The fateful moment.
But half-past five comes at last; then the discussion on the Home Rule Bill has to come to an end, and the Speaker takes the chair. Members think there is a look of unusual excitement on his face, that its air is angry; and the Unionists take comfort from the idea that this step is against his judgment. But, then, it is a matter for the House itself and not for the decision of the chair, and so we go ahead. Mr. Morley is put up by Mr. Gladstone to read the words of the resolution. The Old Man himself is composedly writing that letter to the Queen which it is still his duty daily to indite. Mr. Morley's face betrays under all its studied calm, the excitement of the hour, and he reads every separate announcement with a certain dramatic emphasis that brings out all the hidden meaning; and the document is one, the reading of which lends itself to dramatic effect and to dramatic manifestations. For each clause winds up with the same words, at "ten of the clock," until these words come to sound something like the burden of a song—the refrain of a lament—the iteration of an Athanasian curse against sinners and heretics. The House sees all this; and each side manifests emotion according to its fashion. The Irish cheer themselves hoarse in triumph; the Tories answer back as defiantly and loudly; and so we enter, with clang of battle, with shouts and cheers, and hoarse cries of joy or of rage, into the second great pitched battle on Home Rule.
CHAPTER XV.
MR. DILLON'S FORGETFULNESS.
Mr. Dillon.
Everybody who has ever met Mr. Dillon knows that he has a singularly even and equable temper, except at the moments when he has been stung to passion by the sight of some bitter and intolerable wrong. When, therefore, Mr. Chamberlain made him the subject of a fierce attack on account of a past utterance, he was dealing with a man who was as little influenced by such attacks as anybody could well be. For days Mr. Chamberlain had been trying to bait Mr. Dillon into speech; and for days Mr. Dillon had positively refused to be drawn. At last it seemed to some friends of Mr. Dillon that if he did not speak his attitude might be misunderstood, and that he would be supposed to entertain, as part of a settled policy, what he had really uttered on the spur of the moment and under the influence of intolerable wrong and provocation. But when in the last days of June Mr. Chamberlain made his attack, and Mr. Dillon had listened to it and asked for dates, Mr. Dillon thought that the matter would not be worth further attending to, and relapsed into his old attitude of easy contempt.
The outbreak.
This will account for what would otherwise be inexplicable; namely, that, having had a week to prepare his defence, Mr. Dillon should on July 3rd have fallen into a dreadful, and, for the moment, disastrous blunder. The truth was, Mr. Dillon had never thought of the subject for more than a few moments between the date of the challenge and Mr. Chamberlain's renewal of the attack, and, if he had been left free to exercise his own judgment, would have allowed the whole thing to lapse into the nothingness into which every such charge finally falls. On this Monday night Mr. Chamberlain was in his most venomous mood. He had come down to the House with the set determination to get up a row somehow or other. There was evil in his eye; there was rancour in his voice; there was the hoarse rage which always shows in him whenever he feels that he has been beaten. His judgment is so shallow—his temper so rash and violent—that some people think he actually counted that the Government would never have dared to interfere with his obstructive plan of campaign, and that he would have been permitted to bury the Bill under the vast hedge of amendments. To him, then, the strong and drastic action of the preceding week had come as a painful and most exasperating surprise.