d. Mr. Winterbotham has not had to serve as
long a political and administrative apprenticeship as his chief; for at
the early age of twenty-seven, and after a Parliamentary career of only
two years, he has leapt into the office which Mr. Bruce did not procure
till he was twenty years older and a Member of ten years' standing.
This significant fact seems to "point a moral." It shows that there is
now-a-days a better chance for the man who is capable for an important
political post, despite his circumstances and antecedents. Mr.
Winterbotham is as staunch a Liberal and as pronounced a Nonconformist
as any of his ancestors; and yet, as we have seen, he is appointed at
twenty-seven by Mr. Gladstone to an office which Lord Palmerston did not
bestow upon Mr. Bruce until the latter was verging on fifty; and it is
not at all improbable that Lord Palmerston, when he made the appointment
in 1862, took credit to himself for stretching a point in favour of a
laborious and deserving man?

Mr. Bruce had been Under-Secretary at the Home Office for about a
year-and-a-half when he was appointed Vice-President of the Committee of
Council on Education. This office he held for more than two years. His
tenure of it came to a close in 1866, when Lord Derby (or rather
Derby-cum-Disraeli) returned to power. It was during these two years, in
which he devoted himself to the subject of education, that he made the
most impressive appearance which any portion of his career has yet
presented either to the House of Commons or to the country. Though a
nominee of Lord Palmerston, and like his patron anything but an advanced
Liberal, he displayed an apparent breadth of view and an earnestness of
purpose in his new sphere of Ministerial labour which were exceedingly
creditable to him. Some of his speeches on education were admirable, and
their tone may be guessed from the fact that they made him a favourite
at the time with such organs of public opinion as Mr. Miall's
_Nonconformist_.

It has been argued that Mr. Bruce had not the elevated motives which
must inspire a thoroughly successful minister of education; that he was
still the police magistrate in his ideas; and that he wished to call in
the schoolmaster to aid in the repression of crime. But it is only fair
to add that he never said a word to show that he did not value education
for itself, and in his own locality he has been a constant patron of
Mechanics' and other educational institutions. Ag