But Mr. Bright was consistent. He was against any fight for united nationality. He would never have embarked on war at all, and so could never have withdrawn from struggle at the wrong moment. He never deluded himself or others. It might be said that the author of the essay on “Church and State” led the “Nonconformist conscience” to the altar, and that the eloquent denouncer both of Church and State gave the bride away. But the chivalrous knight-errant could not quite forego the Dulcinea of his youth. It will be remembered that Mr. Gladstone, still by inadvertence, used occasionally to stumble upon the word “empire” in his speeches. Peel himself had called it “wonderful”! Lord John Russell had employed it in 1855. It was a word born with Queen Elizabeth, and familiar throughout the reign of Queen Anne. Chatham’s clarion rang with it. The poet Cowper, whom none can accuse of egotism or of bombast, repeats it with a glow of pride. But Mr. Bright, unless I mistake, never condescended to breathe the name or condone the thing. Mr. Gladstone regained power, and ran riot--the riot of the best intentions in the worst sense of the phrase. The policy of “scuttle” ensued--from what motives I stop not here to inquire. We abandoned Kandahar, “annexed” through a need caused by past vacillations and repulses of the Ameer; but, together with conditions for rendering him independent of Russia’s natural intrigues. We abandoned it just when the disasters of the Soudan again invited Russian encroachment. We abandoned the Transvaal at the first blush of defeat. “Peace, Retrenchment, and Reform” culminated in war, extravagance, and confusion. The trumpeters of impolitic economy, proposing expenditure and yet dangling the repeal of some tax to gratify “the interests or prejudices of the party of retrenchment,” were, in Disraeli’s phrase of 1861, “penurious prodigals.” Upright “prigs and pedants,” intruding private opinions on public affairs, honest hypocrites who deceived themselves and hoped to persuade the sceptics of the world, preachers of theories to the winds, all played with crucial issues and trifled solemnly with a cynical Continent. The school-master was abroad. We took Egypt against our will, and promised not to retain it. We cried, “Hands off, Austria!” and apologised for doing so. We prepared for necessitating the most exceptional war of modern times. It was the policy of panic and disunion, the policy of alternate weakness and bluster, the policy that by turns coaxed and coerced Ireland, allured and abandoned Gordon; it was a policy of private magnanimity at the public expense, and not the policy of wise consolidation and calculated outlets. It was not the policy of diplomacies at once instructed, firm, and gentle. Nor was it one of defined spheres, regulated boundaries, and fortified “gates of empire.” Yet it led us to “expenditure of blood and treasure.” And if we have since--and not, as I believe, in