Successful Methods of Public Speaking | Page 6

Glasgow have more personal claims to a share in the inheritance of Mr.
Gladstone's fame. I, at any rate, can recall one memory--the record of that marvelous day
in December, 1879, nearly twenty-three years ago, when the indomitable old man
delivered his rectorial address to the students at noon, a long political speech in St.
Andrew's Hall in the evening, and a substantial discourse on receiving an address from
the Corporation at ten o'clock at night. Some of you may have been present at all these
gatherings, some only at the political meeting. If they were, they may remember the little
incidents of the meeting--the glasses which were hopelessly lost and then, of course,
found on the orator's person--the desperate candle brought in, stuck in a water-bottle, to
attempt sufficient light to read an extract. And what a meeting it was--teeming, delirious,
absorbed! Do you have such meetings now? They seem to me pretty good; but the
meetings of that time stand out before all others in my mind.
This statue is erected, not out of the national subscription, but by the contributions from
men of all creeds in Glasgow and in the West. I must then, in what I have to say, leave
out altogether the political aspect of Mr. Gladstone. In some cases such a rule would omit
all that was interesting in a man. There are characters, from which if you subtracted
politics, there would be nothing left. It was not so with Mr. Gladstone.
To the great mass of his fellow-countrymen he was of course a statesman, wildly
worshipped by some, wildly detested by others. But, to those who were privileged to
know him, his politics seemed but the least part of him. The predominant part, to which
all else was subordinated, was his religion; the life which seemed to attract him most was
the life of the library; the subject which engrossed him most was the subject of the
moment, whatever it might be, and that, when he was out of office, was very rarely
politics. Indeed, I sometimes doubt whether his natural bent was toward politics at all.
Had his course taken him that way, as it very nearly did, he would have been a great
churchman, greater perhaps than any that this island has known; he would have been a
great professor, if you could have found a university big enough to hold him; he would
have been a great historian, a great bookman, he would have grappled with whole
libraries and wrestled with academies, had the fates placed him in a cloister; indeed it is
difficult to conceive the career, except perhaps the military, in which his energy and
intellect and application would not have placed him on a summit. Politics, however, took
him and claimed his life service, but, jealous mistress as she is, could never thoroughly
absorb him.
Such powers as I have indicated seem to belong to a giant and a prodigy, and I can
understand many turning away from the contemplation of such a character, feeling that it
is too far removed from them to interest them, and that it is too unapproachable to help

them--that it is like reading of Hercules or Hector, mythical heroes whose achievements
the actual living mortal can not hope to rival. Well, that is true enough; we have not
received intellectual faculties equal to Mr. Gladstone's, and can not hope to vie with him
in their exercise. But apart from them, his great force was character, and amid the vast
multitude that I am addressing, there is none who may not be helped by him.
The three signal qualities which made him what he was, were courage, industry, and faith;
dauntless courage, unflagging industry, a faith which was part of his fiber; these were the
levers with which he moved the world.
I do not speak of his religious faith, that demands a worthier speaker and another
occasion. But no one who knew Mr. Gladstone could fail to see that it was the essence,
the savor, the motive power of his life. Strange as it may seem, I can not doubt that while
this attracted many to him, it alienated others, others not themselves irreligious, but who
suspected the sincerity of so manifest a devotion, and who, reared in the moderate
atmosphere of the time, disliked the intrusion of religious considerations into politics.
These, however, though numerous enough, were the exceptions, and it can not, I think, be
questioned that Mr. Gladstone not merely raised the tone of public discussion, but
quickened and renewed the religious feeling of the society in which he moved.
But this is not the faith of which I am thinking to-day. What is present to me is the faith
with which he espoused and pursued great causes. There