LITMIR.BIZ

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filled Session after Session with excitement; and Gladstone pursued each in turn with an ardour which left his followers out of breath.

      He was not very skilful in managing his party, or even his Cabinet. He kept his friendships and his official relations quite distinct. He never realized the force of the saying that men who have only worked together have only half lived together. It was truly said that he understood MAN, but not men; and meek followers in the House of Commons, who had sacrificed money, time, toil, health, and sometimes conscience, to the support of the Government, turned, like the crushed worm, when they found that Gladstone sternly ignored their presence in the Lobby, or, if forced to speak to them, called them by inappropriate names. His strenuousness of reforming purpose and strength of will were concealed by no lightness of touch, no give-and-take, no playfulness, no fun. He had little of that saving grace of humour which smoothes the practical working of life as much as it adds to its enjoyment. He was fiercely, terribly, incessantly in earnest; and unbroken earnestness, though admirable, exhausts and in the long run alienates.

      There was yet another feature of his Parliamentary management which proved disastrous to his cause, and this was his tendency to what the vulgar call hair-splitting and the learned casuistry. At Oxford men are taught to distinguish with scrupulous care between propositions closely similar, but not identical. In the House of Commons they are satisfied with the roughest and broadest divisions between right and wrong; they see no shades of colour between black-and white. Hence arose two unfortunate incidents, which were nicknamed "The Ewelme Scandal" and "The Colliery Explosion"—two cases in which Gladstone, while observing the letter of an Act of Parliament, violated, or seemed to violate, its spirit in order to qualify highly deserving gentlemen for posts to which he wished to appoint them. By law the Rectory of Ewelme (in the gift of the Crown) could only be held by a graduate of the University of Oxford. Gladstone conferred it on a Cambridge man, who had to procure an ad eundem degree at Oxford before he could accept the preferment. By law no man could be made a paid member of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council unless he had served as a judge. Gladstone made his Attorney-General, Sir John Collier, a Judge for three weeks, and then passed him on to the Judicial Committee. Both these appointments were angrily challenged in Parliament. Gladstone defended them with energy and skill, and logically his defence was unassailable. But these were cases where the plain man—and the House of Commons is full of plain men—feels, though he cannot prove, that there has been a departure from ordinary straightforwardness and fair dealing.

      Yet again; the United States had a just complaint against us; arising out of the performances of the Alabama, which, built in an English dockyard and manned by an English crew, but owned by the Slaveowners' Confederacy, had got out to sea, and, during a two years' cruise of piracy and devastation, had harassed the Government of the United States. The quarrel had lasted for years, with ever-increasing gravity. Gladstone determined to end it; and, with that purpose, arranged for a Board of Arbitration, which sat at Geneva, and decided against England. We were heavily amerced by the sentence of this International Tribunal. We paid, but we did not like it. Gladstone gloried in the moral triumph of a settlement without bloodshed; but a large section of the nation, including many of his own party, felt that national honour had been lowered, and determined to avenge themselves on the Minister who had lowered it.

      Meanwhile Disraeli, whom Gladstone had deposed in 1868, was watching the development of these events with sarcastic interest and effective criticism, till in 1872 he was able to liken the great Liberal, Government to "a range of exhausted volcanoes," and to say of its eminent leader that he "alternated between a menace and a sigh." In 1873 Gladstone introduced a wholly unworkable Bill for the reform of University education in Ireland. It pleased no one, and was defeated on the Second Reading. Gladstone resigned. The Queen sent for Disraeli; but Disraeli declined to repeat the experiment of governing the country without a majority in the House of Commons, and Gladstone was forced to resume office, though, of course, with immensely diminished authority. His Cabinet was all at sixes and sevens. There were resignations and rumours of resignation. He took the Chancellorship of the Exchequer, and, as some authorities contended, vacated his seat by doing so. Election after election went wrong, and the end was visibly at hand.

      At the beginning of 1874 Gladstone, confined to his house by a cold, executed a coup d'état. He announced the Dissolution of Parliament, and promised, if his lease of power were renewed, to repeal the income-tax. The Times observed: "The Prime Minister descends upon Greenwich" (where he had taken refuge after being expelled from South Lancashire) "amid a shower of gold, and must needs prove as irresistible as the Father of the Gods." But this was too sanguine a forecast. Greenwich, which returned two members, placed Gladstone second on the poll, below a local distiller, while his followers were blown out of their seats like chaff before the wind. When the General Election was over, the Tories had a majority of forty-six. Gladstone, after some hesitation, resigned without waiting to meet a hostile Parliament. Disraeli became Prime Minister for the second time; and in addressing the new House of Commons he paid a generous compliment to his great antagonist. "If," he said, "I had been a follower of a Parliamentary chief so 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."

      The roost loyal Gladstonian cannot improve upon that tribute, and Gladstone's greatest day was yet to come.

VI

       Table of Contents

      LORD SALISBURY

      This set of sketches is not intended for a continuous narrative, but for a series of impressions. I must therefore condense the events of Disraeli's second Administration (during which he became Lord Beaconsfield) and of Gladstone's Administration which succeeded it, hurrying to meet Lord Salisbury, whom so far I have not attempted to describe.

      From February, 1874, to May, 1880, Disraeli was not only in office, but, for the first time, in power; for whereas in his first Administration he was confronted by a hostile majority in the House of Commons, he now had a large majority of his own, reinforced, on every critical division, by renegade Whigs and disaffected Radicals. He had, as no Minister since Lord Melbourne had, the favour and friendship, as well as the confidence, of the Queen. The House of Lords and the London mob alike were at his feet, and he was backed by a noisy and unscrupulous Press.

      In short, he was as much a dictator as the then existing forms of the Constitution allowed, and he gloried in his power. If only he had risked a Dissolution on his triumphal return from Berlin in July, 1878, he would certainly have retained his dictatorship for life; but his health had failed, and his nerve failed with it. "I am very unwell," he said to Lord George Hamilton, "but I manage to crawl to the Treasury Bench, and when I get there I look as fierce as I can."

      Meanwhile Gladstone was not only "looking fierce," but agitating fiercely. After his great disappointment in 1874 he had abruptly retired from the leadership of the Liberal party, and had divided his cast-off mantle between Lord Granville and Lord Hartington. But the Eastern Question of 1876–1879 brought him back into the thick of the fight. Granville and Hartington found themselves practically dispossessed of their respective leaderships, and Gladstonianism dominated the active and fighting section of the Liberal party.

      It is impossible to conceive a more passionate or a more skilful opposition than that with which Gladstone, to use his own phrase, "counter-worked the purpose of Lord Beaconsfield" from 1876 to 1880—and he attained his object. Lord Beaconsfield, like other Premiers nearer our own time, imagined that he was indispensable and invulnerable. Gladstone might harangue, but Beaconsfield would still govern. He told the Queen that she might safely go abroad in March, 1880, for, though there was a Dissolution impending, he knew that the country would support him. So the Queen went off in perfect ease of mind, and returned in three weeks' time to find a Liberal majority of one hundred, excluding the Irish members, with Gladstone on the crest of the wave. Lord Beaconsfield resigned without waiting for the verdict of the new Parliament. Gladstone, though the Queen had done all she could

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