The whole condition of our domestic politics was changed by this Bulgarian atrocities agitation, as it was called. It riveted the attention of the country upon a great question of foreign policy. It weakened enormously, for the moment, the power of the Tory Government, which still enjoyed so commanding a majority in Parliament. Domestic affairs lost their savour for the ordinary elector, and, writing nearly a quarter of a century after this episode, I am inclined to believe that they have never since regained all that they then lost. In the late autumn, a Conference on the subject of our relations with Turkey was held in St. James's Hall. This was no demonstration on the part of a caucus, but a gathering of the notables of all the great towns of England. No doubt the majority of those present were Liberals, but a very considerable minority were Conservatives who had hitherto supported the Government. It was my good fortune to be present at that wonderful meeting in St. James's Hall. Never was there such a political platform seen at a public meeting before. Mr. Gladstone, Lord Shaftesbury, the Dukes of Westminster and Argyll, Mr. Freeman, the historian, the Bishop of Oxford, Henry Fawcett--these are but a few of the names that occur to my memory as I recall the memorable scene. Great Tory noblemen like the Marquess of Bath sat side by side with Radicals from Birmingham, and the passionate earnestness, amounting to something more than enthusiasm, that inspired the whole gathering was remarkable. It may be said to have marked the high tide of political agitation in my own experience. A simple accident had saved me from the full force of the contagion of passion that swept over the country in September. I had left Leeds to spend some weeks with my family in a house on the Clyde, where I was far from the sounds of political tumult. Possibly, if I had stayed in Leeds at my post at the _Mercury_ office, I might have gone with the tide, and might have been just as extreme and as reckless as anybody else. But I looked on from a distance, and, as it happened, I was absorbed at the time in other work. The consequence was that I could see the evil, as well as the good, of this extraordinary upheaval of popular emotion, and when I returned later on to my work at Leeds I took a cooler view of the whole question than most Liberal journalists did, and dealt with it, not from the merely emotional standpoint, but from that of our duty and interests as a people. Of course, I was blamed for this by the more fervent, and was suspected of being at heart little better than a philo-Turk. I had, in short, to meet the usual fate of the man who will not cry either black or white when it is his misfortune to see only a confusion of colours. By-and-by, however, when the popular passion subsided, and the old alarm about Russia again became rampant, I found myself blamed for precisely the opposite reason. I was no longer assailed as a philo-Turk, but as a Russophil.