Part 11 (1/2)

When the a.s.sociation met that evening the whole of the candidates whose claims had been so eagerly discussed beforehand were swept ruthlessly aside, and nothing was talked of but the proposal of the _Leeds Mercury_. After some discussion--in the course of which one gentleman shrewdly pointed out that the anonymous letter suggesting the candidature of Mr. Gladstone was probably written by the editor of the _Mercury_ himself--the a.s.sociation resolved by an overwhelming majority that Mr.

Gladstone should be one of the two Liberal candidates for Leeds at the next election. And yet, at the very time when this proof of his extraordinary hold upon the affections of a great community was made public, the London newspapers were speaking of Mr. Gladstone as a politician who no longer possessed either reputation or influence. We, who had to live at a distance from Fleet Street, were at least able to form a sounder judgment upon this point.

I may interpolate here an account of one of the inst.i.tutions of Leeds that helped to reconcile me to my sojourn in that city. I do so because it has always seemed to me to be a model inst.i.tution of the kind. This was the Conversation Club. It consisted of twelve members who were supposed to be more or less representative of the intellectual life of the town. The meetings were held monthly, each member entertaining his fellow-members once a year in his own house. After dinner the host acted as president, and the members present talked upon some selected subject.

By an ingenious arrangement it was impossible that anyone should know beforehand what the subject of conversation on any particular evening would be. In this way the preparation of set arguments was prevented, and the club had nothing about it of the debating society. Speeches, of course, were strictly prohibited. We limited ourselves to real conversation, and many a delightful talk we had after dinner in those Leeds drawing-rooms in which we met. Any facility I may have gained in conversation I feel that I owe to the club, as I owe to it also many happy and instructive hours. Considering our limited numbers, and the fact that we met in a provincial town, we counted in our members.h.i.+p an usually large number of men who have made some mark in the world. Amongst the members were William Edward Forster, Sir Edward Baines, the Bishops of Ely (Woodford), Truro (Gott), Chester (Jayne), and Rochester (Talbot); Clifford Allb.u.t.t, Regius Professor of Medicine at Cambridge; Professor--now Sir Arthur--Rucker, who has been secretary of the Royal Society and President of the British a.s.sociation, and is now Princ.i.p.al of the University of London; Professor Thorpe, the chemist and Government a.n.a.lyst, and Dr. Edison. This is not a bad list for so small a club, and one might easily give many other names, in addition, of men who would have been welcomed anywhere for their knowledge and attainments. In the year 1900 the club celebrated its jubilee, and its members can look back with satisfaction upon the influence which it has had on the social and intellectual life of Leeds. Politics and religion were forbidden themes; but many public movements of great importance for the development and improvement of Leeds have had their origin in our conversations, whilst the intellectual stimulus which those conversations afforded cannot be forgotten by at least one grateful member of the club.

I may here mention a visit I received from John Morley about this period.

He was one of the many men whose acquaintances.h.i.+p I owed to the good offices of Lord Houghton. It is an acquaintances.h.i.+p that has lasted over a considerable stretch of years, and that has from time to time been of a close and almost confidential character. The charm of John Morley's manner, and the brightness of his talk, have been felt and acknowledged by all who have been brought into contact with him, and it would be superfluous on my part to say anything about his literary reputation. But I have always felt that neither his fine gifts nor his peculiar temperament were suited for the rough and tumble of political warfare. I have felt this whether I have been, as has often happened, marching behind him in thorough unison with his opinions, or, as has also occurred at times, directly opposed to him and to his policy. He came to see me at Leeds because, having undertaken to deliver an address to the Trades Union Congress, he was wishful to learn something on the spot of the relations of master and men in a great industrial community. I made him acquainted with my friends James Kitson and David Greig. He discussed with them the problems concerning the relations of labour and capital, and in their company visited the great industrial establishments over which they presided. At that time he was not in Parliament, nor had he begun his editors.h.i.+p of the _Pall Mall Gazette_. I remember that, after a fatiguing day, spent in the works of the Kitsons, Morley expressed his conviction that the great captains of industry, like Kitson and Greig, were not only of greater importance to the world than a mere Secretary of State, but were engaged upon much more laborious and responsible tasks. I do not know if he still adheres to that opinion.

I must now turn back to the course of public events, or at least of those with which I had some personal connection. The dissolution of 1880 came very unexpectedly, almost as unexpectedly as that of 1874. One evening, as I was preparing to go down to the office, a messenger arrived in hot haste with a telegram that had come over the _Mercury_ private wire stating that the intention to dissolve Parliament had been announced in the House of Commons that evening. Kitson, Mathers, and I had made all our preparations, so the plan of campaign was already settled. On getting the telegram I crossed over to the house of Mathers, who was a neighbour of mine, and told him the news, and together we drove off to Kitson's to take the first steps in the battle. The next morning the people of Leeds awoke to discover every dead wall in the town placarded with an address, signed by the president of the Liberal a.s.sociation, announcing the dissolution, and appealing to the electors to support the Liberal candidates, Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Barran. By ten o'clock in the forenoon our committee rooms were open, and in full working order, and bands of willing workers, whom we had summoned the night before, were already being despatched to all quarters of the town to begin the indispensable canva.s.s. Our opponents were taken completely by surprise, and we had gained that great advantage in all contests, the first start. As it began, so it continued. All through the great struggle the Conservatives were hopelessly behind us. As the enthusiastic Mathers afterwards remarked, ”We were right on the top of them the whole time.” It was a stirring and Homeric contest. To a staunch Liberal it was one that gave unalloyed satisfaction, for all through the great fight there was the amplest evidence that the flowing tide was on the side of Liberalism.

In Leeds we had, of course, to face the disadvantage of fighting without our chief candidate. Not by a word nor a sign did Mr. Gladstone, who was deep in his own struggle in Midlothian, show that he was conscious that an election in which he was personally concerned was going on in Yorks.h.i.+re. Naturally, our opponents made the most of this, and we had constantly to meet the taunt that we were asking the electors to vote for a man who had refused to countenance our proceedings, and who would never, as a matter of fact, sit as the representative of Leeds in the House of Commons. In ordinary times we should undoubtedly have suffered from this taunt, especially since it had the merit of being true. But in 1880 the times were the reverse of ordinary. The overwhelming majority of the people of Great Britain seemed to be possessed by an almost pa.s.sionate admiration for Mr. Gladstone. Future generations will find it difficult to understand the extent of the fascination that he seemed, at that period in his career, to exercise over the minds and hearts of a majority of his fellow countrymen. Whilst London, and the London press, still refused to admit that he could ever return to power, there was not a public gathering in the provinces at which the mention of his name was not received with enthusiastic cheering, so that, at last, men were almost afraid to name him in their speeches, lest they should be accused of bidding for the inevitable applause. If there was one town in the country where this enthusiasm ran higher than in any other, it was Leeds.

We had no reason, therefore, to fear the taunts of our opponents. We knew that we were being swept on an irresistible current to an a.s.sured victory.

On the Sat.u.r.day before the polling-day a great meeting was held in the Albert Hall, presided over by Kitson. The chief business of the meeting was to listen to a lecture on Mr. Gladstone which I had prepared for the occasion. Never before had I addressed so large an audience, nor one possessed by so boundless an enthusiasm. It was amid an almost incessant accompaniment of rolling cheers that I delivered my hour-long eulogium upon the Liberal leader. I had thought that I had gone as far as any man could in his praise, but I found I had not gone far enough for my audience, and the only sounds of dissent I heard were when I ventured mildly to hint that at some period or other in his career the great man had not shown himself to be infallible. I dwell upon this state of public feeling because it ought to be understood by those who wish to appreciate aright the history of our country at that period. I do not think I go too far when I say that the feeling entertained towards Mr. Gladstone in 1880 by the great majority of the people of these islands was nothing less than idolatrous. Any smaller man must have been intoxicated by the knowledge of the feeling he had thus aroused. It says much for Mr.

Gladstone that, so far from showing any signs of intoxication or personal exultation, from first to last he seemed to regard his hold upon the ma.s.ses of the people simply as one of the a.s.sets in the cause of which he had made himself the champion.

After I had finished my lecture in the Albert Hall a young man, then unknown to me, and who was described as an Oxford don, was called upon to address the meeting. This was Mr. Arthur Acland, subsequently a member of Mr. Gladstone's last Cabinet. The next day I wrote to Mrs. Gladstone--for all direct communication with her husband was forbidden--telling her how the contest was going, and predicting that not less than twenty thousand electors would vote for her husband on the polling day. My prediction was more than fulfilled, for when the votes were counted it was found that Mr. Gladstone's stood at the remarkable number of 24,622, whilst Mr.

Barran came next to him with 23,674. Mr. W. L. Jackson (afterwards Chief Secretary for Ireland), the successful Conservative candidate, was more than ten thousand below the number secured by Mr. Gladstone. It was, indeed, a famous victory; and when I parted from Kitson and Mathers after the declaration of the poll, whilst we all felt more than repaid for the toil and anxiety of months, we admitted, with a certain amount of sadness, that we could never hope to repeat such a success. ”Whatever happens, we shall never see 1880 again,” said Kitson, and he spoke truly.

Mrs. Gladstone, on receipt of my letter, had written to me expressing her warm thanks for what ”the dear people of Leeds” were doing, but she said not a word about her husband, nor did we receive a sign or acknowledgment of the stupendous victory--a victory which had staggered the whole country, and opened the eyes even of the London clubs to Mr. Gladstone's real position--whilst the Midlothian contest remained in suspense. We heard, indeed, from a private source, that the company a.s.sembled with Mr.

Gladstone under Lord Rosebery's roof at Dalmeny had ”jumped for joy” when the telegram announcing the Leeds result had arrived. But that was all.

A few days later Midlothian also spoke, and in turn elected Mr. Gladstone as its representative. Within an hour of the declaration of the poll in Edinburgh, Kitson received a telegram from Mr. Gladstone, thanking Leeds for all that it had done. It was characteristic of the great man's businesslike habits and careful attention to small details that the telegram was so worded as to come within the limits of the s.h.i.+lling rate which was then the minimum charge for telegraphic messages. A day or two later Mr. Gladstone wrote fully and most cordially in acknowledgment of the great services which had been rendered to him and to the Liberal cause by the party in Leeds. But his real thanks were given to us more than a year after, when he paid a memorable visit to the town, of which I shall have occasion to speak later.

A few weeks afterwards, when the Gladstone Ministry had been formed, and the new Parliament, with its overwhelming Liberal majority, had met, we had fresh reason to acknowledge the unique and astounding position of supremacy which Mr. Gladstone had secured among his fellow countrymen. He had, as from the first was antic.i.p.ated, elected to sit for Midlothian, and there was consequently a vacancy for Leeds. All the heart had been taken out of the Tories of the borough by the beating they had received, and their leaders courteously informed us that they would not oppose any candidate whom we might elect. We had, it need hardly be said, many applicants for this safe seat, but we--I speak of the recognised leaders of the Liberal party in the town--had fixed upon one man to fill the vacancy. This was Edward Baines, who had been, as I have told on a previous page, so scurvily treated by the teetotallers in 1874. The executive committee of the a.s.sociation agreed by a unanimous vote to propose Mr. Baines to the Four Hundred as the new candidate in place of Mr. Gladstone. But we reckoned without our host, and, above all, we had failed to give due weight to the overwhelming strength of the Gladstone cult.

When we met the Four Hundred, and Mr. Baines was duly proposed and seconded in the name of the executive committee, we found that the proposition was but coldly received; nor were we long left in doubt as to the reason. Someone in the body of the hall got up and proposed that Mr.

Herbert Gladstone should be the Liberal candidate. Herbert Gladstone was at that time a stranger to me, and I believe to every other man in the room. All that we knew of him was that he was Mr. Gladstone's youngest son, that he was twenty-five years of age, and that he had just been defeated by Lord George Hamilton in the contest for Middles.e.x. No member of Mr. Gladstone's family had suggested Herbert's name to us, and we had naturally felt that the first claim to the vacant seat lay with our old representative and honoured fellow-townsman. But it was useless to struggle against the glamour of the name of Gladstone. The whole meeting broke away from its recognised leaders, and adopted with enthusiasm the candidature of Herbert Gladstone. Looking back, I cannot pretend to regret its decision. Though we knew nothing of Herbert Gladstone at the time, when we did get to know him, a few weeks later, we found him to be a young man of the highest promise, of exceptional talents, and of great amiability of character. The Liberals of Leeds ratified the verdict of the Four Hundred, and he was elected almost by acclamation to be the representative of the town in Parliament--a position which he still holds. The incident of his election when personally quite unknown is, however, conclusive as to the extent of his father's influence among the electors of the country.

In those days, it is no reflection upon Herbert Gladstone's abilities to say that one of the most powerful influences in his favour was his appearance. The young women of Leeds of the working-cla.s.s formed the highest estimate of his good looks, and whenever he appeared in public a crowd of them gathered to feast their eyes upon his pleasant and handsome features. In the later elections that took place during my residence at Leeds I always accompanied him in his drive through his const.i.tuency on the polling day. Wherever our carriage stopped, a group of young women flocked round it, and Gladstone had to listen to their somewhat embarra.s.sing comments upon his appearance--comments, I ought to say, that were uniformly favourable. In the 1885 election, which took place in November, we had drawn up in front of one of the Liberal clubs, and he had gone inside the building to interview his committee. As he disappeared from view, the young women burst forth in their usual praise of his appearance. ”Eh, but isn't he good-looking? Shouldn't I like to kiss him!” said one of the girls who was standing at my elbow. ”Would you really?” I said, anxious for some relief to the grave business of the day; and the girl repeated her declaration. ”Then when he comes out of the club,” said I, ”you may give him a kiss if you like.” And, to my great amus.e.m.e.nt, when the candidate reappeared, a pair of buxom arms were suddenly thrown round his neck, and a good-looking girl kissed him heartily. The crowd cheered with enthusiasm, all the more because of the blush which spread over the features of the ingenuous candidate thus taken by surprise. But kisses, as we learnt long ago, are not to be despised as electioneering weapons.

It was in October, 1881, that the Prime Minister came to Leeds to thank us for his election in the previous year. Among the many political meetings, or series of meetings, that I remember, I can call to mind none like this. For weeks before the event we of the Liberal Committee were engaged in preparing for it. Mr. Gladstone was to arrive on the Thursday evening, and to leave on Sat.u.r.day evening. Into the forty-eight hours of his visit a series of engagements was packed to which a week might well have been devoted. On the first evening he was formally welcomed to the town, which had been decorated for the occasion as though for a royal visit. Afterwards a large dinner party was held at the residence of his host, Mr. (now Sir James) Kitson. On the Friday he received an address from the Mayor and Corporation, and another from the Chamber of Commerce, to both of which he replied in speeches of some length. A little later in the day a great meeting was held in the Victoria Hall, at which addresses were presented to him from all the Liberal a.s.sociations of Yorks.h.i.+re, and he responded in a very fine speech that lasted an hour. In the evening he attended a great banquet at which thirteen hundred persons sat down to dinner in a n.o.ble hall specially erected for the occasion, whilst the day's work ended with a vast torchlight procession from the dining-hall in the heart of Leeds to Kitson's residence at Headingley.

On the Sat.u.r.day, after some minor engagements, the character of which I forget, but which involved a certain amount of speech-making, Mr.

Gladstone was entertained at luncheon in the Victoria Hall by the Leeds Liberal Club, of which I was the honorary secretary; and after speaking there he went direct to the temporary building erected in the Cloth-hall yard, and there addressed a ma.s.s meeting of many thousands of persons.

Afterwards he attended a large dinner party at the house of Mr. Barran, and at ten o'clock departed from Leeds by special train for Hawarden. It will be seen that the burden of work laid upon him was enormous, especially considering the fact that he was already in his seventy-second year. Yet his wonderful const.i.tution and untiring energy enabled him to go through the whole programme not only with apparent ease, but with an exuberant vitality that seemed to suggest that if his engagements had been twice as numerous he would have been equal to them all. I doubt if any other statesman ever before got through so much work and speech-making in the course of a couple of days.

As I look back now, after the lapse of many years, upon that memorable time--for the Leeds visit was memorable, not only in Mr. Gladstone's career, but in the political history of the country--the two speeches which stand out in greatest prominence are those which he delivered at the banquet on the Friday evening, and the ma.s.s meeting on the Sat.u.r.day afternoon. The banquet narrowly escaped being a terrible fiasco. For the first time in my a.s.sociation with them, I had a difference of opinion with Kitson and Mathers regarding the arrangements for the dinner. The cost of erecting the special dining-hall was, of course, very considerable. I proposed that it should be met by a uniform charge of two guineas for the dinner tickets. My friends, on the other hand, prepared an elaborate plan by which the tickets were to be charged at different rates from one guinea up to five, according to the position of the seats.

In this way more money was to be obtained, but it was at the cost of extra labour on the part of the executive, and of a good deal of grumbling from those local Liberals who had helped us most earnestly in the 1880 election, but who could not afford to pay the very high price demanded for the best seats. The allotment of these variously priced seats at the banquet was a heavy task, and it was undertaken by Mathers.

Somehow or other he was delayed in his work until two days before the dinner was to take place, and then he was seized with sudden illness.

I was called in to take his place, and discovered an alarming state of affairs. It was Wednesday night, Mr. Gladstone was to arrive on Thursday, and his heavy round of engagements was to begin on Friday morning. More than thirty thousand tickets had to be sent out to all parts of the country for the various meetings, and on Wednesday night not one ticket had been despatched. Moreover, Mathers had prepared so elaborate a scheme for the allotment and registration of all the tickets applied for, that a rapid calculation satisfied me that we could not possibly despatch the last of the tickets until at least two days after Mr. Gladstone's departure from Leeds. This was rather a terrible discovery to be made on the eve of the Premier's arrival. The knot had to be cut instead of being unravelled. I put aside the elaborate and irreproachable volumes in which Mathers and his staff had been entering the tickets at the time when he was seized with illness, and, with the help of a sixpenny memorandum book and half a dozen smart bank clerks, succeeded in allotting and posting the whole of the thirty thousand tickets between ten o'clock on Wednesday night and eight o'clock on Thursday morning. I never worked harder in my life, but when my work was done, and the tickets had all pa.s.sed beyond my control, I fell into a terrible state of panic. I was firmly convinced that in my rapid allotment of seats to the five different orders of banqueters I had made the most hideous blunders, and I expected nothing less than a riot when the company a.s.sembled in the dining-hall. To my unfeigned astonishment, my fears proved to be utterly unfounded. There was a seat for everybody, and everybody got a seat, though to this day I have a shrewd suspicion that more than one gentleman who had paid five guineas for his place found himself relegated to a one guinea seat. But what did it matter? People had come to hear Mr. Gladstone, and so long as they succeeded in this they were indifferent to everything else.

Mr. Gladstone's speech at the dinner was the famous one in which he discussed the Irish question, warned Mr. Parnell of the dangers of the course upon which he had embarked, and declared emphatically that the resources of civilisation were not exhausted. He did not take his seat at the high table in the hall where Sir James Kitson presided until dinner was over and the speeches were about to begin. I observed that when he did so, after having gazed with admiration upon the brilliant scene, he leant forward, and, covering his face with both hands, remained for some time in that att.i.tude. On the following evening I sat next to Mrs.

Gladstone at dinner at Sir John Barran's house. She asked me if I had observed this action of her husband's, and on my answering in the affirmative, she said to me, ”He was praying. You know, he always prays before he makes an important speech, and he felt that speech very much.

What do you think he said to me last night after he had gone to his dressing-room? 'My dear, if I were twenty years younger, I should go to Ireland myself as Irish Secretary.'” The speech was a great oratorical success, and at the close of the banquet, as I have said, an immense torchlight procession, which had been carefully organised by the local committee, conducted the Premier and his wife from the banqueting hall to the residence of Kitson at Headingley. The procession had to pa.s.s across Woodhouse Moor, and I do not think I ever witnessed a more effective spectacle of the kind.

The speech which, to my mind, ranked next in importance and interest to this at the dinner was that which Mr. Gladstone delivered on the following day to the ma.s.s meeting of Leeds working men. Fully thirty thousand persons attended this meeting, which, like the dinner, took place in a temporary building. It was crowded to suffocation--literally to suffocation. When I arrived, shortly before the proceedings began, I found that the whole thirty thousand people were gasping for breath, and that many were fainting. We had quite forgotten to arrange for the ventilation of the vast hall! Things looked very serious. The hubbub was indescribable, and the sufferings of the crowd were so great that it was clearly impossible that, under the conditions prevailing, any meeting could be held. Fortunately, there were active and willing workers on the spot, and a band of young men was organised who, mounting to the temporary roof of the hall, tore the planking open, and quickly relieved the pressure upon the sufferers beneath. But even when they had been supplied with air the thirty thousand were anything but comfortable. They were tightly packed together in a sweltering ma.s.s, and in no condition to listen patiently to speeches. The noise and hubbub was little short of deafening.