Mr. Bright also reduced his policy to the clauses of a bill in 1858. In
1859 Lord Derby's government had introduced a measure which old whigs and
new radicals, uniting their forces, had successfully resisted. This move
Mr. Gladstone--who, as the reader will recollect, had on that occasion
voted with the tories(140)--always took to impose a decisive obligation on
all who withstood the tory attempt at a settlement, to come forward with
proposals of their own. On the other hand, in the new parliament, the tory
party was known to be utterly opposed to an extension of the franchise,
and a considerable fringe of professing liberals also existed who were
quite as hostile, though not quite as willing to avow hostility before
their constituents. All the leaders were committed, and yet of their
adherents the majority was dubious or adverse. The necessity of passing a
Reform bill through an anti-reform parliament thus produced a situation of
unsurpassed perplexity. Some thought that formidable susceptibilities
would be soothed, if the government were reconstructed and places found
for new men. Others declared that the right course would be first to weld
the party together by bills on which everybody was agreed; to read a good
Reform bill a first time; then in the recess the country would let
ministers see where they were, and the next session would find them on
firm ground. But Lord Russell knew that he had little time to spare--he was
now close upon seventy-four--and Mr. Gladstone was the last man to try to
hold him back.

The proceedings of the new government began with a familiar demonstration
of the miserable failure of English statesmen to govern Ireland, in the
shape of the twentieth coercion bill, since the union. This need not
detain us, nor need the budget, the eighth of the series that made this
administration so memorable in the history of national finance. It was
naturally quite enough for parliament that the accounts showed a surplus
of L1,350,000; that the last tax on raw material vanished with the repeal
of the duty on timber; that a series of commercial treaties had been
successfully negotiated; and that homage should be paid to virtue by the
nibbling of a mouse at the mountain of the national debt. The debt was
eight hundred millions, and it was now proposed to apply half-a-million a
year towards its annihilation. Reform, however, was the fighting question,
and fighting questions absorb a legislature.

(M56) The