At the 1880 general election, Liberals had secured their greatest victory, with Scottish voters responding warmly to Gladstone's emphasis on ‘individual autonomy and self-help, to Liberal doctrines of free trade and limited government, to attacks on aristocratic and clerical privilege, and to the elevation of free speech and human rationality’. Following a turbulent couple of decades, the Scottish electorate had unified behind the dominant personality of William Ewart Gladstone. Over the next two decades, however, ‘what had originally been viewed as hairline fissures in Scottish Liberalism became gaping crevasses, so that the party's triumph became less of a climax and more of a climacteric, ushering in its long-term decline’.

The historian I. G. C. Hutchison identified these ‘crevasses’ as Home Rule and the neglect of progressive social reform, both of which are analysed later in this chapter. Until 1881, judged Michael Dyer, Scottish Liberalism ‘survived as an amorphous agglomeration of local elites with differing interests and values, which coexisted largely because there was no need for them to co-operate on a national or even regional basis’. Gladstone's personality also helped, with the premier achieving the status of a ‘household God’ through plates, prints and busts, especially on Scotland's eastern coast. Frustrated Unionists talked of ‘Gladstonolatry’ and the associated practice of ‘Gladstonian glamour’, whereby the Grand Old Man apparently deployed his charisma to manipulate Liberal fortunes in Scotland.

Significantly, the two Scottish Liberal associations formed in 1876–7 had played very little part in the 1880 election, with William Adam and Lord Rosebery handling any organisational matters between them. After the election, however, negotiations soon began to merge the two associations, something finally achieved on 25 July 1881. The first president of the Scottish Liberal Association (SLA) was, of course, Rosebery, although he resigned soon after on finally joining the government as under-secretary for Scottish affairs.

Hopes of organisational harmony also proved short lived. As James Kellas observed in his account of the party during this period, the subsequent history of the SLA was to show ‘a considerable conflict between the Council and Executive’, with Radical Liberals soon campaigning for more influence.