in his nature to face it with the courage of a statesman. He bandies words over it like a grammarian, and draws fine distinctions like a casuist. At last, when he seems to have involved himself inextricably in a cobweb of subtle reasoning, he breaks loose to strike some rash and unexpected blow. His campaigns are generally as abruptly cut short as they are rashly begun. To satisfy his conscience they must be perfectly fruitless, which he considers the acme of unselfishness. Hence Mr Gladstone has been to this country the costliest as well as the most disastrous of War Ministers. His victories have been as barren as his defeats have been humiliating and "bloodguilty."
During the past four years in Egypt, the inherent vice of his foreign policy has been glaringly attested beyond the expectation of his severest critics. He has lived all the time in a close atmosphere of egotistical illusions. In everything he has done, whether fighting Arabi Pasha and the Mahdi, or dictating to the Khedive at Cairo, or inviting dictation from the European Powers, he has worn a mask. At every turn he has made use of tools he would not acknowledge, and of puppets whose responsibility was a transparent sham. Even the heroic life which was nearest and dearest to British hearts was not too sacred to serve him for a pawn on his political chess-board. Outside of dissenting chapels, not a single soul has ever been greatly deceived by his devices for disguising from himself and others the plain duty which lay before him. His Penelope's web of makeshifts and plausible expedients fell asunder as it was woven; but he might have gone on indefinitely weaving it, had not his Nemesis been roused at last to strike him that crushing blow at Khartoum. Before it, illusions, makeshifts, and fine phrases are swept away as by a whirlwind. A Gladstone policy in Egypt no longer exists. It has failed and discredited itself on all hands. Barely able to maintain order at Cairo, it has sustained in the same week a bitter check both in diplomacy and in the field. Thanks to it, Khartoum has been lost, Gordon sacrificed, Lord Wolseley's army imperilled; and our last hope of securing some slight relief for the cruelly taxed fellaheen has had to be given up. Our attempts to pose before Europe as the friend of the oppressed Egyptian peasantry have all ended in an arrangement with France, which secures to the bondholder his pound of flesh, and fixes the yoke more firmly than ever on the neck of Egypt. So far from having done any good to the fellaheen, or gained any advantage for them from the national creditors, their position has been made in many respects worse than before.
It is a melancholy but indisputable fact, that the original source of the misery in which Egypt is plunged is the old mean story of spendthrift and money-lender. Reckless borrowing, with its inevitable sequel, a bankrupt exchequer, was the opening chapter of this infamous episode, which has brought ruin on Egypt and shame on Great Britain. The ghastly horror of the climax is rendered more ghastly by comparison with the sordid pettiness of its origin. But for the bondholders we should never have interfered in Egypt; and it is a grim though not unprecedented satire on our maxims of State, that they have been more or less violated all along. Since the days of Cobden, it has been a doctrine of the Foreign Office that its authority cannot be used for collecting the debts of private individuals in
