from Iowa.... Rev. Dr. Patterson, a Presbyterian clergyman of Chicago....Madame Janet Patey, a popular English contralto singer. March 1.-Dr. William F. Poole, librarian of the Newberry Library of Chicago, originator of "Poole's Index of Periodical Literature "....John Henry Cornell, author, composer and organist....Ex-Gov. John G. Downey, of California. March 2.-Gen. Jubal A. Early, noted Confederate soldier.... Wm. H. Osborn, ex-president Illinois Central Railroad and of recent years well-known in New York City charitable work. March 4.-James M. Bailey, "the Danbury News man" ....Dr. Wm. H. Burk, assistant editor of the Philadelphia Public Ledger; was engaged on a life of G. W. Childs ... Bishop John Adams Paddock, of Olympia, Wash. March 6.-Mrs. Mary Hemenway, of Boston, a woman devoted to educational and philanthropic enterprises; the income of her estate of $15,000,000 is granted by her will to the undertakings in which she was interested during her life. March 8.-Caleb S. Bragg, the school book publisher. March 9.-The Archbishop of Rouen, Cardinal Leon Benoit Charles Thomas....Cardinal Francesco Ricci Paracciani. March 11.-Hon. G. W. Stone, Chief Justice of the Ala THE LATE DR. CARL LOUIS MICHELET. Professor of Philosophy in the University of Berlin. THE LATE MR. R. M. BALLANTYNE. bama Supreme Court.... Ludwig August Frankl, the poet, at Vienna. March 12.-Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, the English judge who presided at the trial of Mrs. Maybrick; brother of Leslie Stephen and the author of many noted legal works... Gen. James J. Hickman, of Nashville, Tenn., veteran of the Mexican war ... John Graham, civil engineer. March 14.-John T. Ford, of Baltimore, the oldest active theatrical manager in the country, friend of Charles Dickens, Horace Greeley, James G. Blaine, and many ot er noted men. March 15.-M. Mouchicourt, of Paris, judicial liquidator of the Panama Canal Company.... M. Charles Detaille, the French painter of animals, brother of Edouard Detaille... Judge Artemas Libbey, of the Maine Supreme Court.... Captain Frank E. Brownell, who killed the slayer of Colonel Ellsworth at Alexandria, Va., May 24, 1:61, thereby avenging the first blood of the civil war shed in the South....General John L. Otis, of Northampton, Mass....Colonel E Szabad, Hungarian patriot, follower of Kossuth. March 16.-C. L. Kimball, superintendent of the Newburg, Dutchess and Connecticut Railroad, prominent in Masonic circles.... Rev. Dr. Stevens Parker, of New York, a well-known clergyman of the Protestant Episcopal Church. March 17.-James J. Fronheiser, a well-known steel manufacturer of Johnstown, Pa....Thomas S. Negus, president of the New Jersey Pilot Board. March 18.-Mrs. John W. Noble, wife of the ex-Secretary of the Interior ... Allan Campbell, of New York, the engineer who built the first railroad in South America and later acted as chief engineer of construction for the Union Pacific Railroad; succeeded John Kelly as Comptroller of New York City in 1880. March 19.-Commodore William D. Whiting, retired, of the United States Navy. March 20-Louis Kossuth, the Hungarian patriot....1. T. Goodnow, the first Superintendent of Public Instruction in Kansas. THE THREE ENGLISH LIBERAL LEADERS. MR. GLADSTONE, LORD ROSEBERY AND SIR W. HARCOURT. CHARACTER SKETCHES BY W. T. STEAD. 1. MR. GLADSTONE. T is difficult, not to say impossible, for any of us tirement from public life. He retired, it is true, once before. I well remember the feeling of blank dismay and of genuine misery which we all felt when, soon after the general election of 1874, Mr. Gladstone announced that the time had arrived when he must devote his remaining years to preparation for the other world. Yet Mr. Gladstone in 1874 was but a comparatively unimportant figure in the national drama when contrasted with the Mr. Gladstone of to-day. The last twenty years naturally leave a deeper impression on the minds of men than the previous fifty years, but even after making the necessary allowance for the illusions of time and space, the last section of Mr. Gladstone's life is by far the most striking and the most memorable. He was a great man in 1874. To-day he is a hero, already installed, even during his lifetime, in a foremost place among the chosen immortals who for good or for ill influence most deeply the destinies of our English race. How much more poignant, therefore, must be the regret, how much more aching the sense of loss with which we learned that Mr. Gladstone is to lead us no more forever! AT THE DOME OF ST. PAUL'S. Politics in England very much resemble the view of Eastern London as I see it every day from Waterloo Bridge. There is crowded life in the busy city and on the restless river. There are palaces and hovels, churches and warehouses, a great multitudinous expanse of offices and of dwellings. But the centre of that great panorama of life is not on the river or on the streets, in palace, or courts, or park. It is in mid-heaven in the great dome which the genius of Wren reared over the Cathedral of St. Paul. No more stately or beautiful dome ever crowned a city's glory and a city's pride. When you are sufficiently far away, the dome of St. Peter's looms majestic against the horizon through the purple haze of the Campagna. But the sense of immensity disappears as you approach it; the dome seems dwarfed by the Cathedral from which it springs. It is far otherwise with St. Paul's. Over the many steepled city and its towering streets, the great dome rises and rests easily regnant, sitting like some great queen enthroned in a purer air far above "streaming London's central " which rise; from below. What St. Paul's is to roar the city, so is Mr. Gladstone to the political world. Imagine St. Paul's blotted out, and in that eyeless socket of the city that would remain we have a picture of Parliament to-day without its chief. HOW HE IS MISSED. It was inevitable some time, no doubt, and we all knew that it was drawing nearer every day. But so is death, and so possibly is the advent of Macaulay's New Zealander. Yet we are not prepared for the Maori with his sketch book, and until Fate, as summoner, lays his hand on our heart and bids it rest so that the spirit may live, we go on unthinking. A calamity is seldom less calamitous because it has been predicted. Nor are we any the more reconciled to Mr. Gladstone's departure because we have said and have written many times that it must come before long. For Mr. Gladstone has been so long part and parcel of the life of the English-speaking race that it is as if we were tearing with rude hands a thread woven into the very warp and woof of our national existence. It matters not whether we loved him or whether we hated him, he was a part of us; the most conspicuous and shining part. We had to be talking of him for good or for ill all the time. He was no comet sweeping in wide ellipse through the heavens; he was rather as the sun which was always with us, the centre of our system, the giver of light and warmth. We complained of his heat sometimes, or lamented that he spared us so little of his genial rays, but even when we grumbled most the thought of a sunless world never startled our imagination in nightmare. So it was with Mr. Gladstone. He was always with us. He seemed as if he must be always with us, and his departure seems not so much a disaster but rather as if something had dropped out of the order of nature. A NATIONAL HERO. Looking back over the great career which has filled so nobly the canvass of three-quarters of a century, we see much in it to fill the heart with gratitude and praise. The gods have no better boon to give to mortals than a great and good man. As long as England produces men like Mr. Gladstone, the sentiment of loyalty, the habit of trust, the fervor and force of enthusiasm will not die out. The continually increasing and ever widening recognition of the sterling greatness of Mr. Gladstone is a welcome testimony to the soundness of our national judgment. England, like bluff old King Hal, dearly loves a man, and in Mr. Gladstone she found a man whom she was proud to follow. There was no servility in her devotion and her pride. Many a time and oft she rebuked her brilliant chief, sometimes wisely, sometimes foolishly, but, even in her most wrathful moments, her indignation was full of regret. She stormed at him all the more because she felt what an incalculable power for good he would have been on the other side. Her very censures were veiled compliments and her fiercest denunciations ungrudged tributes to his genius and his worth. It has been of immense benefit to our democracy that just as it was attaining man's estate and arriving at full enfranchisement the common people had such an uncommon man to lead them. It is indeed of the richest of the Lord's mercies to "God's Englishmen" that for the last quarter of a century they have had such an old man as Mr. Gladstone to teach them how to rule and such an old woman as Her Majesty to teach them how to reign. Between them, Mr. Gladstone and Queen Victoria have done more than any two, or than any two hundred, to give "our crowned republic's crowning common sense a fair chance to adjust itself to the new conditions of the new time. There is no necessity for me to attempt in these pages a review of the long, illustrious career of Mr. Gladstone. As for a character sketch, that is equally unnecessary. We published a sketch of him before the last general election, and to what we said then we have little to add and nothing to take back. What concerns us now is not so much what Mr. Gladstone is or was, but that we are now without the continual inspiration of his presence and the stimulus of his indomitable spirit. For the very wonderful vitality of the man, his omnipresent activity and the immense ascendency which he rightfully exerted have, like all other things, to be paid for. Nature exacts her compensations without ruth. We may, if we please, exult in the magnificence of the growth of the mighty cedar, but beneath the shade of its far-spreading branches we must not expect to rear fresh trees. And the penalty of having had for so long so supreme a party leader as Mr. Gladstone is that we have no successor ready to take his place. I remember well fencing with this question when the Czar asked me who was to succeed Mr. Gladstone. I did not wish, as an Englishman, to be humiliated by having to name Sir W. Harcourt as a possible Prime Minister in the Imperial presence, and so I said simply: "Mr. Gladstone can have no successor. We shall no doubt have to put some one in his place after he goes, but successor, no-there is only one Mr. Gladstone." But it is no use repining at the shadows which the sun casts. Better the shadows than no sunshine, and we should be fools indeed not to choose the great man with all his drawbacks rather than consent to drivel on from decade to decade in a wilderness of monotonous mediocrities. ITS DRAWBACKS AND COMPENSATIONS. Mr. Gladstone undoubtedly dwarfed his contemporaries and sometimes stunted his colleagues. But the mischief which this all-canopying personality might have done was minimized by the sturdy vigor of the individuality of our race and the enormous expanse of the British Empire. Mr. Gladstone, for instance, has done nothing to cripple, dwarf, or overshadow Mr. Cecil Rhodes, who is, in many respects, the ablest and the most powerful Englishman in the Empire. That was because the Empire is broad enough to afford elbow room for Colonial Cæsars. Neither has he, to all appearance, done Mr. Chamberlain much damage by way of impairing his self-confidence or diminishing his ambitions. It is possible that in his own cabinet he has to some extent atrophied the faculties of some of his colleagues, who have been compelled for years to let him decide many questions which if he had been absent they would have decided for themselves; but even this disadvantage is perhaps more than compensated for by the stimulus which his example has afforded them, and the immense educational influence which mere contact with an administrator so superbly equipped must have exercised upon minds of less culture and less experience. It is, however, vain to speculate upon what we shall all see for ourselves before very long. The experiment of placing all power in the hands of a supremely capable chief does not seem to have had very excellent results in Ireland after the capable chief disappeared. But Mr. Gladstone never dominated his party as Mr. Parnell dominated the Home Rulers. Neither, it may be said, are the English Irish. It may be due to English selfishness, or it may be due to our obtuseness, but the instinct of self-preservation operates so powerfully with English politicians that Mr. Gladstone's party is not likely to go to pieces merely because Mr. Gladstone is no longer at the helm. A CHURCHMAN AT BOTTOM. Mr. Gladstone's influence upon his fellow countrymen was more that of a great churchman than that of a statesman. He reminds me much more of Becket or of Laud than, of the ordinary secular politician. He was a politician, no doubt, and a wary and a wily one at that. But this astuteness which makes it as easy to catch a weasel asleep as to catch Mr. Gladstone napping is a quality much more highly developed in ecclesiastics than among members of Parliament. It is the product of the conclave much more than of the caucus. Mr. Gladstone was a man of affairs-four times Prime Minister of England, five times leader of the House of Commons-but with all his immersion in this world's business he was a man who dwelt in the other world as much at least as any of the great Cardinals who figure in history. There is about him a certain detachment of mind more natural to the member of a cosmopolitan organization than to the insular statesmen of John Bull. He never altogether seemed to identify himself with England. He represented something else. When I last saw him I mildly hinted that he never seemed to be much enthused with the greatness and magnificence of England's mission. "Well, you know," he said, "if you have a son who is somewhat forward and MR. GLADSTONE TO-DAY. |