Mr. Asquith had intended to speak on April 14th, evening, but the portentous and prolix Courtney had shut him out, and he had to wait till the following evening.  The change was, perhaps, desirable, for Mr. Asquith had thus the opportunity of addressing the House when it was fresh, vital, and impressionable.  In these long debates the evenings usually became intolerably dull and oppressive.  Though Mr. Asquith was an untried man when he went into office, in two speeches he succeeded in placing himself in the very front rank of the debaters and politicians in the House.  Let me say at once that the speech was a remarkable triumph, and placed Mr. Asquith at a bound amid not only the orators, but the statesmen of the House of Commons—­the men who have nerve, breadth of view, great courage, enormous resource.

[Sidenote:  Joe’s dustheap.]

One of the discoveries of the speech must have been particularly unpleasant to Mr. Chamberlain.  The gentleman from Birmingham has at last found a man who does not fear him—­who has a much finer mind—­wider culture—­who has judgment, temper, and a vocabulary as copious and as ready as that of Mr. Chamberlain himself.  One had only to look at Mr. Chamberlain throughout the speech to see how palpable, how painful this discovery was—­especially to a man to whom politics is nothing but a mere conflict between contending rivalries and malignities.  Mr. Asquith—­calm, self-possessed, measured—­put Joe on the rack with a deliberation that was sometimes almost cruel in its effectiveness and relentlessness; and Joe was foolish enough to point the severity and success of the attack by losing his self-control.  When Mr. Asquith said that Joe could find no better employment than that of “scavenging”—­here was a word to make Joe wince—­“among the dustheaps” of past speeches, Joe was a sight to see.  A “scavenger”—­this was the disrespectful way in which those quotations were described which had often roused the Tory Benches to ecstasies of delight.  Joe was so angered that he could not get over it for some time.  “Dustheaps!” he was heard to be muttering several times in succession, as if the word positively choked him.  Indeed, throughout Mr. Asquith’s speech, whenever the allusions were made to him, Joe was seen to be muttering under his teeth.  It was the running commentary which he made on the most effective attack that has been uttered against him; it was the highest tribute to the severity and success of the assailant.

[Sidenote:  Limp Balfour.]

Badly as Mr. Chamberlain bore his punishment, Mr. Balfour was even worse.  It is seldom that the House of Commons has seen a more remarkable or more effective retort than the happy, dexterous, delightful—­from the literary point of view, unsurpassable—­parody which Mr. Asquith made of Mr. Balfour’s flagitious incitements to the men of Belfast.  Mr. Asquith put the case of Mr. Morley going down to a crowd in Cork, and using the same kind of language.  Mr.