Excerpt from Joseph Chamberlain: An Honest Biography In an estimate of Mr. Chamberlain, much turns on consistency. It is true, as Lowell has remarked, that the foolish and the dead alone never change their opinion.' Such a dictum, however, is not a sufficient guide. The circumstances must be considered. Alteration of Opinion, ' said Mr. Gladstone, 'is not always to be blamed, but it is always to be watched with Vigilance always to be challenged and put upon its trial.' This was his own fate in the affair of Home Rule, and it was Sir Robert Peel's fate with regard to the corn duty. All political leaders change their Opinions, but the present volume shows that the changes in Mr. Chamberlain's case were unusually numerous and violent, that they affected nearly every great secular subject discussed in his time, and that they occurred not only in the judgments of his youth, but in those of his mature and ripe manhood; he renounced, indeed, during the last two decades of his career, not merely his View of one great subject, but most of the beliefs which he had professed till the age of fifty. Yet the writer, instead of pronouncing a verdict upon his motives, submits the whole case to the jury. He tries to describe what Mr. Chamberlain said and did, and how he looked and spoke to describe the scenes amid which he moved and the contem poraries among whom he mingled, and the impression which he pro duced upon Parliament and people. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.