[WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE, born, Liverpool, December 29, 1809;
died, Hawarden, Flintshire, Wales, May 19, 1898; educated at
Eton and Christ Church College, Oxford University (double first-
class, 1831); Member of Parliament for Newark as a Tory, 1832
46; wrote, 1838, "The State in its Relations with the Church";
held minor financial offices in Peel administration; 1843-45,
President of Board of Trade; 1847-65, Member of Parliament for
Oxford University; 1852, Chancellor of the Exchequer under Lord
Aberdeen; 1858, Commissioner to the Ionian Islands; 1859,
Chancellor of the Exchequer under Lord Palmerston; 1865,
defeated as candidate for Oxford but returned for South
Lancashire as a Liberal; leader of House of Commons; proposes
radical Reform Bill; 1868, Member of Parliament for Greenwich;
1868-74, Premier (I.); Disestablishes Irish Church; carries
National Educational Law, Ballot Law, Irish Land Act; abolishes
purchase in the army; resigns Liberal leadership in 1875, and
publishes works on ecclesiastical controversy; 1876, attacks
Disraeli's Eastern policy in letters on Bulgarian atrocities;
1880, Member of Parliament for Midlothian; 1880-85, Premier
(II.); Irish Coercion Acts; new Land Acts; Arrears of Rent Act;
Franchise and Redistribution Acts; 1886, Premier (III.); First
Home Rule Bill Fails; 1892-94, Premier (IV.); 1893, Second Home
Rule Bill carried through the Commons, thrown out by the Lords;
retires from public life March, 1894; buried in Westminster
Abbey.]
From the first day of the nineteenth century to the last the
statesmen of England have had one standing problem to face. It
might come up under various forms and disguises, and it might
seem to demand various remedies, but in some shape or other the
woes of Ireland have always furnished the test of practical
statesmanship, and have often been the rock on which proud
administrations have met with disaster.
By nature Ireland would seem formed for peace and plenty.
Happily located with the protecting bulwark of Great Britain
between their emerald isle and foreign foes, blessed with a mild
and equable climate, and inhabiting an island of singular
fertility, the Irish would seem to have been marked for
fortune's favors. Yet such has been the misgovernment of the
English that the Irish have seen their paternal acres pass into
the hands of aliens and absentees, their religion made a brand
of shame and outlawry, their Parliament corrupted and done away,
their industries crippled and bound down, and themselves reduced
to wretched poverty.
At the outset of the century the Act of Union went into effect,
abolishing the Irish Parliament and admitting Irish (Protestant)
Lords and Commons to the Parliament at Westminster. Pitt
believed that the change would strengthen the empire and help
Ireland as well, but it was brought to pass by means of lavish
bribery, and sorely against the wish of the Irish patriots.
Furthermore, the determination of Pitt to commend the act to
Ireland by removing the political disabilities which barred
Catholics from membership in Parliament was thwarted by the
stiff-necked George III., who had got it into his head that such
a concession would do violence to the Protestantism of his
coronation oath. Pitt resigned in disgust, and Catholic
emancipation had to await until England had finished Napoleon's
European business and could turn her hand to the troubles nearer
home. It was finally carried, in 1829, by Wellington and Peel,
the reform being fairly forced upon them by the tremendous
agitation in its behalf by the eloquent Daniel O'Connell and his
comrades of the Catholic Association. To save the nation from
civil war the government yielded with scant grace, and O'Connell
and his "tail" of Irish Catholics came into Parliament to form
a new and perplexing element in all subsequent political
calculations.
From his vantage-ground as a member of Parliament O'Connell led
a fresh agitation for the "Repeal," meaning the repeal of the
Act of Union which had destroyed the Dublin Parliament. His
oratory, which in its power over vast multitudes of his
emotional countrymen has never been surpassed, made him the idol
of his party. To boisterous congregations of tens of thousands he
declaimed his bitter harangues on Saxon injustice to the Celt.
But when the people had been brought to fever heat the agitation
failed because the orator proved to be a voice and nothing more.
He yielded meekly to the proclamation of the government
forbidding further meetings, and his followers forsook him when
they saw that he would not cross the Rubicon and take arms after
words had failed. The society called "Young Ireland," formed
about 1840, took up the agitation for Irish nationality, and
carried it to greater lengths than O'Connell had dared. Its
fiery young leaders, Smith O'Brien, Meagher, and Mitchel,
preached sedition with voice and newspaper press, and in 1848,
only by the vigorous exertion of physical force was open
rebellion averted. The principal men of the Young Ireland party
were seized and condemned to death for high treason, though they
ultimately got off with transportation to Australia, whence most
of them eventually found their way to America, whither
thousands of their countrymen had emigrated since the famine
year of 1846.
The famine marks a turning-point in the history of the relations
of England and Ireland. As has been narrated in another place,
it was the dearth of food in Ireland which forced the government
of Sir Robert Peel to do what the Cobdenites had been demanding
for ten years, and repeal the Corn Laws. Probably the
distressful plight of the Irish peasant had never been brought
so strongly to the attention of Englishmen as by the reports
which now reached England from the agents of the relief
committees who visited every part of the island ascertaining
conditions and distributing food. From this time a considerable
number among the English Liberals carried the sad state of
Ireland upon their heart and conscience. Another result of the
famine which was to exercise enduring influence upon Irish
politics was the emigration to America. The hundreds of
thousands who came to the free republic at this time soon made it
the asylum of Irish patriots, the hot-bed of anti-English
conspiracies, and the source of a swelling stream of revenue for
the Irish nationalist treasury.
It was in America that the next alarm was sounded after two
unquiet decades. A widely ramified secret society, the Fenian
Brotherhood, sprang up among the Irish exiles and emigrants in
the United States about 1857, its members swearing "to free and
regenerate Ireland from the yoke of England." The movement
spread to Ireland, and Fenian lodges were organized even on
British soil. The close of the American Civil War set loose many
Irish veterans who eagerly enlisted in the cause of "the Irish
Republic." The reports of vast enlistments and contributions in
America alarmed the British government. In February, 1866, the
Habeas Corpus Act was suspended in Ireland, and scores of
suspects were thrown into jail. In May an armed band of Irish-
American Fenians crossed the Niagara River to invade Canada. The
attempt failed miserably, as did the plans for a general rising
in Ireland. But a succession of surprises, jail deliveries,
gunpowder plots, and the like, kept the English government in a
flutter for several years, and gave the name of Fenian a place
in the somber side of the century's history. The most notable
result of the Fenian outbreak, beyond its obvious one of
embittering the feeling between the governing nation and the
subject race, was that it aroused one man--and he the greatest
statesman of his time--to the need of providing some far-
reaching and sufficient remedy for the disease which showed such
virulence. "We know," says McCarthy, the historian of the epoch,
"that even the worst excesses of the movement impressed the mind
of Mr. Gladstone with a conviction that the hour was appropriate
for doing something to remove the causes of the discontent that
made Ireland restless.....While many public instructors lost
themselves in vain shriekings over the wickedness of Fenianism,
and the incurable perversity of the Irish people, one statesman
was already convinced that the very shock of the Fenian
agitation would arouse public attention to the recognition of
substantial grievance, and to the admission that the business of
statesmanship was to seek out the remedy and provide redress."
The statesman who accomplished the disestablishment of the Irish
Church, reformed the Land Laws, and devoted the closing decade
of a great career to a fruitless endeavor to secure to Ireland
the benefits of self- government, certainly ranks among the
century's foremost Englishmen. In length of parliamentary
service, in the frequency and duration of his terms as premier,
in administrative ability, in moral force, and moving eloquence,
it would be difficult to find in the long history of English
statesmanship a name which shines with a purer ray than that of
William Ewart Gladstone.
The family name was anciently Gledstane, and the ancestry on
both sides of the house was purely Scotch. Sir John Gladstone
made his own way in life, amassed a fortune as a corn merchant
in Liverpool, and became a member of Parliament and a follower
of Peel. His gentle and pious wife admirably supplemented his
masterful nature, and the sons of the household were brought up
in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. At the age of eleven
the third son, William Ewart Gladstone, was sent away to Eton,
where his two brothers were already at school. Here his piety
and studious habits militated against his popularity, but here
his intellectual ambition was aroused and his soul was enriched
by the closest intimacy with Arthur Hallam, whom Tennyson's "In
Memoriam" has eulogized. Like Canning he was a precocious
orator, and edited the school paper with an ability which led
some of his contemporaries to predict a great future for him. "I
am confident," said Arthur Hallam, "that he is a bud that will
bloom with a richer fragrance than almost any whose early
promise I have witnessed." At Christ Church, Oxford, he
justified the hopes of his friends- -a quiet, abstemious, reading
man, mighty in debate, learned and devout in theology, and a
tower of strength in examinations. He graduated with a double
first class (classics and mathematics) in 1831, as Robert Peel
had done a generation earlier. His choice of a career would have
taken him into the clergy of the Church of England, but his
father saw in him the making of a parliamentary leader, and to
the House of Commons he was accordingly returned in 1833,
entering the first Reformed Parliament as a Tory.
Sir Robert Peel was then engaged in rallying the shattered
forces of Toryism under the new name of Conservatives, and
building up a working opposition. He welcomed the eloquent young
Oxonian, and when he became Prime Minister in December, 1834, he
gave William Gladstone one of the minor offices in his
shortlived government. In the spring of 1835 he was again a
private member of the House, free to devote himself to the
religious and literary pursuits which appealed so strongly to
him. In 1838, when the Tractarian movement was at its height,
Gladstone wrote his book on "The State in its Relations with the
Church." Reviewing the work Macaulay described the author as
"the rising hope of the stern and unbending Tories," words often
quoted in later years, when his political bedfellows were of
quite another sort. The book increased the author's reputation.
In 1839 he was married to Miss Catharine Glynne of Hawarden
Castle, Flintshire. In 1840 his second important book, a
vindication of High Church principles, came from the press. The
next year his leader, Peel, came back to power, giving
Gladstone, of course, a post in the government (vice-president
of the Board of Trade). Gladstone was then a protectionist like
his party chief. He bore a hand in the preparation of the tariff
legislation of that epoch-making administration, and though
temporarily not a member of the House of Commons when the bill
for the repeal of the Corn Laws was carried, in 1846, he helped
to frame it, and to secure its passage. He had been fully
converted to the principles of free trade as preached by Richard
Cobden and the Manchester school, and remained true to that
principle to the last.
Going out of office, in 1846, with the fall of the Peel
ministry, Mr. Gladstone continued to occupy a prominent place in
Parliament, acting with the group of Peelites, so called, who
kept alive the name and principles of the lost leader. Though
still accounted as of the Tory party, Mr. Gladstone's alert and
open mind led him to make fresh and independent studies of
current political questions and to decide them according to his
own enlightened judgment. The result was to weaken by degrees
the ties which bound him to the Tories and to knit more closely
the bonds which were to unite his fortunes with the Liberals. In
1852, the Peelites having joined the Liberal coalition to
overthrow the Derby-Disraeli ministry, Mr. Gladstone's services
were rewarded with the Chancellorship of the Exchequer, in which
office he delivered the first of the many budget speeches for
which he was so celebrated. From 1855 to 1859 he was again out
of office, and without party affiliations, "a roving iceberg,"
to use his own description. The latter year found him again at
the head of the Exchequer, this time in the Liberal Cabinet of
Lord Palmerston, where he served with distinction, becoming, in
1865, the leader of the House of Commons, when the death of
Palmerston raised his colleague, Lord John Russell, to the
premiership. With his chief--one of the heroes of the first
successful struggle for parliamentary reform--he now drew up the
Reform Bill of 1866 which was intended so to modify the
qualifications for the franchise as to admit four hundred
thousand new voters to the electorate. Though the government was
defeated and went out of office on the question, the principle
scored a singular victory, for in the following year Disraeli,
bidding high for democratic support, carried by Tory votes an
even more liberal measure of reform. By this bill, which some
one called his "leap in the dark," Disraeli boasted that he had
"dished the Whigs." The taunt was thrown at him which he had cast
at Peel "that he had caught his opponents bathing and run off
with their clothes." Rumor imputed to him the boast that by this
move he had got the best of Gladstone and "would hold him down
for twenty years," yet, within a twelvemonth, Gladstone had
attacked and defeated the government in the Commons, and before
the end of the next year was himself Prime Minister, backed by
a powerful majority of the Reformed Parliament.
It was an Irish question which caused the overthrow of the
Conservatives and swept the Liberals into their seats, and
though this Gladstonian administration (1868-74) and its
successors (1880-85, 1886, 1892-94) were rich in progressive
measures, they are pre- eminent for what they did and attempted
to do for Ireland. The three grievances of Ireland since the
granting of Catholic emancipation have related to the Established
Church, the tenure of land, and self- government. Mr. Gladstone
took them up in succession, removing the first, ameliorating the
second, and giving his closing years to a tremendous
parliamentary struggle to secure the third.
The Church of Ireland, as established by law and maintained by
taxation, was an absurdity. Its doctrines were offensive to
five-sixths of the Irish people, whose voluntary offerings went
to support the Roman Catholic priests, while the absentee
Anglican Protestant rectors lived luxuriously in England or the
Continent upon the revenues of their Irish parishes. The
situation was anomalous. In 1867 Mr. Gladstone, ardent Anglican
though he was, espoused the cause of Irish disestablishment, and
went to the country on the issue, winning the parliamentary
elections by a splendid majority. There was loud outcry from the
British Tories, who professed to fear for the existence of the
Church of England itself. The majority of the English clergy
denounced the proposition, and some even declared its author a
madman; but Mr. Gladstone pursued his chosen way with energy and
directness. In one of those elevated speeches with which he was
accustomed to ennoble debate, he laid the details of his plan
open to the Commons. The Irish Church was to be disestablished
and disendowed, its bishops were to lose their seats in
Parliament, and it was to become a free and independent
ecclesiastical body, like the Presbyterian, Wesleyan, or
Catholic churches, without further aid from the state. "I
trust," said the impassioned advocate, "that when instead of the
fictitious and adventitious aid on which we have too long taught
the Irish establishment to lean, it shall come to place its trust
in its own resources, in its own great mission, in all that it
can draw from the energy of its ministers and its members, and
the high hopes and promises of the Gospel that it teaches, it
will find that it has entered upon a new era of existence--an
era bright with hope and potent for good." The Lords did not
seriously oppose a measure for which the country had spoken so
distinctly, and the bill became a law, July 26, 1869. One
standing grievance of Ireland had thus received radical remedy.
In 1870 Mr. Gladstone laid the ax at the root of another tree
whose fruit had cursed the Irish peasantry. This was the system
of land tenure which prevailed in the southern and western
counties. In the province of Ulster, in the north of Ireland, the
tenantry were of another sort, and there were other means of
livelihood than agriculture. Out of this condition had sprung the
so-called "Ulster tenant-right," the vital principle of which was
that a tenant could not be evicted so long as he paid his rent,
and "could sell the good will of his farm for what it would fetch
in the market." This tenant-right was what Palmerston dismissed
with the scornful remark that it was another name for "landlord's
wrong." It did not exist elsewhere in Ireland, where a landlord
might raise the rent and throw a tenant into the street at will.
The Land Act, which Gladstone carried in 1870, gave legal force
to the old Ulster custom and applied it to the whole island.
Provision was made by which the tenant whose improvements had
increased the value of his holding might receive compensation.
The Irish landlords and the same class in England made a
clamorous protest against such "state interference with freedom
of contract," but without avail. Of what the Land Act of 1870
accomplished, Mr. Justin McCarthy is a competent judge. He says:
"It was a first and an experimental measure, and no first and
experimental measure ever does quite succeed in its object. It
has had to be amended and expanded over and over again.....But it
introduced a new principle, which no one since has ever attempted
to abolish. That new principle was that the Irish tenant was
entitled to some share and property in the improvements which he
himself had made in his farm. It was, therefore, in the best
sense of the word, a revolutionary measure. It created a new
principle, and that principle has since been settled. It did not
go nearly far enough in the right direction, but it showed the
direction in which legislation ought to go, and it was on that
account the opening of a new era for Ireland."
The same wave of reforming zeal which brought these blessings to
Ireland gave the English nation its first system of free schools
(1870), abolished the purchase of commissions in the army (1871),
agreed to the principle of arbitrations in international disputes
(the Geneva award on the "Alabama Claims" 1872), and introduced
the vote by ballot (1872). The effort to establish university
education in Ireland upon a basis broad enough to afford equal
opportunities for Roman Catholic and Protestant youth was
defeated (1873). A few months later, when the national election
had pronounced against the liberal policy, Mr. Gladstone yielded
his place to his rival, Disraeli.
In the spring of 1874 Mr. Gladstone formally resigned the
leadership of his party, then in opposition, and withdrew to a
considerable degree from active participation in parliamentary
affairs, devoting himself with his accustomed zeal to his
studies, which at that time were concerned with ecclesiastical
subjects. From his retirement he emerged, in 1876, to write that
trenchant series of letters on the "Bulgarian Atrocities," which
so stirred the indignation of the English people that Disraeli
was unable to carry them into an armed alliance with the red-
handed Turk against the Russians. His fierce and persistent
onslaughts upon the foreign policy of the government at length
carried the nation with him and drove Disraeli (now Lord
Beaconsfield) from power.
No one but Mr. Gladstone could be thought of to head the
ministry, and in 1880, he came in for his second term as Prime
Minister. The state of Ireland again concerned him deeply. He
carried an improved Land Act, but the Lords threw out his bill to
relieve the special difficulties which the famine of 1880 had
brought upon the Irish tenantry, and the exasperated tenantry
resorted to reprisals upon the persons and property of the
landlords. The Irish Land League, under the direction of Charles
Stewart Parnell, resisted the operation of the new Land Act until
its worth should have been tested. Mr. Gladstone and the Irish
leaders worked at cross purposes, and thoroughly distrusted one
another. The government found it necessary to exert force in
order to suppress the agrarian disorders. Mr. Parnell and his
associates were thrown into jail, and the Land League was
proclaimed as an unlawful association. Parnell, whose word was
law with the Leaguers, retaliated by forbidding the tenantry to
pay rent. In the spring of 1882, when better feeling was
beginning to prevail, some Irish conspirators (Invincibles)
assassinated Lord Frederick Cavendish and his secretary in
Phoenix Park, Dublin. Cavendish was the newly appointed secretary
for Ireland, and appears to have been mistaken for W. E. Forster,
his predecessor, who was held responsible for the rigorous
measures of the past winter. The National League was formed to
take the place of the proscribed Land League, and Irish distress
and crime continued with little abatement. The "boycott" was
applied in its most oppressive form, rents remained unpaid, and
evictions were frequent and distressing.
Cabinet dissensions over Irish measures and general criticism of
the foreign policy which had made a generous peace with the Boers
of South Africa, and was accused of abandoning General Gordon to
his fate at Khartoum, weakened its hold upon the people and their
representatives. The Irish members held the balance of power in
the Commons, and when, in the spring of 1885, they joined forces
with the Conservatives, the Liberals were again unseated.
Lord Salisbury and Lord Randolph Churchill, the Conservative
leaders who came into power in 1885, enjoyed a brief and troubled
tenure of office. The general election of 1885 was the first to
be held under the Reform Law of the previous year, which had
given to Ireland the same freedom of electoral franchise which
had existed in the English and Scottish boroughs since 1869. The
result was a great increase in the number of Nationalist members
in Parliament. Of the one hundred and three members for Ireland
no less than eighty-four were returned as Home Rulers, a compact
and formidable body acting as a unit under the leadership of Mr.
Parnell.
The first leader of the little company of Irish Home Rulers that
had appeared in Parliament in the early '70's was Isaac Butt. His
repeated attempts to have the subject considered were as often
rejected with derision. In his own party he was opposed by an
element which desired to resort to aggressive measures to compel
the English to heed Ireland's demand for local self-government.
Prominent in this radical wing was a young Protestant, Charles
Stewart Parnell, the grandson of Commodore Stewart of the United
States Navy. In 1880 he was recognized as the chairman of the
Irish Home Rulers in Parliament. For many years he continued to
exercise a control over this party and over the Irish people such
as no one, save perhaps O'Connell himself, had ever attained. He
conceived and enforced the obstructive policy which so
embarrassed the second Gladstone administration. By exasperating
tactics, which we Americans call "filibustering," the
obstructionists, unable to secure what they wanted for Ireland,
succeeded in paralyzing the law-making branch of the British
constitution. It was only by adopting new and arbitrary rules for
choking off debate that any legislation could be passed in the
stormy decade beginning with 1881. Arrests, suspensions, and
expulsions of Irish members repeatedly disturbed the dignity of
the House of Commons, and kept ever present before the English
representatives the temper of the subject kingdom.
A statesman as earnest as Mr. Gladstone, as little bound by
precedent, and as surely impelled in his later years by a purpose
to enact into law the wishes of the people, could not but be
profoundly impressed by the unanimity with which, in 1885, the
Irish used their new gift of the ballot to send men to Parliament
who were pledged to work for Home Rule. It was no sudden
conversion but the result of a long consideration which led to
his open profession, in 1885, of his determination to crown his
efforts for the relief of the Irish nation by giving them the
separate legislative body for which they had asked with such
persistent clamor. It is possible, in reviewing his statements
for a dozen years previous, in the light of the final
declaration, that his mind had been dwelling on the subject as
his old political mentor, Peel, dwelt upon the question of free
trade in the years before he renounced protectionism utterly.
No sooner did Gladstone come into office, in 1886, than he
concentrated his energies upon his Home Rule project. His chief
lieutenant, John Morley, the English Radical, was sent to Ireland
as chief secretary. In April, in one of the greatest speeches of
a career remarkable for its eloquence, Mr. Gladstone introduced
to the House of Commons his first Home Rule Bill, "An act to make
better provision for the government of Ireland." It proposed to
establish at Dublin a Parliament of Peers and Commons, under a
lord-lieutenant appointed by the crown, and an independent privy
council. The Irish Parliament was to have control of local
finances except customs duties, and it was excluded from
interference with army and navy, foreign or colonial affairs, or
with religious endowments. An essential provision was that after
the establishment of the Dublin Parliament Ireland should no
longer be represented in the "imperial" Parliament at
Westminster. A week later a "purchase of land" bill was
introduced by the Prime Minister to provide funds for buying out
the Irish landlords and distributing their holdings among the
tenants. The Home Rule Bill split the Liberal party in twain.
Lord Hartington, the Whig, Joseph Chamberlain, the Radical, and
John Bright, the hero of the non-conformists, broke away from
their old leader and helped to organize the "Liberal Unionist"
party, rallying those Liberals who remained true to the Act of
Legislative Union of the three kingdoms. Ninety-three rallied
under this banner on April 14th, when the bill was killed on its
second reading by a vote of 343 to 313. The nation was appealed
to in vain. In July the Gladstonian government gave up the fight
against the Conservative and Liberal-Unionist coalition and Lord
Salisbury resumed the premiership.
For Ireland a new era began, characterized by agrarian crime,
anti-rent agitation under the "Plan of Campaign," and Parnellite
obstruction at Westminster.
In 1893 the "Grand Old Man," now Prime Minister for the fourth
time, and in his eighty-fourth year, made a final endeavor to
bring order into Ireland, by enabling her to regulate her own
affairs. The Home Rule Bill of 1893 differed from the earlier
measure chiefly in respect to the Irish representation at
Westminster. Ireland, in addition to her local Parliament at
Dublin, was granted eighty seats in the "imperial" House of
Commons, though the Irish members might not vote on exclusively
British measures. "This was to get over two objections: The first
was the objection of those who complained of Ireland's being
taxed by the imperial Parliament without representation. The
second was the objection of those who complained that whereas
English members could not interfere in the affairs of Ireland,
Irish members might come over to the imperial Parliament and
interfere in the affairs of England." The Old Man Eloquent, now
backed by an overwhelming majority, carried the bill triumphantly
through the Lower House only to meet defeat by a majority of ten
to one in the Lords, the stronghold of Conservatism, where every
progressive measure of reform has to encounter resistance at the
outset. Though the Lords have learned to yield when the nation
reiterates its determined demand for a law, they were spared on
this occasion. Mr. Gladstone did not renew the bill. In March,
1894, he withdrew forever from public life, which he had adorned
so long and so conspicuously, his last words in Parliament taking
the form of an impressive warning against the assertion of
authority by the Upper House. In his last interview with the
leader of the Irish Home Rulers he assured them of his belief in
the ultimate triumph of their cause--a cause whose success was
mentioned in his prayers.
The Queen offered her aged public servant an earldom on his
retirement, but his was not an ambition to be pleased with such
empty rewards. In his beautiful castle of Hawarden, surrounded by
his books and his family, he spent the years which remained to
him in a graceful old age. To the last his mind remained alert
and active. He busied himself with the classical and theological
studies which had been the delight of his young manhood, and the
relaxation of his active years. His translations, his
controversial pamphlets, his letters on public questions, showed
the refinement and vigor of his remarkable intellect. When he
died the English-speaking world paid a universal tribute of
respect to his memory.
In linking these biographies with certain public questions or
events, the name of Gladstone has been connected with the cause
of Ireland--a "lost cause," as some may say, because Home Rule,
which was to have been the capstone of his edifice, was rejected
by the builders. But it must not be forgotten that it was
Gladstone who swept away the burdensome Irish Church and improved
the land laws, the franchise, and the opportunities of education
in Ireland, and made an English statesman's name beloved in the
Emerald Isle for the first time since Charles James Fox. Nor
should his great work for Ireland obscure the grand achievements
of the earlier years when he led the Liberal party through its
wonderful program of reform in England; nor should any prejudice
against the friend of Ireland dull our perception to the clear
voice which so often pleaded the cause of ignorance and
oppression at home and abroad, and touched the best that was in
the conscience of his countrymen. A good, great, learned,
eloquent statesman, William Ewart Gladstone towers in moral
grandeur above his fellows like a mountain peak above the
foothills, and the far-surrounding plain.