When Mr. Gladstone resumed office it was soon seen that he had not only wrecked his party, but compromised the _prestige_ of the House of Commons. His was admittedly a weakened and discredited Ministry. It had been one of Mr. Disraeli’s favourite theories that whenever a feeble Ministry attempted to govern England, power passed from Parliament to the Crown. At one time, no doubt, the theory seemed plausible enough, but the Session of 1873 completely upset it. No sooner had Mr. Gladstone returned to office than power passed from the Crown and the House of Commons to the House of Lords. The will of the Peers was supreme over all. They said or did what they pleased, and quashed Bill after Bill without the least regard to the sentiments of the Queen, the desire of the Commons, or the interests of the country. The Peers rejected the Bill improving Church organisation contemptuously, though it had passed the Commons without a division. By asserting obsolete privileges of appellate jurisdiction over Scotland and Ireland, they disfigured the Judicature Bill, which consolidated the law courts and constituted a high court of appeal. They destroyed Mr. Stansfeld’s useful Rating Bill almost without debate. They opened a way for the reintroduction of purchase in the army, rejected the Landlord and Tenant Bill without even seeing it, and quashed a Bill, promoted by Mr. Vernon Harcourt and supported by the Government, to protect working men against being imprisoned under the law of conspiracy for non-statutable offences committed in the course of a strike. And the curious thing was that from the day Mr. Gladstone returned to office to lead a moribund Ministry and a disorganised House of Commons, the people submitted without a murmur to the resolute and decisive despotism of the Peers. Thus it came to pass that when the Session ended the Ministry seemed to have sunk into a dismal swamp of humiliation--a humiliation which was intensified by administrative scandals and internal feuds. It was shown that Mr. Lowe, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, prepared plans of his own for public works, without consulting the Public Works Office. Mr. Ayrton, as head of that Department, in his place in the House of Commons, repudiated all responsibility for the votes of money for his department which were altered without his knowledge and consent by Mr. Lowe. There was a painful “scene” in the House of Commons at the end of July when these disclosures were made, and when Mr. Ward Hunt formally asked the Government if its Chancellor of the Exchequer and Chief Commissioner of Works were on speaking terms. Mr. Baxter created another scandal by suddenly resigning office as Financial Secretary to the Treasury, because Mr. Lowe had ignored him in the matter of the Zanzibar mail contract. Mr. Lowe was proved to have given the contract for carrying letters from the Cape to Zanzibar to the Union Steam Company for £26,000, whereas the British India Steam Company