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" Even when he went to the House of Commons as a Liberal he remained the city’s undisputed ruler. In Parliament he surprised his colleagues by not being a wild demagogue but a highly polished debater making concise and pointed speeches. “The performance,” according to the British journalist J. A. Spender, “was, if anything, too perfect. ‘It is all very nice, very nice, Mr. Chamberlain,’ said an old member whose advice he sought, ‘but the House would take it as such a great compliment, if now and again you could manage to break down.’ ”49 CHAMBERLAIN REMAINED A RADICAL, advocating social reforms, and attacked such privileged institutions as landlords and the established Church of England. Yet he also developed a passionate attachment to the British Empire which he believed was a force for good in the world. That conviction led him to break with the Liberals in 1886 when they proposed Home Rule for Ireland; Chamberlain and his supporters argued that it would undermine the unity of the empire. In time, the Liberal Unionists, as they were known, moved towards the Conservative Party.50 Chamberlain never defended himself to his former colleagues. He simply moved on. He had, said Spender, “a deadly concentration” on what he was doing and that was mainly politics: “Everything "
― Margaret MacMillan , The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914