His lordship severely criticised the way in which Mr. Gladstone formed his Ministry, as done with little tact or discrimination. ‘I cannot think,’ he continues, ‘that I was mistaken in giving way to Mr. Gladstone as head of the Whig-Radical party of England. During Lord Palmerston’s Ministry I had every reason to admire the boldness and the judgment with which he had directed our finances. I had no reason to suppose that he was less attached than I was to our national honour; that he was less proud than I was of our national achievements by land or sea; that he disliked the extension of our colonies; or that his measures would tend to reduce the great and glorious empire of which he was put in charge to a manufactory of cheap cloth and a market for cheap goods, with an army and navy reduced by paltry savings to a standard of weakness and inefficiency.’ In March, 1874, Mr. Gladstone addressed a letter to Lord Granville, in which he said: ‘At my age I must reserve my entire freedom to divest myself of all the responsibilities of leadership at no distant date. . . . I should be desirous shortly before the season of 1874 to consider whether there would not be an advantage in my placing my services for a time at the disposal of the Liberal party, or whether I should claim exemption from the duties I have hitherto discharged.’ Mr. Gladstone at that time was sixty-four—certainly no great age for himself or any other statesman of his time; and when Mr. Russell Gurney proposed to legislate on Ritualism, Mr. Gladstone was back in the field. After his unsuccessful intervention, Mr. Gladstone again retired from active participation in affairs; but he returned to the subject in the autumn by contributing an article to the _Contemporary Review_, in which he passionately protested against the attempt to impose uniformity of practice on the clergy of the Church of England by legislation. In the following passage he did much to offend the Roman Catholics: ‘As to the question whether a handful of clergy are or are not engaged in an utterly hopeless and visionary attempt to Romanize the Church and the people of England, at no time since the bloody reign of Queen Mary has such a scheme been possible. But if it had been possible in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, it would still have become impossible in the nineteenth, when Rome has substituted for the proud boast of _semper eadem_ a policy of violence and change in faith; when she has refurbished every rusty weapon she was fondly thought to have disused; when no one can become her convert without renouncing his mental and moral freedom, and placing his civil loyalty and duty at the mercy of another; and when she has equally repudiated modern thought and ancient history.’ This article was followed up by his celebrated pamphlet, ‘The Vatican Decrees in their bearing on Civil Allegiance.’