rt and confidential friends only
as to anything in this letter. The thing, one can see, is not a
_res judicata_. It may ripen fast. Thus far, there is a total want
of moral support from this side to the Irish judgment.

A fierce current was soon perceived to be running. All the elements so
powerful for high enthusiasm, but hazardous where an occasion demands
circumspection, were in full blast. The deep instinct for domestic order
was awake. Many were even violently and irrationally impatient that Mr.
Gladstone had not peremptorily renounced the alliance on the very morrow
of the decree. As if, Mr. Gladstone himself used to say, it could be the
duty of any party leader to take into his hands the intolerable burden of
exercising the rigours of inquisition and private censorship over every
man with whom what he judged the highest public expediency might draw him
to co-operate. As if, moreover, it could be the duty of Mr. Gladstone to
hurry headlong into action, without giving Mr. Parnell time or chance of
taking such action of his own as might make intervention unnecessary. Why
was it to be assumed that Mr. Parnell would not recognise the facts of the
situation? "I determined," said Mr. Gladstone "to watch the state of
feeling in this country. I made no public declaration, but the country
made up its mind. I was in some degree like the soothsayer Shakespeare
introduces into one of his plays. He says, 'I do not make the facts; I
only foresee them.' I did not foresee the facts even; they were present
before me."(273)

(M153) The facts were plain, and Mr. Gladstone was keenly alive to the
full purport of every one of them. Men, in whose hearts religion and
morals held the first place, were strongly joined by men accustomed to
settle political action by political considerations. Platform-men united
with pulpit-men in swelling the whirlwind. Electoral calculation and moral
faithfulness were held for once to point the same way. The report from
every quarter, every letter to a member from a constituent, all was in one
sense. Some, as I have said, pressed the point that the misconduct itself
made co-operation impossible; others urged the impossibility of relying
upon political understandings with one to whom habitual duplicity was
believed to have been brought home. We may set what value we choose upon
such arguments. Undoubtedly they would have proscribed some of the most
important and admired figures in the supreme