and yet, we know that there was a Gladstone who could disarm and delight even his enemies by his bright bravura at dinner or reception; who gave George Russell some of his best and wickedest stories, even that one about the swearing Archbishop of Canterbury; who pursued the oddest fads with enthusiasm, and took up with the wildest fashions in a spirit of hilarity. In Lord Malmesbury's memoirs we find him writing in 1844: "Met Mr. Gladstone, a man who is much spoken of as one who will come to the front. We were disappointed at his appearance, which is that of a Roman Catholic ecclesiastic." But twenty years later the same nobleman wrote: "Gladstone, who was always fond of music, is now quite enthusiastic about negro melodies, singing them with the greatest spirit and enjoyment, never leaving out a verse, and evidently preferring such as Camptown Races.' Punch seized upon the contrast of monk and negro minstrel, and had its caricature of Mr. Gladstone in clerical black, his downcast eyes upon his breviary; with a parallel portrait displaying him in the exaggerated dress of the end man, screaming, "Oh, do dah dey!" But no comic art, testifies an intimate of the family, "could body forth a more amusing picture than the scene in real life when Mr. Gladstone, taking Mrs. Gladstone by the hand, would warble the song of the wandering fiddler :

political development was strangely slow. He signally defied the saying that the great driving impulses come to a man under thirty. Gladstone was fifty before it even became certain to which political party he was to belong. A disheartening list of reactionary measures had his early approval. But his sympathies broadened with time; he burst through the hard casing of his Oxford education, and began to be of Burke's approved type of statesman, one who, with a disposition to preserve, united the ability to improve. His improvements, no doubt, often looked like willful changes. It was said of him that he could let nothing alone — in flat defiance of Lord Melbourne's counsel of political wisdom. "Sir," said an old distributer of revenue stamps, "I must resign. My head is worn out. The Chancellor, sir, is imposing of things that I can't understand.” Many others rebelled at Mr. Gladstone's appalling industry of innovation. Yet one supreme test always differentiated him from the mere agitator. He was ever ready with his bill to enact his policy. His outery was not the vague protest which aims at it knows not what. His grievances he stood ready to reduce to writing, and produced his remedy in the form of an act of Parliament. was not his way to carry an election on blown promises, and then, when challenged on the score of fulfillment, to fall back with the audacious cynicism of a Disraeli upon the assertion that " many things have happened" since the pledge was made. "Do you call that amusing?" he asked Browning, when the poet once told him of "Dizzy's " latest duplicity; "I call it devilish." And through all the changes of front which he had to offer to a changing enemy, Gladstone held fast to some one principle which, to him at least, was vital. This is no place to review his Irish policy. Those who wish to must go to Mr. Morley. But one thing may be said. From the moment that Gladstone bent his mind

It

to the discovery of a real cure for the chronic malady of Irish misgovernment, he clung to the central conception which he formed, through good report and through evil report. One dismal failure more, or a splendid posthumous success -and it is too soon to say which his Home Rule scheme will be rated by history in his personal attitude throughout the great debate he seemed to be the visible realization of Coleridge's prayer: "How miserably imbecile and objectless has the English government of Ireland been for forty years past! Oh! for a great man but one really great man who could feel the weight and the power of a principle, and unflinchingly put it into act!"

his

But all Mr. Gladstone's political principles were subsumed in one. "Political life was only part of his religious life." Mr. Morley writes: "At nearly every page of Mr. Gladstone's active career, the vital problem stares us in the face of the correspondence between the rule of private morals and of public. Is the rule one and the same for the individual and the state? From his early years onwards, Mr. Gladstone's whole language and the moods that it reproduces, vivid denunciations, his sanguine expectations, his rolling epithets, his aspects and appeals and points of view, -all take for granted that right and wrong depend on the same set of maxims in public life and in private. The puzzle will often greet us, and here it is enough to glance at it. In every statesman's case it arises; in Mr. Gladstone's it is cardinal and fundamental." It is, of course, easy the closet moralist to maintain that the law of right conduct is for the politician exactly what it is for the man; but for a leader of a great party in a democracy to assert it, and proudly to challenge the testing of his own political course through many years by this touchstone that is another thing. It would be absurd to say that Mr. Gladstone always emerges triumphant from the ordeal.

for

No intellect but one as subtle and refining as his own could make out a clear moral consistency in all the crises of his public career. He himself confesses to a certain opportunism. The difficulty of saying at a given moment just what is the greater good, he admits. But there lies the hidden rock for the Christian statesman. A little weak compromising to save the party, concealment or truckling for the sake of "the cause," doubt whether the nation might not suffer more by your renouncing the devil, and being driven out of office for it, than by speaking him fair and staying in to compass your beneficent ends, those are the nice distinctions which make political morality so dubious and controverted. That Gladstone never left a gap between his principles and his acts need not be contended. Mr. Morley defends no such thesis. But the principles were so high, and the approximation to them in practice so remarkable, — in the age of Bismarck, that Gladstone was, in this respect, if not impeccable, at least first, and the rest nowhere, among the commanding public figures of his time.

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This trait of a higher standard and a severer morality early impressed those who observed him narrowly. "The only Cabinet Minister of five years' standing," wrote Cobden in 1859, "who is not afraid to let his heart guide his head a little at times." This was particularly the case in all matters affecting foreign relations. He was the most plain-spoken and fearless of diplomats. less of diplomats. Every one recalls the lengths he went in denouncing the Austrian government during his Midlothian campaign. For this, when taking office again, he made an apology as Minister of the Crown; as Gladstone the man, his opinions doubtless remained the same. "Gladstone," wrote the Duke of Newcastle to Abraham Hayward in 1858, "is not a diplomat, and probably spoke in the salons of Count Beust very much what he felt about the tyrannies of Bomba, or those of some of our more intimate friends."

That early and chivalrous championing of the wretched in Naples marked a humane and lofty impulse which never ceased to vibrate under appeal. Gladstone left a mass of notes for a volume which he once contemplated on Future Retribution. The pages were found docketed: "From this I was called away to write on Bulgaria." The present scorch ing of sinners could not wait as well as the Day of Judgment. Mr. Gladstone had an extraordinary capacity for righteous indignation. What his flaming speech against giant injustice could do in the way of impressing the popular imagination, let his sweeping victory of 1880, in the teeth of the wisest political prophets, be the witness. And as the historian J. R. Green wrote to Humphry Ward : "Let us never forget that the triumph is his. He and he only among the Liberals I met never despaired. He and he only foresaw what the verdict on this 'great trial' would be. When folk talk of cool-headed statesmen' and 'sentimental rhetoricians' again, I shall always call to mind that in taking stock of English opinion at this crisis the sentimental rhetorician was right and the cool-headed statesmen were wrong." Mr. Morley quotes Green's glowing tribute to the leader of whom he was so proud, · the man who "was always noble of soul." Mr. Gladstone had the power of thus impressing widely diverse natures. Large-fibred Spurgeon rivaled the finely grained Green in admiration. "We believe," he wrote, "in no man's infallibility, but it is restful to be sure of one man's integrity." "That admirable sentence," comments Mr. Morley. "marks the secret." No ordinary man could have so clasped to himself such differing supporters. At Oxford, he had Pusey's vote, and he had Jowett's. Of this richly endowed and flashing nature, what was the master-passion?

Gladstone himself thought it was a love of human liberty. He worked out into it slowly. Oxford scholasticism and Oxford prejudice long smothered the sacred flame. But at last it burst out. Blazing before the eyes of all the world, it gave Gladstone his peculiar fame, friend of humanity, enemy of all tyrants. An extract from his journal in 1879 lets us into his inner mind: "I am writing in the last minutes of the seventh decade of my life. ... It is hardly possible that I should complete another decade. . . . For the last three and a half years I have been passing through a political experience which is, I believe, without example in our parliamentary history. I profess to believe it has been an occasion when the battle to be fought was a battle of justice, humanity, freedom, law, all in their first elements from the very root, and all on a gigantic scale. The word spoken was a word for millions, and for millions who for themselves cannot speak. If I really believe this, then I should regard my having been morally forced into this work as a great and high election of God. ... Such are some of an old man's thoughts, in whom there is still something that consents not to be old." Nor did it for fifteen years thereafter. That frame

of steel bore him later into still fiercer battles for the inarticulate oppressed. His intellect, with its wonderful strength and its almost equally wonderful weaknesses,

entirely dead, as it was, to the whole scientific movement of his age, flamed high and steady for a decade and a half longer before the men who followed him, like another Dandolo, to a nobler fight; while over all, a pillar of cloud by day and fire by night, was that moral enthusiasm, that majestic rage for truth and right and justice which made Gladstone an inspiring leader not simply of a party, but of mankind.

Rollo Ogden.

THE house part, painted white with neat green blinds, faced the village and the sunrise with an air of conscious rectitude, which quite overshadowed all suggestion of bad company. The dingy stone structure in its rear looked away through narrow close-barred windows to the open country and the hills. There were no other buildings near, for the shire town of Evergreen County was but a sleepy country village after all, and prospecting home builders by common consent avoided the near neighborhood of Evergreen County Jail. Yet it had been a not unpeaceful neighborhood in years gone by. For long months of many years the narrow stone rooms had stood closed and tenantless, or open only to admit a mild offender for the briefest possible term. Evergreen County was the banner county of the state, and Peterson Thomas, who had been its sheriff, and jailer for twelve successive years, boasted freely of the county's record during that time. "We ain't sent but three to State Prison in all them years, he was fond of asserting, "and one of them I never felt sure ought to gone; this circumstantial evidence is a terrible clincher when it comes to provin' things that could have happened so and so whether they actually did or not. The other two I ain't got nothin' to say for. They might have been guilty of the crimes charged against 'em, and then again they might n't. But I'm free to confess, after a close acquaintance of two months, that prison was the proper place for 'em both on any charge whatsoever that would gain 'em entrance there, whether they did it or not. I never could see no real good reason why the brains we send down to Augusty year after year, and pay 'em high to go, could n't make a law that 'll take care of the natural-born criminal before he actually jeperdizes the safety an' well

bein' of the community. A villain's a villain so fur as that goes, and any honest man of good judgment can size him up first jest as easy as last. But then professional villains ain't common to Evergreen County. No, sir. Our folks for the most part are an honest, good-intentioned sort of fellers, who'd done a heap better if they had n't meant so well. Weak wills and shiftlessness may be full as aggravatin' as crime, but they're more respectable."

For Jailer Thomas in his career as sheriff had learned to regard his prisoners with much the same loyalty which Dr. Roswell, president of a neighboring college, felt toward his students.

"If the other party don't increase in power more 'n they have, Emily Ann, you and me bids fair to die in harness, Jailer Thomas frequently assured his good wife. "Well, we might done worse. It's a peaceful life, and our record's one to be proud of. Heaven grant there don't no murders nor bank robberies come up in this county to disgrace us in our old age."

That the thirteenth year of his term of office entered upon Friday was not at the time regarded by the good man as a specially ominous circumstance, yet he recalled it mournfully when, in the months following, the jail experienced what Mrs. Thomas declared to be "a terrible rush of business," and seven of its ten cells were occupied at once by offenders of varying degrees of crime. Peterson Thomas was plunged in gloom. "We're goin' back on our record," he declared mournfully. "I'd ought to let well enough alone, and refused to run the thirteenth year." His dejection did not lessen when just before spring planting an attack of lumbago prostrated the energetic mistress of the house.

"I sh'll have to have a girl, Peterson," she said tearfully, "I that 's