There was some question of Mr. John Gladstone taking Huskisson's place as one of the members for Liverpool, but he did not covet it. He foresaw too many local jealousies, his deafness would be sadly against him, he was nearly sixty-five, and he felt himself too old to face the turmoil. He looked upon the Wellington government as the only government possible, though as a friend of Canning he freely recognised its defects, the self-will of the duke, and the parcel of mediocrities and drones with whom, excepting Peel, he had filled his cabinet. His view of the state of parties in the autumn of 1830 is clear and succinct enough to deserve reproduction. 'Huskisson's death,' he writes to his son at Christ Church (October 29, 1830), 'was a great gain to the duke, for he was the most formidable thorn to prick him in the parliament. Of those who acted with Huskisson, none have knowledge or experience sufficient to enable them to do so. As for the whigs, they can all talk and make speeches, but they are not men of business. The ultra-tories are too contemptible and wanting in talent to be thought of. The radicals cannot be trusted, for they would soon pull down the venerable fabric of our constitution. The liberals or independents must at least generally side with the duke; they are likely to meet each other half way.'
THE REFORM BILL
In less than a week after this acute survey the duke made his stalwart declaration in the House of Lords against all parliamentary reform. 'I have not said too much, have I?' he asked of Lord Aberdeen on sitting down. 'You'll hear of it,' was Aberdeen's reply. 'You've announced the fall of your government, that's all,' said another. In a fortnight (November 18) the duke was out, Lord Grey was in, and the country was gradually plunged into a determined struggle for the amendment of its constitution.
Mr. Gladstone, as a resolute Canningite, was as fiercely hostile to the second and mightier innovation as he had been eager for the relief of the catholics, and it was in connection with the Reform bill that he first made a public mark. The reader will recall the stages of that event; how the bill was read a second time in the Commons by a majority of one on March 22nd, 1831; how, after a defeat by a majority of eight on a motion of going into committee, Lord Grey dissolved; how the country, shaken to its depths, gave the reformers such undreamed of strength, that on July 8th the second reading of the bill was carried by a hundred and thirty-six; how on October 8th the Lords rejected it by forty-one, and what violent commotions that deed provoked; how a third bill was brought in (December 12th, 1831) and passed through the Commons (March 23rd, 1832); how the Lords were still refractory; what a lacerating ministerial crisis ensued; and how at last, in June, the bill, which was to work the miracle of a millennium, actually became the law of the land. Not even the pressure of preparation for the coming ordeal of the examination schools could restrain the activity and zeal of our Oxonian. Canning had denounced parliamentary reform at Liverpool in 1820; and afterwards had declared in the House of Commons that if anybody asked him what he meant to do on the subject, he would oppose reform to the end of his life, under whatever shape it might appear. Canning's disciple at Christ Church was as vehement as the master.50 To a friend he wrote in 1865:—
I think that Oxford teaching had in our day an anti-popular tendency. I must add that it was not owing to the books, but rather to the way in which they were handled: and further, that it tended still more strongly in my opinion to make the love of truth paramount over all other motives in the mind, and thus that it supplied an antidote for whatever it had of bane. The Reform bill frightened me in 1831, and drove me off my natural and previous bias. Burke and Canning misled many on that subject, and they misled me.
While staying at Leamington, whither his family constantly went in order to be under the medical care of the famous Jephson, Mr. Gladstone went to a reform meeting at Warwick, of which he wrote a contemptuous account in a letter to the Standard (April 7). The gentry present were few, the nobility none, the clergy one only, while 'the mob beneath the grand stand was Athenian in its levity, in its recklessness, in its gaping expectancy, in its self-love and self-conceit—in everything but its acuteness.' 'If, sir, the nobility, the gentry, the clergy are to be alarmed, overawed, or smothered by the expression of popular opinion such as this, and if no great statesman be raised up in our hour of need to undeceive this unhappy multitude, now eagerly rushing or heedlessly sauntering along the pathway of revolution, as an ox goeth to the slaughter or a fool to the correction of the stocks, what is it but a symptom as infallible as it is appalling, that the day of our greatness and stability is no more, and that the chill and damp of death are already creeping over England's glory.' These dolorous spectres haunted him incessantly, as they haunted so many who had not the sovereign excuse of youth, and his rhetoric was perfectly sincere. He felt bound to say that, as far as he could form an opinion, the ministry most richly deserved impeachment. Its great innovations and its small alike moved his indignation. When Brougham committed the enormity of hearing causes on Good Friday, Gladstone repeats with deep complacency a saying of Wetherell, that Brougham was the first judge who had done such a thing since Pontius Pilate.
OXFORD ELECTIONEERING
The undergraduates took their part in the humours of the great election, and Oxford turned out her chivalry gallantly to bring in the anti-reform candidate for the county to the nomination. 'I mounted the mare to join the anti-reform procession,' writes the impassioned student to his father, 'and we looked as well as we could do, considering that we were all covered with mud from head to foot. There was mob enough on both sides, but I must do them justice to say they were for the most part exceedingly good-humoured, and after we had dismounted, we went among them and elbowed one another and bawled and bellowed with the most perfect good temper. At the nomination in the town hall there was so much row raised that not one of the candidates could be heard.' The effect of these exercitations was a hoarseness and cold, which did not, however, prevent the sufferer from taking his part in a mighty bonfire in Peckwater. On another day:—
I went with Denison and another man named Jeffreys between eleven and twelve. We began to talk to some men among Weyland's friends; they crowded round, and began to holloa at us, and were making a sort of ring round us preparatory to a desperate hustle, when lo! up rushed a body of Norreys' men from St. Thomas's, broke their ranks, raised a shout, and rescued us in great style. I shall ever be grateful to the men of St. Thomas's. When we were talking, Jeffreys said something which made one man holloa, 'Oh, his father's a parson.' This happened to be true, and flabbergasted me, but he happily turned it by reminding them, that they were going to vote for Mr. Harcourt, son of the greatest parson in England but one (Archbishop of York). Afterwards they left me, and I pursued my work alone, conversed with a great number, shook hands with a fair proportion, made some laugh, and once very nearly got hustled when alone, but happily escaped. You would be beyond measure astonished how unanimous and how strong is the feeling among the freeholders (who may be taken as a fair specimen of the generality of all counties) against the catholic question. Reformers and anti-reformers were alike sensitive on that point and perfectly agreed. One man said to me, 'What, vote for Lord Norreys? Why, he voted against the country both times, for the Catholic bill and then against the Reform.' What would this atrocious ministry have said had the appeal to the voice of the people, which they now quote as their authority, been made in 1829? I held forth to a working man, possibly a forty-shilling freeholder, [he adds in a fragment of later years,] on the established text, reform was revolution. To corroborate my doctrine I said, 'Why, look at the revolutions in foreign countries,' meaning of course France and Belgium. The man looked hard at me and said these very words, 'Damn all foreign countries, what has old England to do with foreign countries?' This is not the only time that I have received an important lesson from a humble source.
SPEECH AT THE UNION
A more important scene which his own future eminence made in a sense historic, was a debate at the Union upon Reform in the same month, where his contribution (May 17th) struck all his hearers with amazement, so brilliant, so powerful, so incomparably splendid did it seem to their young eyes. His description of it to his brother (May 20th, 1831) is modest enough:—
I should really have been glad if your health had been such as to have permitted