In the period at which we have arrived his moral greatness and literary fervor were both called into exercise in an international cause. The Bulgarian atrocities of 1876--spoken of in Chapter X--called the aged statesman from his retirement, and his pamphlet entitled "Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East," rang through England like a trumpet-call. "Let the Turks now carry away their abuses in the only possible manner--by carrying off themselves," he wrote. "Their Zaptiehs and their Mudirs, their Bimbashis and their Yuzbachis, their Kaimakams and their Pashas, one and all, bag and baggage, shall, I hope, clear out from the province they have desolated and profaned." [=His Second Great Contest with Disraeli=] He followed up this pamphlet by a series of speeches, delivered to great meetings and to the House of Commons, with which for four years he sought, as he expressed it, "night and day to counterwork the purpose of Lord Beaconsfield." He succeeded; England was prevented by his eloquence from joining the Turks in the war; but he excited the fury of the war party to such an extent that at one time it was not safe for him to appear in the streets of London. Nor was he quite safe in the House of Commons, where the Conservatives hated him so bitterly as to jeer and interrupt him whenever he spoke, and a party of them went so far as to mob him in the House. Yet the sentiment he had aroused saved the country from the greatest of the follies by which it was threatened; and, if it failed to stop the lesser adventures in which Lord Beaconsfield found an outlet for the passions he had unloosed,--an annexation of Cyprus, an interference in Egypt, an annexation of the Transvaal, a Zulu war which Mr. Gladstone denounced as "one of the most monstrous and indefensible in our history," an Afghan war which he described as a national crime,--it nevertheless was so true an interpretation of the best, the deliberate, judgment of the nation, that it sufficed eventually to bring the Liberal party back to power. [=Gladstone Again Made Premier=] This took place in 1880. In the campaign for the Parliament elected in that year Gladstone took a most active part, and had much to do with the great Liberal victory that followed. In the face of the overwhelming majority that was returned Lord Beaconsfield resigned office, and Gladstone a second time was called to the head of the government. [=Parnell Becomes the Leader of the Irish Party=]