jury without a judge, and that in respect of consistency in interpreting the law and logical application of principles, the new court was a vast improvement on the old one. Though everybody knew that the Irish Church Question must overshadow all others, the utterances of Ministers were eagerly scanned for indications of policy. The spirit of economy, it soon appeared, would reign supreme in the administration, for not only did Mr. Goschen at the Poor Law Board issue orders prohibiting the guardians of the poor in London from giving relief to the able-bodied poor except under conditions of task-work, but the Admiralty issued a circular instructing naval officers to forbid unremunerative and profitless work, and save coals and stores as much as possible. In his speeches to his constituents in Renfrewshire, the Home Secretary, Mr. Austin Bruce, proclaimed his conversion to the ballot; but Mr. Lowe, at Gloucester, seemed to limit himself to rather stale denunciations of the Tory Party. On the 11th of February Ministers dined with the Fishmongers’ Company in the City, but even there their reticence was remarkable. Mr. Gladstone significantly intimated that the Ministry were encouraged in pursuing their Irish policy of conciliation, not only by the verdict of the country, but by “the constitutional character of that Sovereign whose delight it is to associate herself both with the interests and convictions of her people.”[293] Mr. Lowe spoke in a caustic saturnine vein about the difficulty of forcing economy on the servants of the Crown in public departments: they resented an order to save stores as savouring of meanness. And then the House of Commons was always too ready to force up expenditure in detail, whilst clamouring for its reduction in mass. Mr. Bright observed that the Board of Trade was merely a department that sent recommendations to people who rarely paid attention to them, and then launched into an attack on bishops and archbishops, who were, he said, overpaid, owing to the credulity, if not the liberality, of the people. His Grace of York had a few days before claimed that the Episcopal Bench supplied a Liberal element to the House of Lords, and this seems to have tempted Mr. Bright into his display of spleen. Altogether, the first impression produced by the Ministerial speeches was that the Government, though full of good intentions, meant to carry them out in an arrogant and irritating manner. In the meantime a change had taken place in the leadership of the Tory Party in the House of Lords, Lord Malmesbury retiring in favour of Lord Cairns.