t his
position would be very awkward, if he comes and witnesses a great
nakedness of the land. What do you say to all this? If you cannot help me,
who can?" Most of the seceding colleagues accepted, and the dinner came
off well enough, though as the host wrote to a friend beforehand, "If
Hartington were to get up and move a vote of want of confidence after
dinner, he would almost carry it." The Prince was unable to be present,
and so the great nakedness was by him unseen, but Prince Albert Victor,
who was there instead, is described by Mr. Gladstone as "most kind."

The conversion of Peel to free trade forty years before had led to the
same species of explosion, though Peel had the court strongly with him.
Both then and now it was the case of a feud within the bosom of a party,
and such feuds like civil wars have ever been the fiercest. In each case
there was a sense of betrayal--at least as unreasonable in 1886 as it was
in 1846. The provinces somehow took things more rationally than the
metropolis. Those who were stunned by the fierce moans of London over the
assured decline in national honour and credit, the imminence of civil war,
and the ultimate destruction of British power, found their acquaintances
in the country excited and interested, but still clothed and in their
right minds. The gravity of the question was fully understood, but in
taking sides ordinary (M118) men did not talk as if they were in for the
battle of Armageddon. The attempt to kindle the torch of religious fear or
hate was in Great Britain happily a failure. The mass of liberal
presbyterians in Scotland, and of nonconformists in England and Wales,
stood firm, though some of their most eminent and able divines resisted
the new project, less on religious grounds than on what they took to be
the balance of political arguments. Mr. Gladstone was able to point to the
conclusive assurances he had received that the kindred peoples in the
colonies and America regarded with warm and fraternal sympathy the present
effort to settle the long-vexed and troubled relations between Great
Britain and Ireland:--

We must not be discouraged if at home and particularly in the
upper ranks of society, we hear a variety of discordant notes,
notes alike discordant from our policy and from one another. You
have before you a cabinet determined in its purpose and an
intelligible plan. I own I see very little else in the political
arena that is d