r-secretary to the foreign
office. At that time the general feeling was that Sir Charles Dilke, long
in parliament and a man of conspicuous mark within its walls, was rather
badly used, and that Mr. Gladstone ought to have included both. All this
was the ominous prelude of a voyage that was to be made through many
storms.(373)

One incident of these labours of construction may illustrate Mr.
Gladstone's curious susceptibility in certain kinds of personal contest.
He proposed that Mr. Lowe should be made a viscount, while the Queen
thought that a barony would meet the claim. For once it broke the prime
minister's sleep; he got up in the middle of the night and dashed off a
letter to Windsor. The letter written, the minister went to bed again, and
was in an instant sound asleep.

"The new parliament," he told his old friend at school and college, Sir
Francis Doyle (May 10), "will be tested by its acts. It will not draw its
inspiration from me. No doubt it will make changes that will be denounced
as revolutionary, and then recognised as innocent and even good. But I
expect it to act in the main on well-tried and established lines, and do
much for the people and little to disquiet my growing years, or even
yours." All fell out strangely otherwise, and disquiet marked this second
administration from its beginning to its end. To lay all the blame on a
prime minister or his cabinet for this, is like blaming the navigator for
wild weather. In spite of storm and flood, great things were done; deep,
notable, and abiding results ensued. The procedure of parliament underwent
a profound revolution. So too did our electoral system in all its aspects.
New lines of cleavage showed themselves in the divisions of political
party. A not unimportant episode occurred in the chapter of religious
toleration. The Irish peasant, after suffering centuries of oppression and
tyrannic wrong, at last got the charter of his liberation. In a more
distant region, as if to illustrate the power of events against the will
of a statesman and the contemporary opinion of a nation, England for good
or evil found herself planted in the valley of the Nile, and became a
land-power on the Mediterranean.

APPENDIX

Budget Of 1860

_Page __26_

_Sir William Heathcote wrote to Mr. Gladstone, May 4, 1861_:--

I understood you in your rebukes of Lewis in 1857, to be aiming not only
at a change of his plan of finance in that particular year, but