ting society, and copied the arts of journalism in the _Eton
Miscellany_. In both fields the young Gladstone took a leading part. The
debating society was afflicted with 'the premonitory lethargy of death,'
but the assiduous energy of Gaskell, seconded by the gifts of Gladstone,
Hallam, and Doyle, soon sent a new pulse beating through it. The
politics of the hour, that is to say everything not fifty years off,
were forbidden ground; but the execution of Strafford or of his royal
master, the deposition of Richard II., the last four years of the reign
of Queen Anne, the Peerage bill of 1719, the characters of Harley and
Bolingbroke, were themes that could be made by ingenious youth to admit
a hundred cunning sidelights upon the catholic question, the struggle of
the Greeks for independence, the hard case of Queen Caroline, and the
unlawfulness of swamping the tories in the House of Lords. On duller
afternoons they argued on the relative claims of mathematics and
metaphysics to be the better discipline of the human mind; whether
duelling is or is not inconsistent with the character that we ought to
seek; or whether the education of the poor is on the whole beneficial.
It was on this last question (October 29, 1825) that the orator who made
his last speech seventy years later, now made his first. 'Made my first
or maiden speech at the society,' he enters in his diary, 'on education
of the poor; funked less than I thought I should, by much.' It is a
curious but a characteristic circumstance not that so many of his Eton
speeches were written out, but that the manuscript should have been
thriftily preserved by him all through the long space of intervening
years. 'Mr. President,' it begins, 'in this land of liberty, in this age
of increased and gradually increasing civilization, we shall hope to
find few, if indeed any, among the higher classes who are eager or
willing to obstruct the moral instruction and mental improvement of
their fellow creatures in the humbler walks of life. If such there are,
let them at length remember that the poor are endowed with the same
reason, though not blessed with the same temporal advantages. Let them
but admit, what I think no one can deny, that they are placed in an
elevated situation principally for the purpose of doing good to their
fellow creatures. Then by what argument can they repel, by what pretence
can they evade the duty?' And so forth and so forth. Already we seem to
hear the born spe