d, surveying his flock from the
august altitude of the Chair with an acute, experienced, and friendly eye,
made up his mind that the liberal party were "not only strong, but
determined to have their own way in spite of Mr. Gladstone. He has a
difficult team to drive." Two men of striking character on the benches
opposite quickly became formidable. Lord Randolph Churchill headed a
little group of four tories, and Mr. Parnell a resolute band of five and
thirty Irishmen, with momentous results both for ministers and for the
House of Commons.

No more capable set of ruling men were ever got together than the cabinet
of 1880; no men who better represented the leading elements in the
country, in all their variety and strength. The great possessors of land
were there, and the heirs of long governing tradition were there; the
industrious and the sedate of the middle classes found their men seated at
the council board, by the side of others whose keen-sighted ambition
sought sources of power in the ranks of manual toil; the church saw one of
the most ardent of her sons upon the woolsack, and the most illustrious of
them in the highest place of all; the people of the chapel beheld with
complacency the rising man of the future in one who publicly boasted an
unbroken line of nonconformist descent. They were all men well trained in
the habits of business, of large affairs, and in experience of English
life; they were all in spite of difference of shade genuinely liberal; and
they all professed a devoted loyalty to their chief. The incident of the
resolutions on the eastern question(1) was effaced from all (M1) memories,
and men who in those days had assured themselves that there was no return
from Elba, became faithful marshals of the conquering hero. Mediocrity in
a long-lived cabinet in the earlier part of the century was the object of
Disraeli's keenest mockery. Still a slight ballast of mediocrity in a
government steadies the ship and makes for unity--a truth, by the way, that
Mr. Disraeli himself, in forming governments, sometimes conspicuously put
in practice.

In fact Mr. Gladstone found that the ministry of which he stood at the
head was a coalition, and what was more, a coalition of that vexatious
kind, where those who happened not to agree sometimes seemed to be almost
as well pleased with contention as with harmony. The two sections were not
always divided by differences of class or station, for some of the peers
in the