Both parties, to do them justice, held out manfully night after night against the pressure of this appeal to the sordid side of their political character. But the longer the game of obstruction on the flogging question was played, the stronger grew the feeling among the populace against flogging, and night after night Mr. Parnell was at his post with cold malice giving an additional turn to the electoral screw. The first to succumb to the torture was Mr. Chamberlain, and something like a faded smile flitted across Mr. Parnell’s stony visage when that successful and practical politician scurried into his camp. Mr. Chamberlain’s unexpected speech against flogging fell like a bombshell in the House of Commons, where it was understood that Englishmen of all parties had entered into an honourable understanding to meet Mr. Parnell’s obstructive policy with a firm and united resistance. It was a speech which, as Sir Robert Peel very justly said, “entirely upset the calculations of the Government,”[145] a fact which was forgotten or concealed by those critics of Lord Beaconsfield’s Administration who afterwards vilipended them for their weak and vacillating attitude to this question. No sooner had Mr. Chamberlain deserted to the Irish ranks than he found himself the object of unsparing obloquy which Liberals and Conservatives impartially bestowed on him. Of course other Radicals, if they desired to save their seats in a General Election, were forced to follow him, and as soon as Mr. Parnell found that he had lured nearly the whole Radical party into his net, he and the Irish Members suddenly vanished from the scene as leaders in the struggle. They were never absent from their posts, and they never failed to support the cause they had espoused by their votes. But they thrust the work of obstruction and of speaking on the Liberal and Radical Members who had tardily become their allies. The advantage they gained was soon apparent. Mr. Chamberlain speedily lost his temper, and not only publicly quarrelled with Lord Hartington, but one evening he even insulted him amidst furious cries of protest from the Liberal benches, by describing him as “the _late_ Leader of the Liberal Party.”[146] Nothing could be more complete than the disintegration of the Liberal Party which Mr. Chamberlain thus produced, unless it were the perplexity of the Ministry. The Tories did not dare to stand by the lash as a British institution unless they got what they had been promised--the loyal support of the Opposition. Yet under Mr. Chamberlain’s obstructive agitation, and under popular pressure from the constituencies, it was clear that the Opposition was going over piecemeal to the opponents of flogging. What wonder, then, that Colonel Stanley, the Minister of War, temporised, when Mr. Chamberlain extorted from him a damaging schedule, giving a list of the offences for which a soldier could be flogged?