Obstruction is a thing rather of temperament than intellect. The

occurrences of the early weeks of the Session of 1893 fully confirm this

view. The Tory party and the Unionists vowed in their organs, and proved

by their conduct in the House, that they determined to try and prevent,

by obstruction, the second reading of the Home Rule Bill being taken

before Easter. With this design they came down to the House every

evening with a plan of attack. The consequences were somewhat serious to

some members of the House. I saw young gentlemen suddenly developing

activity whom I had beheld in the House for many years in succession

without ever suspecting in them either the power or the desire to take

any part in Parliamentary debate. The same gentlemen now rushed about

with a hurried, preoccupied, and, above all, a self-conscious air that

had its disgusting but also its very amusing side. For instance, Mr.

Bromley-Davenport, during the six years of Tory Government, never spoke,

and rarely even made his appearance in the House of Commons. His voice

was as strange to the assembly as though he had never belonged to it.

But this Session he is constantly getting up in his seat, and he rushes

through the lobbies with the cyclonic movement of a youth bearing on

juvenile shoulders a weight too heavy to bear. Mr. Bartley is about as

dull a fellow as ever bored a House of Commons, and in the last

Parliament even his own friends found him a trial and a nuisance. He has

suddenly taken to making the House of Commons familiar with his voice at

every sitting. Lord Cranborne has been remarkable for the boorishness

and impertinence of his manners--or, perhaps, to be more accurate, want

of manners. I have seen him interrupting Mr. Gladstone in the most

impudent way with a face you would like to slap, and his hands deep down

in the depths of his pockets. Lord Cranborne is now nightly in evidence,

and leads the chorus of jeers and cheers by which the more brutal of the

Tory youth signalize the opening of the new style of Parliamentary

warfare.

[Sidenote: Jimmy.]

But of all the things which indicate the new state of affairs which has

arisen, nothing is so significant as the change in the position of Jimmy

Lowther. People think that I have attached too much importance to this

extraordinary individual, and that he should be taken simply as the

frank horse-jockey he looks and seems. I have given my reasons for

believing that in a crisis Jimmy would develop a very different side of

his character, and that he has in him--latent and disguised for the

moment--all the terrible passions and possibilities of the aristocrat at

bay. However, let that question rest with history and its future

developments; his position at the present moment is very peculiar. There

is a report that the desire of his heart is to sit on the first seat on

the front bench below the gangway, which for seven years was occupied by

Mr. Labouchere, and which for the five years of Mr. Gladstone's Ministry

of 1880 to 1885 was occupied by Lord Randolph Churchill when he was the

chief of the dead and buried Fourth Party. That seat is the natural

point for a sharpshooter and guerilla warrior. Indeed, the first seat

below the gangway seems just as marked out by fate for such a man as

Jimmy Lowther, as one of the high fortresses on the Rhine for the work

of the bold freebooter of the Middle Ages. But for some reason or other,

Jimmy did not attain his heart's desire, and he is compelled to sit on

the front Opposition bench. This would not seem an affliction to

ordinary men. Indeed, the desire to sit on one of the front benches may

be regarded as the root of all evil in Parliamentary nature--the desire

to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge which is as fatal to nature

born without original political sin as that disastrous episode in the

annals of our first parents.

[Sidenote: A recollection of Disraeli.]

One of the most curious episodes in the career of Disraeli was that he

insisted on sitting on the front Opposition bench before he had ever

held office--an act of unprecedented and unjustifiable daring which

throws a significant light on that habit of self-assertion to which he

owed a good deal of his success in life. For what a seat on the front

Opposition bench means is, that the holder thereof has once held office

in an administration, and so is justified for the remainder of his days

in regarding himself as above the common herd. But Jimmy isn't as

ordinary men. A place on the front Opposition bench, with all its

advantages, has the countervailing disadvantages of binding to a certain

decency and decorum of behaviour, and nothing could be more galling to

the free and full soul of the distinguished steward of the Jockey Club.

It is said that in the same way his colleagues on the front Opposition

bench would prefer Jimmy's room to his company. In Parliamentary

politics, as in diplomacy, there is such a thing as having an agent whom

you can profit by, and at the same time disavow--just as it may suit

you. That is one of the many guileful methods of these crafty men who

sit on front benches on both sides of the House. Obstruction is a thing

too horrible to be practised by any man who has ever held responsible

position, and it is delightful to see how Mr. Balfour repudiates the

very idea of anything of the kind. It would, therefore, have suited Mr.

Balfour a good deal better if Jimmy could have obstructed from some

quarter of the House where his closeness of association would not so

largely commit his more responsible colleagues to participation in his

iniquities. However, it was not to be managed; and the leaders of the

Opposition are bound to put up with the closeness of Jimmy's

companionship.

[Sidenote: Mr. Lowther's intellect.]

Again I repeat, obstruction is a matter not of intellect, but

temperament. Intellectually, I should put Jimmy in a very low place,

even in the ranks of the stupid party. Temperamentally he stands very

high. A brief description of his methods of obstruction will bring this

home. First, it should be said that he is entirely inarticulate and,

beyond rough common sense, destitute of ideas. He has nothing to say,

and he cannot say it. There are men in the House of Commons who have

plenty of thoughts, and who have plenty of words besides, and could

branch out on any subject whatever into a dissertation which would

command the interest even of political foes. But Jimmy is not of this

class. He is capable, on the contrary, of bringing down the loftiest

subject that ever moved human breasts to something stumbling,

commonplace and prosaic. When he gets up, then, his speech consists

rather of a series of gulps than of articulate or intelligible

statements. But then mark the singular courage and audacity of the whole

proceeding. There are traditions still in the House of Commons of the

marvellously stimulating effect upon followers of leaders, who were

proverbial for their oratorical impotence. Everybody remembers the

scornful description of Castlereagh which Byron gave to the world; and

yet it has been said in some memoirs that the moment Castlereagh stood

up and adjusted his waistcoat, there was a thrill in the House of

Commons, and his followers bellowed their exultation and delight. In a

more recent day, Lord Althorpe was able to bear down the hostility of

some of the most powerful orators of his time by a bluff manliness which

no rhetoric could withstand. And so also with Jimmy--his sheer audacity

carries him along the slow, dull, inept, muddy tide of his inarticulate

speech.

[Sidenote: An irrepressible nuisance.]

And curiously enough, it is impossible to put him down. On March 6th he

was commenting on some item which he supposed was in a Post-office

Estimate. It was pointed out to him that the item to which he alluded

was not in that particular vote at all, but in quite another vote, which

came later on. Jimmy, nevertheless, went on to discuss the item as if

nothing had been said. Then the long-suffering Chairman had to be called

in, and he ruled--as every human being would have been bound to

rule--that Jimmy was out of order. Was Jimmy put down? Not the least in

the world. He made an apology, and, as the apology was ample and his

deliverance is slow, the apology enabled him to consume some more

minutes of precious Government time. And then, having failed to find

fault with the estimate for what it did not contain, he proceeded to

assail it for what it did contain. Here again he was out of order, for

the estimate was prepared exactly as every other estimate had been

prepared for years. This answer was given to him. But Jimmy went

on--gulping and obstructing, obstructing and gulping. It is amusing,

perhaps, to you who can read this description as part of an

after-dinner's amusement, but what is one to think of a Parliamentary

institution that can be so flouted, and nullified by mere beef-headed

dulness? This is a question to make any one pause who has faith in

Parliamentary institutions.

[Sidenote: Mr. Balfour keeps away.]

During all these performances, Mr. Balfour keeps steadily away from the

House. He never was a good attendant, even in his best of days, and now

that he is relieved of responsibility, he naturally seeks to take

advantage of it. But he doesn't take so much advantage as one would

expect. He who used to be so indolent, has developed a feverish

activity. He seems during some portions of every sitting to be ready to

rise to his feet at the smallest provocation, and to interfere in the

smallest matter of detail. It is this tendency which has hurried him

into some of those ridiculous errors, which he has made so frequently.

The explanation of it all, is that curious figure that sits so silent,

remote, and friendless on the front Opposition bench. Lord Randolph is

still the riddle which nobody can read. Whenever Mr. Balfour appears

Lord Randolph does his best to efface himself, even in the places which

men select on the front bench. Here is a hint of that eternal conflict

and play of ferocious appetites and passions which is going on in the

House of Commons. Everybody who has ever visited the House of Commons

must have observed that pair of boxes which stand on the table in front

of the Speaker's chair. These boxes mark to the outward world the

positions of the most important men in the House of Commons--the Leader

of the House and the Leader of the Opposition. Mr. Balfour, whenever he

is in the House, sits opposite his box, and so proclaims to all the

world the lofty post he holds. And when this is the case, it is in

almost the very last seat--separated by half a dozen other

individuals--Lord Randolph is to be seen. To turn to another part of the

House, it is the men in whom Mr. Gladstone most confides who sit on

either side of him--Sir William Harcourt and Mr. John Morley. If on any

day it were seen that either of these two men had left the side of their

leader, and was separated from him by several others, the rumour would

run like wildfire through the House of Commons that the relations of the

Premier and one of his chief lieutenants were strained.

[Sidenote: Deadly foes.]

So Mr. Balfour watches Lord Randolph and Lord Randolph watches Mr.

Balfour, with the deadly vigilance of two men who stand opposite each

other in a wood with drawn swords in their hands. There is another

gentleman, besides, whom the Tory leader has to watch, and, perhaps,

more keenly. Lord Randolph Churchill is not always in his place, and his

movements in these days are leisurely--I remember when they were

electric in their rapidity and frequency. But Mr. Chamberlain is a

distinctly ready man. Whatever gifts he has, are always at his command.

He is like the shopman who puts all his goods in the window. The goods

are not very fine nor very good, but they are showy and cheap, and,

above all things, take the eye. Mr. Chamberlain in his day has been a

poor attendant in Parliament--a friend of his used to tell him, when he

was supposed to have the reversion of the Liberal leadership, that his

inability to remain for hours in succession in the House of Commons

would always stand in the way of his being the leader of that assembly.

But he turns up now usually after dinner, and from his seat on the third

bench below the gangway, on the Liberal side, watches the progress of

battle. It is known to the intimates of Mr. Balfour that he has not a

particularly high opinion of his partner in the work of obstructing the

cause of Home Rule. Indeed, it is impossible that the two men should be

really sympathetic with each other. With all his faults, Mr. Balfour

does represent the literary and cultured side of political life; while

Mr. Chamberlain is illiteracy embodied. Then, Mr. Chamberlain has a

knack of attributing every victory to himself--modesty isn't one of his

many virtues--and this cannot be particularly agreeable to the real

leader of the Opposition. There is thus a constant competition between

the two men as to which shall give the marching orders to the enemies of

the Government.

[Sidenote: Mr. Chamberlain's slatternly inaccuracy.]

There was a singular scene on March 6th, which brought out the relations

of the two in a singular manner. There appeared that day in the

congenial columns of the _Times_ a letter, a column in length, and set

forth with all the resources of leaded and displayed type which the

office could afford. In this letter Joe had lamented the disappearance

of those courteous manners of an elder and more Chesterfieldian time, to

which he suggested he belonged. The origin of this delicious lament over

a venerable and more courteous past by so flagrant a type of modernity,

was a statement that Sir William Harcourt had played the dirty trick of

putting down a notice to suspend the twelve o'clock rule at a shorter

notice than usual. The suspension of the twelve o'clock rule simply

means that the Tories shall not be allowed to obstruct by the mere fact

that the House is compelled automatically to close at midnight under the

existing rules. Joe appeared in his place swelling with visibly virtuous

indignation; evidently he had come, ready to bear down on Sir William

and the Government generally with the cyclone of attack. But this

notable design was prevented by two accidents. First, Sir William

Harcourt got up and explained that the notice he had given was exactly

the same kind of notice that was always, and had been always, given in

like circumstances. Everybody who knows anything about Parliamentary

matters knows that this was the literal truth. The dirty trick which Mr.

Chamberlain had attributed to Sir William Harcourt existed only in his

own uninstructed and treacherous memory; and so he was crushed. Still he

wanted to have a word in, and more than once he showed signs of rising

to his feet. But he stopped half-way, and, when he did finally get up,

Mr. Balfour was before him, and he had to sit down again. Then his

opportunity was lost, for Mr. Balfour had declared that he was perfectly

satisfied with what Sir William Harcourt had done, and that prevented

Joe from entering on the filibustering tactics which apparently he

contemplated. This appeared to the whole House to be a very distinct and

unpleasant snub for Joseph. A short time afterwards he and Mr. Balfour

were seen in the lobby, engaged in a conversation that was apparently

vehement, and everybody jumped to the conclusion that they were having

it out, and that Joseph was resenting the rejection of his advice with

that haughtiness of temper which is so well-known a characteristic of

the Radical whom wealth has converted into a leader of the aristocracy.

The papers afterwards contained an announcement that the two

conspirators against Mr. Gladstone's Government were in the heartiest

accord. This was one of the semi-official denials which are generally

regarded as the best testimony to the truth of the report denied.

[Sidenote: Mr. Morley.]

If one were on the look-out for dramatic and instructive contrast in the

House of Commons, one could not do better than study Mr. Morley and Mr.

Chamberlain for a week. Mr. Chamberlain--glib, shallow, self-possessed,

well-trained by years of public life--debates admirably. Nobody can deny

that--not even those who, like myself, find his speaking exasperatingly

empty and superficial and foolish. He is master of all his resources;

scarcely ever pauses for a word, and when he is interrupted, can parry

the stroke with a return blow of lightning-like rapidity. But when he

sits down, is there any human being that feels a bit the wiser or the

better for what he has said? And who can get over the idea that it has

all been a bit of clever special pleading--such as one could hear in

half-a-dozen courts of law any day of the week? And, finally, who is

there that can help feeling throughout all the speech that this is a

selfish nature--full of venom, ambition, and passion--seeing in

political conflict not great principles to advance--holy causes to

defend--happiness to extend--but so many enemies' faces to grind to

dust?

Mr. Morley is a fine platform speaker, but as yet he is not nearly as

good a debater as Mr. Chamberlain. He stumbles, hesitates, finds it hard

often to get the exact word he wants. And yet who cannot listen to him

for ten minutes without a sense of a great mind--and what to me is

better, a fine character behind it all? This man has thought

out--possibly in travail of spirit--and his creed--though it may not be

the exultant cheerfulness of natures richer in muscle than in

thought--is one for which he will fight and sacrifice, and not yield. In

short, the thinness of Mr. Chamberlain--the depths of Mr. Morley--these

are the things which one will learn from hearing them speak even once.

I have said that Mr. Morley is not as good a debater as Mr. Chamberlain;

but if Mr. Chamberlain be wise, he will call his watch-dogs off Mr.

Morley, for he is being badgered into an excellent debater. Every night

he improves in his answers to questions. Tersely, frigidly--though

there is the undercurrent of scorn and sacred passion in most of what he

says--Mr. Morley meets the taunts and charges of the Russells, and the

Macartneys, and the Carsons, and never yet has he been beaten in one of

those hand-to-hand fights.

[Sidenote: Flagrant obstruction.]

There was a curious but instructive little scene towards the end of a

sitting early in March. The Tories--headed by Jimmy Lowther--had been

obstructing in the most shameless way for a whole afternoon. Towards the

end of the evening Mr. Chamberlain had come down and joined in the

fray--lending his authority to tactics which usually had been left to

the rag-tag and bobtail of all parties. As I have already said, this

kind of intervention had seriously diminished Mr. Chamberlain in the

respect of the House. And the way in which he did his work was venomous

as well as petty. The vote under discussion was a Supplemental Estimate

for Light Railways in Ireland. Everybody knows that light railways were

the policy of the late and not of the present Government. A supplemental

estimate means simply a smaller sum by which the original estimate has

been exceeded. It ought to have been a matter of course that this

supplementary estimate should have been agreed to by the Tories, seeing

that it was money necessary to carry out the programme passed by their

own friends in the previous administration. But the Tories were in no

humour to listen to such trifles as these, and carried on lengthy

discussions. Mr. Morley, having no responsibility for the policy which

rendered such a vote necessary, was away in his room, attending to the

duties of his laborious department. Mr. T.W. Russell assumed to be in a

great pucker over this absence, and actually tried to stop the

proceedings until Mr. Morley came back.

[Sidenote: While a wronged nation waits.]

Mr. Morley did appear in due course, and then there was an attempt to

assail him for his absence. There was also an attempt to take advantage

of his presence to resume the discussion of the very topics which had

already been discussed for many hours in his absence. Mr. Morley

refused to fall into the trap. Speaking quietly, but with a deadly blow

between every word, he declined to be a party to obstruction by

answering again questions which had already been answered many times

over. At this, there was a loud shout of approval from the Liberal

benches--exasperated almost beyond endurance by the shameless waste of

time in which the Tories, aided by Mr. Chamberlain, had indulged in for

so many hours. Mr. Chamberlain professed to be greatly shocked. But the

House was not in a mood to stand any more nonsense. Mr. Chamberlain and

Mr. Lowther, and the rest of the obstructive gang, had to submit to have

the vote taken. In the meantime there stood the business of the country

to be done. All its needs, its pressing grievances, its vast chorus of

sighs and wails from wasted lives--rose up and called for justice; but

tricksters, and self-seekers, and horse-jockeys stopped the way.

[Sidenote: Carlton Club echoes.]

There were signs of the meeting at the Carlton when the House met on

Thursday evening, March 9th. The Tory benches were crowded; the young

bloods were fuller than ever of that self-consciousness to which I have

adverted, and there were signs of movement, excitement, and the spirit

of mischief and evil in all their faces and in their general demeanour.

There were nearly one hundred questions on the paper--and questions had

become a most effective weapon of Obstruction. But there was a certain

peculiarity about the questioning on this Thursday evening. A stranger

to the House would have remarked that all the questions addressed to Mr.

Gladstone were asked last. This was not an accidental arrangement. It

was done in the case of every leader of the House, so as to leave him

more time before coming down to the House of Commons. It was done in the

case of Mr. Balfour when he was leader of the House, with the result

that that very limp and leisurely gentleman never came down to his place

until the House had been one or two hours at work. There was, of course,

much stronger reason for that little bit of consideration in the case

of Mr. Gladstone, than in that of a young man like Mr. Balfour.

[Sidenote: The epoch of brutality.]

But the Tories, in the new and brutal mood to which they have worked

themselves up, have taken means for depriving Mr. Gladstone of what

small benefit he got from this postponement of the questions to him till

the end of question time. The puniest whipster of the Tory or the

Unionist party now is satisfied with nothing less, if you please, than

to have his questions addressed to and answered by Mr. Gladstone

himself. One of this impudent tribe is a Scotch Unionist named Cochrane.

The Scotch Unionist is one of the most bitter of the venomous tribe to

which he belongs. Mr. Gladstone is a man of peace and unfailing

courtesy, but the old lion has potentialities of Olympian wrath, and

when he is stirred up a little too much his patience gives way, and he

has a manner of shaking his mane and sweeping round with his tail which

is dangerous to his enemies and a delight and fascination to his

friends. He took up the witless and unhappy Cochrane, shook him, and

dropped him sprawling and mutilated, in about as limp a condition as the

late Lord Wolmer--I call him late in the sense of a person politically

dead--when that distinguished nobleman was called to account for his

odious calumny on the Irish members.

[Sidenote: Baiting the lion.]

At last, however, the Cochranes and the rest of the gang that had

thought it fine fun to bait an old man were silenced; but even yet the

ordeal of Mr. Gladstone was only beginning. I have seen many disgusting

sights in my time in the House of Commons; but I never saw anything so

bad as this scene. Mr. Gladstone looked--as I thought--wan and rather

tired. He had been down to Brighton; and I have a profound disbelief in

these short hurried trips to the seaside. But Mr. Gladstone seems to

like them, and haply they do him good. He looked as if the last trip had

rather tired him out. Or was it that he had had to sit for several hours

the day before at a Cabinet Council? These Cabinet Councils must often

be a great trial to a leader's nerves; for all Councils in every body in

the world mean division of opinion, personal frictions, ugly outbursts

of temper, from which even the celestial minds of political leaders are

not entirely free. Anyhow Mr. Gladstone looked pale, fagged, and even a

little dejected. You--simple man--who are only acquainted with human

nature in its brighter and better manifestations, would rush to the

conclusion that the sight of the greatest man of his time in his

eighty-fourth year, thus wan, wearied, pathetic, would appeal to the

imaginations or the hearts of even political opponents. Simple man, you

know nothing of the ruthless cruelty which dwells in political breasts,

of the savagery which lies in the depths of the horse-jockey squire or

the overdressed youth--anxious to distinguish himself, if it be only by

throwing mud at a stately column--you have no idea of these things.

[Sidenote: The lion lashes out.]

Time after time--again and again--in this form and in that--the Tories,

young and old, experienced and senseless, rose to try and corner Mr.

Gladstone. Mr. Frank Lockwood, examining a hostile witness in the

divorce court, could not have been more persistent than the Lowthers,

and the Cranbornes, and even Mr. Balfour. But he was equal to them

all--met them man after man, question after question, and, though he had

to be on his feet a score of times in the course of a few minutes, was

always ready, firm, alert. How we enjoyed the whole splendid display--a

brilliant intellect playing with all the ease of its brightest and best

powers; but, after all, what a flood of holy rage the whole thing was

calculated to rouse in any but rancorous breasts. However, we had our

revenge. The resurgence of Jimmy Lowther seems to be a phenomenon, as

disturbing to his friends as to his foes. The ugly necessity for sharing

responsibility for his vulgar and senseless excesses has come home to

Mr. Balfour. There was something very like a scene this night between

him and the Newmarket steward. Mr. Balfour was ready to accept the

assurances which had been given to him by Mr. Gladstone--assurances

which, if anything, erred on the side of conciliation--but Jimmy has

entered on the frenzied campaign of obstruction to all and everything

which his dull, narrow, and obstinate mind has mistaken for high policy.

This led to a strange and striking scene. Mr. Balfour, speaking on some

question, was interrupted by Mr. Lowther--and then, in front of the

whole House--in words which everybody could hear, with gesture of his

whole arm--sweeping, indignant, irritated--the gesture with which a

master dismisses an importunate servant--the Tory leader rebuked the

interruptions of Mr. Lowther.

[Sidenote: Jimmy flouts Mr. Balfour.]

But Mr. Lowther, in these days, is not to be put down, and doubtless he

feels in his inner breast that wrong which has been done for years to

his talents and his services; doubtless he remembers the silence and

obscurity to which he has been condemned, while Mr. Balfour has been

figuring largely before the general public, in the very situation which

Jimmy held himself in days when Mr. Balfour stumbled and trembled from

his place below the gangway. At all events, Jimmy has determined to

revive; and in these sad days, when nothing but the sheer brutality of

obstruction is required, he is not a man to be trifled with. And so he

defied Mr. Balfour and insisted on a division. Mr. Balfour

ostentatiously left the House, but the majority of the Tory party

followed Jimmy.

[Sidenote: The pity of it.]

All this resuscitation of obstruction necessitated, on Mr. Gladstone's

part, an extreme step. Before this time Mr. Gladstone was very rarely in

the House after eight o'clock. About that hour, he silently stole away

and left the conduct of the business of the House to Sir William

Harcourt. He was thus able to get to bed at a reasonable hour, and to

attend during the day to the business of the nation. But when the

emergency arises, Mr. Gladstone is never able to listen to the dictates

of prudence, or selfishness, or peril. He was determined to show the

Tories that if they were going to play the game of obstruction, they

would have to count with him more seriously than they imagine. To his

friends--who doubtless were aghast at the proposition--he announced that

he was going to break through those rules which had been imposed upon

him by a watchful physician and by his age. At eleven o'clock he

announced he would be in the House again, and accordingly, at eleven

o'clock--quietly, unostentatiously, without the welcome of a cheer--he

almost stole to his place on the Treasury Bench. Something about the

figure of Mr. Gladstone compels the concentration of attention upon him

at all times. He seems the soul, the inspiration, the genius of the

House of Commons. He was not, as is usually the case with him in the

evening, in the swallow-tail and large shirt-front of evening dress; he

had the long, black, frock coat, which he usually wears on the great

occasions when he has a mighty speech to deliver. Of course, Mr.

Gladstone was immediately the observed of every eye; but, as I have

said, there was no demonstration--the House of Commons is often silent

at its most sublime moments.

[Sidenote: He pounces.]

But if there were silence, it was simply pent-up rage, fierce resolve.

When, having brought the discussion down to past midnight, the Tories

calmly proposed that the debate should be adjourned, the Old Man got up.

He was very quiet, spoke almost in whispered lowliness; but he was

unmistakable. The vote would have to be taken. An hour later--when the

clock pointed to one--there was a second attempt. There was the same

response in the same tone--its quietness, however, fiercely accentuated

by Liberal cheers. And then, when the Tories still seemed determined to

obstruct, came a division, then the closure, and at one o'clock in the

morning Mr. Gladstone was able to leave the House. Thus was he compelled

to waste time and strength, that Mr. Chamberlain might nightly hiss his

hate, and Mr. Jimmy Lowther might gulp and obstruct, obstruct and gulp.

CHAPTER VI.

GLADSTONE THE SURVIVAL.

[Sidenote: From the past.]

What I like most about Mr. Gladstone is his antique spirituality. The

modern politician is smart, alive, pert, up-to-date; knows everything

about registration; hires a good agent; can run a caucus, and receive a

deputation. With us, as yet, the modern politician has not wholly

abandoned religious faith--as he has done among our neighbours on the

Continent--and has not come to regard this solid earth of ours as the

one standing-place in a universe alone worthy the consideration of

intelligent men. But the English politician is so far suffused with the

spirit of modernity as to prefer the newspaper to the book, to regard

more closely registration records than the classics, and generally is

wide awake rather than steeped in subtler and profounder forms of

sagacity and knowledge. The Prime Minister is a Survival. With all his

extraordinary adaptiveness, he stands in many respects in sharpest

contrast to his environment. I can never forget, as I look at him, all

those years he spent in that vanished epoch which knew nothing of

evolution or of science at all, and was content to regard a knowledge of

the classics as the beginning and the end of a gentleman's education.

After reading the life of Lord Aberdeen, I was brought back in spirit to

all those years during which Mr. Gladstone was a member of the Tory

party, and lived in an atmosphere of proud, scholarly exclusiveness--of

distrust of the multitude--of ecclesiasticism in the home, in the forum,

and as the foundation of all political controversy. When, therefore, Mr.

Gladstone is going through a crisis, it is intensely interesting to me

to watch him and to see how he carries himself amid it all; and then it

is that this thought occurs to me of how differently and clearly he

stands out from all his colleagues and surroundings.

[Sidenote: A reminiscence.]

Different things suggest early associations to different people. Mrs.

Solness, in the "Master Builder," could think only of her dolls when she

was telling the story of the fire that left her childless for ever. I

have heard of a great lady who cannot see a shell without recalling the

scenes of her dead youth before her. Next to the railway bridge which

spans the river in my native town, there is nothing which brings back

the past to me so palpably and so vividly--I might sometimes say, so

poignantly--as the echoes of books. One of my clearest recollections is

of a little room, looking out on a sunny and, as it appeared to me then,

a beautifully-kept garden, with a small but glistening river in the

distance, and the air filled, not only with the songs of birds, but all

the intoxicating and inaudible music of youth's dreams and visions. All

this phantasmagoria of memory is accompanied by the echo of a melodious,

rich voice, rising and falling, in the to me unfamiliar but delightful

accent of an educated Englishman: and the story of Ancient

Greece--sometimes her poetry with the loves of her gods, the fights, the

shouts of battle, the exhortations and the groans of her heroes--rises

once more before me. Or, again, I hear the tale told anew of that great

last immortal day in the life of Socrates, as the great Philosopher sank

to rest in a glory of self-sacrificing submission, serenity, and

courage--a story which moves the world to tears and admiration, and will

continue so to do as long as it endures. The voice of the teacher and

the friend still survives, which had this extraordinary power of giving

in the very different tongue of England all the glories of the poetry

and the prose of Greece; and other youths, doubtless like me, look out

under the spell of its music to that same green garden in far-off

Galway, by the side of Corrib's stream.

[Sidenote: Gladstone dreams.]

Of all this I sate musing during some idle moments in the middle of

March; for, as I looked at Mr. Gladstone, the whole scene was, by a

curious trick of memory and association, brought back to me. Everyone

who knew the great old Philosopher of Athens, will remember that he had

his familiar _dæmon_, and that he believed himself to have constant

communication with him. If I remember rightly, there is a good deal

about that _dæmon_ in his "Phædo"--that wonderful story to which I have

just alluded, and which lives so vividly in my memory. Sometimes I think

that Mr. Gladstone has the same superstition. He has moments--especially

if there be the stress of the sheer brutality of obstructive and knavish

hostility--when he seems to retire into himself--to transfer himself on

the wings of imagination to regions infinitely beyond the reach, as well

as the ken, of the land in which the Lowthers, the Chamberlains, and the

Bartleys dwell. At such moments he gives one the impression of communing

with some spirit within his own breast--a familiar _dæmon_, whose voice,

though still and silent to all outside, shouts louder than the roar of

faction or the shouts of brutish hate. Then it is that I remember what

depths of religious fervour there are in this leader of a fierce

democracy, and can imagine that ofttimes his communings may, perchance,

be silent prayer.

[Sidenote: In contrast with Lowther.]

As I have said, there have been many such moments in those days in

Parliament. Mr. Gladstone can be severe--wrathful--even cruel. It is not

often that he is so, but sometimes he has, in sheer self-defence, to

notice the dogs that yelp at his heels, and to lash out and maul them so

as to keep off the rest. Nobody will forget how, in a few words, Mr.

Gladstone mercilessly and for ever crushed that impudent young

gentleman, who is titled and considered to-day largely because Mr.

Gladstone was the patron of his sanctimonious father. Mr. Jesse Collings

hides under a painfully extorted smile the agonies he endures on the few

occasions when Mr. Gladstone deems it worth his while to scornfully

refer to his apostasy. But, speaking generally, Mr. Gladstone uses his

giant powers with extraordinary benignity and mercifulness, and is

almost tender with even his bitterest opponents. When, therefore, Mr.

Gladstone was being baited by beef-headed Lowther, he for the most part

looked simply pained; and took refuge in that far-off self-absorption

which enabled him to forget the odious reality in front of him. And

assuredly, if you looked at the face of Gladstone, and then at the face

of Lowther, and thought of the different purposes of the two men, you

could not be surprised that Mr. Gladstone should desire to forget the

existence of Mr. Lowther. Mr. Lowther's face, with its high cheek-bones,

its heavy underhung lip, like the national bulldog in size, and in its

impression of brutal, dull, heavy tenacity--its grotesque

good-humour--its unrelieved coarseness--brings out into higher contrast

and bolder relief the waxen pallor, the beautifully chiselled features,

the dominant benignity and refinement of the face of Mr. Gladstone. And,

then, think that the one man is fighting to maintain, and the other to

put an end, and for ever, to the hateful, bloody, and, it might almost

be said, bestial struggle of centuries; and you can understand the

feeling of overwhelming loathing which sometimes rises in the breasts of

those who see the two men pitted against each other.

[Sidenote: For Jimmy was leader.]

For this was what it had come to in the House of Commons. It was Jimmy

Lowther against Mr. Gladstone. Mr. Balfour occasionally dropped in a

perfunctory word; now and then even tried to raise the standard of

revolt against Mr. Lowther; and, of course, had finally to accept the

consequences of Mr. Lowther's acts. Joe was there too; much more active

in sympathy with Jimmy than Mr. Balfour. With all his faults, there is

a certain saving refinement in Mr. Balfour--it is not a refinement that

has restrained him from being cruel with the hysteric violence of the

effeminate, but it is a refinement that preserves him from the mere

Newmarket horseplay of Jimmy Lowther, and the thin rancour of a

Brummagem drummer. Joe, I say, was there, ready to back up Jimmy in his

worst exploits, but, after all, Jimmy was the leader. In this mighty

struggle--not merely for the reconciliation of England and Ireland, but

for the existence of Parliamentary institutions--the stakes are no

smaller--the gentlemen of England were represented by Mr. Lowther, and

the rude democracy by Mr. Gladstone. Democrats need not feel much

ashamed of the contrast.

[Sidenote: The apotheosis of Jimmy.]

But there Jimmy Lowther was, gulping and obstructing, obstructing and

gulping. The deadly and almost animal dulness of the performance I must

insist on again and again. Mr. Lowther does not speak--he is as

inarticulate as one of the prize bulls which, I doubt not, he delights

to view at Islington what time the Agricultural Hall opens its portals

to fat men and fat beasts. He cannot stand on his legs for five minutes

together without saying half-a-dozen times, "I repeat what I have

already said;" he has no ideas, no language, nothing except sheer

bull-headed power of standing on his legs, and occupying a certain

amount of time. Everybody knows that Lowtherism reached its climax on

Saturday, March 11th. On that day, men, who had held high office, were

not ashamed to resort to so mean and palpable an obstructive expedient

as to put on paper twenty-two questions to their successors in office.

The previous Friday had been bad enough. That was the day which tried

Mr. Gladstone more, perhaps, than any day for many a year; and, indeed,

it tried others as much as he, though not everybody bore it with the

same iron and inflexible courage. There were large absences--some of the

Irish away at conventions in Ireland, others without that legitimate

excuse; there were Liberal absentees as well. Obstruction, meantime,

stalked triumphantly; and when the divisions came, our strength sank

down to almost invisible figures. Ah! it was saddening to look at Mr.

Gladstone's face throughout that long morning sitting of Friday, March

10th. There are some days that live in one's memory, not so much as days

as nights--with the ghastly spectres of darkness--nightmares--hauntings

of a hideous past--anticipations of a joyless future. Such that Friday

remains in my memory--with Mr. Gladstone's face standing out from the

surrounding figures--pale, remote, pained.

[Sidenote: The G.O.M. as a lecturer.]

The announcement of the following Monday came only as a surprise to

those who had not been fully behind the scenes. There were few, who knew

the impression that the Friday had made, who did not feel sure that the

game of pushing the Home Rule Bill on before Easy Easter was up, and

that Mr. Gladstone had been beaten by the sheer brutality of

Obstruction. But still hope springs eternal in the Irish breast, and

there was still the lingering feeling that Mr. Gladstone would make a

further and more desperate effort to break down one of the most

shameless crusades of Obstruction on which a great party had ever

entered. Indeed, Mr. Gladstone himself was responsible for a rise in the

temperature of his own party on the very evening of that fateful and

fatal Friday morning, when obstruction and the abandonment of their own

friends had so nearly driven the Government out of office. I could

scarcely believe my eyes when at nine o'clock on that day I came down to

the almost empty House--in these evening sittings the House always looks

about as cheerful as a theatre at mid-day--and saw Mr. Gladstone on the

Treasury Bench, almost radiant, and evidently full of speech, go, and

spirit. There wasn't really the smallest necessity for his presence.

Nothing stood on the paper save one of those harmless, futile motions

which are discussed with about as much interest by the House generally,

as "abstract love"--to use a bold figure of Labby in a recent debate.

It was a motion which complained that private members did not get

sufficient time. Considering that private members had used their

privileges for some two weeks previously to destroy the very foundation

of all representative Government--namely, that the majority shall

prevail--the complaint seemed a little audacious. Anyhow, a debate upon

it could lead nowhere. But the moment the resolution was proposed, up

stood the Grand Old Man, and delivered a bright, sparkling little

academical address, for all the world like the lecture of a very

_spirituel_ French professor to a parcel of boys from the Quartier

Latin. For the moment you could actually imagine that the Old Man had

forgotten that there were such things in the world as Home Rule,

Obstruction, Newmarket Lowther, and Brummagem Joe. And all the time here

were we, who could be his sons, grinding our hearts in despair--in

futile anger--in melancholy retrospect.

[Sidenote: An hour of gloom.]

With the Monday, however, came a biting frost. The news that Mr.

Gladstone had been struck down from the fray, was sufficient to prepare

anybody for the final announcement. With him leading the Liberal hosts,

one could feel that obstruction could finally be beaten, however

obstinate might be its resistance--for he has the faith that moves

mountains. Then came the announcement that the second reading of the

Home Rule Bill had been postponed till after Easter. The Tories and the

Unionists were apparently taken by surprise; so much so that they did

not seem to have the power of yelling forth their delight at the triumph

of their policy with that full chorus which one would have expected.

Altogether, the announcement came upon the House, and passed the House,

with a quickness and a greater quietness than one might have expected.

The consequences were too serious to be grasped immediately; and men

were almost anxious to get to the lobbies for the purpose of discussing

it in all its bearings.

The rest of the week was but a poor falling-off after the heroic and

tragic fever of its opening, and of the week which preceded it. One

could see that in the Liberal ranks there had succeeded to the fierce

fighting spirit of the previous days a certain lassitude and

disappointment. What their faces told in the House their lips more

freely uttered in the lobbies. For a time, indeed, there was a feeling

of almost unreasoning despair, and that full, frank, unsparing criticism

to which every Government is subject from its friends when the winds

blow and the waves are high. It was said that the Government had

committed the mistake of making too many targets at once; that they had

first infuriated the Church by the Welsh Suspensory Bill; that they had

followed this up by infuriating the publicans and the brewers by the

Veto Bill; that, meantime, there was very little chance of their being

able to obtain the compensatory advantage of getting these Bills passed

into law. There were grumblings about the Registration Bill; in short,

nothing and nobody were spared in this hour of gloom and disaster.

[Sidenote: "Herr Schloss."]

But the House of Commons--as I have often remarked--is like a barometer

in the promptitude of its reflection of every momentary phase, and all

these things are duly discounted by old Parliamentary hands accustomed

to panics when a check comes to what has been a most successful campaign

on the whole. And in the meantime, if there had been any tendency to

disintegration, it was soon restored by the conduct of the Tories. For,

the old game of obstruction and vituperation went on just as strongly as

if no concession had been made, and no victory gained. The Monday night

had been reserved for a debate on the Evicted Tenants' Commission. And

Mr. T.W. Russell, brimful of notes and venom, sate in his place, as

impatient to rise as the captive and exuberant balloon which only strong

ropes and the knotted arms of men hold tight to mother earth. Jimmy,

however, has a passion for his ignoble calling; he sings at his work

like the gravedigger in "Hamlet." And before the inflated Russell was

able to explode, Jimmy had an hour or so to himself in the discussion

of Mr. Mundella's efforts to deal with labour. It was on this occasion

that Jimmy spread something like dismay in the bench on which he sate.

Mr. Schloss, who had been appointed as a correspondent by Mr. Mundella,

has a name which shows a German origin. Jimmy insisted on speaking of

him accordingly as "Herr Schloss." And there, not a yard from Jimmy,

sate the Baron de Worms, one of the most portentous and pretentious of

English patriots, who bears not only a German name, but a German title.

I don't know whether "Herr" Goschen was in the House at the same time;

if so, his feelings must have been very poignant. Mr. Mundella doesn't

know how to treat these Obstructives. The main thing is not to take them

seriously. Jimmy, to tell the truth, makes no pretence of taking himself

seriously, and grins through a horse-collar most of the time he is

speaking. But the poor President of the Board of Trade is conscious of

doing everything man can do to help to the solution of the vexed

questions of the time. He cannot avoid allowing himself to be worked up

into a frenzy by imputations which he ought to know are simply intended

for the purpose of getting him out of temper, and so prolonging debate.

[Sidenote: Sir John Gorst.]

Sir John Gorst is one of the men who have again been brought much into

evidence by the turn events have taken. I remember the time when he

first made a Parliamentary figure. It was in the days when Lord Randolph

Churchill started out on his great and meteoric career, at the beginning

of the Parliament of '80. Sir John Gorst was, in many respects, the

cleverest of the brilliant little group--at least, at the work which

they were then doing. He is cold-blooded, quick, and dexterous, and,

above all things, he has supreme pessimism and cynicism. To him, all

political warfare is a somewhat squalid struggle, in which everybody is

dishonest, and everybody playing for his own hand. It is an advantage in

some respects to take that view; it saves a man from anything like

unduly passionate convictions--enables him to keep cool even in trying

circumstances. I have seen Sir John as cold as ice in the very height

and ecstasy of the most passionate moments in the fierce Parliament of

1880 to 1885, and a man who remains so cool is sure to be able to strike

his blows deliberately and home. My poor friend, Mr. Mundella, sometimes

forgets this. When Sir John Gorst accused him of slighting somebody--I

don't know who; and, really, it doesn't matter, for Sir John Gorst knew

very well that the charge was entirely unfounded--when, I say, Sir John

did this, up jumped honest Mr. Mundella to indignantly deny that he had

ever done anything of the kind. Of course, he hadn't, and Sir John Gorst

knew that as well as Mr. Mundella. But then, ten minutes were wasted in

the encounter; and even ten minutes are not despised by Jimmy and his

compeers.

[Sidenote: T.W. Russell.]

At last, this was got over, and the time came for T.W. Russell. There

are few men in the House of Commons who excite such violent dislike on

Liberal and Irish Benches as this pre-eminently disagreeable

personality. The dislike is well founded. It is not because Mr. Russell

is rancorous, or has strong opinions; it is because nobody has any faith

in his sincerity. For many years of his life he was a paid teetotal

lecturer. Teetotalism is a counsel of perfection, and teetotallers are

estimable men, but the paid platform advocate of teetotalism is never a

very attractive personality. This tendency to shout, and thump the

table, and work up the agony--this eternal pitching of the voice to the

scream that will terrify the groundlings, appal the sinner, and bring

down the house--all these things produce a style of oratory which is

about as disagreeable as anything in the shape of oratory can be. Above

all things, it is difficult to take the itinerant lecturer seriously,

with his smoking meal at home as a reward for his philanthropic efforts.

The whole thing produces on the mind the impression of a clap-trap

performance, with no heart or soul underneath all its ravings,

bellowings, and dervish-like contortions.

Mr. Russell has ceased to be a teetotal lecturer, and has become a stump

orator for the Unionist party, but the scent of the teetotal platform

hangs round him still. He yells, bellows, and twists himself about, puts

all his statements with ridiculous exaggeration--altogether, so overdoes

the part that it is only the wildest and emptiest Tory who is taken in

by him. What spoils the whole thing to my mind is that it is all so

evidently artificial--so palpably pumped up. Clapping his hand on his

breast, lifting his shaky fingers to Heaven, Mr. Russell is always in a

frenzied protestation of honesty, of rugged and unassailable virtue, of

bitter vaticination against the wickedness of the rest of mankind. No

man could be as honest as he professes to be, and live. The whole thing

would be exquisite acting if, underneath all this conscious

exaggeration, you did not see the mere political bravo. You turn

sometimes, and sicken as though you were at the country fair, and saw

the poor raucous-throated charlatan eating fire or swallowing swords to

the hideous accompaniments of the big drum and the deafening cymbal.

[Sidenote: Mr. Carson.]

No--Mr. T.W. Russell is the mere play-actor. If you want one of the real

actualities in the more sinister side of Irish life, look at and study

Mr. Carson. It is he who winds up the debate on the commission of Mr.

Justice Mathew--a debate made memorable by the ablest debating speech

Mr. Morley has made in the whole course of his Parliamentary career. I

see men talking to Mr. Carson that belong to an opposite side of

politics. I confess that I never see him pass without an internal

shudder. Just as the sight of an abbé gave M. Homais, in "Madame

Bovary," an unpleasant whiff of the winding-sheet, there is something in

the whole appearance of Mr. Carson that conveys to me the dank smell of

the prison, and the suffocating sense of the scaffold. Do you remember

that strange, terrible day in the "Dernière Incarnation de Vautrin," in

which Balzac describes Vautrin's passage through the ranks of the

gaol-birds and gaol officials among whom he had passed so much of his

life? Above all, do you recall that final, and supreme, and awful touch

in which, addressing consciously the handler of the guillotine, he

professes to take him for the chaplain, and, bringing the poor

executioner for once to confusion, is addressed with blushing face and

trembling lips with the observation, "Non, Monsieur, j'ai d'autres

fonctions"?

[Sidenote: Green Street Court-House.]

Mr. Carson, doubtless, has "autres fonctions" than that of Jack

Ketch--who has always been so efficient and constant an instrument of

Government in Ireland--but I am never able to regard one part of the

official machinery by which wronged nations are held down as very

different from the other. Above all, I am unable to make much

distinction between the final agent in the gaol and those other actors

who play with loaded dice the bloody game in the criminal court with the

partisan judge and the packed jury. Doubtless, happy reader, you have

never been in a place called Green Street Court-House, in Dublin. If you

ever go to the Irish capital, pay that spot a visit. It will compensate

you--especially if you can get some _cicerone_ who will tell you some of

the associations that cling around the spot. It is in a back

street--narrow, squalid, filthy--surrounded by all those signs of

crumbling decay which speak more loudly to the visitor to Dublin of the

decay and destruction of a nation than fieriest orator or solidest

history. And in no part of Dublin have Death's effacing fingers worked

with such destructiveness as in all the streets that surround the Green

Street Court-House. Palatial mansions are windowless, grimy,

hideous--with all the ghastly surroundings of tenement homes of the very

poor.

It is in Green Street Court-House that the political offenders in

Ireland are tried. Within its narrow and grimy walls I saw many a

gallant Irishman, when I was a young reporter, pass through a foregone

and prearranged trial to torture, agony, madness, premature death. I

can only think of it as of a shambles, or, perhaps, to put it more

strongly, but more accurately, as I think of that wooden framework in

which I saw the murderer, Henry Wainwright, hanged by the neck one foggy

morning years ago, a gallows. The jury was packed, and the judges on the

bench were as much a part of the machinery of prosecution as the Counsel

for the Crown. The whole thing was a ghastly farce--as ghastly as the

private enquiries that intervene between the Russian rebel and the

hunger, and solitude, and death of the fortress of St. Peter and St.

Paul, or the march to Siberia.

[Sidenote: The lawyer and the hangman.]

In all such squalid tragedies, men of the Carson type are a necessary

portion of the machinery, as necessary as the informer that betrays--as

the warder who locks the door--as the hangman who coils the rope. Mark

you, all the forms--all the precautions--all the outward seeming of

English law and liberty--are in these Irish courts. The outside is just

the same as in any court that meets in the Old Bailey; but it is all the

mask and the drapery, behind which the real figures are the foregone

verdict, the partisan judge--the prepared cell or constructed gallows.

In the regime of coercion which has just expired, the whole machinery

was in motion. The last sentence of the law was not resorted to in

political offence, for the days of rebellion in the open field had

passed. But there were the Resident Magistrates ready to do their master

Balfour's bidding, and to send men to imprisonment, in some cases

followed by bread-and-water discipline--by stripping of clothes and

other atrocities, which made the court of the Resident Magistrate the

antechamber to the cell, and the cell the antechamber to the tomb. In

all these ghastly and tragic dramas, enacted all over Ireland, Mr.

Carson was the chief figure--self-confident, braggart,

deliberate--winding the rope around his victim's neck with all the

assured certainty of the British Empire, Mr. Balfour and the Resident

Magistrates behind him.

[Sidenote: Mr. Carson's exterior.]

Nature has stamped on Mr. Carson's exterior the full proclamation of his

character and career. There is something about his appearance and manner

that somehow or other seems to belong rather to the last than the

present century. He is a very up-to-date gentleman in every sense of the

word--clothes included. But the long, lantern, black-coloured jaws, the

protruding mouth, the cavernous eyes, the high forehead with the hair

combed straight back--all seem to suggest that he ought to be wearing

the wig, the queue, and the sword of the eighteenth century. He looks as

though he had come from consultation, not with Mr. Balfour, but Lord

Castlereagh, and as if the work he were engaged in was the sending of

the Brothers Sheares to Tyburn, not William O'Brien to Tullamore, and as

though he had stopped up o' nights to go over again the list of the

Irishmen that could be bought or bullied, or cajoled into the betrayal

of Ireland's Parliament.

Look at him as he stands at the box. You can see that he has been bred

into almost impudent self-confidence, by those coercion tribunals, in

which the best men of Ireland lay at the mercy of a creature like Mr.

Balfour and the meaner creatures who were ready to do Mr. Balfour's

work. Mr. Carson, not a year in the House, places his hands on the box,

then on his hips, with all the airs of a man who had been in Parliament

for a lifetime--attacks Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Morley, Mr. Justice

Mathew--three of the highest-minded and ablest men of their time--as

though he were at Petty Sessions, with Mr. Cecil Roche dispensing

justice. It is an odious sight. It makes even Englishmen shudder. But it

has its uses. It throws on to the floor of the House of Commons with all

the illumination of those great times, the abysses and passions and

sinister figures in Ireland's moving tragedy.

CHAPTER VII.

A FORTNIGHT OF QUIET WORK.

[Sidenote: Dulness.]

The House did very good work during the last fortnight in March. This

has a corollary more satisfactory to the public than to the journalist;

for, whenever business is progressing, it invariably means that the

proceedings have been extremely dull. It is a well-known phenomenon of

the House of Commons, that the moment there is a chance of anything like

a personal scene--though the encounter be of the smallest possible

moment and affect nothing beyond two personalities of no particular

importance--it is well known that whenever such scene is promised, the

benches of the House of Commons prove too small for the huge crowds that

rush to them from all parts. Mr. Fowler introduced one of the most

revolutionary measures ever brought into the House of

Commons--revolutionary I mean, of course, in the good sense--and yet he

delivered his new gospel of emancipation to a House that at no period

was in the least crowded, and that was never excited. Happy is the

country that has no annals, fruitful is the Parliament that has no

scenes.

[Sidenote: Uganda again.]

But there were signs of something like storm at certain portions of the

sitting on March 20th, for there stood on the paper the Estimate which

raised the difficult question of Uganda, and on that question, as

everybody knows, there is a yawning gulf between the opinions of Mr.

Labouchere and a number of Radicals below the gangway, and the

occupants of the Treasury Bench. Of Mr. Labouchere the saying may be

used, which is often employed with regard to weak men--Mr. Labouchere is

far from a weak man--he is his own worst enemy. His delight in

persiflage, his keen wit--his love of the pose of the bloodless and

cynical Boulevardier--have served to conceal from Parliament, and

sometimes, perhaps, even from himself, the sincerity of his convictions,

and the masculine strength and firmness of his will. Somehow or other,

he is least effective when he is most serious. His speech on Uganda, for

instance, was admirably put together, and chock full of facts, sound in

argument, and in its seriousness quite equal to the magnitude of the

issues which it raised. But no man is allowed to play "out of his

part"--as the German phrase goes. Labby has accustomed the House to

expect amusement from him, and it will not be satisfied unless he gives

it. When, therefore, he does make a serious speech, the House insists on

considering it dull, and rarely lends to him its attentive and serious

ear.

[Sidenote: Which is the buffoon?]

Great and yet fatal is the power of oratory. In the course of this same

night's debate, Mr. Chamberlain also made a speech. During portions of

it he delighted the House, and it was extremely effective as a party

speech. In the course of his observations, Mr. Chamberlain, alluding to

some jokelet of Labby, declared that a great question like Uganda should

not be treated in a spirit of "buffoonery." That observation was rude,

and scarcely Parliamentary. But that is not the point--nobody expects

gentlemanly feeling or speech from Mr. Chamberlain. The point is that

the observation could have been applied with much more truth to the

speech of Mr. Chamberlain than to that of Labby; for Mr. Chamberlain's

speech consisted, for the most part, of nothing better than the merest

party hits--the kind of thing that almost anybody could say--that

hundreds of journalists nightly write in their party effusions, and for

very modest salaries. But the heart and soul of the question of Uganda

were not even touched by Mr. Chamberlain. Labby may have been right or

wrong; but Labby's was a serious speech with a serious purpose. Mr.

Chamberlain's speech was just a smart bit of party debating. The

buffoonery--in the sense of shallowness and emptiness--was really in the

speech that everybody took to be grave. The seriousness was in the

speech which, amid the delighted applause of the Tories, Mr. Chamberlain

denounced as buffoonery.

[Sidenote: The grip of Labby.]

In some respects Mr. Labouchere reminds me of the late Mr. Biggar.

Underneath all his exterior of carelessness, callousness, and flippancy,

there lies a very strong, a very tenacious, and a very clear-sighted

man. There are times--especially when the small hours of the morning are

breaking, and Labby is in his most genial mood--when he is ready to

declare that, after all, he is only a Conservative in disguise, and that

his Radicalism is merely put on for the purpose of amusing and catching

the groundlings. As a matter of fact, Labby is by instinct one of the

most thorough Radicals that ever breathed. His Radicalism, it is true,

is of the antique pattern. He is an individualist without compromise or

concession. Life to him is to the strongest; he has no faith save in the

gospel of the survival of the fittest. Equable and even cheery, he does

not take a particularly joyous view of human existence. I have heard him

speak of the emptiness and futilities of human existence in tones, not

of gloom, for he is too much of a philosopher to indulge in regrets, but

with a hearty sincerity that would do credit to the Trappist monk who

found everything vanity of vanities in a sinful world. Despising honours

and dignities, he positively loathes outward show; he is a Radical by

instinct and nature. Though one of the wealthiest men in the House of

Commons, nobody has over known him guilty of one act of ostentation.

Probably he loves power. I have not the smallest doubt that he would

enjoy very well being a Cabinet Minister. But for social distinction,

for the frippery and display of life, he has a positive dislike. He is

like Mr. Biggar also in tenacity.

[Sidenote: And the grit.]

It must have been a disappointment to him--it was certainly a

disappointment to his many friends--that he was not a member of the

Ministry which he did so much to bring into existence. But the very day

the House met after the formation of the Government, Labby was in his

old place on the front bench below the gangway as if nothing had

occurred--just as ready as ever to take his share in the proceedings of

the House of Commons. And every succeeding evening saw him in his

place--listening with commendable piety to the exhortations of Holy

Writ--given forth in the fine resonant voice of Archdeacon Farrar--ready

to seize a point--to take advantage of a situation, eagerly interested

in everything that is going on. Some people may regard this as a very

common gift. It is nothing of the kind. I know no place in the world

which is a severer test of a man's tenacity of purpose, than the House

of Commons. I suppose it is because we see the men more publicly there

than elsewhere; but I know no place where there are so many ups and

downs of human destiny as in the House of Commons--no place, at all

events, where one is so struck with the changes, and transformations of

human destinies. The man who, in one or two Sessions, is on his legs

every moment--who takes a prominent part in every debate--who has become

one of the notabilities of the House--in a year or two's time has sunk

to a silent dweller apart from all the eagerness and fever of debate,

sinks into melancholy and listlessness, and is almost dead before he has

given up his Parliamentary life. Staying power is the rarest of all

Parliamentary powers; Labby has plenty of staying power.

[Sidenote: Sir Charles Dilke.]

Another figure which the new House of Commons is gradually beginning to

understand is Sir Charles Dilke. He is one of the men who seem to have

no interest in life outside politics. When one thinks that he has

wealth, an immense number of subjects in which he can find instruction

and occupation, that he is familiar with the languages, literature, and

life of several countries, it is hard to understand how he could have

had the endurance to go through the hurricane of abuse and persecution

which he has had to encounter in the last seven years. There are traces

in his face of the intense mental suffering through which he has passed;

there are more lines about the eyes than should be in the case of a man

who is just fifty. But, otherwise, he positively looks younger than he

did when he was a Cabinet Minister. There is colour where there used to

be nothing but deadly pallor--freshness where the long and terrible

drudgery of official life had left a permanent look of fag and

weariness. Sir Charles Dilke has taken up the broken thread of his life

just as if nothing had occurred in that long period of exile and

suffering. He is never out of his place: attends every sitting as

conscientiously as if he were in office and responsible for everything

that is going on; and has his eye on subjects as wide apart as the

parish councils and Newfoundland, army reform and the occupation of

Uganda. It is curious to see, too, how he is regaining that ascendancy

over the House of Commons which he exercised formerly. It is an

ascendancy not due in the least to oratorical power. Sir Charles Dilke

never made a fine sentence or a sonorous peroration in his whole life.

It is that power of acquiring all the facts of the case--of being

thoroughly up in all its merits--in short, of knowing his

business--which impresses the House of Commons, which, after all, though

it may cheer the gibes of a smart and pert debater like Mr. Chamberlain,

is most happy when it hears a man talking of something which he

understands thoroughly.

[Sidenote: Joe as a Jingo.]

Mr. Chamberlain spoke, as I have said, in the debate. It was a very

characteristic speech. I know people think I am prejudiced about this

gentleman. Not in the least. I recognize that he has many splendid

qualities for political life. They are not qualities which I think

highest either in the oratorical or the intellectual sense. He also has

staying power, and has gone through seven terrible years. There is the

trace of all the bitterness of that struggle in his face--which has lost

in these years the almost boyish freshness of expression and outline,

which bears in every deep line a mark of the ferocity of the passions by

which his breast has been torn. He is one of the many men in the House

of Commons that give one the impression of being hunted by the worst and

most pitiless of all furies--violent personal passion--especially for

power, for triumph, for revenge. But still, there he is--ready as ever

to take part in the struggle--still holding the position he held seven

years ago--with no sign of weakening or repentance, though there be

plenty of the hunger of baulked revenge.

[Sidenote: The tragedy of politics.]

What a pity it is we can't see some of those great political figures in

the nudity of their souls. They must have many a bitter moment--many an

hour of dark and hopeless depression--probably far more than other men;

for them emphatically life is a conflict and a struggle. And the

conflict and the struggle often kill them long before their time. Was

there ever anything much more tragic than the cry of M. Ferry for "le

grand Repos," as he lay stifling from the weakening heart which the

bullet of a political enemy and the slings and arrows of years of

calumny and persecution had at last broken? To any man with ordinary

sensitiveness of nerves, a political career is a crucifixion--many times

repeated. But Mr. Chamberlain, probably, has not the ordinary

sensitiveness of nerves. Combative, masterful, with narrow and

concentrated purpose, he pursues the game of politics--not without

affliction, but with persistent tenacity and a courage that have rarely

shown any signs of faltering or failing.

All these things must be granted to Mr. Chamberlain; but when I come to

speak of him intellectually, I cannot see anything in him but a very

perky, smart, glib-tongued "drummer," who is able to pick up the crumbs

of knowledge with extraordinary rapidity, and give them forth again

with considerable dexterity. He speech on Uganda, so far as its thought

and its phraseology were concerned, was on the level of the profound

utterances with which Sir Ashmead Bartlett tickles and infuriates the

groundlings of provincial audiences. But it took the House--at least, it

took the Tories; and, after all, what party orators who have not the

responsibilities of office have to do, is to get cheers and embarrass

the Government.

[Sidenote: Another hymn to the G.O.M.]

The reader must not be either exasperated or bored if he finds

continuous mention of the G.O.M. in these pages, for he is, to a great

extent, the House of Commons. I remember hearing Mrs. Gladstone once use

of her distinguished husband a phrase which gave tersely and simply a

complete idea of a side of his character. It was just before his

historic visit to Birmingham, and there was anxiety as to the vast size

of the great Bingley Hall in which it had been decided he was to speak.

"He has such heart," said Mrs. Gladstone of her husband--meaning that

whatever was the size of the hall, he would do his best, at whatever

cost, to fill it with his voice. It is this mighty heart of his which

carries him through everything, and which largely accounts for the hold

he has over the imaginations and hearts of the masses. Well, one can see

proof of this in his conduct whenever he is leader of a Government.

Other Prime Ministers and leaders of the House are only too willing to

leave as much of the work as possible to their subordinates. Disraeli

used to lie in Oriental calm during the greater part of every sitting,

leaving all his lieutenants to do the drudgery while he dosed and posed.

Not so Gladstone. He is almost literally always on his legs. The biggest

bore--the rudest neophyte--the most gulping obstructive is certain of an

answer from him--courteous, considerate, and ample. No debate, however

small, is too petty for his notice and intervention; in short, he tries

to do not only his own work, but everybody else's.

[Sidenote: His justification.]

I have once or twice gently suggested that I thought the G.O.M. might

leave a little more to his subordinates, and spare that frame and mind

which bears the Atlantean burden of the Home Rule struggle. But Mr.

Gladstone is able to unexpectedly justify himself when his friends are

crying out in remonstrance; and it is, too, one of the peculiarities of

this extraordinary portent of a man--extraordinary physically as much as

mentally--that the more he works, the fresher and happier he seems to

be. If you see him peculiarly light-hearted; if he be gesticulating with

broad and generous sweep on the Treasury Bench; if he be whispering to

Sir William Harcourt, and then talking almost aloud to Mr. John

Morley--above all, if he be ready to meet all comers, you may be quite

sure that he has just delivered a couple of rattling and lengthy

speeches, in which, with his deadly skill and perfect temper, he has

devastated the whole army of false arguments with which his opponents

have invaded him. So, for instance, it was on March 28th. It was noticed

that he was not in the House for some hours during the discussion of the

Vote on Account. But, as evening approached, there he was in his

place--fresh, smiling, happy, every limb moving with all the alertness

of auroral youth. In the interval between his first appearance in the

House and then later, he had delivered two lengthy speeches to two

deputations of deadly foes; but he came down after this exertion just as

if he had been playing a game of cricket, and had taken enough physical

exercise to bring blitheness to his spirits and alacrity to his limbs.

[Sidenote: His unending progress.]

And then the best of it all is that Mr. Gladstone justifies his

speech-making by improving every hour. It would scarcely seem credible

that a man with more than half-a-century of speech-making and triumphs

behind him would have been capable of making any change, and especially

of making a change for the better. But the peculiarity of Mr. Gladstone

is that even as a speaker he grows and improves every day. I have been

watching him closely now for some sixteen years in the House of Commons,

and I thought that it was impossible for him to ever reach again the

triumphs of some of his utterances. I have heard people say, too, that

they felt it pathetic to hear him deliver his speech on the introduction

of the Home Rule Bill, and to remember the vigour with which his

utterances on that occasion stood in such a contrast. This was

superficial and false criticism. It is quite true that the old resonance

of the voice is not there, and it is true that now and then he shows

signs of physical fatigue, and that recently after his cold there were

some days when his voice was little better than a very distinct, but

also a very pathetic, whisper. But there is another side. Age has

mellowed his style, so that now he can speak on even the most

contentious subject with a gentleness and a freedom from anything like

venom--with an elevation of tone--that make it almost impossible for

even his bitterest opponent to listen to him without delight and, for

the moment at least, with a certain degree of assent. If anybody really

wishes to find out what constitutes the highest and most effective form

of House of Commons' eloquence, he should spend his days in listening to

Mr. Gladstone in the most recent style he has adopted in the House of

Commons. And the lessons to be derived are that House of Commons'

eloquence should be easy, genial in temper, reserved in force--in short,

that it should put things with the agreeable candour, and

passionlessness want of exaggeration which characterise well-bred

conversation.

[Sidenote: To the slaughter.]

A foredoomed sheep could not have been brought more unwillingly to the

slaughter than was Mr. Balfour to the debate on the Vote of Censure. He

had nothing new to say, and unfortunately he felt that as keenly as

anybody else. Every single topic with which he had to deal had been

discussed already, until people were positively sick of them--in short,

poor Mr. Balfour was in the position of having to serve up to the House

a dish that had been boiled and grilled and stewed, and yet stewed

again, until the gorge rose at it in revolt and disgust. The late Chief

Secretary has the susceptibility of all nervous temperaments. The men

are indeed few who have equal power with all kinds of audiences--with an

audience that is friendly and that is hostile. Still more rare is it to

find a man who can face an audience even worse than a downright hostile

one, and that is an audience which is indifferent, There are very few

men I have known in my Parliamentary experience who could do it.

[Sidenote: A memory of Parnell.]

Mr. Parnell was one. I have seen him speak quite comfortably to an

audience which consisted of himself, Mr. Biggar, the Minister in

attendance, and the Speaker of the House--in all, four, including

himself. Indeed, he often said to me that he rather liked to have such

an audience. Speaking was not easy or agreeable to him, and his sole

purpose for many years in speaking at all was to consume so much time.

Parnell was a man who always found it rather hard to concentrate his

mind on any subject unless he was alone and in silence. This was perhaps

one of the many reasons why he kept out of the House of Commons as much

as he could. Anything like noise or disturbance around him seemed to

destroy his power of thinking. For instance, when he was being

cross-examined by Sir Richard Webster in the course of the Forgeries

Commission, his friends trembled one day because, looking at his face,

with its puzzled, far-away look, they knew that he was in one of those

moods of abstraction, during which he was scarcely accountable for what

he said. And sure enough he made on that day the appalling statement

that he had used certain language for the purpose of deceiving the House

of Commons. He said to me that he liked to speak in an empty House

because then he had time to collect his thoughts. Joe Biggar, his

associate, was also able to speak in any circumstances with exactly the

same ease of spirit. To him, speaking was but a means to an end, and

whether people listened to him or not--stopped to hang on his words or

fled before his grating voice and Ulster accent--it was all one to him.

Two other men have the power of speaking always with the same interest

and self-possession. These are Sir Charles Dilke and Mr. O'Connor Power.

[Sidenote: The Sensitiveness of Mr. Balfour.]

But Mr. Balfour is like none of these men. He requires the glow of a

good audience--of a cheering party--of the certainty of success in the

division lobby--to bring out his best powers. The splendid, rattling,

self-confident debater of the coercion period now no longer exists, and

Mr. Balfour has positively gone back to the clumsiness, stammering, and

ineffectiveness of the pre-historic period of his life before he had

taken up the Chief Secretaryship. That was bad enough; but what is worse

is that the House is beginning to feel it. If you lose confidence in

yourself, the world is certain to pretty soon follow your example. And

so it is now with Mr. Balfour, for when he stood up to speak on March

27th there was the sight--which must have made his soul sink to even

profounder depths of depression--of members leaving the House in troops

and rushing to the lobby, the library, or the smoke-room, rather than

listen to a debater whose rise a few months ago would have meant a

general and excited incursion of everybody that could hear. Starting

thus, Mr. Balfour made the worst of a bad case, his speech was a

failure, and as the American would put it, a fizzle; in short, a ghastly

business.

[Sidenote: The G.O.M.'s outburst.]

It was in the midst of this debate that Mr. Gladstone made his

magnificent and unexpected outburst. He had been paying attention to the

debate--but very quietly, and not at all in a way that suggested an idea

of intervening in it. It was, too, about nine o'clock when Mr. Gladstone

stood up, and anybody acquainted with the House of Commons knows that

nine o'clock is in the very crisis of that dinner hour which nightly

makes the House of Commons a waste and a wilderness. Nor, indeed, was

there much in the opening sentences that seemed to indicate the

fact--the great fact--that the House of Commons was about to listen to

one of the most extraordinary manifestations of eloquence it has ever

heard during its centuries of existence. For the Old Man was in his most

benignant mood. He spoke of his opponents and their case in sorrow

rather than in anger. Evidently, the House was about to listen to one of

those delightful little addresses--half paternal, half pedagogic--to

which it has become accustomed in recent years, since Mr. Gladstone

threw off the fierce, warring spirit of earlier days, and became the

honey-tongued Nestor of the assembly. But, as time went on, the House

began to perceive that the Old Man was in splendid fighting trim, and

seized with one of those moments of positive inspiration, in which he

carries away an assembly as though it were floated into Dreamland on the

waves of a mighty magician's magic power. Smash after smash came upon

the Tory case--as though you could see the whole edifice crumbling

before your eyes, as though it were an earthquake slitting the rocks and

shaking the solid earth. And, all the time, no loss whatever of the

massive calm, the imperturbable good-humour, the deadly politeness which

the commercial gentlemen from Ulster have also found can kill more

effectively than the shout of rhetoric, or the jargon of faction, or the

raucous throat of bigotry.

[Sidenote: In the Empyrean.]

At last the Old Man had come to a contrast between the action of the

Tory Government of 1885 and the Liberal with regard to the treatment of

prisoners in Ireland. The history of that period is one upon which Mr.

Gladstone is now able to speak without feeling; but he dragged out from

that period and its hidden recesses the whole story of the negotiations

between Parnell and Lord Carnarvon, and all the other circumstances that

make that one of the most remarkable epochs in the history of English

parties. He was now sweeping all before him. This Lord Randolph felt,

and it was almost timorously he rose to make an interruption. The Old

Man courteously gave way; but it was only to jump up again and pour on

his young opponent a tide of ridicule and answer which overwhelmed him.

Higher and higher he soared with every succeeding moment, and stranger

and more impressive became the aspect of the House. There is nothing

which becomes that assembly so much as those moments of exaltation

during which it is under the absolute spell of some great master of its

emotions. Then a death-like stillness falls upon it--you can almost hear

the same heavy-drawn sighs as those that in a Paris opera-house tell of

all the passion, the flood of memory and regret, and the dreams which

are evoked by the voice of a Marguerite before her final expiation--of a

Juliet before her final immolation. Laughter and cheers there were in

abundance during this portion of Mr. Gladstone's speech; but the general

demeanour was one of deadly stillness and rapt emotion--the stillness

one can imagine on that Easter morning when De Quincey went forth and

washed the fever from his forehead with the dew of early day.

[Sidenote: An episode.]

And in the midst of it all there came one of the most pathetic little

episodes I have seen in the House of Commons of recent years. Mr.

Gladstone has somewhat changed his habits in one respect. There was a

time when he rarely came to the House to deliver a great speech without

a little bottle--such as one sees containing pomade on the

dressing-table of the thin-haired bachelor. Of late, the pomade-bottle

has disappeared. The G.O.M. is now content to take the ordinary glass of

water. It is very seldom that he requires even that amount of sustenance

during his great speeches. However, he had been doing a good deal that

day--he had already made a long speech to his supporters in the Foreign

Office--and he required a glass of water. He called out for it, and, at

once, there was a rush from the Treasury Bench to the lobby outside.

But, before this could be done, the very pleasant little episode to

which I have alluded took place. There stood opposite Mr. Jackson, the

late Chief Secretary, an untouched glass of water. When he heard the

cry of the Old Man, Mr. Jackson--who has plenty of Yorkshire kindliness,

as well as Yorkshire bluffness--at once took up the glass that stood

before him, and handed it across the table. With a bow, and a delighted

and delightful smile, the Old Man took the glass, and drank almost

greedily. And then, turning to his opponents, he said, "I wish the right

hon. gentleman who uses me so kindly, were as willing to take from my

fountainhead as I am from his." The grace, the courtesy, the readiness

with which it was said, took the House by storm, and it was hard to say

whether the delighted laughter and cheers came in greater volume from

the Tory or the Liberal side of the House.

[Sidenote: The peroration.]

And Mr, Gladstone's power increased with his power over the House. It

looked as if you were watching some mighty monarch of the air that rises

and rises higher, higher into the empyrean on slow-poised, even almost

motionless, wing. Leaving behind the narrow issues of the particular

motion before the House, Mr. Gladstone entered on a rapid survey of the

mournful and touching relations between English officialism and Irish

National sentiment. From the dead past, he called up the touching,

beautiful, and sympathetic figure of Thomas Drummond, and all his

efforts to reconcile the administration of the law with the rights and

sentiments of the Irish people. The time for cheering had passed. All

anybody could do was to listen in spellbound silence, as sonorous

sentence rolled after sonorous sentence. And then cams the end, in a

softer and lower key. It was a direct personal allusion to Mr. Morley.

It was the whole weight of the Government and of its head thrown to the

side of the Chief Secretary in the new policy in Ireland. "We claim,"

said Mr. Gladstone, "to be partakers of his responsibility, we appeal to

the judgment of the House of Commons, and we have no other desire except

to share his fate." And then a hurricane of applause.

[Sidenote: A first experience.]

It was impossible not to feel sympathy for Lord Randolph Churchill in

the difficult task of following such a speech. The first thing he had to

do was to bear testimony to the extraordinary effect the speech had made

upon the House of Commons. It was, he said, a speech "impressive and

entrancing"--two most happily-chosen epithets to describe it. And then

Lord Randolph told a little bit of personal history which was

interesting. In all his Parliamentary career, this was the first time he

had been called upon to immediately follow a speech of Mr. Gladstone. He

would willingly have abandoned the opportunity, for it was a speech

which no man in the House of Commons was capable of confronting. After

it, everything else was bound to fall flat, dull, and unimpressive. Lord

Randolph had the misfortune of having prepared a speech of considerable

length--going into the dead past, forgotten things, and found

himself--almost for the first time in his life--incapable of holding the

attention of the House of Commons. Then the division followed, with 47

of a majority--and loud ringing cheers came from the friends of the

Government--and especially from the Irish benches--represented in the

division by every single member of the party, with the exception of one,

absent on sick leave.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE CALM BEFORE THE STORM.

[Sidenote: Still holiday-making.]

The Easter holidays were slow in coming to an end. People who were

fortunate enough to obtain pairs, lingered by the seaside or in the

country house. Others were busy with the work which the recess now

imposes as much as in the most feverish Parliamentary times on leading

political men. Mr. Balfour was away in Ireland, among the Orangemen of

Ulster and the Loyalists of Dublin; Lord Randolph Churchill was at

Liverpool making silly and violent speeches; Mr. Chamberlain was

_colloguing_--to use an excellent Irish phrase--with the publicans of

the Midlands. The Irish were especially conspicuous by the smallness of

their attendance. They had been months away from business, wives,

children, and naturally they were anxious to take advantage of the brief

breathing space which was left to them before that time came when they

could not leave Westminster for a moment in the weeks during which the

Home Rule Bill was in Committee!

[Sidenote: Return of the G.O.M.]

Mr. Gladstone, of course, was in his place. Down in Brighton, in a

pot-hat, antediluvian in age and shape, he had been courting the breeze

of the sea under the hospitable wing of Mr. Armitstead; escaping from

the crowds of hero-worshippers, and attending divine service sometimes

twice in the same day. He had not been idle in his temporary retreat.

When the day comes to record his doings before the accurate scales of

Omnipotent and Omniscient Justice, he will stand out from all other men

in the absolute use of every available second of his days of life. It

was clear that during his retreat, as during his hours of official work,

his mind had been busy on the same absorbing and engrossing subject. He

was armed with a considerable manuscript, and had evidently thought out

his sentences, his arguments, his statements of facts with intense

devotion and thought.

This is one of the things which distinguishes him from other public men

of his time. There are men I wot of--and not very big men either--who

are nothing without their audience. They deem their dignity abused if

there be not the crowded bench, the cheering friends, the prominent and

ostentatious place. Not so Mr. Gladstone. Perhaps it is the splendid

robustness of his nerves, perhaps the absorption in his subject to the

forgetfulness of himself; whatever it is, he faces this small,

_distrait_, perhaps even depressed, audience with the same zest as

though he were once again before that splendid gathering which met his

eyes on the memorable night when he brought in his Home Rule Bill. Who

but he could fail to have noticed the contrast, and noticing, who but he

could remain so loftily unobservant and unimpressed?

[Sidenote: In splendid form.]

But then Mr. Gladstone has too much of that splendid oratorical instinct

not to fashion and shape his speech to the change in the surroundings.

He has an impressionability--not to panic, not to depression, not to

wounded vanity, but to the appropriateness and the demands of an

environment, which is something miraculous. I have already remarked,

that the infinite variety of his oratory is Shakespearian in its

completeness and abundance. The speech on April 6th was an additional

proof of this. Comparisons were naturally made between this speech and

the speech by which he introduced the Bill, and everybody who was

competent thought that the second speech was the finer and better of the

two. Stories have trickled through to the public of the anxieties and

worries with which Mr. Gladstone was confronted--not from the Irish

side--on the very night before he had to bring forth this prodigious

piece of legislative work. It is these small worries that to many

Statesmen are the grimmest realities and the most momentous and

effective events of their inner lives. It is reported that one of the

few sleepless nights which have ever disturbed the splendidly even and

sane and healthy tenor of this tempestuous and incessantly active life,

was the night before the introduction of the Home Rule Bill. There are

points to be finally settled--clauses to be ultimately fixed--phrases to

be polished or pared at the eleventh hour in all human affairs. Measures

finally settled and fixed for weeks before the last hour exist--like all

perfection--only in the brains and pages of dramatists and novelists.

[Sidenote: Sunburnt, vigorous, self-possessed.]

It was not unnatural under these circumstances that when Mr. Gladstone

made his speech introducing the Home Rule Bill there should have been on

his cheek a pallor deadlier even than that which usually sits upon his

brow. That pallor, by the way, I heard recently, has been characteristic

of him from his earliest years. A schoolfellow from that far-off and

almost pre-historic time when our Grand Old Man was a thin, slim,

introspective and prematurely serious boy at Eton, tells to-day that the

recollection he has of the young Gladstone is of a slight figure, never

running, but always walking with a fast step, with earnest black eyes,

and with a pallid face--the ivory pallor, be it observed, not of

delicacy, but of robustness. Still there was on that Home Rule night, a

pallor that had the deadlier hue of sleeplessness, worry,

over-anxiety--the hideous burden of a great, weighty, and complex speech

to deliver.

On April 6th all this was gone. The fresh, youthful, cheerful man who

stood up in his place had drunk deep of the breezes that sweep The

Front at Brighton; his cheeks were burned by the blaze of a splendid

spring sun; in the budding, blossoming vital air around him he had taken

some of that eternal hopefulness with which the new birth of nature in

the spring inspires every human being with any freshness of sensation

left. Perchance from his windows in the Lion Mansion he had looked in

the evening over the broad expanse of frontierless waters, and risen to

the exaltation of the chainless unrest, the tireless and eternal youth,

the illimitable breadth of the sea. At all events, he stood before the

House visibly younger, brighter, serener than for many a day.

The voice bore traces of the transformation of body and soul which this

short visit to the sea has produced. It was soft, mellow, strong. There

were none of the descents to pathetic and inaudible whispers which

occasionally in the hours of fag and fatigue have painfully impressed

the sympathetic hearer. As Mr. Gladstone subdued himself to the temper

of the House, the House accommodated itself to the tone of Mr.

Gladstone. I have heard his speech on the second reading described as a

pleasant, delightful, historical lecture. Certainly, no stranger coming

to the House would have imagined that these sentences, flowing in a

beautiful, even stream, dealt with one of the conflicts of our time

which excite the fiercest passion and bitterest blood. It is this

calmness that is now part of Mr. Gladstone's strength. It soothes and

kills at the same time.

[Sidenote: The Nestor-patriot.]

The evening was soft and sunny, the air of the House subdued, and the

absence of anything like large numbers prevented outbursts of party

passion. And yet all this seemed to heighten the effectiveness of the

scene and the speech. Once again one had to think of Mr. Gladstone--as

posterity will think of him at this splendid epoch of his career--not as

the party politician, giving and receiving hard blows--riding a

whirlwind of passion--facing a hurricane of hate--but as the

Nestor-patriot of his country, telling all parties alike the gospel that

will lead to peace, prosperity, and contentment. The Tories, doubtless,

see none of this; but even they cannot help falling into the mood of the

hour, and under the fascination of the speaker. Now and then they

interrupt, but, as a rule, they sit in respectful and awed silence.

Whenever they do venture on interruption, the old lion shows that he is

still in possession of all that power for a sudden and deadly spring,

which lies concealed under the easy and tranquil strength of the hour.

He happens to mention the case of Norway and Sweden as one of the cases

which confirm his contention that autonomy produces friendly relations.

He has to confess, that in this case some difficulties have arisen;

there is a faint Tory cheer. At once--but with gentle good humour--with

an indulgent smile--Mr. Gladstone remarks that he doesn't wonder that

the Tories clutch at the smallest straw that helps them to eke out a

case against autonomy, and then he proceeds to show that even the case

of Norway and Sweden doesn't help them a bit.

[Sidenote: A vivid gesture.]

There is another little touch which will bring out the perfection and

beauty of the speech. One of the things which tell the experienced

observer that Mr. Gladstone is in his best form, is the exuberance and

freedom of his gesture. Whenever he feels a thorough grip of himself and

of the House, he lets himself go in a way upon which he does not venture

in quieter moods. He was dealing with the question of our colonies and

of the difference which had been made in them by the concession of Home

Rule. It was while thus engaged that he made one of those eloquent

little asides, which bring home to the mind the vastness and extent of

this great career. Nearly sixty years ago--just think of it, nearly

sixty years ago--he had been associated with the Government of the

Colonies--referring to the time when Lord Aberdeen was his chief, and he

held office for the first time as an Under-Secretary. And then he made

from Lord Aberdeen a quotation in which the Colonial Secretary calls

delighted attention to the fact that Heligoland is tranquil--the single

one of all the dependencies of the Crown of which that could be said at

that moment.

But it was not at this point that the significant gesture came in, to

which I have alluded. Mr. Gladstone had another document to read. By the

way--even over the distance which divides the Treasury Bench from the

Opposition Benches below the gangway, where we Irishry sit--I could see

that the document was written in that enormous hand-writing, which is

necessary nowadays when the sight of the Prime Minister is not equal to

the undimmed lustre of the eagle eye. This letter, said Mr. Gladstone,

was not addressed to him. It was not addressed to a Home Ruler. By this

time, curiosity was keenly excited. But Mr. Gladstone--smiling, holding

the House in firm attention and rapt admiration--was determined to play

with the subject a little longer. The letter was not directed even to

the Commoner. It was directed to a "Peer;" and as he uttered this sacred

word, with a delicious affectation of reverence, he raised the index

finger of his hand to high heaven, as though only a reference to a

region so exalted could sufficiently manifest the elevation of the

personage who had been the recipient of the letter. The House saw the

point, and laughed in great delight. It is on occasions like these that

one sees the immense artistic power which lies under all the seriousness

and gravity of Mr. Gladstone--the thorough exuberance of vitality which

marks the splendid sanity of his healthy nature.

[Sidenote: Mr. Birrell.]

I always tremble when I see a literary man, and especially a literary

man with a high reputation, rise to address the House of Commons. The

shores of that cruel assembly are strewn with the wrecks of literary

reputations. It was, therefore, not without trepidation that I saw Mr.

Augustin Birrell--one of the very finest writers of our time--succeed in

catching the Speaker's eye. My misgivings were entirely unnecessary.

With perfect ease and self-possession--at the same time with the modesty

of real genuine ability--Mr. Birrell made one of the happiest and best

speeches of the debate. Now and then, the epigram was perhaps a little

too polished--the wit perhaps a trifle too subtle for the House of

Commons. But careful preparation always involves this; and every man

must prepare until he is able to think more clearly on his legs than

sitting down. It was just the kind of speech which was wanted at a

moment when the general air is rent with the rhodomontade and tomfoolery

of Ulster. Applying to these wild harangues the destructively quiet wit

of _obiter dicta_, Mr. Birrell made the Orangemen look very foolish and

utterly ridiculous. Mr, Gladstone was one of Mr. Birrell's most

attentive and cordial hearers. Mr. Birrell is going to do great things

in the House of Commons.

[Sidenote: In penal servitude.]

The keen, playful, and penetrating wit of Mr. Birrell did not do

anything for Mr. Dunbar Barton. Mr. Barton is--as he properly

boasted--the descendant of some of that good Protestant stock that, in

the days of the fight over the destruction of the Irish Parliament,

stood by the liberties of Ireland. He is a nephew of Mr. Plunket--he

inherits the talent which is traditional in the Plunket family, and is

said not to be without some of the national spirit that still hides

itself in odd nooks and corners of estranged Irish minds. But he has

none of the saving grace of his country or family. A solemn voice that

seems to come from the depths of some divine despair, and from the

recesses of his innermost organs, together with a certain funereal

aspect in the close-shaven face, gives him an air that suggests the

cypress and the cemetery. But with deadly want of humour, he spoke of

the possibility of his spending the remainder of a blameless life in

penal servitude, and was deeply wounded when the uproarious and

irreverent House refused to take the possibility seriously.

[Sidenote: Mr. Stansfeld.]

The following Friday was made memorable by a fine speech from Mr.

Stansfeld. Full of activity, with undimmed eye, with every mental

faculty keen and alert, with every lofty and generous aspiration as

fresh as in the days of hot and perilous youth, Mr. Stansfeld yet

appears something of a survival in the House of Commons. His appearance,

his style of speech, even the framework of his thought, seem to belong

to another--in some respects a finer and more passionate period than our

own. The long hair combed straight back--the strong aquiline nose--the

heavy-lined and sensitive mouth--the subdued tenderness and wrath of the

eyes--even the somewhat antique cut of the clothes--suggest the days

when the storm and stress of the youthful century were still in men's

souls, and were driving them to conspiracy, to prison, to scaffold, to

barricades, to bloody fields. There is also a deliberation in the

delivery--a sonorousness in the phraseology--that has something of a

bygone day. But all this adds to the impressiveness of the address. The

fervour is all there, the unalterable conviction, the lofty purpose.

There is reason for the warm note of welcome which comes from the Irish

benches; for this man--perhaps disappointed--perchance not too well

used--stands up to defend his principles with the same utter

forgetfulness of self which belongs only to the finest and the truest

natures.

[Sidenote: Commercial culture.]

Mr. Chamberlain has not a wide range of ideas, and his small stock has

not been increased by anything like extensive reading. The House was

relieved to find after his return to Westminster on the 10th of April

that he had just begun to read Tennyson. It is always easy to know when

Mr. Chamberlain is making the acquaintance of an author for the first

time. Strictly business-like in even his reading, he apparently first

thinks of reading a book when he has somewhere seen a quotation from it

which might be worked into a speech; the next and almost immediate

process is to transfer it to one of his speeches. This is one of the

many differences between him and the exhaustless brain and universal

reading of Mr. Gladstone. It was, therefore, not much of a surprise to

those who had watched Mr. Chamberlain for years, to see that he was

making a very bad and poor speech on the second reading of the Home

Rule Bill--a speech certainly far inferior to that which he had

delivered on the first reading. He had exhausted the poor soil; he had

really no more to say. He was unfortunately helped by Mr. Gladstone,

who, instead of listening in silence to attacks grown stale by their

infinite repetition, attempted to correct some of Mr. Chamberlain's

statements. This was especially the case in reference to the famous

speech in which Mr. Parnell is spoken of as passing "through rapine to

dismemberment." Mr. Chamberlain wished to insist that the language had

been applied to all the Irish leaders: Mr. Gladstone insisted that they

were applied to Mr. Parnell alone. This controversy between the Prime

Minister and Mr. Chamberlain gave a little life to a speech that

hitherto had been falling desperately flat, and as such the interruption

was a tactical mistake.

[Sidenote: De mortuis.]

But it brought with curious unexpectedness a scene not without pathos

and significance. In the midst of the thrust and ripost of Mr. Gladstone

and Mr. Chamberlain, a strange and yet familiar voice was heard to shout

out, "They put all the blame on Parnell because he is dead." It was a

startling--even an embarrassing interruption. The memory of Parnell is

still dear to the vast majority of the old comrades who were compelled

to separate themselves from him in the Great Irish Disruption. At the

time when Mr. Gladstone made the speech quoted, Mr. Parnell was the

loved leader of the whole Irish people and a united Irish party; and the

speech was made at a moment particularly solemn and glorious in the

strange life and career of Parnell. The great controversy between the

English and the Irish leader, which Mr. Chamberlain had raked up from

the almost forgotten past, took place at the moment when Mr. Parnell had

gone from town to town and county to county in Ireland, in the midst of

vast and enthusiastic receptions--imperial demonstrations--with salvoes

of cheers, enthusiasm, and auroral hope such as have taken place so

often in Irish history on the eve of some mighty victory or hideous

disaster. And, then, immediately after came Parnell's imprisonment,

which he bore so well--the suppression of the National Land League, and

the era of unchecked and ferocious coercion in which the good intentions

and kindly feelings of Mr. Forster finally were buried. To separate

themselves from Mr. Parnell at that great moment in his and their life,

was a thing which none of Parnell's old comrades could do; and when this

startling interruption came, it was the spoken utterance of many of

their thoughts brought back by Mr. Chamberlain's venomous tongue in

painful reverie over a glorious but dead moment, and a tragically

wrecked and superb career.

[Sidenote: Crocodile tears.]

There was a painful pause, and then came, however, an antidote. It was

not in the Irish Nationalist party--it was not in even his own

colleagues in the small band of Parnell's supporters, that Mr. Redmond's

observation found a responsive echo. A tempest of cheers broke forth

from the Tory Benches--from the backers of the _Times_ and the

supporters of Piggott; and to add to the painful and almost hideous

irony of the situation, Mr. Chamberlain made unctuous profession of

sympathy with the vindication of Parnell's memory. To those who know

that of all the fierce animosities and contempts of Parnell, Mr.

Chamberlain's was perhaps the fiercest--to those who remember that

strange and almost awful scene when Mr. Parnell--in one of those

outbursts of concentrated rage which it was almost appalling to

witness--turned and rent Mr. Chamberlain as first false to his

colleagues and then false to Parnell himself--to those who remembered

that deadly pallor that made even more ghastly the ordinarily pale cheek

of Mr. Chamberlain beneath this withering attack--to those, I say, who

remembered all this, nothing could be more grotesque than Mr.

Chamberlain shedding a pious tear over Parnell's grave.

[Sidenote: Mr. Gladstone and Parnell.]

The situation passed off, but in many breasts it had left its sadness

and its sting behind. And then it was that once more the Old Man

brought back the House to the temper from which it had been carried by

the malignities of Mr. Chamberlain. Very pale, very calm, and, at the

same time, with evident though sternly repressed emotion--even in the

very height and ecstasy of Parliamentary passion there is a splendid

composure and self-command about Mr. Gladstone that conveys an

overwhelming sense of the extraordinary masculinity and strength of his

nature--very pale, and very calm, Mr. Gladstone stood up. Speaking in

low and touching tones he asked to make an explanation, because he

feared that some observations of his might have given pain to gentlemen

who were deeply attached to the memory of Mr. Parnell. Then he stated

that while he had formed an opinion, which might be right or wrong, with

regard to Mr. Parnell before his imprisonment in Kilmainham, he had

always believed, after his release, that Mr. Parnell was working

honestly for the good of Ireland; that he had made a communication to

Mr. Parnell to that effect through a friend; and that from that time

forward no hard word could be found in his speeches with regard to the

Irish leader. This little speech was uttered with exquisite dignity and

kindliness, and Mr. Redmond received it with the handsomest

acknowledgment of its gentleness and grace.

[Sidenote: No manipulating.]

This episode has made me anticipate a little, and almost tempted me to

pass by one of the incidents in the speech of Mr. Chamberlain. But that

would have been a mistake, for it is an incident that brings out fully

the reason why he is so utterly disliked and distrusted even in those

Tory circles which, for the moment, are making use of him. It is an

incident that likewise throws a flood of light upon the inner, hidden,

dark depths of his sinister nature. He was arguing on the financial

aspects of Mr. Gladstone's Bill. Under this portion of the Bill the

trader who has residences in both countries is entitled to make his

return for his income-tax in either England or Ireland. Mr. Chamberlain

proceeded to put the case of a trader in that position who wished to

embarrass the Irish Government, and who would wish accordingly to give

England, and not the Irish Exchequer, the advantage of his income-tax.

This he could do, Mr. Chamberlain pointed out, in the easiest manner

imaginable; he could "manipulate his books." There it stands; these are

the very words he used. Incredible, everybody would say who didn't know

Mr. Chamberlain, and wasn't told by the evidence of eyes and ears that

the words had actually been uttered. The Irish members were not slow to

seize the point, and to shout aloud at this revelation of Mr.

Chamberlain's nature; and even his Tory friends shuddered at such a

manifestation of the real kind of man that lies hidden under Mr.

Chamberlain's oily and smooth exterior. At first, he seemed surprised at

the visible shock and tremor and involuntary sense of repulsion which

this odious suggestion awakened on all sides--then he slowly realized

that he had made a mistake; and, for once, this readiest of debaters was

nonplussed, and even a little abashed.

[Sidenote: The Irish Members and the Bill.]

Mr. MacCarthy followed Mr. Chamberlain; he spoke just from ten to

fifteen minutes--plainly, simply, to the point, and what he had to say

was that he and his friends did look on this Bill as a final settlement,

which Ireland would be honourably pledged to carry out. Unselfish,

straightforward, unpretentious, kindly, Mr. MacCarthy brought into more

vivid contrast the personal venom--the ruthless hunger for vengeance and

the humiliation of his enemies--which came out with almost painful

vividness from the speech to which we had just ceased to listen. Mr.

Gladstone, sitting opposite, attentive and watchful, was evidently much

pleased at the heartiness of Mr. MacCarthy's acceptance of his great

measure.

[Sidenote: Sir George Trevelyan.]

The night wound up with the very best speech I have ever heard Sir

George Trevelyan deliver. Sir George had to answer violent, fierce,

almost malignant assault; but he did so without ever uttering a harsh

word--without losing one particle of his courteous and admirable

self-control--he raised the debate of a great issue to the high place of

difference of principles and convictions, instead of personal bickerings

and hideous and revolting personal animosities. It is the vice of Sir

George Trevelyan as a speaker that he over-prepares--writing out, as a

rule, nearly every word he has to utter, and often some of the very best

speeches I have heard him deliver have been spoiled by giving the fatal

sense of being spoken essays. The speech was carefully prepared, and, so

far as I could observe, was even written out; but its grace of diction,

its fine temper, above all, its manly explanation of a change of view

and its close-knit reasoning, made it really one of the very finest

addresses I have heard in the course of many years' debating.

[Sidenote: Toryism of the gutter.]

And, then, if you wanted to appreciate Sir George Trevelyan the more,

you had only to wait for a few moments to hear the man who followed him.

I am told on pretty good authority that, next to Lord Randolph

Churchill, the favourite orator of the Tory provincial platform is Sir

Ashmead Bartlett. I can well believe it. The empty shibboleths--the loud

and blatant voice--the bumptious temper--that make the commoner form of

Tory--all are there. He is the dramatically complete embodiment of all

the vacuous folly, empty-headed shoutings, and swaggering patriotism

which make up the stock-in-trade of most provincial Tories. Poor Mr.

Balfour was caught by Sir Ashmead before he had time to escape, and in

sheer decency had to remain while his servile adulator was pouring on

him buckets of butter, which must have appalled and disgusted him.

Indeed, the effect of the bellowings of the man from Sheffield could be

seen in the bent back, the depressed face, the general air of limpness

which overcame the Tory leader--as helpless, dejected, bent double, he

looked steadily at the green bench underneath him, and concealed from

the House as much as possible the tell-tale horror of his face.

[Sidenote: A portrait of Michael Davitt.]