from detracting from, added to the effect he produced.  I heard Mr. Gladstone’s last speech in Parliament, on March 1, 1894.  It was frankly a great disappointment.  I sat then on the Opposition side, but we Unionists had all assembled to cheer the old man who was to make his farewell speech to the Assembly in which he had sat for sixty years, and of which he had been so dominating and so unique a personality, although we were bitterly opposed to him politically.  The tone of his speech made this difficult for us.  Instead of being a dignified farewell to the House, as we had anticipated, it was querulous and personal, with a peevish and minatory note in it that made anything but perfunctory applause from the Opposition side very hard to produce.  Two days afterwards, on March 3, 1894, Mr. Gladstone resigned.  In the light of recent revelations, we know now that his failing eyesight was but a pretext.  Lord Spencer, then First Lord of the Admiralty, had framed his Naval Estimates, and declared that the shipbuilding programme outlined in those Estimates was absolutely necessary for the national safety.  Mr. Gladstone, supported by some of his colleagues, refused to sanction these Estimates.  Some long-headed Members of the Cabinet saw clearly that if Lord Spencer insisted on his Estimates, in the then temper of the country, the Liberal party would go to certain defeat.  Accordingly, Mr. Gladstone was induced to resign, as the easiest way out of the difficulty.  I do not gather, though, that those of his colleagues who, with him, disapproved of the Naval Estimates, thought it their duty to follow their chief into retirement.

I am amused on seeing on contents bills of news-papers, as a rare item of news, “All-night sitting of Commons.”

In the 1886 Parliament practically every night was an all-night sitting.  Under the old rules of Procedure, as the Session advanced, we were kept up night after night till 5 a.m.  Some Members, notably the late Henry Labouchere, took a sort of impish delight in keeping the House sitting late.  Many Front-Bench men had their lives shortened by the strain these late hours imposed on them, notably Edward Stanhope and Mr. W. H. Smith.  Mr. W. H. Smith occupied a very extraordinary position.  This plain-faced man, who could hardly string two words together, was regarded by all his friends with deep respect, almost with affection.  My brother George has told me that, were there any disputes in the Cabinet of which he was a member, the invariable advice of the older men was to “go and take Smith’s advice about it.”  Men carried their private, domestic, and even financial troubles to this wise counsellor, confident that the advice given would be sound.  Mr. Smith had none of the more ornamental qualities, but his fund of common sense was inexhaustible, he never spared himself in his friends’ service, and his high sense of honour and strength of character earned him the genuine regard of all those who really knew him.  He was a very fine specimen of the unassuming, honourable, high-minded English gentleman.