With this singular openness and flexibility of mind, there went a not less remarkable ingenuity and resourcefulness. His mind was fertile in expedients, and still more fertile in reasonings by which to recommend the expedients. This gift was often dangerous, for he was apt to be carried away by the dexterity of his own dialectic, and to think schemes substantially good in whose support he could muster so formidable an array of arguments. He never seemed to be at a loss, in public or private, for a criticism, or for an answer to the criticisms of others. If his power of adapting his own mind to the minds of those whom he had to convince had been equal to the skill and swiftness with which he accumulated a mass of matter persuasive to those who looked at things in his own way, no one would have exercised so complete a control over the political opinion of his time. But his mind had not this power of adaptation. It moved on its own lines—peculiar lines, which were often misconceived, even by those who sought to follow him most loyally. Thus it happened that he was blamed for two opposite faults. Some, pointing to the fact that he had frequently altered his views, denounced him as a demagogue profuse of promises, ready to propose whatever he thought likely to catch the people’s ear. Others complained that there was no knowing where to have him; that he had an erratic mind, whose currents ran underground and came to the surface in unexpected places; that he did not consult his party, but followed his own predilections; that his guidance was unsafe because his decisions were unpredictable. Both these views were unfair, yet the latter came nearer to the truth than the former. No great popular leader had in him less of the true ring of the demagogue. He saw, of course, that a statesman cannot oppose the popular will beyond a certain point, and may have to humor it in order that he may direct it. Now and then, in his later days, he so far yielded to his party advisers as to express his approval of proposals for which he cared little personally. But he was too self-absorbed, too eagerly interested in the ideas that suited his own cast of thought, to be able to watch and gage the tendencies of the multitude. On several occasions he announced a policy which startled people and gave a new turn to the course of events. But in none of these instances, and certainly not in the three most remarkable,—his declarations against the Irish church establishment in 1868, against the Turks and the traditional English policy of supporting them in 1876, and in favor of Irish home rule in 1886,—did any popular demand suggest his pronouncement. It was the masses who took their view from him, not he who took his mandate from the masses. In all of these instances he was at the time in opposition, and was accused of having made this new departure for the sake of recovering power. In the