MR. GLADSTONE'S DEFECT.
WE are not amongst those who are accustomed to ignore Mr. Gladstone's greatness and the greatness of what his Government has done, because we can see plainly the great defects of his Administration, and even trace them in some important respects to himself. We have never believed in the least in the charges made against him on the ground of an implacable temper, and we think we see, especially this session, notwithstanding the heat of Thurday's debate on the Parks' Bill, in his .manner of bearing bitter criticism and no ordinary acerbity of attack by political friends as well as enemies, and what is most difficult to endure of all, painful criticism that is not unjust, the clearest proof that in dignity and disinterestedness his character as a statesman stands far higher, instead of lower, than the characters of most of the Liberal leaders to whom in past Parliaments we have looked up. His speech on Monday night against Mr. Cross's motion had nothing in it that showed a spark of animosity, and no one could deny that its tone was lofty, not to say stately. Still, it exhibited the same defect which is no doubt the principal cause of most of the sorrows of the Administration, and this defect came out again with even more conspicuous force in his answer to Mr. Disraeli on Tuesday night with respect to the exact date when the Government first became possessed of the nature of the American Case, and the delay in protesting against the interpretation which the American statesmen had put upon the terms of the Treaty of Washington. We cannot express that defect better than by saying that it is the want of an overseeing mind,—the want of the kind of mind which keeps a good look-out on the general drift and tendency of the Government's procedure, and a consequent tendency to get entangled and embarrassed with details which a Prime Minister ought steadily
\ to pass over as not germane to his duties as chief, though
-A.4f.esibly of some importance from the point of view of Ministers specially charged with the subjects to which they relate. We see this serious defect in Mr. Gladstone's otherwise very powerful political intellect in both the principal incidents of the week. Instead of helping the Lord Chancellor to keep the wider and more important bearing of his duties in relation to the Judicial staff uppermost, we have it on
the express confession of both Mr. Gladstone and Lord Hatherley that he did a good deal to lay a false emphasis on secondary points which should have been kept subordinate ; and we have it again on the Prime Minis- ter's own confession that at least he did nothing to stimulate Lord Granville to make that very important noti- fication as to our understanding of the Treaty which was so long delayed, and that he found excuses for the delay in the most trivial and utterly unimportant details, as to the difficulty of providing enough copies of the American Case for the whole Cabinet ; the real truth being that he was occupied at the time with the English Case, —which, in relation to time at least, was a matter of the slightest possible relative importance,—and had not even got into his head how great a question the Americans had re-opened. On both matters we hold that Mr. Gladstone, instead of bringing to them the mind of an overseer,—the mind which discriminates at once the proportional weight of different features of the case,—brought to them the mind of a specialist, the mind which gets so easily absorbed and involved in particular aspects of what is to be done that it loses the general effect and detail of the whole.
Now, first, with relation to Sir Robert Collier. Mr. Glad- stone began the important part of his answer by asking most properly, "Now is it a mistake we are dealing with, or is it a crime ?" We say at once after the elucidation of the debate in both Houses that it was a mistake and not a crime, but a mistake of the kind which shakes confidence in the Minister's judgment as a general overseer of the work of the Government almost more than some crimes, for it was a mistake evincing a real blindness to the proportions of political things. The one view of the case which never seems to have struck Mr. Glad- stone from beginning to end was, that if the Judicial Com- mittee Act of last Session had intended to include Attorneys- General among those qualified for the Privy Council, it certainly would not have imposed on the Government the mischievous form of passing them through the Common Pleas or any other Court of Law. He never for a moment seems to have been sensible of the shock that it would cause to the public mind to see an office of the first importance in the State, like that of one of our judges, made into a mere instrument of conferring a qualification for another office. This broad and homely and natural view of the case, that you could not make a man a judge for fourteen days,—during which, as Mr. Denman ob- served, his appointment was so obviously and confessedly tem- porary that he sat in robes too short for him,—simply to get a right to pass him on to the Judicial Com- mittee without shocking the feeling of the nation, and at once raising a strong presumption that you were trifling with the law, never occurred to Mr. Gladstone, as he candidly con- fesses; indeed, he says openly that if it had occurred to him, he should have been very foolish to do it. We are not now dealing with the reasons why it was wrong to pass Sir R. Collier through the Common Pleas, though we honestly believe that the intention of the Act was to limit the choice of the Crown to the class of judges already made judges for other reasons, but with the considerations which ought at least to have warned Mr. Gladstone of that which he most naïvely confesses his failure to foresee,—that what he did would startle the public and awaken on the very face of it a suspicion of something wrong. It never even struck him that it was in some sense a demoralizing spectacle to use a Judge- ship as a mere step on the ladder of promotion, and that whatever an Act passed last Session did mean or did not mean, it could not beyond any question have intended to authorize that. But while Mr. Gladstone was quite insen- sible to this consideration, he was evidently completely occupied with the comparatively trivial and utterly unim- portant consideration that, as the Lord Chancellor expressed it, it was not desirable to let the new appointments in the Judicial Committee go abegging. Just observe his words, and the utterly disproportionate estimate they betray of the danger of cheapening the new appointment by getting a few refusals from the Judges,—of course never realized or remembered by, even if positively known to, the public,—and the complete oblivion of the infinitely greater danger of cheapening even the office of a judge itself by making it the mere passage to the new office of paid member of the Judicial Committee :—
" We never dreamt of making the round of the whole of the Ridges, and I must own, after writing three letters in terms as nearly approach- ing to civility as I could commandhopree of the Judges, distinguished and excellent persons, and after a failure in each instance, with a con- siderable lapse of time through accidental causes, but through fault of theirs, that I did begin to think that with reference to this office, and also to the freedom and discretion of Parliament, it was desirable, before we lengthened the list of offers, to have some idea as to their probable reception. Such was the depressing effect of these successive refusals that I must say it was an immense relief when I found, after all, that we were able to obtain a real live Puisne Judge who was willing to take a seat in this tribunal, notwithstanding that Parliament had not made the endowment of which others regretted the absence. We received these refusals one after another with the chance of their being multiplied and of the loss of further time in these communications, and we had to take into view the effect of all this in lowering the judicial office, and perhaps in leaving Parliament in a position far different from that which it oaght to hold,—namely, that of being arbiter and master in determining what the emoluments of the office should be."
We don't say these considerations were altogether irrelevant. They would have been very relevant in considering the Bill while it was still only a Bill, but they were of the class of purely inferior considerations which a Prime Minister should have recognized as such at once, whatever an inferior minister might have done, when the question lay between even the appearance of evading a law and making a judgeship into a qualification for higher offices, and the insignificant evil of offering what might be refused and losing a little time. Mr. Gladstone's office is emphatically the office in which a man is wanted to keep the sense of political distance and relative proportion clear and strong in the minds of the Cabinet ; now he appears in this case to have been Lord Hatherley's evil genius, to have pressed the insignificant consideration on him, and to have abstained from even seeing the all-important consideration.
And so, too, about the time lost in letting the American Government know our opinion about the indirect claims. Mr. Gladstone said in his answer to Mr. Disraeli on Tuesday night
first of all, with regard to the number of copies of the American Case, there is no doubt that, not in the middle of December, but by the 26th, a number of copies of the Case were received at the Fureign Office, which would have enabled them to be distributed among the members of the Cabinet ; but the authorities of the Foreign Office judged, and, I think, judged rightly, that that was not the first use to be made of those copies. A certain number of copies were necessary to be retained in the Foreign Office itself for use and exami- nation by those who belong to it. A certain number it was necessary to send to America for Sir Edward Thornton, who was depending upon us for them. A certain number were necessary especially for Bending to various Colonies, in a part of which the acts alleged against us were known or declared to have happened ;" —and so forth ; Mr. Gladstone accounting in the minutest way for every copy of "the American Case" received in this country, and giving quite a short memorandum on the history of his own copy, which he ought to have received on the 20th December, but "cannot trace ;" but frankly and charac- teristically admitting at the same time that if "he had re- ceived it, and knowingly received it," he should "very likely have allowed a considerable time to elapse before making him- self master of that important volume." "I had," says Mr. Gladstone, "devoted considerable time, at no small incon- venience, to making myself master of the English Case, of which I have read every word, and my comments on which I have sent to the Foreign Office ; but with regard to the American Case, I frankly own that I should have looked for guidance and suggestions from those whose duty it was to consider the international bearing of the points and to prepare the Counter Case." Now this carious confession of laborious painstaking on the details of the one case, and superfluous neglect as to the main features of the other, exactly illustrates the defect of which we speak in Mr. Gladstone. He devotes himself at the cost of "no small inconvenience" to master details which might fairly be left to the legal and other subordinate advisers of the Crown, and did not even intend to glance at so much as the general features of the opposite Case, "without allowing a considerable time to elapse." He throws himself heart and soul into a part of this great question, but does not even care to get a general impression of the whole. Yet precisely what we want from a Prime Minister is to keep himself so far informed of the main aspects of the country's affairs as to know at least where the spur or the curb is Most needed,—so far as to be able to hint authoritatively to one minister that a matter is urgent, and to another that caution is needed,—so far as to satisfy himself, at least, that there is nothing fresh of moment which requires instant attention, and nothing old which is absorbing too much. Nothing could be more important than to know how far the American Case went beyond, or fell within, the limits which our own lawyers ex- pected. And the very Table of Contents of the American Case, which Mr. Gladstone could have mastered easily in a quarter of an hour, would have told him that there was something
requiring the most urgent attention from his Government ; while another hour of conversation with Lord Granville, with the American Case before them, would have enabled him to prepare a friendly question to the American Government, the effect of which would have been to express the sur- prise of this Government at the apparently enormous extension of the meaning of the Treaty of Washington given by the lawyers who had prepared the American Case. But in place of this general supervision, Mr. Gladstone busies himself so deeply in details that he cannot keep a good look-out over the whole situation and prospects of the Government. No English statesman has ever produced legislative measures greater in their conception and completer in their execution than Mr. Gladstone, or shown so wonderful a mastery of their bearings. But as the superintending intellect of a vast and miscellanous system of affairs, his is not great. He plunges too eagerly into subordinate details, and cannot bring himself to keep up that leisurely but vigilant supervision of the whole, which is far more needful in one who holds the helm than any mastery of individual departments.
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