Mr. Balfour had long been a conspicuous and impressive figure in public life.  With a large estate and a sufficient fortune, with the Tory leader for his uncle, and a pocket-borough bidden by that uncle to return him, he had obvious qualifications for political success.  He entered Parliament in his twenty-sixth year, at the General Election of 1874, and his many friends predicted great performances.  But for a time the fulfilment of those predictions hung fire.  Disraeli was reported to have said, after scrutinizing his young follower’s attitude:  “I never expect much from a man who sits on his shoulders.”

Beyond some rather perplexed dealings with the unpopular subject of Burial Law, the Member for Hertford took no active part in political business.  At Cambridge he had distinguished himself in Moral Science.  This was an unfortunate distinction.  Classical scholarship had been traditionally associated with great office, and a high wrangler was always credited with hardheadedness; but “Moral Science” was a different business, not widely understood, and connected in the popular mind with metaphysics and general vagueness.  The rumour went abroad that Lord Salisbury’s promising nephew was busy with matters which lay quite remote from politics, and was even following the path of perilous speculation.  It is a first-rate instance of our national inclination to talk about books without reading them that, when Mr. Balfour published A Defence of Philosophic Doubt, everyone rushed to the conclusion that he was championing agnosticism.  His friends went about looking very solemn, and those who disliked him piously hoped that all this “philosophic doubt” might not end in atheism.  It was not till he had consolidated his position as a political leader that politicians read the book, and then discovered, to their delight, that, in spite of its alarming name, it was an essay in orthodox apologetic.

The General Election of 1880 seemed to alter the drift of Mr. Balfour’s thought and life.  It was said that he still was very philosophical behind the scenes, but as we saw him in the House of Commons he was only an eager and a sedulous partisan.  Gladstone’s overwhelming victory at the polls put the Tories on their mettle, and they were eager to avenge the dethronement of their Dagon.  “The Fourth Party” was a birth of this eventful time, and its history has been written by the sons of two of its members.  With the performances of Lord Randolph Churchill, Sir John Gorst, and Sir Henry Drummond Wolff I have no concern; but the fourth member of the party was Mr. Balfour, who now, for the first time, began to take a prominent part in public business.  I must be forgiven if I say that, though he was an admirable writer, it was evident that Nature had not intended him for a public speaker.  Even at this distance of time I can recall his broken sentences, his desperate tugs at the lapel of his coat, his long pauses in search of a word, and his selection of the wrong word after all.