s. He was obliged, as others have been, to take up and settle
questions he deemed unimportant because they were troubling the body
politic. Now and then, in his later days, he so far yielded to his
party advisers as to express his approval of proposals in which his
own interest was slight. But he was ever a leader, not a follower, and
erred rather in not keeping his finger closely and constantly upon the
pulse of public opinion. In this point, at least, one may discover in
him a likeness to Disraeli. Slow as he was in maturing his opinions,
Mr. Gladstone was liable to forget that the minds of his followers
might not be moving along with his own, and hence his decisions
sometimes took his party as well as the nation by surprise. But he was
too self-absorbed, too eagerly interested in the ideas that suited his
own cast of thought, to be able to watch and gauge the tendencies of
the multitude. The three most remarkable instances in which his new
departures startled the world were his declarations against the Irish
Church establishment in 1867, against the Turks and the traditional
English policy of supporting them in 1876, and in favour of Irish Home
Rule in 1886, and in none of these did any popular demand suggest his
pronouncement. It was the masses who took their view from him, not he
who took a mandate from the masses. In each of these cases he may,
perhaps, be blamed for not having sooner perceived, or at any rate for
not having sooner announced, the need for a change of policy. But it
was very characteristic of him not to give the full strength of his
mind to a question till he felt that it pressed for a solution. Those
who listened to his private talk were scarcely more struck by the
range of his vision than by his unwillingness to commit himself on
matters whose decision he could postpone. Reticence and caution were
sometimes carried too far, not merely because they exposed him to
misconstruction, but because they withheld from his party the guidance
it needed. This was true in the three instances just mentioned; and in
the last of them it is possible that earlier and fuller communications
might have averted the separation of some of his former colleagues.
Nor did he always rightly divine the popular mind. His proposal (in
1874) to extinguish the income-tax fell completely flat, because the
nation was becoming indifferent to that economy in public expenditure
which both parties had in the days of Peel and Lord John R