A Writer's Recollections Volume I Part 10

In other matters--Gordon, Imperial Federation, the Chairmans.h.i.+p of the Manchester s.h.i.+p Ca.n.a.l, and the rest--William Forster showed, up till 1885, what his friends fondly hoped was the promise of renewed and successful work. But in reality he never recovered Ireland. The mark of those two years had gone too deep. He died in April, 1886, just before the introduction of the Home Rule Bill, and I have always on the retina of the inward eye the impression of a moment at the western door of Westminster Abbey, after the funeral service. The flower-heaped coffin had gone through. My aunt and her adopted children followed it. After them came Mr. Gladstone, with other members of the Cabinet. At the threshold Mr. Gladstone moved forward, and took my aunt's hand, bending over it bareheaded. Then she went with the dead, and he turned away toward the House of Commons. To those of us who remembered what the relations of the dead and the living had once been, and how they had parted, there was a peculiar pathos in the little scene.

A few days later Mr. Gladstone brought in the Home Rule Bill, and the two stormy months followed which ended in the Liberal Unionist split and the defeat of the Bill on June 7th by thirty votes, and were the prelude to the twenty years of Tory Government. If William Forster had lived, there is no doubt that he must have played a leading part in the struggles of that and subsequent sessions. In 1888 Mr. Balfour said to my husband, after some generous words on the part played by Forster in those two terrible years: "Forster's loss was irreparable to us [i.e., to the Unionist party]. If he and Fawcett had lived, Gladstone could not have made head."

It has been, I think, widely recognized by men of all parties in recent years that personally William Forster bore the worst of the Irish day, whatever men may think of his policy. But, after all, it is not for this, primarily, that England remembers him. His monument is everywhere--in the schools that have covered the land since 1870, when his great Act was pa.s.sed. And if I have caught a little picture from the moment when death forestalled that imminent parting between himself and the great leader he had so long admired and followed, which life could only have broadened, let me match it by an earlier and happier one, borrowed from a letter of my own, written to my father when I was eighteen, and describing the bringing in of the Education Act.

He sat down amidst loud cheering.... _Gladstone pulled him down with a sort of hug of delight._ It is certain that he is very much pleased with the Bill, and, what is of great consequence, that he thinks the Government has throughout been treated with great consideration in it. After the debate he said to Uncle F., "Well, I think our pair of ponies will run through together!"

Gladstone's "pony" was, of course, the Land Act of 1870.

THE END OF VOL. I