TOPICS OF THE DAY.
MR. GLADSTONE.
THEgreatest Englishman of this generation has passed away. The present writer has never been one of Mr. Gladstone's personal following, recognising in his genius a Celtic strain which created distrust, and when this Celtic strain induced the great Liberal leader to com- mit the blunder of his life, he opposed him strongly ; but in the long watch of thirty years he has never doubted that the statesman who died on Thursday was a great man, head and shoulders above his fellows, one of the figures which stand out in history. This quality of greatness was recognised very early. Mr. Gladstone was not thirty when the Tories looked to him as their future hope, when Macaulay exerted his full strength to destroy the influence of his first book, and when experienced Members believed that as an orator he might rival the greatest who had ever swayed the House of Commons. This sense of his great- ness deepened as time went on, until at last, as death one by one removed his superiors in official rank, the whole country accepted the fact that there was no such figure, that for good or evil he had mastered the Liberal mind of England, that no colleague was of the slightest importance to him—throughout he shed colleagues as a tree sheds leaves—and that he must be supported or resisted as the Government or the Opposition incarnate. How this extra- ordinary position was attained it is a little difficult to describe, but we ourselves believe that he owed it to a combination of gifts very rare in the cultivated class. He was not the greatest orator of his time, never, for instance, quite reaching the height to which Mr. Bright, when the fire as of a Hebrew prophet glowed in his veins, repeatedly attained; but his oratory had in it qualities of illumination and persuasiveness which, as an instrument for convincing popular assemblies, made it absolutely matchless. We remember once in 1863 that he wanted to levy the Income-tax upon all rich charities, but the annoyance created among their managers and subscribers, who included practically the whole House of Commons, was so intense and so loudly expressed that the Whips insisted on the abandonment of the project. Mr. Gladstone gave way, but insisted upon delivering a speech he had prepared in explanation of his measure. He spoke for an hour in a House nearly every man of which was personally aggrieved by his proposal, and when he sat down the chiefs of the Opposition publicly acknowledged that had he persisted he must have carried his vote. The speech, in fact, as any one who reads it can see, could not be answered except by the dull but immovable "No" of the privileged Corporations he assailed. He could speak for four hours on Budget nights without evoking from either side a symptom of weariness ; he could praise in a voice which almost re- duced the subject of his eulogy to tears ; and when he was moved to reproof, even men like Mr. Disraeli, with all his Hebrew wealth of scorn for a rival, shrank before the " Lord of the golden mouth and smiting eyes." With an assembly outside the House he was irresistible, carrying critical Scotch audiences off their feet with excitement, and hushing the duller English into rapt attention, broken only by bursts of applause so long continued as to give his throat a needed physical relief. His second quality was practicalness. He was a Lowland Scot on one side, though a Highlander on the other, and probably the greatest financier that ever lived, with a further reach in the arithmetical grasp of his mind than even Sir Robert Peel. His knowledge upon this subject seemed boundless, and astounded even the pundits of Somerset House. The writer remembers saying to him one day that the ancient habit of the great of amassing silver had almost died away, and was instantly drowned in a flood of evidence that it had materially increased. It really seemed as if Mr. Gladstone knew the contents of the armoires of every great house in England ever since the Revolution. He knew every detail of the compli- cated Irish Land Acts so well that a man who knew them fairly said that no one in the House under- stood them thoroughly except Mr. Gladstone and Tim Healy. The third quality was his courage. It may be questioned if he knew what fear was. Attack, .whether from opponent or from mob, had no effect on him except to call into his eyes a menacing glint which daunted very bold ruffians—the writer was within a yard of him once in a crowd which seemed to want his life—and very proud men, and the fearlessness extended to international affairs. He cared nothing, we have been told by men who. knew, for the opposition of single Powers. He was, in truth, a haughtily fearless man, ready to face France, or Mr. Disraeli, or a mob, or, we must add, recalcitrant colleagues, with a boldness which had for its root-cause something of disdain. Disdain, indeed, was in the very fibre of his intellect, disdain for all that was low, or crafty, or timid, disdain also for all who could not see the arguments he himself considered so irresistible.
It was, however, the fourth quality, his reverence for the moral side of every question, which gave Mr. Glad- stone his final hold upon the affections of his countrymen, and made him, a Churchman to the bone, the idol of Nonconformists. He was, in fact, that character once so rare, now so common, a High Church Puritan, and the British people, always Puritan at heart, believed in him. in consequence. He held with a strength of conviction which admitted of no change that the moral law was the supreme guide, and though he never paraded piety, he never hesitated to express and act on his convictions. Once they nearly cost him his hold upon the people, and once they did cost him it. His Government had decided, unwisely as it turned out, to restore the freedom of the, Transvaal, he himself in particular believing that it had not been voluntarily surrendered, and he consequently held as a corollary that to avenge the defeat of Majuba Hill would be to shed innocent blood. He was wrong, for the right of self-defence against violence appertains to States as well as individuals ; but his conviction was absolute, he simply would not go on, and he risked, knowingly risked, in the cause of what he believed to be right, the infinity of evils which have arisen from the Dutch impression that in battle they are Englishmen's superiors. On the second occasion, his sense of moral obligation pulverised his party. He had satisfied himself that the Act of Union with Ireland had been obtained by fraud, and he was restless in his conscience until he could restore the partial independence which, as he thought, had been "abstracted" from the people of Ireland. That was, we verily believe, the root of his Home-rule proposal. The facts that the bribed Parliament represented nothing but a caste, that the " subordinate position " of Ire- land was therefore only the result of hard fighting continued through centuries, and that the Irish in sending representatives to London, and in accepting grants not derived from their own taxes, morally condoned the Act of Union, signified nothing in his eyes ; and in the teeth of his ablest followers he insisted on following the path that he thought " right." He was wrong, of course, for his principle would dissolve every Empire in the world and make progress in civilisation impossible; but we should. doubt if he ever repented, or even quite understood why an argument to himself so clear seemed even to devoted colleagues so false. This difficulty was in- creased by a fact, little noticed, but traceable, as- we think, through all Mr. Gladstone's history,—that on all but moral questions his mind had a tendency to minimise things. He thought a menace from any single European Power rather a small matter ; he thought, and once said publicly, that a fleet could destroy the Sultan's power ; and while he held the Irish wrong to be gigantic, he underrated the importance of Ireland to the Kingdom. " Nonsense," he once exclaimed to an inter- locutor, who argued that Ireland would impede British policy in foreign affairs, " does the boat towed astern impede a steamer ? " It was alleged, of course, that his Home-rule policy was dictated by a wish for votes ; but the suggestion was untrue, for in his first Bill, the Bill of his heart, the Bill which he exultingly delared always " held the field," he turned the Irish Members out of Parliament, and deprived the Liberals at once of their Parliamentary majority. He yielded to pressure after- wards upon this point; but it was his first Bill, not his second, which was, so to speak, instinctive. His proposal was the mistake of his life, and would have terribly injured both Ireland and Great Britain ; but it was wholly in accordance with a character which, noble beyond that of most rivals, had in it many of the elements which, when the intelligence is less bright sad the temper less Christian, go to make up the fanatic.
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