Time went on. Ireland had improved by rest. There was even prosperity in her borders. Fenianism was subsiding.[142] Classes were less estranged. Emigration had increased, but the Liberals welcomed emigration. Disraeli had risen into supreme power, and had constitutionalised the democracy by his Bill of 1867. The Radicals were incensed at the measure, which they had coveted in another form and with sectional objects. The stiffer even of his own party stood aghast, and some seceded. The Liberals began to nibble at the Radical bait. It is a curious fact that the Whigs, when in political despair, usually resort to a revolutionary measure. Already, over thirty years before, they had done so in connection with Ireland. Suddenly, without warning, without a popular mandate, or even an Irish outcry for the upheaval, like a bolt from the blue came Mr. Gladstone’s first great conversion from principles firmly protested only a year before.[143] The question was sprung on both countries. He brought in, and in a manner so imperious that a solid portion of his own followers deserted him, his Act for the Disestablishment and Disendowment of the Irish Church; not only for its severance from the State, but for its spoliation by the State. In the abstract its disestablishment, apart from its disendowment, was a great, a just, and a generous measure; theoretically it was as sound as bimetallism. But its logical issues were incompatible with a united kingdom. They really, on examination, involved that separatist theory of the “right” of “nationalities” to be self-governing, of which he grew so fond. “Nationality” is here a wrong expression, for “nationality” is, by its essence, a term of union, and not of division. It should be “Locality.” What is meant by this assumed “right” is, that particular races or particular provinces, absorbed into or dependent on “nationalities,” are entitled, from the mere fact of their geographical limits, to withdraw from the greater whole of which they are portions. This theory would revive the Heptarchy. It would make Jersey and Guernsey, or the Isle of Man, it would make Scotland or Wales, a “nation.”