The Life of William Ewart Gladstone Volume III Part 44

IV

In December (1892), at Hawarden, Mr. Gladstone said to me one day after we had been working for five or six hours at the heads of the new Home Rule bill, that his general health was good and sound, but his sight and his hearing were so rapidly declining, that he thought he might almost any day have to retire from office. It was no moment for ba.n.a.l deprecation. He sat silently pondering this vision in his own mind, of coming fate. It seemed like Tennyson's famous simile-

So dark a forethought rolled about his brain, As on a dull day in an ocean cave The blind wave feeling round his long sea-hall In silence.

It would have been preternatural if he had shown the same overwhelming interest that had animated him when the Irish policy was fresh in 1886.

Yet the instinct of a strong mind and the lifelong habit of ardent industry carried him through his Sisyphean toil. The routine business of head of a government he attended to, with all his usual a.s.siduity, and in cabinet he was clear, careful, methodical, as always.

The preparation of the bill was carefully and elaborately worked by Mr.

Gladstone through an excellent committee (M178) of the cabinet.(301) Here he was acute, adroit, patient, full of device, expedient, and the art of construction; now and then vehement and bearing down like a three-decker upon craft of more modest tonnage. But the vehemence was rare, and here as everywhere else he was eager to do justice to all the points and arguments of other people. He sought opportunities of deliberation in order to deliberate, and not under that excellent name to cultivate the art of the harangue, or to overwork secondary points, least of all to treat the many as made for one. That is to say, he went into counsel for the sake of counsel, and not to cajole, or bully, or insist on his own way because it was his own way. In the high article of finance, he would wrestle like a tiger. It was an intricate and difficult business by the necessity of the case, and among the aggravations of it was the discovery at one point that a wrong figure had been furnished to him by some department. He declared this truly heinous crime to be without a precedent in his huge experience.

The crucial difficulty was the Irish representation at Westminster. In the first bill of 1886, the Irish members were to come no more to the imperial parliament, except for one or two special purposes. The two alternatives to the policy of exclusion were either inclusion of the Irish members for all purposes, or else their inclusion for imperial purposes only. In his speech at Swansea in 1887, Mr. Gladstone favoured provisional inclusion, without prejudice to a return to the earlier plan of exclusion if that should be recommended by subsequent experience.(302) In the bill now introduced (Feb. 13, 1893), eighty representatives from Ireland were to have seats at Westminster, but they were not to vote upon motions or bills expressly confined to England or Scotland, and there were other limitations. This plan was soon found to be wholly intolerable to the House of Commons. Exclusion having failed, and inclusion of reduced numbers for limited purposes having failed, the only course left open was what was called _omnes omnia_, or rather the inclusion of eighty Irish members, with power of voting on all purposes.

Each of the three courses was open to at least one single, but very direct, objection. Exclusion, along with the exaction of revenue from Ireland by the parliament at Westminster, was taxation without representation. Inclusion for all purposes was to allow the Irish to meddle in our affairs, while we were no longer to meddle in theirs.

Inclusion for limited purposes still left them invested with the power of turning out a British government by a vote against it on an imperial question. Each plan, therefore, ended in a paradox. There was a fourth paradox, namely, that whenever the British supporters of a government did not suffice to build up a decisive majority, then the Irish vote descending into one or other scale of the parliamentary balance might decide who should be our rulers. This paradox-the most glaring of them all-habit and custom have made familiar, and familiarity might almost seem to have actually endeared it to us. In 1893 Mr. Gladstone and his colleagues thought themselves compelled to change clause 9 of the new bill, just as they had thought themselves forced to drop clause 24 of the old bill.

V

It was Mr. Gladstone's performances in the days of committee on the bill, that stirred the wonder and admiration of the House. If he had been fifty they would have been astonis.h.i.+ng; at eighty-four they were indeed a marvel. He made speeches of powerful argument, of high const.i.tutional reasoning, of trenchant debating force. No emergency arose for which he was not ready, no demand that his versatility was not adequate to meet.

His energy never flagged. When the bill came on, he would put on his gla.s.ses, pick up the paper of amendments, and running through them like lightning, would say, "Of course, that's absurd-that will never do-we can never accept that-is there any harm in this?" Too many concessions made on the spur of the (M179) moment to the unionists stirred resentment in the nationalists, and once or twice they exploded. These rapid splendours of his had their perils. I pointed out to him the pretty obvious drawbacks of settling delicate questions as we went along with no chance of sounding the Irishmen, and asked him to spare me quarter of an hour before luncheon, when the draftsman and I, having threshed out the amendments of the day, could put the bare points for his consideration. He was horrified at the very thought. "Out of the question. Do you want to kill me? I must have the whole of the morning for general government business. Don't ask me."(303)

Obstruction was freely practised and without remorse. The chief fighting debater against the government made a long second-reading speech, on the motion that the clause stand part of the bill. A little before eight o'clock when the fighting debater was winding up, Mr. Gladstone was undecided about speaking. "What do you advise?" he asked of a friend. "I am afraid it will take too much out of you," the friend replied; "but still, speak for twenty minutes and no more." Up he rose, and for half an hour a delighted House was treated to one of the most remarkable performances that ever was known. "I have never seen Mr. Gladstone," says one observer, "so dramatic, so prolific of all the resources of the actor's art. The courage, the audacity, and the melodrama of it were irresistible" (May 11).

For ten minutes, writes another chronicler, Mr. Gladstone spoke, holding his audience spell-bound by his force. Then came a sudden change, and it seemed that he was about to collapse from sheer physical exhaustion. His voice failed, huskiness and indistinctness took the place of clearness and lucidity. Then pulling himself together for a great effort, Mr. Gladstone pointing the deprecatory finger at Mr. Chamberlain, warned the Irishmen to beware of him; to watch the fowler who would inveigle them in his snare. Loud and long rang the liberal cheers. In plain words he told the unionists that Mr. Chamberlain's purpose was none other than obstruction, and he conveyed the intimation with a delicate expressiveness, a superabundant good feeling, a dramatic action and a marvellous music of voice that conspired in their various qualities to produce a _tour de force_. By sheer strength of enthusiasm and an overflowing wealth of eloquence, Mr.

Gladstone literally conquered every physical weakness and secured an effect electric in its influence even on seasoned "old hands."

Amidst high excitement and the sound of cheering that promised never to die away the House gradually melted into the lobbies. Mr.

Gladstone, exhausted with his effort, chatted to Mr. Morley on the treasury bench. Except for these two the government side was deserted, and the conservatives had already disappeared. The nationalists sat shoulder to shoulder, a solid phalanx. They eyed the prime minister with eager intent, and as soon as the venerable statesman rose to walk out of the House, they sprang to their feet and rent the air with wild hurrahs.

No wonder if the talk downstairs at dinner among his colleagues that night, all turned upon their chief, his art and power, his union of the highest qualities of brain and heart with extraordinary practical penetration, and close watchfulness of incident and trait and personality, disclosed in many a racy aside and pungent sally. The orator was fatigued, but full of keen enjoyment. This was one of the three or four occasions when he was induced not to return to the House after dinner. It had always been his habit in taking charge of bills to work the s.h.i.+p himself. No wonder that he held to this habit in this case.

On another occasion ministers had taken ground that, as the debate went on, everybody saw they could not hold. An official spokesman for the bill had expressed an opinion, or intention, that, as very speedily appeared, Irish opposition would not allow to be maintained. There was no great substance in the point, but even a small dose of humiliation will make a parliamentary dish as bitter to one side as it is savoury to the other.

The opposition grew more and more radiant, as it grew more certain that the official spokesman (M180) must be thrown over. The discomfiture of the ministerialists at the prospect of the public mortification of their leaders was extreme in the same degree. "I suppose we must give it up,"

said Mr. Gladstone. This was clear; and when he rose, he was greeted with mocking cheers from the enemy, though the enemy's chief men who had long experience of his Protean resources were less confident. Beginning in a tone of easy gravity and candour, he went on to points of pleasant banter, got his audience interested and amused and a little bewildered; carried men with him in graceful arguments on the merits; and finally, with bye-play of consummate sport, showed in triumph that the concession that we consented to make was so right and natural, that it must have been inevitable from the very first. Never were tables more effectively turned; the opposition watched first with amazement, then with excitement and delight as children watch a wizard; and he sat down victorious. Not another word was said or could be said. "Never in all my parliamentary years," said a powerful veteran on the front bench opposite, as he pa.s.sed behind the Speaker's chair, "never have I seen so wonderful a thing done as that."

The state of the county of Clare was a G.o.dsend to the obstructive. Clare was not at that moment quite as innocent as the garden of Eden before the fall, but the condition was not serious; it had been twenty times worse before without occupying the House of Commons five minutes. Now an evening a week was not thought too much for a hollow debate on disorder in Clare.

It was described as a definite matter of urgent importance, though it had slept for years, and though three times in succession the judge of a.s.size (travelling entirely out of his proper business) had denounced the state of things. It was made to support five votes of censure in eight weeks.

On one of these votes of censure on Irish administration, moved by Mr.

Balfour (March 27), Mr. Gladstone listened to the debate. At 8 we begged him not to stay and not to take the trouble to speak, so trumpery was the whole affair. He said he must, if only for five minutes, to show that he identified himself with his Irish minister. He left to dine, and then before ten was on his feet, making what Lord Randolph Churchill rightly called "a most impressive and entrancing speech." He talked of Pat this and Michael that, and Father the other, as if he had pondered their cases for a month, clenching every point with extraordinary strength as well as consummate ease and grace, and winding up with some phrases of wonderful simplicity and concentration.

A distinguished member made a motion for the exclusion of Irish cabinet ministers from their chamber. Mr. Gladstone was reminded on the bench just before he rose, that the same proposal had been inserted in the Act of Settlement, and repealed in 1705. He wove this into his speech with a skill, and amplified confidence, that must have made everybody suppose that it was a historic fact present every day to his mind. The attention of a law-officer sitting by was called to this rapid amplification. "I never saw anything like it in all my whole life," said the law-officer; and he was a man who had been accustomed to deal with some of the strongest and quickest minds of the day as judges and advocates.

One day when a tremendous afternoon of obstruction had almost worn him down, the adjournment came at seven o'clock. He was haggard and depressed.

On returning at ten we found him making a most lively and amusing speech upon procedure. He sat down as blithe as dawn. "To make a speech of that sort," he said in deprecation of compliment, "a man does best to dine out; 'tis no use to lie on a sofa and think about it."

Undoubtedly Mr. Gladstone's method in this long committee carried with it some disadvantages. His discursive treatment exposed an enormous surface.

His abundance of ill.u.s.tration multiplied points for debate. His fertility in improvised arguments encouraged improvisation in disputants without the gift. Mr. Gladstone always supposed that a great theme needs to be copiously handled, which is perhaps doubtful, and indeed is often an exact inversion of the true state of things. However that may be, copiousness is a game at which two can play, as a patriotic opposition now and at other times has effectually disclosed. Some thought in these days that a man like Lord Althorp, for (M181) instance, would have given the obstructives much more trouble in their pursuits than did Mr. Gladstone.

That Mr. Gladstone's supporters should become restive at the slow motion of business was natural enough. They came to ministers, calling out for a drastic closure, as simple tribes might clamour to a rain-maker. It was the end of June, and with a reasonable opposition conducted in decent good faith, it was computed that the bill might be through committee in nineteen days. But the hypothesis of reason and good faith was not thought to be substantial, and the cabinet resolved on resort to closure on a scale like that on which it had been used by the late government in the case of the Crimes Act of 1887, and of the Special Commission. It has been said since on excellent authority, that without speaking of their good faith, Mr. Gladstone's princ.i.p.al opponents were now running absolutely short of new ammunition, and having used the same arguments and made the same speeches for so many weeks, they were so worn out that the guillotine was superfluous. Of these straits, however, there was little evidence. Mr.

Gladstone entered into the operation with a good deal of chagrin. He saw that the House of Commons in which he did his work and rose to glory was swiftly fading out of sight, and a new inst.i.tution of different habits of responsibility and practice taking its place.

The stage of committee lasted for sixty-three sittings. The whole proceedings occupied eighty-two. It is not necessary to hold that the time was too long for the size of the task, if it had been well spent. The spirit of the debate was aptly ill.u.s.trated by the plea of a brilliant tory, that he voted for a certain motion against a principle that he approved, because he thought the carrying of the motion "would make the bill more detestable." Opposition rested on a view of Irish character and Irish feeling about England, that can hardly have been very deeply thought out, because ten years later the most bitter opponents of the Irish claim launched a policy, that was to make Irish peasants direct debtors to the hated England to the tune of one hundred million pounds, and was to dislodge by imperial cash those who were persistently called the only friends of the imperial connection. The bill pa.s.sed its second reading by 347 against 304, or a majority of 43. In some critical divisions, the majority ran down to 27. The third reading was carried by 301 against 267, or a majority of 34. It was estimated that excluding the Irish, there was a majority against the bill of 23. If we counted England and Wales alone, the adverse majority was 48. When it reached them, the Lords incontinently threw it out. The roll of the Lords held 560 names, beyond the peers of the royal house. Of this body of 560, no fewer than 419 voted against the bill, and only 41 voted for it.

VI

The session was protracted until it became the longest in the history of parliament. The House was sitting when Mr. Gladstone's eighty-fourth birthday arrived. "Before putting a question," said Mr. Balfour in a tone that, after the heat and exasperations of so many months, was refres.h.i.+ng to hear, "perhaps the right honourable gentleman will allow me, on my own part and on that of my friends, to offer him our most sincere congratulations." "Allow me to thank him," said Mr. Gladstone, "for his great courtesy and kindness." The government pressed forward and carried through the House of Commons a measure dealing with the liability of employers for accidents, and a more important measure setting up elective bodies for certain purposes in parishes. Into the first the Lords introduced such changes as were taken to nullify all the advantages of the bill, and the cabinet approved of its abandonment. Into the second they forced back certain provisions that the Commons had with full deliberation decisively rejected.

Mr. Gladstone was at Biarritz, he records, when this happened in January of 1894. He had gone there to recruit after the incomparable exertions of the session, and also to consider at a cool distance and in changed scenes other topics that had for some weeks caused him some agitation. He now thought that there was a decisive case against the House of Lords. Apart from the Irish bill to which the (M182) Commons had given eighty-two days, the Lords had maimed the bill for parish councils, to which had gone the labour of forty-one days. Other bills they had mutilated or defeated. Upon the whole, he argued, it was not too much to say that for practical purposes the Lords had destroyed the work of the House of Commons, unexampled as that work was in the time and pains bestowed upon it. "I suggested dissolution to my colleagues in London, where half, or more than half, the cabinet were found at the moment. I received by telegraph a hopelessly adverse reply." Reluctantly he let the idea drop, always maintaining, however, that a signal opportunity had been lost. Even in my last conversation with him in 1897, he held to his text that we ought to have dissolved at this moment. The case, he said, was clear, thorough, and complete. As has been already mentioned, there were four occasions on which he believed that he had divined the right moment for a searching appeal to public opinion on a great question.(304) The renewal of the income tax in 1853 was the first; the proposal of religious equality for Ireland in 1868 was the second; home rule was the third, and here he was justified by the astonis.h.i.+ng and real progress that he had made up to the catastrophe at the end of 1890. The fourth case was this, of a dissolution upon the question of the relations of the two Houses.

Chapter VIII. Retirement From Public Life. (1894)

O, 'tis a burden, Cromwell, 'tis a burden Too heavy for a man that hopes for heaven.

_Henry VIII._ iii. 2.

I

"Politics," wrote Mr. Gladstone in one of his private memoranda in March 1894, "are like a labyrinth, from the inner intricacies of which it is even more difficult to find the way of escape, than it was to find the way into them. My age did something but not enough. The deterioration of my hearing helped, but insufficiently. It is the state of my sight which has supplied me with effectual aid in exchanging my imperious public obligations for what seems to be a free place on 'the breezy common of humanity.' And it has only been within the last eight months, or thereabouts, that the decay of working sight has advanced at such a pace as to present the likelihood of its becoming stringently operative at an early date. It would have been very difficult to fix that date at this or that precise point, without the appearance of making an arbitrary choice; but then the closing of the parliamentary session (1893-4) offered a natural break between the cessation and renewal of engagements, which was admirably suited to the design. And yet I think it, if not certain, yet very highly probable at the least, that any disposition of mine to profit by this break would-but for the naval scheme of my colleagues in the naval estimates-have been frustrated by their desire to avoid the inconveniences of a change, and by the pressure which they would have brought to bear upon me in consequence. The effect of that scheme was not to bring about the construction of an artificial cause, or pretext rather, of resignation, but to compel me to act upon one that was rational, sufficient, and ready to hand."

This is the short, plain, and intelligible truth as to what now happened.

There can be no reason to-day for not stating what was for a long time matter of common surmise, if not of common knowledge, that Mr. Gladstone did not regard the naval estimates, opened but not settled in December 1893, as justified by the circ.u.mstances of the time. He made a speech that month in parliament in reply to a motion from the front bench opposite, and there he took a position undoubtedly antagonistic to the new scheme that found favour with his cabinet, though not with all its members. The present writer is of course not free to go into details, beyond those that anybody else not a member of the cabinet would discover from Mr.

Gladstone's papers. Nor does the public lose anything of real interest by this necessary reserve. Mr. Gladstone said he wished to make me "his depositary" as things gradually moved on, and he wrote me a series of short letters from day to day. If they could be read aloud in Westminster Hall, no harm would be done either to surviving colleagues or to others; they would furnish no new reason for thinking either better or worse of anybody; and no one with a decent sense of the value of time would concern himself in all the minor detail of an ineffectual controversy. The central facts were simple. Two things weighed with him, first his infirmities, and second his disapproval of the policy. How, he asked himself, could he turn his back on his former self by becoming a party to swollen expenditure?

True he had changed from conservative to liberal in general politics, but when he was conservative, that party was the economic party, "Peel its leader being a Cobdenite." To a.s.sent to this new outlay in time of peace was to revolutionise policy. Then he would go on-"Owing to the part which I was drawn to take, first in Italy, then as to Greece, then on the eastern question, I have come to be considered not only an English but a European statesman. My name stands in Europe as a symbol of the policy of peace, moderation, and non-aggression. What would be said of my active partic.i.p.ation in a policy that will be taken as plunging England into the whirlpool of militarism? Third, I have been in active public life for a period nearly as long as the time between the beginning of Mr. Pitt's first ministry and the close of Sir Robert Peel's; between 1783 and 1846-sixty-two years and a half. During that time I have uniformly opposed militarism." Thus he would put his case.

After the naval estimates were brought forward, attempts were naturally made at accommodation, for whether he availed himself of the end of the session as a proper occasion of retirement or not, he was bound to try to get the estimates down if he could. He laboured hard at the task of conversion, and though some of his colleagues needed no conversion, with the majority he did not prevail. He admitted that he had made limited concessions to scares in 1860 and in 1884, and that he had besides been repeatedly responsible for extraordinary financial provisions having reference to some crisis of the day:-

I did this, (1) By a preliminary budget in 1854; (2) By the final budget of July 1859; by the vote of credit in July 1870; and again by the vote of credit in 1884. Every one of these was special, and was shown in each case respectively to be special by the sequel: no one of them had reference to the notion of establis.h.i.+ng dominant military or even naval power in Europe. Their amounts were various, but were adapted to the view taken, at least by me, of the exigency actually present.(305)