Description is said to be only possible by comparing, and when one is
asked to sketch Mr. Gladstone, how is it to be set about? His admirers
will have it that he has been a very great Minister, so that if we adopt
the comparative method, we ought to look high for standards. Shall we
match him alongside Bismarck or Cavour? The latter, to give him
precedence, stands renowned for building up his country in evil days,
when every omen was against her. But Mr. Gladstone, succeeding to power
when England was in the full tide of prosperity and at the height of
fame, gave up her prospects, and would have acquiesced in her decadence.
There is no likeness whatever between him and Cavour. Then take
Bismarck. The great German Chancellor shares with the Italian Minister
the glory of having widened the bounds and raised the position of his
land, and he stands now head and shoulders above all in the midst of the
diplomatic world a very Colossus. But Mr. Gladstone is and has always
been outside that world altogether. Prince Bismarck has his hand on all
the springs of action, and will let pass no chance of exalting his
country. Mr. Gladstone, we repeat, never made the slightest impression
in the regions of diplomacy; Courts did not know him, foreign statesmen
left him out of their reckoning of the men that had to be dealt with.
The great international achievements for which he has alone been talked
of have been the surrender of British territory and the paying down of
English money lavishly to another State for preposterous claims. But it
will be said that it is not fair to Mr. Gladstone to compare him to
Prince Bismarck and Count Cavour, for they were men who found their
country in unusual circumstances. Look, then, to names in our own
history. Pitt must not be spoken of for the reasons just allowed in the
other cases; but there are Canning and Palmerston. How does Mr.
Gladstone look alongside them? He has himself more than once alluded to
Canning, as if not unwilling to be thought to have received his mantle.
It was, however, always only in connection with Greece that he spoke of
Canning; but that Minister looked much farther than the Mediterranean.
One would have thought that so fine a rhetorician as Mr. Gladstone would
not have forgotten the famous phrase in which Canning claimed to have
called the New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old.
Lord Palmerston was without any such fine phrases, but in foreign
affairs he acted boldly, though he had to fall back on a musty Latin
quotation to describe it. Every Englishman, however, understood Latin
when their Minister said, _Civis Romanus sum_. Yet neither of these
Ministers at any part of their career lived in times more stirring than
Mr. Gladstone has done, nor when the interests of England were more
endangered. He has still later had magnificent opportunities, but he did
worse than lose them.
From all this, it would seem that, whether we look abroad or at home,
there is no possibility of describing Mr. Gladstone by hints of
comparison with these historical personages. What is said in that way
appears, in fact, to turn into contrast; which is, also, itself a mode
of delineation, though not usually of the kind the chief object of it
wishes. We can find no Minister to couple along with him as having
deliberately despaired of his country. However, Mr. Gladstone is
certainly great in some way, for although other nations while we were
under his sway were gradually losing sight of England herself as well as
of him, he was making plenty of noise all the time at home. If it should
turn out, as we go on, that he was not a great Minister but a great
orator, that would seem to account for both the things. If Bismarck and
Cavour have made affairs, Mr. Gladstone has made speeches, beating them
as much in that as they did him in the other respect. But it is not
exactly the same thing to the countries the men represent.
It is, therefore, under a humbler, more domestic aspect than that of
this high supreme style of Minister which we have first tried that we
must begin Mr. Gladstone's portraiture. The task may be divided into two
portions. There is the opinion which we Conservatives hold of the
general influence and effect he has had upon our national interests, in
which we may be credited with at least trying to estimate his acts and
measures on their merits; and, besides that, there is a judgment of him
from a narrower party view, arising out of his historic relation to
ourselves. We will take the latter first.
To hear Liberals talk, one might suppose that Conservatives had always
cherished a special hatred against Mr. Gladstone simply for ceasing to
be a Tory and becoming a Radical. That the Conservatives rather late in
his career came to show much irritation against Mr. Gladstone is
perfectly correct; but it was, as I hope to show as I go on, for very
different reasons than simply because he had made one Conservative less
and one Liberal more. A great political party has no such immortal
animosities as that supposes: party feeling is not based on merely
sentimental grounds. Both sides are used to losing men. It is the common
fate of Parliamentary warfare. Now and then, some rather idle person who
has time to waste in going back a long way in his recollections bethinks
himself that Lord Beaconsfield was not always a Conservative; but we
never yet heard of any one among the party challenging sympathy for him
on the score that he had been hunted by the Liberals through half a
century or so for having deserted them. Yet it will be admitted that
Lord Beaconsfield has injured the Liberals more than ever Mr. Gladstone
has done the Conservatives. What is the reason, then, of this difference
of alleged treatment in the two cases? The answer may be given in half a
sentence,--Lord Beaconsfield, alike when he was Mr. Disraeli and since,
has always fought fair. That is enough in politics to make your
opponents acquiesce in your being such; but Mr. Gladstone as his career
developed surprised and puzzled everybody, his own friends included; and
those who blame the Conservatives for, in the end, losing temper and
showing exasperation, should bear in mind that he finally produced the
very same effect upon the country at large.
It is worth while following this point a little further, for it would
not be of much use attempting to sketch Mr. Gladstone if we are supposed
to dislike him from some mere party instinct. Will anybody be good
enough to tell us when this inscrutable emotion of hatred of Mr.
Gladstone arose? Liberals are not supposed to be strong in history, but
they have very short memories indeed if they have forgotten both their
own career and his. Why, in 1852--that is, in the twentieth year of Mr.
Gladstone's Parliamentary life--the Conservatives were offering him
office, which was not refused by him with over-much promptness. For
nearly fourteen years after that he was retained as the representative
of the University of Oxford. It is, in fact, not yet very much more
than a dozen years since this victim of political persecution, and
present champion of the Radicals, was quietly ensconced in a seat for
what is sometimes spoken of as the head-quarters of Toryism. He has
roved a good deal among the constituencies since, but he was then
willing to have gone on remaining at Oxford, if his constituents had
also been willing to have been made laughing-stocks by letting him
remain. Surely a man who represented Tory electors until he was getting
fast on for sixty could scarcely up to that point have been much hunted
and worried for Liberal principles. To speak plainly, there never was so
late a conversion made of so much histrionic use as this of Mr.
Gladstone's. But though it has suited both his and his present party's
ends, it rather puzzles plain people who have kept their recollections a
little trim to think that if he lives on into senatorial decrepitude, he
will never have sat for Radical constituencies anything like so long a
time as he did for Conservative ones. For between thirty and forty years
this Liberal ex-Premier was a Tory member.
In fact, a glance at the right honourable gentleman's wonderfully
prosperous career will show that in the list of our public men he has of
all others made the fewest, the briefest, the least sacrifices either
for principle or party. There are very simple ways of testing it; Mr.
Gladstone has not been out of office long enough for a man who was
innocent of business prudence in his career. He has, in fact, reaped the
official spoils of two parties, if not of three. The dates and
appointments are on record for anybody to trace out. On the very face of
it, a man who has served under Peel, Aberdeen, Palmerston, and Russell,
and then come out as a full-blown Liberal Prime Minister himself, must
of necessity be said to offer rather a miscellaneous career. His warmest
admirer must admit that he has been either the most fortunate or else
the most prudent of men; and, as we do not wish to be stingy in our
recognition of his skill, we prefer to compliment him by attributing his
great prosperity throughout so many years and under so many different
chiefs to his prudence.
If this very hasty review of Mr. Gladstone's chronicle does not agree
with the impression of him which is the prevailing one on the Liberal
side, it is the one which the bare facts of his career would produce on
every side if they could be seen without the misleading effect of his
very fine words and exceedingly solemn attitudes. Very fortunately for
him it is only the Conservatives who have a full and accurate
recollection of Mr. Gladstone. They have necessarily observed him
continuously from their own unshifting party position, and so have been
able to perceive in a way that hardly was practicable to the Liberals,
who were always shifting and struggling among themselves, how invariably
and consistently his announcements of change of view have hit with the
opportunities for improvement of his Parliamentary position. On every
occasion, to the very moment, so soon as a Liberal question had fully
ripened, Mr. Gladstone presented himself to pluck it. It was so with
Reform, it was so with Church Rates, it was so with University Reform,
it was so with the Ballot, it was so with the spoliation of the Irish
Church and the unsettling of the Irish landowners, and it is so with the
County Franchise, and it will be so once more, if the Liberals ever get
into power again, with the English Church and the English Land Laws. Mr.
Bright, Mr. Miall, and all the Radicals have drudged for many a year for
Mr. Gladstone, who, when all the outdoor work has been done, has always
allowed himself to be persuaded to bring in the Measure just in the nick
of time, and, by expounding it in a very fine speech, has robbed its
actual originators of two-thirds of the credit of making it possible.
Luckily for the Conservatives, though he never had the courage to attack
a question of the very first class himself in the way of initiative, he
had an insatiable ambition for meddling with smaller ones, and by making
vents in these ways for his restlessness and his ambition, he finally
ruined all that his skilful prudence in the larger affairs had gained
him, disgusting the country till it determined to get him off its hands
at any price. Still, that is not just now the point in question.
Mr. Gladstone's so slowly passing through all the stages from
Conservatism to Radicalism has had this effect,--that while all other
public men of his standing have grown more or less antiquated in steady
loyal service to their party, and by presenting a fixed if monotonous
aspect to the public, this one Parliamentary personage kept a perennial
freshness, simply by skilfully dividing his prolonged career into
distinct periods and going on changing. Some political section has been
always welcoming Mr. Gladstone newly into its ranks and to its spoils,
for, as we have said, the two things unfailingly went together; and the
shouts with which he was received were always strengthened by fainter
murmurs of applause from other sections more advanced along the line,
who hoped to receive him themselves later on. They did so. Really to
each one of them he was a recruit from the last party. To the
Palmerstonians he ought at the most to have been only a Peelite; to the
Liberals at worst only a Palmerstonian. But by a surprising adroitness,
it was always made to appear that in all his migrations from party to
party, he joined each successive group as a new retreater from the
Tories. It certainly was true in one sense; he was always going further
away from them. But for all party purposes and reckoning, he had as much
left them when he joined Palmerston as when he shook hands with Mr.
Bright and took his place in front of the Radicals.
These are only a first handful of specimens of a certain unfairness in
Mr. Gladstone's position and career from first to last, from which he
has largely profited, and which very naturally irked his opponents, who
have had to suffer its inconveniences. He has posed as a sort of
political orphan left lonely in the Parliamentary world at the death of
Peel, who has been persecuted by wicked Tories from one Chancellorship
of the Exchequer to another, until they finally drove him into the
Premiership, but all this time he was successfully seceding from them,
though they continued in pursuit. It must have been Mr. Gladstone's
portentous earnestness of demeanour which has covered up from the
general public a joke so huge and prolonged as this, preventing
everybody from seeing that such a tale did not agree with his
unprecedented prosperity. But if in these ways he has kept himself
interesting to the country, and fresh and surprising for every group he
has in rotation joined, both he and his changes have long been stale to
the Conservatives. They are able to look along his whole track, and
seeing him from behind, know him as a Peelite, a follower of Aberdeen, a
Palmerstonian, a Russellite, and a Radical. They are debarred from
applying his own name to the last stage, and calling him a Gladstonian.
Strangely enough, and indeed very significantly, that term has never
taken root in our politics. There really have never been any
Gladstonians: no one ever was or ever will be called by that title. Mr.
Gladstone will end his days and depart without founding any school; he
will stand recorded only as the acceptor of office from those who did
so, and the passer of other people's measures. But in political life a
man who attains the first rank of conspicuousness without founding a
line may fairly be suspected. It will be found that he has been too busy
in a narrower way,--looking after not questions but himself. To that
very small party, numerically reckoned, consisting of only one member,
Mr. Gladstone has been consistently and untiringly faithful. He has
challenged for it sympathy in all the ways to which his very fine
oratory has lent itself, and he has not neglected the humbler art of
perpetual advertisement, keeping it by means of the press and the
platform ever before the public eye. But when he finally leaves us it is
certain to vanish entirely.
Very likely some ardent Radical, whose mind is so full of having got Mr.
Gladstone at last that he forgets, or perhaps never knew, how many
grades and shades of politicians have in succession enjoyed him before,
will say that in all this we are only railing at Mr. Gladstone's
success. His success! In order to describe Mr. Gladstone, we had first
to write retrospectively, take in his earlier phases, and to look
generally at his whole history. In that retrospect, down to a late point
in it, he was exceedingly prosperous; but we never meant to say that he
had been very successful since the beginning of 1874. There is not the
slightest need for any Conservative to feel bitter against Mr. Gladstone
now on any grounds of personal envy. He has done them the greatest
service of any public man for three generations; and at any time he
might have individually prospered as much as he liked for them, if it
had been possible for him to do it without injuring his country. It is
to this more serious examination of his career that we now go.
Not that we propose to entangle ourselves in the minute details of it,
for that is in no way necessary. We have already in part explained why
we may, in such a sketch as this, drop out many years of his political
life. For a great length of time Mr. Gladstone was only a Budget-maker.
It is true he made them for Governments that were not Conservative, but
he still was considered nearly a Conservative outside his financial
handicraft. And here, again, part of the explanation we earlier gave
applies. There is not the slightest reason why any Conservative should
pause long to consider Mr. Gladstone as the passer of the Ballot, or
even as the disestablisher of the Irish Church and the interferer with
the rights of landed property in Ireland. The only thing special to be
said about him in connection with these things as distinguishing him
from the ruck of Liberals would be, that he was a very late ex-Tory, and
at the time a professed High Churchman. He somehow got the Liberals to
let him write his name across every one of those measures so soon as it
was seen that they would pass, and he has made the legislation in that
way seem to be his; but the Conservatives know with whom they had really
to deal in the inception and the pushing forward of those movements, and
it was not Mr. Gladstone. The real men were Mr. Bright, Mr. Dillwyn, Mr.
Miall, and those who for many a year worked with them while Mr.
Gladstone was never heard of, never thought of, in connection with the
matters they had always matured before he had anything to do with them.
Nor was it on account of these affairs that Mr. Gladstone's fall
occurred when it came, which is another reason why it would be waste of
time to discuss them in connection with him. Who is proposing to alter
these things now that they have been fought out between the great
parties of the State and decided? As a supplement to his Irish Land
Bill, we now have the Irish peasants refusing to pay any rent at all:
but in these days when a thing is done in our Parliament it is done. The
Conservatives, in spite of the majority at their back, have never put
forward a finger to touch those settlements, nor do they mean to do so;
and yet not only our own country, but all Europe, and indeed realms
farther away still, have been keenly aware that the Beaconsfield
Ministry has been very busy for years undoing something that Mr.
Gladstone had done.
What was this gigantic task, which was not the repealing of legislation,
or the passing of statutes of any kind, but which required courage and
effort more arduous than those things? There must have been some cause
for the bursts of applause which have again and again echoed on our
shores from all parts of the civilized globe at something that was going
on. It was, we hasten to answer, the rehabilitation of England in the
eyes of the world,--the restoration of her ancient power as a factor in
the enforcement and administration of public right among the nations.
Somehow, coincidently with Mr. Gladstone's prosperity as a Minister,
England, his country, had sunk, and in exactly answering ratio, and was
sinking lower and lower still daily. He was very famous, or at least
very notorious, at home, but the renown of Britain abroad was clouding;
and our people never will bear that, as history had shown before. This
man, who at heart was but a financier, and who ought in the fitness of
things never to have risen higher in office than a Chancellor of the
Exchequer, whose function it should have been to find funds for some one
else as a Prime Minister capable of a policy in the higher international
politics befitting an Empire, was conducting our foreign affairs in the
spirit of a commercial traveller; willing to effect a little saving by
giving up a group of islands in one part or a bit of territory in
another, and to effect an economy at another time by backing out of a
treaty. Though, at the same time, if anybody insisted, and there loomed,
however distantly, a possibility of war, he would pay the money down in
a hurry by millions, as he did in the Alabama case. We should have had
all the world insisting very soon, making peace more costly than war
itself, besides the shame of unjustifiable surrender.
But we were spared all this; though the undoing of the humiliation, as
far as it had gone, has fully occupied Mr. Gladstone's successors ever
since.
This is the great accusation which the Conservatives have to bring
against Mr. Gladstone--that of having degraded the position of his
country; and an arraignment more fatal than this cannot be made in the
case of a chief Minister. It is not alone the Conservatives who make it.
Did not Earl Russell, Liberal though he was, find enough English blood
in his aged veins when writing his last book, to say that Mr. Gladstone
had dragged the name of England through the mire? But it would not be
quite accurate to put this forward as the full explanation of Mr.
Gladstone's sudden tumble from office; for it was not until after that
occurred that the bulk of people quite knew the whole extent of the
injury he had worked in this respect. The Conservative leaders guessed
it, but they knew more about foreign affairs than the rank and file of
the nation. Everybody, of course, high and low, was aware that he had
unasked given up the Ionian Islands because of some literary reasons
which he had come upon in writing books about Homer, that he had
surrendered territory in the San Juan Boundary Question, and that he had
quietly gone to Geneva and paid America, not indeed all she asked,--for
even with Britain's wealth the whole of the first modest request would
only have been found with difficulty,--but he had counted down a sum
that made Brother Jonathan's shrewd eyes twinkle with joy. The country,
from these events following one another, had come to have a very uneasy
feeling that somehow under his auspices everything was going against us
abroad. Still it was only later that it was made fully apparent how
completely England was effaced; not until the three Emperors had begun
to settle the rearrangement of Eastern Europe, without so much as saying
to Great Britain, "By your leave." There is difficulty when looking back
now to prevent oneself from suffering some illusion in this respect; but
it is a fact, and we may be glad of it, that Englishmen did not until it
was roughly forced upon them suppose beforehand that their position had
dwindled to quite so low an ebb.
At the elections of 1874, there was no distinct foreign policy before
the public, for though there were many on the Conservative side who
sympathized with France in her adversity, and saw clearly that Germany's
mutilation of her territory meant trouble in time to come, not a voice
was raised in deprecation of our neutrality. But, for the matter of
that, it may be just as correctly said that there was no matured
domestic question before the country, for it will not be supposed that
there was a single Tory any more than a Liberal who wished the Income
Tax to be retained on his shoulders. It was hardly for proposing to do
away with that impost that everybody voted so unanimously against Mr.
Gladstone; they only did so at the polling-booths in spite of his
proposing it, which somehow seems rather mysterious. If his opponents
were not proposing to recall any of the recent legislation, and if there
was no special question of foreign affairs pending, and if nobody had
any desire not to be lightened of taxation, how was it, pray, that Mr.
Gladstone was so ignominiously hurled from power? In reality, there is
not the slightest difficulty about it--Mr. Gladstone was decisively
rejected by his countrymen, not on any question of policy, either home
or foreign, but because of the _personal impression_ he had slowly but
surely imprinted on their minds. The real issue before the country was
whether it would have any more of Mr. Gladstone, and it said No.
It is a common artifice on the part of his apologisers to insinuate that
he had wearied the nation by offering it too many things for its good.
But neither individuals nor communities are much in the habit of
refusing gifts; it is the one thing, and nearly the only thing, in this
world for which there is an excellent reason whenever so strange a
proceeding happens. There is another way of representing the matter, one
much less complimentary but far more true--the country was sick of Mr.
Gladstone. Even the sight of Mr. Lowe standing at his side with four
millions of surplus in his hands was not enough to tempt them. The
promise to abolish the Income Tax was the most tremendous bribe ever
offered to the constituencies, but, to their credit, it did not corrupt
them. They would not accept Mr. Gladstone any longer at any price
whatever. The believers in democracy, and Mr. Gladstone in particular,
according to some of his very latest reasonings, ought to have accepted
this universal disgust as being a popular inspiration. However, they
have done nothing of the kind, but avow that it was a public delusion,
which they at first hinted would be temporary; but if the public is
liable to delusions, and to fits of them which continue for seven or
eight years at a stretch, for that is now the duration of this one, what
becomes of these very radical gentlemen's democracy? For it is not
really open to them to plead, though they will go on doing it, that the
people's eyes were dazzled by a glitter of diplomatic success, and their
blood infuriated by a skilfully aroused anti-Russian feeling. It is not
open to them for a simple reason, but a very conclusive one: the
elections came before anything of this could have happened; and the
elections themselves arrived with the suddenness they did owing to
something which had preceded them--namely, a steady run of Ministerial
defeats in the by-contests, wherever a vacancy occurred in a
constituency. Mr. Gladstone avowed all this in the address with which he
startled the Greenwich electors and the whole country, though he and his
friends have never mentioned the fact since. It was for the purpose of
putting all things right that the elections which put them all more
wrong still were so unexpectedly ordered. It was not because of being
intoxicated by the diplomatic triumph of Lord Beaconsfield and Lord
Salisbury at Berlin--which did not occur till years after--that the
constituencies rejected Mr. Gladstone. We have no wish to be
unnecessarily impolite, but the true reason for it was that which we
have named already--they had come not to like Mr. Gladstone. If we trace
that fact backwards in a natural way, we shall find that one cause of it
was that they felt the honour and the interest of England were not safe
in his hands; but this was only one among other causes. It swelled
afterwards into the biggest reason of all, and now practically includes
all the others; but, at the moment, it was not actually known that the
safety of England was about to be imperilled.
The voters were affected by other reasons. What were those other
reasons? The public must have known them pretty clearly at the time,
since it acted so promptly and decidedly upon them, and it, therefore,
ought not to need very much recalling of them now, for the time, after
all, is not so very long ago. But it may be as well to go into them a
little, since it was through the incidents furnishing them that the
general public was led to form the very same estimate of Mr. Gladstone
which the Conservatives had held for about a score of years before. At
last the popular judgment coincided with that of his Parliamentary
opponents, and he fell from power. But any one who will give a moment's
consideration to the cases of the Collier appointment, the Ewelme
Rectory affair, and the issue of the Royal Warrant on purchase in the
army, will see that we are right in affirming that Mr. Gladstone's
ignominious expulsion from office was owing to moral rather than
political causes. It stands recorded that this Minister, who had put
religious professions in the front of his politics in a way novel to
public life, had to defend his conduct over and over again in the House
of Commons by quoting the mere letter of the law. Parliament became not
unlike the Old Bailey when a legal wrangle is going on over the
technicalities of an indictment; and the unwonted spectacle of Lord
Chief Justices accusing a theological Premier of having somehow evaded a
statute was not made any less unedifying by Mr. Gladstone showing great
skill in being his own attorney. Everybody must admit that he certainly
did that.
It is possible to recall each of the cases in very few words. An Act of
Parliament had been passed with a view to strengthening the Judicial
Committee of the Privy Council, and, as this Court was one of Appeal, it
stood to reason that those appointed to it to revise other Judges'
decisions should have had judicial experience themselves. It was
expressly provided in the Act that those to be raised to this Court
should be already Judges. To the surprise of the whole country, Sir
Robert Collier, well known as Mr. Gladstone's Attorney-General, and,
therefore, conspicuously only a waiter for a judgeship, not a judge
already, was announced as the filler of one of these vacancies, before
half the readers of the newspapers knew that he had ceased to be
Attorney-General. It turned out, however, that he was in reality a judge
at the moment, and that he had been one for some few moments previously,
having, in fact, sat on the bench of the Common Pleas for just two days.
There is not space to follow Mr. Gladstone's wonderful reasoning, but it
chiefly turned on a point so fine as this, that what the Act meant to
stipulate was not experience, but _status_. In other words, that a man
should be made a judge of one kind for five minutes, in order to be
turned into one of another kind, just for the say of the thing. Amazed
members of the Legislature which had passed the enactment protested that
they were not so foolishly subtle as this, and that they had never,
before Mr. Gladstone mentioned it, thought of any such distinction as
that between _status_ and experience.
But this was not the only instance in which he has told people what they
had intended better than they knew, and all differently. In the Ewelme
Rectory business he would have it that when a statute said Oxford it
meant Cambridge, or at least that its specifying Oxford did not signify,
or that it included Cambridge, or, in fact, might be construed to
prescribe anything else which it did not say and which was contrary to
what everybody had thought of it before. However, here, again, as the
lawyers would otherwise have been troublesome, the technicality was
found to have been formally complied with. The words of the enactment
did really require that the man who was to be made rector of Ewelme
parish should be a member of Oxford Convocation, and Mr. Harvey, Mr.
Gladstone's friend, who had been educated at Cambridge, and who, until
that living became vacant, had never dreamed of connection with Oxford,
was made a member of the Convocation, in order to receive the living. Of
course, Mr. Gladstone argued that Mr. Harvey's being a Master of Arts
was enough, though the statute said nothing of that, and everybody else
had thought it expressly stated a certain University where the Master of
Arts was to come from.
But let us go on to the third case, that of the issue of the Royal
Warrant abolishing purchase. Not a few of the Liberals who exulted at
the success of the party measure had a misgiving at the way in which it
was secured. It was felt to be a victory which could not be repeated,
and one of a style which, if they who snatched it had been
Conservatives, would have thrown the country into a convulsion. The most
violent act in the name of the Crown which the oldest man living in
England has witnessed, was counselled by Mr. Gladstone. Because the
Lords, in the exercise of the power which the Constitution gives them,
were not willing instantly to pass his Bill for giving an entirely new
social aspect to the army, he caused the Queen to do nothing short of
superseding them entirely, and practically reduced the Constitution at a
stroke to the Commons and the Crown. It is just now part of the tactics
of the Liberals to protest against some imagined wish to bring in
"personal rule." If any such preposterous design existed, it would be
Mr. Gladstone's own act which would be fallen back upon for the
precedent. The feeling which has best enabled the most thoughtful among
Englishmen to understand the kind of shock which foreigners experience
on the occurrence of one of the political earthquakes which they call on
the Continent by the name _coup d'etat_, was that which ran through the
country when Mr. Gladstone announced that there was nothing for the
Lords to discuss, that he had advised the Queen to issue a Royal
Warrant. We had lost all recollection of the particular sensation, but
he brought back just a twinge of it. Mr. Gladstone, however, can do
Radical acts and then explain them historically. Once more we found
ourselves all inextricably entangled in his casuistry. He now argued
that the Royal Warrant had not been issued by exercise of prerogative,
but in strict pursuance of statutory power, there being some Act of the
Georges to that effect, which ordinary people had forgotten. It is not
necessary to follow the thing further. In the end, Mr. Gladstone became
too clever for the country. Even the dullest began to perceive that Mr.
Gladstone could conscientiously do whatever he liked. The more subtly he
argued, the more plain John Bull got puzzled.
It may, at first sight, seem tasking the public memory too much to ask
people if they remember the tension there was in the political
atmosphere towards the end of Mr. Gladstone's career. But a very great
many will not have forgotten it. The political weather is so far like
the other sort that it is only borne in mind for its badness; that,
however, was a terrible season. At the last, Mr. Gladstone seemed to
have got into the air, and he did not improve the climate. He may urge,
certainly, that Mr. Lowe had made himself very obnoxious, that Mr.
Ayrton had been found to be intolerable, and that the great trade of the
publicans, with all its supporters, was in arms against Mr. Bruce. That
is all true; the country disliked each one of these his chief
colleagues. But neither Mr. Lowe's hard cynicism, nor Mr. Ayrton's
dogmatic inaestheticism, nor Mr. Bruce's stolid mechanical interference,
stirred the large keen dissatisfaction which Mr. Gladstone's own
incomprehensibility in the end did. He gave men's consciences a shock,
and none of the others affected to feel so deeply as that: it was only
he who had stood forward as a political moralist, and then set everybody
by the ears discussing his conduct. It was the same outside Parliament
and within it. Everybody was arguing Mr. Gladstone; nobody could make
him out, nobody felt safe, or could imagine what was coming next. If the
atmosphere had but been charged a little more with him, England would
not have been worth living in. Luckily the elections came, and the air
was cleared.
But if in the more exaggerated instances we have above spoken of, the
general public became aware of a certain obliquity, an unreliability, a
dissatisfied restlessness, an imperiousness in Mr. Gladstone, the
Conservatives had been more or less continuously aware of those
qualities for many years. They, as we said earlier, have had to observe
the right hon. gentleman closer, more continuously, and it would be easy
for any one of them who is of middle age to give from his own memory a
string of instances, just the same in kind as those above, though not so
broadly striking, beginning much earlier in his career, and coming down
much later. Very recently, Lord Salisbury at Manchester recalled Mr.
Gladstone's dealings with his Oxford constituents in reference to the
disestablishment of the Irish Church. But his lordship courteously
spared his opponent the details. Has the world forgotten the famous
letter to Dr. Hannah, bearing the date of June, 1865, written, as Mr.
Gladstone himself with unlooked-for _naivete_ admits in his "Chapter of
Autobiography," for the appeasing of doubts? He in it asserted, first of
all, that the question was "remote and apparently out of all bearing on
the practical politics of the day;" second, he avowed that he was
probably going "to be silent" on the topic; third, he said that "he
scarcely expected ever to be called on to share in such a measure;" and,
as his finishing words, spoke of it as "a question lying at a distance
he could not measure." These were far too many causes for not doing a
thing, and the Conservatives accordingly began to look out. In 1869, Mr.
Gladstone disestablished the Irish Church. The "remoteness" and the
"distance which was not measurable" somehow came to be packed within
these two dates,--1865-9. What had so hurried matters? Well, one can
only recall what had happened in the interim, and among the events there
had been these two occurrences--he had been expelled from Oxford and
rejected by South Lancashire. The like suddenness attended his
conversion on the subject of the Ballot. After half a lifetime of
opposition, he one fine morning announced that it must pass, hardly a
hint of warning having been given beforehand.
But his whole career has shown this suddenness of advance, at distinct
periods, which, as we have said, always coincided with the brightening
of the prospects of the respective agitations. It is true, as is earlier
pointed out, that he took something like a quarter of a century to
travel the ground between the Conservative starting-point and the
Radical position, but the length of time was not owing to his creeping
between the bounds; he has traversed it at successive leaps, standing
still between, and, at the places where he remained stationary, there
was always the warm shelter of office. This style of progress has
characterized him down to the present moment. As late as 1874 he told a
deputation that he did not consider the question of the County Franchise
ripe. There has been a good deal of very indifferent weather since then;
but whether or not the field crops have matured, it seems now that the
agricultural labourer has been growing fast. Mr. Joseph Arch has been
the sun that has shone upon him, and Mr. Gladstone, as usual, is quite
ready to reap the harvest. Examples might be multiplied manifold. Take
the boasted case of the Liberal surplus, of which we have never ceased
to hear--just as if Mr. Lowe and Mr. Gladstone had between them coined
the money. Its history, stated in three words, was this: Mr. Lowe had
mulcted the public in an unnecessary twopence of Income Tax, and,
instead of shamefully confessing the incompetency it showed in a
Chancellor of the Exchequer, presented himself before the
constituencies, on the eve of the elections, with his hands full of
gold, and with the air of presenting it to them.
Mr. Gladstone, great financier as he is, was not above profiting by his
subordinate's miscalculation. Instead of administering a rebuke, as a
good journeyman might have been expected to do to a bad apprentice, he
patted Mr. Lowe on the back. Indeed, in the Greenwich address, when he
so magniloquently spoke of the money being given back in the shape of
abolishing the Income Tax, he seemed to take some credit to himself.
It will be beginning, perforce, to dawn upon the reader that this was a
Minister very difficult to be dealt with by an Opposition. If we had
space in this paper, a part of the task of sketching Mr. Gladstone would
be to point out how injuriously he has confused the demarcation of
parties; how unscrupulous he has been in seeking allies which on no
principle of fair classification belonged to him. It may be nothing that
he can half apologize for Irish Obstructionists--the Liberals have
always exploited Irish members. But this very high Churchman, who clings
to a tenet so ridiculous in the eyes of Dissenters as apostolical
succession, can figure in Dr. Joseph Parker's chapel, and betray a close
and not uncomplimentary knowledge of the trust-deed of the Rev. Newman
Hall's congregation. This austere gentleman, who, when inquiring into
the "Theses of Erastus" (see his article), finds out that moral offences
are at the root and source of all heresy, has a kindly word for such
free-thinkers as happen to be also political leaders of the working
men--Mr. Bradlaugh, for example. This objector to divorce, on such
stupendously elevated grounds as that we are all members of a mystical
body, and who cannot bring himself to allow more than a civil marriage
to a deceased wife's sister, mingles in the ruck of Radicals. But if he
has what they must think ecclesiastical crotchets, he always manages
them with most skilful prudence. If he has to satisfy his most private
feelings by bringing in no fewer than six resolutions in more or less
opposition to the Public Worship Bill, he can withdraw them again. But
was this the gentleman to champion Radicals and Dissenters? An
Opposition which had to keep its own consistent lines, and which was
closely restricted as to its allies, was at a perpetual disadvantage
with one whose own opinions, subtle and complicated as they might be,
cut him off from nobody who could be of aid.
Fortunately the country itself, at a certain rather tardy point, rallied
its patriotism in that spontaneous way which always practically
reinforces the Conservative party. The "Alabama" claims gave those who
did not meddle much in politics their first shock, while for more
thoughtful persons it brought back a reminiscence of the surrender of
the Ionian Islands; and when, later, the public saw him stand tamely by
while Russia tore up the Black Sea clauses of the Treaty of Paris, every
student of our history knew that Mr. Gladstone's fate was sealed. The
nation, stirred by arousings of the deeper instincts of the English
character, at last reckoned with him on general grounds--dislike of his
personal demeanour, and dread of what he was bringing on the country. It
refused to be won either by the finest oratory or the prospect of
reduced taxation.
The Conservatives came into power on the highest tide of popular feeling
which living Englishmen have witnessed. But the change was too late to
prevent mischief; Russia, encouraged by England's effacement during Mr.
Gladstone's sway, had matured her further plans, and had already put her
secret intrigues into motion. The Treaty of San Stefano showed plainly
what her plan was, and just as clearly does everybody not blinded by
party feeling now know that to Russia's amazement, and amidst the
surprised and grateful admiration of the whole civilized globe, the
present Ministry have thwarted that plan and made England again safe and
famous. It would be a waste of time to retrace the details: a summary of
them is to be found in Lord Salisbury's Manchester speech. What alone
further concerns us here is the manner in which Mr. Gladstone has borne
himself in Opposition. We have already seen how he did so as a Minister.
It was understood, indeed, that he had retired, with something which was
meant to pass for dignity, though to the eyes of the nation there was
never anything which was not sulk which had so much the look of it.
However, on the plea that something had happened in the world, he was
quickly back again in front, elbowing Lord Hartington aside. Speeches,
in Parliament and out, articles in every magazine, republication in
pamphlet and volume, letters to everybody, which, practically, meant to
all the newspapers: there never was such an active resuscitation of one
who had so publicly become politically defunct. It is, however, not for
coming to life again that we find fault with Mr. Gladstone, for, in
truth, we always expected it.
Our complaint is simply this, that if such a style of opposition as he
has resorted to became habitual, the government of the country would be
made impossible. No means were left untried to make Russia hope, and
other nations fear, that Lord Beaconsfield had not the nation at his
back, and, when owing to this encouragement, Russia showed obstinacy,
and it was necessary to risk something by exhibiting boldness, that very
necessity was sought to be turned into a reproach. Mr. Gladstone's own
tactics made it imperative that in the matter of Cyprus, and some other
negotiations, secrecy should be observed, and the Government was charged
with acting unconstitutionally, as if constitutional usage imposed no
limits on the Opposition, or as if those limits had not been
transgressed. Just so, again, in the Afghan war. If Lord Northbrook had
acted with spirit years before, that war would never have been
necessary; but that trifling fact Mr. Gladstone overlooked, he and the
Duke of Argyll making it appear that Lord Lytton had been at great pains
to get himself and his Government into a difficulty. Why Mr. Gladstone
has had so little to say about the Cape war is a mystery, which may be
explained some day; all that can now be said of it is that it shows a
striking inconsistency. Luckily his efforts, though his industry was
gigantic, have failed, and even he must be now aware that his renewal of
them, though we suppose it must go on, having been arranged so long and
announced so pompously, is a trifle late, with the Cape war ended, our
troops in Cabul, those of Austria at Novi Bazar, and checkmated,
scolding Russia gnashing her teeth at Germany. However, no doubt we
shall have some very fine speeches, proving that nothing of this ought
to have happened, or that it won't last long, or that the Beaconsfield
Administration did not bring it about, or any thing else, just as
reasonable, for fine words can be arranged in many different ways by a
practised orator.
What, then, we may finally ask, was the secret of Mr. Gladstone's
success so long as he was prosperous, and what was the explanation of
his fall when it so suddenly arrived? The thrifty skill of calculation
in estimating the growth of questions which his whole career so
irresistibly points to was spoken of early in this sketch; but a man, no
matter how judicious in the management of his own approaches to a party,
cannot impose himself upon it. The Liberals, on the successive
occasions, welcomed Mr. Gladstone, and did so gladly, never making his
very late conversions a reproach. Its leaders were more vociferous in
hailing him at each renewed arrival one stage farther on than were the
rank and file, though some of them, as the thing was repeated, must have
been struck with the unfailing punctuality of his approach. Not that we
are professing to sympathize with these gentlemen. If it satisfied them
that whenever they had upset a Government, be it that of Aberdeen or of
Palmerston, the inevitable Mr. Gladstone always emerged out of the
wreck, just a little more Liberal than the day before, ready to take the
first pick of places in the new Cabinet, all well and good. But the fact
was that his arrival always was a convenience, for, no matter how the
sections differed among themselves, the rallying round Mr. Gladstone as
a further seceder from Toryism was a proceeding in which they could all
join, and it gave them, again and again, an appearance of unanimity and
cohesion. This was, in fact, his great function, and in it he has been
very valuable to the party. Besides, though so late and seemingly slow
in politics, he had from the first been great, and at the outset even
precocious, in finance; and, further, he was a wonderful orator, even
quicker in debating than Mr. Bright. Such a personage, so largely
prudent and so highly gifted, was sure to succeed, and to do so for a
long time; but he was also certain to fail in the end, and that
completely.
His temperament made that nearly certain. He was always too busy making
speeches, or writing for the press, or answering letters, to be any
power in social life. A strange kind of semi-recluse, but combining with
bookworm habits a passion for speechifying and for using the penny post,
was not likely to conciliate London, and he never did. By-and-by he was
railing at the Clubs, because they did not agree with him; and then he
had next to appeal from the metropolitan journals to the superior
politicians and brighter wits who preside over the provincial
newspapers. All this prognosticated failure. Even his special gifts and
the kind of successes which fell to him turned into the means of helping
it. His turn for figures not unnaturally made immediate economy his
great object, forgetful of the larger connection in such a land as ours
between an imperial position in the world and the preservation of our
commerce, and overlooking also the costliness of reasserting our
position when a crisis came; while his ready eloquence, having no longer
open to it the old patriotic themes, had to expend itself in the
adornment of British abnegation, and the excited applause given to his
rhetoric was mistaken by him for assent to his views, till he was amazed
to find himself suddenly quite out of accord with the nation, and
falling, he knew not why, headlong from power.
Even to this hour he seems never to have had the least misgiving that
the man who could speak with such complacency of the trading supremacy
of the world passing to America (see his article on "Kin Beyond the
Sea"), and who could urge as a reason for our not caring to interfere in
Egypt that it would be the egg of a North African empire (see his
article on "Aggression on Egypt and Freedom in the East"), was not the
man to be England's Minister. But the country had found it out even
before he wrote those articles; his threatening his countrymen with the
calamity of finding another empire on their hands, in the only part of
the world yet remaining to be explored and civilized, has only proved
that they were right, and will not terrify Englishmen.
But a fluent orator has always left to him a kind of gambler's hope of
retrieving everything by talking. Mr. Gladstone is going to alter
everything by making a dozen or two of speeches in Scotland. Are these
Midlothian harangues to be longer than that made at Greenwich, or more
numerous than those uttered in Lancashire? They may be as fine as they
will for anything it signifies to Conservatives, if the result is only
again the same as on the other occasions, and it is hardly likely that
he will persuade Englishmen now amidst their returning renown to despair
of the future of England.