"Whenever that man gets my place we shall have strange doings,"
Palmerston had said toward the end of his life, alluding to the
open-minded Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. Gladstone, and had
he remained on earth for another generation, he would indeed have
seen much done by his erstwhile followers under Gladstone's
direction which he would have accounted passing strange.
Admitting the democratic principle that the state owed it to
itself to provide every man's child with an education, Gladstone
inaugurated (1870) a beneficent system of free public schools. An
old popular grievance, the viva voce method of voting at
parliamentary elections, was done away and the secret ballot
substituted (1872), a change which struck a heavy blow at the
prevalent bribery and intimidation. He corrected one of the worst
abuses in the army by abolishing the purchase system, under which
a junior officer was accustomed to buy his promotion by
compensating his seniors, a practice which had closed the higher
grades to men of small means. The extension of the suffrage to
the agricultural laborers was finally reached by his Reform Bill
of 1884, the last class being thus admitted to the body politic.