ee you leave them--and I know
nothing that can prevent your being prime minister before you
approach the age of every other member of the House who has or can
have any claim to that high office.

If you agree rather with the men opposite than with those among
whom you have been sitting of late, I have nothing to say. I am
sure you will follow where 'the right' leads, if you only discover
it, and I am not hoping or wishing to keep you from the right. I
think I am not mistaken in the opinion I have formed of the
direction in which your views have for some years been tending. You
know well enough the direction in which the opinions of the country
are tending. The minority which invites you to join it, if honest,
must go or wish to go, in an opposite direction, and it cannot
therefore govern the country. Will you unite yourself with what
must be, from the beginning, an inevitable failure?

Don't be offended, if, by writing this, I seem to believe you will
join Lord Derby. I don't believe it--but I can imagine your seeing
the matter from a point of view very different to mine--and I feel
a strong wish just to say to you what is passing in my mind. You
will not be the less able to decide on your proper course. If I
thought this letter would annoy you, I would not send it. I think
you will take it in the spirit in which it is written. No one knows
that I am writing it, and I write it from no idea of personal
advantage to myself, but with a view to yours, and to the interests
of the country. I may be mistaken, but think I am not. Don't think
it necessary to reply to this. I only ask you to read it, and to
forgive me the intrusion upon you--and further to believe that I am
yours, with much respect.

_Mr. Gladstone to Mr. Bright._

_10 Great George Street, Feb. 22, '58._--Your letter can only bear
one construction, that of an act of peculiar kindness which ought
not to be readily forgotten. For any one in whom I might be
interested I should earnestly desire, upon his entering public
life, that, if possible, he might with a good conscience end in the
party where he began, or else that he might have broad and definite
grounds for quitting it. When neither of these advantages appears
to be certainly within command, there remains a strong