My Memory of Gladstone

by Goldwin Smith

The announcement of Gladstone’s plan was followed by terrible searching of heart in his party, ending in a split. Lord Hartington undertook the leadership of the Unionist-Liberals, and showed energy and striking ability in his new part. The fatal blow was the declared opposition of Bright, the great pillar of political righteousness, and the lifelong advocate of justice to Ireland.

The stoutest opposition and that which did most to save the integrity of the United Kingdom was made, as I shall always hold, by The Times. The error into which it fell with regard to the Parnell Letters was a trifling matter compared with the memorable service which it rendered on the whole to the Unionist cause.

When the contest had begun, Gladstone’s pugnacity broke all bounds. He appealed to separatist sentiment in Scotland and Wales, as well as in Ireland. He appealed to the “masses” against the “classes.” He appealed to ignorance against intelligence and the professions. One of the most eminent of his lifelong friends and admirers, who had held high office in his Government, said of him in a letter to me, “Gladstone is morally insane.” He had lost the personal influences by which his impulses had been controlled. Graham, Newcastle, Sidney Herbert, Cardwell, all were gone. Cardwell especially, a man eminently sure-footed and cool-headed, had, I suspect, while he lived, exercised an important and salutary though unfelt restraint.

Carried away by his excitement, Gladstone traduced the authors of the Union and their work, a work which he had once coupled with the treaty of commerce with France as supremely honourable to Pitt. “A horrible and shameful history, for no epithets weaker than these can in the slightest degree describe or indicate ever so faintly the means by which, in defiance of the national sentiment of Ireland, consent to the Union was attained.” Such is his language, and he compares the transaction in atrocity to the worst crimes in history. Consent to the Union was attained by the absolute necessity, plain to men of sense, of putting an end to murderous anarchy and averting a renewal of ’98. It has been clearly shown that there was no serious bribery of a pecuniary kind. The indemnities for the owners of pocket boroughs were paid, in accordance with the notions of the day and under an Act of Parliament, alike to those who had voted for the Union and to those who had voted against it. The oligarchy to whose local reign the measure put an end was appeased with peerages and appointments, the scramble for which might well disgust a high-minded man like Cornwallis. This was probably inevitable in those days. Satisfactorily to obtain the national consent was impossible. The Parliament was a Protestant oligarchy, the Catholics being still excluded, and it was deeply stained with the atrocities of repression. Ireland, in fact, was not a nation, or capable of giving a national consent; it was a country divided between two races antagonistic in religion and at deadly enmity with each other. The submission of the question to the constituencies by the holding of a general election, five-sixths of the population being excluded from Parliament, would have been futile, and would very likely have revived the civil war. Pitt, it is true, held out to the Catholics a hope of political emancipation. That hope he did his best to fulfil, but he was prevented by the fatuous obstinacy of the King; and Mr. Gladstone, who was a devout monarchist, might have been challenged to say what, when met by the Royal veto, Pitt could have done. The promise remained in abeyance for one generation, at the end of which it was fulfilled. These bitter appeals to Irish hatred of the Union and belief that it was a deadly and inexpiable wrong, did not come well from the author of a measure intended, as he professed, to pluck the thorn out of the Irish heart.

The Bill was defeated in the House of Commons by a majority of thirty votes; and, on an appeal to the country, the Liberal-Unionists combining with the Conservatives on the special question, the Opposition won by upwards of a hundred. Six years afterwards, by another turn of the wheel, the Salisbury Government losing strength, Gladstone found himself again at the head of the Government, but with a weak majority made up largely of the Irish vote. Then came the catastrophe of Parnell, who, at the critical moment, was convicted of crim. con. It is impossible to read Mr. Morley’s account of the scene of distraction which ensued, matrimonial morality struggling with political convenience, and of the sorrowful decision that crim. con. would be an awkward thing to carry in face of the Nonconformist conscience, without feeling the presence of a comic element in the narrative.

Home Rule, however, was again put to the vote, and in its strangest form, Ireland being given a Parliament of her own, and, at the same time, a representation in the British Parliament with full liberty of voting on all British questions. That the Irish delegation would barter its vote to British parties for Irish objects, and especially for the relaxation of restrictions on its plenary power, was what nobody could fail to foresee. A more extraordinary proposal, surely, never was made to any legislature. The one recommendation that Home Rule had was, that it would rid the British Parliament of an alien and hostile element. That element Gladstone’s Bill would have retained in its worst form. The Bill, however, was carried in the Commons by a majority of thirty-four, some of the English members probably giving a party vote in the assurance that the Bill would be thrown out by the House of Lords.

The use of the clôture in forcing through the House of Commons such a measure as Home Rule surely could not be defended. The clôture by which our overbearing Government is able to gag the House of Commons, even on the most vital question, remains a mark of Gladstone’s impetuousity and inability to brook opposition when what seemed to him an object of prime importance was in view.

After trying to raise a storm against the Lords, Gladstone resigned, as was reported, on a difference with the Admiralty about naval expenditure. One of the most memorable careers in English history came to an end. The party which Gladstone led was utterly shattered, and shattered it still remains. Palmerston, could he have looked upon the scene, might have said that his cynical prophecy had been really fulfilled.

Gladstone, in addition to his immense amount of public work, was a voluminous author; the more voluminous because his style, formed by public and ex tempore speaking, though perfectly clear and correct, was certainly diffuse. His biographer shows good judgment by dwelling no more than he can help on this part of the subject. Readers of Homeric Studies and Juventus Mundi must wonder how such things can have been written and given to the press by so great a man. Stranger things have seldom come from any pen than the pages of the Traditive Element in Homeric Theo-Mythology, connecting Latona with the Virgin, Apollo with the Deliverer of mankind, and Ate with the Tempter. All these volumes are full of fantastic and baseless speculation. The fancy that there was an Egyptian epoch in the early history of Greece appears to be partly suggested by an accidental similarity between the name of an Egyptian and that of a Bœotian city. Not on such reasonings were the famous budgets based.

I was with Gladstone one day, when, our business having been done, he began to talk of Homer, and imparted to me a theory which he had just woven out of some fancied philological discovery. I felt sure that the theory was baseless, and tried to convince him that it was. But he was never very open to argument. Just as I had succumbed, the door opened and his brother-in-law, Lord Lyttelton, came in. Lord Lyttelton was a first-rate classical scholar, and I felt sure that he would see the question aright and prevail. See the question aright he did; prevail he did not; and the discovery has probably taken its place beside that of the Traditive Element.