Ex Libris 
 C. K. OGDEN 
 
 JAMES C.J.PENDEHEL BRODHURST 
 COUNT DE BOSCOBEL.
 
 I 
 
 '
 
 STATESMEN PAST AND FUTURE
 
 STATESMEN 
 
 PAST AND FUTTJEE 
 
 CASSELL AND COMPANY LIMITED 
 
 LONDON PARIS S? MELBOURNE 
 1394 
 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
 
 {Reprinted from the DAILY NEWS]
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 THE MARQUIS OP SALISBURY 7 
 
 MR. BALFOUR 17 
 
 MR. CHAMBERLAIN . . . . . .... 24 
 
 MR. SPEAKER . . . . . . . . * 31 
 
 THE DUKE OF ARGYLL .37 
 
 MR. MICHAEL DAVITT . . . . . . .44 
 
 MR. BRYCE . . .51 
 
 MR. CAMPBELL-BANNERMAN 56 
 
 MR. BURT .62 
 
 SIR JOHN RIGBY ......... 67 
 
 MR. STANSFELD 73 
 
 THE DUKE OF DEVONSHIRE ....... 78 
 
 MR. SEXTON .......... 85 
 
 SIR RICHARD TEMPLE . . . . . . . .91 
 
 THE EARL OF ROSEBERY 97 
 
 MR. GOSCHEN ' . . 104 
 
 THE MARQUIS OF RIPON . . .- . . . .112 
 MR. JAMES LOWTHER . . . . . . . .' 117 
 
 MR. JOHN MORLEY 123 
 
 EARL SPENCER ......... 130 
 
 LORD HERSCHELL ......... 136 
 
 SIR HENRY JAMES .... ... 141 
 
 LORD HALSBURY ......... 147 
 
 MR. HENRY FOWLER . . . . . . . .153 
 
 SIR GEORGE TREVELYAN . . . , . . .158 
 SIR CHARLES RUSSELL . . . . . . . .164 
 
 LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL . . . . . .169 
 
 MR. HENRY MATTHEWS. . . . . . . .176 
 
 SIR JOHN GORST ......... 183 
 
 MR. COURTNEY 189 
 
 MR. BURNS . 195 
 
 MR. CARSON ......... 201 
 
 MR. MELLOR 207 
 
 1C 89430
 
 Most of these Sketches were written during the last 
 year of Lord Salisbury's second Administration. 
 Ephemeral productions, they were intended for ephemeral 
 use. Their value, if they have any, lies in recording 
 the impression of the day. Some critical phrases have 
 been softened, and some removed. It is easy to 
 exaggerate the faults and underrate the merits of 
 political opponents.
 
 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY. 
 
 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY is the head of an ancient 
 and historic family, which before his own time had 
 produced no remarkable man since the days of Queen 
 Elizabeth. He is a conspicuous exception to the 
 two general rules that the British Peerage is modern 
 and that its hereditary representatives are undistin- 
 guished. Unfortunately for the believers in primo- 
 geniture, he was a younger son. He succeeded to the 
 Marquisate on the death of his father in 1868. It was 
 not till 1865 that the death of his brother made him by 
 courtesy Viscount Cranborne. But while Lord Eobert 
 Cecil entered the world with immense social and acci- 
 dental advantages over the vast majority of his fellow- 
 citizens, his bitterest enemy would not deny that his 
 talents and ability have proved more than equal to the 
 foremost place which he holds in the Government of the 
 British Empire. Opinions may differ as to the wisdom 
 of his administration and the consistency of his career. 
 Nobody doubts his capacity for business or his powers 
 of speech ; and these are the two most valuable qualities
 
 8 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 for anyone who hopes to distinguish himself in the 
 public life of this country. When, as is the case 
 with Lord Salisbury, he writes as well as he speaks, his 
 success may be considered assured. It will not be 
 hampered or delayed if he is also the inheritor of an 
 old title, the possessor of great wealth, and the owner 
 of the most splendid residence in a land where country 
 houses are proverbial for their splendour. 
 
 There is thus nothing unusual in Lord Salisbury's 
 steady and uninterrupted advance to place and power. 
 That is all in the general order of things. Lord 
 Robert Cecil entered the House of Commons at twenty- 
 three, and it is worthy of note that while his eldest son 
 sits for a populous district of Lancashire, he himself 
 was returned for the pocket borough of Stamford, 
 extinguished with his own consent in 1885. At thirty- 
 six Lord Cranborne was a Secretary of State, having 
 entered the same office at the same age as Lord Ran- 
 dolph Churchill. A combination of power with oppor- 
 tunity is as much as human beings can expect. There 
 is another and a curious coincidence between the careers 
 of the older and the younger politician. Both resigned 
 their posts and left the Cabinet the year after they had 
 entered it. Lord Cranborne was driven out by Lord 
 Derby's leap in the dark, Lord Randolph by the 
 bloated estimates of the First Lord of the Admiralty 
 and the Secretary for War. But while Lord Cran- 
 borne's secession was followed in a few months bv the 
 
 / 
 
 resignation of the Government from which he had 
 seceded, Lord Randolph has watched from outside for
 
 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY. 9 
 
 more than five years the well-paid blundering of Lord 
 G-eorge Hamilton and Lord Cross. 
 
 The really remarkable feature in Lord Salisbury's 
 progress from political journalism to the First Ministry 
 of the Crown is the contrast between his principles and 
 his practice. This is no accusation of dishonesty. His 
 principles are spontaneous. His practice has been 
 forced upon him by the necessities of his position. An 
 aristocrat by conviction rather than by temper, he has 
 been compelled to work through democratic methods, 
 and he is clever enough to succeed. But a very little 
 observation will show how little he likes the job. It 
 is probable that the act of his life which cost him the 
 least previous hesitation or subsequent remorse was his 
 retirement from the Government of 1867. He thought 
 the suffrage quite low enough then, if not too low. He 
 deluged Mr. Disraeli with scornful invective for pander- 
 ing to the mob. Eighteen years afterwards he accepted 
 household suffrage in counties, and even assisted in 
 arranging the new constituencies. The contradiction is 
 more apparent than real. Mr. Goschen thought that 
 the rural districts were more than twenty years behind 
 the urban, and that their partial disfranchisement should 
 be continued. Lord Salisbury held that both were alike 
 unfit, but as the vote had been given to the one, it 
 might be tossed at the head of the other. Democracy 
 is altogether so hateful to him that he cannot dis- 
 criminate between its degrees. The more ignorant 
 the elector, the more likely he is to be guided by 
 those who know better than himself.
 
 10 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 To say that Lord Salisbury has never courted the 
 favour of the masses would be untrue. In 1885 he 
 angled assiduously for the Irish vote. From 1886 to 
 the present time he has surrendered rather than sup- 
 ported the reform of local government, the payment of 
 fees in elementary schools, the reduction of judicial 
 rents in Ireland, and other points where he had held 
 out as long as he could. But while Lord Salisbury will 
 abandon his principles, he cannot change his nature. 
 He has no sympathy with the people. He does not 
 care to win the cheers of a popular audience. He dis- 
 likes crowds. His platform speeches, though models 
 of polished irony and effective declamation, excite no 
 enthusiasm. They are better to read than to hear, and 
 that is fatal to them as oratory. As essays, their merit 
 is of the very highest kind, and considering that they 
 are delivered without notes, their finish is wonderful. 
 They are probably committed to memory beforehand. 
 Lord Salisbury's voice, though clear and resonant, is 
 monotonous and unmusical. With the art of gesticu- 
 lation he is wholly unacquainted. His sense of humour 
 is exquisitely keen. In society, where he is too rarely 
 to be found, his unassuming courtesy, his ready wit, his 
 genial, albeit somewhat cynical, persiflage make him the 
 most delightful company. But he is exclusive in his 
 tastes. Of political differences he takes no count. The 
 rank and file of his own party do not inspire him with 
 enthusiasm. 
 
 If Lord Salisbury does not shine at a public meeting, 
 he reigns supreme in the House of Lords. The Lords
 
 TEE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY. 11 
 
 do not demand enthusiasm ; they like to be amused. 
 Lord Salisbury is a consummately dexterous debater, 
 and an incalculable loss to his party in the House of 
 Commons. In the Lords he is more than a match for 
 any of his adversaries, with the possible exception of 
 Lord Eosebery. But his special delight is turning 
 foolish Peers into ridicule. Towards stupidity he is 
 absolutely merciless, even when it should elicit compas- 
 sion rather than contempt. There seems to be in Lord 
 Salisbury at least, when he is on his legs a curious 
 want of moral taste. To take a single instance : not a 
 hundred years ago, the most laughter-provoking article 
 happened for the moment to be a fire-escape. Any 
 allusion to such a contrivance in public was sure to be 
 received with boisterous hilarity, and music-halls re- 
 sounded with the word. It might have been thought 
 that if there was a man who would eschew the reference, 
 and a place where the joke would not be made, the man 
 was the Prime Minister, and the place was the House 
 of Lords. But not a bit of it. Out it came on the first 
 night of the Session, from the lips of Lord Salisbury 
 himself. The Peers laughed, of course. But there 
 must have been some who felt that the undignified, 
 almost indecent, jibe was not redeemed by the origin- 
 ality of the treatment or the novelty of the theme. A 
 more favourable instance of Lord Salisbury's cynical wit 
 was afforded by a tiresome nobleman, who proposed, in 
 a long and incoherent speech, that Peers desiring to 
 stand for the House of Commons should be excused 
 from attending the House of Lords. Lord Salisbury
 
 12 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 gently insinuated, without much circumlocution, that 
 while they would be only too glad to let his " noble 
 friend " out of one House, there was not the slightest 
 chance of his getting into the other. This was at 
 least much better than the dull and commonplace 
 jest about the pettifogging attorneys, on which Mr. 
 Traill has expended so much misplaced ingenuity. 
 
 It is as Foreign Secretary that Lord Salisbury will 
 be chiefly remembered ; but as Foreign Secretary he 
 cannot yet be judged. Silence and secrecy are his 
 watchwords. His object is to keep foreign affairs 
 within a narrow circle of professional diplomatists, and 
 especially to keep them out of the House of Commons. 
 As Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury hardly counts. For 
 the first time since the Administration of Sir Robert 
 Walpole inaugurated the modern system of Premiers 
 and Cabinets, the control of foreign affairs was in 1885 
 united with the control of the Government. The union 
 has, with brief intermissions, continued ever since. It 
 is a singular one. It combines the most onerous and 
 important of all offices with the superintendence of that 
 and every other. One of two results was inevitable. 
 If there was a Prime Minister, there would be no 
 Foreign Secretary ; if there was a Foreign Secretary, 
 there would be no Prime Minister. Lord Salisbury has 
 buried himself in the Foreign Office, and left his 
 colleagues to their own devices. Nobody doubts that 
 his personal administration has been in some respects 
 successful. The Triple Alliance and the Franco-Russian 
 understanding are a poor substitute for the Concert of
 
 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY. 13 
 
 Europe. But Lord Salisbury has worked exceedingly 
 hard. He has made himself a master of his business, 
 and his dispatches are among the best ever produced. 
 When he first went to the Foreign Office, in 1878, he 
 was not supposed to know much about it, and his 
 French had the worst reputation. It was said to be 
 almost as bad as Lord Beaconsfield's, whereas Lord 
 Granville and Sir Charles Dilke spoke it like natives. 
 But there are more important qualities for a Foreign 
 Secretary than a good accent or a copious vocabulary. 
 One of these is prudence ; and Lord Salisbury's official 
 utterances have been remarkable for prudence. Rash 
 and rancorous as his tongue can be, he has almost 
 always, since 1885, kept a watch upon his lips in talking 
 of other nations. His chief faults have been two : he 
 has not trusted Parliament or the country ; he has 
 been timid and irresolute in dealing with Great Powers. 
 He has not Lord Beaconsfield's moral courage, as Prince 
 Bismarck discovered at the Congress of Berlin. Firm 
 and even menacing to Portugal, his subservience to 
 Germany is exaggerated, and sometimes painful. He 
 has not cultivated France as much as a British Minister 
 should. He probably yielded to the Queen in forbid- 
 ding Lord Lytton to attend the opening of the French 
 Exhibition ; but he ought to have held out. 
 
 Lord Salisbury's foreign policy will be finally 
 estimated when the secrets of all dispatch-boxes are 
 made known. His patronage the one function of the 
 Premiership he really exercises has been characteristic. 
 On no subject is he more cynical. He is credited with
 
 14 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 the saying that the clergy of the Church of England 
 might be exhaustively divided into those who were fit to 
 be bishops, and didn't want to be, and those who wanted 
 to be bishops, but were unfit to be. His practice has 
 been based on the assumption that one man is as good 
 as another, and therefore political convenience alone 
 need be consulted. It is said that a notorious judicial 
 appointment was forced upon the Chancellor, who almost 
 attained the Christian virtue of resignation in conse- 
 quence. One would like to know who actually sent Sir 
 Alexander Miller to India. Perhaps Lord Salisbury 
 feels, like Carteret, " What is it to me who is a Judge 
 or who is a Bishop ? It is my business to make Kings 
 and Emperors, and to maintain the peace of Europe." 
 
 Lord Salisbury has puzzled some of his critics by 
 a combination of theological orthodoxy with general 
 incredulity. But the blend is not so rare as it seems to 
 be thought. There are many men who, having early in 
 life taken one particular form of religious faith and 
 ecclesiastical discipline for granted, find their powers of 
 belief exhausted, and scoff at everything which is not 
 within the four corners of their creed. " When I speak 
 of religion," said the Rev. Mr. Thwack um, " I mean 
 the Christian religion ; and when I say the Christian 
 religion, I mean the Protestant religion; and by the 
 Protestant religion, I mean the religion of the Church 
 of England." Lord Salisbury, notwithstanding his per- 
 sonal amiability, has led, intellectually, an isolated life. 
 He prefers to work alone. He is not surrounded with 
 able assistants. He thinks for himself. His under
 
 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY. 15 
 
 secretaries have not been men of mark ; his private 
 secretaries are not likely to argue with him. His 
 Cabinet contained only two men of first-rate ability 
 besides himself. His mind is original, and his ideas 
 are his own. His will is not so strong as his under- 
 standing, or the bitter enemy of Mr. Disraeli would not 
 have become the obsequious follower of Lord Beacons- 
 field. But his intellectual independence, probably 
 strengthened by the scientific studies in which he 
 delights, has earned for him general and well-deserved 
 respect. 
 
 It is perhaps needless to add that Lord Salisbury's 
 personal character has been always irreproachable. 
 Moreover, he is incapable of bearing malice. His 
 vitriolic sarcasm is a literary product. It is primarily 
 intended not to hurt other people, but to amuse him- 
 self. The most serious blot on his career is his mis- 
 leading answer to Lord Grey about the Anglo -Russian 
 Agreement in 1878. That such a thing should still be 
 remembered with disapprobation is creditable to the 
 public life of Great Britain and to the straightforward 
 characters of British statesmen. Mr. Traill's defence 
 of it is overstrained and rickety. To have admitted the 
 authenticity of the Treaty stolen by a rascal, and pub- 
 lished by an evening paper, would not have been in- 
 jurious to the country. A refusal to answer would not 
 have been tantamount to an admission. Lord Salisburv 
 
 ii 
 
 deliberately misled the House of Lords and the country; 
 but he would not, in the ordinary sense of the word, 
 tell a falsehood. He spoke by the card, and yet
 
 16 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 equivocation undid him, so that his name was used as an 
 odious synonym. He thought he was right. He acted 
 on a theory, and he could cite great moralists on 
 his side. But the crisis did not justify evasion, if any 
 crisis ever can. It was one of those blunders which 
 are worse than crimes. 
 
 Mr. Sexton described Lord Salisbury as a bigot 
 by calculation. The phrase is not only felicitous, but 
 true. Lord Salisbury does not hate Roman Catholics 
 or Irish Eoman Catholics. But when people are 
 against him in politics, he " goes for them bald-headed." 
 He does not belong to the highest type of statesmen ; 
 but he is much further removed from the lowest. If 
 he has not much hold upon the masses, he interests 
 leisurely and literary folks. Although intensely 
 Conservative, his conservatism is of the utilitarian 
 type. He has singularly little respect either for the 
 stately traditions of the past or for the solemn 
 plausibilities of the world.
 
 MR. BALFOUR. 
 
 AFTER the uncle, the nephew. After the Tory Leader of 
 
 the House of Lords, the Tory Leader of the House of 
 
 Commons. This may seem like inverting the proper order, 
 
 and giving an implied sanction to the use of that 
 
 inaccurate and unauthoritative phrase, the Upper House. 
 
 But Lord Salisbury though people are apt to forget it 
 
 is Prime Minister as well as Foreign Secretary, and 
 
 thus entitled, politically as well as socially, to precedence. 
 
 Nevertheless, Sir William Harcourt was quite right in 
 
 congratulating Mr. Balfour upon having attained the 
 
 highest and most honourable post in the British Empire, 
 
 or indeed in the world. To lead the House of Commons 
 
 many men would gladly endure years of arduous labour 
 
 in subordinate situations. Mr. Balfour succeeded Mr. 
 
 Smith at the age of forty-three, and Lord Randolph led 
 
 at thirty-seven. Mr. Balfour, with his usual candour, 
 
 and more than his usual accuracy, has traced much of his 
 
 success in Ireland to good luck. He has been a fortunate 
 
 man. Inheriting large estates in early youth, closely 
 
 allied by birth and friendship with the acknowledged 
 
 chief of English Conservatism, he was provided with a 
 
 pocket borough when he was twenty-five, and entered 
 
 the Cabinet twelve years afterwards. When, in the 
 
 autumn of 1891, Mr. Smith died and Mr. Balfour 
 
 B
 
 18 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 stepped into his shoes, Mr. Courtney stigmatised as a 
 fool anyone who said that the new First Lord of the 
 Treasury owed his advancement to nepotism. That is 
 Mr. Courtney's way of signifying dissent. Accidental 
 advantages of family or station confer, not indeed 
 ability or knowledge, but the power and opportunity of 
 using them. A mute inglorious Milton is a much 
 more difficult conception to grasp, but there are mute 
 inglorious Balfours in abundance. 
 
 Lord Salisbury had in 1891 to choose between 
 Mr. Balfour and Mr. Goschen. It is unnecessary to 
 suggest that he was biassed in his choice by the ties of 
 kindred. The rank and file of the Conservative party 
 would not have Mr. Groschen at any price certainly not 
 at the price of his own Consols. He was not one of 
 them, and they did not like him, and the memory of the 
 Public House Endowment Bill was unpleasantly strong. 
 Mr. Balfour's qualifications were obvious and undeniable. 
 He had always been a Conservative at least, ostensibly 
 and by profession. He had gained as Chief Secretary 
 for Ireland a reputation which, spurious or genuine, was 
 accepted by Conservatives at large as the source of 
 their strength. He had shown skill and courage in 
 debate. His political opponents, or such of them as 
 came into personal contact with him, regarded him with 
 feelings very different from those which are supposed by 
 distant observers to animate Parliamentary antagonists. 
 Mr. Gladstone once said, with a good deal of exaggera- 
 tion, that a man of forty could no more be made into a 
 member of Parliament than a woman of forty could be
 
 MR. BALFOTTR. 19 
 
 made into a ballet-girl. There are numerous instances 
 to confute Mr. Gladstone's theory. But to enter the 
 House young is a distinct advantage, and this fact was 
 properly reckoned among Mr. Balfour's claims. 
 
 If Mr. Balfour owes much to his uncle, he owes more 
 to himself. It is well to have a quick apprehension, a 
 clear head, a full and orderly mind. It is, perhaps, 
 better to be liked ; and everybody likes Mr. Balfour. 
 Mr. Labouchere plaintively says he knows it's wrong, 
 but he can't help it. What is the particular secret of 
 Mr. Balfour's fascination it would not be easy to say. 
 He is not very witty. He is not very learned. He is 
 not very wise. If Mr. George Wyndham or Mr. Hayes 
 Fisher is taking down his conversation for the benefit 
 of posterity, posterity will not be much obliged to them. 
 He is not in the best sense of the word a great talker, 
 and his serious opinions if he has any are reserved for 
 public occasions. Perhaps it is his unaffected simplicity, 
 his entire freedom from ostentation and pretence, his 
 contempt for cant, and his hearty recognition of intel- 
 lectual capacity in other men which combine to make 
 him so popular and thoroughly agreeable. Something 
 must be added for natural politeness and a keenness of 
 mental sympathy, which is the most attractive of social 
 virtues, as obtuseness is the most tiresome of social 
 crimes. Mr. Balfour is not a man of heroic mould; 
 but nobody is better provided with. the small change 
 of life. 
 
 Mr. Balfour has been called a great debater ; but 
 that is by people who do not understand the House of 
 B 2
 
 20 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 Commons. He is not in the first class. Setting aside 
 Mr. Gladstone, who is unapproached and unapproach- 
 able, Mr. Goschen, Sir William Harcourt, Lord Eandolph 
 Churchill, Mr. Chamberlain, and Mr. Sexton are Mr. 
 Balfour's superiors. So long as Mr. Balfour was in 
 Opposition he made no mark at all. "While he was 
 Chief Secretary for Ireland he dealt with questions 
 which few Englishmen cared to understand, and his 
 deficiencies were only discovered by close observers of 
 political events. Now that he is Leader of a great 
 party in the House of Commons, they are patent 
 to all the world. His merits have long been con- 
 spicuous. He is, very keen-witted, very clever, very 
 well informed. The alertness of his mind is as 
 unusual as it is interesting. He is always for the 
 moment very much of his own opinion, and what he 
 says is transparently clear. That is a formidable list 
 of qualifications, and quite enough to account for Mr. 
 Balfour's career. He had, however, many adventitious 
 aids, the greatest of which was that the Irish members, 
 with the uniform exception of Mr. Parnell, and the 
 occasional exception of Mr. Healy, never knew how to 
 deal with him. Mr. Parnell's ascendency over Mr. 
 Balfour was remarkable. It was the strength of will 
 and purpose triumphing over mere keenness of intellect. 
 Mr. Parnell's fall was the most fortunate incident in 
 Mr. Balfour's life. The ordinary run of Irish National- 
 ists could not understand that Mr. Balfour was not 
 to be disturbed by abuse. He was not merely indif- 
 ferent to it; he positively throve on it. Part of his
 
 MB. BALFOUR. 21 
 
 stock-in-trade was to read out vituperative extracts from 
 United Ireland, and to suggest, adroitly enough, that 
 such language meant, as it would mean in England or 
 Scotland, a weak case. The real weapon with which to 
 fight him was ridicule. When Mr. Healy made fun of 
 him, he collapsed. 
 
 Besides his other advantages, Mr. Balfour has a good, 
 though not an imperturbable, temper, and a wholesome 
 abhorrence of humbug. His defects are now coming 
 out. He is an indolent man, and he has never paid the 
 House of Commons the compliment of preparing his 
 speeches. His great fault as a debater is the charac- 
 teristic sin of a bad advocate. He ignores the strongest 
 points on the other side. He makes a show of compre- 
 hensive reply, sneers at a few of his opponents' most 
 obvious slips or blunders, enunciates a general line of 
 policy which was not impugned, and sits down without 
 having touched the main ground of charge. Such, at 
 least, was his practice as Chief Secretary. His practice 
 as First Lord has hitherto been to make the sort of 
 speech which his adversaries would have made for him 
 if it had been left to them. Everybody who heard or 
 read the debates on Coercion must recollect the sort of 
 thing which used to happen. An Irish member would 
 call attention on the Irish Estimates to the conduct of 
 a resident magistrate in dispersing a political meeting, 
 or to the zeal of a policeman in bludgeoning a peaceful 
 citizen, and would ask the Chief Secretary whether he 
 approved of such proceedings. Mr. Balfour would 
 point out some discrepancies of date, place, and the
 
 22 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 number of persons concerned. Then, taking up a pile 
 of newspaper extracts, he would read to the House every 
 passage in which an Irish newspaper had prefixed to 
 his name a silly and vulgar epithet. Finally, in an 
 energetic peroration, loudly cheered from the benches 
 behind him, he would declare his fixed resolve to stand 
 by his subordinates on every emergency. But on the 
 base mechanic question, whether the dispersed assembly 
 was unlawful, or whether the men assaulted had done 
 anything wrong, he would throw no light at all. Poli- 
 tically, that may have been Mr. Balfour's wisest course. 
 But it was not debate ; it was evasion. 
 
 The House of Commons, which even in its col- 
 lective capacity is not infallible, has made two mistakes 
 about Mr. Balfour. First, it took him for a trifler ; 
 secondly, it took him for a man of genius. Until he 
 became Chief Secretary for Ireland, he was not, to use a 
 theatrical phrase, " in the bill." Since that epoch he 
 has never been out of it. Six years ago his suicide 
 would not have excited any morbid degree of sensation 
 in the public mind. The other day an evening paper 
 chronicled for the instruction and amusement of its 
 readers the thrilling fact that his boots were muddy. 
 It is characteristic of him that he does not boast of his 
 own achievements, leaving that operation with well- 
 founded confidence to others. Indeed, Mr. Balfour has 
 no love of rhetoric and no appreciation of oratory. He 
 is never eloquent, and he has no natural gift of con- 
 tinuous speech. He has not Lord Salisbury's literary 
 faculty and ingenious style. His bent is philosophical,
 
 MB. BALFOUK. 23 
 
 and in metaphysics he can hold his own with professors. 
 On the platform of a Church Congress he has proved, 
 amid clerical applause, the impossibility of being certain 
 that Christianity is not true. In a delightful address 
 at St. Andrews he criticised a rather pedantic discourse 
 by Mr. Frederic Harrison, and pleaded for general 
 licence in reading of books, thus proving himself, as 
 was wittily said at the time, a Coercionist in politics 
 and an Anarchist in literature. Mr. Balfour is a better 
 politician than his uncle. He now represents a great 
 popular constituency. He has no dread or dislike of 
 the masses. Though not devoid of intellectual arro- 
 gance, and by no means suffering fools gladly, he is 
 entirely free from aristocratic hauteur, as people have 
 agreed to call an unpleasant mixture of snobbishness 
 and shyness. William of Wykeham was not such a 
 simpleton as to suppose that manners, except in the 
 sense of character and conduct, make a man. But Mr. 
 Balfour's manners disarm his enemies and attract his 
 friends. They have influenced his critics, and caused 
 him to be taken for a much greater man than he is. 
 There is no originality in his ideas, and little wisdom in 
 his methods. If a thing can be logically defended, he 
 assumes that it may be prudently done. He is a Tory 
 because he disbelieves in progress, not because he believes 
 in tradition or Conservatism. His record would be 
 clearer, and his character would stand higher, if he had 
 not cut bad jokes about the sufferings of the Irish mem- 
 bers in prison. But he has no vices. He is not even 
 an early riser or a Sabbatarian.
 
 MR. CHAMBERLAIN. 
 
 IF in the year 1879, when Mr. Chamberlain described 
 Lord Hartington as the late leader of the Liberal party, 
 and was rebuked by Mr. Fawcett for his rudeness, any- 
 one had prophesied that in the year 1892 Mr. Chamber- 
 lain would be playing second fiddle to the Duke of 
 Devonshire, and dancing to the genteelest of Tory tunes, 
 the prophet would have been set down for a lunatic ; and 
 perhaps the description would have been accurate. Only 
 those who watched Mr. Chamberlain most closely de- 
 tected before 1886 the part of his character which has 
 since become so prominent, and it was only in 1885 that 
 people began to watch him closely at all. In that year he 
 attained the summit of his popularity. As the preacher 
 of the Unauthorised Programme, he became everywhere 
 notorious, and for a short a very short time his name 
 excited more enthusiasm than Mr. Gladstone's. The 
 fortune of the Unauthorised Programme was made by 
 the Tory Press. The principal, if not the only, articles 
 of the Birmingham faith were allotments, graduated 
 taxation, and free schools. Two of these principles or 
 watchwords have been more or less adopted by the 
 Tories, and even graduated taxation has been to some 
 extent recognised by Mr. Goschen. The alarm of the
 
 MR. CHAMBERLAIN. 25 
 
 Tories was exaggerated and absurd enough. But they 
 had some excuse in Mr. Chamberlain's language rather 
 than in his proposals. The tone of Mr. Chamberlain's 
 speeches at that period was undeniably rancorous. He 
 breathed out threatenings and slaughter against those 
 "who toil not, neither do they spin," perhaps uncon- 
 scious of the fact that he was comparing them with the 
 lilies of the field. He assailed the wealthy classes with 
 the doctrine of ransom, and it was six years before he 
 discovered that by this phrase or theory he meant 
 pensions for the aged poor. He was universally and 
 persistently misunderstood at the time by Peers and 
 Proletariats, by paupers and millionaires. To. the 
 Conservatives in 1885 Mr. Chamberlain was the most 
 dangerous and revolutionary agitator since Jack Cade. 
 To the Radicals he was the leader of the future. To 
 the working classes, or a large portion of them, he was 
 a political standard-bearer, and the herald of the good 
 time coming, when plutocracy and aristocracy should be 
 no more. If anyone desires to know what the spirit of 
 olass hatred means, he should study Mr. Chamberlain's 
 oratorical performances in 1884 and 1885. 
 
 There were some who saw very little genuine 
 Liberalism, and still less careful thought, in these wild 
 and whirling words. The despotic intolerance which 
 is at the bottom of Mr. Chamberlain's character, and 
 which makes him perhaps the best hated man of his 
 time, showed itself then, as it shows itself now, though 
 it was not so easy to be seen. . It would be a mistake to 
 suppose that even in 1885 the bulk of the working
 
 26 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 classes were with Mr. Chamberlain. Many intelligent 
 artisans, especially in London, felt and said that the 
 leader of the new Radicalism promised more glibly than 
 he explained, and that his words were a good deal 
 stronger than his reasons. 
 
 To understand Mr. Chamberlain, it is necessary to 
 remember two important dates. In May, 1880, he 
 became President of the Board of Trade. In Feb- 
 ruary, 1886, he became, after refusing the Admiralty, 
 President of the Local Government Board. In each 
 case the office was accompanied with a seat in the 
 Cabinet. The six intervening years had not raised 
 Mr. Chamberlain as much as they ought to have- 
 done in the estimation of Mr. Gladstone. Mr. 
 Chamberlain entered the Cabinet less than four years 
 after entering Parliament. Mr. Morley accomplished 
 the journey in three years. But Mr. Morley only 
 remained in the Cabinet six months, whereas Mr. 
 Chamberlain's length of tenure was five years. To 
 Mr. Chamberlain's administrative ability emphatic 
 testimony is borne by the highly-trained experts who 
 served under him. They say that his only rival at the 
 Board of Trade in recent times was the late Lord 
 Cardwell. But Mr. Chamberlain quarrelled with the 
 shipowners, and thus lost the chance of passing his- 
 most ambitious attempt at legislation, the Merchant 
 Shipping Bill. He was not loved by his col- 
 leagues in the Cabinet. He was a determined 
 opponent of the late Mr. Eorster, and he refused to- 
 attend the complimentary dinner at which Lord
 
 MR. CHAMBERLAIN. 27 
 
 Spencer was entertained on retiring from the Vice- 
 royalty of Ireland. There was not much love lost 
 between John Bright and the new member for Birming- 
 ham. In May, 1880, Mr. Chamberlain received from 
 Mr. Gladstone great and possibly unexpected promo- 
 tion. In February, 1886, when he considered himself 
 at least the second person in the Liberal party, if not 
 the first, he was offered a post he did not like, and on 
 his refusing it, one rather below than above his former 
 level. From this time his flattery of Mr. Gladstone, 
 which had been more copious than refined, suddenly 
 ceased, and has never been resumed. 
 
 Mr. Chamberlain's acceptance of office in February, 
 and his resignation in April, are defensible and con- 
 sistent. He was entitled to join a Home Eule Govern- 
 ment, and to say that he could not support Mr. 
 Gladstone's Home Eule Bill. The abruptness with 
 which he broke up the Eound Table Conference in 1887 
 has, on the other hand, never been completely explained. 
 Its immediate result was a cessation of personal inter- 
 course with Sir George Trevelyan, by which Sir George 
 was certainly not the chief loser. A Parliamentary 
 Eeturn of the old friends with which Mr. Chamberlain is 
 not on speaking terms would be an interesting and 
 voluminous document. It would not, however, include 
 Mr. Gladstone, Sir William Harcourt, or Mr. John 
 Morley. The chief reason why Mr. Chamberlain, with 
 all his ability and ingenuity, has so little weight with 
 the public outside Birmingham is the flagrant contrast 
 between his old and his new self. A man may change
 
 28 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 his mind without lowering his reputation. He who 
 never changes his mind is an obstinate fool, and prob- 
 ably has no mind to change. Mr. Chamberlain could 
 say without any discredit : " I thought Home Rule 
 right. On further reflection and consideration, I think 
 it wrong." Or : " I am a Home Ruler, though I do not 
 believe in Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule." But when he 
 jeers at demagogic arts, when he expresses contempt for 
 votaries of " the People with a big P," when he calls 
 Radicals Nihilists and extols the House of Lords as a 
 " stately " institution, the extent of the conversion is 
 too much for ordinary minds. Such tergiversation, 
 like the elder Sheridan's dulness, is not in nature. 
 
 As a Parliamentary speaker Mr. Chamberlain is 
 almost faultless. He is not indeed eloquent, if by 
 eloquence is meant what excites the passions or appeals 
 to the heart. He never raises the tone of a debate or 
 the mind of an individual. His literary allusions are 
 confined chiefly to Dickens, and in Dickens chiefly to 
 " Oliver Twist." He cannot be persuaded that when 
 Oliver asks for more he enlists the sympathy of the 
 reader, or that to dub a prophet Cassandra is to pay 
 him the highest of all possible compliments. He 
 attributed to Mr. Bright the ancient classic phrase 
 about "going over to the majority." But his perfect 
 command of simple and vigorous English, his admirable 
 lucidity of statement, his power of incisive criticism, 
 his adroitness and readiness in reply, give him immense 
 power in the House of Commons, even among those 
 who most dislike and distrust him. There is only one
 
 MR. CHAMBERLAIN. 29 
 
 great deficiency in Mr. Chamberlain as an orator, and 
 that is his total lack of humour. Mr. Chamberlain 
 came into public life with the same sort of contempt for 
 education and educated people as is expressed by Mr. 
 Tomlinson, the rich miller, in " Janet's Repentance." 
 Early as Mr. Chamberlain retired from business, with 
 an honourable preference of politics for money-making, 
 he could, as Mr. Tomlinson says, " buy up most of the 
 educated men he knew." He was not acquainted, and 
 did not wish to be acquainted, with the past. The 
 present and the future were enough for him. He has 
 since travelled, mixed in fashionable society, and read 
 French novels. Having been to Washington on a 
 diplomatic mission, he ought to understand the American 
 Constitution. But when he tried to turn Professor 
 Bryce the author against Mr. Bryce the politician, he 
 showed once more that before you can use a book you 
 must know something more than how to read. When 
 Mr. Chamberlain was first taunted for his alliance with 
 the Tories, he replied that his new friends were English 
 gentlemen, and not Irish rebels. The phrase was an 
 unhappy and, considering his former relations with Mr. 
 Parnell, an ungenerous one. But it has given rise to 
 an unfounded charge. Snobbishness, the worship of rank 
 and social position, is not among Mr. Chamberlain's 
 faults. That odious vice implies self-distrust and self- 
 contempt, which are not qualities characteristic of Mr. 
 Chamberlain. He thinks too much of himself to be 
 a sycophant or a toady. Disappointed ambition and 
 uncontrollable temper have had more to do with his
 
 30 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 change of front than any reverence for the " Upper 
 Crust." Though by birth a Londoner, he came to 
 London in 1876 with a provincial hatred and dread of 
 the metropolis. That he should have overcome these 
 prejudices is praiseworthy, and he would not injure the 
 prospects or lower the dignity of the Eight Honour- 
 able Joseph Chamberlain for all the dukes and duchesses 
 in England.
 
 MR. SPEAKER. 
 
 ME. GLADSTONE is sometimes said, even by his admirers, 
 to be deficient in the art of choosing the best men for 
 offices of high responsibility in the State. Whatever 
 truth there may be in the general charge, it certainly 
 does not apply to the holders of the two most important 
 posts in the Parliament of 1886. Mr. Courtney 
 is held by competent judges to have been the best 
 Chairman of Committees within living memory or 
 extant tradition. And if as mudh could not be said of 
 the present Speaker by the few veterans who remember 
 Mr. Speaker Lefevre before he became Lord Eversley, 
 it is universally acknowledged that Mr. Speaker Peel 
 need not fear comparison with the most illustrious of 
 his predecessors. When, eight years ago, Mr. Speaker 
 Brand stepped down from the chair and elected to 
 merge the old Barony of Dacre in the new Yiscounty of 
 Hampden, the image of no obvious successor presented 
 itself to the political eye or the Parliamentary imagina- 
 tion. It is said that the name of Arthur Peel, youngest 
 son of the great Minister, and member for Warwick, 
 was suggested by a junior member of the Government, 
 whose father had been Serjeant-at-Arms, and who might 
 therefore be held to have an hereditary interest in the
 
 32 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 order of the House of Commons. Mr. Peel was at that 
 time in his fifty-fifth year, and had been for nearly 
 twenty years in Parliament. Between 1868 and 1880 
 he held several subordinate places in Liberal Adminis- 
 trations, and he had for a few months been principal 
 Whip. In 1880 he left the Home Office, not, it was 
 believed, finding Sir William Harcourt an altogether 
 congenial chief. That fact, however if fact it be 
 did not prevent Sir William Harcourt from warmly 
 supporting his claims to the Speakership in 1884. 
 
 To the general public the personality of the new 
 Speaker was hardly known. He had been, if not exactly 
 a silent member, a sparing and infrequent contributor 
 to debate. Nor, though his remarks were always sen- 
 sible and his arguments well expressed, had his speeches 
 arrested any particular attention either in the House 
 or in the country. His brother members held him in 
 high esteem, and were much less surprised than their 
 constituents at Mr. Gladstone's choice. Still, the nomi- 
 nation was not expected, and doubts of its wisdom were 
 freely expressed. They did not last very long. When 
 Mr. Peel had been proposed, seconded, and unanimously 
 chosen, he delivered an address which took the House 
 by storm. It was not only admirable in taste, temper, 
 and tone, but clothed in felicitous diction and uttered 
 with imposing dignity of demeanour. The perfect 
 manners of the late Lord Hampden had accustomed 
 the House of Commons to high-bred courtesy from their 
 presiding officer. In the new Speaker they found that, 
 and something more. His fine presence and sonorous
 
 MR. SPEAKER. 33 
 
 voice were accompanied by a certain lofty stateliness, as 
 if this quiet representative of a sleepy Midland borough, 
 since amalgamated with the fashionable watering-place 
 of Leamington, had been preparing himself in a compara- 
 tively private station to appear one day in full-blown 
 majesty as First Commoner of the realm. More austere 
 and frigid in deportment than Lord Hampden, Mr. 
 Speaker never forgets his position, and sometimes magni- 
 fies his office. There is a man who played a practical 
 joke upon him, and who still lives nay, even thrives ; 
 but it is the unanimous opinion of the jester's friends 
 that he will never try that form of diversion again. 
 
 Lord Holland said that he had only known one 
 Speaker of first-rate ability, and that the worst Speaker 
 he had ever known. He referred to Lord Grenville, 
 whom Lord Eosebery, in his "Life of Pitt," describes 
 in unusually disparaging terms. If it be true that Mr. 
 Goschen was only prevented by the defective range of 
 his vision from succeeding Mr. Speaker Brand, the 
 shrewd observation of Lord Holland was within an ace 
 of being strengthened by a new instance. It is seldom, 
 indeed, that anyone of Mr. Goschen's calibre dreams of 
 shrouding his talents and capacities beneath the canopy 
 and the wig. Sir Gilbert Elliot, afterwards first Earl 
 of Minto, was offered the post at the age of thirty- 
 five. But if he ever had any idea of taking it, he was 
 soon laughed out of the notion by his lively and 
 ambitious wife. Cleverness is not an indispensable 
 quality in a Speaker. He is assisted by the clerks in 
 cases of difficulty; he has a counsel to advise him on 
 c
 
 34 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 points of law. Abundance of precedents hedge his 
 course and preserve him from going far astray. He 
 has plenty of time in which to make up his mind, 
 unless very exceptional circumstances should suddenly 
 arise, and then he has the advantage of being able 
 to impose his will on all the combatants. The essential 
 qualities in a Speaker are courtesy, dignity, imper- 
 turbability, and fairness of mind. He must be in the 
 real, not the conventional, sense of the word, a 
 gentleman. He must be able to detach himself from 
 party strife and from personal predilections. He must 
 never let technicalities, so far as he can control them, 
 stand in the way of justice. He must have the spirit 
 of a judge, without the mind of a lawyer. 
 
 The Speaker has earned for himself in a very short 
 time a very great reputation. He has made mistakes, 
 as when he allowed Colonel Saunderson to accuse his 
 opponents of consorting with men whom they knew to 
 be murderers, and when he showed that he had read a 
 foolish attack upon himself by a very inconsiderable 
 member of Parliament. But his errors have not been 
 numerous, and they were so clearly the blunders of an 
 impulsive, generous, high-minded man that they rather 
 increased his influence and popularity than otherwise. 
 Not very long after his appointment a number of Tories, 
 among them the present Lord Chancellor, almost drove 
 him to resign by voting against the Closure, and nearly 
 defeating it. That, it must be remembered, was when 
 the Closure could only be put on the Speaker's initia- 
 tive, acting on what he conceived to be the general
 
 MR. SPEAKEB. 35 
 
 sense of the House. In the early part of the present 
 Parliament the Speaker came into slight collision with 
 some of the Liberal leaders, especially his old friend, 
 Sir William Harcourt. More recently he caused some 
 resentment by reading the Liberal party a lecture on 
 the impropriety of multiplying Instructions when a 
 Bill goes into Committee. 
 
 These are specks on the sun ; and very small specks, 
 ioo. Nobody or at least nobody whose opinion is 
 worth having suspects the Speaker of conscious par- 
 tiality. His fault is rather that he takes too much 
 interest in things, and makes himself responsible for 
 what really belongs to the jurisdiction of the House 
 itself. The old-fashioned Speaker sat like a stuffed 
 figure, and only moved if the phrase may be pardoned, 
 when he was pulled with a string. The present 
 Speaker is extremely jealous for the honour, authority, 
 and decorum of the assembly over which he presides, 
 and of which he is the mouthpiece. If in zeal for the 
 House of Commons he sometimes appears to go beyond 
 his exact functions as the guardian of order, the failing 
 is one which leans to virtue's side. If his sensitive 
 magnanimity has been now and then wounded by in- 
 cidents unworthy of serious notice, that, again, is the 
 natural weakness of a high and simple character. When 
 the House of Commons has to be represented before 
 the public, the Speaker appears at his best. The de- 
 bate, or rather the series of wrangles, on the breach of 
 privilege committed by the directors of the Cambrian 
 Railway was not creditable to the House. They began
 
 36 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 in something very like confusion ; they ended in 
 something very like tumult. It lay with the Speaker 
 to redeem the reputation of the mother of Parliaments, 
 and nobly he performed the task. The position was a 
 trying one. The directors, like everybody else, knew 
 that they had escaped, and that they could not even be 
 compelled to reinstate the man they had dismissed. 
 The Speaker was like a judge who is called upon to 
 pass sentence, and has no sentence to pass. Yet he 
 contrived to save the situation. No trace of the exciting 
 conflict which had been surging round him was suffered 
 to intrude upon his calm and serious sternness. His 
 rebuke was a superb performance, which remains on 
 record while the noise and turbulence have vanished 
 into space. Only a great Speaker could on that 
 occasion have protected the righteous assertion of 
 Parliamentary privilege from being dragged into an 
 ignominious farce.
 
 THE DUKE OF ARGYLL. 
 
 THAT the Duke of Argyll is one of the foundations 
 of society we have his own implied authority for 
 believing. Whether there can be more than one 
 foundation of the same structure it would perhaps 
 be hypercritical to inquire. Certainly the Duke of 
 Argyll is neither unseen nor unheard. He has been all 
 his life conspicuous, and he has if anything, a little too 
 obviously enjoyed the fact. He is a wit among 
 Dukes, in the old-fashioned sense of a degraded word. 
 He is the only Duke who can write, and, except the 
 Duke of Devonshire, the only Duke who can speak. 
 He never forgets that he is a Duke, nor, indeed, do any 
 of his natural or acquired advantages ever for a moment 
 escape from the range of his conscious admiration. It 
 was his ancestor that Burns described as "My Lord, 
 their God, his Grace." It was to him that Lord 
 Hosebery applied his happy phrase, "the portentous 
 political pedagogue." Highly blessed and endowed as 
 he is, the Duke lacks one thing. He has not the most 
 elementary sense of humour, a defect which is, perhaps, 
 the only characteristic he has succeeded in bequeath- 
 ing to the Marquis of Lome. As an aristocrat, the
 
 38 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 Duke of Argyll despises statesmen and men of science 
 such as Mr. Darwin and Mr. Gladstone. As a man of 
 science and letters, he despises the illiterate aristocracy. 
 His self-adoration is undisturbed by the shadow of 
 a doubt in his own absolute infallibility. He has 
 lately told the world that he always hated the Whigs, 
 although he condescended to accept office from Lord 
 Palmerston. His political idol is the younger Pitt. 
 Pitt entered public life as a Whig, and never disclaimed 
 the title of a party whose principles he claimed to 
 represent better than Fox. But the Duke of Argyll 
 thinks little more favourably of the Free Traders than 
 of the Whigs. He regards himself as almost the only 
 consistent Free Trader who ever lived, while Cobden, 
 and Bright, and Mr. Charles Villiers were only plausible 
 impostors. Blcardo knew no more about political 
 economy than Darwin knew about natural history, and 
 Mr. Gladstone's conceptions of politics are fundamentally 
 erroneous. The Duke's opinion of his contemporaries, 
 with the exception of the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury 
 and the eighth Duke of Argyll, is a deplorably low 
 one. With the death of the eminent philanthropist 
 departed, in the Duke's opinion, his only rival for 
 the moral crown. Intellectual rival he never had, nor 
 social superior. He permitted his eldest son to connect 
 himself by marriage with the Royal Family. He 
 bestows his patronage upon the Queen, and when his 
 Sovereign created him a Duke of the United Kingdom 
 he made a public speech upon the topic, which was 
 gracious in the extreme. The Duke deplores the follies
 
 THE DUKE OF ARGYLL. 39 
 
 of the world and the ignorance of mankind with a 
 solemn pathos which he, doubtless, means to be sincere. 
 But if everyone were as good and as wise as himself, 
 he would not be so supremely happy as he is. " They'd 
 rather that the Dean should die than their prediction 
 prove a lie," says Swift of the prophets who concerned 
 themselves with the probable date of his demise. The 
 Duke has so often foretold the ruin of his country 
 if it did not follow his advice and unhappily, it very 
 seldom does that its continued prosperity sometimes 
 gives him a passing qualm. 
 
 The Duke of Argyll resembles in some respects the 
 first Lord Brougham, who was also or so he flattered 
 himself a man of ancient descent. Macaulay called 
 Brougham, in language which exactly applies to the 
 Duke, " a kind of semi- Solomon, half knowing every- 
 thing from the cedar to the hyssop." But Macaulay, 
 who had no love for Brougham, admitted that his 
 Parliamentary speaking was of the highest possible 
 order. So is the Duke of Argyll's. A born orator, 
 with a musical voice of great compass and penetration, 
 he has an easy flow of language, which he regulates 
 with consummate art. It is not easy to be heard in 
 the House of Lords ; but the Duke, unless physical 
 weakness restrains him, is always audible and distinct. 
 It is his misfortune that he never sat in the House of 
 Commons, where he would have made his mark, and 
 might have learned some lessons. In the House of 
 Lords his best speeches were made against the political 
 adventures of Lord Beaconsfield. The adventurer
 
 40 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 himself, who had never heard the Duke before, was 
 quite astonished, and pronounced him at once the best 
 speaker among the Peers. The bitterness with which 
 the Duke of Argyll then attacked Lord Salisbury was 
 unusual even in an Assembly where the Speaker has no 
 power to enforce order. He accused Lord Salisbury of 
 deliberate mendacity, and persisted in the charge. His 
 famous apostrophe to the Peers in the Government, 
 " My lords, you are beginning to be found out," may 
 have been in questionable taste, but it excited much 
 sensation in the House and in the country. On that 
 occasion, as at the time of the American Civil War, the 
 Duke of Argyll, with courage and sagacity, set himself 
 against the prevalent prejudices of his own class. He 
 was a resolute Northerner and a determined foe of 
 Turkish oppression in Europe. With Mr. Gladstone, 
 Lord Russell, and the late Lord Granville, who sat in 
 Lord Aberdeen's Cabinet, and were responsible for the 
 Crimean War, he condemned root and branch the 
 Eastern policy of Lord Beaconsfield. He inveighed 
 against it with his tongue and with his pen only less 
 vigorously and copiously than Mr. Gladstone himself. 
 At that time the Duke of Argyll passed for an 
 advanced Liberal. It was on the delicate question of 
 land and the sacred institution of landlords that he 
 separated himself from Mr. Gladstone and the Liberal 
 party. It was then that he politely compared his old 
 colleagues, including Mr. Chamberlain and the present 
 Duke of Devonshire, with a set of jelly-fish. 
 
 Archbishop Magee said of John Bright that he
 
 THE LUKE OF ARGYLL. 41 
 
 divided his opponents into knaves and fools, with the 
 third class of bishops, who united the characteristics of 
 both the others. The Duke of Argyll makes no such 
 nice distinctions. Those who differ from him are bad 
 as well as stupid. In his view their blindness is 
 judicial. They are punished by mental obtuseness 
 for not accepting the gospel of Inverary. Mr. Glad- 
 stone's case puzzles the Duke extremely. The Duke 
 sets great value upon orthodoxy in religion, and he 
 cannot deny that Mr. Gladstone's religion is orthodox. 
 Perhaps the explanation may be found in the fact that 
 Mr. ^ Gladstone is not a Presbyterian. But that only 
 gets over the least serious part of the difficulty. Mr. 
 Gladstone was not only brought up in the true faith 
 which unites Presbyterians with Episcopalians ; he has 
 enjoyed the rich and precious privilege of sitting several 
 times in the same Cabinet with the Duke of Argyll. 
 Every opportunity of learning the truth has thus been 
 presented to him, and nothing short of invincible 
 ignorance can save him from the consequences of dis- 
 believing the ducal message to mankind. Mr. Glad- 
 stone's only consolation and that a poor one is that 
 those who have successively fallen under the Duke of 
 Argyll's displeasure are numerous in quantity and 
 various in quality. Bicardo wrote a treatise as abstract 
 and as disconnected with morals as Euclid, for the 
 malignant purpose of keeping down wages. Cobden 
 only cared for the interests of his own class. Disraeli 
 was a charlatan. Lord Salisbury told lies. The Duke 
 of Devonshire is a jelly-fish. Mr. Chamberlain is no
 
 42 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 better. The members of the present Government are 
 unspeakably mean and base. Lord Shaftesbury is 
 dead. If the Duke of Argyll were to be removed from 
 us, it would be the most tragic event in human history 
 since the decease of Sir John Falstaff. The late Mr. 
 Justice Maule, a much cleverer man than the Duke, but 
 by no means such a model of all the virtues, remarked 
 that public schools turned out sad dogs, and that private 
 schools were responsible for poor devils. Neither the 
 Duke of Argyll, nor Mr. Chamberlain, nor Sir William 
 Harcourt had the discipline which Maule considered so- 
 bracing. Yet they are not distinguished for embarrass- 
 ing bashfulness or shrinking timidity. There is a 
 story told of another Duke, that when he presented 
 himself to Keate for his second flogging within twelve 
 hours, the illustrious pedagogue condescended to ob- 
 serve : " Your Grace is unlucky to-day." It is possible 
 that some such early correction, if bestowed rather in 
 sorrow than in anger, might have done the Duke of 
 Argyll no harm. He never came under the chastening 
 influence of a university, but burst upon the world in 
 the full panoply of the MacCallum More. Mr. Froude, 
 while disclaiming the character of a social leveller, 
 inclines to think that there should be no Dukes. They 
 dazzle him, he says. They are too bright and good 
 he was, perhaps, thinking of the late Duke of Suther- 
 land or the late Duke of Marlborough for human 
 nature's daily food. The Duke of Argyll has dabbled 
 in science, and in the course of his lucubrations has 
 called Professor Huxley much what he called Lord
 
 THE DUKE OF ARGYLL. 4S 
 
 Salisbury. It never seems to have struck him, in 
 bringing wholesale charges of interested motives against 
 legislators and political economists, that he was open 
 to any such suspicion himself. Yet he is a landlord, 
 and the cause of the landlord has no more eloquent 
 advocate. It was on the question of land, not on 
 the question of Home Rule, that he separated himself 
 from the Liberal party. His opposition to the Irish 
 Land Bill of 1881 was an instance of "Proximus 
 ardet Ucalegon" He knew it might be his own turn 
 next ; and so it was. The Crofter Commission reduced 
 his rents, and decided that his Crofter tenants had 
 been paying him for the improvements they had 
 themselves made upon his land. The Duke has now 
 developed into a thorough-going Tory, and his feudal 
 instincts are almost as strong as Mr. Chamberlain's.
 
 MR. MICHAEL DAVITT. 
 
 MR. MICHAEL DAVITT was, with the possible exception of 
 Mr. Edward Blake, the most interesting and remarkable 
 of the new members of this Parliament. His entrance 
 into the House of Commons added little or nothing to 
 his own influence or fame ; but, on the other hand, he 
 was one of the most notable figures in that assembly. 
 It is curious that an Irish patriot of such eminence and 
 ability should have been defeated in his first candida- 
 ture, and should have had a hard fight in his second. 
 The reason, of course, is that he preferred to contest 
 Parnellite strongholds rather than places where his 
 return would have been a foregone conclusion. For 
 Mr. Davitt is an ardent Nationalist, and a loyal mem- 
 ber of the Irish Parliamentary party. No more striking 
 tribute has been paid to the strength of the Nationalist 
 cause, and the prudence of its leaders, than the adhesion 
 of Mr. Davitt. Mr. Davitt, as everybody knows, was in 
 youth an active Fenian, and spent some of the best years 
 of his life in penal servitude for treason-felony. His 
 political opinions are much more Socialistic than those 
 of his Parliamentary colleagues, and during the reign 
 of Mr. Parnell he was not on the best of terms with 
 Mr. Parnell's principal lieutenants. For Mr. Parnell
 
 MR. MICHAEL DAVITT. 45 
 
 himself he had a profound admiration, and never lifted 
 a finger to dispute the authority of the Chief. But 
 when Ireland had to choose between a constitutional 
 alliance with British Liberalism and the desperate 
 struggle of a disappointed man for the recovery of his 
 personal ascendency, Mr. Davitt joined the Consti- 
 tutionalists without a moment's hesitation. If Mr. 
 Gladstone's Irish policy had achieved nothing else than 
 the conversion of Mr. Davitt, it would not have been 
 fruitless. Before 1886 Mr. Davitt, though he trusted 
 Mr. Parnell, gravely doubted the efficacy of political 
 agitation as a weapon for obtaining Home Rule. It 
 was in frank acknowledgment of Mr. Gladstone's 
 wisdom and sincerity that he fell into line with the 
 general body of Nationalist politicians. Nothing could 
 be more creditable to Mr. Davitt. It was Mr. Glad- 
 stone's Government that prosecuted him in 1870; it 
 was Mr. Gladstone's Government that revoked his 
 ticket-of -leave, and sent him back to Portland in 1881. 
 When the interests of his country are concerned, Mr. 
 Davitt is incapable of personal feeling. He may not be 
 always judicious ; he may not sufficiently realise the 
 truth of the maxim that if speech is silver, silence is 
 golden ; but his keenest and bitterest opponents admit 
 his transparent sincerity, his chivalrous sense of honour, 
 and his absolute devotion to the cause of Ireland. In 
 Ireland the name of Michael Davitt is something more 
 than a household word. Even at the height of the 
 lamentable quarrel to which the deposition of Mr. 
 Parnell gave rise, the cowardly assault upon Mr. Davitt,
 
 46 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 for which, like Mr. O'Brien, he refused to prosecute, 
 excited universal indignation. 
 
 The characteristic qualities of the intellectual and 
 gentleman-like party have been well illustrated in their 
 references to Mr. Davitt. Some of their lower organs 
 in the Press think it dignified and becoming to call 
 him "Davitt." The fact that when he was twenty- 
 four he engaged in a criminal conspiracy to procure the 
 restoration of his country's freedom by force has been 
 made the excuse for denouncing him as unfit for the 
 society of honest men. Chief Justice Cockburn's sug- 
 gestion, founded on an ambiguous letter, that he had 
 been engaged in a plot to murder somebody is still 
 repeated without the full explanation given by Mr. 
 Davitt himself to the Special Commissioners. Because 
 in 1882, being in gaol for felony, he was ineligible 
 for Parliament, the jurists and pundits who follow the 
 Duke of Devonshire and Mr. Chamberlain gravely 
 argue that, although his sentence expired in 1885, he 
 must be ineligible now. Their way of putting the 
 argument is even more edifying than the argument 
 itself. They describe Mr. Davitt as " disqualified by 
 a vote of the House of Commons." They might as 
 well say that he was disqualified by a vote of the 
 Ulster Convention, for the House of Commons has 
 no more power to disqualify anybody than, as Sir 
 Fletcher Norton elegantly put it, "so many drunken 
 porters." Mr. Davitt used himself, it is believed, to 
 feel scruples about taking the oath of allegiance 
 to the British Sovereign; but that was before Mr.
 
 ME. MICHAEL DAVITT. 47 
 
 Gladstone had recognised the rights of the Irish 
 people. 
 
 Mr. Davitt's abilities as a speaker are of a very high 
 order indeed. He is fluent if anything, too fluent. 
 He is in deadly earnest. He is capable, when deeply 
 moved, of genuine eloquence. In describing, before the 
 Special Commission, the scenes of hardship and suffering 
 which he had witnessed as a boy, he drew signs of 
 rare emotion from the impassive countenance of Mr. 
 Parnell. Lord Hannen and his colleagues were de- 
 lighted with Mr. Davitt. No doubt, being a hostile 
 tribunal, they relished his candid admissions admis- 
 sions so candid as to raise the question whether he 
 would not have done better to retire from the 
 case with Sir Charles Russell and the other counsel 
 retained. But there was something about Mr. Davitt's 
 manly, straightforward appearance in the witness-box 
 which favourably impressed even the most bigoted 
 Coercionist. It would probably not be denied by Mr. 
 Davitt's warmest admirers that he was anxious to vin- 
 dicate his position as the real founder and originator 
 of the Land League. A man who has been three 
 times imprisoned for his political faith can afford to 
 be self-assertive without dreading the charge of egoism ; 
 and certainly it would be the height of absurdity and 
 the depth of imbecility to accuse Mr. Davitt of undue 
 personal ambition. More than almost any other Irish- 
 man, he has toiled for the advancement and regeneration 
 of the working classes. In pleading for the farmers, 
 he did not forget the artisans, and his relations with
 
 48 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 the labour party in England are very close. The 
 doctrines of Mr. Henry George which he professes, or 
 at least professed, have not been made popular in 
 Ireland, even by him. The Irish peasant is an 
 individualist to the backbone. But as editor of The 
 Labour World he has acquired a good deal of power 
 among the class which lives by weekly wages on 
 this side St. George's Channel, and his most recent 
 speeches have urged his countrymen to co-operate in 
 obtaining social reforms for Great Britain. Two of 
 Mr. Davitt's phrases have become commonplaces of the 
 Irish controversy. One contains the famous image 
 of the "wolf-dog of Irish vengeance bounding across 
 the Atlantic," which was at the time he used it as 
 accurate as it was vivid. The other introduced the 
 familiar simile of breakfast, dinner, and supper, which 
 gave the Tories an occasion for saying that Mr. Davitt, 
 at all events, did not regard Home Eule as final. But 
 when the context came to be examined, the disestab- 
 lishment of the Irish Church appeared to be Mr. Davitt's 
 idea of breakfast, and the Land Acts had supplied 
 his dinner, leaving the programme to be completed by 
 a supper of Home Eule. 
 
 Mr. Davitt's recollection goes back almost to the 
 great famine, and probably covers the cruel evictions 
 which followed it. He exemplifies the truth of John 
 Bright's familiar saying that the people of Ireland were 
 anxious to cross the^ three thousand miles of ocean and 
 join hands with the great Eepublic of the West. His 
 parents emigrated to the United States in his early
 
 MR. MICHAEL DAVITT. 49 
 
 youth, and his own ways of thought are in many 
 respects more American than Irish. As a thorough 
 Radical, however, he is quite at home among the British 
 Democracy, and a very popular speaker on English plat- 
 forms. It would be important that Mr. Davitt should 
 he in Parliament even if he did not succeed there ; for 
 he is a thoroughly representative man, and nohody else 
 could exactly fill his place. It is quite true, as Mr. 
 Lecky says, that in the time of O'Connell, and ever 
 since, Irish members have given valuable assistance to 
 the cause of progress and reform. It is also true that 
 closer intercourse with America has made Ireland more 
 Democratic than she used to be. But still, Mr. Davitt 
 does not belong to any ordinary type of Irish Nationalist. 
 He is more of a philosopher and a theorist, less con- 
 ventional and provincial than most of his colleagues. 
 It is a wonderful thing, which may well make the 
 comfortable classes ashamed of themselves, that a man 
 kept for years in what the Lord Chief Justice of 
 England has called a state of slavery should have em- 
 ployed the period of his punishment and seclusion, not 
 in indulging bitterness and planning vengeance, but in 
 thinking out schemes for the use and benefit of his 
 fellow-countrymen. Mr. Davitt's published account of 
 his life and experience in prison is full of strange and 
 painful interest. The jury who found him guilty were 
 probably right on the evidence, and Sir Alexander 
 Cockburn, . who sentenced him, was by no means a 
 vindictive judge. When Sir William Harcourt, as 
 Home Secretary, revoked Mr. Davitt's licence in 1881, 
 D
 
 50 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 he very sensibly and humanely directed that Mr. Davitt 
 should be treated as a first-class misdemeanant. It 
 would have been a thousand times better, though quite 
 without precedent, if either the Judge himself or Lord 
 Aberdare, who was then at the Home Office, had given 
 such a direction in 1870. Countries far behind Great 
 Britain in many of the things which make up civilisa- 
 tion put political prisoners on a different level and treat 
 them in a different fashion from other and more sordid 
 criminals. Society is justified in protecting itself from 
 armed attempts at revolution ; but the instance of Mr. 
 Davitt, with whom men and women of the highest 
 character are proud to associate, is a valuable warning 
 against the fatal blunder which confounds necessary 
 precautions with degrading penalties.
 
 MR. BRYCE. 
 
 MR. BRYCE is probably the best informed and best 
 educated man in the House of Commons. In the array 
 of monsters which Punch exhibited as the new Cabinet, 
 Mr. Bryce was considerately consigned to the corner, 
 and disguised in academical costume. He has been 
 Regius Professor of Civil Law at Oxford, and as such 
 has, in excellent Latin, presented many a celebrity for 
 his honorary degree. Years, almost centuries, ago he 
 led up Lord Wolseley then Sir Garnet Wolseley to 
 the most dignified Vice-Chancellor Oxford has ever seen. 
 Dr. Liddell sat in his chair of state, himself more dig- 
 nified and impressive than any outward pomp and show 
 could make him. Professor Bryce referred, in the 
 Latin tongue, to the capture of Coomassie, and the 
 defeat of King Coffee Calcali. "Urbem incendit" he 
 said of the gallant general, and was greeted with cries 
 of mock deprecation. "Plebi pepercit" he added, and 
 there were loud ironical cheers. Why sparing the people 
 should excite laughter, and burning the city approval, 
 the undergraduate conscience must decide. Mr. Bryce 
 went dryly on, without regard for interruption or ap- 
 plause. He has always done the same. He has never 
 quite acted up to his encyclopaedic knowledge and 
 D 2
 
 52 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 enormous powers. Mr. Disraeli said that the English 
 people did not like professors : nobody dislikes Mr. 
 Bryce. On the contrary, he is universally popular, and 
 everybody is glad of his success. Even the House of 
 Commons, with all its ignorance and prejudice, likes 
 a man of real learning. Mr. Bryce never parades his 
 information or obtrudes the professor. On the con- 
 trary, he makes, if anything, too little of himself. 
 Somebody at Oxford, being perplexed for a fact or a 
 date, said : " Look it up in Bryce." He did not mean 
 any of Mr. Bryce's books, but Mr. Bryce himself. A 
 reputation of that sort is not lightly acquired at Oxford, 
 where everybody professes to know a great deal more 
 than he does. 
 
 Mr. Bryce's career offers a fine chance for the astro- 
 logers. Mr. Bryce was born, in 1838. If it could be 
 proved that between that year and 1892 anyone had 
 cast Mr. Bryce's horoscope, and predicted that Mr. 
 Bryce would be Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, 
 astrology would be justified of her children, and the 
 Astronomer-Royal would have to take a back seat. Mr. 
 Bryce entered Parliament in 1880 as member for the 
 Tower Hamlets. He signalised himself during the 
 contest by addressing a section of his constituents in 
 German. But a metropolitan constituency is a difficult 
 place for a serious politician who has anything else to 
 do, and in 1885 Mr. Bryce migrated to the good old 
 city of Aberdeen. It has been said, in one of those 
 rash and culpable generalisations which disfigure 
 modern criticism, that a metropolitan member has no
 
 MR. BRTCE. 53 
 
 time for politics. He is expected, so these flippant 
 speculators assert, to attend bazaars on Saturday after- 
 noons, to have tea with the Dissenters on Wednesday 
 evenings, and to sup on Sundays with the infidel clubs. 
 But this category or programme takes no account of 
 the many calls from Westminster to remote districts 
 throughout the week. Mr. Bryce sought refuge in 
 Scotland. He became, in Mr. Gladstone's third Ad- 
 ministration, Under Secretary of State for Foreign 
 Affairs, and the exponent of Lord Eosebery's views in 
 the House of Commons. But Mr. Bryce is by no 
 means a type of the " Under Secretary whose chief is in 
 the Lords." Lord Beaconsfield, in "Endymion," has 
 given an inimitable description of that class. Walder- 
 .share is so much impressed with his own greatness 
 when he reaches that stage of political development that 
 he constructs a gallery for receiving the portraits of 
 Under Secretaries whose chiefs were in the Lords. He 
 regards them as the greatest of God's creatures. Every- 
 one knows the type. Mr. Bryce does not belong to it. 
 He is a hard-headed, keen-witted, half Scottish Ulster- 
 man, educated to the highest possible level, equally 
 conversant with ancient and modern languages, whose 
 place in any Ministry is an accident, whose position in 
 the world of intellect is secure. 
 
 Mr. Bryce is, of course, much more than a simple 
 politician. He is one of the few men who have 
 ascended Ararat. He ranks among the greatest 
 legal and constitutional authorities in Europe. He 
 has written a book about the United States which
 
 54 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 anybody can read, and which, a few people pretend that 
 they can remember. In Germany Mr. Bryce would 
 rank even higher than he ranks here. In the House 
 of Commons he has never quite done justice to his great 
 knowledge and capacity. Occasionally, as in his reply 
 to Mr. Chamberlain about the powers of American 
 tribunals, he is admirably neat and precise. Every 
 now and then, as in his speech at the Eighty Club 
 introducing Mr. Blake, he is peculiarly graceful and 
 distinguished. But as a rule, Mr. Bryce speaks 
 below his abilities. He writes better than he speaks. 
 The interest of the reader, as in Gibbon, never 
 flags, because the interest of the author is always 
 sustained. Mr. Bryce, as becomes a man who has 
 seen, or claims to have seen, the ark, is a warm 
 friend of the Eastern population, and a constant enemy 
 of Turkish tyranny. The Armenians owe much to 
 him, and the Greeks are largely in his debt. But Mr. 
 Bryce has not made as much of these interesting nation- 
 alities in the House of Commons as would have been 
 made by many inferior persons. Mr. Bryce offers a 
 curious contrast to another well-known member of Par- 
 liament, Mr. Chaplin. Mr. Chaplin has a good voice, 
 an impressive manner, and a gesticulation which is a 
 sort of compound of Mr. Gladstone at his best and 
 Mr. Disraeli at his worst; but he has absolutely 
 nothing to say. Mr. Bryce is brimful of information, 
 which. he has thoroughly digested, and over which he 
 has entire control. It is the power of bringing it out 
 which occasionally fails, and which makes some of
 
 MR. BRYGE. 55 
 
 Mr. Bryce's speeches, like Pindar's odes, only in- 
 telligible to the well-informed. But when all is said 
 and done, few men have brought more strength and 
 character to Mr. Gladstone's Cabinet than the member 
 for North Aberdeen.
 
 MR. CAMPBELL-BANNERMAN. 
 
 THERE is probably no man living who has talked less 
 nonsense than Mr. Campbell-Bannerman. When that 
 hopeful youth, Branwell Bronte, was asked if he pro- 
 posed to enter holy orders, he replied that he had no 
 qualification for the Ministry except hypocrisy. That 
 is, perhaps, the one qualification for another sort of 
 Ministry that Mr. Campbell-Bannerman lacks. There 
 is too much nuda veritas about him. Like Boileau, he 
 calls a cat a cat and Howard Vincent a bore. He does 
 not, with Tennyson's orator, charm us till the lion looks 
 no larger than the cat. Mr. Campbell-Bannerman's 
 shrinking and sensitive nature must have suffered 
 severely from the notoriety of his famous phrase about 
 " finding salvation." He is not by any means a Sal- 
 vationist, though in the freedom of conversation he 
 adopted the language of Mr. Booth. Lord Beacons- 
 field once complained that he had suffered from the 
 " misplaced laughter of another." It is the misplaced 
 seriousness of another of which Mr. Campbell-Banner- 
 man has reason to complain ; for what Mr. Campbell- 
 Bannerman whispered in the ear, the object of his 
 confidence proclaimed on the platform. Hence it is that 
 a comfortable, easy-going man of the world figures in
 
 MR. CAMPBELL-BANNERMAN. 57 
 
 contemporary history as a sort of fanatical energumen 
 an unpleasant mixture of unctuous fervour and pro- 
 fessional cant. Mr. Campbell-Bannerman has himself 
 to thank if he is not better known and better under- 
 stood. There are very few abler men in the Government 
 or the House of Commons. But he makes no fuss and 
 no show. He does not sufficiently sacrifice to the 
 glorified spirit of self-advertisement which presides over 
 the new era. He cannot always get up what may, 
 perhaps, be called, without injuring respectable suscepti- 
 bilities, the moral steam. He happened to be Secretary 
 of State for War when the long and bitter agitation 
 against recognising vice came to its inevitable and 
 highly desirable close. He disappointed the zealots on 
 both sides. He refused to be excited or perturbed. He 
 treated the question from the military and utilitarian 
 point of view, without adopting the official doctrine of 
 necessity. The result was that while neither party 
 cheered him with enthusiasm, both parties listened to 
 him with respect. When Thwackum and Square have 
 had their say, Allworthy, prig as he is, strikes in with 
 considerable effect. Mr. Campbell-Bannerman is not 
 a prig; but he has a judicial mind he is free from 
 prejudice and passion. When he speaks, people listen, 
 attend, and are convinced. 
 
 An eminent statesman said the other day that there 
 was no office under the Crown for which Mr. Campbell- 
 Bannerman was not fit. His return to the War Office 
 gave great satisfaction to the inmates of that rather 
 chaotic establishment. The War Office requires a strong
 
 58 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 hand and resents a rough one. There are a good many 
 people to be kept in order, from the Duke of Cambridge 
 downwards. The present Secretary of State is just the 
 man for the post. Everybody who knows him likes 
 him, and he is the more liked the better he is known. 
 He made a superb Chief Secretary for Ireland, though, 
 unfortunately, his reign was brief. The Irish members 
 were then at enmity with the Liberal party, and they 
 " tried it on," half in fun, as their manner is, with Mr. 
 Campbell-Bannerman. But they found the game so 
 dull that they very soon left it off. The imperturbable 
 geniality, the serene good humour, of the Chief Secretary 
 were too much for them. They gave him up in despair. 
 You can be angry with a man who laughs at you; a 
 man who laughs with you is irresistible, and in the long 
 run unassailable. Mr. Bannerman resembles in some 
 respects the celebrated Duke of Wharton, that strange 
 product of the glorious Eevolution. The Duke was a 
 vicious man, and Mr. Bannerman is a virtuous one. 
 But one is as pachydermatous as the other was. 
 The wits of Queen Anne's reign tilted at Wharton, 
 whose manners and excesses afforded them abundant 
 scope for invective. He only laughed at their 
 jokes, and cursed them good-humouredly for their 
 pains. Mr. Parnell, in some interview or other, 
 enumerated with candid comments the Chief Secre- 
 taries he had known. Of Mr. Campbell-Bannerman 
 he had nothing to say except that nothing could be 
 made of him. Like the elderly British spinster who 
 walked unharmed among the lions of Africa, he was
 
 MB. CAMPBELL-BANNERMAN. 59 
 
 too tough. Yet he did not, like that heaven-horn 
 statesman Mr. Balfour, set himself to irritate and 
 annoy the men with whom he had to deal. Being a 
 statesman of a more mundane type, he treated the Irish 
 members in a conciliatory fashion, assumed that their 
 objects were the same as his own, and mildly indicated 
 some unlucky differences of detail. Mr. Balfour's 
 methods may have been very magnificent ; but they 
 were not politics, and they were not common sense. 
 Men of Mr. Campbell- Bannerman's type are invaluable 
 in diminishing the friction which accompanies the 
 management of all human affairs. They do not origi- 
 nate anything ; they have no great ideas. But the 
 geniuses, of whom there may be three in a century, 
 could not get on without them. Fifty James Watts 
 would not dispense with the need for the man in fustian 
 and his oil- can. 
 
 It is believed that nobody has ever seen Mr. Camp- 
 bell-Bannerman out of temper. This quality or defi- 
 ciency sometimes produces a kind of counter-irritation 
 in other men. The present Lord Justice-General of 
 Scotland used almost literally to dance with fury when 
 Mr. Campbell-Bannerman poked fun at him. But with 
 more sensible folks the effect is more agreeable, and 
 Mr. Bannerman is almost as popular on the other side 
 of the House as on his own. At Stirling his constituents 
 thoroughly appreciate him, and give him very little 
 trouble about his seat. The Scotsman gravely rebukes 
 him ; but if The Scotsman were not edited by an Eng- 
 lishman, it would go far to justify English calumnies
 
 60 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 about Scottish lack of humour. Mr. Bannerman is 
 himself a typical Scot of the hard-headed, unemotional 
 type. The ease and charm of his personal manner are 
 peculiarly his own. The late lamented Professor Henry 
 Smith, so well known in Oxford Common rooms and 
 scientific gatherings, used to say, " Young men will be 
 serious. When they come to my age they will find 
 that seriousness is the worst joke out." The remark 
 was open to criticism, and was not calculated to fill the 
 undergraduate with good desires or lofty aims ; but, like 
 everything Henry Smith said, it contained a spice of 
 truth. Some youthful politicians, especially youthful 
 Liberals, might with advantage take a leaf out of 
 Mr. Campbell-Bannerman's book. Whatever they may 
 think, the eyes of the world are not on them. They 
 should avoid the error which is not noble, and is not 
 seldom made of explaining their motives to people who 
 are not concerned in their acts. It is a great mistake to 
 suppose that the population of these islands, or any 
 appreciable part of it, spend their holidays in wondering 
 why Mr. So-and-So had taken such a place, and what 
 effect his taking it would have upon Mr. Gladstone's 
 policy. The brutal world persists in thinking that these 
 young gentlemen have had uncommonly good luck, and 
 will be very glad within altered circumstances to do what 
 Mr. Gladstone tells them. Much to be commended is 
 the answer of him who, when asked why he had 
 accepted a particular office, rejoined, " Did you ever 
 hear of a fellow called Hobson?" Morbid self-con- 
 sciousness is new-fangled in politics, and is not English.
 
 CAHPSELL-BANNEEMAN. 61 
 
 Public schools were supposed to eradicate it ; but 
 they seem to have failed in this respect, as in so many 
 others. Mr. Campbell-Bannerman may be, as is said, 
 fond of French novels, but he is a type of manly 
 British sense, of straightforward, unaffected vigour and 
 ability.
 
 MR. BURT. 
 
 No Liberal will ever forget the month of December, 
 1890. Committee Boom Fifteen has left its impress 
 upon English as well as upon Irish politics. In 
 Scotland, opinion was the more excited and embittered 
 because Mr. Parnell had been recently presented with 
 the freedom of the City of Edinburgh. At the height 
 of the hubbub, when the political atmosphere was full 
 of poisonous miasma, and even the Prime Minister, in 
 the House of Lords, had been joking about a national 
 crisis in the style of a music-hall comedian, the Eighty 
 Club entertained as their principal guest the member 
 for Morpeth, Mr. Thomas Burt. It is the well-known 
 practice of that institution to invite eminent Liberals to 
 dine and to address the club on public affairs. The 
 opportunity has never been abused, except by Mr. 
 Chamberlain, whose violent attack upon his immediate 
 predecessor, Mr. Groschen, was in painfully bad taste- 
 But perhaps nobody ever made a better use of the 
 occasion than Mr. Burt. At that time of acrimonious 
 controversy over a disagreeable subject, in which the 
 lowest type of politician positively revelled, the mere 
 presence and personality of Mr. Burt were wholesome 
 and refreshing. Nothing could be more ludicrously
 
 JlfR. BURT. 63 
 
 unlike the typical demagogue of the Tory imagination 
 than Mr. Burt. The son of a working collier, once a 
 working collier himself, he was born thirty-three years 
 before compulsory education, and what he learned he 
 taught himself. Yet a more perfect example of all the 
 essential qualities in the character of an English gentle- 
 man could not be found in either House of Parliament. 
 His speech to the Eighty Club dealt chiefly with the 
 politics of labour. But it was impossible altogether to 
 avoid the topic of the hour, and Mr. Burt's reference to 
 the great causes which could not be impeded by 
 personal misconduct was exactly the proper medicine 
 for the prevalent complaint. 
 
 Mr. Burt has represented the same constituency in 
 the House of Commons for the continuous period of 
 eighteen years, during which he has never had a serious 
 contest, and only once had a contest at all. He 
 succeeded a typical Whig, the late Sir George Grey, 
 whose grandson is one of the rising hopes of the 
 Liberal party. The transition from Sir George Grey to 
 Mr. Burt was an abrupt one. But Morpeth in that 
 respect only illustrated a general tendency, if not a 
 general rule. Mr. Burt entered Parliament at a period 
 of profound political repose. The policy of the late Mr. 
 Forster, and the consequent dejection of the Dissenters, 
 had the curious and rather illogical result of placing 
 Mr. Disraeli in power. He came unpledged to any- 
 thing in particular, except to leave people alone. 
 There was on the horizon no sign of the foreign 
 troubles which within three years were to convulse the
 
 64 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 nation, and which drove Lord Beaconsfield from office 
 when he appealed to the country. In those days the 
 two special representatives of the working classes in the 
 House of Commons were Mr. Thomas Burt and Mr. 
 Alexander Macdonald. Mr. Macdonald was a failure. 
 He is long since dead, and it would be useless to 
 inquire now why he did not succeed. But a certain 
 pretentiousness of manner and behaviour on his part 
 served to heighten the effect of Mr. Burt's modest 
 simplicity. The House of Commons judges men on 
 the whole fairly, and without the slightest reference to 
 their political opinions. Mr. Burt from the first com- 
 manded an esteem and attracted a regard which Tories 
 feel as much as Liberals, and which have steadily 
 increased since 1874. 
 
 Mr. Burt was never seen at greater advantage than 
 in the chair at the Trades Union Congress at Newcastle 
 in the autumn of 1891. The assembly was a very 
 large, a very independent, and not a very quiet one. 
 The chairman had no power to put down a revolt of 
 his authority by penal methods. On the burning 
 question of a legislative eight-hours day he was strongly 
 opposed to the majority. Yet, by keeping his temper, 
 by never losing his head, and by the sparing employ- 
 ment of a dry, sarcastic humour, he guided the Con- 
 gress through all its difficulties, and enforced his 
 decisions by intimating that if the delegates did not 
 like them they must get another chairman. Mr. Burt 
 is an excellent speaker for those who prefer argument 
 to rhetoric, and who do not demand excitement or
 
 MR. BURT. 65 
 
 gesticulation from a man simply expressing his opinions 
 on his legs. If he does not very often intervene in 
 debate, it is because he never touches a subject with 
 which he has not made himself thoroughly acquainted. 
 His dislike of Parliamentary interference with the hours 
 of labour is well known. It is fully shared by his 
 admirable colleague, Mr. Fenwick, and by Mr. Broad- 
 hurst, who, after working as a journeyman stonemason, 
 has been an Under- Secretary of State. In this respect 
 Mr. Burt agrees with his constituents, and does not 
 therefore deserve some of the compliments he has re- 
 ceived ; but he holds strongly that a regulation of 
 hours implies a regulation of wages. 
 
 Mr. Burt has achieved his position in Parliament, 
 in Trades Unionism, and in the country quite as much 
 by moral as by intellectual qualities. Payment of 
 members is by some philosophers denounced as in- 
 jurious to the character of candidates and legislators. 
 Mr. Burt has since his first election been supported 
 by the voluntary contributions of the Northumbrian 
 miners ; yet his integrity and independence are be- 
 yond dispute. He is so little disposed to self-assertion 
 that the full powers of his cultivated mind are hardly 
 appreciated. He is a singularly close reasoner. He 
 has read widely. He is familiar not merely with the 
 literature of politics, but with literature properly so 
 called. He is a member of the Wordsworth Society, 
 and a warm admirer of the great poet who moralised 
 nature. 
 
 When Mr. Disraeli first heard Mr. Joseph Cowen
 
 66 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 speak in the House of Commons, Mr. Co wen bitterly 
 attacked the Tory Premier's Eoyal Tithes Bill. Asked 
 what he thought of the performance, Mr. Disraeli 
 replied that he " didn't understand the lingo." Some 
 time afterwards Mr. Cowen delivered a powerful speech 
 in support of Mr. Disraeli's foreign policy, and the 
 Premier, without waiting to be asked, declared that 
 nothing had been heard like it since Plunket. Mr. 
 Burt is not an orator, like Mr. Cowen ; but his strong 
 Northumbrian accent, once the southern ear has become 
 accustomed to it, adds richness and raciness to the 
 shrewd and homely good sense which it clothes. Mr. 
 Burt is a man of inbred tact and natural judgment. 
 Finding himself at variance with what is called the 
 New Unionism, he has been content to differ, and has 
 carefully abstained from the use of irritating language. 
 His view is that New Unionism is Young Unionism, 
 and that there is no more incompatibility between the 
 two than between an older and a younger generation of 
 mankind. Mr. Burt is emphatically a Trade Unionist. 
 His mission to Berlin confirmed him in the view that 
 the superior condition of the British workman is due to 
 organised self-help, and would be injured by State 
 patronage or control. " Leave it to the Unions " is 
 the substance of his answer to demands for restrictive 
 statutes. It may be, of course, that he overrates the 
 power of voluntary association, though very few people 
 know so much about the matter as he. But in any 
 case the working classes will never have a more capable, 
 disinterested, high-minded spokesman than Thomas Burt.
 
 SIR JOHN RIGBY. 
 
 SIR JOHN RIGBY would be the acknowledged leader 
 of the Chancery Bar if his position were not disputed 
 by Sir Horace Davey. Neither of them belongs 
 to the party which asserts, sometimes in rather bad 
 grammar, that it monopolises the intellect and edu- 
 cation of the country. Both can afford to smile at 
 pretensions too ridiculous to be gravely criticised. 
 The contrast between the two men is interesting and 
 piquant. Sir Horace is polished, elaborate, debonair ; 
 Sir John is bluff, simple, and downright. Chancery 
 practice does not conduce to making a popular speaker. 
 Judges hate eloquence, and interrupt periods. Even 
 correct English is lost in the Courts, and Mr. Henry 
 Matthews was almost the last advocate who really 
 seemed to care for the turn of his sentences. Certainly 
 Sir John Rigby does not. He is satisfied with the 
 expression of his meaning, and leaves the meaning of 
 his expressions to others. There are those who place 
 him above Sir Horace Davey as a lawyer, believing that, 
 if less ingenious, he is more sound. Perhaps it is 
 scarcely worth while to settle the precedence so diversely 
 constituted, and yet so peculiarly adapted to the inter- 
 pretation of the law. Sir John Rigby's massive and 
 E 2
 
 68 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 powerful understanding can cope successfully with any 
 problem presented by the intricacies of equitable juris- 
 prudence. After him and Sir Horace there is a long 
 interval, though admirers of the past will maintain that 
 there has been a descent at Lincoln's Inn, as elsewhere, 
 since the days of Roundell Palmer and Hugh Cairns. 
 Even now, when an unusually difficult case comes 
 before the House of Lords or the Judicial Committee, 
 it is always proposed to enlist the services of Lord 
 Selborne. 
 
 The unfortunate loss of Sir Horace Davey's seat at 
 Stockton has added to the importance of Sir John Eigby's 
 position in the House of Commons. Sir Horace, it 
 ought to be known, was offered the place in the Court 
 of Appeal left vacant by the resignation of Sir Edward 
 Fry, and refused to take it, lest the prospects of the 
 Liberal party should be injured by a change of can- 
 didate. There are spheres in which Sir Horace Davey 
 shines more conspicuously than Parliament or the 
 platform ; but his steady loyalty to his cause and 
 his leader is unimpeachable. Sir John Rigby is equally 
 steadfast, and has equally little to gain by it. His 
 practice is enormous, and it is a practice of the most 
 lucrative kind. The House of Lords and the Privy 
 Council are his favourite hunting-grounds. His cases 
 are not sensational, and with a large section of the 
 public his name is less familiar than Mr. Geoghegan's 
 or Mr. Gill's. But for the small and select circle who 
 believe that the highest qualities of the human brain 
 are exhibited in Fearne on Contingent Remainders,
 
 SIR JOHN RIQBY. 69 
 
 Sir John Rigby's reputation counts for more than 
 Sir William Harcourt's or Mr. Balfour's. It is a 
 far cry from the Cockpit to Forfarshire, and a strong 
 proof of Sir John's unsuspected versatility that he 
 should have been able to oust Mr. Barclay from the 
 representation of a Scottish county. For Sir John is 
 tainted with original sin, and not merely with actual 
 wickedness. In other words, he is an Englishman, 
 as well as a lawyer. The constituency he now re- 
 presents has lately been made very familiar in England 
 by the delightful writings of Mr. Barrie. Thrums 
 is Kirriemuir, and the little minister, or his son, may 
 have voted for Sir John Bigby. The Forfarshire folk 
 were, no doubt, attracted by the strong sense and 
 sterling honesty of the Liberal candidate. There never 
 was a man of more genuine grit, more entirely free from 
 affectation and pretence, more thoroughly capable of 
 holding his own in any circumstances against all comers. 
 This was not Sir John's first Parliamentary experi- 
 ence. In the short Parliament of 1885 he had sat for the 
 Wisbech Division of Cambridgeshire. He is a Cheshire 
 man, born at Buncorn nearly sixty years ago, and was 
 educated at an ancient and splendid foundation which 
 Oxford men presumptuously call Trinity, Cambridge. 
 Although he has been for many years immersed not so 
 much in the study as in the practice of the law, Sir John 
 Bigby has read many books on many subjects, and is in 
 particular a thorough master of Constitutional science. 
 Few people realise what a liberal education the pro- 
 ceedings of the Judicial Committee afford. That great
 
 70 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 tribunal, which ought to be personally a good deal 
 stronger than it is, has a wider and a more varied juris- 
 diction than any other Court in the civilised world. It 
 is the last legal resort of her Majesty's subjects in every 
 part of her Majesty's dominions except the United 
 Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Within 
 these islands, by one of those odd freaks which enliven 
 the British Constitution, it is restricted to dealing with 
 matters of ecclesiastical ritual and complaints against 
 the criminous clerk. But no one can argue habitually 
 before it without acquiring a complete knowledge ot 
 our colonial system, and nothing is more likely to make 
 a man a Home Ruler than thorough acquaintance with 
 the way in which our kin beyond sea manage their own 
 affairs. In the Judicial Committee, as in the House of 
 Lords, American judgments are often cited, not as bind- 
 ing authorities, but as entitled to respectful considera- 
 tion. Hence the necessity that an English barrister 
 enjoying the highest class of practice should have an 
 adequate insight into that masterpiece of theoretical 
 ingenuity, the American Constitution. An eminent 
 Queen's Counsel, confronted with a decision given by 
 the Supreme Court of an American State on a purely 
 municipal question of State law, contended that it 
 had been reversed by the Supreme Court of the United 
 States, which is of course a Constitutional solecism. 
 Sir John Rigby happened to be on the other side, 
 and he did not spare his learned friend. 
 
 Sir John Eigby 's fame as a sportsman is not quite 
 on a level with his fame as a lawyer ; but shooting is
 
 SIB JOHN RIGBY. 71 
 
 his chief relaxation, and he seeks it on a Scottish moor. 
 His success in Forfarshire was one more proof that 
 Scottish constituencies have no invincible prejudices 
 against an Englishman, provided he understands the 
 questions in which they are interested, and does his 
 duty by them in Parliament. It would be rather hard 
 if they had, considering the number of Scotsmen who 
 stand and sit for English counties and boroughs. 
 Besides being a staunch Liberal, Sir John is an ardent 
 admirer of Mr. Gladstone, whom it takes an intellect of 
 the first class rightly to appreciate and comprehend. 
 As a speaker, Sir John lacks form and symmetry. But 
 the substance of his speeches is always excellent, and 
 he never shirks a difficulty or evades a point. Hearty 
 and good-humoured as he is blunt and straightforward, 
 he is a universal favourite without taking much 
 trouble to be popular. Like Sir Horace Davey, whom 
 he resembles in no other respect, he has achieved 
 distinction as a lawyer, and not as a politician. But 
 he is far better suited than Sir Horace to the rough-and- 
 tumble of public life. There is something painful in 
 the spectacle of a consummately fine and subtle intelli- 
 gence failing where inferior minds succeed, and this 
 spectacle was too frequently offered when Sir Horace 
 Davey, who ought to be a great Judge, spoke from the 
 Treasury Bench. Sir John Bigby has an imperturbable 
 solidity of temper and demeanour which his distinguished 
 friend and rival lacks. He is not the sort of man who 
 would allow himself to be overcrowed by Sir Edward 
 Clarke. The term " Honest John," which looks so
 
 72 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 clumsy and absurd when applied to a chivalrous and 
 sensitive man of genius like Mr. Morley, might be used 
 with some force and point of Sir John Bigby, who as a 
 lawyer is conventionally supposed to be full of tricks. 
 It is not, however, the greatest lawyers who resort to 
 devices, and Sir John's straightforward manner is not, 
 as has been known, assumed for professional purposes. 
 It would be impossible to find a sounder thinker, a 
 more honourable and upright advocate, or a better 
 example of the Liberalism which springs directly from 
 rational conviction.
 
 MR. STANSFELD. 
 
 WHEN Mr. Gladstone composed his fourth Administra- 
 tion, a good many people were surprisingly confident 
 that they knew exactly what Mr. Labouchere would 
 have, and what Mr. Stuart would have, and what Mr. 
 Stansfeld would have. Then came the official list of 
 appointments, and none of these names appeared there 
 at all. Mr. Stan sf eld's friends had sent him hack to 
 the Local Government Board. But, unfortunately, the 
 patronage was not theirs, and Mr. Gladstone put Mr. 
 Fowler in Mr. Ritchie's place. Mr. Gladstone used 
 not to be very clear about the locality of the Local 
 Government Board. When it was wrecked with 
 dynamite, he asked where it was. Outrages teach 
 geography as well as wars teach history. Everybody 
 seems now to admit that Mr. Fowler is in the right 
 place. It is less clear why Mr. Stansfeld should have 
 no place at all. He is not a young man, having been 
 born in 1820. But the Prime Minister, if the ordinary 
 sources of information may be trusted, was born in 
 1809. Mr. Gladstone might say, if he cared to say 
 anything at all, that he could not put everybody in 
 the Cabinet, and that seventeen is too many. Then 
 why ? it might be asked. But that would be an
 
 74 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 indiscreet line of inquiry. It cannot be called a per- 
 sonal slight to pass over a man of seventy-two. 
 Premiers are privileged, and Lord Campbell was raised 
 to the woolsack on the verge of eighty. But in the 
 Army, or the Navy, or the Civil Service, a man of 
 seventy is regarded as altogether impossible, unless he 
 be a Royal Duke and Commander-in-Chief. Sir Lyon 
 Playfair, who was only a year older than Mr. Stansfeld, 
 received a peerage by way of consolation. Probably 
 Mr. Stansfeld might have been similarly honoured, or 
 degraded, if he had chosen. But he could hardly, 
 with his principles and his past, have put the ex- 
 tinguisher of a coronet upon his head. He accepted 
 the situation with a quiet dignity which did him 
 infinite honour. Probably he had heard the story of 
 Cato and the statue. Cato, unlike Sir Henry Edwards, 
 refused that form of material tribute. " I would 
 rather," he said, " that men should ask why Cato is 
 not here than why he is." Mr. Stansfeld has, in that 
 respect, the advantage over more than one member of 
 the present Cabinet. 
 
 He has also the independence so justly appreciated 
 by Robert Burns, arid the consciousness of a dis- 
 tinguished past. For Mr. Stansfeld was a conspicuous 
 figure in political life before the present Home Secretary 
 went to school. It is eight-and-twenty years since Mr. 
 Stansfeld's relations with Mazzini excited the Tory 
 party in the House of Commons. In the trial of Greco 
 and others for conspiring to assassinate the Emperor of 
 the French, the Procureur Imperial said that Greco's
 
 MR. STANSFELD. 75 
 
 address in London was 35, Thurloe Square, and he 
 found with sadness that it was the address of a member 
 of the Parliament of England who already, in 1857, 
 had been appointed by Mazzini treasurer to the Tibaldi 
 Plot. Mr. Stansfeld was questioned as to this state- 
 ment, and made a spirited reply, which Mr. Forster said 
 was quite satisfactory to the country. A little later Sir 
 Henry Stracey gave notice of a resolution declaring 
 that the speech of the Procureur Imperial deserved 
 the serious consideration of the House. Mr. Stansfeld 
 at once resigned, but Lord Palmerston would not hear 
 of resignation. The debate came on, and Mr. Disraeli 
 made one of his most portentous speeches. Mr. Stans- 
 feld, he said, had been the medium of communication 
 between Mazzini and his correspondents. " What cor- 
 respondents ? " asked Mr. Stansfeld. " What corre- 
 spondents ? says the member for Halifax," replied Mr. 
 Disraeli, in his most solemn tones ; " why, the assassins 
 of Europe ! What correspondents ? says the hon. 
 member for Halifax ; why, the men who point their 
 poniards at the breasts of our allies ! " Mr. Bright 
 made a vigorous reply, vindicating Mazzini, and con- 
 cluded by saying : "If I were as hungry as the 
 hungriest to take my seat on that bench, I should be 
 ashamed to make my way to it upon the character, the 
 reputation, the happiness, and the future of the last 
 appointed and the youngest member of the Govern- 
 ment." The motion was defeated by a majority of ten, 
 and Mr. Stansfeld, anxious not to embarrass the 
 Government, persisted in resigning. The attack had
 
 76 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 not only failed, but greatly .increased his reputation, 
 and two years later he became a member of the Govern- 
 ment formed by Lord Russell, on Lord Palmerston's 
 decease. In 1868 he became a Lord of the Treasury in 
 Mr. Gladstone's Government. While he was at the 
 Treasury Mr. Forster introduced into his Education 
 Bill the compromise which so deeply offended the 
 supporters of undenominational teaching. Sir George 
 Trevelyan resigned, and it is said that Mr. Gladstone 
 has never forgiven him. If Mr. Stansfeld had done 
 the same, he might have become the leader of the 
 Radicals below the gangway. In the exercise of his 
 discretion he remained in office, and Mr. Gladstone 
 made him President of the Poor Law Board when Mr. 
 Goschen became First Lord of the Admiralty. In this 
 office he originated the Local Government Board, and 
 became its first President. But in the Government of 
 1880 Mr. Stansfeld held no post. New men notably 
 Mr. Chamberlain shouldered him out, and he has since 
 only for a few brief months in 1S8G returned to official 
 life. The interpretation of the facts may vary ; but 
 the facts are curious, and ought to be instructive. 
 
 Mr. Stansfeld has sat for his native town of Halifax 
 without interruption for thirty-three years. Very few 
 members of Parliament could say as much. Mr. Villiers 
 has represented Wolverhampton, now divided, since 
 1834. But he has not been seen in the town since 
 1874, and his election must be regarded as rather the 
 preservation of an ancient monument than the choice 
 of a popular representative. When Mr. Chamberlain
 
 MB. 8TAN8FELD. 77 
 
 resigned in 1886, Mr. Stansfeld returned to the Local 
 Government Board, after twelve years of emancipation 
 from the thraldom of office. His Parliamentary experi- 
 ence is almost unsurpassed, and he has not become less 
 Eadical with age. In the late Parliament he took the 
 lead in criticising the Local Government Bill from 
 the front Opposition bench, and he was subse- 
 quently entrusted with the charge of the Liberal Regis- 
 tration Bill ; tasks that he accomplished judiciously. 
 Mr. Stansfeld's exclusion from the Ministry may be 
 explained in various ways. Mr. Gladstone makes mis- 
 takes, like other people, and this may be one of them. 
 At the same time, it is possible for a man to outlive his 
 usefulness without surviving his reputation "jam rude 
 donatus" as Horace says having received his testi- 
 monial, whatever it may be. Mr. Lowe, and even 
 Lord Cardwell, were anxious to come back in 1880. 
 Mr. Stansfeld, however, is not infirm in mind or body. 
 But the controversy to which with admirable courage 
 he devoted so much of his time and energies is closed. 
 He completely succeeded in the crusade which he led 
 against the legal recognition of immorality. On women's 
 suffrage he has lived to see a great reaction in the 
 Liberal party, and a counterbalancing move forward 
 among Conservatives. Mr. Stansfeld remains staunch 
 in that as in other matters. Such a Parliamentary 
 career as his cannot be affected by office, or the want of 
 it. It is to be hoped that Mr. Stansfeld's long, 
 useful, and honourable connection with Halifax may 
 be prolonged through more than one Parliament yet.
 
 THE DUKE OF DEVONSHIRE. 
 
 SOON after Mr. Disraeli had been created Earl of 
 Beaconsfield he was congratulated by a brother Peer 
 upon his elevation. " I feel," said Lord Beaconsfield, 
 with the funereal pomposity which marked his later 
 manner " I feel like one already dead ; " then, remem- 
 bering the status of the congratulator, he added, with 
 a nicker of the old spirit : " and in the realms of bliss." 
 Lord Hartington sat in the House of Commons for 
 five-and-thirty years, almost as long as Mr. Disraeli. 
 For five years he was the nominal leader of the Opposi- 
 tion. For fifteen years he was in office. He took his 
 seat in the House of Lords at the first available oppor- 
 tunity. The change must be very great, and, like the 
 result of the Rossendale election, not the more welcome 
 for having been expected. The late Duke of Devon- 
 shire lived to a great age, and devoted a long life, as 
 well as intellectual capacity of a high order, to the good 
 of his neighbours and dependents. He was a lay saint. 
 His son and successor is a very different sort of person. 
 A man of the world, a man of pleasure, of society, of 
 the hunting field, and of the race-course, he has never- 
 theless played, and may yet play, a considerable part in 
 the history of the world. He was not, like most boys
 
 THE DUKE OF DEVONSHIRE. 79 
 
 of his class, sent to a public school ; and it would be 
 interesting if some admirer of those institutions could 
 point out in which of the qualities they are supposed 
 to foster the Duke of Devonshire is deficient. At 
 Cambridge his career was brief and undistinguished, 
 though an academic toady has sought to prove that it 
 would have been extremely brilliant if only it had been 
 a little longer. 
 
 Lord Hartington was really forced into politics 
 against his will, to prevent him from wasting his whole 
 time in amusement. A valuable essay might be 
 written on the use of the British Constitution as a 
 cure for idleness in young men of quality. There are 
 great advantages in such an apprenticeship to public 
 life as Lord Hartington's. There was nothing meri- 
 torious in his early dislike of politics. On the contrary, 
 it showed a rather pusillanimous indifference to the 
 opportunities of his birth and station. But the cant 
 of the British Philistine denounces ambition as sordid, 
 and extols indifference as generous. Because Lord 
 Hartington preferred Newmarket to Westminster, and 
 found the trammels of office inconveniently restrictive, 
 he has been compared with Lord Althorp, a simple, 
 humble-minded, and deeply religious man, who hated 
 publicity, shrank from fame, and desired only to pro- 
 mote the welfare of the nation. The Duke of Devon- 
 shire's political career has been a strictly upright and 
 honourable one. He has never intrigued ; he has 
 never caballed ; he has never made difficulties because 
 his own claims were imperfectly recognised. But he
 
 80 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 has taken the ordinary prizes of Parliamentary life as 
 they came, and up to 1886 he never showed the slightest 
 reluctance to accept them. In 1875 he was offered the 
 leadership of the Liberal party in the House of Commons. 
 He was supported by Mr. Gladstone, by Mr. Bright, 
 and by many Nonconformist Radicals who were dis- 
 satisfied with the educational policy of Mr. Forster. 
 Mr. Forster, however, had influential backing, and if 
 Lord Hartington had retired would unquestionably 
 have been elected. Lord Hartington was perfectly 
 justified in allowing himself to be nominated, and 
 Mr. Forster withdrew. An admirer has recently 
 declared that Lord Hartington did the same, but that 
 his withdrawal " characteristically came too late." If 
 unconscious humour be the most amusing, unconscious 
 satire is surely the most severe. In 1880 the Queen 
 sent for Lord Hartington, and directed him to form an 
 Administration. Instead of at once declining a hopeless 
 task, he applied to Mr. Gladstone and to the late Lord 
 Granville. Here, again, he was entirely within his 
 rights. But on both occasions Lord Althorp would 
 have pursued the opposite course. 
 
 The Duke of Devonshire is not in any way a re- 
 markable man. His mind and character are of the 
 most ordinary type ; but he possesses useful and 
 sterling qualities. He is conspicuously free from 
 meanness or malignity. What he knows he under- 
 stands thoroughly, and he is well acquainted with the 
 limits of his own knowledge. He came into the House 
 of Commons one of the worst speakers that ever
 
 THE DUKE OF DEVONSHIRE. 81 
 
 addressed it. A heavy manner, a limited vocabulary, a 
 thick utterance, and an apparent lack of all interest 
 in what he was saying, seemed to conspire against 
 success. But perseverance and a marquisate will over- 
 come many obstacles. Lord Hartington took office, 
 and was forced to speak frequently. He gradually 
 conquered his worst defects, and then his solid ability 
 came out. The Duke of Devonshire is never eloquent, 
 and he is often exceedingly dull. But his meaning is 
 always perfectly clear; his abstinence from exaggeration 
 is in itself a power ; and he has the invaluable habit of 
 going straight to the point. What was said of Lord 
 Castlereagh may be said of him. He is a very diffi- 
 cult speaker to answer. When Mr. Gladstone argued 
 that the Plan of Campaign was the consequence of 
 rejecting Mr. ParnelTs Land Bill, many indignant and 
 irrelevant comments were made by the Tories. Lord 
 Hartington hit the nail on the head at once. " Is it 
 the legitimate consequence ? " he asked. There was the 
 whole case of his party put in a nutshell, and that a 
 hard nutshell to crack. 
 
 As Leader of the Opposition, Lord Hartington only 
 confronted Mr. Disraeli in 1875 and 1876. By the 
 time the Eastern Question became really acute Mr. 
 Disraeli had gone up higher, and Lord Hartington was 
 more fairly matched with Sir Stafford Northcote. Sir 
 Stafford was the cleverer and by far the better educated 
 man of the two. Lord Hartington had more strength 
 of purpose, less sensitiveness, more backbone. The 
 parts, or at least the places, ought to have been
 
 82 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 reversed. Sir Stafford Northcote was a Conservative- 
 Liberal; Lord Hartington was a Liberal- Conserva- 
 tive. Had the Duke of Devonshire belonged to a 
 Tory family, he would never have left the Tory party, 
 though he would have done his best to cure it of its 
 worst prejudices. In the Liberal party he was never 
 quite at ease, and his final secession from it in 1886 
 must have come to him with a feeling of relief. It 
 would be wrong to say that Lord Hartington, like 
 Lord Selborne, was never in any sense a Liberal at 
 all. He is, or was, in colloquial language, a " Why 
 the devil shouldn't he ? " sort of Liberal, and that is 
 not a bad sort, by any means. General tolerance and 
 licence, easy-going indifference to priggish scruples, 
 have always characterised him, and the Nonconformists 
 soon discovered that he had no ecclesiastical bias. His 
 principal objections to the disestablishment of the 
 Church are understood to be the trouble it would in- 
 volve, and the danger to the security of landed estates 
 which it might possibly bring in its train. If he had 
 not left Mr. Gladstone on Home Eule, he would 
 probably have left him on something else before long. 
 All through the Administration of 1880 to 1885 he 
 was chafing under Mr. Gladstone's supremacy, and by 
 some unfortunate mischance the leading Conservatives 
 knew it. He would have better maintained his 
 reputation for chivalry the grounds of which are 
 not easily discoverable if he had protested against 
 the attacks which are still made by his present allies 
 against Mr. Gladstone as "the murderer of Gordon."
 
 THE DUKE OF DEVONSHIRE. 83 
 
 The murderer of Gordon was an Arab fanatic ; but 
 if any British statesman could be so described without 
 gross and ludicrous calumny, it would be the Duke 
 of Devonshire himself. 
 
 The Duke of Devonshire has always been distin- 
 guished for simplicity, directness, and hatred of fuss. 
 Naturally indolent, but thoroughly business-like, he 
 developed in office the great gift of perceiving what, 
 and what only, he must necessarily do himself. That 
 he did, and did uncommonly well. The rest he left to 
 subordinates, who in the British Civil Service can 
 always be trusted. In the House of Commons Lord 
 Hartington seldom showed any sort of feeling, and his 
 stoicism in the terrible year 1882 was marvellous. In 
 one or two instances, however, he was really moved, 
 and the effect was striking. When Lord Randolph 
 Churchill insinuated in the form of a question a silly 
 charge of underhand conduct against the then Secretary 
 for India, Lord Hartington blazed out after a fashion 
 which considerably astonished and rather alarmed the 
 arch mischief-maker below the gangway. When the 
 Tories made their shameful and scandalous onslaught 
 upon Lord Spencer in 1885, Lord Hartington defended 
 him with a spirit and warmth as impressive as they 
 were creditable. But these are rare exceptions. The 
 Duke of Devonshire's disposition is phlegmatic, and he 
 is seldom roused out of it. His manners are not 
 polished. They are too frequently of the kind which 
 causes children to be called " spoilt." Perhaps it is 
 not good for any of the sons of men to have precisely 
 P 2
 
 84 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 what they want all their lives ; it engenders satiety, and 
 removes the sense of social obligation. On the other 
 hand, there is nothing affected about the Duke he 
 gives himself no airs. His behaviour is perfectly 
 natural sometimes only too natural. It is not that he- 
 wishes to be rude, but that he has never had any par- 
 ticular motive for being civil. The Duke of Devonshire 
 is not a man of science, like his father, nor a man of 
 letters, like his former chief. His speeches may be 
 searched in vain for literary quotations or historic 
 allusions. He once candidly admitted in public that he- 
 did not know the source of the most familiar line in 
 Terence. His books are of the kind which are made 
 rather than written. Like Sir Henry James, he has 
 much improved as a speaker since he left the 
 Liberal party. It is an undoubted fact that he felt 
 himself overshadowed and slighted between 1880 and 
 1886. Within the limits of good sense and good 
 taste, he has since shown clearly enough that he enjoys 
 the increased consideration his independent attitude 
 conferred.
 
 MR. SEXTON. 
 
 MR. SEXTON'S reputation is entirely Parliamentary. On 
 English, platforms he is little known. In his own 
 -country, except in Belfast and on the Corporation of 
 Dublin, his influence is not for a moment to be compared 
 with Mr. Healy's, or Mr. Dillon's, or Mr. O'Brien's. In 
 the House of Commons none of his compatriots can 
 touch him. He belongs to a different class. Apart 
 from Mr. Gladstone, who is above competition, his only 
 rivals in debate are Mr. Chamberlain, Lord Eandolph 
 Churchill, Mr. Goschen, and Sir William Harcourt. 
 But he differs from these eminent statesmen by being 
 a member of Parliament, and nothing more. He has 
 never, from the nature of things, been in office, though 
 few, if any, offices would be too high for his capacity. 
 He has never had any profession, except that sort of 
 journalism which is really a branch of politics. He is 
 not a man of pleasure, or fashion, or sport, or letters. He 
 lives in and for the House of Commons. He knows 
 its rules by heart. He regards its traditions with a 
 respect not shared by many of his colleagues. He is as 
 good a judge of order as the Speaker, and he recently 
 showed that he knew Parliamentary English, such as it 
 is, a great deal better than Mr. Balfour. Mr. Sexton
 
 86 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 entered the House of Commons twelve years ago, when 
 he was thirty-two, a finished dehater. Wherever he 
 learned the art, he had learned it thoroughly. The super- 
 stition that all Irishmen are naturally fluent cannot 
 survive the most meagre acquaintance with the House of 
 Commons. The Irish Parliamentary party contains 
 some of the most excruciating orators in the civilised 
 world. Even Mr. Dillon, who is far above the average, 
 has not reached the second rate, and it requires ex- 
 citement in his hearers, as well as in himself, to draw 
 out the really fine rhetorical gifts of Mr. O'Brien. 
 Mr. Sexton has never, since his election for Sligo 
 in 1880, made a bad speech. He has made many 
 which deserve to be ranked among model specimens of 
 Parliamentary style. 
 
 It was some time before Mr. Sexton's rare and 
 peculiar powers became known, even in the House itself. 
 At the beginning of the Parliament in which he first 
 took his seat there was a disposition among Liberals 
 and Conservatives alike to lump all the Parnellites 
 together. The cant of the day assumed that they were 
 a parcel of obstructives ; that they talked either for the 
 sake of talking or with the object of wasting time ; 
 that it was folly to listen to a word they said ; and 
 that the way in which they said it was a matter of 
 perfect indifference to everyone except themselves. 
 " Oh, let him go on ! " exclaimed a Liberal member 
 when Mr. Dillon was. giving his reasons probably very 
 good ones why Mr. Forster's Coercion Bill should not 
 be passed. But affectation always breaks down sooner
 
 MR. SEXTON. 87 
 
 or later, and this sham cynicism did not last very 
 long. Mr. Sexton spoke patiently, frequently, and 
 assiduously. Gradually it dawned upon his Parliament- 
 ary colleagues that listening to him was a more 
 instructive, as well as a more seemly, occupation than 
 interrupting him. They then discovered that they 
 had amongst them a master of polished sentences and 
 pointed epigrams, who was never slovenly, and always 
 effective. Mr. Sexton, in those days, cared nothing for 
 the aspect of the House. He would address a dozen 
 members at four in the morning with as much care 
 and finish as if the House were crowded from floor to 
 roof at five o'clock in the afternoon. Things are very 
 different now. It is understood that Mr. Sexton must 
 speak at the beginning of a debate or at the end of it, 
 when the benches are full and the interest general. 
 To the vanity which waits upon success he is not a 
 stranger. But it ought, in fairness, to be remembered 
 that he worked out his apprenticeship, and in the days 
 of his political youth flung away upon emptiness, in 
 the small hours, pearls which an inferior performer 
 would have preserved for great occasions. Mr. Sexton 
 must have spent more hours than most men in the 
 precincts of St. Stephen's. In the good old days, when 
 members of Parliament had not become respectable, 
 and were accustomed to go home with the milkman, 
 Mr. Sexton was at his post early and late. He did 
 not go into society or frequent London clubs. At a 
 later period, when Mr. Parnell's principal followers were 
 honoured and genial guests at the festive gatherings
 
 88 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 of the Liberal party, Mr. Sexton was rarely, if ever, 
 to be seen among them. The House of Commons 
 is to him, as dogs were to the character in Dickens, 
 not a mere amusement, but meat, and drink, and house, 
 and wife, and family. 
 
 Mr. Sexton's eloquence is essentially of the Parlia- 
 mentary stamp. He seldom appeals to the feelings, and 
 never carries people off their feet with enthusiasm as 
 O'Connell and Bright did, as Mr. Gladstone can still 
 do. Mr. Sexton is cool, clear, humorous, argumenta- 
 tive, sometimes bitterly ironical. He has no Hiber- 
 nian gush, thorough Irishman as he is in mind and 
 speech. He assumes a certain amount of intelligence in 
 his hearers, and has in consequence suffered from some 
 very ludicrous misrepresentations. When Mr. O'Brien 
 is tearing a passion to tatters, the dullest observer can 
 see that something unusual is going on. Mr. Sexton 
 does not play to the gallery. Some of his best things 
 are dropped out, as it were, inadvertently, in a quiet, 
 conversational, almost confidential tone. He is extra- 
 ordinarily fluent. But fluency is an ambiguous and 
 misleading term. Colonel Nolan is fluent. So far as 
 fluency means carelessness of speech or incontinence of 
 tongue, it has no application to Mr. Sexton. No man 
 weighs his words more thoroughly, or prepares his 
 periods more carefully when he has time and oppor- 
 tunity to prepare them. On the other hand, there are 
 very few who can rise better to an emergency, or 
 whose extemporaneous deliverances will better bear 
 examination. Mr. Sexton's worst fault is of a totally
 
 MR. SEXTON. 89 
 
 different kind. He is generally a slow speaker, and not a 
 quick one. His pauses are sometimes very trying. When 
 lie looks round the House with a complacent smile, as if 
 congratulating members on the treat he had provided 
 for them, the gorge of the natural man rises, and he 
 feels half inclined to be rude. The idea that Mr. Sexton 
 is simply a word spinner, a proficient in the manu- 
 facture of phrases without substance, is, as Carlyle would 
 say, quite curiously the reverse of the truth. Mr. 
 Sexton is an excellent man of business, an astute tacti- 
 cian, and a very useful member of important commit- 
 tees. The speech in which he exposed the Irish Local 
 Government Bill was a capital example of his best style. 
 He had learned the Bill almost by heart, he had all its 
 provisions at his fingers' ends, and he turned them into 
 a, ridicule which was fatal because it was founded on 
 knowledge. 
 
 Mr. Sexton has been twice Lord Mayor of Dublin, 
 and even his enemies admit that his administration of 
 the office was most successful. He is not a rich man, 
 and the Lord Mayor of Dublin can save something out 
 of his allowance if he likes. Mr. Sexton disdained to 
 take that advantage of his position, and set a high 
 example of pecuniary disinterestedness. His manage- 
 ment of the Corporation's finances was singularly skilful, 
 and has left permanent results in the shape of municipal 
 stock at low interest and a premium. Mr. Sexton is 
 said not to be popular in his own party, and he has not 
 many friends among English politicians. When he left 
 Mr. Parnell and followed Mr. McCarthy, it was not
 
 90 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 from any fondness for Englishmen and their ways. He 
 is suspected of playing his own game and fighting for 
 his own hand, regardless of the common cause. But in 
 going with the majority after the divorce case, he 
 certainly took the patriotic line ; and if Home Eule 
 triumphs, he will have done more than most men to 
 obtain the victory. Mr. Sexton's temper is rather fiery, 
 and he sometimes blazes into wrath on insufficient 
 provocation. When he called Colonel Saunderson a 
 wilful and deliberate liar, Colonel Saunderson had 
 genially told him that he associated with men whom he 
 knew to be murderers. If the Speaker had not felt 
 that he allowed Colonel Saunderson to go too far, he 
 must have named Mr. Sexton to the House. Not a 
 particle of evidence was produced before the Special 
 Commission to connect Mr. Sexton with outrage, or 
 crime, or lawlessness of any kind, and the charge was 
 the figment of an Orange imagination. But if Mr. 
 Sexton did well to be angry then, he has been too often 
 angry since. A man cannot help coming into the world 
 with a thin skin ; but he may make it thicker by self- 
 control, as he may make it thinner by self-indulgence. 
 Mr. Sexton is not of the stuff from which leaders of 
 men are constructed ; but he is a great member of 
 Parliament, if ever there was one.
 
 SIR RICHARD TEMPLE. 
 
 THOSE and there are too many who sit in the seat of 
 the scornful say that Sir Richard Temple obtained a, 
 baronetcy by inventing a famine. Probably the 
 scarcity was as genuine and also as important as the 
 title. That Sir Richard displayed on that, as on other 
 occasions, unbounded energy, no one who knows him 
 will feel any difficulty in believing. Nor will his 
 friends find it easy to doubt that the Lieutenant- 
 Grovernor conducted select parties of ladies to see the 
 waggon-loads of provisions which he introduced in such 
 quantities that, according to malicious and probably 
 unfounded rumour, they had to be burned. The Civil 
 Service of India contains some of the hardest workers 
 in the world ; but by universal consent Sir Richard 
 Temple rivalled the best of them in that particular. 
 Long before he became Lieutenant-Grovernor of Bengal 
 he was known as a man of inordinate industry. He 
 did not come into the world with an unusually large 
 stock of brains. He is one of the driest writers of his 
 own or any other age. He does not shine in conversa- 
 tion. He belongs to the plodding order of genius if 
 genius is, as Carlyle said, an immense capacity for 
 taking pains. He has, however, one quality without
 
 :92 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 which mere laboriousness is no path to fame. He 
 was always careful to employ a trumpeter, and when no 
 other was to be had, he acted as his own. Nothing 
 that he did which could by any possibility conduce to 
 his immediate or prospective advancement was ever 
 hidden from the public or the departmental eye. Is it 
 a world to hide virtues in ? Sir Richard Temple's 
 answer to Sir Toby Belch's question was an emphatic 
 negative. The moment he was released from the 
 function of administering Bengal, he became a candidate 
 for Parliament. His most intimate friends had no idea 
 on which side " Dick Temple " would range himself, 
 and it is understood that Conservatism owes the honour 
 of his championship to the eligibility of a vacant seat in 
 a Conservative district. But having chosen his party, 
 Sir Richard stuck to it, as he has always stuck to every- 
 thing. Dr. Whewell used to be fond of asserting that 
 the most valuable of all human qualities was what he 
 called " stiction," and Sir Richard Temple is an excel- 
 lent illustration of the rule. His bitterest enemy could 
 not deny that he had discharged his Parliamentary 
 duties with unusual zeal. He boasts of having never 
 missed a division during his twelve years of Parliament- 
 ary life. Neither social nor domestic ties are strong 
 enough to detain him from the lobby. The approach of 
 the last General Election inspired him with some dis- 
 trust in the fidelity of his "Worcestershire followers. He 
 therefore transferred himself to the Kingston Division 
 of Surrey, where Mr. Charles Hodgson ran him much 
 closer than he expected. His methods of electioneering
 
 SIR RICHARD TEMPLE. 93 
 
 were more astute than magnanimous, and much amuse- 
 ment was caused by his sudden discovery that the 
 gardeners at Kew were under-paid. 
 
 The House of Commons soon found it expedient 
 to make terms with Sir Richard Temple. At first he 
 showed a desire to take part not only in every division, 
 but also in every debate. This was plainly intolerable, 
 and the late ruler of millions had to be coughed 
 down. But the House is a sensible and tolerant 
 body. It acknowledged Sir Eichard Temple's right 
 to be heard on Indian subjects, and stipulated that he 
 should confine his attention or, at least, his oratorical 
 efforts thereto. Sir Eichard Temple does not, of 
 course, know India. Nobody knows India, except a 
 few tourists who have spent an autumn holiday there. 
 Sir Eichard, however, knows some portions of India 
 very well, and is perhaps, on the whole, as good an 
 authority as could be found. His view is always the 
 official one ; but he expresses it with sense and 
 moderation. A grotesque and half -unconscious humour 
 prevents him from being a conventional bore. Nobody 
 has ever succeeded in more thoroughly convulsing the 
 House of Commons. Sir Eichard Temple plays many 
 parts. Legislation does not suffice for his energies. 
 What time he can spare from Westminster, where he 
 squires many dames, he spends at a lower stage of the 
 Thames Embankment, where he unfolds the educational 
 budget of London. For some years he was Vice- 
 chairman of the London School Board, and -used 
 literally to sit under the then Eeverend Joseph Diggle r
 
 94 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 much to the diversion of the idle spectators in the 
 Gallery ; for Mr. Diggle looked for all the world like 
 the simple and innocent son of the slightly rakish 
 and comparatively elderly personage below him. The 
 present Speaker has curtailed, and might with ad- 
 vantage abolish, the absurd practice of putting questions 
 to members not in the Government about subjects with 
 which they are concerned in another capacity. Sir 
 Richard Temple was immensely delighted when in- 
 quiries were put to him on metropolitan education. 
 He rose with a more than Ministerial air of consequence, 
 and he answered in a tone which seemed to combine 
 the solemn dignity of a judge passing sentence of death 
 with the tender grace of a gentleman making a proposal 
 of marriage. He was once asked what would be done 
 if a certain Teachers' Superannuation Bill did not pass. 
 He rose with a smile of beatified self-complacency, 
 holding his hat with one hand and his heart with the 
 other. " Mr. Speaker," he said, " what will happen if 
 that Bill does not pass is a question which no man 
 living can answer." If Sir Richard desired to excite 
 laughter, he had every reason to be satisfied. The 
 hilarity was long, loud, and boisterous. There is good 
 ground for supposing that Sir Richard Temple pro- 
 duces his budgets with zeal and care. He is a strong 
 partisan of denominational education, which is odd in 
 an Anglo-Indian. But he gets up his figures, if 
 he cannot be said to present them, in an intelligible 
 shape. 
 
 Sir Richard Temple's appearance has been made
 
 SIR RICHARD TEMPLE. 95 
 
 familiar to the civilised world by the pencil of Mr. 
 Harry Furniss. Wilkes described himself as only half 
 an hour behind the handsomest man in England, 
 and Sir Richard counts himself a terrible lady-killer. 
 Mr. Disraeli used to cite Sir Greorge Campbell as having 
 destroyed his belief in the faculty of government. Sir 
 George and Sir Richard both exercised the faculty 
 in Bengal. Sir Greorge Campbell was a simple, honest 
 man of great ability, who ruined himself in the Parlia- 
 mentary sense by indulging a tendency to irresponsible 
 chatter. His good points were not such as to strike 
 Mr. Disraeli, who would greatly have enjoyed, had 
 time and fate permitted, the humours (not the humour) 
 of Sir Richard Temple. Anglo-Indians are not wont 
 to charm the House of Commons. Sir James Fer- 
 gusson is, perhaps, the least unsuccessful of them in 
 that respect, and Sir James Fergusson was a member of 
 Parliament before his connection with India began. 
 Sir Richard Temple is ready at any moment with 
 an address on any aspect of Indian life or politics which 
 may come uppermost in debate. A Mechanics' In- 
 stitute would find him a good standing dish when more 
 interesting lecturers were not to be had. Sir Richard 
 has obtained a certain sort of reputation, and if he likes 
 it, there is no more to be said. But he would have 
 acquired more durable, and on the whole more re- 
 spectable, fame if he had waited for the nomination 
 to the Indian Council which he would almost certainly 
 have received. Assiduity and good humour are in- 
 sufficient qualifications for Parliamentary life. It would
 
 96 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 be harsh to say that Sir Eichard's imperturbable temper 
 was the result of crass insensibility. But undoubtedly 
 his skin is tough, and if he would not rather be noticed 
 in any way than left unnoticed altogether, his conduct 
 strangely belies his disposition. To go everywhere, 
 or rather to be seen everywhere, is apparently his 
 guiding principle in life. The character is a difficult 
 one to sustain, and it requires qualities which Sir 
 Eichard Temple conspicuously lacks.
 
 THE EARL OF ROSEBERY. 
 
 SPEAKING at Manchester on the 25th of June, 1886, 
 immediately after the defeat of the Home Rule Bill, 
 and just before the General Election, Mr. Gladstone 
 introduced Lord Rosebery, " the youngest member of 
 the Cabinet," as "the man of the future." Lord Rose- 
 bery was not then forty years of age, while his brief and 
 brilliant career at the Foreign Office was fresh in the 
 public mind. A good many years have passed since 
 then. Time and sorrow have done their work. But 
 Lord Rosebery is still one of the youngest statesmen 
 of Cabinet rank. The curtains of the future hang, and 
 Mr. Gladstone is happily younger than ever. There is 
 one good reason perhaps two why Lord Rosebery 
 should not succeed to the leadership of his party. 
 He sits in the House of Lords, and he will be 
 urgently needed in the direct conduct of foreign 
 affairs. The spectacle of a Prime Minister in a small 
 and perpetual minority of legislators, whose right 
 to legislate his followers denied, would not be dignified. 
 The combination of the Foreign Office with the Pre- 
 miership is the worst that could be imagined, and means 
 either no Foreign Secretary or no head of the Govern- 
 ment. Lord Salisbury's reputation would stand higher
 
 98 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 than it does if he had contented himself with the duties 
 he discharged under Lord Beaconsfield. Lord Palmer - 
 ston did not attempt the double work, and even Mr. 
 Canning reluctantly abandoned the ideal which Lord 
 Salisbury has failed to realise. The field of European 
 diplomacy should be wide enough, and the charge of 
 British interests abroad should be great enough, for the 
 most inordinate ambition. 
 
 Lord Rosebery had the ill luck to succeed his grand- 
 father in the Peerage the year he attained his majority. 
 He never, therefore, had the chance of entering the House 
 of Commons, where he would have been improved by dis- 
 cipline, and where he would have won early distinction. 
 From one supreme calamity he was saved by a circum- 
 stance as accidental as his earldom. His grandfather 
 was a Baron of the United Kingdom as well as a 
 Scottish earl. Had he not borne the technically inferior 
 title, his grandson would have been practically dis- 
 qualified from sitting in either House of Parliament. 
 He would have been ineligible for the Commons, and as 
 a Liberal, the Scottish Peers would never have sent him 
 to represent them in the House of Lords. The ingenuity 
 of Mr. Hunter, M.P., has, however, found him out. The 
 Scottish Home Rule Bill introduced by that ardent 
 Radical would entirely exclude Lord Rosebery from all 
 share in the government of his country ; for it consti- 
 tutes the Queen and the members for Scottish constitu- 
 encies the sole legislative authority for Scotland. The 
 popular training which Lord Rosebery missed in the 
 House of Commons has been supplied by the London
 
 THE EARL OF ROSEBERT. 99 
 
 County Council. As the first chairman of that miscel- 
 laneous and thoroughly representative assembly, he 
 learned more than the House of Lords would have 
 taught him in half a century. How admirably he 
 performed his functions, everybody knows. Lord 
 Eosebery's tact and knowledge of men are almost 
 Napoleonic in their irresistible completeness. His task 
 was a most difficult and delicate one. The body over 
 which he presided was raw and inexperienced, sensitive 
 and independent, amorphous and unruly. His official 
 authority was almost nothing. By personal influence 
 and capacity for business, without any collision, alterca- 
 tion, or disturbance, Lord Eosebery introduced harmony, 
 order, mutual confidence, and respect. It was a remark- 
 able achievement, the more so inasmuch as no more 
 serious complaint could be made against the Chairman 
 than that he was too fond of getting his own way. If 
 he had not got it, the consequences would have been 
 disastrous. 
 
 Lord Eosebery did not belong to the class of studious 
 youth. His abilities were very soon discovered and 
 appreciated by his tutor at Eton, a man who, though 
 little known to the public, had a real genius for teaching. 
 At Christ Church he only kept race-horses, and it 
 looked as if he would be chiefly known at Doncaster and 
 Newmarket. But Lord Eosebery was always ah early 
 riser, and it is said that he used to read before his friends 
 were up. In 1871 Mr. Gladstone selected him to second 
 the Address; and in 18 74 he presided, not without exciting 
 some merriment, over the deliberations of the Social 
 G 2
 
 100 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 Science Congress. He lias been Lord Eector of two Scot- 
 tish Universities, following in one case, with ludicrous 
 incongruity, the late William Edward Forster. Although 
 Lord Eosebery held no very important post until he 
 was appointed Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, it 
 became gradually known that he had not only keen 
 literary tastes, but immense powers of industry and 
 achievement. Although he wrote for publication very 
 little before his study of Pitt, his clever and amusing 
 review of Mr. Richard Hutton's biography of Scott in 
 The Academy showed that he could turn neat sentences 
 with his pen as well as with his tongue. His speaking 
 was thought by the serious to savour of flippancy, 
 and he shares with Lord Melbourne the quality of 
 seeming to know a good deal less than he really 
 knows. He took up with some zeal the subjects of 
 Imperial Federation and reform of the House of Lords. 
 But nothing much came of them ; and before much 
 time had passed Lord Eosebery would probably have 
 been almost as glad to withdraw with a decent excuse 
 from the Federation League as to walk out of those 
 doors which, as he once pathetically said, " only open 
 inwards/' 
 
 In 1886 Lord Eosebery, in the French phrase, "ar- 
 rived," and since that date he has ranked, by universal 
 consent, among the foremost personages in the country. 
 Lord Eosebery had the good sense to follow his party 
 rather than his class, and to stand by the cause of Home 
 Eule from the first. Personal loyalty, or rather, filial 
 devotion to Mr. Gladstone, may have had something to
 
 THE EARL OF UOSEBERY. 101 
 
 do with this decision. But Lord Eosebery is a great 
 Opportunist, a singularly shrewd and far-sighted man 
 of the world. " The doom of an aristocracy divorced 
 from the people," he exclaimed in one of his finest 
 speeches, " is written on the ruined palaces of Venice 
 and in every page of history." Not "by nature a 
 Radical or a Democrat, he has no strong bias against 
 Eadicalism, and a good deal of sympathy with Demo- 
 cracy. He is ambitious, not of pomp, or grandeur, or 
 rank, or dignity but of power. Knowing where the 
 centre of power is, Lord Eosebery longs to be in the 
 House of Commons, and casts a retrospective glance of 
 envy on Pitt for having been a younger son. He 
 supports, if he did not suggest, Mr. Morley's proposal 
 that the House of Lords should be gradually drained of 
 its available talent by allowing the Peers to renounce 
 their privileges and their disabilities together. In his 
 " Life of Pitt " are to be found sentiments and expres- 
 sions which might be cited to prove that the writer was 
 something very like a Tory. But that would be a 
 wholly false inference. Lord Eosebery cares no more 
 for Toryism than he cares for Etruscan antiquities. Pitt, 
 or rather the ideal Pitt he has chosen to draw, is for him 
 the embodiment of will, of force, of ascendancy over 
 other men. If Lord Eosebery were to favour the world 
 with his views on Napoleon, it would probably be found 
 that he had an even more questionable hero than Pitt. 
 Lord Eosebery on the wrong side might become a very 
 dangerous man. Lord Eandolph Churchill was nearer 
 the truth than he knew when he sportively compared
 
 102 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 Lord Eosebery to Machiavelli. Macliiavelli was not 
 a bad man : on the contrary, he was too good for his 
 age. If Lord Eosebery set his mind on the attainment 
 of any object, there are few things on the right side of 
 morality which would stand in his way. 
 
 Lord Eosebery is essentially a statesman. He has 
 at once a large grasp of great subjects and a fine per- 
 ception of small details. He sees obstacles, but they do 
 not alarm him. He regards them not as things to be 
 avoided, but as things to be overcome. As a speaker, he 
 has many and various merits, especially imperturbability 
 and humour. But he has lately tried higher nights 
 with conspicuous success. The vast meeting he ha- 
 rangued in St. James's Hall on the eve of the second 
 elections for the London County Council was fairly 
 carried off its feet by his unwonted display of enthu- 
 siasm, eloquence, and emotion. As a debater he has un- 
 fortunately no opportunity of showing what he can do. 
 As a talker, he is admirable ; with a wit " so nimble 
 and so full of subtle flame," that one never can have 
 too much of it. His reading is extensive, and his 
 knowledge of political history, especially of those 
 memoirs which are the modern materials for the his- 
 torian, almost complete. But it is not Lord Eose- 
 bery's wit, nor his information which is not, after all, 
 out of the way nor his easy, genial, and gracious 
 manners which interest people most in him. There 
 is great charm in mystery, and Lord Eosebery, per- 
 haps as a result of his friendship with Mr. Disraeli, 
 rather affects the mysterious. It is not, however,
 
 THE EARL OF ROSESERT. 103 
 
 mere affectation. Lord Rosebery's character is not a 
 simple one, and his career may yet puzzle those who 
 think they know him best. As long as he lives he 
 must exercise an important influence on the fortunes 
 of his country, and the stage on which he acts will be 
 well lighted beforehand. Whatever the historian of 
 the nineteenth or twentieth centuries may say of Lord 
 Eosebery, he will have to say a good deal. 
 
 * # * These pages had already been printed when Lord Rosebery 
 became Premier. It has not been thought necessary to make any 
 alteration in them. Indeed, read in the light of this event, they 
 may gain rather than lose in interest.
 
 MR. GOSCHEN. 
 
 GREAT men have their foibles, and Mr. Goschen's pet 
 weakness is an almost passionate readiness to prove, 
 beyond the possibility of doubt or cavil, that he has 
 not a drop of Jewish blood in his veins. His German 
 origin, however, is not to be denied, and cannot be con- 
 cealed, even if he wished to conceal it, by omitting the 
 modification of the " o." Although he was educated at 
 Rugby and Oxford, he is less like an Englishman than 
 was the late French Ambassador, who was educated at 
 Eugby and Cambridge. Perhaps it is his foreign 
 descent which makes Mr. Goschen so nervously desirous 
 of emphasising the ardour of his patriotism on every 
 convenient and inconvenient occasion. The ordinary 
 Briton does not talk about making his will and doing 
 his duty, or state in public what precautions he will 
 take when his house is set on fire, merely because the 
 leader of a political party has proposed an important 
 change in the Constitution. This sort of bluster in- 
 dicates timidity rather than courage, and excites the 
 same kind of feeling in the stolid British mind as Burke 
 excited by throwing a dagger on the floor of the House 
 of Commons. Mr. Goschen does not seem to under- 
 stand that the military metaphors with which he
 
 ME. GOSCHEN. 105 
 
 garnishes his more ambitious speeches are rather ridiculous 
 in an elderly gentleman of commercial pursuits, " that 
 never set a squadron in the field nor the division of a 
 battle knows more than a spinster." It is indeed some- 
 times difficult to believe that Mr. Goschen does not 
 derive his descent from the Pharisees. He is not satis- 
 fied with explaining why in his opinion Home Rule 
 would be bad both for Ireland and for England, nor 
 even how the Liberal party have become unmindful of 
 their national obligations. Nothing will serve him but 
 to claim a monopoly of the cardinal virtues, and to in- 
 sinuate, often in language almost too direct to be called 
 insinuation, that Home Rulers are lost to all sense of 
 morality and decorum. A more complete reversal of 
 the charity which thinketh no evil than Mr. Goschen's 
 speeches afford it would not be easy to imagine. Yet 
 his own skin is of the thinnest, and the least criticism 
 makes him angry. 
 
 The charge of inconsistency as usually brought 
 against Mr. Goschen is greatly exaggerated, if indeed 
 it be not wholly unfounded. No doubt Mr. Goschen 
 entered the House of Commons in 1863 as an advanced 
 Liberal. No doubt he has been since 1886, if not 
 before, an intense Conservative. But thirty years ago 
 Mr. Goschen knew little or nothing about politics. 
 Indeed, so ignorant was he of public affairs that he 
 could not even compose without assistance his address 
 to the electors of the City. He went straight from 
 Oxford into business, and became a Director of the 
 Bank of England. He took a first-class in classics ;
 
 106' STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 but it would be difficult to detect the slightest flavour 
 of classical knowledge in anything he ever said or 
 wrote ; and on a recent visit to his old University 
 he astonished the not very erudite members of the 
 Canning Club by attributing to Horace, in a mutilated 
 form, the most familiar line in all the satires of 
 Juvenal. It is a curious fact that while on the front 
 Opposition Bench in the House of Commons there are 
 at least four good scholars, the Treasury Bench cannot 
 produce one. Mr. Goschen, however, imbibed in 
 Austinfriars a more useful form of knowledge than 
 he acquired at Oriel. No Chancellor of the Exchequer 
 since the institution of that office has been so thor- 
 oughly well acquainted with what Mr. Weller called 
 " those things that are always going up and down in 
 the City." When Mr. Disraeli went to the Exchequer 
 in 1852, he did not know contango from backwardation, 
 and he would not have known interest from discount 
 but for the extravagance of his youth. When Mr. 
 Goschen succeeded Lord Randolph Churchill in 1887, 
 there was not a denizen of Capel Court who could have 
 told him anything new. His special training has its 
 disadvantages. Both his faults and his merits as a 
 Minister of Finance are essentially those of an expert. 
 An amateur of equal ability would have failed where 
 Mr. Goschen succeeded, and succeeded where Mr. 
 Goschen failed. 
 
 John Bright always distrusted Mr. Goschen's 
 Liberalism, and even denied his claim to be regarded 
 as a Liberal at all. In later years Mr. Chamberlain
 
 ME. GOSGHEK 107 
 
 took up and exaggerated Mr. Bright's opinion. When 
 Mr. Goschen joined Lord Salisbury's Cabinet, he 
 astonished his colleagues, especially that most moderate 
 of men, the late Mr. Smith, by the strength and fer- 
 vour of his Conservatism. It was probably always 
 there. In 1863 the City was Liberal within the 
 Palmerstonian meaning of the word, and was tolerably 
 faithful to its old connection with Lord Russell. Mr. 
 Goschen had the same politics as the City. He has 
 the same politics as the City still. After Lord Palmer- 
 ston's death he joined Lord Russell's Government, and 
 fell under the influence of Mr. Gladstone, in whose 
 Cabinet he sat from 1868 to 1874. If Mr. Gladstone 
 had never made a speech or passed a Bill, he would 
 nevertheless have exercised upon the minds of his con- 
 temporaries a personal effect without precedent or 
 example. Mr. Goschen served his chief zealously and 
 well. He was always an excellent administrator, and 
 he might, if he pleased, have held high office in the 
 Government of 1880. But with an adherence to prin- 
 ciple which did him infinite honour, he remained a 
 private member of Parliament, because he did not think 
 the agricultural labourers fit for the political franchise. 
 Imperfect justice has been done to Mr. Goschen for 
 this conscientious firmness. Mr. Goschen had no 
 reason to covet the coarser and more material rewards 
 of power. But he has always been a glutton for work, 
 and for a man of his administrative capacity, five years' 
 deprivation of office in the prime of life was a heavy 
 penalty to pay. He could not have foreseen that a
 
 108 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 fresh career would open to him under the patronage 
 of a Tory Premier. 
 
 Mr. Groschen was a Liberal, if a Liberal he was, 
 because he detested religious disabilities and commercial 
 restraints. In 1863 the Universities were still practic- 
 ally closed to Dissenters, and Protection was not suffi- 
 ciently remote to be safely despised. Mr. Groschen's 
 real inconsistency dates from the year 1887. He was 
 perfectly justified, from every point of view, in joining 
 Lord Salisbury's Government. Nothing in his past 
 history disqualified him for doing so, and it is absurd to 
 say that sitting on almost equal terms with Lord Salis- 
 bury in the Cabinet was " giving a blank cheque " to 
 that distinguished statesman. On the other hand, Mr. 
 Groschen's refusal of place in 1880 was in itself a reason 
 for acceptance in 1887. But a man so ready to make 
 imputations as Mr. Groschen should be circumspect in 
 his own behaviour. He should not say that to tamper 
 with judicial rents in Ireland would be dishonest, and 
 then proceed within a few hours to tamper with them. 
 He should not oppose free education as demoralising, 
 and adopt it to forestall the other side. He should not, 
 merely because he differs with his former friends on the 
 government of Ireland, forswear his own doctrines on 
 the incidence of taxation and the apportionment of 
 rates. He should not act upon financial principles 
 which he had denounced as shabby, flabby, and inade- 
 quate. Having entered public life the earnest advocate 
 of religious equality, he should not resist the removal 
 of religious disabilities from Catholics because the
 
 MB. GOSCHEN. 109 
 
 Leader of the Opposition was the author of the Bill. 
 He should not earn the cheers of Mr. James Lowther 
 and Mr. Howard Vincent by dallying with the errors of 
 reciprocity and retaliation. Even if a man must turn 
 his coat and Mr. Goschen might plead that he had 
 bought his without looking at it he should leave his 
 other garments as they were. 
 
 Mr. Goschen's reputation as a financier is the subject 
 of acute controversy. It would stand higher if, instead 
 of laboriously correcting every slip made by his minor 
 critics in speeches from rural platforms, he had replied 
 to the careful and exhaustive indictment drawn up in 
 the year 1890 by Sir Thomas Farrer. It is not dis- 
 puted that while he has removed some burdens which 
 pressed heavily on the shoulders of the struggling 
 classes, he has reduced the Sinking Fund, borrowed 
 without necessity, extended the vicious system of grants 
 in aid, and increased the complexity of the national 
 accounts. His conversion of the National Debt was 
 skilfully performed. But the bribe to the bankers 
 which ensured its success was bad in principle, and 
 made it impossible to ascertain whether the condition 
 of the money market required the reduction of interest. 
 The price of commodities is not set by giving away a 
 new sixpence with a pound of tea. Mr. Goschen's 
 acute and ingenious mind is deficient in grasp and 
 scope. He does not see the wood for the trees. His 
 statements are not lucid, though his arguments are 
 often wonderfully clever. 
 
 As a debater Mr. Goschen ranks very high. Quite
 
 110 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 as quick and ready as Mr. Balfour, he has the great 
 superiority over that statesman of dealing instinct- 
 ively with the strong and not with the weak points of 
 his adversary's case. Interruption he not only bears, 
 but welcomes, and even courts. No public man deals 
 so admirably with the incidental remarks which often 
 put practised speakers out of their reckoning. Only 
 once was Mr. Goschen unprovided with a retort. There 
 was a financial discussion in the House of Commons. 
 Mr. Gladstone, after a few mild and complimentary 
 remarks, had left the House. Sir William Harcourt, as 
 not unfrequently happens, had imparted more warmth 
 into the debate. Following Sir William, Mr. Goschen 
 began in his most pompous style : " When the cat's 
 away the mice will play." An Irish member, sitting 
 under the opposite gallery, said, " And the rats." Mr. 
 Goschen paused, and it was well for that Irishman that 
 the Chancellor of the Exchequer had not the power of 
 life and death. If Mr. Goschen had succeeded Mr. 
 Smith as leader of the House, he would in some respects 
 have done better than Mr. Balfour. But he would 
 have wrought himself into a fit of righteous indigna- 
 tion three times a week, and the idlest lovers of amuse- 
 ment would have been the principal frequenters of the 
 Strangers' Gallery. Although Mr. Goschen was not 
 loved at the Treasury, his private friends are devoted to 
 him, and he shines at what used to be called the festive 
 board, in spite of the tendency to make small jokes so 
 mercilessly satirised by Punch. Ambitious of fame as a 
 wit, he has scarcely realised his ideal. His nickname
 
 MR. GOSCHEN. Ill 
 
 of Jacobyns for the Radical party is the stock-in-trade 
 of the Funny Correspondent, who probably does not 
 know the difference between Jacobins and Jacobites. 
 But the existence of the party is too shadowy, and the 
 personality of Mr. Jacoby too little known, for the 
 general public to taste the humour.
 
 THE MARQUIS OF RIPON. 
 
 LORD EIPON is not the least distinguished of the 
 five Peers who are now necessary members of 
 any Liberal Cabinet. The others are, of course, Lord 
 Spencer, Lord Rosebery, Lord Kimberley, and Lord 
 Herschell. Lord Eipon is certainly the most Radical 
 of the five, and his change of religion involved no 
 change of politics. Nobody has worked harder for his 
 party than Lord Eipon. Few men have been engaged 
 in more of those great historical transactions which will 
 live in the memory of the world when the strife of 
 parties is forgotten. Mr. Gladstone has performed, in 
 the course of his long and laborious life, many notable 
 achievements ; but not one of them has been more 
 glorious to himself, nor more beneficial to mankind, 
 than the Treaty of Washington. The moral effect 
 of submitting the Alabama claims to arbitration was 
 incalculable. It proved that England was not afraid to 
 do right. It united the two great English-speaking 
 Powers in a friendship which has never since been 
 broken, and which forms the greatest possible contrast 
 with their uneasy relations in the past. It gave an 
 example of settling international disputes which has 
 been largely followed, which has saved millions of lives,
 
 THE MARQUIS OF EIPON. 113 
 
 and which has done much to relieve civilisation from 
 the reproach of barbarism. Of the Commission which 
 arranged the Treaty, Lord Ripon, then Lord de Grey, 
 was chairman, Lord Derby and Sir Stafford Northcote 
 being his principal colleagues. The most important 
 post which a subject of the Queen can fill outside the 
 United Kingdom is the Viceroyalty of India. Lord 
 Eipon took up the office at a very critical time. The 
 personal eccentricities and political blunders of the late 
 Lord Lytton had been fruitful in discontentment and 
 disgust. The addition of a tawdry ornament to the 
 simple title of an ancient throne was no amends for the 
 enmity of Russia and the alienation of Afghanistan. 
 Lord Ripon did not forget in India the lessons he had 
 learned at home. He incurred the bitter hostility of 
 those Anglo-Indians who think that her Majesty's Indian 
 possessions should be 'governed for their special behoof; 
 but he earned the undying gratitude of the native 
 races, and he furthered the wise policy of fostering 
 those germs of independence and responsibility which 
 may one day prove the regeneration of India. These 
 are high and splendid services to have been performed 
 by a straightforward man of business, endowed with 
 no more remarkable qualities than an aptitude for 
 statesmanship and an experience of public affairs. 
 
 An excellent administrator, equally at home in 
 the chair of his County Council, or at the head of 
 a great Department in the State, Lord Ripon works 
 calmly and accurately, without haste and without 
 fuss. In one sense of the phrase, Lord Ripon was 
 H
 
 114 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 born in the purple. He is understood to be, with 
 one exception, the only living person who began life at 
 No. 10, Downing Street. His father, the "transient 
 embarrassed phantom " of Lord Beaconsfield's satirical 
 novel, was Prime Minister in 1827, and in 1827 Lord 
 Bipon was born. Lord Goderich survived his brief 
 experience of supremacy without power for thirty-two 
 years, during which he held other offices with respect- 
 able competence, like his grandfather, "Prosperity 
 Robinson," before him. Eew men have been more 
 rancorously abused than the present Lord Bipon. 
 From the rabid cliques, who, as Mr. Lang puts it, 
 " under Eastern skies call Aryan man a blasted nigger," 
 venomous scurrility is an honour. When, in 1880, 
 Lord Bipon was sent out to succeed Lord Lytton, 
 objections were raised on account of his religious 
 opinions. On this point Mr. Gladstone was peculiarly 
 well able to meet his critics ; for he had himself five 
 or six years before attacked Boman Catholicism in a 
 vigorous pamphlet, contending that Papal Infalli- 
 bility was a mischievous innovation, which tampered 
 with the civil allegiance of Catholic subjects to 
 Protestant Sovereigns. Whether a statesman of Mr. 
 Gladstone's eminence is wise to embark upon such 
 controversies is a very doubtful point ; but as a matter 
 of fact, Mr. Gladstone concluded his pamphlet by calling 
 upon the English Catholics to give an assurance of 
 their unimpaired patriotism and unabated loyalty. His 
 Essay naturally provoked many answers, including 
 one of singular force and beauty from John Henry
 
 THE MARQUIS OF EIPON. 115 
 
 Newman. Mr. Gladstone, in replying upon the whole 
 controversy, declared himself satisfied with the declara- 
 tions he had elicited, and so the dispute ceased. He 
 was therefore perfectly consistent in entrusting Lord 
 Ripon with responsible functions, though it always suits 
 his assailants to ignore the second pamphlet altogether. 
 Lord Ripon has never flaunted his change of faith, 
 and never concealed it. It compelled him to resign his 
 post as Grand Master of the Freemasons, to the general 
 regret of that Society. But it has not affected in any 
 way his conduct as a public man, and it has never 
 interfered with his devoted attachment to Mr. Gladstone. 
 In early life Lord Ripon was known as a Christian 
 Socialist, and co-operated for philanthropic purposes 
 with Charles Kingsley, Thomas Hughes, and other 
 young Cambridge men of promise. Many are dead. 
 But the only one who remains as sound a Liberal as 
 ever is the only one of high social rank the only one 
 who sits, or ever has sat, in the House of Lords. 
 Lord Ripon, though an indefatigable speaker, is not an 
 orator. He says what he means, and means what he 
 says. But to eloquence he makes no pretence. He 
 resembles Sir Charles Russell in good-humoured readi- 
 ness to go wherever he is wanted, and to make a 
 speech whenever a speech is required. Genial, 
 sociable, and unpretending, he is so thoroughly good- 
 natured that no opponent could regard him as an 
 enemy. He learnt public business at the War 
 Office under Sir George Cornewall Lewis, whose grasp, 
 and range of mind was almost as much beyond the 
 H 2
 
 116 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 ordinary Cabinet Minister's as Mr. Gladstone's own. 
 One of the few advantages which a young nobleman still 
 enjoys consists in the early apprenticeship to great affairs 
 under great men. Lord Bipon sat for seven years in 
 the House of Commons, and fought several contested 
 elections before he was compulsorily relegated to the som- 
 nolent atmosphere of the Lords. At the age of sixty- 
 five he is as full of fight and energy as ever, with the 
 same trust in the people and the same belief in the 
 future which have sustained him throughout his honour- 
 able career. The British public are apt to think that 
 fidelity and simplicity of character, the preference of 
 public to private interests, the sense of duty, and even 
 the discipline of party, are in the long run more valuable 
 qualities than the dexterous command of a versatile 
 intelligence.
 
 MR. JAMES LOWTHER. 
 
 FEW things are more to be regretted in contemporary 
 politics than the subsidence one happily cannot say the 
 disappearance of the Bight Honourable James Lowther. 
 There are not many more popular men in the House of 
 Commons. There is not one more straightforward, 
 more honest and upright in word and deed. Though 
 not much over fifty years of age, Mr. Lowther has 
 enjoyed, and occasionally abused, a long Parliamentary 
 experience. He was only twenty- five when he was first 
 returned as member for York, and he represented that 
 city continuously for sixteen years. He was four years 
 member for North Lincolnshire, and has now sat just 
 as long for the Isle of Thanet. It may be doubted 
 whether in the whole of that time he has ever changed 
 an opinion or made an enemy. But when he lost his 
 seat for York in 1880, something seems to have happened 
 to him. He is not quite the same " Jim Lowther " the 
 House used to know. The change is not in all respects 
 to be regretted. Perennial youth is not wholly admirable 
 when the youth has been a stormy one, largely asso- 
 ciated with hearing the chimes a good deal later or 
 earlier than midnight. Nobody expects Mr. Lowther, 
 the staid and stolid bachelor, who has sown his wild
 
 118 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 oats, to go behind the Speaker's chair and crow like a 
 cock, as if Mr. Auberon Herbert were still complaining 
 of the Queen's immunity from income tax. But a good 
 many debates since 1888 would have been far less dreary 
 if Mr. Lowther had struck into them as of yore, hitting 
 out at the -Radicals from the shoulder, or aiming a well- 
 planted backhander at the Liberalising tendencies of 
 Ministerial sinners. Mr. Lowther was not included in 
 the Conservative Government of 1885, and has never 
 held office since. Perhaps Lord Randolph Churchill 
 persuaded Lord Salisbury that Mr. Lowther was behind 
 the age, and that it was important to provide for 
 creatures of his own. The result was unfortunate, for 
 the Treasury Bench has been flooded with dismal 
 twaddlers, compared with whom Mr. Lowther is a 
 Demosthenes or a Cicero. 
 
 "When Mr. Lowther entered the House of Commons,, 
 it was led by Lord Palmerston, whose vigour and 
 energy were at last slowly flickering out in listless 
 somnolence. Mr. Disraeli was at the head of an 
 Opposition which became really formidable when, in 
 the following year, the death of the Premier put an end 
 to the truce of Whig and Tory. Mr. Lowther has 
 always been a Tory. He is a genuine Protectionist, 
 who would keep out foreign corn and foreign labourers, 
 if not foreign race-horses and foreign jockeys. Dishing 
 the Whigs has never been in his line ; and when, with 
 the rest of his party, he followed Mr. Disraeli into the 
 dark, he relieved himself with a bitter jibe. " What 
 am I to say to my constituents," he exclaimed, " when,
 
 MR. JANES LOWTHER. 119 
 
 after refusing a small Bill from a good Christian, I 
 have taken a big Bill from a bad Jew ? " Mr. Lowther 
 was never a Disraelite, though he served in Mr. 
 Disraeli's Government; and he has always professed 
 personal admiration for Mr. Gladstone, whose Parlia- 
 mentary supremacy he is too shrewd not to appreciate. 
 For Mr. Lowther, though he does not shine as an 
 abstract thinker, and though his political opinions are 
 founded rather on prejudice than on reason, has a cool 
 head, and a ripe judgment on all personal questions and 
 on all practical points. After holding some minor 
 appointments, he became Chief Secretary for Ireland in 
 1878, and brought in a Local Government Bill for that 
 country, which, if not very far-reaching or thorough- 
 going, was at any rate better than Mr; Balfour's. His 
 selection to succeed such a very serious politician as 
 Sir Michael Hicks-Beach excited a great deal of merri- 
 ment ; but, as a matter of fact, he was far better liked 
 than his predecessor, partly because, with all his blunt- 
 ness, he is thoroughly good-humoured, and partly 
 because his genuine love, not of gambling, but of sport, 
 is a quality congenial to the Irish people. 
 
 Mr. Lowther is by no means a bad speaker. He 
 does not trouble himself much about literary form, and 
 might perhaps describe himself, like Mrs. Squeers, as 
 " no grammarian." But, to apply the famous advice 
 of the Duke of Wellington, he says what he has to say, 
 doesn't quote Latin, and sits down. He knows his 
 own meaning, and never leaves his hearers in any 
 doubt on the subject. He has a large command of
 
 120 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 racy vernacular, and his instinctive sense of fairness 
 gives him a moral authority which is not to be despised. 
 When the disputed votes of the Mombasa Directors 
 were under debate, no speech not even Mr. Glad- 
 stone's was more effective than Mr. Lowther's. He 
 at least could not be accused of priggish Puritanism 
 on the one hand, or of a wish to damage the Govern- 
 ment at all costs on the other. When, in a few grave, 
 weighty, sensible words, he pronounced that, in his 
 opinion, the directors were personally interested, and 
 so ought not to have voted, the House of Commons felt 
 that this unpretending sportsman was a better judge 
 than the brilliant and paradoxical philosopher who 
 found it impossible to distinguish between various 
 motives for voting, which all seemed to him more or 
 less inadequate and absurd. Mr. Lowther has, indeed, 
 much of the judicial faculty in his mental composition. 
 When he sat as a steward of the Jockey Club, with two 
 ornamental colleagues, to hear the complaint of Lord 
 Durham against Sir George Chetwynd, he displayed 
 a mixture of dignity and astuteness which amused and 
 rather astonished the Bar. People sometimes forget 
 that it is much easier to be a good judge than a good 
 advocate. A judge need not say anything until the 
 case has been exhaustively argued, and he is not 
 hampered in the process of investigation by the fear 
 of injuring his client. But, considering his want of 
 legal training, Mr. Lowther's performance in the Courts 
 of Justice was very remarkable. 
 
 In sport, as in politics, Mr. Lowther has always
 
 MR. JAMES LOWTHER. 121 
 
 been perfectly straight. He is not a betting-man, but 
 a sportsman pure and simple. If all owners were like 
 him, the Turf would be cleared of its present disre- 
 putable associations. Not long ago Mr. Lowther went 
 to support the claims of a Parliamentary candidate. 
 The audience was not composed exclusively of ardent 
 politicians, and he was interrupted by cries of " Come, 
 Jimmy, give us a tip for the Grand National." 
 " Jimmy " was equal to the occasion. " Gentlemen," 
 he said, in his most solemn tones, " I never made a bet 
 in my life. But if you take my advice, you'll give 
 three to one against the field, including my friend 
 the Grand Old Man ; and he's a rank stiff 'un ! " With 
 which most oracular response these anxious inquirers 
 after truth had to be content. Mr. Lowther appears 
 to find the atmosphere of the House of Commons less 
 congenial than it was before the enlargement of the 
 county franchise. But it is probably the Treasury 
 Bench that agrees with him the least. Some of the old 
 gang are familiar to him. The Stanhopes and Hamil- 
 tons, with the other Tite Barnacles of the age, he must 
 have known that he would find there. The Queen's 
 Government could not, at least in their own opinion, be 
 carried on without them. Mr. Chaplin he can contem- 
 plate with a not wholly unsympathetic smile. But 
 who is Mr. Eitchie ? who is Mr. Matthews ? why 
 in the name of decency should Mr. Goschen be glaring 
 at his old friends and flattering his old enemies ? Mr. 
 Lowther' s sentiments towards Mr. Pitt and the Act 
 of Union are doubtless orthodox. But it must have
 
 122 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 sometimes crossed his mind that if the Union could 
 not be saved without Mr. Henry Matthews, those 
 abominable Separatists have something to say for them- 
 selves, after all. And Mr. Chamberlain ! If ever a 
 human being enjoyed himself in this world, then did 
 Mr. Lowther taste pure delight when Mr. Gladstone so 
 lovingly, so gently, with such consummate and inimit- 
 able art, chastised Mr. Chamberlain in Committee on 
 the Small Holdings Bill.
 
 MR. JOHN MORLEY. 
 
 IT is often said, and sometimes believed, that when Mr. 
 Gladstone retires from the political arena there will be 
 no public man left to touch the sentiment and thrill the 
 moral fibre of the masses. This is to reckon without 
 Mr. John Morley, whose hold upon the affections and 
 convictions of the people is second to Mr. Gladstone's 
 alone. Whatever may be thought of Mr. Morley by 
 Parliamentary hacks and placemen, there can be no- 
 doubt that the working classes, especially in the north 
 of England, are enthusiastically devoted to him, and 
 would rather follow him, with the exception aforesaid, 
 than any one else. The fact, of which any one may 
 certify himself by a visit to Newcastle, is equally 
 creditable to both the parties concerned. Mr. Morley 
 never natters the masses. He often tells them un- 
 palatable truths. He is a man of indomitable courage, 
 and as little like the typical demagogue as can well be 
 imagined. His attitude towards the Eight Hours Bill 
 and other developments of modern Socialism has been 
 censured by tacticians and time-servers as too stiff and 
 obstinate. But nobody who did not want to make him- 
 self ridiculous would accuse Mr. John Morley of sub- 
 servience to the jumping cat. Mr. Morley 's faults as a.
 
 124 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 statesman if faults they are lie in the opposite direc- 
 tion. He is so determined not to be misled by self- 
 interest or bullied by scheming agitators, that pressure 
 hardens him, and his beliefs are intensified by attack. 
 
 The friend, and in some respects the disciple, of Mill, 
 Mr. Morley entered public life as a philosophic Radical. 
 But he came into Parliament, being then about forty- 
 five, under the immediate auspices of Mr. Chamberlain, 
 and with an especial sense of attachment to Mr. Bright. 
 Mr. Bright and Mr. Chamberlain had not enough philo- 
 sophy between them to endanger the soul of a tomtit. 
 They were, however, practical men, and Mr. Morley, 
 like most literary students, has an exaggerated respect 
 for practical qualities. In 1886. when, three years after 
 taking his seat (and the oath), Mr. Morley suddenly 
 became a Cabinet Minister, he fell under the influence 
 of a far greater personality : one which unites with sin- 
 gular fulness the capacity for business with the enthu- 
 siasm for ideals. The steady growth of warm personal 
 friendship between Mr. Morley and Mr. Gladstone has 
 exercised as it could not fail to exercise a remarkable 
 influence upon Mr. Morley 's view of men and things. 
 Mr. Gladstone is the embodiment of Christian states- 
 manship, and his creed is at the root of his life. He 
 cannot be appreciated without understanding it, although 
 of course understanding does not imply acceptance. 
 But it is difficult to know Mr. Gladstone and to believe 
 that Christianity is a demoralising superstition. 
 
 Mr. Morley, like Mr. Balfour, has never taken very 
 kindly to the House of Commons. The House respects
 
 MR. JOHN MORLEY. 12& 
 
 him a good deal more than he respects the House. 
 Most members of Parliament are rather ignorant, and 
 Mr. Morley's knowledge, though he takes more pains 
 to conceal it than most people do to display it, is ency- 
 clopedic. Parliamentary tactics are his aversion, and he 
 despises the small arts of the lobby. But supreme 
 success in the House of Commons is rarely obtained by 
 men who are not imbued with its corporate spirit, who- 
 do not share its thoughts, prejudices, and habits. Mr. 
 Mill said that if a philosopher went into society he 
 should go as an apostle. Mr. Morley in society is- 
 beyond criticism and above praise. A more fascinating 
 companion does not, and could not, exist. But in the 
 House of Commons he is, perhaps, a trifle too apostolic. 
 The epithet " austere " applied to him by the foolish 
 convention of the uninformed is absurd ; but he has 
 principles, and, unlike many men of the highest personal 
 character, he does not leave them in the cloak-room before 
 going into the House. Then, again, Mr. Morley is not 
 a very ready debater. His speeches eloquent, interest- 
 ing, characteristic, abounding in flashes of epigram 
 and sparks of genius require, as they justify, prepara- 
 tion. Sometimes, and more often of late than in 
 previous years there have been instances the other 
 way. Mr. Balfour's Local Government Bill for Ireland 
 was a tempting theme, and Mr. Morley made the 
 best of it. He has never done anything better in 
 Parliament than his instantaneous dissection of that 
 astonishing measure. 
 
 Mr. Morley and Mr. Balfour have often been
 
 126 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE, 
 
 contrasted and compared. For real knowledge, for literary 
 power, for width of mental range, they cannot, of course, 
 be mentioned in the same week. In Parliament Mr. 
 Balfour's position is, largely owing to accidental circum- 
 stances, higher. On a platform Mr. Morley is infinitely 
 superior to his rival, and that not merely in moral 
 earnestness, but in the oratorical faculty. Few seem 
 now to remember that in the autumn of 1890, just be- 
 fore an undefended divorce case convulsed the politics 
 of the Empire, Mr. Morley had got Mr. Balfour into the 
 tightest of all possible corners. Mr. Morley had made 
 his famous visit to Tipperary. Mr. Balfour, who is not 
 deficient in courage, though he has never been in any 
 serious danger, went to Newcastle and attacked its 
 illustrious representative. Mr. Morley 's reply was crush- 
 ing and triumphant, not only in itself, but on account 
 of the enthusiasm it evoked. Mr. Morley, however, is 
 the most polished of antagonists, and Mr. Balfour, when 
 he is not dealing with Irish members, imprisoned by his 
 orders, fights like a gentleman, as well as a philosopher. 
 Probably no two public men are on better terms, and 
 Mr. Balfour's respect for Mr. Morley is sincere. 
 
 It is Mr. Morley's character, even more than his 
 intellect, which has given him the great influence and 
 ascendancy he exercises over his fellow-men. Honesty 
 is not so rare among British politicians as to make a 
 man eminent and influential. Even the mental integ- 
 rity which is proof against sophistry does not put a 
 statesman upon the pinnacle occupied by Mr. Morley. 
 What his constituents and admirers rightly believe
 
 MB. JOHN MOBLEY. 127 
 
 about him is that he cares neither for place nor power 
 nor party, except as means to the furtherance of social 
 and moral ends. Moreover, the ends must be, not the 
 passing fashions of the day, or the burning question of 
 the hour, but the definite objects which his own reason 
 and conscience approve. Mr. Morley is, in the philo- 
 sophical jargon affected by Mr. Herbert Spencer's dis- 
 ciples, an Individualist. He believes that the greatness 
 and prosperity of this country are largely due to the 
 enterprise and public spirit of its private citizens. 
 Holding this view, he has stoutly resisted the recent 
 tendency to repose trust in the ubiquitous interposition 
 of an omniscient State, and his attitude of manly inde- 
 pendence is respected by those of his opponents whose 
 respect is worth having. 
 
 Mr. Goschen once called Mr. Morley " the St. Just 
 of our English Eevolution." He might as well, while 
 he was about it, have said the Calvin of our English 
 Reformation. Both would have been alike nonsense. 
 But it is more decorous to compare your adversaries 
 with bigots than with thieves. The idea that because 
 Mr. Morley has written some brilliant sketches of 
 French history, and some charming studies of literary 
 Frenchmen, he must therefore be a bad Englishman is 
 even more ludicrous than the famous line : 
 
 " Who drives fat oxen should himself be fat." 
 
 Even as a man of letters, Mr. Morley is at his best, not 
 in depicting Rousseau nor in criticising Voltaire, but in
 
 128 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 rendering to Robert Walpole and Edmund Burke a 
 tribute worthy of their genius and patriotism. Mr. 
 Morley's style, though abounding in power, beauty, and 
 illumination, is not an equal one. When he writes on 
 French subjects he falls into French idioms, which are 
 apt to irritate even those who understand them. When 
 he writes of English statesmen, as one of them- 
 selves, he not only enriches the great storehouse of our 
 literature by work which the world would not willingly 
 let die, but infuses a moral tonic into the somewhat 
 exhausted veins of our body politic. Whether as an 
 administrator and a man of business Mr. Morley will 
 complete the tale of his public services, and justify the 
 historic sense of his worshippers, time must show. But 
 while Mr. Morley has exerted the influence of his vivid 
 and awakening personality upon hundreds who never 
 saw his face or heard his voice, those only who have 
 been under the wand of the magician can thoroughly 
 appreciate the high-minded chivalry and essential great- 
 ness of the man. In Mr. Morley's presence the mean- 
 nesses, the trivialities, the futilities of life disappear. 
 The spell of his magnanimity disperses them, and their 
 haunting presence is laid. One may live, like Isaac 
 D'Israeli, in a library, and yet be immersed in one's own 
 concerns. But Mr. Morley has extracted from books a 
 safeguard against the lowering and deadening forces of 
 the world. His independence and elevation of mind 
 are impervious to the corrupting and debasing elements 
 of party politics. " Great," says Carlyle, "is the com- 
 bined voice of men; the utterance of their instincts,
 
 MB. JOHN MOELEY. 129 
 
 which are truer than their thoughts. It is the greatest 
 a man encounters amid the sounds and shadows which 
 make up this world of time. He who can resist that 
 has his footing somewhere heyond time." Mr. Morley's 
 high courtesy, refined dignity, and delicate sympathy 
 are not the whole secret of the personal devotion he 
 inspires. Even " the man who has no cause but him- 
 self" bows, perhaps in unconscious reverence, before 
 " the man who has no self but his cause."
 
 EARL SPENCER. 
 
 "I EXHORT them," said Gibbon of the Spencers, "to 
 consider the Faery Queene as the most precious jewel 
 in their coronet." Lord Spencer does not follow the 
 exhortation. He has other views. The owner (until 
 recently) of the finest private library in England, if not 
 in the world, prefers a Blue Book to a first folio, and is 
 a greater dab, as the schoolboys say, at riding than at 
 reading. Lord Melbourne perhaps the most omnivorous 
 reader of his time declared that he did not believe in 
 education because " the Pagets got on so devilish well 
 without it." Lord Melbourne did not mean what he 
 said. He seldom said what he meant, and was much 
 misunderstood, in consequence, by fools. But Lord 
 Anglesey, the head of the Pagets, would undoubtedly 
 have governed Ireland with great success, if only the 
 Duke of Wellington had let him alone. Lord Spencer 
 has many of the qualities of his distinguished uncle, 
 the first leader of the reformed House of Commons, and 
 of his no less distinguished grandfather, the ablest 
 Administrator in the Government of Mr. Pitt, after 
 the accession of the Portland Whigs. The second Earl 
 Spencer, Pitt's First Lord of the Admiralty, collected 
 the library. The third better known as Lord Althorp
 
 EARL SPENCER. 131 
 
 was a mathematician of some repute before lie became 
 a politician of great celebrity. The present Lord Spencer, 
 who is the fifth Earl, was regarded till the momentous 
 year 1882 as an hereditary Whig, rather more Liberal, 
 and better affected to Mr. Gladstone than most of his 
 class, who discharged ceremonial functions with ease, 
 grace, and dignity. For a few months before the death 
 of his father he sat in the House of Commons as 
 member for South Northamptonshire. After succeeding 
 to the Peerage, he was appointed on the Households of 
 the Prince Consort and the Prince of Wales. Through 
 the whole of Mr. Gladstone's first Ministry he was 
 a useful and popular Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. For 
 the first two years of Mr. Gladstone's second Ministry 
 he was President of the Council, and nominally re- 
 sponsible for the system of national education ; but 
 the real work was done by the Vice-President, Mr. 
 Mundella. 
 
 So far Lord Spencer's life had been, for a man 
 of his class, singularly uneventful. If little known 
 to the general public, he was universally respected by 
 all who knew him. Weak health had kept him from 
 taking an active part in politics from 1874 to 1880, 
 when his party were in Opposition, and he was never a 
 man to push himself forward. The offices he had held 
 were not in the circumstances of the first importance, 
 and the robust thoroughness of his Liberal principles 
 was only known to a few. In 1882 occurred a crisis 
 which gave Lord Spencer his opportunity, and enabled 
 him to win for himself a high place in the front rank of 
 i 2
 
 132 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 public men. Lord Cowper, one of the faintest and 
 most ineffectual Viceroys who were ever ruled by their 
 Chief Secretaries, retired from Dublin Castle, having 
 " suffered the manners " of Mr. Forster with exemplary 
 endurance for two years. Immediately afterwards Mr. 
 Forster himself resigned, disgusted with the conditional 
 or, as he sometimes put it, with the unconditional 
 release of Mr. Parnell from Kilmainham. Lord Spencer 
 went back to Ireland as Lord Cowper's successor, 
 accompanied by his kinsman, Lord Frederick Caven- 
 dish, as Chief Secretary. They entered Dublin on the 
 morning of the 6th of May with signs of public re- 
 joicing as the harbingers of reconciliation and peace. 
 The same evening Lord Frederick and the permanent 
 Under-Secretary, Mr. Burke, were murdered in the 
 Phoenix Park, almost under Lord Spencer's eyes. The 
 Government acted with the utmost promptitude and 
 energy. Sir George Trevelyan and Sir Robert Hamil- 
 ton succeeded the martyrs of duty. Sir William Har- 
 court, as Home Secretary, introduced a stringent 
 Coercion Bill, and for nearly three years Lord Spencer 
 administered it with mingled firmness and gentleness, 
 but with unflinching justice and vigour. No English 
 statesman has ever worked in more constant peril of 
 death, nor been more rancorously and mendaciously 
 assailed with libels upon his public and private 
 character. Lord Spencer never showed resentment 
 or fear. He simply stayed at his post and did his 
 duty, until Ireland was freed from the terror and dis- 
 grace of the " Invincible " conspiracy. In days when
 
 EARL SPENCER. 133 
 
 Mr. Goschen's fulsome adulation of " brave Mr. Bal- 
 four " passes for patriotic discernment, it is refreshing 
 to think of a statesman whose courage would have 
 deserved the panegyrics Mr. Balfour receives. Lord 
 Spencer's reward was very different. When he retired, 
 after Mr. Gladstone's defeat in June, 1885, Mr. Cham- 
 berlain refused to attend the banquet in his honour, 
 and in the infamous " Maamtrasna Debate " the Tories 
 attacked him with a virulence the more discreditable 
 because it was not even sincere. Mr. Chamberlain did 
 hate Coercion at that time. The Tories delighted in it, 
 and were jealous of Lord Spencer's success. They only 
 dropped it to catch the Irish vote at the General 
 Election of 1885, after which they at once proposed to 
 resume it. 
 
 Lord Spencer left Dublin Castle the second time 
 with a good deal of material for thought. He had put 
 down crime, and refused to interfere with political 
 agitation. The criminals had been hanged, imprisoned, 
 or dispersed. The political agitators the men who 
 really represented the large majority of their country- 
 men were stronger than ever. His Tory successor, 
 Lord Carnarvon, a man of many accomplishments but 
 little wisdom, was substituting, with Lord Salisbury's 
 approval, conciliation for the strong hand. Lord Spen- 
 cer's most trusted colleagues and advisers in Ireland 
 made no secret of their belief that the game of Coercion 
 was up, and that the only cure for Irish disaffection 
 was Home Eule. Mr. Gladstone, as the Duke of 
 Devonshire afterwards acknowledged, had been for some
 
 134 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 years tending towards a drastic reform in Irish govern- 
 ment. Mr. Chamberlain had denounced " Castle rule " 
 as rivalling in tyrannous injustice the treatment of 
 Venice by Austria and the treatment of Poland by 
 Russia. A few weeks before the General Election, 
 Lord Salisbury, whose secret communications with Mr. 
 Parnell, through Lord Carnarvon, were not then known, 
 spoke of the " Irish leader " in terms of high respect, 
 and expressed a pious hope that it were practicable 
 to give Ireland the same independent position as 
 Hungary. 
 
 When Mr. Gladstone declared for Home Eule, Lord 
 Spencer, whose authority was unique, became one of his 
 strongest and staun chest supporters. He adhered to 
 his chief and to his principles at enormous personal 
 sacrifice. The society which he frequented was almost 
 unanimous against him, and declared its intention of 
 boycotting Home E-ulers without mercy. Lord Spencer 
 was regarded with peculiar aversion by those of his own 
 order who had estates in Ireland, and who had reckoned 
 upon him to maintain the ascendancy of their 
 caste. He felt deeply the conduct of his former 
 friends ; but he bore it with the same courageous dignity 
 which had carried him through more material troubles. 
 He did what he believed to be right ; and notwithstand- 
 ing his reverence for Mr. Gladstone, it was not Mr. 
 Gladstone "who converted him. It was the facts of the 
 case. Having discovered that the old methods of ruling 
 Ireland were mistaken and could be no longer followed, 
 he preferred conscience to consistency. He declared in
 
 EARL SPENCER. 135 
 
 a simple and touching speech that he would have been 
 " the most despicable individual "if he had taken any 
 other course. He pursued the fresh path with ardour. 
 Though far from being a natural orator, he pleaded on 
 many platforms with a simple and persuasive earnestness 
 for the cause of justice and peace. Meanwhile, he 
 hunted the Pytchley hounds with untiring enthusiasm ; 
 and in 1889 was unanimously elected the first Chairman 
 of the Northamptonshire County Council. A master of 
 business, familiar with every detail of local administra- 
 tion, he was, quite apart from his rank and position, the 
 best choice that could possibly have been made. The 
 simple manliness and transparent honesty of Lord 
 Spencer's character have extorted from his bitterest 
 opponents the tribute of their reluctant esteem.
 
 LORD HERSCHELL. 
 
 LORD HERSCHELL, as was said of a far greater personage, 
 is not redeemed by a single vice. There was, indeed, a 
 moment when he promised to rise above his reputation, 
 and to elicit the sympathies of erring humanity. That 
 was in 1886, when Sir Henry James refused the Wool- 
 sack, and Sir Farrer Herschell grasped the bauble which 
 Sir Henry was too virtuous or too prudent to accept. 
 But the General Election took away that bauble, and 
 the intensely decorous respectability of the new Chan- 
 cellor was fatal to his chances of wider fame. Sir George 
 Trevelyan says somewhere that the British public like 
 their ministers of religion to believe rather more than 
 themselves, and their representatives in Parliament to 
 believe rather less. Wickedness was once associated 
 with keeping the conscience of the Sovereign. But 
 Lord Hatheiiey, Lord Cairns, and Lord Selborne so 
 sanctified the office that the chair of St. Augustine 
 became by comparison almost secular. Lord Herschell 
 has not edited a hymn-book, and at prayer meetings, if 
 he attends them, he does not lift up his voice ; but he is 
 an orthodox member of the Established Church, and a 
 rigid observer of the moral law. He never indulges in 
 unseemly jests, nor even in jests which have the merit
 
 LORD HEESCHELL. 137 
 
 of seemliness. If Sir Charles Russell had been eligible 
 for the post held by Lord Westbury, a good deal would 
 have been said by the Tories about Irish adventurers 
 and legal flexibility. It was not the least of Sir Farrer 
 Herschell's many eminent qualifications, for presiding 
 over the administration of justice that to accuse him of 
 political or any other form of profligacy would have been 
 not so much unfair as ludicrous. No set of opinions 
 could fail to become respectable if Lord Herschell held 
 them. No one has been more loyal to his party or to 
 his leader. Lord Herschell did not, and could not, 
 excite himself, or become enthusiastic for Home Rule or 
 anything else. But when the clamours of faction were 
 loudest, when the self-constituted rulers of London 
 society were threatening all Liberals with ostracism and 
 disgrace, when foul and calumnious charges of complicity 
 in murder were hurled by frantic partisans against 
 political antagonists more honourable than themselves, 
 Lord Herschell's nerves were calm and his courage 
 unshaken. Intellectually convinced that the Irish case 
 for self-government was made out, he declined to be 
 moved from his course by the wild and whirling 
 words which created the demand for such wares as 
 Eichard Pigott supplied. 
 
 Lord Herschell's progress at the Bar was slow, or at 
 least it began late. It is said that he was briefless for 
 seven years. The first person to discover his great 
 legal abilities was the late Mr. Justice Quain, then a 
 leader of the Northern Circuit, which Farrer Herschell 
 had joined. As soon as he got his opportunity, Mr.
 
 138 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 Herschell knew how to make good use of it. Accurate, 
 painstaking, clear-headed, and laborious, he acquired 
 and preserved a large practice of the best sort, being 
 retained in almost every commercial cause of importance 
 at Manchester and Liverpool. Before a jury he was 
 nowhere with Sir Charles Eussell; but he was an 
 infinitely better lawyer, and his arguments in bane were 
 as powerful as his opinions were authoritative. When 
 his rise once began, it was steady, in politics as well as 
 in law. He was still quite a young man when the city 
 of Durham returned him to Parliament, and he soon 
 made his mark in the House of Commons by his 
 masterly denunciation of the Slave Trade Circular. It 
 is a singular proof of adaptability which prevents Lord 
 Herschell from being exactly like every other man with 
 brains and knowledge, that he should at once have dis- 
 covered how to address the House of Commons. It was 
 said of him at the time, by an acute observer, that he 
 was the only barrister in the House whose profession 
 could not be detected the moment he began to speak. 
 He has since, however, found an audience which suits 
 him even better than the House of Commons. Very 
 few people have really enjoyed the privilege of talking 
 to the House of Lords, except for a guinea a minute, at 
 the Bar. The late Lord Grey, who was not given to 
 strong language, said that it was like speaking to dead 
 men by torchlight. The Duke of Argyll revels in it. 
 But, in the first place, he is a consummate orator; in 
 the second place, he never sat in the House of Com- 
 mons; and in the third place, the sound of his own voice
 
 LORD HERSCHELL. 139 
 
 is to him the sweetest music in the world. Lord 
 Herschell, like Lord Mansfield, has tried both Houses, 
 and prefers, or appears to prefer, the Lords. Everybody 
 remembers Macaulay's contrast of Murray and Pitt 
 with Chatham and Mansfield. In the Commons, a 
 flash of the Great Commoner's eye or a wave of his 
 arm cowed the aspiring lawyer. In the Lords, 
 Chatham's brilliant but histrionic oratory was far less 
 effective than the calm reflection and luminous order 
 with which the great Chief Justice discussed and 
 decided public affairs. It has been said that if a man 
 can speak in the House of Lords, he can speak any- 
 where. But he may not be able elsewhere to speak 
 so well. 
 
 What damps the ardour of the young Peer is the 
 attitude of frigid attention, sometimes varied by the 
 freedom of private intercourse, with which his remarks 
 are received. Applause is extremely rare, and is re- 
 served rather for Toryism than for eloquence. Lawyers 
 are accustomed to speak for hours without a cheer, and 
 with the knowledge that a cheer would be instantly 
 " suppressed." Lord Herschell is the last person in 
 the world who would be embarrassed by the absence of 
 audible approval. All he wants is listeners, and the 
 Peers listen to him open-mouthed. Although he is 
 usually on political questions in a minority of about 
 one to ten, the ascendancy he has acquired over the 
 House is something marvellous. The Tories take his 
 law for gospel. Lord Halsbury, the late Chancellor, is 
 too indolent to dispute his supremacy. Even the Marquis
 
 140 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 himself condescends to meet him with an argument 
 instead of a sneer. Lord Herschell is as free from all 
 suspicion of genius, or even of originality, as anyone 
 can be ; yet his position his unique position is well 
 deserved. His speech on the second reading of the 
 Special Commission Bill was as able, as conclusive, as 
 convincing, as anything which the Lords have heard in 
 this generation. It was unanswerable, and has cer- 
 tainly never been answered. Lord Ashbourne shouted 
 some self-contradictory contradictions ; the English 
 Chancellor tried his hand at a little special pleading; 
 but if any future Government should be minded to pack 
 a tribunal for the trial of their political opponents on 
 political issues, they would do well first to consult Lord 
 Herschell's speech, and consider whether any of his 
 predictions have been left unfulfilled. Lord Herschell 
 has, of course, proved a notable addition to the Supreme 
 Court of Appeal. Lord Halsbury has become a good 
 lawyer, except so far as legal instinct was concerned, 
 since he took the seals. Lord Herschell brought to 
 the judicial bench not only a judicial mind, but a 
 thorough knowledge of jurisprudence, as well as of 
 case law. His industry is omnivorous, and he regards 
 presiding over a Royal Commission as a holiday when 
 out of office. The receipt of five thousand a year for 
 doing nothing [impelled him not to idleness, but to 
 exertion.
 
 SIR HENRY JAMES. 
 
 SIR HENRY JAMES, though no longer young, is a gay 
 bachelor, and a frequenter of Marlborough House. 
 Known for several years as the man who refused the 
 Woolsack, he has since received the particular form of 
 consolation which must have been most grateful to his 
 feelings by becoming Attorney-Greneral to the Prince 
 of Wales. From a professional point of view, it may 
 have seemed odd that Sir Henry James should succeed 
 Sir Charles Hall. But that only shows how limited 
 the professional point of view is. Sir Henry James, 
 though, as he once candidly confessed, he was not 
 born in the atmosphere of aristocracy, has taken very 
 kindly to it, and made himself very much at home 
 there. His conversational shop is not legal. His talk 
 is of Princes and Rothschilds rather than of Byles and 
 Benjamin. Nevertheless, Sir Henry James is quite 
 affable, and never forgets his manners if he chances to 
 find himself in plebeian company, which cannot in these 
 democratic and inclusive days always be avoided. 
 Sir Henry received a great deal of well-merited and 
 some rather exaggerated praise for preferring the Union 
 to the Woolsack in 1886. But his subsequent career
 
 142 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 has not been unenviable. His position in the House of 
 Commons is much better than it was before. His posi- 
 tion at the Bar is unique. From 1880 to 1885 he led 
 the life of a slave. In those days the House sat to any 
 hour, sometimes through the night. There was a 
 famous occasion in that Parliament when the Treasury 
 Bench was packed, Mr. Gladstone sitting in the middle 
 of his colleagues at one o'clock on Sunday morning. 
 Through those crowded and stormy years Sir Henry 
 James was Attorney-General not to the Prince of 
 Wales, but to the Queen. He set a good example to 
 his successors by almost entirely dropping his private 
 practice. But the work was terrible, and told seriously 
 upon his health. It was not unnatural it was very 
 right and proper that before Mr. Gladstone went out 
 of office in 1885 he should have conferred upon his 
 Attorney-General the unusual distinction of a seat in 
 the Privy Council. The social precedence of a Privy 
 Councillor is far higher than that of a knight, 
 so that Sir Henry James had every reason to be 
 gratified. 
 
 Since the memorable night in June, 1885, when the 
 Liberal Government was defeated on the Budget of 
 Mr. Childers, and Lord Randolph Churchill jumped 
 upon the bench in the exuberance of his joy, Sir Henry 
 James has enjoyed comparative leisure. Unable as a 
 Privy Councillor to practise before the Judicial Com- 
 mittee, he has appeared from time to time in almost 
 every other court, taking as many briefs as he wanted 
 of the kind that he liked, and earning a handsome
 
 SIR HENRY JAMES. 143 
 
 income with a very moderate amount of personal exer- 
 tion. If this be martyrdom to principle, it is an easy 
 cross and a comfortable crown. The Prime Minister, 
 as in duty bound, offered the man who might have 
 been Chancellor the first legal vacancy in the House of 
 Lords. Sir Henry refused a place for which he would 
 not have been particularly well fitted ; but if a Peerage 
 were bestowed upon him without any conditions, he 
 might possibly not decline it. 
 
 The year 1886 made the reputation of Sir Henry 
 James. Before that time his fame was purely forensic 
 and fashionable ; but the British public, in the slang 
 of the day, " tumbles " to a man who refuses anything 
 good, and is for some reason or other especially dazzled 
 by the Woolsack. When Mr. Gladstone offered Sir 
 Henry the post, he had probably not read the elec- 
 tioneering speeches of the member for Bury, which 
 made acceptance practically impossible. Sir Henry had 
 broken Walpole's advice to his young men, and used 
 the fatal word " never." He had been bitterly 
 opposed by the Irish population of Bury, and also 
 by the Tory vicar of the town. He had been inso- 
 lently called Mr. Gladstone's lackey, and told that 
 he would do whatever Mr. Gladstone told him. Sir 
 Henry James replied to this impertinence with becoming 
 warmth of temper. He spoke enthusiastically and sin- 
 cerely of his devotion to Mr. Gladstone, but he said 
 there was one thing he would never do for Mr. Glad- 
 stone or anybody else : and that was to vote for an 
 Irish Parliament. He is also reported to have declared
 
 144 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 that he would not accept the Chancellorship if he were 
 elected. Sir Henry had thus burned his boats, and 
 was compelled to remain on Lord Hartington's side 
 of the stream. It must have been a source of satis- 
 faction to so honourable and amiable a man that the 
 place which might have been his fell into such com- 
 petent hands as Lord Herschell's. 
 
 The long and close friendship between Sir Henry 
 James and Sir William Harcourt has survived political 
 differences and Parliamentary contentions. It would, 
 indeed, not be easy to quarrel with Sir Henry James. 
 Opinions may vary about the delicacy of his breeding 
 or the fineness of his taste ; but his civility is unde- 
 niable, and the weary length of the Parnell Commission 
 was constantly lightened by his good-humoured banter. 
 Sir Henry James is not a wit, and his acquaintance 
 with literature is slight ; he carries, however, the small 
 change of society about with him, and keeps people 
 gently amused without any strain upon his mental 
 resources or theirs. A rather cynical man of the world, 
 with a contemptuous tolerance of religious controversy, 
 he revived in his speech to the Commissioners the 
 vehemence with which years before, in the House of 
 Commons, he had fulminated against the Gal way priests 
 in defence of Mr. Justice Keogh. If Sir Henry James 
 denounced the Toryism of the British as he denounces the 
 Nationalism of the Irish clergy, he would be absolutely 
 consistent on at least one great question of public policy. 
 
 Since he left the Liberal party, Sir Henry James has 
 greatly improved as a Parliamentary debater. He was
 
 SIR HENRY JAMES. 145 
 
 wont to bring with him into St. Stephen's the style of 
 Westminster Hall, and to address the Speaker as if 
 he had only a few minutes to spare before appearing in 
 another court. Lately he has adopted a more deliberate 
 tone, and his rhetorical powers, which are considerable, 
 have full play. He stood, however, no chance against 
 Mr Chamberlain, who, though a far less popular man, 
 is also a far more powerful enemy. At the Bar Sir 
 Henry James has always been distinguished for cour- 
 tesy, and for disdaining the arts of intimidation. A 
 masterly cross-examiner, he never attempts to browbeat 
 or confuse a witness, but rather leads him unawares 
 into a trap or pitfall. In this artistic self-restraint 
 he formed a striking contrast before the Parnell 
 Commissioners with Sir Richard Webster, who relied 
 chiefly upon a loud voice and a blustering demeanour. 
 By no means a great or learned lawyer, Sir Henry 
 James has made a remarkably skilful and success- 
 ful advocate, a singularly judicious and capable 
 adviser. It was the general belief of those who knew 
 him that if he had led the case against the Irish 
 members "and others," the forgeries of Pigott would 
 never have been produced in court. Sir Henry James's 
 faults as a politician are timidity and an inclination 
 to magnify the strength of his opponents. On the 
 other hand, he never loses his head, and is never induced 
 by excitement to ignore difficulties, or to imagine that 
 the victory is won before the battle has been fought. 
 His favourite amusement is shooting, and his favourite 
 guest is the Prince of Wales. Judges who do not aim 
 j
 
 146 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 at shining in society, or whose social aspirations have 
 not been gratified, are heard to complain that Sir Henry 
 James is supercilious. But young barristers who have 
 been brought into contact with him speak of him as 
 the best and most generous of friends. Entirely devoid 
 of moral or religious pretence, Sir Henry James has 
 probably done more acts of thoughtful and unselfish 
 kindness than most of the bishops. His early services 
 to liberty in promoting the protection of trades unions 
 and the enfranchisement of the working classes from 
 the fetters of the law are well known. In the Corrupt 
 Practices Act he made an unwise concession to the 
 Tories by allowing the use of private carriages for the 
 conveyance of voters to the poll. His public utterances 
 since the unfortunate secession of 1886 have been 
 almost uniformly courteous, and, unlike some of his 
 political friends, he has spoken of Mr. Gladstone with- 
 out appearing to resent the obligations under which 
 that statesman had laid him.
 
 LORD HALSBURY. 
 
 MR. DISRAELI'S astonishment when he first saw Sir 
 Hardinge Griffard has passed into history. Whatever 
 may have been the precise terms in which the Prime 
 Minister expressed his opinion of his Solicitor-General, 
 there can be no doubt that he entirely failed to appre- 
 ciate a man who never really has been appreciated, 
 except by lawyers. The circumstances of Sir Hardinge's 
 introduction to the House of Commons were peculiar. 
 No Law Officer of the Crown at least, in that part of 
 the United Kingdom called England ever had so much 
 difficulty in finding a seat. When at last he discovered 
 one in the now disfranchised borough of Launceston, 
 he came up to take the oath without bringing a certified 
 copy of his return, and this trivial coincidence fixed 
 his unfortunate adventures upon the public memory. 
 Lord Halsbury's career has been peculiar, if not unique. 
 His quaint personality adds point and zest to the 
 genial and unaffected good humour which make him 
 a universal favourite. But the curious and interesting 
 feature of his life is that he obtained a post for 
 which he has proved himself eminently qualified by 
 means which would have been equally successful if he 
 had had no qualifications at all. Lord Salisbury's 
 j 2
 
 148 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 disregard for fitness in any public appointment which 
 is neither clerical or diplomatic is notorious. He did 
 not know in 1885 and if he had known he would not 
 have cared for the knowledge that he was promoting 
 to the Woolsack a man who, if not as learned as Lord 
 Selborne or as brilliant as Lord Cairns, would establish 
 in the House of Lords a character for judicial breadth 
 and soundness of view which has rarely been equalled, 
 and still more rarely surpassed. Yet this is the simple 
 fact about Lord Halsbury, as lawyers most strongly 
 opposed to him in politics will testify. A clear head, 
 a quick apprehension, a mind which instinctively grasps 
 what is essential and rejects what is accidental, a 
 common sense almost amounting to genius, and a 
 thorough knowledge of the world, make a strong Judge. 
 Lord Halsbury possesses all these qualifications, and 
 there have been few stronger Judges than he. 
 
 In politics the Lord Chancellor hardly counts. His 
 opinions are understood to be those of his grandmother. 
 They have probably not changed by a hair's breadth 
 since he went to school. He is an accomplished man, 
 and what time he has been able to spare from the law 
 has perhaps wisely been spent on literature or astro- 
 nomy rather than on Hansard or Burke. With an 
 Irish origin and an Oxford training, Mr. Griff ard 
 selected the English Bar as his profession, and South 
 Wales as his circuit. His progress was not very rapid. 
 But he gradually became an advocate of almost the 
 highest order. The mental indolence which unexpect- 
 edly shows itself in so many men of strong and
 
 LORD HALSBURY. 149 
 
 vigorous understanding must have stood to some extent 
 in his way. An eminent contemporary, some years his 
 senior at the Bar, described him as far better in reply 
 than in opening his case, because at the end of the trial 
 he had read his brief and mastered the facts. The 
 same thing must be more or less true of most barristers 
 in large practice. With Sir Hardinge Giffard it was 
 sufficiently peculiar to be noticeable. He thoroughly 
 understood the ways and peculiarities, the manners and 
 prejudices, of a British jury. He began his practice in 
 that excellent school of miscellaneous training, the 
 Mayor's Court, and after that for some years his busi- 
 ness was largely criminal. He became exceedingly 
 astute in dealing with witnesses, and infallible in 
 keeping the attention of the twelve men to whom his 
 client's fortunes were committed. Perhaps the greatest 
 mistake of his forensic career was his inability to appre- 
 ciate Mr. Bradlaugh. Theological and political preju- 
 dice may have been at the bottom of the blunder ; but 
 it was a blunder, and Mr. Bradlaugh took every 
 advantage of it. 
 
 In the House of Commons Sir Hardinge Giffard 
 did not shine. He never acquired the Parliamentary 
 manner, and St. Stephen's does not like the style of 
 nisi prim or of the Old Bailey. He was out of his 
 element there, and never did himself justice. His 
 colleague, the late Sir John Holker, concealed under a 
 drowsy manner and a heavy exterior an acuteness and 
 .adroitness in debate that extorted the admiration of Mr. 
 Gladstone, who afterwards selected him to be a Lord
 
 150 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 Justice of Appeal. Mr. Solicitor has not tlie same 
 senatorial opportunities as Mr. Attorney ; but Sir 
 Hardinge Giffard never approached the position of Sir 
 Farrer Herschell in the Commons. It is the same in 
 the Lords when they sit as a political assembly. Lord 
 Herschell is everything, the Chancellor nothing. Lord 
 Herschell may almost be said to "run" the Standing 
 Committees, and Tory Peers, ignoring the Woolsack, 
 listen to him with bated breath. This suits Lord 
 Halsbury very well. He is inclined to be lazy, and his 
 ambition was abundantly satisfied as well it might be 
 when he received the Great Seal. Where legal reforms- 
 are concerned he is, considering his crusted and in- 
 veterate Toryism, Liberal enough. No one is a 
 stronger advocate for the examination of prisoners, and 
 his Land Transfer Bill was, at least, too drastic for the 
 House of Lords. He astonished a good many people 
 by the fervour with which he vindicated Mrs. Jackson's 
 legal independence of her husband. But in ordinary 
 matters of legislation nothing gives him greater pleasure 
 than to announce that " the Not-Contents have it." 
 
 The crisis in Lord Halsbury 's otherwise rather tame 
 existence came when Mr. Gladstone's Government was 
 defeated in June, 1885. Who was to be Lord Selborne's- 
 successor ? Lord Cairns and Sir John Holker were dead. 
 The general opinion was favourable to the Master of 
 the Eolls, now Lord Esher, then Sir Baliol Brett. He 
 had a great reputation as a lawyer ; he had sat in the 
 House of Commons ; he had held legal office under 
 Mr. Disraeli. But Sir Hardinge Giffard perceived that
 
 LORD IIALSBU.RY. 151 
 
 it was now or never, and he did not hesitate. The late 
 Lord Chancellor and the late Attorney-General having 
 passed away, he claimed the Woolsack as the late 
 Solicitor-General's right. It was said by the gossips of 
 tlie hour that he refused to leave Lord Salisbury's 
 presence until his application was granted. At all 
 erents, he succeeded in his object, and the Master of 
 the Rolls was consoled, though not appeased, with a 
 Peerage. At that time Sir Hardinge GifFard had no 
 reputation for knowing anything except the criminal 
 ]aw, with which his acquaintance was admitted to be 
 unique. Grave apprehensions were felt and expressed 
 at his promotion to preside over the Court of last resort 
 for all causes within the United Kingdom. These fears 
 proved to be entirely groundless. Every day Lord 
 Halsbury sat to hear appeals his knowledge and judg- 
 ment improved, until the gloomiest of the croakers were 
 at length forced to admit that they had misunderstood 
 the man. 
 
 It is a positive calamity that Lord Halsbury could 
 not be confined to the discharge of his judicial duties. 
 His abuse of patronage has been exaggerated for sensa- 
 tional purposes, as all such things are ; but it is gross 
 as a mountain, open, palpable, all the same. When the 
 worst instance of it occurred two years ago, and shocked 
 even the most callous partisans, Lord Halsbury's friends 
 declared that he had struggled against the appointment, 
 and only yielded to irresistible pressure. But this is 
 no defence. The puisne Judges are appointed by the 
 Crown upon the nomination, not of the Prime Minister,
 
 152 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 but of the Lord Chancellor. It is absurd to suppose 
 that the Premier would have ventured upon such a 
 step as dismissing Lord Halsbury for not allowing an 
 improper interference with his legitimate province. 
 Jobbing is not Lord Halsbury 's only failing, though 
 it is a serious one. If he has not Lord Eldon's habit 
 of procrastination, the reason is that instead of post- 
 poning business, he neglects it. In this respect he 
 contrasts most unfavourably with Lord Selborne and 
 Lord Herschell. Lord Cairns was perhaps almost as 
 indolent ; but the extraordinary brilliancy of his parts 
 and the marvellous rapidity of his intellect enabled him 
 to overtake in a day what had been accumulating for a 
 month. Lord Halsbury is a clever man, but he is not 
 equal to Lord Cairns. He resembles that great lawyer, 
 however, in the pious fervour of his evangelical ortho- 
 doxy, even if he does not provide tea and hassocks for 
 aspirants to courts above and courts below. It was said 
 of one Administration that the Lord Chancellor believed 
 what the First Lord of the Treasury professed; but 
 the Government alluded to could not, of course, have 
 been Lord Salisbury's.
 
 MR. HENRY FOWLER. 
 
 MR. HENRY FOWLER was Mayor of Wolverhampton at 
 thirty-three. Lord Randolph Churchill was leader of the 
 House of Commons at thirty-seven. Mr. Fowler, how- 
 ever, arrived, in the French sense of the word, a good 
 many years ago, and during the exclusion of his party 
 from office he has advanced, as Mr. Gladstone would say, 
 not so much by steps as by strides. Members of the legal 
 profession gentlemen of the long robe, as Mr. Disraeli 
 would call them are supposed to be rather too well 
 represented in Parliament, and to obtain at least their 
 fair share of the few prizes in public life. As a matter 
 of fact, they have hitherto only been able to accept 
 purely political, as distinguished from judicial or forensic, 
 appointments, at the cost of abandoning for ever the 
 work by which they made their living. But the legal 
 profession has two branches, and the one to which Mr. 
 Fowler belongs has been excluded from the Government, 
 even when it secured a place in the House of Commons. 
 Mr. Fowler is the first solicitor who has ever been sworn 
 of the Privy Council. He is the first solicitor to enter the 
 Cabinet. No one grudges him his promotion, which he 
 has earned by hard work and efficient service. Mr. 
 Fowler, besides being a solicitor, is a Nonconformist,
 
 154 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 and Nonconformists have not in past times received 
 either from Liberal or Conservative Administrations an 
 unduly large share of honours and rewards. If the late 
 Mr. Samuel Morley had not refused a Peerage he would 
 have heen almost the only Dissenter in the House of 
 Lords, to which the present Earl of Carlisle had not 
 then heen called up. Mr. Bright and Mr. Chamberlain 
 were the solitary exceptions to the uniform Church- 
 manship of Mr. Gladstone's successive Cabinets. Mr. 
 Fowler has remained something more than staunch io 
 the religious body in which he was brought up. 
 He has not become a real or a nominal Churchman. 
 He is an active, influential, and prominent member 
 of the Wesley an Connexion. 
 
 The Wesleyans, as everybody knows, are the most 
 Conservative of English Dissenters, and the least hostile 
 to Church Establishment. Bat Mr. Fowler is and 
 has been all his life a strong, advanced, and consistent 
 Liberal. To call him a Radical would perhaps be going 
 too far ; for he is essentially a moderate man. He 
 exemplifies as well as any contemporary politician 
 the solid virtues of the class which the Greek 
 philosopher described as the salvation of society. 
 It is not that Mr. Fowler ever shrinks from 
 defending Nonconformity, or even from pushing its- 
 claims. On the contrary, Dissenters have no steadier 
 or more persistent advocate when their case is really a 
 strong one. He led the Parliamentary protest against 
 the persecution of the Salvationists at Eastbourne, and 
 to no one is their deliverance more largely due. On
 
 MB. HENRY FOWLER. 155 
 
 the other hand, it would be difficult to depict his horror 
 at the obstruction of the Clergy Discipline Bill by two 
 members from Scotland and one from Wales. Mr. 
 Fowler is thoroughly loyal to the House of Commons. 
 He has devoted great ability with excellent results to 
 proving that Lord Salisbury's Government in general, 
 and Mr. Goschen in particular, distrust and dislike 
 the principle of Parliamentary control. The system of 
 hampering future Parliaments by withdrawing naval 
 or military expenditure from the Estimates, and putting 
 it into a statute, has no more strenuous and eloquent 
 opponent. Equally firm and vigorous have been his 
 protests against making financial arrangements as in 
 the Free Education Act, which cannot be altered with- 
 out the consent of the House of Lords. But with 
 perfect consistency he condemns in unsparing terms the 
 efforts of a tiny faction to defy the House of Commons, 
 in order that they may damage the Church of England 
 by preventing the removal of drunken and immoral 
 clergymen. 
 
 It is chiefly, though by no means solely, as a 
 financier that Mr. Fowler has won his great political 
 reputation. Mr. Goschen, who is very fond of taking 
 the high line, and assuming that nobody knows the 
 difference between interest and discount except himself, 
 has found that he caanot deal in that way with Mr. 
 Fowler it would be too arrogant a jest. Mr. Fowler 
 has tracked Mr. Goschen through all the intricate mazes 
 of his complicated system, and has brought out the 
 plain facts that his surpluses are fictitious, his
 
 156 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 reductions in the taxes made out of borrowed money. 
 There is not a better man of business in the House of 
 Commons than Mr. Fowler not even Mr. Chamberlain. 
 Mr. Fowler possesses not merely great capacity and 
 experience, but that instinctive grasp of what figures 
 mean, without which the most plodding industry will 
 never make a Chancellor of the Exchequer. Mr. Fowler 
 has already been at the Treasury, where he was Secre- 
 tary in 1886. If he should ever go back to the same 
 department in a higher rank, the interests of the tax- 
 payer and of the national creditor will be in unusually 
 safe and competent hands. 
 
 Mr. Fowler is a debater who can hold his own 
 against any man on the Tory side. His speeches, like 
 himself, are business-like, full of knowledge, abounding 
 in moderation and good sense. When he first came 
 into the House of Commons, twelve years ago, he was a 
 little apt to be pompous, and to use what St. Jude calls 
 great swelling words. Time has toned him down, and 
 his style is now a model of the straightforward, argu- 
 mentative, practical kind, which, for the purposes of 
 every day, a British Assembly prefers to exalted 
 eloquence. It must not be supposed that Mr. Fowler 
 is nothing but a man of business. His favourite reading 
 on his holidays is said to be Hansard. At all events, 
 he is thoroughly conversant with the political history of 
 the last hundred years, and as diligent a student of 
 Burke as Mr. Gladstone or Mr. Morley. His distaste 
 for extremes has cast upon him perhaps unjustly the 
 imputation of political timidity, and he has been
 
 MR. HENRY FOWLER. 157 
 
 suspected of hankering after an alliance with Birming- 
 ham. But he fights manfully when he thinks the time 
 for fighting has come ; and it was inevitable that he 
 should deeply feel the loss of a man with whom he has 
 so much intellectual sympathy as Mr. Chamberlain. In 
 one respect Mr. Fowler is Mr. Chamberlain's superior, 
 and that is the not unimportant quality of temper. A 
 more courteous and amiable man does not sit on either 
 side of the House, as his political adversaries would be 
 the first to acknowledge. Mr. Fowler likes pleasing 
 people as much as Mr. Chamberlain likes annoying 
 them ; and that is saying a good deal. Of course this 
 virtue, like others, has its corresponding vice or defect. 
 There are occasions when a man ought not to care what 
 the enemy think of him ; there are even some when 
 he should be indifferent to the opinion of his friends. 
 Mr. Fowler will never initiate a great policy or lead a 
 forlorn hope. But he illustrates and typifies in its best 
 shape a class without which the Liberal party could not 
 hold together for a week.
 
 SIR GEORGE TREVELYAN. 
 
 CARLYLE, the countryman of Lockhart, and no great 
 admirer of Macaulay, is reported to have described Sir 
 George Trevelyan's " Life " of his uncle as the best 
 biography in the language. It certainly ranks with 
 the " Life of Johnson " and the " Life of Scott," above 
 all others, if indeed it be below those two. It com- 
 pletely changed the general estimate of Macaulay, 
 who, instead of a book in breeches, was found to 
 have been the most genial, affectionate, generous, and 
 delightful of men. It appeared at a convenient season, 
 before the political lull which followed the General 
 Election of 1874 had been disturbed by the revival of 
 the Eastern Question, which set all Europe by the ears. 
 Perhaps that was the culminating period in Sir George 
 Trevelyan's career. Although he had not attained his 
 fortieth year, he stood remarkably high both as a 
 member of Parliament and as a literary man. It was 
 really due to him and to his courageous crusade 
 against military ofncialism that the iniquitous system 
 of Purchase in the Army had been abolished by Eoyal 
 Warrant in the teeth of the House of Lords. He was 
 also the pioneer of the movement for extending House- 
 hold Suffrage from boroughs to counties, which the
 
 SIR GEORGE TREVELYAN, 159 
 
 next Liberal Government was destined to take up and 
 carry through. His political verses were universally 
 admired, and had, indeed, no contemporary rivals. He 
 possessed the ear of the House of Commons, and a 
 perfectly safe seat. His personal popularity was immense, 
 and was not confined either to his own side of the 
 House or to his own class in society. It seems strange 
 now to reflect that at that time Mr. Balfour, Mr. 
 Chamberlain, and Lord Randolph Churchill were almost, 
 if not entirely, unknown. In the year 1876 Mr. 
 Trevelyan had as good a chance as any man alive of 
 succeeding Lord Hartington in the Leadership of the 
 Liberal party, and of becoming Prime Minister of 
 Great Britain. He had given a signal proof of disin- 
 terested sincerity by resigning office in 1870 because 
 Mr. Forster's Education Bill recognised the public 
 endowment of sectarian teaching. Yet when, in 1875, 
 Mr. Gladstone temporarily withdrew from the task of 
 leading the Opposition, it was Mr. Forster, and not 
 Lord Hartington, whom Mr. Trevelyan would have put 
 in Mr. Gladstone's place. 
 
 It is difficult to realise the transformation of the 
 political world which the last fifteen years have brought 
 with them. The man who in 1875 wrote to the late 
 Lord Granville as if his work in this world was over 
 has since been twice Prime Minister, and commands 
 the unabated devotion of the Liberal party. Lord 
 Hartington, as Duke of Devonshire, presides over the 
 deliberations of a select and dwindling cave of Adul- 
 lamites. Mr. Forster has passed away. The House of
 
 160 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 Commons is led by the languid youth who dawdled 
 through two Parliaments as member for Hertford. 
 Sir William Harcourt, the free lance of old days, 
 stands next in Parliamentary succession to Mr. Glad- 
 stone. Beyond, if not within, the walls of Parliament 
 the most influential name in the Liberal hierarchy 
 belongs to a man who fifteen years ago was simply a 
 rising light in the literary world. Lord Rosebery, then 
 hardly more than a boy, would now, if only he were 
 in the House of Commons, be the Liberal Elisha. Lord 
 Spencer, then a political figure-head of the ceremonial 
 and ceremonious type, has proved himself in moments 
 of doubt, trial, and danger to be essentially a statesman 
 as well as every inch a man. 
 
 Meanwhile, Sir George Trevelyan's history has been 
 full of distinction, and, still more, full of interest. 
 Mr. Gladstone would have done well to include him 
 in the Cabinet of 1880. As Secretary of the Ad- 
 miralty, which he did not become till the month of 
 November having at first been left out in the cold 
 altogether he was doing congenial work in an excellent 
 way when his old and intimate friend, Lord Frederick 
 Cavendish, was murdered in the Phoenix Park. The 
 vacant post vacant almost as soon as filled was offered 
 to Sir Charles Dilke, who declined to leave the Foreign 
 Office without entering the Cabinet. It was then con- 
 ferred upon Sir George Trevetyan, who accepted it in 
 the spirit of duty not because he liked it, but because 
 it was dangerous. For two years and a half, as the 
 subordinate colleague of Lord Spencer, he fought
 
 SIR GEORGE TREVELYAN. 161 
 
 against a murderous conspiracy, and vanquished the 
 conspirators. All the leading combatants in that 
 campaign of law and order are now Home Rulers : 
 Lord Spencer, Sir George Trevelyan, Sir Eobert Hamil 
 ton, and Sir Edward Jenkinson. This simple fact gives 
 some measure of the baseness and falsehood involved 
 in the statement that Home Rule was a cowardly policy, 
 extorted by fear. All these men went about in daily 
 peril of their lives and the lives of their families. Not 
 one of them ever shrank from his duty or uttered a 
 word of complaint. The iron nerves of Lord Spencer 
 carried him safely through an atmosphere of deadly 
 plots and filthy libels. Sir George Trevelyan was more 
 sensitive. Himself the soul of honour, he could not 
 despise as much as he ought the licence of an irrational 
 scurrility. If Coercion was ever justified, it was when 
 the assassination deliberately planned by the Invincibles 
 had shocked the civilised world. But Sir George 
 Trevelyan was too good a Liberal ever to like it, even 
 when he conscientiously believed it to be necessary. 
 As soon as the Chief Secretaryship ceased, largely 
 through his own exertions, to be a post of danger, 
 he resigned it to Mr. Campbell-Bannerman, and came 
 at last into the Cabinet as Chancellor of the Duchy of 
 Lancaster. He looked ten years older for those thirty 
 months ; but the work was done. Ireland was pacified, 
 and civilisation was saved. 
 
 Among the distinguished converts made by Coercion 
 to Home Rule, Sir George Trevelyan was the last. 
 Everybody knows how he resigned office with Mr. 
 K
 
 162 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 Chamberlain in 1886, how he voted against Mr. Glad- 
 stone's Bill, and how, at the General Election of that 
 year, he lost what had always been considered one of 
 the safest Liberal seats even in Scotland. The Eouud 
 Table Conference, from which Mr. Chamberlain petu- 
 lantly broke off, and Mr. Balfour's Coercion Bill, intro- 
 duced not to suppress murder, but to help landlords in 
 collecting their rents, brought him back to the party 
 which he should never have left. Sir George Trevelyan 
 honestly, though erroneously, believed that Lord Har- 
 tington and the other seceders could and would remain 
 a separate and independent wing of the Liberal army, 
 true to their old convictions, if hostile to Mr. Gladstone's 
 Home Rule. He soon discovered his mistake. The 
 meetings he was asked to address consisted almost 
 exclusively of Tories, who hissed the name of Mr. 
 Gladstone and cheered the name of Lord Salisbury. 
 His new associates abhorred the very idea of Liberal- 
 ism, and did not conceal their abhorrence. Sir George 
 Trevelyan might give up Parliament, though the priva- 
 tion was for him perhaps severe ; he could not give up 
 his Liberal principles. He came back, as member for 
 Glasgow, to the old cause and the old chief. Politics 
 have no mercy on even the appearance of vacillation 
 and indecision. But Sir George Trevelyan's motives 
 were suspected only by those whose suspicion is a 
 compliment. 
 
 Sir George Trevelyan is an admirable speaker, espe- 
 cially at a public meeting, to which his eloquence is, 
 perhaps, better suited than to the House of Commons.
 
 SIR GEORGE TREVELTAN. 163 
 
 As a debater, he is not so ready and not so precise as 
 some inferior men. No one in politics, unless it be 
 Mr. Gladstone, has a better memory or a more richly- 
 stored mind. No one in England is a better judge of 
 a book in any department except physical science and 
 theology. No better classical scholar, except Professor 
 Jebb, and perhaps Mr. Roby, sits in the House of 
 Commons. No civilian ever had a greater passion for 
 military history. Even his uncle, whom in so many 
 respects he resembles, had not a more insatiable 
 appetite for reading. There is no reason why Sir 
 George Trevelyan should not be member for Glasgow 
 for the rest of his life, and introduce his three sons con- 
 secutively to the Speaker. But many will regret that 
 the biographer of Macaulay should for ever desert the 
 paths of authorship. That men of ample means and 
 leisure should devote themselves entirely to politics is 
 meritorious on their part and an advantage for the State ; 
 but the House of Commons does not yet sit all the 
 year round, nor every day in the week. Only a unique 
 combination of knowledge, talent, and opportunity could 
 produce the book which fascinated Carlyle. But there 
 is a famous fragment on Fox, which ought not to remain 
 a fragment much longer, especially as it breaks off at 
 the point where Fox had begun to see the error of his 
 way. 
 
 K 2
 
 SIR CHARLES RUSSELL. 
 
 " THERE has been nothing like it since Follett," was 
 the comment of a high judicial authority on Sir Charles 
 Russell's speech before the Parnell Commission. " A 
 great speech, worthy of a great occasion," was the 
 judgment of the President, now Lord Hannen. It 
 placed the orator incontestably at the head of the 
 English Bar, where, indeed, he was before in the opinion 
 of all competent critics. It is curious that Ireland 
 should have sent to the English courts in our time two* 
 such consummate advocates as Charles Russell and 
 Hugh Cairns. On opposite sides of politics, in different 
 branches of the profession, they resembled each other in 
 nothing but eminence and nationality. The first Lord 
 Cairns was incomparably superior to Sir Charles Russell 
 as a legal authority and a Parliamentary debater. After 
 electrifying the House of Commons by his eloquence, 
 he became Lord Chancellor in the prime of life, and 
 shone no less as a judge than as a statesman. It may 
 be doubted whether he ever entered a criminal court, 
 and it was very seldom that he addressed a jury. He 
 was too clever a man not to distinguish himself, even 
 in novel circumstances and uncongenial surroundings. 
 But he would have had no chance at nisi prius against
 
 SIR CHARLES RUSSELL. 165 
 
 Sir Charles Russell. Cairns was stiff, cold-blooded, puri- 
 tanical, austere. He seemed to hold himself aloof from 
 ordinary humanity, and to remember his fellow- creatures 
 only in his prayers. His one weakness was hunting ; and 
 it was believed that he hunted health as much as the fox. 
 Sir Charles Russell's geniality, vitality, and force of 
 character are at the root of his success. With him it is 
 the man who makes the advocate, and not the advocate 
 who makes the man. If Sir Charles were to accost the 
 first male passenger he met in the street, and order him 
 to take off his hat, the order would probably be obeyed; 
 the power would be felt before there was time to realise 
 the absence of what John Austin called sanction. 
 
 Sir Charles Russell, keen, adroit, and full of resource 
 as he is in the conduct of his business, remains the most 
 genuine of men. There is nothing theatrical about 
 him, except the instinctive sense of tone, and manner, 
 and gesture which only the very greatest actors possess. 
 His fine presence and natural dignity of bearing assist 
 the operation of his forensic gifts. But his triumphs 
 are due to himself, and not to his training. Macaulay 
 said that Chatham was the solitary instance of a really 
 great man who had no simplicity of character. In the 
 active pursuit of a calling which encourages every form 
 of menacing or persuasive, of sentimental or dialectical 
 artifice, Sir Charles Russell is at all times and for all 
 purposes himself. He is always an Irishman, always 
 a sportsman, always a Catholic, always a Democrat. 
 When he was Attorney- General he astonished and 
 shocked a good many comfortable prigs by remarking,
 
 166 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 almost casually, that a starving person had a right to 
 take a loaf of bread. Sir Charles was only talking 
 Catholicism, and it probably never occurred to him that 
 anyone could think otherwise. When, again, the outcry 
 against the Prince of Wales for playing baccarat was 
 at its height, Sir Charles Russell did not put on the 
 amazement he showed. It was simply incredible to him 
 that people should see any moral wrong in playing 
 cards for money. It was impossible for him to take the 
 purely legal view on the right of public meeting in open 
 spaces. His democratic sympathies forbade. To be on 
 the side of the people is as natural for him as to be on 
 the side of rank and fashion is natural for Sir Henry 
 James. And when at the close of that magnificent 
 address, which will be read when the Eeport of the 
 Commissioners has sunk into oblivion, he declared that 
 he was pleading for the land of his birth, he explained 
 at once the motive of his advocacy and the sources of 
 its strength. 
 
 In the House of Commons Sir Charles Russell is 
 seldom quite at his best. The atmosphere does not 
 suit him, and he prefers a larger and more democratic 
 assembly. But on the platform of a public meeting 
 he is superb. His opponents complain, naturally 
 enough from their point of view, that there is 
 some lack of novelty both in subject and treatment. 
 For Sir Charles usually speaks about Ireland, and 
 shows how much more loyal are people who 
 manage their own affairs. Yet there is something in the 
 commanding authority and transparent sincerity of the
 
 SIR CHARLES RUSSELL. 167 
 
 speaker, the personal conviction and contagious energy 
 of the man, which impress themselves upon a popular 
 audience better than a more elaborate rhetoric and a 
 more paradoxical originality. Sir Charles never seems 
 to be tired of public meetings. Unlike many inferior 
 performers, he will go to the smallest and remotest places, 
 fifteen miles from a lemon or a reporter, if he can help 
 to promote what with him is the sacred cause of Home 
 Rule. There was never a more striking disproof of the 
 calumny, that lawyers only care for politics as a means 
 of selfish advancement, than the career and conduct of 
 Sir Charles Russell. Devoted to Mr. Gladstone and to 
 the Liberal party, he will go anywhere, and do any- 
 thing, for the purpose of restoring his old chief to office 
 and a native Legislature to Ireland. 
 
 Sir Charles Russell's manner in court has sometimes 
 been said to be domineering and dictatorial. One can 
 imagine a judge begging him, as Mr. Justice Maule 
 begged Sir Cresswell Cresswell, to " recollect that I am 
 a vertebrate animal." Yet in private life Sir Charles is 
 singularly unassuming. His perfect freedom from vanity 
 and self-consciousness is as rare as it is attractive. 
 Nobody could be less pompous, or more anxious to put 
 himself on a footing of entire equality with the company 
 in which he may be thrown. No one, on the other hand, 
 is less inclined to flatter or court the conventionally 
 great. Sir Charles is a thorough Democrat, in things 
 social as well as in things political. 
 
 The abolition of those convenient " Attorney-Gene- 
 ral's pillows," the Chief Justiceship of the Common
 
 168 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 Pleas and the Chief Barony of the Exchequer, has left 
 some eminent lawyers in a position vulgarly described 
 by the epithet " stranded " men who will not accept 
 the drudgery of the Bench in Courts of First 
 Instance, and may never sit on the Bench at all. 
 Sir Charles Eussell is not so learned a lawyer as 
 Sir Horace Davey and Sir John Eigby. Even on 
 a question of common law, their opinion would 
 be better worth having than his. As a speaker 
 he is, of course, beyond all comparison, their supe- 
 rior, as in other respects besides. He and Mr. 
 Morley are the two politicians who have been made 
 by Home Eule on pne side, just as Mr. Balfour and 
 Mr. Groschen have been made by it on the other. Sir 
 Charles Eussell, however, is not one of those morbidly 
 and wearisomely virtuous persons who knew better than 
 their neighbours, and were Home Eulers all along. 
 He sat through the Parliament of 1880, and gave a 
 general support to Mr. Gladstone's Government, with- 
 out discovering that an Irish Parliament was necessary 
 to the land of his birth. It is indeed strange that when 
 he became a Home Euler he had ceased to sit for the 
 Irish constituency of Dundalk, and was member for the 
 English constituency of South Hackney. There could 
 hardly be a better guarantee of good faith or a more 
 obviously natural one.
 
 LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL. 
 
 SINCE the days of Sir Eobert Walpole, if not before, 
 Eton has been a successful nursery of British states- 
 men. But it may be confidently affirmed that never 
 since the time of Henry VI. "most patient and 
 hapless of star-crossed kings " has the greatest of 
 public schools turned out a less conventional product 
 than Lord Eandolph Churchill. Lord Eosebery, Mr. 
 Balfour, and the present Viceroy of India were his 
 schoolfellows. He was Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice's 
 fag. Scholastic and academical distinction were not in 
 his line. His career at Oxford is chiefly remembered 
 by the obscure story of a policeman's helmet, which 
 perplexed the magistrates then, and has not since 
 been elucidated by the historian. At the General 
 Election of 1874 a certain Mr. Barnett retired from 
 the representation of the Duke of Marlborough, face- 
 tiously called Woodstock in the Parliamentary hand- 
 books. Lord Blandford passed for a Liberal in politics, 
 and was not in other respects favourably known to 
 the public. So his brother, a young man of five-and- 
 twenty, was chosen by the owner of Blenheim to 
 fill the vacancy. Nobody, except his immediate 
 friends and relatives, knew anything about Lord
 
 170 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 Randolph Churchill. The helmet had in the course 
 of five years become a legend, and the Randolph 
 Hotel was much more famous than the }^ounger son 
 of an unpopular landlord. Lord Randolph's return 
 was regarded as a certainty. But a dauntless patriot, 
 who was afterwards to beard the Parnell Commissioners 
 in their den, stepped into the breach. Mr. George 
 Brodrick, now Warden of Merton, Lord Randolph's 
 college, and a pillar of " Liberal Unionism," came 
 forward as a candidate. He was supported by Mr. 
 Goldwin Smith, the most brilliant writer and the most 
 incapable electioneerer of the day. Mr. Brodrick him- 
 self harangued the few agricultural labourers who- 
 could be enticed out of their houses on a wintry 
 evening (to find the Duke's agent carefully identifying 
 them) in the style of the college lecture-room. Mr. 
 Goldwin Smith fired over their heads brilliant epigrams, 
 which he might as well have delivered in Greek, but 
 which were appreciated by the few Oxford men who 
 happened to be present. Mr. William Sidgwick, who 
 has also gone over to the minority, thundered away as 
 if he had been Cicero and the Duke had been Verres. 
 It was a remarkable coruscation of talent, and very 
 good fun while it lasted. When it was over the 
 labourers were driven to the poll, and voted for 
 Blenheim Palace, blankets, unfair rents, and compara- 
 tive fixity of tenure. Mr. Goldwin Smith announced 
 that he should go to Canada " the evil shadow of the 
 British aristocracy will fall on me no more " and 
 everybody went to bed.
 
 LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL. 171 
 
 Scarcely a thought was given to the Tory candidate. 
 Mr. Brodrick had a future before him : he was to be the 
 great land reformer of the age. Mr. Goldwin Smith 
 was to remove from the new world the effete supersti- 
 tions of the old. Mr. Sidgwick but this is not an 
 Oxford Calendar. Lord Randolph Churchill was re- 
 garded as his father's son a shocking example of what 
 rotten boroughs could do to lower the intellectual 
 standard of the House of Commons. During the 
 Parliament of 1874 the member for Woodstock only 
 once distinguished himself, and that was by a rather 
 rude attack upon Mr. Sclater-Booth, now at peace 
 where nobody but Lord Salisbury is permitted to make 
 personal remarks. There is more insolence than wit in 
 saying that a double-barrelled name implies mediocrity. 
 When Parliament was dissolved in the spring of 1880, 
 Lord Randolph Churchill had no reputation for any- 
 thing more valuable than impertinence. 
 
 With the commencement of Mr. Gladstone's second 
 Administration, in May of that year, began Lord Ran- 
 dolph Churchill's career. He started with a very small 
 amount of preparation and a very slender stock of 
 materials. At school and college he had learnt scarcely 
 anything. He was ignorant to an almost incredible 
 degree. His conduct was usually reckless ; his state- 
 ments were usually baseless. But he was found to 
 have unbounded audacity, unsparing industry, immense 
 practical shrewdness, with animal spirits and a freedom 
 from scruple which almost amounted to genius. Sir 
 Henry Wolff, Sir John Gorst, and Mr. Balfour supplied
 
 172 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 him with as much information as he could assimilate 
 perhaps with a good deal more. He dominated them 
 all, and it must he admitted that he provided for them 
 well. " Three of us sworn to-day, and all on the same 
 cushion," he is reported to have said when the Fourth 
 Party was dissolved by office. What was the secret of 
 Lord Eandolph's success ? He devoted himself to the 
 House of Commons. The House cares not two straws 
 for what a man is, says, or does " out of doors." 
 It forms its judgments at first hand, and once they are 
 formed, it rarely alters them. [In the Parliament of 
 1880, the most turbulent of modern times, Lord 
 Randolph attended almost every sitting and spoke in 
 almost every debate. It was only by slow degrees 
 that he acquired his admirable Parliamentary manner, 
 his readiness of resource, his adroitness in reply. In 
 1880 he was something very like a buffoon ; in 1885 
 he was something very like a statesman. 
 
 That Mr. Gladstone had something to do with Lord 
 Eandolph's rapid rise cannot be denied. Lord Ran- 
 dolph made a point of attacking the Liberal Premier 
 on every possible occasion, and Mr. Gladstone almost 
 always allowed himself to be drawn. Mr. Gladstone 
 has never quite got rid of the old-fashioned prejudice 
 that it is rather good of a nobleman to feel an interest 
 in anything, and he paid his youthful assailant the 
 compliment of taking him seriously. It should be said 
 on the other hand, that few people have a stronger 
 sentiment of admiration for Mr. Gladstone, or appre- 
 ciate his Parliamentary supremacy better, than Lord
 
 LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL. 175 
 
 Eandolph Churchill. For his own leaders Lord Eandolph 
 showed from the first the most absolute and unconcealed 
 contempt. Collectively, they were "the old gang." 
 Individually, they were " Marshall & Snelgrove." Lord 
 Eandolph culminated, so to speak, in 1886, and then 
 came the crash. He had survived many blunders, and 
 some performances which could not be set down to 
 honest error. At last he made the fatal mistake of 
 supposing himself to be indispensable. He resigned 
 office because he was not allowed to cut down the cost 
 of the spending departments, and to his own amazed 
 bewilderment his resignation was accepted. His king- 
 dom was divided, and given to Mr. Goschen and Mr. 
 Smith. He was left out in the cold, where he has ever 
 since remained. It is the strongest possible tribute to 
 his capacity for business and his knowledge of mankind 
 that he should have left behind him at the India Office, 
 and even more at the Treasury, the reputation of a 
 most able and brilliant administrator. He never intro- 
 duced a Budget. But the Budget he had prepared is 
 the theme of almost hyperbolical praise among those 
 who were officially acquainted with it. His principal 
 opponents are all agreed that during the brief second 
 Session of 1886 he led the House of Commons with 
 consummate dexterity and tact. 
 
 There are reasons why Lord Eandolph Churchill 
 is not likely to achieve the highest prize of public 
 life. To lead the House of Commons, intellectual 
 qualities, properly modified and directed, may suffice ; 
 but the House, though it represents the country, is
 
 174 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 not the country, except, perhaps, in constitutional 
 fiction. Some solidity of character, some moral ballast, 
 is required in the Prime Minister of Great Britain. A 
 man may change his mind, and change it completely, 
 on the gravest and most important subjects, without 
 losing the confidence of the English people ; but there 
 must be reasons for the change, and it must be obvi- 
 ously sincere. Lord Randolph excites interest because 
 nobody can predict what he will do next, It is not, 
 however, a very respectful interest, and it commands 
 more attention than votes. Moreover, a statesman of 
 the first rank cannot afford to be ridiculous, and there 
 was much scope for merriment in Lord Randolph's 
 African adventures. We cannot have a Premier pour 
 rire ; though if Lord Randolph is ever again in a 
 Cabinet without being Premier, there will be few to 
 envy his chief. 
 
 In the House of Commons, Lord Randolph, when- 
 ever he chooses to exert himself, must always be a 
 powerful personage. Mr. Balfour's initial failure as 
 Leader, which has been redeemed, is understood to 
 have filled him with unspeakable delight. Mr. Cham- 
 berlain, on the contrary, appears to inspire him with 
 sincere admiration, not untempered with awe. It is 
 disagreeable to come upon a man cleverer than your- 
 self, and quite as free from inconvenient bondage to 
 principle. When Mr. Morley referred to these two 
 worthies as "wandering stars," he probably did not 
 mean to suggest that for them was reserved the 
 blackness of darkness for ever. Their future is difficult
 
 LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL. 175 
 
 to forecast ; it can hardly fail to be conspicuous. 
 Lord Randolph's temper, and his unrestrained indul- 
 gence of it, has made him many enemies ; yet very few 
 men can be better or more agreeable company than he. 
 One of the brightest and wittiest talkers in London, he 
 criticises friend and foe with an acute discrimination 
 and an entire absence of reserve. A Radical and Demo- 
 crat so far as he is anything at all he is obliged to 
 keep a store of pompous platitudes at command for the 
 ceremonies of the Primrose League and other kindred 
 occasions. His attack upon the London County Council 
 was saturated with insincerity, but his disbelief in 
 Home Rule may perhaps be genuine. What he was 
 like as a colleague may be gathered from Lord Salis- 
 bury's undisguised willingness to part with him, and 
 the obvious substitution of a reign of geniality for a 
 reign of terror on the Treasury Bench when Mr. Smith 
 stepped into his shoes. That Lord Randolph has 
 steadily lost ground since 1887 is a plain and palpable 
 fact. How far he can regain it in a new Parliament 
 is among the most curious personal questions of the 
 immediate political future.
 
 MR. HENRY MATTHEWS. 
 
 LORD EANDOLPH CHURCHILL'S Home Secretary very 
 soon parted company with his political creator. It 
 is said that when Lord Randolph found his resignation 
 accepted at the end of 1886, he expected Mr. Matthews 
 to follow him into retirement. If so, he showed more 
 genuine simplicity of character than has heen usually 
 attributed to him by either friend or foe. If the 
 Chancellor of the Exchequer did not know when he 
 was well off, the Home Secretary was by no means in a 
 similar state of ignorance. So Mr. Matthews remained, 
 and did as much harm to the Gfovernment of which 
 he was a member as a clever man well could. Few 
 Ministers have been subjected to a larger amount of 
 unjust criticism than Mr. Matthews ; but he has 
 brought a great deal of it upon himself by arrogance, 
 pedantry, and want of tact. It is worse than absurd to 
 charge him with vindictive cruelty in the exercise of 
 the royal prerogative. He considers the cases of 
 murderers with laborious and conscientious humanity. 
 Yet, when he is asked questions about them in the 
 House of Commons, he resorts to technical quibbles 
 and to a fine show of virtuous constitutionalism, which 
 make the public suppose that he is indifferent to the
 
 MR. HENRY MATTHEWS. 177 
 
 prisoner's fate. He went into the case of the Aylesbury 
 poachers with almost painful minuteness. He discussed 
 it with the Lord Chancellor, he discussed it with the 
 Attorney- General, he discussed it with an eminent 
 lawyer on the other side of the House. Whether his 
 ultimate decision was right or wrong, it was formed 
 with the most anxious desire to do justice. If he 
 had given the House of Commons a fair account of the 
 impression produced upon his mind by a perusal of the 
 evidence, he would have silenced much of the outcry 
 against him. But Mr. Matthews would rather be 
 misunderstood than communicative, and his preference 
 was abundantly gratified. 
 
 Mr. Matthews had a bad training for political 
 office, and it says much for his ability that his failure 
 has not been more complete. When his name was 
 first mentioned in the summer of 1886 as Lord 
 Randolph's nominee, the public were astounded. They 
 had hardly recovered from their amazement at Lord 
 Randolph's own rapid elevation, when a man wholly 
 unknown outside the Law Courts was pitchforked into 
 the Home Office by an obsequious Premier, at the 
 request of his too powerful colleague. It is true that 
 Mr. Matthews had just been returned for East Birming- 
 ham the first Tory who ever sat for that once Radical 
 town. It is true that nearly twenty years before he 
 had been member for the little Irish borough of Dun- 
 garvan which, however, got rid of him at the first 
 opportunity. He was not, like Sir Richard Webster in 
 1885, new to Parliamentary life, and unprovided with 
 L
 
 178 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 a seat. But few people remembered that he had ever 
 been in the House of Commons, and when the circum- 
 stances came to be investigated they did not increase 
 the general confidence in his character. It is, of course, 
 a picturesque exaggeration to say that Mr. Matthews 
 was in 1868 a Fenian candidate. But he undoubtedly 
 eulogised some of the Fenian leaders in eloquent lan- 
 guage, and attacked his opponent now Lord Justice 
 Barry for having prosecuted them as the legal repre- 
 sentative of the Crown. Moreover, he was at that time 
 a Home Ruler and a supporter of Isaac Butt. That he 
 should now come out as a full-blown Tory and step at 
 once into high place seemed odd and unfortunate. At 
 that time the name of Mr. Henry Matthews was in 
 everybody's mouth, on account of his brilliant, vehe- 
 ment and virulent speech against Sir Charles Dilke in 
 the Divorce Court. He had long been known as an 
 astute and showy advocate, whose soundness of judgment 
 was by no means equal to his more plausible and 
 conspicuous attainments. 
 
 Only Lord Randolph Churchill would have thought 
 of Mr. Matthews as Home Secretary. But Lord Ran- 
 dolph was determined to emancipate the House of 
 Commons from the control of the " old gang," and in 
 particular to clap a coronet, by way of extinguisher, 
 upon the head of Sir Richard Cross. It is understood 
 that her Majesty refused to part with Lord Cross, who 
 succeeded Lord Randolph at the India Office. As for 
 Mr. Matthews, he had attracted the notice of Lord Ran- 
 dolph in 1885. Lord Randolph was then a candidate
 
 MR. HENRY MATTHEWS. 179 
 
 for Central, Mr. Matthews for Eastern, Birmingham. 
 Neither of them was successful, though the impression 
 made by the young Secretary of State upon Mr. Bright's 
 majority was a very remarkable event. Mr. Matthews 
 delighted his colleague in the struggle by the liveliness 
 of his personal attacks upon the memory of Cobden 
 and the personality of Bright. Lord Eandolph, no 
 doubt, thought in 1886 that he had got hold of a clever 
 speaker as he had ; and of an effective debater as he 
 had not. Mr. Matthews hardly counts in a serious 
 debate. His adroitness is undeniable, his words are 
 exceedingly well chosen, while in mental cultivation 
 and knowledge of the world he is far above the Minis- 
 terial average. But neither his style, nor his tastes, 
 nor his habits of mind and temper are suitable to the 
 House of Commons. He was born in Ceylon. He 
 took a degree in Paris. He has a French exuberance 
 of manner and a thoroughly legal view of political 
 issues. His associations, except at the Bar, are as 
 different as possible from those of an ordinary English 
 member ; and as if to widen the gulf, he is a Roman 
 Catholic, who, though a Minister of the Crown, cannot 
 distribute any patronage in the Church of England. 
 When Mr. Gladstone formed his second Government in 
 1880, loud and angry protests were made from diverse 
 parts of Great Britain against the inclusion of two 
 Catholics : Lord Eipon and Lord Kenmare. It illus- 
 trates satisfactorily the growth of tolerance that the 
 appointment of Mr. Matthews should have passed with- 
 out a Protestant murmur. But when a strange face 
 L 2
 
 180 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 suddenly appears on the Treasury Bench, every addi- 
 tional element of strangeness is counted against the 
 new comer. If Mr. Matthews had been an Irishman, 
 it would have seemed more natural; as it was, the 
 eccentricity of the choice could only have been justified 
 by a striking success. 
 
 An eminent counsel past middle life seldom bears 
 transplanting to the Parliamentary or Administrative 
 soil. If Mr. Matthews is too much of an advocate for 
 the House of Commons, he is too much of a lawyer for 
 the Home Office. The ideal Home Secretary would 
 know enough law to understand legal opinions, and not 
 too much to respect them. Mr. Secretary Matthews, 
 though on the Treasury Bench he professes to be a lay- 
 man, is regarded in the official world as too self-confident 
 and too contemptuous of advice. Nor has he contrived 
 to work harmoniously with able and independent men. 
 He quarrelled with Sir Edward Jenkinson. He quar- 
 relled with Sir Charles Warren. He quarrelled with 
 Mr. Monro. Nobody has ever succeeded in quarrelling 
 with Sir Edward Bradford. Mr. Matthews, in spite of 
 his forensic training, is a Constitutionalist, and a man 
 of principle. If he has been fiercely, and sometimes 
 reasonably, attacked, it should be remembered that the 
 onslaughts have not all come from the same side. 
 When he refused to admit the right of public meeting 
 in Trafalgar Square, the Socialists denounced him as a 
 Tory. When he declined to interfere with the full right 
 of combination by the dockers in the great strike, the 
 Tories denounced him as a Socialist. They even had
 
 MB. HENRY MATTHEWS. 181 
 
 the impudence to suggest that he was " unduly influ- 
 enced," in the spiritual sense, by the late Cardinal 
 Manning. When he led the Government to defeat in 
 the stupidly "bungled case of Miss Cass, he was techni- 
 cally right in protesting that as the woman had been 
 acquitted the business was none of his. A prudent 
 Minister would have managed the House, and soothed 
 the feelings of Miss Cass's friends. In dealing with 
 the disturbances at the World's End, Mr. Matthews 
 showed that he had learned a lesson in place, and 
 that he could even display tact upon occasion. 
 
 In the terrible duty of considering capital sentences 
 Mr. Matthews has, perhaps, shown more ingenuity than 
 wisdom. His famous decision that Mrs. Maybrick had 
 tried to poison her husband, but that Mr. Maybrick 
 might conceivably have died of something else, was a 
 miracle of subtlety ; but it was too clever by half. On 
 the other hand, in the case of Lipski he stood firm 
 against a ridiculous agitation much firmer than the 
 Judge, who procured a fruitless respite for which there 
 was no ground. As a politician, Mr. Matthews is 
 strongly opposed to the intervention of the State in 
 matters of trade, and to this now rather unfashion- 
 able belief he has been faithful wherever he could. 
 A man in English politics so highly accomplished as 
 Mr. Matthews has usually been trained at an English 
 University, in a public school, or both. Statesmen of 
 Mr. Chamberlain's type are common enough. But Mr. 
 Matthews is in a class by himself. His reading is 
 wide, though it seldom shows in his speeches, and he
 
 182 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 enjoys the reputation of a learned theologian. There 
 are few more precise purists in the choice of language, 
 and this ought to secure for Mr. Matthews the 
 approval of Mr. Gladstone, of whom he stands in 
 considerable awe.
 
 SIR JOHN GORST, 
 
 THE selection of Sir John Gorst to succeed Sir Gabriel 
 Stokes as member for Cambridge was creditable to 
 that ancient and splendid University, or rather to 
 the Tory caucus which controls its political destinies. 
 They are thoroughgoing Tories at Cambridge. They 
 do not recognise the people called Liberal Unionists. 
 They accepted the Duke of Devonshire as their Chan- 
 cellor partly because he is a duke and partly because 
 he is really a good deal more Conservative than Lord 
 Salisbury. But when they were fortunate enough to 
 secure Professor Jebb to fill the vacancy caused by the 
 death of Mr. Raikes, they insisted that the new member 
 should call himself a Conservative, and sit on the 
 Ministerial side of the House. In choosing Sir John 
 Gorst they have done well. But inasmuch as Sir 
 John is at least fifty per cent, more Liberal than most 
 of the Hartingtonian Adullamites, the Master of Mag- 
 dalene and Canon Browne exposed themselves to the 
 reproach of caring more for the name a man gives 
 himself than for the opinions he holds. If there are 
 to be University members at all, they ought to be men 
 of intellectual eminence, and not like the academic 
 representatives of Oxford. Sir John Gorst was a high
 
 184 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 wrangler and a Fellow of John's, where he now holds 
 an honorary Fellowship. He has seen a great deal of 
 the world, having been successively Civil Commissioner 
 of Waikato, in New Zealand, and principal agent of the 
 Tory party in the best days of Mr. Disraeli. But the 
 interesting fact about his adoption by Cambridge is that 
 he belongs to the progressive school of Conservatism, 
 and is indeed only a Conservative at all because in this 
 free country a public man must be something. 
 
 Various explanations have been offered of Sir John 
 Gorst's exclusion from the last Tory Cabinet, and they 
 agree only in being flattering to Sir John Gorst. The 
 most probable, and the least mysterious, is that Lord 
 Salisbury loves mediocrities and hates argument. The 
 only sign of grace the Prime Minister showed was in 
 raising Sir John to the rank of a Privy Councillor while 
 still an Under-Secretary of State. Perhaps the capricious 
 and versatile fancy of Lord Randolph Churchill may have 
 had something to do with the inadequate recognition 
 of Sir John Gorst's capacity and powers. When in 
 1886 Mr. Matthews became a Secretary of State and 
 Sir John Gorst an Under-Secretary, a duplicate blunder 
 was committed which may take rank with the grossest in 
 the history of Administrations. Nor was the folly made 
 less conspicuous by putting Sir John under the most 
 incompetent member of the old gang. From 1886 
 to 1891 it was Sir John Gorst's function to protect 
 Her Majesty's Indian Empire from the mischievous 
 fussiness of Lord Cross. For five years he deftly 
 accomplished his task, and yet avoided quarrelling
 
 SIR JOHN GORST. 185 
 
 with Lord Cross. At last, in the summer of 1891, 
 the fire kindled, and he spake with his tongue. Few 
 more amusing speeches were ever made in the House of 
 Commons than Sir John Gorst's so-called defence of 
 the Indian Government for their dealings with Manipur. 
 The most brilliant invective from the most eloquent 
 opponent would have been far less damaging than the 
 caustic irony which explained to the world from the 
 Treasury Bench how Lord Lansdowne had punished 
 'the Senaputty, not for his undoubted vices, but for 
 his equally unquestionable talents and vigour. The 
 ease and self-possession with which this unconventional 
 theory was broached, the air of infantine simplicity 
 which emphasised its most telling passages, delighted 
 the Opposition and disgusted the Ministerialists. Sir 
 John Gorst denied that when he talked of mediocrity 
 he was thinking of Lord Cross, as earnestly and indig- 
 nantly as Dickens protested that he did not mean 
 Harold Skimpole for Leigh Hunt. But it was difficult 
 to resist the conviction that the speech had been pro- 
 voked by five years of Lord Cross and the Indian 
 Council. 
 
 Those who know everything, or nothing, declare 
 that when the Tory Prime Minister remonstrated with 
 Sir John Gorst, Sir John naively replied that he had 
 only said in public what Lord Salisbury said in private. 
 But this is probably too good to be true. Having 
 made himself impossible at the India Office, Sir John 
 Gorst was, in accordance with good old English practice, 
 promoted to a higher sphere, and became Secretary to
 
 186 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 the Treasury. He is probably the only man who ever 
 arrived at this thankless and laborious, but very im- 
 portant, office through the legal service of the Crown. 
 In 1885, when the Fourth Party was dissolved after 
 dividing the spoil, Mr. Gorst was knighted on his 
 appointment as Solicitor-General. If his professional 
 status hardly warranted so sudden a rise, the scandal 
 was certainly less than the selection of a briefless 
 barrister with no knowledge of law to be Lord Chan- 
 cellor of Ireland. That so clever a man as Mr. Grorst 
 should not have obtained a larger and more lucrative 
 practice is rather surprising. But it must be recollected 
 that he was not called till his return from New Zealand, 
 and that he devoted himself to politics with intense 
 assiduity. When the Fourth Party was formed, he 
 was its shrewdest and most experienced member. Lord 
 Randolph soon distanced all his companions or com- 
 petitors in the House of Commons, and the Primrose 
 League took shape in the chaste imagination of Sir 
 . Henry Drummond Wolff. But Mr. Grorst knew the 
 Parliamentary ropes as well as the secrets of the elec- 
 tioneering confessional. The Solicitor-General did not 
 approve of Lord Salisbury's first legal appointments, 
 and in 1886, for reasons which could be best explained 
 by Sir Edward Clarke, Sir John Gorst received a 
 post of less dignity and emolument. He deserved a 
 fate which he should have shared with others for the 
 great blot in his political career, the infamous attack 
 on Lord Spencer, by which the Tories disgraced the 
 Session of 1885.
 
 SIR JOHN GOnST. 187 
 
 It is a real misfortune to the House of Commons 
 that Sir John Grorst, who has been, among other things, 
 a political journalist, should speak so seldom. He is a 
 debater of the first class, and would have beaten Mr. 
 Balfour hollow if their chances of distinguishing them- 
 selves had been equal. He is too fond of sarcasm to 
 expend it all upon the other side, and his convictions 
 are suspected of lacking profundity. But he is quick, 
 ready, dexterous, and good-humoured, with a constant 
 command of excellent English, and a decided turn for 
 felicitous epigram. He does not, however, belong to 
 the class by which the Tories think they ought to be 
 ruled, and it takes a man like Peel or Disraeli to rule 
 them altogether from the outside. Political hewers of 
 wood and drawers of water, like Mr. Ritchie and Mr. 
 Jackson, keep their places and get on very well. Sir 
 John Gorst is too human and too independent to speak 
 when he is spoken to and do as he is bid. Moreover, 
 he is substantially a just and humane man, with a 
 genuine hatred of cruelty and oppression, whether 
 exercised by native princes in India or by British 
 colonists in Australasia. When he was a young man 
 in New Zealand he espoused the cause of the Maories, 
 and he had what a more cynical politician than himself 
 called the taint of philanthropy. His interest in the 
 welfare of the working classes is not purely political. 
 He has been active and useful on the Labour Commis- 
 sion; while at Berlin he excited the warm admiration of 
 so competent and unprejudiced a critic as his colleague, 
 Mr. Burt. In the Parliament of 1880 he refused to
 
 188 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 join in factious resistance to the Corrupt Practices Act 
 and showed an honest determination to put down 
 bribery. On the whole, few politicians have a more 
 honourable record than Sir John Gorst, and the Univer- 
 sity of Cambridge has shown itself a better judge of his 
 sterling, straightforward character than either Lord 
 Salisbury or Lord Randolph Churchill.
 
 MR. COURTNEY. 
 
 MR. DELANE is reported to have said that when 
 Leonard Courtney had walked for three hours and 
 written for two he was fit company for ordinary man- 
 kind. This superabundant vitality of mind and body 
 makes Mr. Courtney younger and more vigorous at 
 sixty than many men of half his age. When he was 
 Secretary to the Treasury in Mr. Gladstone's second 
 Administration, the House sat from twelve o'clock on 
 Saturday till breakfast time on Sunday morning to finish 
 the Civil Service Estimates, of which he was in charge. 
 But Mr. Courtney showed no signs of physical fatigue, 
 and in the chair of Committees he is equally tough. 
 Of his virtues as Chairman there is only one opinion, 
 except among a few high and mighty youths below the 
 then Ministerial gangway, whose manners and excesses he 
 did not scruple to correct. It is a mistake to suppose that 
 the Irish members liked him. They would have preferred 
 a man who was less just and more sympathetic. Their 
 attitude was one of reluctant admission. They could 
 not deny that he was absolutely impartial, and all his 
 rulings strictly judicial. Our American friends would not 
 stand Mr. Courtney long in the House of Representatives. 
 The first time he was asked to assist in a party manoeuvre 
 would be also the last. If he had been Speaker at the
 
 190 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 beginning of 1881, the debate on the first reading of 
 Mr. Forster's Coercion Bill would have been suffered to 
 reach its normal close. So stiff was Mr. Courtney in 
 maintaining his neutrality that he would not even con- 
 form to the traditional usages of the House if they 
 conflicted with his ideal of indifferent aloofness. On the 
 comparatively rare occasions when a full-dress debate 
 was held in Committee, as, for instance, on the policy of 
 the Mombasa Eailway, he refused to accept from the 
 whips an arranged list of the speakers on either side. 
 Respect rather than popularity is the reward of this 
 almost pedantic revolt against conventional practices 
 and understandings. 
 
 As Speaker, with the wig and the mace and the 
 other symbols of authority, Mr. Courtney might be 
 thought to have too much roughness and too little 
 polish. As Chairman of Ways and Means, a post for 
 which Mr. Gladstone selected him, he was emphati- 
 cally tbe right man in the right place ; his deficiencies 
 were unimportant, and his qualities had full play. 
 He is perhaps the ablest man who ever filled the office, 
 certainly in our time. His soundness and clearness 
 of head, his rapid insight and comprehensive grasp, are 
 marvellous. He is no respecter of persons. As a 
 general rule, the Speaker or Chairman, when he has 
 to choose between members desirous of joining in 
 debate, takes them alternately from either side of the 
 House. The Speaker usually makes an exception in 
 favour of the two front benches. Mr. Courtney made 
 none. Mr. Gladstone once rose to follow a supporter
 
 MR. COURTNEY. 191 
 
 of his own in a criticism of the Irish Estimates. But 
 Mr. Forrest Fulton got up simultaneously from the 
 opposite side, and Mr. Courtney, without a moment's 
 hesitation, called upon Mr. Fulton. Mr. Gladstone's 
 face was a study. At first he seemed puzzled. Then 
 his features relaxed into the well-known smile which 
 spreads all over them, and he resumed his seat with 
 amused alacrity. On the other hand, Mr. Courtney has 
 repeatedly declined to put the closure, even when moved 
 by the Leader of the House. When Mr. Gladstone 
 intervened in debate on a Wednesday, the Speaker, who 
 was about to retire for refreshment, paused with charac- 
 teristic courtesy and waited until Mr. Gladstone had 
 finished what he had to say. It is doubtful whether 
 Mr. Courtney would have done the same. Mr. Courtney 
 may, perhaps, consider that it is the more essential for 
 him to emphasise his official impartiality because he 
 is a controversial politician outside the chair. The 
 Speaker is precluded by etiquette from making party 
 speeches, and, on the other hand, there is a general 
 feeling, which, of course, has no legal or constitutional 
 validity, that his seat ought not to be contested. The 
 Chairman has no such privilege, and suffers no such 
 disability. He mingles in the fray out of doors as 
 much as he pleases, and has to fight for his political 
 position like anybody else. It speaks volumes for 
 Mr. Courtney's freedom from bias that when complaints 
 have been made of his conduct in the chair, they have, 
 in nine cases out of ten, come from those with whom 
 he acts in Imperial questions.
 
 192 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 Mr. Courtney is, as everybody knows, a staunch 
 and sturdy opponent of Home Rule for Ireland. He 
 has always been a sort of political Nonconformist. The 
 party system does not suit him. He believes in every 
 man thinking for himself, which is a very pretty theory, 
 but which rests on an unverified postulate. If all men 
 were Courtneys, parties would be luxurious superfluities. 
 Mr. Courtney has never, during his political career, 
 been so thoroughly comfortable as when he was dis- 
 agreeing with his own side. After the General Election 
 of 1880, when Liberals were wild with delight over the 
 astonishing magnitude of their triumph, Mr. Courtney 
 characteristically remarked that he distrusted these big 
 turnover majorities. From December of that year, 
 when he succeeded the present Speaker as Under- 
 secretary of State at the Home Office, till 1884 he 
 was in Ministerial harness, proceeding through the 
 Colonial Office to the Treasury. But in 1884 he had 
 the great pleasure of resigning because proportional 
 representation had not been included in the Franchise 
 Bill. His fidelity to the memory of Mr. Fawcett may 
 have helped him in taking this step. But it was just 
 like him. Not one Englishman in a hundred cared 
 then, or cares now, two straws for proportional repre- 
 sentation. Mr. Courtney was not in the Cabinet, and 
 might probably have obtained leave to vote for his own 
 crotchet. He had no more responsibility for the Bill 
 than any other member of the Liberal party. But he 
 doubtless thought that by resignation he would bring 
 the priceless blessings of the transferable vote within
 
 MR. COURTNEY. 193 
 
 the range of the meanest intelligence. Alas for the 
 imperfections of the human mind ! Mr. Courtney was 
 Second Wrangler and first Smith's Prizeman. He can 
 scarcely believe that some voters would find the differ- 
 ential calculus puzzling, or that the transferable vote, 
 even if the element of chance could be eliminated from 
 it, is quite as hard as the differential calculus. He and 
 Sir John Lubbock understood it. Mr. Arnold Forster 
 professes to understand it. Why should the rural 
 voter pretend that he does not ? 
 
 Mr. Courtney's hardness of head is accompanied by 
 great softness of heart, and by an almost gushing 
 enthusiasm for his favourite reforms. When the 
 small majority against the Women's Suffrage Bill was 
 announced by the tellers, no one cheered so lustily as 
 Mr. Courtney at what he doubtless regarded as a moral 
 victory. If he does not suffer fools gladly, the amia- 
 bility of his disposition and the serenity of his temper 
 are never disturbed, even by those poor creatures who 
 are ignorant of geometry, and whom Plato would have 
 excluded from his house. Mr. Courtney is thrown 
 away upon his present associates. His genuine capa- 
 city, so different from the swaggering shallowness 
 which passes for intellectual superiority among the 
 Paper Unionists, is far more appreciated by his political 
 enemies than by his political friends. As a speaker he 
 suffered by taking the Queen's shilling. When he 
 stood up below the gangway, and in a genially philo- 
 sophical way swore at large, the effect was admirable, 
 and perhaps unique. His luminous lectures to his 
 
 M
 
 194 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 constituents are still a refreshing contrast to the solemn 
 platitudes of the Duke of Devonshire and the mock 
 heroics of Sir Henry James. But when he addresses 
 the House of Commons from the front Opposition 
 Bench, whether on a private or on a public Bill, the 
 general impression is that a chairman without a chair 
 resembles, as Martinus Scribblerus would say, a lord 
 mayor without a robe, or a carriage, or a body, or a 
 soul. Mr. Courtney has been a Professor of Political 
 Economy, and used to be a dogmatic individualist. 
 But of late years he has somewhat modified his views, 
 especially where the control of the liquor traffic is 
 concerned. The change is, perhaps, not unconnected 
 with the fact that Mrs. Courtney, a woman of very 
 strong and original mind, has an extensive knowledge 
 of the working classes, their habits, tastes, wants, and 
 temptations. The career of Mr. Courtney, who was 
 for many years a distinguished journalist, has been a 
 singularly honourable one. He has pursued his own 
 straight and independent path, fearing neither Grovern- 
 ments nor mobs, incapable of jealousy or rancour, 
 placing the good of the people above every other object, 
 and patriotism above every other motive. His only 
 weaknesses are to fancy that everyone has the same 
 intellectual advantages as himself, and to dress in 
 the evening as if he were employed to advertise the 
 Review.
 
 MR. BURNS. 
 
 MR. BURNS is almost the only new member who has 
 made a real impression upon the House of Commons. 
 There was a time, and that not a hundred years ago, 
 when the House was disposed to regard working men 
 as an interesting novelty, and to pet them accordingly 
 But it has since got used to them, found that they are 
 very like other people only with rather better manners 
 and taken them, like other people, on their merits. 
 The aristocratic sentiments of the Right Honourable 
 Jesse Collings sometimes lead him, good-natured man 
 as he really is, to sneer at those who claim to represent 
 the masses, because, as he once put it, in a burst of 
 noble rhetoric, " they worked with their hands in the 
 dim and distant future." " I meant the past, Mr. 
 Speaker," he added, as perhaps the Speaker may have 
 guessed. But Mr. Collings is a peculiarly maladroit 
 personage, and the style of controversy in which he still 
 indulges has become generally obsolete. The Labour 
 Members get their share of attention, and no more. 
 Mr. Keir Hardie has been "taken up" by a smal 
 knot of Tories, who have no definite principles except 
 that their own side ought to be in, and who believe 
 that Mr. Keir Hardie is "agin the Government." 
 M 2
 
 196 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 Others, including that curious and instructive sur- 
 vival from a past phase of Irish society, Mr. Edward 
 Carson, made a dead set at Mr. Havelock Wilson, whose 
 undoubted honesty and ability are not always accom- 
 panied by an equal measure of prudence. But on the 
 whole the Parliamentary working man has been left to 
 find his level, and if the level be a high one the credit 
 is his own. Mr. Burns had the great disadvantage of 
 entering the House with a conspicuous reputation 
 gained outside. Mr. Chamberlain tells a good story of 
 an old Parliamentary hand not Mr. Gladstone who 
 advised him to break down in his maiden speech, as the 
 House would take it for a compliment. Mr. Chamber- 
 lain never did break down probably could not if he 
 tried. Diffidence is not one of Mr. Burns's many 
 interesting qualities. The House of Commons had no 
 terrors for him, and he would not affect the fears he 
 did not feel. His maiden speech was delivered with 
 as much breezy confidence as if he had been on a 
 Battersea platform. He had not been long in the 
 House before a sharp little encounter with Mr. Lowther 
 showed how remarkably well he could hold his own. 
 " The honourable member is not in the London County 
 Council," said Mr. Lowther, with his nearest approach 
 to a dignified manner. " Nor is the right honourable 
 gentleman on Newmarket Heath," was the prompt 
 rejoinder, which admitted of no rebutter, or, at least, 
 received none. After that Mr. Burns was interrupted 
 no more. Few men indeed are heard with more atten- 
 tion and respect. Mr. Burns never talks for the sake
 
 MR. BURNS. 197 
 
 of talking. When he gets up he has something to 
 say, and knows how to say it. 
 
 Mr. Burns was one of the first members of the 
 London County Council, being then only thirty years 
 old, so that he is but thirty-five now. Lord Eosebery 
 at once discovered his great ability, and predicted for 
 him a distinguished future. Nevertheless, Mr. Burns 
 has succeeded better at Westminster than at Spring 
 Gardens. He justly despised the reactionary party, 
 who, even granting their opinions to be sound, have 
 always made a miserable show. The result was that 
 he became, in the slang phrase, rather too big for his 
 boots. But in the House of Commons he soon dis- 
 covered, being a thoroughly sensible man, that the 
 Opposition was strongly and ably led. Mr. Balfour 
 and Mr. Chamberlain, at their best, stand very high in 
 the category of political leaders, in spite of Mr. Cham- 
 berlain's temper and Mr. Balfour's indolence. Mr. 
 Burns is full of pluck, and is not afraid of anybody. 
 But he respects a strong enemy, and recognises a good 
 argument. No public speaker is more courageous or 
 less given to flattering the masses. In the debate on 
 the Featherstone Riots he took a very bold line indeed, 
 admitting that dangerous rioters ought to be shot, and 
 even condemning the use of less deadly weapons than 
 the Lee-Mitford rifle. When Mr. Burns took his seat, 
 along with Mr. Keir Hardie, on the left of the Speaker, 
 it was too hastily inferred that he would not support 
 Her Majesty's Government. As a matter of fact, 
 Ministers have had few more staunch and loyal allies.
 
 198 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 When a Eadical protest is made in the Lobbies, Mr. 
 Burns almost always gives a Eadical vote. But he 
 never makes mischief, or attempts to organise a revolt. 
 Why, indeed, should he? Except in one point, the 
 Government have, on matters affecting the working 
 classes, stood in with the Trade Unions. They did 
 not, and having regard to the differences in their own 
 party they could not, make the Eight Hours Bill for 
 miners a Ministerial measure. They refused to give 
 Mr. Woods a day for it after it had been read a second 
 time. But a day would not have passed it, so that an 
 opposite decision would have been of no practical use. 
 On the other hand, the Government have remained firm 
 against contracting out of the Employers' Liability Bill, 
 and are, so far as possible, introducing the eight hours 
 day into Government workshops. These are the chief 
 questions upon which Mr. Burns has insisted since his 
 entrance into Parliament. Now, Mr. Burns is not a 
 dreaming enthusiast, but an essentially practical man, 
 who prefers getting what he wants without making a 
 fuss, to making a fuss without getting what he wants. 
 The principle may look like a truism when stated in 
 black and white. But many a fine career has been 
 spoilt by neglect of it. 
 
 Mr. Burns has good reason to be satisfied with him- 
 self for refusing to despair of Liberalism, and to be led 
 into the wilderness where the " Independent Labour 
 Party " seems likely to wander for the next forty 
 years. He has indeed good reason to be satisfied with 
 himself generally, as he most unquestionably is. A
 
 MR. BURNS. 199 
 
 slight tendency to patronise mankind will doubtless be 
 corrected by experience and time. Mr. Burns has 
 done more than enough to be proud of. His fight for 
 the "docker's tanner" was most gallant, most unselfish, 
 and most sagacious. The admirable nature of his work 
 on the County Council is acknowledged by many of his 
 political opponents in Battersea. Perhaps his least 
 successful effort was his interference in the Scotch rail- 
 way strike of 1890-91, where he was rather out of his 
 element, and which he did not altogether understand. 
 Yet Mr. Burns, though a Londoner by education and 
 residence, is a Scotsman by birth and origin. Indeed, 
 his family is said to be connected with that of the 
 illustrious poet. The House of Commons has done Mr. 
 Burns good. His Parliamentary aptitude is as great 
 as was Mr. Bradlaugh's, and, like Mr. Bradlaugh, he 
 prefers constitutional to revolutionary methods. It is 
 difficult to imagine him ever again acting with such a 
 feather-headed specimen of the sham Democrat as Mr. 
 Cuninghame Graham. Probably it was more the risk 
 than anything else which led Mr. Burns to Trafalgar 
 Square on the unhappily notorious Sunday afternoon. 
 When Mr. Justice Charles had authoritatively, and 
 beyond question rightly, declared the square to be in 
 law the property of the Crown, a Home Secretary of 
 tact and sense would have proceeded to make suitable 
 regulations for meetings to be held there upon con- 
 venient occasions. But Mr. Matthews, with all his 
 cleverness, has neither sense nor tact. It was left for 
 Mr. Asquith, Mr. Graham's counsel, to take the prudent
 
 ^00 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 course whicli has been so completely justified by events. 
 Mr. Asquith did not defend Mr. Burns. Mr. Burns 
 defended himself with eloquence and force. But the 
 case was a purely legal one, and the jury could only 
 follow the direction of the judge. Mr. Burns is an 
 excellent speaker of the direct, business-like, and per- 
 suasive sort. He does not trouble himself to round 
 his periods. What he cares about is going straight 
 to the point and making his meaning absolutely clear. 
 In neither respect does he ever fail. His contro- 
 versial weakness is a passion for statistics, which are 
 double-edged tools. His nature is full of geniality 
 and humour, whicli make him, as he deserves to be, 
 universally popular.
 
 MR. CARSON. 
 
 MR. EDWARD CARSON is the only new member on the 
 Conservative side of the House who has distinguished 
 himself above his fellows. Mr. Scott Montagu created 
 a mild sensation by a clever maiden speech, in which he 
 seemed to hint that Home Rule might not, after all, be 
 quite such a " damnable doctrine and position " as Prim- 
 rose Leaguers were in the habit rather of asserting than 
 of believing. But nothing more has been heard of him 
 from that day to this. If much speaking made an 
 orator, Mr. Grant Lawson might rank with Cicero. But, 
 alas ! it does not, and Mr. Lawson is as little like 
 Cicero as need be. Mr. Carson is neither Ciceronian 
 nor Demosthenic. He does not fill the House, though 
 he does not empty it. His first speech in the House of 
 Commons was an extremely clever one, and Mr. Carson 
 is an extremely clever man. An old Parliamentary hand, 
 on hearing him, compared him with Whiteside, which is 
 understood by an ignorant and oblivious generation to 
 be a high compliment. Although Mr. Carson has not 
 sustained this early level, and although he makes the 
 fatal blunder of letting it be seen that in his own 
 opinion he confers an honour upon the House by taking 
 part in debate, he is an interesting figure. When 
 
 M*
 
 202 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 George the Third said that, if yon wanted an Irishman 
 basted, you could always get another Irishman to turn 
 the spit, he had in his own mind the Carsons of his own 
 day. They were much worse men than the junior 
 member for the University of Dublin. The world im- 
 proves, and its Carsons improve with it. Mr. Fitz- 
 patrick's terrible book, " Secret Service under Pitt," is a 
 gloomy and poisonous illustration of the royal epigram. 
 " You are a villain," says Brabantio to lago. " You are 
 a senator " is lago's reply. Mr. Carson is not a villain. 
 He is a member of Parliament. He is further removed 
 from the spies and informers of old days than they were 
 from the lowest reptiles that crawled. He has never 
 been anything worse than the ready and willing instru- 
 ment of Mr. Balfour's coercive policy in Ireland. The 
 story that he introduced himself to the Chief Secretary 
 then known in Ireland by a silly and opprobrious 
 nickname as Coercion Carson, and urged this phrase as 
 a title to favour, is doubtless mythical ; but Mr. Carson 
 did render great services to the Tory Government in 
 Ireland, and he has been amply rewarded for it. From 
 the year 1887 to the year 1890 he was in almost every 
 prosecution of importance under the Crimes Act, and he 
 did his work, such as it was, exceedingly well. His 
 language and behaviour would not have been tolerated 
 in an English Court of Justice ; but the Nationalist 
 counsel had certainly no right to complain if Mr. Carson 
 paid them back in their own coin. Neither side gave 
 nor asked for quarter, and Mr. Healy, in particular, is 
 on the most friendly terms with his old antagonist.
 
 MB. CARSON. 203 
 
 Mr. Carson sits for a constituency where there is 
 never a serious contest, and upon which a Tory Ad- 
 ministration can always foist a law officer of their own. 
 He succeeded to the Parliamentary vacancy created hy 
 the appointment of Mr. Madden to the Bench, and 
 became for a few weeks Irish Solicitor-General. This 
 was not had for a man of thirty-nine ; for the seat is, of 
 course, a perfectly safe one, unless the University should 
 be disfranchised. But it is understood that Mr. Carson's 
 aspirations are by no means satisfied. When the Tories 
 thought they were coming into office last summer they 
 determined, it is said, to shunt Lord Ashbourne to make 
 Sir Peter O'Brien better known as Peter the Packer 
 Lord Chancellor of Ireland, and to appoint Mr. Carson 
 Lord Chief Justice in his room. With such a prize 
 in prospect, Mr. Carson's almost feverish activity in 
 English politics is natural and intelligible. It is a real 
 misfortune for Ireland that the road to fame and fortune 
 in the legal profession should lie almost exclusively 
 through the patronage of the Crown. Mr. Carson's un- 
 doubted ability would never have raised him to anything 
 like his present position if his politics had been those of 
 the majority of his countrymen. Mr. Carson, like Sir 
 Eichard Webster, took his seat on the Treasury Bench 
 when he first entered the House of Commons. He only 
 occupied it for a very few days before crossing the floor. 
 But to begin Parliamentary life from either Front Bench 
 is an advantage as well as a distinction. Successive 
 Speakers have conformed to the vicious practice, from 
 which Mr. Courtney had the strength of mind to depart,
 
 204 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 of calling upon late and present Ministers of the Crown 
 in preference to any private member, although it often 
 happens that the private member would be far more 
 gladly heard by the House. Now, a man who can speak 
 whenever he likes has a strong pull over the vulgar 
 herd, who have to wait their turn and take the chance 
 of being called. Considering his possession of this valu- 
 able privilege, Mr. Carson's Parliamentary achievements 
 have not been brilliant. Imperturbable assurance never 
 deserts him, and he knows nothing of the temptation to 
 give an independent vote. The House of Commons is 
 accustomed to lawyers, though it is not enamoured 
 of them. But Mr. Carson's brief is too conspicuous 
 and too well marked. It is difficult to listen to him 
 without feeling that he would speak quite as fluently and 
 with the same air of conviction on the other side. Then 
 he has a disagreeable habit of repeating his words, as if 
 he feared that the excellence of his phraseology was 
 not appreciated by the House. Even John Bright's 
 luminous and felicitous flashes of wisdom would have 
 suffered if they had been exhibited twice. Mr. Carson 
 is neither wise, witty, nor eloquent, and the most patient 
 assembly in the world resents hearing twice what was 
 not worth saying once. A stale vocabulary should be 
 aired, as dirty linen should be washed, in private. 
 
 The class of Irishman to which Mr. Carson belongs 
 usually flatter themselves on being intensely English. 
 To English eyes they are no more English than the 
 Swiss soldiers of fortune in mediaeval times. If Ireland 
 were subject to France Mr. Carson would be French,
 
 ME. CARBON. 205 
 
 and if she were subject to America he would be Ameri- 
 can. Mr. Carson, besides taking a prominent part in the 
 festivities of the London season, has got himself called 
 to the English Bar. He is a skilful advocate, and his 
 cross-examination of Mr. Havelock Wilson was justly 
 admired. In Ireland he is a Queen's Counsel. In Eng- 
 land he is a junior, and wears a stuff gown. Mr. Carson 
 likes a row, and thoroughly enjoyed himself on the night 
 of the famous disturbance in the House of Commons. 
 His employers have no reason to be dissatisfied with his 
 fidelity and zeal. Nobody knew better than he the 
 weakness of the case against Mr. Morley's Irish Ad- 
 ministration ; but nobody not even Mr. T. ~W. Russell 
 attacked the Chief Secretary with greater vigour. 
 Mr. Carson does not shine in controversy with Mr. John 
 Morley. Mr. Morley has no legal colleague in the 
 House, and Mr. Carson often trips him up on points of 
 law ; yet the essential large-mindedness of the one man 
 and the essential small-mindedness of the other are too 
 manifest to be ignored. Mr. Balfour does not like the 
 spectacle, and his preference of Mr. Morley to a whole 
 wilderness of Carsons is not always concealed. Mr. 
 Carson suffers also from comparison with his colleague 
 in the representation of Dublin University. Mr. Plunket 
 is a man in whom the whole House of Commons feels a 
 certain pride. His musical voice, his dignified manners, 
 and his stately eloquence make him a great member of 
 Parliament. He is a splendid specimen of a fine type 
 an Irish gentleman of the old school. Staunch Conser- 
 vative as he is, Mr. Plunket listens with genuine and
 
 206 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 obvious pride to a fine speech from a Nationalist 
 fellow-countryman. Mr. Carson is a good fighter, and 
 nothing more ; but it must be acknowledged that he is 
 a very good one. To reflect upon some of the Irish law 
 officers who have sat in the House of Commons on their 
 way to the Judicial Bench is to understand the general 
 want of sympathy with the administration of the law in 
 Ireland. Mr. Carson at least is no fool. He is a 
 capable debater, a capable lawyer above all, a man 
 capable of getting on. If there were no Carsons, it 
 would be necessary to invent them. The supply, how- 
 ever, is not likely to fail, and it is artificially stimulated 
 by the present state of the Union between Great Britain' 
 and Ireland.
 
 MR. MELLOR. 
 
 WHEN Mr. Gladstone became Prime Minister for the 
 fourth time, he had to fill a post quite as important 
 as any of those which are accompanied by seats in 
 the Cabinet. The Chairman of Ways and Means is 
 not a member of the Government, and does not resign 
 office with the Ministers of the Crown. Nominally 
 and formally he is elected by the House when the 
 House first resolves itself into Committee. Really and 
 substantially, he is appointed by the Prime Minister, 
 whose choice has never been though it might be 
 disputed by the House of Commons. Mr. Gladstone 
 took plenty of time for consideration. Parliament met 
 in August, and the new Chairman was not elected 
 till February. It was, however, understood almost 
 from the first that the choice lay between Mr. Courtney 
 and Mr. Mellor. Mr. Courtney was by general consent 
 the best Chairman within living memory. Nobody 
 disputed his ability or doubted his impartiality. But 
 it would have been entirely without precedent that 
 a Minister should bestow this valuable piece of 
 patronage upon a member of the Opposition. Mr. 
 Courtney would, in any case, have voted against 
 the second reading of the Home Rule Bill, and his
 
 208 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 principal duty would have been to preside over the 
 discussion of a measure which he detested and desired 
 to defeat. Two other arguments were sometimes 
 employed which ought not to have weighed, and 
 probably did not weigh, a single ounce with Mr. 
 Gladstone. On the one side, it was said that to muzzle 
 so formidable an opponent, and to prevent him from 
 speaking or voting in Committee, would be plausibly 
 generous and profoundly politic. On the other side it 
 was urged that if the Cornish Liberals were taught to 
 regard Mr. Courtney as an indispensable Chairman, they 
 would come to consider him a necessary representative 
 of the Bodmin Division. The Tories had the benefit 
 of Mr. Courtney's vote, and the Government lost Mr. 
 Mellor's. Lovers of paradox may be heard to contend 
 that Mr. Courtney set too high a standard in what is, 
 after all, a subordinate office. The old-fashioned Chair- 
 man, of whom nobody took any particular notice, and 
 who was as likely as not to cry " Ayes to the Noes, 
 Right to the Left," did well enough, and got through 
 his business somehow. Mr. Courtney may have con- 
 soled himself, if he required consolation, by reflecting 
 that he suffered the ostracism of Aristides. 
 
 Mr. Mellor had deserved well of the Liberal party. 
 He had fought several contests, though it must be said, 
 on the other hand, that he had been rewarded with 
 a safe seat. In Somersetshire, where he resides, and 
 discharges the duties of a country squire, he has 
 been the life and soul of Liberalism. He had held, 
 in the short Liberal Administration of 1886, the post of
 
 MR. MELLOR. 209 
 
 Judge-Advocate-General, which has now ceased to be a 
 political appointment. His qualifications were legal 
 training, high character, an imperturbable temper, and 
 a most amiable disposition. But Mr. Mellor took the 
 reins on very onerous terms, and under very grave 
 disadvantages. The times were troublous. Obstruction 
 was rampant, party feeling ran high, and on one 
 occasion a few members came to blows. Mr. Chamber- 
 lain devoted all his great Parliamentary ability, never 
 before so conspicuously displayed, to inflaming passion 
 and provoking resentment. Mr. Mellor was an alto- 
 gether unknown quantity. Most of the new members 
 and many of the old members did not know him by 
 sight. He had not sat in the previous Parliament, 
 in which the new Rules of Procedure were first framed 
 and applied. Most of the faces must have been strange 
 to him, and he had not the royal gift of instantaneous 
 recognition. His good nature stood in his way. Men 
 accustomed to the manners of Mr. Courtney, who ruled 
 with a rod of iron, took Mr. Mellor's politeness for 
 a sign of timidity. He was no sooner in the Chair 
 than Mr. Chamberlain began to patronise him in his 
 most offensive manner, which is very offensive indeed. 
 The noisier Tories made a dead set at him, and 
 Mr. Hanbury, in particular, contradicted him with a 
 rudeness which would not have been tolerated in a 
 parish vestry. It is to Mr. Mellor's credit, and perhaps 
 to Mr. Balfour's also, that these open demonstrations 
 soon ceased. Mr. Mellor is so thorough a gentleman 
 in every sense of the word, he is so invariably courteous
 
 210 STATESMEN, PAST AND FUTURE. 
 
 and considerate to everyone with whom he comes 
 in contact, that attempts to bully or annoy him were 
 quickly resented by the whole House of Commons. It 
 is a fine achievement to have presided over some of the 
 most stormy and acrimonious debates ever held in 
 Committee without making a single enemy. So much 
 may certainly be said of Mr. Mellor. He has avoided 
 all personal encounters, and has never " named " anyone 
 to the House. His method has been an appeal to 
 the good feeling of both sides, and to enlist that feeling 
 on the side of order. It is better, when it is possible, 
 to ride with a snaffle than to ride with a curb. 
 
 Most of the criticisms upon Mr. Mellor's conduct in 
 the Chair, which have undoubtedly been both numerous 
 and severe, come from the Liberal party. It is much 
 to his honour that the most vehement opponents of 
 Liberals and Liberalism should have been unable to 
 accuse him of anything like unfairness. Of weakness, 
 or at least undue mildness, he cannot altogether be 
 acquitted. There have been occasions when sternness 
 was imperatively required, and when Mr. Mellor's 
 gentleness was misunderstood and abused. But the 
 number of these lost opportunities has been much 
 exaggerated. Most of the Obstructionists are quite 
 clever enough to keep within the law, and forbearance 
 itself has a moral influence which is too apt to be 
 ignored. The remarkable and unexpected success of 
 Sir Julian Groldsmid as temporary Chairman has drawn 
 attention to some of the things which Mr. Mellor leaves 
 undone. There is a standing order, which Mr. Mellor
 
 MR. MELLOR. 211 
 
 has never enforced, against tedious repetition not only of 
 the speaker's own arguments, but of other people's 
 arguments also. The necessity for passing many clauses 
 of the Home Rule Bill without discussion might 
 perhaps have been avoided if Mr. Mellor had been 
 willing to enforce the rule which provides for adding 
 each clause to a Bill after reasonable debate. If 
 Sir Julian had been in Mr. Mellor' s place, he would 
 have begun by refusing to put the closure when 
 Mr. Morley moved it the first night the Home Rule 
 Bill was in Committee; he would next have called 
 Mr. Gladstone to order for wandering from the point ; 
 he would have proceeded to declare that Mr. Chamber- 
 lain was repeating what had been better said by 
 Mr. Collings ; and finally, he would have refused to put a 
 motion to report progress made by Mr. Balfour, on the 
 ground that it was an abuse of the rules of the House. 
 Then his position would have been secure, and he could 
 have done anything he pleased. Mr. Mellor preferred 
 conciliation to coercion, as is no doubt consistent with 
 the tenets of a Liberal and a Home Ruler. He is 
 so generally liked and esteemed that it seems 
 unpleasant and ungracious to find fault with him. But 
 he has carried too far the famous advice of Lord 
 Mansfield against giving reasons. A Chairman should 
 stick to his ruling whatever it is, and should never 
 condescend to argue. But a Member whose amendment 
 is ruled out of order is entitled to know why. Mr. 
 Courtney always gave his reasons, whether they were 
 good or bad, and that without consulting Mr. Milman.
 
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 Tcm Morris's Error. 
 
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 Truth will Out. 
 
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 Abraham Lincoln. 
 
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 : in One yol., clot 
 
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 J arts <fc Melbourne,
 
 II