THE VICTORIAN COLOSSUS: William Ewart Gladstone (1809-1898)

Michael Millard
William Ewart Gladstone was the foremost British statesman of the nineteenth century. He was a Member of Parliament almost continuously for 63 years. He entered the Cabinet in 1843 and resigned as Prime Minister fifty-one years later. He served as a Cabinet minister under four Prime Ministers and remains the only British Prime Minister to have served for four separate terms; finally resigning at the unsurpassed age of 84. Yet there was much more to the man than a politician. One bibliography of his own writings lists 345 titles; including translations and works on classics and ancient history; on theology and biblical scholarship; on philosophy; on literature; on Ireland and on economics. It was Sir Robert Peel who gave him his first ministerial post when he was barely twenty-five. These two men came from strikingly similar backgrounds and owed their privileged beginnings to their fathers successes in accumulating wealth. Neither of them came from the old landed aristocracy but from the new wealth engendered by industry, trade and commerce. Cotton was the source for much of their wealth. The elder Robert Peel has been referred to as the greatest of the early cotton industrialists. John Gladstones amassed a fortune out of several commercial ventures, including cotton plantations in the West Indies. Both of them became Tory Members of Parliament and received baronetcies. Peel and Gladstone were both from their familys first generation to attend major Public Schools: Peel to Harrow and Gladstone to Eton. Both men went up to Oxford, achieving double firsts while at Christ Church. Both men entered Parliament as Tories in their early twenties and progressed towards more liberal positions, not least in economics. Ireland was to mark both their political gravestones. John Gladstones dropped the final s, changing the family name to Gladstone. William Ewart Gladstone was born in Liverpool on 29th.December 1809; at the end of the year that Peel entered Parliament. Gladstones parents were both Scots. The family moved to Seaford House and he attended a nearby prep school. At Eton and Oxford, William excelled as a debater, becoming President of the Oxford Union in 1830. He left Christ Church with a double first in mathematics and classics (greats). His fathers wealth opened all the necessary doors for him. Throughout his life that inheritance enabled him to live on private capital, which combined with his marriage, left him free to pursue his own interests and vocation. His Christian faith was undoubtedly what shaped and challenged his moral and political convictions and goaded him into action. His mother had instilled in him a love of the Scriptures and a bible-based Christian faith, with some elements of Evangelicalism. When he was about ten years old, she wrote in a letter that William had been truly converted to God. Gladstone himself wrote a memorandum on The Doctrine of Conversion in his twenties. He defined conversion as a turning so far from being the work of a moment that it cannot even be the work of a life. Clearly by then he had no time for any forms of religious enthusiasm that involved ideas of inspiration sudden and sensible, of bodily convulsions, of wild and idle speculations and imaginations. The work sensible did not then mean reasonable but rather that which sprang from the senses, from feelings and emotions. Gladstone had gone up to Oxford believing that he was called to the ordained ministry of the Church of England. Gladstone sat his final exams at Oxford in the morning of 14 th. December 1831. That afternoon he received the news of his mathematical first, thus achieving his double first. He packed, said farewells and caught the night coach down to London. He and his brother set off on the Grand Tour on 1st. February 1832. After five days in Belgium, they spent eleven days in Paris and crossed the Alps into Italy; where they were to

spend the next five months. Gladstone was to visit Italy several times and to become fluent enough in Italian to read Dante and translate passages from his Divine Comedy. For one with a pronounced Protestant background, his experiences in Roman Catholic countries were to leave profound and mixed impressions upon him. He wrote of his contempt for what he observed of the temporal power of the Papacy on his visit to the Papal States: there seems to be every absurdity in the idea of an ecclesiastical sovereign- whether legislative or executive. He continued to believe that the fault for the pain and shame of the schism between the English Reformed Church and the Roman Catholic Church surely rests upon Rome itself. Nevertheless, he attributed to his visit to St. Peters the first conception of the unity in the Church- acquired alas! by the existing contrasts- and first to have longed for its visible attainment. He hoped that God might bind up the wounds of his bleeding Church. He was fascinated by his experiences of Roman Catholic worship. Having attended the Easter benediction at St. Peters, he recorded: Nothing could be finer to this scene to the eye-its grandeur transcends everything. He was never to join that Church, but remained a faithful Anglican; sorely afflicted by the Romeward departures of family and friends. Forty years later, he became polemically involved with Newman; writing pamphlets in the wake of the first Vatican Council and the Definition of Papal Infallibility which denounced Vaticanism and the Vatican Decrees in their Bearing on Civil Allegiance. He became a firm High Churchman who defended those great Catholic principles which distinguish our Church from many other Protestant bodies. In old age, Gladstone claimed that he was thrown politically into the anti-liberal attitude by the accident of the Reform Bill of 1831. In a speech at the Oxford Union, he echoed Wellingtons claim that such reform would lead to revolution. He wrote of its protagonists as the speakers on the revolutionary side. That speech led the Duke of Newcastle offer him the nomination for his former pocket borough of Newark. Gladstone entered the first reformed Parliament as a Tory. He made his maiden speech in the debate on the abolition of slavery, when he defended his fathers reputation against the charge of being the murderer of slaves on his estates in the West Indies. Gladstone was always to feel guilty about living off his fathers fortune, which was tainted by revenues from sugar plantations worked by slaves. The scale of the Tory defeat in the election of 1832 was unparalleled until the defeat of John Majors government in 1997. Peel could only rely on 179 out of 658 MPs. As the party recovered and enlarged its representation; Peel sought to attract moderate men to what he renamed as the Conservative Party. In the Hundred Days of Peels minority administration, Gladstone was appointed briefly as Junior Lord of the Treasury in December 1834 and moved in January to become the Under-Secretary of State for War and the Colonies. He was a minister outside of the Cabinet. Peel resigned in April 1835 and Gladstone returned with him to the Opposition benches. Peel appealed to Conservative principles including an established religion and imperishable faith and that established religion shall maintain the doctrines of the Protestant Church. That Established Church received its last belated defence in Gladstones The State in its Relations to the Church. In April and May 1838, the twenty-eight year old William had attended three lectures in London by the Professor of Theology at Edinburgh University, Dr. Thomas Chalmers. Chalmers argued the case for a national establishment of religion. He defined that establishment primarily in terms of endowment. An established church was a church funded by the State. Gladstone found this definition woefully inadequate and set to work to show why. He maintained that the Church of England had all the marks of the Catholic Church of Christ; so that the State, in rejecting her would actively violate its most solemn duty & would, if the connection be sound, entail upon itself a curse. He sought to provide a satisfactory intellectual justification by enquiring merely into the grounds and reasons for the alliance not its terms. The book ranged over a number of interconnected topics and in the fourth edition grew into two volumes. It was in his review of the book in 1839 that Lord Macaulay referred to the twenty-nine year old Gladstone as "the rising hope of those stern unbending Tories .
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In the election of 1841, Sir Robert Peels Conservative Party achieved the first single party majority in British history. Once in power Peel disastrously abandoned his efforts to carry the opinion of his party along with him. The historian of the Conservative Party, Robert Blake, concluded: "At a glance one can see the nature of Tory support. It was overwhelmingly in the counties". The Conservatives won 124 out of 144 seats in the English counties. They had been won on the issues of the defence of the Established Church and agricultural protection. On both issues, Peel gave his rebels good grounds for sensing betrayal. Peels government introduced income tax, reviving Pitts wartime expedient of the property tax. It was a temporary measure and Gladstone was to seek later to abolish it; but it has been with us ever since. The budget of 1842 introduced ceilings on duties and revised the sliding scale on corn imports downwards. Over the next three years duties were relaxed and abolished over such a wide range that only the Corn Laws stood in the way of a full commitment to Free Trade. Their repeal was to bring down the Government and irreparably split the Conservative Party. Gladstone was always in the vanguard of these changes. He became Vice-President of the Board of Trade in September 1841 and entered the cabinet in May 1843 as President of the Board of Trade. He demonstrated his commitment to free trade and the economics of laissez-faire. In 1845, Peel faced a serious revolt over the grant to the Roman Catholic seminary at Maynooth in Ireland. Pitt had introduced it fifty years earlier to gain support from Roman Catholic hierarchy in his stand against revolutionary and radical causes. It was renewed annually by Parliament. Peel and the Cabinet decided not only to increase it substantially but also to make it permanent and automatic without an annual vote. The issue sparked off a wave of Anti-Catholicism. Its opponents argued that by making the grant permanent, the State was no longer funding only the established United Church of England and Ireland but also the Roman Catholic Church; thereby introducing a form of dual endowment in Ireland. Gladstone resigned from the cabinet because of the bills inconsistency with the position he had expressed in The State in its Relations to the Church. He showed his movement from that earlier position by voting for the permanent grant. The issue of religious freedom and pluralism became one of the key ingredients in the gradual conversion from Toryism to Liberalism. At the end of his life, Gladstone reflected: "I was brought up to dislike and distrust liberty. I learned to believe in it. That is the key to all my changes". The establishment of a Roman Catholic hierarchy with assumed jurisdictions caused yet another eruption of Anti-Catholicism and charges of Papal Aggression. Russells government sought to restrict its implementation in the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill of 1851, by declaring illegal any further episcopal creations by the Papacy. Gladstone opposed the bill and posed a question to the House of Commons: Will you go backwards and forwards in the career of religious freedom? He wrote to the Primus, the senior bishop of the Scottish Episcopal Church. Away with the servile doctrine, that religion cannot live but by the aid of the State. Only full religious freedom brings out into full vigour, and also into fair and impartial rivalry, the internal energies of each communion, so that they stand upon their merits before the world. The bill passed into law and Gladstone, as Prime Minister, repealed it in 1871. With the fall of Peel, the Conservative Party now split into two groups. The Protectionist majority accepted the leadership of Stanley and, from 1847, Benjamin Disraeli. They abandoned protectionism in 1851 and there were no major divisive issues until the death of Palmerston in 1865 reopened the real prospect of Parliamentary reform. Peel himself remained an aloof and lonely figure until his death in 1850. In September 1846, he remarked characteristically: I intend to keep aloof from party combinations. His supporters became known as Peelites. Their numerical strength remains a matter for historical debate. In reality they were a very loose group who disagreed among themselves on important issues. As the Whig M.P. George Cornewallis Lewis commented in 1849: the Peelites are small in numbers but divided among themselves. Gladstone remarked: We have no party, no organisation, no whipping in. All the major figures in Peels cabinet became Peelites, except Stanley, who became the acknowledged leader of the Conservative rump. He became the 14th Earl of Derby in 1851. All the opposition parties, including the Peelites, combined to defeat Disraelis budget and brought down Derbys first minority
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government of 1852. When Aberdeen formed his cabinet, he brought in 5 fellow Peelites, 6 Whigs and 1 Radical. Disraeli referred to them as a band of self-educated geniuses. Gladstone turned down an offer of a cabinet post from Derby in 1858, admitting to a strong sense of revulsion from Disraeli personally. The personal animosity between Gladstone and Disraeli prevented any possible rapprochement between these two groups. Gladstone assumed Peels mantle and never forgave Disraeli for his betrayal. He had contempt for the unscrupulousness and second-mindedness of Disraeli. An anti-Tory combination brought down Derbys second government. The Whigs still relied on the support of the Irish and Radical MPs. The Liberal Party grew out of the coalition of Peelites, Whigs and Radicals in Palmerston's second government of 1859. Clarendon called that administration a great bundle of sticks. Out of office after the fall of Peel, William had become Chancellor of the Exchequer in Aberdeens WhigPeelite coalition from December 1852. His three budgets abolished duties on 123 articles and reduced them on 133 more. He introduced a scheme to reduce the National Debt. He resigned in 1855, rather than serve under Palmerston, whose foreign policy he deplored. From November 1858 until the following March, he was High Commissioner to the Ionian Islands. Gladstone was at one with Palmerston in his support for Italian unification. He became Palmerstons Chancellor of the Exchequer in June 1859 and held that office for the next seven years. Gladstone maintained that it was not good for governments to interfere in the economy more than was absolutely necessary. National prosperity was dependent on economic freedom. The government's role in the economy was merely to promote the best conditions for free enterprise and therefore it should not impose unnecessary restrictions. Governments must seek to reduce the tax burden by economising, thereby reducing and limiting public expenditure so that "whatever service should be performed for the public should be executed in the most efficient manner, but likewise at the lowest practical cost ". A commercial treaty with France and the abolition of paper duties demonstrated his continued commitment to Free Trade. His Repeal of the Paper Duties Bill was pursued in the face of opposition from the Prime Minister and most of the cabinet. Confronted by a very adverse House, the bill only scraped through the Commons to be rejected by a narrow margin in the House of Lords. Gladstone then confronted the Lords with a single bill, which included the repeal of the paper duties and the reduction of income tax. By so doing, the Lords could only accept or reject the whole budget. Rejection would have caused a constitutional crisis. Thus he introduced the first single omnibus budget in 1861, which has been the practice ever since. His red box was in continuous use on Budget Day until almost the end of the twentieth century, when Gordon Brown replaced the battered relic with his new shining contribution to cool Britannia. The young Gladstone had referred to the Reform Act of 1832 as 'anti-Christ' and yet by the 1860s he firmly supported a further extension of the vote to " a select portion of the working class". In a speech in 1864, he asked: "What are the qualities which fit a man for the exercise of the franchise? His answer was: Selfcommand, self-control, respect for order, patience under suffering; confidence in the law, regard for superiors. The vote remained a privilege to be earned and merited. Gladstone had been impressed by the responsible attitude of the New Model Unions, which had concentrated on conciliation and arbitration rather than confrontation, while establishing friendly societies to encourage skilled workers in the financial prudence of thrift and self-help. He had come to regard such artisans as morally entitled to come within the pale of the constitution. He went on to introduce, with Russell, the Reform Bill of 1866. It brought down the government and yet it was a much more cautious bill than the Conservatives Reform Act of the following year. Gladstones second administration was to introduce the Third Reform Bill in 1884. The size of the electorate in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was more than ten times greater in 1885 than it had been in 1831, while the population had only increased from 24 million to 36 million. In England and Wales, two thirds of the adult male population had the vote by 1885. The electorate remained all male and subject to property qualifications until 1918.

The Liberals won a decisive victory in 1868 and Gladstone was asked to form his first government. Palmerstons preoccupation with foreign affairs had left a backlog of domestic matters demanding legislation. Palmerston had come to realise that Gladstone was destined to lead his party. Gladstone will soon have it all his own way and whenever he gets my place we shall have strange doings. Gladstones was to be a great reforming ministry, within which he gave much latitude of individual ministers because of his belief in collective responsibility. John Bright looked back in 1873 on its first five years as memorable years in which great principles were established and its measures will bear comparison with those of any government which has preceded it. At the core of Gladstone's liberalism was a belief in merit rather than equality or unearned privilege. Drawing on his immense knowledge of the classical world, he proclaimed: "I am a firm believer in the aristocratic principle - the rule of the best". In his first administration, he brought about a number of institutional reforms based on merit and therefore on efficiency rather than privilege. The 1867 Reform Act made it necessary to provide education for the newly enfranchised. Gladstone delegated responsibility for educational reform to William Forster. Grants to voluntary schools had proved woefully inadequate in a century of rapid demographic growth. The purpose of the Education Act of 1870 was to fill the gaps and cover the country with good schools. As there were currently an insufficient number of school places, school attendance was not yet made compulsory, but the intention to do so was clearly approved. The Army was in urgent need of reform. The grossly inefficient conduct of the Crimean War contrasted with the mechanical perfection of the Prussian Army in its three lightning wars of unification. The purchase of commissions was abolished and promotion was henceforth to be based entirely on merit. Entrance into the Civil Service was still based on connections and contact with someone who knew someone who knew of a vacancy. The reform of the Indian Civil Service in the 1850s introduced entrance by compulsory examination. Gladstone defended the principle that first appointments to the Civil Service are to be regulated by open competition. The reform was implemented by an Order-in-Council. The same principle was extended to university appointments. The religious tests which barred non-Anglicans were abolished. The formation of trade unions was put on a legal basis and they were allowed to register and to organize strikes. Under pressure, Gladstone allowed an amending act, which effectively illegalised picketing. For elections, he ended open voting and replaced it with the secret ballot. Polling booths were to be set up in each constituency. The Corrupt & Illegal Practices Act, the Third Reform Act and a Redistribution Act were passed during his second administration. In a speech in Manchester in 1872, Benjamin Disraeli affirmed that the England was "a great country, an imperial country" and the second great object of the Tory party was "to uphold the Empire of England". Therefore "no minister in this country will do his duty who neglects any opportunity of reconstructing as much as possible of our Colonial Empire". Such an imperial policy required a vigorous and interventionist foreign policy, which Disraeli pursued in government between 1874 and 1880. A cardinal responsibility of British governments was to defend the frontiers of British rule in India with land and sea routes from her, especially after the acquisition of the Suez Canal. Disraeli's Royal Titles Act made Victoria the 'Empress of India' in 1877, with three quarters of her subjects living in the Indian sub-continent. She had made Disraeli the Earl of Beaconsfield. Punch published a cartoon of them graciously exchanging crowns. Disraeli followed Palmerstons policy in relation to the Eastern Question. Palmerston and Disraeli sought to prop up the Turkish Empire, which they saw in great danger of impending collapse. This would enable Russian influence to grow into the Mediterranean, the Balkans and the Middle East, thus endangering the security of India. Gladstone believed that Britain should not intervene. He was appalled by Disraelis policy of supporting Turkey and disregarding the atrocities against her subject peoples. "There is not a cannibal in the South Sea Islands, whose indignation would not arise and overboil at the recital of that which has been
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done. "Let the Turks now carry away their abuses in the only possible manner, namely by carrying off themselves. Gladstone rejected a narrow restless, blustering and self-asserting foreign policy appealing to self-love and the pride of community, which turned national interest into a new and baseless idolatry. This assault on Beaconsfieldism formed the central plank of his famous campaigns in 1879. Gladstone was the first party leader to take his case personally to the people. He undertook a heavy schedule of speeches, public engagements and railway journeys; especially for a man in his seventieth year. Gladstone was not an absolute non-interventionist but he was a reluctant one. Gladstone saw the need for action where British interests were directly concerned or threatened, especially where inaction would mean enlarging Britains commitments. He regarded Disraelis expansionism as a costly folly and an unnecessary drain on the Governments finances. In 1878, his article on Englands mission was published in The Nineteenth Century. Gladstone upheld that it was already clearly proven that the cares and calls of the British Empire are already beyond the strength of those who govern and have governed it. He argued that the British had undertaken far more in governmental responsibilities than had ever been attempted previously in human history. Two years later Disraeli left Gladstone a legacy of entanglements, trouble and wars in Egypt, Sudan, South Africa and Afghanistan. This seriously impaired the work of his second administration and ultimately led to its downfall. For Gladstone, it was essential to maintain good government at home and to avoid needless and entangling engagements. He believed that that Christians should aim to preserve to the nations of the worldthe blessings of peace. These were three of his six right principles of foreign policy. He failed in his second ministry to uphold another- the sound principle to keep the Powers of Europe in union together. His fifth principle was to acknowledge the equal rights of all nations And the sixth is that the foreign policy of England should always be inspired by a love of freedom. Gladstone made many visits to Italy, a country which he loved and continued to be fascinated by. On his way back from the Ionian Islands in 1850, he was shocked by what he found in Naples, still ruled by a Spanish Bourbon king. Ferdinand II had cut back the concessions forced on him in the revolution two years earlier. Gladstone described the way the king treated his subject peoples as the negation of God erected into a system of Government. His observations in Italy affected his views on Ireland, whose people were subjects of Queen Victoria. He made it his mission is to pacify Ireland. He came to uphold the rights of small nations and subject peoples to justice and in some cases self-determination. His commitment to the pursuit of a fair and just solution to the Irish Question led him ultimately to accept the principle of Home Rule for Ireland and to sacrifice his political career and party for that cause. The Act of Union of 1800 united the Anglican Church of England and Wales with that of Ireland into one established church; funded by the State and exercising a privileged position. The basic religious grievance of the Roman Catholic majority was that they were required by law to pay tithes, a tenth of their income and the value of their produce, to the Anglican Church. This was ended by Gladstone's act to disestablish and disendow the Church of Ireland in 1869. Gladstone's First Land Act of 1870 established that no tenant could be evicted if rent was paid on time and that, at the end of the lease, he was to be compensated for improvements. The House of Lords severely mauled the Bill and rendered it largely ineffectual. The widespread violence that followed necessitated a Coercion Act. Disraeli neatly summed up the Irish Question in 1844. "A dense population inhabit an island where there is an established church which is not their church, and a territorial aristocracy, the richest of whom live in a distant capital. Thus they have a starving population, an alien church, and in addition the weakest executive in the world. the Irish could not have a revolution and why? Because Ireland is connected with another and more powerful country. Then what is the consequence? If the connection with England prevented a revolution and a revolution was the only remedy, England logically is in the odious position of being the
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cause of all the misery of Ireland. What then is the duty of an English minister? To effect by his policy all those changes which a revolution would effect by force." Unfortunately, as Prime Minister from 1874 till 1880, he ignored the growing tension caused by unresolved problems in Ireland, leaving it to Gladstone to continue to find the practical solutions to his theoretical summation. The situation had become much graver and the need for those practical solutions much more acute. Agricultural depression led to over 100,000 evictions in seven years, an escalation of agricultural crime and violent outrages, such as arson and the maiming of landlords animals. Charles Stewart Parnell had replaced the moderate Isaac Butt as the leader of the Home Rule party. He had also become President of the newly formed Land League. Parnells attitude to violence was somewhat ambiguous. Gladstone's Second Land Act of 1881 met the basic demands for land reform but by then the Home Rule movement had gained considerable momentum and it was quite simply too little, too late. Gladstone had already conceded the possibility for some form of devolution but Parnell demanded nothing less than the right for Irishmen of making their own laws upon Irish soil. As Peels Colonial Secretary, Gladstone had become convinced of eventual self-government as the destinies of the colonies. In his secret diary entry for 19th September 1885, Gladstone confided: "I have long suspected the Union of 1800. There was a case for doing something but this was like Pitt's Revolutionary war, a gigantic mistake". Gladstone's third and fourth terms as prime minister were cut short by the failure of his Home Rule bills of 1886 and 1893, which aimed to provide Ireland with a qualified form of self-government. In introducing his first Home Rule Bill, Gladstone had no intention of impairing the supreme authority of the Imperial Parliament at Westminster. Nevertheless, when it came to laws that were the concern solely of the Irish, then "they should be passed by proper persons they should proceed from a congenial and native source, and besides being good laws should be their own laws". Gladstone's conversion to Home Rule split the Liberal Party and the bill was defeated in the House of Commons. The issue polarised the 'Irish Question' and set the Conservative Party firmly on the side of upholding the Unionist cause. Whigs and Liberal Unionists now supported Lord Salisbury's Conservatives as Unionists and for most of the next two decades put the Liberals in opposition. Herbert Henry Asquith, who as Prime Minister was to become embroiled in the Ulster Crisis over his own Home Rule Bill, reflected in old age on the impact of Gladstones resolution to introduce Home Rule. It is not an exaggeration to say that it changed the whole course of British politics during the lifetime of a generation. In 1892, the Liberals came back on a wide-ranging and radical manifesto but Gladstone was determined that Home Rule should be the top priority. His second Home Rule Bill passed through the Commons only to be rejected by the Lords by an overwhelming majority on 1st.September 1893. That drove Gladstone to recommend the reform of the House of Lords. Throughout the nineteenth century, the Lords had never rejected a Tory or Conservative measure but had frequently rejected or amended Whig or Liberal ones. A final row erupted in Cabinet over the naval estimates. Gladstone went to Biarritz for a month and on his return called a meeting of the Cabinet on 1st. March 1894. He told them of his intention to resign. He was already two months into his eighty-fifth year and his eyesight was deteriorating from cataracts. He retired at last to Hawarden and edited a new edition of Bishop Butlers Analogy and Sermons; providing a companion volume of Studies subsidiary to the works of that philosopher of religion of the eighteenth century, who had been one of his own major mentors. He had time now to devote to assembling some autobiographica, to enjoy family life, surrounded by his grandchildren, and to take holidays abroad with his wife. William had written his private diary daily for seventy years, He deliberately brought it to a conclusion on 29th.December, 1896 his eighty-seventh birthday. My long and tangled life this day concludes its 87th year. My Father died four days short of that term. The blessings of family life continue to be poured out upon my unworthy head. Still old age is appointed for the gradual loosening or successive snapping of the threads. In March 1898, cancer of the palate was diagnosed while he was in Bournemouth. Gladstone signalled his intention to die at his beloved Hawarden. He suffered a protracted
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and painful period awaiting his release. The Bishop of St. Andrews administered Communion to him for the last time, on Friday in Passion Week, 1898. Gladstone had been ordered to stay in bed. Out of his bed he came. Alone he knelt in the presence of his God till the absolution had been spoken, and the sacred elements received. Gladstone died calmly on Ascension Day 1898. News of his death brought a flood of tributes from friend and foe alike. The House of Commons was adjourned, as was the Oxford Union. He was awarded a state funeral, which, outside of the royal family, was on a par only with that of Wellington and Churchill. Quarter of a million people passed by his body as he lay in state at Westminster Abbey. The Conservative Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, had risen in the House of Lords to pay his tribute to his last great political opponent. In looking back on Gladstones long career of public service, Salisbury identified both the reason for the outpouring of grief and tributes and also the kernel of his greatness. What is the cause of this unanimous feeling? It was on account of considerations more common to the masses of human beings, to the general working of the human mind, than any controversial questions of the policy that men recognised in him a man guided in all the steps he took, in all the efforts that he made, by a high moral ideal. What he sought were the attainments of great ideals and they could have issued from nothing but the greatest and the purest moral aspirations; and he is honoured by his countrymen, because through so many years, across so many vicissitudes and conflicts, they recognised this one characteristic of his action, which has never ceased to be felt. He will leave behind him the memory of a great Christian statesman. Set up necessarily on high- the sight of his character, his motives, and his intentions would strike all the world. They will have left a deep and most salutary influence on the political thought and the social thought of the generation in which he lived, and he will be long remembered not so much for the causes in which he was engaged or the political projects which he favoured, but as an example, to which history hardly furnishes a parallel, of a great Christian man.