its organs, its reduction to something which the Irish
could not have even pretended to accept, and which they would have been no
better than fools if they had ever attempted to work.

Some supposed then, and Mr. Chamberlain has said since, that when he
entered the cabinet room on this memorable occasion, he intended to be
conciliatory. Witnesses of the scene thought that the prime minister made
little attempt in that direction. Yet where two men of clear mind and firm
will mean two essentially different things under the same name, whether
autonomy or anything else, and each intends to stand by his own
interpretation, it is childish to suppose that arts of deportment will
smother or attenuate fundamental divergence, or make people who are quite
aware how vitally they differ, pretend that they entirely agree. Mr.
Gladstone knew the giant burden that he had taken up, and when he went to
the cabinet of March 26, his mind was no doubt fixed that success, so
hazardous at best, would be hopeless in face of personal antagonisms and
bitterly divided counsels. This, in his view, and in his own phrase, was
one of the "great imperial occasions" that call for imperial resolves. The
two ministers accordingly resigned.

Besides these two important secessions, some ministers out of the cabinet
resigned, but they were of the whig complexion.(195) The new prospect of
the whig schism extending into the camp of the extreme radicals created
natural alarm but hardly produced a panic. So deep were the roots of
party, so immense the authority of a veteran leader. It used to be said of
the administration of 1880, that the world would never really know Mr.
Gladstone's strength in parliament and the country, until every one of his
colleagues had in turn abandoned him to his own resources. Certainly the
secessions of the end of March 1886 left him undaunted. Every
consideration of duty and of policy bound him to persevere. He felt,
justly enough, that a minister who had once deliberately invited his party
and the people of the three kingdoms to follow him on so arduous and bold
a march as this, had no right on any common plea to turn back until he had
exhausted every available device to "bring the army of the faithful
through."

III

From the first the Irish leader was in free and constant communication
with the chief secretary. Proposals were once or twice made, not I think
at Mr. Parnell's desire, for conversations to be held between M