iews obtained by thought and study, philosophic in the sense
in which we apply the epithet to Pericles, Machiavelli, Turgot,
Burke, Jefferson, Hamilton, Stein--if one class can be made to include
persons otherwise so dissimilar--may perhaps be doubted. There are few
instances in history of men who have been great thinkers and also
great legislators or administrators, because the two kinds of capacity
almost exclude one another. As experts declare that a man who should
try to operate on the Stock Exchange in reliance upon a profound
knowledge of the inner springs of European politics and the financial
resources of the great States, would ruin himself before his perfectly
correct calculations had time to come true, so a practical statesman,
though he cannot know too much, or look too far ahead, must beware of
trusting his own forecasts, must remember that he has to deal with the
next few months or years, and to persuade persons who cannot be
expected to share or even to understand his views of the future. The
habit of meditating on underlying truths, the tendency to play the
long game, are almost certain to spoil a man for dealing effectively
with the present. He will not be a sufficiently vigilant observer; he
will be out of sympathy with the notions of the average man; his
arguments will go over the head of his audience. No English prime
minister has looked at politics with the eye of a philosopher. But Mr.
Gladstone, if hardly to be called a thinker, showed higher
constructive power than any one else has done since Peel. Were the
memory of his oratorical triumphs to pass completely away, he would
deserve to be remembered in respect of the mark he left upon the
British statute-book and of the changes he wrought both in the
constitution of his country and in her European policy.

Three groups of measures stand out as monuments of his skill and
energy. The first of these three includes the financial reforms
embodied in a series of fourteen budgets between the years 1853 and
1882, the most famous of which were the budgets of 1853 and 1860. In
the former he continued the work begun by Peel by reducing and
simplifying the customs duties. Deficiencies in revenue were supplied
by the enactment of less oppressive imposts, and particularly by
resettling the income-tax, and by the introduction of a succession
duty on real estate. The preparation and passing of this very
technical and intricate Succession Duty Act was a most labor