elf and to many others whom I respect and love. I have to state to
you, as one of your constituents, that from this time I can place no
confidence in you as representative of the university of Oxford, or as a
public man.' Mr. Gladstone's protestations that church patronage would
be as safe in Lord Aberdeen's hands as in Lord Derby's; that his own
past history dispensed with the necessity of producing other assurances
of his own fidelity; that his assumption of office could not shake
it--all these were vain in face of the staring and flagrant fact that he
would henceforth be the intimate and partner in council of Lord John
Russell, the latitudinarian, the erastian, the appropriationist, the
despoiler; and worse still, of Molesworth, sometimes denounced as a
Socinian, sometimes as editor of the atheist Hobbes, but in either case
no fit person to dispense the church patronage of the duchy of
Lancaster. Only a degree less shocking was the thought of the power of
filling bishoprics and deaneries by a prime minister himself a
presbyterian. No guarantee that the member for Oxford might have taken
against aggression upon the church, or for the concession of her just
claims, was worth a feather when weighed against the mere act of a
coalition so deadly as this.

It was an awkward fact for Mr. Gladstone's canvassers that Lord Derby
had stated that his defeat was the result of a concert or combination
between the Peelites and other political parties. Mr. Gladstone himself
saw no reason why this should cause much soreness among his Oxford
supporters. 'No doubt,' he said, 'they will remember that I avowed
before and during the last election a wish to find the policy and
measures of the government such as would justify me in giving them my
support. That wish I sincerely entertained. But the main question was
whether the concert or combination alleged to have taken place for the
purpose of ejecting Lord Derby's government from office was fact or
fiction. I have not the slightest hesitation in stating to you that it
is a fiction. Evidence for the only presumption in its favour was
this--that we voted against the budget of Mr. Disraeli in strict
conformity with every principle of finance we had professed through our
political lives and with the policy of former finance ministers from the
time of Mr. Pitt, against the "new principles" and "new policies" which
Mr. Disraeli declared at Aylesbury his intention to submit to the House
of Comm