[THE UNAUTHORIZED PROGRAMME (1885).]
Source.—Morley's Life of Gladstone, vol. iii., pp. 173, 174, 220-226. (Macmillans.)
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 that though he 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....
Mr. Gladstone made a lenient communication to the orator, to the effect that "there had better be some explanations among them when they met." ... He recognized by now that in the 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....
The address to his electors ... was given to the public on September 17. It was, as he said, as long as a pamphlet.... The Whigs, we are told, found it vague, the Radicals cautious, the Tories crafty; but everybody admitted that it tended to heal feuds.... Mr. Chamberlain, though raising his own flag, was respectful to his leader's manifesto. The surface was thus stilled for the moment; yet the waters ran very deep....
[Gladstone] goes on to say that the ground had now been sufficiently laid for going to the election with a united front, that ground being the common profession of a limited creed or programme in the Liberal sense, with an entire freedom for those so inclined to travel beyond it, but not to impose their own sense upon all other people.... If the party and its leaders were agreed as to immediate measures ... were not these enough to find a Liberal administration plenty of work ... for several years?...
An advance was made in the development of a peculiar situation by important conversations with Mr. Chamberlain [at Hawarden: these] did not materially alter Mr. Gladstone's disposition [but the first crisis which promptly developed tended to obscure the direct issue].
[THE IRISH VOTE (1885).]
Source.—Morley's Life of Gladstone, vol. iii., pp. 188-245. (Macmillans.)