ABSTRACT
At the previous election the number of unopposed returns was by far the lowest on record: fourteen in Great Britain, if university seats are excluded; thirteen Liberals and a solitary Conservative. Barely six months later there were no contests in 149 British seats, outside the universities, returning 109 Conservatives and Liberal Unionists against forty Gladstonian Liberals. The resources of both parties were strained by having to fight another election so soon: but Liberal finances and organization suffered badly for the secession of so many MPs. In those British constituencies which saw a contest the Liberal share of the vote dropped by four and a half per cent in England and Wales, rising very slightly in Scotland. As Salisbury had predicted, Home Rule moved the politicians more than the voters. The Tories, with 316 seats all told, up from 249 in 1885, relied on the seventyseven Liberal Unionists to keep Gladstone out of power when he made way for Salisbury in July, confident that the victory of Home Rule, his last great cause, could not be long delayed. It did not seem probable that the Unionist allies would be able to persuade a democratized electorate to coerce Ireland indefinitely: or that their alliance was strong enough to bear the strain put upon it by the contrasting personalities and opinions of Salisbury, Churchill, Hartington and Chamberlain. Against the odds, Salisbury held the supporters of the Union together by widening the area of agreement to create a Palmerstonian consensus on a range of other issues besides Ireland. Tory policies were steadily subsumed under Unionist policies; a new Conservatism on a Unionist basis replaced the old. The process took time: but, in Salisbury’s judgement, there was no alternative. Although neither Hartington nor Chamberlain was yet prepared to take office under the Tories, their co-operation brought a virtual coalition into being on the lines that Chamberlain sketched for Balfour before the election.1
