In later years Manning's strenuous advocacy of the claims of the working classes, and his declaration that "every man has a right to work or to bread" led to his being denounced as a Social ist. That he was such he denied more than once (Lemire, Le Cardinal Manning et son action sociale, Paris, 1893, p. 21o), nor was he ever a Socialist in principle ; but he favoured some of the methods of Socialism, because they alone seemed to him practi cally to meet the case of that pressing poverty which appealed to his heart. He took a leading part in the settlement of the dockers' strike in the autumn of 1889, and his patient and effectual action on this and on similar occasions secured for him the esteem and affection of great numbers of working men, so that his death on Jan. 14, 1892, and his funeral a week later, were the occasion for a remarkable demonstration. The Cathedral at Westminster is his joint memorial with his predecessor, Cardinal Wiseman.
Preeminently Manning was a devout ecclesiastic, a "great priest"; and his sermons, both Anglican and Catholic, are marked by fervour and dignity, by a conviction of his own authoritative mission as preacher, and by an eloquent insistence on considera tions such as warm the heart and bend the will rather than on such as force the intellect to assent. But many of his instincts were those of a statesman, a diplomatist, a man of the world, even of a business man; and herein lay, at least in part, the secret of his influence and success. In the later years of his life especially he showed that he loved righteousness and hated iniquity, and that he realized as clearly as any one that the ser vice of God was incomplete without the service of man.
The publication in 1896 of Manning's Life, by Edward Purcell, with its very frank revelation of character was the occasion for some con troversy on the ethics of biography. Edward Purcell was a Roman
Catholic journalist, to whom Manning, late in life, had entrusted, rather by way of charitable bequest, his private diaries and other confidential papers. It thus came to pass that in Purcell's voluminous biography much that was obviously never intended for the public eye was, perhaps inadvertently, printed, together with a good deal of ungenerous comment. The facts disclosed which mainly attracted atten tion were: (I) that Manning, while yet formally an Anglican, and while publicly and privately dissuading others from joining the Roman Catholic Church, was yet within a little convinced that it was his own duty and destiny to take that step himself ; (2) that he was continually intriguing at the back-stairs of the Vatican for the furtherance of his own views as to what was desirable in matters ecclesiastical ; (3) that his relations with Newman were very unfriendly ; and (4) that, while for the most part he exhibited towards his own clergy a frigid and masterful demeanour, he held privately very cordial relations with men of diverse religions or of no theological beliefs at all. And certainly Manning does betray in these autobiographical fragments an unheroic sensitiveness to the verdict of posterity on his career. But independent critics (among whom may specially be named Francois de Pressense) held that Manning came well through the ordeal, and that Purcell's Life had great value as an unintentionally frank revelation of character. See also sketches by J. E. C. Bodley, Cardinal Manning (and other essays) (1912) ; Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians (1918) ; Shane Leslie's Henry Edward Manning, His Life and Labours (1921), in which Purcell is supplemented by correspondence not before used, and the Cardinal's letters are sympathetically interpreted.