mpire and the supremacy of parliament, with the
establishment of a legislative body in Dublin. He declared his own
preference for an attempt to come to terms with the Irish members on the
basis of a more limited scheme of local government, coupled with proposals
about land and about education. At the same time, as the minister had been
good enough to leave him unlimited liberty of judgment and rejection, he
was ready to give unprejudiced examination to more extensive
proposals.(184) Such was Mr. Chamberlain's excuse for joining. It is
hardly so intelligible as Lord Hartington's reasons for not joining. For
the new government could only subsist by Irish support. That support
notoriously depended on the concession of more than a limited scheme of
local government. The administration would have been overthrown in a week,
and to form a cabinet on such a basis as was here proposed would be the
idlest experiment that ever was tried.

The appointment of the writer of these pages to be Irish secretary was at
once generally regarded as decisive of Mr. Gladstone's ultimate intention,
for during the election and afterwards I had spoken strongly in favour of
a colonial type of government for Ireland. It was rightly pressed upon Mr.
Gladstone by at least one of his most experienced advisers, that such an
appointment to this particular office would be construed as a declaration
in favour of an Irish parliament, without any further examination at
all.(185) And so, in fact, it was generally construed.

Nobody was more active in aiding the formation of the new ministry than
Sir William Harcourt, in whose powerful composition loyalty to party and
conviction of the value of party have ever been indestructible instincts.
"I must not let the week absolutely close," Mr. Gladstone wrote to him
from Mentmore (February 6), "without emphatically thanking you for the
indefatigable and effective help which you have rendered to me during its
course, in the difficult work now nearly accomplished."

At the close of the operation, he writes from Downing Street to his son
Henry, then in India:--

_February 12, 1886._ You see the old date has reappeared at the
head of my letter. The work last week was extremely hard from the
mixture of political discussions on the Irish question, by way of
preliminary condition, with the ordinary distribution of offices,
which while it lasts is of itself difficult enough.

Upon the whole I