of 1873. The Irish bill was from the first
strongly objected to by a large section of the liberal party, and on the
same grounds that led the conservative opposition to reject it, namely,
that it sacrificed Irish education to the Roman catholic hierarchy. The
party whom the bill was intended to propitiate rejected it as inadequate.
If the sense of the House had been taken, irrespective of considerations
of the political result of the division, not one-fourth of the House would
have voted for it. Mr. Gladstone's doctrine, Disraeli went on, amounted to
this, that "whenever a minister is so situated that it is in his power to
prevent any other parliamentary leader from forming an administration
likely to stand, he acquires thereby the right to call on parliament to
pass whatever measures he and his colleagues think fit, and is entitled to
denounce as factious the resistance to such measures. Any such claim is
one not warranted by usage, or reconcilable with the freedom of the
legislature. It comes to this: that he tells the House of Commons, 'Unless
you are prepared to put some one in my place, your duty is to do whatever
I bid you.' To no House of Commons has language of this kind ever been
addressed; by no House of Commons would it be tolerated."

As for the charge of summary refusal to undertake government, Mr. Disraeli
contented himself with a brief statement of facts. He had consulted his
friends, and they were all of opinion that it would be prejudicial to the
public interests for a conservative ministry to attempt to conduct
business in the present House of Commons. What other means were at his
disposal? Was he to open negotiations with a section of the late ministry,
and waste days in barren interviews, vain applications, and the device of
impossible combinations? Was he to make overtures to the considerable
section of the liberal party that had voted against the government? The
Irish Roman catholic gentlemen? Surely Mr. Gladstone was not serious in
such a suggestion. The charge of deliberate and concerted action against
the Irish bill was 'not entirely divested of some degree of exaggeration.'
His party was not even formally summoned to vote against the government
measure, but to support an amendment which was seconded from the liberal
benches, and which could only by a violent abuse of terms be described as
a party move.

On Saturday afternoon Mr. Gladstone had gone down to Cliveden, and there
at ten o'clock on