1892. In Great Britain the electors in that year pronounced against Home
Rule again by a considerable majority, and it was only by coalition with
the eighty-three Irish Nationalist Members that Gladstone and his party
were able to scrape up a majority of forty in support of his second Home
Rule Bill. Whether there was any ground for Gladstone's belief that but
for the O'Shea divorce he would have had a three-figure majority in 1892
is of little consequence, but the fall of his own majority in Midlothian
from 4,000 to below 700, which caused him "intense chagrin,"[3] does not
lend it support. Lord Morley says Gladstone was blamed by some of his
friends for accepting office "depending on a majority not large enough
to coerce the House of Lords"[4]; but a more valid ground of censure was
that he was willing to break up the constitution of the United Kingdom,
although a majority of British electors had just refused to sanction
such a thing being done. That Gladstone's colleagues realised full well
the true state of public opinion on the subject, if he himself did not,
was shown by their conduct when the Home Rule Bill, after being carried
through the House of Commons by diminutive majorities, was rejected on
second reading by the Peers. Even their great leader's entreaty could
not persuade them to consent to an appeal to the people[5]; and when
they were tripped up over the cordite vote in 1895, after Gladstone had
disappeared from public life, none of them probably were surprised at
the overwhelming vote by which the constituencies endorsed the action of
the House of Lords, and pronounced for the second time in ten years
against granting Home Rule to Ireland.

If anything except the personal ascendancy of Gladstone contributed to
his small coalition majority in 1892 it was no doubt the confidence of
the electors that the House of Lords could be relied upon to prevent the
passage of a Home Rule Bill. It is worth noting that nearly twenty years
later Lord Crewe acknowledged that the Home Rule Bill of 1893 could not