In 1833 Gladstone, then aged twenty-four years, voted for Irish Coercion, opposed the admission of Dissenters to the Universities, and the admission of Jews to Parliament. He was consistent. Irish Reform, Repeal of the Test Acts, and Relief of the Jews, were three verses of one song, the burden of which was “Let each to-morrow find us farther than to-day.” In 1847 Gladstone, then aged thirty-eight years, “astonished his father as well as a great host of his political supporters by voting in favour of the removal of Jewish disabilities.”[151] His desertion, as was natural, aroused a vast amount of indignation in the camp. For had he not, only eight short years earlier, been described as “the rising hope of the stern and unbending Tories”? But the indignation, natural though it might be, was unjustifiable. Gladstone was again consistent. Several important things had happened since his first vote. Both Dissenters and Roman Catholics had been rehabilitated. In other words, the Tory party had surrendered their first line of defence--Anglicanism, and abandoned their second--Protestantism: was there any reason, except blind bigotry, for their dogged defence of the third? Gladstone could see none. The admission of the Jews was henceforth not only dictated by justice, but demanded by sheer logic. Furthermore, the Jews in 1833 had been permitted to practise at the bar; in 1835 the shrievalty had been conceded to them; in 1845 the offices of alderman and of Lord Mayor had been thrown open to them; in 1846 an Act of Parliament had established the right of Jewish charities to hold land, and Jewish schools and synagogues were placed on the same footing as those of Dissenters. The same year witnessed the repeal of Queen Anne’s statute, which encouraged conversion; of the exception of the Jews from the Irish Naturalisation Act of 1783; and of the obsolete statute _De Judaismo_, which prescribed a special dress for Jews. After the bestowal of civil privileges, the withdrawal of political rights was absurd. Gladstone could not conceive why people should be loth to grant to the Jews nominal, after having admitted them to practical equality. But though prejudice had died out, its ghost still haunted the English mind. Men clung to the shadow, as men will, when the substance is gone. Those orators of the press and the pulpit whose vocation it is to voice the views of yesterday still strove to give articulate utterance and a body to a defunct cause. Sophisms, in default of reasons, were year after year dealt out for popular consumption, and the position was sufficiently irrational to find many defenders. But the result henceforth was a foregone conclusion. Even stupidity is not impregnable. Prejudice, resting as it did upon unreality, could not long hold out against the batteries of commonsense.