After the curtain had fallen on the great drama of the Franco-German War there was an interval during which this country was chiefly occupied with questions of domestic interest. The Gladstone Ministry had completed its great achievements. It had disestablished the Irish Church, abolished purchase in the Army, established vote by ballot, reformed the Irish land system, and, above all, had created a national system of education. To Mr. Forster had fallen the high honour of carrying this last-named measure, and it is an honour which seems even greater now than it did at the moment when the Royal assent was given in 1870 to the Education Bill. At that time, indeed, Forster met with criticism and abuse, rather than admiration and gratitude, for his great achievement. As older persons will remember, he excited the bitter hostility of the Dissenters and a section of the Radicals because of his refusal to make a hopeless crusade against the Church schools the basis of his educational policy. Even if he had believed such a step to be just, he would have committed the gravest of errors if he had yielded to Nonconformist clamour. It would have been impossible, even in the Parliament of 1868, to have carried such a Bill as the Birmingham Education League demanded, and there has been no Parliament since then that would even have looked at such a task. Remembering this fact, the injustice of the bitter attacks made upon Mr. Forster by a certain section of the Radicals, among whom a young Birmingham manufacturer named Joseph Chamberlain was now beginning to make himself conspicuous, is manifest. One can only account for the acerbity with which Mr. Forster was attacked on the ground that, both as a Radical and the son of Nonconformist parents, he had excited the hope among the extreme party that he himself would be as extreme as any of them. The wisdom with which he turned existing institutions to account, and succeeded in masking the batteries that the Church was ready to open upon any State system of education, was denounced as cowardice and lukewarmness; and as a consequence of the greatest triumph of his career--a triumph hardly excelled by any other Minister of our time--he became the object of the undying suspicion and hatred of a large number of the members of his own party. To the end of my days it will be a cause of pride to me that, although myself an ardent Liberal, and the son of a Nonconformist minister, I gave all the support I could in the columns of the _Leeds Mercury_ to Mr. Forster. That this support was of real importance to him was due to the fact that the _Leeds Mercury_ circulated largely in Bradford, the town for which Mr. Forster sat.