Part 3

The political part of the Parnell movement Mr. Gladstone had for some time strenuously and vehemently opposed. He denounced Parnell’s policy as leading through rapine to dismemberment. He applied coercion vigorously to Irish outrage, imprisoned a number of Parnellites as suspects, and himself proclaimed the arrest of Parnell to an applauding multitude at Guild Hall. He allowed his colleague to rise night after night from his side, and denounce the Home Rule movement in language even stronger than his own. But, having been defeated in the election of 1885 by the combined forces of Conservatives and Parnellites, he suddenly, to the amazement of everybody, and the general consternation of his party, turned round, declared in favour of Home Rule, and coalesced with Parnell, by whose assistance he ousted the Conservative Government of Lord Salisbury, and reinstalled himself in power. It is not necessary to charge him with being actuated by love of power, or to say that his conversion was not sincere. It is due to him to bear in mind that the Conservative leaders, in what was called the Maamtrasma debate, had unquestionably coquetted with Parnellism, one of them, Sir Michael Hicks Beach, courting Parnellite favour by censuring Lord Spencer; and that by this conduct on their part the aspect of the question had undergone a certain change. On the other hand, it is impossible to forget that Gladstone’s position was that of leader of the Opposition, wishing to reinstate his party in power, and seeing that this could be done only by the help of the Irish vote. Nor can we easily bring ourselves to accept the account of his gradual conversion to Home Rule put forth in his _History of an Idea_. If he felt that his mind was moving on the subject, how could he have deemed it right not only to mask his own misgivings by vehement denunciations of Home Rule, but to lead his party and the nation on what he had begun to feel might prove to be the wrong line? His honesty, I repeat, need not be questioned. But neither his consistency nor the perfect singleness of his motive can very easily be maintained. He was a party leader; a full believer in the party system; and his party wanted to prevail over its rival. It is only by contention for power that party government can be carried on.

Gladstone proposed in effect to break the legislative Union by giving Ireland a Parliament of her own. This Parliament he styled “statutory.” Restrictions were to be laid upon it which would have made its relation to the British Parliament one of vassalage, and against which it would almost certainly have commenced, from the moment of its birth, a struggle for equality and independence. If it was baffled in that struggle, it might even have held out its hands for aid to the foreign enemies of Great Britain. The framer of the measure apparently had not distinctly made up his mind whether he would include the Irish in the Parliament of Great Britain or exclude them from it. That he should have rushed into legislation so momentous, legislation affecting the very existence of the United Kingdom, without having thoroughly made up his mind on the vital point, is surely a proof that, great as he was in finance, mighty as he was in debate, powerful as he was in framing and carrying measures of reform, when, as in dealing with Irish Disestablishment or the Universities, a clear case was put into his hands, he was hardly one of those sure-footed statesmen to whom can be safely intrusted the supreme destinies of a nation.

If after the equitable settlement of the agrarian question and the reduction of the population to the number which the island can maintain, the political enmity generated by the long struggle continues unassuaged, and the Irish contingent remains, as it has now for many years been, an alien and rebellious element in the British Parliament, disturbing and distracting British councils, there may be a sufficient reason for letting Ireland go. It would be folly to keep her as a mere thorn in the side of Great Britain. It would be more than folly to attempt to hold her in bondage. It is not unlikely that, after a trial of independence, she might of her own accord come back to the Union. But all wise statesmen have united in saying that there must be legislative Union or independence. Two Parliaments, two nations.[1]

The announcement of Gladstone’s plan was followed by terrible searching of heart in his party, ending in a split. Lord Hartington undertook the leadership of the Unionist-Liberals, and showed energy and striking ability in his new part. The fatal blow was the declared opposition of Bright, the great pillar of political righteousness, and the lifelong advocate of justice to Ireland.

The stoutest opposition and that which did most to save the integrity of the United Kingdom was made, as I shall always hold, by _The Times_. The error into which it fell with regard to the Parnell Letters was a trifling matter compared with the memorable service which it rendered on the whole to the Unionist cause.

When the contest had begun, Gladstone’s pugnacity broke all bounds. He appealed to separatist sentiment in Scotland and Wales, as well as in Ireland. He appealed to the “masses” against the “classes.” He appealed to ignorance against intelligence and the professions. One of the most eminent of his lifelong friends and admirers, who had held high office in his Government, said of him in a letter to me, “Gladstone is morally insane.” He had lost the personal influences by which his impulses had been controlled. Graham, Newcastle, Sidney Herbert, Cardwell, all were gone. Cardwell especially, a man eminently sure-footed and cool-headed, had, I suspect, while he lived, exercised an important and salutary though unfelt restraint.

Carried away by his excitement, Gladstone traduced the authors of the Union and their work, a work which he had once coupled with the treaty of commerce with France as supremely honourable to Pitt. “A horrible and shameful history, for no epithets weaker than these can in the slightest degree describe or indicate ever so faintly the means by which, in defiance of the national sentiment of Ireland, consent to the Union was attained.” Such is his language, and he compares the transaction in atrocity to the worst crimes in history. Consent to the Union was attained by the absolute necessity, plain to men of sense, of putting an end to murderous anarchy and averting a renewal of ’98. It has been clearly shown that there was no serious bribery of a pecuniary kind. The indemnities for the owners of pocket boroughs were paid, in accordance with the notions of the day and under an Act of Parliament, alike to those who had voted for the Union and to those who had voted against it. The oligarchy to whose local reign the measure put an end was appeased with peerages and appointments, the scramble for which might well disgust a high-minded man like Cornwallis. This was probably inevitable in those days. Satisfactorily to obtain the national consent was impossible. The Parliament was a Protestant oligarchy, the Catholics being still excluded, and it was deeply stained with the atrocities of repression. Ireland, in fact, was not a nation, or capable of giving a national consent; it was a country divided between two races antagonistic in religion and at deadly enmity with each other. The submission of the question to the constituencies by the holding of a general election, five-sixths of the population being excluded from Parliament, would have been futile, and would very likely have revived the civil war. Pitt, it is true, held out to the Catholics a hope of political emancipation. That hope he did his best to fulfil, but he was prevented by the fatuous obstinacy of the King; and Mr. Gladstone, who was a devout monarchist, might have been challenged to say what, when met by the Royal veto, Pitt could have done. The promise remained in abeyance for one generation, at the end of which it was fulfilled. These bitter appeals to Irish hatred of the Union and belief that it was a deadly and inexpiable wrong, did not come well from the author of a measure intended, as he professed, to pluck the thorn out of the Irish heart.

The Bill was defeated in the House of Commons by a majority of thirty votes; and, on an appeal to the country, the Liberal-Unionists combining with the Conservatives on the special question, the Opposition won by upwards of a hundred. Six years afterwards, by another turn of the wheel, the Salisbury Government losing strength, Gladstone found himself again at the head of the Government, but with a weak majority made up largely of the Irish vote. Then came the catastrophe of Parnell, who, at the critical moment, was convicted of _crim. con._ It is impossible to read Mr. Morley’s account of the scene of distraction which ensued, matrimonial morality struggling with political convenience, and of the sorrowful decision that _crim. con._ would be an awkward thing to carry in face of the Nonconformist conscience, without feeling the presence of a comic element in the narrative.

Home Rule, however, was again put to the vote, and in its strangest form, Ireland being given a Parliament of her own, and, at the same time, a representation in the British Parliament with full liberty of voting on all British questions. That the Irish delegation would barter its vote to British parties for Irish objects, and especially for the relaxation of restrictions on its plenary power, was what nobody could fail to foresee. A more extraordinary proposal, surely, never was made to any legislature. The one recommendation that Home Rule had was, that it would rid the British Parliament of an alien and hostile element. That element Gladstone’s Bill would have retained in its worst form. The Bill, however, was carried in the Commons by a majority of thirty-four, some of the English members probably giving a party vote in the assurance that the Bill would be thrown out by the House of Lords.

The use of the clôture in forcing through the House of Commons such a measure as Home Rule surely could not be defended. The clôture by which our overbearing Government is able to gag the House of Commons, even on the most vital question, remains a mark of Gladstone’s impetuousity and inability to brook opposition when what seemed to him an object of prime importance was in view.

After trying to raise a storm against the Lords, Gladstone resigned, as was reported, on a difference with the Admiralty about naval expenditure. One of the most memorable careers in English history came to an end. The party which Gladstone led was utterly shattered, and shattered it still remains. Palmerston, could he have looked upon the scene, might have said that his cynical prophecy had been really fulfilled.

Gladstone, in addition to his immense amount of public work, was a voluminous author; the more voluminous because his style, formed by public and _ex tempore_ speaking, though perfectly clear and correct, was certainly diffuse. His biographer shows good judgment by dwelling no more than he can help on this part of the subject. Readers of _Homeric Studies_ and _Juventus Mundi_ must wonder how such things can have been written and given to the press by so great a man. Stranger things have seldom come from any pen than the pages of the Traditive Element in Homeric Theo-Mythology, connecting Latona with the Virgin, Apollo with the Deliverer of mankind, and Ate with the Tempter. All these volumes are full of fantastic and baseless speculation. The fancy that there was an Egyptian epoch in the early history of Greece appears to be partly suggested by an accidental similarity between the name of an Egyptian and that of a Bœotian city. Not on such reasonings were the famous budgets based.

I was with Gladstone one day, when, our business having been done, he began to talk of Homer, and imparted to me a theory which he had just woven out of some fancied philological discovery. I felt sure that the theory was baseless, and tried to convince him that it was. But he was never very open to argument. Just as I had succumbed, the door opened and his brother-in-law, Lord Lyttelton, came in. Lord Lyttelton was a first-rate classical scholar, and I felt sure that he would see the question aright and prevail. See the question aright he did; prevail he did not; and the discovery has probably taken its place beside that of the Traditive Element.

Before the publication of _Juventus Mundi_, I think it was, there was a Homeric dinner at which, with Cornewall Lewis, Milman, and some other scholars I had the honour of being present. It was a very delightful reunion. No one could be more charming socially than our host. But I doubt whether the critical result was great.

Gladstone had in part put off his Establishmentarianism, but his orthodoxy and belief in the inspiration of the Bible remained unimpaired. This deprives his theological writings of serious value, though they still have interest as the work of a mind at once powerful and intensely religious, dealing with topics of the highest concern. It is not difficult to meet Hume’s philosophic objection to miracles, which seems little more than an assumption of the absolute impossibility of a sufficient amount of evidence. If the death of a man and his restoration to life were witnessed and certified by a great body of men of science, in circumstances such as to preclude the possibility of imposture, we should not withhold our belief, however contrary the occurrence might be to the ordinary course of nature. But we cannot believe anything contrary to the ordinary course of nature on the testimony of an anonymous gospel of uncertain authorship, of uncertain date, the product of an uncritical age, containing matter apparently mythical, and written in the interest of a particular religion. From considering the authenticity and sufficiency of the evidence, Gladstone, by his faith in the Bible, is debarred. So, in his critical work on Butler, he is debarred from free and fruitful discussion by the assumption, which he all the time carries with him, of the authenticity of Revelation. His faith in the inspiration of the Bible seems to go so far as to include belief in the longevity of the Patriarchs before the flood.[2]

Venturing to break a lance with Huxley about the truth of the account of creation in Genesis, he could not fail to be overthrown. His apology seems to amount to this; that the Creator in imparting an account of the creation to Moses, was so near the truth that the account could, by dint of very ingenious interpretation, be made not wholly irreconcilable with scientific fact. Gladstone continued greatly to venerate Newman, and apparently allowed himself to be influenced in his reasoning by the _Grammar of Assent_, a sort of _vade mecum_ of self-illusion, the characteristic purport of the Cardinal’s very subtle but not very masculine and very flexible mind.

To me, Gladstone’s life is specially interesting as that of a man who was a fearless and powerful upholder of humanity and righteousness in an age in which faith in both was growing weak, and Jingoism, with its lust of war and rapine, was taking possession of the world. The man who, breaking through the restraints of diplomatic prudery, pleaded before Europe with prevailing eloquence the cause of oppressed Italy; who dared, after Majuba Hill, in face of public excitement, to keep the path of justice and honour in dealing with the Transvaal; whose denunciation of the Bulgarian atrocities made the Turkish Assassin tremble on his throne of iniquity; who, if he had lived so long, would surely have striven to save the honour of the country by denouncing the conspiracy against the liberty of the South African republics; who, if he were now living, would be protesting, not in vain, against the indifference of England to her responsibility for Turkish horrors; has a more peculiar hold on my veneration and gratitude than the statesman whose achievements and merits, very great as they were, have never seemed to me quite so great as, in Mr. Morley’s admirably executed picture, they appear. Not that I would undervalue Gladstone’s statesmanship or its fruits. Wonderful improvements in finance, great administrative reforms, the opening of the Civil Service, the Postal Savings Bank, the liberation of the newspaper press from the paper duty, the abolition of purchase in the army, the reform of the Universities followed by that of the endowed schools, the disestablishment of the Irish Church, and the commercial treaty with France, make up a mighty harvest of good work; even if we leave the re-settlement of the franchise open to question and carry Home Rule to the wrong side of the account. Very striking is the contrast, in this respect, between Gladstone’s career and that of his principal rival, who gave his mind little to practical improvement, and almost entirely to the game of party and the struggle for power. Moreover, Gladstone filled the nation with a spirit of common enthusiasm and hopeful effort for the general good, especially for the good of the masses, to which there was nothing corresponding on the part of his rival for power, whose grand game was that of setting two classes, the highest and the lowest, against the third. Gladstone was, in the best sense, a man of the people; and the heart of the people seldom failed to respond to his appeal. As an embodiment of some great qualities, especially of loyalty to righteousness, he has left no equal behind him, and deeply in this hour of trial we feel his loss.

FOOTNOTES

[1] I used to think that an occasional session, or even a single session, of the United Parliament at Dublin, for the special settlement of Irish affairs, Irish character being what it is, might have a good effect on the Irish heart. It might put an end to the feeling which at present prevails, that the United Parliament is alien to Ireland and almost a foreign power. The suggestion was considered, but the inconvenience was deemed too great. Yet, inconvenience would have been cheaply incurred if the measure could have answered its purpose. A more feasible course might be to allow the Irish members to meet in College Green and legislate on purely Irish questions, subject to the ultimate allowance or disallowance of the Imperial Parliament, in which the Irish members would still sit.

[2] “The immense longevity of the early generations of mankind was eminently favourable to the preservation of pristine traditions. Each individual, instead of being, as now, a witness of, or an agent in, one or two transmissions from father to son, would observe or share in ten times as many. According to the Hebrew Chronology, Lamech, the father of Noah, was of mature age before Adam died; and Abraham was of mature age before Noah died. Original or early witnesses, remaining so long as standards of appeal, would evidently check the rapidity of the darkening and destroying process.”--_Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age_, II. 4, 5.

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