William Ewart Gladstone

William Ewart Gladstone (29 December 1809 - 19 May 1898) was a British Liberal politician and Prime Minister (1868-1874, 1880-1885, 1886 and 1892-1894). He was a notable political reformer, known for his populist speeches, and was for many years the main political rival of Benjamin Disraeli.

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• Ireland, Ireland! That cloud in the west! That coming storm! That minister of God's retribution upon cruel, inveterate, and but half-atoned injustice! Ireland forces upon us those great social and great religious questions. God grant that we may have courage to look them in the face!
  • Letter to his wife, Catherine Gladstone (1845-10-12).

• Decision by majorities is as much an expedient as lighting by gas.
  • Speech, House of Commons (1858).

• Economy is the first and great article (economy such as I understand it) in my financial creed. The controversy between direct and indirect taxation holds a minor, thought important place.
  • Letter to his brother Robertson of the Financial Reform Association at Liverpool (1859).
  • F. W. Hirst, Gladstone as Financier and Economist (London: Ernest Benn Limited, 1931), p. 241.

• I am certain, from experience, of the immense advantage of strict account-keeping in early life. It is just like learning the grammar then, which when once learned need not be referred to afterwards.
  • Letter to Mrs. Gladstone (14 January, 1860).
  • F. W. Hirst, Gladstone as Financier and Economist (London: Ernest Benn Limited, 1931), pp. 242-3.

• We may be for or against the South. But there is no doubt that Jefferson Davis and other leaders of the South have made an Army; they are making, it appears, a Navy; and they have made — what is more than either — they have made a Nation.... We may anticipate with certainty the success of the Southern States so far as regards their separation from the North.
  • Speech on the American Civil War, Town Hall, Newcastle upon Tyne (1862-10-07).

• I mean this, that together with the so-called increase of expenditure there grows up what may be termed a spirit which, insensibly and unconsciously perhaps, but really, affects the spirit of the people, the spirit of parliament, the spirit of the public departments, and perhaps even the spirit of those whose duty it is to submit the estimates to parliament.
  • Speech in the House of Commons (1863-04-16).
  • John Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone. Volume II (London: Macmillan, 1903), p. 62.

• But how is the spirit of expenditure to be exorcised? Not by preaching; I doubt if even by yours. I seriously doubt whether it will ever give place to the old spirit of economy, as long as we have the income-tax. There, or hard by, lie questions of deep practical moment.
  • Letter to Richard Cobden (1864-01-05).
  • John Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone. Volume II (London: Macmillan, 1903), p. 62.

• I venture to say that every man who is not presumably incapacitated by some consideration of personal unfitness or of political danger is morally entitled to come within the pale of the Constitution.
  • Speech in the House of Commons (1864-05-11).

• At last, my friends, I am come amongst you. And I am come...'unmuzzled'.
  • Speech to the electors of South Lancashire. (1865-07-18).

• The only means which have been placed in my power of 'raising the wages of colliers' has been by endeavouring to beat down all those restrictions upon trade which tend to reduce the price to be obtained for the product of their labour, & to lower as much as may be the taxes on the commodities which they may require for use or for consumption. Beyond this I look to the forethought not yet so widely diffused in this country as in Scotland, & in some foreign lands; & I need not remind you that in order to facilitate its exercise the Government have been empowered by Legislation to become through the Dept. of the P.O. the receivers & guardians of savings.
  • Letter to Daniel Jones, an unemployed collier who complained of unemployment and of low wages (20 October, 1869).
  • H. C. G. Matthew, The Gladstone Diaries: With Cabinet Minutes and Prime-ministerial Correspondence: 1869-June 1871 Vol 7 (Oxford University Press, 1982), p. lxxiv.

• I am inclined to say that the personal attendance and intervention of women in election proceedings, even apart from any suspicion of the wider objects of many of the promoters of the present movement, would be a practical evil not only of the gravest, but even of an intolerable character.
  • Debate on the Women's Disabilities Bill, House of Commons, (1871-05-03) (Parl. Deb. Vol. 206, Col. 91.).

• The idea of abolishing Income Tax is to me highly attractive, both on other grounds & because it tends to public economy.
  • Letter to H. C. E. Childers (1873-04-02).

• ...I am delighted to see how many young boys and girls have come forward to obtain honourable marks of recognition on this occasion,—if any effectual good is to be done to them, it must be done by teaching and encouraging them and helping them to help themselves. All the people who pretend to take your own concerns out of your own hands and to do everything for you, I won't say they are imposters; I won't even say they are quacks; but I do say they are mistaken people. The only sound, healthy description of countenancing and assisting these institutions is that which teaches independence and self-exertion...When I say you should help yourselves— and I would encourage every man in every rank of life to rely upon self-help more than on assistance to be got from his neigbours—there is One who helps us all, and without whose help every effort of ours is in vain; and there is nothing that should tend more, and there is nothing that should tend more to make us see the beneficence of God Almighty than to see the beauty as well as the usefulness of these flowers, these plants, and these fruits which He causes the earth to bring forth for our comfort and advantage.
  • Speech to the Hawarden Amateur Horticultural Society (17 August, 1876).
  • 'Mr. Gladstone On Cottage Gardening.', The Times (18 August, 1876), p. 9.

• As the British Constitution is the most subtile organism which has proceeded from the womb and the long gestation of progressive history, so the American Constitution is, so far as I can see, the most wonderful work ever struck off by the brain and purpose of man.
  • Article in The North American Review (September, 1878).

• National injustice is the surest road to national downfall.
  • Speech, Plumstead (1878-11-30).

• The disease of an evil conscience is beyond the practice of all the physicians of all the countries in the world.
  • Speech, Plumstead (1878-11-30).

• I think that the principle of the Conservative Party is jealousy of liberty and of the people, only qualified by fear; but I think the principle of the Liberal Party is trust in the people, only qualified by prudence.
  • Speech at the opening of the Palmerston Club, Oxford, December 1878. Source: New York Times, 1879.http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9C03E4DB123EE73BBC4153DFB4668382669FDE

• A rational reaction against the irrational excesses and vagaries of scepticism may, I admit, readily degenerate into the rival folly of credulity. To be engaged in opposing wrong affords, under the conditions of our mental constitution, but a slender guarantee for being right.
  • Homeric Synchronism : An Enquiry Into the Time and Place of Homer (1876), Introduction

• Remember the rights of the savage, as we call him. Remember that the happiness of his humble home, remember that the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan among the winter snows, are as sacred in the eye of Almighty God as are your own. Remember that He who has united you together as human beings in the same flesh and blood, has bound you by the law of mutual love, that that mutual love is not limited by the shores of this island, is not limited by the boundaries of Christian civilisation, that it passes over the whole surface of the earth, and embraces the meanest along with the greatest in its wide scope.
  • Speech, Foresters' Hall, Dalkeith, Scotland (1879-11-26) as part of the Midlothian campaign; printed in "Mr Gladstone's visit to Mid-Lothian: Meeting at the Foresters' Hall" (1879-11-27), The Scotsman, p.6. Also quoted in John Morley, Life of Gladstone (1903), II, (p. 595).

• Here is my first principle of foreign policy: good government at home.
  • Speech, West Calder, Scotland (1879-11-27).

• You should avoid needless and entangling engagements. You may boast about them, you may brag about them, you may say you are procuring consideration of the country. You may say that an Englishman may now hold up his head among the nations. But what does all this come to, gentlemen? It comes to this, that you are increasing your engagements without increasing your strength; and if you increase your engagements without increasing strength, you diminish strength, you abolish strength; you really reduce the empire and do not increase it. You render it less capable of performing its duties; you render it an inheritance less precious to hand on to future generations.
  • Speech, West Calder, Scotland (1879-11-27).

• There should be a sympathy with freedom, a desire to give it scope, founded not upon visionary ideas, but upon the long experience of many generations within the shores of this happy isle, that in freedom you lay the firmest foundations both of loyalty and order; the firmest foundations for the development of individual character; and the best provision for the happiness of the nation at large.
  • Speech, West Calder, Scotland (1879-11-27).

• The Chancellor of the Exchequer should boldly uphold economy in detail; and it is the mark of a chicken-hearted Chancellor when he shrinks from upholding economy in detail, when because it is a question of only two or three thousand pounds, he says it is no matter. He is ridiculed, no doubt, for what is called candle-ends and cheese-parings, but he is not worth his salt if he is not ready to save what are meant by candle-ends and cheese-parings in the cause of the country. No Chancellor of the Exchequer is worth his salt who makes his own popularity either his consideration, or any consideration at all, in administering the public purse. In my opinion, the Chancellor of the Exchequer is the trusted and confidential steward of the public. He is under a sacred obligation with regard to all that he consents to spend.
  • Speech at Edinburgh (29 November, 1879).
  • F. W. Hirst, Gladstone as Financier and Economist (London: Ernest Benn Limited, 1931), p. 243.

• As he [Disraeli] lived, so he died — all display, without reality or genuineness.
  • Said in May 1881 to his secretary, Edward Hamilton, regarding Disraeli's instructions to be given a modest funeral. Disraeli was buried in his wife's rural churchyard grave. Gladstone, Prime Minister at the time, had offered a state funeral and a burial in Westminster Abbey. Quoted in chapter 11 of Gladstone: A Biography (1954) by Philip Magnus.

• The reason why the foreign producer gets his produce to market cheaper, relatively, is this—that foreign produce is collected and brought in such large quantities and is sent in great masses to the market. That is the secret of cheap carriage...We must try to make our pounds of produce into tons—or must bring together a number of producers. If you small agriculturists can collectively offer a great bulk of merchandise to the railway companies, they will give you good terms.
  • Speech at Hawarden (5 January, 1884).
  • F. W. Hirst, Gladstone as Financier and Economist (London: Ernest Benn Limited, 1931), p. 258.

• There is a process of slow modification and development mainly in directions which I view with misgiving. "Tory democracy," the favourite idea on that side, is no more like the Conservative party in which I was bred, than it is like Liberalism. In fact less. It is demagogism...applied in the worst way, to put down the pacific, law-respecting, economic elements which ennobled the old Conservatism, living upon the fomentation of angry passions, and still in secret as obstinately attached as ever to the evil principle of class interests. The Liberalism of to-day is better...yet far from being good. Its pet idea is what they called construction,—that is to say, taking into the hands of the State the business of the individual man. Both the one and the other have much to estrange me, and have had for many, many years.
  • Letter to Lord Acton (1885-02-11)
  • John Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone. Volume III (London: Macmillan, 1903), pp. 172-3.

• The rule of our policy is that nothing should be done by the state which can be better or as well done by voluntary effort; and I am not aware that, either in its moral or even its literary aspects, the work of the state for education has as yet proved its superiority to the work of the religious bodies or of philanthropic individuals. Even the economical considerations of materially augmented cost do not appear to be wholly trivial.
  • Liberal Manifesto, September 1885.

• Socialism. Here I am at at one with you. I have always been opposed to it. It is now taking hold of both parties, in a way I much dislike: & unhappily Lord Salisbury is one of its leaders, with no Lord Hartington (see his speech at Darwen) to oppose him.
  • Letter to Lord Southesk (1885-10-27).

• All the world over, I will back the masses against the classes.
  • Speech, Liverpool (1886-06-28).

• But let the working man be on his guard against another danger. We live at a time when there is a disposition to think that the Government ought to do this and that and that the Government ought to do everything. There are things which the Government ought to do, I have no doubt. In former periods the Government have neglected much, and possibly even now they neglect something; but there is a danger on the other side. If the Government takes into its hands that which the man ought to do for himself it will inflict upon him greater mischiefs than all the benefits he will have received or all the advantages that would accrue from them. The essence of the whole thing is that the spirit of self-reliance, the spirit of true and genuine manly independence, should be preserved in the minds of the people, in the minds of the masses of the people, in the mind of every member of the class. If he loses his self-denial, if he learns to live in a craven dependence upon wealthier people rather than upon himself, you may depend upon it he incurs mischief for which no compensation can be made.
  • Speech at the opening of the Reading and Recreation Rooms erected by the Saltney Literary Institute at Saltney in Chesire (26 October, 1889).
  • 'Mr. Gladstone On The Working Classes.', The Times (28 October, 1889), p. 8.

• Selfishness is the greatest curse of the human race.
  • Speech, Hawarden (1890-05-28).

• ...I venture on assuring you that I regard the design formed by you and your friends with sincere interest, and in particular wish well to all the efforts you may make on behalf of individual freedom and independence as opposed to what is termed Collectivism.
  • Letter to F. W. Hirst on being unable to write a preface to Essays in Liberalism by "Six Oxford Men" (1897-01-02).
  • F. W. Hirst, In the Golden Days (London: Frederick Muller, 1947), p. 158.

• The hopelessness of the Turkish Government should make me witness with delight its being swept out of the countries which it tortures. Next to the Ottoman Government nothing can be more deplorable and blameworthy than jealousies between Greek and Slav and plans by the States already existing for appropriating other territory. Why not Macedonia for the Macedonians as well as Bulgaria for the Bulgarians and Serbia for the Serbians?
  • Letter quoted in The Times (London), Mr. Gladstone and The Balkan Confederation (1897-02-06).

• We look forward to the time when the Power of Love will replace the Love of Power. Then will our world know the blessings of peace.
  • As quoted in The Forbes Book of Business Quotations (1997) edited by Edward C. Goodman and Ted Goodman, p. 639

About William Ewart Gladstone

• He has one gift most dangerous to a spectator, a vast command of a kind of language, grave and majestic, but of vague and uncertain import.
  • Thomas Babington Macaulay, "Gladstone on Church and State," Edinburgh Review (April 1839)

• Ah, Oxford on the surface, but Liverpool below.
  • An unnamed Whig's comment in the Commons on Gladstone's budget, Feb. 1860, in Walter Bagehot, "Mr. Gladstone," National Review (July 1860)

• He has — and it is one of the springs of great power — a real faith in the higher parts of human nature; he believes, with all his heart and soul and strength, that there is such a thing as truth; he has the soul of a martyr with the intellect of an advocate.
  • Walter Bagehot, "Mr. Gladstone," National Review (July 1860)

• Who equals him in earnestness? Who equals him in eloquence? Who equals him in courage and fidelity to his convictions? If these gentlemen who say they will not follow him have anyone who is equal, let them show him. If they can point out any statesman who can add dignity and grandeur to the stature of Mr. Gladstone, let them produce him!
  • John Bright, speech at Birmingham, (1867-04-22)

• An almost spectral kind of phantasm of a man--nothing in him but forms and ceremonies and outside wrappings.
  • Thomas Carlyle, letter (March 1873)

• He speaks to Me as if I was a public meeting.
  • Queen Victoria, memorandum to her private secretary Gen. Sir Henry Ponsonby (1874-11-18)

• What you say about Gladstone is most just. What restlessness! What vanity! And what unhappiness must be his! Easy to say he is mad. It looks like it. My theory about him is unchanged: A ceaseless Tartuffe from the beginning. That sort of man does not get mad at 70.
  • Benjamin Disraeli, letter to Lady Bradford (1879-10-03)

• If there were no Tories, I am afraid he would invent them.
  • Lord Acton, letter to Mrs. Drew (1881-04-24)

• Gladstone will soon have it all his own way and whenever he gets my place we shall have strange doings.
  • Lord Palmerston to Lord Shaftesbury towards the end of Palmerston's life. E. Hodder, The Life and Work of the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury: Volume III (London, 1886), p. 187.

• The defects of his strength grow on him. All black is very black, all white very white.
  • Lord Rosebery, diary entry (1887-08-04)

• I saw in the face of Mr. Gladstone a blending of opposite qualities. There were the peace and gentleness of the lamb, with the strength and determination of the lion. Deep earnestness was expressed in all his features. He began his speech in a tone conciliatory and persuasive. His argument against the bill was based upon statistics which he handled with marvelous facility. He showed that the amount of crimes in Ireland for which the Force Bill was claimed as a remedy by the Government was not greater than the great class of crimes in England, and that therefore there was no reason for a Force Bill in one country more than in the other. After marshaling his facts and figures to this point, in a masterly and convincing manner, raising his voice and pointing his finger directly at Mr. Balfour, he exclaimed, in a tone almost menacing and tragic, "What are you fighting for?" The effect was thrilling. His peroration was a splendid appeal to English love of liberty. When he sat down the House was instantly thinned out. There seemed neither in members nor spectators any desire to hear another voice after hearing Mr. Gladstone's.
  • Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1892), Part Three, Ch. 8: "European Tour"

• He was the first Chancellor of the Exchequer who ever made the Budget interesting. "He talked shop," it was said, "like a tenth muse." He could apply all the resources of a glowing rhetoric to the most prosaic questions of cost and profit; could make beer romantic and sugar serious. He could sweep the widest horizon of the financial future, and yet stoop to bestow the minutest attention on the microcosm of penny stamps and the monetary merits of half-farthings.
  • G.W.E. Russell, Collections and Recollections (1898): Ch. 12, "Parliamentary Oratory (continued)"

• If you were to put that man on a moor with nothing on but his shirt, he would become whatever he pleased.
  • T. H. Huxley, quoted in Lord Robert Cecil's Goldfields Diary, ed. Ernest Scott (1945)

• I don't object to Gladstone always having the ace of trumps up his sleeve, but merely to his belief that the Almighty put it there.
  • Henry Labouchere, quoted in Hesketh Pearson, Lives of the Wits (1962)

• The greatest Chancellor of all time.
  • Nigel Lawson, The View From No. 11: Memoirs of a Tory Radical (Bantam, 1992), p. 279.

• They told me how Mr. Gladstone read Homer for fun, which I thought served him right.
  • Winston Churchill (Attributed)