In May 1864 Gladstone said that he saw no reason in principle why all mentally able men could not be enfranchised, but admitted that this would only come about once the working-classes themselves showed more interest in the subject.

After a few minutes the blows ceased and Mr. Gladstone, resting on the handle of his axe, looked up, and with deep earnestness in his voice, and great intensity in his face, exclaimed: ‘ My mission is to pacify Ireland .’ He then resumed his task, and never said another word till the tree was down.

In his election address to his constituents on 23 January, Gladstone said:

In a speech to the Hawarden Amateur Horticultural Society on 17 August 1876, Gladstone said that " I am delighted to see how many young boys and girls have come forward to obtain honourable marks of recognition on this occasion ,— if any effectual good is to be done to them, it must be done by teaching and encouraging them and helping them to help themselves.

It is quite true, as has been often said, that “ we are all socialists up to a certain point ”; but Mr. Gladstone fixed that point lower, and was more vehement against those who went above it, than any other politician or official of my acquaintance.

On 11 December 1891 Gladstone said that: " It is a lamentable fact if, in the midst of our civilisation, and at the close of the nineteenth century, the workhouse is all that can be offered to the industrious labourer at the end of a long and honourable life.

On 24 March 1892 Gladstone said that the Liberals had:

Gladstone said " It was enough to make Peel and Cobden turn in their graves ".

Lloyd George said of Gladstone in 1915: " What a man he was!

In his first major speech after he had lost his seat in the 1918 general election, Asquith said: " That is the purpose and the spirit of Liberalism, as I learned it as a student in my young days, as I was taught it both by the precept and the example of the great Liberal statesman Mr Gladstone ... that remains the same today.

" In July 1922 Asquith said of Gladstone:

Writing in 1944, the liberal Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek said of the change in political attitudes that had occurred since the Great War: " Perhaps nothing shows this change more clearly than that, while there is no lack of sympathetic treatment of Bismarck in contemporary English literature, the name of Gladstone is rarely mentioned by the younger generation without a sneer over his Victorian morality and naive utopianism ".

Gladstone is said to have been the most powerful magician to ever become Prime Minister, and though he is not included as a character, several objects of his are central plot points.

Instead Gladstone said in his speech in the Commons that he did not see why any man should not have the vote unless he was mentally incapacitated, but added that this would not come about unless the working class showed an interest in reform.

Palmerston said that he had received so many resignation letters from Gladstone that he feared that they would set fire to the chimney.

In 1889 Gladstone recounted a story to Lord Rendel of when " a Frenchman, thinking to be highly complimentary, said to Palmerston: ' If I were not a Frenchman, I should wish to be an Englishman '; to which Pam coolly replied: ' If I were not an Englishman, I should wish to be an Englishman.

Robert Smillie, the trade unionist and Labour MP, said that, after Gladstone, Campbell-Bannerman was the greatest man he had ever met.

In The Man versus the State ( 1884 ), he attacked Gladstone and the Liberal party for losing its proper mission ( they should be defending personal liberty, he said ) and instead promoting paternalist social legislation ( what Gladstone himself called " Construction " – an element in the modern Liberal party that he opposed ).

On 27 November his son Albert wrote a letter to Gladstone in which he said his father had " wishes me to write to you and tell you that “ he could not forget your unvarying kindness to him and the many services you have rendered the country ”.

In 1874 the British Leader of the Opposition William Ewart Gladstone published a tract entitled The Vatican Decrees in their bearing on Civil Allegiance: A Political Expostulation, in which he said that after the Syllabus:

Gladstone said his mission was to pacify Ireland and with the Irish Church Act 1869 began with the disestablishment of the Anglican Church of Ireland whose members were a minority who made all political decisions in Ireland and would have largely voted Conservative.

The cover's ornate decoration, a carved dove holding an olive branch surrounded with gilded flames, so delighted William Gladstone, it is said, that he took his grandchildren to see it.

An early type of mobile shelving made of steel is sometimes said to have been invented by Gladstone.

Faced with a vacancy, Disraeli and Derby tried yet again to bring Gladstone into the government.

However, the government resisted calls for the nationalisation of the network ( first proposed by William Ewart Gladstone as early as the 1830s ).

During the 19th century the Liberal Party was broadly in favour of what would today be called classical liberalism: supporting laissez-faire economic policies such as free trade and minimal government interference in the economy ( this doctrine was usually termed ' Gladstonian Liberalism ' after the Victorian era Liberal Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone ).

After a brief Conservative interlude ( during which the Second Reform Act was passed by agreement between the parties ), Gladstone won a huge victory at the 1868 election and formed the first Liberal government.

Constitutional nationalism enjoyed its greatest success in the 1880s and 1890s when the Irish Parliamentary Party under Charles Stewart Parnell succeeded in having two Home Rule bills introduced by the Liberal government of William Ewart Gladstone, though both failed.

However, the Gladstone Liberal government fell in 1874 before its entry into force, and the succeeding Disraeli Tory government suspended the entry into force of the Act by means of further Acts passed in 1874 and 1875.

One of the reasons that the Liberal government under Gladstone wanted to abolish the judicial aspect of the House of Lords was that it was concerned for the poor quality of judges at this court.

Disraeli and Gladstone dominated the politics of the late 19th century, Britain's golden age of parliamentary government.

In 1892 Gladstone formed his last government at the age of 82.

Gladstone returned to Peel's government as Colonial Secretary in December.

The following year Peel's government fell over the MPs ' repeal of the Corn Laws and Gladstone followed his leader into a course of separation from mainstream Conservatives.

In February 1851 the government allowed Gladstone to visit the prisons where they were held and he deplored their condition.

The more people who paid income tax, Gladstone believed, the more the public would pressure the government into abolishing it.

Gladstone argued that the £ 100 line was " the dividing line ... between the educated and the labouring part of the community " and that therefore the income tax payers and the electorate were to be the same people, who would then vote to cut government expenditure.

The Conservative Leader Lord Derby became Prime Minister in 1858, but Gladstone – who like the other Peelites was still nominally a Conservative – declined a position in his government, opting not to sacrifice his free trade principles.

Between November 1858 and February 1859, Gladstone, on behalf of Lord Derby's government, was made Extraordinary Lord High Commissioner of the Ionian Islands embarking via Vienna and Trieste on a twelve week mission to the southern Adriatic entrusted with complex challenges that had arisen in connection with the future of the British Protectorate of the Ionian islands.

In 1859, Lord Palmerston formed a new mixed government with Radicals included, and Gladstone again joined the government as Chancellor of the Exchequer ( with most of the other remaining Peelites ) to become part of the new Liberal Party.

Gladstone believed that government was extravagant and wasteful with taxpayers ' money and so sought to let money " fructify in the pockets of the people " by keeping taxation levels down through " peace and retrenchment ".

When Gladstone first joined Palmerston's government in 1859, he opposed further electoral reform, but he changed his position during Palmerston's last premiership, and by 1865 he was firmly in favour of enfranchising the working classes in towns.

in 1868 Gladstone proposed the Irish Church Resolutions to reunite the Liberal Party for government ( on the issue of disestablishment of the Church of Ireland – this would be done during Gladstone's First Government in 1869 and meant that Irish Roman Catholics did not need to pay their tithes to the Anglican Church of Ireland ).

The general election of 1892 resulted in a minority Liberal government under Gladstone as Prime Minister.

When questioned in the Commons on what his government would do about unemployment by the Conservative MP Colonel Howard Vincent on 1 September 1893, Gladstone replied: