would not be so very bad.  And, indeed, without any desire to make party or personal capital, I may state that undoubtedly they would not have been so bad if Mr. Chamberlain had not intervened at the last moment.  Opinion is unanimous that up to the time he spoke the feeling in the House was, though boisterous, rather good humoured.  There was a conflict of opinion, there were some shouts, there was that general din in the air which always marks the inspiration of a momentous event, but there was no ill-temper.  In a few moments Mr. Chamberlain had, to a certain extent, changed this; but even as to the period when he was speaking, I feel bound to correct the general impression and to say that my own opinion was that the general spirit was one of frolicksome enjoyment rather than of the seriousness of real passion.  Mr. Chamberlain himself, to do him justice—­though he had elaborated a series of the most taunting observations, though sentence after sentence was intended to be an assault and a barbed taunt—­Mr. Chamberlain, I say, seemed himself to regard the whole affair rather from a comic than a tragic point of view.  Under the bitterness of his language, the tone was not that of seriousness—­and, indeed, it is very hard for any man to be perfectly serious when he knows that he is speaking for a certain number of allotted minutes, and instead of addressing himself to the particular question before the House, he has to make something in the shape of a last dying speech and declaration.  The speech, however, was admirable in form, and still more admirable in delivery; the cold, clear voice penetrated to every ear, and some of the sentences were uttered with that deep, though carefully subdued swell which adds intense force by its very reserve, to the rhetoric of passion.

[Sidenote:  Joe’s beautiful elocution.]

Indeed, if I were a professor of elocution, I should feel bound to say that if a pupil required a lesson in the highest art of delivery, he could do nothing better than listen to Mr. Chamberlain’s delivery of this bitter little speech of his; and, above all, that he could nowhere and in nowise better learn the lesson of the extraordinary increase there is in the force of a speech by careful self-suppression on the part of the speaker.  There were one or two marvellous examples of Mr. Chamberlain’s extraordinary readiness in taking a point.  I think Mr. Chamberlain an extremely shallow man.  I believe his knowledge to be slatternly, his judgment to be rash, his temper to be dictatorial and uncertain, but as a debater he stands, in readiness, alertness, and quickness in taking and utilising a point, supreme over anybody in the House of Commons, with the one exception of Mr. Gladstone.  Thus when one or two Liberals made somewhat foolish interruptions on July 27th he turned upon them and exploited their interruption with an art that was almost dazzling in its perfection.  For instance, when he denounced the Liberals for accepting