upon, work only with the idea of making my efforts worthy, at
least as efforts, of the nation's acceptance alike before and
after my death.

"You have adopted a resolution," said Mr. Gladstone in his reply, "of the
kind that makes the nineteenth century stare or blink, as those blink who
stand in a great brightness and have not eyes for it. The course that you
purpose is indeed a self-denying, an unworldly, and a noble one."

(M175) One packet touches a matter that at the moment did Mr. Gladstone
some harm in the judgment of men whose good opinion was worth having. In
1873 John Stuart Mill died, and a public memorial was proposed. Mr.
Gladstone intimated that he was willing to co-operate. Then a liberal
clergyman attacked the obituary notice in the _Times_ as too frigid, and
the author of the notice retorted by tales of Mill's early views on the
question of population. He was well acquainted with Mr. Gladstone, and set
busily to work to persuade him that Mill in his book on political economy
advocated obnoxious checks, that he was vaguely associated with American
publications on the matter, and that he did not believe in God, which was
not to the point. Mr. Gladstone passed on this tissue of innuendo to the
Duke of Argyll. The Duke reported that he had consulted men thoroughly
conversant both with Mill and his writings; that he was assured no passage
could bear the construction imputed, and that the places which he had
himself looked into, clearly referred to prudential restraints on
marriage. Certainly a school of social economy that deals only with
foreign exchanges and rent and values and the virtues of direct taxes and
indirect, and draws the curtain around the question of population, must be
a singularly shallow affair. The Duke of Argyll manfully brushed wasps
aside, and sent his subscription. So did men as orthodox as Lord
Salisbury, and as cautious as Lord Derby. Mr. Gladstone on the other hand
wrote to the promoters of the memorial: "In my view this painful
controversy still exists. I feel that it is not possible for me, situated
as I am at the present time, to decide it or to examine it with a view to
decision. The only course open to me is to do no act involving a judgment
either way, and, therefore, while I desire to avoid any public step
whatever, I withdraw from co-operation, and request that my name may be no
further mentioned." Unfortunately, the withdrawal of such a name could not
be other tha