GLADSTONE THE SURVIVAL.


[Sidenote: From the past.]

What I like most about Mr. Gladstone is his antique spirituality. The
modern politician is smart, alive, pert, up-to-date; knows everything
about registration; hires a good agent; can run a caucus, and receive a
deputation. With us, as yet, the modern politician has not wholly
abandoned religious faith--as he has done among our neighbours on the
Continent--and has not come to regard this solid earth of ours as the
one standing-place in a universe alone worthy the consideration of
intelligent men. But the English politician is so far suffused with the
spirit of modernity as to prefer the newspaper to the book, to regard
more closely registration records than the classics, and generally is
wide awake rather than steeped in subtler and profounder forms of
sagacity and knowledge. The Prime Minister is a Survival. With all his
extraordinary adaptiveness, he stands in many respects in sharpest
contrast to his environment. I can never forget, as I look at him, all
those years he spent in that vanished epoch which knew nothing of
evolution or of science at all, and was content to regard a knowledge of
the classics as the beginning and the end of a gentleman's education.
After reading the life of Lord Aberdeen, I was brought back in spirit to
all those years during which Mr. Gladstone was a member of the Tory
party, and lived in an atmosphere of proud, scholarly exclusiveness--of
distrust of the multitude--of ecclesiasticism in the home, in the forum,
and as the foundation of all political controversy. When, therefore, Mr.
Gladstone is going through a crisis, it is intensely interesting to me
to watch him and to see how he carries himself amid it all; and then it