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WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE (1809-1898)

ENGLAND'S PEERLESS NINETEENTH CENTURY ORATOR

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HE history of Gladstone falls little short of being the history of England in the nineteenth century. From 1830 onward to near the end of the century no public question arose on which he had not something of weight and moment to say, and from the middle of the century to his death he was a controlling power in very much of the important legislation that took place. It was his unrivalled power as an orator, his superb statesmanship, and his earnest labors for the best interests of the British people that gave him this supremacy; while in the closing years of his life Ireland hailed him as her champion in the long-sought-for cause of Home Rule.

Gladstone was a man of immense mental activity. The intervals between his rarely ending parliamentary labors were filled with busy authorship. But his fame will rest on his record as statesman and orator, and especially his work for moral progress and practical reform. It would be impossible to name any other British minister with so long and successful a record in practical and progressive legislation. As a parliamentary debater he never had a superior-it is doubtful if he ever had an equal-in his country's history. Gifted with an exquisite voice-sweet, powerful, penetrating, vibrating to every emotion— his long training in the House of Commons developed his natural gifts to the fullest extent. His fluency was great-almost too exuberant, since his eloquence often carried him to too great lengthsbut his hearers never seemed to tire of listening. He takes rank, indeed, as one of the greatest orators, and we may say distinctively the greatest debater that the British Parliament has ever known.

As respects Gladstone's deep sympathy with all mankind, we may instance his passionate arraignment in 1851, of the shameful

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cruelties of the King of Naples, and at a later date of the terrible Turkish barbarities in Bulgaria. These are two instances of the warm feeling that inspired him on a hundred occasions during his career.

WARFARE AND COLONIZATION

[Of Gladstone's oratory we might select innumerable striking examples. But leaving his parliamentary speeches, we make the following extract from the speech of November 1, 1865, at the City Hall, Glasgow, on the presentation to him of the freedom of that city. Many look on this as the most representative example of his eloquence. We choose that portion of it in which he makes war and its effects his theme.]

It is quite unnecessary before this audience-I may venture to say it is unnecessary before any audience of my countrymen—to dwell at this period of our experience upon the material benefits that have resulted from free trade, upon the enormous augmentation of national power which it has produced, or even upon the increased concord which it has tended so strongly to promote throughout the various sections of the community. But it is the characteristic of the system which we so denominate, that while it comes forward with homely pretensions, and professes, in the first instance, to address itself mainly to questions of material and financial interests, yet, in point of fact, it is fraught and charged throughout with immense masses of moral, social, and political results. I will not now speak to the very large measure of those results which are domestic, but I would ask you to consider with me for a few moments the effect of the system of unrestricted intercourse upon the happiness of the human family at large.

Now, as far as that happiness is connected with the movements of nations, war has been its great implement. And what have been the great causes of wars? They do not come upon the world by an inevitable necessity, or through a providential visitation. They are not to be compared with pestilences and famines even-in that respect, though, we have learned, and justly learned, that much of what we have been accustomed to call providential visitation is owing to our neglect of the wise and prudent means which man ought to find in the just exercise of his faculties for the avoidance of calamity-but with respect to wars, they are the direct and universal consequence of the unrestricted, too commonly of the unbridled, passions and lusts of men.

If we go back to a very early period of society, we find a state of things in which, as between one individual and another, no law obtained; a state of things in which the first idea almost of those who desired to better their condition was simply to better it by the abstraction of their neighbor's property. In the early periods of society, piracy and unrestrained freebooting among individuals were what wars, for the most part,

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BENJAMIN DISRAELI AND JOHN BRIGHT

Two great orators of England in the latter half of the 19th Century. The former was Prime Minister and overcame great natural obstacles to oratory; the latter was the great orator of reform, who was in sympathy with the common people and championed their rights in and out of Parliament.

WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE

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have been in the more advanced periods of human history. Why, what is the case with a war? It is a case in which both cannot be right, but in which both may be wrong. I believe if the impartiality of the historian survey a very large proportion of the wars that have desolated the worldsome, indeed, there may be, and undoubtedly there have been, in which the arm of valor has been raised simply for the cause of freedom and justice that the most of them will be found to belong to that less satisfactory category in which folly, passion, greediness, on both sides, have led to effects which afterwards, when too late, have been so much deplored.

We have had in the history of the world religious wars. The period of these wars I trust we have now outlived. I am not at all sure that there was not quite as much to be said for them as for a great many other wars which have been recorded in the page of history. The same folly which led to the one led, in another form, to the other. We have had dynastic wars-wars of succession, in which, for long periods of years, the heads of rival families have fought over the bleeding persons of their people, to determine who should govern them. I trust we have overlived the period of wars of that class. Another class of wars, of a more dangerous and yet a more extensive description, have been territorial wars. No doubt it is a very natural, though it is a very dangerous and a very culpable sentiment, which leads nations to desire their neighbors' property, and I am very sorry to think that we have had examples-perhaps we have an example even at this moment before our eyes-to show that even in the most civilized parts of the world, even in the midst of the oldest civilization upon the continent of Europe, that thirst for territorial acquisition is not yet extinct.

But I wish to call your attention to a peculiar form in which, during the latter part of human history, this thirst for territorial acquisition. became an extensive cause of bloodshed. It was when the colonizing power took possession of the European nations. It seems that the world was not wide enough for them. One would have thought, upon looking over the broad places of the earth, and thinking how small a portion of them is even now profitably occupied, and how much smaller a portion of them a century or two centuries ago, one would have thought there would have been ample space for all to go and help themselves; but, notwithstanding this, we found it necessary, in the business of planting colonies, to make those colonies the cause of bloody conflicts with our neighbors; and there was at the bottom of that policy this old lust of territorial aggrandizement. When the state of things in Europe had become so far settled that that lust could not be as freely indulged as it might in barbarous times, we then carried our armaments and our passions across the

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