Mr. Gladstone's letter concerning Lord Spencer, an extract from which
was read by Lord Hartington during the Irish debate on Friday night, is so terse and so true that it is worth preserving as a whole. It ran as follows :—" My dear Harting- ton,—I hope that, perhaps, in speaking to-night on Mr. Parnell's motion, you may be able on my behalf to express my deep sense of the debt which we all owe to Spencer for the courage with which he stood in the breach three years ago; for the greatest service to criminal justice and to the security of life ever rendered in Ireland ; for the calm with which he has borne alike the imputations cast from one _side on his first assumption of office, and the late and less disguised attacks of the other ; finally, for an administration of the powers of govern- ment perhaps the most even-handed and intelligent in the annals of Ireland. I also gratefully remember his desire to mitigate the severity of the Crimes Bill by the omission of one of its most stringent provisions, as well as the extraordinary manner in which that desire was frustrated. I am convinced that his name will stand in the very highest rank of the long roll of the Viceroys of Ireland, and that coming generations will know how to separate his personal action from the difficulties and defects of the system which he was called to administer in most arduous times. As I believe I am• expressing your own sentiments, it will be, I hope, no great burden which I seek to impose upon you in asking you to make the briefest possible reference to mine.—Sincerely yours, W. E. GLADSTONE." Strength of that kind, modest, unconscious, unostentatious, and yet inflexible, is rare amongst us now. Mr. Gladstone has done us a service in signalising its presence in Lord Spencer as he has done. And even this fine tribute is brought out into fuller relief by Lord Randolph Churchill's emphatic declaration of want of confidence in Lord Spencer. It is sometimes no trivial distinction to be singled out for such disapprobation as his.
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