MR. GLADSTONE AS THE LIBERAL LEADER.
FOR the second time within ten years an individual name has served as the pivot of a general election, the centre round which its hopes and fears, its sympathies and its hatreds have revolved. The absence of a great question has been supplied by the presence of a great man, and the shortest description of the contest would be a variation on his own epigram—Tories are those politicians whose distrust of Mr. Gladstone is limited only by fear, Liberals are those whose confidence in him is qualified only by prudence. Scarcely a Tory of the manlier kind but has affirmed that while he believes in Lord Palmerston he sees behind him a man of a far more dangerous kind, one who may shortly be the triumphant leader of the " ugly rush" to democracy ; scarcely a Liberal of the stauncher sort but has displayed Mr. Glad- stone's name on his banner, as sufficient proof in itself that there is in him no desire for compromise with the foe. Throughout the struggle the phrase " I believe in Mr. Glad- stone " has served as the Liberal credo, and " I distrust Mr. Gladstone" as the Tory's condensed oommination service upon all manner of change. To the imagination of many of the crasser Conservatives Mr. Gladstone seems to have become since his suffrage speech what Mazzini is to Continental monarchs, something so terrible as to be almost impersonal, a man whose name is at once an alarum, a menace, and a predic- tion,while to some excited Liberals he is a Moses waving his staff from Sinai towards the Promised Land. So strong is the inner feeling that if Mr. Gladstone lives the future belongs to him, that hundreds of crypto-Tories like the Record regret his 6 gte axPal- sion from Oxford as breaking fetters which chained him, w'urn ile hundreds of Liberals rejoice because, as they think, the mce.,,- ber for South Lancashire must be wholly their own. Int every society the question is asked how far the Liberal victory is one for Mr. Gladstone or only for Lord Palmerston, and every angry Tory repeats that he will speedily destroy the majority his colleagues alone have gained. Of the hundreds- of speeches made during the election not one has excited a tithe of the interest felt in his speech at Liverpool, which the Times, with a returning glimmer of that strange prescience which has of late abandoned its directors, has reported verbatim by telegraph; of the two hundred and fifty contests but one surpassed in interest that for South Lancashire, and that one was exciting only because it involved Mr. Gladstone's seat,. and therefore a vote which might take the triumph out of the Liberal victory, and almost compensate for the Tory defeat. His name has in fact been the one antiseptic of the election, the influence which preserved its vitality, and made it something more than a splendid struggle among the rich for social promotion or personal weight in the land. The national reason has not yet accepted Mr. Gladstone as the great Liberal leader, but it is becoming evident that the national imagination has, and nations are governed by their- imaginations.
That the instinctive Liberals, the men who feel for the cause- of progress without perceiving or greatly caring to perceive= its precise direction, should express this emotion of loyalty is natural enough, for they cannot help recognizing in Mr. Glad- stone a force great enough to clear the road for their march, whatever the density of the jungle in the way. But educated Liberals feel it too, feel it sometimes in their own despite, and in opposition to the reason which usually controls their in- stincts. We have pointed out elsewhere one set of reasons- for this phenomenon, this reverence for a statesman whom on many points they nevertheless distrust, and we wish to point out another which with many is stronger than all. There is a large class of politicians, generally, though with one or two marked exceptions, Liberal in the party sense, whose minds have been, so to- speak, over-mastered by what Mr. Disraeli, in one of those extraordinary phrases which are to speeches what a, bird's eye view is to a landscape, called the " condition-of- England question." They believe in their hearts that all political questions, internal and external, allpolicies' home, foreign, or colonial, all measures, wise or foolish, all risings and fallings of individual statesmen are trivialities when compared with the supreme duty of raising the English people, of diminishing the vast sum of human misery still existing: in this grand hive of wealth and industry. It is to them intolerable that in a country where every week developes. some new source of wealth, where the incomes of the middle class have tripled in twenty years, and artizans earn by the thousand more than the mass of Continental officials receive one-fifth of the population should still be reduced to fool insufficient for health or satisfaction. They reflect almost with a sense of anger upon the wages paid in the agricultural, districts, on the endless difficulties in the way of rebuilding_ the wretched houses of the poor, on the monotonous toil, the colourless lives, the apprehensive hours to which whole sections of our population have always been condemned.. Countries are made for the people who live in them, and what is the use of all this prosperity if it does not reach the majority, if there are whole classes to whom decent education, or moderate leisure, or medical attendance, or healthy houses, or succulent food, are as unattainable as wealth like that bequeathed by Mr. Richard Thornton? What profits the elasticity of the revenue when, as in 1864, every soul in England and Wales had to contribute 9s. 4d., upwards of nine and a half millions sterling, in order to keep the poor among them from perishing of want of food, or what avail the palaces which are covering the country if the only certain home of a third of the people after a life of work is to be the pauper barrack ? They want to lighten the pressure on the base of society, to make pauperism at least exceptional, to give some at least of the benefits of civilization to those whose- hands keep it up, to make education universal, to house all men decently, to raise the minimum of wages, to secure to. every labourer the certainty that his thrift shall be to his own advantage. They say, with the Venetian Ten, that there
ought to be at least two necessities in politics, two given data outside the region of device and oratory and wile, beyond
even the region of statecraft—pane a case, giustizia a palazzo,. and till both have been secured society, not this or that govern- ment, but society, rests on rotten foundations. Their view may be a narrow one, we ourselves confess it to be imperfect, IJuly j 2,- 1865.] but there is in it one of those truths which always spread, which are propagandist when there are none to preach, and popular when there are none to hear. Every improvement in civilization, every advance in education, every new addi- tion to wealth, increases the number of such men, and they all turn to Mr. Gladstone, with the certainty that what- ever his crotchets, or his leanings, or his failures, whether
he will or will not hold up the English flag, will or will not desert the colonies, will or will not erase the Irish Church, will or will not maintain oaths and castes, and land laws, and all the silly machinery of useless restriction, he is on their supreme subject heartily one with them. The man, with all his hauteur, and his ways, and his hasty temper, and want of tact to control an educated mob, does to the very bottom of his heart care for the people of England. He smashes traditions in their favour as he would smash the old
porcelain he is so fond of if he thought its existence injured design, and the greatest personal blunder he ever made in the House was made in his wrath at an interest which, as he thought, stood selfishly in the way of their prosperity. It was for them that he threw over the prudent scruples, scruples dear to financiers of his own school, which prevent the State from establishing banks, or insurance offices, or benevolent societies for itself. It was for them that he devised the largest project placed in ourtime before the public, the redemption of the railway system from the private interests which now render it so little beneficial to the bulk of the people. Mr. Gladstone does not believe of course, any more than the unthinking people who are always repeating the phrase, that a nation can be made happy by Act of Parliament, but he does believe, and acts on his belief, that the immense aggregate force which we call the.State, and which centralization is making greater every day, can be applied as a lever to heave up the masses a little nearer to the air and the light, that it is no more impossible to educate a nation by legal measures than to educate all factory hands, as we do by the Factory Act, no more difficult to provide against old age than against starvation, as we do by the Poor Law, no more impracticable to rebuild the cottages of all England than to redrain the fields of all England, as we are doing under the Drainage Act. This very week he has made a great step towards this great reform. A London Alderman who, if he ever steads for a metropolitan constituency, will find not unpleasantly what London workmen think of him, has succeeded in building houses which fulfil the conditions of civilization at rents which the poor can pay, yet which leave an interest on the outlay. Lord Stanley, interested in the work, appeals to his political foe, and Mr. Gladstone has promised to introduce a measure under which the State will furnish the funds required for the rehousing of the poor at 3i per cent. In other words, the State credit, already pledged to keep the masses from starvation, to guarantee the solvency of their banks, and to secure their annuities when old, or provision when widows or orphans, is now to be pledged to secure them houses in which foul air, darkness, and miasma are not ensured by archi- tectural deficiencies. The rebuilding, long pronounced a necessity, is at last made practicable, and the great cities, towards which our population gravitates with constantly increasing force, may gradually be made fit for human beings to dwell in. It looks but a small affair that concession, crowded away as it is into a corner by windy election speeches, but the one need of very great enterprises is cheap money, and here is cheap money provided by the State itself. There is more, much more, to be done in this direction, work sufficient for one generation at least, but whatever the design so it be but practicable, and clearly tends to the happiness of the people, Liberals are certain of Mr. Gladstone's aid. The mere mag- nitude of a project will not alarm the man who in three years has set up 3,000 State Banks, who has thought of making the nation own its own railways, and who has helped to reverse the financial policy once believed to be as demon- strable as any geometrical problem. What wonder, then, that Liberals who want much else, but believe that the physical comfort of people is the first thing to be sought, should watch Mr. Gladstone's progress with eager eyes, and accept with keen pleasure every sign that he is beginning to occupy the place in the minds of the nation he already occupies in their own? National wealth is a thing to be sought, but who •will estimate
the wealth thirty millions of educated Englishmen would deve- lope? National greatness must never be surrendered, but thirty millions of contented people are, as we have seen in America, of all others the most powerful guarantee for the safety of the national territory and the national honour.
Previous page
