regarded by his severe and strenuous opponent.

'The admiration of posterity,' Dr. Jeune wrote to Mr. Gladstone, 'would
be greatly increased if men hereafter could know what wisdom, what
firmness, what temper, what labour your success has required.' More than
this, it was notorious that Mr. Gladstone was bravely risking his seat.
This side of the matter Jeune made plain to him. 'Had I foreseen in
1847,' replied Mr. Gladstone (_Broadstairs_, Aug. 26, 1854), 'that
church controversies which I then hoped were on the decline, were really
about to assume a fiercer glare and a wider range than they had done
before, I should not have been presumptuous enough to face the
contingencies of such a seat at such a time.' As things stood he was
bound to hold on. With dauntless confidence that never failed him, he
was convinced that no long time would suffice to scatter the bugbears,
and the bill would be nothing but a source of strength to any one
standing in reputed connection with it. To Dr. Jeune when the battle was
over he expresses 'his warm sense of the great encouragement and solid
advantage which at every stage he had derived from his singularly ready
and able help.' To Jowett and Goldwin Smith he acknowledged a hardly
lower degree of obligation. The last twenty years, wrote a shrewd and
expert sage in 1866, 'have seen more improvement in the temper and
teaching of Oxford than the three centuries since the Reformation. This
has undoubtedly been vastly promoted by the Reform bill of 1854, or at
least by one enactment in it, the abolition of close fellowships, which
has done more for us than all the other enactments of the measure put
together.'[325] 'The indirect effects,' says the same writer in words of
pregnant praise, 'in stimulating the spirit of improvement among us,
have been no less important than the specific reforms enacted by
it.'[326]

III

ANOTHER FAR-REACHING CHANGE

Another of the most far-reaching changes of this era of reform affected
the civil service. J. S. Mill, then himself an official at the India
House, did not hesitate 'to hail the plan of throwing open the civil
service to competition as one of the greatest improvements in public
affairs ever proposed by a government.' On the system then reigning,
civil employment under the crown was in all the offices the result of
patronage, though in some, and those not the more important of them,
nomin