The name of the family first occurs as Gledstanes, and afterward as Gladstanes, or Gladstane. Not until about the middle of the eighteenth century do we find the name in its more recent form of Gladstone, and not until 1835 did Sir John Gladstone, acting under a royal license, finally drop the terminal from the ancestral nomen. The analysis of the nomen shows the lowland Scottish word gled, signifying a hawk, and stanes, a dialectical variation for stones. Thus the original sense was the Hawk Stones; and this doubtlessly embodied some unknown tradition of the family. Smith, in his Life of Gladstone, suggests that the name of the family may have reference to some custom connected with land tenure in Scotland in the Middle Ages. This is merely conjectural.

The name Gladstanes is an example of the strange disposition shown among nearly all peoples to get their names into the plural form. It has required the force of literature to crystallize the majority of modern proper names and keep them in the singular form. There is, for example, a natural disposition among the folks to call members of the Wood family Woods, or those of the John family Johns, or those of the William family Williams. In the case before us the name was finally fixed in the English spelling of Gladstane, and the pronunciation glad-stun, with a strong accent on the first.

In the early part of the eighteenth century, the Biggar branch of the family was represented by William Gladstone, who was a manufacturer of malt and a man prosperous in his household. His estate, on his death in 1728, descended to his oldest son John, then thirty-one years of age, who took up his father's business in Lanark. He died in 1756, transmitting a respectable property to his family of eleven children, of whom five were sons.

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From this time the history of the family is better known. John Glad­stane, third son of him who died in 1756, had the estate called Mid Toft-combs. He took in marriage Christian Taverner, and received with her a considerable property. She was of her husband's rank, being of that mid­dle folk who constitute the bone and sinew of England. From this mar­riage we have a fourth son, Thomas Glad­stone (for the name now takes this form), who was born just after our Washington, namely, on the 3rd of June, 1732, and lived to the year 1809. In him the Gladstonian qualities be­gan to express themselves strongly. He was a man of vigorous constitution, preserving his powers to the ripe age of seventy-seven, and lacking only a few months of witnessing the birth of that grandson who was to confer an imperishable luster on the ancestral name for all time to come.

Thomas Gladstone also showed the pow­- erful commercial instinct which has expressed itself in the thought and purpose of the family for more than a century and a half. He also had an adventurous spirit, held in check by that same prudential and rational restraint which ever marked the career of the statesman. Thomas Gladstone left his father's house when he was still a boy, and went to Leith, where he became, on his own responsibility, a grain merchant of distinction. He chose for his wife Helen Neilson, of Springfield, and by her became the father of sixteen children, of whom twelve came to adult years. The family instinct was strong upon him. The crowd that grew up around his hearth, instead of terrifying, only inspired him ; and he was able in due time to push out all of his progeny into honorable and useful careers.

The eldest son of this big group of hardy, practical Scotch-English children was John Gladstone, father of the subject of this study He was a native of Leith, and was born in 1763. It was the year of that treaty of Paris by which Great Britain obtained from France her vast territorial empire in America, and by which Spain gained, as if in trust for the possible republic of the United States, her almost limitless province of Louisiana. It was the third year of George III, and the fortieth of Louis XV of France.

John Gladstone, more than any of his predecessors, may be said to have created the fortunes of the family. He was a man of boundless but strictly practical activities. He began in business at first with his father at Leith, but was not destined to remain in that limited sphere. The work of a

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maltster was too simple and small for his ambitions. He remained with his father, however, until he was twenty-one years of age, and was then sent in a tentative way with a shipload of grain to Liverpool. The consignee was a certain Corrie, a grain merchant of that city. Here the world opened to the younger Gladstone in wider vision than ever before. The commer­cial spirit possessed him. On the wharves of the Mersey he saw men as trees walking. The merchant, Corrie, at once discovered in the young man the great qualities which he possessed; and John Gladstone responded to the overture, and became an assistant in the establishment of Corrie and Company.

In the scrapped-out biographies of John Gladstone an account is given of that event by which he first greatly distinguished himself in the commer­cial world. On a certain occasion, when the grain crops of Europe had failed and the supply in Liverpool was correspondingly short, John Gladstone was sent by the firm to the new United States to purchase there and send back as cheaply as possible twenty-four shiploads of grain. He undertook his mission with confidence; but on reaching New York and Philadelphia he found that there had been a short crop also on our side of the Atlantic, and that neither the accessible supply nor the price warranted the carrying out of his home instructions. To do so would be still further to involve the house which he represented.

It was a case in which responsibility had to be taken. The twenty-four ships were waiting to receive their cargoes. With remarkably good judg­ment young Gladstone turned about and, by an examination of current prices of produce in America and in Liverpool, purchased and filled his ships with such articles as bore the largest profit, returned to Liverpool, and rescued his employers from impending bankruptcy. He was thereupon made a member of the firm, under the title of Corrie, Gladstone, and Bradshaw.

The business of this house was thrust out in many directions. In the course of sixteen years the gentlemen Corrie and Bradshaw retired, or were bought out by John Gladstone; and the firm, by the admission of his brother Robert, became John Gladstone and Company. No other commer­cial house in the most commercial city of the world showed greater enter­prise. A trade was established with Russia, through the port of Riga. In the West Indies, and particularly in Demerara, trading stations were established. Gladstone was elected President of the West India Association of Merchants.

The remaining five brothers at Leith left the ancestral city and came to Liverpool, where they established themselves in various branches of trade. When the monopoly of the East India Company expired, in the year 1814, a ship of the house of Gladstone was the first private vessel to reach Calcutta.

At the close of the eighteenth century John Gladstone was thirty-seven

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years of age. His first wife died without children Shortly afterward he took in second marriage Ann Robertson, daughter of Andrew Robertson, of Stornoway, and from this marriage are descended the family of four sons and two daughters, of which William Ewart Gladstone was the fourth and last of the sons.

It should be remarked in this connection that the period just preceding the statesman's birth was that in which British commerce passed through the severest trial it has ever known. That commerce was the industrial expression of the naval supremacy of Great Britain. It was to destroy this supremacy that Napoleon did his utmost in establishing his system of Continental blockade. The declared motive of this system was to obliterate the commerce of England and to let her ships lie rotting on the sea. After Trafalgar it was the one great aim of Napoleon to ruin his enemy by shutting her out of the ports of Europe and America.

All of this bore hard on such a merchant trader as John Gladstone, but it also tended to bring out the full force of his character. There were times, about the year 1807, when it seemed that the Napoleonic system would prevail. In a single year the commerce of Liverpool fell off by a hundred and forty thousand tons. In such an emergency the merchants besought Parliament to cancel such acts as the so-called Orders in Council, to remove the restrictions on neutral trade, and in particular to open the way for the restoration of commerce with the United States and the ports of South America. Nor can it be doubted that had the petitions sent up to Parliament from the commercial cities of England been favorably entertained our second war with the mother country might have been obviated.

John Gladstone, having become wealthy, became an important factor in the politics of Liverpool. He was a conservative, as are nearly all mer­chants of all countries; for trade is timid, and money, the vehicle of trade, is more timid still. In the year 1812, an exciting political contest was held in Liverpool, in which Henry Brougham and the Radical candidate Creevey were defeated by the Conservatives Canning and Gascoyne. The result was attributed in considerable measure to the influence of Gladstone, who was henceforth recognized as one of Canning's powerful supporters. In course of time the rich merchant was himself made a member of Parliament, and then a baronet, by Sir Robert Peel, in 1845. He lived to the great age of eighty-eight, and died in the year 1851, living to see the premonitions of his greater son's ascendancy in the political history of England.

William Ewart Gladstone was born on the 29th of December, 1809. At the present time, all of the brothers and sisters except himself only have passed away. Captain John Neilson Gladstone died in 1863, and Robertson Gladstone in 1875. Sir Thomas Gladstone, Bart., died in 1889. The

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two daughters, Ann McKenzie and Helen Jane, remained unmarried to their death. The statesman exemplifies better than any of his brothers and sisters the great longevity of the family, as well as the extraordinary intel­lectual capacity and hardihood of the race.

Wealth is one of the foundations of British society. The poor do not fare well in England. The sons of the poor in our ancestral islands, as well as the sons of the poor on the Continent, find a difficult emergence from the hard environment which poverty, with its consequent obscurity, draws around them. Only in times of revolutionary tumult do the poor emerge in any part of Europe. The Gladstone family by the first quarter of the present century had, by the enterprise and successful adventure of the merchant John Gladstone, become distinguished for wealth. There was no longer any question that the children of the baronet might receive the best education and obtain the best opportunities in life.

We may mention here some efforts of the curious to connect the states­man with the nobility, and even the royalty, of England and Scotland. The family was, as we have said, of the middle class of the English. Nor does it appear that the Gladstones have themselves taken pains to find in their veins a strain of blood better than that of the common lot. It is claimed, however, that Andrew Robertson, of Stornoway, maternal grandfather of William Ewart Gladstone, was a descendant of Henry III, and also in some complex way of Robert Bruce. The line upward to this great origin in­cludes Lady Jane Beaufort, queen of James I of Scotland, who was in the line of the Bruce. Sir Bernard Burke has made it tolerably clear that the ancestry of Andrew Robertson runs up to this marriage of Lady Jane to King James. Lucy, one of the biographers of the statesman, preserves a note written by William Henry Gladstone in the year 1881, in which the writer says of his maternal grandmother, who was second daughter of Lord Braybrooke, that she was Mary Neville, through whom William Ewart Gladstone is connected with Lord Chatham, William Pitt, Lord Granville, and other notables of English history. Suffice it that, at the time of the birth of him who was so greatly to distinguish the ancestral name, the family of Gladstone, though of the middle class, had become distinguished some­what by remote and traditional kinship with the great, and much more by the honest acquisition of large wealth sufficient to remove from all the sons and daughters of Sir John Gladstone the necessity of personal exertion other than the stimulus of inborn ambitions, and all care as to the acquisi­tion of additional worldly fortune.

Thus, within two days of the end of the year 1809, we contemplate the birth of William Ewart Gladstone, youngest of the four sons of John Glad­stone, Bart. It was the beginning, in the very crisis of the disturbed and chaotic era, of a personal force which was to reach across almost the entire

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expanse of the greatest of the centuries, and to make itself distinguishable somewhat as an energy among the tremendous impulses of general causatior The very earliest impressions, other than the maternal, on the mind o the child Gladstone were those of commerce and politics. He was born in the very heart of the commercial world, at a time when the powerful forces of trade were extending into the political realm and beginning to modify in a large way the policies of States. We may thus discover, coincidently with the first stage of Gladstone's life, the reaction of the environment which sooner or later conduces in large measure to the character and am­bitions of every human being. Gladstone born under other conditions would have been some other than himself. While heredity had prepared him, history had prepared his place. The conjunction of the two has given the great personal result which we discover in him who has been, without controversy, the first public man of Great Britain in our age.

A few illustrative incidents have been preserved of the first years of this remarkable personage. When he was four years old he was taken by his mother to call on Hannah More. That distinguished woman gave him a little book, and he remembered the act and what she said to him—namely, that he had just come into the world, and she was just going out of it. This must have occurred in 1813. In the following year the child was taken by his father to Edinburgh at a time when the guns in the castle were fired in jubilation for the capture of Paris by the allies ; it was the first ab­dication of Napoleon. Gladstone to his old age remembered to have heard the windows shake when the great guns boomed.

Other proofs of his precocious memory are related. He has told us himself that when he was still a babe on the floor he took notice of the odd pattern of his nurse's dress, and remembered it always. This may be re­garded as the farthest luminous point discoverable by him by the backward look into the otherwise total oblivion of infancy. In like manner he was able to remember a circumstance which occurred when he was but three years old. This was the uproar and jubilee of the inhabitants of Liverpool on the occasion of the ratification of the election of George Canning to Parliament, in the latter part of 1812. The house of John Gladstone, in Rodney Street, was illuminated on that occasion, and the tumult in the neighborhood was so great as to excite the wondering interest of the child. The statesman had also a distinct recollection of Waterloo, and was wont

* The statesman, on his seventieth birthday, addressing a delegation of Liverpool people who had gone to Hawarden to congratulate him, said in a reminiscent way: " You have referred to my connection with Liverpool, and it has happened to me singularly enough to have the incidents of my personality, the association of my per­sonality, if I may so speak, curiously divided between the Scotch extraction, which is purely and absolutely Scotch as to every drop of blood in my veins, and, on the other hand, a nativity in Liverpool, which is the scene of my earliest recollections. And very early those recollections are ; for I remember, gentlemen, what none of you could possibly recollect: I remember the first election of Mr. Canning in Liverpool."

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to tell how a Welsh girl who served in the ancestral home in Liverpool used to boast that the Welsh, a million strong, under Sir Williams Wynn, had gone over to Spain " to fight Boney!" We may not forget in this con­nection that the boy Gladstone from the wharves of the Mersey might look across to the mountains of Wales, and that he gathered there from his first distinct impressions of natural scenery.

Besides these few glimpses of the child life of Gladstone, for which we are indebted to his own memory, there is little or nothing to relate of his first years other than that he ate and slept and grew and came to the age when his formal education must be undertaken. This was done when he reached his twelfth year. Already he had received from his mother the rudiments of knowledge. She was a Scotch mother, and the father was a Scotchman. That sufficed to insure strictness and conservatism and moral prudence in the Gladstone home.

Those who have considered carefully the characters of the father and mother discover in the statesman a happy union of the best elements of each. Gladstone's robustness, his physical strength, his mental energy, love of affairs, business capacity, willingness to work out a large part of his life over budgets and estimates, and his healthy half-commoner blood came from his father, the merchant, the burgher, the municipal magnate turned prac­tical politician, the member of Parliament, and possible baronet. But the premier's sympathy, susceptibility to impressions, cool enthusiasm, willing­ness to progress, but only from untenable to more tenable ground, and in general his affection and half-poetic dispositions were derived from the mother; and to her formative hand and will he also owed his instruction in the rudiments of learning.

It is not of record precisely to what point in his primary studies the boy had advanced when the age arrived for sending him away to school. The child was precocious to a degree. We know from absolute demon­stration that his abilities and attainments, even in early boyhood, were quite phenomenal. The broad-minded and discerning John Gladstone perceived the possibilities that were in his son's life and character, and became duly anxious to put in his way the best possible opportunities for education. There was a likelihood, a priori, that the cautious and deliberative merchant would make a conservative choice in the matter of a school so important to the methodical and successful development of his promising son.