Page:Eminent English liberals in and out of Parliament.djvu/25

 repeal of the paper duty, and in contracting the commercial treaty with France. Of his remission of taxes and reductions of the national debt, it is unnecessary to speak. They are achievements engraved with an iron pen on the financial records of his country.

Two great questions, and two only, of his time has he completely misjudged,—the Crimean war and the American war. Of the first he was, to some extent, particeps criminis; and, with regard to the latter, a singularly rash and hostile utterance by implication numbered him with the friends of secession. For the former he has atoned by his late almost superhuman efforts to prevent its recurrence; and for the latter there is ample compensation in our wisest international act, the Alabama arbitration. It is no small misfortune that, in the course of his busy life, Mr. Gladstone has never found time to visit the generous land of "our kin beyond the sea." Such an experience would have taught him that it is better to be enshrined in the heart of a great people than to obtain the favor of all the courts and courtiers in Christendom.

Of the mighty impulse which he gave to the movement which ended in household suffrage being conferred on "our own flesh and blood," of the imperishable achievements of his ministry of 1868 in passing the Ballot Act and the Education Act, in abolishing purchase in the army, and, above all, in disestablishing the Church of Ireland and reforming in some measure the land laws of that unhappy country, what need to speak? To no Englishman of our time has it been given to perform such eminent service to his country and to mankind. His Radicalism, commencing to meander more than forty years ago among the stony uplands of