But, sir, this is to view a religious Establishment upon one side only—upon what I may call the ethereal side; it has likewise a side of earth. And here I cannot do better than quote some lines written by the present Archbishop of Dublin at a time when his genius was devoted to the Muses. He said, speaking of mankind:
‘“We who did our lineage high
Draw from beyond the starry sky,
Are yet upon the other side,
To earth and to its dust allied.”
And so the Church Establishment, regarded in its theory and its aim, is beautiful and attractive. Yet what is it but an appropriation of public property—an appropriation of the fruits of labour and skill to certain purposes; and unless those purposes are fulfilled, that appropriation cannot be justified. Therefore, sir, I think we must set aside fears, which thrust themselves upon the imagination, and act upon the sober dictates of our judgment. I think it has been shown that the cause for action is strong—not for precipitate action, not for action beyond our powers, but for such action as the opportunities of the times and the condition of Parliament, if there is a ready will, will amply and easily admit of. If I am asked as to my expectations of the issue of this struggle, I begin by frankly avowing that I, for one, would not have entered into it unless I had believed that the final hour was about to sound. “Venit summa dies et ineluctabile fatum.” And I hope that the noble lord will forgive me if I say that before last Friday I thought that the thread of the remaining life of the Irish Established Church was short, but that since Friday last, when at half-past four o’clock in the afternoon the noble lord stood at that table, I have regarded it as being shorter still. The issue is not in our hands. What we had and have to do is to consider deeply and well before we take the first step in an engagement such as this, but, having entered into the controversy, there and then to acquit ourselves like men, and to use every effort to remove what still remains of the scandals and calamities in the relations that exist between England and Ireland, and to make our best efforts, at least, to fill up with the cement of human concord the noble fabric of the British Empire.’
Mr. Gladstone triumphed. Mr. Disraeli contented himself with the victory of his great rival. Mr. M‘Cullagh Torrens writes that he happened to pass near the Conservative leader in the cloisters as he muffled to resist the outer air, and could not help asking him what he thought of Gladstone’s speech in introducing the Bill. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘perfectly wonderful! Nobody but himself could have gone through such a mass of statistics, history, and computations.’ And then, after a pause: ‘And so characteristic in the finish to throw away the surplus on the other idiots.’
CHAPTER IX.
EDUCATION AND IRELAND.
During the Educational debates Mr. Miall said that the Premier had ‘led one section of the Liberal party through the valley of humiliation; but once bit, twice shy, and we can’t stand this sort of thing much longer.’ Mr. Gladstone sharply replied: ‘I hope that my hon. friend will not continue his support of the Government one moment longer than he deems it consistent with his sense of duty and right. For God’s sake, sir, let him withdraw it the moment he thinks it better for the cause he has at heart that he should do so. So long as my hon. friend thinks fit to give us his support, we will co-operate with my hon. friend for any purpose we have in common, but when we think his opinions and demands exacting, when we think that he looks too much to the section of the community he adorns, and too little to the interests of the people at large, we must then recollect that we are the Government of the Queen, and that those who have assumed the high responsibility of administering the affairs of the empire must endeavour to forget the part in the whole, and must, in the great measures they introduce into the House, propose to themselves no meaner or narrower object—no other object than the welfare of the empire at large.’ Again, in opposing Mr. Miall’s motion for doing to the English Church what had been done to the Irish, he said: ‘The Church of England is not a foreign Church; it is the growth of the history and traditions of the country. It is not the number of its members or the millions of its revenue—it is the mode in which it has been from a period shortly after the Christian era, and has never for 1,300 years ceased to be, the Church of the country, having been at every period engrained into the hearts and feelings of the great mass of the people, and having entwined itself with the local habits and feelings, so that I do not believe there lives the man who could either divine the amount and character of the work my honourable friend would have to undertake were he doomed to be responsible for the execution of his own propositions, or who could in the least degree define or anticipate the consequences by which it would be attended. If Mr. Miall sought to convert the majority of the House of Commons to his views, he must begin by converting to his views the opinions of the majority of the people of England.’
The attempt to carry an Irish University Bill led Mr. Gladstone to resign. Mr. W. E. Forster writes: ‘Gladstone rose with the House dead against him, and made a wonderful speech, easy—almost playful—with passages of great power and eloquence, but with a graceful ease which enabled him to plant daggers into Horsman, Fitzmaurice and Co.’ Again he writes: ‘Gladstone determined to resign; outside opinion very strongly for resignation. Gladstone made quite a touching little speech; he began playfully. This was the last of a hundred Cabinets, and he wished to say to his colleagues with what profound gratitude—and then he broke down, and could only say that he would not enter on the details. Tears came into my eyes, and we were all very touched.’ As Mr. Disraeli was unable to form a Government, Mr. Gladstone, however, soon returned to power, he resuming his old place as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Touching the Irish University Bill, Lord Blachford writes: ‘Coleridge is sanguine about Gladstone’s Irish University Bill. He seems to have started with the Cabinet against him, and to have converted them all (their point being, I suppose, to have something that would pass), especially some whom Coleridge describes as full of admiration for the scheme. I don’t understand it, but I imagine that it gives or leaves to everybody enough to stop their mouths without infuriating their neighbours.’ As stated, Mr. Gladstone returned to office, only to leave it in the following year, when he dissolved Parliament and the Tories had a majority. Mr. Gladstone retained his seat for Greenwich, but a local Tory was at the head of the poll.
Lord Russell’s charges against Mr. Gladstone of indifference on colonial questions is somewhat borne out by his conduct with regard to the annexation of Fiji, which he opposed in 1873, but which was ultimately carried out by the Government that succeeded his in the following year. In reply to Sir W. M’Arthur’s motion in the House for the annexation of Fiji, Mr. Gladstone said: ‘Nothing was easier than to make out a plausible case of appropriation of this kind, and yet nothing would so much excite the displeasure of those who cheered his honourable friend the member for Lambeth, than when for such appropriations a similar disposition was shown by other countries. It might be the chill of old age that was coming upon him, but he confessed he did not feel that excitement for the acquisition of new territory which animated the hon. gentleman.’ As to commerce, with our inability ‘to cope with expanding opportunities, he did not feel the pressure of the argument for securing special guarantees for our trade in every part of the world.’ He was more discursive in replying to what he called, ‘in no taunting spirit, the philanthropic part of the question.’
Nothing was more unexpected, or, as it happened, nothing more disastrous, than Mr. Gladstone’s sudden dissolution of Parliament in 1874. Mr. M’Cullagh Torrens writes: ‘On January 24 I was amused at breakfast by a paragraph read by one of my family—which, in the profundity of legislative wisdom, I treated as an editorial jest—announcing an immediate dissolution. When convinced at last by reference to an address to Greenwich that the decree had really gone forth, my breath was again taken away by learning that the immediate cause was the authoritative confession that the Cabinet had lost the necessary influence in directing public opinion, and that the new departure requisite for its recovery consisted in the offer to abolish the income-tax, and the creation of a number of peasant boroughs instead of those which might be still spared as belonging to the upper classes.’ Mr. Chamberlain severely described Mr. Gladstone’s address containing these proposals as ‘the meanest public document which had ever in like circumstances proceeded from a statesman of the first rank.’ It fell flat on the public.
In 1875 Mr. Gladstone, to the surprise of his friends, announced his determination to retire from the leadership of his party, and the Marquis of Hartington was selected in his stead, and held that post until the end of the session of 1879. The situation was a little embarrassing. The difficulties he had to encounter as leader of a minority in the House of Commons were enormously increased by the fact that he had to deal, not merely with his followers, but with his brilliant predecessor, who could at any moment, by his own individual action, lead the Liberal party into any course in which he chose to direct them.