LIBERAL REFORMS
"Whenever that man gets my place we shall have strange doings," Palmerston had said toward the end of his life, alluding to the open-minded Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. Gladstone, and had he remained on earth for another generation, he would indeed have seen much done by his erstwhile followers under Gladstone's direction which he would have accounted passing strange. Admitting the democratic principle that the state owed it to itself to provide every man's child with an education, Gladstone inaugurated (1870) a beneficent system of free public schools. An old popular grievance, the viva voce method of voting at parliamentary elections, was done away and the secret ballot substituted (1872), a change which struck a heavy blow at the prevalent bribery and intimidation. He corrected one of the worst abuses in the army by abolishing the purchase system, under which a junior officer was accustomed to buy his promotion by compensating his seniors, a practice which had closed the higher grades to men of small means. The extension of the suffrage to the agricultural laborers was finally reached by his Reform Bill of 1884, the last class being thus admitted to the body politic.