The business was all done very quietly--it had the sombre reticence of all tragic crises; everybody felt the importance of the affair too deeply to give way to strong manifestation of feeling.
But there were significant and profound, though subdued, marks of feeling on the Liberal Benches; and everybody could see what names were in the minds of everybody.
[Sidenote: Mr.Asquith as leader.] Mr.Asquith was for the moment the leader of the House.

Though he has still some of the ingenuous shyness of youth--though he is modest with all his honours--though he has charmed everybody by the utter absence of swagger and side in his dazzling elevation--there is a ready adaptability about Mr.Asquith to a Parliamentary situation, which is as astonishing as it is rare in men who have spent their lives in the atmosphere of the law courts.

The aptitude with which the right word always comes to his lips--his magnificent composure, and, at the same time, his power of striking the nail right on the head and right _into_ the head--all these things come out on an occasion such as that of April 24th.

Very quietly, but very significantly, he told the story of the riots; and very quietly and very significantly he spoke of the responsibility of the Salisburys, and the Balfours, and the Jameses, whose wild and wicked words had led to this outburst of medieval bigotry.
[Sidenote: Mr.Dunbar Barton.] Mr.Dunbar Barton made a valiant but vain attempt to stem the tide against him, but he, like every other Unionist, was weighted down by the feeling that the Orangemen were doing immense service to the cause of Home Rule by their brutality.

However, the fumes of Unionist oratory seem to have ascended to the heads of all the excitable young men of the Tory party.