II.
Description is said to be only possible by comparing, and when one is asked to sketch Mr. Gladstone, how is it to be set about? His admirers will have it that he has been a very great Minister, so that if we adopt the comparative method, we ought to look high for standards. Shall we match him alongside Bismarck or Cavour? The latter, to give him precedence, stands renowned for building up his country in evil days, when every omen was against her. But Mr. Gladstone, succeeding to power when England was in the full tide of prosperity and at the height of fame, gave up her prospects, and would have acquiesced in her decadence. There is no likeness whatever between him and Cavour. Then take Bismarck. The great German Chancellor shares with the Italian Minister the glory of having widened the bounds and raised the position of his land, and he stands now head and shoulders above all in the midst of the diplomatic world a very Colossus. But Mr. Gladstone is and has always been outside that world altogether. Prince Bismarck has his hand on all the springs of action, and will let pass no chance of exalting his country. Mr. Gladstone, we repeat, never made the slightest impression in the regions of diplomacy; Courts did not know him, foreign statesmen left him out of their reckoning of the men that had to be dealt with. The great international achievements for which he has alone been talked of have been the surrender of British territory and the paying down of English money lavishly to another State for preposterous claims. But it will be said that it is not fair to Mr. Gladstone to compare him to Prince Bismarck and Count Cavour, for they were men who found their country in unusual circumstances. Look, then, to names in our own history. Pitt must not be spoken of for the reasons just allowed in the other cases; but there are Canning and Palmerston. How does Mr. Gladstone look alongside them? He has himself more than once alluded to Canning, as if not unwilling to be thought to have received his mantle. It was, however, always only in connection with Greece that he spoke of Canning; but that Minister looked much farther than the Mediterranean. One would have thought that so fine a rhetorician as Mr. Gladstone would not have forgotten the famous phrase in which Canning claimed to have called the New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old. Lord Palmerston was without any such fine phrases, but in foreign affairs he acted boldly, though he had to fall back on a musty Latin quotation to describe it. Every Englishman, however, understood Latin when their Minister said, Civis Romanus sum. Yet neither of these Ministers at any part of their career lived in times more stirring than Mr. Gladstone has done, nor when the interests of England were more endangered. He has still later had magnificent opportunities, but he did worse than lose them.
From all this, it would seem that, whether we look abroad or at home, there is no possibility of describing Mr. Gladstone by hints of comparison with these historical personages. What is said in that way appears, in fact, to turn into contrast; which is, also, itself a mode of delineation, though not usually of the kind the chief object of it wishes. We can find no Minister to couple along with him as having deliberately despaired of his country. However, Mr. Gladstone is certainly great in some way, for although other nations while we were under his sway were gradually losing sight of England herself as well as of him, he was making plenty of noise all the time at home. If it should turn out, as we go on, that he was not a great Minister but a great orator, that would seem to account for both the things. If Bismarck and Cavour have made affairs, Mr. Gladstone has made speeches, beating them as much in that as they did him in the other respect. But it is not exactly the same thing to the countries the men represent.
It is, therefore, under a humbler, more domestic aspect than that of this high supreme style of Minister which we have first tried that we must begin Mr. Gladstone's portraiture. The task may be divided into two portions. There is the opinion which we Conservatives hold of the general influence and effect he has had upon our national interests, in which we may be credited with at least trying to estimate his acts and measures on their merits; and, besides that, there is a judgment of him from a narrower party view, arising out of his historic relation to ourselves. We will take the latter first.
To hear Liberals talk, one might suppose that Conservatives had always cherished a special hatred against Mr. Gladstone simply for ceasing to be a Tory and becoming a Radical. That the Conservatives rather late in his career came to show much irritation against Mr. Gladstone is perfectly correct; but it was, as I hope to show as I go on, for very different reasons than simply because he had made one Conservative less and one Liberal more. A great political party has no such immortal animosities as that supposes: party feeling is not based on merely sentimental grounds. Both sides are used to losing men. It is the common fate of Parliamentary warfare. Now and then, some rather idle person who has time to waste in going back a long way in his recollections bethinks himself that Lord Beaconsfield was not always a Conservative; but we never yet heard of any one among the party challenging sympathy for him on the score that he had been hunted by the Liberals through half a century or so for having deserted them. Yet it will be admitted that Lord Beaconsfield has injured the Liberals more than ever Mr. Gladstone has done the Conservatives. What is the reason, then, of this difference of alleged treatment in the two cases? The answer may be given in half a sentence,—Lord Beaconsfield, alike when he was Mr. Disraeli and since, has always fought fair. That is enough in politics to make your opponents acquiesce in your being such; but Mr. Gladstone as his career developed surprised and puzzled everybody, his own friends included; and those who blame the Conservatives for, in the end, losing temper and showing exasperation, should bear in mind that he finally produced the very same effect upon the country at large.
It is worth while following this point a little further, for it would not be of much use attempting to sketch Mr. Gladstone if we are supposed to dislike him from some mere party instinct. Will anybody be good enough to tell us when this inscrutable emotion of hatred of Mr. Gladstone arose? Liberals are not supposed to be strong in history, but they have very short memories indeed if they have forgotten both their own career and his. Why, in 1852—that is, in the twentieth year of Mr. Gladstone's Parliamentary life—the Conservatives were offering him office, which was not refused by him with over-much promptness. For nearly fourteen years after that he was retained as the representative of the University of Oxford. It is, in fact, not yet very much more than a dozen years since this victim of political persecution, and present champion of the Radicals, was quietly ensconced in a seat for what is sometimes spoken of as the head-quarters of Toryism. He has roved a good deal among the constituencies since, but he was then willing to have gone on remaining at Oxford, if his constituents had also been willing to have been made laughing-stocks by letting him remain. Surely a man who represented Tory electors until he was getting fast on for sixty could scarcely up to that point have been much hunted and worried for Liberal principles. To speak plainly, there never was so late a conversion made of so much histrionic use as this of Mr. Gladstone's. But though it has suited both his and his present party's ends, it rather puzzles plain people who have kept their recollections a little trim to think that if he lives on into senatorial decrepitude, he will never have sat for Radical constituencies anything like so long a time as he did for Conservative ones. For between thirty and forty years this Liberal ex-Premier was a Tory member.
In fact, a glance at the right honourable gentleman's wonderfully prosperous career will show that in the list of our public men he has of all others made the fewest, the briefest, the least sacrifices either for principle or party. There are very simple ways of testing it; Mr. Gladstone has not been out of office long enough for a man who was innocent of business prudence in his career. He has, in fact, reaped the official spoils of two parties, if not of three. The dates and appointments are on record for anybody to trace out. On the very face of it, a man who has served under Peel, Aberdeen, Palmerston, and Russell, and then come out as a full-blown Liberal Prime Minister himself, must of necessity be said to offer rather a miscellaneous career. His warmest admirer must admit that he has been either the most fortunate or else the most prudent of men; and, as we do not wish to be stingy in our recognition of his skill, we prefer to compliment him by attributing his great prosperity throughout so many years and under so many different chiefs to his prudence.
If this very hasty review of Mr. Gladstone's chronicle does not agree with the impression of him which is the prevailing one on the Liberal side, it is the one which the bare facts of his career would produce on every side if they could be seen without the misleading effect of his very fine words and exceedingly solemn attitudes. Very fortunately for him it is only the Conservatives who have a full and accurate recollection of Mr. Gladstone. They have necessarily observed him continuously from their own unshifting party position, and so have been able to perceive in a way that hardly was practicable to the Liberals, who were always shifting and struggling among themselves, how invariably and consistently his announcements of change of view have hit with the opportunities for improvement of his Parliamentary position. On every occasion, to the very moment, so soon as a Liberal question had fully ripened, Mr. Gladstone presented himself to pluck it. It was so with Reform, it was so with Church Rates, it was so with University Reform, it was so with the Ballot, it was so with the spoliation of the Irish Church and the unsettling of the Irish landowners, and it is so with the County Franchise, and it will be so once more, if the Liberals ever get into power again, with the English Church and the English Land Laws. Mr. Bright, Mr. Miall, and all the Radicals have drudged for many a year for Mr. Gladstone, who, when all the outdoor work has been done, has always allowed himself to be persuaded to bring in the Measure just in the nick of time, and, by expounding it in a very fine speech, has robbed its actual originators of two-thirds of the credit of making it possible.
Luckily for the Conservatives, though he never had the courage to attack a question of the very first class himself in the way of initiative, he had an insatiable ambition for meddling with smaller ones, and by making vents in these ways for his restlessness and his ambition, he finally ruined all that his skilful prudence in the larger affairs had gained him, disgusting the country till it determined to get him off its hands at any price. Still, that is not just now the point in question.
Mr. Gladstone's so slowly passing through all the stages from Conservatism to Radicalism has had this effect,—that while all other public men of his standing have grown more or less antiquated in steady loyal service to their party, and by presenting a fixed if monotonous aspect to the public, this one Parliamentary personage kept a perennial freshness, simply by skilfully dividing his prolonged career into distinct periods and going on changing. Some political section has been always welcoming Mr. Gladstone newly into its ranks and to its spoils, for, as we have said, the two things unfailingly went together; and the shouts with which he was received were always strengthened by fainter murmurs of applause from other sections more advanced along the line, who hoped to receive him themselves later on. They did so. Really to each one of them he was a recruit from the last party. To the Palmerstonians he ought at the most to have been only a Peelite; to the Liberals at worst only a Palmerstonian. But by a surprising adroitness, it was always made to appear that in all his migrations from party to party, he joined each successive group as a new retreater from the Tories. It certainly was true in one sense; he was always going further away from them. But for all party purposes and reckoning, he had as much left them when he joined Palmerston as when he shook hands with Mr. Bright and took his place in front of the Radicals.
These are only a first handful of specimens of a certain unfairness in Mr. Gladstone's position and career from first to last, from which he has largely profited, and which very naturally irked his opponents, who have had to suffer its inconveniences. He has posed as a sort of political orphan left lonely in the Parliamentary world at the death of Peel, who has been persecuted by wicked Tories from one Chancellorship of the Exchequer to another, until they finally drove him into the Premiership, but all this time he was successfully seceding from them, though they continued in pursuit. It must have been Mr. Gladstone's portentous earnestness of demeanour which has covered up from the general public a joke so huge and prolonged as this, preventing everybody from seeing that such a tale did not agree with his unprecedented prosperity. But if in these ways he has kept himself interesting to the country, and fresh and surprising for every group he has in rotation joined, both he and his changes have long been stale to the Conservatives. They are able to look along his whole track, and seeing him from behind, know him as a Peelite, a follower of Aberdeen, a Palmerstonian, a Russellite, and a Radical. They are debarred from applying his own name to the last stage, and calling him a Gladstonian. Strangely enough, and indeed very significantly, that term has never taken root in our politics. There really have never been any Gladstonians: no one ever was or ever will be called by that title. Mr. Gladstone will end his days and depart without founding any school; he will stand recorded only as the acceptor of office from those who did so, and the passer of other people's measures. But in political life a man who attains the first rank of conspicuousness without founding a line may fairly be suspected. It will be found that he has been too busy in a narrower way,—looking after not questions but himself. To that very small party, numerically reckoned, consisting of only one member, Mr. Gladstone has been consistently and untiringly faithful. He has challenged for it sympathy in all the ways to which his very fine oratory has lent itself, and he has not neglected the humbler art of perpetual advertisement, keeping it by means of the press and the platform ever before the public eye. But when he finally leaves us it is certain to vanish entirely.
Very likely some ardent Radical, whose mind is so full of having got Mr. Gladstone at last that he forgets, or perhaps never knew, how many grades and shades of politicians have in succession enjoyed him before, will say that in all this we are only railing at Mr. Gladstone's success. His success! In order to describe Mr. Gladstone, we had first to write retrospectively, take in his earlier phases, and to look generally at his whole history. In that retrospect, down to a late point in it, he was exceedingly prosperous; but we never meant to say that he had been very successful since the beginning of 1874. There is not the slightest need for any Conservative to feel bitter against Mr. Gladstone now on any grounds of personal envy. He has done them the greatest service of any public man for three generations; and at any time he might have individually prospered as much as he liked for them, if it had been possible for him to do it without injuring his country. It is to this more serious examination of his career that we now go.
Not that we propose to entangle ourselves in the minute details of it, for that is in no way necessary. We have already in part explained why we may, in such a sketch as this, drop out many years of his political life. For a great length of time Mr. Gladstone was only a Budget-maker. It is true he made them for Governments that were not Conservative, but he still was considered nearly a Conservative outside his financial handicraft. And here, again, part of the explanation we earlier gave applies. There is not the slightest reason why any Conservative should pause long to consider Mr. Gladstone as the passer of the Ballot, or even as the disestablisher of the Irish Church and the interferer with the rights of landed property in Ireland. The only thing special to be said about him in connection with these things as distinguishing him from the ruck of Liberals would be, that he was a very late ex-Tory, and at the time a professed High Churchman. He somehow got the Liberals to let him write his name across every one of those measures so soon as it was seen that they would pass, and he has made the legislation in that way seem to be his; but the Conservatives know with whom they had really to deal in the inception and the pushing forward of those movements, and it was not Mr. Gladstone. The real men were Mr. Bright, Mr. Dillwyn, Mr. Miall, and those who for many a year worked with them while Mr. Gladstone was never heard of, never thought of, in connection with the matters they had always matured before he had anything to do with them.
Nor was it on account of these affairs that Mr. Gladstone's fall occurred when it came, which is another reason why it would be waste of time to discuss them in connection with him. Who is proposing to alter these things now that they have been fought out between the great parties of the State and decided? As a supplement to his Irish Land Bill, we now have the Irish peasants refusing to pay any rent at all: but in these days when a thing is done in our Parliament it is done. The Conservatives, in spite of the majority at their back, have never put forward a finger to touch those settlements, nor do they mean to do so; and yet not only our own country, but all Europe, and indeed realms farther away still, have been keenly aware that the Beaconsfield Ministry has been very busy for years undoing something that Mr. Gladstone had done.
What was this gigantic task, which was not the repealing of legislation, or the passing of statutes of any kind, but which required courage and effort more arduous than those things? There must have been some cause for the bursts of applause which have again and again echoed on our shores from all parts of the civilized globe at something that was going on. It was, we hasten to answer, the rehabilitation of England in the eyes of the world,—the restoration of her ancient power as a factor in the enforcement and administration of public right among the nations. Somehow, coincidently with Mr. Gladstone's prosperity as a Minister, England, his country, had sunk, and in exactly answering ratio, and was sinking lower and lower still daily. He was very famous, or at least very notorious, at home, but the renown of Britain abroad was clouding; and our people never will bear that, as history had shown before. This man, who at heart was but a financier, and who ought in the fitness of things never to have risen higher in office than a Chancellor of the Exchequer, whose function it should have been to find funds for some one else as a Prime Minister capable of a policy in the higher international politics befitting an Empire, was conducting our foreign affairs in the spirit of a commercial traveller; willing to effect a little saving by giving up a group of islands in one part or a bit of territory in another, and to effect an economy at another time by backing out of a treaty. Though, at the same time, if anybody insisted, and there loomed, however distantly, a possibility of war, he would pay the money down in a hurry by millions, as he did in the Alabama case. We should have had all the world insisting very soon, making peace more costly than war itself, besides the shame of unjustifiable surrender.
But we were spared all this; though the undoing of the humiliation, as far as it had gone, has fully occupied Mr. Gladstone's successors ever since.
This is the great accusation which the Conservatives have to bring against Mr. Gladstone—that of having degraded the position of his country; and an arraignment more fatal than this cannot be made in the case of a chief Minister. It is not alone the Conservatives who make it. Did not Earl Russell, Liberal though he was, find enough English blood in his aged veins when writing his last book, to say that Mr. Gladstone had dragged the name of England through the mire? But it would not be quite accurate to put this forward as the full explanation of Mr. Gladstone's sudden tumble from office; for it was not until after that occurred that the bulk of people quite knew the whole extent of the injury he had worked in this respect. The Conservative leaders guessed it, but they knew more about foreign affairs than the rank and file of the nation. Everybody, of course, high and low, was aware that he had unasked given up the Ionian Islands because of some literary reasons which he had come upon in writing books about Homer, that he had surrendered territory in the San Juan Boundary Question, and that he had quietly gone to Geneva and paid America, not indeed all she asked,—for even with Britain's wealth the whole of the first modest request would only have been found with difficulty,—but he had counted down a sum that made Brother Jonathan's shrewd eyes twinkle with joy. The country, from these events following one another, had come to have a very uneasy feeling that somehow under his auspices everything was going against us abroad. Still it was only later that it was made fully apparent how completely England was effaced; not until the three Emperors had begun to settle the rearrangement of Eastern Europe, without so much as saying to Great Britain, "By your leave." There is difficulty when looking back now to prevent oneself from suffering some illusion in this respect; but it is a fact, and we may be glad of it, that Englishmen did not until it was roughly forced upon them suppose beforehand that their position had dwindled to quite so low an ebb.
At the elections of 1874, there was no distinct foreign policy before the public, for though there were many on the Conservative side who sympathized with France in her adversity, and saw clearly that Germany's mutilation of her territory meant trouble in time to come, not a voice was raised in deprecation of our neutrality. But, for the matter of that, it may be just as correctly said that there was no matured domestic question before the country, for it will not be supposed that there was a single Tory any more than a Liberal who wished the Income Tax to be retained on his shoulders. It was hardly for proposing to do away with that impost that everybody voted so unanimously against Mr. Gladstone; they only did so at the polling-booths in spite of his proposing it, which somehow seems rather mysterious. If his opponents were not proposing to recall any of the recent legislation, and if there was no special question of foreign affairs pending, and if nobody had any desire not to be lightened of taxation, how was it, pray, that Mr. Gladstone was so ignominiously hurled from power? In reality, there is not the slightest difficulty about it—Mr. Gladstone was decisively rejected by his countrymen, not on any question of policy, either home or foreign, but because of the personal impression he had slowly but surely imprinted on their minds. The real issue before the country was whether it would have any more of Mr. Gladstone, and it said No.
It is a common artifice on the part of his apologisers to insinuate that he had wearied the nation by offering it too many things for its good. But neither individuals nor communities are much in the habit of refusing gifts; it is the one thing, and nearly the only thing, in this world for which there is an excellent reason whenever so strange a proceeding happens. There is another way of representing the matter, one much less complimentary but far more true—the country was sick of Mr. Gladstone. Even the sight of Mr. Lowe standing at his side with four millions of surplus in his hands was not enough to tempt them. The promise to abolish the Income Tax was the most tremendous bribe ever offered to the constituencies, but, to their credit, it did not corrupt them. They would not accept Mr. Gladstone any longer at any price whatever. The believers in democracy, and Mr. Gladstone in particular, according to some of his very latest reasonings, ought to have accepted this universal disgust as being a popular inspiration. However, they have done nothing of the kind, but avow that it was a public delusion, which they at first hinted would be temporary; but if the public is liable to delusions, and to fits of them which continue for seven or eight years at a stretch, for that is now the duration of this one, what becomes of these very radical gentlemen's democracy? For it is not really open to them to plead, though they will go on doing it, that the people's eyes were dazzled by a glitter of diplomatic success, and their blood infuriated by a skilfully aroused anti-Russian feeling. It is not open to them for a simple reason, but a very conclusive one: the elections came before anything of this could have happened; and the elections themselves arrived with the suddenness they did owing to something which had preceded them—namely, a steady run of Ministerial defeats in the by-contests, wherever a vacancy occurred in a constituency. Mr. Gladstone avowed all this in the address with which he startled the Greenwich electors and the whole country, though he and his friends have never mentioned the fact since. It was for the purpose of putting all things right that the elections which put them all more wrong still were so unexpectedly ordered. It was not because of being intoxicated by the diplomatic triumph of Lord Beaconsfield and Lord Salisbury at Berlin—which did not occur till years after—that the constituencies rejected Mr. Gladstone. We have no wish to be unnecessarily impolite, but the true reason for it was that which we have named already—they had come not to like Mr. Gladstone. If we trace that fact backwards in a natural way, we shall find that one cause of it was that they felt the honour and the interest of England were not safe in his hands; but this was only one among other causes. It swelled afterwards into the biggest reason of all, and now practically includes all the others; but, at the moment, it was not actually known that the safety of England was about to be imperilled.
The voters were affected by other reasons. What were those other reasons? The public must have known them pretty clearly at the time, since it acted so promptly and decidedly upon them, and it, therefore, ought not to need very much recalling of them now, for the time, after all, is not so very long ago. But it may be as well to go into them a little, since it was through the incidents furnishing them that the general public was led to form the very same estimate of Mr. Gladstone which the Conservatives had held for about a score of years before. At last the popular judgment coincided with that of his Parliamentary opponents, and he fell from power. But any one who will give a moment's consideration to the cases of the Collier appointment, the Ewelme Rectory affair, and the issue of the Royal Warrant on purchase in the army, will see that we are right in affirming that Mr. Gladstone's ignominious expulsion from office was owing to moral rather than political causes. It stands recorded that this Minister, who had put religious professions in the front of his politics in a way novel to public life, had to defend his conduct over and over again in the House of Commons by quoting the mere letter of the law. Parliament became not unlike the Old Bailey when a legal wrangle is going on over the technicalities of an indictment; and the unwonted spectacle of Lord Chief Justices accusing a theological Premier of having somehow evaded a statute was not made any less unedifying by Mr. Gladstone showing great skill in being his own attorney. Everybody must admit that he certainly did that.
It is possible to recall each of the cases in very few words. An Act of Parliament had been passed with a view to strengthening the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, and, as this Court was one of Appeal, it stood to reason that those appointed to it to revise other Judges' decisions should have had judicial experience themselves. It was expressly provided in the Act that those to be raised to this Court should be already Judges. To the surprise of the whole country, Sir Robert Collier, well known as Mr. Gladstone's Attorney-General, and, therefore, conspicuously only a waiter for a judgeship, not a judge already, was announced as the filler of one of these vacancies, before half the readers of the newspapers knew that he had ceased to be Attorney-General. It turned out, however, that he was in reality a judge at the moment, and that he had been one for some few moments previously, having, in fact, sat on the bench of the Common Pleas for just two days. There is not space to follow Mr. Gladstone's wonderful reasoning, but it chiefly turned on a point so fine as this, that what the Act meant to stipulate was not experience, but status. In other words, that a man should be made a judge of one kind for five minutes, in order to be turned into one of another kind, just for the say of the thing. Amazed members of the Legislature which had passed the enactment protested that they were not so foolishly subtle as this, and that they had never, before Mr. Gladstone mentioned it, thought of any such distinction as that between status and experience.
But this was not the only instance in which he has told people what they had intended better than they knew, and all differently. In the Ewelme Rectory business he would have it that when a statute said Oxford it meant Cambridge, or at least that its specifying Oxford did not signify, or that it included Cambridge, or, in fact, might be construed to prescribe anything else which it did not say and which was contrary to what everybody had thought of it before. However, here, again, as the lawyers would otherwise have been troublesome, the technicality was found to have been formally complied with. The words of the enactment did really require that the man who was to be made rector of Ewelme parish should be a member of Oxford Convocation, and Mr. Harvey, Mr. Gladstone's friend, who had been educated at Cambridge, and who, until that living became vacant, had never dreamed of connection with Oxford, was made a member of the Convocation, in order to receive the living. Of course, Mr. Gladstone argued that Mr. Harvey's being a Master of Arts was enough, though the statute said nothing of that, and everybody else had thought it expressly stated a certain University where the Master of Arts was to come from.
But let us go on to the third case, that of the issue of the Royal Warrant abolishing purchase. Not a few of the Liberals who exulted at the success of the party measure had a misgiving at the way in which it was secured. It was felt to be a victory which could not be repeated, and one of a style which, if they who snatched it had been Conservatives, would have thrown the country into a convulsion. The most violent act in the name of the Crown which the oldest man living in England has witnessed, was counselled by Mr. Gladstone. Because the Lords, in the exercise of the power which the Constitution gives them, were not willing instantly to pass his Bill for giving an entirely new social aspect to the army, he caused the Queen to do nothing short of superseding them entirely, and practically reduced the Constitution at a stroke to the Commons and the Crown. It is just now part of the tactics of the Liberals to protest against some imagined wish to bring in "personal rule." If any such preposterous design existed, it would be Mr. Gladstone's own act which would be fallen back upon for the precedent. The feeling which has best enabled the most thoughtful among Englishmen to understand the kind of shock which foreigners experience on the occurrence of one of the political earthquakes which they call on the Continent by the name coup d'état, was that which ran through the country when Mr. Gladstone announced that there was nothing for the Lords to discuss, that he had advised the Queen to issue a Royal Warrant. We had lost all recollection of the particular sensation, but he brought back just a twinge of it. Mr. Gladstone, however, can do Radical acts and then explain them historically. Once more we found ourselves all inextricably entangled in his casuistry. He now argued that the Royal Warrant had not been issued by exercise of prerogative, but in strict pursuance of statutory power, there being some Act of the Georges to that effect, which ordinary people had forgotten. It is not necessary to follow the thing further. In the end, Mr. Gladstone became too clever for the country. Even the dullest began to perceive that Mr. Gladstone could conscientiously do whatever he liked. The more subtly he argued, the more plain John Bull got puzzled.
It may, at first sight, seem tasking the public memory too much to ask people if they remember the tension there was in the political atmosphere towards the end of Mr. Gladstone's career. But a very great many will not have forgotten it. The political weather is so far like the other sort that it is only borne in mind for its badness; that, however, was a terrible season. At the last, Mr. Gladstone seemed to have got into the air, and he did not improve the climate. He may urge, certainly, that Mr. Lowe had made himself very obnoxious, that Mr. Ayrton had been found to be intolerable, and that the great trade of the publicans, with all its supporters, was in arms against Mr. Bruce. That is all true; the country disliked each one of these his chief colleagues. But neither Mr. Lowe's hard cynicism, nor Mr. Ayrton's dogmatic inæstheticism, nor Mr. Bruce's stolid mechanical interference, stirred the large keen dissatisfaction which Mr. Gladstone's own incomprehensibility in the end did. He gave men's consciences a shock, and none of the others affected to feel so deeply as that: it was only he who had stood forward as a political moralist, and then set everybody by the ears discussing his conduct. It was the same outside Parliament and within it. Everybody was arguing Mr. Gladstone; nobody could make him out, nobody felt safe, or could imagine what was coming next. If the atmosphere had but been charged a little more with him, England would not have been worth living in. Luckily the elections came, and the air was cleared.
But if in the more exaggerated instances we have above spoken of, the general public became aware of a certain obliquity, an unreliability, a dissatisfied restlessness, an imperiousness in Mr. Gladstone, the Conservatives had been more or less continuously aware of those qualities for many years. They, as we said earlier, have had to observe the right hon. gentleman closer, more continuously, and it would be easy for any one of them who is of middle age to give from his own memory a string of instances, just the same in kind as those above, though not so broadly striking, beginning much earlier in his career, and coming down much later. Very recently, Lord Salisbury at Manchester recalled Mr. Gladstone's dealings with his Oxford constituents in reference to the disestablishment of the Irish Church. But his lordship courteously spared his opponent the details. Has the world forgotten the famous letter to Dr. Hannah, bearing the date of June, 1865, written, as Mr. Gladstone himself with unlooked-for naïveté admits in his "Chapter of Autobiography," for the appeasing of doubts? He in it asserted, first of all, that the question was "remote and apparently out of all bearing on the practical politics of the day;" second, he avowed that he was probably going "to be silent" on the topic; third, he said that "he scarcely expected ever to be called on to share in such a measure;" and, as his finishing words, spoke of it as "a question lying at a distance he could not measure." These were far too many causes for not doing a thing, and the Conservatives accordingly began to look out. In 1869, Mr. Gladstone disestablished the Irish Church. The "remoteness" and the "distance which was not measurable" somehow came to be packed within these two dates,—1865-9. What had so hurried matters? Well, one can only recall what had happened in the interim, and among the events there had been these two occurrences—he had been expelled from Oxford and rejected by South Lancashire. The like suddenness attended his conversion on the subject of the Ballot. After half a lifetime of opposition, he one fine morning announced that it must pass, hardly a hint of warning having been given beforehand.
But his whole career has shown this suddenness of advance, at distinct periods, which, as we have said, always coincided with the brightening of the prospects of the respective agitations. It is true, as is earlier pointed out, that he took something like a quarter of a century to travel the ground between the Conservative starting-point and the Radical position, but the length of time was not owing to his creeping between the bounds; he has traversed it at successive leaps, standing still between, and, at the places where he remained stationary, there was always the warm shelter of office. This style of progress has characterized him down to the present moment. As late as 1874 he told a deputation that he did not consider the question of the County Franchise ripe. There has been a good deal of very indifferent weather since then; but whether or not the field crops have matured, it seems now that the agricultural labourer has been growing fast. Mr. Joseph Arch has been the sun that has shone upon him, and Mr. Gladstone, as usual, is quite ready to reap the harvest. Examples might be multiplied manifold. Take the boasted case of the Liberal surplus, of which we have never ceased to hear—just as if Mr. Lowe and Mr. Gladstone had between them coined the money. Its history, stated in three words, was this: Mr. Lowe had mulcted the public in an unnecessary twopence of Income Tax, and, instead of shamefully confessing the incompetency it showed in a Chancellor of the Exchequer, presented himself before the constituencies, on the eve of the elections, with his hands full of gold, and with the air of presenting it to them.
Mr. Gladstone, great financier as he is, was not above profiting by his subordinate's miscalculation. Instead of administering a rebuke, as a good journeyman might have been expected to do to a bad apprentice, he patted Mr. Lowe on the back. Indeed, in the Greenwich address, when he so magniloquently spoke of the money being given back in the shape of abolishing the Income Tax, he seemed to take some credit to himself.
It will be beginning, perforce, to dawn upon the reader that this was a Minister very difficult to be dealt with by an Opposition. If we had space in this paper, a part of the task of sketching Mr. Gladstone would be to point out how injuriously he has confused the demarcation of parties; how unscrupulous he has been in seeking allies which on no principle of fair classification belonged to him. It may be nothing that he can half apologize for Irish Obstructionists—the Liberals have always exploited Irish members. But this very high Churchman, who clings to a tenet so ridiculous in the eyes of Dissenters as apostolical succession, can figure in Dr. Joseph Parker's chapel, and betray a close and not uncomplimentary knowledge of the trust-deed of the Rev. Newman Hall's congregation. This austere gentleman, who, when inquiring into the "Theses of Erastus" (see his article), finds out that moral offences are at the root and source of all heresy, has a kindly word for such free-thinkers as happen to be also political leaders of the working men—Mr. Bradlaugh, for example. This objector to divorce, on such stupendously elevated grounds as that we are all members of a mystical body, and who cannot bring himself to allow more than a civil marriage to a deceased wife's sister, mingles in the ruck of Radicals. But if he has what they must think ecclesiastical crotchets, he always manages them with most skilful prudence. If he has to satisfy his most private feelings by bringing in no fewer than six resolutions in more or less opposition to the Public Worship Bill, he can withdraw them again. But was this the gentleman to champion Radicals and Dissenters? An Opposition which had to keep its own consistent lines, and which was closely restricted as to its allies, was at a perpetual disadvantage with one whose own opinions, subtle and complicated as they might be, cut him off from nobody who could be of aid.
Fortunately the country itself, at a certain rather tardy point, rallied its patriotism in that spontaneous way which always practically reinforces the Conservative party. The "Alabama" claims gave those who did not meddle much in politics their first shock, while for more thoughtful persons it brought back a reminiscence of the surrender of the Ionian Islands; and when, later, the public saw him stand tamely by while Russia tore up the Black Sea clauses of the Treaty of Paris, every student of our history knew that Mr. Gladstone's fate was sealed. The nation, stirred by arousings of the deeper instincts of the English character, at last reckoned with him on general grounds—dislike of his personal demeanour, and dread of what he was bringing on the country. It refused to be won either by the finest oratory or the prospect of reduced taxation.
The Conservatives came into power on the highest tide of popular feeling which living Englishmen have witnessed. But the change was too late to prevent mischief; Russia, encouraged by England's effacement during Mr. Gladstone's sway, had matured her further plans, and had already put her secret intrigues into motion. The Treaty of San Stefano showed plainly what her plan was, and just as clearly does everybody not blinded by party feeling now know that to Russia's amazement, and amidst the surprised and grateful admiration of the whole civilized globe, the present Ministry have thwarted that plan and made England again safe and famous. It would be a waste of time to retrace the details: a summary of them is to be found in Lord Salisbury's Manchester speech. What alone further concerns us here is the manner in which Mr. Gladstone has borne himself in Opposition. We have already seen how he did so as a Minister. It was understood, indeed, that he had retired, with something which was meant to pass for dignity, though to the eyes of the nation there was never anything which was not sulk which had so much the look of it. However, on the plea that something had happened in the world, he was quickly back again in front, elbowing Lord Hartington aside. Speeches, in Parliament and out, articles in every magazine, republication in pamphlet and volume, letters to everybody, which, practically, meant to all the newspapers: there never was such an active resuscitation of one who had so publicly become politically defunct. It is, however, not for coming to life again that we find fault with Mr. Gladstone, for, in truth, we always expected it.
Our complaint is simply this, that if such a style of opposition as he has resorted to became habitual, the government of the country would be made impossible. No means were left untried to make Russia hope, and other nations fear, that Lord Beaconsfield had not the nation at his back, and, when owing to this encouragement, Russia showed obstinacy, and it was necessary to risk something by exhibiting boldness, that very necessity was sought to be turned into a reproach. Mr. Gladstone's own tactics made it imperative that in the matter of Cyprus, and some other negotiations, secrecy should be observed, and the Government was charged with acting unconstitutionally, as if constitutional usage imposed no limits on the Opposition, or as if those limits had not been transgressed. Just so, again, in the Afghan war. If Lord Northbrook had acted with spirit years before, that war would never have been necessary; but that trifling fact Mr. Gladstone overlooked, he and the Duke of Argyll making it appear that Lord Lytton had been at great pains to get himself and his Government into a difficulty. Why Mr. Gladstone has had so little to say about the Cape war is a mystery, which may be explained some day; all that can now be said of it is that it shows a striking inconsistency. Luckily his efforts, though his industry was gigantic, have failed, and even he must be now aware that his renewal of them, though we suppose it must go on, having been arranged so long and announced so pompously, is a trifle late, with the Cape war ended, our troops in Cabul, those of Austria at Novi Bazar, and checkmated, scolding Russia gnashing her teeth at Germany. However, no doubt we shall have some very fine speeches, proving that nothing of this ought to have happened, or that it won't last long, or that the Beaconsfield Administration did not bring it about, or any thing else, just as reasonable, for fine words can be arranged in many different ways by a practised orator.
What, then, we may finally ask, was the secret of Mr. Gladstone's success so long as he was prosperous, and what was the explanation of his fall when it so suddenly arrived? The thrifty skill of calculation in estimating the growth of questions which his whole career so irresistibly points to was spoken of early in this sketch; but a man, no matter how judicious in the management of his own approaches to a party, cannot impose himself upon it. The Liberals, on the successive occasions, welcomed Mr. Gladstone, and did so gladly, never making his very late conversions a reproach. Its leaders were more vociferous in hailing him at each renewed arrival one stage farther on than were the rank and file, though some of them, as the thing was repeated, must have been struck with the unfailing punctuality of his approach. Not that we are professing to sympathize with these gentlemen. If it satisfied them that whenever they had upset a Government, be it that of Aberdeen or of Palmerston, the inevitable Mr. Gladstone always emerged out of the wreck, just a little more Liberal than the day before, ready to take the first pick of places in the new Cabinet, all well and good. But the fact was that his arrival always was a convenience, for, no matter how the sections differed among themselves, the rallying round Mr. Gladstone as a further seceder from Toryism was a proceeding in which they could all join, and it gave them, again and again, an appearance of unanimity and cohesion. This was, in fact, his great function, and in it he has been very valuable to the party. Besides, though so late and seemingly slow in politics, he had from the first been great, and at the outset even precocious, in finance; and, further, he was a wonderful orator, even quicker in debating than Mr. Bright. Such a personage, so largely prudent and so highly gifted, was sure to succeed, and to do so for a long time; but he was also certain to fail in the end, and that completely.
His temperament made that nearly certain. He was always too busy making speeches, or writing for the press, or answering letters, to be any power in social life. A strange kind of semi-recluse, but combining with bookworm habits a passion for speechifying and for using the penny post, was not likely to conciliate London, and he never did. By-and-by he was railing at the Clubs, because they did not agree with him; and then he had next to appeal from the metropolitan journals to the superior politicians and brighter wits who preside over the provincial newspapers. All this prognosticated failure. Even his special gifts and the kind of successes which fell to him turned into the means of helping it. His turn for figures not unnaturally made immediate economy his great object, forgetful of the larger connection in such a land as ours between an imperial position in the world and the preservation of our commerce, and overlooking also the costliness of reasserting our position when a crisis came; while his ready eloquence, having no longer open to it the old patriotic themes, had to expend itself in the adornment of British abnegation, and the excited applause given to his rhetoric was mistaken by him for assent to his views, till he was amazed to find himself suddenly quite out of accord with the nation, and falling, he knew not why, headlong from power.
Even to this hour he seems never to have had the least misgiving that the man who could speak with such complacency of the trading supremacy of the world passing to America (see his article on "Kin Beyond the Sea"), and who could urge as a reason for our not caring to interfere in Egypt that it would be the egg of a North African empire (see his article on "Aggression on Egypt and Freedom in the East"), was not the man to be England's Minister. But the country had found it out even before he wrote those articles; his threatening his countrymen with the calamity of finding another empire on their hands, in the only part of the world yet remaining to be explored and civilized, has only proved that they were right, and will not terrify Englishmen.
But a fluent orator has always left to him a kind of gambler's hope of retrieving everything by talking. Mr. Gladstone is going to alter everything by making a dozen or two of speeches in Scotland. Are these Midlothian harangues to be longer than that made at Greenwich, or more numerous than those uttered in Lancashire? They may be as fine as they will for anything it signifies to Conservatives, if the result is only again the same as on the other occasions, and it is hardly likely that he will persuade Englishmen now amidst their returning renown to despair of the future of England.
A Conservative.