Chapter VII. Colleagues—Northern Cruise—Egypt. (1883)
Parran faville della sua virtute
In non curar d'argento nè d'affanni.
—Paradiso, xvii. 83.
Sparks of his worth shall show in the little heed he gives either to riches or to heavy toils.
I
The session of 1883 was marked by one legislative performance of the first order, the bill devised against corrupt practices at elections. This invaluable measure was worked through the House of Commons mainly by Sir Henry James, the attorney general, whose skill and temper in a business that was made none the easier by the fact of every man in the House supposing himself to understand the subject, excited Mr. Gladstone's cordial admiration; it strengthened that peculiarly warm regard in which he held Sir Henry, not only now but even when the evil days of political severance came. The prime minister, though assiduous, as he always was, in the discharge of those routine and secondary duties which can never be neglected without damage to the House, had, for the first session in his career as head of a government, no burden in the shaping of a great bill. He insisted, in spite of some opposition in the cabinet, on accepting a motion pledging parliament to economy (April 3). In a debate on the Congo, he was taken by some to have gone near to giving up the treaty-making power of the crown. He had to face more than one of those emergencies that were naturally common for the leader of a party with a zealous radical wing represented in his cabinet, and in some measure these occasions beset Mr. Gladstone from 1869 [pg 111]
Mr. Bright And The Irishmen
onwards. His loyalty and kindness to colleagues who got themselves and him into scrapes by imprudent speeches, and his activity and resource in inventing ways out of scrapes, were always unfailing. Often the difficulty was with the Queen, sometimes with the House of Lords, occasionally with the Irish members. Birmingham, for instance, held a grand celebration (June 13) on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Mr. Bright's connection as its representative. Mr. Bright used strong language about “Irish rebels,” and then learned that he would be called to account. He consulted Mr. Gladstone, and from him received a reply that exhibits the use of logic as applied to inconvenient displays of the sister art of rhetoric:—
To Mr. Bright.