his
Home Rule Cabinet in 1886, entered it as Secretary of State for
War. He went out with his chief in the following August, and in
the incessant clamour for and against Home Rule which occupied
the next six years he took a very moderate part.

When Gladstone formed his last Administration, Campbell-Bannerman
returned to the War Office, and it was on a hostile vote concerning
his Department that the Government was defeated in June, 1895.
He resented this defeat more keenly than I should have expected
from the habitual composure of his character; but it was no doubt
the more provoking because in the previous spring he had wished
to succeed Lord Peel as Speaker. He told me that the Speakership
was the one post in public life which he should have most enjoyed,
and which would best have suited his capacities. But his colleagues
declared that he could not be spared from the Cabinet, and, true to
his fine habit of self-effacement, he ceased to press his claim.

In October, 1896, Lord Rosebery, who had been Premier from 1894
to 1895, astonished his party by resigning the Liberal leadership.
Who was to succeed him? Some cried one thing and some another. Some
were for Harcourt, some for Morley, some for a leader in the House
of Lords. Presently these disputations died down; what logicians
call "the process of exhaustion" settled the question, and
Campbell-Bannerman--the least self-seeking man in public life--found
himself the accepted leader of the Liberal party. The leadership
was an uncomfortable inheritance. There was a certain section of
the Liberal party which was anxious that Lord Rosebery should return
on his own terms. There were others who wished for Lord Spencer,
and even in those early days there were some who already saw the
makings of a leader in Mr. Asquith. And, apart from these sectional
preferences, there was a crisis at hand, "sharper than any two-edged
sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit,
and of the joints and marrow."

The Eastern Question of 1876 had rent the Liberal party once; the
Irish Question of 1886 had rent it again; and now for the third
time it was rent by the South African Question. Holding that the
South African War was a wanton crime against freedom and humanity,
I wished that my leader could declare himself unequivocally against
it, but he felt bound to consider the interests of the Liberal party
as a whole rather than those of any particular section which he
mig