ys endeared you to them personally, has
enabled men playing their own game ... to take out of your hands
the _formation_ of opinion.

On a connected aspect of the same thing, Mr. Gladstone wrote to Lord
Rosebery (Sept. 16, 1880):--

... All this is too long to bore people with--and yet it is not so
long, nor so interesting, as one at least of the subjects which we
just touched in conversation at Mentmore; the future of politics,
and the food they offer to the mind. What is outside parliament
seems to me to be fast mounting, nay to have already mounted, to
an importance much exceeding what is inside. Parliament deals with
laws, and branches of the social tree, not with the root. I always
admired Mrs. Grote's saying that politics and theology were the
only two really great subjects; it was wonderful considering the
atmosphere in which she had lived. I do not doubt which of the two
she would have put in the first place; and to theology I have no
doubt she would have given a wide sense, as including everything
that touches the relation between the seen and the unseen.

What is curious to note is that, though Mr. Gladstone in making his
cabinet had thrown the main weight against (M2) the radicals, yet when
they got to work, it was with them he found himself more often than not in
energetic agreement. In common talk and in partisan speeches, the prime
minister was regarded as dictatorial and imperious. The complaint of some
at least among his colleagues in the cabinet of 1880 was rather that he
was not imperious enough. Almost from the first he too frequently allowed
himself to be over-ruled; often in secondary matters, it is true, but
sometimes also in matters on the uncertain frontier between secondary and
primary. Then he adopted a practice of taking votes and counting numbers,
of which more than one old hand complained as an innovation. Lord
Granville said to him in 1886, "I think you too often counted noses in
your last cabinet."

What Mr. Gladstone described as the severest fight that he had ever known
in any cabinet occurred in 1883, upon the removal of the Duke of
Wellington's statue from Hyde Park Corner. A vote took place, and three
times over he took down the names. He was against removal, but was unable
to have his own way over the majority. Members of the government thought
themselves curiously free to walk out from divisions. On a Transvaal
di