Nothing was more unexpected, or, as it happened, nothing more disastrous, than Mr. Gladstone’s sudden dissolution of Parliament in 1874. Mr. M’Cullagh Torrens writes: ‘On January 24 I was amused at breakfast by a paragraph read by one of my family—which, in the profundity of legislative wisdom, I treated as an editorial jest—announcing an immediate dissolution. When convinced at last by reference to an address to Greenwich that the decree had really gone forth, my breath was again taken away by learning that the immediate cause was the authoritative confession that the Cabinet had lost the necessary influence in directing public opinion, and that the new departure requisite for its recovery consisted in the offer to abolish the income-tax, and the creation of a number of peasant boroughs instead of those which might be still spared as belonging to the upper classes.’ Mr. Chamberlain severely described Mr. Gladstone’s address containing these proposals as ‘the meanest public document which had ever in like circumstances proceeded from a statesman of the first rank.’ It fell flat on the public. In 1875 Mr. Gladstone, to the surprise of his friends, announced his determination to retire from the leadership of his party, and the Marquis of Hartington was selected in his stead, and held that post until the end of the session of 1879. The situation was a little embarrassing. The difficulties he had to encounter as leader of a minority in the House of Commons were enormously increased by the fact that he had to deal, not merely with his followers, but with his brilliant predecessor, who could at any moment, by his own individual action, lead the Liberal party into any course in which he chose to direct them. Continuing his career as a reformer, we find Mr. Gladstone repealing the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill, and abolishing religious tests in the Universities; and as the Lords threw out his Bill for the Abolition of Purchase in the Army, he abolished it by Royal Warrant. Many old Whigs questioned the wisdom of the procedure, as they did also his conduct in the _Alabama_ Claims, which he referred to arbitration, when, as is always the case, the arbitrators decided against us and in favour of America. Earl Russell, who has a claim to be heard on the question, writes that he declined to submit the claims to arbitration by a foreign Power because ‘it appeared to me that we could not consistently with our position as an independent State allow a foreign Power to decide either that Great Britain had been wanting in good faith or that our law officers did not understand so well as a foreign Power or State the meaning of a British statute.’