remark:--"I would
rather have the rate of wages in dockyards regulated by trades unions
than made the sport of party politicians and put up as a kind of Dutch
auction." What have the Government to fear in this matter? The trade
unions must always have to face competition and trade rivalry, and these
elements alone are more than sufficient to keep down wages. So great was
the impression made by Mr. Burns's speech, that official notice of it
was inevitable, and Mr. E. Robertson was able to make an announcement
which gave, if not absolute satisfaction, at least a measure of it to
the champions of the artificers and labourers in our dockyards.

[Sidenote: Home Rule again.]

It was only the Old Man would have had the daring to begin the third
stage of the greatest Bill of modern times at an hour so
inauspicious--noon on a Wednesday sitting. Everybody knows that among
all the dead hours of the House of Commons, there is no hour so utterly
dead as that. Indeed, very often such is the disinclination of the
natural man for unreasonable and unseasonable hours--it is very often
extremely difficult for the Whips of the Government to get together the
forty members who are necessary to form the quorum for the starting of
business; and I have known cases where it was close upon two o'clock--if
not even later--before there was a sufficient muster for the beginning
of the day's business. However, Mr. Gladstone calculated correctly on
the magic of his name and the witchery of his oratory; for by a few
minutes past twelve, when he rose to make his speech, the House was
crowded in almost every part, and he had an audience not only
unprecedented in its fulness at such an hour, but also delightfully
stimulating in its general responsiveness and sometimes even its ready
enthusiasm.

[Sidenote: A mighty speech.]

The speech of the Old Man was worthy of the occasion. For some hours
after it had ended nobody had anything to say about anybody or anything
else; it was one of those speeches that create something like rapture;
and that oft-repeated declaration that he had never done anything like
it before--a declaration I have heard too many times to now altogether
accept. The voice was splendid, the diction very fine, the argument
close and well knit, the matter carefully prepared without any selfish
adherence to the letter of a manuscript--a fidelity which always spoils
anything like spontaneity of oratory. And the Old Man was in splendid
p