vote. The honour of the House is materially involved in giving it
full effect. It would therefore be my first wish to aid, if
possible, in such a task; and remembering the years when we were
colleagues, I may be permitted to say that there is nothing in the
fact of your being the head of a ministry, which would avail to
deter me from forming part of it.

Among the first questions I have had to put to myself, in
consequence of the offer which you have conveyed in such friendly
and flattering terms, has been the question whether it would be in
my power by accepting it, either alone or in concert with others,
to render you material service. After the long years during which
we have been separated, there would be various matters of public
interest requiring to be noticed between us; but the question I
have mentioned is a needful preliminary. Upon the best
consideration which the moment allows, I think it plain that alone,
as I must be, I could not render you service worth your having. The
dissolution of last year excluded from parliament men with whom I
had sympathies; and it in some degree affected the position of
those political friends with whom I have now for many years been
united through evil and (much more rarely) through good report.
Those who lament the rupture of old traditions may well desire the
reconstitution of a party; but the reconstitution of a party can
only be effected, if at all, by the return of the old influences to
their places, and not by the junction of an isolated person. The
difficulty is even enhanced in my case by the fact that in your
party, reduced as it is at the present moment in numbers, there is
a small but active and not unimportant section who avowedly regard
me as the representative of the most dangerous ideas. I should
thus, unfortunately, be to you a source of weakness in the heart of
your own adherents, while I should bring you no party or group of
friends to make up for their defection or discontent.

For the reasons which I have thus stated or glanced at, my reply to
your letter must be in the negative.

I must, however, add that a government formed by you at this time
will, in my opinion, have strong claims upon me, and upon any one
situated as I am, for favourable presumptions, and in the absence