you, and you are chosen to be the
point of attack because the nation is sore on military matters in times of
crisis, and the press which ought to check excitement, by most of its
instruments ministers to its increase. You find yourself unable to suggest
a successor; and I have seen no plan that would not weaken the government
instead of strengthening it. You see what eulogies have been passed on
Bright, now he is gone. You would rise in the market with many after
resigning, to depreciate those who remain behind; but as I have said, you
would not be allowed to have had a legitimate cause of going, and as far
as my observation goes, retirements are quite as critically judged as
acceptances of office, perhaps more so. What is really to be desired, is
that we should get Storks into parliament if possible.




Mr. Gladstone’s Financial Legacy, 1869


_Page __372_

_Mr. Gladstone to Mr. Lowe_

_Hawarden, Jan. 9, 1869._—I have referred to my list of remnants; and I
will begin with those that I tried in parliament and failed in: 1.
Collection of taxes by Queen’s officers instead of local officers. 2.
Taxation of charities. 3. Bill for restraining, with a view to ultimately
abolishing, the circulation of the notes of private banks. 4. Plan for
bringing the chancery and other judicial accounts under the control of
parliament. Here I had a commission (on chancery accounts) but did not
dare to go farther.

The following are subjects which I was not able to take in hand:—

1. Abolition of the remaining duty upon corn; an exceeding strong case. 2.
I should be much disposed to abolish the tea licences as greatly
restrictive of the consumption of a dutiable and useful commodity. I
modified them; but am not sure that this was enough. The B.I.R. could
throw light on this subject. 3. The probate duty calls, I fear, loudly for
change; but I wanted either time or courage to take it in hand. 4. The
remaining conveyance duties, apart from railways, I always considered as
marked for extinction. On this subject Mr. Ayrton has rather decided
antecedents. 5. The fire insurance duty is sure to be further assailed.
Though not as bad (relatively to other taxes) as is supposed, it is bad
enough to be very hard to defend in an adverse House; and this is one of
the questions on which it is not likely that the opposition will help to
see fair play. The promises that liberal reduction will lead to recovery
of anything like the old or previous revenue have always been confidently
pressed by irresponsible men, and are in my opinion illusory. The tax is a
tax on property: and, as we have too few of these rather than too many,
what would seem desirable is to commute it; leaving no more than a penny
stamp on the policy. This might perhaps be done, if it were made part of a
large budget. 6. The income-tax at 6d., I suppose, presents a forward
claim. 7. The commutation of malt duty for beer duty must always, I
presume, be spoken of with respect; but the working objections to it have
thus far been found too hard to deal with.

There is always room in detail for amendments of stamp duties, but the
great case as among them is the probate. They are of a class which,
without any legal knowledge, I found very hard to work through the House
of Commons. I do not look upon the Act of 1844 as the _end_ of legislation
in currency; but this subject is a big one. Scotch and Irish notes would
be hard to deal with until the English case is disposed of. I forget
whether we have abolished the last of the restrictions on newspapers. If
not, they deserve to be taken in hand, according to me. I have always
wished to equalise the outgoings of the exchequer as much as possible over
the several weeks of the year. Few incomes admit of this advantage in the
same degree as the public income. It would make our “account” much more
valuable to our bankers; therefore to us.

These, I think, were the main matters which lay more or less in
perspective before me. I must add that I am strongly in favour of paying
off the national debt, not only by annual surpluses, but by terminable
annuities _sold to the national debt commissioners for securities held by
them against deposit monies_. The opponents of this plan were Mr. Hubbard
and Mr. Laing. I am satisfied that neither of them had taken the trouble,
and it requires some trouble, to understand it. I admit them to be no mean
authorities. Terminable annuities sold to others than yourself are quite
another matter. I got into the law some power of this kind over post
office savings bank monies to be exercised by the chancellor of the
exchequer from time to time.

This is all I need trouble you with, and I have endeavoured to keep clear
of all idiosyncratic propositions as much as in me lies. Of course such a
letter calls for no answer. As this legacy opinion to you takes the form
of a donation _inter vivos_ it will, I hope, escape duty.




Prince Albert, 1854


_Page __426_

Mr. Gladstone wrote an elaborate article in the _Morning Chronicle_ (Jan.
16, 1854) warmly defending the court against attacks that had clouded the
popularity of the Prince Consort. They came to little more than that the
Prince attended meetings of the privy council; that he was present when
the Queen gave an audience to a minister; that he thwarted ministerial
counsels and gave them an un-English character; that in corresponding with
relatives abroad he used English influence apart from the Queen’s
advisers. Mr. Gladstone had no great difficulty in showing how little this
was worth, either as fact supported by evidence, or as principle supported
by the fitness of things; and he put himself on the right ground. “We do
not raise the question whether, if the minister thinks it right to
communicate with the sovereign alone, he is not entitled to a private
audience. But we unhesitatingly assert that if the Prince is present when
the Queen confers with her advisers, and if his presence is found to be
disadvantageous to the public interests, we are not left without a remedy;
for the minister is as distinctly responsible for those interests in this
as in any other matter, and he is bound on his responsibility to
parliament, to decline compliance even with a personal wish of the
sovereign when he believes that his assent would be injurious to the
country.”




Parliamentary Crises


_Page __451_

_Extract from Mr. Gladstone’s letter to the Queen, March 15, 1873_

There have been within that period [1830-1873] twelve of what may be
properly called parliamentary crises involving the question of a change of
government. In nine of the twelve cases (viz., those of 1830, 1835, 1841,
1846, 1852, 1858, 1859, 1866, and 1868), the party which had been in
opposition was ready to take, and did take, office. In the other three it
failed to do this (viz., in 1832, 1851, 1855), and the old ministry or a
modification of it returned to power. But in each of these three cases the
attempt of the opposition to form a government was not relinquished until
after such efforts had been made by its leaders to carry the conviction to
the world that all its available means of action were exhausted; and there
is no instance on record during the whole period (or indeed so far as Mr.
Gladstone remembers at an earlier date) in which a summary refusal given
on the instant by the leader was tendered as sufficient to release the
opposition from the obligations it had incurred. This is the more
remarkable because in two of the three instances the opposition had not,
in the same mode or degree as on Wednesday morning last, contributed by
concerted action to bring about the crisis. On the 7th of May 1832 the
opposition of the day carried in the House of Lords a motion which went
only to alter the order of the opening (and doubtless very important)
clauses of the Reform bill, but which the government of Lord Grey deemed
fatal to the integrity of the measure. Their resignation was announced,
and Lord Lyndhurst was summoned to advise King William iv. on the 9th of
May. On the 12th the Duke of Wellington was called to take a share in the
proceedings, the details of which are matters of history. It was only on
the 15th that the Duke and Lord Lyndhurst found their resources at an end,
when Lord Grey was again sent for, and on the 17th the Duke announced in
the House of Lords his abandonment of the task he had strenuously
endeavoured to fulfil. On the 20th February 1851 the government of Lord
Russell was defeated in the House of Commons on Mr. Locke King’s bill for
the enlargement of the county franchise by a majority composed of its own
supporters. Lord Derby, then Lord Stanley, being sent for by your Majesty
on the 22nd, observed that there were at the time three parties in the
House of Commons and that the ministry had never yet been defeated by his
political friends. He therefore counselled your Majesty to ascertain
whether the government of Lord Russell could not be strengthened by a
partial reconstruction, and failing that measure he engaged to use his own
best efforts to form an administration. That attempt at reconstruction (to
which nothing similar is now in question) did fail, and Lord Derby was
therefore summoned by your Majesty on the 25th, and at once applied
himself, as is well known, to every measure which seemed to give him a
hope of success in constructing a government. On the 27th he apprised your
Majesty of his failure in these efforts; and on March 3rd the cabinet of
Lord Russell returned to office. (This recital is founded on Lord Derby’s
statement in the House of Lords, Feb. 28, 1851.) On Jan. 29, 1855, the
government of Lord Aberdeen was defeated in the House of Commons on a
motion made by an independent member of their own party and supported by
twenty-five of the liberal members present. Though this defeat resembles
the one last named in that it cannot be said to be due to the concerted
action of the opposition as a party, Lord Derby, being summoned by your
Majesty on the 1st of Feb. proceeded to examine and ascertain in every
quarter the means likely to be at his disposal for rendering assistance in
the exigency, and it was not until Feb. 3 that he receded from his
endeavours.




Cabinet Of 1880-1885


_Page __630_

_First lord of the treasury, chancellor of the exchequer_,      W. E.
            Gladstone.
_Lord chancellor_,                               Lord Selborne.
_President of the council_,                      Earl Spencer.
_Lord privy seal_,                               Duke of Argyll.
_Home secretary_,                                Sir W. V. Harcourt.
_Foreign secretary_,                             Earl Granville.
_Colonial secretary_,                            Earl of Kimberley.
_War secretary_,                                 H. C. E. Childers.
_First lord of the admiralty_,                   Earl of Northbrook.
_Indian secretary_,                              Marquis of Hartington.
_President of the board of trade_,               Joseph Chamberlain.
_Chief secretary for Ireland_,                   W. E. Forster.
_Chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster_,          John Bright.
_President of the local government board_,       J. G. Dodson.

On the resignation of the Duke of Argyll, April 1881, Lord Carlingford
(Mr. Chichester Fortescue) became lord privy seal.

In May 1882, Earl Spencer became lord-lieutenant of Ireland. On Mr.
Forster’s resignation he was succeeded by Lord Frederick Cavendish, and
then by Mr. G. O. Trevelyan, neither of whom had a seat in the cabinet.

On the resignation of Mr. Bright in July 1882, Mr. Dodson became
chancellor of the duchy, and Sir Charles Dilke president of the local
government board.

In December 1882, Mr. Gladstone resigned the chancellorship of the
exchequer to Mr. Childers; Lord Hartington became war secretary; Lord
Kimberley, Indian secretary, and Lord Derby colonial secretary.

In March 1883, Lord Carlingford succeeded Earl Spencer as president of the
council.

In October 1884, Mr. Trevelyan succeeded Mr. Dodson as chancellor of the
duchy (with the cabinet), Mr. Campbell-Bannerman becoming Irish secretary
without a seat in the cabinet.

In February 1885, Lord Rosebery, first commissioner of works, succeeded
Lord Carlingford as lord privy seal (with the cabinet) [Lord Carlingford
had also been president of the council from March 1883 in succession to
Lord Spencer], and Mr. Shaw-Lefevre, postmaster-general, entered the
cabinet.





CHRONOLOGY


All speeches unless otherwise stated were made in the House of Commons.

1860.

Jan. 25. Defends good understanding with France.

Feb. 10. Introduces budget.

Feb. 20. Replies to criticisms on commercial treaty.

Feb. 24. Defends his financial proposals.

Feb. 27. Defends proposed reduction of duty on foreign wines.

March 5. Explains objects of Savings Banks bill.

March 9. Defends commercial treaty.

March 12. On Paper Duty Repeal bill.

March 26. On Refreshment Houses and Wine Licences bill.

April 16. Inaugural address before University of Edinburgh on the Work of
Universities.

May 3. In support of Representation of the People bill.

May 8. On Paper Duty Repeal bill.

July 5 and 17. Protests against interference of House of Lords with supply
bills.

Aug. 6. Defends reduction of Customs Duty on paper.

Nov. 8. At Chester on the volunteer movement.

1861.

Feb. 8. Explains provisions of Post Office Savings Bank bill.

Feb. 19. Opposes inquiry into income-tax.

Feb. 21. Introduces Bank of England Payments bill.

Feb. 27. Opposes bill for abolishing church rates.

March 4. Explains provisions of Consolidated Fund and Exchequer Bills Act.

March 7. Defends the government’s Italian policy.

March 14. On Chinese war expenditure.

April 15. Introduces budget.

April 29. Replies to criticisms on financial proposals.

May 2. Moves continuance of tea and sugar duties.

May 6. Announces decision to embody all financial proposals in a single
bill.

May 7. Defends his acts as lord high commissioner of Ionian Islands.

May 16 and 30. On second reading of Customs and Inland Revenue bill.

July 12. Opposes third reading of Universities Elections bill.

July 19. On misgovernment of Italy.

Oct. 10. At Liverpool on the Pursuit of Science.

Nov. 27. At Willis’s Room, London, on the Christian aspect of education.

Publishes _Translations by Lord Lyttelton and the Right Hon. W. E.
Gladstone_.

1862.

Jan. 11. At Edinburgh on American Civil War and results of French treaty.

April 3. Introduces budget.

April 7. Replies to criticisms on budget.

April 10. Defends proposed brewers’ licences.

April 11. Defends government’s Italian policy.

April 23. At Manchester on value of competitive examinations and the death
of Prince Albert.

April 24. At Manchester condemns extravagance in public expenditure.

May 8. Replies to criticisms of Sir S. Northcote on his financial
proposals.

May 13. Defends principles on which income-tax is levied.

May 16. In favour of economy.

June 16. At Archbishop Tenison’s grammar school on middle class education.

July 26. Pays tribute to Sir Hugh Myddelton at inauguration of his statue
on Islington Green.

Aug. 1. Opposes Night Poaching Prevention bill.

Sept. 24. On agriculture at Mold.

Oct. 7. At Newcastle-on-Tyne on the American Civil War and French treaty.

Oct. 8. Makes a tour of inspection of the Tyne.

Oct. 9. At Sunderland on government’s foreign policy.

At Middlesborough on commercial and social progress.

Oct. 10. At York on America and Italy.

Oct. 22. At Wrexham on minor railways.

Dec. 27. At Chester on distress in Lancashire.

1863.

Jan. 5. At Hawarden on his visit to Sicily, 1838.

Feb. 13. Explains provisions of Post Office Savings Bank bill.

March 4. Supports Qualification for Office Abolition bill.

April 15. Supports Burials bill.

April 16. Introduces budget.

April 23. Opposes levying income-tax on precarious incomes at a lower
scale than on permanent.

May 4. Receives deputation protesting against income-tax on charity trust
funds. Defends the proposal in debate.

May 8. Defends government’s Italian policy.

May 12. On condition of Ionian Islands.

May 29. On Turkey and her dependencies.

June 9. On relaxation of the Act of Uniformity.

June 12. On the condition of Ireland.

June 30. Opposes recognition of the Southern Confederacy.

July 20. On condition of Poland.

July 24. On petition for abolition of tests at Oxford.

Oct. 26. Lays foundation stone of Wedgwood Memorial Institute at Burslem.

1864.

Jan. 4. At Buckley on thrift.

Feb. 4. On Schleswig-Holstein question.

Feb. 8. On his bill for regulating collection of taxes.

Feb. 11. Introduces Bank Act (Scotland) bill.

Feb. 26. On taxation of Ireland.

March 7. Defends provisions of Government Annuity bill.

March 16. Receives deputation of London Trades Council on Annuity bill.

March 16. In support of bill abolishing tests for degrees at Oxford.

March 18. On cession of Ionian Islands to Greece.

April 7. Introduces budget.

April 21. On departure of General Garibaldi from England.

May 6. On English public school education.

May 10. On direct and indirect taxation.

May 11. On Mr. Baines’s bill for the extension of the suffrage in towns.

July 3. On the Roman question.

July 4. Replies to Mr. Disraeli’s resolution of censure on
Schleswig-Holstein.

Oct. 11. At Bolton on progress of the past thirty years.

Oct. 12. Opens Farnworth Park, Bolton: on the factory system and open
spaces. At town hall, Liverpool, on principles of colonial and foreign
policy.

Oct. 13. At Liverpool on direct and indirect taxation.

Oct. 14. At Manchester appeals to the nation to protest against
extravagant expenditure. Distributes prizes at Manchester to competitors
in Oxford middle-class examinations: on older and newer pursuits of
Christian civilisation.

Nov. 7. Closes the North London Industrial Exhibition.

Nov. 8. In praise of law and lawyers at banquet to M. Berryer.

Nov. 10. Commends volunteer movement at dinner of volunteers of the St.
Martin’s division.

Dec. 30. At Mold on our coal resources.

1865.

Feb. 10. Explains provisions of Bank of Issue bill.

Feb. 14. Announces appointment of commission on railways.

Feb. 24. On state of Ireland.

March 28. On Irish church establishment.

April 7. On Irish railway system.

April 27. Introduces budget.

May 31. At Chester on liberal principles and parliamentary reform.

June 14. Opposes Mr. Goschen’s bill for abolition of tests at Oxford.

June 15. Explains provisions of Exchequer and Public Audit bill.

June 20. On Irish university education.

July 18. Defeated at Oxford university,—Sir William Heathcote, 3236; Mr.
Gathorne Hardy, 1904; Mr. Gladstone, 1724. At free trade hall, Manchester.
In the evening, at St. George’s hall, Liverpool, replies to Mr. Disraeli’s
attack on his finance.

July 22. Elected for South Lancashire,—Egerton, 9171; Turner, 8806;
Gladstone, 8786; Legh, 8476; Thompson, 7703; Heywood, 7653.

July 27 to Aug. 7. Correspondence with Lord Malmesbury on responsibility
for Chinese expedition of 1860.

Oct. 18. Tribute to memory of the Duke of Newcastle at Shire Oaks, Notts.

Nov. 1. Presented with address by Parliamentary Reform Union, in trades
hall, Glasgow. Presented with freedom of the city in city hall: on
increase of commerce and decrease of wars. In Scotia hall on results of
free trade, a cheap press, and social legislation.

Nov. 3. Delivers valedictory address before Edinburgh University on ’The
Place of Ancient Greece in the Providential Order of the World.’

1866.

Feb. 8. On the condition of Ireland.

Feb. 9. Introduces bill to consolidate the duties of exchequer and audit
departments.

Feb. 17. Defends suspension of Habeas Corpus Act in Ireland.

Feb. 22. Tribute to memory of Lord Palmerston.

Feb. 23. On Fenianism in America.

Feb. 26. On economy in public expenditure.

March 2. Brings in bill consolidating laws regulating the preparation,
issue, and payment of exchequer bills.

March 7. Suggests compromise for settling church rate question.

March 12. Explains provisions of Representation of the People bill.

April 5. At Liverpool replies to Mr. Lowe’s criticisms of the Reform bill.

April 6. On reform at the Amphitheatre, Liverpool.

April 12. Moves second reading of Reform bill.

April 27. Closes debate on Earl Grosvenor’s amendment to Reform bill.

May 3. Introduces budget.

May 7. Brings in Redistribution of Seats bill.

May 8. Brings in Compulsory Church Rate Abolition bill.

May 24. Explains provisions of Terminable Annuities bill.

June 11. On the state of Europe; Austro-Prussian question, etc.

June 15. Tribute to Mr. Hume.

June 18. Moves second reading of Church Rates bill.

June 18. Opposes Lord Dunkellin’s amendment substituting rateable for
rental for borough franchise.

June 26. Announces resignation of Lord Russell’s government.

July 16. On the Queen’s Universities, Ireland.

July 20. On the state of Europe and the Italian policy of Lord
Palmerston’s government.

July 21. At inaugural meeting of Cobden Club; tribute to work of Mr.
Cobden.

Aug. 2. Supports renewal of Habeas Corpus Suspension Act.

Sept. 7. At Salisbury in defence of Reform bill and on Lord Herbert.

Oct. to Jan. In Rome.

1867.

Jan. 27. Speech in praise of free trade at dinner of Society of Political
Economy, Paris.

Feb. 5. On the question of reform.

Feb. 11. On the government’s intention of proceeding by way of
resolutions.

Feb. 15. On the condition of Crete.

Feb. 27. Supports bill enabling Roman catholics to hold office of lord
lieutenant of Ireland.

March 18. Criticises provisions of the Reform bill.

March 20. On Church Rates Abolition bill.

March 21. Meeting of 278 liberal members; advises agreement to second
reading of Reform bill.

March 21. On bill to repeal the Ecclesiastical Titles Act.

March 25. Criticises Reform bill on second reading.

March 28. On England’s share in the defence of the colonies.

April 4. On Mr. Disraeli’s financial statement.

April 10. On abolition of religious tests at Oxford.

April 11, 12. Moves amendment making personal payment of rates not an
essential qualification for the franchise.

April 18. Letter to Mr. R. W. Crawford announcing intention not to attempt
further alteration in basis of borough franchise.

May 3. On right of public meeting in parks and open spaces.

May 7. On Irish church establishment.

May 9. On “compound householders.”

May 11. Receives deputation from National Reform Union to express
confidence in his leadership.

May 13. On Scotch Reform bill.

May 16. Defends policy of reduction of national debt.

May 28. On inconsistency of the government on reform.

May 29. On Mr. Fawcett’s Uniformity Act Amendment bill.

May 30. On penalties for corrupt practices at elections.

May 31. On late ministry’s action regarding Queen’s Universities, Ireland.

June 28. On representation of Ireland.

July 10. On Mr. H. A. Bruce’s Education bill.

Aug. 1. On Irish railways.

Aug. 8. Opposes Lords’ minority representation amendment to Reform bill.

Oct. “The Session and its Sequel” in _Edinburgh Review_.

Nov. 10. On Abyssinian campaign, protests against territorial
aggrandisement.

Nov. 26. On Abyssinian expedition.

Nov. 28. On financial proposals to meet expenses of Abyssinian war.

Dec. 18. At Oldham on national prosperity and the condition of Ireland.
Opens Mechanics’ Institute at Werneth: on education. Distributes prizes to
science and art students, Oldham: on education, machinery, and foreign
competition.

Dec. 19. At Ormskirk on Reform bill. At Southport on Fenianism and the
condition of Ireland.

1868.

Jan. “Phœnicia and Greece” in _Quarterly_.

Feb. 3. At Hawarden on Sir Walter Scott.

Feb. 18. To deputation from London Trades Unions on labour questions.

March 6. On _Alabama_ claims.

March 16. Declares for disestablishment of Irish church.

March 19. On Compulsory Church Rates Abolition bill.

March 23. Gives notice of three resolutions on Irish church establishment.

March 30. In support of his resolutions.

April 3. Replies to Mr. Disraeli’s criticisms.

April 30. Replies to criticisms of first resolution.

May 4. Protests against intention to dissolve parliament.

May 7. Moves second and third resolutions on Irish church.

May 22. On Suspensory bill.

June 9, July 26. On proposal to purchase the telegraph system.

June 25. Replies to Mr. Disraeli’s attack on foreign policy of Lord
Russell’s ministry.

July 2. Seconds vote of thanks to army on conclusion of Abyssinian war.

July 4. Presides at meeting of Social Science Association: on relations of
capital and labour.

July 22. At Romsey on England’s duty to Ireland.

July 27. Tribute to memory of Lord Brougham.

Aug. 5. At St. Helens on disestablishment of Irish church.

Oct. 9. Issues election address to S.-W. Lancashire.

Oct. 12. At Warrington on retrenchment of public expenditure and the Irish
church.

Oct. 14. At Liverpool on tory Reform bill and Irish church.

Oct. 16. At Old Swan, Liverpool, on conservative party as party of
monopoly.

Oct. 17. At Newton criticises proposals for reforming Irish church.

Oct. 20. At Leigh on retrenchment and Ireland.

Oct. 21. At Ormskirk on English and Irish church establishments. At
Southport on finance and Ireland.

Oct. 23. At Wigan on Irish church.

Nov. 13. At Bootle replies to personal calumnies, and on ritualism.

Nov. 14. At Garston on condition of conservative party. At Wavertree on
Irish church.

Nov. 16. At Widnes on national expenditure. At St. Helens on Ireland.

Nov. 17. Elected for Greenwich,—Salomons, 6645; Gladstone, 6351; Parker,
4661; Mahon, 4342.

Nov. 18. At Preston on Irish church.

Nov. 23. _A Chapter of Autobiography_ published.

Nov. 24. Defeated in S.-W. Lancashire,—Cross, 7729; Turner, 7676;
Gladstone, 7415; Grenfell, 6939.

Dec. 9. First ministry formed.

Dec. 21. Returned unopposed for Greenwich: on the liberal programme.

Articles on _Ecce Homo_ published volume form.

1869.

Feb. 11. At Fishmongers’ hall on work before liberal government.

March 1. Introduces bill for disestablishment of Irish church.

March 23. Closes debate on second reading of Irish Church bill.

April 15. Replies to criticisms of Irish Church bill.

May 31. On third reading of Irish Church bill.

June 29. Defends change of opinion on university tests.

July 15, 16. Moves rejection of Lords’ amendments to Irish Church bill.

July 20. Supports Mr. Chambers’s Marriage with a Deceased Wife’s Sister
bill.

July 23. Moves to agree to final amendments of Lords.

Aug. 5. Explains Bishops’ Resignation bill.

Publishes _Juventus Mundi, The Gods and Men of the Heroic Age_.

1870

Feb. 8. On condition of Ireland.

Feb. 15. Brings in Irish Land bill.

March 1. On state-aided emigration to British colonies.

March 11. On second reading of Irish Land bill.

March 18. On Elementary Education bill.

March 22. On Peace Preservation (Ireland) bill.

April 1. On position of Trinity College, Dublin.

April 4. Opposes Mr. Disraeli’s amendment to clause 3 of Irish Land bill.

April 5. Opposes payment of members.

April 11. Moves for committee to inquire into law regarding corrupt
practices.

April 26. On his principles of colonial policy.

April 27. In support of Marriage with a Deceased Wife’s Sister bill.

May 10. On Indian opium revenue.

May 23. In support of University Tests bill.

May 24. Opposes motion in favour of disestablishing church of England in
Wales.

May 30. On third reading of Irish Land bill.

June 15. In support of bill abolishing minority representation.

June 16 and 24. On Elementary Education bill.

June 21. In favour of presence of bishops in House of Lords.

June 30. On conscience clause in Education bill. On religious teaching in
elementary schools.

July 14. Defends vote by ballot in Education bill.

July 22. Replies to reproaches from Mr. Miall and Mr. Dixon on Education
bill.

July 27. Supports second reading of Ballot bill.

Aug. 1. On Franco-German war and neutrality of Belgium.

Aug. 10. On treaty guaranteeing independence and neutrality of Belgium.

Oct. “Germany, France, and England” in _Edinburgh Review_.

Nov. 1. Closes Workman’s International Exhibition, Islington: on benefit
to English commerce of foreign competition.

Nov. 9. At Lord Mayor’s banquet on Franco-German war.

1871.

Feb. 9. Replies to Mr. Disraeli’s criticisms of government’s foreign
policy.

Feb. 10. On University Tests bill.

Feb. 13. Defends Princess Louise’s dowry and annuity.

Feb. 17. Defends the government’s foreign policy.

Feb. 24. Replies to Mr. Disraeli’s attack on his interpretation of treaty
of Paris (1856).

March 2. On appointment of committee to inquire into Ribandism in West
Meath.

March 17. Replies to criticisms on Mr. Cardwell’s Army Regulation bill.

March 23. On Mr. Mundella’s motion that army might be made efficient
without increasing estimates.

March 29. On Parochial Councils bill.

March 31. Explains policy during Franco-German war.

April A poem on “An infant who was born, was baptized, and died on the
same day,” in _Good Words_.

April 18. On dismissal of Sir Spencer Robinson.

April 24. Defends moderate increase of public expenditure under his
government.

May 1. Defends modification in budget.

May 3. On Mr. Jacob Bright’s bill granting parliamentary suffrage to
single women.

May 4. Defends principle of reduction of national debt.

May 9. Opposes motion for disestablishment of the church of England.

May 26. On Protection of Life (Ireland) bill.

June 29. On Ballot bill.

July 3. On third reading of Army Regulation bill.

July 20. Announces abolition of purchase by royal warrant.

July 31. Proposes annuity of £15,000 for Prince Arthur.

Aug. 2. On Mr. Fawcett’s Trinity College, Dublin, bill.

Aug. 4. On treaty of Washington.

Aug. 8. On obstruction to Ballot bill.

Aug. 15. Defends abolition of purchase.

Sept. 2. At Whitby on the Ballot bill.

Sept. 26. Presented with freedom of Aberdeen: on Irish agitation for home
rule.

Oct. 23. At Blackheath Common on the policy of government.

1872.

Feb. 6. Replies to Mr. Disraeli’s criticisms on Address.

Feb. 7. Replies to the criticisms of treaty of Washington.

Feb. 8. Moves vote of thanks to Speaker Denison on retirement.

Feb. 9. On office of speaker.

Feb. 19. Defends appointment of Sir R. Collier.

March 8. Defends appointment of Mr. Harvey to Ewelme.

March 19. Replies to Sir Charles Dilke’s motion for inquiry into Civil
List.

March 20, April 25. On University of Dublin (Tests) bill.

April 12. On England’s treaty obligations for intervention in affairs of
foreign states.

April 26. On motion for extending rural franchise.

May 2. On the demand for home rule.

May 13. On United States indirect claims.

May 14. At King’s College, London, in favour of positive religious
teaching.

June 14. On denunciation by France of treaty of commerce.

June 25. On proposal to annex Fiji Islands.

June 28. On Lords’ amendment to Ballot bill making its adoption optional.

July 2. Opposes inquiry into revenues of church of England.

Aug. 1. Pledges government to bring in large measures on local government
and taxation.

Nov. 14. At Middle Temple on legal opposition to legal reforms and on
arbitration.

Nov. 28. At American Thanksgiving dinner on good understanding between
England and United States.

Dec. 3. At Society of Biblical Archæology on results of excavations in the
East.

Dec. 21. At Liverpool College on unbelief.

1873.

Feb. 6. On _Alabama_ award.

Feb. 13. Introduces Irish University bill.

Feb. 14. On resolution that treaties with foreign powers be submitted to
House of Commons.

Feb. 18. On Mr. Harcourt’s motion that the rate of public expenditure is
excessive.

March 6. At Croyden on Irish University bill.

March 7. On relations between England and the colonies.

March 11. On second reading of Irish University bill.

March 13. Resignation of ministry.

March 20. Resumes office. Explains history of crisis.

March 21. On the three rules of Washington treaty.

April 21. On University Tests (Dublin) bill.

April 29. On proposal for state purchase of Irish railways.

May 2. On German Emperor’s award on Canadian-American boundary.

May 6. On resolution urging redress of electoral inequalities.

May 16. On disestablishment of church of England.

May 26. On _Alabama_ award and arbitration.

July 8. On international arbitration.

July 10. On Judicature bill.

Aug. 15. At Hawarden on school boards.

Aug. 19. Presides at Welsh National Eisteddfod at Mold: on Welsh language.

Dec. Letter on “Evolution” in _Contemporary Review_.

1874.

Jan. 23. Issues election address.

Jan. 28. Speech on Blackheath Common on issues before the electors.

Jan. 31. At Woolwich.

Feb. “The Shield of Achilles” in _Contemporary Review_.

Feb. 2. Replies to Mr. Disraeli’s speeches at New Cross.

Feb. 4. Re-elected for Greenwich,—Boord (C.), 6193; Gladstone (L.), 5968;
Liardet (C.), 5561; Langley (L.), 5255.

Feb. 17. Resignation of ministry.

March 5. On the office of speaker.

March 12. Letter to Lord Granville on leadership.

March 19. Defends the late dissolution.

March 20. On Mr. Butt’s Home Rule motion.

March 30. On the Ashantee war.

April 23. On Sir S. Northcote’s budget.

April 24. On proposed vote of censure on late government for dissolution.

May “The Reply of Achilles to the envoys of Agamemnon” in _Contemporary
Review_.

June “Homer’s place in history” in _Contemporary Review_.

July “The place of Homer in history and in Egyptian chronology” in
_Contemporary Review_.

July 6. Opposes the Scotch Church Patronage bill.

July 9. Opposes Public Worship Regulation bill, explains his Six
Resolutions.

July 14, 21, 24. Opposes Endowed Schools Act Amendment bill.

Aug. 4. Protests against premature annexation of Fiji.

Aug. 5. On Public Worship Regulation bill.

Sept. 7-25. Visits Dr. Döllinger in Munich.

Oct. “Ritualism and Ritual” in _Contemporary Review_.

Oct. Reviews Miss Yonge’s _Life of Bishop Patteson_ in _Quarterly Review_.

Nov. _The Vatican Decrees in their bearing on civil allegiance: a
political expostulation._

1875.

Jan. “Speeches of Pope Pius IX.” in _Quarterly Review_.

Jan. 13. Announces retirement from leadership.

Feb. _Vaticanism: an answer to replies and reproofs._

March Sells 11 Carlton House Terrace.

April 21. Supports Burials bill.

May “Life and Speeches of the Prince Consort” in _Contemporary Review_.

May 5. In support of Irish Sunday Closing bill.

May 7. Criticises Sir S. Northcote’s budget.

May 27. Criticises Savings Bank bill.

June 8. On National Debt (Sinking Fund) bill.

July “Is the Church of England worth Preserving?” in _Contemporary
Review_.

Sept. 9. Lays foundation-stone of King’s School, Chester: on English
public schools.

Sept. 14. At Hawarden on mental culture.

Oct. “Italy and her Church” in _Church Quarterly Review_.

Nov. 11. Distributes prizes to science and art students at Greenwich: on
education.

Dec. Latin translation of “Art thou weary, art thou languid?” in
_Contemporary Review_.

1876.

Feb. 8. On the Andrassy note and the Crimean war.

Feb. 16. Presented with freedom of Turners’ Company: on city companies.

Feb. 21. On purchase of Suez Canal shares.

March “Homerology: I. Apollo” in _Contemporary Review_.

March 6. On danger of future complications in Egypt.

March 9. On Royal Titles bill.

March 23. In support of House of Charity at annual meeting in Soho.

March 23. On third reading of Royal Titles bill.

April “Homerology: II. Hippos, the Horse. III. Diphros, the Chariot,” in
_Contemporary Review_.

May 23. On city of London companies.

May 31. Presides at dinner in celebration 100th anniversary of publication
of _Wealth of Nations_.

June “Courses of Religious Thought” in _Contemporary Review_.

June “A Letter on Newman and Wesley” in _Contemporary Review_.

July “Homerology: IV. Athené. V. Aiolas,” in _Contemporary Review_.

July “Lord Macaulay” in _Quarterly Review_.

July “Memoir of Norman Macleod, D.D.,” in _Church Quarterly Review_.

July 6. Distributes prizes at King’s College: on knowledge.

July 13. Distributes prizes at London Hospital Medical College: on medical
education.

July 21. On Turkish Loan of 1854.

July 31. Defends Crimean war and European concert.

Aug. 17. On cottage gardening at Hawarden.

Aug. 19. Receives five hundred Lancashire liberals at Hawarden.

Sept. 6. _The Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East_ published.

Sept. 9. On Blackheath Common on Bulgarian atrocities.

Nov. “Russian Policy and Deeds in Turkestan” in _Contemporary Review_.

Dec. “The Hellenic Factor in the Eastern Problem” in _Contemporary
Review_.

Dec. Publishes, _The Church of England and Ritualism_.

Dec. _A Biographical Sketch of Lord Lyttelton._

Dec. _Homeric Synchronism: an Inquiry into the Time and Place of Homer._

1877.

Jan. “Life of the Prince Consort” in _Church Quarterly Review_.

Jan. 16. At Hawarden on the Turks, the Greeks, and the Slavs.

Jan. 22. At Bath railway station on Eastern Question.

Jan. 27. At Taunton railway station on duty of England in Near East.

Feb. 3. Address to boys of Marlborough College on value of simple habits.

Feb. 8. On Eastern Question.

Feb. 16. Attacks government’s Turkish policy.

Feb. 28. In support of Servian Relief Fund at Grosvenor House.

March “On the influence of authority in matters of opinion” in _Nineteenth
Century_.

March _Lessons in Massacre_ published.

March 22. On Preaching at the City Temple.

March 23. Supports Mr. Fawcett’s resolution that Turkish promises without
guarantees are useless.

April 24. On a motion in favour of an Irish parliament.

April 30. Gives notice of five resolutions—on the Eastern Question.

May “Montenegro: a sketch” in _Nineteenth Century_.

May 7. Moves first of his resolutions.

May 12. On ceramic art at the Cymmodorian Society, London Institution.

May 14. Closes debate on his first resolution.

May 31. At Birmingham on the Eastern Question.

June 1. At Bristol Street Board School, Birmingham, on Ireland and Irish
representatives. Presented with address by the City: on municipal life.

June 4. Supports amendment to Universities bill, providing that holy
orders shall not be a condition of holding any headship or fellowship.

June 30. Opens Caxton Exhibition: on the work of Caxton.

July “Rejoinder on authority in matters of opinion” in _Nineteenth
Century_.

July “Piracy in Borneo and the Operations of July 1849” in _Contemporary
Review_.

July 13. At Plymouth and Exeter on liberal party and Eastern Question.

July 16. On behalf of Bosnian refugees at Willis’s Rooms.

July 20. On Irish demand for pardon of Fenian convicts.

Aug. “Aggression on Egypt and Freedom in the East” in _Nineteenth
Century_.

Aug. 4, 18, 20. Receives deputations of 5200 liberals at Hawarden on
Eastern Question.

Sept. 19. At Hawarden Grammar School on education.

Sept. 27. At University College, Nottingham, on higher education. At
Alexandra Hall on Eastern Question.

Oct. “The colour sense” in _Nineteenth Century_.

Oct. “The Dominions of the Odysseus and the island group of the Odyssey”
in _Macmillan’s Magazine_.

Oct. 17. Visits Ireland.

Nov. “The County Franchise and Mr. Lowe thereon” in _Nineteenth Century_.

Nov. 7. Presented with freedom of Dublin: on Irish questions. Entertained
at luncheon by corporation of Dublin: on Irish municipalities.

Nov. 12. At Holyhead on Eastern Question.

Nov. 15. Elected Rector of Glasgow University,—Mr. Gladstone, 1153; Sir
Stafford Northcote, 609.

Nov. 23. At Hawarden on Russians, Turks, and Bulgarians.

1878.

Jan. “The Life of the Prince Consort” in _Church Quarterly Review_. “Last
words on the County Franchise” in _Nineteenth Century_.

Jan. 17. Comments on Sir S. Northcote’s explanation of the government’s
Eastern policy.

Jan. 30. At Corn Exchange, Oxford, on the vote of credit for six millions.
At Palmerston Club dinner on Canning, Palmerston, and liberal party.

Feb. “The Peace to Come” in _Nineteenth Century_.

Feb. 4. On Mr. Forster’s amendment against vote of credit.

March. “The Paths of Honour and of Shame” in _Nineteenth Century_.

March 19. On Indian press law.

March 23. Receives deputation of Greenwich liberals: on unpopularity of
economy in public expenditure.

March 28. To deputation from Leeds on the Eastern Question.

April “The Iris of Homer: and the relation of Genesis ix. 11-17” in
_Contemporary Review_.

April 1. Supports Irish Sunday Closing bill.

April 3. On Vaccination Law (Penalties) bill.

April 5. On government and the Berlin Congress.

April 8. On government’s Eastern policy in debate on calling out army
reserves.

April 18. At Memorial Hall on Eastern Question at conference of 400 London
nonconformist ministers.

May 21. Protests against use of Indian troops in Europe without consent of
parliament.

May 23. Receives deputation of Scotch Presbyterian ministers: on the
Eastern Question.

May 27. Protests against despatch of Indian contingent to Malta.

June “Liberty in the East and West” in _Nineteenth Century_.

June 13. On treaties of 1856 and 1871.

June 18. On a motion to appoint select committee on Scotch Church
Patronage act, 1874.

July Contributes paper to symposium,—“Is the popular judgment of politics
more just than that of the higher orders?” in _Nineteenth Century_.

July 6. On Homer at Eton.

July 11. In London on spendthrift administration of charity.

July 15. Supports Irish Intermediate Education bill.

July 20. At Bermondsey on Anglo-Turkish convention.

July 23. Moves address that proceedings under Indian Vernacular Press Act
be reported to parliament.

July 30. Criticises action of British plenipotentiaries at Berlin
Congress.

Aug. 6. Criticises Sir S. Northcote’s finance.

Aug. 15. On art-labour at Hawarden.

Sept. “England’s Mission” in _Nineteenth Century_.

Oct. “The Sixteenth Century arraigned before the Nineteenth: a Study on
the Reformation” in _Contemporary Review_.

Oct. 1-7. Visits Isle of Man.

Oct. 31. At Rhyl on the political situation.

Nov. “Electoral Facts” in _Nineteenth Century_.

Nov. 11. At Buckley on books.

Nov. 30. At Greenwich on liberal organisation. At Woolwich on Afghan war.

Dec. 10. On Afghan war and policy.

Dec. 16. Protests against charging Indian revenues with expenses of Afghan
war.

Dec. Publishes a Literary Primer on _Homer_.

1879.

Jan. “The Friends and Foes of Russia” in _Nineteenth Century_.

Feb. 10. At Hawarden on Life and Labours of Dr. Hook.

March “On Epithets of Movement in Homer” in _Nineteenth Century_.

April 21. At Mentmore on liberal party and foreign policy.

April 28. On increase in national expenditure.

May “Probability as the Guide of Conduct” in _Nineteenth Century_.

May 2. In favour of enabling Irish tenants to purchase their holdings.

May 5. In explanation and defence of his financial policy in 1860.

May 13. Opposes resolution protesting against government’s abuse of
prerogative of the crown.

May 19. On church home missions at Willis’s Rooms.

June. “Greece and the Treaty of Berlin” in _Nineteenth Century_.

June. 11. On education at Mill Hill School.

June. 12. On financial condition of India.

June 14. On tendency of political life to mar a literary career at Savage
Club.

June 20. On condition of Cyprus under English administration.

June 24. Letter to Principal Rainy on Scotch disestablishment.

July. “The Evangelical Movement, its Parentage, Progress, and Issue,” in
_British Quarterly Review_.

July 5. On Homer at Eton College.

July 22. On unfulfilled stipulations of Berlin treaty.

Aug. “The Country and the Government” in _Nineteenth Century_.

Aug. 11. Opens Fine Art Exhibition, Chester: on art and manufacture.

Aug. 19. At Chester on government’s foreign policy.

Aug. 21. At St. Pancras workhouse.

Aug. 28. At Hawarden on garden cultivation.

Sept. 14-Oct. 21. Travelling in Bavaria and Italy.

Oct. “The Olympian System versus the Solar Theory” in _Nineteenth
Century_.

Nov. 3. To students at Wellington College on knowledge.

Nov. 25. At Music Hall, Edinburgh, on issues before the electors.

Nov. 26. At Dalkeith on domestic questions.

Nov. 27. At West Calder on right principles of foreign policy.

Nov. 29. At Edinburgh on tory finance. In Waverley Market on Balkan
principalities.

Dec. 5. Inaugural address at Glasgow University. In St. Andrew’s Hall on
government’s European, Indian, and South African policies.

Dec. Publishes _Gleanings of Past Years_ 1843-79, in seven volumes.






FOOTNOTES


_    1 Eng. Hist. Rev._ April 1887, p. 296.

   M1 Doctrine Of Nationality
   M2 Napoleon III

_    2 Il Conte di Cavour. Ricordi biografici._ Per G. Massari (Turin,
      1875), p. 204.

    3 See _L’Empire Libéral_, by Émile Ollivier, iv. p. 217.

    4 It is a notable thing that in 1859 the provisional government of
      Tuscany made a decree for the publication of a complete edition of
      Machiavelli’s works at the cost of the state.

   M3 Annexation Of Savoy And Nice

    5 One of the pope’s chamberlains gravely assured the English resident
      in Rome that he knew from a sure and trustworthy source that the
      French Emperor had made a bargain with the Devil, and frequently
      consulted him.

   M4 Garibaldi
   M5 Reform Not Unity
   M6 Napoleon’s Share

    6 Walpole’s _Russell_, ii. pp. 335-339.

    7 Martin’s _Prince Consort_, v. p. 226.

_    8 A General Review of the Different States of Italy_; prepared for
      the Foreign Office by Sir Henry Bulwer, January 1853.

   M7 The English Despatch

    9 Cavour to Marquis d’Azeglio, Dec. 9, 1860. _La Politique du Comte
      Camille de Cavour de 1852 à 1861_, p. 392.

   10 June 6, 1861.

   11 The disaster was the outcome of the Chinese refusal to receive Mr.
      Bruce, the British minister at Pekin. Admiral Hope in endeavouring
      to force an entrance to the Peiho river was repulsed by the fire of
      the Chinese forts (June 25, 1859). In the following year a joint
      Anglo-French expedition captured the Taku forts and occupied Pekin
      (Oct. 12, 1860).

_   12 Odyssey_, xx. 63.

   13 On a motion by Lord Elcho against any participation in a conference
      to settle the details of the peace between Austria and France.

   14 I may be forgiven for referring to my _Life of Cobden_, ii. chap.
      xi. For the French side of the transaction, see an interesting
      chapter in De La Gorce, _Hist. du Second Empire_, iii. pp. 213-32.

   15 “I will undertake that there is not a syllable on our side of the
      treaty that is inconsistent with the soundest principles of free
      trade. We do not propose to reduce a duty which, on its merits,
      ought not to have been dealt with long ago. We give no concessions
      to France which do not apply to all other nations. We leave
      ourselves free to lay on any amount of internal duties and to put on
      an equal tax on foreign articles of the same kind at the
      custom-house. It is true we bind ourselves for ten years not
      otherwise to raise such of our customs as affect the French trade,
      or put on fresh ones; and this, I think, no true free trader will
      regret.”—_Cobden to Bright._

   M8 Outline Of The Scheme

   16 The reader who wishes to follow these proceedings in close detail
      will, of course, read the volume of _The Financial Statements_ of
      1853, 1860-63, containing also the speech on tax-bills, 1861, and on
      charities, 1863 (Murray, 1863).

   17 Strictly speaking, in 1845 the figure had risen from 1052 to 1163
      articles, for the first operation of tariff reform was to multiply
      the number in consequence of the transition from _ad valorem_ to
      specific duties, and this increased the headings under which they
      were described. In 1860 Mr. Gladstone removed the duties from 371
      articles, reducing the number to 48, of which only 15 were of
      importance—spirits, sugar, tea, tobacco, wine, coffee, corn,
      currants, timber, chicory, figs, hops, pepper, raisins, and rice.

   18 See an interesting letter to Sir W. Heathcote in reply to other
      criticisms, in Appendix.

   19 On Mr. Duncan’s resolution against adding to an existing deficiency
      by diminishing ordinary revenue and against re-imposing the
      income-tax at an unnecessarily high rate. _Moved Feb. 21._

   20 Martin’s _Life of Prince Consort_, v. pp. 35, 37, 51.

   M9 Budget Introduced

   21 Greville, III. ii. p. 291.

_   22 Eng. Hist. Rev._ April 1887, p. 301. The majority in the Lords was
      193 to 104.

   23 Aug. 31, 1897.

   24 Martin, v. p. 100.

   25 Bright wrote to Mr. Gladstone that he was inclined “to think that
      the true course for Lord John, yourself, and Mr. Gibson, and for any
      others who agreed with you, was to have resigned rather than
      continue a government which could commit so great a sin against the
      representative branch of our constitution.”

  M10 Revival Of Popularity
  M11 Cabinet Currents

   26 See Appendix.

   27 “He made an administration so checkered and speckled, he put
      together a piece of joinery so crossly indented and whimsically
      dovetailed, a cabinet so variously inlaid, such a piece of
      diversified mosaic, such a tessellated pavement without cement ...
      that it was indeed a very curious show, but utterly unsafe to touch
      and unsure to stand upon.”—_Speech on American Taxation._

  M12 Defeat Of The Lords

   28 At Manchester, Oct. 14, 1864.

  M13 Resistance To Panic

   29 For his letter to Mr. Gladstone, Dec. 16, 1859, see Ashley, ii. p.
      375.

  M14 Resistance To Panic
  M15 Fortifications

   30 See Appendix. “This account,” Mr. Gladstone writes, “contains
      probably the only reply I shall ever make to an account given or
      printed by Sir Theodore Martin in his _Life of the Prince Consort_,
      which is most injurious to me without a shadow of foundation: owing,
      I have no doubt, to defective acquaintance with the subject.” The
      passage is in vol. v. p. 148. Lord Palmerston’s words to the Queen
      about Mr. Gladstone are a curiously unedifying specimen of loyalty
      to a colleague.

   31 “It appears that he wrote his final opinion on the subject to the
      cabinet on Saturday, left them to deliberate, and went to the
      Crystal Palace. The Duke of Argyll joined him there and said it was
      all right. The Gladstones then went to Cliveden and he purposely did
      not return till late, twelve o’clock on Monday night, in order that
      Palmerston might make his speech as he pleased. I doubt the policy
      of his absence. It of course excited much remark, and does not in
      any way protect Gladstone. M. Gibson was also absent.”—_Phillimore
      Diary_, July 23. In his diary Mr. Gladstone records: “_July
      21._—Cabinet 3 ½-5 1/4. I left it that the discussion might be free
      and went to Stafford House and Sydenham. There I saw, later, Argyll
      and S. Herbert, who seemed to bring good news. At night we went off
      to Cliveden.”

   32 For an interesting letter on all this to the Duke of Argyll, see
      Appendix.

  M16 Correspondence With The Prime Minister

   33 This letter is printed in full by Mr. Ashley, ii. p. 413.

   34 Diary.

   35 Mr. Evelyn Ashley in _National Review_, June 1898, pp. 536-40.

   36 Plan for Economical Reform.

  M17 Savings Banks

   37 27 and 28 Vict., chap. 43.

  M18 Private Thrift And Public

_   38 Financial Statements_, p. 151.

  M19 Creation Of Public Interest

   39 See his elaborate article in the _Nineteenth Century_ for February
      1880, on _Free Trade, Railways, and Commerce_, in which he
      endeavours fairly to divide the credit of our material progress
      between its two great factors, the Liberation of Intercourse, and
      the Improvement of Locomotion. Under the head of new locomotive
      forces he counts the Suez canal.

  M20 The True Social Question
  M21 Mark Of His Originality

   40 From a letter to his son Herbert, March 10, 1876, containing some
      interesting remarks on Pitt’s finance. See Appendix.

   41 Τὸ ζητεῖν πανταχοῦ τὸ χρήσιμον ἤκιστα ἁρμόττει τοῖς
      ἐλευθεροῖς.—_Politics_, viii. 3.

  M22 Effect Upon The Public Service

   42 Edinburgh, Nov. 29, 1879.

  M23 Heroic In Economy

   43 Edinburgh, Nov. 29, 1879.

_   44 Guinevere_, 90-92.

  M24 Budget Of 1863

   45 For his later views on the French treaty, see his speech at Leeds in
      1881, an extract from which is given in Appendix.

_   46 Nineteenth Century_, Feb. 1880, p. 381.

   47 Mr. Courtney contributes a good account of this measure to the
      chapter on Finance in Ward’s _Reign of Queen Victoria_, i. pp.
      345-7.

   48 On this sentence in his copy of the memorandum Mr. Gladstone pencils
      in the margin as was his way, his favourite Italian corrective,
      _ma!_

   49 Of course the literature of this great theme is enormous, but an
      English reader with not too much time will find it well worked out
      in the masterly political study, _The Slave Power_, by J. E. Cairnes
      (1861), that vigorous thinker and sincere lover of truth, if ever
      there was one. Besides Cairnes, the reader who cares to understand
      the American civil war should turn to F. L. Olmsted’s _Journeys and
      Explorations in the Cotton Kingdom_ (1861), and _A Journey in the
      Seaboard Slave States_ (1856)—as interesting a picture of the South
      on the eve of its catastrophe, as Arthur Young’s picture of France
      on the eve of the revolution.

  M25 General Ideas On The American War

   50 See Nicolay and Hay, _Abraham Lincoln_, v. p. 28. Also Martin’s
      _Life of the Prince Consort_, v. p. 421.

   51 See Walpole’s _Russell_, ii. p. 358.

  M26 Progress Of The War By 1862

   52 War-with England, or the probability of it, would have meant the
      raising of the blockade, the withdrawal of a large part of the
      troops from the Southern frontier, and substantially the leaving of
      the Confederates to a _de facto_ independence.—Dana’s _Wheaton_, p.
      648.

   53 Rhodes, _History of the United States since 1850_, iii. p. 538. See
      also _Life of C. F. Adams_, by his son C. F. A., Boston, 1900,
      chapter xii., especially pp. 223-4.

   54 In the summer of 1862 he took an active part in schemes for finding
      employment at Hawarden for Lancashire operatives thrown out of work
      by the cotton-famine. One of the winding-paths leading through some
      of the most beautiful spots of the park at Hawarden was made at this
      time by factory workers from Lancashire employed by Mr. Gladstone
      for purposes of relief.

   55 Walpole’s _Life of Russell_, ii. p. 361.

  M27 On The Tyne

   56 In a jingle composed for the occasion, the refrain is—

      “Honour give to sterling worth,
      Genius better is than birth,
      So here’s success to Gladstone.”

      In thanking a Newcastle correspondent for his reception, Mr.
      Gladstone writes (Oct. 20, 1862): “To treat these occurrences as
      matter of personal obligation to those who have taken a part in them
      would be to mistake the ground on which they rest. But I must say
      with unfeigned sincerity that I can now perceive I have been
      appropriating no small share of honour that is really due to the
      labour of others: of Mr. Cobden as to the French treaty, and of the
      distinguished men who have in our day by their upright and
      enlightened public conduct made law and government names so dear to
      the people of England.” “Indeed,” says a contemporary journalist,
      “if Middlesborough did not do honour to Mr. Gladstone, we don’t know
      who should, for the French treaty has been a greater boon to the
      iron manufacturers of that young but rising seaport, than to any
      other class of commercial men in the north of England.”—_Newcastle
      Daily Chronicle_, Oct. 11, 1862.

_   57 Letters on England_, pp. 146-78.

   58 Adams wrote in his diary: “_Oct. 8._ If Gladstone be any exponent at
      all of the views of the cabinet, then is my term likely to be very
      short. The animus, as it respects Mr. Davis and the recognition of
      the rebel cause, is very apparent. Oct. 9:—We are now passing
      through the very crisis of our fate. I have had thoughts of seeking
      a conference with Lord Russell, to ask an explanation of Gladstone’s
      position; but, on reflection, I think I shall let a few days at
      least pass, and then perhaps sound matters incidentally.”—Rhodes,
      iv. p. 340. _Life of Adams_, pp. 286-7.

   59 Oct. 18, 1862.

  M28 Estimate Of His Error

   60 Rhodes, iv. p. 340. Also _Life of C. F. Adams_, p. 287.

   61 Lewis, throughout 1861, used language of characteristic coolness
      about the war: “It is the most singular action for the restitution
      of conjugal rights that the world ever heard of.” “You may conquer
      an insurgent province, but you cannot conquer a seceding state”
      (Jan. 21, ’61). “The Northern states have been drifted, or rather
      plunged into war without having any intelligible aim or policy. The
      South fight for independence; but what do the North fight for,
      except to gratify passion or pride?”—_Letters_, p. 395, etc. See
      also preface to his _Administration of Great Britain_ (p. xix),
      where he says, in 1856, he sees no solution but separation.

  M29 A Balanced Speech

   62 There is a story, not very accurate, I should suppose, about Mr.
      Disraeli’s concurrence in the Emperor’s view, told from Slidell’s
      despatches in an article by O. F. Aldus, in _North American Review_,
      October 1879.

   63 June 30, 1863. _Hansard_, vol. 171, p. 1800. On four other occasions
      Mr. Gladstone gave public utterance to his opinion “on the subject
      of the war and the disruption”—at Leith, Jan. 11, 1862, at
      Manchester, April 24, 1862, at Newcastle, Oct. 7, 1862, and once in
      parliament when a member spoke of the bursting of the American
      bubble, he says, “I commented on the expressions with a reproof as
      sharp as I could venture to make it” (May 27, 1861).

   64 See Appendix.

   65 x. iii. 10.

_   66 Memoirs of J. R. Hope-Scott_, ii. pp. 284-293.

_   67 Richard III._ I. sc. ii. At Salisbury, Sept. 7, 1866.

   68 His school friend, and later, governor-general of India.

  M30 Aberdeen, Graham, And Herbert

_   69 March 19._—Reading, conversation, and survey in the house filled
      the morning at Cliveden. At four we went to Windsor ... I had an
      audience of the Queen ... I had the gratification of hearing,
      through Lady A. Bruce, that it was agreeable to H. M.—(_Diary._)

_   70 Gleanings_, i.

   71 The Lancashire cotton famine.

   72 See the three articles on the Life of the Prince Consort in
      _Gleanings_, i. PP. 23-130.

   73 On the estimates for 1862-68.

   74 2 _Henry IV._, v. sc. i.

_   75 Death of Wallenstein_, Act v. Sc. 3. In Coleridge, v. 1.

   76 Denn nur der grosse Gegenstand vermag
      Den tiefen Grund der Menschheit aufzuregen,
      Im engen Kreis verengert sich der Sinn.
      Es wächst der Mensch mit seinen grössern Zwecken.
      _Prologue to Wallenstein_, stanza 5.

   77 See Walpole’s _Life of Russell_, ii. p. 402.

   78 A memorandum of Mr. Gladstone’s of March 1863 on the Roman Question
      is republished in Minghetti’s posthumous volume, _La Convenzione di
      Settembre_, Bologna, 1899.

   79 April 11, 1862. That of March 7, 1861, is also worth turning over.

  M31 Reception Of Garibaldi

   80 Speech at Stafford House. June 2, 1883.

   81 Speech not discoverable by me.

  M32 Garibaldi’s Departure

_   82 Hansard_, April 19, 1864, pp. 1277, 1290. April 21, p. 1423.

   83 This was in reply to a letter from Lord Clarendon to Mr. Gladstone,
      April 23, ’64, asking him: “Do not you think that he ought in a
      letter to some personal friends to state frankly the reasons which
      have induced him to go? He alone can put a stop to all these
      mischievous reports.... He ought to say that no government, English
      or foreign, has to do with his departure, and that he goes solely
      because the state of his health does not permit him to fulfil his
      engagements.”

   84 The story has been told from the radical point of view by Sir James
      Stansfeld in _Review of Reviews_, June 1895, p. 512. Another account
      by Mr. Seely, M.P., was furnished to the _Times_ (April 21, 1864).
      Lord Shaftesbury, who was a staunch Garibaldian, presumably on high
      protestant grounds, also wrote to the _Times_ (April 24): “The
      solid, persevering and hearty attachment of Mr. Gladstone to the
      cause of Italy and General Garibaldi is as notorious as it is
      generous and true, and I declare in the most solemn manner and on
      the word of a gentleman, my firm belief that we were all of us
      animated by the same ardent desire (without reference to anything
      and anybody but the General himself) to urge that and that only,
      which was indispensable to his personal welfare. It was, I assert,
      the General’s own and unsuggested decision to give up the provincial
      journey altogether.”

   85 Fagan’s _Panizzi_, ii. p. 252. The same view was reported to be
      taken at the English Court, and a story got abroad that the Queen
      had said that for the first time she felt half ashamed of being the
      head of a nation capable of such follies. Mérimée, _Lettres à
      Panizzi_, ii. p. 25. On the other hand, the diary has this entry:
      _Oct. 1, 1864._ Dined with H.M. She spoke good-humouredly of
      Garibaldi.

_   86 Le Comte de Cavour_: par Charles de Mazade (1877), p. 389.

  M33 Nationality And Schleswig-Holstein

   87 July 23, 1863.

   88 Memorandum of 1897.

   89 See Walpole’s _Russell_, ii. pp. 402-404.

   90 For the revision of the Treaty of Vienna. See Ashley’s _Palmerston_,
      ii. p. 424.

   91 See Ollivier’s _Empire Libéral_, vii. 71; De la Gorce, iv. 512.

  M34 Cabinet And Non-Intervention

   92 July 4, 1864.

   93 Feb. 4, 1864.

   94 Lord Robert Cecil, July 4, 1864.

  M35 A Wonderful Combination

_   95 Life of W. E. Forster_, i. p. 362.

   96 Speech at Liverpool, April 6, 1866.

  M36 Springs Of New Liberalism
  M37 A Decisive Utterance
  M38 Speeches In Lancashire
  M39 Speeches In Lancashire
  M40 The Protestant Dissenters

   97 The dinner in honour of M. Berryer.

   98 Above, p. 53.

  M41 Death Of Cobden

   99 Heathcote, 3236; Hardy, 1904; Gladstone, 1724.

  M42 Valedictory Address

  100 Egerton 9171; Turner, 8806; Thompson (L.), 7703; Heywood (L.),
      Gladstone, 8786; Legh (C.), 8476; 7653.

_  101 Aen._ iv. 653. I have lived my life, my fated course have run.

  102 Aristotle, _Rhet._ i. 5, 4.

_  103 Life of Wilberforce_, in. pp. 161-164. The transcriber has omitted
      from Mr. Gladstone’s second letter a sentence about Archbishop
      Manning’s letter—“To me it seemed _meant_ in the kindest and most
      friendly sense; but that the man is gone out, φροῦδος and has left
      nothing but the priest. No shirt collar ever took such a quantity of
      starch.”

  104 See _Saturday Review_, July 29; _Spectator_, June 24, etc.

  M43 Death Of Lord Palmerston

  105 Ei fu! siccome immobile, etc. First line of Manzoni’s ode on the
      death of Napoleon.

  106 First lord, Earl Russell; foreign secretary, Lord Clarendon;
      secretary for war. Earl de Grey; first lord of the admiralty, Duke
      of Somerset.

  M44 Leader In The Commons

  107 Church’s _Letters_, p. 171.

  108 Once at Hawarden I dropped the idle triviality that Mr. Pitt, Mr.
      Goschen, and a third person, were the three men who had been put
      into cabinet after the shortest spell of parliamentary life. (They
      were likewise out again after the shortest recorded spell of cabinet
      life.) “I don’t believe any such thing,” said Mr. Gladstone. “Well,
      who is your man?” “What do you say,” he answered, “to Sir George
      Murray? Wellington put him into his cabinet (1828); he had been with
      him in the Peninsula.” On returning to London, I found that Murray
      had been five years in parliament, and having written to tell Mr.
      Gladstone so, the next day I received a summary postcard—“Then try
      Lord Henry Petty.” Here, as far as I make out, he was right.

      “It is very unusual, I think,” Mr. Gladstone wrote to the prime
      minister (Jan. 6, 1866) “to put men into the cabinet without a
      previous official training. Lord Derby could not help himself. Peel
      put Knatchbull, but that was on political grounds that seemed broad,
      but proved narrow enough. Argyll was put there in ’52-3, but there
      is not the same opportunity for previous training in the case of
      peers.”

_  109 Life of Cobden_, ii. p. 232.

_  110 Life of Sir Charles Murray_, p. 300.

  M45 Temper Of His Churchmanship

  111 To Sir W. Farquhar, April 4, 1864.

  M46 Abolition Of Church Rates

_  112 Life of Wilberforce_, ii. pp. 136-46; _Life of Shaftesbury_, ii. p.
      404.

  113 Pattison’s _Tendencies of Religious Thought in England, 1688-1750_.
      Reprinted in his _Essays_, vol. ii.

  114 See the lines from _Euripides_ at the head of the chapter.

  115 In a series of articles published in _Good Words_ in January,
      February, March 1868, and reprinted, in volume form the same year.
      Reprinted again in _Gleanings_, vol. iii.

_  116 Gleanings_, iii. p. 41.

  M47 “Ecce Homo”

_  117 Purgatorio_, xxvii. 126-42.

  M48 Bishop Colenso

  118 A concise account of this transaction is in Lord Selborne’s
      _Memorials Family and Personal_, ii. pp. 481-7. See also Anson’s
      _Law and Custom of the Constitution_, ii. p. 407.

  119 “The Courses of Religious Thought” in _Gleanings_, iii. p. 115.

_  120 Life of Bishop Wilberforce_, ii. p. 286.

_  121 Life of Bishop Wilberforce_, ii. p. 412.

_  122 Ibid._, iii. pp. 92, 101.

  M49 Judgement Of Friends

_  123 Life of Lord Shaftesbury_, iii. pp. 171, 188.

_  124 Ibid._, iii. pp. 201-2.

_  125 Edinburgh, Review_, April 1857, p. 567.

  M50 The Rising Star

  126 Mr. M. Townsend in the _Spectator_.

_  127 Spectator_, October 29, 1864.

  M51 Francis Newman—Church—Bright

_  128 Life of Dean Church_, pp. 179, 188.

_  129 Life of Jowett_, i. 406.

  130 Liverpool, July 18, 1865.

  M52 “Always A Learner”

  131 Norwich, May 16, 1890.

  M53 Too Busy For Epistolary Gift

  132 “Quid igitur? quando ages negotium publicum? quando amicorum? quando
      tuum? _quando denique nihil ages_? Tum illud addidi, mihi enim liber
      esse non videtur qui non aliquando nihil agit.”—CIC., _Orat._ ii.
      42.

  M54 The Duchess Of Sutherland

  133 Martin’s _Prince Consort_, ii. p. 245 _n._

  134 1: Lord Ronald Gower, _Reminiscences_, pp. 114-5.

  135 See Morison’s _Life of St. Bernard_ (Ed. 1868), ii. ch. v.

  136 A French actor who pleased the town in those days.

  137 Edmund John Armstrong (1841-65). Republished in 1877. Sir Henry
      Taylor, _Edinburgh Review_, July 1878, says of this poet: “Of all
      the arts Poetic, that which was least understood between the
      Elizabethan age and the second quarter of this century was the art
      of writing blank verse.

      “Armstrong’s blank verse [The Prisoner of Mount Saint Michael] not
      otherwise than good in its ordinary fabric, affords by its
      occasional excellence a strong presumption that, had he lived, he
      would have attained to a consummate mastery of it.”

  138 Panizzi recovered and lived for eleven years. See _Life_, ii. p.
      299.

_  139 Grey Papers_, Oct. 22, 1865.

  M55 Position Of The Question

  140 See vol. i. p. 625.

  M56 The New Reform Bill
  M57 “Our Own Flesh And Blood”

_  141 Hans._, Mar. 23, 1866, p. 873.

  142 Lord Robert Cecil had on the death of his elder brother in 1865
      become Lord Cranborne.

  143 Above, i. p. 613.

_  144 Aen._ iv. 373: “The exile on my shore I sheltered and, fool as I
      was, shared with him my realm.”

  M58 A Cause And A Man
  M59 Defeat Of The Bill
  M60 Resignation Of Office

  145 Prussia had declared war on Austria, June 18.

  146 Mr. Gladstone had sat on the front opposition bench from 1847 to the
      defeat of the Russell government in Feb. 1852. See footnote vol. i.
      p. 631.

  M61 Rise Of The Popular Tide

_  147 Charles Francis Adams._ By his Son, p. 368.

  148 Son of Oliver Wendell Holmes, afterwards chief justice of
      Massachusetts, and in 1902 appointed a judge of the United States
      Supreme Court.

  M62 Journey To Rome

  149 Purcell, ii. p. 398.

_  150 Oct. 22._—Saw the pope. _Oct. 28._—We went at 3 (reluctantly) to
      the pope. Lady Augusta Stanley accompanied us. We had a conversation
      in French, rather miscellaneous. He was gracious as usual. N.B. his
      reference to the papal coinages.—(_Diary_)

  M63 Monte Cassino

  151 Mr. Gladstone was elected by 27 votes out of 29, two being cast for
      J. S. Mill. The minister of instruction wrote: “Veuillez croire,
      monsieur, qu’il n’est pas de décret que j’aie contresigné avec plus
      de bonheur que celui qui rattache à notre Institut de France un
      homme dont le savoir littéraire, l’habileté politique, et
      l’éloquence sont l’orgueil de l’Angleterre.”

  M64 Member Of The Institute
  M65 Operations Of 1867

  152 This proposal was in effect to abolish compounding in the limits of
      parliamentary boroughs. Carried May 27.

  M66 Opinion Out Of Doors

  153 The electorate was enlarged from 1,352,970 in 1867 to 2,243,259 in
      1870.

  154 Sir Charles Wood had been created Viscount Halifax on his
      resignation of the India Office in 1866.

  155 Grant Duff, _Elgin Speeches_, p. 101.

  M67 Chaotic Parties

_  156 Spectator_, April 20.

_  157 Memories, etc., of Miss Caroline Fox_, p. 339 (March 5, 1867).

_  158 Life of Wilberforce_, iii. p. 227.

  M68 First Proposals

  159 March 18.

  160 “Gladstone,” says Lord Selborne, “would have been ready to oppose
      Disraeli’s bill as a whole, if he could have overcome the reluctance
      of his followers. But when a meeting was called to take counsel on
      the situation, it became apparent that this could not be done”
      (_Memorials_, Part II. i. pp. 68-9).

  M69 “Fresh Intrigue Every Twelve Hours”

_  161 Halifax Papers._

  162 See above, p. 126.

_  163 Gleanings_, vii. p. 135.

  M70 Fenian Plots

_  164 Hansard_, May 31, 1869.

  165 At Greenwich, Dec. 21, 1868.

  M71 The Standard Raised

  166 He had also in his own mind the question of the acquisition of the
      Irish railways by the state, and the whole question of the position
      of the royal family in regard to Ireland. On the first of these two
      heads he was able to man a good commission, with the Duke of
      Devonshire at its head, and Lord Derby as his coadjutor. “But this
      commission,” he says, “did not venture to face any considerable
      change, and as they would not move, I, who might be held in a manner
      to have appealed to them, could do nothing.”

  167 Mr. Gladstone’s letter to Lord Russell is given in Walpole’s
      _Russell_, ii. 446.

  168 Till like a clock worn out with eating time,
      The wheels of weary life at last stood still.—Dryden’s _Œdipus_.

  M72 Disraeli Becomes Prime Minister

  169 Lord R. Gower, _Reminiscences_, p. 202.

  M73 Resolutions On Irish Church

_  170 Gleanings_, vii.

  M74 Elected At Greenwich

  171 In Lancashire (Nov. 24) the numbers were—Cross, 7729; Turner, 7676;
      Gladstone, 7415; Grenfell, 6939. At Greenwich (Nov. 17)—Salomons,
      6645; Gladstone, 6351; Parker, 4661; Mahon, 4342.

  172 England and Wales, Liberal, 1,231,450, Conservative, 824,056,
      Liberal Majority, 407,393.  Scotland, Liberal, 123,410,
      Conservative, 23,391, Liberal Majority 100,019.  Ireland, Liberal,
      53,379, Conservative, 38,083, Liberal Majority, 17,297.

_  173 National Review_, June 1898.

  M75 Formation Of Government
  M76 First Cabinet

  174 The reader will find the list of its members, now and at later
      periods of its existence, in the Appendix.

  M77 The General Situation
  M78 Views Of The Queen

  175 No: Archbishop Trench and Lord Carnarvon. See Selborne, _Memorials_,
      i. pp. 114-6.

  M79 Bill Introduced

  176 See _Life of Tait_, ii. pp. 8-14.

  177 The Irish Church bill is the greatest monument of genius that I have
      yet known from Gladstone; even his marvellous budgets are not so
      marvellous.—_Dr. Temple to Acland, March 12, 1869._

  M80 Second Reading

  178 368 against 250.

_  179 Life of Tait_, ii. pp. 18-19. How little he was himself the dupe of
      these illusions was shown by the next sentence, “What is of
      importance now is the course to be pursued by the House of Lords.”
      Bishop Magee met Disraeli on Jan. 28, ’69. “Dizzy said very little,”
      he wrote to a friend, “and that merely as a politician, on the
      possibilities in the House of Lords. He regards it as a lost game in
      the Commons.”—_Life of Archbishop Magee_, i. p. 214.

  180 See _Daily News_, April 26, 1869.

  M81 The House Of Lords
  M82 Destructive Amendments
  M83 Difficulties Thicken

  181 The memorandum is dated Aug. 14, 1869.

  182 1. The Lords’ amendment as to curates to be adopted, £380,000. 2.
      The Ulster glebes, 465,000. 3. The glebe houses to be free, 150,000.
      Total £995,000.

      Or the Bishop of Peterborough’s amendment as to the tax upon livings
      in lieu of No. 3, would carry a heavier charge by 124,000. Total
      £1,119,000.

  183 The version in society was that “Gladstone wanted to throw up the
      bill after the debate of last Tuesday, when the words of the
      preamble were re-inserted, but he was outvoted in his cabinet; and
      it is said that Lord Granville told him that if he gave up the bill
      he must find somebody else to lead the Lords.”—(July 22, 1869),
      _Memoirs of an Ex-Minister_, ii. p. 409.

  M84 Action Of Lord Cairns

  184 They were somewhat but not very greatly improved. The Ulster glebes,
      however, were gone. He now demanded: 1. The acceptance of the
      amendment respecting curates = £380,000; 2. Five per cent, to be
      added to the seven per cent, on commutations = £300,000; 3. The
      glebe houses to be given to the church at ten years’ purchase of the
      sites, a slight modification of Lord Salisbury’s amendment =
      £140,000. From this it appeared that even in the mid hours of this
      final day Lord Cairns asked above £800,000.

_  185 Life of Archbishop Tait_, ii. p. 45.

  M85 Views Of Mr. Bright
  M86 A Digression

  186 When the present writer once referred to the Principle of the Act of
      1860 as being that the hiring of land is just as much founded on
      trade principles as the chartering of a ship or the hiring of a
      street cab, loud approbation came from the tory benches. So deep was
      parliamentary ignorance of Ireland even in 1887, after the Acts of
      1870 and 1881.—_Hans._ 314, p. 295.

  M87 Land Bill In Cabinet
  M88 New Principle
  M89 Critical Contest
  M90 Bill Carried

_  187 Spectator._

  188 Lecky, _Democracy and Liberty_, i. p. 165.

  M91 Fenian Prisoners

  189 Article on Mr. Forster, _Nineteenth Century_, September 1888.

  M92 Advance Of Ideas

  190 “In 1843 the government of Sir R. Peel, with a majority of 90,
      introduced an Education bill, rather large, and meant to provide for
      the factory districts. The nonconformists at large took up arms
      against it, and after full consideration in the cabinet (one of my
      first acts in cabinet), they withdrew it rather than stir up the
      religious flame.”—_Mr. Gladstone to Herbert Gladstone, May 7, 1896._

  M93 Mr. Forster

  191 In 1869 about 1,300,000 children were being educated in state-aided
      schools, 1,000,000 in schools that received no grant, were not
      inspected, and were altogether inefficient, and 2,000,000 ought to
      have been, but were not at school at all. The main burden of
      national education fell on the shoulders of 200,000 persons whose
      voluntary subscriptions supported the schools. “In other words, the
      efforts of a handful out of the whole nation had accomplished the
      fairly efficient education of about one-third of the children, and
      had provided schools for about one-half; but the rest either went to
      inefficient schools, or to no school at all, and for them there was
      no room even had the power to compel their attendance existed.”—See
      Sir Henry Craik’s _The State in its Relation to Education_, pp. 84,
      85.

  M94 A Crucial Decision
  M95 Anger Of Nonconformists

_  192 Life of Dale_, p. 295.

_  193 Life of Forster_, i. p. 497.

  M96 Effects Of Party
  M97 Bright’s Return To Government

  194 For the rest of the letter see Appendix.

  M98 Endowed Schools

  195 See Appendix.

  196 In 1874 the conservative government brought in a bill restoring to
      the church of England numerous schools in cases where the founder
      had recognised the authority of a bishop, or had directed attendance
      in the service of that church, or had required that the masters
      should be in holy orders. Mr. Gladstone protested against the bill
      as “inequitable, unusual, and unwise,” and it was largely modified
      in committee.

  M99 University Tests

  197 See vol. i., book iv., chap. iv. By the act of 1854 a student could
      proceed to the bachelor’s degree without the test of subscribing to
      the Thirty-nine Articles. Cambridge was a shade more liberal. At
      both universities dissenters were shut out from college fellowships,
      unless willing to make a declaration of conformity.

  198 Speech on Mr. Dodson’s bill, March 16, 1864.

 M100 Opening Of Civil Service

  199 Vol. i. p. 509.

 M101 State Of Europe

  200 July 28, 1870.

 M102 Efforts For Disarmament

_  201 Reminiscences of the King of Roumania._ Edited from the original by
      Sydney Whitman. 1899. P. 92.

 M103 The Spanish Throne

  202 King William wrote to Bismarck (Feb. 20, 1870) that the news of the
      Hohenzollern candidature had come upon him like a thunderbolt, and
      that they must confer about it. _Kaiser Wilhelm I. und Bismarck_, i.
      p. 207.

  203 The story of a ministerial council at Berlin on March 15, at which
      the question was discussed between the king, his ministers, and the
      Hohenzollern princes, with the result that all decided for
      acceptance, is denied by Bismarck.—_Recollections_, ii. p. 89.

_  204 Hansard_, July 11, 1870.

  205 The despatch is dated July 6 in the blue-book (C. 167, p. 3), but it
      was not sent that day, as the date of Mr. Gladstone’s letter shows.
      No cabinet seems to have been held before July 9. The despatch was
      laid before the cabinet, and was sent to Berlin by special messenger
      that evening. The only other cabinet meeting during this critical
      period was on July 14.

_  206 Gleanings_, iv. p. 222. Modern French historians do not differ from
      Mr. Gladstone.

  207 The Rothschild telegram was: The Prince has given up his
      candidature. The French are satisfied.

  208 No. 39. Correspondence respecting the negotiations preliminary to
      the war between France and Prussia, 1870.

 M104 British Remonstrances
 M105 French Diplomacy

_  209 The Diplomatic Reminiscences of Lord Augustus Loftus._ Second
      series, i. p. 283.

  210 Busch, i. p. 312.

 M106 Count Bismarck’s Telegram

_  211 Bismarck: His Reflections and Reminiscences_, 1898, ii. pp. 95-101.
      As I have it before me, the reader will perhaps care to see the
      telegram as Bismarck received it, drawn up by Abeken at the King’s
      command, handed in at Ems, July 13, in the afternoon, and reaching
      Berlin at six in the evening: “His Majesty writes to me: ‘Count
      Benedetti spoke to me on the promenade, in order to demand from me,
      finally in a very importunate manner, that I should authorise him to
      telegraph at once that I bound myself for all future time never
      again to give my consent if the Hohenzollerns should renew their
      candidature. I refused at last somewhat sternly, as it is neither
      right nor possible to undertake engagements of this kind _à tout
      jamais_. Naturally I told him I had as yet received no news, and as
      he was earlier informed about Paris and Madrid he could clearly see
      that my government once more had no hand in the matter.’ His Majesty
      has since received a letter from the Prince. His Majesty having told
      Count Benedetti that he was awaiting news from the Prince, has
      decided, with reference to the above demand, upon the representation
      of Count Eulenburg and myself, not to receive Count Benedetti again,
      but only to let him be informed through an aide-de-camp: That his
      Majesty has now received from the Prince confirmation of the news
      which Benedetti had already received from Paris, and had nothing
      further to say to the ambassador. His Majesty leaves it to your
      excellency whether Benedetti’s fresh demand and its rejection should
      not be at once communicated both to our ambassadors and to the
      press.” (ii. p. 96.)

  212 See Sorel, _Hist. diplomatique de la guerre franco-allemande_
      (1875), i. pp. 169-71.

 M107 France Declares War

  213 In the Reichstag, on July 20, Bismarck reproached the French
      ministers for not yielding to the pressure of the members of the
      opposition like Thiers and Gambetta, and producing the document,
      which would have overthrown the base on which the declaration of war
      was founded. Yet he had prepared this document for the very purpose
      of tempting France into a declaration of war.

  214 Grant Duff’s _Diaries_, ii. p. 153. The technical declaration of war
      by France was made at Berlin on July 19.

_  215 Life_, ii. p. 78.

  216 “II fallait donner à l’Europe le temps d’intervenir, ce qui
      n’empêchait pas que vos armements continuassent, et il ne fallait
      pas se hâter, de venir ici dans le moment où la susceptibilité
      française devait être la plus exigeante, des faits qui devaient
      causer une irritation dangereuse.... Ce n’est pas pour l’intérêt
      essentiel de la France, c’est par la faute du cabinet que nous avons
      la guerre.”—_Thiers_, in the Chamber, July 15, 1870. For this line
      of contention he was called an “unpatriotic trumpet of disaster,”
      and other names commonly bestowed on all men in all countries who
      venture to say that what chances for the hour to be a popular war is
      a blunder.

_  217 Gleanings_, iv. p. 222.

 M108 First Thoughts In England
 M109 Mind Of The British Government
 M110 The Storm Of War

_  218 Gleanings_, iv. p. 197.

 M111 Article In “Edinburgh Review”

  219 To be found in _Gleanings_, iv. In republishing it, Mr. Gladstone
      says, “This article is the only one ever written by me, which was
      meant for the time to be in substance, as well as in form,
      anonymous.” That was in 1878. Three years later he contributed an
      anonymous article, “The Conservative Collapse,” to the _Fortnightly
      Review_ (May 1880).

  220 House of Lords, Feb. 14, 1871.

  221 The stipulations “were politically absurd, and therefore in the long
      run impossible.” “The most inept conclusions of the peace of
      Paris.”—Bismarck, _Reflections_, ii. p. 114.

_  222 Hansard_, May 6, 1856. See also May 24, 1855, and Aug. 3, 1855.

  223 Bismarck, in his _Reflections_, takes credit to himself for having
      come to an understanding with Russia on this question at the
      outbreak of the Franco-German war.

 M112 The Russian Circular

  224 “The whole pith of the despatch was yours.”—Granville to Mr.
      Gladstone, Nov. 18, 1870.

 M113 Bismark’s Action

  225 Bismarck’s private opinion was this: “Gortchakoff is not carrying on
      in this matter a real Russian policy (that is, one in the true
      interests of Russia), but rather a policy of violent aggression.
      People still believe that Russian diplomats are particularly crafty
      and clever, full of artifices and stratagems, but that is not the
      case. If the people at St. Petersburg were clever they would not
      make any declaration of the kind but would quietly build men-of-war
      in the Black Sea and wait until they were questioned on the subject.
      Then they might reply they knew nothing about it, but would make
      inquiries and so let the matter drag on. That might continue for a
      long time, and finally people would get accustomed to it.”—Busch,
      _Bismarck: Some Secret Pages of his History_, i. pp. 312-13.

  226 Correspondence respecting the treaty of March 30, 1856, No. 76, pp.
      44, 45, c. 245.

  227 The tripartite treaty of England, France, Austria, of April 15,
      1856.

 M114 The London Conference

  228 Russell to Lord Granville, c. 245, No. 78, p. 46.

  229 Sorel’s _Guerre Franco-Allemande_, ii. chap. 4.

  230 That this failure to take advantage of the conference was an error
      on the part of France is admitted by modern French historians.
      Hanotaux, _France Contemporaine_, i. p. 108; Sorel, ii. pp. 216-7.
      Lord Granville had himself pointed out how a discussion upon the
      terms of peace might have been raised.

 M115 Changes In English Opinion

_  231 Lord Stanley on the Luxemburg Guarantee, June 14, 1867._—The
      guarantee now given is collective only. That is an important
      distinction. It means this, that in the event of a violation of
      neutrality, all the powers who have signed the treaty may be called
      upon for their collective action. No one of those powers is liable
      to be called upon to act singly or separately. It is a case so to
      speak of “limited liability.” We are bound in honour—you cannot put
      a legal construction upon it—to see in concert with others that
      these arrangements are maintained. But if the other powers join with
      us, it is certain that there will be no violation of neutrality. If
      they, situated exactly as we are, decline to join, we are not bound
      single-handed to make up the deficiencies of the rest.

  232 The number of men was reduced from 49,000 in 1868 to 20,941 in 1870;
      at the same time the military expenditure on the colonies was
      reduced from £3,388,023 to £1,905,538.

_  233 Reign of Queen Victoria_, edited by T. H. Ward (1887), i. p. 211.

 M116 Army Reform

_  234 Hansard_, Feb. 21 and March 23, 1871.

 M117 Purchase And Royal Warrant

  235 At the end of the volume, the reader will find some interesting
      remarks by Mr. Gladstone on these points. See Appendix.

 M118 Freeman’s Judgment

_  236 Memorials, Personal and Political_, vol. i. pp. 193, 194.

  237 E. A. Freeman, in _Pall Mall Gazette_, February 12, 1874.

_  238 Representative Government_, chap. x.

 M119 The Ballot

  239 The reader may remember his stripling letters—vol. i. p. 99.

 M120 The Ballot Passed

  240 In the House of Lords only 48 peers voted for the bill against 97.
      Many of the whigs abstained.

  241 The first parliamentary election by ballot in England was the return
      of Mr. Childers at Pontefract (Aug. 15, 1872) on his acceptance of
      the duchy.

_  242 Life of Grote_, pp. 312, 313.

 M121 Finance

  243 See Appendix.

 M122 Match Tax

  244 Writing to Mr. Lowe on his budget proposals, Mr. Gladstone Says
      (April 11, 1871): “The lucifer matches I hope and think you would
      carry, but I have little information, and that old. I advise that on
      this Glyn be consulted as to the feeling in the House of Commons. I
      am sceptical as to the ultimate revenue of one million.”

  245 See _The Match Tax: a Problem in Finance_. By W. Stanley Jevons
      (London: Stanford, 1871). A searching defence of the impost.

  246 See a speech in the House of Commons by Mr. Childers, April 24,
      1873.

  247 The estimates of 1874-5 were practically the estimates of the
      Gladstone government, showing a revenue of £77,995,000, or a surplus
      of £5,492,000. See Lord Welby’s letter to Mr. Lowe in _Life of Lord
      Sherbrooke_, ii. pp. 383, 384.

_  248 Economist_, Feb. 8, 1873.

 M123 Lowe As Chancellor Of The Exchequer

_  249 Life of Tennyson_, ii. p. 108.

 M124 Speech At Blackheath

  250 Mr. Bright had retired from the cabinet on account of ill health in
      December 1870.

 M125 Case Of Sir Robert Collier

  251 34 and 35 Vict. c. 91, sect. 1.

 M126 Parliamentary Criticism

  252 Selborne’s _Memorials_, i. p. 200.

_  253 Brand Papers._

 M127 Ewelme Rectory
 M128 Disraeli Takes The Field

  254 House of Commons, June 15, 1880.

 M129 Escape Of The _Alabama_

  255 Walpole’s _Russell_, ii. p. 373 _n._

  256 See _Rhodes_, iv. pp. 377-86.

 M130 American Claims

  257 Walpole’s _Russell_, ii. p. 370.

  258 Sir William Harcourt called the Act “the best and most complete law
      for the enforcement of neutrality in any country.” See _Hansard_,
      Aug. 1, 3, 4, 1870.

_  259 Life of Childers_, i. p. 173.

 M131 The British Commission

_  260 A Historical Account of the Neutrality of Great Britain during the
      American Civil War._ 1870.

  261 Franklin, in the negotiations on the recognition of the independence
      of the American colonies in 1782, had made the same suggestion of
      the cession of Canada by way of reparation and indemnification to
      the colonists for losses suffered by them in their rebellion, and
      Lord Shelburne was as deaf in 1782 as Lord de Grey in 1871. At an
      inaugural dinner of what was then called the Colonial Society (March
      10, 1869), Mr. Johnson, then American minister, made some
      semi-facetious remarks about colonies finding themselves transferred
      from the union jack to the stars and stripes. Lord Granville said he
      was rather afraid that the minister of the great republic, who had
      spoken with such singular eloquence, would feel it was a little want
      of sense on his part, that made him unprepared at that moment to
      open negotiations for the cession of British Canada. Mr. Gladstone,
      who was present, referred to the days when he had been at the
      colonial office, when in every British colony there was a party,
      called “the British party,” which, he rejoiced to think, had since
      become totally extinct.

 M132 Difficulties In Cabinet

  262 Selborne, _Personal and Political Memorials_, i. p. 214.

 M133 Treaty Signed

_  263 International Law_, p. 240. On the doubtful value of the rules, see
      Lawrence’s _Principles of International Law_ (1895), pp. 553-4.

  264 Boyd, third Eng. edition of _Wheaton_ (1889), p. 593.

 M134 Indirect Claims

  265 Lord de Grey had been created Marquis of Ripon after the signature
      of the treaty of Washington.

  266 See Moore, _History and Digest of International Arbitration to which
      the United States have been a Party_. Washington, 1898, i. pp.
      629-37.

  267 Mr. Bruce writes home from the cabinet room: “June 5, 1872: You must
      read the House of Lords debate on the _Alabama_ treaty. It was a
      most mischievous move of Lord Russell, as the discussion must weaken
      our last chance—not a bad one—of settling differences. The debate
      was adjourned. But there is no doubt that a vote will be carried
      which, if it were in the House of Commons, would lead to
      resignation. We cannot of course treat the vote of the Lords, where
      we are always in a minority, as of the same quality. But it will be
      misunderstood in America. We are now in the cabinet discussing the
      next steps.” The motion was withdrawn.

 M135 At Geneva

_  268 Charles Francis Adams._ By his Son. Boston, 1900, pp. 394-7.

 M136 The Award
 M137 Criticism By Colleagues

  269 Sir James Stansfeld, _Review of Reviews_, xi. p. 519.

_  270 Pall Mall Gazette_, Dec. 14, 1883.

  271 M. C. M. Simpson’s _Many Memories_, pp. 232-3.

  272 Quoted in Sir E.W. Hamilton’s _Monograph_, p. 324.

 M138 Lord Clarendon—Lowe—Bright
 M139 Ministerial Discipline

  273 May 6, 10, 1873. _Life of Wilberforce_, iii. p. 413.

_  274 Gleanings_, i. pp. 232-3.

  275 July 25, 1889.

 M140 The Queen

  276 See the remarkable article in the _Quarterly Review_, April, 1901,
      p. 320.

_  277 Pall Mall Gazette_, Sept. 29, 1871.

  278 See Appendix.

_  279 Quarterly Review_ for April, 1901, p. 305.

  280 This circumstance is accurately told, among other places, in Mr.
      Sidney Lee’s _Queen Victoria_.

 M141 Patronage

  281 During the twelve years in which he held the office of prime
      minister, he was answerable for sixty-seven new peerages (twenty-two
      of these now extinct), and on his recommendation fourteen Scotch and
      Irish peers were called to the House of Lords. In addition, he was
      responsible for seven promotions of peers to higher rank. During the
      same period ninety-seven baronetcies were created.—See Sir Edward
      Hamilton, _Mr. Gladstone, a Monograph_, p. 97.

_  282 Life of Grote_, pp. 306-10.

 M142 Ecclesiastical Appointments
 M143 At Work On The Bill

  283 The promotion of Dr. Temple to the bench.

 M144 Well Received On Introduction

  284 Stephen’s _Life of Fawcett_, p. 282.

 M145 Hostility Of Irish Bishops

  285 The adverse majority was made up of 209 English, 68 Irish, and 10
      Scotch members. The minority contained 222 English, 47 Scotch, and
      15 Irish members. The absentees numbered 75, of whom 53 were
      English, 3 Scotch, and 19 Irish. There voted with the opposition 43
      liberals—eight English and Scotch, including Mr. Bouverie, Mr.
      Fawcett, Mr. Horsman, Sir Robert Peel, and 35 Irish, of whom 25 were
      catholics and 10 protestants.

 M146 Ministers Defeated

_  286 Life of W. E. Forster_, i. p. 550.

_  287 March 13._—Cabinet again at twelve. Decided to resign ... Gladstone
      made quite a touching little speech. He began playfully. This was
      the last of some 150 cabinets or so, and he wished to say to his
      colleagues with what “profound gratitude”—and here he completely
      broke down, and he could say nothing, except that he could not enter
      on the details. ... Tears came to my eyes, and we were all
      touched.—_Life of W. E. Forster_, i. pp. 550, 551.

 M147 Attitude Of Mr. Disraeli
 M148 Further Discussions

_  288 Carm._ iii. 5, 27. In Mr. Gladstone’s own translation, _The Odes of
      Horace_ (p. 84):—

      ... Can wool repair
      The colours that it lost when soaked with dye?
      Ah, no. True merit once resigned,
      No trick nor feint will serve as well.

      A rendering less apt for this occasion finds favour with some
      scholars, that true virtue can never be restored to those who have
      once fallen away from it.

  289 He said he had once made a computation of what property the church
      would acquire if disestablished on the Irish terms, and he made out
      that “between life incomes, private endowments, and the value of
      fabrics and advowsons, something like ninety millions would have to
      be given in the process of disestablishment to the ministers,
      members, and patrons of the church of England. That is a very
      staggering kind of arrangement to make in supplying the young lady
      with a fortune and turning her out to begin the world.”—_Hans._, May
      16, 1873.

 M149 Death Of Bishop Wilberforce

  290 The house of Mr. Frederick Leveson Gower where for many years Mr.
      Gladstone constantly enjoyed a hospitality in which he delighted.

_  291 Life of Hope-Scott_, ii. p. 284.

 M150 Ministerial Embarrassments

  292 Rising as soon as Mr. Ayrton sat down he said that his colleague had
      not accurately stated the law of ministerial responsibility. He then
      himself laid down its true conditions under the circumstances, with
      the precision usual to him in such affairs. This was one of the
      latest performances of the great parliament of 1868.—July 30,
      _Hans_, 217, p. 1265.

  293 The following changes were made in the cabinet: Lord Ripon
      (president of the council), and Mr. Childers (chancellor of the
      duchy of Lancaster) retired. Mr. Bright succeeded Mr. Childers, Mr.
      Bruce (home secretary, created Lord Aberdare) Lord Ripon. Mr. Lowe
      became home secretary, and Mr. Gladstone chancellor of the exchequer
      in union with the office of first lord. The minor changes were
      numerous. Mr. Monsell was succeeded at the post office by Dr. Lyon
      Playfair; Mr. Ayrton was made judge advocate-general, and Mr. Adam
      took his place as commissioner of public works; Mr. Baxter retired
      from the treasury, Mr. Dodson becoming financial, and Mr. A. Peel
      parliamentary secretaries to the treasury; Lord F. Cavendish and Mr.
      A. Greville were appointed lords of the treasury. On Sir John
      Coleridge being appointed lord chief justice, and Sir George Jessel
      master of the rolls, they were succeeded by Mr. Henry James as
      attorney-general and Mr. Vernon Harcourt as solicitor-general. “We
      have effectually extracted the brains from below the gangway,” Lord
      Aberdare wrote, Nov. 19, 1873, “Playfair, Harcourt, James, and Lord
      Edmond Fitzmaurice, who is Lowe’s private secretary, being gone,
      will leave Fawcett all alone, for Trevelyan does not share his
      ill-will towards the government.”

  294 30 and 31 Vict., cap. 102, sec. 52, and schedule H.

  295 Sir Spencer Walpole thinks that Perceval’s case (_Life of Perceval_,
      ii. P. 55) covered Mr. Gladstone. In its constitutional aspect this
      is true, but the Act of 1867 introduced technical difficulties that
      made a new element.

 M151 The Greenwich Seat

  296 Yet Lord Selborne says that Coleridge ’must have been
      misunderstood’!—_Memorials_, i. pp. 328-9.

  297 21 and 22 Vict., c. 110 (1858).

  298 Mr. Childers (_Life_, i. p. 220) writing after the election in 1874,
      says, “It is clear to me that he would not have dissolved but for
      the question about the double office.” In the sentence before he
      says, “Some day perhaps Gladstone will recognise his mistake in
      August.” This mistake, it appears, was going to the exchequer
      himself, instead of placing Mr. Childers there (p. 219). I am sure
      that this able and excellent man thought what he said about “the
      question of the double office,” but his surmise was not quite
      impartial. Nor was he at the time a member of the cabinet.

_  299 Memoir of Hope-Scott_ ii. p. 284.

 M152 The Bath Election

  300 To Lord Grey de Wilton, Oct. 3, 1873.

  301 In 1871-73 the tories gained twenty-three seats against only one
      gained by the liberals; in the first three years of the government
      nine seats had been lost and nine gained.

      “Individuals may recover from even serious sickness; it does not
      appear to be the way with governments.”—Mr. Gladstone, _Nineteenth
      Century_, Sept. 1887.

 M153 Actual Occasion For Dissolution

  302 Dec. 2, 1873.

  303 The conservatives had gained a seat at Stroud on Jan. 6, and greatly
      reduced the liberal majority at Newcastle-on-Tyne.

  304 “The continual loss of elections,” Lord Aberdare wrote to his wife,
      “and the expediency of avoiding being further weakened in detail,
      have determined us to take at once the opinion of the country, and
      to stand or fall by it. I am rejoiced at this resolution.”—_Aberdare
      Papers_, Jan. 23, 1874.

 M154 Electoral Manifesto

  305 It was an extraordinary feat for a Statesman of sixty-five who had
      quite recently been confined to his bed with bronchitis. The day was
      damp and drizzly; numbers, which are variously estimated from six to
      seven thousand, had to be as far as possible brought within the
      range of his voice, and his only platform was a cart with some sort
      of covering, in the front of which he had to stand
      bareheaded.—_Spectator_, Jan. 31, 1874.

 M155 The General Election

  306 Mr. Gladstone on Electoral Pacts, _Nineteenth Century_, November
      1878.

 M156 To Meet Parliament Or Resign

  307 February 17, 1874.—“I was with the Queen to-day at Windsor for
      three-quarters of an hour, and nothing could be more frank, natural,
      and kind, than her manner throughout. In conversation at the
      audience, I of course followed the line on which we agreed last
      night. She assented freely to all the honours I had proposed. There
      was therefore no impediment whatever to the immediate and plenary
      execution of my commission from the cabinet; and I at once tendered
      our resignations, which I understand to have been graciously
      accepted. She left me, I have no doubt, to set about making other
      arrangements.”

 M157 Explanations Of Defeat

  308 March 19, 1874.

_  309 Aberdare Papers._

 M158 Reasons For Withdrawal

  310 See vol. i. p. 337.

 M159 Ecclesiastical Debate
 M160 Bright And Other Colleagues

_  311 Blachford’s Letters_, p. 362.

_  312 Herod._ vii. 157.

_  313 Congregationalist_, Feb. 1875, p. 66.

  314 See Cecconi’s _Storia del Conc. Vat._ i. p. 3. For Mr. Gladstone’s
      earlier views on the temporal power, see above, vol. i. p. 403.

 M161 The Two Schools

  315 See Purcell, ii. chap. 16.

  316 “Outside the Roman state, I am amazed at the Italian government
      giving over into the hands of the pope not only the nomination to
      the bishoprics as spiritual offices, but a nomination which is to
      carry with it the temporalities of the sees. They ought to know
      their own business best; but to me it seems that this is liberality
      carried into folly; and I know that some Italians think so.”—_To
      Lord Granville, Dec. 21, 1870._

 M162 Issue Of The Council
 M163 Visit To Munich

_  317 Conversations of Döllinger_, by Louise von Köbell, p. 100.

  318 Mr. Gladstone in _Speaker_, Jan, 18, 1890.

_  319 Gleanings_, vi. pp. 107-191. There the reader will also find (p.
      141) the six resolutions deemed by him to furnish a safer and wiser
      basis of legislation than the Public Worship Regulation Act.

 M164 Publication Of The Pamphlet

_  320 The Vatican Decrees in their bearing on Civil Allegiance: a
      Political Expostulation._

 M165 The Pamphlet

  321 Republishing his article on ritualism in 1878 (_Gleanings_, vi. p.
      127) Mr. Gladstone appends in a footnote on the passage that stated
      the anti-vatican campaign, an expression of belief and hope that
      “some at least who have joined the Latin church since the great
      change effected by the Vatican council, would upon occasion given,
      _whether with logical warrant or not_, adhere under all
      circumstances to their civil loyalty and duty.”

  322 He died in 1821, when Mr. Gladstone was a boy at Eton.

 M166 Labours Of The Controversy

  323 Dr. Michael’s _Ignaz von Döllinger_, p. 296.

 M167 Change Of Abode

  324 For a detailed description of this collection, see _Times_, June 21,
      26, 1875. His London house for the next five years was 73 Harley
      Street.

_  325 Guardian_, May 22, 1872.

  326 In the preface to his fourth edition Strauss said, “My countrymen
      might learn from the foreigner how the earnest conscientious
      statesman recognises a similar quality in an author whose influence
      he nevertheless considers to be dangerous. They might learn how the
      true gentleman speaks of one whom he cannot but admit to have
      devoted a long life to the search of truth, and allow to have
      sacrificed every personal prospect to the promulgation of that which
      appeared to him as such.”

  327 Olymp. i. 53.

 M168 Correspondence
 M169 Variety Of Correspondence

  328 George Meredith.

 M170 Polygot And Encyclopædic
 M171 Spirit Of Tolerance

  329 Barrow’s _Works_, iv. p. 107 (ed. 1830).

 M172 Darwin—Hooker—Huxley
 M173 Men Of Letters

  330 See Southey’s _Life_, vi. p. 327.

  331 εὐδαίμων μὲν ὅς ὲκ θαλάσσας ἔφυγε χεῖμα, λιμέυα δ᾽ἔκιχεν; εὐδαίμων
      δ᾽ὅς ὕπερθε μόχθων ἐγένεθ.

      Happy the man who from out the floods has fled the storm and found
      the haven; happy too is he who has surmounted toil and
      trouble.—_Bacchae_, 902-5.

  332 Pyth. iv. 485; _Life of Tennyson_, ii. pp. 332, 308. Mr. Gladstone’s
      share in the pensions to Wordsworth and Tennyson is described in Mr.
      Parker’s _Peel_, iii. pp. 437-442.

 M174 Matthew Arnold—Watts

  333 The glorious lines of the Lycian chief in _Iliad_, xii. 322-8,
      valiantly repeated, by the way, by Carteret, as he lay dying, and
      the very essence and spirit of the minister to whom Mr. Watts was
      writing.

 M175 Death Of Mill

  334 Mr. Gladstone to Mr. W. L. Courtney, Sept. 5, 1888.

  335 See above, vol. i. p. 143.

  336 Referred to by Mr. Gladstone in the House of Commons, Nov. 19, 1867.

_  337 The Prelude_, vii.

  338 Vol. i. pp. 476 and 521.

 M176 Rejection Of Berlin Memorandum

  339 Mr. Stead, then at the _Northern Echo_ in Darlington, began his
      redoubtable journalistic career in pressing this question into life.

 M177 Bulgarian Pamphlet

_  340 The Bulgarian Horrors, and the Question of the East._

 M178 Lord Stratford De Redcliffe
 M179 Feeling In The Country

  341 The story of the heroic death of Colonel Kiréeff, her brother, was
      vividly told by Kinglake in the introduction to the cabinet edition
      of his _Invasion of the Crimea_. This episode is supposed by some to
      have helped to intensify Mr. Gladstone’s feeling on the issues of
      the eastern war.

 M180 Conference At St. James’s Hall

_  342 Lessons in Massacre._

  343 Church, _Life_, p. 252.

 M181 J. R. Green’s Description

_  344 Letters of J. R. Green_, pp. 446-7.

 M182 Episode Of The Resolutions
 M183 Episode Of The Resolutions

_  345 Spectator._

  346 Mr. Balfour, House of Commons, May 20, 1898.

 M184 Tacks In Public Opinion

  347 At this interview Mr. Chamberlain was present. He had asked Mr.
      Gladstone what he would like to do or see in Birmingham. Mr.
      Gladstone said he thought he should like to call upon Dr. Newman.
      The wonderful pair were nervous and constrained, and each seemed a
      little relieved when, after twenty minutes of commonplace
      conversation, they rose to part.

_  348 Speeches of the Fifteenth Earl of Derby_, i. p. 297.

_  349 Pall Mall Gazette_, Feb. 26, 1898.

 M185 Treaty Of San Stefano

  350 Lord Carnarvon resigned in January, 1878, when the fleet was ordered
      to the Dardanelles, and Lord Derby in March on the calling out of
      the reserves.

  351 Russia demanded from Turkey the Dobrudscha in order to cede it to
      Roumania in exchange for the Roumanian province of Bessarabia.

 M186 Congress Of Berlin

  352 As it happened, the severance of northern from southern Bulgaria
      only lasted seven years.

 M187 The British Plenipotentiaries

  353 Mr. Gladstone made an important speech on the treaty-making power on
      June 13, 1878.

 M188 Kernel Of The Case

  354 At Knightsbridge, July 27, 1878.

 M189 Miscellaneous Activities

  355 See _Gleanings_, ii. p. 213.

_  356 Ibid._ ii. pp. 146-7.

 M190 Candidature Decided

_  357 Spectator_, February 8, 1879.

 M191 Journey To Edinburgh

_  358 Saturday Review_, November 29, 1879.

 M192 Oratory
 M193 Character Of The Campaign

_  359 Much Ado_, Act I. Sc. i.

  360 Faguet.

 M194 End Of The Year At Hawarden
 M195 To Mr. Bright On Leadership

  361 Lord Selborne (_Memorials_, i. 471) says that Lord Granville
      reported to him (Dec. 21), that Lord Hartington at this meeting
      wished to insist upon Mr. Gladstone resuming the lead, but that the
      rest were, for the present at all events, against any such step.
      Lord Granville’s own view was that the question, like many other
      questions, would have to be solved _ambulando_.

 M196 Dissolution

  362 Speech at West Calder, April 1, 1880.

 M197 Elected For Midlothian And Leeds

  363 The other candidates stood:—Barran (L.), 23,674; Jackson (C),
      13,331; Wheelhouse (C), 11,965. As the constituency was
      three-cornered, Gladstone, Barran, and Jackson were elected.

  364 Letter to electors of Leeds, April 7, 1880.

  365 The iron railing of this balcony is now a sacred relic in the hands
      of a faithful follower.

 M198 Results

  366 Published anonymously in the _Fortnightly Review_, May 1880.

 M199 Question Of Leadership

  367 See, for instance, _Pall Mall Gazette_, April 2 and 22, then
      conducted by Mr. Greenwood, the most vigorous and relentless of Mr.
      Gladstone’s critics.

  368 November 25, 1879.

  369 The Plimsoll matter was a movement to give Mr. Gladstone a public
      reception on his arrival in London. Mr. Gladstone declined the
      reception as inconsistent with his intention, expressed at
      Edinburgh, to avoid all demonstration, and also because it would be
      regarded as an attempt made for the first time to establish a
      practice of public rejoicing in the metropolis over the catastrophe
      of an administration and a political party, and would wound feelings
      which ought to be respected as well as spared.

  370 See an interesting letter from Viscount Esher, _Times_, Feb. 22,
      1892.

  371 “Without their full acquiescence—and indeed their earnest
      pressure—he could not even now take a step which would seem to
      slight claims which he has amply and generously acknowledged.... If
      either now or a few days later he accepts the task of forming and
      the duty of presiding over a liberal administration, it will be
      because Lord Granville and Lord Hartington, with characteristic
      patriotism, have themselves been among the first to feel and the
      most eager to urge Mr. Gladstone’s return to the post to which he
      has been summoned.”—_Daily News_, April 22.

  372 Up to this point the memorandum is on Windsor notepaper, and must
      have been written between the end of the audience and the time for
      the train—a very characteristic instance of his alacrity.

 M200 Construction Of Cabinet

  373 The reader will find the list of the members of the cabinet, now and
      at later periods of its existence, in the Appendix.