y earnest recommendation to everybody is not
to commit himself. Upon this rule, under whatever pressure, I
shall act as long as I can. There shall be no private negotiation
carried on by me, but the time may come when I shall be obliged to
speak publicly. Meanwhile I hope you will keep in free and full
communication with old colleagues. Pray put questions if this
letter seems ambiguous....

Pray remember that I am at all times ready for personal
communication, should you think it desirable.

III

Before receiving this letter, Lord Hartington was startled, as all the
world was, to come on something in the newspapers that instantly created a
new situation. Certain prints published on December 17 what was alleged to
be Mr. Gladstone's scheme for an Irish settlement.(168) It proposed in
terms the creation of an Irish parliament. Further particulars were given
in detail, but with these we need not concern ourselves. The Irish
parliament was enough. The public mind, bewildered as it was by the
situation that the curious issue of the election had created, was thrown
by this announcement into extraordinary commotion. The facts are these.
Mr. Herbert Gladstone visited London at this time (Dec. 14), partly in
consequence of a speech made a few days before by Sir C. Dilke, and of the
club talk which the speech had set going. It was taken to mean that he and
Mr. Chamberlain, the two radical leaders, thought that such an Irish
policy as might be concocted between Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Parnell would
receive no general support from the liberal party, and that it would be
much safer to (M100) leave the tories in power, in the expectation that
some moderate measures of reform might be got from them, and that
meanwhile they would become committed with the Irishmen. Tactics of this
kind were equivalent to the exclusion of Mr. Gladstone, for in every
letter that he wrote he pronounced the Irish question urgent. Mr. Herbert
Gladstone had not been long in London before the impression became strong
upon him, that in the absence of a guiding hint upon the Irish question,
the party might be drifting towards a split. Under this impression he had
a conversation with the chief of an important press agency, who had
previously warned him that the party was all at sea. To this gentleman, in
an interview at which no notes were taken and nothing read from papers--so
little formal was it--he told his own opinions