My Memory of Gladstone

by Goldwin Smith

Peel’s Government having been overthrown on the question of the Corn Laws by a combination which the Duke of Wellington characterized with military frankness, of Tory Protectionists, Whigs, Radicals, and Irish Nationalists, the whole under Semitic influence, its chief, for the short remainder of his life, held himself aloof from the party fray, encouraging no new combination, and content with watching over the safety of his great fiscal reform; though, as Greville says, had the Premiership been put to the vote, Peel would have been elected by an overwhelming majority. His personal following, Peelites as they were called, Graham, Gladstone, Lincoln, Cardwell, Sidney Herbert, and the rest, remained suspended between the two great parties. When Disraeli had thrown over protection, as he meant from the beginning to do, the only barrier of principle between the Peelites and the Conservatives was removed. Overtures were made by the Conservative leader, Lord Derby, to Gladstone, whose immense value as a financier was well established, and the common opinion was that Gladstone would have accepted had Disraeli not been in the way. But Disraeli, though he offered to waive his claims, was in the way, and the result was that the Peelites, Gladstone at their head, coalesced with the Whigs and helped to form the coalition Government of Lord Aberdeen.

Mr. Morley has said rightly that an impulse in the Liberal direction was lent to Gladstone’s mind by the crusade into which his humanity impelled him against the iniquities and cruelties of the Bourbon government at Naples. Though it was not revolutionary sentiment but zeal for righteousness and hatred of iniquity that moved him, his heart could not be closed against the loud and passionate acclaim of the Mazzinians and all who were struggling against the traditions of the Holy Alliance in Europe, while all the powers of reaction, political or ecclesiastical, denounced him, and even the good Lord Aberdeen shrank from anything which appeared to encourage revolution or to imply that the treaties of Vienna were effete. The famous letters sent a thrill through Europe and made all the powers of tyranny and iniquity tremble on their thrones. Seldom, if ever, has a private manifesto had such effect. Combined with humanity and zeal for righteousness, in Gladstone’s heart was a strong feeling in favour of nationality, which he showed in promoting, as he did, the emancipation of the Ionian Islands and their union with Greece.

Once launched in any career, Gladstone was sure to imbibe the full spirit of the movement and lead the way. His Liberalism presently outstripped that of the Whigs. As the most conspicuous seceder from the Tory camp, he became the special object of antipathy to the Carlton Club, which was fond of speaking of him as insane. A member of the Carlton was reported to have said to a member of the Reform Club, “I am much better off for a leader than you are, my leader is only an unscrupulous intriguer; yours is a dangerous lunatic.” The story was current that Gladstone had bought the whole contents of a toyshop and ordered them to be sent to his house. This came to me once in so circumstantial a form, that I asked Lady Russell whether she thought it could be true. Her answer was: “I begin to think it is, for I have heard it every session for ten years.”

It must be owned that Gladstone was impulsive, and that impulsiveness was the source not only of gibes to his enemies, but sometimes of anxiety to his friends. “What I fear in Gladstone,” said Archbishop Tait, “is his levity.” That he could easily throw off responsibility, I think I have myself seen. But a man on whom so heavy a load of responsibility rests, if he felt its full weight would be killed by it, and want of conscientiousness is not to be inferred from lightness of heart.

It must have been, indeed it evidently was, much against the grain that the great Minister of peace and economy went into the Crimean War. He seems to have tried to persuade himself that the result, after all, would be the bringing of Turkey under control. More substantial was his resolution, as Chancellor of the Exchequer and holder of the purse, to make the generation which waged the war, as far as possible, pay for it by taxes, not cast the burden upon posterity by loans. Mr. Morley is right in pointing to Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, then unhappily Ambassador at Constantinople, as largely responsible for the war. Besides his hatred of Russia, the ambassador had a personal grudge against the Czar. But conspiring with him were Palmerston, intensely anti-Russian, the father of Jingoism, perhaps not unwilling to replace the pacific Lord Aberdeen; and the Emperor of the French, who wanted glory to gild his usurped throne and a better social footing in the circle of Royalties, which he gained by publicly embracing the British Queen. In the middle of the war, Gladstone seceded from the Ministry, reconstructed under Palmerston after its fall under Lord Aberdeen; not, I suspect, so much because Palmerston failed to oppose Roebuck’s motion of inquiry, against which it was useless to contend, as because he was himself thoroughly sick of the war. I happened just then to be with him one morning on business, at the conclusion of which he began to talk to me, or rather to himself, about the situation, saying, in his Homeric way, that if the Trojans would have given back Helen and her treasures, his Homeric phrase for the Vienna terms, the Greeks would have raised the siege of Troy. I had not had the advantage of being at the Greek headquarters; but I could not help seeing in what mood the British people were, and how hopeless it was then to talk to them about reasonable terms of peace. Had Gladstone, instead of bolting in the middle of the war, mustered courage, of which he generally had a superabundance, to oppose it at the outset, he might have incurred obloquy at the moment, but he would have found before long that, to use Salisbury’s metaphor reversed, he had laid his money on the right horse. The grass had hardly grown over the graves on the heights of Sebastopol before everybody condemned the war.

After some turns of the political wheel, we find Gladstone Chancellor of the Exchequer under Palmerston, making the fortune of that Government by his masterly Budgets and splendid expositions of them in the House. If Palmerston was the father of Jingoism, Gladstone was its arch-enemy. Of the two things for which the Prime Minister said he lived, the extinction of slavery, and the military defence of England, Gladstone looked not with special zeal upon the first and very cautiously on the second. Palmerston was a commercial Liberal, and he saw the immense value of such a Chancellor of the Exchequer to his Government. But he was believed to have said that, when he was gone, Gladstone would in two years turn their majority of seventy into a minority, and in four be himself in a lunatic asylum. It was known that he wanted as his successor in the leadership, not Gladstone, but Cornewall Lewis. Very pleasant would have been the situation of that highly respected scholar and statesman, leading the House with Gladstone on his flank!

One fruit, distinctly Gladstonian, the Palmerston Government bore. That fruit was the commercial treaty with France, negotiated through Cobden, who shared, with Bright, Palmerston’s particular dislike. Cobden even suspected that Palmerston would not have been sorry if the treaty had miscarried, and that he betrayed his feeling in his bearing and language towards France while negotiations were going on. There was nothing in the treaty which could militate against a rational policy of free trade. Some Liberals were inclined to demur to it, not because it was inconsistent with free trade, but because it made us to some extent accomplices in a stretch of prerogative on the part of the Emperor of the French, who used the treaty-making power to accomplish, without the authority of his Legislature, a change in the fiscal system of France.

The objections which some might perhaps take to Gladstone’s fiscal system are, that it retains, though it reduces, the income tax, originally imposed only for the purpose of shoring up the fiscal edifice while a great change was taking place, with a promise that when the change should be effected the tax should cease; and that it rests so much upon the consumption of a few important articles. Suppose tobacco, for instance, were to go out of fashion, as some sanitary authorities say it ought, there would be a serious gap in the Budget.

The great master of finance, while he was dealing with it on the largest scale, was conscientiously mindful of the public interest in the most minute details of expenditure. He regarded public money as sacred, and any waste of it, however trifling, as criminal. His biographer has given us amusing instances of his conscientious parsimony in small things. In one case, however, his parsimony was misplaced. He grudged the judges their large salaries. Public money cannot be better expended than in taking the best men from the Bar to the Bench. The expedition of business assured by their command of their courts would in itself be worth the price, apart from the security for justice.