The Real Gladstone Part 12

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 a.s.sistance 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 a.s.sistance 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 a.s.serts 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 a.s.sume, _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 a.s.sume 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.'

CHAPTER XVI.

MR. GLADSTONE AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES.

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 ma.s.s 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 unsurpa.s.sed 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 a.s.sertions 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 inst.i.tutions 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 a.s.sumption 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 ac.u.men 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 pa.s.sing emotions of chagrin and a pious resentment against circ.u.mstances, 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 inst.i.tutions and representative Government are to him, not only the supreme end at which to aim, but the regime 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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.ses; 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 ill.u.s.trating 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 grat.i.tude 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 pa.s.sing 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 bra.s.s 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 G.o.d of Ekron, who seems to be his G.o.d.

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 mult.i.tudinous 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.'