‘Hawarden,
‘July 2, 1886.‘My dear Bright,
‘I am sorry to be compelled again to address you. In your speech you charge me with having successfully concealed my thoughts last November. You ought to have known that this was not the fact, for in reply to others, from whom this gross charge was more to be expected than from you, I pointed out last week that on the 9th November, in Edinburgh, I told my constituents that if the Irish elections went as was expected, the magnitude of the subject they would bring forward would throw all others into the shade, and that it “went down to the very roots and foundations of our whole civil and political constitution” (“Midlothian Speeches,” 1885, p. 44). 2. You say I have described a conspiracy now existing in Ireland as marching through rapine to the break-up of the United Kingdom. This also is contrary to the fact. In 1881 there was, in my opinion, such a conspiracy against the payment of rent and the union of the countries, and I so described it. In my opinion, there is no such conspiracy now, nor anything in the least degree resembling it. You put into my mouth words which, coming from me, would be absolute falsehood. 3. You charge me with a want of frankness, because I have not pledged the Government to some defined line of action with regard to the Land Purchase Bill. A charge of this kind is, between old colleagues and old friends, to say the least, unusual. Evidently you have not read the Bill or my speech on its introduction, and you have never been concerned in the practical work of legislation on difficult and complicated subjects. The foundation of your charge is that on one of the most difficult and most complicated of all subjects I do not, in the midst of overwhelming work, formulate at once a new course or method of action without consulting the colleagues to whom I am so much bound, and from whom I receive invaluable aid. It might, I think, have occurred to you, as you have been in the Cabinet, that such a course on my part would have been indecent and disloyal, and that I should greatly prefer to bear all the charges and suspicions which you are now unexpectedly the man to fasten upon me. 4. You state you are convinced it is my intention to thrust the Land Purchase Bill upon the House of Commons. If I am a man capable of such an intention, I wonder you ever took office with one so ignorant of the spirit of the Constitution and so arbitrary in his character. Though this appears to be your opinion of me, I do not think it is the opinion held by my countrymen in general. You quote not a word in support of your charge; it is absolutely untrue. Every candidate, friendly or unfriendly, will form his own view, and take his own course on the subject. We must consider to the best of our power all the facts before us, but I certainly will not forego my right to make some effort to amend the dangerous and mischievous Land Purchase Law passed last year for Ireland, if such effort should promise to meet approval. I have done what I could to keep out of controversy with you, and, while driven to remonstrate against your charges, I advisedly abstain from all notice of your statements, criticisms, and arguments.
‘Always yours sincerely,
‘W. E. Gladstone.’
To this Mr. Bright replied two days afterwards as follows:
‘Bath,
‘July 4, 1886.‘My dear Gladstone,
‘I am sorry my speech has so greatly irritated you. It has been as great a grief to me to speak as I have spoken as it can have been to you to listen or to read. You say it is a gross charge to say that you concealed your thoughts last November. Surely, when you urged the constituencies to send you a Liberal majority large enough to make you independent of Mr. Parnell and his party, the Liberal party and the country understood you to ask for a majority to enable you to resist Mr. Parnell, not to make a complete surrender to him. You object to my quotations about a conspiracy “marching through rapine to the breakup of the United Kingdom,” and you say there is now no such conspiracy against the payment of rent and the union of the countries. I believe there is now such a conspiracy, and that it is expecting and seeking its further success through your measures. You complain that I charge you with a want of frankness in regard to the Land Purchase Bill. You must know that a large number of your supporters are utterly opposed to that Bill. If you tie the two Bills together, their difficulty in dealing with them will be much increased and their liberty greatly fettered. I think your friends and your opponents and the country have a right to know your intentions on so great a matter, when you are asking them to elect a Parliament in your favour. Your language seems to me rather a puzzle than an explanation, and that of your colleagues, though contradictory, is not much clearer. “I have done what I could to keep out of controversy with you.” I have not urged any man in Parliament, or out of it, to vote against you. I have abstained from speaking in public until I was in the face of my constituents, who have returned me unopposed to the new Parliament, and to them I was bound to explain my opinion of, and my judgment on, your Irish Bills. I stand by what I have said, and shall be surprised if the new Parliament be more favourable to your Irish measures than the one you have thought it necessary to dissolve. Though I thus differ from you at this time and on this question, do not imagine that I can ever cease to admire your great qualities or to value the great services you have rendered to your country.
‘I am, very sincerely yours,
‘John Bright.’
At the St. Asaph Diocesan Conference the following letter, addressed by the Premier to Dr. Hughes, Bishop of St. Asaph, was read by Canon Wynne Edwards:
‘Hawarden Castle,
‘October 19, 1884.‘My dear Lord Bishop,
‘When I undertook to contribute a letter (in default of personal attendance) towards the work of the Diocesan Conference, I did not anticipate the autumnal controversy in which the political world is now engulfed, and I fear that any attempt I now make to redeem a pledge given under other circumstances will be poor and inadequate, even in comparison with what it might otherwise have been, from the cares and distractions which the controversy daily brings upon me. At the same time, I had not even at the outset any ambitious plan before me. I did not prepare to enter on the wide field of argument respecting the disestablishment of the Church—too vast for my available time; too polemical for one who has already more than enough of polemical matter on his hands (a laugh). Will it come? Ought it to come? Must it come? Is it near, or is it somewhat distant or indefinitely remote? All these are questions of interest which I could not touch with advantage unless it be a single point. Whether Disestablishment would be disastrous or not, I think it clear that there is only one way in which it might come to be disgraceful. That one way parts into two. Disestablishment would be disgraceful if it were due to the neglect, indifference, or deadness of the Church (applause). But this is a contingency happily so improbable that for present purposes it may be dismissed without discussion. It might also be disgraceful were it to arrive as a consequence of dissensions among the members of the Church (hear, hear). This, as it appears to me, would be an unworthy termination of a controversy which ought to be settled upon far higher grounds (applause). The particular “duty of Churchmen with regard to Disestablishment,” which I shall try in few words to set forth, is the duty of taking care that dissensions from within shall not bring the Establishment to its end (applause). The last half-century has been a period of the most active religious life known to the Reformed Church of England. It has also been the period of the sharpest internal discord. That discord has of late been materially allayed, not, I believe, through the use of mere narcotics, not because the pulse beats less vigorously in her veins, but through the prevalence in various quarters of wise counsels, or, in other words, the application to our ecclesiastical affairs of that common-sense by which we desire that our secular affairs should always be governed (applause). What I wish now to urge is this. In the fact that such discord has prevailed there is not—nay, even were it to rise again into exasperation there ought not to be—ground for religious despondency or dismay. Divergence is to be expected, not only in all things human, but in all things divine which wear things human for their habiliment; and there were particular reasons why it was to be anticipated and to be patiently borne within the Church of England. We have still to look it in the face as an incident of our history, though it may lie less heavily upon us than in some former years as a present embarrassment. It is, under all circumstances, a cause of pain and a source of danger, but not always a demonstrative proof of weakness. On the contrary, when profoundly felt and yet borne, so to speak, without breach of continuity, it may be a test and a proof of strength (applause). In every living organism, in every institution or system, its health will depend upon the equilibrium of the elements out of which it is composed; but the maintenance of this equilibrium is more easy when the system is uniformly simple and its tendencies determinate and clear; more difficult when it is many-sided and when it aims at binding together and at directing towards a common end tendencies which are naturally divergent, and which more commonly find for themselves homes altogether severed. Let me borrow an illustration from the world of politics. Discord is comparatively rare and slight in a political club, because a political club is an institution formed to maintain some scheme of opinion current at the time and familiarly apprehended, though its tests be but rough, by those who join it. But the Houses of Parliament, in which these rival systems have to dwell together and to work themselves out into common results, are and must be the homes of frequent and serious contention. In the sixteenth century the Continental Churches of the West north of the Alps and Pyrenees were for the most part broken into rival bodies, fiercely contending with one another, but within themselves representing respectively one of the two great tendencies of the period. To these tendencies I will not give a theological name, but will call them those of the Reformation and the counter-Reformation respectively. From the time of the Council of Trent and of Loyola the Church of Rome represented more strictly than it had done before the tendencies of counter-Reformation. The Reformed Church had partly in the letter, and yet more in the spirit, broken with the previous constitution of the Church as well as with her dogma. Their confessions were indeed complex, but were framed upon a basis which their members felt, or at least thought they understood. They had all become in different degrees less like legislatures and more like clubs; that is to say, in the points to which I refer. A considerable time elapsed accordingly before the Latin Church was again seriously troubled with theological quarrels within its own domain; so also the Protestant Churches on the Continent underwent far less of trouble from internal dissensions than did the Church of England.
‘In the Scandinavian countries we may almost say such trouble has been unknown; the reason is, I apprehend, that in each case the hostile elements had been in the main suppressed or expelled by the struggle of the sixteenth century. Within this island it was not so. Both in England and in Scotland the effort was not only made, but tenaciously persisted in, to maintain the external unity of the nation in a common religious profession. I may here drop the case of Scotland, which has found a solution of its own. It is enough to speak of the case of England. It presents a result at first sight paradoxical in this respect—that the Church, which among reformed communions had least broken with tradition and most maintained the framework of the ancient authority, was the most perplexed, and indeed convulsed, with controversies and with schisms. When the matter is examined the cause is not far to seek. Weingarten, a German writer, lays down the proposition that the Reformation, as a religious movement, took its shape in England not in the sixteenth century, but in the seventeenth. The sixteenth century made the Church and the nation independent, and established the external framework of an ecclesiastical policy; but it seems difficult to show that the religion now professed as national in England took its rise at that epoch otherwise than as a legal and national profession. It seems plain that the great bulk of those burned under Mary were Puritans. Under Elizabeth we have to look, I believe (with very rare and remarkable exceptions), among Puritans or among recusants for the exhibition of an active and definite religious life. A strong pressure from without bound together a heterogeneous mass. In the region of theology I apprehend that what is termed Anglicanism began with Hooker—an authority still so high amongst us that none disown him, and a writer whose work is said by Walton to have attracted the laudatory admiration of the reigning Pope. But the body to which Hooker belonged also contained Cartwright, and contained, too, men of the same opinion. These internal differences ripened after a time into convulsion, tyranny, and revolution. I cannot severely blame those who overset Episcopacy for their oversetting, nor those who brought it back for their bringing it back. The contending elements could not live together in the same dwelling upon tolerable terms. Every effort was made to devise schemes of comprehension, and every effort failed. It was better, I suppose, that the rival partisans should part than that they should carry the country onward from one revolution to another. They parted in Scotland by casting out Episcopacy at the Revolution. They parted in England legally at the Restoration, and morally when a series of subsequent experiences had shown that the system then established by law was the only one in which the bulk of the nation could be content to abide (applause).
‘But what was the operation thus effected? It was a drastic process, but a process far less drastic than those of the sixteenth century. On the one side or the other it so far enabled the Church of England to fulfil the conditions of a corporate life and unity that it has now been maintained during two centuries and a quarter without either the unmitigated dualism or the agonies of convulsion which had marked the previous experience, and with this general result: that at the present hour the hopes of the Church of England are higher and more buoyant than perhaps they have ever been (applause). It has been very far indeed from an heroic history. Not only defect but scandal has abounded. These things, however, are beside the present purpose, which aims at pointing out that when uniformity was finally brought by law into the Church of England, still much room for diversity was left—room enough to invite polemical criticism, but perhaps not more than, on the one hand, the inestimable value of the principle of liberty required, or than, on the other hand, the teaching office of the Church could without vital injury allow. She is still working out her system by experience, but still not without this note, that the strife of parties, although softened of late, is still somewhat sharp within her. When it is said that the Church is comprehensive, the true meaning seems to be that her history, which has, of course, determined her character, has tended to comprise within her limits a greater diversity of views than have usually been so brought together. What may be called the Puritanical element, rejected at the Restoration, began slowly to reassert itself in the latter half of the eighteenth century, and is now admitted to have brought about a great revival of religious life in the English Church (applause). A form of thought to which the name of Broad may be applied seems to have been more than tolerated in some conspicuous instances by Laud, and acquired solidity in the universities at last after the Restoration. On the other hand, as regards the Romeward tendency (so to term it) of the Church of England, there is some evidence (though not free from suspicion) in the curious life of Lady Williams, to show that the chief English bishops of that era took a very mitigated view of their doctrinal differences from the Roman Church; and Barillon, the Ambassador of Louis XIV., writes to his Court in the reign of James II. that the Anglican prelates were preferable to the Jansenist Bishops of the Roman Communion. I will not attempt to bring these illustrations (in which I am relying upon memory only) down to the present day. Enough, I think, has been said to show that the Church of England has been all along peculiarly liable on the one side and on the other both to attack and to defection, and that the probable cause is to be found in the degree in which, whether for worldly or for religious reasons, it was attempted in her case to combine divergent elements within her borders. If there be any truth in this rough and very incomplete historical sketch, the conclusions to be drawn from it as regards my present purpose are clear and simple, for it at once appears that the great maxim In omnibus caritas, which is so necessary to temper all religious controversy, ought to apply with a tenfold force to the conduct of the members of the Church of England in respect to differences among themselves. They ought, of course, in the first place to remember that their right to differ is limited by the laws of the system to which they belong; but within that limit should they not also, each of them, recollect that his antagonist has something to say?—that the Reformation and the counter-Reformation tendencies were, in the order of Providence, placed here in a closer juxtaposition than anywhere else in the Christian world; that a course of destiny so peculiar appears to indicate on the part of the Supreme Orderer a peculiar purpose; that not only no religious, but no considerate or prudent, man, should run the risk of interfering with such a purpose; that the great charity which is a bounden duty everywhere in these matters should here be accompanied and upheld by two ever-striving handmaidens of a great reverence and a great patience; that instead of the bitterness, I might almost say the savagery, which has too often characterized our inward contentions, they ought on every ground of history and reason to be peculiarly marked by moderation, mildness and reserve (applause), by thinking no evil, by hoping all things, by kindly and favourable interpretations (applause), and if the demand thus made upon the evangelical resources of human nature seem to be over-large, is it not warranted? Is it not eminently rational at a time when, on the one hand, the deepest and widest questions of belief in a Saviour, in a Deity, and in a moral law, are everywhere coming to issue on a scale hitherto without example; and when, on the other hand, this great organization within which our lot has been cast is from day to day exhibiting here and beyond the seas not only a remarkable material extension, but a growing vigour of inward life, and an increasing abundance in every work of mercy, of benevolence, and of true civilization? (applause). In concluding these remarks, I will only say that I have, in writing them, endeavoured to place myself at a point of view which is impersonal, impartial and historical, and that I have not knowingly wounded the susceptibilities or assailed the opinions of anyone who may read them (loud applause).
‘I remain, with great respect, my dear Lord Bishop,
‘Yours most faithfully,
‘W. E. Gladstone.‘The Right Rev. the Lord Bishop of St. Asaph.’
During the subsequent proceedings the letter was frequently referred to as a magnificent letter, and as one worthy of the Premier’s transcendent abilities.
Mr. Gladstone wrote to Lord E. Fitzmaurice, complimenting him upon a speech which he delivered at Old Cumnock, in Ayrshire. ‘It was pre-eminently,’ said the ex-Premier, ‘the speech that was wanted, made by one who was “in all respects peculiarly the man to make it.” In my view,’ proceeded Mr. Gladstone, ‘Ireland is the heading of a bright chapter in the history, not only of the Liberals, but especially of the Whigs. It was a noble thing on the part of Burke and Fitzwilliam and the other seceders from Fox that not all their horror of France could make them untrue to Ireland. The Whig party after the schism remained for Irish purposes unbroken, and were right in each one of the various stages through which the question had to pass—right in the endeavour, frustrated by Pitt and the ascendency men, to work the Grattan Parliament; right in the opposition to the Union when it was shamelessly forced on Ireland; right in saying, by the mouth of Fox, that so huge a measure must have an unprejudiced and a full trial when it had once been effected, and when no man could undertake to say positively that Ireland might not come, as Scotland had come, to make it her own by adoption; right, probably, when Grattan gave his provisional sanction to coercion as the necessary sequel to the Union; right certainly when Lord Grey and Lord Althorp proposed further coercion in 1834, when they had done, and were doing, for Ireland in so many ways all which at the time they could, and when no Minister was in a condition to say constitutionally that the sense of the Irish people demanded self-government; and, finally, right was a cruelly crippled remnant of their leading class, enthusiastically supported from first to last by a large portion of the nation, in listening to the constitutional demand of Ireland by their representatives in 1885, and in recognising after three generations had passed away that union with coercion—in other words, government by force—had been tried all but too fully, and had entirely failed. We want,’ continued Mr. Gladstone, ‘a little Whig treatment of Ireland.’ Dealing with another aspect of the argument, which he characterized as ‘not less unacceptable and important,’ he expressed the fear that the action of the chief part of the Whig peers and aristocracy in severing themselves from the bulk of the Liberal party might be to narrow the Liberal party, which had hitherto been so broad. This he attributed ‘entirely to the so-called Liberal Unionists.’ ‘Liberal Unionism has,’ he said, ‘tended to break up the old and invaluable habit of Liberal England, which looked to a Liberal aristocracy and a Liberal leisured class as the natural, and therefore the best, leaders of the Liberal movement. Thus it was that classes and masses were united.’ This controversy, and the recollection, will do away with the certain triumph of Home Rule. But will the ranks which have been divided easily close up? ‘I, for one,’ repeated Mr. Gladstone, ‘think that the narrowing of the party by the severance or reduction of one wing is also the crippling of the party.’
Mr. Gladstone had, as he himself put it, ‘felt it his duty to put Liberal candidates in possession of some means of meeting statements’ as to his past connection with the Tory party. The particular remark which elicited this letter was made by Mr. Chatterton, the Tory candidate for the Crewe division. It was that ‘in his fiftieth year Mr. Gladstone was in full sympathy with the Tory party.’ Mr. Gladstone, in his letter, put forward ten propositions: ‘It is true that down to the year 1839, when I was twenty-nine years old, I might fairly be called a Tory of the Tories in questions relating to the Church. (2) It is untrue that even at that time I could justly be so described in other questions. (3) I am not aware that after 1839, or, at all events, after 1841, I could justly be described, even in Church questions, as a Tory of the Tories, or perhaps as a Tory at all. (4) In 1843 I was denounced in the House of Lords as being disloyal to the principles of Protection. (5) In 1849–50 I assisted to the best of my power the Government of Naples. (6) In 1851, in company with the Peelites, the Irish Roman Catholics, and the group led by Mr. Cobden, I actively resisted both Whigs and Tories, but the last especially, in defence of religious liberty, on the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill. (7) Unquestionably I differed strongly from the first Government of Lord Palmerston in 1855–8, on the question of peace, of foreign policy, of finance, and of divorce. The last was not a party question. On the other three I believe that my opinions were, as they are now, practically the opinions of the Liberal party. (8) Lord Derby sent me to the Ionian Islands in 1858, in precisely the same sense as that in which the Government of 1868–74 sent Lord Iddesleigh to America. (9) In company with Lord Russell and Mr. Milner Gibson, I gave the vote in 1858 on the Conspiracy Bill which brought in the Tories. Like Lord Russell, after doing this, I knew it to be my duty to give the Tories fair-play and such support as was equitable until positive cause of difference should arise. (10) Before their Italian policy was made public, I declined to join in the vote of want of confidence which removed them from office. But a few weeks later, when the volume containing it was published, I intimated in Parliament that had I known that policy at the time I should have pursued a different course.’ ‘So much,’ adds Mr. Gladstone, ‘for my Toryism down to 1859.’
In 1876 Mr. Gladstone wrote to Hayward: ‘The Times appears to be thoroughly emasculated. It does not pay to read a paper which next week is sure to refute what it has demonstrated this week. It ought to be prohibited to change sides more than a certain number of times in a year. As to the upper ten thousand, it has not been by a majority of that body that any of the great and good measures of our century have been carried, though a minority have done good service; and so I fear it will continue.’ Mr. Gladstone seems in 1878 to have had a poor opinion of the Daily News. ‘I think,’ he wrote to Blachford, ‘they have often made improper admissions, and do not drive the nail home as it really ought to be done by a strong Opposition paper, such as the Morning Chronicle of Derry.’
In his address to the electors of Midlothian in 1886, Mr. Gladstone said: ‘Lord Hartington has lately and justly stated in general terms that he is not disposed to deny our having fallen into errors of judgment. I will go one step further, and admit that we committed such errors, and serious errors, too, with cost of treasure and of precious lives, in the Soudan. For none of these errors were we rebuked by the voice of the Opposition; we were only rebuked, and that incessantly, because we did not commit them with precipitation, and because we did not commit other errors greater still. Our mistakes in the Soudan I cannot now state in detail; the task belongs to history. Our responsibility for them cannot be questioned; yet its character ought not to be misapprehended. In such a task miscarriages were inevitable. They are the proper and certain consequence of undertakings that war against nature, and that lie beyond the scope of human means, and of rational and prudent human action; and the first authors of these undertakings are the real makers of the mischief.’
In connection with this subject, let us add the following from Gordon’s Diary at Khartoum: ‘Poor Gladstone’s Government! how they must love me! I will accept nothing whatever from Gladstone’s hands. I will not let them even pay my expenses; I will get the King to pay them. I will never set foot in England again.’
Perhaps one of the most remarkable letters a great statesman ever wrote was that to an American in 1862, in which Mr. Gladstone thus shows how impossible it was for the North to put down the South. He writes: ‘You know, in the opinion of Europe, that impossibility has been proved. Depend upon it, to place the matter on a simple issue, you cannot conquer and keep down a country where the women behave like the women of New Orleans, and when a writer says they would be ready to form regiments, were such regiments required. And how idle it is to talk as some of your people do, and some of ours, of the slackness with which the war has been carried on, and of its accounting for the want of success. You have no cause to be ashamed of your military character and efforts. . . . I am, in short, a follower of General Scott; with him I say, Wayward sisters, go in peace. Immortal fame be to him for his wise and courageous advice, amounting to a prophecy. Finally, you have done what man could do; you have failed because you have resolved to do what man could not do. Laws stronger than human will are on the side of earnest self-defence; and to aim at the impossible, which in other things may be folly only when the path of search is dark with misery and red with blood, is not folly only, but guilt to boot.’
In 1880 some correspondence was published between Captain Boycott and Mr. Gladstone. The former wrote to the Prime Minister, giving a narrative of the events which obliged him to leave Ireland, and asked for compensation from the Government. ‘I have been prevented from pursuing my business peaceably; where my property has not been stolen, it has been maliciously wasted, and my life has been in hourly peril for many months. I have been driven from my home, and, having done no evil, find myself a ruined man, because the law as administered has not protected me.’ In reply, Mr. Gladstone’s secretary wrote: ‘Mr. Gladstone has received your letter of the 8th inst., and, in reply, desires me to say that he is not sure in what way he is to understand your request for assistance from her Majesty’s Government. It has been very largely afforded you in the use of the public force; beyond this it is the duty of the Government to use its best exertions in the enforcement of the existing law, which they are endeavouring to effect through the courts, and by asking when necessary the assistance of the Legislature to amend or enlarge the law—a matter of much importance, on which you can, of course, only receive information together with the public generally.’ A little later we were informed Mr. Gladstone declined to accede to Captain Boycott’s claim for pecuniary compensation on account of having to leave his farm, holding that the large display of public force required for Captain Boycott’s protection having been furnished, the State could not be expected to entertain any further claims.
Mr. Gladstone addressed the following letter to the editor of the Baptist:
‘Dear Sir,
‘I have given full consideration, which is well deserved, to your letter and article. I complain of nothing in the article, and am not surprised at the desires which it expresses. I acknowledge the just and generous treatment which I have had from Nonconformists both in and out of Wales; but the same hill or valley presents itself in different forms and tints, according to the point from which it is viewed.
‘My point of view is that determined for me by my political career. I cannot safely or wisely deal in the affirmation of abstract resolutions, though I by no means undertake to lay down the same rather rigid rule for others. In 1868 I moved resolutions on the Irish Church, but they were immediately followed by a Bill.
‘Your article asserts that there is now a great opportunity for disestablishing the Welsh Church, which ought not to be let slip.
‘I will not enter into the arguments pro or con., but will simply refer to the declarations I have made in the case of Scotland, and then assume, for argument’s sake, that the Welsh Church ought to be disestablished.
‘From my point of view there is now no such opportunity at all. I have been telling the country on every occasion I could find that no great political matter, of whatever kind (of course I mean a contested matter), could be practically dealt with until the Irish question, which blocks the way, is settled, and so put out of the way. I may, of course, be wrong, but this is my firm opinion; therefore he who wishes to have a great Welsh question discussed in a practical manner should, as I think, see that his first business, with a view to his own aim, is to clear the road.
‘But you may say Ireland ought not to occupy the attention of Parliament to the exclusion of great British questions. My answer is, that I have not stated whether it ought, but have simply said that it will.
‘Then, you may ask, why not defer the Irish question until these urgent British matters are settled? I reply that I have no more power thus to defer the Irish question than I had to defer the earthquake which happened thirty-six hours ago in France and Italy. Any attempt by me to force a postponement of the Irish question would only add to the confusion and the pressure. I am not creating a difficulty, but only pointing it out. The finger-post does not make the road.
‘I will, however, point out a main reason why this Irish question is so troublesome, obtrusive, and provoking. It is because it involves social order, and it is in the nature of questions involving social order to push their claims to precedence over other questions.
‘In conclusion, I may also observe that your letter and article take no notice of the fact that I am in my fifty-fifth year of public service, and appear to assume that it is my duty to continue in such service until I drop. To this proposition I must, on what appear to me solid and even high grounds, respectfully demur.
‘I have no desire that you should consider this letter as a secret one.
‘Your most faithful and obedient,
‘W. E. Gladstone.’‘21, Carlton House Terrace,
‘February 25.’
Mr. Gladstone’s secretary, writing to a correspondent in the Daily News in 1885, who had asked what the clergy were drawing from national funds, replied: ‘Sir,—Mr. Gladstone, in reply to your letter, desires me to inform you that the clergy are not State paid.’
Again, to a correspondent Mr. Gladstone wrote: ‘You are mistaken in supposing that the outrages in Manchester and Clerkenwell determined or affected my action with regard to Ireland. They drew the attention of the public, on which there are so many demands, to Irish questions, and thereby enabled me in point of time to act in a manner for which I had previously declared my desire. You state that the Irish voters are preparing themselves to punish the Liberal party. In that respect I do not see that those of whom you speak can improve upon what they have already done; for in and since 1874, just after that party had dealt with the questions of Church and Land, they inflicted upon it the heaviest Parliamentary blow it has received in my time. I hope, however, from every present indication, that, notwithstanding the mischief done to it and to the wider interests of humanity by the Irish secession, it will, when an opportunity is allowed, prove to have strength sufficient for the exigencies of the time.’
In 1853 Lord Blachford wrote, just after Mr. Gladstone had unfolded his famous Budget which took off newspapers the additional stamp required for supplements, and imposed a single stamp of a penny for every newspaper of whatever sort: ‘If Gladstone has anything Conservative in him, he will find it difficult to remain in a Ministry which must eventually be thrown upon Radical support. But he is really so powerful a man that, whatever shakes and delays and loss of time there may be, he must come up near the surface. I expect he will show the best—i.e., most politically powerful—side of himself as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Pursuing details is so much his power if he is only not run away with by it. I think, if it is not a paradox, he has not poetry enough for the formation of a first-rate judgment. He has an immense mass of knowledge most methodically arranged, but the separate items must be looked for in their respective boxes, and do not combine. The consequence is not merely want of play, but that crotchety, one-sided, narrowish mode of viewing a matter uncorrected by the necessary comparisons and considerations which people call ingenious and subtle and Gladstonian. He looks at the details, not at the aspects of a subject, and masters it, I should imagine, by pursuing it hither and thither from one starting-point, and not by walking round it; and financial subjects will, I suppose, bear this mode of treatment better than any other.’
In a valuable work by a distinguished German, Dr. Geiffeken, of which an English translation appeared in 1889, the author thus described Mr. Gladstone: ‘His eloquence shows as its prominent quality the acuteness of intelligent methodical thought, and a readiness which, united with the most complete mastery of the matter, seems to require no preparation. He is beyond all cavil the first speaker of his time on subjects connected with public business, and is unsurpassed in power of luminous presentation of complicated economic questions. Relying on a memory that never fails, he knows how to impart life to the dryest array of figures, to group them in attractive forms, and to expound them so that his hearers may have them completely within their grasp. Nor is he less able in mastering the most involved question of law. His imagination is short-winded, dry, and apt to lose itself in speculation. His pathos is without warmth, his diction lacks charm, in spite of his copious command of language, his clear periods, and the inexhaustible staying power of his voice. The most unfavourable side of him as a speaker is seen when he begins to argue. Mr. Escobar never understood so well as he how to use language against the use of language, to involve his thoughts in clouds, to explain away inconvenient facts, to leave himself a back-door open to escape, and to father upon his opponents assertions which they would in nowise acknowledge. He involves the truth so hopelessly that it is impossible to disentangle it.’
Sir Rowland Hill, in his ‘Autobiography,’ writes: ‘There are few public men with whom I have not come on such excellent terms, and from whom I have received so much kindness, as from Mr. Gladstone.’
Archbishop Trench, writing to Bishop Wilberforce in 1864, says: ‘I deeply regret Mr. Gladstone’s Reform speech, which certainly may alter his future—may alter the whole future of England. No man but one endowed with his genius and virtues could effectually do mischief to the institutions of England, but he may do it.’ Again he wrote: ‘Nothing can hinder Mr. Gladstone from being the most remarkable man in England.’
In the autumn of 1859 Sir Archibald Alison, the historian, met Mr. Gladstone at the hospitable mansion of Mr. Stirling, of Keir, near Stirling. ‘I had been acquainted with him,’ he writes, ‘when he was a young man, and he had dined once or twice at our house in St. Colome Street, but I had not seen him for above twenty years, and in the interval he had become a leading Parliamentary orator and a great man. I was particularly observant, therefore, of his manner and conversation, and I was by no means disappointed in either. In manner he had the unaffected simplicity of earlier days, without either the assumption of superiority which might have been natural from his Parliamentary eminence, or the official pedantry so common in persons who have held high office in the State. In conversation he was rapid, easy and fluent, and possessed in a high degree that great quality so characteristic of a powerful mind, so inestimable in discoursing, of quickly apprehending what was said on the other side, and in reply setting himself at once to meet it fairly and openly. He was at once energetic and discursive, enthusiastic, but at times visionary. It was impossible to listen to him without pleasure, but equally so to reflect on what he said without grave hesitation. He left on my mind the impression of his being the best discourser on imaginative topics, and the most dangerous person to be entrusted with practical ones, I had ever met with. He gave me more the impression of great scholastic acumen than of weighty, statesman-like wisdom. Eminent in the University, and transferred without any practical training in the school of life at once from its shades to the House of Commons, he was like the ecclesiastics who in Catholic countries were often transferred direct from the cloister to the Cabinet, and began to operate on mankind as they would do on a dead body to elucidate certain points of physics, and who have so often proved at once the ablest and most dangerous of governors.’
An able writer, Mr. Bagehot, contends Mr. Gladstone is spoilt by applause, as follows: ‘But because his achievements have fallen so much below the standard of his expectations, because destiny has fought against him and proved too much for him, is Mr. Gladstone on that account dejected? On the contrary, although he may experience some passing emotions of chagrin and a pious resentment against circumstances, he cherishes the comfortable conviction that both what he has done and what he has abstained from doing are right. Facts may be against him, but, then, so much the worse for the facts. His view of foreign politics is that every male child born into the world, whether Indian or African, Mussulman, Egyptian fellah or Zulu Kaffir, Aztec or Esquimaux, is capable of being educated into a free and independent elector for an English borough. Parliamentary institutions and representative Government are to him, not only the supreme end at which to aim, but the régime to which all nationalities are instinctively capable of adapting themselves. He makes no allowance for difference of race or climate, historical antecedents, national peculiarities. Herein he displays a lack of imagination, which is more strange, seeing that he possesses a large allowance of the imaginative faculty in other respects, and that he is really poet first and statistician afterwards.
‘Particular causes have combined to confirm this defect. Mr. Gladstone has spent his life in the House of Commons, and cannot imagine a political system or a scheme of popular rule without as accurate a copy as conditions permit of the English representative Chamber. Again, he understands the English people so well, he has so completely identified himself with the ideas and aspirations of the upper class of bourgeoisie, that he considers it scarcely worth while to attempt to understand any other race. If he attempts such an intellectual process he can only measure the unfamiliar by reference to the familiar object.
‘Mr. Gladstone has drunk too deeply of the atmosphere of idolatry and incense by which he has been surrounded. His immense experience of public life, his great capacities as a financier, his moral earnestness, his religious fervour, his scholarship, culture, and conversational powers, have procured for him enthusiastic worshippers in every section of the community—among the lower classes; among the men of commerce and business; among the Whig aristocracy, with whom he has been educated, and who have long since seen in him the bulwark against revolution; among the clergy of the Anglican Church and the Nonconformist ministers; finally, among certain small and exclusive divisions of London society itself. No man can receive the homage that has fallen to the lot of Mr. Gladstone during so many years without experiencing a kind of moral intoxication and forming an excessive idea of his own infallibility. Nor is it good for him that domestic interposition should ward off the hostile expressions of opinions in the newspapers not attached to his cause, but which may, nevertheless, represent the views of a certain section of the English people.’
Mr. G. W. E. Russell, in his charming little book on Gladstone, refers to Mr. Gladstone’s speech on the Don Pacifico debate, as illustrating his tendency ‘to belittle England, to extol and magnify the virtues and graces of other nations, and to ignore the homely prejudice of patriotism. He has frankly told us that he does not know the meaning of prestige, and an English Minister who makes that confession has yet to learn one of the governing sentiments of
‘“An old and haughty nation proud in arms.”
Whether this peculiarity of Mr. Gladstone’s mind can be referred to the fact that he has not a drop of English blood in his body is perhaps a fanciful inquiry; but its consequences are plain enough in the vulgar belief that he is indifferent to the interests and honour of the country which he has three times ruled, and that his love for England is swamped and lost in the enthusiasm of humanity.’
In an article on the Peelites in Macmillan’s, Professor Goldwin Smith writes: ‘Gladstone does not yet belong to history, and the only part of his career which fell specially under my notice was Oxford University Reform. He opposed inquiry when a Commission was announced by Lord John Russell, and afterwards, as a member of the Coalition Government, he framed what was for that day a drastic and comprehensive measure of reform. . . . It was impossible to be brought into contact with Mr. Gladstone, even in so slight a way, without being made sensible of his immense powers of work, of mastering and marshalling details, of framing a comprehensive measure, and of carrying it against opposition in the House of Commons. I also saw and appreciated his combative energy. The Bill had been miserably mauled in the Commons by Disraeli, with the aid of some misguided Radicals. When it got to the Lords I was placed under the steps of the throne, to be at hand if information on details was needed by those in charge of the Bill. The House seemed very full, but the Duke of Newcastle came to me and said that he did not believe Lord Derby intended to venture on a real opposition to the Bill, as there had not been a strong whip on the Conservative side. “In that case,” I said, “what hinders you from reversing here the amendments which have been carried against you in the Commons?” A conference was held in the library to consider this suggestion, but Lord Russell, the leader of the Commons, peremptorily vetoed it on the ground of prudence. Mr. Gladstone was confined to his room by illness, but, in compliance with my earnest prayer, the question was referred to him. Next day the signal for battle was hung out, and I had the great satisfaction of looking on while a series of amendments in committee—the Commons amendments—were reversed, and the Bill was restored to a workable state.’
In 1868 Bishop Colenso writes: ‘I had a very pleasant letter by the last mail from Mr. Gladstone, to whom I wrote ten months ago with reference to his language about Bishop Gray and myself at an S.P.G. meeting at Penmaenmawr. He had my letter before him for four months, as he says, but he begs me to believe that this long interval of silence has not been due to any indifference or disrespect; and, in short, he writes a very kind and courteous letter, administering a little rebuke to me at the end, “not so much with respect to particular opinions, as to what appears to be your method (technically so called) in the treatment of theological questions.”’ Again, in 1881: ‘I need not say that I am utterly disappointed with Mr. Gladstone and Lord Kimberley, and particularly with the tone of the Daily News, speaking, I suppose, as the Government organ. I cannot help thinking that the present Government has lost a great deal of its power by the feebleness they have shown in their action with regard to South African affairs, where, as far as I can see, they have not righted a single wrong committed by Sir B. Frere, and only withdrawn him under great pressure, and when he had already set on foot further mischief.’ In a little while the Bishop writes more approvingly: ‘It gives us hope that other wrongs may be redressed when Mr. Gladstone is ready, even in the midst of defeats at Laing’s Neck, Ingogo, and Majuba, to hold back the hand of Great Britain from cruelly chastising these brave patriots, so unequally matched with our power, which of course could overwhelm and crush them.’
Count Bismarck is reported to have said: ‘If I had done half as much harm to my country as Mr. Gladstone has done to his country the last four years, I would not dare to look my countrymen in the face.’
Mr. Kinglake thus describes Mr. Gladstone: ‘If he was famous for the splendour of his eloquence, for his unaffected piety, and blameless life, he was celebrated far and wide for a more than common liveliness of conscience. He had once imagined it to be his duty to quit a Government and to burst through strong ties of friendship and gratitude by reason of a thin shade of difference on the subject of white or brown sugar. It was believed that if he were to commit even a little sin or to imagine an evil thought he would instantly arraign himself before the dread tribunal which awaited him within his own bosom, and that his intellect being subtle and microscopic, and delighting in casuistry and exaggeration, he would be likely to give his soul a very harsh trial, and treat himself as a great criminal for faults too minute to be visible to the naked eyes of laymen. His friends lived in dread of his virtues, as tending to make him whimsical and unstable, and the practical politicians, perceiving that he was not to be depended upon for party purposes, and was bent on none but lofty objects, used to look upon him as dangerous, used to call him behind his back a good man—a good man in the worst sense of the term.’
In 1865 Carlyle wrote: ‘I had been at Edinburgh, and had heard Gladstone make his great oration on Homer there on retiring from office as Rector. It was a grand display. I never recognised before what oratory could do, the audience being kept for three hours in a state of electric tension, bursting every moment into applause. Nothing was said which seemed of moment when read deliberately afterwards; but the voice was like enchantment, and the street when we left the building was ringing with a prolongation of cheers.’ Again he meets Gladstone at Mentone in 1867, and thus describes him: ‘Talk copious, ingenious, but of no worth or sincerity; pictures, literature, finance, prosperities, greatness of outlook for Italy, etc.—a man ponderous, copious, of evident faculty, but all gone irrecoverably into House of Commons shape; man once of some wisdom or possibility of it, but now possessed by the Prince or many Princes of the Power of the Air. Tragic to me, and far from enviable, from whom one felt one’s self divided by abysmal chasms and immeasurabilities.’ On the passing of the measure of Irish Church Disestablishment, Carlyle writes: ‘In my life I have seen few more anarchic, factious, unpatriotic achievements than this of Gladstone and his Parliament in respect to such an Ireland as now is. Poor Gladstone!’ Again he writes: ‘Ten days ago read Gladstone’s article in the Edinburgh Review with amazement. Empty as a blown goose egg. Seldom have I read such a ridiculous, solemn, addlepated Joseph Surface of a thing. Nothingness, or near it, conscious to itself of being greatness almost unexampled. . . . According to the People’s William, England with himself atop is evidently even now at the top of the world. Against bottomless anarchy in all fibres of her spiritual and practical she has now a complete ballot-box—can vote and count noses as free as air. Nothing else wanted, clearly thinks the People’s William. He would ask you with unfeigned astonishment what else. The sovereign thing in nature is parmaceti (read ballot) for an inward bruise. That is evidently his belief, what he finds believable about England in 1870. Parmaceti, parmaceti—enough of him and it.’ This was written in 1870.
In 1873 the old Chelsea Sage writes more bitterly still: ‘The whole world is in a mighty fuss here about Gladstone and his Bill (Irish Education)—the attack on the third branch of the upas tree, and the question of what is to become of him in consequence of it. To myself, from the beginning, it seemed the consummation of contemptibilities and petty trickeries on his part; one of the most transparent bits of thimble-rigging to secure the support of his sixty Irish votes, the Pope’s brass band, and to smuggle the education violin into the hands of Cullen and the sacred sons of Belial and the scarlet woman, I had ever seen from him before.’ And again: ‘Gladstone seems to me one of the contemptiblest men I ever looked on—a poor Ritualist, almost spectral kind of a phantasm of a man; nothing in him but forms and ceremonies and artistic mappings; incapable of seeing veritably any fact whatever, but seeing, crediting, and laying to heart the mere clothes of the fact, and fancying that all the rest does not exist. Let him fight his own battle in the name of Beelzebub, the god of Ekron, who seems to be his god. Poor phantasm!’ When the catastrophe of 1874 came, and the People’s William was flung from his pedestal, the general opinion was that his star had set for ever, till he saw who it was that the people had chosen to replace him. His mind misgave him then that the greater faults of his successor would lift Mr. Gladstone back again to a yet more giddy eminence and greater opportunities for evil.
‘Finally,’ remarks Mr. Froude, ‘he did not look on Mr. Gladstone merely as an orator who, knowing nothing as it ought to be known, had flung his force into words and specious sentiments, but as the representative of the multitudinous cants of the age, religious, moral, political, literary; differing on this point from other leading men, that he believed in all, and was prepared to act on it. He, in fact, believed Mr. Gladstone to be one of those fatal figures created by England’s evil genius to work irreparable mischief, which no one but he could have executed.’
In her ‘Memories of Old Friends’ Miss Caroline Fox tells us she asked Carlyle, ‘Is not Gladstone a man of principle?’ ‘I did hope well of him once,’ replied Carlyle, ‘in 1867, and so did John Stirling, though I heard he was a Puseyite and so forth . . . and so I hoped something might come of him; but now he has been declaring that England is in such a wonderfully prosperous state—meaning that it has plenty of money in its breeches pockets and plenty of beef in its great ugly belly. But that is not the prosperity we want, and so I say to him: “You are not the lifegiver to England. I go my way; you go yours.”’ Mr. Froude, in his ‘Oceana,’ testifies to Mr. Gladstone’s unpopularity in the Colonies. At Melbourne, at the time of the Gordon catastrophe, he writes: ‘They did not love him before, and had been at a loss to understand the influence which he had so long exercised. His mighty popularity must, they thought, now be at an end. It could not survive a wound so deadly in his country’s reputation. They were deceived, it seems,’ adds Mr. Froude, speaking for them and himself. ‘Yet perhaps they were forming an opinion prematurely which will hereafter be the verdict of mankind. He, after all, is personally responsible more than any other man for the helpless condition into which the executive administration of the English empire seems to have fallen.’ ‘Oceana’ was published in 1886.
‘Gladstone,’ writes Professor Fawcett, ‘made the speech of the evening. He is a fine speaker. He never hesitates, and his action and manner are admirable. In fact, in this respect he resembles Bright, but is far inferior to Bright, in my opinion, in not condensing his matter. Again, Gladstone is too subtle.’ On more than one occasion Fawcett seems to have doubted the judgment of his leader.
Sir E. Watkin writes: ‘Sir John A. Macdonald, then Mr. Macdonald, was once taken by me under the gallery, by special order of the Speaker, to hear a great speech of Mr. Gladstone, whom he had not heard before. When we went away I said: “Well, what do you think of him?” He replied: “He is a great rhetorician, but he is not an orator.”
About twenty years ago Mr. Gladstone’s future career as a Minister was predicted with singular accuracy by a very acute observer of men and things, who had held almost every possible office, from that of Ministerial Whip to Chancellor of the Exchequer and Secretary of State. Observing from the Peers’ Gallery Mr. Gladstone’s mismanagement of public business when he led the House of Commons in Lord Russell’s short-lived second Administration, he said, in effect: ‘We are coming to new times. Mr. Gladstone cannot manage the House of Commons as other Ministers have done, in the usual way, but he can force great measures through by bringing the pressure of outside opinion to bear upon it. This,’ he added, ‘is the way in which Mr. Gladstone will maintain himself in power. We shall have one violent proposal after another, as the means by which Mr. Gladstone may gain or keep office.’
Mr. John Morley writes: ‘He sometimes shows a singular difficulty in apprehending what will be the average judgment even on ordinary proceedings. He showed this in the mistake concerning Sir Robert Collier’s hardly more than colourable qualification to be made a member of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. He showed it again in a blunder of much the same kind—the special pleader’s kind—in the appointment to the Ewelme Rectory of a clergyman who could only by a strained interpretation of the usual rule be regarded as eligible. He showed it more than ever in his attempt to interpret away Lord (then Mr.) Odo Russell’s meaning in the language addressed by him in 1870 to Prince Bismarck on the subject of Russia’s action concerning the Black Sea clause of the Treaty of Paris, and averring the necessity—England’s necessity—for going to war with Russia with or without allies. His hasty resignation of the leadership of the Liberal party in 1874 was a still more important illustration of his rather erratic judgment. The latest instance of it is his letter to Count Carophyl, which shows at the same time, we think, a singularly just appreciation of the diplomatic concessions he had gained, and a singularly inadequate one as to the importance of a proud and lofty tone as one who writes as a spokesman of a great people.’
Mr. Spurgeon, writing to a Cardiff Liberal who opposes Mr. Gladstone’s Irish policy, says:
‘As to Ireland, I am altogether at one with you; especially I feel the wrong proposed to be done to our Ulster brethren. What have they done to be thus cast off? The whole scheme is as full of dangers and absurdities as if it came from a madman, yet I am sure Mr. Gladstone is only doing justice, and acting for the good of all. I consider him to be making one of those mistakes which can only be made by great and well-meaning men.’
In a further deliverance on the question, ‘in answer to many friends,’ and expressing himself as sorry to say what he does, liking to agree with Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Spurgeon says:
‘We feel bound to express our great regret that the great Liberal leader should have introduced his Irish Bills. We cannot see what our Ulster brethren have done that they should be cast off. They are in great dismay at the prospect of legislative separation from England, and we do not wonder. They have been ever our loyal friends, and ought not to be sacrificed. Surely something can be done for Ireland less ruinous than that which is proposed. The method of pacification now put forward seems to us to be full of difficulties, absurdities, and unworkable proposals. It is well meant, but even the best and greatest may err. We cannot look forward with any complacency to Ulster Loyalists abandoned, and an established Irish Catholic Church, and yet they are by no means the greatest evils which we foresee in the near future, should the suggested policy ever become fact.’
There was a brief intercourse between the two, creditable to each. In 1838 Macaulay writes: ‘I found Gladstone in the throng, and I accosted him, as we had never been introduced to each other. He received my advances with very great empressement indeed, and we had a good deal of pleasant chat.’
In 1839 appeared the celebrated work on ‘The State in its Relations to the Church.’ Macaulay bought it, read it, and wrote to Jeffery: ‘The Lord hath delivered him into our hands. I see my way to a popular and at the same time gentleman-like critique.’ Again: ‘I do think I have disposed of all Gladstone’s theories unanswerably, and that there is not a line of the paper even so strict a judge as Sir Robert Inglis would quarrel with as at all indecorous.’ Again Macaulay says: ‘I have received a letter from Mr. Gladstone, who in generous terms acknowledged, with some reservations, the fairness of the article. “In whatever you write,” continues Gladstone, “you can hardly hope for the privilege of most anonymous productions; but if it had been possible not to recognise, I should have questioned your authorship in this particular case, because the candour and single-mindedness which it exhibits are, in one who has long been connected in the most distinguished manner with a political party, so rare as to be almost incredible. . . . In these lacerating times one clings to everything of personal kindness, and husbands it for the future; and if you will allow me, I shall earnestly desire to carry with me such a recollection of your mode of dealing with a subject on which the attainment of truth, we shall agree, materially depends on the temperament in which the search for it is instituted and conducted.”’ ‘How much,’ writes Macaulay’s biographer, ‘this letter pleased Macaulay is evident by the fact of his having kept it unburned, a compliment which, except in this single instance, he never paid to any of his correspondents.’ ‘I have seldom,’ he writes, in reply to Mr. Gladstone, ‘been more gratified than by the very kind note which I have just received from you. Your book itself, and everything that I have heard about you—though almost all my information came, I must say, to the honour of our troubled times, from people very strongly opposed to you in politics—led me to regard you with respect and goodwill.’ Again Macaulay wrote: ‘I have no idea that he will ever acquire the reputation of a great statesman. His views are not sufficiently profound or enlarged for that.’
In 1853 Mrs. Beecher-Stowe, the far-famed author of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’ was in London, and dined with Mr. Gladstone at the Duke of Argyll’s. She writes: ‘He is one of the ablest and best men in the kingdom. It is a commentary on his character that, although one of the highest of the High Church, we have never heard him spoken of among the Dissenters otherwise than as an excellent and highly-conscientious man. For a gentleman who has attained such celebrity, both in politics and theology, he looks remarkably young. He is tall, with dark hair and eyes, a thoughtful, serious cast of countenance, and is easy and agreeable in conversation.’
When the Commercial Treaty with France was being discussed, Cobden wrote: ‘Gladstone is really almost the only Cabinet Minister of five years’ standing who is not afraid to let his heart guide his head a little at times.’ In 1860 Cobden wrote to Bright: ‘I have told you before that Gladstone shows much heart in this business. . . . He has a strong aversion to the waste of money on our armaments. He has no class feeling about the services. It is a pity that you cannot avoid hurting his feelings by such sallies. . . . He has more in common with you and me than any other man of his power in Britain.’ Again: ‘I agree with you that Gladstone overworks himself. But I suspect that he has a conscience, which is at times a troublesome partner for a Cabinet Minister. I make allowances for him, for I have never yet been able to define to my own satisfaction how far a man with a view to utility ought to allow himself to be merged in a body of men called a Government, or how far he should preserve his individuality.’ In 1862 Mr. Cobden writes: ‘Then Gladstone lends his genius to all sorts of expenditure which he disapproves, and devises schemes for raising money which nobody else would think of.’ Cobden’s last reference to Gladstone seems to have been at the time of the Danish War, when he once more laments the fact that Palmerston was still Premier and able to use all parties for his ends. Cobden writes: ‘With Gladstone and Gibson for his colleagues, and with a tacit connivance from a section of the Tories, there can be no honesty in our party life.’
In an ‘Essay on the British Parliament’ a writer gives the prize of eloquence to Mr. Gladstone. It is, as he truly says, ‘Eclipse first, and the rest nowhere.’
‘Mr. Gladstone is an appreciated man, but he is not understood. Why not? The first duty of a pretty woman, it has been said, is to let everyone know that she is pretty. Extending that kind of code to the other sex, it is surely the first duty of an intellectual man to be intelligible. In this age there is more of the suspicion that Mr. Gladstone is Talleyrandizing, and using his copious vocabulary for the concealment of thought. . . . He sees so much to say on all sides that he never clearly defines on which side lies the preponderating reasoning. He sums up controversies, rather than ranges himself in them. Debate is with him pure debate—a division appears, in his apprehension, rather to disfigure the proceedings. . . . If Premier himself, he could ally himself on one hand with Mr. Milner Gibson, and on the other with Mr. Spencer Walpole. He is the juste milieu of the day, and, biding his time, he offers to his contingent supporters “chameleon’s diet—eating the air promise-crammed.’”—‘Political Portraits,’ by E. M. Whittey, published in 1851, p. 226.
Mr. Hill, in his ‘Political Portraits,’ writes: ‘If Mr. Gladstone has to make up his mind while he is on his legs whether he will or will not answer a delicate question, he will express himself somewhat after this fashion: “The honourable gentleman, in the exercise of that discretion which I should be the last to deny to any member of this House, least of all to one so justly entitled to respect as my hon. friend, both on account of his high personal character and his long Parliamentary experience, has asked me whether the Government intend to bring in a Bill for the establishment of secular education in Ireland. Now, the discretion which I freely concede to the hon. gentleman in regard to the proposal of this question, I must, as a member of the Government, reserve to myself in considering whether or how I shall answer the question. I have to consider it not only in itself, but in regard to the time at which it is put, and the circumstances which surround the topic.” Mr. Gladstone then, perhaps, will say, what Lord Palmerston and Lord Russell would have said in a single sentence, that he must decline to answer it.’
Count Beust said: ‘Independently of the demerits and dangers of Mr. Gladstone’s Home Rule scheme, he has, to my mind, little or no excuse for introducing it, and the parallel he draws between it and the dual system I inaugurated is utterly fallacious. Agrarian agitation is the plea which he uses for giving the Irish people a separate Parliament. I believe that the agrarian system in Ireland has for centuries been a bad one, and the land legislation of 1881—whatever people may think of it from a moral point of view—will unquestionably bring about good results. But how these results are to be beneficially increased by giving Ireland a separate Parliament, and handing over its government to the avowed enemies of England, I cannot see, for one of its first acts would be to pass laws—virtually decrees of expulsion—against the landlords, to banish capital from the land, and materially to aggravate the general condition of the peasantry. As an old statesman, I should consider that the establishment of an Irish Parliament, raising, as it unquestionably would, aspirations on the part of the people to free themselves from the English yoke, and increasing the power of political agitators, is fraught with the gravest danger to England. I cannot understand Mr. Gladstone quoting Austria-Hungary as an example, for, independently of the great dissimilarity between the two systems, Mr. Gladstone forgets the condition of Austria when the Hungarian Parliament was established. Austria had been beaten after a short but most disastrous war; Prussia had forbidden her any further interference in German affairs; the country was almost in a state of latent revolution; and an outbreak in Hungary, promoted by foreign agents and foreign gold, with Klapka doing Count Bismarck’s bidding, was in the highest degree probable, and would, had it occurred, have led to almost overwhelming disaster. Knowing this, I felt bound to advise the Emperor to accede to the views of the Déak party, securing the solidarity of the empire by the guarantees afforded through the systems of delegations and joint budget. Mr. Gladstone cannot urge upon your House of Commons the same reasons for granting Home Rule to Ireland. England has not been, and I trust never will be, beaten as Austria had been beaten. No foreign foe has been dictating terms at the gates of London. No revolution is latent, and, a point also worthy of consideration, the population of Ireland is only about five millions, including those Protestants who are against the Home Rule scheme, as compared with what I should think was the wish of the great majority of the thirty millions composing the population of Great Britain; whereas the area of Hungary is greater than that of Austria proper, and its population is nearly one-half of the total population of the empire.’
Well might Count Beust ask: ‘How can Mr. Gladstone use my dualistic system as a precedent for his scheme of Home Rule?’
Mr. Joseph Cowen said: ‘The super-subtlety of his intellect, his faculty for hair-splitting, and his love of party warfare, create distrust, and generate that strong sense of resentment which exists towards him amongst a numerous section of the community. If he were not so subtle he would be more successful. A plain straight man like Lord Hartington, or Lord John Russell, or Sir Stafford Northcote, impresses the average Englishman more favourably than a curiously acute one like the Prime Minister. The popular impression—that he is an austere purist, and would not resort to any of the tricks or wriggles that characterize ordinary party leaders—is altogether a mistake. Those who are brought in contact with the Legislature know that he can resort to any of the devices of partizanship as readily as men who are popularly accounted his inferiors. It is this many-sidedness that leads to the different estimates that are formed of him. He cannot but have felt very keenly the death of Gordon, and the massacre that ensued on the fall of Khartoum; yet I believe it is true that he went to the Criterion that night to see a very second-rate comedy. Ordinary persons having the responsibility that he had would not have been able to attend a theatre at such a time. The other day he laboured to impress the House of Commons with the extreme gravity of the position of affairs with Russia, and shortly after he went to see Miss Anderson play in “Pygmalion and Galatea.” These sudden changes from seriousness to seeming frivolity foster that sense of distrust which a large number of sober Englishmen feel towards him. They cannot understand how a man engaged in such grave and weighty transactions can feel them very acutely when he can so easily throw them on one side and ignore the responsibilities they entail.’
‘What a wonderful fellow Gladstone is, after all!’ said Mr. Disraeli one day to McCullagh Torrens. ‘He had a dreadful passage, I hear, coming back from Ireland, and the moment he got on shore he began to make a speech to the Welshmen, telling them that they were all right, and to keep so.’
‘What an ardent creature!’ he exclaimed as Mr. Gladstone rushed past them to vote on another occasion when a division had been called for.
Under the date of June 8, 1885, Sir Stafford Northcote writes: ‘The great debate came off to-night. . . . The result, a majority of twelve against Government, took the House greatly by surprise, though we ourselves had reckoned on a victory by three or four votes. About forty of the Parnellites went with us. The excitement on the declaration of the numbers was very great, and displayed itself rather indecorously. Randolph Churchill jumped upon his seat and stood waving his pocket-handkerchief and shouting; Walter left the House with Algernon West, and said something about this being a curious end of Gladstone’s career. West said: “Oh, this won’t be the end now; you will see him come out more energetic than ever.”’ Sir Stafford Northcote, it may be stated, seems at times to have been a good deal bothered by Mr. Gladstone. ‘The most incredulous man I ever met!’ he writes in his diary; ‘keeps on shaking his head whenever I refer to him.’ Again he writes: ‘Gladstone had been dining out to meet the authoress of “Sister Dora”—Miss Lonsdale—who was very much alarmed by the rapidity and variety of his questions.’ Again we find him complaining of Gladstone’s habit of speaking late into the dinner-hour, so that his opponent must either speak to empty benches or forego the advantage of replying on the instant. After this, we must admit Mr. Gladstone’s description of himself on one occasion as an ‘old Parliamentary hand.’