rguments of all, and,
except on any question of real vital principle, he is ready to
yield his own opinion to the general sense of the colleagues over
whom he presides.(270)

Imputing his own qualities to others, and always keen to make the best of
people and not the worst, if he had once invited a man to office, he held
on to him to the last possible moment. "The next most serious thing to
admitting a man into the cabinet," he said, "is to leave a man out who has
once been in." Not seldom he carried his invincible courtesy, deference,
and toleration even beyond the domain where those qualities ought to be
supreme. This was part of what men meant, when they said that life was to
him in all its aspects an application of Christian teaching and example.
To this we must add another consideration of first importance, and one
that vulgar criticism of great statesmen too commonly ignores. In the
words of Lord Aberdeen (1856), who knew from sharp experience how much his
doctrine might cost a man: "A prime minister is not a free agent. To break
up a government, to renounce all the good you hoped to do and leave
imperfect all the good you have done, to hand over power to persons whose
objects or whose measures you disapprove, even merely to alienate and
politically to injure your friends, is no slight matter."(271)

A member of this first cabinet wrote to Mr. Gladstone long after it had
come to an end: "I suppose there was no one of your then colleagues less
sympathetic with you, less in tune with your opinions and enthusiasms than
Lowe. Nevertheless this happened to me with him--after you had resigned.
Lowe opened to me one day, on the subject of your relations with your
colleagues. He spoke in terms of warm admiration, and to my great
surprise, ended by saying, 'I have the same kind of feeling towards him
that I can suppose must be the feeling of a dog for his master.' Lowe is a
perfectly sincere man. He would not have said this if he had not felt it."
"In everything personal," Mr. Gladstone replied, "Lowe was an excellent
colleague and member of cabinet. But I had never been in personal
relations with him before, and at the outset of the ministry of 1868 I
knew very little of him. Moreover, he was the occasion of much trouble to
me by his incessant broils with ----, who was an awkward customer." In sheer
intellect Mr. Gladstone held that Lowe had not many equals, but in nobody
else did he discover so many mixed a