The General Election of 1880 is the only election which has ever been fought in Great Britain on the general principles of foreign policy. Gladstone had retired from the nominal leadership of the Liberal party after his defeat in 1874. But there was no question who had directed its policy in the last few years, and Lord Hartington, in 1880, was obviously no more than the lieutenant of his principal follower. Any doubts which may have before existed were dispelled by Gladstone's election campaign {275} in Midlothian. He invaded the strongest Tory constituency in Scotland, beat the nominee of the Duke of Buccleuch, and in his speeches dictated the issues upon which candidates fought all over Great Britain. These speeches were almost entirely concerned with the Liberal case against egoism in foreign affairs, and the result of the polls was an emphatic approval of their principles. There were some errors in the speeches. To represent the Zulu War as an outrage of the same kind as the annexation of the Transvaal, or the invasion of Afghanistan, was absurd. The rights of bloodthirsty and aggressive savages are different from those of civilized white men or even the comparatively peaceful tribes of Asia. But this was only an unwise application of the sound general principles which were expressed in the speeches. The Midlothian speeches reproduced the opinions of Granville's Memorandum of 1851 and those of Clarendon's statement of 1871. Gladstone dissented from the absolute pacificism of the Manchester School.[320] But while he admitted the occasional necessity for war, and pointed to his own readiness to protect Belgium as a proof that he did not believe in peace at any price, he required that a real and sober policy should be substituted for the ostentatious vanities of the Tories. "What we want in foreign policy is the substitution of what is true and genuine for what is imposing and pretentious, but unreal.... Let us get rid of all these shams and fall back upon realities, the character of which is to be quiet, to be unostentatious, to pretend to nothing, not to thrust claims and unconstitutional claims for ascendancy and otherwise in the teeth of your neighbour, but to maintain your rights and to respect the rights of others as much as your own."[321] "The great duty of a Government, especially in foreign affairs, is to soothe and tranquillize the minds of a people, not to set up false phantoms of glory which are to delude them into calamity, not to flatter their infirmities by leading them to believe that they are better than the rest of the world, and so encourage the baleful {276} spirit of domination; but to proceed upon a principle that recognizes the sisterhood and equality of nations, the absolute equality of public right among them."[322] The speaker denounced Beaconsfield's reference to "Imperium et Libertas" as he had once before denounced Palmerston's use of "Civis Romanus Sum," and appealed to "the sound and sacred principle that