William Ewart Gladstone

Viscount Bryce James Bryce

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pubOne.info present you this new edition. No man has lived in our times of whom it is so hard to speak in a concise and summary fashion as Mr. Gladstone. For forty years he was so closely associated with the public affairs of his country that the record of his parliamentary life comes near to being an outline of English politics. His activity spread itself out over many fields. He was the author of several learned and thoughtful books, and of a multitude of articles upon all sorts of subjects. He showed himself as eagerly interested in matters of classical scholarship and Christian doctrine and ecclesiastical history as in questions of national finance and foreign policy. No account of him could be complete without reviewing his actions and estimating the results of his work in all these directions. But the difficulty of describing and judging him goes deeper. His was a singularly complex nature, a character hard to unravel. His individuality was extremely strong; all that he said or did bore its impress. Yet it was an individuality so far from being self-consistent as sometimes to seem a bundle of opposite qualities capriciously united in a single person

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• Histoire
• USA
• History of the Americas
• États-Unis

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• Publié par: Pub One Info
• Date de parution: 06 novembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9782819948339
• Langue: English

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CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION
No man has lived in our times of whom it is so hardto speak in a concise and summary fashion as Mr. Gladstone. Forforty years he was so closely associated with the public affairs ofhis country that the record of his parliamentary life comes near tobeing an outline of English politics. His activity spread itselfout over many fields. He was the author of several learned andthoughtful books, and of a multitude of articles upon all sorts ofsubjects. He showed himself as eagerly interested in matters ofclassical scholarship and Christian doctrine and ecclesiasticalhistory as in questions of national finance and foreign policy. Noaccount of him could be complete without reviewing his actions andestimating the results of his work in all these directions. But thedifficulty of describing and judging him goes deeper. His was asingularly complex nature, a character hard to unravel. Hisindividuality was extremely strong; all that he said or did boreits impress. Yet it was an individuality so far from beingself-consistent as sometimes to seem a bundle of opposite qualitiescapriciously united in a single person. He might with equal truthbe called, and he has been in fact called, a conservative and arevolutionary. He was dangerously impulsive, and had frequently tosuffer from his impulsiveness; yet he was also not merely wary andcautious, but so astute as to have been accused of craft anddissimulation. So great was his respect for authority and traditionthat he clung to views regarding the unity of Homer and thehistorical claims of Christian sacerdotalism which the majority ofcompetent specialists have now rejected. So bold was he inpractical matters that he transformed the British constitution,changed the course of English policy in the Orient, destroyed anestablished church in one part of the United Kingdom, and committedhimself to the destruction of two established churches in two otherparts. He came near to being a Roman Catholic in his religiousopinions, yet was for twenty years the darling leader of theEnglish Protestant Nonconformists and the Scotch Presbyterians. Noone who knew him intimately doubted his conscientious sincerity andearnestness, yet four fifths of the English upper classes were inhis later years wont to regard him as a self-interested schemer whowould sacrifice his country to his lust for power. Though he lovedgeneral principles, and often soared out of the sight of hisaudience when discussing them, he generally ended by deciding uponpoints of detail the question at issue. He was at different timesof his life the defender and the assailant of the sameinstitutions, yet he scarcely seemed inconsistent in doing oppositethings, because his method and his arguments preserved the sametype and color throughout. Any one who had at the beginning of hiscareer discerned in him the capacity for such strange diversitiesand contradictions would probably have predicted that they mustwreck it by making his purposes weak and his course erratic. Such aprediction would have proved true of any one with less firmness ofwill and less intensity of temper. It was the persistent heat andvehemence of his character, the sustained passion which he threwinto the pursuit of the object on which he was for the moment bent,that fused these dissimilar qualities and made them appear tocontribute to and to increase the total force which he exerted.
CHAPTER II: EARLY INFLUENCES
The circumstances of Mr. Gladstone's politicalcareer help to explain, or, at any rate, will furnish occasion forthe attempt to explain, this complexity and variety of character.But before we come to his manhood it is convenient to advert tothree conditions whose influence on him has been profound: thefirst his Scottish blood, the second his Oxford education, thethird his apprenticeship to public life under Sir Robert Peel.
Theories of character based on race differences aredangerous, because they are so easy to form and so hard to test.Still, no one denies that there are qualities and tendenciesgenerally found in the minds of men of certain stocks, just asthere are peculiarities in their faces or in their speech. Mr.Gladstone was born and brought up in Liverpool, and always retaineda touch of Lancashire accent. But, as he was fond of saying, everydrop of blood in his veins was Scotch. His father was a LowlandScot from the neighborhood of Biggar, in the Upper Ward ofLanarkshire, where the old yeoman's dwelling of Gledstanes— “thekite's rock”— may still be seen. His mother was of Highlandextraction, by name Robertson, from Dingwall, in Ross-shire. Thushe was not only a Scot, but a Scot with a strong infusion of theCeltic element, the element whence the Scotch derive most of whatdistinguishes them from the English. The Scot is more excitable,more easily brought to a glow of passion, more apt to be eagerlyabsorbed in one thing at a time. He is also more fond of abstractintellectual effort. It is not merely that the taste formetaphysical theology is commoner in Scotland than in England, butthat the Scotch have a stronger relish for general principles. Theylike to set out by ascertaining and defining such principles, andthen to pursue a series of logical deductions from them. They are,therefore, somewhat bolder reasoners than the English, less contentto remain in the region of concrete facts, more eager to hasten onto the process of working out a body of speculative doctrines. TheEnglishman is apt to plume himself on being right in spite oflogic; the Scotchman delights to think that it is through logic hehas reached his conclusions, and that he can by logic defend them.These are qualities which Mr. Gladstone drew from his Scottishblood. He had a keen enjoyment of the processes of dialectic. Heloved to get hold of an abstract principle and to derive all sortsof conclusions from it. He was wont to begin the discussion of aquestion by laying down two or three sweeping propositions coveringthe subject as a whole, and would then proceed to draw from theseothers which he could apply to the particular matter in hand. Hiswell-stored memory and boundless ingenuity made this finding ofsuch general propositions so easy a task that a method in itselfagreeable sometimes appeared to be carried to excess. He frequentlyarrived at conclusions which the judgment of the sober auditor didnot approve, because, although they seemed to have beenlegitimately deduced from the general principles just enunciated,they were somehow at variance with the plain teaching of the facts.At such moments one felt that the man who was charming butperplexing Englishmen by his subtlety and ingenuity was not himselfan Englishman in mental quality, but had the love for abstractionsand refinements and dialectical analysis which characterizes theScotch intellect. He had also a large measure of that warmth andvehemence, called in the sixteenth century the perfervidum ingeniumScotorum, which belong to the Scottish temperament, andparticularly to the Celtic Scot. He kindled quickly, and whenkindled, he shot forth a strong and brilliant flame. To any onewith less power of self-control such intensity of emotion as hefrequently showed would have been dangerous; nor did thisexcitability fail, even with him, to prompt words and acts which acooler judgment would have disapproved. But it gave thatspontaneity which was one of the charms of his nature; it producedthat impression of profound earnestness and of resistless forcewhich raised him out of the rank of ordinary statesmen. The tide ofemotion swelling fast and full seemed to turn the whole rushingstream of intellectual effort into whatever channel lay at themoment nearest.
With these Scottish qualities, Mr. Gladstone wasbrought up at school and college among Englishmen, and received atOxford, then lately awakened from a long torpor, a bias andtendency which never thereafter ceased to affect him. The so-called“Oxford Movement, ” which afterward obtained the name ofTractarianism and carried Dr. Newman, together with other lessfamous leaders, on to Rome, had not yet, in 1831, when Mr.Gladstone won his degree with double first- class honors, takenvisible shape, or become, so to speak, conscious of its ownpurposes. But its doctrinal views, its peculiar vein of religioussentiment, its respect for antiquity and tradition, its pronenessto casuistry, its taste for symbolism, were already potentinfluences working on the more susceptible of the younger minds. OnMr. Gladstone they told with full force. He became, and neverceased to be, not merely a High-churchman, but what may be calledan Anglo-Catholic, in his theology, deferential not only toecclesiastical tradition, but to the living voice of the visiblechurch, respecting the priesthood as the recipients (if dulyordained) of a special grace and peculiar powers, attaching greatimportance to the sacraments, feeling himself nearer to the Churchof Rome, despite what he deemed her corruptions, than to any of thenon-episcopal Protestant churches. Henceforth his interests in lifewere as much ecclesiastical as political. For a time he desired tobe ordained a clergyman. Had this wish been carried out, it canscarcely be doubted that he would eventually have become theleading figure in the Church of England and have sensibly affectedher recent history. The later stages in his career drew him awayfrom the main current of political opinion within that church. Hewho had been the strongest advocate of established churches came tobe the leading agent in the disestablishment of the ProtestantEpiscopal Church in Ireland, and a supporter of the policy ofdisestablishment in Scotland and in Wales. But the color whichthese Oxford years gave to his mind and thoughts was neverobliterated. They widened the range of his interests and deepenedhis moral zeal and religious earnestness. But at the same time theyconfirmed his natural bent toward over-subtle distinctions andfine- drawn reasonings, and they put him somewhat out o