‘Lord Beaconsfield,’ wrote Lord Randolph Churchill in 1883,[7] ‘was very old and very worn when he got to the top of the tree, and he was but indifferently served by some of his colleagues. Advancing years, an enfeebled constitution, a singularly exhausting and painful form of disease, had compelled him to give way to a disposition naturally indolent and unsuited to the constant mastery of dry administrative detail. He must often have thought that he had done nearly enough; that he might with justice allow himself to seek in the distractions of London society a pleasure and a repose to which, during most of his life, he had been a stranger. Only the most captious mind could blame him for this; but this it was, nevertheless, which greatly conduced to the downfall of his Government. What time he gave to public affairs was absorbed in studying, with the assistance of the Foreign Secretary, the various phases of the Eastern complication. All else was neglected. Finance was left entirely to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, in whose unaided hands deficits and floating debts grew apace. The other heads of departments were all allowed to go their own way, doing what seemed good in their eyes. There was no master mind pervading and controlling every branch of the Administration. Election affairs and organisation went to the dogs. The care, the experience, the personal supervision which Mr. Disraeli, assisted by a few practised hands, had bestowed upon the preparations for the General Election of 1874 disappeared. A weak but wide-spreading centralisation enervated the vigour of the provincial organisation. A stupefying degree of over-confidence, a foolish contempt for the adversary, a fatally erroneous estimate of the revived influence of Mr. Gladstone--these causes, and these alone, all of them preventable, slowly but surely worked the ruin. On March 8, 1880, Sir Stafford Northcote announced to the House of Commons its approaching dissolution. The next morning there appeared in the papers Lord Beaconsfield’s letter to the Duke of Marlborough, assigning to Ireland the foremost place among the perils and embarrassments of British dominion. The memorable and prophetic words of this celebrated document, familiar though they be, require to be recorded here:--