The claim, so to speak, of Granville and Hartington, or rather, I

should say, of Granville with Hartington as against me, or rather

as compared with me, is complete. My labours as an individual

cannot set me up as a Pretender. Moreover, if they should on

surveying their position see fit to apply to me, there is only one

form and ground of application, so far as I see, which could be

seriously entertained by me, namely, their conviction that on the

ground of public policy, all things considered, it was best in the

actual position of affairs that I should come out. It cannot be

made a matter of ceremonial, as by gentlemen waiving a precedence,

or a matter of feeling, as by men of high and delicate honour

determined to throw their bias against themselves. They have no

right to throw their bias against themselves—they have no right to

look at anything but public policy; and this I am sure will be

their conviction. Nothing else can possibly absolve them from

their presumptive obligation as standing at the head of the party

which for the time represents the country.

As a matter of fact, I find no evidence that the two leaders ever did

express a conviction that public policy required that he should stand

forth as a pretender for the post of prime minister. On the contrary, when

Lord Wolverton says that they “did not quite realise the position” on the

12th, this can only mean that they hardly felt that conviction about the

requirements of public policy, which Mr. Gladstone demanded as the

foundation of his own decision.

III

The last meeting of the outgoing cabinet was held on April 21. What next

took place has been described by Mr. Gladstone himself in memoranda

written during the days on which the events occurred.

_Interview with Lord Hartington._

_April 22, 1880._ At 7 P.M. Hartington came to see me at

Wolverton’s house and reported on his journey to Windsor.

The Queen stood with her back to the window—which _used_ not to be

her custom. On the whole I gathered that her manner was more or

less embarrassed but towards him not otherwise than gracious and

confiding. She told him that she desired him to form an

administration, and pressed upon him strongly his duty to assist

her as a responsible leader of the party now in a large majority.

I could not find that she expressed clearly her reason for

appealing to him as _a_ responsible leader of the party, and yet

going past _the_ leader of the party, namely Granville, whom no

one except himself has a title to displace. She however indicated

to him her confidence in his moderation, the phrase under which he

is daily commended in the _Daily Telegraph_, at this moment I

think, Beaconsfield’s personal organ and the recipient of his

inspirations. By this moderation, the Queen intimated that

Hartington was distinguished from Granville as well as from me.

Hartington, in reply to her Majesty, made becoming

acknowledgments, and proceeded to say that he did not think a

government could be satisfactorily formed without me; he had not

had any direct communication with me; but he had reason to believe

that I would not take any office or post in the government except

that of first minister. Under those circumstances he advised her

Majesty to place the matter in my hands. The Queen continued to

urge upon him the obligations arising out of his position, and

desired him to ascertain whether he was right in his belief that I

would not act in a ministry unless as first minister. This, he

said, is a question which I should not have put to you, except

when desired by the Queen.

I said her Majesty was quite justified, I thought, in requiring

positive information, and he, therefore, in putting the question

to me. Of my action he was already in substantial possession, as

it had been read to him (he had told me) by Wolverton. I am not

asked, I said, for reasons, but only for Aye or No, and

consequently I have only to say that I adhere to my reply as you

have already conveyed it to the Queen.

In making such a reply, it was my duty to add that in case a

government should be formed by him, or by Granville with him, whom

the Queen seemed to me wrongly to have passed by—it was to

Granville that I had resigned my trust, and he, Hartington, was

subsequently elected by the party to the leadership in the House

of Commons—my duty would be plain. It would be to give them all

the support in my power, both negatively, as by absence or

non-interference, and positively. Promises of this kind, I said,

stood on slippery ground, and must always be understood with the

limits which might be prescribed by conviction. I referred to the

extreme caution, almost costiveness, of Peel’s replies to Lord

Russell, when he was endeavouring to form a government in December

1845 for the purpose of carrying the repeal of the Corn Law. In

this case, however, I felt a tolerable degree of confidence,

because I was not aware of any substantive divergence of ideas

between us, and I had observed with great satisfaction, when his

address to North-East Lancashire came into my hands, after the

writing but before the publication of mine to Midlothian, that

they were in marked accordance as to opinions, if not as to form

and tone, and I did not alter a word. In the case of the first

Palmerston government I had certainly been thrown into rather

sharp opposition after I quitted it, but this was mainly due to

finance. I had not approved of the finance of Sir George Lewis,

highly as I estimated his judgment in general politics; and it was

in some ways a relief to me, when we had become colleagues in the

second Palmerston government, to find that he did not approve of

mine. However, I could only make such a declaration as the nature

of the case allowed.

He received all this without comment, and said his conversation

with her Majesty had ended as it began, each party adhering to the

ground originally taken up. He had not altered his advice, but had

come under her Majesty’s command to learn my intentions, which he

was to make known to her Majesty returning to Windsor _this_ day

at one.

He asked me what I thought of the doctrine of obligation so much

pressed upon him by the Queen. I said that in my opinion the case

was clear enough. Her Majesty had not always acted on the rule of

sending for the leader of the opposition. Palmerston was the known

and recognised leader of the opposition in 1859, but the Queen

sent for Granville. The leader, if sent for, was in my opinion

bound either to serve himself, or to point out some other course

to her Majesty which he might deem to be more for the public

advantage. And if that course should fail in consequence of the

refusal of the person pointed out, the leader of the party could

not leave her Majesty unprovided with a government, but would be

bound in loyalty to undertake the task.

I did not indicate, nor did he ask, what I should do if sent for.

He did not indicate, nor did I ask, what he should do if the Queen

continued to press him to go on, in spite of his advice to her to

move in another direction.—_April 23, 1880._

A barren controversy was afterwards raised on the question whether at this

exciting moment Lord Hartington tried to form a government. What he did,

according to the memorandum, was to advise the Queen to send for Mr.

Gladstone, on the ground of his belief that Mr. Gladstone would join no

government of which he was not the head. The Queen then urged him to make

sure of this, before she would acquiesce in his refusal to undertake the

commission. The Queen, as Mr. Gladstone says, had a right to require

positive information, and Lord Hartington had a right, and it was even his

duty, to procure this information for her, and to put the direct question

to Mr. Gladstone, whether he would or would not act in an administration

of which he was not the head. He went back to Windsor, not in the position

of a statesman who has tried to form a government and failed, but in the

position of one who had refused a task because he knew all along that

failure was certain, and now brought proof positive that his refusal was

right.(370)

What happened next was easy to foresee:—

_Interview with Lord Granville and Lord Hartington._

_April 23, 1880._—Soon after half-past three to-day, Lord

Granville and Lord Hartington arrived from Windsor at my house,

and signified to me the Queen’s command that I should repair to

Windsor, where she would see me at half-past six.

The purport of Lord Hartington’s conversation with me yesterday

had been signified. They had jointly advised thereupon that I

should be sent for with a view to the formation of a government,

and her Majesty desired Lord Granville would convey to me the

message. I did not understand that there had been any lengthened

audience, or any reference to details.

Receiving this intimation, I read to them an extract from an

article in the _Daily News_ of yesterday,(371) descriptive of

their position relatively to me, and of mine to them, and said

that, letting drop the epithets, so I understood the matter. I

presumed, therefore, that under the circumstances as they were

established before their audience, they had unitedly advised the

sovereign that it was most for the public advantage to send for

me. To this they assented. I expressed, a little later, my sense

of the high honour and patriotism with which they had acted; said

that I had endeavoured to fulfil my own duty, but was aware I

might be subject to severe criticism for my resignation of the

leadership five years ago, which I had forced upon them; but I did

it believing in good faith that we were to have quiet times, and

for the first years, 1875 and 1876, and to the end of the session

I had acted in a manner conformable to that resignation, and had

only been driven from my corner by compulsion. They made no reply,

but Granville had previously told me he was perfectly satisfied as

to my communications with him.

I at once asked whether I might reckon, as I hoped, on their

co-operation in the government. Both assented. Granville agreed to

take the foreign office, but modestly and not as of right. I

proposed the India office as next, and as very near in weight, and

perhaps the most difficult of all at this time, to Hartington,

which he desired time to consider. I named Childers as the most

proper person for the war office. As I had to prepare for Windsor,

our interview was not very long; and they agreed to come again

after dinner.

We spoke of the governor-generalship, at least I spoke to

Granville who stayed a little after Hartington, and I said

Goschen’s position as to the franchise would prevent his being in

the cabinet now, but he should be in great employ. Granville had

had the lead in the conversation, and said the Queen requested

_him_ to carry the message to me.

_Audience at Windsor._

_Windsor Castle, April 23, 1880._—At 6.50 I went to the Queen, who

received me with perfect courtesy, from which she never deviates.

Her Majesty presumed I was in possession of the purport of her

communications with Lord Granville and with Lord Hartington, and

wished to know, as the administration of Lord Beaconsfield had

been “turned out,” whether I was prepared to form a government.

She thought she had acted constitutionally in sending for the

recognised leaders of the party, and referring the matter to them

in the first instance. I said that if I might presume to speak,

nothing could in my views be more correct than her Majesty’s view

that the application should be so made (I did not refer to the

case as _between_ Lord Granville and Lord Hartington), and that it

would have been an error to pass them by and refer to me. They had

stood, I said, between me and the position of a candidate for

office, and it was only their advising her Majesty to lay her

commands upon me, which could warrant my thinking of it after all

that had occurred. But since they had given this advice, it was

not consistent with my duty to shrink from any responsibility

which I had incurred, and I was aware that I had incurred a very

great responsibility. I therefore humbly accepted her Majesty’s

commission.

Her Majesty wished to know, in order that she might acquaint Lord

Beaconsfield, whether I could undertake to form a government, or

whether I only meant that I would make the attempt. I said I had

obtained the co-operation of Lord Granville and Lord Hartington,

and that my knowledge and belief as to prevailing dispositions

would, I think, warrant me in undertaking to form a government, it

being her Majesty’s pleasure. I had ascertained that Lord

Granville would be willing to accept the foreign office; and I had

also to say that the same considerations which made it my duty to

accept office, seemed also to make it my duty to submit myself to

her Majesty’s pleasure for the office of chancellor of the

exchequer together with that of first lord of the treasury.

She asked if I had thought of any one for the war office, which

was very important. The report of the Commission would show that

Lord Cardwell’s system of short service had entirely broken down,

and that a change must be made at any rate as regarded the

non-commissioned officers. Lord Hartington had assured her that no

one was committed to the system except Lord Cardwell, and he was

very unwell and hardly able to act. Lord Hartington knew the war

office, and she thought would make a good war minister. I said

that it seemed to me in the present state of the country the first

object was to provide for the difficulties of statesmanship, and

then to deal with those of administration. The greatest of all

these difficulties, I thought, centred in the India office, and I

was very much inclined to think Lord Hartington would be eminently

qualified to deal with them, and would thereby take a place in the

government suitable to his position and his probable future.

She asked, to whom, then, did I think of entrusting the war

office? [Resumed this afternoon, April 24.](372) I said Mr.

Childers occurred to me as an administrator of eminent capacity

and conciliatory in his modes of action; his mind would be open on

the grave subjects treated by the Commission, which did not appear

to me to be even for Lord Cardwell matters of committal, but

simply of public policy to be determined by public advantage. She

thought that Mr. Childers had not been popular at the admiralty,

and that it was desirable the secretary for war should be liked by

the army. I said that there was an occurrence towards the close of

his term which placed him in a difficult position, but relied on

his care and discretion. (She did not press the point, but is

evidently under strong professional bias.)

She spoke of the chancellorship, and I named Lord Selborne.

She referred to general action and hoped it would be conciliatory.

I said that every one who had served the crown for even a much

smaller term of years than I had the good or ill fortune to

reckon, would know well that an incoming government must recognise

existing engagements, and must take up, irrespective of its

preferences, whatever was required by the character and honour of

the country. I referred to the case of Scinde and Sir R. Peel’s

cabinet in 1843; which she recognised as if it had been recently

before her.

She said, “I must be frank with you, Mr. Gladstone, and must

fairly say that there have been some expressions”—I think she said

some little things, which had caused her concern or pain. I said

that her Majesty’s frankness, so well known, was a main ground of

the entire reliance of her ministers upon her. That I was

conscious of having incurred a great responsibility, and felt the

difficulty which arises when great issues are raised, and a man

can only act and speak upon the best lights he possesses, aware

all the time that he may be in error. That I had undoubtedly used

a mode of speech and language different in some degree from what I

should have employed, had I been the leader of a party or a

candidate for office. Then as regarded conciliation, in my opinion

the occasion for what I had described had wholly passed away, and

that so far as I was concerned, it was my hope that her Majesty

would not find anything to disapprove in my general tone; that my

desire and effort would be to diminish, her cares, in any case not

to aggravate them; that, however, considering my years, I could

only look to a short term of active exertion and a personal

retirement comparatively early. With regard to the freedom of

language I had admitted, she said with some good-natured archness,

“But you will have to bear the consequences,” to which I entirely

assented. She seemed to me, if I may so say, “natural under

effort.” All things considered, I was much pleased. I ended by

kissing her Majesty’s hand.

IV

(M200) The usual embarrassments in building a government filled many days

with unintermittent labour of a kind that, like Peel, Mr. Gladstone found

intensely harassing, though interesting. The duty of leaving out old

colleagues can hardly have been other than painful, but Mr. Gladstone was

a man of business, and lie reckoned on a proper stoicism in the victims of

public necessity. To one of them he wrote, “While I am the oldest man of

my political generation, I have been brought by the seeming force of

exceptional circumstances to undertake a task requiring less of years and

more of vigour than my accumulating store of the one and waning residue of

the other, and I shall be a solecism in the government which I have

undertaken to form. I do not feel able to ask you to resume the toils of

office,” etc., but would like to name him the recipient for a signal mark

of honour. “I have not the least right to be disappointed when you select

younger men for your colleagues,” the cheerful man replied. Not all were

so easily satisfied. “It is cruel to make a disqualification for others

out of an infirmity of my own,” Mr. Gladstone wrote to the oldest of his

comrades in the Peelite days, but—et cetera, et cetera, and he would be

glad to offer his old ally the red riband of the Bath when one should be

vacant. The peer to whom this letter with its dubious solatium was

addressed, showed his chagrin by a reply of a single sentence: that he did

not wish to leave the letter unanswered, lest it should seem to admit that

he was in a state of health which he did not feel to be the case; the red

riband was not even declined. One admirable man with intrepid _naïveté_

proposed himself for the cabinet, but was not admitted; another no less

admirable was pressed to enter, but felt that he could be more useful as

an independent member, and declined—an honourable transaction repeated by

the same person on more than one occasion later. To one excellent member

of his former cabinet, the prime minister proposed the chairmanship of

committee, and it was with some tartness refused. Another equally

excellent member of the old administration he endeavoured to plant out in

the viceregal lodge at Dublin, without the cabinet, but in vain. To a

third he proposed the Indian vice-royalty, and received an answer that

left him “stunned and out of breath.” As the hours passed and office after

office was filled up, curiosity grew vivacious as to the fate appointed

for the younger generation of radicals. The great posts had gone to

patrician whigs, just as if Mr. Gladstone had been a Grey or a Russell. As

we have seen, he had secured Lord Granville and Lord Hartington before he

went to Windsor, and on the evening of his return, the first person to

whom he applied was Lord Derby, one of the most sagacious men of his day,

but a great territorial noble and a very recent convert. He declined

office on the ground that if a man changes his party connection, he is

bound to give proof that he wishes the change from no merely personal

motive, and that he is not a gainer by it.

Mr. Bright had joined, it was true, and Mr. Forster, but Bright the new

radicals honoured and revered without any longer following, and with

Forster they had quarrelled violently upon education, nor was the quarrel

ever healed. One astute adviser, well acquainted with the feeling and

expectations of the left wing, now discovered to his horror that Mr.

Gladstone was not in the least alive to the importance of the leaders of

the radical section, and had never dreamed of them for his cabinet. His

view seems to have been something of this kind, “You have been saved from

whig triumph in the person of Lord Hartington; now that you have got me to

keep the balance, I must have a whig cabinet.” He was, moreover, still

addicted to what he called Peel’s rule against admitting anybody straight

into the cabinet without having held previous office. At last he sent for

Sir Charles Dilke. To his extreme amazement Sir Charles refused to serve,

unless either himself or Mr. Chamberlain were in the cabinet; the prime

minister might make his choice between them; then the other would accept a

subordinate post. Mr. Gladstone discoursed severely on this unprecedented

enormity, and the case was adjourned. Mr. Bright was desired to interfere,

but the pair remained inexorable. In the end the lot fell on Mr.

Chamberlain. “Your political opinions,” Mr. Gladstone wrote to him (April

27), “may on some points go rather beyond what I may call the general

measure of the government, but I hope and believe that there can be no

practical impediment on this score to your acceptance of my proposal.” So

Mr. Chamberlain took office at the board of trade, where Mr. Gladstone

himself had begun his effective career in administration nearly forty

years before; and his confederate went as under-secretary to the foreign

office. At that time the general feeling was that Sir Charles Dilke, long

in parliament and a man of conspicuous mark within its walls, was rather

badly used, and that Mr. Gladstone ought to have included both. All this

was the ominous prelude of a voyage that was to be made through many

storms.(373)

One incident of these labours of construction may illustrate Mr.

Gladstone’s curious susceptibility in certain kinds of personal contest.

He proposed that Mr. Lowe should be made a viscount, while the Queen

thought that a barony would meet the claim. For once it broke the prime

minister’s sleep; he got up in the middle of the night and dashed off a

letter to Windsor. The letter written, the minister went to bed again, and

was in an instant sound asleep.

“The new parliament,” he told his old friend at school and college, Sir

Francis Doyle (May 10), “will be tested by its acts. It will not draw its

inspiration from me. No doubt it will make changes that will be denounced

as revolutionary, and then recognised as innocent and even good. But I

expect it to act in the main on well-tried and established lines, and do

much for the people and little to disquiet my growing years, or even

yours.” All fell out strangely otherwise, and disquiet marked this second

administration from its beginning to its end. To lay all the blame on a

prime minister or his cabinet for this, is like blaming the navigator for

wild weather. In spite of storm and flood, great things were done; deep,

notable, and abiding results ensued. The procedure of parliament underwent

a profound revolution. So too did our electoral system in all its aspects.

New lines of cleavage showed themselves in the divisions of political

party. A not unimportant episode occurred in the chapter of religious

toleration. The Irish peasant, after suffering centuries of oppression and

tyrannic wrong, at last got the charter of his liberation. In a more

distant region, as if to illustrate the power of events against the will

of a statesman and the contemporary opinion of a nation, England for good

or evil found herself planted in the valley of the Nile, and became a

land-power on the Mediterranean.

APPENDIX

Budget Of 1860

_Page __26_

_Sir William Heathcote wrote to Mr. Gladstone, May 4, 1861_:—

I understood you in your rebukes of Lewis in 1857, to be aiming not only

at a change of his plan of finance in that particular year, but (if that

were impossible, or at least could not be carried), at a resumption as

early as circumstances would allow, of what you thought the proper line of

action which he insisted on suspending. Income-tax and war duties on tea

and sugar were and would continue to be, as I understood, the primary

claimants for reduction of taxation, in your judgment.... The very

vehemence of your convictions and expressions on _both_ occasions

perplexes me.

_Mr. Gladstone replied the same day_:—

... You think, 1. That I bound myself to the reduction of the tea and

sugar duties as a policy for future occasions, and not merely for the

issue then raised. 2. That in like manner I was bound to the reduction and

abolition of the income-tax. 3. That even if there arose in the system of

our expenditure a great change, involving an increase of ten or fifteen

millions of money over 1853, I was still in consistency bound to hold over

the first chance of reduction for income-tax, tea and sugar. 4. That

consequently until these duties were remitted I could not propose to

prosecute any commercial reforms involving, as nearly all of them do, a

sacrifice of revenue for a time. 5. It is because I have departed from

these positions by proposing a multitude of reductions and abolitions of

duty, other than the three mentioned, and partly or wholly in preference

to them, that you have lost confidence in my judgment on these matters (a

confidence to which I do not pretend that I had ever any claim).

If I have interpreted you aright, and I hope you will tell me whether I

have done so or not, this is all to me exceedingly curious; such are the

differences in the opinions of men formed from their different points of

view. Now I will give you mine. To give effect to the pledge of honour, by

which I became bound in 1853, I made a desperate effort in 1857, with all

the zeal of which I was capable, and with all the passion to which I am

liable. It was my opinion that the course then taken would be decisive as

to the operations in 1860, for the income-tax never can be got rid of

except by prospective finance, reaching over several years, and liable to

impediment and disturbance accordingly. I therefore protested against the

whole scale of expenditure then proposed; as well as against particular

kinds of expenditure to which I might refer. I likewise protested against

the provision for that expenditure which the government of the day

proposed. First, because the expenditure itself was excessive, in my view.

Secondly, because in the mode of that provision I thought the remission of

income-tax was large out of all proportion to the remission on indirect

taxes; and this disproportion I regarded as highly dangerous. I determined

to let no political prejudice stand in my way, and to test to the best of

my very feeble power the opinion of parliament with respect to tea and

sugar. I stated that if the opinion of parliament were against me I should

not factiously prolong the contest but should withdraw from it. Not only

was the opinion of parliament against me, but it so happened that the

opinion of the country was immediately afterwards taken by a dissolution

on that and on other kindred questions. The country affirmed the policy of

Lord Palmerston, and the policy of a materially increased expenditure, by

an overwhelming majority. I had misjudged public opinion; they had read it

aright. After the dissolution of 1857, Sir George Lewis, who had

previously raised the tea and sugar duties for one year, proposed to raise

them for two more. I immediately followed in debate, and thanked him

warmly for doing it. All this of course I can prove. I said, we are going

to have more expenditure, we must therefore have more taxation.

As I have gone thus far with my history, I will conclude it.

Notwithstanding what had happened, I did not absolutely abandon at that

time the hope that we might still reach in 1860 a state which might enable

us to abolish the income-tax. I had a faint expectation of more economy

under another government. When Lord Derby’s administration came in in

1858, they professed to reduce expenditure by £800,000, and to contemplate

further reductions. I expressed my satisfaction, and gave them the extreme

of support that I could. But I then clearly pointed out that, even with

the scale of expenditure they then proposed, we could not abolish the

income-tax in 1860. In a few months, their reductions vanished into air.

In 1859 came the famous “reconstruction.” I took office in June, and found

a scale of expenditure going on in the treasury far more prodigal and

wanton than I had ever charged upon Lord Palmerston’s first government. I

found also that when the estimates had been completed, I believe entirely

on _their_ basis, there was a probable deficiency of four or five millions

for a year of which nearly one-third had passed. And the expenditure was I

think nearly seventy millions, or some fourteen millions more than in

1853. This was not the act only of the government. The opposition halloed

them on; and the country, seized with a peculiar panic, was in a humour

even more lavish than the opposition.

My view was, and I stated it, that we ought to provide for this

expenditure in a due proportion between direct and indirect taxes. I

showed that this proportion had not been observed; that we had continued

to levy large amounts of war tax on tea and sugar, and had returned to the

scale of 1853 for income. I proposed to provide the necessary sums chiefly

by an increase of income-tax. But neither then (in July 1859), nor for

nearly two and a half years before, had I ever (to my knowledge) presumed

to speak of any one as bound to abolish the income-tax or to remit the

additional duties on tea and sugar.

I fully expect from _you_ the admission that as to these measures I could

not in the altered circumstances be bound absolutely to the remissions.

But you say I was bound to give them a preference over all other

remissions. Nowhere I believe can one word to this effect be extracted

from any speech of mine. I found in 1860 that all the reforming

legislation, which had achieved such vast results, had been suspended for

seven years. We were then raising by duties doomed in 1853, from twelve to

thirteen millions. It would in my opinion have been no less than monstrous

on my part to recognise the preferences you claim for these particular

duties. All of them indeed would have been reliefs, even the income-tax

which is I think proved to be the least relief of any. But, though

reliefs, they were hardly reforms; and experience had shown us that

reforms were in fact double and treble reliefs. I may be wrong, but it is

my opinion and I found it on experience, that the prospect of the removal

of the three collectively (income, tea extra, and sugar extra) being in

any case very remote, it is less remote with than without the reforming

measures of the last and (I hope I may add) of the present year. Had the

expenditure of 1853 been resumed, there would notwithstanding the Russian

war have been, in my opinion, room for all these three things. 1.

Abolition of income-tax by or near 1860; 2. remission of increases on tea

and sugar within the same time; 3. the prosecution of the commercial

reforms.

It may be said that having set my face against an excess of expenditure I

ought to have considered that a holy war, and not to have receded.

Although I place public economy somewhat higher as a matter of duty than

many might do, I do not think it would have been right, I do think it

would have been foolish and presumptuous in me to have gone beyond these

two things: first, making an effort to the utmost of my power at the

critical moment (as I took it to be), and secondly, on being defeated to

watch for opportunities thereafter. Since it should be remembered I do not

recommend or desire sweeping and sudden reductions.

The chief errors that I see myself to have committed are these. In 1853

when I took the unusual course of estimating our income for seven years,

and assuming that our expenditure would either continue as it was, or only

move onwards gradually and gently, I ought no doubt to have pointed out

explicitly, that a great disturbance and increase of our expenditure would

baffle my reckonings. Again in 1857 the temper of the public mind had

undergone a change which I failed to discern; and I attacked the

government and the chancellor of the exchequer of that day for doing what

the country desired though I did not. I name these as specific errors,

over and above the general one of excess of heat.

The budget of last year I cannot admit to have been an error. People say

it should have been smaller. My belief is that if it had been a smaller

boat it would not have lived in such a sea. I speak of the period of the

session before the China war became certain. When it did so, we were in a

great strait about the paper duty. We felt the obligation incurred by the

vote on the second reading, and we construed it according to the

established usage. We took the more arduous, but I think the more

honourable course for a government to pursue. Had we abandoned the bill, I

know not how we could have looked in the face those who had acted and

invested on the faith of an unbroken practice. I admit that political

motives greatly concurred to recommend the budget of last year. It was a

budget of peace, and peace wanted it. The budget of this year followed

from the budget of last, given the other circumstances. At the same time I

can understand how the claim of tea could be set up, but not well after

the occurrences of last year how it could be supported.

This is a long egotistical story. But when you consider that it contains

my whole story (except _pièces justificatives_) in answer to so many

speeches in both Houses and elsewhere, for never to this hour have I

opened my lips in personal defence, you will understand why I might be

garrulous....

Notwithstanding the mild doctrine I have held about expenditure I admit it

may be said I ought not to have joined a government which had such

extended views in that direction, even though they were the views of the

nation. Much may be said on this. I may, however, remark that when the

government was formed I did not fully conceive the extent to which we

should proceed.

The Cabinet. 1860

_Page __36_

_Mr. Gladstone’s memorandum on the currents of opinion in the cabinet of

1860 concludes as follows_:—

1. The most Italian members of the cabinet have been: Lord Palmerston,

Lord John Russell, W.E.G., Gibson, Argyll. The least Italian: Lewis, Wood,

Grey, Herbert, Villiers (especially).

2. In foreign policy generally the most combative have been: Lord

Palmerston, Lord John Russell, Duke of Newcastle, the chancellor. The

least combative: Duke of Somerset, Duke of Argyll, Granville, Gibson,

Herbert, Lewis, Grey, W.E.G., Wood, the same in feeling but not active.

3. In defences and expenditure, the most alarmed, or most martial (as the

case may be), have been: Lord Palmerston, Lord John Russell, Duke of

Newcastle, S. Herbert, followed by Duke of Somerset, the chancellor,

Granville, Cardwell. Inclined the other way: Gibson, W.E.G., Lewis, Grey,

Duke of Argyll (Elgin, I think).

4. In finance some are for movement, some stationary or retrograde so as

to be ready for immediate war. Yet here we are not divided simply as

combative or anti-combative. The onward men in finance are: Lord John

Russell, Duke of Newcastle, Granville, Argyll, Gibson, W.E.G., and, I

think, the chancellor. The stationary men are, first and foremost: Sir

George Lewis, Sir C. Wood; next to these, Lord Palmerston, Cardwell, and,

I think, Villiers, Herbert.

5. On reform I must distinguish between (_a_) extension of the franchise

and (_b_) redistribution of seats. In the first the more liberal men are:

Lord John Russell, Duke of Somerset, Duke of Newcastle, Duke of Argyll,

Gibson, W.E.G. The fearful or opposed are: Lord Palmerston, C. Villiers,

S. Herbert. In the second, for small disfranchisement were, I think, all

the first except Newcastle. For larger disfranchisement: Newcastle,

Villiers, and Lord Palmerston, I think not greatly averse. In fact, I

think that larger disfranchisement of places may have been favoured by

him, 1. as a substitute for enlargement of the franchise, which he chiefly

dreads; 2. as perhaps an obstacle to the framing of a measure.

6. In church matters Herbert, Newcastle, and I are the most conservative

and the most church-like; with a sympathy from Argyll. But, as I said,

there is no struggle here: patronage, the sore subject, not being a

cabinet affair.

Session Of 1860

_Page __47_

_Extract from a Letter to the Duke of Argyll._

_Penmaen., September 3, 1860._—The session has been one to make all of us

thoughtful, and me perhaps most of all. It is indeed much before my mind,

but my head has not ceased to whirl, so that I cannot get a clear view of

what Seward would call my position. Two things I know, one is that it

produced the greatest pleasures and the greatest pains I have ever known

in politics; the other that 1 have had to take various decisions and

perform acts that could neither be satisfactory to others, nor from the

doubt attaching to one side or the other of the alternative, even to

myself. To have been the occasion of the blow to the House of Commons, or

as I call it the “gigantic innovation,” will be a grief to me as long as I

live; if by wildness and rashness I have been its cause, it will be a much

greater grief. Of that I am not yet able to judge. On the whole when I

think of the cabinet, I always go back to Jacob and Esau fighting in their

mother’s womb; only here there have been many Jacobs and Esaus, by which I

do not mean the sixteen members of the cabinet, but the many and very

unhandy causes of division. Perhaps I should find it easiest in the work

of confession to own my neighbour’s faults, _i.e._ to dwell upon those

strange sins of foreign policy which have happily for the most part been

nipped in the bud almost _à l’unanimité_ (yet with what exceptions!); but

avoiding that task, I will make my own confession. I cannot justify the

finance of the year as a whole.... As to the amount of the final demand

[for the China war], what it really demonstrates is _one_ among the

follies and dangers of our high-handed policy, our want of control over

proceedings at the other end of the world. But the weak point is the

fortification plan; I do not now speak of its own merits or demerits, but

I speak of it in relation to the budget.... It is a vile precedent to give

away money by remission, and borrow to supply the void; and in the full

and _chief_ responsibility for having established this precedent I am

involved, not by the budget of February but by the consent of July to the

scheme which involved the borrowing. No doubt there are palliating

circumstances; and lastly the grievous difficulty of choice between

mischievous [_illegible_] and mischievous resignation. Still I must say,

it is in retrospect, as the people and parliament have a right to judge

it, a bad and unworkmanlike business, and under a skilful analysis of it

in the House of Commons (which there is no one opposite fit to make,

except it be Northcote, who perhaps scruples it) I should wince. All these

things and others more inward than these, make sore places in the mind;

but on the other hand, that I may close with a gleam of sunshine like that

which is now casting its shadow on my paper from Penmaenmawr after a rough

morning, I am thankful in the highest degree to have had a share in

resisting the alarmist mania of the day by means of the French treaty, to

which, if we escape collision, I think the escape will have been mainly

due; and likewise in one at least negative service to the great Italian

cause, which is not Italian merely but European.

Mr. Pitt’s War Finance

_Page __59_

_Mr. Gladstone to Herbert Gladstone_

_March 10, 1876._—Mr. Pitt’s position in the Revolutionary war was, I

think, a false one. To keep out of that war demanded from the people of

this country an extraordinary degree of self-control, and this degree of

it they did not possess. The consequence of our going into it was to give

an intensity and vitality to the struggle, which but for the tenacity of

English character it would not have possessed. Mr. Pitt did not show the

great genius in war which he possessed as a peace minister. Until the

epoch of the Peninsula our military performances were small and poor, and

the method of subsidy was unsatisfactory and ineffective. The effect of

borrowing money in three per cents. was to load us with a very heavy

capital of national debt. I think at one time we only got £46, or some

such amount, for the £100. It must, however, be taken into view that a

perpetual annuity of £3, redeemable upon paying £100, brought _more_ than

3/4 of what a perpetual annuity of £4, similarly redeemable, would have

brought; or than 3/5 of what a £5 annuity, similarly redeemable, would

have brought. It is not easy to strike the balance. Mr. Newmarch, a living

economist of some authority, I believe, thinks Mr. Pitt was right. I do

not think the case is so clear against him as to _detract_ from his great

reputation. But were I in the unhappy position of having to call for a

large loan, I should be disposed to ask for the tender in more than one

form, _e.g._, to ask for a tender in three per cents, pure and simple, and

an alternative in 4 or 5 per cents., with that rate of interest guaranteed

for a certain number of years. Sir Robert Walpole had not to contend with

like difficulties, and I think his administration should be compared with

the _early years_ of Pitt’s, in which way of judging he would come off

second, though a man of cool and sagacious judgment, while morally he

stood low.

French Commercial Treaty. 1860

_Page __66_

_Mr. Gladstone at Leeds, October 8, 1881_:—

I, for my part, look with the deepest interest upon the share that I had

in concluding—I will not say so much in concluding, but in conducting on

this side of the water, and within the walls of parliament as well as in

administration—the proceedings which led to the memorable French treaty of

1860. It is quite true that that treaty did not produce the whole of the

benefits that some too sanguine anticipations may possibly have expected

from it, that it did not produce a universal smash of protective duties,

as I wish it had, throughout the civilised world. But it did something. It

enormously increased the trade between this country and France. It

effectually checked and traversed in the year 1860 tendencies of a very

different kind towards needless alarms and panics, and tendencies towards

convulsions and confusion in Europe. There was no more powerful instrument

for confining and controlling those wayward and angry spirits at that

particular crisis, than the commercial treaty with France. It produced no

inconsiderable effect for a number of years upon the legislation of

various European countries, which tended less decisively than we could

have desired, but still intelligibly and beneficially, in the direction of

freedom of trade.

Lord Aberdeen

_Page __87_

_Mr. Gladstone to Sir Arthur Gordon (Lord Stanmore)_

_Downing Street, April 21, 1861._—MY DEAR ARTHUR,—When, within a few days

after your father’s death, I referred in conversation with you to one or

two points in his character, it was from the impulse of the moment, and

without any idea of making my words matter of record. Months have now

passed since you asked me to put on paper the substance of what I said.

The delay has been partly, perhaps mainly, owing to the pressure of other

demands upon my time and thoughts. But it has also been due to this, that

an instinct similar to that which made me speak, has made me shrink from

writing. It is enough in conversation to give the most partial and hasty

touches, provided they be not in the main untrue. Those same touches when

clothed in a form of greater assumption have but a meagre and

unsatisfactory appearance, and may do even positive injustice. Most of all

in the case of a character which was not only of rare quality, but which

was so remarkable for the fineness of its lights and shadows. But you have

a right to my recollections such as they are, and I will not withhold

them.

I may first refer to the earliest occasion on which I saw him; for it

illustrates a point not unimportant in his history. On an evening in the

month of January 1835, during what is called the short government of Sir

Robert Peel, I was sent for by Sir Robert Peel, and received from him the

offer, which I accepted, of the under-secretaryship of the colonies. From

him I went on to your father, who was then secretary of state in that

department, and who was thus to be, in official home-talk, my master.

Without any apprehension of hurting you, I may confess, that I went in

fear and trembling. [_Then follows the passage already quoted in vol. i.

p. 124._] I was only, I think, for about ten weeks his under-secretary.

But as some men hate those whom they have injured, so others love those

whom they have obliged; and his friendship continued warm and

unintermitting for the subsequent twenty-six years of his life.

Some of his many great qualities adorned him in common with several, or

even with many, other contemporary statesmen: such as clearness of view,

strength of the deliberative faculty, strong sense of duty, deep devotion

to the crown, and the most thorough and uncompromising loyalty to his

friends and colleagues. In this loyalty of intention many, I think, are

not only praiseworthy but perfect. But the loyalty of intention was in him

so assisted by other and distinctive qualities, as to give it a peculiar

efficacy; and any one associated with Lord Aberdeen might always rest

assured that he was safe in his hands. When our law did not allow

prisoners the benefit of counsel, it was commonly said that the judge was

counsel for the prisoner. Lord Aberdeen was always counsel for the absent.

Doubtless he had pondered much upon the law, “Thou shalt love thy

neighbour as thyself.” It had entered profoundly into his being, and

formed a large part of it. He was strong in his self-respect, but his

respect for others, not for this man or that but for other men as men, was

much more conspicuous. Rarely indeed have I heard him utter a word

censuring opponents, or concerning those who actually were or had been

friends, that could have given pain. If and when it was done, it was done

so to speak judicially, upon full and reluctant conviction and with

visible regret.

If I have said that he had much in common with other distinguished men who

were like him statesmen by profession, it has been by way of preface to

what I have now to say; namely, that what has ever struck me in his

character as a whole, was its distinctiveness. There were several mental

virtues that he possessed in a degree very peculiar; there were, I think,

one or two in which he stood almost alone. I am not in myself well

qualified for handling a subject like this, and also my life has been too

hurried to give me the most favourable opportunities. Still I must try to

explain my meaning. I will name then the following characteristics, one

and all of which were more prominent in him than in any public man I ever

knew: mental calmness; the absence (if for want of better words I may

describe it by a negative) of all egoism; the love of exact justice; a

thorough tolerance of spirit; and last and most of all an entire absence

of suspicion.

There was something very remarkable in the combination of these qualities,

as well as in their separate possession. Most men who might be happy

enough to have one half his love of justice, would be so tossed with

storms of indignation at injustice as to lose the balance of their

judgment. But he had or seemed to have all the benefits, all the ennobling

force of strong emotion, with a complete exemption from its dangers. His

mind seemed to move in an atmosphere of chartered tranquillity, which

allowed him the view of every object, however blinding to others, in its

true position and proportion.

It has always appeared to me that the love of justice is one of the rarest

among all good qualities, I mean the love of it with full and commanding

strength. I should almost dare to say there are five generous men to one

just man. The beauty of justice is the beauty of simple form; the beauty

of generosity is heightened with colour and every accessory. The passions

will often ally themselves with generosity, but they always tend to divert

from justice. The man who strongly loves justice must love it for its own

sake, and such a love makes of itself a character of a simple grandeur to

which it is hard to find an equal.

Next to Lord Aberdeen, I think Sir Robert Peel was the most just of the

just men I have had the happiness to know. During the years from 1841 to

1846, when they were respectively foreign secretary and prime minister, as

I was at the board of trade for much of the time, I had occasion to watch

the two in the conduct of several negotiations that involved commercial

interests, such as that on the Stade Dues and that on the project of a

commercial treaty with Portugal. Now and then Sir Robert Peel would show

some degree of unconscious regard to the mere flesh and blood, if I may so

speak, of Englishmen; Lord Aberdeen was invariably for putting the most

liberal construction upon both the conduct and the claims of the other

negotiating state.

There is perhaps no position in this country, in which the love of justice

that I have ascribed in such extraordinary measure to your father, can be

so severely tested, as that very position of foreign minister, with which

his name is so closely associated. Nowhere is a man so constantly and in

such myriad forms tempted to partiality; nowhere can he do more for

justice; but nowhere is it more clear that all human force is inadequate

for its end. A nation is rarely just to other nations. Perhaps it is never

truly just, though sometimes (like individuals) what may be called more

than just. There can be no difficulty in any country, least of all this,

in finding foreign ministers able and willing to assert the fair and

reasonable claims of their countrymen with courage and with firmness. The

difficulty is quite of another kind; it is to find the foreign minister,

first, who will himself view those claims in the dry light both of reason

and of prudence; secondly, and a far harder task, who will have the

courage to hazard, and if need be to sacrifice himself in keeping the mind

of his countrymen down to such claims as are strictly fair and reasonable.

Lord Aberdeen was most happy in being secretary of state for foreign

affairs in the time and in the political company of two such men as the

Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel. He was also happy in the general

prevalence of a spirit of great sobriety in the country, which was

singularly free under the government of Sir Robert Peel, from the opposite

but sometimes associated extremes of wantonness and fear. I am glad to

think that his administration of his department earned a decided public

approval. So just a man will, I think, rarely attain in that department to

the same measure of popularity, while a less just man might easily obtain

one far greater.

To fall short of perfect candour would deprive all I have said of the

little value it can possess, as that little value is all summed up in its

sincerity. On one subject to which my mind has been directed for the last

twelve or fourteen years, I had the misfortune to differ from your father.

I mean the state of Italy and its relation to Austria in particular. I

will not pretend to say that his view of the case of Italy appeared to me

to harmonize with his general mode of estimating human action and

political affairs. It seemed to me as if, called in early youth to deal

with a particular combination of questions which were truly gigantic, his

mind had received from their weight and force at an impressible period, a

fixed form in relation to them, while it ever remained open and elastic in

a peculiar degree upon all others. But my mode of solution for what

appeared to me an anomaly is immaterial. I thankfully record that the

Italian question was almost the only one within my recollection, quite the

only one of practical importance, on which during the twenty-six years I

have named, I was unable to accept his judgment. I bear witness with yet

greater pleasure that, when I returned from Naples in 1851 deeply

impressed with the horrible system that I had witnessed, his opinions on

Italian politics did not prevent his readily undertaking to read the

statement I had drawn, nor his using, when he had read it, more strong

words on the subject, which came from lips like his with such peculiar

force. As readily did he undertake to invoke the aid of the court of

Vienna; to which, if I remember right, he transmitted the statement in

manuscript.

Though I feel that I cannot by any effort do justice to what I have termed

his finely-shaded character, I also feel that I might be drawn onwards to

great length on the subject. I must resist the impulse, but I cannot stop

without saying a word on the quality which I regard as beyond all others

his own, I mean the absence from his nature of all tendency to suspicion.

Those who have read his state papers, and have admired their penetrating

force and comprehensive scope, will not misunderstand me when I say that

he was, in this respect, a little child; not from defect of vision, but

from thorough nobleness of nature.

I do not think it was by effort and self-command that he rid himself of

suspicion. In the simple and strong aim of the man to be good himself, it

belonged to the very strength and simplicity of that aim, that he should

also think others good. I recollect, and I dare say you better recollect,

one of his sayings: “I have a habit of believing people.” To some these

words may not seem to import a peculiarity. But as descriptive of him they

indicate what of all the points of his character seemed to me most

peculiar. I have known one man as free from suspicions as was Lord

Aberdeen, but he was not a politician. I am far from thinking statesmen,

or politicians, less honourable than other men, quite the reverse; but the

habit of their life renders them suspicious. The vicissitudes of politics,

the changes of position, the changes of alliance, the sharp transitions

from co-operation to antagonism, the inevitable contact with revolting

displays of self-seeking and self-love; more than all these perhaps, the

constant habit of forecasting the future and shaping all its contingencies

beforehand, which is eminently the merit and intellectual virtue of the

politician, all these tend to make him, and commonly do make him,

suspicious even of his best friend. This suspicion may be found to exist

in conjunction with regard, with esteem, nay with affection. For it must

be recollected that it is not usually a suspicion of moral delinquency,

but at least as it dwells in the better and higher natures, of

intellectual error only, in some of its numerous forms, or at most of

speaking with a reserve that may be more or less or even wholly

unconscious. None of these explanations are needed for Lord Aberdeen. He

always took words in their direct and simple meaning, and assumed them to

be the index of the mind; and its full index too, so that he did not

speculate to learn what undiscovered residue might still remain in its

dark places. This entire immunity from suspicion, which makes our minds in

general like a haunted place, and the sense of the immunity that he

conveyed to his friends in all his dealings with them, combined with the

deep serenity of his mind, which ever seemed to beguile and allay by some

kindly process of nature excitement in others, gave an indescribable charm

to all intercourse with him in critical and difficult circumstances. Hence

perhaps in great part, and not merely from his intellectual gifts, was

derived the remarkable power he seemed to me to exercise in winning

confidences without seeking to win them; and, on the whole, I believe that

this quality, could we hold it as it was held in him, would save us from

ten erroneous judgments for one into which it might lead. For the grand

characteristic of suspicion after all, as of superstition, is to see

things that are not.

I turn now to another point: Lord Aberdeen was not demonstrative; I do not

suppose he could have been an actor; he was unstudied in speech; and it is

of interest to inquire what it was that gave such extraordinary force and

impressiveness to his language. He did not deal in antithesis. His sayings

were not sharpened with gall. In short, one might go on disclaiming for

him all the accessories to which most men who are impressive owe their

impressiveness. Yet I never knew any one who was so impressive in brief

utterances conveying the sum of the matter....

History has also caught and will hold firmly and well the honoured name of

your father. There was no tarnish upon his reputation more than upon his

character. He will be remembered in connection with great passages of

European policy not only as a man of singularly searching, large, and calm

intelligence, but yet more as the just man, the man that used only true

weights and measures, and ever held even the balance of his ordered mind.

It is no reproach to other statesmen of this or other periods, to say that

scarcely any of them have had a celebrity so entirely unaided by a

transitory glare. But if this be so, it implies that while they for the

most part must relatively lose, he must relatively and greatly gain. If

they have had stage-lights and he has had none, it is the hour when those

lights are extinguished that will for the first time do that justice as

between them which he was too noble, too far aloft in the tone of his

mind, to desire to anticipate. All the qualities and parts in which he was

great were those that are the very foundation-stones of our being; as

foundation-stones they are deep, and as being deep they are withdrawn from

view; but time is their witness and their friend, and in the final

distribution of posthumous fame Lord Aberdeen has nothing to forfeit, he

has only to receive.

I see on perusing what I have written, that in the endeavour to set forth

the virtues and great qualities of your father, I seem more or less to

disparage other men, including even Sir Robert Peel whom he so much

esteemed and loved. I had no such intention, and it is the fault of my

hand, not of my will. He would not have claimed, he would not have wished

nor borne, that others should claim for him superiority, or even parity in

all points with all his contemporaries. But there was a certain region of

character which was, so to speak, all his own; and there other men do seem

more or less dwarfed beside him. In the combination of profound feeling

with a calm of mind equally profound, of thorough penetration with the

largest charity, of the wisdom of the serpent with the harmlessness of the

dove, in the total suppression and exclusion of self from his reckonings

and actions—in all this we may think him supreme, and yet have a broad

array of good and noble qualities in which he may have shared variously

with others. There are other secrets of his character and inner life into

which I do not pretend to have penetrated. It always seemed to me that

there was a treasure-house within him, which he kept closed against the

eyes of men. He is gone. He has done well in his generation. May peace and

light be with him, and may honour and blessing long attend his memory upon

earth.—Believe me, my dear Arthur, affectionately yours, W. E. GLADSTONE.

Cabinet Of 1868-1874

_Page __255_

_First lord of the treasury_, W. E. Gladstone.

_Lord chancellor_, Lord Hatherly (Page Wood).

_President of the council_, Earl de Grey (created Marquis of

Ripon, 1871).

_Lord privy seal_, Earl of Kimberley.

_Chancellor of the exchequer_, Robert Lowe.

_Home secretary_, Henry Austin Bruce.

_Foreign secretary_, Earl of Clarendon.

_Colonial secretary_, Earl Granville.

_War secretary_, Edward Cardwell.

_First lord of the admiralty_, H. C. E. Childers.

_Indian secretary_, Duke of Argyll.

_President of the board of trade_, John Bright.

_Chief secretary for Ireland_, Chichester Fortescue.

_Postmaster general_, Marquis of Hartington.

_President of the poor law board_, George J. Goschen.

On Lord Clarendon’s death in June 1870, Lord Granville became foreign

secretary; Lord Kimberley, colonial secretary; Viscount Halifax (Sir C.

Wood), lord privy seal; and Mr. Forster, vice-president of the privy

council, entered the cabinet.

On Mr. Bright’s resignation in December 1870, Mr. Chichester Fortescue

became president of the board of trade; Lord Hartington succeeded him as

chief secretary for Ireland; Mr. Monsell was appointed postmaster general

without a seat in the cabinet.

On Mr. Childers’s resignation in March 1871, Mr. Goschen became first lord

of the admiralty, and Mr. James Stansfeld president of the poor law board.

In August 1872 Mr. Childers rejoined the cabinet, succeeding Lord Dufferin

as chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster. In October Sir Roundell Palmer

(created Lord Selborne) became lord chancellor on the retirement of Lord

Hatherley.

In August 1873 Lord Ripon and Mr. Childers retired, Mr. Gladstone became

chancellor of the exchequer as well as first lord; Mr. Bright rejoined the

cabinet as chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster; Mr. Lowe became home

secretary and Mr. Bruce (created Lord Aberdare) president of the council.

Irish Church Bill

_Page __276_

_Mr. Gladstone to the Queen_

_July 21, 1869._—Mr. Gladstone presents his humble duty to your Majesty

and reports that the cabinet met at 11 this day, and considered with

anxious care its position and duty in regard to the Irish Church bill. The

vote and declaration of the House of Lords last night were regarded as

fatal if persisted in; and the cabinet deemed it impossible to meet

proceedings of such a character with any tender of further concessions.

The cabinet, however, considered at much length a variety of courses; as

(1) To announce at once that they could no longer, after the vote and

announcement of last night, be responsible for further proceedings in

connection with the bill, but that they would leave it to the majority of

the House of Lords to take such steps as it might think proper; (2) To go

through the whole of the amendments of the bill [_i.e._ in the House of

Lords], and then if they were adversely carried to declare and proceed as

above; (3) To go through not the whole of the amendments but the endowment

amendments, and to conclude that when these had been adversely decided,

they could (as before) assume no further responsibility, but must leave

the matter to the majority to consider; (4) To send the bill back to the

House of Commons with the declaration that it would not be accepted there,

and with the intention of simply moving the House to adhere to its

amendments as last adjusted.

Your Majesty has already been apprized by Mr. Gladstone’s telegram in

cipher of this afternoon, that (under the influence of a strong desire to

exhibit patience, and to leave open every opportunity for

reconsideration), the third of these courses had been adopted; although

there was no doubt that the House of Commons was fully prepared to approve

and sustain the first. Lord Granville deemed it just possible that the

peers might be prepared to give way before another return of the bill from

the House of Commons; and the question therefore was left open whether, if

evidence to this effect should appear, the government should then fall in

with that course of proceeding. Although the government have felt it to be

impossible to make biddings in the face of the opposition, the Archbishop

of Canterbury has been apprised, in strict confidence, of the nature and

extent of the concession, which for the sake of peace they would be

prepared to recommend. Sir R. Palmer is also substantially aware of it,

and has expressed his opinion that on such terms the opposition ought to

be ready to conclude the matter.

Board And Voluntary Schools

_Page __310_

_Mr. Gladstone to M. Bright_

_Aug. 21, 1873._—An appeal to me was made to introduce board schools into

Hawarden on account of my share in the Education Act. I stated the two

views held by different supporters of the Act, respectively on the

question of board schools and voluntary schools. For myself, I said, not

in education only but _in all things including education, I prefer

voluntary to legal machinery, when the thing can be well done either way_.

But this question is not to be decided by a general preference or a

general formula. Parliament has referred it to the choice of the local

communities. They should decide according to the facts of the case before

them. What are the facts in Hawarden? Four-fifths are already provided

for; were it only one-fifth or were it two-fifths the case for the board

(I said) would be overwhelming. But besides the four-fifths, arrangements

are already made for a further provision in a voluntary school. Nothing

remains to be done except to build three _infant_ schools. The voluntary

schools will be governed by a committee, including the churchwardens, and

having a majority of laymen. The machinery of a board is of necessity

cumbrous, and the method costly in comparison. I hold that we ought not to

set up this machinery, in order to create three infant schools, where all

the other wants of some 2000 people are already provided for.

Views On A Classical Education

_Page __312_

_Mr. Gladstone to Lord Lyttelton_

_Penmaenmawr, Aug. 29, 1861._—-Thanks for the brief notice which you

recently took of the Public Schools Commission. I was heartily glad to

hear that you had formed a drastic set of questions. I take the deepest

interest in the object of the commission, and I have full confidence in

its members and organs; and at all times I shall be very glad to hear what

you are doing. Meantime I cannot help giving you, to be taken for what it

is worth, the sum of my own thoughts upon the subject.... The _low_

utilitarian argument in matter of education, for giving it what is termed

a practical direction, is so plausible that I think we may on the whole be

thankful that the instincts of the country have resisted what in argument

it has been ill able to confute. We still hold by the classical training

as the basis of a liberal education; parents dispose of their children in

early youth accordingly; but if they were asked why they did so, it is

probable they would give lamentably weak or unworthy reasons for it, such

for example as that the public schools and universities open the way to

desirable acquaintance and what is termed “good society.” Your commission

will not I presume be able to pass by this question, but will have to look

it in the face; and to proceed either upon a distinct affirmative, or a

substantial negative, of the proposition that the classical training is

the proper basis of a liberal education. I hope you will hold by

affirmation and reject negation.

But the reason why I trouble you upon the subject is this, that I think

the friends of this principle have usually rather blinked the discussion,

and have been content with making terms of compromise by way of buying off

the adversary, which might be in themselves reasonable unless they were

taken as mere instalments of a transaction intended in the long run to

swallow up the principle itself. What I feel is that the relation of pure

science, natural science, modern languages, modern history, and the rest

of the old classical training ought to be founded on a principle and ought

not to be treated simply as importunate creditors, that take a shilling in

the £ to-day, because they hope to get another shilling to-morrow, and in

the meantime have a recognition of their title. This recognition of title

is just what I would refuse. I deny their right to a parallel or equal

position; their true position is auxiliary, and as auxiliary it ought to

be limited and restrained without scruple, as a regard to the paramount

matter of education may dictate.

But why after all is the classical training paramount? Is it because we

find it established? because it improves memory or taste, or gives

precision, or develops the faculty of speech? All these are but partial

and fragmentary statements, so many narrow glimpses of a great and

comprehensive truth. That truth I take to be that the modern European

civilisation from the middle age downwards is the compound of two great

factors, the Christian religion for the spirit of man, and the Greek, and

in a secondary degree the Roman discipline for his mind and intellect. St.

Paul is the apostle of the Gentiles, and is in his own person a symbol of

this great wedding—the place, for example, of Aristotle and Plato in

Christian education is not arbitrary nor in principle mutable. The

materials of what we call classical training were prepared, and we have a

right to say were advisedly prepared, in order that it might become not a

mere adjunct but (in mathematical phrase) the complement of Christianity

in its application to the culture of the human being formed both for this

world and for the world to come.

If this principle be true it is broad and high and clear enough, and

supplies a key to all questions connected with the relation between the

classical training of our youth and all other branches of their secular

education. It must of course be kept within its proper place, and duly

limited as to things and persons. It can only apply in full to that small

proportion of the youth of any country, who are to become in the fullest

sense educated men. It involves no extravagant or inconvenient assumptions

respecting those who are to be educated for trades and professions in

which the necessities of specific training must limit general culture. It

leaves open every question turning upon individual aptitudes and

inaptitudes and by no means requires that boys without a capacity for

imbibing any of the spirit of classical culture are still to be

mechanically plied with the instruments of it after their unfitness has

become manifest. But it lays down the rule of education for those who have

no internal and no external disqualification; and that rule, becoming a

fixed and central point in the system, becomes also the point around which

all others may be grouped.

_Mr. Gladstone to Sir S. Northcote_

_Nov. 12, 1861._—The letter I wrote to Lyttelton about the classical

education suggested topics, which as you justly perceive are altogether

esoteric. They have never to my knowledge been carefully worked out, and I

think they well deserve it; but clearly your report is not the place. I

will not say you are not prudent in suggesting that you should not even

give an opinion upon the great question: What is the true place of the old

classical learning in the human culture of the nineteenth century? I am

far from venturing to say the contrary. But one thing I do think, namely,

that it is desirable that, as far as may be, the members of the commission

should have some answer to that question in their minds, and should write

their report with reference to it. For centuries, through the lifetime of

our great schools this classical culture has been made the _lapis

angularis_ of all secular culture of the highest class. Was this right or

was it wrong, aye or no? I think it much to be desired that the commission

should, if they will, proceed upon the affirmative or negative of that

proposition, and should also make their choice for the former. This would

be a long note to their report; but it need not be distinctly and

separately heard in it. Such is my notion. As to particulars I have little

to say that is worth hearing; but I think these three things. First, that

we give much too little scope for deviation from what I think the normal

standard to other and useful branches, when it has become evident that the

normal standard is inapplicable; just as was the case in Oxford before the

reform of the examinations, or let me rather say the new statutes.

Secondly, I am extremely jealous of any invasion of modern languages which

is to displace classical culture, or any portion of it in minds capable of

following that walk. (I take it that among the usual modern tongues

Italian has by far the greatest capacity for strict study and scholarship;

whereas it is the one least in favour and the whole method of dealing with

them is quite alien to strict study.) Lastly, I confess I grieve over the

ignorance of natural history which I feel in myself and believe to exist

in others. At some time, in some way, much more of all this ought to be

brought in, but clearly it would serve in a great degree as recreation,

and need not thrust aside whatever hard work boys are capable of doing.

Position Of The Commander-In-Chief In Parliament

_Page __362_

_Mr. Gladstone to the Queen_

_July 8, 1871._—Mr. Gladstone believes that according to precedent the

commander-in-chief, when a peer, has not shrunk from giving his opinion on

measures submitted to the House of Lords. In 1847, the government of that

day introduced the Short Service bill, of which on the merits it is

believed that the Duke of Wellington, then commander-in-chief, did not

approve. Indeed he expressed in debate on April 26th, 1847, his doubts

whether the measure would produce the advantages which were anticipated

from it; nevertheless, while having no political connection with the

government, he spoke and voted in a division for the bill. It is probable,

as the numbers were only 108 to 94, that his speech and vote alone carried

the bill. Your Majesty will not fail to bear in mind that until 1855,

there was always a very high military authority who was in political

connection with the government, namely, the master of the ordnance.

Indeed, unless Mr. Gladstone’s recollection deceives him, Lord Beresford

was required by the Duke of Wellington in 1829, as master of the ordnance,

to support the Roman Catholic Relief bill. And it is still regretted by

many that ministries have not since comprehended any such officer. All

question, however, as to the political support of a ministry by the

military chiefs of the army is now at an end.

A Soldier At The War Office

_Page __363_

_Mr. Gladstone to Mr. Cardwell_

_Jan. 5, 1871._—It was a great advantage before 1854, that there was

always a considerable soldier either in the cabinet or at least at the

head of an important military department, and politically associated with

the government. This we lost by the crude and ill-advised reconstructions

of ’55. But you, following in this point a wise initiative of your

predecessor, have endeavoured to bring the appointment of Sir H. Storks

into a position which makes it probably the best substitute for the former

plan that can be had at present. The demand that a soldier shall be

appointed at the present time would hold good _a fortiori_ for all periods

of greater emergency. I know not where that principle has been admitted in

our military administration. If we have committed gross errors, it has

been owing to an excess much more than to a defect of professional

influence and counsel. In my opinion the qualities of a good administrator

and statesman go to make a good war minister, especially at this juncture,

far more than those of a good soldier. Show me the soldier who has those

equally with you, and then let him take your place as S.S. But not till

then. You were chosen for your office, not because you would do tolerably

for easy times, and then could walk out, but because you were the best man

the party could supply for the post. The reproaches aimed at you now are

merely aimed at the government through you, and you are chosen to be the

point of attack because the nation is sore on military matters in times of

crisis, and the press which ought to check excitement, by most of its

instruments ministers to its increase. You find yourself unable to suggest

a successor; and I have seen no plan that would not weaken the government

instead of strengthening it. You see what eulogies have been passed on

Bright, now he is gone. You would rise in the market with many after

resigning, to depreciate those who remain behind; but as I have said, you

would not be allowed to have had a legitimate cause of going, and as far

as my observation goes, retirements are quite as critically judged as

acceptances of office, perhaps more so. What is really to be desired, is

that we should get Storks into parliament if possible.

Mr. Gladstone’s Financial Legacy, 1869

_Page __372_

_Mr. Gladstone to Mr. Lowe_

_Hawarden, Jan. 9, 1869._—I have referred to my list of remnants; and I

will begin with those that I tried in parliament and failed in: 1.

Collection of taxes by Queen’s officers instead of local officers. 2.

Taxation of charities. 3. Bill for restraining, with a view to ultimately

abolishing, the circulation of the notes of private banks. 4. Plan for

bringing the chancery and other judicial accounts under the control of

parliament. Here I had a commission (on chancery accounts) but did not

dare to go farther.

The following are subjects which I was not able to take in hand:—

1. Abolition of the remaining duty upon corn; an exceeding strong case. 2.

I should be much disposed to abolish the tea licences as greatly

restrictive of the consumption of a dutiable and useful commodity. I

modified them; but am not sure that this was enough. The B.I.R. could

throw light on this subject. 3. The probate duty calls, I fear, loudly for

change; but I wanted either time or courage to take it in hand. 4. The

remaining conveyance duties, apart from railways, I always considered as

marked for extinction. On this subject Mr. Ayrton has rather decided

antecedents. 5. The fire insurance duty is sure to be further assailed.

Though not as bad (relatively to other taxes) as is supposed, it is bad

enough to be very hard to defend in an adverse House; and this is one of

the questions on which it is not likely that the opposition will help to

see fair play. The promises that liberal reduction will lead to recovery

of anything like the old or previous revenue have always been confidently

pressed by irresponsible men, and are in my opinion illusory. The tax is a

tax on property: and, as we have too few of these rather than too many,

what would seem desirable is to commute it; leaving no more than a penny

stamp on the policy. This might perhaps be done, if it were made part of a

large budget. 6. The income-tax at 6d., I suppose, presents a forward

claim. 7. The commutation of malt duty for beer duty must always, I

presume, be spoken of with respect; but the working objections to it have

thus far been found too hard to deal with.

There is always room in detail for amendments of stamp duties, but the

great case as among them is the probate. They are of a class which,

without any legal knowledge, I found very hard to work through the House

of Commons. I do not look upon the Act of 1844 as the _end_ of legislation

in currency; but this subject is a big one. Scotch and Irish notes would

be hard to deal with until the English case is disposed of. I forget

whether we have abolished the last of the restrictions on newspapers. If

not, they deserve to be taken in hand, according to me. I have always

wished to equalise the outgoings of the exchequer as much as possible over

the several weeks of the year. Few incomes admit of this advantage in the

same degree as the public income. It would make our “account” much more

valuable to our bankers; therefore to us.

These, I think, were the main matters which lay more or less in

perspective before me. I must add that I am strongly in favour of paying

off the national debt, not only by annual surpluses, but by terminable

annuities _sold to the national debt commissioners for securities held by

them against deposit monies_. The opponents of this plan were Mr. Hubbard

and Mr. Laing. I am satisfied that neither of them had taken the trouble,

and it requires some trouble, to understand it. I admit them to be no mean

authorities. Terminable annuities sold to others than yourself are quite

another matter. I got into the law some power of this kind over post

office savings bank monies to be exercised by the chancellor of the

exchequer from time to time.

This is all I need trouble you with, and I have endeavoured to keep clear

of all idiosyncratic propositions as much as in me lies. Of course such a

letter calls for no answer. As this legacy opinion to you takes the form

of a donation _inter vivos_ it will, I hope, escape duty.

Prince Albert, 1854

_Page __426_

Mr. Gladstone wrote an elaborate article in the _Morning Chronicle_ (Jan.

16, 1854) warmly defending the court against attacks that had clouded the

popularity of the Prince Consort. They came to little more than that the

Prince attended meetings of the privy council; that he was present when

the Queen gave an audience to a minister; that he thwarted ministerial

counsels and gave them an un-English character; that in corresponding with

relatives abroad he used English influence apart from the Queen’s

advisers. Mr. Gladstone had no great difficulty in showing how little this

was worth, either as fact supported by evidence, or as principle supported

by the fitness of things; and he put himself on the right ground. “We do

not raise the question whether, if the minister thinks it right to

communicate with the sovereign alone, he is not entitled to a private

audience. But we unhesitatingly assert that if the Prince is present when

the Queen confers with her advisers, and if his presence is found to be

disadvantageous to the public interests, we are not left without a remedy;

for the minister is as distinctly responsible for those interests in this

as in any other matter, and he is bound on his responsibility to

parliament, to decline compliance even with a personal wish of the

sovereign when he believes that his assent would be injurious to the

country.”

Parliamentary Crises

_Page __451_

_Extract from Mr. Gladstone’s letter to the Queen, March 15, 1873_

There have been within that period [1830-1873] twelve of what may be

properly called parliamentary crises involving the question of a change of

government. In nine of the twelve cases (viz., those of 1830, 1835, 1841,

1846, 1852, 1858, 1859, 1866, and 1868), the party which had been in

opposition was ready to take, and did take, office. In the other three it

failed to do this (viz., in 1832, 1851, 1855), and the old ministry or a

modification of it returned to power. But in each of these three cases the

attempt of the opposition to form a government was not relinquished until

after such efforts had been made by its leaders to carry the conviction to

the world that all its available means of action were exhausted; and there

is no instance on record during the whole period (or indeed so far as Mr.

Gladstone remembers at an earlier date) in which a summary refusal given

on the instant by the leader was tendered as sufficient to release the

opposition from the obligations it had incurred. This is the more

remarkable because in two of the three instances the opposition had not,

in the same mode or degree as on Wednesday morning last, contributed by

concerted action to bring about the crisis. On the 7th of May 1832 the

opposition of the day carried in the House of Lords a motion which went

only to alter the order of the opening (and doubtless very important)

clauses of the Reform bill, but which the government of Lord Grey deemed

fatal to the integrity of the measure. Their resignation was announced,

and Lord Lyndhurst was summoned to advise King William iv. on the 9th of

May. On the 12th the Duke of Wellington was called to take a share in the

proceedings, the details of which are matters of history. It was only on

the 15th that the Duke and Lord Lyndhurst found their resources at an end,

when Lord Grey was again sent for, and on the 17th the Duke announced in

the House of Lords his abandonment of the task he had strenuously

endeavoured to fulfil. On the 20th February 1851 the government of Lord

Russell was defeated in the House of Commons on Mr. Locke King’s bill for

the enlargement of the county franchise by a majority composed of its own

supporters. Lord Derby, then Lord Stanley, being sent for by your Majesty

on the 22nd, observed that there were at the time three parties in the

House of Commons and that the ministry had never yet been defeated by his

political friends. He therefore counselled your Majesty to ascertain

whether the government of Lord Russell could not be strengthened by a

partial reconstruction, and failing that measure he engaged to use his own

best efforts to form an administration. That attempt at reconstruction (to

which nothing similar is now in question) did fail, and Lord Derby was

therefore summoned by your Majesty on the 25th, and at once applied

himself, as is well known, to every measure which seemed to give him a

hope of success in constructing a government. On the 27th he apprised your

Majesty of his failure in these efforts; and on March 3rd the cabinet of

Lord Russell returned to office. (This recital is founded on Lord Derby’s

statement in the House of Lords, Feb. 28, 1851.) On Jan. 29, 1855, the

government of Lord Aberdeen was defeated in the House of Commons on a

motion made by an independent member of their own party and supported by

twenty-five of the liberal members present. Though this defeat resembles

the one last named in that it cannot be said to be due to the concerted

action of the opposition as a party, Lord Derby, being summoned by your

Majesty on the 1st of Feb. proceeded to examine and ascertain in every

quarter the means likely to be at his disposal for rendering assistance in

the exigency, and it was not until Feb. 3 that he receded from his

endeavours.

Cabinet Of 1880-1885

_Page __630_

_First lord of the treasury, chancellor of the exchequer_, W. E.

Gladstone.

_Lord chancellor_, Lord Selborne.

_President of the council_, Earl Spencer.

_Lord privy seal_, Duke of Argyll.

_Home secretary_, Sir W. V. Harcourt.

_Foreign secretary_, Earl Granville.

_Colonial secretary_, Earl of Kimberley.

_War secretary_, H. C. E. Childers.

_First lord of the admiralty_, Earl of Northbrook.

_Indian secretary_, Marquis of Hartington.

_President of the board of trade_, Joseph Chamberlain.

_Chief secretary for Ireland_, W. E. Forster.

_Chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster_, John Bright.

_President of the local government board_, J. G. Dodson.

On the resignation of the Duke of Argyll, April 1881, Lord Carlingford

(Mr. Chichester Fortescue) became lord privy seal.

In May 1882, Earl Spencer became lord-lieutenant of Ireland. On Mr.

Forster’s resignation he was succeeded by Lord Frederick Cavendish, and

then by Mr. G. O. Trevelyan, neither of whom had a seat in the cabinet.

On the resignation of Mr. Bright in July 1882, Mr. Dodson became

chancellor of the duchy, and Sir Charles Dilke president of the local

government board.

In December 1882, Mr. Gladstone resigned the chancellorship of the

exchequer to Mr. Childers; Lord Hartington became war secretary; Lord

Kimberley, Indian secretary, and Lord Derby colonial secretary.

In March 1883, Lord Carlingford succeeded Earl Spencer as president of the

council.

In October 1884, Mr. Trevelyan succeeded Mr. Dodson as chancellor of the

duchy (with the cabinet), Mr. Campbell-Bannerman becoming Irish secretary

without a seat in the cabinet.

In February 1885, Lord Rosebery, first commissioner of works, succeeded

Lord Carlingford as lord privy seal (with the cabinet) [Lord Carlingford

had also been president of the council from March 1883 in succession to

Lord Spencer], and Mr. Shaw-Lefevre, postmaster-general, entered the

cabinet.

CHRONOLOGY

All speeches unless otherwise stated were made in the House of Commons.

1860.

Jan. 25. Defends good understanding with France.

Feb. 10. Introduces budget.

Feb. 20. Replies to criticisms on commercial treaty.

Feb. 24. Defends his financial proposals.

Feb. 27. Defends proposed reduction of duty on foreign wines.

March 5. Explains objects of Savings Banks bill.

March 9. Defends commercial treaty.

March 12. On Paper Duty Repeal bill.

March 26. On Refreshment Houses and Wine Licences bill.

April 16. Inaugural address before University of Edinburgh on the Work of

Universities.

May 3. In support of Representation of the People bill.

May 8. On Paper Duty Repeal bill.

July 5 and 17. Protests against interference of House of Lords with supply

bills.

Aug. 6. Defends reduction of Customs Duty on paper.

Nov. 8. At Chester on the volunteer movement.

1861.

Feb. 8. Explains provisions of Post Office Savings Bank bill.

Feb. 19. Opposes inquiry into income-tax.

Feb. 21. Introduces Bank of England Payments bill.

Feb. 27. Opposes bill for abolishing church rates.

March 4. Explains provisions of Consolidated Fund and Exchequer Bills Act.

March 7. Defends the government’s Italian policy.

March 14. On Chinese war expenditure.

April 15. Introduces budget.

April 29. Replies to criticisms on financial proposals.

May 2. Moves continuance of tea and sugar duties.

May 6. Announces decision to embody all financial proposals in a single

bill.

May 7. Defends his acts as lord high commissioner of Ionian Islands.

May 16 and 30. On second reading of Customs and Inland Revenue bill.

July 12. Opposes third reading of Universities Elections bill.

July 19. On misgovernment of Italy.

Oct. 10. At Liverpool on the Pursuit of Science.

Nov. 27. At Willis’s Room, London, on the Christian aspect of education.

Publishes _Translations by Lord Lyttelton and the Right Hon. W. E.

Gladstone_.

1862.

Jan. 11. At Edinburgh on American Civil War and results of French treaty.

April 3. Introduces budget.

April 7. Replies to criticisms on budget.

April 10. Defends proposed brewers’ licences.

April 11. Defends government’s Italian policy.

April 23. At Manchester on value of competitive examinations and the death

of Prince Albert.

April 24. At Manchester condemns extravagance in public expenditure.

May 8. Replies to criticisms of Sir S. Northcote on his financial

proposals.

May 13. Defends principles on which income-tax is levied.

May 16. In favour of economy.

June 16. At Archbishop Tenison’s grammar school on middle class education.

July 26. Pays tribute to Sir Hugh Myddelton at inauguration of his statue

on Islington Green.

Aug. 1. Opposes Night Poaching Prevention bill.

Sept. 24. On agriculture at Mold.

Oct. 7. At Newcastle-on-Tyne on the American Civil War and French treaty.

Oct. 8. Makes a tour of inspection of the Tyne.

Oct. 9. At Sunderland on government’s foreign policy.

At Middlesborough on commercial and social progress.

Oct. 10. At York on America and Italy.

Oct. 22. At Wrexham on minor railways.

Dec. 27. At Chester on distress in Lancashire.

1863.

Jan. 5. At Hawarden on his visit to Sicily, 1838.

Feb. 13. Explains provisions of Post Office Savings Bank bill.

March 4. Supports Qualification for Office Abolition bill.

April 15. Supports Burials bill.

April 16. Introduces budget.

April 23. Opposes levying income-tax on precarious incomes at a lower

scale than on permanent.

May 4. Receives deputation protesting against income-tax on charity trust

funds. Defends the proposal in debate.

May 8. Defends government’s Italian policy.

May 12. On condition of Ionian Islands.

May 29. On Turkey and her dependencies.

June 9. On relaxation of the Act of Uniformity.

June 12. On the condition of Ireland.

June 30. Opposes recognition of the Southern Confederacy.

July 20. On condition of Poland.

July 24. On petition for abolition of tests at Oxford.

Oct. 26. Lays foundation stone of Wedgwood Memorial Institute at Burslem.

1864.

Jan. 4. At Buckley on thrift.

Feb. 4. On Schleswig-Holstein question.

Feb. 8. On his bill for regulating collection of taxes.

Feb. 11. Introduces Bank Act (Scotland) bill.

Feb. 26. On taxation of Ireland.

March 7. Defends provisions of Government Annuity bill.

March 16. Receives deputation of London Trades Council on Annuity bill.

March 16. In support of bill abolishing tests for degrees at Oxford.

March 18. On cession of Ionian Islands to Greece.

April 7. Introduces budget.

April 21. On departure of General Garibaldi from England.

May 6. On English public school education.

May 10. On direct and indirect taxation.

May 11. On Mr. Baines’s bill for the extension of the suffrage in towns.

July 3. On the Roman question.

July 4. Replies to Mr. Disraeli’s resolution of censure on

Schleswig-Holstein.

Oct. 11. At Bolton on progress of the past thirty years.

Oct. 12. Opens Farnworth Park, Bolton: on the factory system and open

spaces. At town hall, Liverpool, on principles of colonial and foreign

policy.

Oct. 13. At Liverpool on direct and indirect taxation.

Oct. 14. At Manchester appeals to the nation to protest against

extravagant expenditure. Distributes prizes at Manchester to competitors

in Oxford middle-class examinations: on older and newer pursuits of

Christian civilisation.

Nov. 7. Closes the North London Industrial Exhibition.

Nov. 8. In praise of law and lawyers at banquet to M. Berryer.

Nov. 10. Commends volunteer movement at dinner of volunteers of the St.

Martin’s division.

Dec. 30. At Mold on our coal resources.

1865.

Feb. 10. Explains provisions of Bank of Issue bill.

Feb. 14. Announces appointment of commission on railways.

Feb. 24. On state of Ireland.

March 28. On Irish church establishment.

April 7. On Irish railway system.

April 27. Introduces budget.

May 31. At Chester on liberal principles and parliamentary reform.

June 14. Opposes Mr. Goschen’s bill for abolition of tests at Oxford.

June 15. Explains provisions of Exchequer and Public Audit bill.

June 20. On Irish university education.

July 18. Defeated at Oxford university,—Sir William Heathcote, 3236; Mr.

Gathorne Hardy, 1904; Mr. Gladstone, 1724. At free trade hall, Manchester.

In the evening, at St. George’s hall, Liverpool, replies to Mr. Disraeli’s

attack on his finance.

July 22. Elected for South Lancashire,—Egerton, 9171; Turner, 8806;

Gladstone, 8786; Legh, 8476; Thompson, 7703; Heywood, 7653.

July 27 to Aug. 7. Correspondence with Lord Malmesbury on responsibility

for Chinese expedition of 1860.

Oct. 18. Tribute to memory of the Duke of Newcastle at Shire Oaks, Notts.

Nov. 1. Presented with address by Parliamentary Reform Union, in trades

hall, Glasgow. Presented with freedom of the city in city hall: on

increase of commerce and decrease of wars. In Scotia hall on results of

free trade, a cheap press, and social legislation.

Nov. 3. Delivers valedictory address before Edinburgh University on ’The

Place of Ancient Greece in the Providential Order of the World.’

1866.

Feb. 8. On the condition of Ireland.

Feb. 9. Introduces bill to consolidate the duties of exchequer and audit

departments.

Feb. 17. Defends suspension of Habeas Corpus Act in Ireland.

Feb. 22. Tribute to memory of Lord Palmerston.

Feb. 23. On Fenianism in America.

Feb. 26. On economy in public expenditure.

March 2. Brings in bill consolidating laws regulating the preparation,

issue, and payment of exchequer bills.

March 7. Suggests compromise for settling church rate question.

March 12. Explains provisions of Representation of the People bill.

April 5. At Liverpool replies to Mr. Lowe’s criticisms of the Reform bill.

April 6. On reform at the Amphitheatre, Liverpool.

April 12. Moves second reading of Reform bill.

April 27. Closes debate on Earl Grosvenor’s amendment to Reform bill.

May 3. Introduces budget.

May 7. Brings in Redistribution of Seats bill.

May 8. Brings in Compulsory Church Rate Abolition bill.

May 24. Explains provisions of Terminable Annuities bill.

June 11. On the state of Europe; Austro-Prussian question, etc.

June 15. Tribute to Mr. Hume.

June 18. Moves second reading of Church Rates bill.

June 18. Opposes Lord Dunkellin’s amendment substituting rateable for

rental for borough franchise.

June 26. Announces resignation of Lord Russell’s government.

July 16. On the Queen’s Universities, Ireland.

July 20. On the state of Europe and the Italian policy of Lord

Palmerston’s government.

July 21. At inaugural meeting of Cobden Club; tribute to work of Mr.

Cobden.

Aug. 2. Supports renewal of Habeas Corpus Suspension Act.

Sept. 7. At Salisbury in defence of Reform bill and on Lord Herbert.

Oct. to Jan. In Rome.

1867.

Jan. 27. Speech in praise of free trade at dinner of Society of Political

Economy, Paris.

Feb. 5. On the question of reform.

Feb. 11. On the government’s intention of proceeding by way of

resolutions.

Feb. 15. On the condition of Crete.

Feb. 27. Supports bill enabling Roman catholics to hold office of lord

lieutenant of Ireland.

March 18. Criticises provisions of the Reform bill.

March 20. On Church Rates Abolition bill.

March 21. Meeting of 278 liberal members; advises agreement to second

reading of Reform bill.

March 21. On bill to repeal the Ecclesiastical Titles Act.

March 25. Criticises Reform bill on second reading.

March 28. On England’s share in the defence of the colonies.

April 4. On Mr. Disraeli’s financial statement.

April 10. On abolition of religious tests at Oxford.

April 11, 12. Moves amendment making personal payment of rates not an

essential qualification for the franchise.

April 18. Letter to Mr. R. W. Crawford announcing intention not to attempt

further alteration in basis of borough franchise.

May 3. On right of public meeting in parks and open spaces.

May 7. On Irish church establishment.

May 9. On “compound householders.”

May 11. Receives deputation from National Reform Union to express

confidence in his leadership.

May 13. On Scotch Reform bill.

May 16. Defends policy of reduction of national debt.

May 28. On inconsistency of the government on reform.

May 29. On Mr. Fawcett’s Uniformity Act Amendment bill.

May 30. On penalties for corrupt practices at elections.

May 31. On late ministry’s action regarding Queen’s Universities, Ireland.

June 28. On representation of Ireland.

July 10. On Mr. H. A. Bruce’s Education bill.

Aug. 1. On Irish railways.

Aug. 8. Opposes Lords’ minority representation amendment to Reform bill.

Oct. “The Session and its Sequel” in _Edinburgh Review_.

Nov. 10. On Abyssinian campaign, protests against territorial

aggrandisement.

Nov. 26. On Abyssinian expedition.

Nov. 28. On financial proposals to meet expenses of Abyssinian war.

Dec. 18. At Oldham on national prosperity and the condition of Ireland.

Opens Mechanics’ Institute at Werneth: on education. Distributes prizes to

science and art students, Oldham: on education, machinery, and foreign

competition.

Dec. 19. At Ormskirk on Reform bill. At Southport on Fenianism and the

condition of Ireland.

1868.

Jan. “Phœnicia and Greece” in _Quarterly_.

Feb. 3. At Hawarden on Sir Walter Scott.

Feb. 18. To deputation from London Trades Unions on labour questions.

March 6. On _Alabama_ claims.

March 16. Declares for disestablishment of Irish church.

March 19. On Compulsory Church Rates Abolition bill.

March 23. Gives notice of three resolutions on Irish church establishment.

March 30. In support of his resolutions.

April 3. Replies to Mr. Disraeli’s criticisms.

April 30. Replies to criticisms of first resolution.

May 4. Protests against intention to dissolve parliament.

May 7. Moves second and third resolutions on Irish church.

May 22. On Suspensory bill.

June 9, July 26. On proposal to purchase the telegraph system.

June 25. Replies to Mr. Disraeli’s attack on foreign policy of Lord

Russell’s ministry.

July 2. Seconds vote of thanks to army on conclusion of Abyssinian war.

July 4. Presides at meeting of Social Science Association: on relations of

capital and labour.

July 22. At Romsey on England’s duty to Ireland.

July 27. Tribute to memory of Lord Brougham.

Aug. 5. At St. Helens on disestablishment of Irish church.

Oct. 9. Issues election address to S.-W. Lancashire.

Oct. 12. At Warrington on retrenchment of public expenditure and the Irish

church.

Oct. 14. At Liverpool on tory Reform bill and Irish church.

Oct. 16. At Old Swan, Liverpool, on conservative party as party of

monopoly.

Oct. 17. At Newton criticises proposals for reforming Irish church.

Oct. 20. At Leigh on retrenchment and Ireland.

Oct. 21. At Ormskirk on English and Irish church establishments. At

Southport on finance and Ireland.

Oct. 23. At Wigan on Irish church.

Nov. 13. At Bootle replies to personal calumnies, and on ritualism.

Nov. 14. At Garston on condition of conservative party. At Wavertree on

Irish church.

Nov. 16. At Widnes on national expenditure. At St. Helens on Ireland.

Nov. 17. Elected for Greenwich,—Salomons, 6645; Gladstone, 6351; Parker,

4661; Mahon, 4342.

Nov. 18. At Preston on Irish church.

Nov. 23. _A Chapter of Autobiography_ published.

Nov. 24. Defeated in S.-W. Lancashire,—Cross, 7729; Turner, 7676;

Gladstone, 7415; Grenfell, 6939.

Dec. 9. First ministry formed.

Dec. 21. Returned unopposed for Greenwich: on the liberal programme.

Articles on _Ecce Homo_ published volume form.

1869.

Feb. 11. At Fishmongers’ hall on work before liberal government.

March 1. Introduces bill for disestablishment of Irish church.

March 23. Closes debate on second reading of Irish Church bill.

April 15. Replies to criticisms of Irish Church bill.

May 31. On third reading of Irish Church bill.

June 29. Defends change of opinion on university tests.

July 15, 16. Moves rejection of Lords’ amendments to Irish Church bill.

July 20. Supports Mr. Chambers’s Marriage with a Deceased Wife’s Sister

bill.

July 23. Moves to agree to final amendments of Lords.

Aug. 5. Explains Bishops’ Resignation bill.

Publishes _Juventus Mundi, The Gods and Men of the Heroic Age_.

1870

Feb. 8. On condition of Ireland.

Feb. 15. Brings in Irish Land bill.

March 1. On state-aided emigration to British colonies.

March 11. On second reading of Irish Land bill.

March 18. On Elementary Education bill.

March 22. On Peace Preservation (Ireland) bill.

April 1. On position of Trinity College, Dublin.

April 4. Opposes Mr. Disraeli’s amendment to clause 3 of Irish Land bill.

April 5. Opposes payment of members.

April 11. Moves for committee to inquire into law regarding corrupt

practices.

April 26. On his principles of colonial policy.

April 27. In support of Marriage with a Deceased Wife’s Sister bill.

May 10. On Indian opium revenue.

May 23. In support of University Tests bill.

May 24. Opposes motion in favour of disestablishing church of England in

Wales.

May 30. On third reading of Irish Land bill.

June 15. In support of bill abolishing minority representation.

June 16 and 24. On Elementary Education bill.

June 21. In favour of presence of bishops in House of Lords.

June 30. On conscience clause in Education bill. On religious teaching in

elementary schools.

July 14. Defends vote by ballot in Education bill.

July 22. Replies to reproaches from Mr. Miall and Mr. Dixon on Education

bill.

July 27. Supports second reading of Ballot bill.

Aug. 1. On Franco-German war and neutrality of Belgium.

Aug. 10. On treaty guaranteeing independence and neutrality of Belgium.

Oct. “Germany, France, and England” in _Edinburgh Review_.

Nov. 1. Closes Workman’s International Exhibition, Islington: on benefit

to English commerce of foreign competition.

Nov. 9. At Lord Mayor’s banquet on Franco-German war.

1871.

Feb. 9. Replies to Mr. Disraeli’s criticisms of government’s foreign

policy.

Feb. 10. On University Tests bill.

Feb. 13. Defends Princess Louise’s dowry and annuity.

Feb. 17. Defends the government’s foreign policy.

Feb. 24. Replies to Mr. Disraeli’s attack on his interpretation of treaty

of Paris (1856).

March 2. On appointment of committee to inquire into Ribandism in West

Meath.

March 17. Replies to criticisms on Mr. Cardwell’s Army Regulation bill.

March 23. On Mr. Mundella’s motion that army might be made efficient

without increasing estimates.

March 29. On Parochial Councils bill.

March 31. Explains policy during Franco-German war.

April A poem on “An infant who was born, was baptized, and died on the

same day,” in _Good Words_.

April 18. On dismissal of Sir Spencer Robinson.

April 24. Defends moderate increase of public expenditure under his

government.

May 1. Defends modification in budget.

May 3. On Mr. Jacob Bright’s bill granting parliamentary suffrage to

single women.

May 4. Defends principle of reduction of national debt.

May 9. Opposes motion for disestablishment of the church of England.

May 26. On Protection of Life (Ireland) bill.

June 29. On Ballot bill.

July 3. On third reading of Army Regulation bill.

July 20. Announces abolition of purchase by royal warrant.

July 31. Proposes annuity of £15,000 for Prince Arthur.

Aug. 2. On Mr. Fawcett’s Trinity College, Dublin, bill.

Aug. 4. On treaty of Washington.

Aug. 8. On obstruction to Ballot bill.

Aug. 15. Defends abolition of purchase.

Sept. 2. At Whitby on the Ballot bill.

Sept. 26. Presented with freedom of Aberdeen: on Irish agitation for home

rule.

Oct. 23. At Blackheath Common on the policy of government.

1872.

Feb. 6. Replies to Mr. Disraeli’s criticisms on Address.

Feb. 7. Replies to the criticisms of treaty of Washington.

Feb. 8. Moves vote of thanks to Speaker Denison on retirement.

Feb. 9. On office of speaker.

Feb. 19. Defends appointment of Sir R. Collier.

March 8. Defends appointment of Mr. Harvey to Ewelme.

March 19. Replies to Sir Charles Dilke’s motion for inquiry into Civil

List.

March 20, April 25. On University of Dublin (Tests) bill.

April 12. On England’s treaty obligations for intervention in affairs of

foreign states.

April 26. On motion for extending rural franchise.

May 2. On the demand for home rule.

May 13. On United States indirect claims.

May 14. At King’s College, London, in favour of positive religious

teaching.

June 14. On denunciation by France of treaty of commerce.

June 25. On proposal to annex Fiji Islands.

June 28. On Lords’ amendment to Ballot bill making its adoption optional.

July 2. Opposes inquiry into revenues of church of England.