The fact was that at that date the followers of Chamberlain and his “unauthorised programme,” as it was called, were under the grave disadvantage of working against the ill-concealed hostility of the moderate Liberals.
I expect when the history of the time is known it will be found that when Gladstone nominated Rosebery as his successor instead of Chamberlain he naturally destined his party to their long sojourn in the wilderness. Certainly in 1885 Chamberlain was as great a name to conjure with as it is to-day. I was present at Bristol at the Liberal Colston dinner just before the autumn election, and shall never forget the enormous enthusiasm with which his name was received.
With the exception of Gladstone, I have never heard a speaker who could play upon any given audience as a musician upon a great organ, pulling out first this stop and then another, and winding up with some diapason of eloquence, some grand swelling burst of harmony, that made speaker and audience, player and organ, one vast instrument of triumph.
The most wonderful instance of his magnetic influence and power that I ever witnessed was when he dined with the Eighty Club on April 28, 1885. It was an open secret that the majority of the club did not want him to be invited, but a Cabinet Minister could not be passed over. The audience was apathetic. They laughed awkwardly when he introduced himself as one “who certainly has never worshipped with Whigs in the Temple of Brooks’s.” He seemed to get no echo from his audience and became uneasy. He was speaking from notes piled up on a heap of oranges in a high dessert dish. Suddenly I saw him drop a page back on to the heap――he left his notes and his voice rang out amongst us in a graphic picture of a Birmingham slum and the children crying for milk, and the shameful contrast of the well-fed, sleek mob in front of him. Melodrama, perhaps, but rattling good melodrama. It made Radicals for the moment of every Whig in the room, and when he returned to his notes and quoted from the “Corn Law Rhymer,” in tones of triumphant fervour:――
They taxed your corn, they fettered trade; The clouds to blood, the sun to shade; And every good that God had made They turned to bane and mockery――