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own avowal to Lord Granville that he was seeking to discover measures likely "materially to mend the position of the party for an impending election," and that he thought such measures

might best be found in the domain of finance. There is a ring of party opportunism about this which ill consorts with a lofty and disinterested statesmanship. At the same time it is clear that income-tax repeal was no desperate expedient hastily adopted by a minister in extremis. He had taken the Exchequer into his own hands, and in the previous summer had instituted inquiries which led the officials concerned to surmise that he was nursing some design of dealing with the income-tax. He had, as he records in his diary, communicated his ideas "in deep secrecy" to Mr. Cardwell, and told him they were "based upon the abolition of income-tax and sugar duties, with partial compensation from spirit and death duties." At the end of September he wrote in the diary, "I want eight millions to handle!" "So much," says Mr. Morley, "for the charitable tale that he only bethought him of the income-tax when desperately hunting for a card to play at a general election.”

On the Midlothian Morley remarks:

campaign, Mr.

To disparage eloquence is to depreciate mankind; and when men say that Mr. Gladstone and Midlothian were no better than a resplendent mistake, they forget how many objects of our reverence stand condemned by implication in their verdict; they have not thought out how many of the faiths and principles that have been the brightest lamps in the track of human advance they are extinguishing by the same unkind and freezing breath. One should take care lest in quenching the spirit of Midlothian, we leave the sovereign mastery of the world to Machiavelli (li, 594).

lar judgment here pronounced, but its spirit must command the sympathy of all generous minds. So, again, men still differ as to the action of Mr. Gladstone and his Cabinet in the sinister tragedy of Majuba; but few will withhold their assent from Mr. Morley's scathing censure on the fatal preliminary dawdling which led directly to the catastrophe. "So a fresh page was turned in the story of loitering unwisdom." That we may not have to revert to a painful subject, we may here quote Mr. Morley's final judgment on the whole transaction:

Some have argued that we ought to have brought up an overwhelming force, to demonstrate that we were able to beat them, before we made peace. Unfortunately, demonstrations of this species easily turn into provocations, and talk of this kind mostly comes from those who believe, not that peace was made in the wrong way, but that a peace giving their country back to the Boers ought never to have been made at all, on any terms or in any way. This was not the point from which either Cabinet or Parliament started. The government had decided that annexation had been an error. The Boers had proposed inquiry. The gov

ernment assented on condition that the

Boers dispersed. Without waiting a reasonable time for a reply, our general was worsted in a rash and trivial attack. Did this cancel our proffered bargain? The point was simple and unmistakable, though party heat at home, race passion in the colony, and our everlasting human proneness to mix up different questions, and to answer one point by arguments that belong to another, all combined to pro

duce a confusion of mind that a certain school of partisans have traded upon ever since. Strange in mighty nations is moral cowardice, disguised as a Roman pride. All the more may we admire the moral courage of the minister. For moral courage may be needed even where aversion to bloodshed fortunately happens to coincide with high prudence and sound policy of state (iii, 43.

We may not all concur in the particu- 44).

We presume that Mr. Morley means that “high prudence and sound policy" were displayed in the surrender of 1881. How utterly we disagree with him, it is hardly necessary to remind readers of this Review. But it is not our purpose on this occasion to combat Mr. Morley's opinions; we prefer to give our readers, with as little adverse comment as may be, some notion of his book. Mr. Morley gives a cogent practical reason why the Cabinet were so strongly inclined to come to an understanding on the basis of the Boer overtures made by Kruger before Majuba, but after Colley's reverses at Laing's Nek and the Ingogo River,

Any other decision would have broken up the government, for, on at least one division in the House on Transvaal affairs, Mr. Bright and Mr. Chamberlain, along with three other ministers not in the Cabinet, had abstained from voting (iii, 35).

The conclusion is, then, that the interests of the country were sacrificed to the cohesion of the Cabinet.

"Ireland never blows over," is another of Mr. Morley's pregnant comments in recording how other "rising storms" in the Cabinet seemed to have blown over in the late spring of 1885, when the powerful government of 1880 was already tottering to its fall. It had, as Mr. Gladstone said himself, "no moral force behind it." Yet his buoyancy and resource were, as Mr. Morley says, never more wonderful than at this juncture:

Between the middle of April and the middle of May, he jots down, with half rueful humor, the names of no fewer than nine members of the Cabinet who, within that period, for one reason or another, and at one moment or another, appeared to contemplate resignation; that is to say, a majority. one meeting he said playfully to a colleague, "A very fair Cabinet to-dayonly three resignations." The large

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packets of copious letters of this date, written and received, show him a minister of unalterable patience, unruffled self-command; inexhaustible in resource, catching at every straw from the resource of others, indefatigable in bringing men of divergent opinions within friendly reach of one another; of tireless ingenuity in minimizing differences and convincing recalcitrants that what they took for a yawning gulf was, in fact, no more than a narrow trench that any decent political gymnast ought to be ashamed not to be able to vault over (iii, 185).

"The point-blank is not for all occasions, and only a simpleton can think otherwise"-this of the ambiguities and obscurities of Mr. Gladstone's utterances during the election of 1885. "You need greater qualities" (said Cardinal De Retz) "to be a good party leader than to be emperor of the universe. Ireland is not that part of the universe in which this is the least true"-this of Parnell's leadership in 1885 and of Ireland's acceptance of it. It may here be noted that a confidential draft of the first Home Rule Bill was entrusted to Parnell before its introduction, with permission to communicate it to a few of his colleagues, accompanied by a solemn warning against premature divulgation.

The draft (says Mr. Morley) was duly returned, and not a word leaked out. Some time afterwards Mr. Parnell recalled the incident to me. "Three of the men to whom I showed the draft were newspaper men, and they were poor men, and any newspaper would have given them a thousand pounds for it. No very wonderful virtue, you may say. But how many of your House of Commons would believe it?" (iii, 320).

"No reformer" (says Mr. Morley) "is fit for his task who suffers himself to be frightened off by the excesses of an extreme wing"-this of Mr. Gladstone's attitude towards the

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"plan of campaign." It seems to go nearer to "the standards of Machiavel” than is Mr. Morley's wont, or than quite befits his estimate of Mr. Gladstone's lofty and uncompromising love of righteousness.

There is no solution of the problem of Mr. Gladstone's character and personality to be found in any compact or simple formula. We may call him hypocrite or saint, according as we judge him harshly or kindly. We may contrast Lord Salisbury's "a great Christian statesman" with Kinglake's earlier and less generous judgment, "a good man-a good man in the worst sense of the word"; or, if in cynical mood, we may combine the two estimates. Mr. Bryce says, in the loyal estimate of his former chief included in his "Biographical Studies": "That he was possessed of boundless energy and brilliant eloquence all are agreed; but agreement went no further." We must, however, demur to the latter clause. We should have thought that agreement went at least so far as to acknowledge that Mr. Gladstone was really a great man-great in intellectual power, great in moral enthusiasm, however misapplied sometimes, great in parliamentary aptitude and resource, great in more than one department of political effort and achievement, even if all his more questionable enterprises be left out of the account or reckoned on the adverse side. It is true that, like all great men of action, and perhaps in larger measure than most, he was gifted with rare powers of selfpersuasion-with a faith in his own judgment and rectitude of purpose which was seldom shared by his critles, and not always by his friends. "The right honorable gentleman," said Mr. Forster on a memorable occasion, "can persuade most people of most things; he can persuade himself of almost anything." He was undoubtedly

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"one section of the nation accused him of sophistry, of unwisdom, of a want of patriotism, of a lust for power;" while "the other section not only repelled these charges, but admired in him a conscientiousness and a moral enthusiasm such as no political leader has shown for centuries" (p. 411).

There is perhaps no complete reconciliation of these conflicting judgments, none, at least, for a generation which knew Mr. Gladstone in the flesh, and still burns either with enthusiasm or with indignation. Lord Rosebery says of the Irish question that it has never passed into history because it has never passed out of politics. So we may say of Mr. Gladstone that he too cannot yet pass into history because he has not yet passed out of politics. Midlothian, Majuba, Kilmainham, Khartoum, the surrender to Parnell, the conversion to Home Rule there is passion, partisanship, and fierce contention still glowing in the very words. Whether we study the spirited biography of Mr. Herbert Paul-the work of an avowed Gladstonian, but fairly impartial, as befits the neutral pages of the "Dictionary of National Biography" in which it first appeared-or the sympathetic but critical analysis of Mr. Bryce, or the more labored and copious, but withal temperate and reasoned apologia of Mr. Morley, we still feel that the time is not yet for a final and judicial closing of the bitter con

troversies which such a character and such a career provoked in such abundance. Nevertheless it is only a man still heated with the passions of bygone conflicts that can now seriously question Mr. Gladstone's fundamental sincerity and uprightness, or doubt that, in whatever walk of life his lot had been cast, his strenuous industry, his amazing versatility, and his commanding intellectual powers, must have brought him to the top.

"I should like to know," cried Huxley, when he met him casually at Darwin's house, "what would keep such a man as that back. Why, put him in the middle of a moor, with nothing in the world but his shirt, and you could not prevent him being anything he liked" (ii, 562).

And Huxley, as Mr. Morley says, was as far as possible from being a Gladstonian. Indeed he is reported later as saying, "Here is a man with the greatest intellect in Europe, and yet he debases it by simply following majorities and the crowd." Did he? It is a digression here to give Mr. Morley's comment on this pungent expression of a very general opinion, but we may cite it as showing that there is at least something to be said on the other side.

All this is the exact opposite of the truth. What he thought was that the statesman's gift consisted in insight into the facts of a particular era, disclosing the existence of material for forming public opinion and directing public opinion to a given purpose. In every one of his achievements of high mark-even in his last marked failure of achievement-he expressly formed, or endeavored to form and create, the public opinion upon which he knew that in the last resort he must depend.

We have seen the triumph of 1853. Did he, in renewing the most hated of taxes, run about anxiously feeling the pulse of public opinion? On the contrary, he grappled with the facts with infinite labor-and half his genius was labor; he built up a great plan; he

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carried it to the Cabinet; they warned him that the House of Commons would be against him; the officials of the Treasury told him the Bank would be against him; that a strong press of commercial interests would be against him. Like the bold and sinewy athlete that he always was, he stood to his plan; he carried the Cabinet; he persuaded the House of Commons; he vanquished the bank and the hostile interests; and, in the words of Sir Stafford Northcote, he changed and turned, for many years to come, a current of public opinion that seemed far too powerful for any minister to resist. the tempestuous discussions during the seventies on the policy of this country in respect of the Christian races of the Balkan Peninsula, he with his own voice created, moulded, inspired, and kindled with resistless flame the whole of the public opinion that eventually guided the policy of the nation, with such admirable effect both for its own fame and for the good of the world. Take again the Land Act of 1881, in some ways the most deep-reaching of all his legislative achievements. Here he had no flowing tide; every current was against him. He carried his scheme against the ignorance of the country, against the prejudice of the country, and against the standing prejudices of both branches of the legislature, who were steeped from the crown of the head to the sole of the foot in the strictest doctrines of contract.

Then his passion for economy, his ceaseless war against public profusion, his insistence upon rigorous keeping of the national accounts-in this great department of affairs he led and did not follow. In no sphere of his activities was he more strenuous, and in no sphere, as he must well have known, was he less likely to win popularity. For democracy is spendthrift; if, to be sure, we may not say that most forms of government are apt to be the same (iii, 536-7).

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was a deeply-read theologian, albeit of a rather belated type; an ecclesiastical thinker of large outlook, though curiously out of touch with the movement of the modern world; a ripe scholar, though no scientific humanist; an ardent lover of letters, who had formed his taste on Homer and Dante, and who, though he read vastly, seldom read without purpose and profit. He was also a vigorous and versatile writer on many topics, as none know better than the conductors of this Review. Though his occasional writings were of very unequal power and felicity, yet they occasionally rise almost to the level of his own consummate oratory. Withal he was a most painstaking, indefatigable, and intrepid man of business, as is shown by the story, hitherto known to few, which is told by Mr. Morley in his chapter on the Hawarden estate.

In connection with this subject, it must suffice to say that he found the estate deeply and almost hopelessly encumbered by hazardous and unsuccessful mining and manufacturing operations affecting an outlying portion of it in Staffordshire. The whole estate was in consequence burdened with a charge of 250,000l., leaving its beneficial owner, Sir Stephen Glynne, with no margin to live upon. Mr. Gladstone was, by the terms of his marriage settlement, implicated in the catastrophe, and for five years at least he "threw himself with the whole weight of his untiring energy and force into this farspreading entanglement." The Наwarden estate was cleared in the end, but not without great sacrifices, nor without his pledging his own fortune on it to the extent of no less than 267,0001. Yet of all this immense labor and sustained personal sacrifice the

1 Mr. Morley refers to some of his political contributions to the Quarterly Review made at a time when his political views were in sympathy with ours; but he was a not infrequent contributor of articles, non-political in character,

world at large has scarcely heard a word. Let us add that his private charities and benefactions, known only to himself, amounted to upwards of 70,0001, between 1831 and 1890, and that before his death a sum of over 13,000l. more was added to the total; and, to complete the chapter of Mr. Gladstone's dealings with his own conscience out of the sight of men and even in defiance of all worldly opinion, let us quote Mr. Morley's account of the life-long mission of mercy which has so often been used to sully his personal repute in the loose and irresponsible gossip of the town.

On his first entry upon the field of responsible life, he had formed a serious and solemn engagement with a friend-I suppose it was Hope-Scottthat each would devote himself to active service in some branch of religious work. He could not, without treason to his gifts, go forth like Selwyn or Patteson to Melanesia to convert the savages. He sought a missionary field at home, and he found it among the unfortunate ministers to "the great sin of great cities." In these humane efforts at reclamation he persevered all through his life, fearless of misconstruction, fearless of the levity or baseness of men's tongues, regardless almost of the possible mischiefs to the public policies that depended on him. Greville tells the story how, in 1853, a man made an attempt one night to extort money from Mr. Gladstone, then in office as Chancellor of the Exchequer, by threats of exposure; and how he instantly gave the offender into custody, and met the case at the police office. Greville could not complete the story. The man was committed for trial. Mr. Gladstone directed his solicitors to see that the accused was properly defended. He was convicted and sent to prison. By and by Mr. Gladstone inquired from the governor of the prison how the delinquent was

at a later period in his career. Some of these were reprinted in his "Gleanings." They are not without biographical value as showing the bent of his mind and thought.

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