_April 8._--Gladstone looked worn and fagged. Very affectionate and confidential, Gladstone feels keenly the want of support in debate. Bright ill. Lowe no moral weight. “I feel when I have spoken, that I have not a shot in my locker.” As a very accomplished journalist of the day wrote, there was something almost painful in the strange phenomenon of a Prime Minister fighting as it were all but single-handed the details of his own great measure through the ambuscades and charges of a numerous and restless enemy--and of an enemy determined apparently to fritter away the principle of the measure under the pretence of modifying its details. “No Prime Minister has ever attempted any task like it--a task involving the most elaborate departmental readiness, in addition to the general duties and fatigues of a Prime Minister, and that too in a session when questions are showered like hail upon the Treasury bench.”[A] Then the Government put on pressure and the majority sprang up to eighty. The debate in the Commons lasted over three and a half months; or about a fortnight longer than had been taken by the Church Bill. The third reading was carried without a division. In the Lords the Bill was read a second time without a division. Few persons clearly foresaw that it was the first step of a vast transfer of property, and that in a few years it would become customary for Ministers of the Crown to base all their legislation on the doctrine that Irish land is not an undivided ownership, but a simple partnership.[B] [A] _Spectator._ [B] Lecky, _Democracy and Liberty_, vol. i., p. 165. EDUCATION BILL: THE COWPER-TEMPLE CLAUSE (1870). =Source.=--_Life of the Right Hon. W. E. Forster, M.P._, by T. Wemyss Reid, vol. i., pp. 501–503. (Chapman and Hall, 1888.) The fate of the Bill was still in suspense. No one could be quite sure that Mr. Gladstone intended to press forward with it during that session. Mr. Gladstone himself held strongly to the Bill in the shape in which it had first been introduced; but he had been startled and alarmed by the rising of the Liberal party against it, and he did not appear to share the robust self-confidence with which Mr. Forster faced the formidable flank attacks that were being delivered upon the Government from the benches below the gangway. On June 12 Mr. Forster submitted to Mr. Gladstone a Memorandum on the subject of the measure and the rival amendments which had been proposed by the representatives of the different sections of their own party.