pers relating to
Vreedenhoop. Lord Althorp did not refuse to grant them, but recommended
him to drop his motion, as Mr. Gladstone insisted on the equal necessity
of a similar return for all neighbouring plantations. Howick withdrew
his motion, though he afterwards asserted that ministers had declined
the return, which was not true. When Buxton moved to reduce the term of
apprenticeship, Mr. Gladstone voted against him. On the following day
Stanley, without previous intimation, announced the change from twelve
years to seven. 'I spoke a few sentences,' Mr. Gladstone enters in his
diary, 'in much confusion: for I could not easily recover from the
sensation caused by the sudden overthrow of an entire and undoubting
alliance.'

The question of electoral scandals at Liverpool, which naturally excited
lively interest in a family with local ties so strong, came up in
various forms during the session, and on one of these occasions (July 4)
Mr. Gladstone spoke upon it, 'for twenty minutes or more, anything but
satisfactorily to myself.' Nor can the speech now be called satisfactory
by any one else, except for the enunciation of the sound maxim that the
giver of a bribe deserves punishment quite as richly as the receiver.
Four days later he spoke for something less than half an hour on the
third reading of the Irish Church Reform bill. 'I was heard,' he tells
his father, 'with kindness and indulgence, but it is, after all, uphill
work to address an assembly so much estranged in feeling from one's
self.' Peel's speech was described as temporising, and the deliverance
of his young lieutenant was temporising too, though firm on the
necessary principle, as he called it, of which the world was before long
to hear so much from him, that the nation should be taxed for the
support of a national church.

Besides his speeches he gave a full number of party votes, some of them
interesting enough in view of the vast career before him. I think the
first of them all was in the majority of 428 against 40 upon O'Connell's
amendment for repeal,--an occasion that came vividly to his memory on
the eve of his momentous change of policy in 1886. He voted for the
worst clauses of the Irish Coercion bill, including the court-martial
clause. He fought steadily against the admission of Jews to parliament.
He fought against the admission of dissenters without a test to the
universities, which he described as seminaries for the established
church. He sup