Chapter III (5)

One of the writer’s most memorable conversations with Lord Derby was on a summer morning in 1872, when he was resting in the cool shade of the Opposition, and had plenty of time on his hands to devote to those subjects of social science and political economy in which one might imagine he takes more real personal interest than in adjusting the balance of power in Europe or in maintaining the prestige of England on the continent. The Stanleys for four centuries, and I know not how long before, have been large landholders. The first Earl Derby was created by King Henry VII. in 1485—seven years before Christopher Columbus discovered America—but the family had been a rich and powerful one long ere that. The Lord Stanley whose designed failure to bring up his contingent to the support of Richard III. at the battle of Bosworth Field had so much to do with the defeat of that resolute monarch was the father-in-law of his conqueror and successor, Henry VII.; and the young George Stanley whose head was so opportunely saved by the suggestion of the Duke of Norfolk, that there would be time enough to decapitate him “after the battle,” was the fifteenth predecessor of the present earl. I was accompanied in this visit by an English commoner, who was greatly interested at that time in certain projects for the systematic improvement of the dwellings of the working-classes—projects which Earl Derby also regarded as worthy of his attention. The large estates of the family in England and Ireland have always, or at least for a very long time, been well administered. Neither the former nor the present earl has been accused of being a bad landlord; they were not given to rack-renting, and their tenants did not fear to ask them for favors. The former earl was perhaps more quick to grant a request from a tenant than the present one; but if the plea be a good one the applicant will not go away denied. But it must be a good one; of all men in England Lord Derby is perhaps the least easily deceived. There is nothing imposing in his town-house. It is not a palace, like the magnificent mansion of the Marquis of Westminster; nor does it stand apart in dull and ugly grandeur, as does Devonshire House; nor bewilder and delight the visitor by the splendor of its saloons and the beauty of its grounds, as does Stafford House, the glories of which so dazzled the Shah of Persia that he asked the Prince of Wales, who had just entertained him in shabby Marlborough House, why he permitted the Duke of Sutherland, a subject, to dwell in a state so superior to that which royalty itself maintained. Earl Derby’s town residence is a plain building in Piccadilly, not far from the almost equally unostentatious house where the richest lady in England resides. There are houses on Park Avenue, New York, which are finer than the London residences of either Lord Derby or the Baroness Burdett-Coutts; and there is little in his lordship’s dwelling that is either rare or strange. The great historical and romantic heirlooms of the family are elsewhere—at Knowlsey Park, for instance. We held our conversation on the occasion referred to in a room looking out upon St. James’ Park and the Green Park. The windows were open; the sweet, fresh air of the morning came freely in. From the leather-cushioned chair in which I sat I could see a portion of the façade of Buckingham Palace, the west front of Westminster Abbey, and the towers of the Parliament House. The earl questioned me for some time concerning the actual condition of affairs as they then were in America; and his questions were sometimes hard to answer. One thing impressed me as rather remarkable: he made no mistakes in his questions; that is, he did not ask how far Chicago was from Illinois, or whether New York and Washington were under the same municipal government—interrogatories which another very studious and painstaking English nobleman once put to me. Had we yet made any satisfactory progress in solving the problem of the true relations between capital and labor? We had certain facilities at our command for working out that solution; would we work it out, and if so, how? Was there any common interest and common feeling between American workmen and American masters? The abolition of slavery was doubtless a fine thing; but had it not been accompanied with, or followed by, a long series of financial, industrial, and political mistakes? It was with a feeling of relief that I found my examination ended, and became a listener instead of a talker.

On the subject of improved dwellings for the working-classes he held very firm convictions. Unquestionably these were needed, but he did not wish to be a party to any scheme which proposed to build little palaces for working-men, and to rent them at one-tenth of their value, making up the deficiency by contributions from the rich. That was all nonsense. Nor was he very much enraptured with the Peabody buildings; they were well enough in their way, but they were not available for those who most needed them. The thing to be done was to make the workmen help themselves. How? Well, possibly by co-operation. The earl thought that much might be accomplished by an aggregation of sixpences. As for co-operation in distribution, that had already demonstrated its own usefulness; would it not be well to attempt the experiment of co-operation, strictly confined to the workmen themselves, in buying lands, erecting houses, and selling them, on long time, to themselves? He had in a drawer of his table an elaborate calculation of what might be accomplished in this way; but after producing it he suggested so many objections to its practicability that I soon regarded it with contempt. The agitation concerning the demands of the agricultural laborers was at this time just beginning to make itself felt; and the conversation drifted into a rather desultory discussion of that subject. The earl made two points very clear: in his opinion the extension of the suffrage to the agricultural laborers would greatly increase the strength of his own party, and if he cared only for that he would advocate it; but it would not advance the interests of the peasants nor promote the general welfare of the country. He made some very hard and dry statements on this point. I was rather taken aback by them, but did not attempt to controvert them. Subsequent events in the United States have shown that the earl had a prophetic ken. He disclaimed, with something like animation, the idea of comparing the liberated and enfranchised slaves of our Southern States with the English peasants; but he said that the party that had enfranchised the slaves would not retain their political allegiance, and would probably owe its ultimate overthrow to them. Men are not grateful beings, he said; it is a great mistake to count on their gratitude. Besides, the negroes will believe that they were enfranchised not so much for their own sakes as for the reason that they might aid in keeping their liberators in power. Unless negro human nature was unlike Anglo-Saxon human nature, the enfranchised negroes would say to themselves: “What has been given to us belonged to us; the men who gave it wished to buy us to serve them; but they have only given us what was rightfully our own, and they have nothing more to give us. A vote is nothing to us, save for the use we can make of it. We do not care whether this man or that man is President; but we do care whether our rent is lowered or raised, or whether we are on good or bad terms with our landlords.”

It was in this way that Earl Derby demonstrated to me that the negro vote in the South, so long as the rights of property were held sacred and order was preserved, would always be at the disposal of the land-owners of that region; and he drew the same conclusion as to the results of the enfranchisement of the English peasants. Affairs were bad enough as they were; despite all the new devices for securing the purity of elections, they were not pure, and he did not see how they were ever to be made pure. It was in 1849, if I remember correctly, that Earl Derby visited the United States and the West Indies. He was then a very young man. Mr. Fillmore was President. A very different political atmosphere prevailed at Washington and elsewhere from the present one. The young Lord Stanley observed affairs for himself and drew his own conclusions. At heart I think he was more pleased with the South than with the North or West; and, without saying so in words, he left upon me the impression that he did not entertain a very high opinion of our Republican statesmen.

It is more pleasant to hear him talk in private than to listen to him in public. But he is not a bad speaker, as English speakers go. He was better in the Commons when Lord Stanley than in the Lords as Earl Derby. But whenever he speaks he impresses you as being an earnest and sincere man—not earnest in the sense of enthusiastic, but sober, steady, and fully believing in the truth of what he is saying and of the necessity of his saying it. He is not what is called a popular man, but he is esteemed and respected by every one. His father died in the autumn of 1869; the nine years that have since passed have been eventful ones for the present earl, and his responsibilities have been heavy. But they have not dismayed or disheartened him, and when I last met him he was looking younger and rather less grave—more happy, I thought—than usually.

In certain respects Mr. John Bright resembles Earl Derby; in others he is the very contradiction of the earl. Physically the two men are not very unlike. Either of them would do very well for a model of the traditional John Bull; indeed, _Punch_ has often used both of them for this purpose. Mr. Bright is fifteen years the senior of Earl Derby, and two years younger than Mr. Gladstone. Earl Derby has been in active political life for twenty-six years; Mr. Bright for thirty-five years; and Mr. Gladstone for forty-six years, for he was returned as the Tory member for Newark in 1832, when Earl Derby was a child of six years; and he had sat in Parliament eleven years before Mr. Bright entered the House in 1843 as member for Durham. It is a curious fact, to which I have heard Mr. Bright refer with some mirthfulness, that he sat in the House for four years without opening his mouth. It was not until 1847 that he made his maiden speech in the House; it was a plea for extending the principles of free trade, and it gave him a national reputation. As between Derby, Bright, and Gladstone, the latter must be admitted to be the greatest man—greatest in his acquired knowledge, greatest in his natural genius, greatest even in his oratorical power. But there is at times a charm in the speeches of John Bright that the finest utterances of Mr. Gladstone never carry with them. Mr. Gladstone captivates the fancy, pleases the taste, convinces the judgment, for the time being at least; Mr. Bright touches the heart and subdues it. I am not certain but that his skill in this depends upon a trick. Mr. Bright in his life has been the doer of some heartless and cruel things; he has wrought more mischief than most men of his age; his idea of progress has been that of the _bourgeoisie_, not that of the workman; his beau ideal of a country is a republic where there is no titled aristocracy, but where the working-classes, having fair wages, are quite content with their station and have no inconvenient aspirations beyond it. The manufacturers and the traders are Mr. Bright’s “people”; he would like to see nothing above them; he thinks those below them should be content with the station wherein God has placed them. Mr. Bright has often fanned popular discontent, but it has been too often for the purpose simply of using the power thus evoked to pull down something that stood above him. The mercantile spirit is strong in him. Anything that was for the good of trade was good in his eyes; the trader was always his idol. But he had “a way with him” that enabled him to carry along the hearts of the workmen. His personal appearance and deportment had something to do with this: his round, florid, solid, “English” face, his almost magical voice, the ease and power of his delivery, his wonderful mastery of plain and forcible but really elegant English, the aptness with which he could introduce a quotation from Holy Writ or from some familiar English poet or rhymster. I find myself unconsciously writing of Mr. Bright in the past tense. It is only while revising these lines for publication that the sudden death of his wife occurs. That bereavement will be very hard for him to sustain; it is probable that his public career has ended. When the utter breaking down of his health compelled him to retire from Mr. Gladstone’s cabinet in December, 1870, he was in a deplorable condition. After many months of entire abstinence from mental excitement of any kind his mind began to resume its strength. But from that time there has always been danger of another collapse. An intimate friend of his family told me that Mr. Bright was in the condition of one whose arm had been broken and who had the bones reset. “So long as he does not use the arm, and allows it to rest in its sling, all will go well; but if he strikes a blow with it, it will fall shattered at his side.” It was during this period of convalescence and rest that I saw Mr. Bright most frequently. The attachment between his wife and himself was very evident. He petted her as if she had been a bride in her honeymoon. On one occasion, when breakfasting with them, the conversation turned chiefly on the then recent declarations of President Grant in his Des Moines speech concerning secular education and the rights of the Catholic Church in the United States. This must have been some time in December, 1875. I was grieved, although not surprised, to hear Mr. Bright express sentiments of very bitter hostility to the church, and a desire to see education wholly taken from her control. He confessed that he did not know anything about the merits of the question as it stood in the United States, but he applauded the President for his boldness in bringing the subject forward. Mrs. Bright, seeing that the topic was an agitating one to both of us, adroitly turned the conversation into another channel, and Mr. Bright was presently telling me stories of Mr. Cobden and of the early struggles for free trade. He said that one of the things he most prized was a copy of a resolution passed in 1862 by the New York Chamber of Commerce, expressing its sense of the devotion which he had manifested to the principles of international justice and peace.

Mr. Bright is a fascinating conversationalist, and it is a great pleasure to listen to him. Like most men who have not been born to high positions, but who have attained them by the force of their own genius, there is sometimes observable a little stiffness, or _mauvaise honte_, in his manner. There is some difficulty here in expressing one’s self clearly without seeming to be offensive. Mr. Bright has often expressed great contempt for the English hereditary nobility; and he is, or was, in the habit of regarding them as a pack of fools. The aristocracy of England have not failed to afford abundant instances of what Mr. Bright was fond of calling their “unwisdom.” More than this, the personal littleness, meanness, duplicity, and cruelty of some of these hereditary noblemen cannot be denied. But it would be impossible for one of them, if you were lunching with him, to tell you that the sherry you were drinking cost ninety shillings a dozen, and therefore must be good.

Mr. Bright has very frequently expressed an ardent admiration for American institutions, and he has often been accused of wishing to Americanize the British Constitution. Had Mr. Bright been born to an earldom, he would have been the greatest stickler for the rights of his class who has lived since the days of Louis XIV. A dozen English noblemen could be named who are more ardent republicans than is John Bright. He does not like to see men above him; but he is quite content to see any number below him, so long as they help him to lower those above him to his own level. Men speak of him as a radical; but he is nothing of the kind. Mr. Gladstone is tenfold more of a radical. If John Bright lived in the United States he would belong to the conservative party, whatever its name might be. Between him and such men as Auberon Herbert, Charles Bradlaugh, and the other republicans in England there is a great gulf fixed; and this not at all by reason of the irreligious opinions of these men. He would like a republic well enough, if he were always to be President, and if the rights of property were secure from all infringement. It is an utter misconception of Mr. Bright’s character to rank him among enthusiastic, unselfish, and theoretical reformers and philanthropists. His passions are strong, but his hate is far fiercer than his love is powerful; and he cares infinitely more for the “freedom of trade” than for the freedom of man. His opposition to the bill for preventing and punishing the adulteration of articles of food illustrates this curious trait in his character. He said, almost in so many words, that it were better that the people were half poisoned and wholly cheated than that the government should interfere between buyer and seller, to protect the former and lessen the gains of the latter. This is the true Manchester spirit—the spirit that has led the cotton-makers of Lancashire to load their fabrics for the Eastern markets with so much glue and chalk that a fabric which appeared of the best quality became a worthless rag as soon as it was wet—a deception, by the way, that has now cost England the loss of a very large share of her Chinese and Indian trade.

Mr. Bright is also violently inconsistent at times. We conversed once for a long time on the question of the extension of the suffrage to the agricultural laborers and to women. Some of his remarks reminded me of that shrewd American politician who was in favor of the Maine Liquor Law, but was opposed to its enforcement. Mr. Bright and his party had recently suffered some mortifying disillusions. The new voters, enfranchised by the Reform Bill, which Mr. Disraeli had taken up and passed after the Liberals had dallied with the question for years, began to manifest evidences of insubordination—not at all, however, in the right direction, from Mr. Bright’s point of view. It must be understood that a superstition had sprung up to the effect that all the new voters must necessarily be on the side of the Liberals; just as it was supposed that the enfranchised negroes in the United States must all vote the Republican ticket for ever and a day. There was this difference between the two cases: the Republicans had actually freed the negroes; the English Liberals, led by Bright and Gladstone, had talked about enfranchising the lower classes in England, but, while talking about it and disputing where the line should be drawn, the Tories, led by Disraeli, stepped in and accomplished the work by establishing what is virtually household suffrage. The former Earl Derby, led an unwilling captive by Disraeli, had reluctantly given his assent to this measure, which he called “a leap in the dark”; but at the time of which I speak it was becoming plain that this leap had landed the Conservative party upon very good ground. The new voters, instead of swelling the ranks of the Liberals, were to a great extent found in the train of the Tories, and Mr. Bright was disgusted with them. I have good reason to know that he disliked the idea of universal suffrage, and that he had quite as sincere a horror of the _residuum_ as that which Mr. Lowe expressed. The “conservative working-man” was beginning to show that he really existed and was not a myth. The voters of the kingdom had been vastly increased in numbers; but the new voters, when they came to the polls, were found to be quite as conservative, and in many cases more so than the old constituencies. This was a source of keen mortification and disappointment to Mr. Bright, and the first results of the Ballot Bill caused him no less chagrin. He had indulged in two illusions: let us have a general suffrage (not universal but general) and secret voting, and we shall carry every election district and be masters of the situation for ever more. Household suffrage and the ballot were provided, and from that day to this the Liberal party has grown weaker. Mr. Bright took no care to conceal from me the annoyance that these results gave him; and it was plain that his faith in the good sense and integrity of the masses was weakened. The impression he left on my mind in this conversation was that he would have preferred a much more limited suffrage; no one should vote, for instance, who did not pay a rental of perhaps six pounds a year. As for the future, there were two classes yet to be enfranchised—the agricultural laborers and the women. With regard to the latter Mr. Bright referred me to his brother Jacob. “He is the great man for the women,” said he. “He has that matter in charge; he can tell you more about the merits of their demands than I can. I am a little afraid of women as voters. Women are naturally easily led away by romance and glitter; and I suspect a showy ministry would always be more apt to secure their support than a sober and dull administration.” With regard to the claims of the agricultural laborers for the suffrage he was cold and guarded in his expressions. Theoretically they should have what they asked; but as a practical measure, and one of immediate action, it was plain that he preferred to allow affairs to rest as they were. He feared that the peasants with votes in their hands would be seduced by the Tories, as the new voters in the boroughs had been. “A little more education would be desirable before thus increasing the constituencies,” said he. “What kind of education, Mr. Bright?” “Well, certainly not that of the parish school, with the parson as the real teacher; and that, as affairs now are, is almost all they can have.”

The study of Mr. Bright’s course upon the great question of the present day in England—war with Russia or surrender to her—is full of interest to those who wish to closely analyze his character. Eighteen months ago Mr. Bright—Quaker as he is, apostle of peace as he is, trader and manufacturer as he is—was altogether in favor of war; that is, of a certain war—the war of the Russians against the Turks. In the Christmas-tide of 1876 Mr. Bright could say nothing too harsh in condemnation of those who were attempting to prevent Russia from entering into the war with Turkey. He spoke, he said, in the name of Christianity, but only to remind his hearers that the Russians were Christians and that the Turks were Mohammedans. Very curious language at that time came from the lips of this great peace advocate. In substance it was an appeal to Englishmen to encourage Russia in her attempt to drive the Turks from Europe, “bag and baggage,” as Mr. Gladstone has it. English Christians were bade remember by this Quaker peace-apostle that seven hundred years ago their ancestors fought to regain possession of Bethlehem and Calvary and the Mount of Olives; and that those sacred places now, as then, were in the possession of the infidels whom Russia, if not interfered with by England—would soon drive forth. England should stand by. If she interfered she would prevent the war; she must not lift a finger nor say a word save in approval of the Russians; and they must be left to wage war as they wished or as they could. Eighteen months have passed; the Russians have waged their war; it has been marked at every step with revolting horrors; half a million of Mohammedans and hundreds of thousands of Christians have perished in it; and Mr. Bright ought to feel satisfied. But now that England proposes to interfere and to fight a little on her own account, Mr. Bright boils over with rage, and calls all England to observe the unparalleled wickedness of the government in proposing to employ its Indian troops to sustain the empire. It is infamous to employ them, especially against “Christian Russia.” War conducted by Russia is not at all shocking; war waged against her is the unpardonable national sin. Russia might shed oceans of Christian blood in her wars, and Mr. Bright be content; but when England proposes to use Mohammedan soldiers in efforts to save English interests in the East from utter ruin, Mr. Bright raises his hands in horror and declaims against the wickedness of war. Radical inconsistencies like these are natural to Mr. Bright. They are observable in many of his acts; they crop out in his conversation. He has spoken eloquently against persecution for opinion’s sake; but, to judge him by his tone, he would burn Earl Beaconsfield at the stake to-morrow.

In all my conversations with Mr. Bright there were two things that impressed me: his indifference to, and want of sympathy with, the question of university education in any of its aspects, and his perfectly ignorant hostility to the Catholic religion. This hostility was not active, or it was rarely so; but it was implanted deep in his mind, and it colored to a great extent some of his most important actions. Without knowing anything at all about the church, and without, as I believe, having even so much as read a Catholic book, he had put it down among his self-evident truths that the church was the foe of what he most held dear, and he hated her accordingly. Mr. Bright’s instincts are clear, and they did not deceive him here. The church is the foe of what he most holds dear; for in the ideal society which John Bright would create, if he had his way, the temple would be a cotton-mill, the priests would be the manufacturers, and the people would have “free trade” for their god.[124]

Mr. Gladstone has within him the power of being as plodding and patient in his search for dry facts as Lord Derby is; he is as passionate in his hatreds and as inconsistent in his affections as is Mr. Bright; but he has what neither Derby nor Bright possesses—genius. He is a far more attractive man than either. It was my dear friend, the late John Francis Maguire, who first brought me into personal contact with Mr. Gladstone. We were talking together in the lobby of the House of Commons one summer evening in 1870, the year after the passage of the Irish Church Disestablishment Bill, when Mr. Gladstone came by and stopped to speak to Maguire, to whom he was very much attached—as who was not that knew him? After a few moments Mr. Gladstone complained of the heat in the lobby. “Let us go out on the terrace,” said he. “But I must not leave my American friend; come along, ——. Mr. Gladstone, permit me to present my friend.” We moved along the long corridor to the terrace that overhangs the Thames; and here, while they continued their conversation, which was of no interest save to themselves, I had ample opportunity to regard at close range the then ruler of England. He was sixty-one years old; he is now sixty-nine. The disappointments, defeats, and ardent but unsuccessful conflicts he has fought during the last four years have aged him; but he is still hale and vigorous, and, for all that one can see, may count upon many years of active life, which indeed no man will begrudge him. He is not by any means an Adonis, and never has been; but as we sat together that evening on the stone bench of the terrace he seemed to me a fascinating man. His voice in conversation is melodious and pleasant, with an occasional touch of a strange, melancholy minor key. If he be interested in his subject and on good terms with the person to whom he is speaking, he is a most charming conversationalist. He was educated at Christ Church, Oxford; he entered Parliament as the member for Newark in the Tory interest in 1832. He has had forty-six years of almost uninterrupted public life. He was under-secretary for the colonies in 1835 under Sir Robert Peel, and vice-president of the Board of Trade in 1841; he revised the tariff in 1842, and was president of the Board of Trade in 1843; he was returned for Oxford in 1847, and became a Liberal in 1851 on the questions of university reform and Jewish disabilities; he was Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Coalition Ministry of 1852, and was sent on a mission to the Ionian Islands by the then Lord Derby in 1858; he was Chancellor of the Exchequer again under Palmerston in 1859, and repealed the paper duty, making possible the establishment of the penny newspaper; he aided Cobden to accomplish his commercial treaty with France, and amused himself by interfering officiously with the domestic government of the kingdom of Naples; he was defeated for Oxford in 1865, but immediately returned for Lancashire, and after the death of Palmerston became leader of the House as Chancellor of the Exchequer under Russell. He brought in his Reform Bill in 1866, was defeated on it, and went into opposition; he brought in and succeeded in effecting the passage of his Irish Church resolutions in 1868; he was defeated for Lancashire at the general election of 1868, but returned for Greenwich, and took charge of the government as Prime Minister in that year. He disestablished the Irish Church in 1869; passed the Irish Land Bill in 1870; abolished purchase in the army in 1871 by the arbitrary exercise of the prerogative of the crown, and negotiated the Treaty of Washington. In 1874, anxious to finish his Irish work, he evolved from out of the depths of his own inner consciousness an Irish University Education Bill, and had the extreme mortification of seeing it not only rejected by the Catholics but violently opposed by the English and Scotch Liberals. He appealed to the country, not on that question but on a new project invented by himself for the abolition of the income tax; his majority of sixty members was turned into a minority of as many, and his old foe, Disraeli, came marching into power with drums beating and colors flying.

Since then Mr. Gladstone has conducted a species of independent opposition of his own; he has sought to punish the Catholics for their refusal to accept his University Bill by writing several venomous pamphlets to show that Catholics could not be loyal subjects; he has endeavored to upset the Disraeli administration on various occasions; he conducted the Bulgarian outrage excitement with great skill; and for the last few months he has been almost incessantly engaged in the most strenuous and violent efforts to prevent England from interfering in any way with Russia in the execution of her designs against Turkey. This was the extraordinary man with whom I was sitting on that summer evening. After a while he turned to me to ask me about some of his American friends, and thus I was drawn into the conversation. Mr. Maguire, for my benefit, I think, diverted it into the channel of the then remaining causes of Irish discontent; and the conversation became animated and ran on until the unlucky ringing of a division bell compelled both the premier and the Irish member to run off and leave me alone—not, however, before Mr. Gladstone had given me an invitation which I was not slow, in future days, to accept.

Thus it came about that many conversations were held between us, and the memory of them is for the most part extremely pleasant. We spoke generally on the immediate questions of the day, occasionally diverging into wider and more fragrant fields. He had at this time a very wide circle of Roman Catholic friends; and he was so fond of their society that Mr. Newdegate and Mr. Johnson, of Edinburgh (the secretary of the Anti-Papal League), got up the story that he was about to be received into the church. This rumor grew into the fact that he had been actually received; but to this there was the variation that he had become a communicant of the Greek Church! There never was any foundation for these stories; but it is probable that there was a period in Mr. Gladstone’s life when, had he not been Prime Minister of England, he would have become a Catholic. This reminds me of a story that Cardinal Manning once told me. He and Mr. Gladstone were very old and very dear friends; and this friendship continued unbroken until Mr. Gladstone’s assault upon the church in his “Vatican” pamphlets. I do not think the friendship thus sundered has ever been restored. But the story was this: One day the premier was talking with the archbishop, and after a little pause he said: “What a pity you ever left us, Manning! Had you remained with us you would have been Archbishop of Canterbury to-day, with £15,000 a year!” “I clasped my hands,” said his grace, “looked up to heaven, and exclaimed with all my heart, ‘Thank God for having saved my poor soul!’”

Mr. Gladstone’s town residence in Carlton House Terrace was pleasant to visit. He had enjoyed being a victim to the old-china and Wedgwood mania, and some of the rooms were crammed with his successes in the collection of “uniques” in this line. He—or some one in his confidence—had had good taste in pictures, and some excellent works of old and new masters hung upon his walls. It was wonderful to hear him talk about blue china, but I think his strong point in this line is Wedgwood. It was pleasanter, however, to draw him away from his china and lead him on to talk about men or books. He discussed both, on occasion, with a freedom and incisiveness that were somewhat startling. It was amusing to see the care with which he sometimes avoided speaking about Mr. Disraeli, and the latitude which he allowed himself on other occasions in denouncing and ridiculing him. He once complained bitterly that Disraeli was not an Englishman and had no English blood in him; and when I ventured to suggest that the wretched malefactor could scarcely be blamed for circumstances so wholly beyond his control, he looked very glum for some moments, and then turned the conversation aside, as if disinclined to accept even that apology for his foe.

It is that curious trait in Mr. Gladstone’s character which makes it so difficult for him in his public speeches to make a statement without qualifying it, or amplifying it, or stating several hypothetical cases with reference to it, that renders his conversation so charming. Beginning to tell you something about Pius IX., for instance, he will branch off into a story about Father Newman, an anecdote of Mazzini, a reminiscence of Orsini, Palmerston, or Louis Napoleon, an adventure that happened to himself in Naples, his feelings when he recognized an old college chum of his as a bare-footed friar in a monastery on the Alps, and so on. It is like the _Arabian Nights_, for one story grows out of the other, and all the time he does not forget the original subject, the Pope, but comes back to him, and winds up with the story about him, told with all due emphasis and action. There was a time when for Pius IX. Mr. Gladstone entertained what seemed to be a truly sincere admiration and respect; occasionally the feeling appeared to be even that of affection. As for the insensate hatred and dread of the church which fills the breasts of Messrs. Newdegate and Whalley, Mr. Gladstone never shared it. This, however, did not prevent him from making his outrageous attacks upon the church, in order to revenge himself upon the Irish and English bishops for refusing to support him in his University Bill. His passions are very strong. The difference between him and Mr. Disraeli is that the latter seems never wholly in earnest, while the former always is. Some of the language in which he has allowed himself to indulge in his recent speeches on the war question have been marked with a degree of passionate violence that would seem to indicate a mind overwrought. There used to be a cruel saying in the London clubs that “Mr. Gladstone would die either in a mad-house or a monastery.” I believe the credit of the _mal mot_ was given to Mr. Disraeli. There seems small hope left of the monastery, and there was probably never any danger of the mad-house. But Mr. Gladstone has now been out of power for four years; he reflects that his own imprudence thrust him out; he can see no prospect of a return to power; and he feels that under the guidance of Earl Beaconsfield England is being led into grave dangers. He chafes and frets, and the apparently unreasonable violence of his language is only the candid expression of his sincere wrath and fear.

Of these three statesmen, Earl Derby, Mr. Gladstone, and Mr. Bright, Mr. Bright is the dandy. The earl is negligent in his dress, and thrifty therein; but his valet, or some one else, manages to turn him out neatly every morning. Mr. Gladstone is positively careless as regards his attire, and one imagines that nobody but himself has anything to do with it. It has been whispered about that Mr. Gladstone’s tailor pays a large sum every year to have his identity concealed, for Mr. Gladstone’s clothes fit him so badly, or seem to do so, that the tailor’s business would be ruined if his name were known. The shocking bad hat of Mr. Gladstone, and his baggy “Sairey Gamp” of an umbrella, so often pictured in _Punch_, are no exaggerations; the last time I saw him he was sailing down Pall Mall under full steam for the Reform Club, with this identical hat and umbrella. There is a deep mystery connected with his legs, or with his trowsers, for they bag to an incredible extent at the knees, and are always too long at the lower extremities. I have said that he was not an Adonis, but when he is pleased and happy there is something winning in the expression of his mouth, and his eyes are wonderfully eloquent. Mr. Bright’s rich but plain costume is always faultlessly neat and clean; his linen spotless; his shoes have an almost unearthly lustre; his hat shines in rivalry with them. When, on the occasion of his taking office as chancellor of the Duchy of Lancashire, he went to Windsor “to kiss hands,” the queen, it is said, was enchanted with him, and the Princess Beatrice, who is much given to speaking out her mind, is reported to have exclaimed: “Ever since Louise married young Mr. Argyll, I have supposed that nothing was left for me but one of Marshal and Snelgrove’s young men. But if any one of those tradesmen were as handsome and good as this old tradesman, I’d take him in a moment.”

Mr. Bright’s handwriting is small, elegant, and beautifully distinct. Mr. Gladstone writes a rapid, bold, and running hand, at times rather illegible. He is somewhat too fond of his pen; of late he has written too much on unimportant subjects. Earl Derby has a happy dread of committing himself on paper, and writes but few letters. “Do not write to me,” he said one day; “come and talk with me; it will be better for each of us.” Mr. Gladstone once made a very happy retort to a question put to him in the House of Commons concerning one of his letters. Mr. Bouverie, with all due solemnity, and after having given a day’s notice of his question, asked the premier if his attention had been called to a letter published in the _Times_, purporting to have been addressed by him to the correspondent of a New York journal, and whether he had really written the letter. “It is quite true,” Mr. Gladstone replied. “Mr. —— addressed me a very proper and courteous letter, upon certain matters connected with the Treaty of Washington and the negotiations at Geneva, and I replied to it. He subsequently obtained my permission to make the letter public. And I have to add that I often have to write letters to much less important persons than the representative of an influential American journal.” As he had recently written a letter to Mr. Bouverie, the hit was thought to be a good one, and the House laughed.

Footnote 124:

The writer, for whose opinion we have all respect, has the advantage
over us of a personal knowledge of Mr. Bright, and an acquaintance
with his public career to which we cannot pretend. So far, however, as
our knowledge goes, our estimate of Mr. Bright is far from agreeing
altogether with that of the writer. We always believed Mr. Bright to
be a man of large heart, of generous impulse, and of large mind,
circumscribed by certain defects of education and inherited prejudice;
but always a man wishing to see right done and to do right.—ED. C. W.

RELATIONS OF JUDAISM TO CHRISTIANITY.
II.
THE INFLUENCE OF JEWISH IDEAS ON HEATHEN PHILOSOPHY.

Strabo, after having mentioned the great number of Jews residing in Cyrene, a city celebrated for its schools of Greek literature, adds that “it would be difficult to show a spot upon earth where they were not found and where their influence was not felt.” The influence of which he speaks must not be restricted to that which they acquired everywhere by their remarkable industry, commercial capacity, and wealth; it was felt in the higher field of thought, and was brought to bear on heathen philosophy, in which it produced considerable modifications. We are chiefly concerned with the Greeks, whom all admit to be the representatives of philosophical speculations in the ages we are reviewing.

It is the opinion of Aristobulus, of Aristeas, and of Philo that the Greek philosophers were acquainted with the sacred books of the Hebrews, and that they derived from them those great truths relating to God, the soul, a future life which we find in their writings. We can easily understand this to have been the case when we reflect that the Hebrews were already in Egypt in great numbers, when the learned men of Greece repaired thither in search of knowledge; and in order to account for the opinion just mentioned it is by no means necessary to have recourse to the national pride with which its supporters are supposed by our rationalists to have been animated. Because Aristobulus, Aristeas, and Philo were Jews it does not follow that they should have been so blinded by the desire of glorifying their nation as to make them lose their well-known critical acuteness. Besides, they were not the only ones who perceived that the Greeks had borrowed from the Hebrews. Antiquity is at one in recognizing the fact. The Fathers of the primitive church who had occasion to touch upon the subject do not hesitate to affirm it from observations of their own. “Our sacred books,” says Tertullian, “are the treasure from which philosophers have drawn all their riches. Who is the poet, who is the sophist, that has not borrowed from the prophets? It is at those sacred sources that the philosophers have striven to quench their thirst. These men, impelled by their passion for glory, endeavored to reach the sublimity of our Holy Scriptures, and when they found in them anything that suited their views they made it their own. But as they did not consider them as divine, they made no scruple to alter them. And, moreover, they could not understand many a passage the sense of which was obscure even for the Hebrews, to whom the books belonged.” St. Justin equally affirms that “Plato took from Moses his doctrine of creation, as well as his notions on the Word, or _Logos_, and the Energy or Spirit of God, though all these truths appear strangely disfigured in the Athenian philosopher.” Again, Clement of Alexandria tells the Neo-Platonics that their master, Plato, had borrowed from the books of Moses his most sublime doctrines and purest moral precepts, and adds: “We state the fact that the Greeks, not satisfied with transferring to their writings the wonderful events related in our sacred books, have stolen from us our principal dogmas in altering them. They are caught in the very act of theft as to what regards faith, wisdom, knowledge and science, hope and charity, penance, chastity, and the fear of God, which virtues are the offspring of truth alone.” Eusebius tells us that Pythagoras had held communications with the prophets at the time when the Jews were exiles in Egypt and Babylonia. Hennippus, according to the testimony of Josephus, confirms that fact by saying that Pythagoras had embraced and professed a part of the doctrines of the Jews, and had transmitted their philosophy to the Gentiles. Clearchus affirms that Aristotle had spoken to him of his conversations with a Jew “from whom much was to be learnt.” Theodoret is not less positive. “Anaxagoras and Pythagoras,” he says, “in their travels in Egypt, had made the acquaintance of learned men of that country and of Judea. It is to the same source that Plato came later in search of knowledge, as we are informed by Plutarch and by Xenophon.” “What is Plato?” said the Pythagorean Numerius. “He is a certain Moses who speaks Attic.” The negations without proofs which men of rationalistic tendencies oppose to this view cannot stand before the overwhelming testimony of the Fathers, doctors, and historians of the primitive church, corroborated as it is by more than one pagan author. Our modern Catholic writers, without any exception that we know of, have recognized that influence of revelation on the heathen mind. “The laws which Solon gave to the Athenians,” remarks Fleury, “had a great analogy with those of Moses. The principles of Socrates are founded on those of the Hebrew legislator; his notions of the unity of God, the immortality of the soul, the distinction between good and evil, the merits and rewards of virtue, the chastisements of vice, are all derived from the sacred books. The political system exposed by Plato in his _Republic_, in which he enjoins that every one should live by his own labor, without luxury or ambition, without innovation or change, under the sway of justice the greatest of all goods, and the government of a wise ruler devoted to the happiness of his subjects, is nothing else but the theory of the constitution which governed Judea.” “Aristotle,” says M. de Maistre, alluding to a passage already quoted, “conversed with a Jew in comparison with whom the most distinguished philosophers of Greece seemed to him but barbarians. The translation of the sacred books into a language which had become that of the universe, the dispersion of the Jews over the whole world, and man’s natural curiosity for everything new and extraordinary had caused the Mosaic law to be known everywhere, which thus became an introduction to Christianity.” “The doctrine of the Hebrews,” writes M. de Bonald, “was spread with their writings in those parts of Asia and of Europe bordering on Palestine. It was not unknown to the Greeks, and undoubtedly gave to the philosophy of Plato that stamp of elevation and of truth by which it is characterized.”

But it is to Alexandria that we must turn in order to follow the developments and modifications of Greek thought in the three centuries which immediately preceded, and in the four centuries which followed, the coming of Christ. Ptolemy I., during his glorious reign, that lasted from 306-285 B.C., among other monuments with which he adorned the city of Alexander, established the famous Museum or University of Alexandria, with its vast library, which is said to have contained seven hundred thousand volumes. It soon became the centre of intellectual life. There the most renowned teachers in philosophy, poetry, mathematics, astronomy, and the arts lived and taught. Thither would resort the learned of many countries and religions. From the time of its foundation to that of Proclus, the most important of the Neo-Platonics, who died four hundred and eighty-five years after Christ, that school continued to flourish, but then began to decline until every trace of it disappeared before the invasions of the barbarian Mussulman. For a long time the philosophy of the Museum consisted in commentaries on Plato and Aristotle. But the Jews of the Greco-Egyptian city, which had become after Jerusalem the most important seat of their religion, were destined to give a new direction to these speculations; and from it arose that peculiar school of thought denominated Neo-Platonism. It was an effort made to reconcile together popular belief with philosophic thought, and was common both to the Jewish and to the Grecian schools. The first endeavored to blend Judaism with Hellenism, as the latter did to give a logical and doctrinal foundation to heathenism.