It is the prompt and sometimes almost irresistible
expression of the feeling that Destiny is throwing the die, and that you
have to watch the grim and fateful result.
[Sidenote: The Treasury Bench looks awkward.]
And if you looked on the Treasury Bench, you could see that the feeling
was not altogether comfortable. It was no secret that the ninth clause
was the one which offered to the Government the one perilous fence they
had still to take--that is to say, so far as their own followers were
concerned. Hitherto the attitude of the Government was quite unknown;
and, indeed, it was quite probable that the Government themselves had
not finally decided what their attitude should be. But when Mr.
Gladstone--pale, excited, and angry--jumped in with this outburst, it
seemed all at once as if the fateful and final word of Destiny had been
spoken, and as if the whole fate of Ireland, of Mr. Gladstone, of this
great Ministry, and of this mighty Bill, had been definitely pledged to
one throw of the dice. Imagine one of those contests which you find in
the pages of Turgenieff or Tolstoi, which perchance you may have seen at
Monte Carlo, which in the last few days may have been observed at Epsom
Downs--in which life or death, ruin or halcyon fortune, depended on one
throw--and you can have some sense of all that passed through the
imagination of the House and that made it almost audibly shiver when Mr.
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