officials in Bulgaria aroused his generous anger, and he flung down his
books and rushed out from his study to preach a crusade against the
Ottoman power in Europe. The waters rose and lifted him, whether he
would or no, into power. The Parliament which had gone on from the
spring of 1874 was dissolved in the spring of 1880, and the Liberals
came in with an overwhelming majority. The period of reaction had gone,
and the period of action was come again. Mr. Gladstone had to become
prime-minister once more. His name was, to adopt the phraseology of
continental politics, the only name that had come out of the voting
urns.

[Illustration: Gladstone's first home rule bill.]

It was an unpropitious hour at which to return to office. There were
troubles in Egypt; there was impending war in the Soudan and in South
Africa. There was something very like an agrarian revolution going on in
Ireland; and the Home Rule party in the House of Commons was under new,
resolute, and uncompromising leadership. Mr. Gladstone succeeded,
nevertheless, in carrying what might be called a vast scheme of
parliamentary reform, a scheme which established something very near to
universal suffrage, arranged the constituencies into proportionate
divisions, extinguished several small boroughs, leaving their electors
to vote in their county division, and in general completed the work
begun in 1832, and carried further in 1867. It is to the credit of the
Conservative party that after a while they co-operated cordially with
Mr. Gladstone in his reforming work of 1885. This was a triumph for Mr.
Gladstone of an entirely satisfactory character; but he had sore trials
to counterbalance it. He found himself drawn into a series of wars in
North and South Africa; and he, whose generous sympathy had of late been
so much given to Ireland, and who had introduced and carried another
land bill for Ireland, found that in endeavoring to pass the measures of
coercion, which the authorities in Dublin Castle deemed advisable, he
had to encounter the fiercest opposition from the Irish members of
Parliament and the vast bulk of the Irish population. That time must
have been, for a man of Mr. Gladstone's nature, a time of darkness and
of pain. Lord Frederick Cavendish and Mr. Burke were assassinated in
Dublin; General Gordon perished at Khartoum. In the end the Irish
members coalesced with the Conservatives in a vote on a clause in the
budget, and Mr. Gladstone's government