WHY MR. GLADSTONE IS HATED.
THE curious expression of hatred attributed to Lord Radnor and his son, Viscount Folkestone, at the Salisbury Conservative Association on Wednesday week, which was at first understood to be the promise of a bounty on Mr. Gladstone's death, but only really referred to the death of his administration, did not at all caricature the feeling of hate with which the Prime Minister is regarded in a vast number of county circles, where his name is not nearly so well received as that of Satan himself. Lord Folkestone did not, it appears, make the speech, nor the Earl of Radnor the offer, attributed to him, but in private such speeches are so often made that everybody accepted the report as likely enough to be true. Indeed, similar speeches were often enough made of the late Sir Robert Peel after he threw over the Corn Laws, and Sir Robert Peel was hardly hated as eagerly as Mr. Glad- stone. In one case within our knowledge, the bells of a village church were rung for joy, by the Squire's orders, at Sir Robert Peel's decease. But then Sir Robert Peel went over to the enemy during one of the most important of all party crises, and his defection was often regarded by foolish and narrow men as treachery in that dishonourable sense which provokes the most violent passions of English politicians. The curious intensity of hatred often directly and still more often indirectly expressed for Mr. Gladstone cannot, however, be thus explained. His transition from the Conservative to the Liberal ranks was very gradual, and was not made at the moment of any bitter party strife. He remained a Peelite after the Peelite Ministry had ceased to be. He joined Lord Aberdeen's coalition administration of the Government " of all the Talents," and took, as he might have been expected to take, the pacific and anti-Palmerstonian view both of the Russian and of the Chinese wars. He went as Lord Derby's High Commissioner to the Ionian Islands in 1858, though he would not join his Government ; supported his proposed Reform Bill in 1859, and though he took office under Lord Palmerston in the same year, the change was anticipated, and had been so gradual that no one had any ground of offence. Yet Mr. Gladstone is really so much hated, that had Lord Folkestone said what he was reported to have said, the farmers would probably have cheered him stillm ore vociferously. And the same intense hatred for Mr. Gladstone crops out where you generally look for only lukewarm sentiments of any kind. The Saturday Review, which has no intellectual raison d'etre except the depreciation of warmth of conviction of every kind, and a mild preference of the common-place because it is common-place, seldom mentions Mr. Gladstone's name without a passion that seems to amount nearly to loathing. For instance, last week it made an article of ours, which the writer had evidently not read, on Mr. Gladstone's passion for Homer,' and of which he did not know the drift, --a drift not in the least affected by that error in the Daily Telegraph's report which the Prime Minister corrected in our columns,—the flimsy excuse for two columns of nothing in particular intended to be disagreeable to Mr. Gladstone. And the Pall Mall rarely loses an opportunity of expressing a closely similar feeling. In Parliament, again, Mr. Gladstone has certainly a great many fierce opponents,—some in his own party, and-more in the opposite party,—yet he certainly has not what both the late Sir Robert Peel and Lord Palmer- ston certainly had a party of personal adherents who could be properly called a body-guard. Men who excite strong political repulsiad. as Sir Robert Peel and Lord Palmerston certainly did, usually also exert strong political attractions. Mr. Disraeli excites neither ; since the Young England party was dissolved, he cannot be said to have had a single earnest personal follower in the House—though he has not a few in the Press, —but then, except the two Messrs. Bentinck, who have a genius for political hatreds, and who probably bracket the Prime Minister and the leader of Opposition equal in their, contemp- tuous aversion,—he has no virulent foes. He is regarded by both parties something in the light in which Mr. Gladstone described the House of Lords on occasion of the amendments to the Irish Church Bill, as " up in a balloon,"—i.e., as a very peculiar and notable political phenomenon, but not one to excite hatred or love. Almost alone amongst recent political leaders Mr. Gladstone appears to excite the most lively and vindictive hatred, without having achieved for himself any interior circle of political adherents,—of such adherents as he himself and Mr. Cardwell and Sir James Graham were to the late Sir R. Peel, or Mr. Monckton Milnes and Lord Dudley Stuart to Lord Palmerston. How are we to account for this I' One reason we do not doubt to be the apparently heterogene- ous character of the religious and political elements in Mr. Glad- stone's creed. Sir Robert Peel and Lord Palmerston were at least homogeneous politicians. The former was a genuine Conser- vative of the colder type, a man of hauteur and reserve, with a keen eye for administrative abuses, and an honest wish to reform them when he was convinced of them. Religiously, Sir Robert Peel was a Conservative, and nothing more. Poli- tically, he was a Conservative with a good eye for the decaying branches of Conservatism, and a sure hand in lopping them off. He was therefore an admirable master for young states- men of the wider and more receptive kind, who could not close their eyes to real errors in the Conservative policy, but who pre- ferred the Conservative camp as the one attaching a greater value to historic traditions, and in a word, as the more dignified. Lord Palmerston was at once a man of the world and a genuine aristocrat of very free and easy-going life, possessed of con- siderable humour, a man of a very shrewd and ambitious dis- position, and one who loved power both for himself and for his country, and was not particularly scrupulous as to the means of getting it. There again there was sufficient to attract a coterie,— the easy, humorous, and jovial side of Lord Palmerston winning him disciples whom the ambitious, powerful, and tenacious strength of him managed to retain. Bat with Mr. Gladstone the case is different. His ecclesiastical and religious views divide him for the most part from those who most earnestly admire his popular political views, and sow all sorts of absurd suspicions of his sincerity in their minds. And his advanced political views divide him from those who share his religious and ecclesiastical views, and stir all sorts of absurd doubts of his sincerity in their minds also. The declaration of war against the Irish Church was in fact almost the final severing of any political friendships which might have been of the kind we have referred to. While bringing him a considerable accession of genuine Liberal strength, it alienated almost all who had felt themselves in inner accord with him on the subject of faith ; and though it left him a few friends, like the late and present Lord Chancellors, who either held him personally blame- less or supported him throughout, they were too independent in their views, too individual, in the same sense as Mr. Glad- stone himself, for the purposes of a devoted Parliamentary following. The crowd of adherents whom his bold, liberal policy brought him, on the other hand, watched with suspi- cious amazement his professions of unchanged religious Conservatism, just as the University of Oxford watched those professions with suspicions of a precisely opposite character. The Radicals thought that his religious belief was really conservative, and would ultimately destroy his radicalism. The ecclesiastics thought that his politi- cal , liberalism was really destructive, and would ulti- mately destroy his faith. And so it became hardly possible for those who sympathised with either side of his mind not to dread and feel irritated by the other side. Nor can we deny that there is something anomalous in the union between the ecclesiastical conservatism which clings, for instance, eagerly, as Mr. Gladstone's certainly does, to the damnatory clauses of the Athanasian Creed, and the political liberalism which is not in the least afraid of disestablishment and disendowment, and which pleads for the extension of the franchise on the ground that the working-men are " our own flesh and blood." The eager sympathy with the multitude which is the source of the latter feeling, might very fairly be expected to result in a dislike to the strict ecclesiasticism of the creeds,—a dislike, of course, quite inconsistent with the former feeling. No doubt a Liberal Roman Catholic must manage to reconcile the two, but in a Church of doctrine so fluid as the Church of England, it is not often that a keen and active sympathy with the multitude is associated with the taking of a strenuous stand on dogmas of spiritual exclusiveness.
But a much more fruitful source of the active hostility felt towards Mr. Gladstone,—as distinguished from the non- existence of any coterie of loyal Gladstonians,—is the pre- vailing character of the Liberalism of the Clubs, and perhaps of the professional classes generally. That Liberalism may be defined as a great hatred of what is called " superstition," superstition being understood to include not only super- natural beliefs, but all other beliefs of which the root is rather in sentiment than in producible evidence. For instance, that reply (to which we have already alluded) given to Mr. Lowe's warning in the Reform debate of 1866 against the Trojan horse that was being introduced within the walls of the Consti- tution, that after all the working classes were not our enemies, but "our own flesh and blood," was denounced by the apostles of Liberal culture with as much irritation and bitterness as if it had been the approval of a Ritualistic incantation. It was not to the point, they said ; it was a piece of unmeaning sentimentalism ; it had no bearing on the constitutional pru- dence of the course under discussion ; it was a darkening of counsel by words without knowledge. The very considerable vein of liberal culture which is irritated to madness by Mr. Gladstone's supposed intellectual superstitions,—especially when they really do a good stroke of work, as the ' flesh- and-blood' sentence did, in bringing popular force to his back, is usually identical with a vein of deep and almost fierce social Conservatism ; and it is this, no doubt, which, speaking chiefly through the Pall Mall and the Saturday Review, has pursued his Ministerial course with inveterate and contemptuous hostility. Mr. Gladstone is Liberal just where these Liberals are Conservative, and Conservative just where they are Liberal. He wishes to relax the Consti- tution just where they desire to fortify it against attack, and to fortify belief just where they desire to relax it. They look with annoyance and anger on his democratic sym- pathies, and with contempt on his obsolete religious prepotsessions. They see that if he ever gives way about the Establishment, it will be from the very motive which makes them cling to the Establishment, namely, because the Establishment is a bulwark against dogmatic narrowness and sectarian zeal. It is impossible to conceive an antagonism more complete than exists between the sceptical Liberals who wish to retain Government in the hands of the educated, and Mr. Gladstone. They detest his Liberalism and despise his Conservatism, and to this cause is no doubt owing a very great portion of the scornful irrita- tion which has pursued him ever since the death of Lord Palmerston.
But atter all, the great spring of hatred remains behind, —the only one which would account, for instance, for the curious detestation in which Mr. Gladstone is held in so many county societies,—and that is the most potent spring of all hatred,—fear. Session after session the Conservatives have seen great measures they detested, and which they believed impossible, carried through by the pertinacity of the Ministry, till they have begun to think Mr. Gladstone's Ministry invinci- ble almost in precise proportion to their horror of its enter- prises. The Irish Church Bill enraged the ecclesiastics ; the Irish Land Bill made the landlords furious ; the Army Bill irritated a powerful service and enraged wealth, which no longer commands its influence in that service ; the Education Bill angered the farmers, many of whom can- not endure the prospect of the intellectual enfranchise- ment of their serfs ; the Ballot Bill irritated property generally, at whose influence it struck a blow ;—and then, too, the prospects for the future are in many directions equally alarming, especially if the agricultural labourer is to have the vote. Mr. Gladstone's genius has certainly shown more of a destructive than of a constructive turn,—perhaps because the restrictions which wanted repeal were more con- spicuous than the facilities which wanted organising,—perhaps because he has, like all the statesmen of the period of Free- trade, more eye for the blunders of our past legislation than for the possibilities of the future. But be that as it may, the Conservatives,—social and political,—see how the most solid obstacles go down like ninepins before the steady push Of Mr. Gladstone's Government, and they are beginning to feel something of the cruel hatred generated by panic. There are many explanations of the non-existence of a political coterie specially devoted to Mr. Gladstone, and of the uncongeniality of 'his type of Liberalism to that of the professional and aristocratic classes. But there is only one explanation of the vehemently expressed impatience to be rid of his malign influ- ence in politics,—and that is earnest, honest, hearty dread.
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