ABSTRACT
When Shaftesbury’s Life appeared in 1886 with long extracts from his diaries, Gladstone, who had been judged very severely in its pages, remarked that reading it had been an excellent discipline for him. The problem of the Land to which Gladstone next turned was unfortunately more complicated. In this case the combination of the Irish heart and the English brain enabled Gladstone to pass a Bill which recognized for the first time a principle of great and revolutionary importance, but prevented him from offering an effective solution of the agrarian problem. Gladstone with rare honesty said that until Ireland shook England’s complacency by the Fenian outrages nothing was done in the way of reform. Gladstone’s view of the importance of this new principle was shared by the Conservative leaders, but whereas he welcomed it as a method of protecting the small tenant, they dreaded it as a gross interference with the power of the landlord.
