How fast the great Liberals of our time are disappearing
either from life or from the scene of action! Mr. Gladstone is dead, Lord Rosebery has retired to his tent, Sir William Harcourt has resigned his leadership, Mr. Morley has dis- connected himself from his party, and Sir George Trevelyan and Mr. Acland have retired from ill-health. And now Lord Herschell, once described to the writer by a Liberal Minister as "the cement of the Liberal Cabinet," has suddenly expired at Washington, when only sixty-one years of age, and apparently in the full vigour of his mental powers. He had recently sustained a bad accident—the breaking of the bone of the pelvis—but he died of the modern disease, "heart failure," or, in other words, was used up. The son of a Polish Jew, and with Jewish characteristics written all over him, Lord Herschell was one of the ablest lawyers of his time, full to repletion of learning, and with the coolest judgment about everything but one. His intellect was so eager that he never could quite perceive that his interference might be out of place. He loved work, too, and was prepared at any notice to be First Commisioner of Inquiry into anything, his investigation always ending in an increase of light. He is a real loss to the country, one of the men who might have been an effective Premier, and he will be missed almost equally by both parties.
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