r the cabinet had decided to make the ballot a ministerial
measure, the head of the cabinet makes a rather pensive entry in his
diary: "_July 27, 1870._--H. of C. Spoke on ballot, and voted in 324-230
with mind satisfied, and as to feeling, a lingering reluctance." How far
this reluctance was due to misgivings on the merits of the ballot, how far
to the doubts that haunt every ministerial leader as to the possibilities
of parliamentary time, we do not know. The bill, enlarged and reintroduced
next year, was entrusted to the hands of Mr. Forster--himself, like Mr.
Gladstone, a latish convert to the principle of secret voting--and by
Forster's persistent force and capacity for hard and heavy labour, after
some eighteen days in committee, it passed through the House of Commons.

After obstruction had been at last broken down, other well-known resources
of civilisation remained, and the Lords threw out the bill.(240) It was
novel, they said; it was dangerous, it had not been considered by the
country or parliament (after eighteen days of committee and forty years of
public discussion), it was incoherent and contradictory, and to enact vote
by ballot was inevitably to overthrow the monarchy. Even the mightiest of
American orators had said as much. "Above all things," Daniel Webster had
adjured Lord Shaftesbury, "resist to the very last the introduction of the
ballot; for as a republican, I tell you that the ballot can never co-exist
with monarchical institutions."

The rejection by the Lords stimulated popular insistence. At Whitby in the
autumn (Sept. 2), Mr. Gladstone said the people's bill had been passed by
the people's House, and when it was next presented at the door of the
House of Lords, it would be with an authoritative knock. He told Lord
Houghton that he was sorry to see the agitation apparently rising against
the House of Lords, though he had a strong opinion about the imprudence of
its conduct on the Army bill, and especially on the Ballot bill. "There is
no Duke of Wellington in these days. His reputation as a domestic
statesman seems to me to rest almost entirely on his leadership of the
peers between 1832 and 1841."

The bill was again passed through the Commons in 1872. Mr. Gladstone was
prepared for strong measures. The cabinet decided that if the House of
Lords should hold to what the prime minister styled "the strange provision
for optional secrecy," the government would withdraw the bill and try an
autu