Their admiration did not prevent his friends from noting tendencies which sometimes led him to miscalculate the forces he had to deal with. Being, like the younger Pitt, extremely sanguine, he was prone to underrate difficulties. Hopefulness is a splendid quality. It is both the child and the parent of faith. Without it neither Mr. Pitt nor Mr. Gladstone could have done what they did. But it disposes its possessor not sufficiently to allow for the dulness or the prejudice of others. So too the intensity of Mr. Gladstone's own feeling made him fail to realise how many of his fellow-countrymen did not know of, or were not shocked by, acts of cruelty and injustice which had roused his indignation. If his hatred of ostentation suffered him to perceive that a nation, however well assured of the reality of its power and influence in the world, may also desire that this power and influence should be asserted and proclaimed to other nations, he refused to humour that desire. He had a contempt for what is called "playing to the gallery," with a deep sense of the danger of stimulating the passions which lead to aggression and war. To national honour, as he conceived it, national righteousness was vital. His spirit was that of Lowell's lines-- I love my country so as only they Who love a mother fit to die for may. I love her old renown, her ancient fame: What better proof than that I loathe her shame? It was this attitude that brought on him the charge of wanting patriotism, a charge first, I think, insinuated at the time of the _Alabama_ arbitration, renewed when in 1876 he was accused of befriending Russia and neglecting "British interests," and sedulously repeated thereafter, although in those two instances the result had proved him right. There was this much to give a kind of colour to the charge, that he had scrupulously, perhaps too scrupulously, refrained from extolling the material power of England, preferring to insist upon her responsibilities; that he was known to regret the constant increase of naval and military expenditure, and that he had several times taken a course which honour and prudence seemed to him to recommend, but which had offended the patriots of the music-halls. But it was an unjust charge, for no man had a warmer pride in England, a higher sense of her greatness and her mission.