Mr. Gladstone described the general outlook in a letter to his son Henry in India (May 16):—
The government declines, but no one can say at what rate. Elections are tolerably satisfactory to us—not, I think, more. A sure though evil instinct has guided them in choosing rather to demoralise our finance, than to pay their way by imposing taxes, but I do not see how they are long to escape this difficulty.... Our people look forward comfortably to the election. The government people say they will not have it this year. But if we come to the conclusion that we ought to have it, I am by no means sure but that though a minority, we can force it by putting our men into the field, and making it too uncomfortable for them to continue twelve or fifteen months in hot water. I am safe in Midlothian, unless they contrive a further and larger number of faggot votes.
Adam looked forward with alarm to the mischief that might be done if the general election were to be protracted beyond the autumn of 1880. “In order to neutralise the present majority,” he told Mr. Gladstone, “they will have to create faggots to a disgraceful extent, but they are not troubled by scruples of conscience.” The charity that thinketh no evil is perhaps less liberally given to party whips than even to other politicians.
Apart from Midlothian Mr. Adam, in January 1879, said to Mr. Gladstone that the liberals were helpless even in the best agricultural counties of England; that he saw no hope of improvement; they had neither candidates nor organisation in most of them, and there was no means that he knew of (and he had done all that he could) to wake them up. By November 1879, he reported that he had been carefully over the list, taking a very moderate calculation of the [pg 587] chances at the coming election; and he believed they ought to have a majority of 20 to 30, independent of home rulers. Mr. Gladstone wrote to Lord Granville:—
Aug. 6, '79.—Salisbury's speech indicates, and for several reasons I should believe, that they intend sailing on the quiet tack. Having proved their spirit, they will now show their moderation. In other words they want all the past proceedings to be in the main “stale fish” at the elections. Except financial shuffling they will very likely commit no new enormity before the election. In my view that means they will not supply any new matter of such severe condemnation as what they have already furnished. Therefore, my idea is, we should keep the old alive and warm. This is the meaning of my suggestion as to autumn work, rather than that I expect a dissolution. It seems to me good policy to join on the proceedings of 1876-9 by a continuous process to the dissolution. Should this happen, which I think likely enough about March, there will have been no opportunity immediately before it of stirring the country. I will not say our defeat in 1874 was owing to the want of such an opportunity, but it was certainly, I think, much aggravated by that want.
II
Journey To Edinburgh
It was on November 24 that Mr. Gladstone soon after eight in the morning quitted Liverpool for Edinburgh, accompanied by his wife and Miss Gladstone. “The journey from Liverpool,” he enters, “was really more like a triumphal procession.” Nothing like it had ever been seen before in England. Statesmen had enjoyed great popular receptions before, and there had been plenty of cheering and bell-ringing and torchlight in individual places before. On this journey of a bleak winter day, it seemed as if the whole countryside were up. The stations where the train stopped were crowded, thousands flocked from neighbouring towns and villages to main centres on the line of route, and even at wayside spots hundreds assembled, merely to catch a glimpse of the express as it dashed through. At Carlisle they presented addresses, and the traveller made his first speech, declaring that never before in the eleven elections in which he had taken part, were the [pg 588] interests of the country so deeply at stake. He spoke again with the same moral at Hawick. At Galashiels he found a great multitude, with an address and a gift of the cloth they manufactured. With bare head in the raw air, he listened to their address, and made his speech; he told them that he had come down expressly to raise effectually before the people of the country the question in what manner they wished to be governed; it was not this measure or that, it was a system of government to be upheld or overthrown. When he reached Edinburgh after nine hours of it, the night had fallen upon the most picturesque street in all our island, but its whole length was crowded as it has never been crowded before or since by a dense multitude, transported with delight that their hero was at last among them. Lord Rosebery, who was to be his host, quickly drove with him amidst tumults of enthusiasm all along the road to the hospitable shades of Dalmeny. “I have never,” Mr. Gladstone says in his diary, “gone through a more extraordinary day.”
All that followed in a week of meetings and speeches was to match. People came from the Hebrides to hear Mr. Gladstone speak. Where there were six thousand seats, the applications were forty or fifty thousand. The weather was bitter and the hills were covered with snow, but this made no difference in cavalcades, processions, and the rest of the outdoor demonstrations. Over what a space had democracy travelled, and what a transition for its champion of the hour, since the days half a century back when the Christ Church undergraduate, the disciple of Burke and Canning, had ridden in anti-reform processions, been hustled by reform mobs, and had prayed for the blessing of heaven on the House of Lords for their honourable and manly decision in throwing out the bill. Yet the warmest opponent of popular government, even the Duke of Buccleuch himself, might have found some balm for this extraordinary display of popular feeling, in the thought that it was a tribute to the most splendid political career of that generation; splendid in gifts and splendid in service, and that it was repaid, moreover, with none of the flattery associated with the name of [pg 589] demagogue. Mr. Gladstone's counsels may have been wise or unwise, but the only flattery in the Midlothian speeches was the manly flattery contained in the fact that he took care to address all these multitudes of weavers, farmers, villagers, artisans, just as he would have addressed the House of Commons,—with the same breadth and accuracy of knowledge, the same sincerity of interest, the same scruple in right reasoning, and the same appeal to the gravity and responsibility of public life. An aristocratic minister, speaking at Edinburgh soon after, estimated the number of words in Mr. Gladstone's Midlothian speeches in 1879 at 85,840, and declared that his verbosity had become “a positive danger to the commonwealth.” Tory critics solemnly declared that such performances were an innovation on the constitution, and aggravated the evil tendencies of democracy.[358] Talk of this kind did not really impose for an instant on any man or woman of common sense.
Oratory