from Ireland. Then again the
City was not easy at the flash of activity and enterprise at the
exchequer, and the money-changers did not know what disturbance this
intrepid genius might bring into the traffic of their tables. On the other
hand, the manufacturers and the merchants of the midlands and the north
adored a chancellor whose budgets were associated with expanding trade and
a prosperity that advanced by leaps and bounds. The nonconformists were
attracted by his personal piety, though repelled by its ecclesiastical
apparel. The high churchmen doubtless knew him for their own, yet even
they resented his confederacy with an erastian and a latitudinarian like
John Russell, or a Gallio like Lord Palmerston, who distributed mitres and
crown benefices at the ultra-evangelical bidding of Lord Shaftesbury. To
borrow a figure from a fine observer of those days,--the political
molecules were incessantly forming and re-forming themselves into shifting
aggregates, now attracted, now repelled by his central force; now the
nucleus of an organised party, then resolved again in loose and distant
satellites.

The great families still held ostensibly the predominance in the liberal
party which they had earned by their stout and persistent fidelity to
parliamentary reform. Their days of leadership, however, were drawing
towards an end, though the process has not been rapid. They produced some
good administrators, but nobody with the gifts of freshness and political
genius. The three originating statesmen of that era, after all, were
Cobden, Gladstone, Disraeli, none of them (M35) born in the purple of the
directing class. A Yorkshire member, destined to a position of prominence,
entered the House in 1861, and after he had been there a couple of years
he wrote to his wife, that "the want of the liberal party of a new man was
great, and felt to be great; the old whig leaders were worn out; there
were no new whigs; Cobden and Bright were impracticable and un-English,
and there were hardly any hopeful radicals. There was a great prize of
power and influence to be aimed at."(95)

This parliamentary situation was the least part of it. No man could guide
the new advance, now so evidently approaching, unless he clearly united
fervour and capacity for practical improvements in government to broad and
glowing sympathies, alike with the needs and the elemental instincts of
the labouring mass. Mr. Gladstone offered that wonderful combination.