ire of his eye, the very music of his voice swept the hearts of
men even before they had been dazzled by the torrents of his
eloquence.

As a statesman, it was the good fortune of Mr. Gladstone that his
career was not associated with war. The reforms which he effected, the
triumphs which he achieved, were not won by the supreme arbitrament of
the sword. The reforms which he effected and the triumphs which he
achieved were the result of his power of persuasion over his
fellow-men. The reforms which he achieved in many ways amounted to a
revolution. They changed, in many particulars, the face of the realm.
After Sir Robert Peel had adopted the great principle which eventually
carried England from protection to free trade, it was Mr. Gladstone
who created the financial system which has been admitted ever since by
all students of finance, as the secret of Great Britain's commercial
success. He enforced the extension of the suffrage to the masses of
the nation, and practically thereby made the government of monarchical
England as democratic as that of any republic. He disestablished the
Irish church, he introduced reform into the land tenure and brought
hope into the breasts of those tillers of the soil in Ireland who had
for so many generations laboured in despair. And all this he did, not
by force or violence, but simply by the power of his eloquence and the
strength of his personality.

Great, however, as were the acts of the man, after all he was of the
human flesh, and for him, as for everybody else, there were trivial
and low duties to be performed. It is no exaggeration to say that even
in those low and trivial duties he was great. He ennobled the common
realities of life. His was above all things a religious
mind--essentially religious in the highest sense of the term. And the
religious sentiment which dominated his public life and his speeches,
that same sentiment, according to the testimony of those who knew him
best, also permeated all his actions from the highest to the humblest.
He was a man of strong and pure affections, of long and lasting
friendship, and to describe the beauty of his domestic life, no words
of praise can be adequate. It was simply ideally beautiful, and in the
later years of his life, as touching as it was beautiful. May I be
permitted, without any impropriety, to recall that it was my privilege
to experience and to appreciate that courtesy, made up of dignity and
grace, which was famous al