er into an insane convention? A body of
English gentlemen, honoured by the favour of their sovereign and the
confidence of their fellow-subjects, managing your affairs for five
years--I hope with prudence, and not altogether without success--or a
sophistical rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own
verbosity,"(354)--and so forth, in a strain of unusual commonness, little
befitting either Disraeli's genius or his dignity. Mr. Gladstone's speech
three days later was as free from all the excesses so violently described,
as any speech that was ever made at Westminster.

No speech, however, at this moment was able to reduce the general
popularity of ministers, and it was the common talk at the moment that if
Lord Beaconsfield had only chosen to dissolve, his majority would have
been safe. Writing an article on "England's Mission" as soon as the House
was up, Mr. Gladstone grappled energetically with some of the impressions
on which this popularity was founded. The _Pall Mall Gazette_ had set out
these impressions with its usual vigour. As Mr. Gladstone's reply
traverses much of the ground on which we have been treading, I may as well
transcribe it:--

The liberals, according to that ably written newspaper, have now
imbibed as a permanent sentiment a "distaste for national
greatness." This distaste is now grown into matter of principle.
"The disgust at these principles of action ever grew in depth and
extent," so that in the Danish, the American, and the
Franco-German wars, there was "an increasing portion of the nation
ready to engage in the struggle on almost any side," as a protest
against the position that it was bound not to engage in it at all!
The climax of the whole matter was reached when the result of the
Alabama treaty displayed to the world an England overreached,
overruled, and apologetic. It certainly requires the astounding
suppositions, and the gross ignorance of facts, which the
journalist with much truth recites, to explain the manner in which
for some time past pure rhodomontade has not only done the work of
reasoning, but has been accepted as a cover for constant
miscarriage and defeat; and doctrines of national self-interest
and self-assertion as supreme laws have been set up, which, if
unhappily they harden into "permanent sentiment" and "matter of
principle," will destroy all the rising hopes of a true public la