“Doubtless,” replied Lord Fauntleroy, coolly. “Some day you may. At present I’m asking questions, and your business is to answer them.”
“The D——!” began the Duke, hotly.
“Quite so—the D—— etails,” interjected Little Lord Fauntleroy, blandly. “As you were doubtless about to say, the details are the things! All very well to say in a general sort of way that the Army is going to—its usual destination, Duke; that Party Spirit and Financial Cheese-paring are the cause of it, and that more men and money are urgently required. That won’t do for me. I want to know—so does the Country—much more than that. How? Why? What? When? How many? How much? These, my dear Duke, are the pertinent questions to which we—the Country and I—demand precise answers. When we get them, instead of vague denunciation and big D’s, we shall know what to do.”
The sensations of his Royal Highness the Duke, could scarcely be described. He was not an old nobleman who was very easily taken aback, because he had seen a great deal of the official world; but here was something he found so novel that it almost took his lordly breath away, and caused him some singular emotions. A civilian had always seemed to him a most objectionable creature—impertinent, parsimonious, and with inadequate conceptions of discipline. But this composed, precise, insolently interrogative little personage was a portent. The Duke’s martinet manner was quite shaken by this startling surprise.
* * * * *
The Standard (London) in 1885 ventured to criticise the political character and conduct of Lord Randolph Churchill, but three years later it contained an article which read like a parody of its former utterances about this Boulanger of the Fourth Party:—
(From the Standard,
July 31, 1885.)
It is time to speak plainly. Lord Randolph Churchill has been puffed by his friends in the daily and weekly press with admirable assiduity. He has dined with them and they have dined with him, and the well-organised claque are ready to cry “Prodigious!” whenever he opens his mouth. But it is all in vain. We no longer live in days when the public can be gulled by such arts.… The truth is, that Lord Randolph Churchill is a much over-rated man. He is now verging upon middle-age and has reached a time of life when even flighty minds ought to sober down. But this is what he cannot do. His almost incredible ignorance of affairs, his boyish delight in offering the crudest insults to men who have been fifty years in the service of the State, his pranks, his blunders, are ceasing to amuse.… Instead of his being broken in by his colleagues, his colleagues have been broken in by him, and he has been able to make them adopt as the deliberate and well-digested convictions of sagacious and practical Englishmen, the crude conceits of a political neophyte, which his own little Senate labour hard to represent as the language of a new Tory gospel.… We will follow Lord Salisbury, but we will not be governed by a sort of overgrown schoolboy, who thinks he is witty when he is only impudent, and who really does not seem to possess sufficient knowledge even to fathom the depths of his own ignorance of everything worthy of the name of statesmanship.
(From the Standard,
July 29, 1888.)
The interest excited by the other appointments sinks into nothing compared with that which must be felt in the promotion of Lord R. Churchill to the Chancellorship of the Exchequer and the leadership of the House of Commons. There is, doubtless, much that may be said against the appointment to so responsible a position of one who has had so brief an experience of official life, and who has hitherto been more remarkable for brilliancy than discretion. On the other hand, Lord Randolph Churchill possesses the debating power and the dauntless spirit which are indispensable to a successful leader. There are times and seasons when self-confidence, readiness, and a command of that pungent rhetoric which often tells better in the House of Commons than the closest and most judicial argument, are of more service to a party than any other qualities which a Parliamentary statesman can possess. Lord Randolph Churchill moreover, is eminently popular with “the masses,” and so far has a title to confront Mr. Gladstone which no other man on the Conservative side of the House can show. In short, he is an orator and a wit; and in a popular assembly these are titles to pre-eminence which it is not very easy to dispute. It remains for Lord Randolph Churchill to demonstrate that the great confidence that has been reposed in him has not been misplaced.