Gladstone agreed with Peel that it was not advisable to put a man into the Cabinet without a previous official training. It was also Gladstone’s custom, once he had invited a man to office, to hold on to him to the last possible moment. “The next most serious thing to admitting a man into the Cabinet,” said he, mentioning one of the principles which guided him in the making of a Government, “is to leave a man out who has once been in.” Still, there were occasions when he was compelled to pass over an old comrade-in-arms on the ground of age. He was himself seventy-one years of age when, in 1880, he was called upon to form his second Government. To one old member of his former Administration he wrote: “I do not feel able to ask you to resume the toils of office.” He admitted that he himself was “the oldest man of his political generation,” and that, therefore, he should be a solecism in the Government which he was engaged in constructing. “I have been brought,” he added, “by the seeming force of exceptional circumstances to undertake a task requiring less of years and more of vigour than my accumulating store of the one and waning residue of the other.” Here we have the answer to the question of age and office. The exclusion of a veteran politician from office is not a matter of the number of years he has counted. Is he an extinct political volcano as well as an old man? May he safely be set aside? On the answer which the Prime Minister gives to these questions in his own mind depends the fate of the office-seeker of advanced years. Gladstone was eighty-four in 1893, but he was still inevitable as Prime Minister. If the strong young man of achievement, and still greater promise, cannot be ignored, neither can the old man, who, having built up a commanding reputation, takes care that it is duly and fittingly recognized.