to all likelihood over three, four, or five years, and
without the smallest reasonable prospect of a break. And this is
not to solve a political difficulty, but to soothe and conjure
down personal misgivings and apprehensions. I have not said
jealousies, because I do _not_ believe them to be the operative
cause; perhaps they do not exist at all.

I firmly say this is not a reasonable condition, or a tenable
demand, in the circumstances supposed. Indeed no one has
endeavoured to show that it is. Further, abated action in the
House of Commons is out of the question. We cannot have, in these
times, a figurehead prime minister. I have gone a very long way in
what I have said, and I really cannot go further.

Lord Aberdeen, taking office at barely seventy in the House of
Lords, apologised in his opening speech for doing this at a time
when his mind ought rather to be given to "other thoughts." Lord
Palmerston in 1859 did not speak thus. But he was bound to no plan
of any kind; and he was seventy-four, _i.e._ in his seventy-fifth
year.

II

It is high time to turn to the other deciding issue in the case. Though
thus stubborn against resuming the burden of leadership merely to compose
discords between Chatsworth and Birmingham, Mr. Gladstone was ready to be
of use in the Irish question, "if it should take a favourable turn." As if
the Irish question ever took a favourable turn. We have seen in the
opening of the present chapter, how he spoke to Lord Hartington of a
certain speech of Mr. Parnell's in September, "as bad as bad could be."
The secret of that speech was a certain fact that must be counted a
central hinge of these far-reaching transactions. In July, a singular
incident had occurred, nothing less strange than an interview between the
new lord-lieutenant and the leader of the Irish party. To realise its full
significance, we have to recall the profound odium that at this time
enveloped Mr. Parnell's name in the minds of nearly all Englishmen. For
several years and at that moment he figured in the public imagination for
all that is sinister, treasonable, dark, mysterious, and unholy. He had
stood his trial for a criminal conspiracy, and was supposed only to have
been acquitted by the corrupt connivance of a Dublin jury. He had been
flung into prison and kept there for many months without trial, as a
person reasonably suspected of lawless pra