William Ewart Gladstone

Reference

Picture; [Wikipedia];

Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia

"Yet Gladstone would have none of Tennyson’s latter-day gloom and doom. In an astonishing article in the January 1887 issue of the respected journal The Nineteenth Century, the former and future prime minister took on the nation’s most famous living poet, toe to toe, though with a wonderfully generous language toward his great year-mate. Looking back over the half-century of Queen Victoria’s reign, and thus of “Locksley Hall” itself, Gladstone argued for a different interpretation. It was true, he conceded, that the more ambitious hopes of the early Liberals had not been realized. But there had been substantial progress on many fronts. . . . The list is numbing, boring, and impressive at the same time. The percentage of children in schools had shot up, Gladstone noted, and the rights of women had been enlarged, the fair wage was much higher, the disgusting criminal code (game laws, inheritance laws) had been cast aside, restrictive trade measures like the Navigation Acts had gone, the press gang in the navy and flogging in the army had been abolished, and commerce had increased fivefold, while crime had greatly diminished." [Kennedy: Parliament of Man, Kindle Edition, Location 4602-23]