And what is left of that old life is gracious, kindly, hospitable. In no place in any part of the earth have I met with greater kindliness than in Freshwater. That is why I am fond of the West Wight and have been there so often. I wonder if ever I shall go there again. Once I crossed the Atlantic to go there and only there. And now, to-day that gracious lady of the old time has gone, never to return. How kindly she was, and gentle! What sweet dignity and thoughtfulness, a manner that was not put on and off like a gown. It was innate. There are few left in the world like that dear lady. The present generation calls them old-fashioned. {137} Theirs was indeed an old fashion, and the world is poorer because it does not know how to match it. Their spirit was not the spirit of the age as we see it at the dawn of the third decade of the Twentieth Century. Farewell, dear lady, you were Thackeray's finest work! {138} CHAPTER X GLADSTONE The enthusiasms and antagonisms set alight by Mr. Gladstone in his long career flame now, a generation after his death, quite as fiercely as they did before the Great War. Not that he was a warlike man, except upon the hustings and in the House. You would think that everybody could see now that Gladstone was right about the Turks. But Woodrow Wilson and the ex-Kaiser have not seen so much. They were on the side of the Turks and Bulgarians. Wilson was so much on their side that he would not fight them, and by his abstention contributed to the situation which made the Armenian massacres a continuous entertainment for Berlin, and isolated Russia from her Allies. And there is Ireland, of course, Ireland with De Valera instead of with Parnell. And there is Egypt. And there is India. All of these synonymes for trouble, and debates in the House. All these troubles to be healed by talk. But there is no one now who talks so well as Mr. Gladstone. When Gladstone died, men did not agree about what he had done in his more than sixty years of public life,--done, that is, for the United Kingdom {139} and the Empire. They do not agree now. What was the outstanding achievement of his life, the thing, above all, by which posterity will remember him? Was it his devotion to the freedom of human kind? Perhaps. But the main question is so difficult to answer that I shall not attempt the task, not merely because it is difficult, but mainly because it is not my intention to tread the mazes of British politics. The Nineteenth Century, the despised Victorian Age, if you please, was an age of great men. Some of them seem smaller now than they did before July, 1914. Bismarck, for example. Bismarck was a liar. Gladstone was not. And yet he had a theological mind. Gladstone's stature has not diminished with the shrinking process of time. But will it diminish? Who can tell? The world salutes his integrity. Does it salute for integrity and courage any political personage of to-day?