on the assumed opinions of
Mr. Gladstone, all in general terms, and only with the negative view of
preventing friendly writers from falling into traps. Unluckily it would
seem to need at least the genius of a Bismarck, to perform with precision
and success the delicate office of inspiring a modern oracle on the
journalistic tripod. Here, what was intended to be a blameless negative
soon swelled, as the oracular fumes are wont to do, into a giant positive.
In conversations with another journalist, who was also his private friend
(Dec. 15), he used language which the friend took to justify the pretty
unreserved announcement that Mr. Gladstone was about to set to work in
earnest on home rule.

"With all these matters," Mr. Herbert Gladstone wrote to a near relative
at the time, "my father had no more connection than the man in the moon,
and until each event occurred, he knew no more of it than the man in the
street." Mr. Gladstone on the same day (Dec. 17) told the world by
telegraph that the statement was not an accurate representation of his
views, but a speculation upon them; he added that it had not been
published with his knowledge or authority. There can be no doubt, whatever
else may be said, that the publication was neither to his advantage, nor
in conformity with his view of the crisis. No statesman in our history has
ever been more careful of the golden rule of political strategy--to neglect
of which Frederick the Great traced the failure of Joseph II.--not to take
the second step before you have taken the first. Neither scheme nor
intention had yet crystallised in his mind. Never was there a moment when
every consideration of political prudence more imperatively counselled
silence. Mr. Gladstone's denial of all responsibility was not found to be
an explicit contradiction; it was a repudiation of the two newspapers, but
it was not a repudiation of an Irish parliament. Therefore people believed
the story the more. Friends and foes became more than ever alert, excited,
alarmed, and in not a few cases vehemently angry. This unauthorised
publication with the qualified denial, placed Mr. Gladstone in the very
position which he declared that he would not take up; it made him a
trespasser on ground that belonged to the government. Any action on his
part would in his own view not only be unnecessary; it would be
unwarrantable; it would be in the highest degree injurious and
mischievous.(169) Yet whatever it amounted to, s