idiot asylums, schools for the
deaf, dumb, and blind, institutions for the training of nurses, for
infirmaries, and hospitals for the needy people of Ireland.

There can be no rational doubt that this reform was beneficent, and it
met the approval of the Liberal party, being supported with a grand
eloquence by John Bright, who had under this ministry for the first time
taken office,--as President of the Board of Trade; but it gave umbrage
to the Irish clergy as a matter of course, to the Presbyterians of
Ulster, to the Catholics as affecting Maynooth, and to the conservatives
of Oxford and Cambridge on general principles. It was a reform not
unlike that of Thomas Cromwell in the time of Henry VIII., when he
dissolved the monasteries, though not quite so violent as the
secularization of church property in France in the time of the
Revolution. It was a spoliation, in one sense, as well as a needed
reform,--a daring and bold measure, which such statesmen as Lords
Liverpool, Aberdeen, and Palmerston would have been slow to make, and
the weak points of which Disraeli was not slow to assail. To the radical
Dissenters, as led by Mr. Miall, it was a grateful measure, which would
open the door for future discussions on the disestablishment of the
English Church itself,--a logical contingency which the premier did not
seem to appreciate; for if the State had a right to take away the
temporalities of the Irish Church when they were abused, the State would
have an equal right to take away those of the English Church should they
hereafter turn out to be unnecessary, or become a scandal in the eyes of
the nation.

One would think that this disestablishment of the Irish Church would
have been the last reform which a strict churchman like Gladstone would
have made; certainly it was the last for a politic statesman to make,
for it brought forth fruit in the next general election. It is true that
the Irish Establishment had failed in every way, as Mr. Bright showed in
one of his eloquent speeches, and to remove it was patriotic. If Mr.
Gladstone had his eyes open, however, to its natural results as
affecting his own popularity, he deserves the credit of being the most
unselfish and lofty statesman that ever adorned British annals.

Having thus in 1869 removed one important grievance in the affairs of
Ireland, Mr. Gladstone soon proceeded to another, and in February, 1870,
brought forward, in a crowded House, his Irish Land Bill. The e