Mr. Gladstone has written a letter to Mr. Walter Maclaren
on the assertion made by Mr. Chatterton, the Tory candidate
for the Crewe Division, that up to his fiftieth year Mr. Glad- stone was " in full sympathy with the Tory Party." Mr. Gladstone things that that was never-true beyond the date of 1839, or at all events 1841, and that even then his sympathy was mainly based on his ecclesiastical views in relation to the Establishment, especially the Establishment in Ireland. On other questions, even in his earliest political years he did not think himself at all genuinely Tory. In 1843 he began to undermine the Tory system of financial protectionism. In 1849-50 he struck a blow at the Neapolitan tyranny. In 1851 he actively resisted the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill. which the Tories supported. In regard to foreign policy and finance, he was between 1850 and 1860 as Liberal in prin- ciple as he is now. In 1858 he went to the Ionian. Islands to do a work much like that which Sir Stafford Northcote went to do in the United States with relation to the ' Alabama' negotia- tions in 1869. In 1859, again, Mr. Gladstone disapproved the Italian policy of the Tory Government, and supported that of the Liberals. All this certainly shows that Mr. Gladstone was not in any true sense a Tory of the Tories. But he forgets that in relation to Parliamentary reform his writings and speeches certainly were, strictly speaking, Conservative before 1859, and not at all cast in the mould of his later career. We should term Mr. Gladstone a high-minded opportunist,— Conservative up to 1860, democratic between 1866 and 1888.
