the speaker. He made a speech which was two hours and a half
in duration; it was in my opinion too long--I think that except in the
most exceptional cases no orator ought to speak more than half an hour.
And yet I would not have had the speech shorter by one second; and it is
a singular proof of the extraordinary command which this man holds over
the House of Commons that he kept its attention absolutely without a
moment's pause or cessation, during every bit of this tremendous strain
upon his attention. With the exception of Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Sexton is
the one man in the House who is capable of such a feat. This is largely
due not merely to his oratorical powers but to the extraordinary range
of his gifts. To the outside public--even to the House of Commons--he is
chiefly known by his great rhetorical gifts; but this is only a part,
and a small part, of his great mental equipment. His mastery over
figures in its firmness of grasp, its lightning-like rapidity, its
retentiveness, is almost as great as that of a professional calculator.
He has a judgment, cold, equable, far-seeing, and he has a humour that
is kindly but can also be scorching, and that has sometimes been deadly
enough to leave wounds that never healed.

[Sidenote: Mr. Chamberlain's arithmetic.]

Perhaps not even Mr. Gladstone--certainly not Mr. Goschen--though he,
too, is a past master in figures--is as formidable and destructive a
gladiator in a fight over figures as Mr. Sexton; I pity any mortal who
gets into grips with him on that arena. Mr. Chamberlain was the unhappy
individual whom Mr. Sexton took in hand. Mr. Chamberlain has the
reputation of being a good man of business, he certainly was a most
successful one; and one would expect from him some power, at least, of
being able to state figures correctly. When the figures he had
presented to the country in a recent speech at Birmingham came under
analysis by Mr. Sexton, Mr. Chamberlain was exposed as a bungler as
stupid and dense as one could imagine. Mr. Chamberlain's mighty fabric
of a war indemnity of millions which the financial arrangements of this
Bill would inflict on England, melted before Mr. Sexton's
examination--palpably, rapidly, exactly as though it were a gaudy palace
of snow which the midsummer sun was melting into mere slush. The
cocksureness of Mr. Chamberlain makes his exposure a sort of comfort and
delight to the majority of the House; but still, the sense of his great
powers--of