could both understand his arguments, and feel his appeal to their
moral sympathies. His speeches, men said, were in fact lay sermons of a
high order, as skilfully composed, as accurately expressed, as if they
were meant for the House of Commons. This was singularly true, and what an
eulogy it was for our modern British democracy that the man whom they made
their first great hero was an orator of such a school. Lord Lyttelton, his
brother-in-law, informed him of the alarm and odium that his new line of
policy was raising. Mr. Gladstone (April, 1865) replied: "After all, you
are a peer, and Peel used to say, speaking of his peer colleagues, that
they were beings of a different order. Please to recollect that we have
got to govern millions of hard hands; that it must be done by force,
fraud, or good will; that the latter has been tried and is answering; that
none have profited more by this change of system since the corn law and
the Six Acts, than those who complain of it. As to their misliking me, I
have no fault to find with them for that. It is the common lot in similar
circumstances, and the very things that I have done or omitted doing from
my extreme and almost irrational reluctance to part company with them,
become an aggravation when the parting is accomplished." "Gladstone, I
think," says Bishop Wilberforce (Dec. 7), "is certainly gaining power. You
hear now almost every one say he must be the future premier, and such
sayings tend greatly to accomplish themselves."

IV

(M40) It was about this time that Mr. Gladstone first found himself
drawing to relations with the protestant dissenters, that were destined to
grow closer as years went on. These relations had no small share in the
extension of his public power; perhaps, too, no small share in the more
abiding work upon the dissenters themselves, of enlarging what was narrow,
softening what was hard and bitter, and promoting a healing union where
the existence of a church establishment turned ecclesiastical differences
into lines of social division. He had alarmed his friends by his action on
a measure (April 15, 1863) for remedying an old grievance about the burial
of dissenters. Having served on a select committee appointed in the rather
quixotic hope that a solution of the difficulty might be found by the
somewhat unparliamentary means of "friendly conversation among candid and
impartial men," he had convinced himself that there was a wrong to be set
right