ed by
the progress of events. England was now subjected to the personal rule
of Disraeli. In 1868 he had been for ten months Prime Minister on
sufferance, but now for the first time in his life he was in power. His
colleagues were serfs or cyphers. He had acquired an influence at Court
such as no other Minister ever possessed. He had conciliated the House
of Lords, which in old days had looked askance at the picturesque
adventurer. He was supported by a strong, compact, and determined
majority in the House of Commons. He was the idol of Society, of the
Clubs, and of the London Press. He was, in short, as nearly a dictator
as the forms of our constitution permit; and the genius, which for forty
years had been hampered and trammelled by the exigencies of a precarious
struggle, could now for the first time display its true character and
significance. Liberals who had been bored and provoked by the incessant
blunders of the Liberal ministry in its last years, and, like Matthew
Arnold, had welcomed a change of government, soon began to see that they
had exchanged what was merely fatuous and foolish for what was actively
mischievous. They were forced to ask themselves how much of the
political faith which they had professed was "real stuff," and how much
was "claptrap." Disraeli soon taught them that, even when all
"claptrap" was laid aside, the "real stuff" of Liberalism--its vital and
essential part--was utterly incompatible with Disraelitish ideals.

The Session of 1874 began quietly enough, and the first disturbance
proceeded from a quite unexpected quarter. The two Primates of the
English Church were at this time Archbishop Tait and Archbishop Thomson.
Both were masterful men. Both hated Ritualism; and both worshipped the
Man in the Street. The Man in the Street was supposed to be an
anti-Ritualist; so the two Archbishops conceived the happy design of
enlisting his aid in the destruction of a religious movement which, with
their own unaided resources, they had failed to crush. Bishop
Wilberforce, who would not have suffered the Ritualists to be bullied,
had been killed in the previous summer. Gladstone, notoriously not
unfriendly to Ritualism, was dethroned; so all looked smooth and easy
for a policy of persecution. On the 20th of April, 1874, Archbishop Tait
introduced his "Public Worship Regulation Bill" into the House of Lords;
and, in explanation of this measure, Tait's biographers say that it
merely "aimed at revivi