To one point only will I permit myself to make brief but significant
allusion, for I cannot allow this book to go forth to the world with the
knowledge that the publication of the companion volume is--through force
of circumstances--for the present postponed, without at least a passing
reference to what in the authoritative biography of Mr. Gladstone is
called the "barren controversy" which arose in 1892, as to whether the
present Duke of Devonshire, in 1880, tried to form a Government. That
controversy was assuredly "barren" to my brother in everything but the
testimony of a good conscience. He was assailed by almost the whole Press
of the country for the part which he played in it, and not least
mercilessly by journalists of his own party. As he said to me himself at
the time, "If I had been Mr. Parnell, fresh from the revelations of the
Divorce Court, I could not have been treated with greater contumely." If
there was one thing on the possession of which he prided himself in life
more than another, it was loyalty, and seldom was political loyalty
subjected to a more cruel strain. He held his peace with all the
materials for his own vindication in his hand, rather than embarrass Mr.
Gladstone at a great political crisis.

The letters on which he based his statements are in existence. I wished
to print them, without note or comment of mine, in an Appendix to the
present volume, but permission has been withheld. They cannot remain for
ever in ambush, and when they are published, with my brother's full and
magnanimous comments, it will be apparent to all the world how greatly he
was misjudged. It is enough for the present to say that Mr. Gladstone
himself admitted in a note under his own hand that the interpretation
which my brother put upon the facts submitted to him _absolutely and
entirely justified_ the course which he took in that controversy. Mr.
Gladstone, as Mr. Morley somewhat drily states in his biography,