William Ewart Gladstone | Page 9

in 1886,--did any popular demand
suggest his pronouncement. It was the masses who took their view
from him, not he who took his mandate from the masses. In all of these
instances he was at the time in opposition, and was accused of having
made this new departure for the sake of recovering power. In the two
former he prevailed, and was ultimately admitted, by his more candid
adversaries, to have counseled wisely. In all of them he may, perhaps,
be censured for not having sooner perceived, or at any rate for not
having sooner announced, the need for reform. But it was very
characteristic of him not to give the full strength of his mind to a
question till he felt that it pressed for a solution. Those who discussed
politics with him were scarcely more struck by the range of his vision
and his power of correlating principles and details than by his
unwillingness to commit himself on matters whose decision he could
postpone. Reticence and caution were sometimes carried too far, not
merely because they exposed him to misconstruction, but because they
withheld from his party the guidance it needed. This was true in all the
three instances just mentioned; and in the last of them his reticence
probably contributed to the separation from him of some of his former
colleagues. Nor did he always rightly divine the popular mind.
Absorbed in his own financial views, he omitted to note the change that
had been in progress between 1862 and 1874, and thus his proposal in
the latter year to extinguish the income tax fell completely flat. He
often failed to perceive how much the credit of his party was suffering
from the belief, quite groundless so far as he personally was concerned,
that his government was indifferent to what are called Imperial interests,
the interests of England outside England. But he always thought for
himself, and never stooped to flatter the prejudices or inflame the

passions of any class in the community.
Though the power of reading the signs of the times and moving the
mind of the nation as a whole may be now more essential to an English
statesman than the skill which manages a legislature or holds together a
cabinet, that skill counts for much, and must continue to do so while
the House of Commons remains the supreme governing authority of the
country. A man can hardly reach high place, and certainly cannot retain
high place, without possessing this kind of art. Mr. Gladstone was at
one time thought to want it. In 1864, when Lord Palmerston's end was
evidently near and Mr. Gladstone had shown himself the most brilliant
and capable man among the Liberal ministers in the House of
Common's, people speculated about the succession to the headship of
the party; and the wiseacres of the day were never tired of repeating
that Mr. Gladstone could not possibly lead the House of Commons. He
wanted tact (they said), he was too excitable, too impulsive, too much
absorbed in his own ideas, too unversed in the arts by which
individuals are conciliated. But when, after twenty-five years of his
unquestioned reign, the time for his own departure drew nigh, men
asked how the Liberal party in the House of Commons would ever hold
together after it had lost a leader of such consummate capacity. Seldom
has a prediction been more utterly falsified than that of the Whig critics
of 1864. They had grown so accustomed to Palmerston's way of
handling the House as to forget that a man might succeed by quite
different methods. And they forgot also that a man may have many
defects and yet in spite of them be incomparably the fittest for a great
place.
Mr. Gladstone had the defects that were ascribed to him. His
impulsiveness sometimes betrayed him into declarations which a cooler
man would have abstained from. The second reading of the Irish
Home-Rule Bill of 1886 would probably have been carried had he not
been goaded by his opponents into words which seemed to recall or
modify the concessions he had announced at a meeting of the Liberal
party held just before. More than once precious time was wasted in
useless debates because his antagonists, knowing his excitable temper,
brought on discussions with the sole object of annoying him and

drawing from him some hasty deliverance. Nor was he an adept, like
Disraeli and Sir John A. Macdonald, in the management of individuals.
He had a contempt for the meaner side of human nature which made
him refuse to play upon it. He had comparatively little sympathy with
many of the pursuits which attract ordinary men; and he was too
constantly engrossed by the subjects of enterprises which specially
appealed to him to have leisure