The Government of Mr. Gladstone, returned to power in 1868, began to disintegrate in 1873. The proximate cause was the Irish University Education Bill, announced in the Speech from the Throne at the opening of the session on 6th February, 1873. Irish affairs have always been the curse of the Liberal Party. But a popular Government would have survived even the Irish University Education Bill, which, designed to please all parties, failed of course to please any. The truth is that, as people soon or late weary of all administrations, so they turned from the Liberal Government. Mr. Disraeli summarised the history of the Government in a piece of invective which has become classic: "You have had four years of it. You have despoiled churches. You have threatened every corporation and every endowment in the country. You have examined into everybody's affairs. You have criticised every profession and vexed every trade. No one is certain of his property, and no one knows what duties he may have to perform to-morrow. I believe that the people of this country have had enough of the policy of confiscation." {123} The Government were beaten on the Irish University Education Bill; Mr. Gladstone resigned; but Mr. Disraeli declined to take office. Mr. Gladstone was therefore compelled to carry on the Government. Early in 1874 he suddenly appealed to the electorate; which, however, chose to give his opponents a majority. Mr. Gladstone resigned, or partly resigned, his leadership, and plunged into the esoteric joys of a controversy dealing with the doctrine of Papal infallibility. It would seem that a great ecclesiastic was sacrificed, when the young Gladstone chose to give to politics talents which would have won him the Archbishopric of Canterbury. In Mr. Disraeli's Cabinet Lord Cairns was Lord Chancellor; Lord Derby, Foreign Secretary; Lord Salisbury, Secretary of State for India; Lord Carnarvon, Colonial Secretary; Mr. Cross, Home Secretary; Mr. Gathorne Hardy, Secretary of State for War; Mr. Ward Hunt, First Lord of the Admiralty; Sir Stafford Northcote, Chancellor of the Exchequer. The Duke of Richmond, as Lord President of the Council, led the Conservative party in the House of Lords. The Liberal leader, walking in the Gladstonian shadow, was Lord Hartington. In 1874 the Bill for the Regulation of Public Worship was passed. In the following year Mr. Plimsoll, by the exercise of that dogged determination and gallant defiance of Parliamentary conventions, by means of which Parliament can sometimes be goaded into acts of justice, forced the Government to pass the Merchant Shipping Bill. Mr. Cross, the Home Secretary, introduced the useful Artisans' Dwellings Bill, which was passed. Upon 25th November, 1875, the Government, at the suggestion of Mr. Frederic Greenwood, purchased from the Khedive of Egypt, 176,000 Suez Canal shares for the sum of £4,000,000.