BOOKS.
MEMORIALS OF THE EARL OF SELBORNE.* TEE editor of these volumes has, we think, shown excellent judgment in publishing them as a separate work. The two volumes about Lord Selborne that had previously appeared were so largely occupied with family details, and with one or two not very important ecclesiastical questions, that they had certainly less interest than might have been expected in the biography of a man who was himself so remarkable and so
• Memorials of the Earl of Seaborne. Part 17., Perronal and Political. With 2 Portraits. 2 vols. London: Macmillan and Co. f 25s, net)
closely connected with many of the most important political and legal events of his time. The present volumes have not this defect. They deal with nearly all the great questions of English political history which arose during a long and active life, and they deal with them with complete knowledge, with absolute truthfulness, and sometimes with eminent sagacity. The work is almost entirely autobiographical, and Lord Selborne, though somewhat diffuse, and apt to dilate at dis- proportioned length on matters of no great interest to the world at large, was always a clear and often a forcible writer, and the many character portraits of his cotemporariea which are scattered through these volumes are admirably done. They are vivid, discriminating, and judicial, and there is not a trace in them of the envious and disparaging spirit that so often almost insensibly steals over autobiographers when they are writing about opponents or competitors, or even about men whose characters are radically different from their own. If Lord Selborne ever deviates from strict justice, it is on the side of generosity, and the singular kindliness and the complete absence of all petty jealousy with which he judges the characters of others is one of the beat proofs of the beauty of his own.
It was said of him when he first became Chancellor that the only danger before him was that "all men spoke well of him." No man, indeed, who has been conspicuous in public life carried with him a greater weight of character, and these volumes enable us to see clearly both his qualities and his limitations. His mind was more distinguished for acuteness, subtlety, and impartiality than for originality or force, and it was cultivated to the highest point. His power of work was extraordinary. Whatever subject he undertook to deal with, he mastered with indefatigable industry and with a most scrupulous conscientiousness. As a lawyer he confessedly stood in the very first line, and though he had a few equals, he had probably, on the whole, no superior among his co- temporaries. As a politician he was, if not an ardent, at least a steady and consistent, party man ; but he always retained the power of intellectual detachment, the capacity of recognising and estimating arguments opposed to his own. His natural bias was to strike out medium courses and to act the part of a moderator. His refusal of the Chancellorship because of his objections to the Irish Church Bill of Gladstone was a splendid instance of his disinterestedness, and it was not the less so because a circumstance which he could not possibly have foreseen soon placed this great prize again within his reach. It was the more honourable because he was far from being one of the uncompro- mising opponents of the policy of his leader. He was quite willing to support the Disestablishment of the Irish Church. He was ready to diminish its revenues where they were found to be excessive, and he was apparently by no means absolutely hostile to complete disendowment if the Church property could have been transferred to a Roman Catholic Establish- ment. He conducted his opposition to the Church Bill with great moderation, and was thus able to act a most useful part in negotiating between the Irish Church leaders and the Government, and he strongly supported the truly statesman- like proposal of devoting a portion of the Church money to purchasing glebes for the priests. He deserves the chief credit for several important measures of legal reform, and on questions unconnected with his own profession he bore an active, and usually a useful, part. It appears to have been largely due to his influence that the Government of Glad- stone was induced to make a real, though unfortunately too tardy, attempt to save Gordon at Khartoum.
It is one of the special trials and difficulties of a man of this stamp when he takes an active part in party government that his colleagues are peculiarly apt to shelter themselves under his character, and to place him in the foreground when there is some measure of dubious rectitude to be defended Lord Selborne had a very strong sense of party allegiance, and it was sometimes much tried in the Ministries in which he sat. When Forster resigned on account of the very do' creditable negotiation with Parnell which was carried on by Gladstone and some of his colleagues in 1882 in the verl height of the Land League outrages ; when the Duke of Argil resigned rather than bear the responsibility of the profound invasion of the rights of property involved in the Irish Lana Bill of 1881; when Bright resigned on account of the bac-
bardruent of Alexandria, Lord Selborne still continued at his post, and he defended, though sometimes not without mis- giving, more than one measure of a very doubtful character. The abolition of purchase in the Army by Royal prerogative was unquestionably legal, but most persons will now agree that to take such a step after the measure had been formally sub- mitted to the decision of Parliament, and had been rejected by the House of Lords, was far from constitutional. Lord Selborne, however, found ingenious arguments to defend it, which are duly recorded in this book. He defended the appointment of Sir Robert Collier, who was not a Judge, to a Tribunal to which it was specially provided by statute that Judges only should be appointed, and the evasion of the statute by making him a Judge for two days in order to qualify him for the post. Nothing was done that was strictly illegal. More than one Judge had been offered and had re- fused the appointment, and the lawyer promoted was very competent. The Irish Land Act of 1881 contained clauses more clearly violating contracts and taking away property than any other measure in modern English legislation, but Lord Selborne took an active part in carrying it. He maintained that in the existing state of Ireland some such measure had become absolutely necessary, and that in its effects it would prove beneficial to both landlord and tenant, and he contended that this would have actually been so if those who had introduced the measure had not been guilty of "an inexcusable breach of public duty and good faith" by themselves tampering with the settlement, "joining hands as soon as they were out of office with the League established to drive ' Landlordism ' out of Ireland, and accepting the denunciations of that League instead of the law of the land as the practical measure of the rights of landlords and the extent to which they ought to be recognised and enforced." "I would rather have cut off my hand," he said in one of his speeches, "than been a party to the measure of 1881, giving the House the reasons and assurances which I then gave, if I had known that within five years after its passing it would have been thrown over by its authors and that the course they have now taken would have been entered on." He had much doubt and misgiving about the measures which threw the great preponderance of political power into the hands of the democracy, and abolished all distinction of franchise between town and country and between loyal England and disaffected Ireland ; but he convinced himself, after a careful balancing of opposing considerations, that these measures were inevitable, and that the wisest course was to acquiesce in and to defend them.
The policy of Gladstone in adopting Home-rule and allying himself with Parnell finally severed his connection with the larger section of the party he had so faithfully served, and the later career of Gladstone was one of the most poignant sorrows, as well as the great disenchantment, of his life. They had been lifelong friends and colleagues during many years, and in many respects no two men in the front rank of politics had more points of sympathy. They had both been formed in the old Tractarian School ; they were both men of intense personal religion; and they both attached enormous importance to measures of an ecclesiastical nature. Both of them were admirable classical scholars ; both retained their literary interests to the last ; and though Lord Selborne had nothing of the Gladstonian power of self-persuasion, and was never led astray by blinding passion or by personal ambition, he had a great deal of the casuistic intellect, delighting in skilful and subtle distinctions, which was so conspicuous in his leader. His admiration for him during many years had been almost unqualified. He regarded him as both morally and intellectually pre-eminent among the statesmen of his time,—in Othello's words "as one entire and perfect chrysolite," "the bright particular star," "moving in an orbit where we thought we could follow him." Even after the entire breach, he acknowledged in pathetic terms "how impossible it was not to admire, and how very easy to love him."
When he saw the statesman who had so often and so vehemently denounced the profound immorality both of the means and of the ends of the Land League party entering into the closest alliance with them, endeavouring to place the government of Ireland in their hands, openly encouraging or apologising for boycotting and the "Plan of Campaign" ;
supporting his new allies in "deliberate and organised obstruction" in Parliament ; representing the cause of anarchy and illegal conspiracy as the cause of liberty; "denying the existence of any case for strengthening the law in the face of a complete and manifest paralysis of law by the power of a seditious organisation into whose scale he had now thrown his whole influence"; stigmatising as "coercion" a Crimes Act essentially similar to those of his own Ministries, and like them introduced for the purpose of "defending those who respect and obey law, from the tyranny of conspirators against it"; doing his best when that Act was carried to destroy its effect by taking every pretext for inveighing against the Government, the Magistrates, and even the pollee when they put it in force ; making speeches in which regard for truth seemed to have almost vanished, and all material facts were given "as they were represented by the partisans and organs of the National League" ;—when he saw him systematically employing all his powers to excite the "classes" against the " masses" ; to inflame animosities and rekindle old jealousies, not only in Irelgud but in every other part of the Kingdom, and at the same time en- couraging by "commendatory letters " the advocates of every revolutionary and predatory project if only they would hap him to regain power,—all this seemed to him much more than mere intellectual aberration. It was, in the judgment of Lord Selborne, the ruin of a great career, the utter demoralisation of a once noble nature. Nothing, be main- tained, could be more melancholy than the spectacle of this aged statesman who was now "morally colour-blind"; "too old to learn, too imperious to have any real con- sideration or respect for anybody's opinion except his own, intoxicated with popularity, surrounded always by those who flatter all his weaknesses and repel as treason every doubt of his infallibility, and so near the end of his life as to be beyond the risk of having to bear in this world any responsibility for the disastrous conse- quences of his measures." "For a man with his attain- ments, his experience, his professions, his fifty years' public service, his political education under some of the greatest and best men of his time, who has three times filled the highest office in the State, and is now on the verge of the grave, so to end his career seems to me more shocling and disheartening than anything else recorded in our history."
The correspondence of Lord Selborne at this time, and especially the elaborate, judicial, and very skilful analysis he has given of the characteristics of Gladstone, have a great though melancholy interest, and they will certainly not be neglected by any impartial historian of the period. Of Lord Selborne's own character little more need be said. Its trans- parent purity, its austere and intense piety, its deep and touching tenderness, were fully recognised by all who knew him. It was characteristic of him that while in some periods of his professional life he often sat up for whole nights at his work, he would never suffer secular business to intrude into the hours of Sunday, and he was even accustomed to rise early to teach a Bible class on that day. The picture of his domestic life disclosed in his letters is singularly beautiful, and no man ever escaped more com- pletely the temptation to an overbearing manner and to a too elastic conscience which is apt to beset men who have spent long years of successful labour in the con- tentions of the Law Courts and in the stormy and perverting atmosphere of party politics. In conversation he could hardly be called brilliant, and his manner was reserved and almost shy, but the rare delicacy of his taste and judgment, his many accomplishments, his complete freedom from affecta- tion and pretension, and his gentle and unvarying courtesy gave him a quiet charm which seldom failed to attract. In our own judgment, there were some grave mistakes in hie public career, and there was some narro wness in his opinions and views of life, but few men have thought and acted more habitually as in the Divine presence, and he had many of the traits of the "Happy Warrior" of his favourite poet, Words- worth. Alfred Tennyson, who was one of his warmest friends, once said that of all the men of the present time Lord Selborne seemed to him to realise the beat his lines on the Duke of Wellington :—
"And as the greatest only are In his simplicity sublime."
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