all the entanglements and to bring the passage out to a clear and legitimate conclusion.

Often, however, this superb exuberant rush of words added indeseribable strength to the eloquence of the speaker. In passages of indignant remonstrance or denunciation, when word followed word, and stroke came down upon stroke, with a wealth of resource that seemed inexhaustible, the very fluency and variety of the speaker overwhelmed his audience. Interruption only gave him a new stimulus, and appeared to supply him with fresh resources of argument and illustration. His retorts leaped to his lips. Mr. Gladstone had not much humour of the playful kind, but he had a certain force of sarcastic and scornful rhetoric. He was always terribly in earnest. Whether the subject were great or small, he threw his whole soul into it. Once, in addressing a schoolboy gathering, he told his young listeners that if a boy ran he ought always to run as fast as he could; if he jumped, he ought always to jump as far as he could. He illustrated his maxim in his own career. He had no idea apparently of running or jumping in such measure as happened to please the fancy of the moment. He always exercised his splendid powers to the uttermost strain. Probably no one, past or present, had in combination so many gifts of voice, manner, fluency and argument, style, reason and passion, as Mr. Gladstone.

Mr. Gladstone grew slowly into Liberal convictions. At the time when he joined the Coalition Ministry he was still regarded as one who had scarcely left the camp of Toryism, and who had only joined that Ministry because it was a coalition. Years after he was applied to by the late Lord Derby to join a Ministry formed by him; and it was not supposed that there was anything unreasonable in the proposition. The first impulse towards Liberal principles was given to his mind probably by his change with his leader from Protection to Free Trade. When a man like Gladstone saw that his traditional principles and those of his party had broken down in any one direction it was but natural that he should begin to question their endurance in other directions. When Mr. Gladstone came to be convinced that there was no such law as the Protection principle at all; that it was a mere sham; that to believe in it was to be guilty of an economic heresythen it was impossible for him not to begin questioning the genuineness of the whole system of political thought of which

it formed but a part. Perhaps, too, he was impelled towards Liberal principles at home by seeing what the effects of opposite doctrines had been abroad. He rendered memorable service to the Liberal cause of Europe by his eloquent protest against the brutal treatment of Baron Poerio and other Liberals of Naples who were imprisoned by the Neapolitan king-a protest which Garibaldi declared to have sounded the first trumpet-call of Italian liberty. In rendering service to Liberalism and to Europe he rendered service also to his own intelligence. He helped to set free his own spirit as well as the Neapolitan people. The common taunts addressed to public men who have changed their opinions were hardly ever applied to him. Even his enemies felt that the one idea always inspired him-a conscientious anxiety to do the right thing. The worst thing that was said of him was that he was too impulsive, and that his intelligence was too restless. He was an essayist, a critic, a Homeric scholar; a dilettante in art, music, and old china; he was a theological controversialist; he was a political economist, a financier, a practical administrator whose gift of mastering details has hardly ever been equalled; he was a statesman and an orator. No man could attempt so many things and not occasionally make himself the subject of a sneer. The intense gravity and earnestness of Gladstone's mind always, however, saved him from the special penalty of such versatility.

As yet, however, he is only the young statesman who was the other day the hope of the more solemn and solid Conservatives, and in whom they have not even yet entirely ceased to put some faith. The Coalition Ministry was so formed that it was not supposed a man necessarily nailed his colours to any mast when he joined it. More than one of Gladstone's earliest friends and political associates had a part in it. The Ministry might undoubtedly be called an Administration of All the Talents. Except the late Lord Derby and Mr. Disraeli, it included almost every man of real ability who belonged to either of the two great parties of the State. The Manchester School had, of course, no place there; but they were not likely just yet to be recognised as constituting one of the elements out of which even a Coalition Ministry might be composed.

CHAPTER XI.

THE CRIMEAN WAR.

FOR forty years England had been at peace. There had indeed been little wars here and there with some of her Asiatic and African neighbours, but from Waterloo downward England knew no real war. The new generation were growing up in a happy belief that wars were things of the past for us, like the wearing of armour. During all the convulsions of the Continent, England had remained undisturbed. A new school as well as a new generation had sprung up. This school, full of faith but full of practical shrewd logic as well, was teaching with great eloquence and effect that the practice of settling international controversy by the sword was costly, barbarous, and blundering as well as wicked. The practice of the duel in England had utterly gone out. Why then should it be unreasonable to believe that war among nations might soon become equally obsolete?

Such certainly was the faith of a great many intelligent persons at the time when the Coalition Ministry was formed. The majority tacitly acquiesced in the belief without thinking much about it. They had never in their time seen England engaged in European war; and it was natural to assume that what they had never seen they were never likely to see. Suddenly all this happy quiet faith was disturbed by the Eastern 'question' -the question of what to do with the East of Europe. It was certain that things could not remain as they then were, and nothing else was certain. The Ottoman power had been settled during many centuries in the South-east of Europe. The Turk had many of the strong qualities and even the virtues of a great warlike conqueror; but he had no capacity or care for the arts of peace. He never thought of assimilating himself to those whom he had conquered, or them to him. The Turks were not, as a rule, oppressive to the races that lived under them. They were not habitual persecutors of the faiths they deemed heretical. Every now and then, indeed, some sudden fierce outburst of fanatical cruelty towards some of the subject sects horrified Europe, and reminded her that the conqueror who had settled himself down in her south-eastern corner was still a barbarian who had no right or place in civilised life

But as a rule the Turk was disposed to look with disdainful composure on what he considered the religious follies of the heretical races who did not believe in the Prophet. They were objects of his scornful pity rather than of his anger.

At one time there is no doubt that all the powers of civilised Europe would gladly have seen the Turk driven out of our Continent. But the Turk was powerful for a long series of generations, and it seemed for a while rather a question whether he would not send the Europeans out of their own grounds. When he began to decay, and when his aggressive strength was practically all gone, it might have been thought that the Western Powers would then have managed somehow to get rid of him. But in the meantime the condition of Europe had greatly changed. No one not actually subject to the Turk was afraid of him any more; and other States had arisen strong for aggression. The uncertainties of these States as to the intentions of their neighbours and each other proved a better bulwark for the Turks than any warlike strength of their own could any longer have furnished. The growth of the Russian empire was of itself enough to change the whole conditions of the problem.

Nothing in our times has been more remarkable than the sudden growth of Russia. A few generations ago Russia was literally an inland State. She was shut up in the heart of Eastern Europe as if in a prison. The genius, the craft and the audacity of Peter the Great first broke the narrow bounds set to the Russia of his day, and extended her frontier to the sea. He was followed after a reign or two by the greatest woman probably who ever sat on a throne, Elizabeth of England not even excepted. Catherine the Second so ably followed the example of Peter the Great, that she extended the Russian frontiers in directions which he had not had opportunity to stretch to. By the time her reign was done, Russia was one of the great powers of Europe, entitled to enter into negotiations on a footing of equality with the proudest States of the Continent. Unlike Turkey, Russia had always shown a yearning after the latest developments of science and of civilisation. A nation that tries to appear more civilised than it really is ends very often by becoming more civilised than its neighbours ever thought it likely to be.

The wars against Napoleon brought Russia into close alliance with England, Austria, Prussia, and other European States of old and advanced civilisation. She was

recognised as a valuable friend and a most formidable enemy. Gradually it became evident that she could be aggressive as well as conservative. After a while it grew to be a fixed conviction in the mind of the Liberalism of Western Europe that Russia was the greatest obstacle then existing in civilisation to the spread of popular ideas. The Turk was comparatively harmless in that sense. now, so much had his ancient ambition shrunk and his ancient He was well content war spirit gone out, if his strong and restless neighbour would only let him alone. But he was brought at more than one point into especial collision with Russia. Many of the provinces he ruled over in European Turkey were of Sclavonian race, and of the religion of the Greek Church. They were thus affined by a double tie to the Russian people, and therefore the manner in which Turkey dealt with those provinces was a constant source of dispute between Russia and her. The Russians are a profoundly religious people. emperor could not be loved if he did not declare his undying A Russian resolve to be the protector of the Christian populations of Turkey. Much of this was probably sincere and single-minded on the part of the Russian people and most of the Russian politicians. But the other States of Europe began to suspect that mingled up with benign ideas of protecting the Christian populations of Turkey might be a desire to extend the frontier of Russia to the southward in a new direction. Europe had seen by what craft and what audacious enterprises Russia had managed to extend her empire to the sea in other quarters; it began to be commonly believed that her next object of ambition would be the possession of Constantinople and the Bosphorus. It was reported that a will of Peter the Great had left it as an injunction to his successors to turn all the efforts of their policy towards that object. The particular document which was believed to be a will of Peter the Great enjoined on all succeeding Russian sovereigns never to relax in the extension of their territory northward on the Baltic and southward on the Black Sea shores, and to encroach as far as possible in the direction of Constantinople and the Indies. seemed to be the natural business of other European powers to It therefore see that the defects of the Ottoman Government, such as they were, should not be made an excuse for helping Russia to secure the objects of her special ambition. England of course, above all the rest, had an interest in watching over every movement that threatened in any way to interfere with the