Huxley says he could be made to believe that two and two made
five. He would try to make others believe it; but would he
himself believe it? His friends will plead, 'he might
deceive himself by the excessive subtlety of his mind.' This
is the charitable view to take. But some who knew him long
and well put another construction upon this facile self-
deception. There were, and are, honourable men of the
highest standing who failed to ascribe disinterested motives
to the man who suddenly and secretly betrayed his colleagues,
his party, and his closest friends, and tried to break up the
Empire to satisfy an inordinate ambition, and an insatiable
craving for power. 'He might have been mistaken, but he
acted for the best'? Was he acting conscientiously for the
best in persuading the 'masses' to look upon the 'classes' -
the war cries are of his coining - as their natural enemies,
and worthy only of their envy and hatred? Is this the part
of a statesman, of a patriot?
And for what else shall we admire Mr. Gladstone? Walter
Bagehot, alluding to his egotism, wrote of him in his
lifetime, 'He longs to pour forth his own belief; he cannot
rest till he has contradicted everyone else.' And what was
that belief worth? 'He has scarcely,' says the same writer,
'given us a sentence that lives in the memory.'
Even his eloquent advocate, Mr. Morley, confesses surprise at
his indifference to the teaching of evolution; in other
words, his ignorance of, and disbelief in, a scientific
theory of nature which has modified the theological and moral
creeds of the civilised world more profoundly than did the
Copernican system of the Universe.
