From the moment when it became clear that Lord Beaconsfield would be swept out of office, it was just as clear to sensible men that only one successor was possible. It was Mr. Gladstone, as everybody knew and said, who had led and inspired the assault. A cabinet without him would hold its councils without the most important of the influences on which it depended. If the majorities that carried the election could have been consulted on the choice of a minister, nobody doubted upon whom with unanimity their choice would fall. Even those who most detested the result, even those who held that a load of anxiety would be lifted from the bosoms of many liberals of official rank if they were to hear of Mr. Gladstone's definite retirement from public life, still pronounced that it was Mr. Gladstone's majority, and that was what the contributors to that majority intended to vote for was, above all else, his return to office and his supremacy in national affairs. If he would not lay down his power, such persons said, it was best for everybody that he should exercise it openly, regularly, and responsibly as head of the government.367 The very fact that he had ceased to be the leader of the opposition five years before, was turned into an argument for his responsibility now; for it was his individual freedom that had enabled him to put forth all his strength, without [pg 619] any of that management and reserve that would have been needed in one who was titular leader of a party, as well as real leader of the nation. The victory would have been shorn of half its glory if any other chief had been given to the party. In short, no minister, not Pitt in 1784, nor Grey in 1831, nor Peel ten years later, nor Palmerston in 1855, was ever summoned by more direct and personal acclaim. Whatever liberty of choice the theory of our constitution assigned to the Queen, in practice this choice did not now exist. It was true that in the first of his Midlothian speeches Mr. Gladstone had used these words, “I hope the verdict of the country will give to Lord Granville and Lord Hartington the responsible charge of its affairs.”368 But events had wrought a surprise, and transformed the situation.

Some, indeed, there were whom a vision of another kind possessed; a vision of the moral grandeur that would attend his retirement after putting Apollyon and his legions to flight, and planting his own hosts in triumph in the full measure of their predominance. Some who loved him, might still regretfully cherish for him this heroic dream. Retirement might indeed have silenced evil tongues; it would have spared him the toils of many turbid and tempestuous years. But public life is no idyll. Mr. Gladstone had put himself, by exertions designed for public objects, into a position from which retreat to private ease would have been neither unselfish nor honourable. Is it not an obvious test of true greatness in a statesman, that he shall hold popularity, credit, ascendency and power such as Mr. Gladstone now commanded, as a treasure to be employed with regal profusion for the common good, not guarded in a miser's strong-box? For this outlay of popularity the coming years were to provide Mr. Gladstone with occasions only too ample.

If retreat was impossible, then all the rest was inevitable. And it is easy to guess the course of his ruminations between his return from Midlothian and his arrival in Harley Street. Mr. Gladstone himself, looking back seventeen [pg 620] years after, upon his refusal in 1880 to serve in a place below the first, wrote: “I conceive that I was plainly right in declining it, for had I acted otherwise, I should have placed the facts of the case in conflict with its rights, and with the just expectations of the country. Besides, as the head of a five years' ministry, and as still in full activity, I should have been strangely placed as the subordinate of one twenty years my junior, and comparatively little tested in public life.”

As the diary records, on Monday, April 12, Lord Wolverton left Hawarden, and was to see the two liberal leaders the same day. He did so, and reported briefly to his chief at night:—

Acknowledging this on the following day (April 13), Mr. Gladstone says to Lord Wolverton:—

As a matter of fact, I find no evidence that the two leaders ever did express a conviction that public policy required that he should stand forth as a pretender for the post of prime minister. On the contrary, when Lord Wolverton says that they “did not quite realise the position” on the 12th, this can only mean that they hardly felt that conviction about the requirements of public policy, which Mr. Gladstone demanded as the foundation of his own decision.