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MR GLADSTONE

A STUDY
‘Changes which are sudden and precipitate—changes ac-
companied with a light and contemptuous repudiation of the
former self —changes which are systematically timed and
tuned to the interest of personal advancement — changes
which are hooded, slurred over, or denied,—for these changes,
and such as these, I have not one word to say; and if they
can be justly charged upon me, I can no longer desire that
any portion, however small, of the concerns or interests of
my countrymen should be lodged in my hands.”—Mr Guap-
STONE’S ‘Chapter of Autobiography’ (1868), p. 13.
MR GLADSTONE

A STUDY

BY

LOUIS J. JENNINGS, MP.

AUTHOR OF

‘REPUBLICAN GOVERNMENT IN THE UNITED STATES,’
‘THE CROKER MEMOIRS,’ ETC.

SECOND EDITION

WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS
EDINBURGH AND LONDON
- MDCCCLXXXVII

} “
= (GEA

DKF.

All Rights reserved.
504924
PREFACE.

THE main object of the following pages is to
present the great central facts connected
with Mr Gladstone’s public career in an-
intelligible form, and to bring them into a
moderate compass, so that they may become
better known to many who cannot follow
political history minutely, and especially to |
the working men of the country, for whom I
have chiefly written.

I have been preparing notes and other
materials for this work, with all the care and
diligence that I could exercise, for many years
past. And I venture to request all who read
this brief history to disregard the sweeping
contradictions and general assertions which
may be brought against it, and to ask them-
7 Preface.

 

selves these simple questions: Did the events
which are recorded here really happen? Were
these words spoken or written? Is it true
that Mr Gladstone said or did this or that,
at such and such a time? These are the
points which it is material for the reader to
be able to decide. In the work itself there is
indicated the sure way of testing its accuracy.
Every quotation or reference has been care-
fully verified, and at the foot of each page,
the volume or other publication is specified |
which contains the original. Moreover, the
originals are not hard to get at—they may be
consulted in almost every Free Library in the
country. Many of the quotations are of the
highest importance, and not one of them can
be passed over unread without loss. Some,
from Myr Gladstone’s political writings, have
never been republished before, for reasons
which will be understood without much ex-
planation.

On these principles, then, let everything
in the book be judged, I have honestly
Preface. vii

 

sought to bring out the truth, and my labour
will not be in vain if intelligent and fair-
minded men are led to inquire further into
Mr Gladstone’s career for themselves.

Lonnon, January 1887.
CONTENTS.

NO,

I. MR GLADSTONE’S PRINCIPLES,

Il. THE DEVELOPMENT OF RADICALISM,
Ill. FOREIGN POLICY, . 3 fa
IV. IRISH POLICY, 1868-1885, . ‘

V. IRISH POLICY, 1885-1886,
VI. FINANCIAL POLICY, .
VII. CHARACTERISTICS, .

INDEX, . : : ; -

PAGE

43

“1

113
143
187
219
251
MR GLADSTONE’S PRINCIPLES
MR GLADSTONE’S PRINCIPLES.

From whatever point of view we may approach
the study of Mr Gladstone’s career, it will be
admitted that he forms one of the most remark-
able and interesting figures in political history.
There is nothing quite like the story of his life
to be found in any other time or in any other
nation. His personal successes were extraor-
dinary, but they were not so surprising as his
administrative and legislative failures, nor were
these failures so astonishing as the readiness
with which the people forgot them. Over and
over again he committed mistakes which every- “
body admitted would have been ruinous to any
other public man. No one else could have
come out almost unscathed from the enormous
disasters wrought by his policy in Egypt. The
4 Myr Gladstone: A Study.

 

Dual Note, the determination to “overthrow
the Mahdi at Khartoum,” the slaughters in
the Soudan, the desertion and death of Gordon,
the endless perils entailed upon the country
by the want of foresight, and even of common
prudence, displayed at every step—this, or a
quarter of this, would have overwhelmed any
other Minister with eternal disgrace. Mr
Gladstone contrived to explain it all away.
He even persuaded a large section of his
countrymen that in some mysterious manner he
was the injured person. His followers helieved
in his wisdom and judgment as firmly as ever.
Nothing that he said or did surprised them.
Throughout his entire life he has accustomed
' the nation to look for sudden reversals of policy.
There is scarcely any principle of government
which he has not alternately advocated and
condemned. Something may be found in his
voluminous writings and speeches to support
every conceivable side of every question. He
has passed from one phase of opinion to another
with a rapidity that has almost baffled the eye
which attempted to follow him. Yet it cannot
be said that he lost the public confidence to
Mr Gladstone's Principles. 5

 

any serious extent until he made his celebrated
capitulation to the Parnellites. The English
people may not be the most acute politicians in
the world, but there seems to be no limit to the
faith which they repose in the public man who
has once succeeded in winning their regard.

It is proposed in these pages to trace Mr Glad-
stone’s career in its general outlines, and to give
an account of his opinions so far as they have
affected the history of the country. It would
be labour lost to go back to the period when
he was described as “the rising hope of those
stern and unbending Tories” who “abhorred ”
Sir Robert Peel while they followed him. Mr
Gladstone has wholly repudiated that part of his
life; but it is highly important to ascertain, at
least approximately, when he became a Liberal.
On this point there exists great misconception,
which Mr Gladstone has done much to con-
firm. At Leeds, on the 7th of October 1881,
he spoke of himself as having then been “for
thirty-five years . . . in the ranks of the
Liberal party ””—that is to say, since 1846.
The diligent inquirer into Mr Gladstone’s career
will soon learn that his statements with refer-
6 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

ence to himself must not be received without
strict investigation. He does not, of course,
intend to mislead; but his recollection of events,
as it will presently be shown in innumerable
instances, is inherently bad, and it is always
unconsciously tinged by the circumstances amid
which he is speaking at the moment. His past
is modified or moulded to suit the present. At
Leeds, in 1881, enthusiasm and excitement
carried him away, and he declared that he had
been a Liberal since 1846. Yet it was in that
very year that he received the appointment of
Colonial Secretary; it was not till 1847 that
he was elected as “an unbending Tory” for
Oxford University. Another point of depart-
‘ure must evidently be found. According to
one of his biographers,’ “Mr Gladstone has
himself stated that, so late as 1851, he had
not formally left the Tory party.” It is quite
clear that this statement, so far as it goes, is
correct,—for in 1858 Mr Gladstone canvassed
the county of Flint for Sir Stephen Glynne,
who was a strong supporter of Lord Derby’s
Government; he accepted from Lord Derby a

1 Mr G. Barnett Smith, Life of Mr Gladstone, vol. i. p. 229,
Mr Gladstone's Principles. 7

 

mission to the Ionian Islands in the same year ;
and in 1859 he voted in support of the Derby
Administration. It will be shown, in fact, that
he was pressing extreme Tory doctrine upon the
public down to his fiftieth year—an age when
most men are held responsible for their opinions
and their acts. Between September 1856 and
April 1859 there appeared in the ‘ Quarterly
Review’ several very striking articles, which were
generally attributed at the time to Mr Gladstone.
He certainly was aware of this, and he never
sought to deny the responsibility of the author-
ship of essays which provoked much discussion
when they appeared, and which now possess
great historical value. He did not, indeed, in-
clude them in the ‘Gleanings’ which he pub-
lished in 1879; but in the preface to that col-
lection it was explained that “essays of a con-
troversial kind, whether in politics or religion,”
were purposely omitted. Mr Gladstone may
also have had other reasons for keeping his
own counsel about these productions. They
cannot, however, be omitted by any future
biographer from the record of his life and

opinions.
8 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

It is a vital part of the history of the times
that Mr Gladstone, until he was near fifty, main-
tained with all his force that Tory principles
were the only safe principles on which this
country could be governed. Why he did not
take office under Lord Derby in 1858 has
never been authoritatively explained. There
were many who fully believed that he was
steering in that direction even in 1855. The
late Lord Shaftesbury recorded in his diary on
the 6th of February 1855, “JI hear that Glad-
stone has long exhibited a desire to return to
Lord Derby, and I believe it. He would then
be leader of the House of Commons, and be

virtually Prime Minister.” *

It must be evident,
however, to any one who now surveys the field,
that Mr Gladstone could not, at the time in
question, have become leader of the Conserva-
tive party in the House of Commons. Mr
Disraeli stood in the way ; and although he was
then underrated by his own side, Mr Gladstone
had measured his strength, and knew well that
he was a most formidable antagonist. If, in-

deed, there had been no Disraeli in 1858, the

? Life of the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, vol. ii. p. 490.
Mr Gladstone's Principles. 9

 

Liberals would probably have had to look else-
where than to Mr Gladstone for a leader. He
was heartily in sympathy with Tory principles
and Tory leaders; he detested the Radicals.
His education, his disposition, the bent of his

 

mind, his natural tastes—all inclined him to-
wards Conservatism. We need not rest upon con-
jecture for support of this view. It is amply
confirmed, as we shall presently see, by his
own writings. But the chief place in the Con-
servative party had already practically fallen to
another. After Peel’s desertion in 1846, Lord
George Bentinck was called, not by his own
wish, to place himself at the head of the be-
trayed and demoralised ranks of the Tories.
Upon his sudden death in September 1848,
Mr Disraeli stepped into his place, for there
was no one else competent to fill it; and in
1852, when Lord Derby came into power, the
post of Chancellor of the Exchequer was natu-
rally and properly taken by the man: who had
done so much for his party, and revealed the
possession of such transcendent abilities. There
was no one strong enough—even if there had
been the inclination in any quarter—to depose
10 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

Mr Disraeli in 1858 for the sake of providing
a place for Mr Gladstone.

There was no room for the two men in the
same party, in the same branch of the Legisla-
ture, and therefore Mr Gladstone continued to
drift about in the orbit of the other Peelites,
although he had very little hope of their future.
He predicted that they would soon “ have either
absolutely disappeared ” or “ become practically
inappreciable.” That he should have looked
round for some more promising alliance is not
surprising, considering the gloomy view he took
of his prospects. The Peelites, he wrote,’ were
among the greatest “anomalies and solecisms
of the Lower House ;” tliey tended “to prolong
the existing state of general weakness and the
relaxation in party organisation ;” they were
not “ powerful either in their numbers or in the
general favour ;” they operated as “solvents of
party connection in a manner and degree for
which their mere numbers or personal qualities
would not account.” And he then proceeded,
in a passage to which after-events imparted

1 Quarterly Review, article on ‘‘The Declining Efficiency
of Parliament,” September 1856, pp. 565, 566.
Mr Gladstone's Principles. 11

 

extraordinary weight and meaning, to explain
the process by which the Peelites might be
converted :—

“Tt is plain that those who are now disassociated,
either wholly or partially, and either on the one side
of the House or on the other, from the leading parties,
ought, if they are ever again to be found in the ranks,
to be found in those ranks where their sympathies prin-
cipally lie; and the question which ranks those are,
must commonly receive its answer, partly indeed from
the tempers of individuals, but chiefly from the course
of public affairs, and from the tendency of this great
question or of that to grow for the time to a paramount
and commanding importance in its bearing on the in-
terests of the country.”

The principle of “ opportunism ” in politics,
the only principle to which Mr Gladstone has
been undeviatingly faithful, could scarcely have
found a more unqualified or more frank ex-
ponent. While watching the growth of “this
or that” great question in popularity, he deemed
it advisable to keep on good terms with the
party which seemed likely to have the com-
mand of power. In 1853 he joined the Co-
alition Government of Lord, Aberdeen. This
did not in any degree imply that he was waver-
12 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

ing in his Toryism. He did not like the
Whigs, but it was necessary to act with some
organisation and cease to be a mere “solvent.”
We shall see how it was that Lord Aberdeen’s
Ministry failed to supply the permanent con-
nection sought for. After his fall, it was
thought that Lord Lansdowne would form a
Ministry. Mr Gladstone made the following
statement in a letter to Mr Hayward (October
22,1872): “Lord Lansdowne sent for me,
and asked if I would remain.? He said that
if I would, he would proceed with his arrange-
ments. But I declined (an act which I soon
and long repented of), and, whether for that or
other reasons, he desisted “from his endeavour.”
He consented, however, to retain office for
a short time under Lord Palmerston. Then
he seceded, and supported the Conservatives.
Eight months after the formation of Lord
Derby’s second Ministry, he expressed the
strongest approval of that Government, and
the strongest condemnation of its Liberal pre-

1 The Hayward Letters, vol. ii. p. 243.
? Mr Gladstone had been Chancellor of the Exchequer under
Lord Aberdeen.
Mr Gladstone's Principles. 13

 

decessor. Lord Derby had done well; he
could point to the “regular, the undisputed,
let us add, the generally successful adminis-
tration of public affairs;” he could afford to
“challenge a comparison” with Lord Palmer-
ston’s Ministry; he had given “an effective
pledge of future economy by foregoing the
command of that potent instrument,” the in-
come-tax. “Lord Derby courageously and
wisely undertook the task before him, and
his undertaking it has resulted in benefit and
satisfaction to the country at large.”?

He not only approved of the Ministry, but of
the views which it sought to embody in legis-
lation. We rely once more solely upon his own
testimony for proof of this, What Mr Gladstone
believed in 1857-58, was doubtless a matter of
indifference to Mr Gladstone in 1886; but it
can never be a matter of indifference to the
historian. There is something much more
important at stake than a mere issue of per-
sonal consistency. The question is whether the
evidence of an eyewitness of a series of events
is not better, more likely to be true, more to be

1 Quarterly Review, vol. civ. pp. 515, 541, &c.
uM Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

trusted in every way, than the evidence of a
highly prejudiced person who speaks long after
the events, and who has the strongest motive for
misrepresenting them. Let it be clearly borne in
mind that Mr Gladstone was in his fiftieth year
when he carefully reviewed the claims which
each party had to public confidence. He gave
judgment in favour of the Conservatives. It
will scarcely be denied that he was as well
able to form a fair opinion of men and measures
then as he was when removed from them by a
gap of twenty or thirty years. Nor will it be
denied that the discrimination and insight of a
man of fifty is quite as likely to be sound as
when he is seventy or seventy-five. In 1856
and 1858, Mr Gladstone had no record of past
inconsistencies to explain away; he merely
described what he had seen and known. It
would be a great injustice to him and to others
to dismiss his contemporary evidence as worth-
less, and to prefer the scattered, confused, and
vindictive recollections of his old age.

What he told the world when his mental
powers were all in their fullest vigour, was that
Radicalism was a force which threatened to
Myr Gladstone's Principles. 15

 

bring great misfortunes upon the nation, while
the Conservative party alone had the power and
the willingness to defend our highest interests.
Perhaps it may in after-times be held that in
this as in many other instances Mr Gladstone
helped to bring to pass his own forecasts and
predictions; but at any rate, his language will
always deserve the most careful attention. In
treating of the Radical school, which he after-
wards joined and led, he remarked :'—

“With this latter school the removal of abuses is
mainly a means to an end, and that end is a funda-
mental change in the character of our institutions.
Their aim is to centralise administration, to break wp
the masses of landed property, to discountenance the
unpaid service which among us is so closely associated
with the influence of hereditary station, to concentrate
political power in the towns, to discredit the ancient
traditions of government, to prevent the Church from
gaining real strength and union by good laws, to make
the franchise irresponsible, and the representative a
delegate; and when by these means the sapping pro-
cess has been brought to sufficient ripeness, then to
open the batteries, which until the proper time will
remain judiciously masked, against the independence

1 Quarterly Review, January 1857, article on ‘‘ Prospects,
Political and Financial,” p. 268.
16 Myr Gladstone: A Study.

 

of the House of Lords, the connection between religion
and the civil institutions of the country, and what-
ever else may still remain open to attack and worth
attacking.”

It would not be easy to present a more
concise summary of his own subsequent work.
In 1885, Mr Gladstone forewarned the country
that the Liberal party could not be trusted to
deal with the Irish question unless it was
placed in power by a majority over all other
parties. But the people of England have not
always understood Mr Gladstone. His warn-
ing that he and the Liberal party could not
be trusted to deal with the Irish question
unless an overwhelming majority was given to
him, did not reveal the fact that he was medi-
tating a surrender to the disloyal faction in
Ireland. So, in 1857, when he told the coun-
try that the independence of the House of
Lords would be attacked, no one imagined that
he would inspire the attack. He had once—
in 1834 — bitterly assailed the Ministry of
Lord Grey for dragging the House of Lords
into a controversy about “legislative measures
that were submitted to their consideration in
Mr Gladstone's Principles. 17

 

their independent capacity,’—that other branch
of the Legislature, he added, being “ indepen-
dent of this branch of the Legislature, and
as capable of exercising a sound and useful
judgment.” “Nothing,” he declared, “could be
more indiscreet, nothing more indecent,” than
such conduct. Yet this was the precise course
of conduct which he pursued on many subse-
quent occasions, and especially in 1884. His
Ministry was discredited by the Egyptian scan-
dals and by the Gordon massacre, and to go
before the country in that plight was simply to
court ruin. [he County Franchise Bill was
hurriedly brought in, unaccompanied by a Re-
distribution Bill, The Lords objected, and Mr
Gladstone summoned his followers to arms.
He threw out allusions which his supporters
- well knew how to interpret. He did not say
very much at any time, when one looked super-
ficially at his words; but they conveyed an in-
finite deal of meaning. When at Edinburgh on
the 30th of August 1884, he remarked, in his
most solemn and emphatic tones, that “if an
hereditary Chamber deliberately involves itself
in that conflict, and perseveres in it, it is tread-
B
18 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

ing the pathway which leads to an issue that I
will not describe, but which is not that of safety
or of honour,” it is little likely that the enemies
of that Chamber would fail to see in what direc-
tion he was pointing, especially as the words
just quoted formed but the introduction of a long
and envenomed attack on the House of Lords.
At a meeting at Carlisle on the 26th Sep-
tember, he further denounced the House as
“the great depositary of irresponsible power,”
and advised it to “seek its safety and its wel-
fare.” At the opening of the autumn session
of 1884 (October 23d), Mr Gladstone again
* contrived to make himself understood, though
confining himself chiefly to suggestive hints.
“Let gentlemen,” he said, “who are desirous of
combining redistribution with franchise, take
care lest they combine something more critical
than either with them both ;” and then he pro-
ceeded to suggest that the Conservatives wished
“to raise the question of organic change in the
constitution of the country.” On the 24th of
September, at Perth, he had also thrown out
dark threats of “organic changes,” of a “most
menacing conflict,” and had said that there was
Mr Gladstone's Principles. 19

 

a great disposition to raise the question whether
the power at present enjoyed by the House of
Lords is not a power too great to be held by
persons irresponsible for its exercise.’ And he
added: “The question would be raised whether
hereditary power and irresponsible power could
any longer be tolerated in its present shape, and
the country would be embarked in a controversy
of which I will only say—(A voice—*“ End
*em”)—that I fear it would be bitter. I know
it might be long, but it could end only one
way, in great and extensive changes in the
present balance of the Constitution.” He con-
cluded by warning the Lords to “be wise in
time.” In the House of Commons he used
much the same language under cover of depre-
cating it, as proceeding from the Conservatives.
In advancing into a new field of policy, Mr
Gladstone’s preliminary step has always been
to impute to his opponents the very course
which he had secretly resolved to carry out.
Before his great surrender to the Irish in 1886,
he repeatedly insinuated that the Conservative
party had decided on submission to Mr Parnell.
Under cover, therefore, of a rebuke to the Con-
20 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

servatives for trying to destroy the House of
Lords, he dropped the phrase, which was soon
eagerly welcomed in all Radical circles, about
working “an organic change in the Constitution
of the country.” One of his chief organs in the
press threw off all disguise. The Radicals, it
said, were now convinced “that a cry against
the Peers would be a trump-card at a general
election, . . . If too much nonsense is indulged
in, they will make short work of the Opposition
by asking the country to draw the teeth and
pare the claws of the Peers, once for all.”* It
so happened, however, that when the elections
came in 1885, it was found that the “ trump-
card” of the Radicals had a good deal to do
with their losing the game.

It must be remembered that the point on
which Mr Gladstone raised this controversy
had been decided long before by himself. All
that the House of Lords asked was that a
Redistribution Bill should accompany the ex-
tension of the Franchise Bill. It held that one
measure could not properly be passed without
the other. This was the very principle which

1 Pall Mall Gazette, October 23, 1884.
Mr Gladstone's Principles. 21

 

Mr Gladstone laid down in 1866. “Nothing,”
he said, in moving the second reading of his
Reform Bill on the 12th of April,’ “could be
more contemptible and base than the conduct
of a Government which could give out, with a
view of enlisting the generous confidence of its
supporters, that it would deal with the subject
of Reform, and would stand or fall by its pro-
positions, and which all the while could silently
exclude from the scope of their declaration all
portions of that question, except only the re-
duction of the franchise, though among such
portions we find one, I mean the distribution of
seats, only second in importance to that of the
franchise itself.” Thus then, in 1884, Mr
Gladstone set on foot a violent agitation for
the destruction of the House of Lords—or, to
use his own words, for an “organic change
in the Constitution ”—because that House de-
clined to adopt a course which, in 1866, he
had expressly stigmatised as “ contemptible and

02

base. Every principle which at one time he

1 Revised edition of his ‘Speeches on Parliamentary Re-
form in 1866,’ p. 122.

2 The two Bills were eventually placed before Parliament
together.
22 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

has earnestly defended, he has attacked with
equal earnestness at another. Concerning the
county franchise itself, he had once written
that it was based on property, and he con-
tended that it ought to remain so. If the sys-
tem gave power to the landlord over voters, “ we
have yet to learn,” he declared, “that it is in
practice either excessive or misused.”* And in
1866, in moving the second reading of his own
Reform Bill, he discouraged the idea of a large
admission of the working classes to the fran-
-chise. “Changes,” he said, “that effect sudden
and extensive transfer of power, are attended
by great temptations to the weakness of human
nature; and however high our opinion may be
of the labouring classes, or of any other classes
of the community, I do not believe that it
- would be right to place such a temptation
within the reach of any one among them.”?
It would be difficult to express a fundamental
distrust of the people in a more concise or
more emphatic form. And these views were

1 Article in the Quarterly Review, vol. ci. p. 583.
2 Speeches on Reform in 1866, revised and published by
Mr Gladstone himself, p. 114.
Mr Gladstone's Principles. 23

 

avowed, not in early youth or in haste, but at
the age of fifty-seven, and in a careful speech
in the House of Commons, subsequently pre-
pared by his own hand for publication. Ob-
_Viously, then, he became a Radical very slowly,
with great reluctance, and under the influence

of motives from which time has stripped | away
all disguis 2

aay oui whether he was ever a Radical
at heart, although he thought proper to adopt
Radical measures. In 1857 he put upon rec-
ord his opinion that the Radical “is essentially
a brawler,’' “naturally disposed to uproar ;”
while as for the whole body of the Liberals,
“it has become the cardinal principle of that

 

party never voluntarily to surrender office.”
Mr Gladstone went on to describe the result of
that determination to keep office at any price:
“The immediate and inevitable consequence is,
that they must work for and adhere to any
Minister who thinks fit to wear their badge
and to recruit from their ranks, even though

1 Vide his article in the Quarterly Review, ‘‘ Prospects,
Political and Financial,” January 1857, vol. ci. p. 263
et seq.
24 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

he may reject their favourite watchwords, and
cast every one of their pledges to the winds.”
Nothing can be more clear than that Mr Glad-
stone had at this time carefully studied the
conditions with which he would have to deal.
There was but one road to the chief seat of
power, and that was through Radicalism. Yet
all the principles of Radicalism were nothing less
than odious and base in Mr Gladstone’s eyes.
Let any one who entertains a doubt on that
point reflect well upon the following declara-
tions made by Mr Gladstone when he was in
his forty-ninth year. He deplored bitterly the’
tendency of the House of Commons “to de-
generate into an assembly of municipal and
parochial minds” — to become a collection of
“little luminaries, fitter for a municipal cham-
ber than for the senate of the most extended
empire in the world.”* In another article he
again regrets the existence of an evil which
the remainder of his life was devoted to
increasing :—
“These things are notorious to all those observers of
parliamentary proceedings who, like ourselves, cannot

 

* Quarterly Review, vol. ci. p. 564,
Mr Gladstone's Principles. 25

 

shake off the belief that our old system of government
was in the main good, generous, and effective ; and who
view with deep regret that undue predominance of merely
local ideas in a very large proportion of the town con-
stituencies, which threatens, particularly on the Liberal
side of the House, to demolish the old system without
rearing up a new one, and to leave the government of the
greatest empire in the world to be the prize of a scramble
among a motley crowd of eager, contentious, and egotisti-
cal mediocrities,” +

Such was Mr Gladstone’s opinion of the
party which he afterwards led. The party of
which he was soon to be the avowed foe and
the inveterate detractor, he described in a pas-
sage of the greatest historical importance :°-—

“They [the Conservatives] earned their character fairly,
after the manner of Englishmen—that is, they earned it
by hard work. They persuaded and convinced the coun-
try that they best understood and could best manage its
affairs. While they retained a characteristic indisposi-
tion to raise abstract questions, or to attempt changes in
the Constitution, they placed their political creed on its
true basis by showing that the desire of practical progress
was with them neither an extorted homage to overruling
necessity, nor a Sunday suit to be worn upon the bust-

1 Quarterly Review, vol. ci. p. 267.
2 The ensuing quotations are from the Quarterly Review
for January 1857, pp. 269-272,
26 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

ings from election to election, and buried in the intervals
between them—but a genuine, positive result of their
Conservative opinions. The Opposition which came to
power in 1841 took care to imprint upon the popular
mind that now, at least, the most loyal children and the
most resolute defenders of our institutions were likewise
the fiercest foes to the abuses that from time to time eat
into them. Partisans we may be called; but we believe
history will emblazon it as a real advance in the art of
practical politics, that the energies of improvement should
have attained their highest vigour at the very moment
when preserving instincts were known to be the strong-
est, and the sentiment of security blended in and grew
along with the consciousness of progress. Lord Derby
and Sir James Graham, Lord Aberdeen and Lord Lynd-
hurst, each played distinguished parts in that not yet
forgotten scene of the historic drama; we are confident
that, amidst the noisy barrenness and the boastful pol-
troonery of the present epoch, these eminent persons
must one and all look back with warm and lively satis-
faction upon that portion of their political career.”

The history of the Conservative party, after
Peel’s death, could scarcely be properly under-
stood without a study of Mr Gladstone’s con-
tributions to it. We have seen that he foresaw
very clearly the extreme measures which the
Radicals would demand, although no divination
taught him that he would be the leader of the
Mr Gladstone's Principles. 27

 

Radicals in the perilous crisis which alarmed
him so much when viewed at a distance. He
was converted slowly; and his conversions were
usually simultaneous with a change in the direc-
tion of public opinion which indicated the path
to powen/ This may have been a mere coinci-
dence ; but the life of no statesman of ancient
or modern times is so rich in such coincidences.
Superficial observers may almost be forgiven if
they decide that the method which brought the
conversion and the reward so close to each
other must have been based upon scientific
calculation rather than upon accident. At any
rate, Mr Gladstone’s review of the Conservative
party from 1846 to 1857 is in the highest
degree instructive. [we vindicated it from the
charge of obstructing reforms, and of opposing
Protection to Free Trade as a party issue. He
extolled the leaders of the party for their justice
and patriotism, and for their economical man-
agement of the finances. His language is far
too important to be condensed or touched, and
it is therefore given here word for word :—-

“Tt would not have been likely at any time that the
Conservative politicians of the country should have ac-
28 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

quired this commanding position unless it had also been
deserved. Least of all could this have happened at a
time when they had had to begin the upward movement
from the lowest point of depression recorded in their
history ; for in 1833 they were but a handful, and in the
debates of that year will be found recorded the words in
which Sir Robert Peel disclaimed all pretensions to lead
a party, and was contented to place his individual exer-
tions at the service of the State. What, then, were the
attributes that made the statesmen’ of 1841 and their
party so strong in the public estimation? In answering
this question we must dispose of an assertion founded
either in error or in malevolence. It is most untrue that
they owed their ascendancy to Protection. Death had
marked the Melbourne Ministry for its own, long before
Lord Melbourne had in the least particular qualified his
memorable declaration that the man must be mad who
could propose the repeal of the Corn Laws, The manner
in which that Government, when at its last gasp, con-
vulsively pronounced the words ‘fixed duty,’ served in-
deed to deepen the discredit into which it had fallen, and
may have turned half-a-dozen or a dozen elections that
would not otherwise have been won by their opponents ;
but the utmost that it did was to add a few tar-barrels to
a bonfire that would have been but little less brilliant
without them. The character of the Conservative party
was founded on positive, not on negative qualities. What
were they? To describe them in one word, a negative
form may be the most convenient. They were in all
respects as nearly as possible the contradictories of those
propensities which impel the motion and trace the career
Mr Gladstone’s Principles. 29

 

of the present Government. One of its cardinal princi-
ples was strict discipline and unity among its members
—not only a salutary misliking of open questions, but
a determined repression of all those erratic tendencies
which now exhibit to us Lords of the Admiralty making
speeches against admirals, and a Prime Minister giving
countenance and confidence to both. Another of them
was the resolute avoidance to promise what it did not
mean to use every effort to perforin, instead of combining
the facility which promises everything with the levity
that never fights an uphill battle like Alma, or a battle
against odds like Inkermann, for anything. Those of
our readers who either shared or observed the proceed-
ings of the House of Commons at that time, will not fail
to remember with what tenacity, nay, with what obduracy
of purpose, even in the teeth of the most formidable com-
binations, Sir Robert Peel, with Lord Derby and Sir
James Graham by his side, clung as a Minister to his
announced intentions. And on the rare occasions when
the Government withdrew a measure, there was no at-
tempt either to hide the miscarriage by artifice, or to
demoralise the Parliament by laughing, and causing it to
laugh, at its inability to discharge its duty to the nation.
That respect at the Foreign Office for the just rights of
other countries, which we never hesitated to acknowledge
in Lord Aberdeen, was combined with respect for the
rights of this country in the Ministry at large, and partic-
ularly for its right to be economically, vigorously, and,
above all, to be earnestly served. Thus the general pro-
ceedings of the Government were marked by discipline,
firmness, hostility to ostentations ; a spirit of peace pre-
30 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

vailed, and the patriotism of those days was not thought
to require an unconditional belief that beyond the shores
of England the world is peopled only with a miserable
alternation of fools and knaves. The laws were improved,
commerce enlarged, education extended, the resources of
the Church made more productive, authority upheld in
Ireland, under every discouragement, we are concerned
to add, from the Opposition, against the menace, and not
remote menace, of physical force; the estimates were kept
down, the goodwill of every country in the globe con-
ciliated without the sacrifice of British honour ; the two
great disputes with America, where the inflaming and
exasperating hand of Lord Palmerston had been previ-
ously at work, were brought to a peaceful termination.
Colonial differences and discussions stood at a mere frac-
tion of what they had been under Lord Melbourne’s Gov-
ernment, and of what they again became under Lord
Grey. The balance of expenditure against income was
converted into a balance of income against expenditure ;
a strict economy was maintained in every department of
the State by the wise and cautious firmness of Mr Goul-
burn ; and the only period since 1842 when there has
been a surplus of revenue sufficient to allow Parliament
to part, if it thought fit, with the income-tax, was in the
year 1845, under the Conservative administration.” 1

It fell in with Mr Gladstone’s purpose
afterwards to declare that the Conservative

1 Quarterly Review, vol. ci. (1857), pp. 269-272, article
“Prospects, Political and Financial.”
Mr Gladstone's Principles. 31

 

party, during the very sixteen years treated
of in these passages, afflicted the country with
the direst evils—that it was indifferent to ‘
the welfare of the people, extravagant, reck-
less, unprincipled. At which period are we
to accept his evidence? The facts had
not altered. Mr Gladstone knew at least as
much about them when he was an actor in
the midst of them, as he did when his memory
was failing and his powers of observation were
deadened. No fair-minded man will pretend
for a moment that the evidence of 1857 and
1858 is to be’ set aside as worthless because
Mr Gladstone, a long time afterwards, “ changed
his mind.” He had reasons for changing his
mind. But when the evidence was given, there
was no party or personal object to lead him to
tell anything but the truth, as he apprehended
it. He did not feel himself bound to discredit
a party which he had deserted, and to flatter
a party which promised to make him its leader.
In 1857 he uttered his real convictions; at a
later date those convictions, in common with
most others which he held, became adapted to
circumstances.
32 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

His strictly independent testimony on the
Free Trade controversy is equally remarkable.
Few persons are aware that he ever gave it,
and yet it is among the most memorable state-
ments ever deliberately put by Mr Gladstone:
before his countrymen. It is not too much
to hope that when once the following passage
has been rescued from unmerited oblivion, it
will never again be forgotten in England, or,
indeed, by any public writer in Europe :—

“Twenty years ago the Liberal and Conservative
parties had taken opposite ground on a multitude of
great public questions. Most of those causes of differ-
ence have disappeared by the settlement of the questions
to which they referred. It is not true that the triumphs
have been all one way, and that the more Conservative
part of the nation have disposed of the contest simply by
surrendering the posts they defended. The great question of
Protection and Free Trade was at no time really a question
between the Conservative and the Liberal parties. If fran-
chises have been enlarged, if corporations have been re-
formed, if Dissenters have been relieved, if education
has been more powerfully aided, mainly through the
efforts of the Liberal party, on the other hand ecclesi-
astical property has been defended, the independence
of the House of Lords upheld, the constitution of the
House of Commons shielded from violent and organic
changes, the relative rights and attitude of classes main-
Mr Gladstone's Principles. 33

 

tained, principally through the energy and determination
of Conservative politicians.”

Now these statements could not have been
true in 1857, and false ten years afterwards.
Black remains black, and white remains white,
no matter how many times a man may “change
his mind” about those colours. Mr Gladstone
spent many years of his life in teaching the
people that the Conservative party kept up
Protection for selfish ends, and that in so doing
- it exhibited a wilful and culpable indifference
to the best interests of the nation. How is
that view to be reconciled with his calm and
sober statements in 1856-57? This is not
an abstract theme upon which we may change
our views with the moon. It is a question
of fact. If a man tells us one day that the
world is round, and the next day that it
is flat, we know what to think of him. The
only point open to discussion in Mr Gladstone’s
statement is: at which period was it that he
was entitled to belief,—in 1857, when he was
free and impartial; or in 1866 and onwards,

1 Article on ‘The Declining Efficiency of Parliament,”
Quarterly Review, vol. xcix. p. 562.

c
34 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

when he was straining every nerve to secure or
keep the leadership of the Liberal party ?

At first, as we have seen, his movement
towards the Whigs was of a halting kind. He
was not sure of his ground. The “ Venetian
oligarchy ” looked upon him with distrust. He
returned aversion for distrust. The Whig, he
wrote,’ “has his merits, and perhaps he some-
what overrates them; but his besetting sin lies
in the opinion that he has an hereditary right
to power, a vested interest in the offices of the
State — or, if not to the whole of them, yet
that at least all the dishes that are arrayed
upon the table are predestined to his single
maw, while Gentiles and proselytes of the gate
are permitted to pick up the crumbs.” There
was one “proselyte at the gate” who was des-
tined to bring the Whigs to a more reasonable
frame of mind. But it could only be done
by arraying against them another force within
the same party—the force of Radicalism. Mr
Gladstone was preparing silently for that great
strategic stroke. It involved the sacrifice of
all his most cherished convictions; yet the goal

1 Quarterly Review, vol. ci. p. 263.
Mr Gladstone's Principles. 35

 

had to be reached, and there was no other way
to it. In 1865 it became evident that Lord
Palmerston could not last much longer. Lord
John Russell could not hope to compete with
Mr Gladstone for the reversion of the Premier-
ship. From that time the political destination of
Mr Gladstone was never for a moment doubtful.

There have been moments in his life when,
either in a sudden outburst of frankness or in
a mood of cynicism, he has to some extent
supplied a key to his own past. In practice
he has defended the principle that there should
be a Statute of Limitations for the utterances
of public men. In theory he has professed
his sympathy with the opinion that it is not
seemly in a statesman to be seen advocating
one opinion to-day and its opposite to-morrow.
In his ‘Chapter of Autobiography’ (p. 10)
he says :—

“In theory, at least, and for others, I am myself a
purist with respect to what touches the consistency of
statesmen. Change of opinion, in those to whose judg-
ment the public looks more or less to assist its own, is
an evil to the country, although a much smaller evil

than their persistence in a course which they know to
be wrong. It is not always to be blamed. But it is
36 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

always to be watched with vigilance; always to be
challenged, and put on its trial.”

But it will be observed that there were
several important limitations in this avowal.
Mr Gladstone declared that he valued consist-
ency, but he did not commit himself to any-
thing more than that he valued it “in theory”
—and—“ for others.’ Consistency, in theory,
may be good for others, but Mr Gladstone
appears in this passage to claim, as he has
always exercised, a special licence and in-
dulgence. In 1845 he paid a strange and
unique tribute to his admiration for consist-
ency by resigning the office he held under
Sir Robert Peel, because “the views of the
Government on the Maynooth Grant, with which
he” agreed, were “at variance with his formerly
published work on Church and State.” One
such sacrifice may serve to embellish a career ;
a repetition of it might perhaps be regarded as
Quixotic. Yet here again there occurs another of
those remarkable coincidences to which refer-
ence has been made¥ It cannot be altogether
overlooked that when Mr Gladstone resigned
his office in 1845, the Ministry itself was in
Myr Gladstone’s Principles. 37

 

great easly It_had_offended the country party,
and it had disappointed the main body of ae
public. The chief members of the Ministry
evidently looked for speedy defeat. “I am
aware,” wrote Sir James Graham to Mr Croker,

a few weeks after Mr Gladstone’s retirement,
“that our country gentlemen are out of hu-
mour, and that the existence of the Govern-
ment is endangered by their present temper

and recent proceedings. . . . We are scouted

as traitors. . . . The country gentlemen
cannot be more ready to give us the death-
blow than we are prepared to receive it.”?

The virtual alliance with Mr Cobden and the
Corn-Law League saved the Ministry; but

this flank movement against its adversaries

was as little foreseen by Mr Gladstone as by

the more eminent of Peel’s colleagues. Be-
tween February and December the storm had
blown over, and Mr Gladstone resumed office

in the latter month. Sir Robert Peel had
undergone his memorable conversion on the /
Corn-Law question in the previous October.”

1 Croker Memoirs, vol. iii. p. 31 (second edition).
? Sir R. Peel’s Memoirs, Part III., vol. ii.
38 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

The lesson of these events was never lost upon
Mr Gladstone.

In 18781 he remarked, with a curious flash
of insight, “ My future, I think, is a matter with
regard to which I am not able—after what I
consider my past is—to say much.” On the
25th of November 1879, in a speech at Mid-
Lothian, he was apparently about to make a
very similar confession, but he was again a
candidate for power at that time; whereas in
1878 he had “finally retired.” He told his
Mid-Lothian audience that he had sat with the
Duke of Buccleuch in the Cabinet of Sir Robert
Peel. “That,” he added, “is now nearly forty
years ago, Since that time, I frankly avow
that I have changed various opinions ;¥ and
then, as if fearing that this might be an impru-
dent admission, he continued—‘“TI should say,
that I have learned various lessons.”\/ Arch-
deacon Denison puts the matter in a somewhat
different way. He tells us” that those who
knew Mr Gladstone best in the earlier part of

1 Speech to a deputation from the ‘‘ Leeds 400,” March 28,
1878.

? In his pamphlet on ‘‘ Mr Gladstone,” 1885.
Mr Gladstone's Principles. 39

 

his career, regarded with much foreboding that
“conscience” of which the world has heard so
often. Thus, Augustus Page Saunders, after-
wards Dean of Peterborough, pronounced upon
him, as early as 1832, the following sinister
prediction: “His conscience is so tender, he
will never go straight.” In 1860, Dr Lake,
Dean of Durham, said of him, “I think his
intellect can persuade his conscience of any-
thing.” Mr W. E. Forster said, long after-
wards, in the House of Commons, “ He can per-
suade most people of most things, but above all,
he can persuade himself of anything.” Future
generations may not marvel at this peculiarity
of his intellect, but they will be at a loss to
account for the confidence which a practical
nation placed in its owner.¥ They will look upon
his course, strewn thickly with failures and dis-
. asters, and marvel that he should still have been
called upon, time after time, to take the direc-
tion of affairs. They will contrast his repeated
and vehement avowals that the Conservative
party was the best fitted to govern the country,
with the envenomed calumnies which he sub-
sequently poured out upon it. They will study
40 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

his declarations made in the prime of his days,
concerning Church, Trade, Protection, and Ire-
land, and compare them with the acts of his
later years\+they will have before their eyes
the needless sacrifices of the Crimean war, the
encouragement given to Russia when she was
aiming a mortal blow at England, the betrayal
of the colonists in South Africa, the blind and
reckless war in Egypt and the Soudan, the
sacrifice of Gordon}the massacre of our miser-
able allies, the attempt to buy off Irish oppo-
sition by a concession which would have been
fatal to the empire, and the subsequent efforts
to stir up sectional strife in all parts of the
country—and marking this, they will see little
cause for wonder that under Mr Gladstone’s
sway the power and influence of England
declined, while internal divisions and animos-
ities weakened her energies, and laid a train
of future evils which no man could estimate.
IL.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF RADICALISM
IT.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF RADICALISM.

EVERYBODY admits that it is not only justifiable,
but eminently right and wise, on the part of a
statesman, to modify his opinions or his policy
in conformity with overruling circumstances of
the hour. Pitt and Canning—not to go farther
back—exercised that freedom; so, in a far
greater degree and in a much bolder manner,
did Sir Robert Peel. More than once Peel
totally reversed his course without a word of
warning either to friends or foes. Even Wel-
lington, the most consistent and inflexible of
public men, yielded to pressure from without.
But Mr: Gladstone, in this respect, far out-
stripped any or all of his predecessors. The
one great lesson which a careful investigation
of his career will be likely to suggest to young
44 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

and ambitious men is, that fixed principles are
a barrier to success, and that the more lightly
equipped a political combatant may be when
he goes into the arena, the better are his
chances of victory. There have been times
when Mr Gladstone has seemed, not so much
to model his opinions upon circumstances, as to
depend upon  hanilaa for the formation of
his opinions.’y It is true that he has sometimes
sustained rude shocks in his attempts to judge
of the state of popular feeling. He was de-
ceived in 1874, and he was still more seriously
mistaken in 1886. But even in 1886 he acted
in accordance with his invariable rule. His cal-
culation was—as the mysterious communications
between Hawarden and Leeds in 1885 suffi-
ciently showed—that the Liberal party would
not dare to oppose his surrender to Mr Parnell.
Mr Chamberlain, the “uninspired memoran-
dum” pointed out, was more than half pledged
to the support of Home Rule; Lord Hartington
might be a little restive at first, but he would
be obliged to submit. This very memorandum,
as will be shown in a subsequent chapter, be-
came the basis of the Home Rule Bill as sub-
The Development of Radicalism. 45

 

mitted by Mr Gladstone to Parliament; and
therefore, though “ uninspired,” it evidently was
not unauthentic. It is clear that Mr Gladstone
never for a moment supposed that his Separa-
tion scheme would result in the disruption of
his party, and would lead to his defeat, first in
Parliament, and afterwards in the country. His
plans were based upon the theory, sufficiently
expounded in the memorandum of December
1885, that he was sure of the whole Liberal
support plus 84 Irish votes, and that this
would suffice to get rid of the Tories for
the remainder of his life. He miscalculated
all the conditions with which he had to deal;
but he was true to his “rule.” The 84 Irish
votes would have made his position impreg-
nable if the Liberal party had remained intact.
In like manner, Mr Gladstone persuaded him-
self that the influence of the Parnellites in the
English boroughs would decide the elections of
1886 in his favour. Mr Parnell boasted? that
he and his friends could transfer “at least 50
seats now held by the Tories to the Liberal ~
party. This will make 100 on a division, and

1 New York Herald, June 20, 1886.
46 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

will convert the majority of 30 against the Bill
into a majority of 70 for it.” Mr T. P. O’Con-
nor made a similar statement in the House
of Commons. Mr Gladstone put implicit con-
fidence in all this. It is no secret that he dis-
solved Parliament in July 1886 in the full
and firm belief that he would be returned to
power with a larger majority than ever. He
went about the country, declaring that, in the
course of his long life, he had never seen so
general an outburst of enthusiasm in his favour.
He boasted in extravagant strains. that the
people were with him; and it was quite evi-
dent, from his speeches and his letters, that
this delusion hung around his mind for some
time even after the elections, and it required
the shock of repeated hostile divisions in the
House of Commons to dispel it.

Although, therefore, it may be alleged that
Mr Gladstone voluntarily associated himself
with a losing cause when he became a convert
to Mr Parnell’s ideas, a little examination into
dates and facts will show that in reality he was
consistent with his general practice. He felt
confident, in the first place, that Lord Harting-
The Development of Radicalism. 47

 

ton and Mr Chamberlain would not dare to
desert him; and his bitterness over his disap-
pointment was frequently shown by his morbid
irritability in the House of Commons during
the autumn session of 1886.V In the next place,
he was persuaded that Scotland and Wales
could certainly be won over to his support by
the offer of Home Rule for themselves, and that
the Irish party could control the result of the
contest in England. The chances, therefore,
according to his theories, were immensely in
his favour. - He did not foresee that his policy
would be rejected by the patriotic working men
of England, apart altogether from the “ classes,”
or that it would cost him the support of all his
ablest colleagues, and leave him in command of
a wreck, aided only by a few followers, who are
famous chiefly for their “reversible” opinions
and their vagaries, or who owe obedience to the
man who has made them what they are, know-
ing well that he alone can keep them from
slipping back into their natural places.
Caution usually comes with old age; but Mr
Gladstone is an exception to every rule. It
was not till he had reached threescore and
48 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

ten years that he began to act with rashness.
The previous part of his life had been marked

by innumerable failures and blunders; but he
always moved slowly and timidly, and seldom
took any risks. ¥ Reform was “in the air” long

before he decided to become its champion. He
had made himself active in getting up a petition
against the first Reform Bill;' but when he
saw that Lord Palmerston’s indifference to
further reform excited some discontent in the
country, he prepared to take the question from
the hands of Lord John Russell. ¥ He was then
beginning to be convinced that, as soon as Lord
Palmerston was taken from the stage, Reform
would prove the password to office. He judged,
from all that he saw going on around him, that
Conservatism, as a living force in politics, was
no longer worthy of consideration, From ex-
aggerating its strength, he passed into the oppo-
site error of underrating it. But all his first
advances towards Radicalism were apparently
made with regret. He has generally fought

1A Chapter of Autobiography. By the Rev. Charles
Wordsworth, Bishop of St Andrews.—Fortnightly Review,
July 1883,
The Development of Radicalism. 49

 

hard and stubbornly in favour of a cause before
avowing himself its enemy. No one has thrown
‘more warmth and zeal into the defence of
landed property, of small boroughs, of Church
Establishments, of the duty of the State to
maintain freedom of contract inviolable.

No one has more vigorously condemned the
abuse of power by a Minister, and no one has
so often outraged his own doctrines. In 1871
he abolished purchase in the army by Royal
Warrant, an exercise of the Royal prerogative
which was denounced by many influential
Liberals as an extremely dangerous innovation.
Mr Faweett declared that if a Tory Ministry
had ventured upon such an act, it “ would have
been passionately denounced by Mr Gladstone,
amid the applause of the whole Liberal party.”
But Mr Fawcett did not foresee that Radicalism
was destined to render Mr Gladstone the most
imperious of Ministers. This had no little to
do with his fall in 1874; and after his return
to power in 1886, his impatience of criticism
or remonstrance sometimes alarmed his best
friends. By his own address and skill the
alliance with the Parnellites had been brought

D
50 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

about, and at first sight it seemed to render
him the master of Parliament. In the spirit
of a master he conducted all his opera-
tions. Few other men would have ventured
to dissolve a Parliament scarcely eight months
old because it declined to pass a measure
of a totally unprecedented kind in English
history. The members who refused to obey
Mr Gladstone were to be deprived of their
seats, or, at the very least, to be fined heavily
for their insubordination. The “one-man”
form of government was never attempted on
so great a scale by a constitutional Minister as
it was during the first session of 1886 by Mr
Gladstone. Confident that he was invincible,
he treated all opponents with undisguised con-
tempt. Whenever his former colleagues de-
sired to explain their positions, he burst in
upon their statements with angry interruptions,
or sought to overwhelm them with the jeering
laughter and taunts which he so frequently in-
troduces as a running commentary upon the
speeches of all who presume to differ from him.
If but a smile passes over the face of one of the
Opposition while he is himself speaking, his
The Development of Radicalism. 51

 

indignation knows no bounds. He condemns
the indecent levity of modern times, and makes
a few pathetic allusions to his old age and his
fifty years of service. Yet he will avail himself
of every form of the House, and even go beyond
the forms, in order that he may disconcert
an antagonist. If unlimited power had been
within his reach in 1886, Mr Gladstone would
soon have shown the world that there was
nothing in Radical principles inconsistent with
crushing and relentless despotism.

One by one, all the “ fundamental principles ”
for which he had fought so hard down to
his fiftieth year had been discarded. Nothing
remained to be thrown over but the Established
Church. From that last and crowning sacrifice
Mr Gladstone has shrunk, but no man is so
accomplished in the art of keeping a question
open, and in stimulating expectation that he
will one day take it in hand. By these tactics
an ad interim support is secured from all who
desire to see their particular question drawn
into the field of “practical politics.” It cannot
be doubted that large bodies of Nonconformists
have thus been led, at various periods, to an-
52 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

ticipate that the all-destroying axe of Mr Glad-
stone would eventually be laid at the root of
the Established Church. He has given them no
express promise, but he has said much to en-
courage their hopes. In a speech at Dalkeith
at the outset of his celebrated “ Mid-Lothian
campaign” in 1879, he uttered words which
were full of hidden meaning. The question of
Scotch Disestablishment was not, he said, for
him to determine. “It is not part of my duty
to keep it backward. It is not part of my duty
to endeavour to thrust it forward.” His hearers
might well be pardoned if they jumped to the
conclusion that when sentence was pronounced,
the executioner would not be found wanting.
He had, on many previous occasions, indirectly
prompted the sentence. The parochial clergy,
he once wrote; though partisans, were not often
“on the side of labour.” This was entirely
meaningless if it was not intended to stir up
bitterness in the minds of the labourers against
the clergy. In fact, Mr Gladstone went on to
say plainly that clerical indifference to labour
had tended to “ stimulate a feeling in favour of

1 Nineteenth Century, November 1877.
The Development of Radicalism. 53

 

the Disestablishment of the Church.” This was
putting the match very close to the fire. Vang
other dexterous bid for the leadership of the
Nonconformist party was made in the same
article—written, be it observed, at the time
when Mr Gladstone was out of office, and had
determined to employ any and every means to
overthrow Lord Beaconsfield. ‘“ Nonconformity,”
he wrote, “which still supplies to so great an
extent the backbone of British Liberalism, is
now largely intent on effecting Disestablish-
ment.” This has been the invariable tone
adopted by Mr Gladstone when endeavouring
to climb back to power. The machinery was
set in motion once more soon after his defeat
in 1886. “I cannot,” he wrote to Dr Parker,
“forget the consistent and generous support
which I have so long received from Noncon-
formists in all parts of the country.” And then
the old lure was brought into requisition, with
all the old adroitness : “In my opinion, which
receives from day to day more and more illustra-
tion, Church Establishments cannot and ought
not to continue unless they prove themselves

1 November 28, 1886.
54 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

useful to the maintenance of the higher life of
the nation.” Like the utterances of the ancient
oracles, this saying might be interpreted in two
ways. Hither “more and more illustration”
was being afforded that Church Establishments
ought not to continue, or the reverse. Non-
conformists would naturally read it in the way
suggested by their wishes; devoted friends of
the Church might hopefully give it the contrary
application. Thus the support of Nonconfor-
mists might be secured without forfeiting the
support of Churchmen, In the feat known to
American politicians as “ carrying water on both
shoulders,’ no one, even in America, has ever
equalled Mr Gladstone’s performances.

Long ago the inevitable goal towards which
Mr Gladstone was working was clearly per-
ceived by a great man under whom he had
served, and whom he used so ill—Lord Pal-
merston. The Conservatism of Lord Palmer-
ston helped to make Mr Gladstone a Radical.
The Radical party wanted a leader, and it was -
the only party at that moment unprovided for.
Mr Gladstone prepared himself for the oppor-
tunity. “Gladstone,” said Lord Palmerston to
The Development of Radicalism. 55

 

Lord Shaftesbury,’ “will soon have it all his
own way; and whenever he gets my place,
we shall have strange doings.” Lord Shaftes-
bury added a weighty comment of his own:
“Gladstone’s language, and specially his acts,
will show that the master-mind which curbed
him is gone, and his resentment will appear
in the political associations he will form, and
in the violence and relish with which he will
overthrow every thought and deed of his great
leader.” All the world is aware that these
predictions were fulfilled to the letter. But
there was much in the story of the connection
between Lord Palmerston and Mr Gladstone
which the world never knew, or has forgotten,
and it constitutes so important a chapter of
political history, and throws such a flood of
light on Mr Gladstone’s subsequent career,
that it cannot be omitted from these pages.
As early as 1850, Mr Gladstone began to
assume the attitude of the sentimentalist, in
opposition to Lord Palmerston’s somewhat ag-
gressive patriotism. The celebrated civis fo-

1 Life and Work of the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury.
Diary, October 25, 1865,
56 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

manus sum speech,’ of which Sir Robert Peel
said “it made us all proud of the man who
delivered it,” roused nothing but scorn in Mr
Gladstone’s mind, He uttered a solemn pro-
test against the comparison of an Englishman
with a Roman citizen— “the member of a
privileged class,” who “belonged to a conquer-
ing race.” Were we, he asked, “to be uplifted
on a platform high above the standing-ground
of all other nations”? He would have nothing
to do with the civis Romanus swm theory. He
wanted universal “ brotherhood” instead. Uni-
versal brotherhood led him, not very long after-
wards, into the Crimean war; but this disaster
did not change his views concerning the de-
pravity of Lord Palmerston’s principles. If
his theory had gone wrong, he held it to be
a proof that Lord Palmerston was still more in
the wrong. To visit his own faults upon the
heads of others has always been one of Mr
-Gladstone’s favourite consolations in adversity.
It is right, he admits, that somebody should
be punished, and he hastens to find a victim
to suffer in his stead. On this principle of

1 June 25, 1850.
The Development of Radicalism. 57

 

vicarious sacrifice, he pursued Lord Palmerston
for some years, in a spirit for which, consider-
ing all the circumstances, scarcely a parallel
can be found in English political history.

In September 1856, Lord Palmerston, who
was then endeavouring to extricate the country
from t the labyrinth of difficulties into which the
Aberdeen Government had conducted it, was
Ritterly assailed by Mr Gladstone. He spoke
of the Ministry as having been guilty of “levity”
and “ poltroonery,” and declared that “for blun-
ders, scandals, failures, and disgraces, official,
political, constitutional, executive, and above all
legislative, the session of 1855 perhaps exceeds
all former precedent.” Lord Palmerston had
“resorted to a subterfuge;” he had assigned
a pretended, not a real cause, for a certain
action. “There is,” he went on to complain,
“no evolution of political mountebankery which
it is not deemed advisable to excute rather
than to tread in the old ways of the Constitu-
tion.” Lord Palmerston had carried “ dictation,
assumption of power, reckless calculation upon
parliamentary timidity or impotence,” to a very
high pitch indeed; he was ignorant of domestic
58 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

politics; he had no “ earnestness of purpose ;”
he bullied the weak and crouched down before
the strong. But Mr Gladstone was not yet
satisfied with the picture of the Prime Minister,
who had committed the offence of accepting his
resignation with too great alacrity. He de-
manded why the country or Parliament did not
interfere :—

“Tf the Minister deals with public business in a man-
ner which destroys the mutual respect between Govern-
ments and Parliaments—if he acts in matters of high
public concern without sincerity, that is, without earn-
‘estness of purpose—if they are mere cards and counters
to be played with for the purpose of the hour—if he has
neither extended knowledge of the public interests, nor is
capable of feeling that deep and wearing solicitude about
them which for other Ministers has constituted at once
the chief burden of their life and their main title to the
posthumous gratitude and admiration of their country,—
why does not Parliament correct all this?” !

It will be seen that there is scarcely any
grave fault of which a public man can be
guilty which is not charged or insinuated in
this assault upon Lord Palmerston. Want of
sincerity, using matters of high public concern

1 Quarterly Review, vol, xcix. p, 544,
The Development of Radicalism. 59

 

as mere cards or counters, ignorance of public
interests, indifference to the welfare of the coun-
try, all the offences which are most reprehen-
sible in a public servant, are imputed to Lord
Palmerston—just as they were afterwards im-
puted, by the same pen and mouth, to Lord
Beaconsfield. The method adopted in both
instances was precisely the same—even the
language was substantially unchanged. There
is seldom little that is new in Mr Gladstone’s
tactics. His custom is to begin by severely de-
precating any imputation of unworthy motives,
and then he proceeds to ascribe the worst of
motives to his opponent. In 1876-77 he insin-
uated in a thousand forms the charge that Lord
Beaconsfield was endeavouring to drag the coun-
try into a war with Russia, although at this
very time Lord Beaconsfield and Lord Salisbury
were straining every nerve to avoid such a war.
Events more than justified their policy, and “
proved that Mr Gladstone had maligned them.'
In the same way he incessantly endeavoured
to excite distrust of Lord Palmerston by alleg-
ing that he was never happy unless he had

1 See Part III., ‘‘ Foreign Policy.”
60 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

a war upon his hands, and by representing
him as a sort of hired bravo, prowling about
restlessly, day and night, in search of a
quarrel with some weak and defenceless
antagonist. .

In January 1857, Mr Gladstone renewed his
attacks. It was popularly supposed that Lord
Palmerston had the virtue of courage. Mr
Gladstone did not expressly deny this, but he
contrived to say that it was not so. “Far be
from us the rudeness of saying he has it not;
but if he has, it is a gem still in the caves of
ocean.” “The secret of Lord Palmerston’s
public life,” he wrote three months later, “has
always been the worship—the skilful and suc-
cessful worship—of Power, in whatever seat it
lay.” As to foreign affairs, “the rule of his
life has been to bluster and to intimidate.” He
complained bitterly of the increasing load of
taxation, and warned the “country districts”
that the burden would be “made heavier for
them ”—just as in later years, when the balance
of power had shifted, and Lord Beaconsfield was
in office, he roused the fears of the working

1 Quarterly Review, vol. ci. p. 258 (1857).
The Development of Radicalism. 61

 

classes by warning them to “look out” for higher
taxes. After the elections of March 1857,
when Lord Palmerston’s Administration was
returned to power stronger than ever, Mr Glad-
stone again accused him of resorting to “ tricks
and manceuvres beyond all precedent,” and of
having, by an artful use of ecclesiastical ap-
pointments, “ attracted—perhaps we should say
bribed—a certain number of votes.” |// One feat-
ure alone in the Ministerial policy compelled
Mr Gladstone’s admiration—Lord Palmerston’s
hostility to a democratic measure of Reform.
If he persisted in resisting such a measure,
“we trust,” wrote Mr Gladstone, “that, irre-
spective of gencral confidence, he will receive
from the independent portions of the House a
warm support, stinted neither by the recollec-
tion of what they have disapproved, nor by
any unworthy jealousy of his perpetuating his
power.”* Above all things, the county fran-
chise must not be tampered with. It was
essential that it should continue to rest on the
basis of “property and beneficial interest.”
Reform has been used by Mr Gladstone to

1 Quarterly Review, vol. ci. p. 583.
62 | Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

serve every purpose in turn: sometimes he has
been against it, when “the classes” had to be
conciliated; sometimes he has been in its favour,
when “the masses” were to be won over. But
he has consistently maintained that Parliament
was in a higher state of efficiency before the era
of Reform svthat the extension of the franchise
has lowered the tone of public life, and injured
the public service. On the other hand, it must
be admitted that he has never employed these
arguments at the moment when he was using
Reform as a means of forcing his way to
power." ; :

In February 1858 the Conspiracy to Murder
Bill, introduced in consequence of Orsini’s at-
tempt on the life of Napoleon IIL., proved fatal to
the Government. Lord Palmerston was defeated
by 19 votes. Mr Gladstone believed that it was
a final defeat. He therefore cast off all restraint
in his onslaughts upon Palmerston. There was
no redeeming point in the character of the fallen
Minister. Mr Gladstone’s exultation passed the
bounds of moderation. “There is an end,” he

1 For the arguments in question, see Mr Gladstone’s articles
in the ‘ Nineteenth Century’ and the ‘ Quarterly Review.’
The Development of Radicalism. 63

 

wrote, “

of the day of that disastrous foreign
policy which is associated with the name—
with the famous but ill-omened name—of Pal-
merston. That sun has set, and has set, if we
read the signs of the times aright, not to rise
again.” And here again he almost seems to
thave had a prophetic glimpse of a later stage
of his own career; for he penned a remarkable
passage, in which his position in 1886 is de-
scribed so accurately, that, after substituting his
own name for that of Lord Palmerston, not a
_ word of it could be changed except for the
worse :— 5

‘We are not, indeed, of those who conceive that that
nobleman is disqualified by age from resuming the first
office of the State. There is no apparent reason, as far
as Time and his scythe are concerned, why he might not
again discharge the duties of Minister as well as, we fear
not better than, before. . . . But he can hardly fail
to see that a number of those who formerly supported
him, amply sufficient in numbers, if their resolution
hold, to give effect to the intention, have written this
sentence upon the tablets of their heart: ‘Come what
may, Lord Palmerston shall not again be Minister” The
quarrel between them is no lover's quarrel. The pro-

1 Quarterly Review, vol. civ. p. 527 et seq.
64 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

scription is no personal proscription. It is the determin-
ation of a great and serious issue, too long neglected and
misunderstood, but now at last deliberately handled, and
to all appearance finally disposed of.”

He went on to remark that Lord Palmerston
“reminds us of the strange antithesis in some
words of Rousseau, who says of a particular
personage —‘Ce n’était assurément pas un
homme sans mérite, quoique ce ffit un grand
It was, however, all over with him;

vilain.’ ”
“he cannot resume the station he has lost.”
But Mr Gladstone has always been fatally
misled when {he has ventured into the regions
of cael In 1859, Lord Palmerston’s sun,
which had set for ever, rose again, and in form-
ing a new Ministry, the “grand vilain” was
adroit enough to offer Mr Gladstone his old
post of Chancellor of the Exchequer. | From
that time Lord Palmerston had no more extra-
vagant admirer and eulogist than Mr Gladstone.
“His mixture of “violence and poltroonery,” his
) want of principle, his trickery and deception,
the discredit he had brought upon England—
~ all were forgotten and forgiven. Let those who
, have carefully considered the foregoing indict-
The Development of Radicalism. 65

 

ment against Lord Palmerston, consider also
the following eulogium, and then ask whether
both could have been honestly put before the
country by the same man? The quotation
now given is from Mr Gladstone’s speech on
proposing a monument to Lord Palmerston,
February 22, 1866 :— |

“Tt was his happy lot as Foreign Minister and Prime
Minister of this country to be associated with that
remarkable extension of constitutional freedom in Europe
which has been among the happy characteristics of the
present age. . . . As to Italy, I will venture to say
that Lord Palmerston was one of the first and most
prophetic of those who in England discerned the grow-
ing destinies of that country, and his name may claim a
place by the side and on a level with that of her most
distinguished patriots. . . . It was the lot of Lord
Palmerston to be the Minister who brought to an hon-
ourable conclusion a war taxing severely the energies of
his country. ,

“Lord Palmerston had had the reward of his untiring
zeal, his immense energy, and his long-continued labours,
in an amount of public admiration and attachment such
as upon the whole has surpassed that which has fallen to
the lot of any other statesman of our time who has borne
office under the Crown, It prevailed in the upper classes,
the powerful and intelligent middle class, and descended
into the ranks of humble and honest labour. In all these

E
66 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

his character and services were favourably and warmly
appreciated. All who knew Lord Palmerston, knew his
genial temper and the courage with which he entered into
the debates in the House, his incomparable tact and in-
genuity, his command of fence, his old English delight in
a fair stand-up fight. He had the power to stir up angry
passions, but he chose, like the sea-god in the Aneid,
‘Quos ego—Sed motos preestat componere fluctus,’ rather
to pacify.

“T believe it was the force of will, the sense of duty,
and the determination not to give in, that enabled him
to make himself a model for all of us who yet remain, to
follow him with feeble and unequal steps in the per-
formance of some of the duties which it fell to his lot to
discharge.

“One other quality which Lord Palmerston possessed,
upon which it is most delightful to dwell, is that he had
a nature incapable of enduring anger or the sentiment of
wrath. This freedom from wrathful sentiment was not the
result of painful effort, but the spontaneous fruit of the
mind—the noble gift of the original nature. It is delight-
ful to remember it in connection with him who has been
taken from us, with whose name we are no longer con-
nected except in the endeavour to profit by his example
wherever it can lead us in the path of duty and right, and
to bestow on his memory that tribute of admiration and
affection which it deserves at our hands.”

It will be observed that the difference be-
tween these two portraits does not turn upon
The Development of Radicalism. 67

 

slight or insignificant details—it goes to the
very foundation of everything.\/ The whole man
is transformed.V The shifty, truculent, unprin-
cipled, ignorant politician becomes the lofty
patriot, the courageous statesman, “the model
for all of us,” the noble example by which we
are humbly “to endeavour to profit.” If both
portraits were exhibited to the world in sin-
cerity and good faith, what is to be said of Mr
Gladstone’s powers of insight or judgment ?
Who, in private life, would trust the reputa-
tions of others to one who had proved himself
capable of committing such deep, such deadly,
injustice? Who would confide the direction
of important affairs to a man who had shown
himself, over a long course of years, persist-
ently, hopelessly, and habitually in the wrong ?
There was one other official who, while Mr
Gladstone was out of office, had incurred his ani-
mosity, perhaps by reason of his fidelity to Lord
Palmerston. This was Lord Clarendon. He was_
described by Mr Gladstone, in 1857,’ as “an
evil genius, fussy, fidgety, turbulent, bombastic,
great with the small and small with the great.”

1 Quarterly Review, vol. ci. p. 256.
68 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

He was a “pliable organ,” a “mere tool,” a
“supple and unresisting medium ”—in short, an
extremely bad and dangerous man. All this,
no doubt, Mr Gladstone sincerely believed, and
believing it, he made Lord Clarendon his own
Foreign Secretary when he formed his Ministry
in 1868. Was it because Lord Clarendon was
a “pliable organ,” such as Mr Gladstone sought
for so diligently when his Home Rule scheme
was to be forced upon the nation in 1886, or
because he was the fittest man for the post ?
In the latter case, what excuse can there be for
the calumnies of 1857 ?

We have seen how great were the changes
produced by the development of Radicalism in
Mr Gladstone’s mind. It will be more im-
portant still to mark the results which followed
the application of his new principles to foreign
affairs and to Ireland.
II.

FOREIGN POLICY
TI.

FOREIGN POLICY.

THERE is one aspect of Mr Gladstone’s public
life from which his future biographers will be
able to exhibit him as the most consistent of
modern statesmen. It is that which connects
him as a Minister with foreign affairs. The
history always runs in the same channels, and
derives its inspiration from the same motives ;
and in the end it always reveals the same
spectacle of national humiliation and misfor-
tune, and of useless and hopeless bloodshed.
Turn the page where we will, Mr Gladstone
stands forth as the instigator or abettor of the
most astounding blunders ever committed in
the foreign policy of any great nation. The
more closely the facts—the hard inexorable
facts—are examined, the more thoroughly will
72 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

every word of this statement be found to be
confirmed.

Some references have been made in the pre-
ceding chapter to the treatment received by
Lord Palmerston at the hands of Mr Gladstone.
But the story is not yet all told.

In 1855 it became evident that the country,
then in the midst of the Crimean war, was
determined to get rid of Lord Aberdeen, whose
feeble and disastrous Ministry had brought
universal discredit upon the nation. Mr Glad-
stone had filled the post of Chancellor of the
Exchequer in ‘that Administration, and upon
him rests no small share of the responsibility
for the Crimean war, as well as for the shameful
condition in which our troops were sent out
to meet the enemy.\/ While the services were
being starved, while army and navy were in a
state of culpable inefficiency, while the country
was rapidly “drifting” into war, Mr Gladstone
went about boasting of ee complete readiness
to meet any emergency.y “I really don’t think,”
he said at a large meeting in Manchester,’
“that England has often been better prepared

1 October 12, 1853.—‘ Times’ of 13th.
Foreign Policy. 73

 

for war than she is at this moment.” The
soldiers who afterwards perished of cold and
disease in the Crimea, bore ghastly and awful
testimony to our fitness for war. But beyond
all this, it is now generally admitted that if
Lord Derby had not been defeated in 1852,
and Lord Aberdeen and Mr Gladstone installed
in office, the Crimean war would never have
occurred. / Authorities suspected of Tory pro-
clivities would probably not be listened to on
such a point, but we have the evidence of Mr
Cobden, who told the House of Commons that
he regretted the vote he gave against Lord Derby
in 1852. “TI have not the slightest doubt,” he
said, “from the information I possess, that that
vote produced the Russian war.” The latest and
one of the most prejudiced of Whig historians is
“obliged to make substantially the ‘same admis-
sion. Mr Spencer Walpole shows’ that the
Emperor Nicholas had “arrived at a virtual
understanding” with Lord Aberdeen upon the
Eastern question some years before 1852, and
that on Aberdeen’s accession to office, the Em-

1 History of England from the Conclusion of the Great War
in 1815, vol. v. pp. 80-95.
74 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

peror naturally thought that the “Sick Man”
was at last in his own hands. “Nicholas could
not believe that war was possible while Aber-
deen, the Minister with whom he had conversed
in 1844, presided over the British Ministry.”
The Crimean war cost England 28,000 lives
and added £30,000,000 to her debt, and it
must be ascribed entirely to the same vacillating
spirit, the same want of foresight, the same
facility of blundering into acts the consequences
of which have not been weighed, as that which
brought the costly and fruitless Egyptian wars
upon us in 1882-84.

In January 1855, Mr Roebuck’s motion for
a Committee of Inquiry into the conduct of the
war gave the cowp de grdce to the Aberdeen-
Gladstone Ministry. Lord Palmerston was
called to power, and for a short time Mr
Gladstone kept his office. But it was evident
to all observers that the popularity of the war
was rapidly on the decline, that a great financial
deficit had to be provided for, and that the new
Ministry had to face a long period of storms,
perhaps of disasters. Mr Gladstone saw all
this, and at the right moment he resigned.
Foreign Policy. 75

 

He was thus enabled to escape from any
further responsibility for the war; but the
Ministry could not get out of it so easily.
/ They were obliged to carry on the struggle
in which Mr Gladstone Bd his colleagues had
so heedlessly embarked. \/ Mr Gladstone lost no
time in using every effort to throw obstructions
in the path of the Ministry. In the House of
Commons he denounced the war—the war he
had helped to make—as “immoral, inhuman,
and unchristian.” He declared that if the
“country continued it, “we should tempt the
justice of Him in whose hands was the fate of
armies, to launch upon us His wrath.” The
slightest sign of weakness on the part of
England at that critical juncture was certain
to give new strength and encouragement to
her enemies, and to prolong the struggle. If
the considerations urged by Mr Gladstone in
May 1855 had been pressed in the Cabinet
in December 1853 or in February 1854, the
war might never have been undertaken. He
waited until the country was committed to it,
until she had sent into the field her best men,
and almost staked her existence upon the issue,
76 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

and then he suddenly called upon her to strike
her flag and surreader to the enemy. Although
some years afterwards, and on a smaller scale,
he was able to perform this -feat in South
Africa, it would have been dangerous, if not
absolutely ruinous, for Lord Palmerston to have
attempted it in the face of Europe in 1855.
It is not surprising that Mr Gladstone’s astound-
ing change of front brought down upon him
severe strictures in the session of that year.
Mr J. G. Phillimore called the attention of the
House of Commons to the fact that there was
no longer any mystery concerning the shameful

 

want of preparation for war which had been
discernible in all our military operations. “I
can comprehend,” he said, “how great and
magnificent preparations have’ shrunk into a
miserable defence, how disaster and defeat have
sprung from the bosom of victory, and how a
fatal and malignant influence has long paralysed
the influence of our fleets and armies.” Mr
Gladstone has never been able to save the
nation from war; he has only succeeded in
ageravating its misfortunes and sacrifices when
war has come upon it by his blundering. |
Foreign Policy. 17

 

In July, Lord Palmerston thus dwelt upon
Mr Gladstone’s treachery towards his former
colleagues, and upon the immense harm he was
doing to his country :—

“But it must indeed be a grave reason which could
induce a man who had been a party with her Majesty’s
Government to this line of policy, who had, after full
and perhaps unexampled deliberation, sanctioned its
commencement, who, having concurred after that full
and mature deliberation, had also joined in calling upon
the country for great sacrifices in order to continue it,
and who had, up to a very recent period, assented to
all the measures that had been proposed for its continu-
ance,—I say it must indeed bea grave reason which could
induce a man who had so acted, utterly to change his
opinions, and to declare that the war to which he himself
was a party was unnecessary, impolitic, and unjust ; to
exaggerate the resources of the enemy, and set before the
country all the imaginary disasters with which his fancy

 

the force of the enemy and the difficulties ‘of 0 our own

position.” v1

One cause of Mr Gladstone’s invariable failure
in foreign affairs, in more recent times, has been
that he has generally found himself fettered in
office by pledges or acts undertaken for the

1 August 7, 1855. Hansard, 3d series, vol. 139, 1942-43.
78 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

purpose of destroying his predecessors. From
1876 to 1880, he continually held up Russia
as an example to be followed by the world, be-
cause Lord Beaconsfield had found it absolutely
necessary to check the renewed encroachments
of that Power in the East. Mr Gladstone
declared ‘that the fears of Russian ageression
in Asia were “no better than old women’s
fears.” England, if she had been in Russia’s
position, would “most likely have eaten up
Turkey long ago.” Yet he had not. always
regarded Russia with the same favourable eyes.
In 18538, at Manchester,’ in referring to Russia
and Turkey, he used these significant words:
“There is a necessity for regulating the dis-
tribution of power in Europe where there is a
certain absorption of power by one of the great
potentates, which would follow the fall of the
Ottoman Empire, which would be dangerous to
the peace of the world ; it is the duty of England,
at whatever cost, to set itself against such a result.”
He thus laid it down as a binding and solemn
obligation on the part of an English statesman
to be perpetually on his guard against Russian

1 Speech at West Calder, November 27, 1879. aaa
> October 12th—‘ Times’ report, October 13th.{ ( 8
Foreign Policy. 79

 

aggression; and yet when, in 1877-78, Lord
Beaconsfield was endeavouring to fulfil this
very duty, and at a time when Russia was
moving rapidly towards Constantinople, Mr
Gladstone applied himself strenuously to the
work of encouraging Russia and paralysing
the British Government. Every expedient was
adopted for the purpose of exasperating the
public mind against Lord Beaconsfield and his
colleagues. In the very midst of the crisis,
at the moment when Russia was actually about
to spring upon Turkey, Mr Gladstone insinu-
ated that the Ministry was secretly plotting to
involve the nation in a huge war. He even
went so far as to throw out dark hints that
English liberties were in danger. “That opens
to you,” he said,’ “ another question which seems
to me extremely grave. Something was said
to-day about the present position of English
liberty. I will go so far as to say that it is
an unexampled position, but whether it is in
danger or not at this moment, I will not say ;
but I will say that tt requires great watchful-
ness. This proceeding with the Indian troops is
itself a proof that if you care for your liberties
1 Speech at Hawarden, May 8, 1878.
80 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

you must be watchful over them.” This solemn
warning doubtless disturbed thousands of anxious
breasts with visions of hordes of bloodthirsty
Hindoos and Mussulmans let loose upon the
helpless population of England, while Lord
Beaconsfield seized the propitious moment to
proclaim himself Dictator. In the ‘ Nineteenth
Century’ for June 1878, Mr Gladstone again
sounded the alarm. The Ministry, he declared,
had committed a “breach of something even
higher” than the “Bill of Rights, or of the
Mutiny Act, or of both.” It had defied the
law, and perpetrated an “assault upon the Con-
stitution.” He endeavoured with might and
main to inflame native feeling in India against
England. “In distant, and to her childyen
ungenial climes,” he wrote, “in lands of usage,
tongue, religion, wholly alien, the flower of her
youth are to bleed and die for us, and she will
have no part but to suffer and obey.”* He
went on, in excited strains, to denounce this as
“injustice, gross and monstrous injustice,” and
he warned the Indians that they were only to
be treated as “the pariah forces” of our wars |

1 Nineteenth Century, June 1878, p. 1165.
Foreign Policy. 81

 

—inferior soldiers, “to whom every high re-
ward of valour is denied, every avenue of hope
for eminence and fame jealously and irremedi-
ably closed.”

Whether it was patriotic on the part of a
public man of Mr Gladstone’s influence and
position thus to strive to stir up disaffection
among our own troops, and even to run the
risk of causing a revolt to break out in India,
and at the same time to give open “aid and
comfort” to our enemies, are questions which
every one may decide for himself. The fact
which has to be recorded against Mr Glad-V
stone’s diatribes is that at the very first foreign
crisis into which he stumbled, he called over
the Indian troops, used them in his wretched
campaigns in Egypt, made them “suffer and
obey,” and sent them back to India without i
even permitting them to share in that wonder- ,
ful military street-procession which was the
finest practical commentary ever seen on Mr
Gladstone’s theories of universal love and
brotherhood. The first summons to our Indian
troops was the greatest stroke of statesmanship
since the days of Pitt. Mr Gladstone covered

F
82 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

Lord Beaconsfield with obloquy for having con-
‘ceived it, and then pirated the invention.

He dealt with the whole policy of his pre-
decessor on a similar principle The acquisi-
tion of Cyprus was denounced as a fraud, an
outrage, a mere “worthless bribe,” the island
itself being “worse than worthless.” He was
afterwards extremely glad to make use of it as
a base of military operations in a new war of
his own creating. The purchase of the. Suez
Canal shares, because Lord Beaconsfield carried
it out, was condemned. as “ foolish ”—a “ man-

” “a, silly transaction,” “devised for hood-
1

ceuvre,
winking the people of this country.”* Every-
body now knows how immensely these shares
have risen in value, and what a profitable in-
vestment they have proved for this country,
regarded merely as a pecuniary transaction.
Austria was denounced as a wicked and bane-
ful Power, simply because Lord Beaconsfield
had thought it wise—and no one now doubts
that he was right—to place Great Britain in
friendly relations with that Power, as well as

1 Speech at Glasgow, December 5, 1879; and ‘Gleanings,’
vol. i. p. 218, article ‘‘ Kin Beyond Sea.”
- Foreign Policy. 83

 

with the German Empire. “Austria,” cried
Mr Gladstone, “has been the steady unflinching
foe of freedom in every country in Europe,”

 

with an infinite deal more to the same effect.
This happened in March 1880. In May, hav-
ing accomplished all that he had in view, and
broken down the government of Lord Beacons-
field, he apologised humbly, almost abjectly, to
the Austrian Minister for the language he had
used. He expressed his “serious concern” at
the expressions he had uttered, and virtually
gave a promise not to offend again. In his
Mid-Lothian speech’ he had denounced Austria
and all her works in the most sweeping man-
ner. “ There is not an instance, there is not a
spot upon the whole map, where you can lay
your finger and say, ‘There Austria did good.”
In his letter to Count Karolyi he meekly denied
that he had any “hostile disposition” towards
Austria, and pleaded that he had “at all times
particularly and heartily wished well to Austria
in the performance of the arduous task of con-
_ solidating the empire.” “TI feel a cordial re-
spect for the efforts of the Emptror ”—“ the

1 March 17, 1880.
84 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

unflinching foe of freedom.” No one tried to
reconcile these two views of Austria ; but every-
where in Europe the apology was stigmatised
as the most humiliating document ever signed
by a great English Minister. But it was some-
thing more than that. It was an acknowledg-
ment that Mr Gladstone had led astray his
own countrymen throughout the agitation of
1879-80—that, as a great German newspaper
said, “the movement upon which he was borne
to power was a deception.” He had totally
misrepresented the policy of Lord Beaconsfield,
and maligned foreign Powers, in order that he
might sweep his opponent from office, and step
into his place.

Apart from pure sentimentalism and dreams,
' Mr Gladstone has never been guided in his
treatment of foreign affairs by any other idea
than that of attacking the policy and reversing
_ the acts of his political opponents. Lord Beacons-
field had caused Candahar to be brought within
the empire, and everybody who knew the im-
portance to British India of that possession,
approved of the sagacity and foresight which
suggested the annexation. Lord Napier’s testi-
Foreign Policy. 85

 

mony on the subject ought never to be for-
gotten. J«1f” he said, “the annexation is
carried out, the district of Candahar will be-
come prosperous and valuable. The inherent
vitality of the trade between India and Central
Asia has enabled it to struggle on in spite of
the perils and exactions to which it has been
subject. A safe road to Candahar will give
it a clear start, and instead of purchasing
Russian articles at Peshawur, we shall deliver
British manufactures to Central Asia.” That
this trade would have been of immense value
to England, at the opening of an era of compe-
tition in manufacturing industries such as* she
had never before known, cannot be doubted, |
But Mr Gladstone decreed that whatever Lor

“Beaconsfield had done must be undone. V Can

dahar was given up, the Quetta railway wa

sacrificed, and the commercial advantages whicl

we might have enjoyed were transferred t

Russian merchants, while Russia, who never
gives up anything, and never recedes a single
step, was encouraged to pursue her advances
towards Afghanistan. Once more the “ Palmer-
stonian legend” had been trampled upon, and
86 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

the great cause of “universal brotherhood” had
. triumphed.

But Mr Gladstone had by no means finished
his work. In the course of the speeches which
he had delivered in 1879-80, he denounced the
measures by which the Transvaal became British
territory, and used every argument which could
induce the Boers to rise against us. These
speeches were circulated far and wide through-
out the colony, and, as a matter of course, the
rising took place in due time. Mr Gladstone
had not only assailed the Ministry, but he had
gone out of his way to attack the Governor of
Cape Colony, Sir Bartle Frere, knowing well
that this official was at too great a distance to
reply. Sir Bartle Frere was accused of being
one of the chief directors of a policy which was
“ depraving the morality and ruining the finances
of England.” No greater, no more cruel in-
justice, was ever done to any man. Sir Bartle
Frere was held up to the execration of his
countrymen, recalled under a cloud, and prac-
tically had his career cut off and ruined. In
July 1881, he wrote a letter in which, while
making but brief allusion to his own wrongs,
Foreign Policy. 87

 

he pointed out the inevitable consequences of
Mr Gladstone’s course :—

“To the personal results to myself I have no intention
to refer ; but I believe that the statements and opinions
to which these speeches gave currency and authority
caused infinite mischief in South Africa, They have
retarded the prosperity and progress of European colonies
in that region ; they have laid the foundation of wars,
_and raised very serious obstacles: to the religious, moral,
and political advancement of the native races. On my
return to England, I find the old calumnies and mis-
representations of fact constantly recalled and used by
your political followers, to the prejudice of the interests,
and the ruin of the prosperity of a region which might
otherwise become a southern home of men of European
races, discharging a great duty in civilising and raising
in the scale of humanity the millions of natives, &c.
Such misrepresentations—which I would gladly believe
were the want of knowledge of actual facts, and not a
wilful distortion of them—affect necessarily not only the
past history but the future of those important colonies.”

It had not been customary in English public
life for distinguished statesmen to blast the
fame of the Queen’s servants engaged in their
duties in distant lands; but Mr Gladstone has
created many new precedents of all kinds in his
time, and ‘the fate of Sir Bartle Frere cost him
88 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

as little compunction or regret as the sacrifice
of any other victim who has stood in his way.
In the meantime, he had succeeded in making
himself Prime Minister. He was at first indis-
posed to be bound by his speeches of 1879.
If he could have got rid of the effects of them
by an apology, doubtless it would have been
forthcoming. But the Boers had taken him at
his word, and fully believed that he would not,
and could not, long stand out against them.
They were right. It would be impossible to
recount in these few pages the mournful history
of the South African war. A brief summary of
its results is all that can be attempted, and that
summary may be taken from the speech of a
man who is now one of Mr Gladstone’s most
active allies—Mr John Dillon’ “TI heard him
(Mr Gladstone) say, in the House of Commons,
that he would enter into no terms with the
Dutch until the authority of the Queen was
re-established in South Africa. He was beaten
once, and he did not stop the war; he was
beaten a second time, and he did not stop the
war; but he was beaten a third time at Majuba

1 October 11, 1881,
Foreign Policy. 89

 

Hill, and then he gave in.” Is it any wonder
that Mr Dillon and his friends afterwards played
upon Mr Gladstone’s fears and weakness as the
Boers had done, and with even more memorable
consequences ?

Mr Forster showed in the House of Com-
mons’ that Mr Gladstone’s course in the Trans-
vaal had involved the shameful desertion of
allies who had been guilty of no other crime
than that of fidelity to the British flag. “Is
the reward of our loyalty,” a Cape Colonist
asked us,” “to be the loss of our lives in battle
to many of us, and to the rest the loss of home,
and wife, and child, and property? Are you so
weak and so cowardly that to fight against you
is certain gain, and to be your friends is certain
destruction?” These were bitter questions to
listen to, and upon many an English ear they
must have grated harshly; but they made no im-
pression upon Mr Gladstone. The loyal colonists
and our native allies were to be betrayed. Mr
Forster protested against this as a “dangerous
and costly act;” one which might some day in- |

1 March 16, 1883.
2 In a letter to the ‘Standard,’ November 7, 1881,
90 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

volve our withdrawal from the Cape altogether.
“Tt is a very serious matter,’ he added, “for
such a country as England to say that it is too
weak to protect its allies.” His warnings fell
upon deaf ears at that time, but there were
some who remembered them afterwards, when a
- desertion of our allies on a still greater and
more shameful scale was witnessed in Egypt,
and the slaughtered garrisons of Sinkat, Tokar,
 Kassala, and Khartoum had tobe reckoned
among the innumerable victims of Mr Glad-

 

stone’s incapacity and blindness,

To recount the history of the Egyptian war
would require far more space than the whole of
this volume contains, but its causes and results
admit of being briefly told. To begin with, the
war was the direct consequence of Mr Glad-
stone’s previous words and acts, and of the
rashness shown by his second Administration
in agreeing to the famous “Dual Note” of
January 1882. “It made a catastrophe in-
evitable,” was the damaging admission at the
time of one of Mr Gladstone’s most docile
supporters,’ afterwards a “flexible instrument ”

1 Mr John Morley in the ‘Fortnightly Review,’ July 1882.
Foreign Policy. 91

 

in the Separation policy. “The first great
false move,” the same authority affirmed, “ was
unquestionably the joint note presented in
January. . . . To that unfortunate step we
owe no small part of our present difficulties.

It undid in a moment the work of years,
and at the same time that it made an enemy of
Arabi, it arrayed the Sultan, the Notables, and
all the other powers on his side. An unluckier

move was never made.” ?

The evidence on this
point is overwhelming, but the examples of it
here cited must suffice, and those examples have
been chosen from a writer whose attachment to
the Parnellite-Gladstone Alliance is not more
remarkable than his constancy to the principle
that when you are threatened it is your first
duty to bow down meekly in the dust, and
yield whatever may be demanded.

The revolt of the Egyptian colonels broke
out, and then ensued the bombardment of the
port of Alexandria, and the subsequent destruc-
tion of a great part of the city. The entire
catastrophe was due to Mr Gladstone’s infatu-
ated policy. Arabi would never have rebelled

1 Pall Mall Gazette, June 27, 1882.
92 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

against the Khedive, or would have been in-
_stantly suppressed, if the Sultan had but raised
a finger against him. But Mr Gladstone had
put it out of his power to call upon the Sultan.
He had formed the idea that Lord Beaconsfield
had undertaken to go to war for the Sultan, and
therefore he went forth from Hawarden preach-
ing a new crusade against the Porte/ Turkey |
was the “great anti-human specimen of human-
ity ;”
its subjects; it exhausted upon them “all the

>

it “plundered, violated, and murdered”

resources of a wickedness more fiendish than
human ;” it indulged in “fell Satanic orgies ;”
wherever the Turks went, a “broad line
of blood marked the track behind them.”
Whether these charges were true or false,
they effectually shut out Mr Gladstone, when
he was reinstated in office, from calling upon
the Sultan to restore order in Egypt. He
had not only accused Turkey of all the crimes
under heaven, but he had insinuated, in no
very indirect manner, that Lord Beaconsfield
had rendered himself responsible for these
crimes. The attack accomplished its main

1 See ‘‘ Bulgarian Horrors,” passim, 1876.
Foreign Policy. 93

 

design; it helped to place Mr Gladstone in
power; but it also saddled him with the
burden and disgrace of a long and terrible
series of cruelties, outrages, and murders in
Egypt and the Soudan, which will for ever
mark his second Administration with a “ broad
line of blood.”

England had lost all influence at Constan-
tinople. The Sultan looked on with cynical
satisfaction at the appalling difficulties with
which Mr Gladstone was surrounding himself
- In Egypt. The “greatest of orators” had once
more staggered into a war which he was im-
potent to conduct. The British fleet was sent
to Alexandria, but Arabi, far from being over- /
awed, made ready for resistance. The |
were bombarded, and as no precautions had
been taken on shore to defend the property
of peaceable inhabitants, the city was sacked
and burnt. So slight was the impression which
these events made upon Mr Gladstone, or so
defective is his memory, that he once attacked
- Sir Stafford Northcote for having asserted that
the burning of Alexandria was occasioned by
the bombardment. He maintained that the
94 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

“conflagration took place before the bombard-
ment.” Some one by his side prevailed upon
him to have a little regard for facts, and at a
later period of the evening he withdrew his
statement, but almost to the last he denied
that we were at war. We were only engaged
in carrying out “military operations.” War,
so shocking to his mind when out of office,
seemed quite an everyday affair when he
was in power. On one occasion he protested
warmly against the waste of time in the House
of Commons over Egyptian affairs. “Why in
the world is this pressure exercised?” he ex-
claimed. “Why two or three times a-week
have we these debates? One might suppose
that Egypt and the Soudan were in England!”?
This was not quite the same tone as that which
ran through his pamphlets on “ Bulgarian
Horrors” and “Lessons in Massacre.” Then
. his deepest feelings were stirred by the stories,
more or less exaggerated or apocryphal, of the
cruelties committed upon unoffending men and
women. The sensitive nature hardened rapidly
in Downing Street. The cry of oppressed man-

1 April 3, 1884—‘ Times’ report, April 4.
Loreign Policy. 95

 

kind excited nothing but impatience. Why so
much din and uproar over a few thousands of
men, women, and children, whose blood red-
dened the Egyptian sands? “ Anybody would
think that Egypt and the Soudan were in
England.”

In November 1888, Hicks Pasha and his
forlorn army were cut to pieces by the
Mahdi; and as the Egyptian Government had
been practically superseded by Mr Gladstone,
he could not avoid taking some steps to check
the progress of insurrection. He persuaded
General Gordon to go to the Soudan as the
representative of the British Government, with
instructions to withdraw the Egyptian garrisons,
and as many of the inhabitants as might wish
to be taken away. It probably never occurred
to General Gordon that he would be expected
to carry out this work single-handed, that his
advice would be disregarded, and that his warn-
ings would be treated with stony indifference. .
The sense of fear or danger was unknown to
him; but had he understood the character of
the man with whom he had to deal, he might
reasonably have refused a mission which could —
96 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

only lead to continued and useless sacrifices of
life. But General Gordon probably knew little
more of Mr Gladstone than everybody knows—
that he is a “great orator.” He supposed him
also to be a man who would be faithful to those
whom he had pressed into his service. He
lived long enough to form a juster estimate of
Mr Gladstone.

While Gordon was on his way to the Soudan
the garrisons of Sinkat and Tokar were mas-
sacred, after many fruitless appeals to the
British Government for help. When relief
was sent to Sinkat, it was too late—the words
written in letters of fire all across the history of
Mr Gladstone’s intervention in Egypt. General
Gordon soon saw that he would require aid, but
everything that he asked for was either refused
or delayed. “We do not propose,” telegraphed
Lord Granville on the 234 of April 1884, “to
supply him with Turkish or other force for the
purpose of undertaking military expeditions,
such being beyond the scope of thé commission
he holds, and at variance with the pacific policy
‘which was the purpose of his mission to the
Soudan ; that if with this knowledge he con-
Foreign Policy. 97

 

’ tinues at Khartoum, he should state to us the
cause and intention with which he so continues.”
The word -fencing and quibbling had begun.
Could there have been a greater mockery than
to ask General Gordon why he continued at
Khartoum? He was sent to withdraw the
garrisons, and after his arrival at Khartoum he
had rendered himself more than ever responsible
for the safety of the people. “It would be the
climax of meanness,” he telegraphed on the 8th
of April, “after I had borrowed money from the
people here, and called on them to sell their
grain at a low price, &c., to go and abandon
them without using every effort to relieve them,
whether those efforts are diplomatically correct
or not; and I feel sure, whatever you may
feel diplomatically, I have your support—and
that of every man professing himself a gentle-
man—in private.” The golden moments when
Khartoum might have been relieved were run-
ning out. In March—perhaps in April—Ber-
ber could have been taken, and the road to
Khartoum kept open ; but Mr Gladstone de-
clared in the House of Commons that the fall
of Berber would not “seriously affect the safety
G
98 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

of Khartoum.”? All the world knew better,
and General Graham, General Stewart, and
General Gordon had earnestly begged the Gov-
ernment to allow the expedition which had
defeated Osman Digna to hold Berber. They
were beating the air. Mr Gladstone had made
up his mind. Gordon began to see into what
sort of hands he had fallen, and in the last de-
spatch which he was enabled to send from Khar-
toum before the telegraph was destroyed, he said
he would suppress the rebellion if he could; if he
could not, he added, “I leave you the indelible
disgrace of abandoning the garrisons of Senaar,
_Kassala, Berber, and Dongola.” When the
‘native tribes saw that the Government had
deserted Gordon, there was little chance of
“escape left for any of the party. The people
of England could not bring themselves to share
Mr Gladstone’s apathy concerning the fate of
the great soldier he had sent out only to be
killed. A relief expedition was demanded, and
nobly it tried to perform its duty; but it was
sent too late. Gordon performed prodigies of
valour throughout the long and weary summer

1 House of Commons, April 24, 1884,
Foreign Policy. 99

 

and autumn, and far into the winter he was
still wrestling with the impossible. At last
treachery within the walls of Khartoum com-
pleted the ruin which ignorance, folly, and
treachery in London had begun. General
Gordon was slain; and a few nights after the
news of his death arrived in England, and while
a shock was still running through the length
and breadth of the land, Mr Gladstone was the
' “observed of all observers” at the play, where
"a roaring farce kept him in continual laughter.

Events had turned out unfortunately; let
the fault rest with the Tories, not with
Mr Gladstone. The battles of Tel-el-Kebir,
Tamasi, Teb, Abu Klea, Gubat, Kerbekan, and
many others, were all in vain; but Mr Glad-
stone’s mind was quite easy. He is said to
have expressed his unbounded surprise at the
“fuss” which was made over the fate of Gen-
eral Gordon. In the House of Commons he
did not scruple to assert that Gordon might
have escaped from Khartoum if he had been
so minded. Gordon forbore, said Mr Glad-
stone—“ determinedly forbore””—“ to make use
of the means of personal safety, which, so far
100 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

as I know, were largely at all times, or at all
events long, within his power.”* There was
too much generous and manly feeling in the
House of Commons to permit this cruel stab
at the reputation of a dead man to be made
without protest, and in deference to the mur-
murs and cries of dissent which arose, Mr
Gladstone modified his words, but he clung to
the idea that Gordon had thrown away his
life. ( On the 23d of February, he ventured
to make another allusion to it. \\“ We be-
lieved,” he said, “that it was in the power of
General Gordon to remove himself, and those
immediately associated with him, from Khar- -
toum, by going to the south.” As for the base ©
desertion of duty which would have been in-
volved in Gordon’s flight, had that flight been
practicable, Mr Gladstone had not a word to
say. He has his own standard of principles
and morals, and the outer world has no part
or lot in it.

Every power or ally which placed dependence
upon England while Mr Gladstone has held
office, has, sooner or later, suffered heavily for

1 Speech in the House of Commons, February 20, 1885.
Foreign Policy. 101

 

it. Denmark dreamt that it could trust a
Ministry of which the great friend and advocate
of “autonomy” and freedom was a powerful
member, but it had reason to rue its mistake.
The Treaty of Berlin provided us with an
honourable means of acting with Turkey, and
laid the basis of a new Austro-German alliance.
The great Powers, which supposed that a com-
pact with England was binding, were soon un-’
deceived. Mr Gladstone accumulated insults
upon Turkey, Austria, and Germany, while he
exhorted us to “emulate the good deeds” of
Russia. But Russia herself did not escape
.from the general penalty exacted from all
who put their trust in Mr Gladstone. Before
‘his expulsion from office in 1885, he had once
more gone within a hair’s-breadth of dragging
his country into war with the Power he had
professed to befriend. He was compelled to
come before. Parliament asking for a vote of
credit of £11,000,000, partly to enable him
to carry out preparations for a new struggle
with Russia. There are the strongest reasons
for concluding that the defeat of the Gladstone
Ministry, and the accession of Lord Salisbury
102 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

to power, alone averted that struggle. The
circumstances which preceded the Crimean war
had all been repeated. Russia had been brought
to believe that she could pursue her designs
upon Turkey and her advances in Asia without
molestation from England. Mr Gladstone had
extolled her good deeds from every platform.
The Emperor of Russia was misled, as his
grandfather Nicholas had been before him. He
thought that all England was in the hollow of
Mr Gladstone’s hands. A more and more
aggressive and defiant attitude was therefore
taken up by Russia, English feeling was aroused,
Mr Gladstone saw at the eleventh hour that he
was about to plunge Europe into strife, and he
was seized with panic. The army and navy
reserves were called out in hot haste; millions
were spent in preparing to meet a danger which
need not have been incurred. When the Rus-
sians were actually advancing upon Constan-
tinople, Lord Beaconsfield obtained a vote of
£6,000,000 to strengthen the army and navy.
Mr Gladstone exhausted all his copious re-
sources of invective in denouncing this act.
In April 1885, the Nemesis which seemed to
Foreign Policy. 1038

 

dog his steps forced him to go to the House of
Commons and ask for £500,000 more than
Lord Beaconsfield had obtained, in order that
he might cry “hands off” to the very Power
which he had instigated to come on. A
further sum of £4,500,000 was demanded
for the “military operations” in the Soudan,
and the whole £11,000,000—representing an
income-tax of 6d. in the pound— was as
utterly thrown away as if it had been sunk
in the depths of the Atlantic. £20,000,000
would not represent the cost to the country
of the Gladstone Government from 1880
to 1885, and an additional burden of at
least £9,000,000 was thrown upon Egypt.
Mr Gladstone’s eloquence and popularity have
been dearly paid for by other nations besides
his own. Between 1880 and 1885, he or his
" representatives stirred up discontent in almost
all parts of our po sessions, besides setting
Europe against us\ /India was thrown into a
dangerous state of agitation by Lord Ripon;
the South African and Australian colonists
were bitterly estranged, in accordance with the
policy too often pursued by the Radical party
104 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

of disregarding alike the wishes and the in-
terests of our fellow -countrymen who have
carried our commerce and our name into dis-
tant parts of the earth. Finally, after the wild
recklessness with which blood and treasure were
lavished in Egypt, the condition of that country
was far worse at the end of Mr Gladstone’s five
years of power than at the beginning. He
lacked the requisite nerve and judgment to
decide upon a definite policy to be pursued in
Egypt, and the consequence was, that instead of
settling the Eastern question, he handed it over
in a more entangled and more critical state than
ever to his successors.

It must be confessed that Mr Gladstone’s
most enthusiastic advocates usually keep silence
in reference to his foreign policy. But there
are many who imperfectly remember the details
of that policy, or who have grown up in the
belief that Mr Gladstone’s greatness as an orator
made him great in every office which he filled,
and in every work to which he put his hand.
Let them try to find a “a spot upon the whole
map” on which “they can lay their fingers ”
and say, “ There Mr Gladstone did good.” He
Foreign Policy. 105

 

sympathised with Italy; but he made no sacrifice
for Italy, and was called upon to make none.
He also sympathised with the Bulgarians; and
yet when a “midnight conspiracy ” was set in
action by Russia to stifle Bulgarian liberties,
Mr Gladstone preserved a dogged silence, until
appeal after appeal from the Bulgarian deputies
compelled him to speak, and then he had only
a few cold and ambiguous words to send them.
Bulgaria in 1886 was useless as a weapon of,
offence against political opponents. The Bul-'
garians, who kept sending him plaintive peti-
tions for encouragement, did not understand
the situation. They did not see that whereas
in 1879-80 they could be used as a means of
turning Lord Beaconsfield out of office, in 1886
they were nothing better than an extinct force
in English politics. Mr Gladstone’s sympathies
are never rashly squandered.

But then, it is said, Mr Gladstone referred
the Alabama claims to arbitration, and thus
avoided a possible war with the United States.
Common justice, however, should couple with
this statement two others of equal importance :
first, that arbitration was originally decided
106 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

upon by the Government of Lord Derby and
Mr Disraeli in 1868; and second, that the
method of arbitration afterwards agreed to by
Mr Gladstone was most unfair and injurious to
England. That the “indirect claims” of the
United States should have been allowed to
enter into the discussion at all, and that no
counter-claims should have been presented for
the losses inflicted upon the Canadians-by the
Fenian invasions,—— these were errors tanta-
mount, as the Americans boasted at the time, to
the “ wholesale capitulation ” of England. \/ The
result of the German Emperor’s arbitration,
and of the Geneva Conference, was that Eng-
land had to surrender the island of San Juan}
and to pay £3,200,000 as indemnity for the
Alabama claims. The actual claims of ship-
owners and others who had sustained losses
from the depredations of the cruisers, did not
amount to half that sum; and for years after
the award, the United States Government were
utterly at a loss to know what to do with the
money. They adopted every reasonable expe-

1 See, for a clear statement of the case, Earl Russell’s ‘ Recol-
lections and Suggestions,’ chap. xii.
Foreign Policy. 107

 

dient to get rid of it. All varieties of claimants
had dipped into “ John Bull’s ransom”; and at
last advertisements were issued calling upon
“merchants, shippers, consignees, captains, sea-
men, and others,’ to come forward and relieve
the American Treasury of the English gold. If
the Cabinet in which Mr Gladstone was so
powerful had done its duty in the first instance
by stopping the Alabama, or if Mr Gladstone
had subsequently done his duty in declining
any arbitration into which “indirect claims”
entered in any shape, either the difficulty with
the United States would not have arisen, or
it would have been arranged on fair and honour-
able terms. But during the American war, Mr
Gladstone believed in the success of the South.
He has denied that he “ sympathised” with it;
he only made speeches encouraging it. At
Newcastle, on the 7th October 1862, he made
the following important declaration: “ There
is no doubt that Jefferson Davis, and other
leaders of the South, have made an army ; that
they are making, it appears, a navy; and that
they have made what is more than either, they
have made a nation. We may anticipate with
108 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

certainty the success of the Southern States so
far as regards their separation from the North.
T cannot but believe that that event is as certain
as any event yet future and contingent can be.”
Apart from the habitual want of foresight dis-
— closed in this rash prediction, it is not difficult.
to imagine, even at this distance of time, the
effect which such a statement, coming from the
Chancellor of the Exchequer, must have had
upon the Southern leaders, who were then daily
expecting their formal- recognition as belligerents _
by the British Government. Mr Gladstone’s
words were accepted as a pledge that this aid
would shortly be forthcoming; and he thus
assisted, in a very powerful manner, to encourage
and prolong the war. The Geneva Conference
ought to have fixed what was the precise portion
of the £3,200,000 which Mr Gladstone would
have been called upon to pay if the fine had been
exacted from the chief offenders.

Among the latest judgments submitted by
Earl Russell to the consideration of his country-
men, there will be found the following :—

“In 1868 I had no reason to suppose, when I surren-
dered the leadership of the party, that he [Mr Gladstone]
Foreign Policy. 109

 

was less attached than I was to the national honour, less
proud than I was to the achievements of our nation by
sea or land, that he disliked the extension of our colonies,
and that the measures he promoted intended to reduce
the great and glorious empire of which he was put in
charge, to a manufactory of cotton and cloth, and a
market for cheap goods ; that the army and navy would
be reduced by paltry savings to a standard of weakness
and inefficiency. . . . By his foreign policy he has tar-
nished the national honour, injured the national interests,
and lowered the national character.” !

Another old member of the Liberal party,
‘Lord Fortescue, summed up the’ long and
ignominious story of Mr Gladstone’s foreign
policy in a few words :2?—

“T thought, with Earl Russell, that Mr Gladstone during
his first Premiership had ‘ tarnished the nation’s honour,
lowered the national character, and injured the national °
interests.’ But I think he has done so much more since.
He has caused or waged wars with profuse bloodshed
in various regions of the earth, but not with honour to
his Government. He has carried on important nego-
tiations of various kinds, but not with credit or advan-
tage to England... . In four years he has brought
England from her proud position, when Lord Beacons-

1 Recollections and Suggestions.
2 Letter to the ‘ Times,’ September 25, 1884.
110 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

field brought back peace with honour from Berlin, far
down towards that secondary position among nations,
which he has frankly told us he contemplates with
cheerful acquiescence her speedily occupying. What
wonder that he and his colleagues, in order to divert
public attention from this sad spectacle, and sadder
future prospects, should have first brought in a large
separate Franchise Bill; and then got up an agitation
against the House of Lords, because that House declines, ©
unless at the desire of the country constitutionally pro-
nounced, to bring into immediate operation one half
only, though itself a nearly unobjectionable half, of a
complete measure of parliamentary reform, during the
intentional delay or suppression of the other half!”

But the record of all these follies and dis-
asters, crushing as it would be to the reputation
of any Minister, is thrown far into the shade
by the tragic story of Mr Gladstone’s active
intervention ‘in Irish affairs. That part of his
public life, at least, is likely, for all time to
come, to remain unapproached and unapproach-
able by any Englishman of equal eminence.
IV.

IRISH POLICY

1868-1885.
IV.

IRISH POLICY.
1868-1885,

Mr GuLapsToNE first held office in 1835.1
From that time down to the year 1868, he
had shown little interest in Ivish affairs. Few
and scanty are the references to Ireland to be
found in any of his speeches. Never was there
a word uttered to indicate that he was dissatis-
fied with the Act of Union or with its effects.
He was far indeed from assailing the policy or
measures of Pitt. In his article on the “ De-
clining Efficiency of Parliament” (Quarterly
Review, September 1856) he incidentally de-
plored the interruption of Pitt’s “attempts
at legislative progress, with the splendid but

1 Not reckoning the minor appointment of Lord of the
Treasury in 1834.

H
114 Mr Gladstone: A Study. .

 

isolated exceptions of the Union with Ireland,
and the abolition of the Slave Trade.” Thus,
before the necessity of purchasing the Irish
alliance was brought home to him, he re- -
garded the Union as reflecting splendour on
the Minister who carried it out. When the
Parnellite vote had to be obtained, on Mr
Parnell’s own terms, Mr Gladstone’s views and
language underwent a great alteration. “I ad-
vise you,” he wrote to one of his protégés, just
after the elections of 1886,' “to take resolutely
to the study of Irish history. JI have done in
that way the little that I could, and I am
amazed at the deadness of vulgar opinion to
the blackguardism and baseness—no words are
strong enough—which befoul the whole history
of the Union.” The transition from splendour
to “ blackguardism,” in an expression of opinion
relating to one and the same measure, is a
change of no little moment, and it is the duty
of every dispassionate inquirer to ascertain
whether any peculiarity in Mr Gladstone’s
position in 1886 throws light upon this change.

1 Letter, undated, to Mr G, Leveson-Gower, Liberal Whip,
defeated in the elections.
Irish Policy, 1868-1885. 115 °

 

It will be necessary to bear clearly in mind
that the period from 1835 to 1868 was barren
in Mr Gladstone’s life, so far as Ireland was
concerned. This is the undoubted fact; yet
facts, as we have seen, have to give way, like
lesser things, at Mr Gladstone’s summons. It
appears, from a statement which Mrs Gladstone
caused to be published,’ that during these three-
and-thirty years, Mr Gladstone was “ absorbed ”
in the Irish question.

“From the very outset of his political career, Mr Glad-
stone’s most ardent wish, his strongest ambition, hus been
to redress the grievances of Ireland and undertake the
settlement of the Irish difficulty upon drastic lines. I
remember very well the day he received his first Cabi-
net appointment under Sir Robert Peel. It was the
same day that my niece, Lady Frederick Cavendish, was
born. Coming home, he threw himself into a chair,
looking quite depressed. ‘What did you get?’ I asked.
‘The Board of Trade,’ he said, I understood his dis-
appointment. He had hoped to get the Irish Chief
Secretaryship, though it was looked on then as a far
less important post.”

That he should have concealed his burning

1 In October 1886—interview with Mr Gill, a Nationalist,
and one of the staff of ‘ United Ireland.’ Mr Gladstone himself
afterwards confirmed the statement.
116 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

affection for Ireland so completely that no one
outside his home circle even suspected it, is at
least a proof of his wonderful self-control. Mr
Disraeli once reminded him, amid the general
cheers of the House of Commons; that he had
held power for “a quarter of a century, and
that he had never done anything for Ireland
but make speeches in favour of the Irish
Church.” But, as Mr Gladstone remarks in
a recent pamphlet, “all men do not perceive,
all men do not appreciate ripeness with the
same degree of readiness or aptitude; and the
slow must ever suffer inconvenience in the race
of life.”* The faculty of distinguishing “ ripe-
ness,” so as not to be left behind in the “race
of life,’ was among the greatest of the gifts
which nature originally conferred upon him.
When was a cause likely to win? When did
power turn upon its advocacy? In a word,
when had “ripeness” set in? Mr Gladstone’s
keenness of perception in such matters as these
can never be exaggerated.

In 1866 Mr Gladstone was Chancellor of
the Exchequer, and Leader of the House of

1 March 16, 1868. ? The Irish Question (1886), p. 22.
Trish Policy, 1868-1885. 117

 

Commons, in an Administration which reso-
lutely declined to consider the question of Irish
Disestablishment.;/ He refused to hold out the
least hope or encouragement to those who rep-
resented the existence of the Irish Church as
an injustice which ought to be redressed. The
question, he declared in 1865, was “remote,
and apparently out of all bearing upon the
practical politics of the day.” As for himself,
he “scarcely expected ever to be called on to

»1 But circumstances

share in such a measure.
marched on rapidly. In 1865 he was rejected
by Oxford University, and found himself, as he
expressed it, “unmuzzled”—that is, free to
declare his real opinions. Lord Palmerston
was still living, and vain would have been the
attempt to lead or drive him into the arms of
Trish agitators. In 1866 Mr Gladstone fell
back upon the old contrivance, a Reform Bill.
But he was defeated on Lord Dunkellin’s
amendment, which proposed to substitute rat-
ing for the rental franchise; and in 1867 Lord
Derby came into office, and Mr Disraeli settled

1 Letter to Dr Hannah, Warden of Trinity College, June
8, 1865.
118 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

the Reform question on a basis which obviously
could not be disturbed for some years. The
“die” was now finally cast. All further hope
of superseding Mr Disraeli in the Conservative
party had to be abandoned. Reform was no
longer available as a Liberal weapon. There
was a large, chaotic vote ready to be won over
by any one who was prepared to take a bold
line on the question of Disestablishment. The
Nonconformists, the Catholics, the Irish party,
and the Radicals, might all be brought to act
together in an assault upon the Irish Church.
Mr Gladstone’s lifelong convictions on the
subject of Church Establishments began to fall
to pieces concurrently with the discovery that
Reform was, for some time to come, a broken
reed, and that Disestablishment was “in the
air,” or to use his own somewhat unguarded
words, speaking of the year 1865, “the wind
was gradually veering to that quarter.”1 The
Conservative Administration was apparently
destined to have a long lease of power, unless
the Liberal forces could be rallied under a new

1 A Chapter of Autobiography, p. 45,
Irish Policy, 1868-1885. 119

 

banner. In February 1868, Lord Derby re-
signed office, and Mr Disraeli became Prime
Minister, to the mingled amazement and con-
sternation of his eminent rival. Mr Gladstone
suffered “ inconvenience in the race of life,” but
only for a few weeks. The hour of “ripeness”
had at last arrived. ,

In the early part of the session of 1868,
he introduced and carried his Disestablishment
resolutions,—few, if any, of the Liberals who
then supported him having the least foreshadow-
ing of the long and weary course which they
would be compelled to traverse before Mr Glad-
stone’s experiments with Ireland came to an
end. For the moment all seemed to prosper.
The combined movement was too much for Mr
Disraeli and the Conservatives, the decision of
a general election proved adverse to them, and
in December 1868 Mr Gladstone had the satis-
faction of becoming First Lord of the Treasury,
in place of Mr Disraeli. The first movement
in the Irish campaign was so successful that
the hand which planned it was not likely ever
to leave Ireland alone again.
120° Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

Mr Gladstone’s own account of these trans-
actions is as follows :—

“Down to the year 1865, and the dissolution of that
year, the whole question of the Irish Church was dead ;
nobody cared for it; nobody paid attention to it in Eng-
land. Circumstances occurred which drew the attention
of the people to the Irish Church. I said myself in 1865,
and I believed, that it was out of the range of practical
politics—that is to say, the politics of the coming elec-
tion. When it came to this, that a great jail in the
heart of the metropolis was broken open under circum-
stances which drew the attention of the English people
to the state of Ireland ; and when in Manchester police-
men were murdered in the execution of their duty, at
once the whole country became alive to Irish questions,
and the question of the Irish Church revived. It came
within the range of practical politics.” 1

Thus early, then, the master-key to Irish
policy was’ furnished by Mr Gladstone—con-
cession to force and violence. The Irish learnt
the lesson by heart, and the “supple mediums ”
chosen by Mr Gladstone at more advanced
stages of his work were never tired of warning
the nation that resistance to the Irish would
bring unnumbered evils upon its head—dyna-

1 Speech at Dalkeith, November 26, 1879,
Irish Policy, 1868-1885. 121

 

mite, revolution, resistance to the laws.1 The
Irish Fenian organisation never afterwards for-
got that Mr Gladstone had specifically attrib-
uted to their operations the overthrow of the
Irish Church. From that time forth their
numbers increased, the contributions from
America set in largely, the leaders acquired
enormous influence in Ireland, and all hope
of an era of peace and prosperity for Ireland.
was at an end.’? Let it never be forgotten that
when the blight of Mr Gladstone’s legislation
began to fall upon Ireland, that country was
in a state of prosperity which it had rarely
attained before, and which it has never reached
since. The relations between landlords and
tenants were becoming more friendly; a larger
area of land was under cultivation; the indus-
trial resources of the country seemed likely to
be rapidly developed by the influx of capital.
In 1868, the potato crop in Ireland was esti-
mated at 4,062,207 tons; in 1880 it was
2,985,859 tons. Wheat was grown in 1868
to the extent of 954,818 quarters, and oats

1 See especially the speeches of Mr John Morley, through-
out which this note of warning continually sounds,
122 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

7,628,857; in 1880 the quantities of each
were 519,801 and 6,845,464. If Ireland
could have been kept out of the arena of
party conflicts a few years longer, and been
allowed to pursue her way undisturbed by
the struggle for power in England, there is
every reason to believe that by this time she
would have advanced far on the road towards
substantial prosperity. But all was soon
changed. The nation embarked upon an un-
known and stormy sea, studded with shoals and
rocks, and Mr Gladstone was the pilot. Lord
Palmerston, Lord Aberdeen, and those who
knew him well, would have had no difficulty
in predicting the inevitable results. The bulk
of the people, who did not know him, trusted
themselves blindly to his guidance.

His speech in bringing forward the Disestab-
lishment Bill, on the 1st of March 1869,
‘formed the model for all his subsequent “ ora-
tions” on Irish affairs. It is but fair to ac-
knowledge that the public never grew tired of
that model, but seemed to admire it more and
more every time it was submitted to them. At
last, one of Mr Gladstone’s followers, who was
Irish Policy, 1868-1885. . 128

 

obliged to part from him on the Separation
scheme, declared that the contemplation of it
“benumbed his intellect.” This sort of flat-
tery was always welcome to Mr Gladstone, and
it had hitherto marked out a man for early
promotion. In truth, that Mr Gladstone’s
oratory “benumbed the intellect” is often the
only rational explanation of its success. Amid
a cloud of words, justice and reason are lost
sight of. His pictures of the results of adopt-
ing his recommendations dazzled the eye, and
the attempts to follow his arguments confused
the mind. The general outline of the Irish
speeches was vigorously sketched in 1869, but
the colours became more vivid in later years.
He admitted, in introducing his Disestablish-
ment Bill, that the Act of Union was to be
“altered” a little; but, he added, “we shall
confidently contend that we are confirming its
general purport and substance.” There was
nothing said about the “ blackguardism ” of the
Act, nor was the wisdom of Pitt called in
question. But it was a favourite argument for
the Separation Bill of 1886 that the Act of
Union had already once been broken by Mr Glad-
124 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

stone? and that whatever it may have had about
it of a sacred and binding character was gone.
Mr Gladstone, indeed, appears to have anticipated
this sequel to his measure. In speaking of the
Trish Church in 1835, he said “he considered
that they had abundant reasons for maintaining
that Church, and if it should be removed, he
believed that they would not be long able to
resist the repeal of the Union.”* The facts
had not altered, though Mr Gladstone’s opinion
had. The mistake of the people consisted in
their imagining that the laws which govern

1 The Fifth Article runs as follows: ‘‘That it be the Fifth
Article of Union that the Churches of England and Ireland, as
now by law established, be united into one Protestant Epis-
copal Church, to be called the United Church of England
and Ireland; and that the doctrine, worship, discipline, and
government of the said United Church shall be and shall re-
main in full force for ever, as the same are now by law estab-
lished for the Church of England ; and that the continuance and
preservation of the said United Church, as the Established
Church of England and Ireland, shall be deemed and taken
to be an essential and fundamental part of the Union; and
that in like manner the doctrine, worship, discipline, and
government of the Church of Scotland shall remain and be
preserved as the same are now established by law, and by the
Acts for the Union of the Two Kingdoms of England and
Scotland.”

2 Hansard, vol. xxvii. p. 512 (March 31, 1835).
Irish Policy, 1868-1885. 125

 

events were changed whenever Mr Gladstone
announced that he had experienced a new
conversion.

His measure of Disestablishment was so
framed as to exasperate party feeling to the most
intense degree. A great Whig authority, Lord
Grey, put this very clearly before the world.
It was, he wrote—

“By no means impossible that if the question had not
been used for the purpose of party warfare, a fair settle-
ment of it might have been arrived at, and it needs no
argument to prove how greatly such a settlement would
have contributed to the welfare of the nation. But it
was not the welfare of the nation, but party interest,
which seems to have guided the conduct of Mr Gladstone.
The resolutions he brought forward and the manner in
which they were advocated made all compromise im-
possible, and in the electoral campaign when Parliament
was dissolved, his speeches were calculated to inflame
to the very utmost the fierce party passions of the
Roman Catholics and Protestants in Ireland, and to
kindle a spirit of hatred against this country in the
minds of the Irish.”

Yet, while sprinkling these dragon’s teeth over
a soil already filled with them, Mr Gladstone
assured the country that peace and reconcilia-

1 In a letter to the ‘ Times,’ April 30, 1886.
126 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

tion would follow in the train of his measure.
What he offered was “a settlement” of Irish
grievances, and in that light his followers and
the country accepted it. “I look at this great
measure,” said Mr Bright, “as tending to a more
true and solid union between Ireland and Great
Britain. I see it giving tranquillity to our
people, greater strength to the realm, and new
lustre and new dignity added to the Crown.”
Stripped of all the illusions of fancy, and de-
prived of all the romance which Mr Gladstone’s
“magic voice” threw around stern realities,
these brilliant anticipations now present a differ-
ent aspect. We have to set against dreams and
visions, years of bloodshed and crime, a country
plunged into confusion and misery, disloyalty
too often triumphant, a revolutionary faction in
the House of Commons, and a dynamite aux-
iliary force acting whenever new demands are
to be brought within the “range of practical
politics.” Sir Robert Peel once said, “I will do
anything to conciliate any portion of the people
of Ireland that is just towards them, just also
towards others. But, alas! we have had many
warnings that conciliation and peace are not the |
Irish Policy, 1868-1885. 127

 

necessary results of concession and of intended
kindness.”* This warning would not have been
- listened to amid the infatuation of 1868; but
eighteen years of stormy and mournful history
have gone by, and an alarmed nation may per-
haps be induced to turn from Mr Gladstone to
his master, and see whether the advice and ex-
perience of Sir Robert Peel in Irish affairs may
not even yet undo some of the evil effects of
his example in other matters as a “versatile”
politician.

The Irish Church fell, and Irish discontent
increased. Canada was harried by the Fenians ;
agrarian agitation in Ireland grew more for-
midable; disorder was more difficult to quell ;
the demon of Irish disaffection became more
menacing in its attitude. The summons to
surrender once more reached Mr Gladstone.
He responded to it with the Irish Land Bill
of 1870. It was entirely a philanthropic
measure. “We wish,” said Mr Gladstone, “to
alarm none; we wish to injure no one.” The
landlords had nothing to fear. ‘“ What we wish

Prd

is,” said the Visionary, whom the world still

1 Speech in the House of Commons, April 25, 1834.
128 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

persisted, in the teeth of all warning and ex-
perience, in regarding as a Statesman, “ that
where there has been despondency, there shall be
hope ; where there has been mistrust, there shall
be confidence; where there has been alienation
and hate, there shall, however gradually, be woven
the ties of a strong attachment between man
and man.” The people listened and believed,
and if wisdom and oratory always went to-
gether, they would have been right in believing.
But they had the failure of 1868-69 before them.
Mr Gladstone’s “ peroration ” blotted it all out.
“My hope,” he said, “is high and ardent that
we shall live to see our work prosper in our
hand, and that in that Ireland which we desire
to unite to England and Scotland by the only
enduring ties, those of free will and free affec-
tion, peace, order, and a settled and cheerful
industry will diffuse their blessings from year
to year, and from day to day, over a smiling
land.”?

In this measure, Mr Gladstone solemnly laid
down certain “fundamental principles.” He

1 The quotations are taken from the speech on proposing the
Land Bill of 1870, February 15th (revised by Mr Gladstone),
Irish Policy, 1868-1885. 129

 

was opposed to a joint ownership in land. He
was against fixity of tenure. He ridiculed the
idea of calling upon the State to assist occupiers
of the soil to become proprietors. Let every
one who desires to judge fairly of Mr Glad-
stone’s claims to public confidence as a practical
statesman, and of the expediency of leaving
him with a free hand to deal with the Irish
difficulty, ponder well and carefully over these
conditions of the Land Act of 1870. Fixity
of tenure, said Mr Gladstone, was a principle
“wholly unsustained by the slightest attempt
at reasoning.” “ Perpetuity of tenure,” he said
on the 15th February, “on the part of the
occupier, is virtually expropriation of the land-
lord... . The effect of that provision will be
that the landlord will become a pensioner and
rent-charger upon what is now his own estate.”
He protested strongly against any such legisla-
tion. Again, on the 11th of March he said,
“ Perpetuity of tenure is a phrase that I flatter
myself is a little going out of fashion. If
I have contributed anything towards it, I am
not sorry.” The occupiers of the land were
not the “whole people” of Ireland. “And it
I
130 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

would, I think, be difficult to show why, in
favour of these particular persons being occu-
piers, the whole essence of proprietary right
should be carried over from the class that now
possesses it to that which, though infinitely
larger, is still a class, is not the whole people
of the country.” He referred to a proposition
which had been suggested to establish a power
in the hands of the State to reduce excessive
rents. He fell upon this with even more than
his usual animation, and tore it to pieces.
“JT own I have not heard, J do not know,
and I cannot conceive,” he said,) “ what is to
be said for the prospective power to reduce
excessive rents.” And as he afterwards de-
molished all his own argument in turn, and
adopted the very course which he here denounces,
his words must be quoted as they were uttered:

“Shall I really be told that it is for the interest of the
Irish tenant bidding for a farm that the law should say
to him, ‘Cast aside all providence and forethought ; go
into the field and bid what you like; drive out of the
field the prudent man who means to fulfil his engage-
ment; bid right above him and induce the landlord to

1 Speech in the House of Commons, March 11, 1870.
Trish Policy, 1868-1885. 131

 

give you the farm, and the moment you have got it come
forward, go to the public authority, show that the rent
is excessive and that you cannot pay it, and get released.’
If I could conceive a plan, first of all, for throwing into
confusion the whole agricultural arrangements of the
country ; secondly, for driving out of the field all solvent
and honest men who might be bidders for farms, and
might desire to carry on the honourable business of
agriculture ; thirdly, for carrying widespread demoralisa-
tion throughout the whole mass of the Irish people, I
must say, as at present advised—to confine myself to the
present, and until otherwise convinced—it is this plan
and this demand that we should embody in our Bill as a
part of permanent legislation a provision by which men
shall be told that there shall be an authority always
existing ready to release them from the contracts they
have deliberately made.” +

All the suggestions thus covered with ridi-
cule were incorporated by Mr Gladstone in his
Land Bill of 1881. The very scheme which
he scouted as absurd, and treated almost as the
delusion of a disordered mind, he afterwards
made his own. The Court to reduce rents was
created, and as Mr Gladstone predicted in 1870,
“ widespread demoralisation ” spread “ through-
out the whole mass of the Irish people.” The ex-
traordinary part of the history is, that although

1 Speech in the House of Commons, March 11, 1870.
132 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

he had foretold this result of the plan, yet when
he seriously produced the plan itself, and em-
bodied it in an Act of Parliament, the nation
neither evinced surprise nor made any objection.
Thus, for the first time in our annals, we see the
First Minister of the Crown coming forward and
saying, in effect—* Here is a proposition which,
if adopted, would bring the most grievous evils
upon the country. I solemnly warn you against
it.” In a few years afterwards, we see him
recommending this same proposition, and no
one questions his wisdom on either occasion.
In 1886, Mr Gladstone urged his Home Rule
scheme upon the nation as a “ final settlement,”
all his preceding measures having come with the
same guarantee affixed to them. If “ Home
Rule” had been accepted, it would have cost Mr
Gladstone no effort and no compunction to come
forward, in due season, and allege that Parlia-
ment—for the whole blame would, as usual, be
thrown upon Parliament—having committed
itself to the principle of Irish independence,
nothing remained but to take the one step still
remaining, and agree to separation. There would
be no more difficulty in finding good reasons for
Irish Policy, 1868-1885. 133

 

that change of base than in finding reasons for
the equally unlooked-for changes of 1868, 1870,
1881, and 1886.

The Land Bill of 1870 produced its natural
result. The tenants saw that contracts might
be broken by Act of Parliament, and that a
little more pressure brought to bear upon
Mr Gladstone would perhaps relieve them
from the necessity of paying any rent what-
ever. The pressure was not withheld. The
Home Rule agitation assumed a definite shape.
“ Ripeness ” was again detected by Mr Glad-
stone. He threw down another of his garments
to the hungry pack which was pursuing him.
The Irish University Bill of 1873 was produced,
and it was pressed upon the country in the old
familiar strain. It was a measure “ vital not
only to the honour and existence of the Govern-
ment, but to the welfare and prosperity of Ire-
land.” The world has been assured, on the very
highest authority, that Mr Gladstone at this
time regarded his work in Ireland as finished.
Treland had no right to ask anything more. Her
grievances were all redressed. This view was
put forward, not in a speech which might easily
134 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

be contradicted, but in a pamphlet carefully
written by Mr Gladstone for the purpose of
striking a blow at the Papal power’ He
remarked :—

“When Parliament had passed the Church Act of
1869, and the Land Act of 1870, there remained only,
under the great head of Imperial equity, one serious ques-
tion to be dealt with—that of the higher education. I con-
sider that the Liberal majority of the House of Com-
mons, and the Government to which I had the honour
and satisfaction to belong, formally tendered payment in
Full of this portion of the debt by the Irish University Bill
of February 1873. Some, indeed, think that it was over-
paid; a question into which this is manifestly not the
place to enter.”

Then, having ascribed the defeat of his Bill
to the action of the “ Roman Catholic prelacy
of Ireland,” he added emphatically, “ the debt to
Ireland had been paid.”* Could any language
make it more clear that Mr Gladstone did not
appreciate or understand even the elements of
the situation at that time—that he had no
conception of the gravity of the crisis he was
bringing upon the country, no insight into the

1 The Vatican Decrees, p. 59. London: 1874.
2 Thid., p. 60.
Irish Policy, 1868-1885. 135

 

character of the Irish people, or of the far-
reaching designs of the Irish agitators, who
were beginning to see that everything might
be gained by playing skilfully upon the in-
firmities of Mr Gladstone’s judgment, and upon
his love of power? All that he had done thus
far was to trifle and tamper with the Irish
problem—the very error against which Burke
might have warned him: “Above all things,I ,
was resolved not to be guilty of tampering—the
odious vice of restless and unstable minds.”

In 1880 Mr Gladstone was brought back to
power largely by the Irish vote. “In every
constituency,” the historian of the Parnellite
party has told us, the Irish electors “marched
in unbroken battalions to vote solidly Liberal.” *
Very soon the bills which had been lavishly
drawn during the elections began to be pre-
sented for payment. But Mr Gladstone was
no longer a suppliant; he was in office. His
Trish allies could not help themselves if he
chose to keep them waiting. What he had not
calculated upon was their power—the power

1 The Parnell Movement. By Mr T.P. O’Connor, M.P.
P. 313.
136 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

which he had himself invoked—of “ carrying
widespread demoralisation throughout the whole
ranks of the Irish people.” The anti-rent war-
fare was opened, and the Parnellite leaders be-
gan to harass Mr Gladstone. Mr Parnell assailed
him for having set the example of plunder-
ing landlords: “There are some persons very
much better entitled to call him a little robber
than he is entitled to call me a big one.”* At
the same time, Mr Parnell made no secret of
his intentions. “The Land League,” he said,
“ig not in favour of fixing rent, but wants to
abolish it. We believe we can abolish it.
Neither is it in favour of permanently fixing
the landlords on the land. We want to get rid
of them.” Mr Gladstone, being in office, had
no motive for refraining from protesting against
this policy of brigandage; if he had been out
of power, courting the Irish vote, he might
have been as silent in 1881 as he was during
the similar “plan of campaign” in the last
months of 1886. He had nothing more, in
October 1881, to expect from the Irish vote,

1 Speech by Mr Parnell at Wexford, October 9, 1881.
2 Speech at Strabane, August 30, 1881.
Irish Policy, 1868-1885. 137

 

and therefore he went to Liverpool, and de-
nounced Mr Parnell and his associates as men
who were “marching through rapine to disin-
tegration and dismemberment of the empire.”
Their immediate object was “rapine”—and he
continued in words which will be engraved
upon the tablets of history with a pen of iron,
for to the very same men here described he
offered, in 1886, to transfer the whole of
Ireland, subject to a few reservations which
would speedily have been swept away like
chaff before the wind :—

“Tt is a great issue; it is a conflict for the very first
and elementary principles upon which civil society is
constituted. It is idle to talk of either law or order, or
liberty or religion or civilisation, if these gentlemen are
to carry through the reckless and chaotic schemes that
they have devised. Rapine is the first object ; but rapine
is not the only object. It is perfectly true that these
gentlemen wish to march through rapine to disintegra-
tion and dismemberment of the empire, and, I am sorry
to say, even to the placing of different parts of the
empire in direct hostility one with the other. That is
the issue in which we are engaged.”!

1 Mr Gladstone at Liverpool, October 27, 1881—‘ Times’
report, 28th October.
138 ’ Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

Nothing had changed in 1886 except Mr
Gladstone’s position. He was out of office
instead of being in it; that was all the differ-
ence, and it was much. The men whom he
denounced in 1881 were still pursuing the
same design, without any attempt at conceal-
ment. But they held the balance of power in
the House of Commons. Mr Gladstone there-
fore proposed to make them masters of Ireland.

The Land Bill of 1881 was the immediate
fruit of the Parnellite threats in 1880. That
bill, as we have seen, enacted all the principles
repudiated by Mr Gladstone in 1870. A Court
was established for fixing rents, but the rents
so fixed were to be binding for fifteen years,
“during which,” said Mr Gladstone, “ there can
be no change.” In 1886 this solemn pledge
went the way of all the others. It became
inconvenient, and it was discarded. Mr Glad-
stone, despite all his guarantees and assurances,
spoke and voted in favour of a bill introduced
by Mr Parnell for still further cutting down
the rents by one-half. Even his own unex-
ampled career had thus far afforded no parallel
to this cynical renunciation of principles which —
Irish Policy, 1868-1885. 139

 

were based upon the very rudiments of morality,
and stood totally outside the field of politics.
The Land Bills did not in any degree satisfy
the Irish agitators; they merely made the gen-
eral problem more insoluble than ever, and
deepened the conviction of the Irish people that
law could be trampled under foot with im-
punity, and that the day of “no rent” was
drawing nigh. Meanwhile, misery and desola-
tion were being carried into thousands of homes.
The amount of suffering and anguish which Mr
Gladstone was the means of inflicting upon
women and children—to say nothing of men—
throughout Ireland, will never be known, but
the victims of his experiments were starving,
between the years 1882 and 1886, in half
the capitals of Europe. Ladies, once in pros-
perous circumstances, were obliged to beg their
bread ; orphans were left totally helpless and
friendless in the world. The newspapers of
those years abounded with narratives of suf-
fering which, if they had occurred in Naples,
would have moved Mr Gladstone to indignation.
Let but one instance be given from the public
journals of the early part of December 1886 :—
140 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

“Yesterday it was reported that an Irish gentleman
had died in one of the North London workhouses, at the
age of sixty-two, and was buried in the Union grave-
yard. Ten years ago he was drawing £1200 a-year from
the property on which he lived in Ireland, but in 1879
his affairs became embarrassed through no fault of his
own, and the revolt against rent completed his ruin.
His wife died twelve months ago heartbroken, His
only son has enlisted in the Foot Guards.”

A lady was shot dead by the side of a kins-
man, in the month of April 1882, while driv-
ing home from church. The kinsman wrote to
Mr Gladstone: “I lay the guilt of the deed of
blood at your door in the face of the whole
country.” Mr Gladstone does not know, and
probably would little heed it if he did know,
how many wives who have “ died heartbroken,”
and how many children who have been thrown
upon the hard mercies of the world, have had
to trace their grief and despair directly to his
hand.

1 Letter to Mr Gladstone from Mr W. B. Smythe, April 3,
1882.
Me,

IRISH POLICY

1885-1886.
V.

IRISH POLICY.
1885-1886.

Mucu had been yielded to the Irish agitators ;
but more, and ever more, was continually their
ery. They decided to oppose the Liberal party
at the general elections of 1885. Their rea-
sons were given, by Mr Parnell’s authority, in a
document addressed to all the constituencies in
the United Kingdom.’ The Irish leaders look
upon each of the regular parties as tools to be
used and flung aside when done with; and in
the autumn of 1885 they were in the mood for
dealing frankly with Mr Gladstone and his fol-
lowers. The testimony of the Parnellite chiefs

1 Signed by Mr T. P. O’Connor, Mr Sexton, and the
leaders of the party generally.
144 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

to the merits of the Liberal party is at least
worth remembering :—

“To Ireland, more than to any other country, it bound
itself by the most solemn pledges, and these it most
flagrantly violated. It denounced coercion, and practised
a system of coercion more brutal than that of any pre-
vious administration, Liberal or Tory. Under this
system juries were packed with a shamelessness unpre-
cedented even in Liberal Administrations, and innocent
men were being sent to the living death of penal servi-
tude. Twelve hundred men were imprisoned without
trial; ladies were convicted under an obsolete Act directed
against the degraded of their sex; and for a period
every utterance of the popular press and of the popular
feeling was as completely suppressed as if Ireland were
Poland, and the administration of England a Russian
autocracy. Under such circumstances we feel bound to
advise our countrymen to place no confidence in the
Liberal or Radical party, and so far as in them lies to
prevent the Government of the empire falling into the
hands of a party so perfidious, treacherous, and incom-
petent.... We advise our countrymen to vote against
the men who coerced Ireland, deluged Egypt with blood,
menaced religious liberty in schools and freedom of
speech in Parliament, and promised the country gener-
ally a repetition of the crimes and follies of the last
Liberal Administration.”

Mr Gladstone’s reply was the celebrated ap-
peal to the country to give him a majority over
Irish Policy, 1885-1886. | 145

 

the Conservatives and the Parnellites combined.
The country refused. Still, it supposed that he
was adverse to further concessions to Mr Par-
nell, whereas, as events afterwards showed, he
was preparing his mind, in case of defeat, for
all and any concessions that might be demanded.
The testimony given on this point by Mr Bright
is as conclusive as it is beyond all suspicion :—

“You say it is a gross charge to say that you con-
cealed 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 Par-
nell, not to make a complete surrender to him.” +

The elections left the Parnellite party in
control of Parliament. They could turn out
one Ministry and make another whenever they
pleased. Lord Salisbury was in office, and the
Queen’s Speech at the opening of the first
session of 1886 sufficiently indicated what his
course would be. He intended to restore order,
to check terrorism, and to have the law carried
out in Ireland as it is in England. Mr Parnell

1 Letter from Mr Bright to Mr Gladstone, July 4, 1886.

K
146 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

was not to be the Prime Minister. Such an
attitude involved the downfall of the Ministry.
Mr Gladstone, looking eagerly on, once more
perceived the signs of “ripeness.” Another con-—
version, the greatest of all, began to work in
his mind. In 1865 he had written to a friend:
“There have been two great deaths, or trans-
migrations of spirit, in my political existence.
One very slow, the breaking of ties with my
original party ; the other, very short and sharp,
the breaking of the tie with Oxford. There
will probably be a third, and no more.” There
is little doubt that when these words were
written Mr Gladstone had in his mind’s eye
the disestablishment of the English Church.
But as often as he has stretched out his hand
to do that work, he has faltered and drawn it
back. The sword had two edges. He kept so
dangerous a question in reserve. In 1885 the
third seal was to be opened, and opened in
_ Treland.

As to the extent of his new conversion, and
its momentous character, nothing need be said ;
as to the rapidity with which it was completed,
the evidence of two of Mr Gladstone’s former
Irish Policy, 1885-1886. - 147

 

colleagues—the ablest of all his colleagues—is
quite decisive. Mr Gladstone thought proper
to assert, after his capitulation to Mr Parnell,
that for fifteen years he had never spoken
against Home Rule. He had chosen this period.
of “new departure” with his usual dexterity ;
for just fifteen years before,’ he delivered a
speech at Aberdeen in which he vehemently
declared that Parliament had done all for Ire-
land that ought to be demanded, and that there
were no inequalities left between Ireland and
England, “ except that there are certain taxes
still remaining which are levied upon Scots-
men and Englishmen, and not levied upon Ire-
land.” He ridiculed the idea of breaking up
“the fabric of the United Parliament,’ and
asked, “ Can any sensible man, can any rational
man, suppose that at this time of day, in this
condition of the world, we are going to dis-
integrate the great capital institutions of the
country for the purpose of making ourselves
ridiculous in the sight of all mankind, and
crippling any power we possess for bestowing
benefits, through legislation, on the country to

1 On the 26th September 1871.
148 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

which we belong?” His argument was un-
answerable, and it is presumed that he adjudged
it to be so in 1886, for he made no attempt to
answer it. He merely said, in effect, “I have
not been opposed to Home Rule since I made
that speech.” He desired the nation to infer
that he had been in favour of Home Rule since
1871. But once again he stands convicted by
the hard facts. Lord Hartington has said : *+—

“We must assume, I think, that if Mr Gladstone has
never for fifteen years condemned the principle of Home
Rule, it was because he had given assent in his own mind
to that principle. That raised some rather serious ques-
tions. During those fifteen years Mr Gladstone has twice
been Prime Minister, and twice he has had much to do
with Irish policy and with Irish legislation. During the
first part of that period I myself had the honour of serv-
ing as Chief Secretary for Ireland in Mr Gladstone’s
Government. From 1870 to 1874 I filled that office,
and I think I can assert, without fear of contradiction,
that neither the Lord Lieutenant, Lord Spencer, nor
myself at that time had the slightest notion that Mr
Gladstone was favourably disposed to accept the prin-
ciple of Home Rule. It was my duty at that time, as
it has been the duty of many other Chief Secretaries,
to introduce a bill into the House of Commons for

1 Speech at Sheffield, June 29, 1886.
Irish Policy, 1885-1886. 149

 

amending the system of county government in Ireland.
I do not recollect that Mr Gladstone ever told us that
he considered that measure miserably inadequate to the
wants of Ireland.v Neither can I recollect that the Gov-
ernment of which he was the head, gave us much assist-
ance or support in Parliament in pressing forward and
carrying to a successful conclusion that measure, which
was at all events a small step in the direction of giving
greater self-government to Ireland. At that period I
was under the impression that I was perhaps more a
Home Ruler than Mr Gladstone was himself, for I
remember that it was my duty to prepare and to sub-
mit for the consideration of my colleagues a measure
—no doubt a small measure, but, I think, not an
unimportant measure—which would have been another
small step in the direction of Home Rule.”

He went on to remark that he could not
even get Mr Gladstone’s attention to this
question, and that when Mr Gladstone came
into power in 1880, he appointed Mr Forster
Irish Secretary—Mr Forster, who had always
opposed the Home Rule scheme. How Mr
Gladstone subsequently treated Mr Forster—
sacrificing him in order that he might conclude
the Kilmainham Treaty with Mr Parnell, and
leaving him to the vengeance of the “rebel ”
party—Lord Hartington did not describe, but
history will not be silent about it.
150 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

Mr Chamberlain’s statement to his constitu-
ents at Birmingham was equally emphatic :—

“T have said I will not refer to what Mr Gladstone
said a long while ago, but you know I was his colleague
from 1880 to 1885, and I can say this, that during the
whole of that time I had no intimation—I had not the
slightest conception—that Mr Gladstone had it in his
mind at any time to propose the creation of an indepen-
dent Parliament in Ireland. I will come even later than
that. You remember that in 1885 there were rumours
about his intentions, reports of statements made by his
son, Mr Herbert Gladstone, and at last there appeared in
the ‘Standard’ newspaper a distinct statement that Mr
Gladstone intended to propose a Parliament for Ireland.
What did he do? He contradicted the statement; he
caused a communication to be sent to the papers to say
that the statement was not an accurate representation of
his views, but that he supposed it was a speculation upon
them; and the ‘Daily News,’ the Liberal organ, took
advantage of this contradiction to write that Mr Glad-
stone had disposed for ever of the sinister design which
was imputed to him by his Tory opponents. These are
statements of fact; and what follows from it ?—that it is
perfectly evident that this idea of a separate Parliament
has only entered into Mr Gladstone’s mind within the
last few months. And I will undertake to say that until
it entered into his mind it had not suggested itself to one
in a thousand of ordinary Liberals.”

But it scarcely needed these. witnesses to
Irish Policy, 1885-1886. 151

 

disprove Mr Gladstone’s assertion, for he had
repeatedly, since 1871, denounced Mr Parnell
and his followers as men whose “ footsteps were
dogged by crime”; and in 1880 he had pas-
sionately declared in the House of Commons
that “her Majesty’s Government would be less
than children in the practice of the business of
the State and Parliament if they could be so
weak as to suppose it was possible to bring
the policy recommended by them to Parliament
into harmony with the objects which the hon.
member for Cork (Mr Parnell) is believed to
pursue.”* That was the very end which Mr
Gladstone set himself to accomplish in 1886.

The latter portion of Mr Chamberlain’s re-
marks relate to a series of incidents which have
already been briefly touched upon in these
pages, but which must now receive the fuller
attention they deserve.

As soon as it was seen that Mr Parnell was
master of the situation, and that he could make
Mr Gladstone Prime Minister at any moment,
subterranean communications were opened up.
between Hawarden Castle and the Parnellite —

1 Hansard, vol. ccliii. p. 1654,
152 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

camp. The chief agent was Mr Herbert Glad-
stone, one of the members for Leeds, who has
often been found useful in work of that peculiar
nature, which his distinguished father could not,
consistently with dignity, or even of decorum,
openly perform. Mr Herbert Gladstone was
fresh from a “campaign” of his own, and he
had boasted to the people of his inflexible in-
tention to drive “nails” into the “coffins” of
all who were his father’s enemies—that is to
say, of all who had presumed to criticise the
policy of Mr Gladstone the elder. Among the
doomed persons was a stanch old Radical, Mr
Peter Rylands, for whom, said Mr H. Gladstone,
“T have reserved the longest nail.” He further
avowed his purpose of driving it “ right through,”
so that Mr Rylands would be well “ pinned ” to
his coffin. But the people of Burnley refused
to have their representative thus “ laid out” by
the pious hands of young Mr Gladstone, and the
long nail was reserved for quite a different coffin.

Now, in the early days of December, the
nail-driver was seen to be in active communi-
cation with certain journalists and wire-pullers
of Leeds. He sent a message from Hawarden,
Irish Policy, 1885-1886. 153

 

in which he said, “If five-sixths of the Irish
people wish to have a Parliament in Dublin,
for the management of their own local affairs,
I say, in the name of justice and wisdom, let
them have it.’ These words did not attract
much attention at the time, for after all it was
only Mr Herbert Gladstone who uttered them ;
but there were some experienced observers,
familiar with the Gladstonian method of opera-
tions, who knew that when certain marionettes
move, an expert. “ old parliamentary hand ” must
be at work somewhere behind the curtain.
Events soon proved that there was only too
much ground for these suspicions. Whether
any signals were exchanged between the Par-
‘nellite leaders and Mr Gladstone himself, is not
yet known to the world. Some day, doubtless,
Mr Parnell, or one of his lieutenants, will tell
all that can be told, for they are not apt to
underrate the value of any “ revelations,” real
or imaginary, which they are able to make. It
is no secret that during the first session of 1886
daily communications were carried on between
Mr Gladstone and his Ministry on the one
hand, and Mr Parnell or his representatives on
154 Myr Gladstone: A Study.

 

the other. Nothing was more common, for
instance, than to see Sir William Harcourt—
the author of the “ironclad” Coercion Bill of
1882—in close consultation with the identical
men whom he had denounced as a “ cancerous
sore,” to be “cut out with the surgeon’s knife.”
Sir William Harcourt “took” conversion from
his chief, almost as easily as some other of the
_new Liberal “ leaders,” who went about boasting
that they had “ found salvation.”

That many other conferences were held prior
to the meeting of Parliament in 1886 is
probable; but that Mr Gladstone was always
in a position to assert that he had taken no
part in them is even more probable. No one
can allege that he has ever been guilty of
clumsiness or imprudence in delicate negotia-
tions of this character. Obviously, however,
it was necessary that the Parnellites should be
prepared to meet Mr Gladstone in a proper
spirit at the opening of the session. Therefore,
on the 17th December 1885, a communiqué
appeared in most of the papers to the effect
that Mr Gladstone had “formulated” a scheme
for Ireland, and that it included the following
Irish Policy, 1885-1886. 155

 

main provisions: (1) A separate Parliament in
Dublin; (2) the police to be handed over to
the Irish Parliament, subject to a “ guarantee ”
that they should not be used “as a cover and
protection for lawlessness ;” (3) the Crown to
be permitted to exercise a veto on the proceed-
ings of the Irish Parliament, but only “on the
advice of the Irish Ministry.” The statement
continued thus :—

“ Mr Gladstone is sanguine that this policy of settling —
the Irish question once for all will commend itself to the
majority of his party and to the English people, when
it is clearly understood that no other course can bring
real peace. If he is enabled to eject the Government on
this issue, he will have a large majority in the House of
Commons for his Irish Bill; and he believes that the
House of Lords, weighing the gravity of the situation,
will not reject it. Should there be a sufficient defection
of the moderate Liberals to encourage the Lords to throw
out the Bill, a dissolution would be inevitable; but, ex-
cept in the event of any serious explosion in Ireland that
would have the effect of exasperating the popular feeling
in England against the Irish, the country would in all
probability endorse Mr Gladstone’s policy, and give him
an unmistakable mandate to carry it into law.”

It was also mentioned that there was “ reason-
able expectation that both Lord Hartington and
156 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

Mr Goschen would come round to Mr Glad-
stone’s views,’ while Mr Chamberlain “could
not consistently oppose them.” Mr Gladstone
had made all his calculations, and they showed
as the general result that power was again
within his grasp. There was one contingency
which he did not take into account—namely,
that Lord Hartington and all the other Liberals
of great ability and of great influence in the
country would be swayed in their action by
patriotism rather than by thirst for office. In
the cleverest of schemes there is a weak point
somewhere, and this weak point in Mr Glad-
stone’s design involved him in ignominious
defeat and overthrow.

The manifesto of the 17th December spread
consternation in the Liberal ranks. As there
was no good purpose to be served by a prema-
ture alarm, and as it was thought advisable to
allow the “timid brethren” a little time to get
accustomed to the new policy, Mr Gladstone
made a short appearance upon the scene in
his own person. He did not repudiate the
manifesto, and declare that it was a fiction—
it is now absolutely certain that he was not
Irish Policy, 1885-1886. 157

 

able to deal with it in that way—but he tried
to produce the same effect in his usual adroit
manner. The statement in question was not,
he said, “an accurate expression of his views.”
Perhaps it was “a speculation upon them.” It
was so good a “speculation” that when the Bill
itself was introduced, it was almost impossible
to tell one from the other.

When the House of Commons met for busi-
ness on the 21st of January, it was quite clear
to all who could look beneath the surface that
the preliminaries of another treaty had been
arranged between Mr Gladstone and Mr Parnell.
In speaking on the Address, Mr Gladstone,
though using all the artifice of which he is
master, was obliged to let fall certain expres-
sions which showed that he had enlisted in the
service of the “uncrowned king.” He turned
.almost wholly to the Parnellites when he
spoke; his manner towards them was studi-
ously deferential, almost obsequious; they ap-
plauded him till the chamber rang with their
shouts. He did not want to be “ controver-
sial””; he invoked the “ blessing” which usually '
ornaments his speeches. But there was some-
158 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

thing much more significant than all this, In
the Royal Speech, an allusion was made to the
Act of Union with Ireland as a “ fundamental
law.” Mr Gladstone saw his opportunity in
that phrase. He turned again to the Irish
benches, and declared that the phrase “ funda-
mental law” was-not known to the British
Constitution, although he might have remem-
bered those very words applied to the Act of
Union, in almost every speech on Ireland
which had been made by English Ministers,
from the days of Pitt downwards. His object,
however, was accomplished. The Parnellites
understood him, and an announcement—not
without significance to the discerning—at once
appeared in the newspapers: “Mr Gladstone
has not taken a house in London this season.”
In other words, he had made up his mind to
go to Downing Street.

So far, the scheme worked precisely as Mr
Gladstone had anticipated. Mr Jesse Collings
placed on the paper an amendment which soon
came to be known as the “three acres and a
cow trick.” It was, of course, pressed forward
before the Government had time to produce
Irish Policy, 1885-1886. 159

 

Irish measures, or any other measures. Mr
Gladstone had over and over again protested
that he was anxious to give Lord Salisbury an
opportunity of suggesting legislation for Ireland.
But he could not wait. “He took the very
earliest opportunity,” said Lord Hartington
afterwards—and Lord Hartington’s evidence on
this point is an overwhelming refutation of Mr
Gladstone’s professions—“ of ejecting the Con-
servative party from office.” An official whip
was issued—certainly not without the know-
ledge of the leader of the party—for the support
of Mr Jesse Collings’s amendment. Mr Glad-
stone made a speech in its favour; he energeti-
cally called upon his party to support it, he
voted for it, and by its means he was made
Prime Minister of England. He afterwards
treated Mr Collings as he had treated many an
instrument of much greater importance. He
not only turned his back upon him, but prac-
tically denied all knowledge of him and his
amendment. “There is a certain Mr Jesse Col-
lings,” he said;? “JI believe he is the man who

1 Speech in the House of Commons, 9th April 1886.
2 Speech at Liverpool, June 28, 1886. _
160 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

promised the three acres anda cow. J have never
shared in that promise.” The defeat of Lord
Salisbury’s Government, on the 26th of January,
was expressly upon Mr Collings’s amendment.
Consider this fact in connection with Mr Glad-
stone’s statement at Liverpool, and then let the
psychologist decide, if he can, whether it is
memory which is absent from Mr Gladstone’s
organisation, or some moral quality.

Mr Parnell’s share in the transaction was
completed, and Mr Gladstone was once more in
office. He rendered what was required of him
in return by producing the “Home Rule” Bill
on the 8th of April, and the “ Land Purchase
Bill” on the 16th. As for the latter Bill, he
declared that it was an “obligation of honour
and of policy that Great Britain should under-
take it.”* It was to be “adopted under serious
convictions both of honour and of duty.” There
is a strong probability, founded upon his past
history, that any step or measure which Mr
Gladstone urges upon the country as an obliga-
tion of honour and of duty, will sooner or later
be cast under his feet and trampled upon. So

1 Speech on introducing the Bill, April 16, 1886.
Irish Policy, 1885-1886. 161

 

it happened with the Land Purchase Bill.
Under the pretext that the landlords had re-
jected it—although they never had the oppor-
tunity of declaring an opinion upon it, one
way or the other—Mr Gladstone abandoned it
with every sign of aversion and contempt. For
so much did the “ obligation of honour” count
with him in the last stage of his life.

The two bills as originally presented to the
House gave a separate Parliament to Ireland,
with an independent Executive. The constab-
wary, which had remained loyal to the Crown
through so many periods of trial and danger,

- were ultimately to be placed at the mercy of
Mr Parnell and his followers. On this point,
some of Mr Gladstone’s supporters attempted
to raise confusion, but his own language was
unmistakable.’ “One thing I must say. We
have no desire to exempt the police of Ireland
in its final form from the ultimate control of the
legislative body—(Home Rule cheers).” The
Irish constabulary were to be betrayed, like Mr
Gladstone’s early colleagues, like Lord Palmer-
ston in the midst of the Crimean war, like the

1 Speech in House of Commons, April 8, 1886.
L
162 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

loyal colonists in South Africa, like the devoted
allies who fought for us in Egypt, like the heroic
soldier who went out to rescue a falling Ministry
from shame and dishonour, and who had his
memory assailed, by the man he went to save,
for rashness and foolhardiness. Such a strain _
upon the fidelity of the Irish constabulary might
have produced a terrible disaster, if the force had
been composed of less resolute men, or if there
had not been a hope in the background that the
English people would interfere to prevent so
great a wrong.

The judges, the magistrates, the civil ser-
vice—all were to be sent adrift by the Nation-
alists; and Ulster, and the Protestants gener-
ally, were to be placed under the authority of
the very men they had most reason to dread.
But this was not all) The Parnellites, and the
party in America, upon which they depend for
support, have never pretended that they want
anything but separation. They consented to
take the Irish Parliament, because they saw
that, when they obtained that, separation would
follow as a matter of course. Mr Parnell pro-
fessed to close with Mr Gladstone’s proposal,
Irish Policy, 1885-1886. 163

 

though with many reservations; but he had no
power to bind his party. He was candid enough
to admit this in a speech at Cork on the 21st
of January 1886 :-—

“We cannot, under the British Constitution, ask for
more than the restitution of Grattan’s Parliament. But
no man has the right to fix the boundary to the march of
a nation; no man has a right to say to his country,
‘Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther ;’ and we have
never attempted to fix the ne plus ultra to the progress
of Ireland’s nationhood, and we never shall. While we
struggle to-day for that which may seem possible for us
with our combination, we must struggle for it with the
proud consciousness that we shall not do anything to
hinder or prevent better men who may come after us
from gaining better things than those for which we now
contend.” :

A plainer warning could not have been given
that “final” settlements were not in Mr Glad-
stone’s power to make, or in Mr Parnell’s to accept.
But Mr Gladstone invariably sees things as he
would have them to be, not as they are.\/ He
was quite satisfied that he had at length reached
the limit of concession. Yet Patrick Ford, the
Trish leader in America, from whom upwards of
$1,000,000 has been received by Mr Parnell
164 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

for the “war on England,” told him clearly
that he was once more the dupe of his own
imagination. “A careful examination of the
text of Mr Gladstone’s bill,” wrote Mr Ford in
his journal,’ shows “that it is a scheme which
is not, in its present form, workable, and if put
in operation somehow, it would originate strong
separatist tendencies in Ireland. If the British-
ers can stand this, we can.” Mr Michael
Davitt, the founder of the Fenian organisation,
echoed the suggestive hints of Mr Parnell.
The bill might be accepted for a time, but
“there is no finality in human progress, nor
can limits be arbitrarily set to the onward

march of a nation.” ?

Against the warnings—
thinly disguised, or openly uttered—of Parnell,
Patrick Ford, and Michael Davitt, Mr Glad-
stone had nothing better to urge than his old
exploded and worn-out prophecies, that if the
nation put implicit confidence in him, all would
be well.

But the bills were not passed. Upon the
rejection of the first, Mr Gladstone angrily

1 The Irish World, May 2, 1886.
2 Speech at Chicago, August 14, 1886.
Lrish Policy, 1885-1886. 165

 

appealed to the country. He shifted his ground
warily. He declared that the bills were dead,
and upon that representation a certain propor-
tion of his followers escaped defeat. They pro-
tested, each more loudly than the other, that
the whole scheme was not only dead but buried ;
and not a few managed to get re-elected ex-
pressly on that assurance, thongh, in most cases,
with diminished majorities. ¥ Among the public
men who refused to hoodwink their constitu-
ents, or to be hoodwinked themselves, was Mr
Bright.

“We are asked,” he remarked in his address,! “ to
pledge ourselves to a ‘principle,’ which may be inno-
cent or most dangerous as it may be explained or in-
sisted on in the future bills. I cannot give any such
pledge. The experience of the past three months does
not increase my confidence in the wisdom of the Ad-
ministration or of their policy with respect to the future
government of Ireland. We have before us a ‘prin-
ciple’ which is not explained by its author or its sup-
porters, and I will not pledge myself to what I do not
understand or to what I cannot approve.”

And he added these pregnant words :—

“T cannot trust the peace and interests of Ireland,

1 Dated Rochdale, June 24th [1886].
166 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

north and south, to the Irish parliamentary party, to
whom the Government now propose to: make a general
surrender. My six years’ experience of them, of their
language in the House of Commons and of their deeds
in Ireland, makes it impossible for me to consent to
hand over to them the property and the rights of five
millions of the Queen’s subjects, our countrymen, in
Ireland. At least two millions of them are as loyal as
the population of your town, and I will be no party to a
measure which will thrust them from the generosity and
justice of the United and Imperial Parliament... . It
is because I am still the friend of Ireland that I refuse
to"give her up to those to whom the recently defeated
bill would have subjected her.”

Other candidates were less scrupulous; but
after making all allowances, the rout was
tolerably complete. The great Liberal party
had gone into the election 333 strong; it
came out with only 190 Gladstonians and 77
Liberal Unionists. The Conservatives went in
with 250 members, and came out with 317.
Then Mr Gladstone struck off in another
direction.

Once or twice already after a defeat, he had
endeavoured to stir up sectional strife between
various portions of the country—setting Scot-
land against England, and Wales against Scot-
Lrish Policy, 1885-1886. 167

 

land, and Ireland against them all, or all against
her, just as circumstances seemed to suggest.
He now resumed this work in a more scientific
manner. He had led up to it in introducing
his Home Rule Bill, on the 8th of April 1886.
Standing in the House of Commons as Prime
Minister of England, he told the Irish people
that they were being governed by foreigners.
This, indeed, was a favourite expedient with him.
Once, in speaking to a Scotch audience,! he made
an allusion to the administration of a person’s
effects, and he immediately added, “I beg par-
don for using a foreign term— you use the
term inventory.” This, however, was but a
gentle approach to the subject. He took a
bolder flight when he declared in the House of
Commons,” “ that law is discredited in Ireland
upon this ground especially, that it comes to
the people of that country with a foreign aspect
and in a foreign garb.” And again, on the
10th of May, he said, “ Why, sir, we have to
deal with the greatest of all causes that can
solicit the attention of a Legislature—namely,
the fact that we have to treat the case of a

1 September 1, 1884. 2 April 8, 1886.
168 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

country where the radical sentiment of the
people is not in sympathy with the law.”
Language of this kind had frequently been
heard from the lips of the leaders of Irish
rebellion, and from moonlighters and cattle-
mutilators ; but the chief Minister of the Crown
had never before used anything distantly resem-
. bling it.

Throughout the general election which Mr
Gladstone precipitated upon the country in
June 1886—for a pilébiscite had by this time
become as dear to him as ever it was to
Louis Napoleon—he incessantly laboured to set
the “masses” against the “classes,” and to let
loose upon the land the evil spirits of rancour,
jealousy, and hatred. At Liverpool, on the
29th of June, he said: “On this question, I
am sorry to say, there is class against the mass,
classes against the nation. Will the nation
show enough unity and determination to over-
bear constitutionally and at the poll that resist-
ance of the classes? It is very material that
we should consider which is likely to be right.
Are we likely to be right? Are the classes
ever right when they differ from the nation?”
Irish Policy, 1885-1886. 169

 

To Scotland and Wales he practically said,
“Help Ireland to get her Parliament, and after-
wards she will help each of you to one of your
own.” Looking on at all this, a well-known
Radical came forward and made this public
protest :—

“‘T have seen the American demagogue at his worst,
and when the ordinary passions of faction were further
inflamed by the fury of civil war; but never did I wit-
ness so deliberate an attempt to set class against class
and to poison the heart of society for a party purpose,
as has been made by the Prime Minister in the present
campaign.” 1 :

Fortunately for England, the honesty and
the common-sense of the mass of her work-
ing classes were too deeply seated to be over-
turned, even by the man in whom so many of
them had placed implicit trust. They rejected
Mr Gladstone’s proffered bribes, and pronounced
emphatically against the destruction of the
ancient Parliament of the country, and the
division of the United Kingdom into discordant
sections. When other Ministers have appealed

1 Professor Goldwin Smith—letter to the ‘Times,’ July 9,
1886.
170 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

to the country, they have usually abided by the
decision. Mr Gladstone, after his defeat, simply
strove harder than before to promote disunion
and to give support and encouragement to the
Irish disloyalists. “I am glad,” he wrote to a
Scotch correspondent,’ “to see that in the mani-
festo you have taken a step towards the free
and full consideration in and by Scotland how
far the present Parliament and Governmental
arrangements are suited to her wants.” In his
pamphlet on ‘The Irish Question,’ published
in August, he had scattered the seed far and
wide :—

“ What is not less likely, and even more important, is
that the sense of nationality, both in Scotland and in
Wales, set astir by this controversy, may take a wider
range than heretofore. Wales, and even Scotland, may
ask herself, whether the present system of intrusting all
their affairs to the handling of a body, English in such
overwhelming proportion as the present Parliament is,
and must probably always be, is an adjustment which
does the fullest justice to what is separate and specific in
their several populations. Scotland, which for a century
and a quarter after her Union was refused all taste of

1 Letter, dated Hawarden Castle, September 29, 1886.
Trish Policy, 1885-3886. 171

 

a real representative system, may begin to ask herself
whether, if at the first she felt something of an unreason-
ing antipathy, she may not latterly have drifted into a
superstitious worship, or at least an irreflective acqui-
escence.”

On the 4th of December 1886, he wrote
to another correspondent in Scotland: “When
Scotland has taken hold of an idea she does
not readily give it up. She lost no time
in making up her mind to the policy to be
pursued towards Ireland. I anticipate that
she will press for it more and more, and I shall
be glad if it should set her on obtaining for
herself some well-considered measure appro-
priate to her case a needs, should she find
occasion so to do.”V Thus, in every way that
could be devised, he laboured as vigorously to
break up the empire as Pitt, Canning, Palmer-
ston, and Beaconsfield, had striven to consolidate
and strengthen it. {The results were soon vis-
ible in all parts of our possessions. In India the
native agitators convoked “mass meetings” to
demand “home rule” for their country. What
was good for Ireland was good also for them,
and Mr Gladstone’s conditions met their case,
172 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

for law undoubtedly came to them in a “foreign
garb.” In Scotland and Wales, Home Rule
meetings were held, and a separate Parliament
was demanded. The Parnellite party had a
great reception in Mr Gladstone’s house at
Hawarden, were /féted and flattered to their
hearts’ content, and had a speech of five col-
umns in length delivered to them. Mr Bright’s
comment upon these proceedings was guarded,
but sufficient -—

“The course taken by Mr Gladstone since the close of
the session has astonished me, and has given me great
trouble. His speaking and writing, and especially his
reception of the Irish deputation, seem to me to have
driven him so far in a wrong course that we can have no
hope of any more moderate policy from him. . . . At
this moment his allies in Ireland—Dillon, O’Brien, and
Co.—are driving matters to an extremity, and he and
Mr Parnell say not a word to arrest or lessen the calamity
which I fear is impending.” }

On the 14th of December, Mr Osborne
Morgan told a Welsh meeting® that Wales did
not mean to be left out in the cold. “It was

1 Letter read by Lord Hartington at the Liberal Unionist

Meeting, December 7, 1886.
2 At Rhyl—‘ Times’ report, December 15, 1886.
Irish Policy, 1885-1886. 173

 

said that the Welsh were not a nation. There
was only one way of meeting that assertion,
by showing that they were one.” It seemed
probable that if Mr Gladstone lived ten years
longer, he would do his best to turn Canning’s
sneer into a reality, and restore the Heptarchy.

Concurrently with the Disunion agitation, he
managed, on the very first day of the second
session of 1886 (August 19th), to throw out
the signal for a new war against rent. He acted
cautiously, but the Irish saw what he meant.
They are not slow to take a hint. He dis-
cussed the question of rent; but, as a matter of
course, he “expressed no opinion.” He merely
pointed out that the crop mght fail, and then
—well, then, said Mr Gladstone, “we know the
opinion that prevails in Ireland.” “I give no
opinion,” he added, but “it is the opinion of
the large portion of the [Irish] community, that
in consequence of the changes in agricultural
values, there is a difficulty of maintaining the
judicial rents ”"—those judicial rents which Mr
Gladstone solemnly pledged himself should be
unaltered and unalterable for fifteen years.
Once more all his promises, all his guarantees,
174 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

all his appeals to honour, and even to honesty,
were flung behind his back, and he advanced
hand in hand with Mr Parnell on the “march
to rapine and dismemberment of the empire.”
Mr Parnell needed no further incitement to
goon. He produced a bill for reducing rents
50 per cent, and it was rejected; no Legisla-
ture could possibly have accepted it, save a Legis-
lature such as that which Governor Moses and
a horde of negro banditti set up in South Caro-
lina after the war. On the 24th of August,
Mr Gladstone, replying in the House of Com-
mons to the assertion that he had become the
leader of the Nationalists, said he was “de-
lighted to have had any share or part in
encouraging the Irish people to hope for the
realisation of their just claims,” and then he let
fall another hint, which was welcomed with
shouts of joy by the Irish party. “In Ireland,”
he said, “law is not administered in an Irish
spirit. ) With that state of facts staring you
in the face, we may teach legality, and we shall
teach it to the best of our power, but you can-
not give security for social order in Ireland.”
And this was said to men, and of men, who
Irish Policy, 1885-1886. 175

 

had declared not long before in Chicago that
“the policy of Ireland would soon be one of
fight,” and that it was their duty to “make the
government of Ireland by England an impossi-
bility.” What construction but one could such
men as these put upon Mr Gladstone’s words ?
Out of those words there sprang the “ Plan of
Campaign,” under which the Irish tenantry were
persuaded or compelled to pay such a portion of
their rent as they chose to agents of the National
League, who undertook to make the landlords
settle on the tenants’ terms, or to keep them
out of their rent altogether. There was no
question of ability or inability to pay. Pro-
clamation was made that nobody was obliged
to pay, and it was seen that Mr Gladstone and
his followers stood ready, if not openly to sup-
port that programme, at least to oppose the
Goapertient in any attempt to interfere with
it.
of rent, the same in character, though not in

A general conspiracy against the payment

form, was energetically denounced by Mr
Gladstone in 1881 as “confiscation,” “ spoli-
ation,” and “rapine,” an attack upon the
“ foundations of society.” He called upon “all
176 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

orders and degrees of men in these two king-
doms——in these three kingdoms—to support the
Government.” But in 1886 he was in inti-
mate and cordial alliance with the conspirators.
Indirectly, he allowed a few sentences to ap-
pear in his name mildly deprecating “ vio-
lence,” but he had not a syllable to utter in
defence of the law, or in condemnation of the
“Plan of Campaign.” His “supple mediums ”
spoke of resistance to the law as the only
means of forcing the Government to comply
with their demands—an amplification of the
doctrine laid down by their chief concerning
the Clerkenwell explosion. Mr Morley, the
consistent advocate of the principle of unlimited
concession to threats, reminded the Irish agi-
tators that “the Parliament at Westminster ”
always “failed to do its duty unless the pres-
sure put upon it was such that it could not be
be resisted.”? . “Ireland,” continued the advo-
cate of French atheism and French anarchists,
“has got nothing, except by making her re-
sistance felt.” This was said at a time when

1Speech at Hawick, November 30, 1886—‘Times,’ De-
cember 1st.
Irish Policy, 1885-1886. 177

 

the Irish agitators were inciting the people to
break the law by refusing en masse to pay their
debts. Moreover, Mr Morley had come fresh
from Hawarden, with a special message from
Mr Gladstone, and with the report that the
Liberal leader was in “good condition.” Per-
haps. Mr Gladstone might have preferred a very
different messenger ; but when Lord Hartington,
Mr Chamberlain, Mr Bright, Sir Henry James,
and all who could carry weight in the country
had been driven from his side, he was compelled
to fall back on such substitutes as he could
find, and they did their work according to their
means.

The new “germs” carried by Mr Morley
from Hawarden were not long dormant. “Make
your resistance felt ’—-such was the “ message of
peace.” Three or four days afterwards the news-
papers had to report the outbreak of a more
dangerous spirit than ever in Ireland. “A
combined and simultaneous attack is made
upon the Government at different points.
There can be no doubt that, in pursuance of
a common purpose, a determined and persist-
ent effort is made to increase and multiply the

M
178 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

embarrassments of the Executive, and to show
that there is really no authority in Ireland, and
virtually no law but that of the League.”?
On the 5th of December, Mr Dillon boasted
that the National League would soon have the
government of Ireland entirely in their own
hands. “The time is at hand,” he said,? “when
the police will be our servants, when the Irish
police will be taking their pay from Mr Parnell,
when he will be Prime Minister of Ireland,”
and then “we will remember them.” “ We are
not the men to forget who stood up against the
people.” Mr Gladstone’s mouthpiece had spoken
at Hawick, and this was the echo. Disorder
was again let loose. In 1868, when referring
to Fenian outrages, Mr Gladstone was disposed
to trace them to the hand of Providence.
“These painful and horrible manifestations,”
he said, “may perhaps, in the merciful designs
of Providence—without in the slightest degree
acquitting the authors of responsibility—have
been intended to invite this nation to greater

1 The ‘Times,’ December 4, 1886.
? Speech at Castlereagh, County Roscommon, December 5,
1886.
Irish Policy, 1885-1886. 179

 

search of its own heart and spirit and con-
science with reference to the condition of Ire-
land, and the legislation affecting that country.”
Mr Gladstone has often undertaken to interpret
the will of Providence to the English people,
but he has seldom done it through so strange
a channel as Mr Morley, who once thought that
he had dethroned the Almighty by spelling his
name with a little g, and whose views concern-
ing Providence are thus defined: “It really
seems to be no more criminal to produce chil-
dren with the deliberate intention of abandon-
ing them to public charity, as Rousseau did, than
it is to produce them in deliberate reliance on
the besotted maxim that he who sends mouths
will send meat, or any other of the spurious
saws which make providence do duty for self-
control, and add to the gratification of physi-
cal appetite the grotesque luxury of religious

unction.” ”

Working men and women, whose
anxieties are sometimes lightened by the humble

hope that the Supreme Power will prosper their

1 God is uniformly spelt god throughout the Essay on
Rousseau (2 vols., 1873).
2 Rousseau, by John Morley, vol. i. pp. 124, 125.
180 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

efforts to maintain their children, may learn
from Mr Morley the crime of which they have
been guilty. That Mr Gladstone should have
selected a man to assist him in expounding the
will of Providence who has done everything
a public writer can do to insult Christians and
the Christian religion, who holds that there is no
God, no future life, no hope beyond this world,
and “that the black and horrible grave is in-
deed the end of our communion [with friends],

and that we know each other no more” 4

—this is
in fine contrast with the principle once laid down
by Mr Gladstone himself, that “men who have
no belief in the divine revelation are not the
men to govern this nation, be they Whigs or
Radicals; and certainly such Liberalism affords
a tolerable indication of that policy by which.
they would thus tear up by the roots all that is
dear to us, and all that makes life valuable.” ?
Such, then, was the situation in Ireland, and
such were the fruits of Mr Gladstone’s policy,
at the close of 1886. The smaller land- .
owners had been nearly or wholly ruined, hun-
dreds of lives had been sacrificed, the advance

1 Rousseau, vol. i. p. 226. 2 Election Address, 1837N
Irish Policy, 1885-1886. 181

 

of the country towards prosperity was com-
pletely checked, and the whole problem of the
government of Ireland had so enormously in-
creased in difficulty, that it had become, if it
never was so before, almost hopeless in its char-
acter. The farmers and other tenants had gained
nothing, for their debts had steadily been roll-
ing up; and some day they must be paid, or the
holders of farms will have to go. The only
persons who are better off than they were are
the leaders of the National League, and the
demagogues who act as their emissaries. In
various parts of Ireland, even if a man has
honestly desired to pay his rent, he has not
dared to pay it, or has lost his life. The fol-
lowing extracts from two letters—two out of
hundreds that have been published—set forth,
in homely and pathetic language, the results of
the “healing measures” of the last eighteen
years :1—
[June 10, 1886.]

“Honrp..Sir,—I don’t know how to tell you the

cruel murder of my poor decent Father. . . . When those

1 These letters were given by the ‘Times’ special corre-
spondent,—‘‘ Letters from Ireland,” No. 7, October 15, 1886.
182 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

wretches came in they asked for him; he got out of
bed and said, ‘Men, what have I done.’ One said,
‘Come on your knees ; did you not bring us this way
before?’ . . . One of them asked him outside the door,
that he wanted a word with him; my mother and I
bawled out that he would not. She ran between my
poor Father and the moonlights; one of them put the
gun to her breast; she said, ‘Let me go for the holy
water.’ At the same time another moonlight had a gun
pointed towards me, and told me get into the room,
He said, ‘Go once, go twice, go the third time ;’ then I
ran, and he fired the shot. I can’t tell you any more,
but he died in my arms.” :

The second letter was written in September
1886. This, also, tells its own piteous tale :-—

“Honrp. S1r,—This sorreful letter contains a sad
tragedy concerning my murdered husband, who was
waylaid and killed by —— son of —— heare in broad
daylight not much more than one quarter of a mile
from his sorreful home on Tuesday last I am sertin you
have a full account of it from the publick papers the
caus of his murder is this he had promised your Honer
to pay rent in July there was a few pounds he had lent
his brother previous to this and in order to keep his
word with you he went to his brother’s house for this
money which he did receive and was found in his
pocket after being murdered thease words you will
find to be correct from the newspapers after the inqure -
which will taek place on next week. Now it is what I
Irish Policy, 1885-1886. 183

 

want from your Honer’s kind consideration tack in to
account the afful trial God has showered uppon me and
I will ask you for a little further indulgence as the most
of the money the he had for the rent went to pay his
funeral expence I do expect to be able to pay after a
little time as there is nothing from this forward so much
before me as to have my rent paid.”

When the time comes to make up the final
account of Mr Gladstone’s services to his country,
let not these eloquent tributes to his work in
Treland be forgotten.
VI.

FINANCIAL POLICY
VI.

FINANCIAL POLICY.

WHEN it is alleged, as at times it still is, though
less frequently than in former years, that Mr
Gladstone is the greatest financier of this or any
other age, every man is entitled to ask on what
grounds the claim is supported? The same
tests by which we endeavour to form an estimate
of Mr Gladstone’s services as a statesman, must
be applied to his work as a financier. What
has he done? ‘What have been the general
results of his policy? If it can be shown that
his estimates, in most instances, proved to be
utterly mistaken or erroneous, that his Budgets
were remarkable chiefly for the number of
glittering illusions which were scattered over
them, and that he was invariably one of the
most extravagant and imprudent of English
188 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

Ministers, it must be admitted that the nation
has little cause for gratitude in reviewing his
achievements as Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Let us, then, appeal to the evidence of facts, by
which Mr Gladstone, like commoner men, must
submit to be judged.

It will be found, upon examination, that Mr
Gladstone’s expedients for raising revenue have
been very simple, and in their way very effec-
tive: (1) to throw increasing burdens upon the
landed interest-; (2) to make the income-tax
furnish the wherewithal for his surplus the
following year. Both these expedients may be
defended on various grounds. It must, how-
ever, be pointed out that they are not in the
nature of brilliant discoveries. The first has
always been advocated by the socialists, from
St Simon to Henry George; but it cannot be
said that its soundness has been proved in this
country, where agriculture is a declining in-
dustry, and where the losses in land have been
estimated to amount to £500,000,000 within
the last few years. Sir James Caird has stated
that he estimates “the total loss to the landed
interest ””— including landlords, tenants, and
Financial Policy, 189

 

labourers—‘“ in spendable income for the last
year (1885) at £42,800,000.”* With regard
to the income-tax, it requires no extraordinary
genius to provide a surplus if the widest lati-
tude is allowed for the free and unrestrained
exercise of this despotic instrument. But we
have to remember that no one has condemned
the income-tax more unsparingly than Mr
Gladstone. Twice at least he has promised to
abolish it; and it almost follows from these
statements that no one has had more frequent
or more unjustifiable resort to it.

Mr: Gladstone borrowed his method of finance
from Sir Robert Peel, but the pupil surpassed
the master in boldness and dexterity. The
main theory underlying the system was this—
if you take off taxes on articles used by the
bulk of the people, they will not complain of
an increase in the income-tax; those upon
whom the special tax falls will be compelled to
pay, and as they belong to the class which does
not organise street processions or get up riots,
the revenue will flow in, and the Government

1 Evidence before the Royal Commission on Trade, Second
Report, p. 296.
190 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

will have an easy existence. Sir Robert Peel,
in 1842, followed this short and summary way
of making a surplus. Mr Gladstone introduced
into his first Budget, in 1853, an elaborate
panegyric on the income-tax, which he intended
to serve as his sheet-anchor. Sir Robert Peel
promised that the tax should be merely tempo- .
rary in its duration; Mr Gladstone followed in
his steps. He invented nothing; he merely
carried on an experiment which others had be-
gun. But he applied it to conditions of trade
and society which Sir Robert Peel never for a
moment contemplated, and he pushed it to an
extremity which the original designer would
most certainly have condemned A fiscal
weapon may be very good in the hands of the
man who fashioned it, and for a certain time;
but it does not follow that anybody and every-
body will be able to make a wise use of it, for
all ages to come.

Peel borrowed from Pitt, and Gladstone from
Peel, but the inequality and the injustice of the

1 The financial speeches of Sir Robert Peel, and many ex-
pressions in his ‘Memoirs’ and his letters (vide the ‘ Croker
' Papers’), contain overwhelming proof in support of this
conclusion,
Financial Policy. 191

 

income-tax were not fully realised until Mr Glad-
stone determined to make it applicable to times
of peace as well as of war. It added much to the
difficulties and hardships which have pressed so
severely of late years upon tradesmen, clerks,
and the poorer classes of professional men.
Not only are their slender means much reduced,
but they are continually exposed to the incon-
venience and annoyance of having to produce
their books, and reveal the whole state of their
affairs, before assessors who may be, and often
are, their neighbours and rivals in business.
Everything must be disclosed, even although
the disclosure of falling profits and declining
trade may sometimes inflict the utmost injury
upon the man required to make it. The pro-
ceedings before assessors are, indeed, supposed
to be private, but most people know or have
heard of instances in which privacy was not
maintained much longer than four-and-twenty
hours. It is not uncommon for persons who
deem it cheaper and better to submit to extor-
tion rather than reveal their diminished pros-
perity, to pay on assessments higher than their
real incomes. Mr Gladstone has always reasoned
192 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

and acted as if the tax fell exclusively upon
the rich—upon those well able to bear it. But
no one is much poorer than the man of small
income who endeavours to bring up his family
respectably, whose receipts are uncertain, and
who has many claims upon his earnings or
profits. To such a man the income-tax is a
scorpion’s whip, and Mr Gladstone has applied
it without pity. There were formerly many
light duties which no one felt, and which
therefore could not be looked upon in the
nature of a hardship. Mr Gladstone took im-
mense credit to himself for sweeping them
away; but he did not compensate for their loss
by economy in the administration of govern-
ment—on the contrary, his expenditure has
always been on the most lavish scale. He
simply increased the weight and pressure of
taxation while going through the form of light-
ening it. “You shall not pay,” he said in
effect, “any tax on pepper or on artificial
flowers; but I will put my hand in your
pocket, and take out 6d., or it may be 1s,
in the £ on all you earn.” It is as Lord
Carnarvon said in 1862—“ Whereas formerly
Financial Policy. 193

 

there existed many sources of taxation, collected
from many quarters, and affecting numerous
classes, yet crushing none, and expanding with
the growth and prosperity of the country, there
was now substituted for this system one iron
and despotic rule, which, in the very nature of
things, must be unequal, and which was gen-
erally oppressive and unjust in its character.”
This “mighty engine,” as Mr Gladstone
called it in 1853, has been set in action by
him, without mercy, whenever he has found it
necessary to replenish an exhausted exchequer,
or to find the means for making a great show
of reducing taxation. It enabled him to pro-
duce a surplus, and at the same time to dazzle
all beholders by playing with a number of other
and smaller taxes, much as a conjuror tosses
balls in the air. People looked on at his per-
formances with amazement. It became the
fashion to go down to the House on a Budget
night. Solid results of financial ability were
not looked for— it was a grand display of
rhetorical fireworks. The smallest detail fur-
nished matter for at least half an hour. The
greater part of an evening was occupied with
N

47
194 Myr Gladstone: A Study.

 

“marvellous effects” of oratory, which nobody
stopped to analyse, and which nobody under-
: stood. “Syllables govern the world,” said John
~ Selden, and no one has ever placed more con-
fidence in the apothegm than Mr Gladstone.
Sometimes he kept back the business part of
his Budget till the very last, and then it was
found that it all might have been explained in
five minutes. But it did not become an orator
to deal with a matter of business in a business-
like spirit. There must bea prodigious pouring
out of words, a thrilling of the heart, a “ be-
numbing” of the intellect. The public had
gathered for a great spectacle, and they had to be
gratified. In 1862, Lord Overstone, an emi-
nently practical man,’ in referring to Mr Glad-
stone’s financial policy, remarked that “the
subject had been enveloped with so much in-
genious rhetoric, and such a blaze of delusive
eloquence, that he did not believe the plain
simple facts of the case were really understood
by the public.” He also told the country that

1Tt may be necessary to remind some readers that Lord
Overstone was Mr Samuel Jones Lloyd, the well-known
banker—a Liberal.
Financial Policy. 195

 

“he could not conceal his conviction—a convic-
tion which was, he believed, shared by many
persons of experience on the subject—that the
management of the national finance during the
last two years’ had been of a very perilous char-
acter, and had led to results neither satisfactory

72 But “experience,” even in this

nor safe.
practical country, seems to count for little
against oratory. “Delusive eloquence” carried
the day. Yet Lord Overstone’s criticisms were
thoroughly just at the time, and it may be
doubted whether, from that day to this, the
“simple facts” have been grasped by the people.

Mr Gladstone’s first Budget was, as we have
said, produced in 1853. It was a sort of
fairy palace, all gilt and splendour—and dis-
appointment. But it took England by storm,
and its author enjoyed a great reputation for
years by virtue of it. Let anybody examine
it now in the light of experience, and it will at
once be seen that there never was a mass of
greater fallacies and blunders produced before

1 During which Mr Gladstone had been Chancellor of the

Exchequer.
2 Speech in the House of Lords, May 80, 1862.
196 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

a civilised community. The chief and most
original feature of the Budget was the succes-
sion-tax, from which Mr Gladstone bade the
world to expect the most startling results.
What it was to do was thus described by him-
self :‘—

“T have no objection, as far as I am able, to state the
results of my investigation as to future years, and I think
I do not exaggerate when I say that this tax, if it is
adopted by the Committee, while it will add £500,000
to the income of the present year 1853-54, will add a
further increase of £700,000 to the year 1854-55, £400,000
more to the year 1855-56, and £400,000 more to the year
1856-57, making a total addition to the permanent tax-
ation of the country of not less than £2,000,000 per
annum, And this, I must remind the Committee, is a
tax which will leave wholly untouched the intelligence
and skill of the country. It is a tax that gives the relief,
and more than the relief, that you aim at by the re-
construction of the income-tax, but does it without
the danger which would necessarily attend that re-
construction.”

Two millions a-year were thus to be added to
the permanent resources of the country. In the
true spirit of a dreamer he began at once to
dispose of this money. The income-tax was to

1 In introducing the Budget, April 18, 1853.
Financial Policy. 197

 

be gradually lowered, and in 1860 it was to
cease altogether. It could not, he said, be re-
tained “as a portion of the permanent and
ordinary finance of the country.” It might
be called into requisition “when the hand of
violence is let loose, and when whole plains
are besmeared with carnage ”—in plain English,
in time of war. But, he said, “my own opinion
is decidedly against the perpetuity of the tax as
a permanent ordinary portion of our finances.”
He summed the matter up as follows :—

“Our proposition, then, so far as it merely regards the
income-tax, is this. We propose to renew it for two
years from April 1853, at the rate of 7d. in the pound.
The Committee will recollect that I said we thought it
our duty to look the whole breadth of this difficulty in
the face : not to endeavour to escape it, not to endeavour.
to attenuate or to understate it, but to face and to settle,
if the Committee would enable us, the whole question of
the income-tax. We propose, then, to re-enact it for two
years, from April 1853 to April 1855, at the rate of 7d.
in the pound. From April 1855, to enact it for two
more years at 6d. in the pound ; and then for three years
more—I cannot wonder at the smile which I perceive
that my words provoke—for three more years, from
April 1857, at 5d. Under this proposal, on the 5th of
April 1860 the income-tax will by law expire.”
198 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

Then there was another “large proposal” to
reduce the interest on the National Debt, by an
operation which sounded plausible enough at
the moment, but which utterly broke down.
Concerning that, Mr Disraeli made the follow-
ing remarks in February 1860. Their accu-
racy was then, and is now, entirely undis-
puted.

“T may say, in passing, what is perhaps not known to
the House, that that part of the scheme of 1853 cost us
the whole of the balance in the Exchequer, and when we

entered on the Russian war, our balance in the Treasury
was little more than £1,000,000.”

So vanished one part of the cloud-castle of
the modern Alnaschar. The other part fared
no better. The income-tax was continually in-
creased. In 1859,MrGladstone made an addition
to it of 4d. in the £, and in the great millennial
year of 1860, when it was to cease altogether,
it stood at 10d. There had been the Crimean
war since the promise of total remission was
made, but Mr Gladstone ought to have fore-
seen that war when he produced his chimer-
ical Budget of 1853. It could very easily
have been foreseen. Mr Gladstone and his
Financial Policy. 199

 

. colleagues might, as Mr Disraeli showed in
1860, have prevented the Russian war if they
had displayed due foresight and firmness. The
utopian scheme of 1853 was brought forward
in the teeth of all the signs and warnings of the
hour, which pointed to war. It was a wild freak
of the imagination throughout. Let Mr Glad-
stone’s own words explain how his anticipa-
tions from the succession duty had turned out:
“ At the present moment, for the year 1860-61,
we stand worse than we reckoned in 1853 by
£1,000,000, on account of the shortcoming in
the receipt from the succession duty.”” There
was not an important detail of the Budget
which did not prove to be based upon the fiscal
principles of Micawber. Yet, so strong is the
faith of Mr Gladstone’s followers in his financial
genius, that Mr Spencer Walpole actually goes
into raptures over this very Budget of 1853.°
“ A Budget of this comprehensive character,” he
says, “had rarely been brought forward by any
financier. It emphasised in a striking manner

1 Speech in the House of Commons, February 24, 1860.
2 Speech in the House of Commons, February 10, 1860.
3 History of England, vol. v. pp. 66, 67.
200 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

the superiority of Mr Gladstone to Mr Disraeli.”
On the very next page the panegyrist is com-
pelled to record the fact that Mr Gladstone’s
proposals “from one point of view ”—that is,
the practical point of view—“ were singularly
unfortunate.” The Budget broke down every-
where ; but, says the Radical writer, “in breadth,
in comprehension, in boldness, in knowledge,
and in originality, it may be compared. with
Peel’s greatest efforts.” All this is deliberately
said of a gigantic and deplorable failure. It is
an example of the manner in which Mr Glad-
stone, whether right or wrong, has been covered
with unceasing adulation by the horde of eulo-
gists who have incessantly burnt their incense
before him. Mr Gladstone must sometimes
have used in secret, as he contemplated his
worshippers, the contemptuous words of Ham-
let: “They fool me to the top of my bent.”

One test of a sound financier, in any country,
is usually held to be the accuracy of his esti-
mates. How does Mr Gladstone stand that
test? Volumes might be written on the sub-
ject, but the essential facts may be compressed
into a small compass.
Financial Policy. 201

 

For the year 1860-61, he estimated the
income at £72,308,000. It turned out to
amount to no more than £70,283,000—a mis-
take of £2,025,000. The expenditure for the
same year he estimated at £70,100,000. It
actually reached the sum of. £72,842,000—a
miscalculation of £2,742,000. He had thus
committed the two errors which are most inex-
cusable in a financial Minister—he had greatly
overrated the income, and greatly underrated

{ These would be adjudged
serious faults in any other man; in Mr Glad-

the expenditure.

stone, we are bidden to regard them as proofs
of a genius too sublime for ordinary com-
prehension.

In 1861-62, he estimated the “income
at £70,283,000. It proved to be only
£69,674,000 —an error of £609,000. He
estimated the expenditure at £69,875,000. It
proved to be £70,837,000—a mistake of
£962,000. Again there was great inaccuracy
in both directions, but it did not reduce the

1 These figures are given from a careful statement made by
the Earl of Carnarvon in the House of Lords, May 30, 1862.
—Hansard, vol. clxvii., 3d series, pp. 131-142.
202 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

publie confidence in Mr Gladstone’s prudence
and foresight. These two years had shown a
total deficit of £4,000,000—a result which
any other Minister might have found it diffi-
cult to reconcile with the theory that he pos-
sessed almost superhuman wisdom in matters
of finance.

The famous French Treaty, which was to
regenerate the commerce of England and France,
and render France a Free Trade nation, landed
us in a deficiency of £2,558,000, which had to
be made up principally by direct taxation. The
repeal of the paper duty, the credit for which
ought to have been largely ascribed by Mr
Gladstone to Mr Milner Gibson, produced
another deficiency of £1,164,000. We need
not enter into a consideration of the merits of
either of these measures; but why were they
not carried out without causing general con-
fusion in the finances, and creating deficits
which the unfortunate income-tax payers were
called upon to make good? In one instance,
five quarters’ tax was crowded into four
quarters of the year—a development of la
haute finance which seemed to the unfortunate
Financial Policy. 203

 

sufferers to savour less of genius than of sharp
practice.

Let us now consider what the great authority
before cited, Lord Overstone, had to say upon
all this :'—

“Tt was difficult to state any possible form of
objectionable financial procedure to which we had not
resorted. We had converted capital into income, we had
seriously diminished our balances in the Exchequer, we
had added to our debt, and we had repealed taxes with-
out a surplus revenue. Year by year, and quarter by
quarter, official acknowledgments of the excess of our
expenditure over income were published, and we were
now presenting to Parliament and the country financial
arrangements for the coming year, of which he had
never yet found a man of common-sense who would
venture to pronounce that they were sufficient for the
purpose, or that the asserted surplus had any reality.
We had converted capital into income by anticipating
the payment of a large amount of taxes. Our next step
had been to repudiate the payment of our Exchequer
bonds, although, when those bonds were issued, it was
promised that they should be repaid on the return of
peace, and that every effort should be made to pay off
in the first years of peace the burdens incurred in time
of war. Although he thought it was very inexpedient
to enter into any such engagement, and had never

1 Speech in the House of Lords, May 30, 1862.—Hansard,
vol. elxvii. p. 154.
204 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

approved of the policy of issuing those Exchequer bonds,
yet, as it had been solemnly entered into, it became
necessary, for the credit of the country, that it should be
firmly carried out. But not only had that not been
done, but, notwithstanding various illegitimate devices
to support the balance of revenue against charges to
which he had alluded, those bonds had been renewed
instead of having been discharged and cancelled. What
had been the result? They lie in the hands of the Bank
of England, not negotiable with the public; and thus
in reality constitute but another form of borrowing money
from the Bank.”

The criticisms made by Mr Disraeli, which
remain to this hour unshaken, must also be
carefully pondered :'—

“Tn addition to this deficit of £4,000,000, the right
honourable gentleman, during these two years, has antici-
pated the resources of the country to the extent. of
£3,500,000—something more than £1,200,000 upon the
malt credit, and £2,000,000 anticipated upon the income-
tax. Well, sir, with one-half of the Spanish payment—
for only one-half of that payment has been enjoyed by
the right honourable gentleman during those two years
—the House will perceive that those sums made up
the amount of £3,500,000. Therefore this great minister
of our finances has in the course of two years expended
more than the ordinary revenue of the country gave

1 Speech in the House of Commons, April 7, 1862.
Financial Policy. 205

 

him—indeed, has exceeded the ordinary revenue of the
country by no less than £7,500,000. But is that all?
What was the ordinary revenue of the country during
those two years when its amount was exceeded by
the right honourable gentleman by the enormous sum
of £7,500,000? It was an ordinary revenue sustained
and supported by war taxation—by a war income-tax,
by war duties upon tea and upon sugar. And yet,
swollen and bloated as the ordinary revenue of the
country was by these war taxes, it was exceeded by the
right honourable gentleman during those two years by
the sum of £7,500,000. Butis that all? It seems im-
possible that there can be any aggravation of such aggra-
vated circumstances. And yet, I can show the House
that hitherto they have not measured the amount of the
prodigality of the right honourable gentleman ; for not
only has he exceeded during two years the ordinary
revenue of the country by £7,500,000, that revenue being
sustained by war taxation, but he has done this at a
period when the charges for the National Debt had
diminished to the extent of £2,000,000 by the lapse of
terminable annuities.”

These comments were little regarded at the
time; they may find a more attentive audience
now, when the tinsel of Mr Gladstone’s Budgets
is wearing off, and the nation is beginning to look
with apprehension on the results of having its
finances modelled on the ideas of an Arabian
Night’s dream. It is even conceivable that the
206 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

day is rapidly approaching when solid business
qualities, foresight, and good judgment may be
more valued in an English Chancellor of the
Exchequer than the power of making a speech
three hours in length.

Mr Gladstone’s previous achievements were
all outdone in later years. In addressing his
constituents on the eve of the general election
of 1874, he once more held out the tempting
bait of the abolition of the income-tax. “I
do not hesitate to affirm,” he said, “that an
~ effort should now be made to attain this advan-
tage, nor to declare that, according to my judg-
ment, it is in present circumstances practicable.”
The bribe was rejected, and the moment Mr
Gladstone returned to office, in 1880, he pun-
ished those who rejected it by increasing the
income-tax to 6d. in the £—a special fine of
jd. in the £. He had again given a tangible
proof of the justice of his own description of
the income-tax in 1857 :* “It is and must be
an inquisitorial tax; it is, upon a scale far
exceeding that of all the other taxes put to-
gether, a demoralising tax... . Lastly, being

1 Quarterly Review, vol. ci. p. 282.
y Pp
Financial Policy. 207

 

loaded with this odium, it must always be a
dangerous tax, and it is clearly the one among
our imposts through which revolutionary or
even democratic finance may most readily carve
a road to the confiscation of property.” Writing
in 1857, after the Crimean war, Mr Gladstone—
not then foreseeing that he would soon be filling
the post of Chancellor ofthe Exchequer in a
Liberal Administration#-still maintained that
the income-tax could and should be abolished in
1860. “We will not for a moment,” he wrote,
“permit ourselves to doubt that Lord Aberdeen
and his political friends, who chiefly reaped the
credit, whatever it may have been, of the Acts
of 1853, will consistently adhere to the pledges
they then gave.” He dwelt upon the solemn
pledges of the Government, and protested? that
“to break an engagement of such deliberation
and such solemnity would be a fresh blow to
the confidence of the people in their represen-
tative institutions, a fresh pretext and a fresh
incentive to dangerous innovations.” Three
years afterwards, his was the hand which de-
liberately broke the engagement.

1 Quarterly Review, vol. ci. p. 283.
208 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

In 1880, besides adding to the income-tax,
he abolished the malt-duty, and announced a
reduction in the wine-duties, to take effect not
later than the 15th of August. The farmers
cared little about the malt-tax, but many of
them, at a time when their means were greatly
restricted, groaned heavily under the extra
pressure of the income-tax. Moreover, on the
24th of June, Mr Gladstone was obliged to an-
nounce to the House of Commons that he did
not see his way to conclude the arrangement
with France by the time he had named, and it
then appeared that he had devised his scheme
without a direct understanding with the Power
on whom its success partly depended. But the
solid part of the Budget—the additional penny
on the income-tax—remained. Then the usual
course of extravagant expenditure, against which
Mr Gladstone has always protested in theory,
and “for others,” was pursued unchecked. All
thoughts of “retrenchment” were flung to the
winds; the income-tax collectors were incited
to give an extra turn to the thumb-screw with
which they are provided ; vast sums were thrown
away on war or preparation for war. The national
Financial Policy. 209

 

expenditure mounted up higher and _ higher.
In December 1882, Mr Gladstone transferred
the office of Chancellor of the Exchequer to Mr
Childers, but the ruling spirit of the Ministerial
financial policy was unchanged. The same dis-
proportion was maintained between estimated
and actual expenditure, until, in Mr Gladstone’s
last year of office, 1885, he earned the distinction
of sanctioning the most enormous Budget. ever
seen since 1814. His financial genius at last
shone forth in all its splendour, and the nation
looked on stupefied at the new reading which
Mr Gladstone had given to the old motto,
“ Peace, Retrenchment, and Reform.” His last
and crowning achievement as a financier is
never likely to be forgotten :—

 

_ Estimated Expenditure, . .  £88,972,000
Vote of Credit, . : : : 11,000,000
£99,972,000

—or within a trifle of £100,000,000. The

ordinary estimated expenditure of this year

“exceeded by nearly £400,000 the total ex-

penditure of the costliest year of the Crimean

war.” There was a deficit of £15,000,000,
0
210 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

which Mr Childers—who has never been sus-
pected of possessing financial genius—was in-
structed to propose should be made up by an
increase of 2d. in the income-tax, a tax of 5
per cent on corporate property, an increase in
the legacy and succession duty, and in the duties
on spirits and beer, and a suspension of the
Sinking Fund. Every principle was violated
which Mr Gladstone had formerly declared in-
violable. All his theories of “sound finance ”
went overboard. Such was his crowning ex-
ploit, and upon this £100,000,000 Budget he
may safely rest his financial fame.

In 1884, there were five separate series of
army supplementary estimates, four separate
series of naval estimates, three of civil service
estimates. The humble taxpayer, without genius,
might be forgiven if he failed to see super-
natural ability in arrangements which produced
these results. In the five years from 1880 to
1885, there had been £12,000,000 demanded
for supplementary estimates, not reckoning the
vote of credit of £11,000,000.1

1 The facts were brought out in an able speech by Lord
George Hamilton in the House of Commons, June 8, 1885.
Financial Policy. 211

 

In 1863, Mr Gladstone proposed to tax
hospitals and other charitable endowments.
There were loud remonstrances from all parts
of the country, and a deputation larger than
had ever before waited upon a Chancellor of
the Exchequer went to expostulate with him.’
He was very angry, and very “eloquent,” and
scolded everybody without mercy. “It is too
much to say,” he exclaimed—as if somebody
had really said anything of the sort—“ that
hospitals are managed by angels and archangels,
and do not, like the. rest of humanity, stand |
in need of supervision, criticism, and rebuke.”
He fought vigorously against a straw man of
his own making,—but all the same, he had to
give way, always a cruel blow to his pride.
He has constantly manifested a restless desire
to turn the income-tax assessor and collector
into hospitals, infirmaries, and other institu-
tions of the kind. Charity should be taxed,
since charity is the outcome of wealth. This
is his favourite idea, but the storm of indigna-
tion which burst upon him in 1863 compelled
him to abandon it. Raise money how and

1 May 4, 1863.
212 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

where you can, so long as you pay your way
as you go. This has been another of Mr
Gladstone’s theories to which he has been true
only when out of office. Lord Palmerston ex-
pended large sums on fortifications, and bor-
rowed money for the purpose, all with Mr
Gladstone’s concurrence. In 1872, Mr Glad-
stone himself raised £3,500,000 for “local-
isation of the forces”—that is, for building
barracks—and he spread the payments over a
series of years extending to 1885. In the
-Budget of 1885, he cansed Mr Childers to
propose a suspension of the Sinking Fund to
the amount of £4,600,000, thus stopping the
gradual payment of the debt—another obliga-
tion of “honour and duty” which he has de-
clared to be binding upon us. It is right to pay
off the debt, or right not to pay it, just as he
happens to be out of office or in it. Economy
of administration is a great and peremptory
necessity of the day, but Mr Gladstone wrung
£41,000,000 more from the taxpayers during
his six years of office (1880-85) than Lord
Beaconsfield’s Administration asked for during
the same time. He spent £18,000,000 more
Financial Policy. 213

 

upon “bloated armaments” than his predeces-
sors. His Civil List and Civil Services charges
amounted to £20,000,000° more. He com-
bined, throughout these six years, the highest
possible rate of expenditure with the greatest
possible inefficiency,

As Mr Disraeli. most justly said in 1862,
“while the right hon. gentleman is without
exception the most profuse Minister that ever
administered the affairs of this country in
peace, he is perpetually insinuating, to use the
mildest term, that he disapproves of that expen-
diture, and is burning to denounce it.” But
though Mr Gladstone’s Budgets were extrava-
gant and his calculations delusive, there was
always something in them to catch popular
applause. The income-tax might be increased,
but the duty on pepper was abolished. And
in dealing with these trifles, Mr Gladstone
clothed his ideas in sonorous language, which
so impressed his hearers at the time that they
lost sight of the jugglery which was being
practised. They stood gazing at the wizard
from whose mouth a Niagara of words poured
out, and they felt that it would be presumptu-
214 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

ous to inquire into his statements. The Budget
might be a tissue of romance, but then there was
the oratory—surely a practical nation might
assess that at a considerable value. Sometimes
there was a new and startling theory unfolded,
as in 1866, when Mr Gladstone disclosed the
terrible fact that our supply of coal would be
exhausted by “1970, 104 years from this time.”
Sometimes it was the “grand eloquence” of the
Minister which transfixed the country. There
was, for instance, his oration on pepper :'—
“We propose to reduce the duty on pepper. The
fate of pepper might well excite the commiseration of
any humane man.... The present appears to be a
good occasion when, without exciting feelings of jealousy
in the agriculturist or any other class of the community,
we can afford to do justice to pepper. The case is a hard
one, and for this reason: all the spices and condiments
in which the wealthier classes have an exclusive interest
have been long ago set free from duty. But pepper is a
condiment common to all classes of the community; and
though I cannot say whether this is so or not, I am told
that tt is largely conswmed in Ireland.”
This is interesting, not only as an example of
the dignity and importance which a great man

1 Budget of 1866.—Hansard, vol, clxxxiii. (8d ser.), pp.
382, 383,
Financial Policy. 215

 

can throw around the smallest of subjects, but
as containing the first indication on record of
Mr Gladstone’s overpowering interest in Irish
affairs. He had been told, but could not say
of his own knowledge, that pepper was largely
consumed in Ireland. Some future eulogist of
Mr Gladstone may trace the germ of all Mr
Gladstone’s Irish measures to this discovery.
Another example of the rare and beautiful gems
with which he adorned his Budgets may be
taken from his statement of April 3, 1862 :—

“There were taxes on every fresh value added to it by
the industry of man ; now there are no taxes on the fresh
value added to it in any branch of production by the in-
dustry of man. There were taxes on the sauce which
pampers man’s appetite ; now there is no tax on sauce,
and man may pamper his appetite as he pleases. There
‘were taxes on the drug that restored him to health ;
now there is no tax on drugs, and he may get well
as quickly as he can. There were taxes on the ermine
which decorates the judge; now that ermine is free.
There were taxes on the rope which hangs the criminal ;
now that rope is free. There were taxes on the poor
man’s salt; now that salt is free. There were taxes on
the rich man’s spice ; now that spice is free. There were
taxes on the brass nails of the coffin ; now those brass nails
are free. There were taxes on the ribbons of the bride—
216 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

and let her wind up the procession—her ribbons also now
are free.”

Whether it is of great moment to the nation
that the ermine of the judge should be free, and
that the rope which hangs the criminal should
be untaxed, and whether these advantages, and
such as these, are not dearly bought by the in-
fliction of a gigantic burden of taxation, such as
no nation has ever borne before in times of
peace—all this will be rigorously inquired into
before many more years have passed. It may
then be decided that flights of eloquence, how-
ever magnificent, do not entirely compensate a
people for having a whole army of assessors and
tax-collectors let loose upon their warehouses,
shops, and homes, or for the innumerable other
evils arising from visionary estimates, deceptive
calculations, and Budgets compounded of “ such
stuff as dreams are made of.”
VIL.

CHARACTERISTICS
VII.
CHARACTERISTICS.

WuatT are commonly called the “ characteris-
tics” of a public man are always observed
with interest by the people, who have a natural
wish to see how the chief performers look and
act when they are off the stage. English
statesmen, down to the time of Mr Gladstone,
have never been unduly solicitous to satisfy
this form of curiosity. Most of them were
rejoiced to withdraw, as soon as. their duties
were discharged, into the privacy of home.
They were not accustomed, in those compara-
tively primitive times, to regard themselves as
part of an exhibition which was always open
to the sight-seer. Sir Robert Peel held much
aloof even from his personal friends; and al-
though Lord Palmerston was a man of sociable
220 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

disposition, the “interviewer” was by no means
invited to live in his house. Very few persons
were able to boast of thorough intimacy with
Lord Beaconsfield at any time of his life. Mr
Gladstone will leave a very different example
for the benefit of posterity. Publicity is to
him as the breath of life. Even his pleasures
and recreations appear to become tedious and
insipid unless he can indulge in them before a
multitude of gazers. When he goes into his
library, somebody follows to see what are the
books he has condescended to read.’ There
must be a public ceremonial whenever he takes
up his devastating axe, that sinister emblem
of his character and life. This peculiar dis-
position is manifested even in affairs of the
highest moment. There is a memorable pas-
sage which speaks of those who “love to pray
standing in the synagogues, and in the corners
of the streets, that they may be seen of men.”

1 Thus, in December 1886, Professor Stuart informed a
public meeting that Mr Gladstone was in ‘splendid vigour,”
and that ‘‘this excellent condition is partly ascribed to the
fact that he is now able to spend three hours every day in the
study of Homer ; and this change from that stormy round of
political controversies, acting as a recreation to the mind, has
also largely improved the condition of his physique.”
Characteristics. 921

 

Mr Gladstone is not one of the class to which
the warning applies; but he realises with al-
most painful vividness that he lives in an
advertising age. It cannot be without his con-
sent that there appear continually in the papers
announcements with which the public have
been for years familiar, to the effect that Mr
Gladstone went to “early morning communion,”
that he “read the lessons ” in a clear (or husky)
voice, and that he made a point of walking to
the church through the snow or rain. Nor can
it be without his knowledge that gaping crowds
are drawn from neighbouring towns to see ayd
hear him perform his self-allotted task.V He
once complained that Lord Palmerston had
fascinated a. certain class of men who were
“so governed by religious partisanship as to
make it the rule of political action in general,”
and another class of men “of marked constitu-

”1 This accusation against Lord

tional timidity.
Palmerston partakes of the grotesque, but much
might be said in its support if it were applied
to the accuser himself, even though it be true

that his chief colleagues in his last Ministry
1 Quarterly Review, April 1857, p. 548.
222 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

were much more remarkable for “ constitutional
timidity” than for “ religious partisanship.”
There have been several periods in Mr Glad-
stone’s career when his popularity manifestly
declined, and it will be found that at these
critical moments a conjunction of two pheno-
mena occurred—a formal and pathetic retire-
ment from public life, and a series of tree-fell-
ing exhibitions. Both have usually produced
their effect. |’ In 1874, after his great defeat
at the general elections, he bade adieu to the
world. It was advertised far and wide as his
last farewell, His party were in a great min- |
ority, the duty of leading it must necessarily
prove very severe and disheartening, and Mr
Gladstone left the thankless work to be done
by Lord Hartington. If it were done success-
fully, or if the veering wind of popularity set
once more in the direction of the Liberals, Mr
Gladstone could, at a moment’s notice, spring
to the front and claim the chief prize. There
could be no danger in leaving others to bear
the heat and burden of the day. Consequently,
in January 1875, Mr Gladstone confirmed his
abdication by a second letter to Lord Granville,
Characteristics. 223

 

in which he said: “I see no public advantage
in my continuing to act as the leader of the
Liberal party. ... At the age of sixty-five,
and after forty-two years of a laborious public
life, I think myself entitled to retire on the
present opportunity. This retirement is dic-
tated to me by my personal views as to the
best means of spending the closing years of my
life.” After a time the wheel of fortune made
another revolution, and Mr Gladstone stepped
forward to take the front place—it should rather
be said the two front places, for Mr Gladstone
made himself Chancellor of the Exchequer as
well as Prime Minister. To be at the head of
a Ministry is a very different thing from being
at the head of a dispirited Opposition. “He
who in the parliamentary field,” remarked Mr
Disraeli, in a striking passage, “ watches over
the fortunes of routed troops, must be prepared
to sit often alone.”* This is a variety of lone-
liness which has never been congenial to Mr
Gladstone’s temperament.

The extraordinary spectacles of public tree-
felling, which have so often moved Europe to

1 Life of Lord George Bentinck, p. 10.
224 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

mirth and astonishment, were frequently re-
peated during the time Lord Hartington was
leading the “routed troops.” On a certain
occasion Mr Gladstone felt constrained to cen-
sure these ludicrous exhibitions, while he con-
tinued to carry them on. This was one of those
subtle compromises between self-interest and
onscience which impart so much delight to
Mr Gladstone, and which would have equally
delighted Ignatius Loyola. “The proceeding,”
he wrote, in his elaborate manner, “assumes
the aspect of an exhibition of domestic life
to the world at large, such as does not,
and, I am compelled to admit, ought not, to
meet with general approval.” About the same
time there appeared in the shop-windows a
photograph of Mr Gladstone clad in his sylvan
attire, consisting of a shirt and trousers. He
was seated upon a fallen tree, axe in hand, and
it was evident that some photographer had come
upon him by mere accident in the midst. of
his Jaques-like meditations in the forest.
These contrivances had their effect upon the
public mind, and Mr Gladstone, not altogether
unconscious of their success, was seen abroad’
Characteristics. 225,

 

more than ever in company with his axe. In
December 1878, a grocer of Clay Cross wrote
to challenge him to cut down a tree, for a sov-
ereign, with a “ timber-feller named Hopkinson.”
Mr Gladstone sent a reply (December 12, 1878),
in which he said he regarded the challenge as
“a great compliment,” but “age and other
causes” compelled him to decline it. The
meaning of the letter was clear to all: “I am
one of yourselves; we have had enough of
proud Ministers; there is no pride in me, at
least when I am out of office. Here I am,
cheap and accessible to all—your own flesh and
blood.” Nevertheless, the working men of Eng-
land like, even more than “condescension,” to
see their public men maintain a becoming atti-
tude of self-respect and dignity.

But all this time the trees continued to fall
like leaves in autumn. It would be too much
to say that the excursionists who thronged to
Hawarden were treated with refreshments, but
chips were sometimes served round by Mr
Herbert Gladstone. It was a diet calculated at
least to promote reflection, and Lord Randolph
Churchill happily expressed what was in many

P
226 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

minds at the time, in a brilliant speech at
Blackpool.1_ Mr Gladstone’s whole policy was
typified in these chips. “Chips to the faithful
allies in Afghanistan, chips to the trusting na-
tive races of South Africa, chips to the Egyp-
tian fellah, chips to the British farmer, chips to
the manufacturer and the artisan, chips to the
agricultural labourer, chips to the House of
Commons itself.” After this there was no fur-
ther distribution of chips in Hawarden Park.
The calumnies upon Lord Beaconsfield, the
appeals to sentimentalists, the bids for the Irish
vote, the promises of economy and perpetual
peace, combined to restore Mr Gladstone to
power in 1880. Nota year had passed before
everybody could see that he was steering his
craft on to the rocks again. He saw it himself,
for he began thus early to talk of retirement.
He intimated that “repose of mind and reflection _
on other matters” —an allusion which could not
fail to produce its effect on a serious people—
“are more appropriate to the latest stage of our
human existence.”? He seemed—for he spoke in

1 January 24, 1884.
2 Speech at Leeds, October 7, 1881.
Characteristics. 927

 

riddles—to nominate as his successor Lord Har-
tington, “ who in the struggles in the House of
Commons has earned the confidence of the
country,’—a confidence which he has never lost,
_ although Mr Gladstone no longer regards him
with the same eyes. High-minded men, actu-
ated by lofty motives, and inspired with inde-
pendent opinions, which they will not sacrifice
even to turn a minority into a majority—men
such as these have never been favourites with
Mr Gladstone. They became inexpressibly re-
pugnant to him towards the last. He preferred
to surround himself with colleagues of the stamp
referred to by the usurper in the “ Tempest ” :—
“ They'll take suggestion as a cat laps milk ;
They'll tell the clock to any business that
We say befits the hour.”

The retirement did not take place; Mr Glad-
stone never retires, except when there is noth-
ing to retire from. He pursued his way till
1885, with results which must sometimes have
bitterly reminded his followers of his own
words to Lord Granville: “I see no public ad-
vantage in my continuing to act as the leader
of the Liberal party.” At length, in 1885,
228 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

after his fall, the old conjunction reappeared
in the political firmament. Mr Gladstone
wished for repose. He desired time to reflect
on “other matters.” Then the tree - felling
was resumed, and it was kept up till an un-
usually late period of the season :—

“In spite of a downpour of rain yesterday afternoon,
Mr Gladstone completed the task of felling a large beech-
tree in front of the castle. The diameter of the tree
was three feet. Lady Stepney, Mr Scott Bankes, Mr W.
H. Gladstone, Mr Herbert Gladstone, and a large party
were present.” +

Thus, in the course of a few months, he had
again shown his “ versatility” by applying his
axe to a Constitution or to a tree with equal
facility and indifference.

These peculiarities, though tinged with bur-
lesque, are not extraneous to Mr Gladstone’s
public life. They have been intended to play
an important and a definite part in the drama,
In like manner, his apparently inexplicable
mania for scattering post-cards all over the
country, in reply to the most frivolous ques-
tions, answers a well-considered purpose, No

1 The Times, November 5, 1886.
Characteristics. 229

 

means, however slight in appearance, which
can contribute to popularity, can safely be
neglected. In pursuance of this principle, the
world has at times been astonished to find in
all the public journals a letter from Mr Glad-
stone on ox-tail soup, or on egg-flip, or on a
music-hall song. The following—to quote but
a single specimen — appeared in September
1878: “When I have had very lengthened
statements to make, I have used what is called
egg-flip—a glass of sherry beaten up with an
egg. I think it excellent, but I have much
more faith in the egg than in the alcohol. I
never think of employing it unless on the rare
occasions when I have expected to go much
beyond an hour.” When the fleet was ordered
to the Dardanelles in February 1878 — the
Russians being then on the march to Constan-
tinople — some eccentric persons in Scotland
wrote to Mr Gladstone to the effect that this
removal of our ships exposed the “whole
colonies of Great Britain” to “attack and pil-
lage,” that Hong-Kong and Australia were in
jeopardy, and that “London will be a fine city
to sack, and the safety of her Majesty and
230 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

royal family endangered.” To this delirious
rigmarole Mr Gladstone sent the following

reply :—

“Dzar Srr,—I shall present your petition with pleas-
ure, and I accept it as fresh proof, added to very many
already received, of the sound feeling of Scotland upon
the great political and constitutional questions now
opened in connection with the condition of the east of
Europe.—Your very faithful and obedient, -

“W. E. GLADSTONE.”

No opportunity, great or small, was ever
missed of instilling into the minds of the elec-
tors the idea that Lord Beaconsfield was bent
upon overthrowing the liberties of the people,
as well as upon plunging his country into
war. The charge was never put into so many
words, for Mr Gladstone does not use plain
words when cunning phrases will convey his
meaning without involving him in responsi-
bility. But in every speech, letter, or article
which Mr Gladstone put forth between 1877
and 1880, Lord Beaconsfield was represented
as a man determined to provoke Russia to war,
In this species of misrepresentation, going at
times to the extent of attributing to opponents
Characteristics. 231

 

language which they had not employed, Mr Glad-
stone stands alone among English public men.
Thus, during the agitation which he stirred up
against the House of Lords in July 1884, in
reference to the County Franchise Bill, he
sought to create a bitter prejudice against Lord
Salisbury by asserting that the “leader of the
Opposition in the House of Lords said he could
not discuss redistribution with a rope round his
neck.” Upon this text, entirely of his own
invention, Mr Gladstone worked himself into a
fever of platform indignation. “A rope round
his neck,” he cried— what is this rope round
his neck? It is the prospect of a large addi-
tion to the franchise. . . . They speak as if
these persons to be enfranchised were a set of
wild beasts, and as if it were thought we could
never have safety until they were all brought
within their cages.” A more inflammatory
harangue could not have been delivered by the
pinchbeck Dantons of Trafalgar Square. The
labourers and workmen of England were
looked upon by the Tories as “ wild beasts,”
—that was intended, as Lord Cairns said at the
time, to be the “key-note of the agitation.”
232 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

The effort to stir up popular passion at such a
moment was, in any case, indefensible; but it
was proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that
Lord Salisbury had never used the words in
question..v Lord Salisbury himself denounced
them in the House of Lords? as “an utter
fabrication,’ and Mr Gladstone, pressed on all
sides for an explanation, owned® that he had
not “the slightest reason to believe that Lord
Salisbury had used those words.” The report
was “verbally accurate,” but not, he “ thought,”
in that particular place. “What is there in
that phrase,” he asked, referring to the phrase
which he had twisted into an attack on the
working men as wild beasts, “of which any
man need be ashamed ?”: Convicted of having
fathered it upon an adversary, he suddenly
found it to be entirely innocent. When a
damaging insinuation or a bold perversion of
language has done its work, Mr Gladstone has
always found it effective to withdraw by some
side door which he has left conveniently ajar.
In this art of using language so that it may

1 July 11, 1884.
? House of Commons, July 11.
Characteristics. 233

 

be susceptible of two opposite interpretations,
or may mean nothing whatever, Mr Gladstone
is the greatest master that ever lived. Whether
it is an art worth cultivating by a public man
who desires to deal honestly with the people,
and who has no deep-laid purpose or crafty
motive to conceal, need not now. be discussed.
What is certain is that it has been extremely
useful to Mr Gladstone, by enabling him to
escape from pledges, guarantees, and specific
un ings i innumerable. Y The Kilmainham
Treaty was "doing him great mischief until he
explained that it was not a Treaty, and that
Mr Parnell and his companions had “been
liberated without any negotiation, promise, or
engagement whatever.” And again he said,
“There never was the slightest understanding
of any kind between her Majesty’s Government
and the hon. member for the city of Cork.
The hon. member for the city of Cork has
asked nothing and got nothing from us, and
we, on our side, asked nothing and got nothing
from him.” Yet it was proved to the House
of Commons and the country’ that Mr O’Shea

1 May 15, 1882. ;
234 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

was employed as the negotiator between the
Government and the Kilmainham prisoners ; and
a letter was read from Mr Parnell to this go-
between, in which the Irish leader undertook,
on the production of an Arrears Bill, to “co-
operate cordially for the future with the Liberal
party,’ while Mr Sheridan was to be used to
discourage outrages instead of planning them.
All this was well known to Mr Gladstone; for
while the negotiation was going on, O’Shea re-
ported at each stage to Mr Forster, and Mr
Forster stated to the House, “I took a memo-
randum at the time, and J sent it to the Prime
Minister, and circulated it among my col-
leagues.”’ The Arrears Bill was actually
brought in, and the prisoners were liberated.
Mr Forster resigned, because he would not be
a party, as he declared, to “paying black-mail
to the law-breakers.” Mr Gladstone contented
himself—Mr Forster's memorandum being still
in his desk—-with asserting that there “never
was the slightest understanding of any kind”
with Mr Parnell.) But there was an Irish
party outside the Parnellites who believed that

1 Mr Forster in the House of Commons, May 15, 1882.
Characteristics. 935

 

Mr Gladstone and the “ patriots” had entered
into an alliance, and that belief, as subsequent
revelations showed, led almost immediately to
the assassination of Lord F. Cavendish and Mr
Burke. The “Invincibles” were determined to
have it understood that bargains between Mr
Gladstone and Mr Parnell would not take all
danger out of the Irish agitation. The first
effect of the Kilmainham Treaty, after the re-
lease of the prisoners, was that Mr Parnell
himself had to go into hiding, while Mr Glad-
stone and his colleagues were vigilantly guarded
day and night.

Mr Gladstone has generally been satisfied to
produce the particular result he desired by the
dexterous use of a sophism, or by a plausible
sentence which might be construed to signify
one thing o-day and a totally different thing
a On the 13th of March 1883, he
boldly assured the House of Commons that
“her Majesty’s Government and the Russian
Government had arrived at an agreement that
the Russian troops should not advance ” towards
Penjdeh\ The troops did advance, and Mr Glad-
stone found it necessary to explain that the
236 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

Russian promise was given on the 18th c
February, and that then it was only conditiona
This was the sort of casuistry which enable
_ him for a long time to deny that we were a
| war in Egypt, and to assert that we were onl,
carrying on certain “military operations.” I:
recalled; he was only ordered “to repair t
London.” So on another occasion he spoke o
the army of 10,000 men, with Armstrong guns
which had been sent to China, as “ bearing peace
ful remonstrances to the mouth of the Peiho;
and again he declared that we were slayin;
Arabs in Egypt “from a love of peace, an
I may say on the principles of peace.”*\ H
denied energetically that General Gordon wa
surrounded at Khartoum—there were merel:
“bodies of hostile troops in the neighbourhooc
forming more or less of a chain around it.\ Whe)
the Jews were being persecuted and killed i
Russia, Mr Gladstone requested a corresponden
to note that these were “cruelties resultin;
from fanatical ignorance ;\) whereas the Bul
garian horrors arose out of Government b:

1 Speech at Penmaenmawr, October 4, 1882.
Characteristics. 237

 

Massacre.” This habit of word-fencing became

so inveterate, that it was often used when it
was quite : superfluous. 1 It seemed to be impos- .
‘sible for Mr Gladstone to speak straight out. In
addressing a meeting at Hawarden in January
1884, he remarked: “It is in everybody’s power
to rear poultry, and, if J may say so, from eggs.”
It would not have occurred to any other man to
qualify the statement that poultry comes from
eggs

In addition to this device, Mr Gladstone has
found it essential to clothe his thoughts in a
mystical kind of jargon, which may safely be
left to the ordinary intellect to unravel or
comprehend if it can. As a general rule, his
sentences are of great length, extremely in-
volved, containing parenthesis within paren-
thesis, shuffled together with modifications,
conditions, and explanations, and piled up
mountains high, until the mind which attempts
to follow it all begins to wander. Out of the
whole mass of his speeches and his writings
gigantic as it is, not half a dozen—not three—
passages can be quoted which are likely to
become classical in the language, or even to
238 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

linger in the recollection. One, and only one,
such passage has ever yet been cited as a mas-
terpiece even by his most extravagant eulogist
—that in which he boasted that the “banner
which we now carry in the fight, though per-
haps at some moment of the struggle. it may
droop over our sinking heads, yet will float
again in the eye of heaven.”* But more than
half the credit for, this thought, and even for
the turn of expression, is due to Lord Byron :—

“Yet, Freedom! yet thy banner, torn, but flying,
Streams like the thunderstorm against the wind.
Thy trumpet voice, though broken now and dying,
The loudest still the tempest leaves behind.?: _

It may indeed be alleged that it is not
likely Mr Gladstone knew of this passage, since
he reads little poetry or verse—a conjecture
which is to some extent fortified by the mem-
orable fact that he once solemnly maintained
' that Lady Nairne intended her beautiful and
pathetic ballad, “The Land o’ the Leal,” to
apply to Scotland.

«1 Speech on Lord Grosvenor’s Amendment to the Reform

Bill, April 27, 1886.
2 “Childe Harold,” canto iv. 98.
Characteristics. 239

 

For the rest, Mr Gladstone has invariably
cultivated a ponderous, stilted, and mysterious
style of communicating with the outer world.
The largest number of words have been used to
express the simplest thought, and the longer the °
words, the dearer they were to Mr Gladstone.
Desiring to say that he had seen some goods
-packed for shipment, he thus delivered himself : *
“T had the pleasure of seeing in a warehouse
yesterday that beautiful manipulation performed
which constitutes the process of packing goods
for exportation.” Being asked at one of his
Mid-Lothian meetings a question as to Dis-
establishment, the following was his reply :-—

“ Probably I may find an occasion for referring more
at large to this subject, to the great satisfaction of my
querist, on some of the occasions when I may speak in
the country; and therefore I will only say that so far as
I am able to judge, we are thinking at the present time,
and the people of Scotland are thinking, of other sub-
jects, which are regarded, I believe, as of much more
urgent and immediate duty than the determination of
a very much controverted question, which, as I have
said before, I believe the people of Scotland will find
themselves perfectly sufficient to determine, and in a

1 Speech at Manchester, October 12, 1853.
240 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

manner which the rest of the empire will respect,
whether the answer be Aye or No. It is not within
my knowledge, certainly, that the consideration of that
question has entered definitely into the concerns of the
’ present election, and therefore I do not feel my own
information or means of judgment about it at all aug-
mented in the course of it by anything that has reached
me.”

Having to say that he had been misreported,
he put it thus :—

“We are requested by Mr Gladstone to state, with ref-
erence to certain interviews had on the part of French
journals with him in Paris, that, while the reports given
of those interviews in the French language bear testi-
mony to the remarkable tact as well as accuracy of the
reporters, there are certain passages, particularly some
relating to public men and to contingencies in English
politics, where, by deviations such as from the reporters’
point of view appear insignificant, an effect is produced
not in full harmony with Mr Gladstone’s intention.”

It is in this. vein that Mr Gladstone usually
speaks or writes. There is obscurity, no doubt,
but the obscurity.is not accidental. It may be
that no one is able to see through it at the
time; but Mr Gladstone can afterwards point to
some sentence or other from which he is able to
develop the entire outline of a policy adapted
Characteristics. 241

 

to a popular demand. He makes a cache, and
conceals in it something for future use. Thus,
in anticipation of that further warfare upon the
landed interest which he has constantly en-
deavoured to stimulate, he delivered a declara-
tion intended to have its bearing on coming
events :*—

“Let me say something to you on the subject which
has occupied so much attention of late years—the subject
of land. . . . The circumstances of land in England
and Scotland demand the closest attention of the Govern-
ment, but they are not the same as the circumstances
of Ireland; and that which was most exceptional in the
Act relating to Ireland, justified as it was by us, and felt
by the majority of Parliament to be justified by the
peculiar circumstances and conditions of that country,
cannot be held to have a parallel application to a country
whose condition has never been subjected to such dis-
turbing action and such unparalleled misfortunes as has,
unhappily, been the case with respect to various in-
terests connected with the land in Ireland. But al-
though that is so, and although I, at least, shall never be
a party to the introduction of the Irish Land Act into
England, nor, indeed, do I believe that is the desire of
any sensible—I beg pardon, any appreciable—portion of
the people of this country, yet there is much to be done.”

“There is much to be done.” Less than this
1 Speech at Leeds, October 7, 1881.
Q
242 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

was said in speeches which Mr Gladstone dis-
entombed, long after they were forgotten by the
world, in justification of his Irish Church policy,
his Land Bills, and his Bill for ae Tre-
land to Mr Parnell.

There are some adherents of Mr Gladstone
who contend that finesse and strategy are neces-
sary in politics, and that they do not affect the
elevation of character which they ascribe to
their leader. But even they are startled when
suddenly confronted with some episodes in his
life. vA
because they have generally been successful ;

They approve of his political gyrations

but they are not able to supply an explanation
of the paradox that, while Mr Gladstone is al-
ways denouncing the “ classes” and the aristoc-
racy, he has created more peers—and peers of
a more dubious kind—and fastened more pen-
sioners on the State, and provided more friends
and jae a with offices, than any modern
Minister. “Favouritism has never been absent
from his dispensation of patronage, ecclesiastical
or political. A list of all the preferments he
has made in the Church, with his true reasons

for making them, and another list of his peers
Characteristics, 943

 

and his pensioners, would be instructive, al-
though perhaps it might be condemned as in-
volving a “ personal attack” on Mr Gladstone.
No one, therefore, would dream of complaining
of his placing private secretaries, when he no
longer had any use for them, in public offices
worth £2000 or so a oumeie would any
mention be made of his gift of a rectory, with
a salary of £3153, to his elder gon; nor of
many similar acts of generosity at the public
cost. \/ But the Collier scandal is fairly open to
discussion. Sir Robert Collier had rendered
himself useful to Mr Gladstone, and he was
made a member of the Judicial Committee of the
Privy Council. It soon appeared that no one
but a Judge was eligible for this appointment,
whereupon Mr Gladstone made his friend a
Judge of the Common Pleas, for two days only,
and then transferred him to the Council.v Lord
Chief-Justice Cockburn denounced this as “ an
evasion of a statute,’ a “manufacture of a
qualification,” a “ violation of the dignity of the
judicial bench.” Lord Westbury described it as
“a fraudulent exercise of power,” a “fraud on
the Act.” The whole Bench and Bar of Eng-
244 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

land concurred in this censure. Under these
circumstances, Mr Gladstone took a course
which, his friends all declared, saved his hon-
our. He had perpetrated a job, but he showed
his conscientiousness by declining to defend it.
The deed was done, but if the doer of the deed
censured it, the code of morals remained un-
broken. Therefore Mr Gladstone went down to
the House of Commons with a quickening dis-
course upon the duty of keeping pure, and he
expressed a pious hope that “the House would
never be drawn aside from the straight road of
justice into slippery paths.” This was a strange
homily to be delivered by a man who had just
been on the slippery paths to men who had not
so much as looked at them.

The Ewelme scandal was a case in which a
similar strategic operation was displayed; but
after one or two misadventures, Mr Gladstone
became more proficient in these details of official
life, and managed to bestow his gifts without
ostentatious infringement upon written or un-
written laws. At all times, however, he has
been disposed to rely for vindication fully as
much upon his popularity, and the influence
Characteristics. 245

 

of his eloquence, as upon abstract justice or
the intrinsic merits of his cause. Oratory
is the aint He has opposed many popu-
lar measures, but no one remembers it. “QGlad-
stone,” records the late Lord Shaftesbury in his
Diary, “ever voted in resistance to my efforts.
He gave no support to the Ten Hours
Bill; he voted with Sir Robert Peel to rescind
the famous decision in favour of it. ~He was
the only member who endeavoured to delay the
Bill which delivered women and children from
mines and nite
on behalf of the factory children until, when
defending slavery in the West Indies, he taunted

/and never did he say a word

Buxton with indifference to the slavery in Eng-
land.”1 He was against household suffrage : “I
do not agree in the demand either for manhood or
for household suffrage.” %y/ He scoffed at the idea
that the colonies would ever be willing to afford
any assistance to the mother country in time of
Q . .
war. } The mere suggestion could only “ excite

1 Life of Lord Shaftesbury, vol. ii. p. 210.

2 Letter to Mr Horsfall of Manchester, August 8, 1866, re-
published by Mr Gladstone in his ‘‘ Reform Speeches,” &.,
1866,
246 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

ridicule.” When these great communities actu-

ally came forward t@ his rescue in the midst of
the Egyptian Ca offer was at first coldly
received, in accordance with the uniform policy
of the Liberal party, which has ue sought
to disparage and estrange the colonies. ” In the
midst of the hardships caused by unprecedented
agricultural depression, he advised the English
farmer to “turn his attention to jam,” or to
“row eggs,” so as to minister to the “ enormous
insatiable capacity of the human stomach.” ?
Advice on all subjects drips from him at every
step. During an election his post-cards flutter
in the air like the announcements of a coming
circus. No man who has held high office has
ever before interfered so scandalously in elec-
tions. / There is scarcely a constituency which
has not been favoured with a telegram or a
message from Mr Gladstone: The warnings
of 1886 may possibly put an end to these dis-
graceful operations. Most of the candidates
who were outlawed by Mr Gladstone were
triumphantly returned to Parliament, and his

1 Article in the Nineteenth Century, September 1878,
2 Speech at Hawarden, January 9, 1884.
Characteristics. 247

 

recommendations generally proved fatal to his
friends. The lesson was not lost upon the
friends, although Mr Gladstone failed to per-
ceive its true significance. He never knows
when he has made a mistake.

For nature, or the use which becomes second
nature, has so ordered it that Mr Gladstone has
no consciousness of the mischief he has occa-
sioned or of the errors he has committed.

w In one of his latest productions,’ he praises the
Factory Acts, without, apparently, the slightest
consciousness that he bitterly opposed anand!
He makes an allusion to the Crimean war, but
carefully omits to mention his own share in it.)
He seems, indeed, to have boldly resolved to
ignore’ all the circumstances connected with it,
for he “conceives” that “it was an attempt,
not wholly unsuccessful, to apply European
authority towards keeping the peace of Europe.”
There surely never was a more “wholly un-
successful” attempt to keep the peace, nor one
which was less justified by its final results.
He deplores the frequency of wars, and the

1 Article on “Locksley Hall and the Jubilee ”—Nineteenth
Century, January 1887.
248 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

cost to the nation of preparations for wal but
_he preserves a. profound silence about Egypt, the
Soudan, and his vote of credit of £11,000,000.
VIn all this he is faithful to the code of morals
which he has established for himself—condemn
a wrong act in principle, and then you are free
to commit the act as often as you please.
His conscience is clear; come what may, he
has done what was right. He looks back, and
sees nothing to regret. Whatever may have
been the faults of others, he is blameless.
Memory, remorse, the sorrowful recollection: of
false steps which have led to disaster—these,
and phantoms such as these, have no terrors
for him. V Yet there comes an awakening even
to one who is armed with a triple plate of self-
confidence. There must be moments when Mr
Gladstone looks out upon the world, and sees it
as it is, and at such moments he cannot but be
aware that there are millions of his countrymen
who believe, with as much depth of conviction
and earnestness as he can believe anything
whatever, that he has wrought more harm in
England than any Minister that ever lived;
that he has inflicted irreparable blows , upon
Characteristics. 949

 

the influence and renown which has been her
birthright for centuries j/that he has stirred up
civil strife which may never be allayed without
civil war; that he has set class against class,
and man against man, until the whole land is
overrun with perplexity and discord. V Ambi-
tious, intriguing, and extravagant, trampling all
things under foot to gain his ends, he seems,
in some dark way, to regard it as his destiny to
work out those decrees which he attributes to
_Providence, “It may be,” he once said, “that
_ the prosperity of the country required the
chastening hand of Providence, that we should
be ‘taught to suffer and struggle, so that we
7 might not be too proud of the great power and
: wealth to which this country has attained.”?
His pitiless contempt for the sufferings of
others, the calmness with which he scatters
abroad “ firebrands and arrows of death,” would
be almost unintelligible upon any other theory
than that which he has himself shadowed forth
—that he is the chosen instrument of a di-
vinely appointed chastisement, a new scourge of
God. Follow out his career from the day in

1 Speech at Hawarden, January 12, 1882.
250 Mr Gladstone: A Study.

 

which his rashness and his negligence helped
to send an army of English soldiers to perish
of cold, disease, and starvation in the Crimea,
down to the time when he was responsible for
the slaughter of thousands of men whose only
crime, he declared, was that of “struggling to
be free,” and terrible to every eye must be the
record which it presents. The day is coming
—let us even hope that it has come—when the
nation will cast off the illusions which have
so long led it astray, and will insist on being
brought face to face with facts; and the facts
will be Mr Gladstone’s all-sufficient and ever-
lasting condemnation.
INDEX.

Aberdeen-Gladstone Ministry, the,
12, 74.

, 74,

Alabama claims, the, 105.

Asian, Central, policy, 84.

Austrian Minister, Mr Gladstone’s
abject apology to the, 83.

Austro-German Alliance, the, 101.

Beaconsfield, Lord, on Russian en-
croachments, 78—on Mr Glad-
stone’s financial policy, 204.

Berlin Treaty, the, 100.

Bright, Mr, on the surrender to the
Parnellites, 78—on the dangers
of Mr Gladstone’s Home Rule
scheme, 165, 172.

Budget, Mr Gladstone’s first, 194—
renewal of the income-tax, 197—
proposed reduction of the interest
on the national debt, 198—addi-
tion of 4d. in the pound to the In-
come-tax, ib.—anticipations from
the succession duty, 199—a de-
plorable failure, 200—the figures,
201—further increase of the in-
come-tax, 206—enormous Budget
of 1885, 209—deficit of £15,000,000,

ab.
“ Bulgarian Horrors,” 94. .

Canada harried by the Fenians, 127.
Capitulation to the Parnellites, 5

et seq.
Caen, Mr Gladstone’s want of,
4

Chamberlain, Mr, his “ uninspired
memorandum,” 44—on Mr Glad-
stone and Home Rule, 150.

Characteristics, Mr Gladstone’s, 219
—publicity of his private life, 220
—his attendance at ‘‘ early morn-

 

ing communion,” 221—his spec-
tacles of tree-felling, 223 et seq.—
excursionists served with chips at
Hawarden, 225—the scattering of
post-cards, 228—his recipe for
ege-flip, 229.

Clarendon, Lord, description of, by
Mr Gladstone, 67.

Cobden, Mr, and the Corn-Law
League, 37.

Collier scandal, the, 243.

Collings’s, Mr Jesse, amendment,
158.

Conservatism of Mr Gladstone, 8.

Consistency of statesmen, Mr Glad-
stone on the, 34.

County Franchise Bill, 17.

Crimean war, the, 56, 72—cost of,
72—Mr Roebuck’s committee of
inquiry on the, {b.—Mr Gladstone
denounces the, 75.

Cyprus, the acquisition of, 82.

Davitt, Mr Michael, on Mr Glad-
stone’s Home Rule scheme, 164,
Disestablishment of the Church,

Mr Gladstone on the, 52.
Disunion agitation, the, 173.
Durham, the Dean of, on Mr Glad-

stone, 39.

Eastern question, the, 73.

Egypt, Mr Gladstone's ittervention
in, 96.

Egyptian war, the, 90—the revolt of
the Egyptian colonels, 91.

Ewelme scandal, the, 244,

Factory Acts, Mr Gladstone praises
the, 247.
252

Index.

 

Faweett, Mr, on the abolition of
purchase in the army, 48.

Fenian organisation, the Irish, 121.

Financial policy, 187.

Financial procedure, Lord, Over-
stone on Mr Gladstone’s objec-
tionable, 2.3

Foreign policy, 72—invariable fail-
ure in,

Forster, Mr W. E., on Mr Glad-
stone’s powers of persuasion, 39—
his resignation, 234.

Fortescue, Lord, on Mr Gladstone's
foreign policy, 109.

Free Trade controversy, 32.

French conmercial treaty, 202.

Frere, Sir Bartle, recall of, 86.

Gladstone’s, Mr, career, 5—when he
became a Liberal, 1b.—appoint-
ment as Colonial Secretary, 6—
Commissioner to the  Jonian
Islands, 7—Chancellor of the
Exchequer and leader of the
House of Commons, 116—rejected
by Oxford University, 117—be-
comes First Lord of the Treasury,
119.

Gladstone, Mr Herbert, as a nail-
driver, 152.

Gordon, General, sent to the
Soudan, 95—desertion of by the
Government, 98—Mr Gladstone’s
defence of his refusal to aid
Gordon, 100.

Grattan’s Parliament, Mr Parnell
on the restitution of, 163.

Grey, Lord, on Irish Disestablish-
ment, 123.

aoe Sir W., Coercion Bill,

Hartiustoti, Lord, on Mr Gladstone
and Home Rule, 148.

Hicks Pasha, defeat of, by the
Mahdi, 95.

Home Rule, 47—agitation, 133—
Bill, 160.

Hospitals and other charitable en-
Sars proposed taxation of,

211.

House of Lords, attack on the, 16.

Income - tax, inequality and in-
justice of the, 190.

Irish iicentablibhmant Resolutions
carried, 118 — Disestablishment
Bill introduced, 122.

 

Trish policy, 113 et seg.—key to,
120.

Irish question, Mr Gladstone’s
manifesto on the, 155 et seq.

Irish votes, 45.

Khartoum, fall of, 9
Kilmainham teeaty, the, 149 et
seq

Language, Mr Gladstone’s mis-
leading, 232 et seq. ~

Land Bill, the Irish, 127 et seq.

Land Purchase Bill, the, 161.

Leadership of the Liberal party,
Mr Gladstone’s abdication of the,
222,

‘Massacre, Lessons in,” 94.

“Masses and classes,” 168.

Maynooth Grant, the, 36

Mid-Lothian speeches, Mr Glad-
stone’s, 38

Morley’s, Mr John, special message,
177 —his insults to Christians,
180.

Opportunism in politics, 11.

Organic change in the constitution
of the country, 18.

Overstone, Lord, on Mr Gladstone’s
financial policy, 194.

Palmerston’s, Lord, indifference to
reform, 48—his opinion of Mr
Gladstone, 55—Mr Gladstone's
assault on, 58—his defeat on the
Conspiracy to Murder Bill, 62—
Mr Gladstone’s eulogy of, ‘64.

Papal power, Mr Gladstone on the,

panes duty, repeal of the, 202.

Parliament, declining efficiency of,
Mr Gladstone on the, 1

Parnellite reception at Hawarden,
172—Mr Bright’s comment on the
proceedings, 7b.

Parnellite subterranean communi-
cations with Hawarden, 151.

Parnell’ 8, Mr, no-rent agitation,
135—his manifesto, 143—his Rent
Bill, 174.

Peel’s, Sir Robert, memorable con-
version, 37.

Hers Mr Gladstone’s creation of,

4

Pepper, Mr Gladstone’s oration on,
14,
Index.

253

 

Peterborough, Dean of, on Mr Glad-
stone, 39.

Phillemore, Mr J. G., on the con-
duct of the Crimean war, 76.

**Plan of campaign,” 174.

Policy, Mr Gladstone’s foreign, 72.

ea competition for the,

Principles, Mr Gladstone's, 1.
Purchase in the army, abolition of,
49.

Radicalism, the development of, 43.

Radicals, Mr Gladstone’s detesta-
tion of the, 9.

Rapine, Mr Gladstone’s denuncia-
tion of the Irish policy of, 137.

Redistribution Bill, the, 20.

Reform Bill, Mr Gladstone’s, 22 et
seq.

Restoration to power in 1880, 206.

Russell, Earl, on Mr Gladstone’s
foreign policy, 108.

Russia, preparations for a new
struggle with, 101.

Russian aggression, Mr Gladstone
on, 78.

Salisbury’s, Lord, Government,
defeat of, 160—Mr Gladstone’s
misrepresentation of, 231.

Scotch Disestablishment, Mr Glad-
stone on, 52.

Separation scheme, Mr Gladstone’s,
44,

 

Shaftesbury’s, Lord, opinion of Mr
Gladstonw, 8.

Sinking Fund, proposed suspen-
sion to the extent of £4,600,000,

212.
Slavery, Mr Gladstone’s defence of,
244,

Smith, Professor Goldwin, on Mr
Gladstone’s attempt to set class
against class, 169.

Suez Canal shares, 82.

Ten Hours Bill, Mr Gladstone
opposes the, 245.

Tory party, Mr Gladstone’s défence
of the, 25 et seq.

Transvaal policy, the, of Mr Glad-
stone, 86—shameful desertion of
allies, 89.

Treachery, Mr Gladstone’s, towards
his former colleagues, 77.

“Uncrowned king,” Mr Gladstone
in the service of the, 157.
United Parliament, the, 147.

“Venetian oligarchy,” the, 34,

War against rent, 173.

Wordsworth, Bishop, on Mr Glad-
stone, 48.

Working classes, admission of the,
to the franchise, 22.

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