st in a county, neutral in a small town,
free trader in a large one. He was for Maynooth in Ireland, and against
it in Scotland. Mr. Disraeli did his best to mystify the agricultural
elector by phrases about set-offs and compensations and relief of
burdens, 'seeming to loom in the future.' He rang the changes on
mysterious new principles of taxation, but what they were to be, he did
not disclose. The great change since 1846 was that the working-class had
become strenuous free traders. They had in earlier times never been
really convinced when Cobden and Bright assured them that no fall in
wages would follow the promised fall in the price of food. It was the
experience of six years that convinced them. England alone had gone
unhurt and unsinged through the fiery furnace of 1848, and nobody
doubted that the stability of her institutions and the unity of her
people were due to the repeal of bad laws, believed to raise the price
of bread to the toilers in order to raise rents for territorial idlers.

AGAIN ELECTED FOR OXFORD

Long before the dissolution, it was certain that Mr. Gladstone would
have to fight for his seat. His letter to the Scotch bishop (see above,
p. 384), his vote for the Jews, his tenacity and vehemence in resisting
the bill against the pope,--the two last exhibitions in open defiance of
solemn resolutions of the university convocation itself,--had alienated
some friends and inflamed all his enemies. Half a score of the Heads
induced Dr. Marsham, the warden of Merton, to come out. In private
qualities the warden was one of the most excellent of men, and the
accident of his opposition to Mr. Gladstone is no reason why we should
recall transient electioneering railleries against a forgotten worthy.
The political addresses of his friends depict him. They applaud his
sound and manly consistency of principle and his sober attachment to the
reformed church of England, and they dwell with zest on the goodness of
his heart. The issue, as they put it, was simple: 'At a time when the
stability of the protestant succession, the authority of a protestant
Queen, and even the Christianity of the national character, have been
rudely assailed by Rome on one side, and on the other by democratic
associations directed against the union of the Christian church with the
British constitution--at such a time, it becomes a protestant
university, from which emanates a continuous stream of instruction on
all