As we have already seen,[111] Mr. Gladstone paid his visit to Holker (January 30), where he found the Duke of Devonshire “wonderfully well, and kind as ever,” where he was joined by Lord Hartington, and where they together spelled out the [pg 172] cipher telegram (on February 5) bringing the evil news of the fall of Khartoum.
It is not uninteresting to see how the notion of Mr. Gladstone's retirement, now much talked of in his family, affected a friendly, philosophic, and most observant onlooker. Lord Acton wrote to him (February 2):—
You mean that the new parliament, the first of our democratic constitution, shall begin its difficult and perilous course without the services of a leader who has greater experience and authority than any other man. You design to withdraw your assistance when most urgently needed, at the moment of most conservative apprehension and most popular excitement. By the choice of this particular moment for retirement you increase the danger of the critical transition, because nobody stands as you do between the old order of things and the new, or inspires general confidence; and the lieutenants of Alexander are not at their best. Next year's change will appear vast and formidable to the suspicious foreigner, who will be tempted to doubt our identity. It is in the national interest to reduce the outer signs of change, to bridge the apparent chasm, to maintain the traditional character of the state. The unavoidable elements of weakness will be largely and voluntarily aggravated by their untimely coincidence with an event which must, at any time, be a blow to the position of England among the Powers. Your absence just then must grievously diminish our credit.... You alone inspire confidence that what is done for the great masses shall be done with a full sense of economic responsibility.... A divided liberal party and a weak conservative party mean the supremacy of the revolutionary Irish....
To this Mr. Gladstone replied:—
10 Downing Street, Feb. 11, 1885. Your argument against letting the outworn hack go to grass, depends wholly on a certain proposition, namely this, that there is about to be a crisis in the history of the constitution, growing out of the extension of the franchise, and that it is my duty to do what I can in aiding to steer the ship through the boiling waters of this crisis. My answer is simple. There is no crisis at all in view. There is a process of slow modification and development mainly in directions which [pg 173] I view with misgiving. “Tory democracy,” the favourite idea on that side, is no more like the conservative party in which I was bred, than it is like liberalism. In fact less. It is demagogism, only a demagogism not ennobled by love and appreciation of liberty, but applied in the worst way, to put down the pacific, law-respecting, economic elements which ennobled the old conservatism, living upon the fomentation of angry passions, and still in secret as obstinately attached as ever to the evil principle of class interests. The liberalism of to-day is better in what I have described as ennobling the old conservatism; nay, much better, yet far from being good. Its pet idea is what they call construction,—that is to say, taking into the hands of the state the business of the individual man. Both the one and the other have much to estrange me, and have had for many, many years. But, with all this, there is no crisis. I have even the hope that while the coming change may give undue encouragement to “construction,” it will be favourable to the economic, pacific, law-regarding elements; and the sense of justice which abides tenaciously in the masses will never knowingly join hands with the fiend of Jingoism. On the whole, I do not abandon the hope that it may mitigate the chronic distemper, and have not the smallest fear of its bringing about an acute or convulsive action. You leave me therefore rooted in my evil mind....
The activity of the left wing, acute, perhaps, but not convulsive, became much more embarrassing than the desire of the right wing to be inactive. Mr. Chamberlain had been rapidly advancing in public prominence, and he now showed that the agitation against the House of Lords was to be only the beginning and not the end. At Ipswich (January 14), he said this country had been called the paradise of the rich, and warned his audience no longer to allow it to remain the purgatory of the poor. He told them that reform of local government must be almost the first reform of the next parliament, and spoke in favour of allotments, the creation of small proprietors, the placing of a small tax on the total property of the taxpayer, and of free education. Mr. Gladstone's attention was drawn from Windsor to these utterances, and he replied (January 22) that though he [pg 174] thought some of them were “on various grounds open to grave objection,” yet they seemed to raise no “definite point on which, in his capacity of prime minister, he was entitled to interfere and lecture the speaker.” A few days later, more terrible things were said by Mr. Chamberlain at Birmingham. He pronounced for the abolition of plural voting, and in favour of payment of members, and manhood suffrage. He also advocated a bill for enabling local communities to acquire land, a graduated income-tax, and the breaking up of the great estates as the first step in land reform. This deliverance was described by not unfriendly critics as “a little too much the speech of the agitator of the future, rather than of the minister of the present.” Mr. Gladstone made a lenient communication to the orator, to the effect that “there had better be some explanations among them when they met.” To Lord Granville he wrote (January 31):—
Upon the whole, weak-kneed liberals have caused us more trouble in the present parliament than radicals. But I think these declarations by Chamberlain upon matters which cannot, humanly speaking, become practical before the next parliament, can hardly be construed otherwise than as having a remote and (in that sense) far-sighted purpose which is ominous enough. The opposition can hardly fail in their opportunity, I must add in their duty, to make them matter of attack. Such things will happen casually from time to time, and always with inconvenience—but there is here a degree of method and system which seem to give the matter a new character.
It will be seen from his tone that Mr. Gladstone, in all the embarrassments arising from this source, showed complete freedom from personal irritation. Like the lofty-minded man he was, he imputed no low motives to a colleague because the colleague gave him trouble. He recognised by now that in his cabinet the battle was being fought between old time and new. He did not allow his dislike of some of the new methods of forming public opinion, to prevent him from doing full justice to the energetic and sincere public spirit behind them. He had, moreover, quite enough to do with [pg 175]
The Left Wing
the demands of the present, apart from signs that were ominous for the future. A year before, in a letter to Lord Granville (March 24, 1884), he had attempted a definition that will, perhaps, be of general interest to politicians of either party complexion. It is, at any rate, characteristic of his subtlety, if that be the right word, in drawing distinctions:—