concluded, in phrases that justly provoked plain
men to wrath, "Mr. Gladstone desires me to remark that to form opinions
upon questions of policy, to announce them to the world, and to take or to
be a party to taking any of the steps necessary for giving them effect,
are matters which, though connected together, are in themselves distinct,
and which may be separated by intervals of time longer or shorter
according to the particular circumstances of the case."(59) Mr. Gladstone
sent a copy of this enigmatical response to the foreign secretary, who was
far too acute not to perceive all the mischief and the peril, but had his
full share of that generosity of our public life that prevents a minister
from bearing too hardly on a colleague who has got the boat and its crew
into a scrape. Lord Russell replied from Walmer (Oct. 20): "I have
forwarded to your private secretary your very proper answer to your very
impertinent correspondent. Still, you must allow me to say that I think
you went beyond the latitude which all speakers must be allowed, when you
said that Jeff. Davis had made a nation. Recognition would seem to follow,
and for that step I think the cabinet is not prepared. However, we shall
soon meet to discuss this very topic." A week after the deliverance at
Newcastle, Lewis, at Lord Palmerston's request as I have heard, put things
right in a speech at Hereford. The Southern states, he said, had not _de
facto_ established their independence and were not entitled to recognition
on any accepted principles of public law.

(M28) It is superfluous for any of us at this day to pass judgment. Mr.
Gladstone has left on record in a fragmentary note of late date his own
estimate of an error that was in truth serious enough, and that has since
been most of all exaggerated by those sections of society and opinion who
at the time most eagerly and freely shared the very same delusion.

I have yet to record, he writes (July 1896) in the fragment
already more than once mentioned, an undoubted error, the most
singular and palpable, I may add the least excusable of them all,
especially since it was committed so late as in the year 1862,
when I had outlived half a century. In the autumn of that year,
and in a speech delivered after a public dinner at
Newcastle-upon-Tyne, I declared in the heat of the American
struggle that Jefferson Davis had made a nation, that is to say,
that the division of the