Lord Hatherley wrote in 1855: ‘There is but one man of genius in the House, I think—Gladstone.’ Professor Tyndall wrote in a letter to the _Times_: ‘Nature, which has so richly endowed him in many ways, has denied him the faculty of discerning the defeat which, even in the springtide of power and in the flush of victory, he has over and over again gratuitously wooed. In fact, he thinks too highly of himself and too meanly of his followers. Like Napoleon’s generals, they are to him mere mud, to be shaped and moulded according to his imperial will. The dissatisfaction arising from his conduct is not a thing of yesterday. God, as Mahomed says, has made men to be men—not foxes and wolves; and the love of truth and abhorrence of untruth inherent in the healthy British character have gradually opened the eyes of Mr. Gladstone’s most able and most independent supporters to his misdeeds. His errors of judgment, his political dishonesty, his impulsiveness and passion, so often invoked for purposes both ungenerous and unwise, his tampering for party ends with the sustaining bulwarks of the State, his cruel indifference to the fate of men far nobler than himself who had trustfully accepted from him tasks the faithful prosecution of which led them to a doom which he might have averted, but did not avert, the voice of many a brother’s blood crying from the ground, had already shaken the faith of honest Liberals in their idol, when his flagitious Irish policy put an end to their forbearance and caused them to fling abroad the banner of revolt. The cream of the Liberal party have been the seceders here; the men who above all others adorned the Liberal ranks have been the first to renounce the heresies of their recreant leader. A former worshipper of the ex-Prime Minister said to me some time ago: “Never in the history of England was there such a consensus of intellect arrayed against a statesman as that now arrayed against Mr. Gladstone. What a fall!” . . . I see with concern letters from Liberal Unionists in the _Times_ which seem to indicate that the writers only deem it necessary for Mr. Gladstone to declare his abandonment of Home Rule to make all right again with the Liberals. But who is to guarantee Mr. Gladstone’s good faith in this matter? He apostatized, for party purposes, when he became a Home Ruler, and he will apostatize again whenever it suits his ambition to do so. I should not be surprised if, some fine day, he took those simple Unionists at their word and made the required declaration. But could we be sure of him afterwards? For years, according to his own confession, he nourished in the dark corners of his mind this fungus of Home Rule, while to all his friends he seemed earnestly bent on extirpating it. A man of this stamp has no claim to the trust or credence of Liberal Unionists.’