WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE

(1809-1898)

LADSTONE made more speeches and better ones on a greater variety of subjects than any other Englishman of his generation. In politics, in literature, in everything that concerned the world's forward movement, his intellectual sympathies were universal, or as nearly so as it is possible for any man's to be. If men less intellectual, less self-contained than he, have learned a road to power over other minds shorter than the purely intellectual by so living

"Ut ridentibus arrident, ita flentibus adflent — »

Gladstone certainly had everything as an orator which the broadest culture of the scholar and the steadiest tension of the thinker can give any man. He does not belong to the same class with Burke, Curran, or Grattan; he was not by nature great as an orator, and he does not always show the habit of radical thought which gave the great Whigs of the eighteenth century their tremendous moral force, but among English orators, Burke alone surpasses him in intellect, and Burke himself did not surpass him in facility of expression. In such speeches as that accepting the freedom of the city. of Glasgow in 1865, Mr. Gladstone surpasses himself as some may hold, but if, under the inspiration of great ideas, he shows an enthusiasm and freedom, which do not characterize his political speeches, it must be remembered that the tone of English parliamentary speeches is almost conversational; that, by force of an authoritative habit, only broken down in great emergencies, the discussion of English public affairs tends to the prosaic.

Born at Liverpool, December 29th, 1809, Mr. Gladstone received the most careful and thorough education the English system can give. He graduated with double honors (in classics and mathematics) at Oxford, and a year later (1832) entered public life under what he must afterwards have considered inauspicious conditions. His father, Sir John Gladstone, Bart., a prominent Liverpool merchant, of aristocratic Scotch descent, was a Tory, and in the first election after the passage of the Reform Bill, the young DoubleHonor man from Oxford was sent to Parliament to represent a "pocket borough" controlled by the Duke of Newcastle. Like Fox

in this particular, he was like him also in following a natural bent towards the Whigs or "Liberals," as they were now called.

After holding Cabinet positions as a Conservative, he became Chancellor of the Exchequer under the Coalition Ministry of 1852, and, through the action and reaction of the opposing forces of English politics, developed into the leading Liberal of his day, recognized at his retirement in 1894 as the greatest statesman of Europe. His influence as a Liberal leader during the last ten years of his political life had been so overwhelming that his death, May 19th, 1898, left his party unable or unwilling to give his successor the confidence it had given him, and the result has been a strong political reaction against the Liberalism which, as he understood it, meant enlarged liberty for the individual, better-defined sovereignty for the people, and freer, more peaceful co-operation among all nations.

THE FUNDAMENTAL ERROR OF ENGLISH COLONIAL AGGRANDIZEMENT

(Delivered at the City Hall, Glasgow, November 1st, 1865, on the Presentation of the Freedom of that City to Mr. Gladstone)

[This speech is considered the best example of Mr. Gladstone's eloquence, and it would certainly be hard, if not impossible, to find another speech delivered by him, or by any other man in England since the death of Brougham, which has in it so much of the moral force through which Pitt and Burke gave direction to the policies of England from their own day to the time of Gladstone's retirement and the reaction which followed the failure of his plan of Home Rule. Those who agree with Mr. Gladstone will find in this speech most of that which made him seem admirable to men of like sympathies throughout the world, while his political opponents will find it a summary of the governing ideas which their ablest statesmanship has been directed to check or to neutralize. The complete text here given is from the 'Oratorical Year Book'-London.]

I

NEED hardly tell you that it is with the liveliest and deepest feelings of satisfaction that I accept from your hands, my lord, the gift you have been pleased to present to me, to be preserved, I hope, for many long years, among the records and the treasures of my family. I have no doubt - indeed, I feel too well assured that a critical judgment might find ample scope for remark upon the too flattering terms in which you have been pleased to advert to my public conduct, but still I presume to say that such acknowledgments as you are pleased to make on occasions like the present, of the feeble and humble efforts of any

individual to render services to his country, are the choicest rewards that we can receive for the past, and are the greatest encouragements and incentives, the greatest and most powerful aids for the future. But such occasions lead us to review the position in which we stand, and to reflect upon that which has been and that which is to be; and perhaps it might at first sight appear strange if upon an occasion so joyous, when I have received at your hands an honor so deeply valued, I confess to you that a powerful, perhaps a predominant, feeling in my mind at the present juncture is a feeling of solitariness in the struggles and in the career of public life. The Lord Provost has alluded briefly, but touchingly and justly alluded, to the loss we have just sustained, and has intimated to you that the covenant which brings me before you was a covenant concluded before that loss had taken place; but, indeed, the retrospect of the last five years is in this regard a touching and melancholy retrospect. Sad, numerous, and wide have been the blanks which death has made in the ranks of our public men, and not alone of our official public men, for many in this country are the public men, many are the statesmen who render true and vital service to the land, but who have never touched a public salary. Within these five years we have lost him whom I must name as the most illustrious in his position and his office,-the beloved husband of our Queen, revered, admired, loved by all classes of the community, and one whose departure from this mortal home has inflicted on the Sovereign so dear to our hearts a loss that never on this side the grave can be repaired. I pass from the Prince Consort to another name, widely, indeed, separated from him in social rank, but yet a name which is great at this moment in the esteem of the country, and which will be forever great in its annals,— I mean the name of Richard Cobden,- so simple, so true, so brave, and so far-seeing a man, who knew how to associate himself at their very root with the deep interests of the community in which he lived, and to whom it was given to achieve, through the moral force of reason and persuasion, numerous triumphs that have made his name immortal But if I look to the ranks of official life, perhaps it may cause even surprise, though we know that our losses have been heavy, when I say that my own recollection supplies me,-and there may be more which that recollection does not suggest,- that my own recollection supplies me with the names of no less than seventeen persons who have died

within the last five years, and whose duty and privilege it was to advise the Sovereign as members of the Government of this country. As to the last of these men, the distinguished man whose loss at this moment the whole community in every class and in every corner of the land deeply and sincerely deplores, we have this consolation-that it had pleased the Almighty to afford him strength and courage which carried him to a ripe old age in the active service of his country. It has not been so with all. It has been my lot to follow to the grave several of those distinguished men who have been called away from the scene of their honorable labors-not, indeed, before they had acquired the esteem and confidence of the country, but still at a period when the minds and expectations of their fellow-countrymen were fondly fixed upon the thought of what they might yet achieve for the public good. Two of your own countrymen, Lord Elgin and Lord Dalhousie, Lord Canning, Lord Herbert, Sir George Cornewall Lewis, and the Duke of Newcastle, by some singular dispensation of Providence, have been swept away in the full. maturity of their faculties, and in the early stages of middle life -a body of men strong enough of themselves in all the gifts of wisdom and of knowledge, of experience and of eloquence, to have equipped a cabinet for the service of the country.

And, therefore, my lord, when I look back upon the years that have passed, though they have been joyful years in many respects, because they have been years in which the Parliament of this country has earned fresh and numerous titles to the augmented confidence of its citizens, they are also mournful in that I seem to see the long procession of the figures of the dead, and I feel that those who are left behind are in one sense solitary upon the stage of public life. But, my Lord Provost, it is characteristic of this country that her people have been formed for many generations in those habits of thought and action. which belong to regulated freedom, and one happy and blessed result of that description of public education is, that the country ceases to be dependent for its welfare upon this man or upon that. There never has yet been in the history of the world a nation truly free-I mean a nation that is free, not only in laws and institutions, but also in thoughts and acts; there has never been a nation in this sense possessed of freedom, and which has likewise had large and spreading and valuable interests, which has found a want of men to defend them. Nor, my

Lord Provost, I am thankful to say, have we yet been reduced to this extremity, and I trust that I am not going beyond the liberty of an occasion such as this when, standing before you at a moment of such public interest, I venture to express my confidence personally in the state of the Government and the country. Her Majesty, well aware of the heavy loss which we have sustained, and wisely exercising her high prerogative, has chosen from among the statemen of the country Earl Russell to fill the place of Prime Minister. I know well the inclination of those whom I am addressing, and also of the whole community, to trust more to the evidence of facts than to that of words, which may be idle and delusive, and I presume to say before you that the name of Lord Russell is in itself a pledge and a promise to a people. A man who fought for British liberty, for our institutions, and for our laws, but with a view to the strengthening of those laws-who has fought on a hundred fields for their improvement, is not likely now, when in his seventy-third honorable year, to unlearn the lesson of his whole life, to change the direction of his career, and to forfeit the inheritance which he has secured in the hearts and memories of his countrymen. Therefore, my Lord Provost, I venture to think that the country has reasonable assurance in the name of the person who has for the second time assumed the responsibility of guiding the councils of a Crown, with the aid of many experienced and distinguished persons whom I am happy to call my colleagues,-I therefore hope that the country has reasonable assurance that the same wise and enlightened spirit which has for the last thirty or thirty-five years distinguished in the main the policy of British legislation, and the conduct of the Executive Government, will still continue to be exhibited by those who will have the responsibility and direction of public affairs. My Lord Provost, if we look to the acts of the period through which we have been passing, they are, indeed, too numerous to allow of reference in detail. The acts of legislation and of government in which my share has been, if earnest, yet secondary-those acts of legislation and government have embraced almost every subject that can be of interest to a free and civilized community. In the period which our own recollection comprehends, we have seen the popular franchise wisely and temperately, yet boldly, enlarged; we have seen the education of the people immensely extended, with, at the same time, all due regard to the sanctity