which Gladstone, while observing the letter of an Act of Parliament,
violated, or seemed to violate, its spirit in order to qualify
highly deserving gentlemen for posts to which he wished to appoint
them. By law the Rectory of Ewelme (in the gift of the Crown) could
only be held by a graduate of the University of Oxford. Gladstone
conferred it on a Cambridge man, who had to procure an _ad eundem_
degree at Oxford before he could accept the preferment. By law no
man could be made a paid member of the Judicial Committee of the
Privy Council unless he had served as a judge. Gladstone made his
Attorney-General, Sir John Collier, a Judge for three weeks, and then
passed him on to the Judicial Committee. Both these appointments
were angrily challenged in Parliament. Gladstone defended them with
energy and skill, and logically his defence was unassailable. But
these were cases where the plain man--and the House of Commons
is full of plain men--feels, though he cannot prove, that there
has been a departure from ordinary straightforwardness and fair
dealing.

Yet again; the United States had a just complaint against us; arising
out of the performances of the _Alabama_, which, built in an English
dockyard and manned by an English crew, but owned by the Slaveowners'
Confederacy, had got out to sea, and, during a two years' cruise of
piracy and devastation, had harassed the Government of the United
States. The quarrel had lasted for years, with ever-increasing
gravity. Gladstone determined to end it; and, with that purpose,
arranged for a Board of Arbitration, which sat at Geneva, and decided
against England. We were heavily amerced by the sentence of this
International Tribunal. We paid, but we did not like it. Gladstone
gloried in the moral triumph of a settlement without bloodshed; but
a large section of the nation, including many of his own party,