I took my seat at the opening of 1833, provided unquestionably with, a large stock of schoolboy bashfulness. The first time that business required me to go to the arm of the chair to say something to the Speaker, Manners Sutton—the first of seven whose subject I have been—who was something of a Keate, I remember the revival in me bodily of the frame of mind in which a schoolboy stands before his master. But apart from an incidental recollection of this kind, I found it most difficult to believe with, any reality of belief, that such a poor and insignificant creature as I, could really belong to, really form a part of, an assembly which, notwithstanding the prosaic character of its entire visible equipment, I felt to be so august. What I may term its corporeal conveniences were, I may observe in passing, marvellously small. I do not think that in any part of the building it afforded the means of so much as washing the hands. The residences of members were at that time less distant: but they were principally reached on foot. When a large House broke up after a considerable division, a copious dark stream found its way up Parliament Street, Whitehall, and Charing Cross.
I remember that there occurred some case in which a constituent (probably a maltster) at Newark sent me a communication which made oral communication with the treasury, or with the chancellor of the exchequer (then Lord Althorp), convenient. As to the means of bringing this about, I was puzzled and abashed. Some experienced friend on the opposition bench, probably Mr. Goulburn, said to me, There is Lord Althorp sitting alone on the treasury bench, go to him and tell him your business. With such encouragement I did it. Lord Althorp received me in the kindest manner possible, alike to my pleasure and my surprise.
The exact composition of the first reformed House of Commons was usually analysed as tories 144; reformers 395; English and Scotch radicals 76; Irish repealers 43. Mr. Gladstone was for counting the decided conservatives as 160 and reckoning as a separate group a small party who had once been tories and now ranked between conservative opposition and whig ministers. The Irish representatives he divided between 28 tories, and a body of 50 who were made up of ministerialists, conditional repealers, and tithe extinguishers. He heard Joseph Hume, the most effective of the leading radicals, get the first word in the reformed parliament, speaking for an hour and perhaps justifying O'Connell's witty saying that Hume would have been an excellent speaker, if only he would finish a sentence before beginning the next but one after it.
No more diligent member of parliament than Mr. Gladstone ever sat upon the green benches. He read his blue-books, did his duty by election committees, and on the first occasion when, in consequence of staying a little too long at a dinner at the Duke of Hamilton's, he missed a division, his self-reproach was almost as sharp as if he had fallen into mortal sin. This is often enough the way with virtuous young members, but Mr. Gladstone's zealous ideal of parliamentary duty lasted, and both at first and always he was a singular union of deep meditative seriousness with untiring animation, assiduity, and practical energy and force working over a wide field definitely mapped.
MAIDEN SPEECH
In the assembly where he was one day to rank among the most powerful orators ever inscribed upon its golden roll, he first opened his lips in a few words on a Newark petition (April 30) and shortly after (May 21) he spoke two or three minutes on an Edinburgh petition. A little later the question of slavery, where he knew every inch of the ground, brought him to a serious ordeal. In May, Stanley as colonial secretary introduced the proposals of the government for the gradual abolition of colonial slavery. Abolition was to be preceded by an intermediate stage, designated as apprenticeship, to last for twelve years; and the planters were to be helped through the difficulties of the transition by a loan of fifteen millions. In the course of the proceedings, the intermediate period was shortened from twelve years to seven, and the loan of fifteen millions was transformed into a free gift of twenty. To this scheme John Gladstone, whose indomitable energy made him the leading spirit of the West Indian interest, was consistently opposed, and he naturally became the mark of abolitionist attack. The occasion of Mr. Gladstone's first speech was an attack by Lord Howick on the manager of John Gladstone's Demerara estates, whom he denounced as 'the murderer of slaves,'—an attack made without notice to the two sons of the incriminated proprietor sitting in front of him. He declared that the slaves on the Vreedenhoop sugar plantations were systematically worked to death in order to increase the crop. Mr. Gladstone tried in vain to catch the eye of the Chairman on May 30, and the next day he wished to speak but saw no good opportunity. 'The emotions through which one passes, at least through which I pass, in anticipating such an effort as this, are painful and humiliating. The utter prostration and depression of spirit; the deep sincerity, the burdensome and overpowering reality of the feeling of mere feebleness and incapacity, felt in the inmost heart, yet not to find relief by expression, because the expression of such things goes for affectation,—these things I am unequal to describe, yet I have experienced them now.' On June 3, the chance came. Here is his story of the day: 'Began le miei Prigioni. West India meeting of members at one at Lord Sandon's. Resolutions discussed and agreed upon; ... dined early. Re-arranged my notes for the debate. Rode. House 5 to 1. Spoke my first time, for 50 minutes. My leading desire was to benefit the cause of those who are now so sorely beset. The House heard me very kindly, and my friends were satisfied. Tea afterwards at the Carlton.' The speech was an uncommon success. Stanley, the minister mainly concerned, congratulated him with more than those conventional compliments which the good nature of the House of Commons expects to be paid to any decent beginner. 'I never listened to any speech with greater pleasure,' said Stanley, himself the prince of debaters and then in the most brilliant part of his career; 'the member for Newark argued his case with a temper, an ability, and a fairness which may well be cited as a good model to many older members of this House.' His own leader, though he spoke later, said nothing in his speech about the new recruit, but two days after Mr. Gladstone mentioned that Sir R. Peel came up to him and praised Monday night's affair. King William wrote to Althorp: 'he rejoices that a young member has come forward in so promising a manner, as Viscount Althorp states Mr. W. E. Gladstone to have done.'58
Apart from its special vindication in close detail of the state of things at Vreedenhoop as being no worse than others, the points of the speech on this great issue of the time were familiar ones. He confessed with shame and pain that cases of cruelty had existed, and would always exist, under the system of slavery, and that this was 'a substantial reason why the British legislature and public should set themselves in good earnest to provide for its extinction.' He admitted, too, that we had not fulfilled our Christian obligations by communicating the inestimable benefits of our religion to the slaves in our colonies, and that the belief among the early English planters, that if you made a man a Christian you could not keep him a slave, had led them to the monstrous conclusion that they ought not to impart Christianity to their slaves. Its extinction was a consummation devoutly to be desired, and in good earnest to be forwarded, but immediate and unconditioned emancipation, without a previous advance in character, must place the negro in a state where he would be his own worst enemy, and so must crown all the wrongs already done to him by cutting off the last hope of rising to a higher level in social existence. At some later period of his life Mr. Gladstone read a corrected report of his first speech, and found its tone much less than satisfactory. 'But of course,' he adds, 'allowance must be made for the enormous and most blessed change of opinion since that day on the subject of negro slavery. I must say, however, that even before this time I had come to entertain little or no confidence in the proceedings of the resident agents in the West Indies.' 'I can now see plainly enough,' he said sixty years later, 'the sad defects, the real illiberalism of my opinions on that subject. Yet they were not illiberal as compared with the ideas of the times, and as declared in parliament in 1833 they obtained the commendation of the liberal leaders.'
COMMON OPINIONS ON SLAVERY
It is fair to remember that Pitt, Fox, Grenville, and Grey, while eager to bring the slave trade to an instant end, habitually disclaimed as a calumny any intention of emancipating the blacks on the sugar islands. In 1807, when the foul blot of the trade was abolished, even Wilberforce himself discouraged attempts to abolish slavery, though the noble philanthropist soon advanced to the