le proof of the violence of his personal
antipathies. As an orator, his speeches are often turgid, wanting in
self-control, and full of those ample digressions in which Mr. Gladstone
delighted to obscure his principles. Yet the irritation did not conceal
a magnificent loyalty to his friends, and it was in his days of
comparative poverty that he shared his means with Barry and with Crabbe.
His alliance with Fox is the classic partnership in English politics,
unmarried, even enriched, by the tragedy of its close. He was never
guilty of mean ambition. He thought of nothing save the public welfare.
No man has ever more consistently devoted his energies to the service of
the nation with less regard for personal advancement. No English
statesman has ever more firmly moved amid a mass of details to the
principle they involve.

He was a member of no school of thought, and there is no influence to
whom his outlook can be directly traced. His politics, indeed, bear upon
their face the preoccupation with the immediate problems of the House of
Commons. Yet through them all the principles that emerge form a
consistent whole. Nor is this all. He hated oppression with all the
passion of a generous moral nature. He cared for the good as he saw it
with a steadfastness which Bright and Cobden only can claim to
challenge. What he had to say he said in sentences which form the maxims
of administrative wisdom. His horizon reached from London out to India
and America; and he cared as deeply for the Indian ryot's wrongs as for
the iniquities of English policy to Ireland. With less width of mind
than Hume and less intensity of gaze than Adam Smith, he yet had a width
and intensity which, fused with his own imaginative sympathy, gave him
more insight than either. He had an unerring eye for the eternal
principles of politics. He knew that ideals must be harnessed to an Act
of Parliament if they are not to cease their influence. Admitting while
he did that politics must rest upon expediency, he never failed to find
good reason why expediency should be identified with what he saw as
right. It is a stainless and a splendid record. There are men in English
politics to whom a greater immediate influence may be ascribed, just as
in political philosophy he cannot claim the persistent inspiration of
Hobbes and Locke. But in that middle ground between the facts and
speculation his supremacy is unapproached. There had been nothing like
him before in Engli