lasting gratitude." Such was the new popular estimate of him. In framing
his reply to this address Mr. Gladstone did his best to discourage the
repetition of like performances from other places; he submitted the draft
to Lord Palmerston, and followed his advice in omitting certain portions
of it. It was reduced to the conventional type of such acknowledgment.

III

In the autumn of 1864 Mr. Gladstone made a series of speeches in his
native county, which again showed the sincerity and the simplicity of his
solicitude for the masses of his countrymen. The sentiment is common. Mr.
Disraeli and the Young Englanders had tried to inscribe it upon a party
banner twenty years before. But Mr. Gladstone had given proof that he knew
how to embody sentiment in acts of parliament, and he associated it with
the broadest ideas of citizenship and policy. These speeches were not a
manifesto or a programme; they were a survey of the principles of the
statesmanship that befitted the period.

At Bolton (Oct. 11) he discoursed to audiences of the working class upon
the progress of thirty years, with such freshness of spirit as awoke
energetic hopes of the progress for the thirty years that were to follow.
The next day he opened a park with words from the heart about the modern
sense of the beauties of nature. The Greeks, he said, however much beauty
they might have discerned in nature, had no sympathy with the delight in
detached natural objects--a tree, or a stream, or a hill--which was so often
part of the common life of the poorest Englishman. Even a century or less
ago "communion with nature" would have sounded an affected and unnatural
phrase. Now it was a sensible part of the life of the working classes.
Then came moralising, at that date less trite than it has since become,
about the social ties that ought to mark the relations between master and
workman.

(M39) The same night at a banquet in Liverpool, and two days later at
Manchester, he advanced to high imperial ground. He told them how, after
an experience now becoming long, the one standing pain to the political
man in England is a sense of the inequality of his best exertions to the
arduous duty of government and legislation. England had undertaken
responsibilities of empire such as never before lay on the shoulders or
the minds of men. We governed distant millions many times outnumbering
ourselves. We were responsible for the welfare of forty or forty-five
separate st