To this extent, then, Mr. Gladstone has not been defeated.  The question set on fire by him will never be extinguished until the combustible matter has gone to ashes.  But personally he meets a sharp rebuff.  The Tories may well raise hurrahs over that.  Radicals have to admit it, and point to the grounds of it.  Between a man’s enemies and his friends there comes out a rough painting of his character, not without a resemblance to the final summary, albeit wanting in the justly delicate historical touch to particular features.  On the one side he is abused as ’the one-man power’; lauded on the other for his marvellous intuition of the popular will.  One can believe that he scarcely wishes to march dictatorially, and full surely his Egyptian policy was from step to step a misreading of the will of the English people.  He went forth on this campaign, with the finger of Egypt not ineffectively levelled against him a second time.  Nevertheless he does read his English; he has, too, the fatal tendency to the bringing forth of Bills in the manner of Jove big with Minerva.  He perceived the necessity, and the issue of the necessity; clearly defined what must come, and, with a higher motive than the vanity with which his enemies charge him, though not with such high counsel as Wisdom at his ear, fell to work on it alone, produced the whole Bill alone, and then handed it to his Cabinet to digest, too much in love with the thing he had laid and incubated to permit of any serious dismemberment of its frame.  Hence the disruption.  He worked for the future, produced a Bill for the future, and is wrecked in the present.  Probably he can work in no other way than from the impulse of his enthusiasm, solitarily.  It is a way of making men overweeningly in love with their creations.  The consequence is likely to be that Ireland will get her full measure of justice to appease her cravings earlier than she would have had as much from the United Liberal Cabinet, but at a cost both to her and to England.  Meanwhile we are to have a House of Commons incapable of conducting public business; the tradesmen to whom the Times addressed pathetic condolences on the loss of their season will lose more than one; and we shall be made sensible that we have an enemy in our midst, until a people, slow to think, have taken counsel of their native generosity to put trust in the most generous race on earth.

CONCESSION TO THE CELT—­1886

Things are quiet outside an ant-hill until the stick has been thrust into it.  Mr. Gladstone’s Bill for helping to the wiser government of Ireland has brought forth our busy citizens on the top-rubble in traversing counterswarms, and whatever may be said against a Bill that deals roughly with many sensitive interests, one asks whether anything less violently impressive would have roused industrious England to take this question at last into the mind, as a matter for settlement.  The Liberal leader has driven