Then as now there existed a certain body of opinion which would have discriminated between a man's private honour and his public usefulness, holding that the nation which throws aside a great public servant because of charges of personal immorality is confusing issues, and sacrificing the country's welfare to private questions. Whatever is to be said for this view, it was one to which Sir Charles Dilke wished to owe nothing. He did not share it, and those whose adherence he acknowledged were those who believed his word. From different sources, then, Sir Charles had found confidence and support, but they were small stay in that gradually accumulating torrent of misfortune. As the Press campaign had developed in the spring, he found himself avoided in Parliament and in society. In the House, where a few months before he had again and again been the Government spokesman and representative, he was retired into the ranks of private members. This short Parliament of 1886 came to an end in June, and, in the General Election which followed, London went solidly against Home Rule; and Sir Charles, though as compared with other Gladstonian Liberals he did well, found himself rejected by the constituency which had stood by him in four contests. Such a reverse occurs in the life of almost every prominent politician, and, though harassing, is of no determining import. For Sir Charles Dilke at this moment it was a cruel blow. The personal discredit against which he had to fight coincided with the discredit of his party; and when the jury came to their decision in July, after a week in which the newspapers had been filled daily with columns of scandalous detail, public feeling assumed a character of bitter personal hostility. 'Sir Charles's fall,' says the chronicler of that period, Mr. Justin McCarthy, 'is like that of a tower. He stood high above every rising English statesman, and but for what has happened he must have been Prime Minister after Gladstone.' [Footnote: This article appeared in a Canadian journal after the second trial.] CHAPTER XLIV THE RADICAL PROGRAMME _VERSUS_ HOME RULE JULY TO DECEMBER, 1885. [Footnote: This chapter and the next cover the same dates as the preceding chapter, which contains the record of other than political events, while these deal with the political history of the time.] The period between July, 1885, and July, 1886, determined the course of English history for a generation. At the beginning of this period, Sir Charles Dilke was one of the three men on the Liberal side who, after Mr. Gladstone, counted most, and he commanded more general approval than either Chamberlain or Hartington. But from the first rumour of his personal misfortune his influence rapidly dwindled; when the period closed, many of those who had been his political associates had left him, and from Mr. Chamberlain, in political life, he was irretrievably sundered.