ILLIAM E. GLADSTONE supported with animation and per­sistency the administration of Sir Robert Peel. Strangely enough, on the very day on which the Corn Laws were finally abolished by the stratagem of the Conservatives, the ministry of Sir Robert was overthrown by an adverse vote in the House of Commons. While the debates were in progress relative to the repeal, an important incidental measure had been brought into the Commons by the ministry, to suppress certain outrages in Ireland. The starving people of that island were not sufficiently tame. Lawlessness, inspired of hunger, prevailed in many parts, and government conceived the project of suppress­ing it by force. The measure came to a vote in the House coincidently with the passage of the repeal bill by the Lords, and to the surprise of Sir Robert Peel was voted down by a large majority. The blow was so direct and significant that the premier at once placed his resignation in the hands of her majesty, who called Lord John Russell, leader of the Whig opposi­tion, to construct a new ministry.

Peel and the Conservatives went out of office and Gladstone with them. For a brief interval he absented himself from the Commons, and when the new election came around, the question then being approval or dis­approval of the late legislation on the educational affairs of Ireland, he pre­sented himself to the electors of Oxford University. That institution was at the time represented in one of its memberships by Sir Robert H. Inglis. The other seat might be contested. For this second seat, Gladstone appeared in a very spirited contest with the opposing contestant, Mr. Round. The latter had the advantage of being a thoroughly orthodox Tory. Mr. Glad­stone was sufficiently orthodox, but his conservatism had become somewhat doubtful—as evinced of late by his speeches and votes on the Maynooth College Bill and on the repeal of the Corn Laws. Both the candidates were men of ability, Gladstone being the superior. But he was handicapped with a certain distrust that he was no longer sound on some of the questions concerning which Oxford University was known to be grounded in stead­fastness and immutability.

In entering the contest for the right to represent the oldest and most scholarly university of Great Britain, Mr. Gladstone sent to the Oxford lectors the usual address of announcement. In this he must needs appear as an apologist for his recent political acts and tendencies. He frankly acknowledged that the incoming of new conditions in Great Britain had changed his views since he had written and published The State in its Rela-

150

tions with the Church. That event was now nearly ten years agone. The point at which he had veered from his former stand was as to the exclusive support of the State religion as a function of the government. He declared that the fight which he had made for this principle had proved abortive. In Great Britain there were many forms of religious faith. The condition had become so complicated that to single out even the national religion, which was indeed the true religion of England, and to make the support of that exclusive of all others was a policy no longer warranted in practice.

Referring to past conditions, and to the necessity that he had been under to make a choice, the speaker said : " The question remaining for me was, whether, aware of the opposition of the English people, I should set down as equal to nothing, in a matter primarily connected not with our own. but with their priesthood, the wishes of the people of Ireland ; and whether I should avail myself of the popular feeling in regard to Roman Catholics for the purpose of enforcing against them a system which we had ceased by common consent to enforce against Arians—a system above all of which 1 must say that it never can be conformable to policy, to justice, or even to decency, when it has become avowedly partial and one-sided in its application."

Perhaps this presentation of his cause was as strong as Mr. Gladstone was able to make it; but it was by no means satisfactory to the Oxford extremists. That constituency already had one of their own kind in the person of Sir Robert H. Inglis. To him Mr. Round, the third candidate, was hardly second in his allegiance to the old, and opposition to the new order in England. It was noted at the time that, while the opposition to Gladstone among the electors was loud and rather angry, the secular voice about the university and far beyond the time-honored precincts, finding utterance in the newspapers of the day, generally cried for Gladstone. The position taken by his advocates was that his allegiance to the Church of England was unshaken, that his fidelity at bottom to the Establishment could not be questioned; but that a statesman must before all things be practical. It was no longer practical to go to the extreme which had—as all confessed and knew—been so strongly supported by the candidate in his work on the Church and the State. That candidate at any rate was able and distinguished. He was one of the hardest-working parliamentarians of the epoch. He was honest; else he would not have taken his present position, to his so great hurt. It was no longer needed—so continued the apologists—that a statesman following abstract views should make himself and his cause impossible. A man could not always promote in practice his own philosophical opinions.

These views found echo far and wide, and as the canvass proceeded Gladstone gained on his competitor. It was noted that those high in authority and close to the government uttered good words for the coming man.

151

The London Times declared that Mr. Gladstone's election, while, unlike that of Mr. Round, it would send an important member to the House of Commons, would be alike honorable and valuable to Oxford University. The hope was added that no hesitancy or apathy among the electors might prevent so fortunate a result. The interest widened and became almost national.

Meanwhile, on the 23d of July, the queen dissolved Parliament. Six days afterward, the nomination of representatives for Oxford took place. The election was held in the Hall of Convocation at the university. More than thirty-eight hundred votes were presented at the polls. The excite­ment was intense, and the contest closes as between Gladstone and Round. The election of Sir R. H. Inglis had been conceded, and that gentleman received almost as many ballots as both the others. Gladstone led his opponent by one hundred and seventy-three votes, and thus became the junior representative of his alma mater in the Parliament of 1847.

The American reader at the close of the century must review with interest the liberalizing tendencies that were working in Great Britain in the fourth and fifth decades. Such liberalism as then began to prevail, however, must needs strike strangely on the American sense. How, for example, could that be called liberal which merely acknowledged that a citizen Jew in London was even as other men?

And what's his reason? I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions ? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is ? If you prick us, do we not bleed ? if you tickle us, do we not laugh ? aye, if you poison us, do we not die ?

This argument of Shylock’s, though put in the interrogative form, would seem to be unanswerable in all time and among all nations. But the Englishman of the first quarter of the nineteenth century did not assent to the humane theory of his greatest bard. The Jews were dis­paraged out of citizenship and almost out of property and life. Coin-cidently with the passage of the Reform Bill and with the introduction of a better policy toward Dissenters and Catholics it began to be acknowl­edged that even an Israelite is human. The restrictions against the race of Jacob began to relax, and in the election of 1S47, what should happen in the heart of London town but the election of the Baron Mayer Anselm Rothschild to the House of Commons! Certainly it was a marvelous thing that one of that race should be thought fit to represent a London constituency holding the principle that religion is a function of the State, and that no religion is authentic other than that incorporated in the Church founded and enforced by Henry VIII!

The Baron Mayer Anselm of the Red Shield was elected. But how could he serve? There was a statute demanding of him before his entrance

152

into the House that he take an oath of fidelity to the Church of England renouncing all others! He must swear "on the faith of a true Christian." Of course a man of pliant conscience might readily do a thing of this kind covering it up with the usual casuistry that it was merely pro forma ; but not so the baron. He was so dishonorable as to refuse to swear a lie, even for

admission to the British Parliament! Such stubbornness, though it might commend him to a heathen, must needs provoke the good. Lord John Russell, now at the head of the ministry, with that adroitness for which the was one of the most remarkable of men, sought to make a way with a resolution to the effect that Jews should be, and were, eligible to all offices and rights "to which Roman Catholics might attain." Already the way had been crookedly opened for Catholics to enter Parliament and to exercise

153

other public functions. Why should not the Jews go up by the same tor­tuous course ?

Though this proposition of the premier was a casuistical contrivance rather than an open avowal, it was even in that form antagonized by the Con­servative opposition. Sir R. H. Inglis, senior representative from Oxford, strongly opposed the resolution ; but his colleague, W. E. Gladstone, had now gone so far as to support it. He addressed the House with what was really an unanswerable argument. He began with the question as to what ground existed for the exclusion of a Jew more than for the exclusion of a citizen of any other class sharing in the deliberations of Parliament. He refuted the argumentum adprejudiciam to the effect that the British House of Commons was a Christian Parliament. Certainly it was a Christian Par­liament, and would always remain such. It could not be unchristianized by the addition of a Jew or Christianized by his exclusion. It was not to be expected that the time would ever arrive when a majority, or even a threatening minority, of the House would be or could be of non-Christian or unchristian character. The apprehension that the admission of a Jew to Parliament would draw down the wrath of heaven was merely an utterance 711 terrorem delivered to the simple.

The speaker went on to show that the admission of Jews to citizenship involved the right of the prejudiced race to aspire to the representative honor and prerogative. A member of the House must needs be a law­maker; but in that capacity he was the organ of a constituency. There was no reason why any member of a constituency should be excluded. As long as the constituencies continued to be Christian, so long must the British Parliament remain for all practical purposes as Christian as before. Moreover, the admission of Jews once granted, the irrational opposition to the measure must soon pass away. Such a prejudice could not be long supported. The motion of Lord John Russell was an expression of the common sense and good faith of the English people. It was the voice of justice—a voice not in opposition to. the Church of England and much less in opposition to Christianity as a system of faith and practice, but rather a measure in opposition to the continuance of prejudices on the score of race and religion. Certainly if the resolution should be adopted the Established Church should be on the alert to extend and confirm her influence in the State, to the end that the time-honored relations between the two might not be disturbed or broken. As for himself, he had foreseen that the former statute removing the disabilities of the Jews would lead logically to their admission to office in the State.

All this may in the retrospect seem reasonable enough. The American reader can hardly conceive of any answer to an argument so strongly buttressed with truth and humanity. We note with astonishment, however,

154

155

that in the course of the debate Mr. Gladstone was twitted with the asser­tion that if he had made his speech before the late election he would never have represented the University of Oxford in the House of Commons. And that was probably true ! In the conclusion of the discussion the reso­lution of Lord John Russell was carried; but the Baron Rothschild, refusing to avail himself of the tortuous method of getting into Parliament, would not take his seat. He would not accept an oath which was hateful alike to his faith and his honor. Nor did he finally enter the Commons until more than ten years afterward, when the oath, first falling into desuetude and then into contempt, was finally abrogated as to Jewish members.

While the life of Gladstone was thus winding on through the parlia­mentary history of the decade the Chartist agitation in England rose higher and higher. The British Chartists, carrying banners with the Lovett charter on them, went up and down the realm. The demand for the enlarge­ment and confirmation of English liberties was loudly echoed in many parts. The reader should remember that this agitation was a part of the conti­nental movement which resulted in the Revolution of 1848. Almost every nation in Europe was shaken to its center. England, as usual in such times of upheaval, was less disturbed than the rest; but the excitement was suffi­cient to alarm the existing order not a little.

In some parts of the country there were serious outbreaks. Mass meetings, bonfires, processions, and declamations were the order of the day. At one time the people rushed by thousands into Trafalgar Square. Glas­gow was the scene of a riot, which was put down under fire by the military. In Edinburgh and Manchester there were similar scenes ; but in these cities, as in most other places, there was little bloodshed. On the 10th of April, 1848, a great throng, numbering more than twenty thousand, gathered on Kennington Common. The defense, however, had been intrusted to the Duke of Wellington, under whom two hundred thousand militiamen were enrolled. It was apprehended that the insurrection of the people might proceed as far as violent revolt. Those who claimed to be the champions of law and order easily held the ascendant. The municipal combined with the military arm to overawe the Chartists, and the latter were effectually cowed. They had prepared the largest petition which had thus far been known in the annals of mankind, and this petition they would bear with the pomp of thousands to the doors of Parliament. The existing order sought to make the enormous business ridiculous, and, having the organs of public opinion, well-nigh succeeded in doing so. Nor may we well pass from this episode without noting the fact that in the enrollment of special constables to act in the preservation of the peace at London, among hundreds of other conspicuous names appear those of Louis Napoleon Bona­parte, destined in less than a quadrennium to make himself emperor of the

156

French, and William Ewart Gladstone, in like manner appointed to a con­spicuous place in the history of the succeeding quarter of a century.

However successful the ministry of Lord John Russell may have been in confronting the dangers of this troublous period it soon fell into extreme perils. The worst evil that came at this juncture was a deficit of more than two millions of pounds in the treasury. We may here observe, in a philo­sophical way, and without much reference to current conditions in our own country, that the immediate effects of free trade and protection on the introduction of the, one or the other as a State policy are sufficiently remarkable. That State which turns from free trade to protection enters at once upon a period of ostensible prosperity as it respects national finances. The State that turns from protection toward free trade gets itself, for a time, into a strait place for the means with which to uphold what is called the national credit and to maintain a respectable balance in the treasury. We do not here enter into the remote or ultimate results of the two systems, but speak only of the temporary stimulus afforded by the one and the depres­sion likely to follow the adoption of the other.

In 1848 England may be regarded as having established herself on the basis of free trade. For the time being she suffered hardship on account of it. The deficit was alarming. The Chancellor of the Exchequer recom­mended an increase of taxation. He would have the income tax, to which Sir Robert Peel had resorted, not only continued for five years, but increased from seven pence to a shilling the pound. The measure proposed reached only the incomes of Great Britain. As to Ireland, that country had none—at least so few that it was deemed expedient not to carry the tax across the Channel.

Such a proposition must needs excite furious debate. No other thing, not even life, will defend itself like property. The "moneyed interests sprang up full armed. The representatives of the landed aristocracy cried out against government, declaring that the deficit and the woeful condition of the whole financial system were the necessary and inevitable results of that heretical free trade which had been adopted along with the overthrow of the time honored system of Great Britain. The peculiar character of these reflections obliged Sir Robert Peel, leader of the opposition, to go over to the support of the ministry, for it had been the work of his ministry to abolish the Corn Laws. It was as though Senator Sherman should have supported the financial policy of the second administration of Cleveland— as he must needs do in self-defense. The debate was hot. The eccentric and brilliant Disraeli threw himself into the arena to answer Sir Robert Peel. His sarcasm flew like venom. He declared that, as to himself, he might be regarded as a free trader, but that there was a difference between a free trader and a freebooter! The latter was the proper office and designation

157

of the Manchester school of economists. He held up a copy of the Blue Book containing the ministerial statistics prepared by the Committee on Imports, declaring that that book he considered the greatest work of imagination produced in the nineteenth century! The effect of these sallies was immense. The delight of the Conservatives was unbounded on behold­ing Sir Robert Peel thus impaled. Some one must of necessity come to the rescue, and that some one was Gladstone.

He had every motive for replying. In the first place his friend and leader, Sir Robert Peel, had been assailed. In the next place the policy of freeing the manufacturing interests and commerce from the burden imposed by the Corn Laws was challenged, as if that policy should be undone. Thirdly, a leader admired by the landed aristocracy and wholly acceptable thereto—brilliant, courageous, and vindictive—had appeared, as if to deny the right of any but himself to be first in the Parliament of Great Britain. Gladstone knew on entering the debate, and acknowledged in his intro­ductory paragraphs, that he could not meet his sarcastic and wary antagonist on his chosen plane of bitter wit and stinging repartee; but he was willing to argue the question and to defend the policy of the Peel administration.

That administration he proceeded to consider in the light of the facts. His appeal was to statistics. He adduced figures in abundance to show that, on the whole, Great Britain was prosperous, or at least was beginning to prosper, from the abrogation of the old and the substitution of a new code of economics. He pointed out that the reversal of this policy, or the attempted reversal of it, by a vote of a majority of the House against the Income Tax Bill could but prove disastrous. Such a course would imply vacillation, uncertainty. It would imply ignorance of the facts. It would tend to show that the continental disturbances of the year, so terrible in Belgium and France and Germany, were working also their pernicious influ­ence in Great Britain—a thing to be deprecated by all patriots. As for himself, he did not doubt that the British Parliament would show itself worthy of its predecessors. He did not doubt that the general will of the nation would be sustained. He did not doubt that while European society was shaken and in some parts reduced to chaos England would remain as firm as ever. Social order should be upheld. Trade should be protected and confirmed. Public employments should be made pure. Conscience, more than party, should be followed in such an era of disturbance and danger. Parliament, acting with moderation and prudence, should show its devotion to English institutions. Those institutions would still survive to bless the coming times. Great Britain should not yield to the European turmoil.—On the whole the effect of these pacific and conservative utter­ances was hardly less marked than had been the epigrams of Disraeli. The measure of the income tax for three years was carried through Parlia-

158

ment by a substantial majority, and the policy of free trade emphatically confirmed.

We have just remarked the distracted condition prevailing in Europe in the year 1848. Nothing like it had been witnessed since the era of the French Revolution. The Citizen King of the French was readily dismissed from further service. The revolution spread into Belgium and Spain and

Italy and far beyond the Rhine. Chartism in England was the correlated circumstance. The government of Great Britain must needs be antirevo- lutionary. Victoria and the late King of the French had been at one. The Chartist leaders found that the overturning of political abuses was a much more difficult task than it had been with the revolutionists on the Conti- nent. The insurrections in Paris, Berlin, and Brussels had easily succeed but that in London could not succeed—except by the tedious processes of

159

history. It is not in the nature of England to yield of a sudden to any­thing. Her structure will not permit it. That structure has been wrought by centuries of evolution and increase. On it the Conqueror used his battle-ax more than eight centuries ago. On it rang the swords of the Plantagenets. The war hammers of York and Lancaster resounded on bulwark and buttress. Victoria had now added grace and womanhood ; the coping stones were not without glory. At the middle of our century English liberty was still a crude thing, and in many respects a misnomer ; but it was worth having.

So England would not revolutionize under the clamor of Chartism. Parliament became reformatory by littles. There was some reform and some adjustment, after the British manner. The Irish agitators—O'Connell, O'Brien, Meagher, Duffy, and Mitchel—shot into the sky of agitation, but went away like meteors. There was persecution, false trials, false convictions, and some hanging, which would have been beheading and quartering if the sentences of the courts could have been carried out.

In the midst of all this two characters emerged, one of which it is the business of this narrative to follow to the end. The other was that fantas­tic Hebrew, Benjamin Disraeli, who, from beginning as the butt of the House of Commons, rose more and more to the rank of leadership. This remarkable personage had entered Parliament as a Radical. On account of his quaint apparel, loud ways, and his mixation of peacock and jackdaw he had been hooted down on the occasion of his maiden speech. He had persevered, however, against all kinds of prejudice, from the age-long prejudice of race to the gadfly prejudice of mere personalities. More and more he gained on the contempt with which he was first assailed. He drifted over to the Conservative benches of the House. He watched his opportunity, and that opportunity came in his debate with Peel. He sprang open like an automatic knife, and cut his way to the ministerial heart. Henceforth, to the day of his death, he was always the idol of the old landed aristocracy of Great Britain and of her majesty the queen.

We have referred to the many important measures that arose at this juncture in Parliament. Among these was the question of revising the navigation laws. The scheme for doing so was prepared by Labouchere, President of the Board of Trade. It grew out of the abrogation of the restrictions that had so long existed on English industry and commerce. Making trade free implied the opening of ocean navigation on terms of equality for every sort of merchandise. The proposed law reserved for the crown the prerogative of restricting the commercial intercourse with foreign nations when such a course should be suggested by the safety or the interest of the State. The measure also included a concession to the. British colonies of opening their coast trade on terms of equality to foreign

160

merchantmen. Finally the act provided for the institution of a Depart­ment of the Marine in the government, at the head of which was to be plated one of the lords of the admiralty. All of this seemed natural and inevitable to the Liberals, with whom Gladstone had now begun to act; but it seemed odious to the Conservatives of the old school. The opposition

threw every possible objection in speech and obstacle in politics in the way of the passage of the measure.

It devolved on William E. Gladstone more than any other to defend the measure of the government. Though not a minister, he must act with the ministry as the lieutenant of Sir Robert Peel, and indeed in the promotion of his own views. In the course of the debate he delivered one of his principal parliamentary orations. It was on the 29th of May, 1840, that he

161

addressed the House on the subject. His burden was to establish the practicability and desirability for repealing the current marine code and instituting another system of commerce on the seas.' In the outset, he admitted that the project of the government was not unexceptionable. It was subject to criticism. Such admission had now become a part of the Gladstonian method. It accorded well with his temperament to allow much in his arguments in order to establish or suggest that slow and con­servative progress in affairs without noticing which it is impossible to understand and interpret his career.

He thought in this instance that government had been too precipitant. Slower methods would have been more sure. In one passage he laid, in part, the foundation of what was destined to be an almost lifelong dislike on the part of the queen. Observe that all sovereigns desire the enlarge­ment and confirmation of their prerogatives. They seem to think—that is, they flatter themselves into thinking—that the interests of their subjects will be best promoted by increasing the power of the crown; this in the face of the fact that history, if she have wrought at any one problem for centuries, has been steadily engaged in the work of reducing—as she will ultimately extinguish—the prerogatives of all crowns whatsoever.

The new Navigation Bill contained a clause conferring on her majesty a large discretionary power as to the rules regulating foreign commerce. This part of the measure Gladstone opposed. He thought that there was a great objection to conferring such a power on government. Even though the queen be surrounded by the privy council, her government should not be empowered to act in the proposed legislative capacity. For himself, he should not concede such an enlargement of the regal prerogatives. No doubt it had been better if the ministerial measure had been less radical. The proposed legislation seemed to him to abolish too much of the past for the mere pleasure of instituting the untried in its place. He also called attention to what he considered the unwise provision by which the coasting trade was excluded from the general scheme. In this part of the debate he hinted at the intercommercial relations between England and America. He said in words that it would be well to admit free the American merchant­men, if our country would in turn do the same for British ships. In one strong and courageous passage he declared his preference for such navigation laws as would make the high seas as free for all innocent commerce as are the winds and tides. For his part, he hoped to live to see such a, time; and he hoped also that Great Britain would lead the way to the end that the ocean might become as free as the land.

It became evident that the bill of the President of the Board of Trade a majority in its favor; but the opposition was active, and the measure at length went over to the next year. It then came to a direct issue.

162

Gladstone spoke a second time on the proposed act in the session of 1849. He again upheld the ministry, pointing out, however, such defects in the governmental measures as he discovered. He again approached the question from the side of facts and figures. The year that had elapsed enabled him to show the House that the relaxation of the former maritime code had already produced a favorable result. The prophecies of the opposition, made in an academic way, had not been verified. The carrying trade of England had within the last twelvemonth considerably increased. If the ship owners and shipbuilders had been or should be injured by the passage of the Navigation Act, then the principle of compensation might be judiciously applied. For his own part he would set an example of free commerce. He would not proceed tentatively and by reciprocity only, but actually and openly. England might recognize the favorable legislation of foreign States; but England should nevertheless go forward on her own lines of progress and expansion. He did not believe that conditional and experimental legislation was wise under existing conditions. He criticized again the part of the act which related to the coasting trade of Great Britain. Government might well declare the coasting trade open to America, and America would come to see the advantage of a correlative measure for herself. He did not doubt that Australia, Canada, and India were favorable to a repeal of the navigation laws. On the whole, he pre­ferred that the clause relating to the coasting trade should be stricken out; but he was willing, if it should be deemed necessary, to support the bill as a whole. The fears of the opposition had little ground. Some or the speakers had called the proposed act a second horse of Troy about to hauled in through the walls. There was no danger of such an apparition. Vague prophecies of harm to come were born of the imagination, would never take corporeal form. Great Britain had a destiny which un Providence she would fulfill, all evil prognostications to the contrary no withstanding.

Meanwhile the Commission on Customs made a report which tended to confirm Gladstone's contention with regard to the part of the bill relating to the coasting trade. Seeing that the revenue would be endangered, the ministry agreed to modify the act in the direction indicated by Gladstone. Henry Labouchere changed the bill in about ten particulars, and Gladstone though not wholly satisfied and though unwilling himself to offer a substi- tute for the whole, agreed to support the modified measure.

This concession on the part of the President of the Board of Trade and this pliancy on the part of Gladstone gave opportunity for another out- burst by the sarcastic and imaginative Disraeli. He came to the attack in one of his best moods. He called attention of the House to the retreat of Labouchere and the complacency of Gladstone. The conduct of the two

163

in making supposititious sacrifices of personal opinion before the public and for the ostensible good of the country, reminded him of that day in the French Revolution when the priests and nobles marching together threw off their miters and coronets, making believe that they were at one not only with each other, but with the third estate and all mankind. That day had passed into history under the name of the Day of Dupes ! It was to be hoped that the coquetting and jowling of statesmen in the British Parlia­ment would not too vividly recall to memory the historical Day of Dupes. The speaker declared that the bill was already in a paralytic condition. He called attention, in the manner of all opposition speakers, to the distressed state of the country. The evil day had come through the precipitancy and recklessness of government—a course by which the best interests of the people had been sacrificed. Persistency in such a course must imperil, if it had not already imperiled, the institutions of the empire. He paid his respects in particular to Mr. Gladstone for trying to make an impossible explanation of his course with respect to pending legislation. Even the pledges of that gentleman had not been fulfilled. After making his argument, he had refused to follow his own deductions. His present atti­tude was that of total inconsistency, etc. The ministry did not indeed, according to Mr. Disraeli, care for Mr. Gladstone, except to use him as an instrument of its purpose, and then to cast him overboard as an obstacle.

Mr. Gladstone, thus criticized, replied with much success. He denied that he had failed in the matter of his pledges. He appealed to the House to verify the assertion that he had in the beginning of the discussion openly reserved to himself the privilege of acting on his own judgment as to the various features of the pending act. He thought the measure of the government one of great importance, and notwithstanding many of his per­sonal views he was supporting that measure as likely to be of advantage to his country. Perhaps his concessive attitude to the interests of the country, even as against himself, was the thing which had roused the sarcastic spirit ot the gentleman on the other side. That gentleman would perhaps not hesitate to take advantage of one who was conscientiously following the train of duty provided thereby he might exercise his brilliant wit. Free trade might be made a subject of sarcasm, but that policy nevertheless had by the goodness of Providence exercised a marked and immeasurable influence for good on the destinies of Great Britain.

Thus with debate and counter debate the question finally came to an issue, and in June of 1849 the bill was passed. The vote showed that the ministry, supported by Mr. Gladstone and others of independent turn, was still upheld by a good working majority.