he peculiar place in Mr. Gladstone's esteem and reverence of
the two statesmen under whose auspices he now first entered the
enchanted circle of public office. The promotion was a remarkable
stride. He was only five-and-twenty, his parliamentary existence had
barely covered two years, and he was wholly without powerful family
connection. 'You are aware,' Peel wrote to John Gladstone, 'of the
sacrifice I have made of personal feeling to public duty, in placing
your son in one of the most important offices--that of representative of
the colonial department in the House of Commons, and thus relinquishing
his valuable aid in my own immediate department. Wherever he may be
placed, he is sure to distinguish himself.'[68]

III

POSITION OF GOVERNMENT

Mr. Gladstone's first spell of office was little more than momentary.
The liberal majority, as has so often happened, was composite, but Peel
can hardly have supposed that the sections of which it was made up would
fail to coalesce, and coalesce pretty soon, for the irresistible object
of ejecting ministers who were liked by none of them, and through whose
repulse they could strike an avenging blow against the king. Ardent
subalterns like Mr. Gladstone took more vehement views. The majority at
once beat the government (supported by the group of Stanleyites,
fifty-three strong) in the contest for the Speaker's chair. Other
repulses followed. 'The division,' writes Mr. Gladstone to his father,
with the honourable warmth of the young party man, 'I need not say was a
disappointment to me; but it must have been much more so to those who
have ever thought well of the parliament. Our party mustered splendidly.
Some few, but very, very few, of the others appear to have kept away
through a sense of decency; they had not virtue enough to vote for the
man whom they knew to be incomparably the best, and against whom they
had no charge to bring. No more shameful act I think has been done by a
British House of Commons.'

Not many days after fervently deprecating a general resignation, an
ill-omened purpose of this very course actually flitted across the mind
of the young under-secretary himself. A scheme was on the anvil for the
education of the blacks in the West Indies, and a sudden apprehension
startled Mr. Gladstone, that his chief might devote public funds to all
varieties of denominational religious teaching. Any plan of