great courtesy and kindness." The government pressed forward and carried
through the House of Commons a measure dealing with the liability of
employers for accidents, and a more important measure setting up elective
bodies for certain purposes in parishes. Into the first the Lords
introduced such changes as were taken to nullify all the advantages of the
bill, and the cabinet approved of its abandonment. Into the second they
forced back certain provisions that the Commons had with full deliberation
decisively rejected.

Mr. Gladstone was at Biarritz, he records, when this happened in January
of 1894. He had gone there to recruit after the incomparable exertions of
the session, and also to consider at a cool distance and in changed scenes
other topics that had for some weeks caused him some agitation. He now
thought that there was a decisive case against the House of Lords. Apart
from the Irish bill to which the (M182) Commons had given eighty-two days,
the Lords had maimed the bill for parish councils, to which had gone the
labour of forty-one days. Other bills they had mutilated or defeated. Upon
the whole, he argued, it was not too much to say that for practical
purposes the Lords had destroyed the work of the House of Commons,
unexampled as that work was in the time and pains bestowed upon it. "I
suggested dissolution to my colleagues in London, where half, or more than
half, the cabinet were found at the moment. I received by telegraph a
hopelessly adverse reply." Reluctantly he let the idea drop, always
maintaining, however, that a signal opportunity had been lost. Even in my
last conversation with him in 1897, he held to his text that we ought to
have dissolved at this moment. The case, he said, was clear, thorough, and
complete. As has been already mentioned, there were four occasions on
which he believed that he had divined the right moment for a searching
appeal to public opinion on a great question.(304) The renewal of the
income tax in 1853 was the first; the proposal of religious equality for
Ireland in 1868 was the second; home rule was the third, and here he was
justified by the astonishing and real progress that he had made up to the
catastrophe at the end of 1890. The fourth case was this, of a dissolution
upon the question of the relations of the two Houses.

Chapter VIII. Retirement From Public Life. (1894)

O, 'tis a burden, Cromwell, 'tis a burden
Too heavy for a man that hopes for h