and it even implies that the work of his "education" has already begun. The process seems likely to be a slow one. When the proposal was laid before him that the revolted lands should be set free from the rule of the Turk, he said that he had no objection to such an arrangement, but that there were "difficulties." Of course there are difficulties in the way of so doing, as in the way of everything else. The world is full of difficulties. Human life chiefly consists in meeting with difficulties, and in yielding to them or overcoming them as the case may happen. Only with men the existence of difficulties is something which stirs them up to grapple with the difficulties, and to overcome them; with diplomatists the existence of difficulties is thought reason enough for drawing back and doing nothing. And there is one difficulty above all difficulties in the way of vigorous and righteous action on the part of England in this matter. That difficulty is the existence of Lord Beaconsfield and Lord Derby. Lord Beaconsfield we all know; Lord Derby most of us are beginning to know. A few zealous county members still express their confidence in him: but they express it in that peculiar tone which men put on when they are trying to persuade themselves that they still put confidence in something in which they have really ceased to put confidence. But with the world in general the strange superstition that Lord Derby is a great and wise statesmen is swiftly and openly crumbling away. It is wonderful indeed to see the change of public opinion on this head. Two or three months back it was the acknowledged creed of Liberals as well as of Conservatives that Lord Derby was to be treated with a degree of respect with which there was no need to treat any of his colleagues. Things are indeed changed now that the Times talks of "educating" him, now that the comic papers jeer at him, now that his name is spoken of, certainly not with any great respect, in writing and in speech throughout the whole land. The sagacious minister, respected on both sides, trusted on both sides, is no longer spoken of with the bated breath which was held to be the right thing even when the present year was a good deal advanced. When the English people are driven really to look into any matter, their sight is sharp enough, and they can see that a man whose one object is to do nothing is not the right man to be at the helm when there is a great work to be done. For my own part, if my own opinion of Lord Derby has changed, it has rather changed for the better. I am beginning to think that a man whom I had for ten years looked on as wicked may perhaps after all have been only stupid. It is a fact, and a very ugly fact, that we have to look to the betrayer of Crete for the redress of the wrongs of Bulgaria. A good deal of education will certainly be needed before we make such an instrument serve our purpose. But as regards the man himself, his treatment of the whole matter since the summer of the last year suggests the thought that, even in the Cretan business, Lord Derby may have been simply frightened and puzzled, and may not have meant any active mischief. But the mischief was done all the same; it may have been only in fright and puzzledom that he gave the order; but the order was given none the less; the women and children of Crete were none the less left, and left by his bidding, to the mercy of their Turkish destroyers. Lord Derby, in the face of one of the great epochs of the world's history, reminds one of nothing so much as the lord mayor before whom Jeffreys was brought after the flight of James the Second. "The mayor," says Lord Macaulay, "was a simple man who had spent his whole life in obscurity, and was bewildered by finding himself an important actor in a mighty revolution." Lord Derby had not passed his whole life in obscurity; but he seemed just as much bewildered at finding that he had to play a part in a great European crisis as ever the simple mayor could have been. The result in the two cases is indeed different The lord mayor, being doubtless an impulsive man, "fell into fits and was carried to his bed, whence he never rose." Lord Derby is not impulsive; so he bore up, and made speeches for Mr. Gladstone to tear into shreds.
From the first to the last utterance of Lord Derby on these matters, from his despatch of August 12, 1875, to his speech of September 11, 1876, the same characteristic reigns throughout. That characteristic is blindness. In the first despatch and in the last speech there is the same incapacity to understand what it is that is going on. On August 12, 1875, the insurrection had been at work for more than a month, and Consul Holms and Sir Henry Elliot had been sending home accounts, not of course of what really had happened, but of what this and that Turk told them had happened. The Turks were of course busy lying, and Safvet Pasha was lying with greater vigor than all the rest; for he was saying that
