severe on the despotism of that miserable king of Naples,
Francis II., whom Garibaldi had overthrown with a handful of men. Mr.
Gladstone, ever since his last visit to Naples, had abominated the
outrages which its government had perpetrated on a gallant and aspiring
people, and warmly supported them by his eloquence. In the same friendly
spirit, in 1858, he advocated in Parliament a free constitution for the
Ionian islands, then under British rule; and when sent thither as
British commissioner he addressed the Senate of those islands, at Corfu,
in the Italian language. The islands were by their own desire finally
ceded to Greece, whose prosperity as an independent and united nation
Mr. Gladstone ever had at heart. The land of Homer to him was
hallowed ground.

On one subject Mr. Gladstone made a great mistake, which he afterward
squarely acknowledged,--and this was in reference to the American civil
war. In 1862, while chancellor of the exchequer, he made a speech at
Newcastle in which he expressed his conviction that Jefferson Davis had
"already succeeded in making the Southern States of America [which were
in revolt] an independent nation." This opinion caused a great sensation
in both England and the United States, and alienated many
friends,--especially as Earl Russell, the minister of foreign affairs,
had refused to recognize the Confederate States. It was the indiscretion
of the chancellor of the exchequer which disturbed some of his warmest
supporters in England; but in America the pain arose from the fact that
so great a man had expressed such an opinion,--a man, moreover, for whom
America had then and still has the greatest admiration and reverence. It
was feared that his sympathies, like those of a great majority of the
upper classes in England at the time, were with the South rather than
the North, and chiefly because the English manufacturers had to pay
twenty shillings instead of eight-pence a pound for cotton. It was
natural for a manufacturing country to feel this injury to its
interests; but it was not magnanimous in view of the tremendous issues
which were at stake, and it was inconsistent with the sacrifices which
England had nobly made in the emancipation of her own slaves in the West
Indies. For England to give her moral support to the revolted Southern
States, founding their Confederacy upon the baneful principle of human
slavery, was a matter of grave lamentation with patriots at the North,
to say