the debate,
and was believed to contain unmistakable promise of an important
political career. So indeed it did, although the promise that career
actually realized was not altogether of the kind which most of its
audience were led to anticipate. It was the speech of Mr. William
Ewart Gladstone. "The present motion," said Mr. Gladstone, "opens a
boundless road--it will lead to measure after measure, to expedient
after expedient, till we come to the recognition of the Roman Catholic
religion as the national one. In principle, we propose to give up the
Protestant Establishment. If so, why not abandon the political
government of Ireland and concede the repeal of the legislative union."
"There is no principle," he went on to say, "on which the Protestant
Church can be permanently upheld, but that it is the Church which
teaches the truth." That, he insisted, was the position which the
House ought to maintain without allowing its decision to be affected by
the mere {248} assertion, even if the assertion were capable of proof,
that the revenues of the State Church in Ireland were entirely out of
proportion to the spiritual needs of the Protestant population. Mr.
Gladstone, however, had the mind of the financier even in those early
days of his career, and he was at some pains to argue that the
disproportion between the numbers of the Protestant and the Catholic
populations in Ireland was not so great as Lord John Russell had
asserted. He made out this part of his case ingeniously enough by
including in the Protestant population in Ireland all the various
members of the dissenting denominations, many or most of whom were as
little likely to attend the administrations of the Established Church
as the Roman Catholics themselves.

[Sidenote: 1835--Defeat of Peel's Ministry]

Gladstone's speech was thoroughly consistent in its opposition to Lord
John Russell's resolution on the ground that that resolution, if
pressed to its legitimate conclusion, assailed the whole principle on
which the State Church in Ireland was founded. "I hope," he said, "I
shall never live to see the day when such a system shall be adopted in
this country, for the consequences of it to public men will be
lamentable beyond all description. If those individuals who are called
on to fulfil the high function of administering public affairs should
be compelled to exclude from their consideration the elements of true
religion, and to view various strange