mpted to counteract them by narrow or flimsy
expedients.... We have proposed plans which will go some way
towards closing up many vexed financial questions.... While we have
sought to do justice to intelligence and skill as compared with
property--while we have sought to do justice to the great labouring
community by further extending their relief from indirect taxation,
we have not been guided by any desire to set one class against
another.--GLADSTONE (1853).

Mr. Gladstone began this year, so important both to himself and to the
country, with what he described as a short but active and pleasant visit
to Oxford. He stayed at Christ Church with Dr. Jacobson, of whom it was
observed that he always looked as if on the point of saying something
extremely piercing and shrewd, only it never came. He paid many calls,
dined at Oriel, had a luncheon and made a speech in the hall at Balliol;
passed busy days and brisk evenings, and filled up whatever spare
moments he could find or manufacture, with treasury papers, books on
taxation, consolidated annuities, and public accounts, alternating with
dips into Lamennais--the bold and passionate French mystic, fallen angel
of his church, most moving of all the spiritual tragedies of that day of
heroic idealists.

On February 3 he moved into the house of the chancellor of the exchequer
in that best known of all streets which is not a street, where he was
destined to pass some two and twenty of the forty-one years of the
public life that lay before him. He had a correspondence with Mr.
Disraeli, his predecessor, on the valuation of the furniture in the
official house. There was question, also, of the robe that passes down
under some law of exchange from one chancellor to another on an
apparently unsettled footing. The tone on this high concern was not
wholly amicable. Mr. Gladstone notes especially in his diary that he
wrote a draft of one of his letters on a Sunday, as being, I suppose,
the day most favourable to self-control; while Mr. Disraeli at last
suggests that Mr. Gladstone should really consult Sir Charles Wood, 'who
is at least a man of the world.' Such are the angers of celestial minds.

At an early cabinet (Feb. 5) he began the battle that lasted in various
shapes all the rest of his life. It was on a question of reducing the
force in the Pacific. 'Lord Aberdeen, Granville, Molesworth, and I were
for it. We failed.' What was the case for