The hesitancy and incompetence which marked the conduct of the Conservative Opposition--although to some extent due to very lofty motives of public duty--filled with exasperation the militant Tories in the country. Members of Parliament, confronted week after week by definite issues on which votes had to be recorded, found themselves drawn inch by inch into supporting whole spheres of Governmental action. Their friends outside took a more general view. They saw what they took to be a succession of feeble surrenders before Mr. Gladstone’s prestige. They saw their representatives, bewitched by his authority and eloquence, in the same Lobby with their arch-enemy. They saw the Liberal Government staggering ponderously forward, in spite of disunion, difficulty, and peril, through a succession of mismanaged warlike undertakings to a series of pernicious domestic reforms. And no man apparently to stand in their path! And then, all of a sudden, a man arose alone, or almost alone, to do battle on their behalf. They watched him struggling day after day against overwhelming odds, overthrown a score of times, deserted and even tripped up by those who should have sustained him; yet always returning with inexhaustible activity to the attack and gaining from month to month substantial and undoubted successes. The Conservative party outside Parliament had as little real liking for much that Lord Randolph Churchill said about Ireland and Egypt as their leaders and representatives in the House. They could not find any sympathy for the followers of Mr. Parnell. They did not enjoy being told that British troops had been used in Egypt to collect the bondholders’ debts, or the description of such thrilling episodes as the bombardment of a city by an ironclad fleet, a cavalry charge by moonlight, or the storming of an entrenched position as ‘tawdry military glories.’ They could not join whole-heartedly in eulogies of a Pasha whom British justice had condemned to life-long exile, or in attacks upon the morality and humanity of a Khedive whom British bayonets had replaced upon his throne. All this, even while they cheered, seemed to them unpatriotic. But they could not overlook the commotion which Lord Randolph Churchill’s denunciations wrought in the Gladstonian ranks, or the embarrassments in which they involved the Radical supporters of the Ministry. They loved their country much, but they hated Gladstone more; and they consoled themselves with the belief (which did Lord Randolph Churchill less justice than he deserved) that he did not really mean all he said; that it was only his way of beating the Grand Old Man; and that, after all, he was Jingo and True Blue at heart.