his friends to stand by the Government or
to desert them--it is a most pregnant question.

It is not easy, in the midst of cyclones, to collect one's thoughts--to
choose one's words--to hit straight home with short, emphatic blow. But
this feat Mr. Storey accomplished. I have never heard, in my thirteen
years' experience of the House of Commons, a speech more admirable in
form. Not a word too much, and every sentence linked tight to the
other--reasoning, cogent, unanswerable, resistless. And the point above
all other things laid bare--are you Liberals going to help the Tories to
postpone, if not finally overthrow Home Rule, or are you not? This, it
will be seen, is but the emphasizing of the lead already given by the
maladroit speech of Mr. Goschen. But Mr. Storey, clear, resonant,
resolute, speaks to a House that listens with the stillness of great
situations. Every word tells. The issue is understood and knit; and now
let us troop into the lobbies, and proclaim to the world either our
abject unfitness to govern an empire and pass a real statute, or let us
stand by our great mission and mighty leader.

[Sidenote: John Burns's penetration.]

Not even yet do levity and faction surrender the final hope of doing
mischief. At the door of the House, as I have already said, stands a
Scotch Liberal doing the work of Tory Whips, and attempting to capture
young members who have smoked their pipes or drank their tea, or
wandered up and down the terrace by the peaceful Thames--all unconscious
of the great and grim drama going forward upstairs. He catches hold of
John Burns, among others--a sturdy son of the soil ready to receive, as
might be hoped, anything which calls itself sturdy and independent
Radicalism. Over honest John's manly form there is a fight; but he has a
strong, clear, practical head over his muscular body, and at once
penetrates to the underlying issue, and walks into Gladstone's lobby.

[Sidenote: The division.]

At last the division is nearing its close, and the excitement--perhaps,
because it is so painfully repressed--has grown until it has almost
become unbearable. Whenever there is a close division like this, several
things happen which never happen on other occasions. Members gather
round the doors of the division lobbies, listening to the tellers as
they count one, two, three, four, and so on, in the mechanical voice of
the croupiers, bidding the gamblers to play with the dice of death. The
Whips als