Show GLAD STONES WORK REVIEWED he had international reputation and was the real leader of his party when abraham lincoln was still an obscure illinois politician he was an old man retiring with broken health never to appear in public life again as every bone one thought when the statesmen of our reconstruction period were earning their laurels laurel and when only one or two of i them were lingering in feebleness bordering on senility he was still shaping the policies of his party and the destinies of the british empire as act its apri prime m e minister these lines are from the new york world and relate to him who in life was called the grand old man and to is a portion of a vo posthumous t bu review partly eulogistic and partly critical of his career opinions vary und and will continue to vary regarding Glad stones place among the publicists of the nineteenth century but none it may be said would have the temerity to say that when he is weighed in the balances and tested by the same means that other men who have passed above mediocrity have been tested his place is tar far from the head it is yet too early to give an accurate judgment or one wholly free from prejudice regarding the mans lifework life work because so faulty axe are the means by which the human animal animae arrives at conclusions clu clue lons regarding the per persons son a and things that are nearest him while they are near that an unbiased and unprejudiced verdict verdia can best be when the place wong among us whick chic aa ate I 1 filled IS 18 vacant we then turn our attention freeo freed from the clogs of partiality and dislike a little at a tittle tithe fo an when our words of censure can no longer depress or injure and our words of praise are alike ineffective because of their being unable to reach as well as to soothe the dull cold ear of death begin to form an opinion in proper spirit of the subject subjects as he was not as we may have thought he ought to be the same authority as that quoted above gives some very pleasant conclusions clu in the line last indicated which relieve materially the harsher things which have at times appeared in its columns and those of many others of the great papers of this country it says in one place that in the last crisis in his career he gave up the political and social friendships of a lifetime he deliberately drove his friends into bitter enmity to him because his conscience told him that Ir elands wrongs must be redressed and his intellect told him that the time when justice was possible had come and it speaks truly further on it holds that the same story of high morality speake from every page of the great commoners life his enlightened morality caused him to drag the old tortes tories as far along the way toward the light as possible it caused him to leave them and toll toil for the formation of a new party of 0 progressive liberalism that enabled him to take the taxes from knowledge and give the people cheap books book s and cheap newspapers it again caused him to change the liberal party into a radical party establishing a common school system and extending the suffrage until the masses had self belt government such achievements alone are enough to constitute greatness measured by any reasonable standard and they are only a part a small part altogether his work amounts to a monument which has but just begun to take share and outline and which in the days to come will be a ie more imposing than any of bronze or stone and fully as enduring as either it to is not a little singular that the greatest and best beat feature in the long career of the sage of hawarden should be noticed so slightly by some papers and not at all by others this was his personal morality his utter contempt for any form of forbidden indulgence hla his positive hatred of vice in any of its forms his loyal devotion to and steadfast regard tor for his family from the cherished wife to the latest great grandchild his treatment of onland one and all was ever even always instructive and as a whole sublime in such respects he comes very close among men in political life in his own country to having baving been without a model and without a shadow |