MR. GLADSTONE'S LETTERS.
'Hawarden,
'_July_ 2, 1886.
'MY DEAR BRIGHT,
'I am sorry to be compelled again to address you. In your speech you
charge me with having successfully concealed my thoughts last
November. You ought to have known that this was not the fact, for in
reply to others, from whom this gross charge was more to be expected
than from you, I pointed out last week that on the 9th November, in
Edinburgh, I told my constituents that if the Irish elections went as
was expected, the magnitude of the subject they would bring forward
would throw all others into the shade, and that it "went down to the
very roots and foundations of our whole civil and political
constitution" ("Midlothian Speeches," 1885, p. 44). 2. You say I
have described a conspiracy now existing in Ireland as marching
through rapine to the break-up of the United Kingdom. This also is
contrary to the fact. In 1881 there was, in my opinion, such a
conspiracy against the payment of rent and the union of the
countries, and I so described it. In my opinion, there is no such
conspiracy now, nor anything in the least degree resembling it. You
put into my mouth words which, coming from me, would be absolute
falsehood. 3. You charge me with a want of frankness, because I have
not pledged the Government to some defined line of action with regard
to the Land Purchase Bill. A charge of this kind is, between old
colleagues and old friends, to say the least, unusual. Evidently you
have not read the Bill or my speech on its introduction, and you have
never been concerned in the practical work of legislation on
difficult and complicated subjects. The foundation of your charge is
that on one of the most difficult and most complicated of all
subjects I do not, in the midst of overwhelming work, formulate at
once a new course or method of action without consulting the
colleagues to whom I am so much bound, and from whom I receive
invaluable aid. It might, I think, have occurred to you, as you have
been in the Cabinet, that such a course on my part would have been
indecent and disloyal, and that I should greatly prefer to bear all
the charges and suspicions which you are now unexpectedly the man to
fasten upon me. 4. You state you are convinced it is my intention to
thrust the Land Purchase Bill upon the House of Commons. If I am a
man capable of such an intention, I wonder you ever took office with
one so ignorant of the spirit of the Constitution and so arbitrary in
his character. Though this appears to be your opinion of me, I do
not think it is the opinion held by my countrymen in general. You
quote not a word in support of your charge; it is absolutely untrue.
Every candidate, friendly or unfriendly, will form his own view, and
take his own course on the subject. We must consider to the best of
our power all the facts before us, but I certainly will not forego my
right to make some effort to amend the dangerous and mischievous Land
Purchase Law passed last year for Ireland, if such effort should
promise to meet approval. I have done what I could to keep out of
controversy with you, and, while driven to remonstrate against your
charges, I advisedly abstain from all notice of your statements,
criticisms, and arguments.
'Always yours sincerely,
'W. E. GLADSTONE.'
To this Mr. Bright replied two days afterwards as follows:
'Bath,
'_July_ 4, 1886.
'MY DEAR GLADSTONE,
'I am sorry my speech has so greatly irritated you. It has been as
great a grief to me to speak as I have spoken as it can have been to
you to listen or to read. You say it is a gross charge to say that
you concealed your thoughts last November. Surely, when you urged
the constituencies to send you a Liberal majority large enough to
make you independent of Mr. Parnell and his party, the Liberal party
and the country understood you to ask for a majority to enable you to
resist Mr. Parnell, not to make a complete surrender to him. You
object to my quotations about a conspiracy "marching through rapine
to the breakup of the United Kingdom," and you say there is now no
such conspiracy against the payment of rent and the union of the
countries. I believe there is now such a conspiracy, and that it is
expecting and seeking its further success through your measures. You
complain that I charge you with a want of frankness in regard to the
Land Purchase Bill. You must know that a large number of your
supporters are utterly opposed to that Bill. If you tie the two
Bills together, their difficulty in dealing with them will be much
increased and their liberty greatly fettered. I think your friends
and your opponents and the country have a right to know your
intentions on so great a matter, when you are asking them to elect a
Parliament in your favour. Your language seems to me rather a puzzle
than an explanation, and that of your colleagues, though
contradictory, is not much clearer. "I have done what I could to
keep out of controversy with you." I have not urged any man in
Parliament, or out of it, to vote against you. I have abstained from
speaking in public until I was in the face of my constituents, who
have returned me unopposed to the new Parliament, and to them I was
bound to explain my opinion of, and my judgment on, your Irish Bills.
I stand by what I have said, and shall be surprised if the new
Parliament be more favourable to your Irish measures than the one you
have thought it necessary to dissolve. Though I thus differ from you
at this time and on this question, do not imagine that I can ever
cease to admire your great qualities or to value the great services
you have rendered to your country.
'I am, very sincerely yours,
'JOHN BRIGHT.'
At the St. Asaph Diocesan Conference the following letter, addressed by
the Premier to Dr. Hughes, Bishop of St. Asaph, was read by Canon Wynne
Edwards:
'Hawarden Castle,
'_October_ 19, 1884.
'MY DEAR LORD BISHOP,
'When I undertook to contribute a letter (in default of personal
attendance) towards the work of the Diocesan Conference, I did not
anticipate the autumnal controversy in which the political world is
now engulfed, and I fear that any attempt I now make to redeem a
pledge given under other circumstances will be poor and inadequate,
even in comparison with what it might otherwise have been, from the
cares and distractions which the controversy daily brings upon me.
At the same time, I had not even at the outset any ambitious plan
before me. I did not prepare to enter on the wide field of argument
respecting the disestablishment of the Church--too vast for my
available time; too polemical for one who has already more than
enough of polemical matter on his hands (a laugh). Will it come?
Ought it to come? Must it come? Is it near, or is it somewhat
distant or indefinitely remote? All these are questions of interest
which I could not touch with advantage unless it be a single point.
Whether Disestablishment would be disastrous or not, I think it clear
that there is only one way in which it might come to be disgraceful.
That one way parts into two. Disestablishment would be disgraceful
if it were due to the neglect, indifference, or deadness of the
Church (applause). But this is a contingency happily so improbable
that for present purposes it may be dismissed without discussion. It
might also be disgraceful were it to arrive as a consequence of
dissensions among the members of the Church (hear, hear). This, as
it appears to me, would be an unworthy termination of a controversy
which ought to be settled upon far higher grounds (applause). The
particular "duty of Churchmen with regard to Disestablishment," which
I shall try in few words to set forth, is the duty of taking care
that dissensions from within shall not bring the Establishment to its
end (applause). The last half-century has been a period of the most
active religious life known to the Reformed Church of England. It
has also been the period of the sharpest internal discord. That
discord has of late been materially allayed, not, I believe, through
the use of mere narcotics, not because the pulse beats less
vigorously in her veins, but through the prevalence in various
quarters of wise counsels, or, in other words, the application to our
ecclesiastical affairs of that common-sense by which we desire that
our secular affairs should always be governed (applause). What I
wish now to urge is this. In the fact that such discord has
prevailed there is not--nay, even were it to rise again into
exasperation there ought not to be--ground for religious despondency
or dismay. Divergence is to be expected, not only in all things
human, but in all things divine which wear things human for their
habiliment; and there were particular reasons why it was to be
anticipated and to be patiently borne within the Church of England.
We have still to look it in the face as an incident of our history,
though it may lie less heavily upon us than in some former years as a
present embarrassment. It is, under all circumstances, a cause of
pain and a source of danger, but not always a demonstrative proof of
weakness. On the contrary, when profoundly felt and yet borne, so to
speak, without breach of continuity, it may be a test and a proof of
strength (applause). In every living organism, in every institution
or system, its health will depend upon the equilibrium of the
elements out of which it is composed; but the maintenance of this
equilibrium is more easy when the system is uniformly simple and its
tendencies determinate and clear; more difficult when it is
many-sided and when it aims at binding together and at directing
towards a common end tendencies which are naturally divergent, and
which more commonly find for themselves homes altogether severed.
Let me borrow an illustration from the world of politics. Discord is
comparatively rare and slight in a political club, because a
political club is an institution formed to maintain some scheme of
opinion current at the time and familiarly apprehended, though its
tests be but rough, by those who join it. But the Houses of
Parliament, in which these rival systems have to dwell together and
to work themselves out into common results, are and must be the homes
of frequent and serious contention. In the sixteenth century the
Continental Churches of the West north of the Alps and Pyrenees were
for the most part broken into rival bodies, fiercely contending with
one another, but within themselves representing respectively one of
the two great tendencies of the period. To these tendencies I will
not give a theological name, but will call them those of the
Reformation and the counter-Reformation respectively. From the time
of the Council of Trent and of Loyola the Church of Rome represented
more strictly than it had done before the tendencies of
counter-Reformation. The Reformed Church had partly in the letter,
and yet more in the spirit, broken with the previous constitution of
the Church as well as with her dogma. Their confessions were indeed
complex, but were framed upon a basis which their members felt, or at
least thought they understood. They had all become in different
degrees less like legislatures and more like clubs; that is to say,
in the points to which I refer. A considerable time elapsed
accordingly before the Latin Church was again seriously troubled with
theological quarrels within its own domain; so also the Protestant
Churches on the Continent underwent far less of trouble from internal
dissensions than did the Church of England.
'In the Scandinavian countries we may almost say such trouble has
been unknown; the reason is, I apprehend, that in each case the
hostile elements had been in the main suppressed or expelled by the
struggle of the sixteenth century. Within this island it was not so.
Both in England and in Scotland the effort was not only made, but
tenaciously persisted in, to maintain the external unity of the
nation in a common religious profession. I may here drop the case of
Scotland, which has found a solution of its own. It is enough to
speak of the case of England. It presents a result at first sight
paradoxical in this respect--that the Church, which among reformed
communions had least broken with tradition and most maintained the
framework of the ancient authority, was the most perplexed, and
indeed convulsed, with controversies and with schisms. When the
matter is examined the cause is not far to seek. Weingarten, a
German writer, lays down the proposition that the Reformation, as a
religious movement, took its shape in England not in the sixteenth
century, but in the seventeenth. The sixteenth century made the
Church and the nation independent, and established the external
framework of an ecclesiastical policy; but it seems difficult to show
that the religion now professed as national in England took its rise
at that epoch otherwise than as a legal and national profession. It
seems plain that the great bulk of those burned under Mary were
Puritans. Under Elizabeth we have to look, I believe (with very rare
and remarkable exceptions), among Puritans or among recusants for the
exhibition of an active and definite religious life. A strong
pressure from without bound together a heterogeneous mass. In the
region of theology I apprehend that what is termed Anglicanism began
with Hooker--an authority still so high amongst us that none disown
him, and a writer whose work is said by Walton to have attracted the
laudatory admiration of the reigning Pope. But the body to which
Hooker belonged also contained Cartwright, and contained, too, men of
the same opinion. These internal differences ripened after a time
into convulsion, tyranny, and revolution. I cannot severely blame
those who overset Episcopacy for their oversetting, nor those who
brought it back for their bringing it back. The contending elements
could not live together in the same dwelling upon tolerable terms.
Every effort was made to devise schemes of comprehension, and every
effort failed. It was better, I suppose, that the rival partisans
should part than that they should carry the country onward from one
revolution to another. They parted in Scotland by casting out
Episcopacy at the Revolution. They parted in England legally at the
Restoration, and morally when a series of subsequent experiences had
shown that the system then established by law was the only one in
which the bulk of the nation could be content to abide (applause).
'But what was the operation thus effected? It was a drastic process,
but a process far less drastic than those of the sixteenth century.
On the one side or the other it so far enabled the Church of England
to fulfil the conditions of a corporate life and unity that it has
now been maintained during two centuries and a quarter without either
the unmitigated dualism or the agonies of convulsion which had marked
the previous experience, and with this general result: that at the
present hour the hopes of the Church of England are higher and more
buoyant than perhaps they have ever been (applause). It has been
very far indeed from an heroic history. Not only defect but scandal
has abounded. These things, however, are beside the present purpose,
which aims at pointing out that when uniformity was finally brought
by law into the Church of England, still much room for diversity was
left--room enough to invite polemical criticism, but perhaps not more
than, on the one hand, the inestimable value of the principle of
liberty required, or than, on the other hand, the teaching office of
the Church could without vital injury allow. She is still working
out her system by experience, but still not without this note, that
the strife of parties, although softened of late, is still somewhat
sharp within her. When it is said that the Church is comprehensive,
the true meaning seems to be that her history, which has, of course,
determined her character, has tended to comprise within her limits a
greater diversity of views than have usually been so brought
together. What may be called the Puritanical element, rejected at
the Restoration, began slowly to reassert itself in the latter half
of the eighteenth century, and is now admitted to have brought about
a great revival of religious life in the English Church (applause).
A form of thought to which the name of Broad may be applied seems to
have been more than tolerated in some conspicuous instances by Laud,
and acquired solidity in the universities at last after the
Restoration. On the other hand, as regards the Romeward tendency (so
to term it) of the Church of England, there is some evidence (though
not free from suspicion) in the curious life of Lady Williams, to
show that the chief English bishops of that era took a very mitigated
view of their doctrinal differences from the Roman Church; and
Barillon, the Ambassador of Louis XIV., writes to his Court in the
reign of James II. that the Anglican prelates were preferable to the
Jansenist Bishops of the Roman Communion. I will not attempt to
bring these illustrations (in which I am relying upon memory only)
down to the present day. Enough, I think, has been said to show that
the Church of England has been all along peculiarly liable on the one
side and on the other both to attack and to defection, and that the
probable cause is to be found in the degree in which, whether for
worldly or for religious reasons, it was attempted in her case to
combine divergent elements within her borders. If there be any truth
in this rough and very incomplete historical sketch, the conclusions
to be drawn from it as regards my present purpose are clear and
simple, for it at once appears that the great maxim _In omnibus
caritas_, which is so necessary to temper all religious controversy,
ought to apply with a tenfold force to the conduct of the members of
the Church of England in respect to differences among themselves.
They ought, of course, in the first place to remember that their
right to differ is limited by the laws of the system to which they
belong; but within that limit should they not also, each of them,
recollect that his antagonist has something to say?--that the
Reformation and the counter-Reformation tendencies were, in the order
of Providence, placed here in a closer juxtaposition than anywhere
else in the Christian world; that a course of destiny so peculiar
appears to indicate on the part of the Supreme Orderer a peculiar
purpose; that not only no religious, but no considerate or prudent,
man, should run the risk of interfering with such a purpose; that the
great charity which is a bounden duty everywhere in these matters
should here be accompanied and upheld by two ever-striving
handmaidens of a great reverence and a great patience; that instead
of the bitterness, I might almost say the savagery, which has too
often characterized our inward contentions, they ought on every
ground of history and reason to be peculiarly marked by moderation,
mildness and reserve (applause), by thinking no evil, by hoping all
things, by kindly and favourable interpretations (applause), and if
the demand thus made upon the evangelical resources of human nature
seem to be over-large, is it not warranted? Is it not eminently
rational at a time when, on the one hand, the deepest and widest
questions of belief in a Saviour, in a Deity, and in a moral law, are
everywhere coming to issue on a scale hitherto without example; and
when, on the other hand, this great organization within which our lot
has been cast is from day to day exhibiting here and beyond the seas
not only a remarkable material extension, but a growing vigour of
inward life, and an increasing abundance in every work of mercy, of
benevolence, and of true civilization? (applause). In concluding
these remarks, I will only say that I have, in writing them,
endeavoured to place myself at a point of view which is impersonal,
impartial and historical, and that I have not knowingly wounded the
susceptibilities or assailed the opinions of anyone who may read them
(loud applause).
'I remain, with great respect, my dear Lord Bishop,
'Yours most faithfully,
'W. E. GLADSTONE.
'The Right Rev. the Lord Bishop of St. Asaph.'
During the subsequent proceedings the letter was frequently referred to
as a magnificent letter, and as one worthy of the Premier's transcendent
abilities.
Mr. Gladstone wrote to Lord E. Fitzmaurice, complimenting him upon a
speech which he delivered at Old Cumnock, in Ayrshire. 'It was
pre-eminently,' said the ex-Premier, 'the speech that was wanted, made by
one who was "in all respects peculiarly the man to make it." In my
view,' proceeded Mr. Gladstone, 'Ireland is the heading of a bright
chapter in the history, not only of the Liberals, but especially of the
Whigs. It was a noble thing on the part of Burke and Fitzwilliam and the
other seceders from Fox that not all their horror of France could make
them untrue to Ireland. The Whig party after the schism remained for
Irish purposes unbroken, and were right in each one of the various stages
through which the question had to pass--right in the endeavour,
frustrated by Pitt and the ascendency men, to work the Grattan
Parliament; right in the opposition to the Union when it was shamelessly
forced on Ireland; right in saying, by the mouth of Fox, that so huge a
measure must have an unprejudiced and a full trial when it had once been
effected, and when no man could undertake to say positively that Ireland
might not come, as Scotland had come, to make it her own by adoption;
right, probably, when Grattan gave his provisional sanction to coercion
as the necessary sequel to the Union; right certainly when Lord Grey and
Lord Althorp proposed further coercion in 1834, when they had done, and
were doing, for Ireland in so many ways all which at the time they could,
and when no Minister was in a condition to say constitutionally that the
sense of the Irish people demanded self-government; and, finally, right
was a cruelly crippled remnant of their leading class, enthusiastically
supported from first to last by a large portion of the nation, in
listening to the constitutional demand of Ireland by their
representatives in 1885, and in recognising after three generations had
passed away that union with coercion--in other words, government by
force--had been tried all but too fully, and had entirely failed. We
want,' continued Mr. Gladstone, 'a little Whig treatment of Ireland.'
Dealing with another aspect of the argument, which he characterized as
'not less unacceptable and important,' he expressed the fear that the
action of the chief part of the Whig peers and aristocracy in severing
themselves from the bulk of the Liberal party might be to narrow the
Liberal party, which had hitherto been so broad. This he attributed
'entirely to the so-called Liberal Unionists.' 'Liberal Unionism has,'
he said, 'tended to break up the old and invaluable habit of Liberal
England, which looked to a Liberal aristocracy and a Liberal leisured
class as the natural, and therefore the best, leaders of the Liberal
movement. Thus it was that classes and masses were united.' This
controversy, and the recollection, will do away with the certain triumph
of Home Rule. But will the ranks which have been divided easily close
up? 'I, for one,' repeated Mr. Gladstone, 'think that the narrowing of
the party by the severance or reduction of one wing is also the crippling
of the party.'
Mr. Gladstone had, as he himself put it, 'felt it his duty to put Liberal
candidates in possession of some means of meeting statements' as to his
past connection with the Tory party. The particular remark which
elicited this letter was made by Mr. Chatterton, the Tory candidate for
the Crewe division. It was that 'in his fiftieth year Mr. Gladstone was
in full sympathy with the Tory party.' Mr. Gladstone, in his letter, put
forward ten propositions: 'It is true that down to the year 1839, when I
was twenty-nine years old, I might fairly be called a Tory of the Tories
in questions relating to the Church. (2) It is untrue that even at that
time I could justly be so described in other questions. (3) I am not
aware that after 1839, or, at all events, after 1841, I could justly be
described, even in Church questions, as a Tory of the Tories, or perhaps
as a Tory at all. (4) In 1843 I was denounced in the House of Lords as
being disloyal to the principles of Protection. (5) In 1849-50 I
assisted to the best of my power the Government of Naples. (6) In 1851,
in company with the Peelites, the Irish Roman Catholics, and the group
led by Mr. Cobden, I actively resisted both Whigs and Tories, but the
last especially, in defence of religious liberty, on the Ecclesiastical
Titles Bill. (7) Unquestionably I differed strongly from the first
Government of Lord Palmerston in 1855-8, on the question of peace, of
foreign policy, of finance, and of divorce. The last was not a party
question. On the other three I believe that my opinions were, as they
are now, practically the opinions of the Liberal party. (8) Lord Derby
sent me to the Ionian Islands in 1858, in precisely the same sense as
that in which the Government of 1868-74 sent Lord Iddesleigh to America.
(9) In company with Lord Russell and Mr. Milner Gibson, I gave the vote
in 1858 on the Conspiracy Bill which brought in the Tories. Like Lord
Russell, after doing this, I knew it to be my duty to give the Tories
fair-play and such support as was equitable until positive cause of
difference should arise. (10) Before their Italian policy was made
public, I declined to join in the vote of want of confidence which
removed them from office. But a few weeks later, when the volume
containing it was published, I intimated in Parliament that had I known
that policy at the time I should have pursued a different course.' 'So
much,' adds Mr. Gladstone, 'for my Toryism down to 1859.'
In 1876 Mr. Gladstone wrote to Hayward: 'The _Times_ appears to be
thoroughly emasculated. It does not pay to read a paper which next week
is sure to refute what it has demonstrated this week. It ought to be
prohibited to change sides more than a certain number of times in a year.
As to the upper ten thousand, it has not been by a majority of that body
that any of the great and good measures of our century have been carried,
though a minority have done good service; and so I fear it will
continue.' Mr. Gladstone seems in 1878 to have had a poor opinion of the
_Daily News_. 'I think,' he wrote to Blachford, 'they have often made
improper admissions, and do not drive the nail home as it really ought to
be done by a strong Opposition paper, such as the _Morning Chronicle_ of
Derry.'
In his address to the electors of Midlothian in 1886, Mr. Gladstone said:
'Lord Hartington has lately and justly stated in general terms that he is
not disposed to deny our having fallen into errors of judgment. I will
go one step further, and admit that we committed such errors, and serious
errors, too, with cost of treasure and of precious lives, in the Soudan.
For none of these errors were we rebuked by the voice of the Opposition;
we were only rebuked, and that incessantly, because we did not commit
them with precipitation, and because we did not commit other errors
greater still. Our mistakes in the Soudan I cannot now state in detail;
the task belongs to history. Our responsibility for them cannot be
questioned; yet its character ought not to be misapprehended. In such a
task miscarriages were inevitable. They are the proper and certain
consequence of undertakings that war against nature, and that lie beyond
the scope of human means, and of rational and prudent human action; and
the first authors of these undertakings are the real makers of the
mischief.'
In connection with this subject, let us add the following from Gordon's
Diary at Khartoum: 'Poor Gladstone's Government! how they must love me!
I will accept nothing whatever from Gladstone's hands. I will not let
them even pay my expenses; I will get the King to pay them. I will never
set foot in England again.'
Perhaps one of the most remarkable letters a great statesman ever wrote
was that to an American in 1862, in which Mr. Gladstone thus shows how
impossible it was for the North to put down the South. He writes: 'You
know, in the opinion of Europe, that impossibility has been proved.
Depend upon it, to place the matter on a simple issue, you cannot conquer
and keep down a country where the women behave like the women of New
Orleans, and when a writer says they would be ready to form regiments,
were such regiments required. And how idle it is to talk as some of your
people do, and some of ours, of the slackness with which the war has been
carried on, and of its accounting for the want of success. You have no
cause to be ashamed of your military character and efforts. . . . I am,
in short, a follower of General Scott; with him I say, Wayward sisters,
go in peace. Immortal fame be to him for his wise and courageous advice,
amounting to a prophecy. Finally, you have done what man could do; you
have failed because you have resolved to do what man could not do. Laws
stronger than human will are on the side of earnest self-defence; and to
aim at the impossible, which in other things may be folly only when the
path of search is dark with misery and red with blood, is not folly only,
but guilt to boot.'
In 1880 some correspondence was published between Captain Boycott and Mr.
Gladstone. The former wrote to the Prime Minister, giving a narrative of
the events which obliged him to leave Ireland, and asked for compensation
from the Government. 'I have been prevented from pursuing my business
peaceably; where my property has not been stolen, it has been maliciously
wasted, and my life has been in hourly peril for many months. I have
been driven from my home, and, having done no evil, find myself a ruined
man, because the law as administered has not protected me.' In reply,
Mr. Gladstone's secretary wrote: 'Mr. Gladstone has received your letter
of the 8th inst., and, in reply, desires me to say that he is not sure in
what way he is to understand your request for assistance from her
Majesty's Government. It has been very largely afforded you in the use
of the public force; beyond this it is the duty of the Government to use
its best exertions in the enforcement of the existing law, which they are
endeavouring to effect through the courts, and by asking when necessary
the assistance of the Legislature to amend or enlarge the law--a matter
of much importance, on which you can, of course, only receive information
together with the public generally.' A little later we were informed Mr.
Gladstone declined to accede to Captain Boycott's claim for pecuniary
compensation on account of having to leave his farm, holding that the
large display of public force required for Captain Boycott's protection
having been furnished, the State could not be expected to entertain any
further claims.
Mr. Gladstone addressed the following letter to the editor of the
_Baptist_:
'DEAR SIR,
'I have given full consideration, which is well deserved, to your
letter and article. I complain of nothing in the article, and am not
surprised at the desires which it expresses. I acknowledge the just
and generous treatment which I have had from Nonconformists both in
and out of Wales; but the same hill or valley presents itself in
different forms and tints, according to the point from which it is
viewed.
'My point of view is that determined for me by my political career.
I cannot safely or wisely deal in the affirmation of abstract
resolutions, though I by no means undertake to lay down the same
rather rigid rule for others. In 1868 I moved resolutions on the
Irish Church, but they were immediately followed by a Bill.
'Your article asserts that there is now a great opportunity for
disestablishing the Welsh Church, which ought not to be let slip.
'I will not enter into the arguments pro or con., but will simply
refer to the declarations I have made in the case of Scotland, and
then assume, _for argument's sake_, that the Welsh Church ought to be
disestablished.
'From my point of view there is now no such opportunity at all. I
have been telling the country on every occasion I could find that no
great political matter, of whatever kind (of course I mean a
contested matter), could be practically dealt with until the Irish
question, which blocks the way, is settled, and so put out of the
way. I may, of course, be wrong, but this is my firm opinion;
therefore he who wishes to have a great Welsh question discussed in a
practical manner should, as I think, see that his first business,
with a view to his own aim, is to clear the road.
'But you may say Ireland ought not to occupy the attention of
Parliament to the exclusion of great British questions. My answer
is, that I have not stated whether it _ought_, but have simply said
that it will.
'Then, you may ask, why not defer the Irish question until these
urgent British matters are settled? I reply that I have no more
power thus to defer the Irish question than I had to defer the
earthquake which happened thirty-six hours ago in France and Italy.
Any attempt by me to force a postponement of the Irish question would
only add to the confusion and the pressure. I am not creating a
difficulty, but only pointing it out. The finger-post does not make
the road.
'I will, however, point out a main reason why this Irish question is
so troublesome, obtrusive, and provoking. It is because it involves
social order, and it is in the nature of questions involving social
order to push their claims to precedence over other questions.
'In conclusion, I may also observe that your letter and article take
no notice of the fact that I am in my fifty-fifth year of public
service, and appear to assume that it is my duty to continue in such
service until I drop. To this proposition I must, on what appear to
me solid and even high grounds, respectfully demur.
'I have no desire that you should consider this letter as a secret
one.
'Your most faithful and obedient,
'W. E. GLADSTONE.'
'21, Carlton House Terrace,
'_February_ 25.'
Mr. Gladstone's secretary, writing to a correspondent in the _Daily News_
in 1885, who had asked what the clergy were drawing from national funds,
replied: 'SIR,--Mr. Gladstone, in reply to your letter, desires me to
inform you that the clergy are not State paid.'
Again, to a correspondent Mr. Gladstone wrote: 'You are mistaken in
supposing that the outrages in Manchester and Clerkenwell determined or
affected my action with regard to Ireland. They drew the attention of
the public, on which there are so many demands, to Irish questions, and
thereby enabled me in point of time to act in a manner for which I had
previously declared my desire. You state that the Irish voters are
preparing themselves to punish the Liberal party. In that respect I do
not see that those of whom you speak can improve upon what they have
already done; for in and since 1874, just after that party had dealt with
the questions of Church and Land, they inflicted upon it the heaviest
Parliamentary blow it has received in my time. I hope, however, from
every present indication, that, notwithstanding the mischief done to it
and to the wider interests of humanity by the Irish secession, it will,
when an opportunity is allowed, prove to have strength sufficient for the
exigencies of the time.'