Gladstone, the Apostle of Liberalism in England.
[=Gladstone's First Political Address=]
It is a fact of much interest, as showing the growth of the human
mind, that William Ewart Gladstone, the great advocate of English
Liberalism, made his first political speech in vigorous opposition to
the Reform Bill of 1831. He was then a student at Oxford University,
but this boyish address had such an effect upon his hearers, that
Bishop Wordsworth felt sure the speaker "would one day rise to be
Prime Minister of England." This prophetic utterance may be mated with
another one, by Archdeacon Denison, who said: "I have just heard the
best speech I ever heard in my life, by Gladstone, against the Reform
Bill. But, mark my words, that man will one day be a Liberal, for he
argued against the Bill on liberal ground."
[=Gladstone in Parliament and the Cabinet=]
Both these far-seeing men hit the mark. Gladstone became Prime
Minister and the leader of the Liberal Party in England. Yet he had
been reared as a Conservative, and for many years he marched under
the banner of Conservatism. His political career began in the first
Reform Parliament, in January, 1833. Two years afterward he was made an
under-secretary in Sir Robert Peel's Cabinet. It was under the same
Premier that he first became a full member of the Cabinet, in 1845,
as Secretary of State for the Colonies. He was still a Tory in home
politics, but had become a Liberal in his commercial ideas, and was
Peel's right-hand man in carrying out his great commercial policy.
[=The Letters from Naples=]
The repeal of the Corn-laws was the work for which his Cabinet had been
formed, and Gladstone, as the leading Free-trader in the Tory ranks,
was called to it. As for Cobden, the apostle of Free-trade, Gladstone
admired him immensely. "I do not know," he said in later years, "that
there is in any period a man whose public career and life were nobler
or more admirable. Of course, I except Washington. Washington, to my
mind, is the purest figure in history." As an advocate of Free-trade
Gladstone first came into connection with another noble figure, that
of John Bright, who was to remain associated with him during most of
his career. In 1857 he first took rank as one of the great moral forces
of modern times. In that year he visited Naples, where he saw the
barbarous treatment of political prisoners under the government of the
infamous King Bomba, and described them in letters whose indignation
was breathed in such tremendous tones that England was stirred to its
depths and all Europe awakened. These thrilling epistles gave the cause
of Italian freedom an impetus that had much to do with its subsequent
success, and gained for Gladstone the warmest veneration of patriotic
Italians.
[=First Contest Between Gladstone and Disraeli=]
In 1852 he first came into opposition with the man against whom he was
to be pitted during the remainder of his career, Benjamin Disraeli,
who had made himself a power in Parliament, and in that year became
Chancellor of the Exchequer in Lord Derby's Cabinet and leader of the
House of Commons. The revenue Budget introduced by him showed a sad
lack of financial ability, and called forth sharp criticisms, to which
he replied in a speech made up of scoffs, gibes and biting sarcasms, so
daring and audacious in character as almost to intimidate the House. As
he sat down Mr. Gladstone rose and launched forth into an oration which
became historic. He gave voice to that indignation which lay suppressed
beneath the cowed feeling which for the moment the Chancellor of the
Exchequer's performance had left among his hearers. In a few minutes
the House was wildly cheering the intrepid champion who had rushed into
the breach, and when Mr. Gladstone concluded, having torn to shreds
the proposals of the Budget, a majority followed him into the division
lobby, and Mr. Disraeli found his government beaten by nineteen votes.
Such was the first great encounter between the two rivals.
Lord Derby resigned at once, and politics were plunged into a condition
of the wildest excitement and confusion. Mr. Gladstone was the butt of
Protectionist execration. He was near being thrown out of the window at
the Carlton Club by twenty extreme Tories, who, coming upstairs after
dinner, found him alone in the drawing-room. They did not quite go this
length, though they threatened to do so, but contented themselves with
insulting him.
In the Cabinet that followed, headed by Lord Aberdeen, Gladstone
succeeded Disraeli as Chancellor of the Exchequer, a position in which
he was to make a great mark. In April, 1853, he introduced his first
Budget, a marvel of ingenious statesmanship, in its highly successful
effort to equalize taxation. It remitted various taxes which had
pressed hard upon the poor and restricted business, and replaced them
by applying the succession duty to real estate, increasing the duty on
spirits, and extending the income tax. The latter Gladstone spoke of
as an emergency tax, only to be applied in times of national danger,
and presented a plan to extinguish it in 1860. His plan failed to work.
Nearly fifty years have passed since then, and the income tax still
remains, seemingly a fixed element of the British revenue system.
[=Gladstone's Great Budget Speech=]
Taken altogether, and especially in its expedients to equalize
taxation, this first Budget of Mr. Gladstone may be justly called
the greatest of the century. The speech in which it was introduced
and expounded created an extraordinary impression on the House and
the country. For the first time in Parliament figures were made as
interesting as a fairy tale; the dry bones of statistics were invested
with a new and potent life, and it was shown how the yearly balancing
of the national accounts might be directed by and made to promote the
profoundest and most fruitful principles of statesmanship. With such
lucidity and picturesqueness was this financial oratory rolled forth
that the dullest intellect could follow with pleasure the complicated
scheme; and for five hours the House of Commons sat as if it were under
the sway of a magician's wand. When Mr. Gladstone resumed his seat, it
was felt that the career of the coalition Ministry was assured by the
genius that was discovered in its Chancellor of the Exchequer.
[=Gladstone's Powers as an Orator=]
It was, indeed, to Gladstone's remarkable oratorical powers that much
of his success as a statesman was due. No man of his period was his
equal in swaying and convincing his hearers. His rich and musical
voice, his varied and animated gestures, his impressive and vigorous
delivery, great fluency, and wonderful precision of statement, gave him
a power over an audience which few men of the century have enjoyed. His
sentences, indeed, were long and involved, growing more so as his years
advanced, but their fine choice of words, rich rhetoric, and eloquent
delivery carried away all that heard him, as did his deep earnestness,
and intense conviction of the truth of his utterances.
We must pass rapidly over a number of years of Gladstone's career,
through most of which he continued to serve as Chancellor of the
Exchequer, and to amaze and delight the country by the financial
reforms effected in his annual Budgets. Between 1853 and 1866 those
reforms represented a decrease in the weight of the burden of the
national revenue amounting to £13,000,000.
Meanwhile his Liberalism had been steadily growing, and reached its
culmination in 1865, when the great Tory university of Oxford, which he
had long represented, rejected him as its member. At once he offered
himself as a candidate for South Lancashire, in which his native place
was situated, saying, in the opening of his speech at Manchester: "At
last, my friends, I am come among you; to use an expression which has
become very famous and is not likely to be forgotten, 'I am come among
you unmuzzled.'"
[=Gladstone the Liberal Leader of the House=]
Unmuzzled he was, as his whole future career was to show. Oxford had,
in a measure, clipped his wings. Now he was free to give the fullest
expression to his liberal faith, and to stand before the country as
the great apostle of reform. In 1866 he became, for the first time in
his career, leader of the House of Commons--Lord Russel, the Prime
Minister, being in the House of Lords. Many of his friends feared for
him in this difficult position; but the event proved that they had
no occasion for alarm, he showing himself one of the most successful
leaders the House had ever had.
[=The Suffrage Reform Bill=]
His first important duty in this position was to introduce the new
suffrage Reform Bill, a measure to extend the franchise in counties and
boroughs that would have added about 400,000 voters to the electorate.
In the debate that followed Gladstone and Disraeli were again pitted
against each other in a grand oratorical contest. Disraeli taunted him
with his youthful speech at Oxford against the Reform Bill of 1831.
Gladstone replied in a burst of vigorous eloquence, in which he scored
his opponent for lingering in a conservatism from which the speaker
gloried in having been strong enough to break. He and the Cabinet were
pledged to stand or fall with the Bill. But, if it fell, the principle
of right and justice which it involved would not fall. It was sure
to survive and triumph in the future. He ended with this stirring
prediction:
"You cannot fight against the future. Time is on our side. The great
social forces which move onwards in their might and majesty, and which
the tumult of our debates does not for a moment impede or disturb,
those great social forces are against you: they are marshalled on our
side; and the banner which we now carry into this fight, though perhaps
at some moment it may droop over our sinking heads, yet it soon again
will float in the eye of Heaven, and it will be borne by the firm hands
of the united people of the three kingdoms, perhaps not to an easy, but
to a certain, and to a not far distant, victory."
[=England Agitated on Reform=]
Disraeli and his party won. The Bill was defeated. But its defeat
roused the people almost as they had been roused in 1832. A formidable
riot broke out in London. Ten thousand people marched in procession
past Gladstone's residence, singing odes in honor of "the People's
William." There were demonstrations in his favor and in support of
the Bill throughout the country. The agitation continued during
the winter, its fire fed by the eloquence of another of the great
orators of the century, the "tribune of the people," John Bright. This
distinguished man and powerful public speaker, through all his life a
strenuous advocate of moral reform and political progress, had begun
his parliamentary career as an advocate of the Reform Bill of 1831-32.
He now became one of the great leaders in the new campaign, and through
his eloquence and that of Gladstone the force of public opinion rose
to such a height that the new Derby-Disraeli ministry found itself
obliged to bring in a Bill similar to that which it had worked so hard
to overthrow.
And now a striking event took place. The Tory Reform Bill was
satisfactory to Gladstone in its general features, but he proposed
many improvements--lodger franchise, educational and savings-bank
franchises, enlargement of the redistribution of seats, etc.--every
one of which was yielded in committee, until, as one lord remarked,
nothing of the original Bill remained but the opening word, "Whereas."
This bill, really the work of Gladstone, and more liberal than the one
which had been defeated, was passed, and Toryism, in the very success
of its measure, suffered a crushing defeat. To Gladstone, as the people
perceived, their right to vote was due.
[=Disraeli Becomes Prime Minister=]
But Disraeli was soon to attain to the exalted office for which he had
long been striving. In February, 1868, failing health caused Lord Derby
to resign, and Disraeli was asked to form a new administration. Thus
the "Asian Mystery," as he had been entitled, reached the summit of his
ambition, in becoming Prime Minister of England.
[=Gladstone is Made Prime Minister=]
He was not to hold this position long. Gladstone was to reach the
same high eminence before the year should end. Disraeli's government,
beginning in February, 1868, was defeated on the question of the
disestablishment of the Irish Church; an appeal to the country resulted
in a large Liberal gain; and on December 4th the Queen sent for Mr.
Gladstone and commissioned him to form a new ministry. The task was
completed by the 9th, Mr. Bright, who had aided so greatly in the
triumph of the Liberals, entering the new cabinet as President of the
Board of Trade. Thus at last, after thirty-five years of active public
life, Mr. Gladstone was at the summit of power--Prime Minister of Great
Britain with a strong majority in Parliament in his support.
Bishop Wilberforce, who met him in this hour of triumph, wrote of him
thus in his journal: "Gladstone as ever great, earnest, and honest; as
unlike the tricky Disraeli as possible. He is so delightfully true and
the same; just as full of interest in every good thing of every kind."
The period which followed the election of 1868--the period of the
Gladstone Administration of 1868-74--has been called "the golden age
of Liberalism." It was certainly a period of great reforms. The first,
the most heroic, and probably--taking all the results into account--the
most completely successful of these, was the disestablishment of the
Irish Church.
Though Mr. Gladstone had a great majority at his back, the difficulties
which confronted him were immense. In Ireland the wildest protests
emanated from the friends of the Establishment. The "loyal minority"
declared that their loyalty would come to an end if the measure were
passed. One synod, speaking with a large assumption, even for a synod,
of inspired knowledge, denounced it as "highly offensive to the
Almighty God." The Orangemen threatened to rise in insurrection. A
martial clergyman proposed to "kick the Queen's crown into the Boyne"
if she assented to such a Bill. Another announced his intention of
fighting with the Bible in one hand and the sword in the other. These
appeals and these threats of civil war, absurd as they proved to be in
reality, were not without producing some effect in Great Britain, and
it was amid a din of warnings, of misgiving counsels, and of hostile
cries, that Mr. Gladstone proceeded to carry out the mandate of the
nation which he had received at the polls.
[=Disestablishment of the Irish Church=]
On the first of March, 1869, he introduced his Disestablishment Bill.
His speech was one of the greatest marvels amongst his oratorical
achievements. His chief opponent declared that, though it lasted
three hours, it did not contain a redundant word. The scheme which
it unfolded--a scheme which withdrew the temporal establishment of a
Church in such a manner that the Church was benefited, not injured,
and which lifted from the backs of an oppressed people an intolerable
burden--was a triumph of creative genius. Leaving aside his Budgets,
which stand in a different category, it seems to us there is no room
to doubt that in his record of constructive legislation this measure
for the disestablishment of the Irish Church is Mr. Gladstone's most
perfect masterpiece.
Disraeli's speech in opposition to this measure was referred to by the
_London Times_ as "flimsiness relieved by spangles." After a debate in
which Mr. Bright made one of his most famous speeches, the bill was
carried by a majority of 118. Before this strong manifestation of the
popular will the House of Lords, which deeply disliked the Bill, felt
obliged to give way, and passed it by a majority of seven.
[=The Irish Land Bill Enacted=]
In 1870 Mr. Gladstone introduced his Irish Land Bill, a measure of
reform which Parliament had for years refused to grant. By it the
tenant was given the right to hold his farm as long as he paid his
rent, and received a claim upon the improvement made by himself and
his predecessors--a tenant-right which he could sell. This bill was
triumphantly carried; and another important Liberal measure, Mr.
Forster's Education Bill, became law.
In the following sessions the tide of Liberal reform continued on its
course. Among the reforms adopted was that of vote by ballot. A measure
was introduced abolishing purchase in the Army; and on this question
Mr. Gladstone had his third notable conflict with the Lords. The Lords
threw out the Bill. The imperious Premier, having found that purchase
in the Army existed only by royal sanction, advised the Queen to issue
a Royal Warrant cancelling the regulation. By a single act of executive
authority he carried out a reform to which Parliament had, through
one of its branches, refused its assent. This was a high-handed, not
to say autocratic, step, and it afforded a striking revelation of the
capacities in boldness and resolution of Mr. Gladstone's character. It
was denounced as Cæsarism and Cromwellism in some quarters; in others
as an unconstitutional invocation of the royal prerogative.
[=Defeat of Gladstone and the Liberals=]
But the career of reform at length proved too rapid for the country to
follow. The Government was defeated in 1873 on a bill for University
Education in Ireland. Gladstone at once resigned, but, as Disraeli
declined to form a Government, he was obliged to resume office. In 1874
he took the bold step of dissolving Parliament and appealing to the
country for support. If he were returned to power he promised to repeal
the income tax. He was not returned. The Tory party gained a majority
of 46. Gladstone at once resigned, not only the Premiership, but the
leadership of the Liberal party, and retired to private life--a much
needed rest after his many years of labor. Disraeli succeeded him as
Prime Minister, and two years afterwards was raised to the peerage by
the Queen as the Earl of Beaconsfield.
Mr. Gladstone was never idle. The intervals of his public duties were
filled with tireless studies and frequent literary labors. Chief
among the latter were his "Homeric Studies," works which showed great
erudition and active mental exercise, though not great powers of
critical discrimination. They adopted views which were then becoming
obsolete, and their conclusions have been rejected by Homeric scholars.
Gladstone's greatness was as an orator and a moral reformer, not as a
great logician and brilliant thinker.
[=Gladstone on the Bulgarian Horrors=]
In the period at which we have arrived his moral greatness and literary
fervor were both called into exercise in an international cause. The
Bulgarian atrocities of 1876--spoken of in Chapter X--called the aged
statesman from his retirement, and his pamphlet entitled "Bulgarian
Horrors and the Question of the East," rang through England like a
trumpet-call. "Let the Turks now carry away their abuses in the only
possible manner--by carrying off themselves," he wrote. "Their Zaptiehs
and their Mudirs, their Bimbashis and their Yuzbachis, their Kaimakams
and their Pashas, one and all, bag and baggage, shall, I hope, clear
out from the province they have desolated and profaned."
[=His Second Great Contest with Disraeli=]
He followed up this pamphlet by a series of speeches, delivered to
great meetings and to the House of Commons, with which for four years
he sought, as he expressed it, "night and day to counterwork the
purpose of Lord Beaconsfield." He succeeded; England was prevented by
his eloquence from joining the Turks in the war; but he excited the
fury of the war party to such an extent that at one time it was not
safe for him to appear in the streets of London. Nor was he quite safe
in the House of Commons, where the Conservatives hated him so bitterly
as to jeer and interrupt him whenever he spoke, and a party of them
went so far as to mob him in the House.
Yet the sentiment he had aroused saved the country from the greatest of
the follies by which it was threatened; and, if it failed to stop the
lesser adventures in which Lord Beaconsfield found an outlet for the
passions he had unloosed,--an annexation of Cyprus, an interference in
Egypt, an annexation of the Transvaal, a Zulu war which Mr. Gladstone
denounced as "one of the most monstrous and indefensible in our
history," an Afghan war which he described as a national crime,--it
nevertheless was so true an interpretation of the best, the deliberate,
judgment of the nation, that it sufficed eventually to bring the
Liberal party back to power.
[=Gladstone Again Made Premier=]
This took place in 1880. In the campaign for the Parliament elected
in that year Gladstone took a most active part, and had much to do
with the great Liberal victory that followed. In the face of the
overwhelming majority that was returned Lord Beaconsfield resigned
office, and Gladstone a second time was called to the head of the
government.
[=Parnell Becomes the Leader of the Irish Party=]
As in the previous, so in the present, Gladstone administration the
question of Ireland loomed up above all others. While Beaconsfield
remained Premier Ireland was lost sight of, quite dwarfed by the
Eastern question upon which the two life-long adversaries measured
their strength. But as Turkey went down in public interest Ireland
rose. The Irish people were gaining a vivid sense of their power under
the Constitution. And another famine came to put the land laws and
government of Ireland to a severe test. Still more, Ireland gained
a leader, a man of remarkable ability, who was to play as great a
part in its history as O'Connell had done half a century before. This
was Charles Stewart Parnell, the founder of the Irish Land League--a
powerful trade-union of tenant farmers--and for many years the leader
of the Irish party in Parliament. In the Parliament of 1880 his
followers numbered sixty-eight, enough to make him a power to be dealt
with in legislation.
Gladstone, in assuming control of the new government, was quite unaware
of the task before him. When he had completed his work with the Church
and the Land Bills ten years before, he fondly fancied that the Irish
question was definitely settled. The Home Rule movement, which was
started in 1870, seemed to him a wild delusion which would die away of
itself. In 1884 he said: "I frankly admit that I had had much upon my
hands connected with the doings of the Beaconsfield Government in every
quarter of the world, and I did not know--no one knew--the severity of
the crisis that was already swelling upon the horizon, and that shortly
after rushed upon us like a flood."
[=The Famine and the Bill for Irish Relief=]
He was not long in discovering the gravity of the situation, of which
the House had been warned by Mr. Parnell. The famine had brought its
crop of misery, and, while the charitable were seeking to relieve the
distress, many of the landlords were turning adrift their tenants
for non-payment of rents. The Irish party brought in a Bill for the
Suspension of Evictions, which the government replaced by a similar one
for Compensation for Disturbance. This was passed with a large majority
by the Commons, but was rejected by the Lords, and Ireland was left to
face its misery without relief.
[=Mr. Forster's Policy of Coercion=]
The state of Ireland at that moment was too critical to be dealt with
in this manner. The rejection of the Compensation for Disturbance Bill
was, to the peasantry whom it had been intended to protect, a message
of despair, and it was followed by the usual symptom of despair in
Ireland, an outbreak of agrarian crime. On the one hand over 17,000
persons were evicted; on the other there was a dreadful crop of
murders and outrages. The Land League sought to do what Parliament
did not; but in doing so it came in contact with the law. Moreover,
the revolution--for revolution it seemed to be--grew too formidable
for its control; the utmost it succeeded in doing was in some sense
to ride without directing the storm. The first decisive step of Mr.
Forster, the chief secretary for Ireland, was to strike a blow at the
Land League. In November he ordered the prosecution of Mr. Parnell, Mr.
Biggar, and several of the officials of the organization, and before
the year was out he announced his intention of introducing a Coercion
Bill. This step threw the Irish members under Mr. Parnell and the
Liberal Government into relations of definitive antagonism.
Mr. Forster introduced his Coercion Bill on January 24, 1881. It was
a formidable measure, which enabled the chief secretary, by signing
a warrant, to arrest any man on suspicion of having committed a
given offence, and to imprison him without trial at the pleasure of
the government. It practically suspended the liberties of Ireland.
The Irish members exhausted every resource of parliamentary action
in resisting it, and their tactics resulted in several scenes
unprecedented in parliamentary history. In order to pass the Bill it
was necessary to suspend them in a body several times. Mr. Gladstone,
with manifest pain, found himself, as leader of the House, the agent by
whom this extreme resolve had to be executed.
[=Gladstone's New Land Bill=]
The Coercion Bill passed, Mr. Gladstone introduced his Land Bill
of 1881, which was the measure of conciliation intended to balance
the measure of repression. This was really a great and sweeping
reform, whose dominant feature was the introduction of the novel and
far-reaching principle of the State stepping in between landlord and
tenant and fixing the rents. The Bill had some defects, as a series of
amending acts, which were subsequently passed by both Liberal and Tory
Governments, proved; but, apart from these, it was on the whole the
greatest measure of land reform ever passed for Ireland by the Imperial
Parliament.
[=Stirring Events in Ireland=]
But Ireland was not yet satisfied. Parnell had no confidence in the
good intentions of the government, and took steps to test its honesty,
which so angered Mr. Forster that he arrested Mr. Parnell and several
other leaders and pronounced the Land League an illegal body. Forster
was well meaning but mistaken. He fancied that by locking up the
ringleaders he could bring quiet to the country. On the contrary,
affairs were soon far worse than ever, crime and outrage spreading
widely. In despair, Mr. Forster released Parnell and resigned. All now
seemed hopeful; coercion had proved a failure; peace and quiet were
looked for; when, four days afterward, the whole country was horrified
by a terrible crime. The new secretary for Ireland, Lord Cavendish, and
the under-secretary, Mr. Burke, were attacked and hacked to death with
knives in Phoenix Park.
Everywhere panic and indignation arose. A new Coercion Act was passed
without delay. It was vigorously put into effect, and a state of
virtual war between England and Ireland again came into existence.
Great Britain, in her usual fashion of seeking to carry the world on
her shoulders, had made the control of the Suez Canal an excuse for
meddling with the government of Egypt.
[=The Bombardment of Alexandria and Death of Gordon=]
The result was a revolution that drove Ismail Pasha from his throne. As
the British still held control, a revolt broke out among the people,
headed by an ambitious leader named Arabi Pasha, and Alexandria was
seized, the British being driven out and many of them killed. Much as
Gladstone deprecated war, he felt himself forced into it. John Bright,
to whom war was a crime that nothing could warrant, resigned from the
cabinet, but the Government acted vigorously, the British fleet being
ordered to bombard Alexandria. This was done effectively. The city,
half reduced to ashes, was occupied by the British, Arabi and his
army withdrawing in haste. Soon afterwards he was defeated by General
Wolseley and the insurrection was at an end. Egypt remained a vassal
of Great Britain. An unfortunate sequel to this may be briefly stated.
A formidable insurrection broke out in the Soudan, under El Mahdi, a
Mohammedan fanatic, who captured the city of Khartoum and murdered the
famous General Gordon. For years Upper Egypt was lost to the state,
it being recovered only at the close of the century by a military
expedition.
In South Africa the British were less successful. Here a war had been
entered into with the Boers, in which the British forces suffered a
severe defeat at Majuba Hill. Gladstone did not adopt the usual fashion
of seeking revenge by the aid of a stronger force, but made peace, the
Boers gaining what they had been fighting for.
[=The Defeat of the Liberals=]
Disasters like this weakened the administration. Parnell and his
followers joined hands with the Tories, and a vigorous assault was made
upon the government. Slowly its majority fell away, and at length, in
May, 1885, it was defeated.
The scene which followed was a curious one. The Irish raised cries of
"No Coercion," while the Tories delivered themselves up to a frenzy
of jubilation, waving hats and handkerchiefs, and wildly cheering.
Lord Randolph Churchill jumped on a bench, brandished his hat madly
above his head, and altogether behaved as if he were beside himself.
Mr. Gladstone calmly resumed the letter to the Queen which he had been
writing on his knee, while the clerk at the table proceeded to run
through the orders of the day, as if nothing particular had happened.
When in a few moments the defeated Premier moved the adjournment, he
did so still holding his letter in one hand and the pen in the other,
and the Conservatives surged through the doorway, tumultuously cheering.
Gladstone's great opponent was no longer on earth to profit by his
defeat. Beaconsfield had died in 1881, and Lord Salisbury became head
of the new Tory Government, one which owed its existence to Irish
votes. It had a very short life. Parnell and his fellows soon tired of
their unnatural alliance, turned against and defeated the Government,
and Gladstone was sent for to form a new government. On February 1,
1886, he became Prime Minister of Great Britain for the third time.
[=Gladstone a Convert to Home Rule=]
During the brief interval his opinions had suffered a great revolution.
He no longer thought that Ireland had all it could justly demand.
He returned to power as an advocate of a most radical measure, that
of Home Rule for Ireland, a restoration of that separate Parliament
which it had lost in 1800. He also had a scheme to buy out the Irish
landlords and establish a peasant proprietary by state aid. His new
views were revolutionary in character, but he did not hesitate--he
never hesitated to do what his conscience told him was right. On April
8, 1886, he introduced to Parliament his Home Rule Bill.
[=A Remarkable Scene in Parliament=]
The scene that afternoon was one of the most remarkable in
Parliamentary history. Never before was such interest manifested in a
debate by either the public or the members of the House. In order to
secure their places, members arrived at St. Stephen's at six o'clock
in the morning, and spent the day on the premises; and, a thing quite
unprecedented, members who could not find places on the benches
filled up the floor of the House with rows of chairs. The strangers',
diplomats', peers', and ladies' galleries were filled to overflowing.
Men begged even to be admitted to the ventilating passages beneath the
floor of the Chamber that they might in some sense be witnesses of the
greatest feat in the lifetime of an illustrious old man of eighty.
Around Palace Yard an enormous crowd surged, waiting to give the
veteran a welcome as he drove up from Downing Street.
Mr. Gladstone arrived in the House, pale and still panting from the
excitement of his reception in the streets. As he sat there the entire
Liberal party--with the exception of Lord Hartington, Sir Henry James,
Mr. Chamberlain and Sir George Trevelyan--and the Nationalist members,
by a spontaneous impulse, sprang to their feet and cheered him again
and again. The speech which he delivered was in every way worthy of the
occasion. It expounded, with marvelous lucidity and a noble eloquence,
a tremendous scheme of constructive legislation--the re-establishment
of a legislature in Ireland, but one subordinate to the Imperial
Parliament, and hedged round with every safeguard which could protect
the unity of the Empire. It took three hours in delivery, and was
listened to throughout with the utmost attention on every side of the
House. At its close all parties united in a tribute of admiration for
the genius which had astonished them with such an exhibition of its
powers.
Yet it is one thing to cheer an orator, another thing to vote for a
revolution. The Bill was defeated--as it was almost sure to be. Mr.
Gladstone at once dissolved Parliament and appealed to the country in
a new election, with the result that he was decisively defeated. His
bold declaration that the contest was one between the classes and the
masses turned the aristocracy against him, while he had again roused
the bitter hatred of his opponents.
But the "Grand Old Man" bided his time. The new Salisbury ministry was
one of coercion carried to the extreme in Ireland, wholesale eviction,
arrest of members of Parliament, suppression of public meetings by
force of arms, and other measures of violence which in the end wearied
the British public and doubled the support of Home Rule. In 1892 Mr.
Gladstone returned to power with a majority of more than thirty Home
Rulers in his support.
[=Gladstone's Last and Greatest Triumph=]
It was one of the greatest efforts in the career of the old
Parliamentary hero when he brought his new Home Rule Bill before
the House. Never in his young days had he worked more earnestly and
incessantly. He disarmed even his bitterest enemies, none of whom now
dreamed of treating him with disrespect. Mr. Balfour spoke of the
delight and fascination with which even his opponents watched his
leading of the House and listened to his unsurpassed eloquence. Old
age had come to clothe with its pathos, as well as with its majesty,
the white-haired, heroic figure. The event proved one of the greatest
triumphs of his life. The Bill passed with a majority of thirty-four.
That it would pass in the House of Lords no one looked for. It was
defeated there by a majority of 378 out of 460.
[=The Close of a Great Career=]
With this great event the public career of the Grand Old Man came to an
end. The burden had grown too heavy for his reduced strength. In March,
1894, to the consternation of his party, he announced his intention
of retiring from public life. The Queen offered, as she had done once
before, to raise him to the peerage as an earl, but he declined the
proffer. His own plain name was a title higher than that of any earldom
in the kingdom.
On May 19, 1898 William Ewart Gladstone laid down the burden of his
life as he had already done that of labor. The greatest and noblest
figure in legislative life of the nineteenth century had passed away
from earth.
[Illustration: NICHOLAS II. AND FAMILY
COUNT LYOF NIKOLAIEVITCH TOLSTOI
RUSSIA'S ROYAL FAMILY AND HER LITERARY LEADER]
[Illustration: CHARLES STEWART PARNELL.
WILLIAM O'BRIEN.
MICHAEL DAVITT.
T. M. HEALY.
FOUR CHAMPIONS OF IRELAND'S CAUSE]