views had changed in the course of seven years, it may be said that in
his speech on these measures he observed how that exclusive support to
the Established Church was a doctrine that was being more and more
abandoned. Mr. Burke considered it contrary to wise policy to give
exclusive privileges to a negative creed like that of Protestantism.
They could not prove their religious scruples for denying this grant to
Roman Catholics, because they gave their votes of money to almost every
Dissenting seat. He hoped the concession now made--which was a great and
liberal gift, because unrestricted and given in a spirit of
confidence--would not lead to the renewal of agitation in Ireland by Mr.
O'Connell. It might be well for him to reflect that agitation was a
two-edged sword. Being conformable to justice and not contrary to
principle, he hoped the measure proposed would pass into a law.

W.T. Stead, in a recent article, said, in relation to Mr. Gladstone's
retirement from the Cabinet, that "It is ridiculous to pretend, with
Mr. Gladstone's career before us, that his course has been swayed by
calculating self-interest. He has been the very madman of politics from
the point of view of Mr. Worldly Wiseman. 'No man,' said he, the other
day, 'has ever committed suicide so often as I,' and that witness is
true. The first and perhaps the most typical of all his many suicides
was his resignation of his seat in Sir Robert Peel's Cabinet, not
because he disapproved of the Maynooth Grant, but because, as he had at
one time written against it, he was determined that his advocacy of it
should be purged of the last taint of self-interest. As Mr. George
Russell rightly remarks, 'This was an act of Parliamentary Quixotism too
eccentric to be intelligible. It argued a fastidious sensitiveness of
conscience, and a nice sense of political propriety so opposed to the
sordid selfishness and unblushing tergiversation of the ordinary
place-hunter as to be almost offensive.' But as Mr. Gladstone was then,