Though the power of reading the signs of the times and moving the mind of the nation as a whole may be now more essential to an English statesman than the skill which manages a legislature or holds together a cabinet, that skill counts for much, and must continue to do so while the House of Commons remains the supreme governing authority of the country. A man can hardly reach high place, and certainly cannot retain high place, without possessing this kind of art. Mr. Gladstone was at one time thought to want it. In 1864, when Lord Palmerston’s end was evidently near and Mr. Gladstone had shown himself the most brilliant and capable man among the Liberal ministers in the House of Common’s, people speculated about the succession to the headship of the party; and the wiseacres of the day were never tired of repeating that Mr. Gladstone could not possibly lead the House of Commons. He wanted tact (they said), he was too excitable, too impulsive, too much absorbed in his own ideas, too unversed in the arts by which individuals are conciliated. But when, after twenty-five years of his unquestioned reign, the time for his own departure drew nigh, men asked how the Liberal party in the House of Commons would ever hold together after it had lost a leader of such consummate capacity. Seldom has a prediction been more utterly falsified than that of the Whig critics of 1864. They had grown so accustomed to Palmerston’s way of handling the House as to forget that a man might succeed by quite different methods. And they forgot also that a man may have many defects and yet in spite of them be incomparably the fittest for a great place.