his Homeric phrase for the Vienna terms, the Greeks would have raised the siege of Troy. I had not had the advantage of being at the Greek headquarters; but I could not help seeing in what mood the British people were, and how hopeless it was then to talk to them about reasonable terms of peace. Had Gladstone, instead of bolting in the middle of the war, mustered courage, of which he generally had a superabundance, to oppose it at the outset, he might have incurred obloquy at the moment, but he would have found before long that, to use Salisbury’s metaphor reversed, he had laid his money on the right horse. The grass had hardly grown over the graves on the heights of Sebastopol before everybody condemned the war. After some turns of the political wheel, we find Gladstone Chancellor of the Exchequer under Palmerston, making the fortune of that Government by his masterly Budgets and splendid expositions of them in the House. If Palmerston was the father of Jingoism, Gladstone was its arch-enemy. Of the two things for which the Prime Minister said he lived, the extinction of slavery, and the military defence of England, Gladstone looked not with special zeal upon the first and very cautiously on the second. Palmerston was a commercial Liberal, and he saw the immense value of such a Chancellor of the Exchequer to his Government. But he was believed to have said that, when he was gone, Gladstone would in two years turn their majority of seventy into a minority, and in four be himself in a lunatic asylum. It was known that he wanted as his successor in the leadership, not Gladstone, but Cornewall Lewis. Very pleasant would have been the situation of that highly respected scholar and statesman, leading the House with Gladstone on his flank! One fruit, distinctly Gladstonian, the Palmerston Government bore. That fruit was the commercial treaty with France, negotiated through Cobden, who shared, with Bright, Palmerston’s particular dislike. Cobden even suspected that Palmerston would not have been sorry if the treaty had miscarried, and that he betrayed his feeling in his bearing and language towards France while negotiations were going on. There was nothing in the treaty which could militate against a rational policy of free trade. Some Liberals were inclined to demur to it, not because it was inconsistent with free trade, but because it made us to some extent accomplices in a stretch of prerogative on the part of the Emperor of the French, who used the treaty-making power to accomplish, without the authority of his Legislature, a change in the fiscal system of France.