was disturbed, when the metropolis itself
was shocked and horrified by an inhuman outrage, when a sense of
insecurity went abroad far and wide ... when the inhabitants of
the different towns of the country were swearing themselves in as
special constables for the maintenance of life and property--then
it was when these phenomena came home to the popular mind, and
produced that attitude of attention and preparedness on the part
of the whole population of this country which qualified them to
embrace, in a manner foreign to their habits in other times, the
vast importance of the Irish controversy.(164)

This influence was palpable and undoubted, and it was part of Mr.
Gladstone's courage not to muffle up plain truth, from any spurious
notions of national self-esteem. He never had much patience with people
who cannot bear to hear what they cannot fail to see. In this case the
truth was of the plainest. Lord Stanley, then a member of his father's
government, went to a banquet at Bristol in the January of 1868, and told
his conservative audience that Ireland was hardly ever absent from the
mind of anybody taking part in public affairs. "I mean," he said, "the
painful, the dangerous, the discreditable state of things that unhappily
continues to exist in Ireland." He described in tones more fervid than
were usual with him, the "miserable state of things," and yet he asked,
"when we look for a remedy, who is there to give us an intelligible
answer?" The state of Ireland, as Mr. Gladstone said later,(165) was
admitted by both sides to be the question of the day. The conservatives in
power took it up, and they had nothing better nor deeper to propose than
the policy of concurrent endowment. They asked parliament to establish at
the charge of the exchequer a Roman catholic university; and declared
their readiness to recognise the principle of religious equality in
Ireland by a great change in the status of the unendowed clergy of that
country, provided the protestant establishment were upheld in its
integrity. This was the policy of levelling up. It was met by a
counter-plan of religious equality; disestablishment of the existing
church, without establishing any other, and with a general cessation of
endowments for religion in Ireland. Mr. Disraeli's was at bottom the
principle of Pitt and Castlereagh and of many great whigs, but he might
have known, and doubtless did know, how odious it would b