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After a continental tour he entered the house of commons in 1832, under the auspices of the late duke of Newcastle, as member for Newark. The more notable of Mr. Gladstone's earliest appearances in the house of commons were made in connection with the slavery question, in discussing which, and without defending slavery itself, he repudiated some of the charges of cruelty brought against the West India planters. To those years also belongs an elaborate parliamentary protest against the admission of dissenters to the universities, which excited much attention, and in the course of which he made use of the remarkable expression—"The state should have a conscience;" the key-note of his earlier disquisitions in politico-ecclesiastical philosophy. He had from the first attached himself to the conservative party; and, on the accession of Sir Robert Peel to power in 1834, he was appointed a lord of the treasury, a post which he exchanged a few weeks afterwards for the under-secretaryship of the colonies. During his short tenure of office in 1834-35 Mr. Gladstone occupied himself mainly with the promotion of practical measures of detail, such as the regulation of passenger-traffic to the colonies. On the downfall of the first Peel administration he accompanied his chief into opposition, and became, as a parliamentary debater, a more and more prominent member of his party; taking a very active share in the discussions on the measures, the failure of which led to the resignation of Lord Melbourne's ministry in 1841. Meanwhile, he had published in 1840 the "State in its Relations to the Church," which went rapidly through several editions, and was followed in 1841 by "Church Principles traced to their Results;" both of them works accepted as emphatic expositions of high-church doctrines in the domain of politics. The former work was made the subject of an elaborate essay in the Edinburgh Review by Macaulay, in the course of which he said—"We certainly cannot wish that Mr. Gladstone's doctrines may become fashionable with public men. But we heartily wish that his laudable desire to penetrate beneath the surface of questions, and to arrive by long and intense meditation at the knowledge of great general laws, were much more fashionable than we at all expect it to become." On the formation of Sir Robert Peel's second ministry in 1841, Mr. Gladstone was appointed vice-president, and in the May of 1843 president, of the board of trade, combining in each case with that office the mastership of the mint. It devolved upon him in this position to explain and defend the commercial reforms introduced by Sir Robert Peel, and he took a principal part in the advocacy of the tariff of 1842, publishing, we may add, in 1845 some "Remarks on Recent Commercial Legislation," in which were exhibited in detail the beneficial results in practice of the changes which he had advocated in theory. Declining to be responsible for proposing to parliament an extension of the Maynooth grant, he resigned office in the May of 1845, but, in the December of the same year, re-entered the Peel ministry on the resignation of Lord Derby, as secretary of state for the colonies. He was one of the foremost adherents among Sir Robert Peel's colleagues to the policy of repealing the corn-laws, and sacrificed to it, not only office, but his seat for Newark. His short tenure of the colonial secretaryship was marked by various useful practical reforms in connection with that department. At the general election of 1847, Mr. Gladstone was elected one of the members for his alma mater, the university of Oxford; but for a year or two his parliamentary activity was limited. He distinguished himself, however, by the delivery of an elaborate speech adverse to the Pacifico-claims in the discussion which immediately preceded the death of Sir Robert Peel (2nd July, 1850). To the controversy on the Gorham case, it may be mentioned, he contributed a pamphlet, "Remarks on the Royal Supremacy," in the form of a letter to the bishop of London, and criticized adversely that famous decision. On the death of Sir Robert Peel, Mr. Gladstone visited Italy, spending the winter of 1850-51 in Naples. It was then and there that he accumulated, from personal observation, the materials for the celebrated "Two Letters to the Earl of Aberdeen on the State Prosecutions of the Neapolitan Government," which produced an immense sensation, and the enormous circulation of which was officially increased by Lord Palmerston, then at the foreign office, who sent a copy of the work to each of the ministers representing England abroad, to be communicated to the courts at which they were accredited. Returning to England immediately after the ministerial crisis of February, 1851, he declined Lord Derby's proffers of office; and at the general election which followed was again returned for the university of Oxford. Giving a qualified support to the new ministry through the greater part of its brief career, he mainly contributed to its overthrow by the speech which he delivered against Mr. Disraeli's budget in the November of 1852. In the new coalition ministry of Lord Aberdeen Mr. Gladstone became chancellor of the exchequer, in which post he carried through the house of commons the successions duties' act, perhaps the chief fiscal memorial of that portion of his ministerial career. The Russian war supervened; and the house of commons having approved of Mr. Roebuck's motion for an inquiry into the causes of the disastrous state of things before Sebastopol, the Aberdeen ministry resigned en masse in the February of 1855. On the reconstruction of the ministry under Lord Palmerston, Mr. Gladstone returned to his former post; but with his colleagues of the Peelite section of the cabinet, resigned office a few weeks afterwards, when the premier resolved to accept the previous decision of the house of commons for the appointment of a select committee of inquiry. During the remainder of Lord Palmerston's first ministry Mr. Gladstone was in quasi-opposition, and participated in the hostile vote on the Canton question which led to a dissolution of parliament, and in that on the conspiracy bill which led to Lord Derby's second premiership. During his absence from office, Mr. Gladstone had contributed to the Oxford Essays and to the Quarterly Review papers on Homer; and in 1858 appeared his "Homer and the Homeric Age," in three volumes, his largest and most elaborate contribution to literature. In the November of the same year he went, at the instance of Lord Derby's ministry, as high commissioner extraordinary to the Ionian Islands, a region of Homeric associations, and which was then menaced by an insurrection against the protectorate of Great Britain. On the formation of Lord Palmerston's second ministry, Mr. Gladstone once more accepted the chancellorship of the exchequer, and signalized his tenure of it by a budget embodying the new commercial treaty with France, which made 1860 a memorable year in the industrial and fiscal history of Britain. Proposals for a considerable extension of the suffrage and other progressive measures were suspended, by a truce between the two great parties in the commons, during the concluding years of Lord Palmerston's life. In 1864 Mr. Gladstone gave expression to views respecting the representation of the people that were then thought excessively liberal, which yet were adopted three years later, as a necessity, by the conservative party. His departure in ecclesiastical matters from the political tenets of his early career, when he had argued that "the state must have a conscience," and that this conscience must be represented by a church, was made manifest in his views on the disestablishment of the Irish church. The immediate consequences of his advocacy of this measure was the loss of his seat as member for the university of Oxford; but he was elected in the same year (1865) for South Lancashire, and after the decease of Lord Palmerston, in October, became the leader of the house of commons. During the second administration of Lord Russell, in 1865-66, Mr. Gladstone retained the chancellorship of the exchequer, and ably supported the proposed moderate reform bill of 1866, which was accepted as an instalment by Mr. Bright and his followers. It was, however, defeated by an alliance of the conservatives with a temporary party consisting of dissentient liberal members, who were described at the time as "Adullamites," and consequently Mr. Gladstone and his friends made room for a conservative ministry. Their leader in the commons, who had strenuously opposed the moderate measure of 1866, soon found, on his accession to office, that the popular demand for an extension of the suffrage must be satisfied by any administration intent on self-preservation. He had, he said, educated the party submitted to his guidance to such a degree, that they could now contemplate calmly a measure that had but lately excited their fears and provoked their opposition. He now explained that nothing less than a radical reform bill, making that of 1866 look poor by comparison, would suffice to keep the whig party out of office; and with characteristic boldness and facility of reasoning he convinced many of his party—including the premier. Lord Derby—that this was their best policy for the time. Lord Derby, with all the impetuosity of his character, explained the process of his own rapid conversion, and urged on the house of lords the acceptance of the measure; though