“Various as were the emotions in other regions of the House, in one quarter rejoicing was unmixed.  There, at least, was no doubt and no misgiving.  There, pallid and tranquil, sat the Irish leader, whose hard insight, whose patience, energy, and spirit of command, had achieved this astounding result, and done that which he had vowed to his countrymen that he would assuredly be able to do.  On the benches round him genial excitement rose almost to tumult.  Well it might.  For the first time since the Union the Irish case was at last to be pressed in all its force and strength, in every aspect of policy and of conscience by the most powerful Englishman then alive.

“More striking than the audience was the man; more striking than the multitude of eager onlookers from the shore was the rescuer, with deliberate valour facing the floods ready to wash him down; the veteran Ulysses, who, after more than half a century of combat, service, toil, thought it not too late to try a further ‘work of noble note,’ In the hands of such a master of the instrument the theme might easily have lent itself to one of those displays of exalted passion which the House had marvelled at in more than one of Mr. Gladstone’s speeches on the Turkish question, or heard with religious reverence in his speech on the Affirmation Bill in 1883.

“What the occasion now required was that passion should burn low, and reasoned persuasion hold up the guiding lamp.  An elaborate scheme was to be unfolded, an unfamiliar policy to be explained and vindicated.  Of that best kind of eloquence which dispenses with declamation this was a fine and sustained example.  There was a deep, rapid, steady, onflowing volume of arguments, exposition, exhortation.  Every hard or bitter stroke was avoided.  Now and again a fervid note thrilled the ear and lifted all hearts.  But political oratory is action, not words—­action, character, will, conviction, purpose, personality.  As this eager muster of men underwent the enchantment of periods exquisite in their balance and modulation, the compulsion of his flashing glance and animated gesture, what stirred and commanded them was the recollection of national service, the thought of the speaker’s mastering purpose, his unflagging resolution and strenuous will, his strength of thew and sinew well tried in long years of resounding war, his unquenched conviction that the just cause can never fail.  Few are the heroic moments in our parliamentary politics, but this was one.”

I will not trench upon politics in these letters; but I may hazard the belief that could those who rejected this noble effort, by the greatest statesman of the age, to assuage the everlasting Irish conflict, have looked into the future, few of them but would have supported it with relief and thanksgiving.

It is generally perhaps a blessing that the curtain that covers the future is impenetrable; but in this case, had it been lifted for us to gaze upon the appalling future, Gladstone’s last effort for the peace of his country would surely not have been permitted to miscarry.