MR. GLADSTONE'S LETTER.
MR GLADSTONE, in his interesting letter to the President of the Tower Hamlets Association, in relation to his Birmingham speech, virtually disclaims any title to be re- garded as a member of the Radical wing of the Liberal party, though he admits that there was one long period of political indifference, when the name of Radical was given, — as a sort of censure—to any Liberal who was really in earnest. That time he evidently regards as one which was a time of depression and discredit for the Liberal party, and though he still esteems the Radicals as a class of Liberals who hold their own views with great earnestness, he evidently prefers the catholicity of Liberalism — which includes many earnest political creeds besides the Radical creed—to the sectarianism, as he holds it, of the Radical wing of that party. He agrees with Mr. Mill, he says, in considering the Liberal party as a kind of Church, which he does not desire to see broken up into fragments of different shades. He would rather not hear men crying out, ram of Hartington,' and '1 of Gladstone,' and ' I of Forster,' and I of Fawcett.' He would rather see the Liberal party whole and undivided, though of course containing many shades of earnest conviction, some of which go further than he has ever gone, and others not so far. And undoubtedly it is the tendency of his letter to discourage the wheels within wheels which so often disturb the advance of the Liberal party. Quite recently he himself made a great sacrifice to prevent the dissensions of Liberals amongst themselves on the Eastern Question from coming to the surface. He consented to press only the first two of his four Resolutions on the House of Commons, though speaking for them all, and in so doing he greatly annoyed not merely the Radical section of his party, but that section of his party with which on the Eastern Question he happened to agree most closely. It may therefore fairly be said that his dis- couragement of sectional Liberalism is not merely a theory, but leads to important practical modifications of his own con- duct.- Even where he is a Radical in creed, he waives some- thing in practice, to conciliate the weaker brethren.' So far as it is possible, he wishes the Liberal party to " move alto- gether, if it moves at all." He prefers a slower advance which carries on the whole, to a swifter advance which separates the vanguard from the main body. And in this we think his actions have supported his professions of opinion. In none of his great measures has Mr. Gladstone shot beyond the majority of his party. That party was fully prepared for the great Irish enterprises, and for the abolition of Purchase in the Army ; and on the question of education it is notorious that he declined to be guided by the extreme wing, though it was not he, but Mr. Forster who earned the unpopularity incurred by the refusal. It has always suited the Tories to represent Mr. Gladstone as a fire-brand, because he has been so much more earnest in his Liberalism than Lord Palmerston. But though he has been in earnest, he has not been disposed to push on in advance of the main body. In relation to the suffrage, he was notoriously far behind the advocates of household suffrage. And even now, in giving his individual support as he does to the extension of household suffrage to the counties, he has neither urged that opinion with any vehemence on those who differ from him and lag in the rear of the rapidly-growing party conviction, nor advo- cated any great scheme of redistribution in connection with it. On the whole, Mr. Gladstone is completely entitled, by his policy as well as his preferences, to disclaim the position of a Liberal extremist, and to urge the duty of mutual concessions and compromises amongst the various sections of the Liberal Church:
And yet there is truth in the position of those who affirm that he is at heart a Radical, and neither has nor ever had
any true sympathy with the attitude of the Whigs. And the truth in it is this,—that with him an opinion is sure to draw an action after it, which was seldom the case with the Whigs, as Whigs. They fed as it were on their Liberal opinions. They " chewed the cud of sweet and bitter fancy" till people were apt to think that it was the holding a right opinion about what ought to be done that was the material point, not willingness to do it. Mr. Gladstone has never been a Minister of that kind. From the beginning to the end of his Ministerial career, the question about him always was what he was going to do next. He never seemed to enjoy being a Liberal for its own sake, as Lord Palmerston did, for instance, and Lord Russell. He never seemed to sun himself in the reflection that he belonged to the true Church in politics. The thing that people always asked about Mr. Gladstone was, what was he brooding over, for whatever it was,—whether a financial treaty, or ecclesiastical policy, or land bills, or paying off the Debt,—something was always quite sure to come of it. He has always had the turn for action. He never could hold an opinion that change was necessary in the abstract, and take credit both for holding it and for not acting on it. That is the quality which makes people think him so dangerous. His political opinions have all of them a practical feature about them, a premise of life, a prospect of embodiment in something which is by no means a mere opinion. Now that is essentially the Radical, as distinguished from the Liberal form of mind. Radicals want to root up what they denounce, or to dig deep the founda- tions of what they found. And in that turn of mind Mr. Gladstone is eminently Radical. His mind is always in eager movement ; his mental movements are sure to be fol- lowed sooner or later by practical proposals ; in neither respect does he resemble the traditional Whigs, who were so satisfied and even gratified with their creed, that they forgot either to revise or to embody it.
Not the less, however, we quite understand why Mr. Glad- stone shrinks so sensitively from the name of Radical. A Radical is not simply a Liberal in earnest, but a Liberal who is furnished with very clear and precise democratic principles, and is in earnest in his desire to carry those principles as his standard into the battle, and to win with them, if he wins at all. Now Mr. Gladstone, in earnest as he is, is not furnished with a few clear fundamental principles, on behalf of which he fights like a Crusader. On the contrary, he always sees every question in a number of cross-lights, and the last thing as to which you are quite certain when he comes to a distinct conclusion is the relative weight, in his own mind, of the different reasons by which he has been compelled to come to that conclusion. Clear and sharply outlined as is his statesmanship, the political grounds on which he justifies that statesmanship are chequered with all sorts of fine shades and distinctions, which separate his mind entirely,—in intellectual type,—from the mind of a genuine Democrat or "Radical" of the old sort. The artistic school of Furnishers praise the particular kind of colour which is called the teint degrade, because, as they say, it is really the harmony of all tints, and- in different
lights gives each in turn. Well, that is the exact analogue of Mr. Gladstone's political Liberalism. It is not a plain, simple, easily defined shade of prismatic colour, such as the Radical's faith always is. It is a sort of blending of all Liberal hues, which becomes and ceases to be each in turn, so that at times it assumes the most Conservative- Liberal shade of purple in the whole Liberal spectrum, and at times the most Radical red, and passes from each into the other as quickly as the tints in a shot-silk vary their effect to the eye. This extreme complexity in the grounds of Mr. Glad- stone's Liberalism must very naturally make him shrink from the apparent naked simplicity of Radical ideas, as if they outraged his individual convictions, and this even at a time when he happens to be in more earnest practical sympathy with the Radicals than with any other section of the Liberal party.
No doubt it is a very rare thing for a man whose intellectual discriminations and sympathies are so finely modulated that it would be extremely difficult for any one else to deduce from them a well-defined, much less a vigorous, line of practical action, to be the foremost reformer of his day, as Mr. Gladstone certainly is. Most men who accepted Mr. Gladstone's complex premisses, would come to no sharply-marked conclusion. But as we have seen, Mr. Gladstone always does come to a distinct and usually an advanced conclusion, and is one of the greatest of Parlia- mentary advocates for that conclusion. The deterrent con- siderations to which he is theoretically so keenly alive, vanish from his mind the moment he has given them expression, while the considerations which justify active measures come into a prominence and preponderance that carry all before them. But not the less is the web of his Liberalism shot through and through with Conservative fibres exceedingly puzzling to many of his followers. And not the less is it true that to describe him as a Radical would be as greatly to misdescribe his mental background, as to describe him as a Con- servative would be to misdescribe his practical actions. His is one of the few subtle and much-balancing intellects which somehow manages to arrive at the clearest and most sharply-defined political policy. Regard his mental processes as he himself often describes them, and you would expect little but indeterminate results. Regard his actual policy as he himself urges it, and you would assume for him the most drastic and clearly outlined principles. But either view would misrepresent him. To put it broadly, Mr. Gladstone is like a Schoolman who has managed to deduce modern reform measures from Aquinas, and who finds himself puzzled by the plaudits of delighted Benthamites. No wonder the Radicals look to him as a leader, and no wonder that he shrinks in perplexity from their panegyric, and almost disclaims their gratitude.
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