One appeal which may be said to run through the whole of the speeches on the side of the Government is familiar to the readers and the audiences of all political debates, whore any manner of Reform is under discussion. "You are asked"--so runs the argument--"to adopt this sort of policy in order to satisfy the demands of a certain class of the population; but how do you know, what guarantee can you give us, that when we have granted these demands they will be content and will not immediately begin to ask for more? We granted Catholic Emancipation in order to satisfy Ireland, and now is Ireland satisfied? It was only the other day we granted Catholic Emancipation, and now already Ireland declares, through her representatives, that she ought to have part of the revenues of the Irish State Church taken away from that Church and applied to the common uses of the Irish people. If she gets even that, will Ireland be contented? Will she not go on to demand repeal of the Union?" We turn with peculiar interest to the speech of a young Tory member which was listened to with great attention during 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]