The schism over Home Rule was now approaching, and, when it came, Lord Rosebery threw in his lot with Gladstone, becoming Foreign Secretary in February, 1886, and falling with his chief in the following summer.  In 1889 he was chosen Chairman of the first London County Council, and there did the best work of his life, shaping that powerful but amorphous body into order and efficiency.  Meanwhile, he was, by judicious speech and still more judicious silence, consolidating his political position; and before he joined Gladstone’s last Government in August, 1892, he had been generally recognized as the exponent of a moderate and reasonable Home Rule and an advocate of Social Reform.  My own belief is that the Liberal party as a whole, and the Liberal Government in particular, rejoiced in the decision which, on Gladstone’s final retirement, made Rosebery Prime Minister.

But it was a difficult and disappointing Premiership.  Harcourt, not best pleased by the Queen’s choice, was Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the House of Commons.  Gladstone, expounding our Parliamentary system to the American nation, once said:  “The overweight of the House of Commons is apt, other things being equal, to bring its Leader inconveniently near in power to a Prime Minister who is a Peer.  He can play off the House of Commons against his chief, and instances might be cited, though they are happily most rare, when he has served him very ugly tricks.”

The Parliamentary achievement of 1894 was Harcourt’s masterly Budget, with which, naturally, Lord Rosebery had little to do; the Chancellor of the Exchequer loomed larger and larger, and the Premier vanished more and more completely from the public view.  After the triumph of the Budget, everything went wrong with the Government, till, being defeated on a snap division about gunpowder in June, 1895, Lord Rosebery and his colleagues trotted meekly out of office.  They might have dissolved, but apparently were afraid to challenge the judgment of the country on the performances of the last three years.

Thus ingloriously ended a Premiership of which much had been expected.  It was impossible not to be reminded of Goderich’s “transient and embarrassed phantom”; and the best consolation which I could offer to my dethroned chief was to remind him that he had been Prime Minister for fifteen months, whereas Disraeli’s first Premiership had only lasted for ten.

VII

AUTHUR JAMES BALFOUR

When Lord Rosebery brought his brief Administration to an end, Lord Salisbury became Prime Minister for the last time.  His physical energy was no longer what it once had been, and the heaviest of all bereavements, which befell him in 1899, made the burden of office increasingly irksome.  He retired in 1902, and was succeeded by his nephew, Mr. A. J. Balfour, The Administration formed in 1895 had borne some resemblance to a family party, and had thereby invited ridicule—­even, in some quarters, created disaffection.  But when Lord Salisbury was nearing the close of his career, the interests of family and of party were found to coincide, and everybody felt that Mr. Balfour must succeed him.  Indeed, the transfer of power from uncle to nephew was so quietly effected that the new Prime Minister had kissed hands before the general public quite realized that the old one had disappeared.