[Sidenote:  Mr. Storey’s contribution.]

At the same moment as Mr. Morton, Mr. Storey had risen from his seat, and demanded the word.  There is a flutter of expectation.  On this speech depended, at this moment, the fate of Home Rule and the Gladstone Government.  What will it say?  Mr. Storey always takes a line of his own; is a strong man with strong opinions, plenty of courage, not altogether free from the tendency of original natures, to break away from the mechanical uniformity of party discipline.  Moreover, he is the chief among that sturdy little knot of Radicals below the gangway who are determined to make the Liberal coach go faster than the jog-trot of mere officialism.  Will he call upon his friends to stand by the Government or to desert them—­it is a most pregnant question.

It is not easy, in the midst of cyclones, to collect one’s thoughts—­to choose one’s words—­to hit straight home with short, emphatic blow.  But this feat Mr. Storey accomplished.  I have never heard, in my thirteen years’ experience of the House of Commons, a speech more admirable in form.  Not a word too much, and every sentence linked tight to the other—­reasoning, cogent, unanswerable, resistless.  And the point above all other things laid bare—­are you Liberals going to help the Tories to postpone, if not finally overthrow Home Rule, or are you not?  This, it will be seen, is but the emphasizing of the lead already given by the maladroit speech of Mr. Goschen.  But Mr. Storey, clear, resonant, resolute, speaks to a House that listens with the stillness of great situations.  Every word tells.  The issue is understood and knit; and now let us troop into the lobbies, and proclaim to the world either our abject unfitness to govern an empire and pass a real statute, or let us stand by our great mission and mighty leader.

[Sidenote:  John Burns’s penetration.]

Not even yet do levity and faction surrender the final hope of doing mischief.  At the door of the House, as I have already said, stands a Scotch Liberal doing the work of Tory Whips, and attempting to capture young members who have smoked their pipes or drank their tea, or wandered up and down the terrace by the peaceful Thames—­all unconscious of the great and grim drama going forward upstairs.  He catches hold of John Burns, among others—­a sturdy son of the soil ready to receive, as might be hoped, anything which calls itself sturdy and independent Radicalism.  Over honest John’s manly form there is a fight; but he has a strong, clear, practical head over his muscular body, and at once penetrates to the underlying issue, and walks into Gladstone’s lobby.

[Sidenote:  The division.]