It is a somewhat curious fact that Mr. Gladstone was not in the House of Commons during the eventful session when the great battle of free trade was fought and won. In thorough sympathy with Peel, he had joined the government again as Colonial Secretary. Knowing that he could no longer be in political sympathy with the Duke of Newcastle, whose influence had obtained for him the representation of Newark, he had given up his seat, and did not come into Parliament again until the struggle was over. At the general elections in 1847, Mr. Gladstone, still accepted as a Tory, was chosen one of the representatives for the University of Oxford. Up to the time of the abolition of the Corn Laws, or at least of the movement which led to their abolition, Mr. Gladstone had been a Tory of a rather old-fashioned school. The corn-law agitation probably first set him thinking over the possible defects of the social and legislative system, and showed him the necessity for reform at least in one direction. The interests of religion itself at one time seemed to him to be bound up with the principles of the Tory party; and no doubt there was a period of his career when the principle of protection would have seemed to him as sacred as any other part of the creed. With a mind like his, inquiry once started, must go on. There was always something impetuous in the workings of his intellect, as well as the rush of his sympathy. He startled Europe, and indeed the whole civilized world, by the terrible and only too truthful description which he gave, in 1851, of the condition of the prisons of Naples under the king who was known by the nickname of "Bomba," and the cruelties which were inflicted on political prisoners in particular. Again and again, in Mr. Gladstone's public life we shall see him carried away by the same generous and passionate emotion on behalf of the victims of despotic cruelty in any part of the world. Burke himself could not be more sympathetic, more earnest, or more strong.