=Source.=--Morley's _Life of Gladstone_, vol. iii., pp. 173, 174,
220-226. (Macmillans.)
Mr. Chamberlain had been rapidly advancing in public prominence,
and he now showed that the agitation against the House of Lords
was to be only the beginning and not the end. At Ipswich (January
14) he said this country had been called the paradise of the
rich, and warned his audience no longer to allow it to remain the
purgatory of the poor. He told them that reform of local government
must be almost the first reform of the next Parliament, and spoke
in favour of allotments, the creation of small proprietors, the
placing of a small tax on the total property of the taxpayer, and
of free education. Mr. Gladstone's attention was drawn from Windsor
to these utterances, and he replied that though he thought some
of them were "on various grounds open to grave objection," yet
they seemed to raise no "definite point on which, in his capacity
of Prime Minister, he was entitled to interfere and lecture the
speaker." A few days later, more terrible things were said by Mr.
Chamberlain at Birmingham. He pronounced for the abolition of
plural voting, and in favour of payment of members, and manhood
suffrage. He also advocated a bill for enabling local communities
to acquire land, a graduated income-tax, and the breaking up of the
great estates as the first step in land reform....
Mr. Gladstone made a lenient communication to the orator, to the
effect that "there had better be some explanations among them when
they met." ... He recognized by now that in the Cabinet the battle
was being fought between old time and new. He did not allow his
dislike of some of the new methods of forming public opinion to
prevent him from doing full justice to the energetic and sincere
public spirit behind them....
The address to his electors ... was given to the public on
September 17. It was, as he said, as long as a pamphlet.... The
Whigs, we are told, found it vague, the Radicals cautious, the
Tories crafty; but everybody admitted that it tended to heal
feuds.... Mr. Chamberlain, though raising his own flag, was
respectful to his leader's manifesto. The surface was thus stilled
for the moment; yet the waters ran very deep....
[Gladstone] goes on to say that the ground had now been
sufficiently laid for going to the election with a united front,
that ground being the common profession of a limited creed or
programme in the Liberal sense, with an entire freedom for those
so inclined to travel beyond it, but not to impose their own sense
upon all other people.... If the party and its leaders were agreed
as to immediate measures ... were not these enough to find a
Liberal administration plenty of work ... for several years?...
An advance was made in the development of a peculiar situation by
important conversations with Mr. Chamberlain [at Hawarden: these]
did not materially alter Mr. Gladstone's disposition [but the first
crisis which promptly developed tended to obscure the direct issue].