Page:Wives of the prime ministers, 1844-1906.djvu/264

WIVES OF THE PRIME MINISTERS Derby Cabinet which, after a jolting and precarious career and a change of leadership from Lord Derby to Mr. Disraeli, fell to cureless ruin in 1868 after the new election.

Lord Cranborne had hardly been a year in office, but he had greatly increased in reputation. He had shown that when he was given responsibility he could rise to it, and his Parliamentary manner was admirable. He shot up automatically from the position of a lone hand, about whose prospects men shook their heads, to that of a coming man and a coming leader, and many regretted profoundly when his father's death in 1868 withdrew him from the House of Commons. One of the most interesting of minor political speculations is the consideration of what might have happened if his elder brother had lived and he had been compelled to pass his career in the comparative rough-and-tumble of the Commons. He was always of a very detached and aloof temperament, and might have absolutely refused to face the passion and blatancy of an ordinary contested election, as opposed to the foreseen "walks-over" of his elections at Stamford. But had he undergone it and been forced into more direct contact with the general mind of the people, it is impossible 226