Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 | Page 3

of an English Newspaper, the Character of General Gordon, or some other theme which appealed to him. He spoke rapidly and clearly, and between the years 1882 and 1886 gave his services without stint in this direction to the people of Leeds, Bradford, and other of the Yorkshire towns. The manuscripts of these lectures are before me as I write; they are all in his own hand, and they must have taken from an hour to an hour and a half in delivery. Yet one of the most important of them--it runs to between sixty and seventy closely written manuscript pages, and bears no marks of haste--was, as a note in his own hand at the outset shows, begun one day and finished the next--a proof, if any were needed, of his rapidity in work. He made many enthusiastic friends amongst the shrewd working people of the North by these deliverances.
The last twenty years of my brother's life are outside the present narrative. Two of them were spent in Leeds in ever-widening newspaper work, and the remaining eighteen in London, under circumstances he has himself described in another volume, which, for political reasons, is for the present withheld. It will appear eventually, and personally I feel no doubt whatever that it will take its place, quite apart from its self-revelation, as one of the most important and authentic records, in the political sense, of the later decades of Queen Victoria's reign. My brother's knowledge of the secret history of the Liberal party in the memorable days when Mr. Gladstone was fighting his historic battle for Home Rule, and during the subsequent Premiership of Lord Rosebery, was exceptional. He was the trusted friend of both statesmen, and probably no other journalist was so absolutely in the confidence of the leaders of the Liberal party--a circumstance which was due quite as much to his character as to his capacity. It is not my intention to anticipate the story, as he himself tells it, either of the "Hawarden Kite" or the Home Rule split, much less to disclose his opinions--they are emphatic and deliberate--of the men who made mischief at that crisis. I leave also untouched the plain, unvarnished account he gives, on unimpeachable authority, of a subsequent and not less discreditable phase in the annals of the Liberal party. There are reasons, obvious to everyone who gives the matter a moment's thought, that render it inadvisable in the interests of the political cause with which my brother all his life was identified, and for which he suffered more than is commonly known, to yield to the very natural temptation to throw reticence to the winds.
To one point only will I permit myself to make brief but significant allusion, for I cannot allow this book to go forth to the world with the knowledge that the publication of the companion volume is--through force of circumstances--for the present postponed, without at least a passing reference to what in the authoritative biography of Mr. Gladstone is called the "barren controversy" which arose in 1892, as to whether the present Duke of Devonshire, in 1880, tried to form a Government. That controversy was assuredly "barren" to my brother in everything but the testimony of a good conscience. He was assailed by almost the whole Press of the country for the part which he played in it, and not least mercilessly by journalists of his own party. As he said to me himself at the time, "If I had been Mr. Parnell, fresh from the revelations of the Divorce Court, I could not have been treated with greater contumely." If there was one thing on the possession of which he prided himself in life more than another, it was loyalty, and seldom was political loyalty subjected to a more cruel strain. He held his peace with all the materials for his own vindication in his hand, rather than embarrass Mr. Gladstone at a great political crisis.
The letters on which he based his statements are in existence. I wished to print them, without note or comment of mine, in an Appendix to the present volume, but permission has been withheld. They cannot remain for ever in ambush, and when they are published, with my brother's full and magnanimous comments, it will be apparent to all the world how greatly he was misjudged. It is enough for the present to say that Mr. Gladstone himself admitted in a note under his own hand that the interpretation which my brother put upon the facts submitted to him absolutely and entirely justified the course which he took in that controversy. Mr. Gladstone, as Mr. Morley somewhat drily states in his biography, "reckoned on a proper stoicism in the victims of public necessity," and I suppose my brother was regarded as thin-skinned,