meant to stick by the ninth clause, and would do their very best to get it accepted by the House.  Here was a most portentous announcement—­the portentousness of which the careful observer could see at once, by the sudden stillness which fell upon the House.  Whenever a Minister, or even a politician of small importance who is not a Minister, makes a statement full of portentous possibilities as to the future, the House suddenly becomes still and tense, and you can hear a pin drop.  It is the prompt and sometimes almost irresistible expression of the feeling that Destiny is throwing the die, and that you have to watch the grim and fateful result.

[Sidenote:  The Treasury Bench looks awkward.]

And if you looked on the Treasury Bench, you could see that the feeling was not altogether comfortable.  It was no secret that the ninth clause was the one which offered to the Government the one perilous fence they had still to take—­that is to say, so far as their own followers were concerned.  Hitherto the attitude of the Government was quite unknown; and, indeed, it was quite probable that the Government themselves had not finally decided what their attitude should be.  But when Mr. Gladstone—­pale, excited, and angry—­jumped in with this outburst, it seemed all at once as if the fateful and final word of Destiny had been spoken, and as if the whole fate of Ireland, of Mr. Gladstone, of this great Ministry, and of this mighty Bill, had been definitely pledged to one throw of the dice.  Imagine one of those contests which you find in the pages of Turgenieff or Tolstoi, which perchance you may have seen at Monte Carlo, which in the last few days may have been observed at Epsom Downs—­in which life or death, ruin or halcyon fortune, depended on one throw—­and you can have some sense of all that passed through the imagination of the House and that made it almost audibly shiver when Mr. Gladstone made this slight and terse interruption.  Mr. Morley’s face—­serious, often sombre—­cast in a mould and reflective of a soul inclined to the darker rather than the more cheerful view of life’s tangled and unsatisfactory workings—­grew black and troubled; the other Ministers who were present looked—­not so eloquently, but still perceptibly—­uncomfortable; Mr. Asquith—­who had been a close observer—­could not keep his keen anxiety from breaking through the mask of easy equanimity with which he is able to clothe his readiness to meet fortune in all her moods; in short, it was for Ministerialists one of those uncomfortable quarters of an hour in which life seems to concentrate all its bitterness, sorrow, and anxieties within a terribly brief space of time.  And if you wanted to know further what was the full significance of what had taken place, you saw it in the open and almost indecent joy of Mr. Chamberlain’s face; in the more subdued but a still unctuous look of Mr. Courtney; and you could hear it in the shriller pitch of Mr. Balfour’s voice.