Beacon Lights of History, Volume 10: European Leaders

Mr. Gladstone was at this time fifty years of age. His political career thus far, however useful and honorable, had not been extraordinary. Mr. Pitt was prime minister at the age of twenty-eight. Fox, Canning, and Castlereagh at forty were more famous than Gladstone. His political promotion had not been as rapid as that of Lord John Russell or Lord Palmerston or Sir Robert Peel. He was chiefly distinguished for the eloquence of his speeches, the lucidity of his financial statements, and the moral purity of his character; but he was not then pre-eminently great, either for initiative genius or commanding influence. Aside from politics, he was conceded to be an accomplished scholar and a learned theologian,–distinguished for ecclesiastical lore rather than as an original thinker. He had written no great book likely to be a standard authority. As a writer he was inferior to Macaulay and Newman, nor had he the judicial powers of Hallam. He could not be said to have occupied more than one sphere, that of politics,–here unlike Thiers, Guizot, and even Lyndhurst and Brougham.

In 1858, however, Gladstone appeared in a new light, and commanded immediate attention by the publication of his "Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age,"–a remarkable work in three large octavo volumes, which called into the controversial field of Greek history a host of critics, like Mr. Freeman, who yet conceded to Mr. Gladstone wonderful classical learning, and the more wonderful as he was preoccupied with affairs of State, and without the supposed leisure for erudite studies. This learned work entitled him to a high position in another sphere than that of politics. Guizot wrote learned histories of modern political movements, but he could not have written so able a treatise as Gladstone's on the Homeric age. Some advanced German critics took exceptions to the author's statements about early Greek history; yet it cannot be questioned that he has thrown a bright if not a new light on the actors of the siege of Troy and the age when they were supposed to live. The illustrious author is no agnostic. It is not for want of knowledge that in some things he is not up to the times, but for a conservative bent of mind which leads him to distrust destructive criticism. Gladstone has been content to present the ancient world as revealed in the Homeric poems, whether Homer lived less than a hundred years from the heroic deeds described with such inimitable charm, or whether he did not live at all. He wrote the book not merely to amuse his leisure hours, but to incite students to a closer study of the works attributed to him who alone is enrolled with the two other men now regarded as the greatest of immortal poets. Gladstone's admiration for Homer is as unbounded as that of German scholars for Dante and Shakspeare. It is hardly to be supposed that this work on the heroic age was written during the author's retirement from office; it was probably the result of his life-studies on Grecian literature, which he pursued with unusual and genuine enthusiasm. Who among American statesmen or even scholars are competent to such an undertaking?

Two years after this, in 1860, Mr. Gladstone was elected Lord Rector of the University of Edinburgh in recognition of his scholarly attainments, and delivered a notable inaugural address on the work of universities.

The chief duty of Mr. Gladstone during his seven years connection with the new coalition party, headed by Lord Palmerston, was to prepare his annual budget, or financial statement, with a proposed scheme of taxation, as chancellor of the exchequer. During these years his fame as a finance minister was confirmed. As such no minister ever equalled him, except perhaps Sir Robert Peel. My limits will not permit me to go into a minute detail of the taxes he increased and those he reduced. The end he proposed in general was to remove such as were oppressive on the middle and lower classes, and to develop the industrial resources of the nation,–to make it richer and more prosperous, while it felt the burden of supplying needful moneys for the government less onerous. Nor would it be interesting to Americans to go into those statistics. I wonder even why they were so interesting to the English people. One would naturally think that it was of little consequence whether duties on some one commodity were reduced, or those on another were increased, so long as the deficit in the national income had to be raised somehow, whether by direct or indirect taxation; but the interest generally felt in these matters was intense, both inside and outside Parliament. I can understand why the paper-makers should object when it was proposed to remove the last protective duty, and why the publicans should wax indignant if an additional tax were imposed on hops; but I cannot understand why every member of the House of Commons should be present when the opening speech on the budget was to be made by the chancellor, why the intensest excitement should prevail, why members should sit for five hours enraptured to hear financial details presented, why every seat in the galleries should be taken by distinguished visitors, and all the journals the next day should be filled with panegyrics or detractions as to the minister's ability or wisdom.

It would seem that no questions concerning war or peace, or the extension of the suffrage, or the removal of great moral evils, or promised boons in education, or Church disestablishment, or threatened dangers to the State,–questions touching the very life of the nation,–received so much attention or excited so great interest as those which affected the small burdens which the people had to bear; not the burden of taxation itself, but how that should be distributed. I will not say that the English are "a nation of shopkeepers;" but I do say that comparatively small matters occupy the thoughts of men in every country outside the routine of ordinary duties, and form the staple of ordinary conversation,–among pedants, the difference between ac and et; among aristocrats, the investigation of pedigrees; in society, the comparative merits of horses, the movements of well-known persons, the speed of ocean steamers, boat-races, the dresses of ladies of fashion, football contests, the last novel, weddings, receptions, the trials of housekeepers, the claims of rival singers, the gestures and declamation of favorite play-actors, the platitudes of popular preachers, the rise and fall of stocks, murders in bar-rooms, robberies in stores, accidental fires in distant localities,–these and other innumerable forms of gossip, collected by newspapers and retailed in drawing-rooms, which have no important bearing on human life or national welfare or immortal destiny. It is not that the elaborate presentations of financial details for which Mr. Gladstone was so justly famous were without importance. I only wonder why they should have had such overwhelming interest to English legislators and the English public; and why his statistics should have given him claims to transcendent oratory and the profoundest statesmanship,–for it is undeniable that his financial speeches brought him more fame and importance in the House of Commons than all the others he made during those seven years of parliamentary gladiatorship. One of these triumphantly carried through Parliament a commercial reciprocity treaty with France, arranged by Mr. Cobden; and another, scarcely less notable, repealed the duty on paper,–a measure of great importance for the facilitation of making books and cheapening newspapers, but both of which were desperately opposed by the monopolists and manufacturers.

Some of Mr. Gladstone's other speeches stand on higher ground and are of permanent value; they will live for the lofty sentiments and the comprehensive knowledge which marked them,–appealing to the highest intellect as well as to the hearts of those common people of whom all nations are chiefly composed. Among these might be mentioned those which related to Italian affairs, sympathizing with the struggle which the Italians were making to secure constitutional liberty and the unity of their nation,–severe on the despotism of that miserable king of Naples, Francis II., whom Garibaldi had overthrown with a handful of men. Mr. Gladstone, ever since his last visit to Naples, had abominated the outrages which its government had perpetrated on a gallant and aspiring people, and warmly supported them by his eloquence. In the same friendly spirit, in 1858, he advocated in Parliament a free constitution for the Ionian islands, then under British rule; and when sent thither as British commissioner he addressed the Senate of those islands, at Corfu, in the Italian language. The islands were by their own desire finally ceded to Greece, whose prosperity as an independent and united nation Mr. Gladstone ever had at heart. The land of Homer to him was hallowed ground.

On one subject Mr. Gladstone made a great mistake, which he afterward squarely acknowledged,–and this was in reference to the American civil war. In 1862, while chancellor of the exchequer, he made a speech at Newcastle in which he expressed his conviction that Jefferson Davis had "already succeeded in making the Southern States of America [which were in revolt] an independent nation." This opinion caused a great sensation in both England and the United States, and alienated many friends,–especially as Earl Russell, the minister of foreign affairs, had refused to recognize the Confederate States. It was the indiscretion of the chancellor of the exchequer which disturbed some of his warmest supporters in England; but in America the pain arose from the fact that so great a man had expressed such an opinion,–a man, moreover, for whom America had then and still has the greatest admiration and reverence. It was feared that his sympathies, like those of a great majority of the upper classes in England at the time, were with the South rather than the North, and chiefly because the English manufacturers had to pay twenty shillings instead of eight-pence a pound for cotton. It was natural for a manufacturing country to feel this injury to its interests; but it was not magnanimous in view of the tremendous issues which were at stake, and it was inconsistent with the sacrifices which England had nobly made in the emancipation of her own slaves in the West Indies. For England to give her moral support to the revolted Southern States, founding their Confederacy upon the baneful principle of human slavery, was a matter of grave lamentation with patriots at the North, to say nothing of the apparent English indifference to the superior civilization of the free States and the great cause to which they were devoted in a struggle of life and death. It even seemed to some that the English aristocracy were hypocritical in their professions, and at heart were hostile to the progress of liberty; that the nation as a whole cared more for money than justice,–as seemingly illustrated by the war with China to enforce the opium trade against the protest of the Chinese government, pagan as it was.

Mr. Gladstone had now swung away from the Conservative party. In 1864 he had vigorously supported a bill for enlarging the parliamentary franchise by reducing the limit of required rental from £10 to £6, declaring that the burden of proof rested on those who would exclude forty-nine-fiftieths of the working-classes from the franchise. He also, as chancellor of the exchequer, caused great excitement by admitting the unsatisfactory condition of the Irish Church,–that is, the Church of England among the Irish people; sustained by their taxes, but ministering to only one-eighth or one-ninth of the population. These and other similar evidences of his liberal tendencies alienated his Oxford constituency, the last people in the realm to adopt liberal measures; and on the proroguement of Parliament in 1865, and the new election which followed, he was defeated as member for the University, although he was a High Churchman and the pride of the University, devoted to its interests heart and soul. It is a proof of the exceeding bitterness of political parties that such ingratitude should have been shown to one of the greatest scholars that Oxford has produced for a century. It was in this year also that on completing his term as Rector of the University of Edinburgh he retired with a notable address on the "Place of Ancient Greece in the Providential Order;" thus anew emphasizing his scholarly equipment as a son of Oxford.

The Liberal party, however, were generally glad of Gladstone's defeat, since it would detach him from the University. He now belonged more emphatically to the country, and was more free and unshackled to pursue his great career, as Sir Robert Peel had been before him in similar circumstances. Instead of representing a narrow-minded and bigoted set of clergymen and scholars, he was chosen at once to represent quite a different body,–even the liberal voters of South Lancashire, a manufacturing district.

The death of Lord Palmerston at the age of eighty, October 17, 1865, made Earl Russell prime minister, while Gladstone resumed under the new government his post as chancellor of the exchequer, and now became formally the leader of the Liberals in the House of Commons.

Irish questions in 1866 came prominently to the front, for the condition of Ireland at that time was as alarming as it was deplorable, with combined Fenianism and poverty and disaffection in every quarter. So grave was the state of this unhappy country that the government felt obliged to bring in a bill suspending the habeas corpus act, which the chancellor of the exchequer eloquently supported. His conversion to Liberal views was during this session seen in bringing in a measure for the abolition of compulsory church-rates, in aid of Dissenters; but before it could be carried through its various stages a change of ministry had taken place on another issue, and the Conservatives again came into power, with Lord Derby for prime minister and Disraeli for chancellor of the exchequer and leader of his party in the House of Commons.

This fall of the Liberal ministry was brought about by the Reform Bill, which Lord Russell had prepared, and which was introduced by the chancellor of the exchequer amid unparalleled excitement. Finance measures lost their interest in the fierceness of the political combat. It was not so important a measure as that of the reform of 1832 in its political consequences, but it was of importance enough to enlist absorbing interest throughout the kingdom; it would have added four hundred thousand new voters. While it satisfied the Liberals, it was regarded by the Conservatives as a dangerous concession, opening the doors too widely to the people. Its most brilliant and effective opponent was Mr. Lowe, whose oratory raised him at once to fame and influence. Seldom has such eloquence been heard in the House of Commons, and from all the leading debaters on both sides. Mr. Gladstone outdid himself, but perhaps was a little too profuse with his Latin quotations. The debate was continued for eight successive nights. The final division was the largest ever known: the government found itself in a minority of eleven, and consequently resigned. Lord Derby, as has been said, was again prime minister.

The memorable rivalry between Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Disraeli was now continued in deeper earnest, and never ceased so long as the latter statesman was a member of the House of Commons, They were recognized to be the heads of their respective parties,–two giants in debate; two great parliamentary gladiators, on whom the eyes of the nation rested. Mr. Gladstone was the more earnest, the more learned, and the more solid in his blows. Mr. Disraeli was the more adroit, the more witty, and the more brilliant in his thrusts. Both were equally experienced. The one appealed to justice and truth; the other to the prejudices of the House and the pride of a nation of classes. One was armed with a heavy dragoon sword; the other with a light rapier, which he used with extraordinary skill. Mr. G.W.E. Russell, in his recent "Life of Gladstone," quotes the following passage from a letter of Lord Houghton, May, 1867:–

"I met Gladstone at breakfast. He seems quite awed with the diabolical cleverness of Dizzy, 'who,' he says, 'is gradually driving all ideas of political honor out of the House, and accustoming it to the most revolting cynicism,' There is no doubt that a sense of humor has always been conspicuously absent from Mr. Gladstone's character."

Sometimes one of these rival leaders was on the verge of victory and sometimes the other, and both equally gained the applause of the spectators. Two such combatants had not been seen since the days of Pitt and Fox,–one, the champion of the people; the other, of the aristocracy. What each said was read the next day by every family in the land. Both were probably greatest in opposition, since more unconstrained. Of the two, Disraeli was superior in the control of his temper and in geniality of disposition, making members roar with laughter by his off-hand vituperation and ingenuity in inventing nicknames. Gladstone was superior in sustained reasoning, in lofty sentiments, and in the music of his voice, accompanied by that solemnity of manner which usually passes for profundity and the index of deep convictions. As for rhetorical power, it would be difficult to say which was the superior,–though the sentences of both were too long. It would also be difficult to tell which of the two was the more ambitious and more tenacious of office. Both, it is said, bade for popularity in the measures they proposed. Both were politicians. There is, indeed, a great difference between politicians and statesmen; but a man may be politic without ceasing to be a lover of his country, like Lord Palmerston himself; and a man may advocate large and comprehensive views of statesmanship which are neither popular nor appreciated.

The new Conservative ministry was a short one. Coming into power on the defeat of the Liberal reform bill introduced by Mr. Gladstone, the Tory government recognized the popular demand on which that bill had been based; and though Mr. Disraeli coolly introduced a reform bill of their own which was really more radical than the Liberal bill had been, and although at the hands of the opposition it was so modified that the Duke of Buccleuch declared that the only word unaltered was the initial "whereas," its passage was claimed as a great Conservative victory. Shortly after this, the Earl of Derby retired on account of ill-health, and was succeeded by Mr. Disraeli as premier; but the current of Liberalism set in so strongly in the ensuing elections that he was forced to resign in 1868, and Mr. Gladstone now for the first time became prime minister.

This was the golden period of Gladstone's public services. During Disraeli's short lease of power, Gladstone had carried the abolition of compulsory church-rates, and had moved, with great eloquence, the disestablishment of the English Church in Ireland. On the latter question Parliament was dissolved, and an appeal made to the country; and the triumphant success of the Liberals brought Mr. Gladstone into power with the brightest prospects for the cause to which he was now committed. He was fifty-nine years old before he reached the supreme object of his ambition,–to rule England; but in accordance with law, and in the interest of truth and justice. In England the strongest man can usually, by persevering energy, reach the highest position to which a subject may aspire. In the United States, political ambition is defeated by rivalries and animosities. Practically the President reigns, like absolute kings, "by the grace of God,"–as it would seem when so many ordinary men, and even obscure, are elevated to the highest place, and when these comparatively unknown men often develop when elected the virtues and abilities of a Saul or a David, as in the cases of Lincoln and Garfield.

So great was the popularity of Mr. Gladstone at this time, so profound was the respect he inspired for his lofty character, his abilities, his vast and varied learning, his unimpeachable integrity and conscientious discharge of his duties, that for five years he was virtually dictator, wielding more power than any premier since Pitt, if we except Sir Robert Peel in his glory. He was not a dictator in the sense that Metternich or Bismarck was,–not a grand vizier, the vicegerent of an absolute monarch, controlling the foreign policy, the army, the police, and the national expenditures. He could not send men to prison without a trial, or interfere with the peaceful pursuits of obnoxious citizens; but he could carry out any public measure he proposed affecting the general interests, for Parliament was supreme, and his influence ruled the Parliament. He was liable to disagreeable attacks from members of the opposition, and could not silence them; he might fall before their attacks; but while he had a great majority of members to back him, ready to do his bidding, he stood on a proud pedestal and undoubtedly enjoyed the sweets of power. He would not have been human if he had not.

Yet Mr. Gladstone carried his honors with dignity and discretion. He was accessible to all who had claims upon his time; he was never rude or insolent; he was gracious and polite to delegations; he was too kind-hearted to snub anybody. No cares of office could keep him from attending public worship; no popular amusements diverted him from his duties; he was feared only as a father is feared. I can conceive that he was sometimes intolerant of human infirmities; that no one dared to obtrude familiarities or make unseemly jokes in his presence; that few felt quite at ease in his company,–oppressed by his bearing, and awed by his prodigious respectability and grave solemnity. Not that he was arrogant and haughty, like a Roman cardinal or an Oxford Don; he was simply dignified and undemonstrative, like a man absorbed with weighty responsibilities. I doubt if he could unbend at the dinner-table like Disraeli and Palmerston, or tell stories like Sydney Smith, or drink too much wine with jolly companions, or forget for a moment the proper and the conventional. I can see him sporting with children, or taking long walks, or cutting down trees for exercise, or given to deep draughts of old October when thirsty; but to see him with a long pipe, or dallying with ladies, or giving vent to unseemly expletives, or retailing scandals,–these and other disreputable follies are utterly inconceivable of Mr. Gladstone. A very serious man may be an object of veneration; but he is a constant rebuke to the weaknesses of our common humanity,–a wet blanket upon frivolous festivities.

Let us now briefly glance at the work done by Gladstone during the five years when in his first premiership he directed the public affairs of England,–impatient of opposition, and sensitive to unjust aspersions, yet too powerful to be resisted in the supreme confidence of his party.

The first thing of note he did was to complete the disestablishment of the Irish Church,–an arduous task to any one lacking Mr. Gladstone's extraordinary influence. Here he was at war with his former friends, and with a large section of the Conservative party,–especially with ecclesiastical dignitaries, who saw in this measure hostility to the Church as well as a national sin. It was a dissolution of the union between the Churches of England and Ireland; a divestment of the temporalities which the Irish clergy had enjoyed; the abolition of all ecclesiastical corporations and laws and courts in Ireland,–in short, the sweeping away of the annuities which the beneficed clergy had hitherto received out of the property of the Established Church, which annuities were of the nature of freeholds. It was not proposed to deprive the clergy of their income, so long as they discharged their clerical duties; but that the title to their tithes should be vested in commissioners, so that these church freeholds could not be bought and sold by non-residents, and churches in decadence should be taken from incumbents. The peerage rights of Irish bishops were also taken away. It was not proposed to touch private endowments; and glebe-houses which had become generally dilapidated were handed over to incumbents by their paying a fair valuation. Not only did the measure sweep away the abuses of the Establishment which had existed for centuries,–such as endowments held by those who performed no duties, which they could dispose of like other property,–but the regium donum given to Presbyterian ministers and the Maynooth Catholic College grant, which together amounted to £70,000, were also withdrawn, although compensated on the same principles as those which granted a settled stipend to the actual incumbents of the disestablished churches.