To turn then to what is more amusing, the battle of last night.

After much consideration and conference with Herbert (who has had an

attack of bilious fever and could not come down, though much better,

and soon, I hope, to be out again, but who agreed with me), I

determined that I ought to vote last night with Disraeli; and made

up my mind accordingly, which involved saying why, at some period of

the night. I was anxious to do it early, as I knew Graham would

speak on the other side, and did not wish any conflict even of

reasoning with him. But he found I was going to speak, and I suppose

may have had some similar wish. At any rate, he had the opportunity

of following Stafford who began the debate, as he was to take the

other side. Then there was an amusing scene between him and Peel.

Both rose and stood in competition for the Speaker's eye. The

Speaker had seen Graham first, and he got it. But when he was

speaking I felt I had no choice but to follow him. He made so very

able a speech that this was no pleasant prospect; but I acquired the

courage that proceeds from fear, according to a line from Ariosto:

_Chi per virtù, chi per paura vale_ [one from valour, another from

fear, is strong], and made my plunge when he sat down. But the

Speaker was not dreaming of me, and called a certain Mr. Scott who

had risen at the same time. Upon this I sat down again, and there

was a great uproar because the House always anticipating more or

less interest when men speak on opposite sides and in succession,

who are usually together, called for me. So I was up again, and the

Speaker deserted Scott and called me, and I had to make the best I

could after Graham. That is the end of the story, for there is

nothing else worth saying. It was at the dinner hour from 7 to

7¾, and then I went home for a little quiet. Peel again replied

upon me, but I did not hear that part of him; and Disraeli showed

the marvellous talent that he has, for summing up with brilliancy,

buoyancy, and comprehensiveness at the close of a debate. You have

heard me speak of that talent before when I have been wholly against

him; but never, last night or at any other time, would I go to him

for conviction, but for the delight of the ear and the fancy. What a

long story!

PARTIAL WITHDRAWAL

During the parliament that sat from 1847 to 1852, Mr. Gladstone's

political life was in partial abeyance. The whole burden of conducting

the affairs of the Hawarden estate fell upon him. For five years, he

said, 'it constituted my daily and continuing care, while parliamentary

action was only occasional. It supplied in fact my education for the

office of finance minister.' The demands of church matters were anxious

and at times absorbing. He warmly favoured and spoke copiously for the

repeal of the navigation laws. He desired, however, to accept a recent

overture from America which offered everything, even their vast coasting

trade, upon a footing of absolute reciprocity. 'I gave notice,' he says,

'of a motion to that effect. But the government declined to accept it. I

accordingly withdrew it. At this the tories were much put about. I, who

had thought of things only and not taken persons into view, was

surprised at their surprise. It did not occur to me that by my public

notification I had given to the opposition generally something _like_ a

vested interest in my proposal. I certainly should have done better

never to have given my notice. This is one of the cases illustrating the

extreme slowness of my political education.' The sentence about thinking

of things only and leaving persons out, indicates a turn of mind that

partly for great good, partly for some evil, never wholly disappeared.

Yet partially withdrawn as he was from active life in the House of

Commons, Mr. Gladstone was far too acute an observer to have any

leanings to the delusive self-indulgence of temporary retirements. To

his intimate friend, Sir Walter James, who seems to have nursed some

such intention, he wrote at this very time (Feb. 13, 1847):--

The way to make parliament profitable is to deal with it as a

calling, and if it be a calling it can rarely be advantageous to

suspend the pursuit of it for years together with an uncertainty,

too, as to its resumption. You have not settled in the country, nor

got your other vocation open and your line clear before you. The

purchase of an estate is a very serious matter, which you may not

be able to accomplish to your satisfaction except after the lapse

of years. It would be more satisfactory to drop parliament with

another path open to you already, than in order to seek about for

one.... I think with you that the change in the position of the

conservative party makes public life still more painful where it

was painful before, and less enjoyable, where it was enjoyable; but

I do not think it remains less a duty to work through the tornado

and to influence for good according to our means the new forms

into which, political combination may be cast.

In 1848 Northcote speaks of Mr. Gladstone as the 'patron saint' of the

coal-whippers, who, as a manifestation of their gratitude for the Act

which he had induced parliament to pass for them, offered their services

to put down the chartist mob. Both Mr. Gladstone and his brother John

served as special constables during the troubled days of April. In his

diary he records on April 10, 'On duty from 2 to 3¾ P.M.'

II

VIEWS OF COLONIAL GOVERNMENT

When Mr. Gladstone became colonial secretary at the end of 1845, he was

described as a strong accession to the progressive or theorising section

of the cabinet--the men, that is to say, who applied to the routine of

government, as they found it, critical principles and improved ideals.

If the church had been the first of Mr. Gladstone's commanding interests

and free trade the second, the turn of the colonies came next. He had

not held the seals of the colonial department for more than a few

months, but to any business, whatever it might be, that happened to

kindle his imagination or work on his reflection, he never failed to

bend his whole strength. He had sat upon a committee in 1835-6 on native

affairs at the Cape, and there he had come into full view of the costly

and sanguinary nature of that important side of the colonial question.

Molesworth mentions the 'prominent and valuable' part taken by him in

the committee on Waste Lands (1836). He served on committees upon

military expenditure in the colonies, and upon colonial accounts. He was

a member of the important committee of 1840 on the colonisation of New

Zealand, and voted in the minority for the draft report of the chairman,

containing among other things the principle of the reservation of all

unoccupied lands to the crown.[212] Between 1837 and 1841 he spoke

frequently on colonial affairs. When he was secretary of state in 1846,

questions arose upon the legal status of colonial clergy, full of knotty

points as to which he wrote minutes; questions upon education in penal

settlements, and so forth, in which he interested himself, not seldom

differing from Stephen, the chief of the staff in the office. He

composed an argumentative despatch on the commercial relations between

Canada and the mother country, endeavouring to wean the Canadian

assembly from its economic delusions. It was in effect little better

than if written in water. He made the mistake of sending out despatches

in favour of resuming on a limited scale the transportation of convicts

to Australia, a practice effectually condemned by the terrible committee

eight years before. Opinion in Australia was divided, Robert Lowe

leading the opposition,[213] and the experiment was vetoed by Mr.

Gladstone's successor at the colonial office. He exposed himself to

criticism and abuse by recalling a colonial governor for inefficiency in

his post; imprudently in the simplicity of his heart he added to the

recall a private letter stating rumours against the governor's personal

character. These he had taken on trust from the bishop of the diocese

and others. The bishop left him in the lurch; the recall was one affair,

the personal rumours were another; nimble partizanship confused the two,

to the disadvantage of the secretary of state; the usual clatter that

attends any important personage in a trivial scrape ensued; Mr.

Gladstone's explanations, simple and veracious as the sunlight in their

substance, were over-skilful in form, and half a dozen blunt, sound

sentences would have stood him in far better stead. 'There was on my

part in this matter,' he says in a fugitive scrap upon it, 'a singular

absence of worldly wisdom.'[214] To colonial policy at this stage I

discern no particular contribution, and the matters that I have named

are now well covered with the moss of kindly time.

Almost from the first he was convinced that some leading maxims of

Downing Street were erroneous. He had, from his earliest parliamentary

days, regarded our colonial connection as one of duty rather than as one

of advantage. When he had only been four years in the House he took a

firm stand against pretensions in Canada to set their assembly on an

equal footing with the imperial parliament at home.[215] On the other

hand, while he should always be glad to see parliament inclined to make

large sacrifices for the purpose of maintaining the colonies, he

conceived that nothing could be more ridiculous, or more mistaken, than

to suppose that Great Britain had anything to gain by maintaining that

union in opposition to the deliberate and permanent conviction of the

people of the colonies themselves.[216]

He did not at all undervalue what he called the mere political

connection, but he urged that the root of such a connection lay in the

natural affection of the colonies for the land from which they sprang,

and their spontaneous desire to reproduce its laws and the spirit of its

institutions. From first to last he always declared the really valuable

tie with a colony to be the moral and the social tie.[217] The master

key with him was local freedom, and he was never weary of protest

against the fallacy of what was called 'preparing' these new communities

for freedom: teaching a colony, like an infant, by slow degrees to walk,

first putting it into long clothes, then into short clothes. A governing

class was reared up for the purposes which the colony ought to fulfil

itself; and, as the climax of the evil, a great military expenditure was

maintained, which became a premium on war. Our modern colonists, he

said, after quitting the mother country, instead of keeping their

hereditary liberties, go out to Australia or New Zealand to be deprived

of these liberties, and then perhaps, after fifteen or twenty or thirty

years' waiting, have a portion given back to them, with magnificent

language about the liberality of parliament in conceding free

institutions. During the whole of that interval they are condemned to

hear all the miserable jargon about fitting them for the privileges thus

conferred; while, in point of fact, every year and every month during

which they are retained under the administration of a despotic

government, renders them less fit for free institutions. 'No

consideration of money ought to induce parliament to sever the

connection between any one of the colonies and the mother country,'

though it was certain that the cost of the existing system was both

large and unnecessary. But the real mischief was not here, he said. Our

error lay in the attempt to hold the colonies by the mere exercise of

power.[218] Even for the church in the colonies he rejected the boon of

civil preference as being undoubtedly a fatal gift,--'nothing but a

source of weakness to the church herself and of discord and difficulty

to the colonial communities, in the soil of which I am anxious to see

the church of England take a strong and healthy root.'[219] He

acknowledged how much he had learned from Molesworth's speeches,[220]

and neither of them sympathised with the opinion expressed by Mr.

Disraeli in those days, 'These wretched colonies will all be independent

too in a few years, and are a millstone round our necks.'[221] Nor did

Mr. Gladstone share any such sentiments as those of Molesworth who, in

the Canadian revolt of the winter of 1837, actually invoked disaster

upon the British arms.[222]

THE TWO SCHOOLS

In their views of colonial policy Mr. Gladstone was in substantial

accord with radicals of the school of Cobden, Hume, and Molesworth. He

does not seem to have joined a reforming association founded by these

eminent men among others in 1850, but its principles coincided with his

own:--local independence, an end of rule from Downing Street, the relief

of the mother country from the whole expense of the local government of

the colonies, save for defence from aggression by a foreign power.

Parliament was, as a rule, so little moved by colonial concerns that,

according to Mr. Gladstone, in nine cases out of ten it was impossible

for the minister to secure parliamentary attention, and in the tenth

case it was only obtained by the casual operations of party spirit. Lord

Glenelg's case showed that colonial secretaries were punished when they

got into bad messes, and his passion for messes was punished, in the

language of the journals of the day, by the life of a toad under a

harrow until he was worried out of office. There was, however, no force

in public opinion to prevent the minister from going wrong if he liked;

still less to prevent him from going right if he liked. Popular feeling

was coloured by no wish to give up the colonies, but people doubted

whether the sum of three millions sterling a year for colonial defence

and half a million more for civil charges, was not excessive, and they

thought the return by no means commensurate with the outlay.[223] In

discussions on bills effecting the enlargement of Australian

constitutions, Mr. Gladstone's views came out in clear contrast with the

old school. 'Spoke 1½ hours on the Australian Colonies bill,' he records

(May 13,1850), 'to an indifferent, inattentive House. But it is

necessary to speak these truths of colonial policy even to unwilling

ears.' In the proceedings on the constitution for New Zealand, he

delivered a speech justly described as a pattern of close argument and

classic oratory.[224] Lord John Russell, adverting to the concession of

an elective chamber and responsible government, said that one by one in

this manner, all the shields of our authority were thrown away, and the

monarchy was left exposed in the colonies to the assaults of democracy.

'Now I confess,' said Mr. Gladstone, in a counter minute, 'that the

nominated council and the independent executive were, not shields of

authority, but sources of weakness, disorder, disunion, and

disloyalty.'[225]

HIS WHOLE VIEW

His whole view he set out at Chester[226] a little later than the time

at which we now stand:--

... Experience has proved that if you want to strengthen the

connection between the colonies and this country--if you want to

see British law held in respect and British institutions adopted

and beloved in the colonies, never associate with them the hated

name of force and coercion exercised by us, at a distance, over

their rising fortunes. Govern them upon a principle of freedom.

Defend them against aggression from without. Regulate their foreign

relations. These things belong to the colonial connection. But of

the duration of that connection let them be the judges, and I

predict that if you leave them the freedom of judgment it is hard

to say when the day will come when they will wish to separate from

the great name of England. Depend upon it, they covet a share in

that great name. You will find in that feeling of theirs the

greatest security for the connection. Make the name of England yet

more and more an object of desire to the colonies. Their natural

disposition is to love and revere the name of England, and this

reverence is by far the best security you can have for their

continuing, not only to be subjects of the crown, not only to

render it allegiance, but to render it that allegiance which is the

most precious of all--the allegiance which proceeds from the depths

of the heart of man. You have seen various colonies, some of them

lying at the antipodes, offering to you their contributions to

assist in supporting the wives and families of your soldiers, the

heroes that have fallen in the war. This, I venture to say, may be

said, without exaggeration, to be among the first fruits of that

system upon which, within the last twelve or fifteen years, you

have founded a rational mode of administering the affairs of your

colonies without gratuitous interference.

As I turn over these old minutes, memoranda, despatches, speeches, one

feels a curious irony in the charge engendered by party heat or malice,

studiously and scandalously careless of facts, that Mr. Gladstone's

policy aimed at getting rid of the colonies. As if any other policy than

that which he so ardently enforced could possibly have saved them.

III

A PAINFUL INCIDENT

In 1849 Mr. Gladstone was concerned in a painful incident that befel one

of his nearest friends. Nobody of humane feeling would now willingly

choose either to speak or hear of it, but it finds a place in books even

to this day; it has been often misrepresented; and it is so

characteristic of Mr. Gladstone, and so entirely to his honour, that it

cannot be wholly passed over. Fortunately a few sentences will suffice.

His friend's wife had been for some time travelling abroad, and rumours

by and by reached England of movements that might be no more than

indiscreet, but might be worse. In consequence of these rumours, and

after anxious consultations between the husband and three or four

important members of his circle, it was thought best that some one

should seek access to the lady, and try to induce her to place herself

in a position of security. The further conclusion reached was that Mr.

Gladstone and Manning were the two persons best qualified by character

and friendship for this critical mission. Manning was unable to go, but

Mr. Gladstone at the earnest solicitation of his friend, and also of his

own wife who had long been much attached to the person missing, set off

alone for a purpose, as he conscientiously believed, alike friendly to

both parties and in the interests of both. I have called the proceeding

characteristic, for it was in fact exactly like him to be ready at the

call of friendship, and in the hope of preventing a terrible disaster,

cheerfully to undertake a duty detestable to anybody and especially

detestable to him; and again, it was like him to regard the affair with

an optimistic simplicity that made him hopeful of success, where to

ninety-nine men of a hundred the thought of success would have seemed

absurd. To no one was it a greater shock than to him when, after a

journey across half Europe, he suddenly found himself the discoverer of

what it was inevitable that he should report to his friend at home. In

the course of the subsequent proceedings on the bill for a divorce

brought into the House of Lords, he was called as a witness to show that

in this case the person claiming the bill had omitted no means that duty

or affection could suggest for averting the calamity with which his

hearth was threatened. It was quite untrue, as he had occasion to tell

the House of Commons in 1857, that he had anything whatever to do with

the collection of evidence, or that the evidence given by him was the

evidence, or any part of it, on which the divorce was founded. The only

thing to be added is the judgment of Sir Robert Peel upon a transaction,

with all the details of which he was particularly well acquainted:--

_Aug. 26, 1849._

MY DEAR GLADSTONE,--I am deeply concerned to hear the result of

that mission which, with unparalleled kindness and generosity, you

undertook in the hope of mitigating the affliction of a friend, and

conducing possibly to the salvation of a wife and mother. Your

errand has not been a fruitless one, for it affords the conclusive

proof that everything that the forbearance and tender consideration

of a husband and the devotion of a friend could suggest as the

means of averting the necessity for appealing to the Law for such

protection as it can afford, had been essayed and essayed with the

utmost delicacy. This proof is valuable so far as the world and the

world's opinion is concerned--much more valuable as it respects the

heart and conscience of those who have been the active agents in a

work of charity. I can offer you nothing in return for that which

you undertook with the promptitude of affectionate friendship,

under circumstances which few would not have considered a valid

excuse if not a superior obligation, but the expression of my

sincere admiration for truly virtuous and generous conduct.--Ever,

my dear Gladstone, most faithfully yours,

ROBERT PEEL.

FOOTNOTES:

[207] _The Halifax Papers._

[208] Among them were such men as Wilson Patten, General Peel, Mr.

Corry, Lord Stanhope, Lord Hardinge, most of whom in days to come took

their places in conservative administrations.

[209] Memo, of 1876.

[210] A bill to indemnify the inhabitants of Lower Canada, many of whom

had taken part in the rebellion of 1837-8, for the destruction and

injury of their property. Mr. Gladstone strongly opposed any

compensation being given to Canadian, rebels.--_Hansard_, June 14, 1849.

[211] _Hansard_, Feb. 21, 1850, p. 1233.

[212] Garnett's _Edward Gibbon Wakefield_, p. 248. See also p. 232.

[213] See _The Gladstone Colony_ by J. F. Hogan, M.P., with prefatory

note by Mr. Gladstone, April 20, 1897, and the chapter in Lord

Sherbrooke's _Life_, 'Mr. Gladstone's Penal Colony.'

[214] Stafford Northcote published an effective vindication in a 'Letter

to a Friend,' 1847.

[215] Speech on affairs of Lower Canada, Mar. 8, 1837.

[216] On Government of Canada bill, May 29, 1840.

[217] See his evidence before a Select Committee on Colonial Military

Expenditure, June 6, 1861.

[218] See speech on Australian Colonies bill, June 26, 1849, Colonial

Administration, April 16, 1849, on the Australian Colonies, Feb. 8,

1850, March 22, 1850, and May 13, 1850. On the Kaffir War, April 5,

1852. On the New Zealand Government bill, May 21, 1852. Also speech on

Scientific Colonisation before the St. Martin in the Fields Association

for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, March 27, 1849.

[219] On the Colonial Bishops bill, April 28, 1852.

[220] Wakefield was their common teacher. In a letter as secretary of

state to Sir George Grey, then governor of New Zealand (March 27), 1846,

he states how the signal ability of Wakefield and his devotion to every

subject connected with the foundation of colonies has influenced him.

[221] To Lord Malmesbury, Aug. 13, 1852. _Memoirs of an Ex-Minister_, by

the Earl of Malmesbury, i. p. 344.

[222] 'Should a war take place, I must declare that I should more

deplore success on the part of this country than defeat; and though as

an English citizen I could not but lament the disasters of my

countrymen, still it would be to me a less poignant matter of regret

than a success which would offer to the world the disastrous and

disgraceful spectacle of a free and mighty nation succeeding by force of

arms in putting down and tyrannising over a free though feebler

community struggling in defence of its just rights.... That our dominion

in America should now be brought to a conclusion, I for one most

sincerely desire, but I desire it should terminate in peace and

friendship. Great would be the advantages of an amicable separation of

the two countries, and great would be the honour this country would reap

in consenting to such a step.' Mr. Gladstone spoke the same evening in

an opposite sense.--_Hans._ 39, p. 1466, Dec. 22, 1837. Walpole, _Hist.

Eng._, iii. p. 425.

[223] See, for instance, _Spectator_, Jan. 17, 1845; _Times_, June 8,

1849. In 1861 it was estimated that colonial military expenditure was

between three and four millions a year, about nine-tenths of which was

borne by British taxpayers, and one-tenth by colonial contribution.

[224] _Edward Gibbon Wakefield_, p. 331. The reader will find an extract

in the Appendix. 'The New Zealand Government bill of 1852, with all its

errors and complications, was a grand step in the recovery of our old

colonial policy; but perhaps its chief contribution to the

re-establishment of constitutional views was Mr. Gladstone's speech on

its second reading.'--Right Hon. C. B. Adderley, _Review of Earl Grey's

Colonial Policy of Lord John Russell's Administration_, p. 135.

[225] See Mr. Gladstone's speech on introducing the Government of

Ireland bill, April 8, 1886.

[226] Nov. 12, 1855. See also two speeches of extraordinary fervour and

exaltation, one at Mold (Sept. 29, 1856), and the other at Liverpool the

same evening, both in support of the claims of societies for foreign

missions.

CHAPTER IV

DEATH OF SIR ROBERT PEEL

(_1850_)

Famous men--whose merit it is to have joined their name to events

that were brought onwards by the course of things.--PAUL-LOUIS

COURIER.

LORD PALMERSTON

It was now that Lord Palmerston strode to a front place--one of the two

conspicuous statesmen with whom, at successive epochs in his career, Mr.

Gladstone found himself in different degrees of energetic antagonism.

This was all the stiffer and more deeply rooted, for being in both cases

as much a moral antagonism as it was political. After a long spell of

peace, earnestness, and political economy, the nation was for a time in

a mood for change, and Palmerston convinced it that he was the man for

its mood. He had his full share of shrewd common sense, yet was capable

of infinite recklessness. He was good-tempered and a man of bluff

cheerful humour. But to lose the game was intolerable, and it was

noticed that with him the next best thing to success was quick

retaliation on a victorious adversary--a trait of which he was before

long to give the world an example that amused it. Yet he had no capacity

for deep and long resentments. Like so many of his class, he united

passion for public business to sympathy with social gaiety and pleasure.

Diplomatists found him firm, prompt, clean-cut, but apt to be narrow,

teasing, obstinate, a prisoner to his own arguments, and wanting in the

statesman's first quality of seeing the whole and not merely the half.

Metternich described him as an audacious and passionate marksman, ready

to make arrows out of any wood. He was a sanguine man who always

believed what he desired; a confident man who was sure that he must be

right in whatever he chose to fear. On the economic or the moral side of

national life, in the things that make a nation rich and the things that

make it scrupulous and just, he had only limited perception and moderate

faith. Where Peel was strong and penetrating, Palmerston was weak and

purblind. He regarded Bright and Cobden as displeasing mixtures of the

bagman and the preacher. In 1840 he had brought us within an ace of war

with France. Disputes about an American frontier were bringing us at the

same period within an ace of war with the United States. When Peel and

Aberdeen got this quarrel into more promising shape, Palmerston

characteristically taunted them with capitulation. Lord Grey refused

help in manufacturing a whig government in December 1845, because he was

convinced that at that moment Palmerston at the foreign office meant an

American war. When he was dismissed by Lord John Russell in 1852 a

foreign ruler on an insecure throne observed to an Englishman, 'This is

a blow to me, for so long as Lord Palmerston remained at the foreign

office, it was certain that you could not procure a single ally in

Europe.'

Yet all this policy of high spirits and careless dictatorial temper had

its fine side. With none of the grandeur of the highest heroes of his

school--of Chatham, Carteret, Pitt--without a spark of their heroic fire

or their brilliant and steadfast glow, Palmerston represented, not

always in their best form, some of the most generous instincts of his

countrymen. A follower of Canning, he was the enemy of tyrants and

foreign misrule. He had a healthy hatred of the absolutism and reaction

that were supreme at Vienna in 1815; and if he meddled in many affairs

that were no affairs of ours, at least he intervened for freedom. The

action that made him hated at Vienna and Petersburg won the confidence

of his countrymen. They saw him in Belgium and Holland, Spain, Italy,

Greece, Portugal, the fearless champion of constitutions and

nationality. Of Aberdeen, who had been Peel's foreign minister, it was

said that at home he was a liberal without being an enthusiast; abroad

he was a zealot, in the sense most opposed to Palmerston. So, of

Palmerston it could be said that he was conservative at home and

revolutionist abroad. If such a word can ever be applied to such a

thing, his patriotism was sometimes not without a tinge of vulgarity,

but it was always genuine and sincere.

This masterful and expert personage was the ruling member of the weak

whig government now in office, and he made sensible men tremble. Still,

said Graham to Peel, 'it is a choice of dangers and evils, and I am

disposed to think that Palmerston and his foreign policy are less to be

dreaded than Stanley and a new corn law.'[227] In a debate of

extraordinary force and range in the summer of 1850, the two schools of

foreign policy found themselves face to face. Palmerston defended his

various proceedings with remarkable amplitude, power, moderation, and

sincerity. He had arrayed against him, besides Mr. Gladstone, the

greatest men in the House--Peel, Disraeli, Cobden, Graham, Bright--but

in his last sentence the undaunted minister struck a note that made

triumph in the division lobbies sure. For five hours a crowded house

hung upon his lips, and he then wound up with a fearless challenge of a

verdict on the question, 'Whether, as the Roman in days of old held

himself free from indignity when he could say _Civis Romanus sum_, so

also a British subject, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident

that the watchful eye and the strong arm of England will protect him

against injustice and wrong?'

DON PACIFICO

The Roman citizen was in this instance a Mediterranean Jew who chanced

to be a British subject. His house at Athens had for some reason or

other been sacked by the mob; he presented a demand for compensation

absurdly fraudulent on the face of it. The Greek government refused to

pay. England despatched the fleet to collect this and some other petty

accounts outstanding. Russia and France proposed their good offices; the

mediation of France was accepted; then a number of Greek vessels were

peremptorily seized, and France in umbrage recalled her ambassador from

London. Well might Peel, in the last speech ever delivered by him in the

House of Commons, describe such a course of action as consistent neither

with the dignity nor the honour of England. The debate travelled far

beyond Don Pacifico, and it stands to this day as a grand classic

exposition in parliament of the contending views as to the temper and

the principles on which nations in our modern era should conduct their

dealings with one another.

It was in the Greek debate of 1850, which involved the censure or

acquittal of Lord Palmerston, that I first meddled in speech with

foreign affairs, to which I had heretofore paid the slightest

possible attention. Lord Palmerston's speech was a marvel for

physical strength, for memory, and for lucid and precise exposition

of his policy as a whole. A very curious incident on this occasion

evinced the extreme reluctance of Sir R. Peel to appear in any

ostensible relation with Disraeli. Voting with him was disagreeable

enough, but this with his strong aversion to the Palmerstonian

policy Peel could not avoid; besides which, it was known that Lord

Palmerston would carry the division. Disraeli, not yet fully

recognised as leader of the protectionists, was working hard for

that position, and assumed the manners of it, with Beresford, a

kind of whipper-in, for his right-hand man. After the Palmerston

speech he asked me on the next night whether I would undertake to

answer it. I said that I was incompetent to do it, from want of

knowledge and otherwise. He answered that in that case he must do

it. As the debate was not to close that evening, this left another

night free for Peel when he might speak and _not_ be in Disraeli's

_neighbourhood_. I told Peel what Disraeli had arranged. He was

very well satisfied. But, shortly afterwards, I received from

Disraeli a message through Beresford, that he had changed his mind,

and would not speak until the next and closing night, when Peel

would have to speak also. I had to make known to Peel this

alteration. He received the tidings with extreme annoyance:

thinking, I suppose, that if the two spoke on the same side and in

the late hours just before the division it would convey the idea of

some concert or co-operation between them, which it was evident

that he was most anxious to avoid. But he could not help himself.

Disraeli's speech was a very poor one, almost like a 'cross,' and

Peel's was prudent but otherwise not one of his best.[228]

Mr. Gladstone had not in 1850 at all acquired such full parliamentary

ascendency as belonged to the hardy veteran confronting him; still less

had he such authority as the dethroned leader who sat by his side. Yet

the House felt that, in the image of an ancient critic, here was no

cistern of carefully collected rain-water, but the bounteous flow of a

living spring. It felt all the noble elevation of an orator who

transported them apart from the chicane of diplomatic chanceries, above

the narrow expediencies of the particular case, though of these too he

proved himself a thoroughly well-armed master, into a full view of the

state system of Europe and of the principles and relations on which the

fabric is founded. Now for the first time he made the appeal, so often

repeated by him, to the common sentiment of the civilised world, to the

general and fixed convictions of mankind, to the principles of

brotherhood among nations, to their sacred independence, to the equality

in their rights of the weak with the strong. Such was his language.

'When we are asking for the maintenance of the rights that belong to our

fellow-subjects resident in Greece,' he said, '_let us do as we would be

done by_; let us pay all respect to a feeble state and to the infancy of

free institutions, which we should desire and should exact from others

towards their authority and strength.' Mr. Gladstone had not read

history for nothing, he was not a Christian for nothing. He knew the

evils that followed in Europe the breakdown of the great spiritual

power--once, though with so many defects, a controlling force over

violence, anarchy, and brute wrong. He knew the necessity for some

substitute, even a substitute so imperfect as the law of nations. 'You

may call the rule of nations vague and untrustworthy,' he exclaimed; 'I

find in it, on the contrary, a great and noble monument of human wisdom,

founded on the combined dictates of sound experience, a precious

inheritance bequeathed to us by the generations that have gone before

us, and a firm foundation on which we must take care to build whatever

it may be our part to add to their acquisitions, if indeed we wish to

promote the peace and welfare of the world.'

EXALTS THE LAW OF NATIONS

The government triumphed by a handsome majority, and Mr. Gladstone, as

was his wont, consoled himself for present disappointment by hopes for a

better future. 'The majority of the House of Commons, I am convinced,'

he wrote to Guizot, then in permanent exile from power, 'was with us in

heart and in conviction; but fear of inconveniences attending the

removal of a ministry which there is no regularly organised opposition

ready to succeed, carried the day beyond all authoritative doubt,

against the merits of the particular question. It remains to hope that

the demonstration which has been made may not be without its effect upon

the tone of Lord Palmerston's future proceedings.'

The conflict thus opened between Mr. Gladstone and Lord Palmerston in

1850 went on in many changing phases, with some curious vicissitudes and

inversions. They were sometimes frank foes, occasionally partners in

opposition, and for a long while colleagues in office. Never at any time

were they in thought or feeling congenial.[229]

On the afternoon of the day following this debate, Peel was thrown from

his horse and received injuries from which he died three days later

(July 2), in the sixty-third year of his age, and after forty-one years

of parliamentary life. When the House met the next day, Hume, as one of

its oldest members, at once moved the adjournment, and it fell to Mr.

Gladstone to second him. He was content with a few words of sorrow and

with the quotation of Scott's moving lines to the memory of Pitt:--

'Now is the stately column broke,

The beacon-light is quench'd in smoke,

The trumpet's silver sound is still,

The warder silent on the hill!'

These beautiful words were addressed, said Mr. Gladstone, 'to a man

great indeed, but not greater than Sir Robert Peel.'

'Great as he was to the last,' wrote Mr. Gladstone in one of his notes

in 1851, 'I must consider the closing years of his life as beneath those

that had preceded them. His enormous energies were in truth so lavishly

spent upon the gigantic work of government, which he conducted after a

fashion quite different,--I mean as to the work done in the workshop of

his own brain,--from preceding and succeeding prime ministers, that

their root was enfeebled, though in its feebleness it had more strength

probably remaining than fell to the lot of any other public man.'

Peel may at least divide with Walpole the laurels of our greatest peace

minister to that date--the man who presided over beneficent and

necessary changes in national polity, that in hands less strong and less

skilful might easily have opened the sluices of civil confusion. And

when we think of Walpole's closing days, and of the melancholy end of

most other ruling spirits in our political history--of the

mortifications and disappointments in which, from Chatham and Pitt down

to Canning and O'Connell, they have quitted the glorious field--Peel

must seem happy in the manner and moment of his death. Daring and

prosperous legislative exploits had marked his path. His authority in

parliament never stood higher, his honour in the country never stood so

high. His last words had been a commanding appeal for temperance in

national action and language, a solemn plea for peace as the true aim to

set before a powerful people.

To his father Mr. Gladstone wrote:--

_July 2, 1850._--I thought Sir R. Peel looked extremely feeble

during the debate last week. I mean as compared with what he

usually is. I observed that he slept during much of Lord

Palmerston's speech, that he spoke with little physical energy, and

next day, Saturday, in the forenoon I thought he looked very ill at

a meeting which, in common with him, I had to attend. This is all

that I know and that is worth telling on a subject which is one of

deep interest to all classes, from the Queen downwards. I was at

the palace last night and she spoke to me with great earnestness

about it. As to the division I shall say little; it is an

unsatisfactory subject. The majority of the government was made up

out of our ranks, partly by people staying away and partly by some

twenty who actually voted with the government. By far the greater

portion, I am sorry to say, of both sets of persons were what are

called Peelites, and not protectionists. The fact is, that if all

calling themselves liberal be put on one side, and all calling

themselves conservatives on the other, the House of Commons is as

nearly as possible _equally_ divided.

QUESTIONS OF LEADERSHIP

I have already described how Mr. Gladstone thought it a great mistake in

Peel to resist any step that might put upon the protectionists the

responsibilities of office. In a note composed a quarter of a century

later (1876), he says: 'This I think was not only a safe experiment

(after 1848) but a vital necessity. I do not, therefore, think, and I

did not think, that the death of Sir R. Peel at the time when it

occurred was a great calamity so far as the chief question of our

internal politics was concerned. In other respects it was indeed great;

in some of them it may almost be called immeasurable. The moral

atmosphere of the House of Commons has never since his death been quite

the same, and is now widely different. He had a kind of authority there

that was possessed by no one else. Lord John might in some respects

compete with, in some even excel, him; but to him, as leader of the

liberals, the loss of such an opponent was immense. It is sad to think

what, with his high mental force and noble moral sense, he might have

done for us in after years. Even the afterthought of knowledge of such a

man and of intercourse with him, is a high privilege and a precious

possession.'

An interesting word or two upon his own position at this season occur in

a letter to his father (July 9, 1850):--

The letter in which you expressed a desire to be informed by me, so

far as I might be able to speak, whether there was anything in the

rumours circulated with regard to my becoming the leader in

parliament of the conservative party, did not come to my hands

until yesterday. The fact is, that there is nothing whatever in

those rumours beyond mere speculation on things supposed probable

or possible, and they must pass for what they are worth in that

character only. People feel, I suppose, that Sir Robert Peel's life

and continuance in parliament were of themselves powerful obstacles

to the general reorganisation of the conservative party, and as

there is great annoyance and dissatisfaction with the present state

of things, and a widely spread feeling that it is not conducive to

the public interests, there arises in men's minds an expectation

that the party will be in some manner reconstituted. I share in the

feeling that it is desirable; but I see very great difficulties in

the way, and do not at present see how they are to be effectually

overcome. The House of Commons is almost equally divided, indeed,

between those professing liberal and those professing conservative

politics; but the late division [Don Pacifico] showed how ill the

latter could hang together, even when all those who had any

prominent station among them in any sense were united....

Cornewall Lewis wrote,'Upon Gladstone the death of Peel will have the

effect of removing a weight from a spring--he will come forward more and

take more part in discussion. The general opinion is that Gladstone will

renounce his free trade opinions, and become leader of the

protectionists. I expect neither the one event nor the other.'[230] More

interesting still is something told by the Duke of Buccleuch. 'Very

shortly,' said the duke in 1851, 'before Sir Robert Peel's death, he

expressed to me his belief that Sidney Herbert or Gladstone would one

day be premier; but Peel said with sarcasm, If the hour comes, Disraeli

must be made governor-general of India. He will be a second

Ellenborough.'[231]

FOOTNOTES:

[227] Parker, iii. p. 536.

[228] Fragment of 1897.

[229] Mr. Gladstone's Don Pacifico speech is still not quite out of

date.--June 27, _Hansard_, 1850.

[230] _Letters_, p. 226.

[231] Dean Boyle's _Recollections_, p. 32.

CHAPTER V

GORHAM CASE--SECESSION OF FRIENDS

(_1847-1851_)

It is not by the State that man can be regenerated, and the

terrible woes of this darkened world effectually dealt

with.--GLADSTONE (1894).

The test case of toleration at the moment of the Oxford election of 1847

was the admission of the Jews to sit in parliament, and in the last

month of 1847 Mr. Gladstone astonished his father, as well as a great

host of his political supporters, by voting with the government in

favour of the removal of Jewish disabilities. No ordinary degree of

moral courage was needed for such a step by the member for such a

constituency. 'It is a painful decision to come to,' he writes in his

diary (Dec. 16), 'but the only substantive doubt it raises is about

remaining in parliament, and it is truly and only the church which holds

me there, though she may seem to some to draw me from it.' Pusey wrote

to him in rather violent indignation, for Mr. Gladstone was the only man

of that school who learned, or was able to learn, what the modern state

is or is going to be. This was the third phase, so Gladstone argued, of

an irresistible movement. The tory party had fought first for an

anglican parliament, second they fought for a protestant parliament, and

now they were fighting for a Christian parliament. Parliament had ceased

to be anglican and it had ceased to be protestant, and the

considerations that supported these two earlier operations thenceforth

condemned the exclusion from full civil rights of those who were not

Christians. To his father he explained (December 17, 1847): 'After much

consideration, prolonged indeed I may say for the last two years and a

half, I made up my mind to support Lord John Russell's bill for the

admission of the Jews. I spoke to this effect last night. It is with

reluctance that I give the vote, but I am convinced that after the civil

privileges we have given them already (including the magistracy and the

franchise), and after the admission we have already conceded to

unitarians who refuse the whole of the most vital doctrines of the

Gospel, we cannot compatibly with entire justice and fairness refuse to

admit them.'

His father, who was sometimes exacting, complained of concealment. Mr.

Gladstone replied that he regarded the question as one of difficulty,

and he therefore took as much time as he possibly could for reflection

upon it, though he never intended to run it as close as it actually

came. 'I know,' he says, in a notable sentence, 'it seems strange to you

that I should find it necessary to hold my judgment in suspense on a

question which seemed to many so plain; _but suspense is of constant

occurrence in public life upon very many kinds of questions, and without

it errors and inconsistencies would be much more frequent than even they

are now_.' This did not satisfy his father. 'I shall certainly read your

speech to find some fair apology for your vote: good and satisfactory

reason I do not expect. I cannot doubt you thought you withheld your

opinions from me under the undecided state you were in, without any

intention whatever to annoy me. There is, however, a natural closeness

in your disposition, with a reserve towards those who may think they may

have some claim to your confidence, probably increased by official

habits, which it may perhaps in some cases be worth your inquiring

into.' The sentence above about suspense is a key to many

misunderstandings of Mr. Gladstone's character. His stouthearted friend

Thomas Acland had warned him, for the sake of his personal influence, to

be sure to deal with the Jew question on broad grounds, without

refining, and without dragging out some recondite view not seen by

common men, 'in short, to be _as little as possible like Maurice, and

more like the Duke of Wellington_.' 'My speech,' Mr. Gladstone answered,

'was most unsatisfactory in many ways, but I do not believe that it

mystified or puzzled anybody.'

JEWISH DISABILITIES

The following year he received the honour of a D.C.L. degree at Oxford.

Mrs. Gladstone was there, he tells his father, and 'was well satisfied

with my reception, though it is not to be denied that my vote upon the

Jew bill is upon the whole unpalatable there, and they had been provoked

by a paragraph in the _Globe_ newspaper stating that I was to have the

degree, and that this made it quite clear that the minority was not

unfavourable to the Jew bill.'

_July 5._--I went off after breakfast to Oxford. Joined the V.-C.

and doctors in the hall at Wadham, and went in procession to the

Divinity schools provided with a white neckcloth by Sir R. Inglis,

who seized me at the station in horror and alarm when he saw me

with a black one. In due time we were summoned to the theatre where

my degree had been granted with some _non placets_ but with no

scrutiny. The scene remarkable to the eye and mind, so pictorial

and so national. There was great tumult about me, the hisses being

obstinate, and the _fautores_ also very generous. 'Gladstone and

the Jew bill' came sometimes from the gallery, sometimes more

favouring sounds.

II

After the whig government was formed in 1846, Mr. Gladstone expressed

himself as having little fear that they could do much harm, 'barring

church patronage.' He was soon justified in his own eyes in this

limitation of his confidence, for the next year Dr. Hampden was made a

bishop.[232] This was a rude blow both to the university which had

eleven years before pronounced him heretical, and to the bishops who now

bitterly and fervidly remonstrated. Grave points of law were raised, but

Mr. Gladstone, though warmly reprobating the prime minister's

recommendation of a divine so sure to raise the hurricane, took no

leading part in the strife that followed. 'Never in my opinion,' he said

to his father (Feb. 2, 1848), 'was a firebrand more wantonly and

gratuitously cast.' It was an indication the more of a determination to

substitute a sort of general religion for the doctrines of the church.

The next really marking incident after the secession of Newman was a

decision of a court of law, known as the Gorham judgment. This and the

preferment of Hampden to his bishopric produced the second great tide of

secession. 'Were we together,' Mr. Gladstone writes to Manning at the

end of 1849 (December 30), 'I should wish to converse with you from

sunrise to sunset on the Gorham case. It is a stupendous issue. Perhaps

they will evade it. On abstract grounds this would be still more

distasteful than a decision of the state against a catholic doctrine.

But what I feel is that as a body we are not ready yet for the last

alternatives. More years must elapse from the secession of Newman and

the group of secessions which, following or preceding, belonged to it. A

more composed and settled state of the public mind in regard to our

relations with the church of Rome must supervene. There must be more

years of faithful _work_ for the church to point to in argument, and to

grow into her habits. And besides all these very needful conditions of

preparation for a crisis, I want to see the question more fully

answered, What will the state of its own free and good will do, or allow

to be done, for the church while yet in alliance with it?'

The Gorham case was this: a bishop refused to institute a clergyman to a

vicarage in the west of England, on the ground of unsound doctrine upon

regeneration by baptism. The clergyman sought a remedy in the

ecclesiastical court of Arches. The judge decided against him. The case

then came on appeal before the judicial committee of the privy council,

and here a majority with the two archbishops as assessors reversed the

decision of the court below. The bishop, one of the most combative of

the human race, flew to Westminster Hall, tried move upon move in

queen's bench, exchequer, common pleas; declared that his archbishop had

abused his high commission; and even actually renounced communion with

him. But the sons of Zeruiah were too hard. The religious world in both

of its two standing camps was convulsed, for if Gorham had lost the day

it would or might have meant the expulsion from the establishment of

calvinists and evangelicals bag and baggage. 'I am old enough,' said the

provost of Oriel, 'to remember three baptismal controversies, and this

is the first in which one party has tried to eject the other from the

church.' On the other hand the sacramental wing found it intolerable

that fundamental doctrines of the church should be settled under the

veil of royal supremacy, by a court possessed of no distinctly church

character.

THE JUDGMENT

The judgment was declared on March 8 (1850), and Manning is made to tell

a vivid story about going to Mr. Gladstone's house, finding him ill with

influenza, sitting down by his bedside and telling him what the court

had done; whereon Mr. Gladstone started up, threw out his arms and

exclaimed that the church of England was gone unless it relieved itself

by some authoritative act. A witty judge once observed in regard to the

practice of keeping diaries, that it was wise to keep diary enough at

any rate to prove an _alibi_. According to Mr. Gladstone's diary he was

not laid up until several days later, when he did see various people,

Manning included, in his bedroom. On the black day of the judgment,

having dined at the palace the night before, and having friends to dine

with him on this night, he records a busy day, including a morning spent

after letter-writing, in discussion with Manning, Hope, and others on

the Gorham case and its probable consequences. This slip of memory in

the cardinal is trivial and not worth mentioning, but perhaps it tends

to impair another vivid scene described on the same authority; how

thirteen of them met at Mr. Gladstone's house, agreed to a declaration

against the judgment, and proceeded to sign; how Mr. Gladstone, standing

with his back to the fire, began to demur; and when pressed by Manning

to sign, asked him in a low voice whether he thought that as a privy

councillor he ought to sign such a protest; and finally how Manning,

knowing the pertinacity of his character, turned and said: We will not

press him further.[233] This graphic relation looks as if Mr. Gladstone

were leaving his friends in the lurch. None of them ever said so, none

of them made any signs of thinking so. There is no evidence that Mr.

Gladstone ever agreed to the resolution at all, and there is even

evidence that points presumptively the other way: that he was taking a

line of his own, and arguing tenaciously against all the rest for

delay.[234] Mr. Gladstone was often enough in a hurry himself, but there

never was a man in this world more resolute against being hurried by

other people.[235]

EXCITING EFFECT OF THE JUDGMENT

We need not, however, argue probabilities. Mr. Gladstone no sooner saw

the story than he pronounced it fiction. In a letter to the writer of

the book on Cardinal Manning (Jan. 14, 1896) he says:--

I read with surprise Manning's statement (made first after 35

years) that I would not sign the declaration of 1850 because I 'was

a privy councillor.' I should not have been more surprised had he

written that I told him I could not sign because my name began with

G. I had done stronger things than that when I was not only privy

councillor but official servant of the crown, nay, I believe

cabinet minister. The declaration was liable to _many_ interior

objections. Seven out of the thirteen who signed did so without (I

believe) any kind of sequel. I wish you to know that I entirely

disavow and disclaim Manning's statement as it _stands_. And here I

have to ask you to insert two lines in your second or next edition;

with the simple statement that I prepared and published with

promptitude an elaborate argument to show that the judicial

committee was historically unconstitutional, as an organ for the

decision of ecclesiastical questions. This declaration was

entitled, I think, 'A Letter to the Bishop of London on the

Ecclesiastical Supremacy.' If I recollect right, while it dealt

little with theology, it was a more pregnant production than the

declaration, and it went much nearer the mark. It has been

repeatedly published, and is still on sale at Murray's. I am glad

to see that Sidney Herbert (a _gentleman_ if ever there was one)

also declined to sign. It seems to me _now_, that there is

something almost ludicrous in the propounding of such a congeries

of statements by such persons as we were; not the more, but

certainly not the less, because of being privy councillors.

It was a terrible time; aggravated for me by heavy cares and

responsibilities of a nature quite extraneous: and far beyond all

others by the illness and death of a much-loved child, with great

anxieties about another. My recollections of the conversations

before the declaration are little but a mass of confusion and

bewilderment. I stand only upon what I _did_. No one of us, I

think, understood the actual position, not even our lawyers, until

Baron Alderson printed an excellent statement on the points

raised.[236]

III

For long the new situation filled his mind. 'The case of the church of

England at this moment,' he wrote to Lord Lyttelton, 'is a very dismal

one, and almost leaves men to choose between a broken heart and no heart

at all. But at present it is all dark or only twilight which rests upon

our future.' He busily set down thoughts upon the supremacy. He studied

Cawdry's case, and he mastered Lord Coke's view of the law. He feels

better pleased with the Reformation in regard to the supremacy; but also

much more sensible of the drifting of the church since, away from the

range of her constitutional securities; and more than ever convinced how

thoroughly false is the present position. As to himself and his own work

in life, in reply I suppose to something urged by Manning, he says

(April 29, 1850), 'I have two characters to fulfil--that of a lay

member of the church, and that of a member of a sort of wreck of a

political party. I must not break my understood compact with the last,

and forswear my profession, unless and until the necessity has arisen.

That necessity will plainly have arisen for me when it shall have become

evident that justice cannot, _i.e._, will not, be done by the state to

the church.' With boundless exaltation of spirit he expatiated on the

arduous and noble task which it was now laid upon the children of the

church of England amid trouble, suspense, and it might be even agony to

perform. 'Fully believing that the death of the church of England is

among the alternative issues of the Gorham case,' he wrote to a clerical

friend (April 9), 'I yet also believe that all Christendom and all its

history have rarely afforded a nobler opportunity of doing battle for

the faith in the church than that now offered to English churchmen. That

opportunity is a prize far beyond any with which the days of her

prosperity, in any period, can have been adorned.' He does not think

(June 1, 1850), that a loftier work was ever committed to men. Such vast

interests were at stake, such unbounded prospects open before them. What

they wanted was the divine art to draw from present terrible calamities

and appalling future prospects the conquering secret to rise through the

struggle into something better than historical anglicanism, which

essentially depended on conditions that have passed away. 'In my own

case,' he says to Manning a little later, 'there is work ready to my

hand and much more than enough for its weakness, a great mercy and

comfort. But I think I know what my course would be, were there not. It

would be to set to work upon the holy task or clearing, opening, and

establishing positive truth in the church of England, which is an office

doubly blessed, inasmuch as it is both the business of truth, and the

laying of firm foundations for future union in Christendom.' If this

vision of a dream had ever come to pass, perhaps Europe might have seen

the mightiest Christian doctor since Bossuet; and just as Bossuet's

struggle was called the grandest spectacle of the seventeenth century,

so to many eyes this might have appeared the greatest of the

nineteenth. Mr. Gladstone did not see, in truth he never saw, any more

than Bossuet saw in his age, that the Time-Spirit was shifting the

foundations of the controversy. However that may be, the interesting

thing for us in the history of his life is the characteristic blaze of

battle that this case now kindled in his breast.

VIEW OF THE CRISIS IN THE CHURCH

On the eve of his return from Germany in the autumn of 1845, one of his

letters to Mrs. Gladstone reveals the pressing intensity of his

conviction, deepened by his intercourse with the grave and pious circles

at Munich and at Stuttgart, of the supreme interest of spiritual

things:--

In my wanderings my thoughts too have had time to travel; and I

have had much conversation upon church matters first at Munich and

since coming here with Mrs. Craven and some connections of hers

staying with her, who are Roman catholics of a high school. All

that I can see and learn induces me more and more to feel what a

crisis for religion at large is this period of the world's

history--how the power of religion and its permanence are bound up

with the church--how inestimably precious would be the church's

unity, inestimably precious on the one hand, and on the other to

human eyes immeasurably remote--lastly how loud, how solemn is the

call upon all those who hear and who _can_ obey it, to labour more

and more in the spirit of these principles, to give themselves, if

it may be, clearly and wholly to that work. It is dangerous to put

indefinite thoughts, instincts, longings, into language which is

necessarily determinate. I cannot trace the line of my own future

life, but I hope and pray it may not always be where it is....

Ireland, Ireland! that cloud in the west, that coming storm, the

minister of God's retribution upon cruel and inveterate and but

half-atoned injustice! Ireland forces upon us those great social

and great religious questions--God grant that we may have courage

to look them in the face, and to work through them. Were they over,

were the path of the church clear before her, as a body able to

take her trial before God and the world upon the performance of her

work as His organ for the recovery of our country--how joyfully

would I retire from the barren, exhausting strife of merely

political contention. I do not think that you would be very

sorrowful? As to ambition in its ordinary sense, we are spared the

chief part of its temptations. If it has a valuable reward upon

earth over and above a good name, it is when a man is enabled to

bequeath to his children a high place in the social system of his

country. That cannot be our case. The days are gone by when such a

thing might have been possible. To leave to Willy a title with its

burdens and restraints and disqualifications, but without the

material substratum of wealth, and the duties and means of good, as

well as the general power attending it, would not I think be acting

for him in a wise and loving spirit--assuming, which may be a vain

assumption, that the alternative could ever be before us.

The fact that in Scotland, a country in which Mr. Gladstone passed so

much time and had such lively interests, the members of his own

episcopal church were dissenters, was well fitted to hasten the progress

of his mind in the liberal direction. Certain it is that in a

strongly-written letter to a Scotch bishop at the end of 1851, Mr.

Gladstone boldly enlarged upon the doctrine of religious freedom, with a

directness that kindled both alarm and indignation among some of his

warmest friends.[237] Away, he cried, with the servile doctrine that

religion cannot live but by the aid of parliaments. When the state has

ceased to bear a definite and full religious character, it is our

interest and our duty alike to maintain a full religious freedom. It is

this plenary religious freedom that brings out in full vigour the

internal energies of each communion. Of all civil calamities the

greatest is the mutilation, under the seal of civil authority, of the

Christian religion itself. One fine passage in this letter denotes an

advance in his political temper, as remarkable as the power of the

language in which it finds expression:--

It is a great and noble secret, that of constitutional freedom,

which has given to us the largest liberties, with the steadiest

throne and the most vigorous executive in Christendom. I confess to

my strong faith in the virtue of this principle. I have lived now

for many years in the midst of the hottest and noisiest of its

workshops, and have seen that amidst the clatter and the din a

ceaseless labour is going on; stubborn matter is reduced to

obedience, and the brute powers of society like the fire, air,

water, and mineral of nature are, with clamour indeed but also with

might, educated and shaped into the most refined and regular forms

of usefulness for man. I am deeply convinced that among us all

systems, whether religious or political, which rest on a principle

of absolutism, must of necessity be, not indeed tyrannical, but

feeble and ineffective systems; and that methodically to enlist the

members of a community, with due regard to their several

capacities, in the performance of its public duties, is the way to

make that community powerful and healthful, to give a firm seat to

its rulers, and to engender a warm and intelligent devotion in

those beneath their sway.[238]

FOUNDATIONS OF LIBERALISM

These were the golden trumpet-notes of a new time. When they readied the

ears of old Dr. Routh, as he sat in wig and cassock among his books and

manuscripts at Magdalen, revolving nearly a hundred years of mortal

life, he exclaimed that he had heard enough to be quite sure that no man

holding such opinions as these could ever be a proper member for the

university of Oxford. A few months later, it was seen how the learned

man found several hundreds of unlearned to agree with him.

IV

This chapter naturally closes with what was to Mr. Gladstone one of the

dire catastrophies of his life. With growing dismay he had seen Manning

drawing steadily towards the edge of the cataract. When he took the

ominous step of quitting his charge at Lavington, Mr. Gladstone wrote to

him from Naples (January 26, 1851): 'Without description from you, I can

too well comprehend what you have suffered.... Such griefs ought to be

sacred to all men, they must be sacred to me, even did they not touch me

sharply with a reflected sorrow. You can do nothing that does not reach

me, considering how long you have been a large part both of my actual

life and of my hopes and reckonings. Should you do the act which I pray

God with my whole soul you may not do, it will not break, however it may

impair or strain, the bonds between us.' 'If you go over,' he says, in

another letter of the same month, 'I should earnestly pray that you

might not be as others who have gone before you, but might carry with

you a larger heart and mind, able to raise and keep you above that

slavery to a system, that exaggeration of its forms, that disposition to

rivet every shackle tighter and to stretch every breach wider, which

makes me mournfully feel that the men who have gone from the church of

England after being reared in her and by her, are far more keen, and I

must add, far more cruel adversaries to her, than were the mass of those

whom they joined.'

In the case of Hope there had been for some considerable time a

lingering sense of change. 'My affection for him, during these later

years before his change, was I may almost say intense: there was hardly

anything I think which he could have asked me to do, and which I would

not have done. But as I saw more and more through the dim light what was

to happen, it became more and more like the affection felt for one

departed.' Hope, he says, was not one of those shallow souls who think

that such a relation can continue after its daily bread has been taken

away. At the end of March he enters in his diary: 'Wrote a paper on

Manning's question and gave it him. He smote me to the ground by

announcing with suppressed emotion that he is now upon the _brink_, and

Hope too. Such terrible blows not only overset and oppress but, I fear,

demoralise me.' On the same day in April 1851, Manning and Hope were

received together into the Roman church. Political separations, though

these too have their pangs, must have seemed to Mr. Gladstone trivial

indeed, after the tragic severance of such a fellowship as this had

been.

MANNING AND HOPE GO OVER

'They were my two props,' he wrote in his diary the next day. 'Their

going may be to me a sign that my work is gone with them.... One

blessing I have: total freedom from doubts. These dismal events have

smitten, but not shaken.' The day after that, he made a codicil to his

will striking out Hope as executor, and substituting Northcote.

Friendship did not die, but only lived 'as it lives between those who

inhabit separate worlds.' Communication was not severed; social

intercourse was not avoided; and both on occasions in life, the passing

by of which, as Hope-Scott said, would be a loss to friendship, and on

smaller opportunities, they corresponded in terms of the old affection.

_Quis desiderio_ is Mr. Gladstone's docket on one of Hope's letters, and

in another (1858) Hope communicates in words of tender feeling the loss

of his wife, and the consolatory teachings of the faith that she, like

himself, had embraced; and he recalls to Mr. Gladstone that the root of

their friendship which struck the deepest was fed by a common interest

in religion.[239]

In Manning's case the wound cut deeper, and for many years the

estrangement was complete.[240] To Wilberforce, the archdeacon, Mr.

Gladstone wrote (April 11, 1851):--

I do indeed feel the loss of Manning, if and as far as I am capable

of feeling anything. It comes to me cumulated, and doubled, with

that of James Hope. Nothing like it can ever happen to me again.

Arrived now at middle life, I never _can_ form I suppose with any

other two men the habits of communication, counsel, and dependence,

in which I have now for from fifteen to eighteen years lived with

them both.... My intellect does deliberately reject the grounds on

which Manning has proceeded. Indeed they are such as go far to

destroy my confidence, which was once and far too long at the

highest point, in the healthiness and soundness of his. To show

that at any rate this is not from the mere change he has made, I

may add, that my conversations with Hope have not left any

corresponding impression upon my mind with regard to him.

A wider breach was this same year made in his inmost circle. In April of

the year before a little daughter, between four and five years old, had

died, and was buried at Fasque. The illness was long and painful, and

Mr. Gladstone bore his part in the nursing and watching. He was tenderly

fond of his little children, and the sorrow had a peculiar bitterness.

It was the first time that death entered his married home.

When he returned to Fasque in the autumn he found that his father had

taken 'a decided step, nay a stride, in old age'; not having lost any of

his interest in politics, but grown quite mild. The old man was nearing

his eighty-seventh year. 'The very wreck of his powerful and simple

nature is full of grandeur.... Mischief is at work upon his brain--that

indefatigable brain which has had to stand all the wear and pressure of

his long life.' In the spring of 1851 he finds him 'very like a spent

cannon-ball, with a great and sometimes almost frightful energy

remaining in him: though weak in comparison with what he was, he hits a

very hard knock to those who come across him.' When December came, the

veteran was taken seriously ill, and the hope disappeared of seeing him

even reach his eighty-seventh birthday (Dec. 11). On the 7th he died. As

Mr. Gladstone wrote to Phillimore, 'though with little left either of

sight or hearing, and only able to walk from one room to another or to

his brougham for a short drive, though his memory was gone, his hold

upon language even for common purposes imperfect, the reasoning power

much decayed, and even his perception of personality rather indistinct,

yet so much remained about him as one of the most manful, energetic,

affectionate, and simple-hearted among human beings, that he still

filled a great space to the eye, mind, and heart, and a great space is

accordingly left void by his withdrawal.' 'The death of my father,' Mr.

Gladstone wrote to his brother John, 'is the loss of a great object of

love, and it is the shattering of a great bond of union. Among few

families of five persons will be found differences of character and

opinion to the same aggregate amount as among us. We cannot shut our

eyes to this fact; by opening them, I think we may the better strive to

prevent such differences from begetting estrangement.'

FOOTNOTES:

[232] See above, p. 167.

[233] Purcell, _Manning_, i. pp. 528-33.

[234] See J. B. Hope's letter (undated) in Purcell, i. p. 530.

[235] On March 13, Hope writes to Mr. Gladstone from 14 Curzon

Street:--'Keble and Pusey have been with me to-day, and the latter has

suggested some alterations in the resolutions; I have taken upon me to

propose a meeting at your house at ¼ before 10 to-morrow morning. If

you cannot _or do not wish_ to be present, I do not doubt you will at

any rate allow me the use of your rooms.' The meeting seems to have

taken place, for the entry on March 14 in Mr. Gladstone's diary is

this:--'Hope, Badeley, Talbot, Cavendish, Denison, Dr. Pusey, Keble,

Bennett, here from 9¾ to 12 on the draft of the resolutions. Badeley

again in the evening. On the whole I resolved to try some immediate

effort.' This would appear to be the last meeting, and Manning is not

named as present. On the 18th:--'Drs. Mill, Pusey, etc., met here in the

evening, I was not with them.' On the same day Mr. Gladstone had written

to the Rev. W. Maskell, 'As respects myself, I do not intend to pursue

the consideration of them with those who meet to-night, first, because

the pressure of other business has become very heavy upon me, and

secondly and mainly, because I do not consider that the time for any

enunciation of a character pointing to ultimate issues will have arrived

until the Gorham judgment shall have taken effect.' No later meeting is

ever mentioned.

[236] Purcell professed to rectify the matter in the fourth edition, i.

p. 536, but the reader is nowhere told that Mr. Gladstone disavowed the

original story.

[237] _Letter to the Right Rev. William Skinner, Bishop of Aberdeen and

Primus, on the functions of laymen in the Church_, reprinted in

_Gleanings_, vi. Also _Letter_ to Mr. Gladstone on this letter by

Charles Wordsworth, the Warden of Glenalmond. Oxford. J. H. Parker,

1852.

[238] _Gleanings_, vi. p. 17.

[239] In 1868 Mr. Gladstone urged him to produce an abridged version of

Lockhart's _Life of Scott_. Then Hope found that his father-in-law's own

abridgment was unknown; and (1871) asks Mr. Gladstone's leave to

dedicate a reprint of it to him as 'one among those who think that Scott

still deserves to be remembered, not as an author only, but as a noble

and vigorous man.'

[240] From 1853 to 1861 they did not correspond nor did they even meet.

CHAPTER VI

NAPLES

(_1850-1851_)

It would be amusing, if the misfortunes of mankind ever could be

so, to hear the pretensions of the government here [Naples] to

mildness and clemency, because it does not put men to death, and

confines itself to leaving six or seven thousand state prisoners to

perish in dungeons. I am ready to believe that the king of Naples

is naturally mild and kindly, but he is afraid, and the worst of

all tyrannies is the tyranny of cowards.--TOCQUEVILLE [1850].

In the autumn of 1850, with the object of benefiting the eyesight of one

of their daughters, the Gladstones made a journey to southern Italy, and

an eventful journey it proved. For Italy it was, that now first drew Mr.

Gladstone by the native ardour of his humanity, unconsciously and

involuntarily, into that great European stream of liberalism which was

destined to carry him so far. Two deep principles, sentiments,

aspirations, forces, call them what we will, awoke the huge uprisings

that shook Europe in 1848--the principle of Liberty, the sentiment of

Nationality. Mr. Gladstone, slowly and almost blindly heaving off his

shoulders the weight of old conservative tradition, did not at first go

beyond liberty, with all that ordered liberty conveys. Nationality

penetrated later, and then indeed it penetrated to the heart's core. He

went to Naples with no purposes of political propagandism, and his

prepossessions were at that time pretty strongly in favour of

established governments, either at Naples or anywhere else. The case had

doubtless been opened to him by Panizzi--a man as Mr. Gladstone

described him, 'of warm, large, and free nature, an accomplished man of

letters, and a victim of political persecution, who came to this country

a nearly starving refugee.' But Panizzi had certainly made no great

revolutionist of him. His opinions, as he told Lord Aberdeen, were the

involuntary and unexpected result of his sojourn.

He had nothing to do with the subterranean forces at work in the kingdom

of the Two Sicilies, in the States of the Church, and in truth all over

the Peninsula. The protracted struggle that had begun after the

establishment of Austrian domination in the Peninsula in 1815, and was

at last to end in the construction of an Italian kingdom--the most

wonderful political transformation of the century--seemed after the

fatal crisis of Novara (1849) further than ever from a close. Now was

the morrow of the vast failures and disenchantments of 1848. Jesuits and

absolutists were once more masters, and reaction again alternated with

conspiracy, risings, desperate carbonari plots. Mazzini, four years

older than Mr. Gladstone, and Cavour, a year his junior, were directing

in widely different ways, the one the revolutionary movement of Young

Italy, the other the constitutional movement of the Italian

Resurrection. The scene presented brutal repression on the one hand; on

the other a chaos of republicans and monarchists, unitarians and

federalists, frenzied idealists and sedate economists, wild ultras and

men of the sober middle course. In the midst was the pope, the august

shadow, not long before the centre, now once again the foe, of his

countrymen's aspirations after freedom and a purer glimpse of the lights

of the sun. The evolution of this extraordinary historic drama, to which

passion, genius, hope, contrivance, stratagem, and force contributed

alike the highest and the lowest elements in human nature and the growth

of states, was to be one of the most sincere of Mr. Gladstone's

interests for the rest of his life.

SPECTACLE OF MISRULE

As we shall see, he was at first and he long remained untouched by the

idea of Italian unity and Italy a nation. He met some thirty or more

Italian gentlemen in society at Naples, of whom seven or eight only were

in any sense liberals, and not one of them a republican. It was now that

he made the acquaintance of Lacaita, afterwards so valued a friend of

his, and so well known in many circles in England for his geniality,

cultivation, and enlightenment. He was the legal adviser to the British

embassy; he met Mr. Gladstone constantly; they talked politics and

literature day and night, 'under the acacias and palms, between the

fountains and statues of the Villa Reale, looking now to the sea, now to

the world of fashion in the Corso.' Here Lacaita first opened the

traveller's eyes to the condition of things, though he was able to say

with literal truth that not a single statement of fact was made upon

Lacaita's credit. Mr. Gladstone saw Bourbon absolutism no longer in the

decorous hues of conventional diplomacy, but as the black and execrable

thing it really was,--'the negation of God erected into a system of

government.' Sitting in court for long hours during the trial of Poerio,

he listened with as much patience as he could command to the principal

crown witness, giving such evidence that the tenth part of what he heard

should not only have ended the case, but secured condign punishment for

perjury--evidence that a prostitute court found good enough to justify

the infliction on Poerio, not long before a minister of the crown, of

the dreadful penalty of four-and-twenty years in irons. Mr. Gladstone

accurately informed himself of the condition of those who for unproved

political offences were in thousands undergoing degrading and murderous

penalties. He contrived to visit some of the Neapolitan prisons, another

name for the extreme of filth and horror; he saw political prisoners

(and political prisoners included a large percentage of the liberal

opposition) chained two and two in double irons to common felons; he

conversed with Poerio himself in the bagno of Nisida chained in this

way; he watched sick prisoners, men almost with death in their faces,

toiling upstairs to see the doctors, because the lower regions were too

foul and loathsome to allow it to be expected that professional men

would enter. Even these inhuman and revolting scenes stirred him less,

as it was right they should, than the corruptions of the tribunals, the

vindictive treatment for long periods of time of uncondemned and untried

men, and all the other proceedings of the government, 'desolating entire

classes upon which the life and growth of the nation depend,

undermining the foundation of all civil rule.' It was this violation of

all law, and of the constitution to which King Ferdinand had solemnly

sworn fidelity only a year or two before, that outraged him more than

even rigorous sentences and barbarous prison practice. 'Even on the

severity of these sentences,' he wrote, 'I would not endeavour to fix

attention so much as to draw it off from the great fact of illegality,

which seems to me to be the foundation of the Neapolitan system;

illegality, the fountain-head of cruelty and baseness and every other

vice; illegality which gives a bad conscience, creates fears; those

fears lead to tyranny, that tyranny begets resentment, that resentment

creates true causes of fear where they were not before; and thus fear is

quickened and enhanced, the original vice multiplies itself with fearful

speed, and the old crime engenders a necessity for new.'[241]

Poerio apprehended that his own case had been made worse by the

intervention of Mr. Temple, the British minister and brother of Lord

Palmerston; not in the least as blaming him or considering it officious.

He adopted the motto, 'to suffer is to do,' '_il patire è anche

operare_.' For himself he was not only willing--he rejoiced--to play the

martyr's part.

I was particularly desirous, wrote Mr. Gladstone in a private

memorandum, to have Poerio's opinion on the expediency of making

some effort in England to draw general attention to these horrors,

and dissociate the conservative party from all suppositions of

winking at them; because I had had from a sensible man one strong

opinion against such a course. I said to him that in my view only

two models could be thought of,--the first, amicable remonstrance

through the cabinets, the second public notoriety and shame. That

had Lord Aberdeen been in power the first might have been

practicable, but that with Lord Palmerston it would not, because of

his position relatively to the other cabinets (Yes, he said, Lord

Palmerston was _isolato_), not because he would be wanting in the

will. Matters standing thus, I saw no way open but that of

exposure; and might that possibly exasperate the Neapolitan

government, and increase their severity? His reply was, 'As to us,

never mind; we can hardly be worse than we are. But think of our

country, for which we are most willing to be sacrificed. Exposure

will do it good. The present government of Naples rely on the

English conservative party. Consequently we were all in horror when

Lord Stanley last year carried his motion in the House of Lords.

Let there be a voice from that party showing that whatever

government be in power in England, no support will be given to such

proceedings as these. It will do much to break them down. It will

also strengthen the hands of a better and less obdurate class about

the court. Even there all are not alike. I know it from

observation. These ministers are the extremest of extremes. There

are others who would willingly see more moderate means adopted.' On

such grounds as these (I do not quote words) he strongly

recommended me to _act_.

II

RETURN TO LONDON

Mr. Gladstone reached London on February 26. Phillimore met him at the

station with Lord Stanley's letter, of which we shall hear in the next

chapter, pressing him to enter the government. 'I was never more

struck,' says Phillimore, 'by the earnestness and simplicity of his

character. He could speak of nothing so readily as the horrors of the

Neapolitan government, of which I verily believe he thought nearly as

much as the prospect of his own accession to one of the highest offices

of state.' He probably thought not only nearly as much, but infinitely

more of those 'scenes fitter for hell than earth,' now many hundred

miles away, but still vividly burning in the haunted chambers of his

wrath and pity. After rapidly despatching the proposal to join the new

cabinet, after making the best he could of the poignant anxieties that

were stirred in him by the unmistakeable signs of the approaching

secession of Hope and Manning, he sought Lord Aberdeen (March 4), and

'found him as always, satisfactory; kind, just, moderate, humane' (to

Mrs. Gladstone, March 4). He had come to London with the intention of

obtaining, if possible, Aberdeen's intervention, in preference to any

other mode of proceeding,[242] and they agreed that private

representation and remonstrance should be tried in the first instance,

as less likely than public action by Mr. Gladstone in parliament, to

rouse international jealousy abroad, or to turn the odious tragedy into

the narrow channels of party at home. Mr. Gladstone, at Lord Aberdeen's

desire, was to submit a statement of the case for his consideration and

judgment.

POSITION OF LORD ABERDEEN

This statement, the first memorable Letter to Lord Aberdeen, was ready

at the beginning of April. The old minister gave it 'mature

consideration' for the best part of a month. His antecedents made him

cautious. Mr. Gladstone, ten years later, admitted that Lord Aberdeen's

views of Italy did not harmonise with what was his general mode of

estimating human action and the world's affairs, and there was a reason

for this in his past career. In very early youth he had been called upon

to deal with the gigantic questions that laid their mighty weight upon

European statesmen at the fall of Napoleon; the natural effect of this

close contact with the vast and formidable problems of 1814-5 was to

make him regard the state-system then founded as a structure on which

only reckless or criminal unwisdom would dare to lay a finger. The

fierce storms of 1848 were not calculated to loosen this fixed idea, or

to dispose him to any new views of either the relations of Austria to

Italy, or of the uncounted mischiefs to the Peninsula of which those

relations were the nourishing and maintaining cause. In a debate in the

Lords two years before (July 20, 1849), Lord Aberdeen had sharply

criticised the British government of the day for doing the very thing

officially, which Mr. Gladstone was now bringing moral compulsion on him

to attempt unofficially. Lord Palmerston had called attention at Vienna

to the crying evils of the government of Naples, and had boldly said

that it was little wonder if men groaning for long years under such

grievances and seeing no hope of redress, should take up any scheme,

however wild, that held out any chance of relief. This and other

proceedings indicating unfriendliness to the King of Naples and a veiled

sympathy with rebellion shocked Aberdeen as much as Lamartine's

trenchant saying that the treaties of Vienna were effete. In attacking

Palmerston's foreign policy again in 1850, he protested that we had

deeply injured Austria and had represented her operations in Italy in a

completely false light. In his speech in the Pacifico debate, he had

referred to the Neapolitan government without approval but in guarded

phrases, and had urged as against Lord Palmerston that the less they

admired Neapolitan institutions and usages, the more careful ought they

to be not to impair the application of the sacred principles that govern

and harmonise the intercourse between states, from which you never can

depart without producing mischiefs a thousand fold greater than any

promised advantage. Aberdeen was too upright and deeply humane a man to

resist the dreadful evidence that was now forced upon him. Still that

evidence plainly shook down his own case of a few months earlier, and

this cannot have been pleasing. He felt the truth and the enormity of

the indictment laid before him; he saw the prejudice that would

inevitably be done to conservatism both at home and on the European

continent, by the publication of such an indictment from the lips of

such a pleader; and he perceived from Mr. Gladstone's demeanour that the

decorous plausibilities of diplomacy would no more hold him back from

resolute exposure, than they would put out the fires of Vesuvius or

Etna.

On May 2 Lord Aberdeen wrote to Schwarzenberg at Vienna, saying that for

forty years he had been connected with the Austrian government, and

taken a warm interest in the fortunes of the empire; that Mr. Gladstone,

one of the most distinguished members of the cabinet of Peel, had been

so shocked by what he saw at Naples, that he was resolved to make some

public appeal; that to avoid the pain and scandal of a conservative

statesman taking such a course, would not his highness use his powerful

influence to get done at Naples all that could reasonably be desired?

The Austrian minister replied several weeks after (June 30). If he had

been invited, he said, officially to interfere he would have declined;

as it was, he would bring Mr. Gladstone's statements to the notice of

his Sicilian majesty. Meanwhile, at great length, he reminded Lord

Aberdeen that a political offender may be the worst of all offenders,

and argued that the rigour exercised by England herself in the Ionian

Islands, in Ceylon, in respect of Irishmen, and in the recent case of

Ernest Jones, showed how careful she should be in taking up abroad the

cause of bad men posing as martyrs in the holy cause of liberty.

During all these weeks, while Aberdeen was maturely considering, and

while Prince Schwarzenberg was making his secretaries hunt up

recriminatory cases against England, Mr. Gladstone was growing

impatient. Lord Aberdeen begged him to give the Austrian minister a

little more time. It was nearly four months since Mr. Gladstone landed

at Dover, and every day he thought of Poerio, Settembrini, and the rest,

wearing their double chains, subsisting on their foul soup, degraded by

forced companionship with criminals, cut off from the light of heaven,

and festering in their dungeons. The facts that escaped from him in

private conversation seemed to him--so he tells Lacaita--to spread like

wildfire from man to man, exciting the liveliest interest, and extending

to the highest persons in the land. He waited a fortnight more, then at

the beginning of July he launched his thunderbolt, publishing his Letter

to Lord Aberdeen, followed by a second explanation and enlargement a

fortnight later.[243] He did not obtain formal leave from Lord Aberdeen

for the publication, but from their conversation took it for granted.

NEAPOLITAN LETTERS PUBLISHED

The sensation was profound, and not in England only. The Letters were

translated into various tongues and had a large circulation. The Society

of the Friends of Italy in London, the disciples of Mazzini (and a

high-hearted band they were), besought him to become a member. Exiles

wrote him letters of gratitude and hope, with all the moving accent of

revolutionary illusion. Italian women composed fervid odes in fire and

tears to the '_generoso britanno_,' the '_magnanimo cor_,' the

'_difensore d'un popolo gemente_.' The press in this country took the

matter up with the warmth that might have been expected. The character

and the politics of the accuser added invincible force to his

accusations, and for the first time in his life Mr. Gladstone found

himself vehemently applauded in liberal prints. Even the contemporary

excitement of English public feeling against the Roman catholic church

fed the flame. It was pointed out that the King of Naples was the bosom

friend of the pope, and that the infernal system described by Mr.

Gladstone was that which the Roman clergy regarded as normal and

complete.[244] Mr. Gladstone had denounced as one of the most detestable

books he ever read a certain catechism used in the Neapolitan schools.

Why then, cried the _Times_, does he omit all comment on the church

which is the main and direct agent in this atrocious instruction? The

clergy had either basely accepted from the government doctrines that

they were bound to abhor, or else these doctrines were their own. And so

things glided easily round to Dr. Cullen and the Irish education

question. This line was none the less natural from the fact that the

editor of the _Univers_, the chief catholic organ in France, made

himself the foremost champion of the Neapolitan policy. The Letters

delighted the Paris Reds. They regarded their own epithets as insipid by

comparison with the ferocious adjectives of the English conservative. On

the other hand, an English gentleman was blackballed at one of the

fashionable clubs in Paris for no better reason than that he bore the

name of Gladstone. For European conservatives read the letters with

disgust and apprehension. People like Madame de Lieven pronounced Mr.

Gladstone the dupe of men less honest than himself, and declared that he

had injured the good cause and discredited his own fame, besides doing

Lord Aberdeen the wrong of setting his name at the head of a detestable

libel. The illustrious Guizot wrote Mr. Gladstone a long letter

expressing, with much courtesy and kindness, his regret at the

publication. Nothing is left in Italy, said Guizot, between the terrors

of governments attacked in their very existence and the fury of the

beaten revolutionists with hopes more alert than ever for destruction

and chaos. The King of Naples on one side, Mazzini on the other; such,

said Guizot, is Italy. Between the King of Naples and Mazzini, he for

one did not hesitate. This was Mr. Gladstone's first contact with the

European party of order in the middle of the century. Guizot was a great

man, but '48 had perverted his generalising intellect, and everywhere

his jaundiced vision perceived in progress a struggle for life and death

with 'the revolutionary spirit, blind, chimerical, insatiate,

impracticable.' He avowed his own failure when he was at the head of the

French government, to induce the rulers of Italy to make reforms; and

now the answer of Schwarzenberg to Lord Aberdeen, as well as the

official communications from Naples, showed that like Guizot's French

policy the Austrian remedy was moonshine.

Perhaps discomposed by the reproaches of reactionary friends abroad,

Lord Aberdeen thought he had some reason to complain of the publication.

It is not easy to see why. Mr. Gladstone from the first insisted that if

private remonstrance did not work 'without elusion or delay,' he would

make a public appeal. In transmitting the first letter, he described in

very specific terms his idea that a short time would suffice to show

whether the private method could be relied upon.[245] The attitude of

the minister at Vienna, of Fortunato at Naples, and of Castelcicala in

London, discovered even to Aberdeen himself how little reasonable hope

there was of anything being done; elusion and delay was all that he

could expect. He was forced to give entire credit to Mr. Gladstone's

horrible story, and was as far as possible from thinking it a detestable

libel. He never denied the foundation of the case, or the actual state

of the abominable facts. Schwarzenberg never consented to comply with

his wishes even when writing before the publication. How then could

Aberdeen expect that Mr. Gladstone should abandon the set and avowed

purpose with which he had come flaming and resolved to England?

SENSATION IN EUROPE

It was exactly because the party with which Mr. Gladstone was allied had

made itself the supporter of established governments throughout Europe,

that in his eyes that party became specially responsible for not passing

by in silence any course of conduct, even in a foreign country,

flagrantly at variance with right.[246] And what was there, when at last

they arrived, in Prince Schwarzenberg's idle dissertations and

recriminations, winding up with a still more idle sentence about

bringing the charges under the notice of the Neapolitan government, that

should induce Mr. Gladstone to abandon his purpose? He had something

else to think of than the scandal to the reactionaries of Europe. 'I

wish it were in your power,' he writes to Lacaita in May, 'to assure any

of those directly interested, in my name, that I am not unfaithful to

them, and will use every means in my power; feeble they are, and I

lament it; but God is strong and is just and good; and the issue is in

His hands.' That is what he was thinking of. When he talked of 'the

sacred purposes of humanity' it was not artificial claptrap in a

protocol.[247]

'When I consider,' Mr. Gladstone wrote to Lord Aberdeen, 'that Prince

Schwarzenberg really knew the state of things at Naples well enough

independently of me, and then ask myself why did he wait seven weeks

before acknowledging a letter relating to the intense sufferings of

human beings which were going on day by day and hour by hour, while his

people were concocting all that trash about Frost and Ernest Jones and

O'Brien, I cannot say that I think the spirit of the letter was

creditable to him, or very promising as regards these people.' The

Neapolitan government entered the field with a formal reply point by

point, and Mr. Gladstone met them with a point by point rejoinder. The

matter did not rest there. Soon after his arrival at home, he had had

some conversation with John Russell, Palmerston, and other members of

the government. They were much interested and not at all incredulous.

Lord Palmerston's brother kept him too well informed about the state of

things there for him to be sceptical. 'Gladstone and Molesworth,' wrote

Palmerston, 'say that they were wrong last year in their attacks on my

foreign policy, but they did not know the truth.'[248] Lord Palmerston

directed copies of Mr. Gladstone's Letters to be sent to the British

representatives in all the courts of Europe, with instructions to give a

copy to each government. The Neapolitan envoy in London in his turn

requested him also to send fifteen copies of the pamphlet that had been

got up on the other side. Palmerston promptly, and in his most

characteristic style, vindicated Mr. Gladstone against the charges of

overstatement and hostile intention; warned the Neapolitan government of

the violent revolution that long-continued and widespread injustice

would assuredly bring upon them; hoped that they might have set to work

to correct the manifold and grave abuses to which their attention had

been drawn; and flatly refused to have anything to do with an official

pamphlet 'consisting of a flimsy tissue of bare assertions and reckless

denials, mixed up with coarse ribaldry and commonplace abuse.' This was

the kind of thing that gave to Lord Palmerston the best of his power

over the people of England.

ENERGETIC SYMPATHY OF PALMERSTON

In the House of Commons he spoke with no less warmth. Though he had not

felt it his duty, he said, to make representations at Naples on a matter

relating to internal affairs, he thought Mr. Gladstone had done himself

great honour. Instead of seeking amusements, diving into volcanoes and

exploring excavated cities, he had visited prisons, descended into

dungeons, examined cases of the victims of illegality and injustice, and

had then sought to rouse the public opinion of Europe. It was because he

concurred in this opinion that he had circulated the pamphlet, in the

hope that the European courts might use their influence.[249] As Lord

Aberdeen told Madame de Lieven, Mr. Gladstone's pamphlet by the

extraordinary sensation it had created among men of all parties had

given a great practical triumph to Palmerston and the foreign office.

The immediate effect of Mr. Gladstone's appeal was an aggravation of

prison rigour. Panizzi was convinced that the king did not know of all

the iniquities exposed by Mr. Gladstone. At the close of 1851 he

obtained an interview with Ferdinand, and for twenty minutes spoke of

Poerio, Settembrini and the condition of the prisons. The king suddenly

cut short the interview, saying, _Addio, terribile Panizzi_.[250] Faint

streaks of light from the outside world pierced the gloom of the

dungeons. As time went on, a lady contrived to smuggle in a few pages of

Mr. Gladstone's first Letter; and in 1854 the martyrs heard vaguely of

the action of Cavour. But it was not until 1859 that the tyrant, fearing

the cry of horror that would go up in Europe if Poerio should die in

chains, or worse than death, should go mad, commuted prison to perpetual

exile,[251] and sixty-six of them were embarked for America. At Lisbon

they were transferred to an American ship; the captain, either

intimidated or bribed, put in at Queenstown. 'In setting foot on this

free soil,' Poerio wrote to Mr. Gladstone from the Irish haven (March

12, 1859), 'the first need of my heart was to seek news of you.'

Communications were speedily opened. The Italians made their way to

Bristol, where they were received with sympathy and applause by the

population. The deliverance of their country was close at hand.

Not now, nor for many years to come, did Mr. Gladstone grasp the idea of

Italian unity. It was impossible for him to ignore, but he did

undoubtedly set aside, the fact that every shade and section of Italian

liberalism from Farini on the right, to Mazzini on the furthest left,

insisted on treating Italy as a political integer, and placed the

independence of Italy and the expulsion of Austria from Italian soil as

the first and fundamental article in the creed of reform. Like most of

the English friends of the Italian cause at this time, except the small

but earnest group who rallied round the powerful moral genius of

Mazzini, he thought only of local freedom and local reforms. 'The purely

abstract idea of Italian nationality,' said Mr. Gladstone at this time,

'makes little impression and finds limited sympathy among ourselves.' 'I

am certain,' he wrote to Panizzi (June 21, 1851), 'that the Italian

habit of preaching unity and nationality in preference to showing

grievances produces a revulsion here; for if there are two things on

earth that John Bull hates, they are an abstract proposition and the

pope.' 'You need not be afraid, I think,' he told Lord Aberdeen

(December 1, 1851), 'of Mazzinism from me, still less of Kossuth-ism,

which means the other _plus_ imposture, Lord Palmerston, and his

nationalities.' But then in 1854 Manin came to England, and failed to

persuade even Lord Palmerston that the unity of Italy was the only clue

to her freedom.[252] The Russian war made it inconvenient to quarrel

with Austria about Italy. With Mr. Gladstone he made more way. 'Seven to

breakfast to meet Manin,' says the diary; 'he too is wild.' Not too

wild, however, to work conversion on his host. 'It was my privilege,'

Mr. Gladstone afterwards wrote, 'to welcome Manin in London in 1854,

when I had long been anxious for reform in Italy, and it was from him

that, in common with some other Englishmen, I had my first lessons upon

Italian unity as the indispensable basis of all effectual reform under

the peculiar circumstances of that country.'[253] Yet the page of Dante

holds the lesson.

III

THE TEMPORAL POWER

On one important element in the complex Italian case at this time, Mr.

Gladstone gained a clear view.

Some things I have learned in Italy, he wrote to Manning (_January

26, 1851_), that I did not know before, one in particular. The

temporal power of the pope, that great, wonderful, and ancient

erection, is _gone_. The problem has been worked out--the ground is

mined--the train is laid--a foreign force, in its nature

transitory, alone stays the hand of those who would complete the

process by applying the match. This seems, rather than is, a

digression. When that event comes, it will bring about a great

shifting of parts--much super-and much subter-position. God grant

it may be for good. I desire it, because I see plainly that justice

requires it. Not out of malice to the popedom; for I cannot at this

moment dare to answer with a confident affirmative, the question, a

very solemn one--Ten, twenty, fifty years hence, will there be any

other body in western Christendom witnessing for fixed dogmatic

truth? With all my heart I wish it well (though perhaps not wholly

what the consistory might think agreed with the meaning of the

term)--it would be to me a joyous day in which I should see it

really doing well.

Various ideas of this kind set him to work on the large and curious

enterprise, long since forgotten, of translating Farini's volumes on the

Roman State from 1815 down to 1850. According to the entries in his

diary he began and finished the translation of a large portion of the

book at Naples in 1850--dictating and writing almost daily. Three of the

four volumes of this English translation were done with extraordinary

speed by Mr. Gladstone's own hand, and the fourth was done under his

direction.[254] His object was, without any reference to Italian unity,

to give an illustration of the actual working of the temporal power in

its latest history. It is easy to understand how the theme fitted in

with the widest topics of his life; the nature of theocratic

government; the possibility (to borrow Cavour's famous phrase) of a free

church in a free state; and above all,--as he says to Manning now, and

said to all the world twenty years later in the day of the Vatican

decrees,--the mischiefs done to the cause of what he took for saving

truth by evil-doing in the heart and centre of the most powerful of all

the churches. His translation of Farini, followed by his article on the

same subject in the _Edinburgh_ in 1852, was his first blast against

'the covetous, domineering, implacable policy represented in the term

Ultramontanism; the winding up higher and higher, tighter and tighter,

of the hierarchical spirit, in total disregard of those elements by

which it ought to be checked and balanced; and an unceasing, covert,

smouldering war against human freedom, even in its most modest and

retiring forms of private life and of the individual conscience.' With

an energy not unworthy of Burke at his fiercest, he denounces the fallen

and impotent regality of the popes as temporal sovereigns. 'A monarchy

sustained by foreign armies, smitten with the curse of social

barrenness, unable to strike root downward or bear fruit upward, the

sun, the air, the rain soliciting in vain its sapless and rotten

boughs--such a monarchy, even were it not a monarchy of priests, and

tenfold more because it is one, stands out a foul blot upon the face of

creation, an offence to Christendom and to mankind.'[255] As we shall

soon see, he was just as wrathful, just as impassioned and as eloquent,

when, in a memorable case in his own country, the temporal power

bethought itself of a bill for meddling with the rights of a Roman

voluntary church.

FOOTNOTES:

[241] For the two _Letters to Lord Aberdeen_, see _Gleanings_, iv.

[242] There was a slight discrepancy between the two on this point, Mr.

Gladstone describing the position as above, Aberdeen believing that it

was by his persuasion that Mr. Gladstone dropped his intention of

instant publicity. Probably the latter used such urgent language about

an appeal to the public opinion of England and Europe, that Lord

Aberdeen supposed it to be an immediate and not an ulterior resort.

Aberdeen to Castelcicala, September 15, 1851, and Mr. Gladstone to

Aberdeen, October 3.

[243] The mere announcement caused such a demand that a second edition

was required almost before the first was published.

[244] _Wesleyan Methodist Magazine_, October 1851. _Protestant

Magazine_, September 1851.

[245] Gladstone to Lord Aberdeen, September 16, 1851.

[246] Mr. Gladstone in an undated draft letter to Castelcicala.

[247] The one point on which Lord Aberdeen had a right to complain was

that Mr. Gladstone did not take his advice. As the point revives in Lord

Stanmore's excellent life of his father, it may be worth while to

reproduce two further passages from Mr. Gladstone's letter to Lord

Aberdeen of July 7, 1851. Before publishing the second of the two

Letters, he wrote to Lord Aberdeen: 'I ought perhaps to have asked your

formal permission for the act of publication; but _I thought that I

distinctly inferred it from a recent conversation with you as to the

mode of proceeding_'--(Mr. Gladstone to Lord Aberdeen, July 7, 1851).

Then he proceeds as to the new supplementary publication: 'If it be

disagreeable to you in any manner to be the recipient of such sad

communications, or if you think it better for any other reason, I would

put the further matter into another form.' In answer to this, Lord

Aberdeen seems not to have done any more to refuse leave to associate

his name with the second Letter, than he had done to withdraw the

assumed leave for the association of his name with the first.

[248] Ashley, _Palmerston_, ii. p. 179.

[249] August 7, 1851. _Hansard_, cxv. p. 1949.

[250] Fagan's _Life of Panizzi_, ii. pp. 102-3.

[251] On the share of Mr. Gladstone's Letters in leading indirectly to

this decision, see the address of Baldacchini, _Della Vita e de' Tempi

di Carlo Poerio_ (1867), p. 58.

[252] _Gleanings_, iv. pp. 188, 195. Trans. of Farini, pref. p. ix.

[253] To Dr. Errera, author of _A Life of Manin_, Sept. 28, 1872. For

Manin's account, see his _Life_, by Henri Martin, p. 377.

[254] The first two volumes were published by Mr. Murray in 1852, and

the last two in 1854. '_June 17, 1851._--Got my first copies of Farini.

Sent No. 1 to the Prince; and wrote with sad feelings in those for Hope

and Manning.'--_Diary._

[255] _Gleanings_, iv. pp. 160, 176.

CHAPTER VII

RELIGIOUS TORNADO--PEELITE DIFFICULTIES

(_1851-1852_)

I am always disposed to view with regret the rupture of party

ties--my disposition is rather to maintain them. I confess I look,

if not with suspicion, at least with disapprobation on any one who

is disposed to treat party connections as matters of small

importance. My opinion is that party ties closely appertain to

those principles of confidence which we entertain for the House of

Commons.--GLADSTONE (1852).

As we have seen, on the morning of his arrival from his Italian journey

(February 26, 1851) Mr. Gladstone found that he was urgently required to

meet Lord Stanley. Mortified by more than one repulse at the opening of

the session, the whigs had resigned. The Queen sent for the

protectionist leader. Stanley said that he was not then prepared to form

a government, but that if other combinations failed, he would make the

attempt. Lord John Russell was once more summoned to the palace, this

time along with Aberdeen and Graham--the first move in a critical march

towards the fated coalition between whigs and Peelites. The negotiation

broke off on the No Popery bill; Lord John was committed to it, the

other two strongly disapproved. The Queen next wished Aberdeen to

undertake the task. Apparently not without some lingering doubts, he

declined on the good ground that the House of Commons would not stand

his attitude on papal aggression.[256] Then according to promise Lord

Stanley tried his hand. Proceedings were suspended for some days until

Mr. Gladstone should be on the ground. He no sooner reached Carlton

Gardens, than Lord Lincoln arrived, eager to dissuade him from accepting

office. Before the discussion had gone far, the tory whip hurried in

from Stanley, begging for an immediate visit.

I promised, says Mr. Gladstone, to go directly after seeing Lord

Aberdeen. But he came back with a fresh message to go at once, and

_hear_ what Stanley had to say. I did not like to stickle, and

went. He told me his object was that I should take office with

him--_any_ office, subject to the reservation that the foreign

department was offered to Canning, but if he declined it was open

to me, along with others of which he named the colonial office and

the board of trade. Nothing was said of the leadership of the House

of Commons, but his anxiety was evident to have any occupant but

one for the foreign office. I told him, I should ask no questions

and make no remark on these points, as none of them would

constitute a difficulty with me, provided no preliminary obstacle

were found to intervene. Stanley then said that he proposed to

maintain the system of free trade generally, but to put a duty of

five or six shillings on corn. I heard him pretty much in silence,

but with an intense sense of relief; feeling that if he had put

protection in abeyance, I might have had a most difficult question

to decide, whereas now I had no question at all. I thought,

however, it might be well that I should still see Lord Aberdeen

before giving him an answer; and told him I would do so. I asked

him also what was his intention with respect to papal aggression.

He said that this measure was hasty and intemperate as well as

ineffective; and that he thought something much better might result

from a comprehensive and deliberate inquiry. I told him I was

utterly against all penal legislation and against the ministerial

bill, but that I did not on principle object to inquiry; that, on

general as well as on personal grounds, I wished well to his

undertakings; and that I would see Lord Aberdeen, but that what he

had told me about corn constituted, I must not conceal from him,

'an enormous difficulty.' I used this expression for the purpose of

preparing him to receive the answer it was plain I must give; he

told me his persevering would probably depend on me.

DECLINES OFFICE

Mr. Gladstone next hastened to Lord Aberdeen, and learned what had been

going on during his absence abroad. He learned also the clear opinions

held by Aberdeen and Graham against No Popery legislation, and noticed

it as remarkable that so many minds should arrive independently at the

same conclusion on a new question, and in opposition to the overwhelming

majority. 'I then,' he continues, 'went on to the levee, saw Lord

Normanby and others, and began to bruit abroad the fame of the

Neapolitan government. Immediately after leaving the levee (where I also

saw Canning, told him what I meant to do, and gathered that he would do

the like), I changed my clothes and went to give Lord Stanley my answer,

at which he did not show the least surprise. He said he would still

persevere, though with little hope. I think I told him it seemed to me

he ought to do so. I was not five minutes with him this second

time.'[257]

The protectionists having failed, and the Peelites standing aside, the

whigs came back, most of them well aware that they could not go on for

long. The events of the late crisis had given Mr. Gladstone the hope

that Graham would effectively place himself at the head of the Peelites,

and that they would now at length begin to take an independent course of

their own. 'But it soon appeared that, unconsciously I think more than

consciously, he is set upon the object of avoiding the responsibility

either of taking the government with the Peel squadron, or of letting in

Stanley and his friends.' Here was the weak point in a strong and

capable character. When Graham died ten years after this (1861), Mr.

Gladstone wrote to a friend, 'On administrative questions, for the last

twenty years and more, I had more spontaneous recourse to him for

advice, than to all other colleagues together.' In some of the

foundations of character no two men could be more unlike. One of his

closest allies talks to Graham of 'your sombre temperament.' 'My

forebodings are always gloomy,' says Graham himself; 'I shudder on the

brink of the torrent.' All accounts agree that he was a good counsellor

in cabinet, a first-rate manager of business, a good if rather pompous

speaker, admirably loyal and single-minded, but half-ruined by intense

timidity. I have heard nobody use warmer language of commendation about

him than Mr. Bright. But nature had not made him for a post of chief

command.

It by and by appeared that the Duke of Newcastle, known to us hitherto

as Lord Lincoln, coveted the post of leader, but Mr. Gladstone thought

that on every ground Lord Aberdeen was the person entitled to hold it.

'I made,' says Mr. Gladstone, 'my views distinctly known to the duke. He

took no offence. I do not know what communications he may have held with

others. But the upshot was that Lord Aberdeen became our leader. And

this result was obtained without any shock or conflict.'[258]

II

BILL AGAINST ECCLESIASTICAL TITLES