pected the world to stand still until he had rendered the great service to humanity of reforming the income-tax. A little of the absorbing attention given to that high theme might have saved us from the Crimean war. In 1860 the gates of the millennium were to be unlocked by means of commercial treaties. But in 1861 we were within an ace of war with the United States; and in 1865, when Bismarck appeared on the scene. Lord Russell and Mr Gladstone ignobly escaped from a disastrous collision with him by leaving Denmark to do the fighting. In 1870, when the agrarian afflatus was strong on our domestic Isaiah, he had evidently not the slightest conception that there was such a thing looming in the near future as the German Empire.
One of the kindest acts Providence ever did to this country was having arranged that Lord Beaconsfield and not Mr Gladstone should be in power on the eve of the Russo-Turkish war. Mr Gladstone, if then in office, would very probably have been lashing up the enthusiasm of the Caucus on behalf of the county franchise, or against the House of Lords. At a critical moment some step might have been taken, without the knowledge of Parliament, or the faintest suspicion on the part of the country, which would have plunged all Europe into the fray. The excuse for it would have been – to use words which Mr Gladstone, when last in Mid-Lothian, actually applied to Egypt – "We have been compelled constantly to come to decisions without that full and adequate knowledge which alone can form a satisfactory basis for political action. We have not known as much as we desired to know of Egyptian affairs. The public out of doors naturally has known still less, and our opponents, who profess to know everything, have known nothing at all." Who, indeed, was to learn anything from a Government which did not publish a single despatch relating to Egypt for almost two years, and which, on the brink of one of the worst because most humiliating and irreparable disasters in our history, confessed through its head that it was in a state of helpless ignorance? Not yet six months ago Mr Gladstone, in addressing his constituents, thought so little of the Egyptian question as to honour it with only half-a-dozen sentences, sandwiched between his threats against the House of Lords and his waitings over obstruction in the House of Commons. The whole difficulty he brushed aside by setting it down to Lord Salisbury's "meddlesome disposition," for which, however, Lord Salisbury was rather to be pitied than blamed. Shades of Chatham! that anything calling itself statesmanship should so complacently worship the verbal rubbish of parliamentary logic-chopping, while the lives of brave men and the honour of a great nation are being trodden under foot by savages for want of a strong firm hand reached out to them in time! More wonderful, more intolerable still, that even half-a-dozen persons should be found in an intelligent community to prefer the fatal rhetoric which tickles their ears while an enemy is striking at their hearts, to the real statesmanship which wards off danger without prating about it!
Gordon sacrificed, the flower of our army lying in the jaws of death on the Upper Nile, fifteen or it may be twenty millions of money lost through being a few days too late, another twenty, or, for aught we know, fifty millions more to spend in rescuing the too late rescuers of Gordon – and what will there be to show for it when
