. 15) the Queen wrote to the archbishop,
telling him that she had seen Mr. Gladstone, "who shows the most
conciliatory disposition," and who at once assured her "of his
readiness--indeed, his anxiety--to meet the archbishop and to communicate
freely with him." The correspondence between the Queen and the archbishop
has already been made known, and most of that between the archbishop and
Mr. Gladstone, and I need not here reproduce it, for, in fact, at this
first stage nothing particular came of it.(176) "The great mistake, as it
seems to me," Mr. Gladstone writes to Archdeacon Stopford (Feb. 8), "made
by the Irish bishops and others is this. They seem to think that our
friends are at the mercy of our adversaries, whereas our adversaries are
really at the mercy of our friends, and it is to these latter that the
government, especially in the absence of other support, must look."
Meanwhile the bill had made its way through the cabinet:--

_Feb. 8._--Cabinet, on the heads of Irish Church bill.. 9.--Cabinet,
we completed the heads of the Irish Church measure to my great
satisfaction. 19.--At Lambeth, 12-1-1/2 explaining to the archbishop.
22.--Conclave on Irish church, 3-4-1/2 and 5-1/2-7-3/4. After twenty
hours' work we finished the bill for this stage.

II

On March 1, Mr. Gladstone brought his plan before a House of Commons eager
for its task, triumphant in its strength out of doors, and confident that
its leader would justify the challenge with which for so many months the
country had been ringing. The details are no longer of concern, and only
broader aspects survive. A revolutionary change was made by the complete
and definite severance of the protestant episcopal church in Ireland alike
from the established church of England and from the government of the
United Kingdom. A far more complex and delicate task was the winding up of
a great temporal estate, the adjustment of many individual and corporate
interests, and the distribution of some sixteen millions of property among
persons and purposes to be determined by the wisdom of a parliament, where
rival claims were defended by zealous and powerful champions influenced by
the strongest motives, sacred and profane, of party, property, and church.
It was necessary to deal with the sums, troublesome though not
considerable, allotted to the presbyterians and to the catholic seminary
at Maynooth. Machinery was constructed for the incorporation o