d
thirty-five minutes. I threw overboard all my heavy armament and
fought light.

Nobody who is not historian or biographer is likely to read this speech of
Mr. Gladstone's to-day, but we may believe contemporary witnesses who
record that the orator's weight of fact, his force of argument, his
sarcastic play of personal impulse and motive, his bold and energetic
refutation of hostile criticism, his defiant statement of the ministerial
case, so impressed even a sceptical and doubting House that, though his
string of special pleas did not amount to a justification, "they almost
reached the height of an excuse," and they crushed the debate. The basis
was the familiar refrain upon Mr. Gladstone's lips,--"The steps taken by
the government, what were they but endeavours to bind together the powers
of Europe for fulfilment and maintenance of an important European
engagement?" Still history, even of that sane and tempered school that is
content to take politics as often an affair of second-best, will probably
judge that Mr. Disraeli was not wrong when he said of the policy of this
era that, whether we looked to Russia, to Greece, to France, there had
been exhibited by ministers a confusion, an inconsistency of conduct, a
contrariety of courses with regard to the same powers and a total want of
system in their diplomacy.(93) It is true, however, that just the same
confusion, inconsistency, and contrariety marked Russia, France, and
Austria themselves. Another speaker of the same party, as mordant as
Disraeli, and destined like him to rise to the chief place in the councils
of the nation, went further, and said, in following Cobden in the debate,
"If Mr. Cobden had been foreign secretary, instead of Lord Russell, I
fully believe this country would occupy a position proud and noble
compared to that which she occupies at this moment. She would at least
have been entitled to the credit of holding out in the name of England no
hopes which she did not intend to fulfil, of entering into no engagements
from which she was ready to recede."(94) Well might Mr. Gladstone enter in
his diary:--

_July 8._--This debate ought to be an epoch in foreign policy. We
have all much to learn. Lord Palmerston's speech was unequivocally
weak in the mental and the bodily sense. I think it was to-day
that the Prince of Wales rode with Granville and me; he showed a
little Danism.

Chapter VIII. Advance In Public Pos