[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