Gladstonesque

To assume that the "theory" of the results of confiding in professional law-breakers (whether Irishmen or London roughs) is for a moment worthy of being considered from the same standpoint as the belief that wìthout the restraints of the law the same gentry will commit excesses, is indeed to beg the whole question, and is thoroughly Gladstonesque.

It was a Victorian concept and its life force perished with the Victorian Age. Victorian in pomp and grandeur, Victorian in the public-school code of its Government, its Philistinism, its middle-class standards of virtue, its creaming of the large Victorian families for its administrators and soldiers, Victorian in the commercialism that mingled with highmindedness in Anglo-Indian relations, Victorian in its Gladstonesque view of the functions of Government, it was above all Victorian in its faith in the rule of law and political liberalism...

The relationship was one of mutual benefit: to the floundering, disunited movement of 1859 Bradlaugh gave unity, purpose and organisation, while the secularists in return paraded and spoke on his behalf, and clapped at the appropriate places in his Gladstonesque speeches.