I

At the opening of the seventh decade of the century—ten years of such moment for our western world—the relations of the European states with one another had fallen into chaos. The perilous distractions of 1859-62 were the prelude to conflicts that after strange and mighty events at Sadowa, Venice, Rome, Sedan, Versailles, came to their close in 1871. The first breach in the ramparts of European order set up by the kings after Waterloo, was the independence of Greece in 1829. Then followed the transformation of the power of the Turk over Roumanians and Serbs from despotism to suzerainty. In 1830 Paris overthrew monarchy by divine right; Belgium cut herself asunder from the supremacy of the Dutch; then Italians and Poles strove hard but in vain to shake off the yoke of Austria and of Russia. In 1848 revolts of race against alien dominion broke out afresh in Italy and Hungary. The rise of the French empire, bringing with it the principle or idiosyncrasy of its new ruler, carried [pg 003] this movement of race into its full ascendant. Treaties were confronted by the doctrine of Nationality. What called itself Order quaked before something that for lack of a better name was called the Revolution. Reason of State was eclipsed by the Rights of Peoples. Such was the spirit of the new time.

The end of the Crimean war and the peace of Paris brought a temporary and superficial repose. The French ruler, by strange irony at once the sabre of Revolution and the trumpet of Order, made a beginning in urging the constitution of a Roumanian nationality, by uniting the two Danubian principalities in a single quasi-independent state. This was obviously a further step towards that partition of Turkey which the Crimean war had been waged to prevent. Austria for reasons of her own objected, and England, still in her Turcophil humour, went with Austria against France for keeping the two provinces, although in fiscal and military union, politically divided. According to the fashion of that time—called a comedy by some, a homage to the democratic evangel by others—a popular vote was taken. Its result was ingeniously falsified by the sultan (whose ability to speak French was one of the odd reasons why Lord Palmerston was sanguine about Turkish civilisation); western diplomacy insisted that the question of union should be put afresh. Mr. Gladstone, not then in office, wrote to Lord Aberdeen (Sept. 10, 1857):—

In 1858 (May 4) he urged the Derby government to support the declared wish of the people of Wallachia and Moldavia, and to fulfil the pledges made at Paris in 1856. “Surely the best resistance to be offered to Russia,” he said, “is by the strength and freedom of those countries that will [pg 004] have to resist her. You want to place a living barrier between Russia and Turkey. There is no barrier like the breast of freemen.” The union of the Principalities would raise up antagonists to the ambitions of Russia more powerful than any that could be bought with money. The motion was supported by Lord John Russell and Lord Robert Cecil, but Disraeli and Palmerston joined in opposing it, and it was rejected by a large majority. Mr. Gladstone wrote in his diary: “May 4.—H. of C.—Made my motion on the Principalities. Lost by 292:114; and with it goes another broken promise to a people.” So soon did the illusions and deceptions of the Crimean war creep forth.

In no long time (1858) Roumania was created into a virtually independent state. Meanwhile, much against Napoleon's wish and policy, these proceedings chilled the alliance between France and England. Other powers grew more and more uneasy, turning restlessly from side to side, like sick men on their beds. The object of Russia ever since the peace had been, first to break down the intimacy between England and France, by flattering the ambition and enthusiasm of the French Emperor; next to wreak her vengeance on Austria for offences during the Crimean war, still pronounced unpardonable. Austria, in turn, was far too slow for a moving age; she entrenched herself behind forms with too little heed to substance; and neighbours mistook her dulness for dishonesty. For the diplomatic air was thick and dark with suspicion. The rivalry of France and Austria in Italy was the oldest of European stories, and for that matter the Lombardo-Venetian province was a possession of material value to Austria, for while only containing one-eighth of her population, it contributed one-fourth of her revenue.

The central figure upon the European stage throughout the time on which we are now about to enter was the ruler of France. The Crimean war appeared to have strengthened his dynasty at home, while faith in the depth of his political designs and in the grandeur of his military power had secured him predominance abroad. Europe hung upon his words; a sentence to an ambassador at a public audience on [pg 005] new year's day, a paragraph in a speech at the opening of his parliament of puppets, a pamphlet supposed to be inspired, was enough to shake Vienna, Turin, London, the Vatican, with emotions pitched in every key. Yet the mind of this imposing and mysterious potentate was the shadowy home of vagrant ideals and fugitive chimeras. It was said by one who knew him well, Scratch the emperor and you will find the political refugee. You will find, that is to say, the man of fluctuating hope without firm calculation of fact, the man of half-shaped end with no sure eye to means. The sphinx in our modern politics is usually something of a charlatan, and in time the spite of fortune brought this mock Napoleon into fatal conflict with the supple, positive, practical genius of Italy in the person of one of the hardiest representatives of this genius that Italy ever had; just as ten years later the same nemesis brought him into collision with the stern, rough genius of the north in the person of Count Bismarck. Meanwhile the sovereigns of central and northern Europe had interviews at Stuttgart, at Teplitz, at Warsaw. It was at Warsaw that the rulers of Austria and Prussia met the Czar at the end of 1860,—Poland quivering as she saw the three crowned pirates choose the capital city of their victim for a rendezvous. Russia declined to join what would have been a coalition against France, and the pope described the conference of Warsaw as three sovereigns assembling to hear one of them communicate to the other two the orders of the Emperor of the French. The French empire was at its zenith. Thiers said that the greatest compensation to a Frenchman for being nothing in his own country, was the sight of that country filling its right place in the world.

The reader will remember that at Turin on his way home from the Ionian Islands in the spring of 1859, Mr. Gladstone saw the statesman who was destined to make Italy. Sir James Hudson, our ambassador at the court of Piedmont, had sounded Cavour as to his disposition to receive the returning traveller. Cavour replied, “I hope you will do all you can to bring such a proceeding about. I set the highest value on the visit of a statesman so distinguished and such a friend of Italy as Mr. Gladstone.” In conveying this [pg 006] message to Mr. Gladstone (Feb. 7, 1859), Hudson adds, “I can only say I think your counsels may be very useful to this government, and that I look to your coming here as a means possibly of composing differences, which may, if not handled by some such calm unprejudiced statesman as yourself, lead to very serious disturbances in the European body politic.” Mr. Gladstone dined at Cavour's table at the foreign office, where, among other things, he had the satisfaction of hearing his host speak of Hudson as quel uomo italianissimo. Ministers, the president of the chamber, and other distinguished persons were present, and Cavour was well pleased to have the chance of freely opening his position and policy to “one of the sincerest and most important friends that Italy had.”2

Among Cavour's difficulties at this most critical moment was the attitude of England. The government of Lord Derby, true to the Austrian sympathies of his party, and the German sympathies of the court, accused Italy of endangering the peace of Europe. “No,” said Cavour, “it is the statesmen, the diplomatists, the writers of England, who are responsible for the troubled situation of Italy; for is it not they who have worked for years to kindle political passion in our peninsula, and is it not England that has encouraged Sardinia to oppose the propaganda of moral influences to the illegitimate predominance of Austria in Italy?” To Mr. Gladstone, who had seen the Austrian forces in Venetia and in Lombardy, he said, “You behold for yourself, that it is Austria who menaces us; here we are tranquil; the country is calm; we will do our duty; England is wrong in identifying peace with the continuance of Austrian domination.” Two or three days later the Piedmontese minister made one of those momentous visits to Paris that forced a will less steadfast than his own.

The French Emperor in his dealings with Cavour had entangled himself, in Mr. Gladstone's phrase, with “a stronger and better informed intellect than his own.” “Two men,” said Guizot, “at this moment divide the attention of Europe, the [pg 007] Emperor Napoleon and Count Cavour. The match has begun. I back Count Cavour.” The game was long and subtly played. It was difficult for the ruler who had risen to power by bloodstained usurpation and the perfidious ruin of a constitution, to keep in step with a statesman, the inspiring purpose of whose life was the deliverance of his country by the magic of freedom. Yet Napoleon was an organ of European revolution in a double sense. He proclaimed the doctrine of nationality, and paid decorous homage to the principle of appeal to the popular voice. In time England appeared upon the scene, and by his flexible management of the two western powers, England and France, Cavour executed the most striking political transformation in the history of contemporary Europe. It brought, however, as Mr. Gladstone speedily found, much trouble into the relations of the two western powers with one another.

The overthrow of the Derby government and the accession of the whigs exactly coincided in time with the struggle between Austria and the Franco-Sardinian allies on the bloody fields of Magenta and Solferino. A few days after Mr. Gladstone took office, the French and Austrian emperors and King Victor Emmanuel signed those preliminaries of Villafranca (July 11, 1859), which summarily ended an inconclusive war by the union of Lombardy to the Piedmontese kingdom, and the proposed erection of an Italian federation over which it was hoped that the pope might preside, and of which Venetia, still remaining Austrian, should be a member. The scheme was intrinsically futile, but it served its turn. The Emperor of the French was driven to peace by mixed motives. The carnage of Solferino appalled or unnerved him; he had revealed to his soldiers and to France that their ruler had none of the genius of a great commander; the clerical party at home fiercely assailed the prolongation of a war that must put the pope in peril; the case of Poland, the case of Hungary, might almost any day be kindled into general conflagration by the freshly lighted torch of Nationality; above all, Germany might stride forward to the Rhine to avenge the repulse of Austria on the Po and the Mincio.3

Whatever the motive, Villafranca was a rude check to Italian aspirations. Cavour in poignant rage peremptorily quitted office, rather than share responsibility for this abortive end of all the astute and deep-laid combinations for ten years past, that had brought the hated Austrian from the triumph of Novara down to the defeat of Solferino. Before many months he once more grasped the helm. In the interval the movement went forward as if all his political tact, his prudence, his suppleness, his patience, and his daring, had passed into the whole population of central Italy. For eight months after Villafranca, it seemed as if the deep and politic temper that built up the old Roman Commonwealth, were again alive in Bologna, Parma, Modena, Florence. When we think of the pitfalls that lay on every side, how easily France might have been irritated or estranged, what unseasonable questions might not unnaturally have been forced forward, what mischief the voice and spirit of the demagogue might have stirred up, there can surely be no more wonderful case in history of strong and sagacious leaders, Cavour, Farini, Ricasoli, the Piedmontese king, guiding a people through the ferments of revolt, with discipline, energy, legality, order, self-control, to the achievement of a constructive revolution. Without the sword of France the work could not have been begun; but it was the people and statesmen of northern and central Italy who in these eight months made the consummation possible. And England, too, had no inconsiderable share; for it was she who secured the principle of non-intervention by foreign powers in Italian affairs; it was she who strongly favoured the annexation of central Italy to the new kingdom in the north. Here it was that England directly and unconsciously opened the way to a certain proceeding that when it came to pass she passionately resented. In the first three weeks of March (1860) Victor Emmanuel legalised in due form the annexation of the four central states to Piedmont and Lombardy, and in the latter half of April he made his entry into Florence. Cavour attended him, and strange as it sounds, he now for the first time in his life beheld the famed city,—centre of undying beauty and so many glories in the [pg 009] history of his country and the genius of mankind. In one spot at least his musings might well have been profound—the tomb of Machiavelli, the champion of principles three centuries before, to guide that armed reformer, part fox part lion, who should one day come to raise up an Italy one and independent. The Florentine secretary's orb never quite sets, and it was now rising to a lurid ascendant in the politics of Europe for a long generation to come, lighting up the unblest gospel that whatever policy may demand justice will allow.4

On March 24 Cavour paid Napoleon a bitter price for his assent to annexation, by acquiescing in the cession to France of Savoy and Nice, provinces that were, one of them the cradle of the royal race, the other the birthplace of Garibaldi, the hero of the people. In this transaction the theory of the plébiscite, or direct popular vote upon a given question, for the first time found a place among the clauses of a diplomatic act. The plébiscite, though stigmatised as a hypocritical farce, and often no better than a formal homage paid by violence or intrigue to public right, was a derivative from the doctrines of nationality and the sovereignty of the people then ruling in Europe. The issue of the operation in Savoy and Nice was what had been anticipated. Italy bore the stroke with wise fortitude, but England when she saw the bargain closed for which she had herself prepared the way, took fierce umbrage at the aggrandisement of France, and heavy clouds floated into the European sky. As we have seen, the first act of the extraordinary drama closed at Villafranca. The curtain fell next at Florence upon the fusion of central with upper Italy. Piedmont, a secondary state, had now grown to be a kingdom with eleven or twelve millions of inhabitants. Greater things were yet to follow. Ten millions still remained in the south under the yoke of Bourbons and the Vatican. The third act, most romantic, most picturesque of all, an incomparable union of heroism with policy at double play with all the shifts of circumstance, opened a few weeks later.

The great unsolved problem was the pope. The French ambassador at the Vatican in those days chanced to have had diplomatic experience in Turkey. He wrote to his government in Paris that the pope and his cardinals reminded him of nothing so much as the sultan and his ulemas—the same vacillation, the same shifty helplessness, the same stubborn impenetrability. The Cross seemed in truth as grave a danger in one quarter of Europe as was the Crescent in another, and the pope was now to undergo the same course of territorial partition as had befallen the head of a rival faith. For ten years the priests had been maintained in their evilly abused authority by twenty thousand French bayonets—the bayonets of the empire that the cardinals with undisguised ingratitude distrusted and hated.5 The Emperor was eager to withdraw his force, if only he were sure that no catastrophe would result to outrage the catholic world and bring down his own throne.

Unluckily for this design, Garibaldi interposed. One night in May (1860), soon after the annexation to Piedmont of the four central states, the hero whom an admirer described as “a summary of the lives of Plutarch,” sailed forth from Genoa for the deliverance of the Sicilian insurgents. In the eyes of Garibaldi and his Thousand, Sicily and Naples marked the path that led to Rome. The share of Cavour as accomplice in the adventure is still obscure. Whether he even really desired the acquisition of the Neapolitan kingdom, or would have preferred, as indeed he attempted, a federation between a northern kingdom and a southern, is not established. How far he had made certain of the abstention of Louis Napoleon, how far he had realised the weakness of Austria, we do not authentically know. He was at least alive to all the risks to which Garibaldi's enterprise must instantly expose him in every quarter of the horizon—from Austria, deeming her hold upon Venetia at stake; from the French Emperor, with hostile clericals in France to face; from the whole army of catholics all over the world; and [pg 011] not least from triumphant Mazzinians, his personal foes, in whose inspirations he had no faith, whose success might easily roll him and his policy into mire and ruin. Now as always with consummate suppleness he confronted the necessities of a situation that he had not sought, and assuredly had neither invented nor hurried. The politician, he used to tell his friends, must above all things have the tact of the Possible. Well did Manzoni say of him, “Cavour has all the prudence and all the imprudence of the true statesman.” Stained and turbid are the whirlpools of revolution. Yet the case of Italy was overwhelming. Sir James Hudson wrote to Mr. Gladstone from Turin (April 3, 1859)—“Piedmont cannot separate the question of national independence from the accidental existence of constitutional liberty (in Piedmont) if she would. Misgovernment in central Italy, heavy taxation and dearth in Lombardy, misgovernment in Modena, vacillation in Tuscany, cruelty in Naples, constitute the famous grido di dolore. The congress of Paris wedded Piedmont to the redress of grievances.”

In August (1860) Garibaldi crossed from Sicily to the mainland and speedily made his triumphant entry into Naples. The young king Francis withdrew before him at the head of a small force of faithful adherents to Capua, afterwards to Gaeta. At the Volturno the Garibaldians, meeting a vigorous resistance, drove back a force of the royal troops enormously superior in numbers. On the height of this agitated tide, and just in time to forestall a fatal movement of Garibaldi upon Rome, the Sardinian army had entered the territories of the pope (September 11).

II

In the series of transactions that I have sketched, the sympathies of Mr. Gladstone never wavered. From the appearance of his Neapolitan letters in 1851, he lost no opportunity of calling attention to Italian affairs. In 1854 he brought before Lord Clarendon the miserable condition of Poerio, Settembrini, and the rest. He took great personal trouble in helping to raise and invest a fund for the Settembrini [pg 012] family, and elaborate accounts in his own handwriting remain. In 1855 he wrote to Lord John Russell, then starting for Vienna, as to a rumour of the adhesion of Naples to the alliance of the western powers: “In any case I can conceive it possible that the Vienna conferences may touch upon Italian questions; and I sincerely rely upon your humanity as well as your love of freedom, indeed the latter is but little in question, to plead for the prisoners in the kingdom of the two Sicilies detained for political offences, real or pretended. I do not ask you to leave any greater duty undone, but to bear in mind the singular claims on your commiseration of these most unhappy persons, if occasion offers.”

As we have already seen, it was long before he advanced to the view of the thoroughgoing school. Like nearly all his countrymen, he was at first a reformer, not a revolutionary. To the Marquis Dragonetti, Mr. Gladstone wrote from Broadstairs in 1854:—

So far removed at this date was Mr. Gladstone from the glorified democracy of the Mazzinian propaganda. He told Cobden that when he returned from Corfu in the spring of 1859, he found in England not only a government with strong Austrian leanings, but to his great disappointment not even the House of Commons so alive as he could have wished upon the Italian question. “It was in my opinion the authority and zeal of Lord Palmerston and Lord John Russell in this question, that kindled the country.”

While Europe was anxiously watching the prospects of war between France and Austria, Mr. Gladstone spoke in debate (April 18, 1859) upon the situation, to express his firm conviction that no plan of peace could be durable which failed to effect some mitigation of the sore evils afflicting the Italian peninsula. The course of events after the peace speedily ripened both his opinions and the sentiment of the country, and he was as angry as his neighbours at the unexpected preliminaries of Villafranca. “I little thought,” he wrote to Poerio (July 15, 1859), “to have lived to see the day when the conclusion of a peace should in my own mind cause disgust rather than impart relief. But that day has come. I appreciate all the difficulties of the position both of the King of Sardinia and of Count Cavour. It is hardly possible for me to pass a judgment upon his resignation as a political step: but I think few will doubt that the moral character of the act is high. The duties of England in respect to the Italian question are limited by her powers, and these are greatly [pg 014] confined. But her sentiments cannot change, because they are founded upon a regard to the deepest among those principles which regulate the intercourse of men and their formation into political societies.” By the end of the year, he softened his judgment of the proceedings of the French Emperor.

The heavy load of his other concerns did not absolve him in his conscience from duty to the Italian cause:—

In a cabinet memorandum (Jan. 3, 1860), he declared himself bound in candour to admit that the Emperor had shown, “though partial and inconsistent, indications of a genuine feeling for the Italians—and far beyond this he has committed himself very considerably to the Italian cause in the face of the world. When in reply to all that, we fling in his face the truce of Villafranca, he may reply—and the answer is not without force—that he stood single-handed in a cause when any moment Europe might have stood combined against him. We gave him verbal sympathy and encouragement, or at least criticism; no one else gave him anything at all. No doubt he showed then that he had undertaken a work to which his powers were unequal; but I do not think that, when fairly judged, he can be said to have given proof by that measure of insincerity or indifference.” This was no more than justice, it is even less; and both Italians and Englishmen have perhaps been too ready to forget that the freedom of Italy would have remained an empty hope if Napoleon iii. had not unsheathed his sword.

After discussing details, Mr. Gladstone laid down in his memorandum a general maxim for the times, that “the [pg 015] alliance with France is the true basis of peace in Europe, for England and France never will unite in any European purpose which is radically unjust.” He put the same view in a letter to Lacaita a few months later (Sept. 16): “A close alliance between England and France cannot be used for mischief, and cannot provoke any dangerous counter combination; but a close alliance between England and other powers would provoke a dangerous counter combination immediately, besides that it could not in itself be trusted. My own leaning, therefore, is not indeed to place reliance on the French Emperor, but to interpret him candidly, and in Italian matters especially to recollect the great difficulties in which he is placed, (1) because, whether by his own fault or not, he cannot reckon upon strong support from England when he takes a right course. (2) Because he has his own ultramontane party in France to deal with, whom, especially if not well supported abroad, he cannot afford to defy.”

As everybody soon saw, it was the relation of Louis Napoleon to the French ultramontanes that constituted the tremendous hazard of the Piedmontese invasion of the territories of the pope. This critical proceeding committed Cavour to a startling change, and henceforth he was constrained to advance to Italian unity. A storm of extreme violence broke upon him. Gortchakoff said that if geography had permitted, the Czar would betake himself to arms in defence of the Bourbon king. Prussia talked of reviving the holy alliance in defence of the law of nations against the overweening ambition of Piedmont. The French ambassador was recalled from Turin. Still no active intervention followed.

One great power alone stood firm, and Lord John Russell wrote one of the most famous despatches in the history of our diplomacy (October 27, 1860). The governments of the pope and the king of the Two Sicilies, he said, provided so ill for the welfare of their people, that their subjects looked to their overthrow as a necessary preliminary to any improvement. Her Majesty's government were bound to admit that the Italians themselves are the best judges of their own [pg 016] interests. Vattel, that eminent jurist, had well said that when a people for good reasons take up arms against an oppressor, it is but an act of justice and generosity to assist brave men in the defence of their liberties. Did the people of Naples and the Roman States take up arms against their government for good reasons? Upon this grave matter, her Majesty's government held that the people in question are themselves the best judges of their own affairs. Her Majesty's government did not feel justified in declaring that the people of Southern Italy had not good reasons for throwing off their allegiance to their former governments. Her Majesty's government, therefore, could not pretend to blame the King of Sardinia for assisting them. So downright was the language of Lord John. We cannot wonder that such words as these spread in Italy like flame, that people copied the translation from each other, weeping over it for joy and gratitude in their homes, and that it was hailed as worth more than a force of a hundred thousand men.6

The sensation elsewhere was no less profound, though very different. The three potentates at Warsaw viewed the despatch with an emotion that was diplomatically called regret, but more resembled horror. The Prince Regent of Prussia, afterwards the Emperor William, told Prince Albert that it was a tough morsel, a disruption of the law of nations and of the holy ties that bind peoples to their sovereigns.7 Many in England were equally shocked. Even Sir James Graham, for instance, said that he would never have believed that such a document could have passed through a British cabinet or received the approval of a British sovereign; India, Ireland, Canada would await the application of the fatal doctrine that it contained; it was a great public wrong, a grave error; and even Garibaldi and Mazzini would come out of the Italian affair with cleaner hands. Yet to-day we may ask ourselves, was it not a little idle to talk of the holy ties that bind nations to their sovereigns, in respect of a system under which in Naples thousands of the most respectable of the subjects of the king were in prison or in exile; in the papal states ordinary justice was administered by rough-handed [pg 017] German soldiers, and young offenders shot by court-martial at the drumhead; and in the Lombardo-Venetian provinces press offences were judged by martial law, with chains, shooting, and flogging for punishment.8 Whatever may be thought of Lord John and his doctrine, only those who hold to the converse doctrine, that subjects may never rise against a king, nor ever under any circumstances seek succour from foreign power, will deny that the cruelties of Naples and the iniquities connected with the temporal authority of the clergy in the states of the church, constituted an irrefragable case for revolt.

Within a few weeks after the troops of Victor Emmanuel had crossed the frontier (Sept. 1860), the papal forces had been routed, and a popular vote in the Neapolitan kingdom supported annexation to Piedmont. The papal states, with the exception of the patrimony of St. Peter in the immediate neighbourhood of Rome itself, fell into the hands of the king. Victor Emmanuel and Garibaldi rode into Naples side by side (Nov. 7). The Bourbon flag after a long stand was at last lowered at the stronghold of Gaeta (Feb. 14, 1861); the young Bourbon king became an exile for the rest of his life; and on February 18 the first parliament of united Italy assembled at Turin—Venice and Rome for a short season still outside. A few months before, Mr. Gladstone had written a long letter to d'Azeglio. It was an earnest exposition of the economic and political ideals that seemed to shine in the firmament above a nation now emerging from the tomb. The letter was to be shown to Cavour. “Tell that good friend of ours,” he replied, “that our trade laws are the most liberal of the continent; that for ten years we have been practising the maxims that he exhorts us to adopt; tell him that he preaches to the converted.”9 Then one of those disasters happened that seem to shake the planetary nations out of their pre-appointed orbits. Cavour died.10

I

As we survey the panorama of a great man's life, conspicuous peaks of time and act stand out to fix the eye, and in our statesman's long career the budget of 1860 with its spurs of appendant circumstance, is one of these commanding points. In the letter to Acton already quoted (p. 1), Mr. Gladstone says:—

The financial arrangements of 1859 were avowedly provisional and temporary, and need not detain us. The only feature was a rise in the income tax from fivepence to ninepence—its highest figure so far in a time of peace. “My budget,” he wrote to Mrs. Gladstone (July 16), “is just through the cabinet, very kindly and well received, no one making objection but Lewis, who preached low doctrine. It confirms me in the belief I have long had, that he was fitter for most other offices than for that I now hold.” “July 21 or rather 22, one A.M.—Just come back from a long night and stiff contention at the House of Commons.... It has been rather nice and close fighting. Disraeli made a popular motion to trip me up, but had to withdraw it, at any rate for the time. This I can say, it was not so that I used him. I am afraid that the truce between us is over, and that we shall have to pitch in as before.”

The only important speech was one on Italy (August 8),13 of which Disraeli said that though they were always charmed by the speaker's eloquence, this was a burst of even unusual brilliance, and it gave pleasure in all quarters. “Spoke for an oretta [short hour],” says the orator, “on Italian affairs; my best offhand speech.” “The fish dinner,” Mr. Gladstone writes, “went off very well, and I think my proposing Lord Palmerston's health (without speech) was decidedly approved. I have had a warm message from Lord Lansdowne about my speech; and Lord P. told me that on Tuesday night as he went upstairs on getting home he heard Lady P. spouting as she read by candle-light; it turned out to be the same effusion.”

Another incident briefly related to Mrs. Gladstone brings us on to more serious ground: “Hawarden, Sept. 12.—Cobden [pg 020] came early. Nothing could be better than the luncheon, but I am afraid the dinner will be rather strong with local clergy. I have had a walk and long talk with Cobden who, I think, pleases and is pleased.” This was the garden walk of which we have just heard, where Cobden, the ardent hopeful sower, scattered the good seed into rich ground. The idea of a commercial treaty with France was in the air. Bright had opened it, Chevalier had followed it up, Persigny agreed, Cobden made an opportunity, Gladstone seized it. Cobden's first suggestion had been that as he was about to spend a part of the winter in Paris, he might perhaps be of use to Mr. Gladstone in the way of inquiry. Conversation expanded this into something more definite and more energetic. Why should he not, with the informal sanction of the British government, put himself into communication with the Emperor and his ministers, and work out with them the scheme of a treaty that should at once open the way to a great fiscal reform in both countries, and in both countries produce a solid and sterling pacification of feeling? Cobden saw Palmerston and tried to see Lord John Russell, and though he hardly received encouragement, at least he was not forbidden to proceed upon his volunteered mission.14 “Gladstone,” wrote Cobden to Mr. Bright, “is really almost the only cabinet minister of five years' standing who is not afraid to let his heart guide his head a little at times.” The Emperor had played with the idea of a more open trade for five or six years, and Cobden, with his union of economic, moral, and social elements, and his incomparable gifts of argumentative persuasion, was the very man to strike Napoleon's impressionable mind. Although, having alienated the clericals by his Italian policy, the ruler of France might well have hesitated before proceeding to alienate the protectionists also, he became a convert and did not shrink.

At the end of 1859 the question of the treaty was brought into the cabinet, and there met with no general opposition, though some objection was taken by Lewis and Wood, based on the ground that they ought not to commit themselves by treaty engagements to a sacrifice of revenue, until they had before them the income and the charges of the year. Writing to his wife about some invitation to a country house, Mr. Gladstone says (Jan. 11, 1860):—

Of course in his zeal for the treaty and its connection with tariff reform, Mr. Gladstone believed that the operation would open a great volume of trade and largely enrich the country. But in one sense this was the least of it:—

II

Out of the commercial treaty grew the whole of the great financial scheme of 1860. By his first budget Mr. Gladstone had marked out this year for a notable epoch in finance. Happily it found him at the exchequer. The expiry of certain annuities payable to the public creditor removed a charge of some two millions, and Mr. Gladstone was vehemently resolved that this amount should not “pass into the great gulf of expenditure there to be swallowed up.” If the year, in such circumstances, is to pass, he said to Cobden, “without anything done for trade and the masses, it will be a great discredit and a great calamity.” The alterations of duty required for the French treaty were made possible by the lapse of the annuities, and laid the foundation of a plan that averted the discredit and calamity of doing nothing for trade, and nothing for the masses of the population. France engaged to reduce duties and remove prohibitions on a long list of articles of British production and export, iron the most important,—“the daily bread of all industries,” as Cobden called it. England engaged immediately to abolish all duties upon all manufactured articles at her ports, and to reduce the duties on wine and brandy. The English reductions and abolitions extended beyond France to the commodities of all countries alike. Mr. Gladstone called 1860 the last of the cardinal and organic years of emancipatory fiscal legislation; it ended [pg 024] a series of which the four earlier terms had been reached in 1842, in 1845, in 1846, and 1853. With the French treaty, he used to say, the movement in favour of free trade reached its zenith.

The financial fabric that rose from the treaty was one of the boldest of all his achievements, and the reader who seeks to take the measure of Mr. Gladstone as financier, in comparison with any of his contemporaries in the western world, will find in this fabric ample material.16 Various circumstances had led to an immense increase in national expenditure. The structure of warships was revolutionised by the use of iron in place of wood. It was a remarkable era in artillery, and guns were urgently demanded of new type. In the far East a quarrel had broken out with the Chinese. The threats of French officers after the plot of Orsini had bred a sense of insecurity in our own borders. Thus more money than ever was required; more than ever economy was both unpopular and difficult. The annual estimates stood at seventy millions; when Mr. Gladstone framed his famous budget seven years before, that charge stood at fifty-two millions. If the sole object of a chancellor of the exchequer be to balance his account, Mr. Gladstone might have contented himself with keeping the income-tax and duties on tea and sugar as they were, meeting the remissions needed by the French treaty out of the sum released by the expiry of the long annuities. Or he might have reduced tea and sugar to a peace rate, and raised the income-tax from ninepence to a shilling. Instead of taking this easy course, Mr. Gladstone after having relinquished upwards of a million for the sake of the French treaty, now further relinquished nearly a million more for the sake of releasing 371 articles from duties of customs, and a third million in order to abolish the vexatious excise duty upon the manufacture of paper. Nearly one million of all this loss he recouped by the imposition of certain small charges and minor [pg 025] taxes, and by one or two ingenious expedients of collection and account, and the other two millions he made good out of the lapsed annuities. Tea and sugar he left as they were, and the income-tax he raised from ninepence to tenpence. Severe economists, not quite unjustly, called these small charges a blot on his escutcheon. Time soon wiped it off, for in fact they were a failure.

The removal of the excise duty upon paper proved to be the chief stumbling-block, and ultimately it raised more excitement than any other portion of the scheme. The fiscal project became by and by associated with a constitutional struggle between Lords and Commons. In the Commons the majority in favour of abolishing the duty sank from fifty-three to nine; troubles with China caused a demand for new expenditure; the yield from the paper duty was wanted; and the Lords finding in all this a plausible starting-point for a stroke of party business, or for the assertion of the principle that to reject a repealing money bill was not the same thing as to meddle with a bill putting on a tax, threw it out. Then when the Lords had rejected the bill, many who had been entirely cool about taking off the 'taxes upon knowledge'—for this unfavourable name was given to the paper duty by its foes—rose to exasperation at the thought of the peers meddling with votes of money. All this we shall see as we proceed.

This was the broad outline of an operation that completed the great process of reducing articles liable to customs duties from 1052, as they stood in 1842 when Peel opened the attack upon them; from 466 as Mr. Gladstone found them in 1853; and from 419 as he found them now, down to 48, at which he now left them.17 Simplification had little further to go. “Why did you not wait,” he was asked, “till the surplus came, which notwithstanding all drawbacks you got in [pg 026] 1863, and then operate in a quiet way, without disturbing anybody?”18 His answer was that the surplus would not have come at all, because it was created by his legislation. “The principle adopted,” he said, “was this. We are now (1860) on a high table-land of expenditure. This being so, it is not as if we were merely meeting an occasional and momentary charge. We must consider how best to keep ourselves going during a period of high charge. In order to do that, we will aggravate a momentary deficiency that we may thereby make a great and permanent addition to productive power.” This was his ceaseless refrain—the steadfast pursuit of the durable enlargement of productive power as the commanding aim of high finance.

III

At the beginning of the year the public expectation was fixed upon Lord John Russell as the protagonist in the approaching battle of parliamentary reform, and the eager partizans at the Carlton Club were confident that on reform they would pull down the ministry. The partizans of another sort assure us that “the whole character of the session was changed by Mr. Gladstone's invincible resolution to come forward in spite of his friends, and in defiance of his foes, for his own aristeia or innings.” The explanation is not good-natured, and we know that it is not true; but what is true is that when February opened, the interest of the country had become centred at its highest pitch in the budget and the commercial treaty. As the day for lifting the veil was close at hand, Mr. Gladstone fell ill, and here again political benevolence surmised that his disorder was diplomatic. An entry or two from Phillimore's journal will bring him before us as he was:—

Mr. Gladstone's own entries are these:—

Of the speech in which the budget was presented everybody agreed that it was one of the most extraordinary triumphs ever witnessed in the House of Commons. The [pg 028] casual delay of a week had raised expectation still higher; hints dropped by friends in the secret had added to the general excitement; and as was truly said by contemporaries, suspense that would have been fatal to mediocrity actually served Mr. Gladstone. Even the censorious critics of the leading journal found in the largeness and variety of the scheme its greatest recommendation, as suggesting an accord between the occasion, the man, and the measure, so marvellous that it would be a waste of all three not to accept them. Among other hearers was Lord Brougham, who for the first time since he had quitted the scene of his triumphs a generation before, came to the House of Commons, and for four hours listened intently to the orator who had now acquired the supremacy that was once his own. “The speech,” said Bulwer, “will remain among the monuments of English eloquence as long as the language lasts.” Napoleon begged Lord Cowley to convey his thanks to Mr. Gladstone for the copy of his budget speech he had sent him, which he said he would preserve “as a precious souvenir of a man who has my thorough esteem, and whose eloquence is of a lofty character commensurate with the grandeur of his views.” Prince Albert wrote to Stockmar (March 17), “Gladstone is now the real leader of the House, and works with an energy and vigour almost incredible.”20

Almost every section of the trading and political community looked with favour upon the budget as a whole, though it was true that each section touched by it found fault with its own part. Mr. Gladstone said that they were without exception free traders, but not free traders without exception. The magnitude and comprehensiveness of the enterprise seized the imagination of the country. At the same time it multiplied sullen or uneasy interests. The scheme was no sooner launched, than the chancellor of the exchequer was overwhelmed by deputations. Within a couple of days he was besieged by delegates from the paper makers; distillers came down upon him; merchants interested in the bonding system, wholesale stationers, linen manufacturers, maltsters, licensed victuallers, all in turn [pg 029] thronged his ante-room. He was now, says Greville (Feb. 15), “the great man of the day!” The reduction of duties on currants created lively excitement in Greece, and Mr. Gladstone was told that if he were to appear there he could divide honours with Bacchus and Triptolemus, the latest benefactors of that neighbourhood.

Political onlookers with whom the wish was not alien to their thought, soon perceived that in spite of admiration for splendid eloquence and incomparable dexterity, it would not be all sunshine and plain sailing. At a very early moment the great editor of the Times went about saying that Gladstone would find it hard work to get his budget through; if Peel with a majority of ninety needed it all to carry his budget, what would happen to a government that could but command a majority of nine?21 Both the commercial treaty and the finance speedily proved to have many enemies. Before the end of March Phillimore met a parliamentary friend who like everybody else talked of Gladstone, and confirmed the apprehension that the whigs obeyed and trembled and were frightened to death. “We don't know where he is leading us,” said Hayter, who had been whipper-in. On the last day of the month Phillimore enters: “March 30.—Gladstone has taken his name off the Carlton, which I regret. It is a marked and significant act of entire separation from the whole party and will strengthen Disraeli's hands. The whigs hate Gladstone. The moderate conservatives and the radicals incline to him. The old tories hate him.” For reasons not easy to trace, a general atmosphere of doubt and unpopularity seemed suddenly to surround his name.

The fortunes of the budget have been succinctly described by its author:—

When Lord John had asked the cabinet to stop the budget in order to fix a day for his second reading, Mr. Gladstone enters in an autobiographic memorandum of his latest years23:—

On May 5 the diary reports: “Cabinet. Lord Palmerston spoke 3/4 hour against Paper Duties bill! I had to reply. Cabinet against him, except a few, Wood and Cardwell in particular. Three wild schemes of foreign alliance are afloat! Our old men (2) are unhappily our youngest.” Palmerston not only spoke against the bill, as he had a right in cabinet to do, but actually wrote to the Queen that he was bound in duty to say that if the Lords threw out the bill—the bill of his own cabinet—“they would perform a good public service.”24

Phillimore's notes show that the intense strain was telling on his hero's physical condition, though it only worked his resolution to a more undaunted pitch:—

IV

The rejection of the bill affecting the paper duty by the Lords was followed by proceedings set out by Mr. Gladstone in one of his political memoranda, dated May 26, 1860:—

As we know, even the fighting party in the cabinet was forced to content itself for the moment with three protesting resolutions. Lord Palmerston and his chancellor of the exchequer both spoke in parliament. “The tone of the two remonstrances,” says Mr. Gladstone euphemistically, “could not be in exact accord; but by careful steering on my part, and I presume on his, all occasion of scandal was avoided.” Not altogether, perhaps. Phillimore says:—

The struggle still went on:—

The occasion of the notable reception was the moving of his resolutions reducing the customs duty on imported paper to the level of the excise duty. This proceeding was made necessary by the treaty, and was taken to be, as Mr. Gladstone intended that it should be, a clear indication of further determination to abolish customs duty and excise duty alike. The first resolution was carried by 33, and when he rose to move the second the cheering from the liberal benches kept him standing for four or five minutes—cheering intended to be heard the whole length of the corridor that led to another place.25

The great result, as Greville says in a sentence that always amused the chief person concerned, is “to give some life to half-dead, broken-down, and tempest-tossed Gladstone.” In this rather tame fashion the battle ended for the session, but the blaze in the bosom of the chancellor of the exchequer was inextinguishable, as the Lords in good time found out. Their rejection of the Paper Duties bill must have had no inconsiderable share in propelling him along the paths of liberalism. The same proceeding helped to make him more than ever the centre of popular hopes. He had taken the unpopular side in resisting the inquiry into the miscarriages of the Crimea, in pressing peace with Russia, in opposing the panic on papal aggression, on the bill for divorce, and on the bill against church rates; and he represented with fidelity the constituency that was least of all in England in accord with the prepossessions of democracy. Yet this made no difference when the time came to seek a leader. “There is not,” Mr. Bright said, in the course of this quarrel with the Lords, “a man who labours and sweats for his daily bread, there is not a woman living in a cottage who strives to make her home happy for husband and children, to whom the words of the chancellor of the exchequer have not brought hope, and to whom his measures, which have been defended with an eloquence few can equal and with a logic none can contest, have not administered consolation.”

At the end of the session Phillimore reports:—

V

In a contemporary memorandum (May 30, 1860) on the opinions of the cabinet at this date Mr. Gladstone sets out the principal trains of business with which he and his colleagues were called upon to deal. It is a lively picture of the vast and diverse interests of a minister disposed to take his cabinet duties seriously. It is, too, a curious chart of the currents and cross-currents of the time. Here are the seven heads as he sets them down:—

“In the many passages of argument and opinion,” Mr. Gladstone adds, “the only person from whom I have never to my recollection differed on a serious matter during this anxious twelvemonth is Milner Gibson.” The reader will find elsewhere the enumeration of the various parts in this complex dramatic piece.26 Some of the most Italian members of the cabinet were also the most combative in foreign policy, the most martial in respect [pg 037] of defence, the most stationary in finance. In the matter of reform, some who were liberal as to the franchise were conservative as to redistribution. In matters ecclesiastical, those who like Mr. Gladstone were most liberal elsewhere, were (with sympathy from Argyll) “most conservative and church-like.”

Before he had been a year and a half in office, Mr. Gladstone wrote to Graham (Nov. 27, '60): “We live in anti-reforming times. All improvements have to be urged in apologetic, almost in supplicatory tones. I sometimes reflect how much less liberal as to domestic policy in any true sense of the word, is this government than was Sir Robert Peel's; and how much the tone of ultra-toryism prevails among a large portion of the liberal party.” “I speak a literal truth,” he wrote to Cobden, “when I say that in these days it is more difficult to save a shilling than to spend a million.” “The men,” he said, “who ought to have been breasting and stemming the tide have become captains general of the alarmists,” and he deplored Cobden's refusal [pg 038] of office when the Palmerston government was formed. All this only provoked him to more relentless energy. Well might Prince Albert call it incredible.

VI

After the “gigantic innovation” perpetrated by the Lords, Mr. Gladstone read to the cabinet (June 30, 1860) an elaborate memorandum on the paper duty and the taxing powers of the two Houses. He dealt fully alike with the fiscal and the constitutional aspects of a situation from which he was “certain that nothing could extricate them with credit, except the united, determined, and even authoritative action of the government.” He wound up with a broad declaration that, to any who knew his tenacity of purpose when once roused, made it certain that he would never acquiesce in the pretensions of the other House. The fiscal consideration, he concluded, “is nothing compared with the vital importance of maintaining the exclusive rights of the House of Commons in matter of supply. There is hardly any conceivable interference of the Lords hereafter, except sending down a tax imposed by themselves, which would not be covered by this precedent. It may be said they are wise and will not do it. Assuming that they will be wise, yet I for one am not willing that the House of Commons should hold on sufferance in the nineteenth century what it won in the seventeenth and confirmed and enlarged in the eighteenth.”

The intervening months did not relax this valiant and patriotic resolution. He wrote down a short version of the story in the last year of his life:—

Of the “internal fighting” we have a glimpse in the diary:—

The abiding feature of constitutional interest in the budget of 1861 was this inclusion of the various financial proposals in a single bill, so that the Lords must either accept the whole of them, or try the impossible performance of rejecting the whole of them. This was the affirmation in practical shape of the resolution of the House of Commons in the previous year, that it possessed in its own hands the power to remit and impose taxes, and that the right to frame bills of supply in its own measure, manner, time, and matter, is a right to be kept inviolable. Until now the practice had been to make the different taxes the subject of as many different bills, thus placing it in the power of the Lords to reject a given tax bill without throwing the financial machinery wholly out of gear. By including all the taxes in a single finance bill the power of the Lords to override the other House was effectually arrested.

In language of that time, he had carried every stitch of free-trade canvas in the teeth of a tempest that might have made the boldest financial pilot shorten sail. Many even of his friends were sorry that he did not reduce the war duty on tea and sugar, instead of releasing paper from its duty of excise. Neither friends nor foes daunted him. He possessed his soul in patience until the hour struck, and then came forth in full panoply. Enthusiastic journalists with the gift [pg 041] of a poetic pen told their millions of readers how, after weeks of malign prophecy, that the great trickster in Downing Street would be proved to have beggared the exchequer, that years of gloom and insolvency awaited us, suddenly, the moment the magician chose to draw aside the veil, the darkness rolled away; he had fluttered out of sight the whole race of sombre Volscians; and where the gazers dreaded to see a gulf they beheld a golden monument of glorious finance; like the traveller in the Arabian fable who was pursued in the Valley of Shadows by unearthly imprecations, he never glanced to right or left until he could disperse the shadows by a single stroke. “He is,” says another onlooker, “in his ministerial capacity, probably the best abused and the best hated man in the House; nevertheless the House is honestly proud of him, and even the country party feels a glow of pride in exhibiting to the diplomatic gallery such a transcendent mouthpiece of a nation of shopkeepers. The audacious shrewdness of Lancashire married to the polished grace of Oxford is a felicitous union of the strength and culture of liberal and conservative England; and no party in the House, whatever may be its likings or antipathies, can sit under the spell of Mr. Gladstone's rounded and shining eloquence without a conviction that the man who can talk ‘shop’ like a tenth Muse is, after all, a true representative man of the market of the world.”

In describing the result of the repeal of the paper duty a little after this,28 he used glowing words. “Never was there a measure so conservative as that which called into vivid, energetic, permanent, and successful action the cheap press of this country.” It was also a common radical opinion of that hour that if the most numerous classes acquired the franchise as well as cheap newspapers, the reign of peace would thenceforth be unbroken. In a people of bold and martial temper such as are the people of our island, this proved to be a miscalculation. Meanwhile there is little doubt that Mr. Gladstone's share in thus fostering the growth of the cheap press was one of the secrets of his rapid rise in popularity.

I

All this time the battle for thrifty husbandry went on, and the bark of the watch-dog at the exchequer sounded a hoarse refrain. “We need not maunder in ante-chambers,” as Mr. Disraeli put it, “to discover differences in the cabinet, when we have a patriotic prime minister appealing to the spirit of the country; and when at the same time we find his chancellor of the exchequer, whose duty it is to supply the ways and means by which those exertions are to be supported, proposing votes with innuendo, and recommending expenditure in a whispered invective.”

Severer than any battle in parliament is a long struggle inside a cabinet. Opponents contend at closer quarters, the weapons are shorter, it is easier to make mischief. Mr. Gladstone was the least quarrelsome of the human race; he was no wrestler intent only on being a winner in Olympic games; nor was he one of those who need an adversary to bring out all their strength. But in a cause that he had at heart he was untiring, unfaltering, and indomitable. Parallel with his contention about budget and treaty in 1860 was persistent contention for economy. The financial crisis went on with the fortifications crisis. The battle was incessant. He had not been many months in office before [pg 043] those deep differences came prominently forward in temperament, tradition, views of national policy, that continued to make themselves felt between himself and Lord Palmerston so long as the government endured. Perhaps I should put it more widely, and say between himself and that vast body of excited opinion in the country, of which Lord Palmerston was the cheerful mouthpiece. The struggle soon began.

Sidney Herbert, then at the war office, after circulating a memorandum, wrote privately to Mr. Gladstone (Nov. 23, 1859), that he was convinced that a great calamity was impending in the shape of a war provoked by France. Officers who had visited that country told him that all thinking men in France were against war with England, all noisy men for it, the army for it, and above all, the government for it. Inspired pamphlets were scattered broadcast. Everything was determined except time and occasion. The general expectation was for next summer. French tradesmen at St. Malo were sending in their bills to the English, thinking war coming. “We have to do with a godless people who look on war as a game open to all without responsibility or sin; and there is a man at the head of them who combines the qualities of a gambler and a fatalist.”

Mr. Gladstone replied in two letters, one of them (Nov. 27) of the stamp usual from a chancellor of the exchequer criticising a swollen estimate, with controversial doubts, pungent interrogatories, caustic asides, hints for saving here and paring there. On the following day he fired what he called his second barrel, in the shape of a letter, which states with admirable force and fulness the sceptic's case against the scare. This time it was no ordinary exchequer wrestle. He combats the inference of an English from an Italian war, by the historic reminder that a struggle between France and Austria for supremacy or influence in Italy had been going on for four whole centuries, so that its renewal was nothing strange. If France, now unable to secure our co-operation, still thought the Italian danger grave enough to warrant single-handed intervention, how does that support the inference that she must certainly be ready to invade England next? He ridicules the conclusion that the invasion [pg 044] was at our doors, from such contested allegations as that the Châlons farmers refused the loan of horses from the government, because they would soon be wanted back again for the approaching war with England. What extraordinary farmers to refuse the loan of horses for their ploughing and seed time, because they might be reclaimed for purposes of war before winter! Then why could we not see a single copy of the incendiary and anti-English pamphlets, said to be disseminated broadcast among the troops? What was the value of all this contested and unsifted statement? Why, if he were bent on a rupture, did the Emperor not stir at the moment of the great Mutiny, when every available man we had was sent to India, and when he had what might have passed for a plausible excuse in the Orsini conspiracy, and in the deliberate and pointed refusal of parliament to deal with it? With emphasis, he insists that we have no adequate idea of the predisposing power which an immense series of measures of preparation for war on our own part, have in actually begetting war. They familiarise ideas which when familiar lose their horror, and they light an inward flame of excitement of which, when it is habitually fed, we lose the consciousness.

This application of cool and reasoned common sense to actual probabilities seldom avails against imaginations excited by random possibilities; and he made little way. Lord Palmerston advanced into the field, in high anxiety that the cabinet should promptly adopt Herbert's proposal.29 They soon came to a smart encounter, and Mr. Gladstone writes to the prime minister (Feb. 7, 1860): “There are, I fear, the most serious differences among us with respect to a loan for fortifications.... My mind is made up, and to propose any loan for fortifications would be, on my part, with the views I entertain, a betrayal of my public duty.” A vigorous correspondence between Mr. Gladstone and Herbert upon military charges followed, and the tension seemed likely to snap the cord.

If I may judge from the minutes of the members of the cabinet on the papers circulated, most of them stood [pg 045] with their chief, and not one of them, not even Milner Gibson nor Villiers, was ready to proceed onward from a sort of general leaning towards Mr. Gladstone's view to the further stage of making a strong stand-up fight for it. The controversy between him and his colleagues still raged at red heat over the whole ground of military estimates, the handling of the militia, and the construction of fortifications. He wrote memorandum upon memorandum with untiring energy, pressing the cabinet with the enormous rate in the increase of charge; with the slight grounds on which increase of charge was now ordinarily proposed and entertained; and, most of all, with the absence of all attempt to compensate for new and necessary expenditure by retrenchment in quarters where the scale of outlay had either always been, or had become unnecessary. He was too sound a master of the conditions of public business to pretend to take away from the ministers at the head of the great departments of expenditure their duty of devising plans of reduction, but he boldly urged the reconsideration of such large general items of charge as the military expenditure in the colonies, then standing at an annual burden of over two millions on the taxpayers of this country. He was keen from the lessons of experience, to expose the ever indestructible fallacy that mighty armaments make for peace.

Still the cabinet was not moved, and in Palmerston he found a will and purpose as tenacious as his own. “The interview with Lord Palmerston came off to-day,” he writes to the Duke of Argyll (June 6, 1860). “Nothing could be more kind and frank than his manner. The matter was first to warn me of the evils and hazards attending, for me, the operation of resigning. Secondly, to express his own strong sense of the obligation to persevere. Both of these I told him I could fully understand. He said he had had two great objects always before him in life—one the suppression of the slave trade, the other to put England in a state of defence. In short, it appears that he now sees, as he considers, the opportunity of attaining a long cherished object; and it is not unnatural that he should repel any [pg 046] proposal which should defraud him of a glory, in and by absolving him from a duty.... I am now sure that Lord Palmerston entertained this purpose when he formed the government; but had I been in the slightest degree aware of it, I should certainly, but very reluctantly, have abstained from joining it, and helped, as I could, from another bench its Italian purposes. Still, I am far indeed from regretting to have joined it, which is quite another matter.”

Now labouring hard in Paris month after month at the tariff, Cobden plied Mr. Gladstone with exhortations to challenge the alarmists on the facts; to compare the outlay by France for a dozen years past on docks, fortifications, arsenals, with the corresponding outlay by England; to show that our steam navy, building and afloat, to say nothing of our vast mercantile marine, was at least double the strength of France; and above all, to make his colleagues consider whether the French Emperor had not, as a matter of self-interest, made the friendship of England, from the first, the hinge of his whole policy. Cobden, as always, knew thoroughly and in detail what he was talking about, for he had sat for three successive sessions on a select committee upon army, navy, and ordnance expenditure. In another letter he turned personally to Mr. Gladstone himself: “Unconsciously,” he says, “you have administered to the support of a system which has no better foundation than a gigantic delusion” (June 11, 1860). “You say unconsciously,” Mr. Gladstone replies (June 13), “I am afraid that in one respect this is too favourable a description. I have consciously, as a member of parliament and as a member of the government, concurred in measures that provide for an expenditure beyond what were it in my power I would fix.... But I suppose that the duty of choosing the lesser evil binds me; the difficulty is to determine what the lesser evil is.”

My story grows long, and it ends as such stories in our politics usually end. A compromise was arranged on the initiative of the Duke of Somerset, keeping clear, as Mr. Gladstone supposed, of the fortification scheme as a whole, [pg 047] and not pledging future years.30 “Never at any time in my life,” Mr. Gladstone told Graham, “have I had such a sense of mental and moral exhaustion.” The strain was not ended by the compromise, for in moving the resolution for a vote of two millions for fortifications (July 23), Lord Palmerston not only declared that he held it to be absolutely necessary to carry the whole scheme into effect—the very proposition which the compromise put aside—but defended it by a series of stringent criticisms particularly fitted to offend and irritate France. Mr. Gladstone was not present,31 but he felt strongly that he had good grounds of complaint, and that faith had not been strictly kept. “Much dismayed,” he wrote in his diary (July 24), “at the terms of Lord Palmerston's resolution.” It was now, however, too late to draw back.32 Mr. Bright made a weighty and masterly attack (Aug. 2), hinting plainly that the thing was “a compromise to enable the government to avoid the rock, or get over the quick-sand, which this question has interjected into their midst,” and quoting with excellent effect a pregnant passage from Peel: “If you adopt the opinion of military men, naturally anxious for the complete security of every available point; naturally anxious to throw upon you the whole responsibility for the loss in the event of war suddenly breaking out of some of our valuable possessions,—you would overwhelm this country with taxes in time of peace.” But this was a Palmerstonian parliament. The year before, a remarkable [pg 048] debate (July 21, 1859) had promised better things. Disraeli had opened it with emphatic declarations: “There is no country,” he said, “that can go on raising seventy millions in time of peace with impunity. England cannot, and if England cannot, no country can.” Bright followed with the assurance that Cobden and he might now consider Mr. Disraeli a convert to their views. Lord John Russell came next, agreeing with Bright; and even Palmerston himself was constrained to make a peace speech.

II

In May 1861 Mr. Gladstone notes “a day of over fourteen hours: thank God for the strength.” The atmosphere around him would have depressed a weaker man. “At Brooks's,” says Phillimore, “they hate Gladstone worse than at the Carlton.” In the summer the strife upon expenditure was renewed. Eventually Mr. Gladstone was able to write to Graham from the cabinet room (July 20, 1861) that Castor and Pollux appeared aloft at the right moment, and the clouds had disappeared. In a letter to his close friend, Sir Walter James, in 1871 Mr. Gladstone says: “The storm of criticism and rebuke does not surprise nor discourage me. Doubtless much must be just; and what is not, is what we call in logic an ‘inseparable accident’ of politics. Time and reflection will, please God, enable us to distinguish between them. For my own part I never was so abused as in 1860; but it was one of the most useful or least useless years of my life.” The battle was as severe in 1861 as it had been the year before. In the middle of the session (May 9) Phillimore reports: “Found Gladstone in good spirits; he spoke with real greatness of mind of the attacks made on him.”

The next year Lord Palmerston wrote to express his concern at something that he came upon in a railway journey. “I read with much interest,” he wrote to his chancellor of the exchequer (April 29, 1862), “your able and eloquent speeches at Manchester, but I wish to submit to you some observations upon the financial part of the second speech.” He did not agree with Mr. Gladstone that the [pg 049] nation had forced the cabinet and parliament into high expenditure, but if it were so, he regarded it not as matter of reproach, but as a proof of the nation's superior sagacity. Panic there had been none; governors and governed had for a long time been blind and apathetic; then they awoke. There was on the other side of the channel a people who, say what they may, hate us and would make any sacrifice to humiliate us, and they had now at their head an able, active, wary, council-keeping, but ever-planning sovereign [Napoleon III.]. “Have the parliament and the nation been wrong, and have Bright and Cobden and yourself been right?” All this being so, he could not but regret that Mr. Gladstone should by speeches in and out of parliament invite agitation to force the government of which he was a member, to retrace its steps taken deliberately and with full sense of responsibility.33 To Palmerston's eight quarto pages, written in one of the finest hands of the time, Mr. Gladstone replied in twelve.

A spirited correspondence followed, for Lord Palmerston knew his business, and had abundant faculty of application; while Mr. Gladstone, for his part, was too much in earnest to forego rejoinder and even surrejoinder. “No claptrap reductions,” cried the prime minister. “You are feeding not only expenditure,” rejoined the chancellor of the exchequer, “but [pg 050] what is worse, the spirit of expenditure.” “You disclaim political community of opinion with Bright and Cobden, and justly,” said Lord Palmerston, “but you cannot but be aware that owing to various accidental circumstances many people at home and abroad connect you unjustly with them, and this false impression is certainly not advantageous.”

“My dear Gladstone,” he wrote good-humouredly on another occasion, “You may not have seen how your name is taken in vain by people with whom I conceive you do not sympathise,—Yours sincerely,

Palmerston.”

Enclosed was a placard with many large capital letters, notes of exclamation, italics, and all the rest of the paraphernalia of political emphasis:—

Of the continuance of the struggle in 1862, a few items from the diary give an adequate picture:—

By midsummer public feeling veered a little: “The tide has turned. Lord Palmerston is now ‘the strong swimmer in his agony.’ ”34

A candid and friendly observer has told us the situation: “When I was private secretary to Lord Palmerston,” he says, “and Mr. Gladstone was his chancellor of the exchequer, it was a constant source of sorrow to me, and a perpetual cause of mystery, to note how they misunderstood one another, and how evidently each mistrusted the other, though perfectly cordial and most friendly in their mutual intercourse.... If the proposal was adhered to, Mr. Gladstone gave way. This seemed to Lord Palmerston a case of gratuitous difficulties put in his way, and attempts to thwart without the courage to resist.”35

In closing this chapter, let us note that in spite of Lord Palmerston, he won no inconsiderable success. When 1866 came, and his financial administration ended, he had managed, with the aid of the reduction of debt charge after the lapse of the long annuities, to carry expenditure back to the level of 1857. Naval expenditure rose until 1861, and then began to fall; army expenditure rose until 1863, and then began to fall. In 1859, when he went to the exchequer, the total under these two heads was nearly twenty-six millions; when he quitted office in 1866 the total was twenty-four millions. In the middle years it had swelled to twenty-eight. After half a dozen years of panic and extravagance, all sedulously fostered by a strong prime minister, that he should still have left the cost of government little higher than he found it was no defeat, but an extremely satisfactory performance. “We must follow the nature of our affairs,” Burke says, “and conform ourselves to our situation. Why should we resolve to do nothing because what I propose to you may not be the exact demand of the petition? If we cry, like children, for the moon, like children we must cry on.”36

III

Ruminating in the late evening of life over his legislative work, Mr. Gladstone wrote: “Selecting the larger measures [pg 052] and looking only to achieved results, I should take the following heads: 1. The Tariffs, 1842-60. 2. Oxford University Act. 3. Post Office Savings Banks. 4. Irish Church Disestablishment. 5. Irish Land Acts. 6. Franchise Act. Although this excludes the last of all the efforts, viz., the Irish Government bill.” The third item in the list belongs to the period (1861) at which we have now arrived.

A sequel to this salutary measure was a bill three years later with the apparently unheroic but really beneficent object of facilitating the acquisition of small annuities, without the risk of fraud or bankruptcy.37 An eyewitness tells how (March 7, 1864) “Mr. Gladstone held the house for two hours enchained by his defence of a measure which avowedly will not benefit the class from which members are selected; which involves not only a ‘wilderness of figures,’ but calculations of a kind as intelligible to most men as equations to London cabdrivers; and which, though it might and would interest the nation, would never in the nature of things be made a hustings cry. The riveted attention of the House was in itself a triumph; the deep impression [pg 053] received by the nation on the following day was a greater one. It was felt that here was a man who really could lead, instead of merely reflecting the conclusions of the popular mind.” The measure encountered a pretty stiff opposition. The insurance companies were vexed that they had neglected their proper business, others feared that it might undermine the poor law, others again took the pessimist's favourite line that it would be inoperative. But the case was good, Mr. Gladstone's hand was firm, and in due time the bill became law amid a loud chorus of approval.

Thus he encouraged, stimulated, and facilitated private and personal thrift, at the same time and in the same spirit in which he laboured his fervid exhortations to national economy. He was deeply convinced, he said and kept saying, “that all excess in the public expenditure beyond the legitimate wants of the country is not only a pecuniary waste, but a great political, and above all, a great moral evil. It is a characteristic of the mischiefs that arise from financial prodigality that they creep onwards with a noiseless and a stealthy step; that they commonly remain unseen and unfelt, until they have reached a magnitude absolutely overwhelming.” He referred to the case of Austria, where these mischiefs seemed to threaten the very foundations of empire.

I

In finance, the most important of all the many fields of his activity, Mr. Gladstone had the signal distinction of creating the public opinion by which he worked, and warming the climate in which his projects throve. In other matters he followed, as it was his business and necessity to follow, the governing forces of the public mind; in finance he was a strenuous leader. He not only led with a boldness sometimes verging on improvidence; apart from the merits of this or that proposal, he raised finance to the high place that belongs to it in the interest, curiosity, and imperious concern of every sound self-governing community. Even its narrowest technicalities by his supple and resplendent power as orator were suffused with life and colour. When ephemeral critics disparaged him as mere rhetorician—and nobody denies that he was often declamatory and discursive, that he often over-argued and over-refined—they forgot that he nowhere exerted greater influence than in that department of affairs where words out of relation to fact are most surely exposed. If he often carried the proper rhetorical arts of amplification and development to excess, yet the basis of fact was both sound and clear, and his digressions, as when, for example, he introduced an account of the [pg 055] changes in the English taste for wine,38 were found, and still remain, both relevant and extremely interesting.

One recorder who had listened to all the financiers from Peel downwards, said that Peel's statements were ingenious and able, but dry; Disraeli was clever but out of his element; Wood was like a cart without springs on a heavy road; Gladstone was the only man who could lead his hearers over the arid desert, and yet keep them cheerful and lively and interested without flagging. Another is reminded of Sir Joshua's picture of Garrick between tragedy and comedy, such was his duality of attitude and expression; such the skill with which he varied his moods in a single speech, his fervid eloquence and passion, his lightness and buoyancy of humour, his lambent and spontaneous sarcasm. Just as Macaulay made thousands read history who before had turned from it as dry and repulsive, so Mr. Gladstone made thousands eager to follow the public balance-sheet, and the whole nation became his audience, interested in him and his themes and in the House where his dazzling wonders were performed. All this made a magnificent contribution to the national spirit of his time. Such extraordinary power over others had its mainspring in the depths and zeal of his own conviction and concern. “For nine or ten months of the year,” he told Sir Henry Taylor in 1864, “I am always willing to go out of office, but in the two or three that precede the budget I begin to feel an itch to have the handling of it. Last summer I should have been delighted to go out; now [December] I am indifferent; in February, if I live as long, I shall, I have no doubt, be loath; but in April quite ready again. Such are my signs of the zodiac.” The eagerness of his own mind transmitted itself like an electric current through his audience.

Interest abroad was almost as much alive as the interest felt in England itself. We have already seen how keenly Cavour followed Mr. Gladstone's performances. His budget speeches were circulated by foreign ministers among deputies and editors. Fould, one of the best of Napoleon's finance ministers, kept up a pretty steady correspondence with the [pg 056] English chancellor: appeals to him as to the sound doctrine on sugar drawbacks; is much struck by his proposals on Scotch banks; says mournfully to him (April 28, 1863), in a sentence that is a whole chapter in the history of the empire: “You are very fortunate in being able to give such relief to the taxpayers; if it had not been for the war in Mexico, I should perhaps have been able to do something of the same sort, and that would have been, especially in view of the elections, very favourable to the government of the Emperor.'”

When Mr. Gladstone came to leave office in 1866, he said to Fould (July 11): “The statesmen of to-day have a new mission opened to them: the mission of substituting the concert of nations for their conflicts, and of teaching them to grow great in common, and to give to others by giving to themselves. Of this beneficent work a good share has fallen to the departments with which we have respectively been connected.” Fould had already deplored his loss. “I counted,” he says, “on the influence of your wise doctrines in finance, to help me in maintaining our country in that system of order and economy, of which you were setting the example.” Alas, in France and in continental Europe generally at that time, selfish material interests and their class representatives were very strong, popular power was weak; in most of them the soldier was the master. Happily for our famous chancellor of the exchequer, England was different.

It has often been said that he ignored the social question; did not even seem to know there was one. The truth is, that what marks him from other chancellors is exactly the dominating hold gained by the social question in all its depth and breadth upon his most susceptible imagination. Tariff reform, adjustment of burdens, invincible repugnance to waste or profusion, accurate keeping and continuous scrutiny of accounts, substitution of a few good taxes for many bad ones,—all these were not merely the love of a methodical and thrifty man for habits of business; they were directly associated in him with the amelioration of the hard lot of the toiling mass, and sprang from an ardent concern in improving human well-being, and raising the moral ideals of mankind. In his “musings for the good of man,” Liberation of Intercourse, [pg 057] to borrow his own larger name for free trade, figured in his mind's eye as one of the promoting conditions of abundant employment. “If you want,” he said in a pregnant proposition, “to benefit the labouring classes and to do the maximum of good, it is not enough to operate upon the articles consumed by them; you should rather operate on the articles that give them the maximum of employment.” In other words, you should extend the area of trade by steadily removing restrictions. He recalled the days when our predecessors thought it must be for man's good to have “most of the avenues by which the mind, and also the hand of man conveyed and exchanged their respective products,” blocked or narrowed by regulation and taxation. Dissemination of news, travelling, letters, transit of goods, were all made as costly and difficult as the legislator could make them. “I rank,” he said, “the introduction of cheap postage for letters, documents, patterns, and printed matter, and the abolition of all taxes on printed matter, in the catalogue of free trade legislation. These great measures may well take their place beside the abolition of prohibitions and protective duties, the simplifying of revenue laws, and the repeal of the Navigation Act, as forming together the great code of industrial emancipation.”39

It was not unnatural that fault should be found with him for not making a more resolute effort to lighten the burden of that heavy mortgage which, under the name of the National Debt, we have laid upon the industry and property of the nation. In 1866 he was keenly excited by Jevons's argument from the ultimate shrinkage of our coal supply, and he accepted the inference that we should vigorously apply ourselves by reduction of the debt to preparation for the arrival of the evil day. But, as he wrote to Jevons (March 16, 1866), “Until the great work of the liberation of industry was in the main effected, it would have been premature or even wrong to give too much prominence to [pg 058] this view of the subject. Nor do I regard that liberation as yet having reached the point at which we might say, we will now cease to make remission of taxes a principal element and aim in finance. But we are in my judgment near it. And I am most anxious that the public should begin to take a closer and more practical view of the topics which you have done so much to bring into prominence.”

He was always thinking of the emancipation of commerce, like Peel and Cobden. His general policy was simple. When great expenditure demanded large revenue, he raised his money by high income-tax, and high rates of duty on a few articles, neither absolute necessities of life nor raw materials of manufacture. He left the income-tax at fourpence. In 1866, he told the House that the new parliament then about to be elected might dispense with the tax. “If,” he said, “parliament and the country preferred to retain the tax, then the rate of fourpence is the rate at which in time of peace and in the absence of any special emergency, we believe it may be most justly and wisely so retained.” While cordially embracing Cobden's policy of combining free trade with retrenchment, he could not withstand a carnal satisfaction at abundant revenue. Deploring expenditure with all his soul, he still rubs his hands in professional pride at the elasticity of the revenue under his management.

II

When it is asked, with no particular relevancy, what original contribution of the first order was made by Mr. Gladstone to the science of national finance, we may return the same answer as if it were asked of Walpole, Pitt, or Peel. It was for Adam Smith from his retreat upon the sea-beach of distant Kirkcaldy to introduce new and fruitful ideas, though he too owed a debt to French economists. The statesman's business is not to invent ideas in finance, but to create occasions and contrive expedients for applying them. “What an extraordinary man Pitt is,” said Adam Smith; “he understands my ideas better than I understand them myself.” Originality may lie as much in perception of opportunity [pg 059] as in invention. Cobden discovered no new economic truths that I know of, but his perception of the bearings of abstract economic truths upon the actual and prospective circumstances of his country and the world, made him the most original economic statesman of his day. The glory of Mr. Gladstone was different. It rested on the practical power and tenacity with which he opened new paths, and forced the application of sound doctrine over long successions of countless obstacles.

If we probe his fame as financier to the core and marrow, it was not his power as orator, it was not his ingenuity in device and expedient, it was his unswerving faith in certain fixed aims, and his steadfast and insistent zeal in pursuing them, that built up the splendid edifice. Pitt performed striking financial feats, especially in the consolidation of duties, in reformed administration, and in the French treaty of 1786. But ill-fortune dragged him into the vortex of European war, and finance sank into the place of a secondary instrument, an art for devising aliments, some of them desperate enough, for feeding the war-chest of the nation. Sir Robert Walpole, Mr. Gladstone wrote, “had not to contend with like difficulties, and I think his administration should be compared with the early years of Pitt, in which way of judging he would come off second, though a man of cool and sagacious judgment, while morally he stood low.”40

In the happier conditions of his time, Mr. Gladstone was able to use wise and bold finance as the lever for enlarging all the facilities of life, and diffusing them over the widest area. If men sometimes smile at his extraordinary zeal for cheap wines and cheap books and low railway fares, if they are sometimes provoked by his rather harsh views on privileges for patents and copyrights for authors, restrictive of the common enjoyment, it is well to remember that all this and the like came from what was at once clear financial vision and true social feeling. “A financial experience,” he once said, “which is long and wide, has profoundly convinced me that, as a rule, the state or individual or [pg 060] company thrives best which dives deepest down into the mass of the community, and adapts its arrangements to the wants of the greatest number.” His exultation in the stimulus given by fiscal freedom to extended trade, and therefore to more abundant employment at higher wages, was less the exultation of the economist watching the intoxicating growth of wealth, than of the social moralist surveying multiplied access to fuller life and more felicity. I always remember, in a roving talk with him in 1891, when he was a very old man and ill, how he gradually took fire at the notion—I forget how it arose—of the iniquities under which the poor man suffered a generation ago. “See—the sons and daughters went forth from their homes; the cost of postage was so high that correspondence was practically prohibited; yet the rich all the time, by the privilege of franking, carried on a really immense amount of letter-writing absolutely free. Think what a softening of domestic exile; what an aid in keeping warm the feel of family affection, in mitigating the rude breach in the circle of the hearth.” This vigorous sympathy was with Mr. Gladstone a living part of his Christian enthusiasm. “If you would gain mankind,” said old Jeremy Bentham, “the best way is to appear to love them, and the best way of appearing to love them, is to love them in reality.” When he thought of the effect of his work at the exchequer, he derived “profound and inestimable consolation from the reflection that while the rich have been growing richer, the poor have become less poor.” Yet, as my readers have by this time found out, there never was a man less in need of Aristotle's warning, that to be forever hunting after the useful befits not those of free and lofty soul.41 As was noted by contemporaries, like all the followers of Sir Robert Peel he never thought without an eye to utilitarian results, but mixed with that attitude of mind he had “a certain refinement and subtlety of religiousness that redeemed it from the coldness, if it sometimes overshadowed the clearness, of mere statesmanlike prudence.” On the other hand, he had “the Lancashire temperament.”

III

This thought and feeling for the taxpayer was at the root of another achievement, no less original than the peculiar interest that he was able to excite by his manner of stating a financial case. Peel was only prime minister for five years, and only four months chancellor. Mr. Gladstone was prime minister for twelve—ten years short of Sir Robert Walpole in that office, seven years short of Pitt. But he was also chancellor of the exchequer under three other prime ministers for ten years. Thus his connection with the treasury covered a longer period than was attained by the greatest of his predecessors. His long reign at the treasury, and his personal predominance in parliament and the country, enabled him to stamp on the public departments administrative principles of the utmost breadth and strength. Thrift of public money, resolute resistance to waste, rigid exactitude in time, and all the other aspects of official duty, conviction that in the working of the vast machinery of state nothing is a trifle—through the firm establishment of maxims and principles of this sort, Mr. Gladstone built up a strong and efficacious system of administrative unity that must be counted a conspicuous part of his very greatest work. “No chancellor of the exchequer,” he once said, “is worth his salt who makes his own popularity either his first consideration, or any consideration at all, in administering the public purse. In my opinion, the chancellor of the exchequer is the trusted and confidential steward of the public. He is under a sacred obligation with regard to all that he consents to spend.”42 This tone of thinking and feeling about the service of the state spread under his magisterial influence from chancellors and the permanent officers that bear unobtrusive but effective sway in Whitehall, down to tide waiters and distributors of stamps. As Burke put the old Latin saw, he endeavoured to “give us a system of economy, which is itself a great revenue.” The Exchequer and Audit Act of 1866 is a monument of his zeal and power in this direction. It converted the nominal control by parliament [pg 062] into a real control, and has borne the strain of nearly forty years.

He was more alive than any man at the exchequer had ever been before, to the mischiefs of the spirit of expenditure. As he told the House of Commons in 1863 (April 16): “I mean this, that together with the so-called increase of expenditure there grows up what may be termed a spirit of expenditure, a desire, a tendency prevailing in the country, which, insensibly and unconsciously perhaps, but really, affects the spirit of the people, the spirit of parliament, the spirit of the public departments, and perhaps even the spirit of those whose duty it is to submit the estimates to parliament.” “But how,” he wrote to Cobden (Jan. 5, 1864), “is the spirit of expenditure to be exorcised? Not by my preaching; I doubt if even by yours. I seriously doubt whether it will ever give place to the old spirit of economy, as long as we have the income-tax. There, or hard by, lie questions of deep practical moment.” This last pregnant reference to the income-tax, makes it worth while to insert here a word or two from letters of 1859 to his brother Robertson, an even more ardent financial reformer than himself:—

Bagehot, that economist who united such experience and sense with so much subtlety and humour, wrote to Mr. [pg 063] Gladstone in 1868: “Indirect taxation so cramps trade and heavy direct taxation so impairs morality that a large expenditure becomes a great evil. I have often said so to Sir G. Lewis, but he always answered, ‘Government is a very rough business. You must be content with very unsatisfactory results.’ ” This was a content that Mr. Gladstone never learned.

It was not only in the finance of millions that he showed himself a hero. “The chancellor of the exchequer,” he said, “should boldly uphold economy in detail; and it is the mark of a chicken-hearted chancellor when he shrinks from upholding economy in detail, when because it is a question of only two or three thousand pounds, he says that is no matter. He is ridiculed, no doubt, for what is called candle-ends and cheese-parings, but he is not worth his salt if he is not ready to save what are meant by candle-ends and cheese-parings in the cause of the country.”43 He held it to be his special duty in his office not simply to abolish sinecures, but to watch for every opportunity of cutting down all unnecessary appointments. He hears that a clerk at the national debt office is at death's door, and on the instant writes to Lord Palmerston that there is no necessity to appoint a successor. During the last twenty years, he said in 1863, “since I began to deal with these subjects, every financial change beneficial to the country at large has been met with a threat that somebody would be dismissed.” All such discouragements he treated with the half scornful scepticism without which no administrative reformer will go far.

He did not think it beneath his dignity to appeal to the foreign office for a retrenchment in fly-leaves and thick folio sheets used for docketing only, and the same for mere covering despatches without description; for all these had to be bound, and the bound books wanted bookcases, and the bookcases wanted buildings, and the libraries wanted librarians. “My idea is that it would be quite worth while to appoint an official committee from various departments to go over the ‘contingencies’ and minor charges of the different departments into which abuse must always be creeping, [pg 064] from the nature of the case and without much blame to any one.” Sir R. Bethell as attorney-general insisted on the duty incumbent on certain high officials, including secretaries of state, of taking out patents for their offices, and paying the stamp duties of two hundred pounds apiece thereon. “I shall deal with these eminent persons,” he wrote to the chancellor of the exchequer, “exactly as I should and do daily deal with John Smith accused of fraud as a distiller, or John Brown reported as guilty of smuggling tobacco.” Mr. Gladstone replies (1859):—

After a due amount of amusing correspondence, the recusant confederacy struck their colours and paid their money.

IV

One of the few failures of this active and fruitful period was the proposal (1863) that charities should pay income-tax upon the returns from their endowments. What is their exemption but the equivalent of a gift to them from the general taxpayer? He has to make good the sum that ought in reason and equity to have been paid by them, as by other people, to the government that protects them. Why should this burden be compulsorily laid upon him? What is the quality of an endowment for a charitable purpose that constitutes a valid claim for such a boon? Into this case Mr. Gladstone threw himself with full force. The opposition to him was as heated and as vigorous as he ever provoked, and the violence of the resistance roused an answering vehemence in him. He speaks in his diary of his “deadly encounter with the so-called charities.” “I was endeavouring,” he says, “to uphold the reality of truth and justice against their superficial and flimsy appearances.” “Spoke from 5.10 to 8.20, with all my might, such as it was.” This speech, with its fierce cogency and trenchant reasoning, was counted by good judges who heard it, to be among the [pg 066] two or three most powerful that he ever made, and even to-day it may be read with the same sort of interest as we give to Turgot's famous disquisition on Foundations. It turns a rude searchlight upon illusions about charity that are all the more painful to dispel, because they often spring from pity and from sympathy, not the commonest of human elements. It affects the jurist, the economist, the moralist, the politician. The House was profoundly impressed by both the argument and the performance, but the clamour was too loud, all the idols of market-place and tribe were marched out in high parade, and the proposal at last was dropped.

Though the idea of putting a tax on the income of charitable endowments was rejected, the budget of 1863 was the record of a triumph that was complete. The American civil war by arresting the supply of cotton had half ruined Lancashire. The same cause had diminished the export trade to America by six millions sterling. Three bad seasons spoiled the crops. There was distress in Ireland. Yet the chancellor had a revenue in excess of expenditure by the noble figure of three millions and three quarters. Mr. Gladstone naturally took the opportunity of surveying the effects of four years of his financial policy. He admitted that they had been four years of tension, and this tension had been enhanced by his large remissions of duty, and by taking in hand the completion of the great work of commercial legislation. The end of it all was a growth of wealth, as he called it, almost intoxicating. The value of British goods sent to France had risen from four millions and three quarters to nearly nine millions and one quarter, in other words had about doubled under the operations of the treaty of commerce.45 If to this were added foreign and colonial produce sent through us, and acquired by us in exchange for our own produce, the value had risen from nine and a half in 1859 to twenty-one and three quarters in 1862. In Mr. Gladstone's own description later, the export trade of 1860, in spite of a bad harvest, was so stimulated by the liberating customs act, that it [pg 067] rose at once from a hundred and thirty millions to a hundred and thirty-five. The next year it fell to a hundred and twenty-five, and in 1862 it fell by another million owing to the withdrawal, by reason of the American war, of the material of our greatest manufacture. In 1866 it rose to a hundred and eighty-eight millions.46 Then under the head of income-tax, and comparing 1842 with 1862, over the same area, and with the same limitations, the aggregate amount of assessed income had risen from one hundred and fifty-six millions to two hundred and twenty-one. Other tests and figures need not detain us.

Lewis had died five days before (April 13), and this is Mr. Gladstone's entry:—

To Sir Gilbert Lewis, he wrote (April 18):—

The final budget of this most remarkable series was that of 1866, when he swept away the last of the old vexatious duties on timber. It contained another element as to which, as I have said, some thought he had not been keen enough. In the budget of 1866 he first started the scheme of a sinking fund, which, when amplified, and particularly when simplified by his successors, did so much to reduce the dead weight of debt.47 The complication of his scheme was due to his desire to make sure of its stability, and undoubtedly he would have carried it if he had remained in office through the session. He is, however, entitled to credit for laying the foundation of an effective sinking fund.

One word more may be added on Mr. Gladstone as financier. He was far too comprehensive in his outlook to suppose that the great outburst of material prosperity during the years in which he controlled the exchequer and guided parliament in affairs of money, was wholly and without qualification due to budgets alone. To insist on ascribing complex results to single causes is the well-known vice of narrow and untrained minds. He was quite alive to the effects of “the enormous, constant, rapid, and diversified development of mechanical power, and the consequent saving of labour by the extension of machinery.” He was well aware of the share of new means of locomotion in the growth of industrial enterprise. But the special cause of what was most peculiar to England in the experience of this period he considered to be the wise legislation of parliament, in seeking every opportunity for abolishing restrictions upon the application of capital and the exercise of industry and skill. In this wise legislation his own energetic and beneficent genius played the master part.

I

Sir Cornewall Lewis in a memorandum printed for the use of his colleagues both truly and impressively described the momentous struggle that at this time broke upon the family of civilised nations in both hemispheres. “It may be fairly asserted,” says the particularly competent writer of it, “that the war in America is the greatest event that has occurred in the political world since the definitive fall of Napoleon in 1815. The expulsion of the elder branch of the Bourbons in 1830; the expulsion of Louis Philippe in 1848; the re-establishment of a republic, and the subsequent restoration of a Bonaparte to the imperial throne—were all important events, both to France and to the rest of Europe; but (with the exception of the recent annexation of Savoy and Nice) they have not altered the boundaries of France; and Europe still, in spite of minor changes, substantially retains the form impressed upon it by the treaty of Vienna.48 With respect to the internal consequences of these changes, a French revolution has become a fight in the streets of Paris, in order to determine who shall be the occupant of the Tuileries. The administrative body and the army—the two great governing powers of France—remain substantially unaffected; whereas the American civil war threatens a [pg 070] complete territorial re-arrangement of the Union; it also portends a fundamental change in the constitution, by which both its federal and state elements will be recast.”

Of this immense conflict Mr. Gladstone, like most of the leading statesmen of the time, and like the majority of his countrymen, failed to take the true measure. The error that lay at the root of our English misconception of the American struggle is now clear. We applied ordinary political maxims to what was not merely a political contest, but a social revolution. Without scrutiny of the cardinal realities beneath, we discussed it like some superficial conflict in our old world about boundaries, successions, territorial partitions, dynastic preponderance. The significance of the American war was its relation to slavery. That war arose from the economic, social, and political consequences that flowed from slavery—its wasteful cultivation, the consequent need for extension of slave territory, the probable revival of the accursed African trade, the constitution of slave-holders as the sole depositaries of social prestige and political power. Secession was undertaken for the purpose of erecting into an independent state a community whose whole structure was moulded on a system that held labour in contempt, that kept the labourer in ignorance and cruel bondage, that demanded a vigilant censorship of the press and an army of watchmen and spies. And this barbaric state was to set itself up on the border of a great nation, founded on free industry, political equality, diffused knowledge, energetic progress. Such was the meaning of secession. “The rebellion,” as Charles Sumner well said to Mr. Gladstone in 1864, “is slavery in arms, revolting, indecent, imperious.” Therefore those who fought against secession fought against slavery and all that was involved in that dark burden, and whatever their motives may at different times have been, they rendered an immortal service to humanity.49

At a very early period Mr. Gladstone formed the opinion that the attempt to restore the Union by force would and must fail. “As far as the controversy between North and South,” he wrote to the Duchess of Sutherland (May 29, 1861) “is a controversy on the principle announced by the vice-president of the South, viz. that which asserts the superiority of the white man, and therewith founds on it his right to hold the black in slavery, I think that principle detestable, and I am wholly with the opponents of it.... No distinction can in my eyes be broader than the distinction between the question whether the Southern ideas of slavery are right, and the question whether they can justifiably be put down by war from the North.” To Cyrus Field he wrote (Nov. 27, 1862): “Your frightful conflict may be regarded from many points of view. The competency of the Southern states to secede; the rightfulness of their conduct in seceding (two matters wholly distinct and a great deal too much confounded); the natural reluctance of Northern Americans to acquiesce in the severance of the union, and the apparent loss of strength and glory to their country; the bearing of the separation on the real interests and on the moral character of the North; again, for an Englishman, its bearing with respect to British interests;—all these are texts of which any one affords ample matter for reflection, but I will only state as regards the last of them, that I for one have never hesitated to maintain that, in my opinion, the separate and special interests of England were all on the side of the maintenance of the old union, and if I were to look at those interests alone, and had the power of choosing in what way the war should end, I would choose for its ending by the restoration of the old union this very day.”

In a letter to the Duchess of Sutherland (Nov. 7, 1862), he says: “A friendly correspondent writes to say he is sorry the South has my sympathies. But the South has not my sympathies, except in the sense in which the North has them also. I wish them both cordially well, which I [pg 072] believe is more than most Englishmen can at present say with truth. In both I see the elements of future power and good; in both I see also the elements of danger and mischief.' To another correspondent: 'I have never to my knowledge expressed any sympathy with the Southern cause in any speech at Newcastle or elsewhere, nor have I passed any eulogium upon President Davis. In dealing whether with South or North I have thought it out of my province to touch in any way the complicated question of praise and blame.”

At a very early stage the Duke of Argyll sent him some letter of Mrs. Beecher Stowe's, and Mr. Gladstone in acknowledging it from Penmaenmawr (Aug. 26, 1861) writes expressing all possible respect for her character and talents, but thinks that she has lost intellectual integrity:—

So much for his view of the case in its general aspect.

II

At one dangerous moment in the conflict it seemed possible that Great Britain might be forced to take a part. The commander of an American man-of-war boarded the Trent (Nov. 8, 1861), a British mail-boat, seized two emissaries from the Southern confederacy on their way to Europe, and carried them off to his own ship, whence they were afterwards landed and thrown into prison. This act was in direct violation of those rights of neutrals of which the United States hitherto had been the strictest champion against Great Britain; and nothing was to be gained by it, for the presence of the two commissioners was not in the least likely to effect any change in the policy of either England or France. Violent explosions of public feeling broke out on both sides of the Atlantic; of anger in England, of exultation in America. Mr. Gladstone's movements at this critical hour are interesting. On Nov. 27, says Phillimore, “Gladstones dined here. Gladstone, with the account in his pocket from the evening papers of the capture of the Southern envoys out of the English mail-ship.” The next two nights he was at court.

Of this important cabinet, Mr. Gladstone wrote an account to the Duke of Argyll, then absent from London:—

We may assume that Mr. Gladstone, in reporting these proceedings at Windsor, did not conceal his own arguments for moderation which had been overruled. On the following day the cabinet again met. “Nov. 30 (Sat.). Left Windsor at 11.25. Cabinet 3-5-½. Lord Russell's draft softened and abridged.” That is to say the draft was brought nearer, though not near enough, to the temper urged upon the cabinet and represented at court by Mr. Gladstone the day before.

The story of the first of these two critical despatches is pretty well known; how the draft initialled by Lord Russell was sent down the same night to Windsor; how the Prince Consort—then as it proved rapidly sinking down into his fatal illness—found it somewhat meagre, and suggested modifications and simplifications; how the Queen returned the draft with the suggestions in a letter to the prime minister; how Palmerston thought them excellent, and after remodelling the draft in the more temperate spirit recommended by the Prince, though dropping at least one irritating phrase in the Queen's memorandum,50 sent it back to the foreign office, whence it was duly sent on (Dec. 1) to Lord Lyons at Washington. It seems, moreover, that a day's reflection had brought his colleagues round to Mr. Gladstone's mind, for Lord Russell wrote to Lord Lyons a private note (Dec. 1) in effect instructing him to say nothing about withdrawing in seven days.51

The British despatches were delivered to Lord Lyons at Washington at midnight on December 18; the reparation despatch was formally read to Mr. Seward on the 23rd; and on Christmas Day Lincoln had a meeting of his cabinet. Sumner was invited to attend, and he read long letters from Cobden and Bright. “At all hazards,” said Bright, “you must not let this matter grow to a war with England. Even if you are right and we are wrong, war will be fatal to your idea of restoring the union.... I implore you not, on any feeling that nothing can be conceded, and that England is arrogant and seeking a quarrel, to play the game of every enemy of your country.”52 A French despatch in the English sense was also read. Seward and Sumner were in favour of giving up the men. The president, thinking of popular excitement, hesitated. In the end, partly because the case was bad on the merits, partly because they could not afford to have a second great war upon their hands, all came round to Seward's view.53

III

By the autumn of 1862 the war had lasted a year and a half. It was already entailing a cost heavier than our war with Napoleon at its most expensive period. The North had still failed to execute its declared purpose of reducing the South to submission. The blockade of the Southern ports, by stopping the export of cotton, was declared to have produced worse privations, loss, and suffering to England and France than were ever produced to neutral nations by a war. It was not in Mr. Gladstone's nature to sit with folded hands in sight of what he took to be hideous and unavailing carnage and havoc. Lord Palmerston, he tells Mrs. Gladstone (July 29, 1862), “has come exactly to my mind about some early representation of a friendly kind to America, if we can get France and Russia to join.” A day or two later [pg 076] (Aug. 3) he writes to the Duke of Argyll: “My opinion is that it is vain, and wholly unsustained by precedent, to say nothing shall be done until both parties are desirous of it; that, however, we ought to avoid sole action, or anything except acting in such a combination as would morally represent the weight of impartial Europe; that with this view we ought to communicate with France and Russia; to make with them a friendly representation (if they are ready to do it) of the mischief and the hopelessness of prolonging the contest in which both sides have made extraordinary and heroic efforts; but if they are not ready, then to wait for some opportunity when they may be disposed to move with us. The adhesion of other powers would be desirable if it does not encumber the movement.”

“In the year 1862,” says Mr. Gladstone in a fragment of autobiography, “I had emerged from very grave financial [budget] difficulties, which in 1860 and 1861 went near to breaking me down. A blue sky was now above me, and some of the Northern liberals devised for me a triumphant visit to the Tyne, which of course entailed as one of its incidents a public dinner.” Seeing a visit to Newcastle announced, Lord Palmerston wrote (Sept. 24) to Mr. Gladstone, begging him on no account to let the chancellor of the exchequer be too sympathetic with the tax-payer, or to tell the country that it was spending more money than it could afford. A more important part of the letter was to inform Mr. Gladstone that he himself and Lord Russell thought the time was fast approaching when an offer of mediation ought to be made by England, France, and Russia, and that Russell was going privately to instruct the ambassador at Paris to sound the French government. “Of course,” Lord Palmerston said, “no actual step would be taken without the sanction of the cabinet. But if I am not mistaken, you would be inclined to approve such a course.” The proposal would be made to both North and South. If both should accept, an armistice would follow, and negotiations on the basis of separation. If both should decline, then Lord Palmerston assumed that they would acknowledge the independence of the South. The next day Mr. Gladstone replied. He was glad to learn [pg 077] what the prime minister had told him, and for two reasons especially he desired that the proceedings should be prompt. The first was the rapid progress of the Southern arms and the extension of the area of Southern feeling. The second was the risk of violent impatience in the cotton-towns of Lancashire, such as would prejudice the dignity and disinterestedness of the proffered mediation.54 On September 17 Russell had replied to a letter from Palmerston three days earlier, saying explicitly, “I agree with you that the time is come for offering mediation to the United States government, with a view to the recognition of the independence of the Confederates. I agree further, that in case of failure, we ought ourselves to recognise the Southern states as an independent state.”55 So far, then, had the two heads of the government advanced, when Mr. Gladstone went to Newcastle.

The people of the Tyne gave him the reception of a king. The prints of the time tell how the bells rang, guns thundered, a great procession of steamers followed him to the mouth of the river, ships flew their gayest bunting, the banks were thronged with hosts of the black-handed toilers of the forges, the furnaces, the coal-staiths, chemical works, glass factories, shipyards, eager to catch a glimpse of the great man; and all this not because he had tripled the exports to France, but because a sure instinct had revealed an accent in his eloquence that spoke of feeling for the common people.56

Unhappily, the slave must still go in the triumphal car to remind us of the fallibilities of men, and here the conqueror made a grave mistake. At the banquet in the town hall of Newcastle (Oct. 7), with which all these joyous proceedings had begun, Mr. Gladstone let fall a sentence about the American war of which he was destined never to hear the last: “We know quite well that the people of the Northern states have not yet drunk of the cup—they are still trying to hold it far from their lips—which all the rest of the world see they nevertheless must drink of. We may have our own opinions about slavery; we may be for or against the South; but there is no doubt that Jefferson Davis and other leaders of the South have made an army; they are making, it appears, a navy; and they have made what is more than either, they have made a nation.”

Here the speaker was forgetful of a wholesome saying of his own, that “a man who speaks in public ought to know, besides his own meaning, the meaning which others will attach to his words.” The sensation was immediate and profound. All the world took so pointed an utterance to mean that the government were about to recognise the independence of the South. The cotton men were thrown into a position of doubt and uncertainty that still further disturbed their trade. Orders for cotton were countermanded, and the supply of the precious material for a moment threatened to become worse than ever. Cobden and Bright were twitted with the lapse of their favourite from a central article of their own creed and commandments. Louis Blanc, then in exile here, describing the feeling of the country, compares the sympathy for the North to a dam and the sympathy for the South to a torrent, and says he fears that Gladstone at Newcastle had yielded to the [pg 080] temptation of courting popularity.57 The American minister dropped a hint about passports.58

To the numerous correspondents who complained of his language Mr. Gladstone framed a form of reply, disclaiming responsibility for all the various inferences that people chose to draw from his language. “And generally,” his secretary concluded, in phrases that justly provoked plain men to wrath, “Mr. Gladstone desires me to remark that to form opinions upon questions of policy, to announce them to the world, and to take or to be a party to taking any of the steps necessary for giving them effect, are matters which, though connected together, are in themselves distinct, and which may be separated by intervals of time longer or shorter according to the particular circumstances of the case.”59 Mr. Gladstone sent a copy of this enigmatical response to the foreign secretary, who was far too acute not to perceive all the mischief and the peril, but had his full share of that generosity of our public life that prevents a minister from bearing too hardly on a colleague who has got the boat and its crew into a scrape. Lord Russell replied from Walmer (Oct. 20): “I have forwarded to your private secretary your very proper answer to your very impertinent correspondent. Still, you must allow me to say that I think you went beyond the latitude which all speakers must be allowed, when you said that Jeff. Davis had made a nation. Recognition would seem to follow, and for that step I think the cabinet is not prepared. However, we shall soon meet to discuss this very topic.” A week after the deliverance at Newcastle, Lewis, at Lord Palmerston's request as I have heard, put things right in a speech at Hereford. The Southern states, he said, had not de facto established their independence and [pg 081] were not entitled to recognition on any accepted principles of public law.

It is superfluous for any of us at this day to pass judgment. Mr. Gladstone has left on record in a fragmentary note of late date his own estimate of an error that was in truth serious enough, and that has since been most of all exaggerated by those sections of society and opinion who at the time most eagerly and freely shared the very same delusion.

Among the many calumnies poured upon him in this connection was the charge that he had been a subscriber to the Confederate Loan. “The statement,” he wrote to a correspondent (Oct. 17, 1865), “is not only untrue, but it is so entirely void of the slightest shadow of support in any imaginable incident of the case, that I am hardly able to ascribe it to mere error, and am painfully perplexed as to the motives which could have prompted so mischievous a forgery.”

IV

As I have already said, the American minister had hinted at passports. Ten days after Mr. Gladstone's speech Mr. Adams saw Lord Russell. Having mentioned some minor matters he came to the real object of the interview. “If I had trusted,” he said, “to the construction given by the public to a late speech, I should have begun to think of packing my carpet bag and trunks. His lordship at once embraced the allusion, and whilst endeavouring to excuse Mr. Gladstone, in fact admitted that his act had been regretted by Lord Palmerston and the other cabinet officers. Still he could not disavow the sentiments of Mr. Gladstone; so far as he understood them (his meaning) was not that ascribed to him by the public. Mr. Gladstone was himself willing to disclaim that. He had written to that effect to Lord Palmerston.... His lordship said that the policy of the government was to adhere to a strict neutrality, and to leave this struggle to settle itself.... I asked him if I was to understand that policy as not now to be changed. He said, Yes.”60

If this relation be accurate, then the foreign secretary did not construe strict neutrality as excluding what diplomatists call good offices. On October 13, Lord Russell circulated a [pg 084] memorandum to the cabinet setting out in an argumentative tone all the adverse and confused aspects of the situation and outlook in America, and ending in the emphatic conclusion that it had now become a question for the great Powers of Europe whether it was not their duty to ask both parties to agree to a suspension of arms for the purpose of weighing calmly the advantages of peace. Cornewall Lewis (Oct. 17), while expressing an opinion that a peaceful separation between North and South would in the end have been best for the North, and while apparently believing that the war must one day end in Southern independence, met Russell's suggestion by cogent arguments against action on our part.61 A week later (Oct. 24), Mr. Gladstone circulated a rejoinder to Lewis, arguing for representation to the two combatants from England, France, and Russia—a representation with moral authority and force, of the opinion of the civilised world upon the conditions of the case.

This pretty nearly concludes all that need be said upon the attitude taken by Mr. Gladstone in that mighty struggle. We may at least add that if, and where, it differed from that of the majority of his countrymen, it did not differ for the worse. In November (1862) the French Emperor renewed proposals of joint mediation. The Emperor had objects of his own to serve. He was entangled in the coils of the Mexican adventure that was to give the first shock to his throne and to add another to the long scroll of tragedies in the house of Hapsburg. From the first the government of the American Union had scowled upon the intervention of Europe in the affairs of Mexico, just as the same government had refused to intervene in a European protest on behalf of Poland. The civil war between North and South kept American hands tied, and Napoleon well [pg 085] knew that the success of the North and the consolidation of the Union would overthrow his designs in Mexico. He cast restlessly about for any combination that promised aid to the Southern confederates, who, whether they should emerge strong or weak from the struggle, would be a useful instrument for his future purposes. So now he pressed England and Russia to join him in a project of mediation. Russia declined. The London cabinet was divided.62 Mr. Gladstone writes home in these important days.—“Nov. 11. We have had our cabinet to-day and meet again to-morrow. I am afraid we shall do little or nothing in the business of America. But I will send you definite intelligence. Both Lords Palmerston and Russell are right.—Nov. 12. The United States affair has ended and not well. Lord Russell rather turned tail. He gave way without resolutely fighting out his battle. However, though we decline for the moment, the answer is put upon grounds and in terms which leave the matter very open for the future.—Nov. 13. I think the French will make our answer about America public; at least it is very possible. But I hope they may not take it as a positive refusal, or at any rate that they may themselves act in the matter. It will be clear that we concur with them, that the war should cease. Palmerston gave to Russell's proposal a feeble and half-hearted support. As to the state of matters generally in the cabinet, I have never seen it smoother; and they look pretty well, I think, as regards my department, though the distress tells upon me.”

The only speech, I believe, delivered by Mr. Gladstone upon the war in parliament, while resisting the motion for the recognition of the confederacy, was curiously balanced.63 As to the South, he said, not a few must sympathise with a resistance as heroic as ever was offered in the history of the world [pg 086] on the part of a weaker body against the overpowering forces of a stronger. On the other hand, the cause of the South was so connected with slavery that a strong counter-current of feeling must arise in the mind. Then again, it is impossible for any Englishman not to have a very strong feeling of sympathy with those in the North who saw exalted visions of the great future of their country, now threatened with destruction. He had never agreed with those who thought it a matter of high British interest that the old American union should be torn in pieces. He had always thought that, involved as England was both in interest and in duty and honour with Canada, the balanced state of the American union which caused the whole of American politics to turn on the relative strength of the slavery and Northern interests, was more favourable to our colonial relations in North America, than if the said union were to be divided into a cluster of Northern and a cluster of Southern states. The North would endeavour to re-establish their territorial grandeur by seeking union with the British possessions in North America. He dwelt upon the horrid incidents of war. He insisted once more that the public opinion of this country was unanimous that the restoration of the American union by force was unattainable. Some cries of “No” greeted this declaration about unanimity, but he would not qualify it further than to say that at any rate it was almost unanimous. The other chief speakers that night were Mr. Forster (who played a brave and clear-sighted part throughout), Lord Robert Cecil, who attacked the “vague and loose” arguments of the chancellor of the exchequer, and Mr. Bright, who made perhaps the most powerful and the noblest speech of his life.

I

Within a few months of one another, three of Mr. Gladstone's closest friends and allies were lost to him. Lord Aberdeen died at the end of 1860. The letter written by Mr. Gladstone to the son of his veteran chief is long, but it deserves reproduction.64 As a writer, though an alert and most strenuous disputant, he was apt to be diffuse and abstract. Partly, these defects were due to the subjects with which, in his literary performances, he mostly chose to deal. Perhaps one secret was that he forgot the famous word of Quintilian, that the way to write well is not to write quickly, but if you take trouble to write well, in time you can write as quickly as you like.65 His character of Lord Aberdeen, like his beautiful letter in a similar vein about Hope-Scott,66 where also his feelings were deeply moved, is very different from his more formal manner, and may claim high place among our literary portraits. It is penetrating in analysis, admirable in diction, rich in experience of life and human nature, and truly inspiring in those noble moralities that are the lifeblood of style, and of greater things than mere style can ever be.

Then, in the autumn of 1861, both Graham and Sidney [pg 088] Herbert died; the former the most esteemed and valued of all his counsellors; the latter, so prematurely cut off, “that beautiful and sunny spirit,” as he called him, perhaps the best beloved of all his friends. “Called on Gladstone,” says Phillimore on this last occasion (Aug. 3); “found him at breakfast alone; very glad to see me. His eyes filled with tears all the time he spoke to me in a broken voice about his departed friend. The effect upon him has been very striking, increased no doubt by recent political differences of opinion.” “It is difficult to speak of Herbert,” Mr. Gladstone said later, “because with that singular harmony and singular variety of gifts—every gift of person, every gift of position, every gift of character with which it pleased Providence to bless him—he was one of whom we may well recite words that the great poet of this country has applied to a prince of our early history, cut off by death earlier than his countrymen would have desired:—

The void thus left was never filled. Of Graham he wrote to the Duchess of Sutherland:—

Not many months later (June 1862) he had to write to Mr. Gordon, “We are all sorely smitten by Canning's death,” [pg 089] whose fame, he said, would “bear the scrutinising judgment of posterity, under whose keen eye so many illusions are doomed to fade away.”68

In the December of 1861 died the Prince Consort. His last communication to Mr. Gladstone was a letter (Nov. 19) proposing to recommend him as an elder brother of the Trinity House in place of Graham. Of Mr. Gladstone's first interview with the Queen after her bereavement, Dean Wellesley wrote to him that she was greatly touched by his evidence of sympathy. “She saw how much you felt for her, and the mind of a person in such deep affliction is keenly sensitive and observant. Of all her ministers, she seemed to me to think that you had most entered into her sorrows, and she dwelt especially upon the manner in which you had parted from her.” To the Duchess of Sutherland Mr. Gladstone writes:—

In the spring he took occasion at Manchester to pronounce a fine panegyric on the Prince,70 for which the Queen thanked him in a letter of passionate desolation, too sacred in the anguish of its emotion to be printed here. “Every source of interest or pleasure,” she concludes, “causes now the acutest pain. Mrs. Gladstone, who, the Queen knows, is a [pg 090] most tender wife, may in a faint manner picture to herself what the Queen suffers.” Mr. Gladstone replies:—

More follows in the vein and on the topics that are usual in letters of mourning sympathy, and the effect was what the writer sought. From Balmoral came a note (May 6, 1862): “The Queen wishes Princess Alice to thank Mr. Gladstone in her name for the kind letter he wrote to her the other day, which did her aching heart good. Kind words soothe, but nothing can lessen or alleviate the weight of sorrow she has to bear.”

Many years later he sat down to place on record his thoughts about the Prince Consort, but did not proceed beyond a scanty fragment, which I will here transcribe:—

The death of the Prince Consort was a greater personal calamity to Mr. Gladstone than he could then foresee. Perhaps the disadvantage was almost as real as the death of the consort of King George ii. to Sir Robert Walpole. Much as they might differ in political and religious opinion, yet in seriousness, conscience, and laborious temperament, the Prince and he were in exact accord, and it is impossible to doubt that if the Prince had survived at the Queen's right hand, certain jars might have been avoided that made many difficulties for the minister in later times.

II

I may as well here gather into a chapter some short pieces, mainly from letters to Mrs. Gladstone during the period covered by this fifth book. The most interesting of them, perhaps, are the little pictures of his life as minister in attendance at Balmoral; but there are, besides, two or three hints of a simplicity in his faculty of enjoyment in regions outside of graver things, that may shock critics of more complex or fastidious judgment. Readers will benevolently [pg 092] take them all as they come. He made a curious entry in his diary upon his birthday at the end of 1860: “'Dec. 29. Began my fifty-second year. I cannot believe it. I feel within me the rebellious unspoken word, I will not be old. The horizon enlarges, the sky shifts, around me. It is an age of shocks; a discipline so strong, so manifold, so rapid and whirling that only when it is at an end, if then, can I hope to comprehend it.” Yet nearly all the most conspicuous scenes still lay before him.

III

IV

I

“My confidence in the Italian parliament and people,” Mr. Gladstone wrote to Lacaita at the end of 1862, “increases from day to day. Their self-command, moderation, patience, firmness, and forethought reaching far into the future, are really beyond all praise.” And a few days later, again to Lacaita—“Your letter proves that the king has not merely got the constitutional lesson by rote—though even this for an Italian king would be much; but that the doctrine has sunk into the marrow and the bone.” The cause was won, and the work of construction went forward, but not on such lines as Cavour's master-hand was likely to have traced. Very early Mr. Gladstone began to be uneasy about Italian finance. “I am sure,” he wrote to Lacaita in April 1863, “that Italian freedom has no greater enemy in the Triple Crown or elsewhere, than large continuing deficits.”

As events marched forward, the French occupation of Rome became an ever greater scandal in Mr. Gladstone's eyes. He writes to Panizzi (October 28, 1862):—

It was in 1862 that Mr. Gladstone made his greatest speech on Italian affairs.79 “I am ashamed to say,” he told the House, “that for a long time, I, like many, withheld my assent and approval from Italian yearnings.” He amply atoned for his tardiness, and his exposure of Naples, where perjury was the tradition of its kings; of the government of the pope in the Romagna, where the common administration of law and justice was handed over to Austrian soldiery; of the stupid and execrable lawlessness of the Duke of Modena; of the attitude of Austria as a dominant and conquering nation over a subject and conquered race;—all this stamped a decisive impression on the minds of his hearers. Along with his speech on Reform in 1864, and that on the Irish church in the spring of 1865, it secured Mr. Gladstone's hold upon all of the rising generation of liberals who cared for the influence and the good name of Great Britain in Europe, and who were capable of sympathising with, popular feeling and the claims of national justice.

II

The Italian sentiment of England reached its climax in the reception accorded to Garibaldi by the metropolis in [pg 109] April 1864. “I do not know what persons in office are to do with him,” Mr. Gladstone wrote to Lord Palmerston (March 26), “but you will lead, and we shall follow suit.” The populace took the thing into their own hands. London has seldom beheld a spectacle more extraordinary or more moving. The hero in the red shirt and blue-grey cloak long associated in the popular mind with so many thrilling stories of which they had been told, drove from the railway at Vauxhall to Stafford House, the noblest of the private palaces of the capital, amid vast continuous multitudes, blocking roadways, filling windows, lining every parapet and roof with eager gazers. For five hours Garibaldi passed on amid tumultuous waves of passionate curiosity, delight, enthusiasm. And this more than regal entry was the arrival not of some loved prince or triumphant captain of our own, but of a foreigner and the deliverer of a foreign people. Some were drawn by his daring as a fighter, and by the picturesque figure as of a hero of antique mould; many by sight of the sworn foe of Giant Pope; but what fired the hearts of most was the thought of him as the soldier who bore the sword for human freedom. The western world was in one of its generous moments. In those days there were idealists; democracy was conscious of common interests and common brotherhood; a liberal Europe was then a force and not a dream.

“We who then saw Garibaldi for the first time,” Mr. Gladstone said nearly twenty years after, “can many of us never forget the marvellous effect produced upon all minds by the simple nobility of his demeanour, by his manners and his acts.... Besides his splendid integrity, and his wide and universal sympathies, besides that seductive simplicity of manner which never departed from him, and that inborn and native grace which seemed to attend all his actions, I would almost select from every other quality this, which was in apparent contrast but real harmony in Garibaldi—the union of the most profound and tender humanity with his fiery valour.”80 He once described the Italian chief to me as “one of the finest combinations of profound and unalterable [pg 110] simplicity with self-consciousness and self-possession. I shall never forget an occasion at Chiswick; Palmerston, John Russell, and all the leaders were awaiting him on the perron; he advanced with perfect simplicity and naturalness, yet with perfect consciousness of his position; very striking and very fine.” Garibaldi dined with Mr. Gladstone, and they met elsewhere. At a dinner at Panizzi's, they sat by one another. “I remember,” said Mr. Gladstone, “he told a story in these words: ‘When I was a boy,’ he said, ‘I was at school in Genoa. It was towards the close of the great French Revolution. Genoa was a great military post—a large garrison always in the town, constant parades and military display, with bands and flags that were beyond everything attractive to schoolboys. All my schoolfellows used to run here and there all over the town to see if they could get sight of one of these military parades and exhibitions. I never went to one. It struck me then as a matter of pain and horror, that it should be necessary that one portion of mankind should be set aside to have for their profession the business of destroying others.’ ”

Another side of Garibaldi was less congenial. A great lady wrote to Mr. Gladstone of a conversation with him. “I talked to Garibaldi with regret that Renan was so much read in Italy. He said ‘Perche?’ and showed that he did not dislike it, and that he has also in leaving Rome left very much else. I know that woman's words are useless: the more men disbelieve, the more they think it well that women should be ‘superstitious.’ You are not likely to have arguments with him, but I would give much that he should take away with him some few words that would bring home to him the fact that the statesman he cares for most would think life a miserable thing without faith in God our Saviour.” To another correspondent on this point Mr. Gladstone wrote:—

The diary records:—

Suddenly one morning the country was surprised to learn that Garibaldi was at once departing. Dark suspicions rose instantly in the minds of his more democratic friends. It had always been rather bitter to them that he should be the guest of a duke. They now insisted that the whig aristocrats were in a panic lest he should compromise himself with the radicals, and that he was being hustled out of the country against his will. This suspicion next grew into something blacker still. A story spread that the Emperor of the French had taken umbrage, and signified to the government that the reception of Garibaldi was distasteful to France. Lord Clarendon promptly denied the fable. He told the House of Lords that the Emperor (of whom he had recently had an audience) had even expressed his admiration [pg 112] for the feeling of which the reception was a sign. Lord Palmerston in the other House explained that Garibaldi was going away earlier than had been expected, because at home he went to bed at eight and rose at five, and to a person of these habits to dine at half past eight and to remain in a throng of admirers until midnight must necessarily be injurious. Still the fog hung heavy on the public mind. A rider was now added to the tale, that it was the chancellor of the exchequer who out of deference to the Emperor, or to please the whigs, or out of complaisance to the court, had induced the hero to take his hurried leave. Mr. Gladstone was forced to explain to the House of Commons, seldom reluctant to lighten its graver deliberations with a personal incident, that the Duke of Sutherland had carried him to Stafford House; there he found that Garibaldi had accepted invitations to thirty provincial towns and that the list was growing longer every day; the doctors declared that the general's strength would never stand the exhaustion of a progress on such a scale; and the friends there present begged him to express his own opinion to Garibaldi. This Mr. Gladstone accordingly did, to the effect that the hero's life and health were objects of value to the whole world, and that even apart from health the repetition all over England of the national reception in London would do something to impair a unique historical event.82 The general was taken to show excellent sense by accepting advice not to allow himself to be killed by kindness. At any rate he firmly declared that if he could not go to all the places that invited him, it was impossible for him to draw a line of preference, and therefore he would go to none. His radical friends, however, seem to have instilled some of their own suspicions into his mind, for two days later (April 23) Mr. Gladstone writes to Lord Clarendon: “I am to see Garibaldi at Cliveden this evening, and it is possible that some occasion may offer there for obtaining from him a further declaration. But since I received your note the following circumstance has occurred. Clarence Paget has been to me, and reports that Mrs. ——, a well-known and [pg 113] zealous but anti-Mazzinian liberal in Italian matters, who is also a friend of Garibaldi's, has acquainted him that Garibaldi himself has made known to her that according to his own painful impression the English government do consider the prolongation of his stay in England very embarrassing, and are very anxious that he should go. What a pity, if this be so, that this simple and heroic man could not speak his mind plainly out to me, but wrapped himself in the depths of diplomatic reserve, instead of acting like Lord Aberdeen, who used to say, ‘I have a habit of believing people.’ ”83 After three or four days at Cliveden the general still held to his purpose. “April 24.—Cliveden. Conversation with Garibaldi. The utmost I could get from him was that it would be sad if the Italian people should lose its faith.” So Garibaldi forthwith sailed away from our shores.84

When all was over, an Italian statesman wrote to Panizzi that though he thought Garibaldi one of the choicest natures ever created,—enterprising, humane, disinterested, eminent in national service, yet neither he nor any other citizen was entitled to set himself above the laws of his country, and that such a man should be officially received by the heir to the throne and by secretaries of state, was a thing to be bitterly deplored by every sensible man.85 Still history [pg 114] can afford to agree with Mr. Gladstone when he said of Garibaldi—“His name is indeed illustrious, it remains inseparably connected with the not less illustrious name of the great Cavour, and these two names are again associated with the name of Victor Emmanuel. These three together form for Italians a tricolour as brilliant, as ever fresh, and I hope as enduring for many and many generations, as the national flag that now waves over united Italy.”

III

The tide of vast events in this momentous period now rolled heavily away from the Danube and the Bosphorus, from Tiber and Po and Adriatic sea, to the shores of the Baltic and the mouths of the Elbe. None of the fascination of old-world history lends its magic to the new chapter that opened in 1863. Cavour had gone. Bismarck with sterner genius, fiercer purpose, more implacable designs, and with a hand as of hammered iron, strode into the field. The Italian statesman was the author of a singular prediction. In 1861 when Cavour was deprecating angry protests from the European powers against his invasion of the Marches, he used words of extraordinary foresight to the representative of Prussia. “I am sorry,” he said, “that the cabinet of Berlin judges so severely the conduct of the King of Italy and his government. I console myself by thinking that on this occasion I am setting an example that probably in no long time, Prussia will be very glad to imitate.”86 So the world speedily found out.

The torch of nationality reached material for a flame long smouldering in two duchies of the remote north, that had been incorporated in Denmark by solemn European engagements in 1852, but were inhabited by a population, one of them wholly and the other mainly, not Scandinavian but German. Thus the same question of race, history, language, sentiment, that had worked in Italy, Poland, the Balkan states, rose up in this miniature case. The circumstances that brought that case into such fatal prominence do not concern us here. The alleged wrongs of her brethren in [pg 115] Schleswig-Holstein unchained such a tempest of excitement in central Germany, that the German courts could hardly have resisted if they would. Just as powerless was the Danish government in face of the Scandinavian sentiment of its subjects and their neighbours of the race. Even the liberals, then a power in Germany and Bismarck's bitter foes, were vehemently on the national side against the Danish claim; and one of the most striking of all Bismarck's feats was the skill with which he now used his domestic enemies to further his own designs of national aggrandisement. How war broke out between the small power and the two great powers of Austria and Prussia, and how the small power was ruthlessly crushed; by what infinite and complex machinations the diplomacy of Europe found itself paralysed; how Prussia audaciously possessed herself of territory that would give her a deep-water port, and the head of a channel that would unite two great seas; how all this ended in Prussia, “the Piedmont of the north,” doing what Cavour in his Piedmont of the south had foretold that she would be glad to do; how at Sadowa (July 3, 1866) Austria was driven out of her long hegemony, and Hanover incorporated; and to what a train of amazing conflicts in western Europe, to what unexpected victories, territorial change, dynastic ruin, this so resistlessly led up—here is a narrative that belongs to the province of history. Yet it has a place in any political biography of the Palmerston administration.

In such an era of general confusion, the English cabinet found no powerful or noble part to play. Still they went far—almost too far to recede—towards embarking in a continental war on behalf of Denmark, that would have been full of mischief to herself, of little profit to her client, and could hardly have ended otherwise than in widespread disaster. Here is one of the very few instances in which the public opinion of the country at the eleventh hour reined back a warlike minister. Lord Palmerston told the House of Commons in the summer of 1863 that, if any violent attempt were made to overthrow the rights of Denmark or to interfere with its independence and integrity, he was convinced that those who made the attempt would find in [pg 116] the result that “it would not be Denmark alone with which they would have to contend.”87 This did indeed sound like a compromising declaration of quite sufficient emphasis.

Throughout the session of 1864 the attention of the country was fixed upon this question whether England should or should not take part in the war between Germany and Denmark. The week before the time arrived for the minister to announce the decision of the cabinet, it became clear that public opinion in the great English centres would run decisively for non-intervention. Some of the steadiest supporters of government in parliament boldly told the party whips that if war against Germany were proposed, they would vote against it. The cabinet met. Palmerston and Lord Russell were for war, even though it would be war single-handed. Little support came to them. The Queen was strongly against them. They bemoaned to one another the timidity of their colleagues, and half-mournfully contrasted the convenient ciphers that filled the cabinets of Pitt and Peel, with the number of able men with independent opinions in their own administration. The prime minister, as I have heard from one who was present, held his head down while the talk proceeded, and then at last [pg 118] looking up said in a neutral voice, “I think the cabinet is against war.” Here is Mr. Gladstone's record:—

It seems almost incredible that a cabinet of rational men could have debated for ten minutes the question of going to war with Prussia and Austria, when they knew that twenty thousand men were the largest force that we could have put into the field when war began, though moderate additions might have been made as time went on—not, however, without hazardous denudation of India, where the memories of the mutiny were still fresh. The Emperor of the French in fact had good reason for fearing that he would be left in the lurch again, as he thought that he had been left before in his attempts for Poland. Your intervention, he said to England, will be naval; but we may have to fight a people of forty millions on land, and we will not intervene unless you engage to send troops.91 The dismemberment of Denmark was thought an odious feat, but the localisation of the war was at least a restriction of the evils attending it.

A high parliamentary debate followed (July 4) on a motion made by Mr. Disraeli, “to express to Her Majesty our great regret that while the course pursued by the government had failed to maintain their avowed policy of upholding the independence and integrity of Denmark, it has lowered the just influence of this country in the councils of Europe, and thereby diminished the securities for peace.”92 Cobden taunted both front benches pretty impartially with the equivocal and most dishonourable position into which their policy had brought the country, by encouraging a small power to fight two great ones and then straightway leaving her to get out as best she might. The government [pg 119] was only saved by Palmerston's appeal to its financial triumphs—the very triumphs that he had himself made most difficult to achieve. The appeal was irrelevant, but it was decisive, and ministers escaped a condemnation by no means unmerited on the special issue, by a majority of eighteen. The Manchester men agreed to help in the result, because in Cobden's words they were convinced that a revolution had been at last wrought in the mischievous policy of incessant intervention. Mr. Disraeli's case was easy, but to propound an easy case when its exposition demands much selection from voluminous blue-books is often hard, and the orator was long and over-elaborate. The excitement of an audience, aware all the time that actual danger hovered over the ministry, revived afresh when Disraeli sat down and Gladstone rose. The personal emulation of powerful rivals lends dramatic elements to disputation. Lord Palmerston had written to Mr. Gladstone beforehand—“We shall want a great gun to follow Disraeli. Would you be ready to follow him?”

Nobody who is not historian or biographer is likely to read this speech of Mr. Gladstone's to-day, but we may believe contemporary witnesses who record that the orator's weight of fact, his force of argument, his sarcastic play of personal impulse and motive, his bold and energetic refutation of hostile criticism, his defiant statement of the ministerial case, so impressed even a sceptical and doubting House that, though his string of special pleas did not amount to a justification, “they almost reached the height of an excuse,” and they crushed the debate. The basis was the familiar refrain upon Mr. Gladstone's lips,—“The steps taken by the government, what were they but endeavours to bind together [pg 120] the powers of Europe for fulfilment and maintenance of an important European engagement?” Still history, even of that sane and tempered school that is content to take politics as often an affair of second-best, will probably judge that Mr. Disraeli was not wrong when he said of the policy of this era that, whether we looked to Russia, to Greece, to France, there had been exhibited by ministers a confusion, an inconsistency of conduct, a contrariety of courses with regard to the same powers and a total want of system in their diplomacy.93 It is true, however, that just the same confusion, inconsistency, and contrariety marked Russia, France, and Austria themselves. Another speaker of the same party, as mordant as Disraeli, and destined like him to rise to the chief place in the councils of the nation, went further, and said, in following Cobden in the debate, “If Mr. Cobden had been foreign secretary, instead of Lord Russell, I fully believe this country would occupy a position proud and noble compared to that which she occupies at this moment. She would at least have been entitled to the credit of holding out in the name of England no hopes which she did not intend to fulfil, of entering into no engagements from which she was ready to recede.”94 Well might Mr. Gladstone enter in his diary:—

I

A rapid and extraordinary change began to take place in Mr. Gladstone's position after the year 1863. With this was associated an internal development of his political ideas and an expansion of social feeling, still more remarkable and interesting. As we have seen, he reckoned that a little earlier than this he had reached his lowest point in public estimation. He had now been more than thirty years in parliament. He had sat in three cabinets, each of a different colour and different connections from the other two. It was not until he had seen half a century of life on our planet, and more than quarter of a century of life in the House of Commons, that it was at all certain whether he would be conservative or liberal, to what species of either genus he would attach himself, or whether there might not from his progressive transmutations be evolved some variety wholly new.

I have already given his picture of the Palmerston cabinet as a kaleidoscope, and the same simile would be no bad account of his own relation to the political groups [pg 122] and parties around him. The Manchester men and the young radicals from the West Riding of Yorkshire were his ardent adherents when he preached economy and peace, but they were chilled to the core by his neutrality or worse upon the life and death struggle across the Atlantic. His bold and confident finance was doubted by the whigs, and disliked by the tories. But then the tories, apart from their wiser leader, were delighted by his friendly words about the Confederates, and the whigs were delighted with his unflagging zeal for the deliverance of Italy. Only, zeal for the deliverance of Italy lost him the friendship of those children of the Holy Father who came from Ireland. Then again the City was not easy at the flash of activity and enterprise at the exchequer, and the money-changers did not know what disturbance this intrepid genius might bring into the traffic of their tables. On the other hand, the manufacturers and the merchants of the midlands and the north adored a chancellor whose budgets were associated with expanding trade and a prosperity that advanced by leaps and bounds. The nonconformists were attracted by his personal piety, though repelled by its ecclesiastical apparel. The high churchmen doubtless knew him for their own, yet even they resented his confederacy with an erastian and a latitudinarian like John Russell, or a Gallio like Lord Palmerston, who distributed mitres and crown benefices at the ultra-evangelical bidding of Lord Shaftesbury. To borrow a figure from a fine observer of those days,—the political molecules were incessantly forming and re-forming themselves into shifting aggregates, now attracted, now repelled by his central force; now the nucleus of an organised party, then resolved again in loose and distant satellites.

The great families still held ostensibly the predominance in the liberal party which they had earned by their stout and persistent fidelity to parliamentary reform. Their days of leadership, however, were drawing towards an end, though the process has not been rapid. They produced some good administrators, but nobody with the gifts of freshness and political genius. The three originating statesmen of that era, after all, were Cobden, Gladstone, Disraeli, none of them [pg 123]

born in the purple of the directing class. A Yorkshire member, destined to a position of prominence, entered the House in 1861, and after he had been there a couple of years he wrote to his wife, that “the want of the liberal party of a new man was great, and felt to be great; the old whig leaders were worn out; there were no new whigs; Cobden and Bright were impracticable and un-English, and there were hardly any hopeful radicals. There was a great prize of power and influence to be aimed at.”95

This parliamentary situation was the least part of it. No man could guide the new advance, now so evidently approaching, unless he clearly united fervour and capacity for practical improvements in government to broad and glowing sympathies, alike with the needs and the elemental instincts of the labouring mass. Mr. Gladstone offered that wonderful combination. “If ever there was a statesman,” said Mill, about this time, “in whom the spirit of improvement is incarnate, and in whose career as a minister the characteristic feature has been to seek out things that require or admit of improvement, instead of waiting to be pressed or driven to do them, Mr. Gladstone deserves that signal honour.” Then his point of view was lofty; he was keenly alive to the moving forces of the hour; his horizons were wide; he was always amply founded in facts; he had generous hopes for mankind; his oratory seized vast popular audiences, because it was the expression of a glowing heart and a powerful brain. All this made him a demagogue in the same high sense in which Pericles, Demosthenes, John Pym, Patrick Henry were demagogues.

It is easy to see some at any rate of the influences that were bringing Mr. Gladstone decisively into harmony with the movement of liberal opinions, now gradually spreading over Great Britain. The resurrection of Italy could only be vindicated on principles of liberty and the right of a nation to choose its own rulers. The peers and the ten-pound householders who held power in England were no Bourbon tyrants; but just as in 1830 the overthrow of the Bourbon line in France was followed by the Reform bill here, so the [pg 124] Italian revolution of 1860 gave new vitality to the popular side in England. Another convulsion, far away from our own shores, was still more directly potent alike in quickening popular feeling, and by a strange paradox in creating as a great popular leader the very statesman who had failed to understand it. It was impossible that a man so vigilant and so impressionable as Mr. Gladstone was, should escape the influence of the American war. Though too late to affect his judgment on the issues of the war, he discerned after the event how, in his own language, the wide participation of the people in the choice of their governors, by giving force and expression to the national will in the United States, enabled the governors thus freely chosen to marshal a power and develop an amount of energy in the execution of that will, such as probably have never been displayed in an equal time and among an equal number of men since the race of mankind sprang into existence.96 In this judgment of the American civil war, he only shared in a general result of the salvation of the Union; it reversed the fashionable habit of making American institutions English bugbears, and gave a sweeping impulse to that steady but resistless tide of liberal and popular sentiment that ended in the parliamentary reform of 1867.

The lesson from the active resolution of America was confirmed by the passive fortitude of Lancashire. “What are the questions,” Mr. Gladstone asked in 1864, “that fit a man for the exercise of a privilege such as the franchise? Self-command, self-control, respect for order, patience under suffering, confidence in the law, regard for superiors; and when, I should like to ask, were all these great qualities exhibited in a manner more signal, even more illustrious, than in the conduct of the general body of the operatives of Lancashire under the profound affliction of the winter of 1862?” So on two sides the liberal channel was widened and deepened and the speed of its currents accelerated.

Besides large common influences like these, Mr. Gladstone's special activities as a reformer brought him into contact with the conditions of life and feeling among the workmen, [pg 125]

and the closer he came to them, the more did his humane and sympathetic temper draw him towards their politics and the ranks of their party. Looking back, he said, upon the years immediately succeeding the fall of Napoleon in 1815, he saw the reign of ideas that did not at all belong to the old currents of English history, but were a reaction against the excesses of the French revolution. This reaction seemed to set up the doctrine that the masses must be in standing antagonism to the law, and it resulted in severities that well justified antagonism. “To-day the scene was transformed; the fixed traditional sentiment of the working man had become one of confidence in the law, in parliament, even in the executive government.” In 1863 he was busy in the erection of the post office savings banks. A deputation of a powerful trades union asked him to modify his rules so as to enable them to place their funds in the hands of the government. A generation before, such confidence would have been inconceivable. In connection with the Government Annuities bill a deputation of workmen came to him, and said, “If there had been any suspicion or disinclination towards it on the part of the working classes, it was due to the dissatisfaction with parliament as to suffrage.” When he replied with something about the alleged indifference and apparent inaction of the working classes as to suffrage, they said, “Since the abolition of the corn laws we have given up political agitation; we felt we might place confidence in parliament; instead of political action, we tried to spend our evenings in the improvement of our minds.” This convinced him that it was not either want of faith in parliament, or indifference to a vote, that explained the absence of agitation.

II

The outcome of this stream of new perceptions and new feeling in his mind was a declaration that suddenly electrified the political world. A Yorkshire liberal one afternoon (May 11, 1864) brought in a bill for lowering the franchise, and Mr. Gladstone spoke for the government. He dwelt upon the facts, historic and political. The parliamentary history [pg 126] of reform for the thirteen years, since Locke King's motion in 1851 upset a government, had been most unsatisfactory, and to set aside all the solemn and formal declarations from 1851 down to the abortive Reform bill of 1860 would be a scandal. Then, was not the state of the actual case something of a scandal, with less than one-tenth of the constituencies composed of working men, and with less than one-fiftieth of the working men in possession of the franchise? How could you defend a system that let in the lower stratum of the middle class and shut out the upper stratum of the working class? In face of such dispositions as the workmen manifested towards law, parliament, and government, was it right that the present system of almost entire exclusion should prevail? Then came the sentence that, in that stagnant or floundering hour of parliamentary opinion, marked a crisis. “I call upon the adversary to show cause, and I venture to say that every man who is not presumably incapacitated by some consideration of personal unfitness or of political danger, is morally entitled to come within the pale of the constitution. Of course, in giving utterance to such a proposition, I do not recede from the protest I have previously made against sudden, or violent, or excessive, or intoxicating change.”

He concluded in words that covered much ground, though when closely scrutinised they left large loopholes. “It is well,” he said, “that we should be suitably provided with armies and fleets and fortifications; it is well, too, that all these should rest upon and be sustained, as they ought to be, by a sound system of finance, and out of a revenue not wasted by a careless parliament or by a profligate administration. But that which is better and more weighty still is that hearts should be bound together by a reasonable extension, at fitting times and among selected portions of the people, of every benefit and every privilege that can be justly conferred upon them.”

The thunderbolt of a sentence about every man's moral title to a vote startled the House with an amazement, half delight and half consternation, that broke forth in loud volleys of cheering and counter-cheering. It was to little [pg 127]

purpose that the orator in the next breath interposed his qualifications. One of the fated words had been spoken that gather up wandering forces of time and occasion, and precipitate new eras. A conservative speaker instantly deplored the absence of the prime minister, and the substitution in his stead of his “intractable chancellor of the exchequer.” An important liberal speaker, with equal promptitude, pointed out that one effect of the speech would be, in the first place, loss of conservative support to the government, and, in the second place, a very great gain to the health and vigour of the liberal party. Two whigs ran off to tell Phillimore that Gladstone had said something that would make his hair stand on end. Speculations began to hum and buzz whether the oracular deliverance would not upset the government. In the press a tremendous storm broke. Mr. Gladstone was accused of ministering aliments to popular turbulence and vanity, of preaching the divine right of multitudes, and of encouraging, minister of the crown though he was, a sweeping and levelling democracy. They charged him with surveying mankind in the abstract and suffrage in the abstract, and in that kingdom of shadows discovering or constructing vast universal propositions about man's moral rights. Mr. Disraeli told him that he had revived the doctrine of Tom Paine. The radicals were as jubilant as whigs and tories were furious. They declared that the banner he had raised aloft was not what the tories denounced as the standard of domestic revolution, but the long lost flag of the liberal party. “There is not a statesman in England of the very first rank,” said one newspaper, “who has dared to say as much, and Mr. Gladstone, in saying it, has placed himself at the head of the party that will succeed the present administration.” This was true, but in the meantime the head of the existing administration was still a marvel of physical vigour, and though at the moment he was disabled by gout, somebody must have hurried to Cambridge House and told him the desperate tidings. On the very instant he sent down a note of inquiry to Mr. Gladstone, asking what he had really said. A brisk correspondence followed, neither heated nor unfriendly.

In the morning Lord Palmerston had written him a premonitory note, not to commit himself or the government to any particular figure of borough franchise; that a six pound franchise had gone to the bottom; that if they should ever have to bring in a reform bill, they ought to be free from fresh pledges; that the workmen would swamp the classes above them; that their influx would discourage the classes above from voting at all; and that the workmen were under the control of trade unions directed by a small number of agitators. All this was the good conservative common form of the time. The speech itself, when the prime minister came to see it, proved no sedative.

On the following day Lord Palmerston wrote to him, “I have no doubt that you have yourself heard a great deal [pg 130] about the bad effect of your speech, but I can assure you that I hear from many quarters the unfavourable impression it has produced even upon many of the liberal party, and upon all persons who value the maintenance of our institutions.”

To others, Mr. Gladstone wrote in less formal style, for instance to an eminent nonconformist minister: “May 14. I have unwarily, it seems, set the Thames on fire. But I have great hopes that the Thames will, on reflection perceive that he had no business or title to catch the flame, and will revert to his ordinary temperature accordingly.” And to his brother Robertson, he writes from Brighton, three days later:—

In the diary he says: “May 11.—Spoke on the franchise bill. Some sensation. It appears to me that it was due less to me, than to the change in the hearers and in the public mind from the professions at least if not the principles of 1859.” Much against Lord Palmerston's wish, the speech was published, with a short preface that even staunch friends like Phillimore found obscure and not well written.

An address, significant of the general feeling in the unenfranchised classes, was presented to him from the workmen of York a month after his speech in parliament. They recalled his services to free trade when he stood by the side of Peel; his budget of 1860; his conspicuous and honourable share in abolishing the taxes on knowledge. “We have marked,” they said, “your manifestations of sympathy with the down-trodden and oppressed of every clime. You have advanced the cause of freedom in foreign lands by the power and courage with which you have assailed and exposed the misdeeds and cruelties of continental tyrants. To the provident operative you have by your Post Office [pg 131] Savings Bank bill given security for his small savings, and your Government Annuities bill of this session is a measure which will stimulate the people to greater thrift and forethought. These acts, together with your speeches on the last named, and on the Borough Franchise bill, make up a life that commands our lasting gratitude.” Such was the new popular estimate of him. In framing his reply to this address Mr. Gladstone did his best to discourage the repetition of like performances from other places; he submitted the draft to Lord Palmerston, and followed his advice in omitting certain portions of it. It was reduced to the conventional type of such acknowledgment.

III

In the autumn of 1864 Mr. Gladstone made a series of speeches in his native county, which again showed the sincerity and the simplicity of his solicitude for the masses of his countrymen. The sentiment is common. Mr. Disraeli and the Young Englanders had tried to inscribe it upon a party banner twenty years before. But Mr. Gladstone had given proof that he knew how to embody sentiment in acts of parliament, and he associated it with the broadest ideas of citizenship and policy. These speeches were not a manifesto or a programme; they were a survey of the principles of the statesmanship that befitted the period.

At Bolton (Oct. 11) he discoursed to audiences of the working class upon the progress of thirty years, with such freshness of spirit as awoke energetic hopes of the progress for the thirty years that were to follow. The next day he opened a park with words from the heart about the modern sense of the beauties of nature. The Greeks, he said, however much beauty they might have discerned in nature, had no sympathy with the delight in detached natural objects—a tree, or a stream, or a hill—which was so often part of the common life of the poorest Englishman. Even a century or less ago “communion with nature” would have sounded an affected and unnatural phrase. Now it was a sensible part of the life of the working classes. Then came moralising, at that date less trite than it has since become, about the [pg 132] social ties that ought to mark the relations between master and workman.

The same night at a banquet in Liverpool, and two days later at Manchester, he advanced to high imperial ground. He told them how, after an experience now becoming long, the one standing pain to the political man in England is a sense of the inequality of his best exertions to the arduous duty of government and legislation. England had undertaken responsibilities of empire such as never before lay on the shoulders or the minds of men. We governed distant millions many times outnumbering ourselves. We were responsible for the welfare of forty or forty-five separate states. Again, what other nation was charged with the same responsibility in the exercise of its moral influence abroad, in the example it is called upon to set, in the sympathy it must feel with the cause of right and justice and constitutional freedom wherever that cause is at issue? As for our fellow subjects abroad, we had given them practical freedom. It was our duty to abstain as far as may be from interference with their affairs, to afford them the shelter and protection of the empire, and at the same time to impress upon them that there is no grosser mistake in politics than to suppose you can separate the blessings and benefits of freedom from its burdens. In other words, the colonies should pay their own way, and if the old dream of making their interests subservient to those of the mother country had passed away, it was just as little reasonable that the mother country should bear charges that in equity belonged to them, and all the more if the colonies set up against the industry and productions of England the mischiefs and obstructions of an exploded protective system. On foreign policy he enforced the principles that, after all, had given to Europe forty years of peace, and to England forty years of diplomatic authority and pre-eminence. “It is impossible that to a country like England the affairs of foreign nations can ever be indifferent. It is impossible that England, in my opinion, ever should forswear the interest she must naturally feel in the cause of truth, of justice, of order, and of good government.” [pg 133] The final word was an admonition against “political lethargy.” For the first time, I think, he put into the forefront the tormenting question that was to haunt him to the end. “They could not look at Ireland,” he told them, “and say that the state of feeling there was for the honour and the advantage of the united kingdom.”

It was observed of this Lancashire tour, by critics who hardly meant to praise him, that he paid his hearers the high compliment of assuming that they could both understand his arguments, and feel his appeal to their moral sympathies. His speeches, men said, were in fact lay sermons of a high order, as skilfully composed, as accurately expressed, as if they were meant for the House of Commons. This was singularly true, and what an eulogy it was for our modern British democracy that the man whom they made their first great hero was an orator of such a school. Lord Lyttelton, his brother-in-law, informed him of the alarm and odium that his new line of policy was raising. Mr. Gladstone (April, 1865) replied: “After all, you are a peer, and Peel used to say, speaking of his peer colleagues, that they were beings of a different order. Please to recollect that we have got to govern millions of hard hands; that it must be done by force, fraud, or good will; that the latter has been tried and is answering; that none have profited more by this change of system since the corn law and the Six Acts, than those who complain of it. As to their misliking me, I have no fault to find with them for that. It is the common lot in similar circumstances, and the very things that I have done or omitted doing from my extreme and almost irrational reluctance to part company with them, become an aggravation when the parting is accomplished.” “Gladstone, I think,” [pg 134] says Bishop Wilberforce (Dec. 7), “is certainly gaining power. You hear now almost every one say he must be the future premier, and such sayings tend greatly to accomplish themselves.”

IV

It was about this time that Mr. Gladstone first found himself drawing to relations with the protestant dissenters, that were destined to grow closer as years went on. These relations had no small share in the extension of his public power; perhaps, too, no small share in the more abiding work upon the dissenters themselves, of enlarging what was narrow, softening what was hard and bitter, and promoting a healing union where the existence of a church establishment turned ecclesiastical differences into lines of social division. He had alarmed his friends by his action on a measure (April 15, 1863) for remedying an old grievance about the burial of dissenters. Having served on a select committee appointed in the rather quixotic hope that a solution of the difficulty might be found by the somewhat unparliamentary means of “friendly conversation among candid and impartial men,” he had convinced himself that there was a wrong to be set right, and he voted and spoke accordingly. “It will most rudely shake his Oxford seat,” says Phillimore. The peril there was becoming daily more apparent. Then in 1864 and on later occasions he met leading nonconformist clergy at the house of Mr. Newman Hall—such men as Binney, Allon, Edward White, Baldwin Brown, Henry Reynolds, and that most admirable friend, citizen, and man, R.W. Dale, so well known as Dale of Birmingham. Their general attitude was described by Mr. Newman Hall as this: they hoped for the ultimate recognition of the free church theory, and meditated no political action to bring it about; they looked for it to come as the result of influence within the church of England, not of efforts from without. “Many dissenters,” one of them told him (Nov. 20, 1864), “would enter the church whatever their theory about establishment, if such slight modifications were made as would allow them to do so conscientiously—holding the essentials of the faith far more soundly than many within [pg 135] the established church.” Another regretted, after one of these gatherings, that they never got to the core of the subject, “namely that there run through the prayer-book from beginning to end ideas that are not accepted by numbers who subscribe, and which cannot all be admitted by any one.”

All this once more brought Mr. Gladstone into a curious position. Just as at Oxford he had in 1847 been the common hope of ultra-clericals on one hand and ultra-liberals on the other, so now he was the common hope of the two antagonistic schools of religious comprehension—the right, who looked towards the formularies, system, discipline, and tradition either of the Orthodox church or the Latin, and the left, who sought reunion on the basis of puritanism with a leaven of modern criticism. Always the devoted friend of Dr. Pusey and his school, he was gradually welcomed as ally and political leader by men like Dale and Allon, the independents, and Spurgeon, the baptist, on the broad ground that it was possible for all good men to hold, amid their differences about church government, the more vital sympathies and charities of their common profession. They even sounded him on one occasion about laying the foundation stone of one of their chapels. The broad result of such intercourse of the nonconformist leaders with this powerful and generous mind, enriched by historic knowledge and tradition, strengthened by high political responsibility, deepened by meditations long, strenuous, and systematic, was indeed remarkable. Dr. Allon expressed it, with admirable point, in a letter to him some fourteen years after our present date (April 15, 1878):—

V

A man's mind seldom moves forward towards light and freedom on a single line, and in Mr. Gladstone's case the same impulses that made him tolerant of formal differences as to church government led slowly to a still wider liberality in respect of far deeper differences. Readers may remember the shock with which in his youth he found that one person or another was a Unitarian. To Mr. Darbishire, a member of the Unitarian body who was for many years his friend, he wrote about some address of James Martineau's (Dec. 21, 1862):—

And to the same gentleman a year or two later (Jan. 2, 1865):—

To not a few the decisive change in Mr. Gladstone's mental history is the change from the “very narrow creed” of his youth to the “high Christian doctrine” of his after life. Still more will regard as the real transition the attainment of this “comforting persuasion,” this last word of benignity and tolerance. Here we are on the foundations. Tolerance is far more than the abandonment of civil usurpations over conscience. It is a lesson often needed quite as much in the hearts of a minority as of a majority. Tolerance means reverence for all the possibilities of Truth; it means acknowledgment that she dwells in diverse mansions, and wears vesture of many colours, and speaks in strange tongues; it means frank respect for freedom of indwelling conscience against mechanic forms, official conventions, social force; it means the charity that is greater than even faith and hope. Marked is the day for a man when he can truly say, as Mr. Gladstone here said, “Long, long have I cast those weeds behind me.”

I

The faithful steward is a chartered bore alike of the mimic and the working stage; the rake and spendthrift carries all before him. Nobody knew better than Mr. Gladstone that of all the parts in public life, the teasing and economising drudge is the most thankless. The public only half apprehends, or refuses to apprehend at all; his spending colleagues naturally fight; colleagues who do not spend, have other business and prize a quiet life. All this made Mr. Gladstone's invincible tenacity as guardian of the national accounts the more genuinely heroic. In a long letter from Balmoral, in the October of 1864, he began what was destined to be the closing battle of the six years' war. To Mrs. Gladstone he wrote:—

Figures, details, points, were varied, but the issue was in essence the same, and the end was much the same. Lord Palmerston took his stand on the demands of public opinion. He insisted (Oct. 19) that anybody who looked carefully at the signs of the times must see that there were at present two strong feelings in the national mind—the one a disinclination to organic changes in our representative system, the other a steady determination that the country should be placed and kept in an efficient condition of defence. He pointed to the dead indifference of the workmen themselves to their own enfranchisement as evidence of the one, and to the volunteer movement as evidence of the other.

Mr. Gladstone rejoined that it was Lord Palmerston's personal popularity, and not the conviction or desire of the nation, that kept up estimates. Palmerston retorted that this was to mistake cause and effect. “If I have in any degree been fortunate enough to have obtained some share of the goodwill and confidence of my fellow-countrymen, it has been because I have rightly understood the feelings and opinion of the nation.... You may depend upon it that any degree of popularity that is worth having can be obtained only by such means, and of that popularity I sincerely wish you the most ample share.” The strain was severe:—

The sort of success that awaited his strenuous endeavour has been already indicated.98

II

In the spring Mr. Gladstone made the first advance upon what was to be an important journey. All through February and March he worked with Phillimore and others upon the question of the Irish church. The thing was delicate, for his constituency would undoubtedly be adverse. His advisers resolved that he should speak on a certain motion from a radical below the gangway, to the effect that the present position of the Irish church establishment was unsatisfactory, and called for the early attention of the government. It is hard to imagine two propositions on the merits more indisputable, but a parliamentary resolution is not to be judged by its verbal contents only. Dillwyn's motion was known to mean disestablishment and nothing less. In that view, Mr. Gladstone wrote a short but pregnant letter to Phillimore—and this too meant disestablishment and nothing less. It was the first tolerably definite warning of what was to be one of the two or three greatest legislative acts of his career.

Lord Palmerston got wind of the forthcoming speech, and wrote a short admonitory note. He had heard that Mr. Gladstone was about to set forth his views as an individual, and not as a member of the government, and this was a distinction that he reckoned impracticable. Was it possible for a member of a government speaking from the treasury bench so to sever himself from the body corporate to which he belonged, as to be able to express decided opinions as an individual, and leave himself free to act upon different opinions, or abstain from acting on those opinions, when required to act as a member of the government taking part in the divisions of the body? And again, if his opinions happened not to be accepted by a colleague on the same bench, would not the colleague have either to acquiesce, or else to state in what respect his own opinion differed? In this case would not differences in a government be unnecessarily and prematurely forced upon the public? All this was the sound doctrine of cabinet government. Mr. Gladstone, replying, felt that “he could not as a minister, and as member for Oxford, allow the subject to be debated an indefinite number of times and remain silent.” His indictment of the Irish church was decisive. At the same time he was careful to explain in public correspondence that the question was out of all bearing on the practical politics of the day. Meanwhile, as spokesman for the government, Mr. Gladstone deprecated the responsibility of raising great questions at a time when they could not be seriously approached. One acute observer who knew him well, evidently took a different view of the practical politics of the day, or at any rate, of the morrow. Manning wrote to Mr. Gladstone two days [pg 143] after the speech was made and begged to be allowed to see him: “I read your speech on the Irish church, which set me musing and forecasting. It was a real grapple with the question.”

III

Not many days after this speech Cobden died. To his brother, Robertson, Mr. Gladstone wrote:—

A few months before this Mr. Gladstone had lost a friend more intimate. The death of the Duke of Newcastle, he says (Oct. 19, 1864), “severs the very last of those contemporaries who were also my political friends. How it speaks to me ‘Be doing, and be done.’ ”

IV

On July 6 (1865) parliament was dissolved. Four years before, Mr. Gladstone had considered the question of retaining or abandoning the seat for the university. It was in contemplation to give a third member to the southern division of Lancashire, and, in July 1861, he received a requisition begging his assent to nomination there, signed by nearly 8000 of the electors—a number that seemed to make success certain. His letters to Dr. Pusey and others show how strongly he inclined to comply. Flesh and blood shrank from perpetual strife, he thought, and after four contested elections in fourteen years at Oxford, he asked himself whether he should not escape the prolongation of the series. He saw, as he said, that they meant to make it a life-battle, like the old famous college war between Bentley and the fellows of Trinity. But he felt his deep obligation to his Oxford supporters, and was honourably constrained again to bear their flag. In the same month of 1861 he had declined absolutely to stand for London in the place of Lord John Russell.

At Oxford the tories this time had secured an excellent candidate in Mr. Gathorne Hardy, a man of sterling character, a bold and capable debater, a good man of business, one of the best of Lord Derby's lieutenants. The election was hard fought, like most of the four that had gone before it. The educated residents were for the chancellor of the exchequer, as they had always been, and he had both liberals and high churchmen on his side. One feature was novel, the power of sending votes by post. Mr. Gladstone had not been active [pg 145] in the House against this change, but only bestowed upon it a parting malediction. It strengthened the clerical vote, and as sympathy with disestablishment was thrust prominently forward against Mr. Gladstone, the new privilege cost him his seat. From the first day things looked ill, and when on the last day (July 18) the battle ended, he was one hundred and eighty votes behind Mr. Hardy.99

His valedictory address was both graceful and sincere: “After an arduous connection of eighteen years, I bid you respectfully farewell. My earnest purpose to serve you, my many faults and shortcomings, the incidents of the political relation between the university and myself, established in 1847, so often questioned in vain, and now, at length, finally dissolved, I leave to the judgment of the future. It is one imperative duty, and one alone, which induces me to trouble you with these few parting words—the duty of expressing my profound and lasting gratitude for indulgence as generous, and for support as warm and enthusiastic in itself, and as honourable from the character and distinctions of those who have given it, as has in my belief ever been accorded by any constituency to any representative.”

He was no sooner assured of his repulse at Oxford, than he started for the Lancashire constituency, where a nomination had been reserved for him.

In the fine hall that stands upon the site made historic by the militant free-traders, he used a memorable phrase. “At last, my friends,” he began, “I am come among you, and I am come among you ‘unmuzzled.’ ” The audience quickly realised the whole strength of the phrase, and so did the people of the country when it reached them. Then he opened a high magnanimous exordium about the Oxford that had cast him out. The same evening at Liverpool, he again dwelt on the desperate fondness with which he had clung to the university seat, but rapidly passed to the contrast. “I come into South Lancashire, and find here around me different phenomena. I find the development of industry. I find the growth of enterprise. I find the progress of social philanthropy. I find the prevalence of toleration. I find an ardent desire for freedom. If there be one duty more than another incumbent upon the public men of England, it is to establish and maintain harmony between the past of our glorious history and the future that is still in store for her.”

When the votes were counted Mr. Gladstone was third upon the poll, and so secured the seat, with two tory colleagues above him.100

The spirit in which Mr. Gladstone took a defeat that was no mere electioneering accident, but the landmark of a great severance in his extraordinary career, is shown in his replies to multitudes of correspondents. On the side of his tenacious and affectionate attachment to Oxford, the wound was deep. On the other side, emancipation from fetters and from contests that he regarded as ungenerous, was a profound relief. But the relief touched him less than the sorrow.

Manning wrote:—

Mr. Gladstone replied:—

The bishop naturally hinted some curiosity as to the third transmigration. “The oracular sentence,” Mr. Gladstone replied, “has little bearing on present affairs or prospects, and may stand in its proper darkness.” In the same letter the bishop urged Mr. Gladstone to imitate Canning when he claimed the post of prime minister. “I think,” was the reply (July 25) “that if you had the same means of estimating my position, jointly with my faculties, as I have, you would be of a different opinion. It is my fixed determination never to take any step whatever to raise myself to a higher level in official life, and this not on grounds of Christian self-denial which would hardly apply, but on the double ground, first, of my total ignorance of my capacity, bodily or mental, to hold such a higher level, and, secondly—perhaps I might say especially—because I am certain that the fact of my seeking it would seal my doom in taking it.”103

Truly was it said of Mr. Gladstone that his rejection at Oxford, and his election in Lancashire, were regarded as matters of national importance, because he was felt to have the promise of the future in him, to have a living fire in him, a capacity for action, and a belief that moving on was a national necessity; because he was bold, earnest, impulsive; because he could sympathise with men of all classes, occupations, interests, opinions; because he thought nothing done so long as much remained for him to do. While liberals thus venerated him as if he had been a Moses beckoning from Sinai towards the promised land, tories were described as dreading him, ever since his suffrage speech, as continental monarchs dreaded Mazzini—“a man whose name is at once an alarm, a menace, and a prediction.” They hated him partly as a deserter, partly as a disciple of Manchester. Throughout the struggle, the phrase “I believe in Mr. Gladstone” served as the liberal credo, and “I distrust Mr. [pg 151] Gladstone” as the condensed commination service of the tories upon all manner of change.104

V

On October 18, the prime minister died at Brocket. The news found Mr. Gladstone at Clumber, in performance of his duties as Newcastle trustee. For him the event opened many possibilities, and his action upon it is set out in two or three extracts from his letters:—

He received, as was inevitable, plenty of letters from admirers regretting that he had not gone up higher. His answer was, of course, uniform. “It was,” he told them, “my own impartial and firm opinion that Lord Russell was the proper person to succeed Lord Palmerston. However flattered I may be, therefore, to hear of an opinion such as you report and express, I have felt it my duty to co-operate to the best of my power in such arrangements as might enable the government to be carried on by the present ministers, with Lord Russell at their head.”

On the other hand, doubts were abundant. To Sir George Grey, one important friend wrote (Oct. 30): “I think you are right on the score of health, to give him [Gladstone] the lead of the House; but you will see, with all his talents, he will not perceive the difference between leading and driving.” Another correspondent, of special experience, confessed to “great misgivings as to Gladstone's tact and judgment.” “The heart of all Israel is towards him,” wrote his good friend Dean Church; “he is very great and very noble. But he is hated as much as, or more than, he is loved. He is fierce sometimes and wrathful and easily irritated; he wants knowledge of men and speaks rashly. And I look on with some trembling to see what will come of this his first attempt to lead the Commons and prove himself fit to lead England.”107 It was pointed out that Roundell Palmer was the only powerful auxiliary on whom he could rely in debate, and should the leader himself offend the House by an indiscretion, no colleague was competent to cover his retreat or baffle the triumph of the enemy. His first public appearance as leader of the House of Commons and associate premier was made at Glasgow, and his friends were relieved and exultant. The point on which they trembled was caution, and at Glasgow he was caution personified.

The changes in administration were not very difficult. Lowe's admission to the cabinet was made impossible by his [pg 156] declaration against any lowering of the borough franchise. The inclusion of Mr. Goschen, who had only been in parliament three years, was the subject of remark. People who asked what he had done to merit promotion so striking, did not know his book on foreign exchanges, and were perhaps in no case competent to judge it.108 Something seems to have been said about Mr. Bright, for in a note to Lord Russell (Dec. 11) Mr. Gladstone writes: “With reference to your remark about Bright, he has for many years held language of a studious moderation about reform. And there is something odious in fighting shy of a man, so powerful in talent, of such undoubted integrity. Without feeling, however, that he is permanently proscribed, I am under the impression that in the present critical state of feeling on your own side with respect to the franchise, his name would sink the government and the bill together.” When Palmerston invited Cobden to join his cabinet in 1859, Cobden spoke of Bright, how he had avoided personalities in his recent speeches. “It is not personalities that we complained of,” Palmerston replied; “a public man is right in attacking persons. But it is his attacks on classes that have given offence to powerful bodies, who can make their resentment felt.”109

Mr. Gladstone's first few weeks as leader of the House were almost a surprise. “At two,” he says (Feb. 1, 1867), “we went down to choose the Speaker, and I had to throw off in my new capacity. If mistrust of self be a qualification, God [pg 157] knows I have it.” All opened excellently. Not only was he mild and conciliatory, they found him even tiresome in his deference. Some onlookers still doubted. Everybody, they said, admired and respected him, some loved him, but there were few who understood him. “So far,” said a conservative observer, “Gladstone has led the House with great good temper, prosperity, and success, but his rank and file and some of his colleagues, seem to like him none the better on that account.”110 Meanwhile, words of friendly encouragement came from Windsor. On Feb. 19: “The Queen cannot conclude without expressing to Mr. Gladstone her gratification at the accounts she hears from all sides of the admirable manner in which he has commenced his leadership in the House of Commons.”

He found the speech for a monument to Lord Palmerston in the Abbey “a delicate and difficult duty” (Feb. 22). “It would have worn me down beforehand had I not been able to exclude it from my thoughts till the last, and then I could only feel my impotence.” Yet he performed the duty with grace and truth. He commemorated Palmerston's share in the extension of freedom in Europe, and especially in Italy, where, he said, Palmerston's name might claim a place on a level with her most distinguished patriots. Nor had his interest ever failed in the rescue of the “unhappy African race, whose history is for the most part written only in blood and tears.” He applauded his genial temper, his incomparable tact and ingenuity, his pluck in debate, his delight in a fair stand-up fight, his inclination to avoid whatever tended to exasperate, his incapacity of sustained anger.

I

The reader will have surmised that amidst all the press and strain in affairs of state, Mr. Gladstone's intensity of interest in affairs of the church never for an instant slackened. Wide as the two spheres stood apart, his temper in respect of them was much the same. In church and state alike he prized institutions and the great organs of corporate life; but what he thought of most and cared for and sought after most, was not their mechanism, though on that too he set its value, but the living spirit within the institution. In church and state alike he moved cautiously and tentatively. In both alike he strove to unite order, whether temporal order in the state or spiritual order in the church, with his sovereign principle of freedom. Many are the difficulties in the way of applying Cavour's formula of a free church in a free state, as most countries and their governors have by now found out. Yet to have a vivid sense of the supreme importance of the line between temporal power and spiritual is the note of a statesman fit for modern [pg 159] times. “The whole of my public life,” he wrote to the Bishop of Oxford in 1863, “with respect to matters ecclesiastical, for the last twenty years and more, has been a continuing effort, though a very weak one, to extricate her in some degree from entangled relations without shock or violence.”

The general temper of his churchmanship on its political side during these years is admirably described in a letter to his eldest son, and some extracts from it furnish a key to his most characteristic frame of mind in attempting to guide the movements of his time:—

He then goes on to cite as cases where something had been done towards securing the action of the church as a [pg 161] religious body, Canada, where clergy and people now appointed their own bishop; a recent judgment of the privy council leading to widespread emancipation of the colonial church; the revival of convocation; the licence to convocation to alter the thirty-sixth canon; the bestowal of self-government on Oxford. “In these measures,” he says, “I have been permitted to take my part; but had I adopted the rigid rule of others in regard to the temporal prerogatives, real or supposed, of the church, I should at once have lost all power to promote them.”

“As to disruption,” he wrote in these days, “that is the old cry by means of which in all times the temporal interests of the English church have been upheld in preference to the spiritual. The church of England is much more likely of the two, to part with her faith than with her funds. It is the old question, which is the greater, the gold or the altar that sanctifies the gold. Had this question been more boldly asked and more truly answered in other times, we should not have been where we now are. And by continually looking to the gold and not the altar, the dangers of the future will be not diminished but increased.”111

In 1866 Mr. Gladstone for the first time voted for the abolition of church rates. Later in the session he introduced his own plan, not in his capacity as minister, but with the approval of the Russell cabinet. After this cabinet had gone out, Mr. Gladstone in 1868 introduced a bill, abolishing all legal proceedings for the recovery of church rates, except in cases of rates already made, or where money had been borrowed on the security of the rates. But it permitted voluntary assessments to be made, and all agreements to make such payments on the faith of which any expense was incurred, remained enforcible in the same manner as contracts of a like character. Mr. Gladstone's bill became law in the course of the summer, and a struggle that had been long and bitter ended.

In another movement in the region of ecclesiastical machinery, from which much was hoped, though little is believed to have come, Mr. Gladstone was concerned, though [pg 162] I do not gather from the papers that he watched it with the zealous interest of some of his friends. Convocation, the ancient assembly or parliament of the clergy of the church of England, was permitted in 1852 to resume the active functions that had been suspended since 1717. To Mr. Gladstone some revival or institution of the corporate organisation of the church, especially after the Gorham judgment, was ever a cherished object. Bishop Wilberforce, long one of the most intimate of his friends, was chief mover in proceedings that, as was hoped, were to rescue the church from the anarchy in which one branch of her sons regarded her as plunged. Some of Mr. Gladstone's correspondence on the question of convocation has already been made public.112 Here it is enough to print a passage or two from a letter addressed by him to the bishop (Jan. 1, 1854) setting out his view of the real need of the time. After a generous exaltation of the zeal and devotion of the clergy, he goes on to the gains that might be expected from their effective organisation:—

II

In 1860 a volume appeared containing seven “essays and reviews” by seven different writers, six of them clergymen of the church of England. The topics were miscellaneous, the treatment of them, with one exception,113 was neither learned nor weighty, the tone was not absolutely uniform, but it was as a whole mildly rationalistic, and the negations, such as they were, exhibited none of the fierceness or aggression that had marked the old controversies about Hampden, or Tract Ninety, or Ward's Ideal. A storm broke upon the seven writers, that they little intended to provoke. To the apparent partnership among them was severely imputed a [pg 164] sinister design. They were styled “the Septem contra Christum”—six ministers of religion combining to assail the faith they outwardly professed—seven authors of an immoral rationalistic conspiracy. Two of them were haled into the courts, one for casting doubt upon the inspiration of the Bible, the other for impugning the eternity of the future punishment of the wicked. The Queen in council upon appeal was advised to reverse a hostile judgment in the court below (1864), and Lord Chancellor Westbury delivered the decision in a tone described in the irreverent epigram of the day as “dismissing eternal punishment with costs.” This carried further, or completed, the principle of the Gorham judgment fourteen years before, and just as that memorable case determined that neither the evangelical nor the high anglican school should drive out the other, so the judgment in the case of Essays and Reviews determined that neither should those two powerful sections drive out the new critical, rationalistic, liberal, or latitudinarian school. “It appears to me,” Mr. Gladstone wrote to the Bishop of London (April 26, 1864), “that the spirit of this judgment has but to be consistently and cautiously followed up, in order to establish, as far as the court can establish it, a complete indifference between the Christian faith and the denial of it. I do not believe it is in the power of human language to bind the understanding and conscience of man with any theological obligations, which the mode of argument used and the principles assumed [in the judgment] would not effectually unloose.” To Bishop Hamilton of Salisbury, who had taken part in one of the two cases, he wrote:—

In the same connection he wrote to Sir W. Farquhar, a friend from earliest days:—

III

No theological book, wrote Mr. Gladstone in 1866, that has appeared since the Vestiges of Creation twenty years before [pg 166] (1844), had attracted anything like the amount of notice bestowed upon “the remarkable volume entitled Ecce Homo,” published in 1865. It was an attempt, so Mr. Gladstone described it, to bring home to the reader the impression that there is something or other called the Gospel, “which whatever it may be,” as was said by an old pagan poet of the Deity,114 has formidable claims not merely on the intellectual condescension, but on the loyal allegiance and humble obedience of mankind. The book violently displeased both sides. It used language that could not be consistently employed in treating of Christianity from the orthodox point of view. On the other hand, it constituted “a grave offence in the eyes of those to whom the chequered but yet imposing fabric of actual Christianity, still casting its majestic light and shadow over the whole civilised world, is a rank eyesore and an intolerable offence.” Between these two sets of assailants Mr. Gladstone interposed with a friendlier and more hopeful construction.115 He told those who despised the book as resting on no evidence of the foundations on which it was built, and therefore as being shallow and uncritical, that we have a right to weigh the nature of the message, apart from the credentials of the messenger. Then he reassured the orthodox by the hope that “the present tendency to treat the old belief of man with a precipitate, shallow, and unexamining disparagement” is only a passing distemper, and that to the process of its removal the author of the book would have the consolation and the praise of having furnished an earnest, powerful, and original contribution.116 Dean Milman told him that he had brought to life again a book that after a sudden and brief yet brilliant existence seemed to be falling swiftly into oblivion. The mask of the anonymous had much to do, he thought, with its popularity, as had happened to the Vestiges of Creation. Undoubtedly when the mask fell off, interest dropped.

Dr. Pusey found the book intensely painful. “I have seldom,” he told Mr. Gladstone, “been able to read much at [pg 167] a time, but shut the book for pain, as I used to do with Renan's.” What revolted him was not the exhibition of the human nature of the central figure, but of a human nature apart from and inconsistent with its divinity; the writer's admiring or patronising tone was loathsome. “What you have yourself written,” Pusey said, “I like much. But its bearings on Ecce Homo I can hardly divine, except by way of contrast.” Dr. Newman thought that here was a case where materiam superabat opus, and that Mr. Gladstone's observations were more valuable for their own sake, than as a recommendation or defence of the book:—

As to the specific principles and particular opinions in Mr. Gladstone's criticism of what we now see to have been a not very effective or deeply influential book, we may think as we will. But the temper of his review, the breadth of its outlook on Christian thought, tradition, and society, show no mean elements in the composition of his greatness. So, too, does the bare fact that under the pressure of office and all the cares of a party leader in a crisis, his mind [pg 168] should have been free and disengaged enough to turn with large and eager interest to such themes as these. This was indeed the freedom of judgment with which, in the most moving lines of the poem that he loved above all others, Virgil bidding farewell to Dante makes him crowned and mitred master of himself—Perch' io te sopra te corono e mitrio.117

IV

Other strong gusts swept the high latitudes, when Dr. Colenso, Bishop of Natal, published certain destructive criticisms upon the canonical Scriptures. His metropolitan at Cape Town pronounced sentence of deprivation; Colenso appealed to the Queen in council; and the Queen in council was advised that the proceedings of the Bishop of Cape Town were null and void, for in law there was no established church in the colony, nor any ecclesiastical court with lawful jurisdiction.118 This triumph of heresy was a heavy blow. In 1866 Bishop Colenso brought an action against Mr. Gladstone and the other trustees of the colonial bishoprics fund, calling upon them to set aside a sum of ten thousand pounds for the purpose of securing the income of the Bishop of Natal, and to pay him his salary, which they had withheld since his wrongful deprivation. “We,” said Mr. Gladstone to Miss Burdett Coutts, “founding ourselves on the judgment, say there is no see of Natal in the sense of the founders of the fund, and therefore, of course, no bishop of such a see.” Romilly, master of the rolls, gave judgment in favour of Colenso. These perplexities did not dismay Mr. Gladstone. “Remembering what the churches in the colonies were some forty years back, when I first began (from my father's having a connection with the West Indies), to feel an interest in them, I must own that they present a cheering, a remarkable, indeed a wonderful spectacle.” “I quite feel with you,” he says to Miss Burdett Coutts, “a great uneasiness at what may follow from the exercise of judicial powers by synods [pg 169] merely ecclesiastical, especially if small, remote, and unchecked by an active public opinion. But in the American episcopal church it has been found practicable in a great degree to obviate any dangers from such a source.” Ten years after this, in one of the most remarkable articles he ever wrote, speaking of the protestant evangelical section of the adherents of the Christian system, he says that no portion of this entire group seems to be endowed with greater vigour than this in the United States and the British colonies, which has grown up in new soil, “and far from the possibly chilling shadow of national establishments of religion.”119

I

It must obviously be interesting, as we approach a signal crisis in his advance, to know the kind of impression, right or wrong, made by a great man upon those who came nearest to him. Friends like Aberdeen and Graham had many years earlier foreseen the high destinies of their colleague. Aberdeen told Bishop Wilberforce in 1855 that Gladstone had some great qualifications but some serious defects. “The chief, that when he has convinced himself, perhaps by abstract reasoning of some view, he thinks that every one else ought at once to see it as he does, and can make no allowance for difference of opinion.”120 About the same time Graham said of him that he was “in the highest sense of the word Liberal; of the greatest power; very much the first man in the House of Commons; detested by the aristocracy for his succession duty, the most truly conservative measure passed in my recollection.... He must rise to the head in such a government as ours, even in spite of all the hatred of him.” Three years later Aberdeen still thought him too obstinate and, if such a thing be possible, too honest. He does not enough think of what other men think. Does not enough look out of the window. “Whom [pg 171] will he lead?” asked the bishop.121 “Oh! it is impossible to say! Time must show, and new combinations.” By 1863 Cardwell confidently anticipated that Mr. Gladstone must become prime minister, and Bishop Wilberforce finds all coming to the conclusion that he must be the next real chief.122

On the other side Lord Shaftesbury, to whom things ecclesiastical were as cardinal as they were to Mr. Gladstone, ruefully reflected in 1864 that people must make ready for great and irrevocable changes. Palmerston was simply the peg driven through the island of Delos: unloose the peg, and all would soon be adrift. “His successor, Gladstone, will bring with him the Manchester school for colleagues and supporters, a hot tractarian for chancellor, and the Bishop of Oxford for ecclesiastical adviser. He will succumb to every pressure, except the pressure of a constitutional and conservative policy.” “He is a dangerous man,” was one of Lord Palmerston's latest utterances, “keep him in Oxford and he is partially muzzled; but send him elsewhere and he will run wild.”123 “The long and short of our present position is,” said Shaftesbury, “that the time has arrived (novus sœclorum nascitur ordo) for the triumph of the Manchester school, of which Gladstone is the disciple and the organ. And for the nonce they have a great advantage; for, though the majority of the country is against them, the country has no leaders in or out of parliament; whereas they are all well provided and are equally compact in purpose and action.”124 Somewhat earlier cool observers “out of hearing of the modulation of his voice or the torrent of his declamation” regarded him “in spite of his eloquence unsurpassed in our day, perhaps in our century, in spite of his abilities and experience, as one most dangerous to that side to which he belongs. Like the elephant given by some eastern prince to the man he intends to ruin, he is an inmate too costly for any party to afford to keep long.”125

“One great weight that Gladstone has to carry in the political race,” wrote his friend Frederick Rogers (Dec. 13, [pg 172] 1868), “is a character for want of judgment, and every addition to that is an impediment.” And indeed it is true in politics that it often takes more time to get rid of a spurious character, than to acquire the real one. According to a letter from Lord Granville to Mr. Gladstone (Feb. 11, 1867):—

Still people went on saying that he had yet to gain the same hold over his party in parliament that he had over the party in the nation; he had studied every branch of government except the House of Commons; he confounded the functions of leader with those of dictator; he took counsel with one or two individuals instead of conferring with the party; he proclaimed as edicts what he ought to have submitted as proposals; he lacked “the little civilities and hypocrisies” of political society. Such was the common cant of the moment. He had at least one friend who dealt faithfully with him:—

In a second letter, after mentioning again some of these complaints, Acland says: “On the other hand I know you are held by some of the best men (that dear, noble George Grey I am thinking of) to have the great quality of leadership: such clear apprehension of the points in council, and such faithful exactness in conveying the result agreed on, truly a great power for one who has such a copia verborum, with its temptations.” He still insists that a leader should drop into the tea-room and have afternoon chats with his adherents; and earnestly wishes him to belong to the Athenæum club, “a great centre of intellect and criticism,” where he would be [pg 175] sure to meet colleagues and the principal men in the public service.

All this was good advice enough, and most loyally intended. But it was work of supererogation. The House of Commons, like all assemblies, is even less affected by immediate displays than by the standing impression of power. Mr. Gladstone might be playful, courteous, reserved, gracious, silent, but the House always knew that he had a sledge-hammer behind his back, ready for work on every anvil in that resounding forge. His sheer intellectual strength, his experience and power in affairs, the tremendous hold that he had now gained upon the general public out of doors, made the artful genialities of the tea-room pure superfluity. Of the secret of the rapidity with which his star was rising, and of the popular expectations thereby signified, an admirable contemporary account was traced by an excellent observer,126 and it would be idle to transcribe the pith of it in words other than his own:—

A letter from Francis Newman to Mr. Gladstone is a good illustration of the almost passionate going out of men's hearts to him in those days:—

Church, afterwards the dean of St. Paul's, a man who united in so wonderful a degree the best gifts that come of culture, sound and just sense, and unstained purity of spirit, said of Mr. Gladstone at the moment of accession to power, “There never was a man so genuinely admired for the qualities which deserve admiration—his earnestness, his deep popular sympathies, his unflinching courage; and there never was a man more deeply hated both for his good points and for undeniable defects and failings. But they love him much less in the House than they do out of doors. A strong vein of sentiment is the spring of what is noblest about his impulses; but it is a perilous quality too.”128 An accomplished woman with many public interests met Mr. Bright in Scotland sometime after this. “He would not hear a word said against Mr. Gladstone. He said it was just because people were not good enough themselves to understand him that he met such abuse, and then he quoted the stanza in the third canto of Childe Harold:—

I asked if he did not think sometimes his temper carried Mr. Gladstone away. He said, ‘Think of the difference between a great cart horse, and the highest bred most sensitive horse you can imagine, and then, under lashing of a whip, think of the difference between them.’ ” After a stay with Mr. Gladstone in a country house, Jowett, the master of Balliol, said of him, “It is the first time that any one of such great simplicity has been in so exalted a station.”129

In one of his Lancashire speeches, Mr. Gladstone described in interesting language how he stood:—

Five-and-twenty years later, when his course was almost run, and the achievements of the long laborious day were over, he said:—

I

Mr. Denison, the Speaker, had a conversation with Mr. Gladstone almost immediately after the death of Lord Palmerston, and he reported the drift of it to Sir George Grey. The Speaker had been in Scotland, and found no strong feeling for reform or any other extensive change, while there was a general decline of interest in the ballot:—

The antecedents of the memorable crisis of 1866-7 were curious. Reform bills had been considered by five governments since 1849, and mentioned in six speeches from the throne. Each political party had brought a plan forward, and Lord John Russell had brought forward three. Mr. Bright also reduced his policy to the clauses of a bill in 1858. In 1859 Lord Derby's government had introduced a measure which old whigs and new radicals, uniting their forces, had successfully resisted. This move Mr. Gladstone—who, as the reader will recollect, had on that occasion voted with the tories140—always took to impose a decisive obligation on all who withstood the tory attempt at a settlement, to come forward with proposals of their own. On the other hand, in the new parliament, the tory party was known to be utterly opposed to an extension of the franchise, and a considerable fringe of professing liberals also existed who were quite as hostile, though not quite as willing to avow hostility before their constituents. All the leaders were committed, and yet of their adherents the majority was dubious or adverse. The necessity of passing a Reform bill through an anti-reform parliament thus produced a situation of unsurpassed perplexity. Some thought that formidable susceptibilities would be soothed, if the government were reconstructed and places found for new men. Others declared that the right course would be first to weld the party together by bills on which everybody was agreed; to read a good Reform bill a first time; then in the recess the country would let ministers see where they were, and the next session would find them on firm ground. But Lord Russell knew that he had little time to spare—he was now close upon seventy-four—and Mr. Gladstone was the last man to try to hold him back.

The proceedings of the new government began with a familiar demonstration of the miserable failure of English statesmen to govern Ireland, in the shape of the twentieth coercion bill, since the union. This need not detain us, nor need the budget, the eighth of the series that made this administration so memorable in the history of national finance. It was naturally quite enough for parliament that the accounts showed a surplus of £1,350,000; that the last tax on raw material vanished with the repeal of the duty on timber; that a series of commercial treaties had been successfully negotiated; and that homage should be paid to virtue by the nibbling of a mouse at the mountain of the national debt. The debt was eight hundred millions, and it was now proposed to apply half-a-million a year towards its annihilation. Reform, however, was the fighting question, and fighting questions absorb a legislature.

The chancellor of the exchequer introduced the Reform bill (March 12) in a speech that, though striking enough, was less impassioned than some of his later performances in the course of this famous contest. He did not forget that “the limbo of abortive creations was peopled with the skeletons of reform bills”; and it was his cue in a House so constituted as the one before him, to use the language and arguments of moderation and safety. Franchise was the real question at stake, and to that branch of reform the bill was limited. The other question of redistributing seats he likened to fighting in a wood, where there may be any number of partial encounters, but hardly a great and deciding issue. The only point on which there was a vital difference was the figure of the borough franchise. In 1859 Mr. Disraeli invented a quackish phrase about lateral extension and vertical extension, and offered votes to various classes who mainly had them already, without extending downwards; but whatever else his plan might do, it opened no door for the workmen. In 1860 the Palmerston government proposed a six pound occupation franchise for boroughs, and ten pounds for counties. The proposal of 1866 was seven pounds for boroughs, and fourteen for counties. We may smile at the thought that some of the [pg 201] most brilliant debates ever heard in the House of Commons now turned upon the mighty puzzle whether the qualification for a borough voter should be occupancy of a ten, a seven, or a six pound house;—nay, whether the ruin or salvation of the state might not lie on the razor-edge of distinction between rating and rental. Ministers were taunted with having brought in Mr. Bright's bill. Mr. Bright replied that he could not find in it a single point that he had recommended. He was never in favour of a six pound franchise; he believed in a household franchise; but if a seven pound franchise was offered, beggars could not be choosers, and seven pounds he would take. In a fragmentary note of later years Mr. Gladstone, among other things, describes one glittering protagonist of the hour:—

The first trial of strength arose upon a device of one of the greatest of the territorial whigs, seconded by a much more eminent man in the ranks of territorial tories. Lord Grosvenor [pg 202] announced a motion that they would not proceed with the franchise, until they were in possession of the ministerial intentions upon seats. Lord Stanley, the son of the tory leader, seconded the motion. Any other form would have served equally well as a test of conflicting forces. The outlook was clouded. Mr. Brand, the skilful whip, informed the cabinet, that there were three classes of disaffected liberals, who might possibly be kept in order; first, those who, although opposed to reform, were averse to a change of government; next, those who doubted whether ministers really intended to deal with the seats at all; and finally, those who felt sure that when they came to deal with seats, they would be under the baleful influence of Bright. The first of the three sections could best be kept right by means of a stiff line against Grosvenor and Stanley, and the other two sections by the simple production of the seats bill before taking the committee on franchise. The expert's counsels were followed. Mr. Gladstone told the House that Lord Grosvenor's motion would be treated as a vote of want of confidence, but that he would disclose the whole plan as soon as the franchise bill had passed its second reading. The mutterings only grew louder. At a great meeting in Liverpool (April 6), accompanied by some of his colleagues Mr. Gladstone roused the enthusiasm of his audience to the utmost pitch by declaring that the government would not flinch, that they had passed the Rubicon, broken the bridges, burned their boats. Still the malcontents were not cowed.

The leader himself rose in warmth of advocacy as the struggle went on. The advocates of privilege used language about the workers, that in his generous and sympathetic mind fanned the spark into a flame. Lowe asked an unhappy question, that long stood out as a beacon mark in the controversy—whether “if you wanted venality, ignorance, drunkenness—if you wanted impulsive, unreflecting, violent people—where do you look for them? Do you go to the top or to the bottom?” Harsh judgments like this of the conditions of life and feeling in the mass of the nation—though Lowe was personally one of the kindest of men—made Mr. Gladstone stand all the more ardently by the [pg 203] objects of such sweeping reproach. In a discussion upon electoral statistics, he let fall a phrase that reverberated through the discussion inside parliament and out. Some gentlemen, he said, deal with these statistics, as if they were ascertaining the numbers of an invading army. “But the persons to whom their remarks apply are our fellow-subjects, our fellow-Christians, our own flesh and blood, who have been lauded to the skies for their good conduct.”141 This was instantly denounced by Lord Cranborne142 as sentimental rant, and inquiries soon followed why kinship in flesh and blood should be strictly limited by a seven pound rental. Speedily Mr. Gladstone passed from steady practical argument in the ministerial key, to all the topics of popular enthusiasm and parliamentary invective. His impulsiveness, said critical observers, “betrays him at times into exaggeration or incaution; but there is a generous quality in it.” Mr. Bright once talked of his own agitation for reform as no better than flogging a dead horse. The parliamentary struggle, led by Mr. Gladstone, brought the dead horse to life, stirred the combative instincts, and roused all the forces of reform. Lowe was glittering, energetic, direct, and swift. Mr. Disraeli, contented to watch his adversaries draw their swords on one another, did not put forth all his power. In a moment of unwisdom he taunted Mr. Gladstone with his stripling's speech at the Oxford Union five-and-thirty years before. As Aberdeen once said, “Gladstone is terrible on the rebound,”143 and anybody less imperturbable than Disraeli would have found his retort terrible here. His speech on the second reading (April 27), as a whole, ranks among the greatest of his performances. “Spoke,” he says, “from one to past three, following Disraeli. It was a toil much beyond my strength, but I seemed to be sustained and borne onwards I knew not how.” The party danger, the political theme, the new responsibility of command, the joy of battle, all seemed to transfigure the orator before the vision of the House, as if he were the Greek hero sent forth to combat by [pg 204] Pallas Athene, with, flame streaming from head and shoulders, from helmet and shield, like the star of summer rising effulgent from the sea. One personal passage deserves a biographic place:—

The closing sentences became memorable: “You cannot fight against the future,” he exclaimed with a thrilling gesture, “time is on our side. The great social forces which move onwards in their might and majesty, and which the tumult of our debates does not for a moment impede or disturb—those great social forces are against you; they are marshalled on our side; and the banner which we now carry in this fight, though perhaps at some moment it may droop over our sinking heads, yet it soon again will float in the eye of Heaven, and it will be borne by the firm hands of the united people of the three kingdoms, perhaps not to an easy, but to a certain and to a not far distant victory.”

A drama, as good critics tell us, is made not by words but by situations. The same is the truth of the power of the orator. Here the speaker's trope was a sounding battle-cry, [pg 205] not a phrase; it disclosed both a cause and a man. For the hour neither man nor cause prospered. Neither fervour nor force of argument prevailed against the fears and resentments of the men of what Mr. Bright called the Cave of Adullam, “to which every one was invited who was distressed, and every one who was discontented.” After eight nights of debate (April 27) Lord Grosvenor was beaten, and ministers were saved—but only by the desperate figure of five. Some thirty of the professed supporters of government voted against their leaders. A scene of delirious triumph followed the announcement of the numbers, and Mr. Lowe believed for the moment that he had really slain the horrid Demogorgon. Two men knew much better—the leader of the House and the leader of the opposition.

The cabinet, which was not without an imitation cave of its own, hesitated for an hour or two, but the two chief men in it stood firm. Mr. Gladstone was as resolute as Lord Russell, that this time nobody should say reform was only being played with, and they both insisted on going on with the bill. The chances were bad, for this was a Palmerstonian parliament, and the Gladstonian hour had not yet struck. As an honourable leader among the conservatives admitted, not one of the divisions against the bill was taken in good faith. If Mr. Gladstone gave way, he was taunted with cringing; if he stood his ground, it was called bullying; if he expressed a desire to consult the views of the House, Mr. Disraeli held up ministers to scorn as unhappy men without minds of their own. In introducing the bill, says Mr. Gladstone, “I struggled with studious care to avoid every word that could give offence.” The only effect of this was to spread the tale that he was not in earnest, and did not really care for the bill. Such was the temper in which ministers were met. And the whole operation was conducted upon the basis of a solemn, firm, and formal understanding between the regular opposition and the cave men, that were it proposed to reduce the ten pound qualification no lower than nine pounds nineteen shillings and sixpence, even that change should be resisted.

Meanwhile, for the leader of the House vexation followed vexation. “The worst incident in the history of our reform struggle,” Mr. Gladstone wrote to the prime minister from the House, on May 28, “has occurred to-night. A most barefaced proposal further to load the bill by an instruction to insert clauses respecting bribery has been carried against us by a majority of 10; the numbers were 248 to 238. This is extremely discouraging, and it much reduces the usual strength and authority of the government. This defeat alters our position with reference to fresh defeats.” The air was thick with ideas and schemes for getting rid of the bill and yet keeping the ministers. “I cannot,” Mr. Gladstone says to Lord Russell (June 4), “divest such ideas and proposals of the aspect of dishonour.” They were told, he said, to introduce an amended plan next year. How would the case be altered? They would have to introduce a plan substantially identical, to meet the same invidious opposition, made all the more confident by the success of its present manœuvres.

At length an end came. On June 18, on a question raised by Lord Dunkellin, of rateable value as against gross estimated rental for the basis of the new seven-pound franchise, ministers were beaten. The numbers were 315 against 304, and in this majority of 11 against government were found no fewer than 44 of their professed supporters. The sensation was almost beyond precedent. “With the cheering of the adversary there was shouting, violent flourishing of hats, and other manifestations which I think novel and inappropriate,” Mr. Gladstone says. The next morning, in a note to a friend, he observed: “The government has now just overlived its seven years: a larger term than the life of any government of this country since that of Lord Liverpool. Many circumstances show that it was time things should come to a crisis—none so much as the insidious proceedings, and the inconstant and variable voting on this bill.”

It had been decided in the cabinet a couple of days before this defeat, that an adverse vote on the narrow issue technically raised by Lord Dunkellin was not in itself to be treated in debate as a vital question, for the rating value could [pg 207] easily have been adjusted to the figure of rental proposed by the government. The debate, however, instead of being confined to a narrow question raised technically, covered the whole range of the bill. Taken together with the previous attempts to get rid of the thing, and the increasing number of the disaffected, all this seemed to extinguish hope, and after what had been said about crossing Rubicons and burning boats, most thought no course open but resignation. They might appeal to the country. But Mr. Brand, the expert whip, told the prime minister that he felt so strongly on the impolicy of dissolution that he could not bring himself to take a part in it. The proceeding would be unpopular with their own friends, who had been put to great expense at their election only a few months before. It would, moreover, break the party, because at an election they would have to bring out men of more extreme views to fight the whigs and liberals who had deserted them on reform, and who might thus be driven permanently to the other side. Such were the arguments, though Mr. Gladstone seems not to have thought them decisive. At hardly any crisis in his life, I think, did Mr. Gladstone ever incline to surrender, short of absolute compulsion. To yield was not his temper. When he looked back upon this particular transaction in later years, he blamed himself and his colleagues for too promptly acquiescing in advice to throw down the reins.

Lord Russell tendered their resignation to the Queen, then far away at Balmoral. The Queen received the communication with the greatest concern, and asked them to reconsider. “The state of Europe,” she said, “was dangerous; the country was apathetic about reform; the defeat had only touched a matter of detail; the question was one that could never be settled unless all sides were prepared to make concessions.” In London three or four days were passed in discussing the hundred ingenious futilities by which well-meaning busy-bodies on all such occasions struggle to dissolve hard facts by soft words. In compliance with the Queen's request, the cabinet reopened their own discussion, and for a day or two entertained the plan of going on, if the House would pass a general vote of confidence. Mr. Gladstone, as we have seen, was on the morrow of the defeat for resignation, and from the first he thought ill of the new plan. The true alternatives were to try either a fresh parliament or a fresh ministry. Bright—not then a member of the government—wrote to Mr. Gladstone (June 24) in strong terms in favour of having a new parliament. Mr. Brand, he says, “makes no allowance for the force of a moral contest through the country for a great principle and a great cause. Last Easter showed how much feeling your appeals could speedily arouse.... I do not believe in your being beaten. Besides there is something far worse than a defeat, namely to carry on your government with a party poisoned and enfeebled by the baseness of the forty traitors [elsewhere in the same letter called the ‘forty thieves’]. In great contingencies something must be risked. [pg 209] You will have a great party well compacted together, and great future. Mr. Brand's figures should be forgotten for the moment.... You must not forget the concluding passage of your great speech on the second reading of the bill. Read it again to nerve you to your great duty.” The Duke of Argyll was strong in the same sense. He saw no chance of “conducting opposition with decent sincerity or possible success, except in a parliament in which we know who are our friends and who are our enemies on this question.” In the end resignation carried the day:—

This decision greeted the Queen on her arrival at Windsor on the morning of June 26. Both the prime minister and the chancellor of the exchequer had audiences the same day. “Off at 11.30 to Windsor with Lord Russell, much conversation with him. Single and joint audiences with the Queen, who showed every quality required by her station and the time. We had warm receptions at both stations.” Mr. Gladstone's memorandum of the interview is as follows:—

“On returning,” Mr. Gladstone enters in the diary, “we went to consult Brand and then to the cabinet, when resignation was finally decided on, and a telegram was sent to Windsor. [pg 211] At six I went down and made my explanation for the government. I kept to facts without epithets, but I thought as I went on that some of the words were scorching. A crowd and great enthusiasm in Palace Yard on departure.” Lord Derby was sent for, accepted the royal commission, and finding Mr. Lowe and the Adullamites not available, he formed his third administration on regular conservative lines, with Mr. Disraeli as its foremost man.

Turbulent scenes had already occurred in the metropolis, and it speedily became evident that whatever value the workmen might set on the franchise for its own sake, they would not brook the refusal of it. They chose Mr. Gladstone for their hero, for, as a good observer remarked, he was the first official statesman who had convinced the working classes that he really cared for them. On the occasion of one popular assemblage the crowd thronged (June 28) to Carlton House Terrace, shouting for Gladstone and liberty. The head of the house was away. Police officers sent up word to Mrs. Gladstone that the multitude would speedily disperse if she would appear for a moment or two on the balcony. In compliance with their request and for the public convenience, she appeared, and all passed off. The incident was described by newspapers that ought to have known better, as the ladies of his family courting an ovation from persons of the lowest class. Mr. Gladstone was compared to Wilkes and Lord George Gordon. With characteristic tenacity he thought it worth while to contradict the story, but not in the columns where the offensive tale had been invented. In [pg 212] July, declining an invitation to speak at a demonstration in Hyde Park Mr. Gladstone said he believed the resignation of the government to be a fresh and important step towards final success. “In the hour of defeat I have the presentiment of victory.”

An interesting glimpse of Mr. Gladstone in the height of these distractions is given in a passage from the diaries of Mr. Adams, still the American minister:—147

Towards the close of the session (July 21) Mr. Gladstone presided over the annual dinner of the club founded in honour of Cobden, who had died the year before. As might have been foretold, he emphasised the moral rather than the practical results of Cobden's work. “Public economy was with Cobden,” he said, “nothing less than a moral principle. The temper and spirit of Mr. Cobden in respect to questions of public economy was a temper and a spirit that ought to be maintained, encouraged, and propagated in this country—a temper and spirit far more in vogue, far more honoured and esteemed and cultivated by both political parties twenty or thirty years ago than it is at the present moment.” An intense love of justice, a singleness of aim, a habit of judging men fairly and estimating them favourably, an absence of the suspicion that so often forms the bane of public life—these elements and all other such elements were to be found in the character of Cobden abundantly supplied. Mr. Cobden's was a mind incapable of entertaining the discussion of a question without fully weighing and estimating its moral aspects and results. In these words so justly applied to Cobden, the orator was doubtless depicting political ideals of his own.

II

In the autumn Mr. Gladstone determined on going abroad with his wife and daughters. “One among my reasons for going,” he told Mr. Brand, “is that I think I am better out of the way of politics during the recess. In England I should find it most difficult to avoid for five minutes attending [pg 214] some public celebration or other, especially in Lancashire. I think that I have said already in one way or other, all that I can usefully say, perhaps more than all. So far as I am concerned, I now leave the wound of the liberal party to the healing powers of nature.... If we cannot arrive in sufficient strength at a definite understanding with respect to the mode of handling the question of the franchise, then our line ought to be great patience and quietude in opposition. If we can, then certainly the existing government might at any time disappear, after the opening of the session I mean, with advantage.” “The journey to Italy,” says Phillimore, “was really a measure of self-defence, to escape the incessant persecution of correspondence, suggestions, and solicitations.”

They left England in the last week of September, and proceeded direct to Rome. The Queen had given as one good reason against a change of ministers the dangerous outlook on the continent of Europe. This was the year of the Seven Weeks' War, the battle of Sadowa (July 3), and the triumph of Prussia over Austria, foreshadowing a more astonishing triumph four years hence. One of the results of Sadowa was the further consolidation of the Italian kingdom by the transfer of Venetia. Rome still remained outside. The political situation was notoriously provisional and unstable, and the French troops who had gone there in 1849 were still in their barracks at the Castle of St. Angelo. But this was no immediate concern of his. “Nothing can be more unlikely,” he wrote to Acton (Sept. 11), “than that I should meddle with the prisons, or anything else of the kind. The case of Rome in 1866 is very different from that of Naples in 1850, when the whole royal government was nothing but one gross and flagrant illegality. I have seen Archbishop Manning repeatedly,” he continues, “and my impression is that he speaks to me after having sought and received his cue from Rome. He is to put me in communication with Cardinal Antonelli and others. I consider myself bound to good conduct in a very strict sense of the word.” We now know that the archbishop took pains to warn his friends at Rome to [pg 215] show their visitor all the kindness possible. “Gladstone,” he wrote, “does not come as an enemy, and may be made friendly, or he might become on his return most dangerous.” The liberals would be very jealous of him on the subject of the temporal power of the pope. Meanwhile Gladstone fully held that the Holy Father must be independent. “Towards us in England,” said Manning, “and towards Ireland he is the most just and forgiving of all our public men. He is very susceptible of any kindness, and his sympathies and respect religiously are all with us.”149

The trip was not in every respect successful. On Christmas day, he writes to Brand: “We have had some discomforts. Our apartments twice on fire, a floor burnt through each time. Then I was laid down with a most severe influenza: very sore throat, a thing quite new to me. The Roman climate is as bad for me as can be.” I have been told by one who saw much of the party during the Roman visit, that Mr. Gladstone seemed to care little or not at all about wonders of archaeology alike in Christian and pagan Rome, but never wearied of hearing Italian sermons from priests and preaching friars. This was consonant with the whole temper of his life. He [pg 218] was a collector of ivories, of china, of Wedgwood, but in architecture in all its high historic bearings I never found him very deeply interested. I doubt if he followed the controversies about French, Gothic and Italian, about Byzantine and Romanesque, with any more concern than he had in the controversies of geology. He had two audiences of Pope Pius ix., as we have seen, as had others of his colleagues then in Rome; and Mr. Gladstone used to tell with much glee in what diverse fashion they impressed the pontiff. “I like but I do not understand Mr. Gladstone,” the pope said; “Mr. Cardwell I understand, but I do not like; I both like and understand Lord Clarendon; the Duke of Argyll I neither understand nor like.” He saw ten of the cardinals, and at Florence he had an audience of the king “who spoke very freely”; he had two long interviews with Ricasoli; and some forty or fifty members of the Italian parliament gave him the honour of a dinner at which Poerio made a most eloquent speech. To the Duchess of Sutherland he wrote:—

Among other objects of his keen and active interest was the preservation for its established uses of the famous monastery founded by St. Benedict thirteen centuries before at Monte Cassino,—the first home of that great [pg 219] rule and institute which for long ages played so striking part in the history of civilisation in the western world. He now visited Monte Cassino in the company of Padre Tosti. The historian of this venerable nursery of learning was his friend long before now—they met first at Naples in 1850—and he had induced Mr. Gladstone to subscribe for the reparation of the tomb of the founder. In 1863 Dean Stanley visited the monastery with a letter from Mr. Gladstone: “It secured for me not only the most hospitable reception, but an outpouring of Padre Tosti's whole soul on pope and church, and Italy and Europe, past and present, in an almost unbroken conversation of three hours.” In 1866, it seemed as if the hand of the Italian government were about to fall as heavily on Monte Cassino as on any other monastic establishment. Mr. Gladstone besides doing his best with Ricasoli and others, wrote a letter of admirable spirit to his friend Sir James Lacaita:—

On his return he passed through Paris. The previous year a signal honour had been bestowed upon him by the illustrious Institute of France—founded on that Academy, in which Richelieu had crowned the fame of arms and statesmanship by honour to purity in national language and competence in letters.151 In acknowledging the election, he wrote to Mignet, the historian, then perpetual secretary:—

This distinction brought with it the duty of attending the funeral of a writer eminent among the philosophers and men of letters of his day. It had been said of him that three days in the week he was absurd, three days mediocre, and one day sublime. The verdict seems to be confirmed.

“Yesterday,” he wrote to Mr. Brand (Jan. 27), “a dinner was given to Cardwell and me at the Grand Hotel, by the Society of Political Economists of France, and I did my best to improve the occasion in terms which might imply censure on the military measures here and the new turn of affairs. Also I am a known accomplice of M. Fould's. So I let all this be balanced by dining with the Emperor to-day, and with Rouher to-morrow.” Of the reception at court, he says, “Dined at the Tuileries, and was surprised at the extreme attention and courtesy of both their majesties, with whom I had much interesting conversation.” The fates with no halting foot were drawing near. The palace was a heap of ashes, host and hostess were forlorn exiles, before in no long span of time they met their guest again.

I

From Rome Mr. Gladstone kept a watchful eye for the approaching political performances at Westminster. He had written to Mr. Brand a month after his arrival:—

II

The general character of the operations of 1867, certainly one of the most curious in our parliamentary history, was described by Mr. Gladstone in a fragment written thirty years after. Time had extinguished the volcanic fires, and the little outline is sketched with temper and a sort of neutrality:—

III

The process effecting this wide extension of political power to immense classes hitherto without it, was in every respect extraordinary. The great reform was carried by a parliament elected to support Lord Palmerston, and Lord Palmerston detested reform. It was carried by a government in a decided minority. It was carried by a minister and by a leader of opposition, neither of whom was at the time in the full confidence of his party. Finally, it was [pg 227] carried by a House of Commons that the year before had, in effect, rejected a measure for the admission of only 400,000 new voters, while the measure to which it now assented added almost a million voters to the electorate.153

We always do best to seek rational explanations in large affairs. It may be true that “if there were no blunders there would be no politics,” but when we have made full allowance for blunder, caprice, chance, folly, craft, still reason and the nature of things have a share. The secret of the strange reversal in 1867 of all that had been said, attempted, and done in 1866, would seem to be that the tide of public opinion had suddenly swelled to flood. The same timidity that made the ruling classes dread reform, had the compensation that very little in the way of popular demonstration was quite enough to frighten them into accepting it. Here the demonstration was not little. Riots in Hyde Park, street processions measured by the mile in the great cities from London up to Glasgow, open-air meetings attended by a hundred, two hundred, two hundred and fifty thousand people at Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, showed that even though the workmen might not be anxious to demand the franchise, yet they would not stand its refusal. In the autumn of 1868 Mr. Bright led a splendid campaign in a series of speeches in England, Scotland, and Ireland, marked by every kind of power. It is worthy of remark that not one of the main changes of that age was carried in parliament without severe agitation out of doors. Catholic emancipation was won by O'Connell; the reform act of 1832 by the political unions; free trade by the league against the corn law. Household suffrage followed the same rule.

It was undoubtedly true in a sense that Mr. Gladstone was at the head of a majority in 1866, and now again in. 1867. But its composition was peculiar. Sir Thomas Acland (April 10, 1867) describes Mr. Gladstone as hampered by three sets of people: “1. Radicals, who will vote for household suffrage, but don't want it carried. 2. Whigs (aristocrats), who won't risk a collision with the government, and hope [pg 228] that very little reform will be carried, and want to discredit Gladstone. 3. A large body who care for nothing except to avoid a dissolution.” “There is a fresh intrigue,” he adds, “every twelve hours.”

The trenchant and sardonic mind of the leader of the revolt that had destroyed the bill of 1866, soon found food for bitter rumination. On the eve of the session Lowe admitted that he had very little hope of a successful end to his efforts, and made dismal protests that the reign of reason was over. In other words, he had found out that the men whom he had placed in power, were going to fling him overboard in what he called this miserable auction between two parties, at which the country was put up for sale, and then knocked down to those who could produce the readiest and swiftest measure for its destruction.

The liberal cave of the previous year was broken up, Lowe and the ablest of its old denizens now voting with Mr. Gladstone, but the great majority going with the government. The place of the empty cave was taken by a new group of dissidents, named from their habitat the party of the Tea-Room. Many, both whigs above the gangway and even radicals below, were averse to bringing Lord Russell and Mr. Gladstone back again; they thought a bill would have a better chance with the tories than with the old leaders. Insubordination and disorganisation were complete. “I have never seen anything like it,” says the new Lord Halifax;154 “but the state of things this year enables me to understand what was very inexplicable in all I heard of last year.” We can hardly wonder that the strain was often difficult to bear. A friend, meeting Mr. Gladstone at dinner about this time (March 25), thought that he saw signs of irritated nerve. “What an invaluable gift,” he reflects, “a present of phlegm from the gods would be! If we could roll up Thompson [master of Trinity] or Bishop Thirlwall with him and then bisect the compound, we should get a pair as invincible as the Dioscuri.” An accomplished observer told his constituents that one saw [pg 229] the humour of the great parliamentary chess tournament, looking at the pieces on the board and the face of Disraeli; its tragic side in a glimpse of the face of Gladstone; in the mephistophelian nonchalance of one, the melancholy earnestness of the other.155

Everybody knew that Disraeli, as he watched the scene from behind his mask, now and again launching a well-devised retort, was neither liked nor trusted, though more than a little feared; and that Gladstone, with his deeply lined face, his “glare of contentious eagerness,” his seeming over-righteousness, both chafed his friends and exasperated his foes. As it was excellently put by a critic in the press,—the House was indifferent, and Mr. Gladstone was earnest; the House was lax and he was strict; it was cynical about popular equality, and he was enthusiastic; it was lazy about details, he insisted upon teaching it the profoundest minutiæ.156 About this time, Lord Russell told Lord Halifax that he had gone down to see his brother the Duke of Bedford when he was dying, and had said to him that things were drifting into the country being governed by Disraeli and Gladstone, and the Duke observed that neither of them was fit for it. And Halifax himself went on to say that Gladstone had, in truth, no sympathy or connection with any considerable party in the House of Commons. For the old whig party remembered him as an opponent for many years; the radicals knew that on many points, especially on all church matters, he did not agree with them, and though they admired his talents, and hailed his recent exertions in favour of reform, they had no great attachment to him, nor did he seem to be personally popular with any of them.

Far away from the world of politics, we have an estimate of Mr. Gladstone at this time from the piercing satirist of his age. “Is not he at any rate a man of principle?” said a quaker lady to Carlyle. “Oh, Gladstone!” the sage replied, “I did hope well of him once, and so did John Sterling, though I heard he was a Puseyite and so forth; still it seemed the right thing for a state to feel itself bound to [pg 230] God, and to lean on Him, and so I hoped that something might come of him. But now, he has been declaiming that England is such a wonderfully prosperous state, meaning that it has plenty of money in its breeches pocket.... But that's not the prosperity we want. And so I say to him, ‘You are not the life-giver to England. I go my way, you go yours, good morning (with a most dramatic and final bow).’ ”157 England however thought otherwise about life-givers, and made a bow of a completely different sort. Yet not at once. It was Mr. Disraeli who played the leading part in this great transaction, not by inventing the phrase of household suffrage, for that principle was Mr. Bright's; nor by giving his bill the shape in which it ultimately became law, for that shape was mainly due to Mr. Gladstone, but as the mind by whose secret counsels the arduous and intricate manœuvre was directed. “The most wonderful thing,” wrote Bishop Wilberforce at the end of the session, “is the rise of Disraeli. It is not the mere assertion of talent. He has been able to teach the House of Commons almost to ignore Gladstone, and at present lords it over him, and, I am told, says that he will hold him down for twenty years.”158 If Mr. Disraeli said this, he proved almost as much mistaken as when Fox was confident of holding the young Pitt down in 1783. Still he impressed his rival. “I met Gladstone at breakfast,” says Lord Houghton (May), “he seems quite awed by the diabolical cleverness of Dizzy.” Awe, by no means the right word, I fancy.

IV

On April 12 the first act of the Reform question of 1867 ended in an awkward crisis for Mr. Gladstone. The details of the story are intricate and not much to our purpose. Mr. Gladstone's version printed above discovers its general features. Some particulars, properly biographic, will fill up his sketch. “If you have to drive a man out of a wood,” Mr. Gladstone said, “you must yourself go into the wood to drive him.” The bystander of a later time, however, may be content to keep outside the thicket until the driver [pg 231] and the driven both emerge. Mr. Disraeli began by preparing a series of resolutions—platitudes with little relation to realities. He told the House that reform should no longer be allowed to determine the fate of cabinets, and the House laughed. Yet if Mr. Disraeli had only at this time enjoyed the advantage of a better character—if he had been Althorp, Russell, Peel—instead of laughing, his hearers would perhaps have recognised good sense and statesmanship. As he said later, whig prime ministers, coalition prime ministers, coalition chancellors of the exchequer, had one after another had their innings, and with a majority at their back; was it not well now to try something that might be carried by consent? Under pressure from Mr. Gladstone the government explained their plan, dropped the resolutions, and brought in a bill.159 Men were to have votes who had university degrees, or were members of learned professions, or had thirty pounds in a savings bank, or fifty pounds in the funds, or paid a pound in direct taxes; but the fighting point was that every householder who paid rates should have a vote. A scheme for seats accompanied. To comfort his party for giving so wide a suffrage, the minister provided checks by conferring a double vote on certain classes of citizens, and imposing strict terms as to residence. Three members of his cabinet, of whom Lord Cranborne was the most important, refused the unsubstantial solace and resigned. But Mr. Disraeli saw that he would regain by disorganising his opponents more than he would lose by dislocating his friends.

Mr. Gladstone flew down upon the plan with energy, as a measure of illusory concessions, and securities still more illusory. His speech was taken in some quarters in a conservative sense, for Lowe at once wrote to him (March 21) urging him to follow it up by resisting the second reading on the principle of righting rent against rating. Since Callimachus, the Athenian polemarch, had to give the casting vote at Marathon when the ten generals were equally divided on the question of fighting the Persians or not fighting, “no one,” cried Lowe, “ever had a weightier case to decide” than Mr. Gladstone now. He forgot that the brave Callimachus was [pg 232] slain, and Mr. Gladstone would in a political sense have been slain likewise if he had taken Lowe's advice, for, as he says, Disraeli had by talk of household suffrage “bowled them over.” A meeting of 278 liberals was held at his house, and he addressed them for nearly an hour, concurring not over-willingly in the conclusion that they should not resist the second reading.160 He had a long conversation with Mr. Bright two days before, whom he found 'sensible, moderate, and firm,' and whose view was no doubt the opposite of Lowe's. The bill was read a second time without a division (March 26).

A few entries in Sir Robert Phillimore's journal help us to realise the state of the case during this extraordinary session:—

The occasion just mentioned marked a climax. Mr. Gladstone moved an amendment to remove the personal payment of rates as an essential qualification, and to confer the franchise on the householder whether he paid the rate direct or through the landlord. The next day the diary records: April 12.—“Spoke [pg 233] in reply and voted in 289-310. A smash perhaps without example. A victory of 21 for ministers.” A new secession had taken place, and 43 liberal members voted with the government, while nearly 20 were absent. The Cranborne secession was small, and some who had been expected to stay away voted with the government. “Gladstone expressed himself strongly to five or six members of the late government whom he summoned to his house in the morning. He spoke of retiring to a back bench, and announcing that he would give up the ostensible post of leader of the opposition. He was dissuaded from doing this at the present moment, and went out of town, as indeed did almost everybody else.”161 Still the notion of a back bench did lodge itself in his mind for long. The “smash” was undoubtedly severe. As Mr. Gladstone wrote to one of the members for the City, a supporter, it showed that the liberals whose convictions allowed united action upon reform were not a majority but a minority of the House of Commons. Considering the large number who supported his proposal, he told his correspondent that though he would move no further amendment of his own, he was not less willing than heretofore to remain at the service of the party. “The friendly critics,” he said to Brand, “note a tone of despondency in my letter to Crawford. That is all owing to Granville and others who cut off a fine peacock's tail that I had appended.” So day after day amid surf and breakers he held to his oar. If Mr. Gladstone was much buffeted in the house of his friends, he was not without valiant backers, and among them none was more stout than Mr. Bright, the least effusive of all men in the direction of large panegyric. Speaking to his constituents at Birmingham, “Who is there in the House of Commons,” he demanded, “who equals Mr. Gladstone in knowledge of all political questions? Who equals him in earnestness? Who equals him in eloquence? Who equals him in courage and fidelity to his convictions? If these gentlemen who say they will not follow him have any one who is equal, let them show him. If they can point out any statesman who can add [pg 234] dignity and grandeur to the stature of Mr. Gladstone, let them produce him.” A deputation against the bill from some popular body came to him (May 11). Mr. Disraeli at once regretted that these “spouters of stale sedition,” these “obsolete incendiaries,” should have come forward to pay their homage to one who, wherever he may sit, must always remain the pride and ornament of the House—

V

To the Duchess of Sutherland Mr. Gladstone wrote (July 9):—

The Phillimore diary gives us one or two glimpses more:—

Two or three items more from Mr. Gladstone's diary are worth recording:—

The conservative leader himself was exposed to onslaughts from his followers and confederates of the previous year as severe as have ever fallen on the head of an English party. “Never,” cried Mr. Lowe, in desolation and chagrin, “never was there tergiversation so complete. Such conduct may fail or not; it may lead to the retention or the loss of office; but it merits alike the contempt of all honest men, and the execration of posterity.” Lord Cranborne, the chief conservative seceder, described the bill in its final shape, after undergoing countless transformations, as the result of the adoption of the principles of Bright at the dictation of Gladstone. It was at Mr. Gladstone's demand that lodgers were invested with votes; that the dual vote, voting papers, educational franchise, savings-bank franchise, all disappeared; that the distribution of seats was extended into an operation of enormously larger scale. In his most biting style, Lord Cranborne deplored that the House should have applauded a policy of legerdemain; talked about borrowing their ethics from the [pg 236] political adventurer; regretted, above all things, that the Reform bill should have been purchased at the cost of a political betrayal that had no parallel in our parliamentary annals, and that struck at the very root of that mutual confidence which is the very soul of our party government.

Merciless storms of this kind Mr. Disraeli bore imperturbably. He complained of the intolerant character of the discussions. “Everybody who does not agree with somebody else is looked upon as a fool, or as being mainly influenced by a total want of principle in the conduct of public affairs.” He doubted whether Mr. Bright or anybody else could show that the tory party had changed their opinions. He had not changed his own opinions; the bill was in harmony with the general policy they had always maintained, though adapted, of course, to the requirements of the year. On Mr. Lowe's “most doleful vaticinations that ever were heard,” about the new voters repudiating the national debt and adopting an inconvertible paper currency, he poured easy ridicule. Yet only a year before this Mr. Disraeli himself had prophesied that the end of a seven pound franchise would be a parliament of no statesmanship, no eloquence, no learning, no genius. “Instead of these you will have a horde of selfish and obscure mediocrities, incapable of anything but mischief, and that mischief devised and regulated by the raging demagogue of the hour.”

Mr. Gladstone summed the matter up in a sentence to Dr. Pusey: “We have been passing through a strange and eventful year: a deplorable one, I think, for the character and conduct of the House of Commons, but yet one of promise for the country, though of a promise not unmixed with evils.”

I

Writing to his brother-in-law, Lord Lyttelton, in April 1865, Mr. Gladstone sets out pretty summarily the three incidents that had been taken to mark the line of his advance in the paths of extreme and visionary politics. When it was written, his speech on the franchise the previous year had not ripened,162 and his speech on the Irish church was only on the eve, nor did he yet know it, of taking shape as a deliberate policy of action.

The question of franchise was settled, the question of the powers of the Lords in matters of taxation was settled. The Irish church held its ground. In 1865 Mr. Gladstone voted against a radical member who had moved that the case of the Irish church “called for the early attention of the government.” He agreed with the mover on the merits, but did not believe that the time had come. In 1866, when he was leader of the House, he concurred with Lord Russell, then first minister, in meeting a motion against the Irish church with a direct negative. “In meeting a question with a negative,” he wrote to the Irish secretary (April 7), “we may always put it on the ground of time, as well as on the merits. To meet a motion of this kind with the previous question only, implies almost an engagement to take it up on some early occasion, and this I take it we are not prepared for.” In the summer of 1865 he wrote to the warden of Glenalmond that the question was “remote and apparently out of all bearing on the practical politics of the day.” So far as his own judgment went, he had told Sir Roundell Palmer in 1863, that he had made up his mind on the subject, and should not be able to keep himself from giving expression to his feelings. Why did he say that he did not then believe that the question would come on in his time? “A man,” he replied, “who in 1865 completed his thirty-third year of a [pg 240] laborious career, who had already followed to the grave the remains of almost all the friends abreast of whom he had started from the university in the career of public life; and who had observed that, excepting two recent cases [I suppose Palmerston and Russell], it was hard to find in our whole history a single man who had been permitted to reach the fortieth year of a course of labour similar to his own within the walls of the House of Commons; such a man might be excused ... if he formed a less sanguine estimate of the fraction of space yet remaining to him, than seems to have been the case with his critics.”163

It was Maynooth that originally cut from under his feet the principle of establishment in Ireland as an obligation of the state. When that went, more general reflections arose in his mind. In 1872 he wrote to Guizot:—

“I must own,” he wrote to Lord Granville (April 11, 1868), “that for years past I have been watching the sky with a strong sense of the obligation to act with the first streak of dawn.” He now believed the full sun was up, and he was right. In an autobiographic note, undated but written near to the end of his days, he says:—

The remaining two will appear in good time. It is easy to label this with the ill-favoured name of opportunist. Yet if an opportunist be defined as a statesman who declines to attempt to do a thing until he believes that it can really be done, what is this but to call him a man of common sense?

II

In 1867 Ireland was disturbed by bold and dangerous Fenian plots and the mischief flowed over into England. In September, at Manchester, a body of armed men rescued two Fenian prisoners from a police van, and shot an officer in charge, a crime for which three of them were afterwards hanged. In December a Fenian rolled a barrel of gunpowder up to the wall of a prison in London where a comrade was confined, and fired it. The explosion that followed blew down part of the wall and cost several lives.

This influence was palpable and undoubted, and it was part of Mr. Gladstone's courage not to muffle up plain truth, from any spurious notions of national self-esteem. He never had much patience with people who cannot bear to hear what they cannot fail to see. In this case the truth was of the plainest. Lord Stanley, then a member of his father's government, went to a banquet at Bristol in the January of 1868, and told his conservative audience that Ireland was hardly ever absent from the mind of anybody taking part in public affairs. “I mean,” he said, “the painful, the dangerous, the discreditable state of things that unhappily continues to exist in Ireland.” He described in tones more fervid than were usual with him, the “miserable state of things,” and yet he asked, “when we look for a remedy, who is there to give us an intelligible answer?” The state of Ireland, as Mr. Gladstone said later,165 was admitted by both sides to be the question of the day. The conservatives in power took it up, and they had nothing better nor deeper to propose than the policy of concurrent endowment. They asked parliament to establish at the charge of the exchequer a Roman catholic university; and declared their readiness to recognise the principle of religious equality in Ireland by a great change in the status of the unendowed clergy of that country, provided the protestant establishment were upheld in its integrity. This was the policy of levelling up. It was met by a counter-plan of religious equality; disestablishment of the existing church, without establishing any other, and with a general cessation of endowments for religion in Ireland. Mr. Disraeli's was at bottom the principle of Pitt and Castlereagh and of many great whigs, but he might have known, and doubtless did [pg 243] know, how odious it would be to the British householders, who were far more like King George III. than they at all supposed.

III

In May 1867, Mr. Gladstone had told the House that the time could not be far distant when parliament would have to look the position of the Irish church fairly and fully in the face. In the autumn Roundell Palmer visited Mr. Cardwell, and discovered clearly from the conversation that the next move in the party was likely to be an attack upon the Irish church. The wider aspects of the Irish case opened themselves to Mr. Gladstone in all their melancholy dimensions. At Southport (Dec. 19) he first raised his standard, and proclaimed an Irish policy on Irish lines, that should embrace the promotion of higher education in a backward country, the reform of its religious institutions, the adjustment of the rights of the cultivator of the soil. The church, the land, the college, should all be dealt with in turn.166 It might be true, he said, that these things would not convert the Irish into a happy and contented people. Inveterate diseases could not be healed in a moment. When you have long persevered in mischief, you cannot undo it at an instant's notice. True though this might be, was the right conclusion that it was better to do nothing at all? For his own part he would never despair of redeeming the reproach of total incapacity to assimilate to ourselves an island within three hours of our shores, that had been under our dominating influence for six centuries.

At Christmas in 1867 Lord Russell announced to Mr. Gladstone his intention not again to take office, in other words to retire from the titular leadership of the liberal party. Mr. Gladstone did not deny his claim to repose. “Peel,” he said, “in 1846 thought he had secured his dismissal at an [pg 244] age which, if spared, I shall touch in three days' time.”167 Lord Russell was now seventy-five. He once told Lord Granville that “the great disappointment of his life had been Grey's refusal to join his government in December 1845, which had prevented his name going down in history as the repealer of the corn laws.” “A great reputation,” wrote Mr. Gladstone to Granville in 1868, “built itself up on the basis of splendid public services for thirty years; for almost twenty it has, I fear, been on the decline. The movement of the clock continues, the balance weights are gone.”168

A more striking event than Lord Russell's withdrawal was the accession of Mr. Disraeli to the first place in the counsels of the crown. In February 1868 Lord Derby's health compelled him to retire from his position as head of the government. Mr. Gladstone found fault with the translator of Stockmar's Memoirs for rendering “leichtsinnig” applied to Lord Derby as “frivolous.” He preferred “light-minded”:—

Mr. Disraeli became prime minister. For the moment, the incident was more dramatic than important; it was plain that his tenure of office could not last long. He was five years older (perhaps more) than Mr. Gladstone; his parliamentary existence had been four or five years shorter. During the thirty-one years of his life in the House of [pg 245] Commons, up to now he had enjoyed three short spells of office (from 1852 to 1868), covering little more than as many years. He had chosen finance for his department, but his budgets made no mark. In foreign affairs he had no policy of his own beyond being Austrian and papal rather than Italian, and his criticisms on the foreign policy of Palmerston and Russell followed the debating needs of the hour. For legislation in the constructive sense in which it interested and attracted Mr. Gladstone, he had no taste and little capacity. In two achievements only had he succeeded, but in importance they were supreme. Out of the wreckage left by Sir Robert Peel twenty-two years before he had built up a party. In the name of that party, called conservative, he had revolutionised the base of our parliamentary constitution. These two extraordinary feats he had performed without possessing the full confidence of his adherents, or any real confidence at all on the part of the country. That was to come later. Meanwhile the nation had got used to him. He had culture, imagination, fancy, and other gifts of a born man of letters; the faculty of slow reflective brooding was his, and he often saw both deep and far; he was artificial, but he was no pharisee, and he was never petty. His magniloquence of phrase was the expression of real size and spaciousness of character; as Goethe said of St. Peter's at Rome, in spite of all the rococo, there was etwas grosses, something great. His inexhaustible patience, his active attention and industry, his steadfast courage, his talent in debate and the work of parliament; his genius in espying, employing, creating political occasions, all made him, after prolonged conflict against impediments of every kind, one of the imposing figures of his time. This was the political captain with whom Mr. Gladstone had contended for some sixteen years past, and with whom on a loftier elevation for both, he was to contend for a dozen years to come.

On a motion about the state of Ireland, proceeding from an Irish member (March 16, 1868) Mr. Gladstone at last launched before parliament the memorable declaration that the time had come when the church of Ireland as a church in alliance with the state must cease to exist. This was not [pg 246] a mere sounding sentence in a speech; it was one of the heroic acts of his life. Manning did not overstate the case when he wrote to Mr. Gladstone (March 28, '68): “The Irish establishment is a great wrong. It is the cause of division in Ireland, of alienation between Ireland and England. It embitters every other question. Even the land question is exasperated by it. The fatal ascendency of race over race is unspeakably aggravated by the ascendency of religion over religion.” But there were many pit-falls, and the ground hid dangerous fire. The parliament was Palmerstonian and in essence conservative; both parties were demoralised by the strange and tortuous manœuvres that ended in household suffrage; many liberals were profoundly disaffected to their leader; nobody could say what the majority was, nor where it lay. To attack the Irish church was to alarm and scandalise his own chosen friends and closest allies in the kindred church of England. To attack a high protestant institution “exalting its mitred front” in the catholic island, was to run sharp risk of awaking the sleuth-hounds of No-popery. The House of Lords would undoubtedly fight, as it did, to its last ditch. The legislative task itself was in complexity and detail, apart from religious passion and the prejudice of race, gigantic.

Having once decided upon this bold campaign, Mr. Gladstone entered upon it with military promptitude, and pursued it with an intrepidity all his own among the statesmen of his day, and not surpassed by Pym in 1640, nor Chatham in 1758, nor Chatham's son in 1783, nor anybody else in days gone by. Within a week of this historic trumpet-blast, he gave notice of three resolutions to the effect that the established church of Ireland should cease to exist as an establishment. Attendant and consequential changes were appended. Within a week of giving notice, he opened the first resolution, and carried the preliminary motion by a majority of 61. The cheering at this demonstration of a united and victorious party was prodigious, both within the House and in Westminster Hall, and an enthusiastic crowd followed the leader and his two sons as they walked home to Carlton House Terrace. “This,” he wrote to the Duchess of Sutherland, “is a day of excitement—almost of exultation. We have made a step, nay a stride, and this stride is on the [pg 247] pathway of justice, and of peace, and of national honour and renown.”169

The first resolution was carried (April 30) by a majority of 65, and a week later the second and third went through without a division. Mr. Disraeli fought his battle with much steadiness, but did not go beyond a dilatory amendment. If Mr. Gladstone had old deliverances to reconcile with new policy, so had his tory antagonist. Disraeli was reminded of that profound and brilliant oracle of 1844, when he had described the root of mischief in Ireland as a weak executive, an absentee aristocracy, and an alien church. He wasted little time in trying to explain why the alien church now found in him its champion. “Nobody listened,” he said, “at that time. It seemed to me that I was pouring water upon sand, but it seems now that the water came from a golden goblet.” The sentiment may have been expressed, he said, “with the heedless rhetoric which, I suppose, is the appanage of all who sit below the gangway; but in my historical conscience, the sentiment of that speech was right.” The prime minister did not escape taunts from those in his own camp who thought themselves betrayed by him upon reform the year before. He repaid the taunts by sarcasm. He told Lord Cranborne that there was vigour in his language and no want of vindictiveness, what it wanted was finish. Considering that Lord Cranborne had written anonymous articles against him before and since they were colleagues—“I do not know whether he wrote them when I was his colleague”—they really ought to have been more polished. Mr. Lowe, again, he described as a remarkable man; especially remarkable for his power of spontaneous aversion; he hates the working classes of England; he hates the Roman catholics of Ireland; he hates the protestants of Ireland; he hates ministers; and until Mr. Gladstone placed his hand upon the ark, he seemed almost to hate Mr. Gladstone.

After Mr. Gladstone's first resolution was carried, the prime minister acknowledged the change in the relations of the government and the House. He and his party had conducted the business of the country though in a minority, just as Lord John Russell between 1846 and 1851 had conducted [pg 248] business for five or six years, though in a minority, “but being morally supported by a majority, as we have been supported by a majority.” In this crisis he pursued a peculiar course. He advised the Queen to dissolve the parliament; but at the same time he told her Majesty that if she thought the interests of the country would be better served, he tendered his resignation. The Queen did not accept it, he said; and the ministerial decision was to dissolve in the autumn when the new constituencies would be in order. The statement was not clear, and Mr. Gladstone sought in vain to discover with precision whether the prime minister had begun by resigning, or had presented two alternatives leaving the decision to the Queen, and did he mean a dissolution on existing registers? The answer to these questions was not definite, but it did not matter.

This episode did not check Mr. Gladstone for a moment in his course; in a week after the resolutions were carried, he introduced a bill suspending the creation of new interests in the Irish church. This proof of vigour and resolution rapidly carried the suspensory bill through the Commons. The Lords threw it out by a majority of 95 (June 29). If we sometimes smile at the sanguine prediction of the optimist, the gloom of his pessimist opponent is more ludicrous. “If you overthrow the Irish established church,” cried the Archbishop of Dublin, “you will put to the Irish protestants the choice between apostasy and expatriation, and every man among them who has money or position, when he sees his church go will leave the country. If you do that, you will find Ireland so difficult to manage that you will have to depend on the gibbet and the sword.” The Bishop of Chester and Bishop Thirlwall, whom Mr. Gladstone described as “one of the most masculine, powerful, and luminous intellects that have for generations been known among the bishops of England,” were deliberately absent from the division. The effect of the bill was not impaired, perhaps it was even heightened; for it convinced the public that its author meant earnest and vigorous business, and the air was instantly alive with the thrill of battle. For it is undoubted that if the country cares for a thing, the resistance to it of the hereditary House seems to add spice and an element of sport.

I

During the election (Nov. 23) Mr. Gladstone published his Chapter of Autobiography, the history of his journey from the book of 1838 to the resolutions thirty years later.170 Lord Granville told him frankly that he never liked nor quite understood the first book; that the description of it in the new “Chapter” gave him little pleasure; that he had at first a feeling that the less a person in Mr. Gladstone's position published, the better; and that unnecessary explanation would only provoke fresh attacks. But as he read on, these misgivings melted away; he thought the description of a certain phase of the history of the English church one of the most eloquent and feeling passages he ever read; the reference to the nonconformists was a graceful amend to them for being so passionate an Oxonian and churchman; the piece of controversy with Macaulay rather an exaggeration and not easy to understand; the closing pages admirable. In [pg 250] short, he was all for publication. Another close friend of Mr. Gladstone's, Sir Robert Phillimore, told him (Nov. 29): “I am satisfied that you have done wisely and justly both with reference to the immediate and future influence of your character as a statesman. It is exactly what a mere man of the world would not have done. His standard would have been the ephemeral opinion of the clubs, and not the earnest opinion of the silent but thoughtful persons to whom the moral character of their chief is a matter of real moment and concern.” Newman wrote to him from the Oratory at Birmingham, “It is most noble, and I can congratulate you with greater reason and more hearty satisfaction upon it, than I could upon a score of triumphs at the hustings.” The man of the world and the man at the club did not hide their disgust, but Phillimore was right, and great hosts of people of the other sort welcomed in this publication a sign of sincerity and simplicity and desire to take the public into that full confidence, which makes the ordinary politician tremble as undignified and indecorous.

That Mr. Gladstone had rightly divined the state of public feeling about Ireland was shown by the result. Manning put the case in apt words when he wrote to him: “I have been much struck by the absence of all serious opposition to your policy, and by the extensive and various support given to it in England and Scotland. It is not so much a change in men's thoughts, but a revelation of what they have been thinking.” Heart and soul he flung himself into the labours of his canvass. The constituency for which he had sat in the expiring parliament was now divided, and with Mr. H. R. Grenfell for a colleague, he contested what had become South-West Lancashire. The breadth, the elevation, the freshness, the power, the measure, the high self-command of these speeches were never surpassed by any of his performances. When publicists warn us, and rightly warn us, that rash expenditure of money extracted from the taxpayer and the ratepayer is the besetting vice and peril of democracy, and when some of them in the same breath denounce Mr. Gladstone as a demagogue pandering to the multitude, they should read the speech at Leigh, in which [pg 251] he assailed the system of making things pleasant all round, stimulating local cupidity to feed upon the public purse, and scattering grants at the solicitation of individuals and classes. No minister that ever lived toiled more sedulously, in office and out of office, to avert this curse of popular government. The main staple of his discourse was naturally the Irish case, and though within the next twenty years he acquired a wider familiarity with detail, he never exhibited the large features of that case with more cogent and persuasive mastery. He told the story of the transformation of the franchise bill with a combined precision, completeness and lightness of hand that made his articles of charge at once extremely interesting and wholly unanswerable. In a vein of pleasant mockery, on the accusation that he was going to ruin and destroy the constitution, he reminded them that within his own recollection it had been wholly ruined and destroyed eight times: in 1828 by the repeal of the Corporation and Test acts; in 1829 by admitting Roman catholics to parliament; in 1832 by reform; in 1846 by free trade; in 1849 by repeal of the navigation law; in 1858 when Jews were allowed to sit in parliament; in 1866 when the government of Lord Russell had the incredible audacity to propose a reform bill with the intention of carrying it or falling in the attempt.

It was a magnificent campaign. But in South-West Lancashire the church of England was strong; orange prevailed vastly over green; and Mr. Gladstone was beaten. Happily he had in anticipation of the result, and by the care of friends, already been elected for Greenwich.171 In the kingdom as a whole he was triumphant. The liberal majority was 112. When the gross votes were added up, it was calculated that the liberals had a million and a half and the conservatives less than a million.172 After a long era of torpor a powerful party thus once more came into [pg 252] being. The cause was excellent, but more potent than the cause was the sight of a leader with a resolute will, an unresting spirit of reform, and the genius of political action. This ascendency Mr. Gladstone maintained for quarter of a century to come.

II

On the afternoon of the first of December, he received at Hawarden the communication from Windsor. “I was standing by him,” says Mr. Evelyn Ashley, “holding his coat on my arm while he in his shirt sleeves was wielding an axe to cut down a tree. Up came a telegraph messenger. He took the telegram, opened it and read it, then handed it to me, speaking only two words, ‘Very significant,’ and at once resumed his work. The message merely stated that General Grey would arrive that evening from Windsor. This of course implied that a mandate was coming from the Queen charging Mr. Gladstone with the formation of his first government.... After a few minutes the blows ceased, and Mr. Gladstone resting on the handle of his axe, looked up and with deep earnestness in his voice and with great intensity in his face, exclaimed, ‘My mission is to pacify Ireland.’ He then resumed his task, and never said another word till the tree was down.”173 General Grey reached Hawarden the next day, bringing with him the letter from the Queen.

One of his first letters after undertaking to form a government was to Lord Russell, to whom he said that he looked forward with hope and confidence to full and frequent communications, and to the benefit of his friendship and advice. “There remains, however, a question,” he went on; “you have an experience and knowledge to which no living statesman can pretend; of the benefit to be derived from it, I am sure that all with whom I can be likely to act would be deeply sensible. Would it be too great an invasion of your independence to ask you to consider whether you could afford it as a member of the cabinet without the weight of any other responsibility?” Lord Russell replied in cordial terms, but said that the servitude of a cabinet, whether with or without a special office, was what he did not wish to encounter. “What I should have said,” he added at a later date (Dec. 28), “if the office of the president of the council or the privy seal had been offered me, I do not know: at all events I am personally very well satisfied to be free from all responsibility.” Sir George Grey also declined, on the ground of years: he was within one of the threescore and ten allotted to mortal man. Lord Halifax, on whose ability and experience both the Queen and Mr. Gladstone set special value, declined the Irish viceroyalty, and stood good-naturedly aside until 1870 when he joined as privy seal. The [pg 254] inclusion in the same cabinet of Mr. Bright, who had been the chief apostle of reform, with Mr. Lowe, its fiercest persecutor, startled the country. As for Lowe, Lord Acton told me that he once informed Mr. Gladstone that Lowe had written the review of his Financial Statements in the periodical of which Acton was editor. “He told me at Grillion's that I thereby made him chancellor of the exchequer.” With Bright he had greater difficulties. He often described how he wrestled with this admirable man from eleven o'clock until past midnight, striving to overcome his repugnance to office. The next day Bright wrote to him (Dec. 5): “Since I left you at midnight I have had no sleep, from which you may imagine the mental disturbance I have suffered from our long conversation last night. Nevertheless I am driven to the conclusion to take the step to which you invite me, surrendering my inclination and my judgment to your arguments and to the counsel of some whom I have a right to consider my friends.... I am deeply grateful to you for the confidence you are willing to place in me, and for the many kind words you spoke to me yesterday.” In the parched air of official politics the relation of these two towards one another is a peculiar and a refreshing element. In the case of Lord Clarendon, some difficulty was intimated from Windsor before Mr. Gladstone began his task. Mr. Gladstone says in one of his late notes:—

Of this cabinet Mr. Gladstone always spoke as one of the best instruments for government that ever were constructed.174 Nearly everybody in it was a man of talent, character, and force, and showed high capacity for public business. In one or two cases, conformably to the old Greek saying, office showed the man; showed that mere cleverness, apart from judgment and discretion is only too possible, and that good intention only makes failure and incapacity in carrying the intention out, so much the more mortifying. The achievements of this cabinet as a whole, as we shall see, are a great chapter in the history of reform and the prudent management of national affairs. It forms one of the best vindications of the cabinet system, and of the powers of the minister who created, guided, controlled, and inspired it.

“And so,” Manning, the close friend of other years, now wrote to him, “you are at the end men live for, but not, I believe, the end for which you have lived. It is strange so to salute you, but very pleasant.... There are many prayers put up among us for you, and mine are not wanting.” At an earlier stage sympathetic resolutions had been sent to him from nonconformist denominations, and in writing to Dr. Allon who forwarded them, Mr. Gladstone said: “I thank you for all the kind words contained in your letter, but most of all for the assurance, not the first I am happy to say which has reached me, that many prayers are offered on my behalf. I feel myself by the side of this arduous undertaking a small creature; but where the Almighty sends us duties, He also sends the strength needful to perform them.” To Mr. Arthur Gordon, the son of Lord Aberdeen, he wrote (Jan. 29, 1869):—

On December 29 he enters in his diary: “This birthday opens my sixtieth year. I descend the hill of life. It would be a truer figure to say I ascend a steepening path with a burden ever gathering weight. The Almighty seems to sustain and spare me for some purpose of His own, deeply unworthy as I know myself to be. Glory be to His name.” In the closing hours of the year, he enters:—

I

Anybody could pulverise the Irish church in argument, and to show that it ought to be disestablished and disendowed was the easiest thing in the world. But as often happens, what it was easy to show ought to be done, was extremely hard to do. Here Mr. Gladstone was in his great element. It was true to say that “never were the wheels of legislative machinery set in motion under conditions of peace and order and constitutional regularity to deal with a question greater or more profound,” than when the historic protestant church in Ireland was severed from its sister church in England and from its ancient connection with the state. The case had been fully examined in parliament. After examination and decision there, it was discussed and decided in the constituencies of the United Kingdom. Even then many held that the operation was too gigantic in its bearings, too complex in the mass of its detail, to be practicable. Never was our political system more severely [pg 258] tested, and never did it achieve a completer victory. Every great organ of the national constitution came into active play. The sovereign performed a high and useful duty. The Lords fought hard, but yielded before the strain reached a point of danger. The prelates in the midst of anger and perturbation were forced round to statesmanship. The Commons stood firm and unbroken. The law, when at length it became law, effected the national purpose with extraordinary thoroughness and precision. And the enterprise was inspired, guided, propelled, perfected, and made possible from its inception to its close by the resource, temper, and incomparable legislative skill of Mr. Gladstone. That the removal of the giant abuse of protestant establishment in Ireland made a deeper mark on national well-being than other of his legislative exploits, we can hardly think, but—quite apart from the policy of the act, as to which there can now be scarcely two opinions—as a monument of difficulties surmounted, prejudices and violent or sullen heats overcome, rights and interests adjusted, I know not where in the records of our legislation to find its master.

With characteristic hopefulness and simplicity Mr. Gladstone tried to induce Archbishop Trench and others of the Irish hierarchy to come to terms. Without raising the cry of no surrender, they declined all approaches. If Gladstone, they said, were able to announce in the House of Commons a concordat with the Irish clergy, it would ruin them both with the laity of the Irish establishment, and with the English conservatives who had fought for them at the election and might well be expected, as a piece of party business if for no better reasons, to fight on for them in the House of Lords. Who could tell that the Gladstone majority would hold together? Though “no surrender” might be a bad cry, it was even now at the eleventh hour possible that “no popery” would be a good one. In short, they argued, this was one of the cases where terms could only be settled on the field of battle. There were moderates, the most eminent being Bishop Magee of Peterborough, who had an interview with Mr. Gladstone at this stage, but nothing came of it. One Irish clergyman only, Stopford the [pg 259] archdeacon of Meath, a moderate who disliked the policy but wished to make the best of the inevitable, gave Mr. Gladstone the benefit of his experience and ability. When the work was done, Mr. Gladstone wrote to the archdeacon more than once expressing his sense of the advantage derived from his “thorough mastery of the subject and enlightened view of the political situation.” He often spoke of Stopford's “knowledge, terseness, discrimination, and just judgment.”

Meanwhile his own course was clear. He did not lose a day:—

The general situation he described to Bishop Hinds on the last day of the year:—

The preparation of the bill went rapidly forward:—

In February Lord Granville thought that it might do good if the Queen were to see Bishop Magee. Mr. Gladstone said to him in reply (Feb. 7, '69):—

On Feb. 12, the Queen wrote to Mr. Gladstone from Osborne:—

He replied on the following day:—

“My impression is,” Mr. Gladstone wrote to Lord Granville (Feb. 14), “that we should make a great mistake if we were to yield on the point of time. It is not time that is wanted; we have plenty of time to deal with the Bishop of Peterborough's points so far as they can be dealt with at all. Sir R. Palmer has been here to-day with overtures from persons of importance unnamed. I think probably the Archbishop of Canterbury and others.175 I do not doubt that on the other side they want time, for their suggestions are crude.”

On the following day (Feb. 15) the Queen wrote to the archbishop, telling him that she had seen Mr. Gladstone, “who shows the most conciliatory disposition,” and who at once assured her “of his readiness—indeed, his anxiety—to meet the archbishop and to communicate freely with him.” The correspondence between the Queen and the archbishop has already been made known, and most of that between the archbishop and Mr. Gladstone, and I need not here reproduce it, for, in fact, at this first stage nothing particular came of it.176 “The great mistake, as it seems to me,” Mr. Gladstone writes to Archdeacon Stopford (Feb. 8), “made by the Irish bishops and others is this. They seem to think that our friends are at the mercy of our adversaries, whereas our adversaries are really at the mercy of our friends, and it is to these latter [pg 263] that the government, especially in the absence of other support, must look.” Meanwhile the bill had made its way through the cabinet:—

II

On March 1, Mr. Gladstone brought his plan before a House of Commons eager for its task, triumphant in its strength out of doors, and confident that its leader would justify the challenge with which for so many months the country had been ringing. The details are no longer of concern, and only broader aspects survive. A revolutionary change was made by the complete and definite severance of the protestant episcopal church in Ireland alike from the established church of England and from the government of the United Kingdom. A far more complex and delicate task was the winding up of a great temporal estate, the adjustment of many individual and corporate interests, and the distribution of some sixteen millions of property among persons and purposes to be determined by the wisdom of a parliament, where rival claims were defended by zealous and powerful champions influenced by the strongest motives, sacred and profane, of party, property, and church. It was necessary to deal with the sums, troublesome though not considerable, allotted to the presbyterians and to the catholic seminary at Maynooth. Machinery was constructed for the incorporation of a body to represent the emancipated church, and to hold property for any of its uses and purposes. Finally, the residue of the sixteen millions, after all the just demands upon it had been satisfied, computed at something between seven and eight millions, was appropriated in the words of the preamble, “not for the maintenance of any church or clergy, nor for the teaching of religion, but mainly for the relief of unavoidable calamity and suffering” not touched by the poor law.

The speech in which this arduous scheme was explained to parliament was regarded as Mr. Gladstone's highest example of lucid and succinct unfolding of complicated matter. Mr. Disraeli said there was not a single word wasted. So skilfully were the facts marshalled, that every single hearer believed himself thoroughly to comprehend the eternal principles of the commutation of tithe-rent-charge, and the difference in the justice due to a transitory and a permanent curate. Manning said that the only two legislative acts in our history that approached it in importance for Ireland were the repeal of the penal laws and the Act of Union. However this may be, it is hardly an excess to say that since Pitt, the author of the Act of Union, the author of the Church Act was the only statesman in the roll of the century, capable at once of framing such a statute and expounding it with the same lofty and commanding power.177

In a fugitive note, Mr. Gladstone named one or two of the speakers on the second reading: “Ball: elaborate and impressive, answered with great power by Irish attorney-general. Bright: very eloquent and striking. Young George Hamilton: a first speech of great talent, admirably delivered. Hardy: an uncompromising defence of laws and institutions as they are, with a severe picture of the character and civil conduct of the Irish population.” Mr. Disraeli's speech was even more artificial than usual. It was Mr. Hardy and Dr. Ball who gave cogent and strenuous expression to the argument and passion of the church case. When the division came, called by Mr. Gladstone “notable and historic” (March 24), the majority in a crowded house was 118.178 “Our division this morning,” Mr. Gladstone wrote to Lord Granville, “even exceeded expectations, and will powerfully propel the bill.” The size of this majority deserves the reader's attention, for it marked the opening of a new parliamentary era. In 1841 Peel had turned out the whigs by a majority of 91. Lord John Russell was displaced in 1852 by 9. The Derby government [pg 265] was thrown out in December 1852 by 19. The same government was again thrown out seven years later by 13. Palmerston was beaten in 1857 by 14, and the next year by 19. In 1864 Palmerston's majority on the Danish question was only 18. The second reading of the Franchise bill of 1866 was only carried by 5, and ministers were afterwards beaten upon it by 11. With Mr. Gladstone's accession the ruling majority for a long time stood at its highest both in size and stability.

With invincible optimism, Mr. Gladstone believed that he would now have “material communications from the heads of the Irish church”; but letters from Lord Spencer at Dublin Castle informed him that, on the contrary, they were angrier after they knew what the majority meant, than they were before. At the diocesan conferences throughout Ireland the bill was denounced as highly offensive to Almighty God, and the greatest national sin ever committed. The Archdeacon of Ossory told churchmen to trust to God and keep their powder dry, though he afterwards explained that he did not allude to carnal weapons. The cabinet was called a cabinet of brigands, and protestant pastors were urged to see to it that before they gave up their churches to an apostate system a barrel of gunpowder and a box of matches should blow the cherished fabrics to the winds of heaven.

Even Mr. Disraeli's astuteness was at fault. The Archbishop of Canterbury perceived from his conversation that he was bent on setting the liberals by the ears, that he looked for speeches such as would betray utter dissension amid professed agreement, that he had good hopes of shattering the enemy, and “perhaps of playing over again the game that had destroyed Lord Russell's Reform bill of 1866.” The resounding majority on the second reading, he told the archbishop, was expected; it created no enthusiasm; it was a mechanical majority.179

The bill swept through the stages of committee without alteration of substance and with extraordinary celerity, due not merely to the “brute majority,” nor to the confidence that all was sure to be undone in another place, but to the peculiar powers developed by the minister. From the speech in which he unfolded his plan, down to the last amendment on report, he showed a mastery alike of himself and of his project and of the business from day to day in hand, that routed opposition and gave new animation and ardour to the confidence of his friends. For six or seven hours a day he astonished the House by his power of attention, unrelaxed yet without strain, by his double grasp of leading principle and intricate detail, by his equal command of legal and historic controversy and of all the actuarial niceties and puzzles of commutation. “In some other qualities of parliamentary statesmanship,” says one acute observer of that time, “as an orator, a debater, and a tactician he has rivals; but in the powers of embodying principles in legislative form and preserving unity of purpose through a multiplicity of confusing minutiae he has neither equal nor second among living statesmen.”180 The truth could not be better summed up. He carried the whole of his party with him, and the average majority in divisions on the clauses was 113. Of one dangerous corner, he says:—

By a majority of 114 the bill was read a third time on the last day of May.

III

The contest was now removed from the constituencies and their representatives in parliament to the citadel of privilege. The issue was no longer single, and the struggle for religious equality in Ireland was henceforth merged before the public eye in a conflict for the supremacy of the Commons [pg 267] in England. Perhaps I should not have spoken of religious equality, for in fact the establishment was known to be doomed, and the fight turned upon the amount of property with which the free church was to go forth to face its new fortunes. “I should urge the House of Lords,” wrote the Archbishop of Canterbury to Mr. Gladstone (June 3), “to give all its attention to saving as large an endowment as possible.”

As at the first stage the Queen had moved for conciliatory courses, so now she again desired Archbishop Tait to communicate with the prime minister. To Mr. Gladstone himself she wrote from Balmoral (June 3): “The Queen thanks Mr. Gladstone for his kind letter. She has invariably found him most ready to enter into her views and to understand her feelings.” The first question was whether the Lords should reject the bill on the second reading:—

At the same time he promised the archbishop that any views of his upon amendments would have the most careful attention of himself and his colleagues, and “they would be entertained in a spirit not of jealousy but of freedom, with every desire to bring them into such a shape that they may be in furtherance, and not in derogation, of the main design of the bill.”

General Grey, the Queen's secretary, told Mr. Gladstone that she had communicated with the archbishop, “having heard that violent counsels were likely to prevail, and that in spite of their leaders, the opposition in the House of Lords was likely to try and throw out the measure on the second reading.” Her own feeling was expressed in General [pg 268] Grey's letter to the archbishop of the same date, of which a copy was sent to the prime minister:—

Mr. Gladstone replied:—

“How much more effectually,” Mr. Gladstone wrote to Hawarden, “could the Queen assist in the settlement of this question were she not six hundred miles off.” As it was, she [pg 269] took a step from which Mr. Gladstone hoped for “most important consequences,” in writing direct to Lord Derby, dwelling on the danger to the Lords of a collision with the Commons. In a record of these proceedings prepared for Mr. Gladstone (August 4, '69), Lord Granville writes:—

The result was doubtful to the very end. It was three o'clock in the morning (June 19) before the close of a fine debate—fine not merely from the eloquence of the speakers and cogency of argument on either side, but because there was a deep and real issue, and because the practical conclusion was not foregone. It was the fullest House assembled in living memory. Three hundred and twenty-five peers voted. The two English archbishops did not vote, and Thirlwall was the only prelate who supported the second reading. It was carried by a majority of 33. In 1857 Lord Derby's vote of censure on Palmerston for the China war was defeated by 36, and these two were the only cases in which the conservatives had been beaten in the Lords for twenty years. Thirty-six conservative peers, including Lord Salisbury, voted away from their party in favour of the second reading.

IV

For the moment ministers breathed freely, but the bill was soon in the trough of the sea. The archbishop wrote to the Queen that they had decided if they could not get three million pounds to float the new church upon, they would take their chance of what might happen by postponing the bill until next year. Asked by the Queen what could be done (July 10), Lord Granville, being at Windsor, answered that the cabinet would not make up their mind until they knew how far the Lords would go in resistance, but he thought it right to tell her that there was no chance of ministers agreeing to postpone the bill for another year. The day after this conversation, the Queen wrote again to the archbishop, asking him seriously to reflect, in case the concessions of the government should not go quite so far as he might himself wish, whether the postponement of the settlement for another year would not be likely to result rather in worse than in better terms for the church. She trusted that he would himself consider, and endeavour to induce others to consider, any concessions offered by the House of Commons in the most conciliatory spirit, rather than to try and get rid of the bill. “The amendments,” said Mr. Gladstone, “seem to mean war to the knife.”

After the second reading a tory lady of high station told Lord Clarendon and Mr. Delane that in her opinion a friendly communication might have great influence on Lord Salisbury's course.

The general result of the operations of the Lords was to leave disestablishment complete, and the legal framework of the bill undisturbed. Disendowment, on the other hand, was reduced to a shadow. An additional sum of between three and four millions was taken for the church, and the general upshot was, out of a property of sixteen millions, to make over thirteen or fourteen millions to an ecclesiastical body wholly exempt from state control. This, Mr. Gladstone told the Queen, the House of Commons would never accept, and the first effect of persistence in such a course would be a stronger move against the episcopal seats in the House of Lords than had been seen for more than two hundred years. He ridiculed as it deserved the contention that the nation had not passed judgment on the question of disendowment, and he insisted that the government could not go further than three quarters of a million towards meeting the extravagant claims of the Lords. Confessing his disappointment at the conduct of the episcopal body, even including the archbishop, he found a certain consolation in reflecting that equally on the great occasions of 1829 and 1831, though 'the mild and wise Archbishop Howley was its leader,' that body failed either to meet the desires of the country, or to act upon a far-sighted view of the exigencies of the church. One point obstinately contested was the plan for the future application of the surplus. A majority of the Lords insisted on casting out the words of the preamble providing that the residue should not be applied for purposes of religion, and substituting in one shape or another the principle of concurrent endowment, so hostile, as Mr. Gladstone judged it, to the peace of Ireland, and so irreconcilable with public feeling in England and Scotland.

On July 12, the bill came back to the Commons. The [pg 272] tension had hardly yet begun to tell upon him, but Mr. Gladstone enters on these days:—

This was the day on which, amid the ardent cheers of his party, he arose to announce to the House the views of the government. He was in no compromising mood. In a short speech he went through the amendments made by men so out of touch with the feeling of the country that they might have been “living in a balloon.” One by one he moved the rejection of all amendments that involved the principle of concurrent endowment, the disposal of the surplus, or the postponement of the date of disestablishment. He agreed, however, to give a lump sum of half a million in lieu of private benefactions, to readjust the commutation terms, and make other alterations involving a further gift of £280,000 to the church. When the Commons concluded the consideration of the Lords' amendments (July 16), Mr. Gladstone observed three things: first, that the sentiment against concurrent endowment in any form was overwhelming; second, that not only was no disposition shown to make new concessions, but concessions actually made were sorely grudged; and third, that the tories were eager to postpone the destination of the residuary property.

V

On July 16, the bill, restored substantially to its first shape, was again back on the table of the Lords, and shipwreck seemed for five days to be inevitable. On July 20, at eleven o'clock, by a majority of 175 to 93, the Lords once more excluded from the preamble the words that the Commons had placed and replaced there, in order to declare the policy of parliament on matters ecclesiastical in Ireland. This [pg 273] involved a meaning which Mr. Gladstone declared that no power on earth could induce the Commons to accept. The crisis was of unsurpassed anxiety for the prime minister. He has fortunately left his own record of its phases:181—

This, dated July 22, was to the effect that Lord Cairns had no right and no desire to ask for any information as to the course proposed that night; but that if the statements as to the intention of the government to proceed with the consideration of the amendments were correct, and if Lord Granville thought any advantage likely to result from it, Lord Cairns would be ready, “as you know I have throughout been, to confer upon a mode by which without sacrifice of principle or dignity upon either side the remaining points of difference might be arranged.” The proceedings of this critical day [pg 277] are narrated by Lord Granville in a memorandum to Mr. Gladstone, dated August 4:—

“The news was brought to me on my sofa,” Mr. Gladstone says, “and between five and six I was enabled to telegraph to the Queen. My telegram was followed up by a letter at 7 p.m., which announced that the arrangement had been accepted by the House of Lords, and that a general satisfaction prevailed.” To the Queen he wrote (July 22):—

On reviewing this whole transaction, and doing full justice to the attitude both of the Queen and the archbishop, the reader will be inclined to agree with old Lord Halifax: “I think we owe a good turn to Cairns, without whose decision on Thursday I hardly think that the settlement could have been effected. Indeed Derby's conduct proves what difficulty [pg 279] there would have been, if Cairns had not taken upon himself the responsibility of acting as he did.”

Among interesting letters was one from Manning (July 24): “My joy over the event is not only as a catholic, though that must be, as it ought to be, my highest motive, but as an Englishman to whom, as I remember your once saying, the old English monarchy is dear next after the catholic church. But at this time I will only add that I may wish you joy on personal reasons. I could hardly have hoped that you could so have framed, mastered, and carried through the bill from first to last so complete, so unchanged in identity of principle and detail, and let me add with such unwearying and sustained self-control and forbearance.”

The diary gives us a further glimpse of these agitating days:—

Sir Robert Phillimore records:—

Sir Thomas Acland writes, August 3, 1869:—

A month later the Archbishop of Canterbury found Mr. Gladstone at Lord Granville's at Walmer Castle:—

I

In the beginning of 1870 one of Mr. Gladstone's colleagues wrote of him to another, “I fear that he is steering straight upon the rocks.” So it might well seem to any who knew the unplumbed depths on which he had to shape his voyage. Irish history has been said to resemble that of Spain for the last three centuries,—the elaboration of all those ideas of law and political economy most unsuited to the needs of the nation concerned. Such ideas, deeply cherished in Britain where they had succeeded, Mr. Gladstone was now gradually drawn forward to reverse and overthrow in Ireland where they had ended in monstrous failure. Here a pilot's eye might well see jagged reefs. The occasion was the measure for dealing with the land of Ireland, that he had promised at the election. The difficulty arose from the huge and bottomless ignorance of those in whose hands the power lay. Mr. Gladstone in the course of these discussions said, and said truly, of the learned Sir Roundell Palmer, that he knew no more of land tenures in Ireland than he knew of land tenures in the moon. At the beginning much the same might have been observed of the cabinet, of the two houses of parliament, and of the whole mass of British electors. No doubt one effect of this great ignorance was to make Mr. Gladstone dictator. Still ignorance left all the more power to prejudice and interests. We may imagine the task. The cabinet was in the main made up of landlords, lawyers, hardened and convicted economists,—not economists like [pg 282] Mill, but men saturated with English ideas of contract, of competitive rent, of strict rule of supply and demand. Mr. Bright, it is true, had a profound conviction that the root of Irish misery and disorder lay in the land question. Here he saw far and deep. But then Mr. Bright had made up his mind that the proper solution of the land question was the gradual transformation of the tenants into owners, and this strong preconception somewhat narrowed his vision. Even while Mr. Gladstone was in the middle of his battle on the church, Bright wrote to him (May 21, '69):—

“I have studied the Irish land question,” said Bright, “from a point of view almost inaccessible to the rest of your colleagues, and from which possibly even you have not had the opportunity of regarding it.... I hope you are being refreshed, as I am, after the long nights in the House—long nights which happily were not fruitless. I only hope our masters in the other House will not undo what we have done.” Mr. Gladstone replied the next day, opening with a sentence that, if addressed to any one less revered than Bright, might have seemed to veil a sarcasm: “I have this advantage for learning the Irish land question, that I do not set out with the belief that I know it already; and certainly no effort that I can make to acquire the mastery of it will be wanting.” He then proceeds to express his doubts as to the government embarking on a very large operation of land-jobbing, buying up estates from landlords and reselling them to tenants; and whether the property bought and sold again by the state would not by force of economic laws gradually return again to fewer hands. He then comes [pg 283] still closer to the pith of the matter when he says to Mr. Bright: “Your plan, if adopted in full, could only extend, to a small proportion of the two or three hundred millions worth of land in Ireland; and I do not well see how the unprotected tenants of the land in general would take essential benefit from the purchase and owning of land by a few of their fortunate brethren.” If the land question was urgent, and Bright himself, like Mill, thought that it was, this answer of Mr. Gladstone's was irrefragable. In acknowledging the despatch of this correspondence from Mr. Gladstone, Lord Granville says to him (May 26, 1869):—

The plan ultimately adopted, after a severe struggle and with momentous consequences, did not first spring from Mr. Gladstone's brain. The idea of adapting the law to custom in all its depth and breadth, and extending the rooted notion of tenant-right to its furthest bearings, was necessarily a plant of Irish and not of English growth. Mr. Chichester Fortescue, the Irish chief secretary and an Irishman, first opened a bold expansion of the familiar principle of many tenant-right bills. He had introduced such a bill himself in 1866, and the conservative government had brought in another in 1867. It is believed that he was instigated to adopt the new and bolder line by Sir Edward Sullivan, then the Irish attorney-general. Away from Sullivan, it was observed, he had little to say of value about his plan. In the cabinet Fortescue was not found effective, but he was thoroughly at home in the subject, and his speeches in public on Irish business had all the cogency of a man [pg 284] speaking his native tongue, and even genius in an acquired language is less telling. What is astonishing is the magic of the rapid and sympathetic penetration with which Mr. Gladstone went to the heart of the problem, as it was presented to him by his Irish advisers. This was his way. When acts of policy were not of great or immediate concern, he took them as they came; but when they pressed for treatment and determination, then he swooped down upon them with the strength and vision of an eagle.

II

His career in the most deeply operative portion of it was so intimately concerned with Ireland, that my readers will perhaps benignantly permit a page or two of historic digression. I know the subject seems uninviting. My apology must be that it occupied no insignificant portion of Mr. Gladstone's public life, and that his treatment of it made one of his deepest marks on the legislation of the century. After all, there is no English-speaking community in any part of the wide globe, where our tragic mismanagement of the land of Ireland, and of those dwelling on it and sustained by it, has not left its unlucky stamp.

If Englishmen and Scots had not found the theme so uninviting, if they had given a fraction of the attention to the tenure and history of Irish land, that was bestowed, say, upon the Seisachtheia of Solon at Athens, or the Sempronian law in ancient Rome, this chapter in our annals would not have been written. As it was, parliament had made laws for landlord and tenant in Ireland without well understanding what is either an Irish landlord or an Irish tenant. England has been able to rule India, Mill said, because the business of ruling devolved upon men who passed their lives in India, and made Indian interests their regular occupation. India has on the whole been governed with a pretty full perception of its differences from England. Ireland on the contrary, suffering a worse misfortune than absentee landlords, was governed by an absentee parliament. In England, property means the rights of the rent-receiver who has equipped the land and prepared it for [pg 285] the capital and the skill of the tenant. In Ireland, in the minds of the vast majority of the population, for reasons just as good, property includes rights of the cultivator, whose labour has drained the land, and reclaimed it, and fenced it, and made farm-roads, and put a dwelling and farm buildings on it, and given to it all the working value that it possesses. We need suppose no criminality on either side. The origin of the difference was perfectly natural. In Ireland the holdings were small and multitudinous; no landlord who was not a millionaire, could have prepared and equipped holdings numbered by hundreds or thousands; and if he could, the hundreds and thousands of tenants had not a straw of capital. This peculiarity in social circumstances made it certain, therefore, that if the moral foundation of modern ideas of property is that he who sows shall reap, the idea of property would grow up in the mind of the cultivator, whenever the outer climate permitted the growth in his mind of any ideas of moral or equitable right at all.

In 1843 the Devon Commission had reported that it is the tenant who has made the improvements; that large confiscations of these improvements had been systematically practised in the shape of progressive enhancements of rent; that crime and disorder sprang from the system; and that parliament ought to interfere. A bill was proposed by the Peel government in 1845 for protecting the rightful interests of the tenant against the landlord. It was introduced in the House mainly composed of landlords. There it had such contumelious greeting, that it was speedily dropped. This was a crowning illustration of the levity of the imperial parliament dealing with Irish problems. The vital necessity for readjusting the foundations of social life demonstrated; a half measure languidly attempted; attempt dropped; bills sent to slumber in limbo; dry rot left quietly alone for a whole generation, until bloody outrage and murder awoke legislative conscience or roused executive fear. The union was seventy years old before the elementary feature in the agrarian condition of Ireland was recognised by the parliament which had undertaken to govern Ireland. Before the union Ireland [pg 286] was governed by the British cabinet, through the Irish landed gentry, according to their views, and in their interests. After the union it was just the same. She was treated as a turbulent and infected province within the larger island; never as a community with an internal economy peculiarly her own, with special sentiments, history, recollections, points of view, and necessities all her own. Between the union and the year 1870, Acts dealing with Irish land had been passed at Westminster. Every one of these Acts was in the interest of the landlord and against the tenant. A score of Insurrection Acts, no Tenant-right Act. Meanwhile Ireland had gone down into the dark gulfs of the Famine (1846-7).

Anybody can now see that the true view of the Irish cultivator was to regard him as a kind of copyholder or customary freeholder, or whatever other name best fits a man who has possessory interests in a piece of land, held at the landlord's will, but that will controlled by custom. In Ulster, and in an embryo degree elsewhere, this was what in a varying and irregular way actually had come about. Agrarian customs developed that undoubtedly belong to a backward social system, but they sprang from the necessities of the case. The essence of such customs in Ulster was first, a fair rent to be fixed not by competition, but by valuation, and exclusive of tenant's improvements; second, the right of the tenant to transfer to somebody else his goodwill, or whatever else we may call his right of occupancy in the holding.

Instead of adapting law to custom, habit, practice, and equity, parliament proceeded to break all this down. With well-meaning but blind violence it imported into Ireland after the famine the English idea of landed property and contract. Or rather, it imported these ideas into Ireland with a definiteness and formality that would have been impracticable even in England. Just as good people thought they could easily make Ireland protestant if only she could be got within earshot of evangelical truth, so statesmen expected that a few clauses on a parchment would suffice to root out at a stroke the inveterate habits and ideas of long generations. We talk of revolutionary doctrinaires in France and other countries. History hardly shows such revolutionary doctrinaires [pg 287] anywhere as the whig and tory statesmen who tried to regenerate Ireland in the middle of the nineteenth century. They first of all passed an Act (1849) inviting the purchase of the estates of an insolvent landlord upon precisely the same principles as governed the purchase of his pictures or his furniture. We passed the Encumbered Estates Act, Mr. Gladstone said, “with lazy, heedless, uninformed good intentions.” The important rights given by custom and equity to the cultivator were suddenly extinguished by the supreme legal right of the rent-receiver. About one-eighth of the whole area of the country is estimated to have changed hands on these terms. The extreme of wretchedness and confusion naturally followed. Parliament thought this must be due to some misunderstanding. That there might be no further mistake, it next proceeded formally to declare (1860) that the legal relations between landlord and tenant in Ireland were to be those of strict contract.186 Thus blunder was clenched by blunder. The cultivators were terror-struck, and agitation waxed hot.

Oliver Cromwell had a glimpse of the secret in 1649. “These poor people,” he said, “have been accustomed to as much injustice and oppression from their landlords, the great men, and those who should have done them right, as any people in that which we call Christendom. Sir, if justice were freely and impartially administered here, the foregoing darkness and corruption would make it look so much the more glorious and beautiful.” It was just two hundred and twenty years before another ruler of England saw as deep, and applied his mind to the free doing of justice.

III

Almost immediately after recovering from the fatigues of the session of 1869, Mr. Gladstone threw himself upon his new task, his imagination vividly excited by its magnitude and its possibilities. “For the last three months,” he writes [pg 288] to the Duke of Argyll (Dec. 5), “I have worked daily, I think, upon the question, and so I shall continue to do. The literature of it is large, larger than I can master; but I feel the benefit of continued reading upon it. We have before us a crisis, and a great crisis, for us all, to put it on no higher ground, and a great honour or a great disgrace. As I do not mean to fail through want of perseverance, so neither will I wilfully err through precipitancy, or through want of care and desire at least to meet all apprehensions which are warranted by even the show of reason.”

It was not reading alone that brought him round to the full measure of securing the cultivator in his holding. The crucial suggestion, the expediency, namely, of making the landlord pay compensation to the tenant for disturbing him, came from Ireland. To Mr. Chichester Fortescue, the Irish secretary, Mr. Gladstone writes (Sept. 15):—

Meanwhile he notes to Lord Granville (Sept. 22) how critical and arduous the question is, within as well as without the cabinet, and wonders whether they ought not to be thinking of a judicious cabinet committee:—

He tells the Irish secretary that so far as he can enter into the secretary's views, he “enters thoroughly into the spirit of them.” But many members of the cabinet, laden sufficiently with their own labours, had probably not so closely followed up the matter:—

At the end of October the question was brought formally before the cabinet:—

The brain rest was not for long. On Dec. 1 he tells Lord Granville that Argyll is busy on Irish land, and in his views is misled by “the rapid facility of his active mind.” “It is rather awkward at this stage to talk of breaking up the government, and that is more easily said than done.” I know no more singular reading in its way than the correspondence between Mr. Gladstone and the Duke of Argyll; [pg 290] Mr. Gladstone trying to lead his argumentative colleague over one or two of the barest rudiments of the history of Irish land, and occasionally showing in the process somewhat of the quality of the superior pupil teacher acquiring to-day material for the lesson of to-morrow. Mr. Gladstone goes to the root of the matter when he says to the Duke: “What I would most earnestly entreat of you is not to rely too much on Highland experience, but to acquaint yourself by careful reading with the rather extensive facts and history of the Irish land question. My own studies in it are very imperfect, though pursued to the best of my ability; but they have revealed to me many matters of fact which have seriously modified my views, most of them connected with and branching out of the very wide extension of the idea and even the practice of tenant right, mostly perhaps unrecognised beyond the limits of the Ulster custom.”

Then Lord Granville writes to him that Clarendon has sent him two letters running, talking of the certainty of the government being broken up. “The sky is very far from clear,” Mr. Gladstone says to Mr. Fortescue (Dec. 3), “but we must bate no jot of heart or hope.” The next day it is Mr. Bright to whom he turns in friendly earnest admonition. His words will perhaps be useful to many generations of cabinet ministers:—

A letter from Mr. Gladstone to Fortescue (Dec. 5) shows the competition between Bright's projects of purchase by state-aid, and the scheme for dealing with the tenants as tenants:—

At this date he was still in doubt whether anybody would agree to interference with existing rents, but he had for himself hit upon the principle that became the foundation of his law. He put to Fortescue (Dec. 9) as a material point:—

Lowe, at the other extremity, describes himself as more and more “oppressed by a feeling of heavy responsibility and an apprehension of serious danger,” and feeling that he and the minority (Clarendon, Argyll, and Cardwell—of whom he was much the best hand at an argument)—were being driven to choose between their gravest convictions, and their allegiance to party and cabinet. They agreed to the presumption of law as to the making of improvements; to compensation for improvements, retrospective and prospective; to the right of new tenants at will to compensation on eviction. The straw that broke the camel's back was compensation for eviction, where no custom could be proved in the case of an existing tenancy. Mr. Gladstone wrote a long argumentative letter to Lord Granville to be shown to Lowe, and it was effectual. Lowe thought the tone of it very fair and the arguments of the right sort, but nevertheless he added, in the words I have already quoted, “I fear he is steering straight upon the rocks.”

What might surprise us, if anything in Irish doings could surprise us, is that though this was a measure for Irish tenants, it was deemed heinously wrong to ascertain directly from their representatives what the Irish tenants thought. Lord Bessborough was much rebuked in London for encouraging Mr. Gladstone to communicate with Sir John Gray, the owner of the great newspaper of the Irish tenant class. Yet Lord O'Hagan, the chancellor, who had the rather relevant advantage of being of the same stock and faith as three-fourths of the nation concerned, told them that “the success or failure of the Land bill depends on the Freeman's Journal; if it says, We accept this as a fixity of tenure, every priest will say the same, and vice versâ.” It was, however, almost a point of honour in those days for British cabinets to make Irish laws out of their own heads.

Almost to the last the critical contest in the cabinet went on. Fortescue fought as well as he could even against the prime minister himself, as the following from Mr. Gladstone to him shows (Jan. 12):—

How much he had his Irish plans at heart, Mr. Gladstone showed by his urgency that the Queen should open parliament. His letter to her (Jan. 15) on the subject, he told Lord Granville, “expresses my desire, not founded on ordinary motives, nor having reference to ordinary circumstances”:—

IV

Public opinion was ripening. The Times made a contribution of the first importance to the discussion, in a series of letters from a correspondent, that almost for the first time brought the facts of Irish land before the general public. A pamphlet from Mill, then at the height of his influence upon both writers and readers, startled them by the daring proposition that the only plan was to buy out the landlords. The whole host of whig economists and lawyers fell heavily upon him in consequence. The new voters showed that they were not afraid of new ideas. It was not until Jan. 25 that peril was at an end inside the government:—

Lord Dufferin, an Irish landlord, watching, as he admits, with considerable jealousy exceptional legislation in respect to Ireland, heard the speech from the peers' gallery, and wrote to Mr. Gladstone the next day: “I feel there is no one else in the country who could have recommended the provisions of such a bill to the House of Commons, with a slighter shock to the prejudices of the class whose interests are chiefly concerned.” He adds: “I happened to find myself next to Lord Cairns. When you had done, he told me he did not think his people would oppose any of the leading principles of your bill.”

The policy of the bill as tersely explained by Mr. Gladstone in a letter to Manning, compressing as he said eight or ten columns of the Times, was “to prevent the landlord from using the terrible weapon of undue and unjust eviction, by so framing the handle that it shall cut his hands with the sharp edge of pecuniary damages. The man evicted without any fault, and suffering the usual loss by it, will receive whatever the custom of the country gives, and where there is no custom, according to a scale, besides whatever he can claim for permanent buildings or reclamation of land. Wanton eviction will, as I hope, be extinguished by provisions like these. And if they extinguish wanton eviction, they will also extinguish those demands for unjust augmentations of rent, which are only formidable to the occupier, because the power of wanton or arbitrary eviction is behind them.” What seems so simple, and what was so necessary, marked in truth a vast revolutionary stride. It transferred to the tenant a portion of the absolute ownership, and gave him something like an estate in his holding. The statute contained a whole code of minor provisions, including the extension of Mr. Bright's clauses for peasant proprietorship in the Church Act, but this transfer was what gave the Act its place in solid legal form.

The second reading was carried by 442 to 11, the minority being composed of eight Irish members of advanced type, and three English tories, including Mr. Henley and Mr. James Lowther, himself Irish secretary eight years later. The bill was at no point fought high by the opposition. Mr. Disraeli moved an amendment limiting compensation to unexhausted improvements. The government majority fell to 76, “a result to be expected,” Mr. Gladstone reports, “considering the natural leanings of English and Scotch members to discount in Ireland what they would not apply in Great Britain. They are not very familiar with Irish land tenures.” One fact of much significance he notes in these historic proceedings. Disraeli, he writes to the Duke of Argyll (April 21, 1870), “has not spoken one word against valuation of rents or perpetuity of tenure.” It was from the house of his friends that danger came:—

To Lord Russell he writes (April 12):—

Phillimore records a visit in these critical days:—

As a very accomplished journalist of the day wrote, there was something almost painful in the strange phenomenon of a prime minister fighting as it were all but single-handed the details of his own great measure through the ambuscades and charges of a numerous and restless enemy—and of an enemy determined apparently to fritter away the principle of the measure under the pretence of modifying its details. “No prime minister has ever attempted any task like it—a task involving the most elaborate departmental readiness, in addition to the general duties and fatigues of a prime minister, and that too in a session when questions are showered like hail upon the treasury bench.”187

Then the government put on pressure, and the majority sprang up to 80. The debate in the Commons lasted over three and a half months, or about a fortnight longer than had been taken by the Church bill. The third reading was carried without a division. In the Lords the bill was read a second time without a division. Few persons “clearly foresaw that it was the first step of a vast transfer of property, and that in a few years it would become customary for ministers of the crown to base all their legislation on the doctrine that Irish land is not an undivided ownership, but a simple partnership.”188

In March Mr. Gladstone had received from Manning a memorandum of ill omen from the Irish bishops, setting out the amendments by them thought necessary. This paper included the principles of perpetuity of tenure for the tiller of the soil and the adjustment of rent by a court. The reader may judge for himself how impossible it would have been, even for Mr. Gladstone, in all the plenitude of his power, to persuade either cabinet or parliament to adopt such invasions of prevailing doctrine. For this, ten years more of agitation were required, and then he was able to complete the memorable chapter in Irish history that he had now opened.

V

Neither the Land Act nor the Church Act at once put out the hot ashes of Fenianism. A Coercion Act was passed in the spring of 1870. In the autumn Mr. Gladstone tried to persuade the cabinet to approve the release of the Fenian prisoners, but it was not until the end of the year that he prevailed. A secret committee was thought necessary in 1871 to consider outrages in Westmeath, and a repressive law was passed in consequence. Mr. Gladstone himself always leaned strongly against these exceptional laws, and pressed the Irish government hard the other way. “What we have to do,” he said, “is to defy Fenianism, to rely on public sentiment, and so provide (as we have been doing) the practical measures that place the public sentiment on our side, an operation which I think is retarded by any semblance of severity to those whose offence we admit among ourselves to have been an ultimate result of our misgovernment of the country. I am afraid that local opinion has exercised, habitually and traditionally, too much influence in Ireland, and has greatly compromised the character of the empire. This question I take to be in most of its aspects an imperial question.” The proposal for a secret committee was the occasion of a duel between him and Disraeli (Feb. 27, 1871)—“both,” said Lord Granville, “very able, but very bitter.” The tory leader taunted Mr. Gladstone for having recourse to such a proceeding, after posing as the only man capable of dealing with the evils of Ireland, and backed by a majority which had legalised confiscation, consecrated sacrilege, and condoned high treason.

I

Amid dire controversies that in all countries surround all questions of the school, some believe the first government of Mr. Gladstone in its dealing with education to have achieved its greatest constructive work. Others think that, on the contrary, it threw away a noble chance. In the new scheme of national education established in 1870, the head of the government rather acquiesced than led. In his own words, his responsibility was that of concurrence rather than of authorship. His close absorption in the unfamiliar riddles of Irish land, besides the mass of business incident to the office of prime minister, might well account for his small share in the frame of the education bill. More than this, however, his private interest in public education did not amount to zeal, and it was at bottom the interest of a churchman. Mr. Gladstone afterwards wrote to Lord Granville (June 14, '74), “I have never made greater personal concessions of opinion than I did on the Education bill to the united representations of Ripon and Forster.” His share in the adjustments of the Act was, as he said afterwards, a very simple one, and he found no occasion either to differ from departmental colleagues, or to press upon them any proposals of his own. If they had been dealing with an untouched case, he would have preferred the Scotch plan, which allowed the local school board to prescribe whatever religious education pleased it best. Nor did he object to a [pg 299] strict limitation of all teaching paid for in schools aided or provided out of public money, whether rate or tax, to purely secular instruction. In that case, however, he held strongly that, subject to local consent, the master who gave the secular teaching should be allowed to give religious teaching also at other times, even within the school-house.189

What Mr. Gladstone cared for was the integrity of religious instruction. What he disliked or dreaded was, in his own language, the invasion of that integrity “under cover of protecting exceptional consciences.” The advance of his ideas is rather interesting. So far back as 1843,190 in considering the education clauses of the Factory bill of that year, he explained to Lord Lyttelton that he was not prepared to limit church teaching in the schools in the exposition of scripture. Ten years later, he wrote to his close friend, Bishop Hamilton of Salisbury:—

As for the government bill of that year (1853), he entirely repudiated the construction put upon some of its clauses, namely, “that people having the charge of schools would be obliged to admit children of all religious creeds, as well as that having admitted them, they would be put under control as to the instruction to be given.” Ten years later still, we find him saying, “I deeply regret the aversion to ‘conscience clauses,’ which I am convinced it would be most wise for the [pg 300] church to adopt. As far back as 1838 I laboured hard to get the National Society to act upon this principle permissively; and if I remember right, it was with the approval of the then Bishop of London.” In 1865 he harps on the same string in a letter to Lord Granville:—

Mr. Gladstone had therefore held a consistent course, and in cherishing along with full freedom of conscience the integrity of religious instruction, he had followed a definite and intelligible line. Unluckily for him and his government this was not the line now adopted.

II

When the cabinet met in the autumn of 1869, Mr. Gladstone wrote to Lord de Grey (afterwards Ripon) (Nov. 4):—

Early in the session before the introduction of the bill, Mr. Gladstone noted in his diary, “Good hope that the principal matters at issue may be accommodated during the session, [pg 301] but great differences of opinion have come to the surface, and much trouble may arise.” In fact trouble enough arose to shake his ministry to its foundations. What would be curious if he had not had the Land bill on his hands, is that he did not fight hard for his own view in the cabinet. He seems to have been content with stating it, without insisting. Whether he could have carried it in the midst of a whirlwind of indeterminate but vehement opinions, may well be doubted.

The Education bill was worked through the cabinet by Lord de Grey as president of the council, but its lines were laid and its provisions in their varying forms defended in parliament, by the vice-president, who did not reach the cabinet until July 1870. Mr. Forster was a man of sterling force of character, with resolute and effective power of work, a fervid love of country, and a warm and true humanity. No orator, he was yet an excellent speaker of a sound order, for his speaking, though plain and even rough in style, abounded in substance; he always went as near to the root of the matter as his vision allowed, and always with marked effect for his own purposes. A quaker origin is not incompatible with a militant spirit, and Forster was sturdy in combat. He had rather a full share of self-esteem, and he sometimes exhibited a want a tact that unluckily irritated or estranged many whom more suavity might have retained. Then, without meaning it, he blundered into that most injurious of all positions for the parliamentary leader, of appearing to care more for his enemies than for his friends. As Mr. Gladstone said of him, “destiny threw him on the main occasions of his parliamentary career into open or qualified conflict with friends as well as foes, perhaps rather more with friends than foes.” A more serious defect of mind was that he was apt to approach great questions—Education, Ireland, Turkey—without truly realising how great they were, and this is the worst of all the shortcomings of statesmanship. There was one case of notable exception. In all the stages and aspects of the American civil war, Forster played an admirable part.

The problem of education might have seemed the very [pg 302] simplest. After the extension of the franchise to the workmen, everybody felt, in a happy phrase of that time, that “we must educate our masters.” Outside events were supposed to hold a lesson. The triumphant North in America was the land of the common school. The victory of Prussians over Austrians at Sadowa in 1866 was called the victory of the elementary school teacher. Even the nonconformists had come round. Up to the middle of the sixties opinion among them was hostile to the intervention of the state in education. They had resisted Graham's proposals in 1843, and Lord John Russell's in 1847; but a younger generation, eager for progress, saw the new necessity that change of social and political circumstance imposed. The business in 1870 was to provide schools, and to get the children into them.191

It is surprising how little serious attention had been paid even by speculative writers in this country to the vast problem of the relative duties of the State and the Family in respect of education. Mill devoted a few keen pages to it in his book upon political economy. Fawcett, without much of Mill's intellectual power or any of his sensitive temperament, was supposed to represent his principles in parliament; yet in education he was against free schools, while Mill was for them. All was unsettled; important things were even unperceived. Yet the questions of national education, answer them as we will, touch the moral life and death of nations. The honourable zeal of the churches had done something, but most of the ground remained to be covered. The question was whether the system about to be created should merely supplement those sectarian, private, voluntary schools, or should erect a fabric worthy of the high name of national. [pg 303] The churchman hoped, but did not expect, the first. The nonconformist (broadly speaking), the academic liberal, and the hard-grit radical, were keen for the second, and they were all three well represented in the House of Commons.

What the government proposed was that local boards should be called into existence to provide schools where provision was inadequate and inefficient, these schools to be supported by the pence of the children, the earned grant from parliament, and a new rate to be levied upon the locality. The rate was the critical element. If the boards chose, they could make bye-laws compelling parents to send their children to school; and they could (with a conscience clause) settle what form of religious instruction they pleased. The voluntary men were to have a year of grace in which to make good any deficiency in supply of schools, and so keep out the boards. The second reading was secured without a division, but only on assurances from Mr. Gladstone that amendments would be made in committee. On June 16, the prime minister, as he says, “explained the plans of the government to an eager and agitated house.”

Two days before, the cabinet had embarked upon a course that made the agitation still more eager. Mr. Gladstone wrote the pregnant entry: “June 14. Cabinet; decided on making more general use of machinery supplied by voluntary schools, avoidance of religious controversy in local boards.” This meant that the new system was in no way to supersede the old non-system, but to supplement it. The decision was fatal to a national settlement. As Mr. Forster put it, their object was “to complete the voluntary system and to fill up gaps.” Lord Ripon used the same language in the Lords. Instead of the school boards being universal, they should only come into existence where the ecclesiastical party was not strong enough in wealth, influence, and liberality to keep them out. Instead of compulsory attendance being universal, that principle could only be applied where a school board was found, and where the school board liked to apply it. The old parliamentary grant to the denominational schools was to be doubled. This last provision was Mr. Gladstone's own. Forster had told him that it was impossible [pg 304] to carry a proposal allowing school boards to contribute to denominational schools, and the only compensation open was a larger slice of the grant from parliament.

III

The storm at once began to rage around the helmsman's ears. Some days earlier the situation had been defined by Mr. Brand, the whip, for his leader's guidance. The attempt, he said, made by Fawcett, Dilke, and others, to create a diversion in favour of exclusively secular education has signally failed; the opinion of the country is clearly adverse. On the other hand, while insisting on the religious element, the country is just as strongly opposed to dogmatic teaching in schools aided by local rates. “You ask me,” said Mr. Gladstone to Mr. Brand (May 24), “to solve the problem in the words ‘to include religion, and to exclude dogma,’ which, as far as I know, though it admits of a sufficient practical handling by individuals acting for themselves, has not yet been solved by any state or parliament.” Well might he report at Windsor (June 21) that, though the auspices were favourable, there was a great deal of crude and indeterminate opinion on the subject in the House as well as elsewhere, and “the bill, if carried, would be carried by the authority and persistence of the government, aided by the acquiescence of the opposition.” It was this carrying of the bill by the aid of the tory opposition that gave fuel to the liberal flame, and the increase of the grant to the sectarian schools made the heat more intense. The most critical point of the bill, according to Mr. Gladstone, was a proposal that now seems singularly worded, to the effect that the teaching of scriptures in rate schools should not be in favour of, or opposed to, tenets of any denomination. This was beaten by 251 to 130. “The minority was liberal, but more than half of the liberal party present voted in the majority.”

“We respect Mr. Forster,” cried Dale of Birmingham, “we honour Mr. Gladstone, but we are determined that England shall not again be cursed with the bitterness and strife from which we had hoped that we had for ever escaped, by the [pg 305] abolition of the church rate.”192 Writing to a brother nonconformist, he expresses his almost unbounded admiration for Mr. Gladstone, “but it is a bitter disappointment that his government should be erecting new difficulties in the way of religious equality.” Under the flashing eye of the prime minister himself the nonconformist revolt reared its crest. Miall, the veteran bearer of the flag of disestablishment, told Mr. Gladstone (July 22) that he was leading one section of the liberal party through the valley of humiliation. “Once bit, twice shy. We can't stand this sort of thing much longer,” he said. In a flame of natural wrath Mr. Gladstone replied that he had laboured not to gain Mr. Miall's support, but to promote the welfare of the country. “I hope my hon. friend will not continue his support to the government one moment longer than he deems it consistent with his sense of right and duty. For God's sake, sir, let him withdraw it the moment he thinks it better for the cause he has at heart that he should do so.” The government, he said, had striven to smooth difficulties, to allay passions, to avoid everything that would excite or stimulate, to endeavour to bring men to work together, to rise above mere sectional views, to eschew all extremes, and not to make their own narrow choice the model of the measure they were presenting to parliament, but to admit freely and liberally into its composition those great influences which were found swaying the community. Forster wrote to a friend, “it does not rest with me now whether or no the state should decree against religion—decree that it is a thing of no account. Well, with my assent the state shall not do this, and I believe I can prevent it.”193 Insist, forsooth, that religion was not a thing of no account against men like Dale, one of the most ardent and instructed believers that ever fought the fight and kept the faith; against Bright, than whom no devouter spirit breathed, and who thought the Education Act “the worst Act passed by any liberal parliament since 1832.”

The opposition did not show deep gratitude, having secured as many favours as they could hope, and more [pg 306] than they had anticipated. A proposal from the government (July 14) to introduce secret voting in the election of local boards was stubbornly contested, in spite, says Mr. Gladstone, “of the unvarying good temper, signal ability and conciliatory spirit of Mr. Forster,” and it was not until after fourteen divisions that a few assuaging words from Mr. Gladstone brought the handful of conservative opposition to reason. It was five o'clock before the unflagging prime minister found his way homewards in the broad daylight.

It is impossible to imagine a question on which in a free government it was more essential to carry public opinion with the law. To force parents to send children to school, was an enterprise that must break down if opinion would not help to work it. Yet probably on no other question in Mr. Gladstone's career as law-maker was common opinion so hard to weigh, to test, to focus and adjust. Of the final settlement of the question of religious instruction, Mr. Gladstone said to Lord Lyttelton when the battle was over (Oct. 25, '70):—

At bottom the battle of the schools was not educational, it was social. It was not religious but ecclesiastical, and that is often the very contrary of religious. In the conflicts of the old centuries whence Christian creeds emerged, disputes on dogma constantly sprang from rivalries of race and accidents [pg 307] of geography. So now quarrels about education and catechism and conscience masked the standing jealousy between church and chapel—the unwholesome fruit of the historic mishaps of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that separated the nation into two camps, and invested one of them with all the pomp and privilege of social ascendency. The parent and the child, in whose name the struggle raged, stood indifferent. From the point of party strategy, the policy of this great statute was fatal. The church of England was quickened into active antagonism by Irish disestablishment, by the extinction of sectarian tests at Oxford and Cambridge, and by the treatment of endowed schools. This might have been balanced by the zeal of nonconformists. Instead of zeal, the Education Act produced refrigeration and estrangement.

We may be sure that on such a subject Mr. Gladstone looked further than strategies of party. “I own to you,” said he to a correspondent before the battle was quite over, “that the history of these last few months leaves upon my mind some melancholy impressions, which I hope at some fancied period of future leisure and retirement to study and interpret.” He soon saw how deep the questions went, and on what difficult ground the state and the nation would be inevitably drawn. His notions of a distinctive formula were curious. Forster seems to have put some question to him on the point whether the three creeds were formularies within the Act. It appears to me, Mr. Gladstone answered (October 17, 1870):—

Manning plied him hard (September, October, November, 1871). The state of Paris (Commune blazing that year, Tuileries and Hôtel de Ville in ashes, and the Prussian spiked helmets at the gates) was traceable to a godless education—so the archbishop argued. In England the Christian tradition was unbroken. It was only a clique of doctrinaires, Huxley at the head of them, who believing nothing trumpeted secular education. “Delighted to see Mr. Forster attacked as playing into the hands of the clergy.” Mr. Gladstone should stimulate by every agency in his power the voluntary religious energies of the three kingdoms. “The real crisis is in the formation of men. They are as we make them, and they make society. The formation of men is the work you have given to the school boards. God gave it to the parents. Neither you nor Mr. Forster meant this; you least of all men on your side of the House. Glad to see you lay down the broad and intelligible line that state grants go to secular education, and voluntary efforts must do the rest. Let us all start fair in this race. Let every sect, even the Huxleyites, have their grant if they fulfil the conditions. As for the school-rate conscience, it is a mongrel institution of quakerism.” How Mr. Gladstone replied on all these searching issues, I do not find.

IV

The passing of the Act did not heal the wound. The nonconformist revolt was supported in a great conference at Manchester in 1872, representing eight hundred churches and other organizations. Baptist unions and congregational unions were unrelenting. We may as well finish the story. It was in connection with this struggle that Mr. Chamberlain first came prominently into the arena of public life—bold, intrepid, imbued with the keen spirit of political nonconformity, and a born tactician. The issue selected for the attack was the twenty-fifth section of the Education Act, enabling school boards to pay in denominational [pg 309] schools the fees of parents who, though not paupers, were unable to pay them. This provision suddenly swelled into dimensions of enormity hitherto unsuspected. A caustic onlooker observed that it was the smallest ditch in which two great political armies ever engaged in civil war. Yet the possibility under cover of this section, of a sectarian board subsidising church schools was plain, and some cases, though not many, actually occurred in which appreciable sums were so handed over. The twenty-fifth section was a real error, and it made no bad flag for an assault upon a scheme of error.

Great things were hoped from Mr. Bright's return to the government in the autumn of 1873. The correspondence between Mr. Gladstone and him sheds some interesting light upon the state into which the Education Act, and Mr. Forster's intractable bearing in defence of it, had brought important sections of the party:—

Mr. Gladstone himself had touched “the watchful jealousy” of Bright's nonconformist friends by a speech made at the time at Hawarden. This speech he explained in writing to Bright from Balmoral (Aug. 21):—

As he said afterwards to Lord Granville, “I personally have no fear of the secular system; but I cannot join in measures of repression against voluntary schools.”

“There is not a word said by you at Hawarden,” Bright replied (Aug. 25), “that would fetter you in the least in considering the education question; but at present the general feeling is against the idea of any concession on your part.... What is wanted is some definite willingness or resolution to recover the goodwill and confidence of the nonconformist leaders in the boroughs; for without this, reconstruction is of no value.... Finance is of great moment, and people are well pleased to see you in your old office again; but no budget will heal the soreness that has been created—it is not of the pocket but of the feelings.... I want you just to know where I am and what I feel; but if I could talk to you, I could say what I have to say with more precision, and with a greater delicacy of expression. I ask you only to put the best construction on what I write.”

If Forster could only have composed himself to the same considerate spirit, there might have been a different tale to tell. Bright made his election speech at Birmingham, and Forster was in trouble about it. “I think,” said the orator to Mr. Gladstone, “he ought rather to be thankful for it; it will enable him to get out of difficulties if he will improve the occasion. There is no question of changing the policy of the government, but of making minor concessions.... I would willingly change the policy of irritation into one of soothing and conciliation.” Nothing of great importance in the way even of temporary reconciliation was effected by Mr. Bright's return. The ditch of the twenty-fifth clause still yawned. The prime minister fell back into [pg 311] the position of August. The whole situation of the ministry had become critical in every direction. “Education must be regarded as still to a limited extent an open question in the government.”

When the general election came, the party was still disunited. Out of 425 liberal candidates in England, Scotland, and Wales, 300 were pledged to the repeal of the 25th clause. Mr. Gladstone's last word was in a letter to Bright (Jan. 27, 1874):—

V

The same vigorous currents of national vitality that led to new endeavours for the education of the poor, had drawn men to consider the horrid chaos, the waste, and the abuses in the provision of education for the directing classes beyond the poor. Grave problems of more kinds than one came into view. The question, What is education? was nearly as hard to answer as the question of which we have seen so much, What is a church? The rival claims of old classical training and the acquisition of modern knowledge were matters of vivacious contest. What is the true place of classical learning in the human culture of our own age? Misused charitable trusts, and endowments perverted by the fluctuations of time, by lethargy, by selfishness, from the objects of pious founders, touched wakeful jealousies in the privileged sect, and called into action that adoration of [pg 312] the principle of property which insists upon applying all the rules of individual ownership to what rightfully belongs to the community. Local interests were very sensitive, and they were multitudinous. The battle was severely fought, and it extended over several years, while commission upon commission explored the issues.

In a highly interesting letter (1861) to Lord Lyttelton Mr. Gladstone set out at length his views upon the issue between ancient and modern, between literary training and scientific, between utilitarian education and liberal. The reader will find this letter in an appendix, as well as one to Sir Stafford Northcote.195 While rationally conservative upon the true basis of attainments in “that small proportion of the youth of any country who are to become in the fullest sense educated men,” he is rationally liberal upon what the politics of the time made the burning question of the sacrosanctity of endowments. “It is our habit in this country,” he said, “to treat private interests with an extravagant tenderness. The truth is that all laxity and extravagance in dealing with what in a large sense is certainly public property, approximates more or less to dishonesty, or at the least lowers the moral tone of the persons concerned.”

The result of all this movement, of which it may perhaps be said that it was mainly inspired and guided by a few men of superior energy and social weight like Goldwin Smith, Temple, Jowett, Liddell, the active interest of the classes immediately concerned being hardly more than middling—was one of the best measures in the history of this government of good measures (1869). It dealt with many hundreds of schools, and with an annual income of nearly six hundred thousand pounds. As the Endowed Schools bill was one of the best measures of the government, so it was Mr. Forster's best piece of legislative work. That it strengthened the government can hardly be said; the path of the reformer is not rose-strewn.196

VI

In one region Mr. Gladstone long lagged behind. He had done a fine stroke of national policy in releasing Oxford from some of her antique bonds in 1854;197 but the principle of a free university was not yet admitted to his mind. In 1863 he wrote to the vice-chancellor how entirely the government concurred in the principle of restricting the governing body of the university and the colleges to the church. The following year he was willing to throw open the degree; but the right to sit in convocation he guarded by exacting a declaration of membership of the church of England.198 In 1865 Mr. Goschen—then beginning to make a mark as one of the ablest of the new generation in parliament, combining the large views of liberal Oxford with the practical energy of the city of London, added to a strong fibre given him by nature—brought in a bill throwing open all lay degrees. Mr. Gladstone still stood out, conducting a brisk correspondence with dissenters. “The whole controversy,” he wrote to one of them, “is carried on aggressively, as if to disturb and not to settle. Abstract principles urged without stint or mercy provoke the counter-assertion of abstract principles in return. There is not power to carry Mr. Goschen's speech either in the cabinet, the parliament, or the country. Yet the change in the balance of parties effected by the elections will cast upon the liberal majority a serious responsibility. I would rather see Oxford level with the ground, than its religion regulated in the manner which would please Bishop Colenso.”

Year by year the struggle was renewed. Even after the Gladstone government was formed, Coleridge, the solicitor-general, was only allowed in a private capacity to introduce a bill removing the tests. When he had been two years at the head of administration, Mr. Gladstone warned Coleridge: “For me individually it would be beyond anything [pg 314] odious, I am almost tempted to say it would be impossible, after my long connection with Oxford, to go into a new controversy on the basis of what will be taken and alleged to be an absolute secularisation of the colleges; as well as a reversal of what was deliberately considered and sanctioned in the parliamentary legislation of 1854 and 1856. I incline to think that this work is work for others, not for me.”

It was not until 1871 that Mr. Gladstone consented to make the bill a government measure. It rapidly passed the Commons and was accepted by the Lords, but with amendments. Mr. Gladstone when he had once adopted a project never loitered; he now resolutely refused the changes proposed by the Lords, and when the time came and Lord Salisbury was for insisting on them, the peers declined by a handsome majority to carry the fight further. It is needless to add that the admission of dissenters to degrees and endowments did not injuriously affect a single object for which a national university exists. On the other hand, the mischiefs of ecclesiastical monopoly were long in disappearing.

VII

We have already seen how warmly the project of introducing competition into the civil service had kindled Mr. Gladstone's enthusiasm in the days of the Crimean war.199 Reform had made slow progress. The civil service commission had been appointed in 1855, but their examinations only tested the quality of candidates sent before them on nomination. In 1860 a system was set up of limited competition among three nominated candidates, who had first satisfied a preliminary test examination. This lasted until 1870. Lowe had reform much at heart. At the end of 1869, he appealed to the prime minister: “As I have so often tried in vain, will you bring the question of the civil service before the cabinet to-day? Something must be decided. We cannot keep matters in this discreditable state of abeyance. If the cabinet will not entertain the idea of open competition, might we not at any rate require a [pg 315] larger number of competitors for each vacancy? five or seven or ten?”

Resistance came from Lord Clarendon and, strange to say, from Mr. Bright. An ingenious suggestion of Mr. Gladstone's solved the difficulty. All branches of the civil service were to be thrown open where the minister at the head of the department approved. Lowe was ready to answer for all the departments over which he had any control,—the treasury, the board of works, audit office, national debt office, paymaster-general's office, inland revenue, customs and post-office. Mr. Cardwell, Mr. Childers, Mr. Goschen, and Lord de Grey were willing to do the same, and finally only Clarendon and the foreign office were left obdurate. It was true to say of this change that it placed the whole educated intellect of the country at the service and disposal of the state, that it stimulated the acquisition of knowledge, and that it rescued some of the most important duties in the life of the nation from the narrow class to whom they had hitherto been confided.

I

During the years in which England had been widening the base of her institutions, extending her resources of wealth and credit, and strengthening her repute in the councils of Christendom, a long train of events at which we have glanced from time to time, had slowly effected a new distribution of the force of nations, and in Mr. Gladstone's phrase had unset every joint of the compacted fabric of continental Europe. The spirit in which he thought of his country's place in these transactions is to be gathered from a letter addressed by him to General Grey, the secretary of the Queen, rather more than a year before the outbreak of the Franco-German war. What was the immediate occasion I cannot be sure, nor does it matter. The letter itself is full of interest, for it is in truth a sort of charter of the leading principles of Mr. Gladstone's foreign policy at the moment when he first incurred supreme responsibility for our foreign affairs:—

Heavy banks of cloud hung with occasional breaks of brighter sky over Europe; and all the plot, intrigue, conspiracy, and subterranean scheming, that had been incessant ever since the Crimean war disturbed the old European [pg 319] system, and Cavour first began the recasting of the map, was but the repulsive and dangerous symptom of a dire conflict in the depths of international politics. The Mexican adventure, and the tragedy of Maximilian's death at Queretaro, had thrown a black shadow over the iridescent and rotten fabric of Napoleon's power. Prussian victory over Austria at Sadowa had startled Europe like a thunderclap. The reactionary movement within the catholic fold, as disclosed in the Vatican council, kindled many hopes among the French clericals, and these hopes inspired a lively antagonism to protestant Prussia in the breast of the Spanish-born Empress of the French. Prussia in 1866 had humiliated one great catholic power when she defeated the Austrian monarchy on the battlefields of Bohemia. Was she to overthrow also the power that kept the pope upon his temporal throne in Rome? All this, however, was no more than the fringe, though one of the hardest things in history is to be sure where substance begins and fringe ends. The cardinal fact for France and for Europe was German unity. Ever since the Danish conflict, as Bismarck afterwards told the British government,200 the French Emperor strove to bring Prussia to join him in plans for their common aggrandisement. The unity of Germany meant, besides all else, a vast extension of the area from which the material of military strength was to be drawn; and this meant the relative depression of the power of French arms. Here was the substantial fact, feeding the flame of national pride with solid fuel. The German confederation of the Congress of Vienna was a skilful invention of Metternich's, so devised as to be inert for offence, but extremely efficient against French aggression. A German confederation under the powerful and energetic leadership of Prussia gave France a very different neighbour.

In August 1867, the French ambassador at Berlin said to the ambassador of Great Britain, “We can never passively permit the formation of a German empire; the position of the Emperor of the French would become untenable.” The British ambassador in Paris was told by the foreign minister there, that “there was no wish for aggrandisement in the Emperor's mind, but a solicitude for the safety [pg 320] of France.” This solicitude evaporated in what Bismarck disdainfully called the policy of pourboires, the policy of tips and pickings—scraps and slips of territory to be given to France under the diplomatic name of compensation. For three years it had been no secret that peace was at the mercy of any incident that might arise.

The small Powers were in trepidation, and with good reason. Why should not France take Belgium, and Prussia take Holland? The Belgian press did not conceal bad feeling, and Bismarck let fall the ominous observation that if Belgium persisted in that course, “she might pay dear for it.” The Dutch minister told the British ambassador in Vienna that in 1865 he had a long conversation with Bismarck, and Bismarck had given him to understand that without colonies Prussia could never become a great maritime nation; he coveted Holland less for its own sake, than for her wealthy colonies. When reminded that Belgium was guaranteed by the European Powers, Bismarck replied that “a guarantee was in these days of little value.” This remark makes an excellent register of the diplomatic temperature of the hour.

Then for England. The French Emperor observed (1867), not without an accent of complaint, that she seemed “little disposed to take part in the affairs of the day.” This was the time of the Derby government. When war seemed inevitable on the affair of Luxemburg, Lord Stanley, then at the foreign office, phlegmatically remarked (1867) that England had never thought it her business to guarantee the integrity of Germany. When pressed from Prussia to say whether in the event of Prussia being forced into war by France, England would take a part, Lord Stanley replied that with the causes of that quarrel we had nothing to do, and he felt sure that neither parliament nor the public would sanction an armed interference on either side. Belgium, he added, was a different question. General non-intervention, therefore, was the common doctrine of both our parties.

After Mr. Gladstone had been a year in power, the chance of a useful part for England to perform seemed to rise on the horizon, but to those who knew the racing currents, the [pg 321] interplay of stern forces, the chance seemed but dim and faint. Rumour and gossip of a pacific tenor could not hide the vital fact of incessant military preparation on both sides—steadfast and scientific in Prussia, loose and ill-concerted in France. Along with the perfecting of arms, went on a busy search by France for alliances. In the autumn of 1869 Lord Clarendon had gone abroad and talked with important personages. Moltke told him that in Prussia they thought war was near. To Napoleon the secretary of state spoke of the monster armaments, the intolerable burden imposed upon the people, and the constant danger of war that they created. The Emperor agreed—so Lord Clarendon wrote to Mr. Gladstone (Sept. 18, '69)—but went on to say that during the King of Prussia's life, and as long as the present Prussian system lasted, he thought no change of importance could be effected. Still the seed by and by appeared to have fallen on good ground. For in January 1870, in a conversation with the British ambassador, the French foreign minister (Daru) suggested that England might use her good offices with Prussia, to induce a partial disarmament in order that France might disarm also. The minister, at the same time, wrote a long despatch in the same sense to the French ambassador at St. James's. Lord Clarendon perceived the delicacy of opening the matter at Berlin, in view of the Prussian monarch's idolatry of his army. He agreed, however, to bring it before the king, not officially, but in a confidential form. This would compromise nobody. The French ambassador in London agreed, and Lord Clarendon wrote the draft of a letter to Loftus in Berlin. He sent the draft to Mr. Gladstone (Jan. 31, 1870) for “approval and criticism.” Mr. Gladstone entered eagerly into Lord Clarendon's benevolent correspondence:—

It is a striking circumstance, in view of what was to follow, that at this moment when Mr. Gladstone first came into contact with Bismarck,—the genius of popular right, and free government, and settled law of nations, into contact with the genius of force and reason of state and blood and iron—the realist minister of Prussia seemed to be almost as hopeful for European peace as the minister of England. “The political horizon,” Bismarck wrote (Feb. 22), “seen from Berlin appears at present so unclouded that there is nothing of interest to report, and I only hope that no unexpected [pg 323] event will render the lately risen hope of universal peace questionable.”201 The unexpected event did not tarry, and Bismarck's own share in laying the train is still one of the historic enigmas of our time.

II

Ever since 1868 the statesmen of revolutionary Spain had looked for a prince to fill their vacant throne. Among others they bethought themselves of a member of a catholic branch of the house of Hohenzollern, and in the autumn of 1869 an actual proposal was secretly made to Prince Leopold. The thing lingered. Towards the end of February, 1870, Spanish importunities were renewed, though still under the seal of strict secrecy, even the Spanish ambassador in Paris being kept in the dark.202 Leopold after a long struggle declined the glittering bait. The rival pretenders were too many, and order was not sure. Still his refusal was not considered final. The chances of order improved, he changed his mind, and on June 28 the Spanish emissary returned to Madrid with the news that the Hohenzollern prince was ready to accept the crown. The King of Prussia, not as king, but as head of the house, had given his assent. That Bismarck invented the Hohenzollern candidature the evidence is not conclusive. What is undoubted is that in the late spring of 1870 he took it up, and was much discontented at its failure in that stage.203 He had become aware that France was striving to arrange alliances with Austria, and even with Italy, in spite of the obnoxious presence of the French garrison at Rome. It was possible that on certain issues Bavaria and the South might join France against Prussia. All the hindrances to German unity, the jealousies of the minor states, the hatred of the Prussian military system, were likely to be aggravated [pg 324] by time, if France, while keeping her powder dry, were to persevere in a prudent abstention. Bismarck believed that Moltke's preparations were more advanced than Napoleon's. It was his interest to strike before any French treaties of alliance were signed. The Spanish crown was an occasion. It might easily become a pretext for collision if either France or Germany thought the hour had come. If the Hohenzollern candidate withdrew, it was a diplomatic success for France and a humiliation to Germany; if not, a king from Prussia planted across the Pyrenees, after the aggrandizements of north German power in 1864 and 1866, was enough to make Richelieu, Mazarin, Louis XIV., Bonaparte, even Louis Philippe, turn in their graves.

On June 27, 1870, Lord Clarendon died, and on July 6 Lord Granville received the seals of the foreign department from the Queen at Windsor. The new chief had visited his office the day before, and the permanent under-secretary coming into his room to report, gave him the most remarkable assurance ever received by any secretary of state on first seating himself at his desk. Lord Granville told the story in the House of Lords on July 11, when the crash of the fiercest storm since Waterloo was close upon them:—

Yet two days before Mr. Hammond told Lord Granville that he was not aware of anything important to be dealt with at the foreign department, a deputation had started from Madrid with an invitation to Prince Leopold. At the moment when this singular language was falling from our under-secretary's lips, the Duc de Gramont, the French foreign minister, was telling Lord Lyons at Paris that France would not endure the insult, and expressing his hope that the government of the Queen would try to prevent it. After all, as we have seen, Bismarck in February had used words not very unlike Mr. Hammond's in July.

On July 5, the Emperor, who was at St. Cloud, sent for Baron Rothschild (of Paris), and told him that as there was at that moment no foreign minister in England, he wished to send through him a message to Mr. Gladstone. He wanted Mr. Gladstone to be informed, that the council of ministers at Madrid had decided to propose Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern for the Spanish throne, that his candidature would be intolerable to France, and that he hoped Mr. Gladstone would endeavour to secure its withdrawal. The message was telegraphed to London, and early on the morning of July 6, the present Lord Rothschild deciphered it for his father, and took it to Carlton House Terrace. He found Mr. Gladstone on the point of leaving for Windsor, and drove with him to the railway station. For a time Mr. Gladstone was silent. Then he said he did not approve of the candidature, but he was not disposed to interfere with the liberty of the Spanish people to choose their own sovereign.

Lord Granville put pressure on the provisional government at Madrid to withdraw their candidate, and on the government [pg 326] at Berlin “effectually to discourage a project fraught with risks to the best interests of Spain.” The draft of this despatch was submitted by Lord Granville to Mr. Gladstone, who suggested a long addition afterwards incorporated in the text. The points of his addition were an appeal to the magnanimity of the King of Prussia; an injunction to say nothing to give ground for the supposition that England had any business to discuss the abstract right of Spain to choose her own sovereign; that the British government had not admitted Prince Leopold's acceptance of the throne to justify the immediate resort to arms threatened by France; but that the secrecy with which the affair had been conducted was a ground for just offence, and the withdrawal of the prince could alone repair it.205 Austria made energetic representations at Berlin to the same effect. In sending this addition to Lord Granville, Mr. Gladstone says (July 8), “I am doubtful whether this despatch should go till it has been seen by the cabinet, indeed I think it should not, and probably you mean this. The Queen recollects being told something about this affair by Clarendon—without result—last year. I think Gramont exacts too much. It would never do for us to get up a combination of Powers in this difficult and slippery matter.”

Events for a week—one of the great critical weeks of the century—moved at a dizzy speed towards the abyss. Peace unfortunately hung upon the prudence of a band of statesmen in Paris, who have ever since, both in their own country and everywhere else, been a byword in history for blindness and folly. The game was delicate. Even in the low and broken estate into which the moral areopagus of Europe had fallen in these days, it was a disadvantage to figure as the aggressor. This disadvantage the French Empire heedlessly imposed upon itself. Of the diplomacy on the side of the government of France anterior to the war, Mr. Gladstone [pg 327] said that it made up “a chapter which for fault and folly taken together is almost without a parallel in the history of nations.”206

On July 6 the French Ministers made a precipitate declaration to their Chambers, which was in fact an ultimatum to Prussia. The action of Spain was turned into Prussian action. Prussia was called to account in a form that became a public and international threat, as Bismarck put it, “with the hand on the sword-hilt.” These rash words of challenge were the first of the French disasters. On July 8 the Duc de Gramont begged her Majesty's government to use all their influence to bring about the voluntary renunciation by Prince Leopold of his pretensions. This he told Lord Lyons would be “a most fortunate solution” of the question. Two days later he assured Lord Lyons that “if the Prince of Hohenzollern should, on the advice of the King of Prussia, withdraw his acceptance of the crown the whole affair would be at an end.”

On July 10 Lord Granville suggests to Mr. Gladstone: “What do you think of asking the Queen whether there is any one to whom she could write confidentially with a view to persuade Hohenzollern to refuse?” Mr. Gladstone replies:—

The ambassador at Paris was instructed to work vigorously in this sense, and to urge self-possession and measure upon the Emperor's council. On July 12, however, the prospects of peace grew more and more shadowy. On that day it became known that Prince Leopold had spontaneously [pg 328] renounced the candidature, or that his father had renounced it on his behalf. The French ministers made up their minds that the defeat of Prussia must be more direct. Gramont told Lyons (July 12) that the French government was in a very embarrassing position. Public opinion was so much excited that it was doubtful whether the ministry would not be overthrown, if it went down to the Chamber and announced that it regarded the affair as finished, without having obtained some more complete satisfaction from Prussia. So the Emperor and his advisers flung themselves gratuitously under Bismarck's grinding wheels by a further demand that not only should the candidature be withdrawn, but the King should pledge himself against its ever being at any time revived. Mr. Gladstone was not slow to see the fatal mischief of this new development.

The substance of this note was despatched to Paris at 2.30 a.m. on the morning of July 13. It did not reach Lord Lyons till half-past nine, when the council of ministers had already been sitting for half an hour at St. Cloud. The telegram was hastily embodied in the form of a tolerably emphatic letter and sent by special messenger to St. Cloud, where it was placed in M. de Gramont's hand, at the table at which he and the other ministers were still sitting in council in the presence of the Emperor and the Empress.208 At the [pg 329] same time Lord Granville strongly urged M. de Lavalette in London, to impress upon his government that they ought not to take upon themselves the responsibility of pursuing the quarrel on a matter of form, when they had obtained what Gramont had assured Lord Lyons would put an end to the dispute. Though Mr. Disraeli afterwards imputed want of energy to the British remonstrances, there is no reason to suppose that Lord Lyons was wanting either in directness or emphasis. What warnings were likely to reach the minds of men trembling for their personal popularity and for the dynasty, afraid of clamour in the streets, afraid of the army, ignorant of vital facts both military and diplomatic, incapable of measuring such facts even if they had known them, committed by the rash declaration of defiance a week before to a position that made retreat the only alternative to the sword? At the head of them all sat in misery, a sovereign reduced by disease to a wavering shadow of the will and vision of a man. They marched headlong to the pit that Bismarck was digging for them.

On July 14 Mr. Gladstone again writes to Lord Granville, suggesting answers to questions that might be asked that night in parliament. Should they say that the candidature was withdrawn, and that with this withdrawal we had a right to hope the whole affair would end, but that communications were still continued with Prussia? In duty to all parties we were bound to hope that the subject of complaint having disappeared, the complaint itself and the danger to the peace of Europe would disappear also. Then he proceeds: “What if you were to telegraph to Lyons to signify that we think it probable questions may be asked in parliament to-day; that having been called in by France itself, we cannot affect to be wholly outside the matter; and that it will be impossible for us to conceal the opinion that the cause of quarrel having been removed, France ought to be satisfied. While this might fairly pass as a friendly notice, it might also be useful as admonition. Please to consider. The claim in the telegrams for more acknowledgment of the conduct of Prussia in parliament, seems to me to deserve consideration.”

On July 13 Gramont asked Lord Lyons whether he could count upon the good offices of England in obtaining the prohibition of any future candidature, at the same time giving him a written assurance that this would terminate the incident. Lord Lyons declined to commit himself, and referred home for instructions. The cabinet was hastily summoned for noon on the 14th. It decided that the demand could not be justified by France, and at the same time took a step of which Gramont chose to say, that it was the one act done by the English government in favour of peace. They suggested to Bismarck that as the King of Prussia had consented to the acceptance by Prince Leopold of the Spanish crown, and had thereby, in a certain sense, become a party to the arrangement, so he might with perfect dignity communicate to the French government his consent to the withdrawal of the acceptance, if France waived her demand for an engagement covering the future. This suggestion Bismarck declined (July 15) to bring before the King, as he did not feel that he could recommend its acceptance. As he had decided to hold France tight in the position in which her rulers had now planted her, we can understand why he could not recommend the English proposal to his master. Meanwhile the die was cast.

III

The King of Prussia was taking the waters of Ems. Thither Benedetti, the French ambassador to his court, under instructions followed him. The King with moderation and temper told him (July 11) he had just received a telegram that the answer of Prince Leopold would certainly reach him the next day, and he would then at once communicate it. Something (some say Bismarck) prevented the arrival of the courier for some hours beyond the time anticipated. On the morning of the 13th the King met Benedetti on the promenade, and asked him if he had anything new to say. The ambassador obeyed his orders, and told the King of the demand for assurances against a future candidature. The King at once refused this new and unexpected concession, but in parting from Benedetti said they would resume their conversation in the [pg 331] afternoon. Meanwhile the courier arrived, but before the courier a despatch came from Paris conveying the suggestion that the King might write an apologetic letter to the French Emperor. This naturally gave the King some offence, but he contented himself with sending Benedetti a polite message by an aide-de-camp that he had received in writing from Prince Leopold the intelligence of his renunciation. “By this his Majesty considered the question as settled.” Benedetti persevered in seeking to learn what answer he should make to his government on the question of further assurances. The King replied by the same officer that he was obliged to decline absolutely to enter into new negotiations; that what he had said in the morning was his last word in the matter. On July 14, the King received Benedetti in the railway carriage on his departure for Berlin, told him that any future negotiations would be conducted by his government, and parted from him with courteous salutations. Neither king nor ambassador was conscious that the country of either had suffered a shadow of indignity from the representative of the other.

Bismarck called upon the British ambassador in those days, and made what, in the light of later revelations, seems a singular complaint. He observed that Great Britain “should have forbidden France to enter on the war. She was in a position to do so, and her interests and those of Europe demanded it of her.”209 Later in the year he spoke in the same sense at Versailles: “If, at the beginning of the war, the English had said to Napoleon, ‘There must be no war,’ there would have been none.”210 What is certain is that nobody would have been more discomfited by the success of England's prohibition than Count Bismarck. The sincerity and substance of his reproach are tested by a revelation made by himself long after. Though familiar, the story is worth telling over again in the biography of a statesman who stood for a type alien to policies of fraud.

Bismarck had hurried from Varzin to Berlin on July 12, in profound concern lest his royal master should subject his [pg 332] country and his minister to what, after the menace of Gramont and Ollivier on July 6, would be grave diplomatic defeat. He had resolved to retire if the incident should end in this shape, and the chief actor has himself described the strange sinister scene that averted his design. He invited Moltke and Roon to dine with him alone on July 13. In the midst of their conversation, “I was informed,” he says, “that a telegram from Ems in cipher, if I recollect rightly, of about 200 ‘groups’ was being deciphered. When the copy was handed me it showed that Abeken had drawn up and signed the telegram at his Majesty's command, and I read it out to my guests, whose dejection was so great that they turned away from food and drink. On a repeated examination of the document I lingered upon the authorisation of his Majesty, which included a command, immediately to communicate Benedetti's fresh demand and its rejection to our ambassadors and to the press. I put a few questions to Moltke as to the extent of his confidence in the state of our preparations, especially as to the time they would still require in order to meet this sudden risk of war. He answered that if there was to be war he expected no advantage to us by deferring its outbreak.... Under the conviction that war could be avoided only at the cost of the honour of Prussia, I made use of the royal authorisation to publish the contents of the telegram; and in the presence of my two guests I reduced the telegram by striking out words, but without adding or altering, to the following form: ‘After the news of the renunciation of the hereditary Prince of Hohenzollern had been officially communicated to the imperial government of France by the royal government of Spain, the French ambassador at Ems further demanded of his Majesty the King that he would authorise him to telegraph to Paris that his Majesty the King bound himself for all future time never again to give his consent if the Hohenzollerns should renew their candidature. His Majesty the King thereupon decided not to receive the French ambassador again, and sent to tell him through the aide-de-camp on duty that his Majesty had nothing further to communicate to the ambassador.’ The difference in the [pg 333] effect of the abbreviated text of the Ems telegram, as compared with that produced by the original, was not the result of stronger words but of the form, which made this announcement appear decisive, while Abeken's version would only have been regarded as a fragment of a negotiation still pending and to be continued at Berlin. After I had read out the concentrated edition to my two guests, Moltke remarked: ‘Now it has a different ring; it sounded before like a parley; now it is like a flourish in answer to a challenge.’ I went on to explain: ‘If in execution of his Majesty's order I at once communicate this text, which contains no alteration in or addition to the telegram, not only to the newspapers, but also by telegraph to all our embassies, it will be known in Paris before midnight, and not only an account of its contents, but also an account of the manner of its distribution, will have the effect of a red rag upon the Gallic bull. Fight we must, if we do not want to act the part of the vanquished without a battle. Success, however, essentially depends upon the impression which the origination of the war makes upon us and others; it is important that we should be the party attacked, and that we fearlessly meet the public threats of France.’ This explanation brought about in the two generals a revulsion to a more joyous mood, the liveliness of which surprised me. They had suddenly recovered their pleasure in eating and drinking, and spoke in a more cheerful vein. Roon said: ‘Our God of old lives still, and will not let us perish in disgrace.’ ”211

The telegram devised at the Berlin dinner-party soon [pg 334] reached Paris. For a second time the 14th day of July was to be a date of doom in French history. The Emperor and his council deliberated on the grave question of calling out the reserves. The decisive step had been pressed by Marshal Lebœuf the night before without success. He now returned to the charge, and this time his proposal was resolved upon. It was about four o'clock. The marshal had hardly left the room before new scruples seized his colleagues. The discussion began over again, and misgivings revived. The Emperor showed himself downcast and worn out. Towards five o'clock somebody came to tell them it was absolutely necessary that ministers should present themselves before the Chambers. Gramont rose and told them that if they wished an accommodation, there was still one way, an appeal to Europe. The word congress was no sooner pronounced than the Emperor, seized by extraordinary emotion at the thought of salvation by his own favourite chimera, was stirred even to tears. An address to the Powers was instantly drawn up, and the council broke off. At six o'clock Lebœuf received a note from the Emperor, seeming to regret the decision to call out the reserves. On Lebœuf's demand the council was convoked for ten o'clock that night. In the interval news came that the Ems telegram had been communicated to foreign governments. As Bismarck had calculated, the affront of the telegram was aggravated by publicity. At ten o'clock the council met, and mobilisation was again considered. By eleven it was almost decided that mobilisation should be put off. At eleven o'clock a foreign office despatch arrived, and was read at the council. What was this despatch, is not yet known—perhaps from the French military agent at Berlin, with further news of Prussian preparations. It was of such a kind that it brought about an instant reaction. The orders for mobilisation were maintained.212

An inflammatory appeal was made to the Chambers. When a parliamentary committee was appointed, a vital document was suppressed, and its purport misrepresented. Thus in point of scruple, the two parties to the transaction were not ill-matched, but Bismarck had been watchful, provident, and well informed, while his opponents were men, as one of them said, “of a light heart,” heedless, uncalculating, and ignorant and wrong as to their facts.213

On July 15 Mr. Gladstone reported to the Queen:—

“At a quarter past four,” says a colleague, “a cabinet box was handed down the treasury bench to Gladstone. He opened it and looking along to us, said—with an accent I shall never forget—‘War declared against Prussia.’ ”214 “Shall I ever forget,” says Archbishop Tait, “Gladstone's face of earnest care when I saw him in the lobby?”215

The British cabinet made a final effort for peace. Lord Granville instructed our ambassadors to urge France and Prussia to be so far controlled by the treaty of Paris that before proceeding to extremities they should have recourse to the good offices of some friendly Power, adding that his government was ready to take any part that might be desired in the matter. On the 18th Bismarck replied by throwing the onus of acceptance on France. On the 19th France declined the proposal.

Just as Bismarck said that England ought to have prevented the war, Frenchmen also said that we ought to have held the Emperor back. With what sanction could Mr. Gladstone have enforced peremptory counsel? Was France to be made to understand that England would go to war on the Prussian side? Short of war, what more could she have done? Lord Granville had told Gramont that he had never in despatch or conversation admitted that after the French had received satisfaction in substance, there was a case for a quarrel on pure form. The British cabinet and their ambassador in Paris had redoubled warning and remonstrance. If the Emperor and his advisers did not listen to the penetrating expostulations of Thiers, and to his vigorous and instructed analysis of the conditions of their case, why should they listen to Lord Granville? Nor was there time, for their precipitancy had kindled a conflagration before either England or any other Power had any chance of extinguishing the blaze.216

To Michel Chevalier Mr. Gladstone wrote a few days later:—

Though good feeling prevented Mr. Gladstone from dividing praise and blame between the two governments, his own judgment was clear. The initial declaration of July 6, followed by the invention of a second demand by France upon Prussia after the first had been conceded, looked to him, as it did to England generally, like a fixed resolution to force a quarrel. In September he wrote of the proceedings of the French government:—

I

“The war is a grievous affair,” Mr. Gladstone said to Brand, “and adds much to our cares, for to maintain our neutrality in such a case as this, will be a most arduous task. On the face of the facts France is wrong, but as to personal trustworthiness the two moving spirits on the respective sides, Napoleon and Bismarck, are nearly on a par.” His individual activity was unsparing. He held almost daily conferences with Lord Granville at the foreign office; criticised and minuted despatches; contributed freely to the drafts. “There has not, I think,” he wrote to Bright (Sept. 12), “been a single day on which Granville and I have not been in anxious communication on the subject of the war.” When Lord Granville went to Walmer he wrote to Mr. Gladstone, “I miss our discussions here over the despatches as they come in very much.” “I hope I need not say that while you are laid up with gout at Walmer,” Mr. Gladstone wrote in October, “I am most ready to start at a few hours' notice at any time of day or night, to join you upon any matter which you may find to require it. Indeed I could not properly or with comfort remain here upon any other terms.” Details of this agitating time, with all its convulsions and readjustments, belong to the history of Europe. The part taken by Mr. Gladstone and his cabinet was for several months in pretty close harmony with the humour of the country. It will be enough for us to mark their action at decisive moments.

On July 16 he wrote to Cardwell at the war office:—

The figures of the army and navy were promptly supplied to the prime minister, Cardwell adding with, a certain shrillness that, though he had no wish to go either to Antwerp or anywhere else, he could not be responsible for sending an expedition abroad, unless the army were fitted for that object by measures taken now to increase its force.

Cardwell sent him a paper by a high military authority, on which Mr. Gladstone made two terse ironic comments. [pg 340] “I think the paper,” he said, “if it proves anything proves (1) That generals and not ministers are the proper judges of those weights in the political scales which express the likelihood of war and peace; (2) That there is very little difference between absolute neutrality and actual war. I advise that Granville should see it.”

On July 25 the Times divulged the text of a projected agreement in 1869 (it was in truth 1867) between the French and Prussian governments in five articles, including one that the incorporation of Belgium by France would not be objected to by Prussia. The public was shocked and startled, and many were inclined to put down the document for a forgery and a hoax. As a matter of fact, in substance it was neither. The Prussian ambassador a few days before had informed Mr. Gladstone and Lord Granville personally and in strict secrecy, that the draft of such a project existed in the handwriting of M. Benedetti. This private communication was taken by Mr. Gladstone to have been made with the object of prompting him to be the agent in producing the evil news to the world, and thus to prejudice France in the judgment of Europe. He thought that no part of his duty, and took time to consider it, in the expectation that it was pretty sure to find its way into print by some other means, as indeed soon happened. “For the sake of peace,” Bismarck explained to Lord Granville (July 28, 1870), “I kept the secret, and treated the propositions in a dilatory manner.” When the British ambassador on one occasion had tried to sound him on the suspected designs of France, Bismarck answered, “It is no business of mine to tell French secrets.”

There were members of the cabinet who doubted the expediency of England taking any action. The real position of affairs, they argued, was not altered: the draft treaty only disclosed what everybody believed before, namely that France sought compensation for Prussian aggrandisement, as she had secured it for Italian aggrandisement by taking Savoy and Nice. That Prussia would not object, provided the compensations were not at the expense of people who spoke German, had all come out at the time of the Luxemburg affair. If France and Prussia agreed, how could we help [pg 341] Belgium, unless indeed Europe joined? But then what chance was there of Russia and Austria joining against France and Prussia for the sake of Belgium, in which neither of them had any direct interest? At the same time ministers knew that the public in England expected them to do something, though a vote for men and money would probably suffice. The cabinet, however, advanced a step beyond a parliamentary vote. On July 30 they met and took a decision to which Mr. Gladstone then and always after attached high importance. England proposed a treaty to Prussia and France, providing that if the armies of either violated the neutrality of Belgium, Great Britain would co-operate with the other for its defence, but without engaging to take part in the general operations of the war. The treaty was to hold good for twelve months after the conclusion of the war. Bismarck at once came into the engagement. France loitered a little, but after the battle of Wörth made no more difficulty, and the instrument was signed on August 9.

The mind of the government was described by Mr. Gladstone in a letter to Bright (August 1):—

The idea of engagements that might some day involve [pg 342] resort to force made Bright uneasy, and Mr. Gladstone wrote to him again (August 4):—

II

By the end of the first week of August the storm of war had burst upon the world. “On the 2nd of August, in the insignificant affair of Saarbrück, the Emperor of the French assumed a feeble offensive. On the 4th, the Prussians replied energetically at Wissemburg. And then what a torrent, what a deluge of events! In twenty-eight days ten battles were fought. Three hundred thousand men were sent to the hospitals, to captivity, or to the grave. The German enemy had penetrated into the interior of France, over a distance of a [pg 343] hundred and fifty miles of territory, and had stretched forth everywhere as he went the strong hand of possession. The Emperor was a prisoner, and had been deposed with general consent; his family wanderers, none knew where; the embryo at least of a republic, born of the hour, had risen on the ruins of the empire, while proud and gorgeous Paris was awaiting with divided mind the approach of the conquering monarch, and his countless host.”218 This was Mr. Gladstone's description of a marvellous and shattering hour.

Talleyrand was fond in the days of 1815 at Vienna, of applying to any diplomatist who happened to agree with him the expression, “a good European.” He meant a statesman who was capable of conceiving the state-system of the western world as a whole. The events of August made the chief minister of Austria now exclaim, “I see no longer any Europe.” All the notions of alliance that had so much to do with the precipitation of the war were dissipated. Italy, so far from joining France, marched into Rome. Austria ostentatiously informed England that she was free from engagements. The Czar of Russia was nephew of the Prussian king and German in his leanings, but Gortchakoff, his minister, was jealous of Bismarck, and his sympathies inclined to France, and Czar and minister alike nursed designs in the Black Sea. With such materials as these Mr. Pitt himself with all his subsidies could not have constructed a fighting coalition. Even the sons of stricken France after the destruction of the empire were a divided people. For side by side with national defence against the invader, republican and monarchic propagandism was at work, internecine in its temper and scattering baleful seeds of civil war.

“Many,” Mr. Gladstone wrote to Chevalier in September, “seem so over-sanguine as to suppose that it is in our power at any moment, by friendly influence of reasoning, to solve the problem which has brought together in the shock of battle the two greatest military powers of Europe.... I do not see that it is an offence on our part not to interfere when the belligerents differ so widely, when we have not the [pg 344] hope of bringing them together, and when we cannot adopt without reserve the language and claims of either.” Material responsibility and moral responsibility both pointed to a rigid equity between the combatants, and to strict neutrality. The utmost to be done was to localise the war; and with this aim, the British cabinet induced Italy, Austria, Russia, and smaller powers to come to a common agreement that none of them would depart from neutrality without a previous understanding with the rest. This league of the neutrals, though negative, was at least a shadow of collective action, from which good might come if the belligerents should some day accept or invite mediation. To this diplomatic neutrality the only alternative was an armed neutrality, and armed neutrality has not always served pacific ends.

To the German contention at one stage after the overthrow of the empire, that the Empress was still the only authority existing legally for France, Mr. Gladstone was energetically opposed. “It embodied,” he said, “the doctrine that no country can have a new government without the consent of the old one.” “Ought we,” he asked Lord Granville (Sept. 20), “to witness in silence the promulgation of such a doctrine, which is utterly opposed to the modern notions of public right, though it was in vogue fifty years back, and though it was acted on with most fatal consequences by the Prussians of eighty years back?” Then as for mediation, whether isolated or in common, he saw no hope in it. He said to the Duke of Argyll (Sept. 6), “I would not say a word ever so gently. I believe it would do great mischief. As at present advised, I see but two really safe grounds for mediation, (1) a drawn battle; (2) the request of both parties.” Ever since 1862, and his error in the American war—so he now wrote to Lord Granville—“in forming and expressing an opinion that the Southerners had virtually established their independence, I have been very fearful of giving opinions with regard to the proper course of foreign nations to pursue in junctures, of which, after all, I think they have better means of forming a judgment than foreigners can possess.”

In the middle of September Thiers, in the course of his valiant mission to European courts, reached London. “Yesterday,” Mr. Gladstone writes (Sept. 14), “I saw Thiers and had a long conversation with him; he was very clear and touching in parts. But the purpose of his mission is vague. He seems come to do just what he can.” The vagueness of Thiers did but mirror the distractions of France. Not even from his ingenious, confident, and fertile mind could men hope for a clue through the labyrinth of European confusions. Great Britain along with four other powers recognised the new government of the Republic in France at the beginning of February 1871.

It was about this time that Mr. Gladstone took what was for a prime minister the rather curious step of volunteering an anonymous article in a review, upon these great affairs in which his personal responsibility was both heavy and direct.219 The precedent can hardly be called a good one, for as anybody might have known, the veil was torn aside in a few hours after the Edinburgh Review containing his article appeared. Its object, he said afterwards, was “to give what I thought needful information on a matter of great national importance, which involved at the time no interest of party whatever. If such interests had been involved, a rule from which I have never as a minister diverted would have debarred me from writing.” Lord Granville told him that, “It seemed to be an admirable argument, the more so as it is the sort of thing Thiers ought to have said and did not.” The article made a great noise, as well it might, for it was written with much eloquence, truth, and power, and was calculated to console his countrymen for seeing a colossal European conflict going on, without the privilege of a share in it. One passage about happy England—happy especially that the wise dispensation of Providence had cut her off by the streak of silver sea from continental dangers—rather irritated than convinced. The production of such an article under such circumstances [pg 346] was a striking illustration of Mr. Gladstone's fervid desire—the desire of a true orator's temperament—to throw his eager mind upon a multitude of men, to spread the light of his own urgent conviction, to play the part of missionary with a high evangel, which had been his earliest ideal forty years before. Everybody will agree that it was better to have a minister writing his own articles in a respectable quarterly, than doctoring other people's articles with concomitants from a reptile fund.

III

On the vital question of the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine, Mr. Gladstone's view was easy to anticipate. He could not understand how the French protests turned more upon the inviolability of French soil, than on the attachment of the people of Alsace and North Lorraine to their country. The abstract principle he thought peculiarly awkward in a nation that had made recent annexations of her own. Upon all his correspondents at home and abroad, he urged that the question ought to be worked on the basis of the sentiments of the people concerned, and not upon the principle of inviolability. He composed an elaborate memorandum for the cabinet, but without effect. On the last day of September, he records: “Sept. 30: Cabinet 2-1/4-6. I failed in my two objects. 1. An effort to speak with the other neutral Powers against the transfer of Alsace and Lorraine without reference to the populations. 2. Immediate release of Fenian prisoners.”

To Mr. Bright, who was still prevented by illness from attending cabinets, and who had the second of the two objects much at heart, he wrote the next day:—

The ground taken by him in the cabinet was as follows:—

Mr. Bright did not agree with him, but rather favoured the principle of inviolability. In November Mr. Gladstone prepared a still more elaborate memorandum in support of a protest from the neutral Powers. The Duke of Argyll put what was perhaps the general view when he wrote to Mr. Gladstone (Nov. 25, 1870), “that he had himself never argued in favour of the German annexation of Alsace and Lorraine, but only against our having any right to oppose it otherwise than by the most friendly dissuasion.” The Duke held that the consent of populations to live under a particular government is a right subject to a great many qualifications, and it would not be easy to turn such a doctrine into the base of an official remonstrance. After all, he said, the instincts of nations stand for something in this world. The German did not exceed the ancient acknowledged right of nations in successful wars, when he said to Alsace and Lorraine, “Conquest in a war forced upon me by the people of which you form a part, gives me the right to annex, if on other [pg 348] grounds I deem it expedient, and for strategic reasons I do so deem it.”

Mr. Gladstone, notwithstanding his cabinet, held to his view energetically expressed as follows:—

On December 20 he says to Lord Granville what we may take for a last word on this part of the case: “While I more and more feel the deep culpability of France, I have an apprehension that this violent laceration and transfer is to lead us from bad to worse, and to be the beginning of a new series of European complications.”

While working in the spirit of cordial and even eager loyalty to the prime minister, Lord Granville disagreed with him upon the question of diplomatic action against annexation. Palmerston, he said to Mr. Gladstone in October, “wasted the strength derived by England by the great war by his brag. I am afraid of our wasting that which we at present derive from moral causes, by laying down general principles when nobody will attend to them, and when in all probability they will be disregarded. My objection to doing at present what you propose is, that it is impossible according to my views to do so without being considered to throw our weight into the French scale against Germany, with consequent encouragement on one side and irritation on the other.”

Like Thiers, Mr. Gladstone had been leaning upon the concurrence of the neutral Powers, and active co-operation at St. Petersburg. Russian objects were inconsistent with the alienation of Germany, and they made a fatal bar to all schemes for lowering the German terms. This truth of the situation was suddenly brought home to England in no palatable way.

I

At the close of the Crimean war in 1856 by the provisions of the treaty of Paris, Russia and Turkey were restrained from constructing arsenals on the coast of the Euxine, and from maintaining ships of war on its waters. No serious statesman believed that the restriction would last, any more than Napoleon's restraint on Prussia in 1808 against keeping up an army of more than forty thousand men could last. Palmerston had this neutralisation more at heart than anybody else, and Lord Granville told the House of Lords what durability Palmerston expected for it:—

In 1856 Mr. Gladstone declared his opinion, afterwards often repeated, that the neutralisation of the Black Sea, popular as it might be in England at the moment, was far from being a satisfactory arrangement.221 Were the time to [pg 350] come, he said, when Russia might resume aggressive schemes on Turkey, he believed that neutralisation would mean nothing but a series of pitfalls much deeper than people expected.222 These pitfalls now came into full view. On the last day of October Prince Gortchakoff addressed a circular to the Powers, announcing that his imperial master could “no longer consider himself bound to the terms of the treaty of March 1856, in so far as these limit his rights of sovereignty in the Black Sea.” On the merits there was very little real dispute in Europe. As Lord Granville once wrote to Mr. Gladstone: “There was no doubt about Germany having at Paris, and subsequently, always taken the Russian view. France made an intimation to the same effect very soon after the conclusion of the treaty. And Austria later. Italy did the same, but not in so decided a manner.... I have frequently said in public that with the exception of ourselves and the Turks, all the co-signatories of the treaty of Paris had expressed views in favour of modifying the article, previous to Prince Gortchakoff's declaration.”223

To have a good case on the merits was one thing, and to force it at the sword's point was something extremely different. As Mr. Gladstone put it in a memorandum that became Lord Granville's despatch, “the question was not whether any desire expressed by Russia ought to be carefully examined in a friendly spirit by the co-signatory powers, but whether they are to accept from her an announcement that by her own act, without any consent from them, she has released herself from a solemn covenant.”224 Mr. Gladstone, not dissenting on the substance of the Russian claim, was outraged by the form. The only parallel he ever found to Gortchakoff's proceedings in 1870 was a certain claim, of which we shall soon see something, made by America in 1872. “I have had half an idea,” he wrote to Lord Granville, “that it might be well I should see Brunnow [pg 351] [the Russian ambassador] either with you or alone. All know the mischief done by the Russian idea of Lord Aberdeen, and the opposition are in the habit of studiously representing me as his double, or his heir in pacific traditions. This I do not conceive to be true, and possibly I might undeceive Brunnow a little.”

In this country, as soon as the news of the circular was made known, the public excitement was intense. Consols instantly dropped heavily. Apart from the form of the Russian claim, the public still alert upon the eastern question, felt that the question was once more alive. As Mr. Gladstone had said to Lord Granville (Oct. 4, 1870), “Everybody at a time like this looks out for booty; it will be hard to convince central Europe that Turkey is not a fair prize.” From France Lord Lyons wrote to Mr. Gladstone (Nov. 14) that the Russian declaration was looked upon with complacency, because it might lead to a congress, and at all events it might, by causing a stir among the neutrals, give a check to Prussia as well as to Russia.

Lord Granville wrote to Mr. Gladstone, who was at Hawarden (Nov. 21):—

Mr. Gladstone replied next day:—

II

The courses open to the British Government in the face of the circular were these. They might silently or with a protest acquiesce. Or they might declare an offensive war (much deprecated by Turkey herself) against a nation that had peculiar advantages for defence, and for an object that every other signatory power thought in itself a bad object. Third, they might, in accordance with a wonderfully grand scheme suggested to ministers, demand from Germany, all flushed as she was with military pride, to tell us plainly whether she was on our side or Russia's; and if the German answer did not please us, then we should make an offensive alliance with France, Austria, Italy, and Turkey checking Russia in the east and Germany in the west. A fourth plan was mutely to wait, on the plea that whatever Russia might have said, nothing had been done. The fifth plan was a conference. This was hardly heroic enough to please everybody in the cabinet. At least it saved us from the insanity of a war that would have intensified European confusion, merely to maintain restraints considered valuable by nobody. The expedient of a conference was effectively set in motion by Bismarck, then pre-occupied in his critical Bavarian treaty and the siege of Paris. On November 12, Mr. Odo Russell left London for Versailles on a special mission to the Prussian king. The intrepidity of our emissary soon secured a remarkable success, and the episode of Bismarck's intervention in the business was important.

Mr. Odo Russell had three hours' conversation with Count Bismarck on November 21. Bismarck told him that the Russian circular had taken him by surprise; that though he had always thought the treaty of 1856 too hard upon Russia, he entirely disapproved both of the manner and time chosen for forcing on a revision of it; that he could not [pg 353] interfere nor even answer the circular, but to prevent the outbreak of another war he would recommend conferences at Constantinople.225 The conversation broke off at four o'clock in the afternoon, with this unpromising cast. At ten in the evening it was resumed; it was prolonged until half an hour beyond midnight.