ABSTRACT
Of all the great Victorian careers, William Gladstone’s was the most remarkable. Gladstone made the rare journey from vigorous conservatism to vigorous liberalism. Of primary importance among the influences that led him to Liberalism was his placement in the ethnic geography of the British Isles. The ideas of Liberalism, indeed, were largely Scottish in origin. French ideas, especially the “Rights of Man,” had deeply influenced Scottish thought, and when young English Whig noblemen studied in Scottish universities in the nineteenth century—as many of them did—they were surrounded by the ideas of Scottish rational Liberalism, as expressed in such great organs as the Edinburgh Review, the voice of Whiggery. The representative system of government within its Church, hard-won in the Reformation, and the stubborn individualism that Calvinism inculcated in its members were both of the essence of Liberalism.
