FROM THE SPEECH ON INCENDIARISM IN IRELAND (1844). HE great and all-present evil of the rural districts is this: you have too many people for the work to be done. And you, the landed proprietors, are alone responsible for this state of things; and, to speak honestly, I believe many of you know it. I have been charged with saying out-of-doors that this House is a club of landowners legislating for landowners. If I had not said it, the public must long ago have found out that fact. My honorable friend, the member for Stockport, on one occasion proposed that before you passed a law to raise the price of bread, you should consider how far you had the power to raise the rates of wages. What do you say to that? You said that the laborers did not understand political economy, or they would not apply to Parliament to raise wages; that Parliament could not raise wages. yet the very next thing you did was to pass a law to raise the price of produce of your own land, at the expense of the very class whose wages you confessed your inability to increase. What is the condition of the county of Suffolk? Is it not notorious that the rents are as high as they were fifty years ago, and probably much higher? But the return for the farmer's capital is much lower, and the condition of the laborer is very much worse. The farmers are subject to the laws of competition, and rents are thereby raised from time to time, so as to keep their profits down to the lowest point, and the laborers, by the competition amongst them, are reduced to the point below which life can not be maintained. Your tenants and laborers are being devoured by this excessive competition, while you, their magnanimous landlords, shelter yourselves from all competition by the corn-law yourselves have passed, and make the competition of all other classes serve still more to swell your rentals. It was for this object the corn-law was passed, and yet in the face of your countrymen you dare call it a law for the protection of native industry. Again, a rural police is kept up by the gentry; the farmers say for the sole use of watching game The and frightening poachers, for which formerly they It is the remark of a beautiful writer that " 'to have known nothing but misery is the most portentous condition under which human nature can start on its course." Has your agricultural laborer ever known anything but misery? He is born in a miserable hovel, which in mockery is termed a house or a home; he is reared in penury; he passes a life of hopeless and unrequited toil, and the jail or the union house is before him as the only asylum on this side of the pauper's grave. Is this the result of your protection to native industry? Have you cared for the laborer till, from a home of comfort, he has but a hovel for shelter, and have you cherished him into starvation and rags? I tell you what your boasted protection isit is a protection of native idleness at the expense of the impoverishment of native industry. WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE. THE "GRAND OLD MAN" OF ENGLISH POLITICS. JEW other men have filled so large a place, both in politics and in literature, as the aged man who has for more than half a century been a leading figure in the English House of Commons, and has found time, amidst the absorbing occupations of a Prime Minister, and in the intervals of political campaigns, to write learned books upon theology and critical essays on Homeric literature. Few men have so well deserved the title "Statesman in Literature"; perhaps no other great statesman has chosen the same literary field. Gladstone is the fourth son of a wealthy Liverpool merchant, and was born in that city in 1809. He distinguished himself at Oxford, where he took the highest honors, and where he was the most remarkable graduate of his generation. From the university Mr. Gladstone carried away two passions-for Greek literature and for Christian theology. He entered Parliament almost immediately after leaving college, and became a member of Sir Robert Peel's government, as Under Secretary for Colonial Affairs, in 1834. The government being defeated the following year, he retired from office, to come in again when Sir Robert formed another government in 1841. He early distinguished himself by financial skill and knowledge of commercial affairs. He supported Sir Robert Peel in the repeal of the corn-laws in 1846, and opposed with all his strength the Crimean War and the Chinese War of 1857. Gladstone's gradual change from the Tory to the Liberal party, his fierce advocacy of the union of Church and State in his early career, and his later support of the bill which disestablished the Irish Church, and the change of front which made him in his last years a supporter of home rule for Ireland, have successively astonished the world. In each case he was accused of inconstancy, if not of treachery. He is one of the few great men who have been able and willing, with the progress of the times, to change their minds and to reverse their positions. Mr. Gladstone became Prime Minister in 1868, and was one of the most popular and influential that ever ruled over the English people. For more than thirty years he was at the head of the Liberals, while Disraeli led the Conservatives; and the contests under these two masters of parliamentary tactics were sometimes amongst the most important and exciting in the history of government by assemblies. The government of Ireland, the extension of the elective franchise, and the multitude of questions arising out of the complicated colonial and foreign relations of England, furnished the bones of contention for the two parties, causing the two great leaders to succeed each other as Prime Minister at almost regular intervals. Mr. Gladstone has now retired from official life, but his interest in public affairs has not abated, and upon every question of State policy which involves the national honor the voice of the old man is still heard, speaking with no uncertain sound, arousing the consciences of his countrymen as no other voice can do. Mr. Gladstone's principal books are: "The State, in its Relations with the Church," his "Chapter of Autobiography," "Church Principles Considered in Their Results," "Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age," "The Gods and Men of the Heroic Age," and "Homeric Synchronisms." Part of his numerous reviews and contributions to periodicals have been collected in seven volumes, under the title "Gleanings of Past Years." Gladstone's fame, however, will rest, not on his theology nor his scholarship, but upon his power as a leader of men. He is considered the greatest of British financiers, and as an orator in the House of Commons had no equal except John Bright. Of his speech on the Budget of 1860, the London Quarterly Review declares: "We find ourselves in the enchanted region of pure Gladstonism-that terrible combination of relentless logic and dauntless imagination. We soar into the empyrean of finance. Everything is on a colossal scale of grandeur-all-embracing free trade, abysses of deficit, and mountains of income tax.' Mr. Gladstone's home at Hawarden Castle is visited by great numbers of tourists, and the public interest in his life, in his favorite exercise of chopping down trees in his forest, and in everything concerning him or his family, extends not only throughout England, but to every corner of the civilized world. ANTICIPATIONS FOR THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. Of individual vigor, the ordeal of public discussion, ND here I close this interview of the religious position of the Church of England under the circumstances of the day [1840] of course not venturing to assume that these pages can effect in any degree the purpose with which they are written, of contributing to her security and peace; but yet full of the most cheerful anticipations of her destiny, and without the remotest fear either of schism among her children, or of any permanent oppression from the State, whatever may befall the State herself. She has endured for ten years, not only without essential injury, but with a decided and progressive growth in her general influence as well as in hering testimony of foes and friends—the hand of her BELIEVE that the foregoing passages de- | favorable to the interests of the religion which it Iscribe the now to scribe fairly, if succinctly, the main propositions of "The State in its Relations with the Church," so far as the book bears upon the present controversy. They bound me hand and foot; they hemmed me in on every side. My opinion of the Established Church of Ireland is now the direct opposite of what it was then. I then thought it reconcilable with civil and national justice; I now think the maintenance of it grossly unjust. I then thought its action was teaches; I now believe it to be opposed to them. An establishment that does its work in much, and has the hope and likelihood of doing it in more; an establishment that has a broad and living way open to it into the hearts of the people; an establishment that can command the services of the present by the recollections and traditions of a far-reaching past; an establishment able to appeal to the active zeal of the greater portion of the people and to the respect or scruples of almost the whole; whose children dwell chiefly on her actual living work and service, and whose adversaries-if she have them-are in the main content to believe that there will be a future for them and their opinion-such an establishment should surely be maintained. But an establishment that neither does nor has the hope of doing work except for a few-and those few the portion of the community whose claim to public aid is the smallest of all; an establishment severed from the mass of the people by an impassable gulf, and by a wall of brass; an establishment whose good offices, could she offer them, would be intercepted by a long, unbroken chain of painful and shameful recollections; an establishment leaning for support upon the extraneous aid of a State, which becomes discredited with the people by the very act of lending it-such an establishment will do well for its own sake, and for the sake of its creed, to divest itself as soon as may be of gauds and trappings, and to commence a new career, in which, renouncing at once the credit and the discredit of the civil sanction, it shall seek its strength from within, and put a fearless trust in the message that it bears. AN ESTIMATE OF MACAULAY. FROM "GLEANINGS OF PAST YEARS." HE truth is that Macaulay was not only accustomed, like many more of us, to go out hobby-riding, but from the portentous vigor of the animal he mounted was liable more than the most of us to be run away with. His merit is that he could keep his seat in the wildest steeplechase; but as the object in view is arbitrarily chosen, so it is reached by cutting up the fields, spoiling the crops, and spoiling or breaking down the fences needful to secure for labor its profit, and to man at large the full enjoyment of the fruits of the earth. Such is the overpowering glow of color, such is the fascination of the grouping in the first sketches which he draws, that when he has grown hot upon his work he seems to lose all sense of the restraints of fact and the laws of moderation; he vents the strangest paradoxes, sets up the most violent caricatures, and handles the false weight and measure as effectively as if he did it knowingly. A man so able and so upright is never indeed wholly wrong. He never for a moment consciously pursues anything but the truth. But truth depends, above all, on proportion and relation. The preterhuman vividness with which Macaulay sees his object, absolutely casts a shadow upon what lies around; he loses his perspective; and imagination, impelled headlong by the strong consciousness of honesty in purpose, achieves the work of fraud. All things for him stand in violent contrast to one another. For the shadows, the gradations, the middle and transition touches, which make up the bulk of human life, character, and action, he has neither eye nor taste. They are not taken account of in his practice, and they at length die away with the ranges of his vision. In Macaulay all history is scenic; and philosophy he scarcely seems to touch, except on the outer side, where it opens into action. Not only does he habitually present facts in forms of beauty, but the fashioning of the form predominates over, and is injurious to, the absolute and balanced presentation of the subject. Macaulay was a master in execution, rather than in what painting or music terms expression. He did not fetch from the depths, nor soar to the heights; but his power upon the surface was rare and marvelous, and it is upon the surface that an ordinary life is passed and that its imagery is found. He mingled, then, like Homer, the functions of the poet and the chronicler: but what Homer did was due to his time; what Macaulay did, to his tempera ment. The "History" of Macaulay, whatever else it may be, is the work not of a journeyman but of a great artist, and a great artist who lavishly bestowed upon it all his powers. Such a work, once committed to the press, can hardly die. It is not be |