At the elections of 1874, there was no distinct foreign policy before the public, for though there were many on the Conservative side who sympathized with France in her adversity, and saw clearly that Germany's mutilation of her territory meant trouble in time to come, not a voice was raised in deprecation of our neutrality. But, for the matter of that, it may be just as correctly said that there was no matured domestic question before the country, for it will not be supposed that there was a single Tory any more than a Liberal who wished the Income Tax to be retained on his shoulders. It was hardly for proposing to do away with that impost that everybody voted so unanimously against Mr. Gladstone; they only did so at the polling-booths in spite of his proposing it, which somehow seems rather mysterious. If his opponents were not proposing to recall any of the recent legislation, and if there was no special question of foreign affairs pending, and if nobody had any desire not to be lightened of taxation, how was it, pray, that Mr. Gladstone was so ignominiously hurled from power? In reality, there is not the slightest difficulty about it—Mr. Gladstone was decisively rejected by his countrymen, not on any question of policy, either home or foreign, but because of the personal impression he had slowly but surely imprinted on their minds. The real issue before the country was whether it would have any more of Mr. Gladstone, and it said No.
It is a common artifice on the part of his apologisers to insinuate that he had wearied the nation by offering it too many things for its good. But neither individuals nor communities are much in the habit of refusing gifts; it is the one thing, and nearly the only thing, in this world for which there is an excellent reason whenever so strange a proceeding happens. There is another way of representing the matter, one much less complimentary but far more true—the country was sick of Mr. Gladstone. Even the sight of Mr. Lowe standing at his side with four millions of surplus in his hands was not enough to tempt them. The promise to abolish the Income Tax was the most tremendous bribe ever offered to the constituencies, but, to their credit, it did not corrupt them. They would not accept Mr. Gladstone any longer at any price whatever. The believers in democracy, and Mr. Gladstone in particular, according to some of his very latest reasonings, ought to have accepted this universal disgust as being a popular inspiration. However, they have done nothing of the kind, but avow that it was a public delusion, which they at first hinted would be temporary; but if the public is liable to delusions, and to fits of them which continue for seven or eight years at a stretch, for that is now the duration of this one, what becomes of these very radical gentlemen's democracy? For it is not really open to them to plead, though they will go on doing it, that the people's eyes were dazzled by a glitter of diplomatic success, and their blood infuriated by a skilfully aroused anti-Russian feeling. It is not open to them for a simple reason, but a very conclusive one: the elections came before anything of this could have happened; and the elections themselves arrived with the suddenness they did owing to something which had preceded them—namely, a steady run of Ministerial defeats in the by-contests, wherever a vacancy occurred in a constituency. Mr. Gladstone avowed all this in the address with which he startled the Greenwich electors and the whole country, though he and his friends have never mentioned the fact since. It was for the purpose of putting all things right that the elections which put them all more wrong still were so unexpectedly ordered. It was not because of being intoxicated by the diplomatic triumph of Lord Beaconsfield and Lord Salisbury at Berlin—which did not occur till years after—that the constituencies rejected Mr. Gladstone. We have no wish to be unnecessarily impolite, but the true reason for it was that which we have named already—they had come not to like Mr. Gladstone. If we trace that fact backwards in a natural way, we shall find that one cause of it was that they felt the honour and the interest of England were not safe in his hands; but this was only one among other causes. It swelled afterwards into the biggest reason of all, and now practically includes all the others; but, at the moment, it was not actually known that the safety of England was about to be imperilled.
The voters were affected by other reasons. What were those other reasons? The public must have known them pretty clearly at the time, since it acted so promptly and decidedly upon them, and it, therefore, ought not to need very much recalling of them now, for the time, after all, is not so very long ago. But it may be as well to go into them a little, since it was through the incidents furnishing them that the general public was led to form the very same estimate of Mr. Gladstone which the Conservatives had held for about a score of years before. At last the popular judgment coincided with that of his Parliamentary opponents, and he fell from power. But any one who will give a moment's consideration to the cases of the Collier appointment, the Ewelme Rectory affair, and the issue of the Royal Warrant on purchase in the army, will see that we are right in affirming that Mr. Gladstone's ignominious expulsion from office was owing to moral rather than political causes. It stands recorded that this Minister, who had put religious professions in the front of his politics in a way novel to public life, had to defend his conduct over and over again in the House of Commons by quoting the mere letter of the law. Parliament became not unlike the Old Bailey when a legal wrangle is going on over the technicalities of an indictment; and the unwonted spectacle of Lord Chief Justices accusing a theological Premier of having somehow evaded a statute was not made any less unedifying by Mr. Gladstone showing great skill in being his own attorney. Everybody must admit that he certainly did that.
It is possible to recall each of the cases in very few words. An Act of Parliament had been passed with a view to strengthening the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, and, as this Court was one of Appeal, it stood to reason that those appointed to it to revise other Judges' decisions should have had judicial experience themselves. It was expressly provided in the Act that those to be raised to this Court should be already Judges. To the surprise of the whole country, Sir Robert Collier, well known as Mr. Gladstone's Attorney-General, and, therefore, conspicuously only a waiter for a judgeship, not a judge already, was announced as the filler of one of these vacancies, before half the readers of the newspapers knew that he had ceased to be Attorney-General. It turned out, however, that he was in reality a judge at the moment, and that he had been one for some few moments previously, having, in fact, sat on the bench of the Common Pleas for just two days. There is not space to follow Mr. Gladstone's wonderful reasoning, but it chiefly turned on a point so fine as this, that what the Act meant to stipulate was not experience, but status. In other words, that a man should be made a judge of one kind for five minutes, in order to be turned into one of another kind, just for the say of the thing. Amazed members of the Legislature which had passed the enactment protested that they were not so foolishly subtle as this, and that they had never, before Mr. Gladstone mentioned it, thought of any such distinction as that between status and experience.
But this was not the only instance in which he has told people what they had intended better than they knew, and all differently. In the Ewelme Rectory business he would have it that when a statute said Oxford it meant Cambridge, or at least that its specifying Oxford did not signify, or that it included Cambridge, or, in fact, might be construed to prescribe anything else which it did not say and which was contrary to what everybody had thought of it before. However, here, again, as the lawyers would otherwise have been troublesome, the technicality was found to have been formally complied with. The words of the enactment did really require that the man who was to be made rector of Ewelme parish should be a member of Oxford Convocation, and Mr. Harvey, Mr. Gladstone's friend, who had been educated at Cambridge, and who, until that living became vacant, had never dreamed of connection with Oxford, was made a member of the Convocation, in order to receive the living. Of course, Mr. Gladstone argued that Mr. Harvey's being a Master of Arts was enough, though the statute said nothing of that, and everybody else had thought it expressly stated a certain University where the Master of Arts was to come from.
But let us go on to the third case, that of the issue of the Royal Warrant abolishing purchase. Not a few of the Liberals who exulted at the success of the party measure had a misgiving at the way in which it was secured. It was felt to be a victory which could not be repeated, and one of a style which, if they who snatched it had been Conservatives, would have thrown the country into a convulsion. The most violent act in the name of the Crown which the oldest man living in England has witnessed, was counselled by Mr. Gladstone. Because the Lords, in the exercise of the power which the Constitution gives them, were not willing instantly to pass his Bill for giving an entirely new social aspect to the army, he caused the Queen to do nothing short of superseding them entirely, and practically reduced the Constitution at a stroke to the Commons and the Crown. It is just now part of the tactics of the Liberals to protest against some imagined wish to bring in "personal rule." If any such preposterous design existed, it would be Mr. Gladstone's own act which would be fallen back upon for the precedent. The feeling which has best enabled the most thoughtful among Englishmen to understand the kind of shock which foreigners experience on the occurrence of one of the political earthquakes which they call on the Continent by the name coup d'état, was that which ran through the country when Mr. Gladstone announced that there was nothing for the Lords to discuss, that he had advised the Queen to issue a Royal Warrant. We had lost all recollection of the particular sensation, but he brought back just a twinge of it. Mr. Gladstone, however, can do Radical acts and then explain them historically. Once more we found ourselves all inextricably entangled in his casuistry. He now argued that the Royal Warrant had not been issued by exercise of prerogative, but in strict pursuance of statutory power, there being some Act of the Georges to that effect, which ordinary people had forgotten. It is not necessary to follow the thing further. In the end, Mr. Gladstone became too clever for the country. Even the dullest began to perceive that Mr. Gladstone could conscientiously do whatever he liked. The more subtly he argued, the more plain John Bull got puzzled.
It may, at first sight, seem tasking the public memory too much to ask people if they remember the tension there was in the political atmosphere towards the end of Mr. Gladstone's career. But a very great many will not have forgotten it. The political weather is so far like the other sort that it is only borne in mind for its badness; that, however, was a terrible season. At the last, Mr. Gladstone seemed to have got into the air, and he did not improve the climate. He may urge, certainly, that Mr. Lowe had made himself very obnoxious, that Mr. Ayrton had been found to be intolerable, and that the great trade of the publicans, with all its supporters, was in arms against Mr. Bruce. That is all true; the country disliked each one of these his chief colleagues. But neither Mr. Lowe's hard cynicism, nor Mr. Ayrton's dogmatic inæstheticism, nor Mr. Bruce's stolid mechanical interference, stirred the large keen dissatisfaction which Mr. Gladstone's own incomprehensibility in the end did. He gave men's consciences a shock, and none of the others affected to feel so deeply as that: it was only he who had stood forward as a political moralist, and then set everybody by the ears discussing his conduct. It was the same outside Parliament and within it. Everybody was arguing Mr. Gladstone; nobody could make him out, nobody felt safe, or could imagine what was coming next. If the atmosphere had but been charged a little more with him, England would not have been worth living in. Luckily the elections came, and the air was cleared.
But if in the more exaggerated instances we have above spoken of, the general public became aware of a certain obliquity, an unreliability, a dissatisfied restlessness, an imperiousness in Mr. Gladstone, the Conservatives had been more or less continuously aware of those qualities for many years. They, as we said earlier, have had to observe the right hon. gentleman closer, more continuously, and it would be easy for any one of them who is of middle age to give from his own memory a string of instances, just the same in kind as those above, though not so broadly striking, beginning much earlier in his career, and coming down much later. Very recently, Lord Salisbury at Manchester recalled Mr. Gladstone's dealings with his Oxford constituents in reference to the disestablishment of the Irish Church. But his lordship courteously spared his opponent the details. Has the world forgotten the famous letter to Dr. Hannah, bearing the date of June, 1865, written, as Mr. Gladstone himself with unlooked-for naïveté admits in his "Chapter of Autobiography," for the appeasing of doubts? He in it asserted, first of all, that the question was "remote and apparently out of all bearing on the practical politics of the day;" second, he avowed that he was probably going "to be silent" on the topic; third, he said that "he scarcely expected ever to be called on to share in such a measure;" and, as his finishing words, spoke of it as "a question lying at a distance he could not measure." These were far too many causes for not doing a thing, and the Conservatives accordingly began to look out. In 1869, Mr. Gladstone disestablished the Irish Church. The "remoteness" and the "distance which was not measurable" somehow came to be packed within these two dates,—1865-9. What had so hurried matters? Well, one can only recall what had happened in the interim, and among the events there had been these two occurrences—he had been expelled from Oxford and rejected by South Lancashire. The like suddenness attended his conversion on the subject of the Ballot. After half a lifetime of opposition, he one fine morning announced that it must pass, hardly a hint of warning having been given beforehand.
But his whole career has shown this suddenness of advance, at distinct periods, which, as we have said, always coincided with the brightening of the prospects of the respective agitations. It is true, as is earlier pointed out, that he took something like a quarter of a century to travel the ground between the Conservative starting-point and the Radical position, but the length of time was not owing to his creeping between the bounds; he has traversed it at successive leaps, standing still between, and, at the places where he remained stationary, there was always the warm shelter of office. This style of progress has characterized him down to the present moment. As late as 1874 he told a deputation that he did not consider the question of the County Franchise ripe. There has been a good deal of very indifferent weather since then; but whether or not the field crops have matured, it seems now that the agricultural labourer has been growing fast. Mr. Joseph Arch has been the sun that has shone upon him, and Mr. Gladstone, as usual, is quite ready to reap the harvest. Examples might be multiplied manifold. Take the boasted case of the Liberal surplus, of which we have never ceased to hear—just as if Mr. Lowe and Mr. Gladstone had between them coined the money. Its history, stated in three words, was this: Mr. Lowe had mulcted the public in an unnecessary twopence of Income Tax, and, instead of shamefully confessing the incompetency it showed in a Chancellor of the Exchequer, presented himself before the constituencies, on the eve of the elections, with his hands full of gold, and with the air of presenting it to them.
Mr. Gladstone, great financier as he is, was not above profiting by his subordinate's miscalculation. Instead of administering a rebuke, as a good journeyman might have been expected to do to a bad apprentice, he patted Mr. Lowe on the back. Indeed, in the Greenwich address, when he so magniloquently spoke of the money being given back in the shape of abolishing the Income Tax, he seemed to take some credit to himself.