When Lord Rosebery brought his brief Administration to an end, Lord Salisbury became Prime Minister for the last time. His physical energy was no longer what it once had been, and the heaviest of all bereavements, which befell him in 1899, made the burden of office increasingly irksome. He retired in 1902, and was succeeded by his nephew, Mr. A. J. Balfour, The Administration formed in 1895 had borne some resemblance to a family party, and had thereby invited ridicule--even, in some quarters, created disaffection. But when Lord Salisbury was nearing the close of his career, the interests of family and of party were found to coincide, and everybody felt that Mr. Balfour must succeed him. Indeed, the transfer of power from uncle to nephew was so quietly effected that the new Prime Minister had kissed hands before the general public quite realized that the old one had disappeared. Mr. Balfour had long been a conspicuous and impressive figure in public life. With a large estate and a sufficient fortune, with the Tory leader for his uncle, and a pocket-borough bidden by that uncle to return him, he had obvious qualifications for political success. He entered Parliament in his twenty-sixth year, at the General Election of 1874, and his many friends predicted great performances. But for a time the fulfilment of those predictions hung fire. Disraeli was reported to have said, after scrutinizing his young follower's attitude: "I never expect much from a man who sits on his shoulders." Beyond some rather perplexed dealings with the unpopular subject of Burial Law, the Member for Hertford took no active part in political business. At Cambridge he had distinguished himself in Moral Science. This was an unfortunate distinction. Classical scholarship had been traditionally associated with great office, and a high wrangler was always credited with hardheadedness; but "Moral Science" was a different business, not widely understood, and connected in the popular mind with metaphysics and general vagueness. The rumour went abroad that Lord Salisbury's promising nephew was busy with matters which lay quite remote from politics, and was even following the path of perilous speculation. It is a first-rate instance of our national inclination to talk about books without reading them that, when Mr. Balfour published _A Defence of Philosophic Doubt_, everyone rushed to the conclusion that he was championing agnosticism. His friends went about looking very solemn, and those who disliked him piously hoped that all this "philosophic doubt" might not end in atheism. It was not till he had consolidated his position as a political leader that politicians read the book, and then discovered, to their delight, that, in spite of its alarming name, it was an essay in orthodox apologetic.