ere is a man who, if he should err deeply, is yet so great that, like
Cotton Mather, he might not hesitate to stand uncovered on the
street-corners and ask the forgiveness of mankind. Such men are saved by
their enemies. Their own good and the good of humanity require that their
balance of power shall not be too great. Had the North gone down,
Gladstone might never have seen his mistake. In this instance and in many
others, he has not been the leader of progress, but its echo: truth has
been forced upon him. His passionate earnestness, his intense volition,
his insensibility to moral perspective, his blindness to the sense of
proportion, might have led him into dangerous excess and frightful
fanatical error, if it were not for the fact that such men create an
opposition that is their salvation.

To analyze a character so complex as Mr. Gladstone's requires the grasp
of genius. We speak of "the duality of the human mind," but here are half
a dozen spirits in one. They rule in turn, and occasionally several of
them struggle for the mastery.

When the Fisk Jubilee Singers visited England, we find Gladstone dropping
the affairs of State to hear their music. He invited them to Hawarden,
where he sang with them. So impressed was he with the negro melodies that
he anticipated that idea which has since been materialized: the founding
of a national school of music that would seek to perfect in a scientific
way these soul-stirring strains.

He might have made a poet of no mean order; for his devotion to spiritual
and physical beauty has made him a lifelong admirer of Homer and Dante.
Those who have met him when the mood was upon him have heard him recite
by the hour from the "Iliad" in the original. And yet the theology of
Homer belongs to the realm of natural religion with which Mr. Gladstone
has little patience.

A prominent member of the House of Commons once said, "The only two
things that the Prime Minister really cares for are religion and
finance." The statement comes near truth; for the chief element in Mr.
Gladstone's character is his devotion to religion; and his signal
successes have been in the line of economics. He believes in Free Trade
as the gospel of social salvation. He revels in figures; he has price,
value, consumption, distribution, import, export, fluctuation, all at his
tongue's end, ready to hurl at any one who ventures on a hasty
generalization.

And it is a significant fact that in his strong appeal