Mr. Gladstone was at Biarritz, he records, when this happened in January of 1894. He had gone there to recruit after the incomparable exertions of the session, and also to consider at a cool distance and in changed scenes other topics that had for some weeks caused him some agitation. He now thought that there was a decisive case against the House of Lords. Apart from the Irish bill to which the [pg 505]
Question Of Dissolution
Commons had given eighty-two days, the Lords had maimed the bill for parish councils, to which had gone the labour of forty-one days. Other bills they had mutilated or defeated. Upon the whole, he argued, it was not too much to say that for practical purposes the Lords had destroyed the work of the House of Commons, unexampled as that work was in the time and pains bestowed upon it. “I suggested dissolution to my colleagues in London, where half, or more than half, the cabinet were found at the moment. I received by telegraph a hopelessly adverse reply.” Reluctantly he let the idea drop, always maintaining, however, that a signal opportunity had been lost. Even in my last conversation with him in 1897, he held to his text that we ought to have dissolved at this moment. The case, he said, was clear, thorough, and complete. As has been already mentioned, there were four occasions on which he believed that he had divined the right moment for a searching appeal to public opinion on a great question.[304] The renewal of the income tax in 1853 was the first; the proposal of religious equality for Ireland in 1868 was the second; home rule was the third, and here he was justified by the astonishing and real progress that he had made up to the catastrophe at the end of 1890. The fourth case was this, of a dissolution upon the question of the relations of the two Houses.
Chapter VIII. Retirement From Public Life. (1894)
O, 'tis a burden, Cromwell, 'tis a burden
Too heavy for a man that hopes for heaven.
Henry VIII. iii. 2.