Part 7

GLADSTONE--AFTER TWENTY YEARS

The 19th of May, 1898, was Ascension Day; and, just as the earliest Eucharists were going up to God, William Ewart Gladstone passed out of mortal suffering into the peace which passeth understanding. For people who, like myself, were reared in the Gladstonian tradition, it is a shock to be told by those who are in immediate contact with young men that for the rising generation he is only, or scarcely, a name. For my own part, I say advisedly that he was the finest specimen of God's handiwork that I have ever seen; and by this I mean that he combined strength of body, strength of intellect, and spiritual attainments, in a harmony which I have never known equalled. To him it was said when he lay dying, "You have so lived and wrought that you have kept the soul alive in England." Of him it was said a few weeks later, "On the day that Gladstone died the world lost its greatest citizen." Mr. Balfour called him "the greatest member of the greatest deliberative assembly that the world has ever seen"; and Lord Salisbury said, "He will be long remembered as a great example, to which history hardly furnishes a parallel of a great Christian statesman."

I have written so often and so copiously of Mr. Gladstone, who was both my religious and my political leader, that I might have found it difficult to discover any fresh aspects of his character and work; but the Editor[*] has kindly relieved me of that difficulty. He has pointed out certain topics which strikingly connect Gladstone's personality with the events and emotions of the present hour. I will take them as indicated, point by point.

1. THE LOVE OF LIBERTY.

I have never doubted that the master-passion of Gladstone's nature was his religiousness--his intensely-realized relation with God, with the Saviour, and with "the powers of the world to come." This was inborn. His love of liberty was acquired. There was nothing in his birth or education or early circumstances to incline him in this direction. He was trained to "regard liberty with jealousy and fear, as something which could not wholly be dispensed with, but which was continually to be watched for fear of excesses." Gradually--very gradually--he came to regard it as the greatest of temporal blessings, and this new view affected every department of his public life. In financial matters it led him to adopt the doctrine of Free Exchanges. In politics, it induced him to extend the suffrage, first to the artisan and then to the labourer. In foreign affairs, it made him an unrelenting foe of the Turkish tyranny. In Ireland, it converted him to Home Rule. In religion, it brought him nearer and nearer to the ideal of the Free Church in the Free State.

2. BELGIUM AND THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR.

Gladstone hated war. He held, as most people hold, that there are causes, such as Life and Home and Freedom, for which the gentlest and most humane of men must be prepared to draw the sword. But he was profoundly anxious that it should never be drawn except under the absolute compulsion of national duty, and during the Crimean War he made this memorable declaration:

"If, when you have attained the objects of the war, you continue it for the sake of mere military glory, I say you tempt the justice of Him in whose hands the fates of armies are as absolutely lodged as the fate of the infant slumbering in its cradle."

This being his general view of war, it was inevitable that he should regard with horror the prospect of intervention in the Franco-German War, which broke out with startling suddenness, when he was Prime Minister, in the summer of 1870. He strained every nerve to keep England out of the struggle, and was profoundly thankful that Providence enabled him to do so. Yet all through that terrible crisis he saw quite clearly that either of the belligerent Powers might take a step which would oblige England to intervene, and he made a simultaneous agreement with Prussia and France that, if either violated the neutrality of Belgium, England would co-operate with the other to defend the little State. Should Belgium, he said, "go plump down the maw of another country to satisfy dynastic greed," such a tragedy would "come near to an extinction of public right in Europe, and I do not think we could look on while the sacrifice of freedom and independence was in course of consummation."

3. WAR-FINANCE AND ECONOMY.

A colleague once said about Gladstone, "The only two things which really interest him are Religion and Finance." The saying is much too unguarded, but it conveys a certain truth. My own opinion is that Finance was the field of intellectual effort in which his powers were most conspicuously displayed; and it was always remarked that, when he came to deal with the most prosaic details of national income and expenditure, his eloquence rose to an unusual height and power. At the same time, he was a most vigilant guardian of the public purse, and he was incessantly on the alert to prevent the national wealth, which his finance had done so much to increase, from being squandered on unnecessary and unprofitable objects. This jealousy of foolish expenditure combined with his love of peace to make him very chary of spending money on national defences. When he was Chancellor of the Exchequer under Lord Palmerston, his eagerness in this regard caused his chief to write to the Queen that "it would be better to lose Mr. Gladstone than to run the risk of losing Portsmouth or Plymouth." At the end of his career, his final retirement was precipitated by his reluctance to sanction a greatly increased expenditure on the Navy, which the Admiralty considered necessary. From first to last he sheltered himself under a dogma of his financial master--Sir Robert Peel--to the effect that it is possible for a nation, as for an individual, so to over-insure its property as to sacrifice its income. "My name," he said at the end, "stands in Europe as a symbol of the policy of peace, moderation, and non-aggression. What would be said of my active participation in a policy that will be taken as plunging England into the whirlpool of Militarism?"

4. ARBITRATION AND THE "ALABAMA."

Gladstone's hatred of war, and his resolve to avoid it at all hazards unless national duty required it, determined his much criticized action in regard to the Alabama. That famous and ill-omened vessel was a privateer, built in an English dockyard and manned by an English crew, which during the American Civil War got out to sea, captured seventy Northern vessels, and did a vast deal of damage to the Navy and commerce of the Union. The Government of the United States had a just quarrel with England in this matter, and the controversy--not very skilfully handled on either side--dragged on till the two nations seemed to be on the edge of war. Then Gladstone agreed to submit the case to arbitration, and the arbitration resulted in a judgment hostile to England. From that time--1872--Gladstone's popularity rapidly declined, till it revived, after an interval of Lord Beaconsfield's rule, at the General Election of 1880. In the first Session of that Parliament, he vindicated the pacific policy which had been so severely criticized in the following words:

"The dispositions which led us to become parties to the arbitration of the Alabama case are still with us the same as ever; we are not discouraged, we are not damped in the exercise of these feelings by the fact that we were amerced, and severely amerced, by the sentence of the international tribunal; and, although we may think the sentence was harsh in its extent and unjust in its basis, we regard the fine imposed on this country as dust in the balance compared with the moral value of the example set when these two great nations of England and America, who are among the most fiery and the most jealous in the world with regard to anything that touches national honour, went in peace and concord before a judicial tribunal to dispose of these painful differences, rather than resort to the arbitrament of the sword."

5. NATIONALITY--THE BALKANS AND IRELAND.

Gladstone was an intense believer in the principle of nationality, and he had a special sympathy with the struggles of small and materially feeble States. "Let us recognize," he said, "and recognize with frankness, the equality of the weak with the strong, the principles of brotherhood among nations, and of their sacred independence. When we are asking for the maintenance of the rights which belong to our fellow-subjects, resident abroad, let us do as we would be done by, and let us pay that respect to a feeble State, and to the infancy of free institutions, which we would desire and should exact from others, towards their maturity and their strength."

He was passionately Phil-Hellene. Greece, he said in 1897, is not a State "equipped with powerful fleets, large armies, and boundless treasure supplied by uncounted millions. It is a petty Power, hardly counting in the list of European States. But it is a Power representing the race that fought the battles of Thermopylæ and Salamis, and hurled back the hordes of Asia from European shores."

Of the Christian populations in Eastern Europe which had the misfortune to live under "the black hoof of the Turkish invader," he was the chivalrous and indefatigable champion, from the days of the Bulgarian atrocities in 1875 to the Armenian massacres of twenty years later. "If only," he exclaimed, "the spirit of little Montenegro had animated the body of big Bulgaria," very different would have been the fate of Freedom and Humanity in those distracted regions. The fact that Ireland is so distinctly a nation--not a mere province of Great Britain--and the fact that she is economically poor, reinforced that effort to give her self-government which had originated in his late-acquired love of political freedom.

6. THE IDEA OF PUBLIC RIGHT.

Of the "Concert of Europe" as it actually lived and worked (however plausible it might sound in theory) Gladstone had the poorest opinion, and, indeed, he declared that it was only another and a finer name for "the mutual distrust and hatred of the Powers." It had conspicuously failed to avert, or stop, or punish the Armenian massacres, and it had left Greece unaided in her struggle against Turkey. Lord Morley has finely said of him that "he was for an iron fidelity to public engagements and a stern regard for public law, which is the legitimate defence for small communities against the great and powerful"; and yet again: "He had a vision, high in the heavens, of the flash of an uplifted sword and the gleaming arm of the Avenging Angel."

I have now reached the limits of the task assigned me by the Editor, and my concluding word must be more personal.

I do not attempt to anticipate history. We cannot tell how much of those seventy years of strenuous labour will live, or how far Gladstone will prove to have read aright the signs of the times, the tendencies of human thought, and the political forces of the world. But we, who were his followers and disciples, know perfectly well what we owe to him. If ever we should be tempted to despond about the possibilities of human nature and human life, we shall think of him and take courage. If ever our religious faith should be perplexed by the

"Blank misgivings of a creature, Moving about in worlds not realized,"

the memory of his strong confidence will reassure us. And if ever we are told by the flippancy of scepticism that "Religion is a disease," then we can point to him who, down to the very verge of ninety years, displayed a fulness of vigorous and manly life beyond all that we had ever known.

HENRY SCOTT HOLLAND[*]

The Hollands spring from Mobberley, in Cheshire, and more recently from the town of Knutsford, familiar to all lovers of English fiction as "Cranford." They have made their mark in several fields of intellectual effort. Lord Knutsford, Secretary of State for the Colonies from 1887 to 1892, was a son of Sir Henry Holland, M.D. (1788-1873), who doctored half the celebrities of Europe; and one of Sir Henry's first cousins was the incomparable Mrs. Gaskell. Another first-cousin was George Henry Holland (1818-1891), of Dumbleton Hall, Evesham, who married in 1844 the Hon. Charlotte Dorothy Gifford, daughter of the first Lord Gifford.

George Holland was an enthusiastic fox-hunter, and frequently changed his abode for the better enjoyment of his favourite sport. In 1847 he was living at a place called Underdown, near Ledbury; and there, on the 27th of January in that year, his eldest son was born.

The first Lord Gifford (1779-1826), who was successively Lord Chief Justice and Master of the Rolls, had owed much in early life to the goodwill of Lord Eldon, and, in honour of his patron, he named one of his sons' Scott. This Scott Gifford was Mrs. George Holland's brother, and his name was bestowed on her eldest son, who was christened "Henry Scott," but has always been known by his second name. This link with George III.'s Tory Chancellor is pleasingly appropriate.