The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 3 (of 3) / 1890-1898

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 [pg 171]

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:—

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 [pg 172] cipher telegram (on February 5) bringing the evil news of the fall of Khartoum.

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 [pg 174] 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):—

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 [pg 175]

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:—

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 [pg 176] 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 [pg 177]

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. Bright has left a note of a meeting with him at this time:—

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 [pg 178] 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.

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. [pg 179]

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:—

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 [pg 181] 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.”

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:—

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 [pg 183] 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 [pg 184] 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 [pg 185]

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, [pg 186] at length it ringeth to evensong, he does not conceal the burden. To Mrs. Gladstone he writes from Downing Street on May-day:—