crisis of lobby or gallery.

One party quickly felt that, for them at least, it was an affair of life
or death. It was no wonder that the Irish members were stirred to the very
depths. For five years they had worked on English platforms, made active
friendships with English and Scottish liberals in parliament and out of
it, been taught to expect from their aid and alliance that deliverance
which without allies must remain out of reach and out of sight; above all,
for nearly five years they had been taught to count on the puissant voice
and strong right arm of the leader of all the forces of British
liberalism.

They suddenly learned that if they took a certain step in respect of the
leadership of their own party, the alliance was broken off, the most
powerful of Englishmen could help them no more, and that all the dreary
and desperate marches since 1880 were to be faced once again in a blind
and endless campaign, against the very party to whose friendship they had
been taught to look for strength, encouragement, and victory. Well might
they recoil. More astounded still, they learned at the same time that they
had already taken the momentous step in the dark, and that the knowledge
of what they were doing, the pregnant meanings and the tremendous
consequences of it, had been carefully concealed from them. Never were
consternation, panic, distraction, and resentment better justified.

The Irishmen were anxious to meet at once. Their leader sat moodily in the
smoking-room downstairs. His faculty of concentrated vision had by this
time revealed to him the certainty of a struggle, and its intensity. He
knew in minute detail every element of peril both at Westminster and in
Ireland. A few days before, he mentioned to the present writer his
suspicion of designs on foot in ecclesiastical quarters, though he
declared that he had no fear of them. He may have surmised that the
demonstration at the Leinster Hall was superficial and impulsive. On the
other hand, his confidence in the foundations of his dictatorship was
unshaken. This being so, if deliberate calculation were the universal
mainspring of every statesman's action--as it assuredly is not nor can ever
be--he would have spontaneously withdrawn for a season, in the (M156)
assurance that if signs of disorganisation were to appear among his
followers, his prompt return from Elba would be instantly demanded in
Ireland, whether or no it were acquiesced in by the leaders and ma