As the general idea of these chapters has been a concatenation of Links with the Past, I must say a word about Lord Palmerston, who was born in 1784, entered Parliament in 1807, and was still leading the House of Commons when I first attended its debates.  A man who, when turned seventy, could speak from the “dusk of a summer evening to the dawn of a summer morning” in defence of his foreign policy, and carry the vindication of it by a majority of 46, was certainly no common performer on the parliamentary stage; and yet Lord Palmerston had very slender claims to the title of an orator.  His style was not only devoid of ornament and rhetorical device, but it was slipshod and untidy in the last degree.  He eked out his sentences with “hum” and “hah;” he cleared his throat, and flourished his pocket-handkerchief, and sucked his orange; he rounded his periods with “you know what I mean” and “all that kind of thing,” and seemed actually to revel in an anti-climax—­“I think the hon. member’s proposal an outrageous violation of constitutional propriety, a daring departure from traditional policy, and, in short, a great mistake.”  It taxed all the skill of the reporters’ gallery to trim his speeches into decent form; and yet no one was listened to with keener interest, no one was so much dreaded as an opponent, and no one ever approached him in the art of putting a plausible face upon a doubtful policy and making the worse appear the better cause.  Palmerston’s parliamentary success perfectly illustrates the judgment of Demosthenes, that “it is not the orator’s language that matters, nor the tone of his voice; but what matters is that he should have the same predilections as the majority, and should entertain the same likes and dislikes as his country.”  If those are the requisites of public speaking, Palmerston was supreme.

The most conspicuous of all Links with the Past in the matter of Parliamentary Oratory is obviously Mr. Gladstone.  Like the younger Pitt, he had a “premature and unnatural dexterity in the combination of words.”  He was trained under the immediate influence of Canning, who was his father’s friend.  When he was sixteen his style was already formed.  I quote from the records of the Eton Debating Society for 1826:—­

“Thus much, sir, I have said, as conceiving myself bound in fairness not to regard the names under which men have hidden their designs so much as the designs themselves.  I am well aware that my prejudices and my predilections have long been enlisted on the side of Toryism—­(cheers)—­and that in a cause like this I am not likely to be influenced unfairly against men bearing that name and professing to act on the principles which I have always been accustomed to revere.  But the good of my country must stand on a higher ground than distinctions like these.  In common fairness and in common candour, I feel myself compelled to give my decisive verdict against the conduct of men whose measures I firmly believe to have been hostile to British interests, destructive of British glory, and subversive of the splendid and, I trust, lasting fabric of the British Constitution.”