When Mr. Gladstone's Ministry left office in the summer of 1885, there seemed to be in all England no man for whom the future held out more assured and brilliant promise than Sir Charles Dilke. He was still young, not having completed his forty-second year; in the Cabinet only Lord Rosebery was his junior; he had seventeen years of unremitting Parliamentary service to his credit, and in the House of Commons his prestige was extraordinary. His own judgment and that of all skilled observers regarded his party's abandonment of office as temporary: the General Election would inevitably bring them back with a new lease of power, and with an Administration reorganized in such fashion that the Radicals would no longer find themselves overbalanced in the shaping of policy. The Dilke-Chamberlain alliance, which had during the past five years been increasingly influential, would in the next Parliament become openly authoritative; and, as matters looked at the moment, it was Sir Charles, and not Mr. Chamberlain, who seemed likely to take the foremost place. Chamberlain's dazzling popular success had been of the kind to which a certain unpopularity attaches. Moderate men of both parties were prone to impute it to demagogism, and Dilke was in the fortunate position of seeing those Radical principles for which he stood advocated by his ally with a force of combined invective and argument which has had few parallels in political history, while to him fell the task, suited to his temperament, of reasoned discussion. Those who denounced Chamberlain's vehemence could hardly fail to point a comparison with Dilke's unfailing courtesy, his steady adherence to argument, his avoidance of the appeal to passion. Some strong natures have the quality of making enemies, some the gift for making friends, outside their own immediate circle, and Sir Charles Dilke possessed the more genial endowment.