'On Tuesday morning Chamberlain was sent for, and accepted a seat in the Cabinet (with the Presidency of the Board of Trade), and at one o'clock I accepted the Under-Secretaryship for Foreign Affairs. Just about this time I received a message from James: "Do, for the sake of our future comfort, take something. The Bench will be dreadfully dull. Stansfeld _in_ office must be worse than Stansfeld out." But Stansfeld was not in office. What had interfered at the last moment to prevent an appointment which was resolved upon I never knew for certain. [Footnote: Mr. Stansfeld is generally believed to have refused office owing to his wish to devote himself entirely to the cause of a special measure of social reform in which he was interested.] But, as they had not intended to put Chamberlain in, and I forced him in, I suppose that Stansfeld was the man who had to make way for Chamberlain.' II. So ended the negotiations. The Radical wing had asserted itself, and asserted itself successfully. It had been enabled to do so by Sir Charles's action. To him the matter represented the mere carrying out of a bargain; but friends were, as is natural in such a case, remonstrant, and he was accused of "needless self-sacrifice," of "Quixotic conduct," of "self-abnegation," of "your usual disinterestedness in politics," and the bargain was much criticized. A letter from Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice, congratulating Sir Charles on the stand he had made, added: "Not that I am altogether satisfied with the result. I had assumed that as a matter of course you would be in the Cabinet. I share the universal feeling that of the two you had the undoubted claim to priority." But this regret was probably based on more than personal grounds, and may well be read with a letter written many years afterwards, in July, 1914: "The real truth is that Dilke was too big a man to be an Under- Secretary in 1880, and the whole position was a false one. I fancy Lord Granville felt it to be so. One of his best points was his readiness to recognize ability. I think he desired Dilke's sphere in the Office to be as large as possible consistently with the general arrangements of the Office, but it is always difficult to make special arrangements work smoothly if they are based on a false principle. "Dilke ought to have insisted on being in the Cabinet. It was very much to his honour that he did not do so." Lord Fitzmaurice goes on to say that in the making of the Cabinet public opinion would have substituted Sir Charles Dilke for Mr. Dodson, who, in spite of his work as Chairman of Committees from 1868 to 1873, and afterwards as Secretary to the Treasury--("he would have made an excellent Speaker")--had done but little in the House for the party in the long period of Opposition from 1874 to 1880.