still
more of partisan machinery. His conclusion was to do nothing; and it was
a conclusion to which he was prone at all times when he did not see his
way clear. This temperamental disinclination to take any action which
might create difficulties was in these days at its height with him.
Since the spring his usually perfect health had been failing; he
suffered from the physical inertia which accompanies the growth of a
fatal disease; and sorrow upon sorrow, rebuff upon rebuff, had weakened
the resilience of his mind. It was not that he lacked courage or
confidence in his own judgment; but he was bound as a statesman to make
allowance for the estimate which others, his followers, would put upon
that judgment when he declared it. Sensitive by nature, he was deeply
aware of failure which had resulted from the most disparaging of
causes--not flat rejection, but belated, half-hearted and blundering
adoption, of whatever course he had proposed. He overrated, I am sure,
the extent to which his personal position had been depreciated in the
minds of those who were there. It was true, as the event was to prove,
that he could no longer count on unquestioning support of any policy
simply on the ground that he advocated it; but any opinion which he
presented would have been commended not only by the cogency of his
argument but by an old esteem for his wisdom, and, above and beyond
this, by a personal feeling Men would have inclined to his side not for
the argument's sake only, but for his sake.

There was felt, too, precisely at the moment when it mattered most, the
defect in his quality as leader. He lacked the personal touch. It was
not that he would not, but that he could not, put himself into contact
with the individual minds of men. He owed it, I think, to the rank and
file to give them more of his guidance than they actually received. He
was a genial presence when they met; but of confidential discussion upon
details I am sure that nothing passed. Had he called the group together,
had he spoken his mind to them collectively, in confidence, things would
in all ways have been better. But there was ingrained in him a sort of
shyness, a repugnance to force his view on others by argument, an
indisposition to controversy, which was his limitation; and all this was
at this time accentuated by the hurt sense that there would be always in
men's minds a memory, not of the hundred times when his wisdom had amply
justified itself, but of