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conducting himself. The report being satisfactory, he next wrote to Lord Palmerston, then at the Home Office, asking that the prisoner should be let out. There was no worldly wisdom in it, we all know. But then what are people Christians for? (iii, 419).

These are some leading features of Mr. Gladstone's personal character and private life, apart from his career as a public man. There are in this portrait, at any rate, no dark or doubtful lineaments, and, did space permit, we could quote passage after passage to heighten the picture of his laborious, high-minded, and conscientious persistence in the profitable use of rare and high gifts, and in the scrupulous discharge of all the duties imposed on him by life and its circumstances. Nevertheless, it was a pre-established harmony between his best gifts and the proper field for their employment that made him a politician. He might have been anything, as Huxley said. But unless he had followed his early and rather schwärmerisch impulse to take orders, it is certain that in any civil walk of life he must have gravitated sooner or later to politics. He was essentially a man of action, although he was a great deal more, and had several qualities, gifts, and even failings which are seldom found so highly developed in men of action of the class to which he belonged. Mr. Morley puts all this very well in his opening pages.

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made the preponderance of politics excessive in the story of a genius of signal versatility, to whom politics were only one interest among many. . . . Yet, after all, it was to his thoughts, his purposes, his ideals, his performances as statesman, in all the widest significance of that lofty and honorable designation, that Mr. Gladstone owes the lasting substance of his fame. His life was ever "greatly absorbed," he

said, “in working the institutions of his country." Here we mark a signal trait. Not for two centuries, since the historic strife of Anglican and Puritan, had our island produced a ruler in whom the religious motive was paramount in the like degree. He was not only a political force but a moral force. He strove to use all the powers of his own genius and the powers of the state for moral purposes and religious. Nevertheless, his mission in all its forms was action. He had none of that detachment, often found among superior minds, which we honor for its disinterestedness, even while we lament its impotence in result. The track in which he moved, the instruments that he employed, were the track and the instruments, the sword and the trowel, of political action; and what is called the Gladstonian era was distinctively a political era (i, 2, 3).

Moreover, he was a great orator; and oratory in these days is more potent in the senate and the market-place than it is even in the pulpit. As an orator he was, at least in some respects, unequalled by any contemporary. Bright had greater majesty, perhaps; his language was more nervous and concise; but his range was far narrower. His was the eloquence of the set speech, elaborately prepared and often for the most part carefully written down. The famous "angel of death" passage was a flight beyond the power even of Mr. Gladstone's wings. Mr. Gladstone, on the other hand, was often at his best when most unprepared. He was often nervous (he told a friend) when opening a de

bate, never in reply. His playful improvisations, when he drew upon the genial stores of his memory to enliven a passing issue or merely to show how charming he could be when he chose, were inimitable. Equally unrivalled was his command of all the resources of lucid exposition, of serious and purposeful pleading, of lofty and impassioned appeal.

But in truth the secret of Mr. Gladstone's eloquence is that it was essentially the oratory of the spoken word. Few, if any, of his speeches will ever be read by posterity as we still read the speeches of Demosthenes or of Cicero, of Burke or of Sheridan, of Macaulay or even of Bright. But if oratory be persuasion, the instant and incessant interchange of sympathy between a speaker and his audience, the magic swaying of a multitude or the irresistible enchantment of a senate, then assuredly was Mr. Gladstone one of the greatest of orators. No one who has not seen and heard the great enchanter at work can now form the slightest idea how enthralling were his spells. It was a dangerous gift, and was often used, as many thought and think, to make the worse appear the better reason. But, even if we put aside altogether every question and occasion about which controversy still rages, there remains in the memory and the records of those who heard him, a large residue of truly noble rhetoric, of lucid and fascinating exposition, of stirring encouragement to the pursuit of great enterprises and high ideals, such as few orators have rivalled, and still fewer surpassed. But the orator, like the actor, lives only in the recollection of those who heard and saw him-for seeing in both cases is quite as important as hearing; nor is any man a great orator who has not many of the gifts of a great actorhis command of gesture, his variety and grace of elocution, his mobility of

feature, his instant sympathy with the ethical tone of this or that situation, his power of evoking that sympathy in every member of his audience; and this is surely what Demosthenes meant by making Tóκpious acting, not action -the secret of all oratory. In this sense Mr. Gladstone was every inch an actor. But all this is essentially evanescent. The living orator departs; nothing but a pale simulacrum survives in the written word. Yet the memory of those who saw and heard him in the flesh can still bring back to us something of the vanished soul and spirit. And since Mr. Bryce and Mr. Morley both enjoyed that privilege, and both select Mr. Gladstone's speech on the Affirmation Bill as one of the most impressive of his later efforts, both describing it in very similar language, we will take Mr. Morley's account of it as a typical illustration of that kind or oratory in which Mr. Gladstone was supreme.

The speech proved one of his greatest. Imposing, lofty, persuasive, sage, it would have been, from whatever lips it might have fallen; it was signal indeed as coming from one so fervid, so definite, so unfaltering in a faith of his own, one who had started from the opposite pole to that great civil prinIciple of which he now displayed a grasp invincible. . . . These high themes of faith, on the one hand, and freedom on the other, exactly fitted the range of the thoughts in which Mr. Gladstone habitually lived. . . . I wonder, too, if there has been a leader in Parliament since the seventeenth century, who could venture to address it in the strain of the memorable passage now to be transcribed:

"You draw your line at the point where the abstract denial of God is severed from the abstract admission of the Deity. My proposition is that the line thus drawn is worthless, and that much on your side of the line is as objectionable as the atheism on the other. If you call upon us to make distinctions, let them at least be rational; I do not say let them be Christian dis

tinctions, but let them be rational. I can understand one rational distinction, that you should frame the oath in such a way as to recognize not only the existence of the Deity, but the providence of the Deity, and man's responsibility to the Deity; and in such a way as to indicate the knowledge in a man's own mind that he must answer to the Deity for what he does, and is able to do. . . . Many of the members of this House will recollect the majestic and noble lines

Omnis enim per se divom natura necesse est Immortali aevo summa cum pace fruatur,

Semota a nostris rebus

longe.

sejunctaque

Nam privata dolore omni, privata peri clis,

Ipsa suis pollens opibus, nihil indiga nostri,

Nee bene promeritis capitur, nec tangitur ira.

"Divinity exists-according to these, I must say, magnificent lines-in remote and inaccessible recesses; but with us it has no dealing, of us it has no need, with us it has no relation! I do not hesitate to say that the specific evil, the specific form of irreligion, with which, in the educated society of this country, you have to contend, and with respect to which you ought to be on your guard, is not blank atheism. That is a rare opinion, very rarely met with; but what is frequently met with is that form of opinion which would teach us that, whatever may be beyond the visible things of this world, whatever there may be beyond this short span of life, you know and you can know nothing of it, and that it is a bootless undertaking to attempt to establish relations with it. That is the mischief of the age, and that mischief you do not attempt to touch."

The House, though but few perhaps recollected their Lucretius, or had ever even read him, sat, as I well remember, with reverential stillness, hearkening, from this born master of moving cadence and high sustained modulation, to "the rise and long roll of the hexameter"-to the plangent lines that have come down across the night of time to us from great Rome (iii, 18-20).

We cannot attempt to discuss all the elements of Mr. Gladstone's extraordinary personality, nor can we consider all the debatable points in his long and extraordinary career. We are not concerned to raise controversial issues, except so far as they invite discussion of a strictly historical nature in the light of facts hitherto unknown or of circumstances hitherto unconsidered. Our own opinions on many of the questions raised by Mr. Gladstone's career are well known, and they remain unaltered. But candor requires us to do justice to Mr. Morley's defence of policies which are still odious to us, and of acts of Mr. Gladstone's which, however well intentioned, we still regard as misguided and impolitic.

Want of space forbids us to discuss those distracted wanderings of Mr. Gladstone in search of a party in the fifties, in the tracing of which Mr. Morley himself, with all his lucidity and candor, sometimes seems almost to lose the thread. That is a history in itself; and, like all histories of the breaking up and remaking of parties, it is a bewildering story of currents and counter-currents, of personal affinities and animosities, of conflicting impulses and aspirations, a very maze of political casuistry and confusion through which the supersensitive conscience of Mr. Gladstone and his supersubtle intellect were certain to take him by paths which seemed tortuous and were assuredly hard to follow. We know not whether Mr. Gladstone's own apology for his political changes, uttered in conversation with Mr. Morley in 1891, may be taken to cover this period of his career; but, if so, it is rather a scanty garment.

I think I can truly put all the change that has come into my politics into a sentence. I was brought up to distrust and dislike liberty; I learned to believe in it. That is the key to all my changes.

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To pass over this period of Mr. Gladstone's life also involves the exclusion of the Crimean War and Mr. Gladstone's share in it, though no one who seeks to understand Mr. Gladstone thoroughly can afford to neglect this episode in his career. But we must not attempt to enumerate all our exclusions, lest the fascination of the subject should beguile us into the discussion of the excluded topics one by one. Most persons would say that Mr. Gladstone's triumphs, or, at any rate, the least questionable of them, were achieved in the domain of finance. We do not dispute this judgment, so far as constructive policy is concerned, nor yet in regard to the boldness of his measures and his unrivalled felicity in expounding them. Yet it is no paradox to say, as Mr. Morley says in speaking of his first budget, that he was a financier almost by accident. It was by no choice of his own that he became Chancellor of the Exchequer in the government of Lord Aberdeen; and it was even against his own inclination that he became Vice-President of the Board of Trade when he joined Peel's government in 1841. When Peel offered him this post, he said: "It is right that I should say, as strongly as I can, that I am not fit for it. I have no general knowledge of trade." He regarded with an equal sense of his unfitness any post connected with the services; but he records later that "the idea of the Irish secretaryship had nestled in my mind." Peel had entertained that idea too, but he had rejected it in deference to "some considerations connected with the Presbyterians of Ireland"; and so Mr. Gladstone went, not very willingly, to the Board of Trade. "In a spirit of ignorant mortification, I said to myself at the moment, the science of politics deals with the government of men, but I am set to govern packages." But it was there that he learnt to govern men, or at VOL. LXXIX. 553

ECLECTIC.

least to understand and handle some of the most potent springs of their activity; and the knowledge he acquired at the Board of Trade was perfected and sharpened by his five years' immersion in the affairs of the Hawarden estate. It is, by the way, an early illustration of administrative inefficiency in this country that, when Mr. Gladstone advanced his ignorance of trade as a disqualification, Peel replied: "I think you will find Lord Ripon a perfect master of these subjects." Lord Ripon, it will be remembered, was Disraeli's "transient and embarrassed phantom." What Mr. Gladstone actually did find was that "in a very short time I came to form a low estimate of the knowledge and information of Lord Ripon." He also found quickly enough that a knowledge of trade was no bad equipment for the government of men. Mr. Morley shall tell the story and point the moral.

It was upon Mr. Gladstone that the burden of the immense achievement of the new tariff fell; and the toil was huge. He used afterwards to say that he had been concerned in four revisions of the tariff, in 1842, 1845, 1853, and 1860, and that the first of them cost six times as much trouble as the other three put together. He spoke one hundred and twenty-nine times during the session. He had only once sat on a committee of trade, and had only once spoken on a purely trade question during the nine years of his parliamentary life. All his habits of thought and action had been cast in a different mould. It is ordinarily assumed that he was a born financier, endowed besides with a gift of idealism and the fine training of a scholar. As a matter of fact, it was the other way; he was a man of high practical and moral imagination, with understanding made accurate by strength of grasp and incomparable power of rapid and concentrated apprehension, yoked to finance only by force of circumstancea man who would have made a shining and effective figure in whatever path

an

of great public affairs, whether ecclesiastical or secular, duty might have called for his exertions (i, 255).

"In whatever path of great public affairs duty might call for his exertions." Another path of public affairs in which, for a short and troubled period, duty did call for his exertions, was the Colonial Office. Did he there show himself a "Little Englander"? His tenure of office was short, and he had no seat in Parliament at the time; but his views on colonial policy were recorded in 1855, at a time when he had not long ceased to be a colleague of Sir William Molesworth-that sturdy Imperialist before his time.

Govern them upon a principle of freedom. Defend them against aggression from without. Regulate their foreign relations. These things belong to the colonial connection.

But

of the duration of that connection let them be the judges, and I predict that, if you leave them the freedom of judgment, it is hard to say when the day will come when they will wish to separate from the great name of England. Depend upon it, they covet a share in that great name. You will find in that feeling of theirs the greatest security for the connection. Make the name of England yet more and more an object of desire to the Colonies. Their natural disposition is to love and revere the name of England, and this reverence is by far the best security you can have for their continuing, not only to be subjects of the Crown, not only to render it allegiance, but to render it that allegiance which is the most precious of all-the allegiance which proceeds from the depths of the heart of

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founded a rational mode of administering the affairs of your Colonies without gratuitous interference (i, 363-4).

He was never at the Foreign Office; and perhaps most people would say that it was well for the country and the empire that he was not. We shall not gainsay the judgment, though it might well be argued that an early initiation into the arcana of continental politics, such as experience at the Foreign Office would have given a man of his commanding aptitude for affairs, might have saved him from some of the worst of those miscarriages of foreign policy which so often seemed to dog his governments like a spectre. Lord Granville was his Foreign Secretary until he was succeeded by Lord Rosebery; and Lord Granville was not a strong man, nor had he the untiring industry of his chief. But Mr. Gladstone held, as Peel had held, and as Grey had held before him, though Melbourne had weakened the salutary tradition, that the conduct of foreign affairs belongs almost as much to the Prime Minister as it does to the Foreign Secretary himself. For this reason the foreign policy of his several governments belongs to his biographical record, and must submit to be judged by the impartial tribunal of history. What verdict will it render?

We are still too near his time for a final judgment on all points, but this, perhaps, may even now be said, without provoking serious dispute, that, in spite of Majuba, on which we have said all that needs to be said here, and in spite of Khartoum, on which we shall have something to say presently, in spite of the vacillations and blunders of his policy in Egypt, in spite of the disrepute into which his general scheme of foreign policy has fallen, Mr. Gladstone must be credited with two notable achievements, of which the full and final consequences are not

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