ussell vied
in demanding. Cherishing his old financial ideals, Mr. Gladstone had
not marked the change. So he failed to perceive how much the credit of
his party was suffering (after 1871) from the belief of large sections
of the people, that he was indifferent to the interests of England
outside England. Perhaps, knowing the charge of indifference to be
groundless, he underrated the effect which the iteration of it
produced: perhaps his pride would not let him stoop to dissipate it.

Though the power of reading the signs of the times and swaying the
mind of the nation may be now more essential to an English statesman
than the skill which manages a legislature or holds together a
cabinet, that skill counts for much, and must continue to do so while
the House of Commons remains the governing authority of the country. A
man can hardly reach high place, and certainly cannot retain high
place, without possessing this kind of art. Mr. Gladstone was at one
time thought to want it. In 1864, when Lord Palmerston's end was
approaching, and Mr. Gladstone had shown himself the strongest man
among the Liberal ministers in the House of Commons, people speculated
about the succession to the headship of the party; and the wiseacres
of the day were never tired of repeating that Mr. Gladstone could not
possibly lead the House of Commons. He wanted tact, they said, he was
too excitable, too impulsive, too much absorbed in his own ideas, too
unversed in the arts by which individuals are conciliated. But when,
after twenty-five years of his unquestioned reign, the time for his
own departure drew nigh, men asked how the Liberal party in the House
of Commons would ever hold together after it had lost a leader of such
consummate capacity. The Whig critics of 1864 had grown so accustomed
to Palmerston's way of handling the House as to forget that a man
might succeed by quite different methods, and that defects, serious in
themselves, may be outweighed by transcendent merits.

Mr. Gladstone had the defects ascribed to him. His impulsiveness
sometimes betrayed him into declarations which a cooler reflection
would have dissuaded. The second reading of the Irish Home Rule Bill
of 1886 might possibly have been carried had he not been goaded by his
opponents into words which were construed as recalling or modifying
the concessions he had announced at a meeting of the Liberal party
held just before. More than once precious time was wasted because
a