Mr. Gladstone's speech at the dinner was the famous one in which he discussed the Irish question, warned Mr. Parnell of the dangers of the course upon which he had embarked, and declared emphatically that the resources of civilisation were not exhausted. He did not take his seat at the high table in the hall where Sir James Kitson presided until dinner was over and the speeches were about to begin. I observed that when he did so, after having gazed with admiration upon the brilliant scene, he leant forward, and, covering his face with both hands, remained for some time in that attitude. On the following evening I sat next to Mrs. Gladstone at dinner at Sir John Barran's house. She asked me if I had observed this action of her husband's, and on my answering in the affirmative, she said to me, "He was praying. You know, he always prays before he makes an important speech, and he felt that speech very much. What do you think he said to me last night after he had gone to his dressing-room? 'My dear, if I were twenty years younger, I should go to Ireland myself as Irish Secretary.'" The speech was a great oratorical success, and at the close of the banquet, as I have said, an immense torchlight procession, which had been carefully organised by the local committee, conducted the Premier and his wife from the banqueting hall to the residence of Kitson at Headingley. The procession had to pass across Woodhouse Moor, and I do not think I ever witnessed a more effective spectacle of the kind.
The speech which, to my mind, ranked next in importance and interest to this at the dinner was that which Mr. Gladstone delivered on the following day to the mass meeting of Leeds working men. Fully thirty thousand persons attended this meeting, which, like the dinner, took place in a temporary building. It was crowded to suffocation—literally to suffocation. When I arrived, shortly before the proceedings began, I found that the whole thirty thousand people were gasping for breath, and that many were fainting. We had quite forgotten to arrange for the ventilation of the vast hall! Things looked very serious. The hubbub was indescribable, and the sufferings of the crowd were so great that it was clearly impossible that, under the conditions prevailing, any meeting could be held. Fortunately, there were active and willing workers on the spot, and a band of young men was organised who, mounting to the temporary roof of the hall, tore the planking open, and quickly relieved the pressure upon the sufferers beneath. But even when they had been supplied with air the thirty thousand were anything but comfortable. They were tightly packed together in a sweltering mass, and in no condition to listen patiently to speeches. The noise and hubbub was little short of deafening.
The Chairman, having briefly addressed the meeting in dumb show, called upon one eminent Liberal after another to move the preliminary resolutions. Not a word that any one of these gentlemen said could be heard a yard beyond the limits of the platform. It seemed that nothing could be done to reduce the vast audience to silence, and we were in despair at the thought that Mr. Gladstone would have to face so severe an ordeal. When at last his turn came, and he stepped to the front of the platform, thirty thousand throats sent up such a shout that it seemed to shake the building. Again and again for a space of some minutes it was renewed, whilst the orator stood, pale and motionless. What could one voice have done against thirty thousand? Then, just as the cheering seemed to be subsiding, someone started "For he's a jolly good fellow," and the whole thirty thousand joined in the song. After that it took some minutes for them all to settle down again, and still there went on that undercurrent of murmuring talk which seemed to make the attempt of anyone to address the gigantic meeting hopeless. But suddenly Mr. Gladstone raised his hand, and it was almost as if a miracle had happened. In an instant there was a deathlike silence in the hall, and every man in it seemed to be holding his breath. The speaker's voice rang out, clear and musical as of old, and it reached to the furthest corners of the mighty apartment. But he had not got further than the conventional opening words when his audience seemed to go mad with delight. A frenzied burst of cheering, far exceeding that which had welcomed him on his first appearance, proclaimed the joy with which they had heard the voice of the man they adored.
Again it was some minutes before Mr. Gladstone was allowed to proceed, but once more his uplifted hand ensured silence, and from that moment until he had reached the end of an hour's speech, every syllable that he uttered was heard distinctly by his thirty thousand listeners. It was, I think, the passionate eagerness of the audience to hear his voice, and their outburst of delight when its notes first fell upon their ears, that formed the most striking feature of that great meeting. Perhaps there was something almost idolatrous in the reception given to the statesman. It would have turned the heads of most men. The wonder is that it affected Mr. Gladstone so slightly. Yet I must say again that one must have been present at scenes like this in order to appreciate the real position of this remarkable man at this the very zenith of his political career. I remember that this speech, which was received with so intense an enthusiasm by all who heard it, contained the speaker's defence of what is known as the Majuba Hill policy. To those of us who were under the wand of the magician it seemed that no other defence was needed.
I had an opportunity, when the meeting was over, of seeing what effect the physical effort of making an hour's speech to an audience of thirty thousand had upon Mr. Gladstone. When I went into the committee room he was half reclining in an armchair, wrapped in a large cloak. His eyes were closed, his face was deathly pale, his whole aspect that of a man who was absolutely exhausted. Mrs. Gladstone brought him a cup of tea, but even as he drank his eyes were shut. To me, who had never seen him in this state before, it was alarming to observe him in a condition of positive collapse. Yet a few hours later he was the life and soul of a large dinner party. That dinner is memorable to me, because it was the first occasion on which I met Mr. Gladstone in private. I had a good opportunity of seeing that charming personal courtesy which distinguished him in all his social relationships. I was introduced to him by our host across the dinner-table, and he immediately plunged into a discussion about newspapers and distinguished journalists who were known to me personally. I remember he paid a great compliment to the Standard, saying that it was a newspaper he always liked to read because he always found it to be fair and honest. "When I read a bad leader in the Standard," he said, "I say to myself, Mr. Mudford must be taking a holiday." I duly reported this saying to Mudford afterwards, and I know that this praise from one whom he had often criticised so severely afforded that distinguished editor intense pleasure.
When Mr. Gladstone left Leeds after his stay of little more than forty-eight hours, he might safely have used the words of Julius Caesar. He had conquered everybody. Even his political opponents were for the moment subdued by the magic of his eloquence; whilst those who, like myself, had for the first time enjoyed direct personal intercourse with him were completely subjugated by the fascination of his manner, and those remarkable social and intellectual gifts which made him so long the foremost figure in English society. Of course, to one who had been a Gladstonian ever since those early days in the 'sixties at Newcastle of which I have spoken in a previous chapter, the joy of knowing the great man in the flesh was very great. Yet not even the strength of my admiration for one so supremely gifted, so ardent in his faith, and so strenuous in his actions made of me a blind follower of his leadership. Not many months after that meeting with him at Leeds I found myself sharply separated from him in a political controversy of which I shall soon have to speak.
I found refreshment after the fatigues connected with the Leeds gatherings in an excursion to Tunis. In 1881 the French, upon a distinctly fraudulent pretext, had invaded the territories of the Bey of Tunis. Their professed purpose was to punish a certain tribe of "Kroumirs," who, it was alleged, had committed outrages in Algeria. The Kroumirs, as it turned out, were a product of the imagination of M. Roustan, the diplomatic agent of France in Tunis. No such tribe was known to the Tunisians, but the pretext served, and Tunis was invaded. The truth, as the world now knows, was that France was resolved to have some compensation for our ill-starred acquisition of Cyprus. She dared not move in the direction of Morocco, because of the jealousy of the other Powers of Europe; but she had obtained the tacit consent of Prince Bismarck to the Tunisian expedition. Of the pledges she gave as to the objects and the limitations of that expedition I need not speak. Yet one is entitled to remember that if the force of circumstances has compelled our neighbours to break their word with regard to Tunis, we are equally justified in alleging the same reason for the breach of our own promises concerning Egypt.
My friend Mudford gave me a commission to act as special correspondent of the Standard in Tunis, and I went there accordingly to spend a few interesting weeks in studying on the spot one of the burning questions of the day. I shall not inflict upon my reader the story of my trip. I feel the less inclined to do so because I was ill-advised enough after my return to publish that story in a volume called "The Land of the Bey." The most interesting fact connected with that volume is one that happened in quite recent years. A gentleman from the Inland Revenue Office called upon me, and in a most courteous manner drew my attention to the fact that I had not, in my income-tax returns, included the profit I had received from this book. It had taken the department just nineteen years to discover the existence of this precious volume. The discovery, though belated, did great credit to the zeal and industry of somebody connected with the Inland Revenue, for I am convinced that he is the only person, myself excepted, who knew that the book had been written. I had clean forgotten its existence myself when it was recalled to my memory in this amusing fashion. My visitor from the Inland Revenue Office smiled sweetly when I explained to him why no profits from this publication had ever swelled my meagre income-tax returns. It was a case of the Spanish Fleet over again. I had never seen those literary profits even to the amount of sixpence, and I could not therefore be expected to cause the collectors of her Majesty's Revenue to succeed where I had failed.
My stay in Tunis was not only interesting but somewhat adventurous. There was only one Englishman besides myself resident in the city of Tunis while I was there. This was Mr. A. M. Broadley, who was at that time acting as the correspondent of the Times, and whose ability had enabled him to create a diplomatic question, which he called the Enfida Case, out of a trumpery lawsuit in which he acted for a rich Arab, called, if I remember aright, General Benayid. Mr. Broadley subsequently became known to fame for the active part he took in defending Arabi Pasha at Cairo. I only mention him now because of the remarkable forecast which he made on the first evening on which I met him in his house in Tunis. Producing a map of the Eastern Hemisphere he pointed out to me what he called the zone of disturbance, and assured me that within the next ten years the eyes of the world would be riveted upon that zone. Roughly speaking, the zone was the belt of the Mahommedan races, extending from Morocco in the west to India in the east. The disturbances which he predicted would come he traced in the first instance from our annexation of Cyprus, and the consequent invasion of Tunis by France. He foretold with great precision the rise of the Mahdi, and the growth of religious fanaticism in the Soudan; and he indicated that through Asia Minor, Persia, and Afghanistan a wave of unrest was running which must have serious consequences for the Christian Powers in the near future. Many times in later days I had occasion to remember the wonderfully clear and precise predictions of Mr. Broadley, as he delivered them to me in his old Arab house in Tunis.
One charming friend I made during my visit. This was the English Consul-General, Mr. Reade, who entertained me in his beautiful house at the Marsa, close to the site of Carthage. A pleasant, rather grave, and thoughtful man, Mr. Reade was a mine of information regarding earlier days in Tunis, when the Bey was a real ruler and the slave-market in the old Bazaar was still the scene of a merchandise in flesh and blood. His father had been Consul-General in Tunis when the influence of Great Britain was supreme, and he had inherited his father's popularity and personal prestige. Too clearly he foresaw that the result of the French foray upon the unoffending principality must be its absorption into French territory, and the consequent loss of England's position and influence in that part of the Mediterranean. All his fears have been more than realised. In 1881 it was the English Consul-General who was the most important person in Tunis—more important in many respects than the Bey himself. In the Bazaars every shop was filled with English goods, whilst many wealthy Tunisians had found protection by securing their recognition as English subjects. In the old Consulate at the gates of the city an English, or at least a Maltese, judge administered justice under the red ensign daily. The travelling Englishman hardly seemed to have left the shelter of his own flag when he found himself in the land of the Bey. All this is changed now. France has elbowed England out of Tunis. Our Consul—he is no longer Consul-General—is a subordinate official. English commerce has dwindled away to comparative insignificance. French shops supply the residents with all they require, and Great Britain has become of no account. This is the direct result of Lord Beaconsfield's action in taking possession of Cyprus in 1878. Would to Heaven that this were the whole of the price we have had to pay for that fatal piece of folly!