MR. GLADSTONE'S CAREER.
MR. GLADSTONE'S political enemies have united with his friends in extolling one great feature of that long and stately public life which is, we presume, now at an end. There has never been a trace in it of anything like bitter personal resentment or animosity. Towards his most contemptuous critics he has always borne himself with a generous detachment of mind which has always deserved and often won an astonished, or even a grateful, acknowledgment. Even Lord Randolph Churchill, who at one time ignored, in relation to Mr. Gladstone, all the courtesies of political life, has at other times recognised this great magnanimity in Mr. Gladstone, and acknowledged it in hearty and even eloquent terms. And that is all the more remarkable a feature of this long career of more than sixty years of public life, because Mr. Gladstone's political ad- vocacy of causes has not been marked by any such reserve. He has denounced the principles of his foes, —not at all less unreservedly, perhaps with all the greater vehemence, even when they had. been his own principles a few years or months earlier,—with an in- dignation which was wholly without reticence. In spite of the singular courtesy with which he has uniformly treated his adversaries, even when they dipped their arrows in venom, his invective against their principles has often far surpassed the bounds of reasonable condemnation. Every one remembers that series of invectives against the
Liberal Unionists as a party, which culminated in the famous description of the very political creed which he had himself so recently professed, as an ill-starred "abortion," and which marked the very latest phase of his boundless, political energy. Yet a statesman who has never denied. himself the full use of all the resources of denunciation in relation to the cause of his antagonists, has never once availed himself of his great wealth of rhetorical scorn and disgust in relation to the personal attitude and character. of his bitterest foes. This has been chiefly due, no doubt, to his sincere and deep religious principles. Mr. Gladstone has not only never let the sun go down upon his wrath, but has hardly ever let it shine upon it at all. But partly, also, we attribute this wise and noble magnanimity to that almost exaggerated humility which has always inclined him to regard an attack upon himself, so far as it touched himself alone, as a matter of absolute insignificance. We remember well the eager indignation which one of the venomous Irish attacks on Mr. Bright excited in him, even after he had separated himself from Mr. Bright on the Home- rule question. But we cannot remember the least symptom of personal anger or even discomposure at any of the wild invective to which Mr. Parnell subjected him, after his breach with Mr. Parnell in 1890. While Mr. Gladstone has been most lavish in his oratorical denunciations of the political principles which have barred his rather hasty and sometimes even capricious way, he has never shown a trace of that personal sensitiveness and vanity which most men reserve for the occasions on which they are conscious of having fallen short of their own highest standard of action. So far as that test of deep moral conviction goes, even Mr. Gladstone's Home-rule policy may well be re- garded as proceeding from the full depth of sincere personal conviction.
It would, however, be untrue to say that his career has usually been marked by any other kind of reserve. It has been marked from the first moment of his taking a great place in political life, by a singular impulsiveness which has always made his great personality an incalculable element on the political stage, all the more incalculable for his, high personal disinterestedness and equanimity. His first resignation, on the ground that he ought not to support the Maynooth Grant after the line he had taken on the subject of State endowments without resigning- office, was a generous but unduly impulsive act which made quite too much of a slight change of personal conviction. During the whole course of the Crimean war, Mr. Gladstone's changes of attitude, though due to a very keen and shrewd appreciation of the incurable evils of the Turkish rule, were like the fits and starts of a feverish politician. They were not sufficiently pondered or based on any clear principle of discrimination. Then for a time Mr. Gladstone certainly wavered between keen dislike of Lord Palmerston's Jingoism and a serious doubt whether Lord Derby's Conservatism would stand against the wave of democratic feeling which was sweeping over- Europe, and which at once alarmed and fascinated him. His speech on Lord Derby's first Reform Bill, —the Reform Bill of 1858,—still showed a predominant though rapidly dwindling Conservatism of feeling, which was soon to be exchanged for an ewer and almost' imperious faith in democracy. Nor is it very easy to trace the steps by whirl the one phase passed into the other. Apparently Mr. Gladstone's deep sympathy with Italian Liberalism had much to do with it. It was that probably which alienated him from Lord Derby's and Lord Malmesbury's Austrian policy, and carried him over to the side of the leader whom he distrusted so much on other European questions as he distrusted Lord Palmer- ston. But what it is less easy to understand is why,. instead of adhering to Lord Palmerston's moderate Liberalism in English politics, he so suddenly threw hie Conservatism to the winds, and bid higher than Mr.. Disraeli for the support of the democracy. No doubt Mr. Disraeli led him on. But he went with much more eagerness and even abandon than would be expected from- one who has always described his own Conservative instincts as very deep-grained. We should describe them as rather of that kind which, though it exerts a real' influence on the habits, adds a certain gusto to the effort necessary to break through these habits where- there is a sufficient motive for repressing Conservative instincts. For example, though in 1885 Mr. Gladstone seized gladly on the Conservative instincts of his party as a reason for not depriving the forty-shilling freeholders of their extra vote, he was apparently quite as glad to with- draw his objection when, in 1890, the cry for "One man, one vote," sprang up. Mr. Gladstone's Conservatism has always been more a Conservatism of taste than a Con- servatism of conviction, and it has given way with a crash whenever he has seen the probability that the rising tide of popular opinion would speedily sweep such flimsy barriers away. Indeed, as he has grown older, reverence for the will of the people has become to him far more of a political religion than the Conservatism of his earlier dais bad ever been to him.
And this brings us to the remark that a great deal of Mr. Gladstone's singular power and dignity has always arisen from his no doubt more or less exaggerated, but still perfectly sincere, and even religious, reverence for public opinion as the gauge of tendencies higher and truer than any that can be ascribed to mere human wills or wishes. Even in his Conservative days, we distinctly remember how one of his Colonial despatches, written, we believe, in 1846, breathed the spirit of those more ethical and ideal relations between the Mother-country and the Colonies, of which hardly anything had been heard at that time in official life, though the craving for them had already begun to pervade the political idealism of the day. In that sense, Mr. Gladstone's growing democracy has ever been a kind of idealism,—often, indeed, as widely severed as possible from the hard facts with which he should have dealt,—but never the coarser democracy which looks upon the people merely as what the late Lord Sher- brooke loved to call them, "our masters." Mr. Gladstone has always been inspired by the hope, too often by the dream, that if we deal with the masses of the people of our State as "our own flesh and blood," it will tend to secure their acting in the spirit of that generous and magnanimous affection which becomes the conduct of men to their own kith and kin. It was this feeling which really converted him in 1866 and 1867 into a democrat, and which animated him throughout that great first Administration of his in which he passed all his best measures,—in which he disestablished the Church of the minority in Ireland, secured a great measure of education for the working classes, abolished purchase in the Army, struck, for the first time, at the root of the evil of the Irish land-laws, and would, if he had been allowed, have given the Catholics of Ireland a great University in which their sons might have been educated without exposing them to any temptation to desert their faith. It was precisely the same reverence for the fraternal feeling which lies at the root of every healthy society which made him so eager to foster Italian patriotism and to set Greece and the Balkan Peninsula free from the desolating tyranny of the Turk. And we believe that even in his second Administration, from 1880-85, though he missed the right path,—which it was only too easy to miss,—when he substituted the attempt to enforce a system of fair rents for the far wiser policy of selling the land to those who actually cultivated it, he was still animated by an idealism which was only too dreamily lofty, till at last he disastrously per- suaded himself that the whole root of the mischief in Ireland could be cured, if he only handed over the. reins from the elect of the people of England to the elect of the Irish peasants themselves. We have nothing to retract of the conviction which we have always expressed that this was a most unhappy, and even fatal, blunder, the blunder of a dreamer and not of a statesman. But still we believe that it was, in its motive, a noble blunder. And it is because it was a noble blunder, and not the blunder of a selfish or cunning manipulator of party tactics, and a flatterer of the mob, that he has been able to command to the very last that strain of stately and impressive eloquence of which both the Duke of Devonshire and Mr. Chamberlain have spoken this week in such cordial and almost reverent terms. The secret of Mr. Gladstone's oratory, as he once described the secret of Homeric oratory, has been to absorb from the popular audiences he addresses, in a sort of ideal vapour, the con- victions which he rains back upon them in a flood ; but unfortunately that has been not only the secret of his oratory, but the secret of his statesmanship too. And when .he allowed himself to absorb from that Irish party which had grown up out of protracted misgovern- ment, and the attitude of vindictive conspiracy which such misgovernment always causes, the malformed aspirations which transformed themselves in his mind into the most ill-grounded hopes, he ceased to be a statesman, and became a mere enthusiastic advocate of perilous revolu- tionary experiments. None the less, he retained all the purity and enthusiasm of his earlier days. He preached. what he thought to be a political gospel, when he should have reformed and enforced a just political law. But he never ceased to believe in his own idealism, and therefore he never lost that ascendency over the people which he had won in days of soberer political judgment and cooler political reserve. Eagerness and audacity in dashing into problems which required the utmost circumspection and reserve were the ruin of his last two Administrations. But he never ceased to believe passionately in his own policy. And therefore he never ceased to command the confidence of a large portion of the English people, and the profound admiration of the House of Commons. Nearly thirty years ago the present writer expressed the conviction that Mr. Gladstone was "a statesman of far greater power than those who would be competent to guide and lead him ; " and that for that reason it would not be safe to trust to his guidance. And so, un- fortunately, it has proved. For a time he was guided by his wisest colleagues, and then he succeeded. Latterly he succumbed to hasty, sanguine, and perilous counsels; and from that time his decline began. He is a political giant on whose sanguine hopes men of very inferior power have played, till they have tempted their hero into initiating an enterprise which he himself is forced to abandon in mid- career,—an enterprise which it is impossible to carry through without bringing on England impotence, and on Ireland ruin.
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