But if in the more exaggerated instances we have above spoken of, the general public became aware of a certain obliquity, an unreliability, a dissatisfied restlessness, an imperiousness in Mr. Gladstone, the Conservatives had been more or less continuously aware of those qualities for many years. They, as we said earlier, have had to observe the right hon. gentleman closer, more continuously, and it would be easy for any one of them who is of middle age to give from his own memory a string of instances, just the same in kind as those above, though not so broadly striking, beginning much earlier in his career, and coming down much later. Very recently, Lord Salisbury at Manchester recalled Mr. Gladstone's dealings with his Oxford constituents in reference to the disestablishment of the Irish Church. But his lordship courteously spared his opponent the details. Has the world forgotten the famous letter to Dr. Hannah, bearing the date of June, 1865, written, as Mr. Gladstone himself with unlooked-for _naïveté_ admits in his "Chapter of Autobiography," for the appeasing of doubts? He in it asserted, first of all, that the question was "remote and apparently out of all bearing on the practical politics of the day;" second, he avowed that he was probably going "to be silent" on the topic; third, he said that "he scarcely expected ever to be called on to share in such a measure;" and, as his finishing words, spoke of it as "a question lying at a distance he could not measure." These were far too many causes for not doing a thing, and the Conservatives accordingly began to look out. In 1869, Mr. Gladstone disestablished the Irish Church. The "remoteness" and the "distance which was not measurable" somehow came to be packed within these two dates,--1865-9. What had so hurried matters? Well, one can only recall what had happened in the interim, and among the events there had been these two occurrences--he had been expelled from Oxford and rejected by South Lancashire. The like suddenness attended his conversion on the subject of the Ballot. After half a lifetime of opposition, he one fine morning announced that it must pass, hardly a hint of warning having been given beforehand.