dren on your knee.

a daisy, bless her little heart!"

Here she comes, fresh as eagerly resigns his place to a well-dressed comer that it is any thing more than pure self-sacrifice. If I were to intimate that, when I lately went to hear Mr. Gladstone introduce the new Reform Bill, and a seedy boy, out at the elbows, kindly yielded to me place No. 6, in which he had been sitting eleven hours, I sat there with $2 50 in gold less in my purse than before, the report might reach Her Majesty's immaculate Government, and a most disinterested functionary might lose his place. Consequently, as you see, I was ushered in by powerful friends, and paid nothing

Ah, it was not a dream; for her own little Birdie nestled down at her side, and she knew that life was hers-life with all its chance for noble ends and uses-life to fill with kindly deeds, with helping words to others-life with its trials to be nobly borne, its shadows in which to work for a Heavenly crown. Then her heart echoed the joyful pæan, "Christ our Lord has risen to-day!" for later than the date in the Christian year had dawned the true resurrection in her heart. Christ, bursting through the hard-nothing whatever, I assure you! rock of skepticism and dark unbelief, had risen to-day in her rejoicing soul with healing on His wings. Then she took the Easter lilies and pressed the frail, pure things to her lips, giving God praise that she had come back also through the grave and gate of death into newness of life; and that love, a cold, dead seed lying under snows colder than wildest storms can give, had found an earthly spring, and lifted itself up through the hard surface to burgeon and bloom and fill her life with fragrance.

It was a very odd place for me to be in-that closet at the foot of the stairway leading to the Strangers' Gallery. When I went in and relieved poor No. 6, I looked around at my company. But few had as yet been relieved from their long watch, and never since the days of Falstaff did eyes behold a more melancholy troop than those who were presumably the auditors of Mr. Gladstone. Through the reeking air of the dark, subterranean place, which by severe crowding held fifty-eight persons, one could see the faces, the filthy raiment, the debauched ex

GLADSTONE AS LEADER OF THE pression of those who would a few hours later

COMMONS.

THERE is nothing that at once strikes a cas

ual visitor to the English Parliament more unpleasantly-especially if he has sat in the spacious galleries of the Capitol at Washington -than the way in which the architects of Westminster Hall have ignored the existence of the people as a body vitally interested in the proceedings of those who are supposed to be their representatives. No matter how important the debate that is to take place, only about one hundred and fifty or two hundred out of the thirty millions of England can be admitted into the Commons' House. And what do not these have to go through! About one half have had their names inserted in the list which admits to the Speaker's Gallery. About twenty ladies-principally the families of members who are to take part in the debate-are crowded into the Ladies' Gallery. The rest must cram themselves into the Strangers' Gallery.

In order to get into this last place we first get an order of admission from a member of the House. We then have to sit in a kind of closet from four o'clock in the morning until four of the afternoon, when the Parliament opens. (This, of course, is when there is some unusual attraction.) We do not sit here all this time in propria persona, but obtain what is called a "dummy." This "dummy" is the first poor ragged wretch that may be picked up in the streets with nothing to do. It is not to be supposed that the ragged regiment who crowd to the door of the closet referred to at daybreak, with notes from Members of Parliament in their hands, have any interest beyond a passionate, sleepless desire to hear a great orator. Oh, dear no! Nor is it to be for an instant thought that when, in the afternoon, one of these meekly or even

be distributed among the dens, station-houses, and work-houses of London. As you gaze a functionary in uniform starts in at the door and cries, "The Hon. Yelverton Hensleigh!" Each poor wretch looks hard at the back of his bit of paper, some asking their neighbors to spell out what is on theirs. "The Hon. Yelverton Hensleigh!" shouts again the official. "Think as that's me," pipes up a half-naked and very dirty little boy. He is called forth. A few novices explode at the fiction; but the policemen look very solemn as the elegant aristocrat comes forward and takes the seat and order from his double."

At last the ragamuffins with their grand aristocratic and literary names have all gone; in their places a well-dressed and select company has appeared; but there, chatting or reading by the one gas-jet, we must remain one hour. At last, however, the great Westminster clock tolls four; a long single file begins to coil slowly upward through a close, dark series of stairways; but at last a curtain is drawn aside, and ere we know it we are seated on delightful cushions looking down on the assembling wisdom of England.

The room is small, though not so small as the deceptive Gothic style of it makes one at first believe. The carvings and ornamentation of it are exquisite. At the other end of the room, high up on the wall, is what the novice at once takes to be a delicate series of tapestries; but as he gazes some movement starts his eye upon a search, which ends in his conclusion that they are ladies. Yes, behind a diamond lattice-work in the wall are the score of ladies to whom that veiled presence was conceded when these new Houses were built. It was not a generation ago that, in this land with a Queen, the interest of women in public affairs

ple is mixed of all European races; and her foremost orator is as complex as the physical, moral, or political elements of his country.

Gladstone is a Scotchman, with a purely English training. He was bred a Tory, and is the leader of the Liberal party. He is a plebeian aristocrat; a royalist who studied and learned to hate despotism in the court of Bomba; a High Churchman, who once wrote a Puseyistic book, whom Oxford fears; a reformer on whom the Argus of liberty finds it needful to keep its hundred eyes wide open. He has given each party its finest watch-word, for the England he loves includes them all; yet no party would go to him to find an advocate. Finding each party devoted much more to its own shell than to its own essence, he touches them all with his wand and they unclose, revealing valuable kernels unsuspected by themselves. His theory of oratory

was supposed to be provided for by a small hole | of many sea-currents from the soils of various at the top of the building, around which a dozen other lands; her Constitution is made of the ladies sat-a hole admitting one face at a time, | odds and ends of all others in Europe; her peothrough which peeresses peered by turns! This Ladies' Gallery-holding twenty-was regarded as a formidable innovation, the Conservatives not failing to observe that it was only a way-station in their progress from the ceiling to the floor. And now that Mr. Mill has got there, who knows but that the Conservatives were right? It would be hard to surpass the impressiveness of the scene when some unusual occasion has brought together all the magnates of the country-when the foreign ministers and the peers are in the places provided for them-and the wandering eye detects among the group of visitors Tennyson or Owen or Froude-and when, as the bishop's prayer closes, a great flood of tinted light descends through the ceiling of toned glass. The little ghostly procession out of the twelfth century-the Speaker with his gown and wig, with his attendants, in tights and kneebuckles and queues, holding up his train or car-classes him among the Leaders. The orator rying the mace before him-has entered. And must, as he once said, "return to the people as now we are called away from the far past, from flood what he has received as vapor." The Repall memory of our "dummy” and our dark clos-resentative would return the vapor he had reet, and we are even charmed away from the ceived more or less rarefied. It is never of a beautiful scene; for the nineteenth century high kind of man that one can say, "He is alspeaks to us through the voice of Gladstone, ways up to the people," or, "He goes as fast as who rises to propose and plead for a measure the people will let him." The Leader will fuse of Reform which, if passed, will go far to thaw and remould public opinion. He will speak to and float away this little House of Commons, marble, never doubting that it will flush with and build one worthy to be the council cham-life under his words, and follow his voice as someber of a new England, in which no class or in- thing for which it has been waiting, bound by terest shall be unrepresented.

an evil spell. But the task of the Leader lies All the great statesmen who have ever lived in his presentative if not in his representative have belonged to one of two classes-the class power; that is, he is not necessarily an originaof Representatives or that of Leaders. The tor. To the masses all not dictated by themRepresentative Man is the direct expression of selves may seem innovation or originality, as his country at the time of his connection with they like or dislike it. The Leader, however, it. He may be its practical expression-as Na- has leaders; and he is oftener than otherwise a poleon of France or Wellington of England; or mediator between the highest thought of his he may be its voice-as Burke was that of En-time and the people. Mr. Gladstone, as we sit gland and Webster that of America. It is es- here, charms away the weariness of hours with sential only that he keep abreast with the peo- an eloquence that, though it is figured and ple, and say or do what they wish to but can changed with the forms of his own mind as that not say or do. The Leader is not abreast with light is by the stained windows, is clearly tracebut just ahead of his time and country. He able to many a solitary thinker-not the least to says or does not what they wish but what that thin, quietly-nervous representative of Westthey want, not what they are but what they minster, who is so fascinated by the unsuspected mean. He interprets them, and often he inter-scrolls into which he finds his own ideas may be prets them best when he is seemingly in antagonism with them. Paul, Luther, Calvin, are historic names in the latter class; and in modern times we have them represented in Italy by Cavour and Mazzini; in England by Palmerston and Gladstone. In England the death of the great Representative of the English people has made way for the accession of their great Leader, who now stands in the front of the Commons. But even as it is hard to classify England it is hard to classify Gladstone. All other nations, from Japan to California, may be described as somewhere in the vast railway train of peoples; but England is aside, running on a groove of her own. Her island is the deposit

woven.

When Mr. Gladstone rises there is a flutter of expectation and anxiety throughout the room; what he will say is utterly unpredictable. When John Bright, the finest orator in Europe of the Representative class, rises, his speech is so written out on his broad, handsome face that Lavater, were he reporter for the Times, would write it all out before he got through. But Gladstone's face is, during the first ten minutes, the sheath of the man; and his idea only comes out gleam by gleam, until, a true Damascus blade, it flashes and darts in graceful curves-such a splendid fencer is he!--and at length is wielded with that skill which generally wins the day.

Nature has, in the clear steel-ray of his eye, the | which, once unsealed, could not be kept down fortress-like brow that protects it, the firm nose that is its buttress above, though it becomes refined and Greekish as it descends to the flexible lips, given him a fit casket in which to keep his brilliants. His gestures are more frequent than with the earlier great speakers of Parliament, but are quite his own. He has, in particular, a way of raising his hand up to the side of his temples, and holding it there vertically a moment before it descends to emphasize his point, which is remarkably impressive. It is, however, in the modulations of his voice, in the tones which come each embodied in a word which expresses it as truly as pallor or blush expresses an emotion, that the great culture of Gladstone is revealed. One seems to be listening to the utterances of some invisible procession of great spirits-stretching from Homer, Demosthenes, Simonides, to Erasmus and Bacon. As his words are, so to speak, complexioned, so his style is physiognomical. His sentences carry in their form something beyond the mere meaning of the words..

in the small casket of statistics. And all who listened to Gladstone when he introduced the bill knew that he must rise with the momentous importance of the theme. He disappointed all who went to hear him as an orator in this; for his main object being to conciliate the Toriesknowing that the reformers were sure to take whatever extension they could get—he devoted himself at the close of his statement to proving that it was a comparatively unimportant change. We had a fine chance to witness the orator's dexterity in talking to one extreme what the other must not hear, and in gilding a revolutionary pill; but there was scarcely a touch of heroism in the speech. The conclusion was the nearest approach to a brave treatment, and occupied five minutes of the speech, which was of two and a half hours' duration. It was an appeal to the Tories, whose objection, it must be remembered, to the extension of the franchise is that the admission of the working-classes is, on account of their numbers, the virtual disfranchisement of the higher and more educated classes:

It was wonderful, indeed, to see a man of this nicety of culture floundering in the great "We do not," said Mr. Gladstone, "entirely abandon Reform Debate among the old phrases and he- the expectation that even those who have protested alreditary expedients of England; and it was not most in principle against the extension of the franchise a small tribute to him, that while he touched downward, will be disposed to accept a measure which they do not wholly approve if they think it offers the them they assumed a certain dignity. Fancy promise of the settlement for a considerable period of a the flower of Oxonian culture talking about grave, important, complex, and difficult subject. I would scot and lot owners and potwallopers! Yet, beg them to consider what an immense value there is in really, when Gladstone spoke of potwallopers the extension of the franchise for its own sake. Liberty is a thing which is good not only in its fruits, but in itself. one seemed to find a new dignity in the solitary This is what we constantly say in regard to English legisindividual-a widower, mayhap, or hermit, or lation, when we are told that affairs are managed more scholar-whose boiling pot assured him an in- economically, more cleverly, and effectually in foreign terest in his country, and entitled him to the countries. Yes, we answer, but here they are managed freely; and in freedom, in the free discharge of political franchise. And so did he build statistics up duties, there is an immense power both of discipline and into pretty architectural forms. Nevertheless of education for the people. We can not consent to look in the pauses of his speech one could but feel a upon this large addition, considerable although it may be, longing to hear that voice filled with the inspira- to the political power of the working-classes of this country as if it were an addition fraught with nothing but tion of universal questions, and not devoting it- danger. We can not look upon it as the Trojan horse apself to the tremendous issue of whether the En-proaching the walls of the sacred city, and filled with glish voter should be a renter to the sum of armed men bent on ruin, plunder, and confiscation. We seven or of ten pounds. Pounds-pounds can not join in comparing it with that monstrum infelix pounds-pounds. The words were reiterated until one would think we had all gathered to perform a solemn rite to a great gold sovereign. I reflected on the wit of that photographer, who, having lately to make a likeness of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, set up a pound sterling in order to rivet his eye. It is one advantage that we of America have reaped from the slavery agitation in America that our people have been educated into an interest in and knowledge of great human questions, and that our Congressmen, in however rude, unoxonian speeches, deal with such. Though the Church questions, and the Irish wrongs, have given of late a deep-beneficent working of the laws of Nature and Providence, er tone to the English Parliamentary debates, yet even now, in four days out of the five of its weekly sittings, one will find an immense amount of learning, research, and thought devoted to the Armstrong gun, to the Pigville Railway Company, and other questions of similar grandeur.

The subject of Reform was one, however,

-we can not say:

Seandit fatalis machina muros, Fata armis; mediæque minans illabitur urbi. I believe that those persons whom we ask you to enfranchise ought rather to be welcomed as you would welcome recruits to your army. We ask you to give within what you consider to be the just limits of prudence and circumspection, but, having determined those limits, to give with an ungrudging hand. Consider what you can safely and justly afford to do in admitting new subjects and citizens within the pale of the Parliamentary Constitution; and, having so considered it, don't do it as if you were compounding with danger and misfortune. Do it as if you were conferring a boon that will be felt and reciprocated in grateful attachment. Give to these persons new interests in the Constitution-new interests which, by the

shall beget in them new attachment to the Constitution;

for the attachment of the people to the throne and to the laws under which they live is, after all, more than your gold and your silver, more than your fleets and your armies, at once the strength, the glory, and the safety of

the land."

Nothing could exceed the grace and dignity with which this peroration was delivered; and

every word and thought in it will bear a micro- | one thing needful; there was far more of that scopic criticism. Yet it was in listening to this that I felt Gladstone's limitations as an orator. There was a certain lack of moral depth in the speaker. Pectus est quod disertum facit. Nothing can go farther than it has come. The plaudits which responded to these words were loud but not deep. Intellectually Mr. Gladstone is profound though not broad; morally he is broad but not profound. I have never in this or any speech been thrilled by him except on the intellectual side. All the parties and the people of England find a reception in his heart-for he is one of the few politicians who have hearts-but it is the reception of a drawing-room; they have no homes there. He is therefore a leader for an intermediate phase between two Englands, and the forerunner of some man with convictions rather than opinions.

If I mistake not, the working-men of England will never obtain their franchises under the leadership of Gladstone. Carlyle reminds us that when any great change is to be wrought God raises up men to whom that change is made to appear as the one thing needful. Nobody would ever suspect Mr. Gladstone of thinking the enfranchisement of the English working-men the

kind of feeling about Mr. Horsman when he bitterly denounced Earl Russell and his ministers as having at last laid the Government at the feet of John Bright. It will be impossible for the men of strong convictions on the radical side to bring in their one-thing-needful power upon a timid half-measure like that now proposed; and so it is probable that, between their indifference and the bitter hostility of the Tories and the Palmerston mourners, the measure may fail. If it does, let it not be supposed that English liberty has received any blow. When the diffusion of intelligence among the English lower classes shall have gone on some years yet; when the beer-houses are no longer tenfold more numerous than the schools; when some of the hard and cruel religious dogmas, whose fetters on the minds and hearts of the lower orders are now hugged, shall be broken; they will be worthy of a higher privilege than to write by another's hand their ignorance upon a ballot and cast it to be another link in the chain of all. And when that day shall come the ballot will be found to be the recognition of an elemental force more needed by Parliament than Parliament by it.