William Ewart Gladstone was the Liberal prime minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland on four separate occasions between 1868 and 1894.

He was noted for his moralistic leadership and his emphasis on world peace, economical budgets, political reform and efforts to resolve the Irish question.

Gladstone saw himself as a national leader driven by a political and almost religious mission, which he tried to validate through elections and dramatic appeals to the public conscience.

Finally Gladstone split his party on the issue of Irish Home Rule, which he saw as mandated by the true public interest regardless of the political cost.

The resulting general election of 1868 (the first under the extended franchise enacted in the Reform Act 1867) returned a Liberal majority of 112 seats in the House of Commons.

These boards had the power to levy rates and from which construct schools, employ teachers, and the ability to force children to attend (if they thought fit) those who were receiving no other education.

[8] The liquor industry had Liberal leanings before the Act but now this totally changed, and from "midsummer 1871 [when the first Licensing Bill was discussed] till the dissolution of 1874 nearly every public-house in the United Kingdom was an active committee-room for the Conservative Party".

It also attempted to remove the House of Lords's role as a judicial body for England, but this provision was not implemented due to the Conservative victory of 1874.

He was also able (he resumed the office of Chancellor of the Exchequer in August 1873 till the dissolution of Parliament in early 1874) to reduce the income tax to 3 pence in the pound in 1873, and the next year proposed to abolish it altogether if he won the next general election.

[11] In the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 Gladstone attempted to persuade the German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck to forbear from annexing Alsace and Lorraine from defeated France.

The most radical change, and one that required Gladstone's political muscle, was to abolish the system of officers obtaining commissions and promotions by purchase, rather than by merit.

Liberals rallied to Gladstone's anti-elitism, pointing to the case of Lord Cardigan (1797–1868), who spent £40,000 for his commission and proved utterly incompetent in the Crimean war, where he ordered the disastrous "Charge of the Light Brigade" in 1854.

Even so, some Whigs were alienated because of his imperial policy, while the radical leader, Joseph Chamberlain broke away in because they opposed his home rule plan for Ireland.

It has been argued that Gladstone mishandled the Bradlaugh affair, giving the opposition a religious cudgel which they used for years, with the result that his second ministry was not nearly as successful as the first.

In August that year Parliament passed the Land Law (Ireland) Act 1881 which gave Irish tenants "the three Fs"; fair rent, fixity (security) of tenure; and the right to freely sell their holdings.

The following year, the Board of Trade was authorized to grant licences to generate and sell electricity, and (as noted by one study) “municipal bodies were enabled to levy rates for electric-lighting.” Additional exactions from ratepayers were authorized as a means of facilitating access to washhouses and baths, while local authorities were empowered, as noted by one observer, “to make bye-laws for securing the decent lodging of persons engaged in picking fruit and vegetables.” A Cheap Trains Act passed in 1883 lowered the cost of travelling for workmen, with the Board of Trade empowered to ensure that there was sufficiently good and frequent accommodation available.

Other Acts forbade wages being paid to workmen at or within public-houses and provided for the inspection of white lead works and bake-houses; with times of employment regulated in both.

The major concern of the campaign was with foreign affairs; with evangelical fervour he articulated his vision of a world community, governed by law, and protecting the weak.

The basis was universalism and inclusiveness; his emotional appeals reached to the sense of concern for others, rising eventually to the larger picture of the unity of mankind.

He proceeded to reverse Disraeli's foreign policy by withdrawing the British garrison in Kandahar in Afghanistan and wanted to cede Cyprus to Greece, although he was dissuaded from this by Lord Granville.

France initially sent warships to join the Royal Navy at Alexandria, but refused to send military forces in fear of weakening its defences against Germany.

[27] The decision to go to war met with opposition from within the Liberal Party, and the Radical MP John Bright resigned from the Cabinet in protest.

[28] On 19 August British troops commanded by Sir Garnet Wolseley landed at Port Said and on 13 September defeated Urabi's forces at the Battle of Tel-el-Kebir.

[29] In January 1884 Gladstone consented to sending General Gordon to the Sudan to report on the best means of evacuating Egyptian garrisons there in the aftermath of the Mahdi Muhammad Ahmad's rebellion.

"No single event in Gladstone's career made him more unpopular"[30] and a vote of censure in the Commons reduced the government's majority to fourteen.

Gladstone fought to get Bradlaugh seated, but took a legalistic approach which allowed the Conservatives to attack the Liberals with an appeal to religious sentiment.

[34]The historian Robert Ensor wrote: Never in the modern era has a triumphant House of Commons majority achieved so little....The reason was not merely the continuing economic unrest outside, nor the new phenomena of two oppositions—an Irish as well as a conservative.

It was that... there persisted a hidden [conflict] within the majority itself, which palsied the government's consuls and zigzagged its policy.... His own method of adjustment, which was to be radical in the open and whiggish behind the scenes, allowed neither side to feel secure.

Among the Liberal rank and file, several Gladstonian candidates disowned the bill, reflecting fears at the constituency level that the interests of the working people were being sacrificed to finance a rescue operation for the landed elite.

Gladstone opposed increasing public expenditure on the naval estimates, in the tradition of free trade liberalism of his earlier political career as Chancellor.