In every one of these matters Mr. Gladstone gets his good fortune with posterity, as we believe, from having acted on Liberal principles. It is the merit of those principles that, to borrow a phrase of his own, they put Time on a man's side. He has trusted himself to the popular impulses, which are the breezes blowing towards the future, giving auspicious omens by the very working out of the world's events. But if, apart from Liberalism, he would have had not much more significance for the coming generations than Lord Beaconsfield will have when his foreign policy has once been undone and set aside, Mr. Gladstone must not be defrauded of a tittle of his due credit. He who has done all this was once a Conservative, and, to make it still more wonderful, a Peelite. Of that pale group of a Parliamentary section, which never could be a party, he is the only one who escaped from the vain middle region of ineffectiveness. For a man who was once a Peelite and has never ceased to be a High Churchman to have gained supreme power in this country is a political miracle. It was worked by sheer mental force. Mr. Gladstone's greatest feat, making all the rest possible, was the slowly but ever-ripeningly turning himself into a good, sound, robust Liberal; but he not only had the wit to appreciate the inevitableness of popular progress, he made himself a shaper and a helper of it in ways which showed a willing adoption of its cause. For we may scrutinize his career more closely than in the above rapid sketch, may look down lower than these great pictorial incidents we have been recapitulating; and, if we do so, we shall see a set of administrative reforms, less showy, but very hard to carry, and which exhibit genuine Liberalism in the grain of every one of them. It was under his auspices that the Civil Service was thrown open to unlimited competition; he, in spite of the Lords, with Earl Derby at their head, took the duty off paper, giving us cheap newspapers; he consolidated the Law Courts, doing away a whole web of legal artificialities; it was as his colleague that Mr. Forster gave to the country its first national educational scheme; but for him Mr. Cardwell would never have succeeded in altering the principle of our military organization from long-period enlistments to the short-term service; while Mr. Gladstone's opponents are willing to thrust upon him the whole honour of abolishing purchase in the army, because they think the issue of the Royal Warrant which, thanks to their resistance of the reform, was the only means of effecting it, lends itself to a taunt. Add to this list, the fact that although he, at first, for easily seen reasons of mere habit of mind, going back to the earlier days when he was Conservative, did not favour University Reform, yet he finally lent himself fully to it, and it is not difficult to understand the successive outcries raised against him in the higher social quarters. He