He saw, of course, that a statesman cannot oppose the popular will
beyond a certain point, and may have to humor it in order that he
may direct it. Now and then, in his later days, he so far yielded
to his party advisers as to express his approval of proposals for
which he cared little personally. But he was too self-absorbed, too
eagerly interested in the ideas that suited his own cast of thought,
to be able to watch and gage the tendencies of the multitude. On
several occasions he announced a policy which startled people and
gave a new turn to the course of events. But in none of these
instances, and certainly not in the three most remarkable,--his
declarations against the Irish church establishment in 1868, against
the Turks and the traditional English policy of supporting them in
1876, and in favor of Irish home rule in 1886,--did any popular
demand suggest his pronouncement. It was the masses who took their
view from him, not he who took his mandate from the masses. In all
of these instances he was at the time in opposition, and was accused
of having made this new departure for the sake of recovering power.
In the two former he prevailed, and was ultimately admitted, by his
more candid adversaries, to have counseled wisely. In all of them
he may, perhaps, be censured for not having sooner perceived, or at
any rate for not having sooner announced, the need for reform. But
it was very characteristic of him not to give the full strength of
his mind to a question till he felt that it pressed for a solution.
Those who discussed politics with him were scarcely more struck by
the range of his vision and his power of correlating principles and
details than by his unwillingness to commit himself on matters whose
decision he could postpone. Reticence and caution were sometimes
carried too far, not merely because they exposed him to
misconstruction, but because they withheld from his party the
guidance it needed. This was true in all the three instances just