circle of thought, feeling, phrase, that in romance and
politics and all the ways of life Europe for a century associated with
the name of Rousseau. There was what men call Rousseau in a statesman
who could talk of men's common 'flesh and blood' in connection with a
franchise bill. Indeed one of the strangest things in Mr. Gladstone's
growth and career is this unconscious raising of a partially Rousseauite
structure on the foundations laid by Burke, to whom Rousseau was of all
writers on the nature of man and the ordering of states the most odious
and contemptible. We call it strange, though such amalgams of contrary
ways of thinking and feeling are more common than careless observers may
suppose. Mr. Gladstone was never an 'equalitarian,' but the passion for
simplicity he had--simplicity in life, manners, feeling, conduct, the
relations of men to men; dislike of luxury and profusion and all the
fabric of artificial and factitious needs. It may well be that he went
no further for all this than the Sermon on the Mount, where so many
secret elements of social volcano slumber. However we may choose to
trace the sources and relations of Mr. Gladstone's general ideas upon
the political problems of his time, what he said of himself in the
evening of his day was at least true of its dawn and noon. 'I am for old
customs and traditions,' he wrote, 'against needless change. I am for
the individual as against the state. I am for the family and the stable
family as against the state.' He must have been in eager sympathy with
Wordsworth's line taken from old Spenser in these very days, 'Perilous
is sweeping change, all chance unsound.'[125] Finally and above all, he
stood firm in 'the old Christian faith.' Life was to him in all its
aspects an application of Christian teaching and example. If we like to
put it so, he was steadfast for making politics more human, and no
branch of civilised life needs humanising more.

Here we touch the question of questions. At nearly every page of Mr.
Gladstone's active career the vital problem stares us in the face, of
the correspondence between the rule of private morals and of public. Is
the rule one and the same for individual and for state? From these early
years onwards, Mr. Gladstone's whole language and the moods that it
reproduces,--his vivid denunciations, his sanguine expectations, his
rolling epithets, his aspects and appeals and points of view,--all take
for granted that right and wrong