Whenever there was fighting to be done for the party, either in Parliamentary debate or on the stump, Gladstone was the man. His Midlothian campaign displayed his almost miraculous powers as a speaker, while it called forth the enthusiastic feeling of the people for the man in whom they thought, and rightly, that they saw their heartiest friend and the most powerful advocate of their interests. Three speeches in one day and an address this prodigy of nature could deliver, and the speeches were not flummery and clap-trap, but addressed to the intelligence of the people. Yet one cannot help being rather sorry that the stump should have been so much dignified by Gladstone’s practice. It is a great evil. To say nothing of its effect upon the passions of the audience, it wears out the statesman; it deprives him, in the intervals of Parliament, of leisure for study and reflection; worst of all, it tempts him imprudently to commit himself. In the case of armed intervention in Egypt, Gladstone seemed to swerve from his usual fidelity to a policy of moderation and peace. It lost him Bright, to whom as he advanced in Liberalism he had been drawing closer, and who had been induced to take office in his Government. Bright would have nothing to do with aggrandizement or war, and in private his words were strong, though in public he showed chivalrous forbearance towards his friends. Seeing that Egypt lay on the road to India and commanded the Suez Canal, it does not appear that the illustrious Quaker would have had much reason for finding fault with Gladstone and his Government, so far as the main scope of their policy was concerned. The fatal mistake, as it turned out, was the employment of Gordon, a heroic enthusiast, whose action no one could well foresee, who perhaps could hardly foresee his own, and who was not the best agent to be selected for carrying out a policy of retreat. That Gladstone went to the opera after receiving news of Gordon’s death, as his malignant enemies said, was denied. But, even if he had, would any real want of feeling have been implied in his continuing to take his ordinary relief from the load of toil and anxiety which he bore? In the case of the Transvaal Republic, Gladstone had the moral courage, in face of the agitation caused by Majuba Hill, to avow that he shrank from “blood-guiltiness,” and to keep the nation in the path of honour and justice. His biographer, in dealing with this case and its sequel, has been evidently restrained by his desire not to multiply points of controversy. He might otherwise have greatly strengthened his proof that the claim of suzerainty was a fraud. Not such would have been the treatment of a breach of the plighted faith of the nation had Gladstone lived.