cut out. "To this question I have not yet got a clear
affirmative answer from either of them."

"The subject of Ireland," he told Lord Hartington, "has perplexed me much
even on the North Sea," and he expressed some regret that in a recent
speech his correspondent had felt it necessary at this early period to
join issue in so pointed a manner with Mr. Parnell and his party.
Parnell's speech was, no doubt, he said, "as bad as bad could be, and
admitted of only one answer. But the whole question of the position which
Ireland will assume after the general election is so new, so difficult,
and as yet, I think, so little understood, that it seems most important to
reserve until the proper time all possible liberty of examining it."

The address to his electors, of which he had begun to think on board the
_Sunbeam_, was given to the public on September 17. It was, as he said, as
long as a pamphlet, and a considerable number of politicians doubtless
passed judgment upon it without reading it through. The whigs, we are
told, found it vague, the radicals cautious, the tories crafty; but
everybody admitted that it tended to heal feuds. Mr. Goschen praised it,
and Mr. Chamberlain, though raising his own flag, was respectful to his
leader's manifesto.(136)

The surface was thus stilled for the moment, yet the waters ran very deep.
What were "the anxious and doubtful matters," what "the coming political
issues," of which Mr. Gladstone had written to Lord Hartington? They were,
in a word, twofold: to prevent the right wing from breaking with the left;
and second, to make ready for an Irish crisis, which as he knew could not
be averted. These were the two keys to all his thoughts, words, and deeds
during the important autumn of 1885--an Irish crisis, a solid party. He was
not the first great parliamentary leader whose course lay between two
impossibilities.

All his letters during the interval between his return from the cruise in
the _Sunbeam_ and the close of the general election disclose with perfect
clearness the channels in which events and his judgment upon them were
moving. Whigs and radicals alike looked to him, and across him fought
their battle. The Duke of Argyll, for example, (M85) taking advantage of a
lifelong friendship to deal faithfully with him, warned him that the long
fight with "Beaconsfieldism" had thrown him into antagonism with many
political conceptions and sympathies that once had a steady hold upon him.
Y