nd deep-toned bell. So much
had vital energy, hardly less rare than his mental power, to do with the
varied exploits of this spacious career.

The topics of his Leeds speeches I need not travel over. (M25) What
attracted most attention and perhaps drew most applause was his warning to
Mr. Parnell. "He desires," said the minister, "to arrest the operation of
the Land Act; to stand as Moses stood between the living and the dead; to
stand there not as Moses stood, to arrest, but to spread the plague." The
menace that followed became a catchword of the day: "If it shall appear
that there is still to be fought a final conflict in Ireland between law
on the one side and sheer lawlessness upon the other, if the law purged
from defect and from any taint of injustice is still to be repelled and
refused, and the first conditions of political society to remain
unfulfilled, then I say, gentlemen, without hesitation, the resources of
civilisation against its enemies are not yet exhausted."(40)

Nor was the pageant all excitement. The long speech, which by way of
prelusion to the great mass meeting he addressed to the chamber of
commerce, was devoted to the destruction of the economic sophisters who
tried to persuade us that "the vampire of free-trade was insidiously
sucking the life-blood of the country." In large survey of broad social
facts, exposition of diligently assorted figures, power of scientific
analysis, sustained chain of reasoning, he was never better. The
consummate mastery of this argumentative performance did not slay a heresy
that has nine lives, but it drove the thing out of sight in Yorkshire for
some time to come.(41)

VII

On Wednesday October 12, the cabinet met, and after five hours of
deliberation decided that Mr. Parnell should be sent to prison under the
Coercion Act. The Irish leader was arrested at his hotel the next morning,
and carried off to Kilmainham, where he remained for some six months. The
same day Mr. Gladstone was presented with an address from the Common
Council of London, and in his speech at the Guildhall gave them the news:--

Our determination has been that to the best of our power, our
words should be carried into acts [referring to what he had said
at Leeds], and even within these few moments I have been informed
that towards the vindication of law and order, of the rights of
property, of the freedom of the land, of the first elements of
political lif