The influence of Gladstone has been of untold value to England.  His ideals for national action have been high.  To the material prosperity of the country he has added millions upon millions; he has made education popular, and schooling easy; his policy in the main has been such as to command the admiration of the good and great.  But there are spots on the sun.

On reading Mr. Gladstone’s books I find he has vigorously defended certain measures that seem unworthy of his genius.  He has palliated human slavery as a “necessary evil”; has maintained the visibility and divine authority of the Church; has asserted the mathematical certainty of the historic episcopate, the mystical efficacy of the sacraments; and has vindicated the Church of England as the God-appointed guardian of truth.

He has fought bitterly any attempt to improve the divorce-laws of England.  Much has been done in this line, even in spite of his earnest opposition, but we now owe it to Mr. Gladstone that there is on England’s law-books a statute providing that if a wife leaves her husband he can invoke a magistrate, whose duty it will then be to issue a writ and give it to an officer, who will bring her back.  More than this, when the officer has returned the woman, the loving husband has the legal right to “reprove” her.  Just what reprove means the courts have not yet determined; for, in a recent decision, when a costermonger admitted having given his lady “a taste of the cat,” the prisoner was discharged on the ground that it was only needed reproof.

I would not complain of this law if it worked both ways; but no wife can demand that the State shall return her “man” willy-nilly.  And if she administers reproof to her mate, she does it without the sanction of the Sovereign.

However, in justice to Englishmen, it should be stated that while this unique law still stands on the statute-books, it is very seldom that a man in recent years has stooped to invoke it.

On all the questions I have named, from slavery to divorce, Mr. Gladstone has used the “Bible argument.”  But as the years have gone by, his mind has become liberalized, and on many points where he was before zealous he is now silent.  In Eighteen Hundred Forty-one, he argued with much skill and ingenuity that Jews were not entitled to full rights of citizenship, but in Eighteen Hundred Forty-seven, acknowledging his error, he took the other side.

During the War of Secession the sympathies of England’s Chancellor of the Exchequer were with the South.  Speaking at Newcastle on October Ninth, Eighteen Hundred Sixty-two, he said, “Jefferson Davis has undoubtedly founded a new nation.”  But five years passed, and he publicly confessed that he was wrong.