But these cases of objection to office on the part of public men, however wealthy or however old, are exceedingly rare. The hunt for posts when a new Government is being formed after a dissolution is eager and untiring. The old men, who will not admit that their weight of years unfits them for the cares of office, haunt the political clubs and Downing Street, so as to keep themselves conspicuous in the eyes of the new Prime Minister. But they cannot all get “jobs,” to use a word commonly employed while a Government is being made. Some of them must be sacrificed; there are so many able and pushful young men to be provided for. The same cry is heard in politics as in other walks of life: “Why should these old fellows lag superfluous on the stage?” But “the old gang”—as they are called by the young—will not retire from public life voluntarily and gracefully. It is not alone that they instinctively revolt against the assumption that their capacity for work is at an end, but they also dislike change of habits and pursuits, and, above all, they desire for a little longer to play a leading part on the prominent stage of Parliament. Public life, therefore, retires from them. It is only the few who have made a great reputation and acquired a great authority that cannot lightly be set aside. For most politicians, no matter how fine their services in the past, a time comes when they are designated “old fogeys,” and, while still anxious to be once more Ministers of the Crown, they experience the humiliation, as they look upon it, of being shunted for ever. It is idle to talk of acquiescing patiently in the inevitable. Political history affords many a sad instance of such a fate being regarded as one of the sorest of the injustices of life. The young and pushful have their disappointments and vexations also. Disraeli—according to Buckle, his biographer—having completed his Administration in 1874, wrote to a lady friend: “I have contrived in the minor and working places to include every representative man, that is to say, everyone who might be troublesome—all those sort of men who would have made a Tory cave.” He adds: “There are some terrible disappointments, but I have written soothing letters, which, on the whole, have not been without success.” But not altogether. For in another letter, written in 1876, Disraeli says that at a dinner party he met Lord Randolph Churchill—“he glaring like one possessed of a devil, and quite uncivil when I addressed him rather cordially.” “Why?” he asks, and answering, he says it was perhaps that “I gave the lordship of the Treasury to Crichton instead of himself.”