I
The just complacency with which Mr. Gladstone regarded his cabinet on its first construction held good:—
I look back with great satisfaction on the internal working of the cabinet of 1868-74. It was a cabinet easily handled; and yet it was the only one of my four cabinets in which there were members who were senior to myself (the lord chancellor Hatherley, Lord Clarendon), with many other men of long ministerial experience. When this cabinet was breaking up in 1874, I took the opportunity of thanking them for the manner in which they had uniformly lightened my task in the direction of business. In reply, Halifax, who might be considered as the senior in years and experience taken jointly, very handsomely said the duty of the cabinet had been made more easy by the considerate manner in which I had always treated them. Some of them were as colleagues absolutely delightful, from the manner in which their natural qualities blended with their consummate experience. I refer especially to Clarendon and Granville.
Criticism By Colleagues
If we may trust some of those who were members of it, no cabinet ever did its business with livelier industry or effect. Under Mr. Gladstone's hand it was a really working cabinet, not an assemblage of departmental ministers, each minding his own affairs, available as casual members of this or the other sub-committee, and without an eye for the general drift and tendency of their proceedings. Of course ministers differed [pg 415] in importance. One was pleasant and popular, but not forcible. Another overflowed with knowledge and was really an able man, but somehow he carried no guns, and nobody cared what he said. One had aptitude without weight—perhaps the true definition of our grossly overworked epithet of clever. Another had weight and character, without much aptitude. The cabinet as a whole was one of extraordinary power, not merely because its chief had both aptitude and momentum enough for a dozen, but because it was actively homogeneous in reforming spirit and purpose. This solidarity is the great element in such combinations, and the mainspring of all vigorous cabinet work.
Of Mr. Gladstone as head of his first cabinet, we have a glimpse from Mr. Stansfeld:—
Mr. Gladstone's conduct in the cabinet was very curious. When I first joined in 1871, I naturally thought that his position was so commanding, that he would be able to say, “This is my policy; accept it or not as you like.” But he did not. He was always profuse in his expressions of respect for the cabinet. There was a wonderful combination in Mr. Gladstone of imperiousness and of deference. In the cabinet he would assume that he was nothing. I thought he should have said, “This is my policy. What do you think of it?” and then have fought it out until they had come to an agreement. He always tried to lead them on by unconscious steps to his own conclusions.[269]
To this we may add some words of Lord Granville used in 1883, but doubtless just as true of 1868-74:—
I have served under several prime ministers, men for whom I had high respect and to whom I had the greatest attachment, but I can say that I never knew one who showed a finer temper, a greater patience, or more consideration for his colleagues than Mr. Gladstone in all deliberations on any important subject. In his official position, with his knowledge, with his ability, and with the wonderful power of work that characterises him, he of course has an immense influence on the deliberations of the cabinet; but notwithstanding his tenacity of purpose and his earnestness, it is quite extraordinary how he attends to the arguments [pg 416] of all, and, except on any question of real vital principle, he is ready to yield his own opinion to the general sense of the colleagues over whom he presides.[270]
Imputing his own qualities to others, and always keen to make the best of people and not the worst, if he had once invited a man to office, he held on to him to the last possible moment. “The next most serious thing to admitting a man into the cabinet,” he said, “is to leave a man out who has once been in.” Not seldom he carried his invincible courtesy, deference, and toleration even beyond the domain where those qualities ought to be supreme. This was part of what men meant, when they said that life was to him in all its aspects an application of Christian teaching and example. To this we must add another consideration of first importance, and one that vulgar criticism of great statesmen too commonly ignores. In the words of Lord Aberdeen (1856), who knew from sharp experience how much his doctrine might cost a man: “A prime minister is not a free agent. To break up a government, to renounce all the good you hoped to do and leave imperfect all the good you have done, to hand over power to persons whose objects or whose measures you disapprove, even merely to alienate and politically to injure your friends, is no slight matter.”[271]