e to the British
householders, who were far more like King George III. than they at all
supposed.

III

(M71) In May 1867, Mr. Gladstone had told the House that the time could
not be far distant when parliament would have to look the position of the
Irish church fairly and fully in the face. In the autumn Roundell Palmer
visited Mr. Cardwell, and discovered clearly from the conversation that
the next move in the party was likely to be an attack upon the Irish
church. The wider aspects of the Irish case opened themselves to Mr.
Gladstone in all their melancholy dimensions. At Southport (Dec. 19) he
first raised his standard, and proclaimed an Irish policy on Irish lines,
that should embrace the promotion of higher education in a backward
country, the reform of its religious institutions, the adjustment of the
rights of the cultivator of the soil. The church, the land, the college,
should all be dealt with in turn.(166) It might be true, he said, that
these things would not convert the Irish into a happy and contented
people. Inveterate diseases could not be healed in a moment. When you have
long persevered in mischief, you cannot undo it at an instant's notice.
True though this might be, was the right conclusion that it was better to
do nothing at all? For his own part he would never despair of redeeming
the reproach of total incapacity to assimilate to ourselves an island
within three hours of our shores, that had been under our dominating
influence for six centuries.

At Christmas in 1867 Lord Russell announced to Mr. Gladstone his intention
not again to take office, in other words to retire from the titular
leadership of the liberal party. Mr. Gladstone did not deny his claim to
repose. "Peel," he said, "in 1846 thought he had secured his dismissal at
an age which, if spared, I shall touch in three days' time."(167) Lord
Russell was now seventy-five. He once told Lord Granville that "the great
disappointment of his life had been Grey's refusal to join his government
in December 1845, which had prevented his name going down in history as
the repealer of the corn laws." "A great reputation," wrote Mr. Gladstone
to Granville in 1868, "built itself up on the basis of splendid public
services for thirty years; for almost twenty it has, I fear, been on the
decline. The movement of the clock continues, the balance weights are
gone."(168)

A more striking event than Lord Russell's withdrawal was the accession of
Mr