Gladstone

Full Title

The one person that might be tagged as the creator of the Western Liberal tradition is William Gladstone.

Context

Liberalism has a pretty rocky start as the old monarchies of Europe decayed in the years from the Beheading of Charles I in 1649 to the start of the first world war.

If there was ever a Superior Man of the Liberal cause it would be Gladstone.

History

The primary source was CAESARISM AND LIBERAL DEMOCRACY 1791 and later.

that he promoted, but more to do with his character and personality: The great pioneer of sociology and German liberal Max Weber noted that Gladstone had great personal charisma. He appealed to the British population's high moral principles, and they in turn trusted the ethical substance of his policy: What brought Gladstone to power and kept him there was "the firm belief of the masses in the moral rightness of his policy and especially in the man's own moral qualities, "34

Gladstone's reputation owes much to what was seen as his commitment to educating and uplifting Britain's citizenry, both intellectually and morally. He was regarded as a principled leader fighting for the whole community and not beholden to any selfish interest. This was particularly important at a time when there remained deep worries about democracy and its tendency to devolve into despotism or socialism. Between 1886 and 1914, Germany, France, and Italy saw the rise of socialist and workers' parties; by contrast, in Britain the Liberals remained the only mass party on the left. Many attributed this fact to the leadership of Gladstone. Like Lincoln, he was perceived as guiding, educating, and moralizing democracy. A person of high moral principle, Gladstone brought workers into the Liberal Party and could make democracy safe.

Like Lincoln, Gladstone was admired for the way he addressed and inspired the masses. In countless soaring and sermon-like speeches, he appealed to their moral sense, reason, and intelligence. Always, he exhorted them to selflessness, patriotism, and devotion to the common good. Workers came in droves and listened for hours. He seemed to hear them, to know and respect them—and they responded with trust and admiration. From the very beginning of his leadership of the Liberal Party, workers supported the liberals at the polls.

The Liberal Party program, Gladstone often said, was aimed at "the general benefit of the whole mass of the people."

(180) CHAPTER FIVE

Its goal was "to bind together the whole of the country in harmony and concord."3" At the same time, Gladstone was not adverse to criticizing the wealthier members of society. The most dangerous threat confronting England, he liked to say, was not the advent of democracy but the likelihood of plutoracy. The danger came not from the lower classes, but from the selfishness of the upper classes, who were sometimes inclined to put their private interests before their public duties.

The modern, industrializing economy was making matters worse. "You are threatened, gentlemen," he told a group of workers in 1876, "in the foundations of national character by the rapid creation and extension of wealth in this country." But they were not the danger, he said; rather, it was the wealthy classes who were enriching themselves at an unprecedented rate and changing their values. They were becoming interested more in their own pleasures at the expense of "the inward health, the manhood, the vigour" of the country. The nineteenth century, Gladstone lamented in 1880, was an "age of sham." Affluence, leisure, and the pursuit of luxury were cor rupting the nation. 36

This kind of populist moralism incensed Gladstone's upper-class critics. They denounced him for using "ultra-democratic" language and behaving like a demagogue. Queen Victoria called him a "half-mad firebrand." Even an admirer like Max Weber likened him to a dictator and "Caesarist plebiscatorian." But Gladstone was no democrat, at least not in our sense of the word, nor was nineteenth-century Britain anything democracy: Even the so-called Third P-*

Gladstone's rhetoric about trusting

Enfranchised voters, he said, must always show evidence of self-control, respect for order, patience under suffering and regard for their superiors. These were also the values he sought to inspire in his audiences.

Character was particularly important to Gladstone.

He spoke frequently of the need for voters to exercise self-command, so as not to vote in narrow and self-interested ways.

It was legitimate, he conceded, in a speech delivered in 1877, for a man to pursue his own interests, but he should always

"test his interests by his duties."38 When voting, it was necessary to rid oneself of "all selfish and narrow ends." And voting, Gladstone liked to say, was an ennobling experience, an act of individual responsibility before God. *The conscientious exercise of important duties," Gladstone told a working-class audience in 1890, "is a function that tends to elevate a man.*39 But to exercise such important duties required real manliness.

In preparation, they must cultivate public spirit and virtue. They must also educate themselves in issues of politics.

Gladstone encouraged his listeners to read newspapers as well as his speeches, which were printed in cheap editions and were veritable political treatises.

While not everybody appreciated Gladstone's style of leadership and brand of populism, he was enormously admired.

He was, said John Stuart Mill, a "great modern statesman," an honest and sincere man who always fought for "the public good. especially of the poorer classes, **° Max Weber, in his famous essay Polities as a Vocation, admired him as an early master of "leadership democracy" and compared him to Lincoln. By the respect Gladstone showed for the working man, and the way the working man responded to him, he seemed to suggest that a liberal democracy -one of patriotic and Civic-minded citizens aware of their rights and duties- was possible,