Radicalism was making itself felt again, and two cycles of Benthamite reform ...

Radicalism was making itself felt again, and two cycles of Benthamite reform were rounded off by the Ballot Act in 1872 and the fusion of Law and Equity in 1873. Never, it was said, had new members talked so much as they talked in 1868. Never had they had so much to talk about: never since 1832 had there been so many of them: the quiet time was over, having, incidentally, purchased the telegraph system for the Post Office.

Proxies in the House of Lords, Church Rates, and public executions, came to an end in the same year, 1868. In its six years of office, this great but unfortunate administration contrived to offend, to disquiet, or to disappoint, almost every interest in the country. Of its three chief measures, Irish Disestablishment failed to placate the Irish and left English Churchmen uneasy.

Forster's Education Act satisfied neither the Church nor the Dissenters. The Irish Land Act did not go to the root of the Irish land trouble and it planted a lasting anxiety in the mind of the English landowners.

Lowe's fancy budget of 187 1 ended in a squalid riot in Palace Yard, two pence on the income tax,

and a lesson to the new electorate that

they might be extravagant at other people's expense.

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