5o8 



The Review of Reviews. 



which with slow impatience drag the plough through 

 the stubborn soil of the fields in Eastern Europe. 

 'Ihe one is a flibberty -gibbet, a kind of Puck, with 

 the mission of a Messiah ; the other the very incar- 

 nation of English stolidity and solidity, a Duke who 

 became an oracle, whose respectability was so unim- 

 peachable as to enable him to wear so shocking a 

 hat that twenty-four ladies on one occasion each on 

 the same day felt constrained by their mischievous 

 charity to send him a new one. Of Mr. Blunt 

 Mr. (jladstone said he was a very charming person- 

 .ility, but on politics quite mad. 



The verdict is hardly too severe of a man who, 

 when he set out to gain a seat in the House of 

 Commons, made the following entry in his diary : — 



I look forward to Parliament as the beginning of a newpliase. 

 I shall be Caliinet Minister in five years' time, head of my party 

 perhaps in ten. I think it is in my fate. 



He did not get in, and he remarks in passing, " My 

 defeat left Churchill without any adviser in the ways 

 of political virtue." A strange adviser indeed ! 



Contrast with this the habitual pose of the Duke 

 who thrice refused the Premiership, who reluctantly 

 accepted the leadership of his party as a bore, and 

 whom Lord Salisbury described as one of the most 

 disinterested men who ever lived. 



But a truce to these parallels and contrasts between 

 the restless impishness of the erratic genius who has 

 spent his life between the breeding of Arab horses 

 and the championship of Arabi, and the sedate 

 embodiment of the English noble at his best, and 

 let us see what each of them has to say about 

 General Cordon. 



II.— MR. BLUNT'S "LORD HARTINGTON." 



Mr. Blunt, as his custom is, has been carried away 

 by a mad theory which leads him wrong. His idea 

 is that the Duke (then Lord Hartington), with Lord 

 Granville and a few more, had formed an infernal 

 secret plot to seize Egypt and the Soudan ; that they 

 had from the first conceived that General Gordon 

 would be their most efficient instrument in securing 

 this nefarious end, and that in order to get Gordon 

 to Khartoum they used Mr. Stead — the writer of 

 this review— as their tool for the achievement of 

 their designs. A more cock-eyed inversion of facts 

 can hardly be conceived. Mr. Holland's unillumi- 

 nating narrative, however unsatisfactory it may be, 

 docs at least compel the conviction that Lord Har- 

 lington was the last man in the world to play the rbk 

 imputed to him by Mr. Blunt. In his lazytongs way 

 the Duke saw clearly enough that Mr. Gladstone's 

 attempt to shuffle off responsibility would not do, but 

 if only he had been keen enough to exert himself 

 actively, even in Mr. Blunt's sense, the disaster would 

 have been averted. 



I.ORn H.^RTINGTON KTAV) GORDON. 



Hut although Lord Hartington no doubt rec'gnised 

 with his sure instinct that General Gordon was the 

 right man to send out, he did not insist on sending 



him out, and although he was equally clear as to 

 the duty of supporting him when he was sent out, 

 he did not feel strongly enough about it to insist. 

 Of couise it must not be forgotten that he was 

 overcome, like everybody else, by the ma.sterful 

 character of Mr. (}ladstone. The Duke was not 

 keen enough to stand up against him. To impute 

 to him, as Mr. Blunt does, the responsibility of 

 an intrigue to get Gordon appointed is the very 

 height of midsummer madness. The Duke was 

 inertia itself. His " don't-care-a-damn " frame of 

 mind made him incapable of acting until fully roused, 

 and then it usually took the shape of a veto upon the 

 action of others. He vetoed the sending of Zebehr ; 

 he defended, if he did not personally veto, the refusal 

 to send the Hussars across the desert to hold Berber, 

 just as in after years he vetoed Home Rule and 

 vetoed Tariff Reform. His strength was to sit still. 



MR. stead's reply. 



Mr. Blunt's theory as to the despatch of Gordon is 

 built up on the presentation of facts which I am in a 

 position to destroy in a single sentene. For Mr. 

 Blunt's theory of the subtle intrigues of Lord Har- 

 tington for the annexation of Egypt, carried out by 

 the despatch of General Gordon, it is necessary to 

 prove that I, W. T. Stead, then editing the P,i/i Ma// 

 Gazette, was his active agent. The whole super- 

 structure rests on the as.sumption that Lord Hartington, 

 from the defeat of General Hicks to the despatch of 

 General Gordon, employed me to advocate the policy 

 which he was determined at all costs to force upon 

 the Government. 



To this my answer is that Mr. Stead never had any 

 communication either directly or indirectly with Lord 

 Hartington during the whole of that period. .As a 

 matter of fact I never met Lord Hartington in my 

 life. When editing the Northern Echo I used to 

 make his life a bit of a burden to him, so he said in 

 after years, by sending him letters pointing out where 

 he had blundered in his speeches on the Eastern 

 Question ; but after I came to London even this 

 slender channel of communication was dried up. I 

 had nothing to do with Lord Hartington and he hail 

 nothing to do with me. He certainly never took tin 

 least trouble to inspire the articles I wrote in the Pa// 

 Ma// Gazette. 



But Mr. Blunt will no doubt reply that although 

 Lord Hartington had no communication with Mr. 

 Stead, Lord Esher (then the Hon. Reginald Brett), 

 Lord Hartington's private secretary, was the medium 

 through whom the communications passed. To 

 which the answer is that I never met Mr. Brett, nor 

 had any communications with him orally, directly or 

 indirectly, or through any intermediary until after 

 General Gordon had left Cairo. 



THE SUPERSTITION OF THE PORTFOLIO. 



The fact is Mr. Blunt suffers from the superstition 

 of the Portfolio. If a man has a portfolio and a seat 

 in the Cabinet he becomes at once a statesman who 



