This subject had been handed over in 18 9 3 to a royal commission, and further discussed by a select committee in 1899 and a departmental committee in 1900, but both of these threw cold water on the schemes laid before them - a result which, galling enough to one who had made so much play with the question in the country, offered welcome material to his opponents for electioneering recrimination, as year by year went by between 1895 and 1900 and nothing resulted from all the confident talk on the subject in which Mr Chamberlain had indulged when out of office.