Chapter X

. As Head Of A Cabinet. (1868-1874)

Rational co-operation in politics would be at an end, if no two men might act together, until they had satisfied themselves that in no possible circumstances could they be divided.—GLADSTONE.

I

The just complacency with which Mr. Gladstone regarded his cabinet on its first construction held good:—

I look back with great satisfaction on the internal working of the cabinet of 1868-74. It was a cabinet easily handled; and yet it was the only one of my four cabinets in which there were members who were senior to myself (the lord chancellor Hatherley, Lord Clarendon), with many other men of long ministerial experience. When this cabinet was breaking up in 1874, I took the opportunity of thanking them for the manner in which they had uniformly lightened my task in the direction of business. In reply, Halifax, who might be considered as the senior in years and experience taken jointly, very handsomely said the duty of the cabinet had been made more easy by the considerate manner in which I had always treated them. Some of them were as colleagues absolutely delightful, from the manner in which their natural qualities blended with their consummate experience. I refer especially to Clarendon and Granville.

(M137) If we may trust some of those who were members of it, no cabinet ever did its business with livelier industry or effect. Under Mr. Gladstone’s hand it was a really working cabinet, not an assemblage of departmental ministers, each minding his own affairs, available as casual members of this or the other sub-committee, and without an eye for the general drift and tendency of their proceedings. Of course ministers differed in importance. One was pleasant and popular, but not forcible. Another overflowed with knowledge and was really an able man, but somehow he carried no guns, and nobody cared what he said. One had aptitude without weight—perhaps the true definition of our grossly overworked epithet of clever. Another had weight and character, without much aptitude. The cabinet as a whole was one of extraordinary power, not merely because its chief had both aptitude and momentum enough for a dozen, but because it was actively homogeneous in reforming spirit and purpose. This solidarity is the great element in such combinations, and the mainspring of all vigorous cabinet work.

Of Mr. Gladstone as head of his first cabinet, we have a glimpse from Mr. Stansfeld:—

Mr. Gladstone’s conduct in the cabinet was very curious. When I first joined in 1871, I naturally thought that his position was so commanding, that he would be able to say, “This is my policy; accept it or not as you like.” But he did not. He was always profuse in his expressions of respect for the cabinet. There was a wonderful combination in Mr. Gladstone of imperiousness and of deference. In the cabinet he would assume that he was nothing. I thought he should have said, “This is my policy. What do you think of it?” and then have fought it out until they had come to an agreement. He always tried to lead them on by unconscious steps to his own conclusions.(269)

To this we may add some words of Lord Granville used in 1883, but doubtless just as true of 1868-74:—

I have served under several prime ministers, men for whom I had high respect and to whom I had the greatest attachment, but I can say that I never knew one who showed a finer temper, a greater patience, or more consideration for his colleagues than Mr. Gladstone in all deliberations on any important subject. In his official position, with his knowledge, with his ability, and with the wonderful power of work that characterises him, he of course has an immense influence on the deliberations of the cabinet; but notwithstanding his tenacity of purpose and his earnestness, it is quite extraordinary how he attends to the arguments of all, and, except on any question of real vital principle, he is ready to yield his own opinion to the general sense of the colleagues over whom he presides.(270)

Imputing his own qualities to others, and always keen to make the best of people and not the worst, if he had once invited a man to office, he held on to him to the last possible moment. “The next most serious thing to admitting a man into the cabinet,” he said, “is to leave a man out who has once been in.” Not seldom he carried his invincible courtesy, deference, and toleration even beyond the domain where those qualities ought to be supreme. This was part of what men meant, when they said that life was to him in all its aspects an application of Christian teaching and example. To this we must add another consideration of first importance, and one that vulgar criticism of great statesmen too commonly ignores. In the words of Lord Aberdeen (1856), who knew from sharp experience how much his doctrine might cost a man: “A prime minister is not a free agent. To break up a government, to renounce all the good you hoped to do and leave imperfect all the good you have done, to hand over power to persons whose objects or whose measures you disapprove, even merely to alienate and politically to injure your friends, is no slight matter.”(271)

A member of this first cabinet wrote to Mr. Gladstone long after it had come to an end: “I suppose there was no one of your then colleagues less sympathetic with you, less in tune with your opinions and enthusiasms than Lowe. Nevertheless this happened to me with him—after you had resigned. Lowe opened to me one day, on the subject of your relations with your colleagues. He spoke in terms of warm admiration, and to my great surprise, ended by saying, ‘I have the same kind of feeling towards him that I can suppose must be the feeling of a dog for his master.’ Lowe is a perfectly sincere man. He would not have said this if he had not felt it.” “In everything personal,” Mr. Gladstone replied, “Lowe was an excellent colleague and member of cabinet. But I had never been in personal relations with him before, and at the outset of the ministry of 1868 I knew very little of him. Moreover, he was the occasion of much trouble to me by his incessant broils with ——, who was an awkward customer.” In sheer intellect Mr. Gladstone held that Lowe had not many equals, but in nobody else did he discover so many mixed and contradictory qualities—“splendid in attack, but most weak in defence, at times exhibiting pluck beyond measure, but at other times pusillanimity almost amounting to cowardice; one day headstrong and independent, and the next day helpless as a child to walk alone; capable of tearing anything to pieces, but of constructing nothing.”(272)

(M138) When Lord Clarendon died,—“An irreparable colleague,” Mr. Gladstone notes in his diary, “a statesman of many gifts, a most lovable and genial man.” Elsewhere he commemorates his “unswerving loyalty, his genial temper, his kindness ever overflowing in acts yet more than in words, his liberal and indulgent appreciation of others.” In the short government of 1865-6, Lord Granville had described Clarendon to Mr. Gladstone as “excellent, communicating more freely with the cabinet and carrying out their policy more faithfully, than any foreign secretary I have known.” Mr. Gladstone himself told me twenty years after, that of the sixty men or so who had been his colleagues in cabinet, Clarendon was the very easiest and most attractive. It is curious to observe that, with the exception of Mr. Bright, he found his most congenial adherents rather among the patrician whigs than among the men labelled as advanced.

Mr. Bright, as we have seen, was forced by ill-health to quit the government. Thirty years of unsparing toil, more than ten of them devoted especially to the exhausting, but in his case most fruitful, labours of the platform, had for the time worn down his stock of that energy of mind, which in the more sinewy frame of the prime minister seemed as boundless as some great natural element. To Mrs. Bright Mr. Gladstone wrote:—

It is not merely a selfish interest that all his colleagues feel in him on account of his great powers, just fame, and political importance; but it is one founded on the esteem and regard which, one and all, they entertain towards him. God grant that any anxieties you may entertain about him may soon be effectually relieved. I wish I felt quite certain that he is as good a patient as he is a colleague. But the chief object of my writing was to say that the Queen has signified both by letter and telegraph her lively interest in Mr. B.’s health; and she will not forgive me unless I am able to send her frequent reports.

He is quite capable of dealing faithfully with colleagues breaking rules. To a member of the cabinet who had transgressed by absence from a division of life and death:—

I should not act frankly by you if I did not state it, without hesitation as a general and prospective proposition, that, without reference to the likelihood or unlikelihood of defeat, upon motions which must from their nature be votes of confidence, [there can] be but one rule for the members of the government, and that is to give the votes themselves which at the same time the government with less strong title is asking from the members of their party.

He scolds a leading minister pretty directly for placing him in a disagreeable and rather ludicrous position, by failing to give the proper information about a government bill containing an important change, so that nobody could explain the reason for it to the House. His own personal example of absolutely unremitting attendance on the scene of action, entitled him to rebuke slackness. Nothing escaped him. Here is the way in which he called defaulters to their duty:—

_April 8, 1873._—The chancellor of the exchequer thinks he has some reason to complain of your having quitted London on Thursday, without any prior communication with him or Glyn, four days before the budget. I have heard with regret that the state of your health has compelled you to spend your vacation abroad; but scarcely even a direct medical order, and certainly in my opinion nothing less, could render such an example innocent in its effects, as is set by a departure from London under such circumstances. Although it has been a great pleasure to me to admit and recognise your parliamentary services and distinctions, and though I have always thought your accession to the government an acquisition of great value, I must frankly avow my opinion that it is hardly possible for the chancellor of exchequer to discharge his duties without your constant and sedulous co-operation, or for the official corps in general to avoid suffering, if the members of it make themselves the judges of the question when and under what circumstances their absence may be permitted during the sittings of the House.

_June 25, 1870._—I am led to suppose by your absence from the division yesterday, that there may not be a perfectly clear understanding between us as to the obligations of members of the government on these occasions. Yesterday gave occasion of much inconvenience on account of the entertainment at Windsor, but all the members of the government who could be expected to attend voted in the division, except yourself. I can say from my own recollection that as far as regards political officers, the sovereign always permits the claim of the House of Commons to prevail.

Changes among subordinate members of the government came early. Of one of these ministers Mr. Gladstone writes to Lord Granville (August 18, 1869): “He has great talent, and is a most pertinacious worker, with a good deal of experience and widely dispersed knowledge of public affairs. But he seems to be somewhat angular, and better adapted for doing business within a defined province of his own, than in common stock or partnership with others.” Unfortunately the somewhat angular man shared his work with a chief who had intellectual angularities of his own, not very smoothly concealed. As it happened, there was another minister of secondary rank who did not come up to the expected mark. “Though he has great talents, remarkable power of speech, and some special qualifications for his department, he has not succeeded in it with the House of Commons, and does not seem very thoroughly to understand pecuniary responsibility and the management of estimates, and there is no doubt whatever that in his department the present House of Commons will be vigilant and exacting, while the rapid growth of its expenditures certainly shows that it should be filled by some one capable of exercising control.” Not thoroughly “to understand pecuniary responsibility” was counted a deadly sin in those halcyon days. So the transgressor accepted a diplomatic mission, and this made room to plant his angular colleague in what seemed a “province of his own.” But few provinces are definite enough to be independent of the treasury, and the quarrels between this minister and the chancellor of the exchequer became something of a scandal and a weakness to the government. One of the fiercest battles of the time (1872) broke out in respect of Kew Gardens between the minister with a definite province of his own and a distinguished member of “a scientific fraternity, which, valuable as it is, has been unduly pampered of late from a variety of causes into a somewhat overweening idea of its own importance.” The premier’s pacifying resources were taxed by this tremendous feud to the uttermost; he holds a stiffish tone to the minister, and tries balm for the _savant_ by propitiatory reminder of “a most interesting fact made known to me when I had the pleasure and advantage of seeing you at Kew, namely the possibility of saving for purposes of food a portion of the substance of the diseased potato. The rescue of a sensible percentage of this valuable esculent will be a noble service rendered by scientific knowledge and skill to the general community.” But science is touchy, and wounds are sometimes too deep to be healed by words.

(M139) A point worth noting is his strict limitation of his own rights as head of a government. “Hope you will not think,” he wrote to a colleague, “I am evading my duties, but while it is my duty to deal with all difficulties arising between members of the government, it is wholly beyond my power, and in no way belongs to my province, to examine and settle the controversies which may arise between them and civil servants who are employed under them.” He is careful to distinguish his own words from the words of the cabinet; careful both to lean upon, and to defer to, the judgment of that body; and when the decision is taken, it is in their name that he writes to the vexatious colleague (July 24, 1872): “The cabinet have come to their conclusion, and directed me to make it known to you.... If you think proper to make the announcement of these intentions of the government, they are quite willing that you should do so. If otherwise, Mr. Bruce will do it as home minister. Thus far as to making known what will be done. As to the doing of it, the rules will have to be cancelled at once by you.”

The reader of an authoritarian or arbitrary cast of mind may ask why he did not throw a handful of dust upon the angry combatants. “It is easy,” he wrote to Cardwell (Nov. 20, 1871) “to talk of uprooting X., but even if it were just, it will, as Glyn [the party whip] would tell you, be very difficult. But Y. perhaps proceeds more like Moloch, and X. in the manner of Belial. Why cannot they follow the good example of those worthies, who co-operated in pandemonium? If you thought you could manage Y., I would try to tackle X. I commend this subject to your meditations.” Sulphureous whiffs from this pandemonium were pretty copiously scented both by parliament and the public, and did the ministry some harm.

Of a peer of much renown in points of procedure, private business, and the like, he says, “he looks at everything out of blinkers, and has no side lights.” Of one brilliant and able colleague in the first administration he writes, that “he has some blank in his mental constitution, owing to which he receives admonitions most kindly, and then straightway does the same thing over again.” Of another colleague, “though much nearer the rights of the case than many who were inclined to object, he is thin and poor in the cabinet.” Some one else is “a sensitive man, given beyond most men to speak out his innermost and perhaps unformed thoughts, and thereby to put himself at a disadvantage.” Another public servant is “not unmanageable, but he needs to be managed.” In the same letter he speaks of the Hibernian presbyterian as “that peculiar cross between a Scotchman and an Irishman.”

Of his incessant toil the reader has already a good idea. Here are a few items. To one correspondent (Jan. 21, 1869) he writes: “I hope you do not think my ‘holiday’ at Hawarden has proved my idleness, for I think ten hours a day has been a moderate estimate of my work there on public business, to which some other matters have had to be added.” To the attorney-general he says when he has had three years more of it (Sept. 18, 1872): “I cannot say with you that my office never gives me a day without business, for in the four ‘vacations’ so far as they have gone, I think I have had no less than five days. This vacation has thus far been the best; but heavy and critical work impends.” In October, 1871, he writes to Mrs. Gladstone from Edinburgh: “I have for _the first time_ since the government was formed, had a holiday of two whole days.” To Lord Clarendon he writes from Lord Granville’s at Walmer (Sept. 2, 1869): “At the end of a holiday morning of work, since I breakfasted at nine, which has lasted till near four, I have yet to say a few words about....” To Archdeacon Harrison, May 25, 1873: “As you may like to have the exact anatomy of my holiday on the Queen’s birthday, I will give it you: 2-1/4 A.M., return home from the H. of C. 10 A.M., two hours’ work in my room. 2-7, the cabinet. Three-quarters of an hour’s walk. 8-12, thirty-two to dinner and an evening party. 12, bed!” To Sir R. Phillimore, July 23, 1873: “Not once this year (except a day in bed) have I been absent from the hours of government business in the House, and the rigour of attendance is far greater now than at earlier periods of the session.”

His colleagues grudged his absence for a day. On one occasion, in accordance with a lifelong passion and rooted habit, he desired to attend a funeral, this time in Scotland, and Lord Granville’s letter of remonstrance to him is interesting in more points than one; it shows the exacting position in which the peculiarities of some colleagues and of a certain section of his supporters placed him:—

It is the unanimous desire of the cabinet that I should try to dissuade you.... It is a duty of a high order for you to do all you can for your health.... You hardly ever are absent from the House without some screw getting loose. I should write much more strongly if I did not feel I had a personal interest in the matter. In so strained a state as Europe is now in, the slightest thing may lead to great consequences, and it is possible that it may be a disadvantage to me and to the _chose publique_ if anything occurs during the thirty-six hours you are absent.

This letter of Lord Granville’s was written on July 10, 1870, just five days before war was declared between France and Prussia.

He wrote to the _Spectator_ (May 1873) to correct a report “that every day must begin for me with my old friend Homer.” He says: “As to my beginning every day with Homer, as such a phrase conveys to the world a very untrue impression of the demands of my present office, I think it right to mention that, so far as my memory serves me, I have not read Homer for fifty lines now for a quarter of an hour consecutively for the last four years, and any dealings of mine with Homeric subjects have been confined to a number of days which could be readily counted on the fingers.” Yet at the end of 1869, he winds up a letter of business by saying, “I must close; I am going to have a discussion with Huxley on the immortality of the soul!”

Who can wonder that after a prolonged spell of such a strain as this, he was found laying down strong doctrine about the age of a prime minister? Bishop Wilberforce met him twice in the May of 1873. “Gladstone much talking how little real good work any premier had done after sixty: Peel; Palmerston, his work really all done before; Duke of Wellington added nothing to his reputation after. I told him Dr. Clark thought it would be physically worse for him to retire. ‘Dr. Clark does not know how completely I should employ myself,’ he replied.” Four days later: “Gladstone again talking of sixty as full age of premier.”(273)

II

In words already quoted, Mr. Gladstone spoke of most of his life having been given to working the institutions of his country. Of all these institutions—House of Commons, Lords, cabinet, church, stern courts of law—that which he was most apt to idealise was the throne. His sense of chivalry and his sense of an august tradition continuously symbolised by a historic throne, moved him as the sight of the French Queen at Versailles had moved the majestic political imagination of Burke a century before. About the throne he sometimes used language that represented almost at its highest the value set upon it in text-books of the constitution, and in the current conventions of ceremonial speech.(274) Although what he called the iron necessities of actual business always threw these conventions into the background when the time came, yet his inmost feeling about the crown and the person of its wearer was as sincere as it was fervid. In business, it is true, he never yielded, yet even in his most anxious and pressing hours he spared neither time nor toil in endeavours to show the Queen why he could not yield. “Though decisions,” he said, “must ultimately conform to the sense of those who are to be responsible for them, yet their business is to inform and persuade the sovereign, not to overrule him.” One writer describes the Queen as “superb in standing sentry over the business of the empire.” This is obsequious phrase-making. But I will borrow the figure in saying what is more real, that Mr. Gladstone from beginning to end stood sentry over the interests, whether profound and enduring or trivial and fleeting, of the ancient monarchy of this kingdom. None who heard it will ever forget the moving and energetic passage in which when he was the doughty veteran of eighty years, speaking against his own followers on some question of a royal annuity, he moved the whole House to its depths by the passionate declaration, “I am not ashamed to say that in my old age I rejoice in any opportunity that enables me to testify that, whatever may be thought of my opinions, whatever may be thought of my proposals in general politics, I do not forget the service that I have borne to the illustrious representative of the British monarchy.”(275)

(M140) My readers have had opportunity enough of judging Mr. Gladstone’s estimate of the Queen’s shrewdness, simplicity, high manners. Above all, he constantly said how warmly he recognised her sincerity, frankness, straight-forwardness, and love of truth. On the other side, his own eager mobility, versatility, and wide elastic range was not likely to be to the taste of a personage with a singular fixity of nature. Then the Queen was by the necessity of her station a politician, as was Elizabeth or George III., although oddly enough she had a bitter dislike of what she thought the madness of “women’s rights.” As politician, she often took views that were not shared either by the constituencies or by the ministers whom the constituencies imposed upon her. The Queen in truth excellently represented and incorporated in her proper person one whole set of those qualities in our national character, on which the power of her realm had been built up. Mr. Gladstone stood for a different and in some aspects and on some occasions almost an antagonistic set of national qualities. The Queen, according to those who knew her well,(276) dreaded what in the eighteenth century they called enthusiasm: she dreaded or disdained it in religion, and in politics almost more. Yet her Englishmen are full of capacity for enthusiasm, and the Scots for whom she had such cordial affection have enthusiasm in measure fuller still. Unhappily, in the case of Ireland that occupied so much of Mr. Gladstone’s life, her sympathies with his long and vigorous endeavour notoriously stood at zero. The Queen’s loyalty to the constitution and to ministers in office was unquestioned, but she was not well placed, nor was she perhaps by character well fitted, to gauge the fluctuating movements of an age of change, as it was the duty of her statesmen to gauge and plumb them. If a cabinet with the confidence of the House of Commons decides upon a policy, it must obviously be a premier’s duty to persist, and in that duty Mr. Gladstone was resolute. If he had been otherwise, he knew that he would be falling short in loyalty to the country, and to its chief magistrate most of all.

In 1871 a wave of critical feeling began to run upon the throne. An influential journalist of that day, singularly free from any tincture of republican sentiment, thus describes it. “A few weeks ago,” he says, “a deep and universal feeling of discontent at the Queen’s seclusion (or rather at its consequences) found voice in the journals of the country. No public print of any importance failed to take part in the chorus; which was equally remarkable for its suddenness, fulness, and harmony. Indeed, the suddenness of the cry was surprising—till we remembered that what was then said had lain unexpressed in the minds of the whole community for years, with annual increment; and that when popular feeling gathers in that way, it is generally relieved at last by something of the nature of an explosion.” He then goes on to speak of “republicanism of a very revolutionary form flooding in,” and says that such a complexion of affairs could be viewed with pleasure by no friend of the monarchy.(277) The details of this movement are no longer of much interest, and they only concern us here because they gave Mr. Gladstone real anxiety. For him it was one of the special duties of a prime minister, as distinguished from his cabinet, to watch and guard relations between the crown and the country. Whether in office or in opposition, he lost no opportunity of standing forth between the throne and even a faint shadow of popular or parliamentary discontent. He had done it in the case of Prince Albert,(278) and he did it now. When the end came after nearly thirty years from our present date, the Queen wrote: “I shall ever gratefully remember his devotion and zeal in all that concerned my personal welfare and that of my family.” In 1871 his zeal went beyond the Queen’s personal welfare, and his solicitude for the institution represented by the Queen undoubtedly took a form of deferential exhortation—an exhortation that she should return to a fuller discharge of public duty, which the Queen found irksome. The Queen was as fond of Balmoral as Mr. Gladstone was fond of Hawarden. The contrast between the formality of Windsor and the atmosphere of simple attachment and social affection that surrounded her in Scotland, was as delightful to her as the air and the scenery. A royal progress through applauding multitudes in great cities made her ill. Hence, when Mr. Gladstone pressed her to defer a northern journey, or to open parliament, or to open a bridge, or otherwise emerge from seclusion, the Queen, though well aware that he had not, and could not, have any motive save her own and the public interest, undoubtedly felt that her energetic minister was attempting to overwork her. This feeling, as most of us know, breeds resistance, and even in time resentment. To say, however, that “in his eagerness Mr. Gladstone pressed her to do what she knew to be not her work so much as his,” is misleading and a little ludicrous.(279) Mr. Gladstone had persuaded himself that in the humour of the day persistence in seclusion did harm; it was his duty to give advice accordingly, and this duty he could not consent to shirk.

In other ways his very awe of the institution made him set an exacting standard for the individual who represented it. The letters contain a hundred instances. One may suffice. On the occasion of the Irish Church bill of 1869, the prime minister sent to the Queen a print of its clauses, and along with this draft a letter, covering over a dozen closely-written quarto pages, in explanation. Himself intensely absorbed and his whole soul possessed by the vital importance of what he was doing, he could not conceive that the sovereign, nursing a decided dislike of his policy, should not eagerly desire to get to the bottom of the provisions for carrying the policy out. The Queen read the letter, and reread it, and then in despair desired a gentleman practised in dealing with parliamentary bills, happening at that time to be at Osborne, to supply her with a summary.(280) The gaunt virtues of a _précis_—a meagre thing where qualifying sentences drop off, parentheses are cut out, adverbs hardly count, the noun stands denuded of its sheltering adjective—were never congenial to Mr. Gladstone’s copious exactitude in hypothesis, conditions, and contingencies. Neither of these two illustrious personages was without humour, and it seems at once a wonder and a pity that the monarch did less than justice to this laborious and almost military sense of discipline and duty in the minister; while the minister failed in genial allowance for the moderation of a royal lady’s appetite for bread and honey from the draftsman’s kitchen. If failing there were, it was natural to a man of earnest and concentrated mind. Be all this as it may, he became more and more conscious that the correspondence and occurrences of 1871-2 had introduced a reserve that was new. Perhaps it recalled to him the distance and formality that marked the relations between King George III. and the proudest, the most intrepid, and the greatest of his prime ministers.

III

Once in a conversation with Mr. Gladstone I asked him whether he remembered Peel’s phrase to Cobden about the odious power that patronage confers. He replied, “I never felt that, when I was prime minister. It came in the day’s work like the rest. I don’t recall that I ever felt plagued by improper applications. Peel was perhaps a little over fond of talking of the sacrifices of office. A man has no business to lay himself out for being prime minister, or to place himself in the way of it, unless he is prepared to take all the incidents of the post whether disagreeable or not. I’ve no sympathy with talk of that kind.” He was far from the mind of Carteret. “What is it to me,” cried that glittering minister, “who is a judge or who is a bishop? It is my business to make kings and emperors, and to maintain the balance of Europe.”

(M141) To the bestowal of honours he brought the same diligent care as to branches of public business that to men of Peel’s type seemed worthier of care. He treated honours on fixed considerations. Especially in the altitudes of the peerage, he tried hard to find solid political ground to go upon. He noted the remarkable fact that though a very large majority of the peerages granted since 1835 had been made on the advice of liberal ministers, yet such is the influence of wealth and privileged station that the liberal minority in the Lords had decreased. In 1869 the conservative majority was between sixty and seventy, without counting bishops or nominal liberals. Yet household suffrage at this very time had immensely increased the moral strength of the House of Commons. The crisis upon the Irish church had been borne with impatience, and Mr. Gladstone discerned a combustible temper at the action of the Lords that might easily have burst into flame. Still he saw no signal plan for improving the upper House. The appointment of life peers might be desirable, he said, but it was not easy to arrange, nor could its effect be great. The means of action therefore for bringing the Lords into more conformity or better proportions to the Commons, were very moderate. But that made it all the more important that they should not be overlooked. The governing idea in respect of both classes of hereditary honours was in his judgment the maintenance of a due relation between the members in those elevated ranks, and the number of persons offering the proper conditions for promotion of this kind, in a country so rapidly growing in wealth and population.

With characteristic love of making knowledge quantitative—one definition, I rather think, of science—Mr. Gladstone caused returns to be prepared for him, which showed that in 1840 there were about seventeen peers for every million of the population, while in 1869 this number had fallen to fourteen (in 1880 it was about the same). Lord Palmerston in his second government appears to have recommended sixteen peerages, and Lord Derby in little more than a quarter of the time recommended fourteen. Mr. Gladstone himself, during his first administration, excluding royal, non-political and _ex-officio_ peerages, added thirty members to the House of Lords, besides making five promotions. In the same period twelve peerages became extinct. Lord Beaconsfield (counting the same exclusions) created between 1874 and 1880 twenty-six new peers, and made nine promotions.(281)

In two directions Mr. Gladstone made an honourable innovation. He recommended a member of the Jewish faith for a peerage, and in the first list of his submissions to the Queen two Roman catholics were included. No catholic peer had been created within living memory. One of these two was Lord Acton, afterwards so intimate a friend, whose character, he told the Queen, “is of the first order, and he is one of the most learned and accomplished, though one of the most modest and unassuming, men of the day.” If religious profession was not in his eyes relevant in making peers, neither was the negation of profession, for at the same time he proposed a peerage to Grote. “I deeply and gratefully appreciate,” he wrote to Mr. Gladstone, “the sentiments you are pleased to express respecting my character and services. These I shall treasure up never to be forgotten, coming as they do from a minister who has entered on the work of reform with a sincerity and energy never hitherto paralleled. Such recognition is the true and sufficient recompense for all useful labours of mine.”(282)

At the same time the prime minister thought that some honour ought to be tendered to Mr. Mill, but Lord Granville, whom he consulted, thought otherwise, “merely on the ground that honours should go as much as possible with general acceptance.” Lord Granville was a man of thoroughly liberal and even generous mind; still not particularly qualified to be a good judge either of the merits of a man like Mill, or of his “acceptance” in circles well worth considering.

IV

It was to be expected that preferments in the church should get a special share of Mr. Gladstone’s laborious attention, and so they did. As member for Oxford he had been so much importuned in Lord Palmerston’s time, that he wrote in a moment of unusual impatience (1863), “I think these church preferments will be the death of me.” Palmerston favoured the evangelicals, and Mr. Gladstone was mortified that Church did not succeed Stanley in the chair of ecclesiastical history at Oxford, and that Wilberforce was not elevated to the throne of York in 1862.

(M142) During his first administration he recommended for no fewer than twelve bishoprics and eight deaneries. He was not unprepared to find, as he put it to Acland, that “saints, theologians, preachers, pastors, scholars, philosophers, gentlemen, men of business,—these are not to be had every day, least of all are they to be commonly found in combination. But these are the materials which ought to be sought out, and put forward in the church of England, if she is to stand the trials, and do her work.”

According to his fashion, he wrote down upon a fragmentary piece of paper what qualifications he ought to look for in a bishop, and this is the list:—

Piety. Learning (sacred). Eloquence. Administrative power. Faithful allegiance to the Church and to the church of England.

## Activity. Tact and courtesy in dealings with men: knowledge of the

world. Accomplishments and literature. An equitable spirit. Faculty of working with his brother bishops. Some legal habit of mind. Circumspection. Courage. Maturity of age and character. Corporal vigour. Liberal sentiments on public affairs. A representative character with reference to shades of opinion fairly allowable in the Church.

One of his earliest preferments, that of Dr. Temple to the bishopric of Exeter, created lively excitement. He had been a contributor to _Essays and Reviews_:—

On some of the papers contained in the volume, Mr. Gladstone wrote to the Bishop of Lichfield, I look with a strong aversion. But Dr. Temple’s responsibility prior to the publication was confined to his own essay. The question whether he ought to have disclaimed or denounced any part of the volume afterwards is a difficult one, and if it was a duty, it was a duty in regard to which a generous man might well go wrong. As regards his own essay, I read it at the time of publication, and thought it of little value, but did not perceive that it was mischievous.

In speaking of him to Acland in 1865, Mr. Gladstone had let fall a truly remarkable saying, going deep down to the roots of many things:—

You need not assure me of Dr. Temple’s Christian character. I have read his sermons, and if I had doubted—but I never did—they would have removed the doubt. Indeed I think it a most formidable responsibility, at the least, in these times to doubt any man’s character on account of his opinions. The limit of possible variation between character and opinion, ay, between character and belief, is widening, and will widen.

How could the leading mark of progress made in Mr. Gladstone’s age be more truly hit, how defined with more pith and pregnancy? How could the illumination of his own vigorous mind in forty years of life and thought be better demonstrated? It would even be no bad thing if those who are furthest removed from Mr. Gladstone’s opinions either in religion or politics could lay this far-reaching dictum of his to heart. By many men in all schools his lesson is sorely needed. Shrill was the clamour. Dr. Pusey, in Mr. Gladstone’s own phrase, was “rabid.” He justified his anger by reputed facts, which proved to be no facts at all, but the anger did not die with the fable. Even Phillimore was disquieted. “It has cut very deep indeed,” he said. Mr. Gladstone, confident of his ground, was not dismayed. “The movement against Dr. Temple is like a peculiar cheer we sometimes hear in the House of Commons, vehement but thin.”

No appointment proved so popular and successful as that of Bishop Fraser to Manchester. He was the first person named by Mr. Gladstone for the episcopate without some degree of personal knowledge. A remarkable concurrence of testimony established the great breadth of his sympathies, a trait much in his favour for the particular see of Manchester. Yet strange to say when by and by Stanley died, Mr. Gladstone was a party to trying to remove Fraser from the north to Westminster.

When in 1883 Mr. Gladstone was challenged as confining his recommendations to the high church side, he defended himself to sufficient purpose. He had a list made out of appointments to bishoprics, deaneries, and the most important parishes:—

There have been thirty important appointments. Out of them I have recommended eleven who would probably be called high churchmen (not one of them, so far as I know, unsympathetic towards other portions of the clergy) and nineteen who are not. On further examination it will appear that the high churchmen whom I take to be a decided majority of the clergy as well as a decided minority of my recommendations, have gone as a rule to the places of hard work and little pay. For example, they have got five out of ten _parochial_ recommendations; but, out of sixteen appointments to deaneries and canonries, they have received four, and those, with the exception of Mr. Furse, the worst. I could supply you with the lists in detail.

One admission I must make; the evidently broad churchmen are too large a proportion of the non-high, and the low churchmen rather too small, a disproportion which I should hope to remove, but undoubtedly the low churchman of the present day has a poorer share than half a century ago of the working energy of the church.

All these terms, High, Low, and Broad, are rather repugnant to me, but I use them as a currency of tokens with which it is difficult to dispense.

Turning from this point of view to the recognition of learning and genius, in the course of his first administration we find that he made Church dean of St. Paul’s, and Scott of the Greek lexicon dean of Rochester, Liddon and Lightfoot canons of St. Paul’s, Kingsley first canon of Chester, and then of Westminster, Vaughan master of the Temple.

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