supposed that there was anything unreasonable in the proposition. The first impulse toward 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. The whole fabric of belief was built up together. Gladstone's was a mind of that order that sees a principle in everything, and must, to adopt the phrase of a great preacher, make the ploughing as much a part of religious duty as the praying. The interests of religion seemed to him bound up with the creed of Conservatism; the principles of Protection must, probably, at one time have seemed a part of the whole creed of which one article was as sacred as another. His intellect and his principles, however, found themselves compelled to follow the guidance of his leader in the matter of Free-trade; and when inquiry thus began it was not very likely soon to stop. He must have seen how much the working of such a principle as that of Protection became a class interest in England, and how impossible. it would have been for it to continue long in existence under an extended and a popular suffrage. In other countries the fallacy of Protection did not show itself so glaringly in the eyes of the poorer classes, for in other countries it was not the staple food of the population that became the principal object of a protective duty. But in England the bread on which the poorest had to live was made to pay a tax for the benefit of landlords and farmers. As long as one believed this to be a necessary condition of a great unquestionable creed, it was easy for a young statesman to reconcile himself to it. It might bear cruelly on individuals, or even multitudes; but so would the law of gravitation, as Mill has remarked, bear harshly on the best of men when it dashed him down from a height and broke his bones. It would be idle to question the existence of the law on that account; or to disbelieve the whole teaching of the physical science which explains its movements. But 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 heresy

then 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 toward 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. We find him, as his career goes on, dropping the traditions of his youth, always rising higher in Liberalism, and not going back. One of the foremost of his compeers, and his only actual rival in popular eloquence, eulogized him as always struggling toward the light. 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. None accused him of being one of the politicians who mistake, as Victor Hugo says, a weather-cock for a flag. With many qualities which seemed hardly suited to a practical politician; with a sensitive and eager temper, like that of Canning, and a turn for theological argument that, as a rule, Englishmen do not love in a statesman; with an impetuosity that often carried him far astray, and a deficiency of those genial social qualities that go so far to make a public success in England, Mr. Gladstone maintained through the whole of his career a reputation against which there was hardly a serious cavil. 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. intense gravity and earnestness of Gladstone's mind always,

The

however, saved him from the special penalty of such versatility; no satirist described him as not one, but all mankind's epitome.

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 colors 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 recognized as constituting one of the elements out of which even a Coalition Ministry might be composed.

CHAPTER XXV.

THE EASTERN QUESTION.

FOR forty years England had been at peace. There had, indeed, been little wars here and there with some of her Asiatic and African neighbors; and once or twice, as in the instance of the quarrel between Turkey and Egypt, she had been menaced for a moment with a dispute of a more formidable kind and nearer home. But the trouble had passed away, and from Waterloo downward England had known no real war. The new generation were growing up in a kind of happy belief that wars were things of the past for us; out of fashion; belonging to a ruder and less rational society, like the wearing of armor and the carrying of weapons in the civil streets. It is not surprising if it seemed possible to many that the England of the future might regard the instruments and the ways of war with the same curious wonder as that which Virgil assumes would one day fill the minds of the rustic laborers whose ploughs turned up on some field of ancient battle the rusted swords and battered

helmets of forgotten warriors. During all the convulsions of the Continent, England had remained undisturbed. When bloody revolutions were storming through other capitals, London was smiling over the dispersion of the Chartists by a few special constables. When the armies of Austria, of Russia, of France, of Sardinia were scattered over vast and various Continental battle-grounds, our troops were passing in peaceful pageantry of review before the well-pleased eyes of their Sovereign in some stately royal park. 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. Battle was

forever out of fashion as a means of settling private controversy in England. Why then should it be unreasonable to believe that the like practice 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 scen England engaged in European war; and it was natural to assume that what they had never seen they were never likely to see. Any one who retraces attentively the history of English public opinion at that time will easily find evidence enough of a commonly accepted understanding that England had done with great wars. Even then, perhaps, a shrewd observer might have been inclined to conjecture that by the very force of reaction a change would soon set in. Man, said Lord Palmerston, is by nature a fighting and quarrelling animal. This was one of those smart saucy generalizations characteristic of its author, and which used to provoke many graver and more philosophic persons, but which nevertheless often got at the heart of a question in a rough-and-ready sort of way. In the season of which we are now speaking, it was not, however, the common belief that man was by nature a fighting and a quarrelling animal, at least in England. Bad government, the arbitrary power of an aristocracy, the necessity of finding occupation for a

standing army, the ambitions of princes, the misguiding lessons of romance and poetry-these and other influences had converted man into an instrument of war. Leave him to his own impulses, his own nature, his own ideas of self-interest, and the better teachings of wiser guides, and he is sure to remain in the paths of peace. Such was the common belief of the year or two after the Great Exhibition-the belief fervently preached by a few and accepted without contradiction by the majority, as most common beliefs are -the belief floating in the air of the time, and becoming part of the atmosphere in which the generation was brought up. Suddenly all this happy, quiet faith was disturbed, and the long peace, which the hero of Tennyson's "Maud" says he thought no peace, was over and done. The hero of " Maud” had, it will be observed, the advantage of explaining his convictions after the war had broken out. The name was indeed legion of those who, under the same conditions, discovered, like him, that they had never relished the long, long peace, or believed in it much as a peace at all.

The Eastern Question it was that disturbed the dream of peace. The use of such phrases as the Eastern Question," borrowed chiefly from the political vocabulary of France, is not in general to be commended; but we can in this instance find no more ready and convenient way of expressing clearly and precisely the meaning of the crisis which had arisen in Europe. It was strictly 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. It had come in there as a conqueror, and had remained there only as a conqueror occupies the ground his tents are covering. 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. He disdained to learn anything from them; he did not care whether or no they learned anything from him. It has been well remarked, that of all the races who conquered Greeks, the Turks alone learned nothing from their gifted captives. Captive Greece conquered all the world except