This menace of war had done what the grotesque treaty of Versailles, the organized anarchy in Ireland, the paralysis of government in every limb had so far failed to do. Others, besides my butler, were saying that the long record of misrule was beyond a joke; and the party-managers, in concert with the independent wire-pullers who were now an established part of our public life, had decided to wreck the coalition. ‘Blob’ Wister had already spoken; and Saltash told me that Woburn and the Press Combine would speak next day. I found my father-in-law engaged on a letter to _The Times_, protesting against the exclusion of peers from the Carlton Club meeting; and for a long spell he reiterated like a sulky child that he could tell me nothing because he was allowed to know nothing. Then he relaxed and informed me that the fight was taking place over foreign policy in general and, in particular, over the prime minister’s dictatorial habit of conducting his foreign relationships through his own secretariat over the head of the Foreign Office. “If I’d been Curzon, I’d have thrown the whole thing up years ago,” said Crawleigh with that eagerness for resignation so often exhibited by men who have not been invited to hold cabinet office. “He may feel he’s more useful as a brake on the prime minister,” I suggested. “If the prime minister goes, the foreign secretary must follow . . . unless he precedes him, when he sees how the cat’s jumping,” said Crawleigh with ill-concealed malice. “Well, it’s quite simple; Chamberlain has pledged himself to support the coalition; Birkenhead and Horne are with him; and the rump is meeting to see if it can overthrow Chamberlain.” “Who’s to be put in Chamberlain’s place?,” I asked. “No one knows yet. No one has the least idea how the meeting will turn out. If I were in the confidence of my party . . . Nowadays the unhappy accident of being a peer . . .” Feeling that I should hear no more, I drifted to the Turf and Stage, where Frank Jellaby thickened the mist in which Crawleigh had enveloped the Carlton Club. After a denunciation of the coalition-liberals which reminded me of Cato’s punctual fulminations against Carthage, he explained that the new crisis had been engineered by ‘Blob’ Wister and that its outcome depended on Wister’s success in finding a leader: “He had no difficulty in persuading people like Dean and Lingfield to come out for an all-tory government when his papers were marching ahead to cover their advance. If he can get Bonar Law to stampede the meeting . . .” “I hear Lingfield and the rest of George’s tory ministers are swearing allegiance to him with one hand,” I said, “and writing him letters of resignation with the other.” “_They_ don’t know anything . . . except that some of them will be badly left.” “But no one,” I encouraged him, “will be left quite so completely as your coalition-liberal friends.” Jellaby’s face darkened: