This mighty question:—what is the nature of a church and what the duties, titles, and symbols of faithful membership, which in divers forms had shaken the world for so many ages and now first dawned upon his ardent mind, was the germ of a deep and lasting pre-occupation of which we shall speedily and without cessation find abundant traces.
II
OFFER OF A SEAT
A few weeks later, the great rival interest in Mr. Gladstone's life, if rival we may call it, was forced into startling prominence before him. At Milan he received a letter from Lord Lincoln, saying that he was commissioned by his father, the Duke of Newcastle, to inform him that his influence in the borough of Newark was at Mr. Gladstone's disposal if he should be ready to enter parliamentary life. This was the fruit of his famous anti-reform speech at the Oxford Union. No wonder that such an offer made him giddy. 'This stunning and overpowering proposal,' he says to his father (July 8), 'naturally left me the whole of the evening on which I received it, in a flutter of confusion. Since that evening there has been time to reflect, and to see that it is not of so intoxicating a character as it seemed at first. First, because the Duke of Newcastle's offer must have been made at the instance of a single person (Lincoln), that person young and sanguine, and I may say in such a matter partial.... This much at least became clear to me by the time I had recovered my breath: that decidedly more than mere permission from my dear father would be necessary to authorise my entering on the consideration of particulars at all.' And then he falls into a vein of devout reflection, almost as if this sudden destination of his life were some irrevocable priesthood or vow of monastic profession, and not the mere stringent secularity of labour in a parliament. It would be thin and narrow to count all this an overstrain. To a nature like his, of such eager strength of equipment; conscious of life as a battle and not a parade; apt for all external action yet with a burning glow of light and fire in the internal spirit; resolute from the first in small things and in great against aimless drift and eddy,—to such an one the moment of fixing alike the goal and the track may well have been grave.
Then points of doubt arose. 'It is, I daresay, in your recollection,'—this to his father,—'that at the time when Mr. Canning came to power, the Duke of Newcastle, in the House of Lords, declared him the most profligate minister the country had ever had. Now it struck me to inquire of myself, does the duke know the feelings I happen to entertain towards Mr. Canning? Does he know, or can he have had in his mind, my father's connection with Mr. Canning?' The duke had in fact been one of the busiest and bitterest of Canning's enemies, and had afterwards in the same spirit striven with might and main to keep Huskisson out of the Wellington cabinet. Another awkwardness appeared. The duke had offered a handsome contribution towards expenses. Would not this tend to abridge the member's independence? What was the footing on which patron and member were to stand? Mr. Gladstone was informed by his brother that the duke had neither heretofore asked for pledges, nor now demanded them.
After a very brief correspondence with his shrewd and generous father, the plunge was taken, and on his return to England, after a fortnight spent 'in an amphibious state between that of a candidate and ἰδιώτης or private person,' he issued his address to the electors of Newark (August 4, 1832). He did not go actually on to the ground until the end of September. The intervening weeks he spent with his family at Torquay, where he varied electioneering correspondence and yachting with plenty of sufficiently serious reading from Blackstone and Plato and the Excursion down to Corinne. One Sunday morning (September 23), his father burst into his bedroom, with the news that his presence was urgently needed at Newark. 'I rose, dressed, and breakfasted speedily, with infinite disgust. I left Torquay at 8¾ and devoted my Sunday to the journey. Was I right?... My father drove me to Newton; chaise to Exeter. There near an hour; went to the cathedral and heard a part of the prayers. Mail to London. Conversation with a tory countryman who got in for a few miles, on Sunday travelling, which we agreed in disapproving. Gave him some tracts. Excellent mail. Dined at Yeovil; read a little of the Christian Year [published 1827]. At 6½ A.M. arrived at Piccadilly, 18½ hours from Exeter. Went to Fetter Lane, washed and breakfasted, and came off at 8 o'clock by a High Flyer for Newark. The sun hovered red and cold through the heavy fog of London sky, but in the country the day was fine. Tea at Stamford; arrived at Newark at midnight.' Such in forty hours was the first of Mr. Gladstone's countless political pilgrimages.
His two election addresses are a curious starting-point for so memorable a journey. Thrown into the form of a modern programme, the points are these:—union of church and state, the defence in particular of our Irish establishments; correction of the poor laws; allotment of cottage grounds; adequate remuneration of labour; a system of Christian instruction for the West Indian slaves, but no emancipation until that instruction had fitted them for it; a dignified and impartial foreign policy. The duke was much startled by the passage about labour receiving adequate remuneration, 'which unhappily among several classes of our fellow countrymen is not now the case.' He did not, however, interfere. The whig newspaper said roundly of the first of Mr. Gladstone's two addresses, that a more jumbled collection of words had seldom been sent from the press. The tory paper, on the contrary, congratulated the constituency on a candidate of considerable commercial experience and talent. The anti-slavery men fought him stoutly. They put his name into their black schedule with nine-and-twenty other candidates, they harried him with posers from a pamphlet of his father's, and they met his doctrine that if slavery were sinful the Bible would not have commended the regulation of it, by bluntly asking him on the hustings whether he knew a text in Exodus declaring that 'he that stealeth a man and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death.' His father's pamphlets undoubtedly exposed a good deal of surface. We cannot be surprised that any adherent of these standard sophistries should be placed on the black list of the zealous soldiers of humanity. The candidate held to the ground he had taken at Oxford and in his election address, and apparently made converts. He had an interview with forty voters of abolitionist complexion at his hotel, and according to the friendly narrative of his brother, who was present, 'he shone not only in his powers of conversation, but by the tact, quickness, and talent with which he made his replies, to the thorough and complete satisfaction of baptists, wesleyan methodists, and I may say even, of almost every religious sect! Not one refused their vote: they came forward, and enrolled their names, though before, I believe, they never supported any one on the duke's interest!'
ISSUES ADDRESS AT NEWARK
The humours of an election of the ancient sort are a very old story, and Newark had its full share of them. The register contained rather under sixteen hundred voters on a scot and lot qualification, to elect a couple of members. The principal influence over about one quarter of them was exercised by the Duke of Newcastle, who three years before had punished the whigs of the borough for the outrage of voting against his nominee, by serving, in concert with another proprietor, forty of them with notice to quit. Then the trodden worm turned. The notices were framed, affixed to poles, and carried with bands of music through the streets. Even the audacity of a petition to parliament was projected. The duke, whose chief fault was not to know that time had brought him into a novel age, defended himself with the haughty truism, then just ceasing to be true, that he had a right to do as he liked with his own. This clear-cut enunciation of a vanishing principle became a sort of landmark, and gave to his name an unpleasing immortality in our political history. In the high tide of agitation