due not merely to his oratorical powers but to the extraordinary range of his gifts.  To the outside public—­even to the House of Commons—­he is chiefly known by his great rhetorical gifts; but this is only a part, and a small part, of his great mental equipment.  His mastery over figures in its firmness of grasp, its lightning-like rapidity, its retentiveness, is almost as great as that of a professional calculator.  He has a judgment, cold, equable, far-seeing, and he has a humour that is kindly but can also be scorching, and that has sometimes been deadly enough to leave wounds that never healed.

[Sidenote:  Mr. Chamberlain’s arithmetic.]

Perhaps not even Mr. Gladstone—­certainly not Mr. Goschen—­though he, too, is a past master in figures—­is as formidable and destructive a gladiator in a fight over figures as Mr. Sexton; I pity any mortal who gets into grips with him on that arena.  Mr. Chamberlain was the unhappy individual whom Mr. Sexton took in hand.  Mr. Chamberlain has the reputation of being a good man of business, he certainly was a most successful one; and one would expect from him some power, at least, of being able to state figures correctly.  When the figures he had presented to the country in a recent speech at Birmingham came under analysis by Mr. Sexton, Mr. Chamberlain was exposed as a bungler as stupid and dense as one could imagine.  Mr. Chamberlain’s mighty fabric of a war indemnity of millions which the financial arrangements of this Bill would inflict on England, melted before Mr. Sexton’s examination—­palpably, rapidly, exactly as though it were a gaudy palace of snow which the midsummer sun was melting into mere slush.  The cocksureness of Mr. Chamberlain makes his exposure a sort of comfort and delight to the majority of the House; but still, the sense of his great powers—­of his commanding position as a debater—­of his formidableness as a political and Parliamentary enemy—­made the House almost unwilling to realize that he could be taken up and reprimanded, and birched by anybody in the House with the completeness with which Mr. Sexton was performing the task.  Mark you, there was nothing offensive—­there was nothing even severe in the language of Mr. Sexton’s attack.  It was simply cold, pitiless, courteous but killing analysis—­the kind of analysis which the hapless and fraudulent bankrupt has to endure when his castles in the air come to be examined under the cold scrutiny of the Official Receiver in the Bankruptcy Court.

[Sidenote:  Johnston of Ballykilbeg.]

A different tone was that which Mr. Sexton assumed to Mr. Johnston of Ballykilbeg.  Mr. Johnston, known to the outer world as a fire-eater of the most determined order, inside the House is one of the most popular of men, and with no section of the House is he more popular than with those Irish Nationalists for whose blood he is supposed to thirst.  With gentle and friendly wit Mr. Sexton dealt with the case of Mr. Johnston lining the ditch, declaring amid sympathetic