haste--was, as a note in his own hand at the outset shows, begun one day
and finished the next--a proof, if any were needed, of his rapidity in
work. He made many enthusiastic friends amongst the shrewd working people
of the North by these deliverances.

The last twenty years of my brother's life are outside the present
narrative. Two of them were spent in Leeds in ever-widening newspaper
work, and the remaining eighteen in London, under circumstances he has
himself described in another volume, which, for political reasons, is for
the present withheld. It will appear eventually, and personally I feel no
doubt whatever that it will take its place, quite apart from its
self-revelation, as one of the most important and authentic records, in
the political sense, of the later decades of Queen Victoria's reign. My
brother's knowledge of the secret history of the Liberal party in the
memorable days when Mr. Gladstone was fighting his historic battle for
Home Rule, and during the subsequent Premiership of Lord Rosebery, was
exceptional. He was the trusted friend of both statesmen, and probably no
other journalist was so absolutely in the confidence of the leaders of
the Liberal party--a circumstance which was due quite as much to his
character as to his capacity. It is not my intention to anticipate the
story, as he himself tells it, either of the "Hawarden Kite" or the Home
Rule split, much less to disclose his opinions--they are emphatic and
deliberate--of the men who made mischief at that crisis. I leave also
untouched the plain, unvarnished account he gives, on unimpeachable
authority, of a subsequent and not less discreditable phase in the annals
of the Liberal party. There are reasons, obvious to everyone who gives
the matter a moment's thought, that render it inadvisable in the
interests of the political cause with which my brother all his life was
identified, and for which he suffered more than is commonly known, to
yield to the very natural temptation to throw reticence to the winds.