amended or modified or made worse in its details. Mr. Gladstone applied himself to an unceasing effort for the elimination from the bill of what seemed to him its worst and most offensive purposes. He pointed out, for instance, that there was a fundamental injustice in that part of the bill which would entitle the husband to obtain a divorce from an unfaithful wife because of a single act of infidelity, but which did not give the same right to the wife against the husband, and did not entitle her to obtain a divorce unless the husband had been physically cruel as well as morally unfaithful.

The debates in committee were conducted on the part of the Government by the Attorney-General, Sir Richard Bethell, afterwards Lord Westbury, one of the keenest and ablest lawyers ever known in the House of Commons. Sir Richard Bethell was master of every statute and every clause which could have any bearing on the subject, and he had an unfailing resource of acrid and even vitriolic sarcasm. It might well have been thought by many people that even Mr. Gladstone, with all his eloquence, would be no match for such an antagonist on that antagonist's own ground. But Mr. Gladstone never in his whole life showed a more marvelous fighting power than he put forward in this long controversy. To every reply he had his rejoinder; to every citation of authority he had another citation at the tip of his tongue. His marvelous gift of memory came into surprising play. He He could repeat whole passages from a statute without a scrap of a note to assist him. One might have thought, to hear him, that he had given up his entire life to the study of the marriage laws of various ages and nations, and had never allowed his attention to be distracted from the subject

by finance or politics or the reading of Homer. He did succeed in obtaining some slight improvements in the measure, but the bill in its main provisions was passed in spite of all his resistance. Old members of the House of Commons will tell you unto this day of the effect produced by those splendid passages of arms. Bethell, they all say, was great, but Gladstone was greater, and it was Bethell's own ground and not Gladstone's. The bill was passed into law, and Mr. Gladstone has never ceased to condemn it. Something, of course, has to be said for the bill if we consent to come down from that lofty religious principle which Mr. Gladstone maintained, and which some of the great churches of the world have always maintained. It has to be said that divorce existed in England long before the passing of the Act Mr. Gladstone opposed, but it was divorce obtained after a very different fashion. A divorce could be obtained, first of all, by proving the offense in a court of law, and then by passing a bill through both Houses of Parliament to give effect to the judgment of the court of law by the dissolution of the marriage. This was an immensely costly process, and it made divorce the luxury of the very rich. Mr. Gladstone did not find his conscience or his mind attracted by the prospect of facility or cheapness.

CHAPTER XVII.-THE IONIAN ISLANDS I venture to think that Mr. Gladstone never undertook a more congenial task than that which was offered to him by the Tory Government, which had turned out Lord Palmerston, when the Homeric scholar was invited to go out to the Ionian Islands for the purpose of conducting an inquiry on the spot as to the complaints and grievances of the island