because the English manufacturers had to pay twenty shillings instead of eight-pence a pound for cotton.  It was natural for a manufacturing country to feel this injury to its interests; but it was not magnanimous in view of the tremendous issues which were at stake, and it was inconsistent with the sacrifices which England had nobly made in the emancipation of her own slaves in the West Indies.  For England to give her moral support to the revolted Southern States, founding their Confederacy upon the baneful principle of human slavery, was a matter of grave lamentation with patriots at the North, to say nothing of the apparent English indifference to the superior civilization of the free States and the great cause to which they were devoted in a struggle of life and death.  It even seemed to some that the English aristocracy were hypocritical in their professions, and at heart were hostile to the progress of liberty; that the nation as a whole cared more for money than justice,—­as seemingly illustrated by the war with China to enforce the opium trade against the protest of the Chinese government, pagan as it was.

Mr. Gladstone had now swung away from the Conservative party.  In 1864 he had vigorously supported a bill for enlarging the parliamentary franchise by reducing the limit of required rental from L10 to L6, declaring that the burden of proof rested on those who would exclude forty-nine-fiftieths of the working-classes from the franchise.  He also, as chancellor of the exchequer, caused great excitement by admitting the unsatisfactory condition of the Irish Church,—­that is, the Church of England among the Irish people; sustained by their taxes, but ministering to only one-eighth or one-ninth of the population.  These and other similar evidences of his liberal tendencies alienated his Oxford constituency, the last people in the realm to adopt liberal measures; and on the proroguement of Parliament in 1865, and the new election which followed, he was defeated as member for the University, although he was a High Churchman and the pride of the University, devoted to its interests heart and soul.  It is a proof of the exceeding bitterness of political parties that such ingratitude should have been shown to one of the greatest scholars that Oxford has produced for a century.  It was in this year also that on completing his term as Rector of the University of Edinburgh he retired with a notable address on the “Place of Ancient Greece in the Providential Order;” thus anew emphasizing his scholarly equipment as a son of Oxford.

The Liberal party, however, were generally glad of Gladstone’s defeat, since it would detach him from the University.  He now belonged more emphatically to the country, and was more free and unshackled to pursue his great career, as Sir Robert Peel had been before him in similar circumstances.  Instead of representing a narrow-minded and bigoted set of clergymen and scholars, he was chosen at once to represent quite a different body,—­even the liberal voters of South Lancashire, a manufacturing district.