m, Majuba, Khartoum,
Penjdeh, and the other party cries of a later period.

III

Let us turn to the general result, and the final composition of Mr.
Gladstone's thirteenth parliament. The polls of the first three or four
days were startling. It looked, in the phrases of the time, as if there
were conservative reaction all round, as if the pendulum had swung back to
the point of tory triumph in 1874, and as if early reverses would wind up
in final rout. Where the tories did not capture the seat, their numbers
rose and the liberal majorities fell. At the end of four days the liberals
in England and Wales had scored 86 against 109 for their adversaries. When
two-thirds of the House had been elected, the liberals counted 196, the
tories 179, and the Irish nationalists 37. In spite of the early panic or
exultation, it was found that in boroughs of over 100,000 the liberals had
after all carried seventeen, against eight for their opponents. But the
tories were victorious in a solid Liverpool, save one Irish seat; they won
all the seats in Manchester save one; and in London, where liberals had
been told by those who were believed to know, that they would make a clean
sweep, there were thirty-six tories against twenty-six liberals. Two
members of the late liberal cabinet and three subordinate ministers were
thrown out. "The verdict of the English borough constituencies," cried the
_Times_, "will be recorded more emphatically than was even the case in
1874 in favour of the conservatives. The opposition have to thank Mr.
Chamberlain not only for their defeat at the polls, but for the
irremediable disruption and hopeless disorganisation of the liberal party
with its high historic past and its high claims to national gratitude. His
achievement may give him such immortality as was won by the man who burned
down the temple of Diana at Ephesus."(161) The same writers have ever
since ascribed the irremediable disruption to Mr. Gladstone and the Irish
question.

Now came the counties with their newly enfranchised hosts. Here the tide
flowed strong and steady. Squire and parson were amazed to see the
labourer, of whose stagnant indifference to politics they had been so
confident, trudging four or five miles to a political meeting, listening
without asking for a glass of beer to political speeches, following point
upon-point, and then trudging back again dumbly chewing the cud.
Politicians with gifts of rhetoric began to talk of t