contact with fact,
and the poor English people had awoke to the dreary conviction that it
was but vapor after all; that Mr. Disraeli had pricked that bubble when
he said, "Under his influence [Gladstone's] we have legalized
confiscation, we have consecrated sacrilege, we have condoned treason,
we have destroyed churches, we have shaken property to its foundation,
and we have emptied jails."

Everything went against the government. Russia had torn up the Black Sea
treaty, the fruit of the Crimean war; the settlement of the "Alabama"
claims was humiliating; "the generous policy which was to have won the
Irish heart had exasperated one party without satisfying another. He had
irritated powerful interests on all sides, from the army to the licensed
victuallers."

On the appeal to the nation, contrary to Mr. Gladstone's calculations,
there was a great majority against him. He had lost friends and made
enemies. The people seemingly forgot his services,--his efforts to give
dignity to honest labor, to stimulate self-denial, to reduce unwise
expenditures, to remove crying evils. They forgot that he had reduced
taxation to the extent of twelve millions sterling annually; and all the
while the nation had been growing richer, so that the burdens which had
once been oppressive were now easy to bear. It would almost appear that
even Gladstone's transcendent eloquence had lost in a measure its charm
when Disraeli, in one of his popular addresses, was applauded for saying
that he was "a sophistical rhetorician inebriated with the exuberance of
his own verbosity, and gifted with an egotistical imagination that can
at all times command an interminable and inconsistent series of
arguments to malign his opponents and to glorify himself,"--one of the
most exaggerated and ridiculous charges that was ever made against a
public man of eminence, yet witty and plausible.

On the retirement of the great statesman from office in 1875, in sadness
and chagrin, he declined to continue to be the leader of his party in
opposition. His disappointment and disgust must have been immense to
prompt a course which seemed to be anything but magnanimous, since he
well knew that there was no one capable of taking his place; but he
probably had his reasons. For some time he rarely went to the House of
Commons. He left the leaders of his party to combat an opponent whom he
himself had been unable to disarm. Fortunately no questions came up of
sufficient impor