Lord Spencer was President of the Council in 1885, and in 1892, when Mr. Gladstone became {287} Prime Minister for the fourth and last time, he was given the post of First Lord of the Admiralty. That ministry brought in another Home Rule Bill, and passed it through the Commons; but the House of Lords rejected it by the overwhelming majority of 378, the actual figures being 419 for its rejection and 41 against. Mr. Gladstone did not appeal to the country, and thus Home Rule passed out of the Liberal repertoire for nineteen years. If Queen Victoria had consulted Mr. Gladstone on the question of a successor, he would have advised Lord Spencer's selection. Her Majesty, however, sent for that brilliant dilettante, Lord Rosebery, and Lord Spencer remained on at the Admiralty. There was some talk of the premiership for him shortly before the resignation of Mr. Balfour's Ministry at the close of 1905, but by then he was a spent force, worn out and ill. He could not join Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman's Cabinet, but he lent it his moral support, and that was not the least important factor in bringing to reason the members of the egregious Liberal Imperialist League, who at first viewed with suspicion the new premier, and then rushed with one accord to be received into the strangest political fold ever presided over by a Liberal shepherd. Lord Spencer died in 1910 at the age of seventy-four, and it can be said of him, as of the late Duke of Devonshire, that he could have risen to greater heights had he not been born with a sense of modesty adorned by a good nature that permitted younger men to pass him, and left him without a {288} trace of rancour or bitterness. He had the satisfaction of witnessing the amazing triumph of the Liberal party, and could die with the knowledge that it savoured of the Gladstonian Liberalism of the middle eighties and the early nineties--the Liberalism he fought for and in whose interest he had sacrificed his best years. {289} CHAPTER XIX