MR. DILLON’S FORGETFULNESS.

[Sidenote:  Mr. Dillon.]

Everybody who has ever met Mr. Dillon knows that he has a singularly even and equable temper, except at the moments when he has been stung to passion by the sight of some bitter and intolerable wrong.  When, therefore, Mr. Chamberlain made him the subject of a fierce attack on account of a past utterance, he was dealing with a man who was as little influenced by such attacks as anybody could well be.  For days Mr. Chamberlain had been trying to bait Mr. Dillon into speech; and for days Mr. Dillon had positively refused to be drawn.  At last it seemed to some friends of Mr. Dillon that if he did not speak his attitude might be misunderstood, and that he would be supposed to entertain, as part of a settled policy, what he had really uttered on the spur of the moment and under the influence of intolerable wrong and provocation.  But when in the last days of June Mr. Chamberlain made his attack, and Mr. Dillon had listened to it and asked for dates, Mr. Dillon thought that the matter would not be worth further attending to, and relapsed into his old attitude of easy contempt.

[Sidenote:  The outbreak.]

This will account for what would otherwise be inexplicable; namely, that, having had a week to prepare his defence, Mr. Dillon should on July 3rd have fallen into a dreadful, and, for the moment, disastrous blunder.  The truth was, Mr. Dillon had never thought of the subject for more than a few moments between the date of the challenge and Mr. Chamberlain’s renewal of the attack, and, if he had been left free to exercise his own judgment, would have allowed the whole thing to lapse into the nothingness into which every such charge finally falls.  On this Monday night Mr. Chamberlain was in his most venomous mood.  He had come down to the House with the set determination to get up a row somehow or other.  There was evil in his eye; there was rancour in his voice; there was the hoarse rage which always shows in him whenever he feels that he has been beaten.  His judgment is so shallow—­his temper so rash and violent—­that some people think he actually counted that the Government would never have dared to interfere with his obstructive plan of campaign, and that he would have been permitted to bury the Bill under the vast hedge of amendments.  To him, then, the strong and drastic action of the preceding week had come as a painful and most exasperating surprise.

[Sidenote:  Joe’s weakness.]

It is one of the many bad turns that Joe’s temper does him to always lead him into overdoing his part.  The wild outbursts of his venom—­the ferocity which he puts into his personal attacks—­these things have the effect of producing a certain amount of reaction; and thus his blows often suffer from the very violence with which they are dealt.  A real master of Parliamentary craft, like Mr. Gladstone or Mr. Sexton, has learned the lesson—­the lesson which all orators of all ages have learned—­that there is nothing so deadly as moderation; that he destroys the effectiveness of a passion by tearing it to pieces, and that you are really effective when you have complete control of your temper, your voice and your language.