When I entered the House of Commons Lord Randolph Churchill said to me, “You have come to the dullest place on earth, with great compensations.” Lord Randolph was right. Except on field days, when there was a “full dress” debate, the House of Commons was a terribly “dull place” and the compensations, like the rewards of virtue, were slow in coming. For three years we streeled through the Division lobbies, sometimes sitting up all night, only to see the mystic piece of paper containing the numbers of the division turned over to the Government Whip, while our own shepherd, Akers-Douglas, now Lord Chilston, whom we all loved, had to stand by him, empty-handed, but with great dignity preserving an equal mind in arduous circumstances. Of the pin-pricks of which I spoke there was no lack. On the bench immediately behind the seats of the mighty there sat near me Hanbury, afterwards Secretary to the Treasury and Minister of Agriculture, and Bowles, both sharp thorns in the side of the Government; the latter producing damaging facts as a conjuror brings toys and flowers out of his hat; but what are damaging facts worth when set before a deaf adder that stoppeth her ear? And what adder is so deaf as the Government party in the House; the party which never forgets the chances of some benefit from the distributors of loaves and fishes? Now it is worse than ever. There is the salary. Men think twice before turning out a Government, which means a dissolution, and the loss of £400 a year. Mr. Gladstone, who, eighteen years earlier, had given out that he felt himself to be too old to remain actively engaged in public life, now, at the age of eighty-two, entered the lists once more as Prime Minister, and as full of fight as ever, carrying mainly upon his own shoulders, but splendidly seconded by Mr. John Morley, the whole weight of the Home Rule Bill, upon the passing of which he had set his heart. It was upon a titanic undertaking that he entered, in spite of his years; a really superb effort; for this was to be no humdrum Parliament for the discussion of petty questions of fiscal or parochial interests.