To Mr. Bright.
Nov. 28, 1879.—You will probably recollect that during your last visit to Hawarden you suggested to me in a walk the expectation or the possibility that when the return of liberals to power seemed probable, there might be a popular call for my resuming the leadership of the party, and that I stated to you what I believed, and you I think admitted, to be the reasons against it. These, if I remember right, were four, and I attached to them differing degrees of weight.
The first was that my health and strength would be unequal to the strain at my time of life.
The second, that the work to be done was so formidable that hardly any amount of courage availed to look it in the face.
The third, weightier than these, was that a liberal government under me would be the object from the first of an amount and kind of hostility, such as materially to prejudice its acts and weaken or, in given circumstances, neutralise its power for good.
The fourth, that I was absolutely precluded under present circumstances, being bound by the clearest considerations of honour and duty to render a loyal allegiance to Granville as leader of the party, and to Hartington as leader in the Commons, and was entirely disabled from so much as entertaining any proposition that could directly or indirectly tend to their displacement.
There is a fifth consideration that now presses me, of which the grounds had hardly emerged in regard to myself personally at the time when we conversed together. Nothing could be so painful, I may almost say so odious to me, as to force myself, or to be forced, upon the Queen, under circumstances where the choice of another from the ranks of the same party would save her from being placed in a difficulty of that peculiar kind. This, it may be said, belongs to the same category as my first and second objections; but there it is.
The enthusiasm of Scotland is something wonderful. As to the [pg 600] county of Midlothian, I doubt whether the well-informed tories themselves in the least expect to win. We go to Taymouth on Monday. I hope you are well and hearty and see cause to be contented with the progress of opinion. The more I think about the matter, the more strange and mysterious does it seem to me that any party in this free nation should be found to sanction and uphold policy and proceedings like those of the last two years in particular. I have written this because I am desirous you should have clearly before you the matter of my conversation with you, and the means of verifying it.
Mr. Bright to Mr. Gladstone.
Rochdale, Dec. 12, 1879.—Perhaps I ought to have written to you sooner to acknowledge the receipt of your letter of the 28th ult., but I preferred to let you get home before I wrote, and I was in truth rather puzzled as to what I ought to say.