Om episode
The Liberals are back, and they're being liberal. Gladstone followed Disraeli into Downing Street, and led a reforming government. So Disraeli with the Conservatives managed to reach the top of the greasy pole first, but he got only ten months before being kicked out unceremoniously by Gladstone and the Liberal Party. Oddly, though, Gladstone didn't too well personally, losing his parliamentary seat - as he had at the previous election too. He only managed to cling on in parliament by being nominated for another seat at the same time, and winning that one. His government brought in a slew of reforms followed in the military, in education, in trade union law and, as another key step on the road to democracy, in legislation to introduce secret ballots in national and local elections. This was also the time when Germany emerged as a nation, proclaimed as the Second Reich in, of all places, the Hall of Mirrors of Versailles, in defeated and humiliated France. German victory was a warning to the other powers, one that Britain failed to take seriously enough. Meanwhile, trouble was continuing in Ireland. But since pacifying that country was Gladstone’s self-declared mission, we’ve left that to our next episode. Illustration: Anton von Werner, The proclamation of the German Empire in the Hall of Mirrors of Versailles. Painted in 1885, it shows the subjects, including King William I, about to be made emperor, at their 1885 ages rather than as they were when the event took place in 1871. Public Domain. Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.