ABSTRACT
The election of 1874 had so decisive an influence on William Ewart Gladstone’s later career that it is necessary to understand the mood in which it left him. In Ireland the Church had been disestablished and, as Gladstone believed, the sting had been taken out of an unjust and provocative land system. Gladstone was a highly sensitive man, and he was so deeply wounded by what he thought gross ingratitude that he decided to go out of politics. Gladstone was justified, however strong his language in controversy, in his contention that his fundamental desire was for unity. Gladstone believed that his pamphlets had had an excellent effect in Europe and at home. He told Granville that he had increased the difficulties in the way of a restoration of the Temporal Power. Gladstone said of the decrees that he attacked that he looked on them as the most portentous of all events in the history of the Christian Church.
