those primitive times, inordinately long. In the hundred encounters
between Mr. Gladstone and Bethell, polished phrase barely hid
unchristian desire to retaliate and provoke. Bethell boldly taunted Mr.
Gladstone with insincerity. Mr. Gladstone, with a vivacity very like
downright anger, reproached Bethell with being a mere hewer of wood and
drawer of water to the cabinet who forced the bill into his charge; with
being disorderly and abusing the privileges of speech by accusations of
insincerity, 'which have not only proceeded from his mouth but gleamed
from those eloquent eyes of his, which have been continuously turned on
me for the last ten minutes, instead of being addressed to the chair.'
On every division those who affirmed the principle of the bill were at
least two to one. 'All we can do,' Mr. Gladstone wrote to his wife, 'is
to put shoulder to shoulder, and this, please God, we will do. Graham is
with us, much to my delight, and much too, let me add, to my surprise. I
am as thankful to be in parliament for this (almost) as I was for the
China vote.... Yesterday ten and a-half hours, rather angry; to-day with
pacification, but still tough and prolonged.' An unfriendly but not
wholly unveracious chronicler says of this ten hours' sitting (August
14) on a single clause: 'Including questions, explanations, and
interlocutory suggestions, Mr. Gladstone made nine-and-twenty speeches,
some of them of considerable length. Sometimes he was argumentative,
frequently ingenious and critical, often personal, and not less often
indignant at the alleged personality of others.'

He made no pretence of thinking the principle of divorce _a vinculo_
anything but an immense evil, but he still held himself free, if that
view were repudiated, to consider the legislative question of
dissolubility and its conditions. He resorted abundantly to what
Palmerston called 'the old standard set-up form of objecting to any
improvement, to say that it does not carry out all the improvements of
which the matter in hand is susceptible.' One of the complaints of which
he made most was the inequality in the bill between the respective
rights of husband and wife. 'It is the special and peculiar doctrines of
the Gospel,' he said, 'respecting the personal relation of every
Christian, whether man or woman, to the person of Christ, that form the
firm, the broad, the indestructible basis of the equality of the sexes
under the Christian law.' Again, 'in the