The beginning of 1869 was a great moment in our political and social history.  Ever since the enthusiasm which surrounded the Reform Act of 1832 had faded away in disappointment and disillusion, the ardent friends of freedom and progress had been crying out for a further extension of the franchise.  The next Reform Bill was to give the workmen a vote; and a Parliament elected by workmen was to bring the Millennium.  The Act of 1867 gave the desired vote, and the workmen used it for the first time at the General Election of 1868.  At the beginning of 1869 the new Parliament was just assembling, and it was possible to take stock of it, to analyze its component parts, to form some estimate of its capacity, some forecast of its intentions.  It was a Liberal Parliament.  There was no mistake about that.  Bishop Wilberforce wrote just after the Election:  “In a few weeks Gladstone will be in office, at the head of a majority of something like a hundred, elected on the distinct issue of ‘Gladstone and the Irish Church.’”

Certainly the Election had been fought and won on Irish Disestablishment, but disestablishment was only part of a larger scheme.  Rather late in the day, the Liberal Party, urged thereto by a statesman who had never set foot in Ireland, had taken into its head to “govern Ireland according to Irish ideas,” or what was understood by that taking phrase.  We were to disestablish and disendow the Irish Church, reform the Irish system of land-tenure, and reconstruct the Irish Universities.  Robert Lowe, who was a conspicuous member of the new Cabinet, burst into rather premature dithyrambics, crying, “The Liberal Ministry resolved to knit the hearts of the Empire into one harmonious concord, and knitted they were accordingly.”  And we, of the rank and file, believed this claptrap; but to us it was not claptrap, for our whole hearts were in the great enterprise of pacification in which we believed our leaders to be engaged.  But Ireland by no means exhausted our reforming zeal.  We had enough and to spare for many departments of the Constitution.  We were determined to give the workmen the protection of the Ballot, and to compel them to educate their children.  We meant to abolish Purchase in the Army and Tests at the University; and some of us were beginning to feel our way to more extensive changes still; to hanker after universal suffrage, to dream of simultaneous disarmament, to anticipate the downfall of monarchical institutions, and to listen with complacency to attacks on the Civil List and Impeachments of the House of Brunswick.  In fine, Reformers were in a triumphant and sanguine mood.  We were constrained to admit that, as regards its personal composition, the new House of Commons was a little Philistine—­not so democratic, not so redolent of Labour, as we had hoped.  But we believed that we had the promise of the future.  We believed that by enfranchising the artisans we had undertaken a long step towards the ideal perfection of the Commonwealth.  We