The first Administration of Mr Gladstone now entered upon its fifth year of existence with the shadow of unpopularity deepening on its course. So many apprehensions had been aroused, such powerful interests harassed, that it might have seemed to Ministers that their only chance of conducting affairs towards the natural term of the Parliament lay in avoiding sensational enterprise in legislation and in allaying rather than rousing opposition.

Aliter visum! In a fatal hour for the Government the Prime Minister plunged once more into the troubled tide of Irish politics. Already he had prevailed to destroy the Irish Church and revolutionise the tenure of Irish landed property ; there remained a third question, the settlement of which he had in his electioneering speeches of 1868 declared to be essential to the conciliation of Irish disaffection. Perhaps in doing so he had yielded to the temptation, irresistible to less experienced orators, of casting rhetoric in a triple mould : it is difficult to assign any other reason for his having discovered in the state of Irish University Education a grievance more crying than the irreconcilable variance of the Protestant and Roman Catholic Churches in temporal matters. Although he can hardly have calculated on the complexity and multiplicity of opposition which was to be called into existence by the mere mention of this question in the Queen's Speech, it has ever been a characteristic of this remarkable statesman never to be so happy as when dragging hesitating and even reluctant followers through the turmoil of parliamentary war to an issue which they would fain avoid.