r-struck, and agitation waxed hot.

Oliver Cromwell had a glimpse of the secret in 1649. "These poor people,"
he said, "have been accustomed to as much injustice and oppression from
their landlords, the great men, and those who should have done them right,
as any people in that which we call Christendom. Sir, if justice were
freely and impartially administered here, the foregoing darkness and
corruption would make it look so much the more glorious and beautiful." It
was just two hundred and twenty years before another ruler of England saw
as deep, and applied his mind to the free doing of justice.

III

Almost immediately after recovering from the fatigues of the session of
1869, Mr. Gladstone threw himself upon his new task, his imagination
vividly excited by its magnitude and its possibilities. "For the last
three months," he writes to the Duke of Argyll (Dec. 5), "I have worked
daily, I think, upon the question, and so I shall continue to do. The
literature of it is large, larger than I can master; but I feel the
benefit of continued reading upon it. We have before us a crisis, and a
great crisis, for us all, to put it on no higher ground, and a great
honour or a great disgrace. As I do not mean to fail through want of
perseverance, so neither will I wilfully err through precipitancy, or
through want of care and desire at least to meet all apprehensions which
are warranted by even the show of reason."

It was not reading alone that brought him round to the full measure of
securing the cultivator in his holding. The crucial suggestion, the
expediency, namely, of making the landlord pay compensation to the tenant
for disturbing him, came from Ireland. To Mr. Chichester Fortescue, the
Irish secretary, Mr. Gladstone writes (Sept. 15):--

I heartily wish, it were possible that you, Sullivan, and I could
have some of those preliminary conversations on land, which were
certainly of great use in the first stages of the Irish Church
bill. As this is difficult, let us try to compare notes as well as
we can in writing. I anticipate that many members of the cabinet
will find it hard to extend their views to what the exigencies of
the time, soberly considered, now require; but patience, prudence,
and good feeling will, I hope, surmount all obstacles.

Like you, I am unwilling to force a peasant proprietary into
existence.... The first point in this legislation, viz., that the