Let me say at once that the speech was a remarkable triumph, and placed Mr.Asquith at a bound amid not only the orators, but the statesmen of the House of Commons--the men who have nerve, breadth of view, great courage, enormous resource.
[Sidenote: Joe's dustheap.] One of the discoveries of the speech must have been particularly unpleasant to Mr.Chamberlain.The gentleman from Birmingham has at last found a man who does not fear him--who has a much finer mind--wider culture--who has judgment, temper, and a vocabulary as copious and as ready as that of Mr.Chamberlain himself.

One had only to look at Mr.
Chamberlain throughout the speech to see how palpable, how painful this discovery was--especially to a man to whom politics is nothing but a mere conflict between contending rivalries and malignities.

Mr.
Asquith--calm, self-possessed, measured--put Joe on the rack with a deliberation that was sometimes almost cruel in its effectiveness and relentlessness; and Joe was foolish enough to point the severity and success of the attack by losing his self-control.

When Mr.Asquith said that Joe could find no better employment than that of "scavenging"-- here was a word to make Joe wince--"among the dustheaps" of past speeches, Joe was a sight to see.

A "scavenger"-- this was the disrespectful way in which those quotations were described which had often roused the Tory Benches to ecstasies of delight.