There was yet another feature of his Parliamentary management which proved disastrous to his cause, and this was his tendency to what the vulgar call hair-splitting and the learned casuistry.  At Oxford men are taught to distinguish with scrupulous care between propositions closely similar, but not identical.  In the House of Commons they are satisfied with the roughest and broadest divisions between right and wrong; they see no shades of colour between black-and white.  Hence arose two unfortunate incidents, which were nicknamed “The Ewelme Scandal” and “The Colliery Explosion”—­two cases in which Gladstone, while observing the letter of an Act of Parliament, violated, or seemed to violate, its spirit in order to qualify highly deserving gentlemen for posts to which he wished to appoint them.  By law the Rectory of Ewelme (in the gift of the Crown) could only be held by a graduate of the University of Oxford.  Gladstone conferred it on a Cambridge man, who had to procure an ad eundem degree at Oxford before he could accept the preferment.  By law no man could be made a paid member of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council unless he had served as a judge.  Gladstone made his Attorney-General, Sir John Collier, a Judge for three weeks, and then passed him on to the Judicial Committee.  Both these appointments were angrily challenged in Parliament.  Gladstone defended them with energy and skill, and logically his defence was unassailable.  But these were cases where the plain man—­and the House of Commons is full of plain men—­feels, though he cannot prove, that there has been a departure from ordinary straightforwardness and fair dealing.

Yet again; the United States had a just complaint against us; arising out of the performances of the Alabama, which, built in an English dockyard and manned by an English crew, but owned by the Slaveowners’ Confederacy, had got out to sea, and, during a two years’ cruise of piracy and devastation, had harassed the Government of the United States.  The quarrel had lasted for years, with ever-increasing gravity.  Gladstone determined to end it; and, with that purpose, arranged for a Board of Arbitration, which sat at Geneva, and decided against England.  We were heavily amerced by the sentence of this International Tribunal.  We paid, but we did not like it.  Gladstone gloried in the moral triumph of a settlement without bloodshed; but a large section of the nation, including many of his own party, felt that national honour had been lowered, and determined to avenge themselves on the Minister who had lowered it.

Meanwhile Disraeli, whom Gladstone had deposed in 1868, was watching the development of these events with sarcastic interest and effective criticism, till in 1872 he was able to liken the great Liberal, Government to “a range of exhausted volcanoes,” and to say of its eminent leader that he “alternated between a menace and a sigh.”  In 1873 Gladstone introduced a wholly unworkable Bill for the reform