Prime Ministers and Some Others: A Book of Reminiscences

by George William Erskine Russell

VII

LORD ROSEBERY

It was in December, 1885, that the present Lord Gladstone; in conjunction with the late Sir Wemyss Reid, sent up "the Hawarden Kite." After a lapse of thirty-two years, that strange creature is still flapping about in a stormy sky; and in the process of time it has become a familiar, if not an attractive, object. But the history of its earlier gyrations must be briefly recalled.

The General Election of 1885 had just ended in a tie, the Liberals being exactly equal to the combined Tories and Parnellites. Suddenly the Liberals found themselves committed, as far as Gladstone could commit them, to the principle of Home Rule, which down to that time they had been taught to denounce. Most of them followed their leader, but many rebelled. The Irish transferred their votes in the House to the statesman whom—as they thought—they had squeezed into compliance with their policy, and helped him to evict Lord Salisbury after six months of office. Gladstone formed a Government, introduced a Home Rule Bill, split his party in twain, was defeated in the House of Commons, dissolved Parliament, and was soundly beaten at the General Election which he had precipitated. Lord Salisbury became Prime Minister for the second time, and ruled, with great authority and success, till the summer of 1892.

Meanwhile, Gladstone, by his indefatigable insistence on Home Rule and by judicious concessions to opponents, had to some extent repaired the damage done in 1886; but not sufficiently. Parliament was dissolved in June, 1892, and, when the Election was over, the Liberals, plus the Irish, made a majority of forty for Home Rule. Gladstone realized that this majority, even if he could hold it together, had no chance of coercing the House of Lords into submission; but he considered himself bound in honour to form a Government and bring in a second Home Rule Bill. Lord Rosebery became his Foreign Secretary, and Sir William Harcourt his Chancellor of the Exchequer. The Home Rule Bill struggled through the House of Commons, but was thrown out in the Lords, 41 voting for and 419 against it. Not a single meeting was held to protest against this decisive action of the Lords, and it was evident that the country was sick to death of the Irish Question.

Gladstone knew that his public work was done, and in the spring of 1894 it began to be rumoured that he was going to resign. On the 1st of March he delivered his last speech in the House of Commons, and immediately afterwards it became known that he was really resigning. The next day he went to dine and sleep at Windsor, taking his formal letter of resignation with him. He had already arranged with the Queen that a Council should be held on the 3rd of March. At this moment he thought it possible that the Queen might consult him about the choice of his successor, and, as we now know from Lord Morley's "Life," he had determined to recommend Lord Spencer.

Lord Harcourt's evidence on this point is interesting. According to him—and there could not be a better authority—Sir William Harcourt knew of Gladstone's intention. But he may very well have believed that the Queen would act (as in the event she did) on her own unaided judgment, and that her choice would fall on him as Leader of the House of Commons. The fact that he was summoned to attend the Council on the 3rd of March would naturally confirm the belief. But Dis aliter visum. After the Council the Queen sent, through the Lord President (Lord Kimberley), a summons to Lord Rosebery, who kissed hands as Prime Minister at Buckingham Palace on the 9th of March.

Bulwer-Lytton, writing "about political personalities, said with perfect truth:

"Ne'er of the living can the living judge,
Too blind the affection, or too fresh the grudge."

In this case, therefore, I must attempt not judgment but narrative. Lord Rosebery was born under what most people would consider lucky stars. He inherited an honourable name, a competent fortune, and abilities far above the average. But his father died when he was a child, and as soon as he struck twenty-one he was "Lord of himself, that heritage of woe."

At Eton he had attracted the notice of his gifted tutor, "Billy Johnson," who described him as "one of those who like the palm without the dust," and predicted that he would "be an orator, and, if not a poet, such a man as poets delight in." It was a remarkably shrewd prophecy. From Eton to Christ Church the transition was natural. Lord Rosebery left Oxford without a degree, travelled, went into society, cultivated the Turf, and bestowed some of his leisure on the House of Lords. He voted for the Disestablishment of the Irish Church, and generally took the line of what was then considered advanced Liberalism.

But it is worthy of note that the first achievement which brought him public fame was not political. "Billy Rogers," the well-known Rector of Bishopsgate, once said to me: "The first thing which made me think that Rosebery had real stuff in him was finding him hard at work in London in August, when everyone else was in a country-house or on the Moors. He was getting up his Presidential Address for the Social Science Congress at Glasgow in 1874." Certainly, it was an odd conjuncture of persons and interests. The Social Science Congress, now happily defunct, had been founded by that omniscient charlatan, Lord Brougham, and its gatherings were happily described by Matthew Arnold: "A great room in one of our dismal provincial towns; dusty air and jaded afternoon light; benches full of men with bald heads, and women in spectacles; and an orator lifting up his face from a manuscript written within and without." One can see the scene. On this occasion the orator was remarkably unlike his audience, being only twenty-seven, very young-looking even for that tender age, smartly dressed and in a style rather horsy than professorial. His address, we are told, "did not cut very deep, but it showed sympathetic study of social conditions, it formulated a distinct yet not extravagant programme, and it abounded in glittering phrases."

Henceforward Lord Rosebery was regarded as a coming man, and his definite adhesion to Gladstone on the Eastern Question of 1876-1879 secured him the goodwill of the Liberal party. The year 1878, important in politics, was not less important in Lord Rosebery's career. Early in the year he made a marriage which turned him into a rich man, and riches, useful everywhere, are specially useful in politics. Towards the close of it he persuaded the Liberal Association of Midlothian to adopt Gladstone as their candidate. There is no need to enlarge on the importance of a decision which secured the Liberal triumph of 1880, and made Gladstone Prime Minister for the second time.

When Gladstone formed his second Government he offered a place in it to Lord Rosebery, who, with sound judgment, declined what might have looked like a reward for services just rendered. In 1881 he consented to take the Under-Secretaryship of the Home Department, with Sir William Harcourt as his chief; but the combination did not promise well, and ended rather abruptly in 1883. When the Liberal Government was in the throes of dissolution, Lord Rosebery returned to it, entering the Cabinet as Lord Privy Seal in 1885. It was just at this moment that Matthew Arnold, encountering him in a country-house, thus described him: "Lord Rosebery is very gay and 'smart,' and I like him very much."

The schism over Home Rule was now approaching, and, when it came, Lord Rosebery threw in his lot with Gladstone, becoming Foreign Secretary in February, 1886, and falling with his chief in the following summer. In 1889 he was chosen Chairman of the first London County Council, and there did the best work of his life, shaping that powerful but amorphous body into order and efficiency. Meanwhile, he was, by judicious speech and still more judicious silence, consolidating his political position; and before he joined Gladstone's last Government in August, 1892, he had been generally recognized as the exponent of a moderate and reasonable Home Rule and an advocate of Social Reform. My own belief is that the Liberal party as a whole, and the Liberal Government in particular, rejoiced in the decision which, on Gladstone's final retirement, made Rosebery Prime Minister.

But it was a difficult and disappointing Premiership. Harcourt, not best pleased by the Queen's choice, was Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the House of Commons. Gladstone, expounding our Parliamentary system to the American nation, once said: "The overweight of the House of Commons is apt, other things being equal, to bring its Leader inconveniently near in power to a Prime Minister who is a Peer. He can play off the House of Commons against his chief, and instances might be cited, though they are happily most rare, when he has served him very ugly tricks."

The Parliamentary achievement of 1894 was Harcourt's masterly Budget, with which, naturally, Lord Rosebery had little to do; the Chancellor of the Exchequer loomed larger and larger, and the Premier vanished more and more completely from the public view. After the triumph of the Budget, everything went wrong with the Government, till, being defeated on a snap division about gunpowder in June, 1895, Lord Rosebery and his colleagues trotted meekly out of office. They might have dissolved, but apparently were afraid to challenge the judgment of the country on the performances of the last three years.

Thus ingloriously ended a Premiership of which much had been expected. It was impossible not to be reminded of Goderich's "transient and embarrassed phantom"; and the best consolation which I could offer to my dethroned chief was to remind him that he had been Prime Minister for fifteen months, whereas Disraeli's first Premiership had only lasted for ten.

VIII

AUTHUR JAMES BALFOUR

When Lord Rosebery brought his brief Administration to an end, Lord Salisbury became Prime Minister for the last time. His physical energy was no longer what it once had been, and the heaviest of all bereavements, which befell him in 1899, made the burden of office increasingly irksome. He retired in 1902, and was succeeded by his nephew, Mr. A. J. Balfour, The Administration formed in 1895 had borne some resemblance to a family party, and had thereby invited ridicule—even, in some quarters, created disaffection. But when Lord Salisbury was nearing the close of his career, the interests of family and of party were found to coincide, and everybody felt that Mr. Balfour must succeed him. Indeed, the transfer of power from uncle to nephew was so quietly effected that the new Prime Minister had kissed hands before the general public quite realized that the old one had disappeared.

Mr. Balfour had long been a conspicuous and impressive figure in public life. With a large estate and a sufficient fortune, with the Tory leader for his uncle, and a pocket-borough bidden by that uncle to return him, he had obvious qualifications for political success. He entered Parliament in his twenty-sixth year, at the General Election of 1874, and his many friends predicted great performances. But for a time the fulfilment of those predictions hung fire. Disraeli was reported to have said, after scrutinizing his young follower's attitude: "I never expect much from a man who sits on his shoulders."

Beyond some rather perplexed dealings with the unpopular subject of Burial Law, the Member for Hertford took no active part in political business. At Cambridge he had distinguished himself in Moral Science. This was an unfortunate distinction. Classical scholarship had been traditionally associated with great office, and a high wrangler was always credited with hardheadedness; but "Moral Science" was a different business, not widely understood, and connected in the popular mind with metaphysics and general vagueness. The rumour went abroad that Lord Salisbury's promising nephew was busy with matters which lay quite remote from politics, and was even following the path of perilous speculation. It is a first-rate instance of our national inclination to talk about books without reading them that, when Mr. Balfour published A Defence of Philosophic Doubt, everyone rushed to the conclusion that he was championing agnosticism. His friends went about looking very solemn, and those who disliked him piously hoped that all this "philosophic doubt" might not end in atheism. It was not till he had consolidated his position as a political leader that politicians read the book, and then discovered, to their delight, that, in spite of its alarming name, it was an essay in orthodox apologetic.

The General Election of 1880 seemed to alter the drift of Mr. Balfour's thought and life. It was said that he still was very philosophical behind the scenes, but as we saw him in the House of Commons he was only an eager and a sedulous partisan. Gladstone's overwhelming victory at the polls put the Tories on their mettle, and they were eager to avenge the dethronement of their Dagon. "The Fourth Party" was a birth of this eventful time, and its history has been written by the sons of two of its members. With the performances of Lord Randolph Churchill, Sir John Gorst, and Sir Henry Drummond Wolff I have no concern; but the fourth member of the party was Mr. Balfour, who now, for the first time, began to take a prominent part in public business. I must be forgiven if I say that, though he was an admirable writer, it was evident that Nature had not intended him for a public speaker. Even at this distance of time I can recall his broken sentences, his desperate tugs at the lapel of his coat, his long pauses in search of a word, and his selection of the wrong word after all.

But to the Fourth Party, more than to any other section of the House, was due that defeat over the Budget which, in June, 1885, drove Gladstone from power and enthroned Lord Salisbury. In the new Administration Mr. Balfour was, of course, included, but his sphere of work was the shady seclusion of the Local Government Board, and, for anything that the public knew of his doings, he might have been composing a second treatise on philosophic doubt or unphilosophic cocksureness. The General Election of 1885 marked a stage in his career. The pocket-borough which he had represented since 1874 was merged, and he courageously betook himself to Manchester, where for twenty years he faced the changes and chances of popular election.

The great opportunity of his life came in 1887. The Liberal party, beaten on Home Rule at the Election of 1886, was now following its leader into new and strange courses. Ireland was seething with lawlessness, sedition, and outrage. The Liberals, in their new-found zeal for Home Rule, thought it necessary to condone or extenuate all Irish crime; and the Irish party in the House of Commons was trying to make Parliamentary government impossible.

At this juncture Mr, Balfour became Chief Secretary; and his appointment was the signal for a volume of criticism, which the events of the next four years proved to be ludicrously inapposite. He, was likened to a young lady—"Miss Balfour," "Clara," and "Lucy"; he was called "a palsied, masher" and "a perfumed popinjay"; he was accused of being a recluse, a philosopher, and a pedant; he was pronounced incapable of holding his own in debate, and even more obviously unfit for the rough-and-tumble of Irish administration.

The Irish, party, accustomed to triumph over Chief Secretaries, rejoicingly welcomed a new victim in Mr. Balfour. They found, for the first time, a master. Never was such a tragic disillusionment. He armed himself with anew Crimes Act, which had the special merit of not expiring at a fixed period, but of enduring till it should be repealed, and he soon taught sedition-mongers, Irish and English, that he did not bear this sword in vain. Though murderous threats were rife, he showed an absolute disregard for personal danger, and ruled Ireland with a strong and dexterous hand. His administration was marred by want of human sympathy, and by some failure to discriminate between crime and disorder. The fate of John Mandeville is a black blot on the record of Irish government; and it did not stand alone.

Lord Morley, who had better reasons than most people to dread Mr. Balfour's prowess, thus described it:

"He made no experiments in judicious mixture, hard blows and soft speech, but held steadily to force and tear.... In the dialectic of senate and platform he displayed a strength of wrist, a rapidity, an instant readiness for combat, that took his foes by surprise, and roused in his friends a delight hardly surpassed in the politics of our day."

It is not my business to attack or defend. I only record the fact that Mr. Balfour's work in Ireland established his position as the most important member of the Conservative party. In 1891 he resigned the Chief Secretaryship, and became Leader of the House; was an eminently successful Leader of Opposition between 1892 and 1895; and, as I said before, was the obvious and unquestioned heir to the Premiership which Lord Salisbury laid down in 1902.

As Prime Minister Mr. Balfour had no opportunity for exercising his peculiar gift of practical administration, and only too much opportunity for dialectical ingenuity. His faults as a debater had always been that he loved to "score," even though the score might be obtained by a sacrifice of candour, and that he seemed often to argue merely for arguing's sake. It was said of the great Lord Holland that he always put his opponent's case better than the opponent put it for himself. No one ever said this of Mr. Balfour; and his tendency to sophistication led Mr. Humphrey Paul to predict that his name "would always be had in honour wherever hairs were split." His manner and address (except when he was debating) were always courteous and conciliatory; those who were brought into close contact with him liked him, and those who worked under him loved him. Socially, he was by no means as expansive as the leader of a party should be. He was surrounded by an adoring clique, and reminded one of the dignitaries satirized by Sydney Smith: "They live in high places with high people, or with little people who depend upon them. They walk delicately, like Agag. They hear only one sort of conversation, and avoid bold, reckless men, as a lady veils herself from rough breezes."

But, unfortunately, a Prime Minister, though he may "avoid" reckless men, cannot always escape them, and may sometimes be forced to count them among his colleagues. Lord Rosebery's Administration was sterilized partly by his own unfamiliarity with Liberal sentiment, and partly by the frowardness of his colleagues. Mr. Balfour knew all about Conservative sentiment, so far as it is concerned with order, property, and religion; but he did not realize the economic heresy which always lurks in the secret heart of Toryism; and it was his misfortune to have as his most important colleague a "bold, reckless man" who realized that heresy, and was resolved to work it for his own ends. From the day when Mr. Chamberlain launched his scheme, or dream, of Tariff Reform, Mr. Balfour's authority steadily declined. Endless ingenuity in dialectic, nimble exchanges of posture, candid disquisition for the benefit of the well-informed, impressive phrase-making for the bewilderment of the ignorant—these and a dozen other arts were tried in vain. People began to laugh at the Tory leader, and likened him to Issachar crouching down between two burdens, or to that moralist who said that he always sought "the narrow path which lies between right and wrong." His colleagues fell away from him, and he was unduly ruffled by their secession. "It is time," exclaimed the Liberal leader, "to have done with this fooling"; and though he was blamed by the Balfourites for his abruptness of speech, the country adopted his opinion. Gradually it seemed to dawn on Mr. Balfour that his position was no longer tenable. He slipped out of office as quietly as he had slipped into it; and the Liberal party entered on its ten years' reign.

IX

HENRY CAMPBELL-BANNERMAN

"He put his country first, his party next, and himself last." This, the noblest eulogy which can be pronounced upon a politician, was strikingly applicable to my old and honoured friend whose name stands at the head of this page. And yet, when applied to him, it might require a certain modification, for, in his view, the interests of his country and the interests of his party were almost synonymous terms—so profoundly was he convinced that freedom is the best security for national welfare. When he was entertained at dinner by the Reform Club on his accession to the Premiership, he happened to catch my eye while he was speaking, and he interjected this remark: "I see George Russell there. He is by birth, descent, and training a Whig; but he is a little more than a Whig." Thus describing me he described himself. He was a Whig who had marched with the times from Whiggery to Liberalism; who had never lagged an inch behind his party, but who did not, as a rule, outstep it. His place was, so to speak, in the front line of the main body, and every forward movement found him ready and eager to take his place in it. His chosen form of patriotism was a quiet adhesion to the Liberal party, with a resolute and even contemptuous avoidance of sects and schisms.

He was born in 1836, of a mercantile family which had long flourished in Glasgow, and in 1872 he inherited additional wealth, which transformed his name from Campbell to Campbell-Bannerman—the familiar "C.-B." of more recent times. Having graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge, he entered Parliament as Member for the Stirling Burghs in 1868, and was returned by the same delightful constituency till his death, generally without a contest. He began official life in Gladstone's first Administration as Financial Secretary to the War Office, and returned to the same post after the Liberal victory of 1880. One of the reasons for putting him there was that his tact, good sense, and lightness in hand enabled him to work harmoniously with the Duke of Cambridge—a fiery chief who was not fond of Liberals, and abhorred prigs and pedants. In 1884, when Sir George Trevelyan was promoted to the Cabinet, Campbell-Bannerman was made Chief Secretary for Ireland, and in that most difficult office acquitted himself with notable success. Those were not the days of "the Union of Hearts," and it was not thought necessary for a Liberal Chief Secretary to slobber over murderers and outrage-mongers. On the other hand, the iron system of coercion, which Mr. Balfour administered so unflinchingly, had not been invented; and the Chief Secretary had to rely chiefly on his own resources of firmness, shrewdness, and good-humour. With these Campbell-Bannerman was abundantly endowed, and his demeanour in the House of Commons was singularly well adapted to the situation. When the Irish members insulted him, he turned a deaf ear. When they pelted him with controversial questions, he replied with brevity. When they lashed themselves into rhetorical fury, he smiled and "sat tight" till the storm was over. He was not a good speaker, and he had no special skill in debate; but he invariably mastered the facts of his case. He neither overstated nor understated, and he was blessed with a shrewd and sarcastic humour which befitted his comfortable aspect, and spoke in his twinkling eyes even when he restrained his tongue.

The Liberal Government came to an end in June, 1885. The "Home Rule split" was now nigh at hand, and not even Campbell-Bannerman's closest friends could have predicted the side which he would take. On the one hand, there was his congenital dislike of rant and gush, of mock-heroics and mock-pathetics; there was his strong sense for firm government, and there was his recent experience of Irish disaffection. These things might have tended to make him a Unionist, and he had none of those personal idolatries which carried men over because Mr. Gladstone, or Lord Spencer, or Mr. Morley had made the transition. On the other hand, there was his profound conviction—which is indeed the very root of Whiggery—that each nation has the right to choose its own rulers, and that no government is legitimate unless it rests on the consent of the governed.

This conviction prevailed over all doubts and difficulties, and before long it became known that Campbell-Bannerman had, in his own phrase, "found salvation." There were those who were scandalized when they heard the language of Revivalism thus applied, but it exactly hit the truth as regards a great many of the converts to Home Rule. In a very few cases—e.g., in Gladstone's own—there had peen a gradual approximation to the idea of Irish autonomy, and the crisis of December, 1885, gave the opportunity of avowing convictions which had long been forming. But in the great majority of cases the conversion was instantaneous. Men, perplexed by the chronic darkness of the Irish situation, suddenly saw, or thought they saw, a light from heaven, and were converted as suddenly as St. Paul himself. I remember asking the late Lord Ripon the reason which had governed his decision. He answered: "I always have been for the most advanced thing in the Liberal programme, and Home Rule is the most advanced thing just now, so I'm for it." I should not wonder if a similar sentiment had some influence in the decision, arrived at by Campbell-Bannerman, who, when Gladstone formed his Home Rule Cabinet in 1886, entered it as Secretary of State for War. He went out with his chief in the following August, and in the incessant clamour for and against Home Rule which occupied the next six years he took a very moderate part.

When Gladstone formed his last Administration, Campbell-Bannerman returned to the War Office, and it was on a hostile vote concerning his Department that the Government was defeated in June, 1895. He resented this defeat more keenly than I should have expected from the habitual composure of his character; but it was no doubt the more provoking because in the previous spring he had wished to succeed Lord Peel as Speaker. He told me that the Speakership was the one post in public life which he should have most enjoyed, and which would best have suited his capacities. But his colleagues declared that he could not be spared from the Cabinet, and, true to his fine habit of self-effacement, he ceased to press his claim.

In October, 1896, Lord Rosebery, who had been Premier from 1894 to 1895, astonished his party by resigning the Liberal leadership. Who was to succeed him? Some cried one thing and some another. Some were for Harcourt, some for Morley, some for a leader in the House of Lords. Presently these disputations died down; what logicians call "the process of exhaustion" settled the question, and Campbell-Bannerman—the least self-seeking man in public life—found himself the accepted leader of the Liberal party. The leadership was an uncomfortable inheritance. There was a certain section of the Liberal party which was anxious that Lord Rosebery should return on his own terms. There were others who wished for Lord Spencer, and even in those early days there were some who already saw the makings of a leader in Mr. Asquith. And, apart from these sectional preferences, there was a crisis at hand, "sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow."

The Eastern Question of 1876 had rent the Liberal party once; the Irish Question of 1886 had rent it again; and now for the third time it was rent by the South African Question. Holding that the South African War was a wanton crime against freedom and humanity, I wished that my leader could declare himself unequivocally against it, but he felt bound to consider the interests of the Liberal party as a whole rather than those of any particular section which he might personally favour. As the campaign advanced, and the motives with which it had been engineered became more evident, his lead became clearer and more decisive. What we read about Concentration Camps and burnt villages and Chinese labour provoked his emphatic protest against "methods of barbarism," and those Liberals who enjoyed the war and called themselves "Imperialists" openly revolted against his leadership. He bore all attacks and slights and impertinences with a tranquillity which nothing could disturb, but, though he said very little, he saw very clearly. He knew exactly the source and centre of the intrigues against his leadership, and he knew also that those intrigues were directed to the end of making Lord Rosebery again Prime Minister. The controversy about Tariff Reform distracted general attention from these domestic cabals, but they were in full operation when Mr. Balfour suddenly resigned, and King Edward sent for Campbell-Bannerman. Then came a critical moment.

If Mr. Balfour had dissolved, the Liberal leader would have come back at the head of a great majority, and could have formed his Administration as he chose; but, by resigning, Mr. Balfour compelled his successor to form his Administration out of existing materials. So the cabals took a new form. The Liberal Imperialists were eager to have their share in the triumph, and had not the slightest scruple about serving under a leader whom, when he was unpopular, they had forsaken and traduced. Lord Rosebery put himself out of court by a speech which even Campbell-Bannerman could not regard as friendly; but Mr. Asquith, Mr. Haldane, and Sir Edward Grey were eager for employment. The new Premier Was the most generous-hearted of men, only too ready to forgive and forget. His motto was Alors comme alors, and he dismissed from consideration all memories of past intrigues. But, when some of the intriguers calmly told him that they would not join his Government unless he consented to go to the House of Lords and leave them to work their will in the House of Commons, he acted with a prompt decision which completely turned the tables.

The General Election of January, 1906, gave him an overwhelming majority; but in one sense it came too late. His health was a good deal impaired, and he was suffering from domestic anxieties which doubled the burden of office. Lady Campbell-Bannerman died, after a long illness, in August, 1906, but he struggled on bravely till his own health rather suddenly collapsed in November, 1907. He resigned office on the 6th of April, 1908, and died on the 22nd.

His brief Premiership had not been signalized by any legislative triumphs. He was unfortunate in some of his colleagues, and the first freshness of 1906 had been wasted on a quite worthless Education Bill. But during his term of office he had two signal opportunities of showing the faith that was in him. One was the occasion when, in defiance of all reactionary forces, he exclaimed, "La Duma est morte! Vive la Duma!" The other was the day when he gave self-government to South Africa, and won the tribute thus nobly rendered by General Smuts: "The Boer War was supplemented, and compensated for, by one of the wisest political settlements ever made in the history of the British Empire, and in reckoning up the list of Empire-builders I hope the name of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, who brought into being a united South Africa, will never be forgotten."

II

IN HONOUR OF FRIENDSHIP

I

GLADSTONE—AFTER TWENTY YEARS

The 19th of May, 1898, was Ascension Day; and, just as the earliest Eucharists were going up to God, William Ewart Gladstone passed out of mortal suffering into the peace which passeth understanding. For people who, like myself, were reared in the Gladstonian tradition, it is a shock to be told by those who are in immediate contact with young men that for the rising generation he is only, or scarcely, a name. For my own part, I say advisedly that he was the finest specimen of God's handiwork that I have ever seen; and by this I mean that he combined strength of body, strength of intellect, and spiritual attainments, in a harmony which I have never known equalled. To him it was said when he lay dying, "You have so lived and wrought that you have kept the soul alive in England." Of him it was said a few weeks later, "On the day that Gladstone died the world lost its greatest citizen." Mr. Balfour called him "the greatest member of the greatest deliberative assembly that the world has ever seen"; and Lord Salisbury said, "He will be long remembered as a great example, to which history hardly furnishes a parallel of a great Christian statesman."

I have written so often and so copiously of Mr. Gladstone, who was both my religious and my political leader, that I might have found it difficult to discover any fresh aspects of his character and work; but the Editor[*] has kindly relieved me of that difficulty. He has pointed out certain topics which strikingly connect Gladstone's personality with the events and emotions of the present hour. I will take them as indicated, point by point.

[Footnote *: Of the Red Triangle.]

1. THE LOVE OF LIBERTY.

I have never doubted that the master-passion of Gladstone's nature was his religiousness—his intensely-realized relation with God, with the Saviour, and with "the powers of the world to come." This was inborn. His love of liberty was acquired. There was nothing in his birth or education or early circumstances to incline him in this direction. He was trained to "regard liberty with jealousy and fear, as something which could not wholly be dispensed with, but which was continually to be watched for fear of excesses." Gradually—very gradually—he came to regard it as the greatest of temporal blessings, and this new view affected every department of his public life. In financial matters it led him to adopt the doctrine of Free Exchanges. In politics, it induced him to extend the suffrage, first to the artisan and then to the labourer. In foreign affairs, it made him an unrelenting foe of the Turkish tyranny. In Ireland, it converted him to Home Rule. In religion, it brought him nearer and nearer to the ideal of the Free Church in the Free State.

2. BELGIUM AND THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR.

Gladstone hated war. He held, as most people hold, that there are causes, such as Life and Home and Freedom, for which the gentlest and most humane of men must be prepared to draw the sword. But he was profoundly anxious that it should never be drawn except under the absolute compulsion of national duty, and during the Crimean War he made this memorable declaration:

"If, when you have attained the objects of the war, you continue it for the sake of mere military glory, I say you tempt the justice of Him in whose hands the fates of armies are as absolutely lodged as the fate of the infant slumbering in its cradle."

This being his general view of war, it was inevitable that he should regard with horror the prospect of intervention in the Franco-German War, which broke out with startling suddenness, when he was Prime Minister, in the summer of 1870. He strained every nerve to keep England out of the struggle, and was profoundly thankful that Providence enabled him to do so. Yet all through that terrible crisis he saw quite clearly that either of the belligerent Powers might take a step which would oblige England to intervene, and he made a simultaneous agreement with Prussia and France that, if either violated the neutrality of Belgium, England would co-operate with the other to defend the little State. Should Belgium, he said, "go plump down the maw of another country to satisfy dynastic greed," such a tragedy would "come near to an extinction of public right in Europe, and I do not think we could look on while the sacrifice of freedom and independence was in course of consummation."

3. WAR-FINANCE AND ECONOMY.

A colleague once said about Gladstone, "The only two things which really interest him are Religion and Finance." The saying is much too unguarded, but it conveys a certain truth. My own opinion is that Finance was the field of intellectual effort in which his powers were most conspicuously displayed; and it was always remarked that, when he came to deal with the most prosaic details of national income and expenditure, his eloquence rose to an unusual height and power. At the same time, he was a most vigilant guardian of the public purse, and he was incessantly on the alert to prevent the national wealth, which his finance had done so much to increase, from being squandered on unnecessary and unprofitable objects. This jealousy of foolish expenditure combined with his love of peace to make him very chary of spending money on national defences. When he was Chancellor of the Exchequer under Lord Palmerston, his eagerness in this regard caused his chief to write to the Queen that "it would be better to lose Mr. Gladstone than to run the risk of losing Portsmouth or Plymouth." At the end of his career, his final retirement was precipitated by his reluctance to sanction a greatly increased expenditure on the Navy, which the Admiralty considered necessary. From first to last he sheltered himself under a dogma of his financial master—Sir Robert Peel—to the effect that it is possible for a nation, as for an individual, so to over-insure its property as to sacrifice its income. "My name," he said at the end, "stands in Europe as a symbol of the policy of peace, moderation, and non-aggression. What would be said of my active participation in a policy that will be taken as plunging England into the whirlpool of Militarism?"

4. ARBITRATION AND THE "ALABAMA."

Gladstone's hatred of war, and his resolve to avoid it at all hazards unless national duty required it, determined his much criticized action in regard to the Alabama. That famous and ill-omened vessel was a privateer, built in an English dockyard and manned by an English crew, which during the American Civil War got out to sea, captured seventy Northern vessels, and did a vast deal of damage to the Navy and commerce of the Union. The Government of the United States had a just quarrel with England in this matter, and the controversy—not very skilfully handled on either side—dragged on till the two nations seemed to be on the edge of war. Then Gladstone agreed to submit the case to arbitration, and the arbitration resulted in a judgment hostile to England. From that time—1872—Gladstone's popularity rapidly declined, till it revived, after an interval of Lord Beaconsfield's rule, at the General Election of 1880. In the first Session of that Parliament, he vindicated the pacific policy which had been so severely criticized in the following words:

"The dispositions which led us to become parties to the arbitration of the Alabama case are still with us the same as ever; we are not discouraged, we are not damped in the exercise of these feelings by the fact that we were amerced, and severely amerced, by the sentence of the international tribunal; and, although we may think the sentence was harsh in its extent and unjust in its basis, we regard the fine imposed on this country as dust in the balance compared with the moral value of the example set when these two great nations of England and America, who are among the most fiery and the most jealous in the world with regard to anything that touches national honour, went in peace and concord before a judicial tribunal to dispose of these painful differences, rather than resort to the arbitrament of the sword."

5. NATIONALITY—THE BALKANS AND IRELAND.

Gladstone was an intense believer in the principle of nationality, and he had a special sympathy with the struggles of small and materially feeble States. "Let us recognize," he said, "and recognize with frankness, the equality of the weak with the strong, the principles of brotherhood among nations, and of their sacred independence. When we are asking for the maintenance of the rights which belong to our fellow-subjects, resident abroad, let us do as we would be done by, and let us pay that respect to a feeble State, and to the infancy of free institutions, which we would desire and should exact from others, towards their maturity and their strength."

He was passionately Phil-Hellene. Greece, he said in 1897, is not a State "equipped with powerful fleets, large armies, and boundless treasure supplied by uncounted millions. It is a petty Power, hardly counting in the list of European States. But it is a Power representing the race that fought the battles of Thermopylæ and Salamis, and hurled back the hordes of Asia from European shores."

Of the Christian populations in Eastern Europe which had the misfortune to live under "the black hoof of the Turkish invader," he was the chivalrous and indefatigable champion, from the days of the Bulgarian atrocities in 1875 to the Armenian massacres of twenty years later. "If only," he exclaimed, "the spirit of little Montenegro had animated the body of big Bulgaria," very different would have been the fate of Freedom and Humanity in those distracted regions. The fact that Ireland is so distinctly a nation—not a mere province of Great Britain—and the fact that she is economically poor, reinforced that effort to give her self-government which had originated in his late-acquired love of political freedom.

6. THE IDEA OF PUBLIC RIGHT.

Of the "Concert of Europe" as it actually lived and worked (however plausible it might sound in theory) Gladstone had the poorest opinion, and, indeed, he declared that it was only another and a finer name for "the mutual distrust and hatred of the Powers." It had conspicuously failed to avert, or stop, or punish the Armenian massacres, and it had left Greece unaided in her struggle against Turkey. Lord Morley has finely said of him that "he was for an iron fidelity to public engagements and a stern regard for public law, which is the legitimate defence for small communities against the great and powerful"; and yet again: "He had a vision, high in the heavens, of the flash of an uplifted sword and the gleaming arm of the Avenging Angel."

I have now reached the limits of the task assigned me by the Editor, and my concluding word must be more personal.

I do not attempt to anticipate history. We cannot tell how much of those seventy years of strenuous labour will live, or how far Gladstone will prove to have read aright the signs of the times, the tendencies of human thought, and the political forces of the world. But we, who were his followers and disciples, know perfectly well what we owe to him. If ever we should be tempted to despond about the possibilities of human nature and human life, we shall think of him and take courage. If ever our religious faith should be perplexed by the

"Blank misgivings of a creature,
Moving about in worlds not realized,"

the memory of his strong confidence will reassure us. And if ever we are told by the flippancy of scepticism that "Religion is a disease," then we can point to him who, down to the very verge of ninety years, displayed a fulness of vigorous and manly life beyond all that we had ever known.