Those who discussed politics with him were scarcely more struck by the range of his vision and his power of correlating principles and details than by his unwillingness to commit himself on matters whose decision he could postpone.Reticence and caution were sometimes carried too far, not merely because they exposed him to misconstruction, but because they withheld from his party the guidance it needed.This was true in all the three instances just mentioned; and in the last of them his reticence probably contributed to the separation from him of some of his former colleagues.Nor did he always rightly divine the popular mind.
Absorbed in his own financial views, he omitted to note the change that had been in progress between 1862 and 1874, and thus his proposal in the latter year to extinguish the income tax fell completely flat.He often failed to perceive how much the credit of his party was suffering from the belief, quite groundless so far as he personally was concerned, that his government was indifferent to what are called Imperial interests, the interests of England outside England.But he always thought for himself, and never stooped to flatter the prejudices or inflame the passions of any class in the community.
Though the power of reading the signs of the times and moving the mind of the nation as a whole may be now more essential to an English statesman than the skill which manages a legislature or holds together a cabinet, that skill counts for much, and must continue to do so while the House of Commons remains the supreme governing authority of the country.A man can hardly reach high place, and certainly cannot retain high place, without possessing this kind of art.Mr.Gladstone was at one time thought to want it.
In 1864, when Lord Palmerston's end was evidently near and Mr.
Gladstone had shown himself the most brilliant and capable man among the Liberal ministers in the House of Common's, people speculated about the succession to the headship of the party; and the wiseacres of the day were never tired of repeating that Mr.Gladstone could not possibly lead the House of Commons.He wanted tact (they said), he was too excitable, too impulsive, too much absorbed in his own ideas, too unversed in the arts by which individuals are conciliated.But when, after twenty-five years of his unquestioned reign, the time for his own departure drew nigh, men asked how the Liberal party in the House of Commons would ever hold together after it had lost a leader of such consummate capacity.Seldom has a prediction been more utterly falsified than that of the Whig critics of 1864.They had grown so accustomed to Palmerston's way of handling the House as to forget that a man might succeed by quite different methods.And they forgot also that a man may have many defects and yet in spite of them be incomparably the fittest for a great place.
Mr.Gladstone had the defects that were ascribed to him.His impulsiveness sometimes betrayed him into declarations which a cooler man would have abstained from.The second reading of the Irish Home-Rule Bill of 1886 would probably have been carried had he not been goaded by his opponents into words which seemed to recall or modify the concessions he had announced at a meeting of the Liberal party held just before.More than once precious time was wasted in useless debates because his antagonists, knowing his excitable temper, brought on discussions with the sole object of annoying him and drawing from him some hasty deliverance.Nor was he an adept, like Disraeli and Sir John A.Macdonald, in the management of individuals.He had a contempt for the meaner side of human nature which made him refuse to play upon it.He had comparatively little sympathy with many of the pursuits which attract ordinary men; and he was too constantly engrossed by the subjects of enterprises which specially appealed to him to have leisure for the lighter but often very important devices of political strategy.A trifling anecdote, which was told in London about twenty-five years ago, may illustrate this characteristic.
Mr.Delane, then editor of the "Times," had been invited to meet the prime minister at a moment when the support of the "Times" would have been specially valuable to the Liberal government.Instead of using the opportunity to set forth his policy and invite an opinion on it, Mr.Gladstone talked the whole time of dinner upon the question of the exhaustion of the English coal-beds, to the surprise of the company and the unconcealed annoyance of the powerful guest.
