If they were, they may remember the little incidents of the meeting—­the glasses which were hopelessly lost and then, of course, found on the orator’s person—­the desperate candle brought in, stuck in a water-bottle, to attempt sufficient light to read an extract.  And what a meeting it was—­teeming, delirious, absorbed!  Do you have such meetings now?  They seem to me pretty good; but the meetings of that time stand out before all others in my mind.

This statue is erected, not out of the national subscription, but by the contributions from men of all creeds in Glasgow and in the West.  I must then, in what I have to say, leave out altogether the political aspect of Mr. Gladstone.  In some cases such a rule would omit all that was interesting in a man.  There are characters, from which if you subtracted politics, there would be nothing left.  It was not so with Mr. Gladstone.

To the great mass of his fellow-countrymen he was of course a statesman, wildly worshipped by some, wildly detested by others.  But, to those who were privileged to know him, his politics seemed but the least part of him.  The predominant part, to which all else was subordinated, was his religion; the life which seemed to attract him most was the life of the library; the subject which engrossed him most was the subject of the moment, whatever it might be, and that, when he was out of office, was very rarely politics.  Indeed, I sometimes doubt whether his natural bent was toward politics at all.  Had his course taken him that way, as it very nearly did, he would have been a great churchman, greater perhaps than any that this island has known; he would have been a great professor, if you could have found a university big enough to hold him; he would have been a great historian, a great bookman, he would have grappled with whole libraries and wrestled with academies, had the fates placed him in a cloister; indeed it is difficult to conceive the career, except perhaps the military, in which his energy and intellect and application would not have placed him on a summit.  Politics, however, took him and claimed his life service, but, jealous mistress as she is, could never thoroughly absorb him.

Such powers as I have indicated seem to belong to a giant and a prodigy, and I can understand many turning away from the contemplation of such a character, feeling that it is too far removed from them to interest them, and that it is too unapproachable to help them—­that it is like reading of Hercules or Hector, mythical heroes whose achievements the actual living mortal can not hope to rival.  Well, that is true enough; we have not received intellectual faculties equal to Mr. Gladstone’s, and can not hope to vie with him in their exercise.  But apart from them, his great force was character, and amid the vast multitude that I am addressing, there is none who may not be helped by him.

The three signal qualities which made him what he was, were courage, industry, and faith; dauntless courage, unflagging industry, a faith which was part of his fiber; these were the levers with which he moved the world.