was no less conspicuous in their delivery. Nothing could be more easy
and graceful than his manner on ordinary occasions, nothing more grave
and stately than it became when he was making a ceremonial reference
to some public event or bestowing a meed of praise on the departed.
His expository discourses, such as those with which he introduced a
complicated bill or unfolded a financial statement, were models of
their kind, not only for lucidity, but for the pleasant smoothness,
never lapsing into monotony, with which the stream of speech flowed
from his lips. The task was performed so well that people thought it
an easy task till they saw how inferior were the performances of two
subsequent chancellors of the exchequer so able in their respective
ways as Sir Stafford Northcote and Mr. Lowe. But when an occasion
arrived which quickened men's pulses in the House of Commons, a place
where feeling rises as suddenly as do the waves of a Highland loch
when a squall comes rushing down the glen, the vehemence of his
feeling found expression in the fire of his eye and the resistless
strength of his words. His utterance did not grow swifter, nor did the
key of his voice rise, as passion raises and sharpens the voice in
most men. But the measured force with which every sentence was
launched, like a shell hurtling through the air, the concentrated
intensity of his look, as he defied antagonists in front and swept his
glance over the ranks of his supporters around and behind him, had a
startling and thrilling power which no other Englishman could exert,
and which no Englishman had exerted since the days of Pitt and Fox.
The whole proud, bold, ardent nature of the man seemed to flash out,
and one almost forgot what the lips said in admiration of the
towering personality.
People who read next day the report in the newspapers of a speech
delivered on such an occasion could not comprehend the impression
it had made on the listeners. "What was there in it so to stir you?"
they asked. They had not seen the glance and the gestures; they
had not heard the vibrating voice rise to an organ peal of triumph or
sink to a whisper of entreaty. Mr. Gladstone's voice was naturally
rich and resonant. It was a fine singing voice, and a pleasant voice
to listen to in conversation, not the less pleasant for having a
slight trace of Liverpool accent clinging to it. But what struck one
in listening to his speeches was not so much the quality of the
vocal chords as the skill with which they were managed. He had a
gift of sympathetic expression, of throwing his feeling into his
voice, and using its modulations to accompany and convey every shade
of meaning, like that which a great composer exerts when he puts music
to a poem, or a great executant when he renders at once the
composer's and the poet's thought. And just as accomplished singers
or violinists enjoy the practice of their art, so he rejoiced,
perhaps unconsciously, yet intensely, in putting forth this faculty
of expression; as appeared, indeed, from the fact that whenever his
voice failed him (which sometimes befell in later years) his
words came less easily, and even the chariot of his argument seemed
to drive heavily. That the voice should so seldom have failed was
wonderful. When he had passed his seventy-fifth year, it became
sensibly inferior in volume and depth of tone. But its variety and
delicacy remained. In April 1886, he being then seventy-seven, it
held out during a speech of nearly four hours in length. In
February 1890 it enabled him to deliver with extraordinary effect an
eminently solemn and pathetic appeal. In March 1894 those who
listened to it the last time it was heard in Parliament--they were
comparatively few, for the secret of his impending resignation had
been well kept--recognised in it all the old charm. The most
striking instance I recall of the power it could exert is to be
found in a speech made in 1883, during one of the tiresome debates
occasioned by the refusal of the Opposition and of some timorous
Liberals to allow Mr. Bradlaugh to be sworn as a member of the House
of Commons. This speech produced on those who heard it an impression
which its perusal to-day fails to explain. That impression was chiefly
due to the grave and reverent tone in which he delivered some
sentences stating the view that it is not our belief in the bare
existence of a Deity, but the realising of him as being a Providence
ruling the world, that has moral value and significance for us. And
it was due in particular to the solemn dignity with which he
declaimed six lines of Lucretius, setting forth the Epicurean view
that the gods do not concern themselves with human affairs. There
were perhaps not twenty men in the House of Commons who could follow
the sense of the lines so as to appreciate their bearing on his
argument. But these sonorous hexameters--hexameters that seemed to
have lived on through nineteen centuries to find their application
from the lips of an orator to-day--the sense of remoteness in the
strange language and the far-off heathen origin, the deep and moving
note in the speaker's voice, thrilled the imagination of the
audience and held it spellbound, lifting for a moment the whole
subject of debate into a region far above party conflicts. Spoken by
any one else, the passage culminating in these Lucretian lines might
have produced little effect. It was the voice and manner, above
all the voice, with its marvellous modulations, that made the
speech majestic.
Yet one must not forget to add that with him, as with some other
famous statesmen, the impression made by a speech was in a measure due
to the admiring curiosity and wonder which his personality inspired.
He was so much the most interesting human being in the House of
Commons that, when he withdrew, many members said that the place had
lost half its attraction for them, and that the chamber looked empty
because he was not in it. Plenty of able men remained. But even the
ablest seemed ordinary when compared with the figure that had
vanished, a figure in whom were combined, as in no other man of his
time, an unrivalled experience, an extraordinary activity and
versatility of intellect, a fervid imagination, and an indomitable
will.
Though Mr. Gladstone's oratory was a main source of his power, both in
Parliament and over the people, the effort of detractors to represent
him as a mere rhetorician will seem absurd to the historian who
reviews his whole career. The rhetorician adorns and popularises the
ideas which have originated with others; he advocates policies which
others have devised; he follows and expresses the sentiments which
already prevail in his party. Mr. Gladstone was himself a source of
new ideas and new policies; he evoked new sentiments or turned old
sentiments into new channels. Neither was he, as some alleged,
primarily a destroyer. His conservative instincts were strong; he
cherished ancient custom. When it became necessary to clear away an
institution he sought to put something else in its place. He was a
constructive statesman not less conspicuously than were Pitt, Canning,
and Peel. Whether he was a philosophic statesman, basing his action on
large views obtained by thought and study, philosophic in the sense
in which we apply the epithet to Pericles, Machiavelli, Turgot,
Burke, Jefferson, Hamilton, Stein--if one class can be made to include
persons otherwise so dissimilar--may perhaps be doubted. There are few
instances in history of men who have been great thinkers and also
great legislators or administrators, because the two kinds of capacity
almost exclude one another. As experts declare that a man who should
try to operate on the Stock Exchange in reliance upon a profound
knowledge of the inner springs of European politics and the financial
resources of the great States, would ruin himself before his perfectly
correct calculations had time to come true, so a practical statesman,
though he cannot know too much, or look too far ahead, must beware of
trusting his own forecasts, must remember that he has to deal with the
next few months or years, and to persuade persons who cannot be
expected to share or even to understand his views of the future. The
habit of meditating on underlying truths, the tendency to play the
long game, are almost certain to spoil a man for dealing effectively
with the present. He will not be a sufficiently vigilant observer; he
will be out of sympathy with the notions of the average man; his
arguments will go over the head of his audience. No English prime
minister has looked at politics with the eye of a philosopher. But Mr.
Gladstone, if hardly to be called a thinker, showed higher
constructive power than any one else has done since Peel. Were the
memory of his oratorical triumphs to pass completely away, he would
deserve to be remembered in respect of the mark he left upon the
British statute-book and of the changes he wrought both in the
constitution of his country and in her European policy.
Three groups of measures stand out as monuments of his skill and
energy. The first of these three includes the financial reforms
embodied in a series of fourteen budgets between the years 1853 and
1882, the most famous of which were the budgets of 1853 and 1860. In
the former he continued the work begun by Peel by reducing and
simplifying the customs duties. Deficiencies in revenue were supplied
by the enactment of less oppressive imposts, and particularly by
resettling the income-tax, and by the introduction of a succession
duty on real estate. The preparation and passing of this very
technical and intricate Succession Duty Act was a most laborious
enterprise, of which Mr. Gladstone used to speak as the severest
mental strain he had ever undergone:
+Kartisten de ten ge machen phato dymenai andron.+[67]
The budget of 1860, among other changes, abolished the paper duty, a
boon to the press which was resisted by the House of Lords. They
threw out the measure, but in the following year Mr. Gladstone forced
them to submit. His achievements in the field of finance equal, if
they do not surpass, those of Peel, and are not tarnished, as in the
case of Pitt, by the recollection of a burden of debts incurred. To no
minister can be ascribed so large a share in promoting the commercial
and industrial prosperity of modern England, and in the reduction of
her national debt to the figure at which it stood when it began to
rise again in 1900.
The second group includes the parliamentary reform bills of 1866 and
1884 and the Redistribution Bill of 1885. The first of these was
defeated in the House of Commons, but it led to the passing next year,
by Mr. Disraeli, of a more sweeping measure. Taken together, these
statutes have turned Britain into a democratic country, changing the
character of her government almost as profoundly as did the Reform Act
of 1832.
The third group consists of a series of Irish measures, beginning with
the Church Disestablishment Act of 1869, and including the Land Act of
1870, the University Education Bill of 1873 (defeated in the House of
Commons), the Land Act of 1881, and the Home Rule bills of 1886 and
1893. All these were in a special manner Mr. Gladstone's handiwork,
prepared as well as brought in and advocated by him. All were highly
complicated, and of one, the Land Act of 1881, which it took three
months to carry through the House of Commons, it was said that so
great was its intricacy that only three men understood it--Mr.
Gladstone himself, his Attorney-General for Ireland, and Mr. T. M.
Healy. In preparing a bill no man could be more painstaking. He
settled and laid down the principles himself; and when he came to work
them out with the draughtsman and the officials who had special
knowledge of the subject, he insisted on knowing what their effect
would be in every particular. Indeed, he loved work for its own sake,
in this respect unlike Mr. Bright, who once said to me with a smile,
when asked as to his methods of working, that he had never done any
work all his life. The value of this mastery of details was seen when
a bill came to be debated in Committee. It was impossible to catch Mr.
Gladstone tripping on a point of fact, or unprepared with a reply to
the arguments of an opponent. He seemed to revel in the toil of
mastering a tangle of technical details.
It is long since England, in this respect not favoured by her
parliamentary system, has produced a great foreign minister, nor has
that title been claimed for Mr. Gladstone. But he showed on several
occasions both his independence of tradition and his faith in broad
principles as fit to be applied in international relations; and his
action in that field, though felt only at intervals, has left abiding
results in European history. In 1851, he being then still a Tory, his
pamphlet denouncing the cruelties of the Bourbon government of Naples,
and the sympathy he subsequently avowed with the national movement in
Italy, gave that movement a new standing in Europe by powerfully
recommending it to English opinion. In 1870 the prompt action of his
ministry in arranging a treaty for the neutrality of Belgium on the
outbreak of the war between France and Germany, averted the risk that
Belgium might be drawn into the strife. In 1871, by concluding the
treaty of Washington, which provided for the settlement by arbitration
of the _Alabama_ claims, he not only set a precedent full of promise
for the future, but delivered England from what would have been, in
case of her being at war with any European power, a danger fatal to
her ocean commerce. And, in 1876, his onslaught upon the Turks, after
the Bulgarian massacres, roused an intense feeling in England, turning
the current of opinion so decisively that Disraeli's ministry were
forced to leave the Sultan to his fate, and thus became a cause of the
ultimate deliverance of Bulgaria, Eastern Rumelia, Bosnia, and
Thessaly from Mussulman tyranny. Few English statesmen have equally
earned the gratitude of the oppressed.
Nothing lay nearer to his heart than the protection of the Christians
of the East. His sense of personal duty to them was partly due to the
feeling that the Crimean War had prolonged the rule of the Turk, and
had thus imposed a special responsibility on Britain, and on the
members of Lord Aberdeen's cabinet which drifted into that war. Twenty
years after the agitation of 1876, and when he had finally retired
from Parliament and political life, the massacres perpetrated by the
Sultan on his Armenian subjects brought him once more into the field,
and his last speech in public (delivered at Liverpool in the autumn of
1896) was a powerful argument in favour of British intervention to
rescue the Eastern Christians. In the following spring he followed
this up by a pamphlet on behalf of the freedom of Crete. In neither of
these two cases did success crown his efforts, for the Government,
commanding a large majority in Parliament, pursued the course upon
which it had already entered. Poignant regrets were expressed that Mr.
Gladstone was no longer able to take effective action in the cause of
humanity; yet it was a consolation to be assured that age and
infirmity had not dulled his sympathies with that cause.
That he was right in 1876-78 in the view he took of the line of
conduct England should adopt towards the Turks has been now virtually
admitted even by his opponents. That he was also right in 1896, when
urging action to protect the Eastern Christians, will probably be
admitted ten years hence, when the facts of the case and the nature of
the opportunity that existed for taking prompt action without the risk
of a European war have become better known. In both cases it was not
merely religious sympathy, but also a far-sighted view of policy that
governed his judgment. He held that the faults of Turkish rule are
incurable, and that the Powers of Western and Central Europe ought to
aim at protecting the subject nationalities and by degrees extending
self-government to them, so that they may grow into states, and in
time be able to restore prosperity to regions ruined by long
misgovernment, while constituting an effective barrier to the advance
of Russia. The jealousies of the Powers throw obstacles in the way of
this policy, but it is a safe policy for England, and offers the best
hope for the peoples of the East.
The facts just noted prove that he possessed and exerted a capacity
for initiative in foreign as well as in domestic affairs. In the
Neapolitan case, in the _Alabama_ case, in the Bulgarian case, he
acted from his own convictions, with no previous suggestion of
encouragement from his party; and in the last-mentioned instance he
took a course which did not at the moment promise any political gain,
and which seemed to the English political world so novel and even
startling that no ordinary statesman would have ventured on it.
His courage was indeed one of the most striking parts of the man.[68]
It was not the rashness of an impetuous nature, for, impetuous as he
was when stirred by some sudden excitement, he showed an Ulyssean
caution whenever he took a deliberate survey of the conditions that
surrounded him. It was the proud self-confidence of a strong
character, which was willing to risk fame and fortune in pursuing a
course it had once resolved upon; a character which had faith in its
own conclusions, and in the success of a cause consecrated by
principle; a character which obstacles did not affright, but rather
roused to a higher combative energy. Few English statesmen have done
anything so bold as was Mr. Gladstone's declaration for Irish Home
Rule in 1886. He took not only his political power but the fame and
credit of his whole past life in his hand when he set out on this new
journey at seventy-seven years of age; for it was quite possible that
the great bulk of his party might refuse to follow him, and he be left
exposed to derision as the chief of an insignificant group. As it
happened, the bulk of the party did follow him, though many of the
most influential refused to do so. But neither he nor any one else
could have foretold this when his intentions were first announced.
We may now, before passing away from the public side of Mr.
Gladstone's career, return for a moment to the opposite views of his
character which were indicated some pages back. He was accused of
sophistry, of unwisdom, of want of patriotism, of lust for power.
Though it is difficult to sift these charges without discussing the
conduct which gave rise to them, a task impossible here, each of them
must be briefly examined.
The first charge is the most plausible. His ingenuity in discovering
arguments and stating fine verbal distinctions, his subtlety in
discriminating between views or courses apparently similar, were
excessive, and invited misconstruction. He had a tendency to persuade
himself, quite unconsciously, that the course he desired to take was a
course which the public interest required. His acuteness soon found
reasons for that course; the warmth of his emotions enforced the
reasons. It was a dangerous tendency, but it does not impeach his
honesty of purpose, for the influence which his predilections
unconsciously exerted upon his judgment appeared also in his
theological and literary inquiries. I can recall no instance in which
he wilfully misstated a fact, or simulated a feeling, or used an
argument which he knew to be unsound. He did not, as does the sophist,
attempt "to make the worse appear the better reason."
His wisdom will be differently judged by those who condemn or approve
the chief acts of his policy. But it deserves to be noted that all the
legislation he passed, even the measures which, like the Irish Church
Disestablishment Bill, exposed him to angry attacks at the time, have
now been approved by the all but unanimous judgment of Englishmen.[69]
The same may be said of two acts which brought much invective upon
him--his settlement of the _Alabama_ claims, one of the wisest strokes
of foreign policy ever accomplished by a British minister, and his
protest against a support of the Turks in and after 1876. I pass by
Irish Home Rule, because the wisdom of the course he took must be
tested by results that are yet unborn, as I pass by his Egyptian
policy in 1882-85, because it cannot be fairly judged till the facts
have been fully made public. He may be open to blame for his
participation in the Crimean War, for his mistaken view of the
American Civil War, for his neglect of the Transvaal question when he
took office in 1880, and for his omission during his earlier career to
recognise the gravity of Irish disaffection and to study its causes. I
have heard him lament that he had not twenty years earlier given the
same attention to that abiding source of the difficulties of England
which he gave from 1866 onwards. If in these instances he erred, it
must be remembered that he erred in company with nine-tenths of
British statesmen in both political parties.
Their admiration did not prevent his friends from noting tendencies
which sometimes led him to miscalculate the forces he had to deal
with. Being, like the younger Pitt, extremely sanguine, he was prone
to underrate difficulties. Hopefulness is a splendid quality. It is
both the child and the parent of faith. Without it neither Mr. Pitt
nor Mr. Gladstone could have done what they did. But it disposes its
possessor not sufficiently to allow for the dulness or the prejudice
of others. So too the intensity of Mr. Gladstone's own feeling made
him fail to realise how many of his fellow-countrymen did not know of,
or were not shocked by, acts of cruelty and injustice which had roused
his indignation. If his hatred of ostentation suffered him to perceive
that a nation, however well assured of the reality of its power and
influence in the world, may also desire that this power and influence
should be asserted and proclaimed to other nations, he refused to
humour that desire. He had a contempt for what is called "playing to
the gallery," with a deep sense of the danger of stimulating the
passions which lead to aggression and war. To national honour, as he
conceived it, national righteousness was vital. His spirit was that of
Lowell's lines--
I love my country so as only they
Who love a mother fit to die for may.
I love her old renown, her ancient fame:
What better proof than that I loathe her shame?
It was this attitude that brought on him the charge of wanting
patriotism, a charge first, I think, insinuated at the time of the
_Alabama_ arbitration, renewed when in 1876 he was accused of
befriending Russia and neglecting "British interests," and sedulously
repeated thereafter, although in those two instances the result had
proved him right. There was this much to give a kind of colour to the
charge, that he had scrupulously, perhaps too scrupulously, refrained
from extolling the material power of England, preferring to insist
upon her responsibilities; that he was known to regret the constant
increase of naval and military expenditure, and that he had several
times taken a course which honour and prudence seemed to him to
recommend, but which had offended the patriots of the music-halls. But
it was an unjust charge, for no man had a warmer pride in England, a
higher sense of her greatness and her mission.
Was he too fond of power? Like other strong men, he enjoyed it.[70]
That to secure it he ever either adopted or renounced an opinion,
those who understood and watched the workings of his mind could not
believe. He was not only too conscientious, but too proud to forego
any of his convictions, and there were not a few occasions when he
took a course which considerations of personal interest would have
forbidden. He did not love office, feeling himself happier without its
cares, and when he accepted it did so, I think, in the belief that
there was work to be done which it was laid upon him individually to
do. His changes sprang naturally from the development of his own ideas
or (as in the case of his Irish policy) from the teaching of facts. He
sometimes so far yielded to his colleagues as to sanction steps which
he thought not the best, and may in this have sometimes erred; yet
compromises are unavoidable, for no Cabinet could be kept together if
its members did not now and then, in matters not essential, yield to
one another. When all the facts of his life come to be known,
instances may be disclosed in which he was the victim of his own
casuistry or of his deference to Peel's maxim that a minister should
not avow a change of view until the time has come to give effect to
it. But it will also be made clear that he strove to obey his
conscience, that he acted with an ever-present sense of his
responsibility to the Almighty, and that he was animated by an
unselfish enthusiasm for humanity, enlightenment, and freedom.