Alas for the schemes of mortals! The very element on which Labouchere relied for the strengthening of the Radical cause in the Cabinet was to prove to Mr. Chamberlain himself the parting of the ways. The statesman who was to reach the highest power on the shoulders of Irish voters, when it came to the point, would have none of such support. The corner-stone fell out of the grandiose edifice that Labouchere had planned, the palace of Armida crumbled in the dust. Bitter, indeed, was his disappointment. It was characteristic of him in these circumstances to lose his head and throw up the game. The reader will remember how, as a boy, he described his own character at the gaming-table: "In playing even I failed because, although I theoretically discovered systems by which I was likely to win, yet in practice I could command myself so little that, upon a slight loss, I left all to chance." He lacked the patience or the industry of mind to reconstruct his schemes, and when Mr. Chamberlain was lost to the Radical party, Labouchere's constructive imagination seems never to have recovered the blow. He continued the war with abuse of privilege, absurdity consecrated by tradition, and the other heads of the hydra with which his party fought, but the tone of his attacks was not the same as before the Home Rule split. Too often they degenerated into mere party criticism, the note of personal invective, one might almost say of spite, becoming more prominent in them. He had lost faith in success, because the combination by which he had hoped to win had failed, and he could not, or would not, think out another. It was this consciousness of failure--of personal failure as he saw it, so closely had he identified himself with {228} his hopes--that inspired the peculiar bitterness with which, in and out of season, he attacked the statesman whom he held responsible for the altered situation. He did not, as his correspondence will show, give up hope for some time of Mr. Chamberlain's return to the party, but, when he had at last given up all such hope, nothing was too bad for "Joe." In the pages of _Truth_, in the Reform Club, in the lobby of the House of Commons, he constantly held forth to all who would read or listen on the "crimes" of the man who had divided the Liberal party against itself. He manifested no such bitterness against Bright or Hartington; but when Mr. Chamberlain fell from grace, he fell as no private individual, but as the symbol of the Radical party. With him, according to Labouchere, the party fell, and with the party his immediate hopes for the regeneration of England. Those hopes had, with ample justification for their existence, run high when Messrs. Chamberlain and Dilke joined Mr. Gladstone's administration in 1880. Labouchere based his scheme on the permanence of Mr. Chamberlain's Radicalism, and upon the fact that, in the natural course of events, a successor would very shortly have to be found for Mr. Gladstone.