But Mr. Balfour is like none of these men.  He requires the glow of a good audience—­of a cheering party—­of the certainty of success in the division lobby—­to bring out his best powers.  The splendid, rattling, self-confident debater of the coercion period now no longer exists, and Mr. Balfour has positively gone back to the clumsiness, stammering, and ineffectiveness of the pre-historic period of his life before he had taken up the Chief Secretaryship.  That was bad enough; but what is worse is that the House is beginning to feel it.  If you lose confidence in yourself, the world is certain to pretty soon follow your example.  And so it is now with Mr. Balfour, for when he stood up to speak on March 27th there was the sight—­which must have made his soul sink to even profounder depths of depression—­of members leaving the House in troops and rushing to the lobby, the library, or the smoke-room, rather than listen to a debater whose rise a few months ago would have meant a general and excited incursion of everybody that could hear.  Starting thus, Mr. Balfour made the worst of a bad case, his speech was a failure, and as the American would put it, a fizzle; in short, a ghastly business.

[Sidenote:  The G.O.M.’s outburst.]

It was in the midst of this debate that Mr. Gladstone made his magnificent and unexpected outburst.  He had been paying attention to the debate—­but very quietly, and not at all in a way that suggested an idea of intervening in it.  It was, too, about nine o’clock when Mr. Gladstone stood up, and anybody acquainted with the House of Commons knows that nine o’clock is in the very crisis of that dinner hour which nightly makes the House of Commons a waste and a wilderness.  Nor, indeed, was there much in the opening sentences that seemed to indicate the fact—­the great fact—­that the House of Commons was about to listen to one of the most extraordinary manifestations of eloquence it has ever heard during its centuries of existence.  For the Old Man was in his most benignant mood.  He spoke of his opponents and their case in sorrow rather than in anger.  Evidently, the House was about to listen to one of those delightful little addresses—­half paternal, half pedagogic—­to which it has become accustomed in recent years, since Mr. Gladstone threw off the fierce, warring spirit of earlier days, and became the honey-tongued Nestor of the assembly.  But, as time went on, the House began to perceive that the Old Man was in splendid fighting trim, and seized with one of those moments of positive inspiration, in which he carries away an assembly as though it were floated into Dreamland on the waves of a mighty magician’s magic power.  Smash after smash came upon the Tory case—­as though you could see the whole edifice crumbling before your eyes, as though it were an earthquake slitting the rocks and shaking the solid earth.  And, all the time, no loss whatever of the massive calm, the imperturbable good-humour, the deadly politeness which the commercial gentlemen from Ulster have also found can kill more effectively than the shout of rhetoric, or the jargon of faction, or the raucous throat of bigotry.