The Round Table Conference
While the Whiggish wing of the Liberal Unionists cooperated informally with the Conservative Government (and supplied it with a cabinet minister), the party's Radical Unionist wing held a series of meetings with their former Liberal colleagues. Led by Chamberlain and Sir George Trevelyan, the Round Table Conference was an attempt to see if reunion of the Liberal party was possible. Despite some progress (and Chamberlain's statement that they were united on ninety-nine out of a hundred issues), the problem of Home Rule for Ireland could not be resolved. Neither Hartington nor Gladstone took a direct part in these meetings, and there seemed to be no other Liberal statesman who could reunite the party. Within a few months the talks were over, though some Liberal Unionists, including Trevelyan, later rejoined the Liberal Party soon after.
Read more about this topic: Liberal Unionist Party
Famous quotes containing the words table and/or conference:
“When you got to the table you couldn’t go right to eating, but you had to wait for the widow to tuck down her head and grumble a little over the victuals, though there warn’t really anything the matter with them. That is, nothing only everything was cooked by itself. In a barrel of odds and ends it is different; things get mixed up, and the juice kind of swaps around, and the things go better.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
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—Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876–1958)