ious
enterprise, of which Mr. Gladstone used to speak as the severest
mental strain he had ever undergone:

+Kartisten de ten ge machen phato dymenai andron.+[67]

The budget of 1860, among other changes, abolished the paper duty, a
boon to the press which was resisted by the House of Lords. They
threw out the measure, but in the following year Mr. Gladstone forced
them to submit. His achievements in the field of finance equal, if
they do not surpass, those of Peel, and are not tarnished, as in the
case of Pitt, by the recollection of a burden of debts incurred. To no
minister can be ascribed so large a share in promoting the commercial
and industrial prosperity of modern England, and in the reduction of
her national debt to the figure at which it stood when it began to
rise again in 1900.

The second group includes the parliamentary reform bills of 1866 and
1884 and the Redistribution Bill of 1885. The first of these was
defeated in the House of Commons, but it led to the passing next year,
by Mr. Disraeli, of a more sweeping measure. Taken together, these
statutes have turned Britain into a democratic country, changing the
character of her government almost as profoundly as did the Reform Act
of 1832.

The third group consists of a series of Irish measures, beginning with
the Church Disestablishment Act of 1869, and including the Land Act of
1870, the University Education Bill of 1873 (defeated in the House of
Commons), the Land Act of 1881, and the Home Rule bills of 1886 and
1893. All these were in a special manner Mr. Gladstone's handiwork,
prepared as well as brought in and advocated by him. All were highly
complicated, and of one, the Land Act of 1881, which it took three
months to carry through the House of Commons, it was said that so
great was its intricacy that only three men understood it--Mr.
Gladstone himself, his Attorney-General for Ireland, and Mr. T. M.
Healy. In preparing a bill no man could be more painstaking. He
settled and laid down the principles himself; and when he came to work
them out with the draughtsman and the officials who had special
knowledge of the subject, he insisted on knowing what their effect
would be in every particular. Indeed, he loved work for its own sake,
in this respect unlike Mr. Bright, who once said to me with a smile,
when asked as to his methods of working, that he had never done any
work all his life. The value of this mastery of details was seen when
a