X. As Head Of A Cabinet. (1868-1874)…

X. As Head Of A Cabinet. (1868-1874)

Rational co-operation in politics would be at an end, if no two men might act together, until they had satisfied themselves that in no possible circumstances could they be divided.—GLADSTONE.

I

The just complacency with which Mr. Gladstone regarded his cabinet on its first construction held good:—

I look back with great satisfaction on the internal working of the cabinet of 1868-74. It was a cabinet easily handled; and yet it was the only one of my four cabinets in which there were members who were senior to myself (the lord chancellor Hatherley, Lord Clarendon), with many other men of long ministerial experience. When this cabinet was breaking up in 1874, I took the opportunity of thanking them for the manner in which they had uniformly lightened my task in the direction of business. In reply, Halifax, who might be considered as the senior in years and experience taken jointly, very handsomely said the duty of the cabinet had been made more easy by the considerate manner in which I had always treated them. Some of them were as colleagues absolutely delightful, from the manner in which their natural qualities blended with their consummate experience. I refer especially to Clarendon and Granville.

(M137) If we may trust some of those who were members of it, no cabinet ever did its business with livelier industry or effect. Under Mr. Gladstone’s hand it was a really working cabinet, not an assemblage of departmental ministers, each minding his own affairs, available as casual members of this or the other sub-committee, and without an eye for the general drift and tendency of their proceedings. Of course ministers differed in importance. One was pleasant and popular, but not forcible. Another overflowed with knowledge and was really an able man, but somehow he carried no guns, and nobody cared what he said. One had aptitude without weight—perhaps the true definition of our grossly overworked epithet of clever. Another had weight and character, without much aptitude. The cabinet as a whole was one of extraordinary power, not merely because its chief had both aptitude and momentum enough for a dozen, but because it was actively homogeneous in reforming spirit and purpose. This solidarity is the great element in such combinations, and the mainspring of all vigorous cabinet work.

Of Mr. Gladstone as head of his first cabinet, we have a glimpse from Mr. Stansfeld:—

Mr. Gladstone’s conduct in the cabinet was very curious. When I first joined in 1871, I naturally thought that his position was so commanding, that he would be able to say, “This is my policy; accept it or not as you like.” But he did not. He was always profuse in his expressions of respect for the cabinet. There was a wonderful combination in Mr. Gladstone of imperiousness and of deference. In the cabinet he would assume that he was nothing. I thought he should have said, “This is my policy. What do you think of it?” and then have fought it out until they had come to an agreement. He always tried to lead them on by unconscious steps to his own conclusions.(269)

To this we may add some words of Lord Granville used in 1883, but doubtless just as true of 1868-74:—

I have served under several prime ministers, men for whom I had high respect and to whom I had the greatest attachment, but I can say that I never knew one who showed a finer temper, a greater patience, or more consideration for his colleagues than Mr. Gladstone in all deliberations on any important subject. In his official position, with his knowledge, with his ability, and with the wonderful power of work that characterises him, he of course has an immense influence on the deliberations of the cabinet; but notwithstanding his tenacity of purpose and his earnestness, it is quite extraordinary how he attends to the arguments of all, and, except on any question of real vital principle, he is ready to yield his own opinion to the general sense of the colleagues over whom he presides.(270)

Imputing his own qualities to others, and always keen to make the best of people and not the worst, if he had once invited a man to office, he held on to him to the last possible moment. “The next most serious thing to admitting a man into the cabinet,” he said, “is to leave a man out who has once been in.” Not seldom he carried his invincible courtesy, deference, and toleration even beyond the domain where those qualities ought to be supreme. This was part of what men meant, when they said that life was to him in all its aspects an application of Christian teaching and example. To this we must add another consideration of first importance, and one that vulgar criticism of great statesmen too commonly ignores. In the words of Lord Aberdeen (1856), who knew from sharp experience how much his doctrine might cost a man: “A prime minister is not a free agent. To break up a government, to renounce all the good you hoped to do and leave imperfect all the good you have done, to hand over power to persons whose objects or whose measures you disapprove, even merely to alienate and politically to injure your friends, is no slight matter.”(271)

A member of this first cabinet wrote to Mr. Gladstone long after it had come to an end: “I suppose there was no one of your then colleagues less sympathetic with you, less in tune with your opinions and enthusiasms than Lowe. Nevertheless this happened to me with him—after you had resigned. Lowe opened to me one day, on the subject of your relations with your colleagues. He spoke in terms of warm admiration, and to my great surprise, ended by saying, ‘I have the same kind of feeling towards him that I can suppose must be the feeling of a dog for his master.’ Lowe is a perfectly sincere man. He would not have said this if he had not felt it.” “In everything personal,” Mr. Gladstone replied, “Lowe was an excellent colleague and member of cabinet. But I had never been in personal relations with him before, and at the outset of the ministry of 1868 I knew very little of him. Moreover, he was the occasion of much trouble to me by his incessant broils with ——, who was an awkward customer.” In sheer intellect Mr. Gladstone held that Lowe had not many equals, but in nobody else did he discover so many mixed and contradictory qualities—“splendid in attack, but most weak in defence, at times exhibiting pluck beyond measure, but at other times pusillanimity almost amounting to cowardice; one day headstrong and independent, and the next day helpless as a child to walk alone; capable of tearing anything to pieces, but of constructing nothing.”(272)

(M138) When Lord Clarendon died,—“An irreparable colleague,” Mr. Gladstone notes in his diary, “a statesman of many gifts, a most lovable and genial man.” Elsewhere he commemorates his “unswerving loyalty, his genial temper, his kindness ever overflowing in acts yet more than in words, his liberal and indulgent appreciation of others.” In the short government of 1865-6, Lord Granville had described Clarendon to Mr. Gladstone as “excellent, communicating more freely with the cabinet and carrying out their policy more faithfully, than any foreign secretary I have known.” Mr. Gladstone himself told me twenty years after, that of the sixty men or so who had been his colleagues in cabinet, Clarendon was the very easiest and most attractive. It is curious to observe that, with the exception of Mr. Bright, he found his most congenial adherents rather among the patrician whigs than among the men labelled as advanced.

Mr. Bright, as we have seen, was forced by ill-health to quit the government. Thirty years of unsparing toil, more than ten of them devoted especially to the exhausting, but in his case most fruitful, labours of the platform, had for the time worn down his stock of that energy of mind, which in the more sinewy frame of the prime minister seemed as boundless as some great natural element. To Mrs. Bright Mr. Gladstone wrote:—

It is not merely a selfish interest that all his colleagues feel in him on account of his great powers, just fame, and political importance; but it is one founded on the esteem and regard which, one and all, they entertain towards him. God grant that any anxieties you may entertain about him may soon be effectually relieved. I wish I felt quite certain that he is as good a patient as he is a colleague. But the chief object of my writing was to say that the Queen has signified both by letter and telegraph her lively interest in Mr. B.’s health; and she will not forgive me unless I am able to send her frequent reports.

He is quite capable of dealing faithfully with colleagues breaking rules. To a member of the cabinet who had transgressed by absence from a division of life and death:—

I should not act frankly by you if I did not state it, without hesitation as a general and prospective proposition, that, without reference to the likelihood or unlikelihood of defeat, upon motions which must from their nature be votes of confidence, [there can] be but one rule for the members of the government, and that is to give the votes themselves which at the same time the government with less strong title is asking from the members of their party.

He scolds a leading minister pretty directly for placing him in a disagreeable and rather ludicrous position, by failing to give the proper information about a government bill containing an important change, so that nobody could explain the reason for it to the House. His own personal example of absolutely unremitting attendance on the scene of action, entitled him to rebuke slackness. Nothing escaped him. Here is the way in which he called defaulters to their duty:—

April 8, 1873.—The chancellor of the exchequer thinks he has some reason to complain of your having quitted London on Thursday, without any prior communication with him or Glyn, four days before the budget. I have heard with regret that the state of your health has compelled you to spend your vacation abroad; but scarcely even a direct medical order, and certainly in my opinion nothing less, could render such an example innocent in its effects, as is set by a departure from London under such circumstances. Although it has been a great pleasure to me to admit and recognise your parliamentary services and distinctions, and though I have always thought your accession to the government an acquisition of great value, I must frankly avow my opinion that it is hardly possible for the chancellor of exchequer to discharge his duties without your constant and sedulous co-operation, or for the official corps in general to avoid suffering, if the members of it make themselves the judges of the question when and under what circumstances their absence may be permitted during the sittings of the House.

June 25, 1870.—I am led to suppose by your absence from the division yesterday, that there may not be a perfectly clear understanding between us as to the obligations of members of the government on these occasions. Yesterday gave occasion of much inconvenience on account of the entertainment at Windsor, but all the members of the government who could be expected to attend voted in the division, except yourself. I can say from my own recollection that as far as regards political officers, the sovereign always permits the claim of the House of Commons to prevail.

Changes among subordinate members of the government came early. Of one of these ministers Mr. Gladstone writes to Lord Granville (August 18, 1869): “He has great talent, and is a most pertinacious worker, with a good deal of experience and widely dispersed knowledge of public affairs. But he seems to be somewhat angular, and better adapted for doing business within a defined province of his own, than in common stock or partnership with others.” Unfortunately the somewhat angular man shared his work with a chief who had intellectual angularities of his own, not very smoothly concealed. As it happened, there was another minister of secondary rank who did not come up to the expected mark. “Though he has great talents, remarkable power of speech, and some special qualifications for his department, he has not succeeded in it with the House of Commons, and does not seem very thoroughly to understand pecuniary responsibility and the management of estimates, and there is no doubt whatever that in his department the present House of Commons will be vigilant and exacting, while the rapid growth of its expenditures certainly shows that it should be filled by some one capable of exercising control.” Not thoroughly “to understand pecuniary responsibility” was counted a deadly sin in those halcyon days. So the transgressor accepted a diplomatic mission, and this made room to plant his angular colleague in what seemed a “province of his own.” But few provinces are definite enough to be independent of the treasury, and the quarrels between this minister and the chancellor of the exchequer became something of a scandal and a weakness to the government. One of the fiercest battles of the time (1872) broke out in respect of Kew Gardens between the minister with a definite province of his own and a distinguished member of “a scientific fraternity, which, valuable as it is, has been unduly pampered of late from a variety of causes into a somewhat overweening idea of its own importance.” The premier’s pacifying resources were taxed by this tremendous feud to the uttermost; he holds a stiffish tone to the minister, and tries balm for the savant by propitiatory reminder of “a most interesting fact made known to me when I had the pleasure and advantage of seeing you at Kew, namely the possibility of saving for purposes of food a portion of the substance of the diseased potato. The rescue of a sensible percentage of this valuable esculent will be a noble service rendered by scientific knowledge and skill to the general community.” But science is touchy, and wounds are sometimes too deep to be healed by words.

(M139) A point worth noting is his strict limitation of his own rights as head of a government. “Hope you will not think,” he wrote to a colleague, “I am evading my duties, but while it is my duty to deal with all difficulties arising between members of the government, it is wholly beyond my power, and in no way belongs to my province, to examine and settle the controversies which may arise between them and civil servants who are employed under them.” He is careful to distinguish his own words from the words of the cabinet; careful both to lean upon, and to defer to, the judgment of that body; and when the decision is taken, it is in their name that he writes to the vexatious colleague (July 24, 1872): “The cabinet have come to their conclusion, and directed me to make it known to you.... If you think proper to make the announcement of these intentions of the government, they are quite willing that you should do so. If otherwise, Mr. Bruce will do it as home minister. Thus far as to making known what will be done. As to the doing of it, the rules will have to be cancelled at once by you.”

The reader of an authoritarian or arbitrary cast of mind may ask why he did not throw a handful of dust upon the angry combatants. “It is easy,” he wrote to Cardwell (Nov. 20, 1871) “to talk of uprooting X., but even if it were just, it will, as Glyn [the party whip] would tell you, be very difficult. But Y. perhaps proceeds more like Moloch, and X. in the manner of Belial. Why cannot they follow the good example of those worthies, who co-operated in pandemonium? If you thought you could manage Y., I would try to tackle X. I commend this subject to your meditations.” Sulphureous whiffs from this pandemonium were pretty copiously scented both by parliament and the public, and did the ministry some harm.

Of a peer of much renown in points of procedure, private business, and the like, he says, “he looks at everything out of blinkers, and has no side lights.” Of one brilliant and able colleague in the first administration he writes, that “he has some blank in his mental constitution, owing to which he receives admonitions most kindly, and then straightway does the same thing over again.” Of another colleague, “though much nearer the rights of the case than many who were inclined to object, he is thin and poor in the cabinet.” Some one else is “a sensitive man, given beyond most men to speak out his innermost and perhaps unformed thoughts, and thereby to put himself at a disadvantage.” Another public servant is “not unmanageable, but he needs to be managed.” In the same letter he speaks of the Hibernian presbyterian as “that peculiar cross between a Scotchman and an Irishman.”

Of his incessant toil the reader has already a good idea. Here are a few items. To one correspondent (Jan. 21, 1869) he writes: “I hope you do not think my ‘holiday’ at Hawarden has proved my idleness, for I think ten hours a day has been a moderate estimate of my work there on public business, to which some other matters have had to be added.” To the attorney-general he says when he has had three years more of it (Sept. 18, 1872): “I cannot say with you that my office never gives me a day without business, for in the four ‘vacations’ so far as they have gone, I think I have had no less than five days. This vacation has thus far been the best; but heavy and critical work impends.” In October, 1871, he writes to Mrs. Gladstone from Edinburgh: “I have for the first time since the government was formed, had a holiday of two whole days.” To Lord Clarendon he writes from Lord Granville’s at Walmer (Sept. 2, 1869): “At the end of a holiday morning of work, since I breakfasted at nine, which has lasted till near four, I have yet to say a few words about....” To Archdeacon Harrison, May 25, 1873: “As you may like to have the exact anatomy of my holiday on the Queen’s birthday, I will give it you: 2-1/4 A.M., return home from the H. of C. 10 A.M., two hours’ work in my room. 2-7, the cabinet. Three-quarters of an hour’s walk. 8-12, thirty-two to dinner and an evening party. 12, bed!” To Sir R. Phillimore, July 23, 1873: “Not once this year (except a day in bed) have I been absent from the hours of government business in the House, and the rigour of attendance is far greater now than at earlier periods of the session.”

His colleagues grudged his absence for a day. On one occasion, in accordance with a lifelong passion and rooted habit, he desired to attend a funeral, this time in Scotland, and Lord Granville’s letter of remonstrance to him is interesting in more points than one; it shows the exacting position in which the peculiarities of some colleagues and of a certain section of his supporters placed him:—

It is the unanimous desire of the cabinet that I should try to dissuade you.... It is a duty of a high order for you to do all you can for your health.... You hardly ever are absent from the House without some screw getting loose. I should write much more strongly if I did not feel I had a personal interest in the matter. In so strained a state as Europe is now in, the slightest thing may lead to great consequences, and it is possible that it may be a disadvantage to me and to the chose publique if anything occurs during the thirty-six hours you are absent.

This letter of Lord Granville’s was written on July 10, 1870, just five days before war was declared between France and Prussia.

He wrote to the Spectator (May 1873) to correct a report “that every day must begin for me with my old friend Homer.” He says: “As to my beginning every day with Homer, as such a phrase conveys to the world a very untrue impression of the demands of my present office, I think it right to mention that, so far as my memory serves me, I have not read Homer for fifty lines now for a quarter of an hour consecutively for the last four years, and any dealings of mine with Homeric subjects have been confined to a number of days which could be readily counted on the fingers.” Yet at the end of 1869, he winds up a letter of business by saying, “I must close; I am going to have a discussion with Huxley on the immortality of the soul!”

Who can wonder that after a prolonged spell of such a strain as this, he was found laying down strong doctrine about the age of a prime minister? Bishop Wilberforce met him twice in the May of 1873. “Gladstone much talking how little real good work any premier had done after sixty: Peel; Palmerston, his work really all done before; Duke of Wellington added nothing to his reputation after. I told him Dr. Clark thought it would be physically worse for him to retire. ‘Dr. Clark does not know how completely I should employ myself,’ he replied.” Four days later: “Gladstone again talking of sixty as full age of premier.”(273)

II

In words already quoted, Mr. Gladstone spoke of most of his life having been given to working the institutions of his country. Of all these institutions—House of Commons, Lords, cabinet, church, stern courts of law—that which he was most apt to idealise was the throne. His sense of chivalry and his sense of an august tradition continuously symbolised by a historic throne, moved him as the sight of the French Queen at Versailles had moved the majestic political imagination of Burke a century before. About the throne he sometimes used language that represented almost at its highest the value set upon it in text-books of the constitution, and in the current conventions of ceremonial speech.(274) Although what he called the iron necessities of actual business always threw these conventions into the background when the time came, yet his inmost feeling about the crown and the person of its wearer was as sincere as it was fervid. In business, it is true, he never yielded, yet even in his most anxious and pressing hours he spared neither time nor toil in endeavours to show the Queen why he could not yield. “Though decisions,” he said, “must ultimately conform to the sense of those who are to be responsible for them, yet their business is to inform and persuade the sovereign, not to overrule him.” One writer describes the Queen as “superb in standing sentry over the business of the empire.” This is obsequious phrase-making. But I will borrow the figure in saying what is more real, that Mr. Gladstone from beginning to end stood sentry over the interests, whether profound and enduring or trivial and fleeting, of the ancient monarchy of this kingdom. None who heard it will ever forget the moving and energetic passage in which when he was the doughty veteran of eighty years, speaking against his own followers on some question of a royal annuity, he moved the whole House to its depths by the passionate declaration, “I am not ashamed to say that in my old age I rejoice in any opportunity that enables me to testify that, whatever may be thought of my opinions, whatever may be thought of my proposals in general politics, I do not forget the service that I have borne to the illustrious representative of the British monarchy.”(275)

(M140) My readers have had opportunity enough of judging Mr. Gladstone’s estimate of the Queen’s shrewdness, simplicity, high manners. Above all, he constantly said how warmly he recognised her sincerity, frankness, straight-forwardness, and love of truth. On the other side, his own eager mobility, versatility, and wide elastic range was not likely to be to the taste of a personage with a singular fixity of nature. Then the Queen was by the necessity of her station a politician, as was Elizabeth or George III., although oddly enough she had a bitter dislike of what she thought the madness of “women’s rights.” As politician, she often took views that were not shared either by the constituencies or by the ministers whom the constituencies imposed upon her. The Queen in truth excellently represented and incorporated in her proper person one whole set of those qualities in our national character, on which the power of her realm had been built up. Mr. Gladstone stood for a different and in some aspects and on some occasions almost an antagonistic set of national qualities. The Queen, according to those who knew her well,(276) dreaded what in the eighteenth century they called enthusiasm: she dreaded or disdained it in religion, and in politics almost more. Yet her Englishmen are full of capacity for enthusiasm, and the Scots for whom she had such cordial affection have enthusiasm in measure fuller still. Unhappily, in the case of Ireland that occupied so much of Mr. Gladstone’s life, her sympathies with his long and vigorous endeavour notoriously stood at zero. The Queen’s loyalty to the constitution and to ministers in office was unquestioned, but she was not well placed, nor was she perhaps by character well fitted, to gauge the fluctuating movements of an age of change, as it was the duty of her statesmen to gauge and plumb them. If a cabinet with the confidence of the House of Commons decides upon a policy, it must obviously be a premier’s duty to persist, and in that duty Mr. Gladstone was resolute. If he had been otherwise, he knew that he would be falling short in loyalty to the country, and to its chief magistrate most of all.

In 1871 a wave of critical feeling began to run upon the throne. An influential journalist of that day, singularly free from any tincture of republican sentiment, thus describes it. “A few weeks ago,” he says, “a deep and universal feeling of discontent at the Queen’s seclusion (or rather at its consequences) found voice in the journals of the country. No public print of any importance failed to take part in the chorus; which was equally remarkable for its suddenness, fulness, and harmony. Indeed, the suddenness of the cry was surprising—till we remembered that what was then said had lain unexpressed in the minds of the whole community for years, with annual increment; and that when popular feeling gathers in that way, it is generally relieved at last by something of the nature of an explosion.” He then goes on to speak of “republicanism of a very revolutionary form flooding in,” and says that such a complexion of affairs could be viewed with pleasure by no friend of the monarchy.(277) The details of this movement are no longer of much interest, and they only concern us here because they gave Mr. Gladstone real anxiety. For him it was one of the special duties of a prime minister, as distinguished from his cabinet, to watch and guard relations between the crown and the country. Whether in office or in opposition, he lost no opportunity of standing forth between the throne and even a faint shadow of popular or parliamentary discontent. He had done it in the case of Prince Albert,(278) and he did it now. When the end came after nearly thirty years from our present date, the Queen wrote: “I shall ever gratefully remember his devotion and zeal in all that concerned my personal welfare and that of my family.” In 1871 his zeal went beyond the Queen’s personal welfare, and his solicitude for the institution represented by the Queen undoubtedly took a form of deferential exhortation—an exhortation that she should return to a fuller discharge of public duty, which the Queen found irksome. The Queen was as fond of Balmoral as Mr. Gladstone was fond of Hawarden. The contrast between the formality of Windsor and the atmosphere of simple attachment and social affection that surrounded her in Scotland, was as delightful to her as the air and the scenery. A royal progress through applauding multitudes in great cities made her ill. Hence, when Mr. Gladstone pressed her to defer a northern journey, or to open parliament, or to open a bridge, or otherwise emerge from seclusion, the Queen, though well aware that he had not, and could not, have any motive save her own and the public interest, undoubtedly felt that her energetic minister was attempting to overwork her. This feeling, as most of us know, breeds resistance, and even in time resentment. To say, however, that “in his eagerness Mr. Gladstone pressed her to do what she knew to be not her work so much as his,” is misleading and a little ludicrous.(279) Mr. Gladstone had persuaded himself that in the humour of the day persistence in seclusion did harm; it was his duty to give advice accordingly, and this duty he could not consent to shirk.

In other ways his very awe of the institution made him set an exacting standard for the individual who represented it. The letters contain a hundred instances. One may suffice. On the occasion of the Irish Church bill of 1869, the prime minister sent to the Queen a print of its clauses, and along with this draft a letter, covering over a dozen closely-written quarto pages, in explanation. Himself intensely absorbed and his whole soul possessed by the vital importance of what he was doing, he could not conceive that the sovereign, nursing a decided dislike of his policy, should not eagerly desire to get to the bottom of the provisions for carrying the policy out. The Queen read the letter, and reread it, and then in despair desired a gentleman practised in dealing with parliamentary bills, happening at that time to be at Osborne, to supply her with a summary.(280) The gaunt virtues of a précis—a meagre thing where qualifying sentences drop off, parentheses are cut out, adverbs hardly count, the noun stands denuded of its sheltering adjective—were never congenial to Mr. Gladstone’s copious exactitude in hypothesis, conditions, and contingencies. Neither of these two illustrious personages was without humour, and it seems at once a wonder and a pity that the monarch did less than justice to this laborious and almost military sense of discipline and duty in the minister; while the minister failed in genial allowance for the moderation of a royal lady’s appetite for bread and honey from the draftsman’s kitchen. If failing there were, it was natural to a man of earnest and concentrated mind. Be all this as it may, he became more and more conscious that the correspondence and occurrences of 1871-2 had introduced a reserve that was new. Perhaps it recalled to him the distance and formality that marked the relations between King George III. and the proudest, the most intrepid, and the greatest of his prime ministers.

III

Once in a conversation with Mr. Gladstone I asked him whether he remembered Peel’s phrase to Cobden about the odious power that patronage confers. He replied, “I never felt that, when I was prime minister. It came in the day’s work like the rest. I don’t recall that I ever felt plagued by improper applications. Peel was perhaps a little over fond of talking of the sacrifices of office. A man has no business to lay himself out for being prime minister, or to place himself in the way of it, unless he is prepared to take all the incidents of the post whether disagreeable or not. I’ve no sympathy with talk of that kind.” He was far from the mind of Carteret. “What is it to me,” cried that glittering minister, “who is a judge or who is a bishop? It is my business to make kings and emperors, and to maintain the balance of Europe.”

(M141) To the bestowal of honours he brought the same diligent care as to branches of public business that to men of Peel’s type seemed worthier of care. He treated honours on fixed considerations. Especially in the altitudes of the peerage, he tried hard to find solid political ground to go upon. He noted the remarkable fact that though a very large majority of the peerages granted since 1835 had been made on the advice of liberal ministers, yet such is the influence of wealth and privileged station that the liberal minority in the Lords had decreased. In 1869 the conservative majority was between sixty and seventy, without counting bishops or nominal liberals. Yet household suffrage at this very time had immensely increased the moral strength of the House of Commons. The crisis upon the Irish church had been borne with impatience, and Mr. Gladstone discerned a combustible temper at the action of the Lords that might easily have burst into flame. Still he saw no signal plan for improving the upper House. The appointment of life peers might be desirable, he said, but it was not easy to arrange, nor could its effect be great. The means of action therefore for bringing the Lords into more conformity or better proportions to the Commons, were very moderate. But that made it all the more important that they should not be overlooked. The governing idea in respect of both classes of hereditary honours was in his judgment the maintenance of a due relation between the members in those elevated ranks, and the number of persons offering the proper conditions for promotion of this kind, in a country so rapidly growing in wealth and population.

With characteristic love of making knowledge quantitative—one definition, I rather think, of science—Mr. Gladstone caused returns to be prepared for him, which showed that in 1840 there were about seventeen peers for every million of the population, while in 1869 this number had fallen to fourteen (in 1880 it was about the same). Lord Palmerston in his second government appears to have recommended sixteen peerages, and Lord Derby in little more than a quarter of the time recommended fourteen. Mr. Gladstone himself, during his first administration, excluding royal, non-political and ex-officio peerages, added thirty members to the House of Lords, besides making five promotions. In the same period twelve peerages became extinct. Lord Beaconsfield (counting the same exclusions) created between 1874 and 1880 twenty-six new peers, and made nine promotions.(281)

In two directions Mr. Gladstone made an honourable innovation. He recommended a member of the Jewish faith for a peerage, and in the first list of his submissions to the Queen two Roman catholics were included. No catholic peer had been created within living memory. One of these two was Lord Acton, afterwards so intimate a friend, whose character, he told the Queen, “is of the first order, and he is one of the most learned and accomplished, though one of the most modest and unassuming, men of the day.” If religious profession was not in his eyes relevant in making peers, neither was the negation of profession, for at the same time he proposed a peerage to Grote. “I deeply and gratefully appreciate,” he wrote to Mr. Gladstone, “the sentiments you are pleased to express respecting my character and services. These I shall treasure up never to be forgotten, coming as they do from a minister who has entered on the work of reform with a sincerity and energy never hitherto paralleled. Such recognition is the true and sufficient recompense for all useful labours of mine.”(282)

At the same time the prime minister thought that some honour ought to be tendered to Mr. Mill, but Lord Granville, whom he consulted, thought otherwise, “merely on the ground that honours should go as much as possible with general acceptance.” Lord Granville was a man of thoroughly liberal and even generous mind; still not particularly qualified to be a good judge either of the merits of a man like Mill, or of his “acceptance” in circles well worth considering.

IV

It was to be expected that preferments in the church should get a special share of Mr. Gladstone’s laborious attention, and so they did. As member for Oxford he had been so much importuned in Lord Palmerston’s time, that he wrote in a moment of unusual impatience (1863), “I think these church preferments will be the death of me.” Palmerston favoured the evangelicals, and Mr. Gladstone was mortified that Church did not succeed Stanley in the chair of ecclesiastical history at Oxford, and that Wilberforce was not elevated to the throne of York in 1862.

(M142) During his first administration he recommended for no fewer than twelve bishoprics and eight deaneries. He was not unprepared to find, as he put it to Acland, that “saints, theologians, preachers, pastors, scholars, philosophers, gentlemen, men of business,—these are not to be had every day, least of all are they to be commonly found in combination. But these are the materials which ought to be sought out, and put forward in the church of England, if she is to stand the trials, and do her work.”

According to his fashion, he wrote down upon a fragmentary piece of paper what qualifications he ought to look for in a bishop, and this is the list:—

Piety. Learning (sacred). Eloquence. Administrative power. Faithful allegiance to the Church and to the church of England. Activity. Tact and courtesy in dealings with men: knowledge of the world. Accomplishments and literature. An equitable spirit. Faculty of working with his brother bishops. Some legal habit of mind. Circumspection. Courage. Maturity of age and character. Corporal vigour. Liberal sentiments on public affairs. A representative character with reference to shades of opinion fairly allowable in the Church.

One of his earliest preferments, that of Dr. Temple to the bishopric of Exeter, created lively excitement. He had been a contributor to Essays and Reviews:—

On some of the papers contained in the volume, Mr. Gladstone wrote to the Bishop of Lichfield, I look with a strong aversion. But Dr. Temple’s responsibility prior to the publication was confined to his own essay. The question whether he ought to have disclaimed or denounced any part of the volume afterwards is a difficult one, and if it was a duty, it was a duty in regard to which a generous man might well go wrong. As regards his own essay, I read it at the time of publication, and thought it of little value, but did not perceive that it was mischievous.

In speaking of him to Acland in 1865, Mr. Gladstone had let fall a truly remarkable saying, going deep down to the roots of many things:—

You need not assure me of Dr. Temple’s Christian character. I have read his sermons, and if I had doubted—but I never did—they would have removed the doubt. Indeed I think it a most formidable responsibility, at the least, in these times to doubt any man’s character on account of his opinions. The limit of possible variation between character and opinion, ay, between character and belief, is widening, and will widen.

How could the leading mark of progress made in Mr. Gladstone’s age be more truly hit, how defined with more pith and pregnancy? How could the illumination of his own vigorous mind in forty years of life and thought be better demonstrated? It would even be no bad thing if those who are furthest removed from Mr. Gladstone’s opinions either in religion or politics could lay this far-reaching dictum of his to heart. By many men in all schools his lesson is sorely needed. Shrill was the clamour. Dr. Pusey, in Mr. Gladstone’s own phrase, was “rabid.” He justified his anger by reputed facts, which proved to be no facts at all, but the anger did not die with the fable. Even Phillimore was disquieted. “It has cut very deep indeed,” he said. Mr. Gladstone, confident of his ground, was not dismayed. “The movement against Dr. Temple is like a peculiar cheer we sometimes hear in the House of Commons, vehement but thin.”

No appointment proved so popular and successful as that of Bishop Fraser to Manchester. He was the first person named by Mr. Gladstone for the episcopate without some degree of personal knowledge. A remarkable concurrence of testimony established the great breadth of his sympathies, a trait much in his favour for the particular see of Manchester. Yet strange to say when by and by Stanley died, Mr. Gladstone was a party to trying to remove Fraser from the north to Westminster.

When in 1883 Mr. Gladstone was challenged as confining his recommendations to the high church side, he defended himself to sufficient purpose. He had a list made out of appointments to bishoprics, deaneries, and the most important parishes:—

There have been thirty important appointments. Out of them I have recommended eleven who would probably be called high churchmen (not one of them, so far as I know, unsympathetic towards other portions of the clergy) and nineteen who are not. On further examination it will appear that the high churchmen whom I take to be a decided majority of the clergy as well as a decided minority of my recommendations, have gone as a rule to the places of hard work and little pay. For example, they have got five out of ten parochial recommendations; but, out of sixteen appointments to deaneries and canonries, they have received four, and those, with the exception of Mr. Furse, the worst. I could supply you with the lists in detail.

One admission I must make; the evidently broad churchmen are too large a proportion of the non-high, and the low churchmen rather too small, a disproportion which I should hope to remove, but undoubtedly the low churchman of the present day has a poorer share than half a century ago of the working energy of the church.

All these terms, High, Low, and Broad, are rather repugnant to me, but I use them as a currency of tokens with which it is difficult to dispense.

Turning from this point of view to the recognition of learning and genius, in the course of his first administration we find that he made Church dean of St. Paul’s, and Scott of the Greek lexicon dean of Rochester, Liddon and Lightfoot canons of St. Paul’s, Kingsley first canon of Chester, and then of Westminster, Vaughan master of the Temple.

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XI. Catholic Country And Protestant Parliament. (1873)

It is all very well to establish united education, but if the persons to be educated decline to unite, your efforts will be thrown away. The question then occurs whether it is best to establish a system, rejected by those concerned, in the hope that it will gradually work its way into acceptance in spite of the intolerance of priests, or to endow the separate denominational bodies on the ground that even such education is better than none, or, finally, to do nothing. The question is one of statesmanship enlightened by a knowledge of facts, and of the sentiments of the population.—LESLIE STEPHEN.

I

Descending from her alien throne, the Irish church had now taken her place among the most prosperous of free communions. To Irish cultivators a definite interest of possession had been indirectly confirmed in the land to which most of its value had been given by their own toil. A third branch of the upas tree of poisonous ascendency described by Mr. Gladstone during the election of 1868, still awaited his axe. The fitness of an absentee parliament to govern Ireland was again to be tested. This time the problem was hardest of all, for it involved direct concession by nations inveterately protestant, to a catholic hierarchy having at its head an ultramontane cardinal of uncompromising opinions and inexorable will.

Everybody knew that the state of university education in Ireland stood in the front rank of unsettled questions. Ever since the establishment of three provincial colleges by Peel’s government in 1845, the flame of the controversy had been alight. Even on the very night when Graham introduced the bill creating them, no less staunch a tory and protestant than Sir Robert Inglis had jumped up and denounced “a gigantic scheme of godless education.” The catholics loudly echoed this protestant phrase. The three colleges were speedily condemned by the pope as fatal to faith and morals, and were formally denounced by the synod of Thurles in 1850. The fulminations of the church did not extinguish these modest centres of light and knowledge, but they cast a creeping blight upon them. In 1865 a demand was openly made in parliament for the incorporation by charter of a specifically catholic university. Mr. Gladstone, along with Sir George Grey, then admitted the reality of a grievance, namely, the absence in Ireland of institutions of which the catholics of the country were able to avail themselves. Declining, for good reasons or bad, to use opportunities of college education by the side of protestants, and not warmed by the atmosphere and symbols of their own church and faith, catholics contended that they could not be said to enjoy equal advantages with their fellow-citizens of other creeds. They repudiated a system of education repugnant to their religious convictions, and in the persistent efforts to force ’godless education’ on their country, they professed to recognise another phase of persecution for conscience’ sake.

In 1866, Lord Russell’s government tried its hand with a device known as the supplemental charter. It opened a way to a degree without passing through the godless colleges. This was set aside by an injunction from the courts, and it would not have touched the real matter of complaint, even if the courts had let it stand. Next year the tories burnt their fingers, though Mr. Disraeli told parliament that he saw no scars. For a time, he believed that an honourable and satisfactory settlement was possible, and negotiations went on with the hierarchy. The prelates did not urge endowment, Mr. Disraeli afterwards said, but “they mentioned it.” The country shrank back from concurrent endowment, though, as Mr. Disraeli truly said, it was the policy of Pitt, of Grey, of Russell, of Peel, and of Palmerston. Ever since 1794, catholic students had been allowed to graduate at Trinity College, and ever since the disestablishment of the Irish church in 1869, Trinity had asked parliament for power to admit catholics to her fellowships and emoluments. This, however, did not go to the root, whether we regard it as sound or unsound, of the catholic grievance, which was in fact their lack of an endowed institution as distinctively catholic in all respects as Trinity was protestant.

Such was the case with which Mr. Gladstone was called upon to grapple, and a delicate if not even a desperate case it was. The prelates knew what they wished, though they lay in shadow. What they wanted a protestant parliament, with its grip upon the purse, was determined that they should not have. The same conclusion as came to many liberals by prejudice, was reached by the academic school on principle. On principle they held denominational endowment of education to be retrograde and obscurantist. Then there was the discouraging consideration of which Lord Halifax reminded Mr. Gladstone. “You say with truth,” he observed when the situation had developed, “that the liberal party are behaving very ill, and so they are. But liberal majorities when large are apt to run riot. No men could have stronger claims on the allegiance of their party than Lord Grey and Lord Althorp after carrying the Reform bill. Nevertheless, the large majority after the election of 1832-3 was continually putting the government into difficulty.” So it befell now, and now as then the difficulty was Irish.

II

(M143) Well knowing the hard work before him, Mr. Gladstone applied himself with his usual indomitable energy to the task. “We go to Oxford to-morrow,” he writes to Lord Granville (Nov. 12), “to visit Edward Talbot and his wife; forward to London on Thursday, when I dine with the Templars. My idea of work is that the first solid and heavy bit should be the Irish university—some of this may require to be done in cabinet. When we have got that into shape, I should be for taking to the yet stiffer work of local taxation—most of the cabinet take a personal interest in this. I think it will require immeasurable talking over, which might be done chiefly in an open informal cabinet, before any binding resolutions are taken. But I propose to let Palmer have his say (general) about law reform on Friday.” At Oxford he saw Dr. Pusey, “who behaved with all his old kindness, and seemed to have forgotten the Temple(283) business, or rather as if it had never been.” On November 20, he records, “Cabinet 2-3/4-6-½. Some heads of a measure on Irish university education.” No communications were opened with the Irish bishops beforehand, probably from a surmise that they would be bound to ask more than they could obtain.

Jan. 16, 1873, Hawarden.—Dr. Ingram [the distinguished fellow of Trinity College] came in afternoon, and I was able to spend several hours with him on the university question. 17.—Many hours with Dr. Ingram on the bill and scheme; in truth, almost from breakfast to dinner. Conversation with him in evening on Homer and ancient questions. Read Old Mortality. 20.—Drew an abstract of historical facts respecting Dublin university and college. 21.—Off at 11. At 11 C.H.T. at 6 P.M. 25.—Mr. Thring 3-5-½ on Irish bill. Attended Lord Lytton’s funeral in the Abbey. The church lighted in a frost-fog was sublime. 31.—Cabinet spent many hours in settling Irish university bill. Feb. 2.—Paid a mournful visit to the death-bedside of my old friend Milnes Gaskell.... Death has been very busy around me. 8.—Cabinet 2-½-6-½. Passed the Irish university bill. 13.—Worked until three upon my materials. Then drove and walked. H. of C. 4-1/4-8-½. I spoke three hours in introducing the Irish university bill with much detailed explanation. (Diary.)

Phillimore has an interesting note or two on his friend at this critical time:—

Feb. 2.—Gladstone looking well, but much aged. Spoke of anxiety to retire when he could do so with honour, said he had forced himself into the study of the whole question relating to Trinity College, Dublin, and that he was sure that his enemies did not understand the very curious facts relative to the university. It seemed as if he meant to frame the government measure on a historical and antiquarian basis. This will not satisfy the country if the practical result is to place more power in the hands of the papists. 10.—Gladstone looked very worn and anxious. Spoke about the relief he should experience after Thursday, the weight of the matter which he had to deal with, and the general misapprehension which prevailed; thought the tide was turning in their favour. 11.—Gladstone in high spirits, confident of success on Thursday. 14.—Dined at Gladstone’s. Our host in high spirits at his achievement of yesterday.

The leading provisions of the measure, though found by the able and expert draftsman unusually hard to frame, may be very shortly stated, for the question by the way is still in full blast. A new university of Dublin was to rise, a teaching as well as an examining body, governed by a council who were to appoint officers and regulate all matters and things affecting the university. The constitution of this governing council was elaborately devised, and it did not make clerical predominance ultimately impossible. The affiliation of colleges, not excluding purely denominational institutions, was in their hands. There were to be no religious tests for either teachers or taught, and religious profession was to be no bar to honours and emoluments. Money was provided by Trinity College, the consolidated fund, and the church surplus, to the tune of £50,000 a year. The principle was the old formula of mixed or united education, in which protestants and catholics might side by side participate.

(M144) What many found intolerably obnoxious were two “gagging clauses.” By one of these a teacher or other person of authority might be suspended or deprived, who should in speaking or writing be held to have wilfully given offence to the religious convictions of any member. The second and graver of them was the prohibition of any university teacher in theology, modern history, or moral and mental philosophy. The separate affiliated colleges might make whatever arrangements they pleased for these subjects, but the new university would not teach them directly and authoritatively. This was undoubtedly a singular limitation for a university that had sent forth Berkeley and Burke; nor was there ever a moment when in spite of the specialisation of research, the deepest questions in the domain of thought and belief more inevitably thrust themselves forward within common and indivisible precincts.

III

On Feb. 14, Mr. Gladstone reported to the Queen:—

The general impression last night appeared to be that the friends of Trinity College were relieved; that the liberal party and the nonconformists were well satisfied with the conformity between the proposed measure and the accepted principles of university organisation in England; but that the Roman catholics would think themselves hardly or at least not generously used. All that Mr. Gladstone has heard this morning through private channels, as well as the general tone of the press, tends to corroborate the favourable parts of what he gathered last night, and to give hope that reasonable and moderate Roman catholics may see that their real grievances will be removed; generally also to support the expectation that the bill is not likely to pass.

Delane of the Times said to Manning when they were leaving the House of Commons, “This is a bill made to pass.” Manning himself heartily acquiesced. Even the bitterest of Mr. Gladstone’s critics below the gangway on his own side agreed, that if a division could have been taken while the House was still under the influence of the three hours’ speech, the bill would have been almost unanimously carried.(284) “It threw the House into a mesmeric trance,” said the seconder of a hostile motion. Effects like these, not purple passages, not epigrams nor aphorisms, are the test of oratory. Mr. Bruce wrote home (Feb. 15): “Alas! I fear all prospect of ministerial defeat is over. The University bill is so well received that people say there will not be even a division on the second reading. I see no other rock ahead, but sometimes they project their snouts unexpectedly, and cause shipwreck.”

Soon did the projecting rocks appear out of the smooth water. Lord Spencer had an interview with Cardinal Cullen at Dublin Castle (Feb. 25), and found him though in very good humour and full of gratitude for fair intentions, yet extremely hostile to the bill. It was in flat opposition, he said, to what the Roman catholics had been working for in Ireland for years; it continued the Queen’s Colleges, and set up another Queen’s College in the shape of Trinity College with a large endowment; it perpetuated the mixed system of education, to which he had always been opposed, and no endowment nor assistance was given to the catholic university; the council might appoint professors to teach English literature, geology, or zoology who would be dangerous men in catholic eyes. Lord Spencer gathered that the cardinal would be satisfied with a sum down to redress inequality or a grant for buildings.

Archbishop Manning wrote to Cardinal Cullen the day after the bill was produced, “strongly urging them to accept it.” It seemed to him to rest on a base so broad that he could not tell how either the opposition or the radical doctrinaires could attack it without adopting “the German tyranny.” He admitted that he was more easily satisfied than if he were in Ireland, but he thought the measure framed with skill and success. After a fortnight the archbishop told Mr. Gladstone, that he still saw reason to believe that the Irish hierarchy would not refuse the bill. On March 3rd, he says he has done his utmost to conciliate confidence in it. By the 7th he knew that his efforts had failed, but he urges Mr. Gladstone not to take the episcopal opposition too much to heart. “Non-endowment, mixed education, and godless colleges, are three bitter things to them.” “This,” he wrote to Mr. Gladstone, when all was over (March 12) “is not your fault, nor the bill’s fault, but the fault of England and Scotland and three anti-catholic centuries.”

(M145) The debate began on March 3rd, and extended to four sittings. The humour of the House was described by Mr. Gladstone as “fitful and fluctuating.” Speeches “void of real argument or point, yet aroused the mere prejudices of a section of the liberal party against popery and did much to place the bill in danger.” Then that cause of apprehension disappeared, and a new change passed over the shifting sky, for the intentions of Irish members were reported to be dubious. There was not a little heat and passion, mainly from below the ministerial gangway. The gagging clauses jarred horribly, though they were trenchantly defended by Mr. Lowe, the very man to whose line of knowledge and intellectual freedom they seemed likely to be most repugnant. It soon appeared that neither protestant nor catholic set any value on these securities for conscience, and the general assembly of the presbyterians declared war upon the whole scheme. The cabinet—“most harmonious at this critical time,”—still held firmly that the bill was well constructed, so that if it once reached committee it would not be easy to inflict mortal wounds. On March 8th the prime minister reported to the Queen:—

Strange to say, it is the opposition of the Roman catholic bishops that brings about the present difficulty; and this although they have not declared an opposition to the bill outright, but have wound up their list of objections with a resolution to present petitions praying for its amendment. Still their attitude of what may be called growling hostility has had these important results. Firstly, it has deadened that general willingness of the liberal party, which the measure itself had created, to look favourably on a plan such as they might hope would obtain acquiescence, and bring about contentment. Secondly, the great majority of the bishops are even more hostile than the resolutions, which were apparently somewhat softened as the price of unanimity; and all these bishops, working upon liberal Irish members through their political interest in their seats, have proceeded so far that from twenty to twenty-five may go against the bill, and as many may stay away. When to these are added the small knot of discontented liberals and mere fanatics which so large a party commonly contains, the government majority, now taken at only 85, disappears....

It is not in the power or the will of your Majesty’s advisers to purchase Irish support by subserviency to the Roman bishops. Their purpose has been to offer justice to all, and their hope has been that what was just would be seen to be advantageous. As far as the Roman catholics of Ireland are concerned, the cabinet conceive that they are now at perfect liberty to throw up the bill. But they are also of opinion that its abandonment would so impair or destroy their moral power, as to render it impossible for them to accept the defeat. There are whispers of a desire in the liberal party, should the catastrophe arrive, to meet it by a vote of confidence, which would probably be carried by a still larger majority. But the cabinet look with extreme disfavour upon this method of proceeding, which would offer them the verbal promise of support just when its substance had been denied.

He then proceeds to more purely personal aspects and contingencies:—

What lies beyond it would be premature to describe as having been regularly treated or even opened to-day. Mr. Gladstone considers himself far more tied to the bill and the subject than his colleagues; and if they upon a defeat were disposed to carry on the government without him, he would with your Majesty’s sanction take effectual means to provide at least against his being an impediment in the way of an arrangement eligible in so many points of view. But his colleagues appear at present indisposed to adopt this method of solution. There would then remain for them the question whether they should humbly tender their resignations to your Majesty, or whether they should advise a dissolution of the parliament, which was elected under other auspices. This would be a matter of the utmost gravity for consideration at the proper time. Mr. Gladstone as at present advised has no foregone conclusion in favour of either alternative, and would act with his colleagues as between them. But he does not intend to go into opposition, and the dissolution of this government, brought about through languor and through extensive or important defections in the liberal party which has made him its leader, would be the close of his political life. He has now for more than forty years striven to serve the crown and country to the best of his power, and he is willing, though with overtaxed faculties and diminishing strength, to continue the effort longer, if he sees that the continuance can be conducive to the objects which he has heretofore had at heart; but the contingency to which he has last referred, would be for him the proof that confidence was gone, that usefulness was at an end, and that he might and ought to claim the freedom which best befits the close of life.

The next day, in reporting that the estimates of the coming division were far from improving, Mr. Gladstone returned in a few words to the personal point:—

Mr. Gladstone is very grateful for your Majesty’s caution against being swayed by private feelings, and he will endeavour to be on his guard against them. He has, however, always looked to the completion of that commission, so to call it, which events in a measure threw into his hands five years ago, as the natural close of the main work of the present government; and many circumstances have combined to impress him with the hope that thus an honourable path would be opened for his retirement. He ought, perhaps, to add that he has the strongest opinion, upon political grounds and grounds other than political, against spending old age under the strain of that perpetual contention which is inseparable from his present position; and this opinion could only be neutralised by his perceiving a special call to remain: that is to say, some course of public service to be done by him better than if it were in other hands. Such a prospect he neither sees nor anticipates. But it is premature to trouble your Majesty on this minor subject.

On the 9th Cardinal Cullen blazed forth in a pastoral that was read in all the churches. He described the bill as richly endowing non-catholic and godless colleges, and without giving one farthing to catholics, inviting them to compete in their poverty, produced by penal laws and confiscations, with those left in possession of enormous wealth. The new university scheme only increased the number of Queen’s Colleges, so often and so solemnly condemned by the catholic church and by all Ireland, and gave a new impulse to that sort of teaching that separates education from religion and its holy influences, and banishes God, the author of all good, from our schools. The prelate’s pastoral had a decisive effect in regions far removed from the ambit of his crosier. The tory leader could not resist a temptation thus offered by the attitude of the Irish cardinal, and the measure that had been much reviled as a dark concordat between Mr. Gladstone and the pope, was now rejected by a concordat between the pope’s men and Mr. Disraeli.

The discussion was on a high level in Mr. Gladstone’s judgment. Lyon Playfair criticised details with some severity and much ability, but intended to vote for the bill. Miall, the nonconformist leader, supported the second reading, but required alterations that were admissible enough. On March 10 Mr. Harcourt, who was not yet an old member, “opened the discussion by a speech in advance of any he has yet delivered as to effect upon the House. Severe in criticism on detail, he was favourable to the substance of the bill.” One significant incident of the debate was a declaration by Bentinck, a conservative ultra, that he would vote against the bill in reliance on the declaration of Mr. Hardy, which he understood to be a pledge for himself and others near him, not to take office during the existence of the present parliament. “Mr. Hardy remained silent during this appeal, which was several times repeated.” Then the end came (March 11-12):—

Mr. Disraeli rose at half-past ten, and spoke amidst rapt attention till midnight. Mr. Gladstone followed in a speech of two hours, and at two o’clock the division was called. During the whole evening the greatest uncertainty had prevailed; for himself Mr. Gladstone leaned to expecting an unfavourable result. The numbers were, Ayes (for the government), 284; Noes, 287; majority against the government, 3. It is said that 45 adherents of the government, or thereabouts, voted against them. It was the Irish vote that grew continually worse.(285)

(M146) Of the speech in which the debate was wound up Forster says in his diary: “Gladstone, with the House dead against him and his bill, made a wonderful speech—easy, almost playful, with passages of great power and eloquence, but with a graceful play, which enabled him to plant deep his daggers of satire in Horsman and Co.”(286) Speaker Brand calls it “a magnificent speech, generous, high-minded, and without a taint of bitterness, although he was sorely tried, especially by false friends.” He vindicated the obnoxious clauses, but did not wish to adhere to them if opinion from all quarters were adverse, and he admitted that it was the opposition of members from Ireland that principally acted on his hearers. His speech contained a remarkable passage, pronouncing definitely against denominational endowment of university education.

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XII. The Crisis. (1873)

.. alla fortuna, come vuol, son presto.. Pero giri fortuna la sua rota, Come le piace, e il villan la sua marra. —Inferno, xv. 93.

For fortune as she wills I am ready.. so let her turn her wheel as she may please, and the churl his spade.

I

A week of lively and eventful interests followed,—not only interesting in the life of Mr. Gladstone, but raising points with important constitutional bearings, and showing a match between two unsurpassed masters of political sword-play. The story was told generally and partially in parliament, but the reader who is curious about either the episode itself, or Mr. Gladstone’s modes of mind and action, will find it worth a little trouble to follow details with some closeness.

March 11.—H. of C. Spoke 12-2, and voted in a division of 284-287—which was believed to cause more surprise to the opposite side than it did to me. At 2.45 A.M. I apprised the Queen of our defeat.

Thursday, March 12.—Saw the Queen at 12.15. Failed to find Granville. Cabinet 1-2-3/4. We discussed the matter with a general tendency to resignation rather than dissolving. Confab. on my position with Granville and Glyn, then joined by Bright. To the Queen again at six to keep her informed. Large dinner party for the Duke of Edinburgh, and an evening party afterwards, to hear Joachim.

Friday, March 13.—After seeing Mr. Glyn and Lord F. Cavendish, I went at 10.40 to see Dr. Clark. He completed his examination, and gave me his careful judgment. I went to Lord Granville, sketched out to him and Glyn my views, and went to the cabinet at 12.15. Stated the case between the two alternatives of resignation and dissolution as far as regarded myself. On the side of resignation it would not be necessary to make any final announcement [of his retirement from the leadership]. I am strongly advised a temporary rest. On the other hand, if we now dissolve, I anticipate that afterwards before any long time difficulties will arise, and my mission will be terminated. So that the alternatives are not so unequally weighed. The cabinet without any marked difference, or at least without any positive assertion to the contrary, determined on tendering their resignations.(287) After cabinet saw Hartington and others respecting honours. At 2.45 saw the Queen and resigned. The Queen informed me that she would send for Mr. Disraeli; suggested for consideration whether I would include the mention of this fact in my announcement to parliament, and added as I was leaving the room, without looking (apparently) for an answer, that she would inform me of what might take place. At 3.45 saw Granville respecting the announcements. Made announcement in House of Commons at 4.30. More business at Downing Street, and home at six.

At a quarter to seven, or a little later, Colonel Ponsonby called with a communication from her Majesty. “Any news?” I said. “A great deal,” he replied; and informed me as follows. Mr. Disraeli had been with the Queen; did not see the means of carrying on the government by the agency of his party under present circumstances; did not ask for the dissolution of parliament (this was understood to mean did not offer to become minister on condition of being permitted to dissolve); did not say that his renunciation of the task was final; recommended that the Queen should call for my advice. Upon this the Queen sent Colonel Ponsonby, and he said, “She considers this as sending for you anew.” I replied that I did not regard the Queen’s reference of this intelligence to me, as her calling upon me anew to undertake the work of government; that none of my obligations to the sovereign were cancelled or impaired by the resignation tendered and accepted; that I was still the minister for the purpose of rendering any service she might be pleased to call for in the matter on which she is engaged, exactly as before, until she has a new minister, when my official obligations will come to an end. That I felt there was great inconvenience and danger of misapprehension out of doors in proceeding over-rapidly with a matter of such gravity, and that each step in it required to be well measured and ascertained before proceeding to consider of the next following step. That I had great difficulty in gathering any precise idea of Mr. Disraeli’s account of what he could not do, and what he either could or did not say that he could not. That as this account was to present to me the state of facts on which I was commanded to advise, it was quite necessary for me to have an accurate idea of it, in order that I might do justice to her Majesty’s commands. I would therefore humbly suggest that Mr. Disraeli might with great propriety be requested to put his reply into writing. That I presumed I might receive this reply, if it were her Majesty’s pleasure to make it known to me, at some not late hour to-morrow, when I would at once place myself in a condition to tender my humble advice. This is an account of what Colonel Ponsonby might fairly consider as my answer to her Majesty’s communication. I enlarged the conversation, however, by observing that the division which overthrew us was a party division. It bore the express authentic symbol of its character in having party tellers on the opposition as well as on the government side; that we were aware of the great, even more than ordinary, efforts of Colonel Taylor, with Mr. Disraeli’s countenance, to bring members to London and to the House; that all this seemed to impose great obligations on the opposition; and if so, that it would be the duty of the leader of the opposition to use every exertion of consultation with his friends and otherwise before declining the task, or in any manner advising the Queen to look elsewhere. To Colonel Ponsonby indeed, I observed that I thought Mr. Disraeli was endeavouring, by at once throwing back on me an offer which it was impossible for me at the time and under the circumstances to accept, to get up a case of absolute necessity founded upon this refusal of mine, and thus, becoming the indispensable man and party, to have in his hands a lever wherewith to overcome the reluctance and resistance of his friends, who would not be able to deny that the Queen must have a government.

(M147) Mr. Disraeli’s reply to the Queen’s inquiry whether he was prepared to form a government, was put into writing, and the two operative paragraphs of it were sent through Colonel Ponsonby to Mr. Gladstone. They ran as follows:—

In answer, Mr. Disraeli said he was prepared to form an administration which he believed would carry on her Majesty’s affairs with efficiency, and would possess her confidence; but he could not undertake to carry on her Majesty’s government in the present House of Commons. Subsequently, her Majesty having remarked that Mr. Gladstone was not inclined to recommend a dissolution of parliament, Mr. Disraeli stated that he himself would not advise her Majesty to take that step.

Viewing these paragraphs as forming the answer offered by Mr. Disraeli to the Queen, Mr. Gladstone reported to her (March 14) that “he did not find himself able to gather their precise effect”:—

The former of the two, if it stood alone, would seem to imply that Mr. Disraeli was prepared to accept office with a view to an immediate dissolution of parliament, but not otherwise; since it states that he believes himself able to form a suitable administration, but not “to carry on your Majesty’s government in the present House of Commons.” In the latter of the two paragraphs Mr. Disraeli has supposed your Majesty to have remarked that “Mr. Gladstone was not inclined to recommend a dissolution of parliament,” and has stated that “he himself would not advise your Majesty to take that step.” Your Majesty will without doubt remember that Mr. Gladstone tendered no advice on the subject of dissolution generally, but limited himself to comparing it with the alternative of resignation, which was the only question at issue, and stated that on the part of the cabinet he humbly submitted resignation of their offices, which they deemed to be the step most conformable to their duty. Mr. Gladstone does not clearly comprehend the bearing of Mr. Disraeli’s closing words; as he could not tender advice to your Majesty either affirmatively or negatively on dissolution, without first becoming your Majesty’s adviser. Founding himself upon the memorandum, Mr. Gladstone is unable to say to what extent the apparent meaning of the one paragraph is modified or altered by the other; and he is obliged to trouble your Majesty, however reluctantly, with this representation, inasmuch as a perfectly clear idea of the tenor of the reply is a necessary preliminary to his offering any remark or advice upon it; which, had it been a simple negative, he would have felt it his duty to do.

Between six and seven in the evening Colonel Ponsonby came with a letter from the Queen to the effect that Mr. Disraeli had unconditionally declined to undertake the formation of a government. In obedience to the Queen’s commands Mr. Gladstone proceeded to give his view of the position in which her Majesty was placed:—

March 15.—Not being aware that there can be a question of any intermediate party or combination of parties which would be available at the present juncture, he presumes that your Majesty, if denied the assistance of the conservative or opposition party, might be disposed to recur to the services of a liberal government. He is of opinion, however, that either his late colleagues, or any statesman or statesmen of the liberal party on whom your Majesty might call, would with propriety at once observe that it is still for the consideration of your Majesty whether the proceeding which has taken place between your Majesty and Mr. Disraeli can as yet be regarded as complete. The vote of the House of Commons on Wednesday morning was due to the deliberate and concerted action of the opposition, with a limited amount of adventitious numerical aid. The division was a party division, and carried the well-known symbol of such divisions in the appointment of tellers of the opposition and government respectively. The vote was given in the full knowledge, avowed in the speech of the leader of the opposition, that the government had formally declared the measure on which the vote was impending to be vital to its existence. Mr. Gladstone humbly conceives that, according to the well-known principles of our parliamentary government, an opposition which has in this manner and degree contributed to bring about what we term a crisis, is bound to use and to show that it has used its utmost efforts of counsel and inquiry to exhaust all practicable means of bringing its resources to the aid of the country in its exigency. He is aware that his opinion on such a subject can only be of slight value, but the same observation will not hold good with regard to the force of a well-established party usage. To show what that usage has been, Mr. Gladstone is obliged to trouble your Majesty with the following recital of facts from the history of the last half century.... [_This apt and cogent recital the reader will find at the end of the volume, see Appendix._]... There is, therefore, a very wide difference between the manner in which the call of your Majesty has been met on this occasion by the leader of the opposition, and the manner which has been observed at every former juncture, including even those when the share taken by the opposition in bringing about the exigency was comparatively slight or none at all. It is, in Mr. Gladstone’s view, of the utmost importance to the public welfare that the nation should be constantly aware that the parliamentary action certain or likely to take effect in the overthrow of a government; the reception and treatment of a summons from your Majesty to meet the necessity which such action has powerfully aided in creating; and again the resumption of office by those who have deliberately laid it down,—are uniformly viewed as matters of the utmost gravity, requiring time, counsel, and deliberation among those who are parties to them, and attended with serious responsibilities. Mr. Gladstone will not and does not suppose that the efforts of the opposition to defeat the government on Wednesday morning were made with a previously formed intention on their part to refuse any aid to your Majesty, if the need should arise, in providing for the government of the country; and the summary refusal, which is the only fact before him, he takes to be not in full correspondence either with the exigencies of the case, or as he has shown, with the parliamentary usage. In humbly submitting this representation to your Majesty, Mr. Gladstone’s wish is to point out the difficulty in which he would find himself placed were he to ask your Majesty for authority to inquire from his late colleagues whether they or any of them were prepared, if your Majesty should call on them, to resume their offices; for they would certainly, he is persuaded, call on him, for their own honour, and in order to the usefulness of their further service if it should be rendered, to prove to them that according to usage every means had been exhausted on the part of the opposition for providing for the government of the country, or at least that nothing more was to be expected from that quarter.

This statement, prepared after dinner, Mr. Gladstone took to Lord Granville that night (March 14). The next morning he again saw Lord Granville and Colonel Ponsonby, and despatched his statement to the Queen. “At 2.45,” he writes to Granville:—

I saw the Queen, not for any distinct object, but partly to fill the blank before the public. H.M. was in perfect humour. She will use the whole or part of my long letter by sending it to Disraeli. She seemed quite to understand our point of view, and told me plainly what shows that the artful man did say, if it came back to him again at this juncture, he would not be bound by his present refusal. I said, “But, ma’am, that is not before me.” “But he told it to me,” she said.

(M148) The Queen sent Mr. Gladstone’s long letter to Mr. Disraeli, and he replied in a tolerably long letter of his own. He considered Mr. Gladstone’s observations under two heads: first, as an impeachment of the opposition for contributing to the vote against the bill, when they were not prepared to take office; second, as a charge against Mr. Disraeli himself that he summarily refused to take office without exhausting all practicable means of aiding the country in the exigency. On the first article of charge, he described the doctrine advanced by Mr. Gladstone as being “undoubtedly sound so far as this: that for an opposition to use its strength for the express purpose of throwing out a government which it is at the time aware that it cannot replace—having that object in view and no other—would be an act of recklessness and faction that could not be too strongly condemned.” But this, he contended, could not be imputed to the conservative opposition of 1873. The Irish bill was from the first strongly objected to by a large section of the liberal party, and on the same grounds that led the conservative opposition to reject it, namely, that it sacrificed Irish education to the Roman catholic hierarchy. The party whom the bill was intended to propitiate rejected it as inadequate. If the sense of the House had been taken, irrespective of considerations of the political result of the division, not one-fourth of the House would have voted for it. Mr. Gladstone’s doctrine, Disraeli went on, amounted to this, that “whenever a minister is so situated that it is in his power to prevent any other parliamentary leader from forming an administration likely to stand, he acquires thereby the right to call on parliament to pass whatever measures he and his colleagues think fit, and is entitled to denounce as factious the resistance to such measures. Any such claim is one not warranted by usage, or reconcilable with the freedom of the legislature. It comes to this: that he tells the House of Commons, ‘Unless you are prepared to put some one in my place, your duty is to do whatever I bid you.’ To no House of Commons has language of this kind ever been addressed; by no House of Commons would it be tolerated.”

As for the charge of summary refusal to undertake government, Mr. Disraeli contented himself with a brief statement of facts. He had consulted his friends, and they were all of opinion that it would be prejudicial to the public interests for a conservative ministry to attempt to conduct business in the present House of Commons. What other means were at his disposal? Was he to open negotiations with a section of the late ministry, and waste days in barren interviews, vain applications, and the device of impossible combinations? Was he to make overtures to the considerable section of the liberal party that had voted against the government? The Irish Roman catholic gentlemen? Surely Mr. Gladstone was not serious in such a suggestion. The charge of deliberate and concerted action against the Irish bill was ’not entirely divested of some degree of exaggeration.’ His party was not even formally summoned to vote against the government measure, but to support an amendment which was seconded from the liberal benches, and which could only by a violent abuse of terms be described as a party move.

On Saturday afternoon Mr. Gladstone had gone down to Cliveden, and there at ten o’clock on the Sunday evening (March 16) he received a message from the Queen, enclosing Mr. Disraeli’s letter, and requesting him to say whether he would resume office. This letter was taken by Mr. Gladstone to show that “nothing more was to be expected in that quarter,” and at eleven o’clock he sent off the messenger with his answer in the affirmative:—

March 16, 1873, 10-3/4 P.M.—It is quite unnecessary for him to comment upon any of the statements or arguments advanced by Mr. Disraeli, as the point referred by your Majesty for him to consider is not their accuracy, sufficiency, or relevancy, but simply whether any further effort is to be expected from the opposition towards meeting the present necessity. Your Majesty has evidently judged that nothing more of this kind can be looked for. Your Majesty’s judgment would have been conclusive with Mr. Gladstone in the case, even had he failed to appreciate the full cogency of the reason for it; but he is bound to state that he respectfully concurs with your Majesty upon that simple question, as one not of right but of fact. He therefore does not hesitate at once to answer your Majesty’s gracious inquiry by saying that he will now endeavour to prevail upon your Majesty’s late advisers generally to resume their offices, and he again places all such service as it is in his power to offer, at your Majesty’s disposal. According to your Majesty’s command, then, he will repair to London to-morrow morning, and will see some of the most experienced members of the late government to review the position which he regards as having been seriously unhinged by the shock of last Wednesday morning; to such an extent indeed, that he doubts whether either the administration or parliament can again be what they were. The relations between them, and the course of business laid down in the royal speech, will require to be reconsidered, or at least reviewed with care.

II

Tuesday, March 18.—[To the Queen] The cabinet met informally at this house [11 Carlton House Terrace] at 2 P.M., and sat till 5-½.

The whole of the cabinet were ready to resume their offices. It was decided to carry on the government in the present parliament, without contemplating any particular limit of time for existence in connection with the recent vote.

Wednesday, March 19.—Went down to Windsor at midday; 3/4 hour with the Queen on the resignation, the statement tomorrow, the Duke of Edinburgh’s marriage, royal precedence, Tennyson’s honour; also she mentioned railway accidents and an assault on a soldier, and on luxury in food and dress. Dined with the Duke of Cambridge. Speaker’s levee, saw Mr. Fawcett [who had been active in fomenting hostility] and other members. Then Mrs. Glyn’s party.

Thursday, March 20.—H. of C. Made my explanation. Advisedly let pass Mr. Disraeli’s speech without notice.

Mr. Gladstone said among other things:—

I felt reluctance personally from a desire for rest, the title to which had possibly been ... earned by labour. Also politically, because I do not think that as a general rule the experience we have had in former years of what may be called returning or resuming governments, has been very favourable in its character.... The subsequent fortunes of such governments lead to the belief that upon the whole, though such a return may be the lesser of two evils, yet it is not a thing in itself to be desired. It reminds me of that which was described by the Roman general according to the noble ode of Horace:—

... Neque amissos colores Lana refert medicata fuco, Nec vera virtus cum semel excidit Curat reponi deterioribus.(288)

Mr. Disraeli made a lengthy statement, covering a much wider field. The substance of the whole case after all was this. The minister could not dissolve for the reason that the defeat had strengthened all the forces against the bill and against the government, and the constituencies who had never looked on it with much favour after its rejection by the Irish to satisfy whom it had been invented, now regarded it with energetic disfavour. The leader of the opposition, on the other hand, produced a long string of ingenious reasons for not abiding by the result of what was his own act: as, for example, that dissolution could not be instant; to form a government would take time; financial business must be arranged; a policy could not be shaped without access to official information; in this interval motions would be made and carried on plausible questions, and when the election came, his friends would go to the country as discredited ministers, instead of being a triumphant opposition. In writing to his brother Robertson, Mr. Gladstone glances at other reasons:—

March 21.—We have gone through our crisis; and I fear that nobody is much the better for it. For us it was absolutely necessary to show that we did not consider return, as we had not considered resignation, a light matter. As to the opposition, the speech of Disraeli last night leaves it to be asked why did he not come in, wind up the business of the session, and dissolve? There is no reason to be given, except that a portion of his party was determined not to be educated again, and was certain that if he got in he would again commence this educating process. The conservative party will never assume its natural position until Disraeli retires; and I sometimes think he and I might with advantage pair off together.

Speaker Brand says: “Disraeli’s tactics are to watch and wait, not showing his hand nor declaring a policy; he desires to drive Gladstone to a dissolution, when he will make the most of Gladstone’s mistakes, while he will denounce a policy of destruction and confiscation, and take care to announce no policy of his own. His weakness consists in the want of confidence of some of his party.”

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XIII. Last Days Of The Ministry. (1873)

ὤσπερ ἂν εἴ τις ναύκληρον πάντ᾽ ἐπὶ σωτηρίᾳ πράξαντα, καὶ κατασκευάσαντα τὸ πλοῖον ἀφ᾽ ὧν ὑπελάμβανε σωθήσεσθαι, εἶτα χειμῶνι χρησάμενον καὶ πονησάντων αὐτῷ τῶν σκευῶν ἤ καὶ συντριβέτων ὅλως, τῆς ναυαγίας αἰτιῷτο.—DEMOSTHENES.

As if, when a shipmaster had done all he could for safety, and fitted his vessel with everything to make her weathertight, then when he meets a storm and all his tackle strains and labours until it is torn to pieces, we should blame him for the wreck.

I

The shock of defeat, resignation, and restoration had no effect in lessening ministerial difficulties. The months that followed make an unedifying close to five glorious years of progress and reform. With plenty of differences they recall the sunless days in which the second administration of the younger Pitt ended that lofty career of genius and dominion. The party was divided, and some among its leaders were centres of petty disturbance. In a scrap dated at this period Mr. Gladstone wrote: “Divisions in the liberal party are to be seriously apprehended from a factious spirit on questions of economy, on questions of education in relation to religion, on further parliamentary change, on the land laws. On these questions generally my sympathies are with what may be termed the advanced party, whom on other and general grounds I certainly will never head nor lead.”

The quarrel between the government and the nonconformists was not mitigated by a speech of Mr. Gladstone’s against a motion for the disestablishment of the church. It was described by Speaker Brand as “firm and good,” but the dissenters, with all their kindness for the prime minister, thought it firm and bad.(289) To Dr. Allon, one of the most respected of their leaders, Mr. Gladstone wrote (July 5):—

The spirit of frankness in which you write is ever acceptable to me. I fear there may be much in your sombre anticipations. But if there is to be a great schism in the liberal party, I hope I shall never find it my duty to conduct the operations either of the one or of the other section. The nonconformists have shown me great kindness and indulgence; they have hitherto interpreted my acts and words in the most favourable sense; and if the time has come when my acts and words pass beyond the measure of their patience, I contemplate with repugnance, at my time of life especially, the idea of entering into conflict with them. A political severance, somewhat resembling in this a change in religion, should at most occur not more than once in life. At the same time I must observe that no one has yet to my knowledge pointed out the expressions or arguments in the speech, that can justly give offence.

A few personal jottings will be found of interest:—

April 7, 1873.—H. of C. The budget and its reception mark a real onward step in the session. 23.—Breakfast with Mr. C. Field to meet Mr. Emerson. 30.—I went to see the remains of my dear friend James Hope. Many sad memories but more joyful hopes. May 15.—The King and Queen of the Belgians came to breakfast at ten. A party of twenty. They were most kind, and all went well.

To the Queen (May 19).—Mr. Gladstone had an interview yesterday at Chiselhurst with the Empress. He thought her Majesty much thinner and more worn than last year, but she showed no want of energy in conversation. Her Majesty felt much interest, and a little anxiety, about the coming examination of the prince her son at Woolwich.

June 8.—Chapel royal at noon. It was touching to see Dean Hook and hear him, now old in years and very old I fear in life; but he kindled gallantly. 17.—Had a long conversation with Mr. Holloway (of the pills) on his philanthropic plans; which are of great interest. 25.—Audience of the Shah with Lord Granville and the Duke of Argyll. Came away after 1-1/4 hours. He displayed abundant acuteness. His gesticulation particularly expressive. 26.—Sixteen to breakfast. Mme. Norman Neruda played for us. She is also most pleasing in manner and character. Went to Windsor afterwards. Had an audience. July 1.—H. of C. Received the Shah soon after six. A division on a trifling matter of adjournment took place during his Majesty’s presence, in which he manifested an intelligent interest. The circumstance of his presence at the time is singular in this view (and of this he was informed, rather to his amusement) that until the division was over he could not be released from the walls of the House. It is probably, or possibly, the first time for more than five hundred years that a foreign sovereign has been under personal restraint of any kind in England. [Query, Mary Queen of Scots.]

(M149) Then we come upon an entry that records one of the deepest griefs of this stage of Mr. Gladstone’s life—the sudden death of Bishop Wilberforce:—

July 19.—Off at 4.25 to Holmbury.(290) We were enjoying that beautiful spot and expecting Granville with the Bishop of Winchester, when the groom arrived with the message that the Bishop had had a bad fall. An hour and a half later Granville entered, pale and sad: “It’s all over.” In an instant the thread of that very precious life was snapped. We were all in deep and silent grief. 20.—Woke with a sad sense of a great void in the world. 21.—Drove in the morning with Lord Granville to Abinger Hall. Saw him, for the last time in the flesh, resting from his labours. Attended the inquest; inspected the spot; all this cannot be forgotten. 23.—Gave way under great heat, hard work, and perhaps depression of force. Kept my bed all day.

“Of the special opinions of this great prelate,” he wrote to the Queen, “Mr. Gladstone may not be an impartial judge, but he believes there can be no doubt that there does not live the man in any of the three kingdoms of your Majesty who has, by his own indefatigable and unmeasured labours, given such a powerful impulse as the Bishop of Winchester gave to the religious life of the country.” When he mentioned that the bishop’s family declined the proposal of Westminster Abbey for his last resting place, the Queen replied that she was very glad, for “to her nothing more gloomy and doleful exists.”

“Few men,” Mr. Gladstone wrote later in this very year, “have had a more varied experience of personal friendships than myself. Among the large numbers of estimable and remarkable people whom I have known, and who have now passed away, there is in my memory an inner circle, and within it are the forms of those who were marked off from the comparative crowd even of the estimable and remarkable, by the peculiarity and privilege of their type.”(291) In this inner circle the bishop must have held a place, not merely by habit of life, which accounts for so many friendships in the world, but by fellowship in their deepest interests, by common ideals in church and state, by common sympathy in their arduous aim to reconcile greetings in the market-place and occupation of high seats, with the spiritual glow of the soul within its own sanctuary.

(M150) While still grieving over this painful loss, Mr. Gladstone suddenly found himself in a cauldron of ministerial embarrassments. An inquiry into certain irregularities at the general post office led to the discovery that the sum of eight hundred thousand pounds had been detained on its way to the exchequer, and applied to the service of the telegraphs. The persons concerned in the gross and inexcused irregularities were Mr. Monsell, Mr. Ayrton, and the chancellor of the exchequer. “There probably have been times,” Mr. Gladstone wrote to the Queen (Aug. 7), “when the three gentlemen who in their several positions have been chiefly to blame would have been summarily dismissed from your Majesty’s service. But on none of them could any ill-intent be charged; two of them had, among whatever errors of judgment, done much and marked good service to the state.” Under the circumstances he could not resort to so severe a course without injustice and harshness. “The recent exposures,” Mr. Gladstone wrote to Lord Russell, “have been gall and wormwood to me from day to day.” “Ever since the failure of the Irish University bill,” he said, “the government has been in a condition in which, to say the least, it has had no strength to spare, and has stood in need of all the strength it could derive from internal harmony and vigorous administration.” The post office scandal exposed to the broad light of day that neither harmony nor vigour existed or could be counted on. It was evident that neither the postmaster nor the chancellor of the exchequer could remain where they were. In submitting new arrangements to the Queen, Mr. Gladstone said that he would gladly have spared her the irksome duty of considering them, had it been “in his power either on the one side to leave unnoticed the scandals that have occurred, or on the other to have tendered a general resignation, or to have advised a dissolution of parliament.” The hot weather and the lateness of the session made the House of Commons disinclined for serious conflict; still at the end of July various proceedings upon the scandals took place, which. Mr. Gladstone described to the Queen as of “a truly mortifying character.” Mr. Ayrton advanced doctrines of ministerial responsibility that could not for a moment be maintained, and Mr. Gladstone felt himself bound on the instant to disavow them.(292)

Sir Robert Phillimore gives a glimpse of him in these evil days:—

July 24.—Gladstone dined here hastily; very unwell, and much worn. He talked about little else than Bishop Wilberforce’s funeral and the ecclesiastical appeals in the Judicature bill. 29th.—Saw Gladstone, better but pale. Said the government deserved a vote of censure on Monsell and Lowe’s account. Monsell ought to resign; but Lowe, he said, ought for past services to be defended. 30th..—Dined at Gladstone’s. Radical M.P.’s ... agreed that government was tottering, and that Gladstone did everything. Gladstone walks with a stick. Aug. 7.—An interview with Gladstone. He was communicative. A great reform of his government has become necessary. The treasury to be swept out. He looked much better.

Nothing at any time was so painful, almost intolerably painful, to Mr. Gladstone as personal questions, and cabinet reconstruction is made up of personal questions of the most trying and invidious kind. “I have had a fearful week,” he wrote to the Duke of Argyll (Aug. 8), “but have come through. A few behave oddly, most perfectly well, some incomparably well; of these last I must name honoris causâ, Bright, Bruce, and F. Cavendish.” To Mr. Bright he had written when the crisis first grew acute:—

Aug. 2.—You have seen the reports, without doubt, of what has been going on. You can hardly conceive the reality. I apprehend that the House of Commons by its abstinence and forbearance, must be understood to have given us breathing time and space to consider what can be done to renovate the government in something like harmony and something like dignity. This will depend greatly upon men and partly upon measures. Changes in men there must be, and some without delay. A lingering and discreditable death, after the life we have lived, is not an ending to which we ought to submit without effort; and as an essential part of the best effort that can be made, I am most desirous to communicate with you here. I rely on your kindness to come up. Here only can I show you the state of affairs, which is most dangerous, and yet not unhopeful.

From the diary:—

Aug. 1.—Saw Lord F. Cavendish, also Lord Granville, Lord Wolverton, Mr. Cardwell, repeatedly on the crisis. 2.—An anxious day. The first step was taken, Cardwell broke to Lowe the necessity of his changing his office. Also I spoke to Forster and Fortescue. 4.—A very anxious day of constant conversation and reflection, ending with an evening conclave. 5.—My day began with Dr. Clark. Rose at eleven.... Wrote.... Most of these carried much powder and shot. Some were Jack Ketch and Calcraft [the public executioner] letters. 6.—Incessant interviews.... Much anxiety respecting the Queen’s delay in replying. Saw Lord Wolverton late with her reply. 9.—To Osborne. A long and satisfactory audience of H.M. Attended the council, and received a third time the seals of my old office.

This resumption of the seals of the exchequer, which could no longer be left with Mr. Lowe, was forced upon Mr. Gladstone by his colleagues. From a fragmentary note, he seems to have thought of Mr. Goschen for the vacant post, “but deferring to the wishes of others,” he says, “I reluctantly consented to become chancellor of the exchequer.” The latest instance of a combination of this office with that of first lord of the treasury were Canning in 1827, and Peel in 1884-5.(293)

The correspondence on this mass of distractions is formidable, but, luckily for us it is now mere burnt-out cinder. The two protagonists of discord had been Mr. Lowe and Mr. Ayrton, and we may as well leave them with a few sentences of Mr. Gladstone upon the one, and to the other:—

Mr. Ayrton, he says, has caused Mr. Gladstone so much care and labour on many occasions, that if he had the same task to encounter in the case of a few other members of the cabinet, his office would become intolerable. But before a public servant of this class can properly be dismissed, there must be not only a sufficient case against him, but a case of which the sufficiency can be made intelligible and palpable to the world. Some of his faults are very serious, yet he is as towards the nation an upright, assiduous, and able functionary.

To Mr. Lowe, who had become home secretary, he writes (Aug. 13):—

I do not know whether the word “timid” was the right one for L——, but, at any rate, I will give you proof that I am not “timid”; though a coward in many respects I may be. I always hold that politicians are the men whom, as a rule, it is most difficult to comprehend, i.e. understand completely; and for my own part, I never have thus understood, or thought I understood, above one or two, though here and there I may get hold of an isolated idea about others. Such an idea comes to me about you. I think the clearness, power, and promptitude of your intellect are in one respect a difficulty and a danger to you. You see everything in a burning, almost a scorching light. The case reminds me of an incident some years back. Sir D. Brewster asked me to sit for my photograph in a black frost and a half mist in Edinburgh. I objected about the light. He said, This is the best light; it is all diffused, not concentrated. Is not your light too much concentrated? Does not its intensity darken the surroundings? By the surroundings, I mean the relations of the thing not only to other things but to persons, as our profession obliges us constantly to deal with persons. In every question flesh and blood are strong and real even if extraneous elements, and we cannot safely omit them from our thoughts.

Now, after all this impudence, let me try and do you a little more justice. You have held for a long time the most important office of the state. No man can do his duty in that office and be popular while he holds it. I could easily name the two worst chancellors of the exchequer of the last forty years; against neither of them did I ever hear a word while they were in (I might almost add, nor for them after they were out). “Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you.” You have fought for the public, tooth and nail. You have been under a storm of unpopularity; but not a fiercer one than I had to stand in 1860, when hardly any one dared to say a word for me; but certainly it was one of my best years of service, even though bad be the best. Of course, I do not say that this necessity of being unpopular should induce us to raise our unpopularity to the highest point. No doubt, both in policy and in Christian charity, it should make us very studious to mitigate and abate the causes as much as we can. This is easier for you than it was for me, as your temper is good, and mine not good.

While I am fault-finding, let me do a little more, and take another scrap of paper for the purpose. (I took only a scrap before, as I was determined, then, not to “afflict you above measure.”) I note, then, two things about you. Outstripping others in the race, you reach the goal or conclusion before them; and, being there, you assume that they are there also. This is unpopular. You are unpopular this very day with a poor wretch, whom you have apprised that he has lost his seat, and you have not told him how. Again, and lastly, I think you do not get up all things, but allow yourself a choice, as if politics were a flower-garden and we might choose among the beds; as Lord Palmerston did, who read foreign office and war papers, and let the others rust and rot. This, I think, is partially true, I do not say of your reading, but of your mental processes. You will, I am sure, forgive the levity and officiousness of this letter for the sake of its intention and will believe me always and sincerely yours.

Then at last he escaped from Downing Street to Hawarden:—

Aug. 11.—Off at 8.50 with a more buoyant spirit and greater sense of relief than I have experienced for many years on this, the only pleasant act of moving to me in the circuit of the year. This gush is in proportion to the measure of the late troubles and anxieties.

II

The reader will perhaps not thank me for devoting even a short page or two to a matter that made much clatter of tongue and pen in its day. The points are technical, minute, and to be forgotten as quickly as possible. But the thing was an episode, though a trivial one enough, in Mr. Gladstone’s public life, and paltry use was made of it in the way of groundless innuendo. Being first lord of the treasury, he took besides the office of chancellor of the exchequer. Was this a fresh acceptance of a place of profit under the crown? Did he thereby come within the famous statute of Anne and vacate his seat? Or was he protected by a provision in the Act of 1867, to the effect that if any member had been duly re-elected since his acceptance of any office referred to in the Act of Anne, he should be free to accept any other such office without further re-election? Mr. Gladstone had been re-elected after being first lord of the treasury; was he free to accept the office of chancellor of the exchequer in addition, without again submitting himself to his constituents? The policy and object of the provision were obvious and they were notorious. Unluckily, for good reasons not at all affecting this object, Mr. Disraeli inserted certain words, the right construction of which in our present case became the subject of keen and copious contention. The section that had been unmistakable before, now ran that a member holding an office of profit should not vacate his seat by his subsequent acceptance of any other office “in lieu of and in immediate succession the one to the other.”(294) Not a word was said in the debate on the clause as to the accumulation of offices, and nobody doubted that the intention of parliament was simply to repeal the Act of Anne, in respect of change of office by existing ministers. Was Mr. Gladstone’s a case protected by this section? Was the Act of 1867, which had been passed to limit the earlier statute, still to be construed in these circumstances as extending it?

Unsuspected hares were started in every direction. What is a first lord of the treasury? Is there such an office? Had it ever been named (up to that time) in a statute? Is the chancellor of the exchequer, besides being something more, also a commissioner of the treasury? If he is, and if the first lord is only the same, and if there is no legal difference between the lords of the treasury, does the assumption of the two parts by one minister constitute a case of immediate succession by one commissioner to another, or is the minister in Mr. Gladstone’s circumstances an indivisible personality as commissioner discharging two sets of duties? Then the precedents. Perceval was chancellor of the exchequer in 1809, when he accepted in addition the office of first lord with an increased salary, and yet he was held not to have vacated his seat.(295) Lord North in 1770, then chancellor of the exchequer, was appointed first lord on the resignation of the Duke of Grafton, and he at the same time retained his post of chancellor; yet no writ was ordered, and no re-election took place.

Into this discussion we need not travel. What concerns us here is Mr. Gladstone’s own share in the transaction. The plain story of what proved a complex affair, Mr. Gladstone recounted to the Speaker on August 16, in language that shows how direct and concise he could be when handling practical business:—

I had already sent you a preliminary intimation on the subject of my seat for Greenwich, before I received your letter of the 14th. I will now give you a more complete account of what has taken place. Knowing only that the law had been altered with the view of enabling the ministers to change offices without re-election, and that the combination of my two offices was a proper and common one, we had made no inquiry into the point of law, nor imagined there was any at the time when, deferring to the wish of others, I reluctantly consented to become C. of E. On Saturday last (Aug. 9) when I was at Osborne, the question was opened to me. I must qualify what I have stated by saying that on Friday afternoon some one had started the question fully into view; and it had been, on a summary survey, put aside. On Monday I saw Mr. Lambert, who I found had looked into it; we talked of it fully; and he undertook to get the materials of a case together. The Act throws the initiative upon me; but as the matter seemed open to discussion, I felt that I must obtain the best assistance, viz., that of the law officers. I advisedly abstained from troubling or consulting Sir E. May, because you might have a subsequent and separate part to take, and might wish to refer to him. Also the blundering in the newspapers showed that the question abounded in nice matter, and would be all the better understood from a careful examination of precedents. The law officers were out of town; but the solicitor-general [Jessel] was to come up in the later part of the week. It was not possible in so limited a time to get a case into perfect order; still I thought that, as the adverse argument lay on the surface, I had better have him consulted. I have had no direct communication with him. But Mr. Lambert with his usual energy put together the principal materials, and I jotted down all that occurred to me. Yesterday Mr. Lambert and my private secretary, Mr. Gurdon, who, as well as the solicitor to the treasury, had given attention to the subject, brought the matter fully before the solicitor-general. He has found himself able to write a full opinion on the questions submitted to him: 1. My office as C. of E. is an office of profit. 2. My commissionership of the treasury under the new patent in preparation is an “other office” under the meaning of the late Act. 3. I cannot be advised to certify to you any avoidance of the seat. Had the opinion of Sir G. Jessel been adverse, I should at once have ceased to urge the argument on the Act, strong as it appears to me to be; but in point of form I should have done what I now propose to do, viz., to have the case made as complete as possible, and to obtain the joint opinion of the law officers. Perhaps that of the chancellor should be added. Here ends my narrative, which is given only for your information, and to show that I have not been negligent in this matter, the Act requiring me to proceed “forthwith.”

Speaker Brand replied (Aug. 18) that, while speaking with reserve on the main point at issue, he had no hesitation in saying that he thought Mr. Gladstone was taking the proper course in securing the best legal advice in the matter. And he did not know what more could be done under present circumstances.

(M151) The question put to Jessel was “Whether Mr. Gladstone, having accepted the office of chancellor of the exchequer is not, under the circumstances stated, protected by the provision contained in section 52 of the Representation of the People Act, 1867, from vacating his seat?” Jessel answered “I am of opinion that he is so protected.” “I may be wrong,” this strong lawyer once said, “and sometimes am; but I have never any doubts.” His reasons on this occasion were as trenchant as his conclusion. Next came Coleridge, the attorney-general. He wrote to Mr. Gladstone on Sept. 1, 1873:—

I have now gone carefully through the papers as to your seat, and looked at the precedents, and though I admit that the case is a curious one, and the words of the statute not happily chosen, yet I have come clearly and without doubt to the same conclusion as Jessel, and I shall be quite prepared if need be to argue the case in that sense in parliament. Still it may be very proper, as you yourself suggest, that you should have a written and formal opinion of the law officers and Bowen upon it.(296)

Selborne volunteered the opposite view (Aug. 21), and did not see how it could be contended that Mr. Gladstone, being still a commissioner of the treasury under the then existing commission, took the office of the chancellor (with increase of pay) in lieu of, and in immediate succession to, the other office which he still continued to hold. A day or two later, Selborne, however, sent to Mr. Gladstone a letter addressed to himself by Baron Bramwell. In this letter that most capable judge and strong-headed man, said: “As a different opinion is I know entertained, I can’t help saying that I think it clear Mr. Gladstone has not vacated his seat. His case is within neither the spirit nor the letter of the statute.” He then puts his view in the plain English of which he was a master. The lord advocate (now Lord Young) went with the chancellor and against the English law officers. Lowe at first thought that the seat was not vacated, and then he thought that it was. “Sir Erskine May,” says Mr. Gladstone (Feb. 2, 1874), “has given a strong opinion that my seat is full.” Well might the minister say that he thought “the trial of this case would fairly take as long as Tichborne.” On September 21, the chancellor, while still holding to his own opinion, wrote to Mr. Gladstone:—

You have followed the right course (especially in a question which directly concerns the House of Commons) in obtaining the opinion of the law officers of the crown.... But having taken this proper course, and being disposed yourself to agree to the conclusions of your official advisers, you are clearly free from all personal fault, if you decide to act upon those conclusions and leave the House, when it meets, to deal with them in way either of assent or dissent, as it may think fit.

Coleridge and Jessel went on to the bench, and Sir Henry James and Sir William Harcourt were brought up from below the gangway to be attorney and solicitor. In November the new law officers were requested to try their hands. Taking the brilliant and subtle Charles Bowen into company, they considered the case, but did not venture (Dec. 1) beyond the singularly shy proposition that strong arguments might be used both in favour of and against the view that the seat was vacated.

Meanwhile the Times had raised the question immediately (Aug. 11), though not in adverse language. The unslumbering instinct of party had quickly got upon a scent, and two keen-nosed sleuth hounds of the opposition four or five weeks after Mr. Gladstone had taken the seals of the exchequer, sent to the Speaker a certificate in the usual form (Sept. 17) stating the vacancy at Greenwich, and requesting him to issue a writ for a new election. The Speaker reminded them in reply, that the law governing the issue of writs during the recess in cases of acceptance of office, required notification to him from the member accepting; and he had received no such notification.(297) Everybody knew that in case of an election, Mr. Gladstone’s seat was not safe, though when the time came he was in fact elected. The final state and the outlook could not be better described than in a letter from Lord Halifax to Mr. Gladstone (Dec. 9):—

Lord Halifax to Mr. Gladstone.

Dec. 9, 1873.—On thinking over the case as to your seat, I really think it is simple enough. I will put my ideas shortly for your benefit, or you may burn them. You did not believe that you had vacated your seat on accepting the office of chancellor of the exchequer, and you did not send notice to the Speaker as required by the Act of 1858. Were you right? The solicitor-general said that you were, in a deliberate opinion. The attorney-general concurred. The present law officers consider it so very doubtful that they will not give an opinion. The Speaker either from not having your notice, or having doubts, has not ordered a new writ. These are the facts. What should you do? Up to the meeting of parliament you clearly must act as if there was no doubt. If you do not, you almost admit being wrong. You must assume yourself to be right, that you are justified in the course which you have taken, and act consistently on that view. When parliament meets, I think the proper course would be for the Speaker to say that he had received a certificate of vacancy from two members, but not the notice from the member himself, and having doubts he referred the matter to the House, according to the Act. This ensures the priority of the question and calls on you to explain your not having sent the notice. You state the facts as above, place yourself in the hands of the House, and withdraw. I agree with what Bright said that the House of Commons will deal quite fairly in such a case. A committee will be appointed. I don’t think it can last very long, and you will be absent during its sitting. No important business can be taken during your absence, and I do not know that any evil will ensue from shortening the period of business before the budget. They may vote estimates, or take minor matters.

This sensible view of Lord Halifax and Mr. Bright may be set against Lord Selborne’s dogmatic assertion that a dissolution was the only escape. As for his further assertion about his never doubting that this was the determining cause of the dissolution, I can only say that in the mass of papers connected with the Greenwich seat and the dissolution, there is no single word in one of them associating in any way either topic with the other. Mr. Gladstone acted so promptly in the affair of the seat that both the Speaker of the House of Commons and Lord Selborne himself said that no fault could be found with him. His position before the House was therefore entirely straightforward. Finally Mr. Gladstone gave an obviously adequate and sufficient case for the dissolution both to the Queen and to the cabinet, and stated to at least three of his colleagues what was “the determining cause,” and this was not the Greenwich seat, but something wholly remote from it.(298)

III

The autumn recess began with attendance at Balmoral, of which a glimpse or two remain:—

To Mrs. Gladstone.

Balmoral, Aug. 22, 1873.—The Queen in a long conversation asked me to-day about you at Holyhead. She talked of many matters, and made me sit down, because odd to say I had a sudden touch of my enemy yesterday afternoon, which made me think it prudent to beg off from dining with her, and keep on my back taking a strong dose of sal volatile.... The Queen had occasion to speak about the Crown Princess, lauded her talents, did not care a pin for her (the Queen’s) opinion, used to care only for that of her father....

Aug. 24.—To-day I had a long talk. Nothing can be better than her humour. She is going to Fort William on the 8th. I leave on Saturday, but if I make my Highland walk it cannot be till Monday, and all next week will probably be consumed in getting me home.

Aug. 27.—I enclose a copy of my intimation to the Queen [the engagement of his eldest daughter], which has drawn forth in a few minutes the accompanying most charming letter from her. I think the original of this should be given to Agnes herself, as she will think it a great treasure; we keeping a copy. Is it not a little odd on our part, more than his, that (at least so far as I am concerned) we have allowed this great Aye to be said, without a single word on the subject of the means of support forthcoming? It is indeed a proceeding worthy of the times of the Acts of the Apostles! You perhaps know a little more than I do. Your family were not very worldly minded people, but you will remember that before our engagement, Stephen was spirited up, most properly, to put a question to me about means. Yesterday I was not so much struck at hearing nothing on the subject of any sublunary particular; but lo! again your letter of to-day arrives with all about the charms of the orphanage, but not a syllable on beef and mutton, bread and butter, which after all cannot be altogether dispensed with.

Of this visit Lord Granville wrote to him (Sept. 20): “The Queen told me last night that she had never known you so remarkably agreeable.” The journey closed with a rather marked proof of bodily soundness in a man nearly through his sixty-fourth year, thus recorded in his diary:—

Aug. 25.—[At Balmoral]. Walked thirteen miles, quite fresh. 26.—Walked 8-½ miles in 2 h. 10 m. Sept. 1.—Off at 9.15 [from Invercauld] to Castleton and Derry Lodge, driving. From the Lodge at 11.15, thirty-three miles to Kingussie on foot. Half an hour for luncheon, 1/4 hour waiting for the ponies (the road so rough on the hill); touched a carriageable road at 5, the top at 3. Very grand hill views, floods of rain on Speyside. Good hotel at Kingussie, but sorely disturbed by rats.

“Think,” he wrote to his daughter Mary from Naworth, “of my walking a good three and thirty miles last Monday, some of it the roughest ground I ever passed.” He was always wont to enjoy proofs of physical vigour, never forgetting how indispensable it is in the equipment of the politician for the athletics of public life. On his return home, he resumed the equable course of life associated with that happy place, though political consultations intruded:—

Sept. 6.—Settled down again at Hawarden, where a happy family party gathered to-day. 13.—Finished the long and sad but profoundly interesting task of my letter to Miss Hope-Scott [on her father]. Also sent her father’s letters (105) to her.... We finished cutting down a great beech. Our politicians arrived. Conversations with Bright, with Wolverton, with Granville, and with all three till long past twelve, when I prayed to leave off for the sake of the brain. 14.—Church morning and evening.... A stiff task for a half exhausted brain. But I cannot desist from a sacred task. Conversation with Lord Granville, Lord Wolverton, Mr. Bright. 15.—Church, 8-½ A.M. Spent the forenoon in conclave till two, after a preliminary conversation with Bright. Spent the evening also in conclave, we have covered a good deal of ground.... Cut down the half-cut alder. 16.—Final conversation with Granville, with Wolverton, and with Bright, who went last. 18.—Wood-cutting with Herbert, then went up to Stephen’s school feast, an animated and pretty scene. 21.—Read Manning’s letter to Archbishop of Armagh. There is in it to me a sad air of unreality; it is on stilts all through. 27.—Conversation with Mr. Palgrave chiefly on Symonds and the Greek mythology.... Cut a tree with Herbert. 28.—Conversation with Mr. Palgrave. He is tremendous, but in all other respects good and full of mental energy and activity, only the vent is rather large. 29.—Conversation with Mr. Palgrave, pretty stiff. Wood-cutting with Herbert. Wrote a rough mem. and computation for the budget of next year. I want eight millions to handle! Oct. 2.—Off at 8, London at 3.

The memorial letter on the departed friend of days long past, if less rich than the companion piece upon Lord Aberdeen, is still a graceful example of tender reminiscence and regret poured out in periods of grave melody.(299) It is an example, too, how completely in the press of turbid affairs, he could fling off the load and at once awake afresh the thoughts and associations that in truth made up his inmost life.

(M152) Next came the autumn cabinets, with all their embarrassments, so numerous that one minister tossed a scrap across the table to another, “We ought to have impeached Dizzy for not taking office last spring.” Disraeli had at least done them one service. An election took place at Bath in October. The conservative leader wrote a violent letter in support of the conservative candidate. “For nearly five years,” said Mr. Disraeli, “the present ministers have harassed every trade, worried every profession and assailed or menaced every class, institution, and species of property in the country. Occasionally they have varied this state of civil warfare by perpetrating some job which outraged public opinion, or by stumbling into mistakes which have been always discreditable and sometimes ruinous. All this they call a policy and seem quite proud of it; but the country has I think made up its mind to close this career of plundering and blundering.”(300) Mr. Gladstone described this curious outburst as “Mr. Disraeli’s incomparable stroke on our behalf,” and in fact its effect on public opinion was to send the liberal candidate to the head of the poll. But the victory at Bath stood solitary in the midst of reverses.

As for the general legislative business of the coming session, Mr. Gladstone thought it impossible to take up the large subject of the extension of the county franchise, but they might encourage Mr. Trevelyan to come forward with it on an early day, and give him all the help they could. Still the board was bare, the meal too frugal. They were afraid of proposing a change in the laws affecting the inheritance of land, or reform of London government, or a burials bill, or a county government bill. The home secretary was directed to draw up a bill for a group of difficult questions as to employers and employed. No more sentences were to be provided for Mr. Disraeli’s next electioneering letter.

December was mainly spent at Hawarden. A pleasant event was his eldest daughter’s marriage, of which he wrote to the Duke of Argyll:—

The kindness of all from the Queen down, to the cottagers and poor folks about us, has been singular and most touching. Our weather for the last fortnight has been delightful, and we earnestly hope it may hold over to-morrow. I have not yet read Renan’s apôtres. My opinion of him is completely dual. His life of Our Lord I thought a piece of trumpery; his work Sur les langues sémitiques most able and satisfactory in its manner and discussion.

The notes in the diary bring us up to the decision that was to end the great ministry:—

Dec. 1.—Dined at Mr. Forster’s and went to Drury Lane to see in Antony and Cleopatra how low our stage has fallen. Miss K. V. in the ballet, dressed in black and gold, danced marvellously. 2.—To Windsor, and had a long audience of the Queen. Dined with H.M. Whist in evening. 3.—Castle. Prayers at 9; St. George’s at 10.30. Off to Twickenham at 11.25. Visited Mr. Bohn, and saw his collection; enormous and of very great interest. Then to Pembroke Lodge, luncheon and long conversation with Lord Russell.... Read The Parisians. 6.—Packing, etc., and off to Hawarden. 13.—Walked with Stephen Glynne. I opened to him that I must give up my house at or about the expiry of the present government. 15.—Read Montalembert’s Life; also my article of 1852 on him. Mr. Herbert (R.A.) came and I sat to him for a short time. 17.—Finished Life of Montalembert. It was a pure and noble career personally; in a public view unsatisfactory; the pope was a worm in the gourd all through. His oratory was great. 19.—With Herbert set about making a walk from Glynne Cottage to W. E. G. door. 20.—Sat to Mr. Herbert. Worked on version of the “Shield” [Iliad]. Worked on new path. 23.—Sat 1-3/4 hours to Mr. Herbert. Worked on correcting version of the Shield and finished writing it out. Read Aristophanes. 26.—24 to dinner, a large party gathered for the marriage. 27.—The house continued full. At 10.30 the weather broke into violent hail and rain. It was the only speck upon the brightness of the marriage. 29.—Sixty-four years completed to-day—what have they brought me? A weaker heart, stiffened muscles, thin hairs; other strength still remains in my frame. 31.—Still a full house. The year ends as it were in tumult. My constant tumult of business makes other tumult more sensible.... I cannot as I now am, get sufficiently out of myself to judge myself, and unravel the knots of being and doing of which my life seems to be full.

Jan. 1, 1874.—A little Iliad and Odyssey. 2.—Tree-cutting. Read Fitzjames Stephen on Parliamentary Government, not wizard-like. (No. 2.) 6.—Read The Parisians, vol. iv., Muir’s beautiful version of Gray’s Elegy, and the Dizzy pamphlet on the crisis. 8.—Revised and sent off the long letter to Lord Granville on the political situation which I wrote yesterday. Axe work. 9.—Tree-cutting with Herbert. Sent off with some final touches my version of the Shield and preface. 10.—Mr. Burnett [his agent] died at one A.M. Requiescat. I grieve over this good and able man sincerely, apart from the heavy care and responsibility of replacing him, which must fall on me of necessity. 15.—Worked with Herbert; we finished gravelling the path. It rather strains my chest. 16.—Off to town after an early breakfast. Reached C. H. T. about 3 P.M. Saw Lord Granville and others.

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XIV. The Dissolution. (1874)

... Cette prétendue sagacité qui se croit profonde, quand elle suppose partout des intrigues savantes, et met de petits drames arrangés a la place de la vérité. II n’y a pas tant de préméditation dans les affaires humaines, et leur cours est plus naturel, que ne le croit le vulgaire.—GUIZOT.

The spurious sagacity that thinks itself deep, because it everywhere takes for granted all sorts of knowing intrigues, and puts little artful dramas in the place of truth. There is less premeditation in human affairs, and their course is more natural than people commonly believe.

I

In the summer of 1873 before leaving London for Hawarden, Mr. Gladstone sent for the chairman of the board of inland revenue and for the head of the finance department of the treasury; he directed them to get certain information into order for him. His requests at once struck these experienced officers with a surmise that he was nursing some design of dealing with the income-tax. Here are two entries from his diary:—

Aug. 11, 1873.—Saw Mr. Cardwell, to whom at the war office I told in deep secrecy my ideas of the possible finance of next year, based upon the abolition of income-tax and sugar duties, with partial compensation from spirit and death duties. Sept. 29.—Wrote a rough mem. and computation for budget of next year. I want eight millions to handle!

So much for the charitable tale that he only bethought him of the income-tax, when desperately hunting for a card to play at a general election.

The prospect was dubious and dark. To Mr. Bright he wrote from Hawarden (Aug. 14):—

MY DEAR BRIGHT,—(Let us bid farewell to Misters.) ... As to the parliamentary future of the question of education, we had better talk when we meet. I remember your saying well and wisely how we should look to the average opinion of the party. What we want at present is a positive force to carry us onward as a body. I do not see that this can be got out of local taxation, or out of the suffrage (whether we act in that matter or not, and individually I am more yes than no), or out of education. It may possibly, I think, be had out of finance. Of course I cannot as yet see my way on that subject; but until it is cleared, nothing else will to me be clear. If it can be worked into certain shapes, it may greatly help to mould the rest, at least for the time. I think the effect of the reconstruction may be described as follows: First, we have you. Secondly, we have emerged from the discredit and disgrace of the exposures by an administration of mild penal justice, which will be complete all round when Monsell has been disposed of. Thirdly, we have now before us a clean stage for the consideration of measures in the autumn. We must, I think, have a good bill of fare, or none. If we differ on the things to be done, this may end us in a way at least not dishonourable. If we agree on a good plan, it must come to good, whether we succeed or fail with it. Such are my crude reflections, and such my outlook for the future. Let me again say how sensible I am of the kindness, friendship, and public spirit with which you have acted in the whole of this matter.

In the early part of the year his mind was drawing towards a decision of moment. On January 8, 1874, he wrote a letter to Lord Granville, and the copy of it is docketed, “First idea of Dissolution.” It contains a full examination of the actual case in which they found themselves; it is instructive on more than one constitutional point, and it gives an entirely intelligible explanation of a step that was often imputed to injurious and low-minded motives:—

Hawarden, Jan. 8, 1874.—The signs of weakness multiply, and for some time have multiplied, upon the government, in the loss of control over the legislative action of the House of Lords, the diminution of the majority in the House of Commons without its natural compensation in increase of unity and discipline, and the almost unbroken series of defeats at single elections in the country.(301) In truth the government is approaching, though I will not say it has yet reached, the condition in which it will have ceased to possess that amount of power which is necessary for the dignity of the crown and the welfare of the country; and in which it might be a godsend if some perfectly honourable difference of opinion among ourselves on a question requiring immediate action were to arise, and to take such a course as to release us collectively from the responsibilities of office.

The general situation being thus unfavourable, the ordinary remedies are not available. A ministry with a majority, and with that majority not in rebellion, could not resign on account of adverse manifestations even of very numerous single constituencies, without making a precedent, and constitutionally a bad precedent; and only a very definite and substantive difficulty could warrant resignation without dissolution, after the proceedings of the opposition in March last, when they, or at any rate their leaders and their whips, brought the Queen into a ministerial crisis, and deserted her when there. If then we turn to consider dissolution, what would be its results? In my opinion the very best that could happen would be that we should come back with a small majority composed of Irish home rulers and a decided minority without them; while to me it seems very doubtful whether even with home rulers counted in, we should command a full half of the House of Commons. In a word, dissolution means either immediate death, or at the best death a little postponed, and the party either way shattered for the time. For one I am anxious to continue where we are, because I am very loath to leave the party in its present menacing condition, without having first made every effort in our power to avert this public mischief.

If I have made myself intelligible up to this point, the question that arises is, can we make out such a course of policy for the session, either in the general conduct of business, or in some departments and by certain measures, as will with reasonable likelihood reanimate some portion of that sentiment in our favour, which carried us in a manner so remarkable through the election of 1868? I discuss the matter now in its aspect towards party: it is not necessary to make an argument to show that our option can only be among things all of which are sound in principle. First, then, I do not believe that we can find this recovery of vital force in our general administration of public business. As men, notwithstanding the advantage drawn from Bright’s return, the nation appears to think that it has had enough of us, that our lease is out. It is a question of measures then: can we by any measures materially mend the position of the party for an impending election?...

Looking to legislation, there are but three subjects which appear to me to be even capable of discussion in the view I have presented. They are local taxation, the county suffrage, and finance. I am convinced it is not in our power to draw any great advantage, as a party, from the subject of local taxation.... Equally strong is my opinion with respect to the party bearings of the question of the county franchise. We have indeed already determined not to propose it as a government. Had we done so, a case would have opened at once, comfortably furnished not with men opposing us on principle, like a part of those who opposed in 1866, but with the men of pretext and the men of disappointment, with intriguers and with egotists. And I believe that in the present state of opinion they would gain their end by something like the old game of playing redistribution against the franchise....

Can we then look to finance as supplying what we want? This is the only remaining question. It does not admit, as yet, of a positive answer, but it admits conditionally of a negative answer. It is easy to show what will prevent our realising our design through the finance of the year. We cannot do it, unless the circumstances shall be such as to put it in our power, by the possession of a very wide margin, to propose something large and strong and telling upon both the popular mind and the leading elements of the constituency.... We cannot do it, without running certain risks of the kind that were run in the budget of 1853: I mean without some impositions, as well as remissions, of taxes. We cannot do it, without a continuance of the favourable prospects of harvest and of business. Lastly, we cannot do it unless we can frame our estimates in a manner to show our desire to adhere to the principles of economy which we proposed and applied with such considerable effect in 1868-70. But, subject to the fulfilment of these conditions, my opinion is that we can do it: can frame a budget large enough and palpably beneficial enough, not only to do much good to the country, but sensibly to lift the party in the public view and estimation. And this, although a serious sum will have to be set apart, even in the present year, for the claims of local taxation....

If we can get from three-quarters of a million upwards towards a million off the naval and military estimates jointly, then as far as I can judge we shall have left the country no reason to complain, and may proceed cheerily with our work; though we should not escape the fire of the opposition for having failed to maintain the level of Feb. 1870; which indeed we never announced as our ultimatum of reduction. I have had no communication with those of our colleagues who would most keenly desire reductions; I might say, with any one.... I will only add that I think a broad difference of opinion among us on such a question as this would be a difference of the kind which I described near the opening of this letter, as what might be in certain circumstances, however unwelcome in itself, an escape from a difficulty otherwise incapable of solution.

Let me now wind up this long story by saying that my desire in framing it has been simply to grasp the facts, and to set aside illusions which appear to me to prevail among sections of the liberal party, nowhere so much as in that section which believes itself to be the most enlightened. If we can only get a correct appreciation of the position, I do not think we shall fail in readiness to suit our action to it; but I am bound to confess myself not very sanguine, if the best come to the best, as to immediate results, though full of confidence, if we act aright, as to the future and early reward.

II

(M153) In notes written in the last year of his life, Mr. Gladstone adds a detail of importance to the considerations set out in the letter to Lord Granville. The reader will have observed that among the conditions required for his operation on the income-tax he names economic estimates. In this quarter, he tells us, grave difficulties arose:—

No trustworthy account of the dissolution of parliament which took place early in 1874 has ever been published. When I proposed the dissolution to the cabinet, they acceded to it without opposition, or, I think, even discussion. The actual occasion of the measure was known, I think, only to Lord Granville and Lord Cardwell with myself, it having a sufficient warrant from other sources.

In 1871, the year of the abolition of purchase and other important army reforms, I had, in full understanding with Cardwell, made a lengthened speech, in which I referred to the immediate augmentations of military expenditure which the reforms demanded, but held out to the House of Commons the prospect of compensating abatements at early dates through the operation of the new system of relying considerably upon reserves for imperial defence.

When Cardwell laid before me at the proper time, in view of the approaching session, his proposed estimates for 1874-5, I was strongly of opinion that the time had arrived for our furnishing by a very moderate reduction of expenditure on the army, some earnest of the reality of the promise made in 1871 which had been so efficacious in procuring the enlargement that we had then required. Cardwell, though not an extravagant minister, objected to my demand of (I think) £200,000. I conferred with Granville, who, without any direct knowledge of the subject, took my side, and thought Cardwell would give way. But he continued to resist; and, viewing the age of the parliament, I was thus driven to the idea of dissolution, for I regarded the matter as virtually involving the whole question of the value of our promises, an anticipation which has proved to be correct. Cardwell entered readily into the plan of dissolving, and moreover thought that if my views carried the day with the constituencies, this would enable him to comply.

The papers in my hands confirm Mr. Gladstone’s recollection on this part of the transaction, except that Mr. Goschen, then at the head of the admiralty, was to some extent in the same position as Mr. Cardwell. The prime minister was in active controversy with both the great spending departments, and with little chance of prevailing. It was this controversy that opened the door for immediate dissolution, though the general grounds for dissolution at some near time were only too abundant. Here is his note of the position,—in a minute addressed to Mr. Cardwell and Mr. Goschen:—

Jan. 22, 1874.—We arrived yesterday at the conclusion that, apart from this or that shade of view as to exact figure of the estimates, the measure now proposed stood well on its own general grounds. This being so, after consulting Lord Granville, and indeed at his suggestion, I have in a preparatory letter to the Queen founded myself entirely on general grounds. This being so, I would propose to consider the point raised between us as one adjourned, though with a perfect knowledge in each of our minds as to the views of the others. My statement to the cabinet must be on the same basis as my statement to the Queen. The actual decision of the estimates would stand over from to-morrow’s cabinet, until we saw our way as to their position and as to the time for their production. I am sure I might reckon on your keeping the future as far as possible open, and unprejudiced by contracts for works or for building or construction. Any reference to economy which I make to-morrow will be in general terms such as I propose to use in an address. If I have made myself clear and you approve, please to signify it on this paper, or to speak to me as you may prefer. I am reluctant to go out, with my chest still tender, in the fog.

Cardwell, in the few words of his minute in reply makes no objection. Mr. Goschen says: “I quite take the same view as you do. Indeed, I had proposed myself to ask you whether what had passed between us had not better remain entirely confidential for the present, as it is best not to state differences where the statement of them is not indispensable.”

The diary for these important days is interesting:—

Jan.17, ’74.—The prospects of agreement with the two departments on estimates are for the present bad. 18.—This day I thought of dissolution. Told Bright of it. In evening at dinner told Granville and Wolverton. All seemed to approve. My first thought of it was as an escape from a difficulty. I soon saw on reflection that it was the best thing in itself. 19.—Confined all day in bed with tightness on the chest. Much physicking. 20.—Bed all day. I spent the chief part of the day and evening in reflection on our “crisis,” and then in preparing a letter to go to the Queen for her information at once, and a long address for an unnamed constituency—almost a pamphlet—setting out the case of the government in an immediate appeal to the country. 21.—Altered and modified letter to the Queen, which went off. Came down at two. Much conversation to-day on the question of my own seat. 23.—Cabinet 12-1/4-4. Address further amended there on partial perusal. In evening corrected proofs of address, which runs well. A very busy stirring day of incessant action.

In the letter of Jan. 21 to the Queen, Mr. Gladstone recapitulates the general elements of difficulty, and apprises her Majesty that it will be his duty at the meeting of the cabinet fixed for the 23rd, to recommend his colleagues humbly and dutifully to advise an immediate dissolution, as the best means of putting an end to the disadvantage and the weakness of a false position. He trusts that the Queen may be pleased to assent. The Queen (Jan. 22) acknowledged the receipt of his letter “with some surprise,” as she had understood him to say when last at Windsor that he did not think of recommending a dissolution until the end of the session or later. But she expressed her “full appreciation of the difficulties of Mr. Gladstone’s position,” and assented, thinking that “in the present circumstances it would be desirable to obtain an expression of the national opinion.”

The next day (23rd) the cabinet met, and Mr. Gladstone in the evening reported the proceedings to the Queen:—

To the Queen.

Jan. 23, 1874.—... Mr. Gladstone laid before the cabinet a pretty full outline of the case as to the weakness of the government since the crisis of last March, and the increase of that weakness, especially of late, from the unfavourable character of local indications; as to the false position in which both the crown and the House of Commons are placed when there can be no other government than the one actually existing; finally, as to the present calls of business and prospects of the country, especially as to its finance, which are such as in Mr. Gladstone’s judgment, to warrant the presentation of a very favourable picture of what may be effected with energy and prudence during the present year. In this picture is included, as Mr. Gladstone on Wednesday intimated might be the case, the total repeal of the income-tax. The cabinet unanimously concurred, upon a review of its grounds, in the wisdom of the proposed measure. It is as yet profoundly secret, but to-morrow morning it will be placed before the world with a lengthened and elaborate exposition, in the shape of an address from Mr. Gladstone to his constituents at Greenwich. There can be no doubt that a large portion of the public will at first experience that emotion of surprise which your Majesty so very naturally felt on receiving Mr. Gladstone’s letter. But, judging from such indications as have reached them, the cabinet are disposed to anticipate that this course will be approved by all those who are in any degree inclined to view their general policy with sympathy or favour. Large portions, and the most important portions, of Mr. Gladstone’s address were read to and considered by the cabinet, and it was in some respects amended at the suggestion of his esteemed colleagues. It is, however, so framed as not to commit them equally with himself, except only as to the remissions of taxes and aid to local rates contemplated in the finance of the year. This method of stating generally the case of the government in substance corresponds to the proceedings of Sir R. Peel in 1834-5, when he addressed the electors of Tamworth. Before concluding, Mr. Gladstone will humbly offer to your Majesty a brief explanation. When he last adverted to the duration of the present parliament, his object was to remind your Majesty of the extreme point to which that duration might extend. When he had the honour of seeing your Majesty at Windsor,(302) the course of the local elections had been more favourable, and Mr. Gladstone had not abandoned the hope of retaining sufficient strength for the due conduct of affairs in the present House. On this question, the events of the last few weeks and the prospects of the present moment have somewhat tended to turn the scale in his mind and that of his colleagues.(303) But finally it was not within his power, until the fourth quarter of the financial year had well begun, to forecast the financial policy and measures which form a necessary and indeed the most vital part of the matter to be stated to the public. Immediately after he had been able sufficiently to ripen his own thoughts on the matter, he did not scruple to lay them before your Majesty; and your Majesty had yourself in one sense contributed to the present conclusion by forcibly pointing out to Mr. Gladstone on one or more occasions that in the event of difficulty, under the present peculiar circumstances, no alternative remained except a dissolution. The mild weather is very favourable to Mr. Gladstone, and if as he has prayed there shall be a council on Monday, he hopes to have the honour of coming down to Osborne.

To his eldest son he wrote on the following day:—

We here of the cabinet(304) and the whips are in admirable spirits. We dissolve on Finance. The surplus will be over five millions. We promise as in our judgment practicable,—1. Pecuniary aid to local taxation, but with reform of it. 2. Repeal of the income-tax. 3. Some great remission in the class of articles of consumption. (This last remission probably means sugar, but nothing is to be said by any member of the government as to choice of the article.) We make it a question of confidence on the prospective budget. As far as we can judge, friends will much approve our course, although for the public there may at first be surprise, and the enemy will be furious.

III

The prime minister’s manifesto to his constituents at Greenwich was elaborate and sustained. In substance it did no more than amplify the various considerations that he had set forth in his letter to Lord Granville. The pith of it was a promise to diminish local taxation, and to repeal the income-tax. At the same time marked relief was to be given to the general consumer in respect of articles of popular consumption. One effective passage dealt with the charge that the liberal party had endangered the institutions of the country. “It is time,” said Mr. Gladstone, “to test this trite and vague allegation. There has elapsed a period of forty, or more exactly forty-three years, since the liberal party acquired the main direction of public affairs. This followed another period of about forty years beginning with the outbreak of the revolutionary war, during which there had been an almost unbroken rule of their opponents, who claimed and were reputed to be the great preservers of the institutions of the country.” He then invited men to judge by general results, and declared that the forty years of tory rule closing in 1830 left institutions weaker than it had found them, whereas the liberal term of forty years left throne, laws, and institutions not weaker but much stronger. The address was a fine bold composition, but perhaps it would have been more effective with a public that was impatient and out of humour, if it had been shorter.

(M154) The performance was styled by his rival “a prolix narrative,” but it is said that in spite of this Mr. Disraeli read it with much alarm. He thought its freshness and boldness would revive Mr. Gladstone’s authority, and carry the elections. His own counter-manifesto was highly artificial. He launched sarcasms about the Greenwich seat, about too much energy in domestic legislation, and too little in foreign policy; about an act of folly or of ignorance rarely equalled in dealing with the straits of Malacca (though for that matter not one elector in a hundred thousand had ever heard of this nefarious act). While absolving the prime minister himself, “certainly at present,” from hostility to our national institutions and the integrity of the empire, he drew a picture of unfortunate adherents—some assailed the monarchy, others impugned the independence of the House of Lords, while others would relieve parliament altogether from any share in the government of one portion of the United Kingdom; others, again, urged Mr. Gladstone to pursue his peculiar policy by disestablishing the anglican as he has despoiled the Irish church; even trusted colleagues in his cabinet openly concurred with them in their desire altogether to thrust religion from the place which it ought to occupy in national education. What is remarkable in Disraeli’s address is that to the central proposal of his adversary he offered no objection. As for remission of taxation, he said, that would be the course of any party or any ministry. As for the promise of reduced local burdens and the abolition of the income-tax, why, these “were measures which the conservative party have always favoured and which the prime minister and his friends have always opposed.”

By critics of the peevish school who cry for better bread than can be made of political wheat, Mr. Gladstone’s proffer to do away with the income-tax has been contumeliously treated as dangling a shameful bait. Such talk is surely pharisaic stuff. As if in 1852 Disraeli in his own address had not declared that the government would have for its first object to relieve the agricultural interest from certain taxes. Was that a bribe? As if Peel in 1834-5 had not set forth in the utmost detail all the measures that he intended to submit to parliament if the constituencies would give him a majority. Was this to drive an unprincipled bargain? As if every minister does not always go to the country on promises, and as if the material of any promise could be more legitimate than a readjustment of taxation. The proceeding was styled a sordid huckstering of a financial secret for a majority. Why was it more sordid to seek a majority for abolition of the income-tax, than it was sordid in Peel in 1841 to seek a majority for corn laws, or in whigs and Manchester men to seek to win upon free trade? Why is it an ignoble bargain to promise to remove the tax from income, and pure statesmanship to remove the tax from bread? “Give us a majority,” said Mr. Gladstone, “and we will do away with income-tax, lighten local burdens, and help to free the breakfast table.” If people believed him, what better reason could they have than such a prospect as this for retaining him in the place of their chief ruler?

IV

Parliament was dissolved on January 26, and the contending forces instantly engaged. Mr. Gladstone did not spare himself:—

Jan. 26, ’74.—8-3/4-5-3/4. To Osborne. Audience of H.M. who quite comprehends the provisional character of the position. ... Boundless newspaper reading. 28.—2-5. To Greenwich. Spoke an hour to 5000. An enthusiastic meeting, but the general prospects are far from clear.(305) 31.—-Woolwich meeting. The meeting disturbed by design was strangely brought round again. Feb. 2.—Third great meeting and speech of an hour at New Cross for Deptford. Much enthusiasm and fair order. 3.—Many telegrams and much conversation with Granville and Wolverton in the evening. The general purport was first indifferent, then bad. My own election for Greenwich after Boord the distiller, is more like a defeat than a victory, though it places me in parliament again. A wakeful night, but more I believe from a little strong coffee drunk incautiously, than from the polls, which I cannot help and have done all in my power to mend.

The Greenwich seat, the cause of such long perturbation, was saved after all, but as Mr. Gladstone wrote to a defeated colleague, “In some points of view it is better to be defeated outright, than to be pitched in like me at Greenwich.” The numbers were Boord (C.) 6193, Gladstone (L.) 5968, Liardet (C.) 5561, Langley (L.) 5255.

(M155) The conservative reaction was general. Scotland and Wales still returned a liberal majority, but even in these strongholds a breach was made—a net loss of 3 in Wales, of 9 in Scotland. From the English counties 145 tories were returned, and no more than 27 liberals, a loss of 13. In the greater boroughs, hitherto regarded as staunchly ministerial, some of the most populous returned tories. The metropolitan elections went against the government, and 7 seats were lost—three in the city, one in Westminster, in both cases by immense majorities. The net liberal loss in the English boroughs was 32. In England and Wales the tory majority was 105; in Great Britain it stood at 83. When all was over, the new House contained a conservative majority of 48, or on another estimate, of 50, but really, in Mr. Gladstone’s words, “of much greater strength.”

Numbers, as Mr. Gladstone said afterwards, did not exhibit the whole measure of the calamity. An extraordinary portent arose in that quarter from which so many portents spring. “The liberal majority reckoned to have been returned from Ireland was at once found to be illusory. Out of the 105 members the liberals were little more than a dozen. The period immediately following the Church Act and Land Act had been chosen as one appropriate for a formal severance of the Irish national party from the general body of British liberals. Their number was no less than fifty-eight, an actual majority of the Irish representation. They assumed the name of home rulers, and established a separate parliamentary organisation. On some questions of liberal opinion co-operation was still continued. But, as regards the party, the weight of the home rulers clearly told more in favour of the conservative ministry than of the opposition; and the liberal party would have been stronger not weaker had the entire body been systematically absent.”(306) Before the election was over, Mr. Chichester Fortescue had warned him that he expected defeat in the county of Louth, for which he had sat ever since 1847; the defeat came. Mr. Gladstone wrote to him (Feb. 11):—

I receive with great concern your dark prognostication of the result of the Louth election. It would be so painful in a public view with regard to the gratitude of Irishmen, that I will still hope for a better result. But with reference to the latter part of your letter, I at once write to say that in the double event of your rejection and your wish, I consider your claim to a peerage indisputable. It would be hard to name the man who has done for Ireland all that you have done, or any man that knew the greatest Irish questions as you know them.

Mr. Parnell, by the way, was not elected for Meath until April 1875.

V

As the adverse verdict became more and more emphatic, Mr. Gladstone stated to the Queen (Feb. 13) what was the bias of his mind, on the question whether the expiring government should await its sentence from parliament. He had no doubt, he said, that this course was the one most agreeable to usage, and to the rules of parliamentary government; any departure from it could only be justified upon exceptional grounds. He was not, however, clear that this case, like that of 1868, was to be treated as exceptional, partly by reason of prevalent opinion, partly because it should be considered what is fair to an incoming administration with reference to the business, especially the financial business, of the year. Lord Granville from the first seems to have been against waiting for formal decapitation by the new House of Commons. To him Mr. Gladstone wrote (Feb. 7):—

I presume you will answer Bismarck’s kind telegram. Please to mention me in your reply or not as you think proper. As to the impending crisis of our fate, one important element, I admit, will be the feeling of the party. I have asked Peel (whose first feeling seems rather to be with you) to learn what he can. I tend to harden in my own view, principle and precedent seeming to me alike clear. There are four precedents of our own time—1835, 1841, 1852, 1859, under three ministers. The only case the other way is that of 1868 of which the circumstances were altogether peculiar. But I admit it to be very doubtful whether we should get beyond the address. On the other hand I admit freely that I have no title to press my view beyond a certain point.

(M156) “It is parliament,” he argued, “not the constituencies, that ought to dismiss the government, and the proper function of the House of Commons cannot be taken from it without diminishing somewhat in dignity and authority.” There would be reproach either way, he said; either it would be clinging to office, or it would be running away. To run away was in every circumstance of politics the thing to Mr. Gladstone most unbearable. According to Sir Robert Phillimore (Feb. 8) “Gladstone would have met parliament but his colleagues objected, though it seems they would have stood by him if he had pressed them to do so; but as he did not mean, or was not going, to fight in the van of opposition, he thought it unfair to press them.”

Feb. 16, ’74.—Cabinet dinner 8-12. It went well. I did something towards snapping the ties and winding out of the coil. Conversation afterwards with Granville, on the flags up and down. Then with Wolverton. To bed at 1-3/4, but lay three hours awake (rare with me) with an overwrought brain. ... 17.—12-½-6. Went to Windsor, and on behalf of the cabinet resigned. Took with me Merchant of Venice and Thomas à Kempis, each how admirable in its way!(307) 20.—Went by 5.10 to Windsor, final audience and kissed hands. Her Majesty very kind, the topics of conversation were of course rather limited. 21.—I cleared my room in Downing Street and bade it farewell, giving up my keys except the cabinet key. 28.—Set aside about 300 vols. of pamphlets for the shambles. March 3.—I have given up all my keys; quitted Downing Street a week ago; not an official box remains. But I have still the daily visit of a kind private secretary; when that drops all is over. 5.—Hamilton paid me his last visit. To-morrow I encounter my own correspondence single-handed.

The Queen repeated a former proposal of a peerage. In returning some submissions for her approval, she wished “likewise to record her offer to Mr. Gladstone of a mark of her recognition of his services which, however, he declines from motives which she fully appreciates.” Mr. Gladstone writes to his brother Sir Thomas (Feb. 13):—

Accept my best thanks for your kind note of yesterday. My reply to the Queen was first made twelve months ago when we proposed to resign simply from the failure of a great measure in H. of C. I repeated it this year with similar expressions of gratitude, but with the remark that even if my mind had been open on the question, I did not think I could have accepted anything while under that national condemnation which has been emphatically enough pronounced at the elections. I may be wrong in my view of the matter generally; but I can only judge for the best. I do not see that I am wanted or should be of use in the House of Lords, and there would be more discrepancy between rank and fortune, which is a thing on the whole rather to be deprecated. On the other hand, I know that the line I have marked out for myself in the H. of C. is one not altogether easy to hold; but I have every disposition to remain quiet there, and shall be very glad if I can do so.

VI

Letters from two of his colleagues explain the catastrophe. The shrewd Lord Halifax says to him (Feb 12):—

As far as I can make out people are frightened—the masters were afraid of their workmen, manufacturers afraid of strikes, churchmen afraid of the nonconformists, many afraid of what is going on in France and Spain—and in very unreasoning fear have all taken refuge in conservatism. Ballot enabled them to do this without apparently deserting their principles and party. Things in this country as elsewhere are apt to run for a time in opposite directions. The reaction from the quiet of Palmerston’s government gave you strength to remove four or five old-standing abuses which nobody had ventured to touch for years. The feelings of those who suffer from the removal of abuses are always stronger than those of the general public who are benefited. Gratitude for the Reform bill and its sequel of improvements hardly gave a liberal majority in 1835, and gratitude for the removal of the Irish church, purchase, etc., has not given us a majority in 1874.

(M157) Mr. Bright wrote to him that as things had turned out, it would perhaps have been wiser first to secure the budget; with that and better organisation, the result might have been better three or six months later. In Lancashire, said Bright, publicans and Irishmen had joined together, one for delirium tremens and the other for religious education. The 25th clause and Mr. Forster’s obstinacy, he added, had done much to wreck the ship. Mr. Gladstone’s own diagnosis was not very different. To his brother Robertson he wrote (Feb. 6):—

For many years in the House of Commons I have had more fighting than any other man. For the last five years I have had it almost all, and of it a considerable part has been against those “independent” liberals whose characters and talents seem to be much more appreciated by the press and general public, than the characters and talents of quieter members of the party. I do not speak of such men as ——, who leave office or otherwise find occasion to vindicate their independence, and vote against us on the questions immediately concerned. These men make very little noise and get very little applause. But there is another and more popular class of independent liberals who have been represented by the Daily News, and who have been one main cause of the weakness of the government, though they (generally) and their organ have rallied to us too late during the election. We have never recovered from the blow which they helped to strike on the Irish Education bill.

But more immediately operative causes have determined the elections. I have no doubt what is the principal. We have been borne down in a torrent of gin and beer. Next to this has been the action of the Education Act of 1870, and the subsequent controversies. Many of the Roman catholics have voted against us because we are not denominational; and many of the dissenters have at least abstained from voting because we are. Doubtless there have been other minor agencies; but these are the chief ones. The effect must be our early removal from office. For me that will be a very great change, for I do not intend to assume the general functions of leader of the opposition, and my great ambition or design will be to spend the remainder of my days, if it please God, in tranquillity, and at any rate in freedom from political strife.

When a short idle attempt was made in the new parliament to raise a debate upon the date and circumstances of the dissolution, Disraeli used language rightly called by Mr. Gladstone “generous.” “The right honourable gentleman’s friends,” he said, “were silent, and I must confess I admire their taste and feeling. If I had been a follower of a parliamentary chief as eminent, even if I thought he had erred, I should have been disposed rather to exhibit sympathy than to offer criticism. I should remember the great victories which he had fought and won; I should remember his illustrious career; its continuous success and splendour, not its accidental or even disastrous mistakes.”(308)

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One word upon the place of this election in our financial history. In 1874, the prosperity of the country and the movement of the revenue gave an opportunity for repeal of the income-tax. That opportunity never recurred. The election of 1874 was the fall of the curtain; the play that had begun in 1842 came to its last scene. It marked the decision of the electorate that the income-tax—introduced in time of peace by Peel and continued by Mr. Gladstone, for the purpose of simplifying the tariff and expanding trade—should be retained for general objects of government and should be a permanent element of our finance. It marked at the same time the prospect of a new era of indefinitely enlarged expenditure, with the income-tax as a main engine for raising ways and means. Whether this decision was wise or unwise, we need not here discuss.

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I. Retirement From Leadership. (1874-1875)

“ἐγὼ μὲν, ὧναξ, πρεσβύτερός τε ἤδη εἰμὶ καὶ βαρὺς ἀείρεσθαι; σὺ δέ τινα τῶνδε τῶν νεωτέρων κέλευε ταῦτα ποιέειν.”—HERODOTUS iv. 150.

“I am too old, O king, and slow to stir; so bid thou one of the younger men here do these things.”

A member of the great government of 1868, in a letter to one of his family, gave an account of the final meeting of the cabinet:—

Feb. 17, 1874.—I doubt—he says—whether I ever passed a more eventful evening than yesterday. The whole cabinet was assembled. We resolved after full discussion of pros and cons, and some slight difference of opinion, to resign at once. After which came the startling announcement that Gladstone would no longer retain the leadership of the liberal party, nor resume it, unless the party had settled its differences. He will not expose himself to the insults and outrages of 1866-8, and he has a keen sense of the disloyalty of the party during the last three years. He will sit as a private member and occasionally speak for himself, but he will not attend the House regularly, nor assume any one of the functions of leader. He does this not from anger, but because he says that it is absolutely necessary to party action to learn that all the duties and responsibilities do not rest on the leaders, but that followers have their obligations too. As a consequence of this Cardwell retires to the House of Lords. He will not take the leadership, nor will he consent to serve under any one but Gladstone. He is too old, he says. Lowe protests against the anarchical experiment, and talks of Hartington as leader. As neither Lowe, nor Bright, nor Goschen, nor Forster is in a position to act as leader, it may come to this, so that the liberal front benches of the two Houses will be entirely remodelled.(309)

Here is Mr. Gladstone’s own account, written twenty-three years later, and confirmed by all other accessible papers of the moment:—

I was most anxious to make the retirement of the ministry the occasion of my own. I had served for more than forty years. My age—65—was greater than that of Sir Robert Peel at his retirement in 1846, or at his death in 1850, and was much beyond that at which most of the leading commoners of the century had terminated their political career, together with their natural life. I felt myself to be in some measure out of touch with some of the tendencies of the liberal party, especially in religious matters. Sir A. Clark, whom I consulted, would give me on medical grounds no encouragement whatever. But I deeply desired an interval between parliament and the grave. In spite of the solicitations of my friends I persisted. For 1874 there was a sort of compromise “without prejudice.” As having a title to some rest I was not a very regular attendant, but did not formally abdicate.

(M158) He found specific reasons for withdrawal in the state of the party (Feb. 12):—

1. The absence of any great positive aim (the late plan [budget] having failed) for which to co-operate. 2. The difficulty of establishing united and vigorous action in the liberal party for the purposes of economy. 3. The unlikelihood of arriving at any present agreement respecting education.

In another fragment of the same date, he says:—

I do not forget that I am in debt to the party generally for kindness, indulgence, and confidence, much beyond what I have deserved. Deeming myself unable to hold it together from my present position in a manner worthy of it, I see how unlikely it is that I should hereafter be able to give any material aid in the adjustment of its difficulties. Yet if such aid should at any time be generally desired with a view to arresting some great evil or procuring for the nation some great good, my willingness to enter into counsel for the occasion would follow from all I have said. But always with the understanding that as between section and section I could not become a partisan, and that such interference even in the case of its proving useful would entail no obligation whatever on those accepting it, and carry with it no disturbance of any arrangement subsisting at the time.

The situation proved, as Lowe had foreseen, an anarchic experiment. Mr. Gladstone went up to London for the session, and followed his ordinary social course:—

March 9, 1874.—Off at 4.45 to Windsor for the fête. We dined at St. George’s Hall. I was presented to the Duchess of C. by the Queen, and had a few kind words from H.M. 11.—Archbishop Manning, 9-11. It is kind in him to come, but most of it is rather hollow work, limited as we are. 16.—Dined at Marlborough House. A civil talk with Disraeli. 20.—Finished Vivian Grey. The first quarter extremely clever, the rest trash.

May 15.—Emperor of Russia’s reception at 3.15. He thanked me for my conduct to Russia while I was minister. I assured his Majesty I had watched with profound interest the transactions of his reign, and the great benefits he had conferred upon his people. He hoped the relations of the two countries would always be good.... Dined at Marlborough House. Stafford House ball afterwards. The emperor complained of the burden and late hours of evening entertainments. Princess of Wales so nice about her picture. D[israeli] complained of my absence, said they could not get on without me. 20.—Dined at the F.O. to meet the emperor. It was very kind of Derby. Much work at Hawarden in arranging books and papers.

The House of Commons is hardly attractive to an irregular and perfunctory attendant; and Mr. Gladstone’s thoughts all turned to other fields. To Mrs. Gladstone he wrote early in April:—

The anti-parliamentary reaction has been stronger with me even than I anticipated. I am as far as possible from feeling the want of the House of Commons. I could cheerfully go there to do a work; but I hope and pray to be as little there as possible, except for such an aim. In London I think we were too much hustled to speak leisurely or effectually of the future. It will open for us by degrees. I shall be glad when the matter of money, after all a secondary one, is disentangled, but chiefly because it seems to put pressure upon you. I spoke to Stephen about these matters on Saturday; he was kind, reasonable, and in all ways as satisfactory as possible. There is one thing I should like you to understand clearly as to my view of things, for it is an essential part of that view. I am convinced that the welfare of mankind does not now depend on the state or the world of politics; the real battle is being fought in the world of thought, where a deadly attack is made with great tenacity of purpose and over a wide field, upon the greatest treasure of mankind, the belief in God and the gospel of Christ.

In June Sir Stephen Glynne died,—“a dark, dark day.” “My brother-in-law,” wrote Mr. Gladstone at a later date, “was a man of singular refinement and as remarkable modesty. His culture was high and his character one of deep interest. His memory was on the whole decidedly the most remarkable known to me of the generation and country. His life, however, was retired and unobtrusive; but he sat in parliament, I think, for about fifteen years, and was lord-lieutenant of his county.”

I thank you much—Mr. Gladstone said to the Duke of Argyll—for your kind note. Your sympathy and that of the duchess are ever ready. But even you can hardly tell how it is on this occasion needed and warranted. My wife has lost the last member of a family united by bonds of the rarest tenderness, the last representative of his line, the best of brothers, who had ever drawn closer to her as the little rank was thinned. As for me, no one can know what our personal relations were, without knowing the interior details of a long family history, and efforts and struggles in common carried on through a long series of years, which riveted into the closest union our original affection. He was a very rare man, but we grieve not for him; he sleeps the sleep of the just. The event is a great one also to the outward frame of our life here.(310)

(M159) In the same letter he says it is most painful to him to be dragged into ecclesiastical turmoil, as for example by the Scotch patronage bill, which he considers precipitate, unwise, and daring, or the bill directed against the endowed schools commissioners, of whom his brother-in-law, Lord Lyttelton, was one. In the last case he acted as a leader of an organised party, but in the more important instance of a bill devised, as Mr. Disraeli said, to put down ritualism, his dissent from most of those around him fulfilled all the anticipations that had pointed to retirement. The House was heartily in favour of the bill, and what is called the country earnestly supported it, though in the cabinet itself at least four ministers were strenuously hostile. Mr. Gladstone writes to his wife a trenchant account of his vigorous dealing with a prominent colleague who had rashly ventured to mark him for assault. He sent word to the two archbishops that if they carried a certain amendment he should hold himself “altogether discharged from maintaining any longer the establishment of the church.” He wrote to Lord Harrowby when the recess came:—

I think, or rather I am convinced, that the effect either of one or two more ecclesiastical sessions of parliament such as the last, or of any prolonged series of contentious proceedings under the recent Act, upon subjects of widespread interest, will be to disestablish the church. I do not feel the dread of disestablishment which you may probably entertain: but I desire and seek so long as standing ground remains, to avert, not to precipitate it.

To another correspondent—

Individually I have serious doubts whether the whole of the penal proceedings taken in this country with respect to church matters from the day of Dr. Hampden downwards, have not done considerably more harm than good. There is no doubt at all that all the evils, of whatever kind, at which they were aimed, exist at this moment among us in a far more aggravated shape than when they began.... My object and desire has ever been and still is, to keep the church of England together, both as a church and as an establishment. As a church, I believe she is strong enough, by virtue of the prayer-book, to hold together under all circumstances; but as an establishment, in my opinion, she is not strong enough to bear either serious secession or prolonged parliamentary agitation.

Finally, in a letter dated from Whittinghame (Nov. 17)—

There are already too many causes of demoralisation operating upon the House of Commons. If it is also to become a debased copy of an ecclesiastical council, all the worst men and worst qualities of the worst men will come to the front, and the place will become intolerable.

Even any member of parliament who shares none of Mr. Gladstone’s theology, may sympathise to the full with his deep disgust at theologic and ecclesiastical discussions as conducted in that secular air. We can easily understand how detestable he found it, and how those discussions fortified his sense of estrangement from the ruling sentiments of the parliamentary party of which he was still the titular leader.

Of course the whigs, always for keeping a parliamentary church in its proper place, disliked his line. Liberals like Thirlwall read his speeches “with great pain and suspicion,” and declared their confidence to be shaken. Hardly any section was completely satisfied. His mind in the autumn and winter of 1874 was absorbed, as we shall see within a few pages, in an assault upon the decrees of the Vatican Council of 1870. This assault, as he told Lord Granville (Dec. 7, 1874), while tending “to hearten” the party generally, was against his resumption of formal leadership, because it widened the breach with the Irishmen in the House of Commons. Apart from this there were many questions, each with a group of adherents to a special view, but incapable of being pursued by common and united action. He ran through the list in writing to Lord Granville. It has historic interest:—

1. Extension of the suffrage, with redistribution of seats abreast or in the rear. 2. Disestablishment in Scotland, England. 3. Land laws. 4. Retrenchment. 5. Colonial policy, territorial extension of the empire. 6. Reform of local government taxation. 7. Secular education. 8. Undenominational education. 9. Irish affairs. On no one of these is there known to exist a plan desired by the entire party, or by any clear and decisive majority of it.

On the whole, he was persuaded that neither the party generally nor the country desired another period of active reforms, even if he were fit to conduct them. Besides this he confessed his “apprehension that differences would spring up, and great shrinking from any breach with the party, and a determination, often expressed, never, if he could help it, to lead one branch of it against another.” In many forms he carried Lord Granville with him round the circle of his arguments. He once sent his points on half-a-dozen scraps of paper. Granville playfully replied, “I should like to treat them as old Lord Bessborough used to treat his playing-cards when luck was adverse—tear them up into small bits and toss them in the fire.” Nothing shook him, not even Mrs. Gladstone’s misgivings. To her he wrote from Carlton House Terrace on the eve of the session of 1875:—

Now for the grave matter about the leadership. I have had much conversation with Granville and Cardwell, and I am going to see Hartington, also Goschen, to-morrow. My letter is rewritten and improved, but I am obliged to stand to my conclusion, for many reasons. Among them the church reason is one of the most serious, and the other the undefined and prolonged character of the service if now undertaken. This, while arguing and deprecating, they admit I think to a great extent. Our old colleagues are inclined to come up on Thursday if they can, and this will be rather to hear than to debate. Hartington will succeed. I am indeed sorry that you and I have not been able to take the same view of this important subject, but you know that I am acting on convictions very long entertained, and will I am sure believe that I have probed myself deeply, and used all the means in my power to get at a right conclusion. Nay, I think you will be more reconciled, when I tell you that Granville did not really see his way either to a nominal leadership, or to making any arrangement by which I could after a short time with some certainty have escaped. I saw Clark last night and this morning; he gives an excellent account of me and makes it impossible for me to plead health as my reason.

The drama went rapidly forward:—

Jan. 12.—I find that the agreement made yesterday that I should meet my former colleagues on Monday will require me to remain until this day, though after a pretty busy morning the pressure is less. I have, however, to preside in the evening at the meeting of the Metaphysical Society, and to listen, though I hope nothing more, to a tough discussion. Manning, I am sorry to say, will be there. His pamphlet is at length going to press, and will extend he says to 150 pages. Newman is not out yet.

11 Carlton House Terrace, Jan. 14, ’75.—This great affair is nearly arranged. My old colleagues all submit under protest; and I shall be free. An article in the Times this morning is undisguisedly aimed at getting rid of me; but it does not express any of their feelings. We have had a morning at Granville’s; Halifax, Granville, Cardwell, Hartington, Aberdare, Forster, Carlingford, Stansfeld, Selborne, Goschen, Lowe, Kimberley,—in short all, I think, except Argyll and Bright. There was argument and exhortation, and much kindness. My letter to Granville will be accompanied by a short reply from him expressing difference of opinion and regret. They are afraid of being blamed by the party if they seem to show indifference.

The Queen thanked Mr. Gladstone for communicating to her his resolution of retiring from the more active duties of parliamentary life. She was not entirely unprepared for it after what he told her himself last year. “She knows that his zeal and untiring energy have always been exerted with the desire of advancing the welfare of the nation and maintaining the honour of the crown, and she thanks him for his loyal assurances of support on all occasions when it may become necessary.”

(M160) The Duke of Argyll wrote “sincerely to congratulate” him upon his withdrawal. Bright on the other hand (Jan. 17) said he could not applaud, yet he would not blame: Mr. Gladstone’s course seemed so unfortunate if not disastrous to the great public interests committed to him:—

For myself, says Bright, if I could have foreseen either the result of the election of last year, or your retirement from the conduct of the party, I should certainly have withdrawn from parliament, where now I seem to have quite as little of duty or of a mission as you have. The front opposition bench is full of discord, and when you are not there full of jealousy, and I find myself without any particular attraction to any particular part of the House. However, I will not complain; some door of escape may open for me, and I can become a spectator as you are proposing to be.

I hope on some occasion I may have the chance of seeing you when you come to town. I have had so much pleasure in your friendship, and have gained so much from it, that I would fain hope it need not cease now, when our association will necessarily be less frequent than it has been of late years. Whether you come back to the political field or turn wholly to study and to literature, I am sure you will be usefully employed, and I hope that nothing but blessing may rest upon all your labours.

The feeling among liberals in the country was of deep dismay. Some of the whigs doubtless found solace in the anticipation that a new middle party might be formed, with “a recovery of the old liberal position demolished for the time by John Mill, Gladstone, and Cobden.”(311) But this was limited to a narrow circle. “All sunshine is gone out of politics,” was a general phrase. The news was compared by one correspondent to Gelon’s message to the Greeks, that the spring was taken out of their year.(312)

An organ of the stiff nonconformists said,(313) “Against his government we felt that we had a great grievance; for himself, the nonconformists of this country have long cherished a loyalty more fervent, we are inclined to imagine, than that with which he has been regarded by any other section of the community. He, beyond all other modern statesmen, with perhaps here and there a doubtful exception, gave us the impression of a man who regarded politics as a part of Christian duty.” And the same writers most truly added, “We do not know what the English people have done for Mr. Gladstone that can be compared for a moment with what Mr. Gladstone has done for them. Claims on him we have none. He has far more than discharged any debt that he could have owed to the nation.” These words are a just remonstrance against the somewhat tyrannical conventions of English public life.

When the session began, he wrote to Mrs. Gladstone (Feb. 15): “I came down to the House and took my seat nearly in the same spot as last year, finding Bright my neighbour, with which I was very well pleased. Granville and Hartington both much preferred my continuing on the front bench to my going elsewhere.” Lord Hartington, strongly encouraged against his own inclinations by Mr. Gladstone, accepted a thankless and unpromising post, and held it with honour and credit for five difficult years to come.

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II. Vaticanism. (1874-1875)

Let no susceptibilities, puritan, protestant, anglican, or other, be startled if we observe that Rome is, and may long be, in some important respects, the centre of the Christian world. It is indeed a centre which repels as well as attracts; which probably repels even more than it attracts; but which, whether repelling or attracting, influences.—-GLADSTONE (1875).

I

One question, as the reader by this time well knows, living deepest in Mr. Gladstone’s heart and mind from his first book in 1838 onwards, was the relation of the churches to modern society. English statesmen are wont to be either blind to the existence of such a question, or else they seek an easy refuge from it in a perfunctory erastianism, sometimes intellectually refined, sometimes a little brutish, but always shallow. In all the three great branches of Christianity, the Latin, the Greek or orthodox, the protestant, Mr. Gladstone’s interest was incessant, sincere, and profound. It covered their theology, their organisation, their history and principles of growth, the bearings of their system upon individual character and social well-being all over Europe. He was one of the very few public men capable of discerning that the fall of the temporal power of the pope marked a more startling change and a profounder crisis in human history, than the unification of Italy, the unification of Germany, the reconstructed republic in France, perhaps even than the preservation of the American union. He knew the force of ideas in the world; he realised the vast transformations that had in their succession swept over the minds of men since cardinal dogmas had been established; he comprehended the motion in articles of faith, as men made their “voyagings through strange seas of thought”; he was alive to the fact that moral crises brought on by change in intellectual outlook and temperature, are of deeper concern than questions of territory, or dynasty, or form of government. The moral crisis is what reaches furthest and matters most. A movement of the first magnitude was accentuated by Pius IX., when by the Syllabus of 1864 he challenged modern society in all its foundations, its aims, its principles, in the whole range of its ideals. Some called this daring ultimatum the gravest event since the French uprising in 1789. The Syllabus prepared the way for a more elaborately organised operation on behalf of papal authority. The train was secretly laid for a grand reaction, a grand re-installation of the Christian faith.(314)

(M161) The pope had been despoiled of territory, his sway within the walls of Rome itself was in constant danger, his most powerful protector north of the Alps had been weakened and humiliated by protestant Prussia. He was now to be compensated for his calamities by a majestic demonstration of his hold upon the spiritual allegiance of millions of adherents in every portion of the habitable globe. The twentieth ecumenical council assembled in St. Peter’s at Rome on December 8, 1869. In this gathering of catholic prelates from both hemispheres, two antagonistic schools confronted one another. The ultramontanes held that the revolutionary welter and confusion of the modern world could only be healed by solemn affirmation of the principle of sovereign authority lodged in an infallible pope, with absolute power to define by that apostolic authority what ought to be held as articles of faith or morals. The assumptions, the standards, the ruling types of the modern age, they boldly encountered with rigid iteration of maxims of old time, imposing obedience and submission to a fixed social order and a divinely commissioned hierarchy. Inflexibility was to be the single watchword by which the church could recover a world that, from Naples even to Mexico, seemed to be rapidly drifting away from her. The opposing school took other ground. Perhaps they saw that supremacy is one thing, and infallibility another thing quite different. The liberal catholics did not contest the dogma of papal infallibility; they questioned the expediency of its proclamation; they were for associating ideas of religion with ideas of liberty; they were not for extending the domain of miracle and the supernatural.

Then as in the old historic councils, influence of race and nation had decisive effects. It could not be otherwise in what was in essence a conflict between a centralised doctrinal authority on the one hand, and the inextinguishable tendency towards national churches on the other. The Italian bishops went with the pope. The Germans, as of old they had been for emperor against priest, were now on the side of freedom against what certain of them did not hesitate to call tyranny and fraud. Some of the ablest of the French were true to Gallican tradition and resisted the decree. Among the most active and uncompromising of all the ultramontane party was our English Manning.(315)

II

At the end of November 1869, Acton had written to Mr. Gladstone from Rome. “Your letter is a very sad one,” Mr. Gladstone answered. “I feel as deep and real an interest in the affairs of other Christian communions as in my own; and most of all in the case of the most famous of them all, and the one within which the largest number of Christian souls find their spiritual food.” Before Manning left for Rome, an amiable correspondence took place between Mr. Gladstone and him. “How sad it is for us both”—this was Mr. Gladstone’s starting-point—“considering our personal relations, that we should now be in this predicament, that the things which the one looks to as the salvation of faith and church, the other regards as their destruction.”

To Mr. Odo Russell, now the informal agent of the British government in Rome, the prime minister wrote:—

It is curious that Manning has so greatly changed his character. When he was archdeacon with us, all his strength was thought to lie in a governing faculty, and in its wise moderation. Now he is ever quoted as the ultra of ultras, and he seems greatly to have overshot his mark. The odds seem to be that the child yet unborn will rue the calling of this council. For if the best result arrive in the triumph of the fallibilitarians, will not even this be a considerable shock to the credit and working efficacy of the papal system? You must really be all eyes and ears, a very Argus in both organs, until the occasion has gone by.

As for the issue of the council, Acton, having Mr. Odo Russell in agreement with him, from the first conveyed to Mr. Gladstone his opinion that the pope would prevail.

The only hope in my mind, said Mr. Gladstone in reply, is that there may be a real minority, and that it may speak plainly. A few bold men would easily insure themselves a noble immortality. But will any have the courage? The Italian government have one and only one method in their hands of fighting the pope: and that is to run, against nomination from Rome, the old and more popular methods of choosing bishops by clerical election, with the approbation of the flock.(316) Unless they resort to this they can do nothing.

All the accounts from Rome, he tells Lacaita (Jan. 2, 1870), are as bad as possible. For the first time in my life, I shall now be obliged to talk about popery; for it would be a scandal to call the religion they are manufacturing at Rome by the same name as that of Pascal, or of Bossuet, or of Ganganelli. The truth is that ultramontanism is an anti-social power, and never has it more undisguisedly assumed that character than in the Syllabus.

(M162) The French government wrote despatches of mild protest but said nothing of withdrawing their garrison. Mr. Gladstone and Lord Clarendon were for informing the Roman court that they were cognizant of the French despatches, and approved of their tenour. The Queen and the cabinet, however, were entirely averse to meddling with the council, and nothing was done officially. This did not prevent Mr. Gladstone from telling Archbishop Manning what impediments would be placed in the way of Irish legislation by the state of English feeling as to the Syllabus and other papal proceedings. “My feelings and convictions,” he says (April 16), “are as you well know decidedly with your ‘opposition,’ which I believe to be contending for the religious and civil interests of mankind against influences highly disastrous and menacing to both. But the prevailing opinion is that it is better to let those influences take their course, and work out the damage which they will naturally and surely entail upon the see of Rome and upon what is bound to it.” In parliament there was an utter aversion to the Roman policy, and he gives instances, noting even a change of opinion about the Irish land bill. “What I have described is no matter of speculation. I know it by actual and daily touch. I am glad you have moved me to state it in some detail. It is to me matter of profound grief, especially as regards land in Ireland.”

To Lord Acton:—

Of all the prelates at Rome, none have a finer opportunity, to none is a more crucial test now applied, than to those of the United States. For if there, where there is nothing of covenant, of restraint, or of equivalent between the church and the state, the propositions of the Syllabus are still to have the countenance of the episcopate, it becomes really a little difficult to maintain in argument the civil rights of such persons to toleration, however conclusive be the argument of policy in favour of granting it. I can hardly bring myself to speculate or care on what particular day the foregone conclusion is to be finally adopted. My grief is sincere and deep, but it is at the whole thing, so ruinous in its consequences as they concern faith. In my view, the size of the minority, though important, is not nearly so important as the question whether there will be a minority at all.

There was a minority. In a division taken at a late stage, 451 composed the majority, 88 resisted, and 62 were for a new examination. Then the minority turned their backs on Rome; and on July 18 the definition of infallibility was acclaimed in St. Peter’s in presence of the pope by 533 against 2.

Mr. Gladstone is very glad when Clarendon instructs Mr. Russell to turn his back on the festivities at Rome. “The whole proceeding has been monstrous, and it will hereafter become one of the laughing-stocks of history. The fanaticism of the middle ages is really sober compared with that of the nineteenth century.” “The proclamation of Infallibility,” he said to Bishop Moriarty, “I must own I look upon as the most portentous (taking them singly), of all events in the history of the Christian church.”

III

The next day, as we know, war was declared by France against Germany, the French garrison left Rome, and on September 20 the Italians marched in.

A month before the war broke out, Mr. Gladstone wrote to Lord Clarendon: “I would avoid any official support of the Italian application to France for the evacuation of Rome, by saying that this country had always abstained from mixing in that question; and that we were the more induced to persevere in that policy from being well convinced that the French government is perfectly aware that in this country the occupation of any part of the pontifical territories by French troops is regarded with regret, pain, and disapproval. Further, that those who most strongly entertain these sentiments, are generally the persons who most highly value, and have most striven to promote, the good understanding between France and England.”

The occupation of Rome by the Italian government brought upon Mr. Gladstone various demands and movements from different parts of the country. His cabinet agreed that the proper course was to decline all interference with a view to the restoration of the temporal power, though they accepted the task of promoting, by means of friendly representations, arrangements to secure the pontiff’s freedom and becoming support. Then some of his presbyterian friends asked him why he should even do so much as this, when he would take no such steps for the moderator of the free church. Now consider, Mr. Gladstone replied: “the pope is a sovereign who was in lawful possession of large revenues, and who had charged himself with the support of a body of cardinals, ministers, nuncios, servants, and guards out of those revenues. He has been dispossessed, not for any fault of his own, but because clerical dominion was deemed intolerable. In the maintenance of the pope and his court, followers and agents, six millions of our fellow-subjects or thereabouts are deeply interested; and they are making demands upon us which we are forced to decline. But I should for one be ashamed to deny that there are the strongest equitable claims upon the Italian government growing out of the past state of things; that in these equitable claims the six millions I speak of have a real interest and share; and as the matter is international, and they have no locus standi with the Italian government, it is our part so far to plead their cause if need be.”

IV

(M163) Four years elapsed before Mr. Gladstone was in a position to follow up his strong opinions on the injury done, as he believed, to human liberty by the Vatican decrees. But the great debate between ultramontanes and old catholics was followed by him with an interest that never slackened. In September 1874 he went to Munich, and we can hardly be wrong in ascribing to that visit the famous tract which was to make so lively a stir before the end of the year. His principal object was to communicate with Dr. Döllinger, and this object, he tells Mrs. Gladstone, was fully gained. “I think,” he says, “I have spent two-thirds of my whole time with Dr. Döllinger, who is indeed a most remarkable man, and it makes my blood run cold to think of his being excommunicated in his venerable but, thank God, hale and strong old age. In conversation we have covered a wide field. I know no one with whose mode of viewing and handling religious matters I more cordially agree.... He is wonderful, and simple as a child.”

“I think it was in 1874,” Döllinger afterwards mentioned, “that I remember Gladstone’s paying me a visit at six o’clock in the evening. We began talking on political and theological subjects, and became, both of us, so engrossed with the conversation, that it was two o’clock at night when I left the room to fetch a book from my library bearing on the matter in hand. I returned with it in a few minutes, and found him deep in a volume he had drawn out of his pocket—true to his principle of never losing time—during my momentary absence.”(317) “In the course of a walk out of Munich in the travelling season of 1874,” Mr. Gladstone wrote sixteen years later, “Dr. Döllinger told me that he was engaged in the work of retrial through the whole circle of his Latin teaching and knowledge. The results were tested in his proceedings at Bonn, when he attempted to establish a formula concordiae upon the questions which most gravely divided Christendom.”(318) Among other topics Mr. Gladstone commended to his mentor the idea of a republication in a series, of the best works of those whom he would call the Henotic or Eirenic writers on the differences that separate Christians and churches from one another. He also read Pichler on the theology of Leibnitz, not without suspicion that it was rather Pichler than Leibnitz. But neither Leibnitz nor Pichler was really in his mind.

After the session of 1874, when the public ear and mind had been possessed by the word Ritualism, he had as usual sought a vent in a magazine article for the thoughts with which he was teeming.(319) He speaks with some disdain of the question whether a handful of the clergy are or are not engaged in “an utterly hopeless and visionary effort to Romanise the church and people of England.” At no time, he says, since the sanguinary reign of Mary has such a scheme been possible. Least of all, he proceeds, could the scheme have life in it “when Rome has substituted for the proud boast of semper eadem a policy of violence and change in faith; when she has refurbished and paraded anew every rusty tool she was fondly thought to have disused; when no one can become her convert, without renouncing his moral and mental freedom, and placing his civil loyalty and duty at the mercy of another; and when she has equally repudiated modern thought and ancient history.” If these strong words expressed his state of mind before he went abroad, we may readily imagine how the Bavarian air would fan the flame.

Though Dr. Döllinger himself—“so inaccessible to religious passions”—was not aware of the purpose of his English friend, there can be little doubt that Mr. Gladstone returned from Munich with the same degree of internal ferment as that which had possessed his mind on his return from Naples three-and-twenty years before. In October he writes to Lord Acton from Hawarden:—

What you have said on the subject of ultramontanism and of the mode in which it should be handled, appears to me to be as wise and as good as is possible. It is really a case for hitting hard, but for hitting the right men. In anything I say or do on the subject, I would wish heartily and simply to conform to the spirit of your words. But I feel myself drawn onwards. Indeed some of your words help to draw me. The question with me now is whether I shall or shall not publish a tract which I have written, and of which the title would probably be, “The Vatican Decrees in their bearing on Civil Allegiance: a Political Expostulation.” I incline to think that I ought to publish it. If it were in your power and will to run over here for a night or two I should seek to profit by your counsel, and should ask you to read as much of the MS. as your patience would endure. A more substantial attraction would be that I could go over much of my long and interesting conversations with Döllinger.

V

(M164) The pamphlet(320) appeared in November, and was meant for an argument that the decree of infallibility aimed a deadly blow at the old historic, scientific, and moderate school; it was a degradation of the episcopal order; it carried to its furthest point that spirit of absolutist centralisation, which in its excesses is as fatal to vigorous life in the church, as in the state; it overthrew the principle not even denied by the council of Trent in the sixteenth century, that the pope and his judgments were triable by the assembled representatives of the Christian world.

Thrice in history it seemed as if the constitutional party in the church was about to triumph: at the council of Constance in the fifteenth century; in the conflict between the French episcopate and Innocent XI. in the days of Bossuet; and thirdly, when Clement XIV., exactly a hundred years before now, dealt with the Jesuits and “levelled in the dust the deadliest foes that mental and moral liberty have ever known.” From July 1870 all this had passed away, and the constitutional party had seen its death-warrant signed and sealed. The “myrmidons of the apostolic chamber” had committed their church to revolutionary measures. The vast new claims were lodged in the reign of a pontiff, who by the dark Syllabus of 1864 had condemned free speech, a free press, liberty of conscience, toleration of nonconformity, the free study of civil and philosophic things independently of church authority, marriage unless sacramentally contracted, and all definition by the state of the civil rights of the church.

(M165) “It has been a favourite purpose of my life,” Mr. Gladstone said, “not to conjure up, but to conjure down, public alarms. I am not now going to pretend that either foreign foe or domestic treason can, at the bidding of the court of Rome, disturb these peaceful shores. But although such fears may be visionary, it is more visionary still to suppose for one moment that the claims of Gregory VII., of Innocent III., and of Boniface VIII. have been disinterred in the nineteenth century, like hideous mummies picked out of Egyptian sarcophagi, in the interests of archæology, or without a definite and practical aim.” What, then, was the clear and foregone purpose behind the parade of all these astonishing reassertions? The first was—by claims to infallibility in creed, to the prerogative of miracles, to dominion over the unseen world—to satisfy spiritual appetites, sharpened into reaction and made morbid by “the levity of the destructive speculations so widely current, and the notable hardihood of the anti-Christian writing of the day.” This alone, however, would not explain the deliberate provocation of all the “risks of so daring a raid upon the civil sphere.” The answer was to be found in the favourite design, hardly a secret design, of restoring by the road of force when any favourable opportunity should arise, and of re-erecting, the terrestrial throne of the popedom, “even if it could only be re-erected on the ashes of the city, and amidst the whitening bones of the people.”

And this brings the writer to the immediate practical aspects of his tract. “If the baleful power which is expressed by the phrase Curia Romana, and not at all adequately rendered in its historic force by the usual English equivalent ‘Court of Rome,’ really entertains the scheme, it doubtless counts on the support in every country of an organised and devoted party; which, when it can command the scales of political power, will promote interference, and while it is in a minority, will work for securing neutrality. As the peace of Europe may be in jeopardy, and as the duties even of England, as one of its constabulary authorities, might come to be in question, it would be most interesting to know the mental attitude of our Roman catholic fellow-countrymen in England and Ireland with reference to the subject; and it seems to be one on which we are entitled to solicit information.” Too commonly the spirit of the convert was to be expressed by the notorious words, “a catholic first, an Englishman afterwards”—words that properly convey no more than a truism, “for every Christian must seek to place his religion even before his country in his inner heart; but very far from a truism in the sense in which we have been led to construe them.” This, indeed, was a new and very real “papal aggression.” For himself, Mr. Gladstone said, it should not shake his allegiance to “the rule of maintaining equal civil rights irrespectively of religious differences.” Had he not given conclusive indications of that view, by supporting in parliament as a minister since the council, the repeal in 1871 of the law against ecclesiastical titles, whose enactment he had opposed twenty years before?

That the pamphlet should create intense excitement, was inevitable from the place of the writer in the public eye, from the extraordinary vehemence of the attack, and above all from the unquenchable fascination of the topic. Whether the excitement in the country was more than superficial; whether most readers fathomed the deep issues as they stood, not between catholic and protestant, but between catholic and catholic within the fold; whether in fastening upon the civil allegiance of English Romanists Mr. Gladstone took the true point against Vaticanism—these are questions that we need not here discuss. The central proposition made a cruel dilemma for a large class of the subjects of the Queen; for the choice assigned to them by assuming stringent logic was between being bad citizens if they submitted to the decree of papal infallibility, and bad catholics if they did not. Protestant logicians wrote to Mr. Gladstone that if his contention were good, we ought now to repeal catholic emancipation and again clap on the fetters. Syllogisms in action are but stupid things after all, unless they are checked by a tincture of what seems paradox.(321) Apart from the particular issue in his Vatican pamphlet, Mr. Gladstone believed himself to be but following his own main track in life and thought in his assault upon “a policy which declines to acknowledge the high place assigned to liberty in the counsels of Providence, and which upon the pretext of the abuse that like every other good she suffers, expels her from its system.”

Among the names that he was never willing to discuss with me—Machiavelli, for instance—was Joseph de Maistre, the hardiest, most adventurous, most ingenious, and incisive of all the speculative champions of European reaction.(322) In the pages of de Maistre he might have found the reasoned base on which the ultramontane creed may be supposed to rest. He would have found liberty depicted less as a blessing than a scourge; even Bossuet denounced as a heretic with dubious chances of salvation, for his struggle on behalf of a national church against Roman centralisation; the old Greeks held up to odium as a race of talkers, frivolous, light, and born incorrigible dividers. In dealing with de Maistre, Mr. Gladstone would have had a foeman worthier of his powerful steel than the authors of the Syllabus, Schema, Postulatum, and all the rest of what he called the Vaticanism of 1870. But here, as always, he was man of action, and wrote for a specific though perhaps a fugitive purpose.

VI

(M166) At the end of the year the total number printed of the tract was 145,000, and of these 120,000 were in a people’s edition. “My pamphlet,” he tells Lacaita, “has brought upon me such a mass of work as I can hardly cope with, and I am compelled to do all things as succinctly as possible, though my work is with little intermission from morning till night. I agree with you that the pamphlet in the main tells its own story; and I am glad there is no need to select in a hurry some one to write on the difference between papism and Catholicism.... There is no doubt that the discussion opens, i.e. makes a breach in the walls of the papal theology, and it ought to be turned to account. But I shall have enough to do with all my hands, if I am to work properly through the task I have undertaken. Not, I trust, for long, for I think another pamphlet should suffice to end it on my side. But I am vexed that Manning (as if he had been pulled up at Rome), after having announced his formal reply six weeks ago, hangs fire and now talks of delaying it.” The result, he assures Lord Granville (Nov. 25), “must be injurious to the pestilent opinions that have so grievously obtained the upper hand in that church, and to the party which means to have a war in Europe for the restoration of the temporal power. To place impediments in their way has been my principal purpose.”

He told Acton (Dec. 18), “When you were putting in caveats and warnings, you did not say to me, ‘Now mind, this affair will absorb some, perhaps many, months of your life.’ It has been so up to the present moment, and it evidently will be so for some time.” With Acton he carried on elaborate correspondence upon some of the questions raised by the Syllabus, notably on the effect of the pope’s disciplinary judgment on anglican marriages, converting them into relations that were not marriage at all. He fears that he has conceded too much to the papal party in not treating the Syllabus as ex cathedra; in allowing that the popes had been apt to claim dogmatic infallibility for wellnigh a thousand years; as to the ecumenicity of the Vatican council. Among other matters he was reading “the curious volumes of Discorsi di Pio IX., published at Rome, and he might find it his duty to write collaterally upon them.” This duty he performed with much fidelity in the Quarterly Review for January 1875. He is active in interest about translations; keen to enlist auxiliaries in every camp and all countries; delighted with all utterances from Italy or elsewhere that make in his direction, even noting with satisfaction that the agnostic Huxley was warm in approval. “I pass my days and nights,” he tells the Duke of Argyll (Dec. 19), “in the Vatican. Already the pope has given me two months of incessant correspondence and other hard work, and it may very well last two more. Nor is this work pleasant; but I am as far as possible from repenting of it, as no one else to whom the public would listen saved me the trouble. It is full of intense interest. Every post brings a mass of general reading, writing, or both. Forty covers of one kind or another to-day, and all my time is absorbed. But the subject is well worth the pains.” The Italians, Lord Granville told him, “generally approved, but were puzzled why you should have thought it necessary.” Retorts and replies arose in swarms, including one from Manning and another from Newman. He was accused by some of introducing a Bismarckian Kulturkampf into England, of seeking to recover his lost popularity by pandering to no-popery, of disregarding the best interests of the country for the sake of his own restoration to power.(323)

I have now finished reading—he said at the beginning of February—the 20th reply to my pamphlet, They cover 1000 pages. And I am hard at work preparing mine with a good conscience and I think a good argument. Manning has been, I think, as civil as he could. Feb. 5.—All this morning I have had to spend in hunting up one important statement of Manning’s which I am almost convinced is a gross mis-statement.... Feb. 6.—Manning in his 200 pages has not, I venture to say, made a single point against me. But I shall have to show up his quotations very seriously. We have exchanged one or two friendly notes. 8.—Worked on Vaticanism nearly all day and (an exception to my rule) late at night. 14.—Eight hours’ work on my proof sheets. 15.—Went through Acton’s corrections and notes on my proofs. 19.—Worked much in evening on finishing up my tract, Dr. Döllinger’s final criticisms having arrived. He thinks highly of the work, which he observes will cut deeper than the former one, and be more difficult to deal with. By midnight I had the revises ready with the corrections. 20.—Inserted one or two references and wrote “Press” on the 2nd revises. May the power and blessing of God go with the work.

The second tract was more pungent than the first, and it gave pleasure to an important minister abroad who had now entangled himself by Falk laws and otherwise in a quarrel with the papacy. “I have had a letter of thanks,” Mr. Gladstone writes to Hawarden (March 6), “from Bismarck. This pamphlet is stouter, sharper, and cheaper than the last, but is only in its eleventh thousand, I believe.” Among others who replied to Vaticanism was Dr. Newman; he appended a new postscript of four-and-twenty pages to his former answer to the first of Mr. Gladstone’s pamphlets. Its tone is courteous and argumentative—far too much so to please the ultras who had the pope’s ear—and without the wild hitting that Mr. Gladstone found in Manning.

Newman wrote to thank him (Jan. 17, 1875) for a letter that he described as “forbearing and generous.” “It has been a great grief to me,” said Newman, “to have had to write against one whose career I have followed from first to last with so much (I may say) loyal interest and admiration. I had known about you from others, and had looked at you with kindly curiosity, before you came up to Christ Church, and from the time that you were launched into public life, you have retained a hold on my thoughts and on my gratitude by the various marks of attention which every now and then you have shown me, when you had an opportunity, and I could not fancy my ever standing towards you in any other relation than that which had lasted so long. What a fate it is, that now when so memorable a career has reached its formal termination [retirement from leadership], I should be the man, on the very day on which it closed, to present to you amid the many expressions of public sympathy which it elicits, a controversial pamphlet as my offering.” But he could not help writing it, he was called upon from such various quarters; and his conscience told him that he who had been in great measure the cause of so many becoming catholics, had no right to leave them in the lurch, when charges were made against them as serious as unexpected. “I do not think,” he concluded, “I ever can be sorry for what I have done, but I never can cease to be sorry for the necessity of doing it.”

VII

(M167) This fierce controversial episode was enough to show that the habit and temperament of action still followed him in the midst of all his purposes of retreat. Withdrawal from parliamentary leadership was accompanied by other steps, apparently all making in the same direction. He sold the house in Carlton House Terrace, where he had passed eight-and-twenty years of work and power and varied sociability. “I had grown to the house,” he says (April 15), “having lived more time in it than in any other since I was born, and mainly by reason of all that was done in it.” To Mrs. Gladstone he wrote (Feb. 28):—

I do not wonder that you feel parting from the house will be a blow and a pang. It is nothing less than this to me, but it must be faced and you will face it gallantly. So much has occurred there; and thus it is leaving not the house only but the neighbourhood, where I have been with you for more than thirty-five years, and altogether nearly forty. The truth is that innocently and from special causes we have on the whole been housed better than according to our circumstances. All along Carlton House Terrace I think you would not find any one with less than £20,000 a year, and most of them with, much more.

He sold his collection of china and his Wedgwood ware.(324) He despatched his books to Hawarden. He can hardly have resolved on retirement that should be effective and complete, or else he must have arranged to quit the House of Commons. In his diary he entered (March 30, 1875):—

Views about the future and remaining section of my life. In outline they are undefined but in substance definite. The main point is this: that setting aside exceptional circumstances which would have to provide for themselves, my prospective work is not parliamentary. My ties will be slight to an assembly with whose tendencies I am little in harmony at the present time; nor can I flatter myself that what is called the public out of doors is more sympathetic. But there is much to be done with the pen, all bearing much on high and sacred ends, for even Homeric study as I view it, is in this very sense of high importance; and what lies beyond this is concerned directly with the great subject of belief.

To Mrs. Gladstone he wrote (May 19, 1875): “I am feeling as it were my way towards the purposes of the rest of my life. It will I dare say clear by degrees. For the general business of the country, my ideas and temper are thoroughly out of harmony with the ideas and temper of the day, especially as they are represented in London.”

The movement of negation had been in full swing for a dozen years before the force and weight of it had, amid the stress and absorption of daily business, reached his inner mind. In May 1872, in a speech as member of the council of King’s College—“averse from, and little used to platform speaking,” as he described himself to Manning—he used some strong language about those who promulgate as science what is not science and as religion what is not religion; but he took care to sever himself from the recent Roman decrees, which “seemed much to resemble the proclamation of a perpetual war against the progress and the movement of the human mind.”(325) In December 1872, he caused a marked sensation by an address at Liverpool, in which he spoke of Strauss’s book on New and Old Belief.(326) He had become a member of the metaphysical society, where eminent representatives of every faith and of no faith discussed every aspect of the foundations of human creeds. He was of too masculine and energetic a cast of mind to feel mere shock as he listened to Huxley, Tyndall, Clifford, Harrison, firmly arguing materialism or positivism or agnosticism or other unhistoric forms. That his whole soul was energetically oppugnant, I need not say. His reverence for freedom never wavered. He wrote to an editor who had criticised his Liverpool address (Jan. 3, 1873):—

In the interest of my address, I wish to say that not a word to my knowledge fell from me limiting the range of free inquiry, nor have I ever supposed St. Paul to say anything so silly as “Prove all things: but some you must not prove.” Doubtless some obscurity of mine, I know not what, has led to an error into which the able writer of the article has fallen, not alone.

To the Duke of Argyll he wrote:—

Dec. 28, ’72.—I have been touching upon deep and dangerous subjects at Liverpool. Whether I went beyond my province many may doubt. But of the extent of the mischief I do not doubt any more than of its virulence. All that I hear from day to day convinces me of the extension of this strange epidemic, for it is not, considering how it comes, worthy of being called a rational or scientific process. Be it however, what it may, we politicians are children playing with toys in comparison to that great work of and for manhood, which has to be done, and will yet be done, in restoring belief.

Sir Robert Morier sent him from Munich Frohschammer’s reply to Strauss. “If I understand him aright,” said Mr. Gladstone, “he is a Unitarian, minus Miracle and Inspiration.” The whole book seemed to him able, honest, and diligent:—

But, he adds, I am one of those who think the Christianity of Frohschammer (as I have described it) is like a tall tree scientifically prepared for the saw by the preliminary process, well known to wood-cutters, of clearing away with the axe all projecting roots, which as long as they remained rendered the final operation impossible. This first process leaves the tree standing in a very trim condition, much more mathematical in form, as it is more near a cylinder, than in its native state. The business of the saw, when the horse and the man arrive, is soon accomplished.

To his article on ritualism he prefixed as motto two short lines of Pindar, about days that are to come being wisest witnesses.(327) In spite of retreat, it was impossible that he should forget the vast responsibility imposed upon him, both by his gifts and by the popular ascendency into which they had brought him. His was not the retreat of self-indulgence, and the days that were to come speedily brought him duties that were to bear him far into regions of storm and conflict now unforeseen. Meanwhile, with occasional visits to Westminster, he lived even and industrious days at Hawarden, felling trees, working at Greek mythology and ethnology, delighting in the woods and glades of the park, above all delighting in the tranquillity of his “temple of peace.” Besides being the bookroom of a student, this was still a far-shining beacon in the popular eye. If sages, scholars, heroes, saints, with time’s serene and hallowed gravity looked upon him from their shelves, yet loud echoes sounded in his ear from roaring surges of an outer world—from turbid ebb and flow of all the struggle and clamorous hopes and half-blind mysterious instincts of the nations.

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