pictures Macaulay's New Zealander being taken
to the House of Lords and hearing learned lords and reverend prelates
lay down the canon that marriage is indissoluble by the law of England
and by the law of the church. But who, he might have asked, are those
two gentlemen listening so intently? Oh, these are two gentlemen whose
marriages were dissolved last year. And that other man? Oh, he was
divorced last week. And those three ladies? Oh, their marriages may in
all probability be dissolved in another year or two. Still this view of
the absurdity of existing practice did not make a convert.

As soon as the bill came down to the House of Commons Mr. Gladstone
hastened up to London in the dog-days. 'A companion in the railway
carriage,' he wrote to Mrs. Gladstone, 'more genial than congenial,
offered me his _Times_, and then brandy! This was followed by a proposal
to smoke, so that he had disabled me from objecting on personal
grounds.' Tobacco, brandy at odd hours, and the newspaper made a triple
abomination in a single dose, for none of the three was ever a favourite
article of his consumption. In London he found the counsels of his
friends by no means encouraging for the great fight on which he was
intent. They deprecated anything that would bring him into direct
collision with Lord Palmerston. They urged that violent opposition now
would be contrasted with his past silence, and with his own cabinet
responsibility for the very same proposal. Nothing would be intelligible
to the public, Lord Aberdeen said, beyond a 'carefully moderated
course.' But a carefully moderated course was the very last thing
possible to Mr. Gladstone when the flame was once kindled, and he fought
the bill with a holy wrath as vehement as the more worldly fury with
which Henry Fox, from very different motives, had fought the marriage
bill of 1753. The thought that stirred him was indicated in a phrase or
two to his wife at Hawarden: '_July 31._--Parliamentary affairs are very
black; the poor church gets deeper and deeper into the mire. I am to
speak to-night; it will do no good; and the fear grows upon me from year
to year that when I finally leave parliament, I shall not leave the
great question of state and church better, but perhaps even worse, than
I found it.'

VEHEMENT OPPOSITION

The discussion of the bill in the Commons occupied no fewer than
eighteen sittings, more than one of them, according to the standard of