For EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & Co. Single Numbers of THE LIVING AGE, 18 cents. From The Fortnightly Review. THE place which will ultimately be assigned to Mr. Gladstone in the ranks of English statesmen can only be fixed by one who is prophet as well as critic. At the present moment he is seen by opponents, and even by friends, through so disturbing a medium of prejudice and partiality; he is presented to the public, by those who pass judgment upon him, in so grotesque and inconsistent a variety of aspects and disguises; he is to such an extent the victim of contradictory and antagonistic superlatives; above all, the exact quality of his influence upon the course of events, and the members of his party, is so difficult to define; the results, in some cases even the tendencies, of his statesmanship are so incalculable, that only the very rash, foolish, and ignorant would presume to anticipate the verdict of posterity on the prime minister. It is a task at once less perilous and more profitable, to measure and classify the attributes by which he has acquired the position he now holds; to summarize a few of the idiosyncrasies of a man who is admitted by his bitterest detractors and enemies to be a commanding force in the political life of England; to define some respects in which he differs from the most distinguished of his contemporaries, and some peculiarities which, as he is nearing the completion of his seventy-fifth year, have accompanied the successive stages of his political development. plished far more gradually and laboriously than in the case of Sir Robert Peel. During the debates on the Irish Church Act, the severest reproach which Mr. Disraeli could bring against the author of the measure was that he had formerly been a champion of the Protestant Estab lishment in Ireland, and that he had spoken in its favor when an undergraduate at Oxford. Neither Mr. Disraeli nor any one else could taunt Mr. Gladstone with having, like Peel, been returned to power to give effect to one policy and then espousing and executing another. To say this is not to bring any charge against the memory of one of the greatest ministers of the century, and, according to Lord George Bentinck's biographer, "the greatest member of Parliament who ever lived." Peel's hand was forced by famine. The arguments with which im. minent pestilence, bred of starvation, and the murmurs of approaching revolution supplied him, were unanswerable. He would have been no true patriot or statesman if he had held out against them. But though the desertion of his principles was prescribed by a destiny whose decrees he could not withstand, the fact of their unexpectedly sudden desertion remains. If Mr. Gladstone's position has been established on the ruins of his old beliefs; if he destroyed that Irish Church of which he was once the enthusiastic advocate; if, in other fields of legislation, he has led his followers to the attack of strongholds which he once defended, It is now just one month less than fifty. it has been after due notice and upon two years that Mr. Gladstone entered clear and unambiguous pretences. In "A Parliament as Tory member for Newark. Chapter of Autobiography" he has demonSince then he has travelled the whole dis-strated the processes by which he arrived tance which separates the early Toryism at the conclusion that the Established of Sir Robert Peel from the Liberalism of Cobden and Bright, and far more than the distance which separated Sir Robert Peel's protectionism from his conversion to free trade. The contrast between Sir Robert Peel and Mr. Gladstone, and between Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Bright, is striking. The changes of opinion undergone by Sir Robert Peel are surpassed in the changes illustrated in the career of the prime minister. But in the case of Mr. Gladstone they have been accom. Church in Ireland, which he had formerly held reconcilable with civil and national justice, could not be perpetuated without gross injustice. His original case, he says, was that "the Church of Ireland must be maintained for the benefit of the whole people of Ireland, and must be maintained as the truth, or it cannot be maintained at all." The latter condition was violated by the Maynooth grant; the former was disposed of by existing facts. "I never held," writes Mr. Gladstone in this Chapter, "that a national Church | tered public life, he had but an imperfect should be permanently maintained except sense of the ineffable blessings of liberty. This deficiency was not unnatural to one who had been brought up in the straitest school of authority and tradition, and who in early manhood was, in Macaulay's fa miliar words, "the rising hope of the stern and unbending Tories." As men rise on stepping-stones of their dead selves to higher things, so Mr. Gladstone has throughout his whole public life been engaged in bursting, and disentangling him. self from, the cerements of his dead faiths. Whether he would have been greater or less than he is but for this progressive movement of his mind may be questioned; it is certain that he is indebted to it for much of the power which he exercises over those who are associated with him, however remotely or indirectly, in public life. It is because Mr. Gladstone has been so consistently inconsistent, because the continuity of his views and beliefs has known such decisive, if slowly consummated, solutions, that he has carried with him so large a group of politicians, and so people. The process of self-education has enabled him effectually to educate others. Those who have themselves learned slowly, at school or college, were declared by Dr. Arnold to make the best schoolmas The contrast between Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Bright is even more strongly marked than that between Mr. Gladstone overwhelming a majority of the English and Sir Robert Peel. As he now draws towards the end of his career Mr. Bright cannot be charged with having abandoned, violated, or withdrawn a single principle that he ever proclaimed. Not a flaw of inconsistency or blemish of self-contradic-ters, because they could most easily place tion is to be seen in his whole career. themselves in the position of unrecepOthers have come round to him; he has tive schoolboys. The wealth of words lived to behold the convictions, which he which Mr. Gladstone expends upon any firmly embraced and which were con- proposal he introduces to the House of demned as extravagant and absurd, incor- Commons; the variety of the points of porated into the accepted doctrines of the view from which he looks at it; his minute Liberal party and of all parties, and into weighing of every sort of counter considthe unquestioned traditions of English eration; the nice and, as they may seem, policy. But though Mr. Gladstone's rec- the tedious and sophistical distinctions ord and retrospect are of the most oppo- which he draws between shades of thought site character, his mutations have never and forms of words, each of these rehad anything in them of vacillation; they flects or suggests some experience of his have partaken from the first of the nature own mental discipline. There are few of a slow growth, and have indicated the objections to any policy or scheme of leg. successive periods of an intellectual de-islation which he has not appreciated, and velopment. Slowly, but with the certainty which consequently he does not set himof daybreak, his horizon has expanded. He has himself told us that when he en Gleanings of Past Years, vol. vii., pp. 112, 113, and seg. self to remove. For this reason he is in his treatment of public topics the least dogmatic of statesmen. Mr. Bright, who has neither receded from nor advanced beyond the tenets with which he first en tered public life, cannot avoid a certain | his contemporaries in his power of interautocracy and absolutism in a statement preting, and placing himself at the head of, public feeling, when it is deeply moved. The Bulgarian atrocities supplied him with one of those opportunities exactly congenial to his character and gifts. His two Midlothian campaigns, whether in their oratorical labors or in the results that fol lowed them, form a monument which supplies a fair measure of the greatness of of opinion. He has been troubled with no doubts, and even his fertile imagination can make little allowance for doubters. But it is to the doubters, the most illustrious of whom he himself has been, that Mr. Gladstone chiefly addresses himself. Hence the extraordinary complexity and comprehensiveness of his argumentation; hence what may be called the metaphysi- the man. He took his stand upon gencal quality in his eloquence, the subtle eral principles, upon those elementary series of appeals to the consciousness of ideas of justice, of humanity, which all his hearers which runs like an undertone can understand, and which he had, in his through his most splendid orations, and reply to Lord Palmerston thirty years which is perhaps the secret of their occa- earlier during the Don Pacifico debate, sional verbosity and even obscurity. clearly foreshadowed. This reply is so Whatever history may say of Mr. Glad-remarkable, so appositely prophetic of the stone it will not say that he was a perfect attitude which in foreign policy Mr. Gladleader of the House of Commons. He fails to be this for the very reasons which make him a great popular leader in the country. He understands more of man in the abstract than of man in the concrete; more of the passions which sway humanity in the bulk, than of the motives to which individuals are amenable, and the treatment to be applied to them. He is at his best when he is the exponent not so much of the policy of a party as of the ideas which animate that policy, and which touch the heart of nations. It was not till he had made his famous "flesh-and-blood" speech that Mr. Gladstone was really rec ognized as a great popular leader, and struck a responsive chord that still vi. brates in the breasts of the English people. He had hitherto been best known as a financier, as the greatest chancellor of the exchequer England ever had, and as somewhat academic, narrow, and exclusive in his sympathies and tastes. But this phrase, to which additional effect was given by the glow of the language and the atmosphere of ideas associated with it, produced an instantaneous and almost electrical result. The place into which he may be then said to have leaped, he has continued to hold. Notwithstanding his temporary retirement and the eclipse which, with the metropolitan public, his popularity suffered in the melodramatic days of Jingoism, events have conclusively shown that Mr. Gladstone surpasses all stone has since repeatedly assumed, and so comparatively little known, that no apology need be offered for quoting an extract from it here: The noble Lord [Lord Palmerston] vaunted, amid the cheers of his supporters, that under his administration an Englishman should be, had been. But, I ask, what then was a Roman throughout the world, what the citizen of Rome citizen? He was a member of a privileged caste; he belonged to a conquering race, to a nation that held all nations bound down by the hand of imperial power. For him there was to be an exceptional system of law; for him principles were to be asserted and rights were to be enjoyed, that were denied to the rest of the world. Is such, then, the view of the noble lord as to the relation that is to subsist between England and other countries? Does he make the claim for us that we are to be uplifted on a platform high above the standingground of other nations? It is indeed too clear that too much of this notion is lurking in his mind; that he adopts, in part, that vain conception that we, forsooth, have a mission to be the censors of abuses and and imperfections among the other countries of the world; that we are to be the universal schoolmasters, and that all who hesitate to recognize our office should have the war of diplomacy, at And least, forthwith declared against them. is merely to carry on a diplomatic war, all certainly, if the business of a foreign secretary must admit the perfection of the noble lord in the discharge of his functions. But it is not the duty of a foreign minister to be like a knight-errant, ever pricking forth, armed at all |