It was on this date in 1898 that Canada’s own Sir Wilfrid Laurier stood in the House of Commons to pay tribute to one of the greats of the British Liberal tradition, William Ewart Gladstone, who had passed into history a few days earlier. “The name of Gladstone has come to be,” Sir Wilfrid said, “in the minds of all civilized nations, the living incarnation of right against might – the champion, the dauntless, tireless champion of the oppressed against the oppressor.” Over his remarkable career, Gladstone had served four times as Prime Minister of the UK, and also four times as Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer.  While in the UK to represent Canada at the 1897 celebrations of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, Laurier had visited Gladstone at the latter’s estate at Hawarden. Sir Wilfrid’s address in tribute to his British hero is found below.   Sir Wilfrid Laurier: England has lost the most illustrious of her sons; but the loss is not England’s alone, nor is it confined to the great Empire which acknowledges England’s suzerainty, nor even to the proud race which can claim kinship with the people of England.  The loss is the loss of mankind. Mr. Gladstone gave his whole life to his country; but the work which he did for his country was conceived and carried out on prin­ciples of such high elevation, for purposes so noble and aims so lofty, that not his country alone, but the whole of mankind, benefited by his work.  It is no exaggeration to say that he has raised the standard of civilization, and the world today is undoubtedly better for both the precept and the example of his life.  His death is mourned not only by England, the land of his birth, not only by Scotland, the land of his ancestors, not only by Ireland, for which he did so much, and attempted to do so much more; but also by the people of the two Sicilys, for whose outraged rights he once aroused the conscience of Europe, by the people of the Ionian Islands, whose independence he secured, by the people of Bulgaria and the Danubian provinces, in whose cause he enlisted the sympathy of his own native country. Indeed, since the days of Napoleon, no man has lived whose name has travelled so far and so wide over the surface of the earth; no man has lived whose name alone so deeply moved the hearts of so many millions of men.  Whereas Napoleon impressed his tre­mendous personality upon peoples far and near by the strange fas­cination which the genius of war has always exercised over the imagination of men in all lands and in all ages, the name of Gladstone has come to be, in the minds of all civilized nations, the living incarnation of right against might – the champion, the dauntless, tireless champion of the oppressed against the oppressor. It is, I believe, equally true to say that his was the most mar­vellous mental organization which the world has seen since Napoleon – certainly the most compact, the most active and the most universal.  This last half century in which we live has pro­duced many able and strong men who, in different walks of life, have attracted the attention of the world at large; but of the men who have illustrated this age, it seems to me that in the eyes of posterity four will outlive and outshine all others – Cavour, Lincoln, Bismarck and Gladstone.  If we look simply at the mag­nitude of the results obtained, compared with the exiguity of the resources at command – if we remember that out of the small kingdom of Sardinia grew United Italy, we must come to the conclusion that Count Cavour was undoubtedly a statesman of marvellous skill and prescience. Abraham Lincoln, unknown to fame when he was elected to the presidency, exhibited a power for the government of men which has scarcely been surpassed in any age.  He saved the American union, he enfranchised the black race, and for the task he had to perform he was endowed in some respects almost miraculously.  No man ever displayed a greater insight into the motives, the complex motives, which shape the public opinion of a free country, and he possessed almost to the degree of an instinct, the supreme quality in a statesman of taking the right decision, taking it at the right moment, and expressing it in language of incomparable felicity. Prince Bismarck was the embodiment of resolute common sense, unflinching determination, relentless strength, moving onward to his ends and crushing everything in his way as uncon­cernedly as fate itself. Mr. Gladstone undoubtedly exceeded every one of these men. . . . He had the aptitude for business, the financial ability which Lincoln never exhibited.  He had the lofty impulses, the generous inspirations which Prince Bismarck always discarded, even if he did not treat them with scorn.  He was at once an orator, a statesman, a poet, and a man of business.  As an orator he stands certainly in the very front rank of orators of his country or any country, of his age or any age. I remember when Louis Blanc was in England, in the days of the Second Empire, he used to write to the press of Paris, and in one of his letters to “Le Temps” he stated that Mr. Gladstone would undoubtedly have been the foremost orator of England if it were not for the existence of Mr. Bright.  It may be admitted, and I think it is admitted generally, that on some occasions Mr. Bright reached heights of grandeur and pathos which even Mr. Gladstone did not attain.  But Mr. Gladstone had an ability, a vigour, a fluency which no man in his age or any age ever rivalled or even approached.  That is not all.  To his marvellous mental powers he added no less marvel­lous physical gifts.  He had the eye of a god, the voice of a silver bell; and the very fire of his eye, the very music of his voice, swept the hearts of men even before they had been dazzled by the torrents of his eloquence. As a statesman, it was the good fortune of Mr. Gladstone that his career was not associated with war.  The reforms which he effected, the triumphs which he achieved, were not won by the supreme arbitrament of the sword.  The reforms which he effected and the triumphs which he achieved were the result of his power of persuasion over his fellow men.  The reforms which he achieved in many ways amounted to a revolution. They changed, in many par­ticulars, the face of the realm.  After Sir Robert Peel had adopted the great principle which eventually carried England from protec­tion to free trade, it was Mr. Gladstone who created the financial system which has been admitted ever since by all students of finance as the secret of Great Britain’s commercial success.  He enforced the extension of the suffrage to the masses of the nation and practically thereby made the Government of monarchical England as demo­cratic as that of any republic. He disestablished the Irish Church; he introduced reform into the land tenure, and brought hope into the breasts of those tillers of the soil in Ireland who had for so many generations laboured in despair.  And all this he did, not by force or violence, but simply by the power of his eloquence and the strength of his personality.  Great, however, as were the acts of the man – after all he was of the human flesh, and for him, as for everybody else, there were trivial and low duties to be performed, it is no exaggeration to say that even in those low and trivial duties he was great.  He ennobled the common realities of life. His was above all things a religious mind – essentially religious in the highest sense of the term. And the religious sentiment which dominated his public life and his speeches, that same sentiment, according to the testimony of those who knew him best, also per­meated all his actions from the highest to the humblest. He was a man of strong and pure affections, of long and lasting friendship, and to describe the beauty of his domestic life no words of praise can be adequate.  It was simply ideally beautiful, and in the later years of his life as touching as it was beautiful. May I be permitted, without any impropriety, to recall that it was my privilege to experience and to appreciate that courtesy, made up of dignity and grace, which was famous all over the world, but of which no one could have an appropriate opinion unless he had been the recipient of it.  In a character so complex and diversified, one may be asked what was the dominant feature, what was the supreme quality, the one characteristic which marked the nature of the man.  Was it his incomparable genius for finance?  Was it his splendid ora­torical powers?  Was it his marvellous fecundity of mind? In my estimation, it was not any one of those qualities.  Great as they were, there was one still more marked, and if I have to give my own impression, I would say that the one trait which was dominant in his nature, which marked the man more distinctively than any other, was his intense humanity, his paramount sense of right, his abhorrence of injustice, wrong and oppression, wherever to be found or in whatever shape they might show themselves.  Injustice, wrong, oppression, acted upon him, as it were, mechani­cally, and aroused every fibre of his being, and from that moment, to the repairing of the injustice, the undoing of the wrong, and the destruction of the oppression, he gave his mind, his heart, his soul, his whole life, with an energy, with an intensity, with a vigour paralleled in no man unless it be the first Napoleon. There are many evidences of this in his life.  When he was trav­elling in southern Italy, as a tourist, for pleasure and for the benefit of the health of his family, he became aware of the abominable system which was there prevailing under the name of constitutional government.  He left everything aside, even the object which had brought him to Italy, and applied himself to investigate and to col­lect evidence, and then denounced the abominable system in a trumpet blast of such power that it shook to its very foundation the throne of King Ferdinand and sent it tottering to its fall. Again, when he was sent as High Commissioner to the Ionian Islands, the Hellenic population separated from the rest of Greece, separated from the kingdom to which they were adjacent and towards which all their aspirations were raised, struck his generous soul with such force that he became practically their advocate and secured their independence. Again, when he had withdrawn from public life, and when, in the language of theirs, under somewhat similar circumstances, he had returned to “ses chères études” his dear studies, the atrocities perpetrated by the Turks on the people of Bulgaria brought him back to public life with a vehemence, an impetuosity, and a torrent of fierce indignation that swept everything before it. If this be, as I think it is, the one distinctive feature of his char­acter, it seems to explain away what are called the inconsistencies of his life.  Inconsistencies there were none in his life.  He had been brought up in the most unbending school of Toryism.  He became the most active Reformer of our own times.  But whilst he became the leader of the Liberal Party and an active Reformer, it is only due to him to say that in his complex mind there was a vast space for what is known as Conservatism.  His mind was not only liberal but con­servative as well, and he clung to the affections of his youth until, in questions of practical moment, he found them clashing with that sense of right and abhorrence of injustice of which I have spoken. But the moment he found his conservative affections clash with what he thought right and just, he did not hesitate to abandon his former convictions and go the whole length of the reforms demanded.  Thus, he was always devotedly, filially, lovingly attached to the Church of England.  He loved it, as he often declared. He adhered to it as an establishment in England, but the very reasons and arguments which, in his mind, justified the establishment of the Church in England, compelled him to a different course as far as that church was concerned in Ireland.  In England the church was the church of the majority, of almost the unanimity of the nation.  In Ireland it was the church of the minority, and therefore he did not hesitate.  His course was clear; he removed the one church and maintained the other. So it was with Home Rule; but coming to this subject of Home Rule, though there may be much to say, perhaps this is neither the occasion nor the place to say it.  England is today in tears, but for­tunate is the nation which has produced such a man.  His years are over, but his work is not closed; his work is still going on.  The example which he gave to the world shall live forever, and the seed which he has sown with such a copious hand shall still germinate and bear fruit under the full light of heaven. caption id="attachment_559003" align="aligncenter" width="440" The 'Empire Premiers' at Hawarden Castle, Wales, at the time of Queen Victoria's Jubilee. From left to right: Sir Louis Davies (former Premier of Prince Edward Island, was Canadian Minister of Marine and Fisheries at time of photo, and later Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada), Rt. Hon. Sir Wilfrid Laurier (Prime Minister of Canada), Rt. Hon. W. E. Gladstone (former British PM, and owner of the Hawarden Castle estate), Rt. Hon. George Reid (Premier of New South Wales, later PM of Australia) and Rt. Hon. Richard Seddon (PM of New Zealand)/caption Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist.  He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy.  A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.