There was to be a debate, of course; but only when I saw the attendants setting chairs on the floor of the House itself--a thing which had not been done since Gladstone introduced his second Home Rule Bill--did I grasp the fact that something wholly unusual was expected.
My strong impression is that the House as a whole was in great measure unprepared for what it had to face.

You could feel surprise in the air as Sir Edward Grey developed his wonderful speech.

Men, shaken away from all traditional attitudes, responded from the depths of themselves to an appeal which none of us had ever heard before.
Having failed to secure my place on the Irish benches, I was sitting on one of the chairs close by the Sergeant at Arms, just inside the bar of the House, so that I saw at once both sides of the assembly: there were no parties that day.

The Foreign Secretary's speech, intensely English, with all the quality that is finest in English tradition, clearly did not in its opening stages carry the House as a whole.

Passages struck home, here and there, to men not to parties, kindling individual sentiments.