I am aware that the age is not what we all wish, but I am sure
that the only means to check its degeneracy is heartily to concur
in whatever is best in our time.—BURKE.
I
The year 1885 must be counted as in some respects the severest epoch of
Mr. Gladstone’s life. The previous twelve months had not ended cheerfully.
Sleep, the indispensable restorer, and usually his constant friend, was
playing him false. The last entry in his diary was this:—
The year closed with a bad night, only one hour and a half of
sleep, which will hardly do to work upon. There is much that I
should like to have recorded.... But the pressure on me is too
great for the requisite recollection. It is indeed a time of
_Sturm und Drang_. What with the confusion of affairs, and the
disturbance of my daily life by the altered character of my
nights, I cannot think in calm, but can only trust and pray.
He was unable to be present at the dinner of the tenants, and his eldest
son in his absence dwelt once more on his father’s wish to retire,
whenever occasion should come, from the public service, or at least from
that kind of service to the public which imposed on him such arduous
efforts.
One great element of confusion was the sphinx’s riddle of Egyptian
finance. On his birthday, among a dozen occupations, he says: “A little
woodcraft for helping sleep; wrote mem. on Egyptian finance which I hope
may help to clear my brain and nerves.” And this was a characteristic way
of seeking a cure; for now and at every time, any task that demanded close
thought and firm expression was his surest (M67) sedative. More perplexing
even than the successive problems of the hour, was the threatened
disorganisation, not only of his cabinet, but of the party and its future.
On January 20 he was forced to London for two Egyptian cabinets, but he
speedily returned to Hawarden, whence he immediately wrote a letter to
Lord Granville:—
_January 22, 1885._—Here I am after a journey of 5-½ hours from
door to door, through the unsought and ill-deserved kindness of
the London and North-Western railway, which entirely spoils me by
special service.
There was one part of my conversation of to-day with Hartington
which I should like not to leave in any case without record. He
referred to the difficulties he had had, and he “gratefully”
acknowledged the considerateness of the cabinet. He said the point
always urged upon him was, not to break up the liberal party. But,
he said, can we avoid its breaking up, within a very short time
after you retire, and ought this consideration therefore to be
regarded as of such very great force? I said, my reply is in two
sentences. First, I admit that from various symptoms it is not
improbable there may be a plan or intention to break up the party.
But if a rupture of that kind comes,—this is my second sentence—it
will come upon matters of principle, known and understood by the
whole country, and your duty will probably be clear and your
position unembarrassed. But I entreat you to use your utmost
endeavour to avoid bringing about the rupture on one of the points
of this Egyptian question, which lies outside the proper business
of a government and is beyond its powers, which does not turn upon
clear principles of politics, and about which the country
understands almost nothing, and cares, for the most part, very
little. All this he took without rejoinder.
_P.S._—We are going to Holker next week, and Hartington said he
would try to come and see me there.
As we have already seen,(111) Mr. Gladstone paid his visit to Holker
(January 30), where he found the Duke of Devonshire “wonderfully well, and
kind as ever,” where he was joined by Lord Hartington, and where they
together spelled out the cipher telegram (on February 5) bringing the evil
news of the fall of Khartoum.
It is not uninteresting to see how the notion of Mr. Gladstone’s
retirement, now much talked of in his family, affected a friendly,
philosophic, and most observant onlooker. Lord Acton wrote to him
(February 2):—
You mean that the new parliament, the first of our democratic
constitution, shall begin its difficult and perilous course
without the services of a leader who has greater experience and
authority than any other man. You design to withdraw your
assistance when most urgently needed, at the moment of most
conservative apprehension and most popular excitement. By the
choice of this particular moment for retirement you increase the
danger of the critical transition, because nobody stands as you do
between the old order of things and the new, or inspires general
confidence; and the lieutenants of Alexander are not at their
best. Next year’s change will appear vast and formidable to the
suspicious foreigner, who will be tempted to doubt our identity.
It is in the national interest to reduce the outer signs of
change, to bridge the apparent chasm, to maintain the traditional
character of the state. The unavoidable elements of weakness will
be largely and voluntarily aggravated by their untimely
coincidence with an event which must, at any time, be a blow to
the position of England among the Powers. Your absence just then
must grievously diminish our credit.... You alone inspire
confidence that what is done for the great masses shall be done
with a full sense of economic responsibility.... A divided liberal
party and a weak conservative party mean the supremacy of the
revolutionary Irish....
To this Mr. Gladstone replied:—
_10 Downing Street, Feb. 11, 1885._ Your argument against letting
the outworn hack go to grass, depends wholly on a certain
proposition, namely this, that there is about to be a crisis in
the history of the constitution, growing out of the extension of
the franchise, and that it is my duty to do what I can in aiding
to steer the ship through the boiling waters of this crisis. My
answer is simple. There is no crisis at all in view. There is a
process of slow modification and development mainly in directions
which I view with misgiving. “Tory democracy,” the favourite idea
on that side, is no more like the conservative party in which I
was bred, than it is like liberalism. In fact less. It is
demagogism, only a demagogism not ennobled by love and
appreciation of liberty, but applied in the worst way, to put down
the pacific, law-respecting, economic elements which ennobled the
old conservatism, living upon the fomentation of angry passions,
and still in secret as obstinately attached as ever to the evil
principle of class interests. The liberalism of to-day is better
in what I have described as ennobling the old conservatism; nay,
much better, yet far from being good. Its pet idea is what they
call construction,—that is to say, taking into the hands of the
state the business of the individual man. Both the one and the
other have much to estrange me, and have had for many, many years.
But, with all this, there is no crisis. I have even the hope that
while the coming change may give undue encouragement to
“construction,” it will be favourable to the economic, pacific,
law-regarding elements; and the sense of justice which abides
tenaciously in the masses will never knowingly join hands with the
fiend of Jingoism. On the whole, I do not abandon the hope that it
may mitigate the chronic distemper, and have not the smallest fear
of its bringing about an acute or convulsive action. You leave me
therefore rooted in my evil mind....
The activity of the left wing, acute, perhaps, but not convulsive, became
much more embarrassing than the desire of the right wing to be inactive.
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 (January 22) 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. This deliverance was described by not unfriendly critics as
“a little too much the speech of the agitator of the future, rather than
of the minister of the present.” Mr. Gladstone made a lenient
communication to the orator, to the effect that “there had better be some
explanations among them when they met.” To Lord Granville he wrote
(January 31):—
Upon the whole, weak-kneed liberals have caused us more trouble in
the present parliament than radicals. But I think these
declarations by Chamberlain upon matters which cannot, humanly
speaking, become practical before the next parliament, can hardly
be construed otherwise than as having a remote and (in that sense)
far-sighted purpose which is ominous enough. The opposition can
hardly fail in their opportunity, I must add in their duty, to
make them matter of attack. Such things will happen casually from
time to time, and always with inconvenience—but there is here a
degree of method and system which seem to give the matter a new
character.
It will be seen from his tone that Mr. Gladstone, in all the
embarrassments arising from this source, showed complete freedom from
personal irritation. Like the lofty-minded man he was, he imputed no low
motives to a colleague because the colleague gave him trouble. He
recognised by now that in his 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. He had, moreover, quite
enough to do with (M68) the demands of the present, apart from signs that
were ominous for the future. A year before, in a letter to Lord Granville
(March 24, 1884), he had attempted a definition that will, perhaps, be of
general interest to politicians of either party complexion. It is, at any
rate, characteristic of his subtlety, if that be the right word, in
drawing distinctions:—
What are divisions in a cabinet? In my opinion, differences of
views stated, and if need be argued, and then advisedly
surrendered with a view to a common conclusion are not “divisions
in a cabinet.” By that phrase I understand unaccommodated
differences on matters standing for immediate action.
It was unaccommodated differences of this kind that cost Mr. Disraeli
secessions on the Reform bill, and secessions no less serious on his
eastern policy, and it is one of the wonders of his history that Mr.
Gladstone prevented secession on the matters now standing for immediate
action before his own cabinet. During the four months between the meeting
of parliament and the fall of the government, the two great difficulties
of the government—Egypt and Ireland—reached their climax.
II
The news of the fall of Khartoum reached England on February 5. One of the
least points, as Mr. Gladstone wrote on the day, was that the grievous
news would put an end to the government, and so it very nearly did. As was
to be expected, Sir Stafford Northcote moved a vote of censure. Mr.
Gladstone informed the Queen, on the day before the division, that the
aspect of the House was “dubious and equivocal.” If there was a chance of
overthrowing the ministry, he said, the nationalists were pretty sure to
act and vote as a body with Sir Stafford. Mr. Forster, Mr. Goschen, and
some members of the whig section of the liberal party, were likely either
to do the same, or else to abstain. These circumstances looked towards an
unfavourable issue, if not in the shape of an adverse majority, yet in the
form of a majority too small to enable the government to carry on with
adequate authority and efficiency. In the debate, said Mr. Gladstone, Lord
Hartington re-stated with measured force the position of the government,
and overthrew the contention that had taken a very forward place in the
indictment against ministers, that their great offence was the failure to
send forward General Graham’s force to relieve General Gordon. In the
course of this debate Mr. Goschen warned the government that if they
flinched from the policy of smashing the Mahdi at Khartoum, he should vote
against them. A radical below the gangway upon this went to the party whip
and declared, with equal resolution, that if the government insisted on
the policy, then it would be for him and others to vote against them. Sir
William Harcourt, in a speech of great power, satisfied the gentlemen
below the gangway, and only a small handful of the party went into the
lobby with the opposition and the Irish. The division was taken at four in
the morning (February 28), and the result was that the government which
had come in with morning radiance five years ago, was worn down to an
attenuated majority of fourteen.(112)
When the numbers were declared, Mr. Gladstone said to a colleague on the
bench, “_That will do._” Whether this delphic utterance meant that the
size of the majority would justify resignation or retention, the colleague
was not sure. When the cabinet met at a more mellowed hour in the day, the
question between going out of office and staying in, was fully discussed.
Mere considerations of ease all pointed one way, for, if they held on,
they would seem to be dependent on tory support; trouble was brewing with
Russia, and the Seats bill would not be through in a hurry. On the other
hand, fourteen was majority enough to swear by, the party would be
surprised by resignation and discouraged, and retirement would wear the
look of a false position. In fact Mr. Gladstone, in spite of his incessant
sighs for a hermit’s calm, was always for fighting out every position to
the last trench. I can think of no exception, and even when the time came
ten years later, he thought his successors pusillanimous for (M69)
retiring on a small scratch defeat on cordite.(113) So now he acted on the
principle that with courage cabinets may weather almost any storm. No
actual vote was taken, but the numbers for and against retirement were
equal, until Mr. Gladstone spoke. He thought that they should try to go
on, at least until the Seats bill was through. This was the final
decision.
All this brought once more into his mind the general consideration that
now naturally much haunted him. He wrote to the Queen (February 27):—
Mr. Gladstone believes that circumstances independent of his own
will enable him to estimate, with some impartiality, future
political changes, and he is certainly under the impression that,
partly from the present composition and temper of the liberal
party, and still more, and even much more, from the changes which
the conservative party has been undergoing during the last forty
years (especially the last ten or fifteen of them), the next
change of government may possibly form the introduction to a
period presenting some new features, and may mean more than what
is usually implied in the transfer of power from one party to
another.
Mr. Bright has left a note of a meeting with him at this time:—
_March 2, 1885._—Dined with Mrs. Gladstone. After dinner, sat for
half an hour or more with Mr. Gladstone, who is ill with cold and
hoarseness. Long talk on Egypt. He said he had suffered torment
during the continuance of the difficulty in that country. The
sending Gordon out a great mistake,—a man totally unsuited for the
work he undertook. Mr. Gladstone never saw Gordon. He was
appointed by ministers in town, and Gladstone concurred, but had
never seen him.
At this moment clouds began to darken the remote horizon on the north-west
boundary of our great Indian possessions. The entanglement in the deserts
of the Soudan was an obvious temptation to any other Power with policies
of its own, to disregard the susceptibilities or even the solid interests
of Great Britain. As we shall see, Mr. Gladstone was as little disposed as
Chatham or Palmerston to shrink from the defence of the legitimate rights
or obligations of his country. But the action of Russia in Afghanistan
became an added and rather poignant anxiety.
As early as March 12 the cabinet found it necessary to consider the
menacing look of things on the Afghan frontier. Military necessities in
India, as Mr. Gladstone described to the Queen what was in the mind of her
ministers, “might conceivably at this juncture come to overrule the
present intentions as to the Soudan as part of them, and it would
consequently be imprudent to do anything which could practically extend
our obligations in that quarter; as it is the entanglement of the British
forces in Soudanese operations, which would most powerfully tempt Russia
to adopt aggressive measures.” Three or four weeks later these
considerations came to a head. The question put by Mr. Gladstone to his
colleagues was this: “Apart from the defence of Egypt, which no one would
propose to abandon, does there appear to be any obligation of honour or
any inducement of policy (for myself I should add, is there any moral
warrant?) that should lead us in the present state of the demands on the
empire, to waste a large portion of our army in fighting against nature,
and I fear also fighting against liberty (such liberty as the case admits)
in the Soudan?” The assumptions on which the policy had been founded had
all broken down. Osman Digna, instead of being readily crushed, had
betaken himself to the mountains and could not be got at. The railway from
Suakin to Berber, instead of serving the advance on Khartoum in the
autumn, could not possibly be ready in time. Berber, instead of being
taken before the hot season, could not be touched. Lord Wolseley, instead
of being able to proceed with his present forces or a moderate addition,
was already asking for twelve more battalions of infantry, with a
proportion of other arms.
Mr. Gladstone’s own view of this crisis is to be found in a memorandum
dated April 9, circulated to the cabinet three or four days before the
question came up for final settlement. (M70) It is long, but then the case
was intricate and the stages various. The reader may at least be satisfied
to know that he will have little more of it.(114)
Three cabinets were held on three successive days (April 13-15). On the
evening of the first day Mr. Gladstone sent a telegram to the Queen, then
abroad, informing her that in the existing state of foreign affairs, her
ministers felt bound to examine the question of the abandonment of
offensive operations in the Soudan and the evacuation of the territory.
The Queen, in reply, was rather vehement against withdrawal, partly on the
ground that it would seriously affect our position in India. The Queen had
throughout made a great point that the fullest powers should be granted to
those on the spot, both Wolseley and Baring having been selected by the
government for the offices they held. No question cuts deeper in the art
of administering a vast system like that of Great Britain, than the
influence of the agent at a distant place; nowhere is the balance of peril
between too slack a rein from home and a rein too tight, more delicate.
Mr. Gladstone, perhaps taught by the experience of the Crimean war, always
strongly inclined to the school of the tight rein, though I never heard of
any representative abroad with a right to complain of insufficient support
from a Gladstone cabinet.(115) On this aspect of matters, so raised by the
Queen, Mr. Gladstone had (March 15) expressed his view to Sir Henry
Ponsonby:—
Sir Evelyn Baring was appointed to carry onwards a declared and
understood policy in Egypt, when all share in the management of
the Soudan was beyond our province. To Lord Wolseley as general of
the forces in Egypt, and on account of the arduous character of
the work before him, we are bound to render in all military
matters a firm and ungrudging support. We have accordingly not
scrupled to counsel, on his recommendation, very heavy charges on
the country, and military operations of the highest importance.
But we have no right to cast on him any responsibility beyond what
is strictly military. It is not surely possible that he should
decide policy, and that we should adopt and answer for it, even
where it is in conflict with the announcements we have made in
parliament.
By the time of these critical cabinets in April Sir Evelyn Baring had
spontaneously expressed his views, and with a full discussion recommended
abandonment of the expedition to Khartoum.
On the second day the matter was again probed and sifted and weighed.
At the third cabinet the decision was taken to retire from the Soudan, and
to fix the southern frontier of Egypt at the line where it was left for
twelve years, until apprehension of designs of another European power on
the upper waters of the Nile was held to demand a new policy. Meanwhile,
the policy of Mr. Gladstone’s cabinet was adopted and followed by Lord
Salisbury when he came into office. He was sometimes pressed to reverse
it, and to overthrow the dervish power at Khartoum. To any importunity of
this kind, Lord Salisbury’s answer was until 1896 unwavering.(116)
It may be worth noting that, in the course of his correspondence with the
Queen on the change of policy in the Soudan, Mr. Gladstone casually
indulged in the luxury of a historical parallel. “He must assure your
Majesty,” he wrote in a closing sentence (April 20), “that at least he has
never in any cabinet known any question more laboriously or more
conscientiously discussed; and he is confident that the basis of action
has not been the mere change in the public view (which, however, is in
some cases imperative, as it was with King George III. in the case of the
American war), but a deep conviction of what the honour and interest of
the empire require them as faithful servants of your Majesty to advise.”
(M71) The most harmless parallel is apt to be a challenge to discussion,
and the parenthesis seems to have provoked some rejoinder from the Queen,
for on April 28 Mr. Gladstone wrote to her secretary a letter which takes
him away from Khartoum to a famous piece of the world’s history:—
_To Sir Henry Ponsonby._
In further prosecution of my reply to your letter of the 25th, I
advert to your remarks upon Lord North. I made no reference to his
conduct, I believe, in writing to her Majesty. What I endeavoured
to show was that King George III., without changing his opinion of
the justice of his war against the colonies, was obliged to give
it up on account of a change of public opinion, and was not open
to blame for so doing.
You state to me that Lord North never flinched from his task till
it became hopeless, that he then resigned office, but did not
change his opinions to suit the popular cry. The implied contrast
to be drawn with the present is obvious. I admit none of your
three propositions. Lord North did not, as I read history, require
to change his opinions to suit the popular cry. They were already
in accordance with the popular cry; and it is a serious reproach
against him that without sharing his master’s belief in the
propriety of the war, he long persisted in carrying it on, through
subserviency to that master.
Lord North did not resign office for any reason but because he
could not help it, being driven from it by some adverse votes of
the House of Commons, to which he submitted with great good
humour, and probably with satisfaction.
Lord North did not, so far as I know, state the cause to be
hopeless. Nor did those who were opposed to him. The movers of the
resolution that drove him out of office did not proceed upon that
ground. General Conway in his speech advised the retention of the
ground we held in the colonies, and the resolution, which
expressed the sense of the House as a body, bears a singular
resemblance to the announcement we have lately made, as it
declares, in its first clause, that the further prosecution of
offensive war (on the continent of America) “will be the means of
weakening the efforts of this country against her European
enemies,” February 27, 1782. This was followed, on March 4, by an
address on the same basis; and by a resolution declaring that any
ministers who should advise or attempt to frustrate it should be
considered “as enemies to his Majesty and to this country.” I
ought, perhaps, to add that I have never stated, and I do not
conceive, that a change in the public opinion of the country is
the ground on which the cabinet have founded the change in their
advice concerning the Soudan.
III
The reader has by this time perhaps forgotten how Mr. Gladstone
good-humouredly remonstrated with Lord Palmerston for associating him as
one of the same school as Cobden and Bright.(117) The twenty intervening
years had brought him more and more into sympathy with those two eminent
comrades in good causes, but he was not any less alive to the
inconvenience of the label. Speaking in Midlothian after the dissolution
in 1880, he denied the cant allegation that to instal the liberals in
power would be to hand over the destinies of the country to the Manchester
school.(118) “Abhorring all selfishness of policy,” he said, “friendly to
freedom in every country of the earth attached, to the modes of reason,
detesting the ways of force, this Manchester school, this peace-party, has
sprung prematurely to the conclusion that wars may be considered as having
closed their melancholy and miserable history, and that the affairs of the
world may henceforth be conducted by methods more adapted to the dignity
of man, more suited both to his strength and to his weakness, less likely
to lead him out of the ways of duty, to stimulate his evil passions, to
make him guilty before God for inflicting misery on his fellow-creatures.”
Such a view, he said, was a serious error, though it was not only a
respectable, it was even a noble error. Then he went on, “However much you
may detest war—and you cannot detest it too much—there is no war—except
one, the war for liberty—that does not contain in it elements of
corruption, as well as of misery, that are deplorable to recollect and to
consider; but however deplorable wars may be, they are among the
necessities of our condition; and there are times when justice, when
faith, when the welfare of mankind, require a man not to shrink from the
responsibility of undertaking them. And if you undertake war, so also you
are often obliged to undertake measures that may lead to war.”(119)
It is also, if not one of the necessities, at least one of the natural
probabilities of our imperfect condition, that when a nation has its
forces engaged in war, that is the moment when other nations may press
inconvenient questions of their own. Accordingly, as I have already
mentioned, when Egyptian distractions were at their height, a dangerous
controversy arose with Russia in regard to the frontier of Afghanistan.
The question had been first raised a dozen years before without effect,
but it was now sharpened into actuality by recent advances of Russia in
Central Asia, bringing her into close proximity to the territory of the
Ameer. The British and Russian governments appointed a commission to lay
down the precise line of division between the Turcoman territory recently
annexed by Russia and Afghanistan. The question of instructions to the
commission led to infinite discussion, of which no sane man not a
biographer is now likely to read one word. While the diplomatists were
thus teasing one another, Russian posts and Afghan pickets came closer
together, and one day (March 30, 1885) the Russians broke in upon the
Afghans at Penjdeh. The Afghans fought gallantly, their losses were heavy,
and Penjdeh was occupied by the Russians. “Whose was the provocation,” as
Mr. Gladstone said later, “is a matter of the utmost consequence. We only
know that the attack was a Russian attack. We know that the Afghans
suffered in life, in spirit, and in repute. We know that a blow was struck
at the credit and the authority of a sovereign—our protected ally—who had
committed no offence. All I say is, we cannot in that state of things
close this book and say, ‘We will look into it no more.’ We must do our
best to have right done in the matter.”
Here those who were most adverse to the Soudan policy stood firmly with
their leader, and when Mr. Gladstone proposed a vote of credit for eleven
millions, of which six and a half were demanded to meet “the case for
preparation,” raised by the collision at Penjdeh, he was supported with
much more than a mechanical loyalty, alike by the regular opposition and
by independent adherents below his own gangway. The speech in which he
moved this vote of a war supply (April 27) was an admirable example both
of sustained force and lucidity in exposition, and of a combined firmness,
dignity, reserve, and right human feeling, worthy of a great minister
dealing with an international situation of extreme delicacy and peril.
Many anxious moments followed; for the scene of quarrel was far off,
details were hard to clear up, diplomacy was sometimes ambiguous, popular
excitement was heated, and the language of faction was unmeasured in its
violence. The preliminary resolution on the vote of credit had been
received with acclamation, but a hostile motion was made from the front
opposition bench (May 11), though discord on a high imperial matter was
obviously inconvenient enough for the public interest. The mover declared
the government to have murdered so many thousand men and to have arranged
a sham arbitration, and this was the prelude to other speeches in the same
key. Sir S. Northcote supported the motion—one to displace the ministers
on a bill that it was the declared intention not to oppose. The division
was taken at half-past two in the morning, after a vigorous speech from
the prime minister, and the government only counted 290 against 260. In
the minority were 42 followers of Mr. Parnell. This premature debate
cleared the air. Worked with patience and with vigorous preparations at
the back of conciliatory negotiation, the question was prosecuted to a
happy issue, and those who had done their (M72) best to denounce Mr.
Gladstone and Lord Granville for trampling the interests and honour of
their country underfoot thought themselves very lucky, when the time came
for them to take up the threads, in being able to complete the business by
adopting and continuing the selfsame line. With justifiable triumph Mr.
Gladstone asked how they would have confronted Russia if “that insane
policy—for so I still must call it”—of Afghan occupation which he had
brought to an end in 1880, had been persevered in. In such a case, when
Russia came to advance her claim so to adjust boundaries as to make her
immediate neighbour to Afghanistan, she would have found the country full
of friends and allies, ready to join her in opposing the foreigner and the
invader; and she would have been recognised as the liberator.(120)
IV
In some respects Mr. Gladstone was never more wonderful than in the few
weeks that preceded the fall of his second administration. Between the
middle of April and the middle of May, he jots down with half-rueful
humour the names of no fewer than nine members of the cabinet who within
that period, for one reason or another and at one moment or another,
appeared to contemplate resignation; that is to say a majority. Of one
meeting he said playfully to a colleague, “A very fair cabinet to-day—only
three resignations.” The large packets of copious letters of this date,
written and received, show him a minister of unalterable patience,
unruffled self-command; inexhaustible in resource, catching at every straw
from the resource of others, indefatigable in bringing men of divergent
opinions within friendly reach of one another; of tireless ingenuity in
minimising differences and convincing recalcitrants that what they took
for a yawning gulf was in fact no more than a narrow trench that any
decent political gymnast ought to be ashamed not to be able to vault over.
Though he takes it all as being in the day’s work, in the confidence of
the old jingle, that be the day short or never so long, at length it
ringeth to evensong, he does not conceal the burden. To Mrs. Gladstone he
writes from Downing Street on May-day:—
Rather oppressed and tired with the magnitude and the complication
of subjects on my mind, I did not think of writing by the first
post, but I will now supply the omission by making use of the
second. As to all the later history of this ministry, which is now
entering on its sixth year, it has been a wild romance of
politics, with a continual succession of hairbreadth escapes and
strange accidents pressing upon one another, and it is only from
the number of dangers we have passed through already, that one can
be bold enough to hope we may pass also through what yet remain.
Some time ago I told you that dark as the sky was with many a
thunder-cloud, there were the possibilities of an admirable
situation and result, and _for me_ a wind-up better than at any
time I could have hoped. Russia and Ireland are the two _great_
dangers remaining. The “ray” I mentioned yesterday for the first
is by no means extinct to-day, but there is nothing new of a
serious character; what there is, is good. So also upon the Irish
complications there is more hope than there was yesterday,
although the odds may still be heavily against our getting forward
unitedly in a satisfactory manner.
On May 2, as he was looking at the pictures in the Academy, Lord Granville
brought him tidings of the Russian answer, which meant peace. His short
entries tell a brave story:—
_May 3, Sunday._—Dined at Marlborough House. They were most kind
and pleasant. But it is so unsundaylike and unrestful. I am much
fatigued in mind and body. Yet very happy. _May 4._—Wrote to Lord
Spencer, Mr. Chamberlain, Sir C. Dilke, Lord Granville. Conclave.
H. of C., 4-¾-8-½ and 9-½-2-½. Spoke on Russian question. A heavy
day. Much knocked up. _May 5._—... Another anxious, very anxious
day, and no clearing of the sky as yet. But after all that has
come, what may not come? _May 14, Ascension Day._—Most of the day
was spent in anxious interviews, and endeavours to bring and keep
the members of the cabinet together. _May 15._—Cabinet 2-4-½.
Again stiff. But I must not lose heart.
(M73) Difference of opinion upon the budget at one time wore a threatening
look, for the radicals disliked the proposed increase of the duty on beer;
but Mr. Gladstone pointed out in compensation that on the other hand the
equalisation of the death duties struck at the very height of class
preference. Mr. Childers was, as always, willing to accommodate
difficulties; and in the cabinet the rising storm blew over. Ireland never
blows over.
The struggle had gone on for three years. Many murderers had been hanged,
though more remained undetected; conspirators had fled; confidence was
restored to public officers; society in all its various grades returned
externally to the paths of comparative order; and the dire emergency of
three years before had been brought to an apparent close. The gratitude in
this country to the viceroy who had achieved this seeming triumph over the
forces of disorder was such as is felt to a military commander after a
hazardous and successful campaign. The country was once more
half-conquered, but nothing was advanced, and the other half of the
conquest was not any nearer. The scene was not hopeful. There lay
Ireland,—squalid, dismal, sullen, dull, expectant, sunk deep in hostile
intent. A minority with these misgivings and more felt that the minister’s
pregnant phrase about the government “having no moral force behind them”
too exactly described a fatal truth.