If this very hasty review of Mr. Gladstone's chronicle does not agree with the impression of him which is the prevailing one on the Liberal side, it is the one which the bare facts of his career would produce on every side if they could be seen without the misleading effect of his very fine words and exceedingly solemn attitudes. Very fortunately for him it is only the Conservatives who have a full and accurate recollection of Mr. Gladstone. They have necessarily observed him continuously from their own unshifting party position, and so have been able to perceive in a way that hardly was practicable to the Liberals, who were always shifting and struggling among themselves, how invariably and consistently his announcements of change of view have hit with the opportunities for improvement of his Parliamentary position. On every occasion, to the very moment, so soon as a Liberal question had fully ripened, Mr. Gladstone presented himself to pluck it. It was so with Reform, it was so with Church Rates, it was so with University Reform, it was so with the Ballot, it was so with the spoliation of the Irish Church and the unsettling of the Irish landowners, and it is so with the County Franchise, and it will be so once more, if the Liberals ever get into power again, with the English Church and the English Land Laws. Mr. Bright, Mr. Miall, and all the Radicals have drudged for many a year for Mr. Gladstone, who, when all the outdoor work has been done, has always allowed himself to be persuaded to bring in the Measure just in the nick of time, and, by expounding it in a very fine speech, has robbed its actual originators of two-thirds of the credit of making it possible.
Luckily for the Conservatives, though he never had the courage to attack a question of the very first class himself in the way of initiative, he had an insatiable ambition for meddling with smaller ones, and by making vents in these ways for his restlessness and his ambition, he finally ruined all that his skilful prudence in the larger affairs had gained him, disgusting the country till it determined to get him off its hands at any price. Still, that is not just now the point in question.
Mr. Gladstone's so slowly passing through all the stages from Conservatism to Radicalism has had this effect,—that while all other public men of his standing have grown more or less antiquated in steady loyal service to their party, and by presenting a fixed if monotonous aspect to the public, this one Parliamentary personage kept a perennial freshness, simply by skilfully dividing his prolonged career into distinct periods and going on changing. Some political section has been always welcoming Mr. Gladstone newly into its ranks and to its spoils, for, as we have said, the two things unfailingly went together; and the shouts with which he was received were always strengthened by fainter murmurs of applause from other sections more advanced along the line, who hoped to receive him themselves later on. They did so. Really to each one of them he was a recruit from the last party. To the Palmerstonians he ought at the most to have been only a Peelite; to the Liberals at worst only a Palmerstonian. But by a surprising adroitness, it was always made to appear that in all his migrations from party to party, he joined each successive group as a new retreater from the Tories. It certainly was true in one sense; he was always going further away from them. But for all party purposes and reckoning, he had as much left them when he joined Palmerston as when he shook hands with Mr. Bright and took his place in front of the Radicals.
These are only a first handful of specimens of a certain unfairness in Mr. Gladstone's position and career from first to last, from which he has largely profited, and which very naturally irked his opponents, who have had to suffer its inconveniences. He has posed as a sort of political orphan left lonely in the Parliamentary world at the death of Peel, who has been persecuted by wicked Tories from one Chancellorship of the Exchequer to another, until they finally drove him into the Premiership, but all this time he was successfully seceding from them, though they continued in pursuit. It must have been Mr. Gladstone's portentous earnestness of demeanour which has covered up from the general public a joke so huge and prolonged as this, preventing everybody from seeing that such a tale did not agree with his unprecedented prosperity. But if in these ways he has kept himself interesting to the country, and fresh and surprising for every group he has in rotation joined, both he and his changes have long been stale to the Conservatives. They are able to look along his whole track, and seeing him from behind, know him as a Peelite, a follower of Aberdeen, a Palmerstonian, a Russellite, and a Radical. They are debarred from applying his own name to the last stage, and calling him a Gladstonian. Strangely enough, and indeed very significantly, that term has never taken root in our politics. There really have never been any Gladstonians: no one ever was or ever will be called by that title. Mr. Gladstone will end his days and depart without founding any school; he will stand recorded only as the acceptor of office from those who did so, and the passer of other people's measures. But in political life a man who attains the first rank of conspicuousness without founding a line may fairly be suspected. It will be found that he has been too busy in a narrower way,—looking after not questions but himself. To that very small party, numerically reckoned, consisting of only one member, Mr. Gladstone has been consistently and untiringly faithful. He has challenged for it sympathy in all the ways to which his very fine oratory has lent itself, and he has not neglected the humbler art of perpetual advertisement, keeping it by means of the press and the platform ever before the public eye. But when he finally leaves us it is certain to vanish entirely.
Very likely some ardent Radical, whose mind is so full of having got Mr. Gladstone at last that he forgets, or perhaps never knew, how many grades and shades of politicians have in succession enjoyed him before, will say that in all this we are only railing at Mr. Gladstone's success. His success! In order to describe Mr. Gladstone, we had first to write retrospectively, take in his earlier phases, and to look generally at his whole history. In that retrospect, down to a late point in it, he was exceedingly prosperous; but we never meant to say that he had been very successful since the beginning of 1874. There is not the slightest need for any Conservative to feel bitter against Mr. Gladstone now on any grounds of personal envy. He has done them the greatest service of any public man for three generations; and at any time he might have individually prospered as much as he liked for them, if it had been possible for him to do it without injuring his country. It is to this more serious examination of his career that we now go.
Not that we propose to entangle ourselves in the minute details of it, for that is in no way necessary. We have already in part explained why we may, in such a sketch as this, drop out many years of his political life. For a great length of time Mr. Gladstone was only a Budget-maker. It is true he made them for Governments that were not Conservative, but he still was considered nearly a Conservative outside his financial handicraft. And here, again, part of the explanation we earlier gave applies. There is not the slightest reason why any Conservative should pause long to consider Mr. Gladstone as the passer of the Ballot, or even as the disestablisher of the Irish Church and the interferer with the rights of landed property in Ireland. The only thing special to be said about him in connection with these things as distinguishing him from the ruck of Liberals would be, that he was a very late ex-Tory, and at the time a professed High Churchman. He somehow got the Liberals to let him write his name across every one of those measures so soon as it was seen that they would pass, and he has made the legislation in that way seem to be his; but the Conservatives know with whom they had really to deal in the inception and the pushing forward of those movements, and it was not Mr. Gladstone. The real men were Mr. Bright, Mr. Dillwyn, Mr. Miall, and those who for many a year worked with them while Mr. Gladstone was never heard of, never thought of, in connection with the matters they had always matured before he had anything to do with them.
Nor was it on account of these affairs that Mr. Gladstone's fall occurred when it came, which is another reason why it would be waste of time to discuss them in connection with him. Who is proposing to alter these things now that they have been fought out between the great parties of the State and decided? As a supplement to his Irish Land Bill, we now have the Irish peasants refusing to pay any rent at all: but in these days when a thing is done in our Parliament it is done. The Conservatives, in spite of the majority at their back, have never put forward a finger to touch those settlements, nor do they mean to do so; and yet not only our own country, but all Europe, and indeed realms farther away still, have been keenly aware that the Beaconsfield Ministry has been very busy for years undoing something that Mr. Gladstone had done.
What was this gigantic task, which was not the repealing of legislation, or the passing of statutes of any kind, but which required courage and effort more arduous than those things? There must have been some cause for the bursts of applause which have again and again echoed on our shores from all parts of the civilized globe at something that was going on. It was, we hasten to answer, the rehabilitation of England in the eyes of the world,—the restoration of her ancient power as a factor in the enforcement and administration of public right among the nations. Somehow, coincidently with Mr. Gladstone's prosperity as a Minister, England, his country, had sunk, and in exactly answering ratio, and was sinking lower and lower still daily. He was very famous, or at least very notorious, at home, but the renown of Britain abroad was clouding; and our people never will bear that, as history had shown before. This man, who at heart was but a financier, and who ought in the fitness of things never to have risen higher in office than a Chancellor of the Exchequer, whose function it should have been to find funds for some one else as a Prime Minister capable of a policy in the higher international politics befitting an Empire, was conducting our foreign affairs in the spirit of a commercial traveller; willing to effect a little saving by giving up a group of islands in one part or a bit of territory in another, and to effect an economy at another time by backing out of a treaty. Though, at the same time, if anybody insisted, and there loomed, however distantly, a possibility of war, he would pay the money down in a hurry by millions, as he did in the Alabama case. We should have had all the world insisting very soon, making peace more costly than war itself, besides the shame of unjustifiable surrender.
But we were spared all this; though the undoing of the humiliation, as far as it had gone, has fully occupied Mr. Gladstone's successors ever since.
This is the great accusation which the Conservatives have to bring against Mr. Gladstone—that of having degraded the position of his country; and an arraignment more fatal than this cannot be made in the case of a chief Minister. It is not alone the Conservatives who make it. Did not Earl Russell, Liberal though he was, find enough English blood in his aged veins when writing his last book, to say that Mr. Gladstone had dragged the name of England through the mire? But it would not be quite accurate to put this forward as the full explanation of Mr. Gladstone's sudden tumble from office; for it was not until after that occurred that the bulk of people quite knew the whole extent of the injury he had worked in this respect. The Conservative leaders guessed it, but they knew more about foreign affairs than the rank and file of the nation. Everybody, of course, high and low, was aware that he had unasked given up the Ionian Islands because of some literary reasons which he had come upon in writing books about Homer, that he had surrendered territory in the San Juan Boundary Question, and that he had quietly gone to Geneva and paid America, not indeed all she asked,—for even with Britain's wealth the whole of the first modest request would only have been found with difficulty,—but he had counted down a sum that made Brother Jonathan's shrewd eyes twinkle with joy. The country, from these events following one another, had come to have a very uneasy feeling that somehow under his auspices everything was going against us abroad. Still it was only later that it was made fully apparent how completely England was effaced; not until the three Emperors had begun to settle the rearrangement of Eastern Europe, without so much as saying to Great Britain, "By your leave." There is difficulty when looking back now to prevent oneself from suffering some illusion in this respect; but it is a fact, and we may be glad of it, that Englishmen did not until it was roughly forced upon them suppose beforehand that their position had dwindled to quite so low an ebb.