e a reason why it should
not be applied forthwith, and that a rule subject to exceptions is not
worth calling a rule; and the worst of it is that these people are mostly
the salt of the earth. In their impatient moments they dismissed him as an
opportunist, but whenever there was a chance of getting anything done,
they mostly found that he was the only man with courage and resolution
enough to attempt to do it. In thinking about him we have constantly to
remember, as Sir George Lewis said, that government is a very rough affair
at best, a huge rough machine, not the delicate springs, wheels, and
balances of a chronometer, and those concerned in working it have to be
satisfied with what is far below the best. "Men have no business to talk
of disenchantment," Mr. Gladstone said; "ideals are never realised." That
is no reason, he meant, why men should not persist and toil and hope, and
this is plainly the true temper for the politician. Yet he did not feed
upon illusions. "The history of nations," he wrote in 1876, "is a
melancholy chapter; that is, the history of governments is one of the most
immoral parts of human history."

II

It might well be said that Mr. Gladstone took too little, rather than too
much trouble to be popular. His religious conservatism puzzled and
irritated those who admired and shared his political liberalism, just as
churchmen watched with uneasiness and suspicion his radical alliances.
Neither those who were churchmen first, nor those whose interests were
keenest in politics, could comprehend the union of what seemed
incompatibles, and because they could not comprehend they sometimes in
their shallower humours doubted his sincerity. Mr. Gladstone was never,
after say 1850, really afraid of disestablishment; on the contrary he was
much more afraid of the perils of establishment for the integrity of the
faith. Yet political disestablishers often doubted him, because they had
not logic enough to see that a man may be a fervent believer in anglican
institutions and what he thinks catholic tradition, and yet be as ready as
Cavour for the principle of free church in free state.

It is curious that some of the things that made men suspicious, were in
fact the liveliest tokens of his sincerity and simplicity. With all his
power of political imagination, yet his mind was an intensely literal
mind. He did not look at an act or a decision from the point of view at
which it might be regarded by other