I have great pleasure in proposing to you that you should accept office as Under-Secretary of State in the Home Department. Alike on private and on public grounds, I trust it may be agreeable to you to accept this appointment, which should remain strictly secret until your name shall have been laid before her Majesty. I remain, with much regard, sincerely yours, W. E. GLADSTONE. According to custom, Broadhurst immediately called upon the Prime Minister. He said that if it were Mr. Gladstone’s wish that he should join the Administration, he hoped it would be in some capacity less important than that of Under-Secretary of the Home Office. But the Prime Minister would not listen to any objections to the offer. “I’ll answer for you myself,” said he, playfully. “You must prepare at once to enter upon the duties of the office.” Broadhurst adds: “I can honestly declare that I left Mr. Gladstone’s house without any of those feelings of exhilaration and pleasing excitement which the gift of office is generally supposed to awake in the breast of the politician.” He lived the hard struggle of his early years over again in the next half-hour. “The lowly beginning of my career,” he says, “its labours at the forge and the stonemason’s shop, the privations, the wanderings, and my varying fortunes, stood out in my mind’s eye as clearly as so many living pictures. Especially did my memory recall the months I had spent working on the very Government buildings which I was about to enter as a Minister of the Crown.” He deplored the lack of education in his early days, and visions of failure and humiliation in the discharge of his new duties, in consequence, tormented him. CHAPTER XIII DISAPPOINTED HOPES 1 It is probably as annoying to an expectant Minister to be offered what he regards as an inferior post as to be entirely ignored. Sir Robert Peel, in December 1834, offered Lord Ashley (subsequently the Earl of Shaftesbury) a seat on the Board of Admiralty, which Lord Ashley, thinking it altogether beneath him, promptly refused. “Had I not,” he writes in his _Diary_, “by God’s grace and the study of religion subdued the passion of my youth, I should now have been heart-broken. Canning, eight years ago, offered me, as a neophyte, a seat at one of the Boards, the first step in a young statesman’s life. If I am not now worthy of more, it is surely better to cease to be a candidate for public honours. Yet Peel’s letter, so full of flummery, would lead anyone to believe that I was a host of excellency. The thing is a contradiction.” Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that he accepted the post subsequently. He satisfied himself that it was of more importance than he at first supposed.