resignation of his office. In 1885, when the Conservatives again came into power and formed a government, Balfour was appointed President of the Local Government Board and afterwards became Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant—in other words, Chief Secretary for Ireland. He had to attempt a difficult, or rather, it should be said, an impossible task, and he got through it about as well as, or as badly as, any other man could have done whose appointed mission was to govern Ireland on Tory principles for the interests of the landlords and by the policy of coercion.

Balfour, it should be said, was never, even at that time, actually unpopular with the Irish National party. We all understood quite well that his own heart did not go with the sort of administrative work which was put upon him; his manners were always courteous, agreeable, and graceful; he had a keen, quiet sense of humor, was on good terms personally with the leading Irish members, and never showed any inclination to make himself needlessly or wantonly offensive to his opponents. He was always readily accessible to any political opponent who had any suggestion to make, and his term of office as Chief Secretary, although of necessity quite unsuccessful for any practical good, left no memories of rancor behind it in the minds of those whom he had to oppose and to confront. More lately he became First Lord of the Treasury and Leader of the House of Commons, and the remainder of his public career is too well known to call for any detailed description here. My object in this article is rather to give a living picture of the man himself as we all saw him in public life than to record in historical detail the successive steps by which he ascended to his present high position, or rather, it should be said, of the successive events which brought that place within his reach and made it necessary for him to accept it. For it is only fair to say that, so far as outer observers could judge, Mr. Balfour never made his career a struggle for high positions. So clever and gifted a man must naturally have had some ambition in the public field to which he had devoted so absolutely his time and his talents. But he seemed, so far as one could judge, to have in him none of the self-seeking qualities which are commonly seen in the man whose purpose is to make his parliamentary work the means of arriving at the highest post in the government of the State. On the contrary, his whole demeanor seemed to be rather that of one who is devoting himself unwillingly to a career not quite congenial. He always appeared to me to be essentially a man of literary, scholarly, and even retiring tastes, who has a task forced upon him which he does not feel quite free to decline, and who therefore strives to make the best of a career which he has not chosen, but from which he does not feel at liberty to turn away. Most men who have attained the same political position give one the idea that they feel a positive delight in parliamentary life and warfare, and that nature must have designed them for that particular field and for none other. The joy in the strife which men like Palmerston, like Disraeli, and like Gladstone evidently felt never showed itself in the demeanor of Arthur Balfour. There was always something in his manner which spoke of a shy and shrinking disposition, and he never appeared to enter into debate for the mere pleasure of debating. He gave the idea of one who would much rather not make a speech were he altogether free to please himself in the matter, and as if he were only constraining himself to undertake a duty which most of those around him were but too glad to have an opportunity of attempting.

There are instances, no doubt, of men gifted with an absolute genius for eloquent speech who have had no natural inclination for debate and would rather have been free from any necessity for entering into the war of words. I have heard John Bright say that he would never make a speech if he did not feel it a duty imposed upon him, and that he would never enter the House of Commons if he felt free to keep away from its debates. Yet Bright was a born orator and was, on the whole, I think, the greatest public and parliamentary orator I have ever heard in England, not excluding even Gladstone himself. Bright had all the physical qualities of the orator. He had a commanding presence and a voice of the most marvelous intonation, capable of expressing in musical sound every emotion which lends itself to eloquence—the impassioned, the indignant, the pathetic, the appealing, and the humorous. Then I can recall an instance of another man, not, indeed, endowed with Bright's superb oratorical gifts, but who had to spend the greater part of his life since he attained the age of manhood in the making of speeches within and outside the House of Commons. I am thinking now of Charles Stewart Parnell. I know well that Parnell would never have made a speech if he could have avoided the task, and that he even felt a nervous dislike to the mere putting of a question in the House. But no one would have known from Bright's manner when he took part in a great debate that he was not obeying in congenial mood the full instinct and inclination of a born orator. Nor would a stranger have guessed from Parnell's clear, self-possessed, and precise style of speaking that he was putting a severe constraint upon himself when he made up his mind to engage in parliamentary debate. There is something in Arthur Balfour's manner as a speaker which occasionally reminds me of Parnell and his style. The two men had the same quiet, easy, and unconcerned fashion of utterance, always choosing the most appropriate word and finding it without apparent difficulty; each man seemed, as I have already said of Balfour, to be thinking aloud rather than trying to convince the listeners; each man spoke as if resolved not to waste any words or to indulge in any appeal to the mere emotions of the audience. But the natural reluctance to take any part in debate was always more conspicuous in the manner of Balfour than even in that of Parnell.

Balfour is a man of many and varied tastes and pursuits. He is an advocate of athleticism and is especially distinguished for his devotion to the game of golf. He obtained at one time a certain reputation in London society because of the interest he took in some peculiar phases of fanciful intellectual inventiveness. He was for a while a leading member, if not the actual inventor, of a certain order of psychical research whose members were described as The Souls. More than one novelist of the day made picturesque use of this singular order and enlivened the pages of fiction by fancy portraits of its leading members. Such facts as these did much to prevent Balfour from being associated in the public mind with only the rivalries of political parties and the incidents of parliamentary warfare. One sometimes came into social circles where Balfour was regarded chiefly as the man of literary tastes and somewhat eccentric intellectual developments. All this cast a peculiar reflection over his career as a politician and filled many observers with the idea that he was only playing at parliamentary life, and that his other occupations were the genuine realities for him. Even to this day there are some who persist in believing that Balfour, despite his prolonged and unvarying attention to his parliamentary duties, has never given his heart to the prosaic and practical work of administrative office and the business of maintaining his political party. Yet it has always had to be acknowledged that no man attended more carefully and more closely to such work when he had to do it, and that the most devoted worshiper