MR. GLADSTONE'S CONTROVERSIAL METHOD.
AS a Controversialist, whether with tongue or pen, Mr. Gladstone has in some respects no superior. and hardly
an equal, among his contemporaries. Certainly no man of our generation has at all approached some of his achievements in that field. It is admitted by both the Liberals and Conservatives of Italy, that his pamphlets on the misgovernment of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies were the main cause of the downfall of the
Bourbon dynasty. It is admitted by everybody in this country that the rout of the Tory Party at the last election was chiefly due to the extraordinary vigour and versatility of the polemic which Mr. Gladstone had waged against Lord Becons- field's Government for three years. How is it, then, that Mr. Gladstone, with all his rare power as a controversialist, contrives sometimes to leave on the public mind the impression of being worsted by comparatively feeble foes ? How does it happen the, when his case is absolutely impregnable, he lets his
opponent off with what looks, to the uncritical eye, something
very like the insignia of victory ? We attribute this char- ! acteristic failing of Mr. Gladstone as a controversialist to two
I causes. Conscious of his own rectitude, he is not sufficiently careful, in small matters, not only to be right, but to make it evident to dull, or ignorant, or prejudiced understandings that he is right. The Ewelme Rectory appointment is a case in
point. That appointment is still occasionally quoted as an illustration of Mr. Gladstone's " Jesuitical " or " casuistical " tone of mind. As a matter of fact, there never was an appointment so transparently free from anything like underhand motives. The accusation was that Mr. Glad- stone had Jesuitically evaded the obligation of a statute, for the purpose of promoting a political supporter. It turned out that the new Rector of Ewelme was personally a total stranger to Mr. Gladstone, and was, in addition, an inveterate Tory, who had never given a Liberal vote in his life. The charge of having evaded a statute was equally fictitious. In the reign of James I. the Rectory of Ewelme was united to the Regius Professorship of Divinity at Oxford and as the Professor of Divinity was obliged to be an Oxford man, it was decreed that the Rector of Ewelme should be an Oxford man. But during Mr. Gladstone's previous Government the Rectory of Ewelme was severed from the Oxford Professorship of Divinity, and consequently from its connection with the University. There was, therefore, no reason why a Cambridge man, or, for that matter, a Dublin or Durham man, or even a literate, should not be made Rector of Ewelme. On the first vacancy Mr. Gladstone appointed a learned Cambridge man, in order to place him within reach of good libraries. If the matter had ended there, we should probably have heard nothing more about it. But Mr. Gladstone is himself an Oxford wan, and from a sentimental feeling towards his own University, he recommended the new Rector of Ewelme to become a member of Oxford University by in- corporation. The cry of evading a statute was immediately raised, the truth being that the statute which was supposed to have been evaded, had been practically repealed by the Act which separated the Rectory of Ewelme from the Oxford Pro- fessorship of Divinity. When Mr. Gladstone made in the House of Commons the explanation which we have now summarised his assailants were silenced, and the Members for the Univer- sity, and, if we remember rightly, its Chancellor (Lord Salis- bury), confessed that Mr. Gladstone's vindication of himself was complete. But, as generally happens, the original accusa- tion has stuck, and is still trotted out as an illustration of Mr. Gladstone's crookedness of character. What it does illus- trate is Mr. Gladstone's childlike simplicity,—lais guileless unsuspiciousness of bad motives being attributed to him, when no shadow of any such motives has ever crossed his own mind.
The second flaw in Mr. Gladstone's character as a controver- sialist is that he has no sooner won a victory in a grand cause than he begins immediately to feel pity for the vanquished, and to be awed with the completeness of his own success. As soon as the issue of the election in Midlothian was de- clared, he issued an address to the electors, in which lie says : —" The fight is fought, and won. Since this is so, I gladly, and as far as depends on me, once for all desist from any further reference to that indictment against the policy of the
existing Administration which. encouraged by your patience, I have laboriously endeavoured to place before you. To arrest mischief has been my only object. We can well dispense with exultation in the hour of victory. Personally long engaged in the hottest of the conflict, I rejoice not only in the prospect of good to be accomplished by the accession of the Liberal leaders to power, but in the cessation of a controversy always on the verge of bitterness." It was in the same spirit that he met the friendly and apologetic advances of Count Karolyi. His miscalled " apology to the Austrian Ambassador has been so misrepresented, that it is worth while to quote it verbatim :-
" With respect to my animadversions on the foreign policy of Austria, in times when it was active beyond the border, I will not conceal from your Excellency that grave np, rehensions had been excited in my mind lest Austria should play a part in the Balkan peninsula hostile to the freedom of the emancipated populations, and to the reasonable and warranted hopes of the subjects of the Sultan. These apprehensions were founded, it is true, upon secondary evidence ; but it was not the evidence of hostile witnesses, and it was the best at my command. Your Excellency is now good enough to assure me that your Government has no desire whatever to. extend or add to the rights it has acquired under the Treaty of Berlin, and that any such extension would be actually prejudicial to Austria-Hungary. Permit me at once to state to your Excellency that had I been in possession of such an assurance as I have now been able to receive, I never would have uttered any one of the words which your Excellency justly describes as of a painful and wounding character. Whether it was my misfortune or my fault that I was not so supplied, I will not now attempt to determine, but will at once express my serious concern that I should, in default of it, have been led to refer to transactions of an earlier period, or to use terms of censure which I can now wholly banish from my mind."
There is plainly no apology at all here. Mr. Gladstone says, in effect :—" I was led to believe, on good though secondary evidence, that Austria intended to push her frontier beyond the limits assigned her by the Treaty of Berlin. I now learn from your Excellency that the Austrian Government has no such intention. I am sorry the Austrian Government did not make that disclaimer sooner, for I should in that case have been spared the necessity of making the strictures which I thought it my duty to make on the foreign policy of Austria. In view of your Excellency's explanation, however, I gladly let bygones be bygones." It was, in fact, Mr. Gladstone, and not Count Karolyi, who scored in the correspondence. Up to Mr. Gladstone's " Hands-off !" warning, the Austrian Government had, in the opinion of her allies, intimated its intention of going forward to Salonica. Lord Salisbury had on more than one occasion proclaimed Austria's advance to Salonica, and possibly to Constantinople, as a logical consequence of the Austrian occupation of Bosnia. Mr. Gladstone's Midlothian warning, coupled with his accession to power, extorted from the Austrian Government an official repudiation of this policy, and he could well afford to acknowledge that repudiation in a few polite phrases. But the courteous form of his letter to Count Karolyi enabled Mr. Gladstone's enemies to misrepresent entirely its drift and meaning.
The latest illustration which Mr. Gladstone has given of his proneness to give a fallen opponent, out of sheer generosity, a seeming controversial advantage, is in his recently-published correspondence with Sir Bartle Frere. Mr. Gladstone had said in Midlothian that Sir Bartle Frere " was the great authority for the proceedings of the Government in Afghani- stan," and that " he supported the Indian policy of advance into Afghanistan." But Sir B. Frere himself Mr. Gladstone characterised as " a man of high character and great ability," and animated by "benevolent motives." Sir B. Frere now positively denies that he was in favour of the Afghan policy of the late Government. " The only policy of advance into Afghanistan I ever advocated was an advance towards cordial and friendly relations between two nations,—England and Afghanistan." The occupation of Quetta, he says, and that alone, " was what I recommended in 1874." Instead of con- fronting Sir B. Frere with his own words, and pinning him to the only interpretation which those words can grammatically and logically bear, Mr. Gladstone expresses himself " naturally much gratified" to find that Sir Bartle repudiates the policy of the late Government, and he expresses his regret that he should have put upon Sir Bartle's language a meaning which Sir Bartle himself now disclaims. Mr. Gladstone is careful, however, to close the correspondence by saying, "I conclude, then, by say- ing that I have not anything to retract." Why, then, did he express any regret ? We honestly wish that he had not done so. It has given his enemies a handle for charging him with having made an unfounded accusation, which he admits, but will not retract. The evident truth is that Mr. Gladstone was anxious to give Sir Bartle Frere the benefit of his own expla- nation of his language, but felt unable at the same time to retract the only construction of which that language was legi- timately capable. Sir Bartle Frere has wisely refrained from quoting the language which he used in 1874-5. What he recommended in his Minutes of 1874-5 was not only the military occupation of Quetta, but the " establishment of British officers" in the principal towns of Afghanistan, " and possibly at other places, such as Balkh, and some points between that and the Thibet frontier of Cashmere." At the same time negotiations were to be opened, independently of Shere Ali, with his disaffected son, the Governor of Herat, with a view to the " establishing permanently " in that city, and in spite of the Ameer, "an intelligent and scientific military officer, with three or four good assistants, acquainted with all arms of the Service." "Regarded in this light," says Sir Bartle Frere, "all the countries immediately around our border, from the Arabian Sea to the Chinese frontier—notably Beloochistan, Afghanistan, Cashmere, Nepaul, and Thibet- are necessarily regarded by us as bulwarks of our Indian Empire." Consequently, " our safest course is to meet" the Russians " on the western frontier of Afghanistan," " in all friendship, with-every disposition to recognise the great work they are doing for civilisation and humanity in Central Asia, and to aid them, by enabling them to deal with their neigh- bours on that frontier as a settled. civilised Power." Sir Bartle Frere admits that this policy would be likely to give umbrage to the ruler of Afghanistan. What then? " I would not break with him," says Sir Bartle, " save in the last extremity, and after all hope of continuing friendly relations had dis- appeared ; but I would clear for action, and give him un- equivocally to understand that we hold ourselves free to act as might seem best for our own interests." How Sir Bartle Frere reconciles all this with his letters to Mr. Gladstone passes our comprehension. The policy which he now so indignantly repu- diates is the very policy which he recommended in 1874 and 1875, and which Lord Lytton attempted to carry out, with such disastrous results. Why did Sir Bartle Frere withhold his non-natural explanation till his policy had borne its bitter fruit, and the constituencies had emphatically reprobated it ? Surely the English newspapers reached him at the Cape, and told him that he was held primarily responsible for the Afghan policy of the late Government by the British public long before Mr. Gladstone's Midlothian speeches ? On the very day on which his celebrated Minute was published (October 18th,1878), the Times, in a laudatory leading article, said of the Minute, " That is what the Indian Government have done." Sir Bartle's advice "so exactly foreshadows all that the Government have done, that they might safely put it forward as a summary of instructions, or a defence of their policy." Sir Bartle Frere greatly errs if he imagines that his irrelevant correspondence with Mr. Gladstone will efface from the national memory the indelible record of his calamitous policy in Afghanistan and South Africa ; and if he were wise, he. would " let sleeping dogs lie."
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