When the Conservatives returned to office in February 1874 it was clearly only a matter of time before they despatched the Endowed Schools Commission. How this should be done they were not wholly agreed and in the end they did it so clumsily as to bring some discredit on themselves. But that it was bound to be done few doubted. The Commission's existence had now become ‘a rather burning political question’. Indeed the reform of endowments had been so almost from the start. For this very reason Maria Grey was careful in 1871 not to give it too much prominence when it came to drafting the aims of her Women's Education Union. However it might have seemed at the beginning – and the Endowed Schools Bill, as we saw, was presented as more than a party measure – it had become one with a vengeance as soon as attempts were made to apply it. Then the Tory press in Bristol exclaimed against despotic powers conferred by ‘an obsequious or sleepy Parliament’, and in Exeter opened fire on ‘Liberal apologists of confiscation’, while in London the Tory peers defended Emanuel Hospital so fiercely that the Government was forced to retreat. ‘It took all Gladstone's strength to maintain the law’, Hobhouse said later.