t useful portion of his varied career. The honorary office of
Vice-Chairman was unanimously conferred on Sir John Lubbock, afterwards
Lord Avebury; and for the Deputy Chairmanship, a salaried post of
practical importance, the Council chose Mr. J. F. B. Firth, who had made
his name as an exponent of the intricacies of Metropolitan Government.

To watch the methods of Lord Rosebery's chairmanship was an interesting
study. After much experience of public bodies and public meetings, I
consider him the best chairman but one under whom I ever sat. The best
was Mr. Leonard Courtney, now Lord Courtney of Penwith, who to the gifts
of accuracy, promptness, and mastery of detail, added the rarer grace
of absolute impartiality. Lord Rosebery had the accuracy, the
promptness, and the mastery, but he was not impartial. He was inclined
to add the functions of Leader of the House to those of Speaker, which
were rightly his. When a subject on which he felt strongly was under
discussion, and opinion in the Council was closely balanced, Lord
Rosebery would intervene just at the close of the debate, with a short,
strong, and emphatic speech, and so influence the division in favour of
his own view. This practice is, in my judgment, inconsistent with ideal
chairmanship, but in the early days of the Council it was not without
its uses.

We had to furnish ourselves with a constitution, to distribute our
various powers, to frame rules of debate, and to create an order of
business. To do all this in a full Council of 137 members, most of them
quite unversed in public life, many of them opinionated, all articulate,
and not a few vociferous, was a work of the utmost difficulty, and Lord
Rosebery engineered it to perfection. He was suave and courteous;
smoothed acrid dissensions with judicious humour; used sarcasm
sparingly, but with effect; and maintained a certain dignity of bearing
which profoundly impressed the representatives of the Great Middle
Class. "By Jove, how these chaps funk Rosebery!" was the candid
exclamation of Sir Howard Vincent; and his remark applied quite equally
to his own "Moderate" friends and to my "Progressives." It was
characteristic of these gentry that they longed to call Lord Rosebery
"My Lord," and were with difficulty induced to substitute "Mr.
Chairman." The one member of the Council who stands out in my memory as
not having "funked" the Chairman is Mr. John Burns, whose action and
bearing in the Council formed one