Gladstone's lasting impact as a great spiritual leader of our nation is difficult to quantify. He won the respect and devotion of the great majority of Nonconformists and working men. His performance was inspiring enough to lead Keir Hardie, Arthur Henderson,45 and George Lansbury,46 all devout Christians, to revere him. But he also won the affection of Irish Catholic MPs as well as the leading Catholic Liberal, Lord Acton. In 1880 Acton described Gladstone's vision as unique because it blended a sympathy for tradition and institutions with a conviction that employers 'ought not to be the political masters of their employees'. Acton believed that for the poor 'misgovernment means not mortified pride or stinted luxury, but want and pain, and degradation and risk to their own lives and to their children's souls ... the poor have a claim on the wealth of the rich, so far that they may be relieved from the immoral, demoralising effects of poverty'.47 Although Gladstone was himself resolutely opposed to economic interventionism the logical progression from Acton's thinking to the social-liberalism of the 1906 Government, and especially Lloyd George's 1909 People's Budget is not hard to decipher.48 Gladstone refused to tolerate the anti-clericalism which was shaping continental liberalism. Instead he invigorated British liberalism by turning its attention to great questions and harnessing it to moral crusades: in the Balkans, Turkey and Ireland. His anti-clericalism and internationalism might account for a curious reference in a document published in Turin in 1899 by the Italian Young Christian Democrats. Amongst demands for proportional representation, decentralisation, protection of labour and legalisation of trades unions, is one for 'a transformation of the conscience of the nation ... a universal renewal of Christian and popular humanism ... in accordance with the desire of such men of genius as Gladstone, Leo XIII and Giuseppe Toniolo, which will be the glory of the twentieth century'.49 It is not surprising that nineteenth-century Christian Democrats, formed as a reaction against liberal anti-clericalism, could feel so much empathy with a British statesman who believed a nation's progress had to be in accordance with the directions desired by God.
Until the Eclipse
After the Liberal Party split over the Irish Question it effectively had twenty wilderness years until the landslide victory of 1906. Then, after this victory, Nonconformists looked for satisfaction over education and Welsh disestablishment. However, with Catholics wanting to retain denominational schools maintained by public funds and most Nonconformists wishing to see denominational education abolished, considerable controversy ensued. A great Catholic gathering at the Royal Albert Hall in May 1908 was attended by 60,000 people inside and outside the building and was addressed by the Catholic Liberal