And there are more to come. Directly we shall have them complaining that he has chosen a constituency so far away as Scotland; the real fact being that they wish he had gone much farther still. They never are sincere with Mr. Gladstone; he cannot please them. We leave them anxiously listening for his approach again unto these shores, knowing very well that to their thinking they will hear his voice all too soon.
A Liberal.
II.
Description is said to be only possible by comparing, and when one is asked to sketch Mr. Gladstone, how is it to be set about? His admirers will have it that he has been a very great Minister, so that if we adopt the comparative method, we ought to look high for standards. Shall we match him alongside Bismarck or Cavour? The latter, to give him precedence, stands renowned for building up his country in evil days, when every omen was against her. But Mr. Gladstone, succeeding to power when England was in the full tide of prosperity and at the height of fame, gave up her prospects, and would have acquiesced in her decadence. There is no likeness whatever between him and Cavour. Then take Bismarck. The great German Chancellor shares with the Italian Minister the glory of having widened the bounds and raised the position of his land, and he stands now head and shoulders above all in the midst of the diplomatic world a very Colossus. But Mr. Gladstone is and has always been outside that world altogether. Prince Bismarck has his hand on all the springs of action, and will let pass no chance of exalting his country. Mr. Gladstone, we repeat, never made the slightest impression in the regions of diplomacy; Courts did not know him, foreign statesmen left him out of their reckoning of the men that had to be dealt with. The great international achievements for which he has alone been talked of have been the surrender of British territory and the paying down of English money lavishly to another State for preposterous claims. But it will be said that it is not fair to Mr. Gladstone to compare him to Prince Bismarck and Count Cavour, for they were men who found their country in unusual circumstances. Look, then, to names in our own history. Pitt must not be spoken of for the reasons just allowed in the other cases; but there are Canning and Palmerston. How does Mr. Gladstone look alongside them? He has himself more than once alluded to Canning, as if not unwilling to be thought to have received his mantle. It was, however, always only in connection with Greece that he spoke of Canning; but that Minister looked much farther than the Mediterranean. One would have thought that so fine a rhetorician as Mr. Gladstone would not have forgotten the famous phrase in which Canning claimed to have called the New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old. Lord Palmerston was without any such fine phrases, but in foreign affairs he acted boldly, though he had to fall back on a musty Latin quotation to describe it. Every Englishman, however, understood Latin when their Minister said, Civis Romanus sum. Yet neither of these Ministers at any part of their career lived in times more stirring than Mr. Gladstone has done, nor when the interests of England were more endangered. He has still later had magnificent opportunities, but he did worse than lose them.
From all this, it would seem that, whether we look abroad or at home, there is no possibility of describing Mr. Gladstone by hints of comparison with these historical personages. What is said in that way appears, in fact, to turn into contrast; which is, also, itself a mode of delineation, though not usually of the kind the chief object of it wishes. We can find no Minister to couple along with him as having deliberately despaired of his country. However, Mr. Gladstone is certainly great in some way, for although other nations while we were under his sway were gradually losing sight of England herself as well as of him, he was making plenty of noise all the time at home. If it should turn out, as we go on, that he was not a great Minister but a great orator, that would seem to account for both the things. If Bismarck and Cavour have made affairs, Mr. Gladstone has made speeches, beating them as much in that as they did him in the other respect. But it is not exactly the same thing to the countries the men represent.
It is, therefore, under a humbler, more domestic aspect than that of this high supreme style of Minister which we have first tried that we must begin Mr. Gladstone's portraiture. The task may be divided into two portions. There is the opinion which we Conservatives hold of the general influence and effect he has had upon our national interests, in which we may be credited with at least trying to estimate his acts and measures on their merits; and, besides that, there is a judgment of him from a narrower party view, arising out of his historic relation to ourselves. We will take the latter first.
To hear Liberals talk, one might suppose that Conservatives had always cherished a special hatred against Mr. Gladstone simply for ceasing to be a Tory and becoming a Radical. That the Conservatives rather late in his career came to show much irritation against Mr. Gladstone is perfectly correct; but it was, as I hope to show as I go on, for very different reasons than simply because he had made one Conservative less and one Liberal more. A great political party has no such immortal animosities as that supposes: party feeling is not based on merely sentimental grounds. Both sides are used to losing men. It is the common fate of Parliamentary warfare. Now and then, some rather idle person who has time to waste in going back a long way in his recollections bethinks himself that Lord Beaconsfield was not always a Conservative; but we never yet heard of any one among the party challenging sympathy for him on the score that he had been hunted by the Liberals through half a century or so for having deserted them. Yet it will be admitted that Lord Beaconsfield has injured the Liberals more than ever Mr. Gladstone has done the Conservatives. What is the reason, then, of this difference of alleged treatment in the two cases? The answer may be given in half a sentence,—Lord Beaconsfield, alike when he was Mr. Disraeli and since, has always fought fair. That is enough in politics to make your opponents acquiesce in your being such; but Mr. Gladstone as his career developed surprised and puzzled everybody, his own friends included; and those who blame the Conservatives for, in the end, losing temper and showing exasperation, should bear in mind that he finally produced the very same effect upon the country at large.
It is worth while following this point a little further, for it would not be of much use attempting to sketch Mr. Gladstone if we are supposed to dislike him from some mere party instinct. Will anybody be good enough to tell us when this inscrutable emotion of hatred of Mr. Gladstone arose? Liberals are not supposed to be strong in history, but they have very short memories indeed if they have forgotten both their own career and his. Why, in 1852—that is, in the twentieth year of Mr. Gladstone's Parliamentary life—the Conservatives were offering him office, which was not refused by him with over-much promptness. For nearly fourteen years after that he was retained as the representative of the University of Oxford. It is, in fact, not yet very much more than a dozen years since this victim of political persecution, and present champion of the Radicals, was quietly ensconced in a seat for what is sometimes spoken of as the head-quarters of Toryism. He has roved a good deal among the constituencies since, but he was then willing to have gone on remaining at Oxford, if his constituents had also been willing to have been made laughing-stocks by letting him remain. Surely a man who represented Tory electors until he was getting fast on for sixty could scarcely up to that point have been much hunted and worried for Liberal principles. To speak plainly, there never was so late a conversion made of so much histrionic use as this of Mr. Gladstone's. But though it has suited both his and his present party's ends, it rather puzzles plain people who have kept their recollections a little trim to think that if he lives on into senatorial decrepitude, he will never have sat for Radical constituencies anything like so long a time as he did for Conservative ones. For between thirty and forty years this Liberal ex-Premier was a Tory member.
In fact, a glance at the right honourable gentleman's wonderfully prosperous career will show that in the list of our public men he has of all others made the fewest, the briefest, the least sacrifices either for principle or party. There are very simple ways of testing it; Mr. Gladstone has not been out of office long enough for a man who was innocent of business prudence in his career. He has, in fact, reaped the official spoils of two parties, if not of three. The dates and appointments are on record for anybody to trace out. On the very face of it, a man who has served under Peel, Aberdeen, Palmerston, and Russell, and then come out as a full-blown Liberal Prime Minister himself, must of necessity be said to offer rather a miscellaneous career. His warmest admirer must admit that he has been either the most fortunate or else the most prudent of men; and, as we do not wish to be stingy in our recognition of his skill, we prefer to compliment him by attributing his great prosperity throughout so many years and under so many different chiefs to his prudence.