GLADSTONE

I

MY LORDS, there would at first sight appear little left to be said after what has been so eloquently and feelingly put from both sides. of the House; but, as Mr. Gladstone's last successor in office, and as one who was associated with him in many of the most critical episodes of the last twenty years of his life, your lordships will perhaps bear with me for a moment while I say what little I can say on such a subject and on such an occasion. My lords, it has been said by the Prime Minister, and I think truly, that the time has not yet come to fix with any approach to accuracy the place that Mr. Gladstone will fill in history. We are too near him to do more. than note the vast space that he filled in the

world, the great influence that he exercised, his constant contact with all the great movements of his time. But the sense of proportion must necessarily be absent, and it must be left for a later time, and even perhaps for a later generation, accurately to appraise and appreciate that relation.

My lords, the same may also be said of his intellect and of his character. They are at any rate too vast a subject to be treated on such an occasion as this. But I may at least cite the words which I shall never forgetwhich were used by the noble marquis (Lord Salisbury) when Mr. Gladstone resigned the office of Prime Minister, that his was "the most brilliant intellect that had been applied to the service of the State since Parliamentary government began." That seems to me an adequate and a noble appreciation; but there is also this pitiful side, incident to all mortality, but which strikes one more strongly with regard to Mr. Gladstone than with regard to any one else, and it is this-that intellect, mighty by nature, was fashioned and prepared by the labour of every day and

almost every hour until the last day of health -fashioned to be so perfect a machine, only to be stopped for ever by a single touch of the Angel of Death.

There

My lords, there are two features of Mr. Gladstone's intellect which I cannot help noting on this occasion, for they were so signal and so salient, and distinguished him so much, so far as I know, from all other minds that I have come into contact with, that it would be wanting to this occasion if they were not noted. The first was his enormous power of concentration. never was a man, I feel, in this world, who at any given moment, on any given subject, could so devote every resource and power of his intellect, without the restriction of a single nerve within him, to the immediate purpose of that subject. And the second feature is one which is also rare, but which I think has never been united so much with the faculty of concentration, and it is this-the infinite variety and multiplicity of his interests. There was no man, I suspect, in the history of England-no man, at any rate, in recent cen

turies-who touched the intellectual life of the country at so many points and over so great a range of years. But that was in fact and reality not merely a part of his intellect, but of his character, for the first and most obvious feature of Mr. Gladstone's character was the universality and the humanity of his sympathy. I do not now mean, as we all know, that he sympathised with great causes and with oppressed nations and with what he believed to be the cause of liberty all over the world; but I do mean his sympathy with all classes of human beings, from the highest to the lowest. That, I believe, was one of the secrets of his almost unparalleled power over his fellow men.

May I give two instances of what I mean? The first time he visited Mid Lothian we were driving away from, I think, his first meeting, and we were followed by a shouting crowd as long as their strength would permit; but there was one man who held on much longer than any of them-who ran, I should think, for two miles, and evidently had some word he was anxious to say-and when he

dropped away we listened for what it might be, and it was this :-"I wished to thank you, Sir, for the speech you made to the workhouse people." I dare say not many of your lordships recollect that speech; for my purpose it does not particularly matter what its terms may have been. We should think it, however, an almost overwhelming task to speak to any workhouse audience and to administer words of consolation and sympathy to a mass who, after all, represent in the main exhaustion and failure and destitution. That is the lowest class. Let me take another instance-from the highest. I believe that the last note Mr. Gladstone wrote with his own hand was written to Lady Salisbury after a carriage accident, in which the noble marquis had been involved. It was highly characteristic of the man that, in the hour of his sore distress, when he could hardly put pen to paper, he should have written a note of sympathy to the wife of the most prominent, and not the least generous, of his political opponents. My lords, sympathy was one great feature of Mr. Gladstone's character.