On the 12th of July John Bright retired from the Government, as a protest against the bombardment, and made a short speech full of solemn dignity. "I asked my calm judgment and my conscience what was the path I ought to take. They pointed it out to me, as I think, with an unerring finger, and I am humbly endeavouring to follow it."
But it was too late. The mischief was done, and has not been undone to this day. I remember Mr. Chamberlain saying to me: "Well, I confess I was tired of having England kicked about all over the world. I never condemned the Tory Government for going to war; only for going to war on the wrong side." It was a characteristic saying; but this amazing lapse into naked jingoism spread wonder and indignation through the Liberal Party, and shook the faith of many who, down to that time, had regarded Gladstone as a sworn servant of Peace. The Egyptian policy of 1882 must, I fear, always remain the blot on Gladstone's scutcheon; and three years later he gave away the whole case for intervention, and threw the blame on his predecessors in office. In his Address to the Electors of Midlothian before the General Election of 1885 he used the following words: "We have, according to my conviction from the very first (when the question was not within the sphere of Party contentions), committed by our intervention in Egypt a grave political error, and the consequence which the Providential order commonly allots to such error is not compensation, but retribution."
But, though Providence eventually allotted "retribution" to our crimes and follies in Egypt, and though they were always unpopular with the Liberal Party out of doors, it was curious to observe that the position of the Government in the House of Commons was stronger at the end of 1882 than it was at the beginning. That this was so was due, I think, in part to the fact that for the moment we were victorious in Egypt,[37] and in part to admiration for the vigour with which Lord Spencer was fighting the murderous conspiracy in Ireland. The Government enjoyed the dangerous praise of the Opposition; obstruction collapsed; and some new Rules of Procedure were carried by overwhelming majorities. Here let me interpolate an anecdote. Mr. M—— L—— was a barrister, an obsequious supporter of the Government, and, as was generally surmised, on the lookout for preferment. Mr. Philip Callan, M.P. for County Louth, was speaking on an amendment to one of the new Rules, and Mr. M—— L—— thrice tried to call him to order on the ground of irrelevancy. Each time, the Chairman of Committee ruled that, though the Honourable Member for Louth was certainly taking a wide sweep, he was not out of order. Rising the third time from the seat Callan said: "I may as well take the opportunity of giving notice that I propose to move the insertion of a new Standing Order, which will read as follows: 'Any Hon. Member who three times unsuccessfully calls another Hon. Member to order, shall be ineligible for a County Court Judgeship.'" Mr. M—— L—— looked coy, and everyone else shouted with glee.
The Session of 1883 opened very quietly. The speech from the Throne extolled the success of the Ministerial policy in Ireland and Egypt, and promised a series of useful but not exciting measures. Meanwhile the more active Members of the Liberal Party, among whom I presumed to reckon myself, began to agitate for more substantial reforms. We had entered on the fourth Session of the Parliament. A noble majority was beginning to decline, and we felt that there was no time to lose if we were to secure the ends which we desired. Knowing that I felt keenly on these subjects, Mr. T. H. S. Escott, then Editor of the Fortnightly, asked me to write an article for his Review, and in that article I spoke my mind about the Agricultural Labourers' Suffrage, the Game Laws, the reform of the City of London, and an English Land Bill. "The action of the Peers," I said, "under Lord Salisbury's guidance will probably force on the question of a Second Chamber, and those who flatter themselves that the Liberal Party will shrink from discussing it will be grievously disillusioned. Disestablishment, begun in Ireland, will inevitably work round, by Scotland, to England. And who is to preside over these changes?"
I returned to the charge in the June number of the Nineteenth Century, and urged my points more strongly. I pleaded for social reform, and for "a Free Church in a Free State." I crossed swords with a noble Lord who had pronounced dogmatically that "A Second Chamber is absolutely necessary." I gave my reasons for thinking that now-a-days there is very little danger of hasty and ill-considered legislation, and I pointed out that, when this danger disappears, the reason for a Second Chamber disappears with it. "But," I said, "granting, for the sake of argument, that something of this danger still survives, would it not be fully met by limiting the power of the Lords to a Veto for a year on a measure passed by the Commons?"
These articles, coupled with my speeches in the House and in my constituency, gave dire offence to the Whigs; and I was chastened with rebukes which, if not weighty, were at any rate ponderous. "Not this way," wrote the St. James's Gazette, in a humorous apostrophe, "not this way, O Junior Member for Aylesbury, lies the road to the Treasury Bench," and so, indeed, it seemed. But, on returning from an evening party at Sir Matthew Ridley's, on the 5th of June, 1883, I found a letter from Mr. Gladstone, offering me the post of Parliamentary Secretary to the Local Government Board. One sentence of that letter I may be allowed to quote:
"Your name, and the recollections it suggests, add much to the satisfaction which, independently of relationship, I should have felt in submitting to you this request." It was like Gladstone's courtesy to call his offer a "request."
Thus I became harnessed to the machine of Government, and my friends, inside the House and out of it, were extremely kind about the appointment. Nearly everyone who wrote to congratulate me used the same image: "You have now set your foot on the bottom rung of the ladder." But my staunch friend George Trevelyan handled the matter more poetically, in the following stanza:
"As long as a plank can float, or a bolt can hold together,