precedent for knighting, to which proceeding Harcourt strenuously objected. When Gladstone told him that it was necessary to keep up the prestige of the order of knights he replied: "Then you should take a knighthood yourself." During the Tory administration of 1874-1880, with its Russian-Turkish imbroglio, he was out of sympathy alike with Gladstone's idealistic humanitarianism and Disraeli's romantic imperialism. "Gladstone and Dizzy seem to cap one another in folly," he wrote, "and I don't know which has made the greater ass of himself." In 1880 he joined Mr Gladstone's second administration as Home Secretary. In the subsequent Liberal governments he invariably appeared as Chancellor of the Exchequer, a position which gave him unmeasured scope for the exercise of his realistic habit of mind in dealing with his colleagues of the spending departments. In these years he drew much nearer to his chief in the long struggle for Home Rule, which ended in defeat by the House of Lords. We forget the figure of Sancho Panza and remember instead the chivalric bearing of The Loyal Servitor. Nor was this the only relation in which Harcourt's loyalty showed as his supreme quality. Although a leading candidate for the succession to Gladstone, he made extraordinary efforts to retain within the party men like Joseph Chamberlain and Lord Hartington who would have been his leading competitors; and on Gladstone's retirement in 1895 he consented to the selection of Lord Rosebery as Premier, and served under him as Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the House of Commons. It gratifies the sense of sportsmanship, so large an element in British politics, that in these years of declining Liberal power and the following ones of Tory rule, when the Liberal party seemed hopelessly distracted, Sir William Harcourt should have reached the height of his career, and a position in the House of Commons equal to that held by any statesman of the nineteenth century, from Canning to Gladstone.
Sir William Harcourt was the descendant of a family, like the Cecils, Cavendishes, and Stanleys, long distinguished in the English oligarchy. It was always a matter of surprise to find him on the liberal side, steadily inclining toward radicalism. The reason for this attitude is to be found in his uncompromising realism, his inveterate habit of seeing things as they are. He has been called a man of the Eighteenth Century, but it was the matter-of-fact, positive school of the beginning of the century to which he belonged,
