of the errors they may since have committed or in alleviation of their sentence. Past services, however great, dwell but little in the memory of a people. Lord Grey who had carried the Reform Act of 1832 was shipwrecked in a couple of years, and never returned to public life. Sir Robert Peel had barely time to carry the repeal of the Corn Laws in that Parliament which had borne him triumphantly into power, when his doom too was sealed. Mr. Gladstone and his colleagues will be remembered in history as the successful authors of five or six measures of first-rate legislative importance-the Disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, the Irish Land Act, the Abolition of Purchase in the Army, the Education Act, the Judicature Act, and the Ballot Act. Two of their minor measures, which exposed them to great odium and misrepresentation, were designed, and well designed, to put a check on drunkenness and debauchery. These measures, as a whole, are their noblest monument. Fiercely debated at the time, there is not one of them which even the strongest antagonists of these Bills would now obliterate from the Statute-book, to bring back the former state of things. On the contrary, it is a part of the good fortune of the Government which has just taken office that the ground has been cleared for them by the labours of their adversaries. Every other Tory Government for the last fifty years has had to confront some momentous question, which could not be carried without a defeat or surrender of their most cherished principles, but which had to be carried nevertheless by the irresistible impulse of time and the national will. Lord Liverpool, before he died, saw his Government divided and broken up by the Catholic Question, which a few years later the Duke of Wellington had to carry. The Duke of Wellington was met and hurled from power by the question of Parliamentary Reform. Sir Robert Peel in 1835 was at once shipwrecked on the fatal Appropriation of the Irish Church Revenue; and in 1841 at the head of one of the most powerful Governments of this century he had to accept, and at last to adopt, the victorious principles of Free Trade. Mr. Disraeli himself in 1866 found the question of Parliamentary Reform in his way, and had, at the sacrifice of several of his colleagues and all his principles, to deal with it and establish household suffrage. Of all these great legislative demands, or of anything resembling them, there is at this moment no trace. There is no lion in the path. These questions have all been settled on Whig principles, and chiefly by Whig Ministers. The Tories succeed to an unincumbered estate. On the one hand the Liberal party is weakened by the completeness of

its own achievements: on the other, the party of stability is strengthened by the absence of fresh objects of change.

No contrast can be more striking than that which suggests itself to the memory between the state of affairs in 1841, when Sir Robert Peel took office at the head of a Conservative majority, and the state of affairs in 1874, when the Tory party has recovered its union and regained its strength, under the man who mainly contributed in 1846 to break it up and destroy it. In 1841 the greatest distress prevailed throughout the manufacturing districts, and disturbances followed distress; even Wales was in a state of partial insurrection; the AntiCorn Law League had just been formed, and continued its career of agitation; the state of the finances was deplorablea deficit of two millions and a half, to be supplied only by the income tax; we had a boundary dispute with the United States, which might at any moment become a quarrel; in Asia, the British arms had, for the first time in history, sustained at Cabul a frightful disaster, which had shaken our power in India to its foundations; and in China we were engaged in war with inadequate means and a very imperfect knowledge of the coasts, the country, and the people. Yet, great as these embarrassments were, Sir Robert Peel declared that a greater difficulty than all these was the state of Ireland. If the Ministry of Mr. Gladstone has been dismissed from office, at least it retires with the proud satisfaction that its successors have no similar difficulties or perils to encounter. Never was the industry and prosperity of the country greater, and indeed the chief danger for the future lies rather in an excess of the profits of labour; the social peace of the United Kingdom is unbroken; there is no formidable subject of agitation; the revenue is overflowing, insomuch that the chief topic of discussion appears to be, what is to be done with the surplus of next year? with the United States a question far more irritating than the North-east boundary has been settled, and our relations are amicable; in India peace is secure, and although a calamity not attributable to any act of man afflicts a great portion of Bengal, measures worthy of a great and civilised Power have been taken to lessen its frightful consequences; throughout the rest of the world we are at peace, for the Ashantee expedition has been successfully terminated by the means judiciously provided by the late Cabinet; and we speak with knowledge and authority when we declare that the new Administration received on its accession to office from all the States and Powers with which we have relations the strongest assurances that language could convey of their respect and con

sideration for this country-from none more than from that Potentate whose only daughter has just taken her place in the Royal Family of England and in the affections of the British people. So that, entangled by no foreign alliances, and threatened by no hostile combination or national weakness, there never was a moment at which Great Britain occupied a more influential position in the world. To these results Mr. Gladstone and his colleagues are entitled to point; for if other Ministers have fallen in the hour of defeat, impoverishment, and depression, they at least have laid down their offices while the tide of prosperity, which they had contributed to raise and direct, is still brimming to the banks, and when the nation has reached perhaps the highest pitch of power to which it had ever attained. It is certainly one of the most singular occurrences in history, that a Ministry which has had the good fortune to govern for five years with uninterrupted success, should at the end of that time be called upon to undergo the sentence usually inflicted on incapacity and failure.

In 1868, the Liberal party, which at that time embraced a large majority of the electors of the United Kingdom, roused from apathy by the Fenian conspiracy, resolved to remove, if possible, the last remains of intolerance or inequality which gave a pretext to Irish discontent. Some time before, Mr. Bright had, in one of the most eloquent and emphatic of his harangues, conjured the leaders of either party in the House of Commons to forget their differences, to come down from their high places, and to apply themselves with singleness of purpose to remove from this Empire the opprobrium, the weakness, the danger of Irish disaffection, by a full and entire concession of justice and remedial measures to Ireland. To frame and carry these measures the people of England could never, at any period of their history, have found an abler minister than Mr. Gladstone. He is earnest, enterprising, eloquent, enthusiastic, with a command of legislative detail and resource which has never been surpassed in Parliament. Mr. Bright himself was associated with him in the task; and it must be added that they found in Mr. Chichester Fortescue a most able lieutenant to second their undertaking-an Irish Protestant gentleman, perfectly possessed of that personal and practical knowledge of Ireland in which Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Bright were deficient, and prepared to make the largest concessions to the 'ideas' of his fellow-countrymen on the questions of religion, education, and land-tenure. The British nation, ardently desiring that no measure of justice should be withheld from Ireland, even at the cost of principles

dear to ourselves, and placing entire faith in Mr. Gladstone and his colleagues, established him firmly in power with an enormous majority. The Ministry performed with energy and ability the arduous task it had undertaken. The Irish Church was disestablished without any injury to vested interests. An Irish land bill was passed which extended the principle of Ulster tenant-right to the whole island. As measures for the settlement of the questions of Irish Church and Land, nothing could be more ingenious, effective, and complete, and they have removed a great stumbling-block from the path of all English statesmen. But as measures to secure the loyalty and gratitude of Ireland, these Acts have had exactly the same fate as all the remedial measures England has consented to adopt in the last hundred years. They have not effectually conciliated the Irish people, though they have removed for ever what were regarded as badges of conquest and causes of disaffection. These great Acts were, however, followed by a more open defiance on the part of the Roman Catholic clergy, and by a renewal or continuance of agrarian crimes which had to be checked by restrictive measures of police. The message of peace was answered by a cry for national independence, of which Mr. Chichester Fortescue, by a signal display of national ingratitude, became the first victim. These events, or what was known of them, were not thrown away on the English people. Whatever might be thought of the principle of these measures, for some of which the Liberal party had contended for forty years, it became apparent that the results were not what we had fondly anticipated, and might even become dangerous hereafter. And when the farthest limit of concession was reached in the University Bill of last session, the House of Commons rejected the measure, and the Irish policy of the Government came to an end.

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In an article of this Review entitled The Session and its Sequel,' which appeared in October 1867, a year before the formation of Mr. Gladstone's Ministry, all these great objects of the future policy of a Reformed Parliament were pointed out-and no wonder, for the article, remarkable in itself, was more remarkable as the expression of the views of the anonymous author of it. He declared that as regards public education, we had become sensible of partial frustration and 'immense deficiency;' and that our condition was like that of an African traveller who encamps in a dry river-bed, from which he is driven by a sudden torrent from the hills: Par

* Ed. Review, vol. cxxvi. p. 579.

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liament had not yet had courage to face that question. He added that the organisation of the army cries aloud for the 'most vigorous handling.' He avowed that the absolute political freedom of the colonies should now be followed by a very great increase in their own responsibility for military defence, especially in North America: and above all he proclaimed that as to the heavier work for Ireland, it was not ' even begun :' that the too familiar names Irish Education, Irish Church, Irish Land' weighed upon us; and that the very principle on which Ireland is to be governed has not 'been determined.' Remarkable words, indicating as they did, the definite and well-formed purposes of the future government, a year before it was constituted: words, not less remarkable if they be now compared with its past performances. A great measure of Education has been passed. The organisation of the army has been vigorously handled. The troops have been withdrawn from the colonies. The Irish Church and Irish Land have been dealt with; but after all, the very principle on which Ireland is to be governed has not been determined, for the bitterest insults which have been offered to the Irish policy of the late Ministry proceeded from the Irish themselves. It was the defection of the Irish which caused the rejection of the University Bill, though we do not believe that any power or skill could have forced that measure through Parliament. And at the General Election Ireland has sent to the House of Commons between fifty and sixty Home Rulers, whom Mr. Gladstone would, under any circumstances, have been sorry to number among his followers, and who must, in truth, have proved his worst enemies. They would, in short, have treated him precisely as the electors of Louth treated Mr. Chichester Fortescue. We are compelled, then, by the evidence of facts to recognise the truth that although Mr. Gladstone's policy to Ireland was conceived and carried on in the most generous and liberal spirit, with the aid of a Roman Catholic Irish Chancellor and several Roman Catholic members of the administration, and although Mr. Gladstone's own views of the claims of the Catholic hierarchy are perhaps the most favourable ever entertained by an English Minister, he has not been more successful than his predecessors in discovering the principle on which Ireland is to be governed, and he has left the great problem still unsolved.

There is no point in the wide but indistinct field of what Mr. Disraeli calls his policy, which excites in us greater interest and curiosity than that which concerns his relations with Ireland.