Some years, however, elapsed before Sir Charles was able to deal with such questions authoritatively as President of the Local Government Board. We can trace at this time the beginning of those close relations which Dilke and Chamberlain cultivated (even after they had joined Mr. Gladstone's Government) with the new power that was growing up in Parliament. On February 15th, 'we were anxious that the Irish should vote with us about the Zulu War, the more so because her leaders were hesitating upon the subject,' and Sir Charles invited Mr. Parnell to meet Mr. Chamberlain at dinner; but they 'were able to make but little of him.' Further meetings took place, from which the only practical result was a promise of Parnell's support in their opposition to the County Boards Bill, which the Conservative Government were putting forward as their main measure. The ground of opposition was that 'it was better to leave the present system alone than to create new Boards only half elective.' The Memoir has a note respecting one of these meetings with the Irish leader at which Parnell was accompanied by Major Nolan, then member for County Galway: 'Nolan showed opportunist Nationalism; Parnell irreconcilable Nationalism. The latter let out, in spite of his great caution, that if we chose to go to Ireland on Mill's land programme, we could destroy his position and the Home Rule movement. Nolan said that a party which would give security of tenure to the small tenants could afford to leave the large ones out. (To touch the large tenancies in that sense would be virtually to charge the possession of property in Ireland with partial compensation.)' At this moment, the beginning of 1879, the purely Nationalist agitation for self-government had not yet been joined to the demand for an improved and freer status for the Irish tenant. This was mainly the work of Davitt, and Davitt had scarcely yet been heard of by the wider public. CHAPTER XIX SOCIAL AND POLITICAL INTERESTS Hospitable and popular, Sir Charles had the best of what those days could offer in talk and talkers. He compared his own country very unfavourably with the possible standard of social intercourse: 'In England and in France people seem wholly unaware that they cannot either in politics or in literature deal with or even understand questions involving philosophical and historical considerations without any training in either philosophy or history, and one sees writings and speeches by persons who think themselves members of an educated class which are unintelligible to any who have the slightest discipline of either habit of thought or form of expression.'