"If he could be prevailed upon to speak in the
course of a great debate, his speech was worth fifty votes," so great
was his influence and power. "However great may have been the
indebtedness of Mr. Gladstone to Sir James Graham, if the former had not
been possessed of far wider sympathies--to say nothing of superior
special intellectual qualities--than his political mentor, he never
could have conceived and executed those important legislative acts for
which his name will now chiefly be remembered."
The other case occupying the attention of Parliament, to which we have
alluded, we must now consider--Mr. Gladstone and the prisons of Naples.
Owing to the illness of one of his children, for whom a southern climate
was recommended, Mr. Gladstone spent several months of the Winter of
1850-1 in Naples. His brief visit to this city on a purely domestic
mission was destined to assume an international importance. It came to
his knowledge that a large number of the citizens of Naples, who had
been members of the Chamber of Deputies, an actual majority of the
representatives of the people, had been exiled or imprisoned by King
Ferdinand, because they formed the opposition party to the government,
and that between twenty and thirty thousand of that monarch's subjects
had been cast into prison on the charge of political disaffection.
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