"If
ever there was a statesman," said Mill, about this time, "in whom the
spirit of improvement is incarnate, and in whose career as a minister the
characteristic feature has been to seek out things that require or admit
of improvement, instead of waiting to be pressed or driven to do them, Mr.
Gladstone deserves that signal honour." Then his point of view was lofty;
he was keenly alive to the moving forces of the hour; his horizons were
wide; he was always amply founded in facts; he had generous hopes for
mankind; his oratory seized vast popular audiences, because it was the
expression of a glowing heart and a powerful brain. All this made him a
demagogue in the same high sense in which Pericles, Demosthenes, John Pym,
Patrick Henry were demagogues.

It is easy to see some at any rate of the influences that were bringing
Mr. Gladstone decisively into harmony with the movement of liberal
opinions, now gradually spreading over Great Britain. The resurrection of
Italy could only be vindicated on principles of liberty and the right of a
nation to choose its own rulers. The peers and the ten-pound householders
who held power in England were no Bourbon tyrants; but just as in 1830 the
overthrow of the Bourbon line in France was followed by the Reform bill
here, so the Italian revolution of 1860 gave new vitality to the popular
side in England. Another convulsion, far away from our own shores, was
still more directly potent alike in quickening popular feeling, and by a
strange paradox in creating as a great popular leader the very statesman
who had failed to understand it. It was impossible that a man so vigilant
and so impressionable as Mr. Gladstone was, should escape the influence of
the American war. Though too late to affect his judgment on the issues of
the war, he discerned after the event how, in his own language, the wide
participation of the people in the choice of their governors, by giving
force and expression to the national will in the United States, enabled
the governors thus freely chosen to marshal a power and develop an amount
of energy in the execution of that will, such as probably have never been
displayed in an equal time and among an equal number of men since the race
of mankind sprang into existence.(96) In this judgment of the American
civil war, he only shared in a general result of the salvation of the
Union; it reversed the fashionable habit of making American institutions
English bugbears, and gav