Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century Part 9

1. Describe the early career of Palmerston.

2. How was he especially qualified for the position of Secretary of Foreign Affairs?

3. What was the chief principle of his foreign policy?

4. How was the independence of Belgium brought about?

5. What was the work of the Quadruple Alliance?

6. How did Palmerston deal with the Egyptian revolt and why?

7. What was England's att.i.tude toward the "Spanish Marriage"?

8. Describe the "Civis Roma.n.u.s" speech and the reasons for it.

9. Why was Lord Palmerston dismissed from the Cabinet?

10. What conditions brought on the Crimean War and what was England's share in it?

11. What was Palmerston's att.i.tude in the American Civil War?

12. How did England regard the premier in the last years of his life?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

LIFE OF VISCOUNT PALMERSTON. Lord Dolling and Bulwer.

VISCOUNT PALMERSTON. L. C. Sanders.

HENRY HAVELOCK. (English Men of Action Series.) THE INDIAN MUTINY. G. B. Malleson.

THE WAR IN THE CRIMEA. Gen. Sir Edward Hamley.

X

GLADSTONE AND THE IRISH QUESTION

[WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE, born, Liverpool, December 29, 1809; died, Hawarden, Flints.h.i.+re, Wales, May 19, 1898; educated at Eton and Christ Church College, Oxford University (double first- cla.s.s, 1831); Member of Parliament for Newark as a Tory, 1832 46; wrote, 1838, "The State in its Relations with the Church"; held minor financial offices in Peel administration; 1843-45, President of Board of Trade; 1847-65, Member of Parliament for Oxford University; 1852, Chancellor of the Exchequer under Lord Aberdeen; 1858, Commissioner to the Ionian Islands; 1859, Chancellor of the Exchequer under Lord Palmerston; 1865, defeated as candidate for Oxford but returned for South Lancas.h.i.+re as a Liberal; leader of House of Commons; proposes radical Reform Bill; 1868, Member of Parliament for Greenwich; 1868-74, Premier (I.); Disestablishes Irish Church; carries National Educational Law, Ballot Law, Irish Land Act; abolishes purchase in the army; resigns Liberal leaders.h.i.+p in 1875, and publishes works on ecclesiastical controversy; 1876, attacks Disraeli's Eastern policy in letters on Bulgarian atrocities; 1880, Member of Parliament for Midlothian; 1880-85, Premier (II.); Irish Coercion Acts; new Land Acts; Arrears of Rent Act; Franchise and Redistribution Acts; 1886, Premier (III.); First Home Rule Bill Fails; 1892-94, Premier (IV.); 1893, Second Home Rule Bill carried through the Commons, thrown out by the Lords; retires from public life March, 1894; buried in Westminster Abbey.]

From the first day of the nineteenth century to the last the statesmen of England have had one standing problem to face. It might come up under various forms and disguises, and it might seem to demand various remedies, but in some shape or other the woes of Ireland have always furnished the test of practical statesmans.h.i.+p, and have often been the rock on which proud administrations have met with disaster.

By nature Ireland would seem formed for peace and plenty.

Happily located with the protecting bulwark of Great Britain between their emerald isle and foreign foes, blessed with a mild and equable climate, and inhabiting an island of singular fertility, the Irish would seem to have been marked for fortune's favors. Yet such has been the misgovernment of the English that the Irish have seen their paternal acres pa.s.s into the hands of aliens and absentees, their religion made a brand of shame and outlawry, their Parliament corrupted and done away, their industries crippled and bound down, and themselves reduced to wretched poverty.

At the outset of the century the Act of Union went into effect, abolis.h.i.+ng the Irish Parliament and admitting Irish (Protestant) Lords and Commons to the Parliament at Westminster. Pitt believed that the change would strengthen the empire and help Ireland as well, but it was brought to pa.s.s by means of lavish bribery, and sorely against the wish of the Irish patriots.

Furthermore, the determination of Pitt to commend the act to Ireland by removing the political disabilities which barred Catholics from members.h.i.+p in Parliament was thwarted by the stiff-necked George III., who had got it into his head that such a concession would do violence to the Protestantism of his coronation oath. Pitt resigned in disgust, and Catholic emanc.i.p.ation had to await until England had finished Napoleon's European business and could turn her hand to the troubles nearer home. It was finally carried, in 1829, by Wellington and Peel, the reform being fairly forced upon them by the tremendous agitation in its behalf by the eloquent Daniel O'Connell and his comrades of the Catholic a.s.sociation. To save the nation from civil war the government yielded with scant grace, and O'Connell and his "tail" of Irish Catholics came into Parliament to form a new and perplexing element in all subsequent political calculations.

From his vantage-ground as a member of Parliament O'Connell led a fresh agitation for the "Repeal," meaning the repeal of the Act of Union which had destroyed the Dublin Parliament. His oratory, which in its power over vast mult.i.tudes of his emotional countrymen has never been surpa.s.sed, made him the idol of his party. To boisterous congregations of tens of thousands he declaimed his bitter harangues on Saxon injustice to the Celt.

But when the people had been brought to fever heat the agitation failed because the orator proved to be a voice and nothing more.

He yielded meekly to the proclamation of the government forbidding further meetings, and his followers forsook him when they saw that he would not cross the Rubicon and take arms after words had failed. The society called "Young Ireland," formed about 1840, took up the agitation for Irish nationality, and carried it to greater lengths than O'Connell had dared. Its fiery young leaders, Smith O'Brien, Meagher, and Mitchel, preached sedition with voice and newspaper press, and in 1848, only by the vigorous exertion of physical force was open rebellion averted. The princ.i.p.al men of the Young Ireland party were seized and condemned to death for high treason, though they ultimately got off with transportation to Australia, whence most of them eventually found their way to America, whither thousands of their countrymen had emigrated since the famine year of 1846.

The famine marks a turning-point in the history of the relations of England and Ireland. As has been narrated in another place, it was the dearth of food in Ireland which forced the government of Sir Robert Peel to do what the Cobdenites had been demanding for ten years, and repeal the Corn Laws. Probably the distressful plight of the Irish peasant had never been brought so strongly to the attention of Englishmen as by the reports which now reached England from the agents of the relief committees who visited every part of the island ascertaining conditions and distributing food. From this time a considerable number among the English Liberals carried the sad state of Ireland upon their heart and conscience. Another result of the famine which was to exercise enduring influence upon Irish politics was the emigration to America. The hundreds of thousands who came to the free republic at this time soon made it the asylum of Irish patriots, the hot-bed of anti-English conspiracies, and the source of a swelling stream of revenue for the Irish nationalist treasury.

It was in America that the next alarm was sounded after two unquiet decades. A widely ramified secret society, the Fenian Brotherhood, sprang up among the Irish exiles and emigrants in the United States about 1857, its members swearing "to free and regenerate Ireland from the yoke of England." The movement spread to Ireland, and Fenian lodges were organized even on British soil. The close of the American Civil War set loose many Irish veterans who eagerly enlisted in the cause of "the Irish Republic." The reports of vast enlistments and contributions in America alarmed the British government. In February, 1866, the Habeas Corpus Act was suspended in Ireland, and scores of suspects were thrown into jail. In May an armed band of Irish- American Fenians crossed the Niagara River to invade Canada. The attempt failed miserably, as did the plans for a general rising in Ireland. But a succession of surprises, jail deliveries, gunpowder plots, and the like, kept the English government in a flutter for several years, and gave the name of Fenian a place in the somber side of the century's history. The most notable result of the Fenian outbreak, beyond its obvious one of embittering the feeling between the governing nation and the subject race, was that it aroused one man--and he the greatest statesman of his time--to the need of providing some far- reaching and sufficient remedy for the disease which showed such virulence. "We know," says McCarthy, the historian of the epoch, "that even the worst excesses of the movement impressed the mind of Mr. Gladstone with a conviction that the hour was appropriate for doing something to remove the causes of the discontent that made Ireland restless.....While many public instructors lost themselves in vain shriekings over the wickedness of Fenianism, and the incurable perversity of the Irish people, one statesman was already convinced that the very shock of the Fenian agitation would arouse public attention to the recognition of substantial grievance, and to the admission that the business of statesmans.h.i.+p was to seek out the remedy and provide redress."

The statesman who accomplished the disestablishment of the Irish Church, reformed the Land Laws, and devoted the closing decade of a great career to a fruitless endeavor to secure to Ireland the benefits of self- government, certainly ranks among the century's foremost Englishmen. In length of parliamentary service, in the frequency and duration of his terms as premier, in administrative ability, in moral force, and moving eloquence, it would be difficult to find in the long history of English statesmans.h.i.+p a name which s.h.i.+nes with a purer ray than that of William Ewart Gladstone.

The family name was anciently Gledstane, and the ancestry on both sides of the house was purely Scotch. Sir John Gladstone made his own way in life, ama.s.sed a fortune as a corn merchant in Liverpool, and became a member of Parliament and a follower of Peel. His gentle and pious wife admirably supplemented his masterful nature, and the sons of the household were brought up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. At the age of eleven the third son, William Ewart Gladstone, was sent away to Eton, where his two brothers were already at school. Here his piety and studious habits militated against his popularity, but here his intellectual ambition was aroused and his soul was enriched by the closest intimacy with Arthur Hallam, whom Tennyson's "In Memoriam" has eulogized. Like Canning he was a precocious orator, and edited the school paper with an ability which led some of his contemporaries to predict a great future for him. "I am confident," said Arthur Hallam, "that he is a bud that will bloom with a richer fragrance than almost any whose early promise I have witnessed." At Christ Church, Oxford, he justified the hopes of his friends- -a quiet, abstemious, reading man, mighty in debate, learned and devout in theology, and a tower of strength in examinations. He graduated with a double first cla.s.s (cla.s.sics and mathematics) in 1831, as Robert Peel had done a generation earlier. His choice of a career would have taken him into the clergy of the Church of England, but his father saw in him the making of a parliamentary leader, and to the House of Commons he was accordingly returned in 1833, entering the first Reformed Parliament as a Tory.

Sir Robert Peel was then engaged in rallying the shattered forces of Toryism under the new name of Conservatives, and building up a working opposition. He welcomed the eloquent young Oxonian, and when he became Prime Minister in December, 1834, he gave William Gladstone one of the minor offices in his shortlived government. In the spring of 1835 he was again a private member of the House, free to devote himself to the religious and literary pursuits which appealed so strongly to him. In 1838, when the Tractarian movement was at its height, Gladstone wrote his book on "The State in its Relations with the Church." Reviewing the work Macaulay described the author as "the rising hope of the stern and unbending Tories," words often quoted in later years, when his political bedfellows were of quite another sort. The book increased the author's reputation.

In 1839 he was married to Miss Catharine Glynne of Hawarden Castle, Flints.h.i.+re. In 1840 his second important book, a vindication of High Church principles, came from the press. The next year his leader, Peel, came back to power, giving Gladstone, of course, a post in the government (vice-president of the Board of Trade). Gladstone was then a protectionist like his party chief. He bore a hand in the preparation of the tariff legislation of that epoch-making administration, and though temporarily not a member of the House of Commons when the bill for the repeal of the Corn Laws was carried, in 1846, he helped to frame it, and to secure its pa.s.sage. He had been fully converted to the principles of free trade as preached by Richard Cobden and the Manchester school, and remained true to that principle to the last.

Going out of office, in 1846, with the fall of the Peel ministry, Mr. Gladstone continued to occupy a prominent place in Parliament, acting with the group of Peelites, so called, who kept alive the name and principles of the lost leader. Though still accounted as of the Tory party, Mr. Gladstone's alert and open mind led him to make fresh and independent studies of current political questions and to decide them according to his own enlightened judgment. The result was to weaken by degrees the ties which bound him to the Tories and to knit more closely the bonds which were to unite his fortunes with the Liberals. In 1852, the Peelites having joined the Liberal coalition to overthrow the Derby-Disraeli ministry, Mr. Gladstone's services were rewarded with the Chancellors.h.i.+p of the Exchequer, in which office he delivered the first of the many budget speeches for which he was so celebrated. From 1855 to 1859 he was again out of office, and without party affiliations, "a roving iceberg,"

to use his own description. The latter year found him again at the head of the Exchequer, this time in the Liberal Cabinet of Lord Palmerston, where he served with distinction, becoming, in 1865, the leader of the House of Commons, when the death of Palmerston raised his colleague, Lord John Russell, to the premiers.h.i.+p. With his chief--one of the heroes of the first successful struggle for parliamentary reform--he now drew up the Reform Bill of 1866 which was intended so to modify the qualifications for the franchise as to admit four hundred thousand new voters to the electorate. Though the government was defeated and went out of office on the question, the principle scored a singular victory, for in the following year Disraeli, bidding high for democratic support, carried by Tory votes an even more liberal measure of reform. By this bill, which some one called his "leap in the dark," Disraeli boasted that he had "dished the Whigs." The taunt was thrown at him which he had cast at Peel "that he had caught his opponents bathing and run off with their clothes." Rumor imputed to him the boast that by this move he had got the best of Gladstone and "would hold him down for twenty years," yet, within a twelvemonth, Gladstone had attacked and defeated the government in the Commons, and before the end of the next year was himself Prime Minister, backed by a powerful majority of the Reformed Parliament.

It was an Irish question which caused the overthrow of the Conservatives and swept the Liberals into their seats, and though this Gladstonian administration (1868-74) and its successors (1880-85, 1886, 1892-94) were rich in progressive measures, they are pre- eminent for what they did and attempted to do for Ireland. The three grievances of Ireland since the granting of Catholic emanc.i.p.ation have related to the Established Church, the tenure of land, and self- government. Mr. Gladstone took them up in succession, removing the first, ameliorating the second, and giving his closing years to a tremendous parliamentary struggle to secure the third.

The Church of Ireland, as established by law and maintained by taxation, was an absurdity. Its doctrines were offensive to five-sixths of the Irish people, whose voluntary offerings went to support the Roman Catholic priests, while the absentee Anglican Protestant rectors lived luxuriously in England or the Continent upon the revenues of their Irish parishes. The situation was anomalous. In 1867 Mr. Gladstone, ardent Anglican though he was, espoused the cause of Irish disestablishment, and went to the country on the issue, winning the parliamentary elections by a splendid majority. There was loud outcry from the British Tories, who professed to fear for the existence of the Church of England itself. The majority of the English clergy denounced the proposition, and some even declared its author a madman; but Mr. Gladstone pursued his chosen way with energy and directness. In one of those elevated speeches with which he was accustomed to enn.o.ble debate, he laid the details of his plan open to the Commons. The Irish Church was to be disestablished and disendowed, its bishops were to lose their seats in Parliament, and it was to become a free and independent ecclesiastical body, like the Presbyterian, Wesleyan, or Catholic churches, without further aid from the state. "I trust," said the impa.s.sioned advocate, "that when instead of the fict.i.tious and advent.i.tious aid on which we have too long taught the Irish establishment to lean, it shall come to place its trust in its own resources, in its own great mission, in all that it can draw from the energy of its ministers and its members, and the high hopes and promises of the Gospel that it teaches, it will find that it has entered upon a new era of existence--an era bright with hope and potent for good." The Lords did not seriously oppose a measure for which the country had spoken so distinctly, and the bill became a law, July 26, 1869. One standing grievance of Ireland had thus received radical remedy.

In 1870 Mr. Gladstone laid the ax at the root of another tree whose fruit had cursed the Irish peasantry. This was the system of land tenure which prevailed in the southern and western counties. In the province of Ulster, in the north of Ireland, the tenantry were of another sort, and there were other means of livelihood than agriculture. Out of this condition had sprung the so-called "Ulster tenant-right," the vital principle of which was that a tenant could not be evicted so long as he paid his rent, and "could sell the good will of his farm for what it would fetch in the market." This tenant-right was what Palmerston dismissed with the scornful remark that it was another name for "landlord's wrong." It did not exist elsewhere in Ireland, where a landlord might raise the rent and throw a tenant into the street at will.

The Land Act, which Gladstone carried in 1870, gave legal force to the old Ulster custom and applied it to the whole island.

Provision was made by which the tenant whose improvements had increased the value of his holding might receive compensation.

The Irish landlords and the same cla.s.s in England made a clamorous protest against such "state interference with freedom of contract," but without avail. Of what the Land Act of 1870 accomplished, Mr. Justin McCarthy is a competent judge. He says: "It was a first and an experimental measure, and no first and experimental measure ever does quite succeed in its object. It has had to be amended and expanded over and over again.....But it introduced a new principle, which no one since has ever attempted to abolish. That new principle was that the Irish tenant was ent.i.tled to some share and property in the improvements which he himself had made in his farm. It was, therefore, in the best sense of the word, a revolutionary measure. It created a new principle, and that principle has since been settled. It did not go nearly far enough in the right direction, but it showed the direction in which legislation ought to go, and it was on that account the opening of a new era for Ireland."

The same wave of reforming zeal which brought these blessings to Ireland gave the English nation its first system of free schools (1870), abolished the purchase of commissions in the army (1871), agreed to the principle of arbitrations in international disputes (the Geneva award on the "Alabama Claims" 1872), and introduced the vote by ballot (1872). The effort to establish university education in Ireland upon a basis broad enough to afford equal opportunities for Roman Catholic and Protestant youth was defeated (1873). A few months later, when the national election had p.r.o.nounced against the liberal policy, Mr. Gladstone yielded his place to his rival, Disraeli.

In the spring of 1874 Mr. Gladstone formally resigned the leaders.h.i.+p of his party, then in opposition, and withdrew to a considerable degree from active partic.i.p.ation in parliamentary affairs, devoting himself with his accustomed zeal to his studies, which at that time were concerned with ecclesiastical subjects. From his retirement he emerged, in 1876, to write that trenchant series of letters on the "Bulgarian Atrocities," which so stirred the indignation of the English people that Disraeli was unable to carry them into an armed alliance with the red- handed Turk against the Russians. His fierce and persistent onslaughts upon the foreign policy of the government at length carried the nation with him and drove Disraeli (now Lord Beaconsfield) from power.

No one but Mr. Gladstone could be thought of to head the ministry, and in 1880, he came in for his second term as Prime Minister. The state of Ireland again concerned him deeply. He carried an improved Land Act, but the Lords threw out his bill to relieve the special difficulties which the famine of 1880 had brought upon the Irish tenantry, and the exasperated tenantry resorted to reprisals upon the persons and property of the landlords. The Irish Land League, under the direction of Charles Stewart Parnell, resisted the operation of the new Land Act until its worth should have been tested. Mr. Gladstone and the Irish leaders worked at cross purposes, and thoroughly distrusted one another. The government found it necessary to exert force in order to suppress the agrarian disorders. Mr. Parnell and his a.s.sociates were thrown into jail, and the Land League was proclaimed as an unlawful a.s.sociation. Parnell, whose word was law with the Leaguers, retaliated by forbidding the tenantry to pay rent. In the spring of 1882, when better feeling was beginning to prevail, some Irish conspirators (Invincibles) a.s.sa.s.sinated Lord Frederick Cavendish and his secretary in Phoenix Park, Dublin. Cavendish was the newly appointed secretary for Ireland, and appears to have been mistaken for W. E. Forster, his predecessor, who was held responsible for the rigorous measures of the past winter. The National League was formed to take the place of the proscribed Land League, and Irish distress and crime continued with little abatement. The "boycott" was applied in its most oppressive form, rents remained unpaid, and evictions were frequent and distressing.

Cabinet dissensions over Irish measures and general criticism of the foreign policy which had made a generous peace with the Boers of South Africa, and was accused of abandoning General Gordon to his fate at Khartoum, weakened its hold upon the people and their representatives. The Irish members held the balance of power in the Commons, and when, in the spring of 1885, they joined forces with the Conservatives, the Liberals were again unseated.

Lord Salisbury and Lord Randolph Churchill, the Conservative leaders who came into power in 1885, enjoyed a brief and troubled tenure of office. The general election of 1885 was the first to be held under the Reform Law of the previous year, which had given to Ireland the same freedom of electoral franchise which had existed in the English and Scottish boroughs since 1869. The result was a great increase in the number of Nationalist members in Parliament. Of the one hundred and three members for Ireland no less than eighty-four were returned as Home Rulers, a compact and formidable body acting as a unit under the leaders.h.i.+p of Mr.

Parnell.

The first leader of the little company of Irish Home Rulers that had appeared in Parliament in the early '70's was Isaac b.u.t.t. His repeated attempts to have the subject considered were as often rejected with derision. In his own party he was opposed by an element which desired to resort to aggressive measures to compel the English to heed Ireland's demand for local self-government.

Prominent in this radical wing was a young Protestant, Charles Stewart Parnell, the grandson of Commodore Stewart of the United States Navy. In 1880 he was recognized as the chairman of the Irish Home Rulers in Parliament. For many years he continued to exercise a control over this party and over the Irish people such as no one, save perhaps O'Connell himself, had ever attained. He conceived and enforced the obstructive policy which so embarra.s.sed the second Gladstone administration. By exasperating tactics, which we Americans call "filibustering," the obstructionists, unable to secure what they wanted for Ireland, succeeded in paralyzing the law-making branch of the British const.i.tution. It was only by adopting new and arbitrary rules for choking off debate that any legislation could be pa.s.sed in the stormy decade beginning with 1881. Arrests, suspensions, and expulsions of Irish members repeatedly disturbed the dignity of the House of Commons, and kept ever present before the English representatives the temper of the subject kingdom.

A statesman as earnest as Mr. Gladstone, as little bound by precedent, and as surely impelled in his later years by a purpose to enact into law the wishes of the people, could not but be profoundly impressed by the unanimity with which, in 1885, the Irish used their new gift of the ballot to send men to Parliament who were pledged to work for Home Rule. It was no sudden conversion but the result of a long consideration which led to his open profession, in 1885, of his determination to crown his efforts for the relief of the Irish nation by giving them the separate legislative body for which they had asked with such persistent clamor. It is possible, in reviewing his statements for a dozen years previous, in the light of the final declaration, that his mind had been dwelling on the subject as his old political mentor, Peel, dwelt upon the question of free trade in the years before he renounced protectionism utterly.

No sooner did Gladstone come into office, in 1886, than he concentrated his energies upon his Home Rule project. His chief lieutenant, John Morley, the English Radical, was sent to Ireland as chief secretary. In April, in one of the greatest speeches of a career remarkable for its eloquence, Mr. Gladstone introduced to the House of Commons his first Home Rule Bill, "An act to make better provision for the government of Ireland." It proposed to establish at Dublin a Parliament of Peers and Commons, under a lord-lieutenant appointed by the crown, and an independent privy council. The Irish Parliament was to have control of local finances except customs duties, and it was excluded from interference with army and navy, foreign or colonial affairs, or with religious endowments. An essential provision was that after the establishment of the Dublin Parliament Ireland should no longer be represented in the "imperial" Parliament at Westminster. A week later a "purchase of land" bill was introduced by the Prime Minister to provide funds for buying out the Irish landlords and distributing their holdings among the tenants. The Home Rule Bill split the Liberal party in twain.

Lord Hartington, the Whig, Joseph Chamberlain, the Radical, and John Bright, the hero of the non-conformists, broke away from their old leader and helped to organize the "Liberal Unionist"

party, rallying those Liberals who remained true to the Act of Legislative Union of the three kingdoms. Ninety-three rallied under this banner on April 14th, when the bill was killed on its second reading by a vote of 343 to 313. The nation was appealed to in vain. In July the Gladstonian government gave up the fight against the Conservative and Liberal-Unionist coalition and Lord Salisbury resumed the premiers.h.i.+p.

For Ireland a new era began, characterized by agrarian crime, anti-rent agitation under the "Plan of Campaign," and Parnellite obstruction at Westminster.

In 1893 the "Grand Old Man," now Prime Minister for the fourth time, and in his eighty-fourth year, made a final endeavor to bring order into Ireland, by enabling her to regulate her own affairs. The Home Rule Bill of 1893 differed from the earlier measure chiefly in respect to the Irish representation at Westminster. Ireland, in addition to her local Parliament at Dublin, was granted eighty seats in the "imperial" House of Commons, though the Irish members might not vote on exclusively British measures. "This was to get over two objections: The first was the objection of those who complained of Ireland's being taxed by the imperial Parliament without representation. The second was the objection of those who complained that whereas English members could not interfere in the affairs of Ireland, Irish members might come over to the imperial Parliament and interfere in the affairs of England." The Old Man Eloquent, now backed by an overwhelming majority, carried the bill triumphantly through the Lower House only to meet defeat by a majority of ten to one in the Lords, the stronghold of Conservatism, where every progressive measure of reform has to encounter resistance at the outset. Though the Lords have learned to yield when the nation reiterates its determined demand for a law, they were spared on this occasion. Mr. Gladstone did not renew the bill. In March, 1894, he withdrew forever from public life, which he had adorned so long and so conspicuously, his last words in Parliament taking the form of an impressive warning against the a.s.sertion of authority by the Upper House. In his last interview with the leader of the Irish Home Rulers he a.s.sured them of his belief in the ultimate triumph of their cause--a cause whose success was mentioned in his prayers.

The Queen offered her aged public servant an earldom on his retirement, but his was not an ambition to be pleased with such empty rewards. In his beautiful castle of Hawarden, surrounded by his books and his family, he spent the years which remained to him in a graceful old age. To the last his mind remained alert and active. He busied himself with the cla.s.sical and theological studies which had been the delight of his young manhood, and the relaxation of his active years. His translations, his controversial pamphlets, his letters on public questions, showed the refinement and vigor of his remarkable intellect. When he died the English-speaking world paid a universal tribute of respect to his memory.

In linking these biographies with certain public questions or events, the name of Gladstone has been connected with the cause of Ireland--a "lost cause," as some may say, because Home Rule, which was to have been the capstone of his edifice, was rejected by the builders. But it must not be forgotten that it was Gladstone who swept away the burdensome Irish Church and improved the land laws, the franchise, and the opportunities of education in Ireland, and made an English statesman's name beloved in the Emerald Isle for the first time since Charles James Fox. Nor should his great work for Ireland obscure the grand achievements of the earlier years when he led the Liberal party through its wonderful program of reform in England; nor should any prejudice against the friend of Ireland dull our perception to the clear voice which so often pleaded the cause of ignorance and oppression at home and abroad, and touched the best that was in the conscience of his countrymen. A good, great, learned, eloquent statesman, William Ewart Gladstone towers in moral grandeur above his fellows like a mountain peak above the foothills, and the far-surrounding plain.

QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW

1. Why has Ireland menaced the peace of England for more than a century?