William Ewart Gladstone

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William Ewart Gladstone (December 29, 1809 - May 19, 1898) was a British Liberal politician and Prime Minister (1868-1874, 1880-1885, 1886 and 1892-1894). He was a notable political reformer, known for his populist speeches, and was for many years the main political rival of Benjamin Disraeli.

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Remember the rights of the savage, as we call him. Remember that the happiness of his humble home, remember that the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan among the winter snows, are as sacred in the eye of Almighty God as are your own. (Loud cheers). Remember that He who has united you together as human beings in the same flesh and blood, has bound you by the law of mutual love, that that mutual love is not limited by the shores of this island, is not limited by the boundaries of Christian civilisation, that it passes over the whole surface of the earth, and embraces the meanest along with the greatest in its wide scope. (Loud cheers).
- Mr Gladstone's visit to Mid-Lothian: Meeting at the Foresters' Hall (November 27, 1879). The Scotsman, p.6.
- Speech made in Foresters' Hall, Dalkeith, Scotland on November 26, 1879 as part of the Midlothian campaign.
- Morley, John (1903), Life of Gladstone, II, p.595.

Jefferson Davis and other leaders of the South have made an army; they are making, it appears, a navy; and they have made what is more than either, they have made a nation...We may anticipate with certainty the success of the Southern States so far as regards their separation from the North.
- Speech on the American Civil War to Newcastle upon Tyne, 7 October 1862.

Ireland, Ireland! That cloud in the west, that coming storm, the vehicle of God's retribution.
- 1879 letter to his wife.

All the world over, I will back the masses against the classes

Justice delayed is justice denied.

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Ah, Oxford on the surface, but Liverpool below.
- unnamed Whig's comment in Commons on Gladstone's budget, Feb. 1860, in Walter Bagehot Biographical Studies: Mr. Gladstone

An almost spectral kind of phantasm of a man--nothing in him but forms and ceremonies and outside wrappings.
- Thomas Carlyle, letter, March 1873

He speaks to Me as if I was a public meeting.
- Queen Victoria, memorandum to her private secretary Gen. Sir Henry Ponsonby, 18 November 1874

He has one gift most dangerous to a spectator, a vast command of a kind of language, grave and majestic, but of vague and uncertain import.
- T. B. Macaulay, Essays, Gladstone on Church and State

He talked shop like a tenth muse.
- anon. comment on Gladstone's Budget speeches, in G. W. E. Russell, Collections and Recollections

I don't object to Gladstone always having the ace of trumps up his sleeve, but merely to his belief that the Almighty put it there.
- Henry Labouchere, in Hesketh Pearson, Lives of the Wits

If there were no Tories, I am afraid he would invent them.
- Lord Acton, letter to Mrs. Drew, 24 April 1881

If you were to put that man on a moor with nothing on but his shirt, he would become whatever he pleased.
- T. H. Huxley, in Ernest Scott, Lord Robert Cecil's Goldfield Diary

The defects of his strength grow on him. All black is very black, all white very white.
- Lord Rosebery, diary, 4 August 1887

...they told me how Mr. Gladstone read Homer for fun, which I thought served him right.
- attrib. Winston Churchill

Gladstone will soon have it all his own way and whenever he gets my place we shall have strange doings.
- Lord Palmerston to Lord Shaftesbury towards the end of Palmerston's life. E. Hodder, The Life and Work of the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury: Volume III (London, 1886), p. 187.

What you say about Gladstone is most just. What restlessness! What vanity! And what unhappiness must be his! Easy to say he is mad. It looks like it. My theory about him is unchanged: A ceaseless Tartuffe from the beginning. That sort of man does not get mad at 70.
- Benjamin Disraeli, letter to Lady Bradford, 3 October 1879

Who equals him in earnestness? Who equals him in eloquence? Who equals him in courage and fidelity to his convictions? If these gentlemen who say they will not follow him have anyone who is equal, let them show him. If they can point out any statesman who can add dignity and grandeur to the stature of Mr. Gladstone, let them produce him!
- John Bright, speech at Birmingham, 22 April 1867

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