t will be grievously
disillusioned. Disestablishment, begun in Ireland, will inevitably work
round, by Scotland, to England. And who is to preside over these
changes?"

I returned to the charge in the June number of the _Nineteenth Century_,
and urged my points more strongly. I pleaded for social reform, and for
"a Free Church in a Free State." I crossed swords with a noble Lord who
had pronounced dogmatically that "A Second Chamber is absolutely
necessary." I gave my reasons for thinking that now-a-days there is very
little danger of hasty and ill-considered legislation, and I pointed out
that, when this danger disappears, the reason for a Second Chamber
disappears with it. "But," I said, "granting, for the sake of argument,
that something of this danger still survives, would it not be fully met
by limiting the power of the Lords to a Veto for a year on a measure
passed by the Commons?"

These articles, coupled with my speeches in the House and in my
constituency, gave dire offence to the Whigs; and I was chastened with
rebukes which, if not weighty, were at any rate ponderous. "Not this
way," wrote the _St. James's Gazette_, in a humorous apostrophe, "not
this way, O Junior Member for Aylesbury, lies the road to the Treasury
Bench," and so, indeed, it seemed. But, on returning from an evening
party at Sir Matthew Ridley's, on the 5th of June, 1883, I found a
letter from Mr. Gladstone, offering me the post of Parliamentary
Secretary to the Local Government Board. One sentence of that letter I
may be allowed to quote:

"Your name, and the recollections it suggests, add much to the
satisfaction which, independently of relationship, I should have felt in
submitting to you this request." It was like Gladstone's courtesy to
call his offer a "request."

Thus I became harnessed to the machine of Government, and my friends,
inside the House and out of it, were extremely kind about the
appointment. Nearly everyone who wrote to congratulate me used the same
image: "You have now set your foot on the bottom rung of the ladder."
But my staunch friend George Trevelyan handled the matter more
poetically, in the following stanza:

"As long as a plank can float, or a bolt can hold together,
When the sea is smooth as glass, or the waves run mountains high,
In the brightest of summer skies, or the blackest of dirty weather,
Wherever the ship swims, there swim I."

The part of "the ship" to which I was